Gunship Over Angola

As Jim passed him, the usurper leapt out of the darkness with a long-handled axe and struck three blows. The first was aimed at Jim’s head and struck the old warrior on top of the forehead, slicing down and severing his optic nerves, causing immediate blindness in both eyes. The second struck him on his left forearm and simultaneously shattered the radius and humerus bones. The last blow hit him high on the back as he fell and opened a deep wound that exposed his right lung and shattered the ribs protecting it.

Jim was close to death when members of his family found him a short while later and carried him back to his kraal, expecting him to succumb at any moment.

But, ever the Shangaan warrior, Jim refused to die.

It was in this state that my frantic dad found him a few days later. Jim had failed to return to work on the appointed day, and my folks, knowing this to be unprecedented, had become concerned for his safety, prompting Dad to drive the 450 kilometres or so to Ressano Garcia in search of Jim.

Jim was carried the few kilometres to Dad’s car and rushed to Kalafong Hospital in Pretoria, where the doctors performed miracles, clearing up the multiple infections and sewing up the gaping wounds. Blind and with his useless left arm in a sling, Jim was discharged three weeks later. He still walked, like a king, from the hospital entrance to a waiting minibus that took him home.

Realising that Jim’s working days were over, his Shangaan and Pretoria families agreed on arrangements to ensure his comfortable retirement. Just a few short weeks later, one Saturday morning, Jim’s son drove his dad to our home at 58 Viking Road.

There he sat, on the second row of the VW Kombi minibus that had brought him to us, his back ramrod-straight as ever, staring sightlessly into the distance through milky eyes as he said his goodbyes to each of us in turn.

Distraught and crying like a little child, I asked him, ‘But why are you saying goodbye, Tata (grandfather)? Your wounds have healed and you look so well. Where are you going?’ I wailed.

‘Maloui, don’t be sad. I am going to where I will be young again.’

Two days later, early on the Monday morning, the phone rang and Jim’s eldest son quietly told us that Jim had not woken up that morning.

*

I have said before that the Six Mile Spruit played a major role in the lives of me and my friends. When it burst its banks after a rainstorm, the real fun would begin. We would play in the abundant mud, stage canoe races in handcrafted sheet-metal boats to sort out the latest neighbourhood pecking order, and wage gang warfare with air rifles and rubber pellets. From time to time waterfowl would miraculously appear and hunting expeditions with catapults, bows and pellet guns were planned and executed in intricate detail.

But the delights of the biannual floods lasted just a few short days, until the Spruit dried up again.

When I was in Standard 9, my penultimate year at Lyttelton Manor High School, one morning I was discussing with a few friends the unfortunate brevity of the periods when the Spruit actually flowed. One of them suggested that we recce the upstream course of the river to establish if some farmer wasn’t perhaps damning the flow of water.

At the time, it sounded like a good idea, and four of us sectioned off parts of the river for ten kilometres downstream of the Irene Farm and set about the task of discovering who the farmer might be who was blunting our fun.

Jurgen, one of our group of four, lived in a newly built suburb called Hennopspark, through which the Spruit flowed. A few days later Jurgen reported to us that he had found a dam across the Spruit near his house. At a subsequent council of war, the four of us decided that, if the fun times along the river were to be extended, the dam simply had to go. I was tasked with approaching our neighbourhood ‘scientist’ with the request that he manufacture an explosive device to blow up the offending structure. I think my initial approach was quite casual in nature, and I didn’t expect it to go anywhere. But then Quentin, the ‘scientist’, told me that he was working on a nitroglycerine-based bomb that could do the job, and things just kind of escalated from there.

When the bomb was ready, we arranged for all four of us to spend a Friday night at Jurgen’s house. My job was to fetch the bomb from Quentin in the afternoon and cycle the four or so kilometres to Jurgen’s home, where the others would wait for me. We planned to detonate the bomb at about midnight. Only Jurgen had seen the dam, and his description lacked a lot of detail, as we were subsequently to discover.

I collected from Quentin an odd-looking plastic jar (about the size of a 500-gram honey jar with two wires coming out of the top) filled with grey jelly, together with an old-time telephone dynamo that produced an electric current when wound rapidly, and set off for Hennopspark on my delivery bicycle.