Rage (67 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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He switched on the headlights and gunned the Land-Rover. They went hurtling down the narrow street.
The shebeen was at the end of the block, in the last cottage hard up against the boundary fence with a stretch of open veld beyond. As the headlights swept across the front of the cottage, he saw half a dozen dark figures pelting away from it, and others were fighting each other to get out of the front door and leaping from the windows.
Lothar swung the Land-Rover up over the pavement, through the tiny garden, and braked it into a deliberate and skilfully executed broadside, blocking the front door.
‘Let's go!' he yelled, and his men flung the doors open and sprang out.
They grabbed the bewildered shebeen drinkers who were trapped between the Land-Rover and the cottage wall. As one of them began to resist, he dropped to a practised swing of a riot baton and the limp body was bundled into the back of the vehicle.
Lothar sprinted around the side of the cottage, and caught a woman in his arms as she jumped through the window. He turned her upside down in the air and held on to one ankle as he reached out and seized the arm of the next man through the window. In a single swift motion he handcuffed the two of them together, wrist to ankle, and left them floundering and falling over each other like a pair of trussed hens.
Lothar reached the back door of the cottage, and made his first mistake. He seized the handle and jerked the door open. The man had been waiting on the inside, poised and ready, and as the door began to open he hurled his full weight upon it and the edge of it crashed into Lothar's chest. The wind was driven from his lungs, and hissed up his throat as he went over backwards down the steps, sprawling on the hard sun-baked earth, and the man leaped clean over him.
Lothar caught a glimpse of him against the light, and saw that he was young and well built, lithe and quick as a black cat. Then he was racing away into the darkness, heading for the boundary fence that backed up to the cottage.
Lothar rolled over onto his knees and came to his feet. Even with the start the fugitive had, there was nobody who could outrun Lothar in a fair match. He was at the peak of fitness, after months of rigorous training for the Currie Cup
match and the national trials, but as he started forward the agony of his empty lungs made him double over and wheeze for breath.
Ahead of him the fleeing figure ducked through a hole in the mesh of the fence, and Lothar fell to his knees and snapped open the holster at his side. Three months before, he had been runner-up in the police pistol championships at Bloemfontein, but now his aim was unsteady with agony and the dark figure was merging with the night, quartering away from him. Lothar fired twice but after each long bright muzzle flash there was no thumping impact of bullet into flesh and the runner was swallowed up by darkness. Lothar slid the weapon back into his holster, and fought to fill his lungs – his humiliation was more painful than his injury. Lothar was unaccustomed to failure.
He forced himself to get to his feet. None of his men should see him grovelling, and after only a minute, and even though his lungs were still on fire, he went back and dragged his two captives to their feet with unnecessary violence. The woman was stark naked. Obviously she had been entertaining a client in the back bedroom, but now she was wailing tragically.
‘Shut your mouth, you black cow,' he told her, and shoved her through the back door of the cottage.
The kitchen had been used as the bar. There were cases of liquor stacked to the ceiling, and the table was piled with a high pyramid of empty tumblers.
In the front room the floor was covered with broken glass and spilled liquor, evidence of the haste with which it had been vacated, and Lothar wondered how so many customers had fitted into a room that size. He had seen at least twenty escape into the night.
He shoved the naked prostitute towards one of his black constables. ‘Take care of her,' he ordered, and the man grinned lasciviously and tweaked one of her tawny melon-round breasts.
‘None of that,' Lothar warned him. He was still angry at the one who had got away, and the constable saw his face and sobered. He led the woman through into the bedroom to find her clothing.
Lothar's other men were coming in, each of them leading two or three sorry-looking captives.
‘Check their passes,' Lothar ordered, and turned to his sergeant. ‘All right, Cronje, let's get rid of this stuff.'
Lothar watched as the cases of liquor were carried out and stacked in front of the cottage. Two of his constables opened them and smashed the bottles against the edge of the kerb. The sweet fruity smell of cheap brandy filled the night and the gutter ran with the amber-brown liquid.
When the last bottle had been destroyed, Lothar nodded at his sergeant. ‘Right, Cronje, take them up to the station.' And while the prisoners were loaded into the two police trucks that had followed his Land-Rover, Lothar went back into the cottage to check that his men had not overlooked anything of importance.
In the back room with its tumbled bed and stained sheets, he opened the single cupboard and distastefully used the point of his riot baton to rummage through it.
Beneath the pile of clothing at the bottom of the cupboard was a small cardboard carton. Lothar pulled it out and tore open the lid. It was filled with a neat stack of single-leaf pamphlets, and idly he glanced at the top one until its impact struck him. He snatched up the sheet and turned it to the light from the bare bulb in the ceiling.
This is the
Poqo
of which it is said, ‘Take up your spear in your right hand, my beloved people, for the foreigners are looting your land.'
Poqo
was the military branch of the Pan-Africanist Congress. The word
Poqo
meant pure and untainted, for none other than pure-blooded African Bantu could become
members, and Lothar knew it for an organization of young fanatics already responsible for a number of vicious and brutal murders. In the little town of Paarl in the Cape
Poqo
had marched hundreds strong upon the police station and when driven back had vented their fury upon the civilian population, massacring two white women, one a girl of seventeen years. In the Transkei they had attacked a road-party encampment and murdered the white supervisor and his family in the most atrocious manner. Lothar had seen the police photographs and his skin crawled at the memory. Poqo was a name to fear and Lothar read the rest of the pamphlet with full attention.
On Monday we are going to face the police. All the people of Sharpeville will be as one on that day. No man or woman will go to his place of work. No man or woman will leave the township by bus or train or taxi. All the people will gather as one and march to the police station. We are going to protest at the pass law which is a terrible burden, too heavy for us to carry. We will make the white police fear us.
Any man or woman who does not march with us on Monday will be hunted down. On that day all the people will be as one.
Poqo
has said this thing. Hear it and obey it.
Lothar read the crudely printed pamphlet through again, and then he murmured, ‘So it has come at last.' He picked out the sentence which had offended him most, ‘We will make the white police fear us,' and he read it aloud.
‘So! We will see about that!' And he shouted for his sergeant to take the carton of subversive leaflets out to the truck.
T
here was an inevitability in Raleigh Tabaka's life. The great river of his existence carried him along with it so that he was powerless to break free of it or even swim against the current.
His mother, as one of the most adept of the tribal
sangomas
of Xhosa, had first instilled in him the deep awareness of his African self. She had showed him the mysteries and the secrets, and read the future for him in the casting of the bones.
‘One day you will lead your people, Raleigh Tabaka,' she prophesied. ‘You will become one of the great chiefs of Xhosa and your name will be spoken with those of Makana and Ndlame – all these things I see in the bones.'
When his father, Hendrick Tabaka, sent him and his twin brother Wellington across the border to the multiracial school in Swaziland, his Africanism had been confirmed and underscored, for his fellow pupils had been the sons of chiefs and black leaders from countries like Basutoland and Bechuanaland. These were countries where black tribes ruled themselves, free of the white man's heavy paternal fluences, and he listened with awe as they spoke of how their families lived on equal terms with the whites around them.
This came as a total revelation to Raleigh. In his existence the whites were a breed apart, to be feared and avoided, for they wielded an unchallenged power over him and all his people.
At Waterford he learned that this was not the law of the universe. There were white pupils, and although it was at first strange, he ate at the same table as they did, from the same plates and with the same utensils, and slept in a bed alongside them in the school dormitory, and sat on the toilet seat still warm from a white boy's bottom and vacated it to another little white boy waiting impatiently outside the door for him to finish. In his own country none of these things were allowed, and when he went home for the
holidays he read the notices with his eyes wide open – the notices that said WHITES ONLY –
BLANKES ALLEENLIK.
From the windows of the train he saw the beautiful farms and the fat cattle that the white men owned, and the bare eroded earth of the tribal reservations, and when he reached home at Drake's Farm he saw that his father's house, which he remembered as a palace, was in reality a hovel – and the resentment began to gnaw at his soul and the wounds it left festered.
Before Raleigh left to go to school, his Uncle Moses Gama used to visit his father. From infancy he had been in awe of his uncle, for power burned from him like one of those great veld fires which consumed the land and towered into the heavens in a column of dense smoke and ash and sparks.
Even though Moses Gama had been absent from Drake's Farm for so many years, his memory had never been allowed to grow dim, and Hendrick had read aloud to the family the letters that he had received from him in distant lands.
So when at last Raleigh matriculated and left Waterford to return to Drake's Farm and begin work in his father's businesses, he announced that he wanted to take his place in the ranks of the young warriors.
‘After you have been to initiation camp,' his father promised him, ‘I will introduce you to
Umkhonto we Sizwe
'!
Raleigh's initiation set the final stamp on his special sense of Africanism. With his brother Wellington and six other young men of his initiation class, he left Drake's Farm and travelled by train in the bare third-class carriage to the little magisterial town of Queenstown which was the centre of the Xhosa tribal territories.
It had all been arranged by his mother, and the elders of the tribe met them at Queenstown station. In a rickety old truck they were driven out to a kraal on the banks of the great Fish River and delivered into the care of the tribal
custodian, an old man whose duty it was to preserve and safeguard the history and customs of the tribe.
Ndlame, the old man, ordered them to strip off their clothing and to hand over all the possessions they had brought with them. These were thrown on a bonfire on the river bank, as a symbol of childhood left behind them. He took them naked into the river to bathe, and, then still glistening wet, he led them up the far bank to the circumcision hut where the tribal witchdoctors waited.
When the other initiates hung back fearfully, Raleigh went boldly to the head of the column and was the first to stoop through the low entrance to the hut. The interior was thick with smoke from the dung fire and the witchdoctors, in their skins and feathers and fantastic headdresses, were weird and terrifying figures.
Raleigh was smitten with terror, for the pain which he had dreaded all his childhood and for the forces of the supernatural which lurked in the gloomy recesses of the hut, yet he forced himself to run forward and leap over the smouldering fire.
As he landed on the far side the witchdoctors sprang upon him and forced him into a kneeling position, holding his head so he was forced to watch as one of them seized his penis and drew out the rubbery collar of his foreskin to its full length. In ancient times the circumciser would have used a hand-forged blade, but now it was a Gillette razor blade.
As they intoned the invocation to the tribal gods, Raleigh's foreskin was cut away, leaving his glans soft and pink and vulnerable. His blood spattered on to the dung floor between his knees, but he uttered not a sound.
Ndlame helped him rise, and he staggered out into the sunlight and fell upon the river bank, riding the terrible burning pain, but the shrieks of the other boys and the sounds of their wild struggles carried clearly to where he
lay. He recognized his brother Wellington's cries of pain as the shrillest and loudest of them all.
Raleigh knew that their foreskins would be gathered up by the witchdoctors, salted and dried and added to the tribal totem. A part of them would remain for ever with the custodians and no matter how far they wandered the witchdoctors could call them back with the foreskin curse.
When all the other initiates had suffered the circumciser's knife, Ndlame led them down to the water's edge and showed them how to wash and bind their wounds with medicinal leaves and herbs, and to strap their penises against their stomachs. ‘For if the Mamba looks down, he will bleed again,' he warned them.
They smeared their bodies with a mixture of clay and ash. Even the hair on their heads was crusted with the dead-white ritual paint, so that they looked like albino ghosts. Their only clothing was skirts of grass and they built their huts in the deepest and most secret parts of the forest, for no woman might look upon them. They prepared their own food, plain maize cakes without any relish, and meat was forbidden them during the three moons of the initiation. Their only possession was their food bowl of clay.
One of the boys developed an infection of his circumcision wound, the stinking green pus ran from it like milk from a cow's teat, and the fever consumed him so his skin was almost painfully hot to the touch. The herbs and potions that Ndlame applied were of no avail. He died on the fourth day and they buried him in the forest and Ndlame took his food bowl away. It would be thrown through the front door of his mother's hut by one of the witchdoctors, without a word being spoken, and she would know that her son had not been acceptable to the tribal gods.
Each day from before dawn's light until after sunset, Ndlame gave them instruction and taught them their duties as members of the tribe, as husbands and as fathers. They
learned to endure pain and hardship with stoicism. They learned discipline and duty to their tribe, the ways of the wild animals and plants, how to survive in the wilderness, and how to please their wives and raise their children.
When the wounds of the circumcision blade had healed, Ndlame bound up their members each night in the special knot called the Red Dog, to prevent them spilling their seed in the sacred initiation huts. Each morning Ndlame inspected the knots carefully to ensure that they had not been loosened to enjoy the forbidden pleasure of masturbation.
When the three moons had passed, Ndlame led them back to the river and they washed away the white initiation clay and anointed their bodies with a mixture of fat and red ochre, and Ndlame gave them each a red blanket, symbol of manhood, with which they covered themselves. In procession, singing the manhood songs which they had practised, they went to where the tribe waited at the edge of the forest.
Their parents had gifts for them, clothing and new shoes and money, and the girls giggled and ogled them boldly, for they were men now and able at last to take a wife, as many wives as they could afford, for the
lobola
, the marriage fee, was heavy.
The two brothers, accompanied by their mother, journeyed back to Drake's Farm, Wellington to take leave of their father, for he was going on to take holy orders, and Raleigh to remain at his father's side, to learn the multifarious facets of Hendrick Tabaka's business activities and eventually to take the helm and become the comfort and mainstay of Hendrick's old age.
These were fascinating and disturbing months and years for Raleigh. Until this time he had never guessed at his father's wealth and power, but gradually it was revealed to him. The pages in the ledger turned for him one at a time. He learned of his father's general dealer stores, and the
butcheries and bakeries in all the black townships spread throughout the great industrial triangle of the Transvaal that was based on the gold-mines and the iron deposits and the coalfields. Then he went on to learn about the cattle herds and rural general dealer's stores in the tribal reservations owned by his father and cared for by his myriad brothers, about the shebeens and the whores that operated behind the front of legitimate business, and finally he learned about the Buffaloes, that ubiquitous and shadowy association of many men from all the various tribes, whose chief was his own father.
He realized at last just how rich and powerful his father was, and yet how because he was a black man, he could not display his importance and could wield his power only covertly and clandestinely. Raleigh felt his anger stir, as it did whenever he saw those signs WHITES ONLY –
BLANKES ALLEENLIK
and saw the white men pass in their shiny automobiles, or when he stood outside the universities and hospitals which were closed to him.
He spoke to his father about these things that troubled him and Hendrick Tabaka chuckled and shook his head. ‘Rage makes a man sick, my son. It spoils his appetite for life and keeps him from sleep at night. We cannot change our world, so we must look for the good things in life and enjoy those to the full. The white man is strong, you cannot imagine how strong, you have not seen even the strength of his little finger. If you take up the spear against him, he will destroy you and all the good things we have – and if the gods and the lightnings intervened and by chance you destroyed the white man, think what would follow him. There would come a darkness and a time without law and protection that would be a hundred times worse than the white man's oppressions. We would be consumed by the rage of our own people, and we would not have even the consolation of these few sweet things. If you open your ears and your eyes, my son, you will hear how the young people
call us collaborators and how they talk of a redistribution of wealth, and you will see the envy in their eyes. The dream you have, my son, is a dangerous dream.'
‘And yet I must dream it, my father,' said Raleigh, and then, one unforgettable day, his uncle, Moses Gama, returned from foreign lands and took him to meet other young men who shared the same dream.
So during the day Raleigh worked at his father's business and in the evenings he met with the other young comrades of
Umkhonto we Sizwe.
At first they only talked, but the words were sweeter and headier than the smoke of the
dagga
pipes of the old men.
Then Raleigh joined the comrades who were enforcing the decrees of the African National Congress, the boycotts and the strikes and the work stoppages. He went to Evaton location with a small task force to enforce the bus boycott and they attacked the black workers in the bus queues who were trying to get to their places of employment or who were going to shop for their families, and they beat them with
sjamboks
, the long leather quirts, and with their fighting-sticks.
On the first day of the attacks, Raleigh was determined to demonstrate his zeal to his comrades and he used his fighting-stick with all the skill which he had learned as a child in faction fights with the boys of the other tribes.
There was a woman in the queue for the bus who defied Raleigh's order to go home, and she spat at him and his comrades and called them tsotsies and
skelms
, gangsters and rogues. She was a woman in middle age, large and matronly, with cheeks so plump and shiny that they looked as though they had been rubbed up with black shoe polish, and with such a queenly manner that at first the young comrades of
Umkhonto we Sizwe
were abashed by her scorn and might have withdrawn.
Then Raleigh saw that this was his opportunity to prove his ardour and he leaped forward and confronted the
woman. ‘Go home, old woman,' he warned her. ‘We are no longer dogs to eat the white man's shit.'
‘You are a little uncircumcised boy with filth on your tongue,' she began, but Raleigh would not let her continue. He swung the long supple fighting-stick, and it split her shiny black cheek as cleanly as the cut of an axe, so for an instant Raleigh saw the bone gleam in the depths of the wound before the swift crimson flood obscured it. The big woman screamed and fell to her knees, and Raleigh felt a strange sensation of power and purpose, a euphoria of patriotic duty. For a moment the woman kneeling before him became the focus of all his frustration and his rage.

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