November/December 2011

“Where were you all that time, Sereto, hmm?” This story takes place in 1976, in South Africa. At this time in its history, the country was in the middle of apartheid, a governmental policy that discriminated against non-whites and gave authorities nearly unlimited power to arrest and kill civilians. By 1976, students in the Soweto township were staging protests and uprisings, and a secret guerilla army called the MKs had formed. Rebellion was in the air… I walked home alone in the reddish dirt, kicking a rock along in front of me. “Sereto! Get over here, boy!” Mama’s shout rang out across the rows and rows of tin-topped shacks that were the Soweto township. “Ja, Mama!” I called over the distance, running all the way back to our little hut, where Mama was sweeping the cracked-dirt stoep. “What’re you doing, hmm? There’s work to be done, water to be fetched. Are the buckets full from the pump? And where’s Ledi?” I scuffed my toe in the dirt. “Ledi’s inside, minding the pots, remember, Mama? And keeping an eye on Tustin. I’m gonna go do the buckets now.” “Where were you all that time, Sereto, hmm?” Mama set the broom aside and looked down at me with a furrowed brow. “I know it’s difficult, and I’m sorry about you not having enough time to play, but with your Pa gone there’s only so much I can do alone.” Her voice was all business, but I knew the sorrow behind it—Pa had died only four months ago, in a riot where the police had open-fired. With Pa gone, everything was floaty and unsettled. It was a struggle just to remember the things that needed doing, like filling the water buckets and fixing meals. I looked into Mama’s quiet gray eyes and sighed. “I’m sorry, Mama. I was playing with Billy.” It wasn’t true, of course, but how could I say that her oldest child was giving himself up to the same cause that killed her husband? She couldn’t know that I was secretly taking part in the student uprisings. She couldn’t. To my surprise, Mama didn’t even seem angry that I had snuck off. She just shook her head sadly. “Ah, Sereto,” she murmured, “I am sorry things have to be this way.” “They’ll be better someday, won’t they, Mama? Things are already changing.” I almost bit back the hint at rebellion, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted her to feel the hope I felt at the rebellion. “Ja, Sereto,” she said sadly, “but not before many more innocent people are destroyed.” Then she picked up the broom and hustled off, leaving me standing on the stoep as the sun set behind me. I heard little kids playing and mothers shouting, and I smelled suppers being prepared. The fiery sun sank and sank, lower and lower, and I wondered if I should feel something. Everything was being taken away from me. Pa was gone, and Ledi and Ma and me were overworked. There wasn’t any time to talk anymore, no time to process what had happened. Tori, who was my closest friend except for Billy, had been arrested in the middle of the night, along with her father, and many other students had been arrested, injured, and killed. The riots were no laughing matter, whether they were led by children or adults, and this apartheid was taking everyone I loved away from me. I stood there, watching the sun sink, so detached that it was as if I looked down at myself from several feet up in the sky. I couldn’t decide how I should react, what I should feel. Then, like a faint tickling that grew steadily in my stomach, a feeling crawled up my throat. Anger. They had taken everything from me. Everything, and yet they could still take more. They could always control me because they could always take more: they could hurt Ledi or Tustin or Mama or Billy, they could arrest me, they could kill me. I remembered something Pa used to say: “That government, those whites—they can do anything they damn please.” I laughed, a bitter, harsh sound in the dusking air, and spat on the dirt, trying to rid my mouth of the sour taste. I spun on my heel to grab the water buckets. And as the last traces of light faded from the sky and I walked towards the water pump, I started to whistle a little tune. It was only when a bird tweeted the last note with me that I realized it was the song we had sung that day at the uprising. I stopped, dead cold. A breeze passed straight through me and a night bird hit one last solemn note. The stars were bright, almost too bright—like a warning. Something was unnatural in the night. I ran the rest of the way, to shake the eerie feeling, and filled the buckets quickly. On the way back, I talked aloud to calm myself. “You’re just being jittery for the sake of it because you’re scared, Sereto, and anyone would be. But don’t you go getting all worked up over nothing. Just now, everything’s fine, hmm?” I went on like that in a whisper, not even realizing I was imitating Mama. My footsteps pressing the earth, I strode back onto our street in Soweto. I stopped, shifting my weight. Every night, even after sunset, the township’s darkness was filled with the clanking of cooking pots and the quiet babble of family conversation. But now there was only silence. The bright stars, the pinprick stars, froze above me. The shacks reminded me of those stars in some odd, disjointed way—too still, too unmoving. Something was wrong, as if the wheels of heaven had stopped turning. I left the buckets behind a few scraggly bushes and crept around the back of our hut. I heard voices from inside—but they were different. Harsh voices. Male voices. I stiffened. “We have reasons to