Cape Town was stunning, the little I saw of it, but if I’d somehow missed noticing that a national election was going on, my ignorance began to fall away on my first walk around the city centre when I came across a street where all the buildings had been sprayed purple. It had happened just the day before, at an anti-apartheid demonstration where the riot police, in an attempt to tag the demonstrators, had added purple dye to the water in their water cannon – only one of the protestors managed to get at the nozzle and redirect it so that it sprayed all along both sides of the street …
Bio:
Joe Davies’ writing has appeared in the Dublin Review, Grain, the New Quarterly, the Manchester Review, PRISM International, the Missouri Review, and previously in Queen’s Quarterly. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario, where much of the time he’s happy enough to stay put.