A South African story -- please critique!

[HamdenRice]

The following is a fragment of a longer short story. It is something of a story within the story. The larger story, entitled "Dinku (Sheep)" is about an African American student, Sam, living in South Africa in the 1980s. In this fragment, Sam recalls to himself a strange experience he has had with a drunken chief -- a recollection that in the larger story, he has decided not to share with the other main character of the story. That's why the first line of the story within the story is a little strange out of context. I am posting the story within the story, just because it is a little further along than the rest of the story. So, what do you think?

This is what Sam did not tell the professor:

That in a recent trip to one of the Western Villages, he had taken a young translator from the university, named Nyaniso, with him to try to interview old people in a village on the Botswana border. Nyaniso was one of the young translators, a cheerful college age young man who had dropped out of the movement and had the extreme good fortune to land a well paying and safe job as a translator. He had a desk in an office that he shared with another translator, on which he plowed through a stack of interview tapes conducted by white graduate students and black researchers which Nyaniso transcribed directly into a new computer. When he wasn’t busy, he told jokes, he was so happy to be there. Once he confided to Sam during a late afternoon beer and cigarette fueled discussion about the police, that when he was an activist he had been detained by security police for being at a meeting that the police decided was illegal. The police had no idea of the much more illegal things that Nyaniso had done, but they nevertheless decided to teach him a lesson. They told him calmly that they were about to beat him so badly that his mother would not recognize him. For two hours, they systematically beat him, and then called his mother to pick him up. When Nyaniso’s mother arrived at the police station, croweded with a dozen other comrades, most of whom had also been beaten, his mother duly walked past him, unable to recognize the wretch he had become, with a face as big and swollen as a South African pumpkin. But now, with a safe job, he laughed it off.

Sam had taken Nyaniso to this village that he had read about in the archives. He had an image of the village based on files that were several decades old. After a very long drive from Johannesburg, from the main South African highway, they turned off onto a dirt road that led after a few miles to the edge of a village in Bophutatswana, not far from the Botswana border. The village was bleak, which was not how Sam had imagined it. There were few people on the streets. After passing a few drab, run down houses, on the outskirts, the first thing they saw was a boy, with a dog leashed to the courtyard fence of a house, and the boy was absent-mindedly beating the dog with a belt. The dog yelped with each stroke of the belt, but must have realized there was no escaping the boy and simply cowered and accepted the beating. Sam knew enough even then that he should find the chief and ask permission to wander around the village, but he also knew not to ask that particular boy with the dog. They proceeded a little further and they came upon a little girl, no more than ten years old, dressed in a school uniform though it was late afternoon, walking along the road with a small plastic bag of groceries. They asked the girl where they might find the chief, and she told them that the chief owned a butcher shop, and that that was where the chief probably was. When they arrived in the butcher shop, inside they found three strange looking men, two behind the counter, the other loitering on the customer side of the shop, all of them very drunk. The shop smelled of cigarette smoke, stale beer and cheap whisky.

One man behind the counter was huge, well over six feet tall and massively if flabbily built. He had bulging bloodshot bug eyes, and was sweating profusely, through his shirt, but especially his forehead, even though the day was quite cool. He had a damp white handkerchief, which he used to mop his head every few seconds. He wore a suit jacket, shirt and tie but mismatched pants. The other man behind the counter was short and fat, and spoke to the others with his hand over his mouth, in a high voice, intermittently giggling almost hysterically, so that neither Sam, who spoke a little Tswana, nor Nyaniso whose first language was Tswana, could understand what he was saying. The man had a white apron wrapped around his waist, suggesting that he was the operator of the butcher shop. The man on the customer side of the meat counter was small and wirey, but he looked meaner than the others. When he turned momentarily toward Sam and Nyaniso, they saw he had a scar from his cheek to the center of his forehead that skipped past his eye, but left a faint grazing mark on his eyelid. The men seemed oblivious to Sam and Nyaniso. To Sam, it seemed they just assumed that they were customers who could wait for their important buisness, these instructions from the man in the apron, to be completed.

Nyaniso whispered to Sam that from what he could understand, the man behind the counter in the apron, was the chief of the village. At a lull in the conversation, Sam said hello in Tswana, and continued in English.

“Hello sir, my name is Sam Atkins, and I’m carrying out research on the history of the villages of this region.” He handed the chief a card showing his name and printed on the university’s stationary. “And I was wondering if I might speak to you for a few minutes.”

There was no reaction. Sam assumed that like everything else he had met from the area, that they spoke English and most likely were fluent. But when they said nothing and stared at him, he felt foolish and a little condescending, like a bad American used car salesman. He started again, “Chief Rakwena? You are Chief Rakwena? I just wanted to ask your permission to walk around the village and talk to old people about the history of your village.”

The small, wiry, scarred man erupted into shouting and began speaking in a dialect that Sam could not understand. The chief, the fat man in the apron, laughed into his hand and the huge man said something grave, but the wiry man interjected and began shouting loudly again. The only English sounding words that Sam thought he caught several times in the man’s tirade were something like, terroreest and communeest.

“What are they saying,” Sam asked Nyaniso softly, as the men argued.

“No, wait,” Nyaniso said. Then he listened intently for a few minutes. “I grew up in this region, but I can’t quite understand what they are saying. I think the ugly guy is saying something like, ‘we must just be killed.’” Sam saw Nyaniso’s left hand was shaking. The possible imminence of Sam’s death was completely unreal to Sam, but Nyaniso was now visibly trembling, his right hand shaking as he half raised it, as though he were a school boy thinking about raising his hand to seek a teacher’s attention, but half afraid to do so.

“You must just come with us,” the big man said in perfect English. “You have insulted the chief,” he said, pointing to the fat man in the apron. And this man,” he pointed to the wiry man, “is village security, and he wants to question you.” The chief smiling, stuck out his hand across the counter to shake Sam’s hand, “Pleasure!” he said in his high voice, “and this is the village headmaster of our school and my councillor. Now you must just come with us, as he said. You must follow us in your car.”

“Perhaps we can come back at a better time,” Sam said.

“No, you must just come with us now ... for security.”

Sam and Nyaniso followed the men outside. The chief and the wiry man got into a sedan parked behind the shop and the big man got into a dirty white pick up truck. Sam and Nyaniso got into their car and drove behind the chief’s car, and behind them, the big man drove the pickup apparently to make sure that they followed. When Sam glanced in the rear view mirror, he could see the big man’s bulging eyes staring at him angrily.

They drove just a few houses down the road to the beginning of a tall gate that surrounded a sizeable lot that included a large modern house. Sam could see in the car in front and the pickup behind, the drivers furiously signalling him to pull over between them.

The men came out of their vehicles and opened Sam’s door before Sam or Nyaniso could understand what was happening. They went into the main building of the compound. The big man in the jakcet ordered Sam and Nyaniso to stand by the wall while they figured out what to do. The wiry, scarred man continued to shout and gesticulate, while the little fat man broke into bouts of hysterical laughter, from time to time, into his hand. Nyaniso looked wide eyed at the men, and eventually broke into their conversation, talking fast in the mixed gutteral language of the townships back in Johannesburg. At the end of Nyaniso’s speech, Sam heard Nyaniso say, “BoAmerica.”

The big man, the headmaster, walked up to Sam and starred at him menacingly, and then said, again in perfect English, “Let me see your pass-port.”

Sam pulled his passport out of his pocket and handed it to the huge man. He showed it to the chief, saying a few words in a resigned tone. The last word Sam caught was again, “BoAmerica".

The chief spoke to Sam directly and without his hand on his mouth said, “You may leave now, but you may not come back to my village. Now, leave with this man, the teacher. He will make sure you leave.”

The chief waived Sam and Nyaniso off and again told them that they could now leave, but that they had to follow the teacher’s car out of the village. The tacher took off in the dirty pickup truck, and as Sam and Nyaniso followed him, Nyaniso suggested, almost whispering as though the man in the lead car could hear them conspiring, “I don’t think he is driving toward the main road. Bra, I think we should just take off. He won’t be able to catch us if we just take off.”

Sam considered this, and had the creeping fear that in fact, the teacher was taking them away from way toward the main road, but he was afraid to try to outrun them. He thought about what might happen if he could not outrun the teacher or if the chief’s thugs were waiting for them somewhere on the way to the main road, and so he lied to Nyaniso, saying “I don’t want to insult these guys. I think we have to trust him.”

The two car caravan drove deeper into the cluster of houses near the villages’ center. Although he was lost, Sam suspected they were doubling back to the chief’s butcher shop. But suddenly, the teacher pulled over hard to the left side of the road, in front of a tidy, somewhat modern looking three or four room single story house, with red tile roof like you would find in a working class white neighborhood in the city. When Sam pulled up behind, the teacher was already getting out of his car. By the time Sam and Nyaniso got out of their car, the teacher was already lumbering toward the doorway of the house, beckoning them inside with his hand, and saying, “Come with me.”

The first room inside the house was a modest living room, with a small coffee table, a worn couch, a large reclining chair and a television on a table in the corner. The big teacher mopped his forehead with his handkerchief and then swept his hand, in an arc around the room, the damp handkerchief fluttering, and announced, “This is my house.”

“You have a very nice house, sir” Sam said, somberly.

“Yes, you have a very pretty house,” Nyaniso said.

The huge teacher wobbled discreetly, the effect of his long afternoon of drinking with the chief. Looking at him, Sam thought of an Afrikaans phrase he had learned that Africans used for in so many occasions often bitterly – whether as an insult to Coloureds, or an insult to anyone putting on airs, the punchline of so many jokes, the last line and excuse for leaving a drinking party: “so dronk soos a kleurling onderweiser” – “as drunk as a coloured teacher.”

A small, delicately boned young woman with an unhappy face, a blanket wrapped around her waist, a worn cotton shirt, and a drab scarf on her head, appeared from a back room. She looked like a domestic, a Sheila.

“This is my wife,” the teacher said.

“Please to meet you,” Sam said, extending his hand.

“Pleasure,” Nyaniso said, quietly.

The sad, silent woman shook both their hands, but said nothing. She was shockingly traditional looking for the wife of a teacher – even the teacher of a small dusty village on the Botswana border – a poor peasant girl. Sam thought for a moment that the sadness on her face might be related to an image that flashed through his mind during this introduction, as soon as the teacher said the word “wife”: the image of the giant, sweating teacher, laboring on top of her.

“Are you really from America?” the teacher asked Sam, in a voice suddenly friendly and inquisitive.

“Ja.” He thought for a moment that his acquired South African accent might work against him.

“I want to apologize for the behavior of the chief and his councillor. These ones are merely country people, and I try to educate them about how modern things are done,” he said conspiratorily, as though a confidence between them. “Also, I want to offer you a cool drink before your long ride back.”

Sam thought it was better to accept the drink than to argue about begging off. The three of them shared in silence a small bottle of Coca Cola that was served by the wife, until Sam announced, “Thank you for your hospitality, but we really must be going. We need to get over Mokwena’s Mountain before it gets too dark.” Sam was of course lying.

As they walked to the door, the teacher abruptly asked, “Are you going back to America soon?” Sam turned around reluctantly. He didn’t want to prolong the conversation.

“Yes,” Sam said curtly, “I will be returning to America.”

“When?”

“In a few months.”

The teacher blurted out, suddenly hurt by his own circumstances in life, “When you get to America, will you tell them we are suffering – we are all suffering – every one?”

[oneighty]

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