My brother would never allow that of course.

We drive upon to the camp. There are soldiers, armoured cars, police. There are English people who think I agree with their harsh racism. There are black people who have some vague notion or hope that I can help. They do want me to tell the story, they believe in the power of it

This is not an easy episode. I disagree with much of what my brother is doing, but he can’t help it.

And I can’t walk away here. I can’t turn the page and forget. This is a story that has a lot to do with me. This is a big news item and one of the main players is my brother. Whatever I feel about it he is my brother. I disagree with a lot of what he does but he is my brother. I love him. I say goodby to him. I'll see him later. It's not the first time little differences have hung between us.

That very afternoon I interview the Artistic Director of the Market Theatre. He is black guy with phenomenal presence. And he is a brilliant raconteur. He shapes up to tell me a story. I hadn’t expected this particular one. It’s about a day, ten years ago, when the police arived to tell him that his brother had been shot. And was lying bleeding, dying in the dust road outside their home. Deaths like that, like those of his brother, will be avenged he says, when black people in South Africa make their lives worthwhile.

We finish the interview.I thank him, tell him how good it was, and what a privilege it will be to broadcast that story. Yes, that’s good, this artist says.

Then he shakes my hand and calls me ‘Brother’.

You know in a story, there is supposed to be a structure. I happen to think structure is important, and so I have a certain desire to end the story there, with that word, 'brother', and its resonances. It’s neat, though. Perhaps not cute. But too neat.

So I want to end it in this way. It may be rougher, less artful, but that is how it has come to me, as a memory and a bundle of thoughts, all related, and in the story for reasons not of structure nor of craft, but because this happened in a context that cannot be parcelled and packaged so easily, for it is the context of life, as it is lived or otherwise.

Just this past week, I was reading a newspaper, and in it there was a picture and a description of a song and a book. They all talked about a reporter by the name of Kevin Carter.

The song is by a band called the Manic Street Preachers. The song uses his name in the title, Kevin Carter.

And the book talks about him and three other exceptionally talented news photographers. Apparently in 1993 or -4, not long after he and I had met, Kevin Carter took a picture of an Ethiopian woman, a picture so stunningly powerful that it makes people weep.

He won an award for the photograph in 1994. In 1994 something else happened to Kevin Carter.

He killed himself. Why? he had seemed to be on top of the world. Successful. Internationally acclaimed. His suicide note talked of money worries. His celebrity had not stopped him panicking about money. He had a wife and child.

In the note he also writes a few sentences expressing the most sharply pointed and intense pain. The every day killings and maimings, the starvation and the needless slaughter. He could stand it no more.

I have finished my story. My story is ragged, not crafted, not structured. I pick up the newspaper. In it there are stories, stories and stories. There are pictures of and by people I do not know, powerful stories of places I may never see.

I fold up the newspaper, and place it in a corner. I think about a few hours I spent eight years ago in the company of a young man called Kevin Carter. Inside I am as clear as can be as to why as I sit all alone in this quiet city, far away from Jo’burg, why my eyes are burning.

Kevin sent me off to find a South African story, but there, sitting next to me by that poolside, there, drinking beer and telling me about the pictures he had taken and the pictures in his mind, there, his friendly eyes more filled with anguish and guilt and rage at what he had seen and what he had made himself see and show, there was the first South African story that I have forced myself to write in eight fucking years.

It’s not a story that makes sense folks. Sorry 'bout that folks. It is a story wrenched from memory written by a storyteller whose first choice 99.9 per cent of the time is humour. It’s just a little something I wrote about my brother and other brothers and sisters too and a young guy I hardly knew who had seen enough bloodied human legs and guts and brains drying and rotting in the sun for a lifetime.

Kevin Carter, a storyteller with his camera, took some pictures of me that day. I want to find them, to see what stories he saw in me. I want to hear that Manic Street Preachers song again. I want to see that photograph of the woman that people look at and it makes them weep.