Chapter 5

Mandisa and her family were moved to Guguletu as a part of a massive forced migration of black people out of "white areas." These people lived in clusters called "black spots," which usually appeared due to the amounts of black people who worked in white homes in "white areas." The white government, deciding that owning the majority of the land was not enough, pushed these black people out of the area and into crowded townships far away from the urban centers. These townships were unprepared for the millions of people who would soon flood into them. This forced migration is compared to a "whirlwind" by Mandisa, who describes black people in this situation as "perched on a precarious leaf balking a tornado" (38).

The government is personified many times in this chapter. An antagonist of the novel in its own right, the government is shown to be an evil force in the lives of black people. The South African government, because of greed and hatred, upended the lives of millions of people in order for the few to benefit. It did so callously, indifferent to the suffering the forced migrations would cause. Every appeal that was sent to the government after the pamphlets were distributed, even the appeals sent to the few representatives of Natives in Cape Town, were unmet. In this chapter, the government, as one entity, had long made up its mind about the upheavals. As the elders of Mandisa's community laugh at a dangerous rumor, "the government was not laughing... the government never showed its smiling teeth when dealing with any matter in connection with Africans" (42).

The scene with the airplane is one of particular importance. Many residents of Blouvlei had never seen an airplane before, so their arrival caused a great disturbance in the community. Panicked parents ran out of homes in search of their children, who were playing directly in their airplane's path. The airplanes were flying so low, the children could see the people inside, "their pink-pink skin and the colours of the clothes they wore... see the dark glasses hiding their coloured eyes" (43). The arrival of the planes, so loud and close to the ground, put them on the "same level as the burning bush, the water-sprouting rock and talking serpents of the Bible" (44). It is the children, who ran inside when the papers were dropped, that are brave enough to go receive the pamphlets, and so it is the children who get the news of the move first. The residents of Blouvlei are warned about the move, but not in an empowering way. They learn they are doomed to lose everything they have ever known.