Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur - Страница 155
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The wheels of the wagons were bound together with trekchains and the spaces between them blocked with thorn branches. The Voortrekkers stood to the barricade with their long muzzle loaders, all of them veterans of a dozen such battles, brave men and the finest marksmen in the world.
They shot down the Zulu hordes, choking the river from bank to bank with dead men and turning its waters crimson, so that for ever after it was known as Blood river.
On that day the might of the Zulu empire was shattered, and the Voortrekker leaders, standing bare-headed on the battlefield, made a covenant with God to celebrate the anniversary of the victory with religious service and thanksgiving for all time.
This day had become the most holy date in the Calvinistic Afrikaner calendar after the day of Christ's birth. It celebrated all their aspirations as a people, it commemorated their sufferings and honoured their heroes and their forefathers.
Thus the hundredth anniversary of the battle had peculiar significance for the Afrikaners and during the protracted celebrations the leader of the Nationalist Party declared, We must make South Africa safe for the white man. It is shameful that white men are forced to live and work beside lesser breeds; coloured blood is bad blood and we must be protected from it. We need a second great victory if white civilization is to be saved. Over the months that followed, Dr Malan and his Nationalist Party introduced a series of racially orientated bills to the House. These ranged from making mixed marriages from a crime, to the physical segregation of the whites from men of colour, whether Asiatic or African, and disenfranchising all coloured persons who already had the vote while ensuring that those who did not have it, remained without it. Up until the middle of 1939 Hertzog and Smuts had managed to head off or defeat these proposals.
The South African census distinguished between the various racial groups, the Cape-coloured and other mixed breeds'. These were not, as one might believe, the progeny of white settlers and the indigenous tribes, but were rather the remnants of the Khoisan tribes, the Hottentots and Bushmen and Damaras, together with descendants of Asiatic brought out to the Cape of Good Hope slaves who had been in the ships of the Dutch East India Company.
Taken together they were an attractive people, useful and productive members of a complex society. They tended to be small-boned and light-skinned with almond eyes in faintly oriental features. They were cheerful, clever and quickwitted, fond of pageant and carnival and music, dextrous and willing workers, good Christians or devout Muslims.
They had been civilized in Western European fashion for centuries and had lived in close and amiable association with the whites since the days of slavery.
The Cape was their stronghold and they were better off than most other coloured groups. They had the vote, albeit on a separate roll from the whites, and many of them, as skilled craftsmen and small traders, had achieved a standard of living and affluence surpassing that of many of their white neighbours. However, the majority of them were domestic servants or urban labourers surviving just above or below subsistence level. These people now became the subject of Dr Daniel Malan's attempts to enforce segregation in the Cape as well as every other corner of the land.
Hertzog and Smuts were fully aware that many of their own followers sympathized with the Nationalists, and that to oppose them rigidly might easily bring down the delicate coalition of their United Party. Reluctantly they put together a counter-proposal, for residential segregation, which would disrupt the delicate social balance as little as possible and which, while making law a situation which already existed, would appease their own party and cut the ground from under the Nationalist opposition's feet.
We aim to peg the present position, General Jan Smuts explained, and a week after this explanation a large orderly crowd of coloured people, joined by many liberal whites, gathered in the Greemnarket Square in the centre of Cape Town peaceably to protest against the proposed legislation.
Other organizations, the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress, the Trotsky National Liberation League and the African Peoples Organization, scented blood in the air and their members swelled the ranks of the gathering, while in the front row centre, right under the hastily erected speakers stand, auburn hair shining and grey-blue eyes flashing with righteous ardour, stood Tara Malcomess. At her side, but slightly below her level, was Hubert Langley, backed by a group of Huey's sociology students from the University. They stared up at the speaker, enthralled and enchanted.
This fellow is very good, Hubert whispered. I wonder why we have never heard of him before. He is from the Transvaal, one of his students had overheard and leaned across to explain. One of the top men in the African National Congress on the Witwatersrand. Hubert nodded. Do you know his name? Gama, Moses Gama. Moses, the name suits him, the one to lead his people out of captivity., Tara thought that she had seldom seen a finer-looking man, black or white. He was tall and lean, with the fare of a young pharaoh, intelligent, noble and fierce.
We live in time of sorrow and great danger, Moses Gama's voice had a range and timbre that made Tara shiver involuntarily. A time that was foreseen in the Book of Proverbs., He paused and then spread his hands in an eloquent gesture as he quoted. There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords and there jaw teeth as knives to devour the poor from the earth, and the needy from among men. d again.
That's magnificent! Tara shivered again. MY friends, we are the poor and the needy. When each of us stands alone we are weak, alone we are the prey for those with teeth like swords. But together we can be strong.
if we stand together, we can resist them. Tara joined in the applause, clapping until the palms of her hands were numb, and the speaker stood calmly waiting for silence. Then he went on, The world is like a great pot of oil slowly heating. When it boils over there will be turmoil and steam and it will feed the fire beneath it. The flames will fly up to the sky and afterwards nothing will be the same again. The world we know will be altered for ever, and only one thing is certain, as certain as the rise of tomorrows sun. The future belongs to the people, and Africa belongs to the Africans. Tara found she was weeping hysterically as she clapped and screamed her adulation.
After Moses Gama, the other speakers were dull and halting and she was angry with their ineptitude, but when she looked for him in the crowd Moses Gama had disappeared.
A man like him dare not stay too long in one place, Hubert explained. They have to move like the will o' the wisp to keep ahead of the police. A general never fights in the front line. They are too valuable to the revolution to be used as cannon-fodder. Lenin only returned to Russia after the fighting was over. But we will hear of Moses Gama again mark my words. Around them the crowd was being marshalled to form up into a procession behind a band, a fifteen-piece marching band, any gathering was an excuse for the Cape-coloured people to make music, and in ranks four and five abreast the demonstration began to snake out of the square. The band played 'Alabama', setting a festive mood, and the crowd was laughing and singing; it seemed a parade rather than a demonstration.
We will be peaceful and orderly, the organizers reinforced their previous orders, passing them down the column. No trouble, we want no trouble with the police. We are going to march to the Parliament building and hand a petition to the prime minister. There were two or three thousand in the procession, more than they had hoped for. Tara marched in the fifth rank just behind Dr Goollarn Gool and his daughter Cissie and the other coloured leaders.
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