The Covenant (177 page)

Only certain types of citizens were apt to be banned: newspapermen, writers, clergymen who strayed from the dictates of the Dutch Reformed Church, women who agitated, and of course any black who showed signs of potential leadership. The good thing about banning, from the government’s point of view, was that it involved no prolonged court case, no publicity, and no obnoxious statements by the accused in their defense. It was clean, effective and final.

On the third night of her banning, Laura Saltwood was not surprised when at four in the morning a bomb exploded outside her door. When the government designated a person like Mrs. Saltwood as objectionable, she became a free target for every hoodlum in the neighborhood, and the police did little to discourage the rabble from bombing and firing the homes of banned persons. In recent years six hundred and seventeen such bombings and attacks had been made, and never once did the police track down the culprits. Always the authorities said, “The bombing was despicable. Every effort is being made to identify those responsible.” In some of the cases, including Mrs. Saltwood’s, fragments of the bomb contained serial numbers comparable to those issued to the police, but the best detectives in the country could not track down the perpetrators. They could trace a lone fountain pen sent into the country by a church in Geneva and know every person who handled it before it found its way to some black scholar, but they could not track down a bomb whose serial number indicated its place of manufacture, its designation, and who had signed for its receipt.

Of the previous attacks, many had resulted in disastrous fires, several had maimed and two had killed, but no suspect had ever even been listed, let alone arrested. In Mrs. Saltwood’s case, the bomb destroyed a door and left a heavy fire-stain on the woodwork, but that was all. What the next one would do she could not know, but there would surely be a next one, which the police would investigate and the officials in Pretoria deplore.

The harshest aspect of Laura Saltwood’s banning was that on the morning of the day when her five years expired, the same two men could appear at her door and say quietly, “Laura Saltwood, you are banned for five more years,” and after that, there could be another five, and another.

That was why the members of the Lady Anne Barnard Club wept as they bade her goodbye that first day of June. They expected never to see her free again.

In his discussions with young Afrikaners, both at the fossicking and at Vrymeer, Saltwood was disturbed by the cavalier manner in which they dismissed world opinion. The United Nations would pass a resolution condemning South Africa for its racial policies, or its treatment of Indians, and the Troxel boys would laugh: “What can they do about it? They need our minerals. To hell with them.” Newspapers in London and New York would print bitter editorials, and the young geologists working with Philip would sneer: “What can England and the United States do? They’ve got to rely on us as bulwarks against Communism, so the bleeding hearts can bloody well drop dead.”

No outsider could talk with these vital young people without becoming convinced that they intended using military force to defend their way of life and were prepared to use their guns against either outside threats or internal ones. “Let their armies step one foot across our borders,” Frikkie said, “and we’ll blow their heads off.”

Jopie made a much different point: “If this Jonathan Nxumalo or any of his kind try to infiltrate us from Moçambique, we’ll shoot them the moment they step on our soil. And we’ll shoot any Kaffir inside our country who raises a finger to help them.”

“You sound like the Götterdämmerung Commando,” Saltwood said one Sunday afternoon at the farm.

“What’s that?” Jopie asked.

“A German myth. The gods have loused everything up, hideously, so they go into laager, and to solve their problems, they burn down all of heaven.”

“I volunteer for that commando,” Jopie said.

“I, too,” said Sannie.

“You mean you would risk destroying the whole structure of South Africa to prolong your advantage?”

This was the kind of rhetorical question that would have been effective among university students in Paris or Berlin. At Vrymeer it evoked from Frikkie an answer which simply stunned Saltwood: “No American could understand our situation. You have a problem with your blacks which you solve in ways harmonious to your history. But what you do bears no relationship to us. Because God placed us here to do His work. He put us here to serve as a bulwark of Christian civilization. We must stay.”

Philip gasped. In the United States, Frikkie and Jopie would be professional football players, and he could not conceive of a pair of athletes from the Dallas Cowboys or the Denver Broncos citing God as the sponsor of their political behavior. “Do you believe what you just said?” he asked, and Sannie replied, “We were placed here to do God’s will, and we shall do it.” When Philip tried to question her, she interrupted: “If Frikkie and Jopie were to be killed in the first battle, I’d take up their guns.”

“To do what?”

“To preserve our Christian way of life.”

“You would go out to your rondavels and shoot the Nxumalos?”

“I certainly would.” And almost imperceptibly she moved toward the cousins.

Silence fell in the kitchen. This was the first intimation that she had decided to cast her lot with the Troxels and against the American intruder, and Saltwood decided it was futile to speak further. Which of the cousins she would ultimately prefer was not discernible, but it was clear that she had enlisted in their Götterdämmerung Commando.

Later, when he was alone with her, he dared to reopen the difficult subject, but at the first tentative question she made her position clear: “Philip, we’re a small group of white people on the edge of a hostile black continent. God placed us here for a specific purpose and gave us a commission. I assure you that we will all perish before we prove false to that obligation.”

“Sannie, it seems to me you’re overpowered by the attitude of Frikkie and Jopie. What do your parents think?”

“What Mother thinks isn’t relevant, she’s English. But if you want to ask Father …”

They went to Marius in his study, a room lined with books he had used at Oxford and others he had imported from London and New York through the years. “In my father’s day,” he said, “this room contained one book, that old Bible. Now I can’t even read the Dutch.”

“We’ve been having a sharp argument, Father. Philip accuses the cousins and me of being members of a Götterdämmerung Commando. Burning South Africa down to save it.”

“He’s correct about your attitudes now. But as you grow older …”

“I’ll grow more convinced. I have no patience …”

“Not now, but when you face the real alternatives.”

“What are they?”

Marius leaned back. For some time now he had been worried about Sannie’s growing militarism; she behaved as if she thought a machine gun answered all questions. But he also wondered about his own attitudes; had his years at Oxford and his marriage to an Englishwoman contaminated him? Well he remembered his father’s telling him what Dominee Brongersma had said about his marriage to a non-Afrikaner: “Now he can never join the Broederbond … never play a major role in our society.” Brongersma had been right. No man who had chosen Oxford above the captaincy of the Springboks, and an English wife over a loyal Afrikaner, could be other than an outcast from the governing cadre; he had never been taken into the confidences of anyone seriously connected with government and had existed in a kind of limbo, neither Afrikaner nor English. He once said of himself, “I’m like an Afrikaner Coloured,” and having admitted this, he realized that his daughter Sannie, who seemed bent on becoming pure Afrikaner, would hold anything he said in suspicion.

“I’ve been pondering this question constantly,” he said slowly. “I’ve had to evaluate the things Father did in his long years on the Race Commission. And I’ve come to the conclusion that Afrikaners like Frikkie and Jopie will never change.”

“Hooray for them!” Sannie cried.

“And at her own request I must place my daughter in their camp.”

“Which is where I want to be.”

“So, Philip, I would be most happy, and so would my wife, if you married this girl and took her away with you.” He was speaking
gravely, almost sorrowfully. “I see no happy future for her here. Like the gifted children of so many families we know, she must make her home in Montreal or Melbourne.”

“Leave me out of it,” Sannie said abruptly. “I can fend for myself. What future do you see for the country?”

“With the fall of Moçambique to black forces—Namibia, Zambia, Vwarda and Rhodesia—can we logically suppose that we can hold out indefinitely against …”

“I can,” Sannie said. “So can Frikkie and Jopie and all loyal Afrikaners.”

“For your lifetimes, perhaps. Or for as long as your guns can find bullets. But in the long run, beyond our petty personal interests …”

He was hesitant about sharing his apocalyptic view with a foreigner who had no vested interest in the country, or even with his daughter, who might be alienated by it. But like all South Africans, he was eager to talk about the future, so he carried on: “I think the blacks, like the Nxumalo brothers—Jonathan in Moçambique, Daniel at the university—will be willing in their moment of triumph …”

“You think they’ll triumph?” Sannie asked contemptuously.

“Or their sons, who will be much like them,” her father said.

“My sons will shoot them down,” she said.

“Then their grandsons. History has time … It can wait.”

“For what?” Saltwood asked eagerly.

“As I was saying, I think the black victors will be generous. They’ll want us to stay. God knows, their brothers haven’t made much of the countries they now control. They’ll realize they need us.”

“You really believe that?” Sannie asked.

“Without question. The black leadership in this country has been the most patient on earth, the most understanding. It’s been a miracle of compassion and tolerance, and I think it will continue in that vein.”

“Then where’s the trouble?” Philip asked.

“With us. With Sannie and Frikkie and Jopie. We won’t be able to accept the change. We’ll ride the Götterdämmerung Commando, as you predict, but we’ll grow sickened of it, even if the rest of the world doesn’t intervene. And then …”

Here he showed himself truly reluctant to spell out his vision, and neither his daughter nor his American guest could possibly have foreseen what he was about to say: “At that moment of crisis the Afrikaner and his English supporters, of whom my wife will be one, will
go into perpetual laager. With the full connivance and even assistance of the new black rulers, we’ll retreat to the western half of the Orange Free State and Cape Province west of Grahamstown. We’ll keep the diamond mines at Kimberley, but surrender the gold fields at Johannesburg. That city and Pretoria will be turned over to the new black government, and in our compressed little area we will build our Afrikanerstan. The tables will be reversed. When we were in power we tried to concentrate all the blacks into little areas, while we held the vast open spaces and the good cities. In the future they’ll hold the open spaces and the good cities, and we’ll be compressed.”

“What will happen to the Coloureds?” Philip asked. “They’ll all be with you—in Afrikanerstan?” And Marius van Doorn gave the same answer his people had been giving for the past three hundred years: “We’ll deal with that knotty problem later.”

When Philip and Sannie, much sobered by her father’s predictions, repeated them to the Troxels, the cousins guffawed, and Jopie said, “When they try to capture Pretoria, they’ll find us in the trenches at the monument, and they better be prepared to die.”

“Father said the real tests will come with your grandsons. They’ll be smart enough to—”

“If one of my grandsons talks like your father, I’ll beat him to a jelly.”

Frikkie sought to face the problem more philosophically: “There was no one on this land when we arrived. God gave it to us. We found a primitive paradise and converted it into a great nation.”

“Just a minute!” Philip protested. “I’m sure I read that natives greeted your ships when they arrived at the Cape.”

“There was no one here,” Jopie insisted. “I heard Sannie’s grandfather state this in a public meeting.”

This evidence so startled Philip that he asked Marius to join them to clarify the facts. “Jopie says he heard your father …”

“On several occasions,” Frikkie added.

“… state that when the Dutch arrived at the Cape, they found the place completely empty.”

Marius laughed. “My father was fond of claiming this in his orations. It was a basic tenet of his religion—still is for the average Afrikaner.”

“See, there were no people here!” Jopie cried triumphantly.

“Detleef was right, according to his definitions. There were no Englishmen, no Spaniards, no Portuguese. And certainly no blacks.”

“We took over a virgin land,” Frikkie said quietly.

“Not exactly. There were many little brown people. Bushmen, Hottentots.”

“They don’t count,” Jopie protested. “They weren’t human.”

“They did die out,” Frikkie said. “Diseases took them. And a few returned to the desert, and pretty soon they’ll die, too.”

“Like we said,” Jopie concluded, looking fiercely at Philip, “the place was empty. God called us here to perform a task on His behalf.”

The Troxel arrogance was somewhat shaken by two events which occurred not in South Africa but abroad, and when Philip saw how the cousins reacted, and the young men working for him, he thought: Maybe the outside world is beginning to penetrate, after all.

The first jolt came from a most unlikely source. Reverend Paulus van den Berghe, moderator of a group of French and Dutch Calvinists, came to South Africa to ascertain whether the rupture which had separated the mother church in Holland and the Afrikaners’ church in South Africa could be repaired, and in the course of his investigations he asked permission to meet with the son of one of its principal architects. Marius, always eager for foreign contacts, agreed to have the distinguished theologian spend some days at Vrymeer, where in the gentlest manner Van den Berghe interrogated not only Marius, but also Frikkie and Jopie and then Daniel Nxumalo, home on vacation.