by Wilbur Smith
For Michael they were the essence of the continent, a distillation of all of Africa’s immensity and infinite beauty. Like a celestial choir, they sang aloud all that he was trying to convey in clumsy stumbling sentences. He felt at peace when at last he left the massive stone building.
He found Des Blake on his usual stool at the end of the bar counter at the George.
‘Are you your brother’s keeper?’ Des Blake enquired loftily, but his words were slurred. It took a great deal of gin to make Des Blake slur.
‘The sub is asking for you,’ Michael lied.
He wondered why he felt any concern for the man, or why any of them bothered to protect him – but then one of the other senior journalists had given him the answer to that. ‘He was once a great newspaperman, and we have to look after our own.’
Des was having difficulty fitting a cigarette into his ivory holder. Michael did it for him, and as he held a match he said, ‘Come on, Mr Blake. They are waiting for you.’
‘Courtney, I think I should warn you now. You haven’t got what it takes, I’m afraid. You’ll never cut the mustard, boy. You are just a poor little rich man’s son. You’ll never be a newspaperman’s anus.’
‘Come along, Mr Blake,’ said Michael wearily, and took his arm to help him down off the stool.
The first thing Michael noticed when he reached his desk again was that the sheet of paper was missing from his typewriter. It was only in the last few months, since he had been assigned to work with Des Blake, that he had been given his own desk and machine, and he was fiercely jealous and protective of them.
The idea of anyone fiddling with his typewriter, let alone taking work out of it, infuriated him. He looked around him furiously, seeking a target for his anger, but every single person in the long, crowded noisy room was senior to him. The effort it cost him to contain his outrage left him shaking. He lit another cigarette, the last one in his pack, and even in his agitation he realized that that made it twenty since breakfast.
‘Courtney!’ the sub called across to him, raising his voice above the rattle of typewriters. ‘You took your time. Mr Herbstein wants you in his office right away.’
Michael’s rage subsided miraculously. He had never been in the editor’s office before, Mr Herbstein had once said good morning to him in the lift but that was all.
The walk down the newsroom seemed the longest of his life, and though nobody even glanced up as he passed, Michael was certain that they were secretly sniggering at him and gloating on his dilemma.
He knocked on the frosted-glass panel of the editor’s door and there was a bellow from inside.
Timidly Michael pushed the door open and peered round it. Leon Herbstein was on the telephone, a burly man in a sloppy hand-knitted cardigan with thick hom-rimmed spectacles and a shock of thick curly hair shot through with strands of grey. Impatiently he waved Michael into the room and then ignored him while he finished his conversation on the telephone.
At last he slammed down the receiver and swivelled his chair to regard the young man who was standing uneasily in front of his desk.
Ten days before, Leon Herbstein had received a quite unexpected invitation to a luncheon in the executive dining-room of the Courtney Mining and Finance Company’s new head office building. There had been ten other guests present, all of them leaders of commerce and industry, but Herbstein had found himself in the right-hand seat beside his host.
Leon Herbstein had never had any great admiration for Shasa Courtney. He was suspicious of vast wealth, and the two Courtneys – mother and son – had a formidable reputation for shrewd and ruthless business practices. Then again, Shasa Courtney had forsaken the United Party of which Leon Herbstein was an ardent supporter, and had gone across to the Nationalists. Leon Herbstein had never forgotten the violent anti-Semitism which had attended the birth of the National Party, and he considered the policy of apartheid as simply another manifestation of the same grotesque racial bigotry.
As far as he was concerned, Shasa Courtney was one of the enemy. However, he sat down at his luncheon table quite unprepared for the man’s easy and insidious charm and his quick and subtle mind. Shasa devoted most of his attention to Leon Herbstein, and by the end of the meal the editor had considerably moderated his feelings towards the Courtneys. At least he was convinced that Shasa Courtney truly had the best interests of all the people at heart, that he was especially concerned with improving the lot of the black and underprivileged sections, and that he was wielding an important moderating influence in the high councils of the National Party.
In addition, he left the Courtney building with a heightened respect for Shasa Courtney’s subtlety. Not once had Shasa mentioned the fact that he and his companies now owned 42 per cent of the stock of Associated Newspapers of South Africa or that his son was employed as a junior journalist on the Mail. It hadn’t been necessary, both men had been acutely aware of these facts while they talked.
Up to that time Leon Herbstein had felt a natural antagonism towards Michael Courtney. Placing him in the care of Des Blake had been all the preference he had shown to the lad. However, after that luncheon he had begun to study him with more attention. It didn’t take an old dog long to attribute the improvement in much of the copy that Des Blake had been turning out recently to the groundwork that Michael Courtney was doing for him. From then onwards, whenever he passed Michael’s desk, Herbstein made a point of quickly and surreptitiously checking what work was in his machine or in the copy basket.
Herbstein had the journalist’s trick of being able to assimilate a full typed sheet at a single glance, and he was grimly amused to notice how often Des Blake’s column was based on the draft by his young assistant, and how often the original was better than the final copy.
Now he studied Michael closely as he stood awkwardly before his desk. Despite the fact that he had cropped his hair in one of those appalling brush cuts that the youth were affecting these days and wore a vividly patterned bow tie, he was a likeable-looking lad, with a strong determined jawline and clear, intelligent eyes. Perhaps he was too thin for his height, and a little gawky, but he had quite noticeably matured and gained in self-assurance during the short period he had been at the Mail.
Suddenly Leon realized that he was being cruel, and that his scrutiny was subjecting the lad to unnecessary agony. He picked up the sheet of typescript that lay in front of him, and slid it across his untidy desk.
‘Did you write that?’ he demanded gruffly, and Michael snatched up the sheet protectively.
‘I didn’t mean anybody to read it,’ he whispered, and then remembered who he was talking to and threw in a lame, ‘sir.’
‘Strange.’ Leon Herbstein shook his head. ‘I always believed we were in the business of writing so that others could read.’
‘I was just practising.’ Michael held the sheet behind his back.
‘I made some corrections,’ Herbstein told him, and Michael jerked the page out from behind him and scanned it anxiously.
‘Your third paragraph is redundant, and “scar” is a better word than “cicatrice” – otherwise we’ll run it as you wrote it.’
‘I don’t understand, sir,’ Michael blurted.
‘You’ve saved me the trouble of writing tomorrow’s editorial.’ Herbstein reached across and took the page from Michael’s limp fingers, tossed it into his Out basket and then concentrated all his attention on his own work.
Michael stood gaping at the top of his head. It took him ten seconds to realize that he had been dismissed and he backed towards the door and closed it carefully behind him. His legs just carried him to his desk, and then collapsed under him. He sat down heavily in his swivel chair and reached for his cigarette pack. It was empty and he crumpled it and dropped it into his wastepaper basket.
Only then did the full significance of what had happened hit him and he felt cold and slightly nauseated.
‘The editorial,’ he whispered, and his hands began to tremble.
> Across the desk Desmond Blake belched softly and demanded, ‘Where are the notes on that American what’s- ’is-name fellow?’
‘I haven’t finished it yet, Mr Blake.’
‘Listen, kid. I warned you. You’ll have to extract your digit from your fundamental orifice if you want to get anywhere around here.’
Michael set his alarm clock for five o’clock the next morning and went downstairs with his raincoat over his pyjamas. He was waiting on the street corner with the newspaper urchins when the bundles of newsprint were tossed onto the pavement from the back of the Mail’s delivery van.
He ran back up the stairs clutching a copy of the paper and locked the door to his bed-sitter. It took all his courage to open it at the editorial page. He was actually shaking with terror that Mr Herbstein might have changed his mind, or that it was all some monstrous practical joke.
There under the Mail’s crest at the very top of the editorial page was his headline: A MARTYR IS BORN.
He read it through quickly, and then started again and read it aloud, mouthing each word, rolling it over his tongue like a noble and precious wine. He propped the paper, open at the editorial, beside the mirror while he shaved, and then carried it down to the Greek fast-food café where he had his breakfast each morning and showed it to Mr Costa, who called his wife out of the kitchen.
‘Hey, Michael, you a big shot now.’ Mrs Costa embraced him, smelling of fried bacon and garlic. ‘You a big-shot newspaperman now.’
She let him use the telephone in the back room and he gave the operator the number at Weltevreden. Centaine answered on the second ring.
‘Mickey!’ she cried delightedly. ‘Where are you? Are you in Cape Town?’
He calmed her down and then read it to her. There was a long silence. ‘The editorial, Mickey. You aren’t making this up, are you? I’ll never forgive you if you are.’
Once he had reassured her, Centaine told him, ‘I can’t remember ever being so excited about anything in years. I’m going to call your father, you must tell him yourself.’
Shasa came on the line, and Michael read it to him. ‘You wrote that?’ Shasa asked. ‘Pretty hot stuff, Mickey. Of course I don’t agree with your conclusions – Gama must hang. However, you almost convinced me otherwise, but we can debate that when next we are together. In the meantime, congratulations, my boy. Perhaps you did make the right decision after all.’
Michael found that he was a minor celebrity in the newsroom, even the sub stopped by his desk to congratulate him and discuss the article for a few moments, and the pretty little blonde on the reception desk who had never before been aware of his existence smiled and greeted him by name.
‘Listen, kid,’ said Desmond Blake. ‘One little fart doesn’t make a whole sewage farm. In future I don’t want you pushing copy over my head. Every bit of shit you write comes across my desk, get it?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Blake. I didn’t—’
‘Yeah! Yeah! I know, you didn’t mean it. Just don’t go getting a big head. Remember whose assistant you are.’
The news of Moses Gama’s reprieve threw the newsroom into a state of pandemonium that didn’t subside for almost a week. Michael was drawn in, and some of his days ended at midnight when the presses began their run and began when the first papers hit the streets the next morning.
However, he found that the excitement seemed to release limitless reserves of energy in him and he never felt tired. He learned to work quickly and accurately and his way with words gradually assumed a deftness and polish that was apparent even to himself.
Two weeks after the reprieve the editor called him into his office. He had learned not to knock, any waste of time irritated Leon-Herbstein and made him bellow aggressively. Michael went straight on in, but he had not yet entirely mastered the pose of world-weary cynicism which he knew was the hallmark of the veteran journalist, and he was all radiant eagerness as he asked, ‘Yes, Mr Herbstein?’
‘OK, Mickey, I’ve got something for you.’ Every time Mr Herbstein used his Christian name, Michael still thrilled with delicious shock.
‘We are getting a lot of requests from readers and overseas correspondents. With all the interest in the Gama case, people want to know more about the black political movements. They want to know the difference between the Pan-Africanist Congress and the African National Congress, they want to know who’s who – who the hell are Tambo and Sisulu, Mandela and Moses Gama and what do they stand for? All that sort of stuff. You seem to be interested in black politics and enjoy digging around in the archives – besides I can’t spare one of my top men on this sort of background stuff. So get on with it.’ Herbstein switched his attention back to the work on his desk, but Michael by now had sufficient confidence to stand his ground.
‘Am I still working under Mr Blake?’ he asked. He had learned by this time if you called him ‘sir’ it just made Leon Herbstein mad.
Herbstein shook his head but did not even look up. ‘You are on your own. Send everything to me. No hurry, any time in the next five minutes will do nicely.’
Michael soon discovered that the Mail’s archives were inadequate, and served merely to initiate him into the complexity and daunting size of the project he had been set. However, from them he was at least able to draw up a list of the various black political groups and related associations such as the officially unrecognized black trade unions, and from there to compile a list of their own leaders and officials.
He cleared one wall of his bed-sitting room and put up a board on which he pinned all this information, using different-coloured cards for each grouping and press photographs of the principal black leaders. All this achieved was to convince him of how little was known about the black movements by even the most well-informed of the white section of the nation.
The public library added very little to his understanding. Most of the books on the subject had been written ten or more years before and simply traced the African National Congress from those distant days of its inception in 1912 and the names mentioned were all of men now dead or in their dotage.
Then he had his first inspiration. One of the Mail’s sister publications under the banner of Associated Newspapers of South Africa was a weekly magazine called Assegai, after the broad-bladed war spear that the impis of Chaka the Zulu conqueror had wielded. The magazine was aimed at the educated and more affluent section of the black community. Its editorial policy was dictated by the white directors of Associated Newspapers but amongst the articles and photographs of African football stars and torch singers, of black American athletes and film actors, an occasional article slipped through of a fiercely radical slant.
Michael borrowed a company car and went out to see the editor of Assegai in the vast black location of Drake’s Farm. The editor was a graduate of the black university of Fort Hare, a Xhosa named Solomon Nduli. He was polite but cool, and they had chatted for half an hour before a barbed remark let Michael know that he had been recognized as a spy for the security police, and that he would learn nothing of value.
A week later the Mail published the first of Michael’s articles in its Saturday magazine edition. It was a comparison of the two leading African political organizations: the Pan-Africanist Congress, which was a jealously exclusive body to which only pure-blooded African blacks were admitted and whose views were extremely radical, and the much larger African National Congress which, although predominantly black, also included whites and Asians and mixed-blood members such as the Cape coloureds, and whose objectives were essentially conciliatory.
The article was accurate, obviously carefully researched, but, most important, the tone was sympathetic, and it carried the by-line ‘by Michael Courtney’.
The following day Solomon Nduli called Michael at the offices of the Mail, and suggested another meeting. His first words when they shook hands were, ‘I’m sorry. I think I misjudged you. What do you want to know?’
Solomon took Michael into a strange world that he had never realize
d existed – the world of the black townships. He arranged for him to meet Robert Sobukwe, and Michael was appalled by the depth of the resentment the black leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress expressed, particularly for the pass laws, by his enormous impatience to effect an upheaval of the entire society, and by the thinly veiled violence in the man.
‘I will try to arrange for you to meet Mandela,’ Solomon promised, ‘although, as you know, he is underground now, and wanted by the police. But there are others you must talk to.’
He took Michael to Baragwanath Hospital and introduced him to the wife of Moses Gama, the lovely young Zulu woman he had seen at the trial in Cape Town. Victoria was heavily pregnant, but with a calm dignity that impressed Michael deeply until he sensed the same terrible resentment and latent violence in her that he had found in Robert Sobukwe.
The next day Solomon took him back to Drake’s Farm to meet a man named Hendrick Tabaka, a man who seemed to own most of the small businesses in the location and looked like a heavyweight wrestler with a head like a cannonball criss-crossed with scars.
He appeared to Michael to represent the opposite end of the black protest consciousness. ‘I have my family and my business,’ he told Michael, ‘and I will protect them from anybody, black or white.’ And Michael was reminded of a view that his father had often expressed, but to which Michael had not given much consideration before this. ‘We must give the black people a piece of the pie,’ Shasa Courtney had said. ‘Give them something of their own. The truly dangerous man is one with nothing to lose.’
Michael gave the second article in the series the title ‘Rage’ and in it he tried to describe the deep and bitter resentment that he had encountered on his journeys into the half-world of the townships. He ended the article with the words:
Despite this deep sense of outrage, I never found the least indication of hatred towards the white person as an individual by any of the black leaders with whom I was able to speak. Their resentment seemed to me to be directed only at the Nationalist government’s policy of apartheid while the vast treasure of mutual goodwill built up over three hundred years between the races seems to be entirely undiminished by it.