Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Namusa was Sipho’s second wife and was many years younger than her husband. The first and senior wife had stopped bearing children seven years earlier, causing Sipho to pay the high price of six good cows for Namusa, her father demanding so much for the prettiest of his daughters. She was fifteen and sixteen when Luke, her first son, was born. He proved to be her only child, and it was this lack of children that threw Luke increasingly into the company of Matthew.

  This changed the course of his life. From the cradle he began to absorb the white man’s culture, and learnt the English language which would be the key to all the knowledge stored in all the books in the world. Even if he could read in Xhosa, the translations would have been so strange as to mean little to him. Had anyone written in Xhosa, something which had never been done, it would have been about the tribe, which had many distinctive ways of describing a bird in flight but no word for machine or algebra. The language barrier was the limiting factor for the black man.

  Luke and Matthew learned to crawl together and talk together, in a mixture of Xhosa and English, which by the time they were three had become two distinct languages and a puzzle for young Luke. Robert would understand whatever he said but Sipho only some of it. So many of the child’s questions were directed at Robert, and son and father, confounded by Sipho’s age, were not as close as they should have been. This brought the first glimmer of doubt into Sipho’s world. The era of discontent had begun, with a harmless clash of cultures.

  When the boys were five, Isalin bought a correspondence course for Matthew, and his education began as normally as it had done for his great great-grandfather. Luke was generally with Matthew during the day, and lessons were fun. It never occurred to them that they were alienating Luke from his family or leading him into conflict with the culture of his own people. What was apparent to both Isalin and Robert, who took it in turn to give instruction, was that both boys were bright and that both of them never stopped asking questions.

  The only outside influence came once a year from the Todds and their friends when they were on holiday, and whatever happened in Port St Johns was light years away from their lives in Johannesburg. They might have thought it strange to see the two little boys from different races holding hands, but no one put it into words.

  Robert and Isalin were largely self-sufficient. Mental stimulation for Robert had ceased with the passing years. He was deeply in love with his wife and nature and the joy of showing his son the simple ways of survival. They dangled baited string in the sea and the foolish crayfish refused to let go as the line was gently pulled out of the water. They dived together for oysters when the sea was calm and took out the Todd motor boat, launching it with skill from the beach. All manner of fish landed in the boat: seventy-fours, yellow-bellies, cape salmon, copper steenbras and black steenbras. The Indian Ocean was plentiful, and some of the fish went in to Port St Johns, the cash giving them money for the few luxuries that flavoured their lives.

  Once a year the Todds took Isalin’s paintings to Johannesburg and David Todd built a savings fund for Matthew’s future education. Isalin’s parents journeyed once to Port St Johns, were appalled by her lifestyle and never came again. Then her father died and her mother returned to England. For both of them, their only family was their own; Robert’s parents both having died young.

  Robert walked with Matthew along the tops of tall cliffs and they made camp down below on the beach, building their cooking fires from driftwood and sleeping above the high tide. Every day saw the father striding the cliff paths and the beaches, his tall staff rhythmically prodding the earth and sand. The boy walked two metres behind the father, idolising him, finding life so sweet, the tears of mental pain as yet unknown to him. Sometimes Luke came on their journeys but mostly it was father and son, year after year.

  When Hitler walked into Poland and the second Great War broke out, they were camped out on the cliff some thirty kilometres from Coffee Bay, and it was only a week later that Robert heard the news that had taken South Africa into the war on the British side by a slim majority in parliament.

  In 1940, Robert answered the call to arms and he was gone from the beach, the cliffs and the sea. The boy was left behind with his memories. The shadow of fear stalked the woodsman’s hut and, for the first time in twenty years, David Todd stayed in Johannesburg, where he watched his sons march off to the war, to the train and the troopship that took the young and the best to Egypt.

  In 1941 the Todd boys and Robert were infantry behind the tanks at Tobruk and all four of them died in the desert within a week of each other. They would never know the sadness of old age. They would never know the pain of being left behind. The news to Matthew Gray was more shattering than the bullet that killed his father.

  A week after the terrible news reached Second Beach, Isalin packed her few things with her son and left. Separately Luke and Matthew cried the loss of their innocence.

  The departure of Isalin and Matthew left Luke Mbeki washed up on an alien shore with a thirst for knowledge and nowhere to find what he wanted. Sipho was helpless. After four and a half years of formal education, Luke could read and write, do arithmetic and knew a lot about a world outside Port St Johns, outside the Union of South Africa. His years of happiness were over and he took to walking morosely up and down the hills and along the beaches alone, friendless and helplessly frustrated. The library was for white people, the school was for white people with money; in fact, the things he had learnt about were for white people with money. In her misery, Isalin had forgotten the black boy who was her son’s only friend and, in his pain at the loss of his sons, David Todd never again visited his home near Port St Johns.

  Luke watched the houses fall into disrepair and a troop of baboons moved into the woodsman’s hut. The motor boat was washed into the river in the storm of 1942 and smashed on the rocks below the Gap. The weeds and forest quickly took over the Todds’ garden and, when the gutters were ripped off in the storm, the rain soaked in through the walls. Luke could find no employment for his mind; looking after his father’s cattle and pigs was not enough. When the chief wife began to abuse the second wife, Namusa, Luke’s mother, in 1943, Luke ran away from home and made his way to Umtata, sixty-five kilometres inland, where he looked for work. The tide of war was shifting in favour of Britain and America but, though it was not apparent at the time, Hitler had sowed the seeds which would quickly destroy the British Empire and leave their colonised people in turmoil.

  Luke was eleven when he found his first job in an English house that spoke no Xhosa. He worked in the garden, doing some of the things he had learnt from Robert Gray, and acted as an interpreter for the house staff. When he asked for books, he was given them to read and he took a path of self-education that would finally make him valuable to the African National Congress. This black political organisation had been founded in 1912 to give the black people a voice after they had been excluded from the political process when the British joined together the defeated Boer states and their own colonies of the Cape and Natal. But that was many years ahead of him. For the present, Luke dug up weeds, cut grass, watered the flowers and absorbed the content of the books he read so eagerly. By 1944, when the British and Americans went on the offensive and invaded Europe, Isalin and Matthew had fallen into poverty. They had lost touch with her aristocratic mother in England, and David Todd wanted nothing to do with anything that reminded him of Port St Johns and his sons. Her paintings sold for very little during wartime, and the one-roomed flat they rented in Hillbrow was in the poor white neighbourhood and Matthew was forced to carry a knife to defend him.

  Like Luke, most of his education came from reading books as his mother had lost all interest in the world. She had grown grey and thin, her full breasts sagging to her navel. Even if Matthew had hoped for a stepfather, a situation he would have found abhorrent, no man would have looked at his mother. When she died in 1945 of pneumonia for lack of the money for a dose of penicillin, Matthew found himself an orphan at t
he age of thirteen with a deep voice, some of his father’s height and a good prospect of growing taller.

  He looked fifteen, and said so when he applied for a job as office boy at the Security Life Insurance Company. Matthew was sure David Todd had forgotten all about his godson and never mentioned his name. He lied about one other matter, saying his father had died at Tobruk, and had sold life insurance for Security Life in the Transkei. He had picked up enough from the Todd children to make his story convincing. He saw the youngest of the Todd girls once in the foyer of the Security Life building but she showed no sign of recognition.

  Enrolled at night school, Matthew continued his education and, when he turned sixteen and had learnt something about life insurance, he decided that selling insurance was not for him. He applied to join the sister short-term company that dealt with fire and accident business. Soon after his transfer, he took a bus to Port St Johns and walked to Second Beach to find Sipho and his bickering wives. One look at his place of happiness had him running back down the road away from the ghost of his past life. His mother had been right.

  Matthew enquired extensively of Luke in the village of Port St Johns, but to no avail. No one could tell him anything about his friend. After two days, Matthew was glad to return to Hillbrow and his digs. He forced himself to concentrate on the future and began his long apprenticeship to the insurance industry with the burning desire one day to make himself rich so that the happiness he had once known would return. One day with the price of the fare he would look up his grandmother in England, but he locked Port St Johns away deep in the back of his memory.

  Soon after David Todd’s boys had been killed in the retreat to Tobruk and the South African army had decreed that in the future brothers would not be allowed to serve on active duty in the same regiment, David bought a ranch on the banks of the Limpopo River, close to the place where South Africa, Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesia briefly touched. The girls were married and the Sandown house was full of memories. The Northern Transvaal was the ideal place for the recluse and the game was plentiful.

  When he turned the ranch over to the wild animals, it was so achingly lonely that he and his wife were barely able to find a purpose for living as the pain of loss, past and future, drifted away with the flow of years. His business was of no further interest. His sons had been the reason for his money. Nothing existed except the monotonous pattern of eating sometimes, sleeping sometimes and walking in the bush. He did not even own a dog and he gave no more thought to his godson Matthew Gray than he did to his business. As far as he was concerned, his life had come to an end and he was simply waiting to die.

  A good business, like a well-run country, takes a few years to run down when management changes for the worse. The officers of Security Life and its subsidiary company, Security Fire and Accident, began to cement themselves into their traditions. They preferred not to make decisions. They maintained the status quo and the graph of progress began to falter. By the time Matthew turned eighteen and was about to train for six months each in the Fire, Accident, Motor, Marine, Public Liability, Personal Life and Marine departments, the line on the graph was beginning to turn downwards.

  No one had seen David Todd in years, which was not surprising as he had not once left his game ranch, not once even phoning the office. His solicitor held his power of attorney and, not knowing anything about insurance, only did the best he could. Then David’s youngest daughter did the only thing that had any positive effect upon her father. She introduced him to his first grandson, four weeks old. All the other grandchildren had been girls.

  Two years earlier, in 1948, South Africa had taken an agonising wrong turn by electing the National Party to power. Hitler had died in his bunker but a lot of new little Hitlers were being bred in South Africa, as the new punitive legislation poured out of Parliament, changing ‘innocent till proved guilty’ to ‘guilty until innocence was approved by the government’.

  The English they left alone, letting them make the money for which the Afrikaner had never been trained. First they concentrated on the poor people of mixed blood. These they legislated as ‘coloured’ and promptly disenfranchised. Grand apartheid, separate development, was born. All positions in government were preserved for the Afrikaner, who voted nationalist irrespective of his education and ability.

  The police began to enforce a long line of regulations which would herd the black man into homelands. Every black man was made to carry a pass and any policeman had the right to demand the pass at any time of the day or night. The scum of the often gentle Afrikaner race, the poor whites, were given jobs in the police and the railways when their only qualification was to be white. More absurd legislation prevented sex across the colour bar, and the semi-literate fools sat in trees all night trying to catch offenders when an indignant neighbour suspected black and white were engaged in any kind of intercourse.

  In 1950, David Todd came back to a country for which he had given his only three sons. Smuts had been tossed on to the garbage heap of history. The little grey men, hiding behind their Calvinism from which they managed to prove to themselves and no one else that God decreed the separation of the races, were in power, and all political opposition stopped. By the end of 1952, when Matthew turned twenty, David saw two alternatives: either to leave the country of his birth and run his company in England, or to stay and use his wealth to fight the Nats. He chose the latter course.

  A young, good-looking man with a little money in his pocket had other things to think about in 1952, and presumed his elders knew what they were doing. The war was over, money was there to be made, and there were girls, girls, girls. Matthew took a flat in Rosebank, near the new George Hotel, and moved up in the world, a world that for him was booze, birds and business. Even in the early days, Matthew kept his social life in check during the week. He learnt to drive and bought himself a pre-war Morris Eight for ten pounds. It was to be the most exciting car he was ever to own. Happiness, fickle happiness, had returned to Matthew Gray.

  David Todd had called Matthew into his office a week after returning from the bushveld, in 1950, and since then they had seen very little of each other and never on social occasions. It was as if the promise at Matthew’s baptism had never been made.

  “You seem to be getting along all right, Matthew,” he had been told. He had stood in front of the large, well-carved desk with its green leather top. He had not been asked to sit down. “I want you to know there is no favouritism in Security Life, just results. Why did you leave my life insurance company?”

  “Because life insurance contains a lot of promises that do not have to be fulfilled,” Matthew responded.

  “Explain yourself.”

  “It’s a con.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?” his godfather demanded.

  “When they sell a policy, they tell the prospect that if the company makes twelve per cent per annum for thirty years he will receive half a million pounds. Sounds good to a man with a mortgage. What you don’t tell the man is that half the compound growth rate is eaten up by inflation, that the first year’s premium goes to the salesman and the second year’s to the pyramid of branch and regional managers, that a quarter per cent of the capital sum is deducted quarterly and ten per cent of the interest is taken annually, all to cover so-called overheads. Which is why there is only a meagre cash value in the policy at the end of the third year. That, to be exact, forty-two per cent of every pound invested in an endowment policy goes up against the wall in overheads and brokerage.”

  “Who told you these ridiculous figures?” David Todd snorted indignantly.

  “An actuary.”

  “He was talking nonsense. We provide a magnificent return for our policy holders.”

  “And a large cash flow for the government in prescribed investments, a phenomenal return for shareholders, to say nothing of all the largest buildings in Johannesburg.”

  “The buildings are an investment,” David told him.

  �
�For whom: the policyholders or the shareholders?”

  “You are being rude.”

  “You asked me, sir, why I left the life division,” Matthew replied courteously. “Short-term insurance is a calculated risk against a calculated premium. The ship floats, nothing; the ship sinks, we pay. I believe in the product. We spread the risk. Clients can do business without fear of a wipe-out.”

  “What about the widows and orphans?”

  “Sell them insurance, pure insurance against death. Unfortunately it is only five per cent of the endowment premium.” Matthew sounded firm and confident.

  “I see. At eighteen years of age, you know all about the insurance industry… I was sorry to hear about your mother.”

  “She never recovered from father’s death.”

  For the first time, Matthew looked straight at his godfather, and some of his anger subsided. The pain of loss was etched into the old man’s face.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said quietly.

  “Maybe one day you will understand why anything to do with Port St Johns makes the pain intolerable. And you, Matthew, you above all, remind me of Port St Johns.”

  Luke Mbeki was luckier with David Todd than Matthew. In honour of his dead sons and to assuage some of the guilt he felt about making his money in a country that legislated against the majority of its citizens, David launched the Todd Scholarships. By then, Luke had fallen victim to the new pass laws, had spent many nights in prison without being charged, and was many degrees angrier with the South African political system than Matthew was with the insurance industry. Defying the pass laws which forced him to stay in the Transkei, the apartheid-engineered homeland-to-be of the Xhosa, he travelled to Johannesburg and made his way into the black township of Soweto, where he first heard about the Todd scholarships for black South Africans.