by Wilbur Smith
The agent joined them there after a few minutes and while the girl kept watch at the door, to warn them of a surprise raid by the colonial police, the man handed Moses the travel documents he had prepared for him, a small bundle of second-hand clothing, and sufficient escudos to see him across the border and as far as the Witwatersrand gold-mines.
The next afternoon Moses joined a group of a hundred or more labourers at the railway station. Mozambique was an important source of labour for the gold-mines, and the wages earned by her citizens made a large contribution to the economy. Authentically dressed and in possession of genuine papers, Moses was indistinguishable from any other in the shuffling line of workers and he went aboard the third-class railway coach without even a glance from the uninterested white Portuguese official.
They left the coast in the late afternoon, climbed out of the muggy tropical heat and entered the hilly forests of the lowveld to approach the border post of Komatipoort early the following morning. As the coach rumbled slowly over the low iron bridge, it seemed to Moses that they were crossing not a river but a great ocean. He was filled with a strange blend of dismay and joy, of dread and anticipation. He was coming home – and yet home was a prison for him and his people.
It was strange to hear Afrikaans spoken again, guttural and harsh, but made even more ugly to Moses’ ear because it was the language of oppression. The officials here were not the indolent and slovenly Portuguese. Dauntingly brisk and efficient, they examined his papers with sharp eyes, and questioned him brusquely in that hated language. However, Moses had already masked himself in the protective veneer of the African. His face was expressionless and his eyes blank, just a black face among millions of black faces, and they passed him through.
Swart Hendrick did not recognize him when he slouched into the general dealer’s, store in Drake’s Farm township. He was dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-downs and wore an old golfing cap pulled down over his eyes. Only when he straightened up to his full height and lifted the cap did Swart Hendrick start and exclaim in amazement, then seized his arm and, casting nervous glances over his shoulder, hustled his brother through into the little cubicle at the back of the store that he used as an office.
‘They are watching this place,’ he whispered agitatedly – ‘Is your head full of fever, that you walk in here in plain daylight?’ Only when they were safely in the locked office and he had recovered from the shock, did he embrace Moses. ‘A part of my heart has been missing, but is now restored.’
He shouted over the rhino-board partition wall of his office, ‘Raleigh, come here immediately, boy!’ and his son came to peer in astonishment at his famous uncle and then kneel before him, lift one of Moses’s feet and place it on his own head in the obeisance to a great chief. Smiling, Moses lifted him to his feet and embraced him, questioned him about his schooling and his studies and then let him respond to Swart Hendrick’s order.
‘Go to your mother. Tell her to prepare food. A whole chicken and plenty of maize meal porridge, and a gallon of strong tea with plenty of sugar. Your uncle is hungry.’
They stayed locked in Swart Hendrick’s office until late that night, for there was much to discuss. Swart Hendrick made a full report of all their business enterprises, the state of the secret mineworkers’ union, the organization of their Buffaloes, and then gave him all the news of their family and close friends.
When at last they left the office, and crossed to Swart Hendrick’s house, he took Moses’ arm and led him to the small bedroom which was always ready for his visits, and as he opened the door, Victoria rose from the low bed on which she had been sitting patiently. She came to him and, as the child had done, prostrated herself in front of him and placed his foot upon her head.
‘You are my sun,’ she whispered. ‘Since you went away I have been in darkness.’
‘I sent one of the Buffaloes to fetch her from the hospital,’ Swart Hendrick explained.
‘You did the right thing.’ Moses stooped and lifted the Zulu girl to her feet, and she hung her head shyly.
‘We will talk again in the morning.’ Swart Hendrick closed the door quietly and Moses placed his forefinger under Vicky’s chin and lifted it so he could look at her face.
She was even more beautiful than he remembered, an African madonna with a face like a dark moon. For a moment he thought of the woman he had left in London, and his senses cringed as he compared her humid white flesh, soft as putty, to this girl’s glossy hide, firm and cool as polished onyx. His nostrils flared to her spicy African musk, so different from the other woman’s thin sour odour which she tried to disguise with flowery perfumes. When Vicky looked up at him and smiled, the whites of her eyes and her perfect teeth were luminous and ivory bright in her lovely dark face.
When they had purged their first passion, they lay under the thick kaross of hyrax skins and talked the rest of the night away.
He listened to her boast of her exploits in his absence. She had marched to Pretoria with the other women to deliver a petition to the new Minister of Bantu Affairs, who had replaced Dr Verwoerd when he became Prime Minister.
The march had never reached the Union Buildings. The police had intercepted it, and arrested the organizers. She had spent three days and nights in prison, and she related her humiliations with such humour, giggling as she repeated the Alice in Wonderland exchanges between the magistrate and herself, that Moses chuckled with her. In the end, the charges of attending an unlawful assembly and incitement to public violence had been dropped, and Vicky and the other women had been released.
‘But I am a battle-trained warrior now,’ she laughed. ‘I have bloodied my spear, like the Zulus of old King Chaka.’
‘I am proud of you,’ he told her. ‘But the true battle is only just beginning—’ and he told her a small part of what lay ahead for all them, and in the yellow flickering light of the lantern, she watched his face avidly and her eyes shone.
Before they at last drifted off into sleep the false dawn was framing the single small wjndow, and Vicky murmured with her lips against his naked chest,
‘How long will you stay this time, my lord?’
‘Not as long as I wish I could.’
He stayed on three more days at Drake’s Farm, and Vicky was with him every night.
Many visitors came when they heard that Moses Gama had returned and most of them were the fierce younger men of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the warriors eager for action.
Some of the older men of the Congress who came to talk with Moses left disturbed by what they had heard and even Swart Hendrick was worried. His brother had changed. He could not readily tell in what way he had changed, but the difference was there. Moses was more impatient and restless. The mundane details of business, and the day-to-day running of the Buffaloes and the trade union committees no longer seemed to hold his attention.
‘It is as though he has fastened his eyes upon a distant hilltop, and cannot see anything in between. He speaks only of strange men in distant lands and what do they think or say that concerns us here?’ he grumbled to the twins’ mother, his only real confidante. ‘He is scornful of the money we have made and saved, and says that after the revolution money will have no value. That everything will belong to the people—’ Swart Hendrick broke off to think for a moment of his stores and his shebeens, the bakeries and herds of cattle in the reservations which belonged to him, the money in the Post Office savings book and in the white man’s bank, and the cash that he kept hidden in many secret places – some of it even buried under the floor upon which he now sat and drank the good beer brewed by his favourite wife. ‘I am not sure that I wish all things to belong to the people,’ he muttered thoughtfully. ‘The people are cattle, lazy and stupid, what have they done to deserve the things for which I have worked so long and hard?’
‘Perhaps it is a fever. Perhaps your great brother has a worm in his bowel,’ his favourite wife suggested. ‘I will make a muti for him that will clear his guts and hi
s skull.’ Swart Hendrick shook his head sadly. He was not at all certain that even one of his wife’s devastating laxatives would drive the dark schemes from his brother’s head.
Of course, long ago he had talked and dreamed strange and wild things with his brother. Moses had been young and that was the way of young men, but now the frosts of wisdom were upon Hendrick’s head, and his belly was round and full, and he had many sons and herds of cattle. He had not truly thought about it before, but he was a man contented. True, he was not free – but then he was not sure what free really meant. He loved and feared his brother very much, but he was not sure that he wanted to risk all he had for a word of uncertain meaning.
‘We must burn down and destroy the whole monstrous system,’ his brother said, but it occurred to Swart Hendrick that in the burning down might be included his stores and bakeries.
‘We must goad the land, we must make it wild and ungovernable, like a great stallion, so that the oppressor is hurled to earth from its back,’ his brother said, but Hendrick had an uncomfortable image of himself and his cosy existence taking that same painful toss.
‘The rage of the people is a beautiful and sacred thing, we must let it run free,’ Moses said, and Hendrick thought of the people running freely through his well-stocked premises. He had also witnessed the rage of the people in Durban during the Zulu rioting, and the very first concern of every man had been to provide himself with a new suit of clothing and a radio from the looted Indian stores.
‘The police are the enemies of the people, they too will perish in the flames,’ Moses said, and Hendrick remembered that when the faction fighting between the Zulus and the Xhosas had swept through Drake’s Farm the previous November it was the police who had separated them and prevented many more than forty dead. They had also saved his stores from being looted in the uproar. Now Hendrick wondered just who would prevent them killing each other after the police had been burned, and just what day-to-day existence would be like in the townships when each man made his own laws.
However, Swart Hendrick was ashamed of his treacherous relief when three days later Moses left Drake’s Farm and moved to the house at Rivonia. Indeed it was Swart Hendrick who had gently pointed out to his brother the danger of remaining when almost everybody in the township knew he had returned, and all day long there was a crowd of idlers in the street hoping for a glimpse of Moses Gama, the beloved leader. It was only a matter of time before the police heard about it through their informers.
The young warriors of Umkhonto we Sizwe willingly acted as Moses’ scouts in the weeks that followed. They arranged the meetings, the small clandestine gatherings of the most fierce and bloody-minded amongst their own ranks. After Moses had spoken to them, the smouldering resentments which they felt towards the conservative and pacific leadership of the Congress was ready to burst into open rebellion.
Moses sought out and talked with some of the older members of Congress who, despite their age, were radical and impatient. He met secretly with the cell leaders of his own Buffaloes without the knowledge of Hendrick Tabaka, for he had sensed the change in his brother, the cooling of his political passions which had never boiled at the same white heat as Moses’ own. For the first time in all the years he no longer trusted him entirely. Like an axe too long in use, Hendrick had lost the keen bright edge, and Moses knew that he must find another sharper weapon to replace him.
‘The young ones must carry the battle forward,’ he told Vicky Dinizulu. ‘Raleigh, and yes, you also, Vicky. The struggle is passing into your hands.’
At each meeting he listened as long as he spoke, picking up the subtle shifts in the balance of power which had taken place in the years that he had been in foreign lands. It was only then that he realized how much ground he had lost, how far he had fallen behind Mandela in the councils of the African National Congress and the imagination of the people.
‘It was a serious error on my part to go underground and leave the country,’ he mused. ‘If only I had stayed to take my place in the dock beside Mandela and the others—’
‘The risk was too great,’ Vicky made excuse for him. ‘If there had been another judgement – if any of the Boer judges other than Rumpff had tried them, they might have gone to the gallows and if you had gone with them the cause would have died upon the rope with all of you. You cannot die, my husband, for without you we are children without a father.’
Moses growled angrily. ‘And yet, Mandela stood in the dock and made it a showcase for his own personality. Millions who had never heard his name before saw his face daily in their newspapers and his words became part of the language.’ Moses shook his head. ‘Simple words: Amandla and Ngawethu, he said, and everyone in the land listened.’
‘They know your name also, and your words, my lord.’
Moses glared at her. ‘I do not want you to try to placate me, woman. We both know that while they were in prison during the trial – and I was in exile – they formally handed over the leadership to Mandela. Even old Luthuli gave his blessing, and since his acquittal Mandela has embarked on a new initiative. I know that he has been travelling around the country, in fifty different disguises, consolidating that leadership. I must confront him, and wrest the leadership back from him very soon, or it will be too late and I will be forgotten and left behind.’
‘What will you do, my lord? How will you unseat him? He is riding high now – what can we do?’
‘Mandela has a weakness – he is too soft, too placatory towards the Boers. I must exploit that weakness.’ He said it quietly, but there was such a fierce light in his eyes that Victoria shivered involuntarily, and then with an effort closed her mind against the dark images his words had conjured up.
‘He is my husband,’ she told herself, fervently. ‘He is my lord, and whatever he says or does is the truth and the right.’
The confrontation took place in the kitchen at Puck’s Hill. Outside the sky was pregnant with leaden thunder clouds, dark as bruises, that cast an unnatural gloom across the room and Marcus Archer switched on the electric lights that hung above the long table in their pseudo-antique brass fittings.
The thunder crashed like artillery and rolled heavily back and forth through the heavens. Outside the lightning flared in brilliant crackling white light and the rain poured from the eaves in a rippling silver curtain across the windows. They raised their voices against tumultuous nature so they were shouting at each other. They were the high command of Umkhonto we Sizwe, twelve men in all, all of them black except Joe Cicero and Marcus Archer – but only two of them counted, Moses Gama and Nelson Mandela. All the others were silent, relegated to the role of observers, while these two, like dominant black-maned lions, battled for the leadership of the pride.
‘If I accept what you propose,’ Nelson Mandela was standing, leaning forward with clenched fists on the table top, ‘we will forfeit the sympathy of the world.’
‘You have already accepted the principle of armed revolt that I have urged upon you all these years.’ Moses leaned back in the wooden kitchen chair, balancing on its two back legs with his arms folded across his chest. ‘You have resisted my call to battle, and instead you have wasted our strength in feeble demonstrations of defiance which the Boers crush down contemptuously.’
‘Our campaigns have united the people,’ Mandela cried. He had grown a short dark beard since Moses had last seen him. It gave him the air of a true revolutionary, and Moses admitted to himself that Mandela was a fine-looking man, tall and strong and brimming with confidence, a formidable adversary.
‘They have also given you a good look at the inside of the white man’s gaol,’ Moses told him contemptuously. ‘The time for those childish games has passed. It is time to strike ferociously at the enemy’s heart.’
‘You know we have agreed.’ Mandela was still standing. ‘You know we have reluctantly agreed to the use of force—’
Now Moses leapt to his feet so violently that his chair was flung crashing against the wall
behind him.
‘Reluctantly!’ He leaned across the table until his eyes were inches from Mandela’s dark eyes. ‘Yes, you are as reluctant as an old woman and timid as a virgin. What kind of violence is this you propose – dynamiting a few telegraph poles, blowing up a telephone exchange?’ Moses’ tone was withering with scorn. ‘Next you will blow up a public shit house and expect the Boers to come cringing to you for terms. You are naive, my friend, your eyes are full of stars and your head full of sunny dreams. These are hard men you are taking on and there is only one way you will get their attention. Make them bleed and rub their noses in the blood.’
‘We will attack only inanimate targets,’ Mandela said. ‘There will be no taking of human life. We are not murderers.’
‘We are warriors.’ Moses dropped his voice, but that did not reduce its power. His words seemed to shimmer in the gloomy room. ‘We are fighting for the freedom of our people. We cannot afford the scruples with which you seek to shackle us.’
The younger men at the foot of the table stirred with a restless eagerness, and Joe Cicero smiled slightly, but his eyes were fathomless and his smile was thin and cruel.
‘Our violent acts should be symbolic,’ Mandela tried to explain, but Moses rode over him.
‘Symbols! We have no patience with symbolic acts. In Kenya the warriors of Mau Mau took the little children of the white settlers and held them up by their feet and chopped between their legs with razor-sharp pangas and threw the pieces into the pit toilets, and that is bringing the white men to the conference table. That is the type of symbol the white men understand.’
‘We will never sink to such barbarism,’ Nelson Mandela said firmly, and Moses leaned even closer to him, and their eyes locked. As they stared at each other, Moses was thinking swiftly. He had forced his opponent to make a stand, to commit himself irrevocably in front of the militants on the high command. Word of his refusal to engage in unlimited warfare would be swiftly passed to the Youth Leaguers and the young hawks, to the Buffaloes and the others who made up the foundation of Moses’ personal support.