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Spanning a period between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, this epic adventure follows three generations of a Zulu speaking family in South Africa in a time of cataclysmic historical and cultural transformation  The action moves in giant leaps throughout South Africa and beyond, stepping out onto the riot torn streets of the black townships of Soweto, burrowing down two thousand feet beneath the earth’s surface – in one of  world’s biggest diamond mines, slipping into the secret hideouts of the insurgents who struggled to overthrow the white supremacist regime.  In a country that appears to be racing toward self-destruction as it veers between authoritarianism and liberation, the protagonists, driven by their passions and compelled by the bonds of love and kinship, dare to confront the brutally powerful and seemingly invincible forces that are controlling their lives.

INSURRECTION

The nominal purpose of my cousin's student organization was to lobby for improvements in the educational system.  Had they openly acknowledged any broader scope of purpose, the organization would have been banned like many before it, and the leaders thrown in jail.  As I have mentioned, there were plenty of issues for them to address that were not explicitly political: overcrowding, incompetent and physically abusive teachers, lack of facilities, required use of the Afrikaans language, and expenses that were unaffordable for many families.  Nevertheless, I had the sense that my cousin and the other members of his group were devoting an increasing amount of attention to more overtly political issues; at the same time student support for his organization and its activities was also growing.  The sponsorship of political debates was one activity in which the student organization was allowed to engage, and I remember my cousin's excitement when one such forum had inspired the naive audience to attack some of the students who had had the misfortune of being assigned to a pro-apartheid debating team.  "It was unbelievable!" he exulted.  "They used to just sit there, totally apathetic."  This increase in intensity was also discernible both in the tenor of their secret meetings and in the general atmosphere on the school grounds.  The organization had ties to the Black Consciousness movement, and the ideology of black pride and black empowerment was becoming increasingly pervasive among students in Soweto.  A number of the newer teachers in the Soweto high schools were also affiliated with Black Consciousness organizations, including a whole contingent of former students who had been expelled from the University of the North in the Transvaal.  Some of them were eventually fired or deported, but not before making a significant contribution to the spread of these ideas.  Even at the primary school level, the influence of the movement could be seen, though often in more subtle ways, as on the football field when players used Black Consciousness slogans and raised fists to express their competitive spirit.

The hottest issue was the government's enforcement of the ruling that certain subjects must be taught in Afrikaans.  Textbooks in Afrikaans were burned at some of the schools.  At my cousin's school, Orlando West Junior Secondary School, universally referred to as Phefeni, he helped stage a boycott of classes that were being taught in Afrikaans.  Some of the teachers supported the protest and refused to teach in Afrikaans, but the examinations to be administered in July would still have to be written in Afrikaans.  At Naledi high school, students demanded a meeting with the regional director of education.  When the security police appeared instead, their car was overturned while they were meeting with the school principal.

The situation exploded on June 16 of that year.  I suspected that something was brewing because my cousin had canceled plans to go to the movies in order to attend a special meeting over the weekend, and he had slipped out of the house in the middle of the night on Monday.  Wednesday the sixteenth was a cold and dreary day, and the smoke from Soweto's coal stoves hung low in the sky.  Since I didn't have to head for school until eleven, I slept in and did some reading.  While I was eating breakfast, I became aware of a low rumble in the distance, and I realized that it was the sound of many people chanting in unison.  I went outside and crossed the street to get a more panoramic view, and I saw, at the bottom of the hill, hundreds of uniformed school kids singing and marching east toward Orlando.  I went back inside and finished dressing, not bothering with my school clothes, and ran down the hill to find out what was going on.  There was a column of students as far as the eye could see.  They were mostly high school and junior high school students from Molapo, Tladi, and Naledi, townships many kilometers west of Dube.  They said that they were marching to Phefeni Junior Secondary School in Orlando West in protest against the Afrikaans language requirement.  The students were raising their fists and shouting "Power!" or "Freedom in our lifetime!" or singing freedom songs.  I fell in with some girls from Tladi Junior Secondary School.  They said that they had first heard about the walkout when they arrived at school that morning.  At the morning assembly, instead of reciting the Lord's Prayer, as usual, everyone sang the freedom song "God Bless Africa," the unofficial anthem of the resistance movement, and then marched out into the street.  They were thrilled that the relatively small group they had started with had now grown and converged into a huge throng.  The crowd was mostly students, but some adults and younger kids had also joined the march.

I was furious at my cousin for intentionally excluding me from the demonstration.  I am sure that he was afraid that I might have informed his father, who might then have interfered with our participation or, even worse, taken steps to obstruct the entire event.  The organizers had imposed a strict vow of secrecy and successfully triggered a protest march that was a complete surprise to the parents as well as the authorities.  But what reason had I ever given him to believe that I was a spy and an informer?  And what a hypocritical snob he was, posing as a political activist who's striving to spread the word, and not even bothering to bring his own cousin on board.  He was just too selfish to take the chance that I might get under foot.

We reached Vilikazi Street in Orlando West and took a left turn in the direction of the junior high school.  Now the crowd was getting extremely thick.  There were throngs of thousands and thousands of students in front of us and, even though the school was still about a kilometer away, it was becoming almost impossible to make any forward progress.  A rumor spread through the crowd that the police were blocking the road up ahead, and a counterflow of humanity began moving in the opposite direction, some of them warning that police dogs had been released.  There were periodic shouts followed by a compression backwards or a surge forward, but I was too far away to see what was going on.  I started moving laterally to the edge of the crowd and finally threaded my way to a side street that took me a block north where it was less densely populated, so that I was able to walk parallel to Vilikazi Street and continue heading toward the school.  As I drew closer to the war zone I could smell teargas and hear the whiz and explosion of the canisters.  Eventually I got close enough to see some police at the top of a hill where the teargas canisters were being launched, and I had an obstructed view of a churchyard where a large group of the school kids were hiding behind a wall and hurling rocks.  I started walking down an alley between two buildings to get closer to the action when I heard the crack of pistol shots ringing out.  Complete pandemonium erupted, and I could hear people screaming and calling out each other's names.  A herd of students came racing up the alley, running for their lives, yelling, "They're shooting!  The dogs are shooting at us!"  I turned and rushed back out of the alley and into the street with the rest of the terror stricken crowd.  From that vantage point I could still see some students hiding behind the churchyard wall, but the street in front was now deserted except for some abandoned placards and a fallen student with a brave companion kneeling at his side.

As I retraced my steps westward, I saw that the crowd was now fanning out from Vilikazi Street and overflowing into all of the surrounding streets.  I attempted to cross Butshingi Drive, but was caught in the powerful current of that river of students, and was carried north; instead, I took a right turn on Kumalo Street, one of the larger east-west thoroughfares in Soweto.  Although the crowd was dispersing, its chaotic energy was being fed by the people's emotions, their anger and fear, and it didn't look as if anyone was going home.  Enraged by the police assault, the students began to seek revenge by attacking any symbol of white authority that could be found.  The municipal beerhalls, owned by the government, and the liquor stores, owned by white businessmen, were among the first targets.  I passed a liquor store with a large crowd in front of it.  The windows were smashed and kids were running into the street carrying cases of beer and brandy.  Some of the looters were walking away with the boxes, while others were setting them down and running inside for more, after which everyone would start grabbing for bottles.  Many of those bottles, once empty, were destined to become ammunition, and to be hurled at the police before the day was out.  As I continued walking toward the Klipspruit ("Klip River" in Afrikaans), I passed by a community hall and a municipal administration building, both of which had been invaded and were in the process of being torn apart.  I passed by a gas station that had been closed up and abandoned by the attendant, and there was a group gathered around a pump attempting to break the lock with a stone.  In the southeast corner of Orlando West, hundreds of my fellow protesters were milling in the streets.  Traffic was at a standstill along Kumalo Street and all of the north-south arteries that intersected Kumalo Street.  There was a delivery truck for SPAR Supermarkets, a white owned grocery store chain, parked on the shoulder of the road, the driver nowhere in sight.  The windshield had been smashed in and the back doors were wide open, and it was apparent that the van's cargo had already been redistributed to hungry demonstrators.  Farther up the road there was a large crowd gathered around one of the private buses that charge high fares to take commuters from Soweto to Johannesburg.  The driver and his passengers had been persuaded to disembark and the bus was being ransacked.  That was where I first ran into some of my fellow students from Dube Primary School.  Outside the schoolhouse, they had heard that the high school kids were staging a protest rally in Orlando West, and they decided to investigate.  Because of the proximity of our elementary school to Phefeni, some of them had gotten ringside seats for the police standoff and had actually seen students hit by the police gunfire and heard bullets whizzing over their heads as they retreated.  The students gathered along one side of the bus, unsuccessfully attempting to flip the vehicle onto its side.  Failing that, we inserted a paper fuse into the gas tank and the entire bus was ablaze in no time.  The bus driver just stood there shaking his head with his arms folded across his chest.

I did not see any passenger vehicles with white occupants, but it was certainly not a good day for a white person to take a drive through Soweto; there were reports of white drivers being beaten to death.  There were plenty of white drivers of military vehicles, however.  "What the hell…" I heard someone say.  "Check it out, Vusi," called my classmate Gordie Xaba, pointing across the river.  "Here comes the cavalry!"  A convoy of armored personnel carriers, driving along the shoulder on the wrong side of the road to avoid the congested traffic, was approaching the Orlando West Bridge from the east side of the Klipspruit, probably coming from the direction of the Orlando police station.  They were being driven by members of specially trained paramilitary units, and most of us had never before seen these white soldiers wearing camouflage, emerging with machine guns at the ready from inside the bellies of the so called "hippos" by which they were deployed.  We were accustomed to the unarmed black police, called blackjacks, who were employees of the municipal council, or to the local white police, with their less imposing police vans.  The occupation of the township by these heavily armed white military troops provoked further outrage among Soweto's residents.

Helicopters circled overhead, and one of them dropped a canister of teargas in the middle of the crowd that was blocking the roadway.  We ran to escape the fumes, and headed back north through the streets of Orlando West.  Everyone was drunk, empty beer bottles were scattered all over the street, and the mood had turned celebratory.  The police had apparently retreated to await reinforcements, and the rioting and looting continued unabated.  Everywhere that one turned was another place to warm the hands - a municipal council office, a community hall, an administration board car - the black smoke billowed up from the flames in every direction that you looked.  A stolen car crawled up the street packed full of kids leaning out the windows, raising their fists, and shouting "Power!" at the top of their lungs, and exhorting everyone in the street to do the same.

By late afternoon, the streets became less celebratory and more dangerous.  Police patrols were shooting at looters.  Skirmishes between the students and the police resumed, with students throwing rocks, bricks, and bottles.  As darkness fell, the poorly lit back streets became the scene of random drunken violence, while on the main streets cruising police vans were reportedly firing shots in the general direction of anyone who raised a clenched fist.  I decided to head back to Dube so that I could make it home before nightfall.

Our street in Dube was relatively quiescent except for the excess accumulated debris and extra car traffic from motorists searching for alternatives to the obstructed main roads.  Nevertheless, the smell of smoke and the sound of helicopters, sirens, and occasional gunshots all penetrated inside the house.  My aunt, alone with her sister-in-law, was nearly hysterical with anxiety over the whereabouts of her children, her husband, and her other relatives.  They had both been drinking, but neither of them was sharing in the euphoria that could be felt among the youth on the streets.  My Aunt Sindiswa's sister-in-law, not the most intelligent woman I have ever met, seemed to believe that I was personally responsible for the uprising, and that I was the appropriate person with whom to lodge her complaints about the misfortune and hardships that would be inevitable consequences of the disturbance.

It was thus a very long evening, and my uncle and cousin Gustav did not arrive home until well after midnight.  My uncle had been through a miserable, frustrating day and night throughout which he was desperately trying to get all of his workers back home.  He had finally given up, and many of them were camping out at an inactive construction site near Pretoria.  He said that Soweto was completely encircled by military troops, there were roadblocks everywhere, and negotiating the township streets was nearly impossible.  My uncle was downplaying the dangerousness of the streets, but the pallor of my cousin's face was adequate testimony to how frightening he had found the experience; he looked as if he was about to be sick.  Gustav subsequently confided to me that his father had to draw the pistol he kept under the driver's seat in order to scare off a group of students who tried to commandeer the car, purportedly to transport a shooting victim to the hospital, and that the car had been struck by several large rocks.

Though my aunt was relieved by the arrival of her husband and her oldest son, their safe return allowed her to focus her anxiety upon the individual at the top of her worry list, my cousin Xolani.  During his travels around town, my uncle had gotten a secondhand report that Xolani was among a group of students who had roughed up one of the community council members at around six o'clock at night.  Soweto's Urban Bantu Council, with which my uncle had some strong ties, was generally regarded as a group of government stooges who were dedicated to lining their own pockets at the expense of the welfare of the community.  My uncle declared that he would embark upon a scouting mission at dawn; he knew that my aunt would make sure that every minute he spent sitting and waiting would be unbearable for everyone.  I pleaded for a chance to accompany him on the mission and was strictly forbidden to set foot outside the house.  It was still dark outside when I heard him preparing to leave.

At around 7:30 AM, I heard some tapping at my window and looked outside to find Zine, the girlfriend of one of Xolani's best buddies.  She was making the rounds for some of the co-conspirators, discreetly picking up clothing and toiletries and leaving messages for their families.  As I rummaged through my cousin's bedroom dresser, filling up a paper bag with some clean clothes, I was caught by his mother, who went outside and dragged Zine into the house.  Under the machine gun fire of Aunt Sindiswa's questions, Zine did a nice job of reassuring my aunt, remaining very calm and confident: "Don't worry, MaXolani, we've got everything under control."  She told Aunt Sindiswa that Xolani was fine; that, as far as she knew, no one from Phefeni Junior Secondary School had incurred any serious injuries; and that they were being very cautious.  She had heard that several students from Orlando High School had been struck by police gunfire, and one of them, whose parents were friends of my aunt, had died before reaching the hospital.  Although everyone in their group seemed to be all right, she did say that some were unaccounted for and that there were rumors of arrests, and she asked whether the police had come to the house.   She was steadfast in refusing to divulge my cousin's whereabouts, and said that she needed to press onwards, but my aunt prevailed upon her to wait while she emptied the cupboards into a large satchel to take with her.  I knew that, aside from the homes of his friends and relatives, Xolani had cultivated a colorful array of hiding places and venues for secret meetings ranging from sewage pipes to basements of municipal buildings to church clocktowers.  I casually inquired after my friend Carla, and Zine told us that Carla had acquired a new nickname: "The Dogcatcher."  Carla had earned her new moniker at the rally, where she had been carrying a sign that read, "Afrikaans is a tribal language."  But after the police released their German shepherds on the crowd, she and her girlfriend had used the broomhandle from the sign to beat one of the vicious beasts to death.  Upon her departure, Zine alerted us that Xolani might try to visit some time soon, though it was also possible that he would have to remain in hiding, if the risk of apprehension was too great.