THE DUBE TRAIN

THE DUBE TRAIN

 The morning was too cold for a summer morning, at least, to me, a child of the sun. But then on all Monday mornings I feel rotten and shivering, with a clogged feeling in the chest and a nauseous churning in the stomach. It debilitates any interest in the whole world around me.

The Dube Station with the prospect of congested trains, filled with sour-smelling humanity, did not improve my impression of a hostile life directing its malevolence plumb at me. All sorts of disgruntled ties darted through my brain, the lateness of the trains, the showing savagery of the crowds, the grey aspect around me.  Even the announcer over the loudspeaker gave confused directions. I suppose it had something to do with the peculiar chemistry of the body on Monday morning. But for me all was wrong with the world.

Yet, by one of those flukes that occurs in all routines, the train I caught was not full when it came. Usually try to avoid seats next to the door, but sometimes it cannot be helped. So it was that Monday morning when I hopped into the Third Class carriage. As the train move off, I leaned out of the paneless window and looked lack-lustrely at the leaden platform churning away beneath me like a fast conveyer belt.

‘Two or three yards away , a door had been broken and repaired with Masonite  so that it would be an opening door no more. Moreover, just there a seat was missing, and there was a kind of a hall.

I was sitting opposite a hulk of a man; his hugeness was obtrusive to the sight when you saw him and to the mind when you looked away. His head tilted to one side in a half-drowsy position, with flaring nostrils and trembling lips. He looked like a kind of genie, pretending to sleep but watching your very nefarious intention. His chin was stubble with crisp, little black barbs. The neck was thick and corded, and the enormous chest was a live barrel that heaved forth and back. The overall he wore was open almost down to the navel; and he seemed to have nothing underneath. I stared, fascinate, at his large breast with their winking, dark nipples.

With the rocking of the train as it rolled towards Phefeni Station, he swayed slightly this way and that, and now and then he lazily chanted a township ditty. The titillating bawdiness of the words incited no humour or lechery or significance. The words were words; the tune was just a tune.

Above and around him, the other passengers, looking Monday-bleared, had no enthusiasm about them. They were just like the lights of the carriage – dull, dreary, and ‘undramatic’.  Almost as if they, too, felt that they should not be alight during the day.

Phefeni Station rushed at us with human faces blurring past. When the train stopped, in stepped a girl. She must have been a mere child. Not just petite, but juvenile in structure. Yet her manner was all adult as if she knew all about ‘this sorry scheme of things entire’ and with a scornful toss relegated It. She had the premature features of the township girls, pert, arrogant, and live. There was that air about her that petrified any grow-ups who might think of asking for her seat. She sat next to me.

The train slid into Phomolong. Against the red-brick waiting-room I saw a tsotsi lounging, for all the world not a damn interested in taking the train,  but I knew the type ,  so I watched him in grim anticipation. When the train started sailing out of the platform, he turned round nonchalantly and tripled along backwards towards an open door. It amazes me no end how these boys know exactly where the edge of the platform comes when they run like that backwards. Just at the drop he caught the edge of the train and heaved himself in gracefully.

He swaggered towards us and stood between our seats with his back to the outside, his arms gripping the frame of the paneless window. He noticed the girl and started teasing her. All township love-making is rough.

‘Hi, rubberneck!’- Clutched at her peer-like breast jutting from sweater - ‘how long did you think you’ll duck me?’  

She looked round in panic; at me, at the old lady opposite her, at the hulk of a man opposite me. Then she whimpered. ‘Ah, Au-boetie, I don’t even know you.’

The tsotsi snarled. ‘You don’t know me, eh? You don’t know me when you’re sitting with your student friends. You don’t know last night, too, me? You don’t know how you ducked me?

Some women, reasonably out of reach, murmured, ‘The children of today…’ in a drifting  sort of Mziimhlophe,the dirty-white station.

The tsotsi turned round and looked out of the window on to the platform. He recognized some of his friends there and hailed them.

‘O, Zigzagza, it’s how there?’

‘It’s Jewish!’

‘Hela, Tholo, my ma hears me, I want that ten-‘n-six!’

‘Go get it in hell!’

‘Weh, my sister, don’t lissen to that guy. Tell him Shakespeare nev’r said so!’

            The gibberish exchange was all in exuberant superlatives. The train left the platform in the echoes of its stridency. A washer-woman had just got shoved into it by ungallant males, bundle and all. People in the train made sympathetic noise, but too many passengers had seen too many tragedies to be rattled by this incident. They just remained bleared.

As the train approached New Canada, the confluence of the Orlando and the Dube train left lines, I looked over the head of the girl next to me. It must have been a crazy engineer who had designed this crossing. The Orlando train comes from the right. It crosses the Dube train overhead just before we reach New Canada .but when it reaches the station it is on the right again, for the Johnnesburg train enters extreme left. It is a curious kind of game.

Moreover, it has necessitated cutting the hill and building a bridge. But just this quirk of an engineer’s imagination has left a spectacularly beautiful scene. After the drab, chocolate-box houses of the township, monotonously identical row upon row, this gash of man’s imposition upon nature never fails to intrigue me.

Our caveman lover was still at the girl while people were changing from our train to the Westgate train in New Canada. The girl wanted to get off, but the tsotsi would not let her. When the train left the station, he gave her a vicious slap across the face so that her beret went flying. She flung a leg over me and rolled across my lap in her hurling escape. The tsotsi followed, and as he passed me he reeled with the sway of the train.

To steady himself, he put a full paw in my face. It smelled sweaty-sour. Then he ploughed through the humanity of the train, after the girl. Men gave way shamelessly, but one woman would not take it. She burst into a spitfire tirade that whiplashed at the men.

‘Lord, you call yourself men, you poltrooms! You let a small ruffian insult you. Fancy, he grabs at a girl in front of you - might be your daughter – this thing with the manner of a pig! If there were real men here, they’re pull his pants off and give him such a leathering he’d never sit down for a week. But, no, you let him do this here; tonight you will let him do it in your homes.  And all you do is whimper. ‘the children of today  have never no respect!’’ Sies!

The men winced. They said nothing, merely looked round at each other in shy embarrassment. But those barbed words had brought the little thug to a stop. He turned round, scowled at the woman, and with cold calculation cursed her anatomically, twisting his lips to give the word the full measure of its horror.

It was like the son of Ham finding a word for his awful discovery. It was like an impression that shuddered the throne of God Almighty. It was both a defilement and a defiance.

’Hela, you street-urchin, that woman is your mother,’ came the shrill voice of the big hulk of a man, who had all the time sat quietly opposite me, humming his lewd little township ditty. Now he moved towards where the tsotsi stood rooted.

There was menace in every swing of his clumsy movements, and the half-mumbled tune of his song sounded like under-breath cursing for all its calmness. The carriage frozen into silence.

Suddenly, the woman shrieked and men scampered on to seats. The tsotso had drowned a sheath-knife, and he faced the big man.

There is something odd that a knife does to various people in a crowd. Most women go into pointless clamour, sometimes even hugging round the arms the men who might fight for them. Some men make gangway, stampeding helter-skelter; but with that hulk of men the sight of the gleaming blade in the tsotsi’s hand, drove him berserk. The splashing people left a sort of area. There was an evil leer in his eye, much as if he was experiencing satanic satisfaction.

Croesus Cemetery flashed past. Seconds before the impact, the tsotsi lifted the blade and plunged it obliquely. Like an instinctual, predatory beast, he seemed to know exactly where the vulnerable jugular was and he aimed for it. The jerk of the train deflected his stroke, though, and the blade slit a long cleavage down the big man’s open chest.

With a demoniacal scream, the big man reached out for the boy crudely, careless now of the blade that made another gash in his arm. He caught the boy by the upper arm with the left hand, and between the legs with the right and lifted him bodily. Then he hurled him towards me. The flight went clean through the paneless window, and only a long cry trailed in the wake of the rushing train.

It was so sudden that the passengers were galvanized into action, darling to the windows; the human missile was nowhere to be seen. It was not a fight proper, not a full blown quarrel it was just an incident in the Dube train.

The big man, bespattered with blood, got off at Langlaagte Station. Only after we had lift the station did the stunned passengers break out into a cacophony chattering.

Odd, that no one expressed sympathy for the boy or man. They were just greedily relishing the thrilling episode of the morning.

  (From: Can Themba, The Will To Die, London: Heinemannn, AWS, 1972, 57–62)

Townships in South Africa are residential areas reserved for blacks who by apartheid laws are not allowed to mix with the whites.  So the blacks have to take trains every day to and from their places of work, mainly in cities, white residential areas and mine fields.

Townships lack essential services such as water, electricity, educational facilities and so on. O n top of this the blacks are oppressed and put down by crude force by the racist white police whenever they protest. So the combination of deprivation and oppression results in lawlessness and immorality among the blacks in the township. Thus the tsotsi (a Xhosa word for vagabond) assault on the innocent girl can be interpreted as the police (tsotsi) brutality against the black (the girl). The women’s plea for rescuing the girl can be said to represent the voice of conscience (churchmen, Amnesty, etc.) and the ensuring fight between the tsotsi   and the other huge man can be said to be a battle between evil and good. Thus the success of the huge man is positive as it confirms the age – old belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

If the tsotsi (strong, evil) can be said to represent the apartheid system, the girl (weak, innocent) to represents the blacks, the woman to represent people of conscience, what do you think the train represents?

Another major genre of literature which also provides pleasurable reading is poetry. Poems are compositions in metrical or verse forms. They are often short and embellished by the creative imagination. A poet, using sounds and figurative language to express intense feelings and emotions. In the following short poem J. P. Clark, a Nigerian poet, describes his impressions of Ibadan, one of the largest cities of West Africa.

                        Ibadan

                        Running splash of rust and gold-flung and scattered among

                        seven hills like broken china in the sun.

                                                           

                                                J. P. Clark ’Ibadan’ in Donatus Nwoga. West African

                                                Verse, 1986 Lagos: Longman, p. 57.

In this poem you might have noticed a good illustration or assonance, resemblance of sound pattern in splash, flung, scattered, broken. You might have also appreciated the use of a simile, a figurative device which states comparison explicitly to liken scattered Ibadan with broken china. These two independent entities share the characteristic of being disorderly spread.

By

Eguriase S. M. Okaka