Indeed Dame Leroux shared the general high opinion of Lothar, so he did not want to belittle him in any way or to offend his minister.
'There may well be disturbances in the Sharpeville area,' he conceded. 'But it is a small township and has always been very peaceful. We can expect our men there to behave well and I do not see any immediate danger. I suggest we send twenty or thirty men to reinforce Sharpeville, and concentrate our main efforts on the larger townships with violent histories of boycotts and strikes." 'Very well,' Manfred agreed at last. 'But I want you to maintain at least forty percent of our reinforcements in reserve, so that they can be moved quickly to any area that flares up unexpectedly." 'What about arms?" Dame Leroux asked. 'I am about to authorize the issue of automatic weapons to all units." He turned the statement into a query and Manfred nodded.
'Ja, we must be ready for the worst. There is a feeling amongst our enemies that we are on the verge of capitulation. Even our own people are becoming frightened and confused." His voice dropped, but his tone was fiercer and more determined. 'We have to change that. We have to crush these people who wish to tear down and destroy all we stand for and give this land over to bloodshed and anarchy." The centres of support for the PAC were widely scattered across the land, from the eastern tribal areas of the Ciskei and the Transkei to the southern part of the great industrial triangle along the Vaal river, and a thousand miles south of that in the black township of Longa and Nyanga that housed the greater part of the migrant worker force that serviced the mother city of Cape Town.
In all these areas Sunday 20 March 1960 was a day of feverish effort and planning, and of a peculiar expectancy. It was as though everybody at last believed that this new decade would be one of immense change.
The radicals were filled With hid feeling of infinite hope, however irrational, and with a certainty that the Nationalist government was on the verge of collapse. They felt that the world was with them, that the age of colonialism had blown away on the winds of change, and that after a decade of massive political mobilization by the black leaders, the time of liberation was at last at hand. All it needed now was one last shove, and the walls of apartheid would crash to earth, crushing under them the evil architect Verwoerd and his builders who had raised them up.
Raleigh Tabaka felt that marvelous euphoria as he and his men moved through the township, going from cottage to cottage with the same message: 'Tomorrow we will be as one people. No one will go to work. There will be no buses and those who try to walk to the town will be met by the Poqo on the road. The names of all who defy the PAC will be taken and they will be punished. Tomorrow we are going to make the white police fear us." They worked all that day, and by evening every person, man and woman, in the township had been warned to stay away from work and to assemble in the open space near the new police station early on the Monday morning.
'We are going to make the white police fear us. We want everybody to be there. If you do not come, we will find you." Amelia had worked as hard and unremittingly as Raleigh had done, but like him she was still fresh, unwearied and excited as they ate a quick and simple meal in the back room of the bakery.
'Tomorrow we will see the sun of freedom rise,' Raleigh told her as he wiped his bowl with a crust of bread. 'But we cannot afford to sleep. There is still much work to do this night." Then he took her hand and told her, 'Our children will be born free, and we will live our life together like men, not like animals." And he led her out into the darkening township to continue the preparations for the great day that lay ahead.
They met in groups on the street corners, all the eager young ones, and Raleigh and Amelia moved amongst them delegating their duties for the morrow, selecting those who would picket the road leading from Sharpeville to Vereeniging.
'You will let no one pass. Nobody must leave the township,' Raleigh told them. 'All the people must be as one when we march on the police station tomorrow morning." 'You must tell the people not to fear,' Raleigh urged them. 'Tell them that the white police cannot touch them and that there will be a most important speech from the white government concerning the abolition of the pass laws. Tell the people they must be joyful and unafraid and that they must sing the freedom songs that PAC has taught them." After midnight Raleigh assembled his most loyal and reliable men, ncluding the two Buffaloes from the shebeen, and they went to the homes of all the black bus drivers and taxi drivers in the township and pulled them from their beds.
'Nobody will leave Sharpeville tomorrow,' they told them. 'But we do not trust you not to obey your white bosses. We will guard you until the march begins. Instead of driving your buses and taxis tomorrow and taking our people away, you will march with them to the police station. We will see to it that you do. Come with us now." As the false dawn flushed the eastern sky, Raleigh himself scaled a telephone pole at the boundary fence and cut the wires. When he slid down again he laughed, as he told Amelia, 'Now our friend th leopard will not find it so easy to call in other police to help him." Captain Lothar De La Rey parked his Land-Rover and left it in a sanitary lane in a patch of shadow out of the street lights and he moved quietly to the corner and stood alone.
He listened to the night. In the years he had served at Sharpeville he had learned to judge the pulse and the mood of the township. He let his feelings and his instincts take over from reason, and almost immediately he was aware of the feral excitement and sense of expectation which had the township in its grip. It was quiet until you listened, as Lothar was listening now. He heard the dogs. They were restless, some close, others at a distance, yapping and barking, and there was an urgency in them. They were seeing and scenting groups and single figures in the shadows. Men hurrying on secret errands.
Then he heard the other sounds, soft as insect sounds in the night.
The whistle of lookouts on the watch for his patrols and the recognition signals of the street gangs. In one of the dark cottages nearby a man coughed nervously, unable to sleep, and in another a child whimpered fretfully and was instantly hushed by a woman's soft voice.
Lothar moved quietly through the shadows, listening and watching. Even without the warning of the pamphlets, he would have known that tonight the township was awake and strung up.
Lothar was not an imaginative or romantic young man, but as he scouted the dark streets he suddenly had a clear mental picture of his ancestors performing this same dire task. He saw them bearded and dressed in drab homespun, armed with the long muzzle-loaders, leaving the security of the laagered wagons, going out alone into the African night to scout for the enemy, the swartgevaar, the black danger. Spying out the bivouac where the black impis lay upon their war shields, waiting for the dawn to rush in upon the wagons. His nerves crawled at those atavistic memories, and he seemed to hear the battle chant of the tribes in the night and the drumming of assegai on rawhide shield, the stamp of bare feet and the crash of war rattles on wrist and ankle as they came in upon the wagons for the dawn attack.
In his imagination the cry of the restless infant in tile nearby cottage became the death screams of the little Boer children at Weenen, where the black impis had come sweeping down from the hills to massacre all in the Boer encampment.
He shivered in the night as he realized that though so much had changed, as much had remained the same. The black danger was still there, growing each day stronger and more ominous. He had seen the confident challenging look of the young bucks as they swaggered through the streets and heard the warlike names they had adopted, the Spear of the Nation and the Pure Ones. Tonight, more than ever, he was aware of the danger and he knew where his duty lay.