Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “Not me, Carel. Raleen and I have been through one bush war. Not another civil war. We’re leaving, going back to Zimbabwe where nobody is killing anybody. During the war I let go a young lad fighting against us in the Zambezi Valley. Jamba Sithole now has influence in Zimbabwe and Raleen and I have money up north. Jamba has got us back our residence permits.”

  “When are you going?” asked Carel.

  “Tomorrow. I told Matt this morning. Raleen and I are going to buy a farm and settle down. Have some kids to replace her two the terrs killed. Matt said it was the best suggestion I had made for years. Said mother would be happy. I’ll be sad to leave you and the colony, Carel, but I can’t take this violence. Leaves you in a state of suppressed tension. You’ll be all right. You’ve got the guns. Look after them all. They may need you sooner than you think.”

  Frikkie Swart’s plan was to shoot up Luke’s car when he went to work in the morning. Frikkie would use a mini-bus taxi and have it look like an extension of the taxi war that had exploded at taxi ranks and along the roads, taking black commuters to work and back.

  His men had watched Luke Mbeki first take John to school every morning and then drive to the ANC offices in central Johannesburg. The man had established a routine and went about his daily life as if he was living in a normal society. The talks between the government, the ANC and the other political parties were going too well and the intention was to have the ANC walk out of the talks. Frikkie Swart was enjoying himself back in South Africa, and in eighteen months had established a network of agents across the country, financing his work from an assortment of parties opposed to a unitary state under black, communist-orientated rule.

  Ben Munroe, Matthew Gray’s bete noire and one time protégé and lover of Gilly Bowles, was now recognised as America’s expert on South Africa’s transition to democracy having joined an American television station to beam into American homes the carnage in South Africa’s townships and his prognosis was not good. Married for the third time to a journalist his own age, he enjoyed the hard work, occasional hard drinking with his new wife and good dinner in a downtown New York restaurant where television celebrities were left to enjoy their food. At fifty-two he was happier than at any other time in his life and had forgiven his mother and father for giving him a childhood that brought back few good memories.

  Ben’s new cameraman was twenty-nine years old, fearless, good-looking and determined to be right at the heart of news breaking anywhere in South Africa. He always took the pictures that made his network consider him one of the best television cameramen in the world. Clark Goss survived on excitement and adrenalin to make up for his dull upbringing in Kansas City, Missouri, and Ben Munroe was never far behind. Being at the scene very often from a tip-off, he was as aware as Ben that TV networks were used by politicians and terrorists, as the networks fed off the newsworthiness of the daily carnage spread across the world. If people wished to kill for political motives, it was Clark Goss’s job to shoot the pictures and Ben’s job to report the background into the camera at the end of the day.

  A phone call warned them that Luke Mbeki was under threat, and Ben put the name to the face as they sped down the R29 to Alberton, Ben driving with Clark keeping his camera at the ready from the open passenger window. The commuter traffic was heavy for a Tuesday morning, as the previous week’s boycotts had been called off and the black people of Soweto wished to make up for the lost hours of work, caused by the ANC calling for mass action to force the government to their point of view at the negotiating table.

  The new year had come and gone with an increase in political violence. The low-key civil war in Natal had spilled over into the townships around Johannesburg, with the Zulu hostels warring with the ANC for political turf and the criminal gangs joining the battle on their own account. Generally, criminals were unlikely to be caught as the people were too scared to point fingers for fear of reprisal. Dead bodies lay in the streets in the mornings and the police could find no one to say how the carnage had occurred.

  Both Ben and Clark wore bullet-proof vests whenever they entered the townships. Ben knew the streets of Soweto from experience, maps and aerial photographs, and he knew how to drive a car to the limit. Twice before he had arrived at the scene of action before anyone else and he was determined to warn Luke Mbeki before the assassination could take place. Twice he had interviewed the man and recognised him as an educated pragmatist who would be needed more than many of the other more militant politicians when it became the turn of the ANC to rule the country to turn from being the destroyer of the economy to the builder of a new, prosperous, democratic South Africa.

  They reached the road leading to the school where John Mbeki was receiving an education that he would have laughed at had he not been drawn into the political mainstream of the school and their struggle for political liberation. His real education came after hours when they reached the small box home that he shared with his mother, half-brother and father.

  John had just emerged from the car when he heard two cars speeding down the road to the school entrance in opposite directions: one a minibus, driven by a black with a black passenger, and the other by a white with his passenger pointing what looked like a camera out of the car’s rear window. At first John thought the gun that came out of the black’s window was to be used on the whites until he saw that the direction it was following pointed at himself and his father. He yelled at his father, “Dad, look out!” and threw himself flat on the pavement.

  “You want to play this easy, Clark?” asked Ben, gripping the wheel band.

  “Side-swipe him, and fast!” Clark kept his camera turning, having fallen over into the back seat, to film the oncoming mini-bus from the right-hand side, the assassin now half out of the high window with an AK47 rifle that began to fire.

  The shots streaked towards the Mbeki car until Ben hit the driver’s side a glancing blow, tipping the assassin out of the car with his gun, breaking his neck on the pavement ten metres from where John was covering his head with his hands. The car mounted the dirt pavement, hit the school wall and rebounded on to the road missing John’s spread eagled legs and his father’s car. The whole assassination attempt was shown to the world just ten minutes later when Ben had checked that Luke and his son were alive and the gunman dead. Chelsea saw the pictures on her television screen and screamed, not sure whether her husband and son were alive until Ben Munroe picked them up from the pavement, the camera switching from the disappearing minibus to film her family on the ground.

  Luke had heard his son’s warning in time to fall in the gutter next to his car, which took automatic fire down the left side, away from where he lay in the mud and filth. The garbage collectors had been on strike for a week, their mass action joining with the pupils and teachers to intimidate the government.

  She waited all day until they came home and then she was hysterical, screaming at her husband and her son, neither of whom had thought Chelsea would see the assassination attempt on television. The telephone in the box house had been out of order for weeks, the white technicians who could repair the fault refusing to come into Soweto for fear of their lives. Chelsea’s nightmare was back in living colour. Young Sipho listened to it all and wondered what was going on. He wanted to go home, to Second Beach and his mother Lorna.

  Frikkie Swart shrugged. He had all the time in the world. To escape, Luke Mbeki had to be lucky every time. Frikkie only had to be lucky once.

  “Keep his nerves tight, man. And the others. Not one of those top bastards will sleep well tonight.” He was enjoying himself,

  The next day, like clockwork, like puppets on a string, the ANC delegation walked out of the talks with the government.

  “Maybe those Americans did us a favour after all,” laughed Frikkie.

  “Don’t get more people looking at a soap opera than this. Those movies make it look good, man. People knew this one was for real; the guy falling out of the minibus was really dead.”

  “Thin
k they can trace the dead man?”

  “Not a chance. And if they do, they’ll find he was a card-carrying member of the Inkatha Freedom Party. Relax, man; that dead kaffir was a Zulu. You got to think when you’re stirring shit.”

  The free and fair elections for a democratic government in Angola had come and gone, and the loser, Jonas Savimbi of UNITA and the American surrogate when he had been fighting the Marxist MPLA had gone back into the bush to continue the civil war, causing the American administration to change sides once again and recognise the MPLA who had fought and won the election.

  Antonio van Perreira dos Santos Cassero’s coffee plantation was in its third year, with the farm self-sufficient in vegetables, fruit, eggs and meat. By the time the MPLA had swept through his plantation on their way to Huambo, Jonas Savimbi’s capital one hundred and sixty kilometres to the north east, there was not an animal left alive, nor a vegetable left in the ground.

  He was forty-six years old. Cuba, without cheap Russian oil and high priced sugar sales, was one step short of collapse. Antonio had nowhere else to go. Laboriously, he set about restoring order from the army’s chaos.

  The South African defence force, which had fought alongside Jonas Savimbi in the days of the total onslaught of communism, the same war that had killed Teddie Botha and sent Security Lion Insurance and its associates into financial crisis, had left behind some of the most sophisticated artillery in the world, notably the new made-in-Pretoria-because-of-the-arms-embargo G6 howitzer that could take off a door knob at forty-seven kilometres. When the MPLA were routed by UNITA and turned back from Huambo, they went back the way they had come, and the MPLA brigade headquarters set up business in Antonio’s farmhouse without bothering to ask permission, rudely forcing Antonio to leave his home. He caught a ride on an air force support vehicle giving his rank and squadron in the Cuban air force. The day he arrived in Luanda, the UNITA gunners were given the co-ordinates of the MPLA brigade headquarters. In five minutes there was nothing alive in the house.

  In Luanda, along with other Cubans left behind to farm, Antonio boarded an aircraft for Havana. He had finally had enough of Africa and as the aircraft circled to gain height over Luanda, which was in MPLA hands and free of potential American Stinger air-to-ground missiles, he looked his last on the African continent.

  “You know what,” he said to no one in particular in Spanish “That continent will only come right when it’s re-colonised and someone gives the people protection.” The one thing he would not think about as the aircraft headed out to sea was his workers who had struggled with him for three years to build a farm that had been raped and pillaged in hours.

  Chelsea’s shock turned to anger, and then to realism. It was how it was. She was married to him and, in retrospect, nothing was worse than the prospect of endless loneliness. The talks, he said, now on again, were going better than he had hoped, the ANC drawing pragmatically nearer the government, even though they were going to fight each other bitterly in the election.

  The firebrands in the party, faced with the reality of imminent responsibility to govern, had been made to see that shouted words, slogans of anger and bitterness over the past were none of them able to fill empty stomachs and take the place of a leak-free roof over the heads of millions of homeless people. The realities of the world were becoming daily more apparent.

  “The ANC are providing the family with bodyguards,” Luke told Chelsea. “We can win the peace, and your soft and gentle presence at the end of each day is more vital to me than food. My precious Chelsea, we have come a long way. Back me now. Stay with me. There is more good in the world than bad, and this country deserves a better future than its past.

  “We now have a date for the election, and then we will have given years of the parties with over five per cent of the vote governing the country together in coalition. We will lead that coalition. The consequences of not achieving our goal are too terrible to contemplate, so it will never happen. When John’s school holidays come, we will go down to Port St Johns for some days of rest. Sipho misses Lorna and Matt. Then we are going to come back and win what I have been fighting for, for thirty-one long years.

  By March of 1993, Matt was able to walk without pain and his mind was clear enough to paint all day, paint without the shadows that had crossed his troubled mind. The world beyond his rondavel, his family and the colony and Second Beach was left to do that which it wished without his help or hindrance. Peace was returning to his soul and, when Luke and his family had visited, they talked of their boyhood together, of Sipho and Robert senior, of their mothers and the joys of a childhood spent in paradise. Death, wars and politics were not mentioned.

  Every morning Matt went down to the sea and left his loin-cloth on the beach to swim in the warm salt water of the Indian Ocean, floating on his back between the troughs of gentler waves and watching seagulls in the sky.

  He was sixty years old, and the years ahead gave pleasure to his mind. All the people who had wished him out of business, forced him out of business, had given him the greatest gift of all, peace in his mind, happiness within himself, and the time to pursue an art that gave his thoughts a way to show, with paint, what the world could be, a place of joy where man could live in harmony without greed. Each day the soft, white sand seeped through his toes as he walked the beach, tall and upright again, free of the pain his fellow-man had taken such pleasure in inflicting. He was a happy man once again.

  Veli Mokoka, schoolboy, was twenty-two years old and had yet to pass standard eight, a lower standard of education than that required from John Mbeki when he passed his common entrance examinations to Cranleigh School in England at the age of twelve.

  Veli’s chance of ever finding a job other than that which required thuggery was small. Since 1976, after the Soweto riots were launched to change the black education system, the black children had been incorporated into struggle and freedom was more important than education, the school term being more political than academic. School boycotts, teachers’ strikes, arson and pillage were the order of the day, and the education system was reduced to fear and uselessness. Long-time students like Veli grew increasingly frustrated when they realised within themselves that their future could only follow the path of poverty without an education. The stronger the realisation, the more militant they became and the more likely to listen to the new slogan of the Pan-Africanist Congress and the militant youth leaders of the ANC, bent on their own agenda of destruction and lack of respect for their elders. “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer,’ rang out from the mouths of children, and a Boer meant any person with a white skin.

  The townships were on the brink of anarchy and the people slept with their clothes on, ready to run out of the shacks and box houses at the first sound of automatic rifle fire. Many could not sleep and many died in the arson and carnage perpetrated under the cover of darkness. Black political parties fought each other, rival black taxi associations fought each other for turf and criminals joined the fray. But everyone spoke of the third force that orchestrated the horror, setting brother against brother, tribe against tribe, yet no one could find the truth or alleviate the misery of millions of blacks trying to reach their workplaces through the taxi battles and armed rampages on the trains. They lived in fear with the inability, week after week, to get a good night’s sleep.

  The teachers’ strike drew Ben Munroe and Clark Goss into Soweto to film and report the effect it was having on the black children’s ability to obtain even a rudimentary education. For three days, the teachers and children marched in demonstrations against the white government, while others roamed the streets looking for trouble, mouthing the slogans, cheap and easy words fed to them by the firebrands who wished to take the country by force.

  The white police captain warned Ben and Clark not to go into the township, which was enough to make Clark insist. There was something going on in the cauldron of the black, seething masses that needed his camera and, with the police no longer backed by emergency laws
, the freedom of the press was paramount.

  “I don’t have enough men to give you an escort,” said the policeman. “Better you stay out, man. It’s bad in there. Too many big kids on the streets looking to express themselves. You take my word and stay out. They won’t care that you’re Americans, a TV crew. You’re different in there. A target. Now excuse me; I have a lot of work.”

  Wearily the policeman went off to muster his forces in the face of the angry masses that took delight in killing policemen. The police captain had not slept for twenty-four hours and had been calling on the government to send in the army to restore order without any success, the political backlash in the talks being a greater problem for the government than the carnage in the streets.

  The ANC executive decided to send in a high-powered delegation to calm the situation and to show that the party was the only authority to which the people would listen. Luke, an ex-freedom fighter and hero of the struggle, was given the task of leading the delegation. With his great height he was recognised by many of the people, though to many he was just another black politician with an axe to grind.

  The quarrel between the ANC and PAC, the leading liberation movements, added to the tension, the teachers’ strike being instigated by the PAC youth movement who were strong among the teachers and the older children. Veli Mokoka was a member of the PAC youth movement and all morning had been chanting, “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer.” Leading his gang in the chanting and toyi-toying. He was high on dagga, which added to his fanaticism. The kids under him hero-worshipped the tall Veli and did everything he told them without question.