Tandia (83 page)

Madam Flame Flo clasped her hands together and drew them into her chest.
'Here,
Tandy! That's the best speech I ever heard!' She turned to Mama Tequila.
'Ousis,
did you hear that? Did you hear what Tandy jus' said, hey? She's right, one hundred per cent! We women must fight now or those black bastards going to do exactly the same to us as the white bastards already done!' She turned to Tandia, an indulgent smile on her face. 'Magtig, what a clever lawyer you going to be Tandy, we very proud of you, you know.' Mama Tequila snorted suddenly. 'All I got to say further on this matter is there is not going to be a revolution and what you saying, Tandy, that lawyer's bullshit, man!'

Now as Tandia sat with Peekay and Gideon sipping coffee, she wondered if Mama Tequila wasn't right. The ANC under Chief Luthuli and Professor Matthews was in good, God-fearing Christian hands, old tired hands and old tired legs that limped from one crisis to another. What was it Luthuli said the other day? I
have knocked on the white man's door and
I
have 'waited, patiently, but no one has answered.

Something like that. It was nice Zulu rhetoric, but the Boers in Pretoria would still be chortling over the old man's naivety. Gideon called him, 'The great Induna, the Father of the Nation'. The black people didn't need a father, they needed a lean and hungry fighter with sharp teeth, someone who wouldn't knock at the door but kick it down instead. In the absence of anyone else, Sobukwe would have to do. Even if the campaign for the abolition of the pass laws failed, it was another blow struck, another kick at the still firmly closed door of apartheid. If the black people kicked long and hard enough the door jamb would finally give.

Peekay took a deliberate swig of coffee from his mug. 'What do you reckon. Gideon, do you think Sobukwe can pull this pass thing off?'

Gideon seemed to consider for a time. It was a characteristic Tandia used to love about him, it made everything he said seem wise, but now she wasn't so sure it wasn't simply a mannerism and a fairly calculated one at that. 'That Sobukwe, he talks and he promises, but he 'doesn't organize. His people think things just happen. You blow a whistle and the people rise up and bum their passes and go to the police and put out their hands like so…' Gideon proffered his hands to Tandia, '…and say, "Arrest me, please, baas,

I have burned my pass." It doesn't happen like this. That I can tell you every time…for sure!'

Tandia's eyes flashed. 'We know what's going to happen, the government is going to ban the ANC and the PAC and then it will be too late!'

Gideon laughed, shaking his head. This time there was no hesitation in his answer. 'I do not think they can do this thing. The ANC is very very old, since 1912, you cannot ban such a organization.'

His manner was pedantic and condescending and Tandia felt a tiny knot of anger in her stomach. But she didn't respond, she was getting much too excited. Magistrate Coetzee had suggested the notion to her outside a cafe near the courts where they regularly met for a chat and a cup of coffee. As Tandia was not allowed to sit in a Whites-Only cafe, he'd buy coffee in two paper cups together with two huge doughnuts and they'd stand on the pavement and chat while they drank the coffee and finally licked the sticky sugar off their fingers.

Old Coetzee was a constant source of valuable information and his suggestion that the ANC might be banned by the government
had
to be taken seriously. Nevertheless Tandia wasn't sure how to use it. It would be impossible to reveal her source and she was fairly certain she wouldn't be taken seriously if she proposed it simply as something she felt.

'Wait a minute, Tandia, why did you say that? What have you heard?' Peekay looked directly at her, his eyes slightly narrowed, the way he did when he sensed. something. Tandia demurred, not wanting to fight Gideon on the issue. 'Ag, nothing Peekay, it was just a silly "just suppose"!'

'Just supposes' were things Peekay encouraged in the office when they were discussing a case. The wildest 'Just suppose…?' would often give them a valuable insight into a case or the character of a witness. Now she watched to see if Peekay scratched his nose, a certain sign that he felt he was onto something and wasn't prepared to let it go. Hastily she added, 'It's, well, just that we have the government on the run at Langa. Robert Sobukwe may be too impatient but I wish the ANC had the same guts as him. Look at what the PAC are doing in Langa.'

Langa was an African township in the Western Cape originally built to house 5,000 people and which now housed 25,000 of which 20,000 qualified as 'new' bachelors - men who had been split (cleaved was a better word) from their families, men who were condemned to poverty and forced to return to their so-called tribal homeland.

Langa was in a crisis situation and the PAC had sent its organizers in to stir the pot and exploit the tension among the disconsolate men. They had done this so effectively that the possibility of a black uprising was being taken seriously by parliament, who ordered up troops with Saracen armoured cars and paramilitary police. Even the air force with Sabre jets and Harvard bombers was on emergency standby. How they intended using the aircraft was anyone's guess, but it was into this overheated atmosphere that Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the PAC, had devised his organization's hastily contrived national campaign for the abolition of the hated pass laws.

Monday, 21 March was a bright highveld late summer morning with just a hint of autumn in the air. Juicey Fruit Mambo didn't need to get up early so he slept in late. He'd had a bit too much beer the night before and when he'd wakened as usual at six his' head was sore; so he'd turned over, pulled his blanket over his head and gone back to sleep, waking finally around eight and feeling somewhat better.

Madam Flame Flo's house girl had left him a pot of meat and
phutu,
maize meal cooked light and fluffy with plenty of salt, and she'd added two ears of roasted corn. When Juicey Fruit got up, he sat in the sun in the back yard eating quietly and reading the
Sunday Times.
He looked for things in it to talk to Tandia about, hoping also he might find a court Case in which Red was involved. He'd followed the Geldenhuis murder trial for three years, searching the papers every day for news. When Peekay secured a verdict of guilty (which was later overturned) he'd simply helped himself to a bottle of Mama Tequila's brandy from the Bluey Jay supply and wandered off down to the river and got himself joyfully plastered, keeping the entire African village awake all night. When he'd returned about noon the next day Mama Tequila had chastised him, 'It was a rotten party without you, you hear! We all got drunk with happiness and here you are doing it on your own down by the river, you got no consideration, Edward King George Juicey Fruit Mambo!' About mid morning, when he'd finished reading the paper, he went out to inspect the Packard. The beautiful pink car gleamed under an open-sided car port which Madam Flame Flo had had specially built for their visits.

Juicey Fruit Mambo realized that more people than ought to were passing the house. It was a Monday; the people should be at work and the children at school. Why were so many of them walking towards the centre of the township? He stopped and leaned over the roof of the Packard. 'Where are you going, what is all the excitement?' he called to a passing group of high-school students dressed neatly in their freshly pressed uniforms.

The group stopped and a boy of about sixteen raised his arm and gave the thumbs-up, freedom salute of the PanAfricanist.
'Izwe Lethu!
Our Land!' he shouted, clearly excited. 'Have you not heard, Bra? We are going to the police station without our passes! Maybe they will arrest us,' he added, puffing out his chest, 'but we don't care. Sobukwe says they can't arrest everyone, so we must all do it all at once, then the police can't do anything, man!'

Juicey Fruit Mambo grinned, showing his two pointed gold incisors, then he shook his head. 'Haya! haya! Sobukwe, he said this thing? The police they can always do something. Maybe they will beat you with a sjambok, or they will bring in the dogs or even tear gas and the water gun machine!' He pointed to an aeroplane flying high overhead. 'Maybe they will bomb you!' he laughed. 'The
amaBhunu,
they can always do something!'

'Izwe Lethu!
Today is the first step to freedom!' a young school girl in the group shouted out. Then she started to giggle, so -they all began to laugh, though Juicey Fruit Mambo could sense there was hope in their laughter; they really believed. 'Kids, they're all crazy!' he thought to himself.

Like Tandia, Juicey Fruit Mambo was an ANC man, though privately he also thought of them as a bunch of no-hopers. He was also surprised at the demonstration; he'd heard Madam Flame Flo tell Mama Tequila that the township was always quiet, even when there was trouble elsewhere. He'd first heard Robert Sobukwe's call to action on the car radio, then, only an hour or so before, he'd read an editorial in the Sunday paper. It was one of the subjects he'd tucked away in his mind to talk to Tandia about. The editorial had suggested there would be trouble in the Western Cape, near Langa and also in some areas of the Southern Transvaal, particularly Orlando township in Johannesburg where Sobukwe himself would lead a group to the police station. The paper anticipated the whole thing would be a bit of an anti-climax but that the police, given seventy-two hours warning by Sobukwe himself, would be heavily armed and ready for anything.

Juicey Fruit Mambo set about waxing the Packard and soon forgot about the people heading for the demonstration.

In his mind he was rehearsing the conversation he would have with Tandia later when they'd drive to Alexandra township for supper before returning to Vereeniging.

Juicey Fruit Mambo missed Tandia terribly. For nearly five years he'd taken her to school and later to university and back every day. She'd sit up in the front seat of the old Packard with him and chat all the way home to Bluey Jay. Because she'd been shy and a misfit and so somewhat isolated both at school and later at Natal University, she would use Juicey Fruit Mambo as her sounding board. They always spoke in Zulu, which he had taught her. She'd talk to him about her lessons and later her lectures and Juicey Fruit, whom Tandia had taught to read and write, took these conversations very seriously. And because he was the only one who actually wanted to hear her talk, Tandia developed a technique of explaining her studies to the huge Zulu so that he could, at least in part, understand them. He was probably the only chauffeur in South Africa who could recite the complete legal torts as a Catholic might recite the catechism.

Tandia didn't know it at the time but these daily lessons with Juicey Fruit Mambo had taught her to explain often quite complex ideas in a simple and direct manner. Many of her clients were illiterate and for the most part completely ignorant of the law, and she became famous for her simple and articulate explanations. She was known among them as
umlomo ubomvu ocacisay,
the red mouth who explains. Like so many African nicknames it was a clever combination of ideas; it told people Tandia was a member of the Red team, at the same time it gave them a physical characteristic to latch onto, the bright lipstick she always wore, and finally it told them what she was famous for. Not bad in four words. Juicey Fruit worried daily about Tandia's safety in Johannesburg and had no trust whatsoever in the boxer Mandoma, even if he was a Zulu. He reasoned that Gideon was a midget and that he could crush him with one hand. What use was a midget when half a dozen tsotsis came at her? Now he grinned at the thought of how he'd solved the problem of her safety.

His love for kids had paid off when, after three days of the previous week spent driving around Meadowlands,

Orlando and Moroka townships, stopping and asking teenagers everywhere, he finally located the whereabouts of Johnny Tambourine.

He didn't recognize Johnny Tambourine when he drew up in the pink Packard outside a shop in Moroka, but he had no need to worry. The moment he opened his mouth to speak Johnny stepped forward. Juicey Fruit Mambo didn't have the sort of face you forgot in a hurry. The tall young man who stepped up to the car had a serious expression on his face.

'Long time no see, Bra.' He spoke quietly with no animation.

Johnny Tambourine was now a tall, lean teenager of sixteen who wore the familiar baggy pants cut down to nothing at the ankles, open-necked floral shirt and cardigan of the tsotsi. On his head he wore the ubiquitous 'tsotsi' itself, the English working man's cloth cap. Juicey Fruit Mambo hid his disquiet at finding Johnny Tambourine was a tsotsi, but after his initial surprise, he realized that it had been inevitable and was, now that he thought about it, perfect. That is, providing he could get the gang to go along with his plans.

Juicey Fruit Mambo broke into an enormous smile. He was dressed in a dark grey suit with a white shirt and brilliant pink tie to match the Packard; he was looking sharp. 'I see you, Johnny Tambourine!' He stuck his large hand out of the car window and Johnny Tambourine took it, his own hand disappearing into the huge black fist.

Johnny Tambourine didn't return the traditional Zulu greeting, nor did he affect the two-phase grip. He didn't go in for that shit…I see you, you see me, everybody sees everybody, then the cows and the hens and on and on for ten minutes or more before any business you've come for takes place! That sort of talk was for the peasants. He remembered the huge man standing in front of him clearly but that was a long time ago when he'd been a little snotnose with a bicycle wheel hoop. He wondered what the big bastard wanted after all these years? His expression remained sober as he spoke. 'I hear you want me, Bra?'