The Last Train to Zona Verde Read Online Free PDF Page B

not the money!” Archie let his finger droop. “But they took both.”
    “They shouldn’t have taken the money?”
    Archie said, “That was the badness.”
    I remembered the name Ntsikana and later looked it up and found that there was a Xhosa prophet by that name, his life well documented. Indeed, he was a pioneer of “black theology,” a self-created Christian (he’d had contact with missionaries, though he was never baptized and never studied with them) who had flourished in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. In 1815 Ntsikana had an epiphany, “an illumination of the soul,” that confirmed in him a belief in monogamy, river baptism, and Sunday prayer to a sovereign God. He wrote hymns and composed poems. Because his conversion had occurred without any missionary intervention, so he said, his followers “claimed a pedigree for Xhosa Christianity independent of missionary influence.”
    “I am sent by God, but am only like a candle,” Ntsikana said, using a felicitous image of illumination and finiteness. “I have not added anything to myself.” Furiously proselytizing, he established rural congregations throughout the Eastern Cape. One day Ntsikana foretold the coming of a race of people to the shores of South Africa. He described them as people “[through] whose transparent ears the sun shines redly” and “whose hair is long as the tail-hairs of a zebra.” Since he had previously seen whites, this prophecy proved accurate, and he apparently did warn his followers not toput much faith in the new people. Ntsikana died in 1821, and his grave, near Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape, is a place of pilgrimage.
    Although Archie had a few details wrong, his sudden parable introduced me to this powerful sect, which still had many adherents. We were walking along the broken paving of littered roads that ran between a pair of two-story cinderblock buildings that had the prison starkness of much public housing. They had once been, Archie said, the hostels of migrant workers — all men — who were employed as field hands, common laborers, and domestics in Cape Town during the apartheid era. An effective way to control them was to house them in an isolated place, require them to carry the
dompas
, and separate them from their wives and children, who remained in distant villages.
    Behind these beat-up hostels were small wooden shacks piled against each other. Ragged children, their noses running on this chilly morning, lurked in the doorways.
    “More people,” I said. “More shacks.”
    “Informal settlements,” Archie said. The name always brought a grim smile to my lips because it conjured the image of people in bright bungalows, sprawled on sofas. “The name for them is
siyahlala
.”
    I asked him to spell it, and I wrote it down.
    “It is Xhosa,” Archie said. “It means ‘We are staying here.’ ”
    He said five or six people lived in each shack, though there seemed hardly room for two. Scattered around the edge of the settlement, beyond the hostels, beyond the shacks, were shipping containers — great rusty steel boxes — and people were living in those, too, recent arrivals, Archie said. Some containers had been divided into two- or three-family dwellings, doors and windows blowtorched as crude openings in the sides. In front of several were stalls selling blackened sheep heads.
    “We call them smileys.” Archie explained that when the severedhead was thrown on the hot grill, “the lips shrivel up in a smile.”
    The locals ate them with “train smash,” he went on, and laughed. “Tomato sauce.”
    As we strolled, teenagers stared at us from where they sat on benches or rubber tires. Some glowered from doorways, others glanced up from card games or from kicking a soccer ball, still others simply stood the way herons stand, motionless, on one leg, the other leg crooked behind it. All of the youths were idle, not a dozen or so, but scores of them, perhaps hundreds, apparently