Qhunna sat under a makeshift shelter, a torn tent, at the Union Buildings in Pretoria.  Part of the protest.

It was baking hot, but that’s how she liked it.  Not the tent, though.  But she mustn’t complain.  It was for the good of her people.  The San.  Also the Khoisan.  Or, as her grandson preferred it, the Qhoisan.  Who they called the Bushmen once.  The invisible people of South Africa.

The shunned ones of the world.  Of the word.

She’d been told just that by her grandson.  Eleven official languages, twelve if you included sign language.  Not their kind of signing though.  No spoken language of the San was included – not a single one of them.  And the original !Xóõ of her ancestors was forgotten, even by her own clan.  Only she knew a few words still.

She was there because she was old.  She knew the stories of her mother, of her grandfather, the stories her great-grandmother told to her grandmother.

As she was the oldest of her clan, in fact the oldest Qhomani San person anyone knew, they said she had to trek from the Kalahari up to the government in the north      to present their case.

She was there to tell the man in that building. The President. In the country’s government building. They wanted recognition.  But she wanted to be at home.  Under the open sky.  A sky she’d been pushed from when she was a girl.  But she remembered.  More clearly than events of a week ago.  Even of a day ago.

The men had been there for six years.  Now she’d been brought by them to this place.  She felt that she’d been dragged because it was hard to get here, hard to be here, hard to stay here.  All that to tell the leader of the country about her past.  Their past and where they were now.  And what they wanted for the future.  A future that would also be their past.

A past where she’d left her /q’àn.  Her heart.  A heart they’d tried to rip from her body since she was—when she was what?  An age?  An idea that they’d foisted on her.  She counted the seasons, not herself.

Her heart had been left where she’d grown up.  When they wanted to mine the earth for what?  Coal? Gold?  Not seeing that what was important was on top.  Or was it to make a—what did they call it?  Yes, a park.  For the animals.  She’d said to them: ‘Né lkharib !nâ da ge.’ Her brother translated it as ‘In this region we’ll find …’  Then those others mentioned oryx, springbok, guinea fowl, ostrich and the rest.  But not her or her people.

Her great-grandson stumbled into the tent.  He, like her granddaughter, had been brought here to help look after her.  Drunk like the other men so often were?  No, not him.  He spoke to her in English, the language he said they all should speak fluently.  She could understand it.

‘Mama, they took my books!’

‘Huh?’

‘I brought them along to study.  But they asked what a Hotnot was doing reading.’

‘Hotnot?’ For Hottentot?  Always an insult, mocking the way they spoke.

‘Reading?’  She couldn’t read what they could read. But she could read the ground, the tracks, the sky, the weather.  They said that the boy was clever.  That when he was older, he’d be a lawyer — not that she quite knew what a lawyer was — and he’d represent them.  He’d tell them, like they’d been told for all these years, that they wanted recognition.  And by that time?  She’d be gone.  Who else could speak her original language?  The language of her clan?  Not him.  But there was the more common San language: that was the one they wanted the President to acknowledge.  Not that he would ever speak it.  Even understand it.

She focused on her great-grandson again.

He added, ‘They said we were squatters.  Here.  At the Union Buildings.’

Those people in those big trucks, and in those gleaming cars, had also said they were squatters on the land.  But it was land those men had stolen from her people.  The land they’d lived on for—how long did her brother say?  Thousands of years? Now they were told they were squatting here as well.  This place where she’d never been before.  Yes, they were squatting.  It was her people’s way of trying to be seen.  To be heard.  To be listened to.

But why did they say they were squatting back there in the desert?  The desert that was her real here.

She ventured out of the shelter and looked around.  The grass was green.  The building.  She’d never seen a building like that.  She peered at it, more used to looking, as she thought again, at the ground for tracks or at bushes for things to eat or ostrich eggs or at the sky which was nearly always blue.  Here, clouds, clouds and more clouds.  There, the clear air.  Even with the dust.  Here, strange smells from those cars and trucks.  There, with very few people around her.  Only those she knew.  Only her clan.

She started walking towards the building, clasping her kierie, her walking-stick.  She also picked up her goura – the bent stick and string she made music with.  But the string was broken now.  Only attached on one side.

People all around.  But where were her own people who’d brought her here?  Probably trying to see the President.  To give him—what did they call it?  A petition.  Or to get him to visit them where they’d lived for thousands of years.  Or even to come and see her here.  To come down from the building. She couldn’t climb all those steps.  Not now.

She peered around.  Some people turned away from her and pretended she wasn’t there.  That suited her fine.  Some stared at her as if she was a porcupine who would hurt them, spike them.  The Xhosas called it an incanda.  The Xhosas.  Yes. That was another story. It reminded her of—of what?  How the Blacks had also stolen their land, had taken what they wanted, had violated them.

Her reverie was interrupted when a woman, a White woman, came up to her and spoke.  She barely understood what the woman was saying but it was something like we understand; we’re with you.  At least she was friendly, so that’s what she must have been meaning.

A young man looked at Qhunna and smiled.  He was eating a pie. Halfway through, he gave it to her.  She didn’t know what to do with it.  She wasn’t a dog, a xãī, you could give your leftovers to.  At least he hadn’t thrown it on the ground.

She stared at the building. Two towers, the roof meeting in the middle.  Like the goura, her instrument.  Or like the bent branch of a camelthorn.  That’s what her grandson said the English called it.  A kameeldoring in Afrikaans.  Something about a giraffe.  She’d seen giraffes eating it, the thorns not bothering them, the pods looking like their ears.  But who would hear her and her people, here?

Now, where was she?  Oh yes.  This building.  What was it that her grandson had told her?  That it was that shape, that they were called the Union Buildings because of the time the English and Afrikaners made peace and formed a country.  They came together.  And he said that when the country became a—what do they call it—yes, a democracy, when Blacks could vote, and even her people could vote, they said it was because Blacks and Whites came together in peace.  Everyone was free.

Everyone.  But not the San.  Because they’d been kicked out.  Scraped out like a splinter, like the land was better if they weren’t there.

But they were there.  They weren’t what the others called Coloureds: a bit of White, a bit of Black.  Or a bit of this and a bit of whatever.  No. They were a people, a group, a kind, alone.  And they wanted the government to grant them land.  Their own land.  Back again.  Home.  To make their language official.  Not !Xóõ of course, she realised, but the language most of them spoke.  She did, too. Khoekhoe, or as her grandson preferred to spell it:  Qhuqhu.  In his own way.  The language spoken by most of the Khoisan.  Or was it the Qhoisan?

‘Hey, ma – what are you doing here?’

She decided not to reply.  She just stood looking at that building.

‘Ek vra:  Wat doen jy hier?’  He was asking in Afrikaans.  Same thing.  But she’d vowed never to speak the language of her own first oppressor.  Even when she’d been beaten as a young girl for not replying.  When she’d had to find work as a—never mind.  That was past.  Long ago.

A woman came up and spoke gently: ‘Ma, u etsang moo?’  Same question.  But this was in Sotho, a language she could understand but in which she wasn’t able to answer.  So, she just gave a little smile.

The same woman tried Zulu, the language with most first-language speakers in South Africa.  Qhunna knew that.  She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did.  ‘Wenzani lapha?’ But Qhunna knew that the Zulus were fighters, and she chose not to answer.  Instead, she put her hand out and offered her the half pie that she’d been carrying all this time.  The woman backed away and said that she should eat it herself.  But Qhunna shook her head, smiled and pressed it on her.  Now this woman in turn didn’t know what to do with it.

By this time, a crowd had gathered around her.  Curious.  Interested.  Some a bit aggressive.  Others not.

A young White man came up to her now and to her surprise, and everyone else’s, spoke to her in Xhosa. The same question: ‘Wenzantoni apha.’  She gave him the broadest of her smiles.  She knew that if she answered in her language, nobody would understand, but she could speak Xhosa fluently.  She also knew that it was a clicking language and the Xhosas had got a lot of their clicks from the Qhoisan.

So, she answered in Xhosa.  The man stared at her intently, taking in what she was saying.  But the whole time, there was chattering in the other languages, as people started translating.  Some were shaking their heads, looking puzzled.  It was like burying nuts in the ground that nobody could then find, even though they knew they had to be there somewhere.  But you knew, and sometimes you also forgot.

She told him first that she was walking with her ancestors. That they’d come with her and the others to see the President.  To tell him that they wanted their land back.  That they wanted their original place to live. That they wanted their language recognised. That she was there because she was old and the President would have to treat her with respect as she held the knowledge of the past.

‘But so few speak your language’, somebody said.

‘And how many have sign language as their first language?’ Someone butted in. It was the woman who’d spoken Zulu.  ‘It’s good that that one’s an official language.  But why discriminate here?’

‘It is the oldest language in South Africa’, the White Xhosa said.

‘But it’s dying or dead’, someone else commented in English.

‘But I is alive’, Qhunna responded in English, which shocked everyone as they’d thought she couldn’t understand.  ‘My language is alive.  My people is alive.  We isn’t many because of—’  And here she stopped, taking a deep breath.

‘Because—because—’ She looked at the Xhosa-speaker for help. He nodded his head in encouragement. ‘Because we was killed by the Germans, the English, the Afrikaners, the Tswanas, the Zulus, the Xhosas.’  There was a murmur of awkwardness.  ‘And our land was taken away.’  She’d learned all of that by listening to her grandson say it over and over.

A lot of tsking and head shaking.

‘Is she right?’ somebody asked.

‘Some of it’, came a response from behind her back.  ‘Maybe not all.  But much of it.’

By now there must have been fifty people around her.  She showed them her goura and that the string was broken.  She put the end in her mouth, but because the string was broken, no sound issued.  Some people tittered.  Someone said, ‘She’s not all there.’  Someone else said, ‘Wait. There must be a reason.’

‘Look’, she said in her language.  Then in Xhosa.

She took a deep breath and remembered what her grandson had taught her.  What she had to say in English to the President because otherwise he wouldn’t understand her.  But she could say it to these people.  To see if she remembered.  Like a—what did her grandson call it?  Like a rehears—?  No, she couldn’t remember that word.

‘The string is broken.  My people are broken.  We can’t make music anymore.  Give us our land.  Remember our language. Then the string will be fixed. Then we can make beautiful sounds again.’

She smiled at everyone: ‘!Gâi tsēs!’  They looked at her blankly. A voice said proudly: ‘That means good day.’  It was her grandson.

‘!Gâise !gû re.’

‘She says, “Goodbye.”’

She looked around and saw the others who’d come up from the desert with her.

‘//Khawa mûgus.’

A chorus from her family: ‘See you soon.’ They said it again.

‘Say it with us’, her grandson said.  He repeated the sentence slowly. The others around them took it up. They couldn’t get the clicking right no matter how they tried.

Qhunna walked slowly back to the shelter.  Nobody followed.

The President never came.

2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist