The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘What we must have in this country,’ he cried with expanding excitement, ‘is a system of order. Indians, Coloureds, blacks, all in their proper place, all obedient to the wise laws we pass. And I don’t want Englishmen passing them, either. I want Afrikaners in all positions of decision.’ When Detlev heard these words he realized that Mr. Krause, starting from his own experiences, had discovered the principle which he, Detlev, had seen in the glass of jellies. They both believed in discipline and the ascendancy of the Afrikaner Volk.

  ‘What was that?’ General de Groot asked when Detlev first used the phrase in the kitchen.

  ‘Mr. Krause uses it all the time. It means the People, the secret force of the Race that makes us different from the English or the Kaffir.’

  ‘I like that word,’ De Groot said, and soon he was speaking about the mission of the Afrikaner Volk.

  Detlev was not surprised when at the end of only five weeks Mr. Krause came nervously to the kitchen to inform the men: ‘Johanna and I seek to marry. I know she’s four years older, but we love each other. We have work to do, and I ask your permission.’ It was granted—by the general, by her father, and most enthusiastically by her brother.

  The wedding ceremony was performed by a newcomer to the community, a man who added much to the quality of Venloo. He was the Reverend Barend Brongersma, a graduate of Stellenbosch, the prestigious university of the Cape, and a most excellent young man. He was thirty-one when he took over the Venloo church, tallish, well proportioned, with very black hair and deep-set eyes to match. His outstanding characteristic was a resonant voice which he had carefully cultivated so that it could range downward from a high, impassioned plea to a thundering middle accusation to a solid reassuring affirmation. It was obvious, when one heard him preach, that he gave much thought to his sermons and that he was a young man who would surely go far in the management of the South African church. He spoke with great conviction, outlining his arguments so that anyone could follow, and buttressing them so firmly that everyone had to agree. He was as fine a predikant as the Dutch Reformed Church offered in this period, and his stay in Venloo would be limited, for he would be needed in some larger community.

  He was married to a woman much like himself: solid good looks, eager, a winning smile, and unafraid to say what she thought. They made an impressive couple, and the three men at Vrymeer were pleased to have them in Venloo.

  It was customary now to speak of three men at the farm, because Detlev was growing into such a hefty young fellow that he was assigned a position in the forward line at rugby, where his weight and more than ordinary strength would prove an advantage. Several times his father had said, ‘Detlev, you’re built just like your grandfather Tjaart. He was a strong man.’ There had been a photograph of the old man, with belt and suspenders, tight-trimmed beard from ear to chin, flat black hat, staring straight ahead; it had gone in the flames, but Detlev could remember it and hoped that one day he would look the same.

  Venloo had now fallen solidly into place as the prototype of a small Afrikaner community: it had in General de Groot its hero of past wars; in Piet Krause, a fiery teacher who wanted to remold the world; in Dominee Brongersma, a charismatic predikant who could both instruct and censure; and in Detlev van Doorn, the typical young lad of promise. At times it seemed that all the forces of this community conspired to make this boy more intelligent, more dedicated.

  At the moment his brother-in-law, Piet Krause, had the greatest influence, for Detlev tended to see society through this vibrant young man’s eyes. Once, coming over the hill, Piet stopped their carriage, looked ahead at the broken farm occupied by General de Groot, and began to rant: ‘Never forget that scene, Detlev! A man who led us in battle living like the swine, forgotten, unloved, a castaway.’

  ‘He wants to live that way,’ Detlev explained. ‘Every year Father asks him to move in with us. He says he likes the old place, the old ways.’

  ‘But look at him, a great hero forgotten.’ When the teacher spoke like this to De Groot, the old man laughed. ‘Detlev’s right. I like it this way. You should have seen how we lived on the trek.’ He told of his family on that last evening when he elected to stay with the Van Doorns, and thus escaped being killed by Mzilikazi’s men. ‘Halt the wagon. Spread some blankets. Draw a canvas out from the wagon. Three poles to form a kind of tent. Go to sleep, and have your throats cut before morning. That’s how we lived.’

  ‘General,’ Krause said with brimming emotion, ‘Johanna and I want you to come in town and live with us.’

  ‘Oh, no! You two would be arguing with me all the time. I’m happy where I am. If I get hungry, I come over to Jakob, here.’

  The Vrymeer farm, with no white woman in attendance now that Johanna was married, faced problems which were solved when Micah Nxumalo and two of his wives moved back from the old general’s place. This did not leave De Groot bereft, for two younger black women looked after him. Five rondavels existed again at Vrymeer, looking much as they had for the past fifty years, and they were occupied by some twenty blacks, half of whom had drifted up from Zululand. They worked at the farm, but it was Nxumalo who remained in charge.

  With Van Doorn’s encouragement he had patiently coaxed a herd of blesbok, more than sixty of them, to lodge permanently beside the three lakes. A stranger coming to the farm would see these handsome animals, white blazes gleaming in sunlight, and think that they had wandered in from the veld, but as day waned and they stayed fairly close to the house, he would realize that they lived here. How beautiful Vrymeer was, with the blesbok and the fattening Herefords and the eucalypts attaining enough height to form tall hedges, and sunlight falling across the lakes.

  Four or five times a year Van Doorn harvested one or two of the older blesbok, turning the meat over to Nxumalo’s wives for making biltong, and this seemed to help the herd rather than hurt it. Van Doorn usually shot unwanted bucks, but with such care that the other members of the herd scarcely knew that a shot had been fired. Certainly he never stampeded them, for he loved these beasts and felt that they helped tie him and De Groot more tightly to the soil of their ancestors. Nxumalo felt the same.

  Piet Krause saw it as his duty to keep the farm and the town of Venloo at the center of Transvaal activity; he forced everyone to follow with careful attention everything that happened, and was always ready to explain its significance. On the memorable day in 1910 when the four disparate colonies—the English Cape and Natal, the Afrikaner Orange Free State and Transvaal—were united by the Act of Union into one nation, with its own governor-general, prime minister and parliament, Krause exulted: ‘Now boys! Someone in this school may be a future prime minister of a country that is totally free.’ He looked at each of the boys, endeavoring to inspire them, but he was thinking of himself.

  ‘We’re not totally free,’ one bright lad said cautiously. ‘We’re still a union which owes allegiance to the king.’ Seeing his teacher frown, he added, ‘We’re part of the British Empire.’

  ‘Don’t use that word!’ Krause stormed. ‘We have no quarrel with Britain. Do we fight against Scotland or Wales or Ireland? Not at all. Our fight is with England.’ And from then on, his students used only that word.

  ‘Will we always owe allegiance to the king?’ the same boy asked.

  ‘That will change,’ Krause said firmly, but for the moment he was not prepared to explore details. However, on his next visit to the farm, Detlev recalled that brief exchange and asked, ‘Do you think we will break away from England,’ and to his surprise, Krause did not respond, but Johanna did. With a fierceness Detlev had not seen before, she orated: ‘We shall never be free until we do break away. We must have our own flag, our own anthem, our own president, and not some bedamned Englishman like Governor-General Gladstone making believe he’s our king.’ On and on she went, outlining a program whereby the Afrikaners would take over control of the nation, as free men and women: ‘In Pretoria only Afrikaans will be spoken, only Afrikaners will hold positions of powe
r.’

  ‘Will the English allow this?’ Detlev asked.

  ‘We will find ways to make them allow it,’ Johanna said, at which General de Groot applauded.

  ‘There will be ways,’ he agreed, slapping Detlev on the knee. ‘And this young fellow will discover what they are.’

  In private conversations Johanna Krause was always the one who gave fiery direction, but in public, as in any good Afrikaner family, she allowed her husband to take the lead, and one morning in school he excited his pupils by announcing, ‘I want everyone who can do so to bring his parents and his wagon, and we’ll ride up to Waterval-Boven to see a magnificent sight.’ He would not tell them what, but when he insisted that General de Groot come along, the old man predicted: ‘He wants you to see where President Kruger ruled this country in the last days,’ and when they reached that revered spot, De Groot lectured the children: ‘The great man lived on these railroad tracks, in Car Number 17, first up here above the waterfall, then down below in the little house next to the hotel. And you must remember one thing,’ he warned them in a voice quivering with anger, ‘no matter what lies the English newspapers print, Oom Paul Kruger did not run away with half a million pounds in gold. It left Pretoria somehow, but he never took it.’

  It was neither the waterfall nor the lost gold that had attracted Piet Krause. His attention was reserved for the clock, and at three he assembled everyone at the railway station.

  ‘We’re about to witness a glorious moment in our national history,’ he said, and when the train from Pretoria appeared around a bend he and his wife led the children in wild applause, though what they were clapping for, the students did not know.

  Piet had arranged with the stationmaster that the train would halt for six minutes, but when the first three customary carriages drifted slowly past, showing no special passengers, General de Groot told Detlev, ‘I don’t understand.’ But now fifteen roofless cattle trucks creaked to a halt, allowing the amazed schoolchildren to stare into the yellow faces of seven hundred Chinese coolies. They were the last contingent of workers imported from Shanghai in 1904. All were being expelled from the country, and when this train slid down the grade to Moçambique, South Africa would be cleared of this menace.

  ‘Out they go!’ Piet Krause exulted as the wagons stood in the sun. ‘A fearful wrong is being corrected.’

  The Chinese, bewildered when they left Canton years ago, bewildered by their treatment in the mines, and now bewildered by this enforced exodus, looked out impassively at the boys they had never understood and the grownups they had never known. One schoolboy picked up a stone and threw it at the hateful exportees, but Piet Krause halted that: ‘No abuse. Just cheer when the train starts.’ And when it did, and the trucks moved again, everyone applauded, for a heavy burden was being removed from the homeland. ‘Die Volk,’ said Krause, ‘is nou skoon!’ (The Volk has been purified.)

  When the boys returned to their school, Krause said, ‘Our next task is to repatriate all the Indians. Gerrit, what does repatriate mean?’

  ‘To send back a person to where he belongs.’

  ‘That’s right. Every person on earth has a place where he belongs. He should stay there. We’ve sent the Chinese back to China. We must send the Indians back to India. And the English should go back to England. This is the land of the Afrikaner.’

  ‘What about the Kaffirs?’

  ‘They belong here. They’re as much a part of Africa as we are. But they’re inferior. They know nothing. It’s our responsibility to protect them, and explain to them how they must obey our laws. The Kaffirs will always be with us, and we must treat them with respect, but also with firmness.’

  Whenever Detlev heard such preachments he thought of that glass of layered jellies, each color in its proper place, each clearly demarked from the other, and as he recalled that moment of revelation, he remembered the earlier day, when Johanna’s experiment had not worked and she had mixed all the jellies together. That result had been pleasing neither to the eye nor to the taste: It was a jumble without character and I didn’t like it. But when it was done right, look what happened! It was beautiful to see, and when you dipped your spoon in, each layer had its proper taste. The orange was the way orange should be, the lemon on top tasted right, and even the currant on the bottom preserved its real flavor. That’s the way races should be.

  Not long after the disappearance of the Chinese, Piet Krause invited three of his best students to accompany him to an important meeting near Johannesburg: ‘You are to hear the one man in this country who knows what he’s doing.’

  It was General J. B. M. Hertzog, a hero during the Boer War, a brilliant lawyer afterward. He was not overpowering, like old General de Groot, for he was only of medium height and weight. He was a handsome man, with a close-clipped mustache and neatly parted hair. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and a business suit, and spoke softly as he offered a justification of his recent behavior:

  ‘I said that South Africa must be for South Africans, and I make no apology. By South Africans, I mean those persons whether of Dutch or English heritage who have committed their lives to this country, and who do not think fondly of some place else as “home.” [He spoke this word derisively.]

  ‘I said that I wanted my country to be ruled by men who are totally South African at heart, and I make no apology. By this I mean that we should be governed only by men who understand this land and its language, who are working for its welfare and not for the welfare of some empire. [Here there was both applause and boos.]

  ‘I have been accused of wanting to make the Afrikaner baas in this country, and I confess to the charge. I certainly don’t want some newcomer who knows nothing of the land or the language or the religion to be my baas. I want South Africa to be ruled by South Africans.

  ‘I have been accused of not being willing to conciliate, and I confess to that charge also. On what principle should I conciliate, and whom? I have done no man any wrong, others have done me wrong by invading my country, and I await conciliation from them. If conciliation means that Dutch-speaking South Africans must always make concessions to English-speaking South Africans, I say that we are not ripe for conciliation, and I refuse to sacrifice the future of one child of the true South Africa on that altar.

  ‘I have been accused of putting the interests of South Africa ahead of those of the empire, and to this accusation I most gladly plead guilty. I will always place the interests of my country first, for unless we are strong, and good and able to govern ourselves, we shall be no use to the empire or anyone else. [At this Krause and many others applauded.]

  ‘Finally, I have been asked by many in authority to dissociate myself from the striking statement made some months ago by a great hero of our country, General Paulus de Groot of the Venloo Commando. He said, while standing on a pile of manure at his farm, “I would rather be here on this dunghill with my people than in the palaces of empire.” I say the same. This is my country, such as it is. This is the country of those who love South Africa.[Here Krause led wild cheering.] First, foremost and always.’

  Detlev had never before heard such a speech, so rational, so carefully organized, and with such a constant appeal to the crowd’s emotions. ‘He must be the finest mind in South Africa,’ he whispered to Piet Krause when the cheering stopped.

  ‘He is. He will lead us to freedom.’

  ‘What does he think about the Act of Union?’

  ‘What I think. That it should be used intelligently as a weapon to attain our freedom.’

  ‘Does he agree with you about the Kaffirs?’

  ‘Absolutely. South Africa must always be a place of white supremacy.’ Detlev had not heard this phrase before. ‘We shall assume fatherly responsibility for the Kaffirs, who will never be able to govern themselves. But we must rule them, for they are children and we must tell them what to do.’

  In these days, when Piet Krause was promoting such ideas, no one noticed that Micah Nxumalo was sometimes away from Vrymeer f
or the better part of a week. His wives were so capable that they kept things moving forward in his absence, assuring Jakob that their husband was over at General de Groot’s, and telling the latter that he was working the far fields.

  He would actually be on his way to Waterval-Boven to catch a train to Johannesburg, where he ducked down alleys to a ramshackle building. For these trips he wore an old dark suit which Van Doorn had given him, shoes, a white shirt with high collar, a four-in-hand tie and a stiff felt hat made in England. He was in his forties, and except for his good clothes, in no way conspicuous. Of medium height and weight, he looked like any of the blacks who worked in Johannesburg offices.

  The dozen blacks who met with him in secret one night in 1912 looked the same. ‘This is Reverend John Dube,’ a man explained, introducing him to the persuasive chairman of the African National Congress.

  ‘This is Solomon Plaatje. He served with the English forces during the siege of Mafeking.’ Nxumalo nodded toward the famous newspaperman and said, ‘I served with the Boers at Ladysmith.’ Whereupon Plaatje, a small, nervous man, laughed. ‘Two rather ugly affairs.’

  Of the other ten, all men as prominent in black circles as Dube and Plaatje, Micah noticed that each spoke English with beautiful ease and pronunciation. Plaatje, of course, had worked for the London Times, so that his mastery was not remarkable, but it was curious that some of the others had acquired such fluency. Nxumalo had only the most meager vocabulary and felt himself at a disadvantage, but not when the discussions started, for by listening to General de Groot and especially young Piet Krause, he had acquired a solid comprehension of what the new laws signified.