‘So, this is it. The end of my first week in solitary confinement,’ Nobantu thinks. The tiny space in which she is held, is pervaded by a tomb-like silence. Except for her own breathing and, on occasion, her restless pacing, there is no other activity to distract her. There is nothing to make her imprisonment more bearable.

She makes an effort to wrest her attention away from the excruciating awareness of the slow monotonous drag of time. Seven days. A mere week. Under the normal hurly-burly of her life, a week would flash by. Now it seems like eternity. The uncertainty or her situation; she is held without the prospect of immediate charges being brought against her, exacerbated things. Time became a sluggish beast. The inertia threatened to infect her mind.

To fill the dreary hours, between unpalatable meals and interrogation sessions, she strives to enlarge her prison world by excavating moments from her past. She knows, by means of the past one is able to come to grips with the present, and perhaps even anticipate the future. That this is commonplace wisdom, she knows very well. She has learnt, however, not to dismiss the tried and the obvious, as is the habit of those who are susceptible to novelty. She is immobilised right now, but she is convinced that this is only temporary. Instead of allowing her mind to be confined to the dimensions of the cell, she chooses to give it free reign while remaining mindful of her predicament.

Between reveries of her childhood in Tembisa and schooling in the Transvaal, vague and fleeting memories of sighting a great bird frequently enter her mind. She cannot understand this. At times it strikes her that this recurring image seems much less some form of memory, than a fleeting suggestion emanating from some obscured layer of her consciousness.

She remembers the criss-cross of untarred streets. The regularity of the houses in the zone where she grew up. During the afternoons she would play kiddibeka with her friends from the neighbourhood. There was Mona, a skinny girl with big black eyes and hair that always stood on end, as if she was in some constant state of trepidation. And there was Thandeka, a pudgy little girl who lived two streets away: her nose was always running. These memories bring a faint smile to Nobantu’s face.

The three of them would play. Always in their backyard, since her grandmother who looked after her while her mother was at work, refused to let her play in the streets or to allow her to go visiting unaccompanied by an adult. They would gather. In the course of an afternoon they ran through a whole series of games involving a little rubber ball and three little girls with enthusiasm and vivid imaginations. They would create endless variations of linear, square, rectangular, triangular and circular games, with nothing more than a ball, and their abilities to discover new mutations of old set-games at their disposal.

She saw herself darting between Mona, Thandeka. The ball bouncing on the ground. With great dexterity she remained within the parameters of the courts demarcated in the dust. She had mastered the art of fully utilising the latitude between conformity and transgression of the rule-governed games. Recalling all this, the image of a red bouncing ball and three little girls immersed in play mingles with the vague recurring vision of a bird. A sense of wings fluttering.

She oscillates between these recollections of her childhood and her first encounter with the police. She was at high school when they first came face to face. It was during a school boycott. The years of carefree play amid squalor were behind her. She had, like others, grown into the ongoing struggle to break the oppressive mould which has been cast around the lives of black people in the country.

Like most of her generation, school was the obvious place to begin. It was axiomatic, she like many others argued that pupils, teachers and their parents reshape the nature of their schooling. It was not enough to demand equal education. It was also necessary to work towards a completely new form of education: one that would not only reflect the longing for justice and freedom, but would also serve as a direct means of realising these aspirations. And there was no time to waste. It was a matter of urgency.