always marching or protesting
somewhere and had to be
suppressed. Playing in my
grandmother’s house, I’d hear
gunshots, screams, tear gas being
fired into crowds.
My memories of the hippos
and the flying squads come from
when I was five or six, when
apartheid was finally coming apart.
I never saw the police before that,
because we could never risk the
police seeing me. Whenever we
went to Soweto, my grandmother
refused to let me outside. If she was
watching me it was, “No, no, no. He
doesn’t leave the house.” Behind