Antjie Krog’s new book, Begging to Be Black, is styled by its publishers as the completing work in an unexpected trilogy that began with her seminal Country of My Skull and continued with A Change of Tongue.
In 1992, a gang leader was shot dead by a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Kroonstad. The murder weapon was then hidden on Krog’s stoep. In Begging to Be Black, Krog begins by exploring her position in this controversial case.
BOOK SA is proud to bring you first sight of Begging to Be Black. Here is the book’s dramatic opening sequence:
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Chapter one
A gunshot cracks. The man lunges forward, his hands groping towards a stationary taxi nearby.
Somebody yells.
Bystanders scramble in all directions. Waiting taxi drivers duck behind their steering wheels. Another shot and the man falls on the tar, his attaché case flung sideways. Blood streams from his shattered shoulder blade as he crawls towards the vehicle. He would reach it, but a figure wearing a balaclava closes in on him. Light-footed, as if with sprung ankles, his pursuer stands astride him as he comes to a stop.
The wounded man turns on his side to look up.
From the planted stance of the heels, the perfect balance of the pelvis, the way the arms in red sleeves reach down, with strange grace, to point the pistol at his forehead, the wounded man knows: this is the end.
A final shot. But because the wounded man moves his head at the last moment, the bullet that kills him does not leave his body: it penetrates the frontal skull bone two centimetres above the eye and exits four centimetres behind the left ear, where it is caught between the skull and the black skin in a small swelling.
Quickly, the killer pulls off the balaclava, rolls the pistol in it and, with elated energy, runs off – accompanied by another man – away from the body and towards the station, sidestepping taxis and terrified spectators.
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It is 25 February 1992 – quarter past six in Kroonstad.
Of what has just happened, we know nothing. Serene from deep-breathing exercises, J. and I roll up our yoga mats and call our youngest child, who is playing with other kids in the garden outside the house where we have our weekly classes. We drive to the local café for milk and bread. I greet the woman working at the bread-cutting machine, but instead of her usual banter, she lowers her eyes and disappears among the shelves. Later, at the till, I pick up her voice in heightened conversation at the back, where fresh milk is being carried in.
I don’t make anything of it, knowing too well that trying to live across racial lines in a rural town is not always easy – for black or white. J. puts the groceries on the back seat and flips Willem a packet of wine gums.
We drive home and we seem what we are: a reasonably comfortable middle-class family in a small rural town. During the height of apartheid we consciously decided to live among poor people and bought a house near the railway line. When our daughter went off to a birthday party one Saturday and came home distraught, after being pushed into the street towards a bakkie draped in AWB flags and called the child of a terrorist, we sent our children away to boarding schools in Bloemfontein.
It is not always easy to work out how to live a righteous life. That apartheid is wrong is relatively obvious, but how to live against apartheid is the harder question, because even the smallest decision has complicated consequences. Moving in and out of townships, without permission, for rallies, meetings and workshops causes tension at home. Sometimes J. calls me The Great Moral Denouncer, who judges every decision taken by the family as white-privileged, exploitative, unfair. Shall we go and see the Lohengrin production in Pretoria? Of course not: the money paid to the soprano flown in from South America would keep our local township in electricity for a year! Even the choice of black or white coffee acquires political undertones in our house, J. says. Sometimes he turns the argument around: because he is working hard, and is civilized to rich clients, his wife can afford to put his cars, fax machine, phone, house and life at the disposal of the oppressed.
So let me try again to describe this moment. A very precise moment in which the terrible has already happened but has not yet reached you, and it’s only looking back that you realize how protected, fortunate and naive you were at that moment, in the car along the familiar streets in which you grew up. (But, as always when I start this story, I feel I am sinking – as if my brain loses its capacity to maintain a physical integrity, a coherent skin around the story, as if my being becomes dispersed in the telling. I also know that when I reach the end of this tale, completely worn out, I will still be asking: What would have been the right thing to do? – and the terror, the real terror of moral bewilderment, is lost among the words.)
So: We’re coming back from yoga. With milk and bread, we stop in our garage. When we get out, Reggie is peering down from the stoep above the driveway. This is a surprise, because I didn’t see his car in front of the house. I laugh: ‘Are you now so high up in the political structures that you are being dropped by helicopter?’
We walk towards the front stoep, where Reggie and three other men are standing.
‘We need a lift,’ he says. He doesn’t introduce the others – which isn’t unusual, because he is often accompanied by chance passengers or political figures who need to remain incognito.
‘Don’t you want coffee or something cold to drink?’ J. offers.
‘No, thank you,’ says Reggie. ‘We’re in a hurry.’
Seeing it’s already dark, J. says he’ll quickly take them.
‘No,’ Reggie stops him. ‘I have to discuss something with your wife.’
I get into the car, with Reggie in front and the other men in the back. I start reversing and, just before I’m all the way out of the garage, Reggie says cursorily, ‘Get rid of this for me.’ And he hands me a red T-shirt.
I open the window and throw it into a box of old clothes that people come and drop off at our place. I drive and turn into Voortrekker Road. Reggie tells me that Regina, his wife, is not doing well and asks whether I can recommend a ‘right’ psychologist in Welkom: ‘You know what the doctors in Kroonstad are like!’ After being in solitary confinement for four months in ’76, Regina had a nervous breakdown and is still battling with the consequences.
I talk about their eldest daughter, Winnie, who is in Standard 9 at Brentpark High, where I teach. She was recently made hockey captain. ‘No other centre forward breaks through like her,’ I say. ‘Takes after her father …’
Reggie laughs, pleased at the compliment.
At the crossroads he says, ‘Rather take us to Maokeng.’ I turn right to the black township instead of left to Brentpark, the coloured area. We drive. The men in the back start talking in Sesotho. They sound angry. Reggie says something, also in Sesotho, which calms them down.
Suddenly police cars come racing past us – it looks as if everyone inside has a walkie-talkie against his mouth. ‘God,’ I say, ‘the police can sometimes look hysterical when they want to.’
Reggie placates the men in the back. ‘It’s a free country,’ he says, speaking Afrikaans now. ‘We can say what we like; we can drive where we like.’
I stop at Tau’s shop. Everyone gets out, and I see my passengers for the first time. Later, however, I will remember only the tall black man with the paper bag and the short one with the long hair and yellow-green eyes.
I drive back. At home J. is busy making toast. I go outside to cut some roses: Porcelain, Duet and the big ochre Just Joey. J. finds me in the passage, holds up my hand with the bunch of roses, and dances with me to his new Harvest Moon tape:
When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart
He kisses my neck and our hands are clasped together around the roses and the scent of jasmine. From somewhere a phrase drifts up in me: ‘’n haag van bloed’ – a hedge of blood. I go and write it down, the beginning of a poem. Our youngest is sitting at the table doing his homework. The phone rings. ‘Where’s Reggie?’ a voice asks. ‘The Wheetie is dead and the police are looking for Reggie.’ I say I don’t know and hang up.
‘There’s something bloody funny going on,’ I say to J. and fetch the T-shirt from the garage. ‘Let’s burn this.’
‘You don’t do anything,’ says J., ‘until you know what’s going on.’
I do not argue. J. is irritated enough. We have a couple of especially difficult months behind us. At the office people started asking what architectural work he thought the firm would be getting if a partner’s wife collaborated with those endangering the lives of the people who used architects in the first place. Some weeks before, there were photographs in the local newspaper of me and Reggie attending ANC rallies, with reports of how we incited innocent children to take part in life-threatening marches.
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