Given to us by God’s own grace:
Viva the champion of our race!
And off went the new President to buy more weapons and do more crushing of anyone who dissented, demurred or disagreed.
‘See what we are up against?’ Soviet Malala asked his pupil. ‘War is on the way. We will drive the colonial settler entity into the sea. Take back what he stole from us. Confiscate his farms, reclaim the mines, nationalize the seas and abolish the banks. Viva the struggle! Viva the lumpenproletariat!’
When Jimfish said he wasn’t sure if he qualified for the lumpenproletariat, his teacher told him: ‘Think of the insulting name hung around your neck and you’ll be as angry as a snake in no time at all.’
Jimfish promised to do his best and walked home longing to feel true rage, but knowing he was more fish than snake.
One day the Lady Godiva sailed back to port without its old skipper and Jimfish heard that he had been washed overboard. But in his dreams Jimfish saw the old man swimming with the coelacanth in deep-sea caves, where the two of them were doing handstands and paddling backwards. And he hoped that one day he could do the same.
He tried to tell Soviet Malala why he so loved the fish. ‘It’s bright blue, dabbed with white. It’s got four legs and can stand on its head and swim backwards. A very queer fish. Like me.’
But the gardener shook his large head until his Lenin cap wobbled, and advised him to dream of revolution instead.
‘When it happens we will nationalize the oceans and the fish will belong to formerly disadvantaged people like you.’
One afternoon Sergeant Arlow’s daughter Lunamiel was walking in the orchard when she saw Soviet Malala sitting under a mulberry tree with one of her mother’s maids, a vibrant girl named Fidelia, whose daily task it was to paint the fingernails of her mother’s left hand. The gardener and the maid were so tightly entangled that Lunamiel, who loved botany, was reminded of the clutching tendrils of the strangler fig, but she had never seen two people in a such a binding embrace and she longed to try the experiment herself.
The very next day, after a long lesson from Soviet Malala on prolo-fisc-freedo-mism, Jimfish was walking through the sergeant’s garden when he saw Lunamiel lazing on a red picnic rug beneath a mulberry tree. She asked Jimfish to sit beside her and he was happy to do so. Their hands touched, their breathing quickened, their clothing loosened, and soon Jimfish and Lunamiel were as tightly entangled as the tendrils of the strangler fig.
At that moment Sergeant Arlow came by, and when he saw the entangled two he pulled out his truncheon and began whacking Jimfish all over his body, much of which was exposed.
‘You odd, foul fish!’ he shouted. ‘My daughter is as white as a wedding cake! Her family tree is Aryan to the nth degree!’
Lunamiel’s mother, woken from her nap by the noise, overcame her exhaustion and marched into the garden, ready to give her daughter a good hiding, but she had forgotten which servant usually wielded the whip. Sergeant Arlow seized his service revolver to shoot the boy and Jimfish ran to Soviet Malala’s room, where his teacher hid him under the bed until Sergeant Arlow, denied the chance of doing his duty, thrashed several of his servants instead.
Jimfish’s relief did not last long. Soviet Malala warned him it was only a matter of time before the sergeant shot him and dragged his body behind his police van, a tradition among the constabulary. And if her father failed to kill him, then Lunamiel’s brother Deon was also very keen to do so, having taken an oath on the family Bible that he would never let his sister dally or tangle with a black man.
‘I am not exactly black,’ said Jimfish.
‘You’re not exactly anything and that’s your trouble,’ his teacher pointed out. ‘The best thing for you is to escape to the outside world.’
Soviet Malala found a map and pointed to the country north of the Limpopo river.
‘Zimbabwe is the perfect place for you. Everyone is free, happy and fed. Its leader is a true revolutionary and a friend of Kim Il-sung of North Korea. He has done away with imperialists and he will soon send the settler entity packing. Zimbabwe is where South Africa will one day be.’
And so, that very night, Jimfish left Port Pallid on a long march north. Every now and then he checked his temperature, hoping to feel it flare into revolutionary rage, the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat that blasts the masses towards the right side of history.
CHAPTER 2
Zimbabwe, 1985–6
After walking for many weeks Jimfish reached the broad Limpopo river, on the far bank of which lay the country of Zimbabwe. He was weak and exhausted, but across the water he could see the outside world, and he silently saluted Soviet Malala for his escape, though he was unable to forget the lovely Lunamiel, left far behind in Port Pallid.
Some ferrymen, using rudimentary rafts of oil drums roped together, now offered to carry him to the other side of the river. Jimfish thanked them for their kindness, but said he would swim across.
‘As you like,’ they told him. ‘But the water is full of crocodiles. They have eaten many refugees fleeing from the terror in Zimbabwe.’
‘You are clearly mistaken,’ Jimfish replied. ‘I know for a fact — and my friend and mentor Soviet Malala has confirmed it — that across the Limpopo lies the land of the free, ruled by a kindly man, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, great friend of the eternal leader of North Korea Kim Il-sung, to whom all oppressed people look up, as living creatures look up to the sun.’
‘If you believe that, you are in for a sad surprise,’ said the ferrymen of the Limpopo. ‘Then again, the ignorance of South Africans is limitless and legendary and nothing can help it. But if you truly wish to find out what lies across the river in Zimbabwe, you will need to arrive on the further bank without being eaten. For a modest sum we will carry you over.’
When Jimfish told them he had no money, the boatmen very kindly accepted his wristwatch in full and final payment, and, at nightfall, they paddled him across the Limpopo. The moment they deposited their passenger on the far bank they hurried back to the South African side of the river, as if their lives depended on it.
‘How odd,’ thought Jimfish, ‘to wish to flee from the land of the free.’ And he set off with a happy heart.
He had not gone far when a jeep packed with heavily armed soldiers wearing red berets drew up beside him.
‘What are you doing on this road in broad daylight?’ the soldiers demanded, astonished by Jimfish’s lack of fear.
‘I’m on my way to the capital where I hope to meet Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the Great Leader of this free land, comrade-in-arms of Kim Il-sung, dear leader of North Korea.’
‘You’re a lucky man,’ the soldiers told him. ‘We are the Red Division, a secret Zimbabwean force trained by those very same North Koreans to serve as the iron fist of our own great dear Comrade Leader. You are a most welcome volunteer to fight shoulder to shoulder with us against the filthy dissidents in this province of Matabeleland.’
Jimfish did not remember volunteering, but he was too polite to disagree when the soldiers pulled him into the jeep and drove him to their camp. There they fed him and gave him a bed and Jimfish was happy to be in a land where the colonialists had melted away, the settler entity would soon be no more, and the masses rejoiced in freedom and peace.
The next day he was shaken awake at dawn and sent on a route march of many miles to a rifle range where he was taught to use a gun, and then marched back to the camp, singing a revolutionary hymn, adapted from a Korean original: