Under African Skies (22 page)

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Authors: Charles Larson

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“I don't have foreign exchange, and I know this won't go far at all, but …”
She just came and threw herself at him, sobbing. He kissed her lips and eyes and mumbled something about victims of circumstances, which went over her head. In deference to him, he thought with exultation, she had put away her high-tinted wig in her bag.
“I want you to promise me something,” he said.
“What?”
“Never use that expression about shelling again.”
She smiled with tears in her eyes. “You don't like it? That's what all the girls call it.”
“Well, you are different from all the girls. Will you promise?”
“O.K.”
Naturally their departure had become a little delayed. And when they got into the car it refused to start. After poking around the engine the driver decided that the battery was flat. Nwankwo was aghast. He had that very week paid thirty-four pounds to change two of the cells and the mechanic who performed it had promised him six months' service. A new battery, which was then running at two hundred and fifty pounds, was simply out of the question. The driver must have been careless with something, he thought.
“It must be because of last night,” said the driver.
“What happened last night?” asked Nwankwo sharply, wondering what insolence was on the way. But none was intended.
“Because we use the headlight.”
“Am I supposed not to use my light, then? Go and get some people and
try pushing it.” He got out again with Gladys and returned to the house while the driver went over to neighboring houses to seek the help of other servants.
After at least half an hour of pushing it up and down the street, and a lot of noisy advice from the pushers, the car finally spluttered to life, shooting out enormous clouds of black smoke from the exhaust.
It was eight-thirty by his watch when they set out. A few miles away a disabled soldier waved for a lift.
“Stop!” screamed Nwankwo. The driver jammed his foot on the brakes and then turned his head toward his master in bewilderment.
“Don't you see the soldier waving? Reverse and pick him up!”
“Sorry, sir,” said the driver. “I don't know Master want to pick him.”
“If you don't know you should ask. Reverse back.”
The soldier, a mere boy, in filthy khaki drenched in sweat, lacked his right leg from the knee down. He seemed not only grateful that a car should stop for him but greatly surprised. He first handed in his crude wooden crutches, which the driver arranged between the two front seats, then painfully he levered himself in.
“Thanks, sir,” he said, turning to look at the back and completely out of breath.
“I am very grateful. Madame, thank you.”
“The pleasure is ours,” said Nwankwo. “Where did you get your wound?”
“At Azumini, sir. On tenth of January.”
“Never mind. Everything will be all right. We are proud of you boys and will make sure you receive your due reward when it is all over.”
“I pray God, sir.”
They drove on in silence for the next half hour or so. Then as the car sped down a slope toward a bridge somebody screamed—perhaps the driver, perhaps the soldier—“They have come!” The screech of the brakes merged into the scream and the shattering of the sky overhead. The doors flew open even before the car had come to a stop and they were fleeing blindly to the bush. Gladys was a little ahead of Nwankwo when they heard through the drowning tumult the soldier's voice crying: “Please come and open for me!” Vaguely he saw Gladys stop; he pushed past her, shouting to her at the same time to come on. Then a high whistle descended like a spear through the chaos and exploded in a vast noise and motion that smashed up everything. A tree he had embraced flung him away through the bush. Then another
terrible whistle starting high up and ending again in a monumental crash of the world; and then another, and Nwankwo heard no more.
He woke up to human noises and weeping and the smell and smoke of a charred world. He dragged himself up and staggered toward the source of the sounds.
From afar he saw his driver running toward him in tears and blood. He saw the remains of his car smoking and the entangled remains of the girl and the soldier. And he let out a piercing cry and fell down again.
 
—1972
(1937-86) SOUTH AFRICA/BOTSWANA
When critics discuss African women writers, they inevitably mention Bessie Head, often placing her name at the top of the list. Bessie Head had to overcome incredible obstacles to become a writer. She was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1937. The name on her birth certificate was Bessie Amelia Emery. Her mother was white, her father African. Head lived her entire life unaware that she had two older siblings, half brothers who were white. One of them died tragically as a child, and her mother was institutionalized for mental instability several times. Under the rigid South African apartheid laws, she was considered insane because of her affair with a black man.
Bessie herself suffered emotionally because of her mixed racial identity. Though initially listed as white as a child, she was subsequently reclassified as Coloured. For many years, she knew little, if anything, about her birth mother, assuming that her foster parents (named Heathcote) were her biological parents. She was an excellent student. At age thirteen, she began attending St. Monica's Home for Coloured girls, an Anglican school. Afterwards, from 1956 to 1958, she taught briefly in Durban. Soon, she stopped teaching and began working as a reporter in Cape Town and later in Johannesburg.
She made several early attempts at suicide. A sudden marriage to Harold Head (who was Coloured) led to the birth of her only child, Howard. When Howard was two years old, Bessie left South Africa with the child on an
exit permit and moved to Botswana. Gillian Stead Eilersen, Head's biographer, states that although she had fled to Botswana in order to teach, “she was not a very successful teacher.” She had, in fact, brought too much emotional baggage along with her.
In Serowe, where she lived much of the rest of her life, Bessie Head became a writer of fiction.
When Rain Clouds Gather
(1968) was followed by
Maru
(1971), both set in Botswana. These novels were widely read and praised, but with
A Question of Power
(1973) critics were initially hostile because of the novel's inaccessibility. That novel, now usually regarded as Head's masterpiece, had been taken from the raw material of her childhood—her years under apartheid, the source of many of the emotional scars she wrestled with for much of her adult life. Head herself was institutionalized for “insanity,” one of the major themes of
A Question of Power.
Other works followed, including a collection of short stories,
The Collector of Treosures
(1977), and
Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind
(1981). The latter is Head's lyrical homage to her adopted village, where she lived in relative isolation, tending to her writing and her garden. Excessive drinking hastened her death in 1986. Several volumes of previously unpublished writings have subsequently been published.
Toward the end of her life,
Liberation,
the French newspaper, requested that Bessie Head and other international writers explain why they write. Her random thoughts included the following statements:
“I write because I have authority from life to do so.”
“Friends walk through my life, talk, smile and shake hands but no one is near me.
“I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”
Scarcely a breath of wind disturbed the stillness of the day and the long rows of cabbages were bright green in the sunlight. Large white clouds drifted slowly across the deep blue sky. Now and then they obscured the sun and caused a chill on the backs of the prisoners who had to work all day long in the cabbage field. This trick the clouds were playing with the sun eventually caused one of the prisoners who wore glasses to stop work, straighten up, and peer shortsightedly at them. He was a thin little fellow with a hollowed-out chest and comic knobbly knees. He also had a lot of fanciful ideas because he smiled at the clouds.
“Perhaps they want me to send a message to the children,” he thought tenderly, noting that the clouds were drifting in the direction of his home some hundred miles away. But before he could frame the message, the warder in charge of his work detail shouted: “Hey, what you tink you're doing, Brille?”
The prisoner swung round, blinking rapidly, yet at the same time sizing up the enemy. He was a new warder, named Jacobus Stephanus Hannetjie. His eyes were the color of the sky but they were frightening. A simple, primitive, brutal soul gazed out of them.
The prisoner bent down quickly and a message was quietly passed down the line: “We're in for trouble this time, comrades.”
“Why?” rippled back up the line.
“Because he's not human,” the reply rippled down and yet only the crunching of the spades as they turned over the earth disturbed the stillness.
This particular work detail was known as Span One. It was composed of ten men and they were all political prisoners. They were grouped together for convenience, as it was one of the prison regulations that no black warder should be in charge of a political prisoner lest this prisoner convert him to his views. It never seemed to occur to the authorities that this very reasoning was the strength of Span One and a clue to the strange terror they aroused in the warders. As political prisoners they were unlike the other prisoners in the sense that they felt no guilt nor were they outcasts of society. All guilty men instinctively cower, which was why it was the kind of prison where men got knocked out cold with a blow at the back of the head from an iron bar. Up until the arrival of Warder Hannetjie, no warder had dared beat any member of Span One and no warder had lasted more than a week with them. The battle was entirely psychological. Span One was assertive and it was beyond the scope of white warders to handle assertive black men. Thus, Span One had got out of control. They were the best thieves and liars in the camp. They lived all day on raw cabbages. They chatted and smoked tobacco. And since they moved, thought, and acted as one, they had perfected every technique of group concealment.
Trouble began that very day between Span One and Warder Hannetjie. It was because of the shortsightedness of Brille. That was the nickname he was given in prison and is the Afrikaans word for someone who wears glasses. Brille could never judge the approach of the prison gates and on several previous occasions he had munched on cabbages and dropped them almost at the feet of the warder, and all previous warders had overlooked this. Not so Warder Hannetjie.
“Who dropped that cabbage?” he thundered.
Brille stepped out of line. “I did,” he said meekly.
“All right,” said Hannetjie. “The whole Span goes three meals off.”
“But I told you I did it,” Brille protested.
The blood rushed to Warder Hannetjie's face. “Look 'ere,” he said. “I don't take orders from a kaffir. I don't know what kind of kaffir you tink you are. Why don't you say Baas. I'm your Baas. Why don't you say Baas, hey?”
Brille blinked his eyes rapidly but by contrast his voice was strangely calm. “I'm twenty years older than you,” he said.
It was the first thing that came to mind but the comrades seemed to think
it a huge joke. A titter swept up the line. The next thing, Warder Hannetjie whipped out a knobkerrie and gave Brille several blows about the head. What surprised his comrades was the speed with which Brille had removed his glasses or else they would have been smashed to pieces on the ground.
That evening in the cell Brille was very apologetic. “I'm sorry, comrades,” he said. “I've put you into a hell of a mess.”
“Never mind, brother,” they said. “What happens to one of us happens to all.”
“I'll try to make up for it, comrades,” he said. “I'll steal something so that you don't go hungry.”
Privately, Brille was very philosophical about his head wounds. It was the first time an act of violence had been perpetrated against him but he had long been a witness of extreme, almost unbelievable human brutality. He had twelve children and his mind traveled back that evening through the sixteen years of bedlam in which he had lived. It had all happened in a small drab little three-bedroom house in a small drab little street in the Eastern Cape and the children kept coming year after year because neither he nor Martha managed the contraceptives the right way and a teacher's salary never allowed moving to a bigger house and he was always taking exams to improve this salary only to have it all eaten up by hungry mouths. Everything was pretty horrible, especially the way the children fought. They'd get hold of each other's heads and give them a good bashing against the wall. Martha gave up somewhere along the line, so they worked out a thing between them. The bashings, biting, and blood were to operate in full swing until he came home. He was to be the bogeyman and when it worked he never failed to have a sense of godhead at the way in which his presence could change savages into fairly reasonable human beings.
Yet somehow it was this chaos and mismanagement at the center of his life that drove him into politics. It was really an ordered beautiful world with just a few basic slogans to learn along with the rights of mankind. At one stage, before things became very bad, there were conferences to attend, all very far away from home.
“Let's face it,” he thought ruefully. “I'm only learning right now what it means to be a politician. All this while I've been running away from Martha and the kids.”
And the pain in his head brought a hard lump to his throat. That was what the children did to each other daily and Martha wasn't managing and if Warder Hannetjie had not interrupted him that morning he would have
sent the following message: “Be good comrades, my children. Cooperate, then life will run smoothly.”
The next day Warder Hannetjie caught this old man with twelve children stealing grapes from the farm shed. They were an enormous quantity of grapes in a ten-gallon tin and for this misdeed the old man spent a week in the isolation cell. In fact, Span One as a whole was in constant trouble. Warder Hannetjie seemed to have eyes at the back of his head. He uncovered the trick about the cabbages, how they were split in two with the spade and immediately covered with earth and then unearthed again and eaten with split-second timing. He found out how tobacco smoke was beaten into the ground and he found out how conversations were whispered down the wind.
For about two weeks Span One lived in acute misery. The cabbages, tobacco, and conversations had been the pivot of jail life to them. Then one evening they noticed that their good old comrade who wore the glasses was looking rather pleased with himself. He pulled out a four-ounce packet of tobacco by way of explanation and the comrades fell upon it with great greed. Brille merely smiled. After all, he was the father of many children. But when the last shred had disappeared, it occurred to the comrades that they ought to be puzzled.
Someone said: “I say, brother. We're watched like hawks these days. Where did you get the tobacco?”
“Hannetjie gave it to me,” said Brille.
There was a long silence. Into it dropped a quiet bombshell. “I saw Hannetjie in the shed today”—and the failing eyesight blinked rapidly. “I caught him in the act of stealing five bags of fertilizer and he bribed me to keep my mouth shut.”
There was another long silence.
“Prison is an evil life,” Brille continued, apparently discussing some irrelevant matter. “It makes a man contemplate all kinds of evil deeds.”
He held out his hand and closed it. “You know, comrades,” he said. “I've got Hannetjie. I'll betray him tomorrow.”
Everyone began talking at once.
“Forget it, brother. You'll get shot.”
Brille laughed.
“I won't,” he said. “That is what I mean about evil. I am a father of children and I saw today that Hannetjie is just a child and stupidly truthful. I'm going to punish him severely because we need a good warder.”
The following day, with Brille as witness, Hannetjie confessed to the theft
of the fertilizer and was fined a large sum of money. From then on, Span One did very much as they pleased while Warder Hannetjie stood by and said nothing. But it was Brille who carried this to extremes.
One day, at the close of work Warder Hannetjie said: “Brille, pick up my jacket and carry it back to the camp.”
“But nothing in the regulations says I'm your servant, Hannetjie,” Brille replied coolly.
“I've told you not to call me Hannetjie. You must say, Baas,” but Warder Hannetjie's voice lacked conviction.
In turn, Brille squinted up at him. “I'll tell you something about this Baas business, Hannetjie,” he said. “One of these days we are going to run the country. You are going to clean my car. Now, I have a fifteen-year-old son and I'd die of shame if you had to tell him that I ever called you Baas.”
Warder Hannetjie went red in the face and picked up his coat.
On another occasion Brille was seen to be walking about the prison yard, openly smoking tobacco. On being taken before the prison commander, he claimed to have received the tobacco from Warder Hannetjie. All throughout the tirade from his chief, Warder Hannetjie failed to defend himself, but his nerve broke completely.
He called Brille to one side. “Brille,” he said. “This thing between you and me must end. You may not know it but I have a wife and children and you're driving me to suicide.”
“Why, don't you like your own medicine, Hannetjie?” Brille asked quietly.
“I can give you anything you want,” Warder Hannetjie said in desperation.
“It's not only me but the whole of Span One,” said Brille cunningly. “The whole of Span One wants something from you.”
Warder Hannetjie brightened with relief. “I tink I can manage if it's tobacco you want,” he said.
Brille looked at him, for the first time struck with pity and guilt. He wondered if he had carried the whole business too far. The man was really a child.
“It's not tobacco we want, but you,” he said. “We want you on our side. We want a good warder because without a good warder we won't be able to manage the long stretch ahead.”
Warder Hannetjie interpreted this request in his own fashion and his interpretation of what was good and human often left the prisoners of Span
One speechless with surprise. He had a way of slipping off his revolver and picking up a spade and digging alongside Span One. He had a way of producing unheard-of luxuries like boiled eggs from his farm nearby and things like cigarettes, and Span One responded nobly and got the reputation of being the best work detail in the camp. And it wasn't only take from their side. They were awfully good at stealing certain commodities like fertilizer which were needed on the farm of Warder Hannetjie.
 
—1973

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