The Covenant (163 page)

Woodrow Desai decided that night to form a committee to visit Pretoria for a serious talk with the government official whose office was
responsible for planning the future of the Indian community. He took Barney Patel with him, but not Morarji Mukerjee, who was something of an alarmist. Patiently they explained the folly of such an evacuation, pointing out that it would accomplish not one single economic advantage, but the official assigned the task of dealing with them cut them off: “We aren’t really talking about economics, are we? We’re talking about instilling some order in the community. Each group secure in its own place.”

“But if you put all of us in this so-called Lenasia so far out into the country …”

“That’s for your protection. All the Indians in one spot.”

“But so far out. We’ll waste hours and rand every day.”

“My dear friends,” the official, a Natal-born Englishman, said with warmth but also with a certain stiffness, “our country has no finer citizens than you Indians. We wouldn’t dream of doing anything to your disadvantage. But we must bring order into our lives. Pageview is intended for whites. Look at the map!” And he showed them how where they lived and traded intruded into areas that could better be used for whites.

“And you can have nice new shops out there,” he assured them, waving his hand in some vague direction. “You’ll like it better when it happens.” He paused. “We’re doing this for your own good,” he said. And before they could reply they were out on the street.

“I wish Mohandas Gandhi were here again,” Patel growled. “He’d know how to stop this.”

The Golden Reef Mines southwest of Johannesburg needed a constant supply of black workers to man the deepest shafts where blasting of the face rock occurred. From all over southern Africa planes and trains and buses brought almost illiterate black men to the compounds within which they would live for the six to eighteen months of their contract. Critics of the labor system likened these compounds to harsh prisons in which the blacks were incarcerated; management spoke of them as well-run dormitories in which the laborers lived infinitely better than they did at home.

There was one clue to the truth of these contrasting claims: black
men in the bush of Moçambique, Malawi, Rhodesia, Lesotho and Vwarda fought for a chance to work at the Golden Reef, and for good reason. Though the wage was trivial, it was much more than they could get in their home villages; the food was better; there was more of it; beds were covered with good blankets; and doctors provided health care. Black nationalists in surrounding countries would publicly inveigh against South Africa but privately see to it that planes which came flying into their airstrips were loaded with workers, for only in this way could some of the economies be kept afloat. Black families also encouraged their men to fly to the Golden Reef for the sensible reason that a good percentage of a man’s wages was paid only when he returned home, and his wife and children could temporarily escape their poverty.

When blacks from thirty or forty different tribes, speaking radically different languages and dialects, had to work together, it was necessary to construct some simple language they could all understand. Fanakalo was the ingenious solution. The word came from pidgin Zulu and meant roughly “do it like this,” and the lingua franca it represented was a marvelous mélange of Bantu, English, Afrikaans and Portuguese. It consisted mostly of nouns, with a few essential verbs, some profanity for adjectival emphasis and a great many gestures. One linguist who tried to analyze it said, “You don’t speak Fanakalo. You dance it while shouting.”

Few things in the world worked better, for a tribesman could master simple instructions in three days: “This here wrench, fanakalo.” (You do it like this.) And once learned, it served as a magical passkey to all the levels of the mine, so that a man from Malawi speaking a unique dialect could work deep in the shaft beside one from Vwarda speaking his. One white supervisor asked an associate what the workers on his shift meant when they referred to “Idonki ngo football jersey,” and the second man said, “Simple. They meant
zebra
.”

A miner could renew his contract again and again, but it was found better to have him return home after a long stint in the mines, see his family back in his home village, and return rested up. These returnees usually spoke well of the Golden Reef, especially the food. Once when Vwarda’s representative at the United Nations was addressing the Security Council and asking for sanctions against South Africa, the government was filling six planes with Vwarda men who wanted to get back to work.

Not all the black mine hands came from foreign countries; the
Golden Reef, along with sister mines, maintained a vast network of some forty recruiters who were engaged only in the enlisting of South African blacks, who comprised a third of the mines’ work force. One such recruiter came to Venloo, set up his table, and counseled with young blacks from that area. Since jobs were scarce, he was able to sign up a score of workers, among them Jonathan Nxumalo, oldest son of Moses, who had been so long associated with the Van Doorns.

Jonathan was a bright lad of twenty, eager to see something more of the world than the restricted view available to a farm hand at Vrymeer, but as soon as he passed through into the Golden Reef compound, where five thousand other black men lived, sixteen to a room, he heard the gates slam behind him—and realized that he had gained not freedom but a new kind of restriction. To learn Fanakalo became essential.

It took the white overseers only a few weeks to promote Jonathan as the best of this gang, and they designated him to work at the face, more than ten thousand feet down the rocky shaft. This paid more money, but it demanded more intense work in a constant temperature of 114° F. Water to cool the body and salt to protect it became almost as important as the gigantic jackhammer drill Jonathan handled, and when the long shift ended and the men from below shot up in the elevator they had the self-satisfaction of knowing that they had completed one of the world’s hardest jobs.

White men shared the heat and the danger. No black was ever assigned a job more treacherous than what the white overseer was willing to do, so that a kind of camaraderie developed among the teams, with each white boss settling upon one or two superior blacks on whom he could rely. Jonathan became an aide to Roger Coetzee, an ambitious Afrikaner who loved the mines and would one day become the big boss.

Jonathan’s job was an exciting one. At the start of each shift he entered the cage with the rest of his gang, bolted the doors, and dropped a sickening ten thousand feet straight down. Occasionally some visitor from Johannesburg or overseas would want to inspect how the men worked, and then the cage was lowered at a much slower rate, which irritated Nxumalo, for he had grown to like that awful drop; it was a badge of his profession. He could take it, whereas a stranger could not.

Below, he would meet up with Coetzee, who came down only with other white miners; the two men and their helpers walked about one
mile hunched over, their heads protected by hard hats, which bumped against jagged rocks, their bodies exuding perspiration. After a long drink of water and some salt pills, they followed a narrower tunnel, in which the noise became shattering. Now they were approaching the face of the gold-bearing rock, and here huge pneumatic drills were sending steel probes far into the rock, prior to the placement of the next charges of dynamite.

It was hellish work. Jonathan would creep into the working hole feet first, lying on his back and never able to sit erect. When he reached the drilling machine, a heavy instrument with cross-bar handles and stirrups for the feet, he would adjust himself, check the electrical lines, then jam his feet into the stirrups and deftly point the six-foot diamond-tipped drill at the spot to be dynamited. Then, taking a deep breath, which always stimulated him, he would squirm about for a comfortable position, thrust his feet forward, and flick the switch. With incredible power and noise, the water-cooled jackhammer drill would eat into the rock, throwing spray and slush until Jonathan looked like a white man.

When the hole was drilled, Nxumalo would squirm back out and signal to Coetzee that all was ready. The Afrikaner would then replace Nxumalo in the cramped tunnel and fix the dynamite, the cap and the connecting wires. Whistles would blow. Sirens would whine. And all men would retreat from this area as Coetzee plunged the detonator, exploding the charge and breaking away the next burden of gold-bearing rock.

When the dust settled and it seemed probable that no last rocks would tumble down from the new ceiling, Jonathan Nxumalo and Roger Coetzee would creep back into the tunnel and start calculating how long it would take for the ore to be hauled away from the stope face to the breaker and then to the refinery. It was hard work, dust-filled and exciting, and the men deep below developed respect for each other’s capacities. Of course, when they left the danger area to go aloft, their lives changed radically. Coetzee could jump into his car and drive where he wished; Nxumalo was restricted to the compound, where all needs were provided by the company.

He was not exactly a prisoner. During any eighteen-month contract, workers were allowed into Johannesburg six times, but only in a group, with some white like Coetzee holding the passes of thirty-six workmen. Should one want to break away from the ensemble, he could risk it, but he would then find himself with no pass, and since
spot checks for pass inspection were quite common, sooner or later he would be detected and packed off to jail.

Several times, however, Jonathan did receive, through Coetzee’s intervention, a special pass allowing him to visit a Vrymeer friend who, with sheer duplicity, had contrived to land a job in Johannesburg without proper papers. “What I did,” he confided, “was to grab on to this white family that had to have help. They protected me.” He added, “Of course, since we’re both breaking the law they pay me less than proper wages. But I don’t complain.”

“You like Johannesburg?” Jonathan asked.

“Good food. Work not too hard. And look at these clothes.”

Jonathan was so enticed by city life that he tried on other visits to find an illegal job, to no avail. During the final moments of one leave he pleaded for more information as to how he should proceed, and his friend asked, “You know anybody important might help you get a pass?”

“My father works for Detleef van Doorn.”

“You crazy? He’s the one behind these laws. He’s no friend. He’s your worst enemy.”

Back at the mine, Jonathan asked Coetzee if he could help, but he said firmly, “You’re a mine worker now. You’ll never be able to change because we need you.” And when Jonathan inquired at the pass office about getting an endorsement that would enable him to work in Johannesburg, the official snapped, “You have mine papers. You’ll never have anything else.”

Since he was sentenced to the underground, as it were, he decided to strive for the best job possible, but here again he was forestalled: “You’re qualified for drilling. Wasteful to try you anywhere else.”

Back in his quarters, Jonathan talked with men from Malawi and Vwarda: “I’m going to apply for a job like Coetzee’s. I know all he knows, or any of the other white bosses who work our deep shafts.” But in cautious Fanakalo the black workers warned him not even to whisper such a possibility: “That job whites only. No matter how stupid, they smarter than you. No black ever be boss.”

Coetzee must have suspected Jonathan’s concern, for one day as they crept out of the tunnel he volunteered: “You could do my work, Nxumalo, but the law is rigid. No black must ever hold a job in which he might give orders to a white.” Before Jonathan could comment he reminded him of the Golden Reef work rules, which stipulated that dynamite placers had to be white. No black could ever aspire to that
job, for the intelligence required to tamp dynamite into a hole drilled by a black was entirely beyond the capacity of non-whites. The fact that black workmen throughout the rest of the world easily performed that function was ignored; in South Africa they could never learn enough to do it properly.

Sometimes the white bosses didn’t do it properly, either. One terribly hot and dust-choked day Roger Coetzee placed his dynamite carelessly, and Jonathan Nxumalo started to point this out, but before he could persuade Coetzee to correct it, the charge went off and an unplanned leaf of ceiling rock fell, trapping the Afrikaner behind a mass of rubble. The rock did not fall directly on him, or he would have been crushed. A sliding fragment did break his leg. He was trapped in a pitch-black, airless, waterless crevice with the temperature at 114° F. It was imperative that air and water pipes be got to him in a hurry, and with no white bosses in the vicinity, the task of doing it fell to Nxumalo. He probed through the fallen rock, lifted aside the chunks that he could handle, and called for other blacks to help with the bigger slabs. Within a few minutes white rescuers appeared on the scene, and proceeded exactly as Nxumalo had planned it. They succeeded in breaking Coetzee free, and from his hospital bed he asked to see Jonathan, who was ushered in by nurses who resented his being in the white hospital.

Coetzee was lucky to be alive, for there was no more deadly work in South Africa than that performed by men like him and Nxumalo. Each year more than six hundred men died in the gold mines—nineteen thousand in thirty years—and more than ninety percent were black.

“I know it was you that got me out,” Coetzee said, and before Nxumalo could say anything, he added graciously, “And you were about to warn me not to do it that way.” He grinned and extended his hand. “I wish I had a cousin in Johannesburg who needed a houseboy.”

No such luck. With Coetzee hospitalized, Nxumalo’s shift got another boss, a tough Afrikaner who despised blacks. Once, when he saw Jonathan resting after a particularly stiff spell at the face, he growled at him, “You work-shy idle black bastard.” Another day, when Nxumalo suggested approaching the face from a different angle, the boss yelled, “No lip from you, you cheeky Kaffir bastard.”