‘Yah. Let’s do this quickly and get out. It’s not looking good,’ said François. ‘I just drove past Ponte City. There’s still a big crowd there – probably a few hundred. They say they’re not leaving till every last foreigner is thrown out of the building. And the cops are just lounging about. Every now and again someone tries to get back in to restart the fire. Even the Red Cross people are being shoved around.’

‘It makes 2008 look like a picnic,’ Sharmi said, a reference to an earlier bout of xenophobia in which immigrants had been killed as competition for scarce jobs had turned to violence. ‘It doesn’t bloody help that SABC reports it as fact that a Mozambican killed Motlantshe’s poor little rich bastard.’

‘Stop that, man!’ Kagiso glowered at Sharmi. ‘He’s not even buried and you’re badmouthing him. The fact that he was rich has got nothing to do with it.’

‘Oh, I must have got this all wrong. I’m so sorry.’ Sharmi played the mock-innocent. ‘And there I was thinking this was all about rich people fucking over the poor people. I seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. All this secret sabotage we’ve been organising and it turns out I didn’t even know who the bad guys were.’

‘You know that’s not what I meant. We’re not here to pass judgement on Lesedi. We’re here to make sure his murder doesn’t derail us.’

‘We’re not here to pass judgement? Christ! Where is this coming from? The guy makes one measly trip to your friggin’ cooperative or whatever and suddenly he’s the people’s hero.’

They had history, the two of them. You had to know someone well enough to have seen their weaknesses and understand how to exploit them. She knew she could keep going, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of trying to goad him into saying something she could pounce on and use for another line of attack. It had happened so many times before.

He’d rejected her once, walked away when they should have talked. It had made her feel used, tawdry. So now she did the talking. For Sharmi this whole enterprise – and it was Sharmi who had pushed the group from debate to direct action – had been visceral. She was the only one of the four who could claim any direct link to the old anti-apartheid struggle. Her father had been imprisoned on Robben Island for six years and died shortly after release, disillusioned and mad. For her the Land Collective was as much about getting even with a state that had robbed her of a father, never mind that that state was now in black hands. It was about striking a blow. The act itself was cathartic. She’d never understood how you could want change – real change – if you didn’t want it in your guts.