A Trojan Affair

by Michael Smorenburg

  “Ja… But I’m still worried about the Xhosa. Those filthy rooinek lawyers will smell money and jump on the cause. They are very tricky, especially the Jewish ones. You know how they got into bed with the Xhosa long ago, with Mandela, and even before that.” Jan warned. “The first thing they’re going to claim is that some ragtag bunch of their ancestors roamed the area hundreds of years ago before our people and used these hills for initiation rites, or something.”

  “I still don’t understand why we are following this one issue,” Willem Bauer interjected. “The main problem for me, Dominee—and I say this with all respect—goes beyond the insult to our beliefs, real as it is. I am keeping my farm…”

  “For now,” Andre reminded him.

  “Yes… for now,” Willem agreed to the implied threat that still kept him awake at night; that someday the dreaded call may come as it had for so many that he was now in the path of the next phase and would have to sell. “And I’m sorry for the families who are losing theirs, but even keeping my farm, I can hardly cope. I have no mobile signal; they’re making me take down the satellite dish I use to link to the Internet. I can’t do banking, I can’t make phone calls. My windmills are all coming down, so I can’t water the sheep. I can’t even kickstart a motorbike and this fokken SKA machine gets disturbed by the spark. I must live and do business like a Voortrekker. They’ve pushed us back a hundred and fifty years and call it progress? Without even the security of a phone, how do I protect my family if we get attacked and murdered in a country where life means nothing?”

  “Because,” Gert assured him, “when we tried to deliver that argument at the meetings with the SKA bosses and government, nobody here cared. Nobody came to the meetings… how many out of hundreds of farmers? Less than ten. Nobody would put money up for a legal challenge. Our people won’t stand together, it’s our fault. But when you challenge our beliefs…” he said, nodding with conviction.

  “It is true,” Andre backed up his Dominee as a Diaken should. “Our beliefs are our culture.”

  “I have a plan,” Gert assured him. “Don’t you worry yourself, we can get outside money for this fight. I have very big guns lined up.”

  Chapter 11

  When not out on the range, Dara had taken to experimenting with debate. In the tiny peer group he’d established since arriving in Carnarvon, there was nobody who had his worldly experience and his level of sophistication. He liked to share with his friends, but he was hungry to learn too; so he took his curiosity online, adopting a pen name—Memes.

  The name portrayed what he intended to learn and hoped to share. It encompassed the meme, a concept his father had taught him.

  “Memes, pronounced ‘meems’,” his father had taught Dara, “are cultural analogues to genes; infectious ideas that self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective social pressures.”

  The concept of memes was first conceived by Professor Dawkins, a world-renowned evolutionary anthropologist to whom Dara’s father aspired to emulate.

  The word had gone on to gain momentum, almost a life of its own. It had become a cultural phenomenon of study in its own right. Memes, it turned out, explained so much of psychology and social anthropology, from racism to religiosity, and fashion to conspiracy theory.

  “A meme is ‘an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person’,” his dad had refined the definition for Dara. “It is the unit that carries cultural ideas, symbols or practices, transmitted from mind to mind through writing, speech, gestures, or rituals.”

  Assuming the pseudonym Memes, Dara went to work. Memes became a buffer that allowed Dara to begin testing and researching the minds of strangers of every ilk. Memes commented in various medias, established a blog and quickly gained new likeminded friends on social media. He gathered enemies too.

  From a memetic perspective, Detlief’s story had become particularly fascinating to Dara.

  Detlief, of course, was up from the city, from Cape Town; sent to Carnarvon to keep him from peers and mischief in the drug-infested and dilapidated slum his family had fallen to. Worse yet, many of Detlief’s closest family members had been drawn into the drug trade and were constantly revolving through the prison turnstiles. They held rank at different levels of the various ferocious Numbers Gangs that raged and killed indiscriminately in the streets every night, in suburbs that had become warzones.

  Beyond the squabbles for turf among the drug gangs, an equally vast and potentially lethal opposing group had grown too. It was religiously based in Islamic heritage; imported as Islam had been to the Cape by the Dutch who favoured Malaysian slaves and laborers over African slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries.

  The Cape Malay community, as they were once known, practiced a benign form of Islam that was not radicalized to the degree seen elsewhere across the globe. These Moslems as they were otherwise known, stuck to themselves; they possessed a violent hatred and grudge toward the gangs.

  They quite literally met fire with high-calibre fire.

  There were contracts out on heads and—in the unlikely event that Detlief somehow managed to avoid direct involvement with the methamphetamine drug known locally as ‘tik’—his head was all too often in close proximity with others that might attract a blizzard of flying lead.

  Detlief was characteristically rough and ready. He had a gentle spirit but his unceasing brushes with violence and brutality from birth had scarred him; his memes were negative. In Carnarvon, until his recent troubles, he had been on the straight and narrow; but his wheels were buckled. Staying on the straight path was an unlikely probability; life had programmed him to veer without warning.

  Dara had picked Detlief’s plight as inspiration to express his very first essay on an Internet blog.

  “The cells of our DNA do not belong to us—they belong to the collective. We borrow them for a short life and then hand them on to our offspring, who, in their turn, pass them forward to a later generation.

  “A billion generations of ancestors, a river of raw data, stand at each of our backs. A deluge of genes flowing down the eons from the primordial soup and through ancient seas, creeping among dinosaurs and dragging its knuckles across Africa’s plains.

  “But before this journey erupted out of Africa an epoch ago, the broth that is the hominid gene had birthed a strange new thing, a new form of data that took its hold as master of our destiny: the accumulated information of chemical gene-created memes—infectious awareness. Small ideas that wove webs in thinking, meshes that trapped and milked us of our industry; some building our empires, others returning no more than blind conviction as their reward.

  “The meme has spun its cultures, fashions and religions too; through these faculties it evolves, it hacks the R-complex—the brooding reptilian brain that lurks in each of our heads serving as the seat of our aggression and territoriality. There, it draws its battle plans for self-preservation.

  “It sings its challenge from the minaret and its rival clangs a response from the church bell close across town.”

  That first piece drew some praise from those who thrilled to the cultural perspective from a poetic stance. Of course, it also left many unmoved. It also reared a few who threw derision at Dara for imagining that memes were in fact any kind of study at all. This latter group was hostile to the idea, Dara came to understand, not because they could show it to be inaccurate or nonsense as they claimed it was, but because its initiator was a man of science whom they hated.

  Dawkins had—long before Dara’s father added his voice to the debate—written landmark books on the topic of human evolutionary origins through natural selection.

  These books had drawn the unrelenting ire of conservative creationists, particularly those known as YECs who believed in a ‘young earth’. YECs took a literal view of biblical interpretation, insisting that the earth and universe are less than ten thousand years old.

  “They’re a relatively small group, Dara,” his father had told him, “but they’re very vocal. Crea
tionists consider that any proofs that contradicted biblical notions are by definition anti-God and therefore, inherently evil.”

  In quick succession, Dara, through his pseudonym alias, Memes, had followed his initial blog essay with dozens of others. He published a new one every few days, just as soon as the dust of argument had settled from the previous one.

  The reading audience polarized into two sharply opposed groups, friends and foes. Many, like Memes, used pseudonyms that provided the persons behind them shields from scorn and praise alike.

  Marsha was in the habit of reading online news during morning coffee breaks and she had been watching this new personality, Memes, as he or she had gathered both a fan club and enemies. She had no idea that the mind behind it was her boy until one day, by chance, she saw a half-finished essay on his computer that, a day later, she saw published.

  She had brimmed with pride but kept her discovery to herself, responding to Dara by creating her own pseudonym—arbitrarily selected to have no connection, ‘Kimberly-A’—through which she could engage Memes to tease and test his knowledge.

  Among those who aligned with and had befriended Dara in social media was the pseudonym, ‘VoorVel’, foreskin in Afrikaans.

  The name was intentionally provocative, intended to irritate the conservative Afrikaans opponents that he enjoyed riling in conversation. He conceived it during an argument over the religiously inspired, blindly followed practice of circumcision.

  During the ensuing weeks, the two pseudonyms, Memes and VoorVel, had befriended one another on social media, had messaged one another and joined the same discussion groups where theists and non-theists thrashed out their differences.

  Dara had found the experience of the blogs and these groups a catharsis; a place he could speak his mind openly and hear a range of opinion—some inspiring and mind-expanding, some outright insane.

  VoorVel, Dara discovered, had been born in Carnarvon. He had grown up and attended the local school many years earlier. Many of the teachers from that era were still at the school, so they had some areas of intersection to discuss.

  Dara was extremely excited by the prospects that lay ahead; VoorVel was coming to visit in a week.

  Neither Dara nor his new friend wanted their identity or association known around the town, so they arranged to meet the following Wednesday at a coffee shop in Loxton. Loxton was a neighbouring village on the Cape Town side of Carnarvon, sixty kilometres to the south.

  “I’ll be there by three p.m. Let’s meet at Blou Schuur Kafee,” VoorVel suggested.

  “How will I recognize you?” Memes typed.

  “I’ll be up in my car… you can’t miss it,” VoorVel had replied enigmatically.

  Farmers usually drive big pickup trucks—on that description, Dara imagined it would be a monster.

  Quite how he would get to the meeting—half an hour’s drive south—was another story. Perhaps, he dared himself, I’ll take the bike.

  It certainly would be an exciting prospect to consider.

  Chapter 12

  The firewood had been uncharacteristically green and moist so that the whole affair had got off to a slow start. The result: an impressive hillock of discarded beer cans and bottles had begun to mount.

  There was a mix of music the whole evening and Sonja had danced her way through most of the boys, laughing from the belly at slapstick pranks and teenage jokes round the fire where the spit-trussed lamb was dripping hisses into the coals, its aroma tempting the predatory passions of the inebriated to swell.

  Wherever she went, Sonja towed behind her a small pack of darting-eyed admirers. Like hyenas near a lion kill, none were bold enough to stake a claim. Instead, they were satisfied to snatch a morsel of her time where they could; a dance or flirtatious word when Neels, the jilted pack alpha, was distracted by the celebration rituals that his 18th birthday demanded.

  For Neels, it had been a spectacular day. It had started with the new truck from his father. She was a beauty; fat tires, five seats, turbocharged diesel grunt and spotlights for night hunting on a bar above the cab. His right to earn a full license and legally drive was now a reality, and he could retire the lesser farm diesel he’d sometimes used.

  Well before sunset, the Vermaak farm—one of the wealthiest in the region—had become a hive of activity. Every teen from the district had come to pay homage. A vast marquee housed a bar, dinner seating and a dance floor, with the cooking fires outside.

  Neels was already well oiled long before the sun approached the horizon, his vision swimming and his voice roaring, almost hoarse.

  His dad watched his lad with pride—it took some constitution to swallow what Neels had managed and still be accelerating well after dark.

  Neels, so preoccupied all day with the stuff of men, had hardly given Sonja a second thought. Suddenly, though, something in the fog of his most primitive self tugged him in a new direction and off he went in search of her, the truth that she’d split with him weeks before anaesthetized by the grog.

  She saw him coming and tried to give him the slip, ducking surreptitiously into the thick of the crowd’s throng. Her gaggle of admirers also saw him beginning to prowl and they too abandoned their hopeful attempts and evaporated out of contention.

  She checked her watch and saw with relief that it was almost 10 p.m., the time her father was scheduled to collect her.

  Tonight, Andre was on duty and so would be in the police van and in uniform.

  She ran her eye over the pockets of adults at the periphery of the revellers, but no sign of dad among them yet. Andre’s booming voice dishing out greetings would precede him anyhow, in the event she’d missed his arriving car.

  “Why so early?” Andre had asked when she’d requested the pickup time.

  “Entrance exams, Pa. I have to be up early tomorrow to study.”

  It was of course nonsense, she could easily stay till midnight without harm to her university ambitions, but she’d anticipated something like this from Neels. Indeed, she’d preferred not to have come at all, but that would have made it worse with him and triggered a scandal across the community. Her father would have forced her to go—it was a cultural necessity. Over the past weeks, the more she’d withdrawn from Neels the more insistent his advances had become.

  Sonja had played cat and mouse with Neels for long minutes under the marquee, flitting from group to group, keeping anything or anyone tall enough to obscure her from his searching eyes, breaking off conversation when she estimated his next drift might bring him in her direction.

  Neels knew Sonja was here, somewhere in this crowd.

  Earlier when she’d arrived, he’d embraced her roughly to the jubilant cheers of his minions.

  After that, he’d seen her several times out on the dance floor. Each time, he’d scrutinized the level of threat posed, but judged that her intimacy with that partner did not require him to intervene and end it.

  Now, no matter where he looked, she seemed to have evaporated.

  There was no doubt in Neels’ mind that she would have left the party earlier. If she’d dared to do such a thing without a goodbye, news of it would have quickly found him through his network of eyes.

  Lately, he admitted to himself as he puzzled her invisibility, she’d been immensely frustrating. Ever since that incident with that prrrrretty boy at school, he pondered for the thousandth time; she’d been disdainful and disobedient to his calls for more of her time, breaking off dates he’d made with her.

  The correlation between the Dara incident and her unacceptable behaviour as ‘his girl’ was unavoidable, and it infuriated him, raising the stakes now that he was drunk.

  Even on this momentous evening of his coming of age, he contemplated that he’d managed only the briefest of words with her before she’d somehow each time spirited herself away rather than hang close at hand as she normally would and properly should.

  The longer his intensive search went on, the more exaggerated his craze became. It was his
birthday, he reminded himself, and about time that the queen of this town submitted to its king. His passions were charging, alcohol fuelled as they were; he could feel them becoming volatile.

  Knowing him as she did, Sonja could see he was hunting her, his urgency in the search beginning to escalate. She needed an escape. Her moment came as he was distracted by a small throng who insisted he drop yet another measure of the powerful local farm-made liquor down his gullet. She slipped out through the back of the enclosure, unnoticed.

  The tension of escape had taxed her, and she needed the relief of a few minutes away from people, so she drifted into the dark and surveyed the parked cars for the police van as her eyes adjusted to the dark.

  The sounds emitting from the tent retreated, becoming a mélange of voices garnished with an occasional whoop or pepper of laughter, the music an underscore.

  Neels’ farm fortunately had not yet seen its mobile phone coverage severed, and earlier she’d sent text messages to her Pa, urging him to hurry. Now, away from the noise, she called him. The phone began ringing.

  “En hier loop my bokkie,” Neels suddenly crooned from the darkness, close behind her, unashamedly calling her a plaything. “Making a call to someone?” he asked with sarcasm ringing in his voice.

  Reports that she’d slipped out back had found his ears and in the dark, the light of her phone homed him in on her position like a missile.

  Sonja froze, ice surging through her veins; it was the worst possible place for him to find her. At that instant, her father’s phone went to voicemail and she let it record, hoping if he got it, it would raise his urgency.

  “Aggghh, Neels,” she tried to make light of it. “I’m just not feeling well. My father will be here in a moment.”

  The urgency of that unexpected news, news of her imminent departure, raised the stakes for Neels, so he closed in.