It’s cup final day in dusty Duduza¹
east of Johannesburg
Not that anyone’s playing football here
in this place they moved the locals
so they wouldn’t be so close to a white town
But we’re here
where the depths of a Highveld winter beckon
to make sure these blacks
aren’t getting out of hand
Or, as I’ve heard some say
that they aren’t getting ‘too white’
Teenagers sent to keep
grown men and women in ‘their’ place;
the place this government put them
when it took their place from them
two decades ago
Some here are too young to remember that
those who were infants then
and those born since ‘relocation’
who’ll have heard the harsh histories
and every occupant of those armoured vehicles
Duduza dwellers have been acting up
Who’d have thought it?
So they’ve sent a bunch of rookies
barely out of basics, to police them
clearly hoping like hell
our mere presence will be enough to deter trouble
Each of us
this bum fluff brigade in our brown ‘buffels’²
has one thing in common with each of them
Not one of us wants to be here
But I have two with the forcibly resettled
It’s cup final day in Duduza
and everywhere else on the planet
but it’s 1985, no way to know here and now
If it’s treble-chasing Everton, or United until I wander to the spaza shop
and it’s packed tight with patrons
around a black and white portable
A man perhaps old enough
to be my grandfather catches my eye
as I squint from a distance at the tiny screen
He’s nervously friendly
perhaps worried about trouble
but it’s a connection
I smile back, “What’s the score?”
He says it’s goalless, but there’s more
“United already got one marching order.”
That was Kevin Moran
first early bath in football’s showpiece final
I’ll find out the next day back at base
when Mum visits, with the Sunday paper
“Norman conquest,” the report is headlined
riffing on Whiteside’s extra-time winner
Did they celebrate Whiteside’s winner
in that Duduza spaza shop?
I have no idea
we’d rolled out by then
but it was only Manchester United
not Kaizer Chiefs
or Orlando Pirates
Were they captivated like I had often been
by that grand occasion?
Or were they just packed around that
14-inch portable because it was
something to do on a windswept
autumn Saturday in the dreary
dump the system had delivered
them to? A chance – this
all-white final – to dream of
ditching Duduza
for destinations distant
free of this diabolical discrimination
We’re nine Saturdays removed from cup final day
when Duduza explodes onto the TV news. A
suspected police informant is necklaced,
murdered by having a burning tyre
placed around her neck
by mourners at the funeral
of a young activist killed by the regime
The state propaganda machine beams
the full horror across the civilised world
as a pointer to the savagery of apartheid’s resisters It’s also 52 days past the deaths of 39 Juventus fans
at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels
for which drunk Liverpool fans are blamed
That night a state of emergency is declared
in parts of South Africa
and I get an elbow in the chin
for calling Afrikaans recruits who cheer
the radio announcement ‘boneheads’
Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps some of them
were glad to be there on cup final day
I wonder what they might have been hoping
would happen that chilly Saturday
in deadly dangerous Duduza
1 FA Cup, shown live from London annually by SABC
2 Armoured troop carrier – Afrikaans for buffalo
