Kraal

by Fenek Solère

  → The family of the editor of the journal IMPACT focusing on cultural, biological and political issues are harassed by state officials;

  → The winner of the British Turner Prize opens a new exhibition of her work entitled Ebony and Ivory: African influences on European Art at the Stellenbosch Contemporary Art Gallery in the Western Cape;

  → The Minister of Civil Service and Administration assures his audience in Hermanus in the Western Cape that Affirmative Action (AA) reforms will be speeded up and that he was dissatisfied with the fact that blacks were only 2.2% over-represented in the Civil Service. He went on to bemoan the fact that clauses still existed in the country’s constitution stipulating there should be equal and proportionate representation and that once such targets have been achieved then the Affirmative Action codes would have fulfilled their intended purpose. ‘Damn Section 1(4) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,’ he screeched, ‘We will do what we want in our own way!’;

  → A further ten clauses are added to the current one hundred and nineteen laws such as the Black Economic Empowerment Law, furthering Majority interests by the National assembly and are confirmed by the National Council of Provinces.

  Over the next few days Gijs began to feel a little better. The black dog of depression slunk away from him for short periods and he was able to go into town to buy food and drink. He was painfully aware of the pitying stares trailing him down the main street, or as he pushed a trolley around the supermarket. Gossip and rumour circulated like a whirlpool, sucking him back to the reality that he was forced to confront, that he was alone now, that his wife and daughter had been killed. His life would never be the same. He was like so many others, a victim of a long and slow genocide, perpetrated under the noble ideals of truth and reconciliation.

  Each afternoon, as he returned home, Gijs noticed a nuclei of squatters on the perimeter fence. No doubt encouraged by Malema’s statement, ‘If you take the land, you take everything with it. You take the seed…’ At first they were passive, raising their heads as he drove by, then shouting when their numbers reached double figures. Heartened by Malema’s side-kick Roland Lamola’s ongoing comments like, ‘Land reforms needs an act as forceful as war’ and ‘It is inevitable this land is going to be expropriated without compensation,’ they were soon joined by large gangs of young men. One in particular stood out from the herd as he threw stones at Gijs’ pickup whenever he came over the horizon.

  Gijs could read the malevolence in the young man’s face, eyes that reflected something of the wild dark interior of this unforgiving land, a feature Joseph Conrad had immortalised and lesser writers struggled to replicate. One time he took a chance and stopped as the boy walked alone beside the road into town, striding along, wearing a multicoloured woollen hat and a dark trench coat that hung down to his ankles.

  ‘What is it?’ Gijs asked through the window, trying to rationalise with him, ‘Why do you throw stones? I don’t even know you!’

  ‘Cuiter!’ the fuscous face shouted, then reaching into the scrub, the boy thrust handfuls of dust towards the vehicle’s windscreen and snarled some incantation. Gijs heard the chomping sound of carnivorous teeth. He saw up close the red thread veins in the sallow eyes glaring back at him. Realising the impossibility of meaningful dialogue in any language, let alone Afrikaans or English, he sped ahead, driving back to the farm, there to wait, like every night, the incessant drum beats and the chanting that filled his living nightmare.

  → Every twenty-six seconds a woman is raped in South Africa;

  → In 2010 a Medical Research Foundation survey found that 37 percent of men admitted to raping at least one woman. 7 percent acknowledge having been involved in gang rape;

  → An emerging crime is that of baby rape. HIV-infected African males believing that having sex with virgins will cure AIDS;

  → 12 percent of the South African population is HIV positive;

  → 50 percent of the drugs delivered to government-run hospitals are stolen from their store rooms;

  → Khayelitsha hospital in Cape Town is inundated with a 70 percent increase of cases of tuberculosis and gastroenteritis;

  → Various senior figures in the ANC are cleared of accusations of failing to pay tax by South Africa’s highest court;

  → The leader of the Democratic Alternative dies in mysterious circumstances in Metsimahol;

  → One in four South African policemen are illiterate;

  → Three black police officers from Brighton, Port Elizabeth, previously convicted of failing to attain the highest standards of their profession, are reprieved and return to duty;

  → An academic text critical of Post-Apartheid South Africa is banned by the Minister of Culture;

  → The Guptas’ ANN7 channel completes a 380-million-Rand take-over of the Multi-Choice Pay TV company that owns DSTv and M-Net.

  Chapter 4

  And by the way it is a curious thing, and just shows how blood will show out...

  — H. Rider Haggard

  King Solomon’s Mines

  Gijs reflected on the stories he had been told about his great grandfather, who as a young boy had watched a Boer Commando riding out from Paardekraal in Krugersdorp to the west of Johannesburg. The Boers had gathered to fight for independence from the British Crown in their felt hats, leather jackets and riding boots. Mauser rifles cracking from the rifts, dropping the khakis as they marched on the plateau below. His great grandmother’s sisters had been seized and starved to death behind the British wires. Nearly twelve percent of the Boer population died in the British concentration camps. At home Gijs had been taught to quote Maria Fischer, a camp survivor, ‘We must leave our menfolk, children, fathers, brothers, sisters, house, everything, yes everything, and us — what shall become of us?’

  And in the long evenings, with the sun slanting out over the veldt, he hummed Bok van Blerk’s song Afrikaanerhart to himself:

  In fire and blood do I find myself now

  As any Boer child and wife

  A superior power now rules our land

  Stand armed to the teeth

  Its shadow falls like a dark cloud

  Over the future of our people

  And if we don’t fight we will vanish at Magersfontein

  Do we draw the line?

  Come Boer warrior, be heroes now

  The day of reckoning is here

  The enemy is running over our fields

  Stand your ground against cannon fire

  The English soldiers want to defeat our people

  Promise pain and sorrow

  But if you shoot, shoot through me

  If you ask me, I will tell you

  How the roots of my heart lie

  If you ask me, I will show you

  It’s my soil here in my fist

  Even if all hell breaks loose behind us

  And even if it falls down

  Keep the line and stand like a man

  It is here we can stop them

  Stand firm South Africa!

  Stand firm South Africa!

  Twenty-two thousand British soldiers had died in South Africa, most from preventable diseases like typhoid. The Empire’s war machine seemed to have learned nothing from its dispute in the far off Crimea. Something like half a million mules and horses lay rotting from the Drakensburg to the muddy banks of the Tugela. Gijs had been taught to idolise those young Boers with flowers in their buttonholes, staring back at him defiantly from the now proscribed school textbooks. Those self-same men, guerrilla warriors like Jan Smuts, who the Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling admitted had given the Brits ‘no end of a lesson’.

  No mention of course was ever made of the causes of the war. The manoeuvring of Rhodes and the ‘gold bugs’, Alfred Beit and his partner Wernher of the Rand mining House, men eager to use patriotism and a blood-drenched Union Jack as a shield in order to advance their own private commercial interests.

  ‘The Boers co
uld mobilise only 25,000 men,’ his grandfather would tell him, pausing only to fill his pipe before continuing, drawing figures in the air with the smoking mouthpiece. ‘And General Cronje warned Baden-Powell very clearly… It is understood that you have armed Bastards, Fingos and Baralongs against us — in this you have committed an enormous act of wickedness. Reconsider the matter, even if it cost you the loss of Mafeking. Disarm your blacks and thereby act the part of the white man in a white man’s war… but the British were driven on by a hatred that was not of their making. In that war the criminal Kitchener said… I do not want any incentive to do what is possible to finish… I think I hate the country, the people, the whole thing more every day… They burned our farms, poisoned our wells and built tin and concrete blockhouses to fence us in. After the disarmament at Slap Kranz it was all done and dusted.’ Then sitting back, puffing on his pipe he would quietly quote Kipling’s poem South Africa in an ironic tone:

  Half her land was dead with drouth,

  Half was red with battle;

  She was fenced with fire and sword

  Plague on pestilence outpoured,

  Locusts on the greening sward

  And murrain on the cattle!

  True, oh true and overtrue!

  That is why we love her!

  For she is South Africa

  And she is South Africa

  She is our South Africa

  Africa all over!

  ‘But it is not their South Africa, it’s ours!’ Gijs remembered shouting indignantly.

  ‘Well,’ his patient forebear would nod, ‘it is true that in 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a shipping station at the Cape. But by 1795 we had lost this land to the British. Within a quarter of a century four thousand English speaking settlers came, they abolished slavery here like everywhere by an act of Parliament and took on the pillaging Zulus who were penetrating down into the empty ground of the north.’

  ‘Are you saying they were brave like us?’ Gijs asked naively.

  The old man looked reflectively into the gloom. ‘They fell like stones at Isandlwana and a mere one hundred and fifty Welsh Borderers saw off four thousand Zulus at Rorke’s Drift. Livingstone may have supplied the Bakwains and the Bakhatla with guns but he laid the groundwork for the incorporation of Nyasaland, Uganda and Kenya into the British Empire. So you could say they have earned their claim too!’ Then, reaching over to a shelf by the fireside, Gijs remembered he had pulled down an old leather-bound copy of G.A. Henty’s By Sheer Pluck – A Tale of the Ashanti War, passing it to the wide-eyed boy, ‘There,’ he said, jabbing toward the tome with his pipe, ‘that will give you a taste of it.’

  Gijs’s own father had served in the notorious 32 Battalion in a war that was no less brutal. Clad in sandy camouflage with a Sterling Submachine gun in his hands he had ridden out with the South African Defence Force, an army of three thousand against forty-five thousand trained Russians, Cubans and their Angolan dupes. The bush war raged from Luanda to the Cucene River and lasted on and off for thirteen years. Gijs now realised that that is where his father had got his physical strength, mental will-power and the Honoris Crux medal which he kept in a sock draw at his house. His mother had never spoken about her husband’s actions at Bridge 14, but the history books said it all. It seemed that Willem too had been tested by a ruthless enemy in hand-to-hand combat at close quarters. Gijs looked once more at the loaded Mamba on the worn corduroy chair arm, then the half-empty bottle of Lambs Navy Rum on the table before him. Outside, the incessant drumming and caterwauling of the squatters resounded in the moonlight and he leaned forward, fingers tightening on the gun’s polymer handle.

  He could hear the melody of Sing Afrikaaner Sing rising from somewhere deep inside him.

  Sing Afrikaaner Sing!

  Let your voice be heard

  Never let go of it

  Ooh, Sing Afrikaaner Sing!

  The next moment, almost without realising it, he was outside, striding manfully through the smoky air. Ahead, the big fire was dying down and the ritual chanting rose once more, a cluster of black figures dancing toe to toe, fists punching upwards into the sky. Gijs strode through the anthracite night towards them, peering over the children’s bobbing heads. In the centre of the crowd was the Izangoma, the leader of the Khosian dance, a shaven-headed hippo-girthed man, wearing a shambolic suit and a shining metal object the size of an Olympic medal, signifying his role as chief. Gijs was conscious the man was speaking, orating, enticing the spirit of the ancestors to come forth. The interloper could not understand what he was saying but every now and then there was a short pause and Gijs recognised the invocation to the praying mantis, which drew forth a sigh of awe from the witch doctor’s disciples, young and old alike, who nodded in wide-mouthed sympathy with his mesmerising words.

  Gijs stopped short and looked about. He was surrounded like those men behind the sandbags at Rorke’s Drift. The malign boy he had tried to talk to by the roadside was standing nearby, his adolescent fury fixed in Gijs’s direction. Other primitive eyes now turned outwards from the revolving wheel of bodies toward him, recognising and feeling the presence of the outsider, The Settler. The man with the medal frowned, his face following his audience’s attention, his vocals faltering for a moment, then consciously rising in a bitter heathen symphony.

  ‘Ayasab’ amagwala, dubula, dubula. Ziyarapa lezinja, dubula, dubula!’

  Gijs stood firm, back straight against the moon. He was not prepared to cower any more, and be damned if this was the rum talking. He lifted a flat white hand to the orator.

  ‘Enough!’ he screamed into the tensile dark, raising the Mamba for all to see. ‘I want you to leave my land!’

  ‘Our land, Bakhatla land!’ The soothsayer barked like a rabid hyena and Gijs shot him dead on the spot. The next thing he knew he was emptying a full fifteen round clip point blank into charging bodies. People were screaming, falling and dying just outside the circle of orange light cast by the fire. The dim-witted boy from the roadside made a crazed rush at him through a halo of flying embers and Gijs took his would-be assailant mid-flight as the boy’s blade circled down to strike. The bones of that hate-filled face imploding like a soft melon with the driving impact of the 9mm parabellum shell hammering through his nasal cartilage.

  → Court officials agree that the execution of two white farm hands for the killing of a black is insufficient ‘because they should have suffered more’. One in particular stating at the unveiling of a plaque to the murdered innocent in Coligny, ‘He is our own Trayvon Martin!’;

  → A Boer activist who said ‘We must fight!’ is forced to go into hiding after a bounty is placed on his head;

  → Books on the history the Afrikaaner people are banned in South Africa;

  → The South African Defense Minister enforces a second charter ‘to transform the sector’ to eliminate white males from the South African defense industry;

  → Downtown areas of Johannesburg go without electricity after five kilometres of copper wire are set on fire underneath the city;

  → A South African man is charged with attempted murder after throwing his six-month-old daughter off the top of a shack at the illegal Joe Slovo township in a protest to stop it being demolished;

  → In Free State, people who speak out against public corruption are suddenly killed in circumstances that, even in a country with widespread violent crime, arouse suspicions. One provincial government auditor who inquired about projects in the agriculture department, is killed along with his wife and children in a carjacking. In nearby Warden, a town where the local councilor had also campaigned on an anti-corruption ticket, property is subjected to compulsory purchase and home-owners turned out into the street;

  → Zimbabwean and South African officials meet in private conclave in Marondera.

  It had not taken long for the jungle drums to relay what had happened to the town. Gijs had slept surprisingly well after finishing off the Navy rum and had just started makin
g coffee when he saw the police car pull up outside the window. He hesitated a moment, the coffee pot steady in his hand. Gently he set it down on the counter, and breathed deep into his lungs, watching the dark figures moving cautiously toward his door. Lifting his Mamba, he slid the weapon inside his trousers.

  ‘Mr de Wet!’ officer Mthethwa called loudly, knocking on the sunscreen door.

  ‘Yes?’ Gijs replied, his white face half in shadow.

  ‘It is I, Sentltse Mthewthwa,’ the black man confirmed, his black face half in sunlight.

  ‘And I, officer Diakanyo,’ his companion echoed from the stoep.

  ‘How can I be of assistance?’ Gijs reached down inside his shirt checking for the butt of his weapon.

  ‘There are some questions we must ask you!’

  ‘Some questions!’ Diakanyo jabbered, nodding.

  ‘About last evening, you mean?’ Gijs tried not to sound too concerned.

  ‘Yes, about the shooting.’

  ‘Shootings!’ Diakanyo corrected.

  ‘Self-defence!’ Gijs stalled, fingers lifting the gun from his waist band.

  ‘Two people have wounds in their back?’

  ‘It was dark, there was smoke...’

  ‘Yes, and they say it was you who attacked them?’

  ‘Attacked them,’ once again that familiar doppelganger’s voice.

  ‘They were on my land. They were trespassing!’

  ‘There are claims and traditions that go back further than your land deeds.’

  ‘Not in my book!’

  ‘Nevertheless, that is the case!’

  ‘The case!’ Diakanyo eased the safety catch off his machine pistol.

  ‘So, how can I help you?’

  ‘We need to see you face to face, to ask some routine questions. May we come in?’

  ‘Questions?’ Diakanyo was raising his weapon.

  ‘Like what?’ Gijs forgot to mask his irritation.