Bastards of a Dream Deferred 2

The military funeral at Hero’s Acre would purportedly provide a dignified end to what had been a shambolic and soulless existence. A man had been gutted in the street. A 30cm gash from below his third rib seeped plasma, blood cells and digestive fluids onto the red dust road that would fail to lead him home.

The men in my family have strange ways of dying; but like a long-running soapie with tired story-line, the premise is always the same. The dusty, Sowetan street. The shebeen  around the corner not too far from home; then the abrupt collapse in the dead of night, with no-one around to assist. With no-one willing to. In the indiscriminate, random temperament of death; patterns are reserved for conspiracy theorists. They function as a placebo for the hurt. They attempt to make life and death something more significant than natural process. A Disney-sized romanticism of the circle of life. A Shakespearian tragedy with a predictable end. Still , the men in my family have strange ways of dying; and the themes are always the same. 

The man was cold before the blood had leaked all signs of life from his imposing frame. For years he had been mere shadow. Marching out of a classroom on June 16, 1976 ; he had stuffed his childhood into the barrel of an AK-47 and kept marching till the armed revolution led him to Tanzania. He buried the fractured shards of his humanity the night he’d hid under the decimated body of his friend after The SADF tore through their camp and slaughtered every single exile. Only he survived. Now somewhere on the shores of Tanganyika, there’s a man who looks like him. He is unaware of the fact that the teenage soldier of the struggle who fathered him; the brave young man whose strength and conviction had forced into a rootless, militant survival; had died at the hands of two drunks on his way home for R50 and a cheap Nokia flashlight phone.

He did not get the 21-gun salute. This is reserved for higher-ranking militia. The ones who were rapidly pushed up the ranks to compensate them for placing their valuable surnames on the line. The footsoldiers with the interchangeable blackness and blood, get no such tribute. He did however get the regal, sombre procession, complete with a 12-piece brass band; and the solemn vow from Colonel Whomever to dedicate his life to finding the boys who murdered his colleague. Honorable. Distinguished, but the portly pallbearers in green, weak from years of pushing political correctness and pseudo-diplomacy, dropped the mahogany box as they carried it up the gravel pathway to the grave. And the trumpeters were out of tune. And the South African flag that adorned his coffin slipped off the top and landed in the mud.