Riotous Assembly

Chapter 1

Piemburg is deceptive. Nothing about it is entirely what it seems to be. Huddled among the foothills of the Drakensberg and crouching at the feet of a great flat-topped hill it has few of the marks of a capital city. Travellers whose trains to Johannesburg stop, if they bother, beneath the rusting sheet-metal gingerbread of its station roof, or who whisk past on the National Highway, glimpse a tiny town that seems to have died and been embalmed. For Piemburg is by popular accounts quite dead. Sleepy Hollow they call it, and an American visitor is reported to have looked at Piemburg and said, 'Half the size of New York Cemetery and twice as dead.' And certainly at a first glance the city's lack of animation seems complete. It lies curled in its valley under the African sun and sleeps. Its red iron roofs and wrought-iron balconies bespeak a distant age of long-forgotten enterprise. Its roads are lined with jacarandas and its gardens are lush with flowering dark verandahs. Everything grows immediately and just as immediately stands still. Time and the climate both combine to growth and growth's suspension.

And Piemburg grew with the garrison, and with the garrison's departure died. Or fell asleep. The capital of Zululand, it sprang up with the British Empire 's conquest of the Zulu nation. In the first flush of that resounding victory, Piemburg was transformed from a tiny settlement long deserted by its Afrikaaner founders into a capital city. Civic buildings multiplied in a rash of colonnade and red Victorian brick. The Governor's mansion bloomed with Italian marble floors, Venetian glass and all the trimmings of Imperial splendour. The railway station, a paragon of metal fretwork and faience, provided a suitable staging post for the Viceregal trains that passed through Piemburg on their way to farther and less attractive Imperial dominions in the hinterland of Africa. And as the great steam engines blustered up the winding gradient to Empire View, the hill above Piemburg, carrying with them their august burden to an early death by tsetse fly or malarial mosquito, monocled and moustached men would gaze serenely down on the capital of Zululand and murmur, 'A gem, a gem set in a green and yellow ring,' and then turn back to study the wholly inaccurate survey maps of their new territories.

Piemburg would salute their passing with a Governor's greeting on the station platform and an exchange of statesmanlike admonitions made inaudible by the military band playing under the iron roof. And Piemburg would pay its respects a few months later when the Viceregal coffin borne in a carriage draped in black and drawn by a locomotive adorned with wreaths halted a moment while the band played a death march with a gusto that made once more inaudible the Governor's condolences to the Aide-de-camp. And in the intervals between Imperial progress and Imperial retreat, the capital of Zululand would adorn itself with new bandstands and botanical gardens and the amusement of a tiny metropolis. In Fort Rapier the great parade ground would echo to the bellowed commands of sergeant-majors. Thousands of putteed legs would stamp or turn about, and the glittering bayonets would eddy to and fro across the brilliant square.

In the town itself the streets were prickly with waxed moustaches. Blanco and brass polish stood high on the list of life's necessities. In the Imperial Hotel the mornings and afternoons were liquid among potted plants and wicker chairs with the music of a Palm Court orchestra. Sam Browne belts and whalebone waist-pinchers restrained the officers and their wives who listened to the whine of the violins and recalled the shires and parishes of England with thankful melancholy. Many would never return and those who stayed and were not buried in the military cemetery in Fort Rapier would build their houses as close to the Governor's mansion as their seniority and overdrafts allowed.

While the garrison stayed Piemburg prospered. Piemburg was even, briefly, gay. The Garrison Theatre was made brilliant by performances of plays and revues that bred one great English actor and playwright and charmed the Governor and his wife. Bazaars and garden parties were bright with the parasols and bustles of wives who had been swept from the terraced suburbs and semi-detached houses of South London to the grandeur of the lawns and shrubberies of Piemburg by the surprising good fortune of having married husbands whose mediocrity won for them the reward of being posted to this distant sliver of the Empire. The taste of the Victorian lower middle class imposed itself indelibly upon Piemburg and has stayed there to this day. And with the taste there came an immutable sense of hierarchy. Viceroys, governors, generals, vice-governors, colonels, down the ranks swept, broadening as they went, through nuances too subtle to enumerate, where schools and wives' fathers' professions and a dropped aspirate or one retained 'g' could cause a major to step in an instant up above a lieutenant-colonel. At the bottom of the scale came private soldiers in the pay corps. Below these pariahs there was nothing left. Zulus competed with Pondos, Coloureds with Indians. What happened down there was simply nobody's concern. All that one had to know was that somewhere even lower than the loyal Zulus and the treacherous Pondos there were the Boers. And so it went until the war. Boers didn't wash. Boers were cowards. Boers were stupid. Boers were an excrescence that blocked the way to Cairo. Piemburg ignored the Boers.

And then came the Boer War and as the Boers shot the monocles out of the eyes of the officers of Fort Rapier, waiting deliberately for a semaphore reflection of the sun to signal a suitable monocled target, a new respect was born in Piemburg. The Boer could shoot straight. The Boer was cunning. The Boer was now the enemy.

And but a moment later the Boer was the enemy no more. The obstacle to Cairo and the gold mines quite removed, Piemburg began its swift decline. As the garrison departed and the bands played Goodbye Dolly Gray for the last time, Piemburg fell asleep. Like a replete puff-adder coiled and bloated it lay under the African sun and dreamt of its brief days of glory. Only a sense of precedence remained to multiply in the luxuriant climate of its own mediocrity. The houses stood and gazed at the ring of hills and on their stoeps the sons and grandsons of the sergeant-majors, quartermaster sergeants and warrant officers pretended to a grandeur their ancestors had never known. In Piemburg time stood still, marked only by the dust that gathered on the heads of the stuffed lions that mouldered in the Alexandra Club and by the drip of snobbery. Piemburg's mediocrity was venomous and waited gently on events.