Jimfish

by Christopher Hope

  ‘My sister has not had an easy time. If you remember the recent wars in Liberia you will know that President Samuel Doe was done to death by Prince Johnson, who in turn was ousted in the race to be president by Charles Taylor, whose election promise – “I killed your ma. I killed your pa. Vote for me or I’ll kill you too!” – was one of the most effective slogans in living memory. After these elections, Brigadier Bare-Butt suddenly declared himself celibate and gave up my sister. He renounced politics for religion, put aside his naked ways, threw away his AK-47 and dissolved his Small Boys Unit, in their fright wigs and wedding frocks, to go on the road, preaching the gospel of charity and forgiveness to the war-weary people of Liberia.

  ‘My dear sister was reduced to begging in the streets of Monrovia, and would still be there but for an amazing stroke of luck. A visiting businessman – hearing her accent when she asked for bread – knew instantly that she was one of us. This good Samaritan turned out to be an important official in the party which will soon form the new government of South Africa. He rescued Lunamiel, flew her home and gave her a job in his Johannesburg mansion, where she works today as a cleaning maid.’

  Hearing this, Jimfish had one thought in his mind: to get home and find Lunamiel – and when he heard that regular flights to South Africa had started again he was overjoyed.

  The Comorians were sorry to see Jimfish and his friends leaving and a big crowd accompanied the four travellers to the airport, where the Mayor thanked each of them personally for their help and advice in showing his compatriots how things were done in the wider world. He praised Jimfish for sailing a United States warship to the Comoros Islands on a first official visit; he complimented Soviet Malala for his uplifting lectures on rage, rocket fuel and how to land on the right side of history; he commended Zoran the Serb for suggesting the Comoros Islands should splinter into a constellation of micro-states along ex-Yugoslavian lines, each with its own flag, army and dictionary; and he promised to bear in mind Deon Arlow’s offer to fly in ‘conflict control contractors’ by helicopter gunship at the first signs of a fresh army coup.

  ‘We plan to preserve your inflatable landing craft as a memento of your visit,’ the Mayor said. ‘When you next meet the American military, please tell them that if ever they plan a fresh humanitarian intervention – or a short, sharp surgical strike in some distant, deserving corner of the world – they are welcome here, whenever their busy schedule permits.’

  So it was on the tenth of May 1994 – a decade after Jimfish had left for what Soviet Malala called ‘the outside world’ – that the flight from the Comoros, carrying Jimfish, Soviet Malala, Zoran the Serb and Deon Arlow, touched down in Johannesburg. They found the airport teeming with presidents, kings, queens, princes, pop stars and potentates, and they very soon understood the reason for the excitement. Their timing could not have been more auspicious: Nelson Mandela was about to be inaugurated as the first freely chosen President of South Africa.

  The travellers joined the cavalcade and were swept along in the human tide of tens of thousands, making their way by road and rail and on foot to the swearing-in ceremony, which was to take place in Pretoria at the Union Buildings, a ponderous, red-roofed government office which reminded Zoran of similar piles in his native ex-Yugoslavia.

  ‘It looks to me,’ said Zoran, ‘like a cross between a giant penitentiary and a mammoth post office.’

  Soviet Malala explained to Zoran that the Union Buildings had been designed by the British at the end of the Boer War, after they had destroyed the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Free State, thereby securing South Africa’s immense gold and diamond reserves for the city of London. It was a triumphal statement in sandstone.

  Deon Arlow was pleasantly surprised to hear Soviet Malala taking this view.

  ‘I never expected to hear you sympathizing with the suffering of Afrikaners in the Boer War,’ he said.

  ‘But it wasn’t really a war – it was more of a smash-and-grab robbery,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘The British saw themselves as aristocrats, when, really, they were simply armed thieves, highwaymen hungry for loot. They saw the Boers as troglodytes, brute Neanderthals who never evolved into a higher order of humanity. They were a problem to be solved. Finally. So the British solved it by burning their farms, and then trucked their women and kids to concentration camps, where thousands died of disease, hunger and heartbreak.’

  Deon Arlow was so moved to hear the fate of his people described with such sympathy by a black Communist that he could only nod vigorously as he fought back his tears.

  ‘Wasn’t it a crying shame, then,’ Soviet Malala continued, ‘once the British left and handed the country back to your lot, that Boers treated blacks in exactly the way the British had dealt with them? Now it was us who were your barbarians, troglodytes, Neanderthals, hewers of wood and drawers of water, useless appendages, monkeys, menials, miscreants or servants. Or caged pets kept for your pleasure. Or slave labour in what you liked to call a “Union” – where we did the work, while you lot prayed and picnicked in front of this triumphant erection in sandstone we see right here, always telling yourselves you were God’s Chosen People.’

  Anxious to calm things down on such an auspicious day, Jimfish said, ‘Well, what better place to begin the new South Africa? The old order is gone. Defeated. The British robbed the Boers, and then they did in the blacks. Now that’s all over. Finished. No one needs to be done in any more, right?’

  ‘It was never a defeat!’ Deon Arlow shouted. ‘We got here through a negotiated settlement. It was a truce between us whites, who decided not to fight to a standstill, and you black guys, who didn’t have the capacity to win. It was a compromise.’

  ‘It was the victory of the lumpenproletariat – fighting under the banner of the glorious liberation movements – over the neo-liberal, semi-fascist, racist, white-settler entity!’ cried Soviet Malala.

  ‘Pretty damn useless liberation movements! You guys couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag! Or run a bath – never mind a revolution!’ retorted Deon Arlow.

  ‘It sounds to me very like a typical stitch-up between elites,’ Zoran the Serb suggested. ‘When a nasty civil war tears a neighbourhood apart, the neighbours get busy and kill each other. When it’s over and the dust settles, those at the bottom of the heap find they’re still there and the guys who did the deal are swigging champagne in the name of the people.’

  Soviet Malala’s response was lost in the jubilation as Nelson Mandela took the oath and the long-term prisoner whose name no one had been allowed to mention was transformed into a president to whom everyone pledged their love and respect.

  When Mandela said, ‘Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all. Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all,’ he spoke to the heart of the country.

  When he saluted his predecessor, F. W. de Klerk, once his jailer, who had made for himself a place in history, everyone cheered.

  When he promised, ‘Never, never and never again shall it be that our beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another,’ strangers hugged each other.

  And when he declared that neither white nor black would ever again rule over the other, but that a Rainbow Nation was to be forged from old hatreds, he summed up what the country wanted to hear more than anything in the world.

  In the great amphitheatre of the Union Buildings, across its vast lawns, in the streets, suburbs and townships of the capital, and across the country, citizens danced, prayed and sang.

  At last Jimfish felt he had arrived at that moment on the right side of history. But what had brought him to this point? Not the high-octane rage that is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat. There was no anger in Mandela and no recrimination.

  Jimfish would have liked to ask Soviet Malala for his frank opinion of just what all this meant. But his old teacher was watching Fidel Castro with intense concentration, as if hoping he would say something to inject a little revolutionary fire i
nto the hazy delirium of rainbows and reconciliation. But El Commandante, who sat on the podium, among queens, princes, presidents, civil rights leaders, prelates, pop stars and a brace of bemedalled dictators, kept his counsel, and so did Soviet Malala.

  CHAPTER 29

  Jimfish had just one goal now: to be reunited with Lunamiel. Helped by Soviet Malala’s connections in the new government, being a devout member of the Communist Party, Jimfish soon knew the name of the good Samaritan who had rescued Lunamiel in Monrovia and brought her back to South Africa. Now a minister in the presidency, he lived in a grand house in the tree-lined northern suburbs of Johannesburg, behind tall walls topped with razor wire and electrified fencing, patrolled around the clock by armed guards.

  Having announced their presence on the intercom, Jimfish and his friends waited while the CCTV cameras checked them over. The automatic steel gates opened, the dogs were kennelled, they were signed in by the gatekeeper in his wooden sentry box, passed through the metal detectors, and a bodyguard escorted them into the minister’s study.

  ‘It is very like visiting a prisoner,’ said Zoran.

  ‘Better,’ said Deon. ‘State-of-the-art electric fencing, lovely-looking razor wire, serious firearms on the guards and infrared beams. I’ll bet they’ve got sound sensors buried under the walls to keep out tunnellers.’

  ‘But it’s all perfectly normal around here,’ said the minister, clearly embarassed. ‘As a member of the new government I had to move into a neighbourhood that was once the sole preserve of our former masters. To show the flag. But I felt a lot safer when I lived in a black township.’

  Jimfish sympathized. The man had been parachuted into the world of the rich white classes – at once so pleasurable and so like a prison.

  ‘We are here to see your maid, Lunamiel,’ said Jimfish, ‘the girl you rescued in Monrovia.’

  The minister was more embarrassed than ever. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. She’s left.’

  ‘But why?’ Jimfish was horrified.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ said the minister. ‘We treated her kindly, paid her promptly, fed and clothed her, gave her an afternoon off once a week. But then, you know how it is with domestic staff, one minute they’re fine – the next they’ve gone. Maybe she had challenges’ – the minister paused delicately – ‘coming from a formerly privileged group.’

  Jimfish was flummoxed. ‘I don’t know how you can call her privileged.’

  ‘He means white,’ said Soviet Malala briskly.

  ‘I must find her,’ said Jimfish. ‘Please help me.’

  The minister sighed. ‘I hear she’s living in a shanty town. In a shack of tin and tarpaulin. Without lights or running water and just a bucket toilet. I’ll give you the address. If you see her, please say that her job is still open. She’s a good girl and I was sorry to lose her.’

  The informal settlement where they would find Lunamiel, the minister warned them, was crowded with poor whites and notorious for drugs, robbery, rape and drug addiction. Tour buses took black families to see for themselves what happened to whites who had lost everything; much as whites once toured black townships for glimpses of life on the other side of the colour bar.

  The minister had not overstated the conditions in the camp where Jimfish and his companions found Lunamiel stooped over a zinc washing tub. It was not easy to recognize her. She looked so much older and her luscious skin, once as downy as a ripe peach, was deeply lined and she had lost much weight.

  ‘My darling Lunamiel! How do you manage to live here?’

  Jimfish put his arms around her and she felt as thin as a starving bird.

  ‘As you see, I take in laundry,’ she told him.

  Soviet Malala was not particularly sympathetic. ‘She comes from a life of pampered privilege. Too bad if she learns how our people had to live.’

  Zoran the Serb said simply, ‘Isn’t it strange how things go around?’

  Jimfish was so overcome with guilt that he covered his long-lost love in kisses and did not notice the looks he was getting from her brother Deon.

  ‘My poor, dear Lunamiel! Can you ever forgive me for abandoning you to the mercies of Brigadier Bare-Butt?’

  ‘It’s an ill wind that blows no good,’ said Lunamiel sweetly. ‘It was when he was with me that the brigadier heard the call of the Lord and turned overnight from homicidal maniac into a holy man.’

  ‘God works in mysterious ways,’ said Jimfish.

  ‘Amen to that. And nowhere are His ways more of a mystery than right here,’ said Lunamiel. ‘The brigadier passed me on, briefly, to a Rwandan politician of the Hutu tribe, but the poor man was far too busy with the civil war in his country and soon dropped me. I was on the streets when this rich South African saved me, flew me home and gave me a job amongst his domestic staff.’

  ‘What generosity!’ cried Jimfish. ‘And he wants you back. Your job is still open!’

  Lunamiel shuddered. ‘Never! I don’t deny he was a kind employer. I had my own room in the backyard, a spoon, an enamel plate and a tin mug. But I had to scrub, wash, iron, cook, sew and look after my employer’s children six days a week – things no normal white woman has ever in her life done for herself, never mind doing it for people who just the other day were doing it for me, whose mother kept a fleet of staff and assigned separate servants to each hand when her nails needed painting. Worse still, my boss had advanced political views and his domestic employees reflected the demographics of our country. He kept ten black staff to one of me and the others mocked me for being useless at the simplest jobs, telling me I hadn’t a clue how to do anything except give orders. They kept asking how it was that whites had run South Africa for so long when we were so useless. One night I ran away and here I am in this shanty town for very poor whites, whose numbers grow each day, but at least I’m back amongst my own people.’

  Listening to the story of Lunamiel’s decline and fall, Zoran sighed his Serbian sigh. ‘This talk of togetherness is all very well,’ he said. ‘But it’s going to take a long time before it works.’

  Soviet Malala regarded Lunamiel’s plight as nothing less than the punishment the settler entity deserved. ‘You’ve at last felt the angry lash of the masses,’ he said. ‘The rage of lumpenproletariat has blown you on to the rubbish dump of history.’

  ‘I don’t care about any of that,’ said Jimfish, and he took Lunamiel in his arms. ‘I have deserted you too often, and I will marry you tomorrow and we’ll go home to Port Pallid!’

  That was when Deon Arlow stepped forward and angrily separated the lovers.

  ‘Now, listen here,’ he said. ‘I’m ready to adapt and I’ll never oppress another because of race or colour. As our new President said in his speech, what is past is past. OK? I love every last colour in the rainbow, I swear to God. But I also swore on the family Bible that I would never let my sister marry a black man, not even one who might be white. Over my dead body.’

  Lunamiel flung herself at her brother’s feet and begged him to reconsider.

  Deon Arlow repeated that Lunamiel descended from the purest Dutch and German and Scandinavian stock; she was Aryan to the nth degree, and love across the colour bar was a rainbow too far.

  Jimfish wheeled on him, yanking his pistol from its python-skin holster.

  ‘Aryan?’ he said. ‘What nonsense! Your family probably descended from slaves and pirates, and Hottentots, Malays and Bushmen. If there is any German or Dutch blood in you it’s from the press-ganged scum of the Berlin gutters and the dross of the Amsterdam pot-houses. Rogues who sailed to the Cape of Good Hope, slept with their slaves and told themselves they were the master race. You leased my dearest Lunamiel to a brace of black Congolese cabinet ministers and a naked Liberian brigadier, without thinking twice. Well, I saved your life in the Comoros and brought you home. I’ve already shot you dead once and I’ll happily do it again!’

  But Soviet Malala stepped between them just in time and took Jimfish aside.

  ‘I ha
ve a better use for him,’ he said. ‘Yes, he’s an unreconstructed racist of the old school: cynical, meretricious and stupid. But the old white mindset aside, since his recent transplant he has an African heart. In the new South Africa we need people able to speak out of both sides of their mouths. His combination of boneheadedness and ubuntu would make him an excellent ambassador.’

  And so it was – after Soviet Malala dropped a few words in the ears of his powerful friends in the governing party – that Deon Arlow was appointed ambassador to Rwanda, where terrible massacres had begun. There it was that the founder of Superior Solutions would come face to face with the wholesale murder of the minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus, and witness the racial cataclysm that those of his kind had been ready to risk – and promote – in South Africa, where, for decades, one tribe ruthlessly ground all others into the dust and where bloodshed of Rwandan proportions was about to happen, had not the miracle of messy compromise arrived at the last moment.

  Everyone praised the brilliant idea of sending Deon Arlow to Rwanda – except Zoran, who thought it might make matters worse.

  ‘At the moment in that sad place Tutsis are being slaughtered by Hutus,’ he said. ‘But what if the tide turns and the Hutus are stopped and defeated? Won’t Tutsis take their turn at the top table and make life hell for the Hutus? They will need arms, advice and military contractors. That’s when Ambassador Arlow’s former skills as Commandant of Superior Solutions will come in handy.’

  Soviet Malala announced that he was shocked by such cynicism.

  ‘Why call me cynical when I am just being Serbian?’ Zoran wanted to know.

  ‘Because there are things people don’t want to hear,’ said Jimfish.

  ‘Or to say,’ said Zoran the Serb. ‘And when that happens you know the new regime has started shutting down debate.’

  Soviet Malala, who was rising fast in the ruling party, was deployed to warn Zoran that while positive criticism was welcome and essential and the democratic right of every citizen, if he insisted on sowing discord the Serb should not complain if some patriot gave him (and here Soviet Malala used a local word that covered everything from a slap on the wrist to a bullet in the heart) a good ‘klap’ and bundled him back to Belgrade. There was no room for a sceptical Serb – or anyone else who failed to applaud the miracle of peace and harmony that was the Rainbow Nation. Negative thinking must be monitored, just as the press, which had been showing signs of irresponsible behaviour, would be made to put its house in order. The beloved country was a miracle in the making and that was official.