By the time Spokes left the office, he had talked the officer into holding out the possibility that in a few years, when the British had taken their fair share of the land, the returned African soldier would be able to occupy a few of the few remaining acres. He had even made the officer put his name – Spokes M Moloi – on a list, and was comforted and gratified by the fact that his name was at the top of the list, and that next to it were two words: Krum’s Place.

Disappointed but hopeful, Spokes left the minuscule office refusing to feel anger at the fact that the long-waited-on promise had not been kept. Anger at the British was what had made his grandfather not only fight in the First Matabele War in 1893 but also join the umvukela in 1896, which in turn was what had made the British hang him by the neck until he was dead.

The unpromised future that now stretched before Spokes presented few possibilities, the most practicable of these being training to become a teacher at the mission school that had educated him – an English teacher. This was his mother’s desire. She did not like the idea of her only child, a son at that, working in the City of Kings. All an educated African man could be in the City of Kings was a boy – a delivery boy, a messenger boy, a teaboy, a houseboy, a garden boy, a cook, a factory worker who was expected to do what the baas said and was never allowed to think for himself. She wanted greater things for her only child, a son at that. She wanted Spokes to be a man.

She did not say it, she did not have to – they both knew that the primary reason she did not want him working in the City of Kings was because of what had happened to his father. A delivery boy, Spokes’s father had been very proud of his job and very happy in it. A naturally friendly man who struck up conversations easily, Spokes’s father had one day been sent by a florist to deliver a bouquet of roses, and had, as was his wont, conversed with the European woman receiving the flowers. Her husband had returned just then and found his wife in too close a proximity to a native. It was only after the delivery boy had left, after the European woman and her husband had discussed the matter at great length, and after the husband – talking to the woman all the while about the proper and right thing to do – had soundly beaten her with the bouquet of roses that had not been sent by him – it was only after all this that the truth of the matter finally presented itself.

Immediately after beating his wife, the husband went and reported the great atrocity that he had witnessed to the BSAP. The BSAP were predictably outraged and went in search of Spokes’s father. The woman, after she had healed from the wounds of the physical assault perpetrated on her person by her husband, swore under oath that Spokes’s father had accosted her and attempted to touch her in a place that she, for propriety’s sake, refused to mention.