Who you calling a Settler?

 

Professor Mamdani;

I am a settler and a native,

I am both,

You don’t speak,

Of us,

The marginalised shame of this continent!

How can a settler become a native?

You ask,

When even natives become settlers in Africa,

And settlers are migrants and trekkers,

Of various colours,

Including Black,

And Brown

Is there a New way?

You ask,

For civil and customary right to be erased from memory?

Am I a settler,

With nowhere to go?

I have a way,

I am the way,

I am the New,

The Un-bordered,

The Un-divided,

The Un-colonised,

The Un-ethnic,

The Un-everything,

Which is everything!

I cannot hold either of the rights of which you speak,

My right is that to life,

And humanity,

Long denied,

Since Slavery, Smuts and Verwoerd,

Lost in the woods

I am the New,
Which can emerge from the old,

From the mixes of settler and ethnic,

Like the Xhosa,

Who know how to mix sources!

We are all mixed here anyway,

And we’re all settlers in some way or another,

Except the Khoisan,

And there’s a bit of him in me,

Am I then the true native?

Or is it Australopithecus?

What sense does all this make?

I am a native of the Now!

A mix of the past,

And my future,

Will be written,

As old words die!

I am free!

Fatima Chapter 6 |1971: Fate

Fatima and Shakes had first met officially when Shakes had been offered a place to stay at a local residence, near the cricket grounds, in Lenz.  He stayed with Suleiman, who was responsible for tending the local cricket pitch.  Suleiman was a man who had taken his role so seriously that he guarded his front lawn like it was his own personal cricket pitch experiment, his laboratory.  His main thesis was that the pitch should be grown with the surface unbroken, from the very start.  Nobody was allowed to walk on his lawn with shoes, and sometimes even going barefoot in a careless manner could warrant a bark from Suleiman.   The only sentient beings he preferred on his lawn were birds, especially pigeons.   Each afternoon he would scatter the remaining day’s crumbs from the breadbin out to them.

“Pigeon shit, very good for the soil dikrah.  Like gold it is!”

This lawn was his pristine experiment, his baseline from which all other pitches could be judged, a perfect, pristine, unused and never to be used cricket pitch lying on a thin strip of grass in front of a council house in Lenz, an unlikely location for such a rare item indeed. 

When his grandchildren would later in life arrive to visit him from Durban they would rush across the lawn, ecstatic to see their grandparents.  His voice would boom loudly (but not un-lovingly) as he would sit up, one hand in the air, finger pointing to the sky,

“Not on the lawn, dikrah, not on the lawn!”

To which Shakes would mutter under his breath in Gujerati and roll his eyes skyward,

“Kassam thi, maro warso gah na niche che!”

(“I swear my inheritance lies under that lawn!”)

Shakes was impressed by the man though, and thought his eccentricity a sign of independence, of not wanting to fit into the stereotypes imposed upon a whole generation of older men.  Suleiman had always wanted a cricketer for a son, and having Shakes, a virtual prodigy, in his home, delighted him. 

He would tire Shakes with questions, comments and remonstrations about cricket but Shakes would always pay him his due respect and made him feel valued.  It was deeply ingrained in Shakes to pay respect to his elders – their family was based upon these hierarchies and they preserved the role of everyone within them.  Suleiman could sense that Shakes had come from a good family, which had its history intact, not the fragmented existence that had been his own.  Even though he knew his history the lack of a living extended family meant that he was somehow without a history. 

Fatima served them tea and biscuits and later cool-drinks in the living room while her father and Shake’s spoke.  She was quiet and very much in awe of him.  She couldn’t believe that he was actually in her home and was deeply infatuated from the start.  It is reasonable; he was a superstar at 22, having already established himself at provincial level and abroad as one of the finest cricketers in the country.  Newspapers followed his progress and women adored him.  She was a 15 year old girl coming of age, beginning to understand her own womanhood and he was a catalyst to her.  Her skin would feel his nearness to her, the warmth from his body and she would feel warm inside.  At the time, Shakes was 22 and Fatima 15, seven years between them.  It may seem a large amount of time between them, but it was not out of place then, and she looked older than she was.  She was already very attractive, and perhaps there was also the Lolita appeal for Shakes in having a woman much younger than him.  She was still a girl, but he saw more in her. 

When he had four front teeth knocked out by a well hit ball into his face at silly point he had only grabbed his mouth with one hand and hung his head to the side.  He was like a wounded animal that didn’t know how bad the injury really was.  He just moved off to the side to show his face to the wicket-keeper who was running over when he removed his hand and saw the blood.  Then the pain hit him.  Until then everything was in slow motion but now he could hear the exclamations of pain around him and started to feel the looseness and dull ache of his gums, blood filling his mouth up, forcing him to bow down on one leg and release the thickened red spittle onto the grass.  Lying in them, like newfound pearls, were his teeth.

“Fuck!” he thought, “what now eh?  Better not lose the teeth.”

By now everyone had rushed over and team-mates were consoling him and organising help for him. 

“Was there a doctor on the field?”

“Where’s he?”

“Oh, call that fullah then, that one who said he knows Chookie bhai!”

He could sense confusion amongst them, and with some help started to make his way up from his knees and started to move off the field.  He didn’t want to hold up the game and make a drama of it.  These things happened.  He would take many full blows to the mouth in his career, some from his trusted peers, but most from the apartheid state sporting machines and white press, which sought first to buy him out, and then to diminish him when he refused their offers of concession to him.  He didn’t want to be seen as ‘special’.  Like Suleiman, he was also infected with the idea of equality. 

When he looked up from his pearls amidst the ground there was a now familiar voice;

“Shakes - you alright?”

“Here, let me get those for you,” she said, reaching down into his pool of spittle and blood with her feminine henna framed fingers and quite matter of factly grabbing the loosened teeth out of them.”

“My fathers friend Johnny-Bhai will take you to the doctor.  There’s one just around the corner and he’s still open.  Don’t worry; he’s got a dentist next door so they can both have a look at you.”

She said it so matter of factly that he obeyed her without thinking.  He didn’t even stop to think that she wasn’t supposed to be there at all.  He took it in his stride and let himself be led by her off the field.  He thought,

“She’s quite grown-up for such a young-one!”

It was a pattern in their relationship.  Where he was strong, she was weak and where he weakened she grew to great strength.  They would grow into an eternally locked dance of the cosmos – they were yin and yang, each with enough of the other to overlap and have a unified experience of the world that is satisfying.  There was much love in that overlapping space, but it is only because of their sharing and appreciation of each others' respective yins and yangs that they were able to move forward together, sharing and bearing each others' burdens for each other when they faltered alone. 

There can be no absolutes where yin and yang are concerned and both of them were no exceptions.  Shakes was yang on the outside; a pillar of strength, the warrior, the jock, the samurai who could stand up against the rogue powers of the time but he was really yin on the inside.  His yin came from his mother, her nature had found itself into his inner core.  It was a patient core, at ease with the cycles of things, with the ability to wait and plot and see before taking action.  Like water, he could feel everything in this state, making him sensitive to even the slightest inflection or deviation in the behaviours around him.  He was more connected to everything because he was calm inside.  Leaping fish are easier to view in calmer waters.

Cricket and women appealed to him because of their cyclic nature.  In human history, most things cyclic are given a feminine essence in its interpretation and is hence yin in nature.  As a batsmen; he was not bored at the change of overs and change of fielding positions every six balls.  It was something which broke the nerve of other players.  They would become taken up by the cycle, finding a hypnotic rhythm in them.  As soon as the hypnosis would set in they would start to feel tired.  They would start to feel the stiffness in their legs and backs every time they had to change overs, walking slowly across the pitch.  It reminded them that there were still more cycles of overs to go and they would start to wane in focus, hitting loose shots and trying to sneak impossible runs with tired legs.  The heat would drone in on their hot heads like a microwave and eventually, the cycle of each run would become an effort.  They would then try to hit for the boundaries, flailing at good deliveries and starting to unravel themselves.  Often, it was the psychology of a player that eroded before his performance did.

Shake’s was of a different ilk and constitution.  For him, every ball was a new one.  The cycle was just an opportunity to take a breather and assess things.  He had the patience of a saint.  His soft yin had given him what the Asian fighting masters call ‘beginners mind!’ He approached every new ball as a totally new opportunity.  He didn’t labour himself trying to figure too much out when a ball was hurtling towards him.  He saw it as new thing entirely from whatever came before, a new universe trapped in red which he felt out like a panther eyeing its prey.  He sharpened only at the point of action.  There, his yin would guide him into a flawless execution of form.  Like a cracking whip all the yang that the ball had arrived with would be dispatched back to it at exactly the right angle he desired.  It was like magic, but he knew his own secret.  He was patient.  He carried no anxiety in his frame but an open-ness to each new event, a calm with the winds of change.  His yang was only perceived by those around him who didn’t understand the graceful source of his actions.  He appeared as a hero, a titan, and indeed, we needed him to be one.  He, like Suleiman, stepped up to a fate which went against his nature, but which he saw as a calling.  When there is a call to arms, many different types of soldiers answer.  He was indeed a soldier in his heart, but it was a soldiering born of love and a desire for peace, not one born of revenge.

Fatima by comparison was all yin on the outside, but she had to keep all her yang within the shade of Suleiman’s large shadow and it always remained hidden, in her core, until she had the occasion and reason to show it.  On the outside, she was her costume; a patchwork of identities crafted to ease her interaction with the world, to please them with her presence.  Maybe it was the way the thickness of the Transvaal accent creeped into her conversation every now and again that gave away the bits of yang waiting to emerge.  Even though she was yin on the outside there was a firmness that revealed the great yang on the inside.  One knew that she had boundaries if you met her in public. 

Their complementary natures would provide each other with support each time one faltered or weakened.  He would put her through clothing design school, from which she would quickly establish a small business which expanded into an entire factory.  She wouldn’t stop there though.  She would set up clinics for underprivileged women and teach them how to source, sell and sow garments.  She passed her skills on without prejudice and thought for monopoly.  She even withdrew when her business grew too big, selling it and using the sales to help Shake’s establish a haberdashery warehouse who was then selling women’s swimwear out of the back of his car in various neighbourhoods.  He was not a person fuelled by personal pride; he would make an effort to feed his family.  His pride was a collective one, one which rested in a belief system rather than his personal make-up.  But it was not a job without hazards,

“Imagine having one of the most desirable men in the country appear at your home with bikini’s to sell?  I wonder how women responded to that?”

Fatima would taunt herself with these thoughts and grow jealous.  Maybe she had serious ulterior motivations for funding his new business effort so heavily, but it was in her nature to deal with things rather than dwell on the sources of unhappiness.

In her marriage to him she’d arrive wearing her costume to his home.  She was aware, that it was an item of great beauty but still felt inside that it was ‘pieced together’.  It wasn’t real!

“Maybe like me?”

 She would feel guilty when these thoughts assailed her and she would push them out of her mind.  She loved strongly and her mothers love meant so much to her that she refused to allow herself to desecrate this love with these thoughts.  She fought it and wore her costume proudly every day.  After all, she did have a history, even though it was wrapped up in a patchwork of people, places and identities that only she knew of.  Hers came from the close family she’d grown up in.  Suleimans brothers who’d arrived in South Africa had also had families by the time she was a child and they were a poorer but loving network of people who openly hugged and made displays of affection towards each other.  In spite of hardships, she’d always felt that this family was what had carried them all through.  Everyone knew how difficult Suleiman could be, so other family members took on different roles, imparting little bits of knowledge they thought would help her in the world. 

She had already learnt a value system, and it came into conflict with her new family at first as she interpreted their inability to hug and kiss, or allow boys and girls or even fathers and daughters (after a certain age) from being too physically close.  She saw it as cold family, but she later learnt that she was mistaken.  They were just not outward about their feelings in the same way.  In their family, not everything you felt needed to be spoken or demonstrated.  She was still young then, a student at technikon, taking in the sights and sounds of Durban, getting accustomed to the differences from the Transvaal.  It must have been difficult for her in many ways but every time she faltered, Shakes would be there standing strong.  She knew he was there for her and he knew she needed to know that.  They argued a lot at first too; but he soon, with his inner wisdom of yin and patience, was able to assess her nature and make the leap that he was not required to talk too much; just to provide love and support.  She would come to him when she needed his opinion, and she respected it deeply.  He loved that about her. 

To view the previous chapter of Fatima please click here

To view the next chapter of Fatima click here

Searching for you

Searching for you,

I found,

Eternity,

Through you,

I can see,

Through my tempest seas,

And into me,

How every moment,

And every touch,

Has brought me,

To you,

Eternally you,

I hungered,

After you,

In every life,

Through every inch of strife,

To be near you,

I chose any fate,

Thrown to earth,

I clamoured in the Guff,

And called Gods bluff,

To be near you,

I carved through stone,

And every thing I know,

Says I cannot grow,

Cannot go,

 A real day,

Without you,

I need you,

And can’t leave you,

Alone

I stand accused,

My reluctant muse,

Of thoughts unspoken,

And held too close,

Dishonest words,

And bravado jokes

I hoped my poetry,

And attempts at books you see,

Would bring you close to me,

The real side of me,

Always playing with you,

My childhood friend,

I would bend time,

To find that rhyme,

That makes you mine

Am I Kahlil?

Seeking out his cup,

Again,

In another lifetime

Even now,

I wait in vain,

And I knew how to do my thing,

Until I felt your sting,

And went bumbling within,

To find you,

And find you I did,

A million lifetimes with kids,

And every time you hid,

And teased me just a bit,

To let me know,

That I should never quit

And quit I never will,

I know your heart isn’t still,

I know it rustles and shakes,

When my voice breaks,

So, on my knees I’ll beg,

Please don’t leave me here again

Real love is Magical,

Mystical,

Spiritual

I adore you,

And want more of you,

Addiction,

To worship you,

Constantly you,

Everywhere

My pretense,

Is past tense,

Strengthened and weakened,

Leaning over your fence,

I have no defence,

It makes no sense,

Like Incense,

How long,

I burn,

For you,

Everywhere I turn,

It’s you,

And only you,

My Eternal glue,

Now unbounded,

Clearly I see you

2005: Juju’s Secret

The darkroom had unlocked the hidden secret that accompanied his elevated consciousness whenever caught in the flash of the camera … as the illustration emerged on each page when placed in the developer, he would see both the complete pasts and futures of all those he had photographed.  It was as if that lightning strike had connected him to the Universe, and by taking his mother, he had become its prescience guided child, enfolded in an inter-dimensional universe whenever light captured an image, and fixed it into time.  The camera, as he saw it, was more than a window upon the world, it was a microscope, and his gift, was being able to penetrate the mysteries of the voyeur lust that accompanies every camera purchase – a greed to capture moments in history that convey meaning about who we are, and what we want to be.  He could actually know, for those moments, everything about what was happening, and why.  The realisation left him reeling.  He had only just completed a degree in journalism and got himself a desk-job with a local paper, writing up petty (and sometimes not so petty) crimes for a senior writer, to whom he was apprenticed.  He’d always focused on writing, but he had no idea that the camera would eventually provide him with his ultimate lens on reality, so to speak.  He’d decided to take the introductory photography class more as an afterthought than an action.  What on earth could this all mean?  Was he some kind of superhero, with special powers, or was he a madman?There was nothing to do but wait and see.  

To read the previous chapter of Juju click here

Fatima Chapter 5 |1970: Newspaper Cuttings

 

She had a favourite picture of him, a newspaper cutting, which she carried in her school blazer pocket for two years until it fell out one day making her secret known to Safi.  It didn’t matter by then though, for every second girl in her school had a picture of him hidden away somewhere, and it didn’t seem at all abnormal.  It seemed quite healthy for a teenage girl to be smitten by an idol in contemporary culture.  By then, her love had grown to epic proportions.  She was one of the few girls she knew who actually had contact with him, and her personality had begun to blossom outwards from the status that brought her within the peer group.  Suleimans occupation had ensured her the opportunity of having regular contact (albeit innocent at this stage) with Shakes.

She was fifteen when he made his intentions known by starting to pay courtship visits to her home.  Who could disapprove?  He was the decent type;

“Could have any girl he wanted.”

What was it that attracted him to her?  Was it her sense of duty or her teenage infatuation and her excitability at the very sight of him, which she would never lose throughout her life.  Maybe it was all these things or maybe it was a simple desire on his part to have a girl whom he felt he could mould into a woman and thus ensure that she embodied all the characteristics he desired.  It’s not easy to tell.  History and memories can be muddled by our need to preserve what is contemporary.  Sometimes we’d rather not know the truth because it makes the present impossible to bear.  Too much history weights us down because our tools of analysis are too plain to give justice to experience.  To miss the experience is to miss it forever.  No amount of digging can reveal more than possible motivations for an action and his actions made sense in the time they occurred.  There can be no doubt that love had taken hold, and no rational explanations need be given to explain that.

There are some who believe that we never truly love more than we project affections that we have an intrinsic need to share, into somebody else.  We elevate them and invest them with qualities we wish we could enjoy forever.  When love fails, it is our failure to realise these qualities that hurt most.  We have needs, powerful needs that drive us to the limits of sanity in order to satisfy them.

Fatima had strong needs.  She’d inherited her father’s idealism.  It reflected in her need to order the world around her.  She had an expert feel for creating an ordered environment.  Everything had its place.  Strangely, this would manifest itself through her life in many ways, the ultimate of which would be her need to find a place into which she could fit herself.  It would be as if the need for order around her had actually been a need to define herself constantly, so that she could be secure and sure of the constancy of things.  This had a profound effect on the way she loved.  She invested the object of her affections with the qualities she most desired in order to preserve her need for constancy and security.  He became the ideal man.  He could do no wrong, Shakes was everything in her life.  He would be all she would need.  It was truly a naïve teenage love, and reality was still being painted into the years of her life.

She looked forward to her moments alone with him.  They were mostly supervised.  He was careful to preserve the authority of her parents, obeying the traditional manner of courtship to an admirable degree.  There was no doubting his intentions or his sincerity and he was admired by all in her family.  There were impressed by his mixture of humility and quiet charm and it was evident in his success that his quiet strength ran deep.  They were grateful of his demeanour and he soon became a guest in their home.

She adored him, doted on him, yet in her girlish way she teased him; trying here and there to provoke a response from his seemingly immovable calm.  It would be a constant theme in their love.  His contentment with himself – as if he was an individual without a need for anyone else - would always provide her with a challenge of sorts; she would always have to extract affection from him.  This was new to her, her family had always openly displayed affection and hugs and kisses were exchanged between the sexes without hesitation.  For him though, affection wasn’t for open display.  It was something that came in small doses and was dealt out in private. 

“He was almost displaced in his nature sometimes,” she thought. 

His reserve was always intact.  It was an immovable veneer which never left him, even when he angered.  This was the ultimate source of stability and security in her life; that he was immovable in this way.  It also made her feel somehow disconnected to him though, and this would be a constant source of tension for her, the oscillating desire for stability and the need to be closer to his being would drive her to behave like a girl more than a woman later in their marriage life.  Knowing him and loving him from such a young age would leave her knowing no other way to love.  He knew this, and it increased his responsibility towards her and he became, in a sense, a father to her.  It was only through this that she could trust him to be a father to her children. 

***To view the previous chapter of Fatima please click here.
***To view the next chapter of Fatima please click here

The Path

Body being passenger

To the mind

The mind being the path

To the soul,

I got lost in the valley

Of gratuitive obscurity

And found myself on the

Edge of realisation

I walked out the possessor

Of a world not my own

An occupant of eternity

Fixed into being

A love supreme preserved in tears,

The path long walked abolished fear!

Fatima Chapter 4 |1969: Spikes and Whites

Fatima was in good company.  Safinaz, daughter of Aunty Fawzi, also known as Fuckinarz to the boys, was at fifteen a fully formed woman of the world in Fatima’s eyes.  She always had new and exciting things to share with Fatima and more recently had begun to replace the role that the boys played in her social life.  She was the first person in Fatima’s life to speak about being modern.   To Fatima, this word soon began to embody all that was fashionable and independent about adult life and as time passed so her imitation of Safinaz grew.  You see, Fatima, like many children, had begun to feel the need to fit in.  Safi fitted in well.  She knew everyone and everyone knew her.  Even the older boys who hung around at the corner shop knew her by name.  She had a loud, giggling, laughing voice and always seemed happy.  She seemed to bounce along on her feet wherever she went and always had a wide smile ready for anyone who happened to pass by.  She could smile, greet or tease yet nobody ever took offence.  In fact, they seemed to like her more for it.

Usually, Safinaz would rest her head in her arms which lay perched upon the backyard wall and tell Fatima all her classroom gossip while Fatima sat cleaning the odd bits of stone which inevitably managed to find its way into the dry dahl kernels that were sold at the local store.  There would be a lazy timelessness that would punctuate their conversation with long comfortable silences and tired laughter.  Today, however, Safi was abuzz with excitement.  It was impossible for her to remain still.

“You don’t know what?  Today is when the Natal boys are coming to play.  Oh Fathu, so many good looking rich boys you won’t find on one single field anywhere.”

Fatima giggled! She was shy about boys now.  At thirteen she had begun to exhibit the first signs of female sexuality.  She was aware of her own confused feelings of attraction to males, especially older males.  Boys her own age were more interested in teasing, laughing, running, fighting or standing on their heads for all she could care.  In a way they were too equal to be attractive.  The older boys, however, could turn her to a blush with just a little comment.  Often, she would picture herself in the arms of a Hindi movie star and she would feel a little flutter in her heart.  Love was all nostalgic infatuation to her at this tender age.

Safinaz was sorting through all kinds of clothing trying to decide what to wear,

“How I look in this one, eh?  Nice?  Nice enough for one of them to fall in love and bring proposal?  He’ey, why you blushing like that?  Maybe you’ll get one boyfriend too!”

Fatima laughed out loud.  She, like everyone else, liked being teased by Safi’s probing, loving, naughty questions.  Despite her youthful lack of tact, Safi often perceived the true desires of those around her.  It was her ability to state it publicly in a way that revealed that she herself might share the same feeling that made people like her.  She teased; she didn’t mock.

“Come, come, come Fathu, time to go do some sight-seeing”

And with that, they made their way down to the field.  There were many people from the neighbourhood sat on the grass, most only paying half their attention to the teams who were tossing balls and warming up on the field.  Fatima could see immediately which team was from Natal.  They spoke differently.  As they shouted and called to each other she could distinguish the difference in their accent.  They had a more traditional way of pronouncing their words.  They sounded more like the older people around her.  There was little of the thickness of the Transvaal accent and more of the nasal twang of the various vernaculars used by the older generation.

Through the milieux of voices, samoosa smells, laughter and cigarette smoke she caught her first glimpse of him.  He was doing a full forward stretch, but kept his eyes on the ground and seemed uninterested and somewhat shy of the eyes that were all congregated around the edges of the field.  His tall, sinewy frame was made all the more attractive by his hair, which curled fashionably over his ears - “like a movie star neh?” Safi would later comment.  His skin shone with a deep red tan, which was exaggerated by the cricket whites that rested on his frame with an ease that suggested tailoring.  He looked up, and for the briefest of moments their eyes met.  It was in this moment, Fatima would later claim, that she first became aware of her destiny.

It is easy to be sceptical; to claim it was all post-fact rationalisation, to claim that it was what came later that day that really got her attention, but it is impossible to deny that there were powerful forces at work inside both of them which would bring them together.  A man of twenty one and a girl of thirteen, like Elvis and Priscilla, seven years between man and wife, roughly the recipe the Koran teaches for matchmaking.   A mans age halved and seven years added yields the perfect age of a wife.  It implicitly acknowledges that woman develop faster than men physically, intellectually and emotionally.  It also guarantees that a 60 year old man still has a chance of children with his newly betrothed – a good formula for successful polygamy.

The two captains met for the toss.  There was a light warm breeze which made the umpire at square leg curse.  The toss was decided without any communication to the crowd and it was only when they saw the Transvaal team spread out over the field that they knew what the status of the game would be.  They limbered up as they took up their positions and until now, everything seemed to indicate that this would be an ordinary game of test cricket between two ordinary Indian provincial teams.  These were social occasions as much as they were competitive occasions, and meant quite a lot to a minority community who were desperately trying to retain a sense of their displaced nationality. 

They were South African Indians, Indians who weren’t comfortable with having a blanket identity thrust upon them by Apartheid.  They had arrived with their own caste distinctions early in the century and some were wealthy, of high caste, who had even intermarried with whites, and felt themselves eligible for membership of the ruling classes, while others had been thought of as ‘working class’ castes and had been relegated to second class citizenship.  Generally, these barriers had been broken down by Apartheid and the communities, walled off from others by Verwoerd, had looked inwards and had unified more strongly.  We were all ‘Indians’ now and our history was indelibly linked to that of Gandhi’s earliest teachings and activities and some caste distinctions had been reversed with the twists of fate accompanying life in a strange new land.  Indeed, for some this was as simple as a name change.  "Maharaj" was a favourite, like Jews forced to choose more 'german' names which brought about the deluge of Goldsteins, Rosenthals, Siversteins, Goldbergs and Blumenthals.

They tried their best to remain normal, and this healthy competition was a way of maintaining the feeling of normality.  It must be remembered that these were the early days of Apartheid; the damage was in the process of being done.  It wasn’t as it is today, a mission complete, a derelict house whose foundations are clenched in granite, making it impossible to remove, which has to be built over.  Like the enclosed chapel in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, it contains a place of both death and awakening, something which defies time its legacy of confusion.

The main difference between these respective generations is a simple one; hope versus acceptance.  The generations of old possessed one quality that redeemed them from oppression; they possessed hope.  It was something that reflected in the quality of game that was to unfold.  The young cricketers had many dreams, many hopes and trained hard to realise them.  Long hours were spent in the nets, on the road and on the field; they were going places.  Many thought that if they played well regularly, it would eventually become impossible for them to be refused from joining the official (white) South African cricket team.  In retrospect, their hope was worth having despite their eventual disappointment.

On that stickly hot summer day though, the half-distracted crowd were in for a treat.  It was a showcase of true and genuinely rare talent.  The star (guess who?) didn’t move from his crease the entire day.  Salim Ahmed (known then to his friends as ‘Shakes’) spent the day executing perfect drives, flicks and squares.  His strength lay in his patience.  He chose his shots with deliberate and implacable calm.  Whenever a bowler managed to bowl his best, he would defend with frustratingly deliberate calm.  At the first glimpse of a loose ball however, he would pull out a stroke with perfect classic poise.  He was a dream to watch, a true professional in the making.  The crowd appreciated every second of it.  They forgot their provincial attitudes and were lulled into admiration by his display of skill.  As the time passed at the crease so he began to relax into his game.  The longer he stayed, the more he began to conjure; as the bowlers started to tire in the draining heat so each ball became more and more playable.  It began to look like a demonstration match, a kind of cricketing Harlem Globetrotters equivalent.  There was little, if any doubt, as to who won the game that day.

Fatima was enthralled, but it was not the magnificent display of sporting prowess that captured her attention.  It was the way his tailored cricket whites rippled with a gentle flow as he made each shot.  It seemed that the clothes refused to betray the nature of its wearers true strength; his sincere and gentle calm.  Even when furious strokes sent the ball sailing off into the wind and beyond the boundaries the movement of his clothes betrayed his lack of aggression.  He was not a man fuelled at the well of aggression or frustration.  Rather, he was motivated by a modest delight in executing perfect form.  He was a true academic of the sport, blessed with the quality of which she’d seen little of even in her short childhood years; inspiration.  So captivated was she by this scene that she very nearly failed to notice her father’s glee.  It was the way he slapped his thighs and let out a cry of booming delight.

‘Atchar! Look at that, what a fullah this one is! Dikrah, I’m telling you, that boy can go places one day.’

There were very few times that she saw her father taken by inspiration.  More often than not he seemed to draw out his feelings and ideas from the complex maze of his personality.  One was never quite sure what inspired him to think and say the things he did.  Mad genius or confused wandering, you could never quite discern where his motivation lay.  It was almost paradoxical that he drew so much pleasure out of so simple an activity; watching a game of cricket.  It’s just another one of those quirks of humanity that we are drawn to extremes to strengthen or weaken our condition.

To be fair to all the cricketers who played that test, people who came back the next day weren’t disappointed when Shakes declared his innings on 141 not out.  There were many other talents lurking on the field who were driven to new heights, inspired by Shakes’s performance.  Bowlers, batsmen and fielders alike took to the field with a quickened sense of reflex, energised and occasionally pumped with adrenaline.  The crowds would grow steadily from mid-morning till late afternoon and it wasn’t long before the Indian press were there, snapping away, writing furiously and interviewing Transvaal and Natal cricket union officials.  Even they were inspired for they began to make predictions of mixed sport, or at the very least inter-racial contact between the separate sports bodies.  It would be too much to say that this one match began a crusade for recognition of non-white sportsmen but in truth these were the very beginnings of what was to become a long battle, where compromises would be made, allegiance’s tested and sometimes broken.  Shakes would play his part, and to be fair to him he never lost sight of the simple inspiration that motivated his excellence.  He never regarded his talent as larger than himself or the people who surrounded him and would eventually never compromise his position; no integrated sporting body meant he would never play for his country in any capacity. 

He would give no timid answers when given the opportunity to play for his country in a lesser capacity, as an occasional exception to the rule, as part of experimental white teams who would allow in a few non-white players.  Rather, he would relish in integrating what was left of the countries displaced players.  But these were early days, and as he exited the field and he was completely unaware of the young girl seated on the grass ten metres away who would steal her way into his heart.

The newspapers began to collect in Fatima’s cupboard space.  Nobody quite noticed that she had begun a stockpile of them because she’d said she needed them to help her with her homework.  Her parents approved and the boys were too distracted by other things to care, but if anyone had cared to rifle through them they would have discovered that there seemed to be a consistency about the articles which were being cut out.  Only Safi knew Fatima’s little secret.  She would comment;

“Hey, he’s sooo cute Fathu.  Look, he’s smiling in this one, what nice teeth too.  Perfect for you, if only you were little bit older, but who knows; maybe luck will come your way.  If it’s meant to be then it will be; inshallah.”

Noticing those teeth, Fatima was unaware of the incident which would bring them together and thought privately that he did have beautifully perfect teeth indeed, not a flaw in their assembly.  Her own teeth overlapped slightly in certain places and she’d never really thought about her inadequacy before Safi’s comment.  Her admiration had made her somewhat self-aware.  She wondered if she would ever be beautiful enough for a man like him.

Click here for the previous chapter of Fatima

Click here for the next chapter.