by Wilbur Smith
He felt his nerves crawl like poisonous insects upon his skin as the tribal memories of his people assaulted him. Here they were once more, the tiny handful of white men at the barricades, and there before them was the black barbaric host. It was as it had always been, but the horror of his situation was not in the least diluted by the knowledge that it had all happened before. Rather it was made more poignant, and the natural reaction of defence more compelling.
However, the fear and loathing in the sergeant’s voice braced Lothar against his own weakness, and he tore his gaze from the approaching horde and looked to his own men. He saw how pale they were, how deathly still they stood and how very young so many of them were – but then it was the Afrikaner tradition that the boys had always taken their places at the laager barricades even before they were as tall as the long muzzle-loading weapons they carried.
Lothar forced himself to move, to walk slowly down the line in front of his men, making certain that no trace of his own fear was evident in expression or gesture.
‘They don’t mean trouble,’ he said, ‘they have their women and children with them. The Bantu always hide the women if they mean to fight.’ His voice was level and without emotion. ‘The reinforcements are on their way,’ he told them. ‘We will have three hundred men here within the hour. Just stay calm and obey orders.’ He smiled encouragement at a cadet whose eyes were too big for his pale face, whose ears stuck out from under his cap, and who chewed his lower lip nervously as he stared out through the wire. ‘You haven’t been given orders to load, Jong. Get that magazine off your weapon,’ he ordered quietly and the boy unclipped the long, straight magazine from the side of his Sten gun without once taking his eyes from the singing, dancing horde in front of them.
Lothar walked back down the line with a deliberate tread, not once glancing at the oncoming mob, nodding encouragement at each of his men as he came level or distracting them with a quiet word. But once he reached his post on the station steps again he could no longer contain himself and he turned to face the gate and only with difficulty prevented himself exclaiming out loud.
They filled the entire roadway from side to side and end to end and still they came on, more and more of them pouring out of the side road like a Karoo river in flash flood.
‘Stay at your posts, men,’ he called. ‘Do nothing without orders!’ And they stood stolidly in the bright morning sunlight while the leaders of the march reached the locked gates and pressed against them, gripping the wire and peering through the mesh, chanting and grinning as behind them the rest of the huge unwieldy column spread out along the perimeter. Like water contained by a dam wall, compressed by their own multitudes, they were building up rank upon rank until they completely surrounded the station yard, hemming in the small party of uniformed men. And still they came on, those at the back joining the dense throng at the main gates until the station was a tiny rectangular island in a noisy restless black sea.
Then the men at the gates called for silence and gradually the chanting and laughter and general uproar died away.
‘We want to speak with your officers,’ called a young black man in the front rank at the closed gates. He had his fingers hooked through the mesh and the crowd behind him pushed him so hard against the wire that the high gates shook and trembled.
The station commander came out of the charge office, and as he went down the steps Lothar fell in a pace behind him. Together they crossed the yard and halted in front of the gate.
‘This is an illegal gathering,’ the commander addressed the young man who had called out to them. ‘You must disperse immediately.’ He was speaking in Afrikaans.
‘It is much worse than that, officer,’ the young man smiled at him happily. He was replying in English, a calculated provocation. ‘You see, none of us are carrying our pass books. We have burned them.’
‘What is your name, you?’ the commander demanded in Afrikaans.
‘My name is Raleigh Tabaka and I am the branch secretary of the Pan-Africanist Congress, and I demand that you arrest me and all these others,’ Raleigh told him in fluent English. ‘Open the gates, policeman, and take us into your prison cells.’
‘I am going to give you five minutes to disperse,’ the commander told him menacingly.
‘Or what?’ Raleigh Tabaka asked. ‘What will you do if we do not obey you?’ and behind him the crowd began to chant.
‘Arrest us! We have burned the dompas. Arrest us!’
There was an interruption and a burst of ironic cheers and hooted laughter from the rear of the crowd, and Lothar jumped up on the bonnet of the nearest police Land-Rover to see over their heads.
A small convoy of three troop carriers filled with uniformed constables had driven out of the side road and was now slowly forcing its way through the crowd. The densely packed ranks gave way only reluctantly before the tall covered trucks, but Lothar felt a rush of relief.
He jumped down from the Land-Rover and ordered a squad of his men to the gates. As the convoy came on the people beat upon the steel sides of the trucks with their bare fists and jeered and hooted and gave the ANC salute. A fine mist of dust rose around the trucks and the thousands of milling shuffling feet of the crowd.
Lothar’s men forced the gates open against the pressure of black bodies and as the trucks drove through, they swung them shut, and hurriedly locked them again as the crowd surged forward against them.
Lothar left the commander to haggle and bluster with the leaders of the crowd and he went to deploy the reinforcements along the perimeter of the yard. The new men were all armed and Lothar posted the older, more steady-looking of them on top of trucks from where they had a sweeping field of fire over all four sides of the fence.
‘Stay calm,’ he kept repeating. ‘Everything is under control. Just obey your orders.’
He hurried back to the gateway as soon as he had placed the reinforcements, and the commander was still arguing with the black leaders through the wire.
‘We will not leave here until either you arrest us, or the pass laws are abolished.’
‘Don’t be stupid, man,’ the commander snapped. ‘You know neither of those things is possible.’
‘Then we will stay,’ Raleigh Tabaka told him and the crowd behind him chanted:
‘Arrest us! Arrest us! Now!’
‘I have placed the new men in position,’ Lothar reported in a low voice. ‘We have nearly two hundred now.’
‘God grant it will be enough if they turn nasty,’ the commander muttered and glanced uneasily along the line of uniformed men. It seemed puny and insignificant against the mass that confronted them through the wire.
‘I have argued with you long enough.’ He turned back to the men behind the gate. ‘You must take these people away now. That is a police order.’
‘We stay,’ Raleigh Tabaka told him pleasantly.
As the morning wore on, so the heat increased and Lothar could feel the tension and the fear in his men rising with the heat and the thirst and the dust and the chanting. Every few minutes a disturbance in the crowd made it eddy and push like a whirlpool in the flow of a river, and each time the fence shook and swayed and the white men fingered their guns and fidgeted in the baking sun. Twice more during the morning reinforcements arrived and the crowd let them through until there were almost three hundred armed police in the compound. But instead of dispersing, the crowd continued to grow as every last person who had hidden away in the township cottages, expecting trouble, finally succumbed to curiosity and crept out to join the multitude.
After each new arrival of trucks there was another round of argument and futile orders to disperse, and in the heat and the impatience of waiting, the mood of the crowd gradually changed. There were no more smiles and the singing had a different tone to it as they began to hum the fierce fighting songs. Rumours flashed through the throng – Robert Sobukwe was coming to speak to them, Verwoerd had ordered the passes to be abolished and Moses Gama to be released from jail, and they
cheered and sang and then growled and surged back and forth as each rumour was denied.
The sun made its noon, blazing down upon them, and the smell of the crowd was the musky African odour, alien and yet dreadfully familiar.
The white men who had stood to arms all that morning were reaching the point of nervous exhaustion and each time the crowd surged against the frail wire fence they made little jumpy movements and one or two of them without orders loaded their Sten guns and lifted them into the high port position. Lothar noticed this and went down the line, ordering them to unload and uncock their weapons.
‘We have to do something soon, sir,’ he told his commander. ‘We can’t go on like this – someone or something is going to snap.’ It was in the air, strong as the odour of hot African bodies, and Lothar felt it in himself. He had not slept that night, and he was haggard and he felt brittle and jagged as a blade of obsidian.
‘What do you suggest, De La Rey?’ the commander barked irritably, just as edgy and tense. ‘We must do something, you say. Ja, I agree – but what?’
‘We should take the ringleaders out of the mob.’ Lothar pointed at Raleigh Tabaka, who was still at the gate. It was almost five hours since he had taken up his station there. ‘That black swine there is holding them together. If we pick him and the other ringleaders out, the rest of them will soon lose interest.’
‘What is the time?’ the commander asked, and although it seemed irrelevant, Lothar glanced at his watch.
‘Almost one o’clock.’
‘There must be more reinforcements on the way,’ the commander said. ‘We will wait another fifteen minutes and then we will do as you suggest.’
‘Look there,’ Lothar snapped and pointed to the left.
Some of the younger men in the crowd had armed themselves with stones and bricks, and from the rear other missiles, chunks of paving slab and rocks, were being passed over the heads of the crowd to those in the front ranks.
‘Ja, we have to break this up now,’ the commander agreed, ‘or else there will be serious trouble.’
Lothar turned and called a curt order to the constables nearest him. ‘You men, load your weapons and move up to the gate with me.’
He saw that some of the other men further down the line had taken his words as a general order to load, and there was the snicker of metal on metal as the magazines were clamped on to the Sten guns and the cocking handles jerked back. Lothar debated with himself for a moment whether he should countermand, but time was vital. He knew he had to get the leaders out of the crowd, for violence was only seconds away. Some of the black youths in front of the crowd were already shaking the mesh and heaving against it.
With his men behind him he marched to the gate and pointed at Raleigh Tabaka. ‘You,’ he shouted. ‘I want to speak to you.’ He reached through the square opening beside the gate lock and seized the front of Raleigh’s shirt.
‘I want you out of there,’ he snarled, and Raleigh pulled back against his grip, jostling the men behind him.
Amelia screamed and clawed at Lothar’s wrist. ‘Leave him! You must not hurt him.’
The young men around them saw what was happening and hurled themselves against the wire.
‘Jee!’ they cried, that long, deep, drawn-out war cry that no Nguni warrior can resist. It made their blood smoke with the fighting madness, and it was taken up as others echoed them.
‘Jee!’
The section of the crowd behind where Raleigh struggled with Lothar De La Rey heaved forward, throwing themselves upon the fence, humming the war cry, and the fence buckled and began to topple.
‘Get back!’ Lothar shouted at his men, but the back ranks of the crowd surged forward to see what was happening in front – and the fence went.
It came crashing over, and though Lothar jumped back, one of the metal posts hit him a glancing blow and he was knocked to his knees. The crowd was no longer contained, and the ranks behind pushed those in front so they came bursting into the yard, trampling over Lothar as he struggled to get to his feet.
From one side a brick came sailing out of the crowd in a high parabola. It struck the windscreen of one of the parked trucks, and shattered it in a shower of diamond-bright chips.
The women were screaming, and falling under the feet of those who were borne forward by the pressure from behind, and men were fighting to get back behind the wire as others thrust them forward, uttering that murderous war cry ‘Jee!’ that brought on the madness.
Lothar was sprawled under the rushing tide, struggling to regain his feet, while a hail of stones and bricks came over the wire. Lothar rolled to his feet, and only because he was a superb athlete he kept his balance as the rush of frenzied bodies carried him backwards.
There was a loud and jarring sound close behind him that Lothar did not at first recognize. It sounded as though a steel rod had been drawn rapidly across a sheet of corrugated iron. Then he heard the other terrible sounds, the multiple impact of bullets into living flesh, like ripe melons bursting open from blows with a heavy club, and he shouted, ‘No! Oh good Christ, no!’ But the Sten guns rushed and tore the air with a sound like sheets of silk being ripped through, drowning out his despairing protest, and he wanted to shout again, ‘Cease fire!’ but his throat had closed and he was suffocating with horror and terror.
He made another strenuous effort to give the order, and his throat strained to enunciate the words, but no sound came and his hands moved without his conscious volition, lifting the Sten gun from his side, jerking back the cocking handle to feed a round into the breech. In front of him the crowd was breaking and turning, the pressure of human bodies against him was relieved, so he could mount the sub-machine-gun to waist height.
He tried to stop himself, but it was all a nightmare over which he had no control, the weapon in his hands shuddered and buzzed like a chain saw. In a few fleeting seconds the magazine of thirty rounds was empty, but Lothar had traversed the Sten gun like a reaper swinging a scythe, and now the bloody harvest lay before him in the dust twitching and kicking and moaning.
Only then did he realize fully what he had done, and his voice returned.
‘Cease fire!’ he screamed and struck out at the men around him to reinforce the order. ‘Cease fire! Stop it! Stop it!’
Some of the younger recruits were reloading to fire again, and he ran amongst them striking out with the empty Sten to prevent them. A man on the roof of one of the troop carriers lifted his weapon and fired another burst and Lothar leapt onto the cab and knocked up the barrel so that the last spray of bullets went high into the dusty air.
From his vantage point on the cab of the truck, Lothar looked out over the sagging fence across the open ground where the dead and the wounded lay, and his spirit quailed.
‘Oh, God forgive me. What have we done?’ he choked. ‘Oh, what have we done?’
In the middle of the morning Michael Courtney took a chance, for there seemed to be a lull in the activity around the police station. It was, of course, difficult to make out exactly what was happening. He could see only the backs of the rear ranks of the crowd, and over their heads the top of the wire fence and the iron roof of the station. However, the situation seemed for the moment to be quiet and apart from a little desultory singing the crowd was passive and patient.
He jumped into the Morris and drove back down the avenue to the primary school. The buildings were deserted, and without any qualms he tried the door which was marked ‘Headmaster’ and it was unlocked. There was a telephone on the cheap deal desk. He got through to the Mail offices on the first try, and Leon Herbstein was in his office.
‘I’ve got a story,’ Michael said, and read out his copy. When he finished he told Leon, ‘If I were you, I’d send a staff photographer down here. There is a good chance of some dramatic pictures.’
‘Give me the directions how to find you.’ Leon acquiesced immediately, and Michael drove back to the police station just as another convoy of police reinforcements pushed
through the crowd and entered the station gates.
The morning wore on and Michael ran out of cigarettes, a minor tragedy. He was also hot and thirsty and wondered what it was like standing in that mob out there, hour after hour.
He could sense the mood of the crowd changing. They were no longer cheerful and expectant. There was a sense of frustration, of having been cheated and duped, for Sobukwe had not arrived, nor had the white police made the promised announcement to abolish the dompas.
The singing started again, but in a harsh and aggressive tone. There were scuffles and disturbances in the crowd, and over their heads Michael saw the armed police take up positions on the cabs of the trucks parked beyond the wire.
The staff photographer from the Mail arrived, a young black journalist who was able to enter the township without a permit. He parked his small brown Humber beside the Morris and Michael cadged a cigarette from him and then quickly briefed him on what was happening, and sent him forward to mingle with the back rows of the crowd and get to work.
A little after noon, some of the youths broke away from the crowd and began to search the verges of the road and the nearest gardens for missiles. They pulled up the bricks that bordered the flower-beds and broke chunks off the concrete paving slabs, then hurried back to join the crowd, carrying those crude weapons. This was an ominous development, and Michael climbed up on the bonnet of his beloved Morris, careless of the paintwork which he usually cherished and polished every morning.
Although he was over a hundred and fifty yards from the station gate, he now had a better view over the heads of the crowd, and he watched the growing agitation and restlessness until the police on the vehicle cabs, the only ones he could see, raised and began loading and cocking their weapons. They were obviously responding to an order and Michael felt a peculiar little chill of anxiety.
Suddenly there was a violent disturbance in the densest part of the crowd directly in front of the main gates. The mass of people surged and heaved and there was an uproar of protesting shouts and cries. Those in the rear of the crowd, closest to where Michael stood, pushed forward to see what was going on, and suddenly there was a metallic rending sound.