Under the wise guidance of ...
Within the Port Victoria branch of Barclays Bank (DCO), all was quiet and drowsy and peaceful.
The sunlight, slanting through slatted blinds, fell on the black-and-white tiled floor as gently as a caressing hand; the big punkah fans murmured like doves. It was mid-morning, and customers were few; the nine o’clock depositors had been and gone, the noontime housewives had not yet arrived to collect their spending money. Solemn as church, solid as quarried marble, kindly as Juliet’s nurse, Barclays was keeping its daily rendezvous with history.
The two old men who shuffled in through the swing doors were like a thousand other old men to be seen on the streets of Port Victoria. They were barefooted, but that was nothing new in a land where the earth was warm and shoes cost good money; their dusty blankets and yellow beehive hats were the time-honoured uniform of Pharamaul.
They looked a little out of place in a bank; but, like misers who dress in rags and yet have seventy-five thousand pounds in their current account, they were acceptable, whether in disguise or not. When they walked up to the teller nearest the door, no one gave them more than a second glance.
But soon all Barclays was looking at them, because in the silence their voices were loud and their words unusual. Arrived at the counter, they said, in firm and perfect unison: ‘Give us money.’
The bank teller, an alert young man who sometimes pictured himself as a hero at a moment of crisis, with swift promotion to follow, came to attention instantly. But the new arrivals were not armed, nor menacing in any way; they were just two old men with their hands held out. The teller asked, as he had asked a hundred times before of tourists and other strangers: ‘Have you an account here?’
The two old men looked at each other, as though confronted by some absolutely strange thing; then the elder, whose wisp of white beard gave him authority, asked: ‘What is account?’
To a large and rapt audience, the teller answered: ‘It means, do you have money here? Are you a customer?’
The spokesman shook his head. ‘We have no money here, barena. You have money. That is why we ask.’
The beautiful logic of this was not to the teller’s taste. He answered firmly: ‘If you have no account, then of course you cannot draw money from the bank.’
‘But we have seen it done,’ the old man explained patiently. ‘We have watched the Europeans. When they want money, they come here and ask for it, and you give it to them. Now this is our country. The chief told us so. So now it is our money.’
The teller leant forward against the mahogany counter, friendly, helpful, almost confidential. With equal patience he explained: ‘The Europeans are given the money because it is theirs. Each one has an account.’
The younger of the two old men asked again: ‘What is this account?’
‘It means that they have put money into the bank. So now they can take it out.’
‘Why do they put it in, if they wish to take it out again?’ Privately, in the case of certain small and whirling accounts, this had puzzled the teller also. But he knew the textbook answer: ‘That is how a bank works. You give money to the bank to look after, and when you want it, you ask for it, and it is given back to you.’
‘We can look after it ourselves,’ said the leader, ‘if we have it.’
Some subdued giggling from the typing section at the back of the room warned the teller that the scene had gone on long enough. He stood up straight again.
‘I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do about that. There is no money for you in the bank.’
‘Is this true?’
‘Yes, it is true.’
The two old men watched as, at the very next wicket, a red-faced man in a silk suit and jaunty panama said: ‘I’d like two five-pound notes and five singles,’ and was given his money straight away. They looked at each other. There was something here which was difficult to understand, which was not to be believed without great faith in the white man’s word. In the meantime, it was a moment for courtesy. They touched their beehive hats, and the elder man said: ‘We will return when we have talked of this.’ Then they walked out of the bank again, their manner betraying nothing, their dignity still theirs.
Not till they were outside did they begin to shake their heads.
Far up-country on the Oosthuizen farm, which had seen such fearful bloodshed in the old days, there was another episode of the same sort; but the rural version had a cruel note to it, and was not to be solved so amicably. Oosthuizen’s was now farmed by the cousin who had inherited it, another South African called Piet Vermeulen, and Vermeulen had a curious story to tell when next he came down to the Port Victoria Club. There he found an attentive audience, which had a special interest in this kind of thing.
‘Those bloody kaffirs!’ he began, in that deep guttural voice which was more at home in Afrikaans. ‘You never know what they’ll get up to next. Like a bunch of bloody kids! D’you know, some of them actually trekked in and settled on my land! Two whole families of them, about sixteen kids, with goats and chickens and God knows what. They just moved in, without a word to anyone, put up a couple of rondavels, and planted a mealie-patch as if they owned the place!’
‘I hope you kicked them out, good and hard,’ said Binkie Buchanan, as Piet Vermeulen paused to take a swig at his beer. ‘There’s a damned sight too much of that sort of thing, these days.’
‘You’re damned right, I kicked them out,’ said Vermeulen, ‘but it wasn’t as easy as all that. To start with, they’d been there more than a month before I heard anything about it. It’s a bit of worthless land up where the high veld begins. All scrub and cactus. You have to walk a mile for a bucket of water from the spruit. To tell the truth, I never look at it, from one year’s end to another, and I wouldn’t have known a thing if one of my herd boys hadn’t mentioned it. He thought I must have given them permission.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I went along double quick and told them to bugger off. D’you know, they actually had the sauce to start arguing! There was one of them, a great big sweaty buck who seemed to be the boss, telling me the tale. Christ, I can hear him now! “This is our land. Dinamaula said so. We’re free to settle down anywhere we like.” Pretty rich, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’ll bet you told him a thing or two,’ said Binkie Buchanan, outraged.
Piet Vermeulen grinned. ‘I did my best, by God! In the old days, I’d have been after the lot of them with a sjambok. Or my ridgebacks would have seen them off the premises, minus the seat of their pants. But this is a bloody democracy! First I had to argue, then I had to send for the police. They soon moved them on, I can tell you. But honestly, would you believe it?’
‘I’d believe anything, these days.’
‘Disgraceful!’
Yet it still had not been easy, even with the police. The intruders would not move for the law, any more than for Piet Vermeulen. They said, again and again: ‘This is our country, so this is now our land.’ They claimed that the police were wrong, that there were many new laws which said that a man could now do this and that. They said that the police must protect their rights, not drive them away like dogs.
They said that the police should drive the white man away, since this was not his land any more … They would not yield to reason, they would not give way to threats. There was a new law, they shouted desperately, even as they warded off the blows, and the land now belonged to any man in Pharamaul who needed it, and would work it.
In the end, four of them were taken off to gaol, and the rest of the squatters were pushed and shoved out beyond the farm boundaries, with their women and children and goats. They were flicked with ox thongs, and told to keep moving till they reached their own village again, and not to come back. The rondavels with their thatched roofs were burned down, and the mealie-patch left to the crows.
After the first brave defiance, there was only ragged shambling retreat, and women wailing, and a half-grown boy calling out: ‘Then what is new in this country?’ before he ran away.
Simon the cook-houseboy had a shameful secret, and only Gloria the nursegirl knew it. Gloria, a sophisticated Port Victoria girl whose get-up on her ‘day off’ was positively startling, had always looked down on Simon, the U-Maula country bumpkin with the slow wits which all southerners laughed at; after her discovery, she positively despised him.
It was a simple secret, which she had found out by accident. Simon was terrified of the Hoover – so terrified that he could not bring himself to use it.
Gloria had been in the garden one day when she heard the Hoover going in one of the bedrooms. By chance curiosity she glanced through the window, and saw something which made her laugh out loud. The Hoover was going, all right, in the sense that it was switched on; but it was purring steadily to itself, tucked away in one corner, while Simon was on his knees brushing the carpet by hand.
She was ready with a derisive greeting when he returned to the kitchen.
‘Old man,’ she said, ‘what is the Hoover for? Do you think it is a radio, to listen to? Does it play your tribe’s music? Is that how they have a party, up in your stupid village?’
In Shebiya, women did not talk to men like this; in fact they did not talk to men at all, unless they were asked a direct question. But this was Port Victoria, where the women chattered freely, like jays, and behaved shamelessly, as if they were equals like the Europeans. Gloria could always make a fool of him; and now, it seemed, she had come upon a new sharp weapon, to make him feel a fool always.
He said: ‘Hold your tongue. I have work to do.’ But his head was hanging low already, and he had great fear of the future.
‘Work with the Hoover?’ Gloria inquired sarcastically. ‘That should be very quick work. That should be finished in a minute, the way you use it.’
‘I do not like the machine,’ said Simon. ‘The brush is better.’
‘Have you told the missus so?’
‘She does not need to be told,’ said Simon, gruff with anxiety. ‘As long as the work is done.’
‘We will see,’ said Gloria. ‘I have to think what is right. The missus hears the Hoover going, and she says to herself: “Ah, the old man is working well, he is doing what he is ordered.” But all the time, old man, you are deceiving her. Should she not be told?’
There were seeds here of endless small blackmail, and Simon knew that he was powerless to withstand it. He said again: ‘The brush is better. I work better with the brush.’
‘Then do not switch on the Hoover. Do not waste the electricity. What about the master who pays all the bills? Should he have to pay for electricity that does nothing, that is used for music?’
Simon said nothing.
‘I will have to think about this, old man,’ said Gloria. ‘While I am thinking, I will have some tea.’
‘It is not time for tea.’
‘It is time when I say it is time,’ snapped Gloria. ‘Make me some tea. And do not make it on the Hoover. Use the kettle and the stove.’ As Simon, dispirited, turned away towards the sink, her voice came threateningly to his ear: ‘Perhaps that is what they use the Hoover for, up in that stupid village.’
Up in that stupid village, under a dry and dusty thorn tree which had sheltered a generation of men and a thousand gatherings, adult education was in progress. There was, as evidence of this, a blackboard borrowed from the school, and a large and attentive audience, and tannoy loudspeakers so that they could all hear, and a teacher – the District Commissioner himself – to give the instruction. His subject was simple: ‘How to vote.’
Charles Seaton, the District Commissioner for Shebiya, was a tall young man in a white bush jacket and white shorts – the only tolerable dress in the glaring heat which the thorn tree hardly tempered at all. At the moment he was standing, chalk in hand, drawing animals and birds and other pictures on the blackboard. By his side sat old Chief Banka, and behind Chief Banka stood a good selection of his twenty sons. Close at hand, and necessary because Charles Seaton’s command of the Maula tongue was not equal to this occasion, was the interpreter. He was the son of the official interpreter at Gamate, Voice Tula, and was known, inevitably, as Small Voice Tula.
Charles Seaton drew, with some labour, stylized versions of the symbols which in this election would stand, not for parties but for men. There were eight such pictures, for the eight candidates who had come forward: a cock, a horned ox, a spread eagle, a horse, a domed mud hut, a water pot, a spear, and a three-legged stool. When he had finished his drawing, Seaton began to speak, pausing at the end of each sentence so that Small Voice Tula could translate. The process took a long time, but in Shebiya there was always plenty of that.
‘This is a choosing,’ he began, and the tannoy speakers echoed his words raggedly, as if in some vast boxing arena. ‘It is a choosing of men for the great new council in Port Victoria. Shebiya is to send four men to the council, which will rule all Pharamaul, and you will choose them, out of the eight men who have come forward. These are the eight men’ – and he pointed to the drawings on the blackboard.
This earned a quick laugh, which was not at all what Charles Seaton wanted. His orders from the Chief Secretary had been firmly summed up in a single phrase: ‘Make them take it seriously,’ and, as a wide-awake young man with his eye on a certain job in the Scheduled Territories Office, he was determined to do exactly as he was told, whether he believed in it or not. So he frowned at the laughter, and raised his hand for silence, and went on:
‘I should say, these are the signs for the men you will choose. I will give you a list of the men now, with their signs. It will be repeated here on the aboura every day until the day of the choosing. If you forget the list, or if you are not sure which sign is for a certain man, then come to the Government office and ask.’
Now Seaton picked up his bamboo swagger stick, and pointed at the blackboard. ‘Listen carefully. Chief Banka – the cock. Benjamin Banka, son of the chief – the ox. Matthew Banka, son of the chief – the eagle. Pele Matale, Government clerk – the horse …’
He went on down the list until he had finished it. It was heavily loaded in favour of tribal authority, he realized, but there was nothing to be done about that. Chief Banka was, for a dozen sound reasons, an essential candidate, and his two sons deserved their chance because of their rank, though it had been the devil’s own job to stop all the sons coming forward, and thus flooding the market completely. The twenty sons of Chief Banka were, beyond doubt, the prime nuisances of Shebiya. Some put on insufferable airs, some chased after other men’s wives, some drank beer all day and snored like pigs all night. None of them ever did a stroke of work, and all of them quarrelled constantly, prodded and poked forward by their jealous wives and competing mothers.
Charles Seaton had had to plague the life out of Chief Banka, already plagued beyond endurance, before weeding out the non-starters and bringing the number of his family candidates down to two.
When he had finished the list, and waited for Small Voice Tula’s translation, he took up his tale again.
‘On the day of the choosing, you will come to the school. Do not come all together. Come at any time during the day, until the sun sets. At that time, a bell will be rung, and that will be the end of the choosing. When you come to the school, you will each be given a paper. On the paper will be these signs.’ He pointed to the blackboard. ‘When you have decided who to choose, you will take a pencil and make a cross – so – against the sign of the man you choose. Remember, you are to mark four of them, and no more. If you mark more than four, your paper will be thrown away.’
He paused again, not only for Small Voice Tula but to allow all this to sink in. He wished above everything that he could have left Shebiya before this nonsense started. He did not believe in any of it. He liked Pharamaul, and the U-Maulas were good chaps, most of them, and he had enjoyed his time in Shebiya. But an election … It was coming about a hundred years too soon, and the childish charade he was now acting out was proof of that.
Cocks and eagles and horses … What these lads needed was reading and writing. Then a literacy test. Then the vote. Not in a hundred years; it wouldn’t take as long as that. But twenty would be about right. When the new generation had grown up and knew what it was voting for, that was the time for elections.
In twenty years, perhaps, he, Charles Seaton, would be remembered in village folklore as the DC who drew pictures on the blackboard and tried to make people vote for animals instead of for men. But in the meantime – he raised his swagger stick again, to cut off the murmur of comment from the crowd, and said: ‘Now. Is there any question you want to ask? Is there anything you have not understood?’ He turned to the old man sitting by his side. ‘Chief?’
‘It is clear to me,’ said Chief Banka after a pause.
‘It is clear to me,’ said his son Benjamin, unasked.
The second son, Matthew, a fat young man who liked the limelight, asked: ‘Why is it only four men from Shebiya?’
Well, that wasn’t too silly a question … Seaton turned back to the microphone. ‘I have been asked, why is Shebiya to send four men? The answer is, it has been decided according to the number of the people. Port Victoria will send eight men. Gamate will send ten men. Fish Village will send two.’
After the translation, there was a sudden surge of talk from the crowd. Then an old man in the front row called out querulously: ‘What chance have four men of Shebiya against ten men of Gamate?’ and there were voices of approval all round him.
Seaton put it as simply as he could. ‘It is not against Gamate. It is with Gamate. Together, all the twenty-four men in the council will rule Pharamaul, for the good of all.’
There was more loud talk at that. Shebiya had never been with Gamate. Gamate, an ancient enemy, was at best a suspect neighbour. But the point was not made in open debate. It was a matter for private words, for night-time murmuring in huts when woodsmoke and suspicion and jealousy could mingle in the darkness without a man having to account to authority. It was not a matter for the District Commissioner. Instead, there was a second question, not quite as rational as the first: ‘If the men we choose go away to the council, how will we hear what they say?’
Perhaps it was rational after all, thought Seaton; it was the normal absentee-member-neglecting-his-constituency complaint. He answered as best he could: ‘From time to time the men you have chosen will come back to Shebiya, and tell you what they have said, and what new laws have been passed.’
A young man at the back shouted: ‘How will we know if they speak the truth?’ and there was a burst of laughter.
Seaton decided that he had better step on this straight away. ‘They will speak the truth because they are the men you trust. That is why you will choose them … Now, are there any more questions?’
After a long silence, the old man who had spoken already asked: ‘You say, we make four marks on the paper, for four men. But can we make four marks for one man? If we do not like a certain man on the paper’ – and he looked with the utmost disdain toward Benjamin Banka – ‘can we then give his mark to another man?’ He rose, and bowed suddenly. ‘Can we, perhaps, give our four marks to the Chief?’
‘No,’ answered Charles Seaton, when all this had been translated. ‘You will give one mark to each man. But if you wish to, you may make only one mark.’
‘Yet you told us, four marks,’ said the old man, accusingly.
‘I said, not more than four marks.’ Seaton, realizing that he had not said this at all, was angry with himself, and impatient with the whole thing. This was all so bloody complicated … ‘You may choose one man, or two men, or three, or four. But not more than four.’
The old man had not finished. ‘Then how many times can we go to the school and make our choosing? Can we return a second time if we have a strong wish to choose a certain man? How many pieces of paper will there be for each one of us?’
Charles Seaton sighed again. Once more, he wished he could have left before the election, before independence itself. This was like a kindergarten, it was like one of those obedience schools for dogs. And, within a few months, his successor as District Commissioner was going to be a Maula … He said firmly: ‘Each man can choose only once. His name is written on a list, and when he is given his voting paper the name is crossed off by a policeman.’ It might be a good moment to stress the rules. ‘If anyone tries to choose twice, he may go to prison, or he may lose all his cattle.’ That was probably the best note to end on. ‘No more talking today,’ Seaton said. ‘If you have a question, come to the Government office and ask it. Or come here each day for the announcement.’ Then he touched his swagger stick to his forehead, which was a salute they all knew, and spoke the traditional closing words: ‘Aboura i faanga. The aboura is ended.’
As the crowd, buzzing with talk, began to melt away, he turned to Chief Banka.
‘Thank you, Chief,’ he said formally. ‘I think that was a good start.’
The old man, who had a sense of humour behind his grave authority, inclined his head. ‘Thank you, Mr Seaton. Let us say, the longest journey starts with a single step.’
On a bare hillside, across which the night wind blew soft and chill, the band of men stood guard by their net. It was a huge net, strung taut on stakes eight and ten feet above the ground; it had been spread and tended each night for more than two years, ever since it had been noticed that the same great bird came flying in each day at dawn.
One day, it was believed, that bird would fly low instead of high, or it would drop from the sky because of failing wings; and then it would flutter into their net and there lie still, and it would be theirs forever, with all its power and magic.
The net-men had built a cave of loose stones near by, and there, well screened from the sky, a fire burned all night to give them comfort. But there were always men awake and on watch under the net, in case the bird came early. These men looked upwards through the net, straining for sounds, watching the moon on its slow journey past the stars.
When, towards dawn, heavy dew fell on the net, the moonlight glistened on it strangely, sending confused gleamings and shafts of light across the great trap. Then one of the watchers would get up, and walk all round the stakes, shaking the net; and the dew would drop down like cold misty rain, and their sight would be clear again.
The pale light which was the dawn began to make an arc in the east. The men on watch strained to listen, and then one of them, whose hearing as a hunter was famous, said: ‘It comes.’ The tiny throb of sound, coming also from the east, gained strength even as they listened; and they called softly to the men lying by the cave fire: ‘It comes,’ and within a moment shadows moved and grew together in the half-light, and the space under the net filled, until all the net-men were at their posts.
The throbbing gained power till it was a steady droning. Presently, over the crest of the bare hillside, the bird itself could be seen, moving across the sky towards them; it had flashing lights, green and red, which were its fearful eyes, and sometimes its breath could be seen, streaming away behind it as it soared in flight.
It seemed perhaps a little lower at this dawning, and the men under the net clenched their hands, and prayed that this might be the day. The noise was very loud, the drumming of the wings like thunder, the flashing eyes as clear as jewels. But once more, the huge bird’s flight was not low enough to bring it into their trap; once more, their net was empty as the prey passed overhead. The bird had escaped them again.
The newspaper plane from Windhoek droned and snarled away to the south, dropping towards Port Victoria. As its eyes disappeared and its breath faded, the net-men sighed, and rubbed their stiff limbs, and went back to the cave and the fire. Another chill night had passed, another sunrise was at hand, and another chance to catch the bird and fill their empty net was gone forever.
But there would be other dawns, and they were bound by the strictest oath to watch them. One day they would catch that bird, a bird so strong that it could fly like the wind, yet so stupid that it flew the same patch of night sky on every journey. One day they would catch it, and eat it, and steal its power with its blood.
All they need do was keep their net in good repair, and tend it faithfully and cunningly, and wait for that great day.