Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur - Страница 109

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His wants were taken care of by the men around him as if by birthright. Already the death of the white overseer, Tshayela, the striker, had been embroidered and built into a legend by many repetitions, reinforcing the stature and authority of Moses Gama and his lieutenant; men walked softly around them and inclined their heads respectfully when either Moses or Hendrick spoke directly to them.

At dawn the next morning they were roused from their bunks in the barrack rooms and after a huge breakfast of maize cake and maas, the thick clotted sour milk, they were led to the long iron-roofed classroom.

Then of forty different tribes come from every corner of the land to Goldi, men speaking forty different languages, from Zulu to Tswana, from Herero to Basuto, and only one in a thousand of them understands a word of English or of Afrikaans, Moses explained softly to his brother as the other men respectfully made room for them on one of the classroom benches. Now they will teach us the special language of Goldi, the tongue by which all men, whether black or white, and of whatever tribe, speak to each other here. A venerable old Zulu boss-boy, his pate covered with a cap of shining silver wool, was their instructor in the lingua franca of the gold mines, Fanakalo. The name was taken from its own vocabulary and meant literally like this, like that', the phrase that the recruits would have urged upon them frequently over the weeks ahead: Do it like this! Work like that! Sebenza fanakalo! The Zulu instructor on the raised dais was surrounded by all the accoutrements of the miner's trade, set out on display so that he could touch each item with his pointer and the recruits would chant the name of it in unison. Helmets and lanterns, hammers and picks, jumper bars and scrapers, safety rails and rigs, they would know them all intimately before they stood their first shift.

But now the old Zulu touched his own chest and said: AUna! Then pointed at his class and said: Wena! And Moses led them in the chant: The! You! Head! said the instructor and Arm! and Leg! He touched his own body and his pupils imitated him enthusiastically.

They worked at the language all that morning and then after lunch they were divided into groups of twenty and the group that included Moses and Hendrick was taken to another iron-roofed building similar to the language classroom. It differed only in its furnishings. Long trestle tables ran from wall to wall, and the person that welcomed them was a white man with peculiar bright ginger-coloured hair and mustache and green eyes. He was dressed in a long white coat like those the doctors had worn, and like them he was smiling and friendly, waving them to their places at the tables and speaking in English that only Moses and Hendrick understood, although they were careful not to make their understanding apparent and maintained a pantomime of perplexity and ignorance.

All right you fellows. My name is Dr Marcus Archer and I am a psychologist. What we are going to do now is give you an aptitude test to see just what kind of work you are best suited to. The white man smiled at them and then nodded to the boss-boy beside him, who translated: You do what Bomvu, the red one, tells you. That way we can find out just how stupid you are. The first test was a blockbuilding exercise which Marcus Archer had developed himself to test basic manual dexterity and awareness of mechanical shape. The multicoloured wooden blocks of various shapes had to be fitted into the frame on the table in front of each subject in the manner of an elementary jigsaw puzzle and the time allotted for completion was six minutes. The boss-boy explained the procedure and gave a demonstration and the recruits took their seats at the tables and Marcus Archer called: Enza!

Do it! and started his stop watch.

Moses completed his puzzle in one minute six seconds.

According to Dr Archer's meticulous records, to date 1 1 6,816

had sat this particular test. Not one of them had completed it in under two and a half minutes. He left the dais and went down to Moses table to check his assembly of the blocks.

It was correct, and he nodded and studied Moses expressionless features thoughtfully.

Of course, he had noticed Moses the moment he entered the room. He had never seen such a beautiful man in his life, either black or white, and Dr Archer's preference was strongly for black skin. That was one of the main reasons he had come out to Africa five years before, for Dr Marcus Archer was a homosexual.

He had been in his third year at Magdalene College before he admitted this fact to himself, and the man who had introduced him to the bitter-sweet delights had at the same time stimulated his intellect with the wondrous new doctrines of Karl Marx and the subsequent refinements to that doctrine by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His lover had secretly enrolled him in the Britis Communist Party, and after he had left Cambridge introduced him to the comrades of Bloomsbury. However, the young Marcus had never felt entirely at home in intellectual London. He had lacked the spiked tongue, the ready acid wit and the feline cruelty, and after a short and highly unsatisfactory affair with Lytton Strachey, he had been given Lytton's notorious treatment and ostracized from the group.

He had banished himself into the wilderness of Manchester University, to take up the new science of industrial psychology. In Manchester he had begun a long and lyrically happy liaison with a Jamaican trombone player and allowed his connections with the Party to fall into neglect. However, he was to learn that the Party never forgets its chosen ones and at the age of thirty-one, when he had already made some small reputation for himself in his profession, but when his association with his Jamaican lover had ended acrimoniously and he was dejected and almost suicidal, the Party had reached out one of its tentacles and drawn him gently back into the fold.

They told him that there was an opening in his field with the South African Chamber of Mines working with African Mineworkers. His penchant for black skin was by now an addiction. The infant South African Communist Party was in need of bolstering and the job was his if he wanted. It was implied that he had free choice in the matter, but the outcome was never in doubt and within a month he had sailed for Cape Town.

In the following five years he had done important pioneering work with the Chamber of Mines and had received both recognition and deep satisfaction from it. His connections with the Party had been carefully concealed, but the covert work he had done in this area was even more important, and his commitment to the ideals of Marxism had grown stronger as he grew older and saw at first hand the inhumanities of class and racial discrimination, the terrible abyss that separated the Poor and dispossessed black proletariat from the enormous wealth and privilege of the white bourgeoisie. He had found that in this rich and beautiful land all the gross ills of the human condition flourished as though in a hothouse, exaggerated until they were almost a caricature of evil.

Now Marcus Archer looked at this noble young man with the face of an Egyptian god and a skin of burnt honey, and he was filled with longing.

You speak English, don't you? he asked, and Moses nodded.

Yes, I do, he said softly, and Marcus Archer had to turn away and go back to his dais. His passion was impossible to disguise, and his fingers were trembling as he took up a stick of chalk and wrote upon the blackboard, giving himself a respite to get his emotions under control.

The tests continued for the rest of the afternoon, the subjects gradually being sorted and channelled into their various grades and levels on the results. At the end only one remained in the main stream. Moses Gama had completed the progressively more difficult tests with the same aplomb as he had tackled the first, and Dr Archer realized that he had discovered a prodigy.

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