Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  “And proud of it!” exclaimed the girl.

  Gat wondered if she were showing off for him—hoped she was—even as Terreblanche kept holding her hand. But perhaps she was simply of an age to enjoy provoking her parents.

  Rousseau gave his daughter a cautioning glance. He explained that French Protestants—Huguenots—had sought refuge in the Cape following wars of religion in France. “You’ve probably heard of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s?” he suggested.

  “My history’s a little shaky,” Gat admitted.

  Rousseau sat back, pleased to open the Afrikaner past to a visitor. “A century and a half after that massacre,” he explained, “the Huguenots and the Hollanders, that is, the Boers— They had assimilated. All of today’s Afrikaners descend from the eighteen hundred Boers and Huguenots living in the Cape in 1700.” Petra yawned, permitting a demure sulk to appear on her face. Terreblanche folded his paper and leaned forward, his hands cupped before him as if to catch every insight that might spill from Rousseau’s mouth, as if each word were a nugget of gold.

  Margaret excused herself to supervise Elsie in the kitchen. Petra left the men to set a place for Gat at the table, wheeling away the tea cart as she went. Gat watched her depart. Rousseau continued his story. While many trekboers left the Cape for a wandering life farther north and east, the Rousseaus and Terreblanches had remained in the Cape even after the British took possession of it in the early 1800s. Margaret came from English people who had emigrated to the eastern Cape in the 1820s. “She is only half-assimilated,” Rousseau explained. “She refuses to speak Afrikaans. So I can swear in it whenever I want and she has no inkling what I’m saying.”

  Rousseau examined Gat. “Tell us about the Congo,” he said. “You don’t mind a grilling, do you?”

  Gat watched Petra return from her woman’s chore. She sat beside Terreblanche, who placed a hand on her knee.

  “If I may speak bluntly,” Rousseau probed, “you Belgians made a catastrophic balls-up in giving the Congo independence.”

  Gat shrugged, but said nothing. Petra saw that she was not the only one among them who could lay down a challenge, even if it were silent.

  Rousseau prodded him. “How could your people let that Communist stooge Lumumba take power?” The garden went suddenly silent as if Rousseau’s tone of voice possessed an authority that could be met only with a hush. Petra and Terreblanche watched to see how Gat would respond.

  “He won the election,” Gat said quietly. “Isn’t that how the Afrikaners took power in this country?”

  “But we weren’t savages,” said Rousseau mildly. “Didn’t your people know what the African was like?”

  “What is he like?” Gat asked. “Perhaps you know better than I do.”

  Rousseau smiled tightly. He regarded Gat through narrowed eyes. Petra looked from one man to the other, enjoying their maneuverings.

  “He’s a baboon!” exclaimed Terreblanche. “An ignorant monkey! How did you think he could run a country as rich as the Congo?”

  “The Congolese are not savages,” Gat replied quietly. His assertion seemed to suck the air out of the garden. Gat glanced at Petra. Her eyes shone with excitement. Obviously the opinions of her father were rarely challenged in her presence. “Lumumba was an extraordinary fellow. I heard him speak once.”

  “What was that like?” Petra asked. Kobus and her father glanced at one another, amused at Petra’s curious interest in the Congolese with the strange name.

  “I was commanding soldiers on riot watch,” Gat said. “Lumumba had a way of casting a spell on a crowd. We thought there might be trouble.”

  Rousseau’s eyes narrowed. “Was there?” Petra asked. “What did he say?”

  “He told his listeners—”

  “These were villagers without shoes, right?” asked Kobus. “Or education?”

  “He told them they would be a free people, a great people in a great country.”

  Kobus guffawed. “With cars and fine houses and white girlfriends.”

  Gat gazed at Kobus as if he were an insect. “Lumumba was mesmerizing. He believed what he said. And why not? The Congo has tremendous resources. Why shouldn’t they be a great people?”

  “Were there riots when he finished?” asked Rousseau.

  “We had matters in hand,” Gat said. “There were some very excited blacks. And whites who went away worried. They had never seen this kind of Congolese before. He terrified them.”

  “You keep using the past tense,” Rousseau observed. “Why? Is he dead?” Rousseau studied him as if suspecting he knew more than he was letting on.

  Gat glanced at Petra. Her eyes watched him excitedly.

  “Do you command—” Terreblanche hesitated as if only just in time he had caught the word “monkeys” from escaping his lips. “Do you command kaffir troops?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they like?” asked Petra. “Father has been in charge of—” She, too, hesitated and chose her words carefully. “Of African policemen. I wonder how you find them.”

  The trio stared at Gat. He felt the two men suspicious of him as unreliable, a liberal, while the girl seemed exhilarated by the presence of someone who did not parrot predictable clichés. “I could explain how I look at my job,” Gat said with a glance at the girl, “but I’m afraid that would bore you all.”

  “Hardly,” replied Rousseau. “You’ve been in a situation that may someday confront us. We want to know what you think.”

  “In my view,” Gat began, “good military leadership requires that an officer win the trust, respect, and confidence of his men. Possibly also their affection, but that’s not necessary. To win trust and respect the leader must assure that his men are well fed, clothed, housed, paid regularly, treated fairly and with dignity. They must understand the job they’re to do. Hopefully their orders will be presented in such a way that they agree to them.”

  Petra watched Gat, fascinated. Rousseau and Terreblanche regarded him skeptically. Gat himself felt impertinent, pontifical, trying to impress the girl by marking out territory unlikely to be visited by her father and the swain.

  Gat ventured, “I assume that this is what young officers are taught pretty much everywhere.”

  “Is this what the police commanders are taught?” Petra asked. It seemed like an innocent question, but since Gat had spoken of treating Africans with dignity, he thought she might be goading her father.

  “The police and the army do different jobs, Pet,” Rousseau replied.

  “The basic job of my troops is to maintain public order.” Gat turned to Rousseau. “A policing job. I stress to the men that the soldier’s job is to serve the citizen, not to take advantage of him.”

  “What about bearing down on them?” Rousseau asked.

  “Sometimes that has to be done,” Gat admitted. “So do it swiftly, forcefully, but with restraint. Not capriciously. Not with cruelty.” Gat regarded Rousseau, assuming that he could bear down very hard. He felt foolish, putting on airs in the presence of an officer of greater experience. But the girl seemed fascinated and he continued. “My observation is that if an officer assumes a malcontent is a savage, he is himself capable of—”

  Petra smiled. “They make savages of each other, don’t they?”

  “Pet, you don’t know anything about this,” Terreblanche chided her. “This is men’s talk.” Petra looked annoyed with him. She glanced at Gat. Gat watched her.

  Rousseau leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “From what I understand you to say, Captain,” Rousseau began, his words now heavily accented by Afrikaans, “I take it that you regard your troops as your equals. Is that right?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Gat said. “I’m their commander.”

  “You say that you treat these men the way you would want to be treated. You talk about their dignity.”

  “The African cherishes his dignity,” Terreblanche said. “While wearing only a blanket over his nakedness.” He c
huckled. Petra again looked miffed with him.

  Feeling defensive under Rousseau’s scrutiny, Gat admitted, “Of course, most of what I’ve just said is out the window these days. Technically we are only advisors now. African sergeants have technical command of the troops.”

  “Our experience with the African,” said Rousseau, “and we have three hundred years of that experience, tells us that in His wisdom the Creator of us all originated us for different purposes. The white race—whom He endowed with intelligence and adaptability, ingenuity and technical skill—was created for the purpose of leading mankind. He gave the black race strong bodies to chop wood and carry water, to dig in the earth for the resources He had hidden there.” Gat knew from the way he spoke that every time Rousseau used a pronoun for the Creator, it was capitalized in his mind. “We believe that only trouble comes from confusing these destinies. Blacks and whites are not equal. Only confusion would tell you that they are. Our experience tells us that separate development is the only solution.”

  “Forgive me,” Gat said. “My father was anticlerical, antiroyalist, and deeply egalitarian. His training may have distorted my perceptions. But it is hard for me to see Africans in business suits in Joburg, greeting each other like professionals, and then think that God meant them only to carry water and chop wood.”

  “I’ve never seen kaffirs in business suits!” exclaimed Terreblanche. “Anyway the chaos in the Congo proves that your approach—”

  Gat raised a hand to interrupt. He was finding Terreblanche as annoying as the girl did. “There must be development,” Gat said. “I’m not sure it must be separate. When Belgium bought the Congo Free State from Leopold Second, whose greed humiliated us, we accepted the civilizing mission. Nation building. Certain infrastructural developments were made, but human development was almost totally ignored.”

  “Our separate development,” said Rousseau, “envisions schools for our Africans appropriate to their life prospects, to their tribal orientation. We don’t want to turn them into bad copies of white men.”

  Petra smoothed her skirt. Watching her out of the corner of his eye Gat lost the train of the conversation. Terreblanche was defending separate development.

  “There is chaos in the Congo,” Gat said, interrupting Terreblanche, “because Belgium ducked its responsibilities by rushing the colony to independence. I’m speaking as a Belgian myself. Our government proposed five years of preparation for independence. But once there were riots in Léopoldville, it abandoned that plan and announced independence in six months. Our government obviously assumed that it would maintain control over an independent Congo, especially over those aspects of the Congo that produced wealth for the metropole.” He glanced at Petra and wondered how he could talk to her alone. He continued, “I can’t decide myself whether that assumption was unconscious, based on the notion that Africans would accept the form without the substance. Or if it was malicious, motivated by greed. By greed, I think.”

  Margaret Rousseau appeared at the door of the room and asked Petra to help with lunch. The girl rose and left the room. Gat watched her go. As did Kobus. When Gat returned his eyes to the girl’s father, Rousseau was watching him.

  AS PETRA walked from the small parlor, allowing her hips to sway languidly, she wondered which men were watching her. Kobus no doubt, asserting his proprietary interest. But was Captain Gautier? Possibly. Of course, she could not look back. The captain had gazed at her frequently while they were talking. But perhaps that was his conversational manner, including everyone as he might when addressing troops. The raw recruits under his command were probably about her age. Would he consider her like his recruits: no longer quite a child, but not yet an adult? Certainly not yet a woman.

  She found her mother standing outside the powder room in the main hall. “Are there things I need to do?” Petra asked. “I thought Elsie had—” Her mother’s conspiratorial smile caused her to stop speaking. She asked, “What? Why’d you call me out?”

  “I thought you might want to separate yourself from Kobus.”

  “Dear Kobus! Possessive and dismissive, all at once.” Petra slipped into the powder room to inspect her face in the mirror.

  “You know you needn’t sit next to Kobus when you go back,” remarked her mother. Petra checked her lipstick. Margaret watched her daughter self-absorbedly examining her face, apparently not fully conscious of how attractive she was, of the beauty that Kobus wanted every other man to understand was his. “What do you think of the officer?”

  Tempted to tell her mother that she was, in fact, much more interested in what the officer thought of her, Petra fluffed her hair. “It’s rather exciting to watch someone disagree with Father, don’t you think? Kobus certainly never disagrees with him.”

  “That’s why he’s so fond of Kobus,” Margaret said. Petra turned from the mirror to face her mother. Had she really made that observation? Her mother beamed at her. “Of course, you won’t tell your father I said that, will you?”

  Petra turned back to the mirror. “I wish I knew more about Katanga,” she said, studying her face. “I really ought to read the papers.”

  “Not that they carry much news.”

  “I feel such a schoolgirl. If the captain asks me about myself, what do I tell him? That we studied Macbeth for our O levels?”

  “That might interest him,” Margaret encouraged, amused. “Macbeth was a soldier, after all.” She added, “When he looks at you, darling, I don’t think he sees a schoolgirl. He sees a very attractive young woman.”

  Petra was not quite sure what to make of this remark. Since her eighteenth birthday her mother had begun to talk to her as if she were an adult. She had even shared confidences as if preparing her for the fact that, now that she was almost ready for varsity, she had become a woman. Petra studied her figure. “I do wish Kobus would stop putting his hands all over me.”

  “He does that, Pet, to let the captain know that you belong to him.”

  “I do not belong to him! How dare he! He can be so tiresome!”

  “I’m afraid we of the weaker sex—”

  “Posh on that weaker sex business, Mother!”

  “—we women are condemned to watching men play out their rivalries as if we were their cause. The truth is that they are simply competitive with each other.” Margaret added, “We are not the weaker sex, my dear. Our strength is letting them think we are. It plays on their vanity and vanity is their weakness.”

  “That sounds so manipulative,” Petra replied, still studying her face.

  “And nurturing one’s beauty: that’s not manipulation?”

  “That’s hygiene, Mum.” The women laughed.

  “Manipulation lubricates daily life,” Margaret Rousseau declared. “Just like white lies. And having things we never talk about.” She studied her daughter in the mirror and placed her hands lightly on the girl’s shoulders. “You will be meeting all sorts of new men in Johannesburg,” she said. “That will be good for you. Some of them will make you wish Kobus were around. And some will make you glad he’s not. And it will be good for you to meet both kinds.”

  MEANWHILE IN the small parlor, Rousseau asked Gat, “Have you seen combat in Katanga?”

  Gat shrugged, then decided to tell the story, a story for men. “Another white officer and I were acting as advisors to three African lieutenants. We led a company of African soldiers into northern Katanga. Our mission was to show the Baluba people the muscle of the Katanga government—that is, the alliance of the Lunda and Bayeke tribes. There was to be no blood shed. The troops would simply show the Baluba—who’ve remained loyal to Lumumba’s government—that the secession would succeed. That was the mission.

  “When we reached Baluba country, I was apprehensive about the men. They’d never seen combat. They were unusually edgy. I was concerned about discipline.”

  “With good reason, I imagine,” said Rousseau.

  “As we moved into the first village, I realized that many of them were afraid
. And angry to feel that way. Some were kids, wearing their first boots. They swaggered, but they also smelled of fear. If a truck door slammed, they ducked and looked for snipers. When we entered that first village—”

  “They rampaged,” Rousseau said. He smiled knowingly.

  “They went berserk,” Gat acknowledged.

  Rousseau nodded his head as if he could have predicted this situation.

  “It was like trying to control a tornado,” Gat confessed. “I don’t know how the firing started. Who began it. Who ordered it. Or if there was an order. They met no resistance. That made them jubilant. They shouted. Laughed. Shot at anything, everything. Killed women, children, old men.”

  In his mind Gat saw huts burning in a fog of smoke, felt the flames singe his skin, heard again their roar and the cries of women running with babies in their arms, the screams of children, the crackle of gunfire. In his mind he smelled again the acrid smoke, tasted in his mouth the dust and chaff from the flaming huts. He recalled men holding a screaming girl while another raped her. He pulled the man off her. They turned to attack him, recognized him, ran off. “The African officers egged them on.” Gat shook his head. “I still have nightmares about that day.”

  “They’re savages,” Rousseau explained.

  “I don’t excuse their behavior,” Gat said. “But they expected to die and they didn’t. They felt powerful, invincible.”

  “They’re savages,” Rousseau repeated. “This business of ‘one man, one vote’ and ‘all men are created equal.’ It’s fine as metaphysics. But every day of the year I deal with facts. We understand the African here. We are making sure here that our way of life, our civilization, is not destroyed by that very tornado you could not control. It cannot be controlled. We will never let it get started.”

  Terreblanche asked, “What happened when you returned to your base?”

  “We were heroes,” Gat admitted. “I wanted to punish the officers. For that I got into trouble. The politicians wanted to stir up tribal hatred. They instructed the officers to shoot up the villages.” Gat shook his head. “It will take years to build a nation of one people out of all those tribes.”