Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Moses did not have to force his way through this jam of bodies. It opened almost miraculously before him, and many of the women called to him respectfully. Hendrick followed closely behind his brother and he was struck with admiration that Moses had been able to achieve this degree of recognition in the three short months since they had arrived on the Rand.

  There was a guard at the door at the far end of the shebeen, an ugly scar-faced ruffian, but he also recognized Moses and clapped his hands in greeting before he pulled aside the canvas screen to allow them to go through into the back room.

  This room was less crowded, and there were tables and benches for the customers. The girls in here were still graced with youth, bright-eyed and fresh-faced. An enormous black woman was seated at a separate table in the corner. She had the serene round moon face of the highbred Zulu but its contours were almost obscured by fat. Her dark amber skin was stretched tightly over this abundance; her belly hung down in a series of fleshy balconies onto her lap, and fat hung in great black dewlaps under her arms and formed bracelets around her wrists. On the table in front of her were neat stacks of coins, silver and copper, and wads of multicoloured bank notes, and the girls were bringing her more to add to the piles each minute.

  When she saw Moses her perfect white teeth shone like precious porcelain; she lumbered to her feet, her thighs so elephantine that she waddled with her feet wide apart as she came to him and greeted him as though he were a tribal chief, touching her forehead and clapping with respect.

  ‘This is Mama Nginga,’ Moses told Hendrick. ‘She is the biggest shebeen keeper and whore mistress on Drake’s Farm. Soon she will be the only one on Drake’s Farm.’

  Only then did Hendrick realize that he knew most of the men at the tables. They were Buffaloes who had travelled on the Wenela train and taken the initiation oath with him, and they greeted him with unfeigned delight and introduced him to the strangers in their midst.

  ‘This is Henry Tabaka. He is the one of the legend. The man who slew Tshayela, the white overseer—’ and Hendrick noticed the immediate respect in the eyes of these new Buffaloes. They were men from the other mines along the reef, recruited by the original Buffaloes, and Hendrick saw that on the whole they had chosen well.

  ‘My brother has not had a woman or a taste of good liquor in three months,’ Moses told them as he seated himself at the head of the central table. ‘Mama Nginga, we don’t want your skokiaan. She makes it herself,’ he told Hendrick in a loud aside, ‘and she puts in carbide and methylated spirits and dead snakes and aborted babies to give it kick and flavour.’

  Mama Nginga screeched with laughter. ‘My skokiaan is famous from Fordsburg to Bapsfontein. Even some of the white men – the mabuni – come for it.’

  ‘It’s good enough for them,’ Moses agreed, ‘but not good enough for my brother.’

  Mama Nginga sent one of the girls to them with a bottle of Cape brandy and Moses seized the young girl around the waist and held her easily. He pulled open the European-style blouse she wore, forcing out her big round breasts so that they shone like washed coal in the lamplight.

  ‘This is where we start, my Buffaloes, a girl and a bottle,’ he told them. ‘There are fifty thousand lonely men at Goldi far from their wives, all of them hungry for sweet young flesh. There are fifty thousand men, thirsty from their work in the earth, and the white men forbid them to slake their thirst with this.’ He shook the bottle of golden spirits. ‘There are fifty thousand randy thirsty black men at Goldi, all with money in their pockets. The Buffaloes will give them what they want.’ He pushed the girl into Hendrick’s lap and she coiled herself about him with professionally simulated lust and thrust her shining black breasts into his face.

  When the dawn broke over the sprawling shanty town of Drake’s Farm, Moses and Hendrick picked their way down the reeking convoluted alleys to where they had left the Ford and the children were guarding it still, like jackals around the lion’s kill. The brothers had sat all night in the back room of Mama Nginga’s shebeen and the preliminary planning was at last done. Each of their lieutenants had been allotted areas and responsibilities.

  ‘But there is still much work to be done, my brother,’ Moses told Hendrick as he started the Ford. ‘We have to find the liquor and the women. We will have to bring all the little shebeens and brothels like goats into our kraal, and there is only one way to do that.’

  ‘I know how that has to be done,’ Hendrick nodded. ‘And we have an impi to do it.’

  ‘And an induna, a general, to command that impi.’ Moses glanced at Hendrick significantly. ‘The time has come for you to leave CRC, my brother. All your time and your strength will be needed now. You will waste no more of your strength in the earth, breaking rock for a white man’s pittance. From now on you will be breaking heads for power and great fortune.’ He smiled thinly. ‘You will never have to pine again for those little white stones of yours. I will give you more, much more.’

  Marcus Archer arranged for Hendrick’s contract at CRC to be cancelled and for him to be issued travel papers for one of the special trains that carried the returning miners who had worked out their ticket back to the reservations and the distant villages. But Hendrick never caught that train. Instead he disappeared from the white man’s records and was absorbed into the shadowy halfworld of the townships.

  Mama Nginga set aside one of the shanties at the back of her shebeen for his exclusive use, and one of her girls was always on hand to sweep and wash his laundry, to cook his food and warm his bed.

  It was six days after his arrival at Drake’s Farm that the Buffalo impi opened its campaign. The objective had been discussed and carefully explained by Hendrick and it was simple and clear-cut. They would make Drake’s Farm their own citadel.

  On the first night twelve of the opposition shebeens were burned to the ground. Their proprietors burned with them, as did those of their customers who were too drunk to crawl out of the flaming hovels. Drake’s Farm was far outside the sector served by the white man’s fire engines, so no attempt was made to fight the flames. Rather, the inhabitants of Drake’s Farm gathered to watch the spectacle as though it was a circus arranged particularly for their entertainment. The children danced and shrilled in the firelight, and screeched with laughter as the bottles of spirits exploded like fireworks.

  Nearly all the girls escaped from the flames. Those who had been at work when the fire began ran out naked, clutching their scanty clothing and weeping wildly at the loss of all their worldly possessions and savings. However, there were kindly concerned men to comfort them and lead them away to Mama Nginga’s.

  Within forty-eight hours the shebeens had been rebuilt on their ashes and the girls were back at work again. Their lot was much improved; they were well fed and clothed and they had their own Buffaloes to protect them from their customers, to make certain they were neither cheated nor abused. Of course, if they in turn shirked or tried to cheat, they were beaten soundly; but they expected that, it made them feel part of the totem and replaced the father and brothers they had left in the reservations.

  Hendrick allowed them to keep a fixed proportion of the fee they charged and made sure his men respected their rights to it.

  ‘Generosity breeds loyalty and firmness a loving heart,’ he explained to his Buffaloes, and he extended his ‘happy house’ policy to embrace his customers and everybody else at Drake’s Farm. The black miners coming into the township were as carefully protected as his girls were. In very short order the footpads, pickpockets, muggers and other small-time entrepreneurs were routed out. The quality of the liquor improved. From now on all of it was brewed under Mama Nginga’s personal supervision.

  It was strong as a bull elephant, and bit like a rabid hyena, but it no longer turned men blind or destroyed their brains, and because it was manufactured in bulk, it was reasonably priced. A man could get falling-down drunk for two shillings or have a good clean girl for the same price.

  Hendrick’s men met
every bus and train coming in from the country districts, bringing the young black girls who had run away from their villages and their tribe to reach the glitter of Goldi. They led the pretty ones back to Drake’s Farm. When this source of supply became inadequate as the demand increased, Hendrick sent his men into the country districts and villages to recruit the girls at the source with sweet words and promises of pretty things.

  The city fathers of Johannesburg and the police were fully aware of the unacknowledged halfworld of the townships that had grown up south of the goldfields but, daunted by the prospect of closing them down and finding alternative accommodation for thousands of vagrants and illegals, they turned a blind eye, appeasing their civic consciences by occasional raids, arrests and the wholesale imposition of fines. However, as the incidence of murder and robbery and other serious crime mysteriously abated at Drake’s Farm and it became an area of comparative calm and order, so their condescension and forbearance became even more pragmatic. The police raids ceased, and the prosperity of the area increased as its reputation as a safe and convivial place to have fun spread amongst the tens of thousands of black mine workers along the Rand. When they had a pass to leave the compound, they would travel thirty and forty miles, bypassing other centres of entertainment to reach it.

  However, there were still many hundreds of thousands of other potential customers who could never reach Drake’s Farm, and Moses Gama turned his attention to these.

  ‘They cannot come to us, so we must go to them.’ He explained to Hendrick what must be done, and it was Hendrick who negotiated the piecemeal purchase of a fleet of second-hand delivery vans and employed a coloured mechanic to renovate them and keep them in running order.

  Each evening convoys of these vehicles loaded with liquor and girls left Drake’s Farm, journeying down the length of the goldfields to park at some secluded location close to the big mining properties, in a copse of trees, a valley between the mine dumps, or an abandoned shaft building. The guards at the gate of the mine workers’ compound, who were all Buffaloes, made certain that the customers were allowed in and out, and now every member of the Buffalo totem could share in the good fortune of their clan.

  ‘So, my brother, do you still miss your little white stones?’ Moses asked after their first two years of operation from Drake’s Farm.

  ‘It was as you promised,’ Hendrick chuckled. ‘We have everything that a man could wish for now.’

  ‘You are too easily satisfied,’ Moses chided him.

  ‘There is more?’ Hendrick asked with interest.

  ‘We have only just begun,’ Moses told him.

  ‘What is next, my brother?’

  ‘Have you heard of a trade union?’ Moses asked. ‘Do you know what it is?’

  Hendrick looked dubious, frowning as he thought about it. ‘I know that the white men on the mines have trade unions, and the white men on the railways also. I have heard it spoken of, but I know very little about them. They are white men’s business, no concern of the likes of us.’

  ‘You are wrong, my brother,’ Moses said quietly. ‘The African Mine Workers Union is very much our concern. It is the reason why you and I came to Goldi.’

  ‘I thought that we came for the money.’

  ‘Fifty thousand union members each paying one shilling a week union dues – isn’t that money?’ Moses asked, and smiled as he watched his brother make the calculation. Avarice contorted his smile so that the broken gap in his teeth looked like a black mine pit.

  ‘It is good money indeed!’

  Moses had learned from his unsuccessful attempts to establish a mine workers’ union at the H’ani Mine. The black miners were simple souls with not the least vestige of political awareness; they were separated by tribal loyalties; they did not consider themselves part of a single nation.

  ‘Tribalism is the one great obstacle in our path,’ Moses explained to Hendrick. ‘If we were one people we would be like a black ocean, infinite in our power.’

  ‘But we are not one people,’ Hendrick pointed out. ‘Any more than the white men are one people. A Zulu is as different from an Ovambo as a Scotsman is from a Russian Cossack or an Afrikaner from an Englishman.’

  ‘Ha!’ Moses smiled. ‘I see you have been reading the books I gave you. When first we came to Goldi you had never heard of a Russian Cossack—’

  ‘You have taught me much about men and the world they live in,’ Hendrick agreed. ‘Now teach me how you will make a Zulu call an Ovambo his brother. Tell me how we are to take the power that is held so firmly in the hands of the white man.’

  ‘These things are possible. The Russian people were as diverse as we black people of Africa. They are Asiatics and Europeans, Tartars and Slavs, but under a great leader they have become a single nation and have overthrown a tyranny even more infamous than the one under which we suffer. The black people need a leader who knows what is good for them and will force them to it, even if ten thousand or a million die in achieving it.’

  ‘A leader such as you, my brother?’ Hendrick asked, and Moses smiled his remote enigmatic smile.

  ‘The Mine Workers Union first,’ he said. ‘Like a child learning to walk, one step at a time. The people must be forced to do what is good for them in the long run even though at first it is painful.’

  ‘I am not sure—’ Hendrick shook his great shaven round head on which the ridged scars stood proud like polished gems of black onyx. ‘What is it we seek, my brother? Is it wealth or power?’

  ‘We are fortunate,’ Moses answered. ‘You want wealth and I want power. The way I have chosen, each of us will get what he desires.’

  Even with ruthless contingents of the Buffaloes on each of the mine properties the process of unionization was slow and frustrating. By necessity much of it had to be undertaken secretly, for the government’s Industrial Conciliation Act placed severe limitations on black labour association and specifically prohibited collective bargaining by black workers. There was also opposition from the workers themselves, their natural suspicion and antagonism towards the new union shop stewards, all of them Buffaloes, all of them appointed and not elected; and the ordinary workers were reluctant to hand over part of their hard-earned wages to something they neither understood nor trusted.

  However, with Dr Marcus Archer to advise and counsel them and with Hendrick’s Buffaloes to push the cause forward, slowly the unionization of the workers on each of the various mine properties was accomplished. The miners’ reluctance to part with their silver shillings was quelled. There were, of course, casualties, and some men died, but at last there were over twenty thousand dues-paying members of the African Mine Workers Union.

  The Chamber of Mines, the association of mining interests, found itself presented with a fait accompli. The members were at first alarmed; their natural instinct was to destroy this cancer immediately. However, the Chamber members were first and above all else businessmen, concerned with getting the yellow metal to the surface with as little fuss as possible and with paying regular dividends to their shareholders. They understood what havoc a labour battle could wreak amongst their interests, so they held their first cautious informal talks with the non-existent union and were most gratified to find the self-styled secretary general to be an intelligent articulate and reasonable person.

  There was no trace of Bolshevik dialectic in his statements, and far from being radical and belligerent, he was co-operative and respectful in his address.

  ‘He is a man we can work with,’ they told each other. ‘He seems to have influence. We’ve needed a spokesman for the workers and he seems a decent enough sort. We could have done a lot worse. We can manage this chap.’ And sure enough, their very first meetings had excellent results and they were able to solve a few small vexing long-term problems to the satisfaction of the union and the profit of the mine owners.

  After that the informal, unrecognized union had the Chamber’s tacit acceptance, and when a problem arose with their labour the Chamber se
nt for Moses Gama and it was swiftly settled. Each time this happened, Moses’ position became more securely entrenched. And, of course, there was never even a hint at strikes or any form of militancy on the union’s part.

  ‘Do you understand, my brothers?’ Moses explained to the first meeting of his central committee of the African Mine Workers Union held in Mama Nginga’s shebeen. ‘If they come down upon us with their full strength while we are still weak, we will be destroyed for all time. This man Smuts is a devil, and he is truly the steel in the government’s spear. He did not hesitate to send his troops with machine-guns against the white union strikers in 1922. What would he do to black strikers, my brothers? He would water the earth with our blood. No, we must lull them. Patience is the great strength of our people. We have a hundred years, while the white man lives only for the day. In time the black ants of the veld build mountains and devour the carcass of the elephant. Time is our weapon, and time is the white man’s enemy. Patience, my brothers, and one day the white man will discover that we are not oxen to be yoked into the traces of his wagon. He will discover rather that we are black-maned lions, fierce eaters of white flesh.’

  ‘How swiftly the years have passed us by since we rode on Tshayela’s train from the deserts of the west to the flat shining mountains of Goldi.’ Hendrick watched the mine dumps on the skyline as Moses drove the old Ford through the sparse traffic of a Sunday morning. He drove sedately, not too slow not too fast, obeying the traffic rules, stopping well in advance of the changing traffic lights, those wonders of the technological age which had only been installed on the main routes within the last few months. Moses always drove like this.

  ‘Never draw attention to yourself unnecessarily, my brother,’ he advised Hendrick. ‘Never give a white policeman an excuse to stop you. He hates you already for driving a motor car that he cannot afford himself. Never put yourself in his power.’

  The road skirted the rolling fairways of the Johannesburg Country Club, oases of green in the brown veld, watered and groomed and mown until they were velvet green carpets on which the white golfers strolled in their foursomes followed by their barefooted caddies. Further back amongst the trees the white walls of the club house gleamed, and Moses slowed the Ford and turned at the bottom of the club property where the road crossed the tiny dry Sand Spruit river and the signpost said ‘Rivonia Farm’.