by Fenek Solère
→ Fewer than 10 percent of South African municipalities are run on a clean balance sheet;
→ Several large scandals over the last twenty years include a multi-billion dollar arms deal which had presidential involvement and the $23,000,000 Nklanda scandal, in which a recently serving president is alleged to have used tax payers money to refurbish his home;
→ South Africa’s Education Minister openly admits the country’s schools are in a state of crisis;
→ 213,000 of 800,000 South African children failed their end of school examinations;
→ 50 percent of the 1.2 million seven year old entering grade one in 2002 dropped out eleven years later — despite 6 percent of South African GDP being spent on education, more than in any other African country;
→ Children are packed like sardines into buses and taken out of Soweto into the white suburbs;
→ White learners are six times more likely to get into Higher Education;
→ Sample testing of 400 school children reveals that only 130 can do basic multiplication (none could answer the same section when written in English);
→ The Rector and Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State implied in a speech that the 1976 school uprisings had damaged the education system by fundamentally undermining the value of the schools themselves. Others have stated that subjects like science had to be taught in English or other European languages because the various black dialects simply did not have the sufficient conceptual vocabulary to articulate what had to be conveyed;
→ Witwatersrand University, once one of the finest medical faculties in the world, is forced to accept affirmative diversity admission quotas;
→ The SONOP and De Goede Hoop student residences in Pretoria become multicultural;
→ A plaque commemorating Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd is removed from Stellenbosch University;
→ Black Economic Empowerment Laws (Affirmative Action Laws) make it almost impossible for whites to secure gainful employment.
Two aircraft streaked from east to west across the sky. Their engines echoing off the billowing cloud, out towards the Swartruggens, thin vapour trails fading slowly in the sunrise. Gijs waited until they passed. Then he signalled for the column to move on. It was noon before they crested the horizon and looked out upon the endless flats. In the distance they could see the outline of another homestead.
‘Just like mine?’ Eelskje breathed close to Gijs’s ear. He turned to examine her handsome Germanic features. She would make a fine wife. A woman worthy to stand by the side of a Volksmanne, a man of the people. There was the cold echo of the Ossewa Brandwag about her, aloof, focussed and determined.
‘Do you know who lives there?’
‘The Vissers,’ Eelskje answered.
‘Sympathetic?’
She smiled.
‘Very!’
It was nearly two hours later they came up against the farm walls. Gijs approached the house cautiously and circled it warily. The shutters were closed and the galvanised roof sheets were riddled with tell-tale bullet holes. Behind the house was a small garden where the Vissers had grown herbs, vegetables and flowers to sell at market. Gijs noticed the chicken shed was empty and a charcoal bonfire circle had been burned into the grass some twenty metres off to the north.
Both front and back doors were locked. He yanked at a shutter and the metal hook eventually gave, freeing a cloud of bluebottles that buzzed him as he cupped his eyes and looked in through the window pane at the scene inside. On the table was the casseroled torso of a man. The meat partially scraped from his rib cage. The severed stump of a woman’s leg was near the fireplace. She was still wearing her shoes. Animals had gnawed the meat from her femur. Turning, he waved the others back.
‘The Vissers?’ Eelskje asked, her eyes wavering.
‘Gone,’ he confirmed.
←→
Back in Vaanderbilt Park, Hastings sat quietly, listening to an inner voice that flattered his ego. ‘You are the One,’ it whispered. ‘I am the One!’ he replied, so excited that he jumped up and ran around the house naked, pulling the wings off flies, stamping on their bodies as they spun in circles on the tiled floor. ‘Bastard English!’ he repeated time and time again, before collapsing exhausted on the side of his bed, flicking through old copies of Leakey’s and Johanson’s books, nodding in agreement with their argument that Kenya and Ethiopia were the cradles from which Homo Sapiens came forth. He particularly liked this explanation of human origin, especially the depiction of an African Eve who had given birth to all civilization. ‘So much has been stolen, and so much has been forgotten!’ he cried. ‘Were not the megaliths in Brittany of Negro origin?’
He knew from reading Churchward’s book that the Inuit were black; that Britain was originally settled by Nilotic people like Cheddar Man; that the Dogons had invented the science of astronomy; and that the Tanzanians had developed semi-conductors in the fifth century A.D. Hastings fully understood the magic of melanin and very soon, if he had his way, everyone else would too. At his feet was Carleton Coon’s text arguing the alternative notion of multiple origins. A shredded copy of Sarich and Howell’s palaeoanthropologist works debating the case of racial diffusion some fifteen thousand years ago. And there, stuck on the wall between two large posters of Malcom X and Louis Farrakhan, was a computer print out of Robert Lewis’s assertion:
Athens was founded by an Egyptian in 1556 BC; Macedonia by descendants of Hercules; Greece, Europe and the whole of America was settled by descendants of the Egyptians; the Indians were related to the Isrealites of Egypt; Syrians, Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans were all negroid.
Hastings was now convinced that every major figure of history, from Euclid to Shakespeare, had been black. Pushkin was proof positive, was he not? On the bedside next to him lay the paperback Black Athena by Martin Bernal. Next to that, tracts by philosophers like Hountondji, Wiredu, Obenga and Okafor. He slowly leaned back on the pillow, picking up a pen, then after a few moments, he began to roughly sketch an idealised black male torso. His subconscious drifting to Cress Welsing’s thesis that white male homosexuals fantasize that through anal intercourse with black men, they can, by intermingling semen and fecal matter, produce something physically which is the colour of real men, something like Hastings himself. ‘We are the Sun People, they are the Ice People,’ he was murmuring. ‘Egypt was founded by us and their Greek States suckled on the warm brown nipple of an African breast!’
He dreamed of the stone palaces of Axum in the Ethiopian highlands; towering obelisks; silk-clad ivory merchants who had lived in golden splendour; and the Sudanese city of Meroë and its iron foundries. The university city of Timbuctu he knew for a fact had been a greater source of scholarship than Paris and Padua combined, much greater than the libraries of Alexandria and Kos. If Sudan had now become a war-torn wilderness it was because Europeans made it that way. After all, had the Karanga Kingdom and the Kingdom of Mutapa, not built skyscrapers along the Zambezi valley?
He rejected the false history about his people pulling up their huts and being forced to move like vapid nomads because they had exhausted, rather than ecologically managed, the patch of veldt they had settled on. Or the fact that many had adopted Christianity simply because after the church singing and the learning of psalms, the Boers would cook a hot Sunday roast and feed every individual of the congregation. He preferred the idea that at heart his people, like the Kalahari bush men, imagined an eternal hunt for the eland among the stars.
‘Like Zuma and Mugabe, I will use magic against the whites. I am the new Asante, son of an Ashanti princess,’ he muttered in the confines of his bungalow, ‘and I will show my people Njia, the way!’
Hastings had read all about the Nkula, Wubwang’u and Wubinda rites and rituals of the Ndembu, the Lunda, Luvale, Chokwe and the Kaonde. He had attended the Nkang’a, singing over the puberty rites of little girls, and the Mukanda, the boy’s circumcision experience. Soon he was an expert on the Isoma, wom
en’s rituals, ancestral spirits and shades. Sometimes he was called upon to practice Chidika and Ndembu in order to cure a man of troublesome women and to enthuse the productive will by means of Lusemu. Perhaps his reputation for ku-kasila, the tying up of shades, was what had finally established his reputation among the Elders. He began to act as a chimbuki doctor, a mukulumpi or great weneni, practising akishi, banishing the shades with his nkaka of male power.
Soon his following began to grow. He found that the people all around him, members of the various cults, were enthusiastic about becoming his apostles. They flocked to him in these times of growing uncertainty and Hastings would shout curses, kumushing’ana, while making a great show by beheading a red cockerel. He also handed out aphrodisiacs as he spoke in Ashanti — ‘May the elephant give you her womb that you may bear ten children!’ Then the crowd began to sing:
I am going to teach her how to smile
Your mother, today, your mother how to smile.
The moon which has gone appears,
I have seen the man on whom to smile.
Mother!
Come and copulate to leave diseases,
Today look at a wet vulva
Mother of penis! Mother of penis!
That will give you pleasure.
I do not close. I have closed already.
You are giving birth, I am one who gives birth.
I am the elder of the twins.
A large vulva, a small penis,
Look, a vulva as on a lion’s brow,
I am going away, I, a veritable witchdoctor of copulation.
I will rub your penis,
Mother, O, mother!
Your swollen scrotum stimulates the vulva indeed.
A strong vulva and a strong penis,
How it tickles like grass! Copulation is like sweet honey.
The penis is making me strong,
You did something when you played with my vulva, here is the
Basket, fill it...
He would call for wubanji, the homicide of the whites, and declare Abusua bako mogya bako — ‘one clan, one blood!’ Then two girls would conduct the Esono by smearing his body in their menstrual blood. ‘Now we must perform the ahorohorua ceremony,’ Hastings would proclaim from his makeshift pulpit, ‘and wash the sunsum clean.’
Then suddenly the people’s new prophet began to feel the melanin inside his body react like a super-conductor, electrical pulses rushing through his synapses. ‘Like the genius Richard King said,’ he would repeat metronomically, swaying in an ecstatic trance, ‘carbon is black... The original Titans found that all life came from black seed… All life was rooted in blackness…’
Chapter IV
The country where the north wind carries away dry thorn bushes. Where the north wind blows knots of wool against barbed wire. Where rivers and rocks reverberate with the cry of the crow and the wild dog. This is a heartbreak land with a heartbreak history. But you are the owners!
— Eugène Terre’Blanche
Speech to the AWB
They moved by the rising and setting of the sun, ever westward towards the Northern Cape. Nestling together in the cold of night, waking with their sleeping bags soaked in silver dew.
People were losing toenails, fingernails and hair to the trail. They knew they were being followed. One time, the rear guards had picked off two of their pursuers who had moved too far ahead of their commander. Their bodies had been weighed down by rocks and sunk in a muddy stream. After that the hunters hung back, not wanting to risk a fire-fight with these white-devils who could kill in silence at long range.
As they walked Eelskje played with a claspknife, telling Gijs about her life. He would imagine her charging down a dry vlei, fists clenched, arms pumping as she hurtled to dive in the river. His imagination conjuring the image of chickens scampering around the barefoot little seven year old in the kitchen garden.
She told him about the Lovedu Rain-Queen myth that had grown around the capture of two Boer girls in the Transvaal. How the Queen was called ‘the soil’ and bringer of fertility. Eelskje recalled picnicking one thirsty summer, sitting on the rocky eczema of a kopje, looking up at a flat stone surface where local Bushmen had painted fantastical lions, wildebeest and rhinoceroses of the most vulgar proportions. Eating her sandwiches she had observed the daubings and realised they were a mere year or two old. It was hard even at that young age for her to reconcile how the creators of such primordial art could comprehend how aircraft worked, the intricacies of digital control mechanisms, satellite lasers and such like. And yet, whenever she watched the television, listened to the radio or read a foreign newspaper, these believers in witchcraft and purveyors of muti were portrayed as scientists, engineers and statesmen in waiting.
Her father had sent her to the Queen Elizabeth, Girls’ High School, where she wore a green skirt and cream shirt as part of her uniform. Every day a school bus would drop off the girls in their white socks, pulled up to their knees, at the roadside.
She remembered coming home one time from school to find her mother, a hand on each hip, confronting a group of bronze penny-faced Pedi on her door-step.
‘No!’ she was replying to them in their own raw English. ‘I have no petrol to sell to you.’ Then looking over their hunched shoulders into the dusty yard. ‘Anyway, where’s your car?’ The men shuffled around, disconcerted by her logic. When Eelskje had come up, her mother rushed her inside, mindful of how the vagabond’s lecherous eyes ran all over her unbuttoned uniform and down inside her blouse.
Eelskje recalled her father birthing the calves, scattering seed for the geese and feeding lambs with milk expressed through a pin hole in a latex glove. She had always lived close to nature. Seeing her father slit the throat and skin the carcass of a billy goat was nothing new to her. She had fired her first handgun at eight and become a marksmen with an automatic rifle by fifteen. Gijs could hear the good training she had been given by her mother and father when she asserted that ‘when faced with uncertainty, you build stone walls or dig into the earth — but first you reach for the ammo.’
→ The President announces that his government’s response to the current strife was to protect and ensure South Africa’s progressive constitution. ‘A constitution,’ he said, ‘that enshrines the freedom and security of the Person against the malign forces of reaction’;
→ The Parliament in Pretoria declares whites ‘outside’ the South African Constitution, ordering that all their livestock, farming implements, residential homes, business premises, equipment, patents, and shares are to be forfeit to the state;
→ The Constitutional Court rules that confiscatory powers may be used to redress past injustices and to promote the achievement of equality and to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination in the past;
→ Church leaders applaud the legislative measures insisting that they were for the ‘Greater good’ of the nation;
→ The South African military command responds affirmatively to offers of support from the Israeli Defense Force.
Chapter V
When warriors again go out to war,
the hilltops pulsing with their savage dance,
the shields thunder and the spear points flash
high in the sun:
then you sleep on
and you sleep sound,
your feathers scattered far by sun and rain,
your body with its tender coppery gleam
perished, and you?
The grasses still will bend,
the cattle low, and life will call,
but you?
Here where you lay, sheep graze in the morning dew.
— ‘Fallen Induna’
C. M. van den Heever
Hastings took to slumming, going down to the townships where he was worshipped, and drinking with his acolytes. He was like a man among children. People bowed their heads to speak to him. While partying at night he would claim to be
able to channel messages like cicada songs from the stars.
‘Beware, do not cross me,’ he would threaten very severely. ‘I speak for the Fathers from beyond and they do not take kindly to disagreement!’ Sometimes, for days on end, he would hide himself back in the bungalow, trying to sober up. At such times he could only see himself as an ugly creature devoid of redemption. He would wake up in sour sheets, view porn movies and masturbate, his shirt soaked through with a cocktail of semen and spilled vodka.
There were moments when Hastings thought his head was bursting open with the bludgeoning pain of a sjamboch. Occasions when he could not remember where he had been the previous night or with whom he had been drinking, but the lingering aftertaste of a woman’s fluid was frequently stuck to his palate.
In the townships his eyes would fix on the dung beetles crawling along the floor and he hated that its shell was the same colour as his face. When he awoke one morning after a night with ‘his people’, he coughed blood.
‘I am a the Black Messiah,’ he reassured himself, and swinging his legs off the mattress, he stood awkwardly on his shaking shanks, looking out through a hole in the cotton drape strung along corrugated metal, eyes trying to focus on Mrs Adwali washing herself in a bucket outside her hut. ‘Damn fine woman,’ he told himself. ‘Good legs and strong teeth!’
Later, making coffee on his gas stove, he caught the smell of roasting dog drifting through the back alleys and he could tell that the café over the road was broiling meat and preparing vegetables for the day’s business. His mind drifted back to when he was young and how everyone had gone to school. He remembered there was always food back then. The liars said all South Africans lived ten times better in those days than other peoples from those black African states that had fought and gained independence from the British, Germans, French and Portuguese. It was a constant, shameful refrain in the conversations of all the old folk: ‘Things were better then, there was safety and security, but now it as all gone!’ If the younger ones questioned their elders on exactly what they meant by it, the grey hairs would bite their tongues, hesitant to speak out, worried they would be reported to the prowling patrols that seized anyone criticising the President. Indeed anyone who dared to suggest that the world prior to 1994, South Africa’s own Year Zero, had been anything other than a living hell, with innocent and industrious natives like Hastings being held back by fat beer-swilling Afrikaners with whips.