CHAPTER 6
Blanchaille walked down the hill struggling with the heavy cases. He regretted vaguely having brought them. Books, socks, clerical suits he had never worn; the blue barathea blazer he was wearing when he entered the seminary, big lapels and double vents — quite out of fashion now… the weeds of yesteryear.
The sky above the crest of the hill was dark grey and becoming blacker with every moment. There was something huge and flamboyant about a highveld storm, an occasion of relentless melodrama. The sky grew heavy and crowded in over you. As the storm built, the air became more highly charged. The trees shook themselves. Birds would swoop and flee. The hush would begin to weigh. Occasionally a small wind would drift a few leaves past your ankles or slide past the eyebrows carrying a faint watery scent. The first flash would come, white as a slash of chalk across a blackboard and a crash that split the ear-drums. But it did not necessarily mean rain, something might happen in the atmosphere and the storm would wheel and miss you leaving you only with prodigious explosions, blackness and vivid fractures of light. All show, impressive but empty bluster, truncheon weather, crash, bash, wallop. Your hair stood on end but you didn’t get wet. Yet you felt the threat, looked with respect at the towering darkness above. Not for nothing did the Regime sometimes broadcast important policy statements on radio and television during electrical storms, the words interspersed by static and thunder. When it did rain, the relief was palpable.
A large black car came bowling down the hill and stopped beside him with a shriek of brakes. The window descended with smooth electrical precision, and there was Gabriel. The interior of the car smelt of its blue vinyl coverings and the refrigerated whisper of its air conditioning. Gabriel didn’t switch off the engine. The car waited, hissing faintly. Gabriel massaged his jaw, smooth, golden, smiling, a model of casual elegance.
‘What’s this, Blanchie? You’ll be soaked if it comes down. You’re a long way from home.’
Blanchaille nodded. Maybe he should ask his question now?
‘I’d give you a lift but I’m meeting the Rome plane. Vatican bigwigs. Visiting firemen. Ah well — no rest for the wicked.’
‘No.’
‘Never be a bishop’s chaplain.’
‘No,’ said Blanchaille, ‘I won’t.’
Blanchaille watched the big black car go purring down the hill. He hadn’t asked his question. It was this: Looksmart Dladla had been warned to get out of the country by his brother. Fair enough. So then, if Gabriel told Looksmart the cops wanted him in connection with the Kipsel business, who told Gabriel?
As he reached the bottom of the hill the first drops fell but he was lucky enough to find a bus stop and gratefully took shelter beneath the corrugated iron roof, swung his cases up on the bench and himself up beside them while the rain sheeted down and ran rivers of red mud and gravel beneath the spindly metal legs of the shelter. Highveld rain was like no other, the drops were large and would sting the hand and batter the head, drilling into the earth, beating and upbraiding it. The highveld rain had weight and made each drop count, was a battering of the country, brief but overwhelming. The earth, so dry, was soon saturated in great pools everywhere, joining up into streams carrying off the top soil, rough brown surges hurtling down the gutters and thundering in the storm-water drains, and everything which had been settled was fluid and running. It never lasted of course. After the deluge the sun would come out and everything dried away to sticky mud and then to dust. But while it lasted the world ran free, and the mind with it.
Now in my dream, as the storm began tapering off, a figure stepped out of the rain and sat beside him on the bench. ‘God Almighty, Blanchie! Did I not direct you to the Airport Palace?’ Father Lynch’s black raincoat was a sheen of wet cloth; rain gathered in the brim of his hat; when he spoke a hundred droplets exploded in the air before his mouth. ‘You delayed. And now you may find the going harder. Bubé is gone!’
‘So?’
‘What do you mean — so? This is the most extraordinary news. At last the truth is beginning to emerge. Bubé has gone. Of course this affects your travel plans.’
‘Why should it?’
‘Why? Because the roads will be full of police. Theodore, for the first time since Paul Kruger’s departure, a president has fled! Adolph Gerhardus Bubé has fled!’
Adolph Gerhardus Bubé, father of the nation. An intellectual who studied in his youth in universities in Holland, Germany and Belgium. One of the original founders of the old policy of ethnic parities, as it was then called, with his thesis ‘Racial Separation with Justice’, which became the Ur-text, the philosophical underpinning of the racial policy of equal freedoms or concomitant responsibilities, the vision of ‘ethnic heartlands’ each reflecting its distinctive tribal rhythm, each tribe breeding to its heart’s content. It was from this thesis that many of the crucial ideas of modern South Africa originated, regarded as revolutionary once but now outmoded, its once striking maxims absorbed into everyday language, sentiments such as: ‘There’s no such place as South Africa’, or as Pik Honneger, his most distinguished disciple put it, ‘What’s ours is ours, and what’s theirs is what we are prepared to give them.’
Bubé’s thesis had been required reading on Father Lynch’s picnics. It was Lynch who pointed out how profoundly influenced Bubé had been throughout his career, as a young MP, as a distinguished Economics Minister and as President — by the birth-rate. Bubé in his formal suits, with his paunch, his watch chain, his benign manner made speech after speech pointing to the burgeoning black population and he would appeal to his followers to remember the old Boer wife in the days of the Great Trek, during the wars of freedom and the oppression of the Boers by the British Empire. The old Boer wife, he said, had been a breeding machine, her womb was a weapon more potent than the Mauser, a holy factory in which there was renewed each month a new army, the white man’s hope of a secure future in South Africa where he could thrive and prosper and protect his traditional way of life, his culture and his Christian God. But now the white birth-rate was spiralling down to zero growth while the black man was rearming in the belly of his wives. Tirelessly the President expounded his theme: ‘White women, remember your duty!’ HAVE A BABY FOR BUBÉ! the headlines ran. His supporters took up the slogan and ran through the streets chanting it, breaking into chemist shops, puncturing contraceptive sheaths and flushing birth control pills down the toilet and assaulting non-white persons for allegedly failing to respect pregnant white women. It was Bubé who funded the sterilisation campaign in the countryside, the secret radiation trucks, the so-called ‘Nagasaki ambulances’ which so terrified the rural population.
Lynch often expatiated upon the role of President Bubé, as he rested beneath the Tree of Heaven, ‘It was our Adolph who reminded us that an earlier and better name for the Boer War was the Gold War. It was a war between Gold Bugs, who understood the importance of the metal, and the Boers who had still to learn this. The British Army came in on the side of the Gold Bugs — people like Werner and Beit, Himmelfarber etc. Let’s not believe the story put out by men in an advanced state of dementia such as Cecil Rhodes, or Alfred Milner that they were defending the Anglo-Saxon race of which the English, God forgive poor Rhodes, were regarded as the most perfect flower, “the best, the most human, the most honourable race the world possesses…” This I quote to you from his Confession of Faith. Have you ever heard such rubbish? Reasons, you see — reasons. We must have reasons before the killing can begin. The Boers on their side under Kruger were fighting, they said, for the right to be free, for Calvinist Afrikanerdom, for the little man against the big, for independence, for truth. All lies, all lies. Gold it was and gold it has always been, the dream, the rumour, the hope and despair of the conquerors and of the conquerors before them, Arabs and Portuguese both. Stories of magical gilded cities, of Solomon’s mines, of Monomatapa and Vigiti Magna lured them here. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and finally even the Boers, they all wanted it. Rhodes and all his fellow Bugs had the gold but Kruger owned the sacred soil from which it was mined. They thought that the Boers didn’t want the gold. How absurd! It was the miners they hated. They saw them as the sub-life that crawled beneath the stone, so they averted their eyes, usually upward to God their Father and kept to the veld, content with their horses, their guns, a herd or two, the horizon endlessly receding, a host of servants and a wife in the back room breeding like a machine, claiming always simply that they wished to be left alone. The Boers were the Greta Garbos of history. The Boers didn’t want the gold only so long as no one else had it. But they soon found the stuff had its uses. Before the war they were already building up their funds by illicitly buying gold stocks and amalgam from shady sellers. There were organised Government theft departments, that’s what it amounted to. Contemporary observers were lost in admiration for the bribery, greed, corruption, the whole quality of the unblushing venality with which those involved enriched themselves in the Boer Republics. The lot of them. All those wily Hollanders surrounding Kruger, were rotten from the toes up. The Transvaal Government was supported by secret funds administered from secret accounts and with this stash fund the Krugerites bought votes, nobbled opponents, paid off old scores and enriched family and friends. When the war broke out they no longer had to buy their gold under the table, because they’d taken over the gold mines. They could take it straight out of the ground and put it into their vaults. So when they went to war with the British they said they were fighting for God and freedom and independence. But by then they knew that whoever got the gold had God and freedom thrown in buckshee. Even so, as Bubé points out in his thesis, men like Kruger and Rhodes were of the old century. Nineteenth-century men. And the quality of their hypocrisy and the nature of their corruption was a Victorian thing. The gold was a means, the way you paid for your dreams, financed them. The difference with us, the New Men, Bubé says, is that gold came first, the dreams later. You can see this change taking place at the end of the Boer War when even the most Christian fighting generals became bank robbers literally overnight. As the British marched into the capital, General Smuts was holding up the Standard Bank and the Mint and making off with a cool half-million in gold. Kruger saw it coming. His Memoirs make it clear that the discovery of gold was a catastrophe. It would ‘soak the country in blood’.