The Covenant (141 page)

It was neither the waterfall nor the lost gold that had attracted Piet Krause. His attention was reserved for the clock, and at three he assembled everyone at the railway station.

“We’re about to witness a glorious moment in our national history,” he said, and when the train from Pretoria appeared around a bend he and his wife led the children in wild applause, though what they were clapping for, the students did not know.

Piet had arranged with the stationmaster that the train would halt for six minutes, but when the first three customary carriages drifted slowly past, showing no special passengers, General de Groot told Detlev, “I don’t understand.” But now fifteen roofless cattle trucks creaked to a halt, allowing the amazed schoolchildren to stare into the yellow faces of seven hundred Chinese coolies. They were the last contingent of workers imported from Shanghai in 1904. All were being expelled from the country, and when this train slid down the grade to Moçambique, South Africa would be cleared of this menace.

“Out they go!” Piet Krause exulted as the wagons stood in the sun. “A fearful wrong is being corrected.”

The Chinese, bewildered when they left Canton years ago, bewildered by their treatment in the mines, and now bewildered by this enforced exodus, looked out impassively at the boys they had never understood and the grownups they had never known. One schoolboy picked up a stone and threw it at the hateful exportees, but Piet Krause halted that: “No abuse. Just cheer when the train starts.” And when it did, and the trucks moved again, everyone applauded, for a heavy burden was being removed from the homeland. “Die Volk,” said Krause, “is nou skoon!” (The Volk has been purified.)

When the boys returned to their school, Krause said, “Our next task is to repatriate all the Indians. Gerrit, what does
repatriate
mean?”

“To send back a person to where he belongs.”

“That’s right. Every person on earth has a place where he belongs. He should stay there. We’ve sent the Chinese back to China. We must send the Indians back to India. And the English should go back to England. This is the land of the Afrikaner.”

“What about the Kaffirs?”

“They belong here. They’re as much a part of Africa as we are. But they’re inferior. They know nothing. It’s our responsibility to protect them, and explain to them how they must obey our laws. The Kaffirs will always be with us, and we must treat them with respect, but also with firmness.”

Whenever Detlev heard such preachments he thought of that glass of layered jellies, each color in its proper place, each clearly demarked from the other, and as he recalled that moment of revelation, he remembered the earlier day, when Johanna’s experiment had not worked and she had mixed all the jellies together. That result had been pleasing neither to the eye nor to the taste: It was a jumble without character and I didn’t like it. But when it was done right, look what happened! It was beautiful to see, and when you dipped your spoon in, each layer had its proper taste. The orange was the way orange should be, the lemon on top tasted right, and even the currant on the bottom preserved its real flavor. That’s the way races should be.

Not long after the disappearance of the Chinese, Piet Krause invited three of his best students to accompany him to an important meeting near Johannesburg: “You are to hear the one man in this country who knows what he’s doing.”

It was General J. B. M. Hertzog, a hero during the Boer War, a brilliant lawyer afterward. He was not overpowering, like old General de Groot, for he was only of medium height and weight. He was a handsome man, with a close-clipped mustache and neatly parted hair. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and a business suit, and spoke softly as he offered a justification of his recent behavior:

Detlev had never before heard such a speech, so rational, so carefully organized, and with such a constant appeal to the crowd’s emotions. “He must be the finest mind in South Africa,” he whispered to Piet Krause when the cheering stopped.

“He is. He will lead us to freedom.”

“What does he think about the Act of Union?”

“What I think. That it should be used intelligently as a weapon to attain our freedom.”

“Does he agree with you about the Kaffirs?”

“Absolutely. South Africa must always be a place of white supremacy.” Detlev had not heard this phrase before. “We shall assume fatherly responsibility for the Kaffirs, who will never be able to govern themselves. But we must rule them, for they are children and we must tell them what to do.”

In these days, when Piet Krause was promoting such ideas, no one noticed that Micah Nxumalo was sometimes away from Vrymeer for the better part of a week. His wives were so capable that they kept things moving forward in his absence, assuring Jakob that their husband was over at General de Groot’s, and telling the latter that he was working the far fields.

He would actually be on his way to Waterval-Boven to catch a train to Johannesburg, where he ducked down alleys to a ramshackle building. For these trips he wore an old dark suit which Van Doorn had given him, shoes, a white shirt with high collar, a four-in-hand tie and a stiff felt hat made in England. He was in his forties, and except for his good clothes, in no way conspicuous. Of medium height and weight, he looked like any of the blacks who worked in Johannesburg offices.

The dozen blacks who met with him in secret one night in 1912 looked the same. “This is Reverend John Dube,” a man explained, introducing him to the persuasive chairman of the African National Congress.

“This is Solomon Plaatje. He served with the English forces during the siege of Mafeking.” Nxumalo nodded toward the famous newspaperman and said, “I served with the Boers at Ladysmith.” Whereupon Plaatje, a small, nervous man, laughed. “Two rather ugly affairs.”

Of the other ten, all men as prominent in black circles as Dube and Plaatje, Micah noticed that each spoke English with beautiful
ease and pronunciation. Plaatje, of course, had worked for the
London Times
, so that his mastery was not remarkable, but it was curious that some of the others had acquired such fluency. Nxumalo had only the most meager vocabulary and felt himself at a disadvantage, but not when the discussions started, for by listening to General de Groot and especially young Piet Krause, he had acquired a solid comprehension of what the new laws signified.

Plaatje was speaking: “We are in the position Thomas Jefferson was in 1774, prior to the revolution. By that I mean, we must utilize all the legal processes open to us to protect our position and to gain such advantage as we can.” Those were the exact words he spoke, and when others took the floor, they referred in comparable phrases to conditions in England, France and Germany.

They were bitterly opposed to the sections in the Act of Union which denied Coloureds and blacks the right to vote in three of the four provinces; only in the Cape was such voting allowed. There was strong feeling that this provision must be attacked, but as one of the men pointed out: “Keeping us off the rolls was one of the principal clauses in the peace treaty that ended the war. It is defended not only here in South Africa but also in London. We are stuck with it, I am afraid.”

Talk then turned to a new bill which these men saw as a serious step backward in relations between the races; the Natives Land Act established the principle that some lands were reserved for the blacks, some for the whites, and that the law itself protected and ensured this division. “The land should be for us all,” Plaatje argued, and others joined in so forcefully that it was unanimously agreed that a delegation of five be appointed to travel to London to present to the king their plea for protection. “We cannot look to the Afrikaner for fair treatment,” one of these men argued, “because his custom and his church deny that we have rights—”

“Now wait!” another interrupted. “They recognize our rights. Even Hertzog does that. What they want to do is restrict them.”

The first speaker ignored this interruption; in the crowded little room with inadequate light he reasoned: “So we must depend upon England and the liberal opinion there. We must keep constant pressure on them to accord us the same privileges they grant native-born New Zealanders and Australians.”

“In the long run,” one man predicted, “the English of this country will prove no different from the Afrikaners.”

When the rules were spelled out for the conduct of the commission to the king, the members wanted to hear from Nxumalo about conditions on the frontier, those little Afrikaner towns where the ideas which would later sweep the cities germinated, and now he spoke, slowly, while the others listened. He had not their command of English, and more than half of them would not have difficulty in understanding his Zulu had he used it; none wanted him to speak Afrikaans, even though he was proficient in it, and they too.

“We have a new teacher, very forceful. Took his boys to see the expulsion of the Chinese. Some came home wanting to expel the blacks, too. But he calmed them down. Took another group to hear General Hertzog. They came home wild-eyed with patriotism. They want to fight the English again. General de Groot encourages them. He says war must come. He speaks of Germany a good deal. He is in contact with other generals, and they may cause trouble one day.”

He spoke of many things, displaying an uncanny understanding of what was motivating the sturdy Afrikaners in the Venloo district, but it was when he came to matters of real importance that he showed his sensitive awareness of probable trends: “The young schoolteacher is like the general; he wants to go to war now. But his ideas come from his wife. She is four years older. Was in the camp at Chrissiesmeer. She is strong, wanted to marry an Englishman but her family wouldn’t allow it. She makes no senseless challenges. She thinks.

“But the true power in Venloo is the new predikant. Very good man. Has a strong mind like yours, Plaatje. Preaches careful sermons, very logical. He has an orderly view of what is going to happen and takes no risks. When I drive the people to church, I stand outside and listen. Powerful voice. Good man. But he is totally against us. He uses the Bible to club us. And in the long run he will be more dangerous to us than anyone you have mentioned.”

“What can he do to hurt us in Venloo?”

“Soon his voice will be heard throughout the land. He is like Jan Christian Smuts. To see him is to know that he will one day command.”

The other men took notice of the name, Barend Brongersma, of Stellenbosch.

In 1913, Detlev received the first letter that had ever been addressed to him specifically, and it came in such form that it overwhelmed him,
as well it might, for his response would go far in determining a major part of his life. It came from a committee of women in Bloemfontein, and said:

The letter went on to say that he would be one of a group of twelve survivors of the camps, six girls, six boys, who would stand at attention as the monument was dedicated. He was eighteen that year; the others would be younger.

Bursting with pride, he showed the letter to Mr. Krause, who said, “It is proper for the Volk to honor its past. This is a profound honor, and I trust you will conduct yourself appropriately.” He added that he would not have recommended Detlev had he not been sure of the boy’s loyalty and patriotism. Detlev walked several inches taller when he carried the letter out to Vrymeer, where General de Groot explained that Detlev would be standing as surrogate for all the young heroes who died in the camps: “You escaped the ground glass in the meal. They didn’t.”