Before Raleigh left to go to school, his Uncle Moses Gama used to visit his father. From infancy he had been in awe of his uncle, for power burned from him like one of those great veld fires which consumed the land and towered into the heavens in a column of dense smoke and ash and sparks.
Even though Moses Gama had been absent from Drake's Farm for so many years, his memory had never been allowed to grow dim, and Hendrick had read aloud to the family the letters that he had received from him in distant lands.
So when at last Raleigh matriculated and left Waterford to return to Drake's Farm and begin work in his father's businesses, he announced that he wanted to take 'his place in the ranks of the young warriors.
'After you have been to initiation camp,' his father promised him, 'I will introduce you to Umkhonto we Sizwe." Raleigh's initiation set the final stamp on his special sense of Africanism. With his brother Wellington and six other young men of his initiation class, he left Drake's Farm and travelled by train in the bare third-class carriage to the little magisterial town of Queenstown which was the centre of the Xhosa tribal territories.
It had all been arranged by his mother, and the elders of the tribe met them at Queenstown station. In a rickety old truck they were driven out to a kraal on the banks of the great Fish river and delivered into the care of the tribal custodian, an old man whose duty it was to preserve and safeguard the history and customs of the tribe.
Ndlame, the old man, ordered them to strip off their clothing and to hand over all the possessions they had brought with them. These were thrown on a bonfire on the river bank, as a symbol of childhood left behind them. He took them naked into the river to bathe, and, then still glistening wet, he led them up the far bank to the circumcision hut where the tribal witchdoctors waited.
When the other initiates hung back fearfully, Raleigh went boldly to the head of the column and was the first to stoop through the low entrance to the hut. The interior was thick with smoke from the dung fire and the witchdoctors, in their skins and feathers and fantastic headdresses, were weird and terrifying figures.
Raleigh was smitten with terror, for the pain which he had dreaded all his childhood and for the forces of the supernatural which lurked in the gloomy recesses of the hut, yet he forced himself to run forward and leap over the smouldering fire.
As he landed on the far side the witchdoctors sprang upon him and forced him into a kneeling position, holding his head so he was forced to watch as one of them seized his penis and drew out the rubbery collar of his foreskin to its full length. In ancient times the circumciser would have used a hand-forged blade, but now it was a Gillette razor blade.
As they intoned the invocation to the tribal gods, Raleigh's foreskin was cut away, leaving his glans soft and pink and vulnerable.
His blood spattered on to the dung floor between his knees, but he uttered not a sound.
Ndlame helped him rise, 'and he staggered out into the sunlight and fell upon the river bank, riding the terrible burning pain, but the shriek of the other boys and the sounds of their wild struggles carried clearly to where he lay. He recognized his brother Wellingtons cries of pain as the shrillest and loudest of them all.
Raleigh knew that their foreskins would be gathered up by the witchdoctors, salted and dried and added to the tribal totem. A part of them would remain for ever with the custodians and no matter how far they wandered, the witchdoctors could call them back with the foreskin curse.
When all the other initiates had suffered the ' ú ' clrcumclser s knife, Ndlame led them down to the water's edge and showed them how to wash and bind their wounds with medicinal leaves and herbs, and to strap their penis against their stomachs. 'For if the Mamba looks dowm he will bleed again,' he warned them.
They smeared their bodies with a mixture of clay and ash. Even the hair on their heads was crusted with the dead white ritual paint, so that they looked like albino ghosts. Their only clothing was skirts of grass and they built their huts in the deepest and most secret parts of the forest, for no woman might look upon them. They prepared their own food, plain maize cakes without any relish, and meat was forbidden them during the three moons of the initiation. Their only possession was their food bowl of clay.
One of the boys developed an infection of his circumcision wound, the stinking green pus ran from it like milk from a cow's teat, and the fever consumed him so his skin was almost painfully hot to the touch. The herbs and potions that Ndlame applied were of no avail.
He died on the fourth day and they buried him in the forest and Ndlame took his food bowl away. It would be thrown through the front door of his mother's hut by one of the witchdoctors, without a word being spoken, and she would know that her son had not been acceptable to the tribal gods.
Each day from before dawn's light until after sunset, Ndlame gave them instruction and taught them their duties as members of the tribe, as husbands and as fathers. They learned to endure pain and hardship with stoicism. They learned discipline and duty to their tribe, the ways of the wild animals and plants, how to survive in the wilderness, and how to please their wives and raise their children.
When the wounds of the circumcision blade had healed, Ndlame bound up their members each night in the special knot called the Red Dog, to prevent them spilling their seed in the sacred initiation huts. Each morning Ndlame inspected the knots carefully to ensure that they had not been loosened to enjoy the forbidden pleasure of masturbation.
When the three moons had passed, Ndlame led them back to the river and they washed away the white initiation clay and anointed their bodies with a mixture of fat and red ochre, and Ndlame gave them each a red blanket, symbol of manhood, with which they covered themselves. In procession, singing the manhood songs which they had practised, they went to where the tribe waited at the edge of the forest.
Their parents had gifts for them, clothing and new shoes and money, and the girls giggled and ogled them boldly, for they were men now and able at last to take a wife, as many wives as they could afford, for the lobola, the marriage fee, was heavy.
The two brothers, accompanied by their mother, journeyed back to Drake's Farm, Wellington to take leave of their father, for he was going on to take holy orders, and Raleigh to remain at his father's side, to learn the multifarious facets of Hendrick Tabaka's business activities and eventually to take the helm and become the comfort and mainstay of Hendrick's old age.
These were fascinating and disturbing months and years for Raleigh. Until this time he had never guessed at his father's wealth and power, but gradually it was revealed to him. The pages in the ledger turned for him one at a time. He learned of his father's general dealer stores, and the butcheries and bakeries in all the black townships spread throughout the great industrial triangle of the Transvaal that was based on the gold-mines and the iron-deposits and the coal fields. Then he went on to learn about the cattle herds and rural general dealer's stores in the tribal reservations owned by his father and cared for by his myriad brothers, about the shebeens and the whores that operated behind the front of legitimate business, and finally he learned about the Buffaloes, that ubiquitous and shadowy association of many men from all the various tribes, whose chief was his own father.