The Covenant (146 page)
Authors: James A. Michener
“That man is an asset to any community,” Coenraad van Doorn said when he assembled his family and Detleef at Trianon. “He speaks with a clarity one seldom hears.”
“He told me things I didn’t know,” Clara said. She looked as if she had been crying, and Detleef asked what had happened.
Her mother answered, “The awful deaths in Europe. Clara has many friends there, you know.”
Detleff said, “I didn’t know there were very many Afrikaners fighting in that silly war.”
“There are,” Clara snapped, “and it’s not silly.”
“Any men we have there are certainly fighting on the wrong side. Germany’s bound to win, and a good thing, too.”
Mr. van Doorn intervened to quash a difficult subject: “I wonder what Brongersma will tell us next time?”
“He said in passing that it would deal with the New Testament,” Clara’s brother said.
“Good. None of us know that section of the Bible well enough.”
“The Old Testament is sufficient, really,” Detleef said, and again the atmosphere chilled, but when it came time for him to say goodnight, Clara volunteered to walk with him to the car, took his hand and squeezed it. “You mustn’t be so contentious, Detleef. A living room isn’t a rugby field.”
“But if a man has beliefs …”
“All men have beliefs. And sometimes they adhere to theirs as firmly as you do to yours.”
“But if theirs are wrong …”
“You feel obligated to correct them?”
“Of course.”
To his astonishment she leaned over and kissed him. “I am glad you’re strong, Detleef. You’re going to need it.”
He was trembling, and clutched her hand. “I don’t want to be obstinate, but … well … even Reverend Brongersma can be wrong sometimes.”
“For example?”
“Well, I felt he was apologetic about the way our church separates into white, Coloured, black. But that’s what God intended. Even the whites separate. Afrikaans for the true believers. English for the others.”
“Detleef, how can you say that?” When he looked blank in the pale light, indicating that he had no concept of what she was talking about, she said, “The Afrikaners and the English as being different religiously.”
“Well, they are!” he said forcefully. “They believe quite differently from us. They don’t pin their faith on John Calvin. They’re almost Catholic, if you ask me.” He trembled again, this time from the terrible force of his convictions. “And surely God entered into no covenant with them.”
To this extraordinary body of belief, Clara had no comment; her family had developed under quite a different body of faith and had often gone to the Church of England for services when that was more convenient. But now it was time for Detleef to return to the university,
and as he held her hand he asked shyly, “May I kiss you goodnight?” but she deftly pulled away.
“No, no! When I kiss you that’s one thing, but when you kiss me that’s another.” And before he knew what was happening, she touched him lightly with another kiss and skipped away.
Reverend Brongersma’s second lecture was a revelation to Detleef and a surprise to others who thought they knew the Bible. It dealt almost exclusively with the teachings of the New Testament and the nature of Christ’s church on earth. It was highly theological, but also intensely practical to those Afrikaners who sensed that with a German victory in Europe, and perhaps in Africa, relationships were bound to be different from what they had been in the past. The audience sat in deep, religious silence as he spoke with that fluid breadth of concepts which would characterize this series:
“I told you last time that the orderly development of our church from the days of Van Riebeeck to the present was a good thing, approved by God and consonant with the teachings of Jesus Christ, and that we must always be proud of the high mission of our church. But since it exists in the bosom of Christ, it behooves us to know what exactly He said about our responsibilities and conduct.”
With this he launched into a patient hour-and-a-half analysis of New Testament teachings, drawing upon the soaring texts in which Christ set forth the essence of his thought. He said, when introducing the focal passage from Matthew, “If we live in a land with divided populations, almost every question we face will pose special problems which other more homogeneous nations can evade. We cannot, and how we solve these problems of race will determine the character of our existence.” He then read the passage:
“Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
He cited so many passages in Christ’s teaching bearing on this issue that Coenraad whispered to Clara and Detleef, who sat together, “He sounds like an LMS missionary,” and none could discern what he might be driving at:
“For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”
And if anyone felt reluctant to accept this teaching, he threw at them a text which emphasized the message. It came from Colossians:
“Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.”
This led him to what he warned was the key text of his entire series, the noble passage on which a God-fearing nation should build its patterns. It came from Ephesians and summarized, he said, the whole teaching of Jesus:
“There is one body, and one Spirit … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
“The spirit of Jesus Christ resides in the bosom of every man and woman and child living in this nation,” he said in rising voice to indicate the conclusion of this lecture. “It takes no cognizance of white or black, of Indian or Coloured, of woman or man, and certainly it does not distinguish between Englishman and Afrikaner. We are all one in Jesus. He loves us equally, He cares for us evenly.”
There was some restiveness in the audience at this revolutionary doctrine, for members felt that whereas these precepts did undoubtedly occur in the New Testament, their application was a more delicate matter than Reverend Brongersma appreciated. When he concluded with the stern warning that Christianity required its adherents to apply these fundamental strictures in their private and public lives, and especially in the organization of their societies and nations, there was actually a rumble of disapproval, but he stalked from the podium without taking cognizance of it.
That night there were no hearty invitations for him to join suppers at Stellenbosch homes, and the Coenraad van Doorns were so agitated that they did not even invite Detleef to Trianon; before they
parted Mr. van Doorn said, “Your predikant hasn’t learned much up north,” and Detleef, without endeavoring to defend him, admitted, “It all sounded so woolly. I like more order in society than that,” and even Clara, who had liked parts of the lecture, grumbled, “He doesn’t seem to understand his audience. We face real problems in this country, and he talks mealie pap.”
But Barend Brongersma did not graduate from Stellenbosch with honors because he was stupid. He had intended his long second lecture to create the effect it did because he wanted it to serve as preparation for what he knew would be one of the most important performances of his life, and when he stepped boldly to the podium for the third lecture he quickly told his audience why:
“Tonight I am addressing the young men who in the years to come will govern this nation. Look about you, I pray. The lad sitting next to you may be your prime minister one day. That fellow over there will preach in the mother church at Cape Town. You will be chancellor of this university, and you will be ambassador of our independent country to Paris. It is important that you think about the future, that you ponder the nature of a free society.
“Jesus addressed himself to this grave problem, and so did St. Paul, and in the New Testament they provide us with guidance. To govern well, we must govern justly, and to govern justly, we must govern wisely. What does Jesus tell us to do?”
Before he cited the relevant texts, he asked his audience a series of blistering hypothetical questions, until everyone present was aroused, leaning forward to catch what solutions he was about to propose. Then, with low voice and gentle patience, he began to unfold the teaching of Jesus, and the text he chose was so recondite and arbitrary that someone not from South Africa would have been at a loss to understand its application, but he claimed it to be the very foundation of the law, the most vital text in the entire Testament, insofar as the governance of nations was concerned. It came from the second chapter of Acts:
“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting … And they were all
filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance … every man heard them speak in his own language.”
What could be profound about that? How could the policy of a nation be built upon such an esoteric base? As he elucidated the text, it became clear: God created all men as brothers, but he quickly divided them into distinctive groups, each man to his own kind, each nation separate and off to itself, and here he thundered forth that wondrous sequence of names appearing in this all-important chapter:
“Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak …”
He explained that God willed this diversity and applauded the strangeness that existed among nations. He wanted tribes to be different, to retain their distinctive qualities, and Brongersma suggested that if South Africa had been in existence when Acts, Chapter 2, was delivered, the litany might have ended thus:
“Afrikaners and Englishmen, Coloureds and Asians, Xhosa and Zulu, all spake in their own tongues.”
Detleef snapped bolt upright, for these local names were recited in the exact order he had seen them that morning when sunlight struck the glass of jellies. His world was in order; the races were distinct and they were separated, each in its proper place. He heard the remainder of this remarkable oration in a kind of majestic stupor; this was a confirmation that would last a lifetime, and others in the audience that evening would say the same when they governed this nation, as Brongersma had predicted they would: “One lecture unfolded the future for me.” Brongersma now cited some fifteen pertinent texts, one of the most powerful coming from another chapter in Acts:
“God that made the world and all things therein … hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord … and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.”
From this passage he derived the principle that God wanted each race to have its own boundaries and not to trespass on the territory of others; this applied both to physical boundaries, such as where people lived, and to mental, so that each race retained its own customs and laws. He then pointed out that religion asked all groups to accept the limitations placed upon them, especially people in the lower ones:
“As the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk … Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant.”
And then he came to the crucial issue: “Are all groups equal in the eyes of God?” He reminded his listeners of what he had said in Lecture Two, that unquestionably all men were brothers, but he went on to say that not all brothers stand equal in the sight of God. On this the New Testament was most specific; there were good nations and bad nations:
“When the Son of man shall come … then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom … then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire …”
He ended superbly, looking with flashing eye at his listeners, as if to challenge each one personally: “In the time of judgment, which is now, will Jesus Christ set our nation on His right hand among the sheep, or throw us on His left side, among the goats? For the nature of our society we must look to the Old Testament, which I shall do in my concluding lecture.”
That night the audience was ecstatic as it left the church, for listeners could be sure that the Afrikaner nation was saved, while the English and the Bantu were probably lost. More than a dozen families wanted Brongersma to come with them to share supper, but he
elected to go with the Van Doorns, and it was then that he saw the dangerous waters into which his young friend Detleef from Vrymeer was heading. He said nothing that night, but he wondered what good could come from this country boy’s falling so blindly in love with a young woman who obviously lived in a much different world, and thought in much different ways. Detleef had said nothing about his deep affection for Clara, nor did he need to.
In his last lecture, like a healing balm, the predikant soothed all spiritual strains by reverting to the marvelous texts of the Old Testament, reminding his Afrikaners of who they were and the special obligations they owed God. He started by assuring them that in the Calvinistic sense they were among the elect, for God had specifically said so:
