Rage

by Wilbur Smith

  She went away with the young men who had brought her, and that night Raleigh dreamed of her. She stood beside the pool in the great Fish River in which he had washed away the white clay paint of his childhood and she wore the short beaded kilt and her breasts and her legs were bare. Her legs were long and her breasts were round and hard as black marble and she smiled at him with those even white teeth, and when Raleigh awoke his seed was splashed upon the blanket which covered him.

  Three days later she came to the bakery to buy bread and Raleigh saw her through the peephole above his desk through which he could watch all that was happening in the front of the store and he went through to the counter and greeted her gravely.

  ‘I see you, Amelia.’

  She smiled at him and replied, ‘I see you also, Raleigh Tabaka,’ and it seemed that she sang his name, for she gave it a music that he had never heard in it before.

  She purchased two loaves of white bread, but Raleigh lingered over the sale, wrapping each loaf carefully and counting the pennies of her change as though they were gold sovereigns.

  ‘What is your full name?’ he asked her.

  ‘I am called Amelia Sigela.’

  ‘Where is your father’s kraal, Amelia Sigela?’

  ‘My father is dead, and I live with my father’s sister.’

  She was a teacher at the Sharpeville primary school and she was twenty years old. When she left with her bread wrapped in newspaper and her buttocks swinging and jostling each other beneath the yellow European-style skirt, Raleigh returned to his desk in the cubicle of his office and sat for a long time staring at the wall.

  On Friday Amelia Sigela came again to the meeting in the back room of the bakery and at the end she sang for them once more. This time Raleigh knew the words and he sang with her. He had a good deep baritone but she gilded it and wreathed it in the glory of her startling soprano and when the meeting broke up, Raleigh walked back with her through the dark streets to her aunt’s house in the avenue beyond the school.

  They lingered at the door and he touched her arm. It was warm and silky beneath his fingers. On the Sunday when he took the train back to Drake’s Farm to make his weekly report to his father, he told his mother about Amelia Sigela and the two of them went through to the sacred room where his mother kept the family gods.

  His mother sacrificed a black chicken and spoke to the carved idols, particularly to the totem of Raleigh’s maternal great-grandfather, and he replied in a voice that only Raleigh’s mother could hear. She listened gravely, nodding at what he said, and later, while they ate the sacrificial chicken with rice and herbs, she promised, ‘I will speak to your father on your behalf.’

  The following Friday after the meeting, Raleigh walked home with Amelia again, but this time as they passed the school where she taught, he drew her into the shadow of the buildings and they stood against the wall very close together. She made no attempt to pull away when he stroked her cheek, so he told her:

  ‘My father is sending an emissary to your aunt to agree a marriage price.’ Amelia was silent and he went on, ‘However, I will ask him not to do so, if you do not wish it.’

  ‘I wish it very much,’ she whispered, and slowly and voluptuously she rubbed herself against him like a cat.

  The lobola, the marriage price, was twenty head of cattle, worth a great deal of money, and Hendrick Tabaka told his son, ‘You must work for it, just like other young men are forced to do.’

  It would take Raleigh three years to accumulate enough to buy the cattle, but when he told Amelia, she smiled and told him, ‘Each day will make me want you more. Think then how great will be my want after three years, and think how sweet will be that moment when the wanting is assuaged.’

  Every afternoon, when school was out, Amelia came to the bakery and quite naturally she took to working behind the counter selling the bread and the round brown buns. Then when Raleigh closed the shop, she cooked his evening meal for him, and when he had eaten, they walked back to her aunt’s house together.

  Amelia slept in a tiny room hardly bigger than a closet, across the passage from her aunt. They left the interleading doors open and Raleigh lay on Amelia’s bed with her and under the blanket they played the sweet games that custom and tribal law sanctioned all engaged couples to play. Raleigh was allowed to explore delicately and with his fingertips hunt for the little pink bud of flesh hidden between soft furry lips that old Ndlame had told him about at initiation camp. The Xhosa girls are not circumcised like the women of some of the other tribes, but they are taught the arts of pleasing men, and when he could stand it no longer, she took him and held him between her crossed thighs, avoiding only the final penetration that was reserved by tribal lore for their wedding night, and skilfully she milked him of his seed. Strangely, it seemed that every time she did this, rather than depleting him, she replenished the well of his love for her until it was overflowing.

  Then the time came when Raleigh judged it expedient to begin infiltrating the Buffaloes into the township. With Hendrick Tabaka’s blessing and under Raleigh’s supervision they opened their first shebeen in a cottage at the far end of the township, hard up against the boundary fence.

  The shebeen was run by two of the Buffaloes from Drake’s Farm who had done this type of work for Hendrick Tabaka before. They knew all the little tricks like adulterating the liquor to make it go further and having one or two girls in the back room for the men that liquor had made amorous.

  However, Raleigh warned them about the local police force, who had an ugly reputation, and about one of the white officers in particular, a man with pale predatory eyes that had given him his nickname Ngwi the leopard. He was a hard cruel man who had shot to death four men in the time he had been in Sharpeville, two of them members of the Buffaloes who had been supplying the township with dagga.

  At first they were cautious and wary, vetting their customers carefully and placing lookouts on all approaches to the shebeen, but then as the weeks passed, with business improving each night, they relaxed a little. There was very little competition. Other shebeens had been closed down swiftly, and the customers were so thirsty that the Buffaloes could charge three and four times the usual rate.

  Raleigh brought the liquor stocks into the township in his little blue Ford pick-up, the crates hidden beneath sacks of flour and sheep carcasses. He spent as little time as possible at the shebeen, for every minute was dangerous. He would drop off the supplies, collect the empty bottles and the cash and be gone within a half an hour. He never drove the pick-up directly to the front door of the cottage, but parked it in the dark veld beyond the boundary fence and the two Buffaloes would come through the hole in the wire mesh and help him carry the crates of cheap brandy.

  After a while Raleigh realized that the shebeen offered another good distribution point for the Poqo pamphlets that he printed on the duplicator. He usually kept a stock of these in the cottage and the two Buffaloes who ran the shebeen and the girls who worked in the back room had orders to give one to each of their customers.

  In early March, not long after the glad tidings of Moses Gama’s reprieve and the mitigation of his death sentence to life imprisonment, Sobukwe sent for Raleigh. The rendezvous was in a house in the vast black township of Soweto. It was not one of the boxlike flat-roofed cottages, but was rather a large modern bungalow situated in the elite section of the township known as ‘Beverly Hills’. It had a tiled roof, its own swimming-pool, garaging for two vehicles and large plate-glass windows overlooking the pool.

  When Raleigh arrived in the blue pick-up, he found that he was not the only invited guest and there were a dozen or so other vehicles parked along the kerb. Sobukwe had invited all his middle-ranking field officers to this briefing and over forty of them crowded into the sitting-room of the bungalow.

  ‘Comrades,’ Sobukwe addressed them. ‘We are ready to flex our muscles. You have worked hard and it is time to gather in some of the fruits of your labours. In all the places where the Pan-A
fricanist Congress is strong – not only here on the Witwatersrand but across the country – we are going to make the white police fear our power. We are going to hold a mass protest demonstration against the pass laws—’

  Listening to Sobukwe speak, Raleigh was reminded of the power and personality of his own imprisoned uncle, Moses Gama, and he was proud to be part of this magnificent company. As Sobukwe unfolded his plans Raleigh made a silent but fervent resolution that at Sharpeville, the area for which he was responsible, the demonstration would be impressive and solid.

  He related every detail of the meeting, and every word that Sobukwe had spoken, to Amelia. Her lovely round face seemed to glow with excitement as she listened and she helped him print the sheets announcing the demonstration and to pack them into the old liquor cartons in lots of five hundred.

  On the Friday before the planned demonstration Raleigh ran a shipment of liquor down to the Buffaloes’ shebeen, and he took a carton of pamphlets with him. The Buffaloes were waiting for him in the darkness beside the track, and one of them flashed a torch to guide the pick-up into the scraggy patch of black wattle, and they unloaded the liquor and trudged across to the township fence.

  In the cottage Raleigh counted the empty bottles and the full ones and checked these figures against the cash in the canvas bank bag. It tallied and he gave a brief word of commendation to the two Buffaloes, and looked into the front room which was packed with cheerful noisy drinkers.

  Then when the door to the nearest bedroom opened and a big Basuto iron-worker came out, grinning and buttoning the front of his blue overalls, Raleigh squeezed past him into the back room. The girl was straightening the sheets on the bed. She was bending over with her back to Raleigh and she was naked, but she looked over her shoulder and smiled when she recognized him. Raleigh was popular with all the girls. She had the money ready for him, and Raleigh counted it in front of her. There was no means of checking her, but over the years Hendrick Tabaka had developed an instinct for a cheating girl, and when Raleigh delivered the money to him he would know if she were holding out.

  Raleigh gave her a box of pamphlets and she sat beside him on the bed while he read one of them to her.

  ‘I will be there on Monday,’ she promised. ‘And I will tell all my men these things and give them each a paper.’ She placed the box in the bottom of the cupboard and then came back to Raleigh and took his hand.

  ‘Stay a little while,’ she invited him. ‘I will straighten your back for you.’

  She was a pretty plump little thing and Raleigh was tempted. Amelia was a traditional Nguni maiden, and she did not suffer the curse of Western-style jealousy. In fact, she had urged him to accept the offers of the other girls. ‘If I am not allowed to sharpen your spear, let the joy-girls keep it bright for the time when I am at last allowed to feel its kiss.’

  ‘Come,’ the girl urged Raleigh now, and stroked him through the cloth of his trousers. ‘See how the cobra awakes,’ she laughed. ‘Let me wring his neck!’

  Raleigh took one step back towards the bed, laughing with her – then suddenly he froze and the laugh was cut off abruptly. Out in the darkness he had heard the whistle of the lookouts.

  ‘Police,’ he snapped. ‘The Leopard—’ and there was the sudden distinctive rumble of a Land-Rover being driven hard and headlights flashed across the cheap curtaining that covered the window.

  Raleigh sprang to the door. In the front room the drinkers were fighting to escape through the door and windows, and the table, covered with glasses and empty bottles, was overturned and glass shattered. Raleigh shouldered panic-stricken bodies out of his way and reached the kitchen door. It was locked but he opened it with his own key and slipped through, locking it again behind him.

  He switched off the lights and stole across to the back door and placed his hand on the door knob. He would not make the mistake of running out into the yard. The Leopard was notoriously quick with his pistol. Raleigh waited in the darkness, and he heard the screams and the scuffling, the crack of the riot batons on flesh and bone and the grunting of the men who swung them and he steeled himself.

  Just beyond the door, he heard light running footsteps and suddenly the door handle was seized from the far side and violently twisted. As the man on the outside tried to pull the door open, Raleigh held it, and the other man heaved and swore, leaning back on it with all his weight.

  Raleigh let the handle go, and reversed his resistance, throwing his body against the cheap pine door so that it burst open. He felt it crash into human flesh and he had a glimpse of the brown-uniformed figure hurtling backwards down the stairs. Then he used his own momentum to leap up and outwards, clearing the police officer like a steeplechaser, and he went bounding away towards the hole in the mesh fence.

  As he ducked through it he glanced back and saw the police officer on his knees. Though his features were contracted and swollen with pain and anger, Raleigh recognized him. It was Ngwi, the killer of men, and the blue service revolver glinted in his hand as it cleared the holster at his side.

  Fear sped Raleigh’s feet as he darted away into the darkness, but he jinked and twisted as he ran. Something passed close to his head with a snapping report that hurt his eardrums and made him flinch his head wildly and he jinked again. Behind him was another thudding report but he did not hear the second bullet and he saw the dark shape of the Ford ahead of him.

  He tumbled into the front seat and started the engine. Without switching on the headlights he bumped over the verge onto the track and accelerated away into the darkness.

  He found that he still had the canvas bag of money clutched in his left hand, and his relief was intense. His father would be incensed at the loss of the liquor stocks, but his anger would have been multiplied many times if Raleigh had lost the money as well.

  Solomon Nduli telephoned Michael Courtney at his desk in the newsroom. ‘I have something for you,’ he told Michael. ‘Can you come out to the Assegai offices right away?’

  ‘It’s after five already,’ Michael protested, ‘and it’s Friday night. I won’t be able to get a pass to enter the township.’

  ‘Come,’ Solomon insisted. ‘I will wait for you at the main gate.’

  He was as good as his promise, a tall, gangly figure in steel-rimmed glasses, waiting under the street lamp near the main gates, and as soon as he slipped into the front seat of the company car, Michael passed him his cigarette pack.

  ‘Light one for me, as well,’ he told Solomon. ‘I brought some sardine and onion sandwiches and a couple of bottles of beer. They are on the back seat.’ There was no public place in Johannesburg, or in the entire land for that matter, where two men of different colour could sit and drink or eat together. Michael drove slowly and aimlessly through the streets while they ate and talked.

  ‘The PAC are planning their first big act since they broke away from the ANC,’ Solomon told Michael through a mouthful of sardine and onion. ‘In some areas they have built up strong support. In the Cape and the rural tribal areas, even in some parts of the Transvaal. They have pulled in all the young militants who are unhappy with the pacifism of the old men. They want to follow Moses Gama’s example, and take on the Nationalists in a head-on fight.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Michael said. ‘You can’t fight Sten guns and Saracen armoured cars with half bricks.’

  ‘Yes, it’s crazy, but then some of the young people would prefer to die on their feet than live on their knees.’

  They were together for an hour, talking all that time, and then at last Michael drove him back to the main gates of Drake’s Farm.

  ‘So that’s it then, my friend.’ Solomon opened the car door. ‘If you want the best story on Monday, I would suggest you go down to the Vereeniging area. The PAC and Poqo have made that their stronghold on the Witwatersrand.’

  ‘Evaton?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Yes, Evaton will be one of the places to watch,’ Solomon Nduli agreed. ‘But the PAC have a new man in Sharpeville.’<
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  ‘Sharpeville?’ Michael asked. ‘Where is that? I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘Only twelve miles from Evaton.’

  ‘I’ll find it on my road map.’

  ‘You might think it worth the trouble to go there,’ Solomon encouraged Michael. ‘This PAC organizer in Sharpeville is one of the party’s young lions. He will put on a good show, you can count on that.’

  Manfred De La Rey asked quietly. ‘So, how many reinforcements can we spare for the stations in the Vaal area?’

  General Danie Leroux shook his head and smoothed back the wings of silver hair at his temples with both hands. ‘We have only three days to move in reinforcements from the outlying areas and most of those will be needed in the Cape. It will mean stripping the outlying stations and leaving them very vulnerable.’

  ‘How many?’ Manfred insisted.

  ‘Five or six hundred men for the Vaal,’ Danie Leroux said with obvious reluctance.

  ‘That will not be enough,’ Manfred growled. ‘So we will reinforce all stations lightly, but hold most of our forces in mobile reserve and react swiftly to the first hint of trouble.’ He turned his full attention to the map that covered the operations table in the control room of police headquarters in Marshall Square. ‘Which are the main danger centres on the Vaal?’

  ‘Evaton,’ Danie Leroux replied without hesitation. ‘It’s always one of the trouble spots, and then Van Der Bijl Park.’

  ‘What about Sharpeville?’ Manfred asked, and held up the crudely printed pamphlet that he had tightly rolled in his right hand. ‘What about this?’

  The general did not reply immediately, but he pretended to study the operations map as he composed his reply. He was well aware that the subversive pamphlets had been discovered by Captain Lothar De La Rey, and he knew how the Minister felt about his son. Indeed Danie Leroux shared the general high opinion of Lothar, so he did not want to belittle him in any way or to offend his minister.