Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  At dawn the next morning they were roused from their bunks in the barrack rooms and after a huge breakfast of maize cake and maas, the thick clotted sour milk, they were led to the long iron-roofed classroom.

  ‘Men of forty different tribes come from every corner of the land to Goldi, men speaking forty different languages, from Zulu to Tswana, from Herero to Basuto, and only one in a thousand of them understands a word of English or of Afrikaans,’ Moses explained softly to his brother as the other men respectfully made room for them on one of the classroom benches. ‘Now they will teach us the special language of Goldi, the tongue by which all men, whether black or white, and of whatever tribe, speak to each other here.’

  A venerable old Zulu boss-boy, his pate covered with a cap of shining silver wool, was their instructor in the lingua franca of the gold mines, Fanakalo. The name was taken from its own vocabulary and meant literally ‘like this, like that’, the phrase that the recruits would have urged upon them frequently over the weeks ahead: ‘Do it like this! Work like that! Sebenza fanakalo!’

  The Zulu instructor on the raised dais was surrounded by all the accoutrements of the miner’s trade, set out on display so that he could touch each item with his pointer and the recruits would chant the name of it in unison. Helmets and lanterns, hammers and picks, jumper bars and scrapers, safety rails and rigs – they would know them all intimately before they stood their first shift.

  But now the old Zulu touched his own chest and said: ‘Mina!’ Then pointed at his class and said: ‘Wena!’

  And Moses led them in the chant: ‘Me! You!’

  ‘Head!’ said the instructor and ‘Arm!’ and ‘Leg!’ He touched his own body and his pupils imitated him enthusiastically.

  They worked at the language all that morning and then after lunch they were divided into groups of twenty and the group that included Moses and Hendrick was taken to another iron-roofed building similar to the language classroom. It differed only in its furnishings. Long trestle tables ran from wall to wall, and the person that welcomed them was a white man with peculiar bright ginger-coloured hair and moustache and green eyes. He was dressed in a long white coat like those the doctors had worn, and like them he was smiling and friendly, waving them to their places at the tables and speaking in English that only Moses and Hendrick understood, although they were careful not to make their understanding apparent and maintained a pantomime of perplexity and ignorance.

  ‘All right you fellows. My name is Dr Marcus Archer and I am a psychologist. What we are going to do now is give you an aptitude test to see just what kind of work you are best suited to.’ The white man smiled at them and then nodded to the boss-boy beside him, who translated:

  ‘You do what Bomvu, the red one, tells you. That way we can find out just how stupid you are.’

  The first test was a blockbuilding exercise which Marcus Archer had developed himself to test basic manual dexterity and awareness of mechanical shape. The multicoloured wooden blocks of various shapes had to be fitted into the frame on the table in front of each subject in the manner of an elementary jigsaw puzzle and the time allotted for completion was six minutes. The boss-boy explained the procedure and gave a demonstration and the recruits took their seats at the tables and Marcus Archer called: ‘Enza! Do it!’ and started his stop watch.

  Moses completed his puzzle in one minute six seconds. According to Dr Archer’s meticulous records, to date 116,816 had sat this particular test. Not one of them had completed it in under two and a half minutes. He left the dais and went down to Moses’ table to check his assembly of the blocks. It was correct, and he nodded and studied Moses’ expressionless features thoughtfully.

  Of course, he had noticed Moses the moment he entered the room. He had never seen such a beautiful man in his life, either black or white, and Dr Archer’s preference was strongly for black skin. That was one of the main reasons he had come out to Africa five years before, for Dr Marcus Archer was a homosexual.

  He had been in his third year at Magdalene College before he admitted this fact to himself, and the man who had introduced him to the bitter-sweet delights had at the same time stimulated his intellect with the wondrous new doctrines of Karl Marx and the subsequent refinements to that doctrine by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His lover had secretly enrolled him in the British Communist Party, and after he had left Cambridge introduced him to the comrades of Bloomsbury. However, the young Marcus had never felt entirely at home in intellectual London. He had lacked the spiked tongue, the ready acid wit and the feline cruelty, and after a short and highly unsatisfactory affair with Lytton Strachey, he had been given Lytton’s notorious ‘treatment’ and ostracized from the group.

  He had banished himself into the wilderness of Manchester University, to take up the new science of industrial psychology. In Manchester he had begun a long and lyrically happy liaison with a Jamaican trombone player and allowed his connections with the Party to fall into neglect. However, he was to learn that the Party never forgets its chosen ones, and at the age of thirty-one, when he had already made some small reputation for himself in his profession, but when his association with his Jamaican lover had ended acrimoniously and he was dejected and almost suicidal, the Party had reached out one of its tentacles and drawn him gently back into the fold.

  They told him that there was an opening in his field with the South African Chamber of Mines working with African mineworkers. His penchant for black skin was by now an addiction. The infant South African Communist Party was in need of bolstering and the job was his if he wanted. It was implied that he had free choice in the matter, but the outcome was never in doubt and within a month he had sailed for Cape Town.

  In the following five years he had done important pioneering work with the Chamber of Mines and had received both recognition and deep satisfaction from it. His connections with the Party had been carefully concealed, but the covert work he had done in this area was even more important, and his commitment to the ideals of Marxism had grown stronger as he grew older and saw at first hand the inhumanities of class and racial discrimination, the terrible abyss that separated the poor and dispossessed black proletariat from the enormous wealth and privilege of the white bourgeoisie. He had found that in this rich and beautiful land all the gross ills of the human condition flourished as though in a hothouse, exaggerated until they were almost a caricature of evil.

  Now Marcus Archer looked at this noble young man with the face of an Egyptian god and a skin of burnt honey, and he was filled with longing.

  ‘You speak English, don’t you?’ he asked, and Moses nodded.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he said softly, and Marcus Archer had to turn away and go back to his dais. His passion was impossible to disguise, and his fingers were trembling as he took up a stick of chalk and wrote upon the blackboard, giving himself a respite to get his emotions under control.

  The tests continued for the rest of the afternoon, the subjects gradually being sorted and channelled into their various grades and levels on the results. At the end only one remained in the main stream. Moses Gama had completed the progressively more difficult tests with the same aplomb as he had tackled the first, and Dr Archer realized that he had discovered a prodigy.

  At five o’clock the session ended and thankfully the subjects trooped from the classroom; the last hour had taxed even the brightest amongst them. Moses alone had remained undaunted and as he filed past the desk Dr Archer said:

  ‘Gama!’ He had taken the name from the register. ‘There is one more task I would like you to attempt.’

  He led Moses down the verandah to his office at the end.

  ‘You can read and write, Gama?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘It is a theory of mine that a man’s handwriting can be studied to find the key to his personality,’ Archer explained. ‘And I would like you to write for me.’

  They sat side by side at the desk, and Dr Archer set writing materials in front of Moses, chatting easily. ‘This
is a standard text I use.’

  On the card he handed Moses was printed the nursery rhyme ‘The Cat and the Fiddle’.

  Moses dipped the pen and Archer leaned closer to watch. His writing was large and fluent, the characters formed with sharp peaks, forward sloping and definite. All the indications of mental determination and ruthless energy were present.

  Still studying the handwriting Archer casually laid his hand on Moses’ thigh, intensely aware of the hard rubbery muscle beneath the velvety skin, and the nib spluttered as Moses started. Then his hand steadied and he went on writing. He finished, laid the pen down carefully, and for the first time looked directly into Marcus Archer’s green eyes.

  ‘Gama.’ Marcus Archer’s voice shook and his fingers tightened. ‘You are much too intelligent to waste your time shovelling ore.’ He paused and moved his hand slowly up Moses’ leg.

  Moses stared steadily into his eyes. His expression did not change, but he let his thighs fall slowly open, and Marcus Archer’s heart was thumping wildly against his ribs.

  ‘I want you to work as my personal assistant, Gama,’ he whispered, and Moses considered the magnitude of this offer. He would have access to the files of every worker in the gold-mining industry; he would be protected and privileged, free to pass and enter where other black men were forbidden. The advantages were so numerous that he knew he could not grasp them all in so brief a moment. For the man who made the offer he felt almost nothing, neither revulsion nor desire, but he would have no compunction in paying the price he demanded. If the white man wished to be treated as a woman, then Moses would readily render him this service.

  ‘Yes, Doctor, I would like to work for you,’ he said.

  On the last night in the barrack room of the induction centre, Moses called all his chosen lieutenants to him. They clustered around his bunk.

  ‘Very soon you will go from here to the Goldi. Not all of you will go together for there are many mines along the Rand. Some of you will go down into the earth, others will work on the surface in the mills and the reduction plants. We will be separated for a while, but you will not forget that we are brothers. I, your elder brother, will not forget you. I have important work for you. I will seek you out, wherever you are, and you will be ready for me when I summon you.’

  ‘Eh he!’ they grunted in agreement and obedience. ‘We are your younger brothers. We will listen for your voice.’

  ‘You must know always that you are under my protection, that all trespasses against you will be revenged. You have seen what happens to those who give offence to our brotherhood.’

  ‘We have seen it,’ they murmured. ‘We have seen it – and it is death.’

  ‘It is death,’ Moses confirmed. ‘It is death also for any of the brotherhood who betray us. It is death for all traitors.’

  ‘Death to all traitors.’ They swayed together, coming once more under the mesmeric spell which Moses Gama wove about them.

  ‘I have chosen a totem for our brotherhood,’ Moses went on. ‘I have chosen the buffalo for our totem for he is black and powerful and all men fear him. We are the Buffaloes.’

  ‘We are the Buffaloes.’ Already they were proud of the distinction. ‘We are the black Buffaloes and all men will learn to fear us.’

  ‘These are the signs, the secret signs by which we will recognize our own.’

  He made the sign and then individually clasped their right hands in the fashion of the white man, but the grip was different, a double grip and turn of the second finger. ‘Thus you will know your brothers when they come to you.’

  They greeted each other in the darkened barracks, each of them shaking the hand of all the others in the new way, and it was a form of initiation into the brotherhood.

  ‘You will hear from me soon. Until I call, you must do as the white man requires of you. You must work hard and learn. You must be ready for the call when it comes.’ Moses sent them away to their bunks and he and Hendrick sat alone, their heads together, speaking in whispers.

  ‘You have lost the little white stones,’ Moses told him. ‘By now the birds and the small beasts will have pecked the loaves and devoured the millet bread. The stones will be scattered and lost; the dust will cover them and the grass will grow over them. They are gone, my brother.’

  ‘Yes. They are gone,’ Hendrick lamented. ‘After so much blood and striving, after all the hardships we endured, they have been scattered like seeds to the wind.’

  ‘They were accursed,’ Moses consoled him. ‘From the moment I saw them I knew that they would bring only disaster and death. They are white man’s toys. What could you have done with the white man’s wealth? If you tried to spend it, if you tried to buy white man’s things with it, you would instantly have been marked by the white police. They would have come for you immediately and there would have been a rope or a jail cell for you.’

  Hendrick was silent, considering the truth of this. What could he have purchased with the stones? Black men could not own their own land. More than a hundred head of cattle and the local chieftain’s envy would have been aroused. He already had all the wives – and more – that he wished for, and black men did not drive in motor cars. Black men did not draw attention to themselves in any way, not if they were wise.

  ‘No, my brother,’ Moses told him softly. ‘They were not for you. Thank the spirits of your ancestors that they were wrested from you and scattered back on the earth where they belong.’

  Hendrick growled softly, ‘Still it would have been good to have that treasure, to hold it in my hands, even secretly.’

  ‘There are other treasures even more important than diamonds or white man’s gold, my brother.’

  ‘What are these treasures?’ Hendrick asked.

  ‘Follow me and I will lead you to them.’

  ‘But tell me what they are,’ Hendrick insisted.

  ‘You will discover them in good time.’ Moses smiled.

  ‘But now, my brother, we must talk of first things; the treasures will follow later. Listen to me. Bomvu, the red one, my little doctor who likes to be used as a woman, Bomvu has allocated you to the Goldi called Central Rand Consolidated. It is one of the richest of the Goldi, with many deep shafts. You will go underground, and it is best if you make a name for yourself there. I have prevailed on Bomvu to send ten of our best men from the Buffaloes to CRC with you. These will be your impi, your chosen warriors. You must start with them, but you will build upon them, gathering around you the quick and strong and the fearless.’

  ‘What must I do with these men?’

  ‘Hold them in readiness. You will hear from me soon. Very soon.’

  ‘What of the other Buffaloes?’

  ‘Bomvu has sent them, at my suggestion, in groups of ten to each of the other Goldi along the Rand. Small groups of our men everywhere. They will grow, and soon we will be a great black herd of buffaloes which even the most savage lion will not dare to challenge.’

  Swart Hendrick’s initial descent in the earth was the first time in his life that he had been frightened witless, unable to speak or think, so terrified that he could not even scream or struggle against it.

  The terror began when he was in the long line of black miners, each of them wearing black rubber gumboots and grey overalls, the unpainted silver helmets on their heads fitted with head lanterns. Hendrick shuffled forward in the press of bodies down the ramp between the poles of the crush, like cattle entering an abattoir, stopping and starting forward again. Suddenly he found himself at the head of the line, standing before the steel mesh gate that guarded the entrance to the shaft.

  Beyond the mesh he could see the steel cables hanging into the shaft like pythons with shining scales, and over him towered the steel skeleton of the headgear. When he looked up he could see the huge wheels silhouetted against the sky a hundred feet above his head, spinning and stopping and reversing.

  Suddenly the mesh gates crashed open and he was carried on the surge of black bodies into the cage beyond. The
y packed shoulder to shoulder, seventy men. The doors closed, the floor dropped under his feet and stopped again immediately. He heard the tramp of feet over his head and looked up, realizing that the skip was a double decker and that another seventy men were being packed into the top compartment.

  Again he heard the clash of closing mesh gates and he started as the telegraph shrilled, four long rings, the signal to descend, and the skip fell away under him – but this time accelerating so violently that his body seemed to come free and his feet lay only lightly on the steel floor plates. His belly was sucked up against his ribs and his terror was unleashed.

  In darkness the skip rocketed downwards, drumming and rattling and racing like an express train in a tunnel, and the terror went on and on, minute after minute, eternity after eternity. He felt himself suffocating, crushed by the thought of the enormous weight of rock above him, his ears popping and crackling at the pressure, a mile and then another mile straight down into the earth.

  The skip stopped so abruptly that his knees buckled and he felt the flesh of his face sucked down from the bones of his skull, stretching like rubber. The gates crashed open and he was carried out into the main haulage, a cavern walled with glistening wet rock, filled with men, hundreds of men like rats in a sewer, streaming away into the endless tunnels that honeycombed the bowels of the world.

  Everywhere there was water, glistening and shining in the flat glare of the electric light, running back in channels on each side of the haulage, squelching under his feet, hidden water drumming and rustling in the darkness or dripping from the jagged rock of the roof. The very air was heavy with water, humid and hot and claustrophobic so that it had a gelatinous texture, seeming to fill his eardrums and deafen him, trickling sluggishly into his lungs like treacle, and his terror lasted all that long march along the drive until they reached the stopes. Here the men split into their separate gangs and disappeared into the shadows.