by Wilbur Smith
‘I don’t understand,’ she protested, her voice and eyes snapping. ‘You told me we could do the interview here in Johannesburg. Now you want me to traipse off into the deep sticks somewhere.’
‘Moses Gama has to be there. Something important is about to take place—’
‘What is so important?’ Kitty demanded, fists on her lean denim-clad hips. ‘What we agreed was important also.’
Most people, from leading politicians and international stars of sport and entertainment down to the lowest nonentity, were ready to risk slipping a spinal disc in their eagerness to appear for even the briefest moment on the little square screen. It was Kitty Godolphin’s right, a semidivine right, to decide who would be accorded that opportunity and who would be denied it. Moses Gama’s cavalier behaviour was insulting. He had been chosen, and instead of displaying the gratitude which was Kitty Godolphin’s due, he was setting conditions.
‘Just what is so important that he cannot make the effort of common courtesy?’ she repeated.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Godolphin, I can’t tell you that.’
‘Well, then, I’m sorry also, Mrs Courtney, but you tell Moses Gama from me that he can go straight to hell without passing Go and without collecting his two hundred dollars.’
‘You aren’t serious!’ Tara hadn’t expected that.
‘I have never been more serious in my life.’ Kitty rolled her wrist to look at her Rolex. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I have more important matters to attend to.’
‘All right,’ Tara gave in at once. ‘I will risk it. I’ll tell you what is going to happen …’ Tara paused while she considered the consequences, and then asked, ‘You will keep it to yourself, what I am about to tell you?’
‘Darling, if there is a good story in it, they wouldn’t get it out of me with thumbscrew and hot irons – that is, not until I splash it across the screen myself.’
Tara told her in a rush of words, getting it out quickly before she could change her mind. ‘It will be a chance to film him at work, to see him with his people, to watch him defying the forces of oppression and bigotry.’
She saw Kitty hesitating and knew that she had to think quickly.
‘However, I should warn you, there may be danger. The confrontation could turn to violence and even bloodshed,’ she said, and she had got it exactly right.
‘Hank!’ Kitty Godolphin shouted through to the lounge of her suite where the camera crew were strewn over the furniture like the survivors of a bomb blast, listening at full volume of the radio to the new rock ‘n’ roll sensation warning them to keep off his blue suede shoes.
‘Hank!’ Kitty raised her voice above Presley’s. ‘Get the cameras packed. We are going to a place called Port Elizabeth. If we can find where the hell it is.’
They drove through the night in Tara’s Packard, and the suspension sagged under the weight of bodies and camera equipment. In his travels around the country Hank had discovered that cannabis grew as a weed around most of the villages in the reserves of Zululand and the Transkei. In an environment that the plant found agreeable, it reached the size of a small tree. Only a few of the older generation of black tribesmen smoked the dried leaves, and although it was proscribed as a noxious plant and listed as a dangerous drug, its use was so localized and restricted to the more primitive blacks in the remote areas – for no white person or educated African would lower himself to smoke it – that the authorities made little effort to prevent its cultivation and sale. Hank had found an endless supply of what he declared to be ‘pure gold’ for the payment of pennies.
‘Man, a sack of this stuff on the streets of Los Angeles would fetch a hundred thousand dollars,’ he murmured contentedly as he lit a hand-rolled cigarette and settled down on the back seat of the Packard. The heavy incense of the leaves filled the interior, and after a few draws Hank passed the cigarette to Kitty in the front seat. Kitty drew on the butt deeply and held the smoke in her lungs, as long as she was able, before blowing it out in a pale streamer against the windscreen. Then she offered the butt to Tara.
‘I don’t smoke tobacco,’ Tara told her politely, and they all laughed.
‘That ain’t baccy, sweetheart,’ Hank told her.
‘What is it?’
‘You call it dagga here.’
‘Dagga.’ Tara was shocked. She remembered that Centaine had fired one of her houseboys who smoked it.
‘He dropped my Rosenthal tureen, the one that belonged to Czar Nicholas,’ Centaine had complained. ‘Once they start on that stuff they become totally useless.’
‘No thanks,’ Tara said quickly, and thought how angry Shasa would be if he knew that she had been offered it. That thought gave her pause and she changed her mind. ‘Oh, all right.’ She took the butt, steering the Packard with one hand. ‘What do I do?’
‘Just suck it in and hold it down,’ Kitty advised, ‘and ride the glow.’
The smoke scratched her throat and burned her lungs, but the thought of Shasa’s outrage gave her determination. She fought the urge to cough and held it down.
Slowly she felt herself relaxing, and a mild glow of euphoria made her body seem air-light and cleansed her mind. All the agonies of her soul became trivial and fell behind her.
‘I feel good,’ she murmured, and when they laughed, she laughed with them and drove on into the night.
In the early morning before it was fully light, they reached the coast, skirting the bay of Algoa where the Indian Ocean took a deep bite out of the continent, and the green waters were chopped to a white froth by the wind.
‘Where do we go from here?’ Kitty asked.
‘The black township of New Brighton,’ Tara told her. ‘There is a mission run by German nuns, a teaching and nursing order, the Sisters of St Magdalene. They are expecting us. We aren’t really allowed to stay in the township, but they have arranged it.’
Sister Nunziata was a handsome blonde woman, not much older than forty years. She had a clear scrubbed-looking skin and her manner was brisk and efficient. She wore the light grey cotton habit of the order, and a white shoulder-length veil.
‘Mrs Courtney, I have been expecting you. Our mutual friend will be here later this morning. You will want to bathe and rest.’ She led them to the cells that had been set aside for them and apologized for the simple comforts they contained. Kitty and Tara shared a cell. The floor was bare cement, the only decoration was a crucifix on the whitewashed wall, and the springs of the iron bedsteads were covered with thin hard coir mattresses.
‘She’s just great,’ Kitty enthused. ‘I must get her on film. Nuns always make good footage.’
As soon as they had bathed and unpacked their equipment, Kitty had her crew out filming. She recorded a good interview with Sister Nunziata, her German accent lending interest to her statements, and then they filmed the black children in the schoolyard and the out-patients waiting outside the clinic.
Tara was awed by the girl’s energy, her quick mind and glib tongue, and her eye for angle and subject as she directed the shooting. It made Tara feel superfluous, and her own lack of talent and creative skill irked her. She found herself resenting the other girl for having pointed up her inadequacies so graphically.
Then everything else was irrelevant. A nondescript old Buick sedan pulled into the mission yard and a tall figure climbed out and came towards them. Moses Gama wore a light blue open-neck shirt, the short sleeves exposed the sleek muscle in his upper arms and neck, and his tailored blue slacks were belted around his narrow waist. Tara didn’t have to say anything, they all knew immediately who he was as Kitty Godolphin breathed softly beside her, ‘My God, he is beautiful as a black panther.’
Tara’s resentment of her flared into seething hatred. She wanted to rush to Moses and embrace him so that Kitty might know he was hers, but instead she stood dumbly while he stopped in front of Kitty and held out his right hand.
‘Miss Godolphin? At last,’ he said, and his voice brought out a rush of goose-bumps
down Tara’s arms.
The rest of the day was spent in reconnaisance and the filming of more background material, this time with Moses as the central figure in each shot. The New Brighton township was typical of the South African urban locations, rows of identical low-cost housing laid out in geometric squares of narrow roads, some of them paved and others rutted and filled with muddy puddles in which the preschool children and toddlers, many of them naked or dressed only in ragged shorts, played raucously.
Kitty filmed Moses picking his way around the puddles, squatting to talk to the children, lifting a marvellously photogenic little black cherub in his arms and wiping his snotty nose.
‘That’s great stuff,’ Kitty enthused. ‘He’s going to look magnificent on film.’
The children followed Moses, laughing and skipping behind him as though he were the Pied Piper, and the women attracted by the commotion came out of the squalid little cottages. When they recognized Moses and saw the cameras, they began to ululate and dance. They were natural actresses and completely without inhibition, and Kitty was everywhere, calling for shots and unusual camera angles, clearly delighted by the footage she was getting.
In the late afternoon the working men began to arrive back in the township by bus and train. Most of them were production-line workers in the vehicle assembly plants of Ford and General Motors, or factory-workers in the tyre companies of Goodyear and Firestone, for Port Elizabeth and its satellite town of Uitenhage formed the centre of the country’s motor vehicle industry.
Moses walked the narrow streets with the camera following him, and he stopped to talk to the returning workers, while the camera recorded their complaints and problems, most of which were the practical everyday worries of making ends meet while remaining within the narrow lines demarcated by the forest of racial laws. Kitty could edit most of that out, but every one of them mentioned the ‘show on demand’ clause of the pass laws as the thing they hated and feared most. In every little vignette they filmed Moses Gama was the central heroic figure.
‘By the time I’ve finished with him, he will be as famous as Martin Luther King,’ Kitty enthused.
They joined the nuns for their frugal evening meal, and afterwards Kitty Godolphin was still not satisfied. Outside one of the cottages near the mission a family was cooking on an open fire, and Kitty had Moses join them, hunched over the fire in the night with the flames lighting his face, adding drama to his already massive presence as she filmed him while he spoke. In the background one of the women was singing a lullaby to the infant at her breast, and there were the murmurous sounds of the location, the soft cries of the children and the distant yapping of pariah dogs.
Moses Gama’s words were poignant and moving, spoken in that deep thrilling voice, as he described the agony of his land and his people, so that Tara, listening to him in the darkness, found tears running down her face.
In the morning Kitty left her team at the mission,-and without the camera the three of them, Kitty and Tara and Moses, drove in the Buick to the railway station that served the township and watched the black commuters swarm like hiving bees through the station entrance marked NON WHITES – NIE BLANKES, crowding onto the platform reserved for blacks, and as soon as the train pulled in flooding into the coaches set aside for them.
Through the other entrance, marked WHITES ONLY – BLANKES ALLEENLIK, a few white officials and others who had business in the township sauntered and unhurriedly entered the first-class coaches at the rear of the train where they sat on green leather-covered seats and gazed out through glass at the black swarm on the opposite platform with detached expressions as though they were viewing creatures of another species.
‘I’ve got to try and get that,’ Kitty muttered. ‘I’ve got to get that reaction on film.’ She was busily scribbling notes in her pad, sketching rough maps of the station layout and marking in camera sites and angles.
Before noon Moses excused himself. ‘I have to meet the local organizers and make the final plans for tomorrow,’ and he drove away in the Buick.
Tara took Kitty and the team down to the seaside at St George’s Strand, and they filmed the bathers on the beaches lying under the signboards BLANKES ALLEENLIK – WHITES ONLY. School was out and tanned young people, the girls in bikinis and the boys with short haircuts and frank open faces, lolled on the white sand, or played beach games and surfed the rolling green waves.
When Kitty asked them, ‘How would you feel if black people came to swim here?’ some of them giggled nervously at a question they had never considered before:
‘They aren’t allowed to come here – they’ve got their own beaches.’
And at least one was indignant. ‘They can’t come here and look at our girls in bathing-costumes.’ He was a beefy young man with sea salt caked in his sun-streaked hair and skin peeling from his sunburned nose.
‘But wouldn’t you look at the black girls in their bathing costumes?’ Kitty asked innocently.
‘Sis, man!’ said the surfer, his handsome tanned features contorted with utter disgust at the suggestion.
‘It’s just too good to be true!’ Kitty marvelled at her own fortune. ‘I’ll cut that in with some footage I’ve got of a beautiful black dancer in a Soweto night club.’
On the way back to the mission Kitty asked Tara to stop at the New Brighton railway station once again, for a final reconnaisance. They left the cameras in the Packard and two white-uniformed railway constables watched them with idle uninterest as they wandered around the almost deserted platforms that during the rush hours swarmed with thousands of black commuters. Quietly Kitty pointed out to her team the locations she had chosen earlier, and explained to them what shots she would be striving for.
That night Moses joined them for the evening meal in the mission refectory, and though the conversation was light and cheerful there was a hint of tension in their laughter. When Moses left, Tara went out with him to where the Buick was parked in the darkness behind the mission clinic.
‘I want to be with you tonight,’ she told him pathetically. ‘I feel so alone without you.’
‘That is not possible.’
‘It’s dark – we could go for a drive to the beach,’ she pleaded.
‘The police patrols are looking for just that sort of thing,’ Moses told her. ‘You would see yourself in the Sunday Times next weekend.’
‘Make love to me here, please, Moses,’ and he was angry.
‘Your selfishness is that of a spoilt child – you think only of yourself and your own desires, even now when we are on the threshold of great events, you would take risks that could bring us down.’
Tara lay awake most of the night and listened to Kitty’s peaceful breathing in the iron bed across the cell.
She fell asleep just before dawn, and awoke feeling nauseated and heavy, when Kitty leapt gaily out of bed in her pink-striped pyjamas, eager for the day.
‘June 26th,’ she cried. ‘The big day at last!’
None of them took more than a cup of coffee for an early breakfast. Tara felt too sick and the others were too keyed up. Hank had checked his equipment the previous night, but now he went over it again before he loaded it into the Packard and they drove down to the railway station.
It was gloomy and the few street lights were still burning while under them the hordes of black commuters hurried. However, by the time they reached the station the first rays of the sun struck the entrance and the light was perfect for filming. Tara noticed that a pair of police Black Maria vans were parked outside the main entrance and instead of the two young constables who had been on duty the previous day there were eight railway policemen in a group under the station clock. They were in blue uniform with black peaked caps and holstered sidearms on their polished leather Sam Browne belts. They all carried riot batons.
‘They have been warned,’ Tara exclaimed, as she parked across the street from the two vans. ‘They are expecting trouble – just look at them.’
Kitty had twisted
around and was giving last-minute instructions to Hank in the back seat, but when Tara glanced at her to assess her reaction to the waiting police, something about Kitty’s expression and her inability to meet Tara’s eyes made her pause.
‘Kitty?’ she insisted. These policemen. You don’t seem—’She broke off as she remembered something. The previous afternoon on the way to the beach, Kitty had asked her to stop outside the Humewood post office because she wanted to send a telegram. However, from across the road looking through the post office window, Tara had seen her slip into one of the glass telephone booths. It had puzzled her at the time.
‘You!’ she gasped. ‘It was you who warned the police!’
‘Listen, darling,’ Kitty snapped at her. ‘These people want to get themselves arrested. That’s the whole point. And I want film of them getting arrested. I did it for all our sakes—’ She broke off and cocked her head. ‘Listen!’ she cried. ‘Here they come!’
Faintly on the dawn there was the sound of singing, hundreds of voices together, and the group of policemen in the station entrance stirred and looked around apprehensively.
‘OK, Hank,’ Kitty snapped. ‘Let’s go!’
They jumped out of the Packard and hurried to the positions they had chosen, lugging their equipment.
The senior police officer with gold braid on his cap was a captain. Tara knew enough of police rank insignia from firsthand experience. He gave an order to his constables. Two of them began to cross the road towards the camera team.
‘Shoot, Hank. Keep shooting!’ Tara heard Kitty’s voice, and the singing was louder now. The beautifully haunting refrain of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika carried by a thousand African voices made Tara shiver.