by Wilbur Smith
‘Have you ever been down the haulage, Master Shasa?’
‘No, sir.’ He was going to add, ‘My Mater has never allowed it,’ but somehow that seemed superfluous, and for the first time he felt a twinge of resentment at his mother’s all-pervading presence.
Twentyman-Jones led him to the head of the haulage and introduced him to the shift boss.
‘Master Shasa will be working with you,’ he explained. ‘Treat him normally – just like you would treat any other young man who will one day be your managing director,’ he instructed. It was impossible to tell by Twentyman-Jones’ expression when he was joking, so nobody laughed.
‘Get a tin helmet for him,’ Twentyman-Jones ordered, and while Shasa adjusted the straps of the helmet he led him to the foot of the sheer cliff.
The incline tunnel had been cut into the base of the cliff, a round aperture into which the steel rail tracks angled downwards at forty-five degrees before disappearing into the dark depths. A string of cocopans stood at the head of the tracks, and Twentyman-Jones led him to the first truck and they climbed into the steel bin. The shift swarmed into the trucks behind them, a dozen white foremen and one hundred and fifty black workers in ragged dusty overalls and helmets of bright unpainted metal, laughing and ragging each other in boisterous horseplay.
The steam winch of the winding gear clattered and hissed and the string of trucks jerked forward and then, rocking and swaying, ran down the steeply inclined ramp on the narrow-gauge railway tracks. The steel wheels rumbling and clacking over the joints of the track, they dropped down into the dark maw of the tunnel.
Shasa stirred uneasily, stabbed with unreasoning fear at the sudden absolute blackness that engulfed them. However, in the trucks behind him the Ovambo miners were singing, their deep melodious voices echoing in the dark confines of the tunnel, a marvellous chorus raised in an African work chant, and Shasa relaxed and leaned closer to Twentyman-Jones to follow his explanation.
‘The incline is forty-five degrees and the capacity of the winding gear is one hundred tons, in mining parlance that is sixty loads of ore. Our target is six hundred loads a shift raised to the surface.’
Shasa was trying to concentrate on the figures; he knew his mother would question him this evening, but the darkness and singing and the rumble of the swaying trucks distracted him. Ahead of him there was a tiny coin of brilliant white light that grew swiftly in size until abruptly they burst out of the far end of the tunnel and involuntarily Shasa gasped with astonishment.
He had studied the diagrams of the pipe and, of course, there were photographs on his mother’s desk at Weltervreden but they had not adequately prepared him for its immensity.
It was an almost perfectly round hole in the centre of the hills. It was open to the sky, and the sides of the excavation were vertical and sheer, a circular wall of grey rock like a cockpit. They had entered it through the tunnel that connected the workings to the far side of the hills and the narrow ramp on which they were riding continued down at the same angle of forty-five degrees until it reached the floor of the excavation two hundred feet below them. The drop on either hand was breathtaking. The great rock-lined hole was a mile across, and its sheer walls four hundred feet from the tip to the floor.
Twentyman-Jones was still lecturing him. ‘This is a volcanic pipe, a blow hole from the earth’s depths up which the molten magma was forced to the surface in the beginning of time. In those temperatures, as hot as the sun, and enormous pressures the diamonds were forged, and they were brought up in the fiery lava.’ Shasa stared around him, screwing his head to take in the proportions of the huge excavation as Twentyman-Jones went on, ‘Then the pipe was pinched off at depth, and the magma in it cooled and solidified. The upper layer, exposed to air and sun, was oxidized into the classical “yellow ground” of the diamond-iferous formation. We worked down through that for eleven years, and only recently we reached the “blue ground”.’ He made an expansive gesture that took in the slaty blue rock that formed the floor of the huge pit. ‘That is the deeper deposit of the solidified magma, hard as iron and as full of diamonds as currants in a hot cross bun.’
They reached the floor of the workings and climbed down from the truck.
‘The operation is fairly straightforward,’ Twentyman-Jones went on. ‘The new shift comes in at first light and begins work on the previous evening’s blast. The broken ground is lashed and loaded into the cocopans and sent up the haulage to the surface. After that they mark out and drill the shot-holes for the next blast and then they set the charges. At dusk we pull out the shift, and the shift boss lights the fuses. After the blast we leave the workings overnight to settle and for the fumes to disperse, then the next morning we begin the whole process over again. There,’ he pointed to an area of shattered blue grey rock, ‘that’s last night’s blast. That’s where we will begin today.’
Shasa had not expected to be so absorbed by the fascination of this mighty excavation, but his interest grew more intense as the day went on. Not even the heat and the dust daunted him. The heat was trapped between the sheer walls when at noon the sun beat down directly onto the uneven broken floor. The dust was floury, rising from the shattered ore body as the hammer-men swung their ten-pound sledges to crack the larger lumps into manageable pieces. The dust hung in a fog over the lashing teams as they loaded the cocopans, and it coated their faces and their bodies and turned them into ghostly grey albinos.
‘We get a bit of miners’ phthisis,’ Twentyman-Jones admitted. ‘The dust gets into their lungs and turns to stone. Ideally we should hose the ore down and keep it wet to lay the dust, but we are short of water. We haven’t enough for the washing gear. We certainly can’t afford to splash it around. So men die and are crippled, but it takes ten years to build up in the lungs, and we give them, or their widows, a good pension, and the miners’ inspector is sympathetic, though his sympathy costs a penny.’
At noon Twentyman-Jones called Shasa across. ‘Your mother said you need only work half the shift. I’m going up now. Are you coming?’
‘I’d rather not, sir,’ Shasa answered diffidently. ‘I’d like to watch them charge the holes for the blast.’
Twentyman-Jones shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Chip off the old block!’ and went away still muttering.
The shift boss allowed Shasa to light the fuses, under his careful supervision. It gave Shasa a sense of importance and power to touch the flaring chesa stick, the igniter, to the bunched tips of the fuses, passing quickly down the line and watching the fire run down the twisted white fuses, turning them sizzling black in the swirl of blue smoke.
He and the shift boss rode up on the haulage to the cry of ‘Fire in the hole!’ and Shasa lingered at the head of the main haulage until the shots fired and he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet.
Then he saddled Prester John and, dusty, streaked with sweat, bone-tired and happy as he had seldom been in his life, he rode back along the pipe track.
He was not even thinking about her when he reached the pumphouse, but there she was, perched up on top of the silver-painted waterpipe. The shock was such that when Prester John shied under him he almost lost his seat and had to snatch at the pommel.
She had plaited a wreath of wild flowers into her hair and unbuttoned the top of her blouse. In one of the books in the library at Weltevreden there was an illustration of satyrs and nymphs dancing in the forest. The book was kept in the forbidden section to which his mother guarded the key, but Shasa had invested some of his pocket money in a duplicate and lightly clad nymphs were among his favourites of all that treasure house of erotica.
Annalisa was one of these, a wood nymph, only part human, and she slanted her eyes at him slyly and her eye teeth were pointed and very white.
‘Hello, Annalisa.’ His voice cracked treacherously, and his heart was beating so wildly that he thought it might spring into his throat and choke him.
She smiled but did not reply, instead she caressed her own arm, a s
low lingering stroke from her wrist to her bare shoulder. He watched her fingers raising the fine coppery hair on her forearm and his loins swelled.
She leaned forward and placed her forefinger on her lower lip, still grinning slyly, and her bosom changed shape and the opening of her blouse gaped and he saw that the skin in the vee was so white and translucent that the tiny blue veins showed through it.
He kicked out of the stirrups and swung a leg over Prester John’s withers in the showy polo player’s forward dismount, but the girl whirled to her feet, hoisted her skirts high and, with a flash of creamy thighs, sprang lightly over the pipeline and disappeared into the thick scrub on the hillside beyond.
Shasa raced after her, and found himself struggling through dense undergrowth. It clawed at his face and seized his legs. He heard her giggle once, not far ahead of him, but a rock twisted under his boot and he fell heavily, winding himself. When he pulled himself up and limped after her, she was gone.
A while longer he floundered around in the scrub, his ardour swiftly cooling, and by the time he battled his way back to the pipe track to find that Prester John had taken full advantage of the diversion and decamped, he was bubbling over with anger at himself and the girl.
It was a long tramp back to the bungalow and he hadn’t realized how tired he was. It was dark by the time he got home. The pony with empty saddle had raised the alarm and Centaine’s concern changed instantly to relieved fury when she saw him.
A week in the heat and dust of the workings and the monotony of the work began to pall, so Twentyman-Jones sent Shasa to work in the winch room of the main haulage. The winch driver was a taciturn, morose man and jealous of his job. He would not allow Shasa to touch the controls of the winch.
‘My union doesn’t allow it.’ He stood his ground stubbornly and after two days Twentyman-Jones moved Shasa to the weathering ground.
Here the ore was tipped out and spread in the open by gangs of Ovambo labourers, all stripped to the waist and chanting in chorus as they went through the laborious repetitive process of tip and spread under the urgings of their white supervisor and his gang of black boss-boys.
On this weathering ground lay the stockpile of the H’ani Mine, thousands of tons of ore spread out on an area the size of four polo fields. When the blue ground was blasted out of the pipe it was hard as concrete; only gelignite and the ten-pound sledgehammers would break it. But after it had been lying in the sun on the weathering ground for six months it began to break down and crumble until it was chalky and friable and could be reloaded in the cocopans and taken to the mill and the washing gear.
Shasa was placed in charge of a gang of forty labourers, and soon struck up a friendship with the Ovambo boss-boy. Like all the black tribesmen he had two names, his tribal name which he did not divulge to his white employers, and his work name. The Ovambo’s work name was Moses. He was fifteen years or so younger than the other boss-boys, and had been selected for his intelligence and initiative. He spoke both English and Afrikaans well, and the respect that the black labourers usually reserved for the grey hair of age he earned from them with his billy club and boot and acid wit.
‘If I was a white man,’ he told Shasa, ‘one day I would have Doctela’s job.’ ‘Doctela’ was the Ovambo name for Twentyman-Jones, and Moses went on, ‘I might still have it, one day – or if not me, then my son.’ Shasa was shocked and then intrigued by such an outrageous notion. He had never before met a black who did not know his place in society. There was a disturbing presence about the tall Ovambo, who looked like one of the drawings of an Egyptian pharaoh from the forbidden section of the Weltevreden library, but that hint of danger made him more intriguing to Shasa.
They usually spent the lunch-hour break together, Shasa helping Moses to perfect his reading and writing in the grubby ruled notebook which was his most prized possession. In return the Ovambo taught Shasa the rudiments of his language, especially the oaths and insults, and the meaning of some of the work chants, most of which were ribald.
‘Is baby-making work or pleasure?’ was the rhetorical opening question of Shasa’s favourite chant, and he joined in the response to the delight of the gang he was supervising: ‘It cannot be work or the white man would make us do it for him!’
Shasa was just over fourteen years old. Some of the men he supervised were three times his age, and none of them thought it strange. Instead they responded to his teasing and his sunny smile and his sorry attempts to speak their language. His men were soon spreading five loads to four of the other teams, and they ended the second week as top gang on the grounds.
Shasa was too involved with the work and his new friend to notice the dark looks of the white supervisor, and even when he made a pointed remark about kafferboeties, or ‘nigger-lovers’, Shasa did not take the reference personally.
On the third Saturday, after the men had been paid at noon, he rode down to the boss-boys’ cottage at Moses’ invitation and spent an hour sitting in the sun on the front doorstep of the cottage drinking sour milk from the calabash that Moses’ shy and pretty young wife offered, and helping him read aloud from the copy of Macaulay’s History of England he had smuggled out of the bungalow and brought down in his saddlebag.
The book was one of his set works at school so Shasa considered himself something of an authority on it, and he was enjoying the unusual role of teacher and instructor until at last Moses closed the book.
‘This is very heavy work, Good Water,’ he had translated Shasa’s name directly into the Ovambo, ‘worse than spreading ore in the summer. I will work on it later,’ and he went into the single-roomed cottage, placed the book in his locker and came back with a roll of newspaper.
‘Let us try this.’ He offered the paper to Shasa, who spread it on his lap. It was poor quality yellow newsprint and the ink smudged onto his fingers. The name on the top of the page was Umlomo Wa Bantu, and Shasa translated it without difficulty: ‘The Mouth of the Black Nations’, and he glanced down the columns of print. The articles were mostly in English, though there were a few in the vernacular.
Moses pointed out the editorial, and they started working through it.
‘What is the African National Congress?’ Shasa was puzzled. ‘And who is Jabavu?’
Eagerly the Ovambo began to explain, and Shasa’s interest turned to unease as he listened.
‘Jabavu is the father of the Bantu, of all the tribes, of all the black people. The African National Congress is the herder who guards our cattle.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Shasa shook his head. He did not like the direction that the discussion was taking, and he began to squirm as Moses quoted:
Your cattle are gone, my people
Go rescue them! Go rescue them!
Leave your breechloader
And turn instead to the pen.
Take paper and ink,
For that will be your shield.
Your rights are going
So take up your pen
Load it with ink
And do battle with the pen.
‘That is politics,’ Shasa interrupted him. ‘Blacks don’t take part in politics. That’s white men’s business.’ This was the cornerstone of the South African way of life.
The glow went out of Moses’ expression and he lifted the newspaper off Shasa’s lap and stood up.
‘I will return your book to you when I have read it.’ He avoided Shasa’s eyes and went back into the cottage.
On the Monday Twentyman-Jones stopped Shasa at the main gate of the weathering grounds. ‘I think you have learned all there is to know about weathering, Master Shasa. It’s about time we moved you along to the mill house and washing gear.’
And as they followed the railway tracks up to the main plant, walking beside one of the cocopans which was full of the crumbling weathered ore, Twentyman-Jones remarked: ‘It is just as well not to become too familiar with the black labourers, Master Shasa, you will find they tend to take advantage if you do.’
Shasa was puzzled for a moment, then he laughed. ‘Oh, you mean Moses. He isn’t a labourer, he is a boss-boy, and he is jolly bright, sir.’
‘A bit too bright for his own good,’ Twentyman-Jones agreed bitterly. ‘The bright ones are always the malcontents and trouble-stirrers. Give me an honest dumb nigger every time. Your friend Moses is trying to organize a black mineworkers’ union.’
Shasa knew from his grandfather and his mother that Bolsheviks and trade unionists were the most dreaded monsters, intent on tearing down the framework of civilized society. He was appalled to learn that Moses was one of these, but Twentyman-Jones was going on:
‘We also suspect that he is at the centre of a nice little IDB operation.’
IDB was the other monster of civilized existence – Illicit Diamond Buying – the trade in stolen diamonds, and Shasa was revolted by the idea that his friend could be both a trade unionist and an illicit dealer.
Yet Twentyman-Jones’ next words depressed him. ‘I am afraid Mister Moses will head the list of those we will be laying off at the end of the month. He is a dangerous man. We will simply have to get shot of him.’
‘They are getting rid of him simply because the two of us are friends.’ Shasa saw through it. ‘It’s because of me.’ He was swamped with a sense of guilt, and guilt was followed almost immediately by anger. Quick words leapt to his tongue. He wanted to cry, ‘It’s not fair!’ But before he spoke he looked at Twentyman-Jones and knew intuitively that any defence he attempted of Moses would only seal the boss-boy’s fate.
He shrugged. ‘You know what is best, sir,’ he agreed, and he saw the slight relaxation in the set of the old man’s shoulders.
‘Mater,’ he thought, ‘I will talk to Mater,’ and then, with intense frustration, ‘If only I could do it myself, if only I could say what must be done.’ And then it dawned upon him that this was what his mother had meant when she spoke of power. The ability to charge and direct the orders of existence that surrounded him.