Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

An orderly march to the grave. Hating faces, but controlled. The young men who had charge let the priest have his say, and they allowed the bereaved family to get clear in an old Morris car, and they gave time for the old men and the women and the small children to start back towards the township.

There was organisation of a sort in what happened afterwards.

A single police jeep was out in front of the main force, there to overlook and photograph. A shambling charge at the jeep, and the driver had lost his gears, and lost time, and the men who guarded the photographer and his long lens had fired volleys of bird shot and gas to keep the running, stoning crowd at a distance.

The driver of the jeep never found his gears. The crowd surged on, vengeance within reach. The police ditched the jeep, left it with the engine howling, ran for their lives. Good and fit, the policemen, and running hard because they knew the alternative to running fast, knew what happened to policemen who were caught by a funeral mob. The photographer didn't run fast, not as fast as he had to run. The lens bouncing awkwardly from his stomach, and the camera bag on his shoulder, and none of the policemen with guns taking the time to cover him.

The officers commanding the police were still shouting their orders when the fleetest of the mob caught up with the photographer. The photographer was White and a year and a half short of his fiftieth birthday. A growl in the mob, the breath intake of a mad dog.

The hacking crack of rifle fire, aimed at random into the crowd at four hundred metres. The crowd of youths not caring because the photographer was caught.

The Casspirs came forward, and the kids fled before them, back towards the township.

The photographer was naked but for one shoe and his socks and the camera with the long lens that lay on his belly.

His clothes had been taken from him as vultures take meat from bones. He was dead. An autopsy would in due course state how many knife wounds he had received, how many stone bruises.

The start of a routine township battle. An hour of unrest.

Shotguns and rifles and tear gas grenades from behind the armour plate of the high built Casspirs. Petrol bombs and rocks from the kids. Pretty unremarkable happenings for the East Rand.

The police saw the kids back into the warren streets of Duduza and left them to their destruction. Eighteen months after the start of the petrol bombing and the rock throwing against the Black policemen's homes and councillor's homes there was little left for the crowd that was worth burning.

Two shops were destroyed by fire. The days were long since gone when the elderly would try to prevent the kids burning a shop out. To have tried to have saved a shop from the fire was to have invited the accusation of collaborator.

Two shops burned.

Four kids died. Eighteen kids were treated for buck shot injuries in Duduza's unregistered clinic. No chance of them going to hospital.

A thirteen-year-old girl had been successfully buried.

Sunday afternoon in Duduza, and time to bring the buckets indoors.

• •*

His eyes were red rimmed.

He sat on a wooden chair in a small room.

Faces peered at him through the cracked glass of the window. Jack looked straight ahead, looked all the time at the man who had been introduced as Henry Kenge, and at Jan.

He dabbed his eyes with his water-soaked handkerchief, and each time he did it he heard the pitter patter of laughter from all around him.

He had made his speech. He had asked for help. He had been heard out. He had been vague and unspecific until Jan had waved him quiet, taken over and whispered urgently a statement of intent in the ear of the one identified as Kenge.

He was filthy from the ditch he had lain in as the Casspirs had rumbled down the main street. With Jan in the bottom of a ditch that doubled as a street sewer.

He thought that if the youngsters he had seen that afternoon had been Black kids on the streets of London or Birmingham or Liverpool then he would have rated them as mindless and vicious hooligans. He thought the kids of Duduza were the bravest he had ever known. So what was the morality of that? Fuck the morality, Jack thought.

Kenge brought Jan a holdall. Jan passed the bag to Jack.

He counted five R.G.-42 grenades.

Jack tugged at Jan's sleeve. "This shouldn't be in bloody public."

"The necklace has made ashes of informers, they're scrubbed out of Duduza. The eyes of the security police have been put out with fire, that's why they're losing…

They have a song about you. They don't know who you are, but they have a song in praise of you. They made a song about the man who carried the bomb into John Vorster Square."

Jack shook his head, like he'd been slapped. "You told them about that?"

"You've been given half of this township's armoury. You grovel your thanks to them."

When they left they could see the lights of the road block vehicles. Jan kept his own headlight off and drove cross-country in a loop taking them well clear of the block.

For a short time a searchlight tried to find the source of the engine sound in the darkness, and they stopped in shadow until it lit upon some other threat, and then rode on.

Jack thought he was pretty damn fortunate to have the grenades. He appreciated that after Thiroko was killed Jan would be isolated from the Movement. That's what any Movement would do. He pounded Jan's back, in gratitude, in relief to be out of Duduza.

Ros was at the flat in Hillbrow. She showed Jack what she had brought. Only after he had seen and handled the pump action shotgun and the two revolvers and the ammunition did Jack realise that she had changed herself.

He thought Ros van Niekerk was quite lovely.

He had fifteen pounds of explosives and detonators and firing fuse and five grenades and a shotgun and two revolvers.

And he had a crippled student to help him, and a girl who worked in an insurance office and who was lovely.

No going back, but then there had never been a time for going back.

A crisp, bright, autumn morning over the flat veld, the diamond frost going with the sunlight.

Monday morning. Another week. One more used up.

Jack had dismantled the model. He had returned the pieces to the bread bin.

In a corner of the yard at the back of the block of flats he discarded one of the two metal tubes. He had explosive enough for one tube only. He had to go out the way that he went in.

Jan carried the suitcase to the car. Ros had the shotgun, broken and carried under an overcoat, and the two revolvers.

Jack brought the tube.

Jack had told them he needed a stop on the way for a bag of readymix concrete. He said that he would sit in the back of the car, that he needed to think. He sat in the back of the car and concentrated on an approach from the south side over Magazine Hill, and diversions on the north side near the guarded perimeters of Defence Headquarters.

They could rent a service flat in Pretoria, Ros said. It wouldn't be difficult to find one, but it would be expensive.

Jack passed her a wad of rand notes. He slipped back to his thinking.

How much could he ask of them, of Jan and Ros?

The principal hotels were tried first.

Two detectives, with the two original photo-fits and also with a third photo-fit that was an amalgam of the shopkeepers' opinions, were briefed to visit the city's four and five star hotels. Other teams were directed towards the two and three star hotels, the booking offices of South African Airways, of the European airlines, and to Jan Smuts.

Every one of them worked from John Vorster Square, had been violated by the bomb. The two with the four and five star list appreciated that the hotels worked shift systems of reception and porter staff. They knew that if they drew blanks with this visit that they must come back to interview those staff who were not on duty that Monday morning.