Kraal
Page 8
→ It is understood that some baby rapists have gone beyond penile penetration and used bottles and sticks in the vagina;
→ A one-month-old baby is raped by her two uncles; the youngest known victim of such an incident is a week old;
→ The Jouberts are assaulted and their farm occupied by sixteen blacks near Elandshoek;
→ Refused medical treatment an Afrikaaner baby girl is left to die in her mother’s arms;
→ A seventy-three-year-old is attacked at her home in Rietspruit;
→ A seventy two year old is beaten to death at her home;
→ A woman is tortured with burning plastic in a farm attack;
→ A black threatens a disabled child with rape;
→ A white family and their babies go missing in the North Cape;
→ The body of a white woman who was presumed kidnapped in May 2015 is found in a shallow grave;
→ A girl is shot in the leg, after a black mugger’s gun trigger failed when the barrel was put to her head;
→ Female customers at a store are attacked by six sadistic black gunmen;
→ A pretty young blonde girl is told by a black man that she ‘has beautiful blue eyes’ before he begins to take them from her with a screwdriver;
→ A black serial rapist tells his Afrikaaner victim, ‘I destroy white bitches like you.’
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Now the apologists for the ANC were nowhere to be seen. Like the world’s media they were in denial, reporting only the beauty of Table Mountain, Springbok victories and the colour and vibrancy of the indigenous peoples who made up this new Rainbow Nation. Just as they had previously ignored the Mengistu genocide in Ethiopia, they now overlooked the pompous hypocrisy of the ANC’s Commission on Religious and Traditional Affairs, where expressions like ‘Don’t ever call our tradition bad names, you intrusive whites with no respect for our traditions!’ went unreported in the interests of the multicultural experiment, a coded word for métissage. ‘Ons word ondergeploeg,’ Gijs whispered to himself as he drove along the former Ladysmith road. ‘We are being ploughed under.’
Hastings had hired a car and insisted on driving them out on the road to Trou-aux-Biches, towards Triolet. There they had pulled over and joined in the Divali celebrations, melting into the crowds, walking through the streets hand in hand, lost among the old and young. Striding side by side, singing along with the traditional songs and sidestepping around the colourful powders forming symbolic patterns on the road. They bought sweet cakes from a market stall and enjoyed the spectacle of the Bengali lights and the thunderclap of firecrackers dancing in caterpillar sparks over the stone road.
‘It is wonderful!’ Marie confessed breathlessly, increasingly overwhelmed by the predictable thrum of the drumskins and the heady perfumed exoticism of the scented mantras in the press of bodies in the streets. Later, in the densely packed temple they listened to the turbaned priest speak of Luckshmi, wife of Vishnu, and joined in the sacred chant ‘Om Shanti, Shanti!’ The worshippers’ blended voices circled upwards over the smooth surfaces of the pillars like coiling cobras hissing in the darkness.
Marie recalled the euphoria Adela Quested had experienced in the Marabar caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. The book had been part of her English language studies. She had thought it so quintessentially Anglo-Saxon — the prudish English rose desiring, but being scared to admit to herself her lust for the other.
Could Hastings be my Dr Aziz? she asked herself. She was not like the fictional Adela, Marie convinced herself. I will take my lovers in whatever colour I want. She breathed in the warm air as they drove away in the car, a sense of exhilaration and liberty tingling through her limbs.
On their return to the Shanti Maurice, Hastings and Marie made straight for the privacy of their room. Once inside she decided to titillate her companion by letting the strap of her dress slide from her shoulder, subtly inviting Hastings’ rubbery lips to kiss her throat. Hands that had previously rested on her carved slim hips, now slipped around her partner, and she felt the flesh rolls of soft living ooze between her fingers. Marie’s eyes met his in an erotic challenge. Her lips parted and he pushed a finger inside the wet orifice, the sound of slurping saliva gurgling in his ears.
‘Like chocolate, don’t you,’ he breathed. ‘You all do, don’t you!’ Marie sensed something in his tone but thought he was carried away in the sex-game. Hastings threw her body backwards onto the crisp starched bed sheets.
‘You are so strong,’ she giggled, playing along.
‘We are all strong!’ Hastings was taking off his shirt. ‘You know that. That is why you desire us over your own.’ There was something in his look that discomforted her. She did not know it at first; it was not lust, not the heat of desire. Revenge, that was it. Revenge for the envy and hurt caused to past generations. Marie had been taught that the French Empire in Africa had covered twelve and a half million square kilometres and included Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Niger and Chad. Now it was time to pay the price. And with this act and thousands more like it from Pretoria to Paris, she, like all her sisters, were making amends, settling the bill in lieu of her people’s redemption by absorbing the black man’s musty seed, bringing forth his mulatto mannequins to repopulate the planet. By such a myriad of singular acts she hoped to atone for their sin, wipe away the cancerous legacy of the past. She let his wrath overtake her.
Gijs pulled onto the N3 north towards Johannesburg and then on to the M1 through the Norwood and Melrose districts heading for Sandton. Circling the shopping centre he parked on the side of the road looking up at the neo-Stalinist bronze of Mandela. Simultaneously, other members of the Ystergarde were honing in on Freedom Park with its fantasy depictions of the ANC liberation and assorted memorabilia of white on black slavery. It had always frustrated him how the artistic community conveniently exorcised current and past Muslim involvement in the African slave trade from their compositions. Likewise the role played by rival tribes. He got out and cased the target. It was about six metres tall, weighing close to two and a half tons, and it stood about twenty metres from the road.
The edifice, perfectly reflecting the limited talents of the sycophantic sculptures, Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane. Conjuring the same discomforting feelings, in a right-thinking healthy mind, as the discovery of the residue of excrement on a hotel towel.
Gijs watched a few people wandering across the grass verge and he saw that the yellowing plinth was protected by a low railing that had become little more than a fly paper stuck with wind-blown Kentucky Fried Chicken cartons, cans of soft drinks and one or two glossy pages torn from pornographic magazines.
Ceausescu would have been proud, Gijs thought as he got back into the car, staring up once again into that marmoset-like visage brooding menacingly over him through the windshield, hand thrust forward as if the metallic Mandela had been trained to direct traffic.
A barely road-worthy taxi juddered up alongside and the driver waved a gun at him, signalling that the shopping centre was his patch. Gijs raised his empty hands, explained that he was not working a taxi route and the man, obviously bemused that there might be some other way of making a living in this world, drove on, music playing loudly out the back of his patchwork car of many colours.
To kill time Gijs chewed spearmint gum, waiting for the pre-ordained moment, eyes lingering contemptuously over the long line of pregnant black teenage girls, some barely adolescent, queuing up to spend their three hundred Rand family allowance in the Asian-run convenience store. Gijs recalled that despite the abject poverty and rate of HIV infection, the Health Minister insisted on encouraging this rampant promiscuity in only a faintly disguised campaign to further inflate the already overwhelmingly black to white population ratio, so that the illiterate and unskilled multiplied, while the taxpaying whites that supported them continued to diminish. Gijs was thinking about how his father would tell him how a disillusioned neighbour had once asked the C
hief Land Commissioner about where he could farm. ‘Try Australia!’ the thick-skulled mimic of a man had cheekily replied, which was ironic coming from a personage whose genus could not devise a means of transport, a communication system or a language that could travel to, let alone describe, that far off continent.
When Gijs looked out the window of his 89’ Corolla and saw that statue leering over this once proud city. He did not think of rock bands playing music festivals with exotic sounding names and the lofty ideals of middle class kids in Philadelphia, London, Berlin and Paris getting together in a corporate dance to supposedly eliminate Third World debt. Instead he saw imitators of Castro in Cuba linking arms with half-educated warlords plundering the developed world’s donations, buying AK47s and turning them on their own people in a jungle of barbarity and depravity, the stench of death drifting to the north and south over the Serengeti.
Around seven in the evening when the crowds had departed Gijs got out, lifted the boot and primed the device. Then, having set the timer for three minutes, he sat behind the Corolla’s wheel, hitting the accelerator hard, ramming into the base of the plinth. Kicking open the door, Gijs drew his pistol and sprinted away, only turning when he heard the explosion which rocketed Mandela out of his metre-long shoes, up into the air, toppling the chimp-like colossus to the ground with a cracking thud.
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The following day there was moral uproar in Pretoria, panic on the Stock Exchange and additional munitions flown into government barracks. ‘Umlungu wahlab’ inkosi,’ the white man has struck at the heart of the king, the Zulu newspaper headline proclaimed in big bold type-set. From Alexander Bay to Kosi Bay, from Mmabatho to Port Alfred, all the key tabernacles of the new religion were desecrated. The ANC’s resistance memorabilia defaced by bullet and bomb. Dams and key train intersections were also hit, along with military communications and logistics centres. Temporarily paralysed, the ANC’s police and army units were randomly despatched to mines, drill sites and key highway junctions across the country. The South African Defence Force recalled its troops, conducting so-called peacekeeping operations in the Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cars and trucks were stopped and searched. Extending their previously rehearsed but poorly executed Safety and Security operation codenamed PROSPER across the Transvaal. Numerous assaults on women and children took place in broad daylight. Men were machine gunned to death just for passing a supposedly insolent glance over the authorities, causing further blow back and fire-fights around majority white enclaves, where, partly prepared for an attack, the population began to defend themselves against the badly coordinated and indignant majority spoiling for a massacre after years of anti-racist propaganda, and who could no longer remember so much as the sting of a white man’s rebuke.
All around the country armed motorcades of white refugees began to roll. They were under the command of local Volksleiers of the Orde Boervolk and the Aksie Eie Toekoms. Aware of the svaart gevaar, the black danger, surrounding them, the Boernasie was starting out towards pre-arranged safe-havens or gathering in defensible areas where they had stockpiled food. Gijs had been saddened to hear that his saviours, Johan Koekemoer and his young side-kick Jooste had been killed after being surrounded and running out of bullets in his old home town. Proud of the fact they had taken twenty three blacks with them to the grave.
In more than one case the savages attacked unharmed whites, killing the men and boys and seizing the younger women and girls for their brothels. They emptied every town they could, assembling the defenceless inside their churches and burning them to death alongside their altars. Aarde and Czapski had unified the white guerrilla armies who rallied under the old Ordnungstheologie, blood and soil Lutheran theology. Aarde made a speech in his great deep voice, speaking out in Pretoria’s main square. Policemen stood around marshalling people with swinging batons and dog-like scowls. The words rising and falling as the sound of helicopters whirred overhead. There were some who were moved, even angered, and some that were transported back in time to a world in balance, where honesty and capability were judged as meritorious, rather than the volume of melanin in a man’s skin. Aarde looked out on the gathered crowd. ‘Remember Diederichs’ words,’ he said. ‘The Nation contains the essence of being human. It is the form of the individual’s spiritual realization and perfection... Love of nation is not in the first place love of people, territories or states, but rather love of the ever-prevailing values, on which the nation is based.’ The sound of police shotguns ricocheted around. ‘And now we fight!’ he yelled before being ghosted out of the city to join the resistance.
After the sex act, Hastings and Marie were tired and dispirited. They lay silent for a moment and neither had any appetite to speak. Mabuza withdrew into the living room, leaving Marie alone in the bed. She heard him turn on the television, flick through the channels, and listened as he selected a porn programme, his lips smacking on an over-ripe banana.
Marie must have fallen asleep because as she slowly came around, the fog clearing from her eyes, she could make out Hastings standing over her, holding an empty bottle above his head.
‘What is it?’ she asked, suddenly frightened of him and realising that his pent-up frustration made him capable of outrageous acts. She felt his black hand press down on her white throat, stifling her cries, choking off the air.
‘I cannot satisfy you!’ he cried and she shook her head desperately, trying to lie that he was man enough for the task, even though they both knew he was not. ‘My spirits failed me and I cannot let it rest.’ His hand slipped from her bruised neck and Marie coughing recognised she had to placate him. His breath stank of Drambuie whisky and his eyes were filled with psychopathic rage.
‘It’s ok Hastings!’ she managed to splutter before he brought down the bottle on her scalp, cracking the skull like an ostrich egg, leaking blood and grey brain matter over the pillow. And how he shook indignantly as he thrashed at her, how dare she not enjoy what he had given her, his whole stiff length, the fruit of his race, every centimetre of his imagined superiority, what else could she want. Didn’t they all long for this?
‘White whore! White whore!’
Gijs escaped by motorbike north eastwards, first along the highway to Pretoria and then westwards by the back roads to Rustenberg where he met up with a company of the Volkseer, the People’s Army, high up in the Magaliesberg mountains. They were a mixed crew of refugees, drawn up in a semi-circle on a windswept hillside crowned with rocky crags. His orders were to lead the column along the track ways through the hills above the Hartbeesport dam. They were to avoid confrontation because their number included surgeons, engineers and other key workers whose lives were to be preserved in order that they could contribute to the new society that was planned. From on high, the Ystergarde looked down on the burst concrete of the Transvaal yachting marina, the waters having swept through the Welwitschia tourist market, washing away the tacky trinkets and souvenirs.
‘Be careful,’ Gijs warned as he assumed personal responsibility for his charges, ‘the water in the lower reaches is full of bilharzia, drink only from your bottles until I say it is safe!’
There was not much talking. Silence had fallen upon them all. Despite the soft, rich-scented twilight streaming in over the hills this was no time to speak of beauty and the splendours of nature. Sadness, fear and hate welled up like a cankerous tumour in each and every heart as they strung out along the escarpment, moving silently in the stillness of the African dusk. Sometimes the women would cry for their broken lives, the lost safety and the end of the security their forefathers had created in this place.
‘It feels like the End Times,’ some would whimper. Widows would weep for the men who had died defending them and their children, the hard echo of their sorrow bouncing off the valley stones like the chirp and squeak of wild dogs.
Moving through the fringe lands of the Kalahari, Gijs with revolver in hand and night vision goggles jammed down over his face, felt like a mode
rn day Moses leading his people toward the Promised Land. Behind, miles away, dark figures emerged over the mountain top.
The pursuit had begun.
←→
Hastings snatched the rum and Coca-Cola from the Malayan flight attendant, angered that he had to wait so long for his thirst to be slaked. Marie’s body had been disposed of for a few hundred Rand by a sympathetic hotel porter and he had concocted some story at the reception about her deciding to stay with some friends on the Island. Once safely through passport control and back aboard Natal Airlines he knew he would evade any awkwardness. Whatever he had done, he would be protected. He had friends in high places. His future was secure.
He was already thinking back to the heroes of yesteryear that he so wanted to emulate and the evolution of a black consciousness movement that had first taken root in the Eastern Cape. The thinkers who had first opposed apartheid like Dr. T. Jabavu, People he liked to think of as pathfinders who had spawned the Native National Congress, based around Fort Hare University, the Lovedale Institute and Healdtown College, in turn nurturing leaders like P. Mzimba, E. Makiwan, Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and his ultimate hero, Steve Biko.
He loved Biko’s quote, ‘Blacks are going to move out of townships into white suburbs, destroying and burning there. It’s going to happen, it’s inevitable. When that happens there will be white panic … a faceless army which destroys overnight will introduce far greater feelings of insecurity than an organized military force on the border, which you can confront and defeat.’