Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

Professor Ryder leaned forward. 'What are you saying, Magistrate Coetzee? That the Afrikaner is maintaining a position he doesn't feel?'

  'Ag, there you go, you see! You English, you make everything seem like it's truth or lies. I didn't say what I feel, man. I said what I think! That is not the same thing.'

  'Surely it is difficult, if we're thinking in terms of a lifestyle, a philosophy, to separate the two. We feel so we think?' Dr Louis said.

  'For the Jew yes, in particular, the Jew! The Jew is firstly an intellectual and a rationalist. For a thousand years he is persecuted and still he looks for reason. Spinoza, Maimonides, Erasmus, Kant, Marx! In every humble shetl the rabbi and the elders are the seekers of truth and the law, the translators of hot grassroots" feelings into cool intellectual reasoning.

  'But my people, the volk, they are not thinkers. They feel and they act. They have won the right to this land with their blood! First from the black man, then twice they fought the Englishman for it. They lost it to the verdoemde rooinekke; their women and children died like flies in the British concentration camps. These feeling, ignorant boere, who were very proud men, swore a sacred oath on the graves of their women and children. They made a covenant with God that they would remain true to themselves as a- people. Heren volk! God's people in the land God gave them! They swore they would win back this land and keep it forever.' Old Coetzee had become quite worked up. He removed a 'kerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped his brow. The room was silent, embarrassed by the Afrikaner's outburst. When Old Coetzee resumed, his voice was surprisingly calm. 'There was only one weapon left to this pathetic, defeated, ignorant bunch of farmers with their ragged, sweat-stained clothes and their half-starved bodies. These men knew they had not been defeated by the Lee Metfords of the English marksmen, who were a joke, but by the cruel scorched-earth policy of the British. Their fields were burned, their homes razed to the ground, their women and children herded into captivity, where twenty-seven thousand died of dysentery, blackwater fever and God knows what else. Their sad-faced, barefoot children and their calm, resourceful wives, the guerilla widows who had kept vigil on the lonely farms, had been destroyed. These women had stoically endured all, had waited in fear for the men they loved to come home, a fleeting shadow in the night, often after months away on commando, only a single night, from moon rise to break of cold dawn across the pale veld. Who saw him leave again, a memory of muffled hooves in the misty morning light. A man who had come and gone and in the haste of rumbled loving, fierce touching and urgent need, brought only more aching loneliness and despair. These women, clutching their ragged children, watched as the hated rooinek soldiers razed their homes and torched their fields. The British might just as well have gunned them down. in their farmhouses. It would have been a better way for them to die than in the mud and squalor of rat-infested, disease-ridden concentration camps.

  'And so the volk bent down and picked up the only weapon left to them. They picked up hate and they sharpened it and kept it bright and waited for Jehovah, the God of vengeance, to give them their day of reckoning. In 1948 when the Nationalists came to power, God had been merciful, the day of vengeance had arrived.'

  Professor Ryder cleared his throat. 'Surely, Magistrate Coetzee, all this is a little simplistic? After all we're a complex, modem society in a very sophisticated world. For God's sake, man! We are halfway through the twentieth century!'

  'That's where you're wrong, Professor!' Old Coetzee replied. 'Hate and fear doesn't work like that. It doesn't die out just because you're in a sophisticated, or so-called sophisticated society. Hitler came to power in the most sophisticated society in Europe and the weapon he used was hate! He slaughtered six million of Dr Rabin's people with hate!' He turned to Dr Louis. 'Dr Rabin, you mark my words, now the Jews are in Palestine, their time for hate has come.' Coetzee took a sip of brandy and leaned back in his chair. 'Is the Jew going to hold Israel with reason and intelligence or with feeling? The Jew has come home to the promised land. How is the Jew going to hold his land? Let me tell you, man. He will hold it with feeling. He will die for it. He will learn to hate for it!'

  Dr Louis had heard enough. 'Magistrate Coetzee, the Jews have been put in an impossible position. They believe they have come home. They believe Israel is the birthright of every Jew. "Next year in Israel", these have been the last words spoken in prayer every Friday at Shabbas for nearly two thousand years. Now the Jew has come home to a small piece of barren earth surrounded by his enemies!'

  'And South Africa? Is this not the same? Inside are a black people who believe their land has been taken. Outside we are also surrounded by black nations who are our enemies. Are we not a minority, a small white minority, who have nowhere else to go? For the Jew it is a new thing to be a nation, a thing of ten years only; for us it is three hundred years. Like you Jews, we Afrikaners believe this is the promised land, this is our birthright. If we share our power we will lose it. So we hold it with the gun and we hold it with hate and finally, we hold it with fear! Hate and fear for those who would rise up to destroy us.'

  'And greed? Before, you said greed, Magistrate Coetzee.' Sonny Vindoo added softly.

  Tandia was exhilarated by the conversation. She had never heard anything like it. Never heard the position of the white man and, in particular, the Boer put so perfectly. For the first time in her life she could see where she fitted. To her surprise she wasn't angry or embittered. Both these reactions now seemed to her to be self-destructive, almost naive. She could feel the hate she knew she carried in her heart grow sharper. It had a point. A direction. Old Coetzee had explained to her what a powerful weapon it could become.

  'Ah, greed! Let me tell you about greed, meneer Vindoo. Greed is the gift of the British to South Africa.' Old Coetzee was enjoying himself. 'When gold was discovered in the Transvaal Republic greed, not hate or fear, greed took over.

  I'm not saying the Boer wasn't greedy also, when he fought and took the black man's land; in today's terms that is also greed. But it was also the way of Africa. Shaka and Cetewayo, the great Zulu conquerors, did the same to the tribes they destroyed. But gold! The discovery of gold, that was a different kind of greed. Gold built a new lifestyle based on greed: of having more than you need, of having more than the seasons brought a man or the droughts denied him, of having power. It brought migration, people from Britain and Europe. The Afrikaner watched as the Britisher and the Jew got the gold and he saw how the European mind cared no more for the black man's welfare than the Boer did. In fact, you may say less. With the old system of paternalism there was some understanding between the white man and the black. Then the men of gold brought the black man into his mines, put a pickaxe in his hands, broke his black back with work and paid him a pittance in wages. He turned the rural economy into a city-based one where the black man was totally dependent for his very existence on the white capitalist mines. The men of gold shared nothing and gave nothing back. It was a system based entirely on white greed and black labour. He learned that he who pays, says. Money is power. So he learned the ways of capitalist greed also and he added them to his hate and his fear.

  As Tandia brought him a second Scotch, Professor Ryder rose from his chair. He took the glass from her absently. 'Magistrate Coetzee, I am, I must say, enormously impressed by your' perspicacity.' He paused, preparing to make his point. 'But I must insist, you have missed the central point, the simple question of biology. My people have been in Natal for a hundred and ten years, ever since the 1840 settlers. We, the British South Africans, realised just like the Boer South Africans that miscegenation was not the way to go forward, that the mix of black and white didn't advance the noble savage or appreciate the white man. In fact the opposite was true…' He stopped suddenly and 'coloured violently, turning to look at' Mama Tequila. 'I do apologise, Mama Tequila, what I have just said must seem unforgivable to you. I beg your forgiveness, I apologise.'

  Mama Tequila laughed. 'What are you apolo
gising for,

  Professor? Embarrassing me? Or for telling what you think is the truth?'

  'Well, er….'

  But Mama Tequila continued. 'I am a coloured person, that not a person in South Africa. A black is a person, and a white is a person. But I am a non-person. For the Afrikaner I am his guilt. He calls me a Hotnot, because he says I'm from the Bushman and the Hottentot, or a Cape Malay or even round here in Durban, a Mauritian coloured or a Maasbieker, who is a coloured person who supposed to come from Mozambique. Always I am something else from somewhere else, not what happened when his daddy or his oupa lay down with a black kaffir girl when the ounooi has gone to visit her sister in another dorp.

  'For the Englishman I am an inferior non-person, a mistake for which he thinks only the Afrikaner is responsible, a boere bastard! How come there are four million nonpeople like me in this country, answer for me that, hey? I'm telling you something, Professor, I am the result of the hate and the fear and the greed Magistrate Coetzee just talked about. Three hundred years of hate and fear. So what am I? I'm going to tell you now! You the Britisher! You the Afrikaner! You the Jew! You the Indian! You know what I am. I am the child of South Africa. Not the non-person, the real person! You hear, I, me, this person who is sitting in this big chair, Sophie Van der Merwe, born in District Six on August 28, 1889, in Cape Town. I am the only real South African!' Mama Tequila was crying quietly. Her tears, gathering mascara on the way, ran black down her rouged cheeks. Professor Ryder sat down abruptly, as though he had been filled with air and now was suddenly and unexpectedly deflated.

  Sonny Vindoo got up from his chair and moved over to join Tandia, who ran over to comfort Mama Tequila. 'Please, take no notice, I am just a stupid old woman, a hout kop,' she sniffed. Tandia, more brandy for Magistrate Coetzee, also Scotch for the doctor and the professor.'

  'No, no I'm fine,' Dr Louis said, placing his hand over his glass.

  'Go sit, Sonny,' Mama Tequila said, pushing the little Indian gently from her. She smiled through her tears. 'I don't know from where comes these stupid words, I am jus' a old coloured woman who doesn't know no better, man! Now it my turn to apologise, Professor.'

  Old Coetzee rose from his chair a little unsteady on his feet, but when he spoke his voice was quiet and reasoned. 'What we have just heard, maybe it will not change any of us. I am a Boer, an Afrikaner, my mind says one thing, my heart says altogether another thing. We, die volk, we a stubborn people, a stupid people of the heart. I don't think we will ever learn this simple lesson.'

  He polished off the remainder of the brandy and handed his glass to Tandia, indicating with his open palms that he did not require a refill.

  Mama Tequila, who had recovered from her lapse, hoped to hell he would remember Sarah was not available tonight and would go home quietly.

  The magistrate removed his gold hunter from his fob pocket and glanced down at it. 'Professor, it is getting late and you are our guest, so I will spare you further rhetoric. It is a strange little fraternity here tonight, very unexpected, hey? I'm sure you will appreciate that what has been said in this room is private. How is it that a man can go his whole life and never sit down and talk in a group such as this one? The true terror of apartheid is that it separates our minds, we do not know each other's thoughts. We all have too much to lose by loose talk. But I just got this one more thing to say. It concerns Tandia Patel, who as you can see is a coloured person. A non-person just like Mama Tequila. She is also a real child of South Africa and I must add, as an old man of course, if all our children were as beautiful we would be the best-looking race of people on earth.'

  Tandia felt herself blushing violently. Old Coetzee continued. 'Today, out of a possible five hundred marks in five subjects in her matriculation exams, Tandia Patel obtained four hundred and eighty-one! Is this a non-mind in a nonperson? Is this the inferior result of miscegenation? Or do you have a place in the Law faculty of your university for a beautiful, intelligent, real child of South Africa?'

  Tandia could feel her heart pounding and her head seemed to fill with blood. She burned fiercely; then she grew as suddenly cold. She tried to hold herself rigid, but she seemed to have no control, and her entire body trembled as the professor spoke.

  'Tandia Patel will be the first coloured female student to read Law at Natal University, that is my promise,' Professor Ryder said quietly.

  Tandia brought her hands up to her face and burst into tears. She wasn't prepared for this moment. Her upbringing contained nothing in it which told her how to react. She panicked and turning on her heels rushed for the doorway. Pushing blindly through the door, she found herself in Juicey Fruit Mambo's arms. 'Oh, oh, Patel, daddy! I been accepted in the best white circus!' she wept The huge black man picked her up, his gold incisors flashing, and his smile seemed to disappear past his shotaway earlobe. 'Edward King George Juicey Fruit Mambo, we very happy for going to the university, Miss Tandy! We very smart combo, for surer He laughed, swinging her around again. 'Me, myself, I am cleaning for dat classroom and you, you learning to be big, big lawyer for de people so de white policeman he be very, very afraid!'

  NINE

  Maybe there is some connection between repressive regimes and good roads? The road from Johannesburg to Durban is claimed to be equal to any in the world, including the autobahns built by Adolf Hitler and the autostrada constructed in Italy by Mussolini. As roads go, this one is wide, fast and well made, with long perfectly flat grey stretches. There is a popular notion that parts of it are designed so that Sabre jets can land on it when the black revolution comes.

  The journey in the big Packard promised to take just over five hours of fairly sedate Juicey Fruit Mambo driving. Mama Tequila with Tandia in tow was headed for Sophiatown to visit her sister Flo, or Madam Flame Flo as she was known by the majietas and the bright boys of Kofifi, the other name by which this rag-tag, multiracial community was known. Madam Flame Flo was the biggest shebeen queen in Sophiatown, a well-known figure who had resided there since the mid thirties.

  In this little Chicago with its unpaved, dirty alleys and roadways delineated by leaning fences, ruts and puddles, the good mixed in almost equal proportions with the bad. There were some rich people, but they were overwhelmed by the poor; and as for the middle class, they were simply those families who ate three times a day.

  In Sophiatown there were stone walls topped with glass built by the wealthy to keep out the marauding poor, but these most often acted as the one sturdy wall to the shanties of beaten tin and scraps of timber which were abutted to them. In this thoroughly mixed community there were no nature strips or carefully manicured lawns to create a noman's-land separating the haves from the have nots. No municipal laws called for segregation by colour, income or status, so Sophiatown became more a conglomeration of ways to live than the result of town planning.

  The township paid almost no taxes and in return received very little help. The utilities were almost non-existent, and electricity was a status symbol. Most families lived and died by lamp and candlelight. A toilet was usually a pit in the ground topped with a small moveable outhouse of Corrugated iron with a crude seat built into it. In the summer the sides were too hot to touch and hundreds of bluebottles IDled the interior. You could hear and smell the presence of a kakhuis long before you arrived at it.

  The sprawling 'Blackopolis', as the newspapermen called it, was also the biggest pain in the arse the Nationalist government had on its racist agenda. There were also other, smaller pimples on the backside of apartheid.' Alexandra to the north, Orlando township to the south-west and, of course, Cape Town's ancient and venerable District Six, a slum which had existed for nearly two hundred years. But none was thought quite as important to cauterise from the body of the Nationalist state than was Sophiatown. Blacks from every tribe, as well as those who had been Kofifi-born and claimed no tribe at all, coloureds, Indians, Chinese and whites, lived together and had done so for w
ell over thirty years. Racial harmony was not what the government were about and they had no intention of allowing an example of it to continue.

  In fairness, the word 'harmony' was a description ill suited to the goings-on in Kofifi. Sophiatown was an untidy drawer which had jammed and refused to close in the neatly arranged filing cabinets of Johannesburg, where every class and colour knew its proper place. But Sophiatown was also the last living demonstration of the thing Old Coetzee had spoken about in Mama Tequila's salon, where people put aside their differences and had a shot at living together as human beings. Another name for it was hope.

  Madam Flame Flo had started making her fortune almost immediately after arriving in Sophiatown from the Cape. She had been a good-looking woman of twenty-five, with an almost pure white, blue-eyed bastard baby and no real prospects ahead of her.

  Fortune had smiled on Flo Van der Merwe from the very beginning. At the bus station on her way to Sophiatown she had sat down beside a diminutive coloured man who took a shine to her blue-eyed baby daughter and who introducted himself as Geel Piet, which simply meant Yellow Peter. Flo was to learn that names were important in Sophiatown; but only the very rich and the law abiding, both of whom were in limited supply, called themselves by their real names.

  Geel Piet, who claimed to have been a professional boxer and from the look of his face must have been a very bad one, turned out to have made a vocation of having his bones broken in just about every prison in South Africa. It was difficult to tell his age. His body seemed to bear witness to a series of unfortunate happenings more than to an aging process. It was as though he'd been poorly constructed in the first place, had been broken regularly over his adult years and on each occasion been badly mended.

  Geel Piet had tagged along with the slim woman with the flaming henna-dyed hair and her chubby fair-skinned baby, promising to help her find accommodation. True to his word, he found her a place to live. A friend of a friend had a small, dark room for rent with a communal tap and a pit-toilet shared by several houses in the vicinity. The room was at the top end of Good Street, Sophiatown's major and most notorious thoroughfare. It had seemed to Flo an exciting and rather frightening place to live after the quieter streets of Cape Town's District Six.