The Covenant

by James A. Michener

  NXUMALO: Then we blacks, who are mostly farmers, ought to have a larger vote than anyone.

  SCHEEPERS: We’re talking of civilized voters.

  And there it ended, with Daniel Nxumalo having offended the judge, the prosecutor, his own advocate and most of the public. Even Philip Saltwood had to concede that he was guilty as hell—but of what? No overt act of treason had been proved; he had been in contact with no foreign power. He had said certain things which college professors and students around the world were saying, except in Russia and Uganda. He had organized a day of remembrance for the dead of Soweto. He had spoken in favor of English as the major language for students. He had used the phrases Black Power and Black Consciousness. And he had done certain things which might embarrass the government, which tried to hide the worst effects of apartheid.

  For these trivial offenses he must be imprisoned?

  Pursuing this line of thought, Saltwood then had to admit that his friend was guilty of two additional crimes which were not trivial: he had visited with revolutionaries in Soweto; he had provided refuge for his renegade brother. But these had not been discussed in court. The final, damning evidence was that Nxumalo had consulted with black leaders—and this was tantamount to conniving with an alien nation. Also, Nxumalo had advanced the disgraceful argument that when blacks honored Soweto they were doing only what whites did when they honored the Day of the Covenant. That was blasphemy; and in a theocracy, a mortal sin.

  It was essential for the protection of the state that Nxumalo be severely punished, perhaps even hanged, but when the court convened in dreadful silence and the time came for Judge Broodryk, creature of the system, to defend the system, he surprised his listeners by intoning:

  ‘Prisoner Daniel Nxumalo, this court finds you guilty on all counts as charged. You have, whenever an opportunity arose, sought to endanger the security of this state by furthering the aims of revolutionary groups plotting to overthrow the government of this republic. The court has listened with patience to your pleas about Black Consciousness and identity, but the good people of this nation have evolved an intricate system which ensures fairness for all. It is defined in sensible laws which you must obey, and for a man of your education to subvert them is criminal. The maximum sentence laid down by the Terrorism Act is death, but in your deportment during this trial I have seen repeated evidences of a superior mind and a solid character, and in this world that counts for something. I sentence you to ten years’ imprisonment.’

  So Daniel Nxumalo, thirty years old, whose only real crime was that he had spoken in terms used by people like Jean Jacques Rousseau, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, was sentenced to a decade on Robben Island.

  He was not frightened by the prospect of imprisonment because he suspected that it would not be long before reason would prevail in his land; even if he were banned for five years after his release, he knew that a time would come before the end of this century when he and black men like him would know real freedom. At that time he would occupy a privileged position because of his martyrdom—as the prisoners Nehru, Mussolini, De Valera, Vorster, Kenyatta, Lenin, Hitler and Gandhi had done before him. He would use his time in prison as they had used theirs: to perfect his theories of government, coming out a much stronger man than when he went in. Nations tend to be governed by men who have been forced by adversity to clarify their thought; those who have enjoyed unbroken smooth sailing are often too lazy to speculate on how to manage their ship in storms.

  In the military prison at Chrissie Meer, Detleef van Doorn had begun his education in restrictive puritanism; in the political prison on Robben Island, Daniel Nxumalo would undergo his apprenticeship in the strategies of freedom.

  When Philip Saltwood landed his job with Amalgamated Mines he promised his favorite professor, Gideon Vandenberg of the University of Michigan, that he would not form any hard conclusions about South Africa until he had worked there a full year, but that when he had done so, he would report to Vandenberg. The professor was a member of that distinguished family which produced Senator Arthur Vandenberg and General Hoyt Vandenberg; he spent his summers in Holland, Michigan, tulip capital of America, and was a kind of professional Dutchman. Just as the senator had presented himself to the electorate as an incorruptible Dutchman, conservative but prudent, so Gideon yearly offered a course in ‘The Golden Age of Holland, 1560–1690,’ in which he extolled those creative pressures which had made this minute country one of the masters of the world, possessors of Java and Cape Town. He needed to know what was happening in the latter and had commissioned Saltwood to tell him:

  Dear Professor Vandenberg,

  One of the best bits of advice you ever gave me was to wait a year before reaching any conclusions about South Africa. Ten years would be a better study period. But I’ve worked diligently with Afrikaners, Englishmen and lots of blacks. I’ve also been in all parts of the nation. And I’ve reestablished contact with the local Saltwoods, whom our branch last knew in 1810. I offer you these tentative speculations.

  South Africa must be one of the most beautiful lands on earth, surpassed in my experience only by New Zealand. All thinking must start from this. It’s a land worth keeping. For whites it also has one of the highest standards of living in the world, and if people in Europe and America knew how grand the daily existence was, they’d all emigrate. Compared to the upper South African white, rich people in Texas and Oregon live like serfs. If you taught here, at your salary, you’d have four servants, a life of ease, and all the amenities. The South African way of life is worth preserving (for whites) and even worth fighting for. I have never lived so well.

  For urban blacks the standard of living is also higher than I have seen in Nigeria, Zambia and Vwarda, and much higher, I’m told, than in any of the surrounding black countries, which is why hundreds of thousands of blacks in those countries would like to emigrate to South Africa. Personal freedoms, of course, are another matter, and much of what you hear in a liberal university like Michigan is true.

  The people of South Africa perplex me. Even cursory investigation proves that what we call an Afrikaner is rarely of pure Dutch descent. The mix seems to be Dutch ancestry thirty-five percent, German a hefty thirty, Huguenot twenty, English five, other European five, and a submerged and denied five percent due to early miscegenation with slaves from Madagascar, Angola, Java, Ceylon and lots of Malays, with a liberal salting of brown Hottentots. But apparently one drop of Dutch blood supersedes all other European strains and can even mask black infusions, if they occurred long enough ago. A man who is demonstrably seven-eighths German, Huguenot and English will say proudly, ‘My ancestors were Dutch.’

  But in recent times the process seems to have been reversed, for now one drop of black blood contaminates ninety-nine percent of white blood, which accounts for the steady rise of the Coloured population. You could live here a thousand years, Dr. Vandenberg, and never understand this problem. The Coloureds, who should be the natural allies of the pure-white man—if ever there were a pure anything—are kept in limbo without any fixed place in society. The Afrikaner language evolved in large part because of contributions from the various languages spoken by the Coloureds, as did many of the social customs and habits, like the Afrikaner’s love of spicy foods. Anyone with training in history, like you, would have to conclude that one of the saddest mistakes the Afrikaners made was to divorce themselves from people of great ability who are in effect their half brothers—these Coloureds.

  Such argument would infuriate the Afrikaner, who is absolutely convinced by his historians, his teachers and his predikants that the white-slave mixture was the consequence exclusively of sailors and soldiers roistering into Cape Town on shore leave, and that no self-respecting Dutchman ever touched a slave girl. A naughty lad at Witwatersrand University has calculated that to achieve the amount of infusion that obviously occurred, every soldier and sailor would have had to come ashore with his trousers half down, go to work immediately, and not stop till
the bo’s’n blew his whistle to summon them back to the ship.

  A phenomenon that you with your Dutch background might anticipate, but which I certainly didn’t, is the Afrikaner’s unshakable belief that God personally has ordained his state and its traditions. I cannot tell you how shocked I was in discussing a management problem the other day with two university graduates and hearing them tell me, ‘But God wants us to do it that way. He entered into a covenant with us for that purpose.’ Any prime minister taking office assures the people that he will keep the nation on the course outlined by God. Students in school are taught that God devised apartheid, and I even heard a rugby enthusiast say that God engineered South Africa’s victories, because He wanted His chosen people to triumph. Any outsider who minimizes the influence of this belief in South African politics misses the core of the problem. Of the four dozen Afrikaners I know well, forty-seven honestly believe that God has directed them to stay on this land, run it exactly as they are now running it, and defend it against blacks and Communism. I have never known an American to be so sure that God personally looked after American interests, which of course He does.

  Like most Americans, I know little about religion, but here one cannot ignore it, it dominates government and gives sanction to whatever the ruling political party decides. Aren’t Presbyterians Calvinists, too? I don’t remember them behaving like this at home. The Dutch Calvinists, you know, have rejected the South African church, and recently a famous theologian from Holland came out here to try to mend fences. I attended a thoughtful lecture he gave in which he said that John Calvin was firm on this matter of government, and he quoted from Calvin himself, something to the effect that all men are certainly subject to the magistrates that rule over them, but only insofar as the magistrate’s obey the basic rules of God. If they do otherwise, the citizens should not pay them any regard, nor be overawed by the dignity they possess as governors. The visitor didn’t go so far as to call for revolution, but he sure did call for new evaluations of government policy.

  As a matter of fact, every sensible Afrikaner, Englishman and black I have met knows that great changes must be made, and they know what changes. But some eighty-five percent of the rural Afrikaner population would rather die than accept even one of those changes, and they are assured by their reactionary leaders, lay and cleric, that they are right. The tragedy is that the philosophers of all sides are prepared to make those changes now, but they will not be made, and ten years from now, when they are grudgingly conceded at the point of a gun, they won’t be enough. In every conversation I have I hear comparisons made with Rhodesia. Ten years ago the whites there should have made certain concessions, but they refused. When they became more than willing to make them, the time for accepting that modest change was past.

  Seems to me there are four alternatives. First, peaceful, gradual change to a modern multi-racial state. The die-hard whites say they will never accept this. Second, black revolution sweeping the whites from power and perhaps from Africa altogether. The blacks don’t appear to be capable of this, yet. Third, continued white domination, with more and more repressive measures as surrounding black nations achieve the power to support infiltration guerrilla forces. The present nation becomes a white laager defending itself from black Africa. Most of my workmen, white and black, think this is what will happen, and that the whites can get away with it for the remainder of this century. But if they persist in rejecting the Coloureds, forcing them into alliance with the blacks, the whites will endanger what chance they have. In the short run, at least, events will be strongly affected by what the Coloureds do.

  The fourth alternative shocked me, but since it was proposed by the finest mind I’ve met here, black or white, Afrikaner or English, I must take it seriously. He suspects that things are moving so swiftly that the Afrikaner will not be able to hold his country against a combination of outside pressure and inside urban warfare, and that if he tries, the land will go down in terrible revolution. He advocates that white men, all of them, retreat voluntarily into the old Cape Province, there to establish a real republic in which Afrikaner, Englishman and Coloured work together as full partners. I was really jolted when he drew the outlines for me on a map. Pretoria and Johannesburg would be surrendered, as would Durban. Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown would be retained, as would Kimberley and Bloemfontein. This beautiful, rational area would be as big as Texas. It would be ruled by those whites who refused to cooperate with the black government of the north, plus the many Coloureds. Safe on the southern tip of Africa, they would become a new Hong Kong. When I asked if the triumphant blacks would permit such a withdrawal and consolidation, he said something profound, which I want you to discuss with your students and all who are interested in Africa. I’ll try to give it in his words:

  ‘If the black men in Africa refuse, as they seem to have done elsewhere, to allow any reasonable partnership for indigenous whites, the result would be harmful to Africa but disastrous to the United States, because your country is in the throes of accepting and defining justice for its black minority. If it sees a black majority in Africa denying comparable justice to whites in countries that they dominate and slaughtering them on television, the backlash could be frightening.’

  I said that he was asking blacks to define their behavior as a majority before they attained an equality, and he said, ‘That’s when the definitions should be made.’

  Which of these four scenarios do I subscribe to? I’ve had pretty good luck as an engineer working on the principle that if I’m smart enough to see something, the people intimately involved must have seen it too. If every sensible man knows what concessions ought to be made right now, my constant hope is that they’ll be made. Therefore, I incline toward the first solution: peaceful, accelerated change leading to a nation in which all men and women vote and in which the black majority safeguards a place for white participants—whom they might not like—because they are needed, just as today the Afrikaner accepts as a partner the English-speaker whose ancestors he opposed so bitterly.

  I’m going to ignore the die-hard machine-gun type of Afrikaner who shouts, ‘Over my dead body.’ The Afrikaner leaders I’ve met are at least as prudent as the American politicians I know, and more so. I’m going to put my faith in them. And I want to make one point clear, which is never ventilated in the South African press. The blacks of South Africa are as capable as any people with whom I’ve worked. Wherever I’ve supervised a mine, I was relieved to find some South African black to take charge, because he was sure to be clever and hard-working and informed. If blacks inferior to him can run Zambia and Tanzania and Vwarda, however awkwardly they may do so at the moment, he can surely run South Africa. As a matter of fact, a grand coalition of black capacity, Coloured adaptability, English skill and Afrikaner force could forge a nation that would be one of the most powerful on earth, situated in one of the best settings, and with a way of life that most other people would envy. This is what I hope for.

  If, as some fear, any rational solution becomes impossible because the stubborn Afrikaner refuses to yield any of his prerogatives, then I see great pressures along all the borders, encouraged and sometimes engineered by Communist-bloc countries, incipient and real civil war within those borders, with the Afrikaner able to defend himself for the rest of this century, after which other pressures which we cannot now foresee will alter the picture radically. On one thing I have been convinced. The young Afrikaners I know will use their guns. They will go forth fighting, to defend a way of life which God himself has ordained and which, for them, is one of the best on this earth. They will not hesitate to slaughter, because God Himself assured the Israelites, after whom they pattern themselves, ‘One man of you shall chase a thousand: for the Lord your God, he it is that fighteth for you, as he hath promised you.’ More frighteningly: ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.’

  The major impediment t
o rational solution is Afrikaner stubbornness, but a contributory one is the regrettable division within the white community. Smashing Afrikaner triumphs at the polls have meant that they can ignore the other sections of the community and throw them out of all official positions. There are no Englishmen in the cabinet, or at the head of major police units or the armed services. I asked a leading Afrikaner whether the nation he foresaw would have any place for Englishmen, and he said bluntly, ‘Not really.’ Then he remembered that I had English relatives here and he conceded, ‘Well, if they quit running back to England every time there’s trouble, we might find a place for them, and even trust them when the crunch comes.’

  The key phrase in every serious discussion is ‘when the crunch comes.’ Everyone expects it to come. Super-patriots argue that when it does, the English will somehow chicken out. Everyone is convinced that when it comes, only the Afrikaner will prove reliable. And what is this mysterious crunch? The armed rebellion of the blacks.

  You must not conclude from what I’ve just said that the English-speaking South African is much different from the Afrikaner. In fact, he profits equally from the present situation and might be even more reluctant than the Afrikaner to surrender his servants and his prerogatives. My English foreman confided the other day, ‘Sure I talk liberal, and I vote liberal, but on election night, when the tally’s announced, I’m damned relieved the Afrikaners have won again. They’ll know how to handle affairs when the crunch comes.’

  I hate to say this to a professor of history, and a very good one, but South Africa is a land cruelly wounded by its constant recollection of things past. At certain points the English did behave poorly; this is never allowed to be forgotten. At every memorial the same time-worn litany of incidents must be recited. Hatreds become enshrined as the most vital components of the national mythos, and no one is ever permitted to forget, or turn his attention to more creative tasks. I remember that day you told us what Santayana had said: ‘Those who forgot history are condemned to repeat it.’ Well, those who remember it obsessively are poisoned by it.