Rage

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘So there are no black directors on the Courtney companies’ boards. Can you tell us how many black departmental managers you have appointed?’

  Once long ago, hunting buffalo in the forests along the Zambezi River, Shasa had been attacked by a heat-maddened swarm of the big black African honey-bees. There had been no defence against them, and he had only escaped at last by diving into the crocodile-infested Zambezi River. He felt that same sense of angry helplessness now, as she buzzed around his head, effortlessly avoiding his attempts to swat her down and darting out to sting painfully almost at will.

  ‘Thirty thousand black men working for you, and not a single director or manager amongst them!’ she marvelled ingenuously. ‘Can you suggest why that might be?’

  ‘We have a predominantly tribal rural black society in this country and they come to the cities unskilled and untrained—’

  ‘Oh, don’t you have training programmes?’

  Shasa accepted the opening. ‘The Courtney group has a massive training programme. Last year alone we spent two and a half million pounds on employee education and job training.’

  ‘How long has this programme been in operation, Mr Courtney?’

  ‘Seven years, ever since I became chairman.’

  ‘And in seven years, after all that money spent on education, not one black of all those thousands has been promoted to managerial status? Is that because you have not found a single capable black, or is it because your job reservation policy and your strict colour bar prevent any black, no matter how good—’

  He was driven back inexorably until in anger he went on the offensive. ‘If you are looking for racial discrimination, why didn’t you stay in America?’ he asked her, smiling icily. ‘I’m sure your own Martin Luther King would be able to help you more than I can.’

  ‘There is bigotry in my country,’ she nodded. ‘We understand that, and we are changing it, educating our people and outlawing its practice, but from what I have seen, you are indoctrinating your children in this policy you call apartheid and enshrining it in a monumental fortress of laws like your Group Areas Act and your Population Registration Act which seeks to classify all men by the colour of their skin alone.’

  ‘We differentiate,’ Shasa conceded, ‘but that does not mean that we discriminate.’

  ‘That’s a catchy slogan, Mr Courtney, but not original. I have already heard it from your Minister of Bantu Affairs, Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. However, I suggest to you that you do discriminate. If a man is denied the right to vote or to own land merely because his skin is dark, that in my book is discrimination.’

  And before he could respond, she had switched again.

  ‘How many black people do you number amongst your personal friends?’ she asked engagingly, and the question transported Shasa instantly back across the years. He remembered as a lad standing his first shifts on the H’ani Mine and the man who had been his friend. The black boss-boy in charge of the weathering grounds on which the newly mined blue ore from the pit was laid out to soften and crumble to the point at which it could be carted to the mill.

  He hadn’t thought about him for years, yet he remembered his name without effort, Moses Gama, and he saw him in his mind’s eye, tall and broad-shouldered, handsome as a young pharaoh with skin that glowed like old amber in the sunlight as they toiled side by side. He remembered their long rambling discussions, how they had read and argued together, drawn together by some unusual bond of the spirit. Shasa had lent him Macaulay’s History of England, and when Moses Gama was fired from the H’ani Mine on the instigation of Centaine Courtney as a direct result of the unacceptably intimate friendly relationship between them, Shasa had asked him to keep the book. Now he felt again a faint echo of the sense of deprivation he had experienced at the time of their enforced parting.

  ‘I have only a handful of personal friends,’ he told her now. ‘Ten thousand acquaintances, but only a very few friends—’ He held up the fingers of his right hand. ‘No more than that, and none of them happen to be black. Though once I had a black man as a friend, and I grieved when our ways parted.’

  With the sure instinct which made her supreme in her craft, Kitty Godolphin recognized that he had given her a perfect peg on which to hang the interview.

  ‘Once I had a black man as a friend,’ she repeated softly. ‘And I grieved when our ways parted. Thank you, Mr Courtney.’ She turned to her camera man. ‘OK, Hank, cut it and get the studio to print it tonight.’

  She stood up quickly and Shasa towered over her.

  ‘That was excellent. There is a great deal of material there we can use,’ she enthused. ‘I am really grateful for your cooperation.’

  Smiling urbanely Shasa leaned close to her. ‘You are a devious little bitch, aren’t you?’ he said softly. ‘A face like an angel and a heart of hell. You know it isn’t like you made it sound, and you don’t care. As long as you get a good story, you don’t give a damn whether it’s true or not or who it hurts, do you?’

  Shasa turned from her and strode out of the boardroom. The floor-show had started and he went to the table at which Centaine and Blaine Malcomess were sitting, but the night had been spoiled for him.

  He sat and glowered at the swirling dancers, not really seeing their long naked limbs and gleaming flesh but thinking furiously of Kitty Godolphin instead. Danger excited him, that was why he hunted lion and buffalo and flew his own Mosquito and played polo. Kitty Godolphin was dangerous. He was always attracted to intelligent and competent women, with strong personalities – and this one was devastatingly competent and made of pure silk and steel.

  He thought about that lovely innocent face and childlike smile and the hard gleam of her eyes, and his fury was compounded by his desire to subjugate her, emotionally and physically, and the fact that he knew it would be difficult made the thought all the more obsessive. He found that he was physically aroused and that increased his anger.

  He glanced up suddenly, and from across the room Jill Anstey, the public relations director, was watching him. The coloured lights-played on the Slavic planes of her face and glinted on the platinum sheet of her hair. She slanted her eyes at him and ran the tip of her tongue over her lower lip.

  ‘All right,’ he thought. ‘I have to take it out on somebody and you will do.’ He inclined his head slightly, and Jill Anstey nodded and slipped out of the door behind her. Shasa murmured an apology to Centaine, then stood up and moved through the pounding music and semidarkness towards the door through which Jill Anstey had disappeared.

  Shasa got back to the Carlton Hotel at nine o’clock in the morning. Still in black tie and dinner jacket, he avoided the lobby and went up the back stairs from the underground garage. Centaine and Blaine were in the company suite, and Shasa had the smaller suite across the passage. He dreaded meeting either of them dressed as he was at this time in the morning, but he was lucky and got into his lounge uninterrupted.

  Somebody had slipped an envelope under his door, and he picked it up without particular interest until he saw the Killarney Film Studios crest on the flap. Kitty Godolphin was working out of that studio and he grinned and split the flap with his thumbnail.

  Dear Mr Courtney,

  The rushes are just great – you look better than Errol Flynn on film. If you want to see them, call me at the studio.

  Kitty Godolphin

  His anger had cooled and he was amused by her cheek, and though he had a full day ahead — lunch with Lord Littleton and meetings all afternoon — he phoned the studio.

  ‘You just caught me,’ Kitty told him. ‘I was on my way out. You want to see the rushes? OK, can you get up here at six this evening?’

  She was smiling that sweet childlike smile and mocking him with a malicious green sparkle in her eyes as she came down to the reception desk of the studio to shake his hand and lead him to her hired projection room in the complex.

  ‘I knew I could rely on your masculine vanity to get you up here,’ she assured him.
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  Her film crew were sprawled untidily over the front row of seats in the projection room, smoking Camels and drinking Cokes, but Hank, the camera man, had the film clip in the projector ready to run, and they watched it through in silence.

  When the lights went up again, Shasa turned to Kitty and conceded.

  ‘You are good – you made me look a real prick most of the time. And, of course, you can always lose the parts where I held my own on the cutting-room floor.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’ she grinned, wrinkling her small nose so the freckles on it gleamed like tiny gold coins.

  ‘You are a bushwhacker, shooting from cover, and I’m out there with my back wide open.’

  ‘If you accuse me of faking it,’ she challenged him, ‘how about you taking me and showing me the way it really is. Show me the Courtney mines and factories and let me film them!’

  So that was why she had called him. He smiled to himself, but asked, ‘Have you got ten days?’

  ‘I’ve got as long as it takes,’ she assured him.

  ‘All right, let’s start with dinner tonight.’

  ‘Great!’ she enthused, and then turned to her crew. ‘Mazeltov, boys, Mr Courtney is standing us all dinner.’

  ‘That’s not exactly what I had in mind,’ he murmured.

  ‘Do tell?’ She gave him her innocent little-girl look.

  Kitty Godolphin was a rewarding companion. Her interest in everything he said or showed her was flattering and unfeigned. She watched his eyes or his lips as he spoke, and often leaned so close to listen that he could feel her breath on his face, but she never actually touched him.

  For Shasa her appeal was heightened by her personal cleanliness. In the days they spent together, hot dusty days in the desert of the far west or in the eastern forests, tramping through pulp mills or fertilizer factories, watching the bulldozers strip the overburden from the coal deposits in billowing clouds of dust or baking in the depths of the great excavation of the H’ani Mine, Kitty was always fresh-faced and cool-looking. Even in the dust her eyes were clear and her small even teeth sparkled. When or where she had an opportunity to rinse her clothes he could never decide, but they were always clean and crisp and her breath when she leaned close to him was always sweet.

  She was a professional. That impressed Shasa also. She would go to any lengths to get the film footage she wanted, taking no account of fatigue or personal danger. He had to forbid her riding on the outside of the mine cage on the H’ani main incline shaft to film the drop into the pit, but she went back later, while he was in a meeting with his mine manager, and got exactly the shot she wanted and then smiled away his fury when he found out. Her crew treated her with an ambivalence that amused Shasa. They held her in fond affection and were immensely protective of her, as though they were her elder brothers, and their pride in her achievements was unconcealed. However, at the same time they were much in awe of her ruthless search for excellence, to which they knew she would sacrifice them and anything else that got in her way. Her temper, although not often displayed, was merciless and vitriolic and when she gave an order, no matter how quietly or how sweet the smile that accompanied it, they jumped.

  Shasa was also affected by the deep feelings which she had conceived for Africa, its land and its people.

  ‘I thought America was the most beautiful country in all the world,’ she said quietly one evening as they watched the sun set behind the great desolate mountains of the western deserts. ‘But when I look at this, I have to wonder.’

  Her curiosity took her into the compounds where the Courtney Company employees were housed, and she spent hours talking to the workers and their wives, filming it all, the questions and answers of black miners and white overseers and shift bosses, their homes and the food they ate, their recreations and their worship, and at the end Shasa asked her, ‘So how do you like the way I oppress them?’

  ‘They live well,’ she conceded.

  ‘And they are happy,’ he pushed her. ‘Admit it. I hid nothing from you. They are happy.’

  ‘They are happy like children,’ she agreed. ‘As long as they look up to you like big daddy. But just how long do you think you can keep fooling them? How long is it going to be before they look at you in your beautiful airplane flying back to parliament to make a few more laws for them to obey and say to themselves, “Hey, man! I’d like to try that also”?’

  ‘For three hundred years under white government the people of this land have woven a social fabric which has held us all together. It works, and I would hate to see it torn asunder without knowing what will replace it.’

  ‘How about democracy for a start?’ she suggested. ‘That’s not a bad thing to replace it with – you know, the will of the majority must prevail!’

  ‘You left out the best bit,’ he flashed back at her. ‘The interests of the minority must be safeguarded. That doesn’t work in Africa. The African knows and understands one principle: winner takes all – and let the minority go to the wall. That’s what will happen to the white settlers in Kenya if the British capitulate to the Mau Mau killers.’

  So they wrangled and sparred during the long hours of flying which took them over the enormous distances of the African continent. From one destination to the next, Shasa and Kitty went ahead in the Mosquito, and the helmet and oxygen mask were too large for her and made her appear even younger and more girlish. David Abrahams piloted the slower and more commodious company De Havilland Dove, the camera equipment and the crew flying with him, and even though most of Shasa’s time on the ground was spent in meetings with his managers and administrative staff there was still much time that he could devote to the seduction of Kitty Godolphin.

  Shasa was not accustomed to prolonged resistance from any female who warranted his concentrated attention. There might be a token flight, but always with coy glances over the shoulder, and usually they chose to hide from him in the nearest bedroom, absentmindedly forgetting to turn the key in the lock, and he expected it to go very much the same way with Kitty Godolphin.

  Getting into her blue jeans was his first priority; convincing her that Africa was different from America and that they were doing the best job they could came second by a long way. At the end of the ten days he had succeeded in neither endeavour. Both Kitty’s political convictions and her virtue remained intact.

  Kitty’s interest in him, however wide-eyed and intense, was totally impersonal and professional, and she gave the same attention to an Ovambo witchdoctor demonstrating how he cured abdominal cancer with a poultice of porcupine dung, or a muscled and tattooed white shift-boss explaining to her that a black worker should never be punched in the stomach as their spleens were always enlarged from malaria and could easily rupture — hitting them in the head was all right, he explained, because the African skull was solid bone anyway and you couldn’t inflict serious damage that way.

  ‘Mary Maria!’ Kitty breathed. ‘That was worth the trip in itself!’

  So on the eleventh day of their odyssey, they flew out of the vastness of the Kalahari Desert, from the remote H’ani Diamond Mine on its mystic and brooding range of hills, into the town of Windhoek, capital of the old German colony of South-West Africa which had been mandated to South Africa in the Treaty of Versailles. It was a quaint little town, the German influence still very obvious in the architecture and the way of life of the inhabitants. Set in the hilly uplands above the arid littoral, the climate was pleasant, and the Kaiserhof Hotel, where Shasa kept another permanent suite, offered many of the creature comforts that they had lacked during the previous ten days.

  Shasa and David spent the afternoon with their senior staff in the local office of the Courtney Company, which before its move to Johannesburg had been the head office, but which was still responsible for the logistics of the H’ani Mine. Kitty and her team, never wasting a moment, filmed the German colonial buildings and monuments and the picturesque Herero women on the streets. In 1904 this tribe of warriors had engaged the German
administration in their worst colonial war which finally left eighty thousand Hereroes dead of famine and battle out of a total population of a hundred thousand. They were tall and magnificent-looking people and the women wore full-length Victorian skirts in butterfly colours and tall matching headdresses. Kitty was delighted with them, and late that afternoon came back to the hotel in ebullient mood.

  Shasa had planned carefully, and had left David at the Courtney Company offices to finish the meeting. He was waiting to invite Kitty and her team through to the beer garden of the hotel where a traditional oom-pa-pa band in lederhosen and Alpine hats was belting out a medley of German drinking songs. The locally brewed Hansa Pilsner was every bit as good as the original of the Munich beerhalls, with a clear golden colour and thick creamy head. Shasa ordered the largest tankards, and Kitty drank level with her crew.

  The mood turned festive until Shasa drew Kitty aside and under cover of the band told her quietly, ‘I don’t quite know how to break this to you, Kitty, but this will be our last evening together. I had my secretary book seats on the commercial flight for you and your boys to fly back to Johannesburg tomorrow morning.’

  Kitty stared at him aghast. ‘I don’t understand. I thought we were flying down to your diamond concessions in the Sperrgebiet.’ She pronounced it ‘Spear Beat’ in her enchanting accent. ‘That was going to be the main act.’

  ‘Sperrgebiet means “Forbidden Area”,’ Shasa told her sadly. ‘And it means just that, Kitty, forbidden. Nobody goes in there without a permit from the government Inspector of Mines.’

  ‘But I thought you had arranged a permit for us,’ she protested.

  ‘I tried. I telexed our local office to arrange it. The application was denied. The government doesn’t want you in there, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘There must be something going on in there that they don’t want you to see or film.’ He shrugged, and she was silent but he saw the play of fierce emotion across her innocent features and her eyes blazed green with anger and determination. He had early on discovered that the infallible means of making anything irresistibly attractive was to deny it to Kitty Godolphin. He knew that now she would lie, cheat or sell her soul to get into the Sperrgebiet.