by Wilbur Smith
‘It must have cost half a million dollars,’ Michael persisted, and Raleigh shrugged and changed the subject.
‘I promised to show you the children of apartheid, Michael, but first I want you to meet their mother, the mother of the nation.’
He led Michael across the terrace. There were beach umbrellas spread in the sunshine, like a field of brightly coloured mushrooms. A dozen black children sat at the white plastic tables drinking Coca-Cola from the cans and listening to one of the ubiquitous portable transistor radios from which blared the driving rhythms of African jazz.
They were boys ranging in age from eight or nine years to the late teens. All of them wore canary-yellow T-shirts with the legend ‘Gama Athletics Club’ printed across the chest. None of them stood up as Michael passed, but they watched him with flat incurious stares.
The glass doors of the main building stood open to the terrace, and Raleigh led the way into a split-level living room whose walls were decorated with carved wooden masks and fetish statuettes. The stone floor was covered with animal skin rugs.
‘Something to drink, Michael?’ Raleigh asked. ‘Coffee or tea?’
Michael shook his head. ‘Nothing, but do you mind if I smoke?’
‘I remember your habit,’ Raleigh smiled. ‘Go ahead. I’m sorry I can’t offer you a match.’
Michael paused with the lighter in his hand and glanced towards the upper level of the spacious room.
A woman came down the steps towards them. Michael took the unlit cigarette from his lips and stared at her. He knew who she was, of course. They called her the black Evita, the mother of the nation. However, none of the photographs had been able to capture her particular dark beauty and regal presence.
‘Victoria Gama,’ Raleigh introduced them. ‘This is Michael Courtney, the newspaperman I told you about.’
‘Yes,’ Vicky Gama said. ‘I know who Michael Courtney is.’
She swept towards him with a stately dignity. She wore a full ankle-length caftan in striking green and yellow and black, the colours of the banned African National Congress. Around her head was an emerald-green turban; the caftan and the turban were her trademarks.
She held out her hand to Michael. It was fine-boned, but the grip of her long tapered fingers was firm and cool, almost cold. Her skin was velvety smooth and the colour of dark amber.
‘Your mother was my husband’s second wife,’ she told Michael softly. ‘She bore Moses Gama a son, as I did. Your mother is a fine woman, one of us.’
Michael was always astounded by the total lack of jealousy between the wives of an African man. His wives regarded each other not as rivals, but rather as sisters with family ties and loyalties.
‘How is Tara?’ Vicky persisted, as she led Michael to one of the sofas and seated him comfortably. ‘I have not seen her for many years. Is she still living in England? And how is Moses’s son, Benjamin?’
‘Yes, they are living in England,’ Michael told her. ‘I saw them both in London recently. Benjamin is a big lad now. He is doing very well. He is studying chemical engineering at Leeds University.’
‘I wonder if he will ever return to Africa.’ Vicky sat down beside him. They chatted easily for a while, and Michael found himself coming under the spell of her charming personality.
At last she asked: ‘So you want to meet some of my children, the children of apartheid?’
It struck Michael that this was the only title for his article or perhaps series of articles that he would write.
‘The children of apartheid,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, Mrs Gama, I would like to meet your children.’
‘Please call me Vicky. We are of the same family, Michael. Dare I also hope that our dreams and hopes are the same?’
‘Yes, I think that we have a great deal in common, Vicky.’
She led him back to the terrace and she called the children and youths around her and introduced them to Michael.
‘He is our friend,’ she told them. ‘You may speak freely to him. Answer his questions. Tell him whatever he wants to know.’
Michael threw off his jacket and tie and sat under one of the umbrellas. The boys crowded around him. With Vicky Gama’s endorsement and assurance they seemed to accept him immediately and were delighted that Michael spoke their language. Michael knew how to draw them out. Soon they were competing for his attention. He did not use his notepad to write down what they told him, for he knew that would inhibit them. He valued their spontaneity and frankness. Besides which, he did not need notes. He would not forget their words, and the sound of their young voices.
They told him stories that were funny and others that were harrowing. One of the boys had been at Sharpeville on that fateful day. As an infant he had been strapped to his mother’s back. The same police bullet that had killed her had shattered one of his legs. The bone had set crookedly, and the other children called him ‘Cripple Pete’. Michael wanted to weep as he listened to his story.
The afternoon passed too swiftly. Some of the boys left the group to swim in the pool. They stripped naked and plunged into the clear bright waters. They shrieked with laughter and splashed each other as they played.
Raleigh sat aside with Vicky Gama and watched the scene. He saw the way that Michael looked at the naked children and he said to Vicky: ‘I want you to keep him here tonight.’ She nodded, and he went on: ‘He likes boys. Do you have one for him?’
She laughed softly. ‘He can take his pick. My boys will do whatever I tell them to do.’
She stood up and walked across to where Michael sat and placed her hand on his shoulder.
‘Why don’t you write your articles here? Stay with us tonight. I have a typewriter upstairs that you can use. Spend tomorrow with us also. The boys like you, and there are so many stories to hear . . .’
Michael’s fingers flew over the typewriter keys in an exuberant allegro, and the words appeared on the blank white page in serried ranks like warriors of the mind, ready to charge into the battle. The story wrote itself. It was not the smoke that spiralled up from the cigarette between his lips that made Michael’s eyelids prickle as he read what he was writing. Very seldom did he have this conviction of the vital worth and weight of his own composition. He knew, deep in his guts, that this was good, really good. This was the story of the ‘children’ as the world should hear it.
He finished the article which he knew now was only the first of a triumphant series and found that he was trembling with excitement. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was a few minutes before midnight, but he knew he could not sleep. The story still fizzed in his blood and seethed in his brain like some heady champagne.
There was a demure tap on the door that startled him. He called softly in Xhosa: ‘It is open. Enter!’ And one of the boys slipped into the bedroom. He was dressed only in a pair of blue soccer-shorts.
‘I heard you typing,’ he said. ‘I thought that you might like me to bring you some tea.’
He was the youth whom Michael had most admired in the swimming pool. He had told Michael that he was sixteen years old. His body was sleek and inviting to stroke as a black cat.
‘Thank you.’ Michael found that his voice was husky. ‘I would like that very much.’
‘What are you writing?’ The youth came to stand behind his chair and leant over him to read the page. ‘Is this what I told you today?’
‘Yes,’ Michael whispered, and the boy placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder and turned his head to smile shyly into Michael’s eyes. His breath was warm on Michael’s face. ‘I like you,’ he said.
Raleigh Tabaka read the article as they sat together beside the pool in the early-morning sunlight. When he finished he held the sheaf of pages in both hands and was silent for a long while.
‘You have a special genius,’ he said at last. ‘I have never read anything so powerful. But it is too powerful. You dare not publish this.’
‘Not in this country,’ Michael agreed. ‘The Guardian in London has invit
ed me to submit it to them.’
‘It would have the greatest effect there,’ Raleigh agreed. ‘I congratulate you. Something like this turns the bullets of the oppressor to water. You must finish the series as soon as possible. Stay here another night at least. You seem to work so well when you are close to your subjects.’
As Michael came awake he was not certain what had disturbed him. He reached out and touched the warm smooth body of the boy who lay beside him. The boy muttered and rolled over in his sleep. One of his arms was flung out across Michael’s chest.
Then the sound that had woken Michael came again. It was faint, from the floor below in the far reaches of the house. It sounded like a cry of terrible pain.
Michael lifted the arm of the sleeping boy from his chest and slipped out from under it. There was a glimmer of moonlight through the open window, sufficient for him to find his underpants. He moved quietly across the bedroom and let himself out into the passageway. He crept towards the head of the stairs and stood there listening. The sound came up to him again much louder, another wild cry like the voice of a seabird, and it was punctuated by a sharp snapping sound that Michael could not place.
He started down the stairs, but had not reached the bottom before a voice arrested him.
‘Michael. What are you doing?’ Raleigh Tabaka’s voice was sharp and accusing, and Michael started guiltily and looked back up the stairs. Raleigh stood on the landing in his dressing gown.
‘I heard something,’ Michael said. ‘It sounded like—’
‘It is nothing. Go to your room, Michael.’
‘But I thought that I heard—’
‘Go to your room!’ Raleigh spoke softly, but it was not an order that Michael could disobey. He turned and went back up the stairs. Raleigh reached out to touch his arm as he passed.
‘Sometimes one’s hearing plays strange tricks in the night. You heard nothing, Michael. It was a cat, perhaps – or the wind. Go to sleep now. We will talk in the morning.’
Raleigh waited until Michael had returned to his bedroom and closed the door before he ran down the stairs. He went directly to the kitchen door and threw it open.
Victoria Gama, the black Evita, the mother of the nation, stood in the centre of the tiled floor. She was naked to the waist. Her breasts were beautifully shaped. Smooth as velvet, black as the fur of sable, large as the ripe tsama melons of the Kalahari desert.
In her right hand she held a supple whip made of cured hippo hide, the terrible African sjambok. It was slim as one of Vicky’s elegant fingers and as long as her arm. In her other hand she held a glass. She was drinking from it as Raleigh burst into the room. The gin-bottle stood on the sink behind her.
There were two members of the Gama Athletics Club in the kitchen with her. They were the eldest and biggest of all her bodyguards. Both of them were in their late teens. They were also bared to the waist. They stood at either end of the long kitchen table and held a naked body pinioned down upon the table.
The flogging must have been in progress for some considerable time. The whip-weals were latticed closely across the shiny black skin, raised and purple. Some of them had cut through into the flesh and were bleeding. The blood formed a puddle under the body and spilled over to drip on to the tiled kitchen floor.
‘Are you mad?’ Raleigh hissed at her. ‘With the journalist in the house?’
‘He is a police spy,’ Vicky snarled at him. ‘He is a traitor. I have to teach him a lesson.’
‘You are drunk again.’ Raleigh struck the glass from her hand, and it spun into the corner and shattered against the wall. ‘Can’t you enjoy your little boys without having to warm yourself up to it?’
Her eyes blazed with fury, and she lifted the whip to slash at his face. He caught her wrist and held it easily. He twisted the whip out of her fingers and flung it into the sink. Still holding her wrist, he spoke to her young bodyguards.
‘Get rid of this.’ He indicated the bleeding figure on the table. ‘Then clean the place up. No more of this sort of thing while the white man is in the house. Do you understand?’
They lifted the boy off the table, and he moaned and blubbered as they half-carried him to the door.
As soon as they were alone, Raleigh turned back to Vicky. ‘You bear an illustrious name. If you bring dishonour upon it, I will kill you myself. Now, go to your room.’
She marched from the room. Despite the gin, her step was regal. She carried her liquor well. If only she could carry her fame and the adulation of the media as well, he thought grimly.
He had watched her change over a few short years. When Moses Gama married her, she had been a bright and pure flame, committed to her husband and the struggle. Then the American left had discovered her, and the media had showered praise and money upon her to the point where she believed all they said about her.
From there the disintegration had been swift. Of course, the struggle was fierce. Of course, freedom must be won through rivers of blood. However, for Vicky Gama the spilling of blood had become a pleasure and not a duty, and her personal glory had eclipsed the call of freedom. It was time to consider carefully what must be done about her.
They took Michael back to the carpark where he had left his old Valiant. Raleigh Tabaka sat up beside the driver in the front seat of the butchery-van while Michael crouched in the back. Michael was surprised to see that his car was still standing where he had left it.
‘Nobody took the trouble to steal it,’ he remarked.
‘No,’ Raleigh agreed. ‘It was guarded by our people. We look after our own.’
They shook hands, and Michael began to turn away, but Raleigh was not yet ready to let him go.
‘I believe you own an aircraft, Michael?’ he asked.
‘Of a sort,’ Michael laughed. ‘It’s an old Centurion that has already flown over three thousand hours.’
‘I have a favour to ask of you.’
‘I owe you one,’ Michael agreed. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Will you fly to Botswana for me?’ Raleigh asked.
‘With a passenger?’
‘No. Fly there on your own – and return on your own.’
Michael hesitated a moment longer. ‘Is it to do with your struggle?’
‘Of course,’ Raleigh replied frankly. ‘Everything in my life is to do with the struggle.’
‘When do you want me to go?’ Michael asked, and Raleigh did not let his relief show in his expression.
Perhaps, after all, it might not be necessary to use the material that they had filmed in the ballet-dancer’s flat in London.
‘When can you get away for a few days?’ he asked.
Unlike his father or his brothers, Michael had not taken to flying early in life. Looking back on it, he realized it was because of their passionate love of aircraft that he had shied away from them. Instinctively he had resented his father’s efforts to interest him and to instruct him. He didn’t want to be like them. He refused to be forced into the mould his father had prepared for him.
Later, when he moved outside the cloying family influence, he discovered the fascination of flight all for himself. He had bought the Centurion out of his own savings. Despite its age, the aircraft was fast and comfortable. She cruised at 210 knots and took him up to Maun in northern Botswana in a little over three hours.
He loved Botswana. It was the only truly democratic country in all of Africa. It had never been colonized by any of the European powers, although Britain had been its protector from the 1880s when the Boer Republic had threatened to muscle in and take the land from the Tswana tribe.
After Britain had relinquished her status as protector and handed the country back to the people, it had swiftly transformed itself into a model for the rest of the continent. It was a multi-party democracy with universal suffrage and regular elections. The Government was truly responsible to the electorate. There were no tyrants or dictators. By African standards, very little corruption existed. The minority white po
pulation was accepted as a useful and productive section of the population. There was little inverse racism or tribalism. After South Africa, it was the most prosperous state in all of Africa. In fact it had achieved almost effortlessly the condition that Michael prayed his own country would some day be able to arrive at, after all the suffering and strife. Michael loved Botswana and was happy to be going back there.
At Maun he cleared the formalities in the small single-roomed building that housed both Customs and Immigration and then took off again for a short northern leg into the Okavango delta.
The delta was an extraordinary wetland area where the mighty Okavango river debouched into the northern Kalahari desert and formed a vast swamp. It was not a swamp of reeking black mud and dreary wastes. The waters were clear as a trout stream. The sandbanks and bottoms of the maze of waterways were of sugary white sands. The islands were decked with palms and luxuriant growth. The wild fig trees were loaded with yellow fruit, and the fat green pigeons swarmed in their branches. Strange and rare fishing owls, seeming more like apes than like birds, nested in the tall African ebony trees.
The fabled lions of the Okavango with manes like russet haystacks were quick as otters in the lambent waters. Great herds of buffalo grazed in the reed-beds with a canopy of snowy egrets hovering over them. Weird sitatunga antelope with elongated hoofs, corkscrew horns and shaggy coats spent their entire amphibian lives in the tall papyrus, and clouds of duck and geese and waterfowl shaded the blazing orange sunsets.
Michael landed the Centurion on an airstrip on one of the larger islands. There were two river bushmen in a dugout canoe to ferry him across a lagoon perfumed with waterlilies to the camp.
The camp was called the Gay Goose Lodge, and catered for up to forty guests who lived in picturesque little reed huts. The ostensible reason for their visit was to study and photograph the animals and birdlife of the delta or to troll for the glittering striped tigerfish that shoaled in the waterways. Each morning and evening expeditions of guests ventured out in the primitive canoes, to be poled silently through the reed-beds and channels by one of the black boatmen.