Shaka II (4 page)

    I stared at him blankly. “Send more troops?” I said at last.

    “Then they will buy more mercenaries, and our soldiers will kill their mercenaries and their mercenaries will kill our soldiers. We will win in the long run, because our population is larger than their diamond mines, but I do not want Botswana if it is impoverished and destroyed by the war. So what would you do?”

    I shrugged. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

    “Blood may be thicker than water,” he said contemptuously. “It is clearly not more intelligent.” He looked around the room. “Can no one else see the way?”

    Silence.

    “I wonder why I pay you at all,” he muttered.

    The food arrived and we moved to an imported mahogany table that four soldiers carried into the office and set up for us.

    “Let me do the honors,” said Robert. He took a pitcher of cold water in his hand, and we passed him our glasses. A tiny smile played around the corners of his mouth, and he slowly poured the contents of the pitcher onto the plush carpet. “Now does anyone see the way?”

    We were all silent.

    “Fools!” he snapped. “Botswana is a desert. It is fed only by three rivers - the Limpopo, the Okavango, and the Chobe. The Okavango and the Chobe originate in Namibia, which we now own, and the Limpopo originates very near Pretoria and flows into it from South Africa.”

    “You are going to cut off their water?” asked an advisor.

    “We will begin diverting or damming all three rivers tomorrow. They cannot mine for diamonds without massive amounts of water. Given a choice, they will save the water for their people. Hopefully the mercenaries will see that their source of income is literally drying up, and will go where the money is and fight in some other war.”

    “And if not?”

    “If not, they will be so weakened from thirst by the time we confront them again that they will prove very easy to subdue.”

    “How long will you wait?” I asked.

    “As long as it takes. At least a year. The Okavango Delta will not dry up before then. And we’ll see if their government wants to keep paying a mercenary army when it is not under attack.”

    “And the tens of thousands of women and children who will die of thirst?” I asked angrily.

    “They would have died of something sooner or later,” he said with no show of concern. “And those who do not die will be so thrilled to have the rivers unblocked again that they will strew flowers in our path.”

    I thought it was cruel beyond belief. These weren’t soldiers or mercenaries we were talking about, but citizens whom he would coldly condemn to a terrible death. The problem was that I couldn’t see any way it could fail.

    Within a week work had begun on all three rivers, and within two months they had been dammed or diverted. Robert was prepared to wait two years, perhaps three, to bring Botswana to its knees-

    -But Botswana wasn’t willing to wait. They had a mercenary army, they couldn’t afford to keep them (or supply them with water) indefinitely, and they decided not to wait. News of the first incursion over our northern border reached us on a Sunday. By Tuesday, before Robert could mobilize our near-dormant air force, Colonel McBride’s men had progressed as far as Pilanesburg, and citizens in both the political capital of Pretoria and the economic capital of Johannesburg were getting nervous.

    Three members of the Parliament called for Robert’s resignation. They did not show up the next day, or ever again, but there was still serious unrest in the government.

    It began to look like McBride might reach Pretoria in another seven to ten days. Then a small private plane crashed very near the main body of McBride’s troops, and within a day almost seventy percent of them were dead.

    “What the hell happened?” asked an advisor when Robert summoned us to tell us that the war was as good as over and that we had won.

    “If I were to guess,” said Robert, “I would guess that a plane loaded with a particularly virulent form of mutated visceral leishmaniasis lost control and crashed in the middle of Colonel McBride’s forces.”

    “Are you crazy?” demanded the advisor. “Germ warfare has been outlawed for centuries!”

    “I was defending my country,” said Robert calmly. “How will the Western nations, with whom I have signed no agreement or treaty, punish us-by sending bigger germs?”

    “But this will kill our own people too!”

    “They are not our people,” replied Robert. “They are Xhosa and Matabele. We are Zulu.”

    “They are South Africans, and you are their President!”

    “Then they will have died for their country, and their families will honor their memories.”

    “I just want it on record that I strongly disapprove,” said the advisor.

    Robert shrugged. “You have that right.”

    The advisor left the room. No one ever saw him again.

    Soon the reports began coming in. Nothing was alive within twenty-five miles of the crash-and ninety percent of McBride’s forces had been that close to it. None of the local residents had survived either.

    A few stray mercenaries, far out on the flanks, or advance scouts, were alive but grievously ill. Robert refused to allow them access to our medical facilities, and they were airlifted to Gaborone, where I am told most of them died within a week.

    “It’s just as well,” said Robert a few days later. “It could have taken as much as three years to starve them out. This saved a lot of time and effort.”

    “But not lives,” I noted bitterly.

    “I’m alive,” he shot back. “You’re alive. We have a new province almost the size of Spain, and almost none of the population died in the conflict. What more could you want?”

    I couldn’t think of any response that would alter his perceptions, so I remained silent.

    “Anyway,” he continued, “since McBride is dead and there is no one left of any rank to surrender to me here, I suppose I shall have to fly to Gaborone and allow them to surrender to me there.”

    “Don’t we have an ambassador there?” I asked.

    “Presidents do not surrender to ambassadors or underlings,” said Robert. “I will go myself.”

    And so he did. But first he got our finest calligrapher to draw up a list of his demands, and write them in beautiful script on an actual piece of parchment. Then, armed with that, he traveled to Gaborone, accompanied only by myself, an advisor, and a small handful of bodyguards.

    A huge crowd gathered as he climbed the steps of the Presidential mansion. The Botswanan President, a withered, elderly man who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, greeted him at the top of the stairs, and the two of them went into his office. They emerged half an hour later, and Robert walked through the ornate entry hall to the top of the steps, holding the signed parchment aloft.

    “Citizens!” he cried. “I bring glad tidings! Beginning this week, the rivers shall flow again.” A huge cheer. “Beginning this week, you will never have to rely on a hired military that owes no allegiance to you, for you will be protected against all external threats by the army of South Africa.” Another cheer. “And beginning right now you will never again be led by a weakling such as this man standing next to me.” And before anyone realized what was happening, Robert had pulled a pistol out of his pocket, placed it against the President’s head, and pulled the trigger.

    The explosion brought a shocked gasp from the crowd, as the withered man collapsed in a heap. I thought they were going to race up the stairs and attack Robert, but he held up a hand. It didn’t mean anything, but it was a dramatic gesture, and it got their attention.

    “All he brought you was thirst and defeat. Now things will be different. To begin with, I am declaring a two-week paid holiday for every worker in Botswana. And if any employer doesn’t honor that promise,” he added sternly, “I want to know about it.” I saw the members of the crowd looking at each other, puzzled expressions on their faces. “Furthermore, to welcome you into the nation of South Africa, I am also declaring a one-year moratorium on all taxes.”

    This time a cheer arose, and Robert shot me a “Did you really think they’d attack me?” smile.

    “Finally,” he continued, “all political prisoners will be freed tomorrow morning, and their prison records expunged.”

    I wasn’t aware of any political prisoners in Botswana, and I was sure Robert wasn’t either, but it brought an exuberant round of applause, and I could see the faces in the crowd, each seeming to say “This isn’t the disaster we’d feared,” and then “This was a blessing in disguise!”

    A woman suddenly shouted out: “Hallelujah!”

    Then a gravel-voiced man climbed the first couple of stairs, turned to his compatriots, and yelled, “Three cheers for Buthelezi!”

    The crowd was about to accommodate him when Robert held up his hand again.

    “Thank you,” he said, stepping over the dead body of the President and walking a few steps closer to them, “but Buthelezi was an insignificant flyspeck on the dungheap of humanity. I reject that name.”

    “What shall we call you then?” asked another man.

    He drew himself up to his full height and looked out at the crowd.

    “Tchaka,” he answered.

    

    

    I thought when word got out the people would be outraged. After all, Shaka was the father of the Zulu people, the reason we ruled the world-well, our world-for almost a century, the reason even men in the farthest reaches of Europe, Asia and America knew that the Zulus were the fiercest, mightiest warriors. And here was my brother, not much over thirty, of obscure birth, a stranger to morality, taking that name for himself.

    And to my surprise, the citizens were thrilled beyond belief-and when I looked at it from their point of view, it suddenly made sense. He was the first Zulu to preside over South Africa since our humiliating defeats just before the turn of the 20th Century. He had doubled our land with the addition of Mozambique, Namibia and Botswana. Other African nations were racing to form alliances with the Europeans and Americans, with the Chinese and Indians and Australians, all because they knew that this Zulu leader would soon be looking north. It was the second coming of Shaka, and their joy and pride knew no bounds.

    Something else that knew no bounds was my brother’s ambition.

    His first step was to dissolve the Parliament. None of our African neighbors said a word-they were too busy preparing to defend their borders-but the rest of the world reacted with outrage. They demanded that Parliament be restored. Tchaka responded by announcing that he was resigning from the Presidency. The world breathed a sigh of relief. It lasted three days-until his coronation as king.

    “They will never stand for this,” I said when the ceremony was over. We were in his office, and he had removed the ceremonial crown and robes, and sat at his desk, relaxed in a tunic and slacks.

    “Of course they will,” he replied easily. “If they stood for my annexing Botswana and Mozambique, they will stand for my wearing a crown, for nothing else has changed.”

    “You have gone too far,” I said.

    “I have barely begun,” he replied, and suddenly I knew that when he looked to the north, he looked beyond Zimbabwe, beyond the Congo, beyond Egypt, that he looked north to Polaris and the stars beyond it. “They are civilized men,” he said, his face contorting in a sneer at the word, “and they will behave in a civilized manner. They will talk, and talk some more, and threaten, and entreat, and eventually they will bribe, and finally they will shrug and learn to live with the situation. Mark my words: you will never see a single European or American or Asian soldier enter our land with hostile intent.”

    And somehow I knew he was right.

    The international cries of outrage began that night. Every newsdisk, every holo, every diplomatic missive, demanded that he resign and restore the constitution. He ignored them all for almost a month, and when the rest of the world had whipped itself into a frenzy, he announced that he would address the world via a holo-transmission that would be seen on every continent.

    The so-called Great Powers thought they had won, that he was preparing to make a resignation speech and, in essence, make peace with the rest of the world, but those of us who knew him best knew better. I got the distinct feeling that he was toying with them the way a cat toys with a mouse, that far from feeling any pressure he was enjoying their discomfiture enormously.

    Finally the night came. I had expected him to wear a conservative suit, or even a tuxedo, but instead he wore a tattered tribal robe and a tarnished, unimpressive replica of his crown.

    “It will put them at their ease,” he said with a smile. “After all, they think they are dealing with a barbarian. I wouldn’t want to disappoint them by not looking the part.”

    An aide brought him an iced tea, and he began sipping it calmly.

    “You are about to address fourteen billion people,” I said. “Aren’t you at all nervous?”

    “It is they who should be nervous, not I,” he replied.

    Soon the time arrived, and the rest of us moved out of camera range while he seated himself behind his desk, waited for the half-dozen cameras to position themselves, and then nodded to the director, whose sole duty seemed to be to count down and tell the cameramen when to start shooting.

    “Good evening,” he said in perfect English. “I am speaking to you because some grievous wrongs have been done, and I have been asked to put them right again. This I shall do to the best of my ability.”

    There was a screen in the corner of the room, showing the reaction of the huge crowd just outside the Presidential Palace, and I could see them mouthing the words: “No, Tchaka! No!” But there was no sound in the office, other than my brother’s voice.