It’s early Saturday morning and I leave Ruschka at home because I sense that today is going to be hard. Reaching Bonteheuwel, a sprawling township on the Cape Flats, takes less than twenty minutes from my home in Wynberg. I park my car on the sandy sidewalk and walk towards the small council house belonging to Ivy Kriel. Activists are dotted all along the fence in front of the house and in the small barren space meant for a garden, now filled with plastic chairs. I pass through them, nodding a silent greeting which they return. Those who are speaking to one another are whispering.

I join the line of family members as they slowly file past the body. Ashley Kriel is lying flat on his back in the coffin in the middle of the tiny room. There is barely space to move. And then I see his face. I look but cannot see. Yet, I do see. His forehead is swollen. His eyes are closed. A deep gash leaping out of his forehead has been stitched up by the coroner. The dark curls are brushed back. In that split second, my eyes blur and I feel my knees bending. A sharp pain shoots through my chest. A comrade hoists me up under my arms, steadying me. I am helped up the narrow steps to a bedroom upstairs where I find Ashley’s sister Melanie. We are both crying.

I know that I had to look at him some time. I was reluctant because I wanted to remember him as I knew him. But it would have been strange for me not to be part of the family ritual. Melanie, unlike her sister Michelle, is unable to function. While 24-year-old Michelle is in the kitchen below helping visitors to the family home, her sister, sedated the night before, cannot stop crying.