‘Marching Without Uniforms’
A Protest Vignette

We’d been in the holding cell for three hours before Adam finally sank to the floor. It was what I loved about him, even why I joined the movement in the second or third place. He would slink around the walls of every room he found even slightly confining until the wonderings which propelled him would disperse themselves into mutters. This was the most claustrophobic he’d ever been in his life, and he knew that I knew that. The three others kept to their own little cell in one corner, discussing in Xhosa, and if they felt any frustration with his frustration they must have forgotten to show it. Everything in the station was irredeemably blue and beige.

I shuffled over to the site of his collapse and lay my head on his shoulder, like a girlfriend.
“I read somewhere that getting arrested is on the list of 101 things to do before you die. So maybe this isn’t that needless an experience for either of us.” I said. I’d kept the line in my head for two hours.

He took a while to acknowledge it. I knew he appreciated physical contact anyway.
“I don’t know, I thought if I ever was arrested it would be for committing a crime. This doesn’t feel authentic at all.”

He looked at the bars of the cell. Most people would gaze out or study the cell’s details, but the old, flaky bars themselves obsessed him instead.
“I know, but you’re not a bad person though, so this is probably the closest you’ll ever get.” I replied.

“You sure I’m not a bad person, Dom? Quite sure?” he smiled.
“You wouldn’t be here if you were, I don’t think.”
He put his arm around me, which was a great gesture all things considered. For a while we didn’t know what to talk about.

This was the end of the fourth day of Outside Life. I tried to think of the protests that way, as a kind of change of scene. Our work is the invention of the Insiders, and so the only things we, as students, ever seemed to pursue in the world itself were the usual forms of escape, which just made the usual procedure easier, our stress less painful. So this was an inverted reality of a sort. For once in our lives we were labouring in the sunshine, seizing upon the streets, and so joining the poor, the workers and the police. Anyone who claims we were skiving off is right and wrong. We were substituting one tiredness for another, a standard curriculum for the true subject, normal complaints for historic ones. And we felt like we could do nothing wrong, at least for the moment.

I joined for the cause, like everyone else, but what sustained me was the talk. It was what I won out of the whole thing. There were a bunch of boys in the front row of every march that I’d been idly attracted to for months but had never mustered the courage to idly talk to. Now I almost had no choice. It was like we were all on an epic film set, with most of each day spent waiting around for an Action which most often proved underwhelming. So we either looked at our phones or entertained each other if we could, and my phone always died before the day’s march did.

So I got to know Mshindi, Donovan and Adam as we occupied sensitive parts of the city and everyone older than thirty got pissed off with us and a few enterprising girls tried to write new songs based on our experience but failed. On the fourth day we tried to take our grievances to Parliament.