Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  The black community’s response to the new laws and the increased powers of the militia was instant and predictable. Within hours of the news, a massive rally had been orchestrated, and a group thousands strong, led by Aaron Muhapi and his entourage, marched on Szenga Square—a beautiful tree-lined park well inside the designated whites only area.

  I was in that entourage. I didn’t know the songs and chants, particularly those that had old Mahweni words in them, but I walked, eyeing the watchful members of the so-called civilian militia, swaggering in their high boots and unearned uniforms. When we reached the designated place where the platform had been raised, I watched Muhapi take the stage, and I listened.

  “So here we are,” he said, facing the crowd, his eyes blazing. “On this spot where we have been for generations, a place we have endured all manner of hardship, injustice, and exploitation at the hands of our white oppressors. It has been a kind of game, and we have played our parts in the hope that if we showed willing, if we were compliant, if we agreed to their terms and went along with their rules, our voices would be heard, our freedoms and rights would be addressed. And we have been patient. We have watched the sun cross the sky over this great city, much of it built by our hands, thousands and thousands of times, waiting for change. And now change has come, but it is not what we expected, not what we were promised by our leaders. We stand here where we have been for hundreds of years, and we are told that simply being here, standing on land that was once ours and ours alone, is no longer allowed. Blacks and coloreds who have lived and worked here must now move away, and their return to this area will be regulated at the discretion of the white man.

  “My friend Peter, Peter Vincenti, a great friend to me and the Mahweni people, tells me that the rules of the game have changed, and he is right. We would have liked to debate those rules, to sit with the leaders of the National-Heritage coalition government to argue our case, but that opportunity has not been provided. Our people have been huddled into pockets so that our representatives—some good men of the Brevard party—have even less power than they used to. Our districts will have populations of tens of thousands, mostly black and colored, to each member of Parliament, while white districts contain mere hundreds or less. For decades we have been promised greater representation, a louder voice in the political process, but what do we have? This change of the rules is one more broken promise, one more step away from equality for the black and colored people of this city. We have, as I say, been patient. We have trusted and waited in spite of right and justice on our side.

  “Well, no more. This is our land. The cobbles we stand on, set by our hands, and ground roamed for a thousand years by our ancestors, belong to us as much as the white men who have passed these laws, and if they want us to move off them, they will have to make us.”

  As the crowd thrilled to his energy, his rage, he turned to face the Parliament, and he was not talking to the assembly anymore. Now he was talking to Richter and the government.

  “You call us beasts. You say we do not merit full power sharing. You ban us from our native lands, from our places of work, and you strip us of our voice in a Parliament that you have shown to serve only your interests. You ban us from our streets, from our very homes with immoral laws passed by an unelected government led by a racist. Did you think we would go quietly? Did you think we would smile and nod and accept the old lie that you know best, that you are protecting us from ourselves, that your version of culture proves you to be our moral betters? Did you think we would skulk away like beaten dogs? You were, as you have so often been, wrong. We. Will. Not. Move.”

  And they didn’t. For three hours they sang and chanted, listened to speeches about what should be done and not done, and the white dragoons watched from the sidelines but did not intervene. There were, perhaps, two or three thousand people in the crowd, too many for the soldiers to engage safely, though I saw no weapons among the assembly, and for all their defiance, they were surprisingly contained, almost placid. When night fell and the meeting broke up, it did so with a sense of something achieved, and the mood was satisfied, even hopeful.

  “We will do it again tomorrow, and the day after,” Muhapi remarked to Peter, his aide. “And we will keep doing it until these absurd laws are abandoned.”

  “And if they aren’t?” said Peter, who seemed more cautious than his charismatic friend, less buoyed up by the success of the rally.

  “Then we are going to be busy,” said Muhapi. “Come, Peter. This was a victory. A peaceful protest of such size, and not just made up of Mahweni. They cannot ignore such protests forever.”

  “I hope you are right,” said Peter.

  “I am,” said Muhapi. “I have to be, for all our sakes. Now, you may be determined to be miserable, but I want to celebrate. You will come to my house, and we will grill meat and drink wine. Miss Sutonga and her friends will join us, yes?”

  It was impossible to refuse him in this rare ebullient mood, and I knew Sureyna wanted to go along, so I nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “You can meet my family. And I believe we have some mutual acquaintances.”

  I gave him a quizzical look, but he just smiled and nodded to where two black men stood in serious conversation, one lean and rangy, almost unrecognizable in city clothes, was Mnenga. The other, bigger in the chest and shoulders, but also unfamiliar in civilian dress, was Captain Emtezu.

  I stared at the strangeness of seeing them together, but I did not have to ask why they were here, and a part of me had known Mnenga would seek Muhapi out. The assimilated and unassimilated Mahweni were testing some new alliances in the light of recent developments, and while Emtezu had kept his politics to himself for the sake for the uniform he wore, that too had become moot. He surely did not intend it, but Richter was driving together people who had circled each other warily like lions for decades. It was good, I decided. Almost good enough to take my mind off Willinghouse, who seemed curiously irrelevant to all this progress. The idea pained me, because I knew he would have been here, talking to the crowd, shaking hands and throwing whatever personal and political muscle he could behind Muhapi’s movement. It seemed unfair that it was all happening without him.

  “You wish Willinghouse were here,” said Muhapi, looking at me shrewdly.

  I gaped at him, amazed—not for the first time—at the way the man seemed to read my thoughts, but opted for simplicity in my answer.

  “I do,” I said.

  “He will be soon,” said Muhapi. “Do not despair. We sent a powerful message today.”

  “A political message,” I said, “yes. But politics alone will not free him. That will take evidence.”

  “Which you will find,” said Muhapi.

  “You are very confident,” I said.

  “Today, yes,” he said. “I am.” He laughed. “This was a good day, and there will be more. See? Even Peter is smiling.”

  “Mr. Muhapi—”

  “Aaron, please.”

  “Aaron,” I said, “forgive me if this is an impertinent question, but do you know Count Alfonse Marino?”

  “The Grappoli ambassador?” said Muhapi. “I have seen him at social events, but I don’t believe we have ever met, no.”

  “What kind of social events?” I asked. It seemed unlikely that Muhapi moved in the same circles as the Grappoli ambassador.

  “It’s quite funny, actually,” he said. “There is a club in Morgessa called the Black Ibis. Music mostly, but also some drinking and dancing. All quite sedate, refined even, but very black. Particularly the music, and the clientele.”

  “You saw the Grappoli ambassador there?” I said, amazed.

  “Twice!” said Muhapi, amused. “He sits in the corner, wearing street clothes. Keeps his hat on indoors and wears spectacles with ordinary glass in them. A kind of disguise, I suppose, but everyone knows who he is. He doesn’t talk to anyone, just sits and listens to the music and drinks brandy. Tips well, I’m told. Always picked up and dropped off by private car
riage. A funny thing, isn’t it, the world?”

  “It is indeed,” I said.

  We walked all the way to Morgessa, Muhapi talking animatedly about his plans for what they would do tomorrow and the day after. I walked with Mnenga who, in his city clothes and stately movement, felt like some foreign dignitary, an ambassador, perhaps. It occurred to me that, in a way, he was. Though the elder dignitaries were not with him, the young woman with the towering hair who he had said was a kind of princess was. She was wearing a long rust-colored dress that fitted her like a sheath. She still wore her beads, but the dress made her look elegant, sophisticated, and I realized that at first I had taken her for one of the city blacks. For reasons I could not pinpoint, the thought unsettled me.

  “Where are the others you came with?” I asked him.

  “Meeting with Kondotsy Furwina at his home, which,” Mnenga added, with a sideways smile, “I believe you once attempted to burn down.”

  “That was under his predecessor,” I said, making a face at him. The incident he was referring to had occurred when Sohwetti was head of the Unassimilated Tribes. “Why wasn’t Furwina here?”

  “Because alliances between the assimilated and unassimilated Mahweni make the city nervous,” he said.

  “So what are you trying to build?” I said.

  “An alliance.”

  He shot me that big, open smile of his, and I couldn’t help laughing, though I knew he was playing with fire. We all were.

  The black population of the city has always been a little larger than the white, which is why the electoral districts were so carefully constructed to reduce the power of their vote, something Richter’s redistricting plans would only intensify. Though the Unassimilated Tribes outside the city had nothing like the coherence and identity the city Mahweni had, there were a lot of them. If they were to combine with the black population of the city itself, they would be a formidable force.

  This was, Sureyna had explained, what made the redistricting so dangerous. The whites thought they were stripping their black neighbors of power, and they were, but they were also closing off the Mahweni’s legal options. I knew very well what happened to people who felt that they could no longer achieve what they wanted, what they needed, under the protection of the law: they stepped outside it. Should Richter make the black vote meaningless, then the Mahweni would look to other possibilities, and a union between city blacks and the Unassimilated Tribes could mean only one thing: civil war, or its threat as a bargaining card.

  “They are saying that the Unassimilated Tribes have been attacking railway lines north of the city,” I said. “Stopping mail, cargo, and passenger trains.”

  “Who has been saying this?” said Mnenga. It wasn’t a real question, and he was still smiling, though his amused look was weary.

  “The papers,” I said, knowing how lame that sounded.

  “The newspapers who have fired their black and Lani staff?” said Mnenga. “The newspapers who now have their stories approved by a government censor before printing them? The newspapers who have yet to produce a single reliable witness or photograph that supports these claims of tribal sabotage and intimidation?”

  “Yes,” I admitted grudgingly.

  “I thought so,” he said.

  “‘Sabotage and intimidation’?” I echoed.

  “What?” he said.

  “You speak Feldish much better than you suggested when we first met.”

  He laughed, then caught the slightly wounded look in my face and realized what I was thinking: that he had misled me on purpose about his role in the politics of the region. He frowned.

  “I have been practicing,” he said, then smiled kindly. “And I have had some good teachers.”

  I returned his smile, then turned to see the young Mahweni “princess” appearing at his side as if she had been looking for him. Mnenga said something to her in his own language and she smiled first at him, then at me.

  “My Feldish is not good,” she said. “Sorry. Mnenga tells me about you.” She smiled and nodded to suggest that he had said good things.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  She looked momentarily puzzled then said, “Ah. Yes. I am Lomkhosi.”

  “I am pleased to meet you,” I said, wondering why that did not feel entirely honest.

  “Ang!” called a voice. I turned to find Sureyna hurrying to catch up with me, her eyes alight. All around us black, Lani, and a handful of whites walked together, talking excitedly, sharing ideas and plans, radiating energy like sunlight. “Isn’t this wonderful!” she breathed. “Can you feel it? It’s like … hope.”

  * * *

  MUHAPI’S WIFE, SAMORA, TOOK over the festivities once we reached their large but simple Morgessa house, throwing open every room and ordering her husband to stay away from the great pit barbecue, which was already hot and smoking in the backyard. Their son, Hlumelo, who was six, was charged with offering juice and wine to their guests, a task he undertook with great solemnity, winning the hearts of all who looked on him. Suddenly it seemed the house was packed with dozens—perhaps even a hundred—people, all laughing and talking, marveling at how Samora was able to provide for so many, and as a group of black men and women broke into song, accompanied by a pair of drums and a stringed instrument whose name I did not know, the whole completed its transition from political meeting to party. When Samora—a solid, businesslike woman who was wearing her hair in the traditional piled manner of Mnenga’s village elders—began to dance, the tension of the last few days seemed to burn away.

  “A remarkable thing,” said Captain Emtezu, appearing beside me, “the power of food and music.”

  It seemed like a very long time since I had spoken to the captain, and uncharacteristically caught up in the mood of the moment, I embraced him like a favorite uncle.

  “I didn’t know you knew Muhapi,” I said, once our pleasantries about his family were done.

  “Everyone knows Aaron Muhapi,” he said, watching the man arguing playfully with his wife to the delight of several bystanders. “I am more surprised to see you here, but I suppose I should not be.”

  “What are you doing now, since…?” I wasn’t sure how to phrase the question and left it dangling.

  “Since I was stripped of my weapons and sent to sit behind a desk organizing supply lines?” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice, though he smiled still. “Precious little. Mostly, I am waiting, though I am no longer sure what I am waiting for. I thought it was reinstatement and rejoining the barracks with my men but now…” Again he scanned the assembled crowd. We were outside, watching as the men bickered over whether the skewers of impala flesh were thoroughly roasted and their wives made fun of them. “Now I am not sure. Something is coming, but I am not sure what. I fear I may yet need my rifle again.”

  I watched Mnenga dancing with Lomkhosi. She looked beautiful. Radiant. Mnenga could not take his eyes off her. I took a breath that was almost a gasp, then looked quickly away.

  Emtezu sipped his wine. “And you?” he said.

  I pulled myself back to the conversation, thought of Willinghouse, and shook my head vaguely.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I am doing … what I can. I’m not sure it will help.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “the effort is all. Muhapi says that when we all try, the world moves on its axis and suddenly impossible things can happen.”

  I smiled. “Do you believe that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “But I do not need to believe in the end to make the attempt.”

  I nodded, watching the dancing people again, caught between elation and a deep sadness. Back in the house, someone shouted. Then another. I thought it was a laugh at first, but then heads were turning, and alarm spread through the crowd like a herd of wildebeests spying a lion.

  “What was—” I began, but then the door into the house was kicked open and I saw the grim-faced white soldiers
with their rifles and truncheons. At the front was a captain in a red tunic. Emtezu stepped toward him, but another soldier drew a pistol and leveled it at his face. Emtezu faltered, hands raised, babbling his rank and number, but the officer ignored him, scanning the crowd.

  The music stopped, and there was a sudden, terrified silence as the officer spotted Muhapi, standing watchful, expectant by the wall of the yard. Peter was beside him, and as the officer took another purposeful step, two more dragoons coming with him, Peter’s hand dropped to his pocket. For a split second, I saw the butt of a pistol in his hand, but then Muhapi reached out, his movement quick as a striking snake, stilling him, pushing the gun back into his pocket.

  “Am I a thief,” said Muhapi to the soldiers, “that you come for me in the night? You could have come for me today in the square. Breaking into my house, disrupting my family, my friends—”

  “Aaron Muhapi,” said the officer, unflinchingly. “I am arresting you on charges of sedition, distributing banned literature, and organizing an illegal gathering. Come with me.”

  Muhapi considered him as if weighing his options seriously. Without taking his eyes off the officer and his men, he said, “Very well. I will come and I will come quietly, and my friends and family will, on this occasion, do as I ask and not interfere.” His eyes flashed to Peter, and he managed a smile for his aide’s benefit. “I am a man of peace. Do me the honor of respecting my wishes.”

  Peter was very still. At last, his jaw tight and his eyes full, he nodded.

  “Have no fear,” said Muhapi to the room in general. “All this means is that they are taking us seriously.”

  He paused only to hug his wife and son, the former strong but strained, the latter confused, his eyes on the soldiers.

  “Well then,” said Muhapi. “It is time.”

  And with that, he followed the soldiers out, leaving the house stunned and silent, the only sound coming from the crackling of the fire whose smoke was still sweet and heavy with the aroma of roasted meat. My eyes moved over the stunned faces and found Samora. She looked, in spite of the people offering her their condolences mixed with their sureties that all would be well, curiously absent. She stood in a way that made her seem completely alone; I felt that I was seeing right into her heart, where there was nothing but profound grief. It was as though she had already seen the future and had found it to be a blasted landscape of loss and the absence of hope.