They Got to You Too: A Novel

By Futhi Ntshingila

Hans van Rooyen is a former police general raised by two women who survived the 1899 South African War. He finds himself being cared for in an old age home by the daughter of liberation struggle activists. At 80, he carries with him the memories of crimes he committed as an officer under the apartheid government. Having eluded the public confessions at the TRC for his time in the Border Wars, he retained his position in the democratic South Africa, serving as an institutional memory for a new generation of police recruits.

Zoe Zondi is tasked to care for the old man. Her gentle and compassionate nature prompts Hans to review his decision to go to the grave with all his secrets. Zoe has her own life story to tell and, as their unlikely bond deepens, strengthened by the isolation that COVID-19 lockdown brings, they provide a safe space for each other to say the things that are often left unsaid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781770107298

Book preview

‘Futhi Ntshingila is so skilful in portraying the characters that I had to take a second look – was this writer using a pen name? I did that because, from the opening sentence, I heard the voice of an aging man of a different race from the one I had assumed was the writer’s. I could not believe such authenticity could come from creation or recreation. But then, the more I read, the clearer it became: I was in the hands of a brilliant storyteller.

Then how she weaves the different layers of quite disparate lives is nothing short of magic … a seamless orchestration of events of each life that then goes on to echo, blend, highlight, or refute a layer or layers of the other’s life … and, surprisingly, sometimes of the same, same life. There is no message in this magical story, so realistic, so necessary. What there is, is the portrayal of the inescapable interrelatedness of humans --- the need humans have for one another to be whatever life deals them.

Ntshingila is to be congratulated on listening to the stories of beings dissimilar to herself and managing to capture their essence – proof she is listening with more than just her two God-given ears … but also with her heart.’

– SINDIWE MAGONA, award-winning author

‘I read this novel while the cities that were the backdrops to our youth, Durban and Pietermaritzburg, were in flames, as protestors looted and burnt down shops: some in anger at the incarceration of former President Jacob Zuma, some in desperate hunger, others in opportunistic greed. Futhi’s novel was a balm to my soul, an ode to the power of storytelling to gently peel away the scars of ancient wounds and provide some sort of relief, catharsis and healing. They Got To You Too is just the right fiction for our troubled time; it reminds us of the many shades of human that stretch between the binaries of black and white, rich and poor in South Africa. Futhi’s ability to inhabit the guilt-ridden mind of Madala, an aging wife-beating, racist Afrikaner policeman, and make you empathise with him while simultaneously loathing him is an incredible feat of literary imagination. She makes you want to take the journey down his heart of darkness, to understand why and how he became the monster he is so ashamed of being.

Futhi’s characterisation of an array of resilient women from different eras in South African history paints us a picture of the true backbone of our country – women who not only nurture and sustain families, but have the courage to carve new paths by breaking the shackles of both stereotype and social pressure. This novel turns the lights on while darkness envelops us.’

– HEATHER ROBERTSON, editor of Daily Maverick 168

‘Built around tightly-knit nuggets of first-person accounsts that fit into one another like puzzle pieces, reading this novel is like standing naked beneath a waterfall during an African summer. Ntshingila uses an amazing repertoire of storytelling techniques to peel layer after layer of the human side of the South African tragedy, often referenced glibly when we write and speak of, the Apartheid era, the struggle, the blacks, the whites or the new South Africa". The reader of this book will be plunged deep into the bowels of South Africa’s dark past. But the reader will also be led towards a brilliant and bright day that beckons. In the process, the reader will be educated, shaken and entertained. In this novel, Ntshingila achieves what every Truth Commission attempts, namely to shed light on the past, truthfully, passionately and compassionately.’

– TINYIKO MALULEKE, senior research fellow, University of Pretoria Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship

They Got To You Too

They Got to You Too

a novel

futhi ntshingila

MACMILLAN

First published in 2021

by Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19

Northlands

2116

Johannesburg

South Africa

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978-1-77010-728-1

e-ISBN 978-1-77010-729-8

© 2021 Futhi Ntshingila

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Editing by Jane Bowman

Proofreading by Sean Fraser

Design and typesetting by Nyx Design

Cover design by Ayanda Phasha

This is for my father Bernard Mtwanas Ntshingila, the gentle giant.

‘The act of writing was too personally important for me to abandon it just because the prospects of my being taken seriously were bleak.’ – Toni Morrison

I heard all of you, thank you for trusting me with your stories.

Madala

if i am being honest, before I ended up here as a heap of troublesome old bones, I will say that my body did give me enough warning that something was amiss. I repeatedly ignored the signs. I was well adjusted to discomfort and my pa had always told me to toughen up. He hated any display of weakness and I suppose as much as I had sworn never to be like him I was turning into him. Isn’t that how it works? We wake up one day having turned into exactly what we have been attempting to outrun. We look in a mirror and horror hits us with the inevitability. I felt it; I had morphed into my father. A slimy feeling washed up from my gut and burnt my throat, making me gag.

But I digress. My warning was not audible, it was corporeal and started with a tiny, almost imperceptible, prodding. I liken it to when you’ve had those jabs for malaria and drunk numerous cans of tonic water. You get that slightly naar but manageable and even ignorable ill feeling – a woozy head rush and clammy hands. My ears were constantly ringing but I ignored it. Next, I would wake up with pins and needles in my feet but after some movement and a shower I would be as right as rain again. My body ramped up the warning from a murmur to an audible ‘help’ that I could not ignore but I had to endure. It was the voices and tormenting laughs that had me in the foetal position, frozen with fear. I would grit my teeth and hang on for the signs of dawn to come and save me. I was pathetic; a fully grown man past andropause with fully visible man-boobs and nuts so droopy that even cold water did not manage to lift them up, yet here I was afraid of the dark.

Even if I could have done something, what would I do? Go to the doctor and say what? I hear the voices of the men I killed in the army all those years ago. No, there is just too much riding on this after keeping my head down for so long and all that TRC dirty linen and other witch-hunt missions that I had managed to escape. Now I must go to a doctor? Who is to say where it will end up? I can just see the headline about another evil dinosaur that got off from killing and torturing blacks has come out of the woodwork. My demons might as well take a Michael Jackson grotesque Thriller walk and come and drag me to my grave.

I am an ex-police officer, one of the few who braved the new dispensation and found it bearable enough, even enjoyable, to be part of. I successfully reinvented myself as Joshua Doore, the friendly uncle who mentored some of the youngsters in the force. I needed it more than they did, I think. I cashed out my pension in 2004 already but they kept me on to advise; an ‘institutional memory’ is what they called me. What was I going to do sitting at home anyway, wifeless and childless? I felt obliged to stay and earn a healthy and steady income and invest my nest-egg pension. One day when I am dead I will finally make good on my son. I don’t want to speculate on whether he would even acknowledge me and my money. Maybe he will give it all to charity or burn it; who knows. It hurts me to think of my son, so I don’t.

I am rewriting the wrongs I committed on my son and wife by becoming a kind uncle to young, mostly black, rookies that I used to eat for breakfast in my heyday. Once in a while we would get an intake of a handful of white kids joining the force but it was becoming more and more rare. I have come to forge relationships with some of these kids that sometimes bring tears to my eyes. I will go to my grave never having told them what I did in the Zimbabwean veld and Mozambican trenches.

First thing I did during the mayhem of the sunset clause was to transfer from Natal to Pretoria, putting distance between me and my old haunts. Ironically, if I really think about it, I was getting back to where it all started, where my father’s dry white bones are resting, if that’s even possible. So I am careful with my stories. I don’t drink, it loosens the tongue and I don’t miss it. I have saved a lot of money since dropping that liquid demon and in my day I would become aggressive, break things, fight people and brandish guns; the worst kind of fool is what I was back then.

‘Madala’ is what the rookies call me; it’s affectionate. I’ll give it to these kids, first they give you a tough time and push you as hard as they can but once they begin to trust you, you become like family. So I really liked it when I found out that I am known as ‘Madala’ in their informal circles. Sometimes when we were all relaxing they would forget the stiff formalities and call me ‘Madala’. Some climbed the ranks and when they bumped into me I was a madala who taught them to stiffen their spine. Not all rookies liked me; some were resentful and as far as they were concerned I didn’t belong in the academy. I never did let on that I could understand isiZulu and I could cuss them out better than some of these kids who dreamed and thought in English. In fact, for some years growing up, I had to think in isiZulu and translate into Afrikaans. It’s funny how the worm turns.

I would sit with my office window open and listen to them test their political ideas. One rookie, whose eyes always seemed to bore into my soul, was holding court outside my window talking about the foolishness of leadership for preserving old fogies like me in the academy.

‘Hayi bafwethu, this thing is not only wrong, it is downright dangerous. My grandfather once told me an old cautionary tale of a frozen snake. A man happens upon a small frozen mamba; he takes it home and leaves it by the warm hearth when he goes to bed. The snake thaws and slithers to where the man sleeps, bites the man’s ankle, unloading its venom. It glides away, leaving him cold, frozen and, later, six feet under. This is what the academy is doing, taking a frozen mamba from the old order. Who knows? He could be briefing his compatriots on all our secrets and one day we won’t wake up from our sleep.’

‘Heee haaa uqalile, Sam. Madala is one of us, mfana. He is fair to the bone. In fact, sometimes I think that old man gives the Boers a harder time than us. Have you seen how he corrected the new rookies who were becoming overfamiliar with him? Isn’t he the one who ratted on old Van Wyk when he called Suzy a kaffir bitch? Man, that cracker of a slap he landed on Van Wyk sobered him up one time!’ The boys laugh, remembering the commotion that day in the academy.

‘You’re right, Madala is one of a kind. His swift justice delivery gave me a new kind of respect for him. He’s not like the others and they don’t like him one bit. I heard them say he brown-noses too much with the unwashed masses. That’s what they secretly call the black generals and the commissioner,’ said the other rookie, dismissing Sam’s suspicions.

It was amusing listening to the rookies and satisfying to know I have earned their trust. They’re right, I did slap the shit out of Van Wyk. It was almost like an automatic reflex. He was new and cocky and, having seen that the principal of the academy is a Boer like him, he thought he could get away with things. He groped the wrong girl; a rookie who turned around and rained solid punches to his gut. She finished him with a mother of a kick to his nuts. That’s when he resorted to the insults he must have heard growing up. ‘Kaffir bitch,’ he spat out. I witnessed all of it and I was walking behind him after practice. I was onto him like lightning. I never said a word. Van Wyk and everyone watching were hushed to silence by the speed, intensity and shock of the slap I delivered.

It activated something in me that had lain dormant. I was shaking with something deeper than anger as I marched to my quarters. I longed for a long drag of something stronger than a cigarette. I needed a joint. I lay down and found myself thinking back to when I was a young boy, my small hand in Kristina’s sandpaper-rough hand walking to the ice-cream truck. It was a hot day, so hot that I was turning red and Kristina was sweating. The truck driver refused to sell her ice-cream so she took me aside, gave me the money and instructed me to stand on my toes and buy my own ice-cream. I couldn’t buy two because the man said he didn’t do business with a ‘kaffir bitch’. It was the meanest thing I had ever heard and remained bitter in my gut for a long time.

Kristina said the man was mean because he was afraid and she told me not to repeat the incident to my Oumagrootjie. I didn’t but I also lost all pleasure eating that ice-cream. We shared it. Kristina and I played a game of licking the ice-cream in turns until she let me have the cone. The man saw us sharing the ice-cream, swiftly stopped the truck and ran over to us. He slapped Kristina so hard in the face I thought she was going to fall but she just held her face, looked him in the eye and laughed so hard.

‘How does it feel being powerful? I know you and your mother. You can pass all you want, you will never be white.’

Kristina’s words were like an air-sucking punch. I saw the man recoil and speed walk back to his truck.

‘Yes, run and send my love to Betty September,’ shouted Kristina. ‘Your mother Beatrice. That’s right, that was her name before she was Betty September. I know your dirty little secret. What’s the matter Big Baas? Did I hurt your feelings?’

Kristina was taunting the man and he screeched away in the ice-cream truck and switched off the singsong lullaby. Kristina stood watching him and laughed dementedly.

I woke up with a start, drenched in sweat, and I could just make out the sound of Kristina’s frightening laughter fading into the ether. It was so real and frightening that I decided then and there that I was getting too old for any of this. I needed to convince the commissioner to let me go and live out my old age with my peers. I was told to wait until the rookies were drill-ready for the 2019 inauguration, which