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lesson, and now that lesson is the rest of his life.
—
One morning I saw an ad in the paper. Some shop was having a clearance sale on mobile
phones, and they were selling them at such a ridiculous price I knew Bongani and I could flip
them in the hood for a profit. This shop was out in the suburbs, too far to walk and too outof-the-way
to take a minibus. Fortunately my stepfather’s workshop and a bunch of old cars
were in our backyard.
I’d been stealing Abel’s junkers to get around since I was fourteen. I would say I was test
driving them to make sure they’d been repaired correctly. Abel didn’t think that was funny.
I’d been caught many times, caught and subjected to my mother’s wrath. But that had never
stopped me from doing anything.
Most of these junkers weren’t street legal. They didn’t have proper registrations or
proper number plates. Luckily, Abel also had a stack of old number plates in the back of the
garage. I quickly learned I could just put one on an old car and hit the road. I was nineteen,
maybe twenty, not thinking about any of the ramifications of this. I stopped by Abel’s garage
when no one was around, picked up one of the cars, the red Mazda I’d taken to the matric
dance, slapped some old plates on it, and set off in search of discounted cell phones.
I got pulled over in Hillbrow. Cops in South Africa don’t give you a reason when they pull
you over. Cops pull you over because they’re cops and they have the power to pull you over;
it’s as simple as that. I used to watch American movies where cops would pull people over
and say, “You didn’t signal” or “Your taillight’s out.” I’d always wonder, Why do American
cops bother lying? One thing I appreciate about South Africa is that we have not yet refined
the system to the point where we feel the need to lie.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?”
“Because you’re a policeman and I’m a black person?”
“That’s correct. License and registration, please.”
When the cop pulled me over, it was one of those situations where I wanted to say, “Hey,
I know you guys are racially profiling me!” But I couldn’t argue the case because I was, at that
moment, actually breaking the law. The cop walked up to my window, asked me the standard
cop questions. Where are you going? Is this your car? Whose car is this? I couldn’t answer. I
completely froze.
Being young, funnily enough, I was more worried about getting in trouble with my
parents than with the law. I’d had run-ins with the cops in Alexandra, in Soweto, but it was
always more about the circumstance: a party getting shut down, a raid on a minibus. The law
was all around me, but it had never come down on me, Trevor, specifically. And when you
haven’t had much experience with the law, the law appears rational—cops are dicks for the
most part, but you also recognize that they’re doing a job.
Your parents, on the other hand, are not rational at all. They have served as judge, jury,
and executioner for your entire childhood, and it feels like they give you a life sentence for
every misdemeanor. In that moment, when I should have been scared of the cop, all I was
thinking was Shit shit shit; I’m in so much trouble when I get home.
The cop called in the number-plate registration and discovered that it didn’t match the