Kraal

by Fenek Solère

  → Gauteng’s H&M is besieged by outraged people protesting against racism in advertising after the poster of a young negro wearing a t-shirt that reads ‘Monkey Business’ goes viral;

  → UN officials, Hollywood actresses and British Labour MP’s joined the chorus extolling Winnie Mandela as the ‘Mother of the Nation’, conveniently ignoring her inflammatory rhetoric at Munsieville on the 19th April 1985, when she said ‘With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country’;

  → An independent journalist with a UK passport is detained for spreading ‘racial hatred’.

  ←→

  ‘What did that man say to you?’ he was asked one day.

  ‘Asked for the way to Jeppestown.’ Kumalo’s eyes clouded over.

  ‘That’s where the old white reformatory they used to send us to is!’ he said.

  ‘Did you get into mischief?’ Hastings asked.

  ‘Robbed a petrol station once,’ Kumalo replied lazily, his hand raised, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  ‘Did you shoot at anyone?’

  Kumalo nodded. ‘Had to, the white woman wouldn’t give from the till!’

  ‘Did she die?’

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care, they took money from my father, lots of money for the petrol. My father used to shake his head. Them whites, he’d say, always charging more every day. So I fired when she said no. Then I ran. It was around liberation time. Mandela was going to be released so I knew things would be alright. One bullet, one settler, right?’

  Kumalo decided to take Hastings to the reform school. ‘We’ll go to the old priest,’ he swaggered, ‘get some free food.’ It did not take long. The old minister talked to them on the porch and then invited them into his house, where he and his stout wife already had a number of boys lodging with them. Big boys rapidly growing into men, some only recently discharged from the reformatory.

  Erwin removed his dog collar and set them down for tea. Vasti, his thick-hipped wife, fussed around with the steaming pot and some fairy cakes with chocolate topping.

  ‘It is really good,’ Erwin was saying, ‘what is happening now; our boys will be safe from the police and can make their own lives free of the past!’ Hastings could tell his words were sincere and well-intentioned but they fell on deaf ears. The semi-naked troop of adolescents lounging around the TV set in the adjacent room were already filled to the brim with hatred and were barely managing to mask it. The books they were given went unread, often unopened; they ate with their fingers and when Hastings needed to wash his hands, he was confronted in the upstairs bathroom with faeces spread all over Vasti’s chrome taps.

  Hastings and Kumalo were almost inseparable by this time, hanging with the gang at Erwin’s house, taking what they wanted from the fridge while the Minister was out proselytising the good folk of Bruma. His wife slowly becoming a prisoner in her own home, forever catering to the boys’ whims and cleaning up after them. Hastings remembered one overcast afternoon when they were bored and stoned, surrounding Vasti and making her cry. She ran to her room and locked the door, telling them she had had enough and to leave her house. That was when he first heard the ‘Dubula! Ibhunu, dubula, dubula!’ bass chant and it excited him. He recalled they all had erections as they kicked in the door.

  It was not long before the boys, now hardened Bafabegiya, extreme black nationalists named those who die dancing, were making headlines in the Evening Star: MURDER IN SASOLBURG — WELL RESPECTED SHOP OWNER SHOT IN THE HEAD. He had denied them liquor, Kamulo had said to justify his trigger-happy nature. ‘He was a coloured anyway,’ he shrugged. ‘Not one of us, not one of them!’ Later they graduated onto burglary, car-jacking and mugging tourists the minute they stepped off the airport concourse. They would chant Lembede’s words, ‘The colour of my skin is beautiful, like the black soil of Mother Africa!’ By their eighteenth birthdays they were taking advantage of affirmative action schemes for jobs with the police. Two of them, Sentletse Mthethwa and Themba Diakanyo, several years later, had been the response team despatched to the de Wet small holding the day Gijs’ family had been brutalized.

  Hastings could not have cared less. He privately celebrated the endless reports of white settlers being tortured and killed. His sympathy was with the Blacks First, Land First mobsters chanting ‘All White Men Must Die’.

  → Ernest (77) and Annetjie (76) are murdered at their farm near Parys in the Free State. He died from loss of blood. Annetjie was suffocated after being stuffed into a freezer while she was still alive;

  → Hennie (73) and Gerrit (78) are murdered outside Vanderbijlpark and Heidelberg, respectively;

  → A British ex-pat is hacked to death in Flicksburg, near Bloemfontein;

  → Gerry and his wife Sandra are beaten almost to death in their own home near Harare in what was formerly Rhodesia, by so-called ‘veterans’ of the black liberation struggle, who demand cash and jewelry.

  → Alan Wessels (58) is found in a ‘house full of blood’, brutally beaten and left to die;

  → A man is attacked by a black gang wielding crowbars on a farm near Naboomspruit;

  → A fourteen year old is wounded in Randate;

  → An elderly couple are killed for R3.50;

  → Peter Doyle (64) and his eighty-year-old mother are attacked on their farm and brutally assaulted;

  → Dries and Fransie (69 and 70, respectively) are attacked in their bedroom in Senekal;

  → An entire family are executed on their farm near Leandra;

  → Rae and Jan Mits are attacked en route to the hospital to visit Rae’s father who is dying of cancer;

  → A bus carrying a netball and rugby team along the R72 from Port Elizabeth to East London is attacked by armed guerrillas;

  → An elderly couple are attacked with an axe by intruders in their Randsburg home;

  → A family are tortured to death on their farm near Kraaifontein;

  → A farmer from Neispruit is attacked with a shovel;

  → Armed terrorists attack people on a small holding near Pietersburg;

  → A white woman is forced to fight off black assailants when she stops at a traffic light;

  → A seventy-nine-year-old white woman is raped and has her throat slashed in Ruiterwacht;

  → A white man is attacked by blacks carrying pangas in broad daylight;

  → House raiders boil a twelve-year-old boy to death in a bath.

  Chapter II

  No one who lived here and was white had an easy time in this country. At Bloukrans and Moordspruit women and children were stabbed. Two white people skewered on one spear as if on a safety pin. I am not popular with the liberals because the fact of the matter is 27,000 gravestones point to heaven and speak to God and to our people. Here are the dead victims of the British concentration camps. This is our country and the AWB claims the land we are willing to die for. They won’t get our land. With gun in hand we’ll crush the ANC. Make a stand! Make a stand with a prayer! Make a stand with work and organisation! Make a stand with your vote! With bullets and guns! Make a stand in God’s name… You don’t have the right to hand this land to the ANC. This is God’s land. The Promised Land… They say the AWB uses threatening language, Yes! I threaten it in the clearest language. Hands off Boer Land!

  — Eugène Terre’ Blanche

  Speech to the AWB

  A full moon streamed down, its milky light flooding the wide flatlands ahead. The earth was dry and sandy, covered in three day stubble of karroo bush and prickly pear. Gijs stopped, kneeling just below the skyline, watching and waiting. Over to the east, amid a circle of low round-topped kopje was a lone homestead, its stone walls and store huts spread like a rash over the yellow grass and struggling succulents. His eyes caught the occasional muzzle flash and he could hear bullets spurt off the zinc-roofed outhouses, smelling the faint trail of smoke in the breeze.

  Just for a moment a pang of memory stabbed at his heart. His night scope picked out about twenty or so
raiders moving slowly forward, raising their SMGs above their heads, lacerating the walls of the farm with covering fire before ducking again behind the criss-cross of the pen walls. There was no order to their assault nor any obvious objective other than to murder the occupants sheltering inside. Gijs had considered skirting the ploughed fields and avoiding contact — but the look in his people’s eyes said it all.

  Down below in the encircled farmstead, a young woman and her badly wounded father were pressed tight up against the windows, firing from front and back, letting loose with buckshot whenever they got the chance.

  One of the Kappie girls reported that a small mortar was being assembled in a dry river bed about two hundred metres to the south and Gijs directed some of his crack shots to take the battery out before the aggressors could make it operational. Then, easing his way into a firing position, he ordered the rest of the Ystergarde and Kappies to unhitch their weaponry ready to lay down sufficient ordnance to drive the marauders off.

  Just as he had hoped, ten minutes later three dead government troopers hung limp over a partially constructed mortar, two others lay wounded in the slurry at the bottom of a cow pen, and the survivors were high tailing it like Kenyan long-distance runners over the western horizon, just as the first rays of sunrise began to pierce the shadows filling clefts in the hills. The farmyard below was awash with a metallic silver-blue light. Gijs spat, stood up and sauntered down the kloof towards the farm where a young woman was opening the door, calling for first aid. It was obvious, as her father lay there on the stoep, that he was not going to survive, but Gijs sanctioned the bandages and painkillers to make his passing easier, both for himself and his girl, who was a hot-tempered fury with a strong grip and a keen eye.

  ‘Bastards!’ she kept hissing, tears welling in her eyes, but her features refusing to distort in her pain. Gijs, sensing the spirit in her, offered her a Browning and gestured over to the cow pens. She took it and holding the weapon out before her wandered over to the injured men, as the eyes of his own contingent followed her steady steps. A few minutes later they all heard two clear echoes resound around the four walls and then the girl returned to Gijs’ side.

  ‘Eelskje,’ she said matter of factly, returning the Browning, still warm from usage, into Gijs open palm.

  After she had watched her father die, Eelskje organised, along with a number of the other women, a warm breakfast and served it to her liberators. ‘My family have been farming here for three generations,’ she sighed, her eyes hard and red from her strangely contained bereavement, ‘and now this. What can I do?’

  Gijs sat on a wooden seat out on the pitted titanium veranda. His eyes fell upon the surrounding fields with a benevolent eye. The morning was beginning to blister already. He could feel the sun pouring down over his shoulders, familiar images from his own past rushing into his mind. The machinery churning clods on his father’s farm, the familiar lowing of sweating livestock and his uncle blowing hard against the stone wall marking the perimeters of the homestead.

  ‘Good times, good times,’ he muttered to himself. He had never wanted trouble but trouble had come to him. It was the same everywhere. No one could just live a peaceful life, do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and take it for granted that what you had left behind at home would still be there when you returned.

  Shovelling the last of the egg, Gijs raised the binoculars to his eyes. There were no particular indications of severe drought hereabouts. Away, in the distance, the Ndotsheni clumps struck him as a little red and bare. Overgrazed, he reflected; and there, on the steep-sided hills, several thin-limbed animals who had escaped during the fight paraded their rib cages across the rims of the mountains, tongues lolling against the skyline. Gijs saw erosion as the only real enemy, other than the savages.

  ‘More?’ Eelskje asked, noticing Gijs had put his plate aside.

  His gaze turned to her, looking over her features. Strong, determined — but not bereft of a certain femininity. He recognized it: he had known it in his own mother, though not in his wife. It was the femininity of a woman in these forgotten places, that femininity which put forth a steely face against a jagged world in the protection of kith and kin, child and man — becoming strong so that it could still be nurturing. ‘Any coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Eelskje said and went off to get a fresh mug. A few moments later she had returned through the crowd gathered about her stoep.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking a long pull, ‘I needed that!’

  ‘You are welcome.’

  Then tempting fate, Gijs asked.

  ‘What will you do now?’

  She was silent, rocking slowly in place, biting her lip hard and staring down at the ground as if she might cry. At last showing some sign, amid the bare dust, some indication of where the hardened Fates were willing her. ‘Staying here is not really an option, is it?’ she asked finally, looking searchingly at Gijs. Her eyes were sad, with a sorrow that outreached even the death of her father. Gijs shook his head.

  ‘Our friends will have already reported this,’ he confirmed, nodding to the horizon where the survivors had vanished. ‘I reckon they will have a recon helicopter up by mid-afternoon!’

  ‘Then you really risked a lot trying to help us.’

  ‘I guess so?’

  ‘What about my father?’ she nodded in the direction of a small shed.

  ‘What faith are you?’

  Eelskje looked unsure what to say. ‘Actually, I’m not very religious,’ she admitted uncertainly. Gijs smiled.

  ‘Like me, then.’

  ‘But these?’ she swung her head around her, taking in the column.

  ‘Many are motivated by their God. I am motivated on a perfectly selfish basis.’

  Eelskje frowned. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘To paraphrase a brave man from a long time ago in a far off land — to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’

  Chapter III

  The moon shines mistily on stone and clay:

  Strange light upon the past for him who led

  An Afrikanerdom that passed away

  — From Kruger’s statue

  Gijs had heard it said often enough that educated people did not want to work on the farms anymore, that it was too difficult a life there in the endless hardscrabble, with death lurking in the lucid distances. Instead they went off to the cities to look for more congenial and lucrative careers. He had seen with his own eyes the field work being done by the very old and the very young alike. And when men like himself came in from the ploughing and bathed they sat out on their stoeps with their families in the time-honoured tradition, discussing the weather and the prices the crops might fetch at market. Some argued, as some had always done, that there was still too little good land to support the growing numbers. Certainly his colleagues argued for more ground. They could see, wherever the Hotties operated, the soil turned into desert, and the blacks drank and gambled rather than re-invested any profits into farm machinery, which they seemed to struggle to understand, much less to maintain. Gijs turned these thoughts over in his mind as he climbed in a slow zig-zag pattern under the brow of the hill. He slipped off his cap, wiping his brass-tinted forehead with the back of his hand.

  He knew the natives had regularly stolen cattle and sheep from his own small holding, and they had made no secret of the fact that they resented working side by side with his family. He may have inherited his father’s vigour but Gijs did not share the old man’s taste for agriculture. It had been a hard blow for his parents when the transfer of power took place. He remembered them grumbling and passing apocalyptic commentary. Gijs had continued to do well in school and had gone off to university to study engineering. That was where he met Betje, at the college dance, and then four years later she had presented a fine granddaughter to both sets of parents, after an uneventful pregnancy that ended with a relatively light labour of six hours.

  But things had begun to
change, even away from the city, with power outs and a deteriorating road and rail infrastructure. Tarmac surfaces grew pockmarked, bridges began to buckle and the streets filled with homeless shabby emotional incontinents. The government officials that he met day to day as part of his work were all black now, as were the police, clerks, postal staff, teachers and civil servants. The Truth and Reconciliation tribunals defined the atmosphere of the time with their lopsided moral logic and their wilful reinterpretation of the history of the pre-Mandela epoch. He noticed how school text books had begun to change the emphasis and trajectory of South African history. Stories of teachers turning into government informers, rather than fountains of wisdom, were whispered in the homes he frequented. But at least the cricket teams toured again and the rugby world cup had been secured, he had told himself, providing the opportunity to make the movie Invictus. Then, of course, there was the Football World Cup, which had come and gone without major incident. The potential for industrial-scale steaming of visitors while they formed queues at the stadiums, the gang rapes of visiting friends and wives, wanton murder and widespread calamity, had all been avoided. But, he knew, in retrospect, even if such things had occurred, the world’s media would most certainly have brushed them under the carpet. Determined to close their eyes, to deny what was; determined to present the multiracial utopia as a paradise on Earth.

  → South Africa’s population is 46,923,000 and its land Area is 1,219,090 square kilometres;

  → The country’s main languages are Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu;

  → The average life expectancy is fifty-three;

  → The South African national debt is currently 44 percent of GDP;

  → South African mining stocks lost on average twelve billion Rand in annual revenue per year over the last decade;

  → The OECD describes South Africa, alongside Indonesia, Brazil, India and Turkey as the ‘Fragile Five’;