HEY TOKOLOSHE, I SEE YOU!Wilderson 8, Frank B. Wilderson is a professor of sociology and film study at US Irvine, “Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid”

This, of course, is not entirely true, for Stimela’s people all knew how the tokoloshes of laissez-faire – the faces in the files that Trevor spread on the bed – were hard at work. They’d been working invisibly since the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Eleven months later, in April 1993, when Chris Hani was assassinated, the tokoloshes of laissez-faire would emerge from their hovels in the knotty snarl of tree rots and say, “Now , yes, now, is the time of the trolls .” Leading ethnographers of trolls, specializing in tokologeology, have concluded that there are an estimated six hundred fifty-eight tokoloshes residing under rocks, in tree trunks, and beneath the beds of unsuspecting victims throughout South Africa. The tokoloshe is a small creature that stands above knee high to an adult . Some have very long hair, like monkeys; others have thick leathery skin, like trolls . “Their eyes are narrow and black and they have small ears.” According to a renowned tokologeologist. Their long pensis look like tails and can be slung over their shoulders when running or walking briskly. Tokoloshes make themselves invisible and go into houses to harm people in their sleep or put poison in their food. “Many people put their beds on bricks so that the tokoloshe can’t catch them in their sleep. It might be a good idea when you check into your hotel to ask if they can give you four bricks … just to be safe.” If you sneak up on a tokoloshe, “He will put a magic stone into his mouth and disappear. He is also very scared of dogs, mousetraps and chameleons.” Normally, if you are haunted by a tokoloshe, your sangoma can cast a spell for you, “ And if the tokoloshe walks into it he will become paralyzed and visible . But if you shout ‘Hey, tokoloshe, I see you!’ then the spell will be broken and he will disappear .” But the laissez-faire tokoloshes , the one in our files, were no ordinary tokoloshes. They were not knee high trolls with leathery faces who snorted and grunted as they rose up from beneath the earth to make mischief. They did not materialize under some unlucky person’s bed and nibble on his toes in the middle of the night. They did not make dishes fly about the room and crash against the walls. They did not open doors when you closed them or close them when you opened them. They had no muti that made you itch or pull your hair out. We could have handled that. We wouldn’t have needed a safe house in Hillbrow to snort through their policy papers, their academic work, or the notes we had stolen from their dust bins – since most tokoloshes don’t write. We wouldn’t have needed a safe house in Hillbrow to study their movements and mount their photographs on the wall, since most tokoloshes can’t be seen. We wouldn’t have needed to bug their offices, bribe their secretaries to eavesdrop on their meetings, or send operatives to monitor their classes-since most tokoloshes are seldom heard and cannot be recorded. The tokoloshes of laissez-faire were not tiny black creatures with gravel in their vocal chord, but grown men and women of average height –though some seemed tall and imposing like Charles van Onselen, the president of the academic senate, or Robert Charlton, the vice- chancellor of the university. Others seemed downright short , bespeckled, and sad, like Etiienne Mureinink with his sharp, pointed, downward nose, a small and timid creature, what’s known in Afrikaans as a bang worse (scared kitten); Mureinik, the lonely law professor who just wanted the Africans to love him. Some were women . Like Dean Elizabeth Rankin and professor June Sinclair, a law professor of some renown who held a Wits cabinet post one

step down the food chain from Robert Charlton. I am not at all convinced that any of them had long tokoloshe penises-certainly not long enough to sling over their shoulders when they ran or walked briskly; though I must confess that in the five years in which I lived there, I did not actually see them running or walking briskly. June Sinclair didn’t curry favor with Mandela’s people. Unlike Mureinik, she craved no feckless fawning from young Africans. No, there were not run of the mill tokoloshes. They lived in the suburbs, not in trees or under rocks. They dined at the Parktonian Hotel and not on the toes of children, for such delicacies as tiny tot’s toes were not on the menu at the Parktonian Hotel. They vacationed in Europe. They dressed for success. And they were English not Afrikaners. The tokoloshes of laissez-faire were well-talcumed and well-deodorized little tokoloshes. You could not smell them coming . But oh, the stench when they’d gone. Like traditional tokoloshes, they made weird noises when they spoke ( they called this gargling “ editorials,” “policy papers,” “scholarly articles,” and “memorandums of understanding, compromise, and reconciliation”). And like other tokoloshes they wreaked havoc from the inside out and they vanished into thin air when you raised a broom to sweep them away or a fist to strike them down. They made poor targets, for they always said they wanted what you wanted , or what you would know you wanted if only you could want what they wanted, for example. They were all for Black participation within the existing paradigm -which seemed so reasonable that the paradigm itself could not be put on the table for critique and dismantling. And unlike normal tokoloshes who screamed and yelled and ran away in the night, the tokoloshes of laissez-faire were always willing to listen. They could listen for hours. They could listen for days. They could spend a lifetime listening. They liked to organize “listening sessions ,” like university transformation forums that would “”listen ” for the next ten years and never transform the university-never devolve power to the masses. Their favorite word was “stakeholder.” Everyone was a “stakeholder” which meant nothing was ever at stake. Their second favorite word was “process.” The process of negotiations had to be free of “intimidation” (their third favorite word), free from mass action, and from civil disobedience. The word they hated was “power.” Talking about power was like saying, “Hey tokoloshe, I see you!” It could make them disappear . “We should just shoot one of them.” I can remember that being said in the Hillbrow house. Was it Jabu? Was it Precious Jabulani or Trevor, as we pored over the writings of the tokoloshes, or was it me, who said it? At one time or another we all had said it. Some nights we said it together. Assassinate Robert Charlton as he leaves the Great Hall. Kill June Sinclair in her office. Audit one of Mureinik’s classes and do the deed as he lectures on how to calibrate the rule of law with the discontent of the disenfranchised. Blow van Onselen away on the floor of the faculty senate. Make a spectacle of it. At the very least it would be good for student morale. We were joking…perhaps. Of course, we couldn’t kill Eddy Webster, he still had friends in COSATU from his days as a labor union advisor. He was still a friend of the Negro. We certainly had the capacity to kill them. Stimela kept an arms cache at another safe house on the other side of Hillbrow; per Chris Hani’s wishes, not all of the weapons in the dead letter boxes scattered across the country had been handed over to the commission set up by de Klerk and Mandela. We had the will to kill them. Oupa would have hit anyone Stimela ordered him to hit; Precious and Jabu had proven themselves in retaliation against the police in the townships; as had Trevor. Jabu was trained in propaganda and psychological warfare-which is not to say he had no training in operations; he did. I only knew how he moved about the demonstrations, the rallies, the caucuses, and

meeting; in the wee hours I knew only how we moved among the newspaper, the file clippings, the stolen memos, the photographs, some surreptitiously obtained, some cut from newsletters, yearbooks, and the evening gazette; and I only knew how we moved between a box of push pins and two computers. Peculiar proxies for live ammunition. “Yes,” someone else would say, as though testing the line between a joke and a plan, “Why don’t we just shoot one of them.” We’d all be bleary-eyed by then. It might be one in the morning. The night’s writing would be stale and redundant-how the hell would we get a pamphlet out by dawn? Or our analysis was on tilt and we’d be irritable and argumentative, instead of sharp and erudite. So we’d clear the bulletin board of our charts, our clippings, and our scraps of analysis. We’d take the photographs of the tokoloshes from their files and pin them to the bulletin board. June Sinclari leaving a restaurant. Etinenne Mureinik shopping at the Rosebank Mall. A portrait of Charlton from the Johannesburg Star; Ron Carter, before he came to South Africa as an honorary White man, when he was at Boston University where he worked as the hatchet man for its neo-con president. Nico Cloete, whose work we interpreted as being tantamount tto the evisceration of radicalism in the Charterist movement. Eddy Webster, striking poses like bargains with the workers he had turned his back on. Charles van Onselen, his head held high, his jaw thrust out like Mussolini, with neither irony nor shame. We’d pint hem side-by-side, like figures facing a firing squad. We’d asked them if they had any last words. For the first time ever, none of these tokoloshes spoke. We’d implore them: “Honor us with something pithy about peace and reconciliation or the rule of law before you die.” Then precious and Jabue would draw bull’s-eyes on them and I’d retrieve darts from the small rooms that was a bedroom long ago when someone lived there and it was furnished and in fee to domestic, as opposed to clandestine, needs and desires. “Ready1” said Precious, as I handed her the darts. She took ten paces back, “Aim!” Jabu, Trevor, and I stood beside her with darts of our own. “Fire!” One by one the tokoloshes slumped and fell. Shooting them in real life might have been worse than letting them run amuck. Invariably, their deaths would spark rancor and indignation in the media ; tears of sympathy from the Whites, long meandering speeches from the Black bourgeoisie followed by the criminalization of armed struggle and mass action in the press, the huge and cry for peace and reconciliation (a.k.a. anger management for Blacks). Yes, the tokoloshe dies but his laissez-faire lives on