“Hey! What’s that noise?” asked Sandile. “Haaibo, Cliff, don’t you hear anything?”

At first I couldn’t trace the sound, then suddenly I could hear what it was.

“Ja, I can hear it. It seems like it’s coming from the back.”

“Come on, let’s check it out,” Sandile said.

We got up in a flash from where we had been sitting on the front stoep of the house and ran to the back yard.

“Yho Yho! Yho! Yho!” both Sandile and I cried out in shock.

“Heh! Haaibo, what on earth is happening down there?” asked Sandile.

Standing in my back yard and looking across the road, we could see a group of residents gathered outside a house. The scene reminded me of the one at the taxi rank. The house was near the St John’s Memorial Church and the Howard Ben Mazwi Junior Secondary School.

The people in the crowd were like a swarm of bees. As we watched from a distance, it became clear that the crowd was angry and aggressive.

The residents were carrying all kinds of weapons and were singing a community war-cry as they tried to break down the fencing around the house.

“Maybe they have found one of the gangsters,” said Sandile.

“Hayi! I doubt it, Sandile, but eish it’s hard to tell. You could be right though; the crowd looks angry.”

Everybody had now come out of their houses along the street to watch.

“What the hell’s going on?” asked Uncle. “What in the Devil’s name is cooking down there?”

“We just heard a loud noise – people are toyi-toying.”

“Hey! No, maan!” Uncle replied with suspicion. “That cannot just be toyi-toying going on over there – there is something really dangerous happening.”

“That’s what I said to Cliff, Uncle,” replied Sandile. “It seems like the crowd are going after someone.”

The crowd roared as they managed to break through the fencing.

“Hey, Uncle, things are bad!” Bra Donda cried out across the wire fence. He lived opposite our house and he was much older than me.

“Ja! Maan, Donda, I can see,” responded Uncle loudly. “Do you know what the commotion’s all about?”

“Yes, Uncle,” Donda replied loudly. “A friend of mine, who was just down there, tells me that the residents want to beat up a young lad by the name of Zakheyi, who stays in that four-room house down there. He says that the crowd believes that this Zakheyi is one of the members of this Grizzly Bear Gang.”

“Yho! Yho! Yho! Yho!” cried Uncle in disbelief.

Sandile and I were as shocked as Uncle.

“Hey, maan,” said Uncle, shaking his head. “Well, Donda, if that’s the case, let this Grizzly Bear Gang be wiped away for good. Better to live in a peaceful township than one in which the order of the day is gangsterism. You see, now the community is taking mass action. The local police are nowhere to be found.”

“You see, I told you,” Sandile said calmly. “Didn’t I tell you that somebody was going to be beaten up badly?”

“Can you see, Uncle? The police are just arriving. There is the van coming down the street.”

“Oh, I would like to see how they deal with this scene.”

As the police van drew nearer to the crowd, it became quite difficult for them to park near the front gate. The police were outnumbered by the residents. They had broken the fence down and swarmed into the house looking for the alleged gang member.

Finally, after minutes of pushing and shoving, we heard four to five gunshots. It was the two police officers who had fired the bullets in the air right after parking the police van near the crowd and jumping out of the vehicle.

Immediately the crowd scattered.

“Hey! If those police officers are not careful, they will be torn to pieces by the same crowd they’re trying to silence. You see what I told you, Clifford? Our local police are unprofessional. They show up driving one police van trying to intimidate such a large number of people. There’s no back-up and it doesn’t seem like back-up will come. If they get beaten up right now, they will only have themselves to blame, I tell you.”

Moments later the two police officers came out of the house empty handed. The guy must have escaped just in time, before the crowd rampaged through the house. But the residents were angry. They would have caught the man, if it weren’t for the police interfering. The residents began to bang with their fists and weapons on the back of the police van. Some were even climbing and hanging on. Finally, the residents who were on the vehicle jumped off as the van sped from the scene.