Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  But my pa said if we never forgot, if we swore revenge every day of our lives the first thing when we woke up and if we learned to hate enough, one day we would win; die volk would be on top again. When Malan came into power in 1948 my pa was so happy on election night, he had a heart attack. You were away at school, but my ousis phoned from the police station and I drove most of the night and was at his bedside just before dawn.

  He'd been unconscious all night but I hadn't been sitting beside his bed for long when he reached out and pulled at my sleeve. He spoke softly, he was a big man with a great white beard, but now his voice was like a small child. "Gert, my son, die volk het gewen! The beloved country is yours again. Nou sal alles reg kom…Hold it tight, never give it up, there will be no second chance. God is with His people again.'"

  'But how will you win, Gert? More and more gun and more and more sjambok. You know why the Boers won the last election? They won it in bed. Afrikaners now outnumber the English-speaking South Africans; your revenge over the British was plotted between the sheets! That's okay, that's what the voting system is all about, the majority point of view wins - providing, of course, that it's white. Enough Afrikaners bought Malan's shit about it being time to return to the laager, to prepare against die swart gevaar, the black danger, when the blacks would rise up and murder us all in our beds: this time, not with the rattle of shields and the stamping of feet until the earth trembles, but silently on padded feet. Like the Bible says, They will come like a thief in the night. Isn't that how Malan put it? Shadows in the night, they will come to slit our throats. The spectre of die bloed smoor, choked by blood, was a surefire vote-winner not only on the platteland but in the cities as well.'

  Peekay drew his breath, he was excited and angry but knew he must calm down, that Gert would grow impatient and his natural good manners forsake him. 'But think about this, Gert. When the Boer War ended there were about four million Africans and about one million whites. Now fifty years later there are ten million Africans and three million whites. That's not too bad really, with enough sjambok and gun the odds are still okay. By the year two thousand, less than fifty years from now, there will be thirty-five million Africans and five and a half million whites. Will we hold them with a sjambok and a gun then? Will hate be enough to arm your fear when the impis of the dispossessed come at the white man in endless waves like wind in the grass?'

  Suddenly Gert raised the hunting knife and plunged the blade into the surface of the work bench. The large knife vibrated from the impact. 'Jy praat leak! You talk shit,' he spat. 'At the battle of Blood River four hundred and seventy Boers held off ten thousand Zulus! The odds were a hundred to one, our hate held then, it will hold again! With modem weapons on our side and only sticks and stones on their side, those odds are no different to Blood River!'

  'They will get guns and if we don't give them hope they will be trained by someone, somewhere to use them. Gert, ou maat, it is not just South AFrica, all of black Africa stirs. Colonialism of every sort is coming to an end. In the whole of Africa, in West Africa, Tunisia, Kenya, both Rhodesias, Angola and Mozambique there are about two hundred million Africans and four million whites. And in all these places the black man is questioning the laws which justify the concept of white supremacy.'

  Peekay paused. 'I once asked my friend Gideon Mandoma, you know, the black welterweight, whether he respected the laws of South Africa? He looked at me and then he slowly shook his head, "The only law is the law that is in a man's heart. There is no white man's law in my heart, Peekay."

  'That's about it, Gert. Until we have the same law in every South African's heart we have no country and we have no future. Gert, please listen! It's my country too! Like the black people and the coloured people, I too would like to have a say in its future, don't you see, we're all brothers and sisters! Christ, Gert, I am about to become an advocate, a lawyer and, like Gideon Mandoma, I cannot feel the law of this land in my heart.'

  Gert's voice suddenly sounded a warning. 'Don't speak like that, Peekay! I heard what you said the first time, that we must all fuck kaffir woman so we all end up the same. If we all hotnots then we going to love each other all of a sudden. You talking shit, you hear? A boesman isn't much better than a kaffir; some are worse even, skollies and drunks and liars, the coloured people are shit, the scum of the earth!'

  His hand shot out and he pulled the knife from the bench and used the point of the blade to prick the inside of his arm just below his wrist. A trickle of dark blood appeared immediately and Gert watched it as it ran down his wrist towards his elbow which now rested on the work bench.

  'That's Afrikaner blood, little boetie, I will willingly die to keep it pure.' His voice was menacing, though hardly above a whisper. 'If you don't fight with me then I will kill you too, Peekay!' He picked up a piece of grey cotton wadding from the work bench and wiped the blood from his arm. 'I love you, Peekay. You are my little brother, but I will kill you just the same. If it is necessary to preserve Afrikanerdom we will drown this country in blood!'

  Peekay rose and grabbed Gert by the shoulder. He had to reach up to do so, the prison sergeant was six feet three and weighed two hundred and sixteen pounds. 'Take it easy, ou maat! Remember, we promised at the beginning of this talk that we'd stay friends. Try to remember, I love my country just as much as you do.'

  Gert sniffed and gave a bitter laugh. 'No, Peekay, you've said that twice now, but you lie. You have other ties. You have just returned from England where you finished your education. Inside you there is still a Britisher, still a verdoemde rooinek. When the trouble comes you can leave and go and live in England or Canada or Australia, you can start a new life, be someone else, somewhere else. Me, I'm a Boer, I don't speak English so well, I don't speak Dutch or French at all, it is three hundred years since my forebears spoke those languages. For three hundred years I have belonged to the Afrikaner tribe and we have kept our bloodline pure. When the shit hits the fan, you can run away, you will run away, but my tribe will have to stay and fight. We have no place to go. Dit is hier of dood, it's here or dead.'

  'Maybe that's why we have to stop the hating now, before it's too late,' Peekay said softly.

  'You might as well try to stop the sun coming up tomorrow morning, Peekay.'

  Peekay returned the tiny brass death's head to the work bench and Gert picked it up and screwed it onto the end of the handle. The leather grip had been roughly shaped, though it hadn't yet been sanded and polished; nevertheless it was a beautiful piece of work. 'It's magnificent, Gert.' Gert looked up and grinned, breaking the tension between them. 'Good! I'm glad you like it, Peekay. It's a coming-home present for you. You better learn how to use it to kill. With your kaffir boetie politics you're going to need to protect yourself with something better than your fists, even if you do end up the welterweight champion of the world.'

  Peekay gripped Gert by his arm, 'Thanks, ou maat, I shall treasure it. No hard feelings hey? When I've fought Jackson I'm going to defend my title only once, against Geldenhuis or Mandoma. After that, like I told you, I'm going to be an advokaat, a barrister. I just want you to know that I'm not on the white side or the black side, but on the side of all South Africans.' Peekay grinned. 'And so you can see, I'm on my ace, up shit creek with a broken stick as a paddle!'

  Gert laughed, glad that the tension had passed between them, glad also that Peekay had stopped in time, for as an Afrikaner he knew he could never back down. 'I guess I'm going to have to tell Captain Smit you a hopeless case, hey? No way you going to learn to hate that black American bastard in time for the title fight.'

  But Gert was wrong. Peekay was beginning to understand the hate he was against. While he'd always seen hate as an evil and repulsive force which must - his nice, clean, rational mind told him - lead to destruction, he hadn't seen how powerful it was and how it could be channelled. Gert's hate could be focussed; he exercised it in the same way as he did his love and lived with it
as easily. Whereas Peekay's initial hate for the Judge had become fear which was mindless and totally unfocussed, Gert's hate, Jackson's hate, was a force they could use, it was the force they used to create fear, the unreasoning fear that weakened Peekay, made him vulnerable to the hate Jackson would bring into the ring with him. He could look into the blind eyes of hate and in their reflection see his own fear, which was just as blind, just as senseless but was totally useless as an emotional force.

  Peekay returned to Johannesburg at the end of January to prepare for the world title. He set up a training camp which he could share with Mandoma, each acting as sparring partner for the other while Gideon worked with Solly Goldman as his trainer and Peekay with Dutch Holland. Several local black, coloured and white sparring partners were selected on an ad hoc basis, though Togger was brought out from London to act as a principle sparring partner. Hymie had selected a small farm in Elandsfontein, some fifteen miles outside Johannesburg, as the training camp and Peekay, Gideon and Togger shared the same bunkhouse which caused some comment in the newspapers. Peekay when asked about this by a visiting reporter had replied, 'The closest you can get to a man is in a boxing ring. You share his sweat and his breath and his arms and his chest. You don't get much closer when you make love to a woman. He doesn't snore so why would I be concerned about sharing a room with him?'

  The South African papers made much of this, the most blatant headline being: PEEKAY SAYS OKAY TO SLEEP WITH BLACK MAN! which appeared in a Bloemfontein paper. But the ongoing quarrel was more the fact that Peekay had elected to train with Mandoma. Almost to a man, the sports pages cried foul! The Peekay camp, they maintained, was giving the Bantu fighter an unfair advantage over Geldenhuis, in that he came under the eye of the world-famous trainer, Dutch Holland, and also enjoyed the services of Solly Goldman, South Africa's foremost trainer. It was even mooted in parliament that a law should be passed preventing people of mixed race sparring together. In fact, five years later, just such a law was passed.

  Peekay was asked about this in an interview he'd given with the press just prior to going into training camp. 'It's perfectly true that Mandoma will benefit from working with Dutch Holland, though he's been under the training of the great Solly Goldman for several years already and Solly remains his trainer. It seems to me that a black fighter of Mandoma's class has none of the infrastructure and training facilities the South African Police College have made available to Jannie Geldenhuis. Mandoma has to work for a living and when he's in training camp he isn't earning. Working out with us means he'll be eating the right food and getting the right sort of rest and I get the best sparring partner I could possibly hope for. I'm delighted with the arrangement, wouldn't you be?'

  Baasie Pienaar, South Africa's foremost sportswriter stood up. 'Good morning, Baasie,' said Peekay. 'I believe you attended the New York fight? I'm sorry I didn't see you to say hello.'

  Baasie Pienaar grinned. 'You did better than that, Peekay, you gave me the best fight I will probably ever see.' He cleared his throat. 'I happen to think, like you in New York, Mandoma got a bum steer last time he fought Geldenhuis. There's been a lot in the paper about it being unfair that he's sharing your camp; I just want to say, personally I'm glad.' There was a murmur of surprise in the room. Die Vaderland was the leading Afrikaans newspaper and, politically speaking, the mouthpiece for the government. 'Because I'm a reporter, I also have a question,' Pienaar went on. 'Geldenhuis says he'll take Mandoma in the seventh. Do you have any comment?'

  Peekay laughed. 'He's a brave man, Mandoma is the most under-rated welterweight in the world. But why don't you ask Mandoma yourself…He pointed to the back of the room where Gideon was standing with Togger.

  Gideon took a couple of steps towards the front of the room. Mr Pienaar for two years already we have been wanting for dis fight. Always Mr Nguni he asks, "Please Mr Geldenhuis, why you not want to fight the black champion of Africa?" But always he say, "No!"'

  Peekay saw the look in Mandoma's eyes when-he talked about Geldenhuis. It was the same thing he'd seen in Gert's. His eyes had gone blank, turned inward, focussed on his hate; even his voice seemed to take on a menacing tone, giving a fierceness to his words which was not actually contained in what he said. 'I am very, very hungry for dis fight. I do not think I will lay down in round seven.' Gideon gave the white reporters a huge smile, but behind its humour Peekay could hear the snarl of the lion, his talisman. 'I am a Zulu, I am chief, I do not think in the ring I have to lay down for dis policeman. In the ring he has only got gloves on his hands same like me, there is no sjambok and there is no revolver.'

  The room broke up in uproar and Peekay terminated the interview. The reporters left, they all had their afternoon headline. Pienaar walked over to Gideon. 'Nice one, Mandoma,' he said quietly.

  The Johannesburg Star was first on the streets. MANDOMA ACCUSES GELDENHUIS OF POLICE BRUTALITY! Baasie Pienaar's paper, Die Vaderland, ran the headline, PEEKAY RATES MANDOMA WORLD BEATER. Hymie was delighted; things were hotting up, in terms of promoting the fight. Nothing they could have dreamed up as a publicity stunt could have had anywhere near the same impact on boxing fans. Geldenhuis had obligingly come back with a comment which, paraphrased, said that in or out of the ring, his hands, with or without gloves, were enough to give the black man a hiding.

  Tickets for the fight had gone on sale the day before and in two days the thirty thousand reserved seats for the fight had been sold out. Hymie was assured of sufficient profit to pay Jackson the huge win-or-lose purse he'd promised him to fight in South Africa and sufficient to pay Mandoma and Geldenhuis the biggest purse either had ever earned.

  TWENTY-NINE

  On the morning of 26 April, an English-speaking announcer on Springbok breakfast radio called the thirty-thousand crowd expected at Ellis Park the largest gathering of blacks and whites in one place since the British fought the Zulu at the battle of Isandhlwana in 1879.

  The remark had been intended flippantly, but, inasmuch as it was a fight which brought both sides together, the symbolism was there for all who wished to see it; and in South Africa that was just about everyone. The old fears were working overtime; the flames fanned by an eager media who imbued the event with the drama of a high-noon shoot-out. Make no mistake, this was no less a battle for race superiority than any other fought against the kaffirs.

  At Ellis Park a white rope ran like a snake down the bleachers and cut across the rugby field to end in the centre of either side of the ring and, by doing so, dividing the entire park in half. This was dubbed 'the wall' by the press and was designed to separate the black fans from the white - no less a wall than one made of granite blocks.

  The crowd control designed for the fight seemed to be the usual overkill. A black policeman would stand every ten feet on the African side of the white rope with his back to the white spectators looking directly into the black crowd for troublemakers and a white one would stand between him and the next black policeman with his back to the black fight fans. The white police officers all carried revolvers and police batons which hung from their Sam Browne belts, while the black constables were armed with riot sticks.

  The fight had been sold out for nearly three months. Nevertheless African ticket-holders started to arrive at dawn and seemed content to sit on the pavement outside the grounds where there was much singing of the Chant as the good-humoured crowd waited for the gates to open at I o'clock.

  The Mandoma versus Geldenhuis fight was scheduled for four o'clock in the afternoon, a ten-rounder followed at a quarter past six by the world-title fight.

  It was late autumn in Johannesburg, a glorious time of crisp mornings and bright, cloudless days when it remains reasonably light until almost seven in the evening. Johannesburg, with its high altitude, grows quite chilly soon after sunset, and a great many of the Africans had brought blankets with them. Red is a favourite colour and by five o'clock the African side of the field was splashed with scar
let.

  Closer to the time of the first major fight the African cognoscenti began to appear, most of them in evening suits and some even in tails. There were few women amongst them; even the gangsters and gamblers had decided to leave their molls behind, the importance of the fight and the prestige of owning a ringside ticket being too great to waste on a woman. Although some white women appeared on the opposite side of the ring, this too was made up largely of white men.

  It was a surprise therefore when, half an hour before the first fight, three women appeared on their own and started to make their way across the short strip of no-man's land leading from one of the entrances under the stands to the ringside seats.

  The excited black crowd, anxious to applaud anything on their side which seemed in the least bit worthy of attention, started to cheer at the perfectly splendid sight which appeared below them.

  Thin as a rake in a glittering red diamante fishtail gown, and wearing a short mink jacket to which was pinned an enormous corsage of purple orchids, was Madam Flame Flo, the famous shebeen queen from Sophiatown. Beside her, big as a circus tent, dressed in a pink satin dress with plunging neckline and wearing a pink fur stole as big as a small blanket, was Mama Tequila. On her head rested a satin turban shaped like a beehive and embroidered with a thousand tiny mirrors. From the centre of the turban, clipped down under a huge circular diamante broach, were three pink ostrich feathers. It was a sight to make the seventeen thousand African men in the stadium positively drool with admiration.