Why You Were Taken

14. Messiah Magic

Johannesburg, 2021

Kirsten waits for James to leave for the paediatric clinic in Alexandra before she pulls out the envelope from Betty/Barbara. While he tries to save the world she'll try to, well, save herself. She flattens out the note on the desk in front of her and tries to decipher it.

Doomsday. D-day. Apocalypse. Armageddon. End-of-the-world. She's never been good at this hellfire and brimstone thing. While everyone else in the classroom was learning about the cheerful trio of Christ, Mohammed and Buddha she had been staring out of the window, wondering why no one else saw what she saw, felt what she felt.

A school religious counsellor once tried to tell her that her Black Hole was the absence of Jesus's light, God's love, and if she were to take the righteous steps and be saved then it would disappear, just like that. Messiah Magic.

Kirsten's eyes had rolled so far back in her head she almost lost them completely. Later, with his warm hand on her back, he had instructed her to stay behind after class, with a look in his eyes that told her that if she did her life would never be the same. His handprint still tingling on her skin, she had been first out the door when the bell rang.

She holds the note to the light, hoping to find a clue. Turns it over and over in her hands. Suddenly she feels ridiculous, trying to make sense of a demented woman's ramblings. She looks at her Tile. Her Echo.news tickertape flashes with new stories. A man gunned down fellow shoppers in a Boksburg mall, killing five people and injuring three. A(nother) municipal worker strike, as if our streets didn't stink enough.

The usual spate of muggings and hijackings, some fatal, some just inconvenient. A flaming crucifixion in Sandton Square, courtesy of The Resurrectors. Funny, that they call themselves that, thinks Kirsten, when they do the opposite. Jesus's light, my foot. They also covered the small spat that Keke had told her about the day before, exaggerated by graphic pictures of gaping knife wounds, and a convicted rapist taking the government to the Constitutional Court for 'enrolling' him in a Crim Colony, or PLC.

When the government instituted the Penal Labour Camps the rest of the world was horrified. Concentration camps for criminals! Shouted the international headlines. New Apartheid for SA! and Underground Crim Colonies! It was in the beginning of the New ANC rule – when they still had balls – and they were dead-set on implementing the programme despite the international pressure not to.

They moved prisoners from their crowded, dirty cells to various high-security farms and mines throughout the country and set them to grind. They learned skills and earned wages, with which they paid their food and board, and had mandatory saving schemes that would be released to them, with interest, at the end of their sentences. The money that was saved by emptying the prisons went to prisoner rehabilitation and university fees.

Crime stats were down and all in all it was a neat move; the conviction rates were still low, but at least the captured criminals were in some way paying their debt to society. The then-defunct 'reclaimed' farms were revived and South Africa reverted to being a mass exporter of goods. The general public was still divided on the matter, but the initial outrage seemed to have dissipated along with the trade deficit.

Kirsten scrolls down. Thabile Siceka, the health minister, was in Sweden to receive some kind of award. South Africa has had some pretty dodgy health ministers in the past, including HIV-denialists who promised that a beetroot and olive oil salsa would cure even the direst case of AIDS. Siceka didn't have to excel at her job to be the best minister to date, but excel she had.

It was well known that she had had a tough start in life. Both her parents and her grandparents died of AIDS, and she had to leave school at eleven years old to look after her younger siblings. When the HI-Vax was in development she pushed it through every stumbling block. She raised funds when they were needed, flew in experts, sped up the testing phase. The vaccine could have taken twenty years to get into public circulation; Siceka had it out in four. She took HIV/AIDS from being the Africa's biggest killer – apart from mosquitoes – to being as easy to avoid as MMR.

The Nancies did havesome strong ministers, but as a whole their leadership just didn't stand up tothe pressures of the country. Too many poor people, poor for too long, too fewrich people, and a wide, painful gap in between. Add to the mix deficientservice delivery, economy-crippling strikes, the panic of the water shortageand relentless violent crime and it's no wonder that creeps are ready to pullout an AK47 at any asshole who says the wrong thing. South Africans were frustrated,and it was erupting in every facet of life. Clearly she was not the only onewith a hollow where her heart should be. Where was the Messiah Magic when youneeded it?