Roots of Outrage
‘Good gracious me!’ George Mahoney cried. ‘What will these students think of next!’
Yes, Sophiatown was also fun. A fun place to go slumming, if you had the nerve. To risk your skin and risk the cops. A place of jazz bands, zoot suits, rock and roll, gambling dens, American cars, snazzy girls and with-it wide-boys, beauty competitions and prize-fighting, Miss Sophiatown and Mr Wonderful, striptease, six-guns and flick-knives and Hollywood heroes, Porgy and Bess, James Cagney and Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte and Humphrey Bogart, hard drinking and dangerous living. Chicago, Africa-style. Live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse: that was the hip attitude and tempo that was captured in Drum, the glossy magazine written and published in Johannesburg that had made Sophiatown glamorously infamous.
‘Does the Honourable Member for Transkei – wherever that is – honestly think that it is proper, that it is right, that it is Christian, that white people go and degrade themselves in a place like that? What I cannot understand is the Honourable Member’s objection to implementing God’s will by the orderly eradication of sin, and social upliftment! And they had plenty of warning!’
‘“Social upliftment”?!’ George Mahoney roared. ‘How about social impoverishment?! How about social destitution! How about … government profiteering! Yes, profiteering, Mr Speaker! Despicable, money-grubbing, corrupt, mendacious profiteering by this government at the expense of the poor for the benefit of the rich! Why do I make this serious allegation? Because this government has compulsorily bought up Sophiatown, plot by plot, at its present slum value, and then, having evicted the poor unfortunate black owner who did not want to sell, it has sent in its big yellow bulldozers to raze his hovel to the ground. Then, waving the magic wand of the Group Areas Act, it has declared the area a white suburb, put in tarred roads, sewers and electricity, and sold the self-same plots for a fortune. For ten-fold! For twenty-fold! ‘He glowered around, then appealed: ‘Is this not despicable? What kind of government is it who takes advantage of its poorest citizens by first legislating that they must sell cheap, and then legislating that the new owner, this government, will sell expensive!’ He spread his hands to the heavens and cried: ‘Good God, Mr Speaker, I tell you that this government is the government of Ali Baba!’
Uproar. Outrage. Honourable Members wanting to leap over their benches and get their hands on the Honourable Member for Transkei.
Social upliftment? A whole society, a whole way of life, a whole livelihood was broken up and the pieces dumped out there in the bare veld beyond the horizon where it wouldn’t be seen. The convoys of government lorries arriving in Sophiatown, the hordes of policemen, the civil servants with their clipboards, the loudspeakers blaring instructions, the bulldozers rumbling, waiting. The army on standby. The poor people filing down the lanes to their designated vehicles, carrying their pitiful possessions, loading them on, climbing up; the waving goodbye, the weeping, the stoicism. ‘Hurry up, please hurry along there, please!’ Those who refused to cooperate were carried. ‘Come along, please, no nonsense now!’ The convoys rumbling out, the bulldozers rumbling in, the crunch of walls coming down, the dust rising up. The long convoys with their police escorts wound through Johannesburg, piled high with people and their belongings, out towards the sprawling black city of Soweto – bureau-speak for South Western Townships – past the vast rows of identical little joyless cottages, the spread-eagled squatter shacks, and on into the veld beyond. And awaiting them were row upon row of numbered wooden pegs in the ground, and government officials with their lists, allocating the little plots. The goods and chattels were dumped on the bare ground, and the vehicles turned back to Sophiatown for the next load of human despair.
‘Social upliftment?’ George Mahoney roared. ‘How about social cruelty?! Dumped in the bare veld, their goods and chattels exposed to the elements! And for this piece of dirt these poor people must now start paying rent! Dumped without a brick or a plank to start building even a shack! Dumped without toilets, with only one communal water-tap every so many hundred yards! Dumped without light, without fuel, miles from their employment, miles from shops, miles from the bus or train station. Dumped heartlessly, callously – and the Honourable Member has the towering brutality to call it social upliftment!’
He clutched his head: ‘Mr Speaker, the destruction of Sophiatown is not social upliftment, it is a stinking, reeking indictment of this government! And it shows this government is not only cynical and cruel, it is brainless … !’
Uproar.
‘It is stupid, Mr Speaker, to generate hatred amongst the people – especially as they are the majority! And it is stupid to bulldoze down one slum only to create another in the bare veld! But Sophiatown is only half the awful story – only a fraction of it! The rest of the story is even more tragic. Because the horror-show of Sophiatown is only the beginning of this government’s crazy plans of Grand Apartheid! As we speak the mad scientists in Pretoria are poring over maps and plotting more diabolical translocations of blackspots, more bulldozer jobs, more convoys, marking out more chunks of bare veld beyond the horizon upon which to dump its black population, to make more despair, more slums, more vice, more degradation, more bitterness, more hatred, more trouble for the white man in the future. Sophiatown is only the beginning! For as long as this government is in power we are going to see the heartbreak of Sophiatown repeated, from the northern Transvaal down to the Cape, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic we are going to see the heartlessness of Sophiatown repeated, whilst this government relentlessly, suicidally, systematically turns the vast majority of its citizens into its enemies, guaranteeing that they will one day rise up and destroy the white man who thrust such injustice upon them!’ He stabbed at the heavens. ‘This government is busily, stupidly, blindly, self-destructing!’
Boos and laughter from the government benches.
‘Self-destruction by the government, Mr Speaker,’ George Mahoney shouted, ‘would be fine with me! The sooner the better! But the tragedy of it is that in so doing they will destroy the whole country too …’
4
Beyond the poor-white houses of Umtata, beyond the Coloureds’ area, where the grand house of Mr Gandhi stood out like a sore thumb, was the black Anglican Mission school, St John’s College, or St John’s Porridge as it was called, for African porridge is made of ‘kaffir corn’, which is brown. By law the two schools were forbidden to have anything to do with each other; but twice a year they did play a cricket match, illegally, for that had been a tradition pre-dating apartheid.
The St John’s Porridge team was not much good, except for one boy called Justin Nkomo. He had no style whatsoever, but what he could do was hit a ball. Any ball: fast, slow, off-spin, leg-spin, googlies, full tosses. Justin stood there in his tattered khaki shorts, holding his bat like a club, as the best high-school bowlers came thundering up to the wicket, and Justin swiped and the ball went sailing up into the wide blue yonder. He always hit the ball in the meat of the bat; he never edged it or blocked it – he smote it. The only way to get him out was to catch him on the boundary. St John’s Porridge put Justin Nkomo in as opening bat, and he stayed there while the rest of his team were dismissed. ‘Get Nkomo!’ was the message the high school team received from their cricket coach. ‘He’s your kitchen boy, Mahoney, can’t you sabotage him somehow?’
It was in Luke’s final year at school, the year after Patti Gandhi disappeared in the bus bound for Natal, the year Luke became head prefect and was nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, that Justin Nkomo became the Mahoney’s kitchen boy, in the sense that he exchanged a few hours’ household work every night for free board and lodging in the servants’ quarters. It was a fashionable act of charity to thus sponsor a St John’s College boy, but it was of questionable legality because under apartheid only bona fide full-time servants were allowed to reside on white property. Colonel Visser turned another blind eye, however, ‘as long as there’re no complaints, hey.’
Mrs Mahoney said to her son: ‘But, please, no cricket with this boy behind the garage wall; he’s here to work and study and I won’t have any familiarity.’
But there was cricket behind the garage wall and that was definitely illegal: bona fide kitchen boys don’t play cricket. Luke and Hendrik Visser, the police commandant’s son, and David Downes, the district surgeon’s son, had rigged some nets behind the garage and, when his mother wasn’t home, Luke would call Justin out of the kitchen to bat. They would hurl ball after ball down, but they could never knock those stumps over. Once David brought a real American baseball-bat along, to see what Justin would do with it, and he did the same. They tried to teach him a bit of style, to make him hold his bat straight, step forward to long balls, back for short balls, and though he tried, to be polite, within a minute he was back to his slugging style. They asked him how he did it and he replied it was ‘just easy’.
The other thing Justin Nkomo found easy was studying. His English was stilted when he first came to work for the Mahoneys – ‘Please scrutinise my endeavours, Nkosaan’ – but he soon became idiomatic. In the evenings, after he’d helped the cook, he was allowed to study at the kitchen table, for there was no electric light in the servants’ quarters, and he sometimes sent a message to Luke via the houseboy to come to the kitchen to help him. Luke found it easy to help him because; although they were both in their matriculation year, Justin’s curriculum was inferior. ‘Nkosi, what did Shakespeare mean when Macduff tells Macbeth that he “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”?’
Luke said, ‘Well, you remember that the three witches have told Macbeth that no man of woman born can kill him? Well, Macbeth and Macduff are now fighting, and Macbeth is confident that Macduff cannot kill him, because of the witches’ prophecy, right?’
‘Correct.’
‘But now Macduff announces that he was not born of a woman in the normal way – so he can kill Macbeth. Because he was born by a Caesarean operation.’
The next night Justin said: ‘Our English teacher says you’re right.’ He added: ‘Shaka once had a hundred pregnant women slit open so he could examine the foetuses.’
‘Shaka did?’ Shaka, the Zulu warrior-king of the century, was one of Luke’s military heroes and he was interested in any new information about him. ‘Why?’
‘Because he was a stupid butcher.’
‘He was also a military genius.’
‘Then why didn’t he get guns? There were traders in those days who would have sold him guns. All Zulus are stupid.’
‘But the Xhosa didn’t get guns either, and they had more opportunity to get them than the Zulus – they fought nine Kaffir Wars against the white man.’
‘And you still didn’t beat us, Nkosi – we committed suicide in the Great Cattle Killing. But only four hundred Boers beat the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.’
‘And why did the Xhosa commit national suicide – wasn’t that stupid?’
Justin Nkomo looked at the young master. ‘No, Nkosaan, because the girl prophet told them it was the right thing to do.’
‘But it was nonsense.’
‘Yes, because she was a false prophet.’
‘So if she hadn’t been a false prophet all the dead warriors of nine wars would have risen from the grave and the white man’s bullets would have turned to water?’
‘Yes,’ Justin Nkomo said.
‘And the Russians would have come?’
‘Yes.’ He added, ‘And one day the Russians will come. Like they have come to help the Mau Mau in Kenya.’
Mahoney was taken aback by this. He had heard such wisdom from his father, but coming from the kitchen-boy it was bad news. ‘Who says?’
‘My history teacher. Haven’t you heard of communism? The South African Communist Party? And the ANC, the African National Congress?’
‘Of course. But what do you know about them?’ They were talking a mixture of English and Xhosa now.
‘Communism,’ Justin said, ‘is good. Soon the whole world will he communist. Soon there will be a revolution all over the world. Like is happening now in Kenya with the Mau Mau, where your aunt comes from.’
‘Your history teacher says this?’
‘Yes. And then we will all be rich like you. Everybody equal.’
‘How am I rich?’
‘You have a bicycle,’ Justin Nkomo said.
‘And when we have communism will they give you a bicycle?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everybody?’
‘Yes.’
‘And cattle?’
‘Yes.’
‘And who will own the land?’
‘The people. Land is not owned, Nkosaan. Land is like the sun. And water. It belongs to the people. Only capitalism says land can belong to rich people who buy it.’
It was the tradition of the Mahoney household that dinner was devoted to intellectual discussions. Any subject was entertained provided it was supported by intelligent argument. If not, it was thrown out (‘Like in the courtroom.’). That night Luke mentioned this conversation at dinner. Aunt Sheila McAdam from Kenya was staying, making her annual visit to South Africa.
His mother said: ‘Typical. Nice boy, goes to a mission school, but believes in witchcraft. And gets his head stuffed full of communist nonsense.’
‘Unfortunately it’s not nonsense,’ George Mahoney said. ‘Apartheid will drive the blacks into the arms of the communists.’
‘Like’s happened in Kenya,’ Jill pronounced gravely.
‘Not quite – ’ Luke began.
‘No, we’ve got no apartheid in Kenya,’ Aunt Sheila said. ‘The Mau Mau rebellion was fostered by Russia, through Jomo Kenyatta who was befriended by the communists when he was in England.’
‘But the whites stole the blacks’ land?’ Jill persisted.
‘No, the Kenyan government bought the land from the Kikuyu, including land which the Kikuyu had never even occupied and to which they had no right. The Kikuyu were left with plenty of land, in guaranteed reserves. The land issue was an excuse dreamed up by Russia and Jomo Kenyatta to make the Kikuyu rebel and start taking those frightful oaths to kill the white settlers, so that the communists can take over – and then spread revolution down the whole of Africa, so Russia can take over.’
‘What was so frightful about the oaths?’ Jill demanded. ‘Drinking blood and all that?’
‘And the rest,’ Aunt Sheila said. She was a weathered, robust English matron, married to Uncle Fred, who managed the East African end of Harker-Mahoney.
‘Please,’ Mrs Mahoney said, ‘not during meals.’ She was the opposite of Aunt Sheila: an English rose.
‘Cutting up people and eating them?’ Jill said hopefully.
‘Please,’ Mrs Mahoney said.
‘Why did they make the oaths horrid?’ Jill demanded.
George Mahoney said to his daughter: ‘I’ve got a book you can read, Jill, called Something of Value by Robert Ruark …’
‘You know how superstitious the blacks are,’ Aunt Sheila said. ‘They utterly believe. The missionaries come and convert them to Christianity, teach ’em readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic, put ’em in pants and – bingo – they imagine they’ve done the trick of turning the black man into a civilized man.’ She shook her head. ‘No such thing. He may – reluctantly – come to accept the white man’s God – usually because of an uneasy feeling that the white man’s magic is pretty strong medicine – but he still also believes in Ngai, his own god, who lives up there on Mount Kenya, and in his ancestors who walk along behind him giving him a hard time, and in all the evil spirits, and in all the spells and curses a witch or wizard can place on him.’ She spread her hands. ‘Of course you do encounter some real Christian converts who have staunchly refused to take the oaths and suffered terribly for it – had their wives and children butchered in front of their eyes, and so on. But for most of them the whole raft of superstitions are still as real to them as the trees and the rocks and Mount Kenya.’
‘But what’s the oath?’ Jill demanded.
George Mahoney looked at his wife. ‘She’s old enough to learn about the darker side of the Africa she lives in.’
‘Well,’ Sheila said. She got onto her hobby horse. ‘Well, it’s that superstitiousness that the Mau Mau oath plays on. The oaths were dreamed up by Jomo Kenyatta and his Russian friends – our future president. Anyway, the Mau Mau oath has its strength in the fact that it desecrates all the Kikuyu believes in, all his taboos. It’s as if you, a Christian, broke all your principles and taboos by taking an oath to the Forces of Darkness. So the person who takes the oath becomes an outcast from his people, which means that the only brotherhood he belongs to which can protect him is the Mau Mau – the Devil. And they believe that the oath will kill him – and his family – if he breaks it, or disobeys orders. And of course the Mau Mau will kill him. So, we are fighting completely degenerate, desperate blood-soaked savages.’
George said: ‘And the Mau Mau work on a secret-cell system, don’t they?’
‘Yes. Devised by the Russians. The oath-administrators initiate the members of a cell — for example, the labour force on a particular shamba. He charges ninety shillings per person – and if they refuse to take the oath they’re hideously killed, as an example to the rest. The administrator keeps thirty shillings, and the rest goes to Mau Mau funds. The oath administrator gets rich and has every incentive to keep initiating people, so it’s spread across the colony until now over a million Kikuyu have taken the oath. They started with initiating a few bandits in the forests, then it spread to the shambas, the farms, and then into the towns. Now it’s spreading into Tanganyika. The Russians’ plan is that it will spread right the way down through South Africa to Gape Town, right across the continent.’
‘Do they make human sacrifices when they do the oath?’ Jill demanded.
‘Please …’ Mrs Mahoney said.
‘Much worse than that,’ Aunt Sheila murmured.
Much worse than that, Luke knew: he had read the book. The purpose was to shock, to horrify, to degrade, to defy all taboos. So the oath had to be disgusting. Each oath administrator was instructed to dream up more horrifying oaths with which to terrify the people, to pass on his new ideas to the other administrators. Human sacrifice was always one ingredient. And animal sacrifice. Blood and body-parts mixed in the ground into a kind of soup. Brains of the persons sacrificed mixed in. Woman’s menstrual blood. Urine. Semen. Human shit. Maggots. Putrefied human flesh exhumed from graves. Pus from running sores. Eyeballs gouged out, intestines cut open. Drinking the vile brew while you repeat the oath. Public intercourse with sheep and adolescent girls. And all the time the dancing and the drums and the bloodcurdling mumbo-jumbo, all at dead of night in the spooky forest, all the oath-takers in a trance. All with the purpose of irrevocably committing the oath-taker to killing Europeans, burning their crops, killing their cattle, stealing their firearms, killing to order even if the victim is your own father or brother – and always to mutilate, cut off the heads, extract the eyeballs and drink the liquid. ‘If I am ordered to bring my brother’s head and I disobey, this oath will kill me. If I am ordered to bring the finger or ear of my mother and I disobey, this oath will kill me. If I am ordered to bring the head, hair or fingernail of a European and I disobey, this oath will kill me. If I rise against the Mau Mau, this oath will kill me. If I betray the whereabouts of arms or ammunition or the hiding place of my brothers, this oath will kill me. When the reed-buck horn is blown, if I leave the European farm before killing the owner, may this oath kill me. If I worship any leader but Jomo Kenyatta, may this oath kill me …’
The Mau Mau had completely shattered the average African’s spiritual equilibrium, absolute sin had created a new barbarism, a fanatic who massacred whole villages, decapitating and mutilating, cutting babies in half in front of their mothers, hanging people, slitting pregnant women open, hacking heads off with pangas, cutting the ears off people so they can be easily identified later. And now cannibalism had been introduced. The victim’s head chopped open, the brains dried in the sun, the heart cut out and dried, steaks cut for food when the Mau Mau gang was on the move. In each gang there was an executioner who acted as butcher. The Batuni Oath, by breaking every tribal taboo, ostracised the oath-taker from all hope, in this world and the next. The result was a terrorist organization composed not of humans fighting for a cause, but of primitive beasts.
‘Your cook-boy tried to kill you, didn’t he, Aunt Sheila?’ Jill said proudly.
‘No, darling.’ Aunt Sheila smiled. ‘It was my houseboy. Old Moses, my cook, he’s loyal, and he’s a devout Christian. Not that that’s any guarantee these days,’ she added. ‘The Mau Mau modus operandi is to kill Moses’s family if he refuses to kill me. So, I’m well armed at all times. If this was Kenya, we’d all be sitting with our pistols on the table. And your servants would be locked in the stockade at this hour.’
‘So you have to serve your own dinner?’ Jill demanded, perturbed.
‘No, Moses and the new houseboy sleep in the kitchen, but the rest are locked in the stockade, which has a high fence around it, and a deep wide trench with sharpened bamboo stakes. We muster them at six o’clock, roll call, then shepherd them in.’
‘Don’t they mind?’ Jill demanded.
‘No. The stockade is to protect them from the Mau Mau. They have their huts and families inside. And their own armed guards. And of course our homestead is also surrounded by a security fence now. With two high towers where our Masai guards sit all night with searchlights and machine guns. With rope ladders, so the Masai can pull it up after them. The searchlights can reach the labour stockade and the new cattle pens where we have to lock up our animals at night now, or the Mau Mau cut the udders off, and hamstring them, slash their hind legs. Terrible.’
‘Oh!’ Jill was wide-eyed.
Mrs Mahoney said: ‘Your Masai are reliable?’
‘Oh yes, they’re the traditional enemies of the Kikuyu, they hate the Mau Mau. In one operation, the police and army sent the Masai into the forest to ambush a huge band of Mau Mau they were flushing out. The Masai attacked in full regalia and killed them all, the army just watched. The Masai went home very happy – because, of course, the government had put a stop to tribal warfare long ago.’
‘Divide and rule,’ George Mahoney murmured. ‘Works every time in Africa.’
‘Tell us about when you were attacked, Aunt Sheila.’ Jill pleaded.
Mrs Mahoney raised her eyebrows, but George said, ‘She’s old enough.’
‘Well,’ Sheila said, ‘it was before we’d put up the security fence and the watchtowers. Fred and I were having dinner. The houseboy – our last houseboy – brings in the soup. Fred tells him to taste it, in case it’s poisoned. The houseboy starts trembling and tries to run to the kitchen. Same moment the door to the kitchen opens and in burst three Mau Mau with pangas. The dogs fly at them and Fred opens up with his pistol and kills the first two dead, but the third comes at me with his panga. I shoot him in the chest but he keeps coming and one of the dogs gets him in the … er, groin. Fred shoots him dead, then charges to the kitchen and there’s the cookboy with his skull split open, and there’s the houseboy standing with a panga and he swipes at Fred’s collarbone. I burst into the kitchen and shoot the houseboy in the heart. Lucky shot.’ She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Oh, what a mess. Blood and brains and bodies everywhere …’