12

The principal was determined to transform Grassy Park High into, as he put it, "something more than just a colored school"—he pronounced the hated word with violent disdain. His plan: to build a wall around the school. A cheap, plain, cement block wall. It would keep skollies and other "elements" from wandering onto the school ground. At the staff meeting where the wall idea was tabled, I was tempted to speak out—in opposition to the wall. I liked the fact that donkeys grazed on the sports field, that lovers and street gangs and matrons used the school as a thoroughfare, meeting place, and refuge. I didn't want to see the campus sealed off from the neighborhood, to see it sterilized, as it were. But mine were alien, romantic reasons, I knew, so I kept quiet.

Other teachers were less reticent. Somebody pointed out that our students' favorite record album at the moment was Pink Floyd's "The Wall." Laughter. (It was true.) Someone else pointed out that the record had been banned by the government. (Not true—it was banned two months later.) More laughter. When the topic became fund raising, more substantial objections were offered. The principal thought he could procure the donation of a new car as a raffle prize by a certain charity-minded corporation president. Muslim staff and parents had already consulted their imam. Now they rejected the raffle idea—too much like gambling. Other staff members supported the fund raising, but did not support the wall—the money, they said, would be better used to buy books. The principal kept his dream alive by appointing a committee to devise acceptable fund-raising events.

I found the wall business symbolic in several ways, for I had already come to assume that such supremely local issues represented at Grassy Park High the extent of most people's interest in world affairs.

That assumption was summarily overturned on the afternoon of March 4. I was looking for books in a supply room, and finding nothing but ancient copies of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines , when I heard a commotion start outside. I went to the door and saw students beginning to dash back and forth between the buildings. I could hear classes chanting, "Fifty-seven! Fifty-seven! Fifty-seven!" Then kids were suddenly writing "57" on the walls with chalk. Pieterse hurried past, looking flushed and breathless. I asked him what the hell was happening. "Fifty-seven!" he shouted, not stopping. "Mugabe has won fifty-seven seats! ZANU-PF is going to rule Zimbabwe!"

In retrospect, it seems outlandish, but at the time I was stunned. And not by the election result so much as by the powerful reaction it provoked at Grassy Park High. The South African newspapers had been covering the Zimbabwe independence election campaign extensively (if poorly: some had actually predicted victory for the black moderate, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was hopelessly compromised by, among other things, his South African support, and was crushed at the polls by the man whom whites in South Africa and Zimbabwe had long insisted was a bloodthirsty Marxist maniac, Robert Mugabe), and I had been talking to my classes about its importance, yet I had gained little sense that anyone else at Grassy Park was really very interested. Now I saw how wrong I was. I also saw how trusted I wasn't: the whole school had been on pins and needles waiting to hear the election results, and no one had said a word to me. The opposition

press in Cape Town described Mugabe's resounding victory as evidence "that the government and most white South Africans had no perception of black political thinking," and the accusation could apparently be made, at a local level, against me, too.

My dismay on that score was dwarfed, however, by the excitement of the event itself, and by the realization that seemingly everyone at Grassy Park High understood quite well, thank you, their basic situation, and even felt as one about its ultimate redress. (The government press continued to try to reassure itself. "Rhodesia's situation is not at all analogous with that of South Africa," insisted Cape Town's Die Burger . Yet over 90 percent of Zimbabwe's voters had gone to the polls, and that in itself seemed to be analogy enough for the 25 million disenfranchised in South Africa. Those black leaders who were not in jail all publicly hailed the election and its result.)

Politics saturates life in South Africa, that I had already figured out; the idea that Grassy Park was an anomalous backwater had been pure delusion. School let out early that afternoon, and it never looked quite the same again to me.