As long as the fire is burning.
In Honour of George Floyd, Tshegofatso Pule and the People of South Africa — one year later.
“My identity it feels, it feels so fractured,” I confide to a friend.
“Well,” she takes a deep breath, “then you’re perfectly at home here.” Her response feels abrasive, but comforting. “Welcome to South Africa.”
It’s June the 4th, 2020 — Johannesburg. Our clocks, too, read 4:00AM: the Ancestral hour. Siya and I lay in bed; we’ve been up all night talking. We can’t decide if want to stay awake or, just go to sleep for a very long time.
The whole world is a week into the George Floyd protests and twenty-eight year old Tshegofatso Pule, eight months pregnant, has just gone missing from Roodepoort. “Where is Tshegofatso?” The radio airways sound, “Where is our George Floyd? When will justice come for South Africa?”
“There is no justice for South Africa,” Siya declares.
We lay out an Ibiyi* fabric and light a candle. Traditionally a gesture of listening, we signal to world’s unseen that we are present and paying attention by placing the fabric across our pillow. Between the two of us, the gesture give us something to hold onto while the world goes up in flames.
“Yeah,” Siya’s breath is drawn, heavy and a little solemn, “I think we should try and sleep.”
Without electricity tonight, we turn our pocket lamps off just as all the lights in the city have gone off. We are in the thick of one of the world’s “strictest lockdown’s” and yet, COVID is a considerably lesser evil as far as epidemics here are concerned.
Tonight we brace for news of yet another Femicide victim, just as we’re braced for a national energy crisis: Load Shedding; scheduled periods of black outs that roll the country over. It’s been six years since the planned outage strategy was reintroduced under Zuma’s administration. In Soweto*, communities burn tires to protest the cuts: cuts that leave some without power for weeks at a time. For Pimville residents it’s been almost a month. The Government says this is because Soweto is indebted; a violent irony that leaves me sick.
The typical hustle of Johannesburg’s streets are stale quiet. President Ramaphosa has ordered the collection of homeless into schools, stadiums and other large public spaces. The massive Casspir: ambush-resistance military vehicles, routinely patrol both the city and the townships for the first time since the Apartheid Regime. The Zegé Zegé*: these industrious, perseverant men and women who tow hundred-pound carts of recycled materials all over the city’s centre, aren’t even peppering the streets. Their presence has always been a symbol and a shadow of the city’s continuity, resourcefulness and the seriousness of its struggle — much like the Casspir vehicles inspire a symbol and a shadow for South African’s with their ghostly reappearance. No downtown is ever completely quiet yet these days, 4AM in Johannesburg is so, and uncomfortably. Slicing through the weight of nothingness, a gunshot breaks in the distance.
Echoing from the west, we hear another sound all together. It bubbles from afar; sounds, syllables and harmonies resonating gradually with more precision and clarity as a voice approaches our window.
Siya and I turn towards each other: It’s a song. A freedom fighter song. From the vast of night a lone voice stretches into space, erupting into a full chant as a man in solitude arrives just beneath our apartment window. In Zulu, we hear:
“Umlilo maw’savutha, amabutho awaka lali.”
“Umlilo maw’savutha, amabutho awaka lali.”
“As long as the fire is burning, The soldiers are awake.
As long as the fire is burning, The soldiers are awake!”
A rush of electricity course through us, I see the shock expressing itself through Siya’s widening eyes. We turn rapidly towards the other; holding our breathe in a state of awe, and knowing. There is a means to this madness. The ancestors are close.
And so, we decide to stay awake.
Mpho tells me in conversation, “How you feel will rub off on your work.”
Standing outside the MarketPhoto Workshop, he takes a long drag off his cigarette. I’ve applied for their Beginner Level Photojournalistic course.
There’s hard sunlight, hitting brash against his face; he pulls the smoke restlessly while squinting his eyes. I look up at him, shading mine with my left hand. We both seem agitated by the heat of the afternoon sun.
“The time for sad stories are gone.” Mpho drags another puff. In a long exhale of smoke and words, he asserts himself, “We must represent people in dignity. If you’re lying: it will show. If you do something with all your heart: It will show. If you’re confused: ask for help.”
I’ve been a mess for representation and I am confused; trying to understand who I am in this world as much as who I am in the other. Black and white. Undulating landscapes of violences, atrocity, hate and hurts. I feel like I’m stuck in a crossfire, difficulty moving in a world that moves so deeply in me, unrecognizable from either end of the spectrum. There are days I don’t have the bravery to face the truths of my being here, or my being there*: there are days I just haven’t gotten enough sleep for it.
“If you don’t know who you are,” Nocebo, another teacher, says during class, “Then I can come up to you as a nobody, and define for myself who it is that you might be.”
Tshegofatso’s body was found. It hurts so bad that there is almost nothing left to feel at all. “We’re going numb to this,” Mbali tells me, in a state of frozen anger about the condition here for her South African women. “We’re just so used to this now.”
I don’t want to love this country, but, I do. I want to rip its history apart as much as I want to shred to pieces my own. Both of our bodies; evolving testaments of resiliency, love and victory. Desperately unprepared, equally determined. Where everything dances in a restless tension of history and the present, a collision of new and old paradigms on the backdrop of trauma and hope. Where questions, unending, simultaneously bring me closer to myself, as much as they drag me farther and farther away.
Families unite around stove fires. There are forced evictions for some, in a country with a staggering 27% unemployment rate pre-COVID. Meals are hot and shared where there are meals and where there are not: “The soldiers still stand, as long as the fire is burning.”
“Healing our men, might mean a chance for our women” I say over conversation. And healing ourselves, might just mean a chance for each other.
In this country who’s founding notion is of Ubuntu* -I am, because you are -there are days I don’t feel much like a person worth being a person at all. Still: I remain determined. I am determined to go where things hurt. I will stay awake, committed to spring loose from the stories of these pains, with a song.
To be continued…
And thank you for reading.
Text Notes, in order of appearance:
- Ibiyi. Traditional Zulu fabric, with spiritual and cultural representations in its design and patterning.
- Soweto. South Western Townships.
- The Zegé Zegé, or in colloquial terms: the Pikitup, are a culture of street men and women who stand in place of a more traditional, municipally governed collections department, recovering and recycling the city’s recyclable goods for processing.
- Ubuntu, abbreviated from “”Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” Zulu principle of: “I am because you are.”
