Kraal

by Fenek Solère

  Any other perspective was deemed heretical, mad — or worse still, pro-white. The repetitious replay of black and white newsreels of police firing into the seething crowds in Sharpville and Soweto needed no interpretation. The truth was self-evident. American news channels like CNN confirmed it and the History Channel beamed it 24/7 around the globe.

  Chapter VI

  I shall not lead the reapers now,

  my blood’s a cooling ember;

  but when you stride across the field

  your right hand will remember...

  by two the heaven and the earth

  are one white molten flood,

  and every clod and ash-blue coal,

  the corn as red as blood...

  — ‘The Harvest’

  G. A. Watermeyer

  The sides of the valley were so deeply cut that the sun struggled to fight off the shadows until nearly midday. In some places the banks sloped down to small beaches, allowing stragglers from the column to wash in the rush of cold water. After cleaning themselves and scrubbing their clothes on dry rocks they came across traces of camps. ‘Probably marauders from the north,’ Eelskje offered. Gijs nodded silently. Crossing over, they tied themselves together, raising their guns out of the rushing white water, strutting awkwardly against the current like stilt-legged street performers. They found some caves above the snaking river and holed up there for a few days, drinking from fresh mountain streams and hunting game before pressing on still further into the Northern territories.

  Gijs lit a cigar from the end of a burning twig and leaned back against a cold boulder.

  ‘I tell you,’ he said to all who would listen, ‘some of the Kappies work harder than the guys.’

  ‘Like Olive Schriener said, We bear the world and we make it,’ Eelskje laughed.

  ‘She wrote that a long time ago!’

  ‘But it’s as true now as it was then!’ She stroked his arm, her fingers playing an arpeggio from the crook of his elbow to the rounded biceps under the flap of his olive green shirt. Gijs shuddered nervously, unsure about intimacy, uncertain if he could be unfaithful to Betje’s memory. The farm girl read his face.

  ‘That was then.’ she said. ‘Now is now!’ Gijs dwelt on her words a moment, feeling the skin of his arm prickling from her touch. He looked into her sky-clear eyes. Then he picked Eelskje up, walking slowly away from the glow of the fire.

  ←→

  When he awoke next morning his first thought was of Betje. But it seemed to Gijs that Eelskje was right, there was nothing to do but live. Straining his eyes he could see the camp begin to stretch and yawn. The first whistle of a tea pot cutting the morning mist.

  A woman who had volunteered to teach at the Volkskool Orania was telling the story of how she had trained a fifteen-year-old girl from the squatter camps called Irene, who had her feet severely burnt when six years old, to win twenty-seven gold medals in athletic competitions.

  ‘She thinks of God when she runs and thanks him for her victories,’ she explained.

  A man crouching to eat Zoete melk and a blood-red slice of watermelon fondly remembered Zola Budd, saying, ‘We have had champions before who broke records and ran barefoot before the world.’

  Eelskje stroked a rust-coloured Boerboel dog that was licking at her face. ‘It is our grootse, our calling,’ she said, ‘to run free in these lands, it is our einbestemming, what the English call destiny.’

  Three hours later Gijs was trying to protect his eyes once more against the inescapable glare of the sun. There was already a throbbing heat beating up off the stones. He was lying on his stomach in a crevice, flattening himself, so that he disappeared into the ground, observing a distant caravan coming over the horizon. The point man was riding a small horse, no bigger than a donkey, so that his feet almost dragged on the ground. Further back there were two other horses, rider-less, but with a white man strung by his hands and feet, hanging from a pole.

  Gijs counted ten men, with an eleventh at the tail. All of them carrying guns, some loaded with packs as well. The first man wore shabby blue trousers, another green, but otherwise they were in a melange of faded camouflaged uniforms. Gijs guessed they were not ANC irregulars. Their faces betraying their ethnicity as Abbala nomads, probably coming south as Janjaweed Mohammedan mercenaries from Sudan, to raid and kill. He could see they were making towards a small dam in the river below, their gape-mouthed calls back and forth to each other echoing across the hill.

  Stopping at the water’s edge, they corralled their animals with a short rope and began to set up camp. Moving slovenly to and fro to gather wood, they lit cigarettes and laid down their guns to drink. Some pulled khiff from their bags, eyeing the white man with suspicion, occasionally walking up to him and swiping at him with clenched fists.

  That evening as it grew darker Gijs continued to watch, sending orders back along the line for a few of the more confident fighters to come up. The dusk was so thick by the time his team were gathered around him that only the whinnying of the horses indicated how close they were to the Abbala slavers below. The Boers could hear laughter, the swapping of stories, and then the thud of an axe, followed by a heart wrenching scream. Gijs could see through his night scope the Janjaweed dancing in the orange glow of their fire. The man he took to be their leader lifting a dismembered white arm from the ground, then walking over to the fire where his stoned troop of Fellaheen intended to devour it like a kebab.

  The Boers lay awake much of the night, listening frustratedly to the men gnawing on the ulna and radius bones below. Then, when the fire dimmed and the snoring of the Abbala rose into the starlight, they surrounded the camp, killing the single drunken sentry with a swipe of a curved kukri, before spraying the sleeping men with bullets.

  Realising septicemea was about to take the Janjaweed’s tormented victim, Gijs ordered a mercy kill. A further single shot rang out in the wilderness.

  Hastings made a silent pilgrimage through the Yeoville shanty town first thing every morning. A hot gust lifting an ochre veil of sand down the dry street. He shuffled in the loose white robes he had taken to wearing, back towards the hut where Mangwa sold his hootch. Children sat around in the sun, flies buzzing their faces, lime fingers of wet urine stretching out in the dust.

  Then pushing back the metal door to the Shanti shop he was met by a big smile.

  ‘Very strong today!’ Mangwa said through his toothless gums. ‘Inelese, inelese!’

  Mabuza as ever nodded and reached inside his pocket to take out his zebra skin pouch with the coins.

  ‘Same price today as yesterday?’ he asked.

  ‘Always same price to you, Master!’ Mangwa pattered. Then, leaning in with a sly look on his face, ‘But don’t tell anyone else, this is damn good hootch. Interlese, interlese.’ Mangwa stirred the still and reached for a plastic motor oil bottle. ‘You want this all full up?’

  ‘All the way to the top,’ Hastings said. ‘I have a big thirst!’

  ‘You always have a big thirst!’ Mangwa grinned. ‘You want a little something else?’ His mischievous eyes winked.

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Wo-man?’ Mangwa drawled. ‘Nice too. Very young. She from good family. Big ass to fuck hard!’ Hastings was not sure. The last time Mangwa had offered him a woman she was in her sixties and rotted through with ringworm.

  ‘Where she be?’

  ‘I can call her!’ Mangwa reassured him, making for the table where is mobile sat like a moulded plastic beetle. ‘She can be here in five minutes.’ Hastings took a look at the hard wooden bench. ‘Can I fuck her here?’ Mangwa pointed back to where Hastings had come from.

  ‘Your place.’

  ‘She won’t mind I’m a god?’ Hastings asked.

  ‘No, she likes make sex very much. Anyways, I tell her you are famous now and she do. I am baas now!’ They both laughed and Mangwa picked up his mobile and began to punch the girl’s number.

  When Inkosi arrived, Hastings saw her long bl
ack thighs through the swish of a red skirt and nodded in approving welcome.

  ‘Come, come,’ Mangwa said, gesturing encouragingly to her. Then turning towards Hastings whose eyes were expanding with desire, ‘Did I not tell you she was beautiful!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the self-anointed Messiah slurped, ‘you did not lie!’ Inkosi with a coy glance spun around on her heels.

  ‘You like girls?’ she said.

  ‘More than boys!’ Hastings grunted nasally. Inkosi sat down and they shared a drink.

  ‘Touch her!’ Mangwa encouraged. ‘Good body, yes!’ Hastings’ fingers ran along her breasts. Inkosi’s face curled lasciviously.

  ‘Come to my room,’ he said. His voice carried the command of the godhead. Mangwa reached out his grasping hand, fingers opening and closing like a leathery tarantula on his palm.

  ‘Money first — even for gods!’ he demanded. Hastings poked about in his sagging loose pockets.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘enough?’ Mangwa counted the money. His face lit up.

  ‘Yes, it is enough!’

  Hastings took Inkosi by the hand. They strode out into the blazing sunlight.

  ‘Soon you will feel the love of heaven,’ he declared boldly.

  → EU and American officials meet in Strasbourg to discuss a joint response to the on-going Civil War in the Cape;

  → Fresh from a trip to Tel Aviv the American Foreign Secretary insists on enforcing sanctions on countries offering to provide sanctuary to the white rebels in South Africa;

  → The British Prime Minister, speaking alongside the Home Secretary outside Number 10 Downing Street, confirms that UK citizens, or other sundry personages resident in the United Kingdom, providing support and succour to the racists in South Africa would face internment under a revised version of the 18 B regulation.

  ←→

  Inkosi stood up, looked around the room; Hastings watching her as she walked, the soles of her feet sticking unpleasantly to the dirty floor. Taking her dress from the nail on the back of the door, she slipped it over her head and began pointing to his stove.

  ‘You have coffee?’

  ‘Yes!’ Her eyes told a story. Hastings slid off the bed and struck a match. ‘It is Nescafé!’ Inkosi’s mouth was watering.

  ‘Do you have food?’

  ‘White rice.’

  ‘Can I have?’

  ‘I am not a cook!’

  ‘I can do?’

  ‘You can?’ Inkosi nodded.

  Later, they had more to drink. Both began complaining about their life. Each blaming apartheid for their troubles. She began telling him about her upbringing in Hillbrow, a former Manhattan-style white enclave, which was now an open brothel. Both her parents had deserted her by the time she was nine. Two brothers were in gangs. Her sister had died of AIDS eighteen months ago. While her five-month-old niece had inherited the condition.

  ‘Yes, it was true, incontestably true. The fact was the tribe was broken,’ Hastings confirmed. ‘The whites have caused all this. It is my destiny to find solutions to our troubles!’ Inkosi knew it and understood that it could be difficult to repair. Hastings bowed his head. It was as if his world was coming apart in his fingers; the truth of the Mandela Miracle had lost its lustre. The Settlers were still fighting. There was less and less food, even fewer jobs and the land fell fallow in decay.

  ‘What are we going to do, brother?’

  ‘I will fix all!’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘That is what I have been planning, a long time!’ Then they began sharing some narcotics from a small leather pouch he had hidden under his sopping mattress.

  Soon they were tripping.

  ‘What do you see?’ There was uncertainty in her face, so Hastings filled in the gaps for her. ‘You see a man walking through a circle of fire, his hair alight, his arms strong and beckoning to you, yes?’ Inkosi hesitated, unsure what to say, or do, in her state of mind. ‘Yes?’ Hastings repeated forcibly.

  ‘That is right,’ she confirmed, a look of certainty returning to her face, touched now by wonder, ‘And his seed is black and strong and he shits on the white man!’

  ‘Yes, yes! You have had a vision!’ Hastings declared, triumphant. ‘You must go tell it to the sisters, the brothers, everyone who will listen. You have received my jissom and become holy in the sight of the prophets, praise be!’

  ‘Are you a goel?’ Inkosi asked, suddenly terrified.

  ‘No, I am no bad spirit. I am the Messiah!’

  ‘Praise be!’ she echoed, running outside to tell everyone the new Black Jesus was among them.

  Chapter VII

  O cold is the slight wind and sere.

  And gleaming in dim light and bare,

  As vast as the mercy of God,

  Lie the plains in starlight and shade.

  — Eugene Marais

  Whether it was first or last light, the magnificent shallow-bowled plains and steeped indigo mountains stood serene. They made good time moving rapidly across the reddy-brown blur of rock, riddled with ores and iron.

  ‘This land is rich,’ Eelskje was saying. ‘You only have to squeeze it gently like a woman to make it respond!’ Some of the Kappies laughed. ‘It is true!’ they said. ‘South Africa is just like any Boer girl, tough and self-reliant on the outside — but wets her knickers for the right man!’

  They came across the scene of a massacre. Swooping vultures hung on warm airwaves in the sky over the mountains, hovering just below the cloud line, the sweet stench of corpses rising to greet them.

  Fizzing flies in the dry breeze. It seemed two groups had run headlong into each other. Once they had ran out of bullets they had fought with spears, body parts testifying to the cut and thrust of blunt blades. Horses lay where they had fallen, sweating out their last hours in a salty lather. Just like the Kenyan Mau Mau decades before the mulatto marauders had taken to mutilating livestock as part of the process of driving farmers off the land. Evidence of slash and burn surrounded them.

  Memories of the Xhosa threat to overrun the twenty-six thousand European settlers back in 1806 and their chief Ndlambe attacking Grahamstown in 1818-19 haunted Gijs’ patrol as they moved off. They could only hope for the return of leaders like Adriaan van Jaarsveld and his Bamboesberg commando who had clashed with Xhosa tribesman around Bruynteshoogte on the upper reaches of the Little Fish River. After a while they came across ossifying avocado trees, papayas dying on the branch, and carpets of macadamia on the broken tarmac. The fugitives would take shelter in thirsty citrus orchards that drooped under a searing sun. They noticed that the well pumps lay broken, tractors went without petrol and the farm workers they did meet had already drunk themselves into a stupor before midday. Everyone had heard stories of ANC officials buying up the seized farms, often using state money, and then awarding themselves management fees of twelve thousand Rand per month. The results of their labour were coming to fruition, with almost no agricultural production taking place in black-controlled areas. Gijs shook his head as the older men regaled each other with stories of how all this was an echo of the situation before the so-called transformation, when blacks lived in the fertile parts of Natal and the Eastern Cape, sitting on some of the country’s most profitable arable soil, and had squandered it all in precisely the same way. And now, despite the supposed Land Reform Acts and all the subsidies they received, they still could not cultivate or rear animals in sufficient quantity to feed the ever growing population. Severe food shortages were pressing all over the country, even before the outbreak of the current hostilities. Now famine stalked like amafufunyana in the shadows of the bushwillow trees.

  Chapter VIII

  Look out here comes the Tokolshe

  Be sure you don’t annoy him

  He’s evil and he’s hard to see

  And you never will destroy him

  He’s eaten a pebble but you know he’s there

  Because strange things are occurring

  There’s a rattling
in the rafters

  And the cat has ceased the purring

  The fire’s gone out and cold wind swirls

  And a window is flapping about

  Then suddenly everything is quiet

  A silence as loud as a shout

  You’d best call the n’anga now

  He’s the only one who can save you

  He’ll exorcise the Tokoloshe

  Before he can enslave you

  — The Tokoloshe

  It was dark inside the church and they had cut a branch from an iroko tree for the rite. The rain beat down, corrugated roofing echoing, water seeping through the rusting prefabricated shell. The christening ceremony involved two virgins dressed in white and a blood sacrifice. The officiating priest, Hastings Mabuza, more witch doctor than Protestant pastor, called upon the saints to bring the people gold and made a sign that the albino children should be brought in to face the congregation. Terrified, the little ones were dragged in one by one and cast into the circle of chanting dancers. Their frail pale faces framing the fear in their little pink eyes. One, an eight-year-old girl, fainted, collapsing to the ground, and just for a moment the chanting fell silent. Then the priest’s monotonous wail started again. A tall bare-chested man strode forward on Mabuza’s cue and seized the albino girl by her burnt stubble hair. He lifted the child and dangled it by its feet. ‘Magic commands, religion implores!’ he announced. Those pink eyes rolling even as she hung upside down, limbs wriggling like she was in the grip of seizure, as he slit her throat. Blood gurgled from between open lips. Then, the body was hacked to pieces with machetes and the limbs thrown into a big open cooking kettle behind the dais.