AROUND THE TIME Lior Sa’at was re-energising Tel Aviv’s organised crime scene, I met Sutenbastud. At first it was a man - an Englishman - but gradually I understood it was a woman too - an American, Australian, Canadian or New Zealander, then a student, a pastor, a nurse, doctor, businessman and of course, a politician. It became a corporation, an international charity or NGO then an actual policy and eventually, it would be difficult to examine an English-speaking, western society without the firm conclusion that these places were jammed with Sutenbastud.
The experience I speak of occurred in the mid-2000s. I had come off a game reserve and was working for a small communications business and for a time it was a glorious experience; at first the company had sufficient money to cover humble salaries each month but not much more. It was this, a just-enough kind of existence, which made the employees, from set and graphic designers to producers, cheerful, easy-going people. Our interactions weren’t yet destroyed by a divisive, hostile media, we had robust attention spans and didn’t need to fiddle endlessly with phones. We could smoke indoors.
Then the company began to grow as clients became enamoured with our oddball-ness and provided repeat business. The growth caught the eye of the company’s major client, The Big Company, which is the same Big Company today that markets its soap through obese models and distributes ice-cream, originally from Vermont, that gives people obesity, then diabetes before finishing them off by making them impossibly stupid. The founders of our company, some of whom were former hippies, warmed to the idea of being integrated into the Big Company’s country communications department.
My closest friend in the company was also its soul. In his late 30s, Clarence Hlenga was a handsome, muscular Zulu who was raised in poverty in a village near Newcastle, KwaZulu Natal, and boasted two menacing scars on his face. Despite the circumstances of his upbringing he was deeply proud and loyal to his tribe, which meant subscription to superstition. “Mfanagit (friend), if you are argue to me,” he warned me at one of our first meetings, “I’m know eh man, thes man, who can ten (turn) you into cat”. He was deadly serious and expected me to accept the threat as possible.
Clarence was the company’s production manager. He led a team of fellow Zulus who he had secured jobs for. Quincy, who wanted to become an actor; Bongi, who would run into a fire for Clarence such was his devotion to his childhood friend; Strike, who, I didn’t know at the time, was wanted by police in Kwa-Zulu for his part in a vicious hostel assault which left three men in ICU and Mafika; a tiny man who spoke with darting eyes and was never without a cigarette between his lips.
My job was to turn essentially company advise or rules into theatrical content that would then be acted out by famous local actors to companies that employed substantial numbers of black staff. The production sets would be erected and struck by Clarence and his team, who also managed the props. We were required to travel often. Whilst the famous actors flew, Clarence, myself and the team drove, followed by a trailer packed with equipment, across South Africa’s provinces, to some of the most remote villages in the country. At the end of every production Clarence and I would sit and close off the day, usually drinking (Clarence liked Amstel - or “Umsteel” - lager, and if not, Windhoek - “Veendhook”). I always finished our informal debrief with Val Kilmer’s lines from True Romance, where Christian Slater’s character, also Clarence, is visited by the ghost of Elvis Presley: “I like you Clarence,” I would say, before snapping my fingers and pointing at him, “always have, always will”.
The benefits to integrating our small company into the Big Company were not clear. I knew nothing about business, especially mergers, but Clarence was happy just to be surrounded by people he could trust, earn enough to keep himself in Umsteel, polony and the odd whiskey, with anything left over spent on the 5 girlfriends he was courting at any point. But others in the company were equally puzzled by the prospect of being owned. Then one Friday evening, when we were gathered for our habitual after-work drinks, we were informed that a man would be coming from London on Monday to speak to us.
On Monday morning I arrived to notice a bald, wiry man sitting on one of the sofas in the central area of our open planned offices. He was reading a set of documents but it was his outfit that alarmed me: he was wearing Oxfords with rubber soles, olive trousers that probably belonged to a suit but instead of a shirt, tie and jacket, he wore what is known as a Madiba shirt - the colorful, loud, band-collar prints beloved by the former President Nelson Mandela. Occasionally he would look up from the documents and case out the room and just after 9am, the founders emerged from the boardroom, climbed up the stairs and told all the staff to leave their desks and converge around the sofas. The man stood up.
“I am Anthony Tice…and today I speak to you in the spirit of Madiba (‘Mudeeeeeeeba’)”… He stopped and waited, with his eyebrows raised, then nodded looking around. It was the type of statement you could only make if someone like the South African singer PJ Powers was standing next to you ready to break into a song exaggerating the ANC’s path to liberation. But there was no PJ and everyone just kept quiet (the accounts department consisted of 4 or 5 Afrikaans secretary-types in their late-50s who smoked so much that yellow films covered their spectacles). It was awkward but before it became uncomfortable, he clasped his hands together: “Right, I have been sent by my company to ready yours and from what I’ve seen….” he started nodding again with his eyebrows raised, “…is that there is a lot of room for improvement. But the good news is that we’ll be doing this together.” I looked across the room to Clarence. He was staring at Anthony Tice in the same way I had seen him looking at geared-up cyclists in Johannesburg’s coffee shops on Sunday mornings. “Now,” Anthony Tice continued, “I will be spending a lot of time with you all in the next three to four months.” He started pointing at everyone and a manic expression consumed his face. “Starting from the bottom up, I want to meet the entire company from tomorrow morning, starting with…erm…” he looked down at his papers and squinted, “um...Claris…yes, starting with Clarinz and moving steadily up. The rest of you will be informed of your time throughout the day. Now I’m going to leave you, carry on please.” As we filed back to our desks, I passed my favourite founder on the way out. “Just a little bit weird?” He didn’t respond.
That evening Clarence and I had a drink in Melville, another one of Johannesburg’s suburbs surrounding the city that was once vibrant and reasonably safe but was now descending into gangster warfare - to the point where it was being referred to as “Helville”. Clarence rented a garden cottage from an elderly couple in Helville, a short distance from the main road with its assortment of grimy bars and nightclubs. “I’m hev to see thet men 9 o’clock tomorrow,” Clarence remarked, “so only 1 beeya (beer) fo me.” His mood suggested something wasn’t sitting right.
He insisted he walk the short distance home. Just before he arrived, two thugs - one armed with a pump action shotgun - jumped out from behind a parked car and accosted him, taking his phone and his wallet. When he didn’t have anything else to give them, the one with the gun shoved the barrel into his brow, knocking him down. Bloody, he staggered into a neighbour’s driveway before collapsing against a garbage door.
The following morning Clarence wasn’t at work. Ordinarily he arrived at 7am having picked up some of the team. At 8am he still wasn’t there but Anthony Tice was, down in the boardroom with its ageing TV and VCR fixed to a shelf. Clarence drove the company vehicle, a white truck, and at 9:30am it appeared at the entrance of the property. From the window above my desk I saw the vehicle park, and Clarence emerged with his head wrapped in bandage. He was alone. I left my desk.
Some of his team were already coalescing in grimaces around him as he explained what happened. He had been at the police station to report the incident but couldn’t call earlier as his phone had been stolen. He was holding a piece of torn paper with digits scribbled on it, presumably the police reference number, but before anything else was said, there was a charge at the door and out came Anthony Tice wearing a tan suit that hung painfully off his slender frame.
“Claris!! What the hell is this?! You were supposed to be here to see me at 9am?!” Even if it was a joke, which I momentarily thought it was, it was in poor taste. Clarence looked at him, puzzled but Anthony was only getting started: “Did you not get the date and time? Huh?!” I tried to protest but Anthony Tice sensed this and quickly waved a hand in my direction to shut me down. He asked the question again, this time slowly, as if he was talking to a child. Clarence’s team, in a combination of shock and embarrassment, quickly dropped their heads. I ignored the previous hand: “He’s been at the police station.” Anthony Tice turned to me: “I’m not asking you. And I don’t give a fuck.” I noticed small, blue veins in his pale neck. He turned back to Clarence: “Whose vehicle is this?” Clarence stammered: “Es vehicle fo company?” “And why are you driving it?” “Er…becoz es job?” “Give me the keys,” Anthony Tice demanded, before raising his voice again, “this ends today. I’m officially giving you a warning - you’ll have it in writing by end of business.” Then he turned around and stormed off.
I went into the office of the founder that I liked the most. “You need to speak to that fucking idiot,” I said, “who the fuck is that?” You would expect a former hippy to willingly leap into an occasion of such blatant injustice, but he just stared at me. “Just do what he tells you,” he said with traces of exhaustion, “please.”
I was still seething when I was given my time to see Anthony Tice. 4pm. I had a couple of hours to burn so I thought I’d go and see Clarence, but he was nowhere to be found. Mafika emerged from the makeshift huts behind the office that served as their canteen and explained that Clarence was walking to the local dry cleaner to collect props. “Walking?” He nodded: “Not stop with the bleeding, needs sum few bendage.” I took Mafika with me and we drove to the nearby shops looking for Clarence along the way. At the store we bought some extra plaster then sat in the parking lot. ‘“You got any weed?” He dipped into his shirt pocket and bought out some black majat folded in old newspaper. He emptied out one of his cigarettes, bit out the butt, filled it with the seed-sodden grass then lit it and handed it to me. “Has that guy asked to see you?” He shook his head. “Thees morning I’m greet thet men… but…he… a just eh quiet.” “He didn’t greet you?” Mafika shook his head. Clearly members of Clarence’s team fell into a space just below his definition of “the bottom”. “Don’t go near him,” I told him, “and use of the aftershave in my boot when we get back.” His eyes were yellow.
The weed was surprisingly strong for black majat, and its effect was decent enough to take my mind off the pending meeting. But then it was 4pm. I went to the bathroom to splash my face before knocking at the boardroom door.
Anthony Tice opened the door and stuck his hand out. “Oh hiya mate.” His smile caught me off balance. “Come and sit down…let’s get to know you.” Inside the boardroom, brown paper panelling had been placed over the lower parts of the four walls. On the brown paper white pages with headings had been stuck with tape. “Systems” read one heading, followed by bullet points. “Values” read another, then there was “strategy” and “accountability”. I sat two seats away from him at the head and waited as he studied the IBM laptop screen in front of him. There was a cycling magazine laying on the table. He noticed me looking.
“Oh that. These days…big cycling man myself, group of lads and I did Ireland some time back for charity. Cycling, oh yes, truly superior to all other forms of cardiovascular, especially running, you know, sometimes I’ll be passing runners whilst I’m cycling thinking, ‘what are they doing?’ Anyways, football, yeah love the game, season ticket holder you know, Arsenal, but come to think of it Burnley was my first team. Great bunch, great lads, yeah, great times really…you know who Dianne Abbott is?”
“Nought”.
He started speaking slowly.
“So…you don’t know the first black female Member of Parliament in the UK?” He emphasised “black” - loudly - “BLLLUCK!”
I shook my head. Had the weed not worn off I would have probably laughed.
“Sorry…you’re asking me if I know a politician from a country I’ve visited twice in my life?”
“She’s bluuu…” He stopped himself and leaned back.
“Nahh, shouldn’t be surprised but anyways, I took her to an Arsenal match, fascinating story, really, you’ll love this, really fascinating, was my idea, I told the board - listen - let me handle the politicos, so we went, and then she told me, ‘you know Anthony, I don’t like white men much, but you, there’s something different about you’. Yeah, had a great time. Great time. Really, but I’m not surprised, I mean I wasn’t - a lot of people have told me I’m excellent with races and so on and this is why I’m good here because, hey…look at me.”
He pointed at himself with two fingers, then turned them around to point at me.
“I know people right, and I know how difficult it must be ten years into the ANC and you’re shocked and you’re having to change but listen to me, I know and I’m telling you…”
“I’m not so much shocked.”
His gaze shifted from me to the floor, like my response had just extinguished a fire in his head. Ten seconds elapsed.
“So….I want to talk about your KPIs…”
“My what?”
He looked at the computer again, then squinted his eyes at me.
“You’re senior here…management….and you don’t know what KPIs are?”
“Nought”.
“Key performance indicators, in your case, client retention - the percentage of repeat customers.”
The sight of his eyebrows raised in expectation dislodged my intention to offer one-word answers only. So I explained how the majority of clients were government departments or state-owned enterprises, and every year they gave us business.
“If that’s what you mean.”
“Okay…okay.”
He flattened his hand and held it out as if he was trying to calm me down.
‘“So let me ask you this then: why are you focussing on only this group, and not going out to the major corporates, big other mining companies, to the machine manufacture…”
He stopped.
“Before that, what do you think is the USP of your division?”
“The what?”
“Oh for fuc…”
He stopped himself and exhaled.
“Unique selling points. Unique…selling…points.”
He was now talking like he had to Clarence earlier and doing the thing with his hand again.
“What…does…this…division…of…the…company…do…that…distinguishes…it…?”
“Ja…so…we do good work, and the good work makes good money - I think - from repeat clients all of whom I regard as good people.”
He rocked back and forth in his seat digesting my response. Then he brought his finger back up and pointed to the ceiling.
“Now when you say to me ‘good people’, I’m immediately thinking: ‘Anthony, this guy values personal relationships’. That’s what I’m thinking and personal relationships are not…”
He stopped and pointed to all the pages stuck on the walls, then slapped the table harder than necessary.
“…integral to company mission now.”
“I mean, I don’t go drinking with clients, I don’t know what you are…” He cut me off.
“I didn’t say you did, but I do say - if I’m talking as one of your clients - ‘see that guy who is doing our comms work, let’s knock his price down ten percent this year because he won’t mind, he thinks we’re cool’. And suddenly we’re charging less than our competitors, things are more expensive, and we got a reputation for being pushovers. Never be a pushover, doesn’t work for me, that and I’m not having that!”
He wagged his finger at me then slapped the table again.
“Ja…um…look that…um…doesn’t happen.”
I shook my head at him and instantly I regretted it because it created another wildcat strike in his brain.
“Doesn’t happen? So I’m lying? You’d know this how? You install listening devices in the offices of your clients? Bug their phones? How do you know they’re not having a laugh?”
“Having a what?”
“STOP SAYING THAT TO ME!”
It was an eruption, and it happened so quickly that I didn’t even see him stand up from his chair. But there he was, almost panting, leaning across the table. He gripped the edge of the table, shaking his head in fake exasperation. He sat back down.
“Now I’ve been phoning your competitors seeking quotes for exactly the thing you do, and we’re coming in less, in some cases twenty percent. Look, everyone here has to do better. I’ve been here three days and I can already see that the company is underperforming. And you’re not taking enough advantage.”
He pointed at me.
“I expect to see more.”
I stood up.
“Cool, we done?”
I didn’t wait for his response and walked to the door.
“By the way, this is for you. Give Claris his when you see him”.
I turned around at the door.
“Claris? Who is that? Who are you actually talking about?”
From a briefcase next to his chair he retrieved two pieces of paper. He pushed them across the table. On both papers, in boxes at the top: “Written Warning”. I saw my name on the second.
“Seriously?”
He stood up and pointed at me.
“I’m not kidding. I wasn’t kidding this morning. You were bang out of order, insubordinate bordering on abusive. But look….”
He stopped and smiled.
“I don’t hold grudges, take that and learn from it. Let’s start new. Hey, you hearing me? Let’s start new. Okay, cheers mate. See ya.”
I walked to my desk and dropped both pages. One of the founders had also signed both warnings. I grabbed my keys and sent Clarence a text message. “My house. Tonight”.
I had dealt with difficult people before. At school I had fought off the advances of amateur pedophiles masquerading as educators. At the game reserve I had driven and walked drunk and obnoxious English and Australians. I had one German couple that insisted on not showering for the 7 days they stayed as they thought bad hygiene could get them closer to animals. But Anthony Tice was different. An alien universe of difficult.
Without the company vehicle it took Clarence over an hour to reach my apartment. I heard him climbing the stairs so went to meet him. He had a new dressing covering his head. I stated the obvious upfront: “That happened in front of everyone!” He nodded: “Yiz…eh…thet was eh heavy.” He shook his head and we stood in silence. An order had been broken, dispatched with cruelty I’d never really seen before. Not even witnessing an incident where some drunk whites had abused a group of terrified coloured people with racist taunts at Newlands Cricket Ground in Cape Town in my youth, or watching grainy videos of white apartheid cops beating black protestors had unnerved me as much as the sight of Clarence - and his hard-won order - being so callously humiliated. “We have to do something. Come.” We started drinking.
Clarence knew violence better than anyone I’d ever met. He’d witnessed shootings, torture and stabbings. He had grown up with a choice: his own hands or extreme pain - in a fight he’d crack Anthony Tice so hard the fucker would be shitting strands of polyester for months. He sat in deep thought through his first Umsteel; at the end of the second, he dropped his voice and whispered: “Thet one…thet men…thet one is the S-U-T-E-N-B-A-S-T-U-D”. “Satenbastud,” he repeated, “the WEST (worst)…the WEST men!” Then he cracked two fingers together in a whipping motion, as if he was summoning the man from the village to conjure a spell. I thought about what he’d just said. “Yes…satan bastard….exactly. That’s him,” I said, “nailed it.” From where Clarence had come, what his life through its frequent tragedies and infrequent wins meant, satan bastard - sutenbastud - was the worst insult possible. I was aware of its existence on the edges of the loxion (location) vocabulary - there was just never anyone awful enough to use it on. Until now. “Sutenbastud,” I said,“sounds better in one word.” He smiled. We had a name.
For the next month, we brooded. Sutenbastud had completed his meetings with other members of staff, many of whom he belittled or ravaged to tears. During that time it felt like we were flying into some strange hell: on the occasion a well-dressed black man or woman came to the office, Sutenbastud would give them the Henry IIIV-John Blanke treatment, often to the individual’s visible discomfort, explaining - without being asked - how much he admired Nelson Mandela, or his pride at taking our company “into the 21st century”, a thinly disguised inference that the rest of us were unwashed, unworldly savages. An hour later and he’d be yelling obscenely at Strike or Quincy.
One Friday morning the foundations of resistance were laid, jump-started by another bullying incident that happened - again - right in front of me.
I was sitting working with the junior graphic designer, Danila, a mildly mannered Polish girl, on a poster for a government campaign. She was relatively new to the company, but popular and talented. Prior to joining the company she’d spent a year teaching herself English, and the Afrikaans secretaries had taken a shine to her. We were interrupted by the sound of a chair being dragged behind us. “Oh,” Sutenbastud said, pointing at her computer, his thin arm sliding between us, “the old Formula 1 hey.” Before Danila was given a chance to respond, he was into the opening chords of his routine, placing one foot on the chair, then leaning his arms on his bent knee menacingly. “You know,” he said, “that if I wasn’t talent spotted by the company, I’d probably be there.” He pointed again to her Ferrari screensaver. “On the circuit. With those lads. Actually get a bit tired of being reminded how good I was. But you know, things happen. When Coulthard wasn’t performing a while back I actually got approached…” “I’m sorry,” Danila cut in politely, “is there anything you needed?” “Don’t interrupt me!!” Both of us froze at his bark. It was inappropriate, but not as bad as the ones he’d shot Clarence and I with. Still, enough to attract attention from others who looked up their desks. Just as quickly he was away again: “Anyways, as I was saying, the boys from McClaren came to see me, we had this long conversation and they could see that I just wasn’t buying it.” He stopped and shook his head. “Just wasn’t buying it.” He shifted his eyes from the monitor to me. “I said to them, ‘look, in two weeks I’m going to meet Nelson Mandela, I just don’t have time for…”’ “So you kicked them out?” Danila squirmed as my words hung in the air. Sutenbastud’s eyes widened and his mouth contorted. “I didn’t,” he said slowly to me, “kick them out. I was busy. Busy.” He took a deep breath. “Now,” he said, turning back to Danila, “I sent you the stuff I need in presentation format right?” Danila nodded. “And what you’ve sent me back is shit. So do it again, and do it properly. Do your job, or I’ll get someone to do it for you. We clear? Right.” He took his foot off the chair and spun around. From the side I could see tears forming in Danila’s eyes. When he was out of sight she showed me his initial instruction. She’d done exactly as he had asked. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, shocked. I sent Clarence a message to meet me at the huts.
“Follow him,” I told him, “when he leaves tonight, tail him in Strike’s car. We need to find out where the motherfucker is staying.”
I didn’t expect the intelligence so quickly. On Saturday morning at 2am I was awoken by the entry phone. It was the sentry manning the security gate from behind bullet proof glass. I had turned off my mobile before I had gone to bed.
“Someone here says he must see you.”
He cleared his throat.
“But he looks like a skabenga (thug).”
“Clarence,” I replied, “let him in.”
I walked downstairs and opened the door. Even in the poor light Clarence’s brown face looked drained of blood. I ushered him in, walked to the kitchen and started pouring us glasses of scotch. “Strike he is eh the one here.” With that Strike appeared shaking his head. He too looked spooked. I stopped pouring: “What the fuck is going on?” Clarence slumped into the sofa, muttering, before putting a hand over his eyes. Then the words came out with a desperate force.
“Yoh mfanagit. Yoh! Me, we, we follow Sutenbastud from evening yestadey, he lee-ving down by Hayidpuk (Hyde Park). He stayin house in complex no security just a..eh..a gate. Thees ol lady she is come out with gate opening so we es going in with the car fo Strike.”
Strike mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
“Then we see Sutenbastud car. Es puk down far by bottom end. Justa lust (last) house in eh complex.”
Clarence stopped and gulped his whiskey.
“Then, we is climbing fo the wall, and walk fo the guden around. There is pool. We hide in a the, er, boooshes…”
“Fuck sakes,” I cut in, “you shouldn’t have done that - were you caught? Please fucking no…” My felt my chest beginning to implode. But Clarence shook his head and waved me down. “No…just, eh, listen mfanagit,” he said, his eyes pleading, “listen.”
He exhaled.
“Then we from guden seeing Sutenbastud sitting in house with eh…er…woomun (woman), maybe is a wife fo Sutenbastud or sumthing, maybe.”
I remembered that he wore a wedding ring.
“She is wearing eh eh…the gown, you know? The door is from room open to guden. We are standing in booosh eh..eh…wutching, across fo the pool. Sutenbastud just a sit down with eh drinking eh listening music eh maybe Feell Collinz. Then there is a sound in house fo eentakom (intercom). This other pepool (people) is come…”
He stopped and took a large sip of whiskey.
“Then Sutenbastud he stand up he go he open fo the door and these man coming in. Es 2 man.”
“Two men? Who? Mlungu? (whites)”
“No, es muntu, es 2 muntu (blacks). Then…”
He cut himself off with another giant sip, finishing the glass. I noticed Strike, who was standing quietly with his hands behind him against the wall, had finished his too.
“Then these 2 men, they stut with the eh woomun, she is eh changing, yoh, gone with the gown, and now naked - ES N-A-K-E-D and the men is…yoh…hayi…hayi hayi hayi….”
He covered his mouth with his hand and started whispering.
“GGGGA! The men is patla-patla (foreplay) with the wooman! In front fo Sutenbastud! He just a sitting…eh…eh…wutching.”
“You’re fucking kidding me?”
He whistled and shook his head again.
“Okay just wait slow down,” I said sitting up: “You’re telling me that you’ve just seen two men…with Sutenbastud’s wife…in front of him?”
“Ex..ex…exact! And we cant a move becoz door es open eh he will eh see us. So we hev to stay shhhh shhhh shhhh and jus a wutch. But em not wutching. Justa wutching fo the ground. Es so bad.”
I looked up to Strike. He nodded sheepishly.
“Then what happened?”
“Ahhhh…mfanagit…no….hayi….Satenbustud he is eh…playing…”
A look of disgust crossed Clarence’s face, like he was sucking on a lemon.
“He sit a up and take fo the trouser off…he is..eh…playing, eh P-L-A-Y-I-N-G with himse...”
He started whispering inaudibly and gripped his right hand into a fist then, with a look of revulsion, opened it and flung it down to his side.
“Hayi…hayi…!”
“Oh my God. Okay, okay. just chill. Fucking hell.”
But he ignored me and he pressed on.
“Then they eh eh finish, the men eh es finish and the wooman she is eh put fo the gown on. Sutenbastud is say a goodbye to men he pay a money a M-O-N-E-Y from the eh trouser and the men is eh leaving. Then Sutenbustud he drinking and get very cross. He very angry.”
He clicked his tongue.
“HE IS A-N-G-R-Y! Shouting…WA WA WA WA…he throw fo a the wall one gluss is break and the wooman she is leavin from room. Satenbustud not happy. Then he closing door for guden and we climbing fo the wall. Too much. Hayi, too much.”
We sat in silence. Clarence cleared his throat.
“Mfanagit es a bad, es a soo bad. Not having word to say. Es so bad.”
Perhaps the proliferation of multiple participant pornography has desensitised us today, but back in the early 2000s, this - what just happened - wasn’t usual in South Africa. Take one step further: to 2 Zulu men, a white man of means paying other men to have sex with his wife in front of him was culturally unfathomable. What they had just seen was almost - almost - the Native American Indians who could not see the boat arriving packed with colonisers because their minds were not trained to consider such things existed. If Clarence and Strike had been caught in that garden, they could have been shot, and judging by their evident horror, both might have agreed that an arguably better outcome.
I refilled our glasses.
“You sure you weren’t seen?”
“Uh uh. Nobudy seeing. Gate open from inside eh complex with the eh car fo Strike. We leaving.”
We drained the whiskeys in silence. Neither smiled when they left.
Because I was so fond of him, I had been concerned that Sutenbastud would try inveigle himself into Clarence’s genuinely good nature and confidence. But the evening’s events had defenestrated that. They were sickened. Outside of that, however, the horror was useless as we didn’t have any footage, so in the weeks ahead we designed another strategy.
When his interviews were completed, Sutenbastud turned his attention to me and my department. I anticipated this, so I played enthusiastic but endlessly dumb and Clarence, for his part, played the hopeless peasant. Together we aimed to frustrate him enough into thinking the company a useless bait-and-switch, that enough doubt would lead to despair and eventually - hopefully - surrender. One evening an email arrived in my inbox from a founder partner. It was a forwarded message, originally from Sutenbastud concerning me - and one line leapt out: “He doesn’t know how to sell the business property.” That was a mistake, but I responded in kind and some days later I booked the boardroom as it housed the only television we had. It annoyed him to have to work elsewhere for the day, and it was about to get worse.
When he returned that afternoon, I showed him the cassette cover of the VHS I had been watching (I hadn’t actually been watching anything): “Masterclasses in real estate. By South Africa’s most well-known and loved estate agents.” He looked at the cover and then at me, puzzled.
“This is for selling houses?”
“Funnily enough, happens to be my one of my other passions.”
“Your what?”
“My other passions? Oh, houses and cars. When I eventually leave I’m going to open a business selling both cars and houses. One office, two passions.”
“You sold before?”
“Not houses, only car. My last one. Unfortunately didn’t sell it for quite what I wanted to, 5 grand short or so, but the dude was really happy with my performance and said he’d write a letter of reference for me.”
The contorting started at the edges of his mouth before three different expressions appeared on his face in rapid succession - confusion, then annoyance, then deflation. He shook his head and spoke softly with his eyes closed.
“Just so I have this right: you’ve spent the day watching videos…about selling houses?”
“Exactly.”
I had printed off the forwarded email I had received. It was ready next to my laptop. He studied it.
“Properly! PROPERLY. Oh for fuc…” He was growling, but I cut him off.
“I’ve learned a lot, totally psyched up.”
I didn’t wait for his response. In the passage outside I heard a loud crack followed by the sound of something crashing to the ground. He’d kicked the table and one its legs had snapped.
There was an obvious risk to the strategy. Technically I could be fired or made redundant at any moment, so I needed Clarence in a pincer movement - incidents of extreme incompetence to take Sutenbastud’s attention off me until I thought of something else to attract it back. And Clarence delivered.
Like me he played keen and eager to improve, but added to his part ways I couldn’t. He started arriving late, but would emphatically excuse himself by appearing panicked and blaming the traffic or taxi drivers who he claimed had threatened him with traditional weapons. He deliberately forgot to include certain props for some productions, prompting complaints from actors. He would get angry with himself until Sutenbastud resigned his own fury with appeals for him to calm down. That took doing.
He and his team faked illness. One morning neither Strike nor Mafika turned up to work, sending Sutenbastud hopping mad and onto the war path. Clarence approached him cautiously.
“Seh, jus eh listen…pliz…the ploblem is eh with eh…the…eh…the pen-uces. The pen-uces es heting (hurting).”
“They have a problem with their…what…penises?”
“Yiz seh. Es sore.”
“How do they have this same problem on the same day?”
“Seh, the gelfrend fo them is eh sistahs.” Clarence threw his arms into the air and smiled. “Maybe sistahs give fo them the ploblem. I’m not know.”
“That,” I told Clarence later that same day, “is exactly how you do it.” He shot me a look that told me what I already knew: he didn’t need my encouragement. As much as we were allied to a cause, I sensed he was doing this for reasons deeper than friendship. He had seen something.
Unfortunately Sutenbastud was energised by a feature of the company we’d once all loved. When he had stopped people smoking indoors, he also limited after-work drinks to one night a week - Thursdays. On those evenings he held court to staff who were too scared not to attend with outrageous stories, all of which were almost certainly lies, and never without a quote from Nelson Mandela’s biography, The Long Walk to Freedom, a copy of which had appeared in recent weeks and now lay choreographed in the boardroom next to his computer. One Thursday evening he almost out Sutenbastud-ed himself:
“And that’s why I always say accountability - accountability - watch the way you speak, your…characterisations. Did I ever tell you lot about my work with Richard Branson? Bloody hell, that was something. Became good mates he and I did. Asked me to head up his new banking strategy. But never mix mates with work - I said to him, ‘Richard, we’re good mates, we’ve both learned a lot from each other’ and then I left him. Poor guy was phoning me for weeks. Never mix mates with work. That’s my advise for all of you, from… experience.”
The more I studied him, the more I began to grasp how powerless we were. There was the official angle for which we had no recourse but to resign. Then there was something else: his menacing and corrupt approach was layered by platitudes complementing the “social justice” threshold we, in the early 2000s, were expected to observe. That made him artificially powerful but powerful non-the-less, and worse, it built within him the defiant conviction that everyone he encountered would buy his talk. Here was his great strength: he was impervious to accusations of hypocrisy.
So collective helplessness seized the office. More and more people were opting to resign, more and more were people were psychologically impacted by his behaviour. Two piecemeal employees were impoverished whites from the shantytown of Munzieville on Johannesburg’s west rand. They didn’t possess the support at home to insulate them from his kind of bullying, so they just didn’t turn up to work. When Sutenbastud learned that they had stopped coming, he summoned the staff to the sofas: “Does it surprise anyone to learn that the people who’ve just decided they’re not working anymore are white Afrikaans? (‘Ufree-kaanz’)”
We had all passed the point of being shocked, but there was something in the way he spoke about those two young, hopeless men - born into a world they would in all likelihood never understand - that pointed toward some macabre vindication, as if he was congratulating himself, checking the boxes of a list he’d compiled. One of the secretaries lit a cigarette and start exhaling clouds of smoke but he was too busy basking in that unnerving pleasure to notice. We seemed to be trapped in a doom loop.
I realised then that our only hope lay in the kind of resistance Clarence was fronting, a last line of defence akin to hand-to-hand street combat against a vastly more powerful adversary. After the 6 or so weeks he spent watching my department, Sutenbastud was now ignoring me, which suggested my dismissal was imminent. But Clarence hadn’t given up: he was perfecting his trolling with patience and timing. Sometimes I would hear Sutenbastud talking to him in his boardroom after work. After having listened to 30m plus of Sutenbastud’s boasting, Clarence would use his allotted 5 second response time to suck up: “yoo, seh, is the a besta biznizmun am eva seeing. I am len sooo so much yohhh,” he whistled, “so, so much.” I didn’t see it at the time but when I thought about it later, and my initial fears that Sutenbastud would attempt to lure Clarence in, I realised that the opposite had happened: Clarence was shoehorning himself into Sutenbastud.
The rumours started exactly 3 months to the day of Sutenbastud’s arrival. They came from the desks of the secretaries; in two weeks time, the company was to be offically absorbed following a presentation from the founders. The Big Company had purchased the house where Satenbastud paid other men to have sex with his wife in, and the word was that 50% of the staff were getting the old fuck-off. The offices would be shuttered. As one of the final moves on our short-ish walk to unemployment, a group of executives from the Big Company in London came to the offices to meet the founders, to check how well lubed up our company was for its pending insertion.
Timing. That day Clarence, Quincy, Strike and Mafika arranged an almighty barbecue at the hut canteen, sending the smell of piles of street meat blowing through the offices. Sutenbastud - a vegetarian cyclist - was incandescent with rage, grinding his teeth with one of his scowls as he showed the party around, then slamming the windows of the boardroom. After the party had left the offices he summoned Clarence, Quincy, Strike and Mafika to the sofa area.
“You fucking lazy assholes destroyed the most important day of the year!”
He singled Mafika out and pointed at him, his finger trembling.
“And you! What the fuck were you running around with a dead sheep’s head like that around for?! With its tongue hanging out?! Are you fucking stupid or something?!’
We watched as the fire in Sutenbastud’s head detonated in hurricane fury - spittle-flecked, he turned around, swung his arms and jumped into the air on both feet. Saliva could be seen landing on Clarence’s shirt a meter away.
“In front of my company! Your new owners! They’re going to be sick because of that!”
He stopped jumping and placed his hands on his head, panting.
“No…no….you lot, you’re all fired! No excuses! Now get your fucking lazy asses out of my sight! GET THE FUCK OUT!”
There was a scramble at the bottom of the stairs. Some of the founders emerged from the stairwell, their faces white with shock.
“Can we all just calm down please,” one whimpered.
Someone else watching too, from a seat across from one of the accountants, partially concealed from view by a metal shelf cabinet.
Freddy Ramvula was the black affirmative action partner, owning 24% of our little company. He was a former operative for the military wing of the ANC - Mkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, and during the years the ANC was banned he’d struck up deals with Chinese heroin merchants as one of the wing’s revenue streams. A big man who wore crocodile skin boots and drove a series of big black German automobiles, Freddy wasn’t interested in diversity or feelings or Mandela talk: he wanted money, everywhere, all the time, and ours was just one of many companies he had a stake in. Gossip from the desks of the accountants indicated he was far from happy with the Big Company’s overtures and subsequent arrangements. There wasn’t enough for him.
I liked him a great deal, but he was unpredictable. At the time he was being investigated for an incident at a prestigious golf course that occurred the previous month when a black caddy had laughed at him for hitting his ball into a lake. He’d smacked the caddy in the face with the 7 iron and stormed off. Now there to get money, he’d watched Sutenbastud humiliate the most vulnerable group in the company and seized a way to shrug off some of the pressure around him in the wake of the golf club incident.
As Sutenbastud was storming down the stairs to the boardroom, past the ashen, mumbling founders, Freddy stood up and addressed Clarence: “Wait. Nobody is going anywhere. Just wait.” He then asked the secretary to find him the telephone number of the CEO of the Big Company in London; when the person on the other end of the line told him that the CEO was unavailable, he threatened to report Sutenbastud - and by extension the Big Company - to the police, to the government and to the media.
Later that afternoon the CEO got wind of Freddy’s threat and scrambled. Sutenbastud had been holed up in the boardroom since his wobbly earlier, hissing and slamming his fingers against the keyboard. One of the secretaries listened in on the call as he was told to catch the 9:30pm British Airways flight to London Heathrow that night. As we were led to understand, he was called into the CEO’s office the following morning where he was given his marching orders. The deal was suspended until further notice.
The bang of Sutenbastud’s departure came with a meek squeal. The damage had been done. We were spent, anxious and resentful. A demon had come from elsewhere, and made us all a bit mad.
(continued in Part b)
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Thanks Simon for sharing. This is very well written and quite captivating. Looking forward to the next chapters