by Wilbur Smith
Slowly she felt herself relaxing, and a mild glow of euphoria made her body seem air-light and cleansed her mind. All the agonies of her soul became trivial and fell behind her.
'I feel good,' she murmured, and when they laughed, she laughed with them and drove on into the night.
In the early morning before it was fully light, they reached the coast, skirting the bay of Algoa where the Indian Ocean took a deep bite out of the continent, and the green waters were chopped to a white froth by the wind.
'Where do we go from here?" Kitty asked.
'The black township of New Brighton,' Tara told her. 'There is a mission run by German nuns, a teaching and nursing order, the Sisters of St Magdalene. They are expecting us. We aren't really allowed to stay in the township, but they have arranged it." Sister Nunziata was a handsome blond woman, not much older than forty years. She had a clear scrubbed-looking skin and her manner was brisk and efficient. She wore the light grey cotton habit of the order, and a white shoulder-length veil.
'Mrs Courtney, I have been expecting you. Our mutual friend will be here later this morning. You will want to bathe and rest." She led them to the cells that had been set aside for them and apologized for the simple comforts they contained. Kitty and Tara shared a cell.
The floor was bare cement, the only decoration was a crucifix on the whitewashed wall, and the springs of the iron bedsteads were covered with thin hard coir mattresses.
'She's just great,' Kitty enthused. 'I must get her on film. Nuns always make good footage." As soon as they had bathed and unpacked their equipment, Kitty had her crew out filming. She recorded a good interview with Sister Nunziata, her German accent lent interest to her statements, and then they filmed the black children in the schoolyard and the out patients waiting outside the clinic.
Tara was awed by the girl's energy, her quick mind and glib tongue, and her eye for angle and subject as she directed the shooting.
It made Tara feel superfluous, and her own lack of talent and creative skill irked her. She found herself resenting the other girl for having pointed up her inadequacies so graphically.
Then everything else was irrelevant. A nondescript old Buick sedan pulled into the mission yard and a tall figure climbed out and came towards them. Moses Gama wore a light blue open-neck shirt, the short sleeves exposed the sleek muscle in his upper arms and neck, and his tailored blue slacks were belted around his narrow waist.
Tara didn't have to say anything, they all knew immediately who he was as Kitty Godolphin breathed softly beside her, 'My God, he is beautiful as a black panther." Tara's resentment of her flared into seething hatred. She wanted to rush to Moses and embrace him so that Kitty might know he was hers, but instead she stood dumbly while he stopped in front of Kitty and held out his right hand.
'Miss Godolphin? At last,' he said, and his voice brought out a rush of goose-bumps down Tara's arms.
The rest of the day was spent in reconnaisance and the filming of more background material, this time with Moses as the central figure in each shot. The New Brighton township was typical of the South African urban locations, rows of identical low-cost housing laid out in geometric squares of narrow roads, some of them paved and others rutted and filled with muddy puddles in which the pre-school children and toddlers, many of them naked or dressed only in ragged shorts, played raucously.
Kitty filmed Moses picking his way around the puddles, squatting to talk to the children, lifting a marvellously photogenic little black cherub in his arms and wiping his snotty nose.
'That's great stuff,' Kitty enthused. 'He's going to look magnificent on film." The children followed Moses, laughing and skipping behind him as though he were the Pied Piper, and the women attracted by the commotion came out of the squalid little cottages. When they recognized Moses and saw the cameras, they began to ululate and dance.
They were natural actresses and completely without inhibition, and Kitty was everywhere, calling for shots and unusual camera angles, clearly delighted by the footage she was getting.
In the late afternoon the working men began to arrive back in the township by bus and train. Most of them were production-line workers in the vehicle assembly plants of Ford and General Motors, or factory-workers in the tyre companies of Goodyear and Firestone, for Port Elizabeth and its satellite town of Uitenhage formed the centre of the country's motor vehicle industry.
Moses walked the narrow streets with the camera following him, and he stopped to talk to the returning workers, while the camera recorded their complaints and problems, most of which were the practical everyday worries of making ends meet while remaining within the narrow lines demarcated by the forest of racial laws. Kitty could edit most of that out, but every one of them mentioned the 'show on demand' clause of the pass laws as the thing they hated and feared most. In every little vignette they filmed Moses Gama was the central heroic figure.
'By the time I've finished with him, he will be as famous as Martin Luther King,' Kitty enthused.
They joined the nuns for their frugal evening meal, and afterwards Kitty Godolphin was still not satisfied. Outside one of the cottages near the mission a family was cooking on an open fire, and Kitty had Moses join them, hunched over the fire in the night with the flames lighting his face, adding drama to his already massive presence as she filmed him while he spoke. In the background one of the women was singing a lullaby to the infant at her breast, and there were the murmurous sounds of the location, the soft cries of the children and the distant yapping of pariah dogs.
Moses Gama's words were poignant and moving, spoken in that deep thrilling voice, as he described the agony of his land and his people, so that Tara, listening to him in the darkness, found tears running down her face.
In the morning Kitty left her team at the mission, and without the camera the three of them, Kitty and Tara and Moses, drove in the Buick to the railway station that served the township and watched the black commuters swarm like hiving bees through the station entrance marked NON WHITES --, NIE BLANKES, crowding on to the platform reserved for blacks, and as soon as the train pulled in, flooding into the coaches set aside for them.
Through the other entrance, marked WHITES ONLY -- BLANKES ALLEENLIK, a few white officials and others who had business in the township sauntered and unhurriedly entered the first-class coaches at the rear of the train where they sat on green leathercovered seats and gazed out through glass at the black swarm on the opposite platform with detached expressions as though they were viewing creatures of another species.
'I've got to try and get that,' Kitty muttered. 'I've got to get that reaction on film." She was busily scribbling notes in her pad, sketching rough maps of the station layout and marking in camera sites and angles.
Before noon Moses excused himself. 'I have to meet the local organizers and make the final plans for tomorrow,' and he drove away in the Buick.
Tara took Kitty and the team down to the seaside at St George's Strand, and they filmed the bathers on the beaches lying under the signboards BLANKES ALLEENLIK -- WHITES ONLY. School was out and tanned young people, the girls in bikinis and the boys with short haircuts and frank open faces lolled on the white sand, or played beach games and surfed the rolling green waves.
When Kitty asked them, 'How would you feel if black pea151e came to swim here?" some of them giggled nervously at a question they had never considered before: 'They aren't allowed to come here - they've got their own beaches." And at least one was indignant. 'They can't come here and look at our girls in bathing-costumes." He was a beefy young man with seasalt caked in his sun-streaked hair and skin peeling from his sunburned nose.
'But wouldn't you look at the black girls in their bathing costumes?" Kitty asked innocently.
'Sis, man!" said the surfer, his handsome tanned features contorted with utter disgust at the suggestion.
'It's just too good to be true!" Kitty marvelled at her own fortune.
'I'll cut that in with some footage I've got of a beau
tiful black dancer in a Soweto night club." On the way back to the mission Kitty asked Tara to stop at the New Brighton railway station once again, for a final reconnaisanc› They left the cameras in the Packard and two white-uniformed railway constables watched them with idle disinterest as they wandered around the almost deserted platforms that during the rush hours swarmed with thousands of black commuters. Quietly Kitty pointed out to her team the locations she had chosen earlier, and explained to them what shots she would be striving for.
That night Moses joined them for the evening meal in the mission refectory, and though the conversation was light and cheerful, there was a hint of tension in their laughter. When Moses left, Tara went out with him to where the Buick was parked in the darkness behind the mission clinic.
'I want to be with you tonight,' she told him pathetically. 'I feel so alone without you." 'That is not possible." 'It's dark - we could go for a drive to the beach,' she pleaded.
'The police patrols are looking for just that sort of thing,' Moses told her. 'You would see yourself in the Sunday Times next week end." 'Make love to me here, please Moses,' and he was angry.
'Your selfishness is that of a spoilt child - you think only of your.
self and your own desires, even now when we are on the threshold all great events, you would take risks that could bring us down." Tara lay awake most of the night and listened to Kitty's peaceful breathing in the iron bed across the cell.
She fell asleep just before dawn, and awoke feeling nauseous and heavy, when Kitty leapt gaily out of bed in her pink striped pyjamas, eager for the day.
'June twenty-sixth,' she cried. 'The big day at last!" None of them took more than a cup of coffee for an early breakfast. Tara felt too sick and the others were too keyed up. Hank had checked his equipment the previous night, but now he went over it again before he loaded it into the Packard and they drove down to the railway station.
It was gloomy and the few street lights were still burning while under them the hordes of black commuters hurried. However, by the time they reached the station the first rays of the sun struck the entrance and the light was perfect for filming. Tara noticed that a pair of police Black Maria vans were parked outside the main entrance and instead of the two young constables who had been on duty the previous day, there were eight railway policemen in a group under the station clock. They were in blue uniform with black peaked caps and holstered sidearms on their polished leather Sam Browne belts. They all carried riot batons.
'They have been warned,' Tara exclaimed, as she parked across the street from the two vans. 'They are expecting trouble -just look at them." Kitty had twisted around and was giving last-minute instructions to Hank in the back seat, but when Tara glanced at her to assess her reaction to the waiting police, Romething about Kitty's expression and her inability to meet Tara's eyes made her pause.
'Kitty?" she insisted. 'These policemen. You don't seem --' she broke off as she remembered something. The previous afternoon on the way to the beach, Kitty had asked her to stop outside the Humewood post office because she wanted to send a telegram. However, from across the road looking through the post office window, Tara had seen her slip into one of the glass telephone booths. It had puzzled her at the time.
'You!" she gasped. 'It was you who warned the police!" 'Listen, darling,' Kitty snapped at her. 'These people want to get themselves arrested. That's the whole point. And I want film of them getting arrested. I did it for all our sakes --' she broke off and cocked her head. 'Listen!" she cried. 'Here they come!" Faintly on the dawn there was the sound of singing, hundreds of voices together, and the group of policemen in the station entrance stirred and looked around apprehensively.
'Okay, Hank,' Kitty snapped. 'Let's go!" They jumped out of the Packard, and hurried to the positions they had chosen, lugging their equipment.
The senior police officer with gold braid on his cap was a captain.
Tara knew enough of police rank insignia from first-hand experience.
He gave an order to his constables. Two of them began to cross the road towards the camera team.
'Shoot, Hank. Keep shooting!" Tara heard Kitty's voice, and the singing was louder now. The beautifully haunting refrain of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika carried by a thousand African voices made Tara shiver.
The two constables were halfway across the road when the first rank of protesters marched around the nearest row of shops and cottages and hurriedly the police captain called his constables back to his side.
They were twenty abreast, arms linked, filling the road from pavement to pavement, singing as they came on, and behind them followed a solid column of black humanity. Some of them were dressed in business suits, others in tattered cast-off clothing, some were silver-haired and others were in their teens. In the centre of the front rank, taller than the men around him, bare-headed and straightbacked as a soldier, marched Moses Gama.
Hank ran into the street with his sound technician following him.
With the camera on his shoulder, he retreated in front of Moses, capturing him on film, the sound man recording his voice as it soared in the anthem, full and magnificent, the very voice of Africa and his features were lit with an almost religious fervour.
Hurriedly the police captain was drawing his men up across the whites-only entrance, and they were hefting their batons nervously, pale-faced in the early sunlight. The head of the column wheeled across the road and began to climb the steps, and the police captain stepped forward and spread his arms to halt them. Moses Gama held up one hand. The column came to a jerking shuffling halt, and the singing died away.
The police captain was a tall man with a pleasantly lined face.
Tara could see him over their heads, and he was smiling. That was the thing that struck Tara. Faced with a thousand black protesters, he was still smiling.
'Come on now,' he raised his voice, like a schoolmaster addressing an unruly class. 'You know you can't do this, it's just nonsense, man. You are acting like a bunch of skollies, and I know you are good people." He was still smiling as he picked a few of the leaders out of the front ranks. 'Mr Dhlovu and Mr Khandela - you are on the management committee, shame on you!" He waggled his finger, and the men he had spoken to hung their heads and grinned shamefacedly. The whole atmosphere of the march had begun to change. Here was the father figure, stern but benevolent, and they were the children, mischievous but at the bottom good-hearted and dutiful.
'Off you go, all of you. Go home and don't be silly now,' the captain called, and the column wavered. From the back ranks there was laughter, and a few of those who had been reluctant to join the march began to slip away. Behind the captain his constables were grinning with relief, and the crowd began to jostle as it broke up.
'Good Christ!" Kitty swore bitterly. 'It's all a goddamned anticlimax. I have wasted my time--' Then on to the top steps of the railway station a tall figure stepped out of the ranks and his voice rang out over them, silencing them and freezing them where they stood. The laughter and the smiles died away.
'My people,' Moses Gama cried, 'this is your land. In it you have God's right to live in peace and dignity. This building belongs to all who live here - it is your right to enter, as much as any other person's that lives here. I am going in - who will follow me?" A ragged, uncertain chorus of support came from the front ranks and Moses turned to face the police captain.
'We are going in, Captain. Arrest us or stand aside." At that moment a train, filled with black commuters, pulled into the platform and they hung out of the windows of the coaches and cheered and stamped.
'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika!" sang Moses Gama, and with his head held high he marched under the warning sign WHITES ONLY. 'You are breaking the law,' the captain raised his voice. 'Arrest that man." And the thin rank of constables moved forward to obey.
Instantly a roar went up from the crowd behind him. 'Arrest me!
Arrest me too!" And they surged forward, picking Moses up with them as though he were a surfer on
a wave.
'Arrest me!" they chanted. 'Malan! Malan! Come and arrest us!" The crowd burst through the entrance, and the white police constables were carried with them, struggling ineffectually in the press of bodies.
'Arrest me!" It had become a roar. 'Amandla! Amandla!" The captain was fighting to keep his feet, shouting to rally his men, but his voice was drowned out in the chant of, 'Power! Power!" The captain's cap was knocked over his eyes and he was shoved backwards on to the platform. Hank, the cameraman, was in the midst of it, holding his A rriflex high and shooting out of hand.
Around him the white faces of the constables bobbed like flotsam in a wild torrent of humanity. From the coaches the black passengers swarmed out to meet and mingle with the mob, and a single voice called out.
'Jee!" the battle cry that can drive an Nguni warrior into the berserker's passion, and 'Jee!" a hundred voices answered him and 'Jee!" again. There was the crash of breaking glass, one of the coach windows exploded as a shoulder thrust into it and 'Jee!" they sang.
One of the white constables lost his footing and went sprawling backwards. Immediately he was trampled under foot and he screamed like a rabbit in a snare.
'Jee!" sang the men, transformed into warriors, the veneer of western manners stripped away, and another window smashed. By now the platform was choked with a struggling mass of humanity. From the cab of the locomotive, the mob dragged the terrified enginedriver and his fireman. They jostled and pushed them, ringing them in.
'Jee!" they chanted, bouncing at the knees, working themselves up into the killing madness. Their eyes were glazing and engorging with blood, their faces turning into shining black masks.
