The Inheritors by Eve Fairbanks

Author:Eve Fairbanks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

21 Christo

BILLYBOY RAMAHLELE HEARD THE RIOT before he saw it. In February 1996, UFS’s first black dormitory head was relaxing in front of a wildlife program on TV with his apartment door open. Suddenly, he became aware of a noise. Could it be the campus’s trees, rustling in a gust? No—it was heavier, more like trampling. Could it be his TV? He switched it off. The noise grew louder.

Ramahlele got up and poked his head out the door. There, he saw the black students in his dorm stampeding out of the entryway and running toward the central quad. Some were holding sticks or cricket bats.

They told him they wanted to confront the white boys on campus. Those boys refused to treat them like they should be treated in a democracy, they said. Racing alongside the group, Ramahlele wasn’t truly worried until he rounded the corner and saw, under the moonlight, a line of white boys at least as long as his line of black students, standing shoulder-to-shoulder. “It looked like an army flank,” he remembered. The white students were also holding cricket bats, cocked over their shoulders like rifles. And their mouths were open: they were singing.

Vivid images flashed in Ramahlele’s mind, memories of his own apartheid upbringing. The song the white boys were singing was “Die Stem,” the apartheid-era national anthem. Sometimes, when ransacking a shack in his township, white police officers would hum “Die Stem.”

Ramahlele’s heart sank. “The history was,” he told me, “if they’re singing that, somebody is going to die.”

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