Tsotsi picked his nails with a hunting knife, his two feets up on a makeshift desk, sneering at Zuma flanked by his gorilla of bodyguard. They were inside a cramped shack made of corrugated iron sheets illuminated with a single petrol lamp hanging from a wall. Guarding the door and standing around them were Tsotsi’s gang members.
– “Sello Zuma, the most powerful man in South Africa needs help from someone like me? I’m touched.” Tsotsi said while the rest of his gang snickered.
Zuma cringed. Anger made him involuntarily clenched his fists. He was furious that he had to come to Soweto in the middle of the night to meet a low-life from the slum like some lackey. It was humiliating. Until recently, Tsotsi had been just one the numerous gang leaders from the township. After the first democratic election in South Africa, crimes had risen dramatically due to the new inexperienced police force and in 2002, a movement called PABG—People Against Black Gangsters—was created in Johannesburg. Being an offshoot of the Islamic organization Qibla, it drew its recruits mostly from the numerous terrorist-sponsored Islamic militant groups. Initially, the community and police welcomed PABG activities, recognizing the need for community action. However, PABG increasingly took matters into their own hands and was believed responsible for killing a large number of gang leaders. It was Tsotsi who had convinced the other gang leaders of the need to eradicate the danger that PABG represented to them. For a full period of a year, Tsotsi waged a relentless war against PABG and its members while the South African police watched from the sidelines. He killed indiscrimanetly men, women, babies and neighbors. He hunted them at home, at work and in school. Any muslim suspected of being a PABG member was shot down, hacked with machetes or burnt to death. He and his men would grabbed toddlers by their legs and swung theirs heads against the wall just to save bullets. When the year ended, PABG was dismantled and Tsotsi’s reputation had soared to new heights. A favorite story about Tsotsi was that one day, needing money for the bus, he robbed a blind beggar with amputated legs of his alms. While waiting for the bus, he saw a white couple in a Lexus, a car he had always wanted to test drive. Tsotsi walked to the couple, shot them in the head and took off with the car. When he realized there was a baby in the back seat, he stopped by the roadside and threw the baby under an oncoming truck before crossing the same road to buy himself a burger with the beggar’s money.
– “Can you do it?” Zuma asked calmly.
Tsotsi spit on the ground. “Yeah, but this time, I want something else besides the money.”
– “What?”
– “I want the police to stop raiding my labs.”
Zuma shook his head. “Can’t do it, Tsotsi.”
Tsotsi kicked the half-empty bottle of whisky on the desk and sent it flying against the wall. Zuma recoiled.
– “Bullshit!”
Zuma looked around him sensing that the atmosphere had suddenly become tense.
– “Tsotsi, be reasonable. I can’t simply just pick up the phone and call the chief of police to tell him to—”
– “I don’t care what you have to do, Sello. It’s that or the deal’s off.”
Zuma took his time to think about a way to extricate himself from the situation.
He looked up at Tsotsi, “How about I tell the police to leave your dealers and your girls alone?”
Tsotsi smiled. “You’ll do that? Woa, what did that Boer woman do to you?”
– “Nothing. I want to show the Afrikaners that they’re no longer welcome here. I want them to know who are their masters now. I want to make them pay for what they did to our people during the apartheid. I want to—”
– “Woa, Sello. Calm down. Save your bullshit for the press and for your rallies. So, I’ll get the money when the job’s done?”
– “The job’s done only when they moved out, nothing less.”
– “By any means?”
Zuma was not that stupid. He was not going to say out loud what he wanted in front of witnesses.
– “I don’t wanna know how you will do it. I just want them out of the farm and if you’re telling me now that you plan to commit murder, I will have to report you to the authorities.”
Tsotsi looked at Zuma with disgust. “Alright, then I guess I would have to convince the white farmers to give away their farm and livelihood to a black guy living in Sandton and driving a brand new Mercedez-Benz who knows nothing about farming just for the sake of justice and because that same black guy holds an ANC party-card membership?”
– “That’s better.”
– “Then that’s settled. You’ll soon hear from me or from the media.”
Tsotsi waited while Zuma conferred with his bodyguard.
– “Alright, but no one and I mean no one should be able to connect this to me or else—”
– “Or else what Sello?” Tsotsi swung himself around abruptly, fixing Zuma with looks that could kill.
– “Tsotsi, don’t you ever forget that I have the police in my pocket. A random raid in Soweto and who knows what can happen?”
– “Are you threatening me, you arriviste bastard?”
– “No, just a reminder.”
The two men stared at each moment for a long time.
– “Get your fat ass out of here Sello. I don’t like the smell in here.”
