The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘I can’t believe they’re going to knock it down,’ Barney Patel said as the bulldozers revved their engines.

  ‘The paper said they start today.’

  ‘But all the people living there?’

  ‘Out in the country. To the new settlements.’

  ‘You mean they’ll have to travel all those miles?’

  ‘That’s not the government’s problem [he pronounced it gommint]. Out they go. Gommint says they shouldn’t have been here in the first place.’

  A bell started ringing in a Protestant church right in the middle of the slum area, and continued for some minutes until a policeman hurried through the crowd to silence it. ‘They don’t want any trouble,’ Patel said. ‘They’ve banned meetings of more than twelve people.’

  ‘They won’t have any trouble,’ Desai said. ‘Look at the police.’

  To deal with the first one hundred and fifty families ordered to abandon the homes they owned, the government had brought in two thousand policemen armed with Sten guns and assegais, backed by troop carriers, signal units and squads of military police.

  When the bulldozers were ready, two men to each machine, a Resettlement Board official gave the signal, and the powerful scrapers moved forward, their blades lowered, their snouts hungry.

  ‘I just don’t believe this,’ Patel said, his throat suddenly dry.

  ‘Look!’ the older man said, and they watched as the monstrous machines ripped a path through a group of shacks. A single bulldozer would wipe out an entire house, but this was no great accomplishment, for that one had been cardboard and planks.

  ‘Look over there!’ Desai cried, and as he pointed, a bulldozer chewed its way into a substantial home of wood and brick.

  ‘That house must have been worth …’ Patel did not finish his sentence, for the bulldozer, having attacked something it could not easily subdue, hung in the air for a moment, then slid sideways, endangering the driver but not upsetting. Angrily it backed up, sped its engine and tore back into the house, which collapsed in a cloud of dust.

  ‘Look at the people!’ Desai said softly, and the two Indians turned to the south where large groups of blacks gathered silently to watch the demolition, mindful of what was in store for them. They stood with anguish on their dark faces, their hands clenched, powerless to obstruct either the bulldozers or the officials who directed them. This black spot could not be tolerated by whites in neighboring Mayfair; it must be cleansed of its vermin and converted to higher purposes.

  ‘There come the trucks,’ Patel said as a line of vehicles moved in to carry away the residents, and while the ‘dozers knocked down the unwanted houses, the trucks carted off the unwanted people, free of charge, as the letter had promised.

  There were, of course, those few blacks who refused to quit their homes; these were routed out by the police but no harm was done them. From one house near where Patel and Desai stood, a team of soldiers carried away an old man who had stubbornly refused to budge. ‘Come on, old grandpop, we’re in a hurry!’ the soldiers said in Afrikaans (‘Kom, Oubaas, ons is haastig’). Almost gently they bore him to a waiting truck and sat him down among the others, and he was scarcely seated before a bulldozer eliminated the house in which his children and grandchildren had been born.

  The two Indians remained on their prominence most of the morning, gripped by the drama of this vast removal and weighing the possibility that they might be next. ‘Do you think they’ll really knock down our houses?’ Patel asked as the bulldozers ate into Sophiatown.

  ‘Gommint policy,’ Desai said. ‘All Indians to get out of Johannesburg.’

  ‘You think they’ll move us miles out in the country, like they say?’

  ‘Look, Barney. Mukerjee told me yesterday the surveyors were out there, laying out streets.’

  ‘Who can believe Mukerjee?’

  ‘Well, he kept warning us that one day Sophiatown would be knocked down. Then I laughed. Today I believe.’

  ‘But blacks are different from Indians. There are so many of them. So few of us.’

  ‘Numbers mean nothing to apartheid. It’s only interested in color. Today it hates this black spot. Tomorrow it’ll be a brown spot, and off we go.’

  ‘But Kruger’s gommint gave us the land we have. I own my land.’

  ‘Yes, they put us there for what they called “sanitary” reasons. Today their grandsons will kick us out for economic reasons. Believe me, Barney, the bulldozers will come down our streets, too.’

  They stood in silence, watching the destruction, marking the exodus of black families, and as they knew themselves to be powerless to protest this brutal maneuver, they thought back upon their own curious history in this fertile land.

  Woodrow Desai’s grandfather had been one of the three Desai brothers shipped to the sugar fields by Sir Richard Saltwood. When their contracts had been worked out, they had stayed on and were soon joined by ‘passenger Indians’ like the Patels, who had paid their own way to serve the rapidly growing community as shopkeepers and traders.

  The Indian immigrants settled mostly in Natal, near the port of Durban, and there they proliferated: Patels, Desais, Mukerjees, Bannarjees. Unlike the Dutch before them and the Chinese, the Indian men would have nothing to do with black women, or white either, for that matter. They remained strictly aloof, and in the first forty years of their work in mine and field, few Indians married persons of another race. Woodrow’s father and others moved to the Transvaal, and in the smallest towns they opened shops to which all customers were invited, but in their homes they kept to themselves, with their dishes of ghee and lamb and rice and curry. They were clean, usually law-abiding, and the other people of South Africa hated them.

  ‘Without the little one,’ Patel reflected, ‘Indians would have been in even worse shape.’

  The little one was a skinny lawyer with a high whining voice who emigrated to Durban in 1893. His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, intelligent enough to have made a good life for himself in South Africa had he been free to operate there. Indeed, when he arrived at age twenty-four he intended to remain, but the disadvantages which Indians suffered so irritated him that he found himself constantly at war with the authorities.

  ‘He was a fighter,’ Desai mumbled, recalling this contentious man who had defied the entire white establishment.

  ‘And clever too,’ Patel said admiringly. ‘When the Boer War was at its worst, what does he do? Organizes an Indian ambulance corps. Helps the English, even though they’ve been harrying him. Very brave, you know.’ He chuckled to think of little Gandhi issuing orders to the white government.

  ‘My father knew him well,’ Desai said. ‘But Father was much like me. Never wanted trouble. So when Gandhi started sending letters to General Smuts, like he was head of an Indian gommint, my father warned him: “You watch out, Mohandas. Gommint’s going to throw you in jail.” That was when he invented Satyagraha, right here in South Africa.’

  ‘If he were watching this disgrace now, he’d do the same for the blacks as he did for us. Peaceful resistance. Just lie down in front of the bulldozers.’

  ‘The bulldozers in India were British. They stopped. These are Afrikaner bulldozers and I don’t think they’d stop. Not even for Gandhi.’

  ‘I love him,’ Patel said. ‘Not for what he did in India. For what he did here.’ He paused and shook his head. ‘I often wonder what might have happened if he’d stayed in Durban. To help our people.’

  ‘He’d have been shot. I don’t think Afrikaners understand Satyagraha.’

  The mention of shooting saddened the two Indians, for the Desai and Patel families back in Natal had suffered grievously when the Zulu, infuriated by government laws restricting them, had taken vengeance not on the whites who had passed the laws but on the Indians with whom they traded daily. For three days the tall Zulu had chased little Indians through the streets, slashing and killing, while some whites even looked on with approval, shouting at times, ‘Kill ’em, Zulu!’ Mo
re than fifty Indians were slain; more than seven hundred required medical attention. It was a different South Africa after that, with many whites muttering that it would have been better if the Zulu had been allowed a free hand to settle the Indian Question once and for all.

  Desai, who had lost an uncle in the riots, smiled sardonically. ‘Well, we had a chance to get out. Remember when gommint provided boat fare and leaving funds so that every Indian could go back to India? I think three old men accepted. Wanted to be buried in their native villages. The rest …’

  ‘My father told me,’ Patel said, ‘that any Indian who left South Africa for India could be certified insane. This was so much better than what he had known …’

  As the sun approached its zenith, and the blacks’ houses crumbled to dust, the two Indians went soberly home to Pageview, where they stood at an intersection and stared at the rows of houses and shops occupied by their compatriots; Indians always preferred living in tight communities for mutual protection. ‘Do you think they’d dare knock all this down?’ Patel asked nervously. ‘Five thousand people. Homes, businesses. Insurance told me ten million pounds, at least.’

  Before he could answer, Cassem Mukerjee came running. He was a small nervous man, much like Gandhi in appearance, and he spoke with that agitated enthusiasm some men display when circulating bad news: ‘My cousin Morarji saw the papers at his office. They’re going to bulldoze this place, too. All our houses are to go. And they’ll take our shops too.’

  Barney Patel did not like Mukerjee, and now he shook him. ‘You stop that rumoring! Your cousin knows nothing.’

  ‘He knew they were going to bulldoze Sophiatown,’ the little man said, almost gleefully. ‘Are the houses gone?’

  ‘It’ll take years,’ Patel snorted, but Desai wanted to know about the supposed papers: ‘Did Morarji actually see anything?’

  ‘The orders have been drafted. All Indians to be cleaned out of Johannesburg.’

  ‘My God!’ Desai said, and he leaned against the wall of a solidly built brick house, and as he stood there, sick in the sunlight, he could see the dust of the future, and thought:

  They will move the bulldozers here, and these houses of warmth and love will go down. The stone ones like mine and Barney’s, they won’t destroy them, but we’ll be forced to sell at government price—twenty cents in the rand. The school where my children went will be razed, and all the little houses where the old people expected to live until they died. Our stores on Fourteenth Street … My God, I worked so hard.

  And we’ll be moved far out into the country. Miles, miles from all our friends, all our customers. There’ll be new houses at prices people can’t afford, and new stores with no customers, and hours on the train each day, and all our money wasted on transportation we don’t really need. And we’ll be off to one side where no one can see us, and the streets we once knew will have vanished—and for what great purpose?

  Woodrow Desai decided that night to form a committee to visit Pretoria for a serious talk with the government official whose office was responsible for planning the future of the Indian community. He took Barney Patel with him, but not Morarji Mukerjee, who was something of an alarmist. Patiently they explained the folly of such an evacuation, pointing out that it would accomplish not one single economic advantage, but the official assigned the task of dealing with them cut them off: ‘We aren’t really talking about economics, are we? We’re talking about instilling some order in the community. Each group secure in its own place.’

  ‘But if you put all of us in this so-called Lenasia so far out into the country …’

  ‘That’s for your protection. All the Indians in one spot.’

  ‘But so far out. We’ll waste hours and rand every day.’

  ‘My dear friends,’ the official, a Natal-born Englishman, said with warmth but also with a certain stiffness, ‘our country has no finer citizens than you Indians. We wouldn’t dream of doing anything to your disadvantage. But we must bring order into our lives. Pageview is intended for whites. Look at the map!’ And he showed them how where they lived and traded intruded into areas that could better be used for whites.

  ‘And you can have nice new shops out there,’ he assured them, waving his hand in some vague direction. ‘You’ll like it better when it happens.’ He paused. ‘We’re doing this for your own good,’ he said. And before they could reply they were out on the street.

  ‘I wish Mohandas Gandhi were here again,’ Patel growled. ‘He’d know how to stop this.’

  AT WORK

  The Golden Reef Mines southwest of Johannesburg needed a constant supply of black workers to man the deepest shafts where blasting of the face rock occurred. From all over southern Africa planes and trains and buses brought almost illiterate black men to the compounds within which they would live for the six to eighteen months of their contract. Critics of the labor system likened these compounds to harsh prisons in which the blacks were incarcerated; management spoke of them as well-run dormitories in which the laborers lived infinitely better than they did at home.

  There was one clue to the truth of these contrasting claims: black men in the bush of Moçambique, Malawi, Rhodesia, Lesotho and Vwarda fought for a chance to work at the Golden Reef, and for good reason. Though the wage was trivial, it was much more than they could get in their home villages; the food was better; there was more of it; beds were covered with good blankets; and doctors provided health care. Black nationalists in surrounding countries would publicly inveigh against South Africa but privately see to it that planes which came flying into their airstrips were loaded with workers, for only in this way could some of the economies be kept afloat. Black families also encouraged their men to fly to the Golden Reef for the sensible reason that a good percentage of a man’s wages was paid only when he returned home, and his wife and children could temporarily escape their poverty.

  When blacks from thirty or forty different tribes, speaking radically different languages and dialects, had to work together, it was necessary to construct some simple language they could all understand. Fanakalo was the ingenious solution. The word came from pidgin Zulu and meant roughly ‘do it like this,’ and the lingua franca it represented was a marvelous mélange of Bantu, English, Afrikaans and Portuguese. It consisted mostly of nouns, with a few essential verbs, some profanity for adjectival emphasis and a great many gestures. One linguist who tried to analyze it said, ‘You don’t speak Fanakalo. You dance it while shouting.’

  Few things in the world worked better, for a tribesman could master simple instructions in three days: ‘This here wrench, fanakalo.’ (You do it like this.) And once learned, it served as a magical passkey to all the levels of the mine, so that a man from Malawi speaking a unique dialect could work deep in the shaft beside one from Vwarda speaking his. One white supervisor asked an associate what the workers on his shift meant when they referred to ‘Idonki ngo football jersey,’ and the second man said, ‘Simple. They meant zebra.’

  A miner could renew his contract again and again, but it was found better to have him return home after a long stint in the mines, see his family back in his home village, and return rested up. These returnees usually spoke well of the Golden Reef, especially the food. Once when Vwarda’s representative at the United Nations was addressing the Security Council and asking for sanctions against South Africa, the government was filling six planes with Vwarda men who wanted to get back to work.

  Not all the black mine hands came from foreign countries; the Golden Reef, along with sister mines, maintained a vast network of some forty recruiters who were engaged only in the enlisting of South African blacks, who comprised a third of the mines’ work force. One such recruiter came to Venloo, set up his table, and counseled with young blacks from that area. Since jobs were scarce, he was able to sign up a score of workers, among them Jonathan Nxumalo, oldest son of Moses, who had been so long associated with the Van Doorns.

  Jonathan was a bright lad of twenty, eager to see someth
ing more of the world than the restricted view available to a farm hand at Vrymeer, but as soon as he passed through into the Golden Reef compound, where five thousand other black men lived, sixteen to a room, he heard the gates slam behind him—and realized that he had gained not freedom but a new kind of restriction. To learn Fanakalo became essential.

  It took the white overseers only a few weeks to promote Jonathan as the best of this gang, and they designated him to work at the face, more than ten thousand feet down the rocky shaft. This paid more money, but it demanded more intense work in a constant temperature of 114° F. Water to cool the body and salt to protect it became almost as important as the gigantic jackhammer drill Jonathan handled, and when the long shift ended and the men from below shot up in the elevator they had the self-satisfaction of knowing that they had completed one of the world’s hardest jobs.

  White men shared the heat and the danger. No black was ever assigned a job more treacherous than what the white overseer was willing to do, so that a kind of camaraderie developed among the teams, with each white boss settling upon one or two superior blacks on whom he could rely. Jonathan became an aide to Roger Coetzee, an ambitious Afrikaner who loved the mines and would one day become the big boss.

  Jonathan’s job was an exciting one. At the start of each shift he entered the cage with the rest of his gang, bolted the doors, and dropped a sickening ten thousand feet straight down. Occasionally some visitor from Johannesburg or overseas would want to inspect how the men worked, and then the cage was lowered at a much slower rate, which irritated Nxumalo, for he had grown to like that awful drop; it was a badge of his profession. He could take it, whereas a stranger could not.