White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,6

Kopano and threw him into the path of the train.” The men seemed to hesitate, as though deciding what to do with Isaac. Then they turned, walked down the platform in no particular hurry, and climbed into a police van.

“Did you try to stop them?” asked Amen.

“They came out of nowhere.”

“Afterward?”

“No.” People who saw what happened moved away. They hurried into second- and third-class train carriages; women held their babies close.

Isaac found a conductor on the platform. He would not tell Amen what happened next. He’d never tell anyone. To his shame, he went down on his knees, holding the conductor’s pant cuff. Please, baas, please help, I beg of you. My friend is under the train.

Get your dirty kaffir hands off me. The conductor glanced at the tracks. Your friend should have been more careful.

He was pushed. You saw it. It was no accident.

The conductor kicked out with his shoe. I tell you, boy, get away. The train departed, and what was left of Kopano lay between the tracks.

Sitting in the afternoon sun now, safe in another country, Isaac closed his eyes and found nothing between him and it: the sound of the train receding, thunder in his ears, Kopano’s body dragged down the track, blood sprayed onto dirt and gravel. And the horror of a small gray mouse running between the rails looking for food.

“I walked to the hospital. I got them to fetch the body. I caught the next train to Pretoria, and I told Kopano’s mother and his grandmother. I told you already, I’m here to save my hide.”

He rose and went behind Amen’s house, his head bowed, unable to bear the thought of Kopano’s mother. She’d been expecting her son. She’d cooked all day. Her hair was newly plaited. He imagined her sitting in the shade, a neighbor braiding her hair, smoothing it with her hands, their low voices, her joy.

Isaac sat on his haunches and looked at nothing. The heat was stifling.

Growing up, he’d thought of himself as ordinary, the second of six children. But others thought differently. He was “the smart one,” encouraged to remain in school. His mother had once told him, “Each person on Earth carries with them their own pouch. That person brings it wherever they go, carried in their hand. Your pouch never empties, only fills and fills. What’s on the bottom remains on the bottom and is covered over in time. You are given things to care for. You are given things that are difficult to understand.”

In his pouch were his mother’s white employers in Pretoria who had no children of their own. They’d singled him out, paid his school fees, given him books, paid for him to go to university. After he’d graduated, Hendrik and Hester Pretorius said, Keep going. He applied to the University of Natal Medical School, Non-White Section, and was accepted. Until Kopano, his pouch had been filled only with good fortune.

Stephen Biko, the antiapartheid activist, had attended the same medical school as Isaac and Kopano. If it hadn’t been for Biko, Isaac wouldn’t have been at Kopano’s side when he was killed, and he wouldn’t now be in Botswana. But the legacy of Biko shamed him into joining the South African Students Organization. He hadn’t wanted to go where there was trouble, but he attended one illegal meeting with his friend, and then another, until it was unthinkable to stay away.

On September, 12, 1977, not long after Kopano’s murder, Biko died in detention in the Eastern Cape province. Colonel Pieter Goosen, the commanding officer of the Security Branch in Port Elizabeth, suggested that Mr. Biko might have fallen on the floor during a scuffle and bumped his head. The postmortem examination showed five lesions to the brain, a scalp wound, a cut on his upper lip, abrasions and bruising around the ribs. After the “scuffle,” Mr. Biko was shackled and handcuffed, left naked for a couple of days, and finally driven twelve hours in a semiconscious state to Pretoria, where he died from a brain hemorrhage.

Blacks were not allowed to travel to King William’s Town where Biko’s funeral was held. Although Isaac hadn’t been there, he’d read what Desmond Tutu had said before the crowd of fifteen thousand: “The powers of injustice, of oppression, of exploitation, have done their worst, and they have lost. They have lost because they are immoral and wrong, and our God … is a God of justice and liberation and goodness.” The Reverend Tutu was a man worthy