Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  The stopes were the vast open chambers from which the gold-bearing ore had already been excavated, the hanging wall above supported now by packed pillars of shoring timber, the footwall under them inclined upwards at an angle following the run of the reef.

  The men of his gang trudging ahead of him led Hendrick to his station, and here under a bare electric bulb waited for the white shift boss, a burly Afrikaner flanked by his two boss-boys.

  The station was a three-sided chamber in the rock, its number on the entrance. There was a long bench against the back wall of the station and a latrine, its open buckets screened by sheets of burlap.

  The gang sat on the bench while the boss-boys called the roll, and then the white shift boss asked in Fanakalo, ‘Where is the new hammer boy?’ and Hendrick rose to his feet. Cronje, the shift boss, came to stand in front of him. Their eyes were on a level, both big men. The shift boss’s nose was crooked, broken long ago in a forgotten brawl, and he examined Hendrick carefully. He saw the broken gap in his teeth and the scars upon his head and his respect was tentative and grudging. They were both hard, tough men, recognizing it in each other. Up there in the sunshine and sweet cool airs they were black man and white man. Down here in the earth they were simply men.

  ‘You know the hammer?’ Cronje asked in Fanakalo.

  ‘I know it,’ Hendrick replied in Afrikaans. He had practised working the hammer for two weeks in the surface training pits.

  Cronje blinked and then grinned to acknowledge the use of his own language. ‘I run the best gang of rock breakers on the CRC,’ he said, still grinning. ‘You will learn to break rock, my friend, or I will break your head and your arse instead. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand.’ Hendrick grinned back at him, and Cronje raised his voice. ‘All hammer boys here!’

  They stood up from the bench – five of them, all big men like Hendrick. It took tremendous physical strength to handle the jack hammers. They were the élite of the rock-breaking gangs, earning almost double wages and bonus for footage, earning also immense prestige from lesser men.

  Cronje wrote their names up on the blackboard under the electric bulb: Henry Tabaka at the bottom of the list and Zama, the big Zulu, at number one. When Zama stripped off his jacket and tossed it to his line boy, his great black muscles bulged and gleamed in the stark electric light.

  ‘Ha!’ He looked at Hendrick. ‘So we have a little Ovambo jackal come in yipping from the desert.’ The men around him laughed obsequiously. Zama was top hammer on the section; everybody laughed when he made a joke.

  ‘I thought that the Zulu baboon scratched his fleas only on the peaks of the Drakensberg so his voice can be heard afar,’ Hendrick said quietly, and there was a shocked silence for a moment and then a guffaw of disbelieving laughter.

  ‘All right, you two big talkers,’ Cronje intervened, ‘let’s break some rock.’ He led them from the station up the stope to the rockface where the gold reef was a narrow grey horizontal band in the jagged wall, dull and nondescript, without the faintest precious sparkle. The gold was locked away in it.

  The roof was low; a man had to double over to reach the face; but the stope was wide, reaching away hundreds of metres into the darkness on either hand, and they could hear the other gangs out there along the rockface, their voices echoing and reverberating, their lanterns throwing weird shadows.

  ‘Tabaka!’ Cronje yelled. ‘Here!’ He had marked the shot holes to be drilled with splashes of white paint, indicating the inclination and depth of each hole.

  The blast was a precise and calculated firing of gelignite charges. The outer holes would be charged with ‘shapers’ to form the hanging wall and foot wall of the stope they would fire first, while the pattern of inner shots fired a second later. These were the ‘cutters’ that would kick the ore back and clear it from the face.

  ‘Shaya!’ Cronje yelled at Hendrick. ‘Hit it!’ and lingered a second to watch as Hendrick stooped to the drill.

  It squatted on the rock floor in front of the face, an ungainly tool in the shape of a heavy machine-gun, with long pneumatic hoses attached to it and running back down the slope to the compressed air system in the main haulage.

  Swiftly Hendrick fitted the twenty-foot-long steel jumper bit into the lug of the drill and then he and his line boy dragged the tool to the rockface. It took all the strength of both Hendrick and his assistant to lift the tool and position the point of the drill on the white paint mark for the first cut. Hendrick eased himself into position behind the tool, taking the full weight of it on his right shoulder. The line boy stepped back, and Hendrick opened the valve.

  The din was stunning, a stuttering implosion of sound that drove in against the eardrums as compressed air at a pressure of 500 pounds a square inch roared into the drill and slammed the long steel bit into the rock.

  Hendrick’s entire body shuddered and shook to the drive of the tool against his shoulder but still he leaned his full weight against it. His head jumped on the thick corded column of his neck so rapidly that his vision blurred, but he narrowed his eyes and aimed the point of the drill into the rock at the exact angle that the shift boss had called for. Water squirted down the hollow drill steel, bubbling out of the hole in a yellow mist, splattering into Hendrick’s face.

  The sweat burst from his black skin, running down his face as though he were standing under a cloudburst, mingling with the slimy mud pouring down his naked back and scattering like rain as his straining muscles fluttered and jumped to the impulse of the pounding steel drill at his shoulder.

  Within minutes the entire surface of his body began to itch and burn. It was the hammer boys’ affliction; his skin was being scrubbed back and forth a thousand times a minute by the violent shaking motion of the drill, and with each minute the agony became more intense. He tried to close his mind to it but still it felt as though a blowtorch was being played over his body.

  The long steel drill sank slowly into the rock until it reached the depth marker painted on it and Hendrick closed the valve. There was no silence, for even though his hearing was dulled, as though his eardrums were filled with cotton wool, yet he could still hear the echoes of the drill thunder resounding against the roof of his skull.

  The line boy ran forward, seized the jumper bit and helped him withdraw it from the first shot hole and reposition the tip on the second daubed paint mark. Once again Hendrick opened the valve and the din and the agony began again. However, gradually the itching burn of his body blurred into numbness and he felt disembodied as though cocaine had been injected under his skin.

  So he stood to the rock all that shift, six hours without let or relief. When it ended and they trooped back from the face, splattered and coated with yellow mud from head to foot and weary beyond pain or feeling, even Zama the great black Zulu was reeling on his feet and his eyes were dull.

  In the station Cronje wrote the total of work completed against their names on the blackboard. Zama had drilled sixteen patterns, Hendrick twelve and the next best man ten.

  ‘Hau!’ Zama muttered as they rode up to the surface in the crowded skip. ‘On his very first shift the jackal is number two hammer.’ And Hendrick had just enough strength to reply:

  ‘And on his second shift the jackal will be top hammer.’

  It never happened. Not once did he break more rock than the Zulu. But at the end of that first month as Hendrick sat in the company beer hall with the other Ovambos of the Buffalo totem gathered around him, the Zulu came to his table carrying two one-gallon jugs of the creamy effervescent millet beer that the company sold its men. It was thick as porridge, and just as nutritious, though only very mildly alcoholic.

  Zama set a one-gallon jug down in front of Hendrick and said: ‘We broke some rock together this month, hey, jackal?’

  ‘And we’ll break a lot more together next month, hey, baboon?’

  And they both roared with laughter and raised the beer jugs in unison and drank them dry.

  Zama wa
s the first Zulu to become initiated into the brotherhood of the Buffaloes, not as natural as it sounded for tribal barriers, like mountain ranges, were difficult to cross.

  It was three months before Hendrick saw his brother again, but by that time Hendrick had extended his influence throughout the entire compound of black mine workers at the CRC mine property. With Zama as his lieutenant, the Buffaloes now encompassed men from many different tribes, Zulus and Shangaans and Matabeles. The only criterion was that the new initiates should be hard reliable men, preferably with some influence over at least a section of the eight thousand odd black miners, and preferably also appointed by the mine administration to positions of authority on the property: clerks or boss-boys or company police.

  Some of the men who were approached resisted the brotherhood’s overtures. One of these, a senior Zulu boss-boy with thirty years’ service and a misplaced sense of duty to his tribe and the company, fell into one of the ore chutes on the sixtieth level of the main haulage the day after he refused. His body was ground to a muddy paste by the tons of jagged rock that rumbled over it. It seemed that nobody had witnessed the accident.

  One of the company police indunas, who also resisted the blandishments of the brotherhood, was found stabbed to death in his sentry box at the main gates to the property, while yet another was burned to death in the kitchens. Three Buffaloes witnessed this last unfortunate incident caused by the victim’s own clumsiness and inattention and there were no more refusals.

  When at last the messenger came from Moses, identifying himself with the secret sign and handclasp, he bore a summons to a meeting, and Hendrick was able to leave the mine property without check.

  By government decree the black mine workers were strictly confined within the barbed-wire fences of the compounds. It was the opinion of both the Chamber of Mines and the Johannesburg city fathers that to let tens of thousands of single black males roam the goldfields at will would invite disaster. They had the salutary lesson of the Chinese before them. In 1904, almost fifty thousand Chinese coolies had been brought into South Africa to fill the huge shortage of unskilled labour for the gold mines. However, the Chinese were much too intelligent and restless to be confined to compounds and restricted to unskilled labour and they were highly organized in their secret tong societies. The result was a wave of lawlessness and terror that swept over the goldfields – rapine and robbery, gambling and drugs – so that in 1908, at huge cost, all the Chinese were rounded up and shipped home. The government was determined to avoid a repetition of this terror and the compound system was strictly enforced.

  However, Hendrick passed through the gates of the CRC compound as though he were invisible. He crossed the open veld in the starlight until he found the overgrown track and followed it to the old abandoned shafthead. There, parked behind the deserted rusting corrugated iron shed, was a black Ford sedan and as Hendrick approached it cautiously the headlights were switched on, spotlighting Hendrick, and he froze.

  Then the lights were switched off and Moses’ voice called out of the darkness, ‘I see you, my brother.’

  They embraced impulsively and then Hendrick laughed. ‘Ha! So you drive a motor car now, like a white man.’

  ‘The motor car belongs to Bomvu.’ Moses led him to it, and Hendrick sank back against the leather seat and sighed comfortably. ‘This is better than walking.’

  ‘Now tell me, Hendrick my brother. What has happened at CRC?’ And Moses listened without comment until Hendrick finished his long report. Then he nodded.

  ‘You have understood my wants. It is exactly as I wished it. The brotherhood must take in men from all the tribes, not just the Ovambo. We must reach to each tribe, each property, every corner of the goldfields.’

  ‘You have said all this before,’ Hendrick growled, ‘but you have never told me why, my brother. I trust you, but the men I have assembled, the impi you bid me build, they look to me, and they ask one question. They ask me why? What is the profit in this thing? What is there for us in the brotherhood?’

  ‘And what do you answer them, my brother?’

  ‘I tell them they must be patient.’ Hendrick scowled. ‘I do not know the answer, but I look wise as if I do. And if they nag me, like children – well, then I beat them like children.’ Moses laughed delightedly, but Hendrick shook his head. ‘Don’t laugh, my brother, I can’t go on beating them much longer.’

  Moses clapped his shoulder. ‘Nor will you have to much longer. But tell me now, Hendrick, what is it you have missed most in the months you have worked at CRC?’

  Hendrick answered. ‘The feeling of a woman under me.’

  ‘That you shall have before the night is finished. And what else, my brother?’

  ‘The fire of good liquor in my belly, not the weak slop from the company beerhall.’

  ‘My brother,’ Moses told him seriously, ‘you have answered your own question. These are the things that your men will get from the brotherhood. These are the scraps we will throw our hunting dogs: women and liquor and, of course money, but for those of us at the head of the Buffaloes there will be more, much more.’ He started the engine of the Ford.

  The gold-bearing reefs of the Witwatersrand form a sprawling arc one hundred kilometres in length. The older properties such as East Daggafontein are in the eastern sector of the arc where the reef originally outcropped; the newer properties are in the west where the reef dips away sharply to great depth; but like Blyvooruitzicht, these deep mines are enormously rich. All the mines are laid out along this fabulous crescent, surrounded by the urban development which the gold wealth has attracted and fostered.

  Moses drove the black Ford southwards, away from the mines and the white man’s streets and buildings, and the road they followed quickly narrowed and deteriorated, its surface rutted and riven with pot holes and puddles from the last thunderstorm. It lost direction and began to meander, degenerating into a maze of lanes and tracks.

  The street lights of the city were left behind them, but out here there was other illumination: the glow of hundreds of wood fires, their orange light muted by their own drifting smoke banks. There was one of these cooking fires in front of each of the shanties of tarpaper and old corrugated iron that crowded so closely that there were only narrow lanes between them, and there was amongst the shacks a feeling of the presence of many unseen people, as though an army were encamped out here in the open veld.

  ‘Where are we?’ Hendrick asked.

  ‘We are in a city that no man acknowledges, a city of people who do not exist.’

  Hendrick glimpsed their dark shapes as the Ford bumped and pitched over the rough track between the shanties and shacks and the headlights swung aimlessly back and forth illuminating little cameo scenes: a group of black children stoning a pariah dog; a body lying beside the track drunk or dead; a woman squatting to urinate in the angle of one of the corrugated iron walls; two men locked in silent deadly combat; a family at one of the fires eating from tins of bully beef, their eyes huge and shining as they looked up startled into the headlights; and other dark shapes scurrying furtively away into the shadows – hundreds of them and the presence of thousands more sensed.

  ‘This is Drake’s Farm,’ Moses told him. ‘One of the squatter townships that surround the white man’s Goldi.’

  The odour of the amorphous sprawling aggregation of humanity was woodsmoke and sewage, old sweat on hot bodies and charred food on the open wood fires. It was the smell of garbage mouldering in the rain puddles and the nauseating sweetness of bloodsucking vermin in unwashed bedding.

  ‘How many live here?’

  ‘Five thousand, ten thousand. Nobody knows, nobody cares.’ Moses stopped the Ford and switched off the headlights and the engine.

  The silence afterwards was not truly silence; it was the murmur of multitudes like the sea heard at a distance, the mewling of infants, the barking of a cur dog, the sounds of a woman singing, of men cursing and talking and eating, of couples arguing shrilly or copulating
, of people dying and defecating and snoring and gambling and drinking in the night.

  Moses stepped out of the Ford and called imperatively into the darkness and half a dozen dark figures came scurrying from amongst the shacks. They were children, Hendrick realized, though their age and sex were obscure.

  ‘Stand guard on my motor car,’ Moses ordered, and tossed a small coin that twinkled in the firelight until one of the children snatched it from the air.

  ‘Eh he! Baba!’ they squeaked, and Moses led his brother amongst the shacks for a hundred yards and the sound of the women singing was louder, a thrilling evocative sound, and there was the buzz of many other voices and the sour smell of old stale alcohol and meat cooking on an open fire.

  They had reached a long low building, a rough shed cobbled together from discarded material. Its walls were crooked and the outline of the roof was buckled and sway backed against the fireglow. Moses knocked upon the door and a lantern was flashed in his face before the door was thrown open.

  ‘So my brother,’ Moses took Hendrick’s arm and drew him into the doorway. ‘This is your first shebeen. Here you will have all that I promised you: women and liquor, your fill of both.’

  The shed was packed with human beings, jammed so tightly that the far wall was lost in the fog of blue tobacco smoke and a man must shout to be heard a few feet away; the black faces shone with sweat and excitement. The men were miners, drinking and singing and laughing and groping the women. Some were very drunk and a few had fallen to the earth floor and lay in their own vomit. The women were of every tribe, all of their faces painted in the fashion of white women, dressed in flimsy gaudy dresses, singing and dancing and shaking their hips, picking out the men with money and tugging them away through the doors at the back of the shed.