Bloodlines (36 page)

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nineteen

MICHAELA

Natal, South Africa, 1965

K
habazela would have been just as happy on a sugar cane farm closer to Zululand—but I had no interest in farming sugar cane. The farm I liked best was in the Midlands, about three hours inland from Durban. It was owned by a Scottish family who had used it as a hunting lodge since the 1890s. The current generation was more interested in buying upscale property in Johannesburg and holiday homes in Cape Town, and they wanted to sell.

Luckily for me, one of Khabazela’s brothers and members of his mother’s family lived in a village close to the farm; several of his relatives already worked on the property. The main black foreman, the farm
induna
, was his uncle. As a result we were able to make the point to the ANC that we had natural local support, and argued strongly for this location.

I have vivid memories of discussions leading up to the purchase of my farm, discussions that today seem laughable, in which I was encouraged by some members to relinquish my bourgeois attitudes and my money, and allow the Governing Council to decide where I should live. In the process I learned much about the inner workings of the ANC. Some members of the Council belonged to the banned Communist Party; others were adamantly capitalist and wanted nothing to do with anything that smacked of socialist or communist doctrine. Still others wanted to divorce themselves from any white organizations and all white people—while the most pragmatic group was willing to include whites who could be useful, until such time as they were no longer needed.

At the end of the day, however, this would be where I made my life. I listened to all the Council’s suggestions—but I made it clear that since this property was to be purchased with my money, I was determined to make the final decision about where I felt most comfortable. Khabazela and I might be able to pretend, at least under cover of dark, that we lived together, but we all knew that the reality was not so clear. He and I could not be seen to be living together, nor could we be seen in public as anything other than mistress and servant.

My strongest argument was that the farm would succeed secondarily as a safe house for the ANC only if it fulfilled its primary purpose as my home. I kept referring back to my life in Johannesburg, when I took part in banned and illegal activities—and the only reason I was successful for so long, I thought, was that I lived a relatively conventional, suburban life. At least, that’s what it seemed at the time. I turned out to have deceived myself, blind to the obvious reality that it was impossible to live a normal family life, and at the same time to break laws, shield fugitives, and participate in activities that threatened an already beleaguered totalitarian regime.

Even if I had wanted to, I could never have anticipated what my daily routine in the Midlands would be like. As life on the farm took shape, I began to see it in terms of yield, just as I learned to evaluate the calving yield of the herd each spring, and the sorghum yield, and the yield of the corn fields, and the apples and pears we grew. I realized how absurdly grand my expectations of home had been, and I began to see, in the yield of our lives, how little of what I wanted was possible, how much less was probable, and, at season’s end, how meager my actual harvest was. In comparison, my life in Johannesburg, masquerading as a clandestine revolutionary, turned out to have been an idyll of stability and peace.

The old hunting lodge became my farmhouse; the large, open central room became the place I lived. It had a huge fireplace open front and back, so that it also served to warm the kitchen in winter, and one wall of the living room opened onto a verandah overlooking the stream that ran through the property. Just across the stream, the foothills of the Drakensberg began, and on clear days, the soaring shape of the reclining giant and the outline of the amphitheatre jutted up through the line of horizon. It was a place of vast beauty and solitude, its fertile valleys rich in wildlife, and in a different world, a different time, Khabazela and I might have chosen no place more perfect. But all we had was our time, and in our world there was no perfect place. So we settled in, and began the life we were allowed.

While the purchase of the farm was taking place and final papers changed hands, he was absent—out of the country, setting up a military training camp somewhere across the border, maybe in Angola. I learned that he would tell me where he had been, or where he was going, only if having the information would not compromise me. I learned never to ask where he had been, and eventually accepted that when he came home, he might be in a state of exhaustion, frequently bruised or otherwise injured. Often, in the days after his return, there would be a news release about a border skirmish between the South African military and Spear of the Nation, or a meeting of operatives outside the country. It wasn’t difficult to guess that he had been involved.

It took me years to learn what it meant to run the farm, and I would have been lost without the staff of people I inherited from the previous owners. Gradually I came to know the house staff, and those I liked remained on the farm; those I felt I could not trust, I eventually let go.

The farm foreman, Brian McWilliams, was at first invaluable to me. He lived with his wife and children in the overseer’s cottage at the entrance to the property, about a mile from the farmhouse. I spent an hour each afternoon with him, poring over the farm accounting books, learning the business of the farm—what our seasonal produce was and the economics of each; where we made our money and where we should be investing; how we bought or produced feed and seed, and where it made sense to risk capital.

At first Mr. McWilliams seemed pleasant enough. He was a burly, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties, and he had golden hair growing in tufts from his open shirt collar and on the back of his hands. He had clear blue eyes and a sun-roughened face, and a thick beard through which his lips were barely visible. While at first I thought he had a humorous mouth, I came to recognize that what seemed like a good natured smile was actually a sneer. I think he wore the beard as camouflage because without it, he knew that he would have difficulty hiding what he felt. He spoke excellent Zulu, and I saw that with the farm workers he was authoritative and demanding, but that he treated them with what looked like a distant respect. It turned out that there was less respect than a need to keep his distance. He neither knew nor cared about them, and although he did not fear them as individuals, he was dependent upon their cooperation, and he feared their numbers. For their part, they seemed to understand the equation, venerating his position, while showing neither interest nor respect for his person.

Mr. McWilliams was kind to me, and respectful, and eager to explain what I did not know—but I sensed in him some kind of anger; a predatory quality I was unused to, and it made me uncomfortable to be around him. I knew soon that he would eventually have to go. He was too integral to the management of the farm, too involved in the daily running of the place, and too intrusive. There was no way we could use the farm as a safe house with him as overseer, and it would have been impossible for Khabazela and me to live the way we intended.

On my first day at the farm, McWilliams and I stood beside the chicken run, and he explained to me how the eggs were collected, how many were used on the farm, and the arrangement we had with a local collective to sell the remainder. As we spoke, a black man in his midfifties approached. He was unusually short and compact and he moved with the compressed energy of a short man—but his back was straight and his shoulders visibly muscular, and his loping stride said that there was nothing small about him. He wore baggy khaki trousers and a torn khaki work shirt that was too big for him, and he moved easily, bouncing on the balls of his feet and laughing as he greeted the women casting feed to the chickens. When he reached us he stood between McWilliams and me, and he removed the stained, khaki hat from his head. He had a pointed gray beard and an easy smile, and bright blue clay discs, about an inch in diameter, were inserted into his pierced earlobes.

“This is Solomon Mavovo, your
induna,
” said McWilliams. And then, in Zulu, he introduced me as the new owner. Solomon looked only at me as McWilliams spoke. His eyes were bloodshot, piercing without being intrusive, and there was warmth in his glance that told me he knew something more about me than he was willing to let on. When McWilliams was through, Solomon gently reached out his right hand to me, and, in the way of Zulu address, placed the fingertips of his left hand tentatively on the inside of his right forearm as he did so. It was a sign of respect and an offering of peace from the distant past, when placing both hands before you was the only way to indicate that you concealed no weapons, and intended no harm. I took his hand.

“
Sawubona, Nkosikazi
,” he said. Hello, madam. I see you. And he did.

It would have been inappropriate for Solomon to mention Khabazela to me—but I knew that he was Khabazela’s uncle. I felt comfortable with him immediately, and he turned out to be a wonderful presence in my life, unfailingly protective of me, upbeat and encouraging. He had started on the farm as a young boy herding cows, and his knowledge of the place was invaluable.

When he was giving instructions to the workers on the farm, speaking Zulu, he talked and moved in double time, a coiled spring, illustrating with his body where he wanted them to go, how he expected a shovel to be wielded or a tractor driven. While he was gesturing, the discs in his earlobes shook and bounced as if he were orchestrating their dance.

But to me he spoke slowly, his movements gentle and abbreviated as if I were an easily startled child. At first I found it irritating, thinking that he was talking down to me, making fun in his own way of this ignorant white woman who had enough money to buy a farm but had no idea what to do with it. It soon dawned on me, however, that this was his restrained way of showing respect. I don’t know how much he knew about my relationship with his nephew, or about the work we were doing, or about the dual role the farm was intended to play, but these turned out to be irrelevant questions.

Solomon was a simple man. He had never been to the city, never seen a cinema, never ridden a bus. He walked several miles to the farm each morning, or rode there on the back of a tractor pulled wagon. He lived in the village with his three wives. He had no idea what a communist was, or why communism was so feared, and he would have laughed at the idea of putting a man under house arrest. But Solomon knew everything there was to know about the running of the farm, and he had eyes everywhere.

Each morning Solomon walked a different part of the farm with me so that I could discover precisely what I had purchased, learn the nature and the boundaries of my property, and meet one by one the men and women who worked for me. Sometimes we walked part of the farm perimeter; we spent other mornings with the workers harvesting potatoes in the fields, or with the cowherds, who shyly introduced me to the cattle, and told me the name of each of my cows. The farm workers didn’t know quite what to do with me—and I had the sense that the previous owners were unlikely to have shown much interest in either the workings of the farm, or in the people who made it possible. I was increasingly grateful for the year we spent in hiding, when I had been forced to learn Zulu. Even so, there were times when Solomon had to intercede because even though I had some language, there were cultural barriers that could not be crossed with words alone.

While I was alone, Solomon insisted upon sleeping in the servant’s quarters behind the house instead of going home to his family. Nothing I said would change his mind, and I will admit that I felt safer knowing that he was there. I didn’t quite understand how this came about, but years later Khabazela admitted having told his uncle that we were lovers. He asked Solomon to watch out for me when he was away, knowing that the request would not be taken lightly.

One morning before dawn, three weeks after I moved onto the farm, I was woken by Solomon calling me from the kitchen. I dressed quickly and went to him, thinking at first that he had news of Khabazela. He beckoned to me from the kitchen door where he waited, holding my field boots in his hands.