Kraal

by Fenek Solère

  ‘The golden child will bring us gold in life!’ Hastings screamed at his audience. ‘Slice, beat and kill! Slice, beat and kill!’ And to the rhythm of his chant they all made their serpent dance as part of the sacrifice ritual, only stopping to partake of the sacrament of broiled flesh, fresh from the tip of the spoon, as their new Messiah scooped into the kettle and offered it up to his devotees. ‘With this I anoint you,’ he preached exultantly, his hands still glistening with the sticky blood and grease. ‘May your house grow and prosper and your loins never fail you!’

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  Gijs was woken early by the swoosh of helicopter blades clattering overhead, its trajectory following the course of the Sun River. Ten minutes later it was back, sweeping further to the south. But by then the column were crouched in gullies and burrows, heads down, gun barrels pointing upwards should they need to fire.

  Black clouds suddenly appeared without warning and opened upon the day. It rained and rained, hanging long mist trails from horizon to horizon. Then, after the downpour, out came the birds, circling, calling to the winds. Sticky runnels of water cascading from the open-palmed leaves of the jacket-plum trees onto the brides bush and hirta grass.

  Below on the road they could see a convoy of vehicles parked head to tail with their lights flicking on and off. An oil tanker lay on its side, beached like a sick whale, blocking the highway. Gijs could just make out that the wheels had burnt out, a river of thick black diesel gushing over the road. There was no way past. The Boers were backed up around the surrounding hills.

  Gijs’ binoculars swept back and forth studying the scene, evaluating how to move forward, before twisting about to face his team. ‘We can’t get around,’ he said, ‘the gorge is too steep. We’ve got to go through!’ He began to strip off his ordnance, unbuckling his belt and ammo clips. ‘There are only three or four regulars down there but they are in radio contact with their base. I’ll go ahead alone so that they think I’ve just wandered in from Setlagole.’

  ‘It’ll look more believable if you are with your wife,’ Eelskje exclaimed precipitously, raising eyebrows all around.

  ‘That’s true,’ Venter agreed, ‘a pretty woman will also distract them, they’ll be less likely to open fire at first sight!’

  Gijs looked into Eelskje’s eyes.

  Ten minutes later Gijs and Eelskje were walking out onto the side of the road, looking west towards the pile up, their shadows moving rapidly up to the confused and illiterate men in their ill-fitting uniforms. At Gijs’s approach they stopped talking and stared at his companion, who had chosen a short tight skirt to emphasise the curve of her long legs. Gijs touched his hat in salute and two army men came around the side of the burnt-out cab. Gijs and Eelskje could hear the banter between the men and their headquarters over the two-way radios. The girl pushed out her hip provocatively. One of them pointed an AK-47 at Gijs’s heart. The other lowered his gun, lit a cigarette, took a long puff and smiled amiably in Eelskje’s direction.

  ‘So, who are you?’ asked the first soldier. ‘Where do you think you are going?’

  ‘Our car broke down,’ Gijs said, gesturing vaguely at the empty land behind him. ‘We need a ride into town!’ The soldier pinched out his cigarette and waved him back, ‘Is that your girl?’ Their eyes drawn to Eelskje. Gijs met their smiles with one of his own.

  ‘Yes, this is Eelskje.’ The nearest soldier licked his lips, calling his other two colleagues to leave the radio and come out from behind their cover to see what they had caught.

  ‘There is a war now, and you are a spy,’ he stated, his lips curling back in an ugly sneer. ‘Give me your papers!’ Gijs reached into the plastic supermarket bag swinging haphazardly at his side. ‘Come, show me what’s in there,’ the soldier ordered. His victim raised the carrier towards his interrogator.

  ‘See,’ Gijs offered, lifting the opened bag. The man with the gun stepped forward to look inside, squinting down into the opening.

  ‘What is this?’

  Gijs tried to look innocent. The camouflaged arm lifting a packet of dagga from the bag held out before him. ‘This is confiscated!’ the soldier declared authoritatively, ‘Now tell your woman we will need to search her!’ And as the men stepped forward they were picked off by snipers from the hillside, bodies dropping onto the tarmac, melting in the flow of oil leaking from the fractured canister.

  Soon, word of his miracles had spread through the townships. Followers began to multiply and gather at his home. One late afternoon Hastings was driving down into Booysens. His passenger seat jinking and jangling with rolling bottles as he came up to an accident on the side of the road. Peeking through the grime-encrusted windscreen he could see an ambulance with a motorcycle escort being attacked by angry youths, throwing rocks and dancing to the sound of Tupac Shakur’s Gangsta Rap song ‘Never had a Friend Like Me’:

  I’m down for you so ride with me,

  my enemies, your enemies,

  cause you ain’t never had a friend like me…

  maybe now they feel us, in the act of war,

  more casualties, no survivors,

  any man that defies us quickly dies,

  cause we riders is you and me against the nation…

  They never wanted us to make it,

  everything that we possess, we had to take it…

  Above him a man was standing on the balcony of a derelict block of flats, his clenched black hand shaking, a revolver firing down through the Red Cross on the ambulance’s roof. Amid the screaming and the burning the residents were hiding in doorways, waving their arms, shaking their heads in frenzied terror. An old man was being kicked insensible under a lamp post, doors were being forced open, another woman trapped at the end of a dark corridor was having her underclothes torn away, looters ransacking everything, people bundling up anything they could carry.

  A police van’s flashing blue light drew up and a burst of machine pistol fire welcomed Hastings’ arrival in the midst of the scene. Everyone scattered as he approached the ambulance, the people fell back, shocked at what they were witnessing, screaming to the heavens as Hastings wearing his large green mantis mask turned his head to gaze upon them.

  ‘God is here!’ they shouted, ‘The Mantis is come to Johannesburg!’ And like Jesus entering Jerusalem, Mabuza was swept up by the crowd, increasing numbers joining his retinue as he was feted and paraded in the back of a 4x4 towards Joubert Park, where he declared he would make a great speech.

  Word spread and by high noon long processions from all over the city and the nearby townships came hot-foot to Joubert. There was no serious attempt to govern any longer. The President and his cabinet were at a complete loss about how to respond. Elsewhere, all over the country, many other landmarks were infested by his disciples, called to take over their sacred ancestral sites, just as Hastings had demanded. Each group was led by an acolyte of Mabuza’s choosing and was accompanied by drummers, women carrying butternut squash and teams of armed guards.

  When Hastings appeared on the platform there was a sharp intake of breath as his unique visage was relayed on TV screens all over the nation. ‘I am me!’ he proclaimed, high on cocaine and alcohol, ‘And I am you!’ he insisted, his deep voice bellowing metallically. Then, after a second’s pause while he swigged bourbon from a bottle, ‘And we are everyone!’ The people responded, ‘We are you! You are us! We is everyone!’

  ‘I have been sent to save us from catastrophe!’ he declaimed loudly into the microphone. ‘The Day of Two Suns, Nongqawuse and Nombanda, is nearly upon us. Like in the old times we must meet at the Gxara river, like Mhalakaza, the last prophet told us!’ Then after the dancing and the shouting died down, Hastings spoke once again. ‘Cattle are the race, they being dead, the race dies. Then a new people will rise: Inkomo luhlanga, zifile luyakufa uhlanga!’

  And then Mabuza told them that as the appointed day approached they were to assemble in their white blankets, wearing new brass wire rings, as he, their Messiah, expected. They m
ust pray for Hastings to make the two new suns to rise over the Amatolas mountains and force the English to walk back through the parting sea. Then he promised that a road would transport the foreign devils back to uhlanga, where Satan would dispose of them. A day of darkness would follow and then the new world would be born. The resurrection of the ancestors and new herds of cattle will erupt from the earth and unbelievers like the settlers would be punished for their faithlessness by snake bites.

  However, even as the sun rose and traversed the heavens over the following days, closely watched by millions of Hastings’ believers, nothing happened. They raised their right hands to the sky and yelled ‘Inkos!’ in invocation of war. Then they chanted ‘Ingwenyama’ after the Lion King and ‘Indlovukati’ after his mother, the Lady Elephant. When, after a week, the sun eventually crested the western hill tops before it finally set, departing to leave the world in darkness, there was a palpable sense of disappointment in the hearts of the dispersing crowds who made their way back to the townships on dusty roads, wailing and dancing out their uncomprehending frustration at the world.

  And each day the magic failed Hastings would find a scapegoat from within his flock. ‘He is Mujiba, a collaborator with the Boer!’ he would cry, pointing to a man or a boy. Then the victim was pulled from the throng and hurled to the floor and Hastings’ body guards would raise their arms and beat his head flat with knobkerries.

  → The South African President and his family leave South Africa for their luxury villa in Antibes;

  → The Western media censors footage of the street fighting in African cities, fearful of accusations of reinforcing stereotypical images of developing nations;

  → The BBC’s Africa Today news channel conducts interviews with victims of atrocities committed by white militias in rural areas;

  → Burundi offers military aid to the AmaGiqwa Clan fighting the Deyi clan in and around Ciskei.

  The sun was high as Czapski’s commando rode over the ridge. Their horses edged right and left among the rocks. A cold wind whistled through flapping clothes, scraping their ribs with mercury-tipped fingers. As the head of the troop reached the crest of the rising eminence, he halted. Before him was a full armoured column of government forces dotted with Chinese advisors. Czapski filled his pipe from a pouch tucked in the inside pocket of his coat. He looked over to his second in command, a veteran called Plaatje.

  ‘Looks like we have a problem.’

  His comrade looked back through world-weary eyes.

  ‘No. I think they have the problem!’ Then mustering the patrol in a thin line along the ridge and cocking their weapons they moved forward in battle formation just like the old Boer army a century ago. Not even the weaving Jian-10 fighter that circled overhead could dissuade them as they started to gallop on.

  The mountains were steep and the ravines deep like a natural frontier land. Not a single beast browsed the ridges, only the sound of bustards circling above.

  The going was hard as the column found itself scrambling through dense scrub. This, they knew, was the country where the Xhosa had fought hand-to-hand with the British amid the mimosa. For nearly a century after the colony’s foundation the descendants of Ngqika and his warlord uncle, Ndlambe, themselves struggling in an internecine war, had instinctively opposed the encroachment of white civilization with their spear points.

  Now as Gijs and the others advanced along deserted tracks, they could see the wreckage of the occasional gabled bungalow lost in overgrown fields. The deserted sheep-runs filled with mud and stones. They found an empty village school house, its desks and chairs broken up and used for firewood. Close to the burnt out wreck of a bakkie they saw a tangle of knife-scraped skeletons lying in cold ash and a pile of blood stained clothes shredded by wandering hyenas.

  ‘We must bury the bodies,’ someone insisted. Gijs shook his head.

  ‘But it is the Christian way. We are not barbarians!’

  ‘It will give us away,’ Eelskje replied sternly. ‘Anyone passing this way will know straight away whites are here!’

  ‘Eelskje is right, it is impossible.’ Gijs was firm.

  ‘But...’

  ‘There is no choice, we are not going to die!’

  ‘Then at least a few words before we pass on!’

  Gijs smiled.

  ‘Make them few,’ he allowed. An old woman recited N.P. van Wyk Louw’s Dialogue of the Dead:

  They saw the Cape and hills, the slopes of the hills

  spread to most distant ends as light

  where last strange stars fade out of sight

  each one is God is so diffused,

  no sign of pain could here be used,

  where all in all are lost in light.

  For two full days and nights they marched on through this eerie and silent land. Sometimes they came across tracks. The telltale paraphernalia of witchcraft marked their progress west. Then one day at twilight their eyes unexpectedly fell upon a very thin native standing before them on the track, upright as some skeletal totem sprung from the earth.

  Gijs approached him, looking side to side, nervous about an ambush. The line behind him bristling like a porcupine with pointing gun barrels. When Gijs got close he could see the man facing him was much younger than he had first thought. Hunger had withered him, his biceps were like small river stones stretched over scraps of old leather.

  ‘Haak!’ he told him in Afrikaans.

  ‘Asihambi!’ was the reply. There was a childlike defiance in the black’s eyes. Then he turned and walked ahead of the Boer trekkers, moving on long gangly legs, singing a traditional song. Gijs and his compatriots followed along the path, realising that the thickets on either side were impassable and that their only hope was to trust in the local native’s indolence and their own firepower.

  The thin man led them up a dust track between thorny num num bushes, skirting a graveyard where the dead had been dug up to feed starving mouths. Emerging into a clearing, the Boers were confronted with a great mass of people. At first glance it seemed they were unarmed and posed no obvious threat. Men in multi-coloured cloaks swayed side by side with breast feeding women who giggled inanely as they watched the strangers come on.

  There were as many as thirty thatched bee-hive huts spread over the grassy knoll. ‘Presents, where are our presents?’ the natives babbled, holding out their twitching fingers to grasp at anything that the newcomers may have to offer. Their leader sat on a great big stone under a tree. ‘Jamesons whisky,’ he called with childish authority, ‘bring to me!’ Eelskje spotted a handwritten sign hanging from a tree.

  ‘Mayibuye! Afrika!’ Gijs read. ‘My language isn’t good enough,’ he admitted. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Let Africa come back!’ Eelskje whispered. They had heard tell of some groups of blacks who had taken Mandela’s fairy tales of a golden African past literally. The fraudulent sentiments expressed so dreamily in his biography were etched into everyone’s memory:

  Many years ago, when I was a boy brought up in my village in the Transkei, I listened to the elders of the tribe telling stories about the good old days before the arrival of the white man. Then our people lived peacefully, under the democratic rule of their kings and their amapakati, insiders, but meaning the closest in rank to the king, and moved freely and confidently up and down the country without let or hindrance. The country was our own, in name and right. We occupied the land, the forests, the rivers; we extracted the mineral wealth beneath the soil and all the riches of the beautiful country. We set up and operated our own government, we controlled our own arms and we organised our trade and commerce. The elders would tell tales of the wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the Fatherland, as well as the acts of valour by generals and soldiers during these epic days...

  Such fanciful dreams had already caused inter-ethnic conflict with the battle cry, Zemk inkomo magwalandini, ‘The enemy has captured the cattle, you cowards!’ being raised across the length and breadth of the country’s black
diaspora. Characters like Hastings had taken advantage of the opportunity by forming unsustainable communes, and much like the Xhosa prophets of the 1850s, began, in their drug-addled state, to encourage their followers to kill their cattle and destroy food stocks, so that the white man would be expelled from the lands he had stolen. Thousands of Xhosa had starved to death in past times and today the ‘sad horror’ was being replicated.

  A pretty kaffir girl of about fifteen ran up to them, holding out her fingers, clicking them provocatively in front of Gijs. She twitched her whole body, small nutwood nipples pointing upwards into the sunlight. She began dancing, two steps right, then two steps left, forward and backward. Her skin was of a deep bronze hue, soft and smooth, though languid of movement, she spoke eagerly, proffering her open legs.

  ‘Mutti,’ she kept saying, ‘take, take!’

  Eelskje smiled.

  ‘She’s courting you.’ Gijs frowned and declined her exhortation just as the thin man who had preceded them came back into view.

  ‘Boer,’ he said in a high shrill voice, ‘if you have no presents you are not welcome in our land anymore. Our leader speaks so!’

  Gijs nodded. ‘We are moving on now,’ he tried to reply in broken Xhosa intermingled with Zulu. The man looked confused and shook an empty skull in front of Eelskje’s face. As Gijs stepped forward to shield her from the affront a young man of some stature appeared through the surrounding circle of tribes people. He was wearing a gold neck chain and the scabbard of an old cavalry sword hung at his narrow hip. Items he had no doubt plundered from one of the numerous family farms in the hills.

  ‘Lobola, lobola?’ he was shouting through broken ivory gums. Gijs stared back confused, shaking his head. The old man let out a snide laugh.

  ‘He asks the bride price for your girl!’ A look of fear crossed Gijs’s face, a spectre of the past rising before him.

  ‘You can’t afford her,’ he said with jaw clenched in bitterness. The old man translated for his excitable compatriot who went to draw his sword, yelling, ‘Ama-Bhulu a-zi-zinjathe Boers are dogs!’ before Gijs shot him dead at point blank range. Awe and terrified rage settled on the visages of the onlookers, who lurched back at the sharp report of the gunshot. The crowd of wild faces parted and they passed on unmolested.