Sizwe

He was named after Umkhonto we Sizwe like many other young men of his generation. Sizwe was 20 when I met him. He arrived at my gate with a group of five or six other young men, new in the city from one or other rural location. Petrus was the leader of the team in the beginning.

They presented a piece of paper with the words 'Action Security' written on it and Petrus's cell number. A few of us in 8th Avenue decided to take a chance on them although it was evident they were not trained for security work.
When news spread that households that reneged on their agreement with Action Security were promptly robbed, it dawned on me that I was nurturing a group of vigilantes, but by this time I knew them all and it was too late for me to extricate myself.

Over the years the team changed and so did the name of the security company. Some of the gang returned home to Limpopo or Mpumalanga or Northwest Province, generally because somebody was dead or dying. As a poet said, these were the days of ‘love in a time of AIDS’.

Others ended up in jail. The team of six became five and then three - Sizwe, Lucas and the Mozambican Caluti - and then just Sizwe and Action Security became 'Sizwe's Security'.

The Portuguese builder from 7^th Avenue gave him a bicycle and I bought a chain for it. Once a day, then once a week, then once every now and then, Sizwe would cycle past and wave.

As more and more cars were stolen, Sizwe's clients dwindled. I was one of the few who endured. He continued to arrive at my gate on the first of every month with a tattered blue receipt book, still bearing the name, 'Action Security' and I continued to pay him.

One starless night in April, he shouted for me from the gate. He was dressed in a leather jacket and a cap and there was a taxi revving in the road behind him. He said he had a problem with rent and was about to be evicted. There was an aura of hysteria around him. I didn't have any money to lend him so I told him to come back the next day.

Weeks passed and still no sign of Sizwe. When I saw Norman, a gardener from Kensington, pushing his lawnmower down Cumberland Avenue, I stopped the car. ‘Any news of Sizwe?’ He shook his head and bending down, demonstrated with his hands Sizwe's swollen legs and feet. ‘I think it's this disease of these days,’ he said, a local euphemism for AIDS.

I sent an SMS to Sizwe's cell number after many futile attempts to call the number: ‘I have known you for more than 12 years, why didn’t you speak to me about your problems?’

Almost a year later, he arrived at my gate. He said he had been treated for TB in a clinic in Mpumalanga for eight months and then went home. His cell phone had been stolen and he had lost all his possessions.

I gave him my bike - a woman’s bike with a white shopping basket in front.

He hasn't managed to re-establish himself as a security company. He says it is because the people who can afford to pay have moved away.  He has a piece job a couple of days a week as a gardener in Observatory and has rented another back room in 8th Avenue.

Plumbing in Bez Valley

Before sunrise I am awoken by dripping water on the bathroom ceiling. At seven, I call Mr Khoza, a self-employed plumber who lives in a backroom in 8^th Avenue. 

He rings the bell at the gate persistently. When I arrive at the front door, he is holding a copy of the 'Joburg East Express' in front of his face. He keeps it there for a few minutes. I wait.  Finally, with intense irritation and impatience, he enters the house.

In the bathroom we perform our usual song and dance routine which involves placing my small ladder on top of my small kitchen table so that once he reaches the highest rung, Mr Khoza can take one foot off the ladder and place it precariously on top of the door in order to hoist himself up into the bathroom ceiling and inspect my archaic geyeser’s latest affliction.

He disappears into the black hole. I wait nervously for his response. His diagnosis is always aggressive, incoherent, and turbulent. This is partly because he was apprenticed to a temperamental Portuguese plumber with a very limited English vocabulary for many years and partly because Mr Khoza - with good reason - is cautious not to commit himself.

The expletives stream out of his mouth, like an overflowing pot of food on the boil. He shakes his head. "It's fucked," he says. I have to establish whether the problem is redeemable or terminal so I try and get him to elaborate. "Fucked ! Fucked!" he says forcefully several times, spluttering with intensity, apparently believing that the weight of emotion behind the words should be sufficient to make a simple-minded person like me comprehend. "Little fucked or big fucked?" I probe. "Fucked! Fucked! Fucked!" He shouts, beads of sweat breaking out on his frustrated face.

After several phone calls to Mr Karam who owns the plumbing supply shop down the road, I give Mr Khoza the money to buy the parts.

I am still handing him lit candles hours later (I can't find my torch and Mr Khoza doesn’t have conventional plumbing tools to see in the dark).

Finally, the dripping sound gurgles and gasps and dies. Mr Khoza descends from the heavens, wreathed with an aura of satisfaction and achievement.

I am dizzy and so exhausted that I feel that my limbs have been dislocated from their sockets by the time I see him off the property. We stand at the gate like an old married couple, depleted by a domestic row that has been raging like a mountain fire for many years, leaving miles upon miles of scorched earth in its wake.

I observe that Mr. Khoza looks even older and more shriveled than he did when he arrived, his hair standing on end like a sucked mango, his shoulders stooped from the stress of his trade and the tyranny of his emotions.

With relief I wave him on his way, marveling that despite the fact that I feel like a victim of post-traumatic stress, the roots of our association go so deep into our individual and national pasts that our future is inevitably intertwined, like a creeper that has been growing along the walls of an ancient building for so long that it has become embedded in the structure.