Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur - Страница 103

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They moved along the ridge until they were beyond all possible chance of observation from the village, and even then they very carefully screened the small fire that they built amongst the ironstone boulders. Hendrick broke open the packets and poured the gleaming stones into a small calabash gourd while Moses prepared the millet meal in another gourd, mixing it with water until it was a soft porridge.

Meticulously Hendrick burned the cartridge paper wrappings in the fire and stirred the ashes to powder with a stick.

When it was done he nodded at his younger brother and Moses poured the dough over the coals. As it began to bubble Hendrick buried the diamonds in the unleavened dough.

Moses muttered ruefully as the millet cakes bubbled and hardened. It was almost an incantation. These are death stones. We will have no joy of them. The white men love them too dearly: they are the stones of death and madness. Hendrick ignored him and shaped the baking loaves, squinting his eyes against the smoke and smiling secretly to himself. When each round loaf was crisped brown on the underside he flipped it over and let it cook through until it was brick hard; then he lifted it off the fire and set it out to cool. Finally he repacked the crude thick loaves into the leather sack and they returned quietly to the sleeping village.

In the morning they left early and the women went with them the first mile of the journey, ululating mournfully and singing the song of farewell. When they fell behind neither of the men looked back. They trudged on towards the low brown horizon, carrying their bundles balanced on their heads. They did not think about it, but this little scene was acted out every single day in a thousand villages across the southern. sub-continent.

Days later the two men, still on foot, reached the recruitment station. It was a single-roomed general-dealer's store, standing alone at a remote crossroad on the edge of the desert. The white trader augmented his precarious business by buying cattle hides from the surrounding nomadic tribes and by recruiting for Wenela'.

Wenela was the acronym for the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, a ubiquitous sprawling enterprise which extended its tentacles into the vastness of the African wilderness. From the peaks of the Dragon Mountains in Basutoland to the swamps of the Zambezi and Chobe, from the thirstlands of the Kalahari to the rain forest of the high plateau of Nyasaland, it gathered up the trickle of black men and channelled them first into a stream and finally into a mighty river that ran endlessly to the fabulous goldfields of the Ridge of White Waters, the Witwatersrand of Transvaal.

The trader looked over these two new recruits in a perfunctory manner as they stood dumbly before him. Their faces were deliberately expressionless, their eyes blank, the only perfect defence of the black African in the presence of the white man.

Name? the trader demanded.

Henry Tabaka. Hendrick had chosen his new name to cover his relationship to Moses and to throw off any chance connection with Lothar De La Rey and the robbery.

Name? The trader looked at Moses.

Moses Gama. He pronounced it with a guttural G'.

Have you worked on the mines before? Do you speak English? 'Yes, Basie. They were obsequious, and the trader grinned.

Good! Very good! You will be rich men when you come home from Goldi. Plenty of wives. Plenty of jig-jig, hey? He grinned lasciviously as he issued them each with a green Wenela card and a bus ticket. The bus will come soon. Wait outside, he ordered, and promptly lost all interest in them.

He had earned his guinea-a-head recruitment fee, good money easily made, and his obligation to the recruits was at an end.

They waited under the scraggy thorn tree at the side of the iron-roofed trading store for forty-eight hours before the railway bus came rattling and banging and blowing blue smoke across the dreary wastes.

it stopped briefly and they slung their meagre luggage up onto the roofrack that was already piled with calabashes and boxes and bundles, with trussed goats and cages of woven bark stuffed with live fowls. Then they climbed into the overloaded coach and squeezed onto one of the hard wooden benches. The bus bellowed and blustered on over the plains and the rows of black passengers, wedged shoulder to shoulder, jolted and swayed in unison as it pitched and rolled over the rutted tracks.

Two days later the bus stopped outside the barbed-wire gates of the Wenela staging post on the outskirts of Windhoek, and most of the passengers, all young men, descended and stood looking about them aimlessly until a huge black overseer with brass plaques of authority on his arm and a long sjambok in his hand chivied them into line and led them through the gates.

The white station manager sat on the stoep of his office building, his boots propped on the half wall of the stoep and a black bottle of German lager at his elbow, fanning himself with his hat. One at a time, the black boss-boy pushed the new recruits in front of him for appraisal. He rejected only one, a skinny little runt of a man who barely had the strength to shuffle up to the verandah.

That bastard is riddled with TB. The manager took a gulp of his lager. Get rid of him. Send him back where he came from. When Hendrick stepped forward he straightened up in his thonged chair and set down the lager glass.

What is your name, boy? he asked.

Tabaka. Ha, you speak English. The manager's eyes narrowed. He could pick out the troublemakers; that was his job. He could tell by their eyes, the gleam of intelligence and aggression in them. He could tell by the way they walked and carried their shoulders; this big strutting, sullen black was big trouble.

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You in trouble with the police, boy? he asked again. You steal other man's cattle? You kill your brother perhaps, or jig-jig his wife, hey? Hendrick stared at him flatly.

Answer me, boy. No!

You call me Baas when you speak to me, do you understand? Yes, Baas, Hendrick said carefully, and the manager opened the police file that lay on the table beside him and thumbed through it slowly, suddenly looking up to catch any sign of guilt or apprehension on Hendrick's face. But he was wearing the African mask again, dumb, and resigned and inscrutable.

Christ, they stink. He threw the file back onto the table again.

Take them away, he told the black boss-boy, and he picked up his beer bottle and glass and went back into his office.

You know better than that, my brother, Moses whispered to him as they were marched away towards the line of thatched huts. When you meet a hungry white hyena, you do not put your hand in his mouth, and Hendrick did not reply.

They were fortunate; the draft was almost full, three hundred black men already gathered in and waiting in the line of huts behind the barbed-wire fence. Some of them had been there ten days and it was time for the next stage of their journey, thus Hendrick and Moses were not forced to endure another interminable wait. That night three railway coaches were shunted onto the spur of line that ran beside the camp and the boss-boys roused them before dawn.

Gather your belongings. Shayile! The hour has struck.

The steamer waits to take you to Goldi, to the place of gold. They formed up in their ranks again and answered to the roll-call. Then they were marched to the waiting coaches.

Here there was another white man in charge. He was tall and sunbrowned, his khaki shirtsleeves rolled up high on his sinewy biceps and wisps of blond hair hanging from under the shapeless black hat that was pulled low down on his forehead. His features were flat and Slavic, his teeth crooked and stained with tobacco smoke and his eyes were light misty blue; he smiled perpetually in a bland idiotic fashion and sucked at a cavity in one of his back teeth. He carried a sjambok on a thong from his wrist, and now and then, for no apparent reason, he flicked the tapered end of the hippohide whip against the bare legs of one of the men filing past him; it was a casual act born of disinterest and disdain rather than calculated cruelty, and though each stroke was feathery light, it stung like a hornet and the victim gasped and skipped and shot up the ladder into the coach with alacrity.

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