Zoo City

Benoît and Zinzi sleep together despite his impending departure. He is headed to a camp in Burundi, where his wife and children are allegedly staying. Zinzi asks if he’s sure the people he’s following are truly his wife and child and whether he has asked for a DNA test. He tells her this isn’t easy for him, and when he says he’s happy she has found someone new, Zinzi intuits that D’Nice relayed news of her kiss with Gio. Then, Benoît shows Zinzi photographs of his wife and children. She wonders how his children will react to his Mongoose, and he says that they might pull the Mongoose’s tail, but the Mongoose would get used to them: “He’s only mean to nasty Sloth girls” (239).

That night, as Zinzi dreams of swimming laps in a pool, she sees something with teeth swimming up toward her.

Zinzi wakes to the sound of gunshots. With her neighbors, she observes a fight between several men equipped with assault rifles. One has a large Bear, and after it suffers multiple gunshot wounds, “the man turns and runs like hell is at his heels. Because it will be” (244). Zinzi spots another man with an AK-47, who empties another clip into the Bear, waves, and escapes along with his Bird.

The Undertow comes for the bear’s owner. Her neighbor covers his daughter’s eyes, but Zinzi thinks that he should really have covered the girl’s ears: “The screaming only lasts for a second before it’s abruptly turned off” (245). Her neighbor reminds Zinzi of something she saw in her vision back at the sangoma’s: a shopkeeper with a name tag, leaning over a hallucinating Zinzi (who was five years old in the vision). The shopkeeper’s name tag said “Murderer.” 

When Zinzi wakes up, the Bear is gone, and its blood has been hosed from the sidewalk. The only thing she sees is a black stain left by the Undertow. Zinzi finds her car trashed by Nasty and Yellow Eyes. She and Benôit get into the car and drive away. Benôit tells Zinzi his polygamy offer is still open. She asks him for Ronaldo’s home address instead; Ronaldo works for the same security company at which Benôit fills in for the sick Elias.

Zinzi goes to Mrs. Luthuli’s; Mrs. Lithuli brings her tea and a box of photographs, in which Zinzi finds a photograph of Song and S’bu’s parents. She senses Songweza’s attachment to her parents and decides she can use that attachment to track Songweza. When she holds the photo, she again sees the vision of the World Trade Center.

Zinzi heads to Ronaldo’s neighborhood, Hillbrow, after Benôit delivers the information, courtesy of D’Nice. When she arrives, she sees a luxurious apartment tower called High Point and realizes that this tower, not the World Trade Center, appeared in her vision. She heads to the residential building, which has a mall on its bottom floors. Despite heavy security, she tries to convince one guard to help her find Songweza. Zinzi says that she hopes Song is in this high-rise, and not in the peeling low-rise across the street that has its curtains drawn in the middle of the day:

Most traffickers don’t even bother with shipping containers. They advertise instead. It’s never prostitution. It’s a secretarial or shop job that pays unreasonably well […] Once they’ve got them, the girls are gang-raped to put them in their place, hooked on drugs, and then put to work (253). 

The security guard agrees to help Zinzi, and together they climb the stairs. Song bursts into the hallway from the 19th floor; when Zinzi calls her name, she runs back up the stairs and back through the door. Zinzi follows her through the door and sees Song, now trapped between Zinzi and two familiar faces: Mark and Amira. Mark and Amira badger Zinzi for failing to answer her stolen phone, and they tell Zinzi that her services are no longer needed.

Song yells that Mark and Amira are trying to kidnap her and throws herself at the security guard. When the guard hesitates, Song grabs his can of mace and sprays him with it. In the commotion, Zinzi grabs Song’s arm and slams her against a window. Zinzi then pulls Song, kicking and screaming, down the stairs, asking Song why she ran away. She asks if it’s something Odi did, and Song replies, “What didn’t Odi fucking do?” (258). She then tells Zinzi to ask what happened to her boyfriend, Jabu.

Amira and Mark tell Zinzi that Songweza is unbalanced, and they take her away. They promise to pay Zinzi, joking that they’d “hate to see this feature in a blog” (260). Zinzi notices that Amira’s gun is no longer amongst her missing objects. She challenges Amira’s story about having been trafficked in a container, suggesting that Amira did the trafficking, not the other way around.