The Covenant (150 page)

He launched an ingenious program aimed at filling every available administrative position with Afrikaners: “Of course, the Englishmen will continue to occupy the flashy front offices. We’ll take the unseen jobs, none of them attractive or well paid. And once we have Afrikaners inserted in the system, we’ll promote them quietly, until they attain positions of real power.

“Then do you see what will happen? The insurance company will still be owned by Englishmen. But our people will pass the little rules by which they operate. And in time we will control everything—not own it, control it.”

He preached that an essential factor in such a strategy was the proliferation of minor administrative jobs: “Where one man is needed,
let us appoint three. If an old office falters, let us establish two new ones, staffed always with our people. Jobs, jobs, jobs. Whether they’re needed or not, create more jobs because they must pay for them. And always in the legislation creating them insert the phrase ‘The occupant must be bilingual.’ With Afrikaans we will strangle them to death.”

As a consequence of this policy, South Africa would become one of the most overly administered governments on earth, and gradually, because of the bilingual requirement, this plethora of officeholders became predominantly Afrikaner. Piet Krause had shown far-seeing wisdom: the English insurance company did continue to make money, but it operated under rules promulgated by Afrikaner functionaries, who drafted these rules in accordance with the wishes of the unseen Broederbond.

While cells of the Broederbond in all parts of South Africa were convening secretly to determine the future character of their nation, awakening young black men were meeting, also in secret, to decide what patterns should be followed when they attained the leadership to which they felt entitled.

Micah Nxumalo was not a great man, but he had always associated with great men, and that was almost as good. Paulus de Groot, Christoffel Steyn, the various Boer generals during the war—he had worked with them all. Usually they had not been aware of him, but in his quiet way he had been intensely aware of them, and had learned from them lessons which would have amazed them had they known the depth of his perception.

He was bewildered by white men. They lived surrounded by blacks, but made no effort to understand them or to profit from the association. The whites were outnumbered in many areas forty-to-one, but they continued living as if they alone possessed the landscape and always would. He watched them making decisions which had to be against their own best interests, and doing so only to maintain control over the larger number of blacks who surrounded them.

For example, Micah was astounded that the two white tribes, Boer and English, should have fought each other so viciously for so long, when at any time each could have achieved everything that came out of the peace treaty and at one-fiftieth of the cost. For him the insanity of their behavior was epitomized by the Battle of Spion
Kop, in which he had played a major role. “I tell you, Moses,” he said to his son, “one side marched up to the top of the hill, then the other side marched up, then one side marched down, then the other side marched down. Then, long after midnight, General de Groot and I walked up, and we captured it. And three days later it didn’t make a bit of difference who held it, but hundreds of white men lay dead and wounded.”

He saw also that it made very little difference, really, which side won: “We fought for the Boers, Moses. They were good people and we could trust them, men like Jakob from this farm, and the old general. But when it was over, we got no thanks. They made laws against us just the same. And don’t you ever believe that the Kaffirs who fought on the English side came off any better. Because the English abandoned them as soon as peace came. ‘We will never desert you,’ they promised in 1899 when they needed black help, but at the peace treaty they forgot about our rights. And now they’re just as eager as the Afrikaners to hold us down.”

Micah, who could not read or write, could formulate such sophisticated analyses because he had for many years been quietly associating with that remarkable group of black leaders who moved through the countryside talking about actual living conditions, legislation and civic rights. These few men were well educated, some in England, one or two in the black colleges of America, and some of them had even visited the Parliament in London with petitions drawing attention to the worsening conditions in South Africa. “It would be improper for England to interfere with the internal relations of a dominion,” they were always told, and helplessly they watched the deterioration.

These men, who would be the leaders of their race in coming years, first brought Nxumalo’s attention to the problem of the poor white Afrikaner, the numerous people like the Troxels, who had been driven off their inherited farms by drought and rinderpest and who had taken refuge in Johannesburg. “I assure you,” Sol Plaatje said at one meeting, “in their hovels they live worse than the blacks do in Sophiatown. Every law that holds us down, holds them down too. In a sensible world the Troxels would combine with us to improve everyone’s condition, but they stay off to themselves, the poorest of the poor, and we stay off to ourselves, the dispossessed.”

What perplexed these leaders was the contradictory policy of the white government: “They spend enormous sums to bring in white
settlers from Russia and Germany and Poland, when they have right on their doorsteps better labor and cheaper, which they refuse to use.” John Dube, in one of these meetings, offered the statement which Nxumalo would always remember: “The worst thing a nation can do to itself is to cultivate and maintain a supply of cheap labor. When salaries are kept down, money stops circulating, taxes bring in diminished funds, and everybody loses. The white man thinks he’s hurting us when he keeps our wages low. Actually, he’s hurting himself.”

At one meeting a young Swazi who had studied in London said, “In our worst industries, the white man earns sixteen times as much as the black man doing the same kind of work. Now, I don’t mean the same work. As you know, certain jobs have been defined by law as too complicated or pivotal for a black man to master. Such jobs must be held by whites only. What I mean is that whites and blacks work together, the whites doing the so-called critical work, which a schoolboy could learn in fifteen minutes, the blacks doing the manual labor, which the white could do more efficiently because he’s usually better fed and stronger. Taking all industries, the white worker gets nine times the wage of a black, and they propose to build a sensible society on that basis!”

Nxumalo understood such reasoning; he would never have elucidated such thoughts himself, but when others did he approved. However, on one point he was as obtuse as the white man: when he contemplated the long future of South Africa he could not visualize any logical place for the Coloureds. The white man had stated in a hundred different laws and regulations that the Coloureds were not white; the blacks knew intuitively they could never be black. Almost never was the problem discussed; once Plaatje said after returning from London, “The white men, if they had any sense, would embrace the Coloureds instead of importing white immigrants at great expense.”

“Should we embrace them?” Nxumalo asked.

Plaatje thought a long time, then said, “I think not. They want to do what they call ‘moving up to whitehood’ and would never be satisfied with doing what they would call ‘falling back to Kaffir status.’ Why distract our attention by bothering with them, when we can argue directly with the whites?”

It was from such discussions that Micah Nxumalo acquired his obsession: “One day our boy Moses will attend the college at Fort
Hare.” To that end he terminated his own practical education; no longer would he waste his few rand by attending the secret meetings in Johannesburg. That money would be saved for the boy. He went to the Van Doorns, asking them to help toward the fees Moses would have to pay, but Detleef growled, “He needs no further schooling, he has a job here,” and the meager funds that Micah could accumulate were inadequate for so bold a venture, and the dream of sending a black lad from Vrymeer to college vanished.

But not the dream of learning: “What you must do, Moses, is read the books that educated men read. You must associate with men who have traveled to America and Europe, and you must listen to what they say. Most of all, son, you must get off this farm. You were not meant to be a peasant.”

Using some of the money he had saved, he returned to his friends in Johannesburg and asked them for books that would start his gifted son on the right track. They gave him one book by Marcus Garvey, the American black; two books by Plaatje on the South African condition; one by George Bernard Shaw; and a splendid volume on the golden age of the Dutch Republic. As he was about to depart, the young Swazi who had recited the figures on comparative wages at the earlier meeting had an afterthought: “What might do him the most good—this novel about Java.”

“What is Java?”

“It used to control South Africa.”

“Why should he read about that?”

“Because you never know, Mr. Nxumalo, what will ignite a boy’s mind.” And he handed over a Dutch novel,
Max Havelaar
, by a man who had been a civil servant in Java in the 1800s; he wrote under the name of Multatuli, Latin for Many Sorrows, and although he spoke only of conditions in Java, everything he said applied to South Africa.

The five scholarly books Micah brought back to Vrymeer were helpful, but
Max Havelaar
sharpened the mind of Moses Nxumalo. He was in his twenties when he read it, bewildered by the flood of ideas that had been coming at him from his own observations, the canny wisdom of his father and the lessons from the serious books; the novel tied these scattered concepts together in a way that was almost magical. It was poorly written, really, forcing upon the reader more instruction about plantation life in Java than he needed, but in the end it left a residue of emotion and moral commitment that
would otherwise have been unobtainable. After an absence of two hundred years, the power of Java had returned to South Africa.

When he finished the six books, Moses told his father, “I want to try it in Johannesburg.”

“You should,” his father said. “And I suppose you know that the chances are good that you’ll be dead before the end of the year.”

“I’ve heard.” In
Max Havelaar
a young Javanese much like Moses had gone to his Johannesburg and died with a belly full of bullets. As in the past, Java was instructing South Africa.

So in the mid 1930s Moses Nxumalo of Vrymeer went quietly away from the farm and into the city, a journey of ninety-nine miles in physical distance, an incalculable distance spiritually.

He sought out his cousin, Jefferson Magubane, somewhat older than he was, and found him living in Sophiatown, and on the first night he was there, police came hammering on the rickety door, demanding to see all documents. By a miracle of timing, Jefferson managed to slip Moses into an alley leading to the communal privy, and there he hid while the others presented their papers for inspection. Although his sheltered life at Vrymeer had not prepared him for this indignity, his experiences with Max Havelaar had, and he thought how strange it was that he, whose ancestors had lived on this land for a thousand years, should be restricted by incomers as to where and how he could travel.

Next morning Jefferson, who had not been distressed by the police visit, for that was a common occurrence, said brightly, “Moses, I think we can get you the proper passes.” And he took his cousin some miles out toward the country to a large suburban house called New Sarum. There, deferentially, he went to the back door and informed the black maid who tended it that he had brought her a first-class houseboy. With nudges and winks he instructed Moses in making proper responses, with the result that a black man was summoned, who led the applicant through the kitchen to a kind of office where a white husband and wife waited. They introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Noel Saltwood, whereupon Mrs. Saltwood, a tall, fine-looking English woman, asked him a series of questions, using English, Afrikaans and Zulu interchangeably.

“Can you read and write?” she asked. When he nodded, she asked him where he lived; he panicked, not knowing what to say, but she perceived this and said quickly, “I know you have no papers. Jefferson
told us. We’ll arrange for your passbook.” She spoke as if she were a conspirator.

“I’m from Vrymeer.”

“I don’t know that. Is it a small place?”

“It’s near Venloo.”

“Ah, yes. The Venloo Commando. Who doesn’t know about that!” She looked at her husband approvingly, and Moses wondered if he should volunteer further information, but his quandary was solved by Laura Saltwood. “Did you know, perchance … No, you’d have been too young. But a very brave man came from Venloo. General de Groot.”

“My father rode with him. I used to live with him.”

Both the Saltwoods gasped, and they spent the next fifteen minutes asking about his father’s experiences on commando, after which Mrs. Saltwood said, “Noel, we really must put someone to the job of compiling the record of the black commandos. On both sides. Their stories must be incredible, and they’ll be lost if we don’t do something.”

Then she became strictly business: “We’ll get you your papers, Moses, but you must work here faithfully, because if you don’t, back you’ll go to the farm. Is that understood?”