The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘What is Java?’

  ‘It used to control South Africa.’

  ‘Why should he read about that?’

  ‘Because you never know, Mr. Nxumalo, what will ignite a boy’s mind.’ And he handed over a Dutch novel, Max Havelaar, by a man who had been a civil servant in Java in the 1800s; he wrote under the name of Multatuli, Latin for Many Sorrows, and although he spoke only of conditions in Java, everything he said applied to South Africa.

  The five scholarly books Micah brought back to Vrymeer were helpful, but Max Havelaar sharpened the mind of Moses Nxumalo. He was in his twenties when he read it, bewildered by the flood of ideas that had been coming at him from his own observations, the canny wisdom of his father and the lessons from the serious books; the novel tied these scattered concepts together in a way that was almost magical. It was poorly written, really, forcing upon the reader more instruction about plantation life in Java than he needed, but in the end it left a residue of emotion and moral commitment that would otherwise have been unobtainable. After an absence of two hundred years, the power of Java had returned to South Africa.

  When he finished the six books, Moses told his father, ‘I want to try it in Johannesburg.’

  ‘You should,’ his father said. ‘And I suppose you know that the chances are good that you’ll be dead before the end of the year.’

  ‘I’ve heard.’ In Max Havelaar a young Javanese much like Moses had gone to his Johannesburg and died with a belly full of bullets. As in the past, Java was instructing South Africa.

  So in the mid 1930s Moses Nxumalo of Vrymeer went quietly away from the farm and into the city, a journey of ninety-nine miles in physical distance, an incalculable distance spiritually.

  He sought out his cousin, Jefferson Magubane, somewhat older than he was, and found him living in Sophiatown, and on the first night he was there, police came hammering on the rickety door, demanding to see all documents. By a miracle of timing, Jefferson managed to slip Moses into an alley leading to the communal privy, and there he hid while the others presented their papers for inspection. Although his sheltered life at Vrymeer had not prepared him for this indignity, his experiences with Max Havelaar had, and he thought how strange it was that he, whose ancestors had lived on this land for a thousand years, should be restricted by incomers as to where and how he could travel.

  Next morning Jefferson, who had not been distressed by the police visit, for that was a common occurrence, said brightly, ‘Moses, I think we can get you the proper passes.’ And he took his cousin some miles out toward the country to a large suburban house called New Sarum. There, deferentially, he went to the back door and informed the black maid who tended it that he had brought her a first-class houseboy. With nudges and winks he instructed Moses in making proper responses, with the result that a black man was summoned, who led the applicant through the kitchen to a kind of office where a white husband and wife waited. They introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Noel Saltwood, whereupon Mrs. Saltwood, a tall, fine-looking English woman, asked him a series of questions, using English, Afrikaans and Zulu interchangeably.

  ‘Can you read and write?’ she asked. When he nodded, she asked him where he lived; he panicked, not knowing what to say, but she perceived this and said quickly, ‘I know you have no papers. Jefferson told us. We’ll arrange for your passbook.’ She spoke as if she were a conspirator.

  ‘I’m from Vrymeer.’

  ‘I don’t know that. Is it a small place?’

  ‘It’s near Venloo.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The Venloo Commando. Who doesn’t know about that!’ She looked at her husband approvingly, and Moses wondered if he should volunteer further information, but his quandary was solved by Laura Saltwood. ‘Did you know, perchance … No, you’d have been too young. But a very brave man came from Venloo. General de Groot.’

  ‘My father rode with him. I used to live with him.’

  Both the Saltwoods gasped, and they spent the next fifteen minutes asking about his father’s experiences on commando, after which Mrs. Saltwood said, ‘Noel, we really must put someone to the job of compiling the record of the black commandos. On both sides. Their stories must be incredible, and they’ll be lost if we don’t do something.’

  Then she became strictly business: ‘We’ll get you your papers, Moses, but you must work here faithfully, because if you don’t, back you’ll go to the farm. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, Baas.’

  ‘We don’t use baas here. I’m ma’am, he’s mister.’

  His pleasure at the prospect of both a job and the papers to prove it was diminished that night when he sat with Jefferson in the cramped room the Magubanes called home and heard the sound of running feet, then screams, then ugly grunts and more screams.

  When he rose to intercede in whatever was happening, his aunt Mpela raised her hand and stopped him. ‘It’s the tsotsis,’ she said, and before she could lower her hand, there came the long terrible scream of a woman, then the echo of runners retreating.

  In the morning the police came, tardily, indifferently: ‘Another Three Star killing.’ They ordered a cart to haul the corpse away, and after they had departed and Moses had inspected the blood, he asked what a Three Star killing was.

  ‘The tsotsis carry knives made in England. Three stars on the handle.’

  ‘How do I avoid them?’ Moses asked.

  ‘Play the coward. They run in gangs, and if you see them coming, get out. Do anything—hide, run, stand behind a woman—but get out of their way.’

  ‘Don’t the police …’

  ‘The police say, “The tsotsis do our work for us.” You see, Moses, they kill only Bantu.’

  ‘Does this happen often?’

  ‘All the time,’ Jefferson said.

  So whenever Moses detected these youthful murderers, pimps, scavengers, thieves, dagga-peddlers and bullies in the area, he quietly disappeared. He was eager to keep himself safe because of the consuming interest he had in the things that Jefferson was doing: the political meetings, the long discussions with knowledgeable men and women. He was enchanted to find that one black woman, a handsome person older than he, had actually been to America and won a college degree; she was Gloria Mbeke, a bold and forceful speaker, and although he was too shy to approach her directly, he did frequent her discussions, listening attentively as she outlined her principles:

  ‘The one thing we can be certain of is that if we endeavor to confront our oppressors with any kind of force, they will not hesitate to mow us down with their machine guns. That realization must be the foundation of our policy.

  ‘When Enoch Mgijima encouraged his Israelites, following their own interpretation of the Bible, to claim land at Bulhoek, the police warned him once to move them off. They warned him twice, then they opened fire on people who carried not even sticks. One hundred and sixty-three dead, one hundred and twenty-nine wounded for life.

  ‘When a remnant of Hottentots in the deserts of South-West Africa a few years ago wanted to continue hunting while the government wanted them to work on farms at almost no pay, what did the government do? They placed a huge tax on dogs, and when the Hottentots refused to pay, they sent in airplanes that bombed them as they ran across the veld. One hundred and fifteen killed, three hundred wounded for life.

  ‘Our policy must be the policy of Mahatma Gandhi, who originated it when he lived among us. Passive resistance, legal pressure, and the constant education of our young people.’

  At another meeting he heard Miss Mbeke say something which influenced him deeply. She returned to the slaughter of the Israelites at Bulhoek:

  ‘There are two lessons to be learned from this. The white police will never hesitate to shoot us down if they don’t like what we’re doing. But also, we blacks get ourselves into trouble when we listen to messianic leaders. Remember how Nongqause led thousands of Xhosa to commit suicide in 1857? You agree now that that was insane. But how did Enoch Mgijima get his hypnotic hold on his Israelites? W
hen Halley’s Comet passed overhead in 1910, leaving a long trail of star dust, he said it was a message from God to him.

  ‘Do not believe outside messages. Many of the gold miners who were shot down during the strike in Johannesburg had been listening to leaders just like Nongquase and Mgijima, except that their revelations came from Moscow. Communism will not save us in South Africa. The silly teachings of Marcus Garvey in America will not save us. We will save ourselves.’

  Thirty minutes after hearing this constructive speech, as he and Jefferson were drifting home through the alleys of Sophiatown, discussing Miss Mbeke’s theses, they were suddenly attacked by a gang of sixteen tsotsis wielding Three Star knives. ‘Give us your money!’ the tsotsis screamed as if demented, and quickly Jefferson did so, but Moses hesitated, and in that flash of a second, the knives came at him. It was a miracle that he was not killed, for even after he had fallen, horribly cut, the inflamed young men kicked at him viciously, and would surely have finished him off had not Jefferson yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Police! Over here!’ There were no police, but the tsotsis dared not take the risk.

  Many had heard the fracas, but none would help. Behind closed doors they thought: In the morning they’ll come and clean it up. It’s not our affair.

  So Jefferson took his cousin home, where his aunt Mpela was always prepared for such an event. She washed the wounds, borrowing from a neighbor a vial of concentrated iodine, which caused Moses to faint, and when she satisfied herself that no arteries had been cut, she went to bed and advised her son to do the same.

  In the days of his recuperation, Moses had an opportunity to evaluate the experiences which had been cascading down upon him. He saw the farm at Vrymeer as a system whereby white employers were able to control black peasants with wages preposterously low. Essentially good-hearted men like General de Groot had never in their lives considered that what they were enforcing was Old Testament slavery, and had they been advised of this, they would not have understood what was wrong. He saw Detleef van Doorn as doing practically the same thing but from sanctimonious motivations, and he found that he had little regard for his father’s employer. He realized that Van Doorn’s associates might force him at any time to return to the gentle slavery at Vrymeer.

  He was impressed by the generosity of the Saltwoods and hoped that he might be able to continue working for them, but he had little faith that they would stand by him when the confrontations that Miss Mbeke foresaw came to pass. The English were excellent people, but too concerned with pleasing others.

  Sophiatown was no worse in his eyes than Vrededorp: in both places he found strong, honest men fighting to uplift their people and give them hope. Again and again he was struck by this parallel between poor Afrikaners and poor blacks: both groups grappling for roots in an alien city, both sharing poverty and dispossession. He constantly hoped, like old Micah, that blacks and Afrikaners alike would escape their wretchedness. But even as he perceived these relationships he had a terrible fear that what Miss Mbeke said was right: ‘The victory of the poor Afrikaner will be at the expense of the blacks.’

  Of the young black intellectuals he had listened to, he found to his surprise that he valued most not Miss Mbeke, who was so fluent in both speech and idea, but the young Swazi who had been to London and who had studied economics. He talked sense. Again and again he laid out the limits of a problem and indicated how it could be solved. It was he who uttered the sentences that influenced Moses most deeply: ‘In South Africa last year thousands of black men and women were arrested because they moved about with improper documentation in a country which they own as much as the white man.’ And ‘Sometimes it seems that we have more black children in jail than in school.’

  It was not long after he recovered from his stab wounds that the permanent wounding of Moses Nxumalo began. One morning he was stopped by police on Eloff Street, Johannesburg’s glittering shopping avenue, and his documents were demanded: ‘I see you haven’t paid your annual tax of one pound. You must come with me.’

  With sixteen more black tax-dodgers he was hustled into a police van, but he never got to jail. He was taken instead to a vacant lot, where a different policeman snarled, ‘Now, you damned Kaffirs, you listen. Tomorrow you go before the magistrate, he’ll give you jail, three months. You know what it’s like in there.’

  ‘Yes, Baas.’

  ‘But I’m willing to give you a chance.’

  ‘Yes, Baas.’

  ‘That truck you see over there belongs to a farmer from Hemelsdorp. He needs strong men who can work well. You sign a two-month contract with him, I’ll forget about the magistrate, you can forget about jail.’

  Moses and most of the others chose Hemelsdorp, Village of Heaven, but the farm to which they were headed lay not in heaven. For twelve hours a day they toiled in the fields; at night they were thrown into a stinking cattle shed, where they lay awake listening to two of their crew who had pneumonia. One morning the older of the pair was dead.

  At the end of one fearful month Moses tried to run away, but was captured in the hills beyond Hemelsdorp and dragged back to the farm.

  ‘Miserable Kaffir bastard!’ the farmer screamed. ‘Time you learned a lesson.’

  The punishment was administered by two of the black overseers, who stripped Moses and bound him about a forty-four-gallon drum. With the rest of the workers forced to watch, he was thrashed with sjamboks till he fainted.

  Two days later he was sent back to the fields, but on the first night, when others were asleep, he made another dash for freedom. A black overseer spotted him, but before the man could raise an alarm, Moses knocked him to the ground. When the overseer tried to rise, Moses smashed him in the temple with a large rock, then fled.

  For six months he hid in lands along the Limpopo River, then crossed over into Rhodesia, following an ancient route which took him to the Zimbabwe ruins, but he did not tarry there. For two years he worked as kitchen ‘boy’ in a Bulawayo hotel, and he was at his job one day when a man from Vrymeer found him: ‘Your father died last Christmas.’

  Moses waited till the end of the month, took his pay and journeyed south, for he was now head of the Nxumalos, and his place was with his people. He slipped in quietly, said nothing to the Van Doorns, who hadn’t even noticed his absence, but his family saw the scars on his back. Within a few weeks he was the acknowledged boss boy, and any dream of a more meaningful life vanished.

  He said little as he went about his work, but sometimes when he was alone he would look across the veld and swear: ‘If I have a son, he will go to college at Fort Hare, and get started right.’ This hope compensated for the pain he felt at his own failure.

  The Saltwoods made efforts to trace Moses, but when he stayed away for months they supposed that he had merely gone back to his kraal. ‘You can never trust a native,’ a neighbor said. ‘You do everything in the world for a boy like your Moses, and when your back’s turned, he steals you blind. How much did he take?’

  ‘I rather think something terrible happened to him,’ Laura said. ‘He was so willing, so keen to please.’

  ‘No doubt the tsotsis got him.’

  ‘Could be,’ Mrs. Saltwood said, but for a long time she continued to wonder about Moses Nxumalo.

  In the heady atmosphere of Johannesburg, when the grand strategies of the Broederbond showed their initial signs of succeeding, Piet Krause was thinking one day about the opportunities that would present themselves for a patriotic outburst in 1938, the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Blood River, the culminating event of the Great Trek.

  ‘We must think of something,’ he told Johanna as they came home from a meeting of schoolteachers, ‘that will stir up the nation and remind the Afrikaners of their heritage.’ They discussed a master rally at the site of Blood River, but that location was so far removed from major centers of population that only a devoted few would be able to attend. They thought of a celebration at Blauuwkrantz, but since that lay in Natal, which was notorio
usly pro-English, they quickly dropped it.

  In fact, they could think of nothing original, and then one morning Johanna read that a committee of Afrikaners was considering the erection of a massive monument on a hilltop outside Pretoria, a memorial to Blood River and the covenant that was entered into on that sacred day. This excited Piet, and the couple talked of inviting huge numbers of people, even from Cape Town, to the dedication of this proposed monument, and when they saw a sketch of how the building might look—a splendid, blunt affair reminiscent of the structures at Great Zimbabwe—they became positively dedicated to the task of making this a historic affair.

  Johanna said, ‘We must see that all parts of the nation cooperate, all the Afrikaner parts, that is,’ and she began to construct patterns for the celebration. As a woman, she was of course not allowed to participate in the Broederbond, but since her husband talked everything over with her and respected her opinions, it was easy for her to feed her ideas through him. She suggested a convocation of religious leaders from all over the world, but discarded this when Piet pointed out that she would have to invite the Pope and certain rabbis. ‘What we could do,’ she countered, ‘is ask the leaders of the Dutch and German churches to join with us.’

  On and on went the planning, and then one day Piet suggested the best thing of all: ‘What might be a splendid idea—we could see if any of the old ox wagons still existed. There’ll be plenty of oxen. Why not build replicas of the old wagons, we have their dimensions, and have two or three of them travel from Graaff-Reinet to the monument. People could dress in the old style—men could let their beards grow like Piet Retief and Gert Maritz …’

  For two days the Krauses imagined this cavalcade winding north over the old route, and then Johanna proposed a brilliant concept: ‘Piet! Not a cavalcade. Five or six separate wagons. Each starting from a major point. Detouring slowly to every small town en route. And all converging on Pretoria on December 16. Every Afrikaner in the nation would have to be there.’