The Covenant

by James A. Michener

  ‘We’ll keep the ones we need.’

  ‘But not the wives? Nor the children?’

  ‘We want to avoid the clutter. They’ll stay behind in the homelands.’

  ‘Is there no appeal I can make in this matter?’

  ‘Mrs. Ngqika is what the law calls a temporary sojourner, and she must go.’

  He would make no concession. Never raising his voice or showing any irritation, he rebuffed every suggestion this difficult woman made, but when she was gone his face went livid and he roared at his assistant, ‘I want three men to look into every aspect of that Ngqika woman’s record. I’m going to teach that pair a lesson.’ And forthwith he phoned a friend in the Security Branch: ‘I suggest you take a close look at this Laura Saltwood. She consorts with Kaffirs.’

  In the case of Mrs. Saltwood, secret police in various cities turned up only the facts that had appeared in newspapers. For some years she had been a thorn, defending non-whites against the just application of the new laws, but she had always acted in the open, so that no reasonable charge could be made against her.

  ‘We’ll keep close watch on her,’ the Security Branch assured the Johannesburg police. ‘One of these days she’ll trip.’

  In the Ngqika case something was found; a black living in Soweto informed the police that Miriam had a son occupying a location in the sky, but when they went to the address given they found that living there was an official of the government, whose wife protested that Miriam’s son was the best and strongest cleaner she had ever employed and his continuance in the job was essential, so he was allowed to stay in Johannesburg, for the time being.

  On a night in the third week, the last that Miriam Ngqika would spend in the house she had possessed for more than ten years but which she had not been allowed to own, the black women met in prayer and consolation. Afrikaners believed and tried to indoctrinate foreigners with the thesis that blacks of South Africa could never coalesce because they were tribal, with one group hating the other, but on this sad night Miriam’s kitchen housed Xhosa, Zulu, Pondo, Sotho, Tswana and Shona. True, they were sometimes suspicious of one another, the way a respectable Episcopalian worries about a hard-shell Baptist, or the way a Catholic looks askance at a Jew, and sometimes that mistrust flared into faction fights, but that they were engaged in mortal combat was preposterous. These women shared a common destiny, and they knew it.

  But as the night wore on, a remarkable event occurred. The schoolteacher who had enlisted the futile aid of the Black Sash crept through the streets leading a white woman, whose presence in Soweto was illegal and whose willingness to come at night was downright revolutionary. ‘This is Mrs. Saltwood,’ the teacher said. ‘You’ve heard of her.’

  The women had, especially the Shona woman who had been paid by Superintendent Grobbelaar to attend this meeting; she would report this criminal act, and the dossier on Mrs. Saltwood would note that at last this dangerous English woman had stepped across the boundary line from open defiance to criminal conspiracy.

  What did the conspiracy consist of? Mrs. Saltwood told the black women, ‘There are women all over the world who are fighting to stop such injustices. We’ve lost this battle, and Mrs. Ngqika will have to go this time, but …’ Suddenly her stalwart manner vanished and she came close to tears, but she controlled herself, thinking: Tonight they need no white woman’s tears. In a low voice she said, ‘Miriam, we shall pray for you. In our hearts you will always have a home, even if they take this one …’ Now she was almost crying, but she bit her lip and sat silent, the black women taking no notice of her emotional reactions.

  In the morning Superintendent Grobbelaar appeared with a government truck, and Miriam’s possessions were thrown into the back. Grobbelaar checked to be sure she did not take the kitchen sink, which was now government property, and at ten o’clock the truck pulled away, with Mrs. Ngqika and two other dispossessed women sitting atop their goods.

  When the truck reached the Johannesburg railway station, the driver was surprised to see Mrs. Laura Saltwood waiting to accompany Mrs. Ngqika to her new home. She would, of course, have to travel in the WHITES ONLY coach, but there was nothing to prevent her watching over the dispossessed woman; if Mrs. Saltwood wanted to waste train fare to cry over one black woman no longer needed by the white community, that was permitted; but the driver did make note of the fact, and when he reported it to the superintendent, Grobbelaar had this latest evidence of rebellion forwarded to the secret police.

  It was a tedious trip south; in the rude third-class compartments provided by the South African Railways for their black customers, women from various towns, whose husbands had died, were heading for homelands they had never seen. Young men who had tried to establish themselves in cities like Pretoria and Johannesburg were being sent back into their Bantustans. Most pitiful, in many respects, were the young married women who had wanted to live with their husbands in a real home, but who had been sent away; their husbands would work in Johannesburg for six or eight or ten years without their wives. In the end they might get legal papers; they might not.

  ‘What is so wrong,’ one young woman with a college education obtained in the black nation of Lesotho said, ‘is that in Alexandra the government will build a six-story building for black men working in the city, and a mile away, surrounded by a high fence, another six-story building for black women, and they honestly believe that they can keep those men locked up at night in their building and the women locked up in their building, with no communion between them. And this is supposed to continue forever. Men and women aged twenty are to live like bees in these cells, without love between them, in a temporary sojourn that could be prolonged for forty years.’

  Late on the second day the train reached a small station—Hilary Siding—in eastern Cape Province, and there the women destined for Soetgrond were ordered into trucks. Mrs. Saltwood was determined to stay with Miriam, but a white policeman said that that was impossible, and he refused to allow her to ride on the government truck. So she watched in angry silence as Miriam’s few belongings were thrown on the ground. Then she phoned the Saltwoods at De Kraal to borrow one of their cars, and when it arrived, she drove with Miriam sitting beside her.

  They followed the route of the truck to its miserable destination, and shuddered as they saw how bleak the area was. Soetgrond became even more forbidding as rain began to fall and darkness deepened, with the car sliding this way and that in the glassy mud.

  They came at last to a village, some two hundred flimsy houses recently erected on eroded land, without a tree, without one square of grass or garden. There was a store, lit with kerosene lamps, and the beginning of two roads, mostly mud. Evacuees who had been moved down during the preceding year gathered to greet the newcomers and give them such encouragement as was possible. A government official took note of names, and when he came to Mrs. Ngqika he said, ‘You have Lot Two-four-three.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ Mrs. Saltwood asked.

  It was now evening, and the official pointed down one of the dark and muddy roads. ‘Down there. You’ll find a placard.’

  ‘Is there anyone to help us with these things?’ she asked.

  ‘Help?’ The official laughed. ‘You carry your own. Down there.’

  So the two women, one black, one white, lifted the bundles and started down the almost impassable road. In some of the shacks lights shone, and this helped them to pick their way, but in others there was nothing, forcing Laura and Miriam to stumble about. They found shack Two-three-nine, then Two-four-zero, and Laura said, ‘It can’t be far.’ But at Two-four-one the shacks stopped. Beyond, there lay only darkness and mud.

  ‘We must be on the wrong road,’ Laura said, and they went to the last house and inquired as to where Lot Two-four-three was, and an old man said in Xhosa, ‘Just down there.’ And he pointed to open space.

  ‘What did he say?’ Laura asked, and Miriam said, ‘My lot is down there.’

  ‘But there’s no house!’ Laura
exclaimed.

  In the gloom the two women stared at the vacant lot, and again Laura was tempted to turn back and ask for clarification, but a faded cardboard tacked to a leaning stick said clearly: Lot Two-four-three.

  Good God! This was it. This woman who had worked so hard for so many years, this woman who had reared her children and educated them, who had mended her husband’s clothes so that he could hold his precious job, received this as her reward.

  ‘There really must be some mistake,’ Laura said brightly. ‘I’ll ask.’ And leaving Miriam, she trudged back to the official at the truck. He laughed again and said, ‘That’s how they all started. They got their lot and made something of it.’

  ‘But where’s she to sleep?’

  ‘That’s her problem.’

  ‘No,’ Laura said quietly. ‘It’s my problem, and it’s yours.’

  ‘Lady, get in your car and go home. These people find a way.’

  She wanted to argue with him, but he turned his back and left. Standing in the drizzle, she thought: It is his problem. Government has plans to move three million eight hundred thousand people. One in six. In America that would be forty million people uprooted from good homes and moved to bad. And tonight I’m responsible for one of them.

  Slowly, refusing to cry in her anguish, she trudged back through the mud, unable to believe that what she was experiencing could occur in a civilized society. A sovereign state, in the latter half of the twentieth century, believed that this was a solution to a problem involving human beings. In the muddy darkness, with soft rain slanting at her, she could visualize Superintendent Grobbelaar leafing through his canvas-backed book, finding the applicable law. It would be there, and it would be enforced.

  ‘We’ll sleep in my car,’ Laura said softly when she joined Miriam.

  In the rain the women wept.

  In a valley not far to the north, on an eroded hillside, stood two stone cairns marking the graves of Mal Adriaan, who talked with hyenas, and Seena van Doorn, lusty daughter of old Rooi van Valck. Close by was the grave of Lodevicus the Hammer, to whom God had sent two faithful wives. Those Afrikaner pioneers had paid a terrible price for a foothold in this land, and they had done it in order to be free. In sentencing Miriam Ngqika to this awful place, their descendants had become prisoners of their own restrictive laws.

  AT RESURRECTION

  Despite the deprivations imposed by apartheid, the blacks of South Africa never lost their courage. They dreamed of a resurrection when they would again be free, and it is important to differentiate between the character of this dream prior to 1975 and after. The crucial change can be perceived in the contrasting lives of two men from the Vrymeer area: Daniel Nxumalo, grandson of Micah who had ridden with General de Groot and served the Van Doorns for so many years; and Matthew Magubane, whose parents worked on a farm near Venloo.

  As a child Daniel Nxumalo showed such promise that as soon as possible he went not to the mines, like his brother Jonathan, but to the black college at Fort Hare. Since 1911 this institution had grown from little more than a high school to a full-fledged university with a faculty like no other in all Africa, composed of informed blacks who glimpsed the possibility of an awakening among their people. ‘Teach as if the destiny of a free South Africa depended upon you alone’ was the whispered motto of these teachers, and each devised tricks of speech and emphasis to signal to their wiser students: ‘The police won’t let me say what I ought to say next, but ask yourselves if Napoleon ever destroyed the national aspirations of any land he temporarily conquered?’ A clever student at Fort Hare learned that what happened in the rest of the world might also happen in South Africa.

  It was in a class in world history that Daniel first caught these signals. A woman professor who had never impressed him one way or other was teaching about the Norman Conquest of England; the curriculum was heavily loaded with developments in Holland and England rather than with pertinent events in South African life. She was explaining how Frenchmen had stormed across the Channel to impose their rule on the Saxon peasants of England, and Nxumalo was dozing.

  She spoke in a singsong voice, reciting meaningless dates and genealogies, and then without a cue of any kind she stood quite still before the class and began to tell in her own words what it had been like in one small Saxon village when the conquerors arrived, and she used such vivid images and so many parallels to the trekboer invasion of frontier villages that all students became attentive. No papers rustled as she spoke on and on, treating of Saxon women with babies who could no longer own a cow for milk, and of the marching of Norman soldiers, and of the payment of taxes, until at the end she just stood there, tears streaming down her dark cheeks, not moving a muscle of her body as her voice continued with overwhelming passion the story of alien occupancy and lost freedoms.

  For three months there was no other day like that, but its harrowing into the students’ lives was deep and fertile, and word passed among the beds in the dormitory that this woman knew. She also knew that if she said anything specific relating to the condition of blacks in South Africa she would be spirited away by BOSS (Bureau of State Security) and perhaps never be seen again. Therefore, she had to convey her inner convictions without ever spelling them out, educating her pupils while keeping clear of BOSS. She played an intricate game, knowing that her history classes waited tensely for the next revealing lecture.

  It came some fourteen weeks after she spoke of the subjugation of the Saxons. She was dealing with the difficult times America faced in 1861, when the nation was ripped apart by civil war, and meticulously she avoided the question of slavery or brutality, focusing instead on the movement of the battles, as was required in schools at that time. But when she came to the end of the war, she began to speak of what it meant to the blacks in one small town in South Carolina, and again she seemed to go into a trance and stood quite rigid as she imagined the impact of freedom on a community that had been so long in bondage, and she aroused in her students such wild visions of a different pattern of life that her small classroom became like a bomb, fused and eager to explode.

  No young black, listening to her that day, could fail to comprehend her message, and among her students was one put there by BOSS, and this girl reported secretly to the police the subversion her teacher was practicing. There was no third lecture, because officials appeared, took the teacher away, and questioned her for three days before she was released. That was only the opening salvo of their harassing, and before the term’s end she vanished. Her students were convinced she’d been sent to Robben Island; the fact was, she had fled the country on a forged exit permit and was teaching at the university in Nairobi, where she did not have to use Norman and Saxon as evasions for trekboer and Xhosa.

  From this incident Daniel Nxumalo derived two generalizations which would determine his life pattern: It is imperative for me to learn what is happening to blacks elsewhere in the world, but I must do it so that I never attract the attention of BOSS. The first generalization was easier to carry out than the second, for as he learned more and more about Africa and Europe, he moved ever closer to the danger line.

  BOSS was a semi-secret agency with power to arrest and detain without warrants of any kind. Any black or Coloured or Indian or even white who did anything that might conceivably endanger society could be investigated, and if shown to be a threat to apartheid, imprisoned on Robben Island, a speck of rocky land in Table Bay with a fine view of Table Mountain. Because of its mysteriousness, the legend grew that it was a hellhole. ‘It makes Devil’s Island look like a fête champêtre,’ a French journalist wrote, but he was wrong. It was merely a strongly guarded prison for political dissidents, and was much more lenient than Alcatraz or even the best jails in Russia.

  Blacks were sent there with shocking frequency, and there they stayed for having promoted the concept that their people should be freed from serfdom … or for having imported machine guns from Moçambique. Some were Communist revolutionaries, but too often that l
abel had been pasted onto men who merely sought to be the Martin Luther King or Vernon Jordan of South Africa. Had Andrew Young been a citizen of the Transvaal, he would more likely have ended up on Robben Island than as an ambassador in the United Nations.

  It was not easy for an involved black scholar to stay clear of BOSS, and by the time Daniel Nxumalo left Fort Hare he had entered their notebooks in four instances: (1) at a student gathering, as reported by the same spy who had turned in the history professor, he had given a rather pointed talk when someone mentioned Brazil; if he had said nothing, the topic in itself would have alerted suspicions, because Brazil had a mainly black population, but he reviewed a book by the Brazilian professor Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, which contained ominous parallels to South Africa; (2) at a mock United Nations convention he was assigned the role of Gromyko; he hadn’t sought it, but someone had to be the Russian, so he accepted, and as a good student, studied Gromyko’s life and opinion; his speech was quite Slavic; (3) at a cricket match in Port Elizabeth he was noted as having cheered not for the South African team but for England; (4) on several occasions he was observed singing the Freedom Hymn, popular with students, ‘with more than necessary enthusiasm.’

  At the end of his student days at Fort Hare it seemed pretty clear that eventually Daniel Nxumalo would be sent to Robben Island, but when he reported to Witwatersrand University to take his master’s degree in sociology he fell in with quite a different kind of professor, a white man trained in England who summoned him to his office one day and roared at him, ‘You damned fool! Keep your mouth shut. How can you exercise any leverage if you’re in jail? Your task is to learn. Make yourself the brightest black in South Africa, then teach others.’

  The professor was careful to avoid stating specifically the end purpose of such education and never explicated his ideas of revolutionary change through superior knowledge, for this would project him also into BOSS territory, but he did defuse Nxumalo’s exhibitionism, converting him into a solid, knowing scholar.