The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  Your friend,

  Lloyd Huxley

  Although Clem’s passing came as no surprise, given his deteriorating state of health, the news still came as a great blow. Oscar rushed down to Kings Cross to seek consolation in the arms of Anna, but Anna, his dear Anna, having met a dozen or more new clients, each one of whom she called John, no longer had time to see him. He took to hanging out in Aboriginal bars and drinking beer with his new friends, all of whom confirmed Anna’s version of Aboriginal history, but only if he paid for the drinks.

  Reverend Mortimer, worried that Oscar was no longer coming to work and unable to reach him by telephone at his apartment, asked the police to track him down. In short order, an officer of the Australian Federal Police paid a call on Anna. Afterward, the secretary to the Australian Cabinet spoke to High Commissioner Evans, who summoned Oscar to his office and asked him to take a seat.

  “I have the sad responsibility to advise you,” he said, smiling uncomfortably and glancing at the photograph of the queen for reassurance, “that Reverend Mortimer has asked me to tell you that your employment with the royal commission has been terminated for reasons I have no desire to enter into. And since we have filled the position you occupied here at the high commission with another officer from Ottawa, you should leave at the earliest opportunity for headquarters. Someone there will know what to do with you.”

  5

  When Oscar reported for duty in Ottawa in September, he expected to be fired. Instead, his staffing officer greeted him with a friendly handshake and compassionate smile and asked him to take a seat on the sofa he used only to receive important visitors.

  “We are proud of you, Oscar,” he said, handing him cup of coffee and sitting down beside him.

  Oscar usually felt patronized when white people said they were proud of him. It was as if he was a child being told by adults that he had exceeded their expectations. But this time, he took it as an indication that High Commissioner Evans had not told headquarters about all the disgraceful things he had been up to over the summer.

  “I think the Australian commissioners found their trip to Canada useful,” Oscar said, guessing the Department had received a positive report on the visit.

  “The Department of Indian Affairs can’t say enough good things about your initiative to bring the Australians to Canada, about your interventions during the briefings and your excellent proposal to have them visit the Indian Camp at Port Carling. I have to confess I had never heard of that little reserve or Port Carling before. Both places are now on the radar here in Ottawa.”

  “I was just doing my job,” Oscar said, shifting uneasily in his seat.

  “You’re just being modest, Oscar. I have a message on my desk from the high commissioner saying that in all his years of service abroad, he had never met an officer who had made as big an impression in such a short time as you did on the locals. Apparently the secretary to the Cabinet even called him about you. He said the visit you organized to Canada will have a long-term effect on Australian policy toward the Aborigines. It seems the Aussies are considering setting up residential schools to be run by members of the mainstream clergy on the Canadian model. And everyone Down Under credits you for giving them the idea.”

  “But that wasn’t my intention,” Oscar said. “That wasn’t what I wanted at all. I really don’t know what to say,” he stammered. “I wouldn’t have proposed the fact-finding mission in the first place if I had thought the commissioners would have considered such a thing.”

  “There you go again, selling yourself short. You deserve all the credit. The high commissioner mentioned one small thing in his message, however, that I feel I must bring to your attention, particularly in view of your record in Colombia. Apparently you occasionally drank too much and acted in a somewhat curious manner. Evans added that since you are an Indian, and as is well known, Indians are physiologically incapable of tolerating spirits, your strange behaviour should be overlooked. He said it would be worth asking you, however, to give up drinking as long as you are in the Department.”

  “I know I’m an alcoholic,” Oscar said. “But I haven’t had a drink since I left Australia, and I’ll be on the wagon from now on.”

  Chapter 10

  SOUTH AFRICA AND APARTHEID

  1

  This time the funeral would be different from the others Oscar had attended since arriving in South Africa. This time it would be held at the Soweto football stadium and not at Regina Mundi Catholic Church or St. Paul’s Anglican Church. This time the security police had killed twelve young anti-apartheid activists, shooting them in the back as they fled the scene of a banned demonstration, and those churches were too small to accommodate the number of mourners expected to attend. Each funeral he had gone to as Canada’s official representative had left him heart-sick and he wanted a break from the emotionally draining duty.

  “Why don’t you send someone else?” he asked Canada’s ambassador to South Africa, Stuart Henderson. “I’ve covered more than my fair share of these things since I arrived.”

  But Henderson, who liked to adopt an avuncular tone when dealing with his staff, did not agree. “Look here, Oscar,” he said. “We’ve had this conversation before. The Department in its wisdom sent you here because it thought that you could do a better job in representing Canada at the funerals of black militants than one of its white diplomats. And now you’re trying to wiggle out of your job when Ottawa has such high expectations for you. So do what you were posted here to do, or get on a plane and go home!”

  Ambassador Stuart Henderson was not a career diplomat like most Canadian ambassadors and high commissioners who join the Department as junior officers and work their way through the ranks to the top. He had been a major fundraiser for the party in power in Ottawa just after the war, and as his reward the prime minister posted him to head up, successively, Canada’s consulates in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago. At the end of the fifties, the prime minister sent him as head of post to South Africa as a sort of farewell gift before retirement. When he sent his political ally to South Africa, however, Canada’s leader did not know that Henderson usually accepted as true what the friends he made at the local golf clubs, service clubs, and churches told him, whatever the facts of the matter.

  And if he hadn’t had political connections at home, he wouldn’t have lasted long in his new post. Soon after his arrival in Pretoria, he sent a lengthy cable back to the Department that shocked everyone who read it. “The Afrikaners are reasonable people doing reasonable things,” he said in his message. “I know this for a fact because some very nice senior ministers of the government and a pleasant and well-informed gentleman who is head of an organization here with the amusing acronym of BOSS have taken the time to brief me on apartheid over drinks at the country club and at intimate dinners in their homes. I am convinced that the reason so many people outside South Africa condemn apartheid is because they don’t understand the benefits of separate development for South Africa’s blacks, whites, Asians, and coloureds.”

  Aghast, the Department recalled him to headquarters and tried to explain to him the iniquities of racism in all its forms. “Don’t rely on government ministers for your information. Get to know the people fighting for their freedom. Stay away from BOSS; it’s the South African Bureau of State Security responsible for torturing and killing political prisoners. And come up with an initiative or two to show Canada’s solidarity with South Africa’s oppressed communities.”

  To Henderson’s credit, although he continued to play golf and share meals with his Afrikaner friends, including the gentleman from BOSS, he made an effort to cultivate the people leading the fight against apartheid, although they suspected he was only going through the motions when he professed support for their cause. He even came up with the idea of asking the Department to send, as a sign of solidarity, an officer to the mission to attend the funerals of militants killed by the South African security service. He was disappointed, however, when Ottawa sen
t Oscar to do the job, since he didn’t like Canadian Indians any more than he did South African blacks, Asians, and coloureds.

  The Department and its senior officers expected their juniors to obey their orders without question, and so Oscar assured Ambassador Henderson that he would attend the funeral. But he was deeply unhappy. And not just because of the emotional cost. Some months before, Canada’s prime minister had made two impressive decisions to advance the cause of human rights in Canada and the world. He announced that Canadian Indians would be allowed to vote in federal elections, and he became a leader in the fight to have South Africa expelled from the Commonwealth because of its apartheid policies. But then he ruined everything by getting up in the House of Commons and saying that “there would always be a light in the window” welcoming South Africa back to the civilized world when the time was right. All it had to do was to behave toward its downtrodden peoples with the same just and humane policies followed by Canada in its treatment of its Indian population.

  The prime minister’s remarks made Oscar wince. Surely Canada’s leader must have known that the South Africans had modelled their apartheid policy, at least the part providing for the herding of black people into townships and homelands, on Canada’s system of Indian reserves? Surely he must have been aware of the pitiful state of the people on the reserves?

  Making him feel worse, despite his best efforts, was the fact that he had made no friends in the anti-apartheid movement. When he made his calls on Anglican bishop Jonathan Tumbula and other black leaders, they had greeted him warily, almost as if they thought he had come to give them lessons on how to deal with oppressive white governments. He did not know that they, in fact, believed his posting was a stunt, devised by Ambassador Henderson to cover up his insincere support for their aspirations.

  2

  Oscar backed his car out of his garage in a whites-only leafy suburb of Pretoria early on the morning of the funeral and drove through streets lined with purple jacaranda trees and red and pink hibiscus bushes to the motorway to Johannesburg. Before he left Ottawa, perhaps because he had seen so many pictures in National Geographic of smiling khaki-clad bronzed game wardens in national parks and people frolicking in the Indian Ocean surf, he had assumed South Africa would be hot and sunny twelve months of the year. But he had been mistaken. The summers on the veldt were hot and dry interspersed with violent thunderstorms, and the winters, more often than not, were cold and damp. The day he set out for the funeral was one of the bad ones. A steady drizzle was falling, the clouds were low and dark, and the air smelled heavily of coal smoke drifting in from cooking fires in the nearby black townships.

  The traffic through Johannesburg was not as bad as he expected, but slowed to a crawl when he started down the road into Soweto. Crowds of people, singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” the anthem of the banned African National Congress, clogged the way. Oscar had been haunted by the beauty of the song’s melody ever since he heard it at the first funeral he attended. It reminded him of the hymns sung in Chippewa back on the reserve when he was a boy, and he learned the words in English to be able to sing along at funerals.

  Lord Bless Africa

  May her horn rise high up

  Hear Thou our prayers and bless us

  Descend, O Holy Spirit,

  Descend, O Holy Spirit.

  A mile from the stadium, a line of heavily armed police was stopping and turning back traffic. Oscar eased his vehicle off the road, parked on a patch of bare land, and continued on foot. Passing through a police line was usually an ordeal. A sullen police sergeant would study the document issued to him by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs identifying him as one of the several first secretaries on staff at the Canadian embassy, entitled on strict basis of reciprocity to all the rights and privileges as outlined in the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations between states, including but not specifically spelling out his right to live in a leafy whites-only suburb of Pretoria despite his dark-brown skin and black hair and eyes. The policeman would motion Oscar to follow and lead him to a mobile police headquarters and leave him standing outside for an hour, presumably in an attempt to humiliate him, before returning his document and telling him he was free to go.

  This time, Oscar seemed to have been expected. An officer stepped forward before he reached the barrier and, brushing aside Oscar’s identity card, said “That won’t be necessary today, sir. Just follow me.” And he escorted him through the lines and saluted him when he said goodbye with what might have been a sarcastic smile. Maybe the police have decided to go easy on the mourners today, Oscar thought. Maybe no one’s going to get hurt afterwards on the way to the cemetery.

  Oscar joined the jostling crowd pushing to gain entrance to the stadium, and once inside, made his way to a group of people gathered around a raised platform in the centre of the field.

  “Ah, Mr. Wolf,” said Bishop Tumbula, who was to lead the service, “I was afraid you weren’t coming. Unfortunately, it appears that you may have to represent the diplomatic corps today. None of your colleagues has as yet put in an appearance. Perhaps they are afraid things may get out of hand.”

  Oscar shook the bishop’s hand and quickly made the rounds, introducing himself to the dozen or more priests and ministers who were to participate in the ceremony, expressing his sympathies to the families of the deceased and saying a few words to people he had met in less public occasions and who belonged to banned organizations. Everyone, except the members of the families of the victims, who did their best to smile, looked through him when they accepted his hand.

  3

  One week later in his hospital room in Pretoria, Oscar emerged from oblivion with a great headache, his jaw wired shut, his right arm in a cast, and Ambassador Henderson looking at him from a seat beside his bed.

  “How are you, Oscar?” the ambassador asked, speaking quickly and coldly, making it clear he just wanted to get an unpleasant task over with as soon as possible. “I guess you can’t talk, so I’ll fill you in. The police brought you here two days ago. They said they found you after the funeral outside some bootlegger shebeen place in Soweto where loose women hang out and where they sell beer. They say you got drunk and fought with the patrons over a woman. They’ve even provided signed affidavits from the proprietor to back up their case. You can just imagine the damage this affair has done to the embassy. Everybody in the country is talking about it. The newspapers, including the South African liberal press, are saying Canada made a colossal mistake in sending a drunk to its embassy in South Africa at such a delicate time. Some enterprising journalist even dug up the press coverage in Colombia and Australia on your escapades during your postings to those countries.

  “I’m on your side, of course, as is headquarters, at least publicly, but only because we have to be, only because the good name of Canada is at stake. Back home, the CBC, which always takes the side of the underdog whether justified or not, gave the story lead coverage in its national radio and television news, claiming you had been hard done by. Editorial writers across the country, who have never had anything positive to say about developments in this country, have accused the South Africans of using the same sort of brutality against a Canadian Indian as they use against their black people. The prime minister has defended you in the House of Commons, saying you were set upon by thugs from the South African security service who then concocted a story claiming you had been beaten up in a house of ill-repute. I hope for your sake it turns out he’s right. Now I must go. Someone from the office will drop by to see you every day until you are fit to travel. Then you are going home. The Department has cancelled your posting.”

  Oscar saw the ambassador’s lips moving but the ringing in his ears was so loud he couldn’t hear what he was saying. It was evident that he was agitated and angry about something. He was probably upset that one of his first secretaries had been injured. Oscar wasn’t surprised. He had always suspected that under his pompous exterior, Henderson had a big heart.

 
In the coming days, the staff of the Canadian embassy took turns visiting Oscar, and as the noise in his ears diminished, he learned to his distress that he was the major figure in a diplomatic row between Canada and South Africa. Still not able to remember what had happened, and unable to talk, he could only listen as his colleagues, some in all seriousness, others unable to suppress their laughter, and everyone believing that he was in some way responsible for his own misfortune, did their best to cheer him up.

  Disconnected images then began to flash through his mind. He once saw twelve coffins draped in the flag of the African National Congress being borne onto the football field on the shoulders of seventy-two pallbearers. Another time, he was in his car frantically turning the key in the ignition and trying to escape someone or something that was trying to seize him and do him harm. The engine would not start and he got out and raised the hood only to find that the distributor coil was missing and to face the same policeman who had escorted him through the police lines.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” the policeman said, before the scene faded away. And yet another time, he saw coffins being dumped onto the ground with bloody corpses spilling out and people running, and he heard screaming and he smelled tear gas and coal smoke and felt cold rain on his face.

  Each day fresh visions appeared: Bishop Tumbula angrily haranguing the crowd before turning and pointing an accusing finger at him as if he were in some way personally responsible for the deaths of the militants; a policeman, armed with a heavy leather whip, beating an old woman until he, Oscar Wolf, intervened, pushing the policeman to the ground and kicking him repeatedly in a blind rage until driven off by other policemen who lashed him with their whips until he outran them and escaped; drinking homemade corn beer in a garishly lit front room of a shebeen and joking and laughing and frolicking around the floor to loud African music with a six-foot-tall, wide-hipped black woman with enormous breasts who had come out of nowhere to sit on his lap.