An angry mob

by Alex Park | 2008

In the evening two nights ago, I was lying awake in my room with the windows ajar to let in whatever breeze might have been outside to keep me even the slightest bit cooler. Around eleven I could hear chanting, like gospel, but not in English. There was a chorus of it, so full of energy that it could have come from anywhere on campus. Just by the sound of it, you knew the sound carried.

I couldn't sleep hearing that, so I stepped out of bed, put on some pants and walked in the direction of the sound. It was the way I often took to the Memorial Tower Building: around the back of my residence, down a red dirt path and alongside the Student Union, past where the security guards would always be sitting on their break and still were at that hour, gossiping about their colleagues and families. The Zulu language sounded beautiful when the talk was as lively as that.

When I got to the music's source, a common room on the ground floor of the Student Union, the chanting had stopped, replaced by the droning hum of a chorus' murmuring, unsynchronized prayers. A man in a suit stood outside the door, perhaps keeping guard, and gave me an odd look—of surprise, warning, perhaps both. Through a crack in the door I could see the group, all dressed in their Sunday best, pacing the room and bobbing their heads to their own private rhythms. The only word I could make out was the loudest of them all, "Jesus," repeated again and again with the emphasis on the first syllable between words of fervent praise. Around the corner, trying for a better glimpse inside, I imagined a minister holding a bible and standing on a table in the middle as the others circled him.

The next morning—the second day of classes—felt uneventful, except for a small and mysterious riot that briefly occupied the attention of campus. I was at my 8:30 Afrikaans class—the second of the day—when I started to hear the reports from some other students of an angry mob breaking windows and making demands outside. The class, mostly Indians, joked that either we'd be first or last on the rioters' target list: first because compulsory Afrikaans instruction was historically a source of conflict in South African society—sparking the Soweto uprising in 1976—but last because no one cared about that history any more.

But by the time I got to the coffee shop in the Memorial Tower Building it seemed as though the event was more on people's minds than I had originally anticipated. Even cups and saucers were thought to be too dangerous to circulate amidst the possibility of outright violence.

"Could I get a tea, with milk, to serve?" I asked at the counter.
"Due to the strike we're only doing take-away. Would that be alright, love?"

I remembered Nikita was having her birthday party on the deck that day, so I walked over to the crowd—made up of her boyfriend and ten others I didn't recognize—and passed her my copy of Bob Dylan's Essential Interviews which I had just finished the night before. She took it and hugged me softly.

"So how's your day been?" I asked.
"Difficult," she said. "They kicked me out of the LAN." I knew she was referring to the strike somehow, but I assumed she meant that she had been evacuated, or that the building had closed temporarily after a power outage. I was wrong. "I was just sitting there and one of them came from over the monitor and hit Control-Alt-Delete, and told us all to get out."

I wondered then how I would react to seeing someone's hands come over my workstation and try to shut it off while I was in the middle of writing an email or even playing a game of solitaire. In my minds eye, I imagined how he would react if I grabbed his wrist and twisted it.

"I don't give a shit what you want, just keep me the hell out of it," I might have said. I wonder how he would have reacted. I wonder how his companions would react. I could have a class with any one of them, copying their notes from one of the development lectures or acting out a skit with them in Afrikaans.

It was a known fact that the dorms had been over-packed, mostly with poor black students as the college faced a housing shortage verging on a crisis. During Apartheid, the place easily had enough space to accommodate its students since all of them were white and most came from a commutable distance. Even if they didn't, most could afford to get a place in Durban. But since 1994, when Apartheid ended and non-whites were allowed to attend the University for the first time, the demographics of the campus had shifted to more closely resemble the country at large, with fewer whites and more towards blacks attending, many of whom came from rural villages in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere in KwaZulu-Natal. For them, commuting from home was impossible, but getting a place in the area was largely beyond their affordability. So for past years, many were squatting in the dorms with friends, sleeping on the floors or sharing beds, and for every year these conditions persisted, they demanded better options and rioted.

"They do this every year," Nikita said, "all over campus. It never seems to stop."

I thought about that. A little later, I considered what Joan, the exiled white Zimbabwean farmer had said to me when I met her on the bus from Umzumbe.

"... The youth, you see, it's the youth who you really have to watch out for."

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