Short Story: The Imam's Daughter by Shereen Pandit

School boycotts were not uncommon in South Africa during Apartheid: Black, Coloured, and Indian students carried out several boycotts, demanding increased school funding, more teachers, and better education. But the overriding grievance of these boycotts was not only the sub-standard education they received, but the entire system of racial discrimination in South Africa.

In this short story, we meet a head teacher during a school boycott somewhere in South Africa. With the aid of a student, she decides to stand up to the government, a decision that demands courage and determination and that will change her life in dramatic ways.

I stood at the window, looking over the deserted tarmac towards the gate. It was days since any uniformed children had come to school through those gates, lined up at those doors, walked along the corridors beyond my office door, to sit quietly working at their desks, gone out to chat or play in the playground, in the way which up to now had been customary in my school . The few students who had come in were not in uniform - or rather, they were in the uniform of the young, the ubiquitous jeans and t-shirts of their generation. They were student leaders and activists who had come solely to use the equipment room to prepare newsletters and leaflets for the evening’s mass meeting. They too, had now left. I could no longer hear the hum of the photocopier and the other sounds of their activities.

From the first, I had told them that I did not want to be involved in what they were doing. So they went ahead and used the school’s facilities without asking me for permission. As the boycott went on, they continued to use them without even advising me of what they were doing, as they used to. It was a strange relationship. On the one hand they were obliged to trust me sufficiently to use my school. On the other, they were not supposed to trust me because I was the head and I still kept the school open. I was not supporting the boycott. I had crossed the invisible picket line.

No teachers had come in either. Most of my staff supported the boycott. Those who didn’t were too scared to come in, but they made sure that they phoned me. Those on strike did not. I knew that many schools and many head teachers were in the same position as I. I wondered if they too longed for a return to normality - the bell ringing in the morning and periodically throughout the day, the silence of the corridors denoting work, not desertion, not really a silence, more a quiet hum of activity of which I was proud. Did they too long for the return of the days when "our kids" were just kids, having adolescent fun and adolescent fears, by turn precocious and puerile, rude and respectful, silly and sensible, dependent upon the adults around them, but desperately trying to break free - but young, so young, and ours to care for and nurture.

These self-assured young adults who seemed to know exactly what they were doing and where they were going, who ran boycotts and called for strikes, who organized mass meetings and saturation leafleting, who spoke in fiery tones from public platforms - these were not the kids I knew. And I feared for them - they were too young to have so much responsibility thrust upon them - responsibility for changing a whole country, perhaps a continent. But if not them, then who? Us?

I sighed ruefully. They regarded us adults as for the most part being too inept or too cowardly to wage the struggle as they thought it should be waged. They despised me for closing down the school, but I had my reasons. They thought that these reasons were largely personal security, a desire to stay on the right side of the authorities, keep my nose clean, my career afloat. I supposed I should be grateful that they did not condemn me outright as a silent collaborator for not taking an active part in the struggle. Would they believe that I also kept my school open so that they would have somewhere safe to do all their business?

I sighed again. After today, they would have every reason to think the worst of me. They would think that I came in everyday because I wanted to keep tabs on what they were doing for sinister reasons, not out of concern for them. But what could I do? I had no choice. Well, I thought, turning from the window, there was one more task I could perform for them, before I found myself totally outcast by doing what I had been instructed to do. I left my office and went along the silent corridor towards the equipment room.

As usual, it was a total shambles. An incriminating clutter of bits which had been cut and pasted for originals of today’s newsletter and leaflets, crumpled up copies which had been messed up by the copier. I wondered who they thought would clean it up. I wondered whether they considered that whoever cleaned it up might hand the lot over to the security police, or that the "SB" as they called them, might stop by themselves, as they would later today.

I was surprised to find someone still there. Gathering together bits of paper and straightening out the chaos, was the imam's daughter. I knew that her name was Nadia - she was my student, after all - but I always called her that in my head. The daughter of Sheikh Ismail, the politically active Muslim cleric who had, whilst in police custody, "slipped on a bar of soap” and died as a result, about ten years previously.

She didn’t see me at first. My rubber soled shoes did not echo on the stone floors of the corridors, so she had clearly not heard me approach. She looked up from what she was doing, startled to realize that she was not alone.

"Nadia," I said quietly, smiling to reassure her that I intended no harm. "What are you still doing here? I saw the others leave quite a while ago." I paused, remembering that she wasn’t even involved in any political activity. She boycotted school like all the rest, but she was not one of the leaders, or even one of the key activists - not according to my well-informed grapevine, anyway. So why was she here at all?

She answered both questions. "I came in to fetch some books that I forgot last week, Miss. Then I saw the mess. I thought I’d tidy it up a bit. Someone might come........"

Her voice trailed off, her usually pale face suddenly suffused with crimson confusion. She’d said too much. I wasn’t supposed to know what they were doing. I was the "someone" who might come. Did she think that I might report them? Had I sunk so low in their esteem?

"Yes, I know," I said, trying to keep the hurt from my voice. "I was coming in to clean it up myself. They leave it everyday." I laughed self-consciously. "Good thing I’m here all the time, eh?"

She didn’t smile. Her mother had once told me that she never did. When she first came to my school, her mother had come to talk to me beforehand about this quiet child, who had not smiled or laughed or cried since she was six years old - when her father had died. I had told the other children about who she was, and of course the staff, so that they would leave her alone, if she wanted to be left alone. But that aloneness had gone on for all the time that she’d been here. In time, the kids, even the activists, forgot who she was. They were just little children when her father died. The struggle had produced many martyrs, and more contemporary ones were the remembered and revered heroes of their young lives. The ones of the past were buried in the political era which preceded the current one, the one which they were convinced would be the final thrust towards freedom.

"Miss,” she said now, “they say that the SB are going around to all the schools checking up on which teachers are supporting the boycott and asking principals for lists of teacher and student leaders. Is it true, Miss? Will they come here to check up?"

I felt the blood drain from my face. Did she know? I looked closely at her. No. My imagination was playing tricks on me. The clear dark eyes which stared up at me questioningly were devoid of any deviousness. The only emotion in their depths was their customary sadness. Should I tell her?

There was no need. Uncannily, she sensed then why I was hesitating. "They’ve already been here." She stated the fact calmly, as though it were an everyday occurrence, not one which had nearly driven me insane for the past twenty four hours.

I nodded, not meeting her eyes and then turning away completely, busying myself with tidying up. "They’re coming back today. For the lists. One of teachers absent. One of student leaders."

"What are you going to do, Miss?"

"I don’t know, Nadia. I just don’t know." I stuffed papers into black bags as we talked. How could I tell her that I, her head teacher, in charge of 600 students for most of their waking day, entrusted with their education, with their futures, did not know what to do when faced with choosing between their future and my own, their families’ sufferings and mine? How could I tell her that, whilst I was still hesitating about drawing up a list of student activists at my school, I had already prepared the list of teachers who had not reported for duty during the boycott?

She said, “They’ll detain all of them. They already have hundreds. It will break the boycott. People will be scared. It will all have been for nothing - all the deaths and disappearances and detentions."

I squared up defensively to face her, “I have no choice, Nadia. If I don't do it, they’ll take me. They’ll close the school down. Even if I say that all the teachers were here and that I don’t know who the student leaders at my school are, they’ll know I’ve lied. What good will that do - one more martyr for the struggle? One more nameless hero to forget?"

I could have bitten off my tongue. Her father, I had often thought, was one of those forgotten heroes. The furore in the immediate aftermath of his death soon subsided. People forgot, life went on. Her mother had struggled to raise them by herself. I myself had only remembered who he was when her mother came to see me about her. Even now, with this new uprising, people like him were seldom, if ever, mentioned.

She was looking steadily at me now. "You are thinking of my father. Yes, I know that the movement soon forgot my father, but they are not the ones who matter. That’s what my mother tells us. She says that the people did not forget and it was in them as well as his God that my father trusted to take care of us when he went to do his duty. Besides, times have changed. The movement is stronger now; the ordinary people are more involved."

I bowed my head, ashamed of my outburst.

"Every struggle of like ours," she said quietly into the silence, "have more heroes and martyrs than it can remember. It doesn’t mean that the people don’t care. It’s just that’s there’s too much to do to stop and call the roll of heroes along the way." Her words rather than her tone admonished me, goading me into defensiveness again by the implication that all I sought was notice for myself.

"But I have a family," I said. "Who will take care of my children, my parents? The movement’s failure to remember will mean that they’ll go cold and hungry."

The child wisely did not respond with the obvious answer that the people whom I would report had families too. They were far less likely to see them again if they were detained, than I was.

She let me down gently, offering herself as an inferior comparison, she of whom too much courage and sacrifice had already been asked, "Look, Miss, I don’t want to be a hero either. I know that people here at school wonder that I am not like my father - a leader, an activist. That’s because I’m frightened. But my time will come, my mother says. The time when I have no choice but to do what is needed. I tell her that our family has sacrificed enough. She tells me that my conscience will tell me when it is enough. Perhaps it is your time now to decide. The teachers and student leaders cannot be taken now. All of them are needed."

I was not offended by the implication that I, by contrast, was expendable. I was too intimidated by the choice which she had resurrected before me - a choice I thought that I had finally made when the restless night came to an end and I rose this morning to type the list. We said nothing further, steadily clearing away paper, tying up black bags, putting things in apple pie order. But in my mind raged the chaos that this girl, this mere child, had sown. The clarity which dawn had brought was stirred up again, muddied, dangerous.

"We’ve finished here," I said at last, suddenly tired and drained. "Go home now, Nadia. Please go home. They are nearly due."

She nodded. She did not ask who "they" were or what I was going to do. Instead, she reached up and kissed my cheek. Then she turned and walked out through the door, down the corridor, out through the front door. She never looked back. Had she really just come to fetch a book, to tidy up?

I closed and locked the equipment room. Then I returned to my office and picked up the list that lay waiting on my desk. I turned it face down. I did not want to remember the men and women on it. Where I was going, it wasn’t a good idea to remember such things. I reached for my cigarettes and matches. I lit a cigarette, and then put the match to the list, watching it burn almost all the way to my fingers before I dropped it into the ashtray. Then I sat down to wait for them, smoking quietly, calm at last now that the decision was taken.

__________________________________________________________

The year or two that I was detained seems of little consequence now, save for what they taught me of barbarism and ruthlessness, but also of fortitude and comradeship. I came home to find that indeed, my family was well and well-cared for, despite the periodic harassment which all families of detainees experienced. Nadia had been right, then, after all. The people had not forgotten.

She must have finished school during the time that the boycott was called off for students to sit their matric exams. I was still away when she entered university and it was there that I saw her again, at a campus rally which I attended soon after my release. The movement was on the ascendancy then, its victory assured.

I was sitting with a number of fellow ex-detainees who’d brought me along. I didn’t at first recognize the slender figure that rose to address the rally from the platform, but I remembered the steady calm voice which had kept me going through many dark and lonely nights.

Towards the end of her speech, with the crowd vociferously applauding her, she held up her hand for quiet. The imam’s daughter had grown up to fill her father’s shoes. The people respectfully fell silent.

"There are many here tonight who have suffered in one way or another for the struggle," she said. "I said to a woman once that the list of our heroes and martyrs is too long for us to call the roll at every stage, but tonight I ask you to do some small thing to show them and their families that we have not forgotten their sacrifices for us. Let us dedicate the closing anthem to those heroes and martyrs."

She hadn’t forgotten, no, she had not forgotten us. And as she led the singing in her strong young voice, did I imagine it, or did she at last smile at me, that wise child?

Copyright © Shereen Pandit,
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