‘Chilling. Just resting, thinking, daydreaming.’ ‘What you daydreaming about?’ ‘Oh, nothing really. What you reading?’ ‘This . . . shit really, but I don’t have anything else. She,’ he points to the author on the cover, ‘has this patronising way of writing about Africa and the black people, and the attitude of the white characters is nauseating.’ ‘You mean, some of them are really nice, as long as they don’t move in next door.’ ‘Exactly. The book is actually about the time of the riots. Where were you during that time? I mean, were you affected at all?’ ‘The valley where we lived had only two roads out, and both ran through black or coloured areas.’ ‘Radical. All I really saw of the riots was what was on TV. It didn’t affect my day-to-day life at all.’ ‘It was totally different for us. On bad days we had to travel in convoy with Police garries to get to school—guys with their rifles sticking through the mesh sides. If we couldn’t wait for a convoy, we would use briefcases or our school bags as shields and wind down the windows so the shattered glass from the stones wouldn’t get into the car.’ ‘Not nice.
