July's people

"He would no sooner shoot a buck than a man; and he did not keep any revolver under his pillow to defend his wife, his children or his property in their suburban house."

"For the twentieth, the hundredth time, since the pass-burnings of the Fifties, since Sharpeville, since Soweto '76 since Elsie's River 1980, it seemed that all was quieting down."

"It was early morning but in their hut the women were dreamy, as at the end of the day... Perhaps they had been out since first light gathering wood or working in their fields--Maureen was aware, among them in the hut, of not knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it."

"White people here! Didn't you tell us many times how they live, there. A room to sleep in, another room to eat in, another room to sit in, a room with books..."

"But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it was pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape. She was already not what she was."

"Bam and Maureen had longed for cigarettes, for a drink of wine or spirits, their children had craved for sweet things; but in the days of rain, the small fire they never let die satisfied all wants."

"If I offended you, if I hurt your dignity, if what I thought was my friendliness, the feeling I had for you--if that hurt your feelings... I know I didn't know and I should have known."

"In the morning he had a moment of hallucinatory horror when he saw the blood of the pig on his penis--then understood it was hers."

"The chief had the sharp, impatient, skeptical voice of a man quicker than the people he keeps around him, but knew no white man's language. Why should he? It was not for him to work as a servant or go down the mines."

"The mists of the night left a vivid freshness that dispels the sickly ammoniacal odour of fowl droppings, the fetid cloying of old thatch, the stinks of rotting garbage--rags, the jaw-bone of a calf, scaly with big glistening flies--that collect wherever the rains have hollowed the ground between huts."

"White people here! Didn’t you tell us many times how they live there…Now you tell me nowhere."

"(Chapter 4)"

"White people must have their own people somewhere. Aren’t they living everywhere in the world…Don’t they go anywhere they want to go? They’ve got money."

"White people. They are very powerful, my son. They are very clever. You will never come to the end of the things they can do."

"They looked different there—you should have seen the clothes in their cupboard. And the glasses—for visitors, when they drink wine. Here they haven’t got anything—just like us."