Plaatje was speaking: ‘We are in the position Thomas Jefferson was in 1774, prior to the revolution. By that I mean, we must utilize all the legal processes open to us to protect our position and to gain such advantage as we can.’ Those were the exact words he spoke, and when others took the floor, they referred in comparable phrases to conditions in England, France and Germany.
They were bitterly opposed to the sections in the Act of Union which denied Coloureds and blacks the right to vote in three of the four provinces; only in the Cape was such voting allowed. There was strong feeling that this provision must be attacked, but as one of the men pointed out: ‘Keeping us off the rolls was one of the principal clauses in the peace treaty that ended the war. It is defended not only here in South Africa but also in London. We are stuck with it, I am afraid.’
Talk then turned to a new bill which these men saw as a serious step backward in relations between the races; the Natives Land Act established the principle that some lands were reserved for the blacks, some for the whites, and that the law itself protected and ensured this division. ‘The land should be for us all,’ Plaatje argued, and others joined in so forcefully that it was unanimously agreed that a delegation of five be appointed to travel to London to present to the king their plea for protection. ‘We cannot look to the Afrikaner for fair treatment,’ one of these men argued, ‘because his custom and his church deny that we have rights—’
‘Now wait!’ another interrupted. ‘They recognize our rights. Even Hertzog does that. What they want to do is restrict them.’
The first speaker ignored this interruption; in the crowded little room with inadequate light he reasoned: ‘So we must depend upon England and the liberal opinion there. We must keep constant pressure on them to accord us the same privileges they grant native-born New Zealanders and Australians.’
‘In the long run,’ one man predicted, ‘the English of this country will prove no different from the Afrikaners.’
When the rules were spelled out for the conduct of the commission to the king, the members wanted to hear from Nxumalo about conditions on the frontier, those little Afrikaner towns where the ideas which would later sweep the cities germinated, and now he spoke, slowly, while the others listened. He had not their command of English, and more than half of them would not have difficulty in understanding his Zulu had he used it; none wanted him to speak Afrikaans, even though he was proficient in it, and they too.
‘We have a new teacher, very forceful. Took his boys to see the expulsion of the Chinese. Some came home wanting to expel the blacks, too. But he calmed them down. Took another group to hear General Hertzog. They came home wild-eyed with patriotism. They want to fight the English again. General de Groot encourages them. He says war must come. He speaks of Germany a good deal. He is in contact with other generals, and they may cause trouble one day.’
He spoke of many things, displaying an uncanny understanding of what was motivating the sturdy Afrikaners in the Venloo district, but it was when he came to matters of real importance that he showed his sensitive awareness of probable trends: ‘The young schoolteacher is like the general; he wants to go to war now. But his ideas come from his wife. She is four years older. Was in the camp at Chrissiesmeer. She is strong, wanted to marry an Englishman but her family wouldn’t allow it. She makes no senseless challenges. She thinks.
‘But the true power in Venloo is the new predikant. Very good man. Has a strong mind like yours, Plaatje. Preaches careful sermons, very logical. He has an orderly view of what is going to happen and takes no risks. When I drive the people to church, I stand outside and listen. Powerful voice. Good man. But he is totally against us. He uses the Bible to club us. And in the long run he will be more dangerous to us than anyone you have mentioned.’
‘What can he do to hurt us in Venloo?’
‘Soon his voice will be heard throughout the land. He is like Jan Christian Smuts. To see him is to know that he will one day command.’
The other men took notice of the name, Barend Brongersma, of Stellenbosch.
In 1913, Detlev received the first letter that had ever been addressed to him specifically, and it came in such form that it overwhelmed him, as well it might, for his response would go far in determining a major part of his life. It came from a committee of women in Bloemfontein, and said:
We have erected a noble monument in remembrance of the Boer women and children who perished in the infamous concentration camps of our Second Freedom War. Since you were in a camp and lost a mother and two sisters, and since your teacher Mr. Krause has given us your name as an able scholar, we deem it proper for you to join us at the dedication of a monument that will stand forever as a reminder of your mother’s heroism and the cruel deaths of your sisters.
The letter went on to say that he would be one of a group of twelve survivors of the camps, six girls, six boys, who would stand at attention as the monument was dedicated. He was eighteen that year; the others would be younger.
Bursting with pride, he showed the letter to Mr. Krause, who said, ‘It is proper for the Volk to honor its past. This is a profound honor, and I trust you will conduct yourself appropriately.’ He added that he would not have recommended Detlev had he not been sure of the boy’s loyalty and patriotism. Detlev walked several inches taller when he carried the letter out to Vrymeer, where General de Groot explained that Detlev would be standing as surrogate for all the young heroes who died in the camps: ‘You escaped the ground glass in the meal. They didn’t.’
For the first time Detlev traveled on a train alone. He carried with him four books of South African history, which he read so assiduously that when he paused for a bite to eat, a young man traveling to Cape Town asked, ‘What preoccupies you?’
‘I am reading about the English settlement of Grahamstown. That’s where my family lived in the old days.’
‘That was a bad period,’ the young man said in fluent Afrikaans. ‘If we hadn’t allowed those extra Englishmen ashore, they wouldn’t have been able to steal our country from us.’
‘One of the Englishmen, man named Saltwood …’
‘One of the worst. Do you know anything about that infamous family? They rob this country blind. Offices in the cities, stealing Afrikaner money.’
‘Mrs. Saltwood saved my life, I think.’
‘She was all right. That I grant. But every family has to have one decent member. Her husband, you know. The big sportsman. Cricket and tennis. He was one of Cecil Rhodes’ worst young men. Horrible spy, and all that.’
After a long and confused tirade, he asked Detlev where he was going, and when he learned about the dedication of the Vrouemonument his manner changed completely: ‘Wonderlik, wonderlik! And you’re to stand there representing us all! How ennobling! Oh, I do wish I could go with you!’
‘Why?’
The young man, who had been so authoritative only a moment ago, could not reply. His eyes filled with tears, and when he tried to speak he choked. He blew his nose, looked out the window at the highveld, glowing in the sun, and tried again to speak. Finally he surrendered and wept for some moments. Then he muttered, ‘My mother. My brother. All my sisters. They died at Standerton.’
When he recovered he told Detlev about the last days, when food was scarce: ‘There was an English hospital nearby. Their troops wounded or knocked down by the enteric. I was sure they must have food, so I sneaked out of our camp and crept along to theirs, but they were dying too. It was a horrible war, Detlev.’
He spoke with such an unusual mix of deep feeling and wide knowledge that Detlev deemed him the appropriate person to answer a nagging question: ‘You don’t believe those stories about ground glass in the meal, do you?’
‘Absolute rot. I just told you, the English died the same way we did.’ Abruptly he asked, ‘Detlev, what a curious name. What’s it mean?’
‘German. Along the Rhine. My mother was a very beautiful woman who had a German uncle or something.’
‘De
tlev! It’s not a Dutch name, you know.’
‘I said it was German.’
‘Why do you keep it?’
‘You keep the name God gave you. Look at General Hertzog. Nobody more Afrikaner than he …’
‘Now, there’s a man, not so?’
‘Do you know his name? No? Well, it’s James Barry Hertzog, that’s what it is.’
‘He ought to change it. With his ideas, he ought to change it.’
‘It’s the name God gave him.’
‘It isn’t at all. Some damn-fool English name, that’s what it is.’
The young man seemed to have so many positive ideas that Detlev wanted to know what he was doing on the train to Cape Town. ‘I’m going down to work in Parliament. I’m to be a clerk of some sort, and one day I’ll be head of a ministry, telling you farmers what to do.’
‘How did you get the job? How old are you?’
‘I’m twenty-one, and the country is hungry for bright young men who can speak Afrikaans and English. You might say that I am needed in Cape Town.’ He said his name was Michael van Tonder and that one day he would be as famous as Jan Christian Smuts, but Detlev never heard of him again.
At Bloemfontein he was met by a committee of women wearing sashes; they were in charge of the ceremonies and had brought with them bold sashes for the twelve young survivors of the camps to wear. Across each was lettered in red: CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVOR, and when Detlev was handed his the woman said, ‘Wait here. We have to find a girl coming down from Carolina. Her father was a hero of that commando and her mother and two brothers died in the camp at Standerton.’
So he stood alone on the platform, his sash across his chest, while the committee searched for the girl; and when they found her, they placed a ribbon on her, too, bearing the same words but in blue. She was introduced as Maria Steyn of Carolina. ‘We’re neighbors,’ Detlev said and she nodded.
For three days they were together, young people caught up in the tormented memories of the camps and proud of the performances of their mothers and their siblings struck down by disease and hunger, and especially their fathers, who had served in the great commandos. ‘My father,’ Maria said, ‘is Christoffel Steyn. Of the Carolina Commando. Many said they were the finest unit in the war.’
‘We all know Christoffel Steyn and Spion Kop. My father rode with General de Groot in the Venloo Commando. They didn’t accomplish much at first.’
‘Oh, but they were heroic! That dash down to Port Elizabeth.’
‘That didn’t accomplish much, either, from what they tell me.’
‘But such willingness!’
At the dedication they stood facing each other, Maria with the young women, Detlev with the young men, and he noticed that when the solemn words of remembrance were spoken, she had tears in her eyes as he did in his.
‘I wouldn’t want to do that again,’ she said, but then they were taken to a church where a very old predikant delivered a marvelous oration, preaching forgiveness and the love which Jesus Christ extended to all his children:
‘And I would say to you young people who bear across your bosoms the sash that tells us that you were in the camps, that Jesus Christ personally saw to it that you were saved so that you might bear witness to the forgiveness that marks our new nation.’
This was followed by a sermon of a much different stripe, for at the conclusion of his prayer he announced that one of the most brilliant of Stellenbosch’s recent ministerial candidates had been asked to speak of the new South Africa that would be erected upon the spirit of the Vrouemonument. It was Barend Brongersma, who spoke in a deep, controlled voice of the dedication ‘which we the living must accept from the hands of those dead’:
‘Not a day dare go by without our remembering the heroic dead, the loving wives who would see their husbands no more, the beautiful children who were destined to cruel death before they could welcome their fathers home from defeat.
‘Yes, it was defeat, but from such defeat great nations have risen in the past, and a great one will rise today if you have the courage to ensure it. You must build on the crucifixion of your loved ones. You must take to your hearts the covenant your forefathers received from the Lord. You must ensure and send forward the convictions of the devout people who formed this nation …’
His voice rose to a powerful thunder as he challenged every individual in that audience to do some good thing for her or his nation so that the martyrs represented by the Vrouemonument should not have died in vain. Detlev, looking across the aisle to where the young women sat, saw that Maria was sobbing, and he felt his own throat choke with patriotic emotion, so forceful had been the peroration of the predikant from Venloo.
During the final session on a vibrant spring day Detlev found himself with Maria constantly, under various circumstances, and while eating a hearty breakfast provided for the young people or walking to a church service with her in central Bloemfontein, he had an opportunity to study her closely, as he did with all people who interested him. She was three years younger than he, but mature for her fifteen years. She was a heavy girl, not beautiful, and even though she had lovely blond hair, which she might have dressed in some attractive way, she ignored it, pulling it back tightly in the old fashion. None of her features was distinctive, each being marked by a certain rural grossness, and she moved with no special grace. She was not a lumpy peasant type, not at all, for she had a quickness of mind which showed itself constantly; she was, indeed, much like Johanna Krause, and since Johanna had served as Detlev’s mother, he had a predilection toward that type of woman. But the essential characteristic of this girl, which even Detlev was old enough to perceive, was the gravity of her deportment. She was a serious young woman in all the best meanings of that word, and any young man who came into contact with her at an emotional level would have to be impressed by her moral solidity. She was not a person forced by the tragedy of the camps into a premature adulthood, worn and withered; she was naturally adult.
Therefore, when the young couple walked to the Vrouemonument for the farewell picnic they walked together, their conversation falling into the pattern of grave thoughts. ‘How were you chosen for the honor?’ Detlev asked as they strolled across the grassy mound. ‘I mean, I know about your father. We learned about him in school. I mean, who chose you?’
‘I think it must have been the dominee.’
‘In my case it was the schoolteacher. He’s married to my sister, you know.’
‘I was not aware of that.’ She spoke cautiously and in a somewhat old-fashioned way.
‘What do you propose doing after we return?’ Anyone talking with Maria Steyn found himself quickly falling into her stately patterns.
‘I shall continue to read. And work on rebuilding the farm. My father remarried, did I tell you?’
‘No.’ He reflected on this, then said, ‘I wish mine had. I think Father has been very lonely.’
‘War alters people,’ she said. ‘Perhaps he had no further need of a wife.’
‘All men need wives.’ He said this with such speed that he felt embarrassed. He had not yet touched Maria, not even by any accident, other than shaking hands one time at the railway station, and he was deeply impelled to take her hand now, but as they turned a corner in the path they came upon another young pair who were kissing rather ardently and bumping into each other, and, as Detlev later expressed it to himself, ‘perhaps doing other things even more awful,’ so that he and Maria backed away in deep confusion. The lively eroticism of the other couple did not, as it might have done with another pair, inspire them to kiss, too; it shocked them; and they returned to the monument, in whose grim shadow they finished their conversation. They were, in other words, both puritans of an especially tenacious character: Huguenots imbued with the living spirit of John Calvin and the intellectual and moral torments that come with that persuasion. But they were also lusty Dutch peasants, close to the soil, and had they once kissed there on the mound, they would have expanded with ha
ppy love. The moment gone, they talked, reverently.
‘Detlev,’ Maria said. ‘That’s a curious name.’ When he explained its German origin, she said with some force, ‘But if you’re to be an Afrikaner, working on the things your brother-in law … What was his name?’
‘Piet Krause.’
‘Now, that’s a proper Afrikaner name. You should have one too. Detleef, that’s what it ought to be, here in a new land.’
‘Do you like it as Detleef?’
‘I do. It sounds proper and responsible.’
Whenever their conversation might have taken a lighter tone, the shadow of the monument fell across them, and they would study its well-carved figures and envision once more the episodes of the camps, or they would look up at the monitory obelisk rising one hundred and thirteen feet above them, summoning them back to serious matters.
‘If the Germans should arrive from the west and the east, would you join with them?’
‘Is there reason to believe …’
‘Oh, yes! My father is sure there will be war in Europe, and that the Germans will mass their forces in South-West Africa and Tanganyika and come toward us like pincers.’ She hesitated. ‘You’d join them, of course?’
Detlev didn’t know what to say. He’d heard such rumors frequently in recent years, when things seemed to be going badly in Europe, but he had never believed that Germany would actually strike at South Africa. If she did, he would leap to her support, of course, because any enemy of England’s had to be a friend of his, but he was not prepared to commit himself openly.
‘My father will be the first to join them,’ Maria said. ‘We pray that they will come soon to liberate us.’ Detlev understood this enthusiasm but still remained silent. ‘It would be rather wonderful, you know, to be a free country again,’ she said, ‘under our own rulers, with a strong Germany on either side to protect us.’
When Detlev made no response, she changed the subject: ‘Will you make your name Afrikaans?’
The Covenant: A Novel Page 109