Zulu Read Free Page B

black identity, and the proof, through fists, that the struggle for black rights was not in vain. That night, Muhammad Ali, who hadn’t boxed much since his trouble with the draft board, had defeated the brute strength of Foreman, the champion of white America, demonstrating that power could be overturned, as long as you fought with intelligence and determination.
    The message, coming as it did during the worst days of apartheid, had galvanized Oscar. The child would have the same name as the champion—Ali. Josephina thought it was a nice name, Oscar saw it as a premonition.
    Oscar was an educated man, and didn’t have much truck with old wives’ tales, but the
amaDlozi
, the venerable ancestors, had surely leaned over their new son’s cradle. Like the boxer who had defended the black cause, their son would be a champion—in everything he did.
    And in fact, Ali Neuman had risen to be head of the Crime Unit of the Cape Town police not through positive discrimination but simply because he’d been better than anyone else. More gifted. Quicker on his feet. Even the old redneck cops, the ones who’d followed orders, the lechers, the permanent drunks, thought he was pretty smart—for a
kaffir
. 7 The others, those who knew him only by reputation, saw him as a tough customer, the descendant of some Zulu chief, not someone you’d want to provoke over anything racial. The blacks had suffered most from a third-rate education 8 and remained a minority among the intellectual elite. Neuman had shown them that he was descended not from the monkey but from the tree, just like them—which didn’t mean he was a pussycat.
    Walter Sanogo, the captain in charge of the Harare police station, knew who Ali Neuman was. The white man’s pet. You just had to see the cut of his suit—no one here could afford clothes like that. It wasn’t that Sanogo felt jealous, they simply lived in different worlds.
    Designed to accommodate two hundred thousand people, Khayelitsha now had a million, maybe two—or three. After the squatters, the homeless from the other overcrowded townships, and the migrant workers, Khayelitsha was now absorbing refugees from all over Africa.
    â€œIf your mother doesn’t report her attacker,” he said, “I don’t see how I can bring anyone in for questioning. I understand how angry you are after what happened to her, but gangs of street kids are as common as crickets these days.”
    The fan was humming in the captain’s office. Sanogo was about fifty, with a nasty scar at the side of his nose, his shoulders sagging wearily beneath his uniform. Half of the wanted notices above his head were a year or two old.
    â€œSimon Mceli’s mother was a
sangoma
,” Neuman said. “She seems to have left the township, but not her son. If Simon is part of a street gang now, we should be able to track him down.”
    The captain sighed regretfully. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help, but there was nothing he could do. Every day, more or less, in groups or alone, people in flight from somewhere else arrived in the township, people who had seen their fields burned, their houses pillaged, their friends killed, their wives raped in front of their families, people who had been driven from their homes by petroleum, epidemics, droughts, violent coups, and genocides, people with misfortune snapping at their heels, terrified people who, out of some instinct for survival, converged on the peaceful Cape province. Khayelitsha had become a buffer between Cape Town, “the most beautiful city in the world,” and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. A hundred? A thousand? Two thousand? Walter Sanogo didn’t know how many arrived each day, but Khayelitsha was going to explode with all these refugees.
    â€œI’ve got two hundred men here,” he said. “And hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Frankly, if your mother doesn’t have