Summary
In the last chapter of the novel, Mandisa contemplates her son's future. The beginning of this chapter is written in italics, indicating a stream-of-consciousness type of writing, as Mandisa reveals her inner monologue. She faces the nothingness that is destined for her son, who is fated to spend the rest of his life in jail. She asks what her son has to live for, now that his "tomorrows were his yesterday" (141). She questions whether her son was destined to this fate, whether he would have been able to survive Guguletu at all. He had a hopeless future this whole time, and "long before the ground split when he pee'd on it, that knowledge was firmly planted in his soul... it was intimately his" (141).
Once again, Mandisa examines the situation her son was raised in. She sees his future through his eyes, watching the adults around him, noting the stooped shoulders and tired eyes. He has seen his future "in the huddled, ragged men who daily wait for a chance at some job whose whereabouts they don't know" (141). He has seen these men tirelessly wait for work, and often find none. He has seen these men suffer at the hand of chance, which rarely comes their way: "chance has been bust in that other world... the white world" (141). Chance has forsaken the black men in Guguletu, stuck with no escape in the hell that is their township, stuck in their misfortune. Mandisa wants us to know that her son was doomed from birth, doomed by the hell apartheid created.
Finally, Mandisa describes the murder. She takes us into the yellow Mazda, where the five passengers are singing as they approach their death. The street is crowded, full of "workers coming back from work, schoolchildren from school, women at home scurrying from the shops to get back and start the evening meal" (141). They arrive at the bus stop, where the crowd is its fullest. Mxolisi and his group are dividing and dividing as he approaches the fateful intersection. The tone of his group changes, and as their walk drains of purpose they begin "shambling" (141). Although Amy and her friends sing, Mxolisi's singing has stopped. He makes plans with his friends and bids them goodbye.
The car, but for its white driver, is at first unremarkable in the stream of automobiles. It comes to a stop on NY1, at the intersection of Mandisa's street with another. It sits at the red light behind several other vehicles. Mxolisi is at the corner, he has almost made it home. He stays in his group, chatting. One look inside the car is all it takes to push the story to its fateful conclusion.
A shout by one, "KwiMazda! Kukh' umlungu kwiMazda!... In the Mazda! There is a white person in the Mazda" (142), turns into a chant by many, "ONE SETTLER, ONE BULLET" (142). The gathering of people becomes a crowd, and "Operation Barcelona is in the air" (142). The cry begins to echo, and it gains both volume and force as people come to understand the situation and see Amy for themselves. It takes on a life of its own, and "all who hear it are riveted" (142). As people crowd, they begin to take on "one goal," at first to verify the claim, after that to participate in the terrible act of defiance. Amy and her friends take note of the situation, and although she is urged to drive on, she is stuck at the red light in a line of cars. Mxiolisi is pulled toward the commotion.
Finally, they meet: "A casual glance from a passer-by. Instantaneous ignition" (142). The car is mobbed by people holding stones. The cry has turned "frenzied": "ONE SETTLER, ONE BULLET!" (143). They reach out to rock the car, almost playful at first, but then they reach for their stones. We are brought inside of Amy's mind. She bravely tells herself not to panic, "her lips tightly pressed together, jaw clenched" (143). The cry continues, gaining even more life: "It becomes a joyous refrain, voluntary and instinctive in its cruelly careless glee" (143). The car is stoned. Its passengers are sprayed with glass as the windows are broken, and they begin to bleed from the wounds. Amy gets glass in her eyes and is blinded.
The passengers attempt to flee to a nearby garage. The mob chases them and surrounds them, and those with weapons reach for them. Lunka yells into the crowd, begging for their mercy. "She is just a university student!," she yells, but the crowd pays her no mind: "My son and his friends and all those mobbing around your daughter's car, they know nothing of universities" (145). Amy is begging for her life when she is murdered. By all of them, by Mxolisi. Blood pounds in his ears, and though this act, Mxolisi ascends: "King! If for a day. If for a paltry five minutes...a miserable but searing second" (145). The chant changes: "AMANDLA! NGAWETHU! POWER! IT IS OURS!" (145). A call and response chant that ran like waves in the crowd, filled Mxolisi's head. It is a refrain he recognized, that he had heard from infancy; a "song of hate, of despair, or rage" (145).
Amy is murdered. In many ways, she led herself to this demise. As Mandisa laments, "Oh, that her goodness had not blinded her to the animosity of some of those for whom she bore such compassion!" (146). In that irrevocable and inevitable moment, the crowd cheered Mxolisi on as he had been cheered on since the day he was born. Mandisa remembers Nongqawuse, and his prediction that a "great raging whirlwind would come," that the nation might try to "rid [itself] of the scourge" (146). The murder, Mandisa writes, was an "eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage" (146). Mxolisi became the arm of a force much larger than himself and helped enact the "deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race"—"the consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe" (146). The crowd took what Mxolisi was and destroyed it. In the process, Amy's life is lost. At the end of the novel, Mandisa wonders why chance might be so cruel.
Analysis
Chance is a major theme of the novel. Mandisa centers her last chapter around chance, and her despair that Mxolisi ended up as part of the crowd that mobbed Amy and her friends. Chance has never been a part of Mandisa's world. It was "busy in that other world... the white world" (141). Mandisa's life was predestined, as was that of her children. Before Amy, Mxolisi's life had no chance either. His path was predetermined by the lack of opportunity surrounding him. He had no hope, none of them did, and "the million-million limped, the lost generation" (141). What a cruel twist that when the chance of something life-changing happening comes to Guguletu, it comes to condemn Mandisa's son. This point, that her son was a murderer but for chance, is central to Mandisa's message to Amy's mother. As she did when she told Amy's mother that she was also grieving, she is drawing a parallel between their pains. On the day of the murder, they both lost children due to chance.
Although Amy's death was a product of chance, it was also in many ways inevitable. It was inevitable because Amy entered a township full of people who had suffered at the hands of her kind. There were rarely white people in Guguletu, so it was inevitable that she be seen, and that it might cause a commotion. It was also inevitable because if it hadn't been Amy, it would have been another white person who would have eventually died in a similar situation, through the "eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage" (145). Once again, Mandisa questions what would have happened if Amy had been more aware of that fact. If Amy had feared for her life more and believed less naively in the importance of good intentions, she might have avoided the altercation in Guguletu.
The motif of chanting drives the novel to the climax. The call and response of "ONE SETTLER, ONE BULLET" ignite the people of Guguletu. Not only does it create a mob mentality, but it also has a historical weight that authenticates the violence. They had spent their whole lives repeating it the call—"one settler, one bullet"—and now they were given the opportunity to fulfill that desire. The call rings "from throat to throat," and "becomes a joyous refrain, voluntary and instinctive in its cruelly careless glee" (144). It filled up the masses, "baptized" them, and transformed them from a cluster of people into a crowd. A crowd with a shared goal—to "rid ourselves of the scourge" (145). The chanting is relentless, and so the reader, too, must listen as the large block letters are spread through the narrative.
As Mxolisi and Amy approach the intersection, the parallel of their experiences crumbles. Mxolisi's group stops singing long before Amy's does. Although they are both approaching goodbyes, the difference in permanency in their goodbyes shows. Mxolisi happily chats with his friends as they discuss their plans for the next day. Amy and her friends sit in an emotional silence. At the street intersection, they meet. Two people from different worlds, but with a shared goal of justice. Most importantly, both were burdened with the weight of their races: "My son, the blind but sharpened arrow of the wrath of his race. Your daughter, the sacrifice of hers" (146). They had a number of similarities—they were caring, politically active, leaders with a shared goal—but that one crucial difference is all that mattered in the moment.
Mandisa writes the murder from Amy's perspective. Although she writes from Mxolisi's point of view before and after the incident, it is only through Amy's eyes that we can watch her die. This could be for a few different reasons. Mxolisi at the time of the murder was so tuned in to the mob mentality, so frenzied, that to write a coherent narrative from his perspective could be impossible. Another explanation has to do with Mandisa's intention: perhaps the narrator could not bear to imagine the event through her son, the murderer's, eyes. Perhaps it has to do with the narrator's intention in the novel, as Mandisa knows that the moment of the murder is a moment the victim's mother could only—should only have to—read about through the eyes of her daughter.
