Dictator

12

Zalika Stratten had long since lost track of where she was. She thought she’d heard voices a couple of days ago talking in Portuguese. That suggested she might be somewhere in Mozambique. Beyond that, though, this was just another bare mattress shoved into the corner of another room, with another uncovered bucket to squat over. The windows were boarded over and the door in the centre of the wall opposite her mattress was locked, with a guard permanently stationed outside. There was no bulb at the end of the wire that hung from the ceiling. The only light came from the cracks between the planks nailed to the window frame.

Zalika’s feet were chained together, just far enough apart that she could shuffle across her room, but too close to allow her to walk properly, let alone run. Her jeans and shoes had been taken away and all she had to wear now were the T-shirt and underwear she’d been wearing when she was captured.

They gave her two meals a day, feeding her on a basic diet of maize-meal porridge, with an occasional treat of salty, bony fried fish, or a meat stew that consisted of a couple of lumps of indeterminate gristle adrift in a plateful of grease. From time to time she’d be handed a small plastic basin filled with cold water and a bar of gritty pale-grey soap with which to wash herself. She did her best but her hair was matted and greasy, there were black rings of dirt beneath her fingernails and she was permanently damp and prickly with sweat.

Just as airline passengers getting off a long-distance flight have no idea how disgusting the air onboard smells to ground-crew getting on, so Zalika’s senses had long since become accustomed to the rank odours of sweat, urine, excrement and stale food that hung in the airless atmosphere of her solitary cell.

Yet Mabeki himself seemed not to care about her plight. She barely recognized her brother’s smiling, impeccably mannered friend in the fierce, embittered ideologue who from time to time came into her room. He paced up and down, his voice ranging from a sinister, low-pitched calm to rabid fury while she huddled on her mattress, as defensive as a curled hedgehog, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped round them.

This was virtually the only human contact left in Zalika Stratten’s life: her meals and bucket were delivered and removed in total silence by guards who ignored any attempt of hers to make conversation.

In the near-darkness, Mabeki was as insubstantial as a wraith. Only his words seemed real. Again and again he repeated the arguments that justified his actions, building up a portrait of her father and family, layer by layer, that flatly contradicted everything she had ever believed.

‘Richard Stratten was an oppressor, an imperialist. How can it be right for one man to have so much land, so much money, so much power when countless millions have so little? How can it be right for the white man to give the orders, while the black man can only say, “Yes, boss! No, boss!” and do his bidding?’

‘But my father was a good boss,’ she argued. ‘All our workers had running water and electric power.’

‘There is no such thing as a good boss,’ Mabeki spat back. ‘There are only the rulers and the oppressed. You talk about running water and power as though they were luxuries for which the workers should be grateful. They are basic human rights. And running water means more than a tap in every village. Power means more than a few bare lightbulbs.’

‘What about your father? Isaac did not think Dad was a bad man. He was devoted to him.’

‘Is that what you think? Then you are a fool. Your eyes have been closed all your life. Do you imagine that my father came back to our meagre hovel, with its four bare walls of breezeblock and its corrugated iron roof, and felt affection for a man who lived in mansions built on land that our ancestors ruled as kings? Do you think he was grateful when your father declared that he would pay for my education? That money was made from land stolen from its rightful owners – stolen by the white man from the black!

‘And tell me, Zalika, since your father was such a fine man: what did he do for all the workers on his farms and his game reserves who suffered from HIV? Did he get them treatment, the latest drugs? No, they were worked until the disease became so bad that they could not work any more. Then they were dismissed and left to die, while new workers were hired in their place.’

Some days Mabeki updated her on the latest development in the negotiations he was conducting from his satellite phone with the hostage rescue consultants brought in by Wendell Klerk. ‘Your uncle does not wish to spend any of his money to free you,’ he said one time. ‘You could be at his house in Cape Town right now, or in London, or on his country estate, or even sunbathing at his place in the Bahamas if he had simply paid what I asked. Do you want to know what price I put on your head?’

‘No,’ said Zalika, trying to sound as though she meant it.

‘It was five million dollars, US. That is roughly one-tenth of one per cent of Mr Klerk’s estimated personal assets. It is a fraction of what he paid to get rid of his last wife, the beauty queen, after just three years of marriage. What was she, Miss Austria?’

‘Czech Republic,’ said Zalika, before she could stop herself.

‘Thirty million he gave her to go away, or so the newspapers said. And all I want is five. Not for myself, but for my people. This money will be used to dig wells and buy tractors, medicines, solar electricity panels, schoolbooks, pencils. It will do far more good working for Africa than it ever could in Mr Klerk’s bank account, and yet… and yet, he will not pay it. He tells his people to bargain with me, to drive the price down. He threatens to walk away and leave you to your fate. I am sorry, Zalika, but he does not think you are worth saving.’

For his part, Moses Mabeki looked forward to his conversations with Zalika Stratten with keen anticipation. He derived great pleasure from seeing her humbled, stripped of all comforts, breathing the stench of her own filth. He enjoyed this daily proof of his newfound power almost as much as he had enjoyed giving the order to shoot Zalika’s brother dead; or pouring diesel fuel down a funnel into her father’s throat until it drowned him; or giving her mother to his men to do with as they pleased; or even the exultant moment when he faced his feeble, lickspittle father and took a machete to the treacherous body with which he had so willingly served the Stratten family. Hearing the pain and bafflement in Zalika’s voice when he had told her those lies about his father – that, too, had been something to relish. But what he was planning to do later this very night… well, that, he thought, he might enjoy even more.