Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Yes, Sergeant!’ we chorused again.

  ‘Your brown bags will be retained by all of you until we find a suitable place to dispose of them. Righto, now there are two webbing seats available, one for myself and one . . .’ He looked around and then pointed to Vermaak. ‘And one for Rifleman Vermaak. We will now do a final rollcall before we board the aircraft. When I call your name you reply, “Sergeant,” that’s all.’ He then proceeded to call out our names and at the conclusion paused, looked us over slowly and shook his head. ‘You’re a pretty ordinary-looking lot! May Gawd help the defence of Rhodesia!’ Then, in the middle of the grin this evoked from us, he suddenly barked ‘Attention!’ We all came to the same ragged and mistimed attention as on the previous occasion. ‘At the double, load your suitcase and board the aircraft. Dismissed!’ he shouted.

  Seated against the starboard wall of the DC-3, a couple of guys from the front, was when my big shock occurred. There against one side of the door leading to the pilot’s cockpit was Pissy Vermaak. Even after all these years there was no mistaking him. My heart began to beat faster for a second time, why, I can’t say because I had never feared him. But it nevertheless did, while at the same time I found myself wondering if he still smelled of piss.

  I had never been in an aeroplane before and was fortunate enough to be placed beside a window. Although taking off was a bit hairy, with the engines straining and the wings arocking and ashuddering, and a definite feeling that we weren’t going to get airborne, suddenly we were in the air and I heard a thump as the undercarriage withdrew into the wheel-well. Once in the air I was able to rest on my knees in order to see out of the plane window and I must say it was a wonderful experience, like playing God and looking at the tiny world of man below. Here and there I spotted a native village, just a few huts and a kraal made of whitethorn bush to keep the cattle safe at night, and the usual patches of maize and vegetable gardens where the women worked. Sometimes there’d be a few cattle or goats, with a small child acting as herd boy, everywhere else to the furthermost horizon was covered in the amazing spring colours of the Northern Rhodesian woodland forest, with an occasional rise of rocky hills to break the appearance of a large randomly coloured quilt that appeared to be covering the earth.

  While we met with turbulence from time to time when I was required to sit tight and when several of the guys were sick, I think I was too enchanted with the prospect of watching the landscape below to think about feeling queasy. All I wanted to do was get back on my knees to look out of the window. At one stage I glanced up to see Vermaak with his face buried in his brown-paper bag. ‘Nothing trivial I hope,’ I heard myself saying under my breath. I was surprised at the sharp sting to my memory that his reappearance in my life had caused. I guess your childhood is never quite over and the early hurts are the ones you’re most likely to take to your grave unhealed.

  Almost three hours later we flew over Bulawayo, a small city with the usual outlying African shanty town with higgledy-piggledy dirt roads and without trees, known in white-man-speak as the native location. Neat, leafy European suburbs with manicured subtropical gardens followed, and finally we flew over the centre of the city’s broad tree-lined avenues with three or four blocks of square buildings five or six storeys high. A central square of palm trees and lawn contained an imposing courthouse of granite, built in the Victorian era, with the Union Jack flying imperiously from a flagpost at the front of the building.

  At the airport we were told to deposit our sick bags in a bin placed on the tarmac, and after retrieving our suitcases, we were lined up into our platoon and marched off to a waiting bus to take us to the military camp.

  Llewellyn Barracks, left over from World War II, was situated about 15 miles from the city and appeared somewhat weary-looking, the usual creosote-splashed rows of wooden barracks with a few new buildings added. It contained all the expected infrastructure: guardhouse, company headquarters, gymnasium, various storage sheds, obstacle course, dusty parade ground and rifle range. This parade ground was shared by the King’s African Rifles, an African battalion with a separate set of barracks at the far end. My home for the next three months was altogether dreary-looking and seemed to speak clearly of a difficult time ahead for all of us. Still, whatever they dished up, it was going to be better than working a grizzly and no worse than The Boys Farm or the School of Mines. I comforted myself with the thought that I was being paid my full copper bonus while being trained to fire a rifle or a mortar, leopard-crawl under a tangle of barbed wire and scramble over wooden walls or swing from ropes across pretend crocodile-infested rivers.

  I guess preparing a young man for the army is a universal procedure. If you’ve done any army training or read about it you’ll have a fair idea of what it’s all about, square-bashing, route-marching, rifle and machine-gun practice being the major component. Sergeant Minnaar, the sergeant-in-charge of our barracks, or those who drilled us or taught us how to defend ourselves, forcefully possessed exactly the same mindset and vernacular and attitude to abuse as Gareth Jones. To go over our military training in detail would be much the same as repeating the experience of the School of Mines, though this time in the sunlight or under the stars. That is, the singular purpose seemed to be to reduce the recruits to instant and unquestioning obedience with repetition and exacting standards involving spit and polish, and the immaculate condition at all times of the barracks room seeming to be the major objective. So much so that our bunks, the blanket and sheets, were made to a precise formula by using a ruler, and when pronounced perfect by Sergeant Minnaar, we used needle and cotton to carefully sew them into a permanently fixed position. At night we would lie on top of the bed so as never to disturb them. This continued for the entire three months, so that while in training we never once crawled between the sheets.

  Punishment, like at the School of Mines, was usually collective, with individual punishment involving extra guard duty during the weekends known as CB, meaning that you were confined to barracks and had to report in full kit to the guardhouse every hour. Or jankers, which was less severe, lugging a full pack and with a rifle held above your head at the double around the parade ground for twenty minutes or so, or marching around it for two hours after the training day was over. Most of it was mindless and seemingly meaningless, and even activity such as bayonet practice seemed like acquiring a skill we were never likely to need. No group of soldiers had been required to fix bayonets and charge the enemy since the Kaffir Wars in the latter part of the nineteenth century when, even then, it had proved a senseless way to fight this type of enemy.

  The lectures we attended proved more interesting as, by contrast, they clearly served a purpose. It wasn’t hard to see, in theory anyway, that we were being trained to combat an African insurrection. In East Africa, in Kenya in particular, the Kikuyu tribe had risen up and several outlying farms and coffee estates had been attacked and ransacked, with the white farmers and their families murdered. What had at first appeared to be a small and localised uprising had quickly gathered momentum to escalate into a full-scale state of emergency. Britain responded to Governor Evelyn Baring’s request for help by sending several battalions of troops to Kenya.

  This small, cruel and often barbaric uprising became known as the Mau Mau rebellion, and involved a new kind of guerilla warfare where witchcraft and ritual murder gave the enemy its fanatical strength and determination, while cruelty and draconian measures armed the resolve of the white settlers and the British Government protecting them. The terrorists hiding within the almost impenetrable forests on the slopes of Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Mountains were a clever and resourceful enemy who would emerge, mostly at night, to launch an attack. Conventional tactics and weaponry were proving ineffective and the enemy very difficult to capture or contain.

  Rhodesia was coming to realise that the same thing could happen with the Matabele, the largest and most sophisticated of the local tribes, and historically warlike by nature. Like the Kikuyu, they were possesse
d of many of the same deeply felt resentments against the colonial government that had caused the Kenya uprising. If they were to take note of the Mau Mau successes to the east they might similarly rise up to demand their independence.

  The more interesting of these lectures were conducted by Captain Mike Finger, who had been seconded from the Kenya Regiment via the King’s African Rifles and had a previous connection with Rhodesia where he had done his basic military training. Kenya, prior to the outbreak of the Mau Mau rebellion, lacked the military infrastructure to train its young men and they were sent to do their basic training at the George VI Barracks in Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. Mike, it seemed, had enjoyed army life and had decided to take a commission with the King’s African Rifles there. Then, with the declaration of the state of emergency, he’d requested a transfer to the King’s African Rifles Kenya Regiment in Tanganyika, Kenya at the time lacking their own native regiment. From here he was seconded to train mounted counter-insurgency units known as the Kenya Police Reserve (KPR) made up of resident farmers and members of the Kipsigis and Nandi tribes. Their task was to mount roadblocks, lay ambushes, guard the farms of members who were on duty and make the Mau Mau wary of entering the north-eastern area of the Aberdare mountain range.

  He’d laugh. ‘With the Mau Mau operating from within the forests on the slope of the Aberdares, the farmers in the North-Eastern District became pretty jittery. While we never really managed to make serious contact with the Mau Mau, who were rather too slippery for us, we at least managed to give the farmers and their wives an occasional good night’s sleep.’

  Mike Finger had a great, though quiet, sense of humour and told me of a time in the Molo District where he’d arranged for members of the KPR to guard several of the outlying farms because the male owners were on patrol. He’d noted that several of the men and women in the district had divorced, and then paired with other men and women in the district. By careful matching and rostering over several weeks he’d managed ‘thoughtfully’ to pair several of the ex-husbands to guard the homes of their ex-wives, all of them on the same night. This had become known in Molo history as ‘The Night of the Wrong Wives’.

  However, Mike felt that he wasn’t being used to the greatest benefit commanding the Molo and North-Eastern District of the KPR. He requested a transfer to the Kenya Regiment and became a special branch officer in Nyeri Province, deep in the heart of the Kikuyu tribal lands. He spoke fluent Kikuyu and had been brought up to deeply understand their culture. I would later learn that the Kikuyu regarded him as one of their own tribesmen, and a white man who could read their secret thoughts. Among the Kikuyu tribe there was a legend that he was a great medicine man, who had turned inside-out to be white on the outside and black on the inside. He was often employed by the army and government authorities to negotiate with the Kikuyu people. Prior to doing so he would dye one half of his tongue black to confirm the legend, while being careful to never talk about it and so give the impression that he was unaware of this physical aberration. This simple visual manifestation was confirmation enough to the Kikuyu people that he could speak on their behalf to the white man, and that if the Mau Mau should attempt to kill him this would bring a great disaster to the Kikuyu people as a tribe. Mike seemed to have a high regard for the Kikuyu people and would openly admit that the Mau Mau insurrection was not entirely without just cause. He would privately talk about the issues involved.

  ‘Tom, I guess all nations have long memories, but Africans never forget and seldom, if ever, forgive. With the Masai their wealth is measured in cattle and the land is communal, but with the Kikuyu more than any of the other forty tribes in Kenya, personal ownership of land is everything. They keep stock but are also maize growers and market gardeners, and they regard the soil as their wealth. Of all the tribes they are the most hardworking and prized among servants, but they are also an independent people and have never regarded the white bwana as absolute lord and master.’ Mike looked up. ‘Personally I like them for this lack of subservience.’ He laughed. ‘As you may expect, this is not a characteristic much admired by some of the settlers.’

  I grinned. ‘I guess you can say the same of our Zulu people under Dingaan and Shaka who gave the white man, both Afrikaners and English, hell when they tried to intrude on or take possession of their land.’

  ‘That was, of course, in the nineteenth century,’ he said. ‘Things in your country have been settled, if badly, a fair while now. But in Kenya the injustice is still within the memory of most adults.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ I ventured. ‘History evolves and accumulates and the longer the injustice, the more deeply felt the resentment.’

  ‘You keep surprising me, Tom, one doesn’t come across too many left-wing liberals in the army or anywhere else in Africa for that matter.’

  ‘There’s an old Xhosa saying, “People are people because of other people”,’ I explained. ‘What it means is that we all belong to each other and can’t exist without the one for the other. As a small child the person I loved the most in the world was a Zulu named Mattress. I think he probably taught me that there is no human pecking order, that God didn’t specifically create a bunch of white-skinned people as the Afrikaners around me insisted and tell them they would forever rule the black world. Besides, if the anthropologists are correct, Africa is the cradle of mankind, and so we all started out black anyway.’

  Mike spoke often of his imminent return to Kenya, and I must confess I’d wondered how someone as useful as he must be in the state of emergency could be sent to Rhodesia on a passive training assignment. One evening, while enjoying a beer or five in a bar in Bulawayo on weekend leave, he told me that his reason for being a special instructor in Rhodesia was because he was recovering from the accumulated effects of malaria. He then added, with what I took to be a somewhat bitter laugh, ‘And one or two other reasons.’

  I waited until a beer or two later before asking, ‘Mike, you suggested it wasn’t just the malaria that brought you to Rhodesia and the camp.’

  He paused, both his hands clasped around his beer glass, and seeming to look directly into it. ‘It’s difficult to talk about it, Tom.’ He glanced at me. ‘In the work I was doing I was seeing both sides of the war, and frankly I was pretty disappointed in the way our side was conducting themselves.’

  ‘You mean the military, the British?’

  ‘The military only do what they’re told to do, they don’t generally make the rules, they simply follow instructions,’ he replied.

  ‘What are you saying, the colonial administration . . . Britain tells them what to —?’ He didn’t allow me to finish.

  ‘Perhaps it’s different in South Africa. I know more than half of the whites there actively hate the British. But in Kenya we have always seen Britain as the home of a benign and fair-minded parent. They are supposed to be an example of how a decent nation should behave towards lesser nations. You know, the whole Rudyard Kipling thing, generally summed up by the expression “It’s simply not British, old chap!” Well, eliminate the expression “old chap”, and it is this prevailing sentiment that sums up the way young Kenyan kids like me were brought up to think.’

  ‘And now in the state of emergency this isn’t proving to be the case?’

  ‘Exactly. Now all that’s changed, the white Kenyans are the worst offenders, we’ve formed the Kenyan Regiment, that is the locals, chaps with whom I went to school. Chris Peterson is the commanding officer, once one of my best friends, now he’s the main instigator of the white atrocities against the Mau Mau.’ He looked at me, plainly distressed. ‘We, Peterson and myself, were brought up with the Kikuyu. They were our playmates, we trusted them, they trusted us, we never thought of it as a skin thing.’

  ‘But isn’t that the case in any war? You know, throw out the moral scruples, forget the high-flown principles, play dirty and win at any cost?’

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Tom, but there was and is so much we could have done before w
e started to employ our present tactics. The Kikuyu, as I’ve told you, have legitimate reasons for rising up in revolt. The maths simply don’t work, at this very moment approximately 250 000 Kikuyu are restricted to 2000 square miles of land while 30 000 settlers occupy 12 000 square miles.’ He pointed a finger at me. ‘Now remember, Tom, both whites and blacks grow the same things: coffee, maize and vegetables; and both are skilled farmers, and to a Kikuyu man land is everything, without it he becomes a non-person. Now the white settlers didn’t buy this land in the first instance, it was granted to them by the colonial administration. The Highlands and parts of the Rift Valley, the two most fertile areas, were simply declared vacant land and taken from the Kikuyu and, in some cases, other tribes and given to the settlers. We’re not talking about some nineteenth-century bloody conquest or tribal treaty! We’re talking recently, from World War II onwards. We’re talking about a stroke of the colonial pen!’ He was plainly angry. ‘Ninety-seven thousand African Kenyans, many Kikuyu tribesmen, fought for the Allies in the war and returned to Kenya to nothing, bugger all! Their experience serving alongside white British soldiers as equals gave them a sense of entitlement. This, especially when white Kenyan returned soldiers and immigrating white men who’d fought in the war were given land grants, angered them greatly.’

  I sighed. ‘Mike, it’s not a unique situation, the apartheid government of South Africa is creating Bantu homelands as we speak. When it’s all over, 88 per cent of the land will be owned by 12 per cent of the population who are white, while 10 per cent of the land will be owned by 75 per cent of the population who are black, with the remaining 2 per cent owned by the other 13 per cent of the population who are non-European. Justice and Africa are contradictory terms.’

  Mike shook his head. ‘I know, but two wrongs don’t make a right; here in Rhodesia things aren’t all that equitable between black and white either and I guess that’s why we’re both here.’ He grinned, and picking up his beer, drained it. ‘C’mon, Tom, that’s enough politics, there’s a dance on at the YWCA, let’s check it out.’