by Wilbur Smith
Sean shouted with laughter. ‘Kill them with old age, Garry.’
Michael did not join in. He was imagining one of the lovely blue and pink rock pigeons that nested on the ledge outside his bedroom window, dying in a drift of loose feathers, splattering ruby drops as it fluttered to earth. It made him feel physically sick, but he knew his father expected it of him.
That evening as usual the children came one at a time to say goodnight to Shasa as he was tying his black bow tie. Isabella was first.
‘I’m not going to sleep a wink until you come home tonight, Daddy,’ she warned him. ‘I’m just going to lie all by myself in the dark.’
Sean came next. ‘You are the best dad in the world,’ he said as they shook hands. Kissing was for sissies.
‘Will you let me have that in writing?’ Shasa asked solemnly.
It was Michael who was always the most difficult to answer. ‘Dad, do animals and birds hurt a lot when you shoot them?’
‘Not if you learn to shoot straight,’ Shasa assured him. ‘But, Mickey, you have too much imagination. You can’t go through life worrying about animals and other people all the time.’
‘Why not, Dad?’ Michael asked softly, and Shasa glanced at his wristwatch to cover his exasperation.
‘We have to be at Kelvin Grove by eight. Do you mind if we go into that some other time, Mickey?’
Garrick came last. He stood shyly in the doorway of Shasa’s dressing-room, but his voice shook with determination as he announced, ‘I’m going to learn to be a crack shot, like Sean. You’ll be proud of me one day, Dad. I promise you.’
Garrick left his parents’ wing and crossed to the nursery. Nanny stopped him at Isabella’s door.
‘She’s asleep already, Master Garry.’
In Michael’s room they discussed the promised safari, but Mickey’s attention kept wandering back to the book in his hands, and after a few minutes Garry left him to it.
He looked into Sean’s room cautiously, ready to take flight if his elder brother showed any signs of becoming playful. One of Sean’s favourite expressions of fraternal affection was known as a chestnut and consisted of a painful knuckling of Garry’s prominent ribcage. However, this evening Sean was hanging backwards over his bed, heels propped on the wall and the back of his head almost touching the floor, a Superman comic book held at arm’s length above his face.
‘Goodnight, Sean,’ Garry said.
‘Shazam!’ said Sean without lowering the comic book.
Garrick retreated thankfully to his own room and locked the door. Then he went to stand before the mirror and regard the reflection of his new hom-rimmed spectacles.
‘I hate them,’ he whispered bitterly, and when he removed them they left red indentations on the bridge of his nose. He went down on his knees, removed the skirting board under the built-in wardrobe and reached into the secret recess beyond. Nobody, not even Sean, had discovered this hiding place.
Carefully he withdrew the precious package. It had cost him eight weeks of his accumulated pocket money, but was worth every penny. It had arrived in a plain wrapper with a personal letter from Mr Charles Atlas himself. ‘Dear Garrick,’ the letter had begun, and Garry had been overcome with the great man’s condescension.
He laid out the course on his bed and stripped to his pyjama pants as he revised the lessons.
‘Dynamic tension,’ he whispered aloud, and he took up .his stance before the mirror. As he began the sequence of exercises he kept time with the soft chant of, ‘More and more in every way, I’m getting better every day.’
When he finished he was sweating heavily but he made an arm and studied it minutely.
‘They are bigger,’ he tried to put aside his doubts as he poked the little walnut of muscle that popped out of his straining biceps, ‘they really are!’
He stowed the course back in its hidey-hole and replaced the skirting board. Then he took his raincoat from the wardrobe and spread it on the bare boards.
Garrick had read with admiration how Frederick Selous, the famous African hunter, had toughened himself as a boy by sleeping uncovered on the floor in winter. He switched out the light and settled down on the raincoat. It was going to be a long uncomfortable night, he knew from experience, already the floor boards were like iron, but the raincoat would prevent Sean detecting any nocturnal spillage when he made his morning inspection, and Garrick was certain that his asthma had improved since he had stopped sleeping on a soft mattress with a warm eiderdown over him.
‘I’m getting better every day,’ he whispered, closing his eyes tightly and willing himself to ignore the cold and the hardness of the floor. ‘And then one day Dad will be proud of me – just like he is of Sean.’
‘I thought your speech this evening was very good, even for you,’ Tara told him, and Shasa glanced at her with surprise. She had not paid him a compliment for a long time now.
‘Thank you, my dear.’
‘I sometimes forget what a gifted person you are,’ she went on. ‘It’s just that you make it seem so easy and natural.’ He was so moved that he might have reached across to caress her, but she was leaning away from him and the Hooper coachwork of the Rolls was too wide for him to reach her.
‘I must say, you look absolutely stunning this evening,’ he compromised with a matching compliment, but as he had expected, she dismissed it with a grimace.
‘Are you really going to take the boys on safari?’
‘My dear, we have to let them make up their own minds about life. Sean will love it, but I’m not too sure about Mickey,’ Shasa replied, and she noticed that he hadn’t mentioned Garrick.
‘Well, if you are determined, then I’m going to take advantage of the boys’ absence. I have been invited to join the archaeological dig at the Sundi Caves.’
‘But you are a novice,’ he was surprised. ‘That’s an important site. Why would they invite you?’
‘Because I offered to contribute two thousand pounds to the cost of the dig, that’s why.’
‘I see, this is straight blackmail.’ He chuckled sardonically as he saw the reason for her flattery. ‘All right, it’s a deal. I’ll give you a cheque tomorrow. How long will you be away?’
‘I’m not sure.’ But she thought, ‘As long as I can be close to Moses Gama.’
The site at Sundi Caves was only an hour’s drive from the house at Rivonia. She reached under the fur coat and touched her stomach. It would begin to show soon – she had to find excuses to keep away from the eyes of the family. Her father and Shasa would not notice, she was sure of that, but Centaine de Thiry Courtney-Malcomess had eyes like a hawk.
‘I presume that my mother has agreed to care for Isabella while you are away,’ Shasa was saying, and while she nodded, her heart was singing.
‘Moses, I’m coming back to you – both of us are coming back, to you, my darling.’
Whenever Moses Gama came to Drake’s Farm it was like a king returning to his own realm after a successful crusade. Within minutes of his arrival, the word was flashed almost telepathically through the vast sprawling black township, and a sense of expectancy hung over it, as palpable as the smoke from ten thousand cooking fires.
Moses usually arrived with his half-brother, Hendrick Tabaka, in the butcher’s delivery van. Hendrick owned a chain of a dozen butcher’s shops in the black townships along the Witwatersrand, so the sign-writing on the side of the van was authentic. In sky blue and crimson, it declared:
PHUZA MUHLE BUTCHERY
BEST MEAT AT BEST PRICES
From the vernacular ‘Phuza Muhle’ translated as ‘Eat Well’ and the van provided a perfect cover for Hendrick Tabaka wherever he went. Whether he was genuinely delivering slaughtered carcasses to his butcheries or goods to his general dealer stores, or was engaged in less conventional business – the distribution of illicitly brewed liquor, the notorious skokiaan or township dynamite, or ferrying his girls to their places of business nearer the compounds that housed the thousands of b
lack contract workers of the gold-mines so that they could briefly assist them in relieving their monastic existence, or whether he was on the business of the African Mineworkers’ Union, that close-knit and powerful brotherhood whose existence the white government refused to acknowledge – the blue and red van was the perfect vehicle. When he was at the wheel, Hendrick wore a peaked driver’s cap and a khaki tunic with cheap brass buttons. He drove sedately and with meticulous attention to all the rules of the road, so that in twenty years he had never been stopped by the police.
When he drove the van into Drake’s Farm, with Moses Gama sitting in the passenger seat beside him, they were entering their own stronghold. This was where they had established themselves when together they had arrived from the wastelands of the Kalahari twenty years before. Although they were sons of the same father, they had been different in almost every way. Moses had been young and tall and marvellously handsome, while Hendrick was years older, a great bull of a man with a bald, scarred head and gapped and broken teeth.
Moses was clever and quick, self-educated to a high standard, charismatic and a leader of men, while Hendrick was the faithful lieutenant, accepting his younger brother’s authority and carrying out his orders swiftly and ruthlessly. Though Moses Gama had conceived the idea of building up a business empire, it was Hendrick who had made the dream a reality. Once he was shown what to do, Hendrick Tabaka was as much a bulldog in tenacity as he was in appearance.
For Hendrick, what they had built between them, the business enterprises both illicit and legitimate, the trade union and its private army of enforcers known and dreaded throughout the compounds where the mineworkers lived and through the black townships as ‘The Buffaloes’, all these were an end in themselves. But for Moses Gama it was different. What they had achieved thus far was only the first stage on his quest for something so much greater that although he had explained it many times to Hendrick, his brother could not truly grasp the enormity of Moses Gama’s vision.
In the twenty years since they had arrived here, Drake’s Farm had changed entirely. In those early days it had been a small squatters’ encampment, hanging like a parasite tick on the body of the huge complex of gold-mines that made up the central Witwatersrand. It had been a collection of squalid hovels, built of scrap lumber and wattle poles and old iron sheets, flattened paraffin cans and tarpaper on the bleak open veld, a place of open drains and cesspools, lacking reticulated water or electricity, without schools or clinics or police protection, not even recognized as human habitation by the white city fathers in Johannesburg’s town hall.
It was only after the war that the Transvaal Divisional Council had decided to recognize reality and to expropriate the land from the absentee landowners. They had declared the entire three thousand acres an official township set aside for black occupation under the Group Areas Act. They had retained the original name, Drake’s Farm, for its picturesque connotations to old Johannesburg, unlike the more mundane origin of the nearby Soweto, which was merely an acronym for South Western Townships. Soweto already housed over half a million blacks, while Drake’s Farm was home to less than half that number.
The authorities had fenced off the new township and covered the greater part of it with monotonous lines of small three-roomed cottages, each identical except for the number stencilled on the cement brick front wall. Crowded close together and separated by narrow lanes with dusty untarred surfaces, the flat roofs in galvanized corrugated iron shone like ten thousand mirrors in the brilliant highveld sunlight.
. In the centre of the township were the administrative buildings where, under a handful of white municipal supervisors, the black clerks collected the rents and regulated the basic services of reticulated water and refuse removal. Beyond this Orwellian vision of bleak and soulless order lay the original section of Drake’s Farm, its hovels and shebeens and whorehouses – and it was here that Hendrick Tabaka still lived.
As he drove the delivery van slowly through the new section of the township, the people came out of their cottages to watch them pass. They were mostly women and children, for the men left each morning early, commuting to their employment in the city and returning only after nightfall. When they recognized Moses, the women clapped and ululated shrilly, the greeting for a tribal chief, and the children ran beside the van, dancing and laughing with excitement at being so close to the great man.
They drove slowly past the cemetery where the untidy mounds of earth were like a vast mole run. On some of the mounds crudely wrought crosses had been set while on the others raggedy flags fluttered in the wind and offerings of food and broken household utensils and weirdly carved totems had been placed to placate the spirits, Christian symbols side by side with those of the animists and witch worshippers. They went down into the old township, into the higgledy-piggledy lanes, where the stalls of the witch-doctors stood side by side with those offering food and trade cloth and used clothes and stolen radios. Where the chickens and pigs rooted in the muddy ruts of the road and naked toddlers with only a string of beads around their fat little tummies defecated between the stalls and the young whores strutted their wares and the stink and the noise were wondrous.
This was a world no white men ever entered, and where even the black municipal police came only on invitation and under sufferance. It was Hendrick Tabaka’s world, where his wives kept nine houses for him in the centre of the old quarter. They were sturdy well-built houses of burned brick, but the exteriors were left deliberately shabby and uncared for, so they blended into the general squalor. Hendrick had learned long ago not to draw attention to himself and his material possessions. Each of his nine wives had her own home, built in a circle around Hendrick’s slightly more imposing house, and he had not limited himself to women of his own Ovambo tribe. His wives were Pondo and Xhosa and Fingo and Basuto, but not Zulu. Hendrick would never trust a Zulu in his bed.
They all came out to greet him and his famous brother as Hendrick parked the van in the lean-to at the back of his own house. The obeisances of the women and their soft clapping of respect ushered the men into the living-room of Hendrick’s house where two plush chairs covered with tanned leopard skins were set like thrones at the far end. When the brothers were seated the two youngest wives brought pitchers of millet beer, freshly brewed, thick as gruel, tart and effervescent and cold from the paraffin refrigerator, and when they had refreshed themselves, Hendrick’s sons came in to greet their father and pay their respects to their uncle.
The sons were many, for Hendrick Tabaka was a lusty man and bred all his wives regularly each year. However, not all his elder sons were present today. Those of them whom Hendrick considered unworthy had been sent back to the country to tend the herds of cattle and goats that were part of Hendrick’s wealth. The more promising boys worked in the butchery shops, the general dealers or the shebeens, while two of them, those especially gifted with intelligence, were law students at Fort Hare, the black university in the little town of Alice in the Eastern Cape.
Only Hendrick’s younger boys were here to kneel respectfully before him, and of these there were two whom Moses Gama looked upon with particular pleasure. They were the twin sons of one of Hendrick’s Xhosa wives, a woman of unusual accomplishments. Apart from being a dutiful wife and a breeder of sons, she was an accomplished dancer and singer, an amusing story-teller, a person of shrewd common sense and intelligence, and a noted sangoma, a healer and occult doctor with sometimes uncanny powers of prescience and divination. Her twins had inherited most of her gifts together with their father’s robust physique and some of their uncle Moses’ fine features.
At their birth, Hendrick had asked Moses to name them, and he had chosen their names from his treasured copy of Macaulay’s History of England. Of all his nephews they were his favourites, and he smiled now as they knelt before him. They were almost thirteen years old, Moses realized.
‘I see you, Wellington Tabaka,’ he greeted first the one and then the other. ‘I see you, Raleigh Taba
ka.’
They were not identical twins. Wellington was the taller lad, lighter-skinned, toffee-coloured against Raleigh’s mulberry-stain black. His features had the same Nilotic cast as Moses’ own, while Raleigh was more negroid, flat-nosed and thick-lipped, his body heavier and squatter.
‘What books have you read since we last met?’ Moses changed into English, forcing them to reply in the same language. ‘Words are spears, they are weapons with which to defend yourself and with which to attack your enemies. English words have the sharpest blades, without them you will be warriors disarmed,’ he had explained to them, and now he listened attentively to their halting replies in that language.
However, he noted the improvements in their command of the language and remarked on it. ‘It is still not good enough, but you will learn to speak it better at Waterford,’ and both boys looked uncomfortable. Moses had arranged for them to write the entrance examination for this elite multi-racial school across the border in the independent black kingdom of Swaziland, and the twins had both passed and been accepted and now were dreading the day not far away when they would be uprooted from this comfortable familiar world of theirs and packed off into the unknown. In South Africa all education was strictly segregated, and it was the declared policy of the Minister of Bantu Affairs, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, not to educate black children to the point of discontentment. He had told parliament quite frankly that education for blacks should not conflict with the government policy of apartheid and should not be of such a standard as to evoke in the black pupil expectations which could never be fulfilled. The annual expenditure by the state on each white pupil was £60 while that on a black student was £9 per annum. Those black parents who could afford it, the chiefs and small businessmen, sent their children out of the country to be educated, and Waterford was a favourite choice.