African Cookboy
By David Dinwoodie Irving, ISBN:9781770098695, R179.95
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If ever a book appeared with an eye-catching cover, it’s African Cookboy by David Dinwoodie Irving.
The manuscript was former EU Literary Award shortlistee; it’s billed by publishers Jacana as a “dazzling first novel”, in which we meet we meet Dhlamini “Shatterproof” Bhekuzulu, a “wily tsotsi geeza” who “gives apartheid-era authority the finger and merrily exploits any loophole that catches his eye.”
Excerpt from Irving’s debut:
* * * * * * * *
The General lived not in a sumptuous home but in an ordinary face-brick unit that was called the Glass House. This was because it was full of big, wide windows with the curtains always drawn open so that you, or anybody else for that matter, could see everything going on inside. Underneath, in an air conditioned basement nearly as big as the house itself, The General had his offices, playroom, bar, and his very own exclusively appointed bioscope, with a projector, big screen, tiered seats, the works.
I was led to a huge, ornate desk covered with telephones and piles of paperwork behind which sat a short, extremely skinny black man, his face dignified by an old-fashioned chin projectile of a spade beard. I could tell he was The General because I could almost feel Baby Face’s dramatic change of demeanour in the man’s presence.
For me the tangible effect of The General’s presence was different. All of a sudden, in the time it took me to walk the length of floor that separated us, The General went from being a big bad giant of a geeza in my awed perception to being a normal, much-respected person, and he was never a big bad giant of a guy to me ever again.
‘Boss General, sir, meet Dhlamini Bhekuzulu.’
The man behind the desk motioned me to sit down.
I pulled out a chair.
Baby Face stood there for a minute. Then he wallowed away towards the full-size bar and sat his monstrous ezzies on a high stool, the seat of which vanished instantly under the fleshy lard-mountains of overlapping glutei maximus.
The General – it was quite a while before I ever called him The General – had a smooth, unlined face, and there was only a hint of grey in his pomaded ebony-bright hair and stiff spade-cut beard. It was impossible to tell how old he was – he might have been thirty-five or sixty. He looks almost the same today except his hair and beard are overall a legendary silver.
When he looked at you and you saw his eyes, he wasn’t little and he wasn’t skinny anymore. He was a Big Man and he would always be a Big Man, anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
He had a real deep voice, very soft, but his words came out clearly and concisely.
‘How long do you think you will survive? If you keep jumping lunatics with loaded guns?’ was the first thing that he, speaking Zulu, ever said to me.
I didn’t have any answer to that one, mfowethu, so I just grinned at him.
He didn’t smile back, just sat there looking at me seriously with those penetrating raptor’s eyes of his, until I began to feel like an obsolete spare part for a discontinued appliance. He could do the same thing to me today at a whim – make me feel the same inconsequential way anytime he felt like it.
‘Why did you do it?’ The General asked me.
I tried to figure out what he wanted me to say. I couldn’t, so I decided to tell the truth.
‘I judged I’d take my chances, umnumzana.’
‘You did the right thing, young man. That fool Ding-Dong could have put us all in deep trouble if he had killed a white policeman. Sheer folly. You, Dhlamini, are you always such a sensible, if volatile, person?’
For no reason at all I began to get annoyed.
The General made me feel as if I’d done something stupid, and I knew in my bones that I had not.
‘Hear me, umnumzana,’ came carelessly fast out of my mouth as if another person was operating it. ‘I’ve been taking care of me, number one, for quite a while, and up to now I’ve never had any complications, understand? I wasn’t going to let any kill-crazy baboon waste my life for me.’
‘You spent two years rotting in juvenile purgatory. Is that taking care of number one? I believe your brother unfortunately shared the miserable fate you decided upon?’
Where had he picked up that juicy little titbit?
He burnt away my cool faster than a blowtorch on full flame roasting a chocolate ice-cream and left me cindered brown-fool legless, mfowethu. There wasn’t much I could say to that verbal assegai thrust. I sat there with my fists clenched under the desk until I heard a disembodied voice that sounded like mine say, ‘That was a mistake I don’t plan to make ever again.’
The General looked at me steadily once more for a long moment. I felt I was under a microscope, a germ frozen into unmoving obedience.
Then he smiled.
A wonderful smile, a smile that made you weightless.
‘You are not a warrior, young man. Warriors are a dispensable necessity. They no longer spearhead the race for survival. I need men with ikhanda. My instincts tell me you are one of that new breed. You are a young man of possibilities, Dhlamini.’
Over the years I’ve seen The General smile fewer times in total than I have fingers and toes. When he does smile that lovely smile, everybody around him smiles automatically too, no matter who they are, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, even the biggest of big cheeses. All of a sudden I began to feel like a millionaire.
The next day I went to work for The General. A direct, personal-staff sort of appointment, an unofficial link to the main man himself, no longer just a useful number.
That was decades ago.
I’ve been working on and off for him in one way or another ever since.
There have been times when I’ve been like a divorcée out of touch with her alimony, sure. But it seems to me now that most of the times I’ve been in bad trouble I make a beeline back to him. He was a friend to me when I needed a good friend, and I can count my true bra compadres on fewer digits than make up the extensions of my left hand.
My first real job for The General was as a dispatcher in one of our camouflaged warehouses, or ‘drunk man’s drops’ as we called them.
I already knew the manufacture set-up pretty much forwards and backwards. My new task was to see that the raw material from various sources was delivered to the warehouses on schedule. Next it was processed according to pre-ordered demand and reloaded for delivery east, west, north and south, out to Meadowlands, Diepkloof, Phiri, Senoane and other townships, all of which fell within our immediate sphere of influence.
It was a regular delivery schedule, requiring spot-on maintenance. We had a veritable mini-fleet of everything from VW Kombis with false floors to Red Cross marked ambulances complete with sirens and uniformed drivers. You see, mfowethu, ambulances too were rigidly segregated by apartheid. There weren’t many white cops keen on eyeballing any blood-and-spilled-guts vokken kaffirs, who, in dying, were reducing the imbalance of population numbers anyway.
We had a regular garage owned by a blowtorch-blueeyed Aryan compatriot of Oom Kaffirboetie’s who looked after servicing. He kept our wheels rolling like Swiss clockwork. In that business, breakdowns along the road spelled multiple disasters, mfowethu.
We never had any breakdowns.
I also had to work out the complex routes and the all important time-schedules with two sussed brothers called Ace and Joker Makanda. They were Tsonga boys who had worked previously in Post Office Transport and took care of ‘honeypots’ along the way. Honeypots were the places where you had to sweeten the local law to make sure your load got through hassle free. For safety’s sake, we kept spontaneously changing the various routes to give gunhappy hijackers maximum tangled confusion, so Ace and Joker spent most of their time on the road.
Before three months had passed, I had that delivery schedule running as smooth as cream blended with imported Chivas Regal.
I knew this was my big chance.
If I could excel in the job, it wouldn’t be long before The General would give me a helping hand up the ladder to success and riches.
I brought in my brother Vilakazi to drive one of the overburdened routes for me. He was partnered by a tough hombre called ‘Guy Fawkes’ Rakhajane, a wild-haired six-foot-five Sotho immigrant so named because of the pyrotechnic way he exploded when the magnesium threads of his temper ignited. Assiduously I made sure to prepare Vilakazi to learn everything he could about how Ace and Joker Makanda operated. This was hands-on knowledge and I had to know every detail of the operation. Meanwhile I spent my own time learning how to perfectly boss a clandestine warehouse.
Bottles which matched the contents of what we were selling were hard to come by.
Ever wondered what those crazy old black men traipsing up and down every white suburb in those days with a donkey and rubber-wheeled cart yelling ‘EMPTY BORRELS! EMPTY BORRELS!’ were about? Now you know.
Later on we managed to gain access to a legitimate glass-bottle manufacturing firm who weren’t particular
about the account details on company invoices if cash was paid upfront. But at that earlier time, besides the donkey carts, we also had droves of picannins spread out like hungry locusts, searching just as rapaciously as any devouring izikhonyane swarm for undamaged, refillable items for which we paid them five cents each.
You might as well know how it worked. The various flavours and colourants were added to the big drawn-off vats, before we bottled the stuff. We got our labels from a stereotypical upper-class mlungu who spoke with a mouth so full of puffed-up starchy vowels you could hardly understand his own mother-tongue English.
His name was Teddy Huffington.
He had a printing business and in the right circles was vocally committed to the overthrow of apartheid, besides being an alcoholic sympathetically committed to his own addiction. He wouldn’t raise his voice too loud in the company of African National Congress radicals, nor would he add more than acquiescence when surrounded by tuxedo-clad clones of Prime Umdidi Minister Malan, the one who began all this Blankes Alleenlik-labelled strife back after the first Nationalist Party government’s ‘landslide’ victory through isolated ‘majority’ voting polls.
But enough of that dreary history, mfowethu.
After the consignment was all packaged and cased, we’d load it for delivery to the destination points I had assigned.
I had Big Bang Bongani and another tsotsi, named ‘Two Bulls’ Kekana because of his renowned sexual prowess, doing security at the drop point. From the moment the back door of the ‘warehouse’ opened and vehicles started rolling out until the last one was making exhaust-fume tracks, the whole delivery operation had two twelve-gauge shotguns loaded with Triple-A buckshot covering every move to discourage hijackers. I made it clear to Big Bang and Two Bulls that hijackers were their only target. A careless bloodfest of unwarranted manslaughter would put us on The General’s list of those not intended to live long lives.
