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Mrs Haddock knelt over her husband, turning him over, but there was no response. She collapsed over him and cried.

“Oh Phil! Don’t give up on me!”

Shingi stood rooted, confused and speechless. Mrs Johnson had turned pale and Shingi could not tell what she was feeling. Something told him to run. He dashed out of the back door and ran alongside two derelict barns, heading towards the white cemetery. It was the only deserted road he knew. This time of the night police would stop any black man and ask for his chitupa.

He was bleeding from the nose and had a deep cut on his forehead. He could smell blood, which he tried to stop with the hem of his shirt. He continued running along the railway line. His heart was pumping rapidly and the heat made blood and sweat feel sticky on his face. He felt faint but he ran on.  He knew that if he fell by the roadside, he would be taken straight to the charge office before being attended to. His bones ached. The white shirt and shorts he wore were smeared with blood.

He regretted having hit the white man so hard. He did not need to be in such a predicament. He then realized that it had happened spontaneously. His anger had been building up for many days. No, for many weeks or even years. Yes, for years. He avoided the main road that led to the white suburbs of Mabelreign, Eastlea, Greendale and Borrowdale. It was getting dark but he continued running. He could hear police sirens in the distance. It was a sound that was dreaded by any black man living in town. That sound, together with the figure of a policeman in a Black Maria, represented a system that was out to put a black man in his place.

The prisons were full of Africans who had been jailed for minor offenses like looking at a policeman with what was  termed a ‘scornful eye’. Some were jailed for talking to a white man or woman while wearing a hat. Even using a white man’s toilet was a serious crime. Now here he was running away after killing a white man, a crime he had never even dreamt of committing. He would surely be hanged. He vowed to see his wife before they arrested him. All blacks in town were somehow a white man’s property. You had to be some white man’s property to live in town or you were declared a vagrant. A vagrant in your own country.

The distance home seemed longer today because of his predicament. He was now far away from the white suburbs and approaching the area just below Harare Kopje. He neared Arcadia across the Mukwisi River on the right side of the railway line. He run on and came near the Harare African Township. Some educated black man who had studied in England had written an article in the now banned black newspaper,Chimurenga Tribune, about racial divisions in Salisbury, using the railway line and the river as boundaries. As he ran along the railway line, he realized how right the writer had been. The railway and the river separated the races confining them to different areas. The whites were on top, then the Indians, followed by the coloureds, and at the bottom of the hierarchy were blacks.

He stopped running and turned eastwards to the Old Bricks. He wondered if his wife had given birth. He realized that it was nine months since she had become ‘in a family way.’ He heard music from the locations and drunken singing from shebeens where half-Christians, half pagans sang both Christian and secular songs. He saw a man on a mule-drawn wagon carrying excreta away from the location. This man wore a cap and when he saw Shingi, he lowered his face and pulled down the cap. The mournful-looking mule moved slowly, rocking the excreta tank and its rider from side to side. Shingi understood why the excreta collector did not want to be recognized. Even the lowest African on the social ladder despised the hapless labourers who  did a job considered beneath any human being. Children mocked the excreta collectors, nicknaming them ‘chimbangus.’ Chimbangus collected human waste in the evening because they did not want to be identified. Chimbangus were foul tempered and when they are sure of where a child who insults them lives, they take revenge by emptying a bucket of human waste at the doorsteps of that house.

The din from the location was maddening. It was two days after the month’s end and many residents had money to buy local brew from the shebeens. He went to his semi-detached houses comprised of a bed-sitter and a small kitchen. This meant that each block had two families living in this bed-sitter irrespective of how big the family was.

He knocked on the door lightly and stood back in the dark waiting anxiously. The candlelight gave some weak light. He heard somebody moving and saw a silhouette of his wife who was heavily pregnant. She coughed loudly and walked towards the door.

“Who is there?” his wife called out from semi darkness. Her shrill voice betrayed fear.
“Who else do you think would knock at the door this time?”
“Oh it is you.”
“If I am being chased, I could get killed just here at my doorstep.”

She opened the door and backed away when she saw blood. He walked past her and sat on the bed taking off his shoes and shirt. He grabbed a piece of cloth from the table and wiped blood from his face.

“Mai-we, mai-we. What happened? Oh my husband. Is it tsotsis who stabbed you? You have blood all over your body.”
“Get me some water!”

She rushed to the corner of the house and poured water into a basin from the bucket where they kept drinking water. She rushed back to her husband. She found a clean cloth and washed his face carefully: he kept  wincing from pain each time she washed his forehead.

She cried silently.  He ignored her and after toweling himself off, he lay on the bed. She joined him. He blew out the candle and pulled the sheets up to his waist leaving his upper torso exposed.

“What happened?”
“When nationalists say a white man is a dog, we should heed them.”
“But you have always been against nationalists….”
“Shut up! You want me to tell you what happened and when I start talking, you interrupt me. What is wrong with you, woman?”

He narrated what had happened: his wife held her mouth when he said he had killed a white man.

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