Firm measures are now being taken
Like a vast army of soldier ants, intent on one target, the great tide of straggling columns pushed slowly southwards. There was not room for them all on the main road, and so some moved painfully on a pathway parallel to it, trudging in a straight Roman line which led them over hills, and across valleys, and along dried-out watercourses, and past small hut circles which had not seen so many men since the circle had first been marked out on the parched earth, by some hopeful head-of-family dead these hundred years.
Other men followed the red-rusted railway track, now so overgrown with weeds that goats could be seen grazing on its iron pasture. These men limped and plodded along the sleepers, for mile after mile; towards sunset they moved as if they were sleepers themselves. But they, and their brothers taking the hill tracks, and their comrades treading the main highway, were united in one purpose.
In anger, in despair, in hunger, in jealousy, hatred, and humility, in simple faith and cunning calculation, they were leaving their homes, and marching upon Port Victoria, to claim what the great President had promised when he had greeted them, calling them ‘My people!’ on that long-ago, first day of freedom – that Pharamaul, now a lion among countries, belonged to them all.
They were for the most part a ragged army, though the small contingent from Fish Village, marching in their white boiler suits with the stencilled Government markings, was smart enough to flatter any procession. They carried many banners, ragged also, and they stirred a towering cloud of yellow dust as they picked up both speed and people on their steady advance.
Father Stubbs was in the van, his brown cassock looped up to give his striding legs full freedom. His banner proclaimed: ‘Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread!’ and he waved it and twirled it from time to time as he exhorted his followers: ‘Close up! Close up! Keep moving, lads!’ Some sophisticates in the ranks just behind him, borrowing from another culture, had made up a chant: ‘All the way with Stubbay!’ and whenever he heard this he turned, and grinned, and tossed his banner upwards in delighted salute.
There were other banners – ‘Colonialism OUT!’ ‘We Demand Our Just Rights!’ ‘Down With The Greedy Men!’ – just as there were other leaders marshalling their people and encouraging them onwards. Though there was a certain number of idlers and troublemakers and persuadable fools, there were men here with a better purpose than most.
There was Chief Justin from Fish Village, with his overalled followers – followers now out of work, since the canning factory was closed for lack of certain vital spares. There was Caspar Muru, with a face set in proud grief, mourning before all the world his dead grandfather, dishonoured in death as a criminal. There was young Matthew Banka, also mourning a father who was still held in prison, still branded as a traitor. There were the two old Agura brothers, uncles of the disgraced Mayika, fiercely resolved on justice and public decency. There was Pele Matale, member of the Opposition, now outlawed and branded in the same way.
Each day they pressed on at their best speed; each night they camped in the best shelter they could find, and lit fires which glowed hopefully in the darkness, covering a whole hillside. Many fell exhausted and parched and footsore as soon as they came to a halt, and were looked after and meagrely fed by other, stronger men; and the two lorries which were travelling with them brought up the stragglers, in a kindly whipping-in which bound them all together again as one determined band of brothers.
They were a band of brothers four thousand strong by the time they were forty miles from Port Victoria.
Two days short of their goal, they came under steady observation. Men with cameras came and took their photographs; the wandering British Council team which had been recording the folk songs of Pharamaul made a record of this enterprise also, under the title ‘March Like a Lion, Leap Like a Lamb’; other men from the newspapers came to watch and to report, and, since Father Stubbs proved talkative at any hour of the day, they took all his words down – words such as ‘Protest of Desperation’ and ‘Freedom Rally’ and ‘Battle for Justice’ and ‘Better Dead than Duped’ – and gave them, or thought they gave them, to a waiting world.
The newsmen were not to know that for many days their world waited in vain. Under a special decree of national emergency, all outgoing cables were destroyed as soon as they were handed in. They did know that the telephone service with the mainland had been suspended, but they put this down to a normal African inefficiency.
There were other people, more potent, more purposeful, keeping a watchful eye on the marchers. Twice a day policemen in cars drove out from the capital, and took notes, and counted heads, and talked on their radios as they sped away again. It happened for the last time when the procession was one night away from Port Victoria. But there was no opposition, no attempt at preventing the advance, no barked command; simply a silent, guardian vigilance which made the nervous afraid, and the rebellious angry.
Then, at noon next day, when they had reached the outskirts of the northern suburbs, they found their way totally barred by a steel-grey, half-track armoured car, also labelled ‘Police’, straddled across the road.
At the sight of it there were angry shouts, and cries of ‘Police spies!’ and a great waving and shaking of banners as the procession was forced to a halt. But it seemed that their way was not barred after all. Within a few moments, the hatch of the armoured car was flung back with an iron clang, and the huge head and shoulders of a man emerged.
His face was gleaming with sweat, and he drew a deep breath of the fresh air – air still hot enough, but far better than the baking furnace which had lately imprisoned him. In his hand he held a powered megaphone – a ‘bullhorn’ – and through this he greeted them.
Not twenty of them recognized Colonel Mboku, not two hundred had ever heard of him. But they recognized the voice of authority – and of friendly authority also.
‘You are welcome!’ Colonel Mboku shouted through the bullhorn, and the astonishing words echoed down the ragged lines until they had astonished the last weary straggler. ‘I bring you a message of peace and help. Follow this car. It will lead you to the cricket ground, where we all met on the day of independence. Government has set up tents there, and cooking pots, and fires for you. There you can rest. There is food for all! There is bariaana for all!’
At the mention of bariaana, the fiery home-brewed beer which all Pharamaul knew, there was another astonished murmur among the marchers. But it was Father Stubbs who reacted most forcibly.
‘You cannot bribe us!’ he shouted out. He shook his fist towards the armoured car, and Colonel Mboku, and the watching policemen. ‘We have come to demand our rights! We must speak to the President!’
‘You will speak to him tomorrow,’ Mboku answered, looking down at the angry, gesticulating priest as if he were the most law-abiding citizen to be found within a hundred miles. ‘That is a solemn promise. But follow me now to the cricket ground. There you can rest after your hard journey, and sleep in peace. Then tomorrow at noon there will be a great aboura.’
As he finished speaking, Colonel Mboku dropped from view; the circular hatch slammed shut again; and the armoured car started its engine with a roar, and manoeuvred slowly round in a circle, the steel claws of the half-track leaving great scars on the surface of the ground. Then it rumbled and clanked down the road towards the city centre. Uncertainly, suspiciously, hopefully, sometimes jauntily, the marchers limbered up their aching limbs, and hoisted their banners, and picked up step, and followed it.
When they came to the next crossroads, there was, of all things, the famous Pharamaul Police Band, in dazzling white helmets and spotless uniforms, with here and there a leopard skin, here and there a gleaming tuba or trombone, waiting to welcome them.
On command, the band wheeled neatly into place, just ahead of the armoured car, and then, with clashing cymbals, booming bass drums, and brass-throated trumpets, it led the marchers onwards, to the tune of Entry of the Gladiators, putting them in great heart for the last mile of their journey.
All that evening on the cricket ground, where the scoreboard, unaltered from a match played four months previously, recorded: ‘Port Victoria, 296 for 6 declared: Visitors, 202 all out,’ the marchers from the north enjoyed rest, and good eating and drinking, and the best of fellowship. For many, it was the first meat they had tasted since they left home; for all of them, the oil drums full of bariaana supplied the most generous offering, the most splendid hospitality of their lives, and there were few who held back from the temptation.
Even Father Stubbs, for whom the home-brewed beer was foul-tasting muck, fit only for pigswill, did his share of roistering, passing from one group to another with a full dipper and cheerful words of encouragement. Later he gathered his own group round him, and led them in brief prayer, and in a singing of Onward, Christian Soldiers! and then in political discussion, when the plans for the morrow were carefully drawn up, and the watchword was declared to be: ‘No Surrender! No Victimization! No Nonsense!’
All next morning, police cars with well-tuned loudspeakers toured the streets of Port Victoria, announcing a single short message: ‘All supporters of the National Party must wear their colours at the aboura! Show your loyalty to the President!’ They did not come anywhere near the cricket ground, where the marchers woke late after their weary pilgrimage, and long talking, and deep drinking, and their exhausted sleep.
No one bothered them, or counselled them, or held out the hand of friendship. The police guard on the gate turned away all visitors, with the order: ‘The aboura will open at noon.’ The marchers were left in isolation, to wake, and yawn, and scratch, and stretch their stiff limbs, and consider what the new day might bring them.
At the stroke of noon by the pavilion clock, the main gate was opened, and all those who wished to join the great aboura began to assemble.
The police, who seemed in a strangely jovial mood, were in full control from the start. About half of them were armed, and the rest carried the skull-cracking, ebony knobkerries which in Pharamaul took the place of truncheons. But they did not seem even to be thinking of using them; the weapons appeared ceremonial, no more than part of their uniforms, as the policemen directed the marchers from the centre of the cricket field towards the covered stand.
‘You are honoured guests!’ some of them said, ushering the marchers forward. ‘You have pride of place at this aboura.’ In a few minutes the stand had become full of the visitors, just as the field itself began to fill up with the citizens of Port Victoria, almost all of them wearing the National Party colours of red and black.
Presently a convoy of trucks made its appearance at the main gate, and drove slowly up to the stand. As their doors were opened, and the first few men appeared, climbing down awkwardily as if they were unused to movement, a murmur of surprise, and then a steady howl of rage, rose from the centre of the ground. These were the long-hidden political prisoners, specially released to attend the aboura! But had they not been branded, for weeks and months, as criminals and traitors? The catcalls multiplied as man after man in prison clothes made his appearance.
Many of them were thin and broken, and there were affecting scenes among the marchers as, sometimes, those nearest to the prisoners found their friends and greeted them. When Chief Banka of Shebiya climbed down, assisted by two policemen, a great shout rose from the stand as soon as he was recognized, drowning the cries of ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Criminal!’; and men came forward to salute him and press his hand.
He looked painfully frail, and very old; the prison dungarees hung in folds from his wasted body, and he found it difficult to hold himself upright, even to greet a man from his own tribe.
He was given the place of honour on the front bench of the stand, next to Father Stubbs.
Then a much louder noise was heard outside the grounds, and people looked towards the main gate again. This time it was the steel-grey armoured car, which lumbered in, its engine roaring in low gear, its tracks rattling and clanking like an iron foundry. Once again, its claws bit and tore the earth as it advanced.
In front of the stand it wheeled round, and came to a halt. The thundering engine was stilled. It now had a loudspeaker mounted on the roof; but no human beings could be seen inside. Even the driver had only a narrow slit in place of a windscreen, and the sides of the car were featureless save for smaller slits, and the black-painted letters ‘Police’. It stood in front of the stand, a squat castle of steel which could never be stormed.
Then some more police arrived in two trucks, and took up their station behind the armoured car. These men were all armed with revolvers, and a number of them seemed to be drunk.
But the armoured car, faceless, non-human, im-pregnable, was undoubtedly in charge. As soon as the police had restored order, and the prisoners had been seated, and their friends had returned to the higher benches, and the shouts from the National Party supporters on the centre field had died away, the loudspeaker on the car roof opened up – first with a blast of heavy breath, and then with words, blaring and echoing as if expelled from iron lungs.
The citizens of Port Victoria had by now come to know this voice well. It was Colonel Mboku.
‘The aboura is now begun,’ he told them, and the phrase, though formal, sounded full of weighty meaning. ‘We greet the marchers from the north. They should tell us first why they are here.’
There was silence from the benches in the stand, as men looked at one another uncertainly. Then Father Stubbs stood up, and came forward to the central microphone. His beaky nose was upthrust, his long hair unkempt after his rough night; but the brown cassock and heavy leather belt gave him a certain authority, and there was no reaction from the crowd except silence.
Father Stubbs began on a sharp note of belligerence.
‘You should tell us first why we have been met with guns, with an armoured car, with rows of policemen!’ he shouted. We have come in peace, to demand our rights! We will not be intimidated!’
The armoured car answered him: ‘There is no intimidation. The police are for your protection. It may happen that you have enemies here. But I do not wish to talk about policemen. Tell us why you have come.’
Father Stubbs, still mutinous, still using his most querulous tone, began to speak again. He spoke briefly, and it was mostly in slogans which had a certain ring of falsehood, since they only aped and mimicked the marchers’ banners: ‘We will not be victimized!’ ‘The north is starving while the south is fat!’ ‘We are not a colony of Port Victoria!’ ‘We fight for justice!’ ‘Give us freedom, not slavery!’
It was strange, outlandish stuff for most of his audience, but he was still heard in silence, as a priest should be. It was only when he shouted at the end of his speech: ‘Where is the President? Why is he hiding from us?’ that there was a long growl from the centre of the field, a growl which swelled into angry shouting. In face of it, Father Stubbs stepped back, and sat down.
He had made no headway – a fact which became clearer still as Colonel Mboku, from his iron shell, answered him roughly: ‘Do not attack the President! That is treason! The President does not hide from anyone. He will come when he chooses to come. Let us hear some more of these fancied wrongs of the northerners. So far I have heard nothing but insults and lies.’
After a moment, Chief Banka made as if to rise, but his wasted muscles could not support the move, and he fell back in pitiful weakness. He was helped to his feet, and brought forward slowly; and as he came into full view, the whole temper of the crowd changed.
Chief Banka had been so vilified during the last months, so scorned as a traitor, so threatened as a criminal: so many words had been written to his dishonour, so many voices had been heard naming him as the most shameful of all creatures, that the very name ‘Chief Banka’ had come to seem an odious term, beyond the regard of any honest man. The opposing crowd could only think of him as an animal to be hunted down without mercy, and cursed if he escaped.
It was many minutes before he could be heard, so loud were the shouts and angry screams and violent roaring which met him; and when at last he spoke, his voice was so feeble, his bearing so miserable, that he could make no impression, even if there had been men and minds prepared to accept him as a human being with human rights.
He did his best, in faltering tones. A few of his words could be heard – ‘Our country has become a prison’ – ‘Liberty has been stolen away’ – ‘We are ruled by a king with power of life and death.’ But then, at the end of certain insulting phrases: ‘The President has become a tyrant! He is also a coward! Where is Dinamaula, the tyrant, the liar, the murderer, the coward?’ the microphone went dead. As Chief Banka continued to mouth into it, the armoured car began to bark back at him, harshly, imperiously, with hateful menace, with a threat of doom.
‘We have heard enough of this!’ Mboku shouted. ‘Your words are treason, and treason is death! No one can attack the President like this, and live!’
Chief Banka, in a moment’s pause, cried out towards the armoured car: ‘I will be heard before I die.’
Few even of those close to him could hear the defiant words, but the armoured car was listening with sharp steel ears.
‘You have been heard!’ the answer came back, sinister, all powerful, sounding like the last words of a hanging judge. Then the voice on the loudspeaker changed, to a tone and to phrases which seemed to have been rehearsed or committed to memory. ‘Now all of you present – hear this! The President has ordered me to deal with this plot, and to punish the plotters, once and for all. If one part of the country rises to attack the Government, the Government must act without mercy. The President has therefore signed an order condemning all such traitors to death. I, Colonel Mboku, have been commanded to carry it out.’ There was a pause, and then a final sentence, smooth, contemptuous, legal: ‘The signed order may be seen at any police station tomorrow.’
Then, in the ominous silence which had now fallen on the whole vast concourse, three wide flaps in the turret of the armoured car fell forward, with sharp ringing cracks like three iron pot covers dropped upon a stone floor, and on the instant three machine-guns began to fire on the people massed in the stand.
Just as the silence had been shattered, beyond bearing, beyond belief, so men were shattered with it, and began to fall. Chief Banka, target of a thousand hate-filled eyes and a hundred bullets, was the first to die, his head nearly severed from his body by this iron hail; and Father Stubbs met at last an honourable death as he bent over the old man to succour him.
The two old Agura brothers were mown down, cut to pieces, as they rose in horror at the sight of Chief Banka falling; and Matthew Banka, shaking his fist on high as he looked down at the body of his father, might have been signalling for his own death, so swiftly did it follow. Caspar Muru, grandson of a man already miserably slain in captivity, had only time to clutch at his torn chest before he joined this honoured ghost in the same agony.
Now the machine-guns, manned by skilful executioners, began to aim higher; men on the upper benches were starting to fall, or to scream in rage or terror, or to make futile efforts to hide behind the rampart of the dead. Blood was already dripping down the steps towards the lower ranks; wherever it reached the hot stonework, it steamed before it became caked into dark-brown filth.
Driven to frenzy by the murderous noise, the sight of falling friends, and the savage venom of the armoured car which had become a fearful mowing machine, the very scythe and sickle of death, men began to run away, to fight and wrestle and flail at each other as they sought to escape.
At this, the jovial armed policemen, drunk or sober, broke ranks and began to hunt them down.
It was guns and clubs against walking sticks, against raised arms, against nothing. It was a matter of killing all who did not wear the National Party colours, and the hundreds of luckless men who had not this passport, or were marked for death by their prison clothes, were easy targets as they ran this way and that, and found their way blocked by other men who would not let them escape, and who pounced on them as soon as they were sighted, naked to their enemies.
Presently, taking their example from the rampaging policemen, everyone on the aboura ground who was protected by a red-and-black armband, or a scarf, or a ribbon, or a child’s flag, started to join in the sport.
Many of them, it turned out, had come prepared. They carried pangas, the heavy curved knife like a machete, like a butcher’s chopper – and indeed, during the past week of rumour and threatening report a certain sound had become familiar all over downtown Port Victoria, the sound of pangas being ground and sharpened and honed to a razor’s edge on the kerbstones, as men sat in the cool of the evening, and prepared their weapons, and talked of an armed invasion which must be halted, and laughed at the thought of the slaughter which was to come.
With savage, barbarous cruelty, with pure delight, with pride – for were they not protecting their great President against his treacherous enemies? – they now went to work on the scores of desperate men who sought to elude them, the hated marchers who threatened the safety of the state, and must not escape their doom.
Having fled the machine-guns which still crackled and roared through iron throats and spat pouring lead into the stand behind them, the marchers now had to run the deadly gauntlet of their fellow men. They sprang this way and that, twisting and turning like hares in a cornfield as they found their way barred, and turned in terror as the hunt closed in on them. Like coursing dogs, the jovial policemen, and the citizens now in triumphant holiday mood, ran them down one by one, and shot them, or clubbed them, or sliced them to gory ribbons, or tore at them until the pulpy flesh gave way. One by one, the last screaming hares, which had been men, fell, and endured their final agony, and died.
There was, at one corner of the cricket ground, a high barbed-wire fence designed to prevent children climbing in to watch the matches without paying for the privilege. A few of the terrorized marchers tried to scale this, and were laughed at as their jerking bodies were torn by the barbs, and they were brought to a halt, tethered by their own flesh, and were killed by flung stones or flying baulks of wood, or a whirling thrown panga or a quick police bullet.
One of the men who had escaped from the stand was Chief Justin of Fish Village, at the head of a band of other young men in their white boiler suits. They were the easiest of targets, but they gave great sport, since they were all young and agile and desperate to live. Some of them, in their white suits, cornered at last, took to the trees which bordered the cricket field; these they climbed up with maddened strength, and perched high in the branches like nesting birds, and tried to shelter among the green leaves.
Presently a policeman would run up, summoned by good citizens; and he would raise his revolver, and take aim, and fire, and perhaps miss; but one by one these white nesting birds were picked off, and their bodies plummeted downwards, thudding and splintering on the baked earth, while bloodstained leaves fluttered down after them, as if the tree itself wished to shed its guilt.
Later these young men from Fish Village passed into Maula folklore as the Big White Birds in the Trees, and it was said that as their bodies dropped to earth their white spirits flew upwards on wildly beating wings.
When all was done, and the last screaming had died away, and the last rivulet of blood had congealed on stone or run into the thirsty earth, the tents of the marchers were uprooted and thrown together into a huge pile, and set alight, making a vast stinking bonfire which burned far into the night.
By its flaring light there could be seen, high up on the scoreboard under the sign which recorded ‘Visitors’, the naked body of old Chief Banka, triced up and strung by the heels as a monument to justice, a fearful warning to traitors. It happened that his wizened genitals, falling downwards, pointing earthwards, had taken on the look of an ancient erection, as his racked body began to stiffen.
‘The first time for forty years!’ said the mockers, as they paraded beneath this poor shrunken shell of manhood. ‘You see what it is to have twenty sons!’ In their coming and going, they laughed all traitors to scorn, and called loyal blessings on the President, and drank the last of the brew of bariaana, which not this old man hanging high in shame above them, nor the men strung on the barbed wire, nor the big bird corpses crumpled at the foot of the trees, nor the piles of dead meat in the grandstand, would ever need again.