A Sport of Nature

Whaila’s Country

The letter was produced at Sasha’s trial.

He must have bribed the young son of a farmer ruined by the ’80s drought in the Koster district who had said there were opportunities for advancement in the prison services. But what could the prisoner have had to offer? It is the wretched thieves and prostitutes, not the politicals, who traffic in the prison economy of drugs. Maybe he had even tried to convert the boy to the cause; it is known to prison officers that those trained by the Left are taught to subvert the Christian values inculcated by the Dutch Reformed Church.

Hendrik Gerhardus Munnik had never written a letter in his life, except as a school exercise. The letter he smuggled out of prison (it was ‘under the plastic’ in his warder’s cap, he told the court) was very thick, he didn’t know what was inside. He kept it for three days before handing it over to the Commandant. And why did he decide to surrender it to prison authorities?

Because he was afraid of what his father would say if he lost his job.

Did the prisoner promise him any reward or remuneration for smuggling the letter?

No.

Why did he agree to take it?

Because he thought it was a love-letter.

Sasha was accused with three others, Burtwell Nyaka, Makekene Conco, Thabo Poswao, on five counts, which the Defence conducted by Joe’s most distinguished colleagues succeeded in getting reduced to the two principal ones: conspiring to overthrow the State and furthering the aims of the African National Congress. The ‘love-letter’, the Prosecution submitted, contained a clear statement of the accused’s intention to commit high treason. The passage was read out and the exhibit, numbered 14, passed to the judge: ‘Yes … I want to overthrow the State … that is the meaning of my life’. The whole tenor of the letter, the Prosecution continued, made clear that for the accused the ‘solution’ to South Africa’s problems was revolution. In this context, he lauded violent uprisings, lawlessness in the black townships, strikes and boycotts, as the blacks’ understanding of means to ‘overthrow that (the) South African way of life’. He blamed whites for the murder of white children. These sentiments he had already expressed on public platforms, in the trade union and other journals to which he contributed, in the pamphlets it would be alleged he had conspired to distribute by pamphlet bombs, in fact in his record of revolutionary activities that could be proved as far back as 1979. And his convictions were so strong that he would even risk sending subversive material out of prison by clandestine means — some love-letter!

The Defence submitted that the letter was, in fact, ‘a moving credo’ from a man whose sense of justice and humanity had found no structures within which to redress the misery he was aware of in South Africa. He had been brought up in a family where a social conscience was the foundation of personal morality, his father had been for many years what would be known in Western countries as a civil rights lawyer, his mother had been an active liberal; their son had seen them leave their country in despair at the fruitlessness of their efforts to assist meaningful constitutional changes. It was, indeed, out of love — love for fellow human beings, for the poorest and most disadvantaged, the majority of the South African population, that the son had given up the promise of a lucrative career in law and a high social and economic position among whites in order to put his life at the service of black workers.

Exhibit 14 included two envelopes. Within the first there was another: State House, the name of the capital, the country, this surely should have been an adequate address to have reached the one for whom it was intended. Exhibit 14 did not even reach the cover address on the outer envelope; but although Hendrik had failed to deliver it there, it had led the police to the friend Sasha had hoped would get it taken to England and forwarded. The friend was arrested and detained as another possible co-conspirator, but released after a week of interrogation.

There was a stir of comment in the public gallery the day Hendrik gave his reason for accepting the letter; typically soppy, probably thinking of his Koster meisie back on the farm. These backveld boys, plaasja-pies! His brother-in-law, a cartage contractor from Pretoria and not to be patronised, who had accompanied Hendrik’s mother to court, turned angrily on the faces behind him. No, a boereseun was no match for a Jewboy communist. The mother grasped his hand in a vice to quiet him; never looked up from under her hat.

The Defence disputed the Prosecution’s interpretation of the letter. The person to whom it was addressed was like a sister to the accused. She was a relative who had been brought up by the accused’s parents as one of their own children. He had been deeply attached to her, she was apparently his confidante through childhood and adolescence. It was not surprising that under conditions of sensory deprivation in solitary confinement, where time loses its normal dimension and partings of many years may seem the same as partings that took place a few weeks or months previously, he should have turned to her, in imagination, to review his life and set out his commitment to serve others. In no way could the intimate confidences of this letter be regarded as constituting a revolutionary document. And whom could it have been planned to incite? The intended recipient had lived abroad for a long time. Defence requested that the letter be read out in its entirety, not quoted from selectively.

The other mother was beside her husband and they heard it all. There were flashes in Pauline’s face. Joe made no move to touch her. There was the sense around them, in them, that the matings, the birth of children, the quarrels, the convictions that didn’t lie together, the unsaid, the spoken that should never have been said, the right questions, the wrong answers, the trust and distrust, the blame and the forgiveness were casting them in the bronze of a single fused figure. For them, there was nobody else in the court; the mass of their feeling occupied it, it would not have been surprising if everyone on the adjoining benches had edged away or silently trooped out with a bow to the judge.

Olga was very supportive. Whether Arthur liked it or not, she insisted that Pauline and Joe move out of that pokey flat and into her house, where they would be properly fed and looked after during their ordeal. After all, the two sisters had only each other — they had lost Ruthie, she might be dead, for all they knew. But Olga did not attend the trial. Pauline would not expect that of her. She had never been in court in her life; police vans from which hands clung through the diamond-mesh guard, men in shackles led to the dock, a red-robed protector with the authority — thank God — to lock away burglars, rapists, embezzlers, car thieves, murderers where they couldn’t threaten decent people any longer — all that belonged to the criminals and the poor. Poor devils, the latter; a matter of environment. Certainly not the environment to which the sisters belonged, and in which even Pauline’s children had been brought up. Poor Pauline, she hadn’t deserved Sasha. Olga’s Clive, hardly a year older, was consultant to exporters and importers in the wine industry, an authority on vintages, with a ‘nose’ equal to that of some of the great experts in France; sad for Pauline: when Clive’s name appeared in the newspapers it was not as an accused in a trial for treason but as author of his syndicated column for wine lovers. But Olga was loyal to her sisters, never would have heard a bad word said about the other one, and would not tolerate any condemnatory remarks about Pauline’s son. Once or twice she invited carefully-selected friends to dinner — her sister and brother-in-law surely needed some distraction, sitting day after day in what she imagined a court must be like. Olga deliberately did not avoid the subject that was in the guests’ minds, like a death in the family. Sasha was not disgraced; he was wronged. He had somehow fallen through one of the manholes of life into an environment that wasn’t his; there had been criminal carelessness somewhere, on somebody’s part, maintenance was a scandal, what did one pay taxes for if no-one was secure any longer. Her own nephew had been locked away by these Afrikaners, put on trial by them, arid he was a young man of good family, intelligent, cultivated. If Arthur wanted to (he didn’t look as if he wanted to, he was spitting out fish-bones without even putting his hand over his mouth) he could tell some tales about the real criminals, the swindling and finagling that went on high up in the financial world in connivance with members of the government. Whom had her nephew swindled? Whom had he cheated or hurt? — He’s done nothing! The government is mad!—

There was an abrupt change of atmospheric pressure which all felt without for a moment knowing why.

Pauline put down her knife and fork, stood up and flattened her hands on Olga’s Georgian table so that the wine jumped in the glasses. Then she lifted the hands and dug the spread fingers up through that wild head of hair that needed the attention of a good stylist. Her eyes held their audience as they had always sought to. — Olga, Sasha did not do nothing. Understand that. He did everything he could to bring down this government, and the power of white people who made it, and all their white governments before it. They recognize the danger he represents to their evil; don’t you sit here and minimize that. This trial is a sign of his effectiveness. He did something. — And she sat down to her plate while others did not know how to take up again the normal flow of the evening; for a few moments only she and Arthur were eating — he never listened when Pauline spoke, and had not been interrupted.

Since Olga did not come to court she did not hear the letter read out. There was merely a mention of its existence as evidence, no extract of its contents or mention of the name of the individual to whom it was written, in the day’s newspaper reports of the trial. When Joe’s colleagues, the team defending Sasha and his co-accused, came to confer with Joe and Pauline, Olga sent in Jethro’s successor with tea and cream scones (Olga’s servants stayed with her faithfully until pensioned; the old cook had been retired to KwaZulu — the recipe remained) but she ensured there would be absolute privacy for the discussion going on in her little sittingroom, where some of her favourite pieces were gathered, including the Blackamoor lamp that used to stand in the main lounge. When she walked past the door she rose on tiptoe.

Pauline did not talk of the letter to Olga. And Joe did not need to be told not to. So Olga was not caused pain by any unearthing of what else had been out of place in the environment of the family. Anyway, it was none of her business, never had been, she had not taken any responsibility for Ruthie’s child beyond buying her a new outfit every six months.

Pain was caused to the girl with whom Sasha lived for several years up to a short while before he was detained. They were parted by then, but although he never mentioned her in the letter, she had been with him in the tin cottage with the water-tank and the frangipani. She had married someone else while he was in detention; the husband was a friend of Sasha and the couple came up from Durban, in solidarity with those on trial, at least once to attend part of the proceedings. When the letter was read out she realized that for its writer she never had been in the cottage, that was what was wrong that she hadn’t understood, all the time they were together. There was no need to laugh at Hendrik, the boereseun, the plaasjapie.

The letter was merely one exhibit in a dossier of incriminating evidence that took months to be led. Burtwell Nyaka and Makekene Conco received varying sentences. Sasha was found guilty on both counts of the indictment and given a lengthy sentence, along with Thabo Poswao, although the period of punishment on each count was to run concurrently. Joe’s colleagues decided against an appeal to a higher court, for Sasha. There was the danger that instead of the result being a reduction of sentence the State might cross-appeal for a heavier one. There were some aspects of the case where the Defence, all things considered, had been lucky. The matter of the letter was an example: because of Hillela’s new names and somewhat unlikely and exotic status, perhaps, the Prosecution never made use of her strong association with the African National Congress, the fact that she was the same woman who had been the wife of the assassinated Whaila Kgomani, and who after his death had worked for the Congress in Eastern Europe as well as Africa. If the Prosecution had chosen to exploit these links, it wouldn’t have been too credible to attempt to establish Exhibit 14 as any kind of love-letter.

When sentence was passed, Sasha suddenly did not belong to them — Pauline and Joe and Carole (who had flown out to be with her parents for the verdict). The blacks in the gallery began to sing and stamp over calls for order and as the police hustled them out they went stamping, waving fists at the four men being led down to the well of the court whose fists were raised to them, and already there were new verses for the refrain of their song: woza Luthuli, woza Mandela, woza Tambo, woza Sisulu, woza Mbeki, woza Slovo, woza Kgomani—to those names they added the names of the four men, the three blacks and their white brother, descending to prison. For the first time in his life Sasha resembled Pauline — turning, pausing before he was pushed down to the well — his face public, blazing, exalted, open to the chanting crowd dragging and tramping their feet heavily along the boards as they left the gallery. Then he was gone.

Outside in the street his family was passed from arms to arms in the huge embrace that is the reverse of the hostility a mob can generate. The mother of Thabo was clinging to Joe, weeping with pride and sorrow, and he held her head to him, like a lover. Viva!, coming by way of Cuba, Mozambique and Nicaragua, had joined the old litany of freedom cries. They flew back and forth, exciting the police dogs and bringing the white shop assistants to the doors of the chainstore and Greek-owned supermarket in the maize-belt town. Political trials were no longer held in the cities, in order to avoid mass gatherings of blacks, but trade unionists had come by the busload and they were joined by local black delivery men wheeling their bicycles, farm workers with their small purchases of soap and sugar, unemployed youths — all those people from a nearby ‘homeland’ who gravitated towards the streets of the town where they were forbidden to live. Petrified among them was the equestrian statue that stands in every Transvaal dorp, the Boer War general with the trunk of a stone tree growing up into his horse’s belly to solve the sculptor’s problem of supporting his work. Press cars and several chauffeur-driven ones with diplomatic number plates (these cases attracted foreign observers at a high level) made through the crowd a passage which flowed closed again. Pauline was swept away but Joe heard her: —Those sentences don’t mean anything! They’re not going to be all those years inside! The end to all this will come long before then!—

Trust Hillela; she chose well. The President was able to achieve in his one-party state what the handbooks on and surveys of Africa concede as ‘impressive development’ during the years when oil prices were high, and by the time oil resources were no longer such a profitable source of revenue had succeeded in diversifying the economy so that, in comparison with most neighbouring countries, his people are reasonably well off and there has been no serious ‘crisis of expectation’ to threaten the stability of the regime. The oil fields, mining industry and banks are nationalized, land has been redistributed and there are co-operative farms, but agriculture, learning from the disasters elsewhere, has not been collectivized. The General within the President has never forgotten the subversive power of hunger. The petty shopkeepers have not been touched. The Lebanese still constitute what is best referred to as an informal banking structure; so long as the back-of-the-shop deals in foreign currency stay within reason, it is best to ignore them. The country rarely has any entry under the list of violations of human rights published by Amnesty International; imprisoned cabinet ministers and officials of the previous regime were amnestied one by one in the yearly celebrations of the President’s reaccession to power which take place in State House, country-wide sports stadia and schools. Of course there is a prison where individuals designated Enemies of The People are held. As a prisoner in another country once wrote, there surely have to be such places? The rendezvous just and unjust keep, in turn. Every power has to put away what threatens it? Habeas corpus is entrenched in the constitution, and the occasional expulsion of a miscreant foreign journalist intent on finding a story discreditable to African regimes in grievances of the sort malcontents and anti-social elements have in all societies, scarcely is to be regarded as suppression of freedom of the press. The President’s son, the Colonel, is Director of National Security. But no-one can accuse the President of nepotism in this case; the Colonel is immensely capable, a man with a particular silence suited to conscientious discharge of his duty. It is a silence that came to him in the room of an Arab house, developing with the pattern of light and dark that played over him there, as a photographic negative fixes a phenomenon of place, time and experience. He is greatly feared and known by the designated Enemies of The People as the President’s hit man. There is no amnesty from his surveillance. He is married to a young woman from the Ministry of Works and has provided the President with the eldest son of an eldest son — in his less formal photographs the President in an open-neck shirt is often shown with his good-looking white wife (or is she half-caste, she has an African name), and this favourite grandson on his knee or restrained by the hand — he’s an exuberant child.

The President has some unwelcome guests in his country. It is not only in Africa, of course, that there are deposed tyrants nobody, not even their former friends, wishes to harbour. And even the just men among the Amins, Bokassas, Shahs, Baby Docs and Marcoses can be an embarrassment in terms of international relations. When the President has had no choice but to grant asylum, those whose statues have been brought down in their former capitals are confined to residence in one of his provincial towns and know they are under the surveillance of the Colonel: It’s not an ideal life, but one can manage, as both the President and the President’s wife know, having experienced it in previous existences. Since the beginning — that is to say, the beginning of the President’s second access to power, with his new wife (he likes to joke and call it the Second Empire) — there have been some taking refuge, however, who seem to be in a special category. His country is too far removed, geographically, to have been any use as a base for incursion to South Africa; not even the government there in its wildest accusations against him could have suggested that. But safe houses were provided and the experienced lobbying ability and growing prestige of the President were brought into play in the world to obtain increasing support for those who temporarily occupied the safe houses. The President’s wife — never has been like other presidents’ wives among members of the OAU, even the other white ones, such as old President Senghor’s — was always present at these negotiations, whether they were with the American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, the director for Africa from the French Foreign Office, the East German Ambassador or the heads of African states: a small but quite voluptuous, bold-eyed woman, one mustn’t be misled, by her perfect grooming and elegant clothes, into dismissing her as the ornament of the President’s sexual tastes and prowess. She offers hospitality to many old friends at State House. She understands well the exhaustion of exiles, flying from country to country with the responsibility of arguments, strategies, methods of presentation and persuasion to be carried from offices up rickety stairs to State anterooms, from bush camps to Intercontinental Hotels. There are many who have found a day’s revival — a moment recovered from responses put aside — in the swimming pool at State House which she has had made private even from the peacocks and guinea-fowl by a surrounding trellis covered with the orange-flowered bignonia that grows at all latitudes in Africa. Tambo came but did not swim; neither did Thabo Mbeki. Arnold was there at State House sometimes, between planes, and Busewe, and young people who were not at the Lusaka headquarters before the assassination took place. The President’s wife and Arnold were in the water together, again, he saw the shape of her body, her legs and arms wavering under water like coloured flags and streamers, then rolled up into flesh and a bright swimsuit as she surfaced, pushing back from her face her long, wet curly hair. Only it was dark bronze now — something fashionable, no doubt. The year he was the Nobel Laureate, Bishop Tutu and his wife Leah were guests and walked in the gardens with her. The Bishop’s laugh sounded from out of the animated chatter, a trumpet from home; he would not have known anyone there the President’s wife remembered, it was too long ago, but he and his wife had about them the kind of bloom of a particular air and place that is unmistakable and that those in exile had lost.

To be with such people is like opening a cupboard and burying a nose in the folds of a forgotten garment.

Despite — or more likely because of? — the sometimes unseemly prominence of the woman the President brought with him when he came back to power, theirs appears to be what is called a happy marriage. Which, in the curiously mysterious while too public sense of the relationship between symbolic figures, surely means a good combination of accommodation. She is said, by the small faction in the South of the country who still support their leader exiled to Zaïre, to have unnatural powers over the President and — a foreigner — too much say in the ruling of a country which is not her country and a people who are not her people. More sophisticated circles remark that she sees herself as a Madame de Pompadour if not an Evita Perón; but no-one who really knows anything about the President believes he would allow anyone, or needs anyone, to be more than his peer; his choice wisely has been a woman who can keep up with him in the reality of the position his power, like that of every country in Africa, straddles — between Africa and the world, neither of which can do without the other.

After a few years, the President was known to have a passing fancy. Another foreigner, far more foreign. The Scots wife of the Swedish Ambassador. Nomo, when she was out on a visit, dubbed her The Albino or The Bloodhound — she was unrelievedly blonde, with blue eyes that showed a wet pink rim at the lower lids and a skin so fair it shone in the dark gardens of State House in the evening, when receptions spilled outdoors. Nomo could not understand why her mother laughed so much at the names. In due course, the Swedish Ambassador’s tour of duty was up, and a successor took his place, a bachelor.

The President has never deserted his wife’s bed, even during the pursuit of passing fancies; and she has never ceased to please and, still, surprise him — for him, there is no one like her. She must have had several affairs of her own — some people would even give names — but the skill of discretion, like any other, comes with the experience of adaptation to circumstance. She travels alone to visit her daughter in Rome, London and Paris, she is invited as an honoured guest to gatherings of socialist women’s organizations in Eastern Europe and feminist congresses in Africa and the West; the Colonel knows better than to keep her under surveillance. And if, after all, the President has some idea that a woman he continues to find so attractive may attract and not resist another man, from time to time — well, Chiemeka is not like other women, she is a match for him in this way as in all others.

Burtwell Nyaka, Makekene Conco, Thabo Poswao and Sasha served their full sentences. The end to it all did not come before then.

During the years Sasha was in prison Joe died one summer night in London while preparing a case for Manchester United. Pauline was in their small garden, restlessly pacing it out; she was due to leave for South Africa next day for a contact visit with Sasha. She came inside under the clematis tapping on the open glass doors and saw the figure dropped sideways in the desk chair. She called him — Joe—exactly as she had called at Sasha’s bedroom door, her voice as a young woman was back in her throat.

Olga died. Arthur remarried. He became richer than ever, during those years, as a subcontractor to Armscor, the South African government’s armament corporation. His new companies made parts for the four-barrelled 7.62-mm cannon, one of the variants of the GA 1 Servo-Controlled aircraft weapons system, and the CB cluster bomb system which could fire 40 six-kilogram bombs like ping-pong balls from its apertures. He was invited to Chile to exhibit home-grown skills South Africa had developed in response to arms embargoes. He did not care for these tropical countries full of half-Redskin, half-Latin coloureds, but to be an honoured industrialist in Chile or Paraguay, almost an official emissary for South Africa, was not like being there as any ordinary tourist.

Neither the four barrels of the cannon nor the deadly juggler was any protection. When the time came, he realized it and went with his wife not to the villa his cultured wife Olga had wanted in Italy (the new woman was a simple person who agreed that as in America there were no servants it was best to put up for auction at Sotheby’s all those fancy things that needed dusting daily), nor, God forbid, to one of those dirty, run-down republics where he had displayed his achievements, but to California, where one of his sons, the eminent urologist, had moved.

Sasha came out of prison, was banned from resuming his tradeunion activities, and worked clandestinely with the liberation front, going Underground every time there were new waves of arrests and reappearing whenever one might be able to count on a respite; he, too, became experienced in adaptation to his circumstances, although nothing in the advantages of his youth had prepared him for them. The death of his father was part of the deaths all around him. A country where the dead breed more dead — that was written in the letter that had become only a document, addressed to nobody, a testament, an exhibit among pamphlets. And death was still breeding. The whites wouldn’t see that their structures were bursting at the joints with the pressure of massed bodies, alive and dead: a country courtroom (this one in a town smaller than the one where Sasha had stood trial) was built to hold only thirty people, and three thousand came to the trial of a few rebellious schoolchildren. The fences fell, the municipal gardens were trampled, the walls shook with the press of the living, the edifice of white justice, big enough only for a minority, could not hold. The police shot into the three thousand as they had shot before, year after year, as they were shooting day after day, hopelessly killing, unable to keep back the living who kept coming on and on, endlessly replacing the dead. The petrol bombs that burned the wives and children of traitors, the stones that hit tourist buses, the limpet mines that blew up police stations and the AK 47s that bred with the dead — the homemade and the smuggled instruments of death could not be kept out, even by a Servo-Controlled weapons system and the cluster bomb. Against her own wishes, Pauline stayed in London after Joe’s death. She understood that her presence in the last days of the old South Africa would place a strain on Sasha that would be at the cost of the work he had to do; for which he had gone to prison, and for which he had now emerged. One day he telephoned Pauline from Amsterdam. Sasha had no passport, she knew he must have come out the way she had helped a black family escape when he was a schoolboy — not by the same route, for a long time there had been no safe houses in Botswana that the South African army hadn’t destroyed — but with the help of someone like herself. She had seen on television the bombed walls of police headquarters in two cities. A limpet mine had been placed in the women’s lavatory, in one, and in the men’s lavatory in the other. Pauline thought how obvious it was that the first must have been placed by a woman, and the other by a man; an error on the part of the saboteurs to give away this clue. Then she read that a young woman had, indeed, been arrested, a white woman. When her son called from Amsterdam she believed she knew the identity of the man.

This year, the President is Chairman of the OAU. It is an honour at which some say he (and his ambitious wife) set his braided cap and his black, leather-bound beret from the beginning of his second regime. The fact is that he was an almost unanimous choice of a body known for its dissension: thrice-over victor in the anti-colonialist struggle, first against the colonial occupation, then in his coup against the government that colluded with the former colonial power, and finally against Europe’s and America’s covert backing of his usurpers; a professed socialist with a mixed economy in his own country, a man of high intelligence whose emotional style makes him popular in Africa and the Eastern bloc, and whose humour and sophistication do the same for him with the West.

One of his first official duties is to attend the proclamation of the new African state that used to be South Africa. It is fitting that this should have come about during his year of office, because he was part of the negotiations that continued outside the country concurrently with undeclared civil war there even when the black leaders were finally released from prison and brought back from exile, the liberation movements unbanned, and apart-heid legislation abolished (a formality, the country had become ungovernable under it), but a section of whites, led by the white military command and a portion of the army, tried to retain a power base — they called it the white homeland — in the Orange Free State and part of the Transvaal. The role of the Frontline States in the independence of Namibia some years before was revived to facilitate the establishment of black liberation in the last and most important of the southern African countries ruled by white power, and the composition of the Frontline States was enlarged accordingly by greater representation of the black power of the continent. The white corporations who owned the mineral wealth of the country have been eager, ever since they saw that the whites were going to lose political power, to ensure that they will have some future — say, 49 %?—under black rule. The present incumbent of the OAU chairmanship has been an extremely useful adviser to the black liberation leaders in their determination to make use of the executive and managerial skills of the corporations in order to maintain the economy while nationalizing the mining industry: his experience in driving such hard bargains has been invaluable. So, in many ways, he can be regarded as a brother who has been part of the South African liberation struggle in accordance with the old Pan-African ideal that sometimes seems forgotten.

There will be many ceremonies to mark the birth of an African republic where there have been a number of kinds of colonial occupation disguised as republics: the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, the Republic of South Africa. There are many historic sites sacred to the black people that were trampled over by white interests and now will be restored to honour by the celebrations to be held on this ground. These sites are everywhere; in the Cape, in Natal, in the Orange Free State, in the Transvaal — and it is all one country now, there are no homelands but only a homeland. (Some observers speculate it may be difficult to keep it that way; there are former ‘national state’ and ‘independent state’ leaders whose addiction to sectional power won’t be easily cured or accommodated.) But the actual ceremony of declaration can take place, it has been decided, only where white power sat immoveably and apparently unassailable for so long: in Cape Town. The House of Parliament is too small; it never was enlarged to take in representatives of the whole population, merely provided with Outhouses to accommodate the failed experiment of annexing the Indian and ‘Coloured’ people to save apartheid. The Gardens adjoining parliament could have provided the site to become the most sacred of all, the one on which the ancestral country itself will be returned to its people; van Riebeeck’s gardens where the first fence was put up, centuries ago, to keep out the indigenous people. But that would have meant destroying the old trees and flowering groves — as in Harare, that was once Salisbury, the public gardens are a relic of the colonial style worth keeping.

A stadium has been built, or rather an existing one has been greatly enlarged and completely refurbished. It has been surrounded, since early last evening, from the foreshore to its six gates of access, as if the ocean itself has flooded up from Table Bay, as if the flanks of Table Mountain itself have crumbled down in a moving mass to the city, by hundreds of thousands of people wanting to get in to occupy the stands open to the public. A cordon of police and the liberation army keeps out the huge crowd for whom there is not room within; the stadium was filled as soon as the gates were opened at ten in the morning for the ceremony that is to take place at noon. There is a sense that the liberation army is protecting the police from the crowd; for many years these black policemen took part in the raids upon these people’s homes and on migrant workers’ hostels, broke down squatters’ shacks, sjambokked schoolchildren and manhandled strikers: every now and then they cannot avoid meeting a certain gaze from eyes in the crowd that once burned with tear gas.

The enormous faces of those who have not lived to see this day sway, honoured on lofty placards. Special contingents overflow the stands packed with those of the liberation organizations and the trade unions. There are student, church and women’s groups, all with their uniforms, T-shirts and banners, there are choirs, musicians with traditional instruments and dancers in the national dress of the amaXhosa, amaZulu, Bapedi, Basotho, VhaVenda, amaPondo, Batswana. Gold, green and black bunting swathes every stand, dais, barrier and pole. The flags of many countries clap at the air in the force of the southeaster blowing. The blue, white and orange flag of the white Republic of South Africa was on the flag-pole in the middle of the arena ready, according to the instructions of some stickler for procedure, to be ceremonially lowered for ever, but during the night someone has got into the stadium despite the heavy guard maintained, and hauled it down. It lies, ripped by a knife, wrapped by the wind round the base of its pole. The television crews from all over the world are filming this image with the same idea in mind: it will provide a striking opening shot for their coverage.

For hours the great swell of singing and chanting has been carried back and forth between the mountain and the sea by the south-easter. When the band in gold, green and black leads in the military escort and motorcade with the first black President and Prime Minister of the country, his wife and his cabinet — all people whose faces were for years not even permitted to be published in newspapers, whose words were banned, and who were banished to exile or prison — the swell rises to a roar that strikes the mountain, and jets above it to the domain of eagles, ululating shrills of ecstasy. The mountain may crack like a great dark glass shattered by a giant’s note never sung before. The instruments of the band, continuing to play as dignitaries and foreign guests are seated on the dais covered with velvet in liberation colours, are obliterated by the human voice; no trumpet or flute can blow against that resonance from half a million breasts, and the Western-style military drums are shallow, beaten out by the tremendous blows of African drums.

Diplomats, white and black, white churchmen and individuals or representatives of organizations who actively supported the liberation Struggle sit among black dignitaries; there are one or two white industries representing the mining corporations. The Chairman of the OAU and his wife are in a place of honour. She is a white woman, but she is wearing African dress today, the striped, hand-woven robes and high-swathed headcloth that is the national dress of the women of the President’s country. Those who know about such things would recognize that the gold earrings suspended from the tip of each lobe that just shows, beneath the headdress, are not of the workmanship of that country, but probably of Ghana. She is a beautiful woman — at least, the splendid outfit makes her appear so; there are not many whites who could carry it off. She has imposing stature despite her lack of height — in the forties, one would say, and rounder than she must have been when she was a girl. Her very large, brilliant black eyes are made-up but unlined — the crease that appears as she smiles and greets people to whom she is being presented, at her husband’s side, is to do with the structure of her face, her high, tight-fleshed cheekbones, which look scrubbed, without artifice. Not possible to see what the colour of her hair may be, now, because of the headcloth. She is embraced by and embraces the wife of the first black President of the country, whom she has never before met; a real beauty, that one once was, and the distinction is still to be discerned despite and perhaps because of the suffering that has aged her to fulfil a different title.

Sasha has not yet come back home. His Dutch wife has twins and she is nervous of going to an unfamiliar country with small children too soon after the long struggle down there has ended. She has been accustomed to the kind of health and welfare facilities taken for granted in Amsterdam. There is also the unsolved problem of Pauline. No longer comrades of war, she and her son have been unable not to resume their own congenital war, but she is certain to want to follow him if he returns. Olga’s sons, Clive and Brian, are the only members of the sisters’ family left in the country. Clive already has been approached by the new Ministry of Agriculture to serve in a consultative capacity on the adaptation of the wine industry to the new social order. He sees no reason to leave. There is no black man with his specialised knowledge in this field, not anywhere. Brian, as the Foreign Exchange economist of one of the largest banks, has been appointed on a commission to review the activities of the Reserve Bank in consideration of the broadening of trade alliances with the world from which the old white regime was excluded, in particular the Afro-Asian and Eastern blocs. So he sees no reason — at present — to leave. Neither brother is in the crowd at the stadium, although there are thousands of whites among the blacks, some wearing the T-shirts that bear the face of the new President. (Clive, with a loan from the Afrikaner bank and in partnership with an Indian clothing manufacturer, was enterprising enough even as a very young man to have had a side-line in the production of such shirts for the liberation movements.) The brothers have always kept away from all that sort of thing, they wouldn’t get mixed up in any mob. The struggle was not their struggle. The celebration is not their celebration.

Now the surface of the living mass has changed, instead of heads it has become fists waving like spores. The wife of the Chairman of the OAU has slowly risen alongside her husband, beside the first black President and Prime Minister, his wife and the other leaders of a new nation, and the Presidents, Prime Ministers, party and union leaders of many others, in practised observance of her training in attendance at great and solemn occasions. She takes a breath, perhaps to ease her shoulders in the robe, and her hands hang at her sides a moment and then are lightly enlaced in front of her thighs in the correct position. Her face is the public face assumed, along with appropriate dress, for exposure.

If it is true that the voice of a life is always addressing someone — for the religiously devout it is a god, for the politically devout it is the human mass — there is a stage in middle life, if that life is fully engaged with the world and the present, when there is no space or need for reflection. The past is not a haunting, but was a preparation, put into use.

It also may be true that a life is always moving — without being aware of this, or what the moment may be, and by a compass not available to others — towards a moment.

Cannons ejaculate from the Castle.

It is noon.

Hillela is watching a flag slowly climb, still in its pupa folds, a crumpled wing emerging, and — now! — it writhes one last time and flares wide in the wind, is smoothed taut by the fist of the wind, the flag of Whaila’s country.