09 - Chapter 4 PDF

Chapter 4
KAFFIR BOY BY MARK MATHABANE AND WAYS

OF DYING BY ZAKES MDA
This chapter is devoted to the semiotic analysis of two novels, viz. Mark
Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy (1986) and Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1991/1995).* These
two novels are treated in one chapter because they are apartheid novels, i.e., they were
published during the period when Apartheid was prevalent as a Government policy in
South Africa.
4.1 KAFFIR BOY BY MARK MATHABANE
This novel which has the subtitle, ‘An Autobiography’ is “the true story of a
black youth’s coming of age in Apartheid South Africa” consists of 350 pages. It is
divided into three parts running into fifty four (54) chapters as follows:
Part I : The Road to Alexandra (pp.1-119) (1-20)
Part II : Passport to Knowledge (pp.121-211) (21-34)
Part III : Passport to Freedom (pp.215-350) (35-54)
Part I consists of twenty chapters (1-20) while Part II has fourteen chapters
(21-34), and Part III twenty chapters (35-54).
4.1.1 A SYNOPSIS OF KAFFIR BOY
Kaffir Boy is the autobiography of the author Mark Mathabane who was born
and brought up in Alexandra, a slum area of Johannesburg, the capital city of South
Africa. During the peak of Apartheid in South Africa he was born of illiterate parents
in 1960. A few months before his birth there was a peaceful demonstration against the
Pass Laws in Sharpeville on March 21, 1960. He was called “Kaffir” by the police
and some Whites which meant a ‘nigger’ as an insulting and humiliating term used as
an address to a poor black person in South Africa.
Leading the life of a poor black along with his younger sister and brother in a
poor shanty, Mark Mathabane (Johannes in the text) passed through a number of
disturbed nights filled with police atrocities, his father and mother living always under
*
The textual passages cited in the course of this chapter are from the latest editions of the
two novels: Kaffir Boy (1986) and Ways of Dying (1995). Hence the page numbers refer to
the texts of these two editions.
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the threat of imprisonment for want of Pass Books and for unemployment and other
meaningless charges.
They were almost starving for days. One night the police took his father away
and his mother had no work to do. He happened to go to a white family along with his
maternal grandmother where she had been working and from that family, he received
books like Treasure Island and David Copperfield. Reading these books written by
white authors, for the first time, he came to know about a different reality of life
outside the only life of the black people, he had known in the ghetto of Alexandra in
South Africa. At thirteen he got acquainted with the game of tennis, a sport of the
whites. Slowly he became an expert in tennis with help of his white friends. He
developed a deep hatred for the local Bantu education. Surviving through the
nightmare of the Soweto protests in 1976, he received a tennis scholarship to study at
an American college in 1978 with the help of the professional tennis player Stan
Smith. This scholarship was his passport to freedom.
During his life at Alexandra, he had learnt so many things. In his own words:
Kaffir Boy is also about how, in order to escape from the clutches of
apartheid, I had to reject the tribal traditions of my ancestors. It was a
hard thing to do, for there were many good things in my African
heritage, which, had it been left to me to choose freely, I would have
preserved and venerated. I, too, had the burning need like human
beings everywhere to know where I came from, in order to better
understand who I was and where I was going in this world. But
apartheid had long adulterated my heritage and traditions, twisted them
into tools of oppression and indoctrination. I saw at a young age that
apartheid was using tribalism to deny me equal rights, to separate me
from my black brothers and sisters, to justify segregation and
perpetuate white power and privilege, to render me subservient, docile
and, therefore, exploitable. I instinctively understood that in order to
forge my own identify, to achieve according my aspirations and
dreams, to see myself the equal of any man, black or white, I had to
reject the brand tribalism, and in the rejection, I ran the risk of losing
my heritage. I took the plunge. (xi)
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After going to America and from his exposure to the outside world, especially
the democratic world in America, Mark Mathabane realized what it means to be
regarded as a human being and what democracy is. He also understood how to use his
pen to fight against injustice and racism in his native country and the result is his
autobiographical novel, Kaffir Boy. Therefore, he concludes his “Preface” as follows:
My family is still in Alexandra, undergoing the same hardships I

describe in this book. The youths of my generation have become more
militant, the tools of repression have become more numerous and
sophisticated and black schools and ghettos have become centers of
social protest and bloody conflict with the police and soldiers. South
Africa has entered its darkest hour, and all its sons and daughters have
a responsibility, a duty, to see to it that truth and justice triumph. I
hope to do my part. (xii)*
4.1.2 A SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF KAFFIR BOY
The word Kaffir, according to the author, which is of Arabic origin, means
infidel and it is used disparagingly by most whites to refer to blacks and it is
equivalent to the word nigger. This narrative is the autobiography of the author, Mark
Mathabane, a black boy born and brought up in Alexandra, a ‘ghetto’ or slum area in
the city Johannesburg. Below is a semiotic analysis of the narrative.
4.1.2.1 PART I: THE ROAD TO ALEXANDRA (pp.3-119) (20 CHAPTERS)
Chapter 1–7: Semic, Cultural, Hermeneutic and Narrative Codes
Part I named ‘The Road to Alexandra’ consists of twenty chapters. In this part
(Chapters 1–7), the miserable life of the blacks in Alexandra is described. The
narrator’s father Jackson, is from Venda, in the north west of Transvaal and mother,
Magdalene from Gazankulu in the north east of Transvaal. They got married in
Alexandra and live in a rented shack. Both do not have passes to live there and
therefore their life is always under the threat of police torture and imprisonment. Mark
Johannes a five-year old black boy has a younger sister, Florah and a young brother
George. One day in 1965 there is a police raid on the shacks in Alexandra, early in the
morning. His father has already left in the darkness before daybreak. His mother
*
All the page references in this study belong to the edition of Kaffir Boy printed by Free Press
(New York) in 1986.
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suddenly wakes them up closing the door with a slam. Suddenly there is a commotion
outside. In the words of author:
Suddenly, as I stood leaning against the table, from outside came a

series of dreadful noises. Sirens blared, voices streamed and shouted,
wood cracked and windows shattered, children bawled, dogs barked
and footsteps pounded. I was bewildered; I had never heard such a
racket before. I was instantly seized by a feeling of terror. (7)
His mother hides and responds to his anxious calls, in a faint voice. She tells
them that Peri-urban (i.e. the Alexandra Police Squad) are here. The police raid
outside becomes more and more dangerous. Finding out her black little book (Pass
Book) with great difficulty, his mother escapes through the bed room door. The
younger children cry horribly. Johannes covers his small brother, who is weeping,
with a blanket. Three black policemen enter and after search finding only the children,
they leave. The young boy has fallen from the bed and broken his head. Their mother
who hides in a ditch returns. In the evening, there is a rumour that the police will raid
the area once again. It is the beginning of the annual ‘Operation Clean-up Month’ to
comb Alexandra to catch people living there without passbooks. His father says that it
is only a rumour but his wife is afraid. In the midnight there is again a police raid.
Two black policemen break open the bolted door of Johannes’s shack. They beat the
boy mercilessly and finally catch his father hiding in the bed room. They verify his
Pass Book and find several irregularities in it. Then they demand some bribe money,
but he has no money. Therefore, he is hand-cuffed and taken away. The following
passage holds mirror to what kind of horror and torture are perpetrated on the black
slum-dwellers of Alexandra:
Curious to find out where they were taking my father, and what was
going on outside, I followed them, forgetting all about my mother. I
ordered my sister, who was crying, “Papa, Papa!” by the door, back
into the house. I stepped outside in time to see the two policemen,
flanking my father, go up a rocky slope leading out of the yard. I saw
more black policemen leading black men and women out of shacks.
Some of the prisoners were half-naked, others dressed as they went.
Several children, two and three years old, stood in tears outside the
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smashed doors, imploring their mothers and fathers to come back.
(23-24)
Afterwards, Johannes returns home and finds that his mother has been hiding
in the small wardrobe. Now it is locked from outside. Finding the key and several
farthings after a long and repeated search, he opens the door and his mother comes
out. His father has been kept in prison for two months and released. He returns to his
family. The police came unannounced and tortured the blacks in Alexandra slum. This
became a way of life in Mathabane’s life as a boy. His mother would have
premonitions of the police raid, but his father would dismiss her fears. Very often his
mother’s borebodings became true. Those who had money paid bribes to the police
and escaped imprisonment. Others would be sent to Modderbee, a maximum-security
penitentiary, on the outskirts of Kempton Park. Women would say that Modderbee
was a “hell which changed black men into brutes, no matter how tough and stubborn
they are” (29). His mother used to pray to their ancestral spirits to save her husband.
The black workers in white houses were paid their wages on Fridays and the blacks,
in spite of the constant terror of Peri-urban, would enjoy their week-ends by feasting
and drinking heavily. One night their dingy shack collapsed and they moved to
another similar shack. His younger brother, George was weaned in the new shack. His
mother had applied red pepper to her breasts and asked George to suckle and when he
did so he started crying terribly and thus he became afraid of suckling. To mark
George’s passage from infancy to childhood, they had a small celebration at home
with a small white chicken. His father started teaching the tribal ways of life to
George also, as he had done before to Mathabane. In the words of the author:
My father’s rule had as its fulcrum the constant performing of rituals

spanning the range of day-to-day timing. They were rituals to protect
the house from evildoers, to ward off starvation, to prevent us from
becoming sick, to safeguard his job, to keep the police away, to bring
us good luck, to make him earn more money and many others which
my young mind could not understand. Somehow they did not make
sense to me; they simply awed, confused and embarrassed me, and the
only reason I participated in them night after night was because my
father made certain that I did, by using, among other things, the whip,
and the threat of the retributive powers of my ancestral spirits, whose
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favour the rituals were designed to curry. Along with the rituals, there
were also tribal laws governing manners. (32)
One example of tribal manners was that a child should not talk while eating
food. For violating this rule Johannes Mathabane was whipped cruelly by his father
with his rawhide belt. Johannes developed hatred towards his father and wanted to kill
him, but his mother pacified him. In his father’s absence, when he told his mother that
his father should stop doing rituals, his mother told him:
Well, it’s not as simple that your father grew up in the tribes, as you
know. He didn’t come to the city until he was quite old. It’s hard to
stop doing things when you’re old. I, too, do rituals because I was
raised in the tribes. Their meaning, child, will become clear when you
grow up. Have patience. (33)
His father also would become angry whenever Johannes spoke Zulu instead of
their own tribal language, Venda. In the end of 1966, his father lost his job as a
labourer for a white firm at Germiston, a white city, south of Johannesburg. Then, one
day, his father was arrested for being unemployed. His mother tried in vain to get him
released from prison. After 16 years of age every black person had to possess a Pass
Book and as his mother said, his father had been arrested because his Pass Book was
not in order. The family continued to starve for days together and the landlord gave an
ultimatum to pay house-rent. One day when their mother was away hunting for food
and money, two powerful and armed Zulu men came and stole the furniture in the
house. A few weeks later, George and Flora became ill. Their mother, as she had no
money for treatment, used some herbal medicine given by their Granny. That year,
there was Christmas celebration in their family, and with a long absence of her
husband and lack of resources for survival, their mother became gradually irritable
and started drinking heavily. Johannes also changed slowly. He started suspecting that
his mother was eating some food secretly in the night while the children were starving
because her stomach had been growing fat. In fact, she was pregnant. When asked,
she told him, that she had already had ‘bloating stomach’ three times before. Thus his
suspicions were cleared. Luckily at this time, their Granny (his mother’s mother)
came to them on her return from Shangaan, Bantustan where she had gone to attend a
ceremony to exorcise evil spirits from a raving mad relative. Learning about their
miserable plight, Granny helped them by clearing the three-month’s rent, by buying
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them bread, sugar and ‘mealie meal’ (i.e., corn meal) and gave his mother one
hundred cents. Further for the treatment of George and Flora who had been suffering
from advanced malnutrition and chicken pox, she gave another three hundred cents.
When Johannes suggested to his mother that they go to Granny’s place and stay there
till their father’s return, his mother said that Granny was already overburdened with
looking after herself and her other children and that she could not afford to keep them
with her. Further, it was against their tribal custom. Then their mother got a small job
of cleaning a storekeeper’s house and washing his family’s clothes and against her
service, he agreed to pay their house rent. Thus the problem of house rent was solved
and for food they started going, along with other poor black neighbours, to Mlothi, a
new garbage dump in Alexandra half a mile away, from their living place. Every
morning they would go there to search for scraps of food in the garbage. From the
Mlothi’s garbage, there were able to pick up, not only some thrown-away food items,
but also many other items like clothes, knives, furniture, spoons, cribs, mugs, forks
and plates thrown away after use by the families of whites. One day, they dug out a
heavy box from the garbage dump and when opened, it turned out to contain the dead
body of a black female baby. Many other neighbours also were present. They returned
home with a shock. When asked by Johannes about the baby, his mother replied:
She told me that some maids and nannies who worked for white
people, because of fears of losing their jobs in the event of an
accidental pregnancy, would often smother the baby and dump the
corpse in garbage bins so they could continue working. (49)
After this incident, they stopped going to Mlothi. Instead, they started going to
a chicken factory at the other end of the veld, Sunnyside, to pickup uncracked eggs
from the dumped loads of dead, diseased chickens and rejected eggs. Almost 99
percent of them were only dead embryos. Their father returned almost after one year
in prison as a changed man physically as well as attitudinally. He became almost a
brute. He told his wife about the horrid life in prison where thousands of black men
were locked inside for their unpardonable crime was being unemployed. Somehow his
father succeeded in getting his pass after running round the Superintendent’s office
several days. But he couldn’t get any job because of his arrest record. One evening,
when her mother was suckling his younger sister, three-month old Maria, Johannes
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felt giddy and shouted that the house was spinning. He was seemed that the house is
on fire. Consider this passage (of the Semic code):
Suddenly, the gyrating objects developed huge mouths and

began laughing at me, a roaring, crazy laughter, which split my head
into two. As the madding laughter continued, each whirling object
suddenly contorted, enlarged, ballooned, stretched, shrank, into all
sorts of grotesque, shifting monsters, all of them attempting to swallow
me up. Each fiend had big, red, unblinking eyes and a wide red mouth
without lips, from which protruded massive, shiny, razor-sharp teeth.
Suddenly all the monsters burst into flames. (51)
With great concern and care his mother tried to calm him down and at last put
him to sleep singing folk songs and telling a story. This passage above is a wonderful
example of the author’s descriptive and narrative skills, besides being an exquisite
example of the Semic and Cultural codes which pervade the entire Part – I.
In the night Johannes Mathabane had a dream as described below:
I had dreamed of being marooned on a strange island, and as I

wandered about the land, I came across a group of white men clad in
loinskins who, upon seeing me, fell on their knees and worshipped me,
as if I were a god. Then they led me to a huge hut filled with mangoes,
papayas, curried rice and fish, oranges, chocolate candy, milk, bread
smeared with peanut butter and jam, bananas and guavas, where they
clad me in a rainbow coloured toga like a chieftain, set me upon a high
boulder in the midst of all the food and beseeched me to eat
everything, saying that here were many other huts similarly filled with
food, which was still mine to eat. I began gobbling all the food until
my stomach burst open, revealing my clogged intestines, which burst
open too. However, I didn’t die. (52)
Look at the interpretation his mother gave to this dream:
My mother, in divining my dream, told me that the events in it meant

that someday I would find myself in a faraway place, among strangers,
who would take me in, clothe me and provide me with all the things I
wanted. (Ibid)
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Both the passages above illustrate the Cultural code in the sense that the first
passage describes the dream of a growing black boy in Alexandra, starving and
struggling to survive in abject poverty and fear and reflects his psychology and
perhaps his imagination enkindled by ill-health and hunger, while the second passage
illustrates how the mother divined his dream using her knowledge of tribal culture.
Johannes’s father luckily got his old job back. But now he was a changed man
given to excessive drinking and gambling. One day he brought home muhodu and
mala (chicken feet, intestines and head), a delicacy for them, a pack of candles, a
small bag of ‘mealie meal’, salt packets and sugar and a packet of fish and chips. This
made the entire family very happy and the children danced and sang happily. That
was one of the rarely happy days in their life. This again is an instance of the Cultural
code. Here after, a chapter-wise analysis has been for a better understanding of the
role played by the different Semiotic codes. Another reason is that some of the
ensuing chapters are lengthy enough to call for a more detailed analysis.
Chapter 8: Narrative, Semic and Cultural Codes (pp.53-55)
Having nothing to do Johannes Mathabane associated himself with a gang of

five to seven year old boys and moved around in different places in and around
Alexandra in search of food and adventure. Indian traders were offering their cheap
garments at low prices by shouting, on First Avenue, gold and green buses were being
washed at PUTCO bus terminal, black men were drinking Bantu beer at beer halls
while black women were waiting outside to buy that beer carrying their small children
on their backs, gun-toting black guards were patrolling near the entrance gate, Tsotsis
(gangsters) were playing dice smoking dagga (marijuana). He used to watch all these
things and to go to the King’s cinema on the First Avenue by buying the ticket along
with his friends with the small money they manipulated by selling empty beer bottles
and used bus tickets to Shebeen queens (black women who made and sold cheap
liquor). He formed an unrealistic picture about the life of the white people that it was
full of violence and murder, from his experience of watching these English films. His
already existing phobia caused by the black police, had increased further by these
films of violence and crime. He saw such a film for the first time when he was three
or four years old. That film made his fear permanent. This part (ch.8) is another
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example the Cultural code associated with the black culture of Alexandra. The Semic
code throws light on the locality and on the characters.
Chapter 9: Cultural, Narrative and Symbolic Codes (pp.55-62)
One afternoon a group of black evangelists headed by a white man pitched a

tent in an open place in the slum and invited people to attend. Somehow his father
agreed to take them to this tent on the next Saturday evening. So they went to the tent
which had already been jam-packed. A black evangelist was explaining the greatness
of Christianity over the tribal religion. This angered some black men including his
father and a likely fight was pacified. After coming home, his father condemned
Christianity as the white man’s religion. When his father had gone out to work,
Johannes had a discussion with his mother about Christianity as he had also seen
some pictures of Christ and others in the houses of his neighbours. His mother
explained to him how Christianity came to Africa. When he asked why Christ was a
white and Devil a black, his mother replied:
Christianity is essentially the religion of white people, therefore it

makes sense that the Christian god should be thought of as a white
person. Just like we, in our religion, have our Black God. (61)
When his father overheard their conversation, he warned his wife not to teach
their son Christianity. His mother had a favourable disposition towards Christianity
because their Christian neighbours were prosperous and happy whereas they
themselves, in spite of their loyalty to the tribal gods, continued to live in poverty,
hunger and misery. However, Mathabane, under his father’s influence developed
great dislike for Christianity.
This chapter also very vividly contributes to the unfolding of the Cultural code
that enveloped some black people’s lives in Alexandra who did not believe in
Christianity and who adhered to their tribal religion despite the attraction of
Christianity. In addition the Symbolic code depicts the conflict between the Christian
and the tribal religions in the minds of the blacks.
Chapter 10: Cultural and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.62-74)
In this chapter the prostitution escapade of the slum boys is described.

Johannes and his family had been starving without food. At the beginning of 1967, the
cost of living went high and the wages earned by his father were not adequate enough
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to provide food for them. So his mother and the children would go out in search of
other means of food like locusts, grasshoppers, leech-like worms called songa’s, and
weeds called murogo which grew near lavatories. Their mother processed them and
served these as food to the children. Sometimes they would also gather animal blood
from the local abattoir on First Avenue. After sometime even such blood was not
freely available and they stopped collecting it. Though Johannes felt repulsive to eat
such food, hunger educated his mind and prepared his stomach to receive it (63). His
mother told him how potatoes by feeding ‘night soil’ were grown to become big.
Nonetheless hunger taught Johannes to develop a passion for games like soccer.
Another important episode in this chapter is the description of how the young
boys were used for homosexuality by grown up black men who were lodged inside
fenced barracks. These were inside, lured the boys with food and money and after
serving them with enough food they would use them for sodomy. Johannes fell into
the company of these boys headed by a thirteen year old pimp, named Mpandhlani
and went into the compound one day, having been compelled by hunger, but luckily
he refused either to eat the food and take the money offered or to yield to the
homosexual act. He escaped from the compound with great difficulty. His friends
called him a fool. But the author concludes by saying:
Throughout all the years that I live in South Africa, people were to call
me a fool for refusing to live life the way they did and by doing the
things they did. Little did they realize that in our world, the black
world, one could only survive if one played the fool, and bided his
time.(74)
In this chapter, the Cultural, Hermeneutic and Semic codes operate side by
side to provide a realistic picture of the life of young boys in the slums of Alexandra
which is but one of such slums around Johannesburg in South Africa. The moral
strength of the protagonist, Johannes, is also confirmed by his fortitude in rejecting
the prostitutional way of life despite horrible hunger and poverty. Thus the central
character is clearly delineated by Semic code in this part.
Chapter 11: Hermeneutic and Cultural Codes (pp.74-78)
Though different in many respects, Johannes’ parents agreed on one respect,

viz. the power of witchcraft and believed that their bad luck and difficulties in life
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were due to the evil of some of their neighbours who practiced witchcraft against
them. One day when they were returning from their grandmother’s place, the police
stopped them and finding that his mother’s pass was not in order, took their mother
away in the van in spite of her being a pregnant woman and because she was not able
to gratify them with any bribe money. After their father returned, he borrowed some
money from the landlord and requested a neighbouring woman, Mrs. Munyama to go
to the police station and get his wife released. This woman’s pass was in order. After
being released Johannes’s mother lamented for not having a pass in order. One day
she happened to meet a group of Full Gospel Church and got all of them including her
baptized. Yet her tribal beliefs continued to be strong. Therefore the narrator says,
“Hers was a Christianity of expediency.” (77)
This chapter is an example of Hermeneutic and Cultural codes, Hermeneutic

because the author’s mother was attracted towards Christianity for material benefits
without exactly understanding Christianity but her belief in her tribal religion was as
strong and unchanged as ever. This chapter is also a manifestation of Cultural code
because it describes the expected impact of Christianity and its material benefits.
Chapter 12: Cultural Code (pp.78-80)
This chapter is one of the important chapters in Part-I. In this chapter the
author describes the tenacity of his mother in going round the Superintendent’s office
for obtaining a regular Pass, and her patience, knowledge and skill in telling tribal
folk stories to her children at the bed time. She was a great teller of tales. She would
tell her children that these stories had been transmitted from generation to generations
of black people and not only did they entertain the children but also taught them
morals and good behaviour. Her stories included those of various tribal traditions of
the past, of the chiefs, witch doctors, sages, warriors, sorcerers, magicians, and wild
monstrous beasts in the mythical African kingdoms ruled by black people where no
white man had ever set foot, of the generous deeds of famous powerful, immortal and
invincible African gods, of legends of noble tribal chiefs and warriors, of their liberal
treatment of the enemies they had vanquished, of animals who were smarter than
humans, of tribal songs, proverbs and riddles, dance songs, mimic songs, harvest
songs, ceremonies and rituals. As the author notes, these stories served them more
than nursery rhymes and story books of school education, by moulding their young
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characters in the right way. These stories, songs, proverbs and riddles are given to
them by her mother.
…served as a library, a golden fountain of knowledge where children

learned about right and wrong, about good and evil. (79)
The author as a young boy learnt many things from the stories and tribal lore
and history of his mother. He concludes the chapter thus:
I learned to prefer peace to war, cleverness to stupidity, love to hate,

and sensitivity to stoicism, humility to pomposity and reconciliation to
hostility, harmony to strife, patience to rashness, gregariousness to
misanthropy, creation to annihilation. (80)
Chapter 13: Narrative, Hermeneutic and Cultural Codes (pp.80-82)
In this chapter, a new crisis faced by Johannes’s family is narrated. When

winter came, one night a fierce storm broke out. That night his mother told the
children about the witch flying in the wind with a blazing torch in hand, against
thunder, set the huts in the village on fire, in revenge as the villagers had burnt her
child at the stake taking mother and child, and who had brought drought to the
villages through voodoo (evil spirits). That night Johannes and the younger children
could not sleep out of fear. His mother forgot to keep the brazier outside and the
poisonous gas of the burning coal suffocated Johannes and he tossed and kicked Flora
who started crying. His mother came out of the bedroom and saved them. She took
him out into the open air where he was drenched in the pouring rain. His father,
Jackson, also came out and his mother explained to him the reason why Johannes got
suffocated. She kept the brazier outside the shack. Next morning the coal became ash.
In this chapter, the Narrative code continues the story, while the Cultural code
throws light on tribal beliefs like Voodoo. Finally the Hermeneutic code resolves the
fear of suffocation to the children revealing that the cause was the poisonous gas from
the burning coal.
This chapter gives an account of how some boys including Johannes made fun
of the shit-men who came in a truck to collect the ‘night soil’ in the huts. As his
parents and other children were away, Johannes moved and joined a band of boys and
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they started saying ditties and making obscene gestures, mocking at the shit-men. The
truck stopped suddenly and three shit-men came after the boys. The others escaped,
but Johannes was caught, he was taken to his shack, forced to undress and was
dumped in a bucket full of shit. When his mother came back, she washed him and
cleaned his body off the shit. From this horrible incident, Johannes learnt a lesson:
…Never again would I jeer at the shit-men, nor at anyone, for that
matter. (85)
From the description of the activity of the shit-men, the reader learns about the
dirty environment in which the black people lived in their shacks in Alexandra. This
is revealed through the Semic code. This chapter also is an example of the Narrative
code as it narrates how the protagonist’s immature behaviour taught him a lesson of
life. Further it illustrates the manifestation of the Cultural code as it describes the poor
and miserable life of the black people in the slum of Alexandra.
Chapter 15: Cultural, Narrative and Semic Codes (pp.86-91)
In this chapter, the narrator presents an account of his experience in his trip to
the tribal reserve, in the company of his father. Jackson, his father, lost his job once
again. Having been worried of his constant losing of job and the consequent problems
in life; Jackson, decided to consult a witch doctor in his village in Venda and to obtain
a talisman and voodoo-combating medicines from the witch doctor. Saving some
money with great difficulty by starving for days, he set out his journey taking
Johannes along with him. They travelled secretly in a PUTCO bus along with some
other black men covered by a huge tarpaulin to protect themselves from the police.
The truck also carried a lot of second-hand goods and furniture. The travelers hide
themselves amidst this assortment under the tarpaulin. Johannes had wished very
much to observe the white man’s world outside but he couldn’t do so due to the
darkness of the night and the tarpaulin cover. Father and son finally reached the black
world, the tribal reserve. Consider the following description of the place which is a
fine example of Semic code:
The place was mountainous, rugged and bone-dry, like a wasteland.

Straggling, unpaved roads, which became treacherous quagmires with
each infrequent rainfall, were the only means of getting from one
village to another. The soil was baked reddish brown, like terra-cotta,
with patches of dried-up stubble here and there. Intermittently, huge
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clouds of dust swelled upward, lingered a few moments in the air, and
then settled down to make everything and everybody reddish brown.
(86)
They went to the local village chief’s kraal where Jackson paid his overdue
tribal taxes. The author says that, the villagers did not know anything about the world
outside their villages. So they went on asking him questions about the city life.
Nothing grew anywhere except at the lavatories. Even the handful cattle were
scrawny, and children suffered from rampant malnutrition. The narrator’s words in
this context are quotable:
The way they went about their daily life reminded me of my mother’s
stories about primitive tribes, and I felt a slight revulsion at being
connected, through my father, to what everyone in the city called a
“backward” way of life. My father, on the other hand, seemed very
much at home; I wondered why. (87)
His father told him, “This is the place where someday soon, all of our people
will have to come to live”. (87) This surprised Johannes and he started suspecting that
his father had brought him there to leave him there forever. At the end of the first
week they visited the cave of the witch doctor located on the mountain top, led by an
old wife of the witch doctor. The atmosphere in the cave scared Johannes greatly.
Consider his description of the cave:
On the rugged walls of the cave hung bones and skins of various
animals; bark, roots and leaves of various plants; bottles containing
grey, cloudy brews, from which pungent vapors came; dead frogs,
snakes and other reptiles. And in one far corner, alongside a font
bubbling an eerie mist, was perched a human skull. (88)
The boy was terrified. His father told him that the skull was part of the witch
doctor’s medicines. His father greeted the witch doctor and bowed several times.
They sat cross-legged in front of the doctor who was dressed in animal bones; shells
etc. and his body and face were painted with red clay. When the actual ceremony
began, Johannes’s father submitted to the witch doctor his problems and requested the
latter to give him medicine to safeguard his job and his family. The witch doctor
collected some bones and shells and threw them on the mat and chanted a musical
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formula, and divined the bones. He said that Johannes’s father’s problems were
caused because he had completely lost contact with his ancestral spirits and made
them angry. By way of diagnosis, he advised that Jackson had to sacrifice a white
chicken twice a year to appease the angry ancestral spirits. He also gave Johannes’s
father several small pouches containing roots, ointments and other stuff as medicine
for all his problems. At the end, an ablution ceremony was held at the back of the
cave and Jackson was made to drink fresh blood from the neck of a goat. While
leaving the witch doctor’s kraal, his father seemed to be a new man with new energy
and hope. On the way his father asked Johannes what he could do if he was left back
in the village under the tutelage of the witch doctor. Johannes strongly expressed his
disagreement. From a local boy of thirteen, Johannes came to know that all able-
bodied men in the village had to go to the cities to work in the mines, leaving their
families behind, because there was no work locally. These men sent money every six
months and their wives visited them once a year.
This is an important chapter because the Cultural, Hermeneutic and Narrative

codes pervade this chapter in juxtaposition.
On the day when Johannes and his father returned from the tribal reserve, his
mother gave birth to a baby girl who was named Merriam afterwards. The family
became poorer with the addition of a new-born baby. The neighbouring women
performed a ritual at night for the safety of mother and baby. Six months later, the
authorities announced that all the shacks in Alexandra would be demolished. Only the
black people with residential permits would be accommodated in a black township
under construction outside the city. Those without permits would be deported back to
the tribal reserves. Somehow their shack was not demolished because they wanted to
do it by stages. His parents after a prolonged search could get a vacant shack on rent
on Thirteenth Avenue. Thus they moved from Fifteenth Avenue to Thirteenth one.
Here Johannes came to know that white people were the authors of apartheid. He also
came to know from his mother that black people were not allowed to own or construct
their own houses and only whites were legally allowed to do so and that the laws were
made by white people. However, his mother could not answer all his questions. The
entire area on Thirteenth Avenue was very dirty and unhygienic in spite of the
warnings given to the bald-headed custodian of the yard by the health inspector. Boys
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and girls of Johannes’s age used to play there several games like the games of “witch
doctor”, digging mounds of dirt for “hidden treasure”. The shacks as well as the open
space were stinking with stench. When their shack began giving away during winter,
Johannes asked his mother why his father or the landlord wouldn’t fix the house. She
said that it was not possible. This was another question for which Johannes found no
answer. Consider the following passage that describes their life in the decaying shack:
Often, during the night, particularly after it had rained and the floor
was soggy wet, my brother, sisters and I after being gnawed by vicious
red ants and scorpions burrowing through the porous cement floor,
would wake up screaming from the floor where we slept. Rats never
stopped eating our palms and feet, and we often were unable to walk or
handle anything for days because both areas were like open wounds.
Bed bugs and lice sucked us dry during the night. And just about every
day my mother had to get new cardboard to make pallets because the
rats were eating those too. (96)
Yet, the house, the yard, the neighbourhood and Alexandra were the only
world that Johannes knew and the only reality.
This chapter holds mirror to the piteous life of the black people, in Alexandra
by manifesting the Cultural and Hermeneutic codes. The Hermeneutic code
introduces a problem without any solution!
Thirteenth Avenue was but a haven for refugees. Because many strangers were
coming and going, Johannes’s mother warned him not to beg for food. As his father
was again arrested, the family started starving again without food. But afflicted with
acute hunger, Johannes resorted to begging for food. One day when he was lingering
in front of a door tempted by smell of food, his mother caught him, dragged him
home, latched the door and tried to beat him. He escaped and explained to her that he
was begging because he was not getting enough food at home. Then his mother told
him that those who often gave him food in the neighbourhood were witches who were
testing their poisonous and voodooed food by giving it to unsuspecting victims like
Johannes. Suddenly he felt attacked by a stomach ache as he had eaten some food
given by two old women the day before. She warned him against eating such begged
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food. But she permitted him to eat at the homes of his friends, that too, along with
them and not alone or separately. He had to bring home any food item given by
strangers. One day he brought home a piece of meat pie given by a stranger and his
mother left it in a corner. The next morning they found a dead rat which had eaten that
food and died. This taught a lesson to Johannes and the remaining children that they
should never beg strangers for food.
This chapter, besides narrating a succession of events through the passage of

time, also describes the impulsive begging habit of Johannes and his mother’s success
in stopping such a habit of his, permanently. Thus the three codes–Narrative, Semic
and Cultural– operate in combination in this chapter.
Chapter 18: Cultural, Symbolic, Narrative and Semic Codes (pp.100-103)
This chapter recounts the inner development of the protagonist, Johannes, as a

seven-year old boy. His father returned and there was temporary normalcy in the life
of his family. But he was aware of the fact that, any moment, this normalcy would be
broken. In his own words, at the opening of this chapter:
But my instincts told me that normalcy could be shattered at any

moment – by another arrest. At this point of in my life I realised that,
willy-nilly, black people had to map out their lives, their future, with
the terror of the police in mind. And that terror led to the hunger, the
loneliness, the violence, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the apathy
and the suffering with which I was surrounded. (100)
Thus, Johannes had learnt that he had to plan and work for his own future but
he didn’t know how to do so. He wondered whether there was any other kind of life
than their black life in Alexandra. He very much lamented the condition of life in
Alexandra where waves of migrant men from the tribal reserves migrated constantly
in search of food and employment. All these people also believed in witchcraft and
they attributed every untoward happening to witchcraft. Johannes also was slowly
becoming superstitious like others by believing in the impact of witchcraft and by
fearing that the strange people coming in vehicles might be the Mai-Mai, the
notorious cannibals. An unhealing foot wound, the many strange noises heard, often,
in the midnight, illness, bad luck and unemployment and the like were thought to be
caused by witchcraft. His father would take some precautions like cordoning his
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house with chicken blood twice a year as advised by the witch doctor, to ward off evil
spirits and the wrath of his ancestral spirits. One superstition may be cited here:
Because my navel was an “innie” and not an “outie” and because I was
left-handed and not right-handed, I was destined to become the sage in
the family, and someday would do something great. (101)
There were many such other superstitions like migration of souls during sleep
in the night, the effect of eating different parts of a sheep or a cow, his sisters had not
to eat eggs after a certain age, his father’s belief that their ancestors would write the
destiny of the members of his family on a big scroll of shining sheepskin. Before he
was five, Johannes also believed in all these tribal superstitions, but finding that no
miracle had ever happened in his life for the better, he developed sceptism and started
thinking realistically. Thus by the time when he was seven years old he decided:
“After all, my life was my own to do with as I pleased. “ (103)
In this chapter, the description of the misery of the residents of Alexandra, the
new migrants, the black people’s superstitions constitute an expression of the Cultural
code whereas the narrator’s opposition to his father and his tribal superstitions is a
manifestation of the Symbolic code because Johannes never confronted his father
regarding these matters. This chapter is also an example of the Semic code as it
depicts the change of attitude in Johannes with the passage of time.
Chapter 19: Hermeneutic, Cultural and Narrative Codes (pp.103-108)
This chapter narrates the incidents of the arrest of his uncle Piet by the Peri-
Urban (i.e., the police) and the efforts made by his grandmother and mother to get him
released.
One day his mother woke him, his brother and sisters at midnight, prepared
them for a short journey even without breakfast for the fear of the police. They
reached his Granny’s place, a shack on Eighth Avenue. It was a neat shack and part of
it was rented out for financial reasons. Granny lived with her two children Uncle Piet,
thirteen and Aunt Bush, fifteen. Her first son Uncle Cheeks was serving a long
sentence in a black peniteritiary for having committed burglary in a white man’s
house. Here is a portrayal of Granny as a person:
Granny, an indomitable matriarch, had single-handedly raised

all her children after her husband had deserted her for another woman.
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She had a statuesque figure – tall, little and ebony-coloured-like
a Massai woman, complete with tribal garbs and multiple anklets,
beads, earrings and bracelets. In that dazzling outfit, she could have
easily been a chief’s daughter. Her genial brown eyes had the radiance
of pristine pearls. She was, I think, the most beautiful black woman I
had ever seen. Though somewhat grey-haired and wrinkled by the time
I came to know her well, from the stories I heard of her youth she
could have captured the heart of any man she wanted. (105)
She was a hard worker and worked for six days a week in spite of her old age, for
white people. She was prepared to work hard until all her children settled well in life
by which time they would take care of her. But that particular morning, Granny was
greatly disturbed because Uncle Piet was arrested and taken by the Peri-Urban police.
In fact he was thirteen years old, but the police mistook him for a grown up boy of
sixteen as he was too tall for his age. Though he was in his school uniform and
protested, they took him in their truck. Informed of this by a neighbouring woman,
Mama Vilakazi, Granny went towards the truck but could not face the police as she
didn’t have a pass being a woman abandoned by her husband and not qualified for a
pass. Peri-Urban would also arrest her if she faced them. They didn’t have any money
on hand to set Piet released by paying bribes to the police. After a week, by pawning
Granny’s meagre belongings and thus collecting some money, they somehow got Piet
released. The next day Granny went to the school where Piet was a student and
obtained a written note from the principal that he was his student.
This chapter is a manifestation of Hermeneutic, Cultural and Narrative codes,

respectively for the reasons, it first introduces suspense about the short journey of
Johannes, his sister and his brother along with their mother, second, it describes the
life style of Granny and third, it accounts for the progress of events in a narrative
way.
Chapter 20: Hermeneutic, Semic, Cultural and Narrative Codes (pp.108-119)
In this chapter the efforts made by Johannes’s mother to get papers from the
Superintendent’s office on First Avenue, papers like his certificate of birth etc.
Johannes did not know why his mother was marching him to the office of the
Superintendent.
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Leaving the younger children at Granny’s place, Johannes and his mother
reached the office. There was already a long queue of black men and women at the
office. They waited for a long time. Being early morning, it was very cold. Johannes
went to a place nearby where some men were warming themselves squatting around a
fire. Johannes whose face became cold and feet got frozen went there to get some heat
to his body with his mother’s permission. But those men did not allow him to join,
calling him ‘vagabond’. He returned to his mother who took him there and requested
the men to allow her son to squat near the fire. They allowed him. While sitting there
for a short while in the company of those black unemployed men, Johannes realized
that these men as thousands of their likes were, failed to get any work for want of
passes. They were very poor and helpless. They were also very envious of the black
men who were being taken in a convoy of trucks to work in the mines and therefore
called the prospective miners “Vermin”, while Johannes found a similarity of attitude
of hatred between these men and his own father. After seven hours of waiting, they
were told to get this paper and that paper from different offices and finally ushered
into the boss’s room by a black policeman. Again they had to stand and wait. They
could not sit down because it was an offence. They waited for an hour but they were
not called in because the boss had left for his lunch. They were told to go there again
after one month. Accordingly, they paid a second visit to the Superintendent’s office
one month later, on a Friday, only when the papers were issued. On the way they
noticed the black miners returning in the trucks and singing because Friday was their
pay day. Johannes asked his mother about his father not being happy on Friday when
he too would receive his wages. She said that he had many worries. Johannes
wondered whether his mother had no worries like his father. In the late afternoon that
day, mother and son were called into the boss’s office room. Seeing the boss who was
a white man, the same white man who had conducted a police raid earlier in
Alexandra, Johannes was frightened and started crying such that his mother had to
drag him far to the back of the office and they had to go back to the office after some
time. This time, the boss refused to give a birth certificate because in their files there
was no indication that he was born in Alexandra. Johannes’s mother’s entreaties fell
on deaf ears. She was told to bring papers of proof that he was born in Alexandra,
from the government hospital. The following Monday they went to the Alexandra
Health Center and University Clinic for obtaining documental proof that Johannes
was born in Alexandra. Even when they reached the clinic at five o’ clock in the
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morning, it appeared that they were late because there was already a long line of
people waiting at different counters. The clinic looked a horrible place to young
Johannes, filled with all kinds of sick, wounded and maimed patients. First they
waited in a wrong line and afterwards, when they went to the right office, the
blackman at the window told her that he could not give a birth certificate without the
necessary papers from the Superintendent’s office. She tried to persuade him but there
was no use. Then they sat on the porch, till lunch time when the office was closed.
The narrator describes the situation of the clinic as follows:
A handful of young student doctors from a white university ran around

all day trying to treat the endless number of black patients. Their task
seemed so impossible that, figuratively speaking, they were like people
attempting to put out a huge fire with their saliva. (118)
While sitting outside the office door, his mother started humming a Tsonga song
sorrowfully, a white woman wearing a white dress and black wimple came by to take
something from the office. His mother accosted her as ‘sister’ and sought her help.
The white woman was moved by listening to their story, went inside and chided the
black man who had earlier driven them away. The same black clerk, after a few
minutes gave them the birth certificate. Johannes’s mother became the happiest
woman and told her son that all the whites were not bad and there were some good
people among them like the white “sister”. She sang in praise of this ‘sister’. The
narrator concludes this chapter thus:
I simply grumbled, little realizing that my entire future had actually

depended on that one piece of paper she had fought so long and so
doggedly to secure. I had, though I hardly knew it then, cleared the
first and most difficult, hurdle toward eventually enrolling at school.
Without a birth certificate I would have never been allowed to enroll at
any of the tribal schools in Alexandra. (119)
This chapter is an exquisite example of how different semiotic codes, viz.,

Hermeneutic, Semic, Cultural and Narrative codes are juxtaposed in order to produce
the intended effect of realism.
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4.1.2.2 PART II: PASSPORT TO KNOWLEDGE (pp.120-212) (14 CHAPTERS)
This chapter narrates the events that led to Johannes Mathabane’s admission to
school. The chapter has, for its sub-heading, a sentence quoted from his mother’s
short speech on the value of education. At seven-and-a half years of age, Johannes
had developed great hatred against education and against going to school. He was
influenced deeply by the wayward life of the black youth in the neighbourhood who
wandered aimlessly and led a life of crime and violence. They had formed into gangs
and their age ranged from ten to twelve years. Johannes developed a fascinated
reverence that “their every word seemed that of an oracle” (123).
He describes their life as follows:
These boys had long left their homes and were now living in
various neighbourhood junkyards, making it on their own. They slept
in abandoned cars, smoked glue and benzene, ate pilchards and brown
bread, sneaked into the white world to caddy, and if unsuccessful,
came back to the township to steal beer and soda bottles from
shebeens, or goods from the Indian traders on First Avenue. Their life-
style was exciting, adventurous and full of surprise; and I was attracted
to it. My mother told me that they were no-gooders, and that they
would amount to nothing, that I should not associate with them, but I
paid no heed. What does she know? I used to tell myself. One thing
that she did not know was that the gang’s way of life had captivated
me wholly, particularly their philosophy on school: They hated it and
considered an education a waste of time.
They, like myself, had grown up in an environment where the

first thing a child learned was not how to read and write and spell, but
how to fight and steal and rebel; where the money to send children to
school was grossly lacking, for survival was first priority. I kept my
membership in the gang, knowing that for as long as I was under its
influence, I would never go to school. (123)
This passage serves the function of the Semic code which vividly signifies the
miserable life of adolescent children in the slum of Alexandra which is but a typical
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representative of all the slums that existed on the periphery of the city of
Johannesburg.
One early morning Mujaji (Johannes’s mother’s maiden name) woke him up,
ordered him to have a bath, helped him clean his body with a scrap brush and a piece
of lifebuoy soap purging the grime of many years. Granny, her mother, and Aunt
Bushy arrived. When they knocked the door, his mother was scared that the police
had come. So when she came to know that they were only Granny and Aunt Bush, she
sighed with a great relief. All the three women managed to dress protesting Johannes
with the long old shirt of his father and a pair of over-size pants. His mother folded
the long shirt tucked in his pants which she also folded several times to make it fit.
They tied him up with a rope and forced him to move with them to the tribal school
on Sixteenth Avenue. On the road, there were other children who were protesting
against going to school. On the way a strange woman carrying coal scuttle on her
head stopped them and narrated the sad fate of her eldest son whom she could not
send to school and who having been given to the bad way of life of the gang, ended
up his life in a premature death. They reached the tribal school and the black principal
gave him admission after taking his birth certificate and asking some questions about
their language. Johannes’s mother’s language was Shangaan and his father’s language
was Venda, while the languages spoken outside were Zulu and Sisotho. All these
were tribal languages. Though the tribal school was meant for Shangaan speaking
children, the principal making an exception, gave admission to Johannes by
registering his name. The principal’s explanation on the importance of “the piece of
paper” (i.e., the birth certificate of a child) for school admission is noteworthy in this
context:
“The piece of paper you’re referring to Mrs. Mabaso (Granny’s maiden

name)” the principal said to Granny, “is as important to our children as
a pass is to us adults. We all hate passes; therefore, it is only natural we
should hate the regulations our children are subjected to. But as we
have to live with passes, so our children have to live with regulations,
Mrs. Mabaso. I hope you understand, that is the law of the country. We
would have admitted your grandson a long time ago, as you well know,
had it not been for the papers. I hope you understand.” (128)
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He advised them to bring the boy again to school after two weeks. On the way
back home, Johannes thought of many ways of escaping school. That evening his
mother and father quarreled about the issue of his admission in school. His father
hated it while his mother was for it. His father drove away his mother and the other
children out and locked the door. The neighbours took them to Granny’s place.
Johannes reached home and peeping through the window hurled insults at his father
who refused to open the door and ran to Granny’s place. His mother told him that his
father had not liked Johannes going to school because he thought it was a waste of
money and time. He had scant respect for the white man’s education. His mother
assured his father that she would work and meet the school expenses. He had beaten
her severely; Granny said that Jackson had the right to beat her for the bride price he
paid at the time of marriage. That money could not be paid back because Granny’s
husband when they were living together had spent it. This was the tribal culture. Until
and unless the lobola (or bride price) was paid back Jackson had full control over his
wife. Johannes’s mother vehemently opposed this kind of tribal culture though the
other tribal women in the neighbourhood blamed her for this. She further explained to
her son that his father had no education and therefore failed to understand its
importance. Although she herself wanted education, it was denied to her because of
the tribal culture. Her words in this context are noteworthy:
“Though our lot isn’t any better today, an education will get you a
decent job. If you can read or write you’ll be better off than those of us
who can’t. Take my situation: I can’t find a job because I don’t have
papers, and I can’t get papers because white people mainly want to
register people who can read and write. But I want things to be
different for you, child. For you and your brother and sisters. I want
you to go to school, because I believe that an education is the key you
need to open up a new world and a new life for yourself, a world and
life different from that of either your father’s or mine. It is the only key
that can do that, and only those who seek it earnestly and perseveringly
will get anywhere in the white man’s world. Education will open doors
where none seem to exist. It’ll make people talk to you, listen to you
and help you; people who otherwise wouldn’t bother. It will make you
soar, like a bird lifting up into the endless blue sky, and leave poverty,
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hunger and suffering behind. It’ll teach you to learn to embrace what’s
good and shun what’s bad and evil. Above all it’ll make you a
somebody in this world. It’ll make you grow up to be a good and proud
person. That’s why I want you to go to school, child, so that education
can do all that, and more, for you. (133-134).
With these enlightening words from his mother, Johannes decided that he would go to
school “forever”.
It may be noted that Johannes was very fortunate to have such a woman as his
mother. Her words were eye-openers not only to her son, but they are also a beacon
light for millions of illiterate mothers and their children world over. Thus this chapter
is a very crucial part in the narrative as it depicts a permanently positive change of
attitude in the central character, Johannes, under the collective influence of Narrative,
Semic and Cultural codes. In this sense, this chapter is a fitting beginning of Part II of
the novel called, “Passport to Knowledge”.
This chapter describes the experience of Johannes on his first day at school.
Johannes went to school at 6.00 A.M. accompanied by his mother and Granny,
they left him after advising him not to be afraid and to learn as much as he could. He
carried a slate tied to his neck, a pencil, and two thin slices of brown bread. The
morning assembly was held and the principal of Bovet Community School amidst the
din of crying and talking, gave a lengthy piece of advice and disciplinary instructions
to the children. Some children fainted due to the excessive stuffiness and suffocation.
Some other teachers also repeated the principal’s advice, and a hymn was sung and
prayer was said. All the new comers were taken into a big church hall. There were
nearly two hundred children. Johannes tried to occupy a place on a front bench for
which he had to fight and throw away other children physically. A young black
teacher of sixteen years tried to control them and to make them repeat the vowels
AEIOU, how to count the numbers from one to twenty in Tsonga and how to sit and
stand when ordered. At two-thirty, there was recess and all left the big room. On
return from school in the afternoon, Johannes’s mother told him that he had to keep
on going to school.
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In this chapter, the Narrative code projects the sequence of events while the
Semic code reveals the poor condition of the tribal Bovet Community School as well
as of the position of the principal and the remaining staff of teachers. The poor
physical accommodation is also described. The Cultural code manifests itself in
exposing the method of teaching and how the children were badly treated.
Chapter 23: Narrative, Cultural, Semic and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.139-150)
This is rather a lengthy chapter in which Johannes’s progress and troubles at

school are narrated. The boy developed a fear for school because he was almost
regularly punished for his lack of uniform, having long nails, uncombed hair, lack of
primers, failing dictation, failure to pay school fees on time. His name was included in
the ‘noisemaker’s list’ of the class made by the perfect (i.e., the monitor) of the class.
Every day he was late to school because he had to take his younger brother and sisters
to Granny’s place as his mother left home early in her hunt for a job. Added to this
there was mountains of homework. But four things made him stay in school, First, the
sixteen-year-old class teacher was dismissed and in her place, an older, able and kind
teacher came. Second, he began making friends with some rich boys in his class.
Third, a nutrition programme called Hebelungu was started near the school where
they gave low cost lunch to children, peanut-buttered brown bread and a mug of
skimmed milk only for four cents. His mother tried her best to give him this money
every day but when she could not do so, he would cling to his ‘affluent’ friends like a
parasite; which the latter didn’t mind. Fourth, he was attracted to the new world
opened up for him through education. Slowly he could speak some English and could
understand some stock phrases in the English movies.
In December the school came to an end and Johannes completed his first year
and on the closing day function, it was announced in the result that Johannes stood
first in his class, i.e., Sub-standard A. He was given applause and also a white sealed
envelope along with the toppers in other classes. The beginning of school Christmas
vacation was marked by collective singing of Lord’s Prayer and good wishes by the
principal and staff. Jackson, father of Johannes’s was so impressed by his son’s
performance at school that he gave him sixty cents which made him and his mother
very happy. Flora, his younger sister, now six years old also began school. Johannes
came to Standard One, but the school life turned out to a torture for him as he failed to
pay the school fee on time. Further, he had no books. He told his teachers that he
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would pay the fee by the end of the month. Unable to bear the punishment, he told his
mother that he would discontinue school. But his mother insisted that he stayed at
school. Luckily she got a job of a house-maid at the Indian place on First Avenue. She
told her children that she would sacrifice even her life for her children. Jackson
stopped giving money for groceries as his wife started working now. One day,
Johannes’s mother bought a box of ‘school books’ at a very cheap rate but those
books were in different languages like Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, German and Afrikaans
and therefore were not useful to Johannes or his sister because at the school they used
books written in the Tsonga language. His mother got this confirmed with help of a
neighbour, named Mr. Brown who had high-school education and who worked as a
bus driver. However, Mr. Brown took all those books and promised he would buy a
few primers for her children in turn.
This chapter is an example of how the four codes, namely Narrative, Cultural,
Semic and Hermeneutic codes function. If the Narrative code projects the progression
of events, the Cultural and Semic codes portray the school conditions and the
Hermeneutic code unfolds a new angle in the character of Jackson, the narrator’s
father, when he gives sixty cents to his son to buy school things.
Chapter 24: Narrative, Cultural, Hermeneutic and Semic Codes (pp.150-155)
In this chapter certain new dilemmas confronted by Johannes are narrated.

Though his mother was working hard to support his education, Johannes was
becoming more and more sceptic about the value of education. His scepticism became
further strong with his father’s comments against the white man’s education which he
compared to Christianity both of which ruined their native tribal culture and tribal
education. His father also said that some black degree-holders were working under
him. Consider the following excerpt that reveals Johannes’s scepticism:
But it came as no surprise, when hardly three years after I had begun
school, the novelty of learning began to fade. Despite my continued
success at school, I failed to find real meaning in what I was being
taught; more important, I failed to find, among the black people I lived
with, and with those accomplishments in life I was familiar, those
particular individuals whom I could indentify as having benefited from
an education, and whose accomplishments in life could act as
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landmarks to orient me and help me set goals in life. Where were the
lighthouses to guide my newly built ship of knowledge just setting sail
on a perilous journey upon a vast, turbulent and unknown ocean of
life? (151)
This part of the chapter combines Narrative, Cultural and Hermeneutic codes, the
important archetypes being white man’s education, and Christianity, tribal culture and
tribal education and Johannes’s dilemma and scepticism.
When Johannes was placed in this type of dilemma, one day he noticed that a
group of black men waving copies of newspapers, moved as if in a procession,
shouting “Ali ! Ali” on the street. Johannes did not know anything about this. On
enquiry he came to know that a black boxer in America, Muhammad Ali (alias
Cassius Clay) defeated a white boxer, named Max Schmeling. They were jubilant
about the great victory of a black man over a white man. Johannes also rejoiced over
this news and developed a secret desire that he too should become a great fighter like
Ali. With this dream he went the local boxing club along with a group of boys. There
by accident he was forced to fight a large hairless boy who completely crushed
Johannes in boxing. This humiliating defeat, in spite of the Jim owner’s
encouragement, made Johannes never to go that club again.
As pointed out already, this chapter is a manifestation of how Narrative,

Cultural, Hermeneutic and Semic codes combine to create the effect of realism.
Particularly the boxing fight between Johannes and the big hairless boy is an excellent
example of Semic code.
This chapter describes how the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
influenced Johannes. One morning in 1968, while going to school, he found the black
people in the neighbourhood with grief and rage in their eyes. Even at school teachers
whispered to one another in uneasy and subdued tones. Johannes did not know who
King was and why the black people were mourning his death. Several placards
displayed this news item in red letters. After going home he asked his mother about
King thinking that he was a king or chief. His mother, who also did not know much
about this black American, told him that “he was a God-fearing man who died
fighting to set his people free. To get them equal rights”(157). She also informed him
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of the fight of black people in Sharperville (South Africa) for their rights. Sixty nine
of these black fighters were shot dead by the police. This happened in the year when
Johannes was born. This information made Johannes to decide that he too would fight
for his rights. His mother was awe-struck.
This chapter again shows Johannes’s gradual transformation as a growing

adolescent. He first heard the name of America and the fight of black people for their
rights in America as well as in his own country, South Africa. Thus Cultural and
Hermeneutic codes are combined in this chapter.
Chapter 26: Narrative, Cultural and Semic Codes (pp.159-161)
This chapter describes the change in Johannes who decides to quit school
permanently and again his forceful attendance at school because of his mother’s
surveillance. Having been vexed with repeated punishment at school for not having
some books, Johannes made up his mind to discontinue school and also he was aware
of the rule of the school that a pupil would not be expelled until he was absent from
school for a month without any reason. So he would start at home as if he were going
to school, but abscond and spend time till evening with a group of truant boys from
other tribal schools. They used to go to King’s Bioscope and after seeing films, they
would imitate the fighting scenes of the films about the Wild West and gladiators. The
ghetto warehouses were the grounds where they practiced these mock fights. In the
evening Johannes would go home late. He would tell his mother, he was late because
of choir rehearsals. This continued for three weeks. In the beginning of the fourth
week, his mother followed him secretly. She also enquired at school whether he was
attending school. Coming to know what was happening, she reported it to the
principal who sent a group of boys headed by a big boy, Mandleve, a well-known
truant-hunter to fetch him to school, using force if necessary. Those boys came to the
junkyard and bound his hands and feet with a thick rope and dragged him to school.
His mother was also there in the principal’s office. He was beaten thoroughly by the
teachers one after another. The following paragraph the last one in this chapter good
example of Semic Code:
“Whip him good”, she impassively gave the order – which was not
necessary – and there and then I knew it was the end. She left the
office and stood outside. The teachers descended upon me like starved
vultures out of the sky. The commenced the savage beating, taking
turns whenever one teacher’s hand got tired. I fainted. They revived
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me, only to whip me some more. I spent an entire week bedridden,
unable to sit up or sleep. For the rest of my primary school years I
seldom, if ever, cut school for any reason. Even when I was gravely ill,
I would crawl to school, and the teachers would send me back home.
(161)
This chapter narrates the ghastly incident of the murder of a black man by a
group of tsotsis (notorious gangsters)
Johannes’s tenth birthday passed without any celebration as in the case of his
previous birthdays. Though he was ten, the suffering he had passed through life made
him much older. There was no change in the life of Alexandra. The suffering of the
black residents in this ghetho worsened due to constant police raids, dying of children
of malnutrition. The dirt of the place increased, families were deported to tribal
reserves, hostels were built in the place of demolished shacks, waves of immigrants
increased, people’s belief in witchcraft got enhanced, drinking and gambling were
waxing. His parents continued quarrelling while his father would often beat up
Johannes’s mother. In the words of the narrator:
In short, the suffering of the black people continued on the increase,

and I continued getting the feeling that we, blacks of Alexandra, were
like animals, quarantined inside a cage – by the white man – fomenting
ignorance and death – and that there was nothing we could do about it
but await, each, our violent end. (162)
One late Friday evening while returning home after playing soccer at the
stadium on Twelfth Avenue, he saw people returning home from work places
hurrying home or to drink at shebeens and when he took a turn to Thirteenth Avenue
he notice six tsotsis chasing two men. Remembering his mother’s advice on what he
should do on seeing tsotsis, he fled into a nearby yard and ran into the patch of tall
dried grass in front of the gate, to hide for safety. The six gangsters were carrying
deadly sharp knives, meat cleavers and tomahawks. The two black men were carrying
heavy paper bags. One of them ran towards the tall grass, and the gangsters chased
him while the other man escaped. The gangsters very cruelly wounded him not caring
for his begging not to kill him and that he had ten children. With the fatal wounds, he
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ran to the street, but the gangsters killed him ruthlessly and stole whatever he had
including his clothes and money. Johannes clearly saw the suffering of the victim and
the diabolic cruelty and enjoyment of the gangsters under the full moon light.
Johannes was almost fainting with panic and somehow he ran home in a great frenzie
and fainted. His mother tried to restore him to his senses, but he was completely
unable to say anything intelligibly. He had high fever. With great difficulty, he was
able to tell his mother about the grisly murder. His mother was worried and asked him
why he was wasting his time in playing soccer without reading his school books or
writing anything. He told her neither he, nor his friends in the neighbourhood had any
books at all. He started suffering from nightmares and lost all interest and hope in life.
He asked himself:
Why in the place of love and compassion, were there implacable hate
and anger and jealousy? I could not see myself living the rest of my
life under such conditions – to me life meant love, understanding,
compassion. Yet, I asked myself, “What other world was there to run
to?”(166)
There were no answers to his questions. He felt utterly alone.
This chapter describes an event that had an everlasting impression on

Johannes when he was ten years old. The entire scenic description of the ghastly
murder is covered by the Semic code while the murder and the ensuing suffering are
manifest in the Cultural code. The protagonists question’s and doubts reveal the
Hermeneutic code that creates suspense as to his future.
Chapter 28: Semic, Cultural and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.167-170)
In this chapter, Johannes’s suicide attempt is described.
The ghastly murder, that Johannes witnessed closely when he was about ten
years old; left an indelible impression of suffering and helplessness on his young
mind. A few months after this incident, he developed a feeling of loneliness and
misery that he found no meaning in life and its continuation. All the encouragement
and moral and physical support given to him by his mother lost their impact. He was
tired of hunger, of being beaten all the time and felt that the whole world was against
him. All his fighting spirit and optimism abandoned him. To quote the protagonist:
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I felt unloved, unwanted, abandoned and betrayed by a world that
seemingly denied any opportunity to find my niche. A world that
seemed to hold out nothing to me but hunger, pain violence and death.
I didn’t feel that the world or anybody owed me anything, but I felt
that the world and everybody had to at least give me an opportunity to
prove my worth, to make something of myself, whatever that
something might be. (167)
In this state of mind, he took a switchblade knife and stood twirling it between
his trembling hands oblivious of the world outside. As to the way of dying, his
familiarity with English movies influenced him to decide to die like a vanquished
gladiator, “to die with honour”. As he stood absorbed in his thoughts on the stoop, his
mother noticed him, came to him and enquired what he was doing with a knife… He
said in utter confusion:
“Mama, what would happen if I were to die? Would anybody miss me?
Would anybody care? Will it matter to anyone?” (168)
His mother seemed shocked, but after a while she regained her cool and
pointed at his two younger sisters, Merriam and Dinah playing in the mud nearby, and
said that his small sisters will miss him very much as he was their big brother who
would help, protect them and help them to go to school when they grew up. She,
herself, would also miss him and she would also die if he died. When Johannes started
weeping, his mother stopped him saying that he was now a big boy and should not
cry. She took the knife from him and made him promise that he would never attempt
suicide anytime in future. Johannes learnt a lesson of life as follows:
For years afterward, I was to think of this suicide attempt in the

following terms: whenever the troubles of the world seem too much, it
helps to have someone loving and understanding to share those
troubles with; and life takes its true meaning in proportion to one’s
battles against suffering. (169-170)
In this chapter the Semic code depicts the psychological deterioration and
pessimism of the protagonist. The chapter also manifests the role of the Cultural code
at a personal level how love and concern of a dear person (here Johannes’s mother)
can save a desperate person from suicidal feelings. The Hermeneutic code, in this
chapter, introduces the dilemmas of the protagonist and resolves them finally.
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Chapter 29: Semic, Cultural and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.170-181)
This chapter narrates the circumstances that led Jackson’s family to launch a
new (business) activity, called ‘stockvel’ which was an indirect way of selling beer.
The first incident described in this chapter is related to Johannes’s good luck
to get access to English comic books, English school books and toys, brought by his
Granny from an English family (of Smiths) where she worked as a gardener and his
humiliating experience at school and the subsequent regaining of his self-confidence
and self-respect. The second incident is related to his father’s entry into beer-selling
business under the guise of stockvel. Thus, the Semic, Cultural and Hermeneutic
codes operate in this chapter.
Johannes’s Granny suddenly lost her job but luckily when she was struggling
to meet her family expenses and the school fee etc., for her children Uncle Piet and
Aunt Bush, she found another gardening job in Rosebank, a posh locality of whites,
with the help of a friend. Returning home after gardening work at Smiths she used to
bring stacks of comic books for Johannes which he started reading them tirelessly
over and over again. These comic books included such as Batman and Robin, Richie
Rich, Dennis the Menace, Tarzan of the Apes, Superman, Sherlock Holmes Mysteries,
Spiderman and others. The neighbouring children became his friends and even he
charged a rent of a penny to lend them each book. One year passed in this way. One
day Granny told him that the Smiths are very kind-hearted whites and Mrs. Smith
gave these books for Granny’s grandson, Johannes, who was a smart school student.
Johannes was surprised because in his world there were no good whites, all whites
were selfish, cruel and inhuman. But Granny told him that the Smiths were different
as they were nice white people though there were not many like them. Gradually she
also brought other strange books like Pinocchio, Aesop’s Fables and Grimm brothers’
fairy tales for Johannes. She also brought a box of toys which Johannes learnt to play
with his brother George and sisters. This was totally a new experience that transported
him into a world of new reality. He started telling his brother, sisters and other
children the stories from these books; like his mother who used to tell them African
folk tales. His skill at telling stories became popular in school also such that one day
his class teacher told him to recite a story before the class. He narrated the story of
Hansel and Goetel. The teacher inquired where he had learnt these stories. Then
Johannes said that he learnt them from the books brought by his grandmother from the
house of nice white people. The teacher and the entire class laughed at this because in
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their view all white people were evilsome and wicked. He had to tell them that it was
true and his grandma worked as a gardener, while announcing this he felt ashamed
and started crying. Three students laughed. Then the teacher became angry and gave
them punishment. He said that his own grandmother also had worked as a gardener in
white people’s gardens and educated him. The teacher congratulated Johannes. This
made Johannes regain his self-confidence and self-respect and since then he had never
felt ashamed to tell others that his grandmother was a gardener in a white people’s
house.
In the slum of Alexandra there were about a dozen shebeens i.e., drinking
parlours. In spite of the threat of sudden raids by the Peri-urban Police because
shebeens were illegal, these drinking places thrived as the only pleasure places for the
black workers. These shebeens were centers of bootlegging and sold brandy, whisky
and cartoons (a fermented sorghum beer). One Friday evening Johannes’s father, at
dinner, proposed to his mother that they would start a little beer business as both of
them had been working and could invest some money in business. Joining a stockvel
was not illegal for which they needed a license. In the narrator’s words:
Stockvel was in vogue throughout the township carried out under the
guise of a party, it worked in the following way: a group of households
would get together and form a sort of club; under the terms of the club,
each weekend a different member would host a party, which all other
members are obligated by prior agreement to “support”. (174)
In this way, a fee called “stockvel money” was paid to the host who, in turn,
provided the members with free liquor, dishes of chicken, rice and vegetables.
Stockvels had such a spirit of community to them, that they were

always well attended. It was not uncommon for a stockvel host to
double, even triple his investment. (175)
Those who ran stockvels became rich and bought items like bathtubs,
wardrobes, new furniture, food, gramophones and even cars. Johannes’s mother did
not agree to her husband’s proposal and insisted that her income was exclusively for
their children’s education. There was a prolonged debate between wife and husband
on this issue. Jackson promised that he would stop gambling, drinking at shebeens
and bring her / his full paycheck every Friday night. Still she didn’t agree. Her
husband became angry and said that he was bewitched so much by her that he was
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tolerating her to oppose him. Johanes’s mother’s reply in this context is worth-
quoting:
Laughing, my mother said, “There is no witchcraft or madness about it.

I don’t think I’m being less of a wife by insisting on the best for our
children. What future will they have without an education, tell me?
Just look around you and you’ll see what kind of jobs those who never
went to school have. Garbage collectors, miners, maids, night soil
collectors. Do you want our children to do the same? I don’t. And
when these children are through with school, and working and bringing
in good money, and we’re no longer living in this leaking shack, eating
crumbs and leftovers, would you still be saying, ‘I don’t believe in
schools?’ Not if I know you well. And after thirteen years of being
your slave, I know you, Jackson. You’ll be boasting to the whole world
that had it not been for you, the children wouldn’t have become what
they are.” (178)
This was true because his father often boasted about his being father of
Johannes when people praised his son’s good performance at school. Then Jackson
pledged that part of the liquor profits from running a stockvel would be used for the
children’s schooling. Saying this he pulled out a small envelope containing his wages
for the week. Johannes counted the money – all of it was there to the tune of ten rands
and forty cents. Johannes also requested his mother to agree to his father’s proposal.
Finally, she agreed to start stockvel business. With their entry into beer-selling (i.e.,
stockvel) business, the family flourished. With his skills at arithmetic, Johannes
maintained the accounts in a notebook. Their customers trusted him fully as he never
overcharged or cheated them. He also helped illiterate migrant workers who
frequented the stockvel, by reading and writing letters to their families who were in
tribal reserves. Sometimes he also felt sorry for the fate of their families. The workers,
in turn, paid him some money which he used to buy his school things. The condition
of these workers’ families in the tribal reserves was very much piteous. One day,
while reading a letter from home for a migrant worker named Phineas, Johannes
started crying. Phineas also was sorrowful, but he was hopeful of a better future. The
narrator’s words in this context deserve mention:
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Phineas was one of the thousands of black migrant workers in
Alexandra forced to live hundreds of miles from their families because
of Influx Control laws, which discouraged black family life in what the
government called “White South Africa”. In the township, no other
group lived as unnaturally as the migrant workers. Housed mostly in
sterile single-sex barracks, they were prey to prostitution, Matanyula,
alcoholism, robbery and senseless violence; they existed under such
stress and absorbed so much emotional pain that tears, grief, fear, hope
and sadness had become alien to most of them. They were the walking
dead. (181)
These workers suffered a death far worse than physical death which was the
death of the mind and soul, caused by night and day toil living miles away from their
loved ones.
As mentioned above, the Semic code takes care of the living physical
conditions of Johannes’s family while the Cultural code reveals human relationships,
particularly that between a black wife and her husband, and the Hermeneutic code
resolves the puzzle of starting the beer-business in the guise of ‘stockvel’ by
Johannes’s family.
Chapter 30: Semic, Cultural and Symbolic Codes (pp.182-193)
This chapter narrates Johannes’s visit to the place of Smith’s along with his
grandmother. Johannes’s Granny shifted her residence from Fifteenth Avenue to a
smaller shack on Eighth Avenue, for economical reasons. He often spent evenings
with her and being proud of his school work she also helped him buy some school
books whenever his mother could not help him. He used to read the school books of
Uncle Piet and Aunt Bush which were of a higher standard. As school education was
becoming more expensive, Granny thought that Aunt Bushy would have to
discontinue school and only Uncle Piet would continue his education. One day
Granny returned home very excited. She told Mujaji (i.e., Johannes’s mother) that Mr.
Smith had agreed to her request to take Johannes to their place, on Mrs. Smith’s
recommendation. So, the following Tuesday she wanted to take him to Smith’s. He
was not ready because he had school on Tuesday. He lied that he had exams on that
day. But the real reason was that he was afraid of meeting any white people.
Somehow on continued persuasion by Granny and his mother, Johannes finally agreed
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to go along with Granny to Smiths’ place. His mother also informed him that the only
son of Smith’s was about his age and he may get lots of magabulela (hand-me-downs)
from that white boy. So she said that now he had a good opportunity which he should
not miss. On Monday evening his mother met the principal of Johannes’s school and
obtained permission for his absence from school on Tuesday. She had given him a
thorough bath and cleaned him. On Tuesday Granny and Johannes took the seven o’
clock bus for blacks to Johannesburg which was jam-packed. On the way he noticed
several skyscrapers and was excited to know that in some of the big and nice houses
only one family lived in each. There were many cars in the compounds of these
houses which had large lawns and gardens. They were the houses of the whites in the
city. The bus suddenly stopped to facilitate school children’s crossing the road safely.
Johannes watched the white school children and was greatly astonished at their clean
and shining school uniforms, stockings and shoes. They were also carrying their
school bags on their backs and all of them had wrist-watches. All the black families at
Alexandra did not have even a clock. The school of the white children was a red-brick
building with nice lawns, playgrounds, tennis courts etc. He was immensely surprised
to note the contrast between this school and his own Bantu School at Alexandra. He
felt as if he were in a dream world. After some time, Granny and Johannes got off the
bus and reached the place of the Smiths in a side street. They went to the back of the
yard and rang the door bell. Mrs. Smith opened the door and stopped, their barking
dog, Buster. Mrs. Smith was “a short, slender white woman with silver hair and
slightly drooping shoulders” (187-188). She expressed happiness on seeing Johannes.
Her warm and kind reception reminded Johannes’s of the Catholic sisters at the clinic.
She called him “a smart pickaninny”. Granny informed her that he was one year
junior to their son, Master Clyde. Mrs. Smith expressed her regret over Clyde’s
becoming spoiled being their only child. She wondered at the large size of Johannes’s
family, one brother and three sisters. Using his pidgin English, Johannes told her his
name, surname, his grade in school and about his principal and teachers. She
appreciated his cleverness. She was preparing to go for tennis and before leaving, she
told what garden work Granny had to attend to. After a good breakfast, Johannes and
Granny went to the garden with tools. He helped her in her work. The neighbouring
white children watched them curiously as if they saw a black boy for the first time in
their lives. Even at midday Granny worked hard. Johannes assured her that one day he
will build a beautiful house with a large garden like the Smith’s house. Mrs. Smith
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returned in the afternoon. Johannes helped her by carrying her several shopping bags.
Carrying her tennis rackets, she remarked that tennis is a tiresome game and on being
questioned by Johannes, she told him that tennis was a gentleman’s sport unlike
soccer which he played and advised him to try tennis instead of soccer because soccer
was a dangerous and rough sport. He said that there were four unused tennis courts
near the stadium where he played soccer at Alexandra. She promised him to give him
an old racket. Then came their son Clyde who reached home by a school bus. Mrs.
Smith introduced Johannes to Clyde but the latter was unfriendly and called him a
Kaffir. His mother checked him and told him to learn good manners and to ignore
what was taught to him at school by Boers from Pretoria. Then Granny said:
“All children, black and white, are God’s children, Madam. The
preacher at my church tells us the Bible says so. ‘Suffer little children
come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of
heaven’, the Bible says. Is that not so, madam? Do you believe in the
words of the Bible, madam?” (190)
Mrs. Smith readily agreed and told Clyde to take Johannes and show around.
They went to Clyde’s room where he had a large number of toys, bicycles, go-carts,
pinball machines and many other things. His playroom was as big as their house at
Alexandra. There were several photographs of Clyde himself and posters and pictures
of white soccer and cricket teams. Clyde asked him whether he could read and gave a
book (a Shakespearean work) and told him to read, but Johannes could not. Then
Clyde started talking derisively about black people and their low level of intelligence.
At this juncture, Mrs. Smith entered and again checked her son. She told Clyde to
show easy books to Johannes. He showed such books as The Three Musketeers,
Treasure Island, David Copperfield and several others. While leaving, Mrs. Smith
expressed her concern over her son’s bad behaviour and gave Johannes a box
containing a couple of shirts, pants and jerseys and also a copy of Treasure Island
underneath the clothes.
This chapter marks a very important turning point in the protagonist’s life. Its
Semic code accounts for his Granny’s shift of residence, her attempt to take Johannes
to the place of the Smiths, his mother’s persuasion etc. followed by the description of
the houses of white people in Johannesburg. The Cultural code takes care of the kind
of luxurious life that the whites enjoy in the city in contrast to the wretched life of the
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blacks at the slum, Alexandra, while the Symbolic code exposes how the white
children like Master Clyde were indoctrinated against the blacks.
Chapter 31: Cultural and Symbolic Codes (pp.193-197)
In this chapter, Johannes’s attempts at improving his English are described

followed by the circumstances that prompted him to keep himself away from the
gangs of Alexandra known as Tomahawks.
Johannes decided to improve his efficiency in the English language having

been inspired by such books as Treasure Island, which Granny brought from the
Smiths. He did not like the kind of Bantu Education introduced in South African
schools by Prime Minister, Dr. Verwoprd, which did not encourage Western or
English education. To improve his vocabulary in English, he constantly borrowed Mr.
Brown’s pocket size dictionary and also tried to improve his pronunciation which was
appalling. Gradually, he realized the richness of the English language and began
imitating white peoples’ talk. The more he failed the stronger did his determination
grow. Of late, a relative from his father’s side, uncle Pietrus moved into their locality.
A bachelor with some education, he would read the World and the black edition of the
Star every day. In the evening Johannes would go to his shack to borrow the two
papers. They would discuss a number of news items in these two papers and on
Mondays and Fridays; they would fill cross-word puzzles for winning cash prizes,
though they never succeeded in this respect. At school there was little opportunity for
him to use English except in the English period, as the medium of instruction was
Tsonga. He occupied himself busily with reading and improving his English.
Johannes completely severed his association with the Thirteenth Avenue Tomahawks.
A sixteen -year-old delinquent, notorious for stabbing a rival to death, approached
Johannes and questioned him why he was not participating in their wars against rival
gangs. Johannes told him that he was busy with studies and would join the next fight
on Saturday. Their weapons included tomohawks, machets, bottles, rocks, daggers,
slingshots and crowbars. In the war on the ensuring Saturday between the
Tomohawks and the Mongols, a thirteen-year-old boy was seriously wounded in his
right eye. Blood spurted out from his eye and no help whatever was coming forth.
This incident made the narrator-protagonist to decide never to participate in gang wars
for life. His mother and father also warned him and supported decision. His father
even went to the extent of shifting him to a village school back in the home lands.
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In this chapter the Cultural and Symbolic codes operate. The Cultural code
depicts the uncivilized and violent ways of life of the young boys in the shanty town
while the protagonist stands out in contrast with his ambition and efforts to improve
his English. This contrast naturally leads to the Symbolic code indicating the rivalry
between the local gangsters and Johannes as well as a difference of opinion between
his parents about the future of his education.
Chapter 32: Narrative, Cultural, Semic and Symbolic Code (pp.197-204)

In this chapter, the success of Johannes at school, his humiliating experience
in Pretoria, his Granny’s warning, and his experience at the Johannesburg Zoo which
was triumphant, is narrated.
Johannes with his hard-work was promoted to Standard Four with the highest
marks in the class. His teachers forecast bright future for him as a teacher or doctor.
Nonetheless, the tribal indoctrination, the main focus of the curriculum bored him
while he enjoyed the Tsonga translations of Greek and Roman mythologies because
they resembled African folklore and appealed to his imagination.
On Saturday his Granny took him to her gardening work in Pretoria, the
capital of Apartheid. In the afternoon they returned to the bus stop and waited for the
bus to Alexandra. Telling him to wait on the pavement, Granny went to the other side
of the street to get some change because the black drivers would not allow them to
travel unless they gave the proper change. Johannes, who started reading a book for
some time, suddenly observed that a bus approached and stopped. Not knowing that it
was a “white” bus (i.e., meant only for white people), he stepped on to the footboard
which caused great fury not only to the bus driver but also to the passengers inside.
The driver abused him in the filthiest language. In the meanwhile his Granny ran to
his rescue and begged the driver and other passengers to excuse them. After the bus
had left, Granny scolded him for committing such an offence which would have sent
them to jail. Her words in this context are noteworthy:
“There’s something you ought to know about how things are in this
country, something your Mama I see has not told you yet. Black and
white people live apart––very much apart––that, you already know.
What you may not know is that they’ve always been apart, and will
always be apart. That’s what apartheid means. White people wanted
that way and they’ve created all sorts of laws and have the guns to
keep it that way.” (200-201)
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She further explained:
“We live in our world… and white people live in their world. We’re
their servants, they’re our masters. Our people fought hard to change
things, but each time the white man always won. He has all the guns.
May be another generation of black people will come which will defeat
the white man, despite his many guns. But for now, he says how things
should be, and we have to obey.” (201)
She also showed him how public telephone boxes were separate for blacks and
whites. Thus Johannes, at a very young age became aware of the cruel nature of
apartheid. He tells the reader as follows:
Because the guards of segregation were everywhere in the white

world, and I saw black people who unwittingly disobeyed them cursed,
beaten or thrown in jail, I became increasingly self-conscious with
each step I took. (202)
When the narrator came to Standard Six, their headmaster took the students on a trip
to the Johannesburg Zoo. Johannes could afford the expenses for the trip with the
money which he earned and saved by selling newspapers after school. It was Tuesday
when the Zoo was open for the students but with two different entrances, one for
Whites only and another Non-whites only. But once inside, the whites and the blacks
walked along the same path to see the same animals. When they were watching a
baboon-cage a white boy made fun of the black students and the other white children
joined him calling the black boys by names. One white boy called Johannes and
cursed Johannes calling him “Bloody Kaffir” and Johannes kicked him in the shin and
abused him in Tsonga. The white boy felt helpless. At that juncture, the headmaster
came and took away his black students for lunch. Johannes felt triumphant.
In this chapter, four Semiotic codes viz., Narrative, Cultural, Semic and
Symbolic codes operate in conjunction. The Narrative code takes care of the
progression of the story while the Cultural code depicts how atrocious apartheid was
whereas the Semic code throws light on the characters of the protagonist, his Granny,
the white bus driver and the white passengers. Finally the Symbolic code covers the
confrontation between the black boys and white boys at the Johannesburg Zoo.
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Chapter 33: Narrative, Cultural, Semic and Symbolic Codes (pp.204-208)
In this chapter, three important events are described : First Johannes’s family’s
financial deterioration, his mother’s delivery of a girl-child, his father’s attempt to
borrow money from Johannes and finally the protagonist’s realization of how
tribalism has ruined his father’s life and those of his generation.
There were repeated police raids on the beer business run by his father and his
mother in the guise of stockvel, and consequently they had to close it. His father fell
back into his past life of drinking and gambling and squandered his wages. This
increased the burden of running the family on Johannes’s mother. Johannes helped
her mother by spending his meager wages on his siblings’ school costs. Aunt Bushy
left school, started working in a garment factory and became pregnant. Uncle Piet
who was only sixteen also left school and started working in order to help Granny.
His mother and Granny bribed black policemen with their hard-earned savings and
obtained passes for both Aunt Bushy and Uncle Piet. Johannes’s mother became
pregnant again and gave birth to a girl-child later named as Linah. She had to beg for
money to buy diapers, baby food and medicines.
On a Monday, early in the morning Jackson, his father, woke him up and
asked him to lend thirty cents for bus fare to go to his work place. Johannes refused to
do so, stating that it was his own money which he would spend on baby food and
books. His father, who felt disobeyed and insulted by his son, became furious and
ordered the latter to leave his house. Johannes went to his Granny’s house, stayed
there for one week and returned. He understood the situation of his father but did not
compromise with his father’s values of tribalism. The narrator’s observations in this
connection are noteworthy. He says about his father and his tribalism as follows:
The thick veil of tribalism which so covered his eyes and mind and
heart was absolutely of no use to me, for I believed beyond a shadow
of doubt that black life would never revert to the past, that the clock
would never turn back to a time centuries ago when black people had
lived in peace and contentment before the coming of the white man.
(207)
He further states:
Tribal ways and ignorance so ruled supreme over my father’s life, and
over many of his generation, that for as long as I was to know him, he
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was like some spectre wallowing in a bottomless hole of unreality,
groping in it, trying with great futility, to surface from it ––to
materialize into reality.(208)
In this chapter, the Narrative code depicts the progression of events while the
Cultural code shows how the poor black families were suffering in the shanty towns
of Johannesburg as illustrated by the protagonist’s family. The Semic code throws
further light on his and his mother’s characters. Finally the Symbolic code describes
the conflict between modernism and tribalism, the former illustrated by the lives of
Johannes and his mother, while the latter by the life of Jackson, his father, and the
men of his generation.
This is the last chapter of Part Two of the novel, called “Passport to
Knowledge”. In this chapter a very important turning-point in Johannes’s life is
narrated. It is his new interest in the game of tennis in the place of soccer. The second
important event is his mother’s exhortation that he had to continue his education and
become an “educated person” in the real sense of the term. The third event is his new
information about the achievements in tennis by Arthur Ashe, a black-American
tennis star. The last important event in this chapter is that Scaramouche, a “coloured”
man accepts to become his tennis coach.
Mrs. Smith once gave Johannes an old wood tennis racket as a gift for his
splendid job of cleaning her silver and brassware and for polishing her shoes. She also
wished that he would become “as our next Arthur Ashe” (208). This inspired him and
he wanted to practice the game of tennis. He was fourteen years old. He left his job at
the butchery and did extra work in the houses and gardens of Smiths’ neighbours to
help his mother. In these days he also read an old copy of Alan Paton’s Cry, the
Beloved country. One day having been moved by the burden of his mother’s work and
her wearing out, he told her that he would stop his education after finishing Standard
Six. But his mother vehemently opposed his decision saying that she wouldn’t mind
even working harder to educate him till he became a teacher or a doctor. She
convinced him with her argument and he dropped the idea of stopping with Standard
Six. In the mean time, his interest in tennis also became so stronger that he started
practicing tennis at the stadium, alone hitting the ball against the wall. Then a big
“coloured man” (a man of mixed black and white blood) took interest in him. His
140
name was Scaramouche and he was an expert tennis player in his circles. He
expressed his willingness to be Johannes’s coach and teach him the game.
This chapter is a ground for the play of Narrative, Cultural, Semic and
Hermeneutic codes, from a semiotic point of view. As usual, the Narrative code
accounts for the progression of the events of the story whereas the Cultural code
illuminates the condition of the protagonists’ family, particularly the hard work of his
mother and his temporary decision to discontinue his education after Standard Six.
The Semic code throws light on the characters of Mrs. Smith, Johannes, his mother
and Scaramouche, A new dimension of the Cultural code in this chapter is its
information on the coloured people in Johannesburg. As the narrator says:
The man’s name was Scaramouche. He resented being called

“Coloured”, but according to apartheid, that was his official
designation as one of over two million people of mixed race that were
more than a blemish to the white man’s theory of racial purity.
According to the government, Coloureds were neither black nor white,
even though some of them were as black as the blackest black man, or
as white as the whitest white man. Coloureds were allowed to live with
blacks, though special areas had been set aside for them under the
Group Areas Act. (211)
4.1.2.3 PART III: PASSPORT TO FREEDOM (pp.213-350) (20 CHAPTERS)
This is the last part of the novel, consisting of twenty chapters and running
into about one hundred thirty six pages. This part describes how Johannes, the
protagonist attains success both in studies and in the game of tennis and finally
obtains admission in a college in South Carolina USA for higher education. Thus the
Kaffir Boy’s story ends on an optimistic note.
Chapter 35: Narrative, Cultural, Symbolic and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.215-216)
This chapter is the shortest one in the entire novel running into one -and-a-half
pages. It describes the state of tennis in South Africa. Scaramouche became not only
the tennis coach for Johannes but also his close friend and surrogate father. As a
coach he was both encouraging and strict. From him Johannes learnt the situation of
tennis in South Africa. There were two organizations of tennis in the country, one for
the whites called South African Lawn Tennis Union (S.A.L.T.U) and another for the
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blacks called South African National Lawn Tennis Union (S.A.N.L.T.U). The former
had all facilities and funds while the latter suffered from lack of facilities and
struggled for funds. As Scaramouche said, if the black tennis organization had
adequate facilities and funds, they would have produced several Arthur Ashes, Althea
Gibsons and Evonne Goolagongs who were black American tennis stars. Johannes
also gathered a lot of information about the game of tennis and famous tennis players
from his regular reading of tennis instruction manuals and magazines. But his mother
warned him not to neglect his studies by devoting more time to tennis whereas his
father made fun of the game as ‘Lady’s game’. He assured his mother that he would
not neglect his studies and did not take his father’s ridicules seriously.
In this chapter, the Narrative code takes care of the progression of the story
while the Cultural code provides information about South African tennis. The
Symbolic code depicts the contrasting positions of the white and the black tennis
associations in the country whereas the Hermeneutic code creates a sort of suspense
about the success of Johannes in tennis, in future.
Johannes admits that his mother’s influence on him was very strong and he
joined her in confronting his father’s tyranny and felt grateful for her hard work and
whole-hearted encouragement to his education. However, he did not like her opinions
about or association with the religion, especially Christianity, the white man’s religion
thrust upon the blacks in South Africa. Not only this, further there were several black
preachers and churches with ridiculous denomination like “The Donkey Church”,
“The Seven Wives Church”, and “The Hundred Rand Net Worth Church” ! His
opinion on Christian religion was founded on facts and reality. Consider his
observations given below.
I frowned upon organized religion for the simple reason that

about me I saw it being misused: by the government in claiming that
God had given whites the divine right to rule over blacks, that our
subservience was the most natural and heavenly condition to be in, by
some black churches to strip ignorant black peasants of their last
possessions in the name of payment for the salvation of their souls, and
by the same churches to turn able-bodied men and women into flocks
of sheep, making them relinquish responsibility for their lives in the
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hope that faith in Christ would miraculously make everything turn
right.
Worst of all, I found among members of some churches a

readiness to accept their lot as God’s will, a willingness to disparage
their own blackness and heritage as inferior to the white man’s
Christianity, a readiness to give up fighting to make things just in this
world, in the hope that God’s justice would prevail in the hereafter,
that the hungry and the oppressed and the enslaved of this world feast
on cornucopias while singing freedom songs and hosannas in a heaven
without prejudice. In short, organized religion made blacks blind to, or
avoid or seek to escape from reality. (216-217)
Therefore, he says: “I instinctively knew that organized religion would hinder

rather than help me, would torpedo my best-laid plans”(217). Nonetheless, he was
aware how his mother was able to see reality through organized religion and to
cultivate virtues like patience, resiliency, fortitude, hope and optimism. His mother
tried to convince him about the positive blessings of the Christian God in achieving
his goals in life. Johannes used to read passages from the Bible for his mother every
day after his studies, because she could not read. He did this not only to show her his
gratitude but also for the beauty and richness of its language, its earthly wisdom in
many of its passages. But he was not an atheist because he believed in a cosmic force
or luck that is more powerful than man in the universe.
There was a neighbour called Limela among the migrant workers for whom
Johannes read and wrote letters. He hated Christianity and continued to tell people to
denounce Christianity which made blacks slaves to the white man. His crusade
against Christianity reminded people of the popular African expression:
“When white people came, we had the land and the Bible, now we
have the Bible and they have our land” (218)
His family was in a village in the tribal reserve and their cattle and land was
confisticated by the local authorities against dues of rent. His family was subjected to
great suffering and poverty. One day, when Johannes was reading a letter from his
village describing his family’s helplessness, two evangelists, a black man and black
woman, entered Limela’s shack ignoring his protest, sat on a brick bench and tried to
143
give him some pamphlets. Limela very much resented their presence and talk. A
debate about the colour of God ensued in their arguments. Limela argued that there
was no difference between Christianity and witchcraft. Johannes enjoyed the situation
and he also supported Limela’s point of view and criticized them strongly. Finally the
two evangelists left, but they had left the pamphlets in Limela’s shack. Both Limela
and Johannes came out and made a fire outside in the cold night and burnt the
pamphlets in the fire.
In this chapter Narrative, Cultural, Semic and Symbolic codes operate

together. If the Narrative code accounts for the progression of events, the Cultural
code clearly displays how Christianity made blacks sapless and cowardly to accept
their submission to the white men as God’s decree. Next the Semic code throws light
on the characters of the narrator, his parents and Limela, a neighbour. Finally the
Symbolic code displays how wise and rationalistic black people hated Christianity.
However, one observation should be made here, Johannes’s contempt for Christianity
as well as his tribal gods and the so-called protective ancestral spirits and evil spirits
is contradicted later and he is left in confusion as some episodes prove in the coming
chapters (See Chapter 37 and Chapter 40).
This chapter narrates Johannes’s father’s futile attempts at his circumcision,

Johannes’s accomplishment in studies, by standing first in the final examinations of
the primary school, his winning of a government scholarship, his joining the
Alexandra Secondary School, his mother’s happiness, his further improvement of
tennis at the tennis ranch, his acquaintance with a German, Wilfred, through another
black boy Tom who played tennis at the ranch etc.
One winter evening Johannes’s father came home with two pitch-black men
who were to take Johannes to a mountain school for his circumcision. In the author’s
words:
Under Venda tribal law, every boy, before being admitted into male
hood, had to attend a “mountain school”, usually situated in wooded,
mountainous areas remote from the villages. During attendance at the
school, the proselytes are put through various rituals by a group of
circumcised men, including the main ceremony where the boys’
penises are cut by razors without anesthesia. (222)
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Johannes refused to go and resisted their attempt to take him by force,
threatening them to kill. This so-called exam of circumcision would last for three
months which meant his absence at school for three months. Johannes said he
preferred to go to a clinic if it was unavoidable. His mother also supported him. The
two men left saying that they would come again, telling Johannes’s father to talk to
his son in the mean time. His father also left with them. Johannes packed his things,
went to his Granny’s place where he stayed for two weeks before he returned home.
He felt ill and suspected his father was trying to poison him. He was not able to go to
a clinic for want of money. Both father and son stopped talking to each other. This
also created mental stress for Johannes. In spite of all these disadvantages, and with
the great inspiration and hope given by his mother, he appeared for the final exams of
Standard Six and came out with flying colours by passing the exam with a First class.
The results appeared in the newspaper, the World. His class teacher, at the instance of
the principal, congratulated him and announced:
“Johannes, I’m proud of you to inform you that you’ve been awarded,
based on your academic record, a government scholarship to pay for
your schooling for each of the three years of secondary school.” (224)
His mother who according to him, “was the eternal optimist”(223), became
very happy, thanked God and told him that this was strong proof that God exists. She
hoped that her son would continue further higher studies and would become the first
doctor in their family. He joined Alexandra Secondary School which was better for
him not only because the medium of instruction was English, but also English was a
subject for study unlike in the other schools in the tribal reserves. Though this school
in Alexandra was overcrowded, it had a few other facilities and most importantly, it
had a tennis team. The general dropout in the primary school was 98%, but this
secondary school was much better in that respect. As his scholarship was sufficient
only for books and fees, he had to earn money for his uniform and other expenses by
doing a part-time job for the Smiths. His Aunt Bushy and Uncle Piet also would help
him often. Uncle Piet appreciated him very much. Aunt Bushy used to give him
regularly his lunch money and money for school trips while his Granny was
overjoyed with his accomplishment. She also joked that he was her young husband
and lover. Johannes also practiced yoga and strict celibacy as he had read somewhere
that sex drained one’s energy and concentration of mind. In 1972, he passed Form
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One standing first in the class. Once, he also defeated Scaramouche, his coach, in the
game of tennis! Scaramouche helped him many ways by getting his name entered for
black tennis tournaments and by giving him a few old tennis rackets for practice. In
June, he met a Zulu boy who played tennis at the tennis ranch in Halfway House,
called Barretts after the construction company that sponsored the ranch. A German,
Wilfred Horn by name, organized the tennis ranch on behalf of his company. Wilfred
came from Germany where he had seen the bitterness and cruelty of Hitler and the
Nazis during World War II. According to Tom, Wilfred, his South-African wife,
Norma and their four–year old son, like many whites treated the blacks as their
equals, including their servants. Tom played tennis only with white male society
which produced all South African leaders and it was called Broedersbond. As Tom
informed Johannes, most German and English people in South Africa were liberals
who hated apartheid. Tom introduced Johannes to Wilfred. Johannes told him that his
name was Mark (and not Johannes) and details of his childhood and ghetto life which
had shocked Wilfred. This German, liked Mark and became his friend. This is also an
important turning point in Johannes’s life.
In this chapter, the Narrative code takes care of the progression of events
while the Cultural code reveals such tribal rituals as male circumcision in a “mountain
school” and the Tsonga medium education in the rural secondary schools and the
liberal attitude of the most Germans and English men South Africa. The Semic code
throws light on the characters of Johannes, his father and mother, the Granny, Uncle
Piet and Aunt Bush as well as zulu and Wilfred whereas the Hermeneutic code
introduces suspense about Johannes’s luck in tennis.
Chapter 38: Narrative, Cultural, Semic, Symbolic and Hermeneutic Codes

(pp.228-241)
This is rather a lengthy chapter that depicts such important events as Arthur
Ashe’s visit to South Africa in 1973; Johannes’s friendship with another Zulu tennis
player, David, the liberation movement carried out secretly by ANC (African National
Congress), its history, Ashe’s winning the match against Sherwood Stevert, a white
American player at Ellis Park Stadium, establishment of Black Tennis Foundation
(BTF) in South Africa and Johannes’s first written application for a tennis scholarship
to BTF and a few other minor events.
146
Towards the end of 1973, the South African government gave permission to
Arthur Ashe to come to their country. Earlier, it was not willing for his visit to South
Africa because he had condemned several times the policy of apartheid, particularly
as a black man, his remark at a press conference in London that he would drop the H-
bomb on Johannesburg to make the government to realize that its racial segregation
policy of apartheid was inhuman, infuriated the South African Government. However,
Johannes and his friend, David did not think that Ashe was serious in his remarks.
David, also a Zulu, became Johannes’s friend as a tennis player. He was a soft-
spoken, brilliant student and also as proficient in English as Johannes. Though he was
also a good tennis player, he was a womanizer unlike Johannes. Both of them used to
discuss the national affairs, particularly the plight of innocent blacks suffering under
apartheid and also those blacks who were shot dead in the jails and whose deaths were
publicized by the police as “suicides”. David’s political awareness influenced
Johannes also who came to know about the underground liberation movement of the
African National Congress (ANC) and its history. As the protagonist observes:
It was founded in 1912 by a group of black intellectuals, many of

whom had studied in England and America. It began as a non-violent
movement, inspired by the work of Mahatma Gandhi, who lived in
South Africa from 1894 to 1914, and it sought to peacefully bring
about a South Africa free of racial prejudice. (230)
But the leaders were disappointed as each year, apartheid became worse and worse
with new laws meant to suppress the black people with increasing cruelty. They
continued to agitate and were arrested and sent to prison on Robben Island with life
sentences. Such leaders included those like Nelson Mandela, Goun Mbeki, Walter
Sisulu and Robert Sobukwe. Their goal was “to establish a free and democratic South
Africa, where all people live in brotherhood and sisterhood, enjoying equal rights and
opportunities”. (Ibid) Young blacks emulated leaders like Mandela and others like
Johannes were looking for a role model like Arthur Ashe. The day when Ashe arrived,
Johannes was very excited. Wilfred made very appreciative observations about Ashe
as a great tennis player and also a very simple gentleman. At about the same time,
there was also a boxing match between a black American and a white challenger, but
Johannes was not as much interested in the boxing match as he was in Ashe’s tennis
matches. Another reason for his lack of interest in boxing was the behaviour and
147
statements of a black American boxing star, Bob Foster, made the blacks in South
Africa angry. But Ashe was different. The first day of the tennis was at Ellis Park and
Johannes went there by the black bus. Not finding place among the white spectators,
he joined a black section. Arthur Ashe won the match with 6-1, 7-6 and 6-4 against
his white opponent. There was clapping and great jubilation, especially from the
blacks. Johannes greatly wondered at how a black man (i.e. Ashe) could vanquish a
white player. It was a miracle for him. He remembered then, a number of
distinguished blacks in America about whom he had read in newspapers. They
included singers, educators, politicians, mayors, inventors, scientists, actors, actresses,
judges, army generals, pilots, writers and so on and so forth. In South Africa, the
blacks had not been slaves, like the forefathers of the distinguished black Americans.
But it seemed a mystery to him why the South African blacks failed to make any great
achievements. However, he realised that the reason was apartheid. Skipping school he
watched Ashe playing tennis at the stadium in Ellis Park and his mannerisms. One
afternoon, Ashe made an appearance to meet people. There was a big crowd in the
centre of which Ashe looked like a star. Johannes could not go near and hear Ashe
clearly but observed that his accent of English was heavy. Towards the first week of
his stay, Ashe announced that he would conduct a tennis clinic in Soweto with the
help of Ray Moore and other white South African players. Ray Moore was a liberal
and criticized his government policies of apartheid. He had led an all White South
African team to its first Davis Cup which was won by default because the other
finalist, the Indian team, had boycotted in protest of apartheid in South Africa.
Johannes travelled to Soweto by train with the money given by Wilfred. The train
journey was a living nightmare as the train was overcrowded and people dangled from
windows and on the top of the train. Two blacks died having been electrocuted on the
top of the train. In contrast, the trains meant for the whites were spacious with
unoccupied cushion seats. He arrived at the destination escaping a gang of tsotsis who
were killing and robbing black passengers. The crowd of spectators at the stadium
considered Ashe as sipho which meant a “gift” in Zulu. As Johannes observes, Ashe
… had become the black messiah sent from strange shores to come to
liberate us. By attacking apartheid in a way no other black American
entertainer or athlete had done, Arthur Ashe did appear to be a sort of
messiah. (238)
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It is true that for Johannes, Ashe became not only a messiah, but also a role
model to emulate in life. Although Johannes was not able to go very close to Ashe
and hear him, he imagined that Ashe’s speech must have been very inspiring. Ashe
lost in finals to Jimmy Conors, but he won the doubles with Tom Okker, a Dutch
player. In his final days of stay, Ashe met high ranking government officials and
appealed to them to abolish apartheid in sports lest the rest of the world players
should boycott South African teams. Before leaving, Ashe also established the Black
Tennis Foundation (BTF) an enduring monument in South Africa, with the help and
support of a white liberal, Owen Williams. Johannes, encouraged by Scaramouche,
applied in writing for a tennis scholarship in America through BTF. The gangsters in
Alexandra called Johannes an Uncle Tom (i.e. a black traitor) and he had to be careful
though he intensified his tennis practice.
In this chapter, the Narrative, Cultural, Semic, Symbolic and Hermeneutic

codes operate enriching one another. While the Narrative code depicts the progression
of the events in the story, the Cultural code displays how Arthur Ashe’s visit to South
Africa inspired not only black young tennis players like Johannes, but also the general
black public, and Ashe’s establishment of BTF. The Symbolic code reveals how
African National Congress struggled for freedom. The Semic code throws light on the
characters of Ashe, Wilfred, Tom, David, and other liberal whites. Finally the
Hermeneutic code sustains the major suspense of the novel whether Johannes (i.e.
Mark) would ever realize his dream of going to America for higher studies on a tennis
scholarship.
In this chapter two important events, viz. Johannes’s winning of his first tennis
championship in the Alexandra Open, in 1974, and his mother’s affiliation with the
Twelve Apostle Church of God and her becoming a staunch believer as witnessed by
Johannes himself.
In 1974, Johannes won his first championship as the Alexandra Open

defeating David. This trophy became the most precious for him. His teachers praised
him as “a student who mixed sports and studies well”(241). His trophy was displayed
at the bar of the Barretts tennis ranch. The white members treated him as their equal
while a short German, Wolfgang, by name, also predicted that Johannes would win
Wimbledon in future. But the moment Johannes left the ranch he was subjected to the
149
laws humiliating the blacks. He, thus, developed a dual personality like Jekyll and
Hyde of R.L. Stevenson’s novel : a man equal to the whites at the ranch and a man
inferior to the whites outside the ranch. He struggled hard to keep it up. One afternoon
when he returned from the school, his mother who was out all day returned
announcing that she had been saved and had truly met the church of God and His
messengers. In spite of his dislike, she told him that this new church i.e, Twelve
Apostle Church of God was a true Church where no money was collected and the
priests had the gift of prophesy like the original twelve apostles of Jesus Christ.
Johannes did not believe this. But there was a great transformation in his mother’s
behaviour under the influence of the new Church. Two miraculous events happened:
one, her mother was given a work permit with the help of her employer at Randburg.
All these years she had been struggling to get this work permit, but she got it now
without any effort on her part; second she found two other washing jobs in the same
week. She earnestly believed that God had a hand in all this. Now she started
attending the Church service on Sunday morning and evening, but also attended choir
practice on every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, her day off. She also
started meeting the sick in the township to make them the members of the new
Church. Her house became almost a pulpit where she would teach about her God
whoever happened to visit her. To quote the narrator in this context:
Her new God turned her into a believer that every problem was
solvable, every obstacle surmountable; she never got angry or wished
anyone ill or hated her enemies, for she believed that her all loving
God would not approve of such emotions. Even her criticism of my
father lessened, she tolerated every abuse he hurled at her, she even
gave him money. She loved to share the little she had and would often
bring home complete strangers off the streets – tramps, prostitutes,
lunatics and even tsotsis – and would share with them whatever little
food was there, and occasionally she would let them sleep over for a
night or two (243)
One day she brought a crazy and filthy woman, prepared food for her and both
of them ate out of the same bowl. This sort of behaviour on the part of his mother
made Johannes so angry that he thought that she had turned mad. People also called
her openly a lunatic. Therefore, he decided to go the church and observe what was
150
happening there that had so much changed his mother. At the Church which was a
zinc sheets structure with wooden pews, the congregation consisted of almost all
ethnic groups like Zulus, Sothos, Tsongas, Xhosas and even coloureds. They greeted
one another as “brother” and “sister”. There was one male priest who interpreted
dreams and was helped by eleven other male deacons. When the priest started his long
prayer, Johannes’s mother from the front pew, jumped and made a sudden half-
scream. The priest stopped his prayer and extended his right hand in her direction.
Then she started speaking “in tongues” (i.e., unintelligible language) with a gurgling
sound like an epileptic. She, thus, spoke or prophesied for five minutes and stopped as
if completely exhausted. The priest interpreted her prophesy but Johannes missed it as
he was worried about her health and well-being. Then two other women also behaved
in the same way uttering some “gibberish”. The priest interpreted their “tongues” also
but Johannes failed to understand the meaning. He left the Church in confusion
without understanding his mother’s behaviour, but he was certain that she was not
insane. He was too young to understand it.
In this chapter, one can notice clearly how the Narrative, Cultural, Semic and
Hermeneutic codes interact with one another to bring about a realistic and aesthetic
effect. The Narrative code reveals the progression of events while the Cultural code
mainly touches upon the element of Magic Realism involved in the transformation of
Johannes’s mother’s behaviour under the influence of the Twelve Apostle Church of
God in which she had been proselytised. In conjunction, the Semic code throws
further light on the characters of Johannes and his mother whereas the Hermeneutic
code leaves Johannes as well as the reader in suspense about the priest’s interpretation
of dreams and “the tongues” of the Church members attending his prayer and the
element of prophesy in their unintelligible “tongues”. This suspense is left unresolved.
Chapter 40: Narrative, Cultural (Magic Realism), Semic, Symbolic and

Hermeneutic Codes (pp.245-252)
Three major events constitute the theme of this chapter. They are as follows:
Johannes represents Southern Transvaal black junior tennis team in the National
Tournament in Pretoria in 1975; he develops a problem with his eye-sight and when
he was in the condition of going blind, a witch doctor cures him subject to a
conditional warning; and finally Johannes helps a migrant miner living a
neighbouring hostel, who violated the Influx Control law by leaving the hostel and
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living separately in a shack in the settlement with his wife and three children whom
he has brought from a tribal reserve in the Bantustan without the government’s
permission.
In June 1975, Johannes was selected to represent the Southern Transvaal black
junior tennis squad in the National Tournament in Pretoria. Though he did not do well
in the individual competitions he helped the Southern Transvaal team to win the team
trophy. His stay in Pretoria for two weeks enabled him to understand the poor
condition of black tennis in his country owing to lack of facilities and encouragement
as well as due to apartheid. In comparison with other young black tennis players, he
was fortunate enough to have training and friends at the tennis ranch. After his return
from Pretoria, he had some problem with his eyes. He thought it was due to fatigue,
but it was not so. He became unable to read or expose his eyes to light. His mother
and others suspected witchcraft. As his mother explained to him, being a Christian did
not prevent voodoo (i.e., witchcraft). But Johannes did not agree with her. So, she
gave him money to go to the clinic for treatment. Unfortunately, he could not meet the
doctor because of the long queue and other emergency cases. He returned home
disappointed and without any treatment. He went to another place, called Tembisa
Hospital by bus. The situation was not better than that at the earlier clinic. Finally, his
mother took him to a witch doctor at Hammanskraal, a three hour journey by bus, to a
rural ghetto outside Pretoria. This was the greatest diviner or witch doctor in the
country. “She was a short fat woman with long strands of hair braided with red clay; a
blown goat’s bladder was tied to the end of one strand of hair ; beads and bones
circled her neck, and copper and silver bangles her arms, her face was caked with
yellow mud; she was draped in goatskin”. (246)
After proper introduction ceremonies, they sat in a hut in opposite directions:

the diviner in one direction and Johannes and his mother in the opposite direction.
Without any prior information given by his mother, the diviner staking bones and
shells in her hands and muttering incantations, narrated each and every incident in the
life of Johannes with complete accuracy. Some of these incidents were even forgotten
by Johannes himself. He was surprised very much. In her diagnosis, the diviner gave
the cause for his blindness as the jealousy of some of his distant relatives at his
success in school and therefore they applied voodoo to make him blind as they could
not kill him because of the protecting power of his ancestors. Not believing her words
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he wanted to test her. He asked her how they bewitched him. She predicted his
question and answered that they were able to do so through the letters he had been
writing for some of his neighbours to their people in the rural areas. She warned him
neither to read nor write letters for other Africans in Alexandra if he wanted to regain
his vision and be safe. Reading and writing at school was an exemption, as she said.
She gave him medicine. They returned home and used the medicine but Johannes still
had doubts about witchcraft so he went to the Tembisa Hospital where the doctor
examined his eyes and told him that there was nothing wrong with his eyes except
they were too strained and gave him medicine. He used both medicines and gradually
his ailment was cured. Still Johannes had a dilemma about which medicine cured his
eye-sight, the diviner’s or the eye-specialists?
Following the advice of the witch doctor, Johannes stopped reading and
writing letters for migrant workers, but he could not refuse to help one migrant
worker, named Ndlamini who violated the Influx Control Law by leaving the migrant
workers’ hostel, bringing his wife and three children from his distant village in
Bantustan as they had been starving and suffering for years. He took a shack in the
ghetto and started living there. This was a legal crime and for this he received
summons from the superintendent, a government official in charge of such affairs.
Ndlamini was afraid that he would be put in jail. So he sought Johannes’s help
because the latter could speak English and Afrikaans like native speakers and
therefore would be able to explain his difficulties in Afrikaans to the Superintend
whose native language was Afrikaans. He was an Afrikaans fanatic and hated English.
The next day they went to the superintendent’s office by bus. The superintendent, the
lord of Alexandra, gave them interview. He examined the papers and confirmed that
Ndlamini committed the crime and had to be imprisoned for his crime. Ndlamini
could not answer the volley of questions from the superintendent and remained silent
and defenseless. Then Johannes intervened speaking impeccable Afrikaans which
impressed the officer. He further enquired whether Johannes and his schoolmates
liked Afrikaans or English more. To please him Johannes said that Afrikaans is much
better than English. The superintendent was very happy, praised Johannes as a ‘smart
young chap’, excused Ndlamini’s offence and gave him written permission to live
separately with his wife and three children until conditions improve in Bantustan.
Ndlamini, on their way home, praised Johannes as a “miracle worker”. (252).
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In this chapter, almost all the semiotic codes operate, each with an equal
effect. The Narrative code takes care of the progression of the three major episodes
mentioned in the introductory paragraph above. The Cultural code in this chapter is
more detailed and effective with its element of Magic Realism, viz. the witch doctor’s
rituals and ability to cure Johannes’s blindness. The Semic code delineates the major
characters in further detail in addition to providing a picturesque description of the
witch doctors appearance, residence, surroundings etc. The Symbolic code displays
the conflict in the protagonist’s mind between Christian’s faith and rationalism on the
one side and that between modern medicine and witchcraft medicine. These conflicts
naturally lead to a suspense or dilemma in the protagonist’s system of beliefs which is
embodied in the Hermeneutic code but the suspense is not resolved because it
represents the dilemma of humanity everywhere in every culture. Nonetheless, it adds
to the narrative effect.
This chapter continues the story of Johannes also called Mark, describing his
extraordinary love for reading English books; the frequent debates held in Form Three
which he is studying now and his success therein and his principal’s appreciation; his
reading of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and listening to the broadcast of the
play by Springbok radio, his presentation of Portia’s speech on the “quality of mercy”
from the play; his interest in German classical music as well as American pop music;
his obtaining a three-year scholarship after the midyear exams, etc.
Now Johannes reached Form Three in the curriculum of which there were
frequent debates and presentations by individual students along with other items of
syllabus on Bantu Education, Culture and social issues. He succeeded in reading
almost all books in his school library, especially the English books. When his
principal joked about his passion for reading, he replied that tennis was his other
passion. At that time he was reading Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
and the principal asked him whether Johannes was interested in visiting foreign
countries in a “time machine”. Johannes replied that he wanted to do so through the
game of tennis. In the conversation that ensued between both of them, Johannes
revealed his desire for freedom with respect for the individual rather than for earning
money. The principal shared his feelings and pointed out that the present young
generation of Johannes were the hope of the nation and cautioned him to not to move
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too close with whites lest his own black people should misunderstand him. Later, his
English teacher gave an assignment from the Shakespearean play, The Merchant of
Venice. The teacher was a Ph.D. degree holder in English literature from a black
university. The students felt that Shakespearean English was tough. But Johannes
persevered and understood some parts of the play with the help of a dictionary.
During his days of preparation for the presentation of a passage from the play in the
class, he luckily listened to a broadcast of the play from a small transistor given to
him by Uncle Piet as a gift. The relay was from Springbok radio station. With this
experience, Johannes struggled hard to imitate correct pronunciation of several
archaic terms in the play. After his presentation of the passage, ‘quality of mercy’
from Portia’s speech in the play, in the class, his English teacher who used to called
him Shiver My Timbers, a character in Treasure Island, appreciated him very much.
From then onwards for Johannes Springbok radio station became his favourite. At the
same time he also learned to appreciate German classical music. Wilfred also
encouraged him to improve his taste for German music because one needn’t know the
language to appreciate music which had a universal appeal. Nevertheless, Johannes
did not lose his taste for American pop music and African tribal vibes. But his father
made fun of this new interest in his son. He made the following comment:
“First it was books”, he said. “Then tennis, then poetry, now it’s this
rubbish that white people listen to all the time. You really must be
going mad. How many black people listen to that rubbish?” (257).
In the midyear exams, Johannes scored the highest marks along with another
student, Steve, from another class and both of them were awarded one scholarship
each, sponsored by Simba Quix, the largest potato-chip and rusks making company in
South Africa. The scholarship was for three years paying for books, school uniform
and fee till they complete matriculation. This company run by the English people had
a purpose in granting the scholarships. In the words of Mr. Wilde, the company
manager, the brilliant students who were awarded their scholarships would also be
given employment in their company, after the completion of their education. As part
of the function of awarding scholarships, there were some programmes like
performance of skits etc. Johannes read a dozen verses from Tennyson’s In
Memorium. Finally there was a barbecue.
155
In this chapter, it may be noticed, that the Narrative, Cultural and Semic codes
operate. The Narrative code accounts for the progression of events in the story while
the Cultural code provides information about the nature of Bantu Education and the
part played by debates in the school curriculum form Form Three (i.e. Standard Eight)
onwards and the encouragement given by some private organizations to brilliant
students, mostly to fulfill their future needs of employment in their organizations. The
reader is reminded, the this context, of the major thrust in Lord Mc Caulay’s 1835
Minute that recommended English education in British India, which focused on
training Indian youth in English to serve the machine of British administration in the
Indian subcontinent. Finally, the Semic code throws light on the different
circumstances that influenced Johannes, and his character as well as on the characters
of the principal, the English class teacher, Johannes’s father, Wilfred, Johannes’s
German friend, and lastly on that of Mr. Wilde the English manager of the potato-
chip- and rusks making company.
Chapter 42: Narrative, Symbolic, Semic and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.259-268)
In this chapter is described the students’ revolt against the government’s

introduction of Afrikaans medium education at the school level instead of English
medium instruction. This rebellion that started first in Soweto on June 16, 1976,
spread to other areas and also to Alexandra causing a lot of bloodshed and death of
innocent school children in the sudden police fire. Some whites, not many, start
leaving the country and ironically, the white government assures them of all safety
measures, ignoring the deaths of hundreds of black students. It became world news.
Later the movement a gets disorgnised and leads to violence, the students and youth
using petrol bombs. Several shops are looted and food-stuff and other materials are
robbed from these shops by the blacks, especially the ghetto dwellers. A friend of
Johannes, a twelve-years-old girl is shot dead. Her funeral is held. The protagonist is
greatly disturbed and realizes that Gandhi’s non-violence alone will not save people
as, fight for freedom calls for violence also.
The Department of Bantu Education declared all of the sudden that in all black
schools, Afrikaans had to be taught in the place of English. This declaration acted like
an igniting spark for the black students who had already been simmering with hate,
bitterness, frustration and anger. On June 16, 1976 there was a revolt against this
decision of the government at Soweto in which about 10,000 students participated and
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marched on the streets of the city protesting the Afrikaans decree. They raised slogans
in favour of independence. Suddenly the police opened fire without any warning and
hundreds of innocent children died. The global newspapers published photographs of
this atrocity. The black people all over South Africa became sorrowful. David and
Johannes discussed this cold-blooded murder of innocent students. The next day the
atmosphere at school was also serious. They also demonstrated carrying placards.
Black men and women cheered them. Again, when the police appeared they
maintained peace. The police warned them declaring through a megaphone that they
had to disperse and return home. A few students turned back, but a majority of them
marched defiantly singing the anthem of Afrikaans National Congress, entitled Nkosi
Sikaleli Afrika (“God Bless Africa”). Then the police charged and fired several
rounds. Students ran in all directions. When David and Johannes approached
Alexandra, they found the entire place was cordoned by several armoured cars and
roads were blocked. They however, managed to walk home. The author describes the
scene at Alexandra as follows:
From time to time, people glanced nervously over their shoulders,

afraid of being shot in the back. When David and I entered Alexandra,
we saw several burning government buildings, beer halls, schools,
stores belonging to Indians and Chinamen. A bus had been overturned
and set afire. People were looking all around, making off with drums
of paraffin, bags of mealie meal, carcasses of beef still dripping blood,
Primes stoves, boxes of canned goods, loaves of bread and so on.
There were power and energy in men, women and children that I had
never seen before. (263)
The author adds: “The rebellion had begun in Alexandra” (Ibid). This situation
spread to the black ghettos of other parts of the country. All black schools were closed
and this continued for a few more days. But working blacks, particularly the black
migrant workers who were threatened with dismissal from service were gradually
forced to return home and report back. This happened in Alexandra also. Blacks
fought against blacks. The white government assured the whites in the country of
safety and security giving them a call not to leave the country. The number of black’s
deaths increased day by day. Black informers carried secret information to the police
against their own black brothers. Thus, gradually the movement got disorganized
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while the students started using petrol bombs. Shops belonging to Indians and
Chinese were looted or set on fire. A Chinese shop and a house were looted. Then the
army trucks came making the mob flee for fear of life. David and Johannes also left
when an Indian shop raided and looted by girls and women who carried the loot to
their shacks. Johannes was reminded of the French Revolution about which he had
read in the novel A Tale of Two Cities. Then the army came and opened fire. To
escape tear gas, Johannes ran into a shack nearby. The head of the shack whom
Johannes called Ntate (Father) expressed his lack of hope that freedom would never
be achieved at this rate. Noticing further firing, Johannes escaped through a small
opening in the fence near the lavatory and saw that a twelve-year-old girl, Mashudu,
who was his girl friend and schoolmate, had been shot dead. She was buried that
Sunday and a funeral was held under a continual drizzle. The preacher addressed the
gathering thus:
“In her, as in hundreds of other black children who have died since this
nightmare began, had been embodied the hope for a better Africa. Give
us strength and courage, O Lord, to triumph over enemies, our
oppressors. Let this child’s death, and all the others be not in vain. Let
there come out of all this spilled innocent blood a new South Africa,
where we can live in dignity and freedom. As you receive her soul into
your bosom, O mighty God, send us the weapons to carry on the
struggle against injustice, to carry on till all Africans are liberated. Out
of dust we came, back to dust we return…..” (267)
Johannes wept because the deceased was a close friend of his. After going
home, lying on bed he questioned his own belief in the efficacy of the teachings of
Mahatma Gandhi and what Martin Luther King Jr. had done for blacks in America.
He came to the conclusion, that the black people can attain freedom from apartheid
not through non-violence but only through the barrel of a gun and violence.
In this chapter, the Narrative code covers the progression of events while the
Cultural code describes the student revolt against Afrikaans education in the place of
English medium education. Simultaneously the Symbolic code displays the hatred of
the blacks against apartheid and the white rule along with the cruelty of the
government with which it has suppressed the black student rebellion. It also describes
how mob behaves in times of violence, under the Semic code. Finally the
158
Hermeneutic code resolves Johannes’s dilemma whether Gandhiji’s non-violence can
bring freedom to South Africa. He decides differently.
This chapter narrates how the rebellion gets intensified and how it is
suppressed in the month of October by the government police.
As days passed, more and more black students joined the movement and more
of them were also killed. The government gave it a political colour stating that it was
supported by African National Congress a banned party and also that Communists
also joined the movement secretly. Many agitators were caught, tried and dragged.
The violence was attributed to the anti-establishment political groups. The Prime
Minister, Vorster left for Germany where he met Henry Kissiger, the American
secretary of state. He propagated there this lie by telling them their unrest was
instigated by some political parties working against the South African Government.
Johannes wondered why the liberal whites did not condemn the government’s atrocity
and genocide. The government also spread a rumour that the ANC was secretly
planning for a peasant revolution. Johannes had a friend from Rhodesia (the present
Zimbabwe), Ngwenya, who was familiar with the guerilla war waged by the black
leaders in his country, like Robert Mugabe and Joshva Nkomo to overthrow the
minority white rule of Ian Smith. This friend also had relatives fighting for freedom of
Rhodesia from the Patriotic Front. One evening Johannes met him and wanted to
know more about fighting the guerilla way and to become a freedom fighter in his
own country. Ngwenya discouraged him by saying that Johannes, with his unusual
love for tennis and books could not carry a gun and kill others in the freedom fight.
He asked Johannes whether he could sacrifice his love for tennis, studies and
friendship with whites. Though Johannes replied in the affirmative, Ngwenya was not
convinced. As they were talking like this, there was firing of tear gas shells by the
police outside. At once Ngwenya’s wife covered the young baby with a rug soaked in
water while the father and Johannes woke up and protected the other sleeping children
in the same way. In this context, Ngwenya gave practical advice to Johannes as
follows:
“There’s room for people with your brains in the struggle. Your kind
fight on a different front. Teachers and doctors and lawyers are needed
to care for the wounded, defend political prisoners and teach the
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masses about freedom. Writers are also needed to tell the rest of the
world what the struggle is all about. So, you see, you don’t need only a
gun to fight against apartheid. There are many roads that lead to Rome.
Think about using your talents in the struggle”. (270).
By October, the rebellion which started in June was completely suppressed by

the government and the unofficial death toll was about eight hundred in the four
months of violence. The government relaxed by making the law of learning in
Afrikaans optional and still said that it was desirable. The puppet black leaders
ratified the compromise. Schools were re-opened. Johannes attended his school again
after six months. Some of the teachers were suspected to have become police
informers. Johannes was greatly disillusioned with the result of the student
movement.
In this chapter, the reader can notice that the Narrative code takes the
responsibility of the progression of events and the Cultural code presents the political
situations of unrest and the deceptive maneuvers of the government to misrepresent
the facts locally as well as globally. The Semic code provides a realist picture of the
main events as also it throws light on the characters of Johannes and Ngwenya
whereas the Symbolic code depicts the hatred between the rulers and the ruled.
This chapter narrates how Wilfred encourages Johannes to describe the life of
the black people in the ghetto of Alexandra to the white audience at the bar in the
tennis ranch. Johannes makes friends with another German by name Helmut whom he
requests to help him to go to America. Again, there is unrest, the stadium is looted
and the library therein is set on fire. Taking great risk, Johannes saves some books
which he carries home afterwards.
This is also lengthy chapter in which some important events are narrated. As
the schools reopened and the government relaxed the restrictions on blacks’
movement in white areas, Johannes was able to go to the Barrett tennis ranch first
time in two months. He met Wilfred in the company of a female friend. Wilfred
expressed his pleasant surprise on seeing Johannes whom he was not able to
recognize first and whom he thought might have died in the recent police firing in the
settlements. While bidding farewell to his female friend, Wilfred requested Mark to
160
collect the tennis balls on the tennis courts and take them to the clubhouse. Later
when they met after Johannes ate some scones and drank two glasses of ginger beer,
Johannes explained to him in detail what had happened for about four months in the
ghettos, particularly in Alexandra. Wilfred was shocked and surprised at the cruelty of
the police. He observed:
“You know, we whites have never heard about the atrocities you’ve
just described. What I can’t understand why the bloody government
would go on the air each night and say everything was under control,
that the few Communists responsible for starting the riots were being
efficiently rounded up and black life was returning to normal. When in
fact the police and army were shooting down innocent people”. (272)
The government censored the news and gave a false and painted picture to the
world through its Afrikaans newspapers throwing the blame on the blacks, the ANC
and the Communists. But some liberal English newspapers published facts. Then
Wilfred suggested that Mark present all this in front of the white audience in the bar
of the ranch. Johannes, first, hesitated but later agreed to do so. Encouraged and
supported by Wilfred, that evening, Mark was able to present the details and facts of
the real situation to all the white members of the club. Many of them were shocked
and surprised while some white females also shed tears. Mark was the only black
person there. His presentation was followed by questions. To a question about the
cause of the riots, by an English liberal, St. Croix, Mark gave the following reply:
“What we black students did on June he was not riot”, I said. “We
spontaneously rebelled against an education system designed to make
us slaves. And black education is not the only thing that’s wrong in this
country. Afrikaans was merely the spark that set off a time bomb that’s
been ticking all these years that we blacks have been living as fourth-
class citizens. We black youths feel the same bitterness and anger and
hatred that our parents feel. But unlike them we are not prepared to
perpetually turn the other cheek, to smile and say ‘Yes baas’, ‘Yes
madam’, while our humanity is being trampled to fragments. We have
realized that our freedom will not come from a white man’s change of
heart. We have to fight for our rights.” (274)
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Mark further, clarified to other questions from other whites about the pleasant
picture of blacks’ lives given by the government and their black supporters. He said
that these were black middle class families who formed a small minority while the
majority of the blacks were poor peasants and workers who live in shacks and mud
houses in the ghettos. Another member, an Afrikaans and supporter of apartheid tried
to corner Mark, but the latter gave balanced and factual answers by establishing
clearly what the blacks want was democracy, and not apartheid. To the Afrikaan’s
question whether the blacks now want to make the whites their slaves, Mark provided
a clear-cut answer as follows:
“No”, I said, “We blacks are not in the least interested in making
slaves out of you. We simply want a country where race and colour
don’t determine your place in the sun. We want a South Africa where
everyone – black, Coloured, white and Indian – is equal before the law.
We want to live in peace with everyone as a nation united”. (275)
The Afrikaans member was getting angry and claimed that the white people
came to South Africa to civilize the blacks and teach them culture through
Christianity. Mark gave a cool reply to him by saying:
“South Africa is as much as our country as it is yours. We can and

must learn to live together. We need each other, not as master and
servant, but as equals. There’s room for everyone in this beloved
country.” (276)
There were a few more questions which Mark answered to the satisfaction of
his white audience. St. Croix gave him a lift to First Avenue in Alexandra on return.
Again the police started raiding black schools and every student was suspect.
There was no safety at school also. Therefore, Johannes went to the Barretts Tennis
Ranch and started living there, practicing tennis and reading English books. There, he
made friends with another German, Helmut by name, who wanted to improve his
tennis by playing with Mark. In the beginning, Mark suspected him to be an agent of
the secret government agency BOSS (Bureau of State Security), but soon discovered
that Helmut was a kind-hearted and liberal German. They became friends. Helmut
even promised Mark to help him to go to America. He also took him to his flat at
Hillbrow where they discussed many things including the genocide in Germany
162
during the Nazi rule of Hitler. Helmut also took Mark to almost all the tennis courts in
the city where they played together. But they were careful and changed the courts
from the time to time. Almost every day Helmut drove Mark home though he had no
permit to enter the ghetto of Alexandra. One day, Helmut left him on the outskirts of
Alexandra because he had to go to the airport to receive his girlfriend. As Johannes
was walking home through the shortest route which was dark, some gangsters headed
by Jarvas attacked him abusing him as Uncle Tom. Being helpless, Johannes prayed
to God and luckily a street truck was coming and seeing the truck, all the gangsters
jumped to the sides of the street. Johannes started running and one fellow hit him with
a brickbat. He lost his front tooth and somehow reached home. His mother who was
shocked to know what had happened gave him first aid. After a few weeks, there were
riots again. In the confusion of revolt and police firing, the blacks of the ghetto again
looted food stuffs, from a government ration shop located in the stadium. They stole a
bus and by driving the bus inside, they had broken the stadium walls and looted food
stuff. There was also a good library on one side of the stadium. A girl run over by the
bus died on the spot. Johannes was worried about the books in the library and ran to
the spot. He noticed what was happening. He went into the library where many books
had already caught fire and were burning. Luckily he found that underneath the third
or fourth shelf, the flame had not touched, some books were intact. He collected them
and tried to return. Suddenly two army trucks appeared. He threw the books in a dark
ditch nearby and faced the soldiers who left him luckily unharmed thinking that he
was a lunatic. After the trucks left, in the afternoon Johannes went to the library back
and brought the books home with the help of his brother.
In this chapter, the Narrative code recounts the major events while the Cultural
code reveals how Mark, at the instance of Wilfred addresses the white gathering at the
bar in the Barretts Tennis Ranch and gives them a factual picture of what has been
happening during the so-called riots. He answers all their questions ably and evokes
their support and sympathy. He also gets a new German friend, Helmut, who promises
to help him in going to America. The Symbolic code operates to depict the looting of
the stadium while the Semic code throws light on the characters of the protagonist,
Wilfred, Helmut and other whites at the ranch.
163
Chapter 45: Narrative, Cultural, Semic, Hermeneutic and Symbolic Codes
(pp.287-289)
This chapter describes the disappointment of Mark at the scrapping of July

championship of the Annual National Junior Tennis Championships announced to be
held near Pretoria in May, Scaramouch’s attempt to console Mark in this respect; his
being introduced to Andre Zietsman a white African Tennis Player friend and his
hopes to go to America with the help of this new friend; Arthur Ashe’s winning the
Wimbledon in England and the general jubilation of the blacks in South Africa; some
students who left schools joining the guerilla training camps secretly; his decision to
stop going to school afraid of the police raids, and finally his faith in God and in
church-going.
Sporadic unrest continued in the ghettos. In May, the black Southern

Transvaal Lawn Tennis Association announced the Annual National Junior Tennis
Championship in Attredgeville, Pretoria, but later cancelled it. Johannes, who made a
team for this, was greatly disappointed, but Scaramouch, his coach, consoled him and
promised him to introduce him to Andre Zietsman a white African player recently
returned from America. Mark hoped that this new friend would help him to go to
America on a tennis scholarship. After some time, the government gave permission
for the tournament to be held. In Attredgeville, the facilities for tennis were slightly
better, but accommodation in the few hotels was crowded. Southern Transvaal won
the team competitions. About the same time, Wimbledon was taking place in
England. This time Arthur Ashe won and became the Wimbledon Champion. All
blacks in South Africa became jubilant and newspapers were full of this happy news.
One paper said, “Ashe Paints Wimbledon Black” (288). Marks ambition was
intensified. Schools reopened in August and Johannes went back to school as his
scholarship was still valid. But many of his school friends disappeared. He came to
know that they had joined the underground guerilla training conducted in the
neighbouring states by a secret organization called Umkhanto We sizere.
An urban guerilla war began soon. The government used more repressive laws
and stern suppressive measures. Some blacks turned into police informers. Mark
became paranoid and wanted to stop school. For safety he often went to church. This
made him gradually theistic, as it appeared. Consider his change in his own words:
Why did God fail to protect innocent students from the police?
Nevertheless, I began to go to church on Sundays, not so much to pray
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but because I felt somewhat safe there. A change gradually came over
me; I began to read the Bible more for renewal of strength and
courage. I wandered from church to church, listened to the sermons
with new ears, and heard pastors begin to preach liberation. Youngsters
whose blood was shed in the battle against apartheid were called
martyrs. Those who fled and became freedom fighters the government
called terrorists; in the churches they were praised as heroes. (289)
Some Churches further sang freedom songs as part of their liturgy, defying the
authorities. Coffins were draped in ANC colours and black young men and women
started wearing ANC T-shirts and raised freedom slogans. The police dispersed them
with tear gas, police dogs, rubber bullets etc.
In this chapter, all the Semiotic codes operate in a mutually intertwining

manner. While the Narrative code takes care of the progression of events, the Cultural
code describes the junior tennis tournament as part of the protagonists’ interest. Next
the Semic code throws further light on the development in the character of the
protagonist as he starts going to Church regularly on Sundays and observes the nature
of Church activities which include praise for freedom fighters and pro-liberation
speeches by the pastors. The Hermeneutic code reveals the dilemmas of the central
character regarding his faith in the Christian God and his ambition of going to
America through tennis. Finally the Symbolic code portrays how the police suppress
the patriotic blacks.
Chapter 46: Narrative, Cultural, Semic, Hermeneutic and Symbolic Codes

(pp.289-292)
This chapter narrates Mark’s friendship with Andre Zietman, a distinguished

South African white tennis player, who was educated in America, his playing tennis
with Mark and giving him lessons of tennis, Andre’s experiences in America and his
change of attitude to the blacks in his own country and Mark’s wonder at the free and
dignified life of blacks in America.
As promised and introduced by Wilfred, Johannes finally met Andre Zietmen,

a white South African who had won dozens of prestigious tournaments, at twenty four
and who had also participated in Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. He was ready to
teach Johannes the finer points of the game of tennis. So, on Saturday mornings, they
165
used to play secretly at Ellis Park or other suburban courts because it was risky for a
black man and a white man to play together in a white neighbourhood. Andre would
tell Mark about his first experience in America. In Africa he was born into a well-to-
do white family, enjoyed all the benefits of a rich white boy born in South Africa –
the best type of education in white-only schools, the obedient services of black
nannies and black servants who called him baas, lessons in tennis, music, swimming,
cricket, rugby, dance and all other things which were part of the white people’s
culture in South Africa. He had believed like the other South African whites, that they
were destined by God to lord over the blacks who were created by God to serve the
whites. But his four year stay in America for education, completely changed this
view. In his own words:
“All this was my world, my reality. Then suddenly there I was, at

eighteen, thrust into a world where all those illusions were shattered. In
America blacks attended the same schools with me, sat in the same
classes and heard the same teachers, some of whom were blacks. I
slept with blacks in the same dormitory, ate meals with them in the
same cafeterias. I was shocked and horrified. No one was calling me
baas and master any longer. (291)
Earlier, Andre had also told Mark as follows:
“It was very frightening at first”, he said, “to see black people
and white people living together side by side in New York,
Washington, cities as big as Johannesburg and Cape Town. In America
there are no laws which keep blacks and whites apart. Blacks vote and
get elected to the American parliament, where together with whites
they make laws for the benefit of everyone in the country.
And laws say that all people are created equal by God, and
therefore should be judged not by their colour but only on merit.”(290)
One day, they went out in Andre’s car and when the car was parked, Mark
hurriedly changed into the backseat because it was an offence for a black to sit beside
a white in the front seat. Thus Mark was careful when both of them moved in the city
in Andre’s car. Andre also told Mark to imagine the American situation in the South
African places like Johannesburg, Soweto and Alexandra, without any laws of
166
segregation like Group Areas Act. Andre’s words immensely incited Mark’s
imagination and his dream to see this Promised Land, i.e., America, was further
intensified. After listening to Andre’s accounts of American society, Mark thought as
follows:
My mind was feverishly trying to compare American society, the way

Andre depicted it, with that of South Africa. There was no comparison
whatsoever. The two societies appeared light years apart. America
seemed a society moving rapidly toward a greater accommodation of
its diverse population, South Africa on the other hand was moving with
equal speed if not more, toward a separation of all races. (292)
In this chapter, one can see that apart from the Narrative code, Cultural and
Semic codes operate in a complementary manner. If the Narrative code describes the
chronological chain of events, the Cultural code holds mirror to the contrast between
the American Society enlightened by democracy and the South African Society
afflicted with racial discrimination and apartheid. The Semic code enlightens the
reader regarding the changed character of Andre Zietman, a white South African and
that of Mark Mathabane, an optimistic black youth living in impoverished conditions.
Chapter 47: Narrative, Cultural, Semic, Hermeneutic Codes (pp.292-296)
In this chapter, the main events narrated are : further development of

friendship between Andre and Mark, Mark’s family facing hard times, Mark’s futile
attempts at getting part time jobs, Andre’s help of offering a job at his sports shop but
Mark’s decline, Andre’s help by giving Mark fifty rands which sustains Mark’s
family, Mark’s winning of Alexandra Open tennis championship for a second time,
the renewal of Simba Quix’s scholarship to Mark, all the members of Mark’s family
persuading him to accept the job at Simba Quix, including Uncle Piet, Granny, Aunt
Bushy, Uncle Cheese and his father, and his decision not to take up the job offered to
him.
The friendship between Andre and Mark grew closer and closer and they
continued to practice tennis surreptitiously. Andre respected the sentiments of Mark’s
though he differed with him sometimes. Taking Andre’s example as a changed and
enlightened South African white, Mark hoped that the rest of the whites in South
Africa would also change if they wanted to. To quote Mark:
167
… if four years of living in America had taught him that apartheid was
wrong, wrong, wrong, then I had hope that someday the rest of his race
could similarly awaken-if they wanted to. (292)
Johannes’s family started facing a tough time. His mother had to leave her job
due to child delivery, this time of a pretty dimpled girl named Linah. By now they
were two sons and five sisters. His father also had lost his job. There was starvation in
the family. Johannes tried for part time jobs, but he failed either because he had too
much education or he had no work permit and no pass. Andre, once, offered him a job
in his sports shop, Johannes declined the offer for the fear of losing time for their
tennis practice. Then Andre gave him fifty (50) rands which sustained the family
during that hard period. With that money, Mark was able to buy the family groceries,
infant diapers, medicine and food till his mother resumed her job as a “washing girl”.
Andre also gave him a bag full of tennis clothes and tennis rackets. The clothes were
used by Mark and his siblings. Further Mark’s game of tennis improved so greatly by
his practice with Andre and Helmut, that he won the Alexandra Open Tennis
Championship for a second time. He passed Form Four in the top one percent of the
class and the Simba Quix Company renewed their scholarship for him. Thus when he
completed his seventeenth birthday, Johannes entered the final year of matriculation
and started working hard. The Simba Quix Company’s manager, Mr. Wilde, offered
him a job in his company where they paid equal salaries to whites and blacks in their
attempt to remove apartheid, at least, in their company. Uncle Piet and others
persuaded him to accept the offer so that Johannes could join the minority number of
well-to-do black middle class families living mostly in an area called Dube. But they
were conservative and pro-government by supporting apartheid and denouncing
democracy. The government showed their well-built houses with two-door garages,
swimming pools, tennis courts, electricity and gardens, to foreigners, particularly to
Americans, Japanese and Europeans, as a show piece to prove the benefits of
apartheid. All this was false as Johannes knew it. But these blacks living at Dube were
very happy and always were in the good books of the government. For this reason, all
the well-wishers of Johannes including Uncle Piet, Aunt Bushy, his Granny, Uncle
Cheese of the penitentiary and also his father pressurized him to accept the job offer
made by Mr. Wilde of Simba Quix company. But what Johannes primarily wanted
was not money, comfort and physical safety, but he wanted freedom to live like a free
168
citizen in his own country. Therefore, he did not accept the offer of employment. He
would not be happy as long as there was apartheid in South Africa. Hence, the
protagonist says:
Something inside me told me I would never be happy. I had to leave

South Africa somehow, somehow I had to get to America, the
Promised Land, where I hoped to find the freedom to use whatever
talents I had. (296)
But how to do so was a big question for him.
In this chapter, it is noticed that the Narrative code keeps the progression
events in tact while the Cultural code proves that there were large-hearted and broad-
minded white men like Andre Zietmen who loves and helps Mark in a time of need
and Mr. Wilde, the Simba Quix manager offers him a good job on a par with his white
employees. Further, the Cultural code also describes what would happen to a black
family in Alexandra when both the parents were out of job, and how difficult it was to
get a part time job for an educated black youth like Johannes for want of a pass book
and a work permit. It is ironical that Mark’s education became a disqualification for
him in this regard. The Semic code throws further light on different characters in the
narrative including Andre, members of Mark’s family, the well-to-do middle class
black families at Dube who serve as show-piece for the government to support
apartheid in the eyes of foreign dignitaries and tourists, and finally on the character of
Mark himself who was not tempted by the Simba Quix company’s job offer because
his principal goal in life was the removal of apartheid and freedom for all blacks in
South Africa. The Hermeneutic code concludes this chapter with a suspense or
dilemma whether Mark would ever be able to reach America, his Promised Land.
Chapter 48: Narrative, Symbolic, Semic and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.298-304)
This chapter narrates the events in South Africa, particularly in Johannesburg

triggered off by the death of Steven Biko’s death in police custody.
Steven Biko, a thirty-three-year black robust and charismatic leader of the

Black Conscious Movement, an organization that had been fighting peacefully to end
apartheid, was arrested on 16th August under Terrorism Act and he died after sixteen
days of detention. The government gave false news that he died of brain hemorrhage
on the way when they were taking him from Durban jail to Johannesburg for
169
interrogation. It was obvious that he was killed either at Durban itself or on the way to
Johannesburg. Many newspapers, opposition leaders in Parliament, the UNO and
others demanded a full inquiry denouncing the Draconian apartheid laws of South
Africa. The Black Consciousness Movement declared its decision to continue their
struggle. Several other pro-black organizations like the Black Consciousness
Movement, the Black Parents’ Association, the Black Peoples Convention, the Black
Communities Programmes, the South African Students’ Organisations (SASO), the
Christian Institute were banned as Communist fronts. The largest black newspaper,
the World was closed and its editor and journalists were detained. Even white leaders
like Beyers Naiude and Donald Woods, a friend of Biko were also arrested.
Alexandra was surrounded by army vehicles in constant vigilance. Blacks betrayed
blacks. To quote the narrator:
Mass paranoia so gripped the ghettos, reminding me of the Reign of

Terror during the French Revolution, that I could not even trust my
own mother. (297)
Seething with anger and helplessness, Johannes wanted to do something to

avenge the deaths of hundreds of innocent black children. But he was unable to do
anything due to his constant loyalty to books and tennis. He felt guilty, fighting
against his own conscience. Finally he made a decision as follows:
As I grappled with my conscience, in me became born a fanatical

determination that if I ever left South Africa alive, I would devote
every minute of my time, every ounce of my strength, to fighting for
the liberation of my countrymen. What my weapons would be I didn’t
know. (298)
In this brief chapter, along with the Narrative code, the Symbolic, the Semic
and the Hermeneutic codes also operate. The death of an active African leader in
police custody, its aftermath in the form of a series of arrests of leaders and closure of
newspapers and banning of several prominent black organizations and the
protagonist’s reaction to these events have been narrated with a remarkable accuracy
that enriches the realistic nature of the novel. The Semic code reveals the multi-
pronged efforts of black leaders, parliamentarians, journalists, editors and the reaction
of the global community on the one side and the increased wicked measures adopted
by the government. Thus the Semic code operates in conjunction with the Symbolic
170
code. Finally the Hermeneutic code portrays the dilemma in the protagonist’s mind
about what to do with a final decision to fight but without any clear-cut solution or
programme.
Chapter 49: Narrative, Cultural and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.298-304)
This chapter describes Johannes’s entry into the SAB Open after a series of
encouraging and discouraging circumstances.
The SAB (South African Breweries) Open Tennis Tournament was announced
one month in advance. It was the same tournament in which Andre Ashe participated
in 1973. Oven Williams, distinguished as an innovative and astute director of SAB,
with a global reputation, wanted to make South African tennis integrated in a gradual
manner. That is, he wanted to enlist some black tennis players in the tournament such
that this would begin to remove apartheid at least in the sports world of South Africa.
Johannes felt that black players were not yet qualified or experienced enough to
participate in this tournament. He opined as follows:
But the best of us weren’t good enough to even win a match in the
qualifying round : a sort of mini-tournament where scores of amateurs
and professionals (a majority of them white South Africans) who
didn’t have enough points to qualify played each other a handful of
slots in the main draw. (298)
Another hurdle was that many blacks thought that it was a trick adopted by the white
tennis officials to show the world that South African tennis was not racial. There was
a debate on this issue between black and white tennis officials. Johannes did not want
to be another sacrificial lamb in this white tennis politics. A third discouraging point
was that in many international competitions, South African players were banned due
to apartheid. Therefore, SALTU was facing a threat of expulsion from International
Tennis Federation (ITF) unless it opened its doors to blacks. It is against this
backdrop that SALTU was frantically searching for black token players to wipe out its
stigma of apartheid in its effort to become a respected member in the community of
international sports associations. Peter Murphy who was aware of Johannes’s
association with the Barretts Tennis Ranch requested Helmut to persuade Johannes to
enter the SAB Open. When Helmut brought this matter to him, Johannes refused to do
so. But Helmut convinced him by saying that this was “a once-in-a lifetime
171
opportunity” (300) for Johannes to meet at lot of distinguished American tennis
players who might help him to get a tennis scholarship to go to America and study
there. Mark practiced frantically to the point of exhaustion such that his mother told
him to give up his effort. But Andre gave him practice, Scaramouche encouraged him,
as did Wilfred and Owen Williams. Therefore, he agreed finally to enter the
tournament. His first match was with Abe Segal a senior and experienced player and a
former Wimbledon Doubles Champion, who would easily trounce Mark. Thus Mark
had second thoughts. Therefore he requested Owen Williams to give him one day to
think about it.
In this chapter, the Narrative code takes care of the chronological progression
of events while the Cultural code explains the internal and international status of
South African tennis and the politics involved in this matter. The Hermeneutic code
leaves the protagonist in indecision which creates suspense in the narrative.
This chapter is a very crucial one because, the ambition of the protagonist,
Johannes (or Mark) to go to America through tennis, takes a material shape in the
form Mark’s friendship with the most distinguished white American Wimbledon
champion, Stanley Smith and his wife Marjory.
On the following Saturday morning was the day of Mark’s most important
tennis match. Having been encouraged by Wilfred who couldn’t accompany him but
who gave him taxi fare and good advice, Mark reached Ellis Park Tennis Stadium at
nine 0’ clock in the forenoon. He avoided many blacks who hated him and reached
the Stadium where his match was scheduled to be with Abe Segal. Among the players
there were several other celebrities like Stan Smith, Roscoe Tanner and others.
Mark, with an empty stomach started the game slowly. But Abe Segal, a very
experienced player was indeed an overmatch for Mark. So he made many mistakes
and Segal defeated him in the first two sets with the scores of 6-2 and 6-3. Mark felt
desperate and went back to the locker room where there were many other white South
African players preparing for their own turns of matches. They smiled at him and said
encouraging words. In contrast, the black players laughed at him. He met several
American players who gave him advice and their addresses to write to them to their
former schools mentioning that he knew them. He returned home feeling totally
172
humiliated. Afterwards, one day he found a news item that he was banned from black
tennis for life. Owen Williams advised him to wait and see the end of the tournament.
On Tuesday, not feeling like going to Ellis Park, Mark kept wandering about the
tennis courts nearby where in one court; Stan Smith and Bob Lutz were practicing.
Smith attracted him much with his ease and grace in his movements in the game. Both
of them were great players and to watch them playing was a great exciting experience
for Mark. After the practice, Stan Smith smiled at him and asked whether Mark would
like to play with him. In fact Smith who was a Wimbledon champion was Mark’s
hero and role-model. They started playing and Smith taught him several things about
the game in an encouraging and friendly manner. Mark’s game seemed to have
improved. After a few hits were over, Smith’s wife, Marjory Gengler joined them.
She was a beautiful woman. They invited him to the Players’ Lounge. On the way,
because it was cold Smith gave his sweater to Mark to wear. Mark wanted to keep it
as a great memento in his life. On the way, on their request, Mark also told them
about his own story and the miserable conditions in which he was brought up and how
he practiced tennis. At the Lounge they treated him as their equal unlike South
African whites. Over snacks, Mark told them further the horrible conditions, constant
threat to life and useless Bantu education at schools and about the atrocities of
apartheid. He would have told them further about how blacks suffered in ghettos and
how the police and the soldiers harassed the blacks in the ghettos but, he didn’t do so
because he thought they would not believe him or they would have been upset. So
gentle was their behaviour and talk. Smith wanted to introduce Mark to his hosts, a
Christian couple, Agnes and Premer. As of Agne’s name sounded like Afrikaans,
Mark was doubtful about them, but Stan told her story of suffering at Nairobi in
Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising and how her parents were killed by the Mau Mau
revolutionaries, in spite of their sympathy for the movement. Mark was moved by her
story. Mark kept meeting Stan and Marjory till the last day of their return to America.
He requested Stan Smith and Marjory to help him to get a tennis scholarship so that
he would be able to travel to America for higher studies. They promised to help him,
but said that it would take quite some time. Stan said that Marjory and he would write
to Mark. Mark also told them that he had been banned from black tennis and therefore
his future plans of tennis in South Africa were very bleak. But there was a chance for
him to partake in the SAB open going to be started by Sugar Circuit. Then Stan talked
to Owen Williams and recommended Mark to enable him to participate in the
173
tournaments to be held at Port Elizabeth and Cape Town for which he would bear all
expenses of Mark’s. It would amount to six hundred (600) rands (or 500 dollars) a
fabulous amount as per Mark’s estimate. Stan also arranged for three Maxply rockets
and a dozen shorts and shirts from Abe Segal. Stan and his wife, despite their wish,
could not visit Mark’s house in Alexandra for want of permit as well as time. Though
Mark wanted to keep his prospective participation in tennis tournaments at Port
Elizabeth and Cape Town, as a secret, he could not do so when his mother questioned
him about the tennis clothes and tennis rackets. She felt very happy and both of them
prayed to God and thanked Him.
In this chapter the Narrative code carries out the function of narration of the
story, whereas the Cultural code depicts the politicization of black tennis in South
Africa as a result of which Mark is permanently banned from South African black
tennis. The Semic code describes the series of dilemmas faced by Mark before he
finally decides to enroll himself for the SAB Open, his participation and defeat by
Abe Segal, a former Wimbledon Champion, but the encouragement he receives from
the other white players. Especially his friendship with Stan Smith and his wife is a
turning point in his fortunes as Stan promises him to help him get admission into
some American University on the basis of his achievements both in studies and tennis.
Thus this chapter ends on a very optimistic note for Johannes alias Mark, the central
character and narrator of the story.

(pp.313-323)
This chapter continues the story of Mark in terms of some important events
like his trip to Port Elizabeth and Cape Town to participate in the tennis tournaments,
sponsored by Sugar Circuit with Stan Smith’s help, his experiences at the posh hotel
where he is given accommodation equal to that of white players’; the white players
mistaking him for a black American; his failure in the match at Port Elizabeth; his trip
to Cape Town, but his failure there also due to an accidental sprain of his ankle; his
successful conduct of tennis clinics at Guguletu and Nyanga, the ghettos of Cape
Town, the condition of apartheid in Pretoria being worse than that in Johannesburg ;
his return home and futile attempts to get membership in Wanderers Club, a white
tennis club ; and his dilemma whether to join a tribal university or wait for an
American tennis scholarship.
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That Stan Smith sponsored Mark to play in the Sugar Circuit tournaments at
Port Elizabeth and at Cape Town made a lot of blacks envious of him and they hated
him. Mr. Montesisi, of the Cue Promotions Office planned for his trip. Mark would
leave from Jans Smuts Airport of Johannesburg, stay at a hotel near the tennis courts
in Port Elizabeth and then at Cape Town he would stay at the home of a Trankeian
diplomat, about half a mile from the tennis courts.
Mark did not like the fake independence given to Transkei, the homeland of
Xhosas. Its independence is only name’s sake and no other country in the world
recognised it except Pretoria. Technically, there was no apartheid in this tiny country,
but in fact it was worse than in Johannesburg. Mark’s thought in this connection are
noteworthy:
Apartheid was purely and simply a scheme to perpetuate white

dominance, greed and privilege. Surely, there is no justification under
the sun for regarding a Chinese as a nonwhite and a Japanese as white,
a black living in Soweto or Alexandra as a native and a black from
America as an “honorary white”, and from Zambia or Zimbabwe as a
“foreign native”. (314)
On the plane which was his first experience in life, he watched the beautiful
landscape of South Africa. He was seated beside a middle aged white woman who
smiled at him. Suddenly, he wanted to go to the bathroom and with great difficulty,
and with the help of a stewardess he was able to find it and ease himself up. The white
woman asked him whether he was a tennis player and he said ‘yes’. They began
talking about tennis, because she was also a tennis lover and saw Wimbledon several
times. She wished him the best. After reaching Port Elizabeth, he was lodged along
with some other white players in a high-class hotel which charged 150 rands per
week. He was treated like a dignitary. Elderly waiters and waitresses called him ‘Sir’
and ‘Master’ in spite of his objection. He met many South African whites in the
dining hall and elsewhere in the hotel and all of them treated him as their equal. He
also played and practiced tennis with several white American players and befriended
them. But at the tournament he lost both in the singles and the doubles. He left for
Cape Town two days before the weekend. At Cape Town he was received by the
Trankeian diplomat and his wife. Their home was located in a beautiful place. Mark’s
description of Cape Town is interesting:
175
Cape Town was known as the home of the Coloureds and one of the
few places in South Africa where blacks were in a minority. Given its
long miscegenation history – began when Jan Van Riebeeck and his
men, the first whites to settle South Africa, arrived in 1652 without
wives – the city was purported to be a most liberal place. But the
liberalism, I soon found out, was skin-deep applying only between
Coloureds and whites: blacks were still throttled by the full apartheid
machinery. (318)
Mark wanted to play better in Cape Town but unfortunately when he was
jogging late in the evening, he stepped into a pothole and severely sprained his ankle.
Consequently, he lost his singles in the tournament and dropped out from the doubles.
He was very much disappointed and depressed. In order to compensate for his failure
he arranged for some tennis clinics in two ghettos of Cape Town, viz, Guguletu and
Nyango. The response and results were wonderful and the training camps (or clinics)
were a full success. The diplomat, his host, was a staunch opponent of apartheid and
took him to the Crossroads Squatters Camp which was much worse than Alexandra.
Consider the following words of the diplomat:
“Every single day “, the diplomat said, “these people have to wake up
at dawn, dismantle their shacks and hide them in the bush because the
authorities raid the place every morning with tear gas launchers,
bulldozers and crowbars. The authorities have decreed that Cross-
roads should go”. (319)
Explaining how, in Transkei, the blacks were unable to eke out a living, flocked to
cities, the narrator further adds:
The Pretoria government paid no attention to such facts in its

homeland nightmare. So black families were forcibly torn apart, with
men remaining in single-sex barracks to work in the cities, and women
and children deported to starve and suffer in homelands ruled by
Pretoria-anointed dictators whose brutality against their own kind often
surpassed that of the South African government.
The motive of apartheid was clear : divide and rule ; pit brother
against brother, sister against sister. (320)
176
After his return from Cape Town, Mark tried to join as a member in the
Wanderers Club, a white tennis club, but it was not possible. The Club’s President,
Mr. Fergerson, in spite of his personal willingness, could not give Mark membership
as it was against the Club Committee’s decision not to take blacks as members since it
would cost more money to equip them with separate showers, locker rooms,
restaurants and bathrooms as per the rules of apartheid. Mark could participate in their
tournaments, if he was willing to use the servants’ bathrooms and eat where they eat.
So, he couldn’t become a member in spite of the recommendations of Mr. Owen
Williams, the Director of SAB.
This helpless situation placed Mark in a dilemma, whether to pursue higher

education in a tribal university against his own wish or to wait for some good news
from America.
In this chapter, all the five Semiotic codes operate in a complementary way. If
the Narrative code takes care of the progression of events, the Cultural code describes
Mark’s first plane journey, the conditions in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town and his
final failure in the two tournaments along with the life conditions of the blacks in
Cape Town and as also his failure to obtain membership in the whites’ Wanderers
(Tennis) Club. The Semic code throws light on different characters including that of
the protagonist and the places he visits. The Symbolic code further reveals the atrocity
of apartheid in Cape Town while the Hermeneutic code finally depicts the
protagonist’s dilemma of what to do in future.
This chapter relates the subsequent events in the life of Mark, the narrator. The
events include his failure in the matriculation exam as he failed in Tsonga, his own
mother tongue, the later correction, the final result being second-class, an encouraging
letter to Mark’s from Stanley Smith, his mother’s advice to him to get a job; his
taking part in white tennis tournaments, his acquaintance with a white coach, Keith
Brebnor; his regular visits to Ellis’ Park every Saturday for tennis practice,
improvement of his game etc.
This chapter begins with the publication of matriculation results in the

newspaper, the World. Mark’s name was not there which meant he had failed. He was
shocked. His mother was also dismayed and said that there could have been a mistake.
177
The next day, he went to his school at Tembisa. Already there were many students
who had failed. A student shouted that the bloody Boers failed them deliberately.
Mark managed to meet the principal alone and the latter showed him the computer
printouts of the results sent from Pretoria. Mark got A’s and B’s in other subjects but
failed in Tsonga, his mother tongue. On the following day the principal wrote to the
Department of Bantu Education for clarification. In the mean time Mark could not eat,
sleep or play tennis because with his failure in matric he could neither join a tribal
university nor go to America. After a few days a reply came from the Department of
Bantu Education. Though he failed in Tsonga, in view of his good performance in the
other subjects, he was awarded a second class instead a third-class pass. This was a
slight consolation for Mark. The same week, he also received a letter from Stanley
Smith from America stating that George Toley, his own coach, accepted to write
Mark to participate in the NCAA tournament in America going to take place shortly.
This letter gave Mark a new hope and he wrote a reply to Stan. His mother asked him
about his taking up a job with Simba Chips Company. Mark said ‘No’, still hoping to
go to America. She insisted that he had to take up a job. As he had neither a pass nor a
work permit, to apply for a job, his mother advised him to try for a permit. But he
didn’t. He was jobless till February but continued playing and practicing tennis at the
ranch. Though he was not a member, the white club allowed him to participate in their
tournaments. In his practice he was lucky to receive training from Keith Brebnor, a so
senior and experienced coach that several who received coaching from him became
world class tennis stars. His practice for eight weeks under the coaching of Keither
Brebnor and his practice with the white players, he being the only black, proved to be
a highly rewarding experience for Mark. Keith encouraged him earnestly and advised
him not to stop playing and practicing. Many whites who were trained by Keith were
about to go to play junior tournaments in America and Europe. But the membership
fee was three hundred (300) rands which Mark did not have. Thus he missed that
chance.
In this chapter, as one can notice, the Narrative code operates via the
progression of events whereas the Cultural code reveals the surprising facts about
Bantu Education system and their gullibility in announcing the results of matric.
Mark’s is a case in point. If the Semic code throws light on characters, the Symbolic
code shows the negative attitude of the Boer education system against those who do
not learn local languages as per their expectations.
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(pp.328-345)
This is rather a lengthy chapter in which a number of events are narrated.

Mark is arrested for moving in the white neighbourhood; his interrogation by the
police, and his release being a student, his father’s anger, and his mother’s advice to
him to get a job; his increased sympathy for his mother who becomes a diabetic now ;
his getting a job at Barclay’s Bank on Andre’s recommendation as Andre’s father is a
member on the executive board of the Bank ; Mr. Bandridge’s, the personnel officer
of the Bank at its Johannesburg headquarters, liking for Marks for his good
performance in the interview; his appointment ; his bitter experience at the
government office to obtain a pass and permit, particularly the physical exam. The
entire process taking a full day ; his not getting any letter from America; his joining
the new job at Elloff Street branch of Barclay Bank ; his getting the first pay cheque
for 295 rands ; his buying a new suit for himself and new clothier for his siblings ; his
mother’s joy ; increase in his salary for his good performance ; his preference to stay
at Alexandra instead of Tembisa ; his continuation of tennis practice at Ellis Park ; his
meeting with a tennis star, Lennart Bergelin a white South African coach and also
with Gullermo Vilas another player and poet ; Marks participation in a Grand Prix
Tournament at Ellis Park ; his receiving two letters from America etc.
As hinted above, this passage marks the final turning point in Mark’s career.
He obtained a job in Barclays Bank with the help of his white friend, Andre and his
father, and received salary on a par with white and Indian employees in the Bank.
With his appointment, he also succeeded in getting a pass and work permit though
after long waiting and physical humiliation. He received his first salary of 295 rands
which was a fabulous amount for his family. He bought new clothes for himself and
for his brother and sisters. His mother was happy. He also got an increment of 40
more rands in recognition of his good performance. Though he became eligible to live
in a house at Tembisa, Mark preferred to live at Alexandra in order to continue his
tennis practice. He participated in a Grand Prix professional tournament at Ellis Park
and conducted a tennis clinic along with such white African tennis celebrities like
Lennart Bergelin and made friends with an Argentenian player, Guillermo Vilas who
was also a poet. Mark also had written some poems in English. They exchanged their
pleasure in poetry. After the tournament was over, Mark received two letters from
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America – one from George Toley and another from Dick Benjamin from Princeton
University. He replied to the Princeton University letter giving the necessary details
about his family, income etc. He also wrote a letter to Stan. But he kept everything
about his American information a secret for an obvious reason that the South African
government might thwart his attempts to go to America. A month later, he received a
letter from Princeton University that he would be given admission along with a
scholarship to meet all his expenses. He was asked to fill in an application form and
send it immediately. In June, Mark received another latter from America, from the
tennis coach of a Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina. The coach, Professor
Killion wrote this letter which was short. Mark was offered 6,000 U.S. dollars a year
as a tennis scholarship and advised to sign the contract form and send it back, and that
Mark had to be there by 18th September. Mark sent his letter of agreement signing the
contract. He shared his joy with his family first and later with Wilfred and Owen. All
were very happy. His mother warned him not to announce this news to all, and reveal
it to others only when he would be leaving. As there was still time for his departure,
he went to the US Consulate library and read books about American culture, society
and government. Particularly the Preamble of the American Constitution and
Declaration of Independence impressed him so greatly that he copied it several times
as if it were his Bible!
At the end of June, he received a package from Limestone College containing

a letter of admission, a letter from Bethel Baptist Church in Gaffney welcoming him
and another letter of congratulations from Professor Killion. Stan offered him help to
get a visa. Then accompanied by Mr. Montsisi, he went to the Department of the
Interior in Pretoria to apply for a passport. But their effort was in vain, the passport
was denied for the present as it would take a longer time to complete the official
procedure. Then, Stan suggested on phone to approach the American embassy for a
visa. After three days he obtained the visa and again went to the Department of the
Interior for a passport. This time the official asked Mark to deposit four hundred rands
for the passport and show the source of money for the plane ticket etc. Mr. Montsisi
said that they would be taken care of. For the four hundred rands Mark along with Mr.
Montsisi approached several members of the BTF board and others. Luckily one of
them who was a white multi-millionaire industrialist, Alf Chalmers, gave him 1200
rands which was adequate enough for the plane ticket as well as for the passport
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money. Mark obtained his passport in August. Then he quit his bank job and utilized
the remaining time for tennis practice and for preparations for his American trip.
In this chapter, the Narrative code takes care of the progression of the story
while the Cultural code describes the arrest and release of Mark by the police, his
getting a Bank job and his efforts for a pass and permit, his good salary and his
ultimate success in getting a pass. The Semic code throws light on the different
characters and places while the Symbolic code delineates how non-cooperative the
black and Afrikaans officials were in helping Mark as against his white friends and
well-wishers who helped him. The Hermeneutic code finally resolves the problems
faced by Mark in obtaining a visa and a passport and in buying the plane ticket with
the help of a white multi-millionaire industrialist on the board of BTF and his final
tennis practice and preparations for his flight to America. Thus Mark’s problems and
ambition which have been kept under suspense hitherto are resolved in this chapter in
terms of the Hermeneutic code.
This is the final chapter of Part Three as well of the novel. In this chapter the
realization of the protagonist’s dream to go to America is described.
On 16th September, 1978, the entire family of Mark’s woke up early in the
morning because it was the day of his departure to America. Mark completed his
eighteenth year and now he was going to his Promised Land. He was “the first black
boy ever to leave South Africa on a tennis scholarship”, an important link between his
country and the outside world. (346). The baggage was packed and ready. His going
to America on a tennis scholarship was almost a miracle. All the members of his
family were tense with anxiety, joy and sorrow. It was half-past five. He bade
farewell to his crying mother who assured him that her tears were those of joy. She
said:
“I’m very happy that God has given you this opportunity to make
something of yourself, of your life. Don’t waste it, child”. (346)
He promised her not to waste the opportunity. His brother George began
crying. Mark kissed each of his five sisters and they also began crying. He kissed his
father again and again and the old man advised him to take care of himself. His father
also shed tears, as he was his father after all, in spite of his differences with his son.
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Mark also shed tears. He promised them to write always as requested by his father.
His mother came to him and kissed him again and said:
“Wherever you go in this world, child, always believe in yourself.

Always have hope. Always have faith. Always believe in the power of
God and never forsake Him. Trust in Him, always, with all your heart
and all your strength, and He will guide you in all your ways. He made
it all happen”. (347)
The day was breaking outside the shack. Again Mark embraced and kissed his
brother and sisters who had been an integral part of his life. He shuddered about the
future of South Africa, of Alexandra and of his family because of apartheid and
whether his family would remain together before his return after four years.
Particularly his siblings were young and innocent liable to be subjected to a lot of
suffering and feared whether they would survive it. He remembered the happiest and
the most miserable times he had spent with them. He pondered over:
I felt the responsibilities piling on my conscience. By going to America

I felt that I owed the duty to my race and country to use my life in a
meaningful way, to see my success and failures as the successes and
failures of the black race. Would I, in whatever endeavours I ended up
undertaking in America, succeed, and would I do so nobly? (348)
He felt that he could never really leave South Africa and Alexandra as he was
part of South Africa described as “a tragically beautiful land” by Alan Paton. Then the
driver brought the car to take Mark to the airport. It was a small car and the driver-
cum-owner offered Mark a free ride. None of the members of his family could
accompany him to the airport. Therefore, his mother requested the car driver to see
her son off at the airport because her son was now “in God’s hands” (349). Again his
brother and sisters started crying. Holding back his own tears Mark consoled them
saying that he would be back in four years and would write to them and send
postcards of big cities in America. Inside, his heart, he was afraid whether his letters
would reach them because such letters used to disappear mysteriously in Alexandra.
So leaving everything to time, he hardened his own heart, kissed his brother and
sisters for a third time. His youngest sisters clung to him. His mother and Flora, the
eldest sister, took them away. He didn’t dare to kiss his mother for fear of enhancing
the sadness of the situation and looked at his brother who almost reminded himself at
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that age. He wanted to take him with him as he was worried about his brother’s future
in Alexandra. He advised him to be brave, have confidence in himself, to set goals
and work hard to achieve them, and to take care of their ailing mother, father and
sisters. Then he moved to the car and, got into it. When the car moved forward on the
rugged road he turned back to find his entire family standing in a row and sadly
waving their hands. Mark followed his destiny.
This is a very moving chapter that describes Mark’s parting with his family in
Alexandra and in South Africa. One can notice how, beside the Narrative code, the
Cultural and Semic codes are manipulated in the narration of events. If the Cultural
code reveals the distinct achievement of Mark the “Kaffir Boy”, who is now going to
America on a tennis scholarship, the Semic code holds mirror to the family affections
and bonds of love within the members of a family whether poor or rich, black or
white and so on. Apartheid way be a matter of South Africa, but love, separation,
sorrow and anguish about the unknown future – all are universal human sentiments. In
this way, the narrative ending acquires a universal appeal.
In this section on Kaffir Boy, it is noted how the Semiotic codes have operated
together to provide a unifying narrative thread to the novel which is purely realistic,
being an autobiography, in spite of the fact that the narrative is simply chronological
without twists or any other fictional techniques like flash-back or Magic Realism, it
makes a very interesting reading as a story thus proving Mark Mathabane to be one of
the best story tellers from South Africa, though it is his own story. Finally, one can
say that this novel is a best example of Realism in the genre of autobiography.
Nowhere does the reader feel bored, precisely because of this quality, during the
process of his reading. This aesthetic effect is largely due the convergent function of
the different Semiotic codes, excellently manipulated by the author, Mark Mathabane.
4.2. WAYS OF DYING BY ZAKES MDA
This novel was first published in 1991 by Oxford University Press, South
Africa, and its second edition in 1995 by Picador in New York. All the citations from
this text in this chapter refer to the second edition of 1995. It may be noted here,
however, it is considered chronologically an apartheid novel first published in 1991
whereas the system of apartheid came to an end in 1994 when South Africa attained
political independence under the leadership of Nelson Mandela.
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The text of this novel (1995) consists of ten chapters and runs into 212 pages.
It is the story of a black South African youth named, Toloki, and his village woman
Noria, both who left their village in rural South Africa and reached the capital city,
Johannesburg at different periods of time, either not aware of the departure of the
other.
The specialty of this novel is that it constitutes three major themes: first it
narrates the story of the two main characters that belonged chronologically to the last
phase of Apartheid in South Africa; second, the narrator of this novel is the collective
community voice which is omniscient and omnipresent; and third, the author employs
the new fictional technique of Magic Realism. Thus this novel has its own distinction
in comparison with the other novels under study in the present work.
4.2.1 A SYNOPSIS OF WAYS OF DYING
In a certain village in rural South Africa, during the last years of the
Apartheid, there lived some farmers in a small village. Jwara was a blacksmith and he
had a black and ugly looking son, Toloki. There was another prosperous farmer and
owner of cattle, by name Xesibe whose wife was known popularly as That Mountain
Woman since her native village was located in a far off mountain valley. She was a
tall and beautiful woman who was daring and modern in outlook. She also helped the
villagers by curing their illnesses by giving herbal medicines. They had a daughter
called Noria who was also very beautiful like her mother and additionally she had a
sweet voice, mesmerizing smiles and laughter. People used to gather around her,
make her laugh so that they would enjoy her enchanting laughter and song.
Toloki was sent to the village school when he was ten years old. Before that,
he used to help his father by taking cattle, (goats and sheep) to the fields as a shepherd
boy. Noria was also admitted in the village school. The school was a stone building
with iron sheets for roof and it also served as the village church during holy occasions
like Christmas, Sunday prayers and other festivals like baptism. The Principal of the
school also served as the priest. Toloki was senior to Noria by three years. It is
particularly interesting that Jwara loved Noria more than his own son because like
many other villagers, he was also enchanted by Noria’s smiles, laughter and song. He
made it his habit to work creatively in his smithy while Noria gave him company
laughing and singing in an enthralling manner. Gradually Jwara neglected his normal
work as a blacksmith and started making strange figurines with iron and brass under
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the spell of Noria’s wonderful singing. For this service, Jwara would buy her sweets,
chocolate and other gifts. Noria’s mother would feel proud of her daughter’s special
gift of entertaining people with her sweet and pleasing laughter and songs. When
Noria left the village school and joined the town school, even the bus drivers or mini-
taxi drivers would not charge her any fare as they loved her for her smiles and
laughter. Toloki continued his education at the village school. There was a love story
about Noria’s mother, That Mountain Woman, that when she went to her parental
village for delivery, a sexual relationship developed, by accident, between her and a
young handsome medical assistant at the government hospital in a nearby town where
she used to go for frequent medical check-up and for collecting the nutritious food
items given to pregnant women at the hospital. This happened when she was eight
months pregnant. One day the assistant came to her village receiving a fake message
from the village that she had a severe pain in the abdomen. He borrowed the Land
Rover Car of the hospital and reached her village. Sending out all women and men
from the house, he spent more than one hour with this woman. Obviously they were
enjoying sexual bouts. An old woman suspected something wrong and when her
father and others broke open the door, they found the two lovers naked. The medical
assistant was beaten black and blue, but a policeman appeared on the scene and saved
him from death stating that it was the duty of the police to punish anyone and not the
common public. After delivery, That Mountain Woman reached her husband’s village
with her pretty baby, Noria. Though the scandal reached her husband’s village, she
did not show any shame or regret and moreover, became more aggressive, and
dominated her husband. This was, perhaps, the reason that Toloki’s mother always
referred to Noria as that ‘stuck-up bitch’.
Toloki was a talented boy despite his ugly appearance, and one of his
drawings of the month of April won him a prize in the national art competition and a
copy of the calendar was kept in his classroom in his school. Strangely when he
showed a copy of the national calendar with his April month drawing to his father,
Jwara, the latter became furious and ordered him to throw it away. This incident
greatly dismayed Toloki. His father always considered him ugly and worthless. On
some other occasion, during Easter, Toloki unknowingly drank brandy with some
other village boys who stole it from the priest’s house, and were drinking it hiding
behind the church. Intoxicated by the brandy which he had tasted for the first time in
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life, Toloki went into the church, and started singing hymns wrongly and too loudly
for a long time and fell down unconscious on the floor. It was only the next morning
that he came back to senses and went home. His father, who came to know about this
shameless behaviour of his son, beat him up severely and kicked in his stomach such
that Toloki vomited blood. His mother became very angry but she was helpless before
the angry and aggressive mood of her husband. Feeling that he was alone and not
wanted by anyone in the world, Toloki left home deciding not to return to his village
as long as his father was alive. At that time he was hardly fifteen years old. He walked
and walked through many villages without food for many days. And one day when he
was almost exhausted and about to fall down on the road, a stranger helped him by
giving some bread to eat as Toloki would not accept any alms. This stranger helped
him to get a part-time job in a mill. There Toloki made friends with a fellow labourer
who gave him shelter in his small hut where he and his father were living. This friend
died accidentally when his white boss was experimenting shooting with his gun. For
the white man it was ‘a fun’ to shoot at black workers and kill them to satisfy his
sadistic pleasure. This incident made Toloki very sad and lonely and he left that
village and reached the city of (Johannesburg) on foot.
His journey on the road took him three months to reach the city. After
reaching the city, with great difficulty, he was able to find a job as a labourer at the
docklands in loading the ships. He started sleeping in a place near the toilets at the
railway station and thus the docklands became his residential ground for many years
to come. Even this temporary job at the harbour was lost and he became jobless again.
Luckily he had saved some money in the post-office with which he bought a cart-like
trolley in which he kept sliced bread rolls and other eatables and roasted the meet and
bread. He started a business of selling these eatables at a city centre and his business
prospered. He made many friends, both men and women with whom he moved,
drank, and spent time in the evenings. But unfortunately, one day his trolley was
stolen when he went to the butcher’s to buy meat. His business collapsed and all his
friends including the prostitutes, who had entertained him before, abandoned him.
Again he was jobless. Then he remembered that Nefolovhodwe, his father’s friend
and the poor carpenter in the village, had come long before to the city on Toloki’s
father’s advice and now he grew into a prosperous businessman making coffins of
different types and selling them. Hoping some help or employment from the
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carpenter, Toloki went to the carpenter’s house which was a big mansion. But to his
utter disappointment, Nefolovhodwe pretended not to have remembered either Jwara
or Toloki. On continued persuasion, he gave him a part-time job on a commission-
basis. Recently, the carpenter discovered that some thieves had been digging out his
coffins from graves after the funerals and selling them at cheaper rates and making
illegal money. Therefore, he appointed Toloki as a spy to catch hold of such coffin-
thieves at graveyards in the night time. The payment would be in the form of
commission, and not any regular salary. In this new job also Toloki failed because he
could not catch any such thieves. Even the three thieves, whom he confronted one
night at a posh cemetery, mercilessly beat him up unconscious. He came back to
senses the next morning, went to his employer and reported what had happened.
Nofolovhodwe became very angry and fired him from his part-time job. The carpenter
had a young wife that is his second wife in the city while his first wife and nine
children starved in the village. Luckily, this woman used to give Toloki some food to
eat whenever he visited their house. Toloki left the carpenter’s house stating that he
would pay back to the last cent which Nefolovhodwe had spent on him. The carpenter
laughed at him mockingly.
A few days before, Toloki was lucky enough to have built a shack for himself
along with a large number of homeless black people who against the law built shacks
on the outskirts of the city. Losing his job, Toloki returned to his shack and started
thinking seriously about his future. He starved for several days and spent sleepless
nights. Then a new idea occurred to him. If making and selling coffins which were
associated with death helped Nefolvolhodwe to become rich, why would the same
concept of death not help him? He wanted to start a new profession as a Professional
Mourner, the first of its kind in South Africa (and in Johannesburg).
It was in Johannesburg, in the funeral of a young boy, on the Christmas Day

that Toloki as a spectator saw Noria, nearly after twenty years. Her son was dead and
his funeral was being conducted by the residents of a shack-settlement. Normally,
funerals were not held on a Christmas Day, but on the insistence of Noria, the mother
of the deceased, it was conducted and this showed her great influence on the poor and
black residents of the settlement. The Nurse, who conducted the funeral, explained
that this boy was killed by his own black people. Toloki did not understand this.
When the funeral procession reached the main street, Noria sitting in a small van
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driven by Shadrack, a tiny man who was the owner-cum-driver of the van, a long and
grand marriage procession was moving from the opposite direction and both
processions stopped and neither would give way to the other. The drivers abused each
other and were about to come to blows. Then Toloki, in his costume of Professional
Mourner interfered with the result that the driver of the marriage procession gave way
not so much because of his respect for the Professional Mourner as because of the
nauseating smell emanating from Toloki’s body and costume. Then Noria wanted to
thank him and when he approached her, both of them recognized each other. Noria
asked him to join for food after the funeral arranged at the house of the squatter-camp
chairman. Toloki followed, washed his hand and left without eating any food. The
next day Toloki went to Noria’s shack in the squatter camp, one of its kinds which
rose up on the outskirts of the city against the wishes of the white Government of
South Africa.
Next, the story of Noria, as narrated by the collective community narrator’s

voice is as follows: As already mentioned above, Noria had grown into a beautiful
girl. Before that, when Noria was ten and Toloki was thirteen, as schoolmates, they
attended a funeral ceremony in their village for the first time. A girl of the school and
Noria’s best friend was shot dead in the city where they went to perform choir singing
at the funeral of their schoolmate, another girl, from the city who had been admitted
in the village school by her parents as they wanted that their daughter had to be
exposed to traditional education which was not offered in the city schools. This girl
used to commute between the village and the city. Suddenly she had caught
pneumonia and died. His funeral was to be held at the city churchyard. So, the village
school principal who was also the village priest took in a bus, a group of girls and
boys who had earned name as the best choir. This village choir performed excellently
at the school girl’s funeral in the city and this made the local choir extremely jealous
and angry. One of them who was crazy, opened fire. Unfortunately a girl in the village
choir and the best friend of Noria’s died. Strangely enough, a day before, this girl had
told Noria that she would die laughing shortly. Her premonition turned true, and her
dead body was brought to the village and her funeral was conducted by the school’s
principal who acted as the Nurse. This was an unforgettable and most sorrowful
memory for both Toloki and Noria.
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When Noria came of age, she looked most beautiful so that many young boys
wanted to marry her, but That Mountain Woman, Noria’s mother, had high plans for
her beautiful and fashionable daughter, i.e, Noria. In the mean time, a scrawny youth,
Napu by name, who would frequently saunter in front of Noria’s house was successful
in winning her love. Telling her mother that she was going to Jwara’s smithy to sing
for him, Noria would meet Napu in the bushes on the outskirts of the village where
they used to make love. The younger village boys who were mostly cowherds used to
watch the sexual intercourse of the two lovers, hiding behind bushes used to enjoy the
exciting spectacle. Once, Toloki also joined them, but his experience was different.
After watching the love-making of Noria and Napu, Toloki vomited. Subsequently,
Noria and Napu had a registered marriage in the town nearby much against the wishes
of Noria’s parents. Her father disapproved of their marriage since Napu had not paid
any ‘labola’ (i.e., the birde-money) as per their custom and his wife, That Mountain
Woman, also hated the marriage because Napu was neither handsome, nor rich.
Therefore, Noria left the village with her husband for the town where Napu had a
small job. She became pregnant and came back to her village for delivery. She bore
the child for fifteen months. When a boy baby was born, there was a serious dispute
about naming the child, but Napu, with his strange courage incited by alcohol,
succeeded in naming the boy Vutha after his own father. After a few days, when
Noria went with her son back to her husband’s house in the town, she found that Napu
had developed an illicit sexual relationship with a neighbouring woman. Angrily, she
returned to her parents in the village. Her mother received her with affection, while
her father hated her for this. After a few days Napu came to the village and begged
Noria’s parents to send his wife and son with him. Against the wishes of her mother,
and to the liking of her father, Noria left her village once again. Unfortunately, there
was no improvement in Napu’s behaviour as he was a ‘koata’ (i.e., an uncivilized and
uncultured person) as Noria’s mother used to call her father. Their financial situation
was deteriorating day by day. Noria wanted to educate Vutha and in two or three
years, Vutha had to be admitted in school. In the mean time, the town also had
developed extensions. So she wanted to get a job of a sweeper or maid in one of the
new government offices. But Napu would not agree to this. The next day Napu
returned home fully drunk and drove her away from his house. Spending the night in a
neighbour’s house, Noria returned to her native village next day along with her son.
But the situation at home had changed: her mother was hospitalized with cancer for
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which there was no cure in those days and her father was unwilling to let Noria live
under his roof. He clearly told her that he would not take the responsibility of Noria
and her son, nor would he feed them. Fortunately, Noria got the job of a sweeper in a
government office in the town. So, she would travel to the town early in the morning
and return home in the afternoon at 3 p.m. The taxi-drivers who had known her from
her childhood would allow her to travel free without charging her any fare. Once she
visited her mother in hospital. But her father at the village would not care for Noria’s
son or wouldn’t give any food to the boy. Vutha was playing with the other village
children in the mud. Noria was very much unhappy with her father’s irresponsibility
and son’s miserable life. One day it so happened that when Noria was about to serve
tea to her big bosses in her office, the big tray slipped from her hands so that the cups
and saucers were broken into pieces. Immediately, she was dismissed from her job. In
a depressed and dejected mood, she went to her mother in hospital and told her about
what had happened. Another female patient in the bed side by, listened to her story
and recommended Noria in her own place at the Bible Society where she herself had
been working but she couldn’t rejoin due to her serious illness. Thus, Noria joined the
Bible Society service as a sweeper. The other workers were also women and
Christian. They were kind to her. One of these women, though their salaries were low,
used to wear expensive dresses and lead a comfortable life. She had been working at
an expensive hotel at night. She introduced Noria also to the nightly job at the hotel.
Foreign tourists would stay in that hotel, would offer drinks, money and gifts.
Obviously this was a call-girl’s job. But Noria started earning more money. With this
money, she bought a new school uniform and shoes for her son and enrolled him at a
private school in the town. But she could not look after her son because during the
day time he was at school and in the night time, she was engaged in her job at the
expensive hotel. This made her unhappy and there was no help whatever coming forth
from her father. To solve this problem, she engaged a woman to cook food, feed and
look after Vutha in her father’s house during her own absence. Once she also visited
her mother in hospital along with her foreign friends. Her mother felt happy and
assured Noria that in a short time, she would return home and teach a lesson to her
father. When Vutha was in the second year of schooling, one day Noria returned
home and found that the woman who was looking after Vutha was crying because
Xesibe, Noria’s father, attempted to molest her. Therefore, that woman packed her
things and left. Once again Noria was in problems. So taking her son and her things in
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a suitcase, she left her father’s house and returned to her husband’s house in the town.
But now Napu was living with another woman. Noria, asserting her position as
Napu’s legal wife drove away that woman and started living there with her son. Napu,
feeling guilty, could not stop her. Nevertheless he used to threaten her when he was
drunk that he would run away with Vutha one day and teach her a lesson. They were
not on talking terms. As if to make his threat true, one day when she returned to her
shack, she found that Napu had run away with her son. She reported this to the police
to no avail. The police said that those days several children were missing and it was
not their duty to trace such children. Later, after many days Noria came to know from
a tactless customer at the shebeen where she helped the owner, that Napu made Vutha
a beggar boy and spent all the money given to Vutha as alms, drank and led a
wayward life. They used to live in a cardboard hut under a bridge outside the city.
One day, Vutha earned more money by begging. Napu took all that money, chained
Vutha to a pole and left. He went on a drinking spree for days and, when he returned
home, he found that Vutha died of starvation and stray dogs were feasting on his
corpse. Napu became semi-mad, went on running and finally he fell in the river and
was drowned to death. Noria left the town and reached the city of Johannesburg in a
desperate mood. She couldn’t find any job there, but in the squatter camp, an old
woman also a shebeen queen who had come to the city years ago from the same
village as Noria, gave her shelter in her shack as a token of her gratitude to Noria’s
mother who had cured her illness in the village years before. Though unemployed,
Noria was able to live comfortably by helping other settlers and doing them service in
need. She had acquired a shack of her own and cut all relations with men.
Nevertheless, she became pregnant again and after fifteen months, she delivered a boy
child and called him Vutha. She believed that the first son Vutha was reborn. The
neighbours called him Vutha The Second. This boy who was very active was killed
by the Young Tigers who were freedom fighters of the settlement, suspecting that he
along with another boy divulged their plan of ambush to attack the rally planned by
the migrant miners in the hostels, the followers of a wicked village chief and the
soldiers of Battalion 77, and thus turned traitors. That is, Noria’s second son and the
other boy who were black children were killed, having been set on fire by their own
black people called Young Tigers. It is this Second Vutha’s funeral that Toloki
attended as a spectator and not as a Professional Mourner, and met Noria nearly after
twenty years.
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The rest of the story deals with, Shadrack’s love for Noria and her rejection,
several funerals in which Toloki acts as a Professional Mourner. Noria’s admiration
for Toloki for his humanitarian and compassionate behaviour, Toloki’s leaving the
docklands to live in Noria’s shack and their liking for each other etc.
Toloki helped Noria in rebuilding her burnt shack and decorated it with
colourful pages from furniture catalogues and other pictures. They lived together
happily. One day Nefolovhodwe, the rich carpenter, came to Noria’s shack in his big
car and a truck. He told them that Jwara died a miserable death and his wife was now
living with Xesibe. This became a scandal in the village. He brought the iron and
brass figurines made by Jwara, Toloki’s father as per Jwara’s will. Jwara had haunted
the carpenter in dreams and threatened him with ruin unless he handed over the
figurines to his son as his legacy. Afraid of Jwara’s spirit how Nefolovhowde brought
all the figurines from late Jwara’s ruined smithy in a truck and dumped them beside
Noria’s shack. Toloki first refused to take them, but on Noria’s persuasion he allowed
the carpenter to leave the figurines there. These figurines in their odd, unearthly and
awkward shapes interested the children and the passers-by greatly. As per the
carpenter’s report an art dealer and the keeper of an archeological museum were
interested in buying these figurines. Toloki decided to sell them and donate the money
to the orphanage (i.e., the dumping ground) maintained by Madimbhazi where Noria
also worked for orphaned and handicapped children.
There are many sections in the novel which describe the travail and
tribulations as well as undeserving deaths of innocent and poor black people who
came to the city from villages in search of employment and who lived illegally in
squatter camps. They were killed by the police, by the wicked migrant miners from
the hostels, by the cruel gangsters on the streets, on trains and everywhere. These are
the several ways of dying. Nevertheless, Toloki and Noria who had also suffered in
life for a long time started a new life in Noria’s shack in the squatter camp on the eve
of the New Year’s Day. It is interesting to note that the narrative begins on a
Christmas Day and concludes on the New Year’s Day.
4.2.2 A SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF WAYS OF DYING
4.2.2.1 Chapter 1: Narrative, Semic, Cultural, Symbolic and Hermeneutic Codes

(pp. 7-24)
This novel narrates the story of Toloki and Noria young South African
villagers. Toloki leaves his native village at a very young age having been insulted by
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his father, Jwara, a blacksmith, and reaches the capital city of South Africa,
Johannesburg, travelling on foot for months together. On the way, he performs odd
and sundry jobs to make a humble living. Once he reaches the city, he meets a former
native of his own village, Nefolovhodwe, a furniture-maker who was a poor carpenter
in the village and who had left for the city on the advice of Toloki’s father, his well-
wisher and friend. Presently, this man has grown into a prosperous businessman
dealing in making and selling coffins of different sizes and prices. Toloki was of the
hope that being his father’s friend, this prosperous furniture-maker would be able to
provide a job for him. To his great disappointment, Nefolovhodwe pretended not to
have known Toloki or remembered Jwara, his erstwhile benefactor. Instead of helping
Toloki, he abused, insulted and drove him out of his mansion. Now Toloki is reduced
to almost a beggar and shelterless wanderer in the city. On Toloki’s serious thinking
for days of suffering and starvation, a new idea strikes him. If coffin-making business
which is associated with death enabled Nefolovhodwe to grow into a rich and
successful man, the same idea of death should help Toloki also. Therefore, he invents
a new profession, namely a Professional Mourner which has been unknown hitherto
in the city. Thus, Toloki becomes the first Professional Mourner of South Africa. He
also acquires a new type of costume for this new profession in a very ingenious
manner. Between two big restaurants there is a small garment shop which gives
different types of dresses and costumes on a rental basis. There Toloki finds a very
attractive outfit in the window which he thinks will suit his new profession quite
appropriately. But it is too expensive for him. Unable either to buy that dress or to
escape from its attraction, Toloki starts sitting on the pavement and looking at the
dress for the whole day, salivating with the gob of desire. The owners of the two
restaurants who served food to the customers in chairs arranged on the pavement
complained that this strange looking man with a leaking mouth was frightening their
customers. On enquiry, they found the reason for Toloki’s regular and repugment
appearance on the pavement. They made a compromise that they would buy him that
dress on their own if he promised them not to be present there forever in future. This
is how Toloki has acquired a strange-looking and odd outfit for his costume as a
Professional Mourner.
As a Professional Mourner, Toloki is able to earn some money that helps him
survive. The first chapter of this novel begins with Toloki attending the funeral of a
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young boy who was killed by his own countrymen, and not either by the police or the
government soldiers. The Nurse (i.e., the conductor of the funeral) explains to the
audience who has attended the funeral, the circumstances in which the boy was shot
to death by the black men who are fighting for freedom. This is unfortunate because
the regular killing of the black people by the police has itself been the worst
misfortune for the people of the squatter-camp (i.e., slum area inhabited by
unemployed black dwellers) this boy’s death by his own black people is the most
unfortunate event.
Toloki attends this funeral not as a professional mourner but as a spectator. He

has an inkling that the deceased boy’s mother looks like Noria, his village woman. So,
he pushes forward, but people object to his presence because they don’t need his
services as they cannot afford to pay him. When he moves close to the people, they
feel nauseated at the bad odour emanating from his body, his mouth and also from his
old costume. He does not bathe every day, while the kind of food he consumes makes
his mouth and breathe release a bad smell in conjunction with the dirty smell of his
unwashed costume. After the Nurse’s speech, the funeral procession, an old van in
which the deceased boy’s mother sits and other people walking on foot, leaves the
church and reaches the main street, a marriage procession in several decorated cars is
also in progress from the opposite direction. The two processions stop and there is a
traffic jam followed by a confrontation between the two drivers. The van driver is a
tiny man while the car driver is a huge person. When the quarrel assumes a serious
proportion, Toloki marches forward and talks to the car driver. Immediately the car
driver stops his cars and gives way to the funeral procession. The narrator(s) tell the
reader in a humorous vein, that the car driver changed his mind not so much by the
reverence evoked by Toloki’s costume as by the foul smell spreading from Toloki’s
body and mouth. Then, the people around him, particularly the deceased boy’s
mother, thank him for his intervention and peaceful resolution of the tangle. As
expected by Toloki, the boy’s mother is no other than Noria, his village woman, who
is still beautiful in spite of being thirty-five years of age. Toloki recalls that she left
their village twenty years ago when she was fifteen. He was three years older than
her. That is Toloki is thirty-eight years old now. Noria invites him to her shack in the
squatter camp where there will be customary washing of hands and food arranged by
the squatter camp committee after the funeral. Toloki decides just to visit her place,
wash his hands and leave without taking any food.
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This is the very first chapter of the novel which reveals the operation of almost
all the five codes. The Narrative code operates by inaugurating the narrative process
which describes the funeral of a boy who died at a very young age, on a Christmas
Day. If the funeral is covered by the Cultural code through the explanatory funeral
speech of the Nurse, the Semic code operates in the description of the scene while the
Symbolic code reveals the alteration between the van driver and the driver of the first
car in the marriage procession. The Hermeneutic code introduces Toloki’s suspense
about the deceased boy’s mother and the later revelation that it is Noria, Toloki’s
childhood friend and his village woman.
4.2.2.2 Chapter 2: Narrative, Cultural, Semic and Symbolic Codes (pp.25-49)
Now the community-voice narrator tells the story of Noria and Toloki in their
village through the sensibility of Toloki’s memories. Noria as a girl was very
beautiful and people who observed her laughing would feel enchanted and would not
leave her. The village was a small hamlet with huts like hovels in which poor families
of farmers lived. Only a few of the houses were white-washed or decorated outside
with geometric patterns of red, yellow, blue and white colours. His father had three
huts and a homestead stone building with four walls and a tin roof which was his
workshop. His father, Jwara, was a blacksmith with a towering handsome personality.
Some days he was engaged in creating figurines of iron and brass while Noria gave
him company singing with her melodious voice which seemed to have been inspiring
Jwara in his creative work. On such days Toloki was not allowed to enter the
workshop. Toloki’s mother used to shout at Jwara for wasting his time with Noria
who, according to her, was a stuck-up bitch though she was only seven years old.
Even Noria’s father, Xesibe, another prosperous farmer in the village did not like his
daughter to spend long hours in Jwara’s workshop. But his wife known to the people
as That Mountain Woman liked the idea of her daughter’s ability to inspire the
process of creation and abused Xesibe for interfering in this process. For Toloki’s
mother Noria was always a stuck-up bitch. When Noria was five, and Toloki was
eight, they used to play silly games outside the workshop. In fact Jwara used to shoe
the policeman’s horses and in the evening time he joined his friends like Xesibe and
Nefolvhodwe. It was rumoured that as a baby Noria had a beautiful laughter. Her
mother came from a village among the mountains and she was tall and beautiful. She
also helped the villagers by giving different curative herbs and medicines to people
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who fell ill. Whenever Jwara bought sweets and chocolates for Noria her father was
angry while her mother was so happy that she used to abuse him publicly even in
front his friends. The villagers were afraid of her sharp tongue. It was the traditional
custom that a newly married woman should give birth to her first child among her
own people. Thus when she was pregnant, she travelled to her mountain village where
in a town nearby there was a government clinic in which she was examined every
mouth by the nurses and given free powdered milk, cooking oil and oat-meal. But
these edible materials would last for a few days as the entire family used to consume
them though they were intended for their daughter. This forced her to visit the clinic
more frequently in the pretext of medical examination for some sort of illness or the
other. She rode on her father’s horse to the clinic in a valley over the hills in spite of
being eight months pregnant. On one day it so happened that when she entered the
examination room and lay on the bed stripped naked, a male health assistant came in
and unexpectedly made love with her physically. As he was handsome, she also
enjoyed the intercourse. To meet again they made a plan. A few days after return to
her place, she was attacked by strange pains in her stomach and a horseman was sent
to fetch the doctor. The same young health assistant, who had been waiting for such a
call from her, readily came in a Land Rover car borrowed from his officers and
reached the village and entered the room and examined her belly. He sent away all the
people outside and closed the door. People were happy at the kind gesture of the
health assistant. But the door was not opened for an hour which made an old woman
suspect something fishy. The pregnant woman’s father kicked the door open only to
find her daughter and the doctor naked. The latter was kicked out in spite of his
protest that he was using a new method of treatment. He would have been killed but
for the policemen took him away stating that it was their duty and not the villagers’ to
punish him. Six months later That Mountain Woman returned to her husband’s
village with baby Noria on her back. The story of her scandal had reached her village
before she did. But she had no sense of shame whatever. It was generally believed
that Noria took after the handsome doctor and therefore she was beautiful.
Toloki attended a funeral when he was thirteen and Noria was ten. The
Principal of village primary school where Toloki studied was the Nurse (that is, the
conductor of the funeral). A schoolmate of Noria had died a painful death of the gun.
This happened in the following manner. The school choir was known for their best
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performance and they were invited to take part in the funeral of another school girl
from the city who had joined the village school because her parents wanted her to be
trained at the village school which was peaceful and imparted traditional education
also. But unfortunately she had caught pneumonia and died. Her funeral was being
held at the city. The Principal and the select group of the Church Choir pupils in
which Noria and her friend also were members, travelled to the city in an old bus
which commuted between the city and the village. Toloki also was interested in going
to the city but his father ordered him not to go. At the city the Principal was the
conductor and, the choir of the children sang at the funeral of the deceased
schoolmate. The city people greatly appreciated their singing. Unfortunately some of
the city youngsters, also members of the local choir, did not like this particularly
when an employee from the radio station offered to record the village choir’s singing
and suddenly one angry man stood up with his gun and opened fire at the village choir
and by accident Noria’s friend was shot dead. She died laughing as she had predicted
before her death as if she had a premonition of her untimely death. This girl’s funeral
was held at the village and was conducted by the Principal of the school. It was a
magic moment for Toloki to listen to the words of the Principal who was transformed
into a different person in contrast with his stern behaviour as Principal of the school.
Now Toloki takes a taxi and reaches Noria’s squatter camp. He was
wondering how her son was killed. It has been a wicked practice of the police to shoot
at black innocent children for fun. When it was complained at the police station they
would say that children were missing everyday and there was nothing they could do
about that. There was a crazy multi-killer who, preyed on defenseless children in the
townships. His victims ranged in age from two to six years and their sex organs were
mutilated. The squatter community concluded that it was not the multi-killer who was
responsible for the death of Noria’s son. When Toloki reaches the squatter camp he
presents himself as such a strange spectacle that the dirty children and many mongrels
follow him, the former laughing at the him and the latter sniffing and barking at him
all the time. Ignoring them all, he enquires for the shack of Noria, and reaches Noria’s
shack.
In this chapter four Semiotic codes, viz. Narrative, Cultural, Semic and
Symbolic codes play an active role. The Cultural and Semic codes account,
respectively for the socio-cultural details of the life in the village while the Semic
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code introduces the important characters and the Symbolic code reveals the facts
relating to the funerals of the two girls and the dual role played by the Principal as
head of the school and also as a Nurse at the funerals. These funerals are part of the
flash-back. This chapter also describes the first and close meeting of the two major
characters, viz. Toloki and Noria after gap of twenty years.
4.2.2.3 Chapter 3: Narrative, Semic, Cultural, Symbolic and Hermeneutics Codes

(pp.50-66)
Hearing the noise outside, Noria comes out and drives away the children and
the dogs. He gives her zinnias, a type of flowers, and she smiles. He feels proud that
he has made Noria smile. He recalls an incident in his village years ago when people
surrounded Noria admiringly when she laughed and they made her laugh more. When
he joined the crowd, the others drove him away calling him an ugly boy whose
presence would stop Noria’s laughing and spoil their enjoyment. But today, on this
Boxing Day, he is able to paint a smile on Noria’s sad face. She thanks him for the
flowers and he regrets that he could not spray perfume on them as he left the perfume
at his headquarters which is a place on the sea-shore at the docklands public toilet. He
has an old trolley in which he keeps a few other things of his, like an old blanket and a
single dress which he wears at home. When he goes outside generally, he wears his
professional costume which is also becoming pretty old. Noria’s shack was petrol-
bombed after they killed her son. Therefore, it has to be rebuilt again. She touches his
hand causing a strange stir in him but he has been away from female association for
so many years that he doesn’t understand whether his present feeling is pity or love
for beautiful Noria. Years ago, when he was living near the seashore observing the
sailors, he happened to get some pages of a pamphlet from a pink-robed devotee
getting off from a boat returning from the east. On reading the pamphlet Toloki
developed a great fascination for the life of oriental monks, particularly the way of
life of the aghori sadhus who were greatly revered by the devout Hindus. An aghori
sadhu, to Toloki’s knowledge, “spends his sparse existence on the cremation ground,
cooks his food on the fires of a funeral pyre and feeds on human waste and human
corpses. He drinks his own urine to quench his thirst. The only detail missing is a
mendicant’s bowl made from a human skull for he shuns the collection of alms”(15).
The aghori sadhu, avoids any relationship with women and observes strict celibacy.
Toloki has been inspired by this information and seems to have taken the aghori sadhu
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for his role model. Prior to this he had some accidental affairs with women who were
mostly prostitutes. Since he has taken up his new job of Professional Mourner he has
avoided women. He offers Noria to help her rebuild her home, saying that there is a
lot of material like plastic and canvas and sheets of corrugated iron at the docklands
lying waste which would be useful for rebuilding her shack. But bringing them from
the docklands to the squatter camp will be a problem. Noria has a friend, Shadrack by
name in the neighbourhood, who runs an unlicensed grocery shop in a shipping
container in his yard. He also runs a van for bringing commuters to and from the city
and the settlement. Thus, the three of them travel in Shadrack’s van to the docklands
and bring the material thrown there as a waste. Shadrack does not accept any
remuneration because he loves Noria secretly. Unfortunately, his own son was also
abducted and killed by migrants from the hostels. The miners who came from a group
of villages have been patronized by a wicked and most selfish village chief who
supplied them with country rifles in order to establish his monopoly of rule not only
in his village but also in nearly twenty surrounding hamlets and villages. These
migrant miners are very cruel and are used to shoot their own black brothers without
any discrimination. There is a rumour that they are also supported by the police in the
city.
Now, it being a full-moon night, both Toloki and Noria successfully build a
really elegant shack much better than the one Noria had before. They work throughout
the night and by the morning; there is a new and beautiful shack for Noria. She thanks
him earnestly and on Toloki’s enquiry informs him that her son’s funeral was held in
the house of the street committee’s chairman. In turn, she asks him how he left their
village. He tells her that his father beat him up one day, so he ran away from home
and vowed never to return while his father was alive. He had no money and walked
all the way from the village to the city. It was a long journey that took him three
months. On the way he passed through a lot of suffering and starvation but avoided
begging. With the help of a passer-by who gave him some food when Toloki refused
to take alms from him, Toloki gets a job at a milling company. He makes friends with
another fellow worker who gives Toloki shelter in his own small house where he was
living with his old father. Unfortunately this friend was shot dead by another white
friend who played fire tricks and called it a game which led to the young man’s death.
His old father in spite of his misfortune and helpless condition, offers to give Toloki
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some money which the latter refuses to take. On the way Toloki passes through
several villages taking part-time jobs with farmers when he ran out of money. Almost
in every village, he witnessed deaths and funerals taking place as a result of the unruly
gangsters who used to rape maidens, rob and murder defenseless community
members. Even the police were unable to take any action against these gangsters.
Thus, people in these villages looked like walking corpses. At the end of three months
after leaving his village, Toloki finally reached the city.
In this chapter Narrative, Semic, Cultural, Symbolic and Hermeneutic codes

operate. In the Narrative code, the flash-back technique is employed while the
Cultural code reveals Toloki’s artistic talents as a boy as well as his wonderful help to
Noria in rebuilding her burnt shack in an artistic manner. The Semic code reveals how
the neighbouring children and women help Noria in reorganising herself into normal
life after her shack was completely burnt down to ashes. The Symbolic code shows,
how the black people themselves attack and kill their fellow blacks in the squatter
camp. The Hermeneutic code takes care of the suspense about the relationship
between Toloki and Noria.
4.2.2.4 Chapter 4: Narrative, Cultural, Semic and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.67-98)
Noria and Toloki are very happy at their singular achievement and the
neighbours also appreciate their work. Noria reminds Toloki that he was a talented
artist in his school days and one of his colourful drawings of the month of April for
the national calendar brought him a prize in the national art competition. That April
calendar is still kept in his school. As a boy, he used to make beautiful figures, of
different animals like cows, horses, sheep etc. But Jwara, his father, was very angry
and ordered that the ugly calendar not to be brought into his house. Noria remembered
this while Toloki has completely forgotten about his juvenile artistic talent. Now he
recalls this information gladly. Even his mother used to say that Toloki’s drawings
were much more beautiful than the stupid images made by her husband in his
blacksmithy. Now the neighbouring women and the children help Noria to bring her
shack into shape. The children bring water while the neighbouring women have
brought household items like pots, a primus stove, a washing basin, a plastic bucket, a
plate, a spoon and two grey blankets and a pillow. One neighbor has brought a
billycan of soft porridge with steamed bread. They say they are lending these things to
Noria and she can use them till her position improves. Shadrack also comes there and
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appreciates their work. He tells Noria that he wants to return all the money she paid
him for petrol. When asked for the reason, he expresses his dying passion for her and
requests her to marry him as he is the richest of all the black people in the township.
Noria gently declines his offer and he leaves away in shame. There is some unknown
satisfaction in Toloki’s eyes. Noria tells Toloki also that she is going to pay him back
every cent he has helped her with. Toloki feels that this is a Noria different from the
young beautiful girl Noria in the village who would accept all kinds of gifts not only
from his father Jwara, but also from bus drivers and mini-taxi drivers who were
always ready to give her free rides from the village and the town, to and fro.
The narrator, i.e., the collective community narrative voice, tells us the story
of Noria when she came off age. Young boys were greatly attracted by her beautiful
appearance, sweet voice, elegant dresses and friendly behaviour. Particularly there
was a young man, Napu by name, who used to come and saunter in front of Noria’s
house as he had fallen in love with her. He was working in a general construction
dealers’ store in a village nearby. That Mountain Woman, Noria’s mother, who had
high plans for Noria’s future that her daughter to be married to a teacher or a highly
educated person did not like Napu’s proposal. But they used to meet very often in the
bushes on the outskirts of the village and make love there. The village herd-boys
would follow them secretly and enjoyed watching the love escapades of Noria and
Napu. On such occasions Noria would tell her parents that she was going to Jwara to
sing for him. Finally Napu and Noria were married much against the wishes of that
Mountain Woman and Xesibe because Napu was not able to pay any lobola (i.e, bride
money). After a short while, Noria ran away with Napu and they had a government
registered marriage. Napu’s village was situated in a far mountainous valley where he
lived with his grandmother, who was dependent upon him for livelihood. He left
Noria with his grandmother and went to the village where he was working. He used to
send them money for maintenance. This old woman did not like Noria and always ill-
treated her. Napu was coming home frequently and in the course of time, Noria
became pregnant. Napu’s grandmother, with the help of an old man who was a distant
relative attempted abortion to Noria by giving her certain herbal medicines forcefully
such that when Napu returned home next time, Noria followed him to the town
without staying along with his grandmother. At the town it had taken a long period for
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Noria to deliver the baby which caused great concern for both of them. They visited
witch doctors and other medicine men to no avail. In the process Napu had spent a lot
of money. It was after fifteen months of pregnancy that Noria gave birth to a male
baby in her parental house. There was a lot of debate and disagreement about naming
the boy. If That Mountain Woman wanted the boy to be names as Jealous Down,
Napu wanted to call his son Vutha after the name of his father, while Xesibe thought
the best name for the boy would Mistake. Napu succeeded in confronting his mother-
in-law with the additional courage he acquired on consuming alcohol, and finally the
boy was named Vutha. Noria followed her husband with her son to the town where
they lived in a shack. To her dismay, Noria found that Napu had illicit sexual relation
with a neighbouring woman and after an angry quarrel she returned to her parents’
house in the villager. Her mother was very sympathetic whereas her father was very
angry with her. Unfortunately Noria’s mother fell ill and was admitted in hospital for
treatment of cancer. It was ironical that this woman who used to cure many ills of the
villagers with her herbal medicines was attacked by cancer for which there was no
treatment in those days. Now she was on bed in hospital. Consequently, Noria’s life in
her father’s house became miserable. Her father clearly told her that he would not
spend even a single cent on her son and that she should maintain her own family.
Noria was forced to seek the job of a servant-maid in an office in the town nearby. As
the bus drivers knew her from childhood and liked her, they did not charge her any
fare for her daily travel to the down. Still misfortune did not leave her because one
day, while serving tea to the bosses in a tray, the tray slipped from her hand and fell
on the floor and was broken. Immediately, she was fired. Luckily on one of her visits
to her mother in hospital, a neighbouring woman patient recommended her for
another job in a church. Here, her colleagues were kind. One of the sisters there
introduced her into a part-time job at night in an expensive hotel. At that time Noria
was facing great financial difficulties and also she wanted to put her son in a good
school in the town. In this respect she was like her mother who had aspired Noria to
be highly educated. To meet the expenditure of her son’s education, which was costly,
Noria accepted this part-time job. Foreigners would stay in the hotel, and offer her
drinks and money. Perhaps there was also an element of sex in her job for she was
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beautiful and attractive. But she continued to work in the hotel, killing her conscience
for the future of her son, such that she gave up the small job at the Church and
accepted this part-time job as a full-time occupation. As her father was not caring for
her son, she engaged a woman to look after her son’s needs during her absence at
home because her new profession at the hotel called only for her night services. A few
days passed happily with this arrangement. One day the woman engaged for Noria’s
son’s services expressed her sudden decision to leave because the previous night
Noria’s father crept into her bed and tried to molest her. Therefore she left. When
Noria asked her father about his misbehaviour he became enraged and ordered her to
leave his house. Once again Noria with her son was on the street. She went back to
the town to her husband’s house, who was living with a new woman. Noria drove her
away and started living there whereas her husband who was feeling guilty could not
stop her. Noria and Napu stopped talking to each other. He used to threaten her in his
drunken moments that one day he would kidnap Vutha and run away with him to a
place where Noria would never find them. After a few days, Napu virtually put his
threat into practice and disappeared with Vutha. Noria made all efforts including a
police complaint about disappearance of her son but nothing happened. Somehow, she
had a faith that one day her son would return to her. Then she left the town for the city
to start a new life.
Stories of past memory are painful and now Toloki and Noria talk about them
and laugh. In this context the narrator says, “Laughter is known to heal even the
deepest of wounds” (95). When Toloki wants to go home, both of them walk together
to the taxi-stand. On being questioned by Noria why he prefers the taxi to the train
which is much cheaper in fare, Toloki replies that he doesn’t want to get killed on the
train. Everyday people are killed on the trains. In this connection, Noria tells him a
story how a resident of the squatter camp narrowly escaped death in the hands of a
group of migrant gangsters, losing one of his eyes, while Toloki tells her another story
of the same kind of cruelty, how when a couple boarded the train with a one-day-old
baby, a group of gangsters walked into the carriage, forcefully carried the woman
throwing away her husband and the baby not caring for the couples’ repeated begging
and pleas. No single one of the passengers raised their fingers to stop the gangsters
from their atrocity. The gangsters gang- raped her and cut her throat. Toloki knows
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this story because he mourned at her funeral. Before Toloki leaves, Noria advises him
to take a bath.
This chapter is a ground wherein the Narrative, Cultural, Semic and

Hermeneutic codes operate. The Cultural code continues further showing the help
extended to Noria by her neighbours. The Narrative code takes care of the progression
of the narrative process while the Semic code describes the spatio-temporal
dimensions. Finally the Hermeneutic code exposes Shadrack’s love for Noria to
which she responds in a negative manner. The important technique of flash-back is
employed in the Narrative code through which is narrated the past life and story of
Noria. Here, there is an element of Magic Realism when we are told that Noria was
pregnant for fifteen months before she gave birth to her first son Vutha.
4.2.2.5 Chapter 5: Narrative, Cultural, Semic, Symbolic and Hermeneutic Codes

(pp. 99-115)
Toloki wakes up early in the morning and takes a bath at the beach. He is very
happy. A policeman orders him out of the beach because of his indecent dress. The
night before he received a note left on his trolley asking him to mourn at a mass
funeral of five people. He returns to the city, goes to the furniture store and collects
many catalogues which are freely given and at a newspaper stall he buys ten back
issues of Home and Garden magazine at a cheaper price. Then he also buys some
cakes and his favourite Swiss roll and some green onions. When he is in taxi, now,
people don’t cover their noses because he does not smell foul due to his bath.
Now the community narrative voice describes the circumstances in which

Jwara, Toloki’s father, died. In the past, when Noria was in the village, she used to
sing for him under the spell and inspiration of which Jwara would create odd-looking
figurines of iron and brass. But now there was no Noria who had left the village for
the town along with her husband. When Noria was there in the village, Toloki’s life
was a hell because her father would also compare his ugliness with Noria’s beauty,
and beat him. At the Easter time, an unfortunate incident took place to further worsen
Toloki’s relationship with his father. It so happened that Toloki joined some
mischievous boys who were drinking stolen brandy sitting behind the Church. Not
used to drink, Toloki in a tipped condition went into the Church and overacted by
dancing and shouting ‘Hallelujah’ on the stage. Then he fell down in a drunken
stupor. He woke up the next morning and went home. By then his father came to
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know about his misbehaviour and kicked him in the stomach repeatedly till Toloki
vomited blood. This contrast in Jwara’s behaviour towards his own son and Noria, a
girl from another family made Toloki hate Noria as well as his father for life. Toloki
and other children also used to make fun of the self-styled Archbishop of the village
and misbehave with him and his devotees on special days such as Easter and baptism,
by pelting stones at them. When this was reported to Jwara the latter laughed it out
because he was in a good mood perhaps in the company of Noria and also because he
hated Christianity.
Presently, Toloki arrives at Noria’s shack in the settlement and tells her that
both of them will plaster the pictures from the magazines and catalogues on to the
walls later. Now he has to attend a mass funeral. Noria also accompanies him. At the
cemetery, Toloki sits on one of the five mounds and groans and wails and produces
other new sounds that he has recently invented, particularly for mass funerals with
political overtones. These five people, brothers and sisters died over a tin of beef
which caused violence - according to the explanatory lamentation of the Nurse. After
the funeral service a woman pays him some money in the form of bank notes for his
excellent performance that reminded her of the traditions of olden times. Toloki and
Noria return to the settlement. At the this juncture, the narrator tells the reader how
Jwara died and was buried. Toloki comes to know about this later from
Nefolovhodwe.
After Noria had left the village, Jwara completely stopped his occupational
smithy work, sat in the smithy for days together without eating food and drinking
water. His wife lost hopes about him and got a job of washing for the manager of a
store in order to earn a living. After some days, some people wanted to buy the black
smithy equipment because Jwara was no longer using them. When they opened the
door of the workshop they found Jwara dead. In front of him there was a piece of
paper, perhaps, his will, on which he had written that he was bequeathing all his
figurines to Toloki, his only son. He had signed the paper which surprised people who
never knew that he was so literate to write the will and sign it.
Now at Noria’s shack Toloki makes a paste with the flour and sugar he has
brought and plasters the pictures from the magazines and catalogues on to the walls.
These include the pictures of ideal kitchens, lounges, dining rooms, bed rooms,
houses, gardens and swimming pools. Thus the shack becomes filled with wallpaper
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of luxury. Then Toloki takes Noria’s hand and both of them stroll through the
grandeur of imaginary bedrooms, gardens, swimming pools, music rooms etc. This is
really an illusionary feast and emotional luxury for both of them. After enjoying their
pleasant strolls in such a grand mansion, they sit for their meal. He offers a variety of
cakes to Noria and he takes only Swiss roll and green onions for himself. When she
expresses her surprise at his meager meal, Toloki explains to her that he takes limited
food because he is austere like the monks from far away mountain monasteries,
particularly the aghori sadhus. After sometime, Noria suggests that they both can live
together in her shack as home boy, and home girl. Toloki disagrees to this proposal
because he prefers to live a lonely life and Death has become a part him and his
profession. Noria promises that she will not interfere with his profession and after her
repeated persuasion, intoxicated by her sweet voice, Toloki agrees to live with her.
In this chapter, all the five semiotic codes function together. If the Narrative
code takes care of the progression of events like Toloki’s going to Noria’s shack
taking some picture papers from magazines and furniture catalogues, in the present,
Jwara’s punishment of Toloki for the latter’s misbehaviour at the church in the past
and again in the present, Toloki and Noria taking food at Noria’s shack and finally
Toloki’s acceptance of live in Noria’s shack as the she requests him. It is notice that,
as in several other chapters in the novel, the Narrative code employs the flash-back
technique so that the narrative process alternates between the present and the past.
The Semic code reveals the nature of the major characters like Jwara, Toloki and
Noria. Toloki and Noria start taking interest in each other. The Cultural code shows
how the villagers like Jwara did not like the spread of Christianity because they
preferred to follow their tribal traditions. This overlaps with the Symbolic code which
reveals that implicitly there is a rivalry between Christianity and the tribal religion.
The Hermeneutic code operates by creating suspense about the relation between
Toloki and Noria as man and woman, because Toloki, like a monk avoids women and
Noria openly says that she does not take anything from the men.
4.2.2.6 Chapter 6: Narrative, Semic, Cultural and Symbolic Codes (pp.116-139)
That night at the docklands, Toloki has nightmares and mutters Noria’s name.
A drunken man sitting nearby laughs at him and tells him not to disturb others’ sleep.
Toloki also blames him for spoiling the place with his frequent farting. Disgusted with
the drunks’ laughing Toloki leaves the docklands with his belongings like his
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shopping cart (i.e., a trolley). He walks throughout the night and when he reaches the
neighbourhood of the settlement, the Young Tigers who are on patrol stop him but
leave him without any harm because he looks innocent. When he reaches Noria’s
shack, she is already up for going to help Madimbhaza who takes care of many
orphan and physically handicapped children. After Noria leaves, he spreads his
blanket and lies on it. Unable to sleep, he remembers his first shack in another
settlement. Eighteen years ago, when he first came to the city, he joined homeless
people who defiantly built their shacks in an open land against the wishes of the
government. Prior to that he had nowhere to stay and not have any job. Having heard
something about the stories of sea adventures, Toloki wanted to go to the ships and
with some difficulty got part-time jobs of loading ships. He slept at the docklands or
on a bench at the railway station and washed himself in public toilets. He led a
wayward life along with his docklands labourer-friends, visited women and joined
drinking parties. It was at that time he heard about the building of shanty towns
illegally by village people and in the process, he joined a group of people who built
their shacks on the outskirts of the city. Thus he got a house of his own, which he
decorated with newspapers and magazine sheets. Sometimes state-paid vigilantes
would set some of the shanties on fire but the residents rebuilt new shacks within no
time. After one year, for part-time jobs at the harbor, it became difficult to get work
there due to increasing competition. Luckily Toloki had saved some money and with
that he obtained a hawkers’ permit from the city council, bought himself a trolley for
grilling meat and boerewors. His four-wheeled trolley was like a cart with a canvass
cover and three small trays in which he put mustard, tomato sauce and bread rolls
along with mealie-pop. He conducted the trade of selling spiced steak and other food
items which attracted drunken customers to his street shop and he made a lot of
money. People were more honest in those days and also his was a new business
without much of competition. He used to keep his trolley in a shop nearby for a
nominal rent and in the night time he would return to his shack. In those days he wore
white overalls and an apron. One day, when he went to fetch some meat from the
butchery, his cart was stolen. He reported the matter to the officer in the informal
trading department, to no avail. Now, he was reduced to cooking boerewors on a
small gas cylinder cooker at the same spot but the customers did not come. Thus, his
business collapsed. His post office savings were not adequate to buy another trolley.
When his business was profitable, he had spent a lot of money recklessly on his
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friends, drinks and women who admired him endearingly. But when he became
money-less due to the failure of trade, all his friends and women fled from him.
Toloki did not know what to do. Then he remembered Nefolovhodwe, the village
carpenter, who had been his father’s friend and who has now settled in the city as a
rich coffin-maker. He specialized in making cheap collapsible coffins and costly
Deluxe Special Coffins all of which were very popular. After sometime,
Nefolovhodwe had a problem that some thieves were digging out the coffins at night
after the burial and selling them secretly. This nefarious activity adversely affected his
business. Toloki wanted to seek help from this man, his father’s old friend. In the
beginning, he was received in a very cold manner and the carpenter even pretended
not to have known either Toloki or Jwara. Years back in the village he used to
appreciate Toloki greatly because the latter used to defend his nine children when
others had attacked them. After long persuasion, he appointed Toloki on a
commission basis with the duty as a guard at cemeteries at night to catch the coffin
thieves. The carpenter’s new and young wife was kind to Toloki and gave him some
food every time he went there to report his lack of progress in the noctornal watch.
But one night, when he was waiting among marble-tomb stones in a posh graveyard,
four men came in a van, parked it outside and began to dig a fresh grave. Toloki
confronted them and all of them beat him up unconscious and left him for dead. The
next morning he woke up with a gash on his head and blood on his clothes. When he
reported this to the carpenter, he fired him from service. Toloki went back to his
shack and on thinking seriously for several sleepless nights, the concept of the
Professional Mourner occurred to him. He was not successful even in this new
profession as only poor people engaged him but his outlook of life has completely
changed for him.
To mourn for the dead became a spiritual vocation… sometimes he

saw himself in the light of monks from the orient and aimed to be pure
like them. It was this purity that he hoped to bring to the funerals and
to share with his esteemed clients. (134)
Noria returns at mid-day. She has been supporting herself by helping others.
That is, she has no particular job. Much of her time is devoted to help the helpless
children living at Madimbhaza’s yard, often known as the dumping yard. She brings
some food to eat and when Toloki offers help she tells him, she does not take
anything from men. Still she is happy.
208
When Noria first arrived in the city entertaining colourful hopes she was
greatly disillusioned. She tried to get some job or the other because she was of the
hope that Vutha, her son, would come back to her. Homeboys and homegirls
welcomed Noria who was given shelter by an old woman now living in the settlement
and who was cured of an illness by That Mountain Woman, Noria’s mother in the
village. This old woman kept a shebeen where most of the people from her village
would come to drink. One of such villagers revealed to Noria tactlessly that her son
Vutha and husband Napu both were dead. Napu had come to the city with Vutha, and
not finding any job, started begging at a street corner with Vutha holding a small can
in which people would throw coins. Napu used to earn a lot of money in this way and
spent all that money on drinking. He lived in a cardboard shelter under a lonely bridge
outside the city. He chained Vutha to a pole and went off drinking. Vutha used to cry
for Noria and for food. One day it so happened that Napu had earned a lot of money
from begging. Chaining Vutha to the pole under the bridge, he went away. For days,
he spent time at shebeens and by the time he returned to the bridge Vutha was dead
and scavenging dogs were fighting over his corpse. Napu half drunk and half-mad ran
away screaming that they had killed his son. In such a delirious condition he dived
into the dam, was drowned and died.
Noria tells this dreadful story to Toloki and he tells her that some months ago
he had seen a dirty beggar with a small child and they could be Napu and Vutha.
Noria doesn’t want to speak about her own troubles any longer and informs him that
presently Shadrack is in hospital. Both of them decide to see Shadrack that afternoon.
As in the case of almost all the other chapters, the Narrative code subsumes
the technique of flash-back to describe the events of the past and also those of the
present. The Semic code throws light on the characters of Toloki and Noria who now
come closer and start liking each other. One important character introduced in this
chapter is Madimbhaza whose yard has become a dumping ground of orphaned and
handicapped children whom she looks after as her own children spending her meager
pension on them. Noria helps her in this regard. This code in conjunction with
Cultural and Symbolic codes describes how Napu and Vutha died in very miserable
circumstances. The Symbolic code highlights the contrast between Toloki and Napu.
Toloki never begged nor did he accept alms from others while Napu using his own
son as a beggar earned money and spent it indiscriminately on drinks which led to the
death of his son and his own death.
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(pp.140-153)
Noria and Toloki visit Shadrack in hospital taking him some oranges and
apples. As Shadrack cannot eat anything, he suggests that they give the fruits to
another patient by his bedside. The ward is overcrowded with patients sleeping on
thin mats and even under the beds. All these people were injured by the war lords, the
police, the army and various political organizations. Shadrack tells them his own sad
story. When he was at the railway station to pick up some passengers, he was
assaulted by three white men who were driving a police van. They were crazy, pulled
him out of his kombi, punched him and kicked him. Then they loaded him into their
van and took him to a dark room which was freezing and filled with naked corpses on
the cement floor. Threatening him that they would kill him, they kicked him so that he
fell down among the corpses. One of them ordered him to make love to the corpse of
a young woman. When he denied, they further assaulted him and took him back to his
taxi from the mortuary. All this they did for fun. With the help of another taxi driver,
Shadrack made a complaint at the central police station. Even there he was threatened
with death. But he was not afraid and told them that he was contacting his own lawyer
as well as human rights lawyers. Several other black taxi drivers had also undergone
similar tortures and this particular experience is known as the ‘hell-ride’ among the
taxi drivers. All the time Shadrack was talking to Noria, he completely ignored the
presence of Toloki. When Noria expresses her sympathy for Shadrack, he revives his
appeal to Noria for her love but Noria gives the same negative reply which she had
already given him earlier. Shadrack wonders what Toloki has to give to her and why
she loves him. Shadrack is very rich but Toloki is poor and stinks. Noria replies that
Toloki doesn’t stink any longer and she loves him because he knows how to live. On
their way back home, Toloki wants to know why she has turned down a rich man like
Shadrack’s love and prefers to work for shebeen queens for survival. She replies she
has been chewed and then pewed. They reach Noria’s shack which is not locked like
many other shacks in the settlement because there is nothing worth to be stolen. Only
rich people like Shadrack locked their houses. Noria lights an improvised crude type
of lamp. They spread some papers on the floor and sit down. For many years Toloki
has spent all his evenings in waiting rooms and has not slept in a house since his
shack was destroyed by the vigilantes many years ago. It was the time when he started
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working as a Professional Mourner when funerals where held on Saturday or Sunday
mornings and also death was not as prevalent then as it is now. The area of the
settlement where he was living was suddenly bull-dozed one day and all the shacks
were destroyed but people would rebuild the shanty towns within no time. The
government has also devised a new strategy to torture the black people in the shanty
towns by recruiting some of the unemployed residents as vigilante groups under the
pretext of protecting the residents. But these vigilante groups forcibly collected
protection money from the residents every week while their leader styled himself as
Mayor. Because Toloki refused to pay this protection money, his shack was set on fire
and he narrowly escaped death. He feels that things have changed now and life is
more complicated but today people are more strongly united. Further, he wonders
why Noria has invited him to stay with her and why he has agreed against his vow of
leading the life of a lonely hermit for the rest of his life. He also wonders who the
father of Noria’s second child was. This second child’s funeral was conducted just
four days before. Noria, who has been looking at him all the while, is able to read his
mind and asks him why he doesn’t ask her about his doubts. Toloki says that he is
confused because he calls her second son also Vutha whereas her first son died before
she came to the city perhaps seventeen years ago. She tells him that after her
separation from Napu, and the death of her son and Napu in conjunction with the
cruelty of city life completely killed her. All her interest in men, her uplifting laughter
as well as all human desires of the flesh had abandoned her. But surprisingly one day
seven years ago she discovered that she was pregnant. The other homegirls suspected
her character but Toloki believes her. She explains that she has not slept with any man
but some strangers who visited her in her dreams made love to her. When they
reached their fourth ejaculation they looked and acted like a youthful Napu, the lover
of her young days. Again she had fifteen months of pregnancy and gave birth to a
male child who exactly looked like her first child. So, she called him also Vutha but to
avoid confusion the homegirls called him Vutha, The Second or just The Second.
Noria sincerely believed that her first son was born again as the second and therefore,
for a few years, till the boy grew for five years when he died, her life was happy.
Toloki expresses his condolences and tells her the following day he has to attend a
funeral. Noria also wants to accompany him so that she can also become a
Professional Mourner as his successor. Although he wants to sleep outside the shack
for reasons of decency, Noria insists that he sleep inside because sleeping outside is
211
dangerous. Both of them sleep on her donkey blankets on the floor with a safe
distance between them. She takes off her dress and sleeps retaining only her worn-out
petty coat. Toloki is happy that she sleeps in a foetal position like all the true sons and
daughters of their village. He looks at her beautiful shape for a short while and then
turns his head because it would be like doing dirty things to a goddess.
In this chapter also all the five Semiotic codes pay an active role in
conjunction. While the Narrative code describes the visit of Toloki and Noria to the
hospital to see Shadrack, the Cultural code reveals the positive custom of people
taking some fruits to the patient the narrators’ voice says in this context.
They have brought him some oranges and apples, since you do not go
to a hospital to see a sick person without taking him or her something
to eat. (140)
It is reminded here, of our Indian custom which says that when you visit your
teacher, old people, children patients or pregnant women you should not go with
empty hands and you should take something for them to eat. The circumstances under
which Shadrack was attacked by the police and how he was ordered to have
intercourse with the dead body of a young woman in the mortuary, just for the fun of
the police reveals the police atrocities on poor and helpless black people in the city
under the Cultural and Semic codes. Further, this is also an instance of the Symbolic
code that shows how the cruel police oppress the helpless blacks for no visible reason.
The Hermeneutic code also operates in this chapter creating unanswerable questions
like how could Noria become pregnant for a second time without any contacts with
men? Why did her second pregnancy also last for fifteen months as in the case of her
first pregnancy? How could she have intercourse with strangers in a dream? All these
questions come under Magic Realism, a technique adopted by the author under the
Narrative code.
4.2.2.8 Chapter 8: Narrative, Cultural and Semic Codes (pp.154-169)
The next day Toloki and Noria attend the funeral ceremony of an old man
conducted by the Nurse who is also a toothless old man and an age-mate of the
deceased. Toloki, sitting on the mound, produces a modern mourning sound which he
has recently developed and which resembles the sounds of a goat being slaughtered.
The Nurse explains that the eldest son of the deceased died before his father, a few
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days before Christmas and at his burial there was a serious dispute about a custom of
cutting of the hair of the nearest relatives including sons, brothers, grandsons and
their women in order of seniority, a seniority of the households and not age. By
mistake the deceased son’s hair was cut first and the other two sons objected to it
because his first son was born to a mistress and not to a legally married wife unlike
their mothers. Therefore they argued that one of their sons had to be considered senior
for the ceremony of torsion. This led to a squabble and the two sons beat their father
up and when the Nurse interfered and took the injured man in Shadracks’ van to
hospital, it was declared by the doctors that he was already dead. It is strange as the
Nurse says that a few days after his eldest son the old man also died and it is his
funeral that they are holding now. The Nurse also refers to another custom of
throwing soil with a spade into the grave only by the male relatives according to
seniority. The Nurse says that two sons of the old man who murdered their father are
waiting deservingly to be hanged. In this context, the narrator observes as follows:
This sad tale confirms what Toloki has long observed. Funerals
acquire a life of their own, and give birth to other funerals. The old
man’s funeral has come about as a direct result of his son’s funeral.
This was also the case back in the village many years ago, when the
choir girl was shot dead at a school-mate’s funeral. Indeed, everyday,
we hear of car accidents in which people on their way to or from the
funerals of friends or relatives are killed. (160).
The funeral was followed by food at the house of the deceased. It was good
food, samp and beef cooked well and served adequately. Toloki first, wanted to avoid
food but he also ate it on the insistence of others. Noria appeared to have been
enjoying the food not generally spiced on the occasion of funerals. In this context the
narrator describes how different items of food are served at funerals in accordance
with social strata and sometimes there were also quarrels in funeral gatherings. After
returning to their shack, Noria goes to help Madimbhaza to help the children there and
returns home after some time. There is a meeting of the community committee in the
afternoon and in the meantime they talk about the world and death. Noria expresses
her appreciation for Toloki’s talent of mourning and they practice some funeral
sounds as Noria wants to learn them. For her they have profound meaning which
comes out from the depths of Toloki’s soul. In this connection, Toloki tells her of an
occasion when the whole graveyard broke into laughter. Then four funerals were
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going on simultaneously. The Nurse at the Zionist funeral who had a booming voice
made a naughty joke about the deceased and all the people present in the graveyard
burst out laughing, some people even had stomach cramps from laughing too much
while some others rolled on the ground. Toloki observes: “In our language there is a
proverb which says that the greatest death is laughter” (164). They recall their village
life and Noria regrets that she was not able to attend Jwara’s funeral and she wants to
visit his grave and sing her last song for him. Toloki remembers his first experience at
the house of Nefolovhodwe, when he went to pay back his debt to him for the food his
wife had given him. He dumped some bank notes on the carpenter’s desk ignoring the
latter insulting remarks.
In the afternoon Noria goes to Madimbhaza’s dumping ground accompanied

by Toloki. The narrator gives the following information about Madimbhaza as
follows:
Toloki learns that for the past fifteen years Madimbhaza has been
taking care of abandoned children. She has often tried to find their
biological parents, but usually without success. She says that some
mothers have returned to collect their children because of pressure
from God but others have just forgotten about their babies. Some of the
children were abandoned because they were born physically
handicapped. Others were crippled by polio, or other diseases at a later
age and parents, unable to cope, also abandoned them at the dumping
ground. The twilight mum as Madimbhaza is called in the settlement
and nearby townships is very proud of all her children. (167).
Madimbhaza supported these children with her meager pension and recently a
newspaper, City Press, wrote a story about her as a result of which some kind hearted
readers donated clothes and blankets for the children. Some of these children were
victims of the war raging in the land or whose parents died in the massacres, in train
slaughters or the attacks from the tribal chief’s followers from the hostels assisted by
Battalion 77 of the Government. In a recent massacre fifty two people died including
children while some other children were orphaned overnight. Madimbhaza has
devoted her life and resources to bring up, to educate and to give them a good start in
life. Noria helps her in these efforts.
214
In this chapter, Narrative, Cultural and Semic codes operates. If the Narrative
code describes the incidents of the present and the past, Toloki’s experience of an old
man’s funeral a few days before is an instance of the Cultural code in which the
traditional practices of the black villagers, particularly those at the funeral
ceremonies. These include cutting of hair of the relatives of the deceased and
throwing soil into the grave, according to seniority of households and not of age. In
the old man’s son’s funeral before there was such a serious quarrel about this kind of
seniority and in the ensuing quarrel, the remaining two sons of the old man beat him
up to death. Now the old man’s funeral is being conducted. The two sons were jailed.
There could also be laughter in funerals as illustrated by Toloki. The Cultural and
Semic codes also function together in the story of Madimbhaza who takes care of
orphaned, and handicapped children in spite of her limited resources. Her yard has
acquired the name of ‘dumping ground’ of abandoned babies. Noria helps
Madimbhaza. Thus these two codes throw light on the characters of Madimbhaza and
Noria.

(pp.170-192)
A community meeting is to be held in the school yard. All women of the

settlement sing songs of freedom preparing food items and cutting slices of loaves of
bread while the Young Tigers are dancing and singing patriotic songs with jubilation.
Noria arrives at this spot accompanied by Toloki. The women make jokes about the
pair and laugh. Some of the elders of the political movement from the city arrive to
discuss the problems of the residents. There is also a problem of security in that the
migrants from the hostels and the soldiers of Battalion 77 may attack them any
moment. While Noria joins the other women in preparing the cabbage curry in a big
pot, Toloki, the only man, among the women, helps them by fetching water on a
wheel barrow from a community tap a few streets away. Gradually, more people
gather, most of them being women, and a few men. After an hour a big black
Mercedes Benz car followed by other small cars enters the school yard while women
and men shout slogans and the Young Tigers form a guard of honour as the leaders
walk from their cars and are seated on the chairs. Noria informs Toloki that the man
who arrived in the big black car and his wife are important members of the national
executive committee of the political movement for freedom and the others are
members of different branch and local of committees. The meeting begins and the
215
leaders ask them about the local grievances. In response, the street committee presents
their problems and asks the leaders to solve them. Toloki observes that the women in
the settlement are the most active not only doing all the work but also playing
leadership roles. They present very practical ideas to solve the problems whereas the
few male residents make high flown speeches without suggesting any practical
solutions to the local problems. The next item on the agenda is the preparations for a
big demonstration in the city the following week. People are going to stay away from
work for the whole week. The negotiations for freedom with the government may not
be fruitful because the government is busy killing the freedom fighters using its
vigilantes and Battalion 77. The Yong Tigers, in song and dance praise their leaders,
who sacrified their lives for freedom. They also condemn some people who sabotage
the movement by calling them ‘sell-outs’. After the speeches a local committee of five
is elected to organise the stayaway (strike) in the settlement. Noria is one of them.
These members have to go from house to house in the settlement explaining to people
why they should not go to work. This is followed by serving of food on paper plates.
The leaders are served on enamel plates. The leaders called Noria and congratulated
her and convey their condolences for the death of her son, but they also imply that he
was not completely innocent. This makes Noria angry because there was no mention
of her son’s death in the public speeches and a heavy sadness occupies her heart.
After the leaders have left the resident men find fault with the women for serving only
bread and cabbage to their important leaders and for being lazy to cook meat, potatoes
rice and make salads. Their women give them a fitting reply by saying that they
served whatever food they themselves eat. Toloki and Noria walk back to their shack
and on the way Toloki notices that in the shacks the women are always doing some
work or the other while the men sit all day, clouding their heads with pettiness and
vain pride dispensing wide ranging philosophies on how things should be done. Noria
has also the same experience and wonders why women, though they take the lead at
the grassroot committees, are not given positions either at the branch, regional or
national committee levels. But Toloki feels that the salvation of the settlement lies in
the hands of women. Noria admires Toloki for his broad outlook and to her further
surprise, Toloki decides not to wear any shoes because Noria doesn’t. That day, they
fail to enjoy their garden walk because Noria is unhappy remembering her deceased
son of whom there was no open mention at all at the meeting and she also sheds tears.
In this respect, she feels that the leaders who claim that they are fighting for freedom
216
are no different from the tribal chief and his followers, since they also commit
atrocities.
At this point of narration, the collective narrative voice describes the

circumstances in which her son Vutha, The Second died. That boy was very active
and talented. He was too young to be sent to school and so spent his time playing with
the children in the neighbourhood. He was an expert in singing revolutionary songs of
the freedom movement which he had learnt from the Young Tigers. He was also able
to recite the Liberation Code and the Declaration of the Peoples Rights. Noria was
very proud of her son’s political involvement like her and her friend Malehlohomvlo,
the washer-woman, who never missed a single demonstration. She worked in the city
and during her absence, she left her four-year old daughter, Danisa with Noria. Vutha
and Danisa played in the mud. They both played, quarreled and became friends in no
time. Noria was worried because wherever there were demonstrations, Vutha was in
the front line of boys throwing stones at the soldiers and the police who came
sometimes in armoured vehicles to suppress the demonstrations. The Young Tigers
praised Vutha as a hero among his peers. One night it so happened that when the
settlement was in deep sleep, Battalion 77 supported by hostel migrants invaded the
settlement. People ran amuck in fear and on that night fifty-two people were killed
and a hundred hospitalized. Luckily, the shacks of Noria and her washer-woman
friend were left untouched. But, as the narrator points out:
For many days that followed, a dark cloud hovered at the settlement.
There was anger mingled with bitterness. People had lost friends, and
relatives. Husbands had lost wives and wives had lost husband.
Children had lost parents, and siblings. (183)
A biggest funeral was conducted to bury the large group of dead people.
Several national leaders attended the funeral. They praised the deceased as martyrs
and warned the government and the tribal chief to stop his gory activities and support
the freedom movement. Further, the national president of the Young Tigers was on
the war-path and called upon his followers to avenge the deaths of their fathers,
mothers, brothers and sisters.
The Young Tigers conducted nightly patrol and every afternoon and they held
meetings about the strategies to be adopted. One day Noria was called to help a
shebeen queen to draw water for her. Noria told Vutha to follow her to the tap but he
217
delayed behind and started to play at the marshlands catching frogs and punishing
them along with an eight-year-old boy who absconded school and stayed back to play.
Then, they were caught by three men from the migrants’ hostel who forcefully took
them to the hostel and fed them to their fill. The next day there was a political meeting
in which the Young Tigers discussed strategies for self defense and also planned to
attack the rally to be held by the followers of the village chief. The next day the two
boys, Vutha and his friend went to the migrants’ hostel where the older boy after
having been fed with plenty of meat and pap and bribed with sweets blurted out the
plan of the Young Tigers. When they were returning home, the older Young Tigers
stopped these two boys and finding their pockets bulging with sweets, questioned
them where they were coming from and who gave them the sweets. The children,
under great fear, confessed that they had told the hostel imamates about the ambush
planned by the Young Tigers who in turn became very angry and called the other
children and watch what would happen to sell-outs or betrayers of their movement.
They put tyres around the necks of the two boys filled them with petrol and gave a
match box to Danisa to set the tyres on fire. Innocently she struck the matches and
threw them at the tyres. Her match fell into Vutha’s tyre. Both children ran and
screamed and in no time the air was filled with the stench of burning flesh. Both of
them died. This is how Vutha, The Second died and the leaders at the community
meeting did not mention his name because there was also his own fault for his death.
Then Danisa innocently ran back to Noria and told her that she had burnt him to death
because he was a sell-out. Noria became very wild with anger and went on scolding
the Young Tigers but no one responded. The entire community also blamed the
Young Tigers but the real culprit was not to be found.
Now Noria asks Toloki whether her child whom she carried in her womb for
thirty months, deserved this kind of death. Toloki is surprised first but understands her
because he knows that Noria believed that her first son, Vutha was reborn as Vutha,
The Second. Both of them are silent for sometime while tears roll down Toloki’s
cheeks. Noria makes warm water in a big tin for both of them to take bath together. At
her insistence, both of them take bath in a naked manner rubbing each others’ bodies
like children. After wiping their bodies jointly, they spread their blankets and fall
asleep on the floor separately.
218
This chapter is a bit lengthier than the preceeding ones and combines all the
Semiotic codes. The Narrative code as in the other chapters juxtaposes the present and
the past whereas the Cultural code describes how social hierarchies existed even
among the black leaders who advocated freedom, democracy and equality. This is
reflected how the leaders from the city are served food in enamel plates. Noria’s
active service is recognised but her second son’s death is not mentioned in their
speeches. This betrays human hypocrisy. Vutha The Second’s death is described
under both Narrative and Semic codes. The Hermeneutic code operates in the
expectations of Noria and her disappointment and utter dismay. Again the Semic and
Hermeneutic codes operate when the close and intimate behaviour of Toloki and
Noria is described. Toloki sympathises with Noria and then they bathe together naked.
Still it is not clear whether they have fallen in love with each other. Hence, the
Hermeneutic code.
4.2.2.10 Chapter 10: Narrative, Cultural (Magic Realism) and Semic Codes
(pp.193-212)
This is the last chapter of the novel, which describes the New Year’s Eve and
one more important incident that of Nefolovhodwe’s bringing of Jwara’s metal
figurines to Toloki.
It was Tuesday morning and the New Year’s Eve. When Toloki wakes up
Noria is still fast asleep and now Toloki looks at the contours of her beautiful body
since he no longer feels guilty since a night before she allowed him to look at her and
touch her body freely. If was like a vision that confirmed that Noria is indeed a
goddess. He had a peaceful sleep that night before without any nightmares and also
for the first time since leaving the village, he had slept naked. He gets up, dresses
himself in his khaki home clothes and washes his face and armpits and leaves the
shack blowing a kiss for Noria. On the way he finds people talking excitedly about the
New Year and the parties. Teenagers were also wearing cross dresses, i.e., boys wear
girls’ clothes and girls wear boys’ clothes. They smeared their faces with black shoe
polish and go from house to house shouting Happy New Year which means that, as on
the Christmas Day, they are asking for delicacies such as cakes, ginger beer and
sweets provided by many families on days like these. People are going to the city to
do last minute shopping, especially for wine and brandy. Some pickpockets are also
plying their trade on streets. It is like the atmosphere of a carnival. Toloki alights his
219
taxi and walks in the familiar streets. He goes to the water front and walks among the
tourists. People do not recognize him because he does not wear his professional
costume. But a watchman recognizes and accosts him. He goes to the sea-shore and
watches the ships sailing. He also, sails to different strange lands in his imagination.
Now, he returns to the central business district, buys pies, Swiss roll, green
onions and tarragon leaves, to celebrate the New Year’s Eve with Noria as a royal
banquet. When he reaches the settlement, he finds the children from Madimbhaza’s
dumping ground playing outside Noria’s shack. He greets the children. Noria comes
out hearing his voice and asks him where he has been. Both sit outside watching the
children. Toloki expresses his regrets that he has not brought any flowers for her but
offers to draw flowers and other pictures for her today with the crayons he has
brought. Now he draws pictures of horses and also human figures when Noria starts
singing. Surprisingly he is able to draw very colourful pictures of children’s faces
some of which resembled some real children there. He paints them with purple,
yellow, red and blue colours. The drawing becomes frenzied as Noria’s song rises.
Passers-by stop to watch these figures and are moved by warm feelings. It is as if
Toloki is possessed by a new ability to create human figures inspired by Noria’s song
just like his late father, Jwara, who used to create strange metal figurines under the
spell of Noria’s song. He is exhausted after sometime, the spell breaks and the
passers-by go on their way. Though they could not say what it is, but the spectators
have felt that Toloki’s pictures have a profound meaning. Shadrack was one of these
spectators pushed in a wheel-chair by his employee. Shadrack who has not cared for
Toloki so far, now directly looks at him and appreciates his work. He has come back
from hospital to open his shack for the New Year’s Day and will go back to hospital
afterwards. He seems to have realized the spiritual bond between Noria and Toloki as
he admits:
“I cannot spoil things between you two. Your’s is a creative

partnership” (200)
As Shadrack’s van drives away, Noria smiles at Toloki and approves of what
Shadrack has said. Toloki feels embarrassed when Noria remarks that he need not feel
ashamed of his dreams about her. To escape his embarrassment he turns to the
children and shows them techniques of drawing pictures.
220
Late in the afternoon, Nefolovehodwe comes to Noria’s shack in his long
Cadillack car followed by a truck. He blames Toloki who looks at him angrily and
also Noria for neglecting their parents. He informs them about the present situation in
the village. People have become poorer, there was a drought and when he enquired to
meet Toloki’s mother, he didn’t find her there and their house was almost in ruins. As
a next choice, he went Xesibe’s homestead where he found that Toloki’s mother was
living with Xesibe. According to him it was a scandal that the two parents were
cohabiting in their old age. But Noria and Toloki burst out laughing looking at each
other. Presently the reason for the rich carpenters’ arrival is that Jwara’s spirit had
been haunting him in dreams and threatening him to ruin his business unless the
carpenter obeyed his order that he should go to the village, bring all his figurines to
Toloki and hand them over to him as his inheritance. So, he went to the village, got
the ruined smithy dug out, took out all the figurines made by Jwara and brought them
now to Toloki, in a big truck. The workers of the carpenter dump all these figurines
by the side of Noria’s shack. They over reach the shalk’s height as a strange
background while Toloki and Noria are surprised to find all these figurines shine like
freshly made ones. The carpenter leaves, telling them that an art dealer and also the
trustee of an art gallery of a museum, both are interested in buying these figurines as
they are like antique pieces of art. The children in the neighbourhood and passers-by
stand near the figurines and express their wonder and admiration. Toloki tells Noria
that they will either sell the figurines and donate the money to the orphanage kept by
Madimbhaza or they could build a larger shack and keep the figurines there like
exhibits for children to come there to laugh and dance while seeing them. Now Noria
and Toloki have their dinner of the cakes, the Swiss roll and the green onions brought
by Toloki. They enjoy them greatly. Now, it is midnight while people are still
shouting Happy New Year and as the night progresses there is gradual silence and
smell of burning tyres without the stench of roasting human flesh. A Happy New Year
is about to begin while the figurines are shinning in the dark.
This is the last chapter of the novel which ends on a note of hope. In this
chapter, the Cultural code depicts the mood of the general public; especially the poor
black people of the squatter camp celebrate the coming of the New Year. Likewise,
the Cultural code includes Magic Realism or surrealism which accounts for the
appearance of Jwara’s spirit in the dreams of Nefolovhowde, the rich carpenter and
221
the dead man’s spirit threatening to ruin the carpenter’s business unless he brings his
iron and brass figurines from the village and passes them over to his son, Toloki, as
his legacy. The Semic code throws light on the characters of the carpenter, Toloki and
Noria. Now Noria and Toloki have become real lovers and a period of hope and
happiness awaits them as symbolised by the Happy New Year.
4.2.3 SOME OBSERVATIONS ON WAYS OF DYING:
As already mentioned in the introduction to this section (i.e., 4.2), this novel,
Ways of Dying, has some distinct features in comparison with the other novels under
study. These may be mentioned as follows:
i) The narrator is the collective voice of the community. This is in consonance

with the most prominent feature of African folk or oral literature.
ii) Every chapter presents a juxtaposition of the present and the past. Flash- back
is the major technique employed to achieve this kind of juxtaposition. Flash-
back is a general narrative technique found in the other three novels also, but
in this particular novel, it is most frequently employed almost in every
chapter.
iii) This novel incorporates the technique of the Magic Realism also in its
narrative process. Instances of Magic Realism or surrealism include the
supernatural influence of Noria’s laughter and singing; her mother’s sexual
bouts in her eighth month of pregnancy with a young and handsome medical
assistant and people’s belief that Noria resembled him, especially in her ears;
Noria’s two times pregnancy, each lasting for fifteen months and Vutha the
Second’s total resemblance of the first Vutha and Noria’s belief that Vutha
was reborn ; her second pregnancy without any contact with real men but with
her dreamland intercourse with strangers; Jwara’s ability to create strange
figurines of iron and brass only when Noria keeps him company, singing and
laughing ; the strange circumstances in which he dies ; Jwara’s spirit haunting
the dreams of Nefolvhodwe, the carpenter ; Noria and Toloki’s strolling in the
imaginary gardens and mansions inspired by the pictures of magazine covers
and furniture catalogues; Toloki’s half-knowledge about the Hindu aghori
sadhu’s way of life, to name a few of them.
iv) The narrator’s voice mentions only ‘the city’ and never the name of
Johannesburg though it is implied and obvious.
222
v) The story time of the novel is more than twenty years whereas the discourse
time is hardly one week, i.e., from the Christmas Day to the New Year’s Day.
These features mentioned above strikingly distinguish this novel from the
other novels under study.
***
223

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Chapter 4

KAFFIR BOY BY MARK MATHABANE AND WAYS

4.1 KAFFIR BOY BY MARK MATHABANE

Part I : The Road to Alexandra (pp.1-119) (1-20)

Part II : Passport to Knowledge (pp.121-211) (21-34)

Part III : Passport to Freedom (pp.215-350) (35-54)

4.1.1 A SYNOPSIS OF KAFFIR BOY

My family is still in Alexandra, undergoing the same hardships I

4.1.2 A SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF KAFFIR BOY

4.1.2.1 PART I: THE ROAD TO ALEXANDRA (pp.3-119) (20 CHAPTERS)

Chapter 1–7: Semic, Cultural, Hermeneutic and Narrative Codes

Suddenly, as I stood leaning against the table, from outside came a

My father’s rule had as its fulcrum the constant performing of rituals

Suddenly, the gyrating objects developed huge mouths and

Suddenly all the monsters burst into flames. (51)

In the night Johannes Mathabane had a dream as described below:

I had dreamed of being marooned on a strange island, and as I

Look at the interpretation his mother gave to this dream:

My mother, in divining my dream, told me that the events in it meant

Chapter 8: Narrative, Semic and Cultural Codes (pp.53-55)

Having nothing to do Johannes Mathabane associated himself with a gang of

Chapter 9: Cultural, Narrative and Symbolic Codes (pp.55-62)

One afternoon a group of black evangelists headed by a white man pitched a

Christianity is essentially the religion of white people, therefore it

Chapter 10: Cultural and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.62-74)

In this chapter the prostitution escapade of the slum boys is described.

Chapter 11: Hermeneutic and Cultural Codes (pp.74-78)

Though different in many respects, Johannes’ parents agreed on one respect,

This chapter is an example of Hermeneutic and Cultural codes, Hermeneutic

Chapter 12: Cultural Code (pp.78-80)

…served as a library, a golden fountain of knowledge where children

I learned to prefer peace to war, cleverness to stupidity, love to hate,

Chapter 13: Narrative, Hermeneutic and Cultural Codes (pp.80-82)

In this chapter, a new crisis faced by Johannes’s family is narrated. When

Chapter 14: Narrative, Semic and Cultural Codes (pp.82-86)

Chapter 15: Cultural, Narrative and Semic Codes (pp.86-91)

The place was mountainous, rugged and bone-dry, like a wasteland.

This is an important chapter because the Cultural, Hermeneutic and Narrative

Chapter 16: Cultural and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.91-96)

Chapter 17: Narrative, Semic and Cultural Codes (pp.96-100)

This chapter, besides narrating a succession of events through the passage of

Chapter 18: Cultural, Symbolic, Narrative and Semic Codes (pp.100-103)

This chapter recounts the inner development of the protagonist, Johannes, as a

But my instincts told me that normalcy could be shattered at any

Chapter 19: Hermeneutic, Cultural and Narrative Codes (pp.103-108)

Granny, an indomitable matriarch, had single-handedly raised

This chapter is a manifestation of Hermeneutic, Cultural and Narrative codes,

Chapter 20: Hermeneutic, Semic, Cultural and Narrative Codes (pp.108-119)

A handful of young student doctors from a white university ran around

I simply grumbled, little realizing that my entire future had actually

This chapter is an exquisite example of how different semiotic codes, viz.,

Chapter 21: Narrative, Semic and Cultural Codes (pp.123-134)

He describes their life as follows:

They, like myself, had grown up in an environment where the

“The piece of paper you’re referring to Mrs. Mabaso (Granny’s maiden

Chapter 22: Narrative, Semic and Cultural Codes (pp.135-139)

Chapter 23: Narrative, Cultural, Semic and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.139-150)

This is rather a lengthy chapter in which Johannes’s progress and troubles at

Chapter 24: Narrative, Cultural, Hermeneutic and Semic Codes (pp.150-155)

In this chapter certain new dilemmas confronted by Johannes are narrated.

As pointed out already, this chapter is a manifestation of how Narrative,

Chapter 25: Cultural and Hermeneutic Codes (pp.156-158)