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words have a profound influence on them. “What is R30 for the whole day of hard work and sweating?”
    A certain woman from the seated group feels obliged to intervene when she hears Priest almost double their prospective earnings. “I think you are mistaken, Father. The money is R16. I heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from the white man himself.”
    Priest stops to listen to the woman who is offering her information. This greatly influences his temper and makes him run out of words. God has reclaimed His possession.
    As Priest stands there, speechless and breathless, an argument commences regarding whom the people must believe. Priest has furnished them with good news, or better news, and the woman who negated his information is offering nothing but bad news. Those who are seated next to her look at her closely, trying to ascertain if her appearance qualifies her to contradict such a powerful person under any circumstances. The viewers decide that she is unattractive, notwithstanding her being prepared for farm work.
    “She is ugly.”
    “No sane person can believe a woman who is ugly.”
    “An ugly woman is a foolish woman.”
    “She needs to be beaten.”
    A number of people are not angry at the woman because she has told them something they themselves have known. Many think that, no matter what they have known earlier, if Priest says they will earn R30, then it must be true. Somebody else might have made a mistake, but not Priest.
    Priest is still speechless while people reorganise their thoughts. He looks awkwardly at them as his mind moves back and forth. In a few moments he counts how much they will get per month if they earn R16 per day. His finding troubles him so much that he pronounces it in a loud and worried tone, “R320 per month?”
    Many people are confused when they hear Priest utter his finding. They do not know whether it refers to R30 or R16. But then the truck arrives and saves Priest from having to address them further.

6
    Sithole, Priest’s friend, refuses to seek employment at the farm. He is convinced that his ancestors have a far better job in store for him, so there is no need to sell himself to be a slave for a white farmer.
    “Not in a million years!” he said boastfully to Priest on Saturday, when Priest was trying to convince him to go. Priest knew that he was fighting a losing battle, but spoke to him anyway for the sake of MaXulu, Sithole’s wife, who begged him to talk some sense into her husband. They both knew, though, that nothing could change Sithole’s mind if he had let himself believe his ancestors wished for him to follow a certain path.
    “He is a hundred per cent believer in ancestors. It’s astonishing,” Priest always says.
    Life is hard at Sithole’s home, as it is in almost all the homes in Hunger-Eats-a-Man. Sithole has been without a job for six years now. He was working as a bus driver at Putco in Durban and used to get a good salary there, something both he and his wife came to realise when he lost the job. In those days his was counted as one of the well-to-do families in Hunger-Eats-a-Man, and he indeed “did not mind it”, as he told his wife every time he got an opportunity. MaXulu’s opinion on the matter – that her husband actually relished the thought of being among the wealthy men according to Hunger-Eats-a-Man standards – was closer to the truth.
    The Sitholes have a five-roomed house, which qualifies as beautiful due to three facts: it is made of bricks, it is plastered, and it is painted. The creamy-white colour is now fading, but it does not deter Sithole’s pride. Both he and his wife point to their home without fear or shame. When things were not yet like this, visitors were always encouraged, the aim being to show people how expensively and beautifully furnished the house was inside. But when hunger strikes, no one brags about wood and cloth, no matter how expensive.
    Before Sithole lost his job, he was contemplating