by Wilbur Smith
The two constables were halfway across the road when the first rank of protesters marched around the nearest row of shops and cottages and hurriedly the police captain called his constables back to his side.
They were twenty abreast, arms linked, filling the road from pavement to pavement, singing as they came on, and behind them followed a solid column of black humanity. Some of them were dressed in business suits, others in tattered cast-off clothing, some were silver-haired and others were in their teens. In the centre of the front rank, taller than the men around him, bare-headed and straight-backed as a soldier, marched Moses Gama.
Hank ran into the street with his sound technician following him. With the camera on his shoulder he retreated in front of Moses, capturing him on film, the sound man recording his voice as it soared in the anthem, full and magnificent, the very voice of Africa, and his features were lit with an almost religious fervour.
Hurriedly the police captain was drawing his men up across the whites-only entrance, and they were hefting their batons nervously, pale-faced in the early sunlight. The head of the column wheeled across the road and began to climb the steps, and the police captain stepped forward and spread his arms to halt them. Moses Gama held up one hand. The column came to a jerking shuffling halt, and the singing died away.
The police captain was a tall man with a pleasantly lined face. Tara could see him over their heads, and he was smiling. That was the thing that struck Tara. Faced with a thousand black protesters, he was still smiling.
‘Come on now,’ he raised his voice, like a schoolmaster addressing an unruly class. ‘You know you can’t do this, it’s just nonsense, man. You are acting like a bunch of skollies, and I know you are good people.’ He was still smiling as he picked a few of the leaders out of the front ranks. ‘Mr Dhlouv and Mr Khandela – you are on the management committee, shame on you!’ He waggled his finger, and the men he had spoken to hung their heads and grinned shamefacedly. The whole atmosphere of the march had begun to change. Here was the father figure, stern but benevolent, and they were the children, mischievous but at the bottom good-hearted and dutiful.
‘Off you go, all of you. Go home and don’t be silly now,’ the captain called, and the column wavered. From the back ranks there was laughter, and a few of those who had been reluctant to join the march began to slip away. Behind the captain his constables were grinning with relief, and the crowd began to jostle as it broke up.
‘Good Christ!’ Kitty swore bitterly. ‘It’s all a goddamned anticlimax. I have wasted my time—’
Then onto the top steps of the railway station a tall figure stepped out of the ranks and his voice rang out over them, silencing them and freezing them where they stood. The laughter and the smiles died away.
‘My people,’ Moses Gama cried, ‘this is your land. In it you have God’s right to live in peace and dignity. This building belongs to all who live here – it is your right to enter, as much as any other person’s that lives here. I am going in – who will follow me?’
A ragged, uncertain chorus of support came from the front ranks and Moses turned to face the police captain.
‘We are going in, Captain. Arrest us or stand aside.’
At that moment a train, filled with black commuters, pulled into the platform and they hung out of the windows of the coaches and cheered and stamped.
‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika!’ sang Moses Gama, and with his head held high he marched under the warning sign WHITES
ONLY.
‘You are breaking the law.’ The captain raised his voice. ‘Arrest that man.’ And the thin rank of constables moved forward to obey.
Instantly a roar went up from the crowd behind him. ‘Arrest me! Arrest me too!’ And they surged forward, picking Moses up with them as though he were a surfer on a wave.
‘Arrest me!’ they chanted. ‘Malan! Malan! Come and arrest us!’
The crowd burst through the entrance, and the white police constables were carried with them, struggling ineffectually in the press of bodies.
‘Arrest me!’ It had become a roar. ‘Amandla! Amandla!’
The captain was fighting to keep his feet, shouting to rally his men, but his voice was drowned out in the chant of ‘Power! Power!’ The captain’s cap was knocked over his eyes and he was shoved backwards on to the platform. Hank, the cameraman, was in the midst of it, holding his Arriflex high and shooting out of hand. Around him the white faces of the constables bobbed like flotsam in a wild torrent of humanity. From the coaches the black passengers swarmed out to meet and mingle with the mob, and a single voice called out.
‘Jee!’ the battle cry that can drive an Nguni warrior into the berserker’s passion, and ‘Jee!’ a hundred voices answered him and ‘Jee!’ again. There was the crash of breaking glass, one of the coach windows exploded as a shoulder thrust into it and ‘Jee!’ they sang.
One of the white constables lost his footing and went sprawling backwards. Immediately he was trampled under foot and he screamed like a rabbit in a snare.
‘Jee!’ sang the men, transformed into warriors, the veneer of Western manners stripped away, and another window smashed. By now the platform was choked with a struggling mass of humanity. From the cab of the locomotive, the mob dragged the terrified engine-driver and his fireman. They jostled and pushed them, ringing them in.
‘Jee!’ they chanted, bouncing at the knees, working themselves up into the killing madness. Their eyes were glazing and engorging with blood, their faces turning into shining black masks.
‘Jee!’ they sang. ‘Jee!’ and Moses Gama sang with them. Let the others call for restraint and passive resistance to the enemy, but all that was forgotten and now Moses Gama’s blood seethed with all his pent-up hatred and ‘Jee!’ he cried, and his skin crawled and itched with atavistic fury and his fighting heart swelled to fill his chest.
The police captain, still on his feet, had been driven back against the wall of the station-master’s office. One epaulette had been tom from the shoulder of his uniform and he had lost his cap. There was a fleck of blood at the corner of his moustache where an elbow had struck him in the mouth, and he was struggling with the flap of the holster on his belt.
‘Kill!’ shouted a voice. ‘Bulala!’ and it was taken up. Black hands clutched at the police captain’s lapels, and he drew the service revolver from its holster and tried to raise it, but the crowd was packed too densely around him. He fired blindly from the hip.
The shot was a great blurt of sound, and somebody yelled with shock and pain, and the crowd around the captain backed away, leaving a young black man in an army-surplus greatcoat kneeling at his feet, moaning and clutching his stomach.
The captain, white-faced and panting, lifted the revolver and fired again into the air.
‘Form up on me!’ he shouted in a voice hoarse and breaking with terror and exertion. Another of his men was down on his knees, submerged in the milling crowd, but he managed to clear his revolver from its holster and he fired point-blank, emptying the chamber into the press around him.
Then they were running, blocking the entrance, jamming in it as they sought to escape the gunfire, and all the police constables were firing, some on their knees, all of them dishevelled and terrified, and the bullets told in the mass of bodies with loud, meaty thumps, like a housewife beating the dust from a hanging carpet. The air was thick with the smell of gunsmoke and dust and blood, of sweat and unwashed bodies and terror.
They were screaming and pushing, fighting their way out into the street again, leaving their fallen comrades crumpled on the platform in seeping puddles of blood, or crawling desperately after them dragging bullet-shattered limbs.
And the little group of policemen were running to help each other to their feet, bruised and bloodied in tom uniforms. They gathered up the engine-driver and his fireman and, staggering, supporting each other, drawn revolvers still in their hands, they crossed the platform stepping over the bodies and the puddles of blood and hurried down
the steps to the two parked vans.
Across the road the crowd had reassembled and they screamed and shook their fists and chanted as the policemen scrambled into the vehicles and drove away at speed, and then the crowd swarmed into the roadway and hurled stones and abuse at the departing vans.
Tara had watched it all from the parked Packard, and now she sat paralysed with horror, listening to the animal growl of the crowd penetrated by the cries and groans of the wounded.
Moses Gama ran to her and shouted into the open window, ‘Go and fetch Sister Nunziata. Tell her we need all the help we can get.’
Tara nodded dumbly and started the engine. Across the road she could see Kitty and Hank still filming. Hank was kneeling beside a wounded man, shooting into his tortured face, panning down onto the pool of blood in which he lay.
Tara pulled away, and the crowd in the road tried to stop her. Black faces, swollen with anger, mouthed at her through the Packard’s windows and they beat with their fists on the roof, but she sounded her horn and kept driving.
‘I have to get a doctor,’ she shouted at them. ‘Let me pass, let me through.’
She got through them, and when she looked in the rear-view mirror, she saw that in frustration and fury they were stoning the railway station, ripping up the pavement and hurling the heavy slabs through the windows. She saw a white face at one of the windows, and felt a pang for the station-master and his staff. They had barricaded themselves in the ticket office.
The crowd outside the building was solid, and as she drove towards the mission she passed a flood of black men and women rushing to join it. The women were ululating wildly, a sound that maddened their menfolk. Some of them ran into the road to try and stop Tara, but she jammed her palm down on the horn ring and swerved around them. She glanced up into her driving-mirror and one of them picked up a rock from the side of the road and hurled it after the car. The rock crashed against the metal of the cab and bounced away.
At the mission hospital they had heard the sound of gunfire and the roar of the mob. Sister Nunziata, the white doctor, and her helpers were anxiously waiting on the verandah and Tara shouted up at her.
‘You must come quickly to the station, Sister, the police have shot and wounded people – I think some of them are dead.’
They must have been expecting the call, for they had their medical bags on the verandah with them. While Tara backed and turned the Packard, Sister Nunziata and the doctor ran down the steps, carrying their black bags. They clambered into the cab of the mission’s small blue Ford pick-up and turned towards the gate, cutting in front of Tara’s Packard. Tara followed them, but by the time she had turned the Packard and driven out through the gates, the little blue pick-up was a hundred yards ahead of her. It turned the corner into the station road and even above the engine-beat Tara heard the roar of the mob.
When she swung through the corner the Ford was stopped only fifty paces ahead of her. It was completely surrounded by the crowd. The road from side to side was packed with screaming black men and women. Tara could not hear the words, there was no sense to their fury, it was incoherent and deafening. They were concentrating on the Ford, and took no notice of Tara in the Packard.
Those nearest to the Ford were beating on the metal cab, and rocking the vehicle on its suspension. The side door opened and Sister Nunziata stood on the running board, a little higher than the heads of the howling mob that pushed closely around her. She was trying to speak to them, holding up her hands and pleading with them to let her through to take care of the wounded.
Suddenly a stone was thrown. It arced up out of the crowd and hit the nun on the side of her head. She reeled as she stood, and there was a bright flash of blood on her white veil. Stunned, she raised her hand to her cheek and it came away bloody.
The sight of blood enraged them. A forest of black arms reached up to Sister Nunziata and dragged her down from the vehicle. For a while they fought over her, dragging her in the road and worrying her like a pack of hounds with the fox. Then suddenly Tara saw the flash of a knife, and sitting in the Packard she screamed and thrust her fingers into her mouth to silence herself.
The old crone who wielded the knife was a sangoma, a witchdoctor, and around her neck she wore the necklace of bones and feathers and animal skulls that were her insignia. The knife in her right hand had a handle of rhino hom and the hand-forged blade was nine inches long and wickedly curved. Four men caught the nun and threw her across the engine bonnet of the Ford while the old woman hopped up beside her. The men held Sister Nunziata pinioned, face up, while the crowd began to chant wildly, and the sangoma stooped over her.
With a single stroke of the curved blade she cut through the nun’s grey habit and split her belly open from groin to rib cage. While Sister Nunziata writhed in the grip of the men who held her, the crone thrust her hand and naked arm into the wound. Tara watched in disbelief as she brought out something wet and glistening and purple, a soft amorphous thing. It was done so swiftly, so expertly, that for seconds Tara did not realize that it was Sister Nunziata’s liver that the crone held in her bloody hands.
With a slash of the curved blade, the sangoma cut a lump from the still living organ and hopped to her feet. Balancing on the curved bonnet of the Ford she faced the crowd.
‘I eat our white enemy,’ she screeched; ‘and thus I take his strength.’ And the mob roared, a terrible sound, as the old woman thrust the purple lump into her toothless mouth and chewed upon it. She hacked another piece off the liver, and still chewing with open mouth, she threw it to the crowd below her.
‘Eat your enemy!’ she shrilled, and they fought for the bloody scraps like dogs.
‘Be strong! Eat the liver of the hated ones!’
She threw them more and Tara covered her eyes and heaved convulsively. Acid vomit shot up her throat and she swallowed it down painfully.
Abruptly the driver’s door of the Packard beside her was jerked open and rough hands seized Tara. She was dragged out into the road. The blood roar of the crowd deafened her, but terror armed her with superhuman strength, and she tore herself free of the clutching hands.
She was at the edge of the mob, and the attention of most of them was entirely on the ghastly drama around the Ford. The crowd had set the vehicle alight. Sister Nunziata’s mutilated body lay on the bonnet like a sacrifice on a burning altar, while, trapped in the cab, the doctor thrashed around and beat at the flames with his bare hands, and the crowd chanted and danced around him like children around the bonfire on Guy Fawkes’ night.
For that instant Tara was free, but there were men around her, shouting and reaching for her, their faces bestial, their eyes glazed and insensate. No longer human, they were driven into that killing madness in which there was no reason nor mercy. Swift as a bird Tara ducked under the outstretched arms and darted away. She found that she had broken out of the mob, and in front of her was a plot of wasteland strewn with old rusted car bodies and rubbish. She fled across it and behind her she heard her pursuers baying like a pack of hunting dogs.
At the end of the open land a sagging barbed-wire fence blocked her way, and she glanced back over her shoulder. A group of men still followed her, and two of them had outdistanced the others. They were both big and powerful-looking, running strongly on bare feet, their faces contorted in a cruel rictus of excitement. They came on silently.
Tara stooped into the space between the strands of the wire. She was almost through when she felt the barbs catch in the flesh of her back, and pain arrested her. For a moment she struggled desperately, feeling her skin tear as she fought to free herself and blood trickled down her flanks – and then they seized her.
Now they shouted with wild laughter as they dragged her back through the fence, the barbs ripping at her clothing and her flesh. Her legs collapsed under her, and she pleaded with them.
‘Please don’t hurt me. I’m going to have a baby—’
They dragged her back across the waste plot, half on her knees,
twisting and pleading in their grip – and then she saw the sangoma coming to meet them, hopping and capering like an ancient baboon, cackling through her toothless mouth, her bones and beads rattling around her scrawny neck and the curved knife in her blood-caked fingers.
Tara began to scream, and she felt her urine squirt uncontrollably down her legs. ‘Please! Please don’t!’ she raved and terror was an icy blackness of her mind and body that crushed her to earth, and she closed her eyes and steeled herself to the stinging kiss of the blade.
Then in the mindless animal roar of the crowd, above the old crone’s shrill laughter, there was another voice, a great lion’s roar of anger and command that stilled all other sound. Tara opened her eyes and Moses Gama stood over her, a towering colossus, and his voice alone stopped them and drove them back. He lifted her in his arms and held her like a child. The crowd around the Packard opened before him as he carried her to it and placed her on the front seat and then slid behind the wheel.
As he started the engine and swung the Packard away in a hard U-tum the black smoke from the burning van poured over them and obscured the windscreen for a moment, and Tara smelled Sister Nunziata’s flesh roasting.
This time she could not control herself and she flopped forward, her head between her knees, and vomited on the floor of the Packard.
Manfred De La Rey had taken the chair at the top of the long table in the operations room in the basement of Marshall Square. He had come across from his own office suite in the Union Buildings in Pretoria to police headquarters at the centre of the storm, where he could be at hand to consider, with his senior officers, each fresh dispatch as it came in from the police provincial HQs around the country.
The entire wall facing Manfred’s seat was a large-scale map of the subcontinent. Working in front of it were two junior police officers. They were placing magnetic markers on the map. Each of the small black discs had a name printed upon it and represented one of the almost five hundred ANC officials and organizers that had been so far identified by the Intelligence Department.