Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— I pass by on my way home. There’s been a queue outside every day. — A bus queue of black men and women waited, orderly, to lift up sheet after sheet to find the familiar face among the dead. There were babies, of course, asleep, warm and wet against backs under the blanket, there are always babies. There were the usual shopping bags that lug newspaper parcels of sustenance to courts and hospitals and prisons; one woman had a plaid Thermos flask sticking up out of her bag — the queue was long, and some people would have to come back next day.

— The police must’ve shot him between our place and the shop. Shot dead. She identified him all right. Just there in his own street, man. It was about nine at night when he went out, that’s all. You lock yourself in and stay home as soon as it’s dark. You don’t move, man. I won’t go back tonight, a-a-h no! I can tell you — when it’s dark I’m afraid to go across my yard to the lavatory. I never know when I’m going to get a bullet in my head from the police or a knife in me from someone else. — He shook back shirt cuffs with square gilt and enamel links. He was dressed for success and happiness, his usual snappy clothes, like a woman who has nothing to hand in an emergency but the outfit she wore to dinner last night and left hanging over the chair when she went to bed. — Every morning I expect to find my car burned out. We’ve got no garages in our places. What can I do? It stands in the street. The students are going around setting fire to the cars of reps and so on, people who have good jobs with white firms… Who doesn’t work for whites? If they know the owner of such-and-such a car is a sports promoter who arranges boxing matches with whites… They can come after me… — His laugh was an exclamation, protest. — What this government has done to us. Can I just — She pushed the brandy bottle over to him and he helped himself. She tipped the last drops of tea out of her cup and poured brandy into it, taking a first sip that burned along her lips voluptuously while she listened. — I want to get my kids out, that’s all. Margaret and the baby can go down to Natal with the old lady — her people are there. I want to put the older kids in boarding-school somewhere… But you know what the students are saying? They’re going to go to the trains when the kids leave for schools in the country and they’re going to stop them, they’re going to drag them off the trains. They say no one must break the boycott. And they’ll do it, I’m telling you, they’ll do it. I’ll take mine away by car. They don’t listen to me or their mother, there’s no school, they run in the streets and how d’you know every day they’re going to come back alive?—

— I don’t know what I would do. — She was white, she had never had a child, only a lover with children by some other woman. No child but those who passed under her hands, whom it was her work to put together again if that were possible, at the hospital.

SOWETO STUDENTS REPRESENTATIVE COUNCIL

Black people of Azania remember our beloved dead! Martyers who were massacred from the 16th June 1976 and are still being murdered. We should know Vorster’s terrorists wont stop their aggressive approach on innocent Students and people who have dedicated themselves to the liberation of the Black man in South Africa — Azania. They shall try at all costs to suppress the feelings of the young men and women who see liberation a few kilometres if not metres There’s no more turning back, we have reached a point of no return as the young generation in this challenging country. We have proved that we are capable of changing the country’s laws as youths this we shall persue until we reach the ultimate goat — UHURU FOR AZANIA.

Remember Hector Peterson the 13 year old Black child of Azania, a future leader we might have produced, fell victim to Kruger’s uncompromising and uncontrollable gangsters of the riot squad. What does his parents say, what do his friends say, what does the stupid and baldheaded soldier who killed — actually murdered him in cold blood — say, of course he is less concerned. What do you say as an oppressed Black and brother to Hector? Remember our learned scientist ‘who decided to commit suicide all of a sudden’ Tshazibane? We suspect that somebody somewhere knows something about this ‘suicide’ For how long will our people persue with these ‘suicide attempt’ and ‘successful suicides’.

Remember Mabelane who ‘attempted to escape from John Vorster Square by jumping through the 10th floor window’ apparently avoiding some questions? Remember our crippled brothers and sisters who have been disabled deliberately by people who have been trained to disrespect and disregard a black man as a human being? Remember the blood that flowed continuously caused by wounds inflicted by Vorster’s gangsters upon the innocent mass demonstrating peacefully? What about the bodies of our dead colleagues which were dragged into those monsterous and horrible looking riot squad vehicles called hippos? We the students shall continue to shoulder the wagon of liberation irrespective of these racists maneouvers to delay the inevitable liberation of the Black masses. June the 16th will never be erased in our minds. It shall stand known and registered in the minds of the people as STUDENTS’ DAY as students have proved beyond all reasonable doubt on that DAY that they are capable of playing an important role in the liberation of this country without arms.

We are also aware of the system’s conspiracy:

1. To discredit present and past leadership with the hope of distracting the masses from the leaders.

2. To capture present leadership with the hope of retarding the student’s struggle and achievements.

FORWARD FOREVER…………………BACKWARD NEVER!!!

issued by the S.S.R.C.

Our children and our children’s children. The sins of the fathers; at last, the children avenge on the fathers the sins of the fathers. Their children and children’s children; that was the Future, father, in hands not foreseen.

You knew it couldn’t be: a change in the objective conditions of the struggle sensed sooner than the leaders did . Lenin knew; the way it happened after the 1905 revolution: as is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory . The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new. They seem to know what is to be done. They don’t go to school any more and they are being ‘constantly reeducated by their political activity’. The parents who form committees to mediate between their children and the police are themselves being detained and banned. It could happen to Fats; a black heavyweight can win a title from a white heavyweight now and black and white teams play together on the soccer fields, but that isn’t what the children will accept. It has even happened to Mrs Daphne Mkhonza, who used to come to Flora’s lunch parties. There are new nightclubs in Johannesburg where fashionable get-ups provide consumers’ equality and apparently privilege the self-styled black and white socialites from police raids. But these are not the kind of pleasures on which the children are set. The black men with yearnings to be third-class, non-Europeans-only-city-fathers, who sat on the Advisory Boards and school boards set up by the whites have resigned at the threat of a generation’s retribution. The people who were Uncle Toms, steering clear of the Mofutsanyanas, Kotanes, Luthulis, Mandelas, Kgosanas, Sobuk-wes who went to jail for the ANC and PAC have begun to see themselves at last as they are; as their children see them. They have been radicalized — as the faithful would say — by their children; they are acting accordingly; they are being arrested and detained. The real Rosa believed the real revolutionary initiative was to come from the people; you named me for that? This time it’s coming from the children of the people, teaching the fathers — the ANC, BPC, PAC, all of them, all the acronyms hastening to claim, to catch up, the theory chasing events.