‘In many ways you are. You ought to pay your blacks high wages, then tax them like hell to provide public services. That’s the path to civilization.’
‘Philip! They’d not be worth a penny more than they’re paid.’
‘Wrong.’ He became quite excited on this point. ‘I’ve worked in three different black nations. With all kinds of black workers. And whenever we had in our cadre a black from South Africa, especially a Zulu or a Xhosa, he was invariably the best in the work force. If blacks with much less experience can rule Moçambique and Vwarda and Zambia, yours could certainly run this country.’ It was a startling statement, which she did not wish to discuss.
The third sad discovery came always at night. They would have had a fine dinner with friends she knew from one past experience or other; the conversation would have been lively, ranging over politics and economics; the food would have been superb and the local wines even better; and then, as they were about to depart, Philip would see on the mantel over the fireplace three handsome photographs of young people Sannie’s age.
‘I didn’t know you had children.’
‘Yes!’ And if the family was of English derivation, or Jewish, or enlightened Afrikaner, either the mother or father would say, ‘That’s Victor, he’s in Australia. Helen is married to a fine young man in Canada. And that’s Freddie, he’s at the London School of Economics.’
They were gone. They were gone to the far continents. They would never return to South Africa, for the pressures were too great, the possibilities too forbidding.
When the young lovers returned from one such trip Mrs. van Doorn asked unobtrusively if she could speak with Philip, and when she had him alone she said forthrightly, ‘You must not lose your heart to Sannie. The Troxel boys will soon be back from the frontier, and then things will be different.’
‘Who are the Troxel boys?’
‘Their families own the old De Groot farm. Their parents, that is.’
‘Those people who live on the far side of the lake?’
‘Yes. Marius’ father brought them here from Johannesburg over fifty years ago. Wonderfully sturdy people.’
‘And they have two young men, Sannie’s age?’
‘Yes. They’re cousins. On military service just now, but they’ll be back, and things will be different.’
‘Sannie’s said nothing.’
‘I think she has, Philip. Didn’t you ask to marry her?’
‘Twice.’
‘Why do you think she hesitated?’
‘Had she some arrangement with one of the boys?’
‘With both, I think. Point is, when they left she hadn’t made up her mind between them. But she will, Philip. She’s Afrikaner to the core and will marry an Afrikaner. Of that I’m convinced.’
‘I’m not,’ he said with laughter that softened the disagreement.
‘Nor should you be. But remember my warning. Don’t take this too seriously, because, I assure you, Sannie doesn’t.’
He was prevented from brooding about his courtship when his obligations at Swartstroom suddenly intensified. His men had come upon a reach where the stream took a pronounced turn to the left, producing a bend where diamonds ought to have been deposited had any ever existed in this territory.
The crew found what it was looking for, two tiny bits of diamond, glistening so pure in sunlight they seemed to create a radiance all the way to Pretoria, Antwerp and New York, where word circulated that ‘Amalgamated Mines may have something at Swartstroom.’ The two tiny fragments were worth about four rand, enough to pay one black worker for one day’s effort, but they had the power to inflame men’s imaginations, for when taken in conjunction with Pik Prinsloo’s earlier find, they confirmed that at some time far distant this little stream had been diamantiferous. Saltwood’s problem was to isolate the ancient source, but so far he could find no signs of it.
A helicopter was flown in to take him aloft so that he might inspect contiguous areas, but this disclosed nothing, and he had to revert to time-tested procedures of following the little stream. He discovered no more diamond chips, but in reality he needed no more. Those he had found proved that somewhere in this vicinity there had been a source of diamonds, and in time he, or someone like him, would uncover it.
So he was kept at the dig and for some weeks found no opportunity to visit with Sannie, but his spare time was not wasted, for an unusual young man came to visit him, and through this accidental meeting he was about to behold rather more of South Africa than the average foreign geologist would ordinarily have seen.
His visitor was Daniel Nxumalo, a black of about Saltwood’s age; he spoke the precise English of one who had been educated in a colonial college by itinerant scholars from Dublin or London, and he was on a curious mission: ‘Mr. Philip Saltwood? I’m Daniel Nxumalo, associate professor—as you would call me in America—at Fort Hare. I was advised to come see you.’
‘By whom?’ Saltwood had the prejudices of a typical Texas engineer: he would hire anyone, but he had an instinctive distrust of any black who spoke in complete sentences.
‘The people in Venloo. They told me you were interested in all things South African.’
‘How would they know?’
‘They’ve seen you in church. They listen.’
‘What was it you wanted?’
‘Because you’ve seen so much of Africa, Mr. Saltwood, I thought it would be courteous if I showed you the real part—our portion, that is.’
With this rather condescending introduction, Daniel Nxumalo, home on vacation from his duties at the university, began to take his American guest to little enclaves in eastern Transvaal occupied by blacks who, like his own predecessors, had fled the Mfecane of King Shaka and Mzilikazi. They had survived for the past century and a half in various settings, some attached to white farms like Vrymeer, some living by themselves in hidden valleys. Quite a few clustered about the environs of rural towns like Carolina and Ermelo, but all had made sensible adjustment, and Philip was surprised at the substantial goods some of them had accumulated.
‘But under the new laws,’ Nxumalo said, ‘we must move ourselves to one of our Bantustans … By the way, ever met any Xhosa?’
‘Had two of them working for me in Vwarda. Spoke with clicks.’
‘In some ways they’re more fortunate than the Zulu; in other ways, not.’
‘I’m amazed to hear a Zulu confess that anyone is better.’
‘I didn’t say better.’ Nxumalo laughed. ‘I said “more fortunate.” ’ When he grinned, his teeth were extremely white and his eyes glistened.
‘Let me guess,’ Saltwood said, for he was growing to like this somewhat cheeky fellow. ‘It’s something the white man did to the Xhosa and you, something very unfair to the Zulu.’
‘You’re perceptive, Mr. Saltwood. The Afrikaners have given the Xhosa a beautiful territory, compact and arable. The Transkei. And next to it another cohesive tract, the Ciskei. In that land the Xhosa have a fighting chance to build something good. But what did they give the Zulu? Fifty, a hundred unconnected fragments of land. They call it kwaZulu, and it’s supposed to be a homeland for all the Zulu. But it’s really a collection of junk. They want us to occupy that broken territory.’
‘In time it’ll coalesce, if the idea’s a good one.’
‘The idea’s bad and the land’s bad, because all the good parts have been preempted by white men.’
‘I should think that could be changed.’
‘You haven’t lived here very long.’ He altered his tone completely. Up to now he had been a college professor, outlining a general problem; now he became a human being, lamenting a wrong done him personally: ‘In pursuit of their policy, Mr. Saltwood, they insist that we Zulu, who have made good lives in places like Vrymeer and Venloo, pick up all we have, leave all our friends and our ways of life, and move off to one of the fragmented sections of their kwaZulu.’
‘I thought you said it was your Bantustan.’
‘W
e don’t want it. It was never our idea.’
‘You’re to be evacuated?’
‘Yes, as if a plague had struck our land. As if locusts had eaten our little fields and we had to move on.’
When Saltwood argued that Nxumalo must be telling only part of the story, the professor agreed, heartily: ‘I am indeed. And the reason I came to see you is that I wondered if you would like to see the other part.’
‘I certainly would.’ Philip Saltwood operated on the principle that governed many young scientists these days as they worked about the world: whether they were American or Russian, Chinese or Australian, they wanted to know what was happening in the lands which employed them at the moment, and often they moved far from their basic tasks, investigating possibilities that at the moment seemed remote but which, at some future date, might become all-important.
With Nxumalo as guide, Philip drove west to Johannesburg, where they toured inconspicuously up and down the handsome main streets of that thriving American-style city. Since it was four in the afternoon, the business areas were jammed with people, and half of them black. They were laborers, and messengers, clerks and minor officials, shoppers and dawdlers, and they could all have been in Detroit or Houston. ‘Look at them,’ Nxumalo said with some pride. ‘They keep the wheels of this city spinning.’
At quarter to five he directed Philip to the area around the central railway station, and in the ensuing hour Saltwood saw something that was so shocking as to be unbelievable: from all parts of central Johannesburg streams of black men and women converged, more than half a million of them crowding to leave the city before sunset, after which it would be unlawful to be there. Like swarms of grasshoppers leaving a ruined field, the workers of Johannesburg hastened to that endless belt of steel that ran perpetually out of the city at sunset and back in at sunrise. It was a movement of people of such magnitude that he knew nothing with which to compare it.
At the end of the hour he thought: When I look at those streams of black people I see all the occupations of a major city. You have street sweepers and young men with briefcases. Sheep butchers and young women who work as doctor’s assistants. There are draymen and junior executives. And they are all being expelled.
‘Are you game to see where they’re going?’ Nxumalo asked, as if he could read Philip’s mind.
‘It’s forbidden, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s against the law for whites, but it can be done.’
It was the kind of challenge a peripatetic geologist often faced: Strangers are not allowed in that temple, it’s sacred to Shiva. Or, You’re not permitted in that corner of Afghanistan, too close to the Russian border.
But always the daring ones went, and now Philip Saltwood was on his way to a clandestine visit to Soweto, a nonexistent city of at least one and a half million black people. South Western Townships was its official title, the first two letters of each word having been taken to form the acronym.
As they drove the twelve miles to it, with trains rushing past in orderly procession, each laden with workers, some clinging to the doors, Nxumalo said, ‘It’s the same problem as the little one we saw at Venloo. The Afrikaners honestly believe that no black people live in their all-white cities. They believe that we work there briefly during daylight hours, then vanish. Soweto up ahead does not exist officially. The million and a half people who live there, fifty percent of them illegally, are not really there. They’re supposed to sleep there temporarily while they work in the city, but if they lose their jobs, they’re obligated to move back to their Bantustans, which most of them have never seen.’
When Philip started to respond to this macabre fairy tale of the city twice as large as Boston that did not exist, Nxumalo grinned and jabbed him in the arm. ‘I’ll wager you didn’t notice the most important fact about that exodus at the railway station.’
‘As a matter of fact, I did. I saw that the crush contained all kinds of workers, from street sweepers to college professors.’
Nxumalo laughed. ‘You failed your examination. The significant fact was that almost everyone carried a package of some kind. You see, because Soweto doesn’t exist, and because it’s seen as only temporary, ephemeral … Well, what’s logical? It has no stores. No real ones, that is. They’re not allowed, because they don’t fit into the white man’s plan. Everything except a few minor commodities must be purchased from white-owned stores in Johannesburg. Soweto is not a city. It’s a dormitory.’
Saltwood’s first impression was arbitrary and in a sense preposterous: ‘Christ! Look at all those churches. I never heard of one of them before.’ At frequent spots in areas that contained nothing but row upon row of uniformly dismal blockhouses, a flagstaff would display a torn ensign indicating that this building was the Church of Zion, or the Church of the Holy Will, or the Xangu Church, or simply the home of a holy man who had direct contact with God.
‘After the beer hall,’ Nxumalo explained, ‘it’s the best racket in Soweto. Maybe four thousand different churches preaching God-knows-what.’ But now they were opposite a huge wire-enclosed shed, devoid of any charm whatever, where hundreds of workingmen sat at long bare tables guzzling weak Kaffir beer. That word was officially outlawed now, and if a white man called a black a Kaffir he could be charged with common assault, but the name for the beer persisted. It was a pernicious drink, strong enough to be expensive, weak enough to prevent a man from becoming dangerously drunk.
‘The beer hall is the greatest anti-revolutionary instrument in Africa,’ Nxumalo said, but even as he spoke, a force of much different character swept past, a gang of tsotsis running to some rendezvous that could involve theft, or rape, or one of the thousand murders each year, fifty percent unsolved because the victims were black.
Out of the vast miasma of this forsaken city, this purgatory that was not hell, for the houses were livable, nor heaven, for there was no ease or hope, Nxumalo led Saltwood to the small dark house that was the focus of this visit. Inside the curtained kitchen sat nine men in a kind of ring, into whose center Philip was thrust: ‘This is my friend, Philip Saltwood, the American geologist who is highly respected by his workmen at Swartstroom. He is completing his education.’ The men acknowledged him briefly, then turned to Nxumalo and started to press him with questions.
‘What do you hear from Jonathan?’ one asked, and Philip had no way of guessing who Jonathan might be.
‘Nothing.’
‘Any news at all from Moçambique?’
‘From this side we know that the frontier patrols are penetrating into Moçambique every week. They must be doing damage.’
‘Is your brother still alive?’
‘I hear nothing from Jonathan.’
Philip judged that Nxumalo hedged on his reply, perhaps because he did not want to say anything incriminating in the presence of a white witness.
They discussed the situation on each of the other frontiers, where apparently they had men from Soweto in position among the rebels, and in no segment of the extensive border did their people seem to be accomplishing much. But when Philip analyzed what actually had been said, he realized that verbally at least these men were not plotters against the government; they were simply discussing events along the frontier, exactly as the white people at Vrymeer followed these affairs, but from a much different point of interest.
The talk was broad in scope and free in manner. These men were teachers, a clergyman, businessmen of sorts, and they were concerned about the directions their nation was taking. They were deeply worried about the forthcoming American presidential election and wondered whether Andrew Young would regain his position of power in a new administration. They were particularly interested in one aspect of American life. ‘What accounts for your ambivalance?’ a teacher asked. ‘Your big newspapers are against apartheid, so is President Carter, so is Andy Young, but ninety-eight percent of the Americans who visit our country approve of it. Almost every American who comes here goes home convinced that Afrikaners are doing the
right thing.’
‘It’s simple,’ Philip said. ‘What Americans come here? It’s far away, you know, and very expensive. Businessmen come on company accounts. Rich travelers. Engineers. And they’re all wealthy and conservative. They like what they see. They approve of apartheid, really, and would like to see it introduced in America.’
‘You’re an engineer. You’re not a conservative.’
‘On many things I am. I’m sure as hell no liberal.’
‘But on apartheid?’
‘I’m against it because I don’t think it works.’
‘Do you find the world turning conservative? Canada? England? Maybe America?’
‘I do.’
Late in the evening they got down to cases, and now Nxumalo moved to the fore: ‘I’ve been pondering what we might do to inspirit our people. To send a signal to the men in Moçambique that we’re still with them. And it seems to me that the most effective single thing, under present conditions, is to organize a day of remembrance for our dead children who were gunned down in Soweto in 1976.’
‘That has merit.’
‘I would propose that on June 16 this year we have a national day of mourning. No disturbances, just some kind of visual remembrance.’
‘Would that antagonize government?’ a short man asked.
‘Anything we do antagonizes government.’
‘I mean, to the point of retaliation?’
Nxumalo sat silent. This was a penetrating question, for the tactic of committees like this had to be protest up to the edge of the precipice at which Afrikaner guns began to fire, as they had at Sharpeville, in Soweto and at a score of other sites. Judiciously he said, ‘If the white man can make a national holiday of Blood River, where he slaughtered thousands of us Zulu, we can remember Soweto ’76. I say let’s go ahead.’
It was agreed, and when Saltwood left the meeting and slipped out of Soweto, he was aware that his new friend Daniel Nxumalo had entered upon dangerous ground, but he had no idea that by this simple gesture of irritating the government the young educator would place himself in mortal jeopardy.
The Covenant: A Novel Page 133
