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| A quest for redemption | |
| By Katsinella | ||||||||||||||||||
| 25 March 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||
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This is a piece written for an upcoming assignment for the creative writing course. I've chosen the style intentionally to make the pain and confusion of the time hit home. The voice is of a young Afrikaans woman, seeking to identify herself in the new South Africa. The past is so overwhelming for her, and her personal loss possibly marrs her abilty to see the true extent of the complicty of white South Africa. Your feedback on any point, is as always very welcome. I'd be particularly interested in what you think of the narrator. Being born white in South Africa marks you with searing, eternal guilt and I am no different. I so desperately want to call myself an African. To be like Mbeki, and to owe my being to the hills and valleys of our beautiful land. But being white, it’s just not that easy. And perhaps, as a white Afrikaner, it’s never going to happen. My family has its own story of heartache that makes up the torrid past of South Africa. Many more families than mine have had the very heart ripped out of it by the savage years of apartheid. This is by no means the saddest or cruelest story you will hear but it is mine. Ours was a typical Afrikaner farming family. There were five children, born to austere Calvinists who could still remember the horror stories of their parent’s internment at the camps after the Boer War. Decades of poverty, and precarious living on the vagaries of nature’s seasons meant ours was a parsimonious existence. Clothes were passed down between the siblings, even to me as the only girl. There was always enough food although in the years of drought it was often game rather than from our own herd of cattle. Our farm was forty kilometers out of Sanniesdorp, and another hundred kilometers from Groot Marico. As a town, Sanniesdorp is just a standard cookie-cutter town in the bush serving the local farming community. It sat assuredly at the intersection of the road coming from the East out of Johannesburg and the other north-south road leading to Derdepoort, on the border with Botswana. Growing up, it seemed to me that nothing ever happened in town. But the truth is that it all happened in Sanniesdorp. Along with the requisite town hall (also a post-office between 7 and 12 each weekday morning), the hotel and the Dutch Reformed church, was the general store. It was known affectionately after its original owner now long dead, as Oom Samie’s. It was in fact Pieter Geldenhys who owned and ran the store. You could buy everything from the store and if it wasn’t on the shelf, Pieter could probably get it for you from Johannesburg. And then there was the ever ubiquitous bottle store. Looking back, it was somewhat surprising as to how much trade the store did given the Calvinist attitudes of the farming families. But isn’t that just the real truth about life! The store also sold alcohol to the blacks but only through a hole in the wall out at the back. No blacks were allowed in the front entrance. And no, before you ask me, it never seemed odd to me. It was just the natural order of things then. But back to my story. Pa would say that was typical of me, incapable of delivering stories in logical, linear order. Being the only girl in a family of five boys meant that I was never really understood. I’m not saying that Pa was ever cruel. But to him, I remained an unfathomable species of capable of irrational thought and an alarming source of tears and unexpected outbursts. But there again I digress. My brothers, all of whom are older than me, started with great purpose in life and have gone on to have remarkable careers, with orderly, respectable families. All with the exception of Christian. Hendrik, my elder by twenty years, has a criminal law practice in Pretoria. Cornelius and Jacobus both studied veterinary science at Overpoort. Jacobus is a partner in a veterinary practice in Groot Marico. Cornelius is now part of the government as a strategic advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture. And darling Christian, what became of him? Well, this is in part a story about him. He is a painful reminder to our family of the country’s lies and deceit. He was always an easy-going child. Being the youngest boy, the pressure was off him, and being only two years older than me, we spent much of our childhood together. He taught me how to shoot a rifle. Coke cans to start with and then as my proficiency met with his approval, he would take me on his rounds along the farm border when he was tracking predators. He taught me how to track buck, and how to tell the difference in animal droppings. He was the only one interested in teaching me to drive. He did well at school with seemingly little effort. He never expressed any desire for a specific vocation, but no-one doubted he would do great things. Fresh out of high-school, he went on to his two years conscripted service with the army, just as our brothers had done before him. The three months basic training came and went without any trouble. Then he was sent to the border to fight the war. I’m not surprised if you haven’t heard about this was as it wasn’t a well publicised war. And the border wasn’t actually ours but sort of no-mans land in the Caprivi Strip that separated Namibia and Angola. All any of us knew at the time was that South Africa was facing a great threat in the form of communism and that it was about to spill over from Angola and engulf our country in chaos. President Botha spoke often and darkly about the Swart Gevaar (‘the Black Danger’). This undefined yet seemingly real threat tinged my dreams. We’d always had good relations with our workers on the farm (yes, all black) but still we feared being attacked at night. We’d heard stories from elsewhere in the country of this happening. It was the 1980s and even our family could see the change in the younger generation of blacks. In Sanniesdorp, the youth were less subservient than their parents, less likely to doff their caps or stand out the way as a white man approached. And in the capital, a hot bed of unrest unfolded. Many youths were refusing to be taught at school in Afrikaans. Indeed, the Soweto riots had been exactly about that. Against this backdrop of fear, Botha’s plan of creating separate states for the blacks made sense. If they were going to cause trouble, then best they do it elsewhere. But back to my story about Christian. From the border, we received few letters and many of them had the black Koki marks of the censor pressed to hard as to tear the thin, yellow paper. About four months into his stint on the border, he sent me a personal letter. He said he was scared of what he was becoming. That line disturbed me. As far as I knew, Christian has never been scared of anything in his life. He’d been the one to stand up to school bullies with his mean right-hand swing. Even as a youngster, he was out there with Jacobus and Pa in the dark of night when there was a threat from the sheep rustlers. And then there was the famous story of how he’d shot a lioness that had stood between Henrik and the bakkie. One bullet in the forehead. Pa still had the lion’s head, stuffed, over the fireplace in the family room. So how could Christian be scared? Silence followed this letter. He should have been due for a pass out. A much longed for weekend break from the tour of duty but we weren’t sure when it was due. Instead, we received a visit from the Military Police. A harsh knock on the door on a Saturday night whilst we were having dinner announced two blue-uniformed policemen with black MP arm bands. They demanded to search the house. Ma looked horrified, Pa objected strongly, but they went ahead anyway. Once they had finished their search, they returned to the kitchen. Reading from a formal looking piece of paper, the older one announced that Christian was now officially absent without leave from the South African Defense force and henceforth, would be arrested and imprisoned for dereliction of duties. They left with my parents and me sitting at the kitchen table, dumbstruck. All Pa could say was what disgrace Christian had brought upon the family. Ma, paler than I had ever seen her, just crossed herself, and bent her head in silent prayer. I was with Ma, wanting to ask God for help in our hour of need but I didn’t think he was listening. Months went by and the family had no word. Although nothing was said by the local families, the pall of disgrace hung clearly across our house. After some initial inquisitive visitors, all enquiries dried up. The hostility in town kept our visits to a bare minimum. We only went in on Sundays for the morning service. Hendrik phoned from Johannesburg every Friday night to ask for news. But we heard nothing. News finally came in the form of a letter addressed to me but care of my geography school teacher. It was a single sheet with taut words scrawled across the page. He was alright, he assured me in the first paragraph, and to please tell Ma and Pa he was safe. He said the war on the border was not one we should be fighting. ‘They train us to be murderers and I can’t be part of that’ he said. I didn’t quite get his meaning. Was he saying our government was wrong? I’d never heard anyone question the National Party. Letters from Christian became more regular but always through a third party in the town. Many families had ostracized us for having an objector, whether he knew that or not, I don’t know. But he always sent the letters to sympathetic families. He was now living in London and doing ‘important work’ for an underground political party, eventually named this party as the United Democratic Front. In his private letters to me, often a sealed envelope within the letter written to the family, he assured me we would see a change in our lifetime. ‘The National Party has come to their end – they must be overthrown’ he wrote once. He’d sign off with Afrikaans words of comfort like ‘sterkte’ or stranger ones in Zulu like ‘Amandla!’ Perhaps it was naivety or perhaps Christian’s letters has sown the subversive seed. Either way, I found myself caught up with politics at the Students Union. I had signed up for a science degree at a university in Johannesburg. For the first time, I came in contact with other South Africans. Blacks, English-speaking whites, Indians and Coloureds. A rainbow of people that lived in my country that I didn’t know existed. But this rainbow spoke only of indescribable heartache. I listened to innumerable stories about human lives that had been unfolding around me but of which I was so unforgivable unaware. I heard stories about unfair beatings at the hands of the police, brothers and fathers who had disappeared in the early hours of the morning, torn from their warm beds by the South African police. I heard the other side of the student uprising that the world knew as the Soweto riots. There were endless stories of pain and human suffering. The true impact of the dark, vicious laws of apartheid became real. The list of horrors perpetrated by the government I had thought I trusted became my own personal nightmare. My tidy white existence was shameful to me. Many of my fellow students didn’t think I could ever truly understand or support their cause and perhaps they were right. But for the first time, I understood what Christians’ letters were about. As a white Afrikaner, I felt I had a moral imperative to stand up and be counted. To show others that being white didn’t mean you supported the regime. I’d like to say I made a contribution to the struggle but that would be a lie. I distributed pamphlets, took part of demonstrations, and even have a scar from a bullet shot by a policeman at a student demonstration. But only when Christian was murdered, was my validity to the claim of being part of the struggle accepted. The fragments of his last days are composed from a single source. He was arrested with a comrade, Joseph Ncube. They had both come back into the country using a false passport. On their arrival, they made their way to Alexandra where they were stopped by the police on the main road into the township. In hindsight, their plans were clearly ill-thought out. Joseph was unclear as to why they were arrested. But there was a declared Sate of Emergency so reasons didn’t have to be given. Once at the station, the police found incriminating papers. Joseph said they were separated at that point and each taken to an interrogation cell. He didn’t know what happened to my brother other than to guess their treatments would be similar. I can’t dwell on the details for fear of crying on these pages. Joseph managed to escape with the help of a sympathetic warder in the jail. My brother was less lucky. He was pronounced dead from mishap. Mishaps were frighteningly common in those days. He apparently had fallen down the stairs. Joseph assured me that he had died fighting the good cause. Years have passed and we’re now celebrating our tenth year of true democracy. And now it’s a country full of hope. One where the president talks of being an African. But as a white Afrikaner, I have a much tainted past. As I’ve said, this is the story of my family’s tragedy. Does it make me more of an African to have lost in the struggle?
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