Wings of the Morning (57 page)

We started with a news roundup on our families. Guy sympathised with the trouble I have in keeping up with everyone. I’ve been living in Millennium since I graduated from university in
Century nearly seven years ago. I’ve never regretted the decision to make the country my home, but a downside is that I get to see my parents and siblings only once or twice a year. My
brother Edward went into shipping and is now doing a couple of years based in Korea, Christina my elder sister is through Uni in the UK and training to be a vet and Charlotte is having a ball at
Durham reading English. My Dad, Oscar, continues a hard working pillar of Hereford and my mother is non-stop busy and into everything. It’s not easy to get any of them to come here, so when I
go to Europe I don’t usually get further than Hereford, plus Hampshire to see my grandmother Tepee.

Over coffee, Guy got down to business

‘I have to give you this suitcase Olty,’ Guy spoke excellent English with a lovely Clouzot accent, ‘and there’s a letter of authority which goes with it. I understand
that it contains a form of memoire left to you personally by David Heaven. He left it in his will to my Aunt Alexa for safekeeping and she thinks it’s high time for you to receive your
legacy. She asked me to deliver it by hand, so here am I; and here it is.’

Guy pushed across the case under our table and I grasped the worn old leather handle for the first time. I must have looked pretty perplexed. He smiled at me and said,

‘It seems that David finished his work on the manuscript a year or so after Aischa died. Then he packed everything up in that old case and left it to Alexa. With your grandfather Conrad
gone so long ago, I guess she was his greatest friend from Oxford days which is where life really began for him it seems.’

‘Perhaps,’ I replied uncertainly, ‘but I’d have thought he would have chosen Pente Broke Smith for something like this.’

‘I don’t know, Olty, but my guess is that maybe Alexa and David had a thing going in days long past.’

He gave a Gallic shrug as he continued, ‘Who can say? My aunt would never say and I wouldn’t ask, but she was insistent that I should make the handover at the earliest opportunity.
To be honest, I think she had forgotten all about it, but she’s over seventy-five now and wants to conclude her responsibility for it. What’s more, as she said to me, you yourself are
full grown and established. Whatever it is that David wanted to leave to you is overdue for delivery.’

I thanked him warmly for his candour and for taking this trouble. Then we talked of other things until we left the restaurant to go our separate ways. I haven’t seen Guy since then, but
I’ll send him a copy of this account. There will be things which he’ll want to read about.

I took the case home to Millennium with me. I started to browse through it here in my apartment in Century and as I’ve said, I was fascinated from the start. But I didn’t have time
to do much more right then because we were manically busy at work and the reason for that was Joe Kaba.

He’s a wonderful man, my boss: Armenian born but no one could pronounce his name so he made up another. He’s been in Millennium for seventeen years, arriving with his wife and three
children, their hand luggage and a bit of cash: nothing else. They were evicted from Minsk where Joe had been well established until he fell foul of the authorities and he was lucky to get slung
out on his ear.

He’s an absolute powerhouse, is Joe: a brilliant linguist and a superb manager. He comes from humble origins but he mixes easily at any level. He’s strong on detail with an
inspirational style about him. Thinking of the characters I’ve been discovering over the last year, I guess he’s a bit of a mixture of Sol Kirchoff and Felix Maas, but he’s got
also my grandfather’s sense of strategy. Joe’s weak point is figures. He can make money OK and has proved it. But he has no grasp of high level finance and that’s why he
absolutely idolises Hugh Dundas and still picks his brains whenever he gets the chance.

From New York and my meeting with Guy in December 2019, I went first to the UK and spent Christmas freezing with my parents in Hereford. I didn’t mention the legacy to my mother. I’d
hardly opened the case by then and felt that I needed to know more before I started in on it. I got back to Century, celebrated my birthday with a bit of mischief, and went off to work again.

Joe Kaba got stuck in straightaway to tell all of us in International Affairs about his latest brainwave. In a year’s time, he said, Millennium would turn twenty-one and if that was a
coming of age for a person, why not a nation also? He had already cleared it with President Menendez. We were going to organise a great shindig in Century at the end of January 2021. Nominally, it
would be a conference based around Orphans of Africa and the plans to extend the Charity. In addition, we would have a setting to showcase everything about Millennium — the people, the
progress, the productivity. We were going to invite the world for a week or so to see at first-hand how our country had become the standard bearer for Africa.

All this was heady and exciting stuff, but it was a huge project with only a year for preparation. Joe was ready for that. We would do what we could do, but not attempt the impossible. So there
was only one building project, which was to be an upgrade to the airport. Otherwise, he was planning a myriad of trips and demonstrations all around the country to provide a real flavour of what we
had achieved under the auspices of Orphans. He had a key task programme for the twelve of us who worked directly for him and we went away to get stuck in to arranging our own staff and timetables
to make sure that we delivered for him.

Looking back on things, I can understand that Joe’s vision always risked being seen as propaganda. We were extolling Orphans which is an international charity, but the second agenda was to
trumpet the success of Millennium itself. Not every country round the globe liked that, but the reasons for disapproval varied. To explain why, I have to give you a few facts and figures.

Millennium has posted some impressive statistics over the last twenty years. Our GDP world ranking has moved up from 121 to 68. The per capita income has quadrupled. Our exports now exceed $25bn
a year, but the contribution from oil has declined from 50% to just over 15%. That’s not because we have fewer reserves, as we have discovered much more offshore. The reason is that we make a
lot of goods here which the rest of the world wants to buy. Our population has shot up from about 5 million to 13.76 at the last census in 2018 and the reason is that some eight million people,
nearly 60% of our nation, have chosen to emigrate from forty different countries around the world to live amongst us and to contribute to Millennium’s success. Considering that my grandfather
arrived with three thousand odd, that’s some result.

Our literacy rate has gone from 15% to 85% and our life expectancy from 45 to 73 years. Our political system gives every adult over eighteen a vote every four years. Tertiary and university
education is free to all. You can travel where you want on decent roads by scheduled services any tick of the clock and your security is assured by our Combined Services and National police force
which are so efficient that they are now contributing to our export figures through the sale of training to other countries.

All this is good news, and I could go much further in listing results and measurements. The trouble and the paradox is that our development is not universally well regarded. Why not? Well, of
course, the cynic can always say that good news is no news and for sure, there’s some dog in the manger attitude out there. But the truth of it goes much deeper than that. For starters, we
have benefited from some outstanding people who came to Millennium because they were outcast from the nations of their birth or previous existence: my own boss today is a good example. And the
countries from which they fled don’t like to acknowledge that they got it wrong.

Then you have the Great Powers. The US of A still claims the title of the land of opportunity. The descendants of European colonisers of two centuries back can’t decide whether to be
ashamed or patronising. The Chinese and the Indians are happy to grab what they can with whatever it takes. But having said all of that, Millennium remains a small plot of real estate on the map.
Whatever we’re doing or achieving, however different the style and quality of life which we are building, none of this should be of too much account on the world stage. That’s true
until you come to South Africa.

The problem here is the Republic’s direction, because South Africa is going backwards. It’s not been easy for them, of course. Since apartheid ended with a new beginning under
Mandela in 1994, there have been huge issues for them to confront — really grotesque in size and complexity. The tough bottom line is not that they haven’t succeeded; it’s more
that things have got worse. During the first decade of this century, whilst we were lucky enough to be starting afresh, South Africa struggled with a prolonged hangover of celebration followed by a
protracted ‘where do we go from here?’ There were disasters of crumbling infrastructure, diminishing wealth, deteriorating governance and soaring crime. Meanwhile, the whole world
wanted to believe that new roses really were springing up in the garden.

During the last ten years, things started to change. About eighty per cent of native born South Africans are black with the remainder white, coloured or of Asian descent. They make a small
minority, but that’s still a powerful lot of people and many of them became completely disillusioned by the ‘new’ South Africa. They felt condemned for the sins of their
forefathers, disenfranchised by the majority rule. In a country with a quarter of workers unemployed, they were still the powerhouse of the economy and yet — and this was the worst of it
— they felt increasingly threatened. Throughout the Republic, in cities and rural communities, violent crime continued to grow with the have’s being constantly menaced by the have-nots.
This was the prime reason for so many applying to come to Millennium. But a much greater number said ‘No. I was born and bred in South Africa and my forebears have been here for generations.
Whatever the colour of my skin, this is my place and I’m staying even if I do have to build a fortress around my home, my family and my business.’

There was another influence on this group. Around that time in ’11 or ’12, the world witnessed what was dubbed at the time as being the Arab Spring. There was uprising and regime
change in all sorts of spots in the Middle East — Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya, even a bit going on in Jordan. Incoming new governance didn’t work so well for all of them and there
were problems which made even American-invaded Iraq look mild. But each country worked it out over a while, although at great cost. Meanwhile, all those minority South Africans were looking at what
happened in the Middle East and were saying to themselves that maybe you’ve just got to shake the cage a bit to see what drops out. It can’t be worse than it is now. After a while, they
began to talk to each other and in late 2015, they formed an organisation which they called simply ‘Future’, claiming with reason that’s what it’s all about.

The Future Group took a big gamble. Their leader, Henrik de Vries, made a speech in Durban over Easter 2016 in which he said to the ANC-descended Government of South Africa, ‘Look. We need
each other. On our side, we don’t want to leave the Republic and we acknowledge that you guys are the elected Government and there’s no chance of you being voted out. From your side,
you can’t afford to lose us or ignore us. You’re in enough shit already and it’s we Whites, Coloureds and Asians who make the economy work, bad as it may be. But a lot of us have
had enough of working our balls off only to worry if ours is the next business to be pillaged or if we’re going to get home and find our women raped and our houses trashed — secure
compounds or not. So here’s the deal. We’ll stay put and keep putting money in your coffers. In return, you give us a place of our own. More than one. At least three tracts of land
which we can enclose, protect and develop as our own communities with our own security. Without that, what’s the point of living even if we get to do so? And anyway, this is not such a
radical idea. Look at Lesotho: self governing up to a point, but still an enclave surrounded by the Republic.’

The Government of the day simply could not see its way past this one. It was a weird proposal because it implied a sort of reverse apartheid. Future’s promise — guarantee even
— was to produce the money, the technical and management skills in return for living in isolation, taking no part in politics but leaving Pretoria financed to sort out the shambles into which
the Republic’s health, education, housing and policing systems had degenerated. So they agreed eventually and in 2018 the first Dedicated Territory was opened in Cape Province with the next
being prepared in the Karoo for the following year.

Meanwhile on the world stage, all this was seen as a seriously retrograde step. The great and the good of global statesmen were complaining that the maturity of civilisation had been diminished
during the preceding thirty years. Exploitation in the former USSR, carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, thuggery in the Middle East and now turning back the clock in Southern Africa. Not to mention
the outright piracy which had brought Millennium into being. This was disingenuous talk of course, mentioning nothing of the desire in established quarters to maintain the status quo.

That’s enough of a lecture. I know that it’s a point of view but the fundamental truths are there and verifiable. And here’s another. One of the facts of life with which we
struggled in Millennium was the persona of Hugh Dundas. Not the person and not the character. But the perception and the manner in which others wanted to portray him. No one on the planet could
deny that Hugh was a toweringly successful man. Whatever his personal wealth, it was immeasurable and with hardly a bean of it inherited. He was quite simply a very clever guy with the additional
talent of knowing how best to employ his abilities. And this made him a target for jealousy, all the more so because he was so straightforward and open. He never sought to hide his long term
relationship with Alexa while maintaining his marriage to Janey and he never denied or excused his activities to fund Zero. Perhaps this was a mistake although he would never have played it
differently. Whatever, the result in later years and long after he had given up the Millennium Presidency was that he continued to be shot at from all sides. Nobody, the world decided, could be
both that successful and simultaneously that honest. The net result was that whenever a world figure chose to have a go at Millennium, they would include Hugh Dundas personally as part of the
target. He was fair game for all.