Star of Africa

Chapter 61

Ben was barely conscious of the presence of the soldiers around him as he walked back to the village. He could only dimly sense that Jude, Jeff and the others were looking at him. He couldn’t return their looks. He felt as though he had lead weights attached to his legs. His head was filled with a kind of buzzing and everything seemed somehow distant and unreal.

Back at the village, the rearguard of soldiers left behind stood over Sizwe’s five companions, still kneeling on the ground with their heads bowed so low that their hair brushed the dirt. Sizwe himself would be long gone now. If he had any sense. Running through the bush, stricken with grief, streaming tears in the knowledge that his friends and family could no longer be saved, and there was nothing he could do but try to stay alive himself.

Trust me, Ben had said. And Sizwe had trusted him. And now it had come to this.

Khosa ordered for the village’s vehicles to be brought, and soldiers hurried off to fetch them. Moments later, the grunt and snort of diesel engines filled the air. This was Africa, where fuel stations were so few and far that even the poorest man kept his truck fully gassed, if he could afford one at all, and loaded it with all the spare jerrycans he could fill. The vehicles lumbered through the village: a scarred and rusted-out old Mercedes-Benz L-series nineteen-ton heavy truck, and an even more ragged long-wheelbase Land Rover with a spare wheel mounted on the bonnet and a canvas top so ripped by thorns and branches that it was hanging in tatters. Both were blowing clouds of smoke, and their engines clattered and rattled.

Ben didn’t have many prayers left in him, but he was praying that the arrival of the vehicles would spur Khosa to get out of here before he wrought worse carnage on the blighted village.

Once more, Ben’s prayers went unanswered.

After Khosa had surveyed the vehicles and seemed satisfied with them, he turned his attention back to Uwase, Ntwali, Gasimba, Mugabo and Rusanganwa, the five them all kneeling silently in the dirt. ‘I have tried to show fairness to these men,’ he proclaimed, in a tone that conveyed both his greatness as a leader and his hurt at their betrayal. ‘I have offered them the chance of freedom, for themselves and their families. What do they offer in return? Treachery. They have proved to me that they are nothing more than cockroaches. Unworthy of mercy. Unworthy of life.’

Khosa paused. He shook his head, solemnly, like a judge weighing up the gravity of the moment before passing sentence.

‘You will bring the women and children,’ he told the soldiers. ‘You will make them kneel here before me. Then you will kill the children in front of their mothers. Cut off their heads. Then cut off the heads of the mothers. Then you will kill the last of the men. Kill them all.’

And they did.