The Covenant (167 page)

“Running to Moçambique, are you?”

He was too numb to respond, so they jabbed him for almost two minutes, after which he fainted.

When he revived, too weak to stand erect, they propped him against a wall, and he felt blood oozing from his nose. He was positive that this had not occurred when he was conscious; they must have been kicking him while he lay on the floor, and he moved parts of his body to see if anything had been broken by their heavy boots.

“And what, pray tell, Mr. Magubane, is ‘falling, falling’?”

“Nothing, Boer.” More punishment.

“Stand up, you cheeky Kaffir bastard. Now you tell us what you mean by ‘falling, falling.’ I put it to you, Magubane. You mean that South Africa is falling, don’t you?”

There was more punishment, the flailing out of worried men, and Matthew realized that he was being tortured so furiously because he had been overheard singing a song whose words the police could not interpret.

“All right, you cheeky bastard, you sing the song for us.” Krause began in his monotone to chant the words, joined quickly by Krog, whose efforts augmented the dissonance. “Sing!” Krog screamed, and slowly, with deep powerful tones, Magubane picked up the song, lending it significance and beauty:

“I follow the sun, no matter how bright
.
There goes the moon, down out of sight.”

Krog, reading from a typed copy of the song, detected Magubane’s change in words and halted the singing.

“You changed the words!”

“There are many verses,” Magubane said.

On the seventh day he heard the second serious charge: “People say you’re a black-consciousness activist.”

“I am for black power, yes.” Smash to the jaw.

“You’re a Bantu, a stupid goddamned Kaffir Bantu, with no power at all!”

“Yes, Boer, I am an African.” Fist in the mouth.

Afrikaners like Marius van Doorn, the son of Detleef, looked forward to the day when there was one citizenship in South Africa; he felt himself to be a man of Africa—an African—and he did not want that honorable word applied only to blacks. But other Afrikaners were infuriated if any black claimed to be an African, as Magubane
was doing, for they sensed a grave danger: the black was seeking outside help from his brothers in powerful black nations like Nigeria.

“Now, Mr. Magubane, I want you to explain what makes you think you’re an African.” Prod with the electric tip. “Dance if you wish, but go on with your explanation.” More prodding.

“I’m a native of Africa, as you are. We’re both Africans.” Smash to the face. “I’m willing to accept you, and you must accept me.”

“You cheeky bastard!” And the fury of the two officers at being linked in a brotherhood stemming from a common terrain was ungovernable.

Next morning Magubane awakened convinced that on this day Officers Krause and Krog intended killing him. He was mistaken. BOSS was never so callous as to plan a murder; all it sought was to intimidate potential troublemakers. “Trimming the hedge,” Krause called it. “When a cheeky Kaffir starts to stick his head up, like a wild branch in a hedge, what’s the sensible thing to do? Knock it back.” This prevented trouble later on, so BOSS developed the system of bringing any black who was beginning to exhibit leadership into custody, kick him around a bit, and set him free. The danger was that after nine or ten days of interrogation the black man might be beyond freedom: “Case No. 51. Verdict. Death while trying to escape.”

And this might have been Magubane’s end except for the work of two men outside the jail who had never met Magubane. The first was André Malan, white, twenty-nine, and a reporter for the
Durban Gazette
. He was a courageous chap dedicated to the high quality of South African journalism and suspicious of why so many Hemelsdorp investigations ended in fatal attempts at escape.

On the day of Matthew Magubane’s arrest two black men had slipped into Malan’s office and expressed a premonition that the young man was exactly the kind of black who would prove so intractable that Jurgen Krause would be tempted to forget what the regulations said about avoiding undue pressure. “Watch what happens,” the blacks warned.

So André Malan began writing articles about the detention of Magubane, and he asked the police to issue reports of the young man’s well-being. In fact, he created so much pressure that officials became irritated and decided to apply one of their laws against him.

There was a law in South Africa which said that BOSS could invade the quarters of any writer at any time without a warrant, and if they found any notes or materials or photographs which
might
be
used to write an article which
might
be offensive to the government, that writer could be detained indefinitely without any charges being brought against him.

On the morning of the eighth day one of Malan’s two black informants ran to his apartment, shouting, “Get rid of your papers!”

As a newsman who had watched three of his colleagues imprisoned by BOSS, he required no additional explanation; he destroyed the few papers he had allowed to accumulate, even those not relating to Matthew Magubane, then hastily scanned his bookshelves to see if any of the thousands of books banned by the government were there. Reasonably assured, he waited.

The BOSS crew did appear. They did ransack his quarters. And they did find one book published by the World Council of Churches in Geneva, and it was this which justified them in putting him in jail, on no charges, with no warrant, and with no right of self-defense.

News coverage of Matthew Magubane ended. The police were free to continue their probing of his life and beliefs as they wished, except that on a farm near Vrymeer the rebellious young black Jonathan Nxumalo, unemployed now but once a worker at the Golden Reef Mines, had been following in the newspapers the running record of Magubane’s detention. Now he heard of Malan’s arrest and deduced that Magubane was about to be murdered. Convening four friends, he took an informal vote: “How many say we try to rescue Magubane?” All five voted yes. “And then flee to Moçambique?” This time only four voted, the man who refrained explaining, “My mother …”

“No explanations necessary. Tomorrow night we could all be dead.”

“Or on the way to Moçambique.”

Jonathan then cleared his throat and said, tentatively, “My brother’s home on vacation from university. I think we should have his advice.” Someone was dispatched to fetch the professor, and when he stood at the entrance to the small room in which they met, he realized that the men inside represented a conspiracy. To take even one step into that room would make him a part of the criminal movement, with the possibility of a lifetime in prison, or even death. His whole inclination was to turn and run, but the liveliness of their faces made that impossible. These were the young men he had been training, and now they were about to train him. He joined them.

“We’re going to storm the jail at Hemelsdorp,” his brother said.

“I supposed that might be it.”

“We’ve a cache of guns smuggled in from Moçambique.”

“I wish you could do it without guns.”

“This is the year of the gun,” Jonathan said. “If we get to Moçambique, what do you think we should do?”

If he had left the room even at this point he might have avoided incrimination, but like other blacks across the nation he felt a growing sense of the future. “I would not storm the police station. You could all get killed.” As soon as he uttered these words he knew they were irrelevant; these men were prepared to die.

“About Moçambique,” his brother repeated.

“I can’t go with you. My job is to teach young men at the university.”

“Daniel,” his brother cried. “We don’t want you to come. Men like you … stay here to build. Men like us … get out so we can tear down.”

Professor Nxumalo felt old and out of place; he was alarmed at where his teaching had led, but he was also profoundly excited by the challenge. “When you reach Moçambique—and you will, I know you will—you’ve got to consolidate. Make no move till you can rely upon help from all the frontiers. Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Vwarda, and especially Moçambique. Then move subtly, a push here, a retreat there. In a dozen years, with help from Russia, East Germany and Cuba, the monolith will crumble.”

“We give it the first push tomorrow,” Jonathan said, embracing his brother. And when the professor was gone, he handed out the guns.

By separate routes the five young men journeyed to Hemelsdorp, having agreed to rush the detention center at one in the afternoon, when lesser policemen, like Krog, would be at lunch and their superiors, like Krause, so well-fed as to be lethargic. Jonathan’s men would be armed, a fact which almost guaranteed their execution if apprehended.

Quietly they converged on the barracks, waited an interminable five minutes in position, then without any kind of juvenile exhibitionism, walked resolutely into the headquarters, took possession of the desk and the hallways, and hurriedly searched the rooms till they found Magubane.

“What’s happening?” he asked through swollen lips.

“Off to Moçambique!”

As they ran from the barracks without having fired a round, the young man who had to care for his mother headed north, where he would function underground. The others concealed their guns and went into exile.

One of the most gratifying days in Van Doorn’s life occurred on 16 December 1966, when he was invited to deliver the main speech at the Day of the Covenant celebrations at the new housing development that had arisen, under his direction, on the site from which the black township of Sophiatown had been bulldozed. The area had been renamed Triomf and was now occupied by white Afrikaner families who kept their little houses neat and their flower beds flourishing.

But as Detleef drove along the clean wide streets that had replaced the slum alleys he said somewhat sourly to his white chauffeur, “I’ll wager most people in those houses have no idea what the new name means.”

His chauffeur said quickly, “But we know what a triumph it was, don’t we?”

Van Doorn showed his appreciation for this support, then said, “Sophiatown was a national disgrace. Crime, poverty, young tsotsis running wild.”

“A white man would be afraid to go there after dark,” the chauffeur agreed.

“Tell me frankly, isn’t our new Triomf a hundred times better?”

Like any impartial judge, the chauffeur had to admit the new suburb was not only better, but was also inhabited by people of a much higher status: “You did a wonderful thing here, Mr. van Doorn.”

Inspired by such approbation, Detleef showed real enthusiasm as he approached the podium in the church hall. Among the other dignitaries on the platform were four ancient men, oudstryders (old fighters), veterans of the Boer War, who nodded approvingly as he lambasted the enemies of the nation. In many ways his speech was a summation of his vision regarding the future of the Volk: