I wake, but not with a start. The engine of the Datsun 120Y screams as Lena flogs it up the incline, stuck in second. Her foot is flat on the floor, but she can’t change gear. One hand, gripping the wheel, the other, hauling me through the gap between the front seats, pressing my bleeding head into her side.

It’s 1981, four years since Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko died in police custody. We’re not far from the place where he was arrested at a roadblock near Port Elizabeth, where he was beaten until his brain bled, where he was thrown in cuffs into the back of a police van and shipped off to a jail cell in Pretoria. The medical examiner’s report later found nothing untoward in his death.

Lena and I have made a brief trip to Fort Beaufort to see the family doctor — I’m down with a fever — and by the time we head home I’m already lights-out on the back seat when we hit the stretch of road that pulls out of town and winds briefly past Kwatinidubu township and out into the countryside.

Lena notices a crowd gathered on the gravel shoulder. A man steps out of the throng — must have been in his 30s, maybe? — but it’s the hate that sticks with her afterwards. Lena says she’ll never forget the hate in his face.

His arm swings. A projectile the size of a cricket ball flies from his hand. A passenger-side window shatters. She’s reaching back through the blood and glass shrapnel to grab me, shoving my gushing head against her side, the engine wailing as we helter-skelter towards some kind of safety.

When we stop a few kays down the country road, she pops me matter-of-factly on the car bonnet and rifles in the boot for the first aid kit — there was always one in the car in those days — and finds a pressure bandage, which she wraps around my head just above my ears. She flags down a passing car, whose driver reckons it’s safer for us to head on to Alice for medical help than risk the mob by going back the way we’d come. The stranger takes Bruce’s number with the promise that he’ll get a message to him as soon as he can find a phone line. It’ll be two decades before mobile phones become every-day in this part of the world.

Memory is a tricksy thing. I remember this like a movie, but without a soundtrack. The visuals are there, but there’s no emotional content. The only niggle is when we pull up at the Whites-only state hospital in the university town of Alice and make our way across the parking lot. It must be well past noon, maybe heading towards mid-afternoon, because the sun casts enough of a shadow to give me the first glimpse of my injured self: my silhouette is wearing a chef’s hat. The bandage is taut around my ears, and pushes my hair into a bulge above it. I’m strangely self-conscious about this.

The other niggle is the bee stings when the anaesthetic’s needle spears sideways into the scalp somewhere above my right ear. In and out it goes, again and again, until the v-shaped gash fogs over and all I feel is a curious tug-tug-tug as the doctor does his needlework. When we leave, I have a shaved patch, eight or so sutures, and no sense of drama whatsoever. It isn’t so for Lena. It takes her two years to burn through the fury. This immigrant from Liverpool — who’d grown up on the banks of the Mersey and cut her pub-crawling teeth as a student nurse in the same taverns where The Beatles played their first gigs before they went global — is not yet ten years in the country. She’s culturally cloistered and politically naive, but here she is, thrown into a strange country’s immolation, the roots of which she barely understands.

Later, when I recount this day like the earnest child storyteller I imagine I was back then, I can’t understand why people giggle when I say: ‘I got stoned once’.

Now that I’m in on the joke, I tell it slightly differently: ‘the first time I got stoned…’.

Although I don’t tell this story anymore, because the laughter quickly splutters out. What comes next in the telling? A grim reminder of what lies in our collective rearview mirror, and what we haven’t freed ourselves from yet, in spite of there being so much distance between then and the relative stability of now in a country where we are all emancipated but few are equal?

It’s not so much that our family was on the wrong side of history. What does that even mean, other than that we were riding the wave of a system that kept the best for people like us? Our ID books classified us as White and therefore placed us at the top of the pile. That we were slipstreaming behind a racist, undemocratic, minority-rule government that was clinging violently to power as the country’s majority raged against their second-class citizenry. These were the children of generations of Imperial, Colonial and now apartheid exploitation and brutality, leveraging themselves free with stones and burning tyres and toy-toying.

Why does Lena’s and my story matter when so many others suffered much greater traumas as the country tore itself apart?

Whose stories were being told at the time? Mine made it into the national news, apparently, although the newspaper clippings of this, if they still exist, haven’t surfaced after some digging. By Lena’s account, the phone rang off the hook with journalists wanting to report on a White child violated by an angry Black mob. But what of the isiXhosa high school principal who was gunned down outside his school in the same township, on the same day? Where is his story in the historical records? Some brief rummaging through the newspaper archives hasn’t turned up anything on his death, either, or any similar incidents.

The pecking order: separate and above

Apartheid: translated literally from the Afrikaans, it means a state of separateness.

In policy, it was the South African White minority government’s strategy of ‘separate development’ which the National Party kicked into play in 1948 and enforced brutally for nearly five decades. It’s for our own good, the party told us, wagging its finger at us from the halls of power, we’ll be better off if we stick with our own kind.

The White minority government took a world view — White supremacy — and an ideology — nationalism — and codified it into a legal system that played out in day-to-day acts that amounted to crimes against humanity. It’s hard to reconcile that such barbarism could happen in the modern age. But it’s just one chapter in the ongoing evolutionary arc of a species that came to believe that all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

In reality, apartheid wasn’t just about separateness. Apartheid was about domination, control, and exploitation, and it was enacted through an authoritarian legal system that ensured the country’s Whites remained the ‘baas’ or boss, and the ‘non-White’ majority — the Black, Coloured, and Indian— had to know their place in a tiered system of servitude. It was Imperialism and Colonialism handed down to the new generation of settlers.

Once each of us had our race marked in our identity documents, our path through life was set: whether we got to go to a decent school or hospital, whether we could live in the suburbs or were more likely to wash up in a slum, if we could climb our way up through the social strata, or if we were forever locked into the labour-class.

Anyone who was racially ambiguous — because some did transgress the Immorality Act and have the nerve to engage in coitus across the colour line, producing ‘mixed-race’ offspring — could have their lot in life determined by whether or not their hair was curly enough to hold a pencil. The straighter your hair, the better your prospects.

Silly ‘petty apartheid’ laws kept public spaces segregated: beaches, picnic spots, hotels and restaurants, taxis and buses.

When the apartheid state tightened segregation laws up, the British Colonial rulers had already given them a head start. The 1913 Land Act set aside a small bit of the land for Black Africans, leaving them squashed into 13 per cent of the countryside’s footprint. It ensured that Whites got the rest of the land and all the wealth it held.

The apartheid state then took this a step further, creating within that area 10 ‘homelands’, our equivalent of the US’s tribal reserves for Native Americans. These were supposed to be self-governing states, or ‘Bantustans’, for Black people to do their own thing. This set in place a conveyor belt of migrant labour, where work-able adults had to leave their kids back home under the care of grandparents or extended family, and trek to a nearby town or city to take trade their cheap labour as gardeners, labourers and domestic cleaners, usually squatting on the town’s edges. They weren’t allowed South African citizenship, and their pass books were how the state policed someone’s movements within what eventually became the Republic.

By the 1980s, the country’s economy was soaring on blood money exsanguinated from the generations of Black and Brown people, who, to the mining executives, were simply units of labour to be worked at the rock face at the bottom of a mine shaft in 40-odd degree heat, preparing the wall for blasting so that some rich person half a planet away could buy themselves a few carats of bling. We had a lot of gold and diamonds back then.

Under the National Party government, grander apartheid laws kept a miner living in perpetual separation from his family back in the Bantustan, while he had to squat in a mining town hostel, shoved into a dormitory-style arrangement with other men and reduced to the conditions of a schoolboy. He might only be allowed to visit home once a year.

After Bruce had hung up his mariner’s hat and returned to South Africa with his Catholic bride, he studied agricultural engineering and took a teaching job at the University of Fort Hare, a designated Blacks-only campus in a scruffy blink-and-you-miss-it town called Alice.

It is into this context that our family of five — Bruce, Lena, Simon, Nikki, and myself — found ourselves living on the edge of the Ciskei, one of the smaller Bantustans, just as the country was entering the last bloody decade of apartheid rule. Bruce’s work was on campus in the valley, and we lived up in the misty hills of Hogsback, about 30 km away.

By now South Africa was a pariah state. International sanctions were crippling the economy. The Black majority was seeing weakness, and starting to fight back with a growing ferocity.

Fort Hare campus, and the towns in this part of the country, were in a state of political foment, and it was on a trip between Alice and Fort Beaufort that Lena and I collided with history and a rock.

Country life

The mystique of country life in Hogsback, on the South African side of this fractious border, is in stark contrast to the litter-strewn, potholed streets of Alice, in the Ciskei bantustan, where burning tyres often billow noxious, threatening smoke during the student protests.

Up here, we are swaddled in mist and safe to pony-ride anywhere we like; down there, on campus, the bullets sometimes fly.

Shortly after we settle here in 1981, Lena takes a part-time nursing job at the local doctor’s practice.

Dr Bride Dickson, the battle-ax boss-lady, is all steel-bladed elocution and cum laude Scrabble scores. Gwen Barlow is the twinkly-eyed nursing sister who Lena tucks in next to as trusty sidekick. Bride is towering and leathery, and her turkey wattle quivers when she punctuates a sentence with a brisk jerk of the head. Gwen is slight as a sunbird, flitting about beneath a hunch that has swelled between her shoulders as she’s ripened into older age.

Local lore has it that Bride once swam across the Mbhashe River next to her horse to get to her patients during a diphtheria epidemic in the Transkei. Gwen is the World War II-era Scottish nurse who had met her husband Bill while serving in North Africa before settling down here in the south of the continent.

Both seem equally and eternally ancient to the eight-year-old me. In reality, Bride is 60, and Gwen is 66.

Bride introduces me to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe — can you imagine anything more enchanting than discovering Narnia and experiencing snow for the first time? — and Gwen introduces me to rhubarb pie.

Bride’s voice transports itself, rather than speaks. She, too, has Scottish roots but her accent has been domesticated by a haughty Englishness that remains even after travelling to South Africa by ship in the years following the war and working as a mission station doctor in the Transkei Bantustan. Now running her own small show in Hogsback, some call her the ‘horse doctor’ because of her no-nonsense bedside manner. Lena pictures her putting a knee on someone’s chest as she pries a tooth from their jaw. But her reputation as an unparalleled diagnostician draws patients from good distances away in this remote countryside.

I don’t remember Gwen’s voice, but I do recall her smile, her granny’s bun, her penchant for ‘moling’ about in her garden, and her adoring poodles.

The doctor’s practice is in the heart of Hogsback, which is to say it’s a repurposed house across the dirt road that runs through the village, which is a single dusty trading store with fuel pumps and post office. The practice only has running water in those days, no electricity, so the medical threesome sterilise instruments in a pressure-cooker style autoclave over a gas burner. The place smells of mould, methylated spirits, and paraffin, and is almost always on the darker side of gloomy.

One bedroom has been repurposed as the medicine and instrumentation room. Two other rooms are for seeing patients.

The former lounge is now the waiting room for White patients, with chairs and soft furnishings.

Black patients — mostly farm labourers, gardeners, maids, or tree fellers with the local timber company — queue outside on hard wooden benches that are twisting in the damp weather and turning grey.

White patients phone to make appointments.

Black patients arrive and wait to be seen on a first-come first-served basis.

There is no need for the ‘Whites only/slegs Blankes’ sign above the waiting room, the way there is down the road at the bottle store, and there’s no need for the local cops to enforce the segregated entrances. The community polices itself.

In that first year in Hogsback, before we head off to boarding school, my sister and I spend many hours loitering here, waiting for Lena to finish a shift.

There is a poster tacked to the wall that is drawn for kids, and seems to be the only thing worth looking at as I while away the time.

There’s a crocodile with bandaged jaws, a stork with a dressing around one leg, and a monkey with its eye swaddled in some kind of dressing. There’s some or other creature with criss-crossed plasters over its wound, and they’re all queuing to see a nurse. I don’t remember what sort of animal the nurse is.

At the bottom of the poster, printed in a heavy bold font: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that way the whole world will be blind and toothless.

Roll of the die

The day that Christina Mtandana and I meet in 2014, Cape Town is wringing out its bloomers after a humdinger of a storm.

Christina has agreed to share her experience as a businesswoman, health activist, mother and resident living in a flood-prone slum on the edge of the Mother City for an article I’m writing for a local magazine. It’s one of the rinse-and-repeat stories that I’ve done so many times over the years that I could write the lede blindfolded: how the poorest and most vulnerable, who are least responsible for the weather shocks caused by the industrial Capitalist carbon-polluting machine, are the most vulnerable to their impacts.

South Africa is still one of the most unequal countries in the world, and Cape Town one of the most unequal cities. Not more than 30 km from Christina’s home is some of the most premium real estate on the continent. You couldn’t ask for a more stark demonstration of the global carbon/climate divide than this.

The two of us discover that we have a few things in common. We’re both Eastern Cape gals. We’re a similar age, born around 1972. We both went to school in the same obscure farming town about 12 hours’ drive east of Cape Town: she lived in Queenstown, and this is where my siblings and I went to boarding school in the ’80s. Like many people from this moribund province, Christina and I later became part of the steady stream of economic migrants looking for a better life in Cape Town.

But that’s about where our similarities end.

After the previous night’s storm, I’d woken to a flooded kitchen in my ground-floor suburban apartment, although it was easily resolved with a few towels and some elbow grease. No damage to the kitchen cupboards, thankfully, but even that would’ve been covered by insurance.

Christina’s is altogether another story. In the early hours of that morning, the wind had ripped the corrugated iron roofing sheets off the ceiling-less bedroom where she and her son were sleeping, sending them scurrying to another room to wait out the downpour. Her home is sturdy, as far as informal board-and-iron sheet structures go, but it couldn’t withstand that kind of punishment. Come daylight, she has no time to waste. By the time I pull up outside her place an hour or so after sunrise, she already has some neighbourhood men hammering the iron sheets back in place.

Christina runs a tuck-shop and take-away from the kitchen in her five-room home in Sweet Home Farm near Gugulethu, a part of Cape Town that once was the ‘dumping ground’ for people of colour under the apartheid state. This is literally the wording that history texts use to describe what happened to the many people forcibly removed from their homes and communities, and relocated onto the city’s margins when the state tightened up its segregation policies.

Many of Cape Town’s informal settlements sprawl precariously over natural wetlands that flood every winter when the rains come. The pattern is clear, but the solutions to the problem of urban flooding are not simple: in summer, the place looks dry and ideal for building an informal home, and there’s little policing to stop families from setting up home here. Come the winter storms, the water table rises, the ground becomes waterlogged, ponds form, homes get flooded.

Like most of her neighbours, Christina and her family don’t have a toilet in their home, and must walk to a nearby communal outhouse to relieve themselves. She shows me the bucket they use inside if they need the loo during the night. It’s a 10 litre plastic job with a lid that seals tight. Come daybreak, they empty it into the outside toilet. Bucket toilets like this are more than a mere convenience. They’re for safety, too. Midnight loo stops can be deadly for women, what with the skulduggery that happens in dark alleys when people are heading home from the local watering hole.

The municipal outhouses often block up, though, leaving people with little option but to empty their night buckets into the storm water drains. The drains in turn clog up with litter because municipal waste services aren’t quite what you get in the leafy, well-maintained suburbs. When the winter rains come, the drains back up and spill over into the swelling ponds, flooding walkways and people’s homes with litter-strewn, fetid water. One woman in the neighbourhood tells me how she had raw sewage in her lounge, seeping into the couch and lounge chairs.

South Africa has been democratic for 20 years by this time. Christina and I are equal before the law. Her children are the ‘born free’ generation — born free from chains of Colonial and apartheid discrimination, free to vote, eligible for the same rights in our Constitution as I am — but that doesn’t buy them a ticket out of the slums and into the plush suburbs.

Christina and my life seem to diverge most dramatically at the start of our teenage years. In my family, education was everything, and getting through school was a non-negotiable.

Christina tells me that her father wasn’t quite so insistent. She had to bail on her schooling at the age of 12, and trek to Cape Town to get a job as a domestic worker and support her dad. Her property investment strategy was entirely different to mine. It took me quite a bit longer to build up a nice deposit and eventually get a mortgage to buy an apartment in town. But Christina got cracking on her property investment right then, as a teenager. She started saving her wages, and built a one-bedroom home from wooden board and iron sheeting for her and her dad. Over time, she added another room, and then another. Then she had to dismantle the whole lot, because the city wanted to clear the neighbourhood of squatters, so she hired a truck to move her stuff to a new site a few kilometres away and put it all back together again.

Eventually, though, she has a comfortable five-room place for her family — when I meet her, she has four children — and from which she runs her foodie business. If the kitchen floods after a storm, she just gets on with things, lifting the electrical cables and plugs off the ground and stands on an upturned plastic crate to keep her feet dry while she cooks.

Our lives are a microcosm of the world as it is today: her daily experience and mine, her neighbourhood and mine, both reflecting the global divide between the rich and the poor that continues to widen on the back of the exploitation by the powerful of those with the least power.

Our lives are immeasurably different, and our day-to-day comforts and difficulties hard to place alongside each other, for the discomfort this comparison stirs up.

The random accident of fate has her born into an isiXhosa-speaking Black family under an apartheid government, while I am born into a White English-speaking family in a cultural and legal context that makes me the cream of the crop and her forever a few steps behind.

There, but for the grace of the gods and the roll of the die, goes each one of us, the privileged of the world, our comfort and safety subsidised by the suffering of others.

Do unto others

Suturing human skin doesn’t look much more difficult than sewing a piece of cloth, except it’s way more stretchy. The tricky thing is you have to clasp the curved surgical needle with forceps, and you can’t be squeamish. The way the skin elongates before the needle finally breaks through with a bit of a snap, the layers of dermis and fatty tissue, the oozing bloody bits that need dabbing with cotton wool, you have to have a stomach for that, I’m finding out.

It’s a Saturday night, some time in that first year in Hogsback and eight-year-old me is watching Bride stitch up a man’s hand after he’d been bitten by a dog. When the call came through for Lena on the party-line saying someone needed patching up after an incident, you can be sure I wasn’t going to stay at home. She lets me tag along, and gives me the job of holding a paraffin lamp overhead while Bride and her patch up the mauled hand.

All these years later, looking back, I see the lessons my parents taught me then. One: awe of the wild, and that nature is our true home. Two: keep your head down and don’t buck the system (they coasted with the politics of the day, rather than paddled against it). Three: take care of those around you (especially people who look, think, and sound like you).

Hogsback’s bucolic appeal is in part because it’s miles from anywhere, and back then didn’t have any state emergency services. No fire trucks, no ambulances, no EMTs on speed-dial. It was up to the locals to put our own fires out. Anyone with medical training or who was willing to hold a firehose was unofficially on call 24/7. Over the four decades that Bruce and Lena lived in Hogsback, they were almost always the first people to respond to fire and medical emergencies, until their age meant the stronger youngsters had to take it over.

So, it's hardly a surprise that Bruce was one of the first on the scene on that Thursday in March, 1998, after a neighbour called to say something was up at Gwen’s place.

What he saw that day can’t have made any sense to him at first. It probably never would.

According to the police investigation and the local rumour mill, Gwen’s neighbour, Pat Preciado-Elliot, a medical doctor down at an Alice hospital, had stumbled upon some shenanigans in the hospital ledgers. Being the feisty Bronx expat that she was, with her Peace Corps credentials, Pat wasn’t going to keep quiet, and someone senior in the hospital administration was getting antsy.

Pat and Gwen did what Hogsback neighbours often did back then — and probably still do now — they’d gone off to the nearest town to stock up on groceries. As they pulled up into Gwen’s driveway to offload her shopping, they were confronted by two men waiting in ambush.

By the time Bruce arrives, he finds Pat (58) and Gwen — now, 83 — face down on the ground, each with a single bullet wound to the back of their heads.

The two men who were later arrested for the killings — 29-year-old Siphelo Ndzuzo; Lungisa Nqweniso, 31 — wouldn’t give up the name of the person who allegedly hired them.

Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith wrote back in the 1700s that where there is great property there is great inequality.

‘For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.’

Three-plus centuries deeper in the mire of the unfair spread of resources and wealth, and Smith’s observations still hold true. Today, the data shows that societies with bigger gaps between rich and poor have higher levels of violent crime. The same data shows that the treatment for the malady isn’t harsher criminal punishment, but to create a more just society by reducing income inequality.

If we smooth out the peaks and troughs between the haves and the have-nots just a bit, there’s an almost outsized comparative decrease in violence within communities.

It’s pretty simple. When someone’s existence is curdled with the stress of not being able to make ends meet, of daily trade-offs between train fare to get to work or breakfast for the kids before school, or the maddening powerlessness of not being able to simply earn more to pay for everything, it wears a person downl. The bitterness that grows each time a Mercedes cruises past you while you’re waiting in the rain for a taxi, or someone turns a deaf ear to your reasonable request for a job, or some small change. When you’re living on the desperation line, some prison time is hardly a social demotion.

But it would be overly simple to say that South Africa’s taste for excessive violence is purely to satisfy the lust of jealousy or the acid spill of resentment, even though the chasm between rich and poor has only gotten bigger here, just as it has globally.

Steve Biko was in his 20s when he wrote the essay We Blacks, which was later published in the collection I Write What I Like in 1978, shortly after he was murdered by the state. In it he wrote that the ‘Black man was a defeated person’. The logic of apartheid — such a benign-sounding word — was to condition the Black man for servitude, to dehumanise him, to strip him of his manhood. It was to make him believe that this position was inevitable, and that there was nothing to do to fight the tide of misery that came with it.

‘The Black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.’

So much has been written in an effort to understand South Africa’s bloodthirstiness. Why do we harm so much? When we harm, why do we do it with such extreme violence?

We can’t separate the material world from the internal emotional experience of existing in a state of want, when there’s so much potential comfort out there in an unequal society, writes Wahbie Long, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town, in his book Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind.

The alienation, the envy, the shame, on the back of generations of living in a society that strips the other of its humanness.

‘Shame is at the root of much violence and substance abuse, envy is what happens when shame turns to resentment,’ he argues.

Within this, there’s the question of recognition.

‘When you are systematically and repeatedly disrespected and misrecognised by someone, then that relationship is distorted. Alienation is then built into that relationship,’ Long says.

But Biko is not long in the grave, the ink on the pages of his essay collection is barely dry and the book just banned, when things begin to change in South Africa. By the time my family settles in Hogsback in the early 1980s, the oppressed ox is beginning to realise his strength, and leverage it against the apartheid state. Riots, stonings, ‘necklace’ burnings, bombs, shoot-outs.

Then the spirit of the country changes again. By 1994, it’s one person, one vote, after an unexpectedly peaceful transition from White-minority autocracy to emancipated democracy. Everyone in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ is equal before the law. No bloodbath, no massacring of the frightened former oppressor.

But in this part of the Eastern Cape, something that must have been simmering in the psyche of this border community for generations bursts into flames. There is a slew of home attacks where the violence is so disproportionate to the supposed objective — usually robbery — that it is hard to fathom. Life seems cheap, and the viciousness a catharsis.

Blind and toothless

It’s a little over a year since Gwen’s execution, and Lena and Bruce are kicking back on the veranda when the phone rings. They’re dusty and sweaty after one of their usual outdoorsy Sunday mornings, and they’re wetting their whistles with a chilly beer.

They don’t get to finish their drinks.

When they get to Bride’s place, not five minutes’ drive away, they have to climb over the farm gate which is still padlocked. Fat lot of good that was. When they get to the front door, Bruce won’t go in. He doesn’t want to see what he knows is there. Lena has to, although she can’t really explain why. There’s so much history between the two of them, it seems the right thing to do.

Bride, 78, the retired missionary doctor and by now one of the first women priests to be ordained in South Africa’s Anglican Church, is on her bed in a state of undress, her head bloodied and pulped, her body cold.

It wasn’t long before the police tracked down her attacker, a man by the name of John Sinto who’d worked for her as a gardener. He had recently been released from prison for beating her up three years earlier.

He had returned to her place to finish the job, only this time, he came with two others.

Who knows what words were exchanged between Bride and the three men who visited her the night before. What did they say in those moments: what curses uttered, what rage spat out, what pleading, what prayers, what mundanity might they have shared, or not shared? How much of what was said was done so in English, how much in isiXhosa?

What must she have seen in their faces as they circled in. What must they have seen in hers as she understood what was to come.

Bride and her assailants — one of whom had been arrested in relation to Gwen and Pat’s killings — are born onto different sides of a chess board in a game whose rules they didn’t write. All pawns in another round where the tally was being added to a scoreboard for generations. Bride, on the side of the game that is stacked in her favour, born into the empire whose wealth is built on the plunder of slaves and Colonised labour on multiple continents, built with stolen gold, silver, copper and diamonds. John and his accomplices, destined from birth to live in wattle-and-daub homes in a native reserve with no running water or flushing toilet or electricity, in a place where the best job he could get is as a barely literate gardener for a foreigner who never learned to speak his language.

None of the four people in that home on that night could make a move that would in any way fix the rules of the game, or make up for all the wins and losses that had been clocked up over countless decades.

A debt this old can never be repaid.

The closing pages of Bride’s story, after a lifetime of service as a missionary medic and priest: twice beaten; twice mauled; once left for dead; once, left dead.

Chapter 6…

[Some newspaper clippings: title and date unlisted, but probably the Daily Dispatch; Anglican Journal, 1 September 1999; Gwen Barlow on geni.com; Patricia Preciado-Elliot on geni.com.]