Nelspruit was the nearest mainline station to Malelane, Soil of Africa’s home. Kagiso had done the journey many times before and knew he’d have to wait no more than an hour or so before the first taxis to Malelane started plying the route.

Nelspruit station resembled a vast covered dormitory. Every wall and pillar had someone slumped against it; bags and blankets were strewn over every available patch of floor space, in front of shop windows, under staircases, even the approaches to the toilets.

In one corner the Red Cross had set up a stand. He noticed a message board with dozens of photos pinned to it – people who had become separated from their families, many of them children.

He walked out of the station and started along Voortrekker Street towards the city. He was heading for Mama K’s. It was the last café to close at night and the first to open in the morning. Kagiso rented a room in a property owned by the eponymous Mama K – Khethiwe Shabangu – in Malelane. The pain of parting with his money when he went to see her to pay the rent was always eased by the ample meal he got in return. Ma Khethiwe was as generous as she was well proportioned. She was large, buxom, sensual, the kind only Africa produces: women who have no desire to hide what they see as nature’s gift. If Ma Khethiwe was there, he knew he’d be set up for the day. He was in luck.

‘You are working too hard, child,’ she said, putting down a plate with two thick slabs of airy white bread, covered with margarine and jam. ‘These other fellows,’ she was pointing at two uniformed men slumped at an adjacent table, ‘they are security guards, they working all night. But you, you supposed to be resting before you go to the office.’ She’d already stirred three heaped spoons of sugar into the milky tea (out there in the sticks, anything less and you might be accused of mimicking ‘white’ habits). Kagiso leaned back on the plastic chair, which gave way disconcertingly till his head rested on the wall behind. He shut his eyes.

He had spent much of the train journey awake (sleep was impossible in ‘sitter class’), turning over the events of the previous forty-eight hours and trying to quell his anxiety. No, not anxiety: fear. That was what it was. It wasn’t fear for his personal safety, though he did worry about that too, but something bigger, more amorphous and sinister. He was frightened by the magnitude of what was unfolding all around him, and knowing that he was at the centre of it, even if he’d never intended it to be that way.