by Wilbur Smith
The woman screamed again, this time the sound was so filled with outrage and agony that it goaded the other young warriors and they fell upon the bus passengers with such fury that the terminus was strewn with the wailing and sobbing injured and the concrete floor was washed sticky red.
When the ambulances came with sirens wailing to collect the casualties, the comrades of Umkhonto we Sizwe pelted them with stones and half bricks and Raleigh led a small group of the bolder ones who ran out into the street and turned one of the stranded ambulances on its side, and when the petrol poured from the tank, Raleigh lit a match and tossed it on to the spread pool.
The explosive ignition singed his eyelashes and burned away the front of his hair, but that evening when they got back to Drake's Farm, Raleigh was the hero of the band of warriors, and they gave him the praise-name of Cheza which means 'the burner'.
As Raleigh was accepted into the middle ranks of the Youth League of the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe, so he gradually understood the cross-currents of power within them and the internal politics of the rival groups of moderates and radicals - those who thought that freedom could be negotiated and those who believed that it must be won with the blade of the spear, those who thought that the treasures so patiently built up over the years - the mines and the factories and the railways - should be preserved and those who believed that it should all be destroyed and rebuilt again in the name of freedom by the pure ones.
Raleigh found himself inclining more and more towards the purists, the hard fighting men, the exclusive Bantu elite, and when he heard the name Poqo for the first time, he thrilled to the sound and sense of it.
It described exactly his own feelings and desires - the pure, the only ones.
He was present in the house in Drake's Farm when Moses Gama spoke to them and promised them that the long wait was almost at an end.
'I will take this land by its heels and set it upon its head." Moses Gama told the group of intense loyal young warriors. 'I will give you a deed, a sign that every man and woman will understand instantly.
It will bring the tribes into the streets in their millions and their rage will be a beautiful thing, so pure and strong that nobody, not even the hard Boers, will be able to resist." Soon Raleigh came to sense in Moses Gama a divinity that set him above all other humans, and he was filled with a religious love for him and a deep and utter commitment. When the news reached Raleigh that Moses Gama had been caught by the white police as he was on the point of blowing up the houses of parliament and destroying all the evil contained in that iniquitous institution, Raleigh was almost prostrated by his grief, and yet set on fire by Moses Gama's courage and example.
Over the weeks and months that followed, Raleigh was exasperated and angered by the calls for moderation from the high councils of the ANC, and by the dispirited and meek acceptance of Moses Gama's imprisonment and trial. He wanted to vent his wrath upon the world, and when the Pan Africanist Congress broke away from the ANC Raleigh followed where his heart led.
Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress, sent for him. 'I have heard good words of you,' he told Raleigh. 'And I know the man who is your uncle, the father of us all who languishes in the white man's prison. It is our duty - for we are the pure ones to bring our message to every black man in the land. There is much work to do, and this is the task I have set for you alone, Raleigh Tabaka." He led Raleigh to a large-scale map of the Transvaal. 'This area has been left untouched by the ANC." He placed his hand over the sweep of townships and coalfields and industry around the town of Vereeniging. 'This is where I want you to begin the work." Within a week Raleigh had conditioned his father to the idea that he should move to the Vereeniging area to take charge of the family interests there, the three stores in Evaton and the butchery and bakery in Sharpeville, and his father liked the idea the more he thought about it, and he agreed.
'I will give you the names of the men who command the Buffaloes down there. We can begin moving the shebeens into the Sharpeville area. So far we have not put our cattle to graze on those pastures, and the grass there is tall and green." Raleigh moved slowly at first. He was a stranger in Sharpeville and he had to consolidate his position. However, he was a strong and comely young man, and he spoke fluently all the major languages of the townships. This was not an unusual achievement, there were many who spoke all the four related languages of the Nguni group of peoples, the Zulus, the Xhosas, the Swazi and the Ndebele, which make up almost seventy percent of the black tribes of South Africa and whose speech is characterized by elaborate clicking and clucking sounds.
Many others, like Raleigh, were also conversant with the other two languages which are spoken by almost the entire remainder of the black population, the Sotho and the Tswana.
Language was no barrier, and Raleigh had the additional advantage of being placed in charge of his father's business interest in the area, and therefore was accorded almost immediate recognition and respect. Sooner or later every single resident of Sharpeville would come to either Tabaka's bakery or butcher shop and be impressed by the articulate and sympathetic young man who listened to their worries and troubles and extended them credit to buy the white bread and fizzy drinks and tobacco; these were the staple diet of the townships where much of the old way of life was abandoned and forgotten, where the soured milk and maize meal were difficult to procure and where rickets made the children lethargic, bent their bones and turned their hair fine and wispy and dyed a peculiar bronze colour.
They told Raleigh their little troubles, like the cost of renting the township houses and the hardship of commuting such distances to their place of work that it was necessary to rise long before the sun.
And then they told Raleigh their greater worries, of being evicted from their homes and of the harassment by the police who were always raiding for liquor and pass offences and prostitution and to enforce the influx control laws. But always it came down to the passes, the little booklets that ruled their lives. The police always were there to ask 'Where is your pass? Show me your pass book." The dornpas, they called them, 'the damned pass', in which were stamped all their details of birth and residence and right to reside; no black person could get a job unless he or she produced the damned pass book.
From all the people who came to the shops, Raleigh chose the young vital ones, the brave ones with rage in their hearts, and they met discreetly at first in the storeroom at the back of the bakery, sitting on the bread baskets and the piles of flour bags, talking the night through.
Then they moved more openly, speaking to the older people and the children in the schools, going about as disciples to teach and explain.
Raleigh used the funds of the butchery to buy a secondhand duplicator, and he typed the pamphlets on the pink wax sheets and r/n them' off.on the machine.
They were crude little pamphlets, with botchy typing errors and obvious corrections and each one began with the salutation, 'This is /'we of which it is said--' and ended with the stern injunction, 'P, qe has said this thing. Hear it and obey it." The young men whom Raleigh had recruited distributed these and read them to those who could not read for themselves.
At first Raleigh allowed only men to come to the meetings in the back room of the bakery store, for they were purists and it was the traditional role of the men to herd the cattle and hunt the game and defend the tribe, while the women thatched the huts and tilled the earth for maize and sorghum and carried the children on their backs.
Then the word was passed down from the high command of Peqt and PAC that the women were also part of the struggle. So Raleigh spoke with his young men and one evening a girl came to their Friday-night meeting in the bakery storeroom.
She was a Xhosa and she was tall and strong with beautiful swelling buttocks and the round sweet face like one of the wild veld flowers.
While Raleigh spoke she listened silently. She did not move or fidget or interrupt and her huge dark eyes never left Raleigh's face.
Raleigh fe
lt that he was inspired that night, and though he never looked directly at the girl and seemed to address himself to the young warriors, it was to her he spoke and his voice was deep and sure and his own words reverberated in his skull and he listened to them with the same wonder as the others did.
When he finished speaking at last, they all sat in silence for a long time and then one of the young men turned to the girl and said, 'Amelia --' that was the first time ever that Raleigh heard her name, 'Amelia, will you sing for us?" She did not simper or hang her head or make modest protestations.
She simply opened her mouth, and sound poured out of her, glorious sound that made the skin on Raleigh's forearms and at the back of his neck tingle.
He watched her mouth while she sang. Her lips were soft and broad, shaped like two leaves of the wild peach tree, with a dark iridescence that shaded to soft pink on the inside of her mouth, and when she reached for an impossibly sweet high note, he saw that her teeth were perfect white as bone that had lain for a season in the veld, polished by the wind and bleached by the African sun.
The words of the song were strange to him, but like the voice that sang them, they thrilled Raleigh: 'When the roll of heroes is called, Will my name be on it?
I dream of that day when ! will Sit with Moses Gama, And we will talk of the passing of the Boers." She went away with the young men who had brought her, and that night Raleigh dreamed of her. She stood beside the pool in the great Fish river in which he had washed away the white clay paint of his childhood and she wore the short beaded kilt and her breasts and her legs were bare. Her legs were long and her breasts were round and hard as black marble and she smiled at him with those even white teeth, and when Raleigh awoke his seed was splashed upon the blanket which covered him.
Three days later she came to the bakery to buy bread and Raleigh saw her through the peephole above his desk through which he could watch all that was happening in the ant of the store and he went through to the counter and greeted her gravely. 'I see you, Amelia." She smiled at him and replied, 'I see you also, Raleigh Tabaka,' and it seemed that she sang his name, for she gave it a music that he had never heard in it before.
She purchased two loaves of white bread, but Raleigh lingered over the sale, wrapping each loaf carefully and counting the pennies of her change as though they were gold sovereigns.
'What is your full name?" he asked her.
'I am called Amelia Sigela." 'Where is your father's kraal, Amelia Sigela?" 'My father is dead, and I live with my father's sister." She was a teacher at the Sharpeville primary school and she was twenty years old. When she left with her bread wrapped in newspaper and her buttocks swinging and jostling each other beneath the yellow European-style skirt, Raleigh returned to his desk in the cubicle of his office and sat for a long time staring at the wall.
On Friday Amelia Sigela came again to the meeting in the back room of the bakery and at the end she sang for them once more.
This time Raleigh knew the words and he sang with her. He had a good deep baritone but she gilded it and wreathed it in the glory of her startling soprano and when the meeting broke up, Raleigh walked back with her through the dark streets to her aunt's house in the avenue beyond the school.
They lingered at the door and he touched her arm. It was warm and silky beneath his fingers. On the Sunday when he took the train back to Drake's Farm to make his weekly report to his father, he told his mother about Amelia Sigela and the two of them went through to the sacred room where his mother kept the family gods.
His mother sacrificed a black chicken and spoke to the carved idols, particularly ro the totem of Raleigh's maternal great-grandfather, and he replied in a voice that only Raleigh's mother could hear. She listened gravely, nodding at what he said, and later while they ate the sacrificial chicken with rice and herbs, she promised, 'I will speak to your father on your behalf." The following Friday after the meeting, Raleigh walked home with Amelia again, but this time as they passed the school where she taught, he drew her into the shadow of the buildings and they stood against the wall very close together. She made no attempt to pull away when he stroked her cheek, so he told her: 'My father is sending an emissary to your aunt to agree a marriage price." Amelia was silent and he went on, 'However, I will ask him not to do so, if you do not wish it." 'I wish it very much,' she whispered, and slowly and voluptuously she rubbed herself against him like a cat.
The lobola, the marriage price, was twenty head of cattle, worth a great deal of money, and Hendrick Tabaka told his son, 'You must work for it, just like other young men are forced to do." It would take Raleigh three years to accumulate enough to buy the cattle, but when he told Amelia, she smiled and told him, 'Each day will make me want you more. Think then how great will be my want after three years, and think how sweet will be that moment when the wanting is assuaged." Every afternoon, when school was out, Amelia came to the bakery and quite naturally she took to working behind the counter selling the bread and the round brown buns. Then when Raleigh closed the shop, she cooked his evening meal for him and when he had eaten, they walked back to her aunt's house together.
Amelia slept in a tiny room hardly bigger than a closet, across the passage from her aunt. They left the interleading doors open and Raleigh lay on Amelia's bed with her and under the blanket they played the sweet games that custom and tribal law sanctioned all engaged couples to play. Raleigh was allowed to explore delicately and with his fingertips hunt for the little pink bud of flesh hidden between soft furry lips that old Ndlame had told him about at initiation camp. The Xhosa girls are not circumcised like the women of some of the other tribes, but they are taught the arts of pleasing men, and when he could stand it no longer, she took him and held him between her crossed thighs, avoiding only the final penetration that was reserved by tribal lore for their wedding night, and skilfully she milked him of his seed.
Strangely, it seemed that every time she did this, rather than depleting him, she replenished the well of his love for her until it was overflowing.
Then the time came when Raleigh judged it expedient to begin infiltrating the Buffaloes into the township. With Hendrick Tabaka's blessing and under Raleigh's supervision, they opened their first shebeen in a cottage at the far end of the township, hard up against the boundary fence.
The shebeen was run by two of the Buffaloes from Drake's Farm who had done this type of work for Hendrick Tabaka before. They knew all the little tricks like adulterating the liquor to make it go further and having one or two girls in the back room for the men that liquor had made amorous.
However, Raleigh warned them about the local police force who had an ugly reputation, and about one of the white officers in particular, a man with pale predatory eyes that had given him his nickname 'Ngwi' the leopard. He was a hard cruel man who had shot to death four men in the time he had been in Sharpeville, two of them members of the Buffaloes who had been supplying the township with dagga.
At first they were cautious and wary, vetting their customers carefully and placing lookouts on all approaches to the shebeen, but then as the weeks passed, with business improving each night, they relaxed a little. There was very little competition. Other shebeens had been closed down swiftly, and the customers were so thirsty that the Buffaloes could charge three and four times the usual rate.
Raleigh brought the liquor stocks into the township in his little blue Ford pick-up, the crates hidden beneath sacks of flour and sheep carcasses. He spent as little time as possible at the shebeen, for every minute was dangerous. He would drop off the supplies, collect the empty bottles and the cash and be gone within a half an hour. He never drove the pick-up directly to the front door of the cottage, but parked it in the dark veld beyond the boundary fence and the two Buffaloes would come through the hole in the wire mesh and help him carry the crates of cheap brandy.
After a while Raleigh realized that the shebeen offered another good distribution point for the Poqo pamphlets that he printed on the duplicator. He us
ually kept a stock of these in the cottage and the two Buffaloes who ran the shebeen and the girls who worked in the back room had orders to give one to each of their customers.
In early March, not long after the glad tidings of Moses Gama's reprieve and the mitigation-of his death sentence to life imprisonment;-Sobukwe-sent for--Raleigh_-The-rendezvous was in a house in the vast black township of Soweto. It was not one of the boxlike flat-roofed cottages, but was rather a large modern bungalow situated in the elite section of the township known as 'Beverly Hills'.
It had a tiled roof, its own swimming-pool, garaging for two vehicles and large plate-glass windows overlooking the pool.
When Raleigh arrived in the blue pick-up, he found that he was not the only invited guest and there were a dozen or so other vehicles parked along the kerb. Sobukwe had invited all his middle-ranking field officers to this briefing and over forty of them crowded into the sitting-room of the bungalow.
'Comrades,' Sobukwe addressed them. 'We are ready to flex our muscles. You have worked hard and it is time to gather in some of the fruits of your labours. In all the places where the Pan Africanist Congress is strong - not only here on the Witwatersrand but across the country - we are going to make the white police fear our power.
We are going to hold a mass protest demonstration against the pass laws --' Listening to Sobukwe speak, Raleigh was reminded of the power and personality of his own imprisbned uncle, Moses Gama, and he was proud to be part of this magnificent company. As Sobukwe unfolded his plans Raleigh made a silent but fervent resolution that at Sharpeville, the area for which he was responsible, the demonstration would be impressive and solid.
