Chapter 27: The Next Incident Goes Viral

…continued from 5 June 2026...

WARNING: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENCE AND RACIAL PREJUDICE. DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY THIS.

Rania felt something stir inside her. It was a foreign sensation to her, she could not quite put her finger on it, as she had never felt this sensation before. “Just leave me alone and mind your own business,” she replied while turning around to walk away.

She’d only taken one step away, when she felt her head being snapped back as the girl yanked her hair sharply. Suddenly Rania felt her temper rocket up and boil over in an instant. It was a very strange sensation for her, because it was a release of such a primal rage, which she had no idea she possessed. “Probably got that from dad,” she reflected later.

She spun around and instinctively balled her fist and unleashed a right-hand punch that landed squarely on the girl’s nose which erupted in a spurting fountain of blood.

The girl stumbled backwards, trying to maintain her balance. Rania followed the punch to the face with a left strike into the girl’s stomach, causing her to fall down and hit the ground hard.

She was on her like white on rice, holding her by the neck, preparing to rain down some more blows. However, as her rage stormed through her mind and body, it was abruptly interrupted by a sharp pain to her temple. She instantly saw stars and felt herself quickly slipping off the girl’s chest.

When she came to her senses about 5 minutes later the fight had been stopped by one of the teachers. Rania’s face was a bloody mess and her body ached all over. She had blacked out for a while and now realised that the girl’s friends had given her a hell-of-a beating.

When Wasiela arrived to fetch her after being summoned by the principal, she had to be physically restrained from attacking the principal. She somehow managed to bring herself under control and took her daughter home to nurse her wounds.

Malik was sharing a beer with one of his liquor suppliers.

Bernie Stein owned a legitimate chain of liquor stores, which was franchised across the country. Malik had been in business with Bernie for several years, paying a little more for the liquor he needed to stock his illegal shebeens across the Cape Flats. Stein, maintained his public image as a prominent Jewish businessman, and only a select few trusted individuals knew of his ties to Cape Town’s criminal underworld.

Malik felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He took it out and saw that he had received a message from Kamali. “Sorry Bernie, I have to take this,” he said.

He opened the text message from Kamali. It was a link that took him to a video. His face went pale as he watched in angry horror how his daughter was being beaten up. He quickly made his excuses to Bernie before calling Wasiela and rushing home.

The interesting thing about the video was that it did not show any footage of Rania punching the girl. All it showed was how Rania had been pummeled and left senseless.

The video went viral and the school was lambasted for allowing “this kind of racial violence”. The media were fed the coconut slur story, and it added just the right amount of fuel to the fire to enrage Malik to the point of removing his daughter from the school.

It was all he could do to control his temper not to do harm to his daughter’s attackers or their parents. However, several of the papers quoted him and Wasiela as condemning the act as a cowardly racist attack by a bunch of non-Coloured girls on their Coloured daughter.

The media articles trended for two weeks and resulted in a few retaliatory incidents between Coloured and black youths. Once the furore settled down and Rania had been installed into her new, very exclusive and very private school. Malik’s well-developed sense of intuition sensed that coverage of the incident and the sustained online commentary was no coincidence. A part of him smiled at the genius of it all. He was even proud of Rania for throwing the first punch, which actually had given the girl a broken nose.

Continued tomorrow 7 June 2026, before 12pm