Murderous

by David Hickson

  “At six there will still be enough light to enjoy sundowners,” said Roelof, and I assured him we’d be on time. We wouldn’t want to end up drinking in the dark.

  “Couldn’t have done this two days ago,” said Piet van Rensburg as he held up his rum and made the ice clink. He indicated the vast stretch of ocean and a sky so full of clouds it looked like an amateur painter had been trying out a whole new book of sky painting tricks. There were layers of dark jagged clouds like mountain peaks against orange puffy ones in the distance, and beneath them the grey clouds that trailed tendrils of rain across the ocean. But on our balcony on the fourth floor of the Van Rensburgs’ chrome and glass pied-à-terre we were dry and kept comfortably warm by the hot air piped up from the boiler in the basement. “Weather has changed over the last week,” he said. “Have you noticed that?”

  “Looks like all the trouble is moving out to sea,” I said. Piet was not a Capetonian, but like many South Africans he assumed the mantle of one when in the Cape and expressed it in an obsession with the weather.

  “They said on the radio,” said Melissa, resplendent this evening in an ankle-length, blue chiffon number with real fur on top, “they said that it was because they arrested that man. That the weather, like the country, is breathing a sigh of relief.”

  Piet’s face hardened. “They talk a lot of shit in the Cape,” he said. “Smoke too much of that green stuff.”

  “I think it’s a relief he’s locked up,” said Melissa and she pouted a little because no one was agreeing with her.

  “Not much of a relief,” said Colonel Colchester. “Not yet.” He was standing with his back to us at the glass balcony edge with his sparkling mineral water, admiring the sunset. He turned and faced us. “For a start, they haven’t proved it was him.”

  “They won’t,” said Piet determinedly, “because it wasn’t. They arrested someone we know. Bloody fools. Man called Q. It wasn’t him.”

  “It’s one thing if it turns out to have been a lone madman,” said the colonel. “That might bring some relief. Quite another if it wasn’t.”

  “They haven’t proved it,” said Hendrik, as if he had tuned into a delayed broadcast of the conversation. Melissa laid a calming hand on his chest and gave him a smile. Hendrik was looking as if his mother had just finished scrubbing him in the hot tub. His face was pink and his blond hair was wet and combed back. He was wearing a freshly washed rugby shirt with shorts and long socks. Afrikaners like him did not feel the cold.

  “There has been no relief,” said Piet. “You gauge the mood of the people by listening to the conspiracy theories, and when they start making headlines, you’d better know we’re feeling anxious.”

  “Conspiracy theories?” asked Roelof. He stood a little outside the circle with his fruit juice, as if he’d been sent in as a silent observer.

  “You’ve seen the headlines: The End is Nigh … Time to Get Out …White Genocide is Real. Load of bullshit.” Piet spilt some of his rum as he waved his glass at us in dismissal of the bullshit. “Hogwash, all of it. Thirty-three people died from gunshot wounds. That’s not genocide.”

  A small silence settled over us, and we sipped our drinks.

  “You going to the game tomorrow?” asked Hendrik. He was looking at me.

  “I’m not,” I said regretfully.

  “It’s going to be a big one. Us against the Lions.”

  “Gosh,” I said, and dried up.

  “It’s Pa’s team, you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Hendrik nodded and drank more of his beer. I guessed that he was speaking about rugby, a sport that was often considered a second religion of the white people of South Africa. When sanctions were imposed during the apartheid years, the passion for the sport built to a fever pitch. In those days, even the sports were divided upon racial grounds; rugby for the white people and soccer for the black.

  “Ja,” said Hendrik. “Die Streeptruie are ours. They’ve got a good chance at the Currie Cup this year.”

  “Striped jerseys,” said Melissa for the foreigners, and she rubbed Hendrik’s striped blue and white chest to demonstrate.

  “You were a rugby player yourself?” I asked.

  “Played at Newlands once,” said Hendrik.

  “Almost twenty years ago,” said Roelof, the pedant. “It was a warm-up match. School teams.”

  Hendrik finished his beer and nodded. But he wasn’t going to let Roelof diminish the memory.

  “I took the tunnel with my team,” he said, and his face turned a little pinker.

  “You’ll have to explain about the tunnel,” said Piet. “These are Engelse mense we’re talking to.”

  “The tunnel is the corridor that connects the changing rooms with the field,” explained Roelof. “The players run through the tunnel and are greeted by the crowd as they come onto the field.”

  “It’s a good feeling. I’m going to do it again,” said Hendrik, and his eyes looked as if they were filling with tears. “One day I’m going to do it again.”

  “You’ll need to lose some of that flab,” pointed out Roelof. “Or the closest you’ll get to the tunnel is that bar in the Railway stand where you meet your friends.”

  “We play every Saturday. Training.”

  “I didn’t know it was a sports club,” scoffed Roelof. “Aren’t the White Africans a political group?”

  “We do social things. Cultural things. As well as political.”

  Hendrik looked at Roelof and tried to drink more beer out of his empty glass in a defiant way.

  “Let’s go inside, shall we?” suggested Piet to cover his son’s embarrassment. There was a large open fireplace with a hearty blaze inside, and despite the relieved weather it was getting cold on the balcony as the golden clouds lost the sun. “You must forgive the boys. Hendrik might be my only son, but Roelof is like a son to me. And in the manner of all siblings, they like to squabble. One day, you must join us in our box at Newlands. The Currie Cup final is in a few weeks. We could make a party of it. Rugby is a uniting force in this country of ours.”

  He gave a broad smile of slightly ageing teeth, and his bright eyes tested me. There was a sharp mind behind his affable congeniality. Every move we made was being scrutinised.

  Piet was a Renaissance man. Wealthy businessman, Media Mogul, Provincial Rugby Club owner, and Cook. The dining saloon was an expanse of Tuscan terracotta with the skins of dead animals to quieten the tread of the servants, a large fireplace, a glass wall through which to view the Atlantic, and a central cooking island which had its own small fire that had been tended by an elderly African, while the master of the house was warming up the guests. As we came into the room from the balcony, Roelof scurried ahead and issued a command. The man stepped away from the fire and another servant held open the neck of a super-sized apron into which Piet inserted his head. The servant then tied the cords of the apron behind Piet’s back so that his prosperous belly was encased. A third servant handed Piet a set of tongs and held a platter of bloody meat before him.

  “I like to do my own cooking,” explained Piet. He lifted a slab of meat off the platter with the tongs and placed it upon the grid which sat over the coals that had been scraped to the side of the flaming fire by the elderly servant. The meat sizzled abruptly and billowed steam and wood smoke over Piet. He emerged from the cloud with a broad Cheshire cat smile, closed eyes and flared nostrils.

  “Ah, the smell of a good braai. Nothing to beat it.” He opened his eyes and selected another slab of meat. “That’s a barbecue to you Engelse mense. But for us South Africans it’s a braai.”

  “You had better not be vegetarians,” threatened Hendrik.

  Chandler and I both showed carnivorous enthusiasm at the smell of the flame-grilled meat, and we took our places at the table as the silent servants poured wine and water and delivered bowls of salad and roasted vegetables. I guessed that Piet van Rensburg’s involvement as chief cook extended only to the few minutes of grilling, bu
t he accepted our compliments on the meal as he took his seat at the head of the table while the elderly African cleared up the detritus.

  “I am a man of the media,” said Piet modestly. “And I can tell you that this whole situation is going to come down to a choice of labels. It has nothing to do with the truth. Which labels are we going to stick onto it? That’s all there is to it.”

  We looked up from our meals, but no one said anything. Piet had taken to the stage like he was doing a one-man show.

  “Can we label this as the deluded act of a madman?” asked Piet, raising a forkful of slightly bloody steak to make his point. “In that case our fellow white-skinned folk could safely go to church again knowing that it is very unlikely that they are going to encounter another lunatic madman. There just aren’t that many of them around. On the other hand, what if the label is ‘white genocide’? Not a relief. Not for the white-skinned population. We will not be going to church with easy minds. If there is genocide underway against our people, then the chances of us encountering a man with an automatic weapon in our church are uncomfortably high. The question is not which label is correct. But which one do you think our trusted leaders will choose to unleash upon the public?”

  “They’re going to tell us he’s a lone madman,” I suggested. “Even if he has an entire platoon waiting to follow in his footsteps.”

  “Exactly.” Piet gave me a broad smile and pointed another chunk of meat in my direction in an encouraging way. “Believing they will release the truth about what happened is like believing that a fat man in a red suit climbs down your chimney on Christmas Eve.”

  “It won’t stop the conspiracy theorists, though,” said the colonel.

  “Of course not. Conspiracies, including white genocide, are here to stay. Myth or not. Every minority group in the history of the world has had their own persecution complex. We are no different.”

  “And some of them turn out to be true,” said Roelof, as if speaking from personal experience.

  “Absolutely, which is why one cannot simply renounce the white genocide idea, because like all good myths there’s an element of ‘could it be true?’ There’s enough killing in this country for us to make it into the top five on the intentional – not international – intentional death hit-parade every year. But the numbers are meaningless on their own. You can twist any statistic to prove your story.”

  “That is what those people who went over to the States were accused of doing,” I said. “Twisting the statistics.”

  Everyone looked at me. Except for Melissa, who was trying to get a servant to refill her glass.

  “The ones who introduced the world to the idea of white genocide,” I clarified.

  “The Suidlanders,” said Hendrik, and he glared at me in anticipation of my derogatory opinion.

  But Piet jumped in. “My son is a revolutionary.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “He has his own little band of angry young men.”

  “We are the White Africans,” said Hendrik, and looked at me to deny it. I didn’t.

  “Yes,” said Piet, “the Suidlanders got some right-wing Americans all hot under the collar about it. All that business about a white farmer being killed every day in South Africa. It made for great headlines, but very few people bothered to scrutinise the numbers they were claiming. If anything, the deliberate killing that might be happening here is of people who own the land. It just happens that those people are the pale-skinned descendants of Europeans.”

  “Are you saying there is deliberate killing?” I asked. “Land-owner genocide?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. There is killing, yes. Many land-owners have died and many more will die. But what does deliberate mean? When there’s an imbalance, things are bound to get nasty. And when eight percent of the population own ninety percent of the land, that’s a severe imbalance.”

  “It sounds as if you are going to start defending the land grabs,” said the colonel. “Are they part of a natural process of correcting the imbalance?”

  “Not defending, colonel. Explaining. It is clear to see why it is happening, but that doesn’t make it justifiable. And depending on your viewpoint, you would call it different things. Land grabs, expropriation, redressing the imbalance.”

  “Just because you call it something else doesn’t change what it is.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Piet. “I suggest that history is nothing but our interpretation of events by means of the labels we apply to them. The problem today is that we tend to stick the labels on before we grasp what really happened. The labels are flung about and they distort our perception of what is happening around us. Think of when someone dies. You have the choice of several labels: it was murder, accident, manslaughter, assassination, killed in the line of duty, executed as just punishment, unjust punishment, criminally executed, the list goes on and on.”

  “And so the church massacre will go into the history books as the tragic act of a lone madman?”

  “You see if I’m proved wrong.”

  “Pa is never wrong,” said Hendrik.

  Piet smiled as if to announce the end of act one, and we put our heads down to focus on the food.

  “Think of the Battle of Blood River.” Piet suggested as the servants cleared our plates. “You know the story, colonel?”

  “Only the bare details,” admitted the colonel. “A handful of Afrikaners fought against thousands of Zulus and killed so many of them that the river ran red with their blood.”

  “That’s the one. Almost two hundred years ago. A little under five hundred Afrikaners, the Voortrekkers: front runners, pioneers trekking north in search of better lives and fertile land.”

  “And to get away from the British,” I said, “who were imposing their rule in the Cape.”

  “Indeed.” Piet considered his two British guests, as if wondering whether to pursue the well-worn track of the conflict between our cultures, but decided instead to press on with his story. “Those five hundred Afrikaners were attacked by ten to fifteen thousand Zulu warriors. Imagine that! Being outnumbered thirty to one; guns and some small cannons for the Afrikaners, nothing but spears and knives for the Zulus. Three thousand Zulus died that day.” A pause for effect. “Not a single Afrikaner.”

  “We made a vow,” said Melissa, who was making good progress on her fifth glass of wine and had spent much of the conversation gazing into her glass. It was something of a surprise that she was keeping up.

  “We did,” said Piet. “You tell me, colonel, as a military man – the Battle of Blood River … was it an extraordinary military victory or a cruel and pointless massacre of unarmed Zulu tribesmen?”

  “We would need to understand more about it,” said the colonel. “Superficially, I would guess it could be portrayed as both.”

  “Which is exactly my point. You need to know more. And each layer of the onion changes your perspective.” Piet took a deep draught of wine. “We’ll never get to the truth of this church business.”

  “How would you describe the Battle of Blood River?” asked the colonel.

  “Well … we start with the fact that the Zulus were attacking, and the Afrikaners were defending themselves. Bully for the Afrikaners. They survived an attack in which they were greatly outnumbered. Well done to them. But then we ask, why were the Zulus attacking them? And it turns out that the Afrikaners were travelling towards the heart of the Zulu nation. They were planning to attack the big chief Dingaan at umGungundlovu. Attack and eliminate.”

  “umGungundlovu was Dingaan’s royal residence,” said Roelof.

  “It was,” agreed Piet. “A huge kraal, a tribal settlement that was the beating heart of the Zulu nation. The Zulu tribe is a mix of monarchy and military dictatorship. But my point is: knowing that the Afrikaners were intending to assassinate the Zulu king, how do you feel about that?”

  “Not so bully for the Afrikaners,” said the colonel.

  “Exactly. Our perspective shifts again. Naughty Afrikaners … Their malicious intent
puts them on the side of wrong. And we understand why the Zulu warriors attacked. Our sympathies are with them.” Piet sat back and fanned himself with a folded napkin. The combination of the rich food, the wine, the fire, and his passion for the history of the country were causing him to run hot.

  “But there’s more?” I asked.

  “There’s always more, Mr Moss. Because to be fair, we have to ask why the Afrikaners were attacking Dingaan.”

  “Why were they?” I asked, to be fair.

  “Ten months earlier, Dingaan had signed a treaty between the two groups: the Zulu and the Afrikaners. A treaty that was to pave the way for peaceful sharing of the land, involving an exchange of cattle for land. Cattle was the only currency we shared, one of the few things of value to both cultures.”

  “So this story goes back to the ownership of land?”

  Piet nodded and drank. “Like every other story on this continent. It’s all about the land.” He gave the satisfied smile of a man who owned a good deal of it. “Two days after signing the treaty with Dingaan, he invited the Voortrekker leader Retief and his companions to umGungundlovu for a beer-drinking celebration of the treaty and a farewell before Retief returned with the signed treaty to his people.”

  “Which he didn’t get to do,” said Roelof.

  “He did not,” agreed Piet. “Things turned nasty at the celebration. Retief and all his men were brutally slain. Over the next few days Zulu warriors went out to several nearby Voortrekker encampments and over five hundred Afrikaners were killed.”

  Piet laid the napkin aside, and produced a bath-towel sized handkerchief from a pocket, which he held at the ready as he continued. “So you see, again, our perspective shifts. That wasn’t really fair play by the Zulus. Now we can understand the motivation behind the Afrikaners’ actions. We understand why they were intent upon attacking umGungundlovu.” The handkerchief swooped in and Piet blew his nose like a trumpet.