And Tsotsi knew it. Knowing it not only as a fact as big as the brave men who stepped aside to let him pass, and the shopkeeper who hurried out to board up his windows and bolt his door, or as small as fatherless children and the whispers of hate that scuttled away down the alleys, he knew it also as his meaning. Life had taught him no other. His knowledge was without any edge of enjoyment. It was simply the way it should be, feeling in this the way other men feel when they see the sun in the morning. The big men, the brave ones, stood down because of him, the fear was of him, the hate was for him. It was all there because of him. He knew he was. He knew he was there, at that moment, leading the others to take one on the trains.

That is why in his passing down the crooked street, men looked the other way and women wept into the dust.

His name was Gumboot Dhlamini and he had been chosen. But he never knew until it was too late. They gave him no warning.

Gumboot was a man. Measured in hope he stood in his shoes tall amongst men, but even barefoot on a day back with an empty belly and a chesty laugh sounding the vastness of his humour as he walked into the city so that those who heard him looked up and laughed at him, even then Gumboot had stood as high as a head in heaven.

‘Maxulu,’ he had said a thousand miles away, standing on the side of the road with his wife, ‘Maxulu, I will be back.’ The white man had pointed along the road to Sabata’s place as the way to the Golden City, so he started walking that way. His wife stood and watched him for a long time and later when she got tired, because she was heavy with child, she sat down on the grass and he saw her like that until the road took him over the hill, and he remembered her like that ever since.

He had also asked the white man how many days it would take and the white man had said he reached the city travelling in two days in his motor car, which of course was faster than walking. Anyway, he started counting and when he reached ten and could count no further he made a notch in his stick. Thereafter he made a notch in his stick every time he had counted another ten. There were quite a few notches in his stick when he broke it killing the snake and had to throw it away. So he stopped counting.

The weather had been warm when he left his wife on the side of the road, and his belly full, but with time the nights grew colder, his one blanket thinner and there were days of hunger. He worked once and with the money he earned bought himself a pair of shoes which he carried wrapped up in his blanket. He lived through days of vast silence, tramping along the road with the unending veld stretching away unseen on every side, tramping through the clouds of dust left by the hurrying cars, always silent, very alone, but never without hope. Then on a big day of the new world he was in, the brown, flat, unbroken world he had walked into, on a certain big day, topping a rise he saw the buildings of the Golden City in a purple distance. And they were big, and that day Gumboot found his voice, and laughed, and hoped high again, and put on his shoes for the last day of his long walk.