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‘Yes.’
George sighed. ‘So, young man, you’re going to Cape Town, to stay with your uncle. You leave by train tomorrow. And you’re going to finish your matric by correspondence course. When that’s over, you’ll come home and we’ll review your future.’ He sighed again. ‘But there’s no chance of sending you to Oxford now, without that scholarship. Or any other university overseas. I can’t afford that.’
‘Of course not, Dad.’
‘And that means you’re going to have to take your law degree by correspondence too, through the University of London. Because there’s no point in taking a South African law degree – there’s no future in this country under apartheid. You must prepare yourself for somewhere where they practise English law.’
‘Apartheid can’t last forever, Father.’
‘No, but it could easily last half your lifetime. And it’s going to collapse in a bloodbath. And when that happens you’ll need an English law degree, not Roman-Dutch. I want your sister to get out too.’
‘I’m not sure I want to be a lawyer.’
‘Nonsense. I know talent when I see it – you’ve got a nose for the law, like I have. And for argument. Anyway, it’s an excellent degree to have, good background for other walks of life. What the hell do you think you want to do – history?’
‘Yes. Or journalism.’
The old man sighed. ‘History? Look, son, you’re under the influence of this woman. Sure, history’s fascinating but there’s no money in it and anyway you’re far too brainy to be a teacher. Even if you become a university professor, there’s no money in it. And as for journalism, forget it, there’s no money in it either. And all newspapermen drink too much. Listen, son: you’ll get enough journalism if you write up those journals arid get them published one day – including your own story. The modern South Africa. In fact I want you to make me a solemn promise that you’ll do that. You’ve got the gift of the gab and history. Do you? Promise?’
Mahoney looked at his good father. ‘Yes, sir,’ he promised.
George slapped Luke’s knee: ‘The Law, son. It’s a grand profession. Get to the top! Become a QC. Then a judge. Not a country attorney like me. So, do you promise me you’ll do an LLB through the University of London? I’ll pay the fees.’
Luke was in no position to refuse anything. ‘Yes, I promise you.’
George Mahoney nodded. ‘So the next question is what job are you going to do while you’re doing your LLB? You can’t work for me in this town, after what’s happened. I think we could get you a job with HM Shipping for a few years?’
Mahoney said grimly: ‘I don’t want family charity.’
‘Charity? I’m sure you’d do an honest day’s work, even if you are bored out of your mind. I would be too. But –’ he pointed out a bright side – ‘I’m sure they’d give you a few trips on their freighters. See something of the world? Australia. The States.’
‘I’d love that, but not at the price of being a shipping clerk.’ Luke turned to his father. ‘No, for those three years I’ll be a newspaper reporter.’
The old man looked at his son. ‘And that’s a slippery slope, my boy. However …’ He sighed and began to get out of the car. ‘We’ll preview the future when you come home at Christmas. And now – let’s go and face your tearful mother.’
Mahoney put his hand on his father’s arm – a good man whom he’d disappointed so badly. ‘Dad? I’ve screwed up. And I don’t want you to pay for my stupidity.’
The old man smiled. ‘Miss Rousseau wasn’t stupidity, son. She was Life. The stupid part was getting caught. Remember that. Of course I’m bitterly disappointed about your Rhodes Scholarship. But don’t worry about my opinion of you, young man. You’re all right. And you only did what any young man with balls would do. And one day you and I will be laughing about this.’ He looked at his son, then clapped him on the shoulder. ‘And now let’s go and face the music …’
But there was no music from his mother. Only her gaunt face, her sniffs. Only once did she start to recriminate: ‘And we had such hopes that you were going to be a top lawyer one day … ’ and George Mahoney muttered: ‘And who says he won’t be?’ Nothing else was said throughout the meal, except Please and Thank you. The clink of cutlery, the tasteless meal. Jill glanced at her big brother with big, compassionate eyes and said not a word. Justin came in to replace plates and dishes: he knew the Nkosaan was in big shit. The whole town knew Luke Mahoney was in big shit. When the dessert was over Mrs Mahoney dabbed her eyes, and departed wordlessly.
That night, when silence had descended, there was a scratch on Luke’s door, and Jill came creeping in. She pulled a letter out of her dressing gown. ‘Miss Rousseau made me promise to tell nobody about this.’
Luke switched on his bedside light. He opened the envelope.
Dearest Luke
It will seem that a terrible thing has happened, but one day you will laugh about this. Despite this setback, I am confident you will get through the examinations ahead, and the many others you will doubtless sit, with flying colours. You should not think of contacting me, but I’m sure I will hear about you and I will do so with pride and great affection. You are the most promising historian, and young man, I have met. Work hard, and you will have a wonderful life.
Love
Lisa
Jill whispered: ‘Does she say she loves you?’
Luke switched out the light. ‘No.’
Jill didn’t believe that. ‘Are you going to marry her when the exams are over?’
Luke smiled despite himself. ‘No.’
‘Why not? She’s so wonderful. She loves you, all the girls think so. Did you … you know?’
‘What?’
‘You know …’
Luke put his hand on his sister’s. ‘No,’ he smiled sadly.
Jill put her hands to her face and gave a sob.
‘Oh I can’t bear it! My two most favourite people leaving at once, you and Miss Rousseau!’
Luke said softly: ‘You’ll be leaving too, in a few years.’
She sniffed. ‘Do you promise that you’ll write to me … ?’
Later there was a tap on Luke’s window. ‘Nkosi?’
Luke got out of bed and went to the window.
‘Come with me,’ Justin whispered. He turned and crept away through the garden.
At this hour? It could only be Lisa. He thought she had already left town! He scrambled into shorts and climbed breathlessly out of the window.
Justin was waiting. ‘I have a witch doctor here.’
Luke’s knocking heart sank. Not Lisa … ? And, oh, he didn’t want medicine from any witch doctor. ‘But I have no money.’
‘You can pay me tomorrow. He is a very good witch doctor, from my area; he is staying in my room tonight.’
Justin led the way down through the vegetable garden towards the servants’ quarters. Outside the row of rooms a cooking fire was glowing under a big black tripod pot. Round it squatted the cookboy, and gardenboy and their wives. And dominating them all, the witch doctor.
He was an old man. Around his neck hung the accoutrements of his office: the cloak of civet skin and monkey hide, the pig’s bladder, the necklace of baboon’s teeth, the pendants of bones and claws and fruit-pips, the bracelets of animal hair, the leggings. He looked up at Luke, without rising, and softly clapped his hands. ‘I see you.’
Luke clapped his hands. ‘I see you, nganga.’ He squatted down on his haunches. The servants looked on, wide eyes white in black faces. Luke wished they were not there to hear his troubles.
The witch doctor crouched, staring at the ground for a long minute, his white head down. Luke waited, and despite himself he was in the age-old grip, in the awe of the medicine-man, the priest, the medium to the supernatural. Then suddenly the witch doctor gave a shriek, and everybody jerked, he flung out his hands, and bones scattered on the ground.
They all stared at them. The witch doctor looked at the bones intently, motionlessly: then he pointed. To one, then another, then another: then he began to chant softly. He chanted over the bones for a minute; then scooped them up and threw them again. He threw them a third time. Then he rocked back on his heels, eyes closed. For a minute he was still: then he spoke softly: ‘Beware the land of twenty-one
Mahoney’s heart was knocking. Beware the land … A hundred and twenty-five years ago his great great grandfather had written in his journal, Woe unto the land whose borders lie in shadow … And that prophecy had turned out to be true. The murder of Piet Retief. Blaukrans, Weenen … It gave Luke gooseflesh. But the land of twenty-one?
‘Beware the woman with the red forehead.’
The red forehead … ?
‘Beware the woman who talks of pigs …’
Who talks of pigs?
Then the witch doctor said: ‘Stay in the land of the evening sun, or you will weep in the land that lies in shadows.’
Luke had gooseflesh. The land that lies in shadows … He wanted to ask, Where is this land? Justin touched his knee and shook his head, No. Then the witch doctor opened his eyes. He got up and disappeared into the nearest room.
Justin stood up. He beckoned to Luke. They walked back through the vegetable garden towards the house. Luke said in English: ‘Please ask him where the land of twenty-one is. And about the women. Come to the window and tell me.’
‘He only knows what the spirits have spoken.’ Justin stopped. ‘Maybe one day we will see each other again, in Johannesburg. I will pray for you.’
Luke’s eyes were burning. He held out his hand.
PART II (#ulink_8878e5b1-c635-54aa-b88e-d6674308c18d)
GHANA AND NIGERIA GRANTED INDEPENDENCE
BELGIAN CONGO TO GET INDEPENDENCE
HAROLD MACMILLAN MAKES WIND OF CHANGE SPEECH
SHARPEVILLE MASSACRE
6 (#ulink_41f18830-a884-5550-bc5d-c8e6a0824465)
In Kenya the bloody Mau Mau rebellion had finally been stamped out and, as Lisa Rousseau would have pointed out, referring to the Boer War, history repeated itself: having finally crushed the rebellion, Britain promptly gave independence to the blacks, and Jomo Kenyatta, the pro-capitalist but Russian-helped revolutionary, became the prime minister of Kenya and immediately instituted a one-party state. Ghana had been granted its independence, and Kwame Nkrumah had thrown his opposition into jail. The British had promised Nigeria its independence and fierce tribal fighting for dominance had broken out. In the vast Congo there were also demands for independence, the Belgian government panicked and agreed to grant it soon: there was fierce tribal fighting and looting in anticipation, and the whites were fleeing back to Europe. It was a bloody time in Africa and it was set to get bloodier.
Luke Mahoney started writing up his family’s journals in the Antarctic, on the whaling ships: there was nothing else to do when you came plodding off shift through the gore. He did not enjoy whaling but the pay was good, and you had nothing to spend it on down at the Ice. For four months you waded through gore, but you had enough money to last the next eight months. Most of those months Mahoney spent doing his compulsory military training. Then he returned to the whalers and plodded through more blood. And for the next three years he also plodded through blood as a crime reporter for Drum at the same time as he kept his promise to his father to study for a law degree through the University of London.
Drum was a glossy English-language magazine for blacks, about black issues, black society, black fashions, black music, black beauties, black sports; black news, black views, black politics, black crime, and black gore. Drum was a good magazine and the publisher wanted his black readership to be mindful of the blood they shed: the blood of faction fights, witchcraft murders and the blood of political rivalry. For junior reporters like Luke Mahoney it meant the stuff of police stations, courtrooms, photographs of pathologists’ tables with every glistening wound for the judge to see, the probes inserted to show the depth, the bones exposed, the gaping stomach, the severed limb, the shattered skull, and the weapons that caused it, the knives, the knobkerries, the axes, spears, screwdrivers, guns, all neatly labelled. And if there was not enough of the right gore, Luke Mahoney went to the black townships to look for it.
Soweto was the best place for that. Soweto, the vast black township beyond the Johannesburg horizon with its desolate rows of concrete boxes in tiny dusty yards, sprawling slumlands of shacks made of flattened tin and cardboard, the sprawling compound which supplied the labour needs of the Golden City, the grim place whites never saw where their serfs lived, the city of tsotsis who robbed and killed for a living, the city of shebeens and witch doctors and warlords and tribal fighting and just plain murder. Soweto had the highest murder-rate in the world. Usually the police telephoned the crime reporters if something worthwhile had happened because, firstly, they wanted the public to know what they were up against, and, secondly, the press were regarded as left-wing, anti-government, and the police wanted to rub their noses in the barbarity of Africa.
‘Thought you might like to see some of these photographs, Mahoney …’
The scene-of-crime photographs, the mortuary photographs. The charred body, the flesh still smoking.
‘We’ve got the body in the morgue right now. Like to see it?’
‘Who was he?’
‘Who knows? His face is burnt off. Probably somebody your ANC pals didn’t like. I hope you print that. And this one,’ the sergeant said, flipping the photograph, ‘we’ve got her in the morgue here, too, you must see her …’
The inside of a squatter’s shack: on the floor, in a mush of blood, the torso of a naked black girl of five, her stomach slashed open and her liver hacked out, her arms hacked off, her genitals removed.
‘Muti,’ the sergeant said. ‘He needed her liver and arms to make medicine to win the next fight.’
‘Who is “he”?’
‘Her father, Mr Mahoney. Her father cut her arms off while she screamed for mercy. Her mother saw everything. She’s here now, you can ask her yourself.’
‘But who were they fighting?’
‘An ANC gang. Unfortunately, he’ll hang. The evidence is strong.’
Unfortunately … He wrote an article that night around that word. Two interpretations were possible: ‘Unfortunately for the accused he will hang’, and ‘It is unfortunate that we have to hang a man who fights the ANC’, which is what the sergeant had in mind. Divide and rule: ‘Let ’em fight each other, the more the better.’ And there was a third interpretation, Mahoney wrote, with which many South Africans would secretly agree, even though they clamoured for the end of apartheid: they were afraid of them, the ANC, and felt secretly sorry for the primitive man who wanted muti to enable him to fight them … But the editor didn’t publish it: ‘Good stuff, Luke,’ he said, ‘but we can’t say it.’
And then came the famous speech in South Africa by Harold Macmillan, prime minister of Great Britain, and then came the gore of Sharpeville, and then came the gore of the prime minister of South Africa.
Harold Macmillan had just been on a whistle-stop tour through his government’s colonies in Africa. He had been impressed by the level of African nationalism and he wanted to tell Her Majesty’s dominion of South Africa a thing or two about their folly of apartheid.
‘The Wind of Change is blowing through this continent,’ he told the South African parliament, ‘… and this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact and our national policies must take account of it …’ The third world of emergent nations, he said, were trying to choose between the models of the first, free, world of the West and the second, communist, world of the East. ‘Choosing by our example.’ Great Britain, he said, was granting independence to its African colonies in the belief that it was the only way to establish a free world, as opposed to a communist world. ‘We try to respect the rights of individuals … merit alone must be the criterion for man’s advancement … We reject racial superiority, we espouse harmony, unity and the individual’s rights … We in Great Britain have different views to you on this…’ History, he prophesied, would make apartheid a thing of the past. Isolationism, he advised them, was out of date in the modern, shrinking world. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee …
‘It was a brilliant, dignified speech,’ George Mahoney wrote to his son, ‘and you must include it verbatim in the journals, but you can imagine that it went over like a lead balloon. The applause was, at best, mutedly polite, except from me: my clapping was thunderous. I’ve been telling them the same thing for years, to no avail. And old Mac’s speech will avail nothing either. I regret to report that old Hendrik Verwoerd made a most clever – and persuasive, goddamn it – impromptu reply. He made a defence of the white man’s rights as a European in the minority on a black continent, and a presentation of apartheid as a policy “not at variance with the new direction in Africa but in the fullest accord with it” – because he’s going to grant independence to the black homelands exactly as Britain is doing in her black colonies! But his speech left out of account the mathematics – the simple fact that these black homelands are incapable of being economically self-supporting, not big enough for the ever-increasing black population – they’ll be simply reservoirs of labour for white South Africa. And, of course, it leaves out of account the economic injustice and indignity of the blacks in the white urban areas. You must put all this in the journals, Luke …’
Mahoney did, with relish. And then, six weeks after Harold Macmillan’s speech, came a new defiance campaign, and the massacre of Sharpeville.
It is questionable how much Harold Macmillan’s speech resulted in the massacre of Sharpeville, for the new defiance campaign by the ANC had been planned for months: it had been set for 31st March. But the rival PAG decided to upstage the ANC and mount their own defiance ten days earlier, to draw new supporters. The campaign was directed against the pass laws that decreed that a black man who wished to look for work in a white area had to have a pass: if he failed to find work within fourteen days, he had to return to his native area. If found without a valid pass, he was jailed. It was the law that put the lie to Prime Minister Verwoerd’s dignified and clever reply to Harold Macmillan’s speech: the police cells were packed each night with pass-offenders, the courts clogged, the prisons overflowing. A cruel system: cruel to make it difficult for a man to find work, cruel to punish him if he failed to find it. And so the ANC had spread the word that on the appointed day all the people must come together in their thousands and burn their passes on huge bonfires and then march en masse to their police stations and demand to be arrested. Thus would they swamp the system and make the law totally unenforceable.
Luke Mahoney was at Sharpeville that day. His editor could have sent him to dozens of other locations, but he chose Sharpeville for Luke, the only white reporter on Drum, because it was a ‘model location’ with a reputation for little violence. But Sharpeville was not quiet on March 21 1960. A noisy mob of five thousand had almost finished burning their passes when he arrived. He threaded his way through, holding up his camera and calling out: ‘Mr Drum, Mr Drum!’ People were chanting and dancing as they tossed their hated passes onto the leaping flames.
Mahoney was the only white man present, but the mob was not hostile, they wanted publicity. Then the last passes burned and the mob began to surge down the road to the police station. Mahoney was swept along in the crush as the people converged on the open ground outside it. He worked his way through the mob to the very front.
The big police compound was surrounded by a high, diamond-mesh fence, topped with barbed wire. In the centre, surrounded by lawn, was the charge office, a single-storey building, behind it were garages, cells and quarters for the black constables. Beyond them the joylessness of the model location stretched on and on. And all along the stout fence surged the chanting, dancing mob, offering themselves up for arrest.
Mahoney’s impression was that the mob was not hostile. Ebullient, he scribbled, cocky, noisy, taunting – but not hostile in the military sense. In fact, from what I overheard, many people were expecting to hear some important announcement from the police about the suspension of the pass laws …
Suddenly out of the police station the constables came running, with rifles, and they formed a line across the lawn facing the mob. The commander strode up to the fence with a loudhailer and bellowed: ‘Please disperse! Go back to your houses! This gathering is illegal!’
The shouts came back: ‘Yes, we are illegal!’ ‘We have no passes!’ We must be arrested, please!’
The rest was confused. The people at the front were being shoved from behind, and the fence was heaving, a sea of excited, laughing, shouting, singing black faces, men, women, children, young and old pressed against it, clamouring to be arrested. Again and again the station commander bellowed over his loudhailer, and the mob yelled back. Then a black sergeant ran up to the fence in panic, shouting: ‘Disperse! They’re going to shoot! Disperse!’ From his position at the corner of the heaving fence Mahoney formed the impression that the vast majority of the people were just enjoying themselves at the expense of the nervous policemen inside the fence, gleeful grins on black faces.
Mahoney did not hear any order to open fire, and the commander subsequently denied ever giving one. All Mahoney remembered was the line of frightened young Afrikaner policemen, rifles at the ready, the massive mob yelling at the heaving fence, the commander yelling, the black sergeant pleading: then the first shocking shot, then the ragged volley, then the pandemonium.
The pandemonium as the mob turned to flee, screaming, shoving, trampling each other underfoot, bodies crashing, and the panicked firing continued cacophonously. Shots cracked out above the screaming chaos. Men, women, children and old people were running, stumbling, lurching, tripping, sprawling, and still the shocking gunfire continued, cracking open the heavens. Mahoney stared, horrified, his face creased up, screaming: ‘No! No! No! No! No!’ And still it continued, the bodies crashing and writhing; then the commander was running amongst his men, bellowing, and the gunfire spluttered out. Then wailing rose up in its place.
Luke Mahoney stared, aghast. On the ground lay sixty-nine dead, a hundred and eighty wounded. He strode furiously from his corner, his camera and notebook on high, his heart full of outrage, and he cried out to the policemen behind the fence:
‘You stupid fucking bastards!’
