The Covenant Part 83

So the two women, one black, one white, lifted the bundles and started down the almost impa.s.sable road. In some of the shacks lights shone, and this helped them to pick their way, but in others there was nothing, forcing Laura and Miriam to stumble about. They found shack Two-three-nine, then Two-four-zero, and Laura said, 'It can't be far.' But at Two-four-one the shacks stopped. Beyond, there lay only darkness and mud.

'We must be on the wrong road,' Laura said, and they went to the last house and inquired as to where Lot Two-four-three was, and an old man said in Xhosa, 'Just down there.' And he pointed to open s.p.a.ce.

'What did he say?' Laura asked, and Miriam said, 'My lot is down there.'

'But there's no house!' Laura exclaimed.

In the gloom the two women stared at the vacant lot, and again Laura was tempted to turn back and ask for clarification, but a faded cardboard tacked to a leaning stick said clearly: Lot Two-four-three.

Good G.o.d! This was it. This woman who had worked so hard for so many years, this woman who had reared her children and educated them, who had mended her husband's clothes so that he could hold his precious job, received this as her reward.

'There really must be some mistake,' Laura said brightly. 'I'll ask.' And leaving Miriam, she trudged back to the official at the truck. He laughed again and said, 'That's how they all started. They got their lot and made something of it.'

'But where's she to sleep?'

'That's her problem.'

'No,' Laura said quietly. 'It's my problem, and it's yours.'

'Lady, get in your car and go home. These people find a way.'

She wanted to argue with him, but he turned his back and left. Standing in the drizzle, she thought: It is his problem. Government has plans to move three million eight hundred thousand people. One in six. In America that would be forty million people uprooted from good homes and moved to bad. And tonight I'm responsible for one of them.

Slowly, refusing to cry in her anguish, she trudged back through the mud, unable to believe that what she was experiencing could occur in a civilized society. A sovereign state, in the latter half of the twentieth century, believed that this was a solution to a problem involving human beings. In the muddy darkness, with soft rain slanting at her, she could visualize Superintendent Grobbelaar leafing through his canvas-backed book, finding the applicable law. It would be there, and it would be enforced.

'We'll sleep in my car,' Laura said softly when she joined Miriam.

In the rain the women wept.

In a valley not far to the north, on an eroded hillside, stood two stone cairns marking the graves of Mai Adriaan, who talked with hyenas, and Seena van Doorn, l.u.s.ty daughter of old Rooi van Valck. Close by was the grave of Lodevicus the Hammer, to whom G.o.d had sent two faithful wives. Those Afrikaner pioneers had paid a terrible price for a foothold in this land, and they had done it in order to be free. In sentencing Miriam Ngqika to this awful place, their descendants had become prisoners of their own restrictive laws.

AT RESURRECTION.

Despite the deprivations imposed by apartheid, the blacks of South Africa never lost their courage. They dreamed of a resurrection when they would again be free, and it is important to differentiate between the character of this dream prior to 1975 and after. The crucial change can be perceived in the contrasting lives of two men from the Vrymeer area: Daniel Nxumalo, grandson of Micah who had ridden with General de Groot and served the Van Doorns for so many years; and Matthew Magubane, whose parents worked on a farm near Venloo.

As a child Daniel Nxumalo showed such promise that as soon as possible he went not to the mines, like his brother Jonathan, but to the black college at Fort Hare. Since 1911 this inst.i.tution had grown from little more than a high school to a full-fledged university with a faculty like no other in all Africa, composed of informed blacks who glimpsed the possibility of an awakening among their people. 'Teach as if the destiny of a free South Africa depended upon you alone' was the whispered motto of these teachers, and each devised tricks of speech and emphasis to signal to their wiser students: 'The police won't let me say what I ought to say next, but ask yourselves if Napoleon ever destroyed the national aspirations of any land he temporarily conquered?' A clever student at Fort Hare learned that what happened in the rest of the world might also happen in South Africa.

It was in a cla.s.s in world history that Daniel first caught these signals. A woman professor who had never impressed him one way or other was teaching about the Norman Conquest of England; the curriculum was heavily loaded with developments in Holland and England rather than with pertinent events in South African life. She was explaining how Frenchmen had stormed across the Channel to impose their rule on the Saxon peasants of England, and Nxumalo was dozing.

She spoke in a singsong voice, reciting meaningless dates and genealogies, and then without a cue of any kind she stood quite still before the cla.s.s and began to tell in her own words what it had been like in one small Saxon village when the conquerors arrived, and she used such vivid images and so many parallels to the trekboer invasion of frontier villages that all students became attentive. No papers rustled as she spoke on and on, treating of Saxon women with babies who could no longer own a cow for milk, and of the marching of Norman soldiers, and of the payment of taxes, until at the end she just stood there, tears streaming down her dark cheeks, not moving a muscle of her body as her voice continued with overwhelming pa.s.sion the story of alien occupancy and lost freedoms.

For three months there was no other day like that, but its harrowing into the students' lives was deep and fertile, and word pa.s.sed among the beds in the dormitory that this woman knew. She also knew that if she said anything specific relating to the condition of blacks in South Africa she would be spirited away by BOSS (Bureau of State Security) and perhaps never be seen again. Therefore, she had to convey her inner convictions without ever spelling them out, educating her pupils while keeping clear of BOSS. She played an intricate game, knowing that her history cla.s.ses waited tensely for the next revealing lecture.

It came some fourteen weeks after she spoke of the subjugation of the Saxons. She was dealing with the difficult times America faced in 1861, when the nation was ripped apart by civil war, and meticulously she avoided the question of slavery or brutality, focusing instead on the movement of the battles, as was required in schools at that time. But when she came to the end of the war, she began to speak of what it meant to the blacks in one small town in South Carolina, and again she seemed to go into a trance and stood quite rigid as she imagined the impact of freedom on a community that had been so long in bondage, and she aroused in her students such wild visions of a different pattern of life that her small cla.s.sroom became like a bomb, fused and eager to explode.

No young black, listening to her that day, could fail to comprehend her message, and among her students was one put there by BOSS, and this girl reported secretly to the police the subversion her teacher was practicing. There was no third lecture, because officials appeared, took the teacher away, and questioned her for three days before she was released. That was only the opening salvo of their hara.s.sing, and before the term's end she vanished. Her students were convinced she'd been sent to Robben Island; the fact was, she had fled the country on a forged exit permit and was teaching at the university in Nairobi, where she did not have to use Norman and Saxon as evasions for trekboer and Xhosa.

From this incident Daniel Nxumalo derived two generalizations which would determine his life pattern: It is imperative for me to learn what is happening to blacks elsewhere in the world, but I must do it so that I never attract the attention of BOSS. The first generalization was easier to carry out than the second, for as he learned more and more about Africa and Europe, he moved ever closer to the danger line.

BOSS was a semi-secret agency with power to arrest and detain without warrants of any kind. Any black or Coloured or Indian or even white who did anything that might conceivably endanger society could be investigated, and if shown to be a threat to apartheid, imprisoned on Robben Island, a speck of rocky land in Table Bay with a fine view of Table Mountain. Because of its mysteriousness, the legend grew that it was a h.e.l.lhole. 'It makes Devil's Island look like a fete champetre,' fete champetre,' a French journalist wrote, but he was wrong. It was merely a strongly guarded prison for political dissidents, and was much more lenient than Alcatraz or even the best jails in Russia. a French journalist wrote, but he was wrong. It was merely a strongly guarded prison for political dissidents, and was much more lenient than Alcatraz or even the best jails in Russia.

Blacks were sent there with shocking frequency, and there they stayed for having promoted the concept that their people should be freed from serfdom ... or for having imported machine guns from Mozambique. Some were Communist revolutionaries, but too often that label had been pasted onto men who merely sought to be the Martin Luther King or Vernon Jordan of South Africa. Had Andrew Young been a citizen of the Transvaal, he would more likely have ended up on Robben Island than as an amba.s.sador in the United Nations.

It was not easy for an involved black scholar to stay clear of BOSS, and by the time Daniel Nxumalo left Fort Hare he had entered their notebooks in four instances: (i) at a student gathering, as reported by the same spy who had turned in the history professor, he had given a rather pointed talk when someone mentioned Brazil; if he had said nothing, the topic in itself would have alerted suspicions, because Brazil had a mainly black population, but he reviewed a book by the Brazilian professor Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, The Masters and the Slaves, which contained ominous parallels to South Africa; (2) at a mock United Nations convention he was a.s.signed the role of Gromyko; he hadn't sought it, but someone had to be the Russian, so he accepted, and as a good student, studied Gromyko's life and opinion; his speech was quite Slavic; (3) at a cricket match in Port Elizabeth he was noted as having cheered not for the South African team but for England; (4) on several occasions he was observed singing the Freedom Hymn, popular with students, 'with more than necessary enthusiasm.' which contained ominous parallels to South Africa; (2) at a mock United Nations convention he was a.s.signed the role of Gromyko; he hadn't sought it, but someone had to be the Russian, so he accepted, and as a good student, studied Gromyko's life and opinion; his speech was quite Slavic; (3) at a cricket match in Port Elizabeth he was noted as having cheered not for the South African team but for England; (4) on several occasions he was observed singing the Freedom Hymn, popular with students, 'with more than necessary enthusiasm.'

At the end of his student days at Fort Hare it seemed pretty clear that eventually Daniel Nxumalo would be sent to Robben Island, but when he reported to Wit.w.a.tersrand University to take his master's degree in sociology he fell in with quite a different kind of professor, a white man trained in England who summoned him to his office one day and roared at him, 'You d.a.m.ned fool! Keep your mouth shut. How can you exercise any leverage if you're in jail? Your task is to learn. Make yourself the brightest black in South Africa, then teach others.'

The professor was careful to avoid stating specifically the end purpose of such education and never explicated his ideas of revolutionary change through superior knowledge, for this would project him also into BOSS territory, but he did defuse Nxumalo's exhibitionism, converting him into a solid, knowing scholar.

The days at Wits were like the rich summer days of February in a good year; the enthusiasms of spring were gone, but the fruition of the ripening season was at hand. Daniel met students from all over the country, and professors of extraordinary brilliance from all over the world. Many of the students were Jewish, a group he had not known before, and their keen a.n.a.lysis of things he took for granted enlightened him; he was particularly impressed by the way many Wits students ridiculed apartheid, defying the segregation laws in private and infuriating the more conservative citizens of Jo'burg by lining the sides of Jan s.m.u.ts Avenue outside the university and waving at them, as they streamed home from work, amusing placards of an abusive nature.

But his real education came not from Wits, where he acquired an M.A., but from a university unique to South Africa and one of its most commendable inventions. The University of South Africa had no campus, no buildings, no cla.s.srooms in the sense of a regular university. Its campus was merely a post-office address in Pretoria and a faculty of learned men and women capable of supervising students throughout the republic. By mail Nxumalo registered for his doctoral studies and by mail he conducted them. He rarely met his professors, posting them each week the results of his study. He worked in silence, spending large sums on books published in London and New York, and if he lacked the advantage of arguing with students in dormitories, he achieved a comparable intellectual stimulus when his professor wrote: 'Interesting, but apparently you haven't read what Philip Tobias says on this subject. Can you dismiss Peter Garlake's theory on Great Zimbabwe?' In fact, he read rather more widely than young men his age at Stanford or the Sorbonne.

UNISA enabled any bright young man or woman in even the most remote village to acquire an advanced degree, and from government's point of view this produced two desirable results: South Africa was becoming one of the most capable nations on earth; and the lack of a central campus prevented potentially rebellious students from congregating at one spot, where ideas offensive to the proponents of apartheid might germinate. It also avoided the problems that would arise when the government ordered other universities like Wits and Cape Town to segregate.

At the conclusion of his doctorate-by-mail, Daniel Nxumalo, having utilized the system to maximum advantage, was an educated man with a burning determination to effect revolutionary change in his birthplace, and a firm resolve to escape entanglement with BOSS. Few men graduating that year from universities like Harvard or Oxford were undertaking a more difficult, tightrope a.s.signment, but unexpected a.s.sistance from Matthew Magubane enabled him to fulfill it.

In his early years this Matthew had showed little promisea bull-necked boy who resented disciplineand his education might well have ended at fourteen, except that his father knew the Nxumalos and asked young Daniel, already studying for his doctorate, to talk with his son.

Nxumalo found the boy quite difficult and was about to conclude that further education would be wasted, when the boy said suddenly and with great arrogance, 'Man don't have to go to college like you did to get what you want.'

'And what do I want?'

'Change things. I can tell by your face.'

'And you want to change things, too?' When the boy just sat there, refusing to answer, Nxumalo wanted to shake him as if he were a stubborn child, but he repressed the urge and said quietly, 'Matthew, to achieve what you want, you, too, must have an education.'

'Why?'

'Because I can see that you want to lead others. And you can't do this unless you know at least as much as they do.'

He arranged for Matthew's entrance to the black high school at Thaba Nchu, erected on the very site which Tjaart van Doorn and his Voortrekkers had occupied when they were seeking their freedom. There, like Nxumalo before him, he fell under the spell of an inspired woman teacher who kept on her desk a wood-carved motto: teach this day as never before teach this day as never before. She was convinced that a revolution in values was under way across all of Africa; the Portuguese had been driven from Mozambique and Angola; South-West Africa would soon be black-governed; and great Rhodesia was crumbling. She never ranted about these vast changes, merely kept on the wall behind her as she lectured a large map of the area with three changes indicated by paste-on alterations: South-West Africa became Namibia; Rhodesia was Zimbabwe; and the fine port city of Lou-renco Marques was now Maputo. Day after day her students saw those signals.

'You will be with me only for a brief time,' she told them. 'I must arouse enough enthusiasm to last your lifetime.' And she did, and underlying it all was a visible commitment to revolutionary change. On no student was her impact greater than on Matthew Magubane, whose marks never exceeded a low average but whose fiery convictions surged to an apex.

Magubane expressed himself not in sports, for he was awkward, nor was he much good in debating, which required an adroit mind. What captured him, sweeping his soul, was music. He had a resonant ba.s.s voice, unusual in a high school student, and an innate sense of how to use it to advantage. He sang alone; he sang in the quartet; and best of all, he sang in the school chorus. Four times a year the South African Railways offered black high schools concessions so that soccer teams and choruses could travel to various parts of the republic for compet.i.tion with other black schools, and these safaris awakened Matthew to the possibilities of his country. He saw the rich ranching lands of the north, the Indian character of Durban, the majesty of the Cape. While other boys roughhoused in the S.A.R. coach, he stayed at the window staring at the endlessness of the barren Karroo, taking its brutal quality to heart, and with this awareness of the land he had inherited, even though it was not now his, he began to appreciate what Daniel Nxumalo had told himthat to accomplish anything in South Africa, he had to learn. In his final year he won the English and history prizes.

Magubane and Nxumalo arrived at the University of Zululand the same April, the first as a stocky fellow with the kind of hairdo that infuriated whites, the second as a gracile young man with a three-piece suit and neat haircut. They maintained a cool distance until the first term had almost ended; then Nxumalo went to the younger man's quarters, missed him, and left a note: I would be pleased to see you in my room at five, Daniel Nxumalo. I would be pleased to see you in my room at five, Daniel Nxumalo.

When Magubane in his rough clothes reached there, he found two uppercla.s.smen seated on the floor, accompanied by three girl students, all drinking sweetish tea and discussing Gunnar Myrdal. It was a disconcerting experience, with Magubane conspicuously out of place but appreciative of the fact that Professor Nxumalo still retained an interest in him.

He did not want to become like the polished young men sitting on the floor; he was more at home with radical students who met around back tables at the cafe, and it was through a.s.sociation with them that he fell afoul of BOSS. It had started on a train excursion to Durban when Matthew led a gang of noisy students in a selection of revolutionary songs: 'There's a sun in the east Rising, rising.

There's a moon in the west Falling, falling.

I follow the sun, no matter how bright.

There goes the moon, down into night.

Oh, glorious sun!'

Police officials went to the university following this exhibition, for there were always spies, and the administrators asked Professor Nxumalo to warn young Magubane of the dangerous path he was pursuing, singing songs like that and encouraging others to join him.

When they were alone Daniel turned to Matthew: 'You're heading for trouble. You must pause and take a deep breath.'

'There can be no more pausing,' Matthew said.

'What do you intend?' Nxumalo asked evenly, not wanting to hear the response.

I think many like me will have to go into exile. Into Mozambique.' 'No!' Daniel cried. 'That is not the way.'

'We'll go into Mozambique and get guns, the way the blacks in Mozambique went into Tanzania and got their guns.'

'South Africa will not be Mozambique. The Portuguese did not have the will to defend themselves. The Afrikaners do.'

'Then we will have to shoot the Afrikaners.'

'Believe me, they will shoot you down.'

'The first ten thousand, the second. But others will keep coming.' 'You expect to be in the first ten thousand?' 'I'd be ashamed not to be.'

They spoke in Zulu, and the phrases young Magubane used echoed the great periods of Zulu history; they were words from a past century applied to the one that was coming. He visualized himself as marching in an impi that dared not turn back, even though it faced certain annihilation. 'The others will keep coming,' Matthew said. He would not be among those others, and the victories they won would be unknown to him, for he would be dead, but they would be his victories, too.

Teacher and pupil ended this painful exchange centuries apart but with strong admiration each for the other, and when Professor Nxumalo discussed Magubane with the administration, he used empty and noncommittal phrases: 'I came away convinced that Matthew Magubane saw the error of his ways . . . There is no reason why he cannot return to what he was at Thaba Nchu ... I see a bright future for this young man, for his commitment will match his grades . . .'

Before the end of the second term, Magubane was picked up by BOSS operatives and transferred to a police interrogation center in remote Hemelsdorp, where many infamous inquisitions had been conducted and where Jurgen Krause, grandson of Piet Krause, was determined to stamp out even the slightest signs of black insurgency.

He was a six-foot-three, broad-shouldered blond Afrikaner with a generous smile and powerful fists. As soon as the door closed behind Magubane, and the northern officers were gone, Krause said to his a.s.sistant, Sergeant Krog, 'Bring him here.'

With a mighty sweep of his right arm, Krog struck Magubane from behind, knocking him forward, and as the black stumbled toward Krause's desk, the latter swung his right fist with full power and smashed Matthew in the face. As the boy fell, both Krause and Krog leaped at him, punching and kicking until he fainted.

A security investigation anywhere in South Africa was a solemn affair; over the years some fifty men had fallen carelessly from eight-story buildings, strung themselves up with public-works blankets and died, but in Hemelsdorp, investigation was an art, and here such mistakes were avoided. When Magubane revived, his face wet with the water tossed over him, he found himself facing Sergeant Krog, who held an electric cattle prod.

'Undress,' Krog said.

When Magubane hesitated, the sergeant summoned two minor a.s.sistants, who ripped Matthew's clothes away, and as soon as he stood naked, Krog applied the prod to his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, watching with satisfaction as Matthew leaped and jumped to avoid the torture. When he ran into a corner, bending to protect his genitals, Krog jammed the end of the prod into his a.n.u.s, applying such a heavy charge of electricity that the student fainted.

Year after year one black in four throughout the general population was arrested for some trivial offense or other, and it was fortunate for them that not all police were as determined and s.a.d.i.s.tic as the team of Krause and Krog. Their like could be found in most countries; Russia, East Germany, Iran, Argentina, Brazil, all had such interrogators. But the majority of South African policemen tried to be law-abiding officers of justice; Krause and Krog were officers of terror.

For three days Magubane was punched and kicked and tormented. He did get fed and he was allowed to go to the bathroom and drink as he required, but the torture was incessant. At the end of four days the only charge against him was 'You cheeky Kaffir b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' a phrase leveled against any black who had progressed as far as high school or who refused to behave deferentially. It was a terrifying charge, because almost invariably it was accompanied by some brutal punishment, so that the words actually meant Take that, you cheeky Kaffir b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' the that that being a smash to the mouth or a prod with an electric probe. being a smash to the mouth or a prod with an electric probe.

Matthew had been told, on the playing grounds at Thaba Nchu, that 'white police officers are preoccupied with black genitals,' but in his innocence he could not conceive what this meant. Now he was learning, for Krause and Krog relished having him stand before them naked so they could jab his private parts with the electric tip, and once, as they prepared to do so, Matthew broke into laughter. He was recalling what he had heard a black man say after being released: 'They put so much electricity into me I was afraid I'd light up like a bulb.'

Matthew's laughter so infuriated Krause that he and Krog kicked him unconscious, and when he revived, still naked in the cold room, he heard the first serious charge against him. The officers were singing in cracked and unharmonious voice the freedom song: 'There's a sun in the east Rising, rising.

There's a moon in the west Falling, falling.'

The words were familiar, as Matthew came out of his daze, but not the tune, and he looked with pity at the two officers, for they were singing their own dirge and could not find the melody.

'What do you mean, "a sun in the east"?'

'Nothing, Boer.' A smash to the side of the head.

'Don't you mean Mozambique?'

'No, Boer.' Another smash behind the ear.

'Don't you mean the swine who have fled this country into Mozambique?'

'No, Boer.' Another smash.

'I suggest, Magubane, that you mean the terrorists with guns over there.'

'No, Boer.' This time he was jabbed so hard with the electric prod that he danced in the air, arms and legs in all directions. 'Running to Mozambique, are you?'

He was too numb to respond, so they jabbed him for almost two minutes, after which he fainted.

When he revived, too weak to stand erect, they propped him against a wall, and he felt blood oozing from his nose. He was positive that this had not occurred when he was conscious; they must have been kicking him while he lay on the floor, and he moved parts of his body to see if anything had been broken by their heavy boots.

'And what, pray tell, Mr. Magubane, is "falling, falling"?'

'Nothing, Boer.' More punishment.

'Stand up, you cheeky Kaffir b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Now you tell us what you mean by "falling, falling." I put it to you, Magubane. You mean that South Africa is falling, don't you?'

There was more punishment, the flailing out of worried men, and Matthew realized that he was being tortured so furiously because he had been overheard singing a song whose words the police could not interpret.

'All right, you cheeky b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you sing the song for us.' Krause began in his monotone to chant the words, joined quickly by Krog, whose efforts augmented the dissonance. 'Sing!' Krog screamed, and slowly, with deep powerful tones, Magubane picked up the song, lending it significance and beauty: 'I follow the sun, no matter how bright.

There goes the moon, down out of sight.'

Krog, reading from a typed copy of the song, detected Magubane's change in words and halted the singing.

'You changed the words!'

There are many verses,' Magubane said.

On the seventh day he heard the second serious charge: 'People say you're a black-consciousness activist.'

'I am for black power, yes.' Smash to the jaw.

'You're a Bantu, a stupid G.o.dd.a.m.ned Kaffir Bantu, with no power at all!'

'Yes, Boer, I am an African.' Fist in the mouth.

Afrikaners like Marius van Doorn, the son of Detleef, looked forward to the day when there was one citizens.h.i.+p in South Africa; he felt himself to be a man of Africaan Africanand he did not want that honorable word applied only to blacks. But other Afrikaners were infuriated if any black claimed to be an African, as Magubane was doing, for they sensed a grave danger: the black was seeking outside help from his brothers in powerful black nations like Nigeria.