Wings of the Morning

by Julian Beale

  May was not a good month for sloughing off the memories, but he could distract himself with a little review of what else had happened during these past years, and he could not help but hug to himself the recognition of achievements.

  Millennium was now a country far removed from the place they had come storming into at the turn of the century. Not everything was perfect of course. There was and would forever remain more to be done and to plan for, but there were times when it was so good to sit back and reflect on the story so far.

  It was the politics which fascinated him the most. David relinquished the President’s office to Hugh Dundas who held the position for just a matter of months. During that time, Hugh concentrated on their finances. He was tireless in effort, impeccable in judgement, inspired in innovation. When he gave up day to day control at the Treasury, he left behind an apparently perfect machine of management which promised to run for a thousand years without much adjustment.

  Concurrently, they worked as a team on creating a new Constitution and looking back on it, David had to admit that his own contribution was of better quality because he didn’t have an executive role to distract him. Hugh was replaced as President by an impressive lawyer, born in Vietnam and thereafter a Canadian citizen before he emigrated to Millennium in the second wave of arrivals. He took over under the new Constitution to head a Presidential executive with seven members who voted their choice of President. Beneath the executive was a form of parliament with two hundred members who were voted in by their electorate. The parliament elected the members of the Executive who were full time, salaried officers of the state. The parliamentarians were obliged to demonstrate a profession or business which would engage and reward them for the majority of their time. They were not permitted to be full time politicians. The Constitution called for national elections every four years. A President could serve only one term but a member of the executive was permitted two consecutive terms and thus each succeeding President was identified four years before he or she took up the top job.

  They created a new style of fixed civil service which drew on aspects of the colonial services which had operated so long ago. The detail of all of this was complex to devise and install, but it worked well enough in practice and it did much to earn legitimacy for Millennium in the eyes of the international community.

  By this time, of course, David was long departed from any sort of official office but that did not prevent him from maintaining his close interest, his contacts and occasionally his influence. He was surprised to find how well the arrangement suited him although he should have known better. Aischa had always told him that he had done his bit: much better to quit at the top and leave others to build on his foundations.

  And how well it had gone. Earlier this year, Millennium had succeeded in joining the Commonwealth and now there was even talk of a State visit from the Monarch. Everywhere, there was an acknowledgement that Millennium was bringing a new style of nationality to Africa. It would have been impossible for the world to ignore, much less deny, the success which the formula as created by David Heaven and his colleagues had brought to the country. The opportunities for personal success and fulfilment in a land blest with space and natural resources were self evident and proved on a daily basis by the track record of those who had been encouraged to come from the four corners of the world to practice their skills and diligence. This in turn meant that standards and facilities were constantly improving against the backdrop of a rapidly developing economy.

  Once rolling, this bandwagon had hardly slowed in its progress and had never checked, hardly even during the world financial crisis of 2009. There had of course been problems, scandals, dishonesty and mismanagement, but successive governments had used a heavy hand to deal with transgressions. Overall, the enthusiasm and commitment had been such that Millennium could point to outstanding results in just about any area — in manufacturing and trading business, in agriculture, in mining and in oil, in forestry and ecology, in tourism, in the arts. In support of these developments were outstanding examples of citizen care — health, education, transport, policing and a legal system free to all.

  I’m a fortunate man, thought David Heaven to himself as he gazed out of his study window across the immaculate gardens of Founder’s Hill. It may be that we make our own luck in this world, but by God I’ve been lucky with my friends and my opportunities: all the people, all the things I’ve seen and the places I’ve been. It’s best of all to be able to look out over a plan, a dream, a vision and see that it has become a reality.

  What of regrets? The absence of Aischa to share the twilight years which we planned to have together. That’s the haunting sadness, made far worse by my responsibility for her illness and premature death. The same applies to Connie Aveling, my greatest friend. I wasn’t there for him when he needed me and I was too busy with my own life to notice it. But then there’s Anna and her children, all my descendants although they don’t know it and it’s too late now for lifetime confessions: still it will all come out one day. The memoir is done. I know it’s merely adequate and certainly not inspired but I’ve done my best and I’ll give it to young Olty one day when I think he’s ready: I’ve got high hopes for that boy.

  With that thought, David rose from his chair and walked over to the long wall in his study which displayed his rogues’ gallery, a hundred and more photographs hanging on the wall of his study in an arrangement which was impressive if not artistic. There were few occupations these days which gave him so much pleasure as to muse over this record of the places in which he had set foot, and the people who had populated his varied life. And he never failed to look longest at the original of that snapshot of the twin sisters in Mocamedes in 1970. It was the least expert record of all on his wall, but it carried the most meaning for him.

  He pulled himself from his reverie and went to fetch the light set of steps which were stored inside a cupboard. He put them in place, returned to collect a couple of empty frames which he used for sizing up which of his latest acquisitions should hang where. With a soft grunt of appreciation, he approached the steps. This was his favourite past time, and it seemed reasonable to enjoy it to the full on this rather special day, his seventieth birthday.

  David Heaven was standing near the top of his vantage point on the steps when he had the presentiment that he was to be as lucky in death as he had been lucky in life. The sudden pain in his chest was briefly excruciating. He dropped a frame to the carpet and clutched at a photograph which skewed in its mount. He lost consciousness and he had lost life before his body hit the floor.

  OLIVER AVELING — 2021

  It’s Christmas Eve and working up to the hottest time of our year. I’m in my apartment in Century and staring at my screen. I should finish the writing today and I’m going to feel quite lonely with this project complete.

  It’s now nearly two years since Guy Labarre came to visit me in New York. We had our business meeting and then we went off to lunch with Guy carrying that small suitcase which has since come to dominate my life.

  We started with a news roundup on our families. Guy sympathised with the trouble I have in keeping up with everyone. I’ve been living in Millennium since I graduated from university in Century nearly seven years ago. I’ve never regretted the decision to make the country my home, but a downside is that I get to see my parents and siblings only once or twice a year. My brother Edward went into shipping and is now doing a couple of years based in Korea, Christina my elder sister is through Uni in the UK and training to be a vet and Charlotte is having a ball at Durham reading English. My Dad, Oscar, continues a hard working pillar of Hereford and my mother is non-stop busy and into everything. It’s not easy to get any of them to come here, so when I go to Europe I don’t usually get further than Hereford, plus Hampshire to see my grandmother Tepee.

  Over coffee, Guy got down to business

  ‘I have to give you this suitcase Olty,’ Guy spoke excellent English with a lovely Clouzot accent,
‘and there’s a letter of authority which goes with it. I understand that it contains a form of memoire left to you personally by David Heaven. He left it in his will to my Aunt Alexa for safekeeping and she thinks it’s high time for you to receive your legacy. She asked me to deliver it by hand, so here am I; and here it is.’

  Guy pushed across the case under our table and I grasped the worn old leather handle for the first time. I must have looked pretty perplexed. He smiled at me and said,

  ‘It seems that David finished his work on the manuscript a year or so after Aischa died. Then he packed everything up in that old case and left it to Alexa. With your grandfather Conrad gone so long ago, I guess she was his greatest friend from Oxford days which is where life really began for him it seems.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied uncertainly, ‘but I’d have thought he would have chosen Pente Broke Smith for something like this.’

  ‘I don’t know, Olty, but my guess is that maybe Alexa and David had a thing going in days long past.’

  He gave a Gallic shrug as he continued, ‘Who can say? My aunt would never say and I wouldn’t ask, but she was insistent that I should make the handover at the earliest opportunity. To be honest, I think she had forgotten all about it, but she’s over seventy-five now and wants to conclude her responsibility for it. What’s more, as she said to me, you yourself are full grown and established. Whatever it is that David wanted to leave to you is overdue for delivery.’

  I thanked him warmly for his candour and for taking this trouble. Then we talked of other things until we left the restaurant to go our separate ways. I haven’t seen Guy since then, but I’ll send him a copy of this account. There will be things which he’ll want to read about.

  I took the case home to Millennium with me. I started to browse through it here in my apartment in Century and as I’ve said, I was fascinated from the start. But I didn’t have time to do much more right then because we were manically busy at work and the reason for that was Joe Kaba.

  He’s a wonderful man, my boss: Armenian born but no one could pronounce his name so he made up another. He’s been in Millennium for seventeen years, arriving with his wife and three children, their hand luggage and a bit of cash: nothing else. They were evicted from Minsk where Joe had been well established until he fell foul of the authorities and he was lucky to get slung out on his ear.

  He’s an absolute powerhouse, is Joe: a brilliant linguist and a superb manager. He comes from humble origins but he mixes easily at any level. He’s strong on detail with an inspirational style about him. Thinking of the characters I’ve been discovering over the last year, I guess he’s a bit of a mixture of Sol Kirchoff and Felix Maas, but he’s got also my grandfather’s sense of strategy. Joe’s weak point is figures. He can make money OK and has proved it. But he has no grasp of high level finance and that’s why he absolutely idolises Hugh Dundas and still picks his brains whenever he gets the chance.

  From New York and my meeting with Guy in December 2019, I went first to the UK and spent Christmas freezing with my parents in Hereford. I didn’t mention the legacy to my mother. I’d hardly opened the case by then and felt that I needed to know more before I started in on it. I got back to Century, celebrated my birthday with a bit of mischief, and went off to work again.

  Joe Kaba got stuck in straightaway to tell all of us in International Affairs about his latest brainwave. In a year’s time, he said, Millennium would turn twenty-one and if that was a coming of age for a person, why not a nation also? He had already cleared it with President Menendez. We were going to organise a great shindig in Century at the end of January 2021. Nominally, it would be a conference based around Orphans of Africa and the plans to extend the Charity. In addition, we would have a setting to showcase everything about Millennium — the people, the progress, the productivity. We were going to invite the world for a week or so to see at first-hand how our country had become the standard bearer for Africa.

  All this was heady and exciting stuff, but it was a huge project with only a year for preparation. Joe was ready for that. We would do what we could do, but not attempt the impossible. So there was only one building project, which was to be an upgrade to the airport. Otherwise, he was planning a myriad of trips and demonstrations all around the country to provide a real flavour of what we had achieved under the auspices of Orphans. He had a key task programme for the twelve of us who worked directly for him and we went away to get stuck in to arranging our own staff and timetables to make sure that we delivered for him.

  Looking back on things, I can understand that Joe’s vision always risked being seen as propaganda. We were extolling Orphans which is an international charity, but the second agenda was to trumpet the success of Millennium itself. Not every country round the globe liked that, but the reasons for disapproval varied. To explain why, I have to give you a few facts and figures.

  Millennium has posted some impressive statistics over the last twenty years. Our GDP world ranking has moved up from 121 to 68. The per capita income has quadrupled. Our exports now exceed $25bn a year, but the contribution from oil has declined from 50% to just over 15%. That’s not because we have fewer reserves, as we have discovered much more offshore. The reason is that we make a lot of goods here which the rest of the world wants to buy. Our population has shot up from about 5 million to 13.76 at the last census in 2018 and the reason is that some eight million people, nearly 60% of our nation, have chosen to emigrate from forty different countries around the world to live amongst us and to contribute to Millennium’s success. Considering that my grandfather arrived with three thousand odd, that’s some result.

  Our literacy rate has gone from 15% to 85% and our life expectancy from 45 to 73 years. Our political system gives every adult over eighteen a vote every four years. Tertiary and university education is free to all. You can travel where you want on decent roads by scheduled services any tick of the clock and your security is assured by our Combined Services and National police force which are so efficient that they are now contributing to our export figures through the sale of training to other countries.

  All this is good news, and I could go much further in listing results and measurements. The trouble and the paradox is that our development is not universally well regarded. Why not? Well, of course, the cynic can always say that good news is no news and for sure, there’s some dog in the manger attitude out there. But the truth of it goes much deeper than that. For starters, we have benefited from some outstanding people who came to Millennium because they were outcast from the nations of their birth or previous existence: my own boss today is a good example. And the countries from which they fled don’t like to acknowledge that they got it wrong.

  Then you have the Great Powers. The US of A still claims the title of the land of opportunity. The descendants of European colonisers of two centuries back can’t decide whether to be ashamed or patronising. The Chinese and the Indians are happy to grab what they can with whatever it takes. But having said all of that, Millennium remains a small plot of real estate on the map. Whatever we’re doing or achieving, however different the style and quality of life which we are building, none of this should be of too much account on the world stage. That’s true until you come to South Africa.

  The problem here is the Republic’s direction, because South Africa is going backwards. It’s not been easy for them, of course. Since apartheid ended with a new beginning under Mandela in 1994, there have been huge issues for them to confront — really grotesque in size and complexity. The tough bottom line is not that they haven’t succeeded; it’s more that things have got worse. During the first decade of this century, whilst we were lucky enough to be starting afresh, South Africa struggled with a prolonged hangover of celebration followed by a protracted ‘where do we go from here?’ There were disasters of crumbling infrastructure, diminishing wealth, deteriorating governance and soaring crime. Meanwhile, the whole world wanted to believe that new roses really were springing up in the garde
n.

  During the last ten years, things started to change. About eighty per cent of native born South Africans are black with the remainder white, coloured or of Asian descent. They make a small minority, but that’s still a powerful lot of people and many of them became completely disillusioned by the ‘new’ South Africa. They felt condemned for the sins of their forefathers, disenfranchised by the majority rule. In a country with a quarter of workers unemployed, they were still the powerhouse of the economy and yet — and this was the worst of it — they felt increasingly threatened. Throughout the Republic, in cities and rural communities, violent crime continued to grow with the have’s being constantly menaced by the have-nots. This was the prime reason for so many applying to come to Millennium. But a much greater number said ‘No. I was born and bred in South Africa and my forebears have been here for generations. Whatever the colour of my skin, this is my place and I’m staying even if I do have to build a fortress around my home, my family and my business.’

  There was another influence on this group. Around that time in ’11 or ’12, the world witnessed what was dubbed at the time as being the Arab Spring. There was uprising and regime change in all sorts of spots in the Middle East — Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya, even a bit going on in Jordan. Incoming new governance didn’t work so well for all of them and there were problems which made even American-invaded Iraq look mild. But each country worked it out over a while, although at great cost. Meanwhile, all those minority South Africans were looking at what happened in the Middle East and were saying to themselves that maybe you’ve just got to shake the cage a bit to see what drops out. It can’t be worse than it is now. After a while, they began to talk to each other and in late 2015, they formed an organisation which they called simply ‘Future’, claiming with reason that’s what it’s all about.