• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Several weeks earlier I’d seen a young man shot to death. I was at a demonstration by the Inkatha Freedom Party against the African National Congress. It was in downtown Johannesburg, before downtown had completely fallen apart. Snipers in nearby buildings let off a couple of shots into the crowd. No one knew where the shots came from or which way to run.

“You can just as easily run into a bullet as run away from one,” a cameraman once told me. I didn’t run at all.

There was pandemonium, chaos, but standing watching it all unfold around me, I could break it down into hundreds of separate actions and reactions, a thousand different moments. An enraged old woman used a stick to hit a fallen Mandela campaign poster promising A BETTER LIFE FOR ALL. A half-dozen South African police tried to batter down the door of a building, while a female cop gripped the trigger of her shotgun, scanning the windows looking for shooters. Down the street, Asian hookers who worked out of a storefront whorehouse stood on a balcony in low-cut tops, their breasts squeezed between their elbows as they leaned straight-armed over the ledge trying to see what was happening.

The boy was perhaps fifteen. Shot once in the chest, he lay motionless on the ground. One of his red sneakers was by his side—it must have fallen off when he was shot—the other sneaker was still on his left foot. It had no laces. Four black policemen in riot gear dragged the boy’s body behind a concrete wall. His feet scraped the ground, and the remaining sneaker came off. The bullet hole in his chest was small, surrounded by just a thin trickle of blood.

After the shooting stopped, the police began covering the bodies with blankets or campaign posters—whatever they could find. I walked several blocks to a nearby store and bought bottles of soda and water. I sat on the curb and downed them one after the other. During the chaos, I’d forgotten that I was in the middle of a city. I’d forgotten everything about myself. All I felt was the rush, the adrenaline. Sitting on the street, I could still feel it. It took hours for it to fade.

I’d been on this corner before. Two years earlier I’d gotten out of a cab across the street. The white Afrikaner driver had been lecturing me about how blacks would never rule here.

“AIDS and public transportation will be the savior of Africa,” he told me.

He had picked me up outside a butcher’s shop on Rocky Street, where a sign read MEAT MARKET and the wall behind the counter was plastered with nude centerfolds.

“See, the black male has sex four to five times a week,” the driver had said matter-of-factly, “whereas the white person gets by with one to two times a week. So with AIDS, it’s going to solve the problem. Ninety-four to ninety-seven is the big die-off period. I figure if eighty percent of the blacks, and only twenty percent of the whites are infected, and most of them are drug addicts, homosexuals, and liberals, that’d rule out a future black government here.”

I didn’t argue with him. Everyone carried a gun in those days, and there wasn’t any point. On Election Day in Soweto, I thought about that cabdriver, and I thought about the young man I’d seen shot to death. We like to think we can predict the future. We like to think we understand the present. I’m not sure we ever do.

Niger

NIGHT SWEATS

ICLOSE MY EYES, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa it’s hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the day’s dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.

In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You can’t catch them all. It’s like sticking your head out of a fast-moving car—you suffocate; it’s too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Handmade tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like