The S.K.A. at Carnarvon
A
TROJAN
AFFAIR
Michael Smorenburg
First published in the United States of America by CreateSpace in 2014.
Copyright ©Michael Smorenburg, 2014
All rights of Michal Smorenburg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Some of the concepts and quotations expressed in this fictional tale first appeared, some in a different form, in various print or electronic expressions by the originators, authors or presenters so named.
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Updated Edition
House of Qunard Publishing
Copyright © 2014 Michael Smorenburg
Copyright © 2018 Michael Smorenburg & Qunard Publishing
All rights reserved.
ISBN Print: 978-0-620-62576-0
ISBN eBook: 978-0-620-62577-7
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My appreciation to the many people from both sides of the divide who, over the past five years of research, helped me come to grips with the arguments, rebuttals and general confusion that abounds when science and faith begin to tussle.
Thank you to darling Kirstin Engelbrecht for your tireless line-by-line edits and putting up with me in all ways. Much appreciation goes to Lin Sampson for her hard-hitting critique and to my very special friend Patricia Glyn who always finds the time to hear me out, and give great advice and YouTube interviews. Thanks to all proofreaders and others, particularly: Butch Coetzee, Craig Campbell, Dino Contario, Leverne Gething, Noel Harman, Charmaine Hoffmann, Mondy Holliday, Glenda & Kitt Lill, Meredith Martin, Christy McCullagh, Denzil Newman, Lynne Newnham, Frank Ortmann, Paul Prinsloo, Chyrisse Torrente, Debbie Wilding, Catherine Winn… and too, too, too many others for my flitting mind to remember—please forgive! You all gave so much input, feedback and encouragement along the way. I am enormously grateful to Peter and Francy Schoeman, and Nestie and JD Smit for their hospitality and huge volume of feedback and experience as residents of the impacted area that the SKA will cover. Thank you Hans Pietersen for taking an entire working day to do an emergency last minute proof-read to iron out some gogos that had crept into this updated version. A huge “thank you” to Karolyn Herrera of DocEditing.com for her attention to detail in editing—I should have listened more in class to make your job easier. / To Gemma Poppet Rice of Southern Stiles Book Covers for this and my other covers—they’re fabulous Poppet! / To Leila Summers of Leila Summers of Spread-the-Word, whose efforts put this book into your hands. For this cover, matched as it is to my other 3 titles, I give special thanks to Southern Stiles Designs and Gemma Poppet for her creativity and astounding work ethic. I am grateful to my many friends who patiently listened to my unceasing babble about this undertaking over several years; I apologize to my online friends for my unceasing posts, ‘keeping you in the loop’ as the project drew to a close
DEDICATION
This novel explores the drama humans create for themselves.
It is dedicated to those who have lost their lives and suffered unnecessarily at the hands of intolerance and irrational fears
“News is like the wind; it comes over mountains and valleys and brings with it the fragrance of flowers and also the stench of other things.”
Bushman adage
The Square Kilometer Array Telescope
At Carnarvon
In this work of fiction based as it is on fact: names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The arguments for and against science and theism are originated by minds greater than mine. I borrow them for dramatic effect and send all credit for them to the many inspired authors and books on these topics; shelves of which I devoured in research for this work of fiction.
Also by Michael Smorenburg:
Ragnarok—Qunard Publishing—2017
The Praying Nun—Qunard Publishing—2016
LifeGames—Qunard Publishing—1995 & 2016
Business Buyer’s Kit—Career Press 1997
The Everything Sailing Book Part 1—Adams Media 1998
The Everything Sailing Book Part 2—Adams Media 1999
PROLOGUE
The world is shrinking. Everywhere, new ideas bursting in on the blissful isolation of traditional cultures; modern thinking driving wedges between the generations; doubt creeping into long-cherished religious dogmas of small communities.
____
In the 1990s, an Afrikaner, South Africa’s President, FW de Klerk, brokered the end of apartheid. On paper and in theory, all citizens and ideologies became equal. But culture is no slave to politics, and hardened stalwarts in forgotten corners continue to march to the beat of an older drum, resisting outsiders and their threatening new ideas.
____
On 28 May 2012, the decision was made to build science’s biggest infrastructure in history—the SKA, Square Kilometre Array telescope—around Carnarvon, South Africa.
The SKA will find the origin of the universe.
Thing is, Carnarvon is Bible country.
____
This is one of those stories. It is set in Africa and echoed in small towns all around the world.
____
For your ease and convenience:
A glossary of technical and foreign words and terms appears at the back of this book
Chapter 1
Dara was slight of build.
Indeed, with his diminutive proportions, twinkling eyes and a complexion like a tenderly airbrushed glossy, he risked being pretty—a dangerous liability in his sudden predicament.
Still shaking from the confrontation, his mind was a clutter of competing thoughts.
“What th...” his mouth began of its own accord, but he cut it short. With his persecutor still in shoving distance, this was not the moment to vent.
“Don’t you beckchat me boy. Don’t you dare….” the voice with a heavy guttural accent barked from the unlit corridor behind him. “You GET OUT!”
The muted sounds of the school corridor fled as he reached the threshold. Beyond that doorway—outdoors—freshly minted enemies waited.
This scrubland he’d become marooned in, this village, this dorp—Carnarvon in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province—had never felt more like a prison.
The teacher’s voice behind him demanded that he keep moving. This was the “final warning”, it threatened.
He ignored it a moment to steal a glimpse heavenward and the sun glared fiercely back. Like the biblical God of old, it commanded him to avert his foreign eyes.
The sun here was a different beast from its insipid self in England. Here it was a cruel master. Dominating every outdoor ambition from horizon to horizon, unhurried as it was to vacate its daytime throne.
Everything in this place was in no hurry to do much at all. Lethargic and slow paced: everything but the insects and flies that delighted in aggravating with their
manic agitations.
Everything was parched too. Years of drought left the powdery residue of fine grit on every surface.
He squinted out over the arc-lit gravel wasteland where shadows seemed to hide on tiptoe, the zinging din from the cicadas a wall of sound plaited into the sweltering heat, amplifying his misery.
As he scanned the school grounds, clutches of kids were engaged in small private dramas, distinct groups apart in separate places. Apartheid, the forced separation of races had not yet relinquished its grip here.
He huffed in resignation and pocketed his trembling hands. Predators feed on fear, he reminded himself.
This was now home. For the next three months, this lot would be his lot, so he squared his shoulders and stepped out into Hell.
Manufacturing a leisurely attitude that he didn’t feel, he steered his hands-in-pockets amble toward the shade of a flat-topped acacia thorn tree that promised some slim relief from the cloudless sky.
As he approached, the clutch of brown boys loitering in the shade there halted their conversations and eyed him with suspicion and masks of dread.
Beyond them in the distance, seemingly oblivious to the oppressive climate, a noisy game with a ball was in full swing. Big boned lads, all white, charged about while a group of girls looked on admiringly. Most had blonde hair, but one stood out, hers lustrous and full of body even from this range.
“You’re the new one they’re talking about?” the boldest of the brown boys under the tree inquired directly.
“Till the end of term,” Dara confirmed, relieved that the pitch of his own voice was only a breath too high. He offered his hand and the most nonchalant shrug and smile he could muster. The boys looked at the trembling offer as if it dripped with disease.
“Best you keep opinions to yourself then,” said the wispy lad with a yellow tinge to the brown of his skin and a shrewd oriental set to intelligent eyes.
“I haven’t expressed any,” Dara frowned, giving up on his attempt at a handshake.
“They say you have…” the accuser replied, motioning with his head toward the big-boned boys. “You challenged the teacher, the domi...”
“Oh hogwash,” Dara guffawed. The absurdity of the lie bringing confidence flooding back. “That teacher…” he shook his head, “he bloody well told me to tell the class why I’m here…. He went nuts about religion.”
There was an awkward moment of silence, the boy studying Dara’s effort to subdue private terrors. In it, he saw his own reflection, so he extended his hand and a smile of encouragement.
“I’m Dawid, they call me ‘Dawie’.” He pronounced the ‘w’ as a ‘v’ and drew out the ‘a’ so it sounded like two ‘a’s and a ‘v’— “Daah-Vee”. He introduced the others.
Dara greeted each in turn, the relief of overcoming terror, an exhilaration.
Adrenaline had washed Dara’s mind clear and, with his confidence rushing back, the details of the scene started catalysing in his mind.
Dawie’s hair echoed the sparse pockets of bush in the desert just beyond the school’s fence. It tufted in clumps on his head. That and his startlingly high cheekbones and small ears struck Dara as peculiar.
The eyes of one boy caught Dara’s attention; they were green as emeralds and just as crystal clear. With his dusty blond hair and dusty skin, he seemed strangely at odds with this group in this divided place.
Dawie saw the small question in Dara’s frown.
“This is Tjaardt,” he introduced, and the boy’s face lit up. “He’s also a foreigner.”
Tjaardt protested: his mother was from the Baster community in neighbouring Namibia, but his father was local, and “I was even been born in this town!”
“Ja… but you’re not really one of us… and you’re not one of them…” Dawie’s head again motioned toward the ball game. “So you’re a foreigner.”
As if arranged by divine intervention to stress the point, a wave of tension suddenly dashed through Dara’s new friends as a a shout came from the field beyond them. The game had momentarily halted and there was some consultation between several of its participants, one brute clearly the ringleader. He was glaring toward Dara and the huddle under the tree. Nods of agreement and an unmistakable hand gesture flicked in their direction, emphasized by a rasping curse in the local language that carried on the still air.
The boys in the shade pretended not to notice, but darting glances betrayed their fear. The game resumed, but the message was sent and received; this newcomer in their midst placed the brown boys in jeopardy. Dara felt the thing within trying to grip him with its terror again. To overcome it he spoke his defiance carefully in a measured voice, mainly to assure himself all would be fine.
“So, they think I’ve ventured an opinion? And...? What’s wrong with my opinions even if I had? It’s a free world.”
“Free?” Dawie laughed the word out. “In this place, if you don’t say what they want to hear, that is opinion enough. And it’s worse for you because you’re black.” Dara confirmed his condemnation with a scrawny finger that poked at Dara’s forearm.
“I’m Indian,” Dara corrected.
“Ja… whatever…” he waved with the back of his copper coloured hand, “you’re a coolie. Brown, black, makes no difference. You don’t have an opinion,” Dawie assured him.
Dara looked down at the offending blackness of his own forearm; the son of an Indian father whose father in another era had indeed been a coolie according to the word’s definition—an unskilled native labourer from India’s south.
He was proud of his Indian heritage, but he hadn’t really noticed its blackness like this before. Here though, under the intense glare of the African sun and the fierce scrutiny of the locals, his blackness seemed his standout and perhaps only defining feature.
The news got worse and worse, they explained. He was the darkest with a strange accent that didn’t fit the expectations the locals had for how he should talk. His larney—his posh British accent—was hated so much because it was, well, British. And the British had burned their farms and imprisoned their women a century earlier. To the bitter end… they would never forget it.
“He says,” Dawid gestured toward the distant tormentors, “they’ll shut your mouth for you if you open it again.”
“I’m not scared of them,” Dara parried and forced the involuntary swallow he felt coming to leave him—it would undermine the dismissive claim he needed to believe.
“Well then, you’re a fool. Don’t you understand? They’ll fuck you up properly.”
Today was Dara’s first full day at the school.
The last class he’d attended before this lunch break had been Life Orientation.
The teacher, Mr. van der Nest, was a tall thin man with a hawkish face and ferocious eyes inherited from generations that scanned distant horizons. He was not on staff but an outsider who filled in pro bono to teach various guidance subjects both in and out of the curriculum.
Van der Nest, in an increasingly ill mood, had checked his watch and halted class early.
“Sit julle Bybels weg,” he’d instructed the class. He’d wanted all bibles safely stowed before allowing this little black foreigner to speak the heresies that the school authorities had insisted he must.
He’d then fixed Dara with his most intimidating glare and gruffly told the boy to introduce himself, to explain to the class who he was and why he had come to their Carnarvon, and to get it over with quickly.
The order for this introduction, Van Der Nest explained in an apologetic tone to the class, in his Afrikaans language, had come from a higher authority.
“They say to treat him like an ambassador for the project,” the Principal, Dr. Deon Louw, had earlier told Gert van der Nest. “I’ve been instructed by the department that, as he’s the first of the scientist’s kids, we need to formally welcome him and allow him to talk on their behalf. Now, I don’t like it either Gert… but I’d rather he do it in your class because I know you can get it
over with in the right context. As long as you let him have his say before the end of class, we’ve done our duty.”
Van der Nest was not a man who like being told what to do or how to do it; it was one of the advantages of volunteering his time. For years, everyone had turned a blind eye—indeed they’d been delighted—as he’d ignored the State’s official curriculum in his Life Orientation course in favour of his own doctrine.
But this unfolding situation had become even worse. He’d only just stomached the unfortunate news that a foreign scientist’s son would soon defile his turf when, ahead of the school assembly that morning, he’d realized the boy was a dark-skinned Indian with flashing white teeth and the charm of the devil. He’d watched, brooding, as the boy had quickly drawn several of the white girls into a tittering mob around him.
If many more like this Indian were threatening to come, Gert had determined that he’d set the mood for their welcome with this one.
So, with all bibles safely out of sight, he’d rounded on Dara, his tone making the lad’s presence sound like an accusation of some dreadful sacrilege, “Explain to the class why you’re here, and make it quick.”
Dara had understood the tone clearly enough but was clueless as to its murky motivation. For him, the straightforward question without a hidden sleight involved two logical answers. Dara had elected to come to Carnarvon school to meet friends, avoid boredom and kill the last months of the year before his final year of schooling, which would see him in a private Cape Town boarding school next year.
But to get to that explanation, he’d first need to explain what had brought him to Carnarvon; and that would require him to explain his mother’s career….
Since most of the kids were the children of sheep farmers or farm laborers, Dara had imagined that expanding on the details of the most exciting technology ever conceived in science coming to their very doorstep would be riveting and welcomed.
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