The year was 1933, Black Peril was yet again feared to be on the rise, and so Spokes’s father found himself a most wanted man. When questioned, he remembered the woman, he remembered her loneliness and sadness, he remembered wanting to make her happy, he remembered carrying the bouquet of roses into her home, he remembered her husband entering just as he put the flowers on the centre table, he remembered leaving soon after without having received a gratuity.

But it did not matter what Spokes’s father remembered or how he remembered it, because the woman in question had said otherwise and her husband, Erasmus C Rutherford, was the owner of several prosperous factories, an upstanding citizen of the City of Kings, and a well-regarded member of a masonic lodge. In the end, it was Erasmus C Rutherford’s unimpeachable words that had made the British hang Spokes’s father by the neck until he was dead.

As Spokes walked away from the corner of Lobengula Street and Selborne Avenue with a promise unfulfilled, seriously contemplating joining the teaching profession and thus steering clear of the unpredictable European women of the City of Kings, he thought of his grandfather and his father and began to understand something about them that he had never done before. In living and dying the way that they had, they had given him an invaluable lesson that he could use at this very moment in his life: a place changes its character many times within its lifetime, and with each metamorphosis it asks those within it to change along with it. This was a choice, although those who held power never presented or treated it as such. A man could choose to let go and follow the tide of change, and a man could also choose to hold on to himself.

Before this realisation, Spokes had never been able to do anything with the legacy of what had happened to his grandfather and father except accept and carry it with him here and there and everywhere. But now he knew that he need not just carry things; he could also help lighten the loads of Africans who had experienced wrongs that needed to be righted. Africans, like Zwakele Mkhize, whose deaths had left their stories only half told.

This realisation gave Spokes a new purpose, and he found himself walking in a particular and definite direction that led him to the BSAP Drill Hall. He would use the qualities that Msimanga had highlighted – bravery, integrity and intelligence – to get a job as a constable in the BSAP. He would become a man who ensured that justice prevailed. This seemed to him to be the best way to do right by the memories of his grandfather and father.

There was no way that Spokes could have known in 1947 that it was these very qualities that would in the distant future – five months spanning 1979 and 1980 to be exact – make him the true inheritor of his grandfather’s and father’s legacy, and lead him down a path that would make him the kind of man that the government would hang by the neck until he was dead.