Contact Wounds by Jonathan Kaplan

Author:Jonathan Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2005-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Mike Hoare’s calamitous coup attempt had happened as I was entering my third English winter. I thought of Godwin and Jo, sitting on their terrace listening to the BBC World Service in the warm evening. The Seychelles seemed a long way away. Despite the time I’d spent in London, the walls of my flat were bare as though I’d be leaving any day. But I couldn’t return to the country of my birth, from where came reports of continuing tragedy. I was swallowing a sandwich one day in the doctors’ lounge of my hospital when on the TV set a familiar face appeared: Neil, the trade union doctor with whom I’d shared a student house in Cape Town and last seen on his rustic farm outside Johannesburg, when I’d dropped off his girlfriend Liz. I leapt for the volume control.

‘… is reported to have died in police custody. An enquiry, demanded by his family, has been refused. Friends and colleagues claim he was a victim of over-vigorous interrogation like the black student leader Steve Biko, who died five years ago of head injuries incurred during police questioning…’

The other doctors, their conversation interrupted, stared at me.

‘I knew him,’ I said, and they turned away and continued talking.

The bad news kept coming. In September 1984 the black townships around Johannesburg exploded with redoubled violence and the uprising spread across the country, despite the large-scale mobilisation of the army reserve to try to suppress it. Black rallies were met by gunfire, each fatality sparking more demonstrations and more deaths, and images of flames and armoured vehicles and bodies in the streets filled the BBC evening news. A state of emergency was declared. Jacqui, Debra’s sister whom I’d admired and with whom I’d sometimes sparred, had returned to her teaching job in Lesotho. There she’d met and fallen in love with Joe, a member of the ANC, and they’d had a child. One evening in December 1985 a South African police hit-squad crossed the Caledon River into Lesotho – possibly over the unguarded drift near the motel we’d used to stay in – and were guided by an informer to a Maseru house where an ANC meeting was under way. The gunmen swept through the building, killing everyone inside. Joe had left the meeting early in order to help Jacqui prepare a party for their daughter’s first birthday; now the killers were led to Joe’s house. Once the neighbours were sure that the gunmen had gone, they entered the scene of carnage. Only the baby survived; screaming in her cot, splashed with her parents’ blood.

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