White Dog Fell from the Sky

26



They took him to the prison in Johannesburg called Number Four, the place his heart feared most. He had known of many black men dying here—and women dying nearby in the Old Fort near the Constitutional Court. Suffocated, beaten beyond recognition, hung, burned, flayed, electrocuted.

A large door opened under the slab of building, the van entered, and the door closed behind them. The meaty security officer unchained him from the floor of the van and yanked him out by his shirt collar. “You’ll be taking off your broekies here,” said the other one. Women’s underwear.

They delivered him to Starkers, a short man with a blunt tool of a head and a smile to make one’s flesh crawl. They gave him a stinking pair of rubber sandals and took his brother’s leather shoes. He would never see Nthusi’s shoes again. Modimo was nowhere on the premises, nowhere on Earth for that matter, the God who’d once caused the noise of a great rushing, the noise of wings and of wheels whirling in air. The God who’d made the tree of life, the heavens and the Earth and all therein. There was only silence now. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death … If he was anywhere, He was the God of suffering. The God of injustice, of fruitless hope. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures … A white man’s God.

Starkers took his name, mashed his fingers into ink and then onto paper, told him to strip, pulled him roughly here and there, made him bend over so his cavernous eyes could inspect. Starkers wrote “communist threat” on a sheet of paper and sent him to be hosed down. From there it was emakhulakhuthu, the dark hole. Tiny concrete isolation cells lined up one after the other off a filthy corridor roofed in barbed wire, each a dunghill of human squalor and suffering. If he didn’t die from malnutrition, or at the hands of a man like Starkers, he’d die of typhoid fever. He was given a blanket that smelled of piss, and the door swung shut behind him.