Two of them caught Lindi’s eye. Their chatter – loud and ebullient – was in a language she didn’t recognise at first but then realised was a version of French. One had the tell-tale facial tribal markings still evident on some of the more elderly migrants from West Africa. They were playing their part in the great conveyor-belt of trade, unnoticed in the official statistics, which distributes wealth from Africa’s teeming and wealthy cities to its forgotten and poor villages. The meagre profits from a few weeks outside Park station in Johannesburg would, in the wonderful alchemy of pavement commerce, be transmuted into a corrugated-iron roof over a mud hut somewhere in the Bandiagara Hills of Mali.

Inside the station Lindi and the other early-morning travellers were like fish swimming against the current, quickly swamped by commuters coming the other way, disgorged by one of the arriving trains from Johannesburg’s township hinterland. It made her think of the Hugh Masekela hit ‘Stimela’, a favourite of her father. The Afro-jazz classic, with Masekela’s inimitable sound effects mimicking gushes of high-pressure steam and whistles, evoked the old journey of rural labourers drawn to Johannesburg’s gold reef – and all too often to a life of dissolution in the city’s migrant hostels. More than two decades of majority rule had yet to rid the country entirely of that particular remnant of the old order.

Lindi realised she was in the wrong place and looked for signs for the long-distance bus terminus. She spotted an elderly porter. His shirt collar hung around his scraggy neck.

‘Follow me,’ he said, and started to shuffle back towards where Lindi had come from. He stopped just before the entrance and pointed to one side.

‘Just over there, madam. You see the soldiers over there? Go past them.’

‘Do the buses to Mpumalanga go from there?’

‘Mpumalanga? You’re not going to Cape Town?’

‘No, I want to go to Nelspruit.’

‘For the Kruger Park?’

‘No, no, I just want to go to Nelspruit,’ Lindi said, struggling to disguise her irritation.

‘Only these Mozambicans are going that way now. Watch them – they are going to steal your things.’

‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ she said, and walked towards the group of soldiers. The presence of troops in the city centre was highly unusual. They were there to help a police force now stretched to the limit.

There were about six of them. One of the soldiers eyed her. Lindi realised how incongruous she was in this place. She was white and she was a woman alone. She’d spotted a couple of backpackers earlier, sitting on the ground, slouched against a wall. Batik-trousered, dread-locked hippies, Anton would have called them. British, judging from their accents. The soldiers were moving on, except the one who had been watching her.

‘You are going where?’ he said, as she approached.

‘To get a coach ticket,’ she said.

‘To where?’

‘To Nelspruit.’