Viktor felt a hand slap his back. He jolted forward, looked up to see Tendai and pulled the headphones from his ears.

'So are you coming, Viktor? The protest starts in thirty minutes. You can write about it if you like.'

Tendai folded his tall frame into the chair next to Viktor. His fluorescent jacket was emblazoned with the initials of the company he worked for, Balford and Collins Workplace (BCW); over the letters Tendai had pinned a badge: Fair Pay, Justice for Cleaners, with the words circled in red.

'No, I can't. I have a deadline. I'm finishing an article.' Viktor indicated his notebook, his hand holding his place under the black and red cover. 'You know I am writing a piece on the campaign.'

'Good, but we need your presence. Support from academic staff is important.'

'I'm more student than staff. I don't have a contract – zero hours. Worse than you, Tendai.'

Tendai laughed derisively, stretched back in the chair, opened his arms and looked around the café at the muddled groups of students leaning over books, executives, men and women in suits, the canteen staff, three women like him from Zimbabwe – Rejoice, Patience, Sylvia. He dropped his head closer to Viktor's and spoke in a loud whisper. 'Fucking crap, Viktor, man. You are like the bosses, drinking your café lattes, listening to that ... that noise, and writing. While we, us' – he indicated the women at the counter with a sweep of his arm – 'the poor, the poor of the poor, we protest.' Breaking his whisper, he laughed loudly again, so that people turned.

'You have it all wrong, Tendai,' Viktor answered calmly. 'Being an academic today means poverty, insecurity – we're proletarianised too. No contracts, no stable jobs, no benefits, no overtime. Déraciné, unrooted, forgotten, members of the poors.'

'The poors!' Tendai repeated, mocking.

Viktor had a rule that functioned across British society. The worse the job, the more degrading and humiliating, the more cruel and bullying the bosses, the more respect he bestowed on the worker. In this formulation, exploitation and poverty were answered by politesse and gratitude. Yet in the face of Tendai's goading he was unable to be entirely consistent with this rule.

'You know,' Viktor added, pushing his chair away from Tendai, 'I am with you. I support the campaign.'

'Mr Poors, we don't need your seated support, your pity – we need your presence.' Tendai could do this: get to the heart of the matter, stick the knife in and laugh so it stung with accuracy, yet the pain of the attack almost instantly dispersed. To press the point, Tendai shuffled his chair closer to Viktor's, recovering the lost distance. 'Some facts: one hundred and fifty new members of the union in six months, in your union branch. All in cleaning and security, all outsourced workers. A campaign – the biggest of any college at the University of London. The demands clear.' He held his hand out, fingers spread, the skin between them fine and clear. 'One, the London living wage. Two, sick pay. Three, pensions. And four, leave. Each demand is about simple parity with University of London workers, man. When we have won these, Viktor – and we will – we will then fight to get cleaning and security back in-house. The final blow against BCW.'

Tendai wondered why he bothered. Viktor was hopeless, always immersed in his computer, his brow knitted as if he was Zimbabwean, as if he didn't have papers, as if he was illegal – but this strange man, with his questions, his curiosity and worries and misplaced urgency, somehow softened Tendai.

Tendai rose slowly, prising himself from the chair, leaning and pushing on the table. Finally Viktor answered, 'If I finish this piece I will come.'

'Make sure you do or I will fucking crush you, brother.' Tendai motioned with his hands, a substance – Viktor, paper, capitalism – being crushed, then turned and left.

Viktor watched him turn the collar of his jacket up, hoisting the hood over his head, bracing himself for the cold – tightening the drawstring so only his nose and upper lip were visible.

Tendai's exposed fingers grew numb in his fingerless gloves as he pushed the dustcart around the university, his books open, held down on the cart with elastic bands – fooling himself that he could read and study as he swept and cleaned. His pockets bulged with union forms and campaign material. In the winter he looked like a tramp and could be heard talking to himself, reading aloud. Oh, poor crippled Zimbabwean beggar, his weeping was all in vain, 'Cos that rich man was never gonna feed him again. The winter lasted six months on this infernal, ugly island, worse than Cape Town. Here the sun belonged to another, distant galaxy; the UK was a remote planet where real life could not exist.

Tendai was not Tendai. He was Soneko Dotwana, and he was not Zimbabwean, he was South African – though what did it matter, these lines that divided Southern Africa, paralysing communities and imprisoning the people. Where there had always been movement, now there were only borders, death, lethargy. Tendai's five-year stay in the UK was part of the historical movement of Africans, he reasoned. It was his right to disperse, roam, flee as we have always done, part of the peopling of the planet from Africa, filling Europe, the dark continent, with black faces. If the first human beings were African, then we, they, were also the first immigrants. We never travelled with papers. Why would we start now?

When in the early twenty-first century Zimbabweans had headed south to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban and north to London, Tendai had bucked the continental trend and fled to Zimbabwe from South Africa. He fled to Mugabe's proud Africa, to the project of resistance and anti-imperialism, and taken a Zimbabwean struggle name. The dream of socialism and freedom north of the Limpopo had dissolved into the air before it could even form. The only remnant of it that Tendai kept was his name. In a bar on his first night in Harare a drunken ZANU comrade called Tendai had listened to his story, slapped his shoulder and said, 'Now you are Zimbabwean. You are our brother, this country is your home and we are your family. As a Zimbabwean, you can farm, take a wife, make a business.' The ZANU comrade then asked him if he had chosen a Zimbabwean name for himself and Tendai responded with elation, 'Yes, I want to name myself Tendai' – a choice that had delighted the man.

In London, then, he was Tendai.

When Viktor had asked Tendai about Mugabe months ago, Tendai's tongue had split, divided in two, his eyes narrowed. Yet when he spoke of Mandela – the Crowned Prince of Peace and Reconciliation, the poster boy of liberals and conservatives alike, the grey-haired old man in coloured shirts – Tendai spat. He rose on his feet. It seemed to Viktor that he actually floated, hovered over the ground, lifted by his words, his anger and bile still fresh with betrayal.

'When the regime, the racists, the apartheid dogs, wanted to negotiate, they fingered Mandela – not because he was the best of the ANC, but because the clever bastards knew he would talk, bend, compromise on everything. Each clause and principle he would sell. And Mandela, in turn, with his cheap rhetoric, he reined in the movement, turned us on and off, man. Viktor, I didn't...