My Traitor's Heart
by
Rian Malan

"The book Rian Malan set out to write was altogether more conventional
than the one he has written.  It was supposed to be a history of the
great and detested Malan family, as told by its kafferboetie (that is,
'brother of blacks', 'nigger-lover') renegade.  But along the way he
ran into, and faced up to, the truth that is the making of his book
that for all his nigger-loving, leftist views, for all his long hair
and days smoking zol (dope) on the hillsides in the mystical Toikeinish
company of 'wise old Afs', for all his daubing pro black slogans on the
walls of Johannesburg's northern suburbs, where scarcely a black would
ever see them, he was still a Malan; that he could only write about the
atrocity of South Africa by admitting the atrocity hidden in his own
traitorous heart ... Here, as in nothing I've read before, is the
demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa ... The old woman,
Creina Alcock, tells Rian Malan: "Love is worth nothing until it has
been tested by its own defeat ... Love is to enable you to transcend
defeat."  My Traitor's Heart, which tells us of the defeat of its
author's illusions, his ideals, his sense of his own goodness, his
courage, and his ability to comprehend his fellow South Africans as
they dance their death-dances, which is full of bitterness, cynicism,
anger and storms, is a triumphant instance of this type of defeated
love."

Salrnan Rusbdie


"Has there ever been a better moment to remind ourselves of the essence
of the South African situation, which is fear and hatred, racial fear
and racial hatred?  This is ... a magnificent book, an explosion of
truth-telling at a time when we are being given so much half-informed
and over-optimistic simplification.  Malan belongs in a line of
Afrikaner breast-beating."

Times Literary Supplement

"Unusual, vivid, raw and revealing- those were the words that came to
mind when I finished Rian Malan's powerful book ... This is an
impressive book, and a useful one to read in view of the current
momentous developments in South Africa.  It reminds us of the scale of
challenge that will face all South Africans in the post-apartheid era,
and that the new South Africa, in its formative years, will be as
dangerous as it will be exciting.  It will be best served by the
passion and candour of young patriots like Rian Malan and other whites
determined to undo the harm done by their ancestors over so many years
of fear, hatred and violence."

Donald Woods, Sunday Times

"The remorseless exercise of a reporter's anguished conscience gives us
a South Africa we thought we knew all about:

but we knew nothing"

John Le Carr

"A great swirling devil of a book and it is equal in every way to its
vast subject the black and white country of the heart"

Don Delillo

"Rian Malan has written a tragic masterpiece and a classic of our
time"

Time Out

"My Traitor's Heart is a tremendous book about candour, honour and
race, a wireess-bearing act of the rarest courage.  No one who reads it
could ever forget it."

Michael Herr

The right of Rian Malan to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Courier International Ltd, Tiptree, Essex

ISBN 0 09 974900 9 For the forgotten legions of the South African
centre, for my parents, and for Creina, who took the enormous risk of
trusting me.

How do I live in this strange place?

- BERNOLDUS NIEMAND, from the Boer reggae song, "Reggae Vibes Is
Cool'

I'M BURNED OUT and starving to death, so I'm just going to lay this all
upon you and trust that you're a visionary reader, because the grand
design, such as it is, is going to be hard for you to see.  I know
you're interested in my ancestors, so I guess I should begin at the
very beginning.  I am a Malan, descendant of Jacques Malan, a Huguenot
who fled the France of Louis XIV to escape being put to the sword for
his Protestant faith.

He sought refuge among the Dutch, only to be put aboard ship in 1688
and sent to the Dark Continent, to the rude Dutch colony at the Cape of
Good Hope.  Jacques the Huguenot was the first Malan in Africa.  In the
centuries since, a Malan has been present at all the great dramas and
turning points in the history of the Afrikaner tribe.

Jacques tamed the Cape and planted vineyards.  His sons built gracious
gabled homesteads in the lee of Table Mountain.  His grandson Dawid the
Younger ran off to the wild frontier in 1788, where he fought the
savage Xhosa and took part in Slagtersnek, the first Afrikaner
rebellion against the British.

Hercules, son of Dawid the Younger, led the third wave of Voortrekkers
into the heart of Africa.  In February 1838 he sat in the kraal of the
great king Dingaan, watching a huge Zulu army wheeling back and forth
on the plain.  The sun glinted off thousands of spears.  Feet thundered
in unison.  Clouds of dust rose into the sky.  And then Dingaan cried,
"Kill the wizards," and Hercules and his seventy companions were
murdered stakes driven up their anuses, skulls smashed with stones, and
their bodies left on a hill for the vultures.

Once the killing was done, King Dingaan pointed, and his army set off
for the north at a run.  They ran all day and most of the night, and it
was still dark when they fell on the main Trekker party.  The attack
was unexpected.  Men were disemboweled, women mutilated, and the brains
of small children dashed out on wagon wheels.  In all, 530 Trekkers
died that dawn, in a place we still call Weenen the Place of Weeping.

In the aftermath, the survivors drew their wagons into a circle on the
bank of a nameless river and made ready for the final battle.  On its
eve, they laid hands on the Bible and swore a covenant with Jehovah: If
he granted them victory over the heathen, they would hold true to his
ways forever.  A Malan was there Jacob Jacobus Malan, brother of the
fallen Hercules.  As the sun rose on December 16, he saw something
amazing: rank upon rank of Zulu warriors sitting silently on their
haunches, waiting for the mist to rise.

Two hours later, the river was red with black blood, and it was no
longer nameless: It was Blood Riven Mountains of Zulus lay dead on the
battlefield, but not a single Boer was slain.  It was surely a miracle,
a sign that God's will was ours.

So we remember Jacob Jacobus Malan and' still honor his solemn
covenant. We also remember his sons Jacobus and Hercules, who survived
the Zulu wars, dragged their covered wagons over the mountains, and
smashed the black tribes on the high plain.  There, on conquered land,
they established Boer republics, where white men were free to rule
blacks in accord with their stern Jehovistic covenant.

In 1881, Hercules Malan the second sat on an African hilltop watching
another seminal event in the white tribe's bloody saga the Battle of
Majuba, turning point in our first war against the British.  Kommandant
Malan's soldiers were an undisciplined rabble of farm boys and
graybeards, but they could drop a buck at a thousand yards, and every
bullet counted.  The redcoats were annihilated, and the British retired
to lick their wounds.  A few years later, however, gold was discovered
on our land, and they came after us in earnest.

In that next war the Second War of Freedom our forces were outnumbered
nine to one.  The largest army yet assembled on the planet rolled
across our frontiers and occupied our towns.  We fought on, though.  A
Malan was there, too:

General Wynand Malan, the bravest of the brave, leader of a guerilla
band that ranged deep into enemy territory.

crush our resistance, the British scorched the earth and put Afrikaner
women and children in concentration camps, but General Malan fought on
to the bittersweet end, taking a bullet on the war's very last day.

In the aftermath, we became a backward peasantry, despised by our
British bosses and betters.  But we rose again, with yet another Malan
at the fore Daniel Franqois Malan.

His Afrikaner National Party came to power in 1948, vowing to throw off
the imperial British yoke and devise a final solution for the 'native
question."  This final solution was apartheid, a gridlock of more than
a hundred laws designed to keep blacks and whites forever separate and
to ensure, not at all coincidentally, that blacks remained in their
Godordained place, hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and
ever.

This fate was unacceptable to blacks, so they rose against us in
earnest in 1976, in a rebellion that has never really ceased since.  In
this era, too, the destiny of the tribe is in the hands of a Malan
General Magnus Malan, minister of defense.  There are those who say it
is he who truly controls the country, through the awesome power of the
white military establishment.  In these troubled times, the name Malan
is often heard on the lips of black comrades, in the chanted litany of
those who will die when the day comes.  I see them at the township
rallies, thousands upon thousands of them, running to and fro in tight
formation.  Their feet thunder in unison.  Their faces glisten with
sweat and excitement.  Dust rises.  They cradle imaginary AK-47s in
their arms, and chant, "Voetsek, Malan!"  Fuck off, Malan!  Fuck off!
Fuck off!  And then they wheel in formation and thunder away to the far
side of some dusty township stadium, leaving me poised there on a cusp
of history.

There is only one war here, you see, the war that was and is and yet
will be.  I don't know how it will end, but I can tell you where it
began.  It began in the 1780s, on the eastern frontier of the old Cape
Colony, and a Malan, inevitably, was there.

I found him in the national archives in Cape Town, buried in the index
underneath a cryptic "M."  The entry referred to a trial held in 1788,
but the felon's name was not revealed.

He was just M. It was the only entry of its kind.  I thought, here lies
some secret, some truth long obscured, so I asked to see the records of
this two-hundred-year-old trial.  The story they revealed was myth made
flesh, the destiny of a nation embodied in the fate of a single man.

On the outskirts of Cape Town, beside a four-lane freeway, stands a
pair of whitewashed pillars and an imposing wrought-iron gate.  Behind
the gate, in a grove of oak and camphor trees, lies the homestead
Vergelegen, one of the finest remaining examples of an architectural
style called Cape Dutch.  The house is achingly lovely to the eye, a
symphony of whitewashed walls, flowing gables, dark thatch, wooden
shutters and huge yellowwood doors that open on the cool gloom of tiled
interiors.  Two centuries ago, it was the home of one Dawid Malan, the
man behind the M. Dawid Malan was born in 1750, son of Dawid the Elder
and grandson of Jacques the Patriarch.  At the age of twenty-four, and
by virtue of a shrewd marriage to his cousin Elizabeth, he became
master of Vergelegen, then the finest estate in the entire Cape Colony.
Vergelegen stood at the foot of the Hottentot's Holland Mountains, a
day's horse ride from the shores of Table Bay.

In Dawid's time, the Cape was already a tame, orderly place.  Lions and
elephants were a fading memory, and the yellow-skinned Hottentot tribes
living there when whites first came had long since been driven off or
turned into servants and herders.  From his rooftop, Dawid would have
looked out upon a breathtaking tableau of vineyards, golden wheat
fields, whitewashed farmhouses, and purple mountains.  In the distance,
at the foot of Table Mountain, stood a great stone castle flying the
flag of the mighty Dutch East India Company.

Under its ramparts lay a bustling wharf where merchantmen bound for the
Spice Islands of the Orient took on fresh food, water, and wine.

Above the castle, on the slopes of the mountain, stood a city of great
beauty.  Cape Town struck one early visitor as a place of 'elegant and
capacious dwellings," inhabited by people of 'general intelligence and
cultured politeness."

Travelers were invariably astonished to discover so charming and
civilized a settlement in such an unlikely place.  In Cape Town, the
gentry sported powdered wigs and danced the minuet in the castle's
ballroom.  They built schools and churches, employed learned pastors
and pedagogues.  They had heard of Rousseau and Voltaire, and there
were even some Free Thinkers among them.  Cape Town was a tiny outpost
of Europe, an enclave of the Enlightenment at the foot of the Dark
Continent.

In this community, in the year 1788, Dawid the Younger was a citizen of
great substance.  As master of Vergelegen, he was a rich man, owner of
a score of slaves, twice that many horses, and more than fifty thousand
vine stocks  His father was a candidate for a seat on the citizen's
council that advised the Dutch governor on matters of policy; his
uncle, an elder of the Dutch Reformed Church.  Dawid himself was a
colonel in the Burger Dragoons, the citizens' militia.  He had an
upstanding wife, four young children, and a neighbor named Jurgen
Radijn.

Radijn was a German, a mercenary who had recently retired from the
service of the Dutch East India Company and settled on an estate called
Harmonic.  Among Radijn's possessions was a slave girl named Sara, who
gave birth that year to a son.  Her master would normally have taken
pleasure in this increase in his human flock, but this child was a
half-breed, and that meant money out of his pocket: The children of
slave and Christian had to be baptized, educated, and eventually freed,
and Sara's child, by the look of it, had surely been fathered by a
Christian.  Radijn was incensed.

Someone had been tampering with his brood stock, so to speak.  He
demanded the man's name, but Sara refused to answer.  She swore to don
a man's clothing and run away if a hand was laid upon her, then turned
her face to the wall.

Under the circumstances, there was little Radijn could do but keep a
close watch on the errant girl and make sure that she remained
henceforth chaste.

Late one night, Radijn's wife was awakened by the barking of dogs.  She
looked outside and saw a shadow stealing across the courtyard below her
window.  She waited.  A while later, two shadowy figures came out of
the dark and disappeared into the door of the slave quarters.  This was
the moment Mother Radijn was waiting for.  She gathered up her
nightdress and tiptoed after them.  In the slave quarters, she lit a
taper and held it aloft.  Sara was lying in her cot, feigning sleep.

Mother Radijn was not fooled.  She summoned the intruder forth.  At
that, a white man crawled out from under Sara's bed and stood up, naked
save for his stockings.  It was Dawid Malan, master of Vergelegen.

"Mother Radijn," he said lamely, 'this is not what you think it to
be."

For masters to sleep with slaves was not unheard-of, but it was done
discreetly, furtively.  It was a breaking of caste and, worse yet, a
violation of Calvinist piety.  So there was a minor scandal when
Malan's philandering first came to light, but it was nothing compared
with what was to come.  Dawid seemed obsessed with the slave girl, and
refused to give her up.  He took to lurking around Harmonic's
homestead, trying to catch a glimpse of her.  He waylaid Radijn's
slaves in the fields and begged them to carry secret messages to her.
It was outrageous.  In the court case in which these doings were
subsequently aired, witness after witness stepped forward to tell of
their shock at Malan's behavior, and of the dire warnings of God's
punishment they had issued to him.  Dawid scorned their advice, and his
conduct became the talk of the colony.

His wife kicked him out of her bed, the Church shunned him as a
fornicator, and Radijn, in a final effort to put an end to the shameful
affair, took the child from Sara's breast and sent her to live with Jan
de Vos, keeper of tolls on a distant mountain pass.  De Vos was
instructed to keep Sara indoors at all times, and Dawid Malan at bay.

The toll-keeper tried, but he had to leave his home from time to time.
One day, a slave informed de Vos that something curious had happened
while he was away.  A white man had crept into his cottage, spoken to
Sara, and then slipped quietly away.  Who was it?  The slave had no
idea.

On the night of August 11, Dawid Malan rose from his bed and crept into
Vergelegen's stables.  He saddled two horses, loaded them with
provisions, powder, and shot.  And then he rode out into the night and
started climbing the pass that led over the Hottentot's Holland
Mountains and away from Cape Town.  In his day, the pass was just a
rough track that wound tortuously up the hillside, following a path
worn centuries earlier by herds of migrating antelope.  Near the stone
cottage of the toll-keeper, Malan whistled like a bird, and a woman
materialized out of the darkness.  Sara mounted Dawid's spare horse,
and they rode on up the pass together.

It was a long and grueling climb, so dawn was probably breaking by the
time they reached the mountain's crest.  If his eyes were keen, Dawid
might have seen a frenzied scurrying between the tiny farmhouses far
below.  Finding two horses missing, Elizabeth Malan had broken into her
estranged husband's bedroom and discovered his bed unslept-in.  She
galloped over to Harmonic, tears streaming down her face, and told
Jurgen Radijn, who instantly dispatched a rider to check on Sara's
whereabouts.  She, too, was gone; her guardian, the toll-keeper de Vos,
was out on the mountainside with his flintlock and his dogs, searching
for the spoor.  Radijn's messenger wheeled and rode off to raise the
alarm.  The fugitives had to make haste.

Ahead of Dawid and Sara lay a cool, high plain called Overberg, the
land beyond the mountains.  They pushed on across it, riding as hard as
they could.  On the third day of their flight, an inquisitive
militiaman barred their way, and Malan was forced to give a false name,
and a false account of himself.

He claimed to be Jan Nortj of Cape Town, and introduced his
dark-skinned companion as his wife.  After that, they avoided farms and
settlements, although a sharp-eyed widow spotted them as they skirted
the town of Goudini.  Beyond Goudini lay the Breede River.  In Dutch,
breede means 'broad," and there was only one way to cross such a river
by ferry.

The ferryman, one Abraham Finnerholm, was surprised to see a
well-horsed white gentleman on his landing.  Such gentry seldom passed
his way.  Finnerholm couldn't help asking his name.

"I am Jan Nortj," said the stranger.  The ferryman asked his business,
but the traveler gave no reply.  All this was most unusual.  The
details lodged in the ferryman's memory, and when the pursuers galloped
up to his landing a few days later he was able to give them an
unmistakable description of Dawid Malan and the missing slave girl.

Beyond the ferry, Dawid and Sara drew away from the Cape, where nature
was benign.  The landscapes across which they now crawled were arid,
and empty.  The green grass of the Cape gave way to dust and rocks and
thorns.  The ridges above them were lined by spiny aloes, each as tall
as a man, a watchful sentinel against the sky.  They were drawing
closer to the frontier, to Africa.  There were few people, no permanent
settlements.  After about two weeks of hard riding, they came to a wild
canyon cut deep into the earth by a muddy brown river.  This was the
Great Fish River, the Cape Colony's outermost frontier.  Ahead lay the
howling wilderness, full of wild beasts and hostile savages; behind,
the scaffold for Dawid Malan, death by strangulation for his runaway
slave lover.

Dawid's first life was over; he must have known he would never return
to the Cape.  The Dragoons were on his trail, but they would turn back
short of the frontier and return to the castle with the evidence they
had gathered.  A trial would be held, and Malan found guilty in
absentia of stealing a slave.

The Council of Justice would issue a decree banishing him from the
Dutch colony forever.  His disgraced father would disown him, the
authorities strip him of his rank in the burger cavalry, and his bitter
wife attempt to have him declared dead.

He had sacrificed everything for the love of a black woman.

That was quite something, I thought, a Malan forfeiting his birthright
and all his wordly goods for the sake of a black slave staggering, in
light of the humiliations Dawid Malan's descendants would later inflict
on their half-breed brothers and sisters.  In a century to come,
Afrikaners would claim that the so-called colored people were spawned
in dockside brothels by seafaring white rabble, certainly not by Malans
and their pious Calvinist ilk.  It was a Malan, the dour and bloodless
Daniel Francois Malan, who rose in Parliament to promulgate the laws
that made it a crime for blacks to sleep with or marry whites.  The
same Malan stripped Dawid and Sara's colored descendants of their right
to vote, evicted them from white suburbs, and chased them out of white
schools.  No wonder this tale had been buried in the archives, the
trail to it obscured by that cryptic M. The honorable Daniel Franqois
was linked by blood, and even love, to the colored people he so cruelly
scorned.

Those moldering court documents made it clear that Dawid's feeling for
Sara was no mere fit of lust.  Dawid was an educated man.  He knew the
law.  He must have calculated his losses before saddling his horses,
and known the price he would pay.  Yet he went ahead with it, stole
away with a black slave girl to brave an uncertain future in a terribly
dangerous place.  To go that far, he must have loved Sara, and that
love must surely have opened his heart to other black people.  So it
seems fair to say that Dawid Malan left the Cape a racially enlightened
man.  And then he crossed the river and disappeared into Africa, where
he was transformed, as all white men who went there were transformed.

I shall tell you the details of that transformation in due course, but
first we must consider the nature of the wilderness into which Dawid
and Sara had fled.  In maps of the time, the territory behind the Great
Fish River was shown as a void.

Nobody really knew what was out there, save wild beasts and savages and
wild white men in animal skins.  It was a place of nightmarish
harshness, hot and dry, with meager, shallow soils and, in places,
grass so sour that cattle balked at eating it.

It was stricken by periodic droughts and hailstorms, infested with
lions and leopards.  Huge swarms of locusts darkened its skies and
crossed its rivers on bridges of their own dead.

Migrating antelope flowed across it in herds so huge that they took
days to pass a single point.

The white men along and beyond the frontier lived as nomads, moving
from place to place as the grazing wore out.  They were simple to the
point of idiocy, naming each feature of the landscape for its
characteristics: the Great Fish River, the Broad River, the Snow
Mountains, the River of Elephants.  They were desperately poor, ragged,
and mostly illiterate, and their Dutch was degenerating into the vulgar
dialect that would later be called Afrikaans.  They lived by the gun,
and according to the Old Testament.  Its tales of tribes wandering in
the desert spoke to them, and so did its notions of an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.

Since straying from the Dutch-ruled colony a century earlier, these
nomadic Boers had extracted many teeth.  At first, the country they
moved into was populated by yellow-skinned races that disintegrated in
the face of white advance.  Those Hottentot not wiped out by smallpox
were made servants, and as for the stone-age Bushmen, they were
regarded as dangerous vermin.  The Bushmen saw no distinction between
domestic cattle and wild game and preyed on both alike, so they were
hunted like wild dogs, and if caught, slaughtered;

no one was spared save those women and children who might be tamed and
put to work as chattel.  It was cruel, but then the bushmen themselves
had the cruel hearts of beasts of prey.  They would hack a limb off a
living cow and eat it before the bellowing animal's eyes.  Once the
Bushmen had tasted the white man's retribution, they began to retaliate
in kind.  A Boer who didn't kill one when he had the chance was likely
to collect a poison arrow from behind a rock, or find his family
butchered when he returned from hunting.

And so the Bushmen were dying out, retreating into the deserts and
mountains, but the blame for their sad fate did not rest with the white
men alone.  Others persecuted them, too.

These were the Xhosa, the magnificent and warlike African tribe that
was migrating slowly down the east coast toward the Cape even as the
Boers advanced to meet them.  Like the Boers, the Xhosa had driven the
weak before them, and had never met a foe sufficiently powerful to
contain them.  In 1778, the Boers and Xhosa came face to-face along the
Great Fish River.  Both races owned vast herds of cattle, and that
alone doomed them to clash.  The fact that the Xhosa were savage and
heathen in white eyes merely made it easier for whites to kill them.

The Xhosa had no writing and few tools, not even the wheel.  Their
incomprehensible tongue was full of strange clicks.

22 They went naked save for a fringe of beads and a cloak of animal
hide.  They daubed their bodies with red clay, and traded cattle for
wives.  They worshiped their ancestors and blamed illness and
misfortune on witches, who were routinely smelled out and put to a
hideous death.  They bled the vaginas of young girls to cool their
lust, twirled thorn twigs up the rectums of ailing babies to bleed the
bad blood out of them.  In the words of an Englishman named Steadman
who hunted and explored beyond the frontier in the early nineteenth
century, the very sight of the Xhosa produced in a white man 'the most
appalling sensations."

On the other hand, early travelers were scarcely more complimentary of
the Boers who inhabited the void beyond the Great Fish River.  Most
concluded that they were sliding back toward barbarity, each generation
growing wilder than the last.  When a stranger came among them, they
swarmed over him like curious savages, fingering his fancy European
clothing, gaping in awe at his modern guns and possessions, asking
childlike questions.  The Boers, observed the botanist Lichtenstein,
were rendered 'no less laughable than dangerous' by their 'ignorance
and crude conceptions."  As to how the Boers felt about him, the record
is silent.  Very few of them could read or write.

And so white men squared off against the Africans, and in 1779 the war
began a war without end, a war that just was, and still is, for what
started then is still not finished today.  The Xhosa rustled cattle,
and the Boers' bloody reprisals usually turned into outright raids of
plunder.  Capturing Xhosa cattle, one white frontiersman noted, was
easier than breeding your own.  On both sides, men died in droves, but
the black bodies were always stacked deeper, because the white men had
guns.

Their strategy was to ride within range of the Xhosa, fire a volley,
and gallop off before the sprinting warriors were close enough to hurl
their spears.  It was an ignoble form of warfare, but then the Boers
could ill afford casualties: There were scarcely five hundred
able-bodied white men and boys on the frontier in the 1780s, ranged
against a hundred thousand Xhosa.  Neither side was strong enough to
win an outright victory, so the line of battle swept back and forth
across the Great Fish River for decades.

There were many such frontiers in the world at that time, but this one
was unlike most others.  All the Dutch really wanted of Africa was the
land they could see from the battlements of Cape Town Castle.  They had
no imperial ambitions, no interest in the interior.  Dutch governors
seldom sent military expeditions to help the beleaguered frontiersmen.
Instead, they sent bailiffs to collect the 'lion and tiger' tax, the
'pontoon' tax, and the quitrent on farmland.  Most Boers resented
paying taxes to a government that did little or nothing for them, so
the taxmen invariably returned to the castle empty-handed.  At one
stage, there was talk of dispatching troops to tame the frontiersmen
and seize their taxes.  It came to nothing, though.  The governor was
warned that if he sent soldiers, the Boers would kill half of them,
salt their corpses and send them home with the survivors, 'as earnest
of what they would do to any authority that should dare interfere with
them."

So the frontiersmen struggled on alone.  In 1793, they drove the Xhosa
out of the Zuurveld, a buffer zone separating black from white.  Two
years later, a British fleet sailed into Simon's Bay, captured Cape
Town Castle, and raised their flag over the Cape Colony.  The Xhosa
took advantage of the ensuing disarray to pour across the frontier in
force, looting and pillaging all the way to Mossel Bay, almost three
hundred miles to the south.  More than half the Boer farms on the
border were abandoned or destroyed.  In the following decade, the Boers
pushed the front line back across the Great Fish River.

In 1811, the Xhosa reoccupied the buffer zone.  It went on like that
for almost six years.

This then was the maelstrom into which Dawid Malan and

Sara vanished in August 1788.  Elsewhere in the world, great upheavals
were taking place, new orders coming into being.

In America, democracy was twelve years old.  The French were poised to
topple Louis XVI in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity.  It
was the Age of Enlightenment, but Dawid and Sara seemed to disappear
into darkness.

I spent months in the Cape Town archives, reading the yellowed annals
of those times, searching for clues to their fate.  At first I found
none, just chronicles of hatred received and hatred applied, of raids
and reprisals and bloodshed.  And then I started reading the chronicles
of Slagtersnek, the first Boer rebellion against the British.  Around
1806, the British installed a magistrate on the frontier, ordering him
to impose upon it the rule of law.  As the British conceived it, that
meant justice for all, not only for white men.  To the Boers, the very
idea was abhorrent.  Their concept of relations between master and
servant, or Christian and heathen, arose from the Old Testament's most
stern and unforgiving passages.  Read selectively, the Old Testament
provided divine justification for the way they lived and the cruelties
they inflicted on the dark-skinned heathen: 'a whip for the horse, a
bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool's back."  The Boers found
succor in such stern Old Testament injunctions.  They found the New
Testament less palatable, however, and some of them seemed to disregard
everything in the Bible save the bit about stern punishment.

One such frontiersman was Frederik Bezuidenhout, a shameless fornicator
who had a white wife, a black concubine, and a house full of half-breed
children.  Like many of his neighbors, Bezuidenhout was less a pious
Calvinist than a creature of Africa, where the strong eat and the weak
are eaten or beaten, as the case may be.  In 1813, Bezuidenhout whipped
a Hottentot shepherd named Booi.  After the flogging, Booi took up his
goods and vanished.  A few weeks later, a horseman rode out to serve a
summons on Bezuidenhout.  Booi had been to see the British magistrate
in Graaff Reinet and laid a charge against his white master.

The Boers did not accord servants, heathens, and blacks generally the
right to do such a thing.  When Bezuidenhout heard why the horseman had
come, he 'flew up, with fists swaying to and fro," uttering 'curses and
invective' and declaring that he would sooner die than answer such a
summons.

The British magistrate ordered him arrested, but that was easier said
than done.  Bezuidenhout inspired 'general dread' in the hearts of more
civil men, and the magistrate's veldkornets, his sheriffs, were too
scared to set foot on his land.  The r stalemate dragged on for years,
making the mighty British Empire look foolish and ineffectual.  In the
end, the magistrate had to dispatch troops to bring Bezuidenhout in.

True to his word, Bezuidenhout holed up in a cave with his musket and
opened fire on the redcoats, who slew him with a bullet in the heart.
His death ignited a smoldering anti-British sentiment among the
frontier Boers.  In the Boer view, British missionaries and
administrators were siding with the enemy, interfering with their right
to chastise and slaughter the darkskinned heathen as they deemed
necessary.  The frontiersmen swore drunken vengeance over
Bezuidenhout's coffin and, once it was laid to rest, rose up against
the British.  The rebellion that followed heralded the start of another
war that continues to this day the war of words and moral recrimination
between Boers and other white men.  In military terms, the Slagtersnek
uprising was an utterly futile affair, soon put down by British troops.
In the aftermath, the ringlea&rs were rounded up and put on trial in
the town of Uitenhage.

And that is where Dawid Malan resurfaced among the race-hating white
savages in the dock, on trial for high treason.  The man who abandoned
his birthright for the love of a black woman had become what would one
day be called a white supremacist, willing to die rather than accord
black people equality before the law.  According to evidence laid
before the court, it was Malan who penned the rebels' insolent
communiqus.  He set the paper on the saddle of a horse and scrawled
upon it with a quill pen.  When the writing was done, the illiterate
rabble peering over his shoulder asked, "Is it proper?"  As a learned
man, he was a figure of influence among the rebels.  Indeed, the
prosecutor singled Malan out as a man 'of the most dangerous sort' one
of a triumvirate of white barbarians 'who have never submitted to any
authority, who have been the greatest part of their lives among
savages, and are men of the most depraved morals."

I cannot tell you what became of Sara in the intervening twenty-seven
years; she simply disappeared from the records, and her resurrected
lover now had a white woman at his side, and a brood of strong white
sons.  Nor can I tell you what befell Dawid Malan in the void, what
caused his heart to turn.  All I know is that he was one man when he
crossed the river into Africa and another when he reappeared, and that
his transformation paralleled the transformation of his entire tribe,
for that was what the Boers had become in their isolation: They had
become Afrikaners, the white tribe of Africa, arrogant, xenophobic, and
'full of blood," as the Zulus say of tyrants.  They had their own
language, their own customs and traditions, and a myth to light their
way, a mystic Christian mission on the Dark Continent.  They spoke of
themselves as bearers of the light, but in truth they were dark of
heart, and they knew it, and willed it so.

The Afrikaners lived in isolation, but rumors and fragments of ideas
reached them from the outside world, borne by deserters and outlaws and
missionaries.  They heard of the American Revolution, and of the new
philosophies sweeping Europe of the Jacobin doctrine of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, of Rousseau's concept of the Noble Savage,
and of the Enlightenment, the civilized reinterpretation of the
Scriptures upon which all this was based.  They did not like what they
heard.

To them, such ideas invited a degree of moral introspection that could
make men weak and doubtful.  On the frontier, it was an eye for an eye,
and then an arm for an arm, and a leg for a leg, or so the Boers
believed, and who is to say they were wrong?  There was nothing in the
Xhosa's history of expansion and conquest to suggest that they were any
more willing to love than the white man.  Bloed roep om wraak.

Siyabiza igazi wetbo.  That was a saying on both sides of the frontier.
It means, "Spilled blood calls for vengeance."  In such a place, or so
the Boers believed, a weak and doubtful man would soon be a dead one.

And so, when rumors of the Enlightenment penetrated their wilderness,
the Afrikaners considered them, consulted their Bibles and preachers,
and finally reached a consensus:

These new ideas presented a threat to their survival, and should be
suppressed not only in the world at large, but in their own hearts.
Soon, many Afrikaners were calling themselves Doppers, after the little
metal caps with which they snuffed out candles.  They called themselves
Doppers because they were deliberately and consciously extinguishing r
the light of the Enlightenment, so that they could do what they had to
do in darkness.

There are many truths about Afrikaners, but none so powerful and
reverberant as this willful self-blinding.  It was the central act in
our history, or so it seems to me.  The men of Dawid Malan's generation
were the first true Afrikaners;

they were the mold, and all who followed were cast in it.  They snuffed
out the light, and we have lived ever since in darkness.

We shit on the altars of Western enlightenment and defy the high
priests who would have us behave in accordance with its moral tenets.
It was so; it is so.

Dawid Malan was spared the gallows and died in 1824, but his spirit
lived on.  His sons' Great Trek of 1838 was essentially a flight from
the light, from the enlightened policies of the British.  The
Voortrekkers drove into the heart of the Dark Continent, where no light
penetrated at all, and there, on conquered land, they set up Boer
republics in which blacks were ruled in accordance with the Dopper
principle.  There was apartheid by another name in those republics, and
apartheid of sorts in the era of British dominion.  After Daniel
Francois Malan came to power in 1948, there was apartheid in earnest,
but it was really nothing new.  It was the same old Dopper principle,
disguised in the language and strategies of twentieth-century
totalitarianism.

It seems to me, looking back on history, that all of South

Africa's agony is rooted in Dawid Malan's ancient act of self blinding.
The Doppe?  spirit survived the centuries and finally blossomed in
apartheid, and we are eating its poisonous fruit to this day.  The
Dopper spirit manifests itself in everything my tribe has done to
dark-skinned people: in repression and censorship, pass laws and job
reservation; in the disfranchisement of our colored brothers and the
razing of District Six;

in the Sharpeville massacre and bloody Soweto uprising; in detention
without trial and interrogation by torture; in the death of Steve Biko
and the jailing of Nelson Mandela; and finally, in 1985, in the
shooting of black schoolchildren in township streets.  It all leads
back, in the end, to Dawid Malan and a law formulated on the far bank
of the Great Fish River two hundred years ago: You have to put the
black man down, plant your foot on his neck, and keep him that way
forever, lest he spring up and slit your white throat.

What would you have me say?  That I think apartheid is stupid and
vicious?  I do.  That I'm sorry?  I am, I am.  That I'm not like the
rest of them?  If you'd met me a few years ago, in a bar in London or
New York, I would have told you that.  !  would have told you that only
I, of all my blind clan and tribe, had eyes that could truly see, and
that what I saw appalled me.  I would have passed myself off as a
political exile, an enlightened sort who took black women into his bed
and fled his country rather than carry a gun for the abominable
doctrine of white supremacy.  You would probably have believed me.  I
almost believed myself, you see, but in truth l was always one of them.
I am a white man born in Africa, and all else flows from there.

r Socialism has done an invaluable service to humanity, and not the
least to Christianity itself, by turning its searchlight on the evils
of the existing system.  We hope and pray that Christianity and
socialism may be so guided in their future development that the deep
yearning, the widespread movements, and even the passions and the
violence of the age may prove to be but the birth pangs of a better
social world.

DANIEL FRANCO IS MALAN,

architect of apartheid I WAS BORN in 1954, a member of the tribe that
upheld Dawid Malan's legacy, a citizen of the country ruled by it, and
son of a man who believed in it all.  And yet, if you'd put it to my
father that he believed blacks had to be kept down lest they leap up
and slit white throats, he would have insisted that he thought nothing
of the sort.  He would have told you that his faith lay in something
called grand apartheid, the overarching ideology that promised to make
white South Africans and all their nine subject African tribes
'separate but equal' in separate nation-states.  In favor of this
schema, he would have offered some fairly sophisticated arguments
revolving around the awesome power of ethnocentricity and the apparent
failure of the integrationist solution everywhere from Ireland to
Armenia, from Chicago to Nigeria.  My father had an uncanny ability to
discern a moral basis to apartheid.  In fairness to him, there was one,
in the beginning, but it was betrayed in the year of my birth.

Soon after coming to power, in 1948, the government of Daniel Franqois
Malan set up a commission to establish what would be required to turn
South Africa's bitterly poor and crowded tribal homelands into free and
economically viable Bantustans.  The Tomlinson Commission tabled its
report in 1954, and it must have made disheartening reading for true
believers in ethical apartheid.  It said that vast tracts of farmland
would have to be expropriated from whites and turned over to blacks. It
called for massive investments in infrastructure, education, and
industry.  It concluded that it would cost at least a billion English
pounds over the coming decade to make apartheid work ten times more
than the Malan government had planned to spend.  This was far too high
a price to pay for good intentions, of course, so the Tomlinson Report
was buried.  After that, separate but equal became an empty slogan, and
apartheid was just another variant of the ancient Afrikaner doctrine of
keeping blacks down.

Ah, but I knew nothing of such things in the year of my birth.  When my
eyes opened, I found myself in a split-level suburban house surrounded
by similar houses, in a white suburb much like any other white suburb
anywhere else in the Western world.  My father worked for Total, the
French oil company, and my mother taught at a school for the mentally
retarded.  Mr.  Prior, who lived next door, worked for Volkswagen, and
Mrs.  Pretorius across the street was a primary-school principal.  Our
house had three levels.  My mother, father, brother, and I lived in the
top two stories, and the black servants lived at the bottom, next to
the garage.

I had two living grandmothers, and two dead grandfathers, who were
pictures on the wall.  One grandfather was wearing a broad ceremonial
sash and topcoat and twirling his handlebar mustache.  The other
grandfather was sitting at a desk, brooding and smoking.  His name was
Stephanus Jacobus Malan, and he had died the year I was born.

Stephanus Jacobus Malan was said to have been a melancholy man.  He had
a smattering of education, rare for an Afrikaner of his era, and was
known to quote Shakespeare and sing snatches of opera in his more
buoyant moods.  Mostly, though, he was melancholy.  He would come home
after work and shut himself into his study to drink brandy and read.

There was always a cigarette in his mouth.  He didn't puff it, just let
it dangle there, burning slowly, the smoke trailing up his cheek and
over his squinting eye.  After fifty years, the stream of smoke left an
indelible yellow streak across his face.

In the photograph, it looked as though someone had slashed his cheek
with a knife.

Stephanus was the bookkeeper in a dusty sheep town called Calvinia,
which lay in the semidesert Great Karroo three hundred miles north of
Cape Town and south of almost nothing.  There were no blacks in
Calvinia, only Afrikaners,"Boer Jews,"

"Hottentots', sheep, dust, and locusts.  My grandfather married a
Steenkamp, daughter of Piet Steenkamp, whose farm was almost as big as
some European countries.  They had five children, of whom my father,
born in 1920, was the second eldest.

My grandfather Stephanus was a SAP- a supporter of General Jan Smuts's
South African Party, which was in power at that time.  General Smuts
was that rare creature, a reasonable Afrikaner, an internationalist and
a philosopher.  He was also a segregationist and white supremacist, of
course.  Everyone was.  Even the Communist Party deferred to Dawid
Malan's legacy and organized under the slogan "Workers of the world
unite and fight for a white South Africa."  In any event, my
grandfather was a SAP, but Calvinia was no SAP town.  It was the
parliamentary seat of Dr.  Daniel Fran;ois Malan, leader of the
Afrikaner National Party.

Dr.  Malan passed himself off as a full-blooded Afrikaner nationalist,
but his credentials were dubious.  He sat out the Boer War in Holland,
where he was a student, and later returned to South Africa with a head
full of exotic philosophies.  In many ways, Malan was a classic
early-twentieth-century intellectual, a utopian social engineer
inclined to speak of socialism as a 'passionate and imperious demand
for justice," a 'moral force' more powerful than 'the fury of the
storm."  He was also a Calvinist, though, so he resolved the conflicts
between Marx and God in God's favor, and wound up a national socialist
of a uniquely Afrikaner ilk.

After his return from Europe, Daniel Franqois became a minister in the
Dutch Reformed Church and later, a politician.

He was a pale man with soft white flesh, soft white hands, and weak
eyes.  Like most social engineers, he was somehow cold and bloodless,
more comfortable with books and theories than human beings.  He
apparently remained celibate until late middle age, and his belated
marriages first to M M Van Tonder, and then to Maria Louw, a niece of
my grandmother's had less to do with love than with his need to cut an
acceptable figure on the political hustings, or so the cynics said.
Malan's National Party was bent on ousting General Smuts and his
English-speaking chums, and DF himself was applying his rather
formidable intellect toward a 'scientific' and final solution for the
native question.

Dr.  Malan's 1938 election campaign caused a rift among his Calvinia
cousins.  DF was blood a second cousin to my grandfather and married to
my grandmother's niece besides but Stephanus Malan did not allow that
to sway his judgment.

In his eyes, DF was something of a clown, but my schoolboy father,
Adriaan, thought otherwise.  He had been all the way to Cape Town and
seen District Six, the sprawling colored slum above the docks. District
Six was the reputed lair of whores, drunken sailors, and knife men  He
shuddered at the thought of going in there, and concluded that
separation of the races was probably a good idea.  There was a solid
segregationist plank in the National Party's platform, so Adriaan Malan
threw his support to DF, in defiance of the rest of the family.

The Nats stood for segregation, but Smuts's SAP also stood for
segregation.  Since there was little to choose between the parties on
that score, it was clear that their differences would have to be
resolved by violence, in accordance with Boer political tradition.  It
was a very rough campaign.  The Nats started it, breaking up a SAP
rally with their fists.

In retaliation, the SAPs swore that Dr.  Malan would never speak in
Calvinia again.  The Nats picked up the gauntlet and organized a rally
in Calvinia's town hall.  When Dr.  Malan arrived, a riot broke out,
and he had to beat a strategic retreat to the home of one Schalk
Pienaar.  The SAPs gave chase.  Malan's supporters armed themselves
with sticks and prepared to defend their cowering candidate.

Just then, a distant bell rang, and school let out.  My barefoot,
eighteen-year-old father and his barefoot friends came running through
the dusty streets and arrived on the scene just as the confrontation
was coming to a head.  The SAPs were parading up and down outside
Pienaar's house, carrying their candidate, a certain Dr.  Lock, on
their shoulders.  Dr.  Lock was waving a blown-up photograph of a
prominent Nat leader borne aloft like a hero on the shoulders of some
black men.

This was intended to show that the Nats were actually soft on blacks.
If they truly favored segregation, how come they had such ardent black
supporters?

"The Nats are kafferboeties!"  cried Dr.  Lock of the SAP.

A kafferboetie is a 'brother of blacks' - a nigger-lover, if you will.
It was a grave insult, but Dr.  Lock was so sallow of complexion that
he could have passed for a light-skinned black man himself.  A Nat lady
pointed an angry finger at him.

"Who are you to talk!"  she shrieked.

"You black Abyssinian!"

After this exchange, a fight was inevitable, and the Nats and SAPs
joined battle.  In the ensuing melee, my father struck his first blows
for the National Party, and one of his friends, finding his shoes
squishy with blood, discovered a stab wound in his buttocks.  The
battle was inconclusive, but Dr.  Malan was so shaken by the SAPs' show
of force that he moved to a safer constituency, where he was easily
reelected.  Ten years later, he became prime minister and started
shoveling blacks around like cement in the name of his apartheid
doctrine.

I tell you this story because it was the centerpiece of my Afrikaner
political heritage.  My father was a man of few words, and disinclined
to waste those he spoke on philosophical dispute with small boys.  When
I was old enough to understand these things, I often asked my father
how he came by his political convictions, and why he supported
apartheid.  His invariable answer was, "We have no choice.

We must make it work."  One day, though, I caught him in an expansive
mood, and he came out with that story.  I was taken aback by its
farcical tenor.  It was hard to imagine my old man fighting SAPs in the
street, but then his transfiguring passion was lost to me too.

In my father's youth, in the twenties and thirties, race wasn't the
central issue in white South African politics.

Afrikaners of his generation were less concerned about keeping blacks
in their place than tearing down the Union Jack, resurrecting the lost
Boer republics, and uplifting the yolk from its poor white penury.  As
my father saw it, his own SAP father was something of a collaborator, a
lackey of the English king.  My father did not quote Shakespeare, and
he had no love for the British Empire.  It was the British, after all,
who had invented concentration camps, using them to crush Afrikaner
resistance in a war still remembered with great bitterness.

In 1939, Adriaan Malan went off to the University of Stellenbosch,
crucible of Afrikaner nationalism.  The campus was seething with
radicalism.  Student nationalists wanted nothing to do with the looming
war in Europe, and when it broke out, many joined the Ossewa Brandwag,
or Oxwagon Sentinel, an extremist sect virulently opposed to South
Africa's entry into World War II on the British side.  My father joined
up too.

For several melodramatic months, he was a virtual terrorist, attending
clandestine midnight meetings on the university's rugby fields or
climbing 'like a baboon' into the surrounding mountains, to plot
sabotage of the British war effort and guerrilla war against the
traitor Smuts.

In Stellenbosch, the Boer rebel cadres merely talked about such things,
but their comrades in Johannesburg actually did them blew up a police
station and a power pylon or two.

At that point, the Brandwag started falling into disrepute, becoming so
nakedly fascist and Germanic that even Dr.  Malan denounced it.  At
that, my father quit the organization, and his career as a terrorist
came to an end.  Beyond that point, he more or less withdrew from
active politics, although he always marched in step with the yolk,
subscribed to Afrikaans magazines and newspapers, and voted for the
National Party.

After graduating from Ste!ienbosch, he became a teacher of mathematics
at a high school in Queenstown, where he met my mother.  She was a
jolly-hockey-sticks head girl type, the school's lively mistress of
gymnastics.  It was a most unlikely love affair.  My mother was
English-speaking, my father a real Afrikaner who stumbled and stuttered
in the British tongue.

They were an 'interracial couple," in the newspaper usage of the day,
but they fell in love and married anyway an act of tribal treachery on
both their parts, given the lingering bitterness between Briton and
Boer.  After the wedding, my father returned to Stellenbosch, earned a
second degree, and emerged a personnel manager.  My brother Nell was
born in 1952, and I in 1954, and we lived in a triple-story house on
Penelope Avenue, in a Johannesburg suburb called Blairgowrie.

Having married an Englishwoman, my father had little choice other than
to embrace a doctrine known as 'broader South Africanism," which held
that it was time for the English and Afrikaners to let bygones be
bygones.

Ours was a 'dual-medium' household.  My brother and l spoke English at
school, Afrikaans at home.  Dinner began with grace, and concluded with
a reading from the Bible.

On Sunday mornings, my mother slicked down my hair with Brylcreem and
put on my Davy Crockett tie, and we went to the Afrikaner church, the
Dutch Reformed Church, where dreary sermons were preached and dirges
sung.  After church, there was Sunday school, where we studied the
katkisasieboek the heavy gray tome of Calvinist catechism.  The book
was full of solemn warnings about idolatrous Catholicism and heathen
Judaism, but it made no mention of the swart gevaar, the black threat.
It was not necessary.  The legacy of Dawid Malan was taken for
granted.

We lived in the city, but every year or so we'd go on a pilgrimage into
the heartland, into Afrikanerdom.  It started in Calvinia, where my
grandmother, the widow of Stephanus Jacobus, lived in an old-age home.
My father had converted her from a SAP to a Nat, and she became a party
stalwart in her old age, always turning out to flip pancakes for the
apartheid-supporting faithful at National Party rallies.  She was a
nice old lady.  She smothered me in the lavender-smelling folds of her
huge bosom and pressed treats on me pancakes with cinnamon and sugar,
and koeksisters, twists of deep-fried dough saturated with golden
syrup.

From Calvinia we trekked south to the Sandveld, where n Uncle Ben
farmed sheep on the shore of a cold gray sea.  It was a barren and
lonely place, the Sandveld, charged with an ominous and forbidding
power.  Ben's farmhouse stood all alone in a desolate, dun-gray
landscape, shuttered against the harsh light, the heat and drifting
sand.  The house was dark and gloomy inside, the heavy Victorian
furniture sinister under dust drapes never removed unless the Calvinist
dominee was due to visit.  At dusk, an old crone in a long black dress
came hobbling across the sand dunes to fetch food at the kitchen door.
She was a bywoner, one of Ben's white vassals, too old to work now and
living out her life as the master's pensioner.

Her name was Tannic Jeanette, and she terrified me.  She had hairy
warts on her face and a hunchback, and I took her for a witch.  She
once bought a portable radio from the Jewish peddler who made the
rounds of those lonely farms.  When the peddler returned, months later,
Tannic Jeanette tried to claw his eyes out, claiming he'd sold her a
radio that spoke only English.  She had never owned a radio before. She
didn't know it could be tuned.

There was an Afrikaner for you.  Almost all of us were that way, three
or four generations ago.  In fact, everyone on Ben's farm was a
throwback in some sense or other.  The Mongolian cheekbones of the
brown-skinned shepherds recalled the Hottentots, a race long extinct.
Ben's speech was haunted by the brei- a roll of the r that harked back
to French, a language unspoken in South Africa for almost two
centuries, and his white bywoners spoke an archaic dialect called High
Dutch.

Indeed, the bywoners themselves were archaic.  There were three of them
in all, Tannic Jeanette and men named Nic and Evert.  They were unlike
any other whites I had ever met, standing in virtually the same feudal
relation to their master as the brown shepherds.  They lived in bare
rooms whose white washed walls were hung with the skins of trapped
animals.

The men often went barefoot, wore beards that hung to their chests, and
sawed through the throats of kicking sheep on a blue gum stump in the
yard of the farmhouse.  They were the r last of their kind, but then
Ben's way of life was dying, too.  It seldom rained on the Sandveld, so
he drank from a brackish well.  His wife cooked on one of those old
cast-iron stoves with balled claw feet and lighted her house with
paraffin lamps.  At night, they slept under karosses made of jackal
skins.

I think Uncle Ben was happy in the nineteenth century, but his wife
Millicent aspired to better.  She wanted tiled bathrooms, pop-up
toasters, eye-level electric ovens and other trappings of white
civilization.  She was my father's youngest sister, and very beautiful,
with raven hair and skin as dark as a Spaniard's.  She was stern, pious
and prone to fits of shrieking:

at children, at Ben, at the ragged colored girls who slaved over the
cast-iron stove in her kitchen.  Ben, on the other hand, was a quiet,
goodnatured fellow.  He smoked a pipe and wore khaki shorts.  There
were lines around his eyes from squinting at the sun, and he seldom
felt the urge to speak.

His farm was big and trackless, and he traveled it in a prototypical
beach buggy, an old car stripped down to its engine and steel skeleton.
It took half a day to cross the farm, and Ben always brought his rifle
along in case he saw a buck for the pot, or a lynx; the lynx took
lambs, so he shot them on sight.  In the far corner of his land there
lay a vlei, a marsh that was home to one of Africa's largest breeding
colonies of flamingo.  As we drew near, the sound of the engine
startled the birds into flight, and there would be streaks of pink and
gray across the sky, as if the sun was rising at noon.

At day's end, we drove over the sand dunes to watch the gray-green
Atlantic breakers rolling onto a lonely, windswept beach.  There was
always a gale on that beach.  It picked up sand and blasted it at your
legs, and it stung so sharply it made you want to cry.  Sometimes a
defense-force Shakleton flew by at rooftop height, patrolling against
the Russians.  Ben knew they were out there, lurking, because a Russian
life-jacket had once washed ashore on the beach.  The Russians were the
enemy.  That was already known.  Ben's only son grew up to be a
professional soldier, and went off to fight Russia's Cuban surrogates
in darkest Africa.  His daughter also joined the army, and married a
very famous South African soldier indeed Captain Wynand du Toit, shot
and captured by Cubans in 1985 while trying to blow up Gulf Oil's
intallations in Angola.

When we returned to the farmhouse in the evening, the brown shepherds
would be lined up in the courtyard, tin beakers in their hands, waiting
for their 'tot' their daily ration of vaaljapie, a crude white wine
that came from a town two hours' drive to the south.  Ben kept the
stuff in a stack of leaky old barrels, in a room where the sandy floor
had remained damp with wine for generations.  As the door of the wine
room swung open, the pungent smell of vaaljapie permeated the yard, and
everyone's mood seemed to lighten.

The tired shepherds drew their daily tumbler full and settled down
along the walls of the barn, talking softly.  Sometimes I sat with
them.  The wall at my back was still warm from the sun, golden dust
hung in the air, and the evening was filled with the heady fragrance of
cheap wine.  It was the best time of day on that farm.  When I went
back twenty years later, the farmhouse was empty and abandoned, its
shutters flapping in the wind.  Ben was dead, his wife had moved into a
condo, and all the bywoners and brown shepherds had vanished.  But I
picked up a handful of dust in the old wine room, and it still smelled
of vaaljapie.

From the Sandveld we traveled inland to Nieuwoudtville, home of Tannic
Aletta, my father's elder sister.  Her husband, Jooste, was a sergeant
in the South African Police.  They lived in the stone police station.
When we visited, they put us in the whites-only section of the
adjoining jailhouse, where we slept under rough blankets on bare wooden
bunks.  This seemed very exciting to me.  I shivered deliciously as the
thought that my bunk might once have harbored a murderer or bank
robber.  I once asked my aunt if this was at all likely.

"Oh no," she said, 'it's very quiet here.  There has never been a
murder here.  It's only the coloreds who kill each other."

Nieuwoudtville lay within the Bokkeveld Mountains, high and dry and
sometimes very cold at night.  Through the barred window of my cell, I
saw a dusty street, a post office, a general-dealer store, a church,
and distant mountains.  The town was a speck in a vast ocean of arid
scrub and dust.

Its emptiness was frightening.  Even more frightening were my cousins,
tough little fellows with brush-cut hair who ran barefoot over thorns
and played rugby to maim on fields of dust and stone.  They called me
Rooi ]an, or Red Rian, a play on my name that embodied a scornful
reference to the Boer term for a foreigner who turned pink and peeling
in the blazing African sun.  They were barbaric little tribesmen, those
cousins of mine.  I was always relieved when we moved south to
Clanwilliam, where my uncle Etienne taught farmers' sons in the village
boarding school.

My uncle Etienne was a gregarious fellow, darkly handsome, with a
flashing gold tooth in his easy smile.  Decades later, I opened a book
called The Super Afrikaners and discovered his name in it.  In fact,
both my father's brothers were in it.  They were both Broederbonders,
members of the Brotherhood, the secret society of Calvinists and
apartheid zealots that constituted the spine of the Afrikaner power
structure.

The prime minister, his cabinet, most Afrikaner MPs, and all senior
civil servants were Brothers.  The Brotherhood's invisible hand
controlled the state broadcasting corporation, the censor board, the
police, the education system, and probably the army too.  The
Brotherhood was a sinister organization, ruthlessly dedicated to the
aggrandizement of Afrikaner power and the imposition of doctrinal
purity on South African minds.

Even in retrospect, my Oom Etienne seems a most unlikely Brother.  He
had none of the trappings no Mercedes Benz with tinted windows, no
lucrative government contracts, and no secret bank accounts bulging
with the profits from crooked land deals, at least as far as I know. My
Oom Etienne even had a sense of humor, not a quality for which Brothers
were known.  He owned a movie projector, and when we visited, he'd show
us Laurel and Hardy shorts or AI Debbo's lunatic Boer farces. He had a
Wagnerian passion for rugby, but as for apartheid, I never heard him
mention the word.

And that was Afrikanerdom for me.  Those pilgrimages marked me, to be
sure, but they were not enough to make me a true Afrikaner.  Even my
father failed in that.  I was always sceptical or disdainful of those
things that lay closest to the Afrikaner heart.  I used to stare up
into the eaves of the church while the dominee droned on, wondering how
on earth God tolerated such boredom.  I flinched when the brush-cut
Boerboys came in for the tackle, and struggled to breathe Lx the
oppressive Calvinist atmosphere of their homes.  I was intimidated by
the immensity of the landscapes in which they lived, and horrified when
they shot wild animals out there.

Once, crossing Ben's farm in his buggy, we flushed an aardvark on the
sun-blackened plain.  Aardvark were harmless and inedible, but Ben was
tired of breaking axles in their burrows, so he gave chase.  The
creature disappeared down a hole in the ground.  Ben leapt from the
buggy, rifle in hand.  The aardvark was trying frantically to dig its
way out of sight.

Ben put a bullet or two into its scrambling hindquarters before it
dragged itself around a bend.  He shrugged and climbed back in the
buggy, but I was traumatized for weeks by the thought of that wounded
creature, dying slowly in its dark tomb.  It was an unworthy reaction
for a Boer, but I was never much of a Boer anyway.

I didn't even enjoy playing war with my brush-cut cousins.

They always wanted to play Boer War, and stalk imaginary British
invaders around the outbuildings and barns of various farms.  It seemed
a stupid and backward game to me.  I came from Johannesburg, you see,
and my imagination had already been colonized by foreign influences. In
Jo'burg, we always fought the Japs or Jerries, like the heroes in
Hollywood movies or imported war comics.

Johannesburg lay in Africa, but that was more or less incidental.
Johannesburg had skyscrapers, smart department stores, cinemas, and
theaters.  It was part of a larger world.

There was no TV in my boyhood, because the Brotherhood feared it would
cause what Mao termed 'spiritual pollution."  We had radio, though, and
all the characters in the boys' serials were British or American. Randy
Stone was the night-beat reporter .in an American city.  Ricky Roper,
the Sunrise Toffee Junior Detective, lived in an ambiguous someplace
where everyone had BBC accents.  Chuck drove a cab in Brooklyn.  Mark
Saxon came from outer space, but even his world seemed more immediate
than Afrikanerdom to me.

I mean, I didn't realize Reader's Digest was a foreign magazine until I
was at least ten.  I have no recollection at all of the Sharpeville
massacre, in which sixty-nine black people were shot dead while
protesting against the pass laws; only the vaguest memory of Nelson
Mandela's trial and jailing.  I remember the day John F Kennedy died,
though.  It was a Saturday morning in South Africa.  I was helping my
father in the garden when Mrs.  Pretorius came scurrying across the
street to say President Kennedy had been shot.  She'd just heard it on
the radio.  My mother gasped, clasped her hand over her mouth and said,
"Shame."  My Afrikaner father shook his head regretfully.

Even he was somehow detribalized by education, by urbanization, maybe
just by inclination; all that was left in him of the mythic Afrikaner
was the peasant cast of his features and an instinctive desire to plant
things.  He was an Afrikaner Nationalist and a supporter of apartheid,
but above all he was a personnel manager, and his overriding
preoccupations were insurance, the mortgage, the garden, the car, the
family, and the job.  The shelves of his study were lined with American
tomes on management and motivation.

He even bought I'm OK, You're OK, thinking it might be useful in his
line of work.  He subscribed to Die Huisgenoot, to be sure, but he also
got Time and Life and National Geographic.  Those American magazines
brought news of a world that seemed infinitely more alluring than my
own a world where people a few years older than me were growing their
hair long, smoking dope, and rioting in the streets.

In 1967 or thereabouts, Life carried a story about a Frenchman named
Regis Debray who went off to Bolivia with one Che Guevara.  Their
mission was to help oppressed Indians in their fight for freedom.  I
gathered from the text that Che was a disreputable something called
Communist, but he cut a pretty dashing figure in the pictures, with his
long black hair, combat boots, beard, and beret.  I thought, whoa,
Communism, that's for me.  The plight of Bolivia's Indians seemed
rather similar to the wretched lot of the blacks in my own backyard, so
I put two and two together, and bingo, I was the Just White Man,
champion of the downtrodden, sworn foe of racism, and ardent proponent
of Commumsm, whatever that was supposed to be.

No, that's not all there was to it; there was more to it than that. I'd
better go back to the beginning and see if i can dredge it up.

In my childhood, there were always Africans in our backyard.

We called them natives.  They lived in cold, dark rooms with tiny
windows.  They put their beds on stacks of bricks, so that the
mattresses stood waist-high to a grown man.  This was to thwart a
ground-hugging, night-prowling gremlin called the tokolosbe.  The
natives' quarters smelled of Lifebuoy soap, red floor polish, and putu,
the stiff corn porridge that is the staple food of Africa.  Natives
cooked my meals, polished my shoes, made my bed, mowed the lawn,
trimmed the hedge, and dug holes at my father's direction.  They ate on
enamel plates and drank out of chipped cups with no handles, which were
known as the boy's cup or girl's cup and kept separate from the rest of
our china.  They spoke broken English or Afrikaans, wore old clothes,
had no money and no last names.  That was all it was really necessary
to know about them.

On Thursdays, their day off, many natives donned Crusader robes of blue
or green and tied white sashes across their chests.

They took up their staves and shepherd's crooks and set forth for the
nearest stretch of undeveloped land, where they sang and danced in
circles around fires.  There was a place near our home called the Dip,
a steep valley that separated the suburbs of Victory Park and
Parkhurst.  Looking down into the Dip on Thursday afternoons, you saw
at least a dozen columns of smoke and a dozen rings of dancing
Zionists.  The drums of Africa were beating in the humdrum heart of
white suburbia, but that sound made virtually no impression on me as a
child.  I never asked Zionists who they were worshiping, and why.  I
never made a point of finding out what the tokoloshe looked like and
whether he might get me, too.  Natives put their beds on bricks,
Zionists danced on Thursdays, and thunderstorms washed streaks of red
African earth into the streets.  These were signs of Africa, but almost
all of us were blind to them.

Some natives lived in white backyards, and some lived elsewhere over
those hills, beyond the mine dumps, beyond the industrial wastelands,
in a desolate and despairing place called Soweto.  On winter evenings,
the acrid smoke of cooking fires came drifting over the horizon from
that direction.

Otherwise, you wouldn't have known there were a million natives living
there, in regimented ranks of boxlike cement houses that marched over
the horizon in all directions.

Some of our servants had homes and families in Soweto, and we sometimes
dropped them off there on Saturday afternoons.  They were actually
'from' somewhere else, though, some faraway place where natives lived
in some mud huts and kept cattle.  We drove through such places when we
went away on holiday, singing "She'll Be Coming "Round the Mountain' or
Afrikaans songs about baboons and angry farmers.  We saw the mud huts
and the cattle, as well as children dancing for coins in the roadside
dust.  My mother waved at everyone she saw and encouraged us to wave,
too.  The blacks always waved back.

My mother was very found of the natives good natives, at any rate, the
ones with shining, open faces and friendly smiles.

She didn't like coloreds much, and occasionally said nasty things about
Greeks, Portuguese, or Afrikaners.  Sometimes she wasn't even sure
about natives.

"They'd still be in mud huts if it weren't for us," she'd snap.

"What did they do to build this country?  Just dug where we said dig."
But that was only when she was cross with them, or cross with me, when
I was in my Communist phase and wont to rant about their miserable lot.
Mostly she loved natives, and they loved her.

She and our girl Lena were always chatting over the sink in a language
known as Fanagalo, half Zulu, half pidgin English.

They'd tut-tut sympathetically over each other's children's diseases,
and gossip about the neighbors.  Lena would say, this madam pays her
girl only ten rand a month, that one gives no paid holiday.  My mother
would say, "Shame," or cluck her tongue disapprovingly.  It's a little
harder to say how my father really felt about natives.  He was a slow,
grave man, quite shy, and often lost in abstraction.  His dealings with
blacks tended to be awkward and formal, as though he didn't know quite
what to say, but this was true of all his human dealings.  My old man
was not one to jive and scintillate.  He once remarked that he would
never want to work under a black man, but his opinions on race were
otherwise quite moderate, his unshakable faith in the doctrine of
'separate but equal' notwithstanding.  He forbade the use of the word
'kaffir' in our house, and instructed my brother and I always to say
'please' when issuing orders to the servants.

Apart from the natives in our backyard, the ones I knew best worked for
my mother's brother John, who lived in the small Free State town of
Parys.  Parys was like a Mark Twain novel for me.  It lay in a ring of
low hills, and through it flowed a slow brown river, overhung with
willows, full of fish to catch and islands to explore.  In the older
parts of Parys, houses were set directly on the street, giving the town
a vaguely European flavor.  At sunset, gnarled old Boers in floppy hats
would come out into the cool evening air and sit on their porches,
talking about the Boer War and watching the sparrow hawks circling in
the sky above.  Once a week, water came running down the roadside
furrows, and my granny would lead it into her backyard to irrigate her
corn, tomatoes, and peaches, which she grew in abundance and canned for
storage in her fragrant pantry.  At night when the rain drummed like
thunder on the tin roof and I was warm in bed, it was the best place in
the whole world to be.

As for my Uncle John, he was a heroic figure.  He had fought in World
War II, in the western desert, and had a scar on his knee to prove it.
His house was full of spectacular war loot:

an Iron Cross, a Jerry helmet, and a braided Jerry officer's whip.
There were empty shell casings alongside the fireplace and empty Sten
gun cartridges on the mantelpiece.  He also had a record of Scottish
martial music called Tartan on the Veld, for which I developed a most
disloyal and unpatriotic passion.  It opened with the sound of the
artillery barrage at the battle of El Alamein.  You heard the cannon
crumping and the machine guns rattling, and then you heard the thin
skirl of bagpipes sounding the infantry charge, and shivers of glory
ran down your spine.

My uncle owned a shop and employed lots of boys.  His boss boy was
Paul, except you said it "Pole," because the natives in Parys spoke
Afrikaans.  Paul was big and strong and had an open, honest face that
was always creased with a smile.  He was a good native.  The same could
not be said of Mathibes, who scowled and drank too much.  Mathibes was
said to be 'cheeky," but he was very clever with his hands, knew
welding and soldering and how to make change, so he was put up with
respected, even.

On Saturday mornings my uncle took some bills out of his hand-cranked
cash register and sent me down to the butcher to buy boerewors, a long
coil of raw sausage that came wrapped in bloody brown paper.  At one
o'clock, my uncle shouted, chi la African for knock off.  The boys
closed the doors, and we all trooped into the shop's yard, which was
full of machinery and gutted old trucks.  The boys made a fire.

We put the wors on a blackened old plowshare, and while it sizzled my
uncle gave each of his boys a bottle of Castle beer and a wage packet.
Then we stood around the fire, eating the wors with our fingers.  I
wouldn't exactly say my Uncle John was a liberal, but he had a way with
natives.  He understood some of their language, joked with them, shook
their hands he saw them, whereas most whites didn't.  So there was
always laughter and good feeling around that fire.  Mathibes scowled
and made cynical remarks, but even his heart wasn't in it.

If I asked nicely, he would sometimes give me a slug of his beer, as if
I were a real man.  Goddamn it, remembering those Saturdays makes me
cry.  It was all so simple then.

When the wors and the beer were finished, we loaded up the truck with
big bottles of propane gas.  My uncle and Paul got in front; my brother
and I climbed on the back with the boys.

We turned left on Dolf Street, drove past the railroad station, over
the bridge, and into the location where the natives lived.

Here and there, you saw a facade decorated with geometric tribal
designs, but most of the houses were the same color as the rutted roads
gray, like Free State mud.  We drove all around the location, dropping
the boys off one by one and delivering gas to the homes of my uncle's
customers.  I stood up behind the cab with the wind in my face.  Many
of the blacks we passed knew my uncle, so they smiled and waved and
yelled, "Baas John, Baas John."  I waved and shouted right back.  I
felt like a war hero, like a little white prince.

Maybe it was the love of a prince for his loyal subjects, and
conditional upon their remaining loyal and subservient, but I loved
natives anyway.  The first one I loved was Johannes, our garden boy
before I went to school.  Johannes looked after me while my mother was
away teaching.  I followed him everywhere.  When he was tired, I made
him come inside and sit in my father's armchair.  I made him put his
feet up and served him tea.  Ah, yes a revealing choice of word.

I was only five years old, but already I was giving orders.  I made
Johannes accept my gestures of love.  Was I any more to him than a
bossy white child?  I don't know, because he went away, or we went
away, and James eventually came in his place.  James taught me to play
Zulu walking guitar, and then he went away, too, and along came Piet.

Pier was a squat, ugly Tswana.  He drank and smoked zo!

dope but he had spirit, and big dreams.  He once bought some rabbits
and made a pen for them on the compost heap behind the shed.  He was
going to breed and butcher them to make some money.  It was a secret
from my father, but he let me in on it.  One day our dog got into the
pen, and that was the end of the rabbits.  Another time, Piet bought
one of those motor tricycles with a box on the back, the kind delivery
boys drove.  He was going to fix it up and make a business taking
things home to Pietersburg for other natives, but he never could get it
going.  Pier and I spent hours lying shoulder to shoulder in the dirt
between the peach trees in my father's garden, shooting rats in the
hedge with my pellet gun.  He bought beer for me when I was too young
to be drinking legally, and scored the first zol I ever smoked.  When
Phillip Nel and his gang were sitting on my chest, beating me, it was
Piet Maribatse who pulled them off.  Piet was my good friend.

Hey, what can I say; I loved him.

I loved them all, indiscriminately: Lena, Johannes, Piet, James, Betty,
Miriam, Miriam's children and teeming grandchildren, the other Pier,
who worked next door, the waiters in the hotel down the road, John's
boys all of them.  Loving natives was a very good investment.  I
learned that at the very beginning, and it remains true to this day. If
you were friendly, they lit up and laughed and returned your love a
hundredfold.

It seemed so easy and ordinary to love them then.  Maybe we are all
that way in the beginning.  Maybe we just grow out of it, or are taught
otherwise.  When I was a little older, I began to notice that many
whites around me felt otherwise about blacks.

By then, we were living in Linden, a predominantly Afrikaans suburb of
Johannesburg.  All the houses in Linden were square and tin-roofed, set
exactly in the middle of one-acre plots with a garage on the side, a
lawn out front, and some fruit trees in the back.  Linden was infested
with Broederbonders and Dutch reformed ministers, but that wasn't why
my father found it congenial.  He liked it because the garden was so
big; it offered scope.  My old man was always happiest in his garden,
wearing short pants and a funny hat and up to his elbows in muck.  So
he sunk a borehole, put a swimming pool in the back, and filled the
front yard with neatly regimented flower beds.  A very Afrikaans garden
it was.

In Linden, there were Afrikaners to the left, Afrikaners to the right,
and Afrikaners to the fore.  The ones across the street were most
interesting.  They were all Smits, a whole row of houses full of Smits.
On the corner was a slovenly woman whose son, Stoffel, sometimes played
with me.  Next door to Stoffel was Smit the sportsman, who went to the
races several times a week, and in the next house down, Mr. Justice
Smit of the Supreme Court.  Judge Smit was famous, among other reasons,
for presiding over the trial of John Harris, the white idealist who
blew up Johannesburg's railroad station in the early 1960s.  Judge Smit
sent him, among many others, to the gallows.

Judge Smit had some strange habits.  Every now and then, he filled his
trunk with brandy and beer and hailed one of his tattooed, duck tailed
nephews.  The judge and the greaser drove to a dismal industrial region
south of the city and parked on the banks of a slow, scummy river. They
watched the river flowing by, the smoke rising from the steel works and
drank until they could no longer sit up straight, or so Stoffel told
me.  In mitigation, I should mention that this usually happened after
the judge sentenced someone to death.  Still, it was typical Smit
behavior.  They were all gores, or rednecks common, in my mother's prim
Victorian estimation.  On Friday nights they'd get drunk, and there'd
be cars with twin-cam engines and furry dashboards revving up in the
road, women screaming, men cursing and once, guns going off in the
air.

In any event, the point about the Smits is that some of them weren't
very nice to natives.  When they wanted one, they yelled, "Come here'
in the tone of voice you might use with a dog.  Or one of the women
would stick her peroxided head out the front door and shriek, StoiC[ el
waar's die boy?

Laat die boy die kar skoonmaak!"  (Stoffel, where's the boy?

Tell the boy to clean the car!) And Stoffel, who was barely twelve,
would swagger over to the boy and tell him to wash the car, make it
nice and clean now, understand?  The boy was really a grown man, but he
was a native, so he had no choice but to lower his sullen head and
obey.

That sort of thing rankled me.  I had an entirely uncalled-for internal
struggle about it and decided that calling a boy 'boy' to his face was
rude and that I would henceforth call a boy 'sir' if I didn't know him.
I didn't like the way Stoffel talked to boys, and I didn't really like
Stoffel, either.  One day we were playing in the garden, and he said,
"These kaffirs must all go back to kaffir land  I said, "This is kaffir
land  He was taken aback, and so was I. Where did that come from?

So Stoffel and his clan were otherwise, which in white South Africa
means mean-spirited.  So was Mr.  Greyvenstein, who was reputedly nasty
to his garden boy, and Mrs.  Greef, who locked up her grocery cupboards
so that her girl couldn't pilfer sugar.  In fact, most whites were to
some degree otherwise.  It wasn't that they beat or whipped blacks; it
was the way they talked to them.  Many years later, when I lived in Los
Angeles, I heard LAPD officers using the same bullying tone of voice,
the same body language.  A cop told me it was called 'command presence'
and taught at the academy.  It was the tone of voice you used to exact
instant and unquestioning obedience.

In Linden, that was a common language of interracial communication. The
Portuguese who ran the green grocery on the corner used it, and so did
the Greek who owned the Soft Serv ice-cream store in the arcade. One
Sunday afternoon, I was hanging around in his shop when an albino came
in.  The Greek started taunting him, saying, "You're a white kaffir,
aren't you, a white kaffir, hey?"  The albino was hurt and humiliated,
but he put on a brave face, slapped his coin on the counter, and
demanded service.  The Greek just laughed and called him more names.  I
was hurting for the freak, so l huffed and puffed and looked the Greek
in the eye.

"You're the white kaffir," I said.  Then I turned and ran, because I
thought he might hit me.

No, I'm lying.  I mustn't lie anymore.  I stood there watching, with
that retort running through my mind.  I thought, Say it, say it, but I
didn't, because l was scared.  I just stood there seething.

I am trying to explain why l became a "Communist," and this is all part
of it.  I suppose it would make more sense if I could testify to
gruesome and bloody acts of cruelty and repression, but it wasn't that
way in Linden.  In Linden, apartheid atrocities were something you read
about in the English newspapers, which gave the impression that the
state was in the hands of some profoundly warped men.  Instances of
warp were legion.  Some drunken white would beat a 'cheeky' black to
death and leave the dock with six months suspended.  A sallow little
schoolgirl whose hair was suspiciously kinky was summoned before a
tribunal of apartheid experts, judged a half-breed, and kicked out of
her whites-only school.  Some colored fishermen once drowned in a storm
because they were scared to put ashore on a whites-only beach.  Once or
twice in my childhood the police swept through Linden in the dead of
night, knocking on the doors of servants' quarters, hunting blacks
without passes.  If they caught one, he or she was carted off in a
police truck and usually jailed for thirty days.  This never happened
to any of our natives, though, and I never saw a black physically
abused save once.

One afternoon, on my way home from school, I heard screams in the
distance.  A black youth came sprinting down the hill toward me with
several white men and a shrieking woman on his heels.  The fugitive had
apparently snatched her purse.  About ten yards from me, the black man
tripped and went sprawling across the pavement.  In an instant, the
whites were on him.  They pulled him to his feet, punched him twice in
the face, and then dragged him away to the police station.

This was the first time I had witnessed such violence.  I mean, I had
seen the duck tailed white battlers kicking one another in the face
outside the Linden Hotel Bar on Friday nights while their
bouffant-hairdoed wives and girlfriends screamed in the Chevy, but I
had never seen a black man struck.  I reacted like a proper liberal.  I
was appalled.  All my sympathy lay with the black, because he seemed an
underdog.

That is how I was.  I was a sentimental little fellow who liked natives
and thought it a pity that they were so poor and that so many whites
were nasty to them.  In their wretchedness, they seemed rather similar
to those Bolivian Indians in Life magazine, so I thought, okay, if Che
can do it, so can I, and I became a "Communist."  After that, I took to
mooning around in my bedroom after school, delivering imaginary
speeches to the United Nations or writing letters to the editor about
the plight of black South Africans.

When I was in the ninth or tenth grade, an Indian revolutionary named
Ahmed Timol 'fell' to his death from a tenth-floor window while
undergoing interrogation by the secret police.  Ahmed Timol was the
twelfth man on the list of detainees who'd died suspiciously in the
custody of the secret police, falling somewhere between the Islamic
imam who 'fell down a flight of stairs' and Steve Biko, who 'struck his
head on a bench' during a 'fight' with his interrogators.

Something sinister was obviously afoot, so I wrote a letter to The
Star, Johannesburg's dominant daily, expressing my Afrikaner's dismay
over the manner in which Timol died, and my Afrikaner's insistence on a
thorough and impartial inquiry.

In those days, an Afrikaner with a conscience was still something of a
novelty, even if he was only fourteen.  A day or two later, my letter
appeared at the head of the letters-to-the-editor page, under a huge
headline reading, "An Afrikaner Speaks Out."  At the bottom, in bold
type, it said "Rian Malan, Linden."

It was a day of delirious triumph for me, largely because my childish
scribblings had been accorded such adult weight and dignity.  Mrs.
Pretorius, the neighbor, rang up to congratulate me.  Two
schoolteachers called to commend me.  My Uncle John called from Parys,
chuckling, "Ho, ho, ho, what's all this, then?"

Toward evening, my father came home, poured himself a whiskey, and sat
down to read the afternoon papers.  My father supported apartheid,
moderately, and didn't mind moderate criticisms of it.  In his eyes, it
was a sensible solution to the problems of a multiethnic society the
only solution.  It wasn't perfect, but you couldn't change things
overnight.  He truly believed apartheid's central lie, its promise to
create a world in which blacks and whites were separate but equal, and
he was incapable of seeing the suffering it was inflicting meanwhile.
In some ways, he was a wise and compassionate manwise enough, several
years later, to talk a friend of mine down from a bad acid trip.  In
other ways, he was completely blind.  It seemed very strange to me.

He paged through The Star's news and business sections, scanning the
headlines, and came at last to the letters page.

He read my letter and let the paper fall to his lap.  He took off his
glasses and gave me a dirty look.  I thought he was about to offer his
standard argument, which ran thus: The secret police know more than you
do.  If they lock somebody up, there must be a reason for it; and if
they say Timol fell, he surely fell.  But he didn't say that.  He just
said, "What gives you the right to call yourself an Afrikaner?"  Then
he lifted the paper and turned to the sports page.

One summer night, a few years after my conversion to "Communism I
donned dark clothing and slipped out of my sleeping father's house to
strike a blow against apartheid.  My fellow conspirators were waiting
on the wall of Emmarentia

Dam.  Anton wore John Lennon glasses, read Dostoyevsky, and considered
himself to be on a higher spiritual plane than the rest of us.  He was
the mastermind of this escapade.  Robin was already out of school.  He
had curly, shoulder-length hair and girls thought he looked just like
Marc Bolan, the English rock star.  I was sixteen, pimply and
anguished.  I suggested that we blacken our faces with mud so as to
flit through the sleeping suburbs unseen, but Anton vetoed the
proposal.  He didn't want to dirty his new cowboy boots scrambling
around on the shore of the dam.  So we scrapped that precaution and we
set off as we were, the weapon tucked under Anton's denim jacket.

The year was 1971.  It was the eleventh anniversary of the Sharpeville
massacre, the eighth of Mandela's incarceration, and the fifth of the
inauguration of our stern Calvinist ruler, Balthazar Johannes Vorster.
It was the apogee of the apartheid era.  All across the country,
government trucks were moving into so-called 'black spots," black
settlements inside 'white' South Africa, where no blacks were allowed
to be.  The sight of such settlements offended the mad scientists of
apartheid.

The blacks had to go.  They had to get onto the trucks and cross the
border of the nearest Bantustan, where they could be separate but
equal.  Three million blacks were moved that way, dumped on the barren
homelands, and often left to starve, in triumphant culmination of
Daniel Franqois Malan's cold-blooded logic.

We were vaguely aware that the forced removals were underway, but they
were not on our minds that night.  We were talking about UFOs, as I
recall.  Our friend John claimed to have seen one hovering over our
very suburb, so we were on the lookout for more.  It was a wild night,
and we were stoned, as usual, so we didn't mind that it was two in the
morning before we came across a vast embankment of virgin concrete
where the deed could be done on an appropriate scale.  Robin stood on
the pedestrian bridge and kept chips for the fuzz.

I stood on the corner in case they came the other way, and Anton
wielded the spray can.  Our subversive slogan was the title of an
American soul hit, but we'd never heard James Brown sing it.  The
Brotherhood would never have allowed us to hear a song entitled "Say It
Out Loud, I'm Black & I'm Proud."  We had read about it in Time.

If you'd chanced upon us that morning and asked us what we thought we
were doing, we would probably have said we were into the concept of
just war and supported the struggle of the people against the tyranny
of the rock spiders crunchies, hairy backs ropes, and bloody Dutchmen.
Those were the names by which we referred to Afrikaners.  I was an
Afrikaner, too, but I was a member of a subspecies known as the
detribalized krantz athlete- that is, a Boer who'd somehow become a
liberal or whatever and thrown himself into the struggle against
apartheid.  I'm not sure how spray-painting the title of a James Brown
song on a wall in a lily-white neighborhood was supposed to harm the
hairy backs but that wasn't very important anyway.  We believed that
apartheid was stupid and vicious, but we also believed that growing our
hair long undermined it.  We believed Tolkien's hobbit books were
founts of pure wisdom, and that drugs raised one's spiritual
quotient.

As teen rebels, we considered ourselves among South

Africa's oppressed.  If you asked why, we probably would have talked
about school.  Robin went to a private school, but both Anton and I had
been inmates of whites-only government schools, where we were 'forced,"
in the earliest grades, to color in pictures of Dirkie Uys, the
twelve-year-old Voortrekker who sacrificed his life in a futile attempt
to save his father during an epic battle against the Zulus in !  838.
Later, we were taught that history began in 1488, when a Portuguese
navigator first rounded the Cape.  We were likely to point to such
things as proof that the rock spiders were giving us lies for truth and
trying to wash our brains with "Christian nationalism."

There was an element of truth in that, but we had more compelling
reasons to hate the system.  We hated it because it made us lop off our
sideburns at the ear lobe, caned us if we misbehaved, and forced us to
wear military uniform on Fridays, when we spent the first hour of the
school day marching around the rugby field as part of something called
youth preparedness.  The cadet uniform featured short khaki pants and a
silly cap that made you look ridiculous in front of the girls, who
didn't have it so easy themselves.  While we marched, they were
inspected by women teachers, to make sure that their skirts hung
demurely to the knee and that their undies conformed to regulation.  In
our eyes, there was an unmistakable link between such fascism and the
larger workings of apartheid, between short-back-and-sides haircuts and
pass raids, between the banning of Playboy and forced removals, between
corporal punishment and the mysterious deaths of black dissidents in
detention.  Those totalitarian bastards stopped at nothing.  They
banned Sunday sport, forbade movies on the Sabbath, and wouldn't even
play the Beatles on state radio after John Lennon claimed to be more
popular than Jesus.  That was why they had to be overthrown.

So we were into toppling Vorster, but we were also into ending the
Vietnam War and scrapping the draft.  We knew what was what and what
was cool, because we read about in in Time and Life.  Carlos Castaneda
was cool, and so were Tolkien, Hermann Hesse, The Greening of America,
campus revolt, and the Black Panthers.  Our heads were full of
hand-me-downs from the great white mother culture, ideas that we copied
from foreign books and movies and magazines in the way other teenagers
copied hairstyles or fashions.  I had a picture of Che on my wall,
alongside one of Frank Zappa and one of Danny the Red hurling
cobblestones at riot police in Paris in May '68.  The person I most
admired in the entire world was Anton's older brother, Leon, a student
leftist in the SDS tradition.  Leon was always cloaked in a duffle coat
and an aura of conspiracy.  He demonstrated against apartheid on Jan
Smuts Avenue.  He owned a tattered copy of Roiling Stone, the only one
I'd ever seen, and he was a close personal friend of "Franco," a
political cartoonist whose seditious work appeared in the local student
newspaper.  Franco's most notorious cartoon showed a toddler peering
down into a toilet and asking, "Are you the Prime Minister?"

Most of my schoolmates were into the Beatles and bubble gum, but my
circle had more sophisticated tastes, thanks to Leon's civilizing
influence.  It was Leon who turned us on to Bob Dylan.  I bought all
Dylan's old records and painted his name in psychedelic letters on my
school bag  I knew the words to all his generational war songs: "The
Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,"

"Oxford Town,"

"The Times They Are A-Changin,"

"Only a Pawn in Their Game," and "Masters of War."  I also knew the
words to "We Shall Overcome' and "Marchin' to the Freedom Band' by
heart.  In contrast, I doubt that any of us could so much have as
hummed the melody of "Nkosi Sikelel' iA[rika' - "God Bless Africa' the
black African national anthem.  Don't think we weren't into black
culture, though.  We were heavily into black culture.  We dug soul,
reggae, and the blues, too, and we even smoked dope, a mostly black
habit, supposedly.

I was thirty before I discovered that many Africans thought
dope-smokers were losers and fuck-ups.  In my teens, everyone knew that
all "Afs' smoked dope.  That was why they were so wise.  They sat up
there in the hills, you know, smoking zol, watching the sun rise and
set, just being cool and in touch with nature and all that.  We were
plastic; they were real.  It was a time when silly ideas were rampant
everywhere in the West, and we did our best to keep up.  Americans and
Europeans had their Hindu gurus; we had our wise old Afs.  Once, on an
unsupervised camping trip in the Drakensberg Mountains, some friends
and I had a passing encounter with such a wise one an old, yellow-eyed
kebla who sold us some zol and invited us to sit down for a smoke
outside his hut.  It was a moment of profound, almost religious
significance.  We were at great pains to hold the pipe right and not
cough as we drew the raw, searing smoke into our lungs.  A real African
did not cough when he 'bust' a pipe; everyone knew that.

And there we sat, zonked, the white sons of personnel managers, art
dealers, and brain surgeons, utterly oblivious to the squalor and
misery around us, rocking back and forth on our haunches and thinking,
Ah, so this is what it's really like to be one of them; pretty cool. We
couldn't talk to the old one, of course, because we learned useless
languages at school, like German, or dead ones, like Latin.  Instead,
we communed silently.  We could tell just from the old one's vibe that
he was a head, as we would have said.

Vibes were an inarticulate tongue, but it really didn't matter  This
was a symbolic encounter anyway.  It was hip to be into black culture,
so we got into it in much the same way that we got into bell-bottom
pants.  In white Johannesburg, black culture was inclined to mean James
Brown and James

Baldwin, not the culture of that old black man in the mountains or the
black people in our back yards.  They didn't really count, because they
were inscrutable Africans and, worse yet, 'local."  Almost all things
South African were tawdr nd third-rate, except notional noble savages
and maybe Herman Charles Bosman, who wrote witty short stories about
simple backcountry Boers.  People from 'overseas' were celebrities in
their own right, just for being from there.  Culture was also something
that came from there, even if it stopped in Salisbury on the way.

In my thirteenth year, there came from the north a blues band, the
first ever heard in South Africa.  They were longhair white boys from
the rebel colony of Rhodesia, where Ian Smith was holding out for a
thousand years of white rule.  They were the Otis Waygood Blues Band. I
heard the blues, and I saw the light.  I slaved in a bakery, folding
boxes, until I had the money for an electric guitar, and then we
started our own blues band.  Ferreira blew that blues harp, Malan tried
to make his guitar cry like BB King, and Van de Vyfer strummed the
chords.  We got us a bass and drummer, learned some Howlin' Wolf
numbers and some Sonny Boy Williamson tunes, and there we were,
Boerboys, wailin' and holierin' about Negro trouble and sufferin' at
garage parties in the segregated white suburbs of John Vorster's South
Africa.

And nobody laughed at us.

Isn't that absurd?  Nobody laughed.  We were utterly oblivious to the
irony of it, which says something significant about those
English-speaking, bourgeois northern suburbs.  They were in South
Africa, but somehow not really of it.  The rest of the country was a
racist Calvinist despotism, but the northern suburbs were liberal,
permissive, governed by the ruling philosophical orthodoxies of the
West.

My ninth-grade English teacher, Mrs.  Hunter, had a short story
published in Harper's or The Atlantic Monthly.  She read it aloud to
the class.  It was about an innocent black youth beaten up on a Jo'burg
street by some white thugs who suspected him of picking pockets.  When
the story was finished, Mrs.  Hunter asked, "What is the highest virtue
of civilization?"  and I raised my hand.

"Tolerance," I said.

"Very good, Rian," she replied.

I liked Mrs.  Hunter and did my best to please her, putting some strong
language in my essays.  In one, I was on an imaginary mission in
Bolivia, fighting to free the Indians.

"I

was filled with revolutionary fervor," I wrote, 'burning with desire to
fight against imperialism, colonialism, and many other evils."  Mrs.
Hunter gave me high marks and appended an approving remark: "Good
ideas, well expressed."

And that was a government school, a "Nazi youth camp," in our scathing
estimation.  A year or so later, I somehow conned my conservative
father into sending me to a liberal private school called Woodmead.  I
promised to reform and work hard, but all I really wanted to do was
grow my hair.

The headmaster of my new school espoused the progressive educational
theories of Britain's A S Neill, founder of the 'free school'
Summerhill, and the progressive politics of Alan Patoh's defunct
Liberal Party, which had espoused one-man, one-vote democracy.  Mr.
Krige invited Soweto headmasters to address the student body and sent
us off to play cricket against a black school in Swaziland.  A few
years later, he was the first private-school headmaster to defy the law
and integrate his school.

At Woodmead, almost everyone's parents were rich and left-liberal.
Brenda's father took photographs of apartheid's black victims, and
Brian's father defended them in court,

Steve's father moved to East Germany, and Dave's father was the
neuro-pathologist who demolished the state's lies at the inquest into
Steve Biko's death.  As president of the

Student Council, I organized fund drives for black education and closed
the school cafeteria in solidarity with the Reverend

Bernie Wrankmore's epic anti-apartheid hunger strike.  In the northern
suburbs of Johannesburg, such actions were not necessarily evidence of
moral grit and courage.  We liked to think of ourselves as brave
opponents of tyranny, but the secret police weren't particularly
interested in us.  Indeed, my worst fear was that someone might stake
out a position to the left of mine, or do something more radical than
what I was doing.  It was at least partly for that reason that I slept
with a black woman when I was sixteen.

It was a Thursday night, maid's night off in the white sub urbs.  I had
a friend named Ivan who lived in the stockbroker

7i suburb of Saxonwold, where every second house was mock Tudor and the
streets named for the forests of old England.

Every Thursday night, our band practiced in Nan's garage, and black
servants came from all around to drink and dance to our music.  It was
sometimes noisy and riotous, but Ivan's parents didn't mind.  They were
"Progs," partisans of the tiny pro-black Progressive Party, which had
one seat in parliament and supported democratic principles.

One night, a black woman among the dancers took a liking to me.  She
came and stood right in front of me, bumping and grinding drunkenly.
She was wearing her maid's uniform, a plain blue housedress, and a
headscarf known as a dock.  She had a generous behind and thighs like
tree-trunks, and seemed very old indeed at least twenty-five if not
older.  When we took a smoke break Ivan's gardener came over to say,
"That woman, she wants the big one."  That was me.

I was a virgin, but this was not something one admitted.

Pretending sophistication in sexual matters was crucial to preserving
face.  So I couldn't say, hey, nooit, never, I've never done it with
anyone.  And I certainly couldn't say, are you crazy?  She's black.
That was what I was thinking, but I could never have said it, because I
was a social democrat or whatever.  I umm'd and ah'd and drew manfully
on my cigarette and finally said, "Thanks anyway, but I don't really
feel like it tonight."  At this, my chinas started taunting me for
being chicken, and it suddenly became a question of face.  So I
shrugged and arranged an assignation.

After practice, I set off on foot down Abbotswold Road, swept along by
a gang of jeering, sniggering teenage boys.

Whenever I stopped, they joshed and jeered, so I had to keep going.  We
came to a big white house.  My mates decamped outside under a
streetlight, and I slunk down the dark alley that led to the servants'
quarters, moving on tiptoe, because what I was about to do was
unlawful.

I tapped on an iron door and the black woman opened it, wearing a satin
nightgown.  A candle was burning in the room behind her.  The cement
floor was bare, the walls adorned only by a picture of a blond Jesus,
his blue eyes spaniel with compassion.  A lace-covered table stood at
her bedside, and on I it a mirror, some cheap trinkets, and a bottle of
skin-lightening cream.  The room smelled of all the things I associated
with servants red floor polish, putu, and Lifebuoy soap.  Even her bed
was waist-high on bricks, to thwart the tokolosbe.  I took off my
clothes and clambered onto it, and then I was in her arms, overpowered
by the smell of her, and terrified, utterly terrified.  I couldn't talk
to her because we had few words in common.  I didn't know what to do. I
recoiled at the thought of French-kissing her, but I did it anyway,
because I was a social democrat, and I did not want to insult her.  And
then I pulled up the nightie and instants later it was over.  I rolled
off and asked, "Was I good?  Am I big enough?"  She said yes.

She was very kind.

For years after, I offered this incident as the ultimate proof of my
anti-apartheid bona fides, of my triumph over my

Afrikaner conditioning.  It was nothing of the sort.  I came out of
that room laughing nonchalantly, but at heart I was stricken with
guilt.  In my fevered racist imaginings, I was quite sure she'd given
me the pox, or had turned me in to the police.  It was a nightmare, but
I dared not say so out loud.

Instead, at school the next day, I casually mentioned that I had taken
a black lover.  My chinas were impressed.  This was a truly staggering
defiance of the rock spider tyranny.  I sat there smiling modestly,
praying that no one would ask her name.  I didn't know it, you see.

The only black person I really knew, at the age of s!xte, el, was Mrs.
Miriam Tshabalala, our servant.  Lena nau re urea y then, and my friend
Piet Maribatse was dead.  He had moved on to another gardening job,
where he was set to work felling trees.  One struck his head as it came
down.  He went into his room, complaining of a headache, and never came
out again.

So Miriam was the only black person in my life.  She had no idea of her
birth date, but she was already old when she came to work for us.  She
wore spectacles for knitting and sewing, and, as I saw on those rare
and startling occasions when she was bareheaded, her stubbly peppercorn
hair was flecked with gray.  She could not read or write, and spoke
very little

English.  When she was pleased, she clapped her hands and said,
"Happy-happy."  When she was angry, she stamped her

?

foot and said, "Haul"  She was plump and shapeless, walked with a
waddle, and seemed to sag, the downward slope of her shoulders
following the downward curve of her mouth.

She was not defeated, just resigned.  Her life had been hard.

She had endured.

Miriam was a Catholic, but she still feared the tokoloshe and slept
with her bed on bricks.  Whenever there was misfortune or illness in
her family, she suspected witchcraft.  The witches must have been
active, because Miriam's life was full of unbearable woe.  She gave
birth to seven children, but only two survived to adulthood.  Her
husband deserted her, leaving her to bring up Elizabeth and Ephraim on
her own.  Ephraim developed epilepsy and could never work.  In Soweto,
epilepsy was often mistaken for possession by demons.  Whenever Ephraim
'fell down," as Miriam put it, onlookers would stone him, to stop his
diabolical writhings.  By the time he shambled into our lives, Ephraim
was so fucked up it was hard to look at him.  One leg dragged, he could
barely talk, and his face was all asymmetrical where the bones had been
smashed in.

As for Elizabeth, she married a rotter who abandoned her with six young
children and no means of support.  Miriam and Elizabeth tried their
best, but they had a very hard time of it.

The boys cut school, and the girls well, the eldest put on a little
weight after her thirteenth birthday, and next thing a baby popped out
of her.  There were several more babies after that, sliding out between
the legs of startled schoolgirls, all fathered by hit-and-run seducers,
born into a family where there was too little food, less money, and no
hope.  Things never got better for Miriam and her family; they just
seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the mire.

Miriam's clan lived in Soweto, but they paid periodic visits to our
white suburb.  Those weekends are among the sweetest memories of my
childhood.  I trundled Miriam's grand- and great-grandchildren around
the garden in a wheelbarrow.  I taught them to swim in our swimming
pool, and to ride on my bicycle.  I led processions of dapper little
black boys to the corner store, and squandered my pocket money on great
feasts of candy and cake.

I loved Miriam and her family, and dare to presume they loved me back,
and yet there was something symbiotic about our relationship: Its
essential condition was that they were victims and I their putative
savior.  I used to spend hours lecturing Miriam about the evil of
apartheid, as if this was something she didn't know.  I told her I was
fighting for her with all my teenage might.  She was never very
impressed, but those discussions left me feeling very good about
myself.

One afternoon, I swore Miriam to secrecy and drew her attention to the
front page of Rapport, an Afrikaans Sunday paper.  On it was a
photograph of a roadside embankment, disfigured by a monumental
graffito, six feet tall, forty yards long, and bracketed, come to think
of it, by twin sets of the hammer-and-sickle.  Miriam was illiterate,
so I read the slogan to her: "Say It Out Loud, I'm Black & I'm Proud."
I beamed proudly.  I think I expected her to say thank you, but she
just snapped, "Ah, suka," and walked away.

"Suka' means 'get lost."

Maybe she didn't understand.  Maybe she understood all too well.

Ah, my friend, do I seem poisoned with cynicism?  I try not to be. It's
just that I'm trying to fight my way out from under an ages-old
accretion of myth about the world I grew up in.  An African boyhood? An
Afrikaner boyhood?

I don't think so.  Looking back, the strangest thing about my African
childhood is that it wasn't really African at all.  It was a more or
less generically Western childhood, unfolding in generic white suburbs
where almost everyone subscribed to Life and Reader's Digest, and to
the generic Western verities they upheld.  Our heads turned to the
north like flowers to the sun, toward where the great white mother
culture lay.  Our imaginary lives were rooted there, not in this
strange place, where Zionists danced on Thursdays and rain washed the
red earth of Africa into the streets.

In our imaginations, painting "I'm Black & I'm Proud' on a wall was an
entirely logical act of subversion.  In the real South Africa, it was
pointless.  That embankment lay in a lily-white neighborhood where few
blacks would see it and few who did could read it.  In a day or two,
the wall was sandblasted clean, and the grim mechanics of apartheid
ground on regardless.

The sole result of the entire effort was to boost our sense of
self-righteousness.

That was the common outcome of most political undertakings in
Johannesburg's predominantly English, predominantly liberal northern
suburbs.  In the northern suburbs, most whites disapproved of apartheid
and were free to say so more or less openly.  The intelligentsia
denounced it, the English newspapers condemned it, and most people my
Afrikaner father and sundry others excepted voted against it in
elections.

The hard men who ruled the country simply ignored us, because we were
too few to make a difference.  The northern suburbs were like a
glass-bottomed boat, adrift on a violent and mysterious sea.  We could
peer down into the depths and see strange life-forms twisted
Calvinists, cold-blooded apartheid zealots, dancing Zionists and
suffering, inscrutable Africans but we remained tourists of sorts, warm
and safe in our comfortable berths.  So long as we stayed in our proper
place, the hard men left us to our own devices.  If we stepped
overboard, though, anything could happen.  There were killer sharks
down there.

It was hard to know exactly where the line was, but spraying a James
Brown song title on a lily-white suburban wall apparently carried us
across it.  According to the caption under Rapport's photograph of our
handiwork, the Security Police were investigating.  Not the juvenile
delinquency squad, or the vandalism squad, but the heavyweight
political enforcers themselves.  It was absurd.  In such a country, it
was not entirely illogical to think that growing your hair undermined
the state.  It may be true that my various 'blows' against apartheid
were callow acts of self-aggrandizement, but worse was true of the hard
white men who ran the country.  They really were cruel and twisted, and
one thing was certain: I was not willing to carry a gun for them.

After high school, white boys were supposed to report for military
service, the most dreaded rite of a white boy's passage.  Not mine,
though; not if I could help it.  I was determined that the army would
not have me.  The South African Defence Force was run by mean hairy
backs who toughened you up to keep blacks down.  They forced you to
leopard-crawl from horizon to horizon, or run around the Namib desert
carrying telephone poles a notorious torture known as pole FT.

I considered myself above such indignities, of course, but my stated
reasons for avoiding the call-up were political.  I was a white
leftist, and white leftists did not serve in apartheid's army,
especially not in 1975.  There had been a revolution in Portugal the
previous April, and the new Portuguese government was about to set its
African colonies free.  That raised the specter of bitterly hostile
black Marxist governments in neighboring Angola and Mozambique, and
that, in turn, raised the specter of regional war.  If there was to be
a war, I knew which side I wanted to fight on: the other side.

Meanwhile, I had parents to oblige.  I was doing odd jobs here and
there, attending some university classes, playing in rock and roll
bands, and, for a while, prospecting for copper in Namibia.  None of it
led anywhere in particular.  My despairing parents insisted I make
something of myself, so I applied for a newspaper job.

Next to joining the underground, journalism was the most honorable
calling for a white leftist, and besides, there was a certain overlap
between the two professions.  As a journalist, you could do propaganda
for the cause, and you could always dabble in revolution on the side.
In that era, as in this, whites picked up for running guns or joining
Communist plots almost invariably turned out to have been newspaper
reporters at some point or other.  The paper to work for was the Rand

Daily Mail, Johannesburg's cocky morning daily, but the Mail wasn't
hiring, so I applied to The Star instead.  The Star was the city's
afternoon paper, and the largest daily in Africa.

The Star summoned me to take a test.  I answered a general-knowledge
questionnaire and wrote a mock report of a 'terrorist' attack in the
Kruger National Park.  I guess my scribblings passed muster, because I
was called back for an interview.  A panel of white editors
interrogated me across a conference table.  They posed some probing
questions, and then asked whether I had ever written a letter to the
editor.

"Yes,"

I said, "I wrote a letter protesting the death of Ahmed Timol."

The editors exchanged glances, as if to say, Aha, here's our

?

boy.  I think that's why they hired me, and sent me up star to the
Argus Group's Cadet School.

The Argus Group was South Africa's premier newspaper chain.  It owned
dailies in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, and Pretoria,
plus the weekly Sunday Tribune.

Those were its white possessions.  It also owned The World, Soweto's
black daily; The Cape Herald, a semiweekly for Cape coloreds; and The
Post, an Indian paper.  Each year, every outpost of the group's
far-flung empire recruited one or two aspiring hacks and sent them to
Johannesburg, to be trained in the crafts of typing and shorthand and
the allied art of writing succinct prose.

This here is a picture of my graduating class.  That's me in the
foreground, shaking hands with Ren de Villiers, the retired eminence of
South Africa's liberal editors, but the interesting thing about this
photograph is the background.

Consider the faces of my fellow cadet reporters.  There are four white
men, four white women, and four 'blacks' two black Africans, one
Indian, and one colored man.  To your outsider's eye, it might seem an
almost perfect affirmative-action tableau, with its precise symmetries
of race and gender.  The Argus Group was a liberal institution,
genuinely committed to the Western ideals of equal opportunity and
affirmative action.

This was South Africa, though.  There were about seventeen million
blacks out there, plus two million colored people and 750,000 Indians.
If they were all allowed in, the white liberals would have been
swamped, and that was too high a price for good intentions.  So they
opened the doors just a crack.

According to the mathematics of affirmative action, there should have
been at least eight Africans in our class of twelve, not just Mothobi
and Mike, but I was thankful anyway.  I had been on the side of the
blacks for more than a decade, but Mothobi and Mike were the first real
black men I ever met.  By real, I mean men who assumed three dimensions
in my white eyes and culture; black men who spoke perfect English,
looked me in the eye, told me to shut up about this, reconsider that,
or sit down and have a beer.

Indeed, I have much for which to thank The Star an introduction to real
black men and to my one true calling, a close look at how the country
worked, a two-year deferment of military service, and last and least of
all a salary.  The pay was $120 a month, but it was enough to afford a
flat of my own.  My Belgian girlfriend, Joji, and I moved into a block
called Sandringham in the suburb of Berea.  It was a dank, verminous
place.  Plaster flaked off the walls, and paint peeled from the
ceilings.  Green slime oozed out of the ancient water faucets and
welled up out of the shower drain.  The rent was $15 a month.

In my parents' shocked view, the flat was a krot, a 'cave."

In my circle, it was a fashionable address, a liberated zone of sorts.
Almost all the inhabitants of Sandringham were social or political
deviants.  I lived in number 2. There was a Rand Daily Mail reporter in
number 1, a future anti-apartheid filmmaker in number 3, and a banned
person upstairs.  His name was Garth, and he had been a trade union
organizer until the secret police silenced him.  A banned person could
not engage in political activities or be quoted by the media or even
attend gatherings of more than two or three persons.  I forget the
precise terms of Garth's banning order, but he had a tendency to slink
away when third or fourth parties joined a conversational knot.  It was
safer that way.  You never knew who was watching, or working, for
'them."

Garth had a wife and newborn baby.  He also had a sister named Faye,
who lived in a cottage in the backyard with her boyfriend, Blair.  Faye
is in the African National Congress these days, in its military wing,
but back then-she was just a radical feminist with ambitions.  Blair
was one of those desperately earnest, tortured whites who couldn't
handle South Africa at all.  Faced with an army call-up, he ran away to
Europe, where he joined the external wing of Swapo the Southwest
African People's Organization, a terrorist organization in the eyes of
the South African authorities.  As it turned out, he couldn't handle
exile either, so he came home and fell into the hands of the military
police, who threw him into detention barracks and finally into Ward 30
at Voortrekkerhoogte Military Hospital.  I knew Ward 30 well.  It was
the psychiatric ward.  Several of my friends ended up there, trying to
fake their way out of uniform.  It was fuW

15 of bush-mad hard cases and brutalized gays, raving acid casualties
and suicidal liberals.  Blair wasn't deranged, but he soon learned the
tricks.  He was discharged as insane, whereupon he became a reporter.
So did Faye.

Blair and Faye were my good friends.  I was going to be their best man,
but Faye called off the wedding, claiming fresh insights into the
manner in which marriage perpetuated capitalist patriarchal structures.
Blair barely seemed to notice.

He was a mystic, a Marxist visionary with a wild beard and eyes that
burned in torment in deep holes in his skull.  He and I spent our
evenings endlessly harrowing the same old bone, the bone of what was to
be done.

We were all socialists, of course.  In a country like South Africa,
with its brutal disparities in wealth, socialism had the logic of
gravity.  As far as we were concerned, all men of good faith were
socialists.  The capitalist democracies were the scourge of the earth.
Business stood condemned by its own crass profit motive.  The wealth of
Western industrialized countries was the fruit of neocolonialist
exploitation of the Third World.  And as for white South Africa, it was
infected with greed and racism and had to be destroyed.  Toward this
end, Blair was planning to form a Marxist study group, but all we ever
did was get drunk on cheap red wine and sleep with each other's
girlfriends, in deference to the Bolshevik free-love tradition.  No,
that's not true; we once visited Red China's embassy in Botswana,
hoping to be recruited.  They didn't even offer us tea.

Blair also worked for The Star.  Our corporate slogan" The Star tells
it like it is' was emblazoned across billboards and bus shelters all
over town, and I guess the paper tried to live up to it.  Its
editorials were critical of apartheid, so many blacks saw it as an
ally.  African women would wrap themselves in blankets and sit in the
lobby in mute suffering, waiting for a chance to tell their troubles to
some white reporter whose intervention might save them.  A black
breadwinner had died, and his survivors were being evicted from their
township house and 'endorsed out' to the homelands.  A black husband
had been picked up without a pass and had disappeared.  The baas had
cheated them on their wages, or they'd

67 signed a hire-purchase contract they didn't really understand to buy
a lounge suite they couldn't afford.  That was very common, that one:
Respectable white businessmen made fortunes gulling deposits out of
blacks and repossessing and recycling the goods once they missed a
payment, which was often inevitable.  Sometimes they couldn't afford
schoolbooks or school fees, or they were just hungry and out of work
and thought we could help.

My first assignment was to cover the magistrates' courts, which lay
within walking distance of The Star's offices on the west side of
downtown.  The magistrates sat in an imposing stone courthouse with
wide marble corridors, but they tried mostly petty cases shoplifting,
drug offenses, assault, muggings, prostitution, car theft, and
burglary.

A magistrates court reporter seldom made the front page, but the
assignment had its moments.  South Africa was reputed to have the
highest crime rate in the 'free world," and most of the alleged
perpetrators were black.  To my socialist eye, crime seemed a just
mechanism of redistribution.  Apartheid and capitalism gave, and black
criminals took away.  There was so much petty crime in Jo'burg that The
Star had to be selective.

The news desk was not interested in magistrates'-court stories unless
there was an unusual angle, which usually meant that whites were
involved.  In our copy, we always designated race with a capital
letter.  A White woman would lose her bag to a Black purse-snatcher.
That was too commonplace to make the paper.  A White burglar, on the
other hand, might merit a story, but his Black counterpart not, unless
he was mastermind of a Black burglary ring.

On slow days, I often sat in on black trials anyway, just for
interest's sake.  The state provided a defense in serious cases, but
otherwise indigent blacks were on their own, and the odds were against
them.  Some couldn't read and had no idea of the contents of statements
to which they affixed their x. Others didn't understand white languages
and struggled to follow the proceedings through interpreters.  They
couldn't really comprehend what witnesses were saying against them, and
the be-robed white man on the bench couldn't really make out their
rebuttals.  Sometimes they made long, impassioned speeches, at the end
of which the black interpreter would turn to the court and say, "He
says he didn't do it, your honor."  Many black accused were clearly
guilty; many simply despaired of proving their innocence, hung their
heads, and trooped off to do their time.  I have never understood why
Justice should be blind; she should be clear-eyed.  In those courts,
she was indeed blind, and less just for it.

So I spent eight hours a day in the magistrates' court, and at night, I
jolled.  I haven't said much about ordinary life, have I?  It's strange
how obsessed we South Africans are with race.  To hear me talk, you'd
imagine there was no more to life than being white or black and coping
with the relevant consequences.  It wasn't really that way.  i was
fixated on apartheid, to be sure, but I was equally agonized about acne
and premature ejaculation.  Sometimes the racial conundrum sat in my
brain like a gnarling, malevolent octopus, but at others it was very
remote, as remote as the threat of earthquakes in Los Angeles.  We all
knew disaster was coming, but we didn't know when.  Meanwhile, we ate,
drank, and jolled.

The jol say 'jawl' was a very important South African concept,
connoting kamikaze debaucheries.  It was a Cape colored street term,
but all races used it, making it one of the pathetically few things we
had in common.  Divided we stood, united we jolled.  Blacks jolled to
obliterate their dismal present; whites to blot out the uncertain
future.  The word is essentially untranslatable, but any tattooed
gangster from the colored slums could define its essential ingredients:
drank, dagga, dob bel en vok - 'drink, dope, dice and fucking."

I spent most of my youth jolling.  Jol is both verb and noun, and a jol
can take many forms.  If you were brave, you could jol to a shebeen in
Soweto, and have a jol once you got there.

You could jol to Zoo Lake on a Sunday afternoon to laze on the
greensward, watching blacks jive to the music of transistor radios, and
you could jol to Swaziland.  Swaziland was a free black country, four
hours' drive east of Johannesburg.  It was a peaceful tribal kingdom,
ruled by an absolute monarch, King Sobhuza.  There was no racial
tension in Swaziland.

The countryside was green and fertile, the people well fed and
friendly.  As you crossed the Swazi border, some huge and dark shadow
seemed to lift from your shoulders.  Swaziland was a balm for the mind
of racially tormented South Africans.

I grew deliriously light-headed the instant I set foot in it, and not
just from smoking zol.

You could buy zol on almost any roadside in Swaziland.  A finger cost
ten cents, an arm five rand, and it was very strong.

We stuffed it into the jagged maw of a broken bottle-neck and smoked it
in the African manner, holding the pipe in clasped hands and drawing in
great billowing clouds of smoke.  Then we put Dollar Brand on the tape
player, and set forth on voyages of discovery in my old green Peugeot.
Dollar was a black jazz pianist from Cape Town, and his "Mannenberg'
was the song of those times- twenty-two intoxicating minutes of wailing
African saxes and shifting township rhythms.

Swaziland's back roads were crude, and I often had accidents on them.
It was in the benign nature of the place that we would always come out
laughing.  One afternoon, I put the Peugeot's nose into a ditch.  We
dug it out, but I was so goofed that I reversed the rear end into the
ditch on the far side of the road.  At that moment, a laughing
tribesman leapt out of the bush, quoting Yeats: "Things fall apart; the
center cannot hold."  He was a mission boy, and spoke with a BBC
accent.

The car was firmly stuck, so we sat down and laughed at it.

Then we made another pipe.  I got out my guitar and taught our black
samaritan to sing "Da-Doo-Ron-Ron," and there we were- some Boers, a
Swazi, a Muslim from the Cape and two girls, dancing and singing in the
dust of an African roadside.  It was a moment of utterly blinding
exultation, and all the more precious because it was so rare, so
rare.

In my life, those moments seemed to come mostly when I was stoned.
Maybe it was my imagination, but being stoned seemed a Switzerland of
the mind to me.  All of a sudden, it didn't really matter whether you
and blacks really understood each other.  You could just laugh.  It was
good enough.  The best times I had with blacks were when we were
smoking together.  Indeed, the ritual of buying the stuff was one of
the few activities that brought me face-to-face with a black man who
had to be dealt with as an equal.  Black dope dealers were suspicious
of whites, so you had to tune them in tsotsi-taal, the half-Afrikaans
patois of the streets; you had to goot lgive the double-horned devil's
hand sign and charf (say), "Level with the gravel, ek sg."  And then,
if the dealer smiled, you had a black brother in conspiracy, bonded to
you in mutual terror of the police.  It lasted no more than a minute or
two, but it was something to hold onto.

Until I became a reporter, those furtive encounters with dope-dealing
skollies in alleys were just about the only contact I had with blacks,
other than servants.  I had a head full of grandiose political
theories, all revolving around blacks and my putative brotherhood with
them, but I was completely bereft of black friends.  I yearned for
black friends, to make it all real, and in the end I was given some.
Their names were Mike, Fanyana, Khulu, and Langa, and they were
reporters on The tar's Soweto edition.  Fanyana was a man of kingly
proportions tall, broad, and muscular and staggeringly good-looking, a
giant with the smooth round face and saucerlike eyes of a child.  Langa
was older, a veteran reporter with a grizzled beard and liver trouble.
And Mike Mike was a spiv, a sharp dresser and quick as a cardsharp in
mind and movement.  I liked Mike because he didn't give a fuck.  He was
an absolute nihilist and cared about nothing, least of all the honorary
whiteness of his well-paid white-collar job.

He'd say, "I'm just a boy around here," as in garden boy, or kitchen
boy, and stare you in the eye, you white liberal, as if daring you to
contradict him.

I didn't.  Maybe that's why we got on.  It was clean and cutting
between us, utterly without sentiment.  There was an unspoken rule that
we would not talk politics, except to make cynical jokes about it.  We
talked about boxing, soccer, the bosses, music, sex, booze, gangsters,
but not politics.  If we had talked politics, I would have had to creep
and crawl and beg forgiveness for what my people were doing to his.  I
would have turned into a worm, and Mike into a cripple, a victim.

So we kept it hard and unsentimental.  He called me boer the 'little
Boer," and I no, I didn't call him kaffir; I just grinned his insults
away.  If I had, though, I think he would have roared with laughter.
Like most politicized blacks in that era.  he was a Biko man, into
black consciousness, black pride.  Maybe that's why he was so clean and
hard, so determined not to be pitied or patronized.  I don't know.  We
didn't talk about it.

Mike was my friend, but he didn't trust me, not an inch.

Almost everything I knew about him and his background was scavenged,
dropped by him in passing and stashed away in my memory, bit by bit,
never adding up to much.  His grandfather was a farm laborer in the
Free State; his father, a driver in Johannesburg.  He won all sorts of
academic prizes at Soweto's Orlando High and had a brother, Martin, who
was somehow involved in the underground.  One day Martin slipped over
the border and disappeared into exile.  A week or so later, the secret
police kicked down the door of Mike's father's house in Orlando West,
looking for the fugitive brother.  Mike once acted out the ensuing
scene for me, darting from one side of his father's kitchen to the
other, cackling like a maniac, playing now a loutish white cop, now
himself, standing at attention in the corner, rigid with terror, saying
"Yes, sir.  No, sir' like a schoolboy.  At one stage, the cop was going
through the kitchen cupboard, scattering utensils while Mike watched in
silence.  The cop looked up and barked, "Don't look at me!  I'll shoot
you!  Don't look at me!"

Mike's father was an immensely dignified old man who treated white
visitors with equanimity.  I wish I could say the same for my parents.
I once took Mike home with me.

Having an educated black in the house was a big event for my parents
and visiting aunt.  They were determined to make a good impression.
They sat Mike down in the lounge.  My mother brought out her best
china, and put the kettle on while I ran upstairs to search for
something in the room that had once been mine.  When I came back down,
my aunt was perched uneasily on the edge of her chair, talking to Mike
in pidgin in the childlike English of illiterate black servants.

"You like it sugar?"  she asked.

"How many spoon sugar you like?"  As I entered, she looked up at me
with a vapid smile on her face and said, "Wouldn't the boy like a
biscuit?"

It was best, under the circumstances, to meet on neutral ground.  But
where was that?  After work, most white reporters got pissed over the
road in the bar at the Elizabeth Hotel, but we couldn't do that.  Oh,
we tried it once, white Mike

(another reporter) and Langa and I, but there was , it scene.  The
owner was sorry but he stood to lose his !icen,c would we please go.
After that, we walked down to 5on, Kramer's bottle store after the
day's last deadline, bought whiskey and six-packs of Lion or Castle and
carried them up to a disused canteen on the fourth floor of The Star's
office building, where we sat around Formica tables that shimmered with
neon, drank out of paper cups, and smoked Lexingtons till the whole
room fogged up.  Sometimes we played dice, blowing on the stones for
luck and in canting lucky rhymes 'lucky five, staying alive, lucky
seven, going to heaven' and hurling them down with a great flourish and
a cry of tsa!  And sometimes we played informer-informer.

There was surely a secret-police informer in our newsroom, perhaps even
among us.  I was a prime suspect, of course, being a Malan, but I was
so obvious not even the Boers would be so stupid.  Or would they?  You
never knew.  Maybe they were smart enough to use a man like Don
Mattera, a colored poet who edited copy in a Nigerian dashiki and
preferred to be called Bra Zinga, his name from the days when he led a
township gang.  Don was under a banning order, but he was so free in
his talk of revolution you sometimes wondered whether he was trying to
lure you out.

Was it Harry Mashabela?  Probably not.  They'd already had Harry, used
him up, and spat him out.  He'd been a state witness in an underground
pamphlets case, and now he wouldn't meet your eye and wore a neck brace
that said, They made me do it.  Was is John Horak, who weaseled around
in safari suits, poking his nose into sensitive corners?  Possibly.

Or maybe it was someone at this very table, a black man with a wife and
kids to support, always short because he pissed away his wages in the
shebeens.  Such an oke could use a little extra on the side.  I'd
suggest that, and eyes would go darting around the table, each man
eyeing the next over the rim of his beer can and thinking, yes, oh yes
indeed; but then someone would laugh, and we'd all laugh, and it'd be
okay again.

And so we'd sit there until late at night; and as the levels in the
bottles sank, it became easier and easier to believe that we were truly
brothers.  This was the second empirical property of racial tension: It
went up in dope smoke, and it also dissolved in alcohol.  Drunkenness
was also Switzerland.

Few of the brothers had cars, so I'd sometimes drive them home to
Soweto.  They'd take me inside to meet their wives, who were by now in
nighties and face cream and radiating disapproval.  They'd pour me one
for the road, and we'd exchange soul handshakes and fraternal hugs, and
then I'd be back in the battered Peugeot, driving home, and I'd be
thinking, There is something profoundly fucking wrong with a system
that makes kaffirs of these my brothers.  I'd think, Fuck white South
Africans, and all they have wrought, and fuck their army, whose summons
to service I had been dodging since I was eighteen.  I wasn't going to
carry a gun for them.

I'd run away, join the other side, and comeback to blow them all up.

It was two or three in the morning, and we were standing in a dark
garden, waiting for a sound.  My companion was a nervous, chain-smoking
white woman in a nightgown and hair curlers.  She lived in a
working-class neighborhood in south Johannesburg, under the walls of a
grimy old police station.  She'd just gone to bed when she first heard
the scream.

It started loud, trailed off into choking sobs and then silence.

Five minutes later, it came again.  And again, five minutes after that.
At first, the howling was merely irritating, because the woman couldn't
get to sleep.  After an hour, though, she'd been unnerved by the
thought of what might be causing it.

So she'd called The Star, where I was working the night shift, and I'd
driven out to investigate.  And now we were standing under the walls of
the police station, waiting.

In due course, the scream came again.  It was coming from inside the
police station, and it sounded as though they were killing someone in
there, slowly.  I wanted to block my ears, but the woman clapped her
hand over her mouth and looked at me with frightened eyes.  She
expected me to do something, so I walked around to the front of the
station, where a wan, blue light burned, and pounded on the door.
Nobody answered.  I shouted.  Nobody came.  I tried the door; it was
locked.  There were no lights on inside the building, not that

74 I could see.  There was nothing I could do.  The woman a, I smoked a
few more cigarettes.  In a while, the screami% stopped, and I went back
to the office.  I left a note asking the day shift to look into it, but
that was just to cover myself It wasn't a story.  It was just one of
those South African things.

After six months in the courts, I had been appointed The Star's crime
reporter, a job usually reserved for someone who had the common touch
who spoke fluent Afrikaans, that is.

Most English South Africans had some Afrikaans, but their accents
betrayed them as soutpiels - 'salt dicks."  A soutpiel was an
Englishman with one foot in South Africa and the other in England a
straddle so broad that his cock dangled in the sea.  Most policemen, on
the other hand, were rocks, or Afrikaners, and rocks were not all that
fond of soutpiels, especially those who worked for the disloyal English
press.

So the crime reporter slot usually went to someone like me, a rock
spider who could speak the tongue and had some cultural affinity with
Boers.  Afrikaner policemen were sentimental about their rural past. 
Even if they worked in skyscrapers, looking out on tar and concrete,
they liked talking about the rains, rugby, and prospects for the
forthcoming harvest.

I could pass as a Boer on the telephone, but I was less convincing in
person, perhaps because the cops could see in my eyes that I wasn't
truly one of them.  Almost every day brought a moment when my eyes
threatened to give me away.  Still, I developed a good contact in the
so-called ghost squad, a plainclothes unit that patrolled downtown
Jo'burg on the lookout for pickpockets and knife men  They shadowed a
likely black suspect, and when he struck they usually shot him dead. My
china on the ghost squad often called me when he killed someone, hoping
that we would dash out and photograph him standing over the body like a
trophy hunter.  What was I supposed to say?  If I'd told him he was a
bloodthirsty fucking savage, he would never have called me again. So I
just looked away when he started boasting, hoping that my eyes would
hold their secrets.

South African policemen tended to be very firm in their support of the
government and its apartheid policies.  Next to rugby and rain, the
subject they most loved to discuss was the unfair and hypocritical way
in which the rest of the world was ganging up on us over apartheid.  I
couldn't afford to alienate them, so I always sighed and shook my head
and said 'ja-nee," a Boer phrase that means 'yes-no' and comes in handy
when nothing else comes to mind.  If I wrote anything critical about
the force, it appeared without a byline.

Someone once leaked me an 'ethnographic' manual used as a textbook in
the police training college.  It was a nasty little book, full of
comically malevolent racial characterizations.

It proceeded from the assumption that Aryans generally behaved
themselves, indians, on the other hand, were 'the advanced guard of
countries trying to rid themselves of their surplus population," and an
'unhygienic health menace' to boot.  Jews were sly and cunning,
inclined toward 'fraud, embezzlement and swindling."  Greeks and
Portuguese were hot-blooded and prone to crimes of passion.  And as for
the Bantu, they were 'primitive' and likely to resort to violence at
the slightest provocation.

"They do not think in an abstract way," said the manual.

"This is reflected in the way they count.

Their way of thinking is full of contradictions.  They cannot talk
logically."  A black man was childlike, and needed firm but kindly
guidance from his white 'guardian and superior."

My piece laid out these assertions and wondered, somewhat ingenuously,
whether this might be why relations between police and blacks were so
sour.

In the Vorster era, such insolence was not tolerated.  The response of
the commissioner of police was characteristic.

He didn't defend the book, or apologize for it, or promise to
investigate, or yank it out of circulation.  He called for the
traitor's head.  He ordered The Star to identify the writer so that
measures could be taken.  The editor held firm, and the storm blew
over.

As it turned out, that was one of the few blows I got to strike for the
cause in my years as a crime reporter.  For the most part, I was too
busy covering the endless churning of the great redistribution machine
bank robberies, holdups, muggings, and murders.  Around Easter 1976, I
wrote something a little out of the ordinary, a series about
illegal-gambling bosses and their friends in the police vice squad.  It
was well received, so the

76 news desk set me to work on an expo sd of child homo sext

prostitution.  This was a novel vice in a puritanical countrs and a
white vice to boot, which made it a high-priority for, at least as high
as anything that happened in Soweto.

Earlier that year, pupils at several Soweto schools had gone out on
strike against the imperial Afrikaner government.  Urban blacks reviled
Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor, and most black schools
chose English as their medium of instruction.  The Vorster government
felt slighted.

It didn't want its Bantu vassals becoming Anglicized, so it decreed
that certain school subjects would henceforth be taught in Afrikaans.
It didn't matter that many teachers and pupils could barely speak the
language, or that their textbooks were in English.  The Vorster
government ignored petitions and turned away deputations, so the
students called a strike.  So what?  It was a black issue, an
inside-page story.

The Star's white readers were presumably much more eager to read about
perverse goings-on in the dead of night in the vast, echoing concourse
of Johannesburg railroad station.

The concourse was deserted after midnight, and lonely gay men threw
long shadows as they stalked rent boys across its floodlit floor.  In
the early weeks of June 1976, I spent my nights lurking in the station,
observing these eerily beautiful courtship rites and plying sad young
runaways with coffee and doughnuts.  I had dispensation to go into work
late in the mornings.  On the morning of June 16, I arrived in the
newsroom around 10:30, just in time to catch the tea trolley on its
midmorning round.  I was sipping my first cup of tea and reading the
morning papers when Harry Mashabela burst through the door to announce
the end of an era.

Harry was black, but at that moment his face was gray, and his white
shirt was spattered with blood.  He'd been in Soweto covering a march.
High-school pupils had taken to the streets with placards denouncing
the Afrikaans-language decree.  A few stones were thrown, and the
police opened fire, killing two young boys and wounding untold others.
Harry loaded some of the injured in a staff car and rushed them to
Baragwanath Hospital, which lay on the outskirts of the township.  When
he looked back, Soweto was already exploding.  The schools and
government installations were destroyed first.  Then the mob turned on
anything associated with the white economic structure, burning trucks,
delivery vans, shops, and banks.

The under had been accumulating for generations, and once it caught the
conflagration was unstoppable.

I stayed on the telephone all day, trying to keep track of casualties,
but it was impossible.  Soweto was in a state of anarchy.  The police
were trapped inside their stations, all roads blocked by mobs and
barricades of burning tires.

Everything was burning.  Toward sunset, I went out into the streets of
Jo'burg, and it was as though the world had ended.  There were no
people, no cars, no city sounds.  The black work force had rushed home
to Soweto as news of the trouble spread, and whites were cowering
behind locked doors, waiting.  We all knew this was coming, you see; we
knew it in our bones.  A day would come when the blacks would rise up
and surge through the city, and we'd all wind up on the roofs of our
burning American-dream split-levels, begging the baying horde for
mercy.

The outcome hung in the balance for thirty-six hours.  The police had
been taken by surprise, but they pulled themselves together, moved
heavy reinforcements and armored vehicles into the townships, and put
the rebellion down at a terrible cost in lives.  When the fires finally
died down several months later, there were four hundred black corpses,
or five hundred, or seven hundred, and the police were firmly back in
control.

Newspapers proclaimed that the situation had returned to normal, but
there was no longer any such thing.  South Africa's psychic landscape
had been transformed.  Blacks saw that they had shaken the white power
structure to its very foundations, and they suddenly had hope.  The
tide of history had turned.

After June 16, a dozen black suppliants were steered to my desk each
day.  They'd press a dirty scrap of ruled exercise book paper into my
hand.  On it would be written the name of a missing person a son,
usually.  I was supposed to help find him, but there was nothing I
could do.  I just wrote a note on the newspaper's stationery and sent
them off on the usual pilgrimage: police headquarters to Diepkloof
Prison to Modder B Prison to the morgue, where they often found what

they were looking for.  Sometimes the grieving parents would return to
say, But he was well and strong when they arrested him, and now the
nostrils have been ripped off his face: his bones are broken and his
body is full of contusions, lqc)w l this be?  I couldn't tell them.  I
didn't know.  I couldn't find (,t:t.

But I couldn't help wondering as I did my rounds inside the Blue
Hotel.

The Blue Hotel was police headquarters, a blue-trimmed office block
called John Vorster Square.  Every fortnight or so, I parked my car
outside the Blue Hotel, walked around the back and into the underground
parking garage.  In a corner of that garage was an elevator, a special
elevator, with padded walls and only one button on its control panel.
You pushed the button, and it took you nonstop to the tenth floor,
headquarters of the Witwatersrand Division of the Security Police, the
secret police.  On the tenth-floor landing, a man in a bullet-proof
glass booth looked you over and pressed a button that spun a steel
turnstile, and then you were walking down a corridor that gleamed with
fluorescence, on your way to pay a courtesy call on the colonel.  Every
now and then, you passed an open office door, and maybe glimpsed a
frightened black suspect handcuffed to a bench.  Your eyes might meet,
but not for long, because you didn't really want to see, and besides,
this was no place for shows of empathy.  There were cannibals here.
This was the floor from which Ahmed Timol had 'fallen' to his death six
years earlier.  This was the haunt of the notorious "Nails' van Zyl, a
cop who supposedly nailed the foreskins of obstinate suspects to the
interrogation desk.  This was where rebellious blacks were beaten,
shocked, suffocated in wet canvas bags, and forced to stand naked on
bricks for days on end.

On one such visit, I had just stepped into the secret elevator when a
car drew up at the door and disgorged three men.

Two were plainclothes white cops with short hair and neat mustaches
wearing cheap jackets that gaped at the stomach and trousers that
showed too much sock.  The third was a black man in a black hood.  The
cops dragged him toward the lift.  They were a little taken aback to
find it already occupied, but it was too late, so they got in with me.
The door closed, and the elevator started rising.  The black man's
shirtfront was drenched with blood.  I couldn't think of anything to
say, and the white cops avoided my eyes.  There was no sound, save the
gurgling of blood in the prisoner's ruined mouth.  At the tenth floor,
the doors opened, the turnstile turned, and the cops hustled their
quarry out of my life.  No, this wasn't a story either.  It was just
another of those South African things.

In my time, the chief of the Witwatersrand Division of the Security
Police was Colonel Coetzee, later revealed to be the great Boer
spymaster, running agents in the very hearts of the exiled liberation
movements.  He was a portly, courtly fellow, very dapper in his
expensive dark suits.  He sported a Clark Gable mustache and seemed to
regard himself as something of a ladies' man, and an erudite
conversationalist to boot.  A glass case in his office was crammed with
banned books Marx, Engels, Althusser, and so on.  The colonel was
particularly interested in Trotsky.  He was preparing a doctoral thesis
on Trotsky.  He assumed I was a leftist of some sort, perhaps because I
worked for the English press, perhaps because he'd read the report of
my own 'interrogation."

The secret police had intercepted a letter to my friend Robin, who was
living in London.  In it, I went on at length about how much I hated my
job and what brutal swine the police were, but they didn't seem to care
what I had said about them.  They were interested only in this
observation:

"Meanwhile, underground, Maoist cells are plotting in deadly earnest."
What did I mean by that?  What did I know?  I explained that the remark
was sarcastic, so they let me go.

For whatever reason, Colonel Coetzee was always eager to engage me in
ideological debate.  In a country where almost anyone who opposed
apartheid was considered a Communist, his line was very
sophisticated.

"These Marxists claim they're fighting for freedom," he'd say, 'but
what freedom is there under a dictatorship of the proletariat?"  Stuff
like that.  I think he hoped I would argue, but I was so nervous that I
always agreed with him, no matter what he said.  I just wanted to get
out of there, before my eyes betrayed me.  I must have been a terrible
disappointment.

By and by, Colonel Coetzee would ring a bell, and a black

7 constable would appear carrying a tray.  On one occasion, the door to
an adjoining office opened, and Colonel Swanepoel joined us for
afternoon tea.  Swanepoel's gray hair was cropped like a Prussian's.
His face was a bloodred morass of broken veins hence his nickname Rooi
Rus, the Red Russian.  Swanepoel was a man who gave off great blasts
and gusts of energy.  His movements were rapid and agitated, his speech
a jackhammer in your face.  It seemed an ongoing struggle for him to
control himself.  He was so right wing that he thought his own
government, the most right wing in the world, was infiltrated by
Reds.

He was also world famous.  Colonel Swanepoel's exploits as chief
interrogator of the Security Police had been discussed at the United
Nations.  His alleged cruelties had made him a one-man propaganda
liability, so his superiors transferred him to the office next to
Coetzee's, to do God knows what.

He was soon to be sent to the border, where he enhanced his reputation
still further as commander of a notorious counterinsurgency unit called
Koevoet the Crowbar.  Koevoet was once accused of searing the flesh off
Swapo suspects on the red-hot exhaust pipes of armored cars.  That lay
in the future, though.  For the moment, the Red Russian was sipping tea
with the liberal English press and not liking it at all.

This was just after the fall of South Vietnam, around the time of the
US Senate's Church hearings.  Senator Church's revelations about
poisoned cigars for Fidel and other CIA plots had caused a furor, and
President Carter was clearly bent on reining in the agency.  Britain's
MI5 had long since been infiltrated by pink nancy boys and now the CIA
was having its teeth pulled, too.  In the colonel's opinion, this was
proof of Western decadence.

"The West is a spent force," growled Swanepoel.

"It has lost its blood."  In fact, all white nations save the
Afrikaners and Israelis had lost their blood, and would shortly wind up
on the trash heap of history.

Swanepoel got so worked up about Jimmy Carter and the Church hearings
that you could almost hear him sizzle.  He was quivering with rage, his
florid face pulsating as he spilled his tea in the saucer.

"They're cutting off their own balls!"  he bellowed, glaring at me as
though it were my fault.  I sat there nodding my head, agreeing
frantically, spilling tea in my own quaking lap.

"Ja-nee, Colonel," I said.

"You certainly have a point there, Colonel."

At such moments I'd close my eyes and think, This is not my life.  This
is too weird to be true.  Is this me, this Afrikaner who says yes-no to
cold-blooded colonels?  If so, who was drinking with the black brothers
last night?  Or was that me the night before, tripping on acid in a
white slum flat, watching the grains in the floorboards turn into
revolutionary armies that fought battles across a darkling plain while
Dollar Brand played saxophone on the turntable and Faye danced around
me with closed eyes, dreaming of bearded guerrillas?

That word yaw.  It's an aeronautical term, isn't it, a word to describe
the shuddering of an aircraft in a dive too steep and fast for its
design, an aircraft that's shaking itself to bits?

I was yawing in that time, going too fast, propelled by fuels too
volatile between points immeasurably distant from one another.  It was
too far from Sandringham to the Blue Hotel, too far from the canteen
where I drank with the brothers to the house of my Afrikaner father. He
wanted me to do my duty and put on a uniform for my country.  I had
been dodging military service since I was eighteen, and now I was
twenty-two and running out of options.  They wanted me in June,
infantry, Walvis Bay, and this time there was no way out.  I either
reported for duty or left South Africa forever.

It was not an easy decision.  I got drunk most nights rather than think
about it, and then I lay down under my naked light bulb, watching
shadows stirring on the wall and listening for footsteps in the alley
outside.  I was waiting for something.

On almost any night in 1977, all the lights in number 2 would have been
blazing, and a spent record spinning endlessly on the turntable.  Malan
would have been passed out in his clothes on a mattress on the bedroom
floor.  He would probably have looked shabby and disheveled, with
ballpoint ink all over his hands and face, and drifts of cigarette ash
in his lap.  He would almost certainly have been wearing his brown
leather jacket, the lining of its pockets rent by the barrel of the
pistol he had recently taken to carrying.  Oh, and the knife we mustn't
forget the knife.  It would have been imbedded in the floorboards near
his head, within easy reach, in case he woke up from one of his
thrashing nightmares and discovered that the apocalypse was finally
underway.

What form did those nightmares take?  Once, I would not have told you,
but now I may as well.

Maybe I should never have become a reporter, especially not a reporter
who worked the police beat.  Maybe I should have been a dentist, like
my mother wanted, and stayed in the white suburbs, cosseting my
illusions and plodding blindly toward the light, like the other white
liberals.  If I'd done that, I might never have left South Africa.
Instead, I took a job that put me in contact with people most white
liberals never met, and took me to places they never saw.  Many of
those places were the scenes of crime, and many of the crimes were
murder.  That was my job; I waded chin-deep through gore.  Almost every
day, I tucked my spiral-bound notebook in my pocket and ventured forth
to study the way South Africans killed each other.

South Africa wasn't like other countries when it came to murder.
Elsewhere in the world, murder was just another function of ordinary
social relationships.  In the vast majority of cases, murderers killed
someone they knew wives, bosses, fellow drunkards, rivals in business
or love.  In South Africa, it wasn't like that.  In South Africa, you
could be walking down the street, minding your own business, when white
trash boiled off the back of a passing pick-up and kicked your head in,
simply because your skin was black.

On the other hand, you could be white and lying in bed at night,
counting your blessings, when a black came through the window and sank
a knife into your chest not because you were white, necessarily, but
because you had something he wanted, while he had nothing at all.  It
wasn't really a racial murder, but then again it was, because the black
murderer's destitution was to some large extent a consequence of the
color of his skin.  To my socialist eye, such killings seemed telling
little parables of Marxism in action, skirmishes in the great class
war.  I had a theory to contain and explain them, but there was a third
category of resonant killing for which I had no theory at all.

Consider, if you will, this newspaper photograph.  It was taken inside
an ordinary Soweto house a cement hut, really, with an asbestos roof
and three tiny rooms in a zone of Soweto called Naledi.  There are
three people in the picture: an elderly black woman wrapped in a
blanket and her two small grandchildren.  Mrs.  Christina Ramathlape is
displaying the shattered door of a clothes wardrobe, and telling an
invisible reporter how it got that way.

Her story began with the theft of a battery from a car that was parked
outside her house.  Suspicion fell on her son, Jeremiah.  The boy knew
nothing about the stolen battery, but nobody believed him.  One night,
the car's owner and several of his friends came pounding on Christina's
door, looking for her son.  As they burst in, the boy crept into a
wardrobe and pulled the door shut behind him.  The intruders somehow
sniffed him out, though, and smashed the cupboard open with an ax, as I
could plainly see.  Then they grabbed Jeremiah, put a belt around his
neck, and dragged him away screaming.

They took him to a house diagonally across the street.

Christina followed.  She stood outside in the dark, listening to her
son's screams.  She threw stones on the roof, but she was too scared to
go inside.  She couldn't call the police, because there were no
telephones in Soweto.  After a while, the screams stopped, and she went
home, hoping that the boy would soon be released, whipped but none the
worse for his ordeal.  Jeremiah didn't show up the next day, however,
nor the next.  In fact, she hadn't seen him since.  Eventually, she
wrapped herself in a blanket and joined the throng of victims and
suppliants in The Star's waiting room.

In itself, the abduction was just another of those South African
things.  There was an unusual angle, though, in that Mrs.  Ramathlape
claimed that the men behind the kidnapping were Makgotla members of a
tribal vigilante movement that had recently been dispensing rough
justice in the townships, administering public floggings to suspected
thieves and adulterous women.  Now that was a story.  That is why I was
there, looking at the ax-splintered cupboard and other evidence.

After taking down the details, I drove to the nearest police station
and reported the abduction to its white commandant.

He promised a prompt investigation.

A week later, I went back to Soweto to see what had developed.  It was
midafternoon, but Mrs.  Ramathlape's house was locked up tight, all the
curtains drawn.  I knocked on the door.  Someone peeped out from behind
a curtain, and I heard heavy objects and furniture scraping across the
floor.

The door opened a crack, and I slipped through.  It was dark inside,
and reeked of shit and urine.  Old Mrs.  Ramathlape and her
grandchildren had been barricaded inside the house for almost a week.
The day after my first visit, she told me, detectives had moved through
the neighborhood, asking questions about her missing son.  They had no
sooner gone than a crowd surrounded her house and tried to break down
the door.  It was a steel door, and it withstood the mob's battery, so
they poured paraffin under it and tried to burn her out.  She managed
to smother the flames before they did serious damage.  As soon as night
fell, she tried to slip away, but the house was being watched.  She and
the children had been barricaded inside ever since.  They had no water,
no food, and no toilet.

I took the children to my car.  Their tiny hands clung to mine like
vices, and their eyes were wide with fear.  I returned to the house to
help their grandmother, who was gathering her possessions into a
bundle.  Meanwhile, a crowd of blacks was gathering on the far side of
the street.  Some of the men were armed with fighting sticks and
sjamboks whips and I didn't like the look of them.  My guts knotted in
dread.  Just as we were about to leave, they crossed the road and
surrounded the car.

Their leader, a wiry man with yellow eyes, came up to me and said, "You
can't take this woman away.  This woman is skaberash' she is a drunken
whore.

"Give her!"  he said.

"Give her!"  I gave him my shit-eating grin, saying brother this,
brother that, not nice to harm a woman and children.  It didn't help. I
couldn't speak his language, and he barely understood mine.  And
besides, I doubt he was amenable to talk of justice and fair play,
anyway.  He lost control of himself at the mere sight of Mrs.
Ramathlape, yelled and gesticulated and tried to push past me so he
could lay into her with his whip.  The

85 children started screaming.  I pushed their grandmother into the
car, locked the door behind her, and leapt into the driver's seat.  I
started the engine, but the mob's leader planted himself in front of
the hood and started performing some sort of primordial war dance,
gyrating and grunting and smiting the dust with his whip.  I gunned the
engine threateningly.  He leapt aside and froze in a crouch, with the
whip raised high in the air.  He looked like a gargoyle.  Only his
impenetrable yellow eyes followed us as we moved off down the road.

Such incidents left me with grave misgivings.  Misgiving was part of my
life, Soweto being part of my crime reporter's beat.

Almost every day, I wrote a story or saw something that inspired
misgiving.  As far as The Star was concerned, crimes perpetrated by
blacks against other blacks were just more of those South African
things.  It was the paper's practice to lump all Soweto crime into a
single, essentially statistical story.  I once wrote a lead that ran,
"In what Soweto police described as a quiet weekend, only eleven people
were murdered and nineteen stabbed' something like that.  A copy editor
had the good taste to put a blue line through it.

So we didn't print the grisly details, but white cops rubbed my nose in
them anyway.  As a representative of the liberal English press, I was
presumably in need of stiff doses of brutal reality, and whenever I
toured Soweto's police stations, I was given one.  The cops would say,
"Ah, here's Malan.  Come here, Malan; here's a nice case for you.  Nine
men raped this woman; then someone jumped the queue, and the tenth one
got stabbed in the back while he was on top of her.  Then they all
started fighting with knives, so we've got a murder, nine rape charges,
and six stabbings on our hands."  Or, "Come into the morgue, Malan;
we've got something to show you."  Once, the body on the tray was that
of a ten-year-old black child, the victim of what headline writers
called a 'muti slaying' a voodoo killing.  The boy's fingers, eyes,
liver, heart, and genitals had been cut out, to be used in some
sorcerer's brew.

"How do you like that?"  guffawed one of my guides.

"That's how your black friends behave."

These killings were fairly common, but this was the first such corpse
I'd seen, and its empty eye sockets haunted my dreams for months.  In
my imagination, Soweto c,me to resemble Europe in the Dark Ages, a
place where humble people barricaded their doors at darkness and
trembled through the night while werewolves howled outside.  It was not
an entirely fanciful vision.  Soweto was a charnel house.

Its murder rate was four or five times higher than New York's.  Its
trains were infested with tsotsis, young gangsters who immobilized
their victims with a sharpened bicycle spoke in the thigh, and then
made off with their cash or packages.

On Friday nights, pay nights, wolf packs of gangsters lay in wait for
incoming trains, and picked off the breadwinners on their way home from
the station.

Every now and then, a white liberal or academic weighed in with an oped
piece about black crime, attributing it all to adverse social
conditions.  I wrote such pieces myself.  Here's one a review of a
criminological study, in which I resoundingly trash racist assumptions
about innate black criminality and explain Soweto's crime rate in terms
of apartheid-induced poverty, overcrowding, frustration, and nihilism.
There was a drastic shortage of houses and schools in Soweto.  There
were no cinemas, no bars, no hotels, no modern shopping centers, few
recreational facilities, and no electricity.  The place was a giant
labor barracks, grimly utilitarian, and intentionally so.  The mad
scientists of apartheid wanted urban blacks to be miserable.  They
wanted blacks to get out of white South Africa, to go to the homelands.
Soweto was one big apartheid atrocity.  I said that, and believed it,
but my own words did nothing to dilute the apprehension I felt whenever
I set foot in that grim black city.

In my memory, it is always winter in Soweto; the setting sun is an orb
of cold orange in a gray sky, and gray smoke is drifting across a
desolate gray landscape.  The houses are gray; their asbestos roofs are
gray; the wastelands are strewn with gray ash and rubble.  The roads
are clogged with morose men streaming home from the railroad station in
cast-off gray overcoats.  As I flash past, they register white skin;

their mouths form silent words, and something leaps into their eyes
maybe just recognition; maybe something else.

It was hard to be sure.  At such moments, I'd shudder and thank God I
was inside the steel exoskeleton of a fast car.

After dark, it was even worse.  The night seemed full of sinister
shadows.  It was easy to get lost, easier still to wander into a ditch.
Late one night, I drove into a morass of mud around a communal tap and
couldn't get out again.  The roar of my engine and the shriek of my
spinning wheels drew a crowd, and before I knew it the car was
surrounded by tsotsis in baggy chinos, their skulls shaved to the nub
and riven with glistening scar tissue.  I was terrified.  One tapped on
the window.  I rolled it down and flashed my shit-eating grin.

"I want to know," the tsotsi said mockingly, 'what the baas is going to
give me."

"A few kind words?"  I said.

"A little encouragement?"

He laughed.  '1 like your jacket," he said.

"If I want your jacket, I can have it."

This was certainly true.  He and his comrades exchanged glances, as if
to coordinate their next move, and I floored the accelerator.  The
wheels caught, and I went fishtailing out of there, drenched with sweat
and weak with relief.

I was always relieved to leave Soweto, to see the lights of white
Johannesburg looming up ahead always.  Once I was back in the world of
light, the fear would dissipate, and I'd be ashamed of myself, to think
that my own psyche was rid died with irrational racist phantasms.  And
yet, whenever I returned to Soweto the fear fell in behind me, and
dogged me like a shadow.  I loved blacks, and yet I was scared of
them.

I was scared of them, and yet I loved them.  It was a most paradoxical
condition.  One minute, you'd be hat rowed with guilt and bleeding
internally for your suffering black brethren.

The next, you'd recoil in horror from the things they did, and from the
savage latencies that seemed to lie buried in their hearts.  You yawed
between extremes.  Sometimes you completed the round trip in just
fifteen minutes.

One lunchtime, my source in the ghost squad called me from a downtown
phone booth.  It was soon after the riots of June '76, and Johannesburg
was so tense it was hard to breathe.  Soweto was mourning its many
hundred martyrs, and a political detainee named Wellington Tshazibane
had just 'hanged himself' while in the custody of the secret police.

Rumors of Gotterd Limmerung were sweeping the suburbs.  Some whites had
it on good authority that black mald5 '.c: ' being incited to poison
the master's morning to.  hen my telephone rang, some white paranoiac
came tn the line to pass along another rumo Children were being
butchced on their way to school.  A black mob was marching on
Roodepoort. Terrorists had blown up Rosebank.  Then the phone rang
again, at lunchtime, and a voice said, "There's a kaffir running amok
in the streets.  He's shouting, "Africa!

Africa!"  and chopping whites' heads off with an ax."  This time it was
for real.  The axman was avenging Soweto's slaughtered innocents.

A photographer named Alan Coxon and l leapt into a car and rushed to
the scene.  When we got there, a few white pensioners who couldn't run
fast enough were bleeding on the pavement, and a knot of plainclothes
cops was bundling a black suspect into a car.  Alan shot a few
pictures, and then we raced off after the police.  I was thinking,
Well, this is how it is, and how it will always be.  If your skin was
white and fate had placed you in that axman's path, all the good you'd
ever said, thought, and done would not have saved you.  It's us or
them, I thought; it's primordial, primeval.

I was still thinking along those lines as we drew up outside the Blue
Hotel.  And then a black man fell out of the sky.  He came flying
through a fifth-floor window, landed at our feet in a spray of glass,
and lay there like an upturned tortoise, feebly waving his arms in the
air.  l ran over and knelt beside him, but I didn't know what to do;
his body was all broken, blood was oozing from his mouth, and I was
afraid to touch him.  Just then, a shiny black boot entered my field of
vision.

I looked up, and there stood the divisional commissioner himself,
Brigadier Visser, his shoulders encrusted with gold braid and a little
smile playing about beneath his handsome mustache.  He stirred the
black man with his toe.

"Ja," he told me, 'this is the Bantu who was hitting people with an ax.
He just dived out the window."

"Ja-nee, Brigadier," I said.

"Yes-no."

So what did you do at the end of such a day?  You went down to Sony
Kramer's for another bottle of whiskey, and up to the fourth floor with
the brothers to drink the paradox away.  Sometimes it just wouldn't go,
though.  On the night of the axman's rampage, the air around our
Formica table was dense with thoughts unspoken, and unspeakable.  I
couldn't exactly say, Listen, brothers, on the basis of today's events,
it occurs to me that the Boers might be right that if we don't keep you
blacks down, you'll all rise up and come after us with axes, screaming,
"Africa!  Africa!"  And they, too, had to mask their feelings.  How
could they fail to empathize with the axman?  I was white, but even I
had an inkling of the rage that surely drove his ax through white
skulls.  Was I really on their side?  Were they on mine?  Or did we
meet like soldiers in no-man's-land, exchanging cigarettes and
handshakes on Christmas Day?  It sometimes felt that way.  When the
whiskey was finished, we always returned to our own psychic trenches,
to vastly different and possibly irreconcilable worlds: Mike to his
single room in Soweto, and I to my slum flat, where I lay down on my
mattress in a wintry bleakness of spirit to think things over.

I thought a lot about the riots of June '76, and about Dr.  Melville
Edelstein, the only white civilian to die in them.

Edelstein was a sociologist, a liberal who had recently published a
book entitled What Young Africans Think.  It was deeply sympathetic to
the black point of view, and uncannily present.  Edelstein warned that
black youths were angry and that a storm was building inside them.  He
foresaw many things deafly, but not the way in which the storm would
consume him.  On the morning of June 16, he was doing research at a
clinic in Soweto.  When rioting broke out, police advised all whites to
leave, but Edelstein and another man stayed.  Edelstein was not scared;
he knew which side he was on.  When the mob came, he walked out to
greet it, and they stomped him to death.  He was white.

Seeing this, Edelstein's companion thought his time had come too.  He
locked himself into a tiny storeroom, put his back to the wall, both
legs against the door, and braced himself.  The ululating horde threw
itself against the door, but it held.  Then a window shattered above
his head, and F

broken glass rained down upon him.  A dozen black arm came through the
window, groping for his face like the tentclcs .f an octopus.  Just
when he thought he was done for, e head helicopters coming, and machine
guns rattling, and the he fainted.

Ja-nee.  So many things died in the course of hide three bloody days,
but the one I most selfishly mourned was the disintegration of a
fantasy of my dream of myself as the Just White Man leading blacks to
the barricade.  In the eyes of the mobs of June, l saw little but
indiscriminate rage and nibilism, and I feared it might consume me
too.

There were so many of them, and they were so poor and hungry, so
primitive, so wounded and angry.  Their numbers were exploding, their
anger mounting, their demands growing more and more urgent, and less
easily appeased.  I used to watch the morose, sullen mass of them
trudging past my office window at five o'clock, heading for the End
Street bus terminal, an endless throng of them, a gray army of black
men, and I'd say to myself, It's just a matter of time.

1 knew who I was waiting for as l lay drunk on my mattress, and what
dreams awaited when I fell asleep.

I dreamed, one night, that my entire family, all the Malans in
creation, were living in a huge bare tree on the banks of a broad and
mighty river.  The tree stood on a vast dry plain, flat and
featureless, like the Karroo, and overhung with a feeling of
inescapable doom and dread.  The world was about to end.  Three giant
waves would come down the river and sweep away every last vestige of
our world.

The sky was a baleful yellow, l looked upstream, to where the river
meandered over the shimmering horizon, and saw tiny boats scattering
for cover.  The flood was coming.  As l watched, a huge brown wave
loomed over the horizon and came rumbling slowly across the plain, so
high and broad it was as if a range of mountains was bearing down upon
us.

The terror was like a falling nightmare, and then the wave broke over
our heads and we were deep under the dark water, clinging desperately
to our branches.  After an eternity, the water subsided and we could
see the sky again.  An aunt and some brush-cut cousins had been torn
off their perches and washed away.

The second wave took my grandmother, and by then our situation was
desperate.  The raging waters had churned the plain into a muddy swamp
and eroded a deep hole at the foot of our tree, leaving our roots
dangling in thin air.  Unless we built a dyke to divert the third and
final wave, we were surely doomed.  So my father and I floundered out
into the mud and started clawing at it with our bare hands, but the mud
was heavy and unyielding.  It sucked at our feet and clung obstinately
to our fingers.  No matter how desperately we tried, we made no headway
at all.  It was hopeless.

The river was growing turbulent, roaring louder and louder, starting to
heave and roll and break into standing waves.  It was too late.  I
looked at my Afrikaner father; he was staring upstream, with an job,
shit' took in his eyes.  So was my mother.  She was standing on a bough
high above me, with that baleful yellow light playing across her face,
her gray hair streaming out behind her in the wind of a gathering
storm.  The last wave was coming, and we were about to be
obliterated.

92 We are betrayed by what is false within.

GEORGE MEREDITH

AND THAT, MY friend, is why I ran away.  I ran away because I was
scared of the coming changes, and scared of the consequences of not
changing.  I ran because I wouldn't carry a gun for apartheid, and
because I wouldn't carry a gun against it.  I ran away because I hated
Afrikaners and loved blacks.  I ran away because I was an Afrikaner and
feared blacks.  You could say, I suppose, that I ran away from the
paradox.

How do you render a paradox?  !  just don't seem able to get it down
right, and yet I know it in my mind.  On the beach near where I live
today, a rocky promontory presents a square, blunt face to the sea.  At
high tide, a big wave sometimes charges the cliff, climbs halfway up
it, then turns and rushes back to the sea.  Twenty yards out, it meets
the incoming wave, and they defeat one another in a great clash of
spray.  Both waves simply disappear, and for a few moments the sea lies
still and hissing.  It is that state of ... quandary that I am trying
to describe, but I can't get it; I can only feel it.

And that is how it has been all my life, from the moment my eyes first
opened.  It was quite clear, even to a little boy, that blacks were
violent, and inscrutable, and yet I loved them.

It was also clear that they were capable, kind, and generous, and yet I
was afraid of them.  The paradox was a given in my life, part of the
natural order of things.  It was only later, when I was old enough to
be aware of what was happening around me that the paradox started
eating me.  I'd been born into an agony of polarization and felt I had
to commit myself one way or the othen I couldn't just stand there,
paralyzed by the paradox.

So l fell into the habit of saying that [ loved blacks, and I sided
with them against my own people.  I did my best to act accordingly, but
in truth, I was always rid died with doubt.  The instant I stepped
beyond rhetoric and into bed with a black woman, I felt as though I had
broken a very law of nature, and yet, thinking such thoughts, I was
simultaneously stricken by another shame and disgust, a traitor's
shame, the shame of discovering that I was capable of harboring such
ideas.

Because I truly did love them.

You want to know my true position in the revolution?  Look at this
photograph, which comes from Die Vaderland, an Afrikaans daily.  Those
are my outstretched arms, and those are my cheekbones, jutting out over
the layout artist's crop line.  This picture was taken in July or
August 1976, just after the riots of June.  Soweto's students had the
temerity to board trains and come into white Johannesburg, where they
paraded through the streets with their placards.  The Boers fell on
them, of course.  That snarling white traffic cop with a whip in his
hand is trying to get at this black teenager here in the left-hand
corner, and that's me in the middle, with arms akimbo and spiral-bound
notebook between my teeth, trying to keep them apart.  Trying to make
them stop it.  That was my position in the middle, skewered by the
paradox.  It was a stupid position to be in, and untenable.  In South
Africa, you had to be true to one side or the other, but I belonged to
neither, and that is why I ran away.

As I shook Mike's hand for the last time, he said, "So you're leaving
us to the Boers' mercy, hey boer tile  Langa said, "You're doing the
right thing.  Don't come back."  Miriam wept and said, "Why are you
going?  You a good somebody."

At the airport, my Afrikaner father said, "You have given nothing to
this country.  You have just taken, and now you are running away."

And then I got on a plane, and ran away.

I'd sworn not to inflict further disgrace on rn un?, suffering father
by applying for political asylum a ,1 Jraf5 dodger, so I roamed Europe
for a few years, proddeJ m and by the unsympathetic immigration
service.  of hah x J zeu countries.  Canada didn't want me either, sat
wound up T the United States in 1979, with no money and n workm papers.
I washed dishes, picked crops, sold m5 blooJ, rode freight trains and
Greyhounds, cowering in bus tat ion roil et during stopovers for fear
that la migra would nail me.  No.  I'm not whining.  It was great
adventure, and besides, I considered myself a socialist.  I imagined
that I was finally seeing the sole of the boot as it ground the working
man down.  I was, certainly as low as you can go.  There came a day
when I had no money at all, not a cent.  I was stranded on the side of
a highway in the Cascades in Washington State, all alone on a continent
on which I knew nobody, with nowhere to go and little hope of getting
there before dark... Anyway my bit part in the great drama of American
immigration isn't really at issue here.  Suffice it to say that l ended
up in Los Angeles, where I landed a job writing rock and roll reviews
for a small music magazine.  Being illegal, and wary of the immigration
police, I published my scribblings under a nom de plume.  I, Malan, an
Afrikaner secretly beset by all manner of racist equivocations, called
myself Nelson Mandela.  It was meant as a tribute, but still: such
staggering effrontery, and no one to take offense.  The ESTians who
owned the magazine mistook the word for mandala, but they saw where I
was coming from; if I wanted to call myself a Buddhist meditation
cycle, they were willing to grant me my space.  In Los Angeles in 1979,
the only people who seemed to have heard of Nelson Mandela were members
of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who called up to invite me for a
beer.  They took me for a kindred spirit, which indeed I was, although
I found their sectarian enthusiasm for Albania somewhat baffling.

Indeed, many things about America puzzled the socialist in me.  The US
was the world's most advanced capitalist country, and yet there seemed
to be no classes in it, and no class consciousness.  After a year or
so, it dawned on me that Marx had been wrong about a thing or two, and
l fell in with the great mass of Russians, Chinese, and Eastern
Europeans who were turning away from the Marxian dream in despair and
disillusion.  I had come to America imagining it to be a rather
diabolical place, belly of the capitalist beast, but in the end I
became something of an American myself, l got a green card, and I got
some good stories.  I came to see a certain tawdry glory in American
democracy, and a clean and pleasing logic in the workings of free
markets.  I even learned to say 'wadder' instead of 'wawtuh," and
'assk," not 'arsk," but I never stopped yearning for South Africa, or
wrestling with the question of exactly whom I had betrayed.

Several candidates stepped forth to make claims on my conscience.  I
had betrayed the memory of my dead friend Piet, and all my promises to
Miriam and her grandchildren.

I had betrayed the brotherly spirit of The Star's fourth-floor canteen.
I had betrayed my tribe, whose cause l understood in my blood, and I
had betrayed my Afrikaner father.  And finally, I had betrayed
myself.

It struck me, after a few years in exile, that I had thrown away
something very precious by leaving South Africa.  Maybe it was just
nostalgia, but in my memory my former life seemed somehow charged with
meaning.  Every day had been a battle against howling moral head winds.
!  had lived amidst stark good and evil, surrounded by mystery and
magic.  There was a witch doctor in the servants' quarters, and
Zionists danced around fires outside the window.  Nothing in America
could ever compare with so powerful a set of intoxicants.  In America,
my soul was desiccated.  There was nothing to do but get drunk, get
laid, and make money, and no hope that there would ever be more to it
than that.  I used to lean against walls at parties, demoralized beyond
uplift, asking Americans what the point was, what larger significance
they saw in their lives.  They seldom had answers.

And so I found myself yearning for South Africa.  I yearned for the
reckless jol, for rutted dirt roads and lonely farmhouses; for the
clank of a windmill, the sound of Afrikaans, clouds towering over the
Karroo; for the peculiar quality of African light, harsh and piercing;
for the smell and look of J

: f Johannesburg after rain; and for my Uncle Ben's farm, the memory of
which twisted in my heart like a knife, for its loneliness and
foreboding, and the blackened plain on whi,hid it stood.  I longed for
Wicks bubble gum, radio serials, Mrs.  H S Bali's homemade chumey,
biltong, Lion beer, a pipe of Durban poison; and for the bikini girl on
the back page of the Sunday Times, over whom I jerked off in the
suffocating Calvinist stillness of Jo'burg Sunday afternoons, i longed
for Parys, with its slow, brown river and its mysterious islands, and
for its black location, through which I once rode like a little white
prince, and even for the endless harrowed waiting.

I yearned to sit again with anguished socialists over mugs of tea in
cold slum kitchens, talking politics, for even then, at your lowest and
most miserable, life was a larger stage and you were on it, playing
your allotted part.  I often wished I'd stayed at home, or that I could
go back, but I couldn't; I might have been jailed as a draft evader.
All I could do was go down to the nearest South African consulate and
read its copy of The Star.

As the years passed, the South African conflict headed inexorably
toward a conclusion foreseen thirty years earlier by Alan Paton.

"By the time we turn to loving," he said, 'they will have turned to
hating."  Four months after I ran away, Steve Biko died in the hands of
the secret police.  In the aftermath, his network of Black
Consciousness organizations was crushed, all its leaders banned or
jailed, and two

Biko-supporting newspapers shut down.  The time of black hating drew
closer.

And then Pieter Willem Botha came to power.  I wouldn't accuse Botha of
loving blacks, but he was certainly more reasonable than any of his
predecessors.  One of Botha's first moves in office was to scrap the
grand apartheid blueprint, which called for all blacks to be removed
eventually from 'white' South Africa.  He recognized blacks as
permanent residents of white cities and granted them the right to own
houses and property in the townships.  He permitted the rise of a real
black opposition and allowed the hostile trade unions to organize
openly.  His predecessors banned Guess Who's

Coming to Dinner for its favorable portrayal of blacks;

Botha put Bill Cosby on state TV.  He rescinded some of the more odious
apartheid laws and offered a vote of sorts to the coloreds and Indians,
hoping to make them allies in the struggle against blacks.  He started
pouring money into black education and easing restrictions on black
enterprise, hoping to create a black middle class as a bulwark against
revolution.

To pay for all this, he taxed white South Africa till it bled.  In the
first several years of his rule, black income rose five-fold, while
white income barely kept pace with inflation.  To whites who whined, PW
had this to say: "Adapt or die."

Adapt or die.  That struck me as the strangest phrase I had ever heard
in the mouth of an elected leader.  It sounded like the choice you'd
offer a deadly enemy while holding a knife to his jugular, not a
politician addressing his constituency.

To someone who had grown up under the imperial Calvinist tyranny of
Verwoerd and Vorster, Botha looked a virtual liberal.  In the eyes of
the Los Angeles Times, he remained a white supremacist.  The Los
Angeles Times was right, of course, but so was I. Revolutions don't
break out in times of intense oppression.  They come during periods of
reform and liberalization.  PW Botha allowed black South Africans a
little freedom of speech, organization, and action, and they responded
according to the law of revolutions: As soon as he gave them an
opening, they flew at his throat.

The first township to explode was Sebokeng, which went up in September
1984.  Botha was forced to send in the army to quell that uprising, but
the trouble spread to adjoining townships.  Soon, all the townships in
the industrialized Vaal Triangle were in flames, and then the fires
spread to the Eastern Cape, to the cities of Port Elizabeth and
Uitenhage, and into the country districts.  Relatively minor issues
like rent hikes or corporal punishment in schools sparked mass
demonstrations which turned into battles between black youths and
heavyhanded policemen whose concept of effective crowd control was a
bullet between the eyes.  The martyrs were buried at mass funerals,
which turned into new demonstrations, which resulted in further
casualties, more mass funerals, and still more bloodshed.  The uprising
became a fire storm, a cyclone of violence that threatened to engulf
the entire country.

?

!:

South Africa's agony made riveting cinema.  Black ?uths danced like
dervishes against skies of smoke and fire.  Police came trundling over
the horizon in nightmarish war machines, bristling with guns and
helmets.  You must have seen it on television the hissing whips, the
snarling white faces, the bloody welts on black skin; the savage
shotgun volleys and the crumpled black bodies in the streets.  It was
on the evening news, night after night, for months on end.  The toll of
martyrs rose into the hundreds and finally the thousands, and South
Africa was suddenly an issue, a searing hot one.  Rock stars and
celebrities sacrificed themselves on the police line outside South
Africa's Washington embassy.  Apartheid became the talk of the talk
shows.  Mock Sowetos arose on college campuses all across America.
Worldwide, thirty anti-apartheid movies went into development.

As the distant uprising gathered momentum, discreet little ads started
appearing in the classified sections of South African newspapers,
offering 'visa assistance' or the services of international
house-moving concerns.  In South Africa, 1985 was a boom year in such
trades.  Several American immigration lawyers hung up shingles in
Johannesburg's northern suburbs, and for those who couldn't afford
their services, there were several best selling paperbacks with titles
like Leaving South Africa.  The subject was on many white minds.  The
white power structure was under assault, and the townships were on
fire.  The economy was sick, the price of gold was falling, and the
rand had lost two-thirds of its value almost overnight.  The militant
black unions were demanding huge raises, and striking if they didn't
get them.  And now there was talk of sanctions.  The good old days were
clearly over.

The time had come to abandon the sinking ship.

And so there came a time when you could go into the nicer parts of LA,
the whitest of white middle-class suburbs, and find the air thick with
Johannesburg accents the nasal whine of Highlands North on this side,
the plummy ripeness of

Saxonwold on that.  White South Africans loved Los Angeles.

Its weather was sunny and its bland suburbs were not so very different
from those they'd left behind.  Many pitched up in

Beverly Hills or West LA, burdened with moneybags and full of talk
about how they'd fought apartheid, loved the blacks, and stood up to
the Afrikaner tyranny for as long as they could stand it.  I'd look at
them and think, Fuck, there's me eight years ago, lying through my
teeth.

Indeed, there was me to this day.  You could still count on Malan for a
glib denunciation of apartheid or a telling vignette about someone
else's racist backwardness.  Now that everyone knew what townships
were, and what happened in them, these commodities were suddenly in
demand.  In an odd parody of my youth, South Africans became minor
celebrities just for being from there.  Magazines asked you to write
about the uprising.  People sought your opinion on it.  Strangers even
invited you to dinner, just to hear you talk about it.

One such dinner party took place in New York, around Easter, 1985.  The
host was a left-liberal lawyer, overflowing with love for the
Sandinistas and enthusiasm for the nuclear freeze.  His politics were
impeccable, as were the politics of his guests.  South Africa's foreign
minister, Roelof "Pik' Botha, had been on TV the previous evening,
talking about the nebulous 'power-sharing' deal his government was
offering its black subjects and warning of dire consequences if they
dared reject it.

"We'll fight to the very last drop of blood," he swore.  My fellow
Americans were shocked by such extreme langnage.  Between courses, our
host asked, "What's wrong with that man?"  and I rose to sing for my
supper.

l could have told the truth, l suppose, but the raw facts of the matter
were as remote and irrelevant to most Americans as the fact that
gravity bent light.  In their imagination, South Africa was a distant
place where everything was simple a country adrift from its continent,
populated by caricatural white villains and black victims.  They
thought the struggle was a replay of their own civil rights movement,
and who was I to disillusion them?  I didn't.  I said the easy and
obvious things, the things they expected to hear.  I told them about
Boer colonels who sputtered comically at the thought of Jimmy Carter,
about little girls banished from white schools for having suspiciously
kinky hair.  By the time I was done, they were shaking their heads
knowingly over white South V

Africa's racist backwardness, and I was counting my silver.

My thirty pieces of silver.

I didn't tell the truth because I couldn't, hid had nothing to do with
politics, you see.  It had to do with Africa, and the ancient mysteries
of race; with the strange forces that put me to bed with a gun and a
knife and eventually sent me scurrying out of my country like a coward.
The entire subject was so deeply taboo that even dreams imposed silence
on me.

In one dream, I was at a black-tie banquet in some great capital.  The
room was full of diplomats, ambassadors, mandarins of high government
and distinguished correspondents.

They were making speeches about my country, about all the bloodshed.  I
was burning to say something.  It was very important.  I knew why these
terrible things were happening, and I also knew the antidote, the
formula of understanding and healing that was suddenly blossoming in my
mind like a miracle.  Eventually someone asked, "Is there anyone here
from the ANC?"  and I, a Boer, raised my hand.  I strode up to the
podium, trembling with urgency.  I leant into the microphone.  I opened
my mouth.  And then my brain went dead, and I was struck dumb.  There
were no words for what I wanted to say.  They were lost, banned,
forbidden.  By whom ?

By the high priests of Western culture.  Does that make any sense to
you?

As 1985 rolled on, the procession of South African images across my
television screen grew increasingly grim, and the dreams came more and
more frequently.  One night, Boer cops would be whipping black
schoolchildren on my TV, and I'd feel it was somehow my fault.  The
next, a township mob would burn a 'sellout' alive in my living room,
and I'd thank

God I was on the far side of the planet.  All the old misgivings would
well up in my heart, and the old civil war break out in my brain.  Part
of me would say, You're twisted, Malan, you're poisoned with racism.
The other would counter, Screw you; I'm just a realist.  In the midst
of all this, a letter arrived from Soweto, penned in a childlike hand.
It was from Miriam

Tshabalala, my family's beloved retainer.  She couldn't read or write,
so one of her children must have scribed it for her.

Miriam was retired by now, and living in a house my father had bought
for her in Diepkloof, one of Soweto's worst war zones.  This is what
she had to say:

"Now I can see the End of the Earth is coming.  You cants walk at
Night.  I can say at about 8 o'clock we are afraid of soldiers shooting
at us.  I can't explain for you.  Such a long time I am afraid, but the
only thing is that God is here.  Pray for God don't forget before you
sleep."

]a-nee, South Africa, la-nee.  I had been running for eight years, and
I had to run to the far side of the planet, but I hadn't outrun the
paradox.  It still had its claws in my brain.  I had been running all
my life, and each flight left me weaker, more diminished, more deeply
dishonored.  Each time I opened my mouth to speak about South Africa, I
betrayed myself again.  I always said the obvious things, the easy
things, always presented myself as the Afrikaner dissident, too noble
to carry a gun for apartheid.  This did wonders for my political
reputation, but nothing at all for the millions of Miriams.  I was
without honor: as an Afrikaner, as a liberal, as a reporter, and as a
human being.

It might be hard for you to understand this, being an outsider, but
South Africa holds the souls of its sons and daughters in an almost
inescapable grasp.  History cast all of us in a strange and gripping
drama, but I had deserted the stage.  I had no idea what my role was,
and felt I would never be whole unless I found out.  I would live and
die in LA and be buried under a tombstone that read, "He Ran Away."

People would ask, who was Malan?  Ah, a South African.  And what did he
stand for?  He never really knew.

It seemed to me, looking back, that my life had been somehow out of
balance ever since my days as a police reporter.

It was the most humble of newspaper jobs, but it took me to all those
extraordinary places to police stations where men screamed in the dead
of night, to tea with cold-blooded colonels, into mortuaries to see
eyeless black corpses, and down a street where a black man ran amok
with an ax, crying, "Africa!  Africa!"  I didn't learn about the
paradox by living in South Africa's white suburbs; I lea rued about it
on the police beat.  The job put me in a position to ask the right
questions, the questions that cut to the very darkest heart of the
matter, but I'd been too cowardly to wait for ansers Instead, I ran
away.

I would have had to go home even if I sold real estate for a living,
but I didn't; I typed.  So l typed a book proposal and sent it to a New
York publisher.  I delayed leaving for several months because I was
afraid of being jailed as a draft dodger, but in the end I just
entrusted my fate to the hope that they'd forgotten me, and stepped
aboard a plane.

"To live in Africa," said Hemingway, 'you must know what it is to die
in Africa."

That made sense to me.  I was going home to be a crime reporter again,
to seek a resolution of the paradox of my South African life in tales
of the way we killed one another.

BOOK TWO

TALES OF

ORDINARY MURDER

I found myself haunted by an impression I myself would not understand.
I kept tbilk ing that the land smelled queer.  It uas the smell of
blood, as though the soil was soaked with blood.

CARL JUNG, upon arriving in Africa EXILE IS A sweet thing to end, even
if you come from a troubled country like South Africa, or maybe
especially if you come from South Africa.  There is something in the
air there that the Boer poet Breytenbach called heart space and the
danger of beauty."  In some way that I can't really capture, it is a
function of all the hatred and horror, all the broken hearts and the
blinding hope of a healing, sometime, someday.

They say that junkies sometimes put themselves through the cold sweats
and sickness of withdrawal just so they can start anew, and experience
that wild rush of intoxication to the brain as if for the first time.
Coming home was like that.

When I got off the plane during a brief stopover in Johannesburg, the
first thing I saw was a gang of blacks pushing luggage around on a
trolley.  They were just ordinary black workmen, blank and inscrutable,
chattering in an incomprehensible tongue, but I was transfigured by the
sight of them.  I just stood there staring, cursing myself for the
tears running down my cheeks.  It was so stupid.  I was overwhelmed by
the most absurd of things the sound of Afrikaans, the sight of a Boer
in a safari suit with a comb in the back of his socks, the face of Jan
van Riebeeck on a South African bank note.  My eyes blurred at the
sight of Table Mountain, at the foot of which the first Malan had
settled three centuries earlier.  I found myself crying in the fur of
two yapping mongrels that accompanied my mother to Cape Town's DF Malan
Airport to fetch me, and even over my Boer old man, who sat in his easy
chair that first night, explaining in his painfully sincere and
Christian fashion that in spite of what the newspapers said, the Great
Afrikaner Reform was still on track, and things would turn out well in
the end.

For all I knew, he was entirely right.  When I looked out the window,
all I saw was gray fog and drifting rain.  I had come home at the tail
end of winter.  Cold winds were sweeping in from the South Atlantic,
bringing mist and rain and seas that broke heavily over the breakwater
outside Cape Town harbor.

It looked pretty grim out there, but worse was to come.  The rest of
the country was burning, wracked by riots and civil strife, but Cape
Town somehow remained relatively peaceful.

On the fifth day after my return, the weather cleared up.  On the
seventh, the Reverend Allan Boesak of the United Democratic Front
called a march on Pollsmoor, the prison where Nelson Mandela was being
held.  The police blocked the route with armored cars.  Some kids threw
stones.  The police opened fire.  People were killed, and the Cape
townships exploded.

After the seventh day, every day was bloody.  If I stood on the lawn
outside my father's condominium and looked south, I could see smoke in
the sky above the killing grounds the bleak, windswept salt flats where
the blacks lived, and where few white men dared go.  Next morning,
there would be pictures of it on the Cape Times front page huge,
full-color pictures, full of chilling detail: armored cars trundling
across the killing grounds like medieval war machines, looming so huge
they blotted out half the sky; masked black teenagers hurling petrol
bombs; seething throngs of blacks, rivers of them, surging through the
streets, unstoppable, uncontrollable, and the sky behind them filled
with flames and black smoke.  The mood of the white city was shot
through with dread and foreboding.  When I walked in the streets, I
found it hard to look black people in the eye.  Maybe it was my
imagination, maybe it was just me, but whites seemed constantly to be
looking to the sky for flames, smoke, or signs, or searching the
horizon for the rampaging mobs for which they had so long been
waiting.

I had seen this all before, in 1976, but now I seemed to be seeing it
for the first time, and finally understanding it, especially its impact
on the white psyche.  Whites seemed to draw fearfully into themselves,
closing their hearts to Africa, blinding their eyes to the suffering
out there oil the salt flats.

In my Marxist days, I would have said that the force causing these
peristaltic convulsions was class struggle, the mundane drama of
having, not having, and wanting; but now it seemed a woefully
inadequate explanation, much too small and dispassionate to explain the
awful fury of white repression.  It could not explain ... this, for
instance: this picture from the Cape Times of a shirtless
twelve-year-old with his back to the camera, displaying the whip welts
on his brown skin.

Why did they do that to him?  In furtherance of their class interests?
Bullshit.  They did it because he was black, and had to be kept down.
They did it because they were scared of all he represented.  This was
the law and legacy of Dawid Malan.  We were keeping them down lest they
leap up and slit our white throats.

There were armored cars on the highway as I drove away from Cape Town,
taking a route that many whites were too scared to drive after dark for
fear of bricks in their windshield.

I was driving an ancient Mercedes, a veritable tank, chosen because it
was cheap and immune to stones.  I was wearing shades, and listening to
Art of Noise on the headphones.  My boots were Italian, and my leather
jacket came from New York.  I might have appeared a modern man, and yet
some very old things were alive in my heart.

Outside the city, I passed the tall, white gates of Vergelegen, the
estate that was once Dawid Malan's.  His old Cape Dutch house was still
standing, as was the stable in which he saddled those horses on the
night of August 11, 1788.  A few miles beyond, the four-lane highway
banked into the mountainside and started climbing.  This was Dawid
Matan's pass, and that tumble of stones on the hillside marked the side
of the cottage where he rendezvoused with Sara.  It was all still
there, the physical evidence, and the intangible legacy.

I crested the pass and pressed on across the Overberg beyond, following
Dawid Malan's footsteps.  I passed the town where he bought provisions,
and the river he crossed on a ferry.  And then I, too, was drawing away
from the Cape, and entering Africa.  The countryside grew rugged, and
the roadside dust turned red.  The very cast of the light seemed to
change and grow harsh to the eye.  I started seeing Africans, black
Africans, walking along the verge of the road, sometimes hitching.  I
gave a ride to a black woman whose face was daubed with a reddish paste
in the old Xhosa fashion.  In Dawid Malan's day, she would have smeared
red clay on her face; in 1986, the cosmetic was made from instant
coffee.

"Nescafe," she told me.

It was weird.  I was traversing landscapes crisscrossed by highways and
power lines.  The hard-bitten white Boers of yore were now wearing dark
glasses and driving Japanese pickups, and their Xhosa foe had become
for the most part a downtrodden industrial proletariat, living on
concrete under tin, going to work in coats and ties or hard hats.  And
yet, viewed in a certain way, nothing had really changed since Dawid
Malan's day.  On the outskirts of a town called Kirkwood, some fifty
miles short of the Great Fish River and fifty miles south of the spot
where Dawid Malan lay buried, I ran into an army roadblock.  The
soldiers were pulling blacks out of their cars and searching them, but
they waved me straight through.  I was white.  As in Dawid Malan's day,
you could tell the enemy by the color of his skin.

I checked into Kirkwood's only hotel and went for a walk in the
twilight.  The wind was blowing dust around, the streets were silent
save for the scurrying of newspaper scraps and the creak of shop signs
in the wind.  One of those signs read Salters and rang some sort of
bell.  Jack Salters was Kirkwood's lone Just White Man, a British
immigrant who married a colored woman.  After that, many whites refused
to set foot in his general store, claiming it to be permeated by a vuil
Homotstink - 'the foul reek of Hottentot."  They turned their back on
Salters in the street and hung up 'closed' signs when he tried to enter
their shops.  Then the town elders withdrew his business license.  Now
Jack alters was gone, driven back to England, and the main street
deserted save for me and the village idiot, a small mongoloid boy in a
grown man's body.

As we talked, I noticed a mustached white man in a white safari suit
watching us from across the street.  When I walked on, the safari suit
exchanged a few words with the idiot.  I rounded a corner, and the
safari suit came after me.  I circled the block and found the idiot
still standing on the same corner.

still gaping into the wind.

"Who is that man?"  I asked him.

"That uncle is a police," said the idiot.  It made sense.  In the
prevailing climate of paranoia, I was a suspect figure.  My hair was
too long, my clothes were outlandish, and I was driving a car with
Jo'burg plates.  I decided to play a joke on my tail.  I walked on
until I saw the blue light of the police station.  And then I walked
right into the commander's office, flashing my press credentials, and
introduced myself.

The commander was a slight, gray man, spick-and-span in his regulation
blues.  He had a kindly, rumpled face, indecisive blue eyes, and a
golden cocker spaniel at his feet.  The wall behind him was lined with
plaques for border service, and the name on them rang another bell.
Lieutenant John William Fouche.  It slowly dawned on me that I was face
to face with the notorious Butcher of Langa, the officer who ordered
the police to open fire on an unarmed black crowd several months
earlier in an incident that became know as the Langa massacre. Nineteen
blacks had died, or twenty-three, or twenty-seven, depending on who was
counting.  In the judicial inquiry that followed, there was evidence
that some of Fouche's men had taunted the crowd dared the blacks to
throw stones then mowed them down once they did.

Fouche must have recognized the look on my face, because he started
telling me he wasn't really the bad man the press had made him out to
be.  He spun his chair and drew my attention to a bravery citation on
the wall behind him.  He won it for rescuing 104 blacks from the
flooded Gamtoos River, and now they were saying he was a racist
butcher.  He insisted it was not true.  '1 believe in change,!  he
said.

"Ons kannie met n ossewa en perd voortgaan me [We can't go on as we
are, in ox wagon and on horseback].  Things must change.  I don't mind
if a black comes to live next door to me.  He must just behave
himself."

Taken aback by Fouche's pathetic defense of unspoken charges, I asked
him for his side of the story.  He started talking about something
terrible he'd seen in that very township, something that had shattered
his nerve.  At one point, he said, he and his detachment had been
dispatched to rescue one of Langa's black 'collaborators' from a
riotous mob.  They were too late.  By the time they arrived on the
scene, the collaborator's house was burning and his entire family was
dead, one son shot by his own father to save him from being burned
alive.

In the aftermath, Fouche told me, he saw a man carve a slice off one of
the charred bodies and eat it.  I shook my head in disbelief, but
Fouche gave me his word.  I checked it out later, and it was true in
all save one respect it had happened in the explosion of rage that
followed the Langa massacre, not before it.  Still, I seemed to have
returned to a country in which anything could be true even the most
farfetched horror.

"It's easy to talk if you weren't there," Fouche continued.

"They wanted to march through the white part of town.  My orders were
to turn them back, but they wouldn't listen, so what was I supposed to
do?  What would you have done?"

The subject clearly pained him, so I changed it.

"How's the security situation?"  I asked.

It was quiet these days, he said, quieter than before.  A few months
earlier, Kirkwood had been the site of an uprising, just one among
thousands, barely reported in the press.  The blacks burned the
township's hated Bantu Administration office, along with a few buses
and the homes of five black policemen.  The police subdued them with
tear gas and bird shot, and scores of protesters were injured.

A week or two later, an old Boer in an isolated farmhouse woke up to
find a horde of Mandela comrades battering his kitchen door with axes.
He fired through the door until he ran out of ammunition.  Then the
blacks broke in, and that was the end of the Boer and his wife.  In the
months since, all the whites whose farms abutted Kirkwood's black
township had been driven off their land by arson and rustling.  Once
frontier, sll frontier.

On the night before the rebellion started, a handwritten manifesto was
nailed to the door of Kirkwood's Bantu Administration office.  This is
what it said:

Children of Africa, let us fight for our lives.  We have lost our
soldiers of Africa and they were killed by white pigs.

Hollanders, Sea Dwellers, etc.  Shoot us like birds, because we have no
weapons.  Those suckers of our bloods.  I mean white pigs, Boers, white
dogs, why does not emancipate (mr black nation from under this
oppression?  They must packed their bags and go to Holland their
motherland.  We are uprising against government.  May God bless you. By
Comrades

Soldiers of Africa.

Soldiers of Africa versus sea dwellers.  It remained an equation that
Dawid Malan would have recognized instantly.

Nothing had been forgotten, and nothing forgiven.

The following morning, I crossed the Great Fish River and pressed on
across what was now Transkei, independent tribal homeland of the Xhosa
people.  Through the window of a speeding car, the Transkei looked like
a giant billiard table, the green grass grazed to the nub, grazed flat
as a bowling green by too many cattle.  This, too, was part of Dawid
Malan's legacy, the inevitable consequence of a policy that confined
South Africa's black majority to only 13 percent of its land.

Here, too, there was political strife.  A platoon of rifle-toting black
soldiers was standing guard at the gates of the University of the
Transkei.  The road beyond was lined with black hitchhikers, earnest
young men carrying bags and suitcases and cardboard signs stating their
destination.  I picked one up.

He told me that the Transkei Defence Force had just moved onto the
campus to quell an uprising against the homeland government.

The student's name was Mandella, and he was a nice kid, deeply
religious and passionately idealistic.  As soon as he saw I was
sympathetic, he started ranting about the homeland's 'stooge leaders'
and his hatred for them.

"Those bastards," he said, 'they sell us out like Judas.  They sell us
out for the money.  That's all they're interested in the money that the
Boers give them."  He certainly had a point.  According to a recently
released report, at least R175 million ($85 million) of the Botha
government's 'foreign aid' to the tribal states had been diverted into
the private bank accounts of its leaders.

Even more staggering than the sum embezzled was the Botha gnvernment's
reaction to it.  In Africa, a government spokesman stated, such
corruption was 'natural."  Mandla and I had a good laugh about that.

Indeed, the entire apartheid homeland setup was degenerating into a
tragicomedy, especially in the Republic of Transkei.

The country's founding prime minister, Kaiser Matanzima, had recently
been banished by his brother George, the new head of state.  George was
an engaging fellow who kept untold millions of purloined rands in his
bank accounts and a human skull in his office safe.  He was shortly to
be ousted by Stella Sigcau, "Africa's first female head of state," who
would in turn be toppled by a military coup after only twelve weeks in
office.  Meanwhile, there were rumors of war between the Transkei and
neighboring Ciskei, another apartheid banana republic, ruled by the
brutal demagogue Lennox $ebe.  Sebe was incensed by the Transkei's
decision to grant asylum to his brother Charles, whom he accused of
plotting against him.

'1 hate these people!"  Mandla cried.

"I hate them!"  It took him hours to vent his hatred of the system in
all its many forms.  Indeed, he was still ranting when we drew into the
town of Elandsfontein, seven hundred miles to the north.  I had to cut
him off, with apologies, and drop him on the outskirts of town.  I had
business in Elandsfontein.  I was on my way to visit the grave of one
Dennis Moshweshwe, and to explore the meaning of his death.

g MERLE BEETGE CAME from the white suburbs of Jo'burg, from a family
that spoke English and supported the United Party, the party of choice
among Englishmen who secretly approved of apartheid but couldn't quite
bring themselves to side with the bloody Dutchmen.  Merle might not
have put it exactly that way herself, but then she wasn't really one to
hold a strong political opinion.  As a young woman, she had been much
more interested in receiving flowers from her beaux, going out on
dates, and weighing marriage proposals, of which she had many.  She was
very beautiful, a fine-featured, tiny woman with vivid blue eyes and
Katharine Hepburn's sharp cheekbones.  In 1967, she accepted a ring
from Jurie Beetge, an advertising man who owned his own business in
downtown Johannesburg.  Her husband had grown up on a farm and yearned
to return to one, so he and Merle made their first home out in
Elandsfontein.

Elandsfontein isn't very far from Johannesburg, from civilization, but
it is a different world.  It is 'the plots."  All South African cities
are surrounded by a belt of small holdings known as the plots and
populated variously by Portuguese market gardeners, recent British
immigrants who put a pool and some ponies on their land and call it a
country estate, and working-class Afrikaners.  Out in the plots, a Boer
too poor to afford a real farm can live out a fantasy of his tribe's
rural past.  He can own a cow and some sheep and grow himself some
mealies.  He can put his Chevy on blocks and gun the engine all night,
tuning up the twin carbs.  He can get pissed on brandy and Coca-Cola
and shoot tin cans in the backyard.

If you were white, Elandsfontein was a very pleasant place to live.  If
you were black, it could be hell.

One night, shortly after the Beetges moved into the area, there was a
knock on the back door.  A black man stood at the doorstep, begging for
help.  A second black man on the lawn behind him lay clutching his
stomach and bleeding profusely.  He had been stabbed in a fight.  Mrs.
Beetge ran to the telephone.  First she called Baragwanath, Soweto's
huge public hospital.  Not our problem, said Baragwanath.  Our
ambulances don't go that far.  Next she called the police.  The duty
officer at the nearest station umm'd and ah'd and said there was
nothing he could do because both his vans were out on patrol.  A man
was bleeding to death on the lawn, but no one seemed concerned.  So
Mrs.  Beetge put the stab victim in her car and drove him to the
hospital herself.

In Elandsfontein, this was a remarkable act of grace and mercy.  There
were no services of any sort for blacks in Elandsfontein, you see, and
no other whites inclined to display such kindness.  Word of Mrs.
Beetge's good deed spread throughout the district, and she soon became
black Elandsfontein's ambulance driver, ferrying an endless stream of
maimed, ailing, burned, and beaten blacks to and from Baragwanath.  She
began to understand what it was to be a black farmworker or squatter in
Elandsfontein.

"If one died," she said, 'that was just tough.  Nobody cared.  There
was always another black to replace him."

Many of those potential replacements lived just over the horizon, in a
squalid squatter encampment called Weiler's Farm.  There were some five
thousand black squatters there, 40 to 45 percent of them unemployed,
and as many again bereft of passes entitling them to live in a white
area.  Once a week, usually on Friday night, the police raided the
camp.

Anyone caught without a pass was given a two-minute hearing in court,
then sentenced to the traditional thirty rand or thirty days.  Those
blacks who could not pay the fine often spent their thirty days
performing convict labor on white farms.

When they returned, they would laugh ruefully and say, "Ons is verkoop'
- 'we were sold' as if they were slaves.  That squatter camp was a
volcano of misery, and many of the

118 miserable people it spewed forth made their way?  to Merle Beetge's
door.

Sometimes, she would come home from work to find twem?

desperate people waiting for her help or advice.  The child had
dysentery; the husband had tuberculosis.  The child had kwashiorkor;
the boyfriend was stabbed.  The father had becel 'sold' as a convict;
the children were starving.  There were problems with the pass office
or problems with the white baas.

In Elandsfontein, it was not uncommon for economy-minded whites to fire
a black laborer at the end of the month and refuse to pay him his
wages.  If the worker demanded justice, why, they just whipped the
insolence out of him.

"If you go to the police," one black man told me, 'they just take you
back to your baas, and they hit you some more."  So blacks seldom went
to the police.  Instead, they went to Merle Beetge.

In 1983, Merle found herself driving yet another severely injured black
man to the hospital.  His name was Daniel Molefe, and this is his
story.  He was walking home on the footpath that ran past the land of
the Viljoens, a crude clan of Afrikaners reputed to be trigger-happy.
Local blacks called the Viljoens Baas en Missies Skiethom - "Master and
Madam Shoot "Era."  Staying with the Viljoens at the time was their
grandson Tony, a draft dodger hiding out from the military police. Tony
couldn't hold a job, so he whiled away the days taking potshots with a
BB gun at blacks passing on the footpath.  tn the plots, this passed
for sport.  Daniel Molefe knew all about the Viljoens, but he was in a
hurry, so he decided to take a shortcut across their land.  He was
halfway through the danger zone when Tony came charging out of nowhere,
knocked him down, and started kicking him.  The black man was badly
beaten and complained of an unbearable pain in his chest.  As it turned
out, Tony's boot had fractured his ribs, and one of the ribs had
punctured a lung.  By the time Mrs.  Beetge got him to the hospital,
his breathing was labored, and he kept losing consciousness.  Five
hours later, he was dead.

Mrs.  Beetge was outraged.  She was a demure, ladylike creature, but
when her blood was up she could be fearfully determined.  She put
Molefe's widow in her car, drove to the police station, and threatened
to raise a scandal unless something was done.  The warrant officer on
duty happened to be a decent sort.  He went straight out to the
Viljoen's place, put the cuffs on young Tony, and booked him on a
charge of culpable homicide.  Tony was tried, found guilty, and
sentenced to four years in jail a slap on the wrist anywhere else, but
a triumph of justice in the plots.  To the best of Merle Beetge's
knowledge, it was the first time a white man from Elandsfontein had
ever gone to jail for assaulting a black.

It would also be the last, as far as the white folk of the plots were
concerned.  After Tony's trial, they turned on Merle Beetge, thirsting
for vengeance.  There were anonymous calls in the dead of night,
threats of death.  White men in pickups shadowed her children on their
way home from school.  One night, a white man in a white car smashed
through her front gate and careened across the lawn, trying to run down
her manservant, John Mqaba.  John hurdled a fence to save himself, and
the car roared off into the night.  Mrs.  Beetge decided to give
chase.

She was speeding along on the white car's tail when its driver caught
sight of her in his-rearview mirror.  He braked, turned, and came
charging at her head-on.  She swerved to avoid a collision, and after
that she became the hunted.  The white car chased her through the plots
at high speed for an hour, twice sideswiping her Renault in an attempt
to run it off the road.

Mrs.  Beetge eventually shook off her pursuer and returned home,
shaken.  She called the police.  Just as they arrived, the white car
came crashing through the gate again.  The police pulled the driver
out.  He was one of the Viljoen clan, a cousin of the boy she had sent
to jail.  He was drunk and stoned.  The police tut-tutted and took him
home to sleep it off.  '1 got the impression," Merle Beetge said later,
'that they thought it was all my fault."

A few nights later, unidentified white men driving a white car waylaid
her manservant John Mqaba on a lonely road, fractured his skull, broke
both his arms, and left him for dead at the roadside.

Such a place was Elandsfontein.  Over the years, the conditions of
black life had improved somewhat.  White liberal organizations grew in
strength and rallied to Mrs.  Beetge's aid.  White charities started
working in the local black squatter camp.  In the Botha era, the police
grew a lit tic more evenhanded, but still Elandsfontein remained
Elandsfontein.

When someone knocked on Merle Beetge's back door, it usually meant
trouble.

One Sunday evening in the summer of 1985, Mrs.  Beetge found two black
women on her doorstep.  Paulina Msimang was a slim, pretty girl, aged
twenty-two.  Her mother, Mavis, was middle-aged and already stolid in
the way of African women.  Mrs.  Beetge sighed inwardly at the sight of
the women and thought, Here we go again.  But she smiled, and invited
them in.

Merle Beetge knew Mavis Msimang quite well.  She and her family were
among the multitudinous clients of her private welfare service.  Mavis
was a rather pathetic character, small, quite pretty, maybe forty years
old, and not unintelligent, but hopeless in many respects.  She drank a
lot, and was deeply fatalistic.  She had babies one after the other,
each by a different father.  When she went into labor, she always came
to Mrs.  Beetge for help.  If Mrs.  Beetge wasn't there, Mavis would
lie down on the lawn outside her house, waiting for 'the madam' to come
home and take her to the hospital.  After the sixth such trip, Mrs.
Beetge refused to fetch Mavis home unless she had her tubes tied.

Poor Mavis.  She and her family were short of everything food, clothes,
education, pride, possessions, and even passes.

It was hard to imagine black people surviving for decades inside white
South Africa without passes, but the Msimang clan got away with it.
They were so low as to be almost invisible.  In 1985, most of the
family was living on an aging grandmother's old-age pension.  It was
seldom enough to get by on, so they often turned to Mrs.  Beetge for
help.  When Paulina and Mavis showed up on her doorstep that Sunday
night, she assumed they were once again in dire straits.

This time, however, they had come for help of another kind.  They had
come to report the disappearance of Dennis Moshweshwe, common-law
husband of young Paulina.  Paulina was convinced Dennis was dead.  She
said she could hear his voice inside her head, which led her to believe
he must have entered the spirit world.  She described the circumstances
surrounding Dennis's disappearance, and the white woman's heart sank.
Mrs.  Beetge called the Black Sash, an anti-apartheid women's
organization and asked for a lawyer to be placed on standby.  On the
basis of what she had heard, she had to agree with Paulina: Dennis
might well be dead.

DENNIS MOSHWESHWE CAME from Nancefield, Soweto, and he was a polished
swell, at least in the eyes of a barefoot plots girl like Paulina.  He
was a slight, cocksure fellow who smoked Consulate cigarettes and
dressed well.  He read the newspapers, went to the cinema, and drank in
the smatter shebeens.  He had a good job of some sort, working in a
white hotel, and dreamed of becoming a big-time bootlegger, a shebeen
king.  He was about twenty-two when Paulina met him, and he swept her
right off her twenty-year-old feet.  The attraction was mutual, so
Dennis gave Paulina's mother a hundred rand as a down payment on her
bride-price and took her away to live with him in Soweto.

Dennis was a grown man, but he still lived with his parents.

He had no choice.  His parents had no choice, either.  There were no
spare houses in Soweto.  The mad scientists of apartheid didn't want
more blacks in Soweto.  They wanted blacks to leave for the tribal
homelands, so they allowed a massive housing shortage to develop.
Dennis's family had been waiting sixteen years for a house.  Meanwhile,
they were all living in a single rented room in someone's backyard. Ten
people lived in that room, and Dennis's young bride made eleven. If he
and Paulina wanted to make love, they had to ask everyone else to step
outside.  Or they had to wait.  Mostly, they waited.

Paulina and Dennis's dreams were humble.  They admired whites, and
envied their wealth.  They were afraid of the police, and of whites of
a certain type.  Beyond that, they had no politics.  All they wanted
was a room of their own and one day, a house, maybe even a car.  When
Dennis was off duty, they often went window-shopping in downtown
Johannesburg, picking out goods they would buy if they ever became
rich.  One day, Dennis bought Paulina a fashionable pleated skirt, and
it was the finest thing she had ever owned.  And one night, he took her
to see a movie Rocky III, where the white boxer fights a black one.
Paulina's eyes lit up as she described its plot and the dress and
life-style of its characters.  It was the first movie she had ever
seen.

Then Dennis lost his job.  Paulina didn't know why.  In fact, she
wasn't quite sure what the job was.  She just knew that he had it, and
then lost it.  After that, he stayed at home with her, and started
smoking zol.  His personality changed when he was stoned.  He became
jealous and paranoid, sometimes accusing Paulina of making eyes at
other men behind his back.

Once he beat her up really badly, and she lost the child she was
carrying.  She loved Dennis, though, and never thought of leaving him.
She thought their life together would improve if they could just find a
place to live on their own.  When she heard that a white man named
Matthew Homan was looking for a domestic servant, she leapt at the
chance to get out of their crowded room.

Matthew Homan was twenty-seven years old, a fitter and turner by trade.
He was a businesslike little man, four-foot eleven, with a neat
mustache and a friendly smile.  His wife, Rita, was all plump
cheerfulness.  They had met at church.

Both were members of the Apostolic Church, happyclappies in South
African slang into the laying on of hands, faith healing, and speaking
in tongues.  They had two small children, both girls, and lived in a
working-class white area called Turffontein.  Mr.  and Mrs.  Homan
liked the look of Paulina Msimang and hired her to be their girl.

As the Homans' girl, Panlina was expected to cook, dust, wash dishes,
make beds, polish shoes, clean windows, scrub floors, and mind the
children while the baas and missies were at work.  Her hours were seven
to five, six days a week, and the pay was thirty dollars a month plus
room and food.  Mr.  Homan sometimes shouted at Paulina, and she had to
work quite hard.  Overall, though, she considered herself lucky beyond
her expectations.  With the job came a room a verminous, virtually
windowless concrete cubicle in the Homans' backyard but at last a place
where she and Dennis could be alone.  They exterminated the bugs, tore
down the rotting wallpaper, and painted the room blue.  They bought a
transistor radio.  At night, they lay in bed, arm in arm, listening to
the Sotho-language service of Radio South Africa.  They were very
happy.

One weekend, they boarded a bus in downtown Johannesburg, carrying
packages, and set off to visit Paulina's family in Elandsfontein.
Paulina was very attached to her mother and, especially, to her
grandmother, the widow Sina Msimang, who had more or less reared her.

Mrs.  Sina Msimang had led a very hard life.  Once she had lived in
Soweto, in her own house, the proud mother of six children and married
to a good provider.  And then, around 1962, her husband died.  This was
an unimaginable catastrophe, with implications far beyond the loss of a
loved one and his income.  A husband's job entitled his family to
residence rights in white South Africa.  If the husband died, his
family had to go 'home' to some barren tribal territory they had often
never seen.  One day, Bantu Administration officials came to Sina's
house with an eviction order and told her to get out.  She piled her
Primus stove, her pots and pans, her blankets, and six babies onto a
donkey cart and trekked sadly out of Soweto.

She had no idea where she was going.  Just over the horizon, however,
she came to a place of open farmland where there was work to be had,
doing stoop labor on white small holdings  This was Elandsfontein.  The
widow Msimang stopped and reared her children there, moving from farm
to farm, job to job, wretched hut to miserable hovel, earning two to
four dollars a month plus food and lodging.  By 1985, she was too old
and ill to work any longer.

She was living in a shack on the property of a senile Latvian named Max
Weiler.

In his dotage, Max Weiler imagined that there were diamonds under his
cow pasture, so he allowed blacks to squat on his land in return for a
little digging.  There were no diamonds, of course, but by the time
Weiler discovered that, his barns and cattle pens had been converted
into makeshift housing, and hundreds of tin shacks had sprung up around
his house.

There were almost five thousand illegal black squatters sharing water
from a single outdoor pump and shitting in don gas - gulleys, hid
dawned on Weiler that there was money in this more money than in dairy
farming, certainly, maybe even more money than in diamonds.  He started
charging a rent of five dollars a month per shack.  There were several
hundred shacks, so it added up to a nice income.

Grandma Sina's shack was like a cave, an animal lair.  Its walls and
roof were blackened with smoke, and it reeked of unwashed bodies.
Grandma herself was paralyzed by an ailment she could not name.  She
had lain for years on a wooden board balanced on some oil drums,
covered with greasy blankets and tended by her sullen, drunken
offspring.

Into this squalid den one Saturday morning stepped her granddaughter
Paulina and Paulina's man, Dennis.  Poor as he was, Dennis was unnerved
by Grandma Sina's gruesome poverty.

He didn't have the stomach for it.  He had no sooner arrived than he
excused himself and took off for Soweto.  He told Paulina he was going
to see some friends and would be back by nightfall.

Toward evening, Paulina made a fire and prepared a meal of rice and
meat a special meal, and a rare treat for her crippled grandmother.
Dennis didn't show up.  After supper, in candlelight, Paulina sat at
the foot of her grandmother's makeshift bed.  They talked about Dennis,
and about men in general.  Grandma thought they were totters, all of
them.

When she was middle-aged, her own late husband had taken a second wife,
a young wife.  Whenever he wanted to make love to his new wife, he
locked the old one outside, to sleep on the cold, hard ground.  Sina
advised her granddaughter to make the best of it to put up with
Dennis's philandering, and to pray.

Paulina prayed, slept, and woke, but there was still no sign of Dennis.
She washed her grandmother's clothes in a bucket of cold water and hung
them out to dry.  At midday, Dennis was still missing.  So Paulina
decided to go watch a soccer match.  Elandsfontein's home team was
called AmaZion, or the Zionists.  They played in the third or fourth
league Their stadium was a sloping stretch of veld, with wattle poles
at either end to mark the goalposts.  Paulina was waking back to her
grandmother's after the game when she saw Dennis coming toward her on
the footpath.  She could see he was angry, and also that he had been
smoking zol again, or maybe drinking all night.  His eyes were flaming
red.  As Paulina came up to him, he shouted, "Where have you been?  Who
said you could go to the soccer?"  And then he struck her in the lace,
opening an inch-long gash above her right eye.

Paulina fell down, bleeding and crying.  Dennis hat lied her to her
feet.

"I'm taking you home," he said, 'and then I'm going to give you a good
hiding."  He grabbed her wrist and dragged her off down the footpath.
She cried and resisted every inch of the way.

The path wound through the veld and past a house that belonged to
whites.  The house stood in a grove of acacia trees.  A few old cars
were rusting in the peach orchard, and there was a tractor in a tin
shed alongside the house.  A windmill marked it as one of the area's
original farmhouses, but its edifice had been tatted up to look vaguely
Moorish or Spanish.  From the road, you saw a gravel parking area and
beyond it, a Spanish archway leading into a garden.  The archway was
decorated with a frieze of burros, cactus trees, and Mexicans snoozing
under sombreros.

Several cars sat in the parking area.  One was a green VW, and Paulina
thought she recognized it: She thought it was her boss Matthew Homan's
car.  She heard laughter and splashing coming from the garden, and the
sound of familiar voices.  She wasn't entirely sure, but she was
willing to chance it rather than submit to further beating.  So she
broke away from Dennis and ran in under the archway, shrieking for
help.

AUGUST DE KOKER was a plasterer by trade and what South Africans call a
battier by nature.  He was forty-two years old.

He had a coarse, reddened face, a beard, and a murderous temper.  Until
recently, he'd lived in Roodepoort, a white working-class suburb of
Johannesburg.  He had two teenage sons and a wife whom he'd reputedly
beaten into abject, quivering submission.  He'd recently left her for
Kathy Pelser, a peruxided blond half his age.  Augie de Koker's
interests in life were fast cars, big bikes, drinking, and fighting. If
there is anything to be said in mitigation for Augie de Koker, it is
that he was indiscriminately violent, especially when drunk.

He hit his black 'boys," and he hit strangers in bars.  Once, in a
drunken rage, he destroyed someone's car with a crowbar.

More recently, he had beaten his own brother half to death.

There was so much blood on the walls and floor that the African
servants thought a cow had been slaughtered in the room where it
happened.

After dispensing with his wife, Augie and his girlfriend moved into a
cottage on the plots.  Augie liked the plots.  The air was fresh and
the horizon was open, but Jo'burg was close enough for a jol.  On
drunken Saturday nights, he sometimes roamed the countryside in his
bakkie, his pickup, poaching rabbits and steenbok.  If the police saw
his headlights and gave chase, he would tear through fences or ramp
over streams, just like a stunt man in an American movie.  Indeed,
Augie's new life was altogether congenial.  His cottage was quaint and
rustic, and when the landlord was away, he had free run of the big
house, the grounds, and the swimming pool.

That Sunday, the Sunday of Paulina's visit to her grand mother, Augie
had invited a few of his chinas around for a braaivleis, a traditional
open-air barbecue.  The first arrivals were Matthew Homan and his
family.  They came straight from church.  Homan's wife was the daughter
of Augie's landlord.  She had known Uncle Augie since she was this
high.  Next to come were Adriaan van Staden and his wife.

It was a hot afternoon, so everyone jumped into the pool.

Ah, yes, the sweet life in white South Africa.  Anywhere else in the
world, save perhaps the United States, a blue-collar worker would
consider himself terribly lucky to be floating face up in cool water
under a hot blue sky in a country garden.  In South Africa, however,
such an experience was a white man's virtual birthright.  Apartheid had
failed in almost all else, but at least it had put Augie de Koker in a
swimming pool on that Sunday afternoon.

One of apartheid's main aims, you see, was to help poor whites like de
Koker attain the good life.  For years, blacks were barred from
entering Augie's humble trade.  Such job reservation, or
civilized-labor laws, shielded him from black competition and kept the
price of his services artificially high.

At the same time, the pass laws kept his black labor costs artificially
low, and anti subversion laws prevented blacks from forming trade
unions.  Under these circumstances, only the dumbest white men failed
to prosper.

A white man didn't even have to work very hard.  Blacks did the heavy
work, and those on Augie de Koker's construction crews worked very hard
indeed.  One of his 'boys' told me that Angie was a cruel mlungu - a
cruel white man.  He worked his gang until their backbones ached, and
if it started raining at midday be docked them a full day's wages.
Augie's boys made forty or fifty rand a week, but Augie himself was
quite rich rich enough to buy his new girlfriend a brand-new Mazda 323;
to stock up on beer, whiskey, and meat; to invite his friends for a bra
ai and to float on his back under the hot blue sky, savoring the good
life, thanks to apartheid.

This idyl{ was rudely interrupted around two in the afternoon by the
sound of screaming.  Seconds later, a young black woman came running
into the pool enclosure with blood streaming down her face.  It was
Paulina, Matthew Homan's 'girl," and she was shrieking, "Baas, baas,
Dennis wil my doodmaak' - "Boss, boss, Dennis is trying to kill me."

And sure enough, Dennis was hard on her heels, livid with rage. Paulina
ran into Mrs.  Homan's arms, and Dennis bore down on them. Homan shot
out of the water like a missile and punched Dennis in the face.  Dennis
staggered.

"What would you do," he bawled, 'if you caught your wife fucking
around?"

"Hey!"  shouted van Staden, "You don't talk like that in front of my
wife!"

Van Staden threw a punch at the black man, and then Augie joined in,
too, just for good measure.  Dennis went down under a hail of blows and
curled up like a baby, crying "No sir, please sir."  After a while,
Homan decided that the boy had had enough.  He hauled Dennis to his
feet, grabbed him by his shirtfront, and marched him off the property.
At a safe distance, Dennis turned around and pointed a finger at
Paulina.

"You," he yelled.

"When the boss is at work, I'm going to kill you."

Those words bothered Matthew Homart.  They preyed on his mind a bit.
Dennis and Paulina lived in his backyard.

During office hours, Paulina was alone at home with his two tiny
daughters.  Homan had visions of Dennis slitting Paulina's throat in
the kitchen, and maybe slitting his daughters' throats while he was at
it.  The more he thought about it, the more it worried him.

He grew even more worried after taking Paulina up to her grandmother's
shack to fetch her belongings.  Dennis was lurking nearby.  He was
insolent and surly.  He called Homan a vokken Boer, a 'fucking
Afrikaner."  He even picked up stones and, as Homan put it, 'throwed my
car with it."

Back at the poolside, Homan gave voice to his concerns.

Everyone agreed that he had a point.  You never knew with these blacks;
you never knew what they might do when they got hit up.  And besides,
Dennis Moshweshwe had been cheeky.  He had called a white man a vokken
Boer.  Now that was going a bit too far.

"You should have brought this boy back with you," said Augie de Koker.
'I'd show you what I do with a kaffir like that."

Overhearing this, a chill came over Paulina, because the knew what
these white men were like.  She was cross with Dennis but didn't want
to see him hurt.  So she set off running through the veld, trying to
find Dennis and warn him to hide.

The whites were in a car, though, and they beat her to him.  She
arrived at her grandmother's shack to see Homan and Dennis wrestling in
the dust.  Homan had the black man down, and he was yelling at his wife
to bring a rope.

"Bring the rope, angel," he called.  In due course, Dennis was bound
hand and foot and slung onto the backseat of the car.  Homan said he
was taking the boy to the police station, so Paulina jumped into the
car, too.  But Homan didn't go to the police.  He turned off the tar
and took the rotted dirt road that led across the veld toward Augie de
Koker's plot.

About a year later, I went looking for Paulina in the company of a
black man named Eugene.  Eugene was an affable guy in his early
forties, corpulent, with a hearty laugh.  He drove a sporty Fiat and
wore rings on several of his fingers.  He was truly a Soweto swell, in
with the big boys, the show-biz celebrities, the tycoons, and even the
gangsters.  He knew where to get a brand-new seven-series BMW with more
or less clean papers for five grand cash, no questions allowed.

He had a line on some brand mew VCRs that had fallen off a truck, and
there was even talk of a few crates of fine Scotch going cheap.  Eugene
was no criminal, though.  He was just from Soweto, from the adversary
culture, where the great redistribution business was an honorable
trade.

His own trade was show biz.  He played the piano, produced records, and
sometimes worked on movies.  He was between jobs that month, so he came
along to Elandsfontein to be my translator.

We stopped off at Max Weiler's squatter farm to ask a few questions.
Someone gave us directions to a nearby small holding where several
black families lived in a forlorn barracks in some white man's
backyard. Paulina came out to greet us.  She was a slender little slip
of a girl, light skinned and very pretty.  She was wearing a light
summer dress, her feet were bare, and she was very shy.  She brought
out a wooden bench and set it down in the shade of a tree.  She and
Eugene sat on the bench, and I sat on the ground beside them.  Then she
started telling her story, with Eugene translating.

It was midafternoon by the time Matthew Homan returned to the party
with his bound black captive.  All the guests had arrived by now, and
the pool was full of children.  Their parents had made a fire and set
out the vodka, whiskey, cold beer, and bread rolls on a picnic table.
They were waiting for the flames to die down a bit so they could put
their meat on the coals and start the bra ai  Augie de Koker was on the
way to his seventh whiskey, and he was spoiling for a battle.  So was
his girlfriend, the one with peroxided hair.  She had been boasting
that Augie would show everyone how you dealt with an insolent Bantu.
This aroused the partygoers' anticipation, and so when the green VW
carrying Dennis came barreling back down the dirt road all the children
got out of the pool and followed their parents down the garden path,
under the Spanish archway, and into the gravel parking area, where
Augie stood waiting.

Matthew Homan threw open the back door of his VW, and there on the seat
lay Dennis, bound hand and foot.  Homan grabbed the black man's ankles
and hauled him out.  Dennis found himself lying face down in the gravel
and surrounded by, oh, maybe a dozen whites men in shorts, women in
halter tops, dripping children in bathing suits.  Augie's girlfriend
shrieked, "Show him, Augie!  Show him!"

At that, Augie grabbed the black man by the ears and started grinding
his face into the gravel.  He ground so hard that Dennis's ears were
partially torn from his head, his nostrils ripped off his face.  Then
Augie turned Dennis onto his back and leaned into the black man's
bloody face.

"A mouth that talks like yours," hissed Augie, 'is asking for a
hiding."

With that, he clapped a hand over Dennis's nose and mouth so that he
could not breathe.  Dennis started writhing, and the white children
squealed in anticipation.

And now you must steel yourself, for what is to come is hideous.
Paulina was speaking through Eugene, telling her story sentence by
sentence.  At the end of her next sentence, Eugene got up and walked
away into the veld.  He buried his face in his hands, and kicked up
sods of turf.  He picked up a stone, and threw it angrily at a tree. He
stared into the distance with tearful eyes.  And then he finally
collected himself and returned to tell me what the girl had said: "And
then the white man started kicking Dennis in the side.  The white women
screamed, and the white children jumped up and down.  I think they were
happy."

Paulina spoke again.  When she fell silent, Eugene walked off into the
veld once more.  He pulled himself together, came back, translated.
This happened at the end of each of Paulina's sentences, so the story
emerged slowly, like water torture, sentence by appalling sentence:
"And then the white man laughed and said, "These kaffirs have hard
heads, you know."  He jumped high in the air and came down on Dennis's
head with both feet.

"And then some of the whites said stop, but one woman shouted, "It's
good!  Let him hit!  Let him hit!"

"And then they picked Dennis up by his feet and neck and threw him like
a sack of mealies onto the back of the pickup truck.  He landed hard,
with his neck hanging over the side.

"And then they held him there, and brought a heavy chain, and put it
around his neck, and tied him to the truck with his face in the sun."

Augie grunted with satisfaction.

"Dis boe jy 'n kaffer vasmaak," he said.  That's the way to tie up a
kaffir.

And then the whites went back to their braaivleis, for this was just
the beginning, not the end.  You must understand that a braaivleis is
no mere barbecue.  It is a profound cultural ritual, recalling the days
when the Afrikaners rode the empty plains on hone back and brought down
buck with a single shot.  They built a fire and roasted the meat right
there, in the open, beneath the sunlit blue heavens celebrated in the
opening line of our national anthem.  Even foreign admen understood the
deep evocations of the word braaivleis.  In my youth, Chevrolet South
Africa mounted a hugely successful advertising campaign around the
slogan "Braawleis, Rugby, Sunny Skies and Chevrolet."  It was a good
slogan.  It evoked all that was finest about the sweet white life in
the land of apartheid.  The slogan was plastered across huge
billboards, across blown-up photographs of sunny outdoor scenes rather
like the one we are looking at now.

Look carefully, for it is a uniquely South African image.  The sky is
blue and cloudless, and the veld is green from rain.  The sun glints
off distant church spires.  We hear the somnolent drone of faraway
traffic, the sizzle of meat on the grill, the good-humored banter of
mustached white men.  Their bellies are slumping over the belts of
their short pants, and they are clutching cold beers in their fists.
Their white wives and girlfriends are in bikinis and halter tops, their
children in swimsuits.  All these strong, suntanned white people are
standing around a fire, stuffing meat into their mouths with their
hands while a hog-tied black man squints at the sun through blood and
moans for water in the background.

As the afternoon wore on, Augie got drunker and more belligerent.
Matthew Homan wanted to let the boy go, but Augie snarled, "If you
really want to make me cross, untie those ropes."  Homan was suddenly
frightened.  He had seen the bloody room in which Augie had virtually
butchered his own brother.  He knew what Augie could do after a few
drinks.  So Homart backed down.  He went off and sat alone, away from
the rest of the party.

Paulina, meanwhile, was cowering in the tractor shed.  The whites had
ordered her to stay there until they decided what to do with her
boyfriend.  She was very frightened.  She could hear the clink of ice
in glasses and other sounds of white merrymaking.  She could also hear
Dennis moaning, "Water, water."  She filled a soft-drink bottle at a
garden tap and tried to sneak it to Dennis, but Augie saw her and
yelled.

"Hey!  !

told you to stay away from that bakkie!"  If the kaffir wanted a drink,
Augie would serve one himself.  He drew a bucket of water, and walked
over to the pickup.

"I hear you're thirsty," he said.

"Yes, baas," croaked Dennis.

"Open your mouth," said Augie.

"Yes, baas," said Dennis.

"Look up," said Augie.

The black man obeyed.  The white man upended the bucket, poured the
water over Dennis's face and walked away, laughing.

Matthew Homan thought himself a good Christian.  and he suddenly was
not sure that his daughters should see this.  5, o he put his family
and his girl, Paulina, in the green VW and went home, leaving Dennis
Moshweshwe at the mercy of A ugie de Koker.

Paulina couldn't sleep that night for worrying about Dennis.

At breakfast the following morning, her baas and missies seemed oddly
strained.  They said nothing about Dennis.

Eventually, she plucked up the courage to ask whether they had heard
anything.

"Oh yes," said Mrs.  Homan brightly, 'l forgot to tell you.

The other baas telephoned last night.  He said he took Dennis to the
police.  He says we don't have to worry about Dennis anymore, ever
again.  The police have locked him up forever."

Paulina was ignorant, but not that stupid.  She knew how the law
worked.  She knew there had to be a trial, and evidence, and all that.
She knew they were lying.  She just didn't know why.  She was too
scared to ask.

The baas and missies went to work, leaving their daughters in Paulina's
care.  Monday was washing day, washing-and ironing day.  Paulina was
laboring over the ironing board, weeping quietly, when the telephone
rang.  One of Homan's daughters answered it.

"Mommy," she said, "Paulina's crying."

So Paulina was summoned to the phone and asked what the matter was.

It's Dennis," she said.

"What about Dennis?"  asked Mrs.  Homan.

"I hear his voice," she said.

"He is telling me I must go to his mother and tell her."

"Tell her what?"

"That Dennis is dead."

There was a gasp on the other end of the line, and then a long silence.
Finally, Mrs.  Homan said, "Don't you leave my daughters alone.  Don't
go anywhere, you hear?"  She slammed down the telephone.

Half an hour later, a car screeched to a halt in the driveway.

Out got Mrs.  Homan and a white man, a stranger to Paulina.

They ordered Paulina to pack her things.  They seemed panicky.  They
were in such a hurry that they even helped Paulina carry her belongings
out to the car and stuff them in the trunk.  Then they sat the black
girl on the backseat, hit the M1 Highway, and sped south towards
Elandsfontein.  They dumped Paulina and her possessions on the roadside
near her grandmother's shack and sped off without saying a word.

It was that evening that Paulina and her mother went to see Mrs.
Beetge, to ask her help.  The white woman gave them a ten-rand note and
sent them off to the nearest police station armed with a letter
inquiring as to Deunis's whereabouts.  The black women had no sooner
left than there was another knock on Mrs.  Beetge's back door.  This
time, some black youngsters were waiting outside.  They had come to
report the discovery of a body.  She put them in her car, and they
guided her to a coppice of Port Jackson trees a hundred or so yards off
the main road that bisected the area.

Merle Beetge had seen a great deal of gore and agony in her eighteen
years in Elandsfontein, but she had never seen anything like this.  The
corpse was ice-cold, stiffened in a fetal curl.  It was covered with
sand.  There had been bleeding from the nose and ears.  There was no
skin on the soles of the feet.

The ribs had caved in on one side.  One hand was twisted like a claw.
The ears were partially torn off the head.  She rolled the body over
gingerly.  The face was a mask of coagulated blood.

The lips were swollen; the nostrils ripped off the upper lip.

It was Dennis Moshweshwe.

At the trial, it emerged that Augie de Koker's bra ai had continued
until sundown.  When Augie had finally eaten and drunk his fill, he
announced that it was time to take the prisoner to the police and have
him charged with assaulting Paulina.  The two brothers Borman, Johan,
eighteen, and Thorne, twenty-four, were asked to drive the pickup.
Augie dim bed onto the back, whip in hand.  As they set off down the
rutted country road, he steadied himself against the cab and started
laying into his helpless black captive with the whip.

Halfway to the police station, he ordered the Bormans t( pull off the
tar.  They parked in the coppice of Port Jackson trees.  Augie hauled
Dennis off the pickup and jumped up and down on his genitals.  Then he
took the spare tire and pounded it on Dennis's head.  Then he tried to
lynch him, but he was too drunk to get the rope over a ho ugh and
besides, the black man was probably dead already.  So Augie untied
Dennis's bonds, because there was no point wasting a good piece of
rope, and left him there, face down in the sand.

The Bormans claimed that they had done nothing but watch, so they were
not charged.  Matthew Homan was put in the dock, but he claimed it was
all Augie's doing, and got off with three months or a
three-hundred-rand fine.  As for de Koker, he broke down and cried in
the dock, claiming that he had not intended to kill the boy, only to
teach him a lesson.

This was necessary 'for the sake of the children."

I guess the white judge might have taken that into consideration,
because he somehow found that Dennis had 'provoked' his own
torture-murder.  He also ruled that de Koker's seven whiskeys were a
mitigating factor, and found him guilty only of aggravated assault.

As it happened, August de Koker and a black member of the outlawed
African National Congress came up for sentencing on the same day.  The
ANC member had been caught in possession of pamphlets and literature
advancing the aims of a banned organization.  That was his crime. Augie
de Koker tortured a black man to death.  Augie de Koker got seven
years; the ANC man got ten.

Eugene and l were talking about that as we headed home from
Elandsfontein.  We were talking about the judge and his lenient
sentence, and about the fact that the barbarian de Koker was still free
on bail appealing his sentence because he considered it unjustly harsh.
We were also talking about the ANC, and wishing it would abandon
indiscriminate bombings and land-minings in favor of some pointed
people's executions.  I am not usually so bloodthirsty, but l was
unhinged by the terrible image that lay at the heart of Paulina's story
that quintessentially South African tableau of braaivleis, rugby, sunny
skies, and torture.  It was all so fucking, heartbreakingly
traditional.  DennisMoshweshwedied a completely traditional South
African death.  There is even a traditional word for it in the
Afrikaans language: he died of a kafferpak, meaning a 'kaffir hiding,"
a brutal beating of the sort whites have been administering to blacks
since the day we set foot on this continent.

On the way back to Johannesburg I told Eugene a story I'd read in the
archives, in the annals of Dawid Malan's time.  The year is circa 1825,
and a British administrator is riding across a lonely African plain. He
comes across a lone Boer horseman, and they start discussing the
Bushman scourge.  The Boer tells the story of a Bushman hunt he once
went on.  He and his white neighbors tracked down a band of the
stone-age hunters and slaughtered all of them, sparing only five women
who seemed sufficiently sturdy to make useful slaves.  The Boers set
off for home, driving their captives before them.  The little yellow
creatures couldn't keep up with horses, though, so the white men
decided to get rid of them.  Some wanted to let them go; others had
something else in mind.  They dismounted and started priming their
guns.

The Bushwomen sensed what was coming, so they threw themselves at the
white men, begging for mercy, clinging desperately to their arms and
legs.  The Boers remained resolute.

They peeled the women off their arms and legs and shot them one by one.
The Boer shakes his head ruefully at the close of the tale and says,
"May God forgive the land."

Hearing this, the enlightened British administrator imagines he's
finally met a kindred spirit among the Boers.  He starts talking of
love and justice, only to have the Boer leap at his throat, challenging
his right to criticize.  The Bushmen are constantly killing our cattle,
he says.  Indeed, says he, they'd probably kill us too if they had the
means and the power.  The Boer seems to be arguing that his people have
no choice, but he stops short and shakes his head again.

"Rust, locusts, and drought we have had already," he says sadly, 'and
ten thousand plagues more may we yet expect, as punishments for the
blood which lies upon this land."

That ancient Boer understood that there would be an accounting for his
deeds, and yet he was unwilling or unable to stay his own hand.  One
hundred and sixty years later, his descendants were shedding as much
blood as ever, and God' wrath had yet to descend.  Eugene observed that
the toll ol plagues yet to come had probably risen somewhat since the
1820s.

"I can't hate," he said, 'but sometimes ..."  His w)icc trailed off,
and when he spoke again, it was to pose a troubling question.

"Can you imagine," he asked, 'how many people are going to die in this
country?"

The South African Police are the guardians of law and order.  In spite
ole the fierce and unfair criticism and the mistakes we have made
because we are not perfect, we also make mistakes we shall continue to
maintain law and order firmly but fairly, and with restraint.

Chaos and anarchy will not be tolerated.  Peaceloving and law-abiding
people can rely on the protection of the South African Police.

- A J VLOK, Deputy Minister of Law and Order, 1985 THE ROAD TO Samuel
Mope's home is a six-lane highway that hurtles through Jo'burg's
northern suburbs and out into the open countryside, racing toward
Pretoria.  On the way, it sweeps past a giant military base, affording
travelers a glimpse of the volk's military muscle army trucks, jeeps,
and armored cars by the square mile, neatly ranked in the blazing sun.
A little farther on, a gray monolith rises out of the veld up ahead. As
you draw nearer, it grows bigger and bigger, and by the time you come
upon it, it has become a blunt, hulking chunk of gray stone, virtually
square and almost fifteen stories tall.  This is the Voortrekker
Monument, intended to symbolize the fundamental values and unshakable
resolve of the Boer founding fathers.  Beyond the monument lies the
capital, Pretoria, a deeply conservative city in a deeply conservative
country.

Samuel Mope happens to be black, and to live in a township just west of
the city, but he is as conservative as an Boer in Pretoria proper.  He
was born in 1925 in a district called Skoolberg, an area of rural small
holdings not far from his present home.  His father was a tenant farmer
on land owned by a white man and as such, a member of a tiny and
relatively prosperous caste.  His father had no cash, but at least
there was food to eat, and spare eggs and chickens that went toward
paying the children's fees at the farm school.  So young Samuel got a
modicum of education, six years of it, and when he set out to seek his
fortune in the white city he was able to land a reasonably good job
with a construction firm.  Within a few years, he had risen to foreman.
He paid the bride-price for his first wife in 1948, but she died soon
after.  Subsequently, he married a niece of hers.  In all, he fathered
nine children.

Since 1955, Samuel Mope (say mo-PAY) and his family have lived in a
house on Chilwane Street, in a township called Atteridgeville.  It is a
township like any other, dreary and dusty, and Mope's house, when he
first moved in, was the standard government four-room concrete
matchbox.  Over the years, though, he has added on an extra bedroom and
expanded the lounge and dining room.  He has turned the outhouse into a
shed, built a tiled bathroom, fenced his yard, and planted flower beds
in the front garden.  A carport alongside the house shelters a
second-hand Renault.  There is a big color TV in the lounge, and the
furnishings are new and comfortable.  The walls of the dining room,
where he and I sit down to talk, are hung with sepia-toned photographs
of his two wedding parties.  The men and women in them are wearing
tuxedos and ball gowns, and they have the prosperous, confident look of
extras in Coppola's Cotton Club.  Through an open door, I glimpse a bed
covered with a plush, satiny spread and, mounted on the wall above it,
a replica of the South African Defence Force's R1 automatic rifle.  One
of Mope's sons is a policeman.  The rifle is a trophy, won at police
training college.

Samuel Mope speaks fluent Afrikaans.  He is tall and strong.

There is plenty of flesh on his big bones, and his dark eyes seem to
weigh and judge harshly all who pass before them.

He sits at the table with his shoulders squared and his spine straight,
his huge hands folded before him: a proud and stern black patriarch,
and a translucently decent man.

On the day of our first meeting, he was hoarse and wheezing, wearing
pajamas.  He had been in bed with bronchitis.

He got up to talk to me, though, because he wanted people to know how
his son had died.  But first, he had to talk about the church, because
the church was central to the story.

"The child was killed because he was going to church," said Mr. Mope.

"That was his only sin."

On the wall above Mope's head was a framed color photograph of a
studious-looking, bespectacled black man wearing ceremonial robes. This
was Bishop Lekhanyana, prophet of the Zion Christian Church the largest
church in the country, with more than three million African adherents. 
Samuel Mope had been a member of the ZCC since 1951, and the life of
everyone in his family revolved around the church.  He and his wife
attended prayer meetings on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. 
After the Friday night prayer meeting, there was choir practice for the
children and teenagers, starting around ten and finishing at dawn the
following morning.

On Saturday, the faithful rested.  Then they returned for a service
that commenced around ten on Saturday night and continued, with breaks
for meals and naps, until sunset on Sunday.

Such marathons of worship were designed to limit a Zionist's
interaction with the sinful, mundane world: A strict Zionist went to
work or school but otherwise spent almost all his time in church.

"I don't drink, and I don't smoke," said Mr.  Mope.  "I have never been
arrested, and I have never been in jail."  He pointed to a violet in a
vase on the table between us.

"I am clean as that flower," he declared.

"That Bible, I like it."

Samuel Mope once had a son named Moses.

"My last born," he said.  Moses was thirteen years old when he died,
and in the sixth year of his schooling.  He was a very fine boy, Mr.
Mope explained.  He always did his homework, and teachers spoke
optimistically of his prospects.

"If he did well at school," said Mr.  Mope, "I promised I would make
him a lawyer."  In fact, Moses was a fine boy in all respects.  He
swept the yard, tended the garden, and never disobeyed his father, or
any of his elders.

"My wife used to say she bore this child for other people," Mr.  Mope
went on; 'he was always running errands for the neighbors."  Moses
liked to play soccer and watch Bible stories on the Sotho TV channel,
but the highlight of his life, in his doting father's estimation, was
the church choir

The boy's voice was still high, said Mope, and he was a soloist in the
choir, which performed 'secret' Zionist music a music unlike any other
I had ever heard, remotely akin to New Orleans funeral marches, but
faster paced and martial in flavor, with snare drums rattling and
woodwinds braying and the choir singing African scales that were eerie
and enchanting to Western ears.  It was called secret because it was
not supposed to be heard by outsiders, and was never played on the
radio.

Anyway, come Saturday evening, Moses would don his church uniform
starched khaki pants and jacket and handmade white shoes known as many
arras and set off to sing at the all-night church service.  On that
final Saturday, he left home at 7:30, walking through the dark streets
of the township.  Atteridgeville's streets were infested with tsotsis,
unsafe after dark at the best of times.  In these days of unrest, the
danger was more acute than ever.  The township had had its share of
street fighting.  Earlier that year, the Atteridgeville Youth Congress
had taken its cause to the streets, and at least four protesters had
been shot dead by the police.  Dozens were injured.  After that, the
comrades spray-painted a plea on the wall of the soccer stadium at the
Atteridgeville entrance.  It read, "Leave us in peace," but it had gone
unheeded.  The police were still out in force, patrolling in armored
cars, and nobody was really safe.  Just a few days before, a
four-year-old had been killed by a tear-gas cannister.  And before
that, a thirteen-year-old schoolmate of Moses' was cut down by the
proverbial stray bullet while on his way to buy bread for his mother.
But Samuel Mope trusted in the Lord, and did not fear for his son.  He
simply bade the boy farewell and went to bed.

Shortly before midnight, one of his daughters tapped on his bedroom
door.

"Father," she said, 'they've brought Moses."

"What do you mean," he asked, 'they've brought Moses?"

"No," she said.

"Come and see."

Samuel Mope put on a dressing gown and went into the living room, where
he found Moses lying on a couch, bleeding from the mouth and nose. Mope
pulled up his son's T-shirt.

Blood was welling from abrasions on the boy's rib cage and seeping from
a wound on his head.  Mope reached out and touched the wound, tenderly,
but the child flinched.

"Moses," he said, 'where does it hurt?"  The boy just grunted, and his
eyes rolled back in his head.

So Samuel Mope picked up the limp body of his youngest son and rushed
to Kalafong Hospital, a few kilometers down the road.  It was a
Saturday night, always a busy night in the ghetto, and the emergency
room was full of people with stab wounds, bullet wounds, and burns.
Like all black hospitals, Kalafong was understaffed and overcrowded.
The attendants laid Moses on a stretcher and just left him there. After
an hour, someone finally noticed the boy.

"What about this one?"

said an attendant to a nurse.

"Have you forgotten about him ?"

After that, Moses was finally wheeled into the X-ray unit.  A nurse
came to say his condition was very serious: He had a fractured skull,
and blood on the brain.

Mope and his wife sat in the waiting room, holding hands.

An hour or so later, he saw the nurse coming down the corridor, her
eyes full of professional concern.  The nurse took his wife by the hand
and struggled to find the right words.

"There's no need," Mope told her.

"I know my son is dead."  Mr.  and Mrs.  Mope cried themselves to sleep
in the waiting room.

When Samuel woke up, it was already 5 A.M. He roused his wife, took her
home, and then set off into the dark township to find out why his
youngest son had died.

The people who brought Moses home had told a garbled story about, the
police, about how some white policemen had beaten Moses for no reason.
Samuel Mope found that hard to believe.  Why should the police beat his
son to death?  Moses was a Zionist, and Zionists had nothing to do with
politics, street fighting, or stone throwing.

"You may not take part in politics," the bishop told his flock.

"You may not utter those strange words; you may not disobey
authority."

Samuel Mope and his family had always heeded that command.

"I didn't even want to hear about politics," Mr.  Mope told me.
Sometimes, as he rode the train to work, the people around him would be
talking about the struggle, and he would put his fingers in his ears to
save himself from subversion.  A man once challenged him for doing
this, and he'd had to 'dodge' to avoid being branded a sellout.

"My ears are itching," he said.

"I think I'll have to see a doctor."

It was dangerous to be branded a sellout.  Indeed, there came a time
when it was dangerous just to be a Zionist.  In some townships,
militant comrades took to stopping Zionists on the streets and forcing
them to eat the silver star they wore on their chest.

As the struggle intensified, it became harder and harder for Zionists
to maintain neutrality.  At one point in 1985, Atteridgeville was
virtually controlled by the young comrades.

They set up "People's Courts' to try criminals and manned roadblocks at
all the township's entrances, to ensure that the don't-buy-white
campaign was observed.  In their spare time, they launched a civic
clean-up campaign, clearing empty lots of trash and garbage and
transforming them into parks revolutionary shrines, really, with names
like Biko Park, Mandela Park, and Freedom Square.  Each park boasted a
symbolic cannon, its barrel trained on Pretoria.

Samuel Mope took a somewhat dim view of all this, but he understood how
dashing and exciting it might seem to a thirteen-year-old.  So he had
taken Moses aside and given him a stern lecture.

"Moses," he'd said, "I don't want you running around with these
comrades.  You go to school, and then you come straight home, and you
sit in the house.  If you see other children throwing stones at the
police, don't you do it too.  We are Zionists.  If it is God's will
that the government changes, it will happen.  It is not for us to do.
We are out of the things of this world."

Mope was convinced that his son had obeyed his edict.

Moses was a good boy.  And yet those people said the police had beaten
him to death.  It can't be, thought Samuel Mope.

One of his own sons was a policeman, for God's sake; so was the pastor
of his church.  Mope himself had spent most of his working career
building jails for the apartheid government.

He didn't exactly admire the South African Police, but he found it
impossible to believe they'd attack an innocent child without
provocation.  So he stalked into the Zionist church hall, just before
dawn, disrupting the ongoing service.

"I want the lighties [little ones] who sing with my son !"  he
bellowed.

There were four of them.  Simon and Ntime Makgatholela were twins, aged
twelve.  They were tiny, deer like creatores with big, round eyes and
legs that twisted nervously around one another.  Their elder brother,
Joshua, was thirteen, and a head or so taller, and their cousin
Surprise, also thirteen, was considerably fatter, but they were all
small boys, shy little dirt-scufflers, too timid to meet a white
stranger's eyes, let alone the Jehovistic gaze of a towering black man
like Samuel Mope.  He was glad they were frightened.  He wanted them to
be.  Hemarched them outside for questioning.

"All right," he said.

"You little buggers were causing trouble, weren't you?  You were
throwing stones at the police!"

"No, sir," cried the small boys.

"It's not true, sir."

"Don't lie to me!"  thundered Samuel Mope.

"You were making jokes!  You were calling the police names!"

"No, sir," cried the small boys.

"You can hang us if that's true, sir."

"Very well then," said Samuel Mope.

"Now I want the truth, and you'd better tell it, or there'll be big
trouble."

This is what the boys had to say.  They said Moses arrived at their
house around eight the previous evening.  The boys had sat down in
front of the TV and shared a supper of tripe and porridge, eating with
their fingers from a communal bowl, as was the African custom.  After
the meal, they washed their hands and set out for their friend Robert's
house five small boys, talking about girls and soccer.  Robert lived a
few blocks away, on Tshabangu Street.  His father, Mr.  Komane, owned a
panel van.  On Friday and Saturday nights, he loaded it full of
uniformed Zionist choir boys and drove them up the hill to the
church.

The streets were dark that night, because all the streetlights were
out.  In fact, streetlights went out in townships throughout the
country at the height of the rebellion; the authorities claimed the
power lines had been sabotaged, but blacks believed they were actually
switched off so the police could do their dirty work unseen.  The choir
boys had heard stories about 'the system," and how it could get you at
night, so they walked quickly.  They reached Robert's gate without
mishap but didn't go in, because they were scared of Robert's dog. 
Instead, they stood at the gate, shouting and whistling for their
friend to come outside.

Just then, a brown Toyota Corolla turned onto Tshabangu Street and
cruised slowly toward them.  They paid no attention.  It was surely a
civilian car.  When the Toyota was abreast of them, however, it drew to
a halt, and a voice yelled, "Wat sock julie in die straat die tyd?"
What the hell are you doing in the street at this time of night?
Looking up, the boys saw white faces and blue police uniforms inside
the car, and they panicked.

"We knew they would think we were the comrades," said Joshua, the
oldest of the boys.  So the choir boys took to their heels, and cops
exploded out of the car in pursuit.

Joshua hurdled a fence and made a clean getaway.  Tiny Simon ran into
the grounds of number 3 Tshabangu Street, ducked into the backyard
privy, and huddled there, whimpering with terror.  But Moses and the
others were a little slower, and the police caught them.  And then.
well, they weren't really sure what had happened then.  It was dark,
they were scared, and they hadn't seen it clearly.  It might be better
if Mr.  Mope heard the story from the lady at number 3.

The lady in question was a plump, forceful woman named Rebecca Mvalo.
In township parlance, she was a shebeen queen, mistress of an illicit
speakeasy.  Samuel Mope had often passed her place and seen groups of
men sitting on the incandescent yellow porch, sipping from quart
bottles of Lion or Castle beer, but he had never been inside.  Zionists
did not frequent shebeens.  Mrs.  Mvalo took no offense.  Indeed, she
had respect for Samuel Mope and his stern, abstinent religion, so she
told a white lie.  She said she was entertaining 'a few friends and
relatives' over 'cool drinks' when the incident occurred.

It was ten to ten, she said.  She and her guests were watching TV3, the
Tswana channel, when they heard a high-pitched scream right outside the
window.  Her first thought was for her daughters, who were out there
somewhere, so she rushed to the back door, flung it open, and found
herself face to face with a white polies, a policeman.  He was holding
two whimpering Zionist choir boys by the scruffs of their neck.

The children twisted out of his grasp and ran into her arms, but the
screaming continued.  It was coming from the side of her house.

Mrs.  Mvalo brushed past the cop, turned a corner, and entered the
alley that separated her house from the one next door.  It was dark,
but the man in the alley was clearly a white policeman.  He was
steadying himself against the wall with one hand, holding onto the
neighbor's fence with the other, and trampling something underfoot a
screaming child, by God.

Mrs.  Mvalo stormed down the alley shrieking, "Hey, what do you think
you're doing?"

The white cop looked up, startled.  Such boldness was rare in blacks.
Mrs.  Mvalo noticed that he was holding what she called a skietyster in
one hand a 'shooting iron," or revolver but she wasn't scared.  She was
skelling in Afrikaans bawling at the top of her voice.

"How can you do this to a child?"  she screamed.

"Look at you, you great big bully, kicking a child!  How would you feel
if it was your baby?  Hey?  Would you feel nice?"

She planted her palms on the policeman's chest and shoved.

He staggered backward, shattering a windowpane with the gun as he lost
his footing, and finally fell flat on his back.  The child got up and
vanished into the darkness.  The cop hauled himself to his feet and
stood there, weaving drunkenly.

The little Zionist choir boys clutching Mrs.  Mvalo's skirts were
screaming something in the Tswana tongue.

"Kereke.t' they cried.

"Kereke!  Kereke!"  The white cop wanted to know what it meant.

"They're saying church, church," Mrs.  Mvalo snapped.

"They're not comrades!  They're on their way to church !"

The policeman suddenly seemed unsure of himself.

"Is it your children?"  he asked.

Just then, someone parted a curtain and peered out to see what the
commotion was about, and a shaft of light fell across the scene.  Mrs.
Mvalo got a good look at the policeman.  He was very young, she said,
with short hair and a neat mustache.  He was wearing riot gear, a
gray-blue bush jacket, baggy pants, and heavy boots.  And he was so
drunk, she said, that it seemed a struggle for him to focus his eyes on
her.  Just then, the second policeman, the one Mrs.  Mvalo had
encountered outside her kitchen door, came around the corner.  He
slapped his brother officer on the back and said, "Let's get out of
here."

Mrs.  Mvalo followed the policemen out into the street, still skeUing
for all she was worth.  She screamed for someone to bring a pencil and
paper and take down these bastards' plates.

Her sister came out, planted herself in front of the Toyota's bumpers,
and started jotting down the license number.  The policemen were
apparently too drunk to care.

"So you're writing numbers?"  they sneered.

"Come stand in the headlights so you get it right!  Write down the back
one, too!"

Mrs.  Mvalo's shrieks of outrage were attracting a crowd, and the
policemen decided it might be prudent to leave before there was real
trouble.  There were four of them altogether three young ones, barely
out of their teens, and one a little older.  Two climbed inside the
Toyota and two stood in its open doorways.  The car raced off to the
end of the block, turned, and came charging toward the crowd at top
speed, the outriders clinging precariously to the roof.  The crowd
scattered.  The car screeched to a halt.

"Get inside!"  the cops shouted.

"Get off the street or we'll shoot!"

One of the policemen drew his revolver and fired two warning shots into
the sky.  Then the driver gunned the engine, and the car shot away in a
spray of gravel.  As it disappeared, an empty bottle came flying out of
the car window and shattered against someone's garden wall.

Once the police were gone, Mrs.  Mvalo looked around for the injured
boy, but he was nowhere to be found.  Moses had in fact staggered back
to Robert Komane's house, clutching fences to keep himself upright.
Mrs.  Agnes Komane let him in.

There were dusty tread marks all over Moses' khaki uniform, she said,
and his hair was matted with blood.  He asked for a pencil and paper,
which struck her as strange.  She humored him, but once he had the
pencil in his hand, he didn't seem to know what to do with it.  Then he
vomited blood.  At that, Mrs.  Komane grew alarmed, and rushed the boy
back to his home.

The sun was up by the time Samuel Mope concluded his investigation into
the death of his youngest son.  He drove home with a heavy heart.  He
sat down at the kitchen table, and his wife brought him a cup of tea.

"No," he said.

"Don't bring me tea.  Bring me a rope, and let me hang myself.  Even
today, when I look out that window and see the garden that my boy made
for me, my heart comes up in my throat, and that is how I feel."

The following afternoon, a detachment of policemen led by two colonels,
one white and one black, came out to open an investigation.  The
detectives took photographs of the scene and statements from the
witnesses.  The colonels promised Samuel Mope that justice would be
done.  It didn't quite work out that way, though.  A twenty-year-old
police constable was tried for culpable homicide, but there were
glaring inconsistencies in the state's case.  Such things were known to
happen when policemen were investigating a fellow policeman and writing
down statements in a language the black witness might not read or even
speak.  And besides, the little choir boys and the shebeen queen picked
out different men in the lineup.  So the constable in the dock was
acquitted.

As if to rub salt into the wound, the police came around and broke up
Moses' funeral.  Moses was the apolitical son of an apolitical Zionist,
and the brother of a policeman, but he was killed by police, and that
made him a martyr to the struggle.  The Atteridgeville comrades took
over most of the funeral arrangements, draping Moses' coffin in the
black, green, and gold flag of the ANC and singing freedom songs over
his grave.

Samuel Mope asked the police to stay away.  A senior officer gave his
word, but it was broken.  An armored Hippo showed up at the cemetery
and followed the hymn-singing throng of mourners home to Samuel Mope's
place.  The policemen parked right across the street from the house and
sat there, waiting.  There were six white policemen in the armored
vehicle, mostly young, some chewing gum and grinning insolently from
behind dark glasses.  Someone yelled an insult, and the cops started
firing tear-gas grenades into the funeral party.

There were tears in Mope's eyes by the time he reached this part of his
story.

"I bought a cow for the funeral," he said.

"It cost me 450 rand.  There were tables full of food, and hundreds of
people.  I asked the police to stay away, but they came anyway, and
then they fired that tear gas.  I tell you, people were rolling around
like pumpkins.  All the tables were knocked over, and the food was
ruined.  I just stood there.

What could I do?

"And then there was no case against that policeman.  My son is dead,
but nothing will happen.  No white man has come here to say, "I'm sorry
your child is dead."  Not one.  Nobody came and said, "Here is my hand,
I am sorry."  You are the first.

"The child was killed because he was going to church.  That was his
only sin.  I still think that if I didn't let him go to church, he
would still be alive.  But how could I stop him?

The church is our life.  We pray to God, and we are out of the things
of this world.  And now there is no case against that policeman.  When
I think about that, my heart comes up into my throat, but I am black,
and he is white.  What can I do?

I have no power, I have fuck-all.  I can only pray.  I can only say,
"Hallelujah, it is all over.  The vessel has shattered, and the water
has drained away."

And so, on October 15, 1985, Moses Mope entered the statistics, one of
some 750 black civilians to die in political violence in the first
thirteen months of the great uprising.  The choirboy stands here to
represent the untold slaughtered innocents, the black babies choked on
tear gas, toddlers crushed by armored cars, little boys shot on the way
to the shops, innocent bystanders clipped by 'stray bullets," and yes,
even the legions of martyred comrades, because there was something very
innocent about a black child confronting an armored car with only a
rock in his hand and anger in his heart.  Moses Mope stands also in
representation of the thousands injured by rubber bullets and bird shot
up to that point, the tens of thousands lashed with whips, and the
hundreds of thousands tear gassed because they were no longer content
to have, as Samuel Mope phrased it, fuck-all.

He was such a decent man, that Samuel Mope, so stern, moral,
law-abiding and God-fearing.  An Uncle Tom, to speak plainly.  He was
the sort of black man the Botha government thanked God for in its
nightly prayers, one of the moderate majority, patient as a donkey and
endlessly respectful of white authority.  I don't mean to belittle him.
Samuel Mope was a man of immense dignity and great restraint.  His
story unfolded in a grave and impartial manner until the very end, when
his face suddenly twisted and tears filled his eyes and he said, Ek bet
vokoL I am black, and I have no power; "I have fuck-all."  In his
mouth, that crude word was like a fist in my white face.

And so a question arises: With the killers of Moses Mope and Dennis
Mosheshwe on one side, how could anyone but a monster not be on the
other?

What then shall we do?

LEO TOLSTOY

IN OCTOBER 1985, I was living in Cape Town, in a flat on a hill above
the harbor.  On the day of Moses Mope's death, like any other day, I
got out of bed and walked down the hill to Mr.  Ali's corner cafe,
where I bought the morning's newspapers.

I had been home a mere month or two, and even in that brief time the
political situation seemed to have deteriorated drastically.
Demonstrations, riots, and police shootings had become so common that
the liberal Cape Times no longer had space to cover them all.  Instead,
it published a map on page 2, a political weather chart showing the
movement across the country of a dark front of violence.

On the Cape Times map, each outbreak of political violence was
represented by a numbered star, cross-referenced to a fine-print legend
that gave sparse details of anonymous black casualties in obscure
places, places most whites had never heard of.  Some days, there was so
much violence that the stars were bursting atop one another, their ink
running together and giving the map the look of a Rorschach blot.

Most of the rest of the news section was taken up with stories about
the political crisis and its bloody consequences.  It was harrowing,
and yet if you wanted, if you were white and lived in a white suburb,
you could just turn straight to the sports page, and see nothing at
all.  I often stood on the balcony of my apartment, peering in the
direction of the townships where the blacks lived, expecting to see
columns of smoke above the killing grounds.  I saw nothing, though.  It
was too far away.  It was all happening in another world.

One reason I'd left Los Angeles was that I could no longer bear to live
in a place where my country's agony was something I read about in the
newspapers.  So I came back to South Africa, and in white South Africa,
South Africa's agony was still something I read about in the
newspapers.  If anything, it was worse, because what you read about
South Africa in its own newspapers sometimes bore no relation to what
you saw and felt on the streets.  The newspapers said that the racial
crisis was intensifying, polarization deepening, and yet there were
times when I would have sworn the opposite was true.  On their
deceptive surface, South Africa's big cities were integrated in
proportions familiar to eyes grown accustomed to America.  There were
blacks in the bars, on the buses, and in the universities; token blacks
in boardrooms and executive suites; black announcers on white
television; little black cricketers on the playing fields of expensive
private schools; and yes, blacks at the lunch counter in Woolworth's.
There were even blacks in Cape Town's municipal swimming pools.  What a
hallucinatory sight that was: blacks splashing in the holy waters of
Sea Point Pavilion.

I had arrived home during South Africa's Prague spring, or at least the
tail end of it, and there was an astonishing freedom of speech and
action.  The Cape Times was utterly merciless in its attacks on the
Botha government much tougher than the New York Times.  The Cape Times
published politically explosive studies of torture in detention,
ignored the ban on quoting the exiled liberation movements, and openly
accused the police of the most flagrant lies and distortions.  And yet
it still appeared on the streets every morning, bearing news, among
other things, of numerous antigovernment rallies and protest meetings.
At that time, it was still possible to stage such events openly, and
some of them were public councils of war.

At one township meeting shortly after my return, the proceedings opened
with the singing of "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika."

After that, a union organizer took the mike and started warming 'em up
for the speakers.

"Viva socialism!"  he shouted.

"Viva!"  roared the crowd.

"Viva communism!"  he yelled.

"Viva!"  roared the crowd.

"Viva ANC !"  the organizer concluded.

"Viva!"  thundered the crowd.  I looked over my shoulder, expecting to
see the secret police closing in, but nothing happened.  It was
staggering.  In the Vorster era, you scarcely dared whisper such
sentiments to your most trusted friends;

now they were being shouted from the podium at mass meetings.  Works of
leftist scholarship that would once have landed their owners and
authors in jail were now hyped on display stands on the floors of chain
bookstores.  Cinemas were showing movies that would never have made it
past the censor a decade earlier, and Cape Town's theaters were clogged
with black people's-theater productions of the Woza Albert and
Asinamali ilk.

I'd seen both plays in America, and been deeply moved by them.  They
were raw, powerful, and utterly revolutionary in content.  They brought
American audiences to their feet and made a vivid impression on
American critics.  I took the Los Angeles Times at its word when it
reported that the creators of such plays were likely to be 'jailed and
tortured' if they dared make their statements on a South African
sidewalk.

That accorded with my memories of the country I grew up in.  And then I
came home, only to discover that black people's theater was actually
performed in the glittering pantheons of white culture, before adoring
audiences of tuxedoed and bejeweled white liberals who forked out ten
bucks apiece to have abomination and calumny heaped upon their heads.

When the curtain fell, the audience reacted just like its American
counterpart; it rose to its feet and awarded its black tormentors a
standing ovation.  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  I seemed to
have come home from the far side of the planet only to find myself in a
lost suburb of Los Angeles.

If I left my new home, which lay in a suburb called Greenpoint, and
strolled south along the se afront I came to a place that was uncannily
evocative of my old home, of Los Angeles.  Sea Point was vulgar and
tacky and full of brazen, sunstruck hedonists sporting gold chains and
golden suntans.  The chamber of commerce put out promotional fliers
infested with words like international and cosmopolitan.  Sea Point
wasn't content to be a white suburb at the foot of an awesome mountain
on the tip of Africa.  It tar ted itself up as 'the South African
riviera," and even that was a misnomer, because there was almost
nothing South African about it.

Its restaurants were French, or Italian, or American, like the Seven
Spurs Steak Ranch and The Drug Store, or Greek, or Indian, or just dumb
hybrids, like American Croissants.

The jeans and paraphernalia store was called The Mafia, the local disco
was Charlie Parker's, and the Israeli felafel joint at the far end of
Main Street was KazaN an  At Kazablan, you could sit at an outdoor
table, drink espresso, and read, say, Style magazine, a slick glossy
virtually indistinguishable from the average American city magazine, or
the Weekly Mail, voice of the aboveground white left.  The Mail read
rather like The Village Voice.  It was apartheid atrocities from cover
to cover, save for some columns in the back where the movie critic
subjected Rambo to Marxian analysis and the art critic apologized for
liking sculpture that lacked a specific anti-apartheid message.  The
Mail's tone was sometimes blacker-than-thou, but its advertisers knew
whom they were reaching.  In one ad, a property developer invited white
yuppies to purchase restored houses in a semi proletarian
gentrification zone, dangling before them the enticing prospect of
'rubbing shoulders with civil rights lawyers, alternative publishers,
off-mainstream medics and subversive academics."

For some whites, at any rate, this was what the anti-apartheid struggle
had become a device by which to sell real estate to trendy liberals.

Earlier I described the predominantly English-speaking and well-off
white suburbs of my childhood as glass-bottomed boats adrift on a
strange and violent sea.  They remained just that, but the composition
of the boats' companies seemed to have changed, to have grown much more
sophisticated and cosmopolitan.  The whites I passed on the streets
looked just like whites in America same hairstyles, same clothes, same
gleaming white teeth, and similar cultural and political attitudes.

There were Boers aboard the dream boat, too untold hundreds of
thousands of them.  They were called New Afrikaners, and they were
people of the most civilized sort.

They holidayed in Europe, collected art, drank fine Cape wines, and
appreciated the best in books especially the works of Breyten
Breytenbach, the bad boy of Boer literature.

The great Boer poet spent the sixties in exile in Paris and most of the
seventies in a South African prison, paying for his role in a quixotic
'terrorist' plot.  In the eighties, however, he won Afrikanerdom's
foremost literary award and returned from exile to receive it.  Five
hundred tuxedoed members of the High Afrikaner Establishment turned out
to witness the ceremony.

Breytenbach told them that they were disgusting.  He said he could not
breathe in South Africa for the stench of moral hypertrophy.  The word
Afrikaner, he added, had become synonymous with 'spiritual
backwardness, ethical decay, cruelty, dehumanization, armed baboon
bandits, and the stigma of brutal violence."  The Afrikaner
establishment rewarded this tirade with another confounding standing
ovation.

At a dinner party, I ran into an old school friend.  In the decade
since I'd last seen him, Anthony had become the quintessential Western
ad exec.  His ads for BMW, among other products, topped their American
counterparts in subtlety and cunning.  Anthony invited me to a party in
a generic se afront condo, where I met a generic Costoo girl named
Penny.  Actually, Penny wasn't generic at all; she was beautiful and
intelligent, and she'd come a long way from the Slum where she was
born.  She had a degree from a white university and a job on the local
edition of Cosmopolitan, inserting quotes from South African
celebrities into articles from the American mother magazine.  Her
values were the values of Costoo, which were also the values of the
white suburb where she lived.  Even her radical politics were expressed
in terms appropriate to Costao's ladylike pages.

"Yes," she once told me, 'a little revenge would be very sweet."  She
was interested in vengeance because she happened to be black or
colored, to split hairs.

Penny was black and I was white, but that scarcely seemed to matter in
the place Cape Town had become, so I asked her for a date.  After that,
we went together for a while.  In many ways, my friendship with Penny
was just another glancing urban encounter with just another Costoo girl
in pumps and black stockings.  In white Cape Town, apartheid often
seemed a dim and distant menace.  You could ignore it if you chose
to.

We ate in restaurants, drank in bars, saw plays and movies, and nobody
ever hassled us.  We might as well have been in New York.  Sometimes we
stayed home and watched TV, and most of that was American, too: Hill
Street Blues, Dallas, Dynasty, Mork 4 Mindy, and even Bill Cosby, to
one of whose TV daughters Penny bore a passing resemblance.

The lunatic white right hated Cosby.  They called him daardie lelike
cling met die uitpeul o- 'that ugly creature with popping-out eyes' and
claimed he was a propaganda tool in the hands of the traitor Botha.
According to Eugene Terre' Blanche leader of the fascist Afrikaner
Resistance Movement, Botha was trying to brainwash whites into
believing that most blacks were really suave, likable people like the
Huxtables.  The white right thought all this was deeply subversive, and
they were right.  Whatever else you might say about American sitcoms,
the best of them were effective proselytizers for apple-pie American
values tolerance, fairness, sexual and racial justice.  They seemed to
have let a lot of light into the Afrikaner volk's dark Calvinist
heart.

One of the largest-selling magazines in the country, for instance, was
the Afrikaans weekly Die Huisgenoot.  In my childhood, it was a
stultifying organ of Calvinist orthodoxy, standing for cleanliness,
godliness, patriotism, and obedience, and against sex, adultery, pop
music, and degenerate foreign culture.  When I came home, it was
running articles on Boy George.  In my absence, there had been several
seismic changes in Afrikanerdom: The Dutch Reformed Church had
withdrawn its blessing of apartheid; the grand apartheid blueprint for
a pure white South Africa had been scrapped;

and the Afrikaner tribe itself had split into right-wing and ultra
right factions.  All this was astonishing, but it somehow paled
alongside the change in that Boer magazine.  If you'd told me when I
was twenty-two that Die Huisgenoot would one day grant space in its
pages to a long-haired, sexual Iv ambiguous heroin-addicted British pop
star, I would have howled at your idiocy.

So where was I?  Ah, yes, talking about TV.  There was something
positive to be said for the entertainment fare on the state-run
network, but news was another matter entirely.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation dwelt lovingly on terrorist
bombings in Paris, ethnic riots in Sri Lanka, and IRA knee-cappings in
Belfast, as if to say, look, things are tough all over.  It had very
little to say about the ongoing mayhem in the townships, though.  If it
addressed the subject at all, it was to blame Communist agitators, who
were said to be inciting children too young to understand what they
were doing to sacrifice themselves in senseless acts of arson and
violence.

After Bishop Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Prize for Peace, it became
impossible to ignore him entirely, so the SABC tried to portray him as
an agitator, too.  That was rather hard, given the Bishop's generally
moderate demeanor.  The SABC did its best to catch him wearing shades,
which gave him a cool and predatory look, and saying something that
could be construed as incendiary.  To get the quotes they wanted, they
often had to cut him off in mid-sentence.  The good Bishop would vanish
from the screen in the midst of a subversive formulation, or the sound
would die away, leaving him to mouth silently on the screen, a goldfish
in a bowl.

SABC news was hopeless.  The most insightful political coverage on the
state network was an American science-fiction series called V, about a
race of outer space aliens that colonizes Los Angeles.  The conquering
aliens could take human form, but they were actually cold-blooded
reptiles and oppressed the natives in cruel and devious ways.  The
parallels were not lost on black kids: It was not uncommon to see the
letter V spray-painted on a township wall.

As in all things in the land of apartheid, there was white TV and black
TV.  In Cape Town, the Bantu channel spoke Xhosa, the tongue-defying
click language that so perplexed travelers in Dawid Malan's time.  I
used to peer into Xhosa television for hours on end, hoping for
revelations and insights, but the only show I could follow was
Spiderman.  Otherwise, I couldn't figure why people were laughing, or
what the plot was.  I couldn't even decipher the rules of the game show
that came on at six on Saturday evenings.  The set looked like a
kindergarten playground for adults, full of brightly colored plastic
ramps, funnels, and tunnels.  Black contestants in bright orange
overalls and crash helmets pushed one another around this indoor
obstacle course in what looked like a golf cart.  The host was a black
Chuck Barns, a hugely cheerful and fun-loving fellow.  He yelled
encouragement into the mike in this incomprehensible language.  The
studio audience fell around laughing.  Every now and then, the helmeted
contestants climbed out of the golf cart and hung their heads in a wave
of derisive laughter.  Then they were dismissed, and more contestants
brought on to perform the same antics.

I watched this show religiously for weeks, but I could never figure it
out.  Nor could Penny.  In many ways, she was very much like me.  She
was black and I was white, but we had more in common with one another
than with the indecipherable African world on TV2.  Even the weather
forecast was hard to follow because the map was completely devoid of
familiar place names.  There was no Johannesburg on TV2, no Durban, no
Pretoria.  Instead, all the cities had African names: eGoli, Pitoli,
Tegwini.  It was like looking at a different country, so we switched
back to the white channel, and watched Love Boat or Hill Street Blues
or something.

Whenever I saw a familiar location, I whooped and yelled, "I've been
there."  Sometimes that seemed the most marked difference between us
that I had been there while she had stayed put.

One night, we went to see Kiss of the Spider Woman, a movie about two
cellmates imprisoned in some South American despotism.  One was a
political prisoner, the other a transvestite.  In some ways, it is a
movie about political morality.  The transvestite is apathetic and
acquiescent; the political prisoner, an idealist.  When the
transvestite asks why he bothers, the idealist replies, "A real man
doesn't allow anyone around him to be humiliated."

That line lodged in my memory, and later, when Penny and I were sitting
side by side on a sofa, watching television, it brought on one of my
periodic convulsions of conscience.  I was suddenly struck by the
improbability of our situation.

She was black and I was white, and in spite of all that had changed the
city blinking in the dark outside the windows was not New York or
London.  It was Cape Town, South Africa.  There were still some
whites-only signs out there.  The government schools were still
segregated; the suburbs, too, at least technically.  Coloreds like
Penny were expected to vote in coloreds-only elections for a sham,
powerless coloreds-only House of Parliament.  Penny was just like me,
and yet she had been born a second-class citizen under apartheid, and
remained one in terms of at least a dozen discriminatory laws still on
the books.  And Penny, let it be said, was lucky.

Somewhere out there, in some dark township, a black man was being
beaten to death by white soldiers, or tied to a chair and shocked and
tortured.  Somewhere out there, insanely brave black boys and men were
ferrying guns from place to place, manufacturing petrol bombs, building
barricades of tires in the streets or setting fire to government
buildings.

They were no longer willing to settle for vokol, for 'fuck-all," and
some of them would die as a consequence.  Even as we sat there,
someone, somewhere was dying, in a day or two his anonymous death would
be marked by yet another star on the Cape Times page-2 map.

So yes, in the end, the question stood: With the killers of Moses Mope
on one side, how could there be any question as to which side Malan was
on?

It might be a little early to spring this on you, my friend, but this
is what white South African politics ultimately reduce to: a question
of faith, preferably blind.  Those who have it do fine, and those who
don't ... well, they sometimes find themselves in a state not so very
different from the one Tolstoy described in "A Confession," his essay
on religious torment.  As Tolstoy saw it, members of his circle of the
Russian aristocracy followed one of four paths in life.  Some were too
stupid to ponder the meaning of life.  Some found the question bleak
and depressing, and drowned it in debauchery and drink.  Some gave
careful consideration to the meaning of life, discovered that there was
none, and committed suicide.  And finally, there were those who reached
the same conclusion, but were too cowardly to act consequentially.
Among these, Tolstoy numbered himself.  He felt that life was
impossible without faith, and yet he believed in nothing.  Logic called
for him to kill himself, but he lacked the courage.

"My position was terrible," he said.

Leo Tolstoy might have enjoyed South Africa.  As a white man living in
South Africa in the mid-eighties, he would have faced another choice of
four paths.  The first path, the most right ward path, was the road of
eternal, absolute, and uncompromising white supremacy, leading into the
arms of the neo fascist far white right.  There were two 'respectable'
political parties out there, plus a growing constellation of lunatic
paramilitary sects.  In the headquarters of one such sect, the mighty
Afrikaner Resistance Movement, I saw a Hieronymus Bosch-like mural that
eloquently summed up the white right's beliefs: In the center of a
darkling plain stood a bound white Christian holding aloft the cross of
knowledge.  Like Gulliver in Lilliput, he was surrounded by swarms of
antlike beings in this case, blacks all hauling on ropes, trying to
pull him to his knees.  Two puppets Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young- were
flying by on a magic carpet.  The strings on their limbs led up through
the clouds and attached themselves to the fingers of Leonid Brezhnev,
depicted as a huge, leering puppet master.  An ominous front of
blue-black thunder clouds was rolling in across the landscape,
transforming as it advanced into a battle formation of black warriors
armed with hammers and sickles.  A single shaft of sunlight fell from
the darkening heavens and lighted up the face of the bound white
Christian.  His eyes were steely with resolution.  They said, "Over my
dead body."

The second path was the path of PW Botha's National Party, the path of
gradual reform, leading to God knows what end.  This was the path
chosen by most whites, including my family, who tended to think of it
in terms of sound government and conservative common sense.  When I
came back from the United States, my brother Neil slapped me on the
back and asked, "How's my boy Ronnie?"  My brother was a jocular
fellow.  He'd grown up to be a magistrate, a fervent Christian, and a
great admirer of Ronald Reagan's.  When he heard I'd passed through
London on my way home, he slapped my back again and asked, "How's my
girl Maggie?"  In his judgment, Ronnie, Maggie, and PW were all of a
similar ilk.

As for my father, his politics had evolved to the point where he would
occasionally have colored colleagues over to dinner, shake his head
ruefully over the stupidity of putting whites-only signs on entry ways
and elevators, and turn snarling on his own sister when her nose
wrinkled at the thought of blacks coming into her church.  He would sit
in his armchair of an evening with a whiskey in hand and the day's
newspapers spread out on his lap, drawing my attention to all that had
changed or was about to change.  President Botha had removed the ban on
interracial love and marriage.

President Botha had offered freedom to political prisoners who
renounced violence.  President Botha had promised 'just and peaceful'
solutions to the country's problems.

"By the time Nelson Mandela gets out of jail," said my father,
'there'll be nothing left for him to do."

It was a sweet sentiment, but rather naive.  Like an American, my
father thought that dismantling apartheid was mostly a question of
allowing blacks to move to the front of the bus, use the drinking
fountains, and sit alongside whites at lunch counters.  He didn't grasp
that the only issue was power.  The Botha government was committed to
sharing power with blacks under some nebulous new constitution,
diagrams of which always looked like spiderwebs.  Arrows of black
influence crossed dotted lines of black advisory input, but the myriad
strands always came together in the box labeled State President.  The
diagrams were accompanied by a torrent of indecipherable newspeak from
Botha's constitutional theorists, but at least one thing emerged
clearly: The Afrikaner National Party would compromise but never
surrender.  Power would have to be shared on white terms, with ultimate
power remaining in white hands.  In other words, Botha's policies were
simply a new and slightly more compassionate variant of the ancient
Boer doctrine of keeping blacks down.

The third path was the path of white liberalism, which led into the
embrace of the Progressive Federal Party, party of choice in the
glass-bottomed boat.  The PFP stood for Western-style democracy, free
markets, and negotiated solutions ideas that struggled to find support
outside the urban enclaves of upper-middle-class English-speakers.  The
broad mass of Afrikaners found the PFP unpalatable, and so did blacks.
Since Dawid Malan's time, white English-speaking liberals had been
standing in the wings, wringing their hands, manicuring their delicate
humanist principles, and asking blacks to be patient just a little
while longer.  By 1985, white liberalism was a discredited, impotent
force.  I believed in everything the PFP stood for, and yet I found it
hard to believe in the party itself.  Indeed, the PFP no longer seemed
to believe in itself.  Soon after I came home, its leader resigned,
saying that he had begun to take bimsellc for granted.  In an
explanatory statement to the press, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert likened
himself to 'one of those mantelpiece music boxes that people dust off
from time to time and listen to with a quaint nostalgia."  Under the
circumstances, the PFP appeared to have become less a choice than an
evasion.

And that left the left, which forked into two paths.  The first was the
path of Steve Biko's Black Consciousness.  Most of my black colleagues
on The Star had long since disappeared down that path, but a white man
could not follow.  Black Consciousness organizations did not accept
white members.

All that remained for a white man's salvation was the broad faith of
Charterism.  The charter in question was the Freedom Charter, credo of
the exiled African National Congress and its internal wing, the United
Democratic Front.  The charter was an ambiguous, poetic document, open
to almost any interpretation.  Its opening line was "The people shall
govern!"

and it went on to state that the doors of learning would be thrown
open, the land shared by those who worked it, and gold revenues by
those who mined it.  Liberals thought it a liberal tract, social
democrats believed it reflected their agenda, and hard-line
Marxist-Leninists saw nothing in it to contradict their point of view.
To the extent that there was an agreed-upon canon, it consisted of
this: Nelson Mandela is 'our father," the ANC is our movement, and we
stand for black rule in some sort of socialist state.

Those friends of my youth who had stayed in the country had for the
most part evolved into Charterists.  Susie was a doctor in a township
clinic.  She and her husband were founding members of the left-leaning
National Medical and Dental Association, committed to 'bringing the
medical profession directly into the liberation struggle."  In
practice, this translated into digging bird shot out of the flesh of
black teenagers without reporting the injuries to the police.  Vasi had
become a civil rights lawyer, suing the bastards when they ill-treated
detainees.  Most of the others had become journalists, dedicated to
recording police atrocities with their notebooks and cameras, and at
least one literally had abandoned the pen for the sword and joined the
military wing of the exiled ANC.  This was Faye, the radical feminist
from my crime-reporter days.  She was awaiting trial in a neighboring
country for possession of Soviet ammunition.

Another figure from those times, the Belgian girl with whom I once
shared my slum flat, had recently returned from Europe and thrown
herself into 'people's education," a critical front in the struggle.
Joji had been away almost as long as I had.  She'd spent seven years in
Europe, earning a philosophy degree from the Free University of
Brussels.  In Europe, she'd become a Green, and if there was no Green
on the ballot she voted for the Communist candidate.  She was working
for an organization called SACHED, the South African Council for Higher
Education.  Her boss, Neville Alexander, was a Trotskyite intellectual
and a former political prisoner.  If his faction of the left triumphed,
Alexander hoped to become minister of education.  He was readying
himself for that day by drawing up alternative school syllabi, free of
racist indoctrination and capitalist distortions of history.  Joji was
one of a team of researchers and writers working on the project.

She cast herself as a white radical, but her politics were a matter of
emotion rather than science.  She hated rock spiders hated apartheid,
and had "a good vibe with the Afs."  She told me that she could see in
their eyes, as they passed on the street, that they were friendly and
kind.  Earthy and pagan, too, and those were qualities she admired
tremendously.  She loved dancing and parties, and cloaked herself in an
aura of primal womanhood, which made her, at least in her own mind, a
natural ally of Africans: They were also unfettered by the restraints
of bourgeois white convention.

Joji lived in Tamboerskloof, an aging Cape Town suburb where rents were
low and the atmosphere vaguely bohemian.

She shared an apartment and had only one room to herself, but it was a
pleasant room full of flowers, sprigs of wild grass, and seashells with
a view of the gray slopes of Table Mountain.  She slept on the floor,
on a mattress covered by a colorful cloth called a kikoi, from East
Africa.  Another kikoi was draped across the ceiling.  She had a huge
collection of African music on tape, and danced in the African style,
with bent knees, stiff torso, and much thrusting back and forth of the
hips and derriere.  With her African beads flying and African bracelets
jingling, her skin burned dark by the sun, her green eyes closed, and
her body moving to the hypnotic beat of the music, she looked almost
African.  In fact, she once told me that in some reach of her soul, she
was African.  She felt as though the African sun had touched her, and
the rawness of it infiltrated her blood.

That was a pretty common sentiment in our circle of hell, which was the
same circle as ever, the circle of bourgeois leftists, white-suburban
division.  It was hip to call yourself a white African and even to
assume an African first name.  East African kikois were in, as were
car-tire sandals, African music, African jewelry, African political
leaders, and the authentic pronunciation of the word itself, as in
AAH-free-kah.  All this struck me as a rite of sympathetic magic,
performed in the hope that it would somehow make its practitioners less
white, less comp licit  It was silly, and yet it went much deeper than
mere affectation.  It was harder than ever to be white and conscious,
now that things were coming to a head and blacks were being slaughtered
in the townships.

Many young whites genuinely yearned to shed their whiteness and the
unbearable freight of bullshit and guilt that came with it.

There were so many white Africans that they had their own national
magazine, a sort of bush-league Rolling Stone called Villa.  Villa's
basic philosophy was fuck apartheid, let's dance, and it celebrated the
jol, of which I have already spoken.  The magazine was an odd mix of
rock and politics, given to fanlike adulation of the new black heroes,
and to covering political rallies as if they were rock and roll shows.
In its pages, a young white writer once described the way he felt while
watching the comrades dance at some rally, their black faces glistening
with sweat, their feet thudding in unison, chanting the litany of the
ANC's mightiest blows against the white system.  I longed to be black,
he said; I longed so bad that I trembled.  But when the euphoria wore
off and the music died away, he was still white, and doomed to play a
supporting role in the revolution.

For many white Africans, that role was cultural intervention, arising
from the idea that art should be subversive, and that artists played an
important role in the struggle.  To this, my friend Joji added amen.
She was a member of Teenage Botha, an avant-garde rock band that was
featured occasionally in the pages of Villa.  Teenage Botha's songs
bristled with cryptic references to the 'violent riddle' of life in a
country they described as 'the penis of the West," whatever that meant.
At some point in their show, they invited the audience on stage to talk
dirty into the microphone.  White kids in black leather would leap up
and spit out the utterances or even just the names of Afrikaner cabinet
ministers, and the winner would be awarded a funny hat.  This was
considered subversive, but the secret police were quite tolerant of
white cultural intervention.  Teenage Botha was silenced only once,
when the guy next door to a party called the police to complain about
the noise.

So yes, Joji had her frivolous side, but on Monday mornings she put her
face on straight and returned to her chosen site of struggle.  In
fairness, her cause was a noble one.  Some

South African high-school history textbooks still referred to apartheid
as a 'final solution' based on 'the Christian principles of right and
justice."  People who disagreed too strongly were still likely to find
the secret police breathing down their neck, but Joji took it all in
stride.  She was a battle-hardened activist.  In her student days in
Brussels, her vanguard organization occupied a building on the campus
of the Free University and turned it into a 'people's' school of
architecture.  They managed to hold the building for months, and Joji
was right there in the front line, clawing at the eyes of riot
policemen or whatever.  Her friends in Europe didn't understand why she
wasn't at the barricades in South Africa, doing the same thing.  She
had always proclaimed her hatred for apartheid, and yet they never saw
her among those black demonstrators and rioters on television, and her
letters never mentioned taking part in 'direct action' against the
system.  How come?  Had she gone soft, or what?

It was difficult to explain to outsiders, especially if you were a
socialist who endorsed libera tory violence and the historical
inevitability of revolution.  All the anti-apartheid resistance
organizations were essentially socialist in orientation, but it was the
whites who were the most dogmatic, the most prone to dotting i's,
crossing t's, and enforcing doctrinal purity.  You might find this
puzzling, since whites had the most to lose in a socialist
redistribution, but it made complete sense to a white South African.
Whites who surrendered their claims to class privilege gained something
infinitely more precious in return:

relief from the guilt and complicity that preyed on their minds like a
nightmare.

It was impossible to change race, you see, and almost completely
pointless to be a liberal.  As far as the black resistance was
concerned, liberal democrats of Helen Suzman's ilk and racists like PW
Botha were just different teeth in the same white mouth.

"They help crush the food for the same throat," opined Sechaba, journal
of the ANC.  There was only one avenue of escape from this awful maw
and it lay in the embrace of socialism.

First step on the road to redemption was to convince yourself that
South Africa was being torn apart by class struggle, not race war.  The
second was to move into alignment with the black working class and its
self-proclaimed vanguard, the nonracial, socialist ANC.  Beyond that
point, you were born again.  South Africa became a country where
enemies were determined by class alliance, not race, and since you were
allied in theory to the black proletariat, your whiteness was
theoretically irrelevant an enormously comforting thought in an agony
of racial polarization.  In the eighties, socialism became the
political religion of choice among younger and better-educated members
of South Africa's white suburban aristocracy, a sort of opium of the
elite.  It numbed you pretty effectively so long as you stayed in your
glass bottomed boat.

As the center withered and white liberals became figures of ridicule,
the boat took a sharp left ward turn.  In a way, this was deeply
heartening.  In my youth, I prayed for a political realignment that
would smash the racial monoliths and deposit substantial numbers of
whites on the black side.

This wouldn't have solved South Africa's problems, but it would at
least have transformed the struggle into a political one.  The
alternative, as our late leader Vorster put it in a rare moment of
lucidity, was too ghastly to contemplate: a war in which we slaughtered
one another on the indiscriminate basis of race.  In my first few
months back home, it seemed to me that such a realignment was truly
coming about.  In my circle of hell, at any rate, everyone was jumping
up and down and yelling hallelujah for the struggle.  I should have
been pleased, but I felt as if I were an atheist at a revival meeting;
I longed to join in, but I was crippled with doubt.  In order to be
saved, it seemed to me that all I had to do was shout "I am saved!

Hallelujah!  Down with apartheid!  Viva socialism!"

I tried it a few times, but it didn't work for me.  I even joined the
United Democratic Front's abortive march on Pollsmoor Prison, to
deliver a message to Nelson Mandela.  The black part of that march
turned into a bloody street battle between police and protesters, but
the white part was a sad affair.  A few thousand scared and indecisive
students gathered in the Great Hall of Cape Town's ivy-covered liberal
university.  There was a great deal of talk from the podium about
'building socialism' and 'demonstrating solidarity with the masses."
Then we set off on the march, having agreed in advance that if the
police insisted, we would turn back, so as to live to build socialism
another day.  There was some halfhearted singing of freedom songs, but
they sounded a little silly in English, and lame in the throats of
whites.  Besides, hardly anyone knew the words.

And so, mumble-singing, we trooped half-heartedly down to the highway.
A senior police officer and a handful of constables met us at the
university's gates and warned us not to look for trouble, so we turned
around and marched back up the hill again.  After lunch, a small band
of diehards decided to go it alone in a placard demonstration along the
highway that skirted the campus.  Such demonstrations were an old
student tradition in white Cape Town, a ritualized pas de deux in which
both sides could be counted upon to follow their assigned steps.
Students lined up on one side of De Waal Drive, cops on the other.
Sometimes, though not always, the police would disperse the
demonstrators with a baton charge, but nobody was ever seriously hurt.
The South African Police didn't kill white students, and white students
never tried to kill them.

That afternoon's demonstration proceeded as choreographed.  We waved
signs in the air, cops glowered from the far side of the road.  We
refused to disperse, so they gratified us with a few rounds of tear gas
and that was the end of that.

The white left had fought apartheid, and now we were free to go home
and crane our necks in the direction of the townships in search of
smoke we could never see.  We all hated apartheid, but when the chips
were down, and it was high noon on the township streets, and the
killing started, there were no whites on the black side of the
barricades.  None.  Ever.

It was a Saturday in Cape Town, and we were 'going in."

This is how reporters put it: They always said, "We're going in today,"
and I always thought, That's a line from a John Wayne war movie,
although I couldn't remember which one.

Today, we were going in to cover the mass funeral of the Gugnletu
Seven, seven black men killed in a shoot-out ten days or so earlier.
The South African Police had apparently got wind of an ANC hit squad in
town, planning to ambush a van ferrying black cops home after their
shift.  The police laid an ambush for the ambushers.  In the ensuing
gun battle, seven black men were shot dead, and one white cop was cut
up by flying fragments of a Soviet-made grenade.

In the aftermath, witnesses claimed to have seen white policemen walk
over to two of the wounded and blow them away in cold blood.  Worse
yet, in the eyes of the Cape Times, at least two innocent bystanders
appeared to have been caught in the cross fire.  One of the dead black
men was retarded, another a peace-loving Rasta who'd never evinced the
slightest interest in the struggle.  The police insisted that all seven
dead men were trained terrorists, but then the South African Police
constantly talked shit.  So there was a hue and cry in the opposition
press about the slaughter of innocents, and at least twenty-five
thousand wrathful blacks were expected to turn out to bury their
martyrs.

It was hard to predict how the day would turn out.  A few months
earlier, there would have been no question at all:

The funeral would have ended in another blood bath.  The burial of
martyrs was usually preceded by twenty-four hours of mourning, singing,
and speech making.  By the time the flag-draped coffin was lowered into
the grave, the comrades were primed for battle, and the police could
almost always be relied upon to provide a provocation.  They would fire
tear gas into the crowd, or order the group to disperse, and then the
shit would hit the fan, with the unarmed crowd hurling itself at
armored cars in a suicidal fury of grief, rage, and frustration.  At
such times, white skin became a grave liability in the townships.

The only white civilians who dared venture into riot situations were
reporters and cameramen, and they went in on journalistic commando
raids, driving fast cars, preferably rented ones.  The model of choice
was a BMW with a sunroof.  In a sun-roofed BMW, a white reporter could
shoot photographs and footage without setting foot in black South
Africa, and make a quick getaway if necessary.

Some news crews plastered their cars with 'foreign press' signs and
wore T-shirts bearing the same message in English and two African
languages.  This was a brave gamble, because apartheid's riot police
hated the foreign press, and clearly drooled at the prospect of a few
foreign correspondents falling victim to stray bullets.  Still, it was
better to court danger from that quarter than abandon yourself to the
mercy of the mob.

Those foreign press signs were intended to say, We're on your side;
we're here to amplify your cry of freedom, and document your terrible
suffering, but sometimes the message failed to get through.  At the
height of the battle of Cape Town, in September 1985, a car seldom
lasted longer than a day.  At sunset, you returned it bent and dented,
and in the morning you hired a replacement.  It got so bad that some
car-hire agencies stopped renting to news organizations.  In those
harrowing times, going in was like jumping from a plane, or clambering
out of a Flanders trench into the teeth of a machine-gun gale.

In the months since, the tension had ebbed somewhat, but still, you
never knew; you never knew.  That very week, a BBC TV crew had driven
into a roadblock of boulders and oil drums in a township called Duncan
Village.  Some five hundred black children sealed off the road behind
them and closed in on the trapped BBC car.  And then the stoning
started.  Every window in the car was shattered, but the newsmen
couldn't move.  Panic-stricken, they rammed the car up the pavement,
across a gutter, and limped away on flat tires, nursing cuts and
bruises.  Yet another rental car wrecked.

My companion on this trip to the front line was Victor Mallet, Reuters'
Cape Town correspondent.  He was a rosy cheeked dark-haired English
lad, twenty-five years old, the scion of a foreign service family and a
graduate of Oxford.

On our way in, we were ruminating on South Africa's unique occupational
hazards and worrying about the day ahead.  I had been stoned a few
times, but Victor was a veteran.

He'd been in the thick of it since the uprising started and had had
several close shaves.  In the aftermath of the Langa massacre, for
instance, he had himself smuggled through a police roadblock in the
trunk of a Reuters car.  Just inside the seething township, they ran
into a mob which started rocking the car as a prelude to burning it. At
this, Victor popped out of the trunk, grinning nervously and waving his
foreign press credentials.  The blacks weren't very much impressed.
They were holding Victor by the scruff of the neck and pondering what
to do when a brave black reporter came to his aid.

"These days," Victor concluded, "I avoid going in unless it's
absolutely necessary."

By now, we were crossing the buffer zone, the stretch of industrial
wasteland that isolates black Guguletu from white Cape Town, and I
found myself wishing that Victor hadn't told that story.  This modern
no-man's-land was strewn with garbage and the hulks of rusting cars,
but it fulfilled exactly the same function as the buffer zone that
separated the Boers and Xhosa in Dawid Malan's day.  As we neared the
township, the old psychic toxins started flooding my brain, and my
viscera began to churn uneasily.  By the time we entered the township
itself, I was lighting my next cigarette on the butt of the one I'd
just finished.

The auspices seemed favorable, however.  The streets of Guguletu were
calm this morning: no angry crowds, no smoke in the sky, no barricades
of burning tires.  We wove our way through the maze of boxlike houses
to the football stadium, where the funeral would take place.  The
ceremony wasn't due to start for another hour or two, so Victor and I
joined the knot of white reporters and cameramen loitering outside the
stadium gates.  The Washington Post was there, and the BBC, Libgration,
the Miami Herald, Reuters, some German news agency, ITN, the Cape
Times, the Cape Argus, and a dozen or so scribes I didn't recognize.

CBS News was represented by Allen Pizzey, an amiable Canadian who had
been in South Africa for fifteen years.  In my days as a lowly crime
reporter, he held a glamorous job on The Star's Africa News Service.  I
had not forgotten Allen Pizzey.  In the final year of my American
exile, I saw his face on Dan Rather's newscast almost every night,
talking about the latest apartheid atrocity, about the hideous
injustice and unfairness of it all.  Pizzey and I stood together for a
while, talking about the old days and watching the passing show.

Blacks were streaming into the stadium.  One of them, an old man,
detached himself from the passing throng and approached the knot of
white pressmen.  He halted five yards from us and started railing like
an Old Testament prophet.

"We are not fooled!"  he shouted.

"We know how you live, with your cars, your big houses, your swimming
pools!"  The passing stream slowed to a halt, and several hundred black
faces turned toward us.  The white press fell silent.

"I am sorry for you," the old man yelled.

"You will die!

I am sorry for you!"  He was unsteady on his feet, drunk on liquor and
hatred.  The white press stared variously at the dust, at the scudding
clouds, at their shoes and watches.  It was one of those exquisite
South African moments.  It seemed unwise to meet the old man's fiery
eyes, or to say anything at all.  Eventually, a marshal came to the
rescue and led our tormentor away.

The day was warming up, and the crowd was growing.

The forbidden black, green, and gold colors of the outlawed African
National Congress were everywhere: on streaming flags, on banners, in
scarves, on lapel pins, and on the epaulets of the black marshals, who
looked like so many Che Guevaras in their black berets and khaki
fatigues.  Inside, an army of young comrades was raising dust on the
floor of the stadium.  They were dancing the toi, the township war
dance, running on the spot, their feet thundering in unison.  They were
cradling imaginary mortars, bazookas, and AK-47s in their arms and
singing war songs about soldiers coming to free them.  A tiny black
tyke led them through a call-and-response routine.  In America, such a
boy would have been playing video games, but here he was already a
soldier, smiting the sky with his tiny fists, puffing out his child's
cheeks and howling, "Harrrrrrrrrrrrrr," in electrifying imitation of a
machine gun.

You'd have had to be dead of heart to remain unmoved by such a crowd,
by its passion and its sense of invincible righteousness.  I was moved,
all right toward confusion.

Part of my heart was with them, but my own surname kept cropping up in
the chanted litany of those who would one day die.  The reference was
to General Magnus Malan, minister of defense, but another song
broadened to include me.  Its refrain ran, "Gibela pezul qwentblu
abatchela, Jabula mani shaya amaBunu' - "I climb up on the roof and
shout it out, my mother is happy when I hit a Boer."  My heart always
sank when I heard that song.

I was still chatting with Pizzey when a column of black women rounded a
corner and bore down on us, dancing and singing their way toward the
funeral.  This was the contingent of the United Woman's Congress.  The
sisters were wearing uniforms and berets, jogging along in tight
formation.  Running abreast of them was a gawky white girl, a student
by the look of her, wearing jeans and thick glasses, hair tied back in
a sensible bun.  She was trying to insinuate herself into the packed
black ranks.  She was smiling nervously, waving her fist in the sky,
and copying the black sisters' steps, but there was no room for her in
the formation.  Pizzey and I turned to stare at her.

"Oh, baby," chuckled the CBS news correspondent, 'when the day comes,
you'll still be whitey."

When the day comes, you'll still be whitey.  Here was a fine how do you
do.  I was gifted by a vision of Dan Rather saying, "In South Africa,
some whites are stupid enough to believe in civil rights and democracy,
and think they can change sides in a race war.  Allen Pizzey has the
story."  The image was so absurd that I found myself chuckling along
with the Canadian newsman.  In truth, I tended to agree: Baby was a
little ridiculous.  Whatever her politics, Baby remained whitey when
the chips were down, which is why there were never any whites at the
burning barricades.  If you were white in the wrong place at the wrong
time, you were a target.

It seemed entirely fitting that the comrades should stone me, given my
advanced degree of genetic complicity and my secret racist heresies,
but most victims seemed to deserve better.  It was never the bad guys,
the Augie de Kokers, who got into trouble in the townships.  It was
almost always one of the tiny, tiny minority of whites who were willing
to break the unwritten rules that governed everyone else.  An
idealistic foreign doctor who came to South Africa to work in a black
hospital was knocked off his motorcycle in Soweto and set upon by a mob
armed with steel fence poles.  A kindly white woman taking her servant
home to the township of Sebokeng ran into a mob that put a brick
through her window, killing her baby.  In Cape Town, a building
contractor's willingness to spare his black laborers a long walk home
cost him his life his pickup crashed in a hailstorm of stones, and a
mob beat him to death.  And in a small Free State town called Parys,
going into the township cost my Uncle John his certainties.

Uncle John was certain that blacks loved him.  As you may recall, he
was one of the few adults in my childhood who actually saw blacks, who
shook their hands and treated them like men.  My uncle was an old man
now, but he still had his shop on Dolf Street, his 'boys," and his
black friends.  All that had really changed was the nature of his
handshake.  When blacks bounded into his shop to buy something or just
to say hello, Uncle John greeted them with the elaborate handclasp of
black power and solidarity.  He still voted for Botha, and I doubt he
knew that the handshake had vaguely subversive connotations.  He wasn't
a leftist or anything, just a thoroughly decent old man whose view was
not obscured by fear, not even when the uprising started and unrest
broke out in the township on the far side of the railway tracks.  He
still crossed the bridge to deliver gas to black customers or to confer
with black men who'd served alongside him in South Africa's forces
during World War II.  They had become old men, too, but the government
was sometimes sticky about granting them their veterans' pensions.  So
my uncle often went into the township to help some struggling old
comrade-in-arms draft his proof of-service petition.

On one such excursion, he saw a crowd of uniformed black schoolchildren
on the road ahead.  They seemed to be waving at him.  He was accustomed
to being waved down for a friendly chat, so he slowed as he neared
them, rolled down his window, and leaned out to greet them.  And that
is why their stones caught him full in the face.

My uncle was lucky.  His face and forehead were badly cut, and every
window of his pickup was shattered, but he survived.  At dawn the next
morning Africans started knocking on the door of his home to say how
sorry they were.  By sunset, my uncle's spirits had revived somewhat,
but the incident left me deeply dismayed.

I mean, nobody was exempt from the law of genetic complicity, not even
foreign dignitaries.  Around that time, the recently deposed socialist
prime minister of France, Laurent Fabius, and his former minister of
culture, Jack Lang, visited South Africa at Bishop Tutu's invitation.
They had come, as Fabius put it, 'to support the fight against
apartheid," but that was more easily said than done.  In Johannesburg,
Alexandra township had become so dangerous for whites that the
Frenchmen couldn't set foot in it.  In Cape Town, they were bold enough
to actually go in.  Unfortunately, the comrades of Old Crossroads
didn't recognize eminent socialists on sight.  They saw whites in a
van, so they stoned it.  Later, standing beside their shattered vehicle
and looking somewhat shaken, Fabius and Lang said thank you.

"I'm pleased I had this experience," Fabius told the press, 'because I
can now understand the level of frustration and anger in this
country."

At that, the Frenchmen boarded an airliner and flew away, trailing the
usual high sounding denunciations of apartheid.

It seemed to me that they'd left a rather haunting question unanswered:
How did you fight apartheid and build a just society if the people you
were doing it for stoned you because your skin was white?  White
Charterists looked at me as though I were insane for even asking, let
alone harping on the question the way I did.  I couldn't help myself,
though.

It seemed a central fact of political life.  Whites were clinging to
power because they were apprehensive about blacks' intentions toward
them, and events like Fabius's stoning reinforced and intensified those
fears.  Most whites were so afraid of Africans that they never went
anywhere near the townships, not even in peacetime.  They crossed the
road when they saw Africans coming, or locked the doors of their cars.
They were so scared that they wouldn't even attend professional soccer
matches in the secure heart of white Johannesburg because they knew
blacks would be present in large numbers.  White Charterists mocked and
scorned such backward people, but when it came down to it they weren't
that different themselves.

They stayed away from the burning barricades because they were
frightened, too.

That line of argument lost me several friends, including another former
lover.  Her name was Jill, and she was a fairly devout white radical.
When the resistance called a stay-away, she stayed away from work, and
when it called a boycott of white business, she drove miles to shop at
stores owned by Indians.  My talk of genetic complicity enraged her.

"You don't argue," she said.

"You just trample on our flowers."  She was right, of course.  I
thought her flowers were weeds.  I thought that random stonings of
whites because they were white undermined the Charterists' nonracial
doctrine, and I had lost faith in socialism besides.

"You have become one of them," she once told me, meaning that I had
become an American.  In South African resistance circles, this was the
most cutting insult imaginable.

The endless bickering was poisoning our relationship, so we went
camping one weekend, to see if there was anything to be salvaged.  Not
much, it turned out.  We bickered all weekend, and we were still
bickering on the way home.  What did our whiteness mean in the context
of the South African struggle?

Nothing, she said.  Everything, said I. It was a Sunday night, and we
were crossing the dark Cape flats in a speeding car.  In the distance,
we could see the floodlit face of Table Mountain, and the lights of the
white city at its feet.  The night around us was dark, however, and
full of the winking campfires of squatters Africans who had come to the
city in defiance of apartheid's influx-control laws and built shacks in
the dense bush on the flats.  It was no way to live, but such people
had no choice.  For that reason, among others, the road was no longer
safe at night.  There had been stories in the newspapers about blacks
coming out of the bush to stone passing cars, or to drop bricks from
bridges.  A brick in the windshield at seventy miles an hour can kill
you, so Jill and I were tense.

Halfway across the flats, the headlights picked out a strange
apparition at the roadside.  From the corner of my eye, it looked like
a giant water boatman, skating down the shoulder of the freeway in the
dark.  I twisted around for a second look and saw a crippled black man
flying along on a single roller skate, his thin, useless legs drifting
beneath a wasplike torso.  His elongated crutches were sweeping back
and forth like oars, and he was literally rowing toward Cape Town.

The instant we passed him, Jill spoke sharply.

"You're not going to stop," she said.  I didn't really want to.  In
fact, I'd have preferred to pretend we hadn't seen him at all, but now
that she'd mentioned him, I felt obliged to act.  So I braked and
pulled off the freeway.

Jill said nothing.  We sat there in silence, peering into the
surrounding darkness for signs of ambush.  I shuddered and thanked God
the car hadn't broken down out here.  After what seemed an eternity,
the cripple drew abreast of us and gratefully accepted a ride.  He
tossed his oars in the backseat and started tugging at the system of
buckles and belts that crisscrossed his chest.  For an instant, I
thought he was going to unbuckle his legs, and that I was fated to
drive back to Cape Town with a talking torso on the seat beside me.  It
turned out, however, that he carried the tools of his trade in bags
slung around his chest, bandolier-fashion.  The tools followed the
crutches into the back.  The crippled man slid onto the front seat
between Jill and me, and we pulled back into the traffic.

The cripple turned out to be a most congenial fellow.  He smiled and
laughed and chattered away at the top of his voice in Xhosa.  I
gathered that he fixed Primus stoves for a living, and that he was
going to Guguletu, some miles down the road.

Beyond that, everything he said was Greek to me; I laughed when he
laughed, but I had no idea what he was saying.

And then Jill broke in.  She spoke over the cripple's head, as though
he were not there at all, and I guess he might as well not have been,
for all the English he understood.

"Tell him you can't take him home," she said.  She meant, tell him
we're not going into any township for his sake, even if he is a
cripple.  But she couldn't say that, of course, so she said, "Tell him
you're running out of petrol."  I glanced down at my fuel gauge.  The
tank was more than half full.  Jesus, I thought, what if he knows how
to read a fuel gauge and catches me lying?  There had to be another way
out of this.  I was trying to dream one up when Jill tapped the cripple
on his shoulder.

"Petrol finish!"  she shouted.

"We not take you home!  Petrol finish!  Understand?"

It was by no means clear that he did.  He laughed and nodded his head
and chattered on in Xhosa.  I ransacked my memory and tried to tell him
the bad news in Fangalo, the African Esperanto spoken in the gold
mines.  'iPetroli pelile," I ventured 'the petrol's finished."  At
this, he laughed louder than ever, tapped the fuel gauge, and nodded
his head vigorously.  Oh, shit, I thought, I'm going to have to do
better than this.

I was trying to figure out a solution when a fluorescent blue sign
reading Guguletu flashed by in the windshield.  I snapped on the
indicator and started cutting across the lanes toward the slipway
leading off into the heart of darkness.  I was halfway there when Jill
lunged across the dashboard and grabbed the steering wheel.

"We're not going in there!"  she hissed.  The car swerved back and
forth as we wrestled over the wheel.  By the time I'd regained control
and pulled onto the verge, we were a hundred yards beyond the Guguletu
offramp, and I had still more to apologize for.

So I got out, helped the cripple into his harness, shook his hand, and
tried to explain.

"We would like to take you home," I said, 'but we are scared we will
get killed if we go in there."  I don't know if any of it got through,
or if it mattered anyway, because he was still smiling as we drove
away.

And that's how it was in white South Africa at the height of the great
black uprising.  Some of us supported apartheid and some of us didn't,
but we all had something in common with Dawid Malan: We approached
Africa in fear and trepidation, or better yet, we didn't approach
Africa at all.  It seemed to me that this was surely our central
problem.  We had yet to come to terms with Africa, and doing so was not
going to be easy.  I mean, how do you come to terms with something you
don't really understand?

Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being
reshaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others.  I say be
is a cannibal, and be becomes a cannibal:

I say be is a laundryman, and he becomes a laundryman.  What is the
truth of Friday?

-] M COETZEE, from the novel Foe NOW COMES ANOTHER tale of ordinary
life and extraordinary death in my country.  Take my hand, and let's
fly like gods to where it happened.  Let's swoop down on the Indian
Ocean port of Durban and race north along the torrid coastal lowlands,
over gleaming seaside mansions and palm-fringed resorts, over the
Tugela River, and into Zululand.

A little more than a century ago, a British army crossed that muddy
river and conquered the mighty Zulu nation.  The land we're passing
over is the land those redcoats opened up for white settlement.  From
the air, the whites' land is a broad river of lush green sugarcane
flowing north into the heart of Zululand.  Here and there, on a
hillock, stands a big white house with cool slate floors and French
windows open to catch the breeze that comes up off the Indian Ocean in
the late afternoon.  The life of a Zululand sugar baron is very
sweet.

In Zululand, the sun always shines, the rains seldom fail, the flowers
bloom all year, and there are always enough Zulus to cut your cane and
serve your gin and tonic at sunset.

Every few miles, a tributary of sugarcane flows out of the hills to
join the main channel of this river of white man's land.  If we bank
and follow one of these tributaries inland, into the hills, we soon
find ourselves in another world.  As we advance up the fertile river
valley, the land grows drier and the slopes grow steeper, and
eventually the sugarcane peters out altogether.  The land beyond is too
dry or mountainous to be farmed profitably, so it has been left to the
Zulus.  It is a sad landscape of weedy corn patches and dusty roads,
mud huts, tin shanties, dilapidated schools, and crumbling mission
churches.  It wounds our eyes, so we turn back to the great green river
of white-owned land and follow it northward.

Some ninety miles north of Durban, in the headwaters of the white
land-river, lies a town called Empangeni - a fitting name in South
Africa, for its roots lie in the Zulu word for loot or plunder.
Empangeni is built on plunder, on rich black soil that belonged to the
Zulus a century ago.  The town rises like an island from a sea of green
cane, and the sky above it is often stained by the smoke from a turning
sugar mill.

It is sugar that creates the wealth that gives white Empangeni its
prosperous gloss, its look of a boom town in the American Sunbelt.
There's a brand-new mall downtown, vaguely Moorish in architecture, and
one or two multi story office blocks on the main street.  The parks are
clean, the schools spacious, the streets and driveways full of shining
new Toyotas, Hondas, and BMWs.  A blight of split-level ranch homes is
spreading out across the surrounding countryside.  In white backyards,
uniformed black maids are hanging out the washing, barechested black
garden boys trimming the hedges, and the white madams are... Well,
Debbie Good is seated on a comfortable sofa in her living room, sipping
tea.  Her ginger hair is permed just so, her fingernails are long and
red, and she favors polyester slacks.

She has three young children and a husband named Bennie, who is
puttering around the garden in short pants and rubber slip-slop
sandals.  Bennie is a good-natured bloke with blue eyes and a blond
shock of Shirley Temple curls.  The skin exposed by the V of his shirt
has been burned bloodred by the sun.

Debbie and Bennie own a farm on the very edge of Empangeni, just beyond
the last row of brand-new Americandream suburban tract homes.  This
land was settled by Debbie's grandparents in the early twenties, when
it was still quite wild.  Debbie's grandfather died young, and it was
her grandmother who plowed the swamps with mule teams and planted cane.
Grandma also built a spacious house with a cool veranda, and lined the
dirt road leading up to it with fir trees, to make it feel a little
more like home.  Home, of course, was England.  Most of the original
settlers in these parts were British, empire loyalists and cricketers
to a man.

They named their farms Brandon Hill and Briarley Grange and sent their
sons to a 'public' school, Michaelhouse, where they were taught to keep
a straight bat and a stiff upper lip.

The Goods' farm is called Carsdale, and it is but one of three they
own.  They have a second sugar farm south of here, and a sheep ranch in
a place called Mooi River.  At first glance, their life seems very
sweet, but it is less so than it appears.  Debbie is only
thirty-something, but she is already talking about the good old days,
when the Zulus were childlike in their simplicity, too innocent to
harbor a capacity for guile, cunning, or envy.  She remembers walking
home from high-school parties carrying a lantern and being not at all
afraid.  She remembers hot summer nights when you could sleep with your
doors and windows open and be bothered by nothing but mosquitoes.

In those days, the Zulus were loyal and faithful and obedient, and
whites honored and loved them in the way they might have loved a good
dog.  They were 'our Zulus."  They didn't steal or drink white liquor;
they didn't demand higher wages, and they didn't go out on strike.

In those days, the Zulus knew their place and kept to it, scurrying
around on the periphery of white lives, bearing gin and tonics,
responding to bells, cutting cane, and minding children.  You could
walk across the farm or around town, and all the Zulus you passed would
smile and greet you respectfully.  But now ... Debbie can't put her
finger on it, but she knows something has changed.  As a child, she
used to hang around the black cane-cutters' shacks, sharing the wild
spinach and putu they cooked in iron pots on open fires.  She'd never
allow her six-year-old daughter to do that today.  She just doesn't
trust the Zulus anymore.

"You never know with them," she says.

They haven't harmed her in any way, apart from pilfering the odd stick
of cane.  They've just grown 'cheeky."  They talk back.  They don't
greet whites any more.  And there are so many of them.  On shopping
trips, white madams have to jostle their way to the counter through
throngs of noisy blacks.  At the bank of pay phones outside the post
office, the queue is always ten blacks deep.  In the chemist shops
across the street, row upon row of shelves are given over to black
cosmetics and skin-lightening creams with brand names like Hollywood,
Kool Look, and Jet Set Four-in-One Lite Lotion.  In the old days, such
merchandise was available only in 'coolie' trading stores near the
railway station, but now it's everywhere even the big department stores
and supermarkets carry it.

Of course, Debbie doesn't mind the Zulus getting ahead, growing worldly
and sophisticated, wearing makeup and high-heeled shoes, and driving
cars and all that.  She's not a racist.  In fact, she is genuinely
'nice' to the 'girls' and 'boys' who work for her and Bennie.  She
wishes them all the best in the world, but she doesn't want them forced
on her.  She likes them, but not enough to have them in her home. After
all, what would she and a Zulu matron talk about?  They have nothing in
common.  She knows it's not much fun to be black in South Africa, but
she bristles at the notion that it's all the whites' fault. As she sees
it, the blacks want everything whites have, but they're not willing to
improve themselves or work for it.

"They want it all on a plate," she says.

"It's because of that that they're so bitter."

She says such things without having any real familiarity with
conditions in Ngwelezane, the local township.  She can see it creeping
over the lip of a hill on the eastern boundary of the family farm, but
she seldom sets foot there.  The government has built no new houses in
Ngwelezane for twenty-six years, because Pretoria's mad scientists
don't want more blacks in 'white' South Africa.  They want them to stay
in the hills, in the reserve, and remain wards of KwaZulu, the Zulu
state.  It is the same old dilemma.  Blacks can't get jobs in white
South Africa unless they have residence rights in the townships, and
they can't get residence rights unless they have jobs.  Those cunning
enough to solve this conundrum are crammed in ten to the tiny house.
The schools are overcrowded, the teachers incompetent, the hospital
understaffed and inefficient.  Unemployment has virtually doubled in
recent months.  In Ngwelezane, life is a grim struggle for survival.

In the hills outside town, in the Zulu homeland, times are even harder.
Almost four million black peasants live out there in mud huts and,
tin-roofed hovels, paying obeisance to traditional chiefs.  A bus
service called Washesha plies the rutted roads leading into and out of
the reserve.  Each year it brings a million black passengers to town,
to shop or look for jobs.  There are no jobs in town, but out on the
reserve there is nothing at all, not even hope.  It hasn't really
rained in almost four years.  Cattle are dying; crops are shriveling.
Some people think the drought is God's punishment for apartheid. Others
think the end of the world is approaching.

In fact, things are building to a thunderhead throughout the country in
this late winter of 1983.  The rumble of black discontent is growing.
The Afrikaner government, running short of options, is suddenly talking
about reform and negotiation, about peaceful change and power sharing.
Prime Minister PW Botha has just unveiled his proposed new
constitution, which extends a vote of sorts to Indians and colored
people but leaves blacks out in the cold.  As far as many Africans are
concerned, this is the final insult.  Even moderates are outraged.
Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, ruler of KwaZulu, the self governing Zulu
homeland that borders on Empangeni, has denounced Botha's
constitutional proposals as a 'blueprint for violence."  The insult
embedded in the new constitution, he warns presciently, will trigger a
devastating explosion of black rage.

"It draws us nearer," he says, 'to the night of the long knives."

Debbie shudders to hear such talk.  So many whites have already left
the country because of it.  They've taken their families to Australia,
or 'home' to England, because they were afraid of being butchered in
bed.  She sometimes wonders whether they'd done the right thing,
because she, too, is scared of being butchered in bed.  Almost all
white South Africans are.  It's a given.  They're all waiting for the
night of the long knives.  You never know when, but you know it's
coming.

And then one night you go to bed around ten.  You hear the old red
setter barking outside, but you don't bother to get up; you doze off
again, so you don't hear the mosquito screen on the kitchen window
being peeled back, and you don't hear someone climbing quietly into
your house.  You don't hear him coming down the passage on his bare
feet, and you don't hear him easing open the bedroom door.  All you
remember, really, is the split second of terror when you wake up.
Bennie is thrashing around at your side, and there's a dark figure
looming over the bed.  And then the hammer smashes into your temple,
and the next thing you know you've woken up in a surreal horror movie.
Blood is dripping all over the telephone, the children are screaming,
and your husband is tottering around in circles, drenched in blood,
looking for his guns.  You're trying to phone the doctor, but you can't
remember how to dial.

Major Reginald Reynolds of the South African Police, detective branch,
is a darkly handsome man in his forties.  A sportsman.  A visitor is
likely to find Major Reg Reynolds hunched over a table, lovingly
cleaning and oiling his small arms and hunting rifles.

"Eleven months I hunt men," he says, straight-faced, 'and in the
twelfth I hunt animals."  Major Reynolds usually enjoys both his blood
sports, but Debbie and Bennie are friends of his, so he's upset when
he's called out to their farm in the dead of night.  He's even more
upset when he gets there, because he's seen all this before.  Same
modus operandi, same means of entry, same circular lesions on the
skulls and faces of the victims.

The first victim was Peter Trollip, a young fellow who works for one of
the local hotels.  Peter and his wife, Wendy, live in the blight of
split levels that has crept up to the border of the Goods' farm.  Three
weeks ago, a black man stole into the Trollips' home and bludgeoned
Peter unconscious as he lay sleeping.  Wendy woke up to find herself
face-to-face with a demon from her darkest subconscious: a huge black
man with bulging muscles, standing at the foot of the bed with a bloody
claw hammer in his fist.  He advanced on her, whispering "Sssh, sssh."
She screamed, "Bring the gun!  Bring the gun !"  There was no gun, but
the ruse worked.  The black man climbed out the window and disappeared
into the darkness.

Who is this guy?  All Reg Reynolds knows is that he's black.

He takes off his shoes and wears his socks as gloves, so he leaves no
prints.  His weapon is an ordinary claw hammer of the sort you can buy
in any hardware shop.  He doesn't rape women, and he doesn't harm
children.  Debbie Good's six-year-old daughter woke up during the
attack and came wandering down the passage toward her parents' bedroom,
crying for Mummy.  The intruder heard her coming, intercepted her in
the doorway, took her by the hand, and gently led her away from the
carnage.  And then he disappeared.

Major Reynolds thinks that's a little weird.  I mean, an ordinary
criminal would surely have smashed the child's head in, too, and
thoroughly ransacked the house.

The ambulances come and take the injured to the hospital.

Bennie winds up in intensive care, and Debbie undergoes surgery for
brain damage.  They were lucky.  The Macaskills weren't.

Graham and Anna Macaskill are warders at Empangeni's jail.  They and
their young son live in a house on the grounds of the prison.  One
stiflingly hot night, three months after the Good attack, they leave
the French windows in their dining room open.  The Hammerman steals
into their house after midnight.  He kneels on the bed between the
sleeping couple and rains alternate blows on their heads and faces.

He has perfected his technique, and this time he drives the hammer
right into Graham Macaskill's brain.  He beats Mrs.  Macaskill's head
and face to a bloody pulp.  He keeps hitting until both of them are
dead.  Then he takes some loose cash and slips out of the house without
waking their sleeping son.  Once again, there are no clues, no
fingerprints, nothing.

Empangeni is a small town.  Almost everyone in white Empangeni knows
everyone else.  If you didn't know the Macaskills, you knew the Goods
or the Trollips, and you had to wonder, Why them?  Who's next?  It
could be you.  The terror begins in earnest.

Who is the Hammerman?  Is he a psychopath?  Whenever he strikes, he
helps himself to whatever's lying around, but robbery seems a barely
adequate motive.  He never bothers to loot systematically.  Is he
killing because he hates whites?  Some blacks think so.  His weapon is
Africa's traditional pig-killing instrument; a black magazine called
Pace thinks this may be a point to consider.  Pace speculates that the
Hammerman might be 'a maniac insurgent from the ANC or PAC camps."  The
police doubt it, because the modus is too crude.  But they remember the
Mau Mau, who butchered Kenyan settlers with pan gas and they remember
Poqo, a local terrorist band that hacked a few isolated white farm
families to death in the early sixties.  So they're taking no
chances.

They cast the largest dragnet in the history of the province and tell
the press they're closing in on the Hammerman, but they're lying.  They
have no leads, no fingerprints, and there's nothing coming in on the
informer network.  Major Reynolds and his men are spending their nights
lurking under bushes in suburban gardens, watching everything that
moves.  The Hammerman doesn't show himself.  So Pretoria sends in a
posse of reinforcements from the big-city Murder and Robbery squads,
cannibal cops who stop at nothing to get their man.  Any African on the
street after dark is liable to be collared, questioned, told to produce
his pass, maybe knocked around a little if he doesn't give straight
answers.

This sort of thing hasn't really happened in Empangeni in years. Whites
know it's souring race relations, but that's too bad.  They're scared. 
Gun sales double; sales of burglar bars triple.  Some white hard-liners
demand a racial curfew; they want all blacks off the streets at night. 
Whites start going to bed in crash helmets, with guns under their
pillows.

And so the fear mounts toward hysteria, fed by increasing turbulence in
the political sphere.  One day, the tabloid Zululand Observer appears
on Empangeni's streets with the headline "Bloodbath!"  emblazoned
across its front page.  War has broken out at the nearby University of
Zululand.  Six black students have been killed in a dash between
moderates and radicals.  The night of the long knives is apparently
starting, and the Hammerman is still at large.  Rumor has it that he
has struck repeatedly, and that news of his depredations is being
suppressed to prevent panic.  The Observer publishes an editorial
headlined "Attack Rumors and Paranoia."  It cautions its white readers
against panic, and dispel Is rumors of 'an imaginary monster ...
battering children and raping young girls."

To understand such things, you must see them in the context of the
state of elemental guilt and fear in which white South Africans live.
The Hammerman's killings raise the specter of indiscriminate black
retribution; they force whites to examine their lives, and the
structure of their society, and when whites do so, they see that they
cannot escape complicity.  That quickens the fear into a fever.  They
hear the Hammerman rustling in the garden; they see him lurking in the
bushes; they hear his footsteps on the path; his shadow falls across
the curtain.

The police are inundated with false alarms.

"Perhaps he watched our house today," says a columnist in the
Observer.

Perhaps he's already decided where he will strike next.  It's as if the
darkness and insecurity is filtering in through our very windows... The
fear has become an infectious disease.  it grows and intensifies in the
hours of the night, and yet it gets us nowhere.  When fear of the
Hammerman recedes, a new fear will take its place.  Every new day will
bring new fears, because we don't know, and not to know is almost
always to fear.

Ah, yes, now we're hearing the heart of the matter.  Whites don't know
blacks, or what their rise portends.  To most whites, blacks are
inscrutable; they can't talk to them, don't understand them, and
struggle to see them in three dimensions.  Blacks are merely black;
they are blank screens onto which whites project their own fears and
preconceptions.

Empangeni's district surgeon, for instance, is a kindly man named Louis
Fourie.  Dr.  Fourie is a cosmo pole a so-called new Afrikaner.  He
lives in a magnificent house and drives around his district in a white
Land Cruiser, wearing an immaculate white safari suit.  He owns a fine
collection of African crafts and a cellar full of vintage Cape wines.
His elegant, blond wife, Ronelle, was reared to be a concert pianist,
and Louis is a passionate ecologist.  On his study wall hangs a framed
copy of Chief Seathl's moving plea to white men, to cease their rape of
the earth.  In South African terms, Louis and Ronelle Fourie are a most
enlightened couple.

The Fouries have two blond daughters, both still in primary school.
Their father is worried about them, so he takes precautions.  He has
the burglar bars checked, then opens his diary and writes down a plan
to thwart the Hammerman.  He will drape a fishnet over his marital bed,
to catch the hammer as it descends.  He and his wife will henceforth
sleep with their heads at opposite ends of the bed, each with a pistol
within reach.  In Dr.  Fourie's view, such precautions are merely
sensible.

The Fouries' houseboy is a luminously gentle and loving young Zulu
named Emmanuel.  Emmanuel is an old-fashioned Zulu, a mission boy.  He
is a figure from a romantic African novel of an earlier age, the loyal
gun bearer who sacrifices himself to save the bwana from the lion.  He
cares so deeply for his white master's family that whenever the doctor
is called out after dark, the houseboy stands guam in the garden.  He
does this of his own volition, without telling the madam.

One night, the madam peers out into the menacing darkness and sees the
faithful black retainer standing in the shadows, watching the house,
and a shiver runs down her spine.  She thinks, Oh, God, it's Emmanuel;
he is the Hammerman.  So she suffers frightful terror until her husband
comes home and sorts it all out.

"You never really know what they're thinking," she explains later,
somewhat shamefacedly.

Justin Smith and Dave Brauteseth are also wary of 'the black."

They're easygoing, beer-swilling white guys, Jo'burg boys, brand-new in
town.  They've just taken over the lease on the African eating house
down at the bus terminal, and they're doing very nicely, thanks.  The
buses carry eighteen thousand potential customers to their doorstep
every week, and their joint is so busy it's anarchic.  They're selling
tankersful of iJuba Special, African sorghum beer, and truckloads of
palishi, or corn porridge.  An Indian does the books; blacks do the
heavy work; and Dave and Justin Jay take alternate weeks off to relax
or go fishing.

Dave and Jay used to smoke zol and jol, but they've outgrown all that.
They're both turning thirty, both newly 'turned on to free enterprise."
Jay has a wife and two kids already, and Dave has just acquired a
'steady bird."  They're sharing a house on the edge of town, one of
those big white farmhouses with a swimming pool and big windows to
catch the breeze off the distant sea.  They're somehow Australian, in
their short pants, slip-slops and suntans.  They like the "Afs," but
they're a little wary of them, because, well because of those
troublesome hawkers, for one thing.

Dave and Jay paid 150 grand for their lease, and then these black
hawkers set up tables on the very doorstep of their eating house,
selling flyblown tripe and grilled chicken innards.

The police chase them away, but there is no work out in the reserve, no
food, no rain, and no hope, so they're always back the next day.  Dave
figures they're costing him five hundred a day in lost business, so he
takes the traditional approach.

"I

used to go beat the shit out of them," he says.

According to tradition, blacks are supposed to cower and run away when
the white man cracks his whip.  Times are changing, though.  One day,
the hawkers stand their ground, and Dave finds himself surrounded by a
menacing black crowd.  It is a very ugly scene.  So Dave gets his mate
Roger, and they both get their guns, and then they go out on the plaza
and threaten to blow some cheeky black heads off.

"It's the only way," says Dave.

Since that is Dave's way, perhaps he and Jay have cause to be wary. Jay
sleeps with the .32 within reach, and Dave keeps an ax under his bed. 
The Hammerman is seldom far from their minds.  Every day, a 'big coon'
comes into their joint and sits in a corner, nursing a beer. He's an
undercover cop, working on the Hammerman case; he's waiting for some
drunkard to loosen up and say too much.  And then one day, yet another
demon from the depths of a disturbed white subconscious materializes on
the other side of the counter: "A man with eyes like fire," Dave tells
the Zululand Observer.  The Hammerman.

At least Dave thinks it's him.  He looks something like the IdentiKit
picture in the newspapers.  Dave calls the police, but by the time they
come the suspect has vanished.

This visitation leaves Dave and Jay feeling a little uneasy.  Is the
Hammerman after them?  Has someone told him about the rough way they
deal with the hawkers?  They take no chances.

That night, Jay and his young wife bed down with the .32 on the bedside
table.  Dave, being single, goes out.  He gets smashed on beer at the
Rugby Club, gets home around 1:30, and falls asleep in the car.  He
wakes to find the sun rising.  It's already 5:30; they should have
opened the eating house thirty minutes ago.  Where the fuck is
Justin?

Dave staggers into the house and barges into his buddy's bedroom.  Jay
is slumped against the wall, dead, with a dozen hammer holes in his
skull.  His half-naked wife is lying on the floor.  She'd spent hours
spinning around in a pool of her own blood, trying in vain to get up.
Her underpants are full of stool, passed reflexively.  Her face is a
bloody pulp, and now she's dead, too.

Dave hears whimpering and, turning, sees Jay's tiny daughter, Leanne,
standing up in her cot and calling for her mother.

Dave picks her up, covers her eyes, and walks away to call the
police.

Once again, there are no dues, no prints nothing but a single drop of
blood on the pajamas of one of the Smith children.  In his mind's eye,
Major Reg Reynolds sees a muscular black man standing in a moonlit
bedroom, listening to the soft breathing of a sleeping white child
while blood drips from his bloody daw hammer.  Weird.  Who is this man?
Reynolds is gaunt and gray from exhaustion.  He's working this case
night and day, because he's worried that his career might be blighted
if the big-city Murder and Robbery cops solve it before he does.  He's
working so hard that his marriage is disintegrating, but he's no doser
to an arrest than he was six months earlier, when Peter Trollip was
attacked.  The only good news, as far as Major Reynolds is concerned,
is that Jay's .32 has disappeared.  Reg Reynolds knows in his bones
that the Hammerman's going to use it, and when he does, he might break
cover.

A mere ten days later, Sergeant J J Myburgh of the dog squad is out on
patrol with his faithful Alsatian and his faithful Bantu constable. The
radio reports a shooting in the Zulu reserve on the edge of town, so
they leave the tar and head up into the hills on a dirt road.  In a
shack three miles from town, they find a black man hiding under a bed,
bleeding from several bullet wounds.  His woman, Mavis, is yelling
indignantly.  She tells the police that her Moses had a fight with his
step-brother, Simon, and that Simon pulled a gun and shot him.  The
gunman has apparently fled to the white suburbs, where his girlfriend
works as a domestic.

As the sergeant and his entourage roll up at the given address, a
disheveled black man appears in the doorway of the servants' quarters.
He smiles wanly when he sees the police, and offers his wrists.

"Well," he says in Afrikaans, 'you may as well put the cuffs on."
Sergeant Myburgh is a dull cop, and not at all given to poetry.  He is
moved to observe, however, that to his way of thinking, the suspect
seemed 'spiritually weary."

The suspect's name is Simon Mpungose; pronounced mmpon-go-say.  He is
thirty-five years old.  At the police station, he says, "I am the
Hammerman."  Within three hours, Major Reynolds has him up before a
magistrate, formally confessing to four murders, four assaults with
intent, and one armed robbery, committed with Justin Smith's .32.  He
describes his killings in graphic detail and concludes, somewhat
enigmatically, that he has committed these crimes because he wants to
die.

"All I want," he says, 'is to go away and rest."

August 27, 1984.  We're in Empangeni's courthouse, a single story brick
building next door to the post office.  Mr.  Justice John Broome,
presiding, is a dignified eminence.  His manner is ascetic, his
language grave and precise.  Glenda Sanders, counsel for the defense,
is young, blond, and brilliant.  She has a Cambridge degree behind her
and a job with a major American law firm in her near future.  The
prosecutor, Dorian Paver, is a graduate of the liberal University of
Cape Town.  Save for the interpreter, the officers of the court are all
white.

It's not just their skin that's white; their minds are white, too. They
are generic white people with generic Western values.  The ritual of
justice they are about to act out is white, Western, ancient, and
alien.  It has nothing to do with Africa.

Africa is outside.  You can hear it through the window a clamoring
throng of several hundred Zulus held at bay by cops with dogs.  They're
climbing trees and standing on one another's shoulders to get a glimpse
of their hero of the moment, the captured Hammerman.

Simon Mpungose is solid, chunky, muscular.  His skin is smooth, brown,
and shining.  He has a mustache and a goatee.

He's wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt, white slacks, and ankle
shackles that rattle as he moves in the dock.  His dark eyes are full
of humor and intelligence, and when he smiles there is something truly
charismatic about him.

Simon smiles a great deal.  In fact, he's done little but smile and
laugh since the trial opened this morning.  Simon is on trial for his
life, but he seems very happy.  His fellow Zulus reach for words
meaning 'full," 'high," or even 'transfigured' to describe the state he
is in.  He has fulfilled his destiny: He is ready to die.

He has refused to mount a defense.  The moment Judge Broome gaveled the
court to order, Simon demanded that the trial be aborted.  He had
committed the murders, he said, and that was that.  He wanted to be
taken away and hanged.

The ritual of white justice had to take its course, however, so Judge
Broome ordered him to sit down and shut up.  Simon responded by
instructing his counsel not to challenge the state's case in any way.
And then he sat back, smiling sympathetically while a parade of state
witnesses told their stories.

The gist of the state case is that the accused is a common criminal.
Dorian Paver contends that Simon broke into white homes because he
wanted a gun and murdered their white inhabitants for fear they'd wake
up and catch him.

It isn't really necessary for the prosecution to establish a clear
motive, however, because the accused has admitted everything.  Indeed,
Dorian Payer's most serious problem is making himself heard above the
din of Africa, above the constant hubbub coming in through the
windows.

Even Judge Broome finds it trying.

"I don't like people peering through the windows," he says at one
point.

"It is unsettling and objectionable."

Paver plods on, laying out his case.  There is the story of Wendy
Trollip, who woke up in a bed drenched with blood.

There is the story of Debbie and Bennie Good, who woke up in intensive
care.  There is the story of the Macaskills, who didn't wake up at all.
And finally, there is the testimony of Dave Brauteseth, who tells of
the morning he discovered Justin and Terri Smith dead in their bedroom.
On that note, the state closes its case, and it is Simon's turn.

He shuffles out of the dock and into the witness box, leg irons
clattering.  He lays his hand on the Bible and swears to tell the
truth.  The Zulu interpreter, a dapper man in a dark suit, stands
beside him, and Simon starts speaking.  His voice is pitched oddly high
for a man of his bulk.  He speaks in Zulu, but his words emerge in the
curiously Victorian English of the interpreter.

At the outset, Glenda Sanders asks him a few questions, but Simon
doesn't want to be led.  He knows that he is doomed and that these are
his last public words.  He wants to talk to his judge, man to man.  He
wants to tell him what it is to be black in South Africa.

"Everything that is happening today," he says, '1 have seen it before.
I have seen it in my dream, in the prison at Barberton."

In many ways, the story Simon told his judge was the tale of a black
Everyman.  Simon was a Zulu.  His tribe was broken by whites in 1879
and stripped of its best land.  The Zulus were ground down by the
British and ground down still further by DF Malan, who came to power in
the year of Simon's birth.  Subjugation was his birthright, and further
oppression awaited his people.

During the years in which Simon should have been in school, South
Africa was ruled by Dr.  Hendrik Verwoerd, a blatant racist who openly
opposed education for blacks.

They were destined to wield shovels, Verwoerd argued, so why teach them
to read and encourage them to imagine that they might be allowed to
enter 'the green pastures of European society?"  So Simon never set
foot inside a school.  His mother died when he was young, and he was
farmed out to relatives who didn't want him and treated him cruelly. By
the age of twelve, he was laboring in the cane fields on nearby white
farms, or washing dishes in farmers' kitchens.  The money he earned was
never enough to live on, so he got into trouble for pilfering.  He ran
away with a friend and lived in the bush outside a big city.  The South
African state made little provision for such children, so Simon begged
and stole to stay alive.  His juvenile criminal record was pathetic,
and left no doubt as to his desperation. On one occasion, he was
flogged for stealing ten cents; on several others, for stealing food.

In his late teens, Simon came up before a white magistrate who took a
look at his lengthening record and decided to put an end to his
nonsense.  Simon had no lawyer: The state provided a defense for blacks
only in capital cases.  He was illiterate and could barely speak
English.  He wanted to tell the court that he stole only because he was
hungry.  He wanted to say that he had never harmed anyone or used
violence, but he was not asked to explain himself.  Simon was just
another larcenous black, so the magistrate sent him to prison for seven
years.

"I felt," he said later, 'that they slammed the door on me, and wrote
"closed" upon it."  Simon was so despondent that he tried to hang
himself, but the rope snapped, and he found himself sitting on the
floor of his isolation cell feeling more desolate than ever.  It was
the first of several suicide attempts.

Next, he launched a suicidal escape attempt, hoping to be shot in the
course of it.  He escaped unharmed, however, and returned to his life
of theft and pilfery.  In due course, he fell afoul of the law again.
This time, the charge was burglary.

Simon's original sentence was lengthened, and he was sent to
Barberton.

Barberton is a country town in the eastern Transvaal.  A few miles
outside town lies a blacks-only prison farm, a complex of low-slung
buildings, tilled fields, and rock quarries, surrounded by barbed wire
and guard towers.  None of South Africa's segregated black prisons was
a pleasant place to do time, but Barberton Prison was hell.  It was the
most notoriou, prison in the entire country.  On the day of their
arrival, Simon and the rest of the men in his intake were stripped
naked and given the traditional welcome.  A white lieutenant explained
the brutal verities of life.

"You are in Barberton now," he said.

"The train does not go past Barberton.  There is no turning back. Here,
even the human brain changes.  There are only two ways here.  It is
death, or living.  Don't think of anything;

just crack the stones.  There must be no other thoughts for you if you
want to live."

And then the initiation rite began, a ghastly game of ringo-roses. Some
fifty warders and trustees stood in a circle, and the naked convicts
ran around its inner circumference.  The warders and trustees were
armed with lengths of hose pipe and lashed the convicts as they passed.
Round and round the convicts ran, until they all fell down. Simon was
so badly injured that he could not walk for a month.

Once he recovered, Simon was returned to the general prison population
and sent to work on the farm.  Discipline was ruthless.  Simon once saw
white warders ironing the body of a black prisoner they had beaten to
death.  They were trying to erase the welts on the corpse, to avoid
troublesome questions.  On another occasion, he witnessed an atrocity
worse than any dreamed of in movies of the chain-gang genre.

It was December 29, 1982, and the prison's white commandant had a minor
disciplinary problem on his hands.

Some prisoners had talked back to the warders and had to be taught a
lesson.  So they were shackled hand and foot, marched into the fields,
and ordered to push heavily laden wheelbarrows up and down a slope.  It
was a brutally hot day.  Some of the black men were old, one was
crippled, and one was recovering from surgery, but the warders showed
no mercy.  They whipped the shackled convicts up and down that hill
until they started collapsing, then whipped them to their feet again.

When the commandant arrived on the scene, a hellish vision greeted his
eyes: some twenty convicts lay half-conscious in a bloody heap, while
the rest reeled around like drunkards, too exhausted even to scream.
The commandant hadn't come to stop it, though; he'd brought more blacks
to be dealt with.

"Slat die drie cloocl," he ordered beat these three to death.

Then he walked away.  By sunset, thirty-four convicts were in hospital
with heat exhaustion and trauma, and three black men were dead.

Beat them to death, the white man said.  Simon worked in the prison
quarry, under white warders' whips and guns.  All day long, he broke
the rocks with his hammer, and thought about things he had seen.

"I liked the white man," Simon said later, 'but there came a time when
it ceased in me that I fear a white person.  And I also lost love of
him."  The rocks that Simon smashed with a hammer were whitish in
color.

"You hold them in one hand," Simon said, 'and break them easily.

It is not long before the rocks are the white man's head."

In Barberton, Simon was visited by a dream, a prophetic dream.  In it,
he saw himself swelling and bloating, growing taller and taller.  He
flexed his muscles, and the prison walls crumbled around him.  The
white warders opened fire, but their bullets passed through without
harming him.  Simon crushed the warders like insects, and then rolled
away across the landscape like a thunderstorm, obliterating all the
whites in his path.

In that state, he encountered a figure of overwhelming power.

"This man," he said, 'this person, my persecutor, did not have a face,
but his head looked just like the rocks that I broke with my hammer. It
is easy for those round white rocks to take the shape of a head.  So I
killed him.  And when I had killed him, they took me away and I was
small again, and they put me to death and I had freedom from
torment."

A Zulu cannot ignore such a dream, for it is a message from his sacred
ancestors and reveals his isipiwo, his destiny.

As Simon put it, "The dream was like a voice from the gods, a messenger
I should not deny."  Like Moses in the Old Testament, Simon trembled at
his gods' command, and sought to escape their fearful dictates.  He
converted to Christianity and prayed to his new God to free him from
the destiny revealed, but the God of whites did not heed him.  Many
years passed, but the dream remained strong in his heart.

In 1983, the prison authorities informed Simon that he was about to be
paroled.  Upon hearing the news, Simon asked for an interview with
Barber toWs white commandant.  He could not very well tell a white man
what was really on his mind, so he asked instead to be deported from
South Africa.  Failing in that, he asked the major to get him a job on
Johannesburg's gold mines, where he would live in an all-black compound
and be spared contact with whites.  He was even willing to stay in
prison, if that was the only way to avoid being sent home.  The white
man just laughed at him.

"Go away from here," he said.

"You are mad."

And so, in July 1983, Simon Mpungose was given fifteen rand ($7.50), an
ill-fitting suit, and a cardboard suitcase containing two shirts and
two pairs of underpants.  Then the warders took him to the station and
put him aboard a train bound for Empangeni.

In Simon's memory, Empangeni was a small town with hand-cranked
telephones, swooning in a malarial trance.

The Mhlatuze River skirted the village and emptied sixteen miles
downstream into the estuary of Richard's Bay, a crocodile-infested
swamp in Simon's day.  Sixteen years later, the crocodiles were still
there, but now the waters in which they lurked were tinted orange at
night by the flames of industrial smokestacks.  The Empangeni-Richard's
Bay region had been declared a growth point by the state.  The bay had
been transformed into a huge concrete-lined harbor.  A railhead had
been pushed through the swamp, to carry coal to the wharves, where it
was loaded aboard Japanese freighters and carried off to the far side
of the planet.  Giant factories had risen on the marshes.  There was
now a white town called Richard's Bay where there had been no town
before, and Empangeni had become a small city, with bright neon lights
and city vices.

When night fell, Zulu girls put on high heels and makeup and trawled
the streets for white johns.  Simon hardly recognized the place.
Everything was different: everything was strange.

"I

felt like a just-born baby," he said.

A free man at last, he trudged into the hills, to the village where he
was born.  There was nothing left of it, or so he said, but a cluster
of ruins and tombstones.  His entire family was dead, or so Simon said.
So he walked back to the township of Ngwelezane, where people had
little to spare for him save sympathy.  Simon was alone in the world.
He had almost no money, no food, and nowhere to stay.  He didn't even
have a pass, so he had no legal right to work or even to be in
Ngwelezane.

To South African blacks, the pass was the single most loathsome aspect
of a loathsome control system.  A black man had to carry his pass with
him at all times, and produce it on demand.  Unless it bore the name of
his employer, and the signature of his white boss, he was not allowed
to be in white South Africa.  Blacks hated the pass and the state of
virtual serfdom it symbolized.

Even so, a pass could be hard to come by.  To get one, you had to step
onto an infuriating bureaucratic treadmill manned by scornful and
obstructive clerks.  You had to stand in the sun all day outside the
Bantu Administration Bureau, waiting your turn at the counter.  When
Simon finally reached the head of the line, the clerk said, "Where's
your photograph?  You must have a photograph."  But a photo cost three
rand, and Simon had less than half that in his pocket.

So he begged the balance, had his snap taken, and returned to the
endless queue.

This time, the clerk behind the counter wanted to see the signature of
Simon's tribal chief, granting him permission to leave his home
district.  Simon's chief had three kraals, three far-flung homesteads
out in the reserve.  It would have taken days of walking to visit them
all.  So Simon begged for an exemption, and the clerk grudgingly
granted him a 'duplicate," a temporary pass, good for three months.

Pass in hand, he trudged the streets until he landed a job as a laborer
on a construction site in white Empangeni.  The work was very hard, and
the wages too low to live on.

"Yes, I wanted money," Simon said later.

"No, not to be rich.  All I wanted was enough to live on, like the
other people of means."

Many black workers felt that way, but few had the temerity to complain
about it.

"I told the white man how much my traveling expenses were, how much the
food cost me.  It was too little to live on.  When I told the white man
so, I noticed his face, how it changed.  He told me in Afrikaans that
he was not happy with what I had stated to him.  His face also told me
this."  The white man snatched Simon's hard-won pass and tore it to
pieces before his eyes.

"Now try and find work," he snapped.

"I looked at him," Simon recalled, 'and a thought came into my mind,
saying, well, this white man is in the dark.  He does not know what is
going on in my mind.  He doesn't think that black people have also got
brains in their heads and they can think."  Simon Mpungose could think.
He thought the matter over and decided to go to the police.  After all,
it was a criminal offense to deface a passbook.  This was a lesson many
black South Africans had learned the hard way, when they were jailed
for burning the loathsome document in protest.  When Simon told his
story at the police charge office, though, the white constables on duty
just shrugged.  So he trudged into Empangeni to report the matter to
the white municipality, which referred him to the Bantu Administration
authorities, who referred him back to the police, who just laughed at
him.

And so Simon found himself back on square one.  He was thirty-four
years old then, and he still had nothing no pass, no job, and no money
in his pocket.  He couldn't face the thought of returning to the lines
outside the pass office, and then pounding the streets in search of a
job he might never find.

"There were lots of people looking for work," he said.

"So I laughed with myself.  I have been trying to live a decent life
and be a good citizen, but from what I have discovered, it means I am
an outcast."  He thought deeply about his plight, and decided he had
had enough.

"I saw there was no point in running away from it," he told his
judge.

"I saw there was no other way but to follow the swallows and disappear
into the mountains."

To follow the swallows is a Zulu proverb that means to die, but what do
white judges and lawyers know of such things?

That would only have confused them.  So the interpreter declared that
Simon decided 'to start another type of life," and left it at that.

Simon's next statement was rooted in an even more obscure rural Zulu
metaphor- the metaphor of the furrow that carries the waters of life.
Simon spoke of laboring to open the furrow, so that the water might
flow in behind him and carry him away, but white men knew nothing of
these things either, and even less about the confounding allusions to
doom and destiny that followed.  The prisoner's words defeated the
interpreter.

He tried, but all that really came through was the image of a man
digging 'a deep furrow or a trench."  It sounded, to white ears, as if
Simon had merely garbled the old English saying about digging one's own
grave.

As Simon listened to the translation, a change came over him.  His
smile vanished.  He turned his face away from the court, sat down on
the rim of the witness box, and lowered his head between his knees.  A
great sob racked his body.  And then he was suddenly bellowing and
howling, like a man in unendurable pain.  It was a harrowing sound, the
sound of a bull with a sword in its heart, an animal with its leg in a
trap.  The judge paled, the courtroom fell silent, and the noise
outside subsided.  All who heard that sound were stricken, for it was
surely the scream of a black man tormented beyond endurance by
apartheid.  At last, the scream subsided and the judge said, "Please
stand up.  Please stand up."

Simon accepted a tissue from the interpreter and dried his eyes.  The
judge asked whether he required a short adjournment to recompose
himself, but Simon pulled himself together, took a deep breath, and
continued.  In the next few minutes, he delivered as moving and
powerful an indictment of white South Africa as had ever been spoken.

"I know," said Simon, 'that a white person on this earth, whether he
claims to be a Christian or not, all what he prays for is that he lives
for a long time and that he enjoys life.  A white person does not pray
to God that God.  causes us, irrespective of color, to live peacefully
and in harmony.

The whites always talk of peace when they in fact do not exercise
peace.

"I once feared a white person, m'lord.  I also respected a white person
and liked a white person, m'lord.  In fact, in the whole of my life
before, I had never resorted to violence on another person.  Even if I
met a white person, as brown person, or a black person, I used not to
lift my hand at that person.

What I used to do I used to break into places and steal, that is what I
was doing.  I never resorted to violence.  But when I got to the stage
where I developed the disliking of the white person, it was then that I
decided that I should shed blood that is, the blood of the white
people.  So I started last August.

I went and attacked the white people at their houses at night whilst
they were asleep.  I do so here in town.

"Another thought came into my mind and that was the thought in regard
to the children, as to what I would do if the children happened to see
what was happening to their parents and they started crying out.
M'lord, I wish to state this in court that I am a Christian.  I belong
to a certain religion.  In fact, if I may mention this, m'lord, on each
occasion, before I set out to attack these people, I used to go down
onto my knees and start praying.  So I decided, well, I should not
touch the children.  No matter what they were doing.  I should not
touch them, seeing that the children really do not know what is
happening on this earth.  The children will be left untouched.

"M'lord, I am not going to go into the details of what I did.  The
court is full aware of what happened.  Everything is recorded down in
the documents which have been produced in this trial.  In fact, m'lord,
I might state quite bluntly that I am not sorry for all what I did.  In
fact, my heart is free, and I feel relieved.

"White people like to kill black people in various ways.

Once that white person is brought to court for trial, you will find
that he has instructed an advocate to defend him or her, so that his
life, his or her life, is saved.  I disagree with such a thing.  If one
has killed another, he must come forward and tell the court, "Look
here, I did this, so I must be executed as well."  In what I am saying
here, m'lord, it is not that I am trying to defend myself or trying to
put excuses of some sort as to why I did this.  In fact, I am not to
live, because of what I did.

"I have given the reasons that caused me to act in this manner.  It is
because of what I had witnessed happening to my fellow black men and
also to me, because of all that was done to us by the white people.
There is no fairness on this earth.  One must know that as a fact that
in my life, I have noticed there is no fairness in this earth.  So, I
must die, so that what I dreamed in 1972 be fulfilled.

"That is all I wish to say."

Ah, Simon, Simon, in spite of all I know about you, your words still
break my heart.  Simon was a killer, and yet, as a friend of mine
pointed out, his story seemed to unfold like the story of a saint,
deeply disturbing in its biblical parallels.

A dream sets his task before him, but he does not accept its
inevitability.  He tries again and again to sidestep his destiny.

"And he went forward and fell on the ground and prayed that if it were
possible, the hour might pass from him."

But Simon was black in white-ruled South Africa, and his life proceeded
along its inexorable course.  Fate threw him up against a white man who
tore his pass to pieces.  'in this world," Simon said, 'sometimes the
little things change to a big thing."  That white man's act, such an
ordinary act of white cruelty and contempt, set off a chain of events
that grew very big indeed.  Four whites died beneath Simon's hammer,
three others were seriously injured, and finally, Simon himself was
taken to the Central Prison in distant Pretoria, where he was given a
cell on death row, and a scribe to take down his last letters.  And
finally the moment came.  He was borne through the night by the hymns
of doomed brothers, and when the sun rose he was taken to the gallows
and hanged from the neck until dead.

The date was November 20, 1985, and Simon's death was just one among
many.  It coincided with a massive upsurge in political carnage and
merited only a few paragraphs on the inside pages of the newspapers.
Still, it struck me as a remarkable parable of life in a country where
blacks were being kept down lest they leap up and slit white throats.

This was Dawid Malan's law, and it fulfilled its own grim prophecy: If
you treat a black man that way, he will indeed leap up and drive a
hammer into your brain.  That seemed to be Simon's message.  I heard no
hatred or despair in his last words, just clarity, which he seemed to
be offering as a man offers a gift a gift of understanding, I thought,
and a warning.  It seemed a rare offering, and so, some months after
Simon's execution, I went to Empangem to receive it.

The first sight that greeted my eyes as I drove into town was a giant
black fist, huge as a train, smashing through the price barrier on a
billboard.  It was just an ad for Power Stores, but in that time, in
that place, it was easy to see it as a symbol for rising black rage.
Indeed, it was very easy for me to see Simon himself.  He was right
there in my mind's eye, a black man barely six years older than me. His
life had surely been shaped by forces I knew and understood by DF
Malan's apartheid, by Verwoerd's Bantu Education policies, and by
Vorster's barbaric prisons, I presumed to know exactly what Simon meant
when he spoke of a world without fairness.  I presumed to know exactly
what that billboard symbolized.

As it turned out, I presumed a great deal.

A man who is isolated and alone can be regarded as a sort of discarded
person.  He is a man cast out of society, and that type of man, in the
old days, would have been killed.

Let me say this and I say it very seriously:

there is nothing worse than being isolated.

- DINI ZULU king oft be Zulus, c. 1910 THE TEENAGER AT the wheel was a
white Zulu.  His name was Rauri Alcock, and he grew up in a mud hut on
the banks of a river in northern Zululand, but that is another story.
He spoke Zulu like a Zulu, and his role on this expedition was to act
as an intermediary between me and the grave black dignitary in the
backseat.  Majozi Nxongo (pronounced non go wore ragged khaki overalls
and had huge holes in his earlobes, into which brightly colored disks
might be inserted on ceremonial occasions.  In the white cities, where
he had worked most of his life, he had been some white man's 'boy."  In
his own world, however, he was a figure of great power and influence.
He was the chief induna, or prime minister, if you will, of the Thembu
tribe, a sub tribe of the Zulu nation, and a guardian and interpreter
of the Zulu mtbetwa, or laws.

I turned to Nxongo for guidance because my inquiries about Simon had
dead-ended in a wall of silence.  I was unable to find the cold-hearted
Afrikaner who had supposedly torn up Simon's pass, but that was the
least of my journalistic problems.  I had been unable to find Simon
himself.  The Hammerman's tale had turned out to be something of a
fable.

It contained many half-truths and at least one outright lie.

Simon was no orphan.  He had a family.  At the time of Simon's release
from jail, his father was living in Ngwelezane, undergoing a witch
doctor's treatment for tuberculosis.  Simon, for some unfathomable
reason, chose to deny him, even to his face.  On the day they were
reunited, Simon said, "I don't know you, old man.  Go away !"

Why?  The black lawyers and tradesmen of Empangeni were eager to air
their sympathetic views of Simon, but few of them had ever met him.
Those who had his family especially would not answer questions.  Some
wouldn't even talk to me.  Simon's cousin Sipho Mpungose, for instance,
told me, "Simon had a secret problem," and walked away.  A man who had
grown up in the same household as Simon said he knew nothing about the
Hammerman's childhood.  When I asked why, he said, "Our eyes did not
meet.  He never became human."

He refused to elaborate further.

It was really eerie.  It was as though they were talking about an
unperson, about the living dead, and when I stopped to think about it,
I realized Simon had sometimes spoken of himself in similar terms.  In
court documents, psychiatric reports, and police interrogations, he had
occasionally referred to himself as a dog, an outcast, a man who
'didn't fit in anywhere' and 'could never be like the others."  He told
a psychiatrist that he had had only one friend and only one lover in
his entire life.

Why?  Nobody would tell me.  I wandered around Empangeni and the
surrounding hills for weeks, filling notebook after notebook with
cryptic evasions.  I seemed incapable of even formulating the questions
that might have did ted the truth about Simon.  One day, however, a
Zulu woman took pity on my floundering and whispered a secret in my
ear. Her name was Mavis Khumalo, and she said, "Simon was born wrong." 
Her explanation was so confounding that I had to turn to anthropology
texts for understanding, and finally to Nxongo in his capacity as
guardian of beliefs I thought long dead.

"Something is hiding in this story," he said, and agreed to come into
the hills with me to ask those questions that lay beyond my
imagination.

And so there we were, tooling through the lush green cane fields of
Zululand in a borrowed Mercedes.  Five miles outside Empangeni, we
peeled off the tar and entered the Zulu reserve.

We passed a memorial to the great king Shaka and an old Lutheran
mission.  Some miles farther, we coasted to a halt alongside a
whitewashed stone.  This was Bus Stop Four, in the vicinity where Simon
Mpungose was born.

As far as the eye could see, green hills rose and fell like the steep
breasts of young girls.  The nipple of each hill was topped by a kraal,
a circular cluster of mud huts, and gurgling streams flowed through
each of the valleys between.  There was nobody in sight save an old man
sitting alone on the crest of a ridge above us, watching his cattle.
Nxongo hailed him, and he came tottering down toward us.  He was
wearing a tattered tweed jacket and a jaunty feather in his homburg. He
hobbled across the road, bent double over his cane, and stuck his head
through the car window.  His toothless gums clattered, and his black
eyes darted hither and thither, full of curiosity.

"We are looking for the kraal of Simon Mpungose," said Nxongo.  The
instant Simon's name was spoken, the old fellow started yelping and
howling with outrage.

"Mtagaat.t' he shrieked.

"Sorcerer!  That boy was a sorcerer!  He killed the white men, who are
my gods!  I am getting an old-age pension, and he is killing the people
who are giving me my old-age pension!"  He was flailing the air with
his stick and hopping around in the road, cursing and laughing
simultaneously.

"So you knew this man," Nxongo observed drily.

"Myself, I am Mpungose," said the old man.

"I was cousin to his father."

When Nxongo suggested he tell us about Simon, however, the old man
lapsed into a muttering silence.  His face clouded, and he stared off
into the distance.

"I don't know," he said.

"No, I cannot say anything about this matter.  I am not the head of the
family.  If you want to know about this matter, you must ask my older
brother."

It seemed inconceivable that such an ancient man could have an older
brother.

"Where is your brother?"  asked Nxongo.

"There," said the old man, pointing.

Several hundred yards away, we spotted a man lying on his back in tall
grass at the roadside.  I asked Rauri to fetch him, but the old man
declined to ride in the car, so we had to wait while he made his way
toward us on tottering legs.  When he finally arrived, panting, Nxongo
asked why he was afraid of automobiles.

"I am from the time before cars," he replied.

He and Nxongo started exchanging the elaborate courtesies demanded by
rural Zulu etiquette.  What is your clan?  Where do you come from?  Has
it rained there?  Eh-heh.  I lay on my back in the grass, listening.  I
couldn't keep my eyes off the old man's bare feet, and the geological
accumulation of callus on his soles and heels.  His feet looked like
weathered rock, or the hooves of a wild animal.

Meanwhile, we had attracted an audience.  At first glance, this
landscape had seemed empty, but now people were rising up from the
earth and converging on us from all directions, drawn by the unusual
presence of whites.  Older men sat down alongside Nxongo, younger men
formed a row behind us, and women parked themselves at the very limit
of earshot, where they sat in respectful silence.  I smoked two
cigarettes before Nxongo deemed it time to get down to business.

"We are here," he said finally, 'to find out the whole story of Simon
Mpungose."

Anger flashed in the elder brother's eyes.

"We do not speak of those people," he snapped.

"They are the abomination of the Mpungose dan."  In Zulu, he used the
word ny ala which connotes 'disgust," 'filth," 'disgrace."  The
audience fell silent and waited to see how we would deal with this
rebuff.  Nxongo was a statesman, however.

"We already know the secret," he said.

"We have merely come to find out if it is true."  The old man demanded
to know how we had found out.  I said it was in the court papers a
white lie, so to speak, but it freed the old man from the stigma of
being an impimpi, one who betrays secrets to whites.

"Yes," he said sternly, 'what you heard is true.  It is a horrible
thing.  I will answer, but ask only the questions you need."

We heard it first from his lips, and heard it again and again in those
hills.  It was always the same story, told in the same manner, from the
very beginning, as all stories must be told.

It always began 'in the years of the Great War' the war of 1914-18 in
the kraal of Bhaleni, a Zulu man of noble blood.

In formal terms, his name was Bhaleni ka Gawozi ka Silwane, marking him
the son of the great warrior chieftain Gawozi, and grandson of Silwane,
a legendary figure in Zulu history.

Silwane was one of the first sub chieftains to ally himself with

Shaka, the great king who forged a scattering of Zulu-speaking clans
into a mighty nation in the early nineteenth century.

With Silwane at his side, Shaka launched a blitzkrieg on his neighbors,
eventually laying waste to half the subcontinent and inspiring such
terror that some refugees fled almost to the equator to escape his
fury.  In Zululand, the names Shaka and Silwane are still spoken with
awe.

Bhaleni Mpungose's kraal stood on a hilltop not far from Bus Stop Four.
Bhaleni was very old, so old he could no longer move.  In the morning,
his wives dragged him into the sun on an oxhide.  In the evening, they
dragged him back into his hut.

He had many wives, many cattle, and hordes of children.  The exact
numbers are lost to memory, but it is remembered that Bhaleni's
favorite daughter was a girl named Musa.  She was about sixteen years
old when the story opened, and very beautiful.

Musa was the daughter of Bhaleni's old age, and he was very old indeed.
His memory stretched all the way back to King Dingaan, who ruled from
1828 to 1840.  In his time, Bhaleni had been a fearsome warrior.  He
had fought at Isandlwana, the bloody battle recreated a century later
in the movie Zulu Dawn.  At Isandlwana, in 1879, the Zulus slew 858
British soldiers the worst defeat ever inflicted by 'savages' on white
men armed with guns.  It was the Zulu's last great feat of arms, or
spears, if you will, for their lack of guns doomed them to ultimate
defeat.  In the end, the redcoats rolled across the Tugela River and
smashed the mighty Zulu nation.

His tribe was broken, but Bhaleni himself was not reconciled to defeat.
He refused to learn the white man's language or don the conqueror's
clothes.  To the very end and he died long after Zulu glory had faded
Bhaleni wore the besbu, the skirt of civet tails, and remained a fierce
traditionalist.

He even resorted to murder in a futile attempt to halt the spread of
Christianity among his people.  One of the first Zulu converts in the
district vanished without trace.  This was held to be a miracle, and a
monument was erected to mark the spot where Thomas Khanyile was
supposedly lifted up to heaven.  The police were a little skeptical
about miracles, though.  They believed Khanyile had actually been
murdered.

So did the Zulus.  They even knew who had done it: Bhaleni.

It was during the Great War that the greatest misfortune came to
Bhaleni's kraal.  It began when his favorite daughter was stricken by
ufufunyane, an affliction that became endemic among the Zulus after the
white conquest.  It was a disease that struck only young girls.  They
would lose control and run amok, howling and hyperventilating and
jabbering in strange tongues.  Today, white scholars will tell you that
they were suffering from sexual hysteria, but the Zulus themselves
believed that the girls were possessed by demons by the spirits of
whites or Indians, hundreds of them simultaneously, in a truly serious
case.  In this weak-minded condition, someone took advantage of Musa,
and she became pregnant.

This was scandalous.  The Zulus were a highly moral people.

Premarital sex was forbidden.  Girls were regularly inspected by older
women to ensure that their hymens were intact.

Bhaleni demanded to know who had defiled his favorite daughter, but
Musa would not name the culprit.  In due course, she gave birth to a
son.  When the son was weaned, she became pregnant again, yet she still
refused to name the father.

This time, however, the older women bore down hard on her.

"Where did you get this stomach?"  they shouted.

"Where?"

Musa hung her head.  And then she pointed to her own 'brother,"
Sonamuzi, and said, "It was he; he is the father of my son, and of the
baby !  am carrying."

There is little to tell about Sonamuzi.  I cannot even tell you his
real name, for he was born under another name, a name that is no longer
spoken.  All people would say of him is that he was black, and 'lower
than a dog," because only dogs and animals have intercourse with their
own mothers and sisters.

Actually, Musa wasn't even his sister.  They called one another brother
and sister, as was the custom, but they were actually first cousins. In
Zulu eyes, the distinction is insignificant.

Incest is forbidden not because of the danger of deformed children.  It
is forbidden because it outrages the ancestors.

And now we must talk of the ancestors, the amaDlozi, the forebears
worshiped by living Zulus.  Almost all Zulus venerate their ancestors,
even today.  If you are a Zulu Christian, your dead father becomes an
intermediary between you and Christ.  You pray to him as if he were a
saint or an angel.  And if you are pagan, you worship him in the
old-fashioned manner.

Either way, the ancestors are with you.  They are entities that live in
your house, and hover over you at all times helping, advising,
punishing.  Some anthropologists call them shades rather than gods,
because every man casts a shadow; it falls on his heels, and follows
him everywhere.  The ancestors are that close, that omnipresent.

The shades command obedience to the traditions and laws of the nation,
one of which holds that you may not take as a wife anyone within your
own clan, even if this clan is tens of thousands strong.  You may not
marry a woman from your father's bloodline, or your mother's.  You may
not marry anyone from a family that has married into your bloodline,
and of course, you may not marry within your own family.  Of all the
degrees of kinship off-limits to a lustful man, a sister or a first
cousin is the most profoundly forbidden of all.  The thought of sexual
congress between a man and woman so related evokes 'horror' in a Zulu,
because it causes harrowing turbulence in the spirit world.

The instant a man deposits his sperm in a woman, the shades converge in
anticipation of a new birth.  They come expecting to meet honorable
shades from other clans and exchange mutual respect.  If the seed has
been deposited in a forbidden womb however, the shades come
face-to-face with their own kin, with the spirits of their own
brothers, fathers, and grandfathers.  This cannot be.  Such a meeting
drives the shades mad with rage; they wrestle among themselves, and
also turn their terrible wrath on their living descendants, on those
who have subjected them to this ghastly indignity.  There is little
hope of forgiveness.  It is said that the shades will hound the guilty
until they and their entire bloodline are extinguished, or until the
world itself ends.

"This sin," Nxongo told me, 'is the last sin.  You cannot disown your
own blood.  You cannot cast off your shadow.  Even if you try to hide
from the shades, they will finish you.  If you have this sin in your
family, there is nothing you can do.  It is better you die."

A decade or two earlier, Musa and Sonamuzi and the child of their union
would have been put to death on the spot, to placate the shades.  But
now Zululand was ruled by white men, and they would not understand why
such killings were necessary.  They would arrest the killers and hang
them.  It is said that Bhaleni was willing to die in order to efface
this disgrace from his bloodline, but he was too old to stand up, let
alone kill anyone.

And yet something had to be done.

"This matter could not lie down," I was told.  The case was brought
before the chief and debated in tribal council.  Meanwhile, Bhaleni and
his entire household were place under quarantine.

"We were not allowed to eat food prepared at the kraal of Bhaleni," I
was told, 'or even approach it.  It was as though his kraal was the
lair of wild beasts."  The trial dragged on for months, but Chief
Mbango and his elders remained confounded.  There was no guiding
precedent in the law.  It had never come to this before, because in the
past the offenders would simply have vanished from the face of the
earth.  In the end, the chief concluded that the crime lay beyond his
powers of punishment beyond any man's power of punishment, now that the
whites were in charge.  He washed his hands of the matter, and left the
final decision to Bhaleni.

Bhaleni summoned the father and gave him his new name, Sonamuzi,
meaning 'sin of the family."  And then Bhaleni renamed his infant
grandson, whose continuing existence was a hideous affront to the
shades.  Henceforth, he decreed, the child would be called Mkhonyoza,
which means 'to wrestle," or 'to press with muscular force."  The
purpose of that name, it is said, was to remind all who met him that he
should have been throttled at birth.

And finally, Bhaleni banished them all from his sight forever. Sonamuzi
hung his head, took his pregnant sister and his abominable son, and led
them away into purgatory.

After their expulsion, Sonamuzi and Musa wandered the hills of
Zululand, homeless and unwanted.  It is said that they settled briefly
in the Zulu capital of M!habatini, but their secret was discovered and
they were driven out.  The same thing happened in Nkandla, in Mtunzini,
and in Umfolozi, according to various accounts.  Musa gave birth to a
second son, who was named Amon, and a third, who was named Jonas.  She
and Sonamuzi became Christians and took Christian names, perhaps hoping
that the white man's God would be sufficiently powerful to protect them
from the shades.  That He may have been, but the God of the Christians
could not protect them from living Zulus.  They were still unwelcome
everywhere.

"Until the day he died," I was told, "Sonamuzi never built a house.
Till he died, he wandered."

Bhaleni, meanwhile, had become deranged by the knowledge of his
daughter's sin, and the terrible fury it was surely causing in the
spirit world.  He must have been mad, I was told, or he would never
have done what he did.  In his agony, Bhaleni somehow convinced himself
that his beloved Musa had been married according to the law.  Under
Zulu law, the father of the bride receives a bride-price in cattle from
the father of the groom.  So Bhaleni summoned his brother, his own
brother, father of Sonamuzi, and insisted that he pay sixteen cattle
for Musa's hand in marriage.  To the Zulus, this was not merely wrong,
this was insane.  A man could not buy his brother's daughter as a bride
for his son.  It violated every law, every tenet of Zulu religion.  It
was yet another terrible affront to the shades.

And yet the transaction took place, and Bhaleni got his sixteen cat de
Nobody else would touch the beasts, for they were said to be tainted,
so he ate them all himself.  It is said that Bhaleni realized as he lay
dying that he, too, had committed a terrible sin, a sin that doomed his
entire house.

On his deathbed, the man who once murdered a Zulu convert gave his own
soul to Jesus in the hope of passing on to the Christian heaven rather
than to the Zulu spirit realm.  It is said that Bhaleni was afraid to
face the shades of his noble forebears of brave Gawozi and ferocious
Silwane.  In the spirit world, a man who had sold his daughter to his
own brother would endure unimaginable torments.

Many years after Bhaleni's death, Sonamuzi, Musa, and their sons
returned to the hills near Bus Stop Four.  By then, all the tribe's
elders were dead, and Sonamuzi hoped his sin had been forgotten.  It
hadn't.

"That man was an abomination all his life," I was told.

"The people would just look at him and not know what to do.  If they'd
had the power and strength, they would have chased him away, or killed
him, but they could not do that anymore.  A brother and sister living
together?  Nobody accepted it.  But what could we do?"

They could only wait for the shades.  Everyone knew that the shades
would act in due course.  Tradition said that a man guilty of incest
would rot alive.  Nobody was surprised, therefore, to hear that
Sonamuzi was holed up in a hut, his flesh decaying, his breath reeking
of putrefaction.  In due course he died.

"Nobody really felt it," I was told.

"Nobody was sorry."

There was no ceremony to bring home his spirit, because nobody wanted
Sonamuzi's spirit anywhere near them.  Even the Lutherans, among whom
Sonamuzi numbered himself, did not want him in their graveyard, so he
was buried on a faraway hillside.  A few years later, Musa was also
obliterated by the shades.  She walked behind a horse that lashed out
with both hooves, striking her in the forehead.  She died instantly.

So Sonamuzi and Musa were gone, but their three sons lived on.  The
youngest, Jonas, vanished as soon as he was old enough to fend for
himself.  The second son, Amon, mysteriously lost his voice as a
teenager.  This was a sure sign that the shades wished to efface him
from this earth.  Amon was said to be infected with the 'sickness' of
his family, and to yearn only for the flesh of women of his own
bloodline.  Since they were untouchable, he spurned all contact with
women, becoming a 'mule."

In the fifties, Amon also disappeared, and the last son left was
Mkhonyoza, the boy who should have been strangled.

Stigmatized by his very name, he was taunted and scorned wherever he
went.  The people of Bus Stop Four called him Mpungose impela, meaning
'pure' Mpungose, or Mpungose 'both sides."  It was so bad for him that
he eventually made a jester of himself, introducing himself to
strangers as 'the pure Mpungose' and cracking black jokes at his own
expense.  He was continually drunk, had no fixed abode, and worked only
to earn enough money to get drunk again.

"That man was not well in his head," I was told.

"Even if you looked at him, you could see he was not really human."

For such a man, marriage was out of the question.

"When Zulus meet each other," one Zulu explained, 'we want to know,
Where your mother come from?  Where your father come from?  Where your
grandmother and grandfather come from?

For courting, you must know these things.  You must know the whole
background."  Mkhonyoza was once betrothed, but his intended discovered
'the whole background' and broke the engagement.  In the late forties,
however, he met a widow named Colinda Ngobeshe.  She had a son to
support and a thirst for liquor, so she allowed Mkhonyoza to move in
with her.  In 1948, she gave birth to a son, and called him Simon.

Simon was his Christian name, but in Zulu he was Mnotho, which means
'plenty."  He was given this name, I was told, because life was good in
the first year of apartheid.

"The water never dried up in streams, the cat de always had milk, and
the sweet potatoes never ran out."

Simon's name meant 'plenty," but his parents had next to nothing. Simon
and his half-brother, Moses, were brought up 'like animals," according
to one of my informants.  Their parents were usually drunk, and little
Simon was taunted by other children and even by adults.

"People would use him for an amusement," I was told.

"Truly, truly, truly, that boy suffered!"

Simon's mother died when he was ten or so, and he was dumped on the
Khumalo clan, distant relatives of his deceased mo then Simon's father
seldom visited, and contributed nothing to his upkeep.  Simon was never
really welcome in the kraal.

His peers, the boys who grew up with him, never invited him to
participate in the rituals of their Zulu boyhood- never invited him to
herd cattle or to fight with sticks.  They called him umqola, a term of
scathing derogation meaning 'old woman' or 'hag."  In the stories they
told, there was a recurring image of the boy Simon sitting alone in a
corner of the hut, not speaking and not spoken to.  It was a Khumalo
man who had told me that he grew up with Simon but knew nothing about
him, because 'our eyes did not meet."  It was dangerous to have too
much truck with someone of Simon's background, because his 'bad luck'
might contaminate you, too.

Simon was expected to turn out badly, and he did.  When he was still
tiny, the neighbors would come home to find him stealing food from
their pots.  They whipped him, but he was incorrigible.  They sent the
brightest of their own sons to the mission school down the road, but
nobody seemed to care what Simon did.  He was doomed anyway.  In his
early teens, he started pilfering from neighboring white farms.  The
patriarch of the Khumalo dan sent him away, saying, "I don't want to
see you here, because you are going to influence and spoil my
children."

The patriarch had acted too late, however, because when Simon left, he
took one of the patriarch's sons with him.

This was Mdadune, whom Simon would later describe as the only friend he
ever had.  Simon and Mdadune lived together in the bush, thieved to
stay alive, and were always in trouble with the law.  When Mdadune was
sixteen or so, he was shot dead while fleeing from the police.  The
Khumalos held Simon responsible.

"We swore," they said, 'that if we ever see him again we will kill him,
because our son is dead through his influence."

The people of Bus Stop Four had not seen Simon since, but they had kept
track of his sad progress.  They knew he had gone to jail and tried to
kill himself.  They knew he had done time in Barberton, and asked to be
kept there rather than set free.

"When you have this thing in your family," they said, 'you stay nicely
in jail, because nobody knows the background."  They knew Simon had
invented a fictitious past for himself, and denied his father to his
own face.  They knew he had killed white people, and that his first
words to his captors were, "All I want is to go away and rest."  None
of this surprised them.  Of course the Hammerman wanted to die.  It was
the only way to escape the wrathful shades.

Indeed, those old men on the hillside above Bus Stop Four seemed to
know everything about Simon save that the Boers had already hanged him.
Nxongo told them, and they were glad.

"About time," they said.

Everyone laughed.

One day I trudged behind Nxongo to the top of a hill, where we met an
old Zulu man with an impossible name:

Muntuonganaise Mpungose.  We sat down in the waving grass, opened the
first of the beers we had brought as gifts and awaited the old man's
tale..

It was the same story, told in the same manner, from the very
beginning.  I lay back in the grass, smoking.  A jet passed overhead. A
clock struck in the white town of Eshowe, which lay in the middle
distance.  A tiny figure appeared at the foot of the hill.  It was the
old man's daughter, carrying her groceries in a plastic supermarket
bag.  She started climbing the hill.  It was a very high hill, and a
very long story.  Just as the daughter came up to us, the story was
drawing to a close.  The old man was saying, "Unless this thing is
somehow set right, more people will go mad or suffer misfortune.  Just
look what is happening to Mandla."

That's what they all said: look what's happening to Mandla.

Mandla was an uncle of Simon's, and a grandson of the doomed Baleni.
Mandla Mpungose had truly made something of himself.  As a young man,
he left the district and settled in Sharpeville, a township near
Johannesburg, where he married a big city woman and became a rich man,
owner of a butchery and a waste-haulage business besides.  His life was
full and sweet until the day his wife gave birth to twins.  In the eyes
of Zulu traditionalists twins were a sure portent of coming misfortune.
In the old days, they were regarded as such bad omens that one twin was
sometimes put to death.  Shortly thereafter, Mandla's wife fell
pregnant again, and presented him with a second set of twins.  After
that, she went mad, and had to be institutionalized.

Mandla moved to Durban, but the hell hounds stayed on his trail.  He
remarried, but his new wife gave birth to twins, too.  His businesses
started running in the red.  One of his sons suffered a mental
breakdown, and spent a spell in hospital.

One of his daughters showed ominous signs.

Mandla was growing old by now, and some said he was weakening under the
tireless persecution of the shades.  For whatever reason, he sold up
his city assets and retired to Bus Stop Four, where he built a
spacious, white-washed mansion on the crown of one of Zululand's green
hills.  To keep busy, he bought a trading store, a panel van and a
tractor with which to plough the fields of his peasant neighbors for a
fee.

The businesses all went bankrupt, though, and this too, was deemed the
work of wrathful shades.

"The shades are going to destroy that man'.  That is what everyone told
me.  Some even said it to Mandla's face, but he just laughed at them.

This was the truly shocking thing about Mandla Mpungose.

He defied the spirits of the ancestors.  Indeed, he denied their very
existence, threatening to whip his own relatives if he caught them
performing rites or sacrifices in honor of the shades.  If anyone asked
about all the madness in his family, he wrote it off as coincidence.
Indeed, Mandla had been to see a white doctor, who had established
beyond doubt that there was no 'genetic predisposition' towards mental
illness in his bloodline.

Mandla lived in the brave new world, you see, in a modern house with
electric light, comfortable furnishings and a color TV.  He wore a
jacket and tie every day of the week, preached in church on Sundays,
and held office in Inkatha, the Zulu political movement.  On the day of
my first visit, he was wearing scholarly spectacles, pouring over
Farmers' Weekly and plotting an entrepreneurial venture into poultry
farming.

He looked up and said hello in perfect English.  It was the first time
in weeks that I'd met a Zulu I could talk to.  It was as though I had
been blind, and could suddenly see again.

And yet, when I mentioned that I was researching the life of his nephew
Simon, the very first thing Mandla said was, "If you want to understand
that boy, I must tell you about something that happened when I was very
young."  Then the story of incest was told again, but offered this time
as a folk fable, an anthropological curiosity.  Mandla placed no store
in it at all.  As far as he was concerned, a harsh childhood left Simon
psychically disfigured, and his transformation into a killer was
completed in apartheid's brutal jails.

"The Boers were pressing down on Simon," he said, 'always pressing
down."

Still, there was no gainsaying the fact that some superstitious people
believed otherwise.  Mandid told me a long story about Simon's uncle
Amon, second son of Sonamuzi.  Amon was still alive, he said, and still
allowing himself to be victimized on account of this supposed curse.
Amon lived alone in the distant city of Durban, in a rented room with a
roof that leaked.  He was desperately unhappy, but the people of Bus
Stop Four still taunted him about his background, so he'd refused
Mandla's offer of a permanent home.  Mandid found such behavior
incomprehensibly sad.

"Amon is just like a lost sheep," he said.

"He goes here to visit the sick, there to bury the dead.  He goes up
and down, up and down... And at that very moment, Amon walked in the
door.

The sole surviving son of the abominable Sonamuzi was a thin old man in
an ill-fitting grey suit, carrying a battered briefcase and a
battery-operated megaphone.  His eyes were sunk deep in a prehensile
skull, and to me, they seemed full of pain and uncertainty; the eyes of
a man who anticipated rejection.  Amon was the person whose voice had
been taken away by the shades, and when he opened his mouth to greet
us, the sound that emerged was a barely audible rasp.  He seemed
pathetically diffident, pathetically grateful for the warm welcome we
accorded him.  He looked so lonely.  I longed to put an arm around his
thin shoulders to comfort him.

It seemed impolite to talk about incest in front of Amon, so I asked
about his megaphone instead.  It turned out that he was a lay preacher
in an evangelical church, and the megaphone a tool of his trade.  Our
talk turned to the nature of God, and to his many and varied faces.  At
one point, apropos of nothing in particular, Amon leaned forward, his
haunted eyes burning into mine.

"Do you believe a spirit can take over the body of a man?"  he asked.

"I don't!  I don't!"

And neither, of course, did I. I was a generic Western man, bereft of
faith in any religion, including my own.  I was incapable of believing
anything those rural Zulus told me about Simon and his angry shades. My
scepticism must have communicated itself, because one of my informants
in the hills sought me out a week or two later and rubbed my dubious
white nose in the latest developments.

This time, the tale concerned Mandla Mpungose's favorite daughter, a
glamorous young woman, by all accounts, and married to a most
successful man a black lieutenant in the South African Police.  The
lieutenant had paid the virtually royal bride price of R3,500 for her
hand.  She had borne him a son, and they had been very happy for a
while.

Lately, however, a telltale strangeness had came over the daughter, and
the lieutenant had grown terribly anxious.  He knew 'the whole
background' and begged Mandla to do something to call his family
together and sacrifice cattle to the shades, before it was too late.
Mandla Mpungose said no.  As far as he was concerned, neither he nor
his daughter would ever participate in a pagan rite.  In that case,
said the lieutenant, you can have your daughter back.  He loaded his
wife and baby into a car, drove to Bus Stop Four, and dumped them on
Mandla's doorstep.  That very night, my informant concluded, the
daughter stripped off her clothes and ran naked into the night,
screaming, stark-raving mad.  Mandla had been forced to subdue her
violently, and now she was in hospital, too.

On the evening after this incident, I found Mandla sitting in his easy
chair, staring disconsolately at the news on TV.  He was grey with
fatigue and seemed desperately unhappy.  Amon was there too, looking
more haunted than ever.  I took the proffered armchair and tried to
summon the courage to do what I had come to do.  I wanted to say, help
me, Mister Mpungose, for I am lost.  Your daughter's screams were heard
all down the valley, and you know what people are saying.  They are
saying that the shades are punishing you for the sin that can never
end.

They say the shades will continue to hound you and your entire family
until you are all mad or dead and your bloodline is extinct.  So please
let's talk about it, let's parse out the meeting point between common
sense and an ancestral curse.

I didn't have the heart to do it, though, and besides, I suddenly saw
that it didn't really matter.  Even if Mandla had confessed that he
dreaded his angry ancestors, and that the curse was real to him, it
would not have been real to me.

And so I just mumbled my condolences, and sat quietly in a room heavy
with sadness.  After a while, Mandla's wife put the children to bed and
doused all the lights save one, and we sat in the semi-darkness for an
hour or so, talking about politics, about this and that.  At bedtime,
Mandla asked Amon and I to stand and join hands in prayer with him.  He
begged God to heal his sick daughter, and thanked him for the
friendship of a white man.  And what could I say, other than, Amen?

So what was the truth of Simon?  I was so certain in the beginning.  As
I read the Hammerman's moving courtroom testimony, Simon sprang to life
in my imagination, fully fleshed and three-dimensional, a victim and
martyr, a potentially good man made monster by apartheid.  And then I
went into the hills, and ducked into the huts of Simon's kin, and found
myself in a parallel world, a kingdom of unconquered consciousness that
had somehow proved invulnerable to the white man's guns, his corruptive
culture, and his truculent missionary faith.  In that world, there was
no Simon.  There was only Mnotho, the boy who could not become human.
Who was the Hammerman?  In the end, I couldn't say.

In Johannesburg, however, I met a white man who had come face-to-face
with the Hammerman and had formulated some strong conclusions about
him.  Bruce Gillruer was a practitioner of 'political forensic
psychology," a left-leaning discipline whose adherents hold that
apartheid has brutalized black psyches to such an extent that apartheid
itself constitutes a mitigating circumstance for any crimes they might
commit.

Toward the end of the Hammerman trial, Simon's lawyer realized that the
only way to save her client from the gallows was to convince the judge
that he was insane.  So she had called Bruce Gillruer in to conduct a
psychological evaluation.

Like most whites who met the Hammerman, Gillmer was profoundly affected
by the encounter.  Simon was no ordinary man, you see.  He had the
power of a great novelist, the power to draw whites into his black
nightmare, to take them into punishment cells awash with blood, to show
them the broken corpse on which the warders were erasing whip welts
with hot irons.  When Simon described his days'in Barberton, you felt
the sun burning down on the back of your own neck, the sweat pouring
off your brow; your own eyes saw rocks transformed into the heads of
white oppressors and explode under the blows of a sledgehammer.
Listening to Simon, Bruce Gillmer felt as though he was looking into
the man's soul, and as though he was finally understanding what it was
to be black under apartheid.

"I know it sounds absurd," he told me later, 'but I never felt it
before."

Gillmer swiftly concluded that he was dealing with a man of superior
intelligence.  Simon had a logical, observant mind and a vivid way with
words.  His explanation of why he hated whites was entirely lucid.

"I spent my whole life in prison," Simon said, 'for things for which I
should have spent a few months."  He talked of lurking in the clark
sugarcane, peering through windows into the well-lit white world from
which he was excluded.  He described the rage that overwhelmed him
then, and the pity he felt later for his victims.  Tears welled in his
eyes.

"I am not crying because I am scared of dying," said the Hammerman.

"Dying is what I want.  But when I recall all what happened, I feel
very sorry.  As you see me, I am not a man with a bad heart."

In the end, Bruce Gillmer could not contest that assessment.

The following day, he called Simon's lawyer and told her that, in his
opinion, Simon was sane.  As a political strategy, beating white
civilians to death made little sense, but given Simon's life
experience, given what Gillmer felt in that prison cell, it seemed
entirely understandable.

Toward the end of his interview with the Hammerman, Gillmer said, "You
are a Christian.  Aren't you afraid you'll go to hell for what you
did?"  Simon looked him in the eye and smiled.

"Nothing could be worse than this," he replied.  Gillmer was left with
absolutely no doubt as to what Simon meant.  He was talking about the
hell of being black in South Africa.

Or was he?

Bruce Gillmer is a white man who has lived at the farthest conceivable
remove from the mud huts of Simon's childhood.

He is sensitive, compassionate, politically progressive, and rational,
and for that very reason, he assumed that the old gods of Africa were
dead.  In all the massive literature on apartheid, there is scarcely a
word that casts light on Simon's secret.  If the old gods are mentioned
at all, it is in the context of lost cultural values, or some such.
This is the civilized, progressive position, and Bruce Gillmer is a
civilized man.  It would never have occurred to him to ask how matters
stood between Simon and his shades, or exactly what he meant when he
said he could never be like the others.  Consequently, Gillmer knew
nothing of Simon's background, or his secret, and when I brought it up
he said it sounded 'mythical."

That is exactly what I would have said once, but it wasn't mythical at
all.  Whatever else was true of Simon, he remained an abomination in
the eyes of his own people: the son of a man who should have been
strangled at birth, and the grandson of a Zulu warrior who committed
murder to save his people from the rot of Christianity.  These were
facts, not myths, although what freight they carried I could not say. I
was deaf in Simon's language, and blind in his culture.

In the end, all I really understood of Simon was that terrible scream,
the scream torn from him when he broke down in the dock.  I understood
because it was couched in a universal human language, the language of
pain.  But what did it mean?

The transcript gave no dear indication as to why he was stricken with
sorrow at that particular point.  So I obtained a copy of the official
tape recording and had it translated authentically.

The tape made for intriguing listening.  After all I had learned about
Simon and the world he came from, his trial seemed truly farcical less
a miscarriage of justice than theater of the absurd.  The court was so
white, so Western, and Simon so black- or more truly, so African.  The
psychiatrist who ultimately testified in the Hammerman's defense was
also 'black," also a victim of apartheid- but he was Indian, not
African, and as culturally alien from Simon as I was.  He, too, had
failed to ask the telling questions.  He reduced Simon's resonant
dreams to pathological hallucinations and saw his lifelong loneliness
as evidence of a psychopathic disorder.  What on earth would the word
amaPsychopatb have meant to an illiterate Zulu?  As little, I daresay,
as Simon's real words would have meant to his white judge.

Simon was sitting right before him in the dock, laughing in the face of
death, but in many respects he wasn't there at all.  He could not speak
for himself and was not expected to.  He spoke through an interpreter,
in images, poetry, and metaphors that did not translate easily, and
would have meant nothing to whites, nothing at all.  The interpreter
simply rendered them into serviceable English, into words and ideas
white men could understand.  In that way, Simon had his tongue cut out,
too, just like the black man Friday in Coetzee's novel.

But I am straying from the point.  I obtained the tape to find out
exactly what was on Simon's mind when he broke down.

These were his true words.  He had just told the judge that he had
decided to 'follow the swallows," to commit crimes that would
precipitate his death in the manner so long foreseen.

He continued thus: "And I saw that ay!  No!  It is necessary that I
start now because everything is coming to an end... the in-laws, and
the order of things, and their children, and the few pennies I had.  I
must set my heart and mind on the one thing only.  I saw there was
nothing I could do to prevent it.  I would start a life of damaging
things and others, knowing it was a path of no return.  Where I am
going I must open a furrow,1 so that when I look backward I find I do
not know how to come out again.

"All the time my heart was sore, because when I look at my
forebears..."

And there the Hammerman broke down.  His heart was rent open, and that
is what was in it.

1The metaphor of the furrow refers to an inherited weakness,
predisposition, or destiny.  If a son dies in the same manner as his
father, Zulus say, 'the furrow has opened."

After all, we are all blood brothers and sisters.

- BREYTEN BREYTENBACH, The True

Confessions of an Albino Terrorist I MUST ADD something to Simon's
story.  Perhaps I should begin by showing you a photograph, a
black-and-white snap taken toward the end of the fifties with a Brownie
camera on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in an ordinary suburb of white
Johannesburg.  It shows two gap-toothed white boys enfolded in the arms
of a handsome African woman.  The black woman's face is partially
obscured by a curtain of beaded hair.  She is wearing goatskin thongs
and a skirt of stiff, uncured leather.  There are dozens of strands of
beads and totems around her neck, and she is holding a ceremonial fly
whisk in one hand.  One of the little white boys is me.  The other is
my brother, Neil Stephanus.  The black woman is Lena Sithole, our
resident sangoma, or witch doctor.

Lena lived in our house, in a room next to the garage.

During the day, she washed dishes and made beds.  After hours and on
weekends, she donned her beads, braided her hair, and received clients
in the servants' quarters.  I have no idea what passed between them.  I
never asked.  Once, I beat a small snake to death with my pogo stick in
the garden, and Lena took the corpse away to make a muti- a magic
potion.  I didn't ask what the muti was, exactly or what it was used
for.

Nor did my parents.  Lena's other calling did not seem sinister or even
particularly mysterious to us.  It was just something the natives did,
like donning robes and dancing around fires, or sleeping with their
beds on bricks for fear of the night-stalking tokoloshe.

We seldom saw Lena in her sangoma regalia.  One Sunday afternoon,
however, my mother caught her sitting in the sun outside her room,
swathed in beads and totems, with the fly whisk in her lap.  My mother
thought, how quaint, how colorful.  She brought out the Brownie, sat my
brother and me down on Lena's lap, and told us to say 'cheese."  When
the shutter clicked, we were all laughing.

Looking at this photograph, I cannot believe how blind I was, how blind
we all were, we white people.  I was reared until the age of five by a
witch doctor, by a woman whose shades must have come to her in dreams
and told her that she was chosen, that she had been given powers denied
to most others and must now learn to use them the power to heal or
divine, to bewitch or protect.  Behind Lena's dark eyes lay a world of
profound mystery and deep religious mysticism, but none of us could see
it.  This is the trouble with white people in my country.  Our eyes are
sealed by cataracts against which our white brains project their chosen
preconceptions of Africa and Africans.  Some whites see danger, some
savagery, some see victims, and some see revolutionary heroes.  Very
few of us see clearly.

Consider the eyes of Joseph Lelyveld, a New York Times correspondent
and author of Move Your Shadow, one of the most penetrating accounts of
apartheid ever written.  In his book, Lelyveld recounts a meeting with
Credo Mutwa, a renowned sangoma and author who once ran a state
supported witchcraft museum in Soweto.  In Lelyveld's eyes, Mutwa seems
a charlatan, and his museum a bizarre Potemkin village, set up by the
ruling white racists to fool foreign tourists into believing that
'these people really are different, in more ways than you can imagine."
Lelyveld quotes a few of the witch doctor's weird utterances, then
mocks him as a salesman who knows his market.

"I don't mean to imply," Lelyveld writes, 'that Mutwa occasionally
pandered to white prejudice.  I mean to say that had become his
essential business, so that finally the Africa he portrayed was an
almost perfect reflection of the Africa whites want to see."  Lelyveld
walks away from the encounter muttering about 'cultural wounds' and
'lost values," as if Mutwa was a pathetic relic of an era long gone.

In 1985, the year in which Lelyveld's book won a Pulitzer Prize, some
10,000 sangomas and inyangas were practicing in greater Johannesburg,
consulted at least occasionally by 85 per cent of all black households
and supported by a nationwide network of approximately 40,000 traders
in healing and magical herbs.  The African "Traditional Healers
Association' claimed a membership of 179,000, outnumbering Western
doctors by a crushing factor of ten to one.  Most of Soweto's dashing
professional soccer teams had a witch doctor on staff, throwing the
bones to ensure victory, and its business tycoons hired diviners to
advise them on deals.  The classified sections of Soweto's newspapers
carried ads in which 'traditional healers' or 'herbalists' offered to
restore love to the lovelorn, seal homes against evil spirits, thwart
the designs of enemies, and cure disease.  On weekends, makeshift
corrals appeared on Soweto's roadsides, full of goats destined to
become 'beasts for talking' to be sacrificed to awaken the shades.

Soweto's newspapers and magazines frequently offered accounts of
zombies raised, sorcerers sniffed out, ritual murders, and, once, a
high school closed down when the entire student body started
experiencing supernaturally induced hallucinations.  The subject
cropped up from time to time in political coverage, too.  Some of
Soweto's militant black trade unions were demanding that white
employers grant black workers the right to take paid sick leave if a
sangoma or inyanga advised it.  Some of Soweto's militant young
comrades were using witchcraft to strengthen themselves in their
struggle against apartheid's police.

This did not necessarily mean they weren't Christians, though.  In
fact, they probably were.  A majority of African South Africans are
Christians, but the faith means different things to different people.
For whites, it means traditional Western theology.  For almost ten
million Africans, it means membership in one of the myriad "Zionist' or
"Ethiopian' churches sects that preserve the 'lost values'

of African ancestral religion in a shallow amber of European
Christianity.  These 'free' African churches as in free of European
religious imperialism worship the Holy Trinity but also believe in
divination and magic, and in dreams as communications from the
shades.

Beyond that, untold millions of Africans are simply and proudly pagan,
for lack of a less judgmental word.  They honor their ancestors and
cleave to the central tenet of African religion: Illness or misfortune
results from 'loss or damage to the soul," inflicted either by
witchcraft or wrathful shades.  In the cities, 45 percent of Africans
hold this to be true;

in the rural areas, around 80 percent.  Angry shades may be appeased by
sacrifice, but evil witches are sometimes killed.

In 1985, eighty-four evil witches or sorcerers were burned or stoned to
death in the Northern Transvaal alone.  They were victims, one assumes,
of lost cultural values.

In my circle of hell, the circle of white left liberals, discussions of
such matters are fraught with curious peril.  Elsewhere in the world,
veneration and respect for non-Western cultures is the hallmark of the
humane and open-minded white man.

In South Africa, it is quite the opposite.  One of apartheid's
underlying tenets is that there are distinct and immutable cultural
differences between races, and that it is God's will that they be
maintained.  Under the circumstances, any acknowledgment of differing
cultural values threatens to sound like an oblique argument in
apartheid's favor, and an insult to Africans besides.  That is why I,
as a Just White Youth, never asked blacks what the night-stalking
tokoloshe looked like, or who they worshiped when they danced in robes
around fires.  Such questions seemed impolite, even racist.  It was
much easier, and more fashionable, to talk of lost cultural values.

By the time I returned from exile, it was easier than ever.

Millions of black South Africans had moved decisively into the First
World.  There were black physicists, MBAs, doctors, systems analysts,
novelists, engineers, and newspaper editors.

A sector of Soweto had been dubbed Beverly Hills and boasted mansions
worthy of the name.  There was a glossy black magazine called Tribute,
full of ads for Chanel, Chivas, and BMW.

On TV, advertising was pitched at the emerging black middle class's
fondest image of itself an American image, usually;

sleek black Americans in black American settings, listening to soul or
jazz and consuming products with names like "Manhattan Lemon Sting." At
my old private school, black parents had vaulted right over white South
Africa in their westward hurtle.  When Zulu was introduced into the
school's progressive curriculum, black parents demanded that it be
dropped: They didn't want their children learning an African
language.

One of the best-known denizens of this brave new South Africa was
Soweto's redoubtable Nthato Motlana, MD.  Like many members of South
Africa's black elite, Motlana was born on a Christian mission and
blessed with the sound education denied to most other blacks.  He
earned a medical degree in the fifties, when black doctors were still
something of a rarity, and had practiced in Soweto ever since.  Over
the years, he'd become a figure of great renown- physician, community
leader, outspoken foe of apartheid, and a familiar face on the world's
TV screens.  His Soweto surgery was a low-slung, modern affair, his
receptionist exquisitely polite and lovely to the eye.  The magazine
rack in his waiting room featured the New Statesman and the Manchester
Guardian Weekly unusual reading materials, in a country such as mine.
There was a message from the BBC in London on the doctor's desk as I
walked into his office, and the doctor himself was on the phone.  He
nodded and motioned me into a chair.

In the flesh, Dr.  Motlana was a handsome sexagenarian, spry and
impish, with lively eyes and a full beard streaked with gray.  His
tongue was lashing the person on the other end of the line.

"Let me speak to Joe," Motlana snapped.  When Joe came on the line, the
doctor greeted him in the half-Afrikaans patois of the streets "Hoe's
my 'bra?  he said and then switched into Tswana.  After that, the
conversation kept leaping from language to language, but I was able to
glean its gist.  It revolved around a bright and talented black
executive who managed a medical clinic or hospital somewhere in South
Africa.  The institution's white funders were so impressed by this
man's performance that they wanted to take out a ten-million-rand 'key
man' insurance policy on his life.

As a director of the medical facility, Dr.  Motlana was strongly
opposed.  The white donors seemed to be implying that the black man in
question was uniquely intelligent and irreplaceable, and Motlana was
insulted by the idea.  He was whooping with indignation, virtually
dancing in his chair, clearly relishing his own anger.  Whenever he got
in a real zinger, he'd chuckle wickedly and wink conspiratorially
across the desk.

After fifteen minutes or so, Motlana put down the phone, turned his
charismatic smile on me and said, "Well, Mr.  Malan, what can I do for
you?"  I launched into a rambling, half apologetic preamble about
differing cultural values and their significance in South African life.
I tried my best, but it still came out sounding like an oblique
justification for apartheid, and an insult to Africans besides.  The
doctor caught the drift, and cut me off before I was through.  He spun
in his chair and drew my attention to a volume on the bookshelf behind
him:

William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

"Culture," said Dr.  Motlana, 'is a word that became disreputable
because of Hitler, who made culture synonymous with race.  I worry
about the misuse of that word.  We use it to divide mankind."  As far
as he was concerned, there was no such thing as "Western culture, per
se."  He made some pithy remarks about 'white bastards' who refused to
acknowledge that their 'so-called Western heritage' owed a huge debt to
the Chinese and Arabs, among others, and wound up talking about the
global village.

"I've been to Japan," he said.

"I've been to Israel.  I've been to Europe.  I've been to Canada, I've
been to Nigeria I've been all over the world, and what I've seen is
that the influence of American television, music, and film is driving
people together."

This implied that a similar process was underway in South Africa, and
yet, on the basis of Motlana's own evidence, the reverse could well be
true.  Dr.  Motlana was engaged in something of a crusade against what
he called 'the tyranny of superstition' the influence of the witch
doctors and their allies, Africa's traditional medicine men.  When
neighboring Mozambique started throwing witch doctors into reeducation
camps, Motlana expressed approval, and he was constantly demanding that
the South African authorities enforce their own anti-witchcraft laws.
It was a curious campaign, and the most curious aspect of it was that
Dr.  Motlana appeared to be losing.

In a recent speech, he had noted that there were 'several hundred'
witch doctors practicing in his Soweto neighborhood, where thirty years
earlier there had been hardly any at all.  On a recent visit to the
mission village of his birth he had been astonished to hear the drums
of Africa pounding in the night.  In his childhood, the German
missionaries had strictly forbidden all 'pagan' rites.  I drew Dr.
Motlana's attention to these anomalies and asked how they might be
accounted for.

He leaned forward in his chair, slapped a palm on the desk, and gave me
a piece of his mind.

"As if in anticipation of this discussion," he began, "I spent the
evening last night with two men from my civic association and we talked
about something similar.  One of these young men was a Pedi-speaking
fellow from the north, where you have this rampant belief in
lightning-control and many cases of people being burned as witches.
This Pedi boy seemed to be suggesting that there might be something to
all this, and I got very agitated.  So he turns to me and says, very
innocently, "But isn't it our culture?"  He sent me up the wall!  I
mean, I just crawled up the ceiling in anger!  I said, "My culture is
not synonymous with superstition and ignorance and denial of everything
scientific!"  Dr.  Motlana was dancing with indignation again, his
voice leaping into a higher register as he warmed to the theme.

"My reaction is fuck this old shit," he said.

"That is my reaction!

"Don't confuse culture with belief in the supernatural," he warned
me.

"African culture is such things as respect for your elders, knowing
your place in society, avoiding vulgar language, love of your
neighbors, the care of orphans and widows.  That's my culture.  Not
shit about lightning, man, or scarification, or some charlatan who
gives you herbs that make you shit the whole night until you die!  I
get really agitated when whites start romanticizing this stuff.  It's
as if there is a bloody conspiracy to lock us into ignorance and
superstition.  Do you get my point?"

I did indeed, but I had just enough spunk to pose a final question.

"When you speak this way," I asked, 'do many Africans agree?"

"Do I get support from the black community?"  said Dr.  Motlana.  The
question seemed to stop him in his tracks.  His agitation subsided and
a rueful smile creased his face.

"Oh, no.  Oh, no.  On the contrary, a chorus of attacks.  Phew!"  He
wiped imaginary beads of sweat off his forehead, illustrating the heat
he had taken.

"They say, "This is our culture"?"

"Exactly!"  the doctor replied.

"Which is absolute shit, man!

It's all a lot of nonsense!"

Was it all nonsense?  My friend Eugene would disagree.  He was the
show-biz promoter, musician, and aspirant movie director who, as you
recall, occasionally worked with me as an interpreter, more as a lark
than for the money.  Eugene wore trendy clothes and rings on several
fingers and had lived, until very recently, in the part of Jo'burg we
called the Bronx a region of high-rise apartments colonized by forty
thousand blacks in defiance of whites-only laws.  He had an amazing
range of friends and contacts white lawyers, gay activists, black
revolutionaries, criminal aristocrats, pop and movie stars.  He was
cinema-literate, witty, and sophisticated.  His taste in music made me
feel decidedly square.  At the time I met him, he was planning to cut a
record album inspired by Brian Eno and David Byrne's arcane experiments
with found sound.

The idea was to collect snippets of Botha's and Tutu's speeches and lay
them down atop some funky dance tracks, creating an aural pastiche of
South Africa's warped political reality.

One night, on the way home from one of our forays into the townships,
this African renaissance man started talking about witchcraft and its
role in the entertainment industry.  It was like listening to a
Hollywood hustler gossiping about agents, save that Eugene was talking
about sangornas and inyangas wizards and witch doctors.  Sipho
"Hotstix' Mabuse consults this one, he said.  The Soul Brothers use
that one.  Brenda Fasi of Brenda and the Big Dudes had no sangorna at
all, and she was looking for trouble.  In Eugene's estimation, it was
virtually impossible to stay on top in a field like show business
unless you had a crack witch doctor on your side.

He illustrated the point by recounting the inside story of the rise and
fall of a famous black playwright called.  ah, let's just call him
Phil.

Phil's mother was a sorceress, Eugene explained, a mistress of dark
forces.  She gave her son a 'thing' to watch over him and advance his
career.  This 'thing' was a white woman, and she propelled him to great
fame and fortune in the seventies.

In return, Phil had to follow certain rules.  He had to make frequent
sacrifices and never allow anyone to see his 'thing."

One night, however, his wife caught a glimpse of it, sitting naked at a
dressing table, combing its hair, and that was the start of Phil's
downfall.  Soon after, he stopped making the requisite animal
sacrifices, and now he was a complete nonentity.  He hadn't had a play
produced in years.  Eugene shook his head sadly.

"That's typical," he said.

"His ship comes in, and suddenly he's too good to sacrifice, because
you get blood all over your house, and it smells like an abattoir."

"How do you know?"  I asked, too taken aback to think of anything else
to say.

"Oh," he said, "I sacrifice.  It's our religion."

All this was a prelude to a pitch.  Eugene felt that his own rise
toward the top had slowed a little of late, so he wanted to make a
pilgrimage to Maputo, Mozambique, to see a legendary witch doctor.  His
own car was unreliable, so he wanted me to take him in mine.

I was honored to be asked to accompany him, greatly honored.  Black men
seldom took whites into their confidence on such matters.  It was the
last thing I expected to hear from Eugene, though, not that it affected
my judgment of him either way.  After eight years in Los Angeles, a
city infested with chanters, channelers, crystal gazers, tarot readers,
televangelists, and flotation tankers, all superstitions and religions
seemed pretty equal to me.  In South Africa, however, they tended to
differ according to which side of the racial divide you stood on.

I was always aware of that, I suppose.  I saw the signs of Africa, but
they were like stars in the sky; they were just there.  Lena was a
witch doctor, Zionists danced on Thursday, and witches were sometimes
burned alive in the bundu.  After Simon, I looked at these things again
and felt like Galileo, because the heavens had reordered themselves
before my very eyes.  In Galileo's time, man in his arrogance assumed
that the heavens revolved around him.  In my time, in my country, white
men assumed that they were the center of the black universe that they
had subjugated the dreams and psyches of Africans, along with their
bodies.  It simply wasn't true.  That is what Simon taught me.

I cannot say what all this means, but I do know that religion and
culture are forces of awesome power, and that nations are to some
extent welded together by shared languages, shared religious and
cultural mythology.  After a year of pursuing the truth of Simon, I was
no longer sure that such commonality existed in South Africa.  I prayed
it did, though, and that we would all find it in time.  Without it, I
feared we were doomed.

235 There is nothing in man that was not put into him when he sprang
from the reeds in the beginning.

African saying on the origins of rage THIS IS THE story of a man who
died on the boundary between rival kingdoms of consciousness, under
circumstances embarrassing to both sides.  Whites were embarrassed by
the coldblooded manner of his killing, Africans by events that led up
to it, and hardly anybody would talk about him in the aftermath.  This
account is thus constructed from leaks, off-hand remarks and fragments,
and its central figure remains something of a mystery to me.  All I can
really tell you about Themba Ngwazi is that he was short, stocky and
twenty-nine years old, and that he wasn't afraid to die.

Themba was a Xhosa from the Flagstaff district in the nominally
independent Transkei.  I once drove there in search of his family the
wife, the two children, the heartbroken father, who was said to have a
hunchback and to be of royal blood but I couldn't find them.  All I
found was a homeland whose deceptively green and pleasant face
concealed desperate unhappiness.  In Flagstaff, the cattle were
scrawny, the fields barren, the people bitterly poor.  Whenever I
stopped to ask the way, little children surrounded the car, rubbing
their stomachs and saying, "Hunger!  Hunger!"  or "Ten cents!

Ten cents!"

There were few grown-up men in Flagstaff, because there was no work
there.  If you were a man born in Flagstaff, you went to work in the
distant white cities.  Or, as in Themba's case, you left your wife and
children, walked to the nearest depot of TEBA, and signed your life
away to the mines.  TEBA was The Employment Bureau of Africa,
recruiting arm of the Johannesburg Chamber of Mines.  The officials at
TEBA gave you a number and a contract and put you on a train bound for
eGoli, the city of gold.

In eGoli, you were taken to the Chamber of Mines hospital, ordered to
strip, and sent into an acclimatization chamber a giant Turkish bath,
really, unbearably hot and humid in emulation of underground
conditions.  You and your fellow recruits, hundreds of you, were placed
in front of small stepladders and told to climb up and down, up and
down, for hours on end while the sweat cascaded off your naked bodies
and white men in lab coats listened to your heart with stethoscopes or
fondled your testicles in their hands, checking for a hernia.  This
rite of mass humiliation was designed to make sure that new recruits
wouldn't drop dead on the job, down in the bowels of the earth.  It
went on for days and days.

If you were judged tough enough and Themba was you were sent to miners'
school and then sent underground.

This is how Joel Matlou described his first day down there:

At 7:15 AM the boss boy took us to the lift.  As it went down my ears
went dead and I saw dark and light as we passed other levels.  The lift
stopped at 28 level.  We gave our tickets to the boss boy and walked
for one hour to the end of the shaft.  The mine shaft was very hot. 
The sweat ran off me like water.  There were three tunnels.

The small trains had red lights on the back and front indicating
danger.  Before the blasting, small holes were drilled in the walls and
a man referred to as a chessa-boy gut explosives into them.  After the
blasting we found roken pipes, bent rails, a cracked wall and other dam
age.  The blast gave us heavy work.  The small trains and their trucks
were called to collect all stones.  You can find a stone weighing 450
pounds far from the blast.  Water leaked from the top of the walls.
Sometimes small stones fell on us.  My boots were full of water.  A
Zulu from King

Williamstown was digging water concrete when part of the ventilator
fell on him and his left leg was trapped under it.  The boss called us
and we lifted the ventilator to take out the trapped man.  His leg was
broken and bloody... And so on.  What is true on one mine is not
necessarily true on another, and the gold mine where Themba worked was
cooler and safer than most, or so its white officials told me.  The
mine was called Randfontein Estates, and it lay twenty-five miles
southwest of Johannesburg, on the western arm of the gold reef that
made white South Africa rich.  It was a vast complex, with a perimeter
at least ten miles long.  There were at least three shafts, judging
from the headgear I saw rising from the veld, and possibly four
separate compounds, or hostels, for the black workers, who numbered
fourteen thousand.  Security on the mine was very tight.  You couldn't
just walk in, and you certainly couldn't go down underground unless you
were invited, which I wasn't.

So I hung around the mine gates and buttonholed a white guy in a hard
hat.  I told him that management said his mine was cooler and safer
than most, and he seemed a bit taken aback.

"All I can say," he said, 'is that it's bloody hot down there anyway."
He said Randfontein Estates was so deep that it took half an hour to
descend to its deeper levels, and another half hour to travel to the
working face.  It was like a city down there, he said, or a giant
underground factory, so noisy that your brain seemed to rattle inside
your skull.  Trains thundered, machines clattered, drills yammered, and
the shock waves of muffled explosions came rumbling out of the mouths
of dark, claustrophobic tunnels.  It was a frightening place to work,
he said, what with a mile of rock between you and the sun and cave-ins
an ever-present danger.  Beyond that, he had no real complaints.  He
was white, and white miners made very good money.

The same was not true of Themba and other black men who labored in
South Africa's mines, digging the gold, diamonds, coal, and platinum
that made white South Africa wealthy.

I once asked a trade union organizer how he went about 'conscientizing'
black miners, and he said, "I begin at the beginning.  I say, "The
whites came here in 1652, and ever since it has been bad for us.  They
stole our fathers' cattle, and they stole our fathers' land.  Then they
found the gold, and started stealing our fathers' labor."  He went on
to talk about the 'hut taxes' and 'livestock taxes' imposed on rural
Africans around the turn of the century at the behest of Johannesburg's
mining capitalists.  The aim was to force black tribesmen off the land
and into the mine compounds, where cheap labor was desperately
needed.

South Africa's mines were the deepest in the world a mile and a half
deep, in some cases and so close to hell that the walls and roofs of
the shafts were sometimes too hot to touch with bare hands.  The work
was exquisitely uncomfortable, and for decades it earned black miners a
mere pittance in pay R10.70 a month as late as 1970.  That is why South
Africa's gold mines were so obscenely profitable, why their shares were
among the bluest chips on the world's stock exchanges for more than a
century.  As recently as 1985, I heard an American congressman on
network television refer to black miners as 'slave labor."

He had a point, I suppose, but he'd missed the moment to make it.  By
1985, the slaves who dug the gold were doing relatively well.  Themba
Ngwazi, for instance, was pulling down around five hundred rand a
month, plus free board and lodging.  In South Africa, this was a living
wage.  On the other hand, it was barely a quarter of what a white miner
made, and it was very hard for Themba to make more, no matter how
intelligent or capable he was, or how hard he tried.  He was black, you
see, and all the highly skilled and best-paid jobs on South African
mines were reserved by law for whites only.

Themba could never become a blaster, for instance.  Only a white man
was allowed to hold a blasting certificate.  This was insulting and
hurtful in itself, but it had an even more invidious consequence
underground: It encouraged white bosses to sacrifice black miners'
lives.  White blasters were paid according to how much rock they broke,
so they took risks or rather, they ordered black men like Themba to
take risks.  If black miners were killed, that was just too bad.

"They're just baboons anyway."  So said Arrie Paulus, leader of the
reactionary white Mine Workers' Union.

And so black 'baboons' died by the thousand in mining accidents fifty
thousand deaths since the turn of the century.

Mine safety conditions started improving in the seventies, but blacks
were still dying in disproportionate numbers, partly because they had
no right to refuse to work in dangerous areas.  If the white boss gave
Themba an order, Themba had to obey.  If he balked, he risked being
fired, and if he was fired, there was no union to fight for him not
prior to 1982, at any rate.

Prior to the Botha reforms, black trade unions were denied legal
recognition in South Africa, and black mine workers made their
arguments in other ways, sometimes with acts of sabotage.  They threw
spanners into engines, started fires underground.  Now and then they'd
explode with rage and frustration, and wild rioting would break out in
the compounds, at which point the police were called in to subdue them,
often with loss of life.  After that, the troublemakers were usually
fired and replaced.  It was so easy to replace a black mine worker. Out
in the bush, in the homelands and surrounding countries, almost half a
million men were on the waiting list for jobs on South African mines.

This is how the writer Joel Matlou felt at the end of his first
shift:

The time for clocking out started to on round, so we followed our boss
boy back to the station.  We switched off our lamps while we waited in
the queue because at the station there were electric lights.  We were
wet like fishes and ugly like hippos.

Some were sitting and resting with empty stomachs.  After twenty
minutes, the lift arrived.  The guard opened the door and we flowed in.
The notice on the door said the lift took only 20 people, but we were
packed like fishes in a small can.

Back up in the sunlight, black miners lived in bleak all-male
compounds, far from their homes and families.  Themba's compound looked
rather like a prison to me a model prison, to be sure, with sports
fields and recreation facilities, but still: not the nicest place to
live.  It consisted of nine single-story face-brick buildings, strewn
in a crescent across several acres of lawn.  In the center stood a
giant mess hall, and off to one side was an open-air amphitheater,
where movies were sometimes shown.  The whole was surrounded by tall
fences, and accessible only through an elaborate gate flanked by
guardhouses teeming with security men.

The security barracks lay a mile or two away.  All I could see from the
outside were a few 'riot vehicles' armored Toyota Land Cruisers parked
on the tarmac, but I gathered that they had some serious weapons in
there: razor-wire trailers, water cannon, armories of semiautomatic
rifles, shotguns, and 'stoppers," devices for firing tear gas or rubber
bullets.  There was also a guard-dog school somewhere on the premises,
and even a secret service of sorts, controlling a network of management
spies.

White mine managers bristled at the suggestion that there was anything
sinister about all this.  They insisted that the guns and war toys were
necessary to guard the gold and keep the peace among men from mutually
hostile tribes.

They had a point, I suppose, but then they would also say their workers
were quite contented, and I'm not sure that was entirely true.  To hear
Joel Matlou tell it, black mine workers were miserable.

"There was no time or chance to prove yourself," he wrote, 'who you are
and what you want."

I did not wash my clothes or bathe because I did not have soap or other
clothes to put on.  All I did was eat and sleep on the grass... The
mine injection makes you forget about your parents, relatives and
friends, even your girlfriend.  The injection makes you think only
about work underground.

After three weeks underground, I was part of that world.

Washing, bathing, cutting nails, dressing in clean clothes and reading
newspapers was far from me.  It could be about 640,000 miles far from
me.  Life was so bad; for me life was a little piece of stone.

Themba Ngwazi had lived the life of a stone for most of his adult life,
and he was very, very tired of it.  That is one thing I can say with
certainty: Themba was an angry man.

This is a parable about industrial relations, about the struggle of
workers against bosses.  We have met Themba, and now we must meet his
antagonists.  Once again, I know less than I'd like to about them,
because they decided not to talk to me after an exploratory interview
or two.  I visited their headquarters, though.  It was a windowless
monolith in Johannesburg's financial district, vast planes of
reflective glass on the outside, and strikingly sumptuous within.  The
lobby was full of expensive art.  In the elevators, a disembodied voice
reminded travelers which way they were going and when they'd arrived at
their floor.  The corridors were deep and plushly carpeted.  The desks
were broad and imposing, the white executives behind them well tailored
and fed.  There was a smell about the place that reminded me of
America.

It was the smell of money and power, the smell of a big oil company, or
an insurance conglomerate, maybe.

This was the headquarters of JCI, or Johannesburg Consolidated
Investments, a mining house with assets of three and a half billion
rand and net annual revenues of R322 million.

JCl owned Randfontein Estates, and was a subsidiary of Anglo American,
the giant gold- and diamond-mining conglomerate that owned many of
South Africa's richest mines and almost everything else besides
including a controlling interest in around 45 per cent of the companies
listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.  The Anglo American
Corporation was South African capitalism personified.

In my leftist youth, I thought institutions like Anglo American and JCI
were evil, but I was no longer so sure about that.  The white men who
ran the Anglo empire were businessmen, no more or less moral than their
counterparts elsewhere.  Most were liberals, in the English-speaking
South African sense, and most collaborated with apartheid in the
decades when it was good for business.  By 1985, however, apartheid had
become a liability, and the liberal capitalists were turning against it
not for moral reasons, but because it was causing turbulence and
instability, threatening the flow of profits and fostering the growth
of bolshevism among increasingly antagonistic black workers.  The
capitalists saw which way the wind was blowing, and started
repositiomng themselves.

By 1985, they were doing their best to endear themselves to the angry
black masses.  This entailed, among other things, the granting of
exponential wage increases to black workers and some sly encouragement
of trade unionism on the mines.

Some of South Africa's capitalists were very sophisticated, and saw
that it was in their own best interests to help the emerging black
trade unions to their feet.  That way, they might be molded, tempered,
and turned into organizations with whom the capitalists could work in
the long run.  And so, when a militant black union informed JCl that it
wanted to conduct a recruitment campaign on Randfontein Estates, JCI
smiled graciously and invited the union in.

The union in question was NUM, the mighty black National Union of
Mineworkers, headed by a charismatic young lawyer named Cyril
Ramaphosa.  NUM was only three and a half years old in 1985, but it was
already the country's largest black union, with 230,000 paid-up members
and a solid foothold in the mines.  In some respects, NUM was a
wages-and-working conditions trade union; in others, a revolutionary
force, clearly bent on a far-reaching restructuring of South African
society.  It elected Nelson Mandela its honorary president, spoke
warmly of socialism, and established ties with the exiled ANC.  All
this was no doubt alarming to JCI's urbane capitalists, but it was the
shape of things to come.  NUM was a force to be reckoned with, even
appeased, maybe.

The union's 'access agreement' at Randfontein Estates was thus quite
generous in its terms.  NUM was given leave to hold meetings and
distribute literature on mine property.  It was even given an office at
the mine.  The agreement was valid for a year, and stipulated that JCl
would recognize NUM once it recruited a majority of workers as members.
Given the size of Randfontein Estates workforce, it was an important
campaign, so NUM sent one of its best men in to run it.

His name was Blackie Mshotshiza, and he was barely twenty-seven years
old.  He wore his hair in an Afro, had a fondness for fancy fitted
shirts, and lived in an apartment in a once whites-only part of
Johannesburg.  A former student activist from one of the independent
homelands, he'd come to Johannesburg in 1982, matriculated at a private
high school, and gone straight to work for NUM.  In the three years
since, he'd risen to be a regional organizer, in charge of NUM
activities on nine huge mines west of Johannesburg.

Themba showed up at the very first NUM meeting on Randfontein Estates
and immediately caught the union organizer's eye.

"He was singing, you know, these songs of Africa," Blackie told me.

"He was leading the singing and dancing.  I was hearing that he came
from a blood family, that his father was a chief or something- that is
why he was so much strong, because he was coming from a blood family."
Themba couldn't read or write very well, but this did not mean he was
dumb.

"He could understand what you were talking," said Blackie.

"As for his politics, I will just say he was hating the whites.

That's all."

"I started liking him straight away," the union organizer added.
Indeed, Blackie liked Themba so much that Themba became a NUM shaft
steward, and a spearhead of the recruitment drive.

In spite of the spectacular grievances among Randfontein Estates' black
miners, the drive got off to a disappointing start.

Many black miners were simply scared of joining the union, scared of
losing their jobs.  Others were ill-educated men from isolated areas,
unfamiliar with the concepts of trade unionism and resistant to the
idea of paying dues.  To complicate matters still further, a
significant percentage of Randfontein Estates' workers were Shangaan
tribesmen from Mozambique, and they were utterly terrified of getting
into trouble and being sent home.  Their country was racked by war and
famine, and they were liable to starve if that happened.

On top of all this, NUM accused management of hampering it at every
turn.  The white bosses expected Blackie to hold meetings only in his
office not in the compounds.  If he wanted to distribute pamphlets, he
had to get the bosses' approval, and if he failed to do so, his
literature was confiscated.  As far as management was concerned, all
this was in keeping with the small print in the access agreement.  They
took the drive's halting progress as proof of their own most cherished
contention Randfontein Estates' black workers were actually quite
happy.

Whatever the truth, Blackie and Themba made little headway.  By
November 1985, NUM was still drawing barely a hundred supporters to
meetings, and the access agreement was soon to expire.  JCI was willing
to renew it, but the union was in a hurry.  It wanted to sign up all
600,000 of South Africa's black mine workers and weld them into a
weapon with which to cudgel the apartheid state.  There was no time to
waste.  The townships were on fire; the children were fighting and
dying; the time for the conclusive uprising had come.  NUM's president,
James Mahlatsi, was saying that South Africa would be a socialist
country within the year, but even this prospect failed to ignite the
workers of Randfontein Estates.  The mine remained quiet.  Some union
militants seemed to find that disappointing.

On November 13, Blackie Mshotshiza called a meeting and took the mine's
apathetic majority to task.  His speech focused on a change in
labor-contracting procedures known among miners as the waya-waya, or
'why-why."  Once upon a time, migrant mine workers had enjoyed
something approaching job security.  At the end of any given contract,
they went home to their wives and cattle armed with a 'record of
service' containing a 'coming-back date."  On the coming-back date, a
man reported to the nearest TEBA depot, and was put aboard a
Jo'burg-bound train.  These days, however, the mines were mechanizing,
cutting down on unskilled labor, employing fewer men.  These days, many
workers received a record of service containing no coming-back date.
The bosses promised that they'd be recalled when they were needed, but
sometimes, the call never came.  The workers asked, "Why?

Why?"  Why must it be this way?  Workers at nearby Kloof mine were
fighting the why-why.  So were the workers at Vaal Reefs and Western
Areas.  But the men of Randfontein were just sitting on their hands.
Blackie accused them of being 'old women," too frightened to join the
union.

"Wake up and fight!"  he said.

In due course, Blackie's 'emotional and aggressive' remarks reached the
white mine managers' ears.  Randfontein Estates ran an intelligence
system almost as sophisticated as the state's black men with code names
such as Foxtrot-Foxtrot, Delta Delta or Golf-Whiskey planted in the
compounds to keep an ear open for subversive undercurrents.  In the
days following Blackie's speech, the spies' reports took on an
increasingly unsettling tenor.  One spy caught wind of a plan to attack
the mine's security force and 'kill the white dogs."  Another overheard
someone say, "Black Africa belongs to the blacks.

The whites must be driven away."  A third reported a plan to chase
'dogs like security staff, hostel representatives, indunas and
personnel' off the mine.  The dogs in question were 'management
lackeys' blacks of the supervisor caste.

By December 7, the tide seemed to be turning in the union's favor.  A
big union rally was scheduled for that day.

NUM hired a fleet of buses to pick up its supporters, but Randfontein
Estates refused to let them in.  Management was clearly growing uneasy.
Undaunted, several hundred miners jumped the fences, hoisted Blackie
onto their shoulders, and then piled onto the buses, singing freedom
songs.

The rally must have been quite an event.  When the miners came home,
thirty-six hours later, they were utterly intoxicated by the freedom
spirit and in the mood for action.

Their demand was, "No more why-why," and to back it up, they imposed a
boycott on the canteens management-run beer halls where workers relaxed
over mugs of the African brew called tsbwala.  Once the beer halls were
shut down, the militants turned on the so-called Jew shops, concession
stores that traded in soap, shoe polish, tobacco, and other small
necessities.  On its way to close one such store, a throng of singing
miners had to cross a public road.  They ran into the police at the
intersection.  Stones were thrown, and the cops opened fire, killing
one miner, injuring thirteen, and arresting thirty-seven.

At that, the real troubles began.  As word of the shootings spread,
workers started downing tools.  By nightfall, at least a thousand were
on strike.  The Shangaans wanted no part of this and set off for work
as usual.  The militants waylaid them on their way to the shaft head,
and several were beaten up as scabs.  Next morning, the Mozambicans
decided it might be prudent to stay in their rooms, but the militants
were having none of that.  They surged through the Shangaans' quarters,
smashing furniture and driving the cowards out before them.

Soon, almost three thousand workers were out in the quadrangle,
dancing, singing, and roaring.

"Amandla!  Amandla!"

"Power!  Power!"  The bosses were shaken by their fury.  'l shit
myself," one said.

The mine's white supervisors retreated into their offices and watched
the revolution through the windows.  The dancing went on day and night
and the whites grew delirious with exhaustion.  Indeed, there came a
point, forty-eight hours into the strike, when they were dancing and
shouting amandla, too.  Every now and then, a delegation came in to
confront Piet Rademeyer, the mine's manpower manager.  Rademeyer was a
painfully earnest Arikaner, and an old-fashioned compound manager by
repute.  Until the struggle came to Randfontein, being manpower manager
was a little like being a colonial magistrate.  You could walk without
fear through the teeming compounds.  The tribesmen would call you
nkosi, or lord, and pass the time of day with you in Fanagalo, the
half-Zulu lingua franca of South African mines.  Piet Rademeyer had
always assumed that the blacks were quite fond of him.  Now he was
learning otherwise.

One afternoon, Themba led a delegation into Rademeyer's office to
present some new demands.  Rademeyer listened politely, then tried to
put across management's point of view.

"We're not concerned' he began, but Themba cut him off.

"You're not concerned about what?"  he snapped.  The rest of the
delegation took up the chant in Fanagalo: "You're not concerned about
what!  You're not concerned about what!"  Then Themba stood up and
waved a finger in Rademeyer's face.

"You, Piet!"  he shouted.

"You too clever!  You shut up!"  Themba was a very angry man.  As far
as he was concerned, the boss was going nowhere until the workers'
demands were met.

What were their demands?  They wanted their thirty seven comrades
released from police custody.  They wanted the mine security force
abolished.  They wanted the induhas - boss boys fired and replaced with
'worker representatives."  And finally, they wanted no more why-whys.

They wanted coming-back dates.  They wanted job security.

According to Rademeyer, management was willing to make concessions but
didn't know whom to talk to.  They couldn't exactly talk to Themba.  He
was illiterate and hardly spoke English.  And yet they had to talk to
someone, because the situation was getting out of hand.  In the end,
they called Cyril Ramaphosa at NUM headquarters and pleaded for his
help.

A deal was duly cut, and NUM sent Blackie Mshotshiza out to the mine.

It was almost midnight by the time Blackie got there.  There was
thunder and lightning in the sky, and the strikers were waiting in
pouring rain.  According to the reports of management spies, Blackie
pointed to the silent headgear of the nearest mine shaft.

"You see those wheels?"  he asked.

"They are not moving.  Through your power and unity, this mine has come
to a standstill.  Now you see, this mine belongs to the blacks.  We
have the managers where we want them."  The miners cheered.

The time would come, Blackie continued, when the union would tell Piet
Rademeyer to 'take his jacket and fuck off," but the time was not yet
ripe.  For now, they should go back to work.  The miners cheered again,
donned their helmets, and went back underground.

A day or two later on December 12 - a delegation of NUM higher-ups and
Randfontein miners trooped into JCI House and sat down to talk with the
bosses.  They came out with at least one major concession an end to the
why-why system and the promise of more to come.  It was something of a
triumph for the union.  NUM had humbled the mighty mining house, and
brought the capitalists to their knees.

The peace lasted only twenty-four hours.  On December 13, trouble broke
out again.  The issue, this time, was a gate a massive red gate that
separated the mine from the township of Bekkersdal.  Themba wanted the
gate open, but management insisted it stay closed, citing security
reasons.

Themba refused to swallow that.  As far as he was concerned, Rademeyer
was trying to break the beer hall boycott by denying workers the right
to go drinking off the mine.

When management declined to yield to his demands, Thetuba drummed up a
crowd and staged an unruly demonstration.

Blackie showed up just in time to negotiate a truce.  The bosses backed
down, the gate was opened, and Thembas followers dispersed.

Four days later, Themba came up from underground to find the red gate
locked again.  The bosses claimed that black supervisors and personnel
officers had asked for it to be closed, on the grounds that tsotsis
from the township were coming in to rifle their cars.  Themba wasn't
buying that, though.  He and his followers were outraged.  They
uprooted the giant gate with their bare hands and dumped it outside the
compound manager's door.  Looking around, they spotted two bosses
standing a hundred or so yards away.

"They came charging at us like a rugby team," one of the white men told
me.

"It was a bloody frightening sight."  The whites ducked into an office
and closed the door.  Hundreds of workers gathered on the lawn outside,
dancing and singing again.  NUM shaft stewards rushed to the scene, but
Themba's band apparently brushed them aside.

Darkness fell, tension mounted, and the situation degenerated into
confusion.

I think it only fair to mention that this narrative is drawn in part
from a confidential document leaked to me by the proverbial disgruntled
employee.  It was JCl's internal report on Themba's uprising, and it
mentioned several people I had never met among them Cyril Ramaphosa,
founder and leader of NUM.  When it was all over, Ramaphosa's union
would proclaim Themba a loyal shaft steward, and a martyr to the cause.
JCl's report told a somewhat different story.

According to the report, a worried white mine official named H Fischer
called union headquarters around eight that night and found himself
speaking to Ramaphosa himself.  Listen, said Fischer, the situation
here is getting out of control, and your men don't seem able to contain
it.  Ramaphosa is said to have groaned, "Oh, no," and promised to see
what he could do.

Not much, apparently.  Over the next ten days the mine started sliding
into anarchy.  There was a rash of wildcat work stoppages, called by
God knows who.  The work force seemed to split into factions, each
claiming to be the union, each putting forth its own den lands  All
issues seemed to become one issue the issue of white bosses, white
power, white privilege, white rule.  It got to a stage where nobody
knew what was happening, not even the person who compiled JCI's secret
report.  There were scattered outbreaks of tribal fighting, and several
violent clashes between militants and mine security.  More scabs were
beaten up, and then it was the indunas' turn.  The militants insisted
that they all be fired.  Immediately.  The indunas' lives were in
danger, so management evacuated them from the compounds.

As far as the militants were concerned, this wasn't good enough.  One
afternoon, a leaderless mob of three hundred miners marched on the
bosses' office and demanded to know why they still saw indunas on the
premises.  They called another strike.  That evening, there was renewed
fighting between the militants and the reluctant Shangaans.  This had
been going on for almost a month now, and management decided to step in
and stop it.

The capitalists were reluctant to use force, because they saw far, and
carefully calculated the consequences of their action, but once they'd
decided to use muscle they proceeded with deliberation and
determination.  The mine's own forces were mobilized.  A
command-control helicopter was borrowed from Anglo American, two riot
teams from a neighboring mine.  The South African Police were invited
to send a detachment too, just in case.  Two days before Christmas,
this ad hoc army moved in to crush the militants, who numbered around a
thousand, according to the mine's intelligence estimates.  The orders
were rubber bullets only, no lethal force, but someone loaded his rifle
with live ammunition, and one miner was shot dead.  Another, hit in the
head by a rubber bullet, died of his injuries.  In all, twenty-two men
were hospitalized.  In the aftermath, management tightened security and
banned meetings of more than ten men on mine property.  The unrest was
finally over, or so it seemed.

And then, early one Sunday morning, an alert security guard noticed
something odd happening in a marsh just off mine property, and it
started all over again.

It is Sunday, January 19, 1986, 8:30 AM on a southern summer morning.
The rains have been good this season.  The grass is lush and dewy, and
there is a blush of intense green in the boughs of the willows and
poplars on the banks of the marsh that Eric Magnus is studying through
his binoculars.

Eric Magnus is white, in his late thirties, and wearing jeans, a light
summer shirt, and the ubiquitous white South African mustache.  Magnus
and a black man in combat uniform are standing beside a car on a dirt
road, looking out over a semirural landscape.  Behind them, we see the
towering headgear of a mine shaft, and mine dumps yellow as beaches and
high as hills, partially obscured by groves of blue-gum trees.  A line
of split-level houses along the horizon marks the outskirts of the
gold-mining town of Randfontein.

Eric Magnus is a cop; one look at his blunt face, and you know he's a
cop.  He was once a lieutenant in the South African Police, but these
days, he's chief of security at Randfontein Estates Gold Mine,
commander of the mine's 460-man private army.  This is supposed to be
Eric Magnus's day off, but he's been called in to take a look at what's
happening down in the marsh.  The reeds are eight feet tall in some
spots and so dense that an army could be hiding in them.  Magnus has
been watching for fifteen minutes already, but he's still not quite
sure what he's seeing.

At first, he thought they were Zionists, African Zionists, conducting
baptisms in the muddy rivulet that trickles between the beds of reeds.
There is no 'prophet' to be seen, however, no be-robed pastor dunking
the faithful in the drink, and there's none of the clapping or singing
that usually accompanies such ceremonies.  Just forty or fifty black
men, some wearing underpants, some completely naked.  They're just
standing around in a marsh without any clothes on, as if this is a
perfectly ordinary thing to be doing at dawn on a Sunday morning.  They
seem to be aware that Magnus is watching, and waiting for him to go
away.  Why on earth are they naked?  They certainly aren't swimming.
Eric Magnus can't figure it out, but it makes him feel uneasy.

He recognizes several faces among the crowd.  One is a yellow-faced,
fattish fellow with tribal scars on his cheeks.

What's his name again?  Ah, yes, Themba.  And there's Comrade Bala,
too.  Comrade Bala is a real hard case, a hard man with a strong body
and intense, coal-black eyes.  A holy warrior.  What's he doing down
there?  It worries Eric Magnus.

Another thing that worries him is the way some of those men are tearing
branches off trees and snapping them into sturdy three-foot lengths,
the length of a traditional fighting stick.

Magnus doesn't like that at all.

He swings his glasses toward the house of the white man on whose
property this gathering is taking place.  The farmer is out in his
backyard, also observing the situation through field glasses.
Traversing back across the dewy green landscape, Magnus discovers a new
element in the tableau a yellow South African Police pickup, pulling
off the tar and heading down the dirt road toward him.  The cops pull
up and say how zit  One of the policemen jerks a thumb at the blacks in
the marsh.

"What are those guys doing down there?"  he asks.

Magnus shrugs.

"You tell me," he says.

It turns out that the cops are here on business.  The white farmer on
the far side of the marsh has asked them to clear the trespassers off
his land.  Neither of the cops speaks an African language, so Magnus
offers the services of his black sidekick, and the loan of his PA
system, too.  The cops tell the black man what to say.  He dicks on the
microphone, clears his throat, and makes the announcement in Xhosa.

"Attention!"  he says.

"Attention!  You are on private property!  Please leave now!"

In response, there is an astonishing stirring at the waterside, and
several hundred hitherto invisible black men rise from the reeds.  Some
are naked, others armed with staves cut from surrounding trees.  They
turn toward the white men and stare at them, silently.  Eric Magnus is
suddenly very uneasy indeed.

"Uh-oh," he thinks.

"Here's trouble."

In his days as a South African Police detective, Eric Magnus was
assigned to track down the right-wing terrorists who sent
acid-impregnated T-shirts to the children of liberal newspaper editor
Donald Woods an incident immortalized in the moyle Cry Freedom.  Just
as he was closing in on the culprits, the police brass pulled him off
the case.  Magnus quit in disgust because of that, and he seldom misses
the force save in moments like these.  If this were a South African
Police operation, he could step in right now, throw his weight around,
and nip the trouble nicely in the bud.  But that's out of the question
today.  Eric Magnus is a civilian now, answering to a civilian boss.
JCl's vice-chairman has laid down a policy: "Mine management must
endeavor to maintain a low-key security profile, and at the same time
retain complete control."

Maintain a low-key profile, but retain complete control.

What on earth does that mean in a situation like today's?

Magnus thinks it over and decides that JCI's vice-chairman would
probably want him to walk out into the marsh and have a friendly chat
with the workers.  So he does that.  He goes strolling among them,
nodding hello on this side, good morning on that.

"Aren't you cold?"  he asks those who are naked.  The mine workers seem
a line surly and resentful, but they aren't at all hostile at this
stage.  With a little encouragement from the white man, they put their
clothes on and start walking back to the mine.

Magnus heaves a sigh of relief, climbs into his car, and follows.  He's
crawling along behind the marching column when he hears a sound that
makes his heart sink.  The mine workers are singing.  Their song is
hauntingly beautiful 'the most beautiful song I've ever heard," Magnus
says but he'd rather not be hearing it right now.  It's the song Xhosa
warriors sing as they go into battle.  The mine workers start waving
sticks and fence-droppers in the air.  Some stoop to pick up stones
from the road.  A disembodied arm rises from the center of the throng,
holding a knife in its hand.

At this point, Piet Rademeyer shows up.  He takes a look at the crowd,
turns to Magnus, and says, "We can't let them in with those weapons."
So Magnus gets on the radio and calls out a riot team or two forty or
fifty black men in combat boots and visored riot helmets, armed with
truncheons, shotguns, and stoppers.  Reaching the gate of their
compound, the miners discover themselves outgunned.  Piet Rademeyer
steps out to talk to them.  We don't want another fight, he says.  You
guys just put down your weapons and come inside, and we'll forget this
ever happened.  The miners find this acceptable.

One by one, they start passing through the gate.

As they come in, a mine official named Jan Oosthuizen notices something
curious.  Most of these men have tiny cuts on their bodies, two tiny
parallel incisions on their cheeks, between their eyes or behind their
shoulder blades, in the case of those still shin less  At first sight,
this doesn't strike him as unusual.  You often see ceremonial tribal
scars on the faces of black South Africans.  Even ANC leader Oliver
Tambo has them.  The only odd thing about these scars is that they
aren't relics of adolescent initiation rites.  They're fresh.  A dark,
gooey substance seems to have been rubbed into them.

Oosthuizen has no idea what to make of this, so he just puts it out of
his mind.

As he passes through the gate, each miner is patted down by a security
guard.  Then he joins a knot of comrades seated on the lawn fifty yards
away.  They are waiting to make sure everyone makes it safely through
the security cordon.

They do.  As soon as they're all disarmed, though, the South African
Police step in and collar two apparent ringleaders for questioning.
This is treachery.  Rademeyer gave his word.  The mine workers start
shouting angrily.  The cops swiftly release their two suspects, but
it's too late.

The miners start breaking down trees, tearing down washing lines, and
breaking them up for weapons.  Some run into the nearby compound to
round up reinforcements.  Rademeyer hears an incredible racket as the
militants move through the building, smashing the walls and ceilings
with sticks, driving the timid out before them.  Men start boiling out
of the doors and windows, leaping fences, fleeing the militants.  The
crowd at the gate starts growing, getting more and more excited.

Eric Magnus sends one of his armored vehicles out onto the lawn,
loudspeakers blaring a warning to disperse.  The miners throw stones at
it.  Rademeyer runs to a telephone and calls the mine's general
manager.  We've got trouble again, he says.

The general manager authorizes the use of force.  The mine's riot team
squares off against a throng of five-hundred-odd dancing, stick-waving
black miners, and it's high noon again on Randfontein Estates.

The showdown has started, but Eric Magnus is still thinking in terms of
low-key security profiles and defusing the situation.  So he gets on
the radio again and calls in his secret weapon, a war toy that he has
christened Ndlovu, meaning 'elephant."  A minute or two later, Ndlovu
appears in the distance.  It's a gleaming, sinister, armor-plated
machine, red as a fire engine, with what appears to be a cannon mounted
on its turret.  Ndlovu comes trundling down the perimeter fence and
turns into the compound.  The mine workers have never seen this machine
before.  They gasp as its cannon swings to bear on them, and most of
them start backing away.  Then Ndlovu opens fire and water comes
spewing out of its gun barrel.

Ndlovu is a water cannon.

A great cry goes up from the miners, and then something inexplicable
begins to happen.  A few men are knocked flying by the jet of water,
but the rest 'just went mad," in Eric Magnus's phrase.

"They were running away, but as soon as the water cannon opened fire,
they turned back and attacked us.  They came flat out for us, throwing
stones and pieces of coal."  To Oosthuizen, who is watching the battle
from a distance, the black men seem 'jubilant."  They're ducking and
dodging rubber bullets, laughing their heads off.  They seem utterly
fearless.  The security force fires salvo after salvo of rubber
bullets, though, and some of the missiles find their mark.  More and
more of the mine workers go down, howling, clutching injured legs.
Eventually the attack wavers, and after that it's all routine "Good,
clean fun," says Magnus.  The crowd breaks and runs, and in minutes
it's all over.

In the aftermath, in an office papered with pin-studded ordnance maps
of his turf, Magnus ponders the curious failure of his new riot-control
weapon.  He has Ndiovu's user's manual right there in his desk, written
by an American counterinsurgency expert whose research has clearly
established the water cannon's effectiveness.  To intimidate and
discourage white rioters, you put green dye in the water.  If your
rioters are black, the water must be red, or purplish, actually; black
South Africans call it purple rain.  Magnus did everything by the book,
and yet Ndlovu intimidated nobody;

on the contrary, its use inspired euphoria.

Magnus is mulling over this mystery when one of his secret agents comes
in with a curious report.  He says that the workers down at the marsh
this morning were members of a rogue faction led by Themba.  The union
has been urging Themba to cool it, to calm down, but Themba's too angry
to listen to reason.  He and several other shaft stewards have decided
to go it alone.  They failed to show up at Blackie's most recent
meeting, and when the organizer sent someone to call them they told the
messenger to get lost.

According to the secret agent, their plan is to overthrow the mine's
white authorities and install Themba on Piet Rademeyer's throne. Toward
this end, they imposed a levy on themselves, two rand per man, raising
a total of eighteen hundred rand.  This sum in hand, they dispatched a
representative to the Transkei, homeland of the Xhosa and Pondo tribes,
to consult a renowned inyanga, or witch doctor.  The inyanga provided
several shoe-polish tins of a very powerful battle medicine called
intsizi, traditionally made from charred herbs and animal fat.  It was
black in color, and if you made tiny cuts in your body on the cheeks,
between the eyes, on the shoulder blades and rubbed it in, it would
turn the white man's bullets into water, or so the witch doctor
claimed.

The medicine arrived at the mine on Friday, and Themba had been holding
secret meetings all weekend, administering it to his followers.

Magnus has no idea what to make of all this.  He's white, so it sounds
incredibly cockeyed to him.  Still, it would seem to explain the water
cannon's ignominious failure.  At the same time, he can't help
wondering what's going on in the heads of the dozens of mine workers
stung and bloodied by rubber bullets in this morning's riot.  He
imagines it will be rather hard to convince them this battle medicine
is worth the money they paid for it.

It was indeed.  Themba and his men held a postmortem the following
afternoon.  Agent Victor-Victor was there.  In his report to mine
management, he describes a great grumbling about this lying inyanga and
his useless battle medicine.  The inyanga (or maybe it was his
representative; Victor-Victor wasn't quite clear on that score) stood
up and explained that there had been a misunderstanding.  The medicine
did not work on the day you took it, he said.  You had to wait three
days before it worked.  What's more, he said, if you took a bath or had
a woman in that period, it would not work at all.

And finally, he cautioned that the medicine would protect only those
warriors who kept their face to the enemy and pressed home the attack.
Cowards who turned their backs would be cut down.  The miners nodded
understandingly and resolved to give it a second chance.  They made it
clear, however, that if the magic failed again on the third day, the
inyanga was a dead man.

In conclusion, Victor-Victor notes that Themba's faction has scheduled
a meeting for the following day the third day, the fatal day.  Three
hundred fighting comrades from a nearby township have sworn to be
there, Victor-Victor says, and they are going to bring guns.

This is not the only alarming report to cross Magnus's desk this night.
Golf-Whiskey says a plot is afoot to burn down Cooke 2 compound.
Foxtrot-Foxtrot reports talk of a brewing faction fight in Cooke 3,
where Xhosa and Pondo tribesmen are at odds with Swazi and Basotho.  A
neighboring mine reports the discovery of an ominous leaflet in its
compounds?  If your heart is weak you can't stand blood," it says,
'then go home."  And most alarming of all, miners from conservative
factions are deserting Randfontein Estates in droves.

They are hundreds, even thousands of miles from home, but they are
packing their suitcases and just walking off the mine.

This is the surest of all portents of coming trouble.  Magnus picks up
the telephone and calls the South African Police.

Johannes Bernoldus Eksteen is a cheerful little shrimp of a man,
sandyhaired, buck-toothed, and barely five feet tall.  He's also a
former policeman, about twenty-two years old.  Unlike Magnus, Eksteen
misses his old job misses it so much he's going back to it in another
month or two.  Meanwhile, he's taking no chances.  He's got a shotgun
on his shoulder and a bag of buckshot in one of his pockets, in
flagrant contravention of JCI regulations.  Mine security officers
aren't supposed to carry live ammunition.  Eksteen stands to be fired
if Magnus finds his bag of buckshot, but he doesn't care.  If there's
going to be a battle today, Johannes Bernoldus Eksteen intends to take
a few of the enemy with him.

Today, on Eric Magnus's orders, he's sitting on top of a man-made
mountain of grayish crushed rock, binoculars glued to his eyes.  Below
him and to his right lies one of Randfontein Estates' worker compounds.
A six-foot fence marks the mine's perimeter.  Beyond the fence lie two
'slimes dams," filled with waste from the gold extraction process, and
beyond that, a stretch of open veld, fluorescent green after the rain.
On the far side of the veld, about three hundred yards away, lies a sea
of small asbestos-roofed houses- the township of Bekkersdal.

A dirt road leads past the compound, through the fence, and out into
the open veld.  Eksteen has been watching that road since noon, when
the morning shift started coming up from underground.  Black men are
leaving the hostel in a steady trickle.  They are walking out into the
veld and sitting down in an ever-growing circle, apparently waiting for
something to happen.  Eksteen has duly reported these developments over
his walkie-talkie, and they're being passed on to the South African
Police.  By and by, a yellow Chevy four-by-four with steel mesh on all
its windows appears at the base of Eksteen's rock pile.  Eksteen
scrambles down to say how zit to the boys in blue.  Turns out he knows
them.

Sergeant Daniel Pretorius and Constable Frikkie Koekemoer are members
of the West Rand Reaction Unit, an elite SAP riot-suppression squad.
They are both Afrikaners.

Sergeant Danit is twenty-five, blond, sports the regulation white South
African mustache and beer belly.  Sergeant Daniels, well, you could
almost say famous.  A few months back, he was on gatkruip patrol lie
meaning 'ass-creep patrol," in a township called Tembisa.  Ass-creep
patrol is the hearts and minds aspect of riot control in South Africa.
A photographer caught him handing out sweets to uniformed black school
kids.  Danit and the black kids gave the camera a smile and a thumbs-up
sign, and the picture made the front page of the Sunday Times.

"Thumbs up for education," said the caption.

Sergeant Danie's taste in music inclines towards Fleetwood Mac and Van
Halen, which sometimes puts him at odds with his partner, Constable
Frikkie Koekemoer, aged twenty-seven.

Constable Frikkie looks like Buddy Holly, with his long, thin body and
black-framed glasses, but he digs the polka beat of boeremusiek,
traditional Afrikaner concertina music.  Constable Frikkie and his
eight-months-pregnant wife, Ria, are just crazy about a boeremusiek
combo called Dol[en sy Dol[yne, Dolf and the Dolphins.  There was a
time when Frikkie and Ria used to go dancing every Saturday night, but
these days they never go out anymore.  In fact, Frikkie and Danie have
had virtually no time off since the black rebellion started, and that's
more than a year ago.  They're both very tired.  Frikkie used to be
able to drink a bottle of brandy on his own, or 'on his ace," as we
say.  These days, he has two or three brandies and Coke and passes out
exhausted.

On the other hand, let it not be said that Constable Frikkie Koekemoer
dislikes his job.  It's a swashbuckling, soldier-of fortune game, and
besides, Frikkie rather likes oppressing blacks.

"Frikkie hated the kaffirs," his stepfather Danie van Zyl told me.  One
night, when there was nothing better to do, Van Zyl accompanied Frikkie
on one of his patrols.  On some dark road, they spotted a vehicle
weaving suspiciously in the traffic up ahead.  Frikkie pulled it over.
It was a Zola Budd, a twelve-seat microbus used as a black taxi.
Frikkie yanked the keys out of the ignition and threw them away.  When
the black driver complained, Frikkie uncorked a tear-gas grenade,
chucked it into the bus, then put his shoulder into the door so that
the black passengers were trapped inside.

"They were jumping around and screaming and banging on the roof," Van
Zyl chuckled.

"Hoo, boy, you should have seen those kaffirs when we let them out!"
This was his and Frikkie's idea of fun.

Frikkie and his sergeant have been in the thick of it since the great
uprising began.  They have done tours of duty in Sharpeville, in
Tembisa, in Kagiso, in places where the toll of black protesters was
really heavy.  They have probably shot a rioter or two, or five, or
ten, and came close to copping it themselves on at least one occasion.
Just two weeks ago, a black kid lobbed a petrol bomb into the cab of
their Chevy, and they were splashed with flaming gasoline.

Sergeant Danie's prematurely receding hairline receded a little
farther, and Constable Frikkie's mustache was singed.  Their faces
turned pink, as if they'd spent a day in the burning sun.

After all they've seen, and all the places they've been, they're not
all that impressed by what young Eksteen has to show them.  It looks
pretty calm to them.  Just a knot of mine workers sitting quietly in
the veld, fewer than a hundred of them at this stage.  Eksteen mentions
in passing that these black men have been taking medicine to turn
bullets into water.

"You should have been here Sunday," he says, 'and seen how this muti
worked.  They ran so fast you wouldn't believe it!"  They all have a
good laugh about that, then the cops drive off casually, promising to
look in again later to see if anything interesting has developed.

Sergeant Danie and Constable Frikkie might have been a little less
cavalier if they had had a chance to speak to the spy called
Victor-Victor, who was out there in the veld with the miners.  The
crowd was growing.  By 4:30, there were four hundred men; by five
o'clock, more than six hundred, their ranks swelled by a contingent of
comrades from the township of Bekkersdal.  Later, in his written
report, Victor-Victor will say that many of the black men out there
were armed with sticks, iron bars, and pan gas  The Bekkersdal comrades
had a can of gasoline, a pile of rags, and a stack of empty bottles.

They were making petrol bombs, and hiding them in the grass.

And finally, there was the man in the balaclava, an ANC insurgent,
judging by the gun he carried a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle.  The
Bekkersdal comrades were clustering around him, like Secret Service men
around an American president, so that nobody got too close a look at
him.

The meeting got underway in earnest around five, according to
Victor-Victor.  It was presided over by Themba and a man identified
only as Hlangana.  Hlangana was wearing a yellow NUM T-shirt, and
Themba was a NUM shaft steward, but both men made disparaging remarks
about the union.  The union's struggle is going forward too slowly,
said Themba.

We must take action on our own.  He called for five men from each tribe
present to step forward and form a delegation to approach the white
bosses with the workers' demands.  If they were arrested, Themba
concluded, steps would be taken to set them free.

While this plan was under discussion, the yellow Chevrolet four-by-four
reappeared in the distance and came bouncing across the veld.  The
police vehicle stopped seventy yards from the crowd, and Sergeant
Daniel Pretorius got on his bullhorn.

This is an illegal gathering, he said in Afrikaans.  You have five
minutes to disperse.  He repeated the warning in English, and then he
and Koekemoer sat back to wait.  The mine workers didn't move.  After a
while, Danie got back on the bullhorn and gave a second warning, the
two-minute warning.  Themba told his men to stay put, so Pretorius and
Koekemoer got out of the truck, carrying grenade launchers.  The crowd
began to seethe and rumble, but the cops weren't scared.  They'd been
through this so often before.  This lifted their weapons and fired.

As the tear-gas grenades fell hissing in around him, Hlangana leapt to
his feet yelling "Bulala area Bunu.t' Kill the Boers!

"The medicine is strong!"  he shouted.  And so a great cry arose from
the assembled mine workers, and they rose and charged as one.  They
came out of the cloud of tear gas in the ox horn formation of
nineteenth-century African warfare, the center attacking while the
horns rushed to outflank the enemy and close in on him from behind.
Sergeant Pretorius unslung his shotgun and shot one of the charging
miners in the chest, blew the head off the next at point-blank range.
Constable Koekemoer was standing behind the open door of the truck,
blasting away with his service pistol.  The guns were going off in
their very faces, but the miners seemed utterly unafraid.

They kept coming.

The watchers on the mine dump saw Pretorius stagger as someone caught
him a blow on the head from behind, and then he was overwhelmed and
disappeared under a tide of black men.  Koekemoer fired until his gun
was empty, and then ducked back inside the Chevy's cab.  He grabbed the
radio and screamed, "Maak gou, boys!"  -"Hurry, boys, they're killing
us."  And then the mob grabbed his legs and hauled him out of the cab,
and he, too, was stomped, hacked, and kicked to pieces.  Literally.
Once the cops were dead, the ferocious mob virtually tore their truck
apart with their bare hands and overturned it on Koekemoer's corpse.
Then they bled some gasoline out of the tank and made a fire on the
white man's face, just to be sure he was dead.

In the aftermath, or so it was said at the inquest, Eksteen was white
with shock, and shaking so badly that he had to sit down while telling
his story.  He watched the whole thing from the top of his rock pile,
and his account was improbably cinematic; an episode from a war movie,
or a hokey Western, maybe.  When the smoke started rising, everyone
knew the white cops were done for.  Eric Magnus went out to retrieve
their bodies, but his armored truck was driven back by a barrage of
stones.  So he deployed his men in a skirmish line between the mine and
the township and kept the mob at bay with a 'wall of rubber."

At that point a second police vehicle came careening onto the
battlefield and drove right up to the crowd.  Two white cops leapt out
with shotguns and opened fire at point-blank range.  The crowd didn't
flinch.  They just stood there, throwing stones.  Someone scored a
bull's-eye, and one of the cops staggered back, blood pouring down his
face.  He and his partner leapt into their van and fled for their
lives.  Their van jumped a ditch, buried its nose in the far side, and
stalled.

The van was instantly surrounded, and two more cops seemed doomed. They
got the engine going again, however, and shot their way out of the
crowd.  They'd no sooner escaped than the man in the balaclava opened
up from the cover of a blue-gum plantation.  Magnus's men hit the dirt,
bullets screaming over their heads.

And then there came the sound of a distant droning, and the black crowd
looked up to see something terrible an endless convoy of police vans
and armored personnel carriers, converging on the scene.  It was the
first time this had happened the first time since the start of the
bloody tip rising that white cops had been killed in action, and their
brother officers were outraged.  Every policeman on the West Rand
seemed to have heard Constable Koekemoer's dying cry oil the radio, and
now they were coming in to wreak vengeance.

The mob melted away into the township.  More than forD' blacks had been
injured, and eight lay dead or dying on the battlefield.

Half an hour later, helicopters started dropping of out the sky above
Randfontein Estates.  Convoys of army trucks rolled in from nearby
military bases.  A grim-faced police brigadier stalked into Piet
Rademeyer's office and ordered him to clear out.  He set up a command
post in Rademeyer's executive suite, threw a cordon of steel around the
mine and the adjacent township.  And then he sent in his boys to clean
up.

It was a very bad night in Bekkersdal.  The police kicked every door
down and searched every nook and cranny, arresting anyone with razor
blade scratches on his face or shoulders.

On the mine, police set up a machine gun on the roof of a compound and
ordered black workers to strip and lie face down on the lawn, so that
their bodies could be inspected for the telltale markings.  By dawn,
the cops had 371 prisoners, including the man in the balaclava, plus
his rifle and six hand grenades.

By dawn, Themba Ngwazi was also dead.  The police apparently worked
some of their prisoners over, asking, "Who told you to do this?  Who is
your leader?"  Everyone said, "Themba."

There was no escape from Bekkersdal, not that night.  The police net
was drawn tight and Themba got caught in it.  The official version was
that he tried to escape, but it was dark, and no one could really see.
The prisoner was handcuffed and shackled, and surrounded by heavily
armed cops.  Some say he ran; some that he was invited to run.  All
that was really clear, in the end, was that Themba started hobbling
away.  He had not gone very far before a policeman put a load of
buckshot in his back.

A new era of freedom has begun.

State President P VlBOTHA, April 1986 AND NOW IT comes time to take a
coldly scientific look at the sociopolitical scoreboard as it stood on
June 12, 1986, another watershed day in the history of South Africa.

The great anti-apartheid uprising of the mid-eighties had been underway
for twenty-one months.  Hundreds of thousands of blacks had been
tear-gassed in clashes with the police, and at least ten thousand
injured by rubber bullets, whips, or bird shot.  Some 1,650 people were
dead.  A total of 11,006 had been arrested for 'public violence' and
similar unrest-related crimes; a further 18,500 detained for varying
periods under various state-of-emergency and security regulations.

Almost all detainees were black, of course, and almost all of them were
given a rough time one survey, by a liberal university, found that 83
percent of detainees were subjected to 'some form of physical abuse."
Most were just beaten up, but some were tortured, too.  They were
stripped naked and forced to stand on bricks, kept awake for days on
end, ordered to sit for hours on nonexistent chairs.  Some were given
the 'helicopter," an ingenious cruelty in which a detainee's wrists
were cuffed to his ankles, a broomstick inserted through the loop thus
created, and the person suspended for hours in midair.  Some had
electrodes attached to their nipples or genitals and were subjected to
electric shock.  This happened to children as young as ten.

In that period, most detainees were released after two weeks and sent
home to the townships, which remained as wretched and overcrowded as
ever.  The nationwide backlog of housing for blacks stood at 487,000
units.  The number of homeless black squatters in the industrialized
regions was climbing toward the million mark.  In white South Africa,
schools were standing empty; in black South Africa, they were so
crowded that pupils were being turned away.  There were empty beds in
white hospitals; in black hospitals, patients slept on floors and in
corridors.  Even the minister of police acknowledged that 'appalling'
township conditions lay at the root of the political uprising.

The unemployment rate among blacks was officially 7 percent, but
academic economists insisted that the true figure was at least four
times that and rising rapidly.  The population was expanding faster
than the economy.  About 50 percent of black people were under twenty,
and one economist was predicting that up to 44 percent of them would
never find a ion A state-financed study of this doomed generation of
black teenagers established that one in five suffered from depression,
a quarter so severely that they were contemplating suicide.

Nine percent were so angry and frustrated that they wanted 'to kick and
break things," and 12 percent 'to hurt and kill."

And so a great deal of hurting and killing had been done.  In the
townships, the comrades had petrol-bombed 7,700 buses, torched 1,447
schools and 985 black-owned businesses.  They had also burned 46
churches, 26 clinics, 60 halls, 3,920 private homes, and untold
hundreds of collaborators, rivals, dissidents, and informers.

The rebellion had swept through all four of the country's provinces,
and there had been major outbreaks of political violence in several
tribal homelands.  Many black schoolchildren and university students
had barely seen the inside of a classroom in three years.  White
business had been hit hard by periodic don't-buy-white and stay-away
campaigns, and white industry convulsed by strikes more than four
hundred strikes in the first six months of 1986, leading to a
cumulative loss of around 500,000 man-days and countless millions in
production.

In many townships, black householders were no longer paying bills for
rent, lights, or water, and municipalities were on the verge of
bankruptcy.  In many townships, black local authorities had resigned or
been murdered as collaborators and replaced by 'peoples' structures'
controlling quasi-liberated zones dubbed Cuba or Azania or Russia.

Those black mayors who yet survived had become virtual warlords, kept
in power by 'blackjacks' or green beans young black men who were given
guns, uniforms, and three weeks' police training and sent in to shore
up the collapsing structures of state.  The slogan of the ANC and the
United Democratic Front for 1985 was 'render South Africa
ungovernable," and it had come close to succeeding in the townships, if
nowhere else.  White South Africa was losing control of black South
Africa.

And then the year turned, and it was 1986, Year of the Armed Struggle
for the ANC underground, year of the all-out push against the hated
apartheid state.  There was a certain mad euphoria on the left as the
year turned, a sense that victory was close.  As 1986 wore on, the
struggle intensified.

According to the state Bureau for Information, there were 1,605
outbreaks of political violence in January, resulting in 41 deaths.  By
April, the number of 'unrest incidents' had climbed to 2,293; and in
May, it was higher still 2,645 incidents, claiming 157 lives.  In the
same period, the number of 'stone and petrol-bomb attacks' on the white
'security forces' increased from 312 to 744, and the extermination rate
of black moderates, sellouts, and dissidents rose to alarming levels.
During the southern autumn of 1986, 172 blacks died inside the ring of
fire, inside the necklace.

And then came June, South Africa's month of destiny.  This may sound
suspect in light of the grim figures just cited, but South Africa
wasn't an entirely totalitarian country on June 11, 1986.  In the
townships, any black man with a stone in his hand was liable to get a
police bullet in his head, yet there remained a measure of freedom in
other arenas of life, especially if you were lucky enough to be
white.

My high-school buddy Roy, for instance, was a cameraman for Witness to
Apartheid, a documentary that had excited widespread international
attention and was about to be nominated for an Academy Award.  Directed
and narrated by a New Yorker named Sharon Sopher, Witness was the
season's most impassioned denunciation of the apartheid tyranny. During
her flying visit to South Africa, Sopher was detained for an hour or
two by the security forces in Soweto.  On the US promotion circuit, and
in the documentary itself, she parlayed this into a breathless yarn
about risking death to steal the truth from under the guns of
apartheid's brutal police.

Moved to anxiety by such tales, my American friends wrote letters
asking if 'they' were onto me.  No, they weren't.  They never came
anywhere near me, or Roy, or the white guy who produced Sopher's
documentary, or anyone else we knew.

They were out in the townships, torturing black radicals, presumably.
We were sitting around Roy's pool, drinking up the profits of what was
privately referred to as 'the gold rush."

It was a very good time to be a journalist in South Africa.  The
outside world had suddenly developed an insatiable craving for images
of black suffering, and whites of a certain social caste and political
inclination were falling over one another in their eagerness to provide
them.

Among the items in demand were pictures of and stories about black
leaders thunderously denouncing the Botha government as the most evil
since Hitler's, There was a measure of truth in that, but anyone who
spoke such words in Hitler's Germany would have been in a concentration
camp already, along with any reporter who dared quote him.

Hitler would also have crushed the militant trade unions, and
obliterated the structures of black resistance.  Botha had not done
that, not yet.  Some key black leaders had been rounded up and put on
trial for 'terrorism' or 'treason," but the major organs of resistance
the UDF, National Forum, Azapo, and South African Council of Churches
were still operating mote or less openly, and the press remained more
or less free, subject to a web of restrictions that kept being
overturned or reinterpreted by the courts, which were also functioning
more or less freely.  Those who compared Botha with Hitler were crying
wolf, and the wolves finally came, as is their wont.  They came on June
12, 1986, four days short of the tenth anniversary of the bloody Soweto
rebellion.

On June 12, at six in the evening, President Botha appeared on TV
wagging his authoritarian finger.  On television, Botha resembled no
one so much as the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev.  They had the same
sallow jowls, the same balding pate, and a similar tendency to wag
their fingers and deliver lectures.  In fact, the similarities went
further.  Both men had inherited ideologically sclerotic regimes and
launched tentative reforms in the teeth of stiff opposition from vested
interests and ideological purists.

I dunno, my friend, this is a minority view, but it seemed to me that
Botha had tried.  He was a cantankerous old bastard, to be sure, but
he'd come a long way against the grain, considering that he'd learned
his ideological chops from the master, DF Malan.  Many of the changes
he'd made were merely cosmetic, but their cumulative impact was
immense, if only on the psyches of whites.

"Adapt or die," he ordered.

"Tame your hearts with your minds."  Botha was signalling that the old
days and old ways were over.  He seemed to have no clear idea of what
came next, but he kept chipping half-heartedly at the edifice of
legislation he'd spent the first thirty years of his career enacting.

In the end, he even scrapped the hated pass laws, a move that heralded
the end of the deranged Boer fantasy of a pure white South Africa.
Shortly thereafter, the National Party took out a series of newspaper
ads in which Botha seemed to be begging blacks to take his reforms
seriously.

"From my heart," said the State President, "I ask you to share in the
future."  He conjured up a vision of 'a new South Africa, where all
decent men can look one another in the eye without fear or hatred," and
appealed to blacks to help him bring it into being.

"A

new era of freedom has begun," declared PW Botha.  As if to convince
himself, he added a little postscript, dramatically underlined with a
hand-held pen: "That is the reality!"

But the overriding reality, the one that really counted, was that it
was all too little too late.  His policies had set the stage for a
black rebellion, and his ruthless attempts to quell it had triggered a
furious outcry in the outside world.  He had lost the battle for world
opinion, and he was losing the fight to stave off sanctions.  He was
even losing his own right wing.

Fractious right-wing elements were forming vigilante groups, demanding
shoot-on-sight curfews and throwing government supporters through
plate-glass windows at stormy rallies.  The white right wanted their
government to un glove the iron fist and put blacks back in their
place, once and for all.  Maybe Botha agreed with them in his heart;
maybe they forced his hand.  Whatever the truth, his jowly face
appeared on my television screen at six in the evening of June 12,
1986, to announce the coming of the wolves.

The sinister forces of revolution, Botha charged, had marked the
upcoming Soweto Day anniversary as the moment of final and conclusive
uprising.

"There comes a time," he continued, 'when a nation must choose between
war and a dishonorable, fearful peace, and we have arrived at that
point."  Botha was speaking Afrikaans, to Afrikaners, so the foreign
press seemed to miss those words, but they chilled me to the bone.  The
state president had actually declared war, and now he was launching his
opening offensive; another nationwide state of emergency, effective
immediately.  Even as he spoke, the security forces were moving into
the townships in crushing force.  They picked up every comrade,
activist, and organizer they could lay their hands on, and 24,000
blacks were soon in detention, many of them schoolchildren.  The
government cracked down brutally on the press, kicking a few foreign
correspondents out of the country and forbidding everyone else to film
or photograph any 'security-force action."

The newspapers were no longer allowed to name detainees, agitate for
their release, or even quote court testimony about torture during
interrogation.  On the day of supposed reckoning, June 16, the streets
of black South Africa were eerily quiet.  Nothing moved save armored
cars, and nobody dared breathe too loud.

Beyond that point, the Great Afrikaner Reform of the early eighties
came grinding to a halt.  Botha unleashed his dogs on the Charterists,
abandoned his courtship of the center, and turned his attention to his
mutinous right wing.  Suddenly, you heard little about 'power sharing'
or 'just and peaceful solutions."  Instead, you heard cabinet ministers
like FW de Klerk saying, "Race remains the basis of National Party
policy, and will remain behind lock and key."

On the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, attitudes were
equally intransigent.  The Afrikaners' most deadly enemy, in this great
struggle for power, was not blacks in general so much as the mighty
Charterist movement the UDF-ANCSouth African Communist Party axis.  It
was sometimes hard to say exactly what the ANC stood for, but its
journal Sechaba offered the occasional clue.  In February 1985, Sechaba
published a document of great import- an essay by Joe Slovo, the
influential white Communist who doubled as chief of staff of the ANC's
military wing.  A great deal of hot air had been expended in debates
about which ANC leaders wore what hat, who was Communist and who
wasn't, but it all seemed irrelevant to me.  The ANC and its Communist
allies saw eye to eye on almost everything, and when Comrade Slovo
spoke he used the royal we, as in 'we the movement," the revolutionary
alliance.

In his essay, Slovo began by acknowledging that Botha's reforms were
having an impact on the lives of blacks inside South Africa, and even
on the minds of some comrades in the liberation movement.  Indeed, he
continued, some 'friends and brothers' were taking Botha's talk of
'negotiation' so seriously that they had begun to question the ANC's
strategy of armed struggle.  Such men, Slovo warned, had lost sight of
the ANC's true objectives.

"In the South African context," he said, 'we cannot restrict the
struggle objectives to the bourgeois democratic concept of civil rights
or democratic rights."  Victory would be empty unless the revolution
seized the commanding heights of the economy, and Slovo insisted that
such an assault had to be carried out by force of arms.

Under the circumstances, talk of compromise and negotiation was
'nothing but a recipe for submission and surrender."

"We do not believe," Comrade Slovo concluded, 'that classes ever commit
suicide."  The Western press missed this, too, which was a pity.  It
was the ANC's equivalent of Botha's June 12 declaration of war.

So, race remained under lock and key, and the classes did not commit
suicide.  To an outsider, FW de Klerk and Joe Slovo might appear to
have been talking about entirely different matters, but inside South
Africa the distinction ultimately vanished.  The Botha government's
race struggle was the ANC's class struggle.  The economic class that
would not commit suicide was white South Africa, and white South
Africa's "Communist' enemy was rebellious blacks in general.

What then should we do?  I found it hard to accept the ANC's assertion
that I was still living in 'the epoch of world transition from
capitalism to socialism," harder still to believe that collectivist
policies would feed South Africa's hungry millions and provide roofs
for their homeless heads.  I mean, it was 1986, not 1916.  The Soviet
Union, Eastern Europe, and China were emerging from their dark
Marxist-Leninist nights, gasping for 'bourgeois democratic' freedoms
and clutching at capitalist tools to rebuild their crippled
economies.

In such an era, Joe Slovo's politics seemed absurd, but so for that
matter did Botha's.  It was hard to keep a straight face when his
government tried to cast itself as the valiant defender of 'democratic
values' and the Western way.  If the white rulers truly wished to
thwart the 'total Communist onslaught," why didn't they invite black
democrats like Gatsha Buthelezi into their camp, and make his followers
their equal ?  Why did they continue to bar blacks from white schools
and residential areas, and relegate their putative colored and Indian
allies to separate houses of Parliament, where they had no real
power?

As a hearts-and-minds campaign against Marxism, it was the most stupid
conceivable, and it revealed the white state for what it truly was: a
ruling racial class.  In the end, all South African issues merged into
one the race issue, the issue t had come home to resolve.

WALLS

Man is a great wall builder The Berlin Wall The Wailing Wall of
Jerusalem But the wall most impregnable Has a moat flowing with frigbt
around his heart A wall without windows for the spirit to breeze
through A wall without a door for love to walk in.

OSWALD MTSHALI, Soweto poet THE MURDER VICTIM this time was an
Afrikaner traditionalist, an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church and a
supporter of Dr.  Andries Treurnicht's Conservative Party, which stood
for a return to the granitic, unyielding apartheid of the Verwoerd and
Vorster eras.  He made the mistake of driving into a township on a bad
day and had an accident in a hailstorm of stones.  He was white.  A
black mob hauled him out of his wrecked pickup and trampled him to
death.

In the aftermath, I knocked on the door of the dead man's home and
found myself facing his widow.  She was young and slender and pale with
grief.  After her children were in bed, I asked her to tell me about
her husband.  She said she couldn't.

She said her family would not like it.  She hinted at some terrible
secret, something too dark and painful to be aired in public.  I
pressed her, though, and she finally relented.

She said her husband was brain dead when he reached the hospital, and
that doctors told her there was no hope for him.

They wanted to turn off the life-support systems and use his organs to
give life to others.  She thought that that was a good idea, so she
gave her blessing.  The machines were turned off, and her husband was
allowed to die.

And then his heart was transplanted- into a black man.  The widow saw
no wrong in that at all, because she was not one to hate, but the
family in the countryside... It tormented them, tortured them.  They
could not eat or sleep for the thought of their white son's heart
beating on inside a black body.  They simply could not bear it.  Tbey
wanted the heart back.  They wanted the widow to hire a lawyer and sue
the hospital to force the doctors to slice that black man's chest open
and return their son's heart to them, so that it could be buried with
the rest of him.  That is why she could not talk to me.

It was not a dispute to be aired in public.

And so I left, mesmerized by the appalling power of the story I'd just
heard.  Tbey wanted the heart back.  The shelves of my flat were lined
with books about apartheid, dozens and dozens of books about apartheid,
all dismissing the idea of race as a biological misnomer, rooted in the
dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"To speak of race," sniffed the journal Critical Inquiry, 'is to speak
... generally in metaphor."  That about summed up the conventional
wisdom, but the conventional wisdom was incapable of interpreting the
widow's tale.  I found it hard to see her story as a metaphor for
anything.  In South Africa, it was reality.

I have a wise friend in Johannesburg who says he knows where the race
question lies.

"It lies in your heart," he says, 'too deep for you ever to find." Note
quite, Adriaan, not quite.

I found it in mine.  When I came home from exile, I was overwhelmed by
the feeling that I was seeing South Africa clearly for the first time.
The poverty, despair, and injustice were all the more apparent to eyes
that had seen the United States, and yet this was not the only curse
inflicted by my alien senses.

I was accustomed to hearing English and seeing white faces, accustomed
to living in a more-or-less homogeneous culture.

After all those years away, I felt acutely white back home.  I couldn't
talk to many Africans, and communicating through interpreters was
difficult.  Stories got garbled, poetry lost its resonance, and
narratives foundered in misunderstanding.

The more questions I asked, the more confused I became, especially with
regard to the most important question of all:

Where do we really stand in relation to one another, 'bra?

Such things were un discoverable in the eerie isolation of white
suburbia, so I swore a pact with myself: Wherever I went, I would stop
for all the black hitch-hikers I saw, to see what they might reveal.

At the outset, I'd fall into a near psychosis of fear whenever I saw a
knot of black travelers on the road up ahead.  I'd study their clothes
and belongings for clues as to who they might be, search their eyes to
see whether they were dangerous.

Two times out of three, I'd conclude they were, but I'd stop anyway,
full of misgivings and visions of my own murder.  I'd pull off onto the
shoulder and wait for them to catch up to the car.  They'd yank the
doors open and pile in, five or six black men at a time.  I'd swallow
hard and think, Oh, shit, now I'm really done for.  I'd think.  Okay,
if they pull knives I'll put my hand in my pocket and pretend I've got
a gun, and maybe I'll live to tell the tale.  Then the doors would slam
and I'd pull off, and the black man in the passenger seat would turn to
me and say something like, "What kind of white are you, that you stop
for blacks?"  Or, "God has sent you to help us."

At such moments, I was stricken with remorse, to think I had harbored
such ugly suspicions about such kindly people.

Sometimes it was even worse.  Sometimes the hitchhikers didn't come at
all, and when I turned and looked back I saw heels disappearing into
the bush at the roadside, or frightened eyes watching me from behind a
distant tree.  I was white, they were black, and this was a lonely
road.  They thought I was going to shoot or rape them.

I began to understand something quite important about South Africa: My
fear of blacks was obscuring my understanding of the fear blacks felt
for my white skin.  On one occasion, I was lost inside a township in
the Eastern (ape.

The area was aseethe with unrest, and I was scared to get out of the
car, but there was no choice.  I parked outside a primary school and
walked into a quadrangle teeming with tiny black children.  They fell
dead silent at the sight of me.  It was like that brokerage firm ad on
American television.  Two hundred black children stopped chattering and
laughing the instant I appeared.  I smiled, but they didn't smile
back.

A teacher appeared, shook my hand, and apologized for his children's
odd behavior.  The only whites who ever came here were policemen, he
explained, and the children were scared of them.  He was very friendly,
though.  He deputized a small black boy in a starched white shirt and
short pants to guide me on my way.  As we left, the teacher warned me
to watch out for the white soldiers camped on the township's outskirts.
Just last weekend, he said, they captured two teenage comrades and
forced them to drink gasoline.

My tiny guide had probably been raised on such stories, and clearly
thought he'd been put in a car with the bogeyman.  He perched on the
edge of the passenger seat, rigid and speechless with terror.  Hundreds
of minute beads of sweat appeared on his face.  I had never seen such a
thing.  I told him not to be frightened, but he didn't really
understand English, so l reached across and tried to put a reassuring
arm around his shoulders.  He cried out in fear, and cringed into his
corner.

To me, such moments seemed to reveal the true tragedy of South Africa.
There are so many such moments in our history.  In 1510, the Portuguese
Viscount D'Almeida came in peace, but the sight of his white skin and
strange vessel struck terror in the hearts of Hottentots on the shores
of Table Bay, so they killed him, and we've been slaughtering one
another in fear ever since.  Dawid Malan and the Xhosa slaughtered one
another along the Great Fish River for sixty years, and then the Boers
trekked into the interior, where they ran into the mighty Zulus.  The
Voortrekker leader Piet Relief approached the Zulu king Dingaan under a
white flag, but Dingaan feared him, and murdered him and all his
party.

The Afrikaners never forgot Dingaan's treachery.  After that, we always
shot before we saw the whites of black eyes, and then, in 1948, we
invented apartheid, to keep blacks so far away that we couldn't see
them at all.

At one point in the fifties, Nelson Mandela's ANC was willing to settle
for sixty seats in the white Parliament.  The Afrikaners feared black
domination, though, and thought they could keep blacks down forever, so
they spurned Mandela's humble demands and tried to crush his movement.
Three decades later, Botha had second thoughts, and extended a
tentative hand of friendship across the racial divide.  By then, blacks
were also contaminated by fear and hatred, so they struck his hand
away, and we spiraled on down toward mutual annihilation.  We always
seemed to miss each other in the murk of our mutually baffling cultures
and our mutually blinding fears.

This is a parable of fear obscuring fear that occurred a long time ago,
in a small town called Bulwer, in 1906 the year of the Bambatha
rebellion, the last Zulu uprising.

Bulwer lay close to Zulu territory, and white farmers in the district
feared the local Zulus might join Bambatha's rebel army and butcher
their masters in bed.  So the whites called a meeting and formulated a
plan of action: If the Zulus rose, all whites would rush to Bulwer and
barricade themselves inside the stone courthouse.

A few days later, someone cried wolf, and the whites panicked.  They
loaded their guns and children onto wagons and abandoned their farms,
leaving meals on the tables and lowing cows un milked in the barns.
They barricaded themselves inside the courthouse, loaded their guns,
posted lookouts, and sat back to await the barbarians.  By and by, they
saw dust in the distance.  Peering out through chinks in the barricade,
the whites beheld a vision from their worst nightmares a horde of Zulus
approaching on foot.  The crowd halted a few hundred yards away.  A
deputation detached itself and approached the courthouse.  The Zulus
knocked on the door.  The wary whites opened a window, expecting to
hear an ultimatum.

Instead, the black men said "Why have you forsaken us?  We

;3

';4 i see there is a terrible danger coming, because our masters have
fled into this fort, and we are frightened, for we don't know what it
is.  So we came to ask if we could also come inside, to be under the
protection of our masters' guns."

After several months on the road, it dawned on me that I was behaving
rather like the whites in that courthouse.

Whenever I ducked into the darkness of an African hut, I felt like
Columbus in the New World.  There would be chickens roosting in
corners, goatskins drying in the dark rafters.  The walls would be
lined with black men.  I couldn't talk to them, and when I looked into
their eyes I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing there.  Someone would
press a bowl of bitter tshwala beer into my hands.  Then the hut would
fall silent, all the men watching to see whether this uninvited white
visitor was willing to drink from the communal vessel.  When I lifted
it to my lips, they murmured approvingly.  Then they would begin to
discuss me in a language I didn't understand.  Some seemed to be
saying, "Ah, he's okay; we can talk to him."

Others seemed to object to my presence.  It was impossible to be sure.
It was 1986, but I felt just as my ancestor Hercules Malan must have
felt on his first visit to King Dingaan's kraal in 1838: alien,
nervous, and paranoid.  And yet, on the far side of the racial divide,
I was almost always received like a brother.

There is an African tradition called ubuntu, which means 'largeness of
spirit."  Ubuntu requires a man to show hospitality to travelers and
strangers, and it is still strong in some parts of South Africa,
especially in the countryside.  In the countryside, black people
weren't merely friendly; they treated me as if I were a visiting
dignitary.  The man of the house would dispatch one of his sons into a
hut to fetch a comfortable chair for the white man to sit on, another
to buy beer or Coke to slake his thirst.  No matter how poor they were,
they often tried to feed me.

I once interviewed a tribesman outside a mud hut in a desperately poor,
drought-stricken homeland.  As I arrived, I noticed that there was
nothing but dirt in the garbage pile alongside his home.  No scraps of
plastic, no empty tins, no gnawed bones, no pumpkin rinds, no scrapings
from the bottom of the porridge pot nothing.  These black people had
nothing to throw away because they were living on the brink of
starvation, and yet, in the midst of our talk, the Zulu householder's
second wife appeared with a bowl of tripe heaped atop a pile of putu
(corn porridge).  This food was a giant sacrifice, and yet they offered
it to me, a white man, and a Boer to boot.  The tripe was green, badly
cleaned, and swimming in grease, but I ate every last mouthful, forcing
it down past the huge lump in my throat.

I carry the memory of many such moments in my heart, and few are finer
than my encounter with Spiderman and Halftime.  I met them in the
Eastern Cape, in the township where the terrified little black boy was
given to me as a guide.  The boy's instructions were to take me to the
UDF, to the lair of the comrades, and if he was scared, I was, too.

In those times, the comrades balled their fists when they saw white
skin in a passing car and cried, "Tsa!  Tsa, tsa!"  the sound of mighty
blows striking the ruling class.  Sometimes they picked up stones and
let fly, and I floored the accelerator, praying that my old car would
keep going.  I used to have bad dreams in which my car sputtered to a
halt in a hail of stones, heralding the end of me.  In short, I was
scared of comrades, and scareder still when Spiderman came out with a
hammer in his hand.

Spiderman was eighteen.  He had a Grace Jones haircut, the sculpted
face and graceful bearing of an Ethiopian prince.  He was an
office-bearer in the local Youth Congress, in the group that said
Mandela that supported the aims and objectives of the Charterist
movement and its parent-in-exile, the ANC.

In that strife-torn region, it was essential to reach some sort of
understanding with the Mandela comrades if you intended to move around
on their turf.  You wanted them to know you weren't a cop, and better
yet, to act as your guides and bodyguards.  So I rolled down my window
and made a pitch to Spiderman.

"I have come here to find out the truth of the murder of a black man,"
I said, 'and I want you to work with me."  Spiderman slapped the hammer
into his palm and thought it over.  Then he dropped the hammer and said
okay.

He climbed into the passenger seat, his sidekick, Halftime, climbed
into the back, and we drove off to investigate yet another ordinary
murder in this extraordinary country.

We worked together for the best part of a week, and I grew rather fond
of Spiderman and Halftime.  They ferreted out witnesses, persuaded them
to trust me and interpreted their words if they couldn't speak a white
language.  I had much to thank them for, and so, on my last night in
town, I bought two six-packs of beer and took them for a farewell
cruise in the dark countryside.

The comrades were socialists, of course, but they didn't really know
from Marx.  All they really knew was injustice, and the myriad forms it
took in their lives.  Their township was overcrowded, and their
drinking water tasted of piss.  Their houses were made of mud and fell
down whenever it rained.

Their black community councillors were in cahoots with the white
authorities.  The whites gave liquor and business licenses to their
black cronies; the black cronies cut them in on the profits.  No
competition was allowed, so township dwellers had to pay almost twice
the going price for a tin of pilchards.

"Dis 'n smokkel plek bier die said Halftime: "This is a very crooked
town."

In Halftime's hometown, the only available work was picking oranges on
white farms.  This paid about $2.50 a week.

"It's hard work," Halftime told me.

"You must carry heavy loads on your shoulder.  The thorns, they stick
you, and the dust comes in your mouth.  But you can't eat an orange. If
you eat an orange, you get fired."

As he spoke, we were traveling through orange groves, endless orange
groves so many orange trees in this valley alone that the orange market
frequently glutted.  When that happened, the local white farmers'
cooperative pulped, dumped, and sometimes poisoned the surplus so that
blacks could not steal and eat it.  Blacks were expected to feed,
clothe, and educate an entire family on $2.50 a week, and buy their own
oranges to boot.  And yet, if a black dared steal an orange off a white
farmer's tree, he got six months.

"They tell us in school we must eat vitamin C," Spiderman raged.

"Where must we get vitamin C ?"

Where indeed.  I mean, I agreed wholeheartedly; something had to be
done about the vitamin C, and about everything else.  By now, the first
six-pack was finished, and we were feeling downright comradely.  We set
to work on the second, and by the time it was done we were singing
freedom songs - "Rolihlahla Mandela, freedom is in your hands, show us
the way to freedom, in our land in Africa."  I was absurdly moved to
hear that the black brothers held a tune scarcely better than I, the
Boer.  It was a small thing, but it seemed tremendously encouraging.
When I dropped them off in the township, Spiderman and Halftime said
they had heard of whites like me, but never yet met one.  I was so
chuffed that I gave them my beloved cassette tape of Fosatu Worker
Choruses, a collection of subversive trade union songs.

"Can it talk?"  Spiderman asked.  Then we exchanged the elaborate
triple-grip handshake of black power and swore eternal brotherhood, and
I drove away with yet another lump in my throat.

It was quite often like that, even in the midst of that bloody
uprising.  I was desperate to win black trust and friendship, to have
done with the absurd bullshit, and often thought I saw an answering
yearning in black men's eyes.  I hate to inflict yet another
contradiction on you, but I think this was a symptom of love.  I had
been obsessed with blacks all my life, you see, and it was not so
different a feeling from that of first love, the truly intense and
tragic kind.  It was all distance and tension, and I read once that
romantic love is a function of those very things.  My relations with
blacks had always been somehow adolescent, sweaty, and nervous, full of
awkward gropings and unrequited yearnings and what was that, if not
love?

We all seemed to be groping for one another in the murk of a mutual
blindness.  Our hands usually missed, so the times when they actually
touched seemed heartrendingly poignant.

In Zululand, for instance, I worked for a while with a black man named
Ozias.  Ozias was a dashing fellow, with huge black eyes and a handsome
beard.  He was forty-odd years old and boasted of having lathered
thirteen children by a wife and an impressive collection of concubines,
all somehow supported on his earnings as soccer correspondent and
sports photographer for the local white newspaper.  Ozias and I got

?

-4

!

on well, and when our work was done, he refused to accept payment from
me.  He said I was a friend, and he didn't take money from friends.  I
invoked his several women and many children, and pressed the cash on
him.  Eventually he shrugged and took it, but turned right around and
blew it on a party, in my honor.

On the appointed night, I pitched up at his place in the township of
Esikawini.  It was a stormy night, with a rain laden wind blowing in
from the sea.  I was full of the usual forebodings, and received the
usual friendly welcome.  It is one of the great ironies of South Africa
that it is extremely fashionable in certain circles to have friends of
another race.

White liberals fell over one another in their eagerness to recruit
blacks for their dinner parties, and black men sometimes walked you
through every shebeen in the district, just so they could throw a
public arm around a white shoulder and say, "Here's Rian.  He's a Boer,
but he's okay."

Ozias, for instance, seemed to have primed the entire neighborhood with
the news that he was having a white over for a bra ai  I had just
arrived, and was sitting on Ozias's bed, browsing through his fine
collection of American R & B records, when the first of the pilgrims
came in to pay his respects.  I don't remember his name, but he wore
spectacles and taught in a nearby school.  He had heard that I was a
writer, and wanted to show me the 'write to read' computer system that
had just been installed at his school.  I told him I'd love to, but
this wasn't the right time.  So he left, and a slim, goa teed dude in
jeans and an Afro appeared in his place.

We exchanged the triple-grip power handshake, and the black man said he
was Tiger.

Tiger had heard that I was interested in black music.  He had a VCR and
a great Teddy Pendergrass tape he wanted me to see.  I'll be with you
in a moment, I said, I just want to pick out a few records so that
Ozias can tape them for me.

A few minutes later, a man named Simon popped his head in the door.  I
hear you want to tape some music, he said.  Come on over to my place,
he said.  My stereo is state of the art.

I didn't know what to say, because I was pathetically eager to please
everyone.  I was mulling my options when Tiger's ten-year-old son
materialized at my side, and started tugging at my sleeve.

"Teddy Pendergrass is starting," he said.  So I told Simon the kid had
a prior claim on my attentions, and let the boy lead me out of the
house.

We stepped out of the kitchen door and into a roaring gale.  Somewhere
in the surrounding darkness, someone was splintering wood with an ax. I
walked toward the sound and discovered Ozias hacking up some furniture
with a chopper.

He suffered a seizure of awkwardness when I appeared.  He had forgotten
to get wood, he explained, so he was putting some old furniture on the
fire.  I said, shit, man, don't go to any trouble for me, but he was
determined to do things the right way, and brushed my protestations
aside.  By now Tiger's son had vanished, but Simon loomed out of the
darkness, took me by the elbow, and steered me away to see his
state-of-the-art stereo.  After drinking a beer and listening to a side
of jazz, I excused myself and returned to Ozias's yard.

There a harrowing sight awaited.  The high wind had turned Ozias's fire
into a raging conflagration.  Flames were leaping four feet into the
air, fat flying, meat charring.  Ozias was dancing around this bonfire,
trying to douse the flames and save his sausages and steak.  A score or
so friends and relatives were looking on, anxiously offering advice.  I
stood around the fire, offering encouragement, but Ozias ignored me and
his relatives kept calling me baas.  Our conversations faltered after a
few exchanges, so I was rather relieved when a little boy appeared at
my elbow, saying, "Teddy Pendergrass!  Teddy Pendergrass!"

Tiger lived just across the courtyard, in a row of fancy duplex
apartments.  Esikawini was one of the country's newest townships, and
it was something of an apartheid showpiece.

Tiger taught school, and his lifestyle was middle class.  His furniture
looked as though it had just come out of a Lubner's display window, and
one entire wall was devoted to what Americans would call a 'media
center' - a fine stereo, a VCR, a large record collection, and a huge
color TV.  Teddy Pendergrass was standing in the center of the screen,
eyes closed, sweating, singing his soul out.  Watching from chairs and
sofas were Tiger, his brother Lawrence, and their buddies f 4 Wiseman
and Zee.  All four of them were teachers.  They offered me a beer, and
then another.  I thought Ozias knew where I was, and that Tiger was a
fellow guest of his.  I thought he'd call us when it was time to eat.
After an hour, though, I got worried and went outside to see what was
happening.

The yard was deserted, and the fire had burned out.  Ozias was sitting
alone and disconsolate in his house.  There had been a
misunderstanding.  The white guest of honor had disappeared in the
midst of the party, and Ozias had been humiliated.  His friends and
relatives had eaten the meat, drunk the beer, and gone home, no doubt
sniggering.

I felt so wretched I wanted to stick knitting needles in my eyes, but
that wouldn't have helped.  So I just apologized for my stupidity,
clapped an arm around his shoulder and suggested we go back to Tiger's
place for a few more drinks, at which point I discovered that Tiger
wasn't even a friend of his.

"I don't like that guy," he said, but he came along anyway.  Back in
Tiger's living room, I did my best to repair the hurt I had inflicted
on Ozias by talking of my high regard for his writing, his skill as an
interpreter, and his eye with a camera.  I was patronizing him, sure,
but what the fuck else could I do?

The evening wore on, and we all got drunk again.  And then we started
talking politics.  You had to be drunk to talk politics in Zululand,
because Zululand was teetering on the brink of civil war.  South Africa
was becoming a country of many conflicts, and the one about to erupt in
Zululand would be blood Jest of them all, claiming around eighteen
hundred African lives to date.  This time, the combatants were those
who said Mandela, and those who said Buthelezi who were members of
Inkatha, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi's million-strong Zulu 'liberation
movement."  As we sat drinking in Tiger's lounge, the first shots had
just been fired, and those men were already wary of one another.  If
you revealed support for one side, the other might mark you down for
eventual assassination, and vice versa.

"You can't trust anyone," Tiger explained.

"So if you ask me what I think of Inkatha, I say "Bleh!"  And if you
ask me about UDF, I say, "Bleh!"  If you ask me about Azapo, or the
Boers, or anyone, I always say, "Bleh!"  It's dangerous to say anything
else.  They are all around us."

Who were 'they'?  I could not ask, but I'd guess that Tiger's
sympathies lay with the UDF, and that they were Inkatha.

Tiger was drunk by now; we all were.  He was waving the dregs of a
brandy bottle and waxing somewhat belligerent.

"I'll show you how it works," he said.  He took two empty beer bottles
and set them down side by side on a coffee table.

The empty Castle was brown, the spent Amstel green.

"This is one side," he said, lifting the first bottle, 'and this is the
other.

You are either on this side, or you are on that side.  If you're in the
middle you're the worst.  The people in the middle are the most
dangerous, and they must be killed.  If I find out my brother is in the
middle, I will kill him.  It's people like this who must die," he said,
pointing at his brother Lawrence.

"He's in the middle."  Bra Lawrence just laughed at him.

"The end of the world is coming," said Lawrence.

"Well, okay," said Tiger.  His head was drooping toward his chest and
he was swaying in his chair, but he pulled out of his drunken slump and
turned on Ozias.

"Ozias," he said, "I don't trust you."  Ozias looked scared and
uncomfortable.  He said nothing.

"If I find out you're a sellout," Tiger continued, "I'm going to kill
you, Ozias."  And then he lay back in his chair, laughing bitterly.

"I know, man, I know," he laughed.

"We're all going to kill each other.  This country is going to get so
bad, man.  If only I could get out of here, if only I could get a
scholarship, man, I'd take my kids and fuck off and never come back."

He looked up at me.

"Hey," he said, 'can't you get me a scholarship in America?"  I
shrugged.

"Well," said Tiger, 'that's it then.  Hey, Ozias," he chuckled, 'let's
kill each other.  Let's do it now, man."

Ah, God, how did I write myself into that corner?  I started out to say
something entirely different, but all roads somehow led into darkness
in the winter of 1986.  And that wasn't even my darkness; it was the
darkness gathering around Ozias and all the Zulu people.  My white
darkness was something else entirely.  It lay in a thousand places, at
the end of a thousand roads, but it always took the same form.  I guess
I should tell you about the first time I saw it, about a night that
changed my life.

One of the first people I looked up when I came home from exile was
Mike, my friend from the days when t was The Star's rock spider police
reporter and he the crack black writer who'd loll around the newsroom
saying, 'I'm just a boy around here," as if daring the white liberals
to disagree.  Mike was the proud black Biko man, the hard drinker who
matched me shot for shot in The Star's fourth-floor canteen.  I would
never have told him this, but our relationship meant a lot to me, and l
sometimes imagined the feeling was mutual.  He would never have said
so, but I sometimes saw something in his cool, challenging gaze amused
tolerance, maybe even affection.

On my first day back in Jo'burg, I called him up, introducing myself as
Speurdersersant Malan van die Veiligheidspolisie "Detective Sergeant
Malan of the secret police."  He chuckled at the sound of my voice and
said, "You remembered me," as if touched.  He was doing PR for an
American corporation in downtown Johannesburg, so we arranged a
rendezvous outside a landmark hotel.

I recognized his jaunty tread from a hundred yards away, and my heart
came up in my chest.  As he neared, I caught a glimpse of white sock
between his trouser cuff and shoe.  That was unlike the Mike I
remembered.  The old Mike dressed sharp.  The new Mike was eight years
older, and eight years closer to defeat.  His once-defiant eyes were
now hooded, but still he seemed pleased to see me.  We shook hands,
simultaneously observing that a little jol was called for.  So Mike
hopped behind the wheel of my rented car, and we roared off toward
Soweto.

On the way, he told me that he'd developed something of a drinking
problem while I was away.

"There came a day," Mike told me, 'when I decided l might as well just
get drunk.  Or die."  His cackle was as bitter as ever.  As he spoke,
we were just entering Soweto, and the first sight of it seemed to kick
me in the face.  It was so huge, so gray, so dismal, and most of its
black people seemed so poor and despairing.  I didn't really have to
ask Mike why he wanted to obliterate himself.

I knew.  I knew.  I was looking at one of the reasons.  Mike went on to
say that he'd taken his despairing addiction to a sangoma, who had
affected a miraculous cure.  'I'm exhuming myself from the grave," he
said cheerfully.  He was technically on the wagon, but he figured that
a drink or two on a special occasion wouldn't really hurt anyone.

Life was harder than ever in Soweto, now that the struggle was
underway, but there was still a defiant exuberance in the shebeens,
still plenty of beer and laughter and raucous conversation.  Mike
introduced me to lawyers, gangsters, bespectacled existentialist, and
several painted black ladies of questionable virtue.  If anyone asked
what whitey was doing here, Mike spoke up for me.

"He's a liberal rebel of the Afrikaner yolk," he said.

"I'll go the whole hog for him."

That, too, meant a lot to me.

A drink or two became several, and more to follow.  Around sundown, we
were sitting around a table with five or six black men.  They were
office workers, truck drivers, and the like, unwinding after work, but
they werrdeeply politicized, like many blacks in South Africa's cities.
They were sick of being 'slaves and industrial tools," as a garrulous
fellow named Panky characterized their lot.  They were eagerly looking
forward to the day when 'all hell breaks loose."

I had forgotten how to comport myself in such conversations.  On the
one hand, I was white, and dreaded the day that all hell broke loose.
On the other, I wasn't prepared to say so I was still pretending to be
the Just White Man, and just white men were obliged to endorse the
righteousness of violent revolution.  I guess I agreed with Panky a
little too enthusiastically for Mike's liking.  He was never one to
abide hypocrisy.  He cleared his throat and said, "There is one small
thing Mr.  Malan isn't telling you."  In Harlem, he would have said,
"Tell them your family's in the KKK."  In Jerusalem, "Tell them your
father was a Nazi."  In Soweto, Nat said: "Tell them you're an
Afrikaner Malan, of the Malan family."

"Vertel die muntoes, man," he chuckled.

"Tell the kaffirs."

The table fell silent.

"Whose country is this?"  Mike continued, still jiving me in Afrikaans.
I was momentarily at a loss.  I had been away for eight years, in a
world that was almost entirely white.  My jive chops had rusted away.

"It's the white man's land," I said, falsely jocular.  It's the white
man's land.  The line flopped.  The silence persisted.

"Okay," I said finally.

"Now that he's brought it up, how do you feel about drinking with a
Boer?"

"The Afrikaner wants the black to be inferior to him," said a man named
Sibogang.

"Do you think that's true of me?"  I asked.

"I don't think that," he answered.

"But a white is a white against the black."

"As long as there's confrontation," Panky chipped in, 'you'll vouch for
the guy who is your own color.  Because there is this hatred beating
between us.  If we go to one of those integrated hotels, I won't sit
with you, man.  I want to sit with my own flock.  And during the office
Christmas party, we will ask you, "Please sit somewhere away."  We have
nothing in common.

You stay in the white suburbs; I stay in a shack here.  When it's
raining, my roof is leaking, but you are sitting comfortably.

But you can't be peaceful.  You must sleep with a gun under your
pillow.  You see, this monster is your creation."

"Do you mean," I asked, 'that we have to be enemies, because of this?"
I indicated my white skin.  This time the pause was even longer. Stevie
Wonder's voice filtered through the wall.

"We won't accept a white man," Sibogang said finally.

"Never.  Because every white man we see is an enemy to us."

"Unless," he added affably, gesturing around the table, 'you sit down
with us and make it clear you are with us."

So the truce flags went up, and we resumed our drinking.

And when it was time to leave, Mike and I clapped arms around one
another's shoulders and staggered out into the night.  The darkness was
merciful.  The towering anticrime floodlights hung like yellow moons in
the sky, bathing the streets in a soft yellow benediction.  It was
easier that way easier on the eyes, but harder on the psyche.  At night
in Soweto, you fear what you can't see; you fear the tsotsis, the knife
men who ring up a murder rate four or five times higher than New York
City's.  It struck me that I was possibly the only white man in this
vast black city, and I started getting edgy.  Every white man we see is
an enemy to us.

The night turned into a blur of stark rooms, naked light bulbs, liquor
posters of bikini girls on coral beaches.  On our way into one shebeen,
a disembodied black face suspended in that weird yellow light muttered
something to Mike in a tribal tongue.

"He wants to know," Mike chuckled, 'if this whitey is ripe for the
picking."  Inside that shebeen, the black drinkers scowled darkly at
the sight of white skin, and even Mike thought it prudent to go
elsewhere.  The old psychic toxins flooded my brain, and ancient,
animal unease started eating at my viscera.  I slipped outside myself,
and started watching Malan go through the motions, flashing his
shit-eating grin, fumbling the black power handshake, saying "Hey
'bra."

"How you, 'bra' and, Tell me, 'bra, is my paranoia showing?  I wanted
to go home, but Mike wanted another drink, and then another.  He had
fallen off the wagon, and fallen hard.

Sometime after midnight, we found ourselves sitting at someone's
Formica kitchen table, having one for the road.  I was drunk.  Mike was
drunk.  The third man at the table was named Judo.  He had one eye and
no shoes.  Mike and I were talking about our fathers.  Mike's old man
had somehow managed to put five children through high school, a
near-miracle in black South Africa.  He had a brother at Oxford.  I
observed that Mike's old man must have been a wonderful father.

"Well," said Mike, 'he made his accommodations with the system, for my
sake, I suppose.  Baas Malan would kick his arse, and he'd say, "Okay,
that's sweet."  Later, I started questioning why we were like this, and
the white man like that.  I said, "Why, why, why?"  and my father said,
"Boy, you still small; you don't understand."  But today I know.  I
know why."

"Are you trying to tell me something?"  I asked.

"Are you trying to tell me something?"  he countered.

"Fuck you," I said.

"Fuck you," he said.

After a minute or so of uneasy silence, Mike changed the subject,
started talking about the politicization of crime.  In the old days,
ripping off whitey's handbag had been theft.  Now it was a
revolutionary act, as our drinking buddy Judo could apparently attest.
Mike claimed he'd once seen Judo hold up a white man on a Jo'burg
street.  Judo shook his head and said, "No couldn't have been me." Mike
was adamant, though.

He leapt to his feet and started reenacting the robbery, using me as a
prop.

"You grabbed him like this," Mike said, throwing an arm roughly around
my neck.

"You held the knife in his side here, like this yes!  I saw you,
skollie!"  He was laughing, but something wild and violent had entered
his mood.

"If Judo saw you in the street in Jo'burg," Mike cackled to me, 'he'd
rob young Judo?"

A black stranger appeared in the doorway, looked me up and down, and
muttered something to Mike and Judo in a language I didn't understand.
I started thinking how desirable my shoulder bag must seem to a man
with no shoes.  I started thinking about murder and robbery, about
sharpened bicycle spokes in the heart, a favorite means of dispatch in
Soweto.

My shit-eating grin tightened to breaking point and then snapped.  I
surged to my feet, nodded curtly to Mike, and walked out into the
menacing yellow night.  A lone white man on foot in Soweto in the
middle of the night in the midst of a black uprising, looking for a car
parked hundreds of yards away.  Maybe it was paranoia, but I figured my
chances of reaching the car alive were less than even.

I walked in the middle of the road.  I kept my eyes down and moved
fast.  I passed a group of youths loitering in the surreal yellow glow;
their mouths opened, and they spoke to me, but no sound registered. One
disembodied foot followed the other.  Pebbles leapt off the road in
brilliant clarity, casting shadows as stark as shadows on the moon. The
night was as silent as outer space.  I was walking on the moon. All I
could hear was the drumming of blood in my ears, and the rasp of my own
breathing.  I was out of my mind with terror, and in that moment, in
that moment, it came to me: This was it the unseen force that
obliterated reason in South Africa; the force that held the white tribe
together, and kept our sweating white fists locked in a death grip on
the levers of power.

Where did the fear come from?  The weight of the human sciences said it
was the poisonous fruit of racist conditioning, and I suppose there was
truth in that.  I grew up in a house where the black servants had to
drink from their own cups and eat off their own dishes, which were kept
separate from the rest of the crockery.  In his dealings with blacks,
my father was stiff and formal, my mother was somewhat patronizing.

She loved blacks, but she loved dogs, too, and I am not sure the
distinction was all that clear in her mind.  Many of the adults in my
life were to varying degrees racist.  The old lady next door, for
instance, once announced that she needed new glasses because she could
no longer tell blacks from whites at a distance.  She had caught
herself waving to blacks on the street, and that would never do.  Such
things clearly left their mark on me, but they should surely have
inspired contempt, not fear.  The fear had another root entirely.

I sometimes think the fear was always with me, even when I was a child
and loved all natives, indiscriminately.  It is the lot of children to
be stalked by amorphous fears and nocturnal terrors, by the feeling
that there is something out there in the dark, something threatening.
It seems to me that must be true everywhere, but in South Africa's
white suburbs, the terror always had a black face.  You'd lie with your
head under the covers, frozen with fear, listening to the window
rattling in the wind, and you knew it was a black out there.

One night when I was maybe twelve or so, my brother and parents went
out, leaving me alone in the house.  Around nine o'clock, Piet the
gardener came banging on the kitchen door.

He was my friend, and I would normally have let him in without
question, but there was something odd about the banging; he wasn't
knocking to be let in, he was trying to batter the door down.  So I
stuck my head out a window and asked what was going on.  I could see
straight away that he was half out of his mind.  His eyes were flaming
red, his breath reeked of brandy, and he was raving incoherently about
a woman who had betrayed him, something like that.

I couldn't see what this had to do with me, or why he was so determined
to come inside, and besides, I was suddenly scared of him.  So I
refused to open the door.

Piet walked away into the dark garden and stood there

3 silently, staring at Jo'burg's glittering skyline.  It was a cold
night, and his breath steamed in the air.  The dogs were barking
nervously.  Piet appeared to be deep in thought.  And then he spun
around and charged the house like a mad bull, smashing his head into
the wall so hard that the windows rattled.  After that, he started
raking his fingernails down the rough Spanish plaster- leaping and
twisting high into the night sky and raking the wall on his way down,
again and again, until the nails were hanging off his fingers in
bloody, fleshy shreds.  And then he disappeared into his room and
didn't come out again.

The next day Piet was sullenly sober, and his fingertips were knobbly
with blood clots.  I didn't tell my father what had happened, because I
loved Piet and didn't want him to be fired.

But I didn't talk to Piet about it either.  I couldn't.  Something big
had come between us, and the words and concepts we had in common were
very small, and good only for parsing out the everyday.  If he could
have spoken, he might have described a seething hell of frustration and
impotence.  He had a wife and three children to support, but my father
paid him a pittance, which is what gardeners got.  He was always
dreaming up schemes for making more money, but they always fell apart,
no matter how hard he tried.  If I'd asked, Piet might have told me
that he'd reached a point where he just couldn't take it any more.  Or
he might simply have said, "I wanted to kill someone."

I don't know.  He was African, and we white people couldn't really talk
to Africans.  They lived on the far side of a barrier of language and
culture, so when we tried to look into their hearts, we sometimes saw
only darkness.  Who knows what lurks in darkness?  We feared the worst.
It was our superstition, I suppose, but it was no less real to us for
all that.

Anyone who doubted the menacing nature of Africa was sent to see Africa
Addio, a documentary that appeared on South African screens when I was
ten or so.  Africa Addio was about things that happened in Africa in
the early sixties, after the European powers set their colonies free.
The work was banned or suppressed in most of the civilized world, but
white South Africans were encouraged to see it.  And what we saw was
this: beaches strewn with corpses in Zanzibar, piles of human hands in
the Congo, Alps of dead people in Rwanda, Himalayas of them in
Burundi.

I remember my parents discussing these events in hushed tones, so as
not to upset the children.  We had relatives who lived 'up there," you
see in Northern Rhodesia, a British colony that was about to be granted
independence.  My uncle Bernie was fond of the colonial life-style, the
pink gins at sunset and meditative cricket games on the country club's
green oval.  Many whites left long before independence, but my uncle
Bernie waited until the very last minute.  Indeed, he waited too long.
By the time he had his family in the car and their belongings on the
roof, there was no petrol in Mufulira, and the black masses were
rioting in the streets.  Uncle Bernie was driving around town looking
for an open petrol station when he ran into a crowd that stopped the
car and started rocking it.  They were chanting, "Independence!
Independence!"  My aunt and cousins were crying, because they thought
they were done for, but my uncle Bernie climbed out and shouted,
"Hurrah, independence!"  along with the black men, so they let him
go.

After that, they drove all the way down to Johannesburg without
stopping, and when they got to our house, one of my girl cousins
crawled under a bed and started crying because she was terrified of
Lena, our black servant.  She was littler than me, so I went in after
her, stroked her hair, and said, "It's all right, Catherine, it's all
right; she won't hurt you."  l was amused that she should be so scared
of Lena, because I loved Lena and assumed she loved me back.  I
understood exactly why Catherine was scared, and yet I knew that her
fear was entirely, absolutely groundless.

My moonwalk in Soweto ended on a similar note.  I heard footsteps
behind me, and my terror reached a crescendo.  And then a hand tapped
my shoulder.  I spun around and discovered that the werewolves were
phantasms inside my brain.

One-eyed Judo was padding along behind me in his bare feet, smiling
cheerfully, accompanied by a teenage boy.  Mike was straggling along
fifty yards behind them, grumbling.

"It is not safe for you here," said Judo.

"We will walk with you."

I was devastated by their kindness, and utterly ashamed of myself. Even
so, my life changed that night.  I went on saying that apartheid was
stupid and vicious, that racism was ignorant and backward, but in my
heart it was no longer simple.  I had seen the fear for what it was,
and it became my constant companion.  It came upon me whenever the
black comrades punched the sky at the sight of me, when their stones
thundered down on the roof of my car, when I couldn't understand what
blacks were saying about me, when I searched the eyes of black
hitchhikers, and even when I opened the newspapers.  It doesn't help to
say that the fear was irrational, or even psychotic.  You are what you
think, and white men who think blacks pose a mortal danger are in
mortal danger.  After that night, I knew that I had to purge the black
fear from my white heart.  Unless I did that unless we all did it there
was no hope for any of us.  Whites and blacks would tear one another
apart like dogs in a war that left the victor standing in a landscape
of graves and ruins.  We had to find a way of trusting all the one-eyed
black Judos, of giving ourselves into their arms, or we would all wind
up like Andries Petrus Hendricks.

When people asked why I was researching murders in the midst of a great
racial rebellion, I'd always tell them about the revelatory life and
prophetic death of Andries Petrus Hendricks.  Alongside the raging
struggle, his murder was an inconsequential little drama, but it seemed
to illumine the subterranean South African issue more clearly than an
entire library of books.

Andries Petrus Hendricks was born in 1910, the younger son of an Orange
Free State farmer who expected him to make his own way in life.  In the
early thirties, young Andries set off to seek his fortune in the
Sperrgebiet the forbidden zone, the nightmarish desert coast of
South-West Africa where the beaches were said to be littered with
diamonds.  Andries and his brother disappeared into the wilderness in a
donkey cart.

They almost perished out there, but when they came back four months
later they were rich men rich enough, at any rate, for Andries to buy
himself a 120-morgen farm just outside a small town named Vredefort, in
the flat, featureless mealie fields of the northern Orange Free
State.

Andries Hendricks was a strangely gnarled and arid man, incapable of
loving or trusting anyone.  He didn't trust banks, so he hoarded his
money and gold coins in chests under his bed.  He didn't trust women,
so his only marriage lasted but nine months.  He didn't trust men, so
he had few friends.  And above all, he didn't trust blacks.

In this, he was not so different from his neighbors, rock solid Boer
conservatives for the most part.  Very few of them considered blacks to
be fully and truly human, but even they were put off by the way Oom
Andries treated his black workers.  It wasn't that he beat them or
anything; he was just meanspirited and devious, always on guard, always
trying to cheat them or belittle them, and so rid died with fear and
hatred that he denied himself the traditional white luxury of live-in
servants.  He didn't want blacks anywhere near him.

He was so profoundly warped, according to his sister-in-law, that he'd
walk out of a movie if a black actor appeared on the screen.

This is a story another of his relatives told about him: "Old Amities
showed up on my doorstep at ten o'clock one night.  It was harvest
time, and he'd been working since dawn to bring in his crop.  One of
his wagons broke an axle, and he wanted to borrow mine, because there
was still another load to be taken to the co-op.  He looked as though
he'd had a hard day, so I asked him in for a brandy.

"I looked over his shoulder and saw a kaffir sitting in his truck.  The
boy was covered with dust from head to toe, and he was looking very
sorry for himself.  So I said to Artdries, "Call your boy to the door,
man, and I'll give him a dopa shot of spirits], too."  And Amities said
no.  Just like that.

For no reason.  He was just heartless.  I said it wasn't very
Christian, but he said he didn't care.

"If I'm in heaven," he said, "and a kaffir comes walking in through the
gates, that's when I walk out the back door."

Such spiritual deformity is quite common in white South Africans, but
old Amities had a particularly bad case of it, and it ravaged his life.
A man who hates cannot expect to be loved, and Amities had no illusions
about where he stood in relation to blacks.  He hated them and assumed
they hated him.  He always said, "Those kaffirs will mutilate me one
day."

As he grew older, his fear deepened into an obsession and, finally,
into dementia.

In his late sixties, Oom Andries grew too old and tired to go on
farming alone, and he had no sons to take over.  5o he sold off all his
land save for a silver fifteen feet wide and some three hundred yards
long.  On this silver, he built a fort.  It was an ugly massif of raw
concrete, three stories tall and virtually windowless, rising in the
middle of a flat and dreary plain.  The reinforced concrete walls were
fourteen inches thick, the door a ponderous chunk of steel looted from
a demolished bank vault.  There were battlements on the roof, and
chinks in the walls through which a white man could fire at the
encroaching savages.  Old Andries sunk a well through the floor for
water and stocked the larder with a supply of tinned food.  He stashed
his three chests of gold under his bed and welded the remainder of his
cash into steel pipes in the walls.  He brought in his guns (two
revolvers, a shotgun, and a rifle) and stockpiled ammunition.  And then
he locked himself inside his monument to racial paranoia, and sat back
to await the apocalypse.

Oom Andries had one weakness, though, a typical white man's weakness.
He was prepared to cook and clean for himself, but drew the line at
washing and ironing clothes.

Twice a week, therefore, the steel door of his fortress swung open, and
an old African woman was allowed in to do his drudgery.  She was the
only black who ever set foot inside Oom Andries's castle.  She saw the
chests under the bed, and knew about the cash inside the pipes.  One
day, she brought her two grown sons to work with her, and that was the
end of old Andries Hendricks.  His body was chopped to pieces and
thrown down the well.  The old black woman and her sons were caught
near the border in his pickup, tried, and hung for murder.  By the time
I arrived in Vredefort, five years had passed, and no whites could
remember their names.  They had receded into the anonymous black
masses.

"Jussus," chuckled one neighbor," 'just say the black peril got him."

In his will, this bitter and lonely old Boer bequeathed five English
pounds to any relative who attended his funeral; the rest of his money
was to be spent on his sarcophagus.  He died a fairly rich man, and
only one Hendricks showed up at the graveside.  So it was quite some
tomb that eventually arose in Vredefort's lonely graveyard: six
towering columns of marble, swarms of angels and cherubs, a life-sized
apostle, and a plinth inscribed with the bitter epitaph Andries
Hendricks had chosen for himself: "Gone and Forgotten."

As a tribe, a nation, we are all immured inside a fortress of racial
paranoia, jealously hoarding our gold and getting deeper and deeper
into a race war we cannot possibly win.  We all know that.  Our
generals have been saying so since 1973.

There is no military solution because the enemy is within.  He is not
beyond a border, where we could machine-gun or shell or even nuke him
if it came to it, because we are reputed to have that weapon too.  The
enemy is inside our cities, inside our very homes, washing dishes and
minding children, driving trucks and manning factories.  Moral
questions aside, we cannot defeat such an enemy without destroying
ourselves.

If we fail to accept that, we will also be chopped to pieces in a great
orgy of bloodletting, obliterated by the forces of history.

The ruins of tall buildings will mark our graves, and we, too, will be
gone and forgotten.

We must find a way of trusting, but who is there to trust?

We have managed to inflict some casualties on the side of the enemy,
eliminating sellouts and stooges... -Radio Freedom, Voice of the ANC,

November 1985 AND HERE WE are on the east side of downtown
Johannesburg, the side that is rapidly turning black.  Scores of
thousands of black office workers flow through this district every
morning and evening, on their way to and from Park Station.  All the
district's white merchants are bent on capturing their share of the
passing black trade.  Furniture and clothing stores offer attractive
hire-purchase deals, allowing economically distressed blacks to secure
goods with very low down payments.  Hair salons place pictures of
exquisitely coiffed black models in their windows.  Record bars put
loudspeakers on the sidewalk and bombard the crowds with the cool,
urban Afro-disco sound of Hotstix Mabuse or Shangaan jive from Obed
Ngobeni and the Kurhula Sisters.

On Wanderers Street, we turn into the foyer of a rundown office
building.  The elevators are broken, the corridors dark under smashed
light bulbs.  The walls are smeared with the grime of decades of
commerce.  Every third door has a splintered jamb, the work of
mysterious nocturnal visitors who jimmy the doors, rifle through desks
and filing cabinets, and vanish without being seen.  Nobody knows who
the visitors are, but the tenants have their suspicions, because
they're all enemies of the apartheid state.  This is the de facto
national headquarters of the BC movement, the network of trade unions
and political organizations that carry the standard of Steve Biko,
fallen prophet of Black Consciousness.  I pass the offices of the
building and construction union, the office cleaners' union, the media
workers' union, and finally, at the end of a dark corridor plastered
with "Don't Buy White' bumper stickers, I find a door marked AZAPO,
headquarters of the Azanian People's Organization.

The suite of offices beyond is as dingy as the rest of the building.
Springs are busting out of the waiting-room sofa.

Cigarettes have been ground out in the threadbare carpet, and bits and
pieces of anonymous office machinery lurk in corners under dusty
plastic shrouds.  On the wall is the Azanian flag, the flag that might
have been South Africa's had Biko lived, and BC triumphed.  It is
divided diagonally into orange and black segments, with a red star in
the heart of the orange sector.  Alongside the flag are portraits of
the BC movement's patron saints: Muammar Qaddafi, Chairman Mao, and
Saint Steve Biko the Radiant.

Six thousand miles away, in London, Sir Richard Attenborough is editing
a film about Steve Biko and his brave struggle against white tyranny.
Biko is about to become a household name in the larger world, but the
larger world doesn't seem particularly interested in Biko's surviving
friends and comrades, judging from today's turnout.  The leaders of
Azapo are bitterly cynical about the white-dominated world media.  They
have seen a draft of Attenborough's script.  In their view, it turns
Biko into a tame Martin Luther King-like figure, a black liberal
acceptable to fastidious white political palates.  Attenborough has
stolen their martyr, and Bishop Tutu's United Democratic Front has
stolen their spotlight.  If Bishop Tutu calls a press conference to
denounce apartheid, you can scarcely get in for the hordes of foreign
correspondents.  But when the followers of Biko call one, look who
shows up: two black reporters from The Star, a camera less
correspondent from ABC, two or three additional stragglers, and me,
Malan.

The eight or so reporters crowd into a tiny office, and Azapo's leaders
take their seats on the far side of a large desk: Comrade Myeza,
Comrade Wauchope, and Comrade Molala.  Between them, these three black
men have spent a total of almost eighteen years in prison or detention
for fighting apartheid.  Comrade Muntu Myeza was kicked out of
university for political activism, tortured by the secret police, and
ultimately jailed for organizing a rally celebrating the downfall of
the colonial regime in neighboring Mozambique.

He spent eight years on Robben Island, the notorious political prison
in Table Bay.

Comrade Nkosi Molala was on the island, too, serving seven years for
sabotage.  Such experiences are supposed to break a man, but Molala
resumed the struggle as soon as they set him free, only to be struck in
the face by a police tear-gas grenade and blinded in one eye.  The
third member of the troika, Comrade George Wauchope, was one of Steve
Biko's main men in Johannesburg in the mid-seventies and played a
leading role in the process of political organization and education
that culminated in the 1976 Soweto rebellion.  These three men have
been arrested so often they've lost count, beaten and tortured so
routinely that they no longer care to talk about it.

They've spent most of their adult lives running from the white secret
police, but now they're running from someone else.

Comrade President Molala opens the proceedings with some general
remarks about the BC movement's present predicament.

"There are rumors floating in the ghetto," he declares, 'that we are
going to be eliminated."  He goes on to describe a series of attacks
recently suffered by members of his movement.  Homes have been burned
down with firebombs, or blown up with Soviet limpet mines.  BC
supporters have been attacked on the streets and expelled from schools
under threat of death.  Members of the BC youth movement have been
abducted and murdered.  In some instances, the parents and grandparents
of these children have been taken hostage and murdered, too.  A
campaign is underway, Molala concludes, to eliminate Azapo as a
political force, and everyone knows who lies behind it: members of the
United Democratic Front, the liberation movement championed by Bishop
Tutu and other clergymen.

Actually, it is a little unfair to mention the bishop's name in this
context.  Bishop Tutu is a figurehead, not a leader.  His truest
eminence lies in the eyes of foreign TV cameras.  He doesn't control
the comrades, and he certainly doesn't write pamphlets of this ilk.
Comrade Molala holds up the pamphlet for all to see.  It is a two-page
document, printed on a UDF letterhead.

Just yesterday, thousands of copies of it were scattered in the streets
of Soweto.  It says, "We are calling all units of our front to war.  We
have tolerated Azapo for too long.  They want to upstage our popularity
in the community and they oppose all our campaigns... WE MUST NOT REST
tnnL WE HAVE HUNTED DOWN

EACH AND EVERY MEMBER OF AZAPO FROM SEKHUKUNILAND THROUGH

PORT ELIZABETH TO LANGA?

It is hard to be sure, but this particular pamphlet reeks of forgery.
It's probably the work of the white secret police, who are old and
cunning masters of the art of black propaganda, of dividing the
resistance against itself.  Even so, as Comrade Molala observes, the
state cannot be accused of creating the present crisis, only exploiting
it.  The bloodcurdling sentiments expressed in this pamphlet bear no
relation to the UDF's public positions, but the actions it exhorts are
already being undertaken in the streets.  The truth of the matter is
that followers of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu are killing followers
of Steve Biko.

The first question from the press, of course, is why?  Why should black
radicals, in the midst of a convulsive struggle against a brutally
oppressive white supremacist regime, suddenly turn on one another and
start killing each other?  The query is fielded by Muntu Myeza, Azapo's
publicity secretary.

"It's not only difficult for people outside to understand why blacks
are at each others' throats," he says.

"It's difficult for ourselves."

If he doesn't know, what hope of understanding have we?

Let us try.

I remember Steve Biko.  I never met him, nor saw him speak, but he
towered over my Just White Youth like a colossus, a figure who inspired
true awe.  There are those whites, both leftists and rightists, who
dismiss him as a black racist, but I did not see him that way.  His
writings and court statements seemed to embody the truth, the real
truth, not the simpering variant one encountered in the writings of
white liberals.  White liberals looked down on black victims and said,
"Shame."  Steve Biko, on the other hand, spoke to the wounded black
heart.  He said, Rise up; embrace your blackness; be proud of who you
are; grow strong.  He scorned the sentimental doctrine of mankind's
unity, and the white liberals who propounded it, and yet this was not
done with hatred.  He never sounded like Louis Farrakhan. He slapped
away the patronizing hand of whites like me, and yet I was not
offended.  He seemed to be saying, First this, first the black healing,
and then we can talk, when we are fully men.  I don't know, my friend,
I am not sure that Steve Biko was really a political figure.  I think
he transcended politics.  I could scarcely believe, in my secret racist
heart, that a black man could be so wise and perceptive, and the awe I
felt for him had almost religious overtones.  I am not mocking when I
call him Saint Biko the Radiant.  That is how I saw him.

In a way, Biko was a creation of the oppressive white state, in that
its own actions set the stage for his inevitable emergence.

In 1960, in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, the state
crushed Nelson Mandela's ANC and Robert Sobukwe's PanAfricanist
Congress.  Both Sobukwe and Mandela later went to jail, and many of
their followers into exile.  In exile, the ANC was kept alive largely
by Moscow, and the PAC by Peking.  Both organizations virtually ceased
to exist inside South Africa.

Into this absolute vacuum, in the late sixties, stepped Steve Biko. All
other leaders had been cut down, and all hope crushed, so Biko was
sucked hungrily into the empty, hopeless hearts of hundreds of
thousands of black people.  In my youth, all the black men I knew
supported Biko.  All the black reporters with whom I drank in The
Star's fourth-floor canteen were Biko men.  All the black universities
were aseethe with his ideas, and when Soweto's black students took to
the streets on June 16, 1976, Steve Biko's name was on their lips.

They were shot down, of course, and a year later Biko met his own
tragic end in the hands of the secret police.

In the aftermath of his death, revolution again threatened.

So the secret police rounded up Biko's followers and smashed his
movement, banning eighteen Black Consciousness organizations along with
the two newspapers that supported the BC line.  Forty-eight of the Biko
movement's leaders were arrested and detained for up to a year without
trial.

When they were finally set free, many of those leaders regrouped in
Azapo, the Azanian People's Organization.  The exiled ANC was slow to
exploit the climate of anger created by the Soweto riots and Biko's
subsequent death, and Sobukwe's PAC was withering away, its Chinese
sponsors too preoccupied with their own internal problems to pay much
attention to events in distant Africa.  So Azapo carried the standard
of the black struggle for several years.  The BC movement designed a
flag for the coming free country and even gave it a name.  It would be
called Azania, from the ancient Arabic term for the terra incognita
that lay south of Zanzibar, and it would be a 'black communalist'
people's republic, cleansed of the scourge of 'racial capitalism."  The
world's left-wing newspapers took to referring to South Africa as
Azania and to black South Africans as Azanians.  In the late seventies,
Azapo's domination of the internal black resistance was complete.

The ANC was the oldest liberation movement, however, and in many ways
the most effective.  It had enormous support in the outside world, a
useful relationship with the Soviet Union, and a military wing that
constituted the only serious threat to white power.  A number of
prominent BC activists and leaders took note of these realities and
changed sides.  In some quarters, Steve Biko's blacks-only line was
said to be outdated, a relic of the consciousness-raising epoch of the
seventies.  In others, questions were raised about Biko himself.
According to reports in the US, recruits in some ANC camps in Angola or
East Germany were taught that the martyred BC prophet was actually a
CIA agent.

In the early eighties, the ANC moved to reestablish an aboveground
presence inside South Africa.  This presence ultimately took the form
of the UDF, the United Democratic Front, which hailed Nelson Mandela as
its leader and cleaved faithfully to the ANC line.  As a political
movement, the ANC-UDF axis had a great deal going for it a righteous
cause, a living martyr as leader, Bishop Tutu as a spokesman, and a
line that played well in the West's white-controlled media.  This line
was non racialism  Race was discounted, and the battle for South Africa
recast as as struggle between good and evil, or, alternatively, between
the working and ruling classes.  Whites were welcome to change sides. 
This analysis appealed to Western journalists and, through them, to
Western churches and governments, who poured in funding for salaried
organizers, computers, offices, T-shirts, pamphlets, and political
campaigns.  The UDF was formed in 1983.

Within months, it had become a formidable force in South African
politics, and Azapo had gone into apparent eclipse.

Azapo had next to nothing in the way of resources.  It was so broke
that even its leaders were un salaried volunteers.  It had few cars,
few telephones, few staff, and its few foreign backers were so distant
or powerless that they could offer little but moral support.  Its
'black racist' line was repugnant to white Western humanists, who
couldn't very well endorse an organization that would not accept them
as members.  Azapo had nothing, in fact, but the memory of Biko, a
tradition of brave resistance, and a political line that played rather
well in the townships.

That line was that whites were the enemy.  Azapo proclaimed that the
true aim of the struggle was redemption of the land from the white
conquerors.  The UDF-ANC axis, on the other hand, cast the 'apartheid
state' or the 'ruling class' as the enemy.  Beyond that, it was six of
one and half a dozen of another, or so it seemed to me.  In South
Africa, whites were the ruling class, and race struggle was class
struggle.  The terms were more or less interchangeable, and besides,
both Azapo and the ANC were overtly socialist and overwhelmingly
black.

There were a handful of whites in the ANC, but they weren't allowed to
sit on its ruling council until 1985.  It was hard for a white outsider
to see why the two organizations didn't join forces and set about
routing the Boer.

Instead, they became rivals.  At first, the rivalry was peaceful,
ideological, political.  And then, in 1985, Senator Ted Kennedy came to
South Africa at the invitation of the UDF's clerical leaders, and the
real troubles began.  The Reverend Boesak and Bishop Tutu felt that
such a visit would focus international attention on the freedom
struggle.  Azapo was incensed.  It wanted to know what kind of black
men, not to mention socialists, would go to bed with a white
millionaire from Boston.  Wherever Kennedy went, Azapo showed up with
placards lampooning him, and by extension the UDF, as tools of
international capitalism.  In radical circles in South Africa, this was
the worst insult imaginable.  There were angry confrontations, brawls,
and fistfights.

Azapo was scarcely visible in the media, but when it came to a showdown
it turned out to be extremely powerful.  In fact, Azapo had enough
clout to keep Kennedy out of Soweto altogether.  The liberal senator
who had come to South Africa to champion black liberation couldn't set
foot in South Africa's largest black city because blacks were
threatening to harm him.  It was a propaganda debacle, and heralded the
onset of open hostilities between Azapo and the UDF.

A few months later, Radio Freedom, clandestine voice of the ANC,
broadcasting from somewhere in the heart of Africa, called on its
followers inside South Africa to eliminate 'the third force."  What was
the third force?  On the streets, it seemed to mean anyone who did not
pledge alliance to the ANC and Nelson Mandela moderates, tribalists,
apartheid 'stooges' and 'sellouts," police informers, but also
followers of Steve Biko.

In the Eastern Cape, the region where Steve Biko lived and worked, and
where his influence had once been strongest, Azapo 'virtually ceased to
exist," according to press reports.

In Queenstown and Uitenhage, Azapo members were hounded out of town,
their homes often burned down behind them.

In nearby Port Elizabeth, where Biko sustained fatal brain injuries in
a police interrogation cell, the regional secretary of the party that
carried his standard was dragged out of a doctor's surgery by a mob and
stabbed in broad daylight.

In the industrialized Vaal Triangle, townships were divided into rival
Mandela and Biko strongholds.  It's hard to say how many people died in
the Biko versus Mandela war, because their deaths tended to get lost in
the general township carnage.

Scores, certainly; more than a hundred, possibly Things had finally
reached a pass where even Azapo's top leaders were no longer safe, not
even in the hearts of their own strongholds.

And that, ultimately, is why Comrade Molala called a press conference
in downtown Johannesburg to focus the white media's attention on the
crisis, in the hope of shaming the UDF into condemning the violence and
disciplining the rank and file.

The strategy seemed to have failed, judging from the relatively poor
turnout at the press conference.  It failed in another respect, too:
Nobody offered a convincing explanation as to why the killing was
taking place, why it was necessary.  That is why I stayed around after
the rest of the press had left, and asked the comrades' permission to
interview a teenage member of Azasm the Azanian Students' Movement,
youth wing of the BC movement.  Azasm members were not supposed to
speak to the press without clearance, so I was instructed to come back
the following day, to be screened by the young wing's national
executive.

Twenty-four hours later, I found myself sitting in the same conference
room, facing six black youths across the same broad desk.  They were
all in their late teens or early twenties, all passionately sincere and
idealistic young people.  They genuinely wanted me to understand the
roots of their struggle.  They explained the history of their movement
in great detail and elucidated the points on which they disagreed with
the UDF.

The rival organization, they said, was wishy-washy in its commitment to
socialism.  Furthermore, it was not sworn to reclaim the conquered
land.  In this, they saw the influence of the white leftists and
Communists who occupied some key positions in the UDF and in its mother
body, the ANC.  The presence of whites in such positions, said these
youngsters, had inevitably diluted ANC-UDF doctrines, and blunted its
thrust for liberation.  Only Azapo, they said, remained true to Biko's
vision.

"Our views," concluded Thami Hlekiso, national vice president of the
youth wing, 'are understood by the black community.  That is why we are
a force, and that is why they are killing us."  He knew whereof he
spoke.  He had moved out of his parents' home and was living on the
run.  Some of his fellow executive members had been beaten up or
expelled from their schools for refusing to renounce their BC beliefs.
All had lost friends in the war against the UDF, and one was soon to
lose a brother.

I asked Hlekiso if Azapo would survive the crisis.

"We have given our lives to the struggle," he replied, 'and if it is
necessary to die, I think we will die.  That is why I am confident
Black Consciousness will survive."

I was glad to hear that, because I was saddened by the thought of a
South Africa in which Steve Biko's spirit was extinguished.  I said as
much, and after that the comrades loosened up somewhat.  They had been
speaking guardedly, stiffly, but now they relaxed a little.  Some even
seemed to take a liking to me, in spite of my white skin.

I offered my own analysis of the situation.  The ANC's public
disavowals of Marxism, I argued, were largely strategic;

they were intended to deny conservatives of Ronald Reagan or Margaret
Thatcher's ilk a weapon in the struggle for international public
opinion.  I told them about articles I had read in Sechaba in which ANC
leaders divided the world into rival 'socialist' and 'imperialist'
blocs, led respectively by the Soviet Union ('the invincible bulwark of
peace and mankind's social progress') and USA ('spearhead of the
international forces of reaction').  There was no question as to where
the ANC stood in this fray: it was 'totally and uncompromisingly
anti-imperialist," in president Oliver Tambo's phrase.

"Antiimperialists of the world unite!"  he declared.  Hlekiso and the
others found these remarks intriguing.  They had never seen Sechaba
because it was banned in South Africa.  We wound up talking for more
than an hour.  I kept asking why.  Why not join forces with the UDF?
Why not get on with the struggle and leave the picking of ideological
nits for later?  In the end, I got an interesting answer.

"The UDF is stealing our struggle," Hlekiso said heatedly.

"They have stolen our sign," he said, referring to the clenched fist of
black power, 'and they have stolen our songs."

"What songs?"  I inquired.

"The Zulu song, "My mother becomes happy when I beat a white," he
said.

Well, well, I thought.  The 'nonracial' UDF steals songs about hitting
whites, and the doctrinally pure BC socialists get very upset about it.
There was clearly more here than met the eye.  The national vice
president of t]ac Azanian Students' Movement must have missed my raised
eyebrows.  A few minutes later, he cleared my request to interview a
rank and file member of his movement.

If South Africa were a black-run country, Old Potch Road would be a
six-lane highway.  It's a white-run country, though, so Soweto's
motorists crawl to and from town along a potholed two-lane blacktop
that is clogged with traffic at almost any hour of the day.  About the
best thing to be said for Old Potch Road is that you have to travel it
slowly slowly enough to take in the sights, such as they are.  We pass
a little kid selling bumper stickers at the roadside "I Love Soweto,"
they say, or "God Bless and Heal Africa."  We pass the cathedral, the
squatter camp at Kliptown, and then Moroka Police Station, surrounded
by an eight-foot fence.

Inside, laborers are at work on a new apartment complex for black
police officers.  It is no longer possible, at this stage of history,
for black cops to live among fellow blacks.  To stay alive, they must
stay inside guarded perimeters, behind barbed wire.  A little further
on, we pass another sign of the times, a gleaming new fast-food joint
called Chicken Upeo, fruit of Botha's drive to create a black middle
class.  And on a transformer housing (itself a sign of 'reform," of the
recent electrification of Soweto), yet another telling detail a
bloodred V, homage to the science-fiction TV series in which freedom
fighters battle a cruel race of conquering aliens in the suburbs of Los
Angeles.

In the nine years since I was last in Dhlamini, the place has
brightened somewhat.  Black people have finally been granted the right
to permanent residence in 'white' South Africa.  Many now own the
houses they live in, and with ownership has come a measure of pride.
Every second or third residence has been expanded or modified in some
fashion.  There are splashes of color here and there a house brightly
painted, a flowering rose garden, a new car in some lucky man's
driveway- but the backdrop remains dreary and depressing.  The ranks of
matchbox houses run down toward a stretch of reedy marshland, where a
rubble-strewn patch of land serves as a makeshift soccer field.

It is deserted today, but in a more innocent time a group of black
schoolboys in their early teens might have been playing soccer down
there.  Those soccer games were a daily after-school ritual for the
schoolboys of Dhlamini 1 and its adjoining zone, Dhlamini 2. They took
their games seriously and always played to win, but they were good
friends off the field.  They lived within hailing distance of one
another, and often attended the same schools.  They were all black, all
sons of struggling parents, all victims of apartheid's atrocious Bantu
Education, dished out in overcrowded classrooms by teachers barely
educated themselves.  And they were all to some degree politicized.
Some of the boys were members of Azapo, and some belonged to the UDF,
but they were still playing soccer together in the afternoons a year or
so ago.  Today, they're trying to kill each other.

I locate the house I'm looking for and knock on the door.

A firebomb has recently exploded on this very doorstep.  A month or two
hence, a teenaged son of the household within will be waylaid as he's
coming home, stabbed with garden forks and burned alive.  Right now,
however, the street seems peaceful.  Even so, I feel apprehensive and
cast fearful glances in the direction from which danger will come, if
it comes.

I usually work with a black interpreter, but nobody would accompany me
on this particular mission.  They all said it was too dangerous.

The door opens, and I find myself shaking hands with a teenager in a
T-shirt and skintight designer jeans.  The boy's skin is golden-brown
and he's still carrying a little baby fat on his plump face and frame.
This is Vuyisele Byron Wauchope, age fifteen.  Alongside him stands his
friend and ideological mentor, Vuyo Kapa, age nineteen.  Through an
open doorway I catch a glimpse of Byron's Uncle George, the general
secretary of Azapo, sleeping the sleep of the utterly exhausted in a
bedroom piled with clothes and other belongings.  He is a refugee now.
He and his wife and children no longer have a home.  Their home has
burned down, which means that Byron is homeless too.

Byron leads me through into the dining room, and we sit down at the
table to talk.  Vuyo joins us.  Vuyo is a desperately serious young
man.  He has a goatee like Trotsky's, and some ideas to match.  He is
here to keep vigil over the utterances of young Byron, who is too young
to have truly mastered the party line.  Byron has only just turned
fifteen, and he's still inclined to squirm and giggle nervously in the
presence of a strange adult.  It's hard to see him as a player in the
deadly game of township politics, but that's how things were in the
great uprising of the mid-eighties.  In some ways, it was a Children's
Crusade.

Byron is the son of George Wauchope's sister, but he was raised in the
BC leader's household and seems to have radical politics in his bones.
One of his earliest memories is of visiting his famous uncle in prison
during one of George's periodic detention spells.  Byron's relatives
used to carry him to BC rallies and congresses before he could walk or
talk.

"I joined politics when I was five," the boy says proudly.

Shortly thereafter, he was tear gassed for the first time, at a rally
commemorating Steve Biko's death in detention.  At the age of twelve,
he became a card-carrying member of the Biko youth movement, and soon
rose to be treasurer of the Dhlamini 1 branch of Azasm.  His best
friend, Fana Mhlongo, was the branch's mascot.  Fana was by no means
the youngest comrade, but he was one of the smallest, short and fat
like a snub-nosed revolver.  That's why they called him Gunman comrade
Gunman Mhlongo, a soldier at the age of fourteen.

Fana lived just up the road, and he'd been Byron's best friend since
1983.  The boys were inseparable in all things, not just politics. They
attended the same primary school, played on the same soccer team in
those afternoon pick-up games.  They liked the same TV shows- Knight
Rider, The A-Team and Bill Cosby and the same pop groups: Stimela, The
Big Dudes, Yvonne Chaka-Chaka.  Their favorite film stars were "James
Bond' and Chuck Norris.  Their favorite movies were Rambo, First Blood,
and Wild Geese, a luridly racist action adventure in which white
mercenaries kick hell out of a caricatural African despot.  And their
favorite game, Byron added, was Monopoly.  I thought the next thing to
emerge from his young mouth would be some kind words about Ronald
Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, but Byron Wauchope was actually a
revolutionary socialist.  His friend Fana was one, too.

"We wrote a freedom song," said Byron.  It was called, "Strive
Tirelessly for a Socialist Azania," and it went like this: "If you can
fight fearlessly, I'll meet you on the freedom day.  I shall fight for
Azania, Azania, my beloved country."

Impressed, I asked Byron why he and Fana had opted to join the
Azanians, as opposed to the UDF.

"Well," Byron answered, 'the UDF says, "Mandela it's our father," but
we say, "Biko it's our father."

"Yes," I said, "I understand that, but what I'm really asking is, Why
do you prefer BC ?  What is Black Consciousness?"

He thought about that, and then he said, "Steve Biko was a man, and
Abraham Tiro says there is no struggle without casualties."

The late Abraham Tiro was a prominent BC leader in the seventies, but
even so, it was not the most illuminating reply.

My line of questioning was clearly incorrect, so I tried another tack.
Instead of asking what was right about BC, I asked what was wrong with
the UDF.

"They are trying to confuse the masses," said Byron.

"How so?"  I wondered.

"When they saw we were too powerful," he said, 'they said you will get
free money and free T-shirts if you join the UDF."

At this point, Vuyo stepped in to offer a more coherent statement on
the boy's behalf.

"Biko was trying to boost the morale of the exploited masses of
Azania," Vuyo began.  His discourse lasted ten minutes and touched on
several hair-raising conspiracy theories, one of which was that the
American CIA was funneling funds through the ANC to the UDF, which was
using the money to bribe Biko followers over to the Mandela side.  He
concluded on a familiar note: Only the BC movement was 'fighting for
socialism and the total liberation of all blacks and oppressed people'
and would not rest until victory was achieved.  It was very
interesting, but Byron's remark about the T-shirts stood and deserved
to be heard.

In the beginning, to hear young Byron tell it, being a comrade was
quite exciting.  They held meetings and workshops in their homes after
school while their parents were away at work.  They discussed apartheid
and the fight against it.  Older members of the organization delivered
lectures on ideology and tactics.  Once the struggle got underway in
earnest, they declared Dhlamini 1 a 'liberated zone' and drew up plans
to defend it.  Every comrade was given a list of names and phone
numbers to keep beside his parents' telephone, if they had one, so that
he could raise the alarm in the event of an attack.  They also devised
codes to battle the system's ubiquitous spies.  If a comrade said,
"Bring the Kentucky!"  for instance, it really meant, "Bring the gun!"
Many comrades were so young that they'd stub out cigarettes when they
saw their parents coming, but some carried pistols or revolvers in
their socks.

The guns were intended for defense against the system, of course, not
against people like Paulos Madonsela.  Paulos lived three doors down
from Byron and often played soccer with him and Fana after school.
Paulos was a year or two older, and inclined to play rough.  Indeed, he
once tackled Byron so hard that he accidently broke his arm, but that
was part of the game.

The boys remained friends in spite of everything.  Even when Paulos
succumbed to alleged CIA blandishments and donned the yellow T-shirt of
the rival UDF, he and Byron stayed friends.

"We all shared a pain for Soweto," Byron explained.

But then Senator Kennedy came to South Africa, and nothing was ever the
same again.

As the BC comrades saw it, the American senator's visit would only
raise false hopes and foster illusions among Soweto's downtrodden
people.

"The Charterists were telling people who doesn't know anything that
someone from the USA is coming to deliver a speech," Byron said.

"So people who are not educated thought maybe this man is having good
news, coming from the States.  But BC said, "There's nothing like that.
Kennedy will deliver nothing.  He's out of order.  We don't want
Kennedy here."

Paulos disagreed.  He and his fellow Charterists were planning to roll
out the red carpet for the famous American.  One day Paulos saw Byron
in the road and called out mockingly, "Come and listen to this man!
Maybe you can be liberated!"  Byron just laughed.

"Paulos," he replied, 'you are still young in politics.  You are an
amateur."

On the appointed day, all the comrades in Dhlamini marched down the
hill to Regina Mundi cathedral, where Kennedy was scheduled to speak.
Thousands of people were waiting, plus scores of reporters and TV
cameras from all over the world.  Paulos and the Charterists stood at
the front of the hall.  Byron, Fana, and the rest of the BC contingent
stood at the back.  And Bishop Tutu stood on stage with his hands in
the air, begging the seething factions to make peace.  It didn't
help.

The BC comrades were determined not to let Kennedy speak.

Indeed, they put on such a show of force and fury that Tutu lost his
nerve and advised his friend Kennedy to stay away.  It was a
humiliation for the UDF, and there would be a price to pay.

One day, not long after, the slogan "One Azania, One Nation' appeared
on a transformer housing at the entrance to Dhlamini 1, marking the
zone a Zim-zim stronghold.  Few whites knew the term Zim-zim, and it
seldom if ever appeared in the copy of foreign correspondents.  It was
becoming an important word in Soweto, though.  In Soweto, youngsters
who said Biko were dubbed Zim-zims, in honor of all theisms in their
ideological arsenal: socialism, racism, capitalism, colonialism.  Those
who said Mandela, on the other hand, were called Wararas, a corruption
of the Afrikaans waarwaar, meaning 'where-where."  In the estimation of
Zim-zims, anyone who believed the UDF's nonracial doctrine was very
confused.  They were groping around in the dark in search of their true
enemy, crying, "Where?  Where ?"  Dhlamini I became a Zim-zim
stronghold, and Dhlamini 2, just across the road, became Warara turf.
Much of the rest of Soweto was similarly divided, in preparation for
the coming war.

To the best of Byron's recollection, the first casualty was Sipho
Mngomezulu, a young man who 'preached BC' in a part of Soweto called
Emdeni.  The Wararas abducted him from his home in full view of his
helpless parents, dragged him to a vacant lot and stoned him to death.
I tried to ask the Wararas for their version of this event, but l
couldn't contact them.  They were hiding from the Zim-zims, or on the
run from the police.  If I had reached them, though, I daresay they
might have claimed that Mngomezulu was executed in retaliation for the
recent abduction and torture-murders of three teenaged Wararas.  The
Zim-zims, in turn, denied complicity in those killings, claiming that
they were actually carried out by the maKabasa, a criminal gang that
just happened to live in a Zim-zim stronghold and probably took orders
from the white secret police.  Such knots are never unraveled, not in
South Africa.

All that is certain is that Sipho Mngomezulu was abducted and killed in
broad daylight.  To add insult to injury, a mob of Wararas invaded the
wake, set fire to Sipho's coffin, and demolished his parents' home with
a hijacked bulldozer.  The Zim-zims managed to save the coffin and bury
it, but there was a second killing after the funeral.  This time, the
victim was Martin Mohau, age twenty-nine.  Mohau was a hero of the
struggle against apartheid and another 'graduate' of Robben Island, the
political prison in Table Bay.  He was also a Zim-zim.  A mob of
Wararas waylaid him on his way home from Sipho's funeral and neck laced
him put a car tire around his neck, poured gasoline on him, and burned
him alive.

"After that," Byron continued, 'everyone chose sides."  Wararas started
'expelling' Zim-zims from schools in their strongholds.  Teenagers with
dissident politics were threatened or beaten up by their classmates.
Some were doused with petrol, put inside car tires and given a choice:
"Say Mandela or die."

Or: "Say Biko or die."

Fana's school was lbongho High, a bad place to be BC.  One morning,
leaders of the dominant Warara faction ordered their teachers and
headmaster to go sit in the staff room.  Then they summoned the
students to an assembly.  All Zim-zims were ordered to step to the fore
and recant.  Several did, but not Comrade Gunman Mhlongo.

"He was ready to die for BC," young Byron told me.  So Fana and
approximately twenty fellow BC stalwarts were banished on pain of
death.

"If we ever see you here again," the Wararas warned, 'tell us what size
car tire you wear."  Then the Zim-zims were chased away.

Fana was a fat boy and couldn't run very fast.  He dropped his school
bag while making his getaway, and that was the end of his education.

A few days later, a similar incident took place at Byron's school.  A
group of Wararas led by his old friend Paulos burst into Byron's
classroom, looking for him.

"Where is he?"  the Wararas demanded.

"We want to necklace him."  Byron was lucky; he'd had a premonition and
stayed at home that day.

Appalled by the image of a gang of sixteen-year-olds invading a
higher-primary-school classroom to murder a fifteen year-old, I asked
Byron how the teacher responded.

"He just shut his mouth," the boy giggled, 'because he knew that if he
opened it they would kill him, too.  But after they left, he phoned my
house and told me I must not come back to school."

And so Byron and his best friend Fana stayed home, with nothing to do
all day.  They listened to Radio Bop, beaming in from the
quasi-independent homeland of Bophuthatswana.

They played Monopoly, or fooled around on Uncle George's tape,
recording themselves singing freedom songs.  One day, on their way to
the shops, they were attacked by a band of Wararas.  Fana fended off a
knife-thrust with his bare hand, and one of his fingers was virtually
severed.  After that, the BC comrades always traveled in a group.  They
started sleeping in groups too, staying one night at one comrade's
house, the next at another's.  They wanted to be together in case of an
attack.

Outside, the killing continued.  A BC comrade's home was damaged by a
Soviet limpet mine.  In apparent retaliation, Zim-zims hijacked a bus
and crashed it into the home of a Warara leader.  In counter strike the
Wararas started kidnapping and killing Zim-zim next-of-kin.  A
well-known Soweto sports personality and church leader was abducted and
murdered by Wararas hunting his son.  The aging grandmother of a
Zim-zim met a similar fate.  A UDF street committee ordered her to
produce her grandson; when she failed to comply, she was killed.  A few
days later, someone from the other side was bundled into a car, shot
thrice, and his body dumped in a coal yard  And so it carried on.

In this war, as in all wars, there were no innocent parties and no
innocent bystanders, but the Zim-zims were clearly on the losing end.
Azapo seemed to be disintegrating, its members resigning in fear of
their lives, its leaders driven underground.

There came a time when no one was safe anymore, least of all the
Wauchope family.  George Wauchope had been one of Steve Biko's closest
allies, but this did not entitle him to mercy.  First there were phone
calls, anonymous voices warning George that his time was running out.
Then someone rammed a stolen van into the front of his house.  A few
nights later, a firebomb was hurled at George's home.  It smashed
against an outside wall, causing little damage, but still, these
incidents left him unnerved.  George had a family to think about a
wife, two young children, an ailing mother and a teenage nephew. That's
why he went into hiding, hoping to draw the Wararas away.

And that in turn is why there was no man in the house at 1454 Dhlamini
when the Wararas returned to burn it down.

They came at three in the morning, and this time they came in force.
Byron was wakened by a great crashing of glass, and the who mp of
igniting gasoline.  In his estimation, at least twenty Molotov
cocktails came in through the windows simultaneously.  One landed right
on top of his cousin Ephraim, setting his clothes and bedding afire. It
was bright as day from the flames, but the house soon filled with
smoke.

The family milled around in terror.  Byron groped his way to the door,
but it wouldn't open.  Someone was holding it closed from the outside.
The flames were mounting, and the Wauchopes thought themselves doomed
to burn.  They were lucky, though.  Their screams roused the neighbors,
who came to see what was going on.  At that, the Wararas melted away
into the night.  The door suddenly gave, and the Wauchopes staggered
outside, choking and gasping for air.

Nobody was seriously injured in the fire, but the Wauchopes lost almost
everything they owned.  In the aftermath, young Byron telephoned Uncle
George at his place of hiding and told him to come and see.  The BC
leader arrived just as the fire brigade was dousing the last flames in
the smoldering ruins of his home.

"He didn't say anything," Byron told me.

"He just looked down at the ground."

Mrs.  Leah Mhlongo is old and tired, and her face is deeply lined with
grief.  She's sixty-nine years old and wears a dock over her iron-gray
hair.  She sits at a Formica table in her humble kitchen, talking,
crying, and punctuating her tales with a curious whooshing sound.  The
sound signifies something lost and gone - a job here, a certainty
there, and all too often, a person.

"And where's the boy now?"  she asks.

"Whoosh."  The boy is lost and gone.

Mrs.  Mhlongo is the grandmother of Fana Mhlongo, Byron Wauchope's best
friend.  She's a Zulu with roots in the countryside, but she spent most
of her adult life in Soweto, working as an office cleaner.  She gave
birth to three daughters, two of whom whoosh are dead of heart disease
already.

Her beloved husband has passed away, too.  The sole surviving daughter,
Elizabeth, teaches at an Anglican school in Wilgespruit.  It's too far
to commute every day, so she lives at the school, leaving Granny
Mhlongo to raise five grandchildren more or less alone.  The old lady
has had a hard time of it especially with Fana and Yvonne, who were
fourteen and fifteen respectively when the uprising started.

Mrs.  Mhlongo is a conservative person not a supporter of the apartheid
status quo, really; just an old Zulu widow who can't imagine things
being any other way.  She says she knew from the start that anyone
involved in the uprising was bound to meet a sorry end; if the Boers
didn't get them, the comrades surely would.

"I was not liking this thing," she says.

"I saw it's too dangerous."

So she took Fana and Yvonne aside and warned them to stay out of
politics and keep their noses clean.  They said yes to her face,
because they were both dutiful children, but behind her back they did
what most other teenagers did became comrades and threw themselves into
the struggle, both on the BC side.  When Granny Mhlongo found out about
it, she gave them a tongue-lashing, but they weren't prepared to
listen. They told her a new world was coming into being, a world where
black peoples' lives would be easier and everyone would be free.

Mrs.  Mhlongo didn't believe it.  She ducked angrily to hear such
nonsense.  Yvonne and Fana just laughed.

"Oh, Granny," they said, 'you too old.  You know nothing because you
too old."

The old lady sighs and wipes the tears from her eyes.

"Ah," she says, 'you know the kids.  If we are saying, "Don't do it!"

then they do it.  And now where are they?  Whoosh."  Both gone.

Yvonne vanished at the height of the Biko versus Mandela war, fearing
that someone might kill her for being BC.  She was fleeing the
depradations of the ANC-supporting Wararas, but there was nowhere to
run save into the arms of the ANC, and that's where she is today in
some ANC refugee camp in the Botswana desert, an unhappy and lonely
fifteen-year-old, desperate to come home.  She can't come home, though
not now, maybe never.  If she comes home, the South African secret
police will take her for one of the people she fled in the first place
a supporter of the outlawed ANC.  She'd almost certainly go to jail.

And as for Fana well, the last time Mrs.  Mhlongo saw Fana was a
Thursday morning.  The boy got up as usual around 7:30 Aa and helped
her with the chores.  He ate several slices of bread and jam for
breakfast, washing them down with a mug of tea.

Then he changed into his oldest clothes- a pair or red shorts and a
threadbare sweater and informed grandma that he was on his way.

"Where to?"  Mrs.  Mhlongo asked.  To Comrade George's house, Fana
replied.  He was going to help his friend Byron clean up the rubble
from the fire.  Granny Mhlongo frowned disapprovingly, but there was
nothing she could do.  She just warned the boy to be careful and kissed
him goodbye.

Several hours later, the old lady heard a great commotion in the street
outside.  Peeping through a window, she saw dozens of people running in
the streets some running toward the sound of gunfire, some running
away.

"The guns were too much that day," she recalled.

"Pow!  Pow!  Pow.t I thought, what's wrong?"  Nobody knew.  After a
while, the streets emptied and the gunfire died away.  Mrs.  Mhlongo
thought no more about it until a boy from the neighborhood came
pounding on her door.

"Hey, granny," he said breathlessly.

"The comrades have taken Fana away."

Mrs.  Mhlongo gathered up her skirts and lumbered to the Wauchope's
home, several hundred yards away.  She found Byron's grandmother Ethel
sitting on the ground outside her gutted home, weeping and weak with
shock.  Several older BC comrades were standing around with guns in
their pockets, uncertain what to do.  They told Mrs.  Mhlongo that her
grandson had been kidnapped.

Fana, Byron, and four young friends had been scraping down the
blackened walls of the Wauchope's house when someone warned them that
Wararas were gathering nearby.

Fana and Byron looked outside, and sure enough, there they were a knot
of black teenagers on the far side of the road, among them Paulos
Madonsela, their soccer-playing buddy from three doors down.  The boys
exchanged cold stares.

"Never trust a friend," said Fana.  There was nothing the Zim-zims
could do.  They were vastly outnumbered these days.

They just went back to work.

A while later, Fana and Byron checked the road again.  There were more
Wararas now, gathering at either end of the block.

The boys grew frightened.  Byron decided to go for help.  He leapt the
backyard fence, strode through the neighbor's property and onto the
road beyond.  But the Wararas were there, too, an entire platoon of
them, armed with knives, guns, and petrol bombs.

One lifted a pistol and took aim.  Byron dodged out of sight and ran
back into his gutted home, shouting, "The enemy is here!"

The Wararas came in behind him, shooting, and Zim-zims ran for their
lives.  Byron fled into a nearby house and hid under a bed.  He heard
Fana screaming in the yard outside.

Then the Wararas burst in, found Byron's hiding place, and dragged him
out into the street.  At that moment, a yellow car came around the
corner.  A police car?  Byron's captors were momentarily distracted. He
twisted out of their grasp and ran, bullets whistling past his ears.

Fana was less lucky.  The last Byron saw of his best friend, he was
struggling in the grip of a dozen Wararas, screaming, "What have I done
to you?  Let me go!  Let me go!"  The Wararas picked Fana up and set
off at a run, firing shots into the air to discourage pursuit.  A
hundred yards away, a white Nissan panel van drew abreast of the
trotting throng.  The Wararas bundled Fana into it, and wboosb, he was
spirited away.

The abduction was carried out in broad daylight.  There were scores of
witnesses.  The identity of Fana's captors was never a secret.  Several
were boys from the neighborhood, boys who had grown up with Fana and
played soccer against him after school.  Most were members of the
Soweto Student's Congress, an affiliate of the mighty UDF, or so the
Zim-zims said.

Mrs.  Mhlongo gave their names to the cops at Moroka Police Station,
but the police didn't seem particularly interested.

"Do you think you're the only one who's crying?"  they asked her.

"Do you think your grandson is the only one missing?"

They opened a docket, but beyond that they dragged their feet.  Indeed,
there were those who claimed that the list of suspects fell into the
hands of the secret police, who returned it to the Zim-zims, hinting
that they might want to take the law into their own hands.  The cruel
white game of divide and rule had become easier than ever to play.

The Zim-zims had a shrewd idea where Fana had been taken to a house
maybe one thousand yards from his own home, in the Warara stronghold on
the far side of Old Potch Road.  He might as well have been in Moscow.
His grandmother actually located his prison.  She loitered near the
gate and spoke to a schoolgirl who confirmed that the Wararas were
interrogating a captive within.  Grandma Mhlongo was too scared to go
inside, though.

"I know they want to hit everybody," she said, 'and doesn't care if you
are old or young."

We were sitting in Granny Mhlongo's living room by now the old lady,
George Wauchope, and I. The BC leader offered an interpretative
remark.

"If you go into their stronghold," he explained, 'you will surely be
killed, because you are outnumbered.  Either you are with them, or you
are not.  There is no middle of the road."  He was right.  In South
Africa's townships, the middle of the road had become a place where
nobody dared stand.

Fana's body was found on Soweto's golf course ten days later.

He had apparently been over an electric stove at some stage of his
'interrogation," because his legs were covered with burns in the shape
of concentric circles.  There were tiny cuts on his head and on the
soles of his feet, where he had been pricked with the point of a sharp
knife.  Finally, someone had put a bullet in his temple, dumped his
body and built a fire on top of it.  He was fourteen years old.  The
body wore short pants.  So it goes.

Blessed are the dead For they will:

Never be suspected,

Never be chased,

Never be unmanageable

Never be transformed into firewood

Never be killed For they are now:

Protected from adversaries

Saved from opponents

Secured from the persecution of this world.

Blessed are those who are dead.

-Toumsbip Poet B M THEMBA

LAST TIME I saw George Wauchope he'd been drinking, but then lots of
people were drinking heavily in those harrowing times.  It was a
weekday afternoon, and he was sitting in Azapo's dingy headquarters in
downtown Jo'burg, telling war stories.  A new picture of Steve Biko had
materialized on the wall behind him a painting by some South American
revolutionary who had literally beatified the BC martyr, depicting him
with a halo around his head.  Alongside Saint Biko hung a poster
proclaiming, "Our history is written in bloodshed.  Our history is
written on prison walls."  And beneath the poster sat Comrade Wauchope,
a lanky, loose-limbed man in an old sportcoat, speaking in an intense
monotone.  He was filling in the gaps in his background for a white
reporter.

George Wauchope's struggle began in the early seventies, when he was a
twenty-one-year-old student at the segregated University of Fort Hare.
Steve Biko lived in nearby King Williamstown.  He was already under a
banning order, but he often stole onto the campus under cover of
darkness for consciousness-raising sessions.  George was something of a
moderate at the time, but he attended a few Biko meetings and was won
over heart and soul.  He became campus coordinator for the BC movement
and soon incurred the displeasure of the university's white
administrators.  In 1972, they expelled him and seventeen others as
troublemakers.

George returned to his hometown, Soweto, and went to work for Biko's
Black People's Convention, becoming chairman of its Johannesburg
Central branch.  The BC prophet was confined to a distant country town,
so the task of spreading his word through the vast townships outside
Johannesburg fell to disciples like George Wauchope.  He was a widely
respected organizer, low-keyed, intelligent, self-effacing, efficient.
He organized high school pupils, students, workers even organized his
own family.  Under his influence, a sister and a girl cousin 'went
outside' jumped the border and joined the exiled ANC.  In those days,
the Mandela and Biko movements were still on good terms, two fists of
the same tighter.  His mother, Ethel, and her sister, Joyce, were drawn
into the struggle too.  Both women eventually wound up in detention
under the Terrorism Act, accused of running an underground railroad for
young rebels bent on leaving the country for military training.

When the Soweto rebellion broke out in June 1976, George Wauchope's
name leapt onto the secret police's most-wanted list.  They picked him
up on the second day of the troubles and held him without trial longer
than any other detainee;

297 days in all.  One night, at the height of the fighting, some white
cops took him out of his cell and into a makeshift morgue.  Several
black bodies lay on the floor, mangled by bullets from automatic
rifles.

"This," said the cops, 'is what happens when black power comes up
against white power."

George Wauchope didn't flinch.  He knew where he stood, and he was
willing to die for it.  'If you get into politics in this country," he
told me, 'you know you're going to wind up in prison or dead."

So he returned to the struggle as soon as they set him free and became
the Biko movement's labor secretary.  There was a massive upsurge in
support for BC organizations in the wake of the Soweto uprising, and
the movement became 'a state within the state," in George's estimation.
That made George himself a virtual shadow cabinet minister, but his
exalted office remained largely un salaried  He had a wife, Nozwakaze,
by now, and would soon have two children.  Life was sometimes hard.  No
money would come in for months on end, but George and his family made
do.

"The struggle must go on," George said.

"My wife knew the type of job I was involved in, so she just had to
accept the life we lived."

She also had to accept that each day with her husband might be the
last.  In South Africa, radical black leaders lived from moment to
moment.  Sooner or later, as George observed, they were likely to wind
up in jail or dead.  In September 1977, Steve Biko wound up dead, and
George Wauchope wound up behind bars again.  As far as the white state
was concerned, he was too dangerous to be on the loose in a climate of
impending revolution.  This time, they held him for 281 days, again
without trial, but his spirit remained unbroken.

"You can't turn back," he said.

Once restored to freedom, George opened a new front in the struggle.
The first target was American singer Ray Charles, who toured South
Africa in the late seventies.  One night there was a knock on Charles's
dressing-room door, and there stood George Wauchope, come to do some
consciousness-raising.

The young BC leader told the legendary blind soul man what it was to be
black under apartheid, and then demanded to know what Charles was doing
in the country.

"You're giving comfort to our enemy," George declared.  Ray Charles was
chagrined and swore never to set foot in South Africa again.

This was the opening gambit in George's so-called isolation campaign,
designed to sever cultural ties between white South Africa and the
outside world.  Pop stars who ignored pleas to stay away reaped a
harvest of bad publicity, and touring South Africa soon became more
trouble than it was worth, especially after the European Anti-Apartheid
Movement intensified its own cultural boycott.  The flow of foreign
entertainers to South Africa slowed to a trickle and ultimately ceased
almost entirely.  One of the last acts to defy the boycott, an American
R & B band called the O'Jays, found their footsteps dogged by
demonstrators wherever they went.  And George, who had organized the
protests, found himself back behind bars.

That was 1981.  Two years later, the United Democratic Front emerged
and began to compete with the BC movement for the loyalties of radical
blacks.  In the beginning, George had the 'ambitious and very
idealistic' idea that the disparate strains of the resistance movement
could be unified, but it didn't work out quite that way.  BC ideologues
were reluctant to forsake their doctrine of racial exclusivity, and the
UDFANC axis didn't seem particularly eager to strike a deal.  From the
very start, the resurgent Mandela movement billed itself as 'the only
authentic voice' of oppressed black South Africans.

One thing led to another, and by mid-1986 the relationship between the
rival movements had degenerated into war.

This other civil war in Soweto was a largely subterranean affair,
covered desultorily by the press.  From time to time the papers noted
the violent death of some BC activist at the hands of faceless 'groups
of youths' or 'members of a rival organization," but the killing was
seldom if ever attributed to supporters of the UDF not at the outset,
at any rate.  Indeed, America's major newspapers didn't cover the war
at all.

"There was a very, very heavy bias," said George.  He ascribed this to
a 'rightist' conspiracy in the media, but a simpler explanation
suggested itself to me.  The UDF was a supposedly nonviolent,
democratic movement, and a fount of hope and righteousness in the eyes
of many reporters.  It was inconceivable that such an organization
should be implicated in a campaign of extermination, so the cutting
questions went unasked, which was probably just as well.  Many UDF
leaders thought there was no war at all; the black community was simply
cleansing itself of collaborators and right wing vigilantes.

"They didn't see anything," George said bitterly.

"Murphy Morobe, Terror Lekota, Albertina Sisulu they never ever
acknowledged that there was this internecine warfare.  They never ever
tried to stop it."  George's movement condemned the violence, but the
UDF was slow to follow suit.  A Soweto clergyman called two peace
parleys, but UDF leaders failed to show.  Some were said to fear
assassination and many others were already behind bars, detained in the
massive security roundups that followed the June emergency.  The UDF
seemed to be turning into something of a headless monster, its most
capable leaders rotting in jail while the rank and file ran amok.

And then George's house was burned down, and young Fana Mhlongo
abducted from the ruins.  George was thirty-six years old on the day it
happened, and he'd been a revolutionary for sixteen years.  There was
nothing else.  He had given his entire adult life, every working day,
every waking hour, to the cause of BC, the cause of black pride, black
power, and total non collaboration  Azapo did not court favorable
coverage in the white-controlled media and disdained the use of the
white courts, even for purely strategic ends.  There came a time,
however, when such pure doctrinairism was no longer affordable.

And so, in the wake of Fana's abduction, George Wauchope took a step
that must surely have broken his heart: He appeared, cap in hand,
before a white Supreme court judge, and asked the white judicial system
to protect him and his family from further Warara attacks.

The word Warara was not mentioned in the pleading, of course.  In the
pleading, George claimed to be under attack by members of the Soweto
Students Council, an affiliate of the UDF.  Four individuals were
identified by name.  They didn't show up to defend themselves, so the
judge granted a temporary injunction restraining the Charterists from
further violent acts.  It made a handy hook for newspaper stories, but
otherwise the court order wasn't worth the paper it was printed on not
in Soweto, in 1986.  "It just went on and on," the BC leader said.

There were more attempts on George's own life.  One of his aunts was
kidnapped, another threatened with death.

His mother, Ethel, never recovered from the trauma of the firebombing
and died within the month of a heart attack.

One of his uncles was the target of an attempted assassination.

Another uncle was shot dead.  One of his nephews was shot in the face,
another stabbed in the hand.  In the end, George's family was
devastated.  Most surviving Wauchopes had fled to a township on the far
side of the Witwatersrand, and young Byron had been sent to school in a
quiet country town.

Another relative, seventeen-year-old-Ephraim Zitha, was in jail on a
murder rap, arising from a killing he maintained was an act of
self-defense.

As for George himself, he'd recently stepped down as Azapo's general
secretary, and his political career appeared to have come to a tragic
end.  There were killings on both sides in Soweto's other civil war,
and now one was being blamed on him; he was about to stand trial for
murder, in a country where convicted murderers were usually hanged.

I asked what had happened, but George just shook his head.

"I don't want to talk about it," he said.  There was no pain or anger
in his voice.  Indeed, he seemed curiously dispassionate, as if
something inside him was already dead.

There was so much horror in my country, and it came in so many forms.
There was the white horror, the horror of black protesters shot down in
the streets 412 of them that year.  But there was another kind of
horror too, the horror blacks inflicted on one another.  It was there
from the very beginning, from the day it all started, back in September
1984, in the township of Sebokeng.  The very first casualty of the
great uprising was a black community councillor, a supposed sellout,
hacked and burned to death by a black mob.  After that, it grew and
grew, until it equalled and ultimately eclipsed the white horror.  As
the grip of the white state weakened, blacks turned on one another in a
bloody struggle that has since claimed close to three black lives for
every martyr cut down by apartheid's riot police.

The white state blamed the carnage of a cold-blooded Marxist plot to
exterminate the center, and the Mandela Charterists, in a manner of
speaking, agreed.  Government spokesmen referred to the dead as
'moderates' or 'law-abiding citizens," Charterists called them
'stooges' or 'sellouts'; both sides would have had you believe that
there was some sort of overarching logic to the madness, and both sides
were talking complete shit.

When that terrible year was done, statisticians in the service of the
liberal Institute of Race Relations counted only 79 'perceived
collaborators' among 1,302 unrest fatalities.  Of the remaining deaths,
265 were attributed to 'internecine conflict' among blacks, a further
98 to 'unexplained conflict."  And beyond that, beyond internecine and
inexplicable violence, beyond 'accidents' (10 deaths) and
'indeterminate' (31), lay the black hole of 'burned bodies found'- 231
of them in all, the anonymous burned alive by the faceless, under
circumstances no one dared examine too closely.

Who on earth were those people?  Who ordered their deaths?

The ANC initially condoned the burnings of collaborators, but changed
its mind in January 1986, and issued a statement condemning the
practice.  The sole result was a massive rise in the number of neck
lacings  Azapo termed the necklace 'a crime against humanity," so it
was surely not to blame.  Bishop Tutu's UDF was supposedly nonviolent. 
So was Inkatha, Chief Buthelezi's Zulu political movement. So who was
doing the killing?  Who was telling the truth?  Who were the good
guys?

Who ordered Fana's abduction and execution?  Were the UDF comrades who
allegedly carried it out disciplined by their nonviolent organization?
Indeed, where were the comrades who did it?  Where were the police? Who
was really in charge the reasoned and rational black leaders who sat
behind the desks, or the teenagers on the streets?  There were no clear
answers, in the South African winter of 1986.

The only place where the country really made sense was in the pages of
the world's enlightened white newspapers, where the struggle was
usually portrayed as a rather fastidious affair.

In this other, largely imaginary South Africa, 'anti-apartheid
activists' waged a 'nonviolent' and 'intensely principled' struggle
against white evil in the name of democracy or civil rights.

The reality on the streets was so much darker, so much darker.

The comrades' ends were just, to be sure, but their means were
sometimes as ruthless as the Boers'.  They lopped people's ears off for
breaking boycotts, forced pacifist Zionists to eat their metal badges.
People were dragged behind cars or forced to drink detergent for
violating don't-buy-white campaigns.

Thousands of moderate, middle-aged blacks were herded to funerals and
rallies by young comrades shaking boxes of matches a not-so-subtle
warning of what awaited those who approached the struggle with
insufficient enthusiasm.

These grim facts of black life tended to undercut the horror of
children tortured or shot dead in the streets, so the Western media
down played them whenever possible, sometimes barely mentioned them at
all.

Consider this clipping from the New York Times, dated April 15, 1986.
At the top of the page is a fourteen-inch story about Desmond Tutu's
election as Archbishop of Cape Town, and thus head of South Africa's
Anglican Church.  It is an elegant piece of writing, intended to evoke
a cathedral mood, a reverent silence in which one might hear stirring
the most noble aspects of the human spirit, unquenchable in its thirst
for freedom and justice.

"The doors were suddenly opened.

Light poured from the chapel into the darkness.  and Bishop Tutu
stepped into the cool air' to deliver his moving victory speech.  He
called upon South African churches to transform 'religious belief into
political code," and rededicated himself to the pursuit of 'fundamental
change."

Beneath the Tutu story is a minute headline reading, "Eleven Die in
Night of Violence," and a squib of copy summarizing the government's
overnight 'unrest report."  The police shot and killed five black
people, and six anonymous burned bodies were found.  And beneath that,
unheralded by any headline, are two cryptic little sentences about the
discovery, in a place called Sekhukuniland, of something horrible
beyond comprehension: the remains of thirty-two African women, hurled
alive into pits of flame.  This was the worst mass murder in South
African history, and it took place in a context that The Times clearly
could not bring itself to explain.  The seventy-six black youths
arrested in connection with the massacre were all members or supporters
of the UDF the supposedly nonviolent liberation movement championed by
the Nobel Peace Laureate at the head of the page.  The thirty-two
victims were suspected of using sorcery to retard the freedom struggle,
and were incinerated in the name of fundamental change.

Looking at this shred of newsprint, my brain yaws at South Africa's
amazing reality.  I don't intend to deride Bishop Tutu or suggest he
was in any way comp licit in those killings, l can even find it in my
heart to forgive those witch-burning comrades, because I cannot judge
an action that lies so far beyond my own understanding.  I don't hate
any of the black men who appear in this clipping, and yet the sight of
it makes me choke with rage.  I think I should rest my case right here,
for fear that I lose control, leap off the page, and tear out the
throat of the nearest enlightened white man.

It is ancient and primordial, this rage of mine; it is the spirit of
Slagtersnek spirit of the futile 1815 rebellion that marked the start
of the war of words and the moral recrimination between Boers and other
white men.  What are we fighting over?  Over the doctrine of the
brotherhood of man, which holds that all men are born the same and,
given the same environment and opportunities, would turn out to be
exactly alike.  This is a fundamental tenet of the Great Church of
Western Thought, and I believe it;

I believe it is true.  I'm just not sure what it means in a country
such as mine.  In South Africa, we must evolve a definition of human
brotherhood broad enough to embrace an African of Bishop Tutu's stature
as well as tribal youths who burn witches in his name; broad enough to
grant the justice of black political aspirations and yet ease the fears
of whites so apprehensive of Africa that they vow to die rather than
accept fundamental change.  That's no easy task.  It's so much easier
for critics to preserve their moral rectitude by looking the other
way.

Consider these color photographs, introduced as evidence in a South
African trial virtually ignored by the outside world.

They show the scarred and mutilated torsos of two teenage torture
victims, brothers named Peter and Phillip.  (Peter was only sixteen, so
the brothers' last name was withheld by the court in accordance with
South African law.) Peter and Phillip claim they were roused from their
beds in the dead of night by masked gunmen and taken to a prefabricated
shack in someone's Soweto backyard, where they were accused of
treachery to the struggle and ordered to confess.  When they balked,
Peter was hanged by the neck from the rafters until the rafters broke.
Then the torturers put a plastic bag over his head and half-drowned him
in a bucket of water.  After that, some women tied Phillip's hands
behind his back and forced him to sit in a chair.  A man produced a
penknife and started carving freedom slogans onto the boy's body: a big
"M' for Mandela on his chest, "Viva ANCon his thigh.  And finally,
someone fetched a car battery and the wounds were etched into Phillip's
flesh with sulphuric acid.

It was just another atrocity in a season of atrocities in most respects
save one: It allegedly took place at the home of Mrs.  Winnie Mandela,
first lady of the Charterist movement and Nobel Peace Prize nominee;
subject of ten thousand hagiographic newspaper and magazine profiles,
several sycophantic books, at least three prospective Hollywood movies
and an on-again, off-again miniseries to be produced by Harry
Belafonte.

"A woman of extraordinary faith and love of God and of country," gushed
Senator Edward Kennedy, deeply moved by Mrs.  Mandela's 'gentleness and
firmness, in a touching but meaningful way."

As I write, the newspapers are full of tales of another dark deed in
Mrs.  Mandela's backyard- this time, murder; the murder of Stompie
Mokhetsie Seipie, a fourteen-year-old soldier in the anti-apartheid
struggle who somehow fell out with his own side.

He was allegedly abducted by Mrs.  Mandela's bodyguards, tied up,
whipped under her supervision, dropped repeatedly on his head until
half-conscious, and finally dumped in the veld with a slit throat.  The
Western media is aghast with shock and dismay at this news, but theirs
are crocodile tears.  Stompie's murder was the third attributed to
members of Mrs.  Mandela's entourage, and remarkable only in that the
Western media chose to cover it.  Two earlier killings and numerous
allegations of thuggery and intimidation were resolutely ignored by
Mrs.  Mandela's media sympathizers for fear, one assumes, of
undermining a myth of their own creation.

Schoolchildren in Mrs.  Mandela's neighborhood grew so tired of being
bullied by her thugs that they eventually burned her house down in
broad daylight while her neighbors looked on indifferently, none
bothering to throw so much as a cup of water onto the flames.  Every
journalist in Johannesburg knew the goryaletails, but no newspaper that
I know of printed them not at the time, at any rate.  Why?  I'll tell
you why.  Because white reporters and editors didn't want to be branded
racists, and black reporters were 'paralyzed by fear," to use George
Wauchope's phrase.  If you lived in Soweto, there were some things you
dared not say for fear of being labelled a sellout.  Sellouts did not
live long.  One of the township's most prominent black journalists
chuckled bleakly when I asked why the full story of the arson attack on
Winnie Mandela's home hadn't yet been written.

"You write it," he said.

"You're white, you might get away with it."

Am I upsetting you, my friend?  Good.  Do you want to argue?  Do you
want to tell me about the evil of apartheid?

Do you want to talk about democracy and the allied civil and human
rights that fall under the umbra of its name?

Okay.  Let's open my bulging files of tales of ordinary murder.

You choose your weapons and I'll choose mine, and we'll annihilate the
certainties in one another's brains.

We're in the capital, Pretoria.  In the distance stands the Voortrekker
Monument, a towering blunt chunk of gray concrete, symbolizing the
remorseless resolve of the Boer founding fathers.  And here comes a
Boer now, strolling down the sidewalk, calmly shooting every black
person he passes.  The trail of bodies behind him is three blocks long
twenty-nine blacks are down, and six of them are dead.  The woman
beside us is black, and she says something very strange.

She says the terrorist is 'beautiful."  A Boer holy warrior, with a
beatific smile on his face.

We're in Orlando West, Soweto, outside the home of the lovely Masabata
Loate, a beauty queen in a more light-hearted era.  She's what the
Western press would call an anti-apartheid activist.  She's just spent
five years locked in prison for agitating for the downfall of the
apartheid state.  She expected to be welcomed home as a heroine, but
her politics are out of fashion these days.  Here she comes now,
running for her life, with a

' S'

pack of rival ann-apartheid actiViSt.  on her heels.  She falls, is
stabbed, rises and runs on again, screaming for help.  She pounds on
the doors of neighbors, but they're too scared to let her in.  She goes
down for the last time on her grandmother's doorstep, where she's
hacked to pieces with pan gas

We're in Beaufort West in the Karroo, listening to bangs, thuds and
screams from inside a black man's humble shack.

The door opens and a UDF leader named Kratshi comes staggering outside,
blood pouring from wounds in his head.

A white cop follows, motioning his brother officers to stand aside.  He
says something like, "I'm going to shoot this pig."

And he does.  Dead.

We're in yet another township, at the funeral of a young black boy who
became a burned body found.  The bereaved father asked the comrades to
stay away, but they don't like being told what to do.  So they throw
the father into his son's grave and hit him with shovels when he tries
to climb out again.  The old man eventually gives up and sits down on
his dead son's coffin, cradling his bloody head in his hands.  The
comrades bury him alive.

Are you sick and confused, my friend?  I'll make you sick yet.  I'll
hold you down and pound these images into your brain, like Simon
pounded white skulls with his hammer, and I'll keep on pounding until
they poison you the way they poisoned me.

We're in a forest in the homeland Venda, watching an African father
hack off his living daughter's arms.  She says, "Please father, let me
go, I won't tell anyone," but her father just keeps hacking.  A
political power struggle is underway in Venda, and he needs her body
parts for battle medicine.

We're in a stronghold of the South African Police, discussing the
security situation with a Boer colonel.  We're speaking the tongue of
my tribe, a guttural bastard Dutch in which the r's roll like thunder
and the g's grate like a shovel in cold gravel.  It is a brutal
language, so violent on the tongue that Americans would quail when I
tried to teach them the odd word or two.  Colonel Viljoen is eyeing us
warily.  He is thinking, this Malan looks a little weird for a Boer,
and he's been out of the country too long to be entirely wholesome, but
maybe he's okay.  I know the look in his eyes.  It is a look of
recognition.  It says, maybe I can trust him;

maybe he's one o[us.  When I fall silent, the colonel says nothing,
just takes a card from his wallet and slides it wordlessly across the
desk.  I pick it up.  It is professionally printed and lovingly
laminated.  It bears a saying of Albert Schweitzer's: "Any white man
who comes to work in Africa must understand that these people are
subhuman," or words to that effect.

We're on a farm in Bonnievale, wimessing subhuman behavior.  An elderly
white woman has been raped, and her son has captured a black suspect.
The white man puts a shotgun in the black man's face, hands him a
pig-castrating tool, and orders him to use it.  The black man refuses,
so the white shoots him in the leg.  At that, the black man unbuckles
his blood-drenched trousers and uses the castrating knife on himself.
The white man uses a stick to flick the testicles away.

We're in Pietermaritzburg, staring at something the police have seized:
a trunk full of human body parts and testes, cut out of corpses by a
gang of African holy warriors for use in potions to give their side
victory in the struggle for fundamental change.

We're at a roadblock near Soweto, where white soldiers have stopped a
car driven by a light-skinned black man.  They ask him, "Why are you so
white?"  Then they beat him to death with their helmets.

"They didn't say why," says a witness.

"I

think they were just doing it for fun."

I could go on, but I'll spare you.  Let's stop at this photograph,
which appeared on the front page of a black newspaper called City
Press.  The picture was taken on the streets of some sub-tropical
township.  There are palm trees in the background.  In the foreground,
in a pool of molten rubber tar, lie the burning bodies of two nameless
young black men.

The fire has singed all their hair off.  Their skulls and limbs are as
smooth and shiny as baked ceramic.  They look like department store
mannequins toppled over on their sides, all twisted and contorted in
death.  Behind them stands a young black schoolgirl, laughing and
clapping her hands.  I spent hours staring at this picture, trying to
read the girl's avid expression, studying the positioning of her school
shoes in relation to her shadow.  I can't be sure, but I think she was
rising into the air as the shutter clicked.  I think she was dancing.

The headline says, "This Is the Burning Face of South Africa Today'.

So I dunno, my friend.  I dunno what to say anymore.  When I came home
to face my demons, I heard a song called "Reggae Vibes Is Cool," as
sung by Bernoldus Niemand, "Bernard Nobody," the world's first exponent
of Boer New Wave rock and roll.  His song was a Boer reggae song, the
music of black suffering sung in the vernacular of white supremacy, and
its chorus had a line that broke my heart.  It ran, "How do I live in
this strange place?"  That seemed a very valid question to me.

I had never learned how to live in my own country.  I ran away because
it was too strange to bear, and when I came home, it was stranger than
ever.  Everyone had blood on their hands.

Chief Gatsha Buthelezi's Inkatha movement was trying to crush the
Mandela Charterists, and the Charterists were reciprocating.
Traditionalists were killing modernists, radicals killing moderates.
Those who said Mandela were killing those who said Biko, and vice
versa.  Conservative vigilantes known as Fathers were killing their
comrade sons, and everyone was exterminating those they regarded as
traitors.  All the blacks were killing each other, and atop the boiling
roil sat the Afrikaner tyrants, playing the various forces against one
another and killing anyone who survived to challenge them.  South
African politics had turned into a hall of mirrors in which every
reflection was a mockery of itself, and in the center of it all stood a
sphim saying yes: the answer to everything is yes.  Yes, the black
cause is just.  Yes, the Boers are barbaric.  Yes, the blacks are
barbaric too.  Yes, things are bad now.  Yes, they can only get worse.
The time had come to make choices, but there was nothing on the market
but rival barbarities and absurd ideologies.

"A new era of freedom has begun," declared State President Botha,
standing atop a pile of corpses.

"The Soviet Union is a torchbearer for all our hopes and aspirations,"
Winnie Mandela told TASS at the height of what was supposedly a
struggle for freedom.

"In Soviet Russia," she said, 'genuine power of the people has been
transformed from dreams into reality."

The time had come to make choices, but there were no rational choices
at all.

But that was politics.  Beyond politics, there was mythology, and rival
myths to live and die by: for some whites, the myth of white supremacy,
and for others, the myth of brave and noble Africans in heroic struggle
against unspeakable evil.

If you were white, you had to embrace one of those two myths, and let
it guide your way.  If you believed in neither, the paradox fractured
your skull and buried its poisonous claws in your brain.

I'm sorry to use such lurid language, my friend, but South Africa calls
for strong and sickening words.  It has a way of making your brain
seethe and your blood boil.  South Africans develop antibodies to the
poison, they grow numb and blind, but if you leave long enough to
detoxify and come back with clear eyes, your skull gets fractured.  You
see too much, and it makes you sick.  God knows what it is like for
blacks, but all the white exiles I know fell prey to a disease similar
to mine when they returned.  My childhood hero, Leon the New Leftist,
spent his six weeks back home hiding in a mobile home, afraid of what
would happen to his head if he dared venture outside.  My childhood
sweetheart, Joji, spent seven years in the rational world.  When she
came home, she took one look, went straight to bed, and wept for weeks.
She remembered what it was like.  When my own brain started seething
she used to hold my hand, and say, "Don't worry.  One of these days,
you'll be lobotomized.  One of these days, you'll go blind again."

Blindness and lobotomy.  These were not metaphors, my friend.  They
were physical conditions in my country, in the winter of 1986.  You
could not afford to see everything.  You could not afford to go from
the grave of Simon to the graves of his white victims, from Dennis
Moshweshwe's grave to Fana Mhlongo's grave to the grave of Moses Mope.
Such pilgrimages made you sick.  They forced you to your knees, begging
an accommodation with the howling ambiguities; begging for your eyes to
go blind.

It was in such a state of mind that I set out for a place called
Msinga.

BOOK THREE

A ROOT IN

ARID GROUND

And you must know this law of culture: two civilizations cannot know
and understand one another well.  You will start going deaf and blind.
You will be content in your civilization surrounded by the hedge, but
signals from the other civilization will be as incomprehensible to you
as if they had been sent by the inhabitants of Venus.  If you feel like
it, you can become an explorer in your own country.  You can become
Columbus, Magellan, Livingstone.  But I doubt that you will have such a
desire.  Such expeditions are very dangerous, and you are no madman,
are you?

- RYSZARD KAPU$CINSKI, The Emperor THE ROAD TO Msinga begins in white
South Africa and runs for hours through neat and orderly white
farmland, not so different in appearance from parts of central
California.  Some ten miles beyond the last white town, you cross the
border between the First and Third Worlds, between white South Africa
and black KwaZulu.  The border isn't marked; there is no need.  You
know you are coming into a different country, a different world.  The
white centerline vanishes, and the road itself starts rearing and
plunging, like a turbulent river rushing toward a waterfall.  The very
mood of the landscape changes.

And then you round a bend, and the tar falls away beneath the wheels,
and you're looking down into Africa, into a vast, sweltering valley
strewn with broken hills, mud huts, and tin-roofed shanties.  From the
rim of the escarpment, it looks as though some mad god has taken a
knife to the landscape, slashing ravines and gulleys into its red flesh
and torturing its floor into rugged hills.  This is Msinga, a
magisterial district in the self-governing homeland of KwaZulu, the
place of Zulus.

As white South Africa fell away behind me, the countryside grew barren
and dusty.  There were no fences.  Goats and cattle strayed into the
road.  The deeper I drove into Msinga, the worse it got: less grass,
less hope, more goats, and more hopeless black people sitting
motionless as stones in the roadside dust.  The place was an ecological
Hiroshima.  The last big trees looked like mangroves, stranded high and
dry by a receding tide of soil.  The earth at their feet had washed
away down gaping erosion gulleys and into the river, leaving the first
nine inches of root dangling in thin air.  In some places, there was no
soil at all, just sheets of gray slate and clayey subsoil baked hard as
concrete by the sun.  Thermals rising from these zones of devastation
caused such turbulence at thirty thousand feet that white businessmen
jetting between Johannesburg and Durban were losing their lunch over
Msinga.  South African Airways solved the problem by rerouting its
flights.  That was white South Africa's usual response to Msinga's
problems:

Avoid them.

Whites couldn't bear to look at Msinga because its devastation was to
some large extent their own fault.  Msinga was declared a location, or
Zulu reservation, in 1849.  As early as 1878, government reports were
noting that it was dry, barren, and prone to famine.  In the century
since, the district's population had quintupled to maybe 120,000, the
natural increase augmented in the late sixties by 22,000 'surplus
people' blacks cleared off nearby white farmland and dumped across the
border in KwaZulu.  The land was carrying at least twice as many
humans, cattle, and goats as it could support.  That is why it was
turning into desert.

Some twenty miles inside the district, a dirt road peeled off the tar
and headed north along the banks of the Tugela River.

It was a bucking, boulder strewn abomination of a road, and at the end
of it lay an agricultural development project called Mdukatshani, Place
of Lost Grasses, where a man named Neil Alcock had done his last good
works.  As I bounced through the project's gate, a Zulu man wearing
tattered overalls and huge colored disks in his earlobes leapt out to
challenge me.

After checking roe out, he set off at a trot down the track, beckoning
me to follow.  A few hundred yards farther on, he ordered me to park,
led me through a wooden gate and into a thicket of thorn trees.  Then
he saluted and disappeared.

I was left standing on a bluff about twenty feet above the muddy Tugela
Riven It was dusk, almost dark.  A vervet monkey was tethered in the
tree above my head.  Peering into the surrounding gloom, I realized I
was standing in front of a house of sorts.  It was made of mud and
thatched with grass.  A gnarled old tree rose up through the floor,
poked its limbs through the walls, and soared into the darkening sky.

The house was the color of the landscape, of rock and grass and dust,
and virtually invisible in the half-light.  Instead of windows, there
were holes in the walls, and the doors and shutters were made of raw
logs.  The walls were plastered with smooth red mud, and the furniture
was all stone.  Long slabs of gray slate served as benches and tables,
and some large boulders, polished smooth by the river, were offered as
chairs.

It was the Flintstones' living room, save for an incongruous plastic
telephone.

The river rushed past this extraordinary structure, turned sharply to
the left, and emptied into a still pool at the base of a cliff.
Something was moving down there, on a shelf of flat rock beside the
pool.  At first, I took it to be a troop of baboons drinking from the
river, but the creatures scattered and came toward me, revealing
themselves to be a woman and her dogs.  A white woman, forty-some years
old.  She came loping up the footpath on powerful calves, a curtain of
straight blond hair waving to and fro across her face.  She was wearing
an old cotton dress and a threadbare cardigan.  Her bare calves were
crisscrossed with thorn scratches.  Her face, when she finally lifted
it, was somehow medieval perfectly oval, with a high, broad forehead
and oval eyes, all framed by blond hair that fell to her shoulders from
a middle parting.

She was spectrally thin.  The hand she offered was horny with callus,
and the accompanying look was disconcertingly cool.

This was Creina, Neil Alcock's widow, a woman of formidable and fearful
repute.  Awed Zulus in the surrounding hills whispered that she was a
sangoma, or witch doctor, and whites in the cities thought she was
insanely brave to live the way she did, alone'in a lawless and
dangerous place.  I had been warned that she didn't suffer fools,
gawkers, or sensation seeking reporters, whom she referred to as
'looters."  When I first called to ask if I could visit, she said, "We
have a rule here, Mr.  Malan.  We only allow visitors who bring
tangible benefits to the valley."  I offered to bring a pickup-truckful
of corn, and she laughed scornfully.

"We can't be bought either," she said.  In the end, though, she
relented, at least to the extent of allowing me to present my case in
person.

So Creina Alcock made me a cup of coffee, sat me down outside the door
of her hut, and invited me to explain myself.

By now, the sun had set, and it was bitterly cold and dark.  I
suspected she was hoping I'd be so uncomfortable that I'd get into my
car and return to white South Africa, but I stuck it out- not that I
thought it very likely that she would talk to me.  Her late husband was
a famous liberal, you see.  In Neil Alcock's lifetime, Mdukatshani had
been a station on the South African via dolo rosa a place where foreign
diplomats and journalists came for a firsthand look at the misery of
life in the tribal homelands.  I had collected a file of newspaper
clippings datelined Msinga, and they constituted about as withering an
indictment of apartheid as I had ever read.  The Zulus of Msinga were
desperately poor and downtrodden.

There were no jobs, and the ravaged land would no longer yield enough
food to support a family.  Msinga's men spent their lives in labor
barracks in distant cities; its women and children spent their lives
waiting.  In Msinga, a husband or father was someone you saw once a
year, and for that you counted yourself lucky.  If your breadwinner got
fired, injured on the job, or died, you faced starvation.

In many ways, then, Msinga was the ultimate apartheid horror story, and
the Alcocks themselves were always good for a sidebar.  They had spent
two decades living among Africans, like Africans, trying to undo some
of the harm done by apartheid.  They lived in mud huts and shit in
holes in the ground.  They washed their clothes and bodies in the
Tugela River and drank its muddy water.  Visitors found flies and ants
in the sugar bowl and boiled tadpoles in their coffee.

The Alcocks were always dusty and disheveled.  They endured fire ants
in their armpits and rats in their beds, unbearable heat in summer and
biting cold in winter.  They were as ragged as the black peasants among
whom they worked, and thinner to boot.  They were the only whites in
the country who lived beyond all suspicion of complicity.  In a way,
Neil Alcock had given his life to his cause, and his death was marked
by an obituary in the London Times a rare honor indeed for a South
African.

I somehow doubted that the widow of such a man would be receptive to
the dark things I was thinking and feeling about South Africa.  I
thought of lying, and telling her I had come to investigate apartheid
atrocities, like all the others before me, but I was tired of lying, so
I told the truth.  I told her I was searching for a way to live in this
strange country for an alternative, if one existed, to the law of Dawid
Malan, as formulated on the far bank of the Great Fish River.  I
observed that she and Neil seemed to have crossed a similar river and
penetrated deeper into Africa than any other whites in our time.

"I want to know," I concluded, 'what you have learned here."  And then
I sat back, expecting to be asked to leave.

Instead, Creina fell silent for a long time, so long I thought she'd
fallen asleep.  When she finally spoke, it was to pose a series of
penetrating questions.  She asked whether I believed in truth, and
sought to serve it honorably.  She asked what sins I had committed in
my life, and what I understood by the word love.  She threw out quotes
from D H Lawrence and T S Eliot, and kept asking what I thought.  I
thought I was hallucinating.

I was sitting outside a mud hut on a pitch-dark night in the heart of
the Dark Continent being riddled by a sphim.  She seemed to be guarding
some secret, some treasure, and testing me to see whether I was worthy
of receiving it, whether I understood the gravity of my own question. I
answered to the best of my ability, and she lapsed into silence again. 
In the end, the widow Alcock decided to sleep on it.  She produced a
flashlight, led me up a dark footpath and into the mud hut kept ready
for guests.

It was very cold that night.  The chill crept in through the hut's open
doorway, through the chinks between the mud walls and the thatched
roof.  The instant I snuffed out the candle, something came in from
outside and started skittering around the floor.  Next, it was rooting
around inside my bag.

It skittered again, and then it was on the bed.  A rat, by the weight
of it.  I flung it off me and relighted the candle, but the creature
was nowhere to be seen, so I pulled the blankets over my head and fell
asleep.  In the course of the night, I was twice woken up by the
pitter-patter of tiny feet across my face.

I surged up, shouting and yelling, but the rat wouldn't go away.  It
was utterly fearless, or maybe it was just desperate.  In winter,
everything and everyone in Msinga grew desperate.

In the morning, there was a pail of water and a washing bowl at my
bedside, but I decided I'd rather stink than wash in the bitter cold. A
hole in the ground behind my hut led down to an underground chamber, in
the center of which stood a 'long drop' - a plastic toilet on a wooden
platform suspended above a deep pit of shit.  This throne was
surrounded by cobwebs, and the walls were full of holes and crannies
that surely harbored snakes.  After pissing, I walked down to the river
to brush my teeth.  Frost crunched beneath my boots.  The muddy water
was so cold that it numbed my face, sent shocks racing up my fillings
and into my brain.  I'd been in Msinga barely twelve hours, and I was
already thinking, How the fuck does she stand this?

I found Creina in the open-air kitchen behind her house, boiling water
on a gas cooker.  She made coffee, and we drank it on a stone patio
above the river.  The sun rose from behind a twin-humped mountain
called Mashunka, and its first rays turned the tawny floodplain across
the river into a wash of gold.  The river curved away in a series of
still pools, each veiled by mist.  The valley was very beautiful in the
early light.

It was a landscape, as Creina put it, of 'enormous dramatic
potential."

Over the years, she and Nell had often sat here at night, listening to
gunfire in the hills and watching tracers arcing across the sky.  A few
years earlier, the Zulu people living on one of Mashunka's twin humps
had fought a war against those on the other.  After that, the people on
the larger hump went to war against the people of the valley beyond.  I
drained my tin mug and discovered a dreg of river mud at the bottom.

A very strange place indeed.

After a while, the sun acquired some strength, and movement returned to
my numb limbs.  I guess it must have warmed my cold blood, too, because
I just didn't have the heart to ask the first question on my mind.  I
wanted to ask, Where is it?  Where is the agricultural development?
What have you accomplished here?  What did Nell die for?  I was
expecting to see tilled fields, fenced paddocks, barns, and tractors.
Instead, there was nothing but a cluster of mud buildings, the ruin of
a waterwheel, and the lone and level bush stretching far away.

So I alluded and insinuated, and Creina answered with aphorisms about
Africa, about how slow it was to change, how the chameleon wavers with
each step, how any change is so slow as to be imperceptible, and so
deep as to be virtually immeasurable.  Eventually, she seemed to lose
patience with me.  She suggested we take a walk, so l could get a
better feel for this place in which she lived.

The project's land began at the river, crossed over a range of hills,
and stretched away across the plain beyond.  It was dry, rugged
country, riven by deep don gas and choked with thickets of thorn trees.
I followed Creina along a footpath that led away from the river and up
into the hills.  She stopped occasionally to exclaim over a rare plant,
or to point out a patch of rooigras, 'red grass."  In these parts, she
said, there are many grasses, but the red grass is king, so sweet and
tasty to cattle that it is the first species to disappear when the land
is overgrazed, and the last to return.  These few stands of red grass
were one step of the African chameleon, one sign that the land was
healing.  The tendrils of grass growing in the bed of a nearby don ga
were another.  It took nature seventy thousand years to create an inch
of soil, she said, so it would take aeons for this and to heal
completely.

That was my botany lesson.  Its moral was, Be patient.  At the top of
the hills, my history lesson commenced.  Beyond lay an endless plain of
grassland and thorn bush so rugged that it took hours to cross the
first two miles.  This was the plain of Ngongolo, site of the country's
last great tribal battle the Battle of Ngongolo, fought in 1944 by
eight thousand Thembu and Mchunu armed mostly with spears and
shields.

Seventy-six men died in that battle, fighting for land that had
belonged to whites, at least on paper, since 1849.

This land had once been a 'kaffir farm," you see, a labor farm. Indeed,
all the land around us, as far as the eye could see, had belonged to
labor farmers absentee white landlords who usually lived on sugar or
wattle plantations in more fertile regions.  Such men had need of many
laboring hands in certain seasons, so they bought land on the borders
of the African tribal reserves and allowed blacks to live on it.  In
return, they exacted six month's labor from every man on the property,
sometimes from his wives and children, too.

Otherwise, the blacks were left entirely to their own devices.

They lived in the traditional manner, under the rule of tribal chiefs.
They worked the land, grazed their cattle on it, and buried the fathers
whom they worshiped in its red earth.  They even fought wars over it,
as in 1944.  In their hearts and minds, it was their land.

As far as white liberals were concerned, the six-month system reeked of
feudalism, so they agitated for its abolition.  In 1969, the apartheid
government bowed to mounting pressure and outlawed labor farming,
leaving hundreds of thousands of black labor tenants stranded inside
'white' South Africa, making a complete mess of the grand apartheid
master plan.

Pretoria decided that most of them had to go back to where they
'belonged," back to the tribal homelands.

Elsewhere, labor tenants left quietly.  In this area, however, the
Zulus dug in their heels and refused to go until the police moved in
with guns and helicopters.  The land on which Creina and I were walking
had once been dotted with Zulu huts, but they'd all been burned down
and their inhabitants driven into the desolation of Msinga.  It was as
though a great wave had swept the people off the land and dumped them
like hurricane debris on the far side of the border, where there was no
free land for them to farm, and no room for their cattle.  God knows
how they were meant to survive.  Perhaps they weren't expected to
survive at all.  They were officially known as 'surplus people,"
anyway.

When they first came to Msinga, Creina told me, she and Neil had walked
this path with an ancient Zulu man, one of the thousands driven off the
land in the forced removals.  The old one was overcome with emotion. In
his heart, this land was his land, and he had never thought to see it
again.  He greeted every tree by name, Creina told me, and when they
reached the largest tree on all the plain, he sat down in its shade,
and said, "All my fatigue lies buried under this tree."

Beyond the old man's tree, we turned west, and fought our way down the
brush-choked walls of the Skhelenge Gorge.

When the Alcocks first came to Msinga, a skeletal black man was living
in a cave in its sunless depths.  His name was Delanie Mbatha, and he
had temporarily lost his sanity when the police drove him off his
ancestral land.  He thought to himself, This is a terrible country,
where white men do such things.  I must leave, he thought.  So he put
his belongings into a sack and set out on foot, looking for another
country.

Delanie had never seen an atlas, and had no idea where he was going. He
walked all the way to East London, about 700 miles away.  In East
London, black people spoke a different language, but everything was
otherwise the same.  It was still South Africa.  There was no escape.
So Detanie turned around and walked all the way back to Msinga.  He
wanted to be close to the shades of his forefathers, so he moved into a
cave in the depths of the gorge, where he lived on roots, ants, and
spiders an waited for the world to end.

Beyond Delanie's cave, Creina and I climbed out of the gorge.  Creina
sat down on a rock on the brink of a precipice and started peeling an
orange.  I was too tired and dusty to ask any more stupid questions,
and I suppose that is what she intended.  She invited me to sit down
beside her, and started talking.

Neil Alcock was born in a stone farm cottage in 1919 and grew up to own
a farm of his own.  It was called Sunset and lay in the foothills of
the Drakensberg Mountains, where the air was cool and streams so cold
and clean that trout survived in them.

Neil Alcock had some sort of learning disability, and struggled in
school.  He was a gifted farmer, though.  He knew the names of all the
plants and grasses, all the animals and birds.  He understood the ways
of nature and the interdependence of living things.  He took good care
of his land, and in time prospered greatly.  By the mid-1950s, he had
built a fine house on Sunset and installed in it a pretty wife, who
bore two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom attended the right
'public' schools.  Neil Alcock was a regular fellow, a leading member
of the local Farmers' Association and a rugby player to boot.

Outwardly, all that really distinguished him from his white neighbors
was his uncanny way with cattle he could calm a calving cow simply by
laying a hand on its head and the way he treated his 'boys," his
African laborers.  He allowed them to run their own cattle on his range
and granted each man eight acres to farm on his own account.  If their
chiefs or headmen called on him, he fed them at his own table, off his
own china, and gave them beds with sheets in his own house, just as if
they were white.  And then he joined Alan Paton's Liberal Party, and
proceeded to sign up all the unwashed 'boys' in the district as
members.  In rural Natal in the 1950s, such behavior was virtually
certifiable, but whites tended to accept it as a queer eccentricity in
a man they otherwise respected.

Neil Alcock was a liberal, but never soft or sentimental, you see.  He
never preached or moralized.  If anyone asked why he stood for
democracy, he muttered, "Everyone has the right to make their own
mistakes."  Beyond that, he was a man of action.  He could run barefoot
across mountain ranges, swim swollen rivers, and nurse crippled Land
Rovers across trackless swamps.  He could fix almost any engine, and
make ingenious contraptions from spare parts.

"Nothing that can't talk can beat me," he boasted.

Nor could most men.  Anyone who crossed the young Neil Alcock got 'ten
kinds of living shit knocked out of them," in his eldest son David's
phrase.  He wasn't a bully, though, and his violence was never unjust.
He simply hadn't mastered the civilized arts of compromise and
appeasement.  If something was wrong, it had to be set right, by any
means necessary.  If circumstances demanded it, Neil Alcock would plant
himself in the path of a thundering train.  That is exactly what he did
when sparks from a passing steam engine set fire to grasslands near his
home: chased the train down, parked his car across the tracks, and
informed the astounded engineer that he was under arrest.

This is an image of Neil Alcock we must hold in our minds:

a man with thunderbolts of anger in his eyes, facing down a train
because that was the right thing to do.  In a country where so much was
wrong, that attitude was a lethal liability.

Sooner or later, Nell Alcock was doomed to run into a wrong too
profound to be set right.  As it turned out, he encountered it in a
brimming milk pail in the late 1950s.

At the time, he was still living the sweet life of an ordinary white
farmer, cushioned and cosseted by government loans.

price supports, and subsidies.  His prosperity, was based on milk,
which he sold at a heavily subsidized price to the government Milk
Board.  In the late fifties, the milk market glutted, and the Milk
Board started dumping its surplus into the sea, to keep prices up.
Meanwhile, black South Africans had one of the highest mortality rates
in the world, largely because they didn't have enough food to eat.
Millions of blacks seldom saw milk, because they were too poor to buy
it at the retail price.

To Neil Alcock, this seemed wrong.  Milk was meant to be drunk, not
dumped.  So he put a milk can on the back of a bicycle and sent one of
his laborers into Pholela to see whether the blacks wanted to buy it at
cost.  The Zulu returned to say that his people were very grateful, and
would the master please send more cheap milk?  The next day, Neil put
the milk on a truck and drove over to Pholela himself, and that was the
end of his first life.  He had opened the door into another world, and
he was sucked through it, into a vortex of hopelessness and need.

Pholela was a 'homeland," and South Africa's homelands were desperately
sorry places.  When whites first asserted control over the land in the
mid-nineteenth century Africans were confined to reservations barely
large enough to support existing populations.  By 1960, the homelands
were overflowing, overgrazed and over plowed to the brink of ecological
devastation.  Some seven million Africans were still trying to practice
traditional subsistence agriculture on their ruined land, and most were
close to starving.

In Pholela, as elsewhere, four in ten children died in infancy.

Many of those who survived were dulled or deformed by kwashiorkor or
rickets.  Their mothers were often sickly and dry-breasted, their
fathers rid died with tuberculosis.

Under the circumstances, it seemed obscene that surplus milk should be
thrown into the sea, so Neil started selling his entire production at
cost to the poor people of Pholela.

Demand exceeded supply, so he started buying up his white neighbors'
surplus, too.  Soon, he was calling white dairy farmers all over the
province, saying, "I am the sea; dump your milk on me."  Eventually,
even that wasn't enough, so he went to Johannesburg and persuaded some
wealthy white philanthropists to bankroll a nationwide
surplus-distribution scheme.  He called this new organization Kupugani,
Zulu for Raise Yourself, and left his farm to run it.  He traveled the
country sponging up agricultural surplus in white South Africa and
setting up centers to distribute it at cost to hungry blacks.

Wherever he went, Neil encountered misery and hunger more misery and
hunger than he had ever imagined.  So he spoke out.  Liberal English
newspapers started running black bordered articles headlined
"Starvation: A National Disgrace."

The secret police started tailing Neil wherever he went, trying to link
him to imaginary Communist plots.  Some whites accused him of
interfering with the balance of nature, arguing that blacks were
breeding too fast and that the 'surplus' should be allowed to die off.
Others were shamed.  Beamik folk singers staged benefits for Kupugani,
and guilt-stricken liberals dug deep into their pockets.  Flashbulbs
detonated, donations poured in, and Neil Alcock became something of a
household name.  When a white newspaper invited readers to nominate a
public figure to go to America and meet Elizabeth Taylor as part of
some Hollywood publicity stunt, Neil Alcock came in second.

He wasn't entirely immune to glamour, but he didn't take his new
celebrity very seriously.  Whatever good Kupugani had done wasn't
enough.  It was barely even a beginning.

Like many whites who achieved consciousness, Neil started choking on
the privileges of whiteness.  His salary seemed too great in a country
where so many had so little, so he gave it away, or plowed it back into
Kupugani.  Then he shed the white life-style, refusing to sleep in
segregated hotels or eat in segregated restaurants.  Within a year, he
had become a wandering ascetic, sleeping on roadsides, subsisting on
milk and army-surplus fortifiea biscuits.  He went into debt and
eventually lost his farm.  After that, he lost his wife and children,
too.  By the time Creina met him, he owned nothing but an old Peugeot
station wagon, a blackened cooking pot, and a dog named Ulysses, in
recognition of his broad travels.

At the time, Creina Bond was in her early twenties and working as a
newspaper reporter in the Pietermaritzburg bureau of Durban's Daily
News.  She was one of the more sought-after women in the city's smart
young set, the blond and beautiful escort of famous sportsmen and
yachtsmen.  She was a serious girl at heart, though, with little
stomach for the sweet white life.  Like many reporters on the English
newspapers, Creina was thirsting to strike blows for the cause, to 'do
something' about apartheid, or at least to write about the suffering it
was causing.  In 1963, she heard that Kupugani's famous monk penitent
was living in the back of his station wagon on the outskirts of her
city.  She shared Neil's interests in nature and ecology, and in the
homeland hunger problem.

When her bureau chief suggested that someone accompany Alcock on one of
his expeditions into the wounded African heartland, she leapt at the
chance.

They set off on a weekday morning, Neil, Creina, and her sister Joey
crammed into the front seat of the clattering old Peugeot.  In the
flesh, Neil Alcock was a striking man six feet three inches tall, thin,
wiry, and balding now that he was in his forties.  His head was
curiously elongated toward the crown, giving him the look of the
African bird called hamerkop, or 'hammerhead."  His face was the face
of a bird of prey, long and thin, with a hooked nose, jutting brow, and
furiously beetling eyebrows.  People who knew him by reputation were
surprised to find that he wasn't at all sanctimonious in person.  The
eyes behind his dusty spectacles were full of humor and kindness.

He laughed a lot, made jokes at his own expense, and told spellbinding
stories about Africa.

Within hours of their meeting, Creina concluded that Neil Alcock was an
extraordinary man, the only white she had ever met who was completely
at ease in the world of Africans.  That first night, he introduced her
to Gatsha Buthelezi, an obscure young Zulu nobleman who was about to
start his rise to power and prominence.  Buthelezi threw his arms
around the white man, greeting him as 'my brother."  He and Neil sat up
late into the night, talking politics in fluent Zulu.

The following day, Neil's party pressed on into Tongaland, a wild
region near the Mozambique border.  Wherever they went, the same thing
happened; black leaders threw their arms around the white man and
called him brother.  In a country where almost all dealings across the
racial gulf were poisoned by awkwardness and condescension, Neil's
relationship with blacks was loose, easy, and completely natural.

Between stops, Nell talked about Africa and its fragile ecology.  He
had never made it beyond tenth grade in school, but he was a profoundly
wise man, especially when it came to land and soil and the peculiar
problems of peasant farmers in Africa.  He was convinced that the
people of South Africa's tribal homelands would ultimately starve if
they were not helped to conserve soil and increase crop yields.

"This is our worst problem," he would say.

"It is worse than apartheid, because it will be harder to solve."  He
made Creina think, and he also seemed to have a destiny.  For a serious
girl, that was an irresistible combination.  And so, when Neil asked
her to marry him she did, in spite of her family's initially strenuous
objections.  She was twenty-three; Neil, forty-six.

They wanted to hold the ceremony in the bush, in some wild and African
place.  South Africa had a law against open-air weddings, though, so
they had to get married in a church.

They were planning to serve champagne at the reception, but there was a
law against that, too.  Many of the guests were Africans, and Africans
weren't allowed to drink white man's liquor.  The law kept a close eye
on Neil Alcock, so his wedding reception was dry.  The guest of honor
was the novelist Alan Paton, and Neil's best man was the Zulu chieftain
Gatsha Buthelezi.  All this was so wildly unusual, in South Africa in
1965, that the pictures made the front page of newspapers in distant
Johannesburg.

The Alcocks spent the first year of their marriage living in a car, and
the next ten in an abandoned chicken and rabbit run on a Roman Catholic
mission farm, where Neil had set up an agricultural demonstration
project.  The mission was overgrazed, badly eroded, teeming with hungry
people, and perfect for Neil's purposes.  He had come to heal it, you
see, to show homeland Africans how it could be done.

He began by convincing local Africans to exchange direct ownership of
their cows for pieces of paper representing shares in an intangible
cattle cooperative.  This was no small thing.  A piece of paper was not
a cow, and in an African cattle culture a man without cows was no man
at all.  In the end, though, the suspicious peasants agreed to give
Neil's plan a try, and black Africa's first cattle cooperative came
into being.

Once the cattle were pooled into a single herd, it became possible to
fence the communal land and rotate the livestock from camp to camp,
allowing the grass to recover.  Financed by a grant from The Chairman's
Fund, charity arm of the gold- and diamond-mining Anglo American
Corporation, Neil set the jobless to work, blocking don gas with stones
and thorn bushes  In time, the wounds in the land started healing.

Grass returned to the hillsides, and dry springs came back to life.  As
the grazing recovered, the communal herd was able to double in size. On
a continent where most development projects failed, all this was
something of a miracle.  Development workers came from far and wide to
stare at the mission's lush pastures and fat cattle, and to replenish
their sense of what was possible.

They found the Alcocks still living in a hovel an abandoned Trappist
winery that had been a chicken and rabbit run prior to their arrival.
The Alcocks' toilet was a long drop, and there was no running water in
their house.  They ate vegetables and putu and read by lamplight.  They
owned little but a few books and some changes of clothing.  They had
two sons by now, GG and Rauri, little sandy-haired boys who spoke
English with a Zulu inflection, saying 'tlee' instead of 'three' and
'volovolo' instead of 'revolver."  As managing director of an entity
known as Church Agricultural Projects, or CAP, Neil was entitled to a
salary of about seventy-five dollars a month, but he never drew it.
Creina was editing a small magazine called African Wildlife by mail.
The job paid fifty dollars a month, about what a domestic servant would
earn in one of Johannesburg's better suburbs, but it was enough for a
family of four to live on, if they lived like blacks.  Neil was widely
thought of as a visionary, a guru, even a secular saint.

A saint?  Father Barney was not so sure about that.  Father Barney was
one of the Franciscan priests who ministered to the mission folk's
spiritual needs.  He was an Irishman, and in his cups was wont to say
that apartheid was nothing compared with the misery the British had
inflicted on the Irish.  Father Barney and his brethren disapproved of
Neil's divorce, and were distressed to learn that Creina was agnostic.
When she was caught dispensing birth-control pills to black women, the
fathers' worst fears were confirmed.

"Some of them aren't even married!"  sputtered one clergyman.  The
priests declared war on the Alcocks, and a long and bitter struggle
ensued.  The Holy Fathers won.  Citing his desire to preserve 'the
Catholic character of the mission," the archbishop of Natal declined to
renew Neil's cooperative's lease when it expired.

And so in the winter of 1975, Neil Alcock and his loyal Zulu
lieutenants saddled horses and drove the co-op's cattle off the mission
farm.  His most generous backer, The Chairman's Fund, had offered to
help buy a new home for the project.  It was a huge spread, six
thousand acres of unfenced, undeveloped, and badly eroded land.  It lay
sixty miles away, across the river from the place called Msinga.

Msinga is... Oh, God, how do I explain Msinga?  Msinga is wild, and yet
it is not leaping with buck and lions.  There is probably not a single
antelope left alive in the entire valley.

The district is crisscrossed by tar roads and power lines, packed with
tin-roofed shanties and mud huts.  It is a place of head-spinning
contrasts.  In Msinga, you see black men driving goats, and black men
driving BMWs.  You see Zulu women going down on all fours at the feet
of nondescript old men in ill-fitting three-piece suits; they are
tribal chiefs or headmen, and must be shown respect.  You see
bare-breasted Zulu maidens with shaved heads and bodies draped with
beads.

They seem to have stepped out of National Geographic, but if you look
closer you see that they're wearing Day-Glo leg warmers and running
shoes.  You see men in traditional dress carrying briefcases through
the bush, and school-uniformed teenagers dancing through the wastelands
with ghetto blasters on their shoulders.  So Msinga isn't quaint, and
it's not storybook Africa.  It is a sprawling rural slum, infested with
dope smugglers, gun-runners, and bandits.  It is the iron age shit
squalling and sullen into the twentieth century.  Its people look
broken as they eat the dust of your passing car, but ill their hearts
they are proud and untamed, and utterly ungovernable by anyone.

It's easy to blame the apartheid regime for Msinga's misery, but Nelson
Mandela or Fidel Castro might not have done any better.  The district
capital, Tugela Ferry, is an indescribably forlorn and dusty little
hamlet on the banks of the Tugela River.  From its rooftops, you look
out over a broad floodplain.  A network of gravity canals comes snaking
out down the distant hills and fans out across the plain.  These canals
draw irrigation water from the Tugela eight miles upstream, carry it
across the plain, past the town, and finally return it to the river
unused.

There are hundreds of hectares of rich, irrigable land there, enough
land to render Msinga agriculturally self-sufficient if it were farmed
intensively.  But much of it isn't farmed at all.

It has lain fallow almost constantly since 1928, its ownership a matter
of dispute between sub tribes of the Zulu nation.  A Thembu who sinks a
plowshare into that plain will surely be killed by the Mabaso, and vice
versa.

Even the KwaZulu government, a neutral party, cannot use this land.  A
few years ago, the government assumed direct control of part of the
irrigation scheme and invited tribesmen to farm it under government
supervision.  An official involved in the project was assassinated.
After that, KwaZulu formed a cash-crop consortium with some white
farmers and planted strawberries on the disputed land.  When the first
crop was ripe, someone opened the gates and drove hundreds of cattle
and donkeys into the strawberry fields.  The consortium disintegrated.
The government gave up.  The land lay fallow, and the people of Msinga
stayed hungry.

So the Thembu and Mabaso are hostile toward one another, but that is
only the first order of battle in Msinga.  The Zulu nation consists of
250 such sub tribes seven of which call Msinga home.  Those seven sub
tribes are in turn divided into dozens of subgroups called isigodi,
each three to five thousand strong.  An isigodi is a neighborhood, for
lack of a better word.

This hill is Mashunka, the valley beyond Ngubo.  The land to this side
of that dry watercourse is Ndlela; the land beyond is Mhlangaan.  It
takes a Msinga man to know the borders between these isigodi, and the
consequences that await if he crosses them in wartime.  There is
nothing to distinguish the people on one side from those on the other.
They speak the same language, belong to the same nation, suffer the
same deprivations.  And yet, every now and then, they fight bloody wars
against one another.

Why?  It's hard to say.  There are several theories, but in the end I
preferred the word of an old white policeman who said he didn't really
know.

Warrant Officer Jurgen Freese was a crusty old militarist who lived in
a firearm-squad camp on the outskirts of Tugela Ferry.  His superiors
posted him to Msinga in 1956, and he'd been there ever since.  In 1956,
there were few roads in Msinga, and police still patrolled the valley
on horseback.

The district was administered by old Africa hands, portly colonials
with handlebar mustaches, pith helmets, and hides blackened by decades
in the sun.  The whites played tennis on an old clay court, swam in a
pool, and sipped pink gins at sunset on the verandas of quaint colonial
bungalows.  Tugela Ferry was a lost outpost of the dying British
Empire.

Jurgen Freese's mission in Msinga was to stamp out the gun trade and
combat 'faction fighting," the official term for Msinga's fratricidal
wars.  In the fifties, Msinga's wars were honorable, manly affairs,
fought under the sun on open plains by half-naked warriors.  The death
toll was light, and the whole thing was over quickly, usually in a
single day.  If a man fell in battle, every warrior in the opposing
impi would stab a blade into his corpse, a traditional Zulu battle
ritual.

Such killings were not regarded as murder by the white authorities.
They were treated as tribal offenses and tried under African law.
Whenever someone died in a faction fight, Freese would mount his horse
and visit the chief in whose territory the killing had taken place.  He
would say, "Listen, you fellows know you're not supposed to do this.

Now I want the names of those involved."  The chief and his headmen
would confer with the warring parties.  Some warriors were appointed to
be the accused, others to give evidence.  Such decisions were based
less on guilt than on a man's ability to pay a fine.  On the appointed
day, all the warriors would appear before the white magistrate in the
courthouse at Tugela Ferry.  Everyone understood that the trial was
essentially a farce, a ritual designed to preserve the white man's face
and honor.  The witnesses told a yarn, the accused tried to look
contrite, the magistrate handed down a few two-pound fines, and it was
all over.

In the early days, Freese's firearm squad seized the occasional sidearm
or hunting rifle, but Msinga's wars were mostly fought with spears and
homemade blunderbusses crafted from spare parts and plumbing supplies.
As Msinga's migrant laborers were integrated into the white cash
economy, however, more and more guns started coming into the
district.

Battles fought with guns fell outside the legal definition of faction
fighting.  Warriors who took part in them were supposed to be charged
with murder, and tried under white law.

"The change was well meant," said Freese, 'but I don't know that it was
a good thing."  Once white law started superseding traditional Zulu
law, there was virtually no law in Msinga at all.

Msinga's warriors saw little wrong in these killings, you see.  They
saw no reason why a man who slew an enemy in honorable battle should be
taken away and hanged by the white man so they stopped cooperating with
the police.

It became hard to find witnesses.  Freese's cosy arrangement with the
chiefs gave way to elaborate trials in white courts, where white judges
followed white evidentiary rules and white lawyers found it easy to
confuse and discredit illiterate witnesses.  The state case inevitably
fell apart in a welter of contradictions, and the accused went
unpunished in those rare cases where they were charged at all.

It was hard to say how many murderers there were in Msinga, or how many
victims they had claimed, because nobody was really counting.  Suffice
to say Msinga's murder rate was ten to twenty times higher than New
York City's, and its conviction rate so low as to be almost
immeasurable.  It was once the practice to post photographs of executed
killers on the wall of Tugela Ferry's courthouse.  To the best of
anyone's recollection, the last time this happened was in 1964.

In the seventies, Msinga's warfare underwent a further evolution,
driven this time by soaring sales of the district's chief cash crop,
marijuana.  Msinga suddenly had money with which to cut big deals on
the underground arms market.  It was illegal for South African blacks
to own guns, but Msinga scoffed at the white man's laws.  The latest
South African automatic rifles were going into use in Msinga before
the

South African Defence Force got to test them in combat in

Angola.  Soviet AK-47s smuggled into the country by brave
revolutionaries were sold for beer money on the black market and wound
up in the hands of rival factions in the hills above

Tugela Ferry.

Msinga's armies dressed to kill in army-surplus combat fatigues and
carried deadly modern weaponry, but their campaigns remained curiously
archaic.  Leaders sought strategic advantage in witchcraft, and most
soldiers' marksmanship was erratic.  They were reluctant to squint down
the sights of a rifle in the heat of battle because they believed that
the spirit of a warrior who died with closed eyes was likely to remain
trapped inside his body.  They shot from the hip instead.  In 1978, the
Sithole hired a white mercenary sharpshooter to aid them in a war
against the Zwane, and a great slaughter ensued.  The sharpshooter
decimated the front ranks of the Zwane army, which broke and ran.  At
day's end, there were fifty-six bodies strewn across the plain.

Such battles were rare, though.  Msinga's wars were mostly furtive
hit-and-run affairs.  Combatants were ambushed on lonely footpaths,
shot in their huts at night, pulled off buses at roadblocks, and
executed.  Wars that were once over in a day now dragged on for months
or even years, unreported even in the South African press.  There was
always fighting in Msinga, and always had been.

In 1978, black officials of the KwaZulu government took over the
district's administration, and most whites left Tugela Ferry.  The
tennis court disappeared under weeds, and the swimming pool was filled
with rubble.  Only Jurgen Freese stayed on, alone in his Quonset hut on
the river bank, with flies buzzing around his head and sweat trickling
down his back.  His job was impossible.  For every gun his squad
seized, another came in, and there were more corpses to account for.

In the end, Msinga turned the man into a Graham Greene character. There
was a time when he spent most of his day on his back in his hut,
contemplating hell through the bottom of a brandy bottle.

After twenty-seven years in purgatory, Freese retired to the suburbs
and quit drinking.  Msinga was an intoxicant in its own right, though.
He found it hard to readjust to normal life, and the South African
Police found it equally hard to do without him.  And so, when the force
asked, Freese returned to Msinga to resume his weary struggle.

I found him sitting behind a desk in a prefabricated hut, surrounded by
squawking radios and maps festooned with colored pins and pennants,
each marking the site of a trouble spot.  Over a cup of tea, he told me
that he had learned a great deal about Msinga in thirty years enough to
know that he knew virtually nothing.

"You will never really find out why a war starts," he said, 'and once
it has started, you will never stop it."

I asked why, and the old policeman shrugged.

"The Zulu is a brave man," he said.

"You and I would not go into something looking to be killed, but a Zulu
will, if honor demands it.

To him, death is of no particular concern.  An ox is killed;

it's eaten.  A man gets killed, and his brothers look after his wives
and children.  That's it.  It's no big thing.  If we go out to stop a
war, the men know we are coming.  They watch us with binoculars
watching them with binoculars.  So we see no guns, but they're there,
hidden within a few hundred feet.  They are waiting for us to pass.
Once we're gone, they collect the guns and start fighting again.  We
have postponed some wars by arriving, but we've never stopped one.  Not
ever yet."

When war was brewing, the police were tipped off by a spy in the dusty
post office across the river.  The spy knew trouble was coming when
women started drifting in to send telegrams to their husbands, fathers,
and brothers in the cities.

All the telegrams contained a similar message: "There has been a death
in the family.  Come home."

Those who did not answer this veiled call to arms were expected to make
cash contributions to their faction's war effort, but most men came
home.  You could not avoid war by staying in Soweto, Kimberley, or
Pretoria.  Disputes rooted in Msinga's dusty hills often bore bloody
blossoms in distant white cities.  In 1983 in Soweto, one such battle
claimed forty two lives, but slaughter on that scale was unique. 
Msinga men were more often hunted down singly by hit squads from a
rival isigodi and killed quietly in their migrant-worker barracks.

There was no escape.

So most men came home, dug up their guns, slung greatcoats over their
shoulders, and headed for the hills, where they lived for the duration.
They slept in the open, in the high ravines, plagued by ticks and heat
in summer, freezing cold in winter.  There was no respite.  The war
dragged on until enough blood had been shed to satisfy honor.  Then the
dead were buried, but never forgotten.  In two years, or five, or ten,
the war would flare up again.

That's Msinga; that's the way it is.  If you ask Msinga's warriors why
they fight, they say that someone stabbed someone else's father in
1965, and that the insult must be avenged.  White academics, on the
other hand, advance a theory that revolves around apartheid-induced
land hunger and frustration.  In Msinga, life is an appallingly grim
business.

Most people are hungry most of the time.  There are no pipes, so women
have to carry water on their heads from distant springs and streams.
Even firewood is a luxury.  In 1975, there was only one school in
Msinga, and one high-school graduate.

Eighty-three percent of the populace was illiterate.  Msinga's
population density is 101 per square kilometer, versus 14 per square
kilometer in white South Africa.  About 80 percent of Msinga's people
have too little land from which to feed themselves.

It makes complete sense that anyone trapped in such a shithole should
want to take up arms and fight.  All that's odd about Msinga's wars is
that Zulus kill one another, instead of joining forces and wiping out
the whites across the border.

Oom Flip de Bruin Uncle Flip is a great big boulder of a man with a
bull neck and prehensile arms that bow out from his muscular body.  His
face is red from the sun and his hair thinning, now that he's in his
fifties.  He has a sly smile and chuckle, and a way of looking at you
from under his eyelashes that is almost coy, almost shy, almost
feline.

He is a big sly cat of a man, light on his feet, fast thinking, and
probably dangerous the sort of man to whom violence might come easily
and naturally, without passion or anger.  On the day I visited, he was
wearing shoes but no socks, and a plaid shirt hanging out over faded
denims.  He looked like a huge overgrown Boer teenager.  He told me
that he had once been a champion wrestler.

"I have terrible power in my body," he said.  I believed him.

De Bruin was born on a cattle farm in the far western Transvaal, on the
rim of the Kalahari Desert.  He wanted to be a farmer himself, but he
was a younger son in a poor white family, so he never got the chance.
He quit school after the eighth grade and spent most of his adult life
working in a factory.  He was a Boer at heart, though, so he always
owned a little patch of land somewhere and kept a few cattle on it.

When blacks were cleared off Msinga's labor farms and the land put on
the market dirt cheap, he saw a chance he'd waited his whole life for.
So he bought himself a big chunk of it, and became a full-time
farmer.

Oom Flip's new farm was an old labor farm.  The Zulus driven off it in
1969 were now living in huts and shanties on the far bank of the river,
simmering in bitter resentment.

They did not exactly welcome their new Boer neighbor.  In Msinga, it is
said that 'the only law that counts is the law inside a man's head." In
Zulu heads, Flip de Bruin and other whites had taken possession of Zulu
land.  There were periods of peace along the boundary, but whenever the
rains failed, old antagonisms rose to the surface.  The Zulus cut white
farmers' fences, rustled their stock, stole their crops, hamstrung
their cattle, and set fire to their grazing land. Along that frontier,
most Zulus obeyed one law, the law inside their heads.  Most white
farmers lived according to another the law they wrote with their
guns.

De Bruin was one of the district's best-known authors of gun
legislation.  In just one year, ninety-five of his cattle were
butchered or stolen, so the Boer retaliated in kind, developing some
novel methods of interrogating suspected rustlers and a trigger-happy
reputation.  He once called to welcome a newcomer to the district and
asked, just by way of small talk, how many blacks the stranger had shot
in his time.

"None," said the newcomer.

"I don't believe it," said Flip de Bruin.

"You've been a farmer all your life, and you've never shot a black?" He
was never convicted of murder, so it must have been a joke.

Still, the Zulus had reason to hold all manner of grudges against him.
One day, he came home to find his watchdogs shot dead and his house on
fire.  In retaliation, de Bruin and his son burned down the nearest
Zulu settlement.  A week or two later, a party of Zulu gunmen ambushed
de Bruin on a lonely road and tried to kill him.  He survived only
because he was armed himself and ready to return their fire.  Flip de
Bruin seldom left home without a rifle slung over his shoulder.

"To live here," he told me, 'you must be strong and positive.

You must be direct.  You can't walk in two directions.  You must be
straight and strong and hold true to one line.  If you're weak, you
won't last long here."

I was about to ask his definition of strength when an illustration of
sorts unfolded before my disbelieving eyes.

A muscular young white man in a sleeveless T-shirt came running into
the farmhouse in a state of agitation.  This was Oom Flip's nephew.

"HuUe's daar," he shouted "They're there!  They're there!"  The boy ran
to a padlocked gun rack and started rattling it frantically.  Oom Flip
shot out of his armchair, strode to the kitchen door, shielded his
eyes, and peered into the distance, like a pioneer rancher in a
Western, scanning the skyline for hostile Injuns.  He shrugged.  He and
the boy disappeared into a bedroom for a whispered conversation.  The
boy came out looking crestfallen and walked away.

Oom Flip sat down to continue our conversation.  I asked what was going
on.

"Ag," he said, 'the boy's crazy."  He offered no further explanation.
He just smiled coyly and grinned like a Cheshire cat.

On the far side of the district, I met a man named Charles Cuff, who
had once farmed along Msinga's land boundary.

While his wife served tea, Mr.  Cuff sat back to spin some yarns about
life on the frontier.  Once, he said, he allowed some Zulus displaced
by a war to take refuge on his farm.

The refugees' enemies concluded that Cuff had formed an alliance
against them, and he was warned to be ready for an attack.  Next thing
he knew, his house was full of white cops with machine guns, ordering
him to send his wife away, sleep on the floor, and stay away from
windows in case an assassin was lurking out there with a high-powered
rifle.  The attack never materialized.  After a few weeks, the war died
down, and life returned to normal.

In Msinga, normal was like this: You were white and more or less
comfortable; the people on the far side of the fence or river were
black and desperate.  From time to time, they stole a few of your
cattle, or simply killed one, butchering it on the spot, and dragging
the bloody haunches back into Msinga.

There was no point calling the police.  The people of Msinga didn't
assist police inquiries.  One of them might, however, sidle up to a
white farmer and whisper that so-and-so had been selling fresh meat
lately.

Such leads could not be passed on to the police.

"If that man talks to the police," Cuff explained, 'it's tickets for
him.  He'll be dead within days."  So there was still no point in
calling the police.  Instead, said Mr.  Cuff, "You get your friends and
go to the suspect's kraal at two in the morning.  You give him a little
experience, so he remembers it was your cow he ate."

I asked what an experience was, but Cuff just shrugged.

"It's an ugly way to live," he said.

"Both my sons have grown up violent and full of hate.  I'm sorry about
that."

Cuff's former next-door neighbor, Peter Gill, was a graduate of one of
South Africa's better private schools.  After finishing high school,
Gill went off into the wilds of Angola and hewed a farm out of virgin
bush.  When the Angolan civil war broke out in 1975, he was wiped out
in the cross fire.  He left Angola with nothing, walking south by night
until he ran into the South African army on the Namibian border.  After
that, he settled in Ian Smith's Rhodesia, where he bought a cut-rate
farm in the war zone.  He held onto it until Robert Mugabe's guerrillas
blasted several of his neighbors out of their fortified farmhouses with
rocket-propelled grenades.  He returned to South Africa completely
penniless, and worked on a construction site until he'd saved enough
money to buy a half-share in a farm on the Msinga border.  The first
time he drove onto his new land, someone took a shot at him from the
back of a bush.  Okay, he thought, if that's the way they want it,
we'll see who wins.

Most of the whites along that border were blind racists, but Gill was a
cool headed man with a clear understanding of the brutal equation into
which he was stepping.  He arrived in Msinga at the start of a long and
merciless drought.  The Zulus had been grazing and watering their
cattle on his land, so his arrival threatened their survival.  Gill
didn't contest that, or advance spurious moral and legal arguments to
justify his actions.  He knew that the Zulus were desperate, but he was
desperate, too.  He was rich in Zulu terms, but in white terms he was
poor.  His house would have blended into the hollows of Appalachia, and
he had no running water.  He lost a baby daughter in a very Third
Worldly accident: She drowned in a bucket of trucked-in drinking water.
He understood that the Zulus were suffering, but saw no room for
compromise.  As far as Gill was concerned, this had nothing to do with
racism.

"I like blacks," he insisted.  He just didn't have enough water or
grazing land to share with them.  So he took up his gun and secured his
boundary.

Any black who set foot on Peter Gill's land was looking for trouble.
Even small children stealing water or firewood were likely to find
bullets kicking up dust at their feet.  Gill had picked up some
special-forces skills in the various wars he'd lived through.  At
night, he blackened his face, donned dark clothing, and patrolled his
perimeters on foot.

"Basically," he said, "I would say that I defended my land as best I
could.  I used whatever force was necessary."

Peter Gill was tough.  In Msinga, tough was like this: Gill once hired
a white farmhand who packed a pistol as he went about his duties.  One
day, the hired hand strayed a little too close to the Msinga boundary.
Some Zulus knocked him out, disarmed him, put the weapon to his head,
and pulled the trigger.  The gun was on safety, though, so the hired
hand lived to tell the tale.  As soon as he regained consciousness,
however, Gill fired him.

"He was weak," Gill told me.

"The mere fact that he'd allowed them to flatten his head would have
invited more attacks.  I was declaring to the Zulus that he wasn't a
worthy soldier."

"There's no second prize," Gill concluded.  'I'm the fastest gun, and
while that lasts 1'll survive here.  The guy with the bigger stick runs
things."

Ask Peter Gill where he lives, and he will say Weehen, which means the
Place of Weeping in Dutch.  Weenen is the white magisterial district
that borders black Msinga, and it was named in remembrance of the 530
Voortrekkers massacred nearby by the Zulus in 1838.  Pose the same
question to the Zulus on the far side of the boundary fence, however,
and they will say that Gill lives in Nobamba, the Place Where We Caught
the Whites.  What hope of reconciliation is there in such a place?  I
saw none.  That river was just another front in the war without end the
war that started in the 1780s along the Great Fish River and continues
to this day.  Nothing has been forgiven, nothing forgotten, nothing
settled.

Into this churning vortex of hatred and violence, in the winter of
1975, stepped Neil and Creina Alcock.  Theirs was the last farm in
white South Africa, separated from Msinga in the west by a rusting
fence, in the south by the Tugela River.  Their land began by the
river, climbed over a line of hills, and stretched away across the vast
plain beyond.  On the day they arrived, Neil and Creina walked the
eroded hills, strewing handfuls of wild-grass seed into the wounds of
the ruined land.  They decided to name the new farm Mdukatshani, the
Place of Lost Grasses, but they were already dreaming of another
Msinga, a place where grass grew tall and green.

Neil and Creina once set their vision down in a document entitled
Msinga 2000, less a blueprint for development than a dream of how
Msinga might one day be.  In the dream, furrows led spring water down
Msinga's barren hillsides and into tiny gardens, where Zulu kraal
holders grew vegetables in soils enriched by manure and the
phosphate-rich ashes of cattle bones.  Each Zulu kraal was shaded by
fruit trees and surrounded by beehives.  Each had its own fish pond and
poultry run, its own solar cooker and gas digester a digester being a
low-tech oil-drum contraption designed to transform dung into methane
gas.  In the dream, this gas replaced wood as Msinga's fuel, allowing
the last trees to be spared in order to stabilize the eroding slopes.
On the hillsides, the don gas had been blocked with stone packs, and
they were slowly silting up.  Now that the cattle were communally
herded and grazed in rotating camps, grass was returning to the
wasteland, and all the cattle were fat again.

The people of this fortunate valley drew their wisdom from Mdukatshani.
In the dream, there was a school for children at Mdukatshani, and a
'barefoot university' where their fathers studied farming and
conservation.  Mdukatshani also had a plant nursery, a veterinary
clinic, and a cattle stud with prime bulls for injecting good blood
into Msinga's scrawny herd.  As the dream drew to a close, Msinga's
gardens were blooming, its milk pails overflowing, its people plump and
healthy.  A near-desert had been transformed into Eden, and it had all
been accomplished without purchased fertilizer or chemicals, tractors
or gasoline.  Msinga couldn't afford such things.  If it were to
survive, and feed itself, it had to do so with existing resources: sun,
water, the dung of animals, and the sweat of men.

"For the Msingas of Africa," Neil concluded, 'and there are many, there
is no other way."

Nell's was a new way, a new approach to the problems of a continent
where other ways had already failed.  It was clear, by 1975, that
Africa was heading toward a state of permanent famine. Well-intentioned
Westerners were trying to help, but grafts of alien agricultural
technology just didn't seem to take in Africa. Development workers
would move into the continent's dust bowls with heads full of
university theory and pockets bulging with UN or EEC or US AID cash. 
They'd bulldoze huge dams, plow up plains, install batteries of diesel
pumps and center-pin irrigation systems.  And then they'd go home, and
things would fall apart.  Machines broke down and stayed broken down. 
Few Africans had the skills to maintain complex equipment, and there
were no spare parts anyway.

Within a year or two, the peasants had returned to scuffling the dust
with hoes and donkey plows, and there was little left to see for the
new missionaries' efforts save the rusting hulks of imported machinery
and futile scratches on the face of the and.

This was often cited, in South Africa and elsewhere, as proof of
African incompetence.  In Neil Alcock's judgment, it was more likely
proof of Western arrogance.  It was axiomatic that African peasants
were too backward to make plans for themselves, so the new missionaries
did it for them.  Then they set off for the wastelands in
air-conditioned caravans and tried to impose their nostrums on people
who had little idea of what they were talking about.

Neil, on the other hand, was something of a peasant himself, a white
farmer with a tenth-grade education.  He believed in African farmers,
and thought they were quite wise enough to devise solutions to their
own problems.  Such solutions, moreover, were the only ones that would
work African solutions, using African methods and African technologies.
As Neil saw it, the role of a Western man, an educated man, was to
place himself and his skills at the disposal of the peasantry to stop
dictating and start advising.  He also thought some patience was called
for.  A two-year tour of duty in some famine-stricken African hellhole
clearly helped no one.  As far as Neil Alcock was concerned, you had to
live among Africans, like an African, until you saw through African
eyes, until African problems became your own problems and African pain
became your pain.  It didn't matter whether it took years, even
decades.  To be effective, a white man had to earn the right of trust
and acceptance.  Only then could he turn to his black brothers and say,
"We are in the dust, my friends;

we are lower and less consequential than the white man's dog, but there
is a way out, and I will show it to you."

Neil was not so naive as to believe his vision would be easily
realized, but he was brave enough to try.  A lesser man would have
given up on day one.  Neil arrived in Msinga with a piece of paper
saying that Church Agricultural Projects owned six thousand acres of
land.  In Msinga, such paper meant nothing.

The only land to which Neil could truly lay claim was the few hundred
acres visible from his riverside settlement.  The land beyond the
hills, away from the river, was not really his, and never would be. The
Alcocks called it the top country, and it was Zulu country, in terms of
the law inside Zulu heads.

Zulus cut wood on it, hunted across it, grazed and watered their cattle
on it.  If anyone controlled the top country, it was the cattle thieves
and bandits who lived along its border.

For such men, Nell's arrival was too good to be true.  Eight hundred
fat cattle, and nobody to guard them but a white man with no guns and a
handful of tame Zulu Christians from some upcountry mission.  Nell
didn't have enough hands to herd the cattle, let alone guard them
against human predators.

They were easy game.  One by one, and then by the dozen, the cattle
started disappearing, driven off in the night down the Skhelenge Gorge,
across the river, and into the wild heart of Msinga.  The police did
nothing but take statements, so Neil and his henchmen tracked down some
stolen cattle on their own and provided the cops with evidence for a
few convictions.  If anything, this worsened the rustling, and drew
threats of retribution.  The mission Zulus were terrified.  One by one,
they deserted and returned to safer climes.  In just two months,
seventy of the project's cattle were stolen; almost half as many again
died of heart water a low veld cattle disease.

"We were hanging on," said Creina, 'by the tips of our fingers, on the
brink of utter disaster."

And so Neil's dream of continuing the cattle cooperative and ultimately
extending it into Msinga came to nothing.  It became clear that so long
as the project ran cattle, the Zulus would regard Neil as a competitor,
not a friend, and he'd have to hold them off with guns, like his white
neighbors.

Rather than turn Mdukatshani into an armed encampment, the project's
directors decided to sell the communal cattle herd and reach an
understanding with the people of Msinga.

They would henceforth be welcome to graze cattle and collect firewood
on the project's land, provided that they cooperated with Neil's
conservation schemes.  It was an eminently fair deal, and it brought a
measure of peace to Mdukatshani's sector of the frontier.

Once the cattle were gone, Neil turned his attention to agricultural
development, to the vision contained in the Msinga 2000 document.  He
invited Msinga men to a series of indabas, or open-air meetings, where
he laid out plans.  The Zulus were too polite to say so, but they
thought this white man was mad.  He claimed it was possible to grow
food in the dust in waterless places without spending any money.  Even
a child knew that was nonsense.

So Neil and some helpers set out to prove them wrong.  They purloined
some railroad tracks from an abandoned siding and built a towering
scaffold on the riverbank.  Then they took a tractor tire, cut it into
scoop like segments, and bolted it spoke wise onto the hub of an old
tractor wheel.  A system of pulleys lowered the wheel into the river.
The rubber scoops dipped into the swift brown torrent and spun the
tractor hub, which turned the differential from a scrapped Land Rover,
which drove a pump, which delivered water to a dry, stony garden site
hundreds of yards away.  There, in soil fertilized by dung and the ash
of cattle bones, some Zulu women planted and reaped a bumper crop of
vegetables.  Surrounding communities were hugely impressed.  From that
point, the scheme started moving forward.

Neil organized a committee of tribal elders to run the project casting
himself as their humble servant and technical adviser.  The committee
was nominally in charge, but it was

Neil who really made things happen.  He was a man who could stand on a
barren, eroded hillside, miles from the nearest water, surrounded by
incredulous peasants, and say, "There will be a dam here."  And lo, a
dam there would be, or a weir across the river, or an irrigation furrow
to carry a trickle of precious water from a distant spring to tiny
patches of tillable land.  Bankrolled by donations from churches,
foreign governments and the Anglo American conglomerate, he hired
armies of Zulus to work on a vast iron-age engineering project- laying
furrows, stringing fences, blocking don gas with dikes of stone.

Dams were dug with shovels, the dirt carried off in buckets on women's
heads.  Neii drew plans in the dust with sticks, and judged levels with
his naked eye.  If a boulder lay in the path of one of his furrows,
Zulu women built a bonfire under it, heated it until it glowed, then
doused it with pails of water.

Voil& The rock shattered.  Zulu dynamite, they called it.

In the spring of 1977, the first water came trickling down the furrows
and into the pioneer gardens, and for a while, the dream seemed to be
coming true.  In her monthly newsletter to donors and supporters,
Creina wrote, "We sense the beginning of a small revolution."
Mdukatshani became a place of pilgrimage for young white volunteers
yearning to atone for the sins of their fathers.  A steady stream of
foreign diplomats and new missionaries came to see the project for
themselves.

The man who met visitors at the project's gates was getting on toward
sixty now, completely gray, and balding.  Neil was always wearing dusty
jeans and car-tire sandals, and the first thing he showed off was
always his waterwheel; he was immensely proud of his waterwheel.  After
that, visitors were escorted through a complex of eleven houses, huts,
and workshops, all built in the Zulu fashion of mud, stone, and thatch,
and costing less than $125 apiece.  In the workshops, Zulus were
assembling experimental solar cookers and beating old oil drums into
prototypical methane dig esters  There was a fish pond stocked with
bass and tilapia, and an earthen cave full of glowing glass beads, the
raw materials of a thriving craft project.  Under Creina's direction,
the beads were turned into Zulu jewelry of astonishing beauty and sold
in the distant cities.

As visitors did the rounds, they were introduced to tongue tied black
men who turned out to be the leaders of the project.  Mdukatshani's
dignified chairmln, Petros Majozi, was formerly a cook in a
Johannesburg hotel.  The resident engineer was Mphephete Masondo, who
had never seen the inside of a school.  A former police constable, the
flamboyant Elijah Mhlongo, was chief of security.  The general manager,
Bokide Khumalo, couldn't read or write, but he gave orders to white
volunteers with impressive university degrees.

At some point, you might have seen Neil scribble his daily love letter
to his wife and hand it to a herdboy, who scurried off to deliver it.
Creina spent her days in a mud 'office' on the cliff top, bashing away
on a portable typewriter on a 'desk' of river stone.  She was still
editing African Wildlife by mail, and in her spare time writing reports
and newsletters to the project's supporters.  At the outset, her
newsletters were quite dry and factual, but as she and Neil got to know
Msinga better they evolved into literature.  Fantastic characters moved
across her pages, engaged in utterly improbable undertakings.

An ancient Zulu gunsmith sat under a thorn tree in the bush, fashioning
scrap-metal shotguns with his bare hands.  An illiterate dope farmer in
the high ravines devised an automatic irrigation system that would have
earned a masters in engineering at any Western university.  The
newsletters were a window into a secret world the world of rural black
South Africans, the country's invisible people.  Creina refused to
allow them to be published, so they were passed from hand to hand until
they fell apart at the staples.

If the visitors were really fortunate, Neil might row them across the
river to see the work being done in Msinga itself.

They saw irrigation furrows leading water from springs in the hills.
They saw the first crops coming up in tiny gardens, fenced against
goats with loans from the project's Small Farmer's Trust.  They
sometimes met ragged black men and women who made solemn statements in
broken English.  They would declare, "We are weak, but when Neil is
with us we feel strong.

We cannot write, but he is teaching us to write with grass on the
hillsides."  Or simply: "God is sending Numzaan to help the people."
Numzaan is a Zulu honorific meaning squire.

Come sunset, visitors met the rest of the Alcock household the white
sons, GG and Rauri, and the black sons, seven barefoot Zulu herd boys
whom the Alcocks had more or less adopted.  Mboma, the eldest, had red
hair when he first moved in with the Alcocks - a symptom of the
nutritional disease kwashiorkor.  He soon recovered, though, and
blossomed into an artful dodger, an exceptionally bright child who
swiftly mastered English and the allied art of manipulating white
volunteers.  Creina's sister Cathy wrote a children's book about
Mboma's life and hard times, which included a spell as a ten-year-old
laborer on a white farm in the district.  The Story of Mboma became a
minor best-seller in the world's progressive book shops  Mboma Dladla's
name was an even mentioned in the United Nations, in the course of a
debate on 'slave labor' in South Africa.

Mboma was GG's best friend.  Among Rauri's best friends was a boy named
Sensilube, who had been caught milking the

Alcocks' cows under cover of darkness.  It turned out that his parents
had been murdered, leaving Sensilube to fend for his younger siblings
and himself.  A third boy was Ndudu, a witty little spiv who dreamed of
going to Soweto when he grew up and becoming a fancy bootlegger.  The
black sons and white sons slept in adjoining huts, ate and played
together, and explored the surrounding countryside on horseback.  In
many ways, the white boys were assimilated Zulus.  They spoke Zulu like
Zulus.  They knew how to suck sweet jelly from a hole in the stem of an
aloe flower, how to set snares for birds and small game.  From Mboma,
they learned the best game of all riding the raging river on driftwood
after a summer thunderstorm.  It was only in their teens, when they
went away to high school, that GG and Rauri realized how unorthodox
their childhood had been.

And finally, of course, there was Creina.  She was the last person you
expected to meet in a mud hut.  She wore rags and tatters, eschewed
makeup, and never shaved her legs, but she remained truly beautiful.
She could talk knowledgeably about almost anything literature, science,
the arcana of apartheid legislation, the botany of the thorn veld,
agricultural production in the Sudan.  There you were in a mud hut,
with ants in your food and tadpoles in your coffee, making small talk
with a ravishing intellectual who graced her wisdoms with quotes from
great philosophers and poets.  It all seemed highly improbable.

After supper, Neil sank into the depths of his wicker chair and told
stories in the firelight.  He'd talk about oh, the history of the
tribes in the region, or the inner workings of the local dope trade, or
hapless secret policemen he had known.

Some of his best yarns concerned his white neighbors, many of whom
referred to him as die groot terror is - 'the master terrorist,"
supposedly trained in Red China.  It was said that he and his wife had
'kaffir' lovers.  It was said that Creina stripped naked and washed in
the river in full view of any black man who happened to be passing
by.

And finally, it was said that the Alcocks were stirring the Zulus to
revolt, even arming them.  From time to time, the secret police picked
up the project's Zulu staff and interrogated them on that score.  What
did Alcock say?  Was he a Communist?  Why did he live like a kaffir?
What was wrong with him?  Was he mad?  Lots of whites thought he was
mad, living the way he did, in a mud hut, eating 'bloody plant soup' or
whatever it was that Africans survived on.

Come bedtime, visitors groped their way up a dark footpath and into a
mud hut, where they lay under coarse woolen blankets, listening to the
river roaring over rapids and staring at the smoke-darkened thatch.
Later, many would struggle to describe what they'd experienced that
day.  They were white, and came from a culture that had lost the
ability to discuss matters of the heart without diminishing them inside
quotes or disarming them with cynical asides.  One such visitor was a
former Rhodes scholar who held very high office in a multinational
corporation.  When I asked what he made of Neil Alcock, he vacillated,
coughed embarrassedly, and said, "One was struck by his
nonmaterialistic attitude."

Well, that was certainly true.  Mdukatshani was arguably the most
cost-efficient development project in Africa.  At one point, the
project's funding level was $1,250 a month just about enough to cover
the salary of a single United Nations development worker.  In Neil
Alcock's hands, it kept an entire project running, paying the salaries
of sixty-nine black and five white staff members.  The Alcocks' cut was
about $50.  On that kind of money, you lived in a mud hut, very simply,
and were liable to be mistaken for a saint, a missionary, a man of God,
and all sorts of other things that Neil Alcock wasn't.

He was a complete stranger to sanctimony.  He mocked self-righteous
solemnity and cracked jokes about bearded liberals behind their backs.
He didn't mind living in a mud hut.  If anything, he liked it.  He
liked farming, liked cattle, and like nothing better than sitting under
a thorn tree, disputing with Zulu men.  There is a Zulu saying "I see
you with my heart."  Neil saw Zulus that way, and that was the way they
saw him.

His arrival in the district, in 1975, had caused fear and consternation
on the far side of the boundary fence.  Most Zulus had long since
ceased to trust whites.  When Neil announced that he'd come to help
them, they listened impassively, then went home and tried to divine the
trick.  They spent hours arguing about him, trying to figure out
exactly what he was up to, and how he intended to rip them off. Word of
his arrival filtered back to Johannesburg's migrant-worker hostels, and
the debates continued there.  When someone informed Johan

Dladla that a white had arrived in Msinga, talking nonsense about
working together and sharing the land, he clicked his tongue angrily.

"Black and white can never work together," he said.

On his next trip home, Dladla visited the project and told

Neil so to his face.

"Black and white can never work together," he said.  Neil just laughed,
and invited Dladla to sit down for a talk.  They saw each other's
hearts, and Johan Dladla was won over.  He never went back to Jo'burg.
He resigned his city job and stayed to work with the white man.

Another man who never went back was Petros Majozi, who eventually
became the project's chairman.  Majozi sported a giant handlebar
mustache and was a man of silent strength, a self-taught philosopher
who learned to read under Johannesburg streetlamps.  He had always
yearned to be a farmer, but that option was closed to a Zulu family
man.  A Zulu man had to go to the white cities and earn cash, so that
his family could 'farm at the store."  So Majozi spent thirty-six years
in Johannesburg, living in some lonely servants' quarters and longing
for his home.  He had four children back in Msinga, plus a wife and a
small herd of beloved cattle, but he saw them only once a year.

January 9, 1975, was the last day of Petros Majozi's annual holiday. He
was driving his cattle through the bush, leaden with sadness at the
thought of leaving on the morrow, when a white man materialized before
him.  Majozi's knees turned to water.  He was on no-man's land land
that belonged to whites on paper but to the Zulus in their heads.  He
thought the white would surely pull a gun, impound his cattle, and
maybe arrest him, too.  Instead, Neil smiled and said hello in Zulu.
They sat down under a tree and talked about land and cattle for a
while, and then Neil continued on his way.  It was such an
insignificant encounter that Neil promptly forgot about it.

Petros Majozi, on the other hand, had seen a white man with his heart.
The next morning, he took the bus to Tugela Ferry, joined a queue
outside the post office, and telephoned his white boss in
Johannesburg.

"I'm not coming back," he said.

Majozi was a highly valued employee, so the boss demanded to know
why.

"I met a white man who will help me to farm," said Majozi.

"How long have you known him?"  asked the boss.

"I have only met him once," Majozi replied.

"And how much is he paying you?"

"Nothing."

"Your family will starve," said the white man.

"I hope not," said Majozi.

"You will lose your pension," said the white man.

"I don't care," Majozi replied.  The white man at the other end of the
line was at an utter loss to understand how a level-headed and
intelligent man could take such a risk on the basis of a chance
encounter in the bush, and Majozi was at a loss to explain it.  His
English was halting, and besides, white men knew little about seeing
with the heart.  So Majozi just said, "I'm sorry," and put the
telephone down.

And then he took the bus back to Mdukatshani, went to see Neil, and
told him that he also believed in working together.

"We must take this fright in our hearts," he said, 'and throw it in the
river."

And so Majozi and many others threw in their lot with Neil, and for
three years all went well.  Mdukatshani became a sort of dusty Camelot,
a congenial spot where it was possible to believe, if only for a
moment, that South Africa's problems might all be sorted out.  It was
just a small agricultural project in a forgotten corner of the country,
but there was nowhere else quite like it.  It lay astride the country's
most bitter old frontier, and if love could flourish there it could
surely flourish anywhere.

Or so it seemed, at any rate.

Africa is a cruel country; it takes your heart and grinds it into
powdered stone and no one minds.

- ELSPETH HUXLEY,

The Flame Trees of Tbika THE ROAD LINKING Mdukatshani to the village of
Weenen is as bad as any other in Msinga.  It winds along the riverbank,
crosses the Bushman's River on a causeway, climbs a rugged hill, and
heads on across the plain beyond.  It is not a good road to drive in
convoy.  The wheels of the vehicle ahead raise clouds of choking dust
and spray stones into your windshield, and if the vehicle ahead is a
bus the journey becomes absolutely intolerable.  One morning, Creina
got stuck behind a lumbering bus on her way into town and ate dust for
several miles.  It was hard to overtake another vehicle on Msinga's
dirt roads.  In the end, though, she saw an opening, shot past the bus,
and traveled on toward town.

It was around Christmas 1978.  The Alcocks had been in Msinga for three
and a half years and were starting to feel less like strangers.
Visitors' first impressions to the contrary, their first years in
Msinga hadn't been all that easy.  They were struggling to control the
project's boundaries.  A Zulu man who had given evidence on the
project's behalf in a goat-theft case had been murdered for his
trouble.  Indeed, there had been many murders, but that was the nature
of Msinga, reflected in its very place names.  In Zulu, Tugela Ferry
was known as Msbaya Safa Hit Him till He's Dead.  In Msinga, you could
get killed for almost anything- for having the wrong name, or the wrong
address, or plowing disputed land.  Mdukatshani's black bookkeeper,
Anton Hlongwane, was so scared of being murdered that he refused to
send out notices to Zulu debtors.

Still, the Alcocks had persevered in spite of all problems, and
imagined they had already seen Msinga's worst side.  But they had seen
nothing, nothing, nothing.

The bus Creina had just passed, for instance, was about to run into
trouble.  As it rounded a bend, a platoon of black men armed with
rifles stepped into the road and forced the driver to halt.  The gunmen
boarded the bus, pulled five male passengers off it, and executed them.
Creina knew nothing of this, of course.  She drove on into Weenen,
bought supplies, and headed back toward the project.  En route, she
found the road closed by a line of big boulders.  The Zulus traveling
with her were too scared to move, so Creina asked one of her sons to
get out and roll the rocks aside.  She had not been in Msinga long
enough to know when to be afraid.

A few miles farther on, at the gates of the project, she came upon a
harrowing sight a Zulu truck driver with a bullet in his abdomen,
bleeding to death in Neil's arms.  The driver had been ambushed at the
line of boulders the sixth man shot on that road in a single morning.
What on earth was this?

Where were the police?  Where on earth was the ambulance?

The fatally injured man had been lying in the sun for hours.  An
ambulance finally came, and the Alcocks retired to the rocks above the
river, to recover from the traumas of the day.

And then they looked up and saw something amazing: a skirmish line of
heavily armed black men in military uniforms, advancing toward them on
the river's far bank.  The Alcocks had been in Msinga for three years,
but this was their first sighting of a Zulu impi.  Most whites would
have fled in terror, but not Neil Alcock.  He walked down to the water,
cupped his hands, and yelled, "Go away!  We don't want you here with
guns!"  The Zulu warriors stood their ground.  They had come to escort
one of their brothers to safety, and wouldn't leave until he had
crossed the river to join them.  Then they retreated into the hills.

And so ended the first of many bad days in Msinga.  There had been wars
elsewhere in the district in the preceding three years, but none near
Mdukatshani until now.  As Neil and Creina understood it, a young man
from the Majola faction, a few miles upriver, had tried to seduce the
girlfriend of a rival Madondo.  Now young men were killing one another
in consequence killing innocent truck drivers, too.  In the ensuing
three months, the Majola-Madondo war claimed twenty seven lives.  Just
as it was dying down, another war broke out across the river, sparked
off this time by a disagreement over the outcome of a tribal dancing
competition in a Johannesburg migrants' hostel.  Members of the losing
team refused to abide by the judges' decision.  The argument escalated
into violence, so the migrants came home, took up their guns, and
settled the dispute in the hills.  That war was no sooner over than a
third broke out, triggered this time by the murder of a Zulu headman
whose testimony put a cattle thief behind bars.

The Alcocks were dismayed.  At the outset, they'd believed that all
Msinga's problems were rooted in land hunger and apartheid, and would
respond to 'a little social engineering," as Creina put it.  Now it
dawned on them that it was not going to be quite that easy.  From 1979
onward, Neil and Creina lived amidst constant terror.  Bands of gunmen
roamed the farm and set up ambushes on the roads that crossed it. There
were tracers in the sky at night, and the ravines resounded with
gunfire during the day.  The wars made development work very difficult.
As soon as the first shot was fired, men disappeared, and their wives
stopped working, too they had to carry food and water to their
husbands' secret lairs.  A war could last months, even years, and while
it raged there was little the Alcocks could do save ferry the dead and
wounded to the mission hospital in Tugela Ferry.  By the end of 1979, a
note of despair was creeping into Creina's newsletters.  She closed one
with a quote from the poet Roy Campbell: "The hurricanes of chaos have
begun to buzz like hornets in the shifting sands."

The following year, the rains failed, and the coffin lid started
closing on Neil's dream.  The grass withered, crops shriveled, and Zulu
cattle started dying by the thousand.  Atop the drought came two more
wars among the Zulus.  After war came pestilence first cholera, then
rabies and after pestilence came famine.  As the drought intensified,
Zulus started cutting fences along the boundary and turning their
starving livestock loose on the project's land.  By the end of that
first dry winter, more than a thousand cattle and innumerable goats
were trespassing on Mdukatshani, and the project was living up to its
name: a place of lost grasses, a place of stones and dust.

In 1981, the rains failed again.  The fish in Neil's pond went belly up
in the foul water.  His methane-gas dig esters turned out to be
impractical and had to be abandoned.  The solar cookers tarnished and
were thrown out to rust.  White volunteers tired of reading their Marx
in mud huts and left to find easier ways of fighting apartheid.  The
irrigation system at Dimbi was spotted by helicopter-borne narcotics
cops on a search-and-destroy mission.  Taking it for a marijuana farm,
they landed and destroyed it.  The springs in the hills dried up, and
the river dwindled to a turgid trickle.

Beyond a certain point, Neil and Creina's lives seem to assume the
quality of a myth or fable; event succeeds event with the random
disconnected ness of a dream or nightmare;

the plot unfolds according to the caprice of cruel and vengeful gods.
The last white volunteer to work on Mdukatshani told me she quit
because there seemed to be no end to Msinga's crises and no resolution
to any of them.  They rolled in like breakers onto a beach, one after
the other, with no time between to recover.

"Msinga's such a confused and destroyed place," she said.

"I felt completely blindfolded and helpless.  There was nothing you
could do except rave at somebody."  So Neil raved.

He raved for years, at anyone with the power to help- the Red Cross,
white newspapers, relief organizations, Gatsha Buthelezi, even the
apartheid government.  He raved so long and so loud that there came a
time when even his liberal allies could no longer bear to listen.  In
1981, he wrote a series of letters to old friends in the liberal
movement, asking why they had abandoned him to his 'fatigue,
inefficiency and failure."  He asked, "Why me alone?"  No replies came.
He was on his own.

The drought dragged on until 1982, only to break in a raging
cloudburst.  The canal at Mseleni was buried by a landslide, the dam at
Umhlumba washed away by a flood.

The river came down in a spate and crippled NeWs beloved waterwheel.
After that single thunderstorm, the skies cleared, and the sun beat
down more mercilessly than ever.

By September 1982, it was clear that Neil Alcock had met his match in
Msinga.  After three rainless years, there was little to show for his
efforts save some bone-dry furrows, empty dams, a weir across the
river, and a single garden in which the two widows of one Philemon
Khoza were growing enough vegetables to feed themselves.

"Those two women," he said in a heartbreaking report to donors, 'must
serve as our example of what can be achieved."  Otherwise, it was all
dust to dust, and chaos to chaos.

Is this beginning to sound like hell to you?  It sounded that way to me
when I first heard it, and yet it was really a love story, a story
about two whites who loved Africa.  Love drew Neil and Creina to
Msinga, and love kept them there, in their mud hut in the dust, even
though staying meant Neil"s death.

He had leukemia, you see, and he was dying.  He'd been advised that he
had five years to live and that if he wanted all of them, he had to eat
fresh meat, milk, and cheese.  There was no electricity on Mdukatshani,
and hence no refrigerator.  In Msinga's torrid summers, milk curdled in
minutes, meat rotted within a day.  If Neil wanted to live, he had to
leave.  He had made a commitment to stay forever, though, and he kept
it.

Toward the end, Neil and Creina's life became what life must be for the
overwhelming majority of people on this sad continent.  They lived from
day to day, season to season, with little hope of salvation and no
certainties save the certainty of death.  Those mute, starving people
we see on TV, cradling their dying children in their arms is that not
how life is for them?  How else do they see it, if not that way?  And
yet, to hear Creina tell it, it was often a life of unbearable
ecstasy.

She did not dwell on the despair and defeat.  Instead, she spoke of the
hot dust between her toes, and the water of the river cool against her
skin.  She spoke of men who greeted trees as they walked through the
bush, and children who ducked away from the face in the glass because
they had never seen themselves in a mirror.  She spoke of the nobility
and courage of Zulu warriors, and the strength of their widows.  She
spoke of Christmas Eve, when the migrants came home from the cities and
the valley rang with the sound of bugles and hooters and the joyful
cries of children who had not seen their fathers in a full year.

And she told me about the time their hut burned down.  She and Neil
lost what little they had in that fire.  As word of their misfortune
spread, Zulus started converging on Mdukatshani from miles around. Some
were old, some were total strangers, and all were desperately poor, and
yet they came to help the white man.  Some offered gifts of cash, and
those who had nothing offered their muscles, to help with the
rebuilding.

One ancient man tried to press a tattered banknote into Neil's hand. He
must have been hoarding it for decades, and now he was offering it to a
white man.

Afterward, if anyone asked Neil why he stayed even though it meant
dying, he mentioned that day the day the poorest black people dug up
their buried treasure and offered it to him.  He and Creina had yearned
all their lives to belong in Africa, and it seemed that Africa had
finally accepted them, and returned their embrace.  After that, he
could not forsake his people, and so he stayed, and Creina stayed with
him.

Toward the end of 1982, Neil's end seemed near.  His body lost the
ability to heal itself.  The smallest scratch festered, and soon his
face and legs were covered with suppurating sores.

He ran a constant fever, and his skin was hot to the touch.

He lay down in the windless heat on the flat rocks beside the dwindling
river and made ready to die.  He didn't die, though;

he was too tough.  He somehow pulled through.  He was too weak to walk,
so he had a horse brought to the door, and on its back, he mounted his
last crusade.

It was a hot summer afternoon, and the herd boys were watching the sky.
There were three of them, all Zulu teenagers, guarding their fathers'
cattle on the plain of Ngongolo on the far side of Mdukatshani's hills.
Thunderclouds were building above them, and the boys were worried about
lightning.  They didn't want to be caught in the open by an electrical
storm.

And so, when the sky darkened and started spitting, they abandoned
their duties and ran home to sit out the storm.

After a while, the rain stopped and the sun came out again.

The trio of herd boys ventured out onto the rain-swept plain, only to
find that their cattle had scattered in the storm.  The spoor ran
through a hole in the boundary fence, and into white

South Africa into land that belonged to 'the soldier."

The soldier's real name was James Christie, but the Zulus didn't know
that.  When he first bought land on the border, Zulus asked who he was,
but Christie wouldn't say.

"I come from the world," he said.  Then he flipped an eyelid and
displayed the white of an eye a gesture of insult and malevolent
intent.

In the year or two since, James Christie had become a figure of dread
for the Zulus on the far side of the fence.  He didn't farm the land
himself, but he came by from time to time to make sure that the Zulus
weren't grazing their stock on it in his absence.

On these patrols, he wore combat fatigues, carried a gun, and allegedly
shot any Zulu goats or cattle he came across on his side of the fence.
The Africans claimed that he also fired warning shots at them, and in
one instance, broke the jaw of a man caught trespassing on his land.
The herd boys knew all this, but they had no choice- they had to cross
the boundary to retrieve their cattle.

They were not many paces inside white South Africa when the soldier
stepped out from behind some bushes with a shotgun in his hands.

"Ja, madoda," he said in Zulu, 'what are you doing on my land?"  And
then he pulled the trigger.

The boys fled, one limping on a leg full of buckshot, another with a
wound in his back.  Only when they were safely back in Msinga did the
second boy collapse, 'breathing bubbles through a hole in his back."

The wounded teenager was rushed to a hospital in Pietermaritzburg,
where surgeons operated to remove shot lodged close to his heart.  A
week or two later, when the boy was well enough to walk again, his
father and some relatives took him to the police station in Weenen to
press charges against the white gunman.  The policeman behind the desk
was white.

"Is it true," he asked the boy, 'that you were walking on a white man's
land at the time of the shooting?"

"Yes," the boy replied.

"Well," said the policeman, "if I had been that farmer, I would have
put the bullet here."  He leaned over the desk and put a finger against
the black youngster's temple, and that was just about the end of that,
as far as law enforcement was concerned.  The shooting was just another
skirmish in a very old war the war of blacks and whites over land.

Men on both sides of the Msinga border kept cattle, and there was too
little land to go round, especially for men who were black.  The
average Msinga cattleman had access to around nine hectares of tribal
land.  His counterpart in white South Africa owned 598.  These were the
basic, brutal facts of life along the border, and all else flowed from
them.  If it rained, the border remained more or less peaceful; if it
didn't, there was trouble.  In times of drought, Msinga's grazing was
swiftly depleted and starving Zulu livestock started piling up along
the boundary fence, staring dumbly into white South Africa, where some
grass and water remained.  For a Zulu, a cow was no mere beast of
utility.  Each cow had a name, and was spoken to as though she were a
member of the family.

When a starving cow sank to her knees in the dust and couldn't get up
again, her owner sank down and cried alongside her.  Rather than see
their beloved cattle die, the Zulus started cutting fences and turning
them loose on white land.

Whites responded with their guns, and the border became a virtual
free-fire zone.

Some white farmers simply shot Zulu goats and cattle, but others found
a way to profit from the war.  They rounded up trespassing livestock
and drove it to the government pound.  The Zulus had to pay stiff fines
for the release of their animals, and most of the money went straight
into the white farmer's pocket as compensation for damage to his land.
Zulus charged that some whites were actually luring Zulu cattle onto
their land with a view to exacting fines.

They also alleged that they were routinely assaulted or shot at for
trespassing on white land, but the police often turned a blind eye to
such complaints.  In the case of the herd boys shot by James Christie,
for instance, they took some statements and a photograph of the scene
of the shooting, but nothing happened after that.  More than two years
passed, but no charges were filed.

One day, however, a messenger of court showed up at James Christie's
place and handed him an official-looking envelope.

Christie ripped it open and snorted with indignation.  The herd boys
were suing him in civil court for attempted murder.

A while later, Flip de Bruin received a similar communication.

In his case, the plaintiff was a suspect Zulu cattle thief who'd
allegedly been subjected to one of de Bruin's novel interrogations made
to crawl through the veld on all fours for half a mile while the Boer
prodded him onward with a spear.  Soon after that, Peter Gill started
receiving inquiries about his habit of using 'whatever force was
necessary' to defend his land.

Neil Alcock's last crusade was under way.

He had two allies in this campaign the Legal Resources Center, a
Durban-based legal services foundation, and a Zulu matron with a
seventh-grade education.  Mrs.  Natty Duma was almost as round as she
was tall, and her heart was as big as the rest of her.  She was Neil's
private eye.  Whenever a white man raised his fists or gun to a black
man, Natty Duma came sniffing around on his farm, conducting
surreptitious interviews with the injured parties.  She reported the
details to Neil, who passed them on to the Legal Resources Center and
encouraged them to sue the bastard.

In all, Neil and Natty investigated some forty allegations of assault
and wrongdoing by local whites in the final years of his life.  One
case involved an eighty-six-year-old black man who was allegedly
kicked, beaten, and dragged around by the nose by a white farmer.
Another involved a farm laborer who made the mistake of asking his baas
for his wages.  He was beaten up, loaded in a car, dumped in the veld,
collected again, and taken to the police, who charged him with
trespassing.  A third case involved a Zulu woman who claimed she'd been
raped by a white farmer and produced a half-breed twelve-year-old
daughter to prove it.  The white man, Phil Opperman of the farm Darkest
Africa, denied all knowledge of the incident.  A blood test proved
otherwise, though, and he was ordered to start paying child support.

That story made headlines throughout the country and didn't draw Neil
Alcock any closer to the hearts of local whites.  The lawsuit that
completely outraged them, however, was the so-called roads dispute.  In
the roads dispute, Neil's stated aim was to force the reopening of
certain traditional rights-of-way, thus restoring to Zulus the right to
travel crosscountry from Msinga to Weenen, or down to the river.  As
far as his white neighbors were concerned, it was something else
entirely.  The disputed rights-of-way ran across white-owned land; if
they were reopened, Zulus would be legally entitled to drive their
cattle onto white farms and water them at any point where the path
crossed a watercourse.  In white minds, the lawsuit raised the specter
of huge herds of starving Zulu goats and cattle trekking back and forth
between Msinga and their dwindling dams, devouring their last grazing
en route.

The whites were incensed.  They thought Neil was trying to drive them
off their land.

White farmers weren't the only target of Nell's final campaign.
"Towards the end," a government official told me 'he made life
impossible for everyone."  He sued the Tugela Ferry police for
torturing suspects.  He raised a hue and cry about police corruption.
He had embarrassing questions asked in Parliament, and twisted the
government's arm until it set up a commission to arbitrate
Weenen-Msinga border tensions.

In the process, he made himself the most hated white man in central
Natal.  His telephone rang at odd hours, and anonymous Boer voices
warned him that his time was coming.  The local branch of the ruling
National Party passed a resolution imploring the government to remove
A!cock from their midst.

The secret police sent out a detachment to investigate charges of
'racial incitement."  Neil didn't falter.  If anything, he fought
harder as the five years his doctor had allotted him ran out.

In 1983, the rains failed yet again, and the screws on Msinga
tightened.  Zulu cattle were dying again, but the disputed
rights-of-way remained closed.  There was no time to wait for justice
to run its course, so Neil took matters into his own hands.  He and his
sons and brother went out one night with picks and ax handles and
forced one of the disputed roads open.  They broke chains, smashed
padlocks, tore the very gates off their hinges and threw them into the
nearest gulley.  Then they dumped the broken chains and padlocks on a
white farmer's doorstep, as if daring him to do something.  In rural
South Africa, such behavior was virtually suicidal.  Neil Alcock was
looking for trouble, and there came a time when he seemed likely to get
it soon.

Some five miles upriver from Mdukatshani there lived a white man named
Tom Uren, a British citizen who'd spent many years in Kenya.  He'd
recently arrived in Msinga to manage a farm called Sun Valley.  Whites
regarded Uren as a sound fellow, a good, strict farm manager, but
blacks were reputed to hate him, claiming that he docked their wages
for infringements of arbitrary rules and put the money into his own
pocket.  One day, Uren got out of his pickup to open a gate on a lonely
road.  A shot rang out, and he fell dead with a bullet in his head.
Some whites immediately blamed Neil Alcock.

"Figure it out for yourself," one told me.

"He wanted the kaffirs to have our land, so we had to be chased away.
He was encouraging them to attack us."

In the aftermath, Zulu laborers started coming to Mdukatshani at night
to warn Neil that their masters were planning murder.  One alleged plot
was for a sniper to take Neil out on a lonely road.  Another was to
lure him to a stock sale and start beating up a black in his presence;
when Neil intervened in the fight, they'd kill him and claim
justifiable homicide.

Neil shrugged off the danger, but some of his friends were worried.  It
was all too easy to see him slain by the bullet from an assassin's gun.
Everyone knew, of course, where the danger lay, but when the shot
finally rang out, it came from an entirely different direction.

The house of Qamatha Sokhela stood on a barren plain in the sun-blasted
devastation of Msinga, halfway between Mdukatshani and the dusty hamlet
of Tugela Ferry.  Sokhela was an old man who worked on the railways all
his life.  It was a good job, and he became very rich, rich enough to
afford three wives and a fine house, with five big rooms, brick walls,
cement floors, glass windows, and a tin roof.  Inside, it was furnished
with ancient Victorian armchairs and real beds, just like a white man's
home.  In Msinga terms, Sokhela's house was a mansion, but that was not
why the neighbors envied the old man.  They envied him because his roof
could not be set alight, and because bullets could not pass through his
walls as they could through those of the mud huts of lesser men.  In
Msinga, Sokhela's house doubled as a fortress, and that is why, at dawn
on Christmas morning in 1982, its floors were covered with the sleeping
forms of refugees omen and children who were too scared to sleep in
their own huts because of the war.

The house of Sokhela overlooked a dry watercourse called the Hyena
River.  The land on Sokhela's side belonged to an isigodi called
Mhlangaan.  The land on the far side belonged to the Ndlela.  In 1982,
the Mhlangaan were at war with the Ndlela, and the enemy was strong.
The enemy sometimes railed the territory of the Mhlangaan at night,
shooting up huts with submachine guns and setting fire to their straw
roofs.  Women and children were usually considered noncombatants, but
they still risked being caught in the cross fire in these nocturnal
raids.  So dozens of them slept in Sokhela's house for safety.  Their
fathers, husbands, and brothers were in the hills fighting.  They had
been up there three months already, living 'like baboons' in the
ravines.  Old Sokhela had been in the hills himself, but he was now too
old to fight, too old even to run when it became necessary.  Some black
policemen from Tugela Ferry caught him and ordered him to reveal the
hiding place of the Mhlangaan army.  But Sokhela did not trust the
police.  He feared that they would betray the whereabouts of his
brothers to the Ndlela.  When he refused to speak, the policemen beat
him with their rifle butts, and he was hurt inside.  So he came down
from the hills on Christmas Eve, and slept in his own house.  It was
his plan to rise at dawn and flee the district.

Just before the sun rose, however, the slumbering refugees were
awakened by the sound of gunfire.  One of Sokhela's daughters opened
the door and peered outside.  She heard shouts.  She heard doors kicked
open at the neighboring kraal.

She heard the wall of an old woman whose husband had been shot dead as
he hunted a lost cow in the gray dawn.  And then she saw them: 'many,
many' black men, wearing uniforms and military caps and carrying
rifles.  It was the Ndlela impi, the Ndlela army.  By now, the refugees
knew there was danger coming.  They were streaming out of the house and
slipping away into the bush.  Sokhela's daughter ran inside and woke
her father.

"The war has come," she said.

Sokhela hid under his bed.  The daughter positioned herself in the
doorway to await the enemy.  She left the door open behind her, hoping
to convey the impression that the house was empty.  A Ndlela warrior
sauntered toward her.

"Where is the man from here?"  he asked.

"There is no man here," she replied.

The soldier glanced through the door behind her, shrugged, and turned
to leave.  Just then, however, old Sokhela moved in his hiding place,
and the bed scraped on the cement floor.

The Ndlela soldier turned back.

"Come, come," he shouted to his comrades, 'there is someone here."
Several Ndlela soldiers pushed the daughter aside and stormed into the
house, rifles at the ready.

"I came away," she told me, 'because I didn't want to see.  They have
come to kill my father, and I don't want to see."

The bullets passed through the mattress and into Sokhela's heart, and
he became the fifth casualty in another of Msinga's senseless wars. Why
had he died?  An ancient elder of Sokhela's faction dimly remembered a
land dispute, but he could not say exactly how it originated, or when,
because it had happened long before his time. Otherwise, Mhlangaan's
warriors said the war arose from an incident that took place in a
migrant workers' barracks in the distant city of Kimberley in 1965.

"It all started," said Masithela Mbatha, an elder from Mhlangaan, 'when
a young man named Ntsele was sitting quietly and drinking his beer. Two
men from Ndlela sat down with him and helped themselves to his beer. 
Ntsele said, "How can you drink my beer without asking?"  And the
Ndlela men said, "How can you stop us?"  Ntsele was from Mhlangaan, and
he told his brothers about this rudeness.  The insult festered for
weeks.

"Then Christmas came," Masithela continued, 'and all we Zulus gathered
for a beer drink  Everyone was discussing this thing that was done to
Ntsele, and the young men wanted to fight.  I was there.  I fought,
too.

We fought with sticks and spears and knives.  Five men were killed four
of them and one of us."

The men involved in that brawl were arrested but released for lack of
evidence.  Once set free, they returned to Msinga and continued the war
in the hills.

"Many' men were killed, but the fires of anger finally burned out, and
peace returned to the banks of the Hyena River.  By 1982, however, a
new generation of warriors had come of age in Ndlela, and they were
thirsting for vengeance.  They said, "You killed our fathers in
Kimberley, so we must kill you."

The new war started quietly, as these wars do.  A Mhlangaan man was
assassinated in Johannesburg.  In Msinga, a Ndlela was killed in
retaliation.  One night, the Ndlela army came into Mhlangaan and shot
up a kraal with machine guns.  After that, the men on either side took
to the hills with their guns, and the war got underway in earnest.  In
the ensuing nine months, it claimed twenty-one lives, including
Sokhela's.  Three men were assassinated in hostels in Johannesburg, one
in Dundee.

Two were killed in a shoot-out aboard a bus.  Stezi Mpungose, a friend
of Nell's, was ambushed on a footpath, shot dead, and beheaded.  The
police made some half-hearted attempts to stop the war.  A local chief
intervened, but he failed, too.

And then one day in the winter of 1983, two old men came down from the
mountain to speak to Neil.  Albert Mbatha was a jocular fellow whose
trademark homburg was always tilted at a jaunty angle.  Thobola Mutwa
was a shy, diffident man who had recently retired after forty years in
Johannesburg, where he had worked as a security guard.  They were both
good friends of Neil's, but he hadn't seen them for a long time.  They
had been on impi, on active service in the ravines, for three hundred
nights and days.  And now they were too old and tired to continue.

"Oh, Numzaan," cried Albert, "You must help us stop this killing."

This was the truly tragic aspect of Msinga's wars: Nobody wanted them,
save the bloodthirsty young hotheads who set them off.  Ordinary people
thirsted for peace and stability.

Hardly anyone wanted to fight, but older men like Albert found it hard
to control their sons.

"When we tell them this terrible thing must stop," he said, 'they
reply, "Watch it, baba [father].  We'll hit you too."  So the
youngsters stirred up trouble, and then everyone else was forced to
join in by the law of indiscriminate retaliation.  Once the slaughter
was under way, there was simply no mechanism to stop it.  The tribal
leaders' power was waning, and the South African Police were entirely
ineffectual.  Even if a killing took place in broad daylight within
sight of hundreds, they could never seem to find witnesses.  Maybe they
didn't really try.  It was said to cost about a hundred dollars to buy
yourself out of a murder rap at the police station in Tugela Ferry, a
goat or two for a lesser offense.

And now Albert and Mutwa were asking Neil for help.

A less courageous man would have said no on the spot.  It was terribly
dangerous to intervene in Msinga's disputes, but Neil never said no.
After the old men left, he contacted the police, the local chiefs and
the district magistrate and started organizing a peace conference.  At
the time, there were two wars under way within a six-mile radius of the
project Mhlangaan versus Ndlela, and Mashunka against Ngubo and Neff
decided to attempt settlements of both simultaneously.  The
preliminaries took three months.  Warriors on all sides were suspicious
and had to be convinced that they would not be assassinated if they
came out of hiding.  To allay their fears, Neil persuaded a police
brigadier to give his blessing to the conference and to send some of
his men to attend.  It was a token gesture, but it strengthened the
warriors' confidence, and a date was finally set.

On the appointed day, Bob Frean of Durban's Daily News drove out to
Msinga.  The peace conference was the first of its kind, and his paper
thought it would make a fine feature story.

Frean arrived at the project just after dawn, and found Neff already
waiting, dressed as usual in frayed jeans and car-tire sandals.

In the newsman's estimation, the day got off to an inauspicious start.
He and Neil climbed into the project's Japanese microbus and set out
for an agreed-upon rendezvous, where a delegation from one of the
warring factions was supposed to be waiting.  The spot was deserted, so
they waited.

Hours passed.  The sun rose higher in the sky, and the heat grew
suffocating.  The dusty hills shimmered and danced in the distance.
Half-naked herd boys settled in the shade of nearby thorn trees and
stared at the white men.  Bony cattle hobbled by.  Frean got out and
walked around in the dust and desolation.  He peered over the wall of a
concrete stock dam, and saw a dead dog floating in the scummy water.  A
crushing sense of enervation descended on his shoulders.  Three hours
in Msinga, and he already wanted to get out.  Alcock had been there
eight years, but he still wasn't complaining.  In fact, he was sitting
behind the wheel of the microbus, scribbling furious letters to
newspapers and Members of Parliament about deplorable conditions in
Msinga.  Frean shook his head.  How on earth did the man stand it?

Another person who had his doubts about what Neil was up to was Warrant
Officer Jurgen Freese of the firearm squad at Tugela Ferry.  He was
waiting in the town's sweltering courthouse, fanning himself and
yawning.  In Jurgen Freese's opinion, the peace conference was a waste
of time.  He knew what would happen.  The warriors would eventually
arrive.

Alcock would make a speech.  Then the tribesmen would yell at one
another about incidents that had taken place in their fathers' and
grandfathers' days, and nothing would be resolved.

Freese was more or less right.  In due course, all four delegations
pitched up, and Nell made some opening remarks.

"All of you are suffering," he told the warriors.

"For months you have been sleeping in the hills.  You have known the
pain of having your friends and relatives killed.  But the pain has to
be forgotten if we are to find a path to stop the blood."  With that,
he ceded the floor to the warriors.

One by one, they stood up to affirm that they, too, wanted peace, but
beyond that, they found no common ground.

"A

lot was spoken," Freese commented, 'but nothing was really said."  In
the end, the Zulus agreed only to meet again, and the conference broke
up on a note of anti-climax.

Outside, the heat was pitiless.  Neil sent someone to buy cold drinks
at the general store.  The conferees waited on the shady porch of the
courthouse, watching goats forage through garbage in the dusty
marketplace across the street.  Mutwa, Albert, and other members of the
Mhlangaan delegation stood on one side, the men of Ndlela on the other,
not talking or even looking at one another.  Later, people would claim
to have seen sinister comings and goings around the courthouse,
conspiratorial nods and winks, but nobody remarked on them then, and
besides, Neil was not really on the lookout for danger.

He doubted that the Zulus would harm him.  He was their brother, their
father.  That was what many called him uBabawetbu, our father.

After the Cokes were drunk, Albert and the rest of the Mhlangaan
delegation clambered aboard an open truck and set off for home, with
Creina at the wheel.  On the outskirts of town, however, someone
started banging frantically on the roof of the cab.

"We cannot go down this road," they told Creina, pointing out that it
passed through the territory of their Ndlela enemies.

"There is danger here they said.  Creina was at a loss to understand
why they were so scared; after all, they were travelling under a truce
flag.  The tribesmen were insistent, though, so she turned back to the
courthouse.

There, Albert's delegation announced that it was willing to travel the
dangerous road only in a closed vehicle, with Neil at the wheel.  So
Creina drove home alone.

Around four that afternoon, nineteen sweating Zulu men squeezed into
Neil's microbus and set off after her.  Neil took the road that peeled
off the tar on the far side of the bridge and headed north along the
banks of the river, toward the land of the Ndlelas.  This was of no
particular concern to those of his passengers who were members of the
Mashunka faction, for they had no quarrel with the Ndlelas.  The
Mhlangaan men, on the other hand, fell dead silent as they entered the
territory of their enemies.  They were right to be afraid.  Eyes were
watching through binoculars.  Word was passing down the line.  Rifle
bolts were snapping and clips of ammunition clicking into place on
submachine guns.

Halfway through the danger zone, the road ahead disappeared into a
tumble of huge boulders.  As the van neared the spot, some small Zulus
boys at the roadside started dancing in a frenzy of excitement.  They
shouted Olololo, a Zulu war cry which means We've got you.  The sound
filled the passengers with alarm, but Neil didn't seem to notice.  His
eyes were on the road.

As he turned the corner, some fifty to seventy Ndlela warriors rose
from their hiding places among the boulders and started shooting,
concentrating their fire on the driver.  A bullet from an automatic
rifle hit Neil in the neck.  Blood spewed into the windshield.  The van
slowed to a halt.  Nell opened the door, staggered out, and felt.

Behind him, Zulus were boiling out of the bus with bullets whistling
around their ears.  The neutral Mashunka delegation stood to one side
with their hands up, screaming, "Tshwele baThembu,t' Have mercy!  Have
mercy!  The Ndlela soldiers ignored them and fired at the fleeing
Mhlangaan.  Several were already injured one hobbling away on a
shattered foot, another trying to run while holding his intestines
inside with his hands.  The Ndlelas left their hiding places and gave
chase, firing as they ran.  The screams and gunshots died away in the
distance, and there was silence save for the groaning of the wounded. A
Zulu man lay dying in the bus, and four others Mutwa and Albert among
them had been killed before getting very far.  And Neil was lying on
his face in the dust of Africa, dead.

Once the shooting stopped, crowds of weeping, praying Zulu women
converged on the scene.  They found an old Zulu man sitting bleakly in
the middle of the road, keeping watch over Neil's body.  As Neil fell,
his briefcase burst open, scattering papers and money.  Someone
suggested that the old man pick up the papers, but he said no.  The
police must see it all, just as it happened; nothing must be touched.
So he fetched a rock, placed it beside Neil's body, and sat down upon
it, waiting.

One or two cars came by, but their black drivers were too scared to
help.  A big bus thundered over the horizon in a cloud of dust, edged
through the crowd, around Neil's body, and drove on without stopping.
The sun wheeled and set, and it was nightfall when the police came.

The old man looked up and saw cigarettes glowing in the dark above him.
One of the cops stirred Neil's corpse with his toe.

"We don't pick up dogs," he said.

"You pick him up.  He's your Jesus."

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.  It was
very quiet there.

- ]OSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness AND SO NEIL was dead.  For many
days, it did not seem real to Creina.  Zulu women started brewing beer
and preparing food for a funeral.  Whose funeral?  An old black man
appeared in the doorway, took off his hat, and held it over his heaR.

"You're all alone now," he said, 'all alone, all alone."  It all seemed
so unreal.

One morning while it was still dark outside, she heard the clink of
shovels and spades as men climbed the hill to dig the grave.  Later,
she heard the big truck staR, and knew her stepson Dave had left to
fetch the bodies from Greytown.  They had been taken there, forty miles
away in white South Africa, because there were rumors of a plot to
steal the corpses from the morgue at Tugela Ferry and dismember them
for inclusion in a battle medicine brew.  So Dave drove all the way to
Greytown, and when he got there the police declined to release all six
bodies to him, citing talk of a plot to waylay the truck on its way
back into Msinga.  And so only Neil's body was taken from the morgue
and placed in its coffin, a reject bought cheap from an undertaker in
the Place of Weeping.

The coffin was loaded on the truck and set out on its last sad journey,
bracketed by vehicles bristling with armed police.

Neil had asked to be buried on the cliff top, on a spot overlooking the
bend in the river and the sweeping floodplain beyond.  A crowd was
waiting up there in the burning sun two prominent black men in suits
and a thousand ordinary Msinga people in rags and tatters and vestiges
of tribal finery.

Many mourners remarked favorably on the coffin, which was made of two
shades of wood, one light and the other dark.

They said it was a fitting coffin for a man like Neil Alcock, who was
half-black and half-white in his heart.

An ancient Zionist prophet said a few words, and the crowd sang "Nkosi
Sikalel' iAfrika,"

"God Bless Africa."  And then the coffin was lowered into the grave and
covered with stones, and Creina turned and walked away.  She sat near
the river for a while, watching the male mourners wind down the cliff
to the flat rocks at its base, where they stripped off their clothes
and washed themselves in accordance with Zulu burial ritual.

This is not real, she thought; this is not my river; it looks just like
the Ganges.

And so Neil was dead.  Why?  It seemed so pointless for him to have
died in that way.  In the distant cities, many whites received the news
with disbelief, thinking, No, this just can't be; Neil Alcock cannot
have been killed by Zulus.  They were certain that there must have been
a conspiracy, that if the connections could only be traced, it would
emerge that the order for the killing came from somewhere inside the
white system, inside the secret police or the apparatus of military
intelligence.  All the laws of destiny, the rules of poetic symmetry,
and the requirements of plot demanded that this be so, but there was
lit He to back the theory save its proponents' longing to believe it.
It was hard to believe that any white man other than Neil himself had
sufficient influence among the tribes to coax an impi to do his secret
bidding.

The bad-cop theory was a little more compelling.  Shortly before his
death, Neil had finally prevailed on the police brass to send an
undercover officer to investigate Msinga's hundreds of unsolved murders
and the reek of fix that hung over them.  In the weeks leading up to
the ambush, Neil and a cop named Fires van Vuuren held several secret
meetings with Zulus who claimed to have evidence regarding such
things.

Under the circumstances, certain members of the police garrison at
Tugela Ferry had reason to wish Neil dead, and they were in a position
to have organized it most of them were Zulus, several with blood ties
of the Ndlela faction.

The mystery was never really solved, although the police seemed to try
a little harder than usual.  Alcock was a ka#erboetie and a perpetual
pain in their necks, but he remained a white man, and his killing
called for swift and certain retribution.  So police poured into the
district, set up a tent camp on the outskirts of Tugela Ferry, and used
helicopters to round up the Ndlela irnpi.  Scores of warriors were
arrested, and a dozen or so weapons dug up from secret caches in the
bush.  Ballistics tests proved that some of the guns had been used in
the ambush, but the police apparently struggled to establish exactly
whom they belonged to, and by whom their triggers had been pulled.

Eventually, thirteen Ndlelas were charged with murder, but there wasn't
much of a case against them.  Six men were shot dead in broad daylight
on an open road in a densely populated area, but nobody saw anything.
It was the same old Msinga story.  Indeed, the case differed from the
thousands before it in only one respect- there was at least one
witness, a woman named Buthelezi who stepped forward and broke the law
of silence.  She told the police she had seen a throng of men with
rifles at the ready sitting on the rocks above the ambush site an hour
before the killings.  She identified eighteen of them by name, and then
she vanished.  When I went looking for her, some Zulus told me there
was no such person, and never had been.  A white policeman interpreted
this to mean she was probably dead.  Without her, there was no case at
all;

the attorney general declined to prosecute, and the thirteen suspects
were set free.

So white man's justice had failed yet again, and to some men in the
valley the situation seemed to call for a traditional Msinga solution.
Soon after the ambush, the generals of four nearby isigodi came to
Creina and told her that if she wished, if she was hungry for blood,
they would lead their combined armies into Ndlela and burn it to the
ground.  Creina thanked them, for they were paying her dead husband a
great honor, but said no.  Neil would not have wanted more war.  So the
generals went home, and the case was closed in Msinga terms, too.  All
that was left was for Creina to come to terms with it, and that was the
hardest part of all.

She believed in love, you see; not in a sentimental sense, or a
religious sense, but just.  love: giving of yourself and trying to do
good for others.  Her and NeWs willingness to love had carried them
deeper into Africa than any other whites, and she thought love would
protect them there.  It seemed she had been mistaken.

"After Neil's death," she said, "I thought that the whole of my life
had been meaningless, and that I had misunderstood every single thing I
had ever looked at that there had never been any meaning from the
beginning."

After thinking it through, Creina concluded that she must somehow have
failed in love, not loved enough or sacrificed enough to shield her
husband from the forces at work in Msinga.  It seemed to her that
staying was the only way to salvage the meaning of NeWs life, so she
refused to abandon the project.  Friends, relatives, and the police
tried to convince her otherwise, but she refused.

"Have you ever planted a tree?"

she asked one cop.

"Neil and I planted a tree, and I must stay to see it grow."  The
chorus of white friends and relatives eventually gave up and returned
to their cities, leaving Creina and her teenage sons on their own.

She built a rock garden on NeWs grave and planted it with aloes,
wildflowers, and grasses.  She sat on the grave for hours on end, all
through the night sometimes, telling herself that the world had not
come to a standstill, that life and movement remained; that even
sitting there, in the hollow she had worn on her husband's grave, she
was hurtling through space at nine hundred miles an hour.  She grew
thin and gaunt, and her friends sometimes feared for her sanity, for
she was in the habit, in that extremity of grief, of talking about Neil
in the present tense, as if he were still alive.  They redoubled their
efforts to persuade her to leave, but she would have none of it.

"Every time I left the farm, I felt as though I was dying," she said.

"It was the only reality there was, and the world outside was so
strange."

A year passed, a bitterly hard year for a white woman alone in Africa,
and a widow at that, so low on the African social scale that she had
virtually ceased to exist.  Creina couldn't speak Zulu very well, and
knew next to nothing about farming Neil had always taken care of that.
In fact, Neil had taken care of almost everything, and now Neil was
gone.

"The center pole has fallen," said the Zulus, referring to the pole
that kept their structures of mud and thatch erect.

They doubted that the project could survive without him, and doubted
that Creina had the courage to stay.  Believing that Mdukatshani was
doomed, some of them starting taking care of their own interests. There
was a rash of petty thefts.

One of Nell's Zulu lieutenants plowed and planted crops in a sacrosanct
conservation camp.  Another set himself up in the transport business,
ferrying goods and people all over the district in the project's truck.
A third man, also a truck driver, took to using the truck for his
night-time jaunts.  When Creina asked him to stop, he suggested she
mind her own business.

And then someone entered Creina's office, which was never locked, and
could in fact not be locked, and took the only things of value in it: a
broken cassette recorder and a portable typewriter that Neil had given
her.  When the theft was discovered, everyone thought, Uh-oh, this
Mboma's doing Mboma Dladla, the little Zulu starveling who'd become
part of the Alcock household at the very beginning.  Creina had nursed
him back to health, and he had become her son GG's best friend, and
subject of the best-selling Story of Mboma.

Mboma and Ndudu and Sensilube these are names we must resurrect now.
They were among the herd boys who had once lived in her household and
been her sons' best friends members of her family, virtually. $ensilube
was the boy who milked the cows in secret so he could feed his orphaned
brothers and sisters.  Ndudu was the spiv, the boy with wit and
sparkle, and Mboma was the clever one, the ingenious kid of whom Neil
joked, "This boy will either be prime minister, or wind up on the
gallows."

Several years had since passed, and Mboma, Ndudu, and Sensilube were
now in their late teens or early twenties.

Ndudu and Sensilube were still living nearby, but Mboma had been cast
out, and it looked as though he was fulfilling the darker half of Neirs
prophecy.  He had been caught stealing from fellow Zulu workers and was
kicked off the project at their insistence.  Mboma's version was that
he'd been framed, and that the others had put a witchcraft on him
because they were jealous of his closeness to Nell and the white boys.
Whatever the truth, Mboma left the Alcocks and went to live with his
father.  The Alcocks heard that he'd dug up the old man's gun and sold
it, then stolen his clothes and sold them, too.  After that, Mboma was
banished again, and vanished into the maw of Soweto.

A few months after the ambush, though, he turned up in Msinga again.
He'd grown into a heavy-set young man, moon faced and slow moving, with
a chiseler's winning smile.  The farm committee seemed to have
forgotten that it had declared the project off-limits to him, and
Creina lacked the authority to enforce the rule herself.  Whenever she
drove out of the project's gates, there was Mboma, peering at her
through his scholarly bifocals, thumb in the air for a ride.  She
always picked him up, but she had grown wary of him from long
experience.  He was hanging around on the day her typewriter
disappeared, and the evidence pointed to him as the one who'd taken
it.

Creina didn't think it worth calling the police, but the typewriter was
of sentimental value, so she asked Mboma's community to help.  A day or
two later, two of Msinga's toughest guys showed up at the project,
announcing that they'd come to solve the case of the missing
typewriter.

Kunene was a professional car thief, and Zwane a famous warrior, with
many killings to his name.

"A most enchanting man," said Creina, and not at all sarcastically; if
you were prissy about choosing friends in Msinga, you were likely to
have no friends at all.  The two tough guys borrowed one of the
project's vans, and set out in search of Mboma.

That evening, Creina was flagged down in the bush by a crowd of
shouting Zulu men.  They told her they'd caught

Mboma and $ens'fiube, another of her Zulu 'sons," in possession of
something in a suitcase.  Was this the missing machine?  It was indeed.
Creina burst out crying.  The Zulu men stood around beaming.  It was
just a small thing, but it gave Creina a tremendous surge of hope and
confidence.

By rallying around her, the Zulu men seemed to be saying that she, too,
was an insider now, in the way that Neil had been.

Even as the hand-over ceremony was under way, however, Mboma and
Sensilube were on their way to the police station at Tugela Ferry, to
report that the warrior Zwane had leveled a revolver at them.  Next
thing, the police were out looking for him, investigating a firearms
charge.  Zwane fled to Johannesburg.  As soon as he was out of the way,
Mboma and Sensilube came swaggering back into the project, not in the
least put out.  When next Creina passed through the farm gates, Mboma
was there as usual, smiling and chattering as though nothing had
happened.  There was little Creina could do but smile back, and stop to
pick him up.

Another year passed.  One day, South Africa's minister of justice
passed overhead in a helicopter and landed at Tugela Ferry, where a
press conference was held.  The minister made noises about cleaning up
the district and ameliorating its suffering, but the killings
continued, as did the hunger and hardship.  Lacking Neil's command of
Zulu and his male authority, Creina found it hard to negotiate the
tortuous tribal politics on the far side of the river.  She and the
farm committee thus decided to expand the community gardens that lay on
Mdukatshani itself.  Several hundred additional plots were laid out
alongside the river, dams built, a pump installed, and the women of the
valley invited in to till and hoe and plant.  The gardens were a great
success, and Cre'ma's bead business was doing better than ever.  Orders
were pouring in from the great fashion houses of Europe.  Msinga beads
were to be seen in the display cases of Yves St.  Laurent, around the
necks of Vogue models, and on the wrists of Hollywood stars.

Bead day came once a month.  On its eve, Cre'ma drove into Greytown and
drew the proceeds of sales from a bank.  The following morning, Zulu
women in purple cloaks and ocher headdress came out of the hills, and,
folding their stiff leather skirts beneath their thighs, settled in a
great chattering flock in the shade of a big thorn tree.  Creina sat
down among them with a pair of scales and bags of ruby-red and
aquamarine and emerald-green glass beads.  Then loose beads were
exchanged for finished articles, and other things exchanged, too:
gossip and rumors of war, obituaries and requiems for newly dead
fathers, husbands, and sons.  Creina loved her bead women, and assumed
they loved her back.

On the eve of one bead day, Creina's sons came home from town with a
van load of bread and groceries, and a satchel containing two thousand
dollars in cash the bead women's wages.  It was dark by the time they
arrived, so they left the money and goods in the van overnight.  In the
morning, the gas tank was empty, and so was the vehicle itself: All the
groceries had vanished, along with the satchel of cash.

Creina couldn't figure out how the thief or thieves had carried off an
entire van load of loot on foot.  She was standing there, puzzling it
over, when some staff members mentioned that they'd just seen Mboma
Dladla and some of his cronies on the road, pushing a broken-down
pickup piled with cardboard cartons and grocery bags.  Creina put two
and two together and called the police, it turned out that Mboma's
pickup had been stolen in a nearby white town, and as for the missing
groceries, some were discovered stashed away in his grandmother's
kraal, along with about one hundred and eighty dollars in cash.  The
rest of the money had vanished.

"What money?"  said Mboma.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

So Mboma was taken away, protesting his innocence, and Creina was left
in a quandary.  Forty or fifty Zulu women were sitting under the thorn
tree outside her hut waiting to be paid for their beadwork.  Creina
felt rotten.  She felt she'd been negligent, and blamed herself for the
theft.  So she drove back into town, borrowed money to cover the wages,
and resigned herself to the long and hard struggle of repaying the loan
out of her own wage of seventy-five dollars a month.

There was some consolation to be drawn from the fact that

Mboma was behind bars, and presumably on his way to jail, but it didn't
last long.  One Sunday, six weeks after his arrest, he came back home,
laughing his head off again.  Creina was outraged.  She called the
police, who explained that Mboma had been released because he had 'a
sore eye."  Such were the mysterious processes of law enforcement in
Msinga.

Mboma hadn't held a steady job in his life, but he suddenly seemed to
have plenty of money.  He tossed coins to adoring young herd boys
donated groceries to the poor.  Indeed, someone claimed to have seen
him root under a rock near his family's kraal and emerge with fistfuls
of cash, which he threw into the air, singing and dancing and blessing
his ancestors for bringing him luck.  When asked where the money came
from,

Mboma reportedly laughed.

"If you are walking to water," he said, 'and find something in your
path, it is yours to keep."

Creina tried not to count betrayals.  She'd virtually raised that boy.
She provided a steady income for one of his grandmothers, who did
beadwork, and Neil had lied to help his grandfather obtain a government
old-age pension.  She and Neil had done several good works in Mboma's
community, which was Ndlela the community whose army had ultimately
murdered Neil.  Indeed, one of Mboma's uncles was in the impi that
carried out the killings, and when the police came hunting in
helicopters, relatives used Creina's telephone to arrange a hiding
place in the city for him.  Only one woman in Ndlela had come forward
to testify about the ambush, and now nobody would test fly about the
bead-money theft not even Creina's beloved bead women.  Worse yet,
Mboma emerged from the affair as something of a hero.  Little Zulu boys
would come to Creina and say, "Oh, Mboma's so nice;

he's giving us presents," while their mothers stood around beaming.
What could Creina do?  She forgave, as she'd always forgiven.

From a criminal point of view, the theft of the bead money was
inspirational, in Msinga, two thousand dollars was a fortune.  Nobody
in the valley had had any idea that there were such riches on
Mdukatshani, to be had more or less for the taking.  In Msinga, anyone
who owned anything worth stealing had guns, guards, and barbed-wire
fences, but Creina was alone and defenseless.

One night, she was awakened by a torch in her face.  Two young black
men were standing over her bed, leveling a revolver at her.

"We want money," they said.

"We kill you."

Creina got up and opened the safe where the bead women's wages were
kept.  She was a little too slow for the robbers' liking, so they
dubbed her to the ground with the butt of the gun, then hauled her to
her feet, bleeding and half-conscious, and warned her to be quick about
it.  So she handed over the package of bank notes, and they vanished
into the night.

She didn't know who had done it, of course, and Ndudu was the last
person she suspected.  Ndudu was one of her younger son's best friends.
He was no longer working on the project, but he almost always came to
lunch on Sunday.  He was there as usual after the robbery, full of
solicitude, and wondering aloud who could have done such a vile deed.
He knew more than he was letting on, though.  He knew when Creina went
to get the money, how much it was, and where she hid it.  He also knew
her dogs.  A day or two later, he was in police custody, confessing
that it was he who led the robbers to the house, he who calmed the
barking dogs and held them while his accomplices went inside to
pistol-whip his white mother.

After Ndudu's robbery, the darkness seemed to close in on Creina.  If
Mboma, Sensilube, and Ndudu were not loyal to her, was there anyone in
the valley whom she could trust?

Suddenly, every sign seemed ominous.  Strangers approached the
project's staff asking curious questions about her dogs.

The telephone kept ringing in the dead of night, and a black voice
would ask for people she'd never heard of.  For the first time in her
life, Creina grew afraid.  She came to dread the sunset.  She often lay
awake long into the night, listening for footfalls on the path outside
her hut, and praying that if they came again, they would at least not
hit her, please not hit her.

Half of her face was left nerveless after Ndudu's robbery, and she'd
almost lost an eye.

And then the year turned, and it was 1985.  The winter was a bad one,
as brutal as any in recent memory.  By August, it had not rained in ten
months.  The grass was all eaten, and cattle started dying again.  Even
the rats grew desperate so desperate that they lost their fear of
humans, and started invading Msinga's houses.  At night, when Creina
doused her lamp, they invaded her hut and skittered over her face as
she lay waiting for the next Ndudu.

When the sun rose, the sky was blue and cold and cloud less, and puffs
of powdery dust hung in the wake of bony cattle moving on the
hillsides.  And then the goats started coming, huge swarms of hungry
goats, pouring through holes in the project's cut fences and devouring
every last shred of vegetation on Mdukatshani's dusty, eroded hills.

The goat owners lived along the project's boundaries, and

Creina regarded them as friends.  She begged them to keep their animals
out, and they were only too eager to oblige.

For a day or two, there would be no goats on the project, but promises
were soon forgotten, and the goats would start coming again, scavenging
along the riverbank and right into

Creina's mud-walled living-room.  She'd come out at night to find dung
on her windowsills, dung all over the floor.

Creina was so weary of talking.  She and Neil and their Zulu allies had
talked nicely for more than a decade, but nothing ever seemed to
change.  It had always been like this, you see, even in Neil's day,
even in the time of his last crusade, when he was smashing gates on
white farm roads and accompanying the Zulus in midnight raids on his
white neighbors' dwindling springs.  Zulus knew their animals wouldn't
be shot or impounded if they were turned loose on Mdukatshani, and a
lawless few took advantage of that fact.  They cut the project's fences
to ribbons and there was little anyone could do about it, short of
resorting to force.

Neil's two dos est Zulu allies, his blood brothers Majozi and Nxongo,
had become the chief indunas, or prime ministers, of their respective
Zulu sub tribes  Both men urged Msinga's outlaws to cooperate with the
project; both were warned to mind their own business or die.  As if to
underscore the threat, a Zulu appointed to make sure that no green
trees were felled on Mdukatshani was waylaid and beaten to within an
inch of his life.

Neil had understood why these things happened.  He knew the depths of
desperation that drove people to such acts, so he forgave, as he'd
always forgiven.  That grew harder as the years went by and grazing
piracy intensified, and he and his Zulu allies eventually decided to
strike back.  They rounded up all the goats and cattle trespassing on
Mdukatshani and started driving them towards the kraal of the nearest
Zulu chief, planning to ask him to try and punish their owners under
traditional African law.  The posse never reached its destination,
though.  It was waylaid en route by a mob of irate Zulus who waved
sticks in the air and howled with outrage, accusing the white man of
stealing their cattle.  They threatened violence, and a very ugly scene
ensued.  Nell wound up firing warning shots into the air to keep the
peace, and had to let the trespassing goats and cattle go.

"There are two theories of fence maintenance," Creina observed in her
next newsletter.

"Shoot or negotiate.  Our neighbors live by the first theory, we live
by the second.  Our neighbors have their fences cut, but Mdukatshani's
fences are severed too.  If guns, threats and talks have failed, what's
left?

Something formidably slow."

Formidably slow indeed.  In the final year of his life, Neil was
reduced to pleading with the local Zulu chiefs to support the project
and uphold some semblance of law.  This put the chiefs in a very
difficult position.  Their own authority was growing tenuous, and they
were reluctant to be seen as acting against their own people on behalf
of a project run by a white man.  Shortly before his death, Neil asked
the Msinga's Regional Authority, or council of chiefs, to put the
sensitive livestock trespass issue on the agenda for an upcoming
meeting.  On the appointed day, he spent four hours waiting at the
meeting place, but no chiefs came, and Neil didn't live long enough to
find out why.  A week later, he was dead, shot down in broad daylight
by Zulus, within earshot of hundreds of Zulus who heard nothing.

And now, in the winter of 1985, the situation was worse thaa ever.
Whenever Creina raised her eyes to the horizon, goats were swarming
across it.  After they'd eaten everything else, they started on Neil's
grave, stripping it of its flowers and and defiling it with their
droppings.

"I just felt desk' Creina said.

"We had meeting after meeting with everyonai I said, "For God's sake,
can't you just make sure the goats; into the gardens?", They had
finished my garden.  They fiaied everybody s gardens.  Day after day,
we'd see them from almost everywhere, advancing.

I'd say to people; "Can't you just post children, just let them swim in
the river' and shoo the goats away?"  Small boys would be posted for a
day or two, but then they'd vanish, and the invasion would begin
again.

Early one winter morning, Creina set out from her home with a pack of
mongrels at her heels.  One of the dogs was

Insiswa, a tawny brute with the look of a jackal and an instinct to go
for the throat.  As a puppy, he'd attacked goats, but the habit had
been thrashed out of him.  He was a good dog these days.  Creina led
the dogs across the dirt road and up into the foothills, to a barren,
sheet-eroded field she was trying to red aim  She was working alone,
laying rocks in anti-erosion contours, when the first flock of goats
appeared.

She waved her arms, shouted, and threw pebbles at them.  The goats
scattered, but as soon as Creina turned her back they returned.  She
chased them off several times, but they always came back again.

Soon, two more flocks appeared.  While she was chasing one, another
would dash into the field behind her.  The goats were pitiless,
relentless.  The skirmish went on all morning, and it was slowly
driving Creina mad.  She thought she'd lost the ability to feel anger
when Neil was murdered, but she was suddenly seething with rage.  She
thought, Well, maybe the only way anybody will understand anything is
if I do things the way Msinga does.

Msinga's way was violence and killing, and Msinga's rules, as Cre'ma
saw them, were 'an eye for an eye, and then an arm for an arm, and a
leg for a leg."  That was the law on the black side of the frontier,
and on the white side of the frontier, too.  If black-owned goats
invaded a white man's land, the white man shot or impounded them, and
threatened to do likewise to their owners to put a bullet between their
eyes and throw their black bodies in a thorn thicket so dense that
their rotting corpses would be traced only by the smell.

This was an old Mrikaner philosophy called kragdadigheid, the act of
power: You took what you wanted, and held it with your gun and fists.
Creina and Ne'll Alcock had spent their entire lives fighting against
whites who lived according to that barbaric philosophy, but now Creina
decided to try it their way.

It was August 1985, almost two centuries since Dawid Malan crossed the
Great Fish River.  Like him, Creina entered Africa an enlightened
creature.  Her head was full of reason and rationality, of D H Lawrence
and T S Eliot.  She was a gentle person, moved easily to tears.  She
was so sickened by violence that she could not bear to sit through an
ordinary Hollywood action-adventure movie.  She had always tried to
love, but now it was time to kill.

When the next flock came, she whistled for Insiswa and took off running
alongside the goats, inciting the dog to attack.  Insiswa had been
whipped for attacking goats, so he was bewildered and uncertain at
first.  Creina kept goading, though, and the dog finally took off on
the hunt.  Creina lost sight of him, but she heard a terror-stricken
bleating in the bushes, and knew he'd caught and killed a goat.
Insiswas returned, tail wagging, and Creina was coldly pleased.

She set the dog on another goat, and then another, and another.  Two
goats were killed, two injured too badly to walk, before Creina decided
that she'd shed enough blood to make herself dear.  Then she stalked
over to the community gardens and told the Zulu women what she'd
done.

"Insiswa has just killed your goats," she shouted.

"It was not an accident.  I wanted to kill them and will go on killing
your goats until they stop coming onto the farm.  Go home and tell your
men!"

The following morning, Creina returned to the site of her killings and
found one of the dead goats still lying there, half-eaten by some
scavenging beast.  She set to work, carrying rocks to and fro.  The
smell of death hung in the air around her.

An old Zulu woman a relative of Mboma's came up to her, asking for
blankets and food.  Creina screamed, "Go away, you horrible old woman!"
She worked furiously all morning, entirely untroubled by goats.  There
wasn't a single goat on the project.  Not one.

"I thought I had won," Creina said.

"I had beaten Msinga.  I had found a language Msinga could
understand."

She had indeed, and Msinga replied in a similar tongue.

Three weeks later the owner of one of the goats she'd killed sent
Creina a death threat.  It brought home to her what she had done.  It
was like waking up from a bad dream, a night mare in which some foul
excrescence had come bubbling up out of some uncharted reach of her
brain.  She felt defiled.  She had behaved like a savage, like a Boer
like all those white men along the border who shot or impounded
trespassing Zulu livestock and threatened to do likewise to their
owners.

She felt as though she'd betrayed everything she lived for, and all
Nell had died for.  So she visited the aggrieved goat owner, begged
forgiveness for her uncontrollable temper and promised to make
restitution.

It was a mistake.  It merely revealed another vulnerability, another
avenue of exploitation.  Not long after, Creina received a second
letter in the post.  In it, a Zulu man accused her of killing eight of
his goats, in a place where she had never been.

He demanded compensation, and added a little postscript, entirely in
keeping with the traditions of a brutal continent.

"If you don't pay," he wrote, "I will kill you."

Creina had been talking into my tape recorder every night for almost a
week, and her voice was growing hoarse.  Her tale was not yet done, but
she fell silent for a while, and I lowered my head into my hands.  I
didn't want to hear any more.  I was thinking about Afrikaners about
Dawid Malan and the Doppers, the frontiersmen who extinguished the
light of the Enlightenment because they found themselves in a place of
darkness, where loving made for weak and doubtful men.

Creina's willingness to love, to bear light, had carried her deeper
into Africa than any other white I had ever heard of, and she seemed to
be telling me that the Doppers were right.  If you loved you were
vulnerable, and if you were vulnerable you were weak, and if you were
weak in Africa, you got fucked, and fucked again, and again, until you
could no longer stand it.

And then Creina resumed her tale, and finally answered the question I
put to her on the night of my arrival, the night she'd rid died me like
a sphim.  I had asked, "How do you live in this strange place?"  and
now she was about to tell me.

"I put the second death-threat letter aside," she whispered, 'and
looked out the door, and I was suddenly terribly afraid.  I had this
sense of utter blackness, worse than when Neil had died.  I thought,
Well, I can't actually live in Msinga, because I haven't got what it
takes to live by Msinga rules.  I could manage two goats once, but I
would never be able to keep it up.  I felt utterly betrayed by loving.
All the things I had ever been told about love just weren't true.  It
was all full of false promises.

I understood that love was a safety and a protection, and that if you
loved you would be rewarded by someone loving you back, or at least not
wanting to damage you.  But it wasn't true, any of it.  I knew that if
I stayed, this was how it was going to be: It would never get any
better; it would stay the same, or get worse.  I thought, if you're
really going to live in Africa, you have to be able to look at it and
say, This is the way of love, down this road: Look at it hard.  This is
where it is going to lead you.

"I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing
until it has been tested by its own defeat.  I felt I was being asked
to try to love enough not to be afraid of the consequences.  I realized
that love, even if it ends in defeat, gives you a kind of honor; but
without love, you have no honor at all.  I think that is what I
misunderstood all my life.  Love is to enable you to transcend
defeat.

"You said one could be deformed by this country, and yet it seems to me
one can only be deformed by the things one does to oneself.  It's not
the outside things that deform you, it's the choices you make.  To live
anywhere in the world, you must know how to live in Africa.  The only
thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves
light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness."

She fell silent for a while, and when she spoke again it was about the
paradox of light and darkness, about rare and tiny sources of light
that were visible only from places of deep darkness, such as the one we
were in.  I looked up, but the sky seemed pitch black to me.  It was
late winter, and the Zulus were burning grass across the river to
ensure a swift sprouting of green when the first rains fell.  The wind
was laden with the acrid smell of smoke, and there was an orange glow
in the sky.

We sat there in the dark, this otherworldly woman and I, our faces bat
in the light of the fires, the hot wind stirring our hair, and for me,
it was like standing in the mouth of some diabolical tiara ace like
staring into hell.

We must give ourselves into the arms of the Great African mother and
trust she will not drop us.

- BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

I'M SO VERY tired, my friend.  This all started so long ago, so long
ago, and I'm so deeply enmeshed in half-truths and fictionalizations of
myself that I'll never escape until I simply tell the truth.  This is
not the book I was contracted to write, long ago by someone in New
York, and I am not sure I'm any of the men I have pretended to be.  The
book that was to be was very different from the book you have just
read.

It was supposed to be about the Malan clan, and our bloody trajectory
across three centuries of African history; a book that began with Dawid
Malan and traced apartheid from its roots to poisonous fruits.  But I
am a reporter and a muckraker, so I started raking the muck in my own
brain, and discovered a story more telling than the one I had in
mind.

This other story begins long ago in a cave on the banks of a nameless
river, on the shores of a nameless green sea.  In this cave lived
creatures unlike any ever seen before.  They were tall, clean-limbed,
dark-skinned, and almost hairless.

They used tools, hunted with weapons, painted their bodies with ocher,
and buried their dead a sign that they were self-aware.  You could have
taken one of them and put him in a suit and turned him loose in
Manhattan, and nobody would have turned a hair, because they looked
just like us.  In fact, they were us; they were Homo sapiens sap lens
the very first modern man.  Some of these men stayed in and around
their cave, and some set out to conquer new lands.  They walked out of
the continent we call Africa, and nothing was ever heard from them
again.

And then one day, countless generations after their brothers had
vanished, the dark-skinned Africans living in the cave's vicinity
looked up and saw two riders crossing the horizon, a black woman and a
white man.  It was August 1788, and Dawid Malan was coming home, not
that he saw it that way.  How was he to know?  Nobody knew it, not
then.

For Dawid Malan, the nameless stream was just another obstacle to be
forded in his headlong flight from the law, so he and Sara just rode on
by.  Two more centuries would pass before archaeologists discovered the
cave at the mouth of the Klasies River, and in it, the oldest relics
yet found of the species we call mankind.

A few days later, the riders came to another river, the Great Fish
River, on the far side of which lay Africa.  Dawid Malan had been away
from Africa for a very, very long time.  His skin had been blanched
white by aeons in the mist and snow, and he carried the coldness of the
northern winter in his heart.  All those aeons of whiteness behind him,
those aeons of cthnocentricity, in which whites were 'us' and all
others 'them," and the relationship between the two was one mostly of
war.  As he spurred his horse across the river, Dawid Malan surely
thoht, What now?  If I lower my gun and open my arm will the Africans
embrace me as a brother?  Or will they lvatage of my position to plunge
their spears into me The ,n tableau remained frozen in that moment for
lwid Malan and his generation found no grounds for Africa, so they put
the black man down and-[Wd a keeping him that way, forever and ever and
ever.

"ItZ had changed between that day and the day I came my country, after
eight years of running away My "W) still standing guard with guns at
the " -' : "' - k - ready and jackmAtnca s bac , anti I was one of
them.

I didn't have to jtt archives for Dawid Malan; I looked

411 in the mirror and there he was.  His frontier had moved inside my
head, and travelled with me wherever I went.  I thought of him whenever
I crossed the border into the riot-torn black townships, and my guts
started gnarling with dread.  I thought, What now?  If I lower my guard
and approach these people with open arms, will they embrace me like a
brother?  Or will they pick up stones at the sight of me, and throw
them at my speeding car?  A dozen generations had passed, but the
question remained essentially the same.  If Dawid Malan had a disease
of the soul, then Rian Malan had it too.

Call it whatever you choose, but for me it was something that could not
be spoken, that nobody knew how to say;

something that could be addressed only in allegory.  One allegory, on
the editorial page of Johannesburg's Sunday Times, portrayed white
South Africans as a nation of paranoics, stranded on a desert island in
the midst of what they believed to be a shark-infested sea.  They would
never be induced to leave their island unless someone convinced them it
was safe to go in the water.  The writer concluded by appealing to the
Western powers to help whites understand that the creatures in the
encircling sea weren't sharks at all, but friendly, harm less dolphins.
It was a nice idea, but impractical.  What did he expect the West to
do?  What could anyone do?  I had no idea.

I just thought that the time had come for one of us to venture into the
sea and find out what was there.

So I threw away the book that was to be and set out to confront this
thing in a place where I knew it lay in myself.  I have told you
several murder stories, but the true subject of this narrative has been
the divided state of my own heart.  I have always been two people, you
see a Just White Man, appalled by apartheid and the cruelties committed
in its name, and an Afrikaner with a disease of the soul.  Dawid Malan
might have diagnosed it differently, but for me it was a question of
being white in Africa, the continent of cruel dictators and endless
famine, of collapsing economies, crumbling infrastructures, starving
refugees and perpetual civil war.  It seemed risky to lower one's
defenses on such a continent, and yet the price, of dominating it was
way too high in terms of the damage we were doing to black people, but
also to ourselves.  Two centuries of keeping them down had left us
spiritually deformed, rotten with fear and greed, and yet we still
couldn't find it in ourselves to trust.

So what were we to do?  I didn't know, but the domain of crime seemed
as likely a place to seek answers as any.

And so I set off on a pilgrimage that led from town to town and grave
to grave and around and around in circles.

Until I went to Msinga, I didn't learn much that I didn't know already,
but Msinga .... You must understand that apartheid had left South
Africa surgically and scientifically divided, whites on this side,
blacks on that, and the twain very seldom meeting.  There were
exceptions, of course, but not many.  The Roman Catholic Church had
installed white priests and nuns in a few black parishes, and some
townships were rumored to harbor a white renegade or two.  Around that
time, a white Methodist moved into Soweto, and an Afrikaans dominee
into Mamelodi, both in a blaze of flashbulbs and Kliegs.  As for the
rest of us, we stayed in our whites-only moonbase on Africa, where the
flick of a switch brought light, water came from taps, and a phone call
brought police protection.

Cre'ma and Neil Alcock were the only whites I knew who had lived for
decades among Africans, on more or less African terms.  They arrived in
Africa years ahead of the rest of us, and it was hard not to see their
experience as some sort of foretaste of What awaited the rest of us
there.  Nell was defeated by drought and chaos, and finally murdered
for his pain.  In the aftermath, Creina wound up kneeling over his body
and those of the five Zulus who died with him, asking "Was it trust
that brought you here, six dead men laid out in a row?  Was it trust
that you?"

I slistening after that, because I thought I had heard enough.l!mleed,
months passed before any of Creina s words sunk 'm:my head.  I didn't
place much store in love, and beside it d the wrong time to be talking
of such things the Wi death and dying, in the winter of 1986; the time
when had to be one thing or the other; when there was middle of the
road.  I'd spent my entire life wondering what lay ahead for whites in
my country, and by the time Creina's story was done I thought I knew. I
got in my car the following morning and sped back to Johannesburg,
coldbloodedly determined to inflict this book on you.  I had a head
full of thunder and a heart of steel, and I was thinking:

I was thinking, Over my dead body.

It was a curious period in my life, my brief life as a totalitarian.  I
was utterly terrible, so full of murder that I frightened myself. After
Msinga, I felt as though I'd turned into a dark star, capable of
obliterating all the tiny pinpricks of hope in the South African
firmament.  I wandered around Johannesburg raving drunk, spitting my
poisonous interpretation of Creina's parable into the faces of every
white liberal I met.  I wanted to contaminate them too.  I wanted to
wipe the pious smiles off their white faces and trample their flowers
in the dirt.  I tortured them with the story of Simon the Hammerman and
his parallel kingdom of consciousness, and scores of others just like
it stories that cut their tender sentiments to pieces and planted the
axe of doubt and ambiguity in their brains.  If they were socialists, I
tormented them with the socialist speeches of D.F. Malan, or the story
of the mine workers whose assault on the system was inspired by muti,
not Marx.  And if they still wouldn't shut up, I poured beer on their
heads and punched them in the face.

Beyond a certain point of drunkenness, all I could hear was the
drumming of blood in my brain, and it spoke a language much clearer
than logic.  It spoke of my own barbarous tribalism, of all the lessons
Afrikaners had learned in their three centuries in Africa.  I once had
a friend who performed experiments on rats in a laboratory.  You put
two male rats in a clear plastic tube.  They fight.  The loser backs
down.  You put the winner to stud.  You take its male offspring and
return them to the gladiatorial tube.  You put the winner to stud
again, and again, and again.  In six generations you have a rat that
wants to tear your throat out.

There were nine generations of Boer blood in my veins, and they drummed
like thunder in my ears.  They said, there is no middle ground.  When
the day comes you'll still be whitey.

A white is a white against the black.  And they also said, there is
only one choice, Malan.  Hew to your tribe, be true to your race, and
let the white rock stand in the turbulent African sea.

There came a time, in the winter of 1986, when nothing stood between me
and the commands of my blood save some dissenting voices in my heart.
They were reminding me of all the good times I'd ever had with African
people, and all the times I'd been touched by their kindness.  They
were reminding me of Piet Maribatse, the gardener who saved me from
Phillip Neil's gang, and Miriam Tshabalala, the old woman who brought
me up.  They were reminding me of all the Africans I knew who were more
reasoned and civilized than I was of men like my drinking buddy Mike,
who quoted Milton and hummed Handel, and his father, a stern and
dignified old patriarch who said, We shall no longer be slaves.  I
didn't want to hear that any more.  I wanted Mandela and Biko to shut
up in my conscience.  I wanted Mike and all blacks of his ilk to
vanish.  I wanted to become deaf to their talk of injustice and
exploitation, and blind to the sight of it.  I didn't want to hear
anything more about altruism.

What the fuck is altruism, anyway?  Philosophers say it's God in man,
but socio biologists laugh at philosophy.  They say altruism is
genetic. Altruistic social cooperation occurs throughout nature, but
most commonly among kin; among genetically similar insects or animals,
or among men with "green beards," as the socio biologist Richard
Dawkins put in his best-seller, The Selfish Gene.  Dawkins squirmed at
the implications of his extrapolation, but I didn't, not in South
Africa, in the bloody winter of 1986.  There was nothing to contradict
it, in the end, but those dissenting voices in my heart, and there were
times when I thought they were talking shit.

I read a book in that period called Dictatorships and

Democracy, by Jean Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan'sambas sad or to the
United Nations.  It was about ideology, not the uncertain destiny of
Afrikaners in Africa, but there was a certain familiarity to the theme.
Ms.  Kirkpatrick believed that tinlxt right wing dictators were often a
lesser evil than socialist totalitarians, and I thought she had a
point.  There was something she hadn't addressed, though.  For all her
supposed toughness, Miss Jean had been too prissy to face the
cold-blooded and terrible question that lay at the heart of her
philosophy: was she sufficiently ruthless to act on her own insights?
Would she have slit the throat of a Salvadoran revolutionary in the
service of her ideology of lesser evils?

Would I put a gun to some local African's head and blow him away for
daring to demand more than fuck-all?  I often wondered about that.  I'd
sit there in my kitchen, contemplating the totalitarian absolute, and
then Desmond Vuyani Tyali would walk in and I'd think, oh, yes, oh yes
indeed: This little bastard I could throttle.

Desmond was thirteen years old, with the moonface of a child, and an
adolescent's gawky legs.  He came into my life in a rather strange way.
A friend once stayed overnight in my flat, leaving her car in the
street outside unlocked.  She was halfway home the following morning
when a black face popped up in the back seat and said, Hello!  What's
your name?  Maria almost had an accident, but Desmond's aplomb remained
unshaken.  Desmond Vuyani Tyali was possibly the most sussed
13-year-old I had ever met.  Do you know that word?  In Johannesburg,
it means street-smart, self-possessed, a master of angles and dodges.

Desmond defined it.

He told Maria he was an orphan, all alone in the world, and the tale
moved her to great pity.  Fifteen minutes later she was standing in my
doorway with tears in her eyes and this cheerful street urchin in tow,
and what could I say?  I shrugged and said, "Of course he can stay." As
soon as Maria was gone, Desmond told me more ripping yarns about his
life as an orphan, but none of it rang exactly true; I suspected he was
just a runaway.

I kept threatening to drag him off to Soweto and return him to his
mother, but he'd just laugh and say, "You can't go there.

You white.  If you go there the comrades will kill you."

Desmond certainly knew his whites and their weak points.

He'd been living on the streets of downtown Johannesburg for two years,
sniffing glue, begging, sleeping in alleys and preying on white
liberals.  He carried a little address book in his back pocket, and
whenever he met a white liberal, especially a girl, he'd seduce her
verbally, I mean and then whip out the address book and demand
particulars.  In due course, the doorbell would ring and there was
Desmond in his short pants and ragged sweater, grinning hugely.  He'd
throw his arms around you, and next thing you knew he'd moved in.

In return, you got to take Desmond on your social rounds ' to parties
and cinemas, shopping, even to nightclubs and bars.

A child his age did not belong in such places, of course, but Desmond
was a valuable social asset a black mascot, living proof that you
weren't like other whites.  He was very young, but he understood this
transaction quite clearly.  That is why he was so arrogant.  When he
first moved in with me, I told him he was expected to do the dishes if
I cooked, and to clean the tub after he'd bathed.  He looked completely
crestfallen.

"I'm a racist," I explained.

"What is racist?"  he asked.

"A vokken Boer," I said, a fucking Afrikaner.

"Ah," he said, seeing.

So Desmond moved in and our struggle commenced.  The ungrateful little
swine would never stoop to manual labor, no matter how hard I pushed
him.  He cheated at dice and backgammon, and absolutely refused to eat
putu, the staple food of blacks.  Desmond wanted rice and meat, but
there was no money for such luxuries, so he'd push the putu to the side
of his plate and announce that he was going out to park cars.  That's
how he earned money- guiding cars into parking bays outside cinemas and
then hustling coins from their white drivers, I'd say, hey, it's your
turn to wash up, but he'd say, "Rian!  I make it money!  I buy you
cigarette!"  And then he'd be gone, and I'd be left to do the dirty
dishes.  Again.

If I put on a jacket after supper and started fishing for my car keys,
Desmond would start gambolling underfoot like a Labrador puppy.

"Rian," he would say, 'are we goingloUing?"

He was too young to jol, but when I told him he had to stay at home
he'd whine and grumble, claiming that he couldn't be alone in the dark
on account of trouble with 'spirits'.  Spirits abound in Africa, but I
doubt they haunted Desmond Vuyani Tyali; I think he was just jiving me,
but he'd go on and on until I felt so bad that I'd bribe him to shut up
and go to bed.

One evening, for instance, I took him to OK Bazaars and bought him some
new jeans and tennis shoes.  Then I took him over the hill, to a
steakhouse in Orange Grove.  It was not entirely usual for blacks to
eat in that particular restaurant.  If Desmond had been goggle-eyed
with awe at finding himself in so swell a place, the whites would just
have fawned and said, "Ag sweet."  Instead, the little devil chose to
play the Black Elvis, the Black Panther.  He strutted into the joint as
if he owned it, wearing my leather jacket and shades.  He sat down in a
vinyl booth, turned up his jacket collar and lit one of my cigarettes.
Everyone stared at him.  The white kids in the next booth turned around
and kneeled on their seats to have a closer look.  Desmond blew smoke
in their faces.

I was amused, but the black waiter who took our order wasn't.  He was
old enough to be Desmond's grandfather, but the boy blew smoke in his
face too, and cheeked him from behind the shades.

"Chizburg!"  he snapped.  Cheeseburger.  The waiter went to fetch it.
When he came back, Desmond cheeked him again.

"Tomato sauce!"  he commanded, insolently.  The waiter lost his temper.
He spoke sharply to Desmond in Zulu, and then he turned on me.

"Look how young this boy is!"  he yelled.

"Why do you let him smoke?"  Every head in the joint swivelled in my
direction, and there I was, the Walter Mitty of Afrikaner supremacists,
naked and humiliated again.

I let Desmond smoke because he was black, of course.

I bribed him to be good because he was black.  In fact, I'd never have
let him into my house were it not for the color of his skin.  If he had
been white, I would have taken him to the police, who would have put
him in a state orphanage.  But Desmond was black; no orphanages for the
likes of Desmond, so I took him in, only to find that I couldn't even
oppress a thirteen-year-old.

So what else is there to say?  Just this, I think.  I was ashamed of
running away from South Africa, and so I came home to redeem myself. At
the outset, I thought that redemption lay in the acquisition of
certainty, in the act of joining one side or the other; of drawing a
line in the red dust of Africa and standing behind it, saying, this is
who I am, and where I stand.

Very well, then.  I wound up standing in a cold slum kitchen, over a
camp gas stove, conducting imaginary conversations with Jean
Kirkpatrick and cooking putu for a little black boy who wouldn't deign
to eat it anyway.  Ja-nee.  I seemed to have lost my blood, as Colonel
Red Russian Swanepoel once put it over tea in the Blue Hotel.  Perhaps
I never had the blood in the first place.  Maybe the Red Russian was an
animal, and I something just slightly more.

It is winter again, the southern winter of 1990, in the 42nd year of
apartheid, in the fourth century of white domination.

Outside my window the trees are bare of leaves, the veld is grey and
wind swirls dust into the sky.  Johannesburg is bleak and ugly in this
season, and this is its ugliest part, a sad landscape of dingy semis
with washing on their balconies and vacant lots strewn with trash.  In
the morning, human beings emerge from the undergrowth, pathetically
thin and clad in rags and tatters.  They shiver around garbage fires,
and if you go close there is rheum seeping from their eyes, pus from
the sores on their arms and legs.  They are bloutreinryers, riders of
the blue train.  In this country, methylated spirits are tinted blue.
The blue cocktail is the drink of choice for those who have no choice,
who are black and derelict to boot.  There are so many of them.

They aren't supposed to be here, of course.  This is still a white area
under the Group Areas Act.  The vagrants are illegal.  So are the
colored people next door, and most of the Africans in the cold,
windowless dungeon underneath this block of flats.  But what can
government do?  There are forces at work that it could not control,
even if it had the will to try.  Consider that sound on the wind, the
sound of distant cheering.  It comes from that raw concrete monolith in
the middle distance Ellis Park rugby stadium, holy of holies, once the
most sacred shrine of the Afrikaner tribal sport.  How sacred is
sacred?  Consider this.  Twelve years ago, at the dawn of the Great
Afrikaner Reform, our rulers gave permission for some colored
schoolboys to take part in a school rugby tournament at Ellis Park.  In
certain eyes, this was outrageous sacrilege.  In fact, some right-wing
Afrikaners broke away from the ruling clique rather than countenance
the setting of black feet upon their sacred turf.

I wonder how they feel these days, those Neanderthals, listening to the
cheering on the wind.  Their temple has fallen, you see.  White rugby
crowds were too small to pay off Ellis Park's construction costs, and
black soccer crowds too large for township stadiums.  A deal became
inevitable, and what you hear now is the sound of eighty thousand
blacks, baying for the Birds or the Pirates or some other titans of
black professional soccer.  You're an outsider, so it's virtually
impossible to explain what that sound means to a conservative Boer.  It
is the knell of doom, a portent of the coming swamping, and yet another
reason to curse EW.

de Klerk.

Our new State President came to power just short of a year ago.  At the
outset, everyone assumed he was just another nasty racist, but he
proceeded to smash the mold that had been cast in Dawid Malan's day and
turn the country upside down.

De Klerk didn't exactly lay down his gun, but he certainly lowered it
several degrees, extended his hand to black South Africa and said,
let's talk.  The liberation movements were un banned censorship eased,
and everyone began to talk of a New South Africa.  And then the doors
of Victor Verster Prison swung open, and Nelson Mandela stepped
outside.

South Africans of a certain sort had always believed in magical
endings, and the moment seemed to have come.  It was largely an
illusion, though.  The euphoria wore off in a week or two, and when
they woke up their innocence was lost.  All the old problems were still
there, most more intractable than ever, and it was no longer possible
to imagine that magic might make them go away.

It would be irrational to expect a conflict with roots in Dawid Malan's
era to resolve itself in a month or two, but still this has been a
dismaying year, the bloodiest in our history, leaving most of us
desperately confused.  As I write, a wave of apparently tribal violence
is sweeping the Witwatersrand;

gunmen and pang amen are roaming the townships, killing at random, and
madness is in the air.  The death toll in our wars within wars within
wars has just passed the six thousand mark, and the bill for burned and
looted buildings now exceeds the loss in any other South African war
including the devastating conflict between the Britons and Boers. Every
time I buy a newspaper, mobs are marching across its front page, or the
police are firing into a crowd, or yet another unfortunate is being
burned alive.

The business pages are equally dismaying.  The economy is
disintegrating, the lot of the poor becoming completely unbearable.
Every second black man is unemployed; every third child goes to sleep
on an empty stomach.  The cities are besieged by armies of squatters,
seven million of them, flooding in from the rural areas in search of
jobs they will never find.  In the townships, the schools are largely
deserted, the hospitals swamped, the police overwhelmed, the mortuaries
overflowing.  The young lions of the liberation movements are still
marching under the hammer and sickle, still clamoring for a Red
revolution.  One has to admire their courage, but their politics are
beginning to seem tragically misguided.  Almost all the casualties of
their battles are fellow Africans, and their talk of Peoples' War just
strengthens the white right wing.

All across the country, the white right is on the rise.  Shadowy
vigilante groups are cruising the streets of small towns, shooting
blacks at random from the back of pick-up trucks.

In the cities, they're blowing up black taxi-ranks, stirring up mayhem
in the townships, plotting to assassinate the traitor De Klerk.  The
whites-only moonbase is under siege by muggers and burglars, slowly
turning into an armed camp.  I wish I could say this will end well, but
I find it hard to have faith.  A year ago, the graffitti in my
neighborhood consisted mostly of hammers and sickles and pa ens to the
ANC.  These days, it's a broken-hearted play on the title of a novel by
Alan Paton:

Braai The Beloved Country burn, baby, burn.  The writing is on the
wall.

And so I wind up back where I began, a white man in the white suburbs
of white South Africa, bobbing up and down on the cross of my
ambiguities and pondering the only meaningful choice that is mine to
make: to stay here or go away.  I could board a plane and leave, I
suppose, but I've done that too often before, and each flight has left
me more diminished, more deeply dishonored than the one before.  A
tombstone is still waiting for me in Los Angeles, reading "He Ran

Away."  I don't want to be buried under such an epitaph, and moreover,
I don't want to die of boredom, which is another reason why I stay.
There's something to be said for living on the edge, in a country where
rival kingdoms of consciousness overlap and interact in strange and
intoxicating ways.  There's a Zulu witch doctor in the house next door,
and the ether is full of exotic musics and voices that speak in
tongues.  On Saturday night a procession of African Zionists looms out
of the darkness like a hallucination from a Marquez novel, wearing
robes, bearing crosses, beating drums and singing.  I could spend the
rest of my life in Los Angeles, and never ever see anything quite so
magical.  This is where I come from, and this is where I will stay.

That being the case, there is only one path for the likes of me, the
path that leads into Africa, the path of no guarantees.

There were no guarantees for Dawid Malan in 1788, and there are none
for white South Africans today.  The place where we are going will
dearly be very different from the whites-only moonbase where I was
born.  Strange terrors and ecstasies await us in Africa, but that is
the choice we face: either we take up arms and fight, or we open the
door to Africa and set forth into the unknown.

There are other roads into the unknown, I suppose, but the one I took
was the road to Msinga, the road that carried me across an invisible
boundary and into another world, where a strange, mystical white woman
lived in a house of mud.  Neil and Creina Alcock were pioneers in the
country South Africa will one day become a truly African country, where
whites have no guarantees.  They arrived in Africa years ahead of the
rest of us, and I have told you what befell them there.  It was a
worst-case scenario, unfolding in a worst-case place, and yet, and yet,
and yet: It was not entirely bereft of hope.  There was light beyond
the darkness a tiny pinprick of dawning possibilities, casting just
enough of a glow to show the rest of us the way.

As I write, Creina Alcock is still living in Msinga, where the ravines
still echo with gunfire and tracer bullets still arc across the night
sky.  The wars continue as always, unreported by anyone.  The village
across the river was burned down one night, and the view from Creina's
bluff in the morning evoked Berlin at the end of World War II.  The
drought of the early eighties gave way to a season of floods, one of
which obliterated her home under a 15-foot-deep glacier of mud.

A while ago, gunmen came to the project to kill a Zulu headman staying
there.  They surrounded Creina's house, cut the telephone line, and
opened fire on the night watchmen.

Creina crawled out of a window and fled.  In the darkness, she ran into
a warrior who raised his rifle and pulled the trigger, twice.  Hearing
all this gunfire, the project's Zulu staff thought Creina was surely
dead, but they found her alive in the morning, shivering in a hiding
place on the river's bank.

Afterwards, I told her that it was surely time to give up, but she just
laughed, and pointed out something that I had misunderstood.

"The path of love is not a path of comfort," she said.

"It means going forward into the unknown, with no guarantees of safety,
even though you're afraid.  Trusting is dangerous, but without trust
there is no hope for love, and love is all we ever have to hold against
the dark."

And it cannot be said that the Alcocks' love has gone unrewarded, in
spite of all that has happened.  The long years of struggle against
desertification appear to be bearing fruit.

There is grass where there was no grass before, and the don gas are
slowly silting over.  Little Zulu children build anti-erosion contours
with pebbles on footpaths.  Their fathers have visions of a green
valley not so different from the one Neil once saw.

There is less tension along the border now.  White farmers say it is
because Alcock is no longer around to stir things up, but who knows
perhaps it is the memory of Neil's last crusade that stays their hands.
There is a line of T S Eliot's that Creina is fond of quoting: "Be
satisfied that ye have enough light to secure another foothold."  She
has held onto a foothold in Africa, and her husband's investment of
love would seem to have been redeemed.

Early one morning in the winter of 1988, two aging Zulu men who'd loved
and honored Neil climbed into a pickup and drove to the bend in the
road where he was killed.  What they were about to do had never been
done before, and there were those Zulu traditionalists who thought it
should not be done at all.  They asked, "How can you do this thing?"
and the two men answered, "Because Neil, he was same like a black
man.

The skin was white, but the heart it was same like a black."

One of the Zulus was Petros Majozi, the man who'd given up his job and
pension on the basis of a single glimpse into a white man's heart.  The
other was Majozi Nxongo, the tribal warrior-statesman who once helped a
floundering white reporter unravel the secrets of Simon the
Hammerman.

They stood over the spot where their white brother was slain, and
invited his spirit to enter their sacred stick.

"Numzaan," they said, 'we come to fetch you.  Come, let us go to
home."

Then they placed the stick in a plastic bag and returned in solemn
silence to the mud house by the river, bringing Neil's spirit back
home.

The following day, a huge crowd of Zulus gathered outside Creina's
house, looking more ragged and pitiful than ever in honor of this great
occasion.  At such a ceremony, Zulus wore their oldest clothes, to
ensure that the returning spirit would recognize them and not be
startled by unfamiliar sights.  There were several sangomas in the
crowd, draped in beads and totems, with inflated pig bladders in their
hair, and, right beside them, an old friend of Nell's from the
townships a black man in a jacket and tie, as fascinated by the strange
goings-on as any of the whites present.  Two cattle were brought
forward and slaughtered with knives, in such a way that their bellowing
might awaken and summon Msinga's shades.  Then the carcasses were
butchered and hung in great bloody chunks in Creina's bedroom, which
looked like a charnel house by the time the ceremony was done: blood on
the walls, blood on the floor; blood to wash the sins and sorrows of
the past away.

After that, the ceremony became a celebration, and Zulus came from far
and wide to join in.  Two thousand liters of beer were drunk, mountains
of food consumed, and the dancing carried on for two days.  It was a
stirring spectacle indeed.  Feet thundered in unison, sweat glistened
on black skin, and dust rose into the sky.  The Zulus heaved and
ululated joyously, carrying a lone white woman along with them,
teaching her how to dance.  Creina was smiling shyly and moving
stiffly, but you had to start somewhere; in coming to terms with
Africa, as in learning how to dance.

In the end, the sun went down and the celebrants went home, leaving the
horns of the sacrificial cattle nailed to the roof of Creina's home.
The horns were a reminder of the ceremony performed that day, a sign
that the household within had honored its shades.  In a continent where
people worship their ancestors, Neil Alcock had become a god the first
white god in Africa, as far as anybody knows.  Aeons after our
ancestors walked away, the first white man had come home to Africa to
stay.

The End...........