He woke up in the morning as he normally does like every other morning between Monday and Friday. His mother gives him a hard tap under his feet and pulls the blanket off his back at around five o’clock. The cold breeze blows through a crack in the shack, piercing his skin making way around the pores on his skin, causing the hairs on his body to stand up and a simultaneous formation of goose bumps around his arms and chest. His mother pours him warm water in a washing basin made out steel. Fresh from the kettle with a green bar of soap sitting in a cracked soap dish which is rough around the edges.
After taking a bath, he wears his neatly ironed school clothes, complemented by a slightly oversized blazer and a pair of parabelum shoes. Shoes so shiny that the reflection of the only light in the shack shows a faded image of his face on the black leather. It is a typical summer’s morning in the informal settlement of Makhaza. The morning sun gives a misty red color to the horizon facing the direction of the suburbs, a destination which he often embarked upon with mixed feelings and emotions.
The passage way through the informal settlement to the bus stop on the main road is filled with different characters and events. He often passes a local shebeen, a place characterized by the stench of intoxication, laughter, life, pain and death. The patrons of Engoja use the spot as a place of communal interaction, the point of socialization. The world view here is different, it is poverty stricken. The faces of each ageing citizen characterized by decades of humiliation and oppression. In the eyes of his community, he is the hope of the slums, he is a living testimony that the ghetto still produces good black men. To his teachers he is the prime example of what every young black man should be. He just takes it a day at a time.
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