Rage (60 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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D
inner at Weltevreden that evening was a sombre affair. The only one who was unaffected by the day's events was Garry, who had flown down in the Mosquito from the Silver River Mine for the weekend.
While the rest of the family sat in silence, each of them brooding on the events of these last days and their own
particular part in them, Garry was enthusiastically selling to Centaine and Shasa his latest plan for reducing costs at the mine.
‘Accidents cost us money in lost production. I'll admit that in the last two years our safety record has been about average for the industry as a whole, but if we could cut down our fatalities to one per hundred thousand shifts or better, we could reduce our overall production costs by over twelve per cent. That is twenty million pounds a year. On top of that we would get the added bonus of worker satisfaction and cooperation. I have put all the figures through the computer.' Garry's eyes behind his spectacles glittered as he mentioned that piece of equipment. Shasa had reports from Dave Abrahams and the general manager of the Silver River that Garry sometimes sat all night at one of the terminals of the new IBM computer that the company had at last installed.
‘The lad knows his way around the machine as well, if not better, than any of our full-time operators. He can almost make it sit up and whistle “God Save the Queen”.' David Abrahams had not attempted to conceal his admiration and Shasa had remarked deprecatingly, to conceal his paternal pride, ‘That will be a redundant accomplishment by next year, when we become a republic.'
‘Oh, Garry, you are being an utter bore,' Isabella interrupted him at last. ‘All that business about tonnages and pennyweights – at the dinner table, what's more. No wonder you can't find a girlfriend.'
‘For once I think Bella is right,' Centaine said quietly from the end of the table. ‘That's enough for one night, Garry. I just cannot concentrate at the moment. I think this has been one of the worst weeks of my entire life, having to watch that monster, with Blaine's blood on his hands, sitting there defying us and making a mockery of our system of justice. He threatens to tear down the whole structure of government, to plunge us all into anarchy and
the same savagery of Africa which rent the land before we whites arrived. Then he smirks at us from the dock. I hate him. I have never hated anything or anybody as much as I hate him. I pray each night that they hang him.'
Unexpectedly it was Michael who replied. ‘Yes, we hate him, Nana. We hate him because we are afraid of him, and we are afraid of him because we do not understand him or his people.'
They all stared at him in astonishment.
‘Of course we understand him,' Centaine said. ‘We have lived in Africa all our lives. We understand them as nobody else does.'
‘I don't think so, Nana. I think if we had truly understood and listened to what this man had to say, Blaine would be alive today. I think he could have been an ally and not our deadly enemy. I think Moses Gama could have been a useful and highly respected citizen, and not a prisoner on trial for his life.'
‘What strange ideas you have picked up on that newspaper of yours! He murdered your grandfather,' Centaine said, and shot a glance down the table at Shasa. Shasa interpreted it fluently and it meant, ‘We have another problem on our hands here,' but Michael was going on obliviously.
‘Moses Gama will die on the gallows – I think we all know that. But his words and his ideas will live on. I know now why I had to be a journalist. I know what I have to do. I have to explain those ideas to the people of this land, to show them that they are just and fair, and not dangerous at all. In those ideas are the hopes for our survival as a nation.'
‘It is a good thing I sent the servants out,' Centaine interrupted him. ‘I never thought to hear words like those spoken in the dining-room of Weltevreden.'
‘V
icky Gama waited for over an hour in the visitors' room at Roeland Street prison while the warders examined the contents of the package she had brought for Moses and made up their minds whether or not to allow her to hand it to the prisoner.
‘It is only clothing,' Vicky pointed out reasonably.
‘These aren't ordinary clothes,' the senior warden protested.
‘They are the traditional robes of my husband's tribe. He is entitled to wear them.'
In the end the prison governor was called in to arbitrate and when he finally gave his permission, Vicky complained, ‘Your men have been deliberately rude and obstructive to me.'
He smiled at her sarcastically. ‘I wonder how you will treat us, madam, if you and your brothers in the ANC ever seize power. I wonder if you will allow us even the courtesy of a trial or whether you will slaughter us in the streets, as your husband tried to do.'
When Vicky was at last allowed to hand the parcel to Moses under the watchful eye of four warders, he asked her, ‘Whose idea was this?'
‘It was mine but Hendrick paid for the skins and his wives sewed them.'
‘You are a clever woman,' Moses commended her, ‘and a dutiful wife.'
‘You, my lord, are a great chief, and it is fitting that you should wear the robes of your office.'
Moses held up the full-length cloak of leopard skins, heavy and glossy golden, studded with the sable rosettes.
‘You have understood,' he nodded. ‘You have seen the necessity of using the white man's courtroom as a stage from which to shout our craving for freedom to the world.'
Vicky lowered her eyes and her voice. ‘My lord, you must not die. If you die, then the great part of our dream of
freedom dies with you. Will you not defend yourself, for my sake and for the sake of our people?'
‘No, I will not die,' he assured her. ‘The great nations of the world will not let that happen. Britain has already made her position clear and America cannot afford to let them execute me. Her own nation is racked by the struggle of the American coloured people – she cannot afford to let me go to my death.'
‘I do not trust the altruism of great nations,' Vicky said softly.
‘Then trust in their own self-interest,' Moses Gama told her. ‘And trust in me.'
W
hen Moses Gama rose before the court in the golden and black robes of leopard skin, he seemed a reincarnation of one of the ancient black kings. He riveted them.
‘I call no witnesses,' Gama told them gravely. ‘All I will do is to make a statement from the dock. That is as far as I am prepared to co-operate in this mockery of justice.'
‘My lord,' the prosecutor was on his feet immediately. ‘I must point out to the court—'
‘Thank you!' Judge Villiers interrupted him in frigid tones. ‘I do not need to be told how to conduct this trial,' and the prosecutor sank back into his seat, still making inarticulate sounds of protest.
Heavily the scarlet-robed justice turned his attention back to Moses Gama.
‘What counsel for the prosecution is trying to tell me is that I should make it clear to you that if you do not enter the witness stand and take the oath, if you do not submit to cross-examination, then what you have to say will have little relevance to the proceedings.'
‘An oath to your white man's God, in this courtroom
with a white judge and a white prosecutor, with white prosecution witnesses and white policemen at the doors. I do not deign to submit to that kind of justice.'
Judge Villiers shook his head with a woeful expression and turned both his hands palms up. ‘Very well, you have been warned of the consequences. Proceed with your statement.'
Moses Gama was silent for a long time, and then he began softly.
‘There was once a small boy who wandered with joy through a beautiful land, who drank from the sweet clear rivers, who listened with pleasure to the song of the bird and studied the antics of the springbok and pangolin and all the marvellous wild things, a small boy who tended his father's herds, and sat at night by the fire and listened to the tales of the great heroes of his people, of Bambata and Sekhukhuni and mighty Chaka.
‘This boy believed himself to be one of a peaceful people who owned the land on which they lived and were free to move wherever they wished in confidence and joy. Then one day when the boy was nine years of age a curious being came to the kraal at which the boy lived, a creature with a red face and a lordly manner, and the boy saw that the people were afraid, even his father and his grandfather who were chieftains of the tribe, were afraid as the boy had never seen them afraid before.'
There was no sound nor movement in the crowded courtroom as Moses Gama described his loss of innocence and how he had learned the bitter truths of his existence. He described his bewilderment as the universe he knew was proved an illusion. He told them of his first journey into the outside world, where he learned that as a man with a black skin there were places where his existence was circumscribed and limited.
When he went to the white man's towns, he found that he could not walk the streets after curfew without a pass,
that he could not live outside the areas that had been set aside for his people on the outskirts of that town, but most important to him he found that he could not attend the white man's schools. He learned that in nearly every public building there was a separate entrance for him to use, that there were skills he was not allowed to acquire, and that in almost every way he was considered different and inferior, condemned by the pigmentation of his skin always to remain on the bottom rung of existence.
Yet he knew that he was a man like other men, with the same hopes and desires. He knew that his heart beat as fiercely and that his body was as strong, and his brain was as bright and quick as any other. He decided that the way to rise above the station in life that had been allotted him was to use that brain rather than employ his body like a beast of burden as most of his people were forced to do.
He turned to the white man's books and was astonished to find that the heroes of his people were described as savages and cattle-thieves and treacherous rebels. That even the most sympathetic and charitable of the authors he read referred to his people as children, unable to reason or think for themselves, children who must be sternly protected but prevented from taking part in the decisions which governed their lives.
He described to them how at last he had realized that it was all some monstrous lie. That he was not different, that because his skin was black he was not unclean or contaminated or childlike. He knew then for what purpose he had been put upon this earth.
‘I came to know that the struggle against injustice was my life,' he said simply. ‘I knew that I had to make the white men who ruled me and my people understand.'
He explained how each of his attempts to get the white men to listen had failed. How all his people's efforts had resulted only in more savage and draconian laws, in fiercer oppressions.
‘In the end I had to accept that there was only one course left to me. That was to take up arms and to strike at the head of the serpent whose venom was poisoning and destroying my people.'
He was silent and his audience who had listened in complete and rigid silence for most of the morning, sighed and stirred, but as soon as Moses Gama spread his arms they were completely attentive once more.
‘Every man has a right and a sacred duty to protect his family and his nation from the tyrant, to fight against injustice and slavery. When he does so he becomes a warrior and not a criminal. I challenge this judge and this white man's court to treat me as a soldier and a prisoner of war. For that is what I am.'
Moses Gama drew his leopard skins about him and sat down, leaving them all shaken and silenced.
Judge Villiers had sat through the entire address with his chin couched in his hand, his eyes hooded with concentration, but now he let his hand drop and he leaned forward to glower at the prisoner.
‘You claim to be the leader of your people.'
‘I do,' Moses replied.
‘A leader is chosen or elected. How were you chosen?'
‘When an oppressed people has no voice, then their leaders come forward of their own accord to speak for them,' Moses told him.
‘So you are a self-proclaimed leader,' the judge said quietly. ‘And your decision to declare war on our society was taken alone. Is that correct?'
‘We are involved in a colonial war of liberation,' Moses Gama replied. ‘Like our brothers in Algeria and Kenya.'
‘You approved of the methods of the Mau Mau, then?' Judge Villiers asked.
‘Their cause was just – their methods, whatever they might have been, were therefore just.'
‘The end justifies the means – any means?'
‘The struggle for liberation is all, in the name of liberty any deed is sanctified.'
‘The slaughter and multiation of innocents, of women and children. These are also justified?'
‘If one innocent should die that a thousand might go free, then it is justified.'
‘Tell me, Moses Gama, do you believe in democracy – in the concept of “One man, one vote”?'
‘I believe that every man should have one vote to elect the leaders of the nation.'
‘And after the leaders are chosen, what should happen?'
‘I believe that the people should submit to the wisdom of their chosen leaders.'
‘A one-party state – with a president for life?'
‘That is the African way,' Moses Gama agreed.
‘It is also the way of the Marxists,' Judge Villiers observed drily. ‘Tell me, Moses Gama, what makes a black totalitarian government superior to a white totalitarian government?'
‘The wishes of the majority of the people.'
‘And the sanction of your people, of which only you are aware, makes you a holy crusader – above the laws of civilized man?'
‘In this land there are no such laws, for the men who make the laws are barbarians,' said Moses Gama softly, and Judge Villiers had no more questions to put to him.

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