The year is 1846. The city of Bloemfontein is founded. Between 1848 and 1899 farmers of the Orange Free State are continually at war with the Basutos or the British.
Henry Gibbs, Twilight in South Africa (1949)
Albert van Jaarsveld gave me an introduction to Sue and Maurice and on arrival I discovered that Maurice and Margaret are also old friends. (The white population of South Africa is little more than the population of Ireland, where every other stranger you meet knows someone who knows your cousin/brother-in-law/grandmother/aunt-by-marriage.) Maurice is an English-speaker, Sue a Cape Afrikaner. They have two lovable teenage daughters and three lovable dogs and seem very positive, though not at all starry-eyed, about the new South Africa. For many years both have been in close touch, through their work, with a cross-section of black society and they have made me wonder if perhaps I am too sceptical an observer, too anxious about the hazards ahead and not sufficiently appreciative of what has already been achieved.
During the past three days I have become quite fond of Bloemfontein – ringed by flat-topped koppies, small enough for everywhere to be accessible on foot, the traffic light by urban standards, the atmosphere agreeably laid-back, the natives of all pigmentations friendly. Yet the mere mention of this city makes most South Africans groan and say, ‘D’you really want to go there?’
This prejudice is not unfounded. Bloemfontein is (was?) the Vatican of the DRC, where until quite recently dancing was forbidden on the Sabbath and no such thing as a ladies bar existed because women were supposed not to drink. However, despite its ultra-conservative past Bloemfontein – and the Free State in general – is now being acclaimed as a model of adaptability to the new South Africa.
In this provincial legislature, twenty-four of the thirty elected representatives are ANC, including two Afrikaners. Four Nat men, and a man and woman from the right-wing Freedom Front, make up the opposition. During the legislature’s first session, the Freedom Front leader thanked Premier Patrick Lekota in English for so often using Afrikaans in his public speeches. (The Free State’s Hansard records are to be kept in Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. Members are also free to debate in Tswana, Zulu and Xhosa.) Among these supposedly hardline ‘Staters’ their black premier’s organizational abilities are much praised, as are his quick intelligence, warm heart and sense of fair play.
Some say Bloemfontein was South Africa’s most beautiful city before the developers got at it. In 1986 the controversial Sand du Plessis Theatre was completed at a cost of R60 million – ‘one of the most modern theatres in the world’, claims the Tourist Board. Anywhere its soaring shiny vulgarity would be repellent. Here, at the very heart of gracious, dignified, mellow Bloemfontein, it is unforgivable. Not far away looms the Provincial Administration’s twenty-six-storey Swart building. ‘The pride of the Free State’, say the tourist folk. An affront to the Ionic columns of the nearby Raadzaal, say I.
Even in Bloemfontein, most employers seem to be taking affirmative action seriously, if only because the new South Africa doesn’t leave them much choice. During the past few months I have found myself dealing more and more often – on trains, in hotels and banks, at supermarket checkouts – with ill-trained blacks whose hasty hiring or promotion, and minimal English, can lead to countless trivial but tiresome errors, misunderstandings and delays. Whereupon the average white exclaims, ‘I told you so!’ Affirmative action is often the first change to affect individuals personally and, as it gains momentum, it is testing white acceptance of the new regime. The sharing of scarce jobs calls for a much more strenuous feat of adjustment than constitutional change, however cataclysmic.
Bewilderingly, a fragment of Bophuthatswana was to be found thirty-two miles east of Bloemfontein, despite this being Sotho country. Botshebelo is South Africa’s second largest township (after Soweto) with a guesstimated population of 250,000. In 1979, 38,000 Thaba’Nchu Sothos were forced to settle on a godforsaken expanse of semi-desert at the foot of low bare hills. Soon after, they were joined by more and more labour tenants – evicted from their homes as mechanization rendered them ‘surplus’ – and by countless thousands from ‘deproclaimed townships’. (The language of apartheid had a flavour all its own.)
At dawn yesterday I set off on a day-trip to Botshebelo, walking to the city centre’s chaotic taxi terminus where three kindly men found me a Botshebelo minibus – battered but not overcrowded. This year I notice SAPS daring to be strict about overloading and random checks are common, with on-the-spot fines. Pre-elections, any such police intervention would have been likely to start a riot; now it is resented but accepted.
Directly behind me sat a male figure of indeterminate age, a small man lacking a left arm, his right hand distorted and burned, his face like a mask in a horror film – the nose missing, the left eye a blind bloody mess, the skin shiny pink and taut, the forehead smashed in, the teeth few and decayed in a twisted, permanently open mouth.
‘A mining accident,’ explained Vax, the young man beside me. After the minimum of hospital treatment this pitiable ruin was dispatched to Botshebelo to become his family’s responsibility. The mining bosses, Vax believed, would have preferred him to die; they don’t like victims in his condition being on view to the public.
Vax offered to introduce me to his uncle, Ngoako, an ANC community leader. ‘He talk fine English and give you big information.’ In the Free State blacks speak Afrikaans rather than English, perhaps as their third or fourth language. Most blacks are linguistically gifted (one notices this throughout Africa) and often speak several complex languages fluently. No wonder they regard my monolingual status as a sort of congenital handicap – which indeed it is.
Botshebelo is short of everything except space; the land being valueless, its seventeen ‘sections’ cover a vast area. As we turned off the main road, Vax pointed out the Botshebelo Stadium, recently made famous when the Housing Minister, Joe Slovo, held a Housing Summit here – drawing 800 bankers, senior civil servants and construction-industry tycoons to where they could not avoid seeing and smelling the magnitude of the problem they were conferring about. This original strategy (a typical Slovo ploy) raised Botshebelo’s morale, making people feel their desperate state had at least been recognized. It also shattered many of the delegates, who hitherto had conferred only in conference centres and seen townships only on their TV screens. And it led to the setting up of a provincial housing bank which will lend to those whose monthly earnings are below R1,500.
An industrial estate of 136 small factories at first sight looked hopeful. But most are closed – and by now vandalized. ‘My uncle will explain,’ said Vax.
The taxi delivered everyone to his/her exact destination, which meant our driving to nine of the seventeen sections, and during this tour I stayed on board. Botshebelo’s few posh homes are breeze-block shoe-boxes, their tin roofs weighted with stones and tyres; the low hills to the north give scant protection from the frequent gales that drive dust into every crevice. Many live in tiny mud huts, crudely built, or (some 60 per cent) in ‘informal residences’ – one room, constructed of scraps of scavenged materials. Electricity is available in some sections but rarely affordable. The scarcity of litter is owing to an ANC anti-litter campaign which in this loyal-to-Madiba township has worked miracles. Ninety-five per cent of families must use the bucket sewage system and we passed two ‘sanitation’ tractors lurching along the rutted tracks, their trailers piled with black plastic buckets. Only three sections have a domestic water supply; the rest depend on one standpipe per street and since mid-November many of those have been dry. All the basic services deteriorated after the setting up of Botshebelo’s Transitional Local Council (TLC) and ‘the old guard’ within the Provincial Administration are suspected of trying to sabotage it.
My tour ended at a startlingly grand taxi terminus where labelled stands for the various services are sheltered by a high curved blue metal roof. Opposite, across a brick-paved plaza, rises a shopping-mall extravaganza – its incongruity painful. In the mid-’80s Pretoria diagnosed Botshebelo as a well-organized ANC flashpoint. The reaction was to try to placate the destitute by providing a veneer of ‘white’ affluence – like giving an expensive toy to a baby dying of malnutrition.
Outside the shopping-mall entrance hawkers spread their wares on the ground, or on trestles made of beer-crates. Inside, the shops are either poorly stocked or closed. And the would-be American trendiness of this concourse is decisively diminished by a sangoma’s display – laid out on a tarpaulin – of traditional cures and spellbinding (literally) artefacts. Here are bundles of many varieties of tree bark, dried venom sacs from mambas green and black, powders made from crushed stones of various hues, bunches of leaves and herbs tied with bands woven from multicoloured cattle-tail hairs, monkey skulls, crocodile eyes, teeth and feet, porcupine quills stuck in strangely shaped roots, and the paws, tails, penises and obscure internal organs of other unidentifiable creatures. The youngish sangoma wears a white headband, a leopard-skin scarf and a long triple necklace of nuts. He ignored me, which seemed to confirm his authenticity; fake sangomas target tourists. Most blacks still value traditional healers’ remedies, sometimes in conjunction with Western cures, and business was brisk around this rent-free space. Later, Ngoako told me no one (black or white) would have the temerity to demand rent from a genuine sangoma. When whites who jeer at black superstitions are themselves tested – when they have to do business with a sangoma – many suddenly become subdued if not actually conciliatory.
I was to wait for Ngoako in a café/bar kiosk beside the taxi terminus. Beer-drinkers stood at the front, resting their bottles on the little counter; at 7.30 a.m. three taxi drivers were enjoying large Castles. Tea-drinkers sit at the back around the one small table; on joining them my milkless tea was served in a chipped enamel mug – the only mug. A ragged elder followed me but had to wait until I had finished. He wanted sugar in his tea but was told that would be extra. He took a stale hunk of bread from his pocket and softened it in the sugarless tea.
Ngoako is a vigorous confident 40-year-old, tall for a Sotho. On arrival he mopped his glistening face with a sleeve of his Berkeley University T-shirt and said, ‘Welcome, mama! My nephew says travelling is your job – you can organize some bus tours through Botshebelo for foreigners? Like Soweto has – or are we not entertaining enough? Not enough crime and publicity? Come, mama, come to my house.’ And he led me away by the hand.
A taxi drove us (for free) down the central strip of narrow tarred road to a street of concrete cubes where two other ANC officers (they used to be called activists) awaited me. Moses is a COSATU organizer, Charlie a redundant miner now working as an unpaid ‘empowerment officer’. Under the tin roof one felt one’s lungs being scorched at each breath. I looked out to see if there was any nearby shade, not under a roof. There wasn’t. Blue fertilizer bags papered the living-room walls and a certificate over the doorway told me that Ngoako is a qualified car mechanic.
Ngoako translated Moses’s explanation for all those empty factories. ‘When government subsidies stopped the Taiwanese left. They were lured with a big package of incentives, with a monthly subsidy of R120 for each worker! That skewed things like crazy – overmanning, people paid R60 a month and the Taiwanese keeping the rest. With 75 per cent unemployed, people will settle for any wage. This country’s economy depends on that fact. It was a crazy thing about apartheid, the State would pay anything to keep races separate. For us to go to work in Bloemfontein, they spent over R80 million on daily transport subsidies – instead of on housing for the same workers in Bloemfontein!’
In theory Botshebelo’s TLC is controlled by the ANC/SACP alliance. ‘But,’ said Ngoako, ‘we can’t really control it, we’ve no assets and no trained staff. Our place never had municipal structures like other townships. In the ’80s the state tried so hard to force a puppet council on us. But we resisted, even when the army came in to give us hell under the State of Emergency. We’re united here, you never heard of Botshebelo shootings and stabbings and house-burnings and necklacing like on the Rand. But we’re determined, we’re not going to be messed around by small white officials. It’s the mean little boere puppies working out here make all the difficulties. Their seniors in Bloemfontein work well with our new government.’
Ironically, there is much to be said for a lack of diversity in Archbishop Tutu’s ‘rainbow nation’. Botshebelo’s Sothos, though so recently uprooted from different places in different circumstances, have been able to form a stable community cemented by loyalty to the ANC/SACP alliance. (The SACP’s local membership, over 10,000, makes Botshebelo’s branch the biggest in the country.) Had some of the ‘relocated’ been Inkatha-controlled Zulus, the Third Force could have created bloody mayhem here as elsewhere.
However this enviable stability is now, according to Ngoako, itself making problems. Another ‘relocation’ has been suggested, to new housing forming a suburb of Bloemfontein, but to everyone’s amazement the residents are reluctant to move; they want their decent houses and urban amenities in Botshebelo. How, then, can the two communities be ‘married’, to give birth to a uniform tax base? Somehow the Botshebelo folk must be convinced that this would be greatly to their advantage.
At 10.30 a TLC meeting required Ngoako’s presence. ‘Go see our hospital,’ he urged. ‘Come back after and tell me what you think.’
Half an hour later I could see the two-storeyed hospital, brightly spreadeagled on the drab veld, all freshly painted red and green including its curved metal roofs – these evidently the architectural flavour of the ’80s in Botshebelo. Despite the midday heat several bucket-bearing women were converging on the imposing pillared and arched entrance – their nearest water-source. Morning and evening, hundreds queue at the borehole within the hospital grounds.
Like Aliwal North’s golf club, Botshebelo’s hospital has not yet arrived in the new South Africa and Afrikanerdom’s manic bureaucracy still rules. Many true stories circulate about the tangled skein of trivial regulations co-existing throughout the public service with every sort of chicanery and crookery. Where else could you find a Public Service Staff Code specifying job applicants’ maximum and minimum weights, depending on heights? This is bureaucracy fallen over the cliff into dementia.
In a bullet-proof office beside the hospital gate lounged a long-armed, lowbrowed security officer who seemed to have missed out on several evolutionary stages. He ordered me to wait but declined to explain why. Then the women with their buckets began to pass through the narrow pedestrian entrance and he moved from behind his desk to stand silently in the doorway. The women walked by with downcast eyes, each dropping a coin into a nearby flower-tub. The guard glanced around the immediate vicinity, saw no one else in sight and quickly pocketed the coins. Who said Botshebelo residents pay no service charges?
Fifteen minutes later a senior sister arrived, short and dumpy and smiling. She beckoned me into a curtained-off corner – where else would an elderly woman visitor to a public hospital have to undergo a body-search? ‘It is the rule,’ said Sister pleasantly, while checking my person in intimate ways – as though ‘the rule’ were a magic spell that could render normal any aberration. She then led me – firmly grasping my elbow – to a large bare reception area within the central building, not unlike a Pollsmoor waiting room. And there I sat for half an hour under the eye of another armed guard of a certain type – small blond moustache, thin mouth, fat belly, tattooed forearms. Sister had explained, ‘The hospital secretary must see you.’
There was something eerily impersonal about the hospital secretary – bony, dour, grey-haired, with colourless dead-fish eyes. Perhaps a lifetime dominated by the Public Service Staff Code vitiates a man’s humanity. Methodically he scrutinized my passport, health certificates, publisher’s letter. Next he entered various details in a ledger and requested me to sign the page. Then a male nurse attendant who spoke no English (coincidence or not?) was summoned to show me around. He was a Sotho; here all the nurses and servants are black, apart from an Indian cook. And all the security officers, admin, staff and most of the doctors are Afrikaners.
Jacob led me into every corner of the building, including electronically locked store-rooms; the fraudulent procurement of pharmaceutical goods within the public-health system, and theft from hospitals, is estimated to be costing some R500 million a year. In one store – its door wide open – a solitary nurse was unpacking crates of infant formula, each tin proclaiming in English: MOTHER’S MILK IS BEST. This scene seemed to negate the purpose of those electronic locks.
Various departments, in their separate buildings, are linked by long, tunnel-like tiled corridors. I fumed inwardly at this waste of money and the consequence soon becomes apparent. Unlike the average black hospital, Botshebelo’s is underused, with numerous empty beds and some empty wards in which cheerfully chatting nurses were relaxing. Only the outpatients’ department was as busy as one would expect. Even the paediatric ward had empty cots, from which I did not deduce that the average Botshebelo child is robust. A young woman doctor, avoiding my eye, gave one explanation: ‘This is a forwarding hospital, we send the most serious cases elsewhere. And of course we also have clinics in the different sections.’ Later, Ngoako’s explanations were different. ‘They spent so much on the buildings there’s nothing over to staff and run it properly. And for most of our people even the low fees charged are too high.’ A familiar Third World story: Pretoria’s toleration of corruption aligned the white supremacists’ administration with those of Moi in Kenya, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Mobuto in Zaire.
In a children’s ward a nurse was bathing a 3-month-old baby, handling this miserable mite with great tenderness and looking at him with love. His emaciation was so extreme he hardly seemed human. ‘What’s the diagnosis?’ I asked. The nurse sighed and said, ‘His mother smokes, it is not good for pregnant women to smoke.’
I felt a sort of despair then, so well does this reply illustrate the vulnerability of the uneducated to unexplained slogans.
Jacob handed me over to Dr Pretorius: tall, handsome, welcoming. We sat in his office and he described himself as ‘a new South African, a Free State liberal!’ Throughout the Free State, he assured me, Boers and blacks got on well for nearly two centuries before Grand Apartheid.
Dr Pretorius – a keen traveller, uninterested in conventional tourism – is planning a motoring safari with his family from Bloemfontein to Mombasa. ‘What puzzles me is – how do you get to know the ordinary people of a country, especially in Africa?’
When I had given a few helpful hints Dr Pretorius shook his head in bewilderment. ‘It’s different for you from Europe, I can see that. Never could I live with blacks – eating, sleeping, bathing in their homes. For me this would be impossible psychologically – or emotionally, or whatever.’
‘But is this more class than race? Could you live in a white slum? Would you accept a black colleague’s invitation to stay in his home?’
Dr Pretorius laughed. ‘You’re trying to let me off the hook – yes? But the answer is I could stay in a white slum – I wouldn’t want to, I hope I never have to, but I could. And no, I would not accept an invitation from a black colleague to stay in his home. It will be different for my kids, after integrated schooling. It makes me happy to think of all our people being at ease with one another in the future. I could send my kids to mainly white private schools but I don’t want to. I’ve nothing against desegregation. But if you’re brought up one way you can’t buy a new mindset at the age of 42!’
After lunch in the staff canteen Dr Pretorius escorted me to the entrance where we said goodbye under a gigantic hoarding. It announces that another R8 million is soon to be spent on an extension to Botshebelo’s hospital and my expression must have been easily read. Dr Pretorius said soothingly, ‘Don’t worry, it’s likely our new Premier will put a stop to that. If he doesn’t he’ll have a revolution in Botshebelo. The people here are mostly illiterate but they’re not stupid.’
Back in Bloemfontein, I heard that the Transkei Deputy Commissioner of Police has been assassinated, shot fifteen times outside his Umtata home. His wounded wife is recovering. Lieutenant-General Mdluli Wheedon Mbulawa was the man held mainly responsible for the boiling discontent within the lower ranks of his force. The weapon used was an R4, a police rifle.
Tomorrow is the last Day of the Vow; from next year 16 December will be a truly national holiday, South Africa’s Day of Reconciliation. It is a measure of President Mandela’s sensitivity that in 1994, the year of uhuru, Afrikaners have not had their very special day cancelled – which may be why most people (right-wingers apart) are already calling it by its new name. As usual, the main commemoration will be at the Voortrekker Monument where a short service within the building is to replace the customary open-air mass-rally harangued by fanatics. Not more than 1,500 are expected tomorrow; twenty years ago you could have added a nought to that.
Near a Voortrekker cemetery outside Brandfort, thirty-five miles north of here, ET is staging his own AWB commemoration and Sue has volunteered to drive me to this terminal event.
All the way to Brandfort the veld lies bare and pallid and sun-scourged: you can almost hear it pleading for rain. A few low koppies break the flatness, thornbushes try to be green but are dusted grey. Once the whiff of a decomposing cow, drought-killed, penetrated the car.
Brandfort is that isolated little dorp to which Winnie Mandela was banished in 1977 – banished but not subdued. She had to live in a three-roomed shack, without water or electricity, in the township Phathakahle (meaning ‘handle with care’). From there she emerged daily, wearing flowing African robes, to sweep regally through the dorp breaking every possible apartheid law while giving drab little Brandfort a glimpse of how to dress stylishly and live flamboyantly. No plebeian brandy and Coke for this lady: the Drankwinkel’s sales of Cinzano and champagne rocketed. The dour volk were pole-axed; never had they imagined that a black could behave as though she owned their town. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, something astonishing was happening. Winnie had found a good friend of the most unlikely lineage: Adèle de Waal, a direct descendant of the Voortrekker leader and martyr, Piet Retief, killed by Dingane in 1838. Adèle’s husband Piet, being the only lawyer in Brandfort (the sort of place that has only one of everything), had no option but to handle Mrs Mandela’s affairs and her rapid integration with the de Waal family – her frequent visits to their home – could be disguised as ‘legal consultations’. This closeness to the ‘enemy’ was to have momentous consequences. It so happened that Kobie Coetsee and Piet de Waal were life-long friends and it was de Waal who first suggested to Coetsee (Minister for Justice, Police and Prisons) that the time had come to open negotiations with his most famous prisoner, Nelson Mandela.
Sue fell silent as we drove up Voortrekker Street – long and straight, no one in sight, most shops shut. The AWB ‘trek’ could be seen ahead, the width of its ox-wagon blocking oncoming traffic, and I was eager to follow the last bakkie. But suddenly Sue freaked out. She could not bring herself to seem to be supporting ET; plainly this was something as visceral as Dr Pretorius’s inhibition about living with blacks. ‘Let’s park in the shade,’ she said, ‘and follow when they’ve reached the cemetery. It’s the processing with them that shows allegiance. Being an onlooker is different.’ I appreciated then how noble had been her offer to drive me here.
We bought cooldrinks before parking under a jacaranda; even in hardline Brandfort the new South Africa emboldened Indian store-keepers to trade on what used to be a Christian-National ‘Sabbath’. Our vantage point afforded an unexpectedly good view of the procession. Having turned off the road, it was very slowly crossing the veld, led by seven oxen drawing a wagon-load of maidens wearing Voortrekker dress, ET followed on his famous black horse and behind him rode some thirty young men. The bakkies brought up the rear, rather spoiling the nineteenth-century effect. As we watched this forlorn gesture of loyalty to times past – to a mythology no longer sustaining – I was suddenly unaccountably touched. To me there was a pathos about those oxen and those horsemen moving through the thornbush in the shimmering heat – now visible, now hidden – seeming as insubstantial as ghosts, as irrelevant as last year’s calendar, as sad as the death of any cherished illusion. When I said as much to Sue she stared at me with horrified incredulity. ‘But,’ she protested, ‘they’re being loyal to a hateful ideology!’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said – and remembered my reaction to the Voortrekker Monument. Then I added lamely, ‘I just get a bit sentimental about the Voortrekkers – in one way they’re kindred spirits.’
‘I’m an Afrikaner,’ retorted Sue, ‘but they’re not my kindred spirits!’
We drove on then, parked at a pointed distance from the bakkies and went first to admire the magnificent oxen, red with touches of white – a classic well-matched span. (Though one short: the eighth fell ill last night.) No self-respecting Boer would be seen driving grey or all-white oxen; only black and white or red and white were lekker. (How, we wondered, did those bovine fashions originally come about?) As Sue pointed out, ‘drive’ is the wrong word because no reins are used. Every well-trained ox knows its name, and a span (from eight to sixteen beasts) is directed verbally and with whip cracks – or a light flick on the flanks if an ox now and then eases off. (During the Great Trek, extreme cruelty had to be involved in forcing oxen through pathless territory, over high mountains; but the Boers were being equally cruel to themselves.) Each ox has its own permanent place in a span; the strongest pair lead, yoked to a single shaft. These seven were complacent creatures, well aware of being special, accepting respectful caresses as their due. Very few spans of working oxen remain in South Africa.
The oxen owners – two brothers – were tall, big-boned, sun-tanned. Both their rough-hewn features and their aloof, humourless expressions – eyes ever watchful – marked them as thoroughbred descendants of Boer War commandos. Now their breed, Boers who have let the twentieth century pass them by, is almost extinct. Their expressions softened when I stroked the oxen and asked permission to photograph them. The Boers’ affinity with their cattle once forged a strong link between Xhosas and trekboers. Some say the modern Afrikaners’ devotion to their motor vehicles is a degenerate mutation of that affinity.
Then I went on – Sue lingering in the background – to introduce myself to ET’s steed, a docile gelding of some eighteen hands who after a brief conversation allowed me to examine his teeth; he is advanced in years though AWB publicity presents him as young and mettlesome. His two teenaged Tswana attendants were hugely amused by my dental inspection. I asked them, ‘How is it, working for Mr Terre’ Blanche?’ Both laughed and one replied, ‘He is kind man.’ And I daresay he is kind to his black servants, just as Mr Paisley sees to the welfare of his Roman Catholic constituents.
Tentatively Sue and I moved closer to the little crowd – tentatively because of ET’s inclination to turn on outsiders and inflame his followers against them. But today was different, this is a new South Africa.
No more than 200 had assembled, including children. The horsemen remained in their saddles, hock-deep in tawny grass, mostly mounted on glossy chestnuts, many displaying a Vierkleur saddle-cloth. Beyond them rose a long flat-topped ridge, mauve and trembling in the cruel heat. The maidens clustered under a thorn tree, slim and solemn-faced in their ankle-length white gowns and nun-like bonnets. Hymn-singing was in progress: hauntingly beautiful hymns, devoutly sung, their cadences muted by the immensity of the empty veld, harsh and parched under its molten sky. Then came a prayer and every adult head was bowed. The age of the little gathering struck me; I doubt if anyone was over 35. Then I was struck by the scarcity of guns; a year ago every male would have been weapons-laden, here I counted only ten revolvers. (Leaving aside the bodyguards’ – one official SAPS, the other unofficial AWB.) This was very much a family occasion; there were as many women as men, some with toddlers perched on their shoulders, others with babies in slings. And, essentially, it was a religious occasion. One knew that these were simple, frightened, rigid people: too rigid to cope with the new South Africa and here seeking a reassurance that wasn’t on offer.
When the khaki-clad ET began his harangue I studied him through my binoculars. He looks older than his fifty years and has spectacularly lost weight. Conveniently, Sue is a professional translator so I received the core of his message as he spoke. His demands were irrational and futile but he was also implicitly conceding defeat, addressing a black as his President, begging for clemency from a black on behalf of the AWB’s numerous convicted psychopathic murderers. He roared, ‘Release our prisoners before Christmas! President Mandela, send the political prisoners home. They are not criminals! Not me, not the President, or anyone else can stop retaliation if my people are not set free. If this government really wants peace, if they want to bury the past, let the soldiers go home. We will always remember this day, we will remember it as a Sunday, I will have nothing to do with Reconciliation Day …’
And so on, tediously, while the horses began to stamp and toss restlessly and the babies began to whimper and the toddlers to stray through the thornbushes. But the rage was counterfeit, the bluffing pathetic, ET was ranting without fire, without conviction, without rousing the crowd’s emotions. He knows and they sense that an era has ended.