First things first. Lindi decided to change her accommodation in Nelspruit. A private B&B outside the city was probably wisest. She pulled out her phone and turned it on. Glancing at her emails, she saw Anton had already been in contact – he had sent a web link to Radio 702. It was reporting that the violence was spreading, much of it in Mpumalanga Province. Hundreds of homes belonging to Mozambicans had been ransacked and their belongings burned. The plumes of smoke she’d seen twisting out of virtually every town they’d passed began to make sense.

Back in Johannesburg, the death toll at Ponte City was not conclusive but was rising. The report said the final count would almost certainly be in the dozens. Mozambicans had been asked to report to their local police to have their identity documents checked, ‘for their own safety’. Huge queues had formed outside the stations. Anyone with connections to Mpumalanga Province or who had been there in the previous few days was pulled aside. Radio 702 quoted a number of Mozambicans saying the police had asked for money before releasing them. Anton’s email had been characteristically robust: If we don’t make a breakthrough soon there won’t be a conflict to resolve, just bodies to bury.

15

Lindi went back inside her room at the Mirabel Guesthouse, careful not to let the insect screen slam shut. She needn’t have worried. As far as she could tell there was no one else in the place. She’d been sitting on the stoep for about half an hour, catching the last of the sun as it floated down towards the serried ranks of citrus trees on the adjoining estate. Her room was unremarkable, apart from a solid stinkwood riempie bench, its rawhide thongs stretched and sagging. Lindi had been reluctant to put her bag on it when Mrs Venter, the landlady, had shown her to the room.

‘Don’t worry, it’s carried a lot of heavier weights than that,’ she’d said. ‘It belonged to my great-grandfather. I’m told he used to sit on it most of the day, smoking his pipe, after they brought him back from Ceylon.’

Her voice had trailed away with those last few words, as if the incarceration of Boer prisoners of war on that Indian Ocean island was an injustice she could still feel.