Dear new subscriber
Enjoy chapter one for free.
Here begins book 2 of the Koba trilogy. If you would like to read/listen to book 1, you’ll find it here. Also, feel free to give me feedback on any aspect of the chapter. Your interest and opinion is valued.
Dedication
To the Ju|’hoan people of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, and to you, the reader, for supporting them by purchasing this extract. Mi ui i, ‘we thank you’, in the Ju|’hoan language.
Chapter 1
The train had left the city at dusk. Three days and two nights across the subcontinent, through empty stretches of veld, past remote farms, on and on between dune and desert, carriages clicking along like a row of bright beads.
Now it sputtered towards the terminus, Onderwater, fragrant with orange blossom, last oasis before the Kalahari Desert.
Heavy-breathing, this train. Will it stop?
Koba longed to get away from the press of people, from the miasma of stale breath and unwashed bodies, from the rasp of the blue serge sleeve rucked up against her. She glanced down at her wrist, manacled to the policeman’s broad, black one. The metal had rubbed a raw patch in her skin. She stole a look at his proud Zulu profile. Frightening, but not as frightening as what lay out there.
When he unlocks me . . . what . . . where must I go?
She felt again the frustration of all her dealings with authority. Always-always the same, even when they get a blue baboon like this to do their dirty for them, she thought. This policeman didn’t care that his kind had left her parents’ murders un-punished, had allowed her to be abducted, had raped her. She felt the burn of tears and refused to let them fall. She blinked at the filthy window.
Stained by the desert’s red breath.
When she turned back, the policeman’s fist was coming towards her. She ducked . . . but instead of a blow, a gentle dab on her face.
She started as he blotted her tear with a white handkerchief. He was saying something. She closed her eyes. She needed to think.
He excuses himself for leaning across me. He wipes the window with that white-white cloth a woman ironed for him . . . so I can see out. Maybe he’s not a tame baboon for the Boere? But he does have South African Police badged over his heart.
It helped to visualize the silver S.A.P insignia sitting like a chip on his shoulder. She felt calmer; she understood survival. She opened her eyes, but couldn’t meet his questioning look. She turned back to the window. Through the cleared porthole she saw heat shimmer off the tin roof of the station building; flowers she now knew were called zinnias wilted in a bed under the signpost. ‘Underwater,’ she translated for herself. She decided to repay her guard’s unexpected kindness.
‘The water must be far under,’ she observed, straight-faced, in Afrikaans.
‘Ja,’ the Zulu replied in the same language, ‘but for-suh the Boer has taken the sweetest parts for himself.’
They shared a bitter smile.
A shame I never knew his heart while our shoulders pressed, she thought.
It was unlikely they would have spoken. Even in her carefree days when she sat with the Marais family around their dining-room table and felt their love settle like a soft skin mantle across her shoulders; even then, she hadn’t chattered. Chat was for the carefree and Koba had seldom been that.
The train stopped. She saw a station bench — on it, in wavering letters, a sign: WHITES ONLY. She and her guard remained seated while around them passengers of every shade of black and brown except her own, scrambled to retrieve their baggage or gather their children and chickens. Women hitched their toddlers onto their hips or bound them to their backs with colourful wraps. They instructed their older charges to bring the bounty: shopping bags stuffed with starch, tea, coffee, tins of condensed milk; Rose skin lightening cream; Nivea body lotion; cobs of corn; mangoes, pineapples, avocados; cuts of a meat beginning to pong after days in the heat.
The prepubescent girls lifted the bags onto their braided heads with practised ease, leaving a hand free to lead younger siblings. Boys swung squawking chickens in home-made cages. One grappled with a goose, trying to bind its beak as it attacked him.
Koba didn’t notice. She was far, far away, remembering the quiet of Impalala with its frangipani trees and cool, clear tap water, remembering Mannie, friend of her youth, love of her life.
She wasn’t sure how old she’d been when she first arrived at Impalala, the bushveld farm in South Africa. Ten, perhaps twelve? Her race were small, slim-limbed people to whom puberty came late. Survival was not counted in years, but in seasons of feast or famine; a child’s fate was linked to the prevailing climatic conditions at the time of its birth. Koba felt she must have been that most unlucky of children — one born in a harrowing drought. She had no one to confirm this; her close family were long dead and she’d spent her childhood thousands of miles from her Kalahari Desert home. She’d grown fond of the white family who'd abducted her.
I did not want them, but they took root in my heart. And now the government wants to reverse me, send me back to my birth n!ore like I am still that Ju|’hoan child who knows nothing of |’Hun ways. Now I must go back to squat in the sand with my people; I must get my water from roots and my meat with a bow and arrow. But I am toothpaste now; I have been squeezed out.
The policeman’s cuff brushed against her as he undid the handcuff. She couldn’t help flinching. She became aware that people were staring, the bolder among them calling out, asking the constable what she had done.
‘I am not permitted to talk about a prisoner,’ he said, arms akimbo to block her from public view.
Koba heard speculation build among the waiting crowd.
‘Passbook offence?’
‘No, brother, you don’t get your own police escort for that.’
‘Political? Is she the one who shoot Verwoerd?’
‘Huw, if she is, we should sing praise poems to her.’ The group laughed.
‘It say here,’ a man with glasses spoke, holding his newspaper conspicuously high. ‘It say in this English newspaper that Verwoerd was shot with a gun, not a bow and arrow.’ His illiterate neighbours seemed to wither under his magnified glare. Except for one matron.
‘Eish,’ she countered, balancing a sack of flour on her head, ‘better Verwoerd had suffered Masarwa poison; it brings a slow, painful death.’ She patted the sack into place, raising a cloud of flour dust that immediately settled white on the black faces around her. ‘A long death gives a man time to think about his evil.’
‘You speak of apartheid, Mma?’
‘Yebo.’
‘You speak the truth. Let me read you from this English newspaper.’ He rapped the pages with his knuckles, but his glasses were filmed with flour dust and he had to pause and wipe them. A younger man draped in a boldly patterned Basuto blanket stepped forward.
‘What, uncle, is a Masarwa?’
‘Must be you are not from here, nephew; you do not know our animals,’ said Glasses. ‘The whites call them Bushmen.’
‘Eish, beware of those,’ said the matron, jerking her thumb in Koba’s direction. ‘They look like children but they steal cattle like tsotsis steal pay packets.’
Basuto Blanket looked alarmed; he’d never had a pay packet, but he had been a cattle herder in the Drakensberg mountains.
Koba bit her tongue to stop from shouting out: ‘You-people stole from my ancestors; stole our great meat animals, our freedom to follow the herds. You, Blindman, for all your four eyes, for all your reading in English, have surely not read how we Bushmen suffered from your coming. Even now, even still. I have read it with my own eyes. And in English.’ Instead she ducked her chin against her shoulder as the conversation continued.
‘I noted the Chinese eyes of the Masarwa girl; eyes like the Chinks who cheat you in shops,’ Basuto Blanket was saying, not bothering to lower his voice.
Koba prickled with humiliation.
Your Ju|’hoan skin has grown thin, Bushgirl, a voice reminded her.
She heard this pest in her head quite distinctly when she was debating something with herself. It buzzed her like a mosquito, whining when she was less than honest with herself. I wish I could make decisions without having to look through an insect’s eye, she’d said to Mannie Marais, the only person she’d ever told about her other voice. He’d called her pest a cricket.
‘You know that fillum we saw – Pinocchio?’
Mannie’s parents, Marta and Deon Marais, owned Impalala, a guest lodge catering for tourists to the nearby Kruger National Park. Deon had planned to build an open-air cinema there but, in the seven years Koba lived on Impalala, neither screen nor projector ever materialized. There were always more pressing needs around the lodge, like repairs to the exhausted Lister generator, their only power source on pitch-black nights when the roar of lion in the nearby reserve seemed closer.
Occasionally, Marta would raid what she called ‘Koba’s Train Home’ fund. It existed largely in Marta’s well-meaning mind, but the odd metal manifestation could be found in pennies dropped into jars in the empty pantry or in the storeroom where Marta kept her watercolour-painting paraphernalia. Random coins could also be found in her wardrobe, forgotten in scuffed handbags or in the toes of tramped-down shoes. Only the urgent need for a family treat in lieu of the holiday they could never afford would convince her to raid ‘the fund’. Then she’d tear through cupboards with the urgency of an anteater in a termite nest. She’d emerge waving the fifty cents for the cinema fee. Wringing her hands, she’d assure her unofficial foster child that they’d soon replace the train fare money. The four of them would set off for the drive-in, stopping just before the paying booth with its glaring WHITES ONLY / BLANKES ALLEEN notice, to hide Koba under a blanket behind the car seat.
It was on one of these nights, with rows of cars balancing on the tarred waves like a pod of star-gazing whales, that Koba had seen her first Disney animation. She hadn’t been impressed.
‘You remember Pinocchio’s friend, Jiminy Cricket?’ Mannie had asked.
‘Hnmpf, stupid gogga in a hat?’
‘Okay, he’s an insect, but it’s only a fairy story . . . the thing is, the cricket’s like Pinocchio’s conscience . . .’
The way Koba was staring at him made him feel uncomfortable. Maybe he should fetch the big dictionary Ma kept in the kitchen in the place where Pa said most women kept recipe books. But then he’d have to know how to spell the word properly.
Koba had known she was staring, but she’d been struck by how soft she felt inside towards the worried boy.
She had never told even Mannie that she believed Insect had been sent to her by her deceased grandmother, Zuma. The old lady’s lap had been her cradle; Zuma’s spellbinding stories the distraction needed to keep a toddler entertained on long walks in the Kalahari sandveld as they foraged for roots and berries. The insect was one of several spiritual inheritances from her grandmother. When Koba was old enough to make a useful contribution to the family’s store of veld food, Zuma had asked to be taken to her ancestral area to die. Koba had last seen her silhouetted on a ledge, her skin cloak billowing out like insect wings.
During her long, cave-dwelling years on Impalala, Koba had been lonely. She was used to being surrounded by people, to being parented by any and every adult in the group. She’d had dozens of playmates to sing and skip and dance with. Suddenly, she was surrounded by silence.
Then she began to hear Zuma. It was as if the garrulous old woman was seated on the other side of her small fire. This didn’t frighten or surprise the girl. Her grandmother had been renowned in the band not just as a storyteller, but also for having powerful n|om. This gave Zuma the ability to move between supernatural realms and the everyday world of heat and hunger. As Koba became more integrated into the Marais family, Zuma stopped talking to her.
Or you just stopped listening, her internal cricket chirruped.
The cricket notion had become a private joke for Koba and Mannie. Once, sitting in her cave, he’d tried to stamp on an insect crawling across the rock floor. ‘Don’t kill my conscience,’ she’d said, laughing.
Koba had fed several cockroaches in the prison cell she’d just been released from. She’d seen them as links to Mannie and her life on Impalala.
Impalala-Impalala, green and bushy with buck. Safe there until they discovered my love for a |’Hun man. Now white and black hate me.
Hush, Bushgirl. You have nothing to be ashamed of; in a wiser world what you have done would not be a crime.
She turned to stare out of the window and saw her reflection, blurred and red. She was no longer the quaking child of that first, terrible train journey. She was no longer dressed in animal skins. She wore western dress and shoes; she could read and write in English and Afrikaans. But what did it help? she thought. I am speechless in the only language that matters now, my mother tongue.
Too light for in here, Bushgirl, too dark for out there; sticking out everywhere like a white lion cub.
She and Mannie had seen one once in the game reserve. When he’d brought news of the birth of an albino cub nearby, she’d wanted to see it. Unconcerned about the danger, they’d slipped through the game fence separating Impalala from the Kruger Park and tracked the pride. Mannie said it was like seeing a snowball in the desert.
‘Prey will spot it,’ she’d whispered to Mannie. ‘Unless that cub grows darker fur it will go hungry as an adult.’
‘No-man, they’ll put it in a zoo, or sell it to the circus.’
‘Better it dies from hunger.’
To be continued …
For your interest:
A glossary of foreign words and a pronunciation guide will be provided at the end of this novel, along with a note on some of the history and customs of the San people.
Delighted to be back with Koba, having finished read the wonderful Salt & Honey justcyedterday.
Great first chapter ☺️