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By Root 1046 0

month of November 1985. Mandela, unimaginably, was meeting secretly with Kobie Coetsee, but Justice himself was in less mood for compromise than ever before. He seethed with the dark indignation of a man who knew that, because he was born black, he would never be able to exploit his natural gifts to the full. He had always been an unusually bright pupil, way ahead of his peers and of his parents (his mother never learned to read) by the age of fifteen. But the Upington authorities, who ran Paballelo, did not provide schooling for black children beyond that age. They stuck by the spirit and the letter of apartheid’s chief architect, Hendrick Verwoerd, who in 1953, as head of the Department of Native Affairs, came up with a school curriculum designed, as he put it, for “the nature and requirements of black people.” Verwoerd, who would go on to become prime minister, stated that the aim of his Bantu Education Act was to stop blacks from receiving an education that might make them aspire to positions above their station. The deeper purpose was to uphold the apartheid system’s giant, covert job-protection scheme for whites. Justice’s father, determined to do what he could to short-circuit the system, sent him far across the country to the Eastern Cape, to a Methodist school called Healdtown that Mandela himself had attended.

Justice spent the next ten years shuttling back and forth between Upington and the Eastern Cape, six hundred miles across country, in an often frustrating search for an education that would help him achieve his dream of becoming a doctor. He was beginning to get close, passing all the right exams to be admitted eventually to study medicine, when, at the end of 1985, disaster struck. He fell for a girl and made her pregnant. He was twenty-five years old but the Christian educational establishment he now attended found such behavior intolerable. He was expelled, returning home to Paballelo on the first week of November, burning with frustration.

Justice’s return coincided with the township’s first serious episode of what the apartheid authorities called “black unrest.” It was happening all over the country but was a novel phenomenon for a backwater like Paballelo, where until now political resistance had dwelled underground. During Justice’s first weekend back, on Sunday, November 10, his township erupted. The “unrest” followed the grim choreography that was by now familiar to viewers of television news everywhere in the world, except for South Africa, where such images were censored. A group of black people gathered in an open space in Paballelo to denounce the latest litany of social injustices. The local police had been fearing for some time that their hitherto tame blacks (“our blacks” was the phrase they would use, ignorant of the rebellious thoughts that swirled inside their heads) were in danger of following the violent lead of their uppity cousins in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Certain now that the dread day had finally come, they followed the script of their unrest-hardened metropolitan peers and fired tear gas into the small crowd of protestors. Justice was not actually present that day, but there was no shortage of other angry young blacks around to respond by hurling stones at the police, who replied by hurling themselves into the crowd, setting their dogs on the stone-throwers, chasing them, and beating those they caught with their truncheons.

The police were unprepared to cope with the ensuing mayhem, in which rioters burned houses and vehicles owned by those perceived as black collaborators, people such as the black town councilors paid by the regime to give it a veneer of democratic respectability. The police opened fire, killing a pregnant black woman. They said later she had been throwing stones at them. But the truth, as far as Paballelo was concerned, was that she had simply stepped out of her house to buy some bread.

The revolution had finally come to Upington. Over the next two days, Monday and Tuesday, Paballelo residents engaged in running battles with the police, this time with