Rage

by Wilbur Smith

  Raleigh knew that their foreskins would be gathered up by the witchdoctors, salted and dried and added to the tribal totem. A part of them would remain for ever with the custodians and no matter how far they wandered the witchdoctors could call them back with the foreskin curse.

  When all the other initiates had suffered the circumciser’s knife, Ndlame led them down to the water’s edge and showed them how to wash and bind their wounds with medicinal leaves and herbs, and to strap their penises against their stomachs. ‘For if the Mamba looks down, he will bleed again,’ he warned them.

  They smeared their bodies with a mixture of clay and ash. Even the hair on their heads was crusted with the dead-white ritual paint, so that they looked like albino ghosts. Their only clothing was skirts of grass and they built their huts in the deepest and most secret parts of the forest, for no woman might look upon them. They prepared their own food, plain maize cakes without any relish, and meat was forbidden them during the three moons of the initiation. Their only possession was their food bowl of clay.

  One of the boys developed an infection of his circumcision wound, the stinking green pus ran from it like milk from a cow’s teat, and the fever consumed him so his skin was almost painfully hot to the touch. The herbs and potions that Ndlame applied were of no avail. He died on the fourth day and they buried him in the forest and Ndlame took his food bowl away. It would be thrown through the front door of his mother’s hut by one of the witchdoctors, without a word being spoken, and she would know that her son had not been acceptable to the tribal gods.

  Each day from before dawn’s light until after sunset, Ndlame gave them instruction and taught them their duties as members of the tribe, as husbands and as fathers. They learned to endure pain and hardship with stoicism. They learned discipline and duty to their tribe, the ways of the wild animals and plants, how to survive in the wilderness, and how to please their wives and raise their children.

  When the wounds of the circumcision blade had healed, Ndlame bound up their members each night in the special knot called the Red Dog, to prevent them spilling their seed in the sacred initiation huts. Each morning Ndlame inspected the knots carefully to ensure that they had not been loosened to enjoy the forbidden pleasure of masturbation.

  When the three moons had passed, Ndlame led them back to the river and they washed away the white initiation clay and anointed their bodies with a mixture of fat and red ochre, and Ndlame gave them each a red blanket, symbol of manhood, with which they covered themselves. In procession, singing the manhood songs which they had practised, they went to where the tribe waited at the edge of the forest.

  Their parents had gifts for them, clothing and new shoes and money, and the girls giggled and ogled them boldly, for they were men now and able at last to take a wife, as many wives as they could afford, for the lobola, the marriage fee, was heavy.

  The two brothers, accompanied by their mother, journeyed back to Drake’s Farm, Wellington to take leave of their father, for he was going on to take holy orders, and Raleigh to remain at his father’s side, to learn the multifarious facets of Hendrick Tabaka’s business activities and eventually to take the helm and become the comfort and mainstay of Hendrick’s old age.

  These were fascinating and disturbing months and years for Raleigh. Until this time he had never guessed at his father’s wealth and power, but gradually it was revealed to him. The pages in the ledger turned for him one at a time. He learned of his father’s general dealer stores, and the butcheries and bakeries in all the black townships spread throughout the great industrial triangle of the Transvaal that was based on the gold-mines and the iron deposits and the coalfields. Then he went on to learn about the cattle herds and rural general dealer’s stores in the tribal reservations owned by his father and cared for by his myriad brothers, about the shebeens and the whores that operated behind the front of legitimate business, and finally he learned about the Buffaloes, that ubiquitous and shadowy association of many men from all the various tribes, whose chief was his own father.

  He realized at last just how rich and powerful his father was, and yet how because he was a black man, he could not display his importance and could wield his power only covertly and clandestinely. Raleigh felt his anger stir, as it did whenever he saw those signs WHITES ONLY – BLANKES ALLEENLIK and saw the white men pass in their shiny automobiles, or when he stood outside the universities and hospitals which were closed to him.

  He spoke to his father about these things that troubled him and Hendrick Tabaka chuckled and shook his head. ‘Rage makes a man sick, my son. It spoils his appetite for life and keeps him from sleep at night. We cannot change our world, so we must look for the good things in life and enjoy those to the full. The white man is strong, you cannot imagine how strong, you have not seen even the strength of his little finger. If you take up the spear against him, he will destroy you and all the good things we have – and if the gods and the lightnings intervened and by chance you destroyed the white man, think what would follow him. There would come a darkness and a time without law and protection that would be a hundred times worse than the white man’s oppressions. We would be consumed by the rage of our own people, and we would not have even the consolation of these few sweet things. If you open your ears and your eyes, my son, you will hear how the young people call us collaborators and how they talk of a redistribution of wealth, and you will see the envy in their eyes. The dream you have, my son, is a dangerous dream.’

  ‘And yet I must dream it, my father,’ said Raleigh, and then, one unforgettable day, his uncle, Moses Gama, returned from foreign lands and took him to meet other young men who shared the same dream.

  So during the day Raleigh worked at his father’s business and in the evenings he met with the other young comrades of Umkhonto we Sizwe. At first they only talked, but the words were sweeter and headier than the smoke of the dagga pipes of the old men.

  Then Raleigh joined the comrades who were enforcing the decrees of the African National Congress, the boycotts and the strikes and the work stoppages. He went to Evaton location with a small task force to enforce the bus boycott and they attacked the black workers in the bus queues who were trying to get to their places of employment or who were going to shop for their families, and they beat them with sjamboks, the long leather quirts, and with their fighting-sticks.

  On the first day of the attacks, Raleigh was determined to demonstrate his zeal to his comrades and he used his fighting-stick with all the skill which he had learned as a child in faction fights with the boys of the other tribes.

  There was a woman in the queue for the bus who defied Raleigh’s order to go home, and she spat at him and his comrades and called them tsotsies and skelms, gangsters and rogues. She was a woman in middle age, large and matronly, with cheeks so plump and shiny that they looked as though they had been rubbed up with black shoe polish, and with such a queenly manner that at first the young comrades of Umkhonto we Sizwe were abashed by her scorn and might have withdrawn.

  Then Raleigh saw that this was his opportunity to prove his ardour and he leaped forward and confronted the woman. ‘Go home, old woman,’ he warned her. ‘We are no longer dogs to eat the white man’s shit.’

  ‘You are a little uncircumcised boy with filth on your tongue,’ she began, but Raleigh would not let her continue. He swung the long supple fighting-stick, and it split her shiny black cheek as cleanly as the cut of an axe, so for an instant Raleigh saw the bone gleam in the depths of the wound before the swift crimson flood obscured it. The big woman screamed and fell to her knees, and Raleigh felt a strange sensation of power and purpose, a euphoria of patriotic duty. For a moment the woman kneeling before him became the focus of all his frustration and his rage.

  The woman saw it in his eyes and held up both arms over her head to ward off the next blow. Raleigh struck again, with all his strength and skill, using his wrist so that the fighting-stick whined in the air and the blow landed on the woman’s elbow. Her arms
were wreathed in layers of deep fat. It hung in dewlaps from her upper arms and in bracelets about her wrists, but it could not cushion the power behind that whistling stick. The joint of her elbow shattered, and her forearm dropped and twisted at an impossible angle as it hung helplessly at her side.

  The woman screamed again, this time the sound was so filled with outrage and agony that it goaded the other young warriors and they fell upon the bus passengers with such fury that the terminus was strewn with the wailing and sobbing injured and the concrete floor was washed sticky red.

  When the ambulances came with sirens wailing to collect the casualties, the comrades of Umkhonto we Sizwe pelted them with stones and half bricks and Raleigh led a small group of the bolder ones who ran out into the street and turned one of the stranded ambulances on its side, and when the petrol poured from the tank, Raleigh lit a match and tossed it on to the spread pool.

  The explosive ignition singed his eyelashes and burned away the front of his hair, but that evening when they got back to Drake’s Farm, Raleigh was the hero of the band of warriors, and they gave him the praise-name of Cheza, which means ‘the Burner’.

  As Raleigh was accepted into the middle ranks of the Youth League of the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe, so he gradually understood the cross-currents of power within them and the internal politics of the rival groups of moderates and radicals – those who thought that freedom could be negotiated and those who believed that it must be won with the blade of the spear, those who thought that the treasures so patiently built up over the years – the mines and the factories and the railways – should be preserved and those who believed that it should all be destroyed and rebuilt again in the name of freedom by the pure ones.

  Raleigh found himself inclining more and more towards the purists, the hard fighting men, the exclusive Bantu elite, and when he heard the name Poqo for the first time he thrilled to the sound and sense of it. It described exactly his own feelings and desires – the pure, the only ones.

  He was present in the house in Drake’s Farm when Moses Gama spoke to them and promised them that the long wait was almost at an end.

  ‘I will take this land by its heels and set it upon its head,’ Moses Gama told the group of intense loyal young warriors. ‘I will give you a deed, a sign that every man and woman will understand instantly. It will bring the tribes into the streets in their millions and their rage will be a beautiful thing, so pure and strong that nobody, not even the hard Boers, will be able to resist.’

  Soon Raleigh came to sense in Moses Gama a divinity that set him above all other humans, and he was filled with a religious love for him and a deep and utter commitment. When the news reached Raleigh that Moses Gama had been caught by the white police as he was on the point of blowing up the Houses of Parliament and destroying all the evil contained in that iniquitous institution, Raleigh was almost prostrated by his grief, and yet set on fire by Moses Gama’s courage and example.

  Over the weeks and months that followed Raleigh was exasperated and angered by the calls for moderation from the high councils of the ANC, and by the dispirited and meek acceptance of Moses Gama’s imprisonment and trial. He wanted to vent his wrath upon the world, and when the Pan-Africanist Congress broke away from the ANC Raleigh followed where his heart led.

  Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress, sent for him. ‘I have heard good words of you,’ he told Raleigh. ‘And I know the man who is your uncle, the father of us all who languishes in the white man’s prison. It is our duty – for we are the pure ones – to bring our message to every black man in the land. There is much work to do, and this is the task I have set for you alone, Raleigh Tabaka.’ He led Raleigh to a large-scale map of the Transvaal. ‘This area has been left untouched by the ANC.’ He placed his hand over the sweep of townships and coalfields and industry around the town of Vereeniging. ‘This is where I want you to begin the work.’

  Within a week Raleigh had conditioned his father to the idea that he should move to the Vereeniging area to take charge of the family interests there, the three stores in Evaton and the butchery and bakery in Sharpeville, and his father liked the idea the more he thought about it, and he agreed.

  ‘I will give you the names of the men who command the Buffaloes down there. We can begin moving the shebeens into the Sharpeville area. So far we have not put our cattle to graze on those pastures, and the grass there is tall and green.’

  Raleigh moved slowly at first. He was a stranger in Sharpeville and he had to consolidate his position. However, he was a strong and comely young man, and he spoke fluently all the major languages of the townships. This was not an unusual achievement, there were many who spoke all the four related languages of the Nguni group of peoples, the Zulus, the Xhosas, the Swazi and the Ndebele, which make up almost seventy per cent of the black tribes of South Africa and whose speech is characterized by elaborate clicking and clucking sounds.

  Many others, like Raleigh, were also conversant with the other two languages which are spoken by almost the entire remainder of the black population, the Sotho and the Tswana.

  Language was no barrier, and Raleigh had the additional advantage of being placed in charge of his father’s business interest in the area, and therefore was accorded almost immediate recognition and respect. Sooner or later every single resident of Sharpeville would come to either Tabaka’s bakery or butcher shop and be impressed by the articulate and sympathetic young man who listened to their worries and troubles and extended them credit to buy the white bread and fizzy drinks and tobacco; these were the staple diet of the townships where much of the old way of life was abandoned and forgotten, where the soured milk and maize meal were difficult to procure and where rickets made the children lethargic, bent their bones and turned their hair fine and wispy and dyed a peculiar bronze colour.

  They told Raleigh their little troubles, like the cost of renting the township houses and the hardship of commuting such distances to their place of work that it was necessary to rise long before the sun. And then they told Raleigh their greater worries, of being evicted from their homes and of the harassment by the police who were always raiding for liquor and pass offences and prostitution and to enforce the influx control laws. But always it came down to the passes, the little booklets that ruled their lives. The police were always there to ask ‘Where is your pass? Show me your pass book.’ The dompas, they called them, ‘the damned pass’, in which were stamped all their details of birth and residence and right to reside; no black person could get a job unless he or she produced the damned pass book.

  From all the people who came to the shops, Raleigh chose the young vital ones, the brave ones with rage in their hearts, and they met discreetly at first in the storeroom at the back of the bakery, sitting on the bread baskets and the piles of flour bags, talking the night through.

  Then they moved more openly, speaking to the older people and the children in the schools, going about as disciples to teach and explain. Raleigh used the funds of the butchery to buy a secondhand duplicator, and he typed the pamphlets on the pink wax sheets and ran them off on the machine.

  They were crude little pamphlets, with botchy typing errors and obvious corrections and each one began with the salutation, ‘This is Poqo of which it is said—’ and ended with the stern injunction, ‘Poqo has said this thing. Hear it and obey it.’ The young men whom Raleigh had recruited distributed these and read them to those who could not. read for themselves.

  At first Raleigh allowed only men to come to the meetings in the back room of the bakery store, for they were purists and it was the traditional role of the men to herd the cattle and hunt the game and defend the tribe, while the women thatched the huts and tilled the earth for maize and sorghum and carried the children on their backs.

  Then the word was passed down from the high command of Poqo and PAC that the women were also part of the struggle. So Raleigh spoke with his young men and one evening a girl came to their Friday-night meeting in t
he bakery storeroom.

  She was a Xhosa and she was tall and strong with beautiful swelling buttocks and a round sweet face like one of the wild veld flowers. While Raleigh spoke she listened silently. She did not move or fidget or interrupt and her huge dark eyes never left Raleigh’s face.

  Raleigh felt that he was inspired that night, and though he never looked directly at the girl and seemed to address himself to the young warriors, it was to her he spoke and his voice was deep and sure and his own words reverberated in his skull and he listened to them with the same wonder as the others did.

  When he finished speaking at last, they all sat in silence for a long time and then one of the young men turned to the girl and said, ‘Amelia—’ that was the first time ever that Raleigh heard her name, ‘Amelia, will you sing for us?’

  She did not simper or hang her head or make modest protestations. She simply opened her mouth, and sound poured out of her, glorious sound that made the skin on Raleigh’s forearms and at the back of his neck tingle.

  He watched her mouth while she sang. Her lips were soft and broad, shaped like two leaves of the wild peach tree, with a dark iridescence that shaded to soft pink on the inside of her mouth, and when she reached for an impossibly sweet high note, he saw that her teeth were perfect white as bone that had lain for a season in the veld, polished by the wind and bleached by the African sun.

  The words of the song were strange to him, but like the voice that sang them, they thrilled Raleigh:

  When the roll of heroes is called,

  Will my name be on it?

  I dream of that day when I will

  Sit with Moses Gama,

  And we will talk of the passing of the Boers.