The Covenant Part 82

There was one clue to the truth of these contrasting claims: black men in the bush of Mozambique, Malawi, Rhodesia, Lesotho and Vwarda fought for a chance to work at the Golden Reef, and for good reason. Though the wage was trivial, it was much more than they could get in their home villages; the food was better; there was more of it; beds were covered with good blankets; and doctors provided health care. Black nationalists in surrounding countries would publicly inveigh against South Africa but privately see to it that planes which came flying into their airstrips were loaded with workers, for only in this way could some of the economies be kept afloat. Black families also encouraged their men to fly to the Golden Reef for the sensible reason that a good percentage of a man's wages was paid only when he returned home, and his wife and children could temporarily escape their poverty.

When blacks from thirty or forty different tribes, speaking radically different languages and dialects, had to work together, it was necessary to construct some simple language they could all understand. Fanakalo was the ingenious solution. The word came from pidgin Zulu and meant roughly 'do it like this,' and the lingua franca it represented was a marvelous melange of Bantu, English, Afrikaans and Portuguese. It consisted mostly of nouns, with a few essential verbs, some profanity for adjectival emphasis and a great many gestures. One linguist who tried to a.n.a.lyze it said, 'You don't speak Fanakalo. You dance it while shouting.'

Few things in the world worked better, for a tribesman could master simple instructions in three days: 'This here wrench, fanakalo.' (You do it like this.) And once learned, it served as a magical pa.s.skey to all the levels of the mine, so that a man from Malawi speaking a unique dialect could work deep in the shaft beside one from Vwarda speaking his. One white supervisor asked an a.s.sociate what the workers on his s.h.i.+ft meant when they referred to 'Idonki ngo football jersey,' and the second man said, 'Simple. They mean zebra.' zebra.'

A miner could renew his contract again and again, but it was found better to have him return home after a long stint in the mines, see his family back in his home village, and return rested up. These returnees usually spoke well of the Golden Reef, especially the food. Once when Vwarda's representative at the United Nations was addressing the Security Council and asking for sanctions against South Africa, the government was filling six planes with Vwarda men who wanted to get back to work.

Not all the black mine hands came from foreign countries; the Golden Reef, along with sister mines, maintained a vast network of some forty recruiters who were engaged only in the enlisting of South African blacks, who comprised a third of the mines' work force. One such recruiter came to Venloo, set up his table, and counseled with young blacks from that area. Since jobs were scarce, he was able to sign up a score of workers, among them Jonathan Nxumalo, oldest son of Moses, who had been so long a.s.sociated with the Van Doorns.

Jonathan was a bright lad of twenty, eager to see something more of the world than the restricted view available to a farm hand at Vrymeer, but as soon as he pa.s.sed through into the Golden Reef compound, where five thousand other black men lived, sixteen to a room, he heard the gates slam behind himand realized that he had gained not freedom but a new kind of restriction. To learn Fanakalo became essential.

It took the white overseers only a few weeks to promote Jonathan as the best of this gang, and they designated him to work at the face, more than ten thousand feet down the rocky shaft. This paid more money, but it demanded more intense work in a constant temperature of 114 F. Water to cool the body and salt to protect it became almost as important as the gigantic jackhammer drill Jonathan handled, and when the long s.h.i.+ft ended and the men from below shot up in the elevator they had the self-satisfaction of knowing that they had completed one of the world's hardest jobs.

White men shared the heat and the danger. No black was ever a.s.signed a job more treacherous than what the white overseer was willing to do, so that a kind of camaraderie developed among the teams, with each white boss settling upon one or two superior blacks on whom he could rely. Jonathan became an aide to Roger Coetzee, an ambitious Afrikaner who loved the mines and would one day become the big boss.

Jonathan's job was an exciting one. At the start of each s.h.i.+ft he entered the cage with the rest of his gang, bolted the doors, and dropped a sickening ten thousand feet straight down. Occasionally some visitor from Johannesburg or overseas would want to inspect how the men worked, and then the cage was lowered at a much slower rate, which irritated Nxumalo, for he had grown to like that awful drop; it was a badge of his profession. He could take it, whereas a stranger could not.

Below, he would meet up with Coetzee, who came down only with other white miners; the two men and their helpers walked about one mile hunched over, their heads protected by hard hats, which b.u.mped against jagged rocks, their bodies exuding perspiration. After a long drink of water and some salt pills, they followed a narrower tunnel, in which the noise became shattering. Now they were approaching the face of the gold-bearing rock, and here huge pneumatic drills were sending steel probes far into the rock, prior to the placement of the next charges of dynamite.

It was h.e.l.lish work. Jonathan would creep into the working hole feet first, lying on his back and never able to sit erect. When he reached the drilling machine, a heavy instrument with cross-bar handles and stirrups for the feet, he would adjust himself, check the electrical lines, then jam his feet into the stirrups and deftly point the six-foot diamond-tipped drill at the spot to be dynamited. Then, taking a deep breath, which always stimulated him, he would squirm about for a comfortable position, thrust his feet forward, and flick the switch. With incredible power and noise, the water-cooled jackhammer drill would eat into the rock, throwing spray and slush until Jonathan looked like a white man.

When the hole was drilled, Nxumalo would squirm back out and signal to Coetzee that all was ready. The Afrikaner would then replace Nxumalo in the cramped tunnel and fix the dynamite, the cap and the connecting wires. Whistles would blow. Sirens would whine. And all men would retreat from this area as Coetzee plunged the detonator, exploding the charge and breaking away the next burden of gold-bearing rock.

When the dust settled and it seemed probable that no last rocks would tumble down from the new ceiling, Jonathan Nxumalo and Roger Coetzee would creep back into the tunnel and start calculating how long it would take for the ore to be hauled away from the stope face to the breaker and then to the refinery. It was hard work, dust-filled and exciting, and the men deep below developed respect for each other's capacities. Of course, when they left the danger area to go aloft, their lives changed radically. Coetzee could jump into his car and drive where he wished; Nxumalo was restricted to the compound, where all needs were provided by the company.

He was not exactly a prisoner. During any eighteen-month contract, workers were allowed into Johannesburg six times, but only in a group, with some white like Coetzee holding the pa.s.ses of thirty-six workmen. Should one want to break away from the ensemble, he could risk it, but he would then find himself with no pa.s.s, and since spot checks for pa.s.s inspection were quite common, sooner or later he would be detected and packed off to jail.

Several times, however, Jonathan did receive, through Coetzee's intervention, a special pa.s.s allowing him to visit a Vrymeer friend who, with sheer duplicity, had contrived to land a job in Johannesburg without proper papers. 'What I did,' he confided, 'was to grab on to this white family that had to have help. They protected me.' He added, 'Of course, since we're both breaking the law they pay me less than proper wages. But I don't complain.'

'You like Johannesburg?' Jonathan asked.

'Good food. Work not too hard. And look at these clothes.'

Jonathan was so enticed by city life that he tried on other visits to find an illegal job, to no avail. During the final moments of one leave he pleaded for more information as to how he should proceed, and his friend asked, 'You know anybody important might help you get a pa.s.s?'

'My father works for Detleef van Doorn.'

'You crazy? He's the one behind these laws. He's no friend. He's your worst enemy.'

Back at the mine, Jonathan asked Coetzee if he could help, but he said firmly, 'You're a mine worker now. You'll never be able to change because we need you.' And when Jonathan inquired at the pa.s.s office about getting an endors.e.m.e.nt that would enable him to work in Johannesburg, the official snapped, 'You have mine papers. You'll never have anything else.'

Since he was sentenced to the underground, as it were, he decided to strive for the best job possible, but here again he was forestalled: 'You're qualified for drilling. Wasteful to try you anywhere else.'

Back in his quarters, Jonathan talked with men from Malawi and Vwarda: 'I'm going to apply for a job like Coetzee's. I know all he knows, or any of the other white bosses who work our deep shafts.' But in cautious Fanakalo the black workers warned him not even to whisper such a possibility: 'That job whites only. No matter how stupid, they smarter than you. No black ever be boss.'

Coetzee must have suspected Jonathan's concern, for one day as they crept out of the tunnel he volunteered: 'You could do my work, Nxumalo, but the law is rigid. No black must ever hold a job in which he might give orders to a white.' Before Jonathan could comment he reminded him of the Golden Reef work rules, which stipulated that dynamite placers had to be white. No black could ever aspire to that job, for the intelligence required to tamp dynamite into a hole drilled by a black was entirely beyond the capacity of non-whites. The fact that black workmen throughout the rest of the world easily performed that function was ignored; in South Africa they could never learn enough to do it properly.

Sometimes the white bosses didn't do it properly, either. One terribly hot and dust-choked day Roger Coetzee placed his dynamite carelessly, and Jonathan Nxumalo started to point this out, but before he could persuade Coetzee to correct it, the charge went off and an unplanned leaf of ceiling rock fell, trapping the Afrikaner behind a ma.s.s of rubble. The rock did not fall directly on him, or he would have been crushed. A sliding fragment did break his leg. He was trapped in a pitch-black, airless, waterless crevice with the temperature at 1140 F. It was imperative that air and water pipes be got to him in a hurry, and with no white bosses in the vicinity, the task of doing it fell to Nxumalo. He probed through the fallen rock, lifted aside the chunks that he could handle, and called for other blacks to help with the bigger slabs. Within a few minutes white rescuers appeared on the scene, and proceeded exactly as Nxumalo had planned it. They succeeded in breaking Coetzee free, and from his hospital bed he asked to see Jonathan, who was ushered in by nurses who resented his being in the white hospital.

Coetzee was lucky to be alive, for there was no more deadly work in South Africa than that performed by men like him and Nxumalo. Each year more than six hundred men died in the gold minesnineteen thousand in thirty yearsand more than ninety percent were black.

I know it was you that got me out,' Coetzee said, and before Nxumalo could say anything, he added graciously, 'And you were about to warn me not to do it that way.' He grinned and extended his hand. I wish I had a cousin in Johannesburg who needed a houseboy.'

No such luck. With Coetzee hospitalized, Nxumalo's s.h.i.+ft got another boss, a tough Afrikaner who despised blacks. Once, when he saw Jonathan resting after a particularly stiff spell at the face, he growled at him, 'You work-shy idle black b.a.s.t.a.r.d.' Another day, when Nxumalo suggested approaching the face from a different angle, the boss yelled, 'No lip from you, you cheeky Kaffir b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

Since Nxumalo's contract had only five more weeks to run, he tolerated the new man's insults, and when the compound manager said, at the termination of his eighteen months, I hope you'll sign on again,' he was noncommittal, but he was satisfied that he wanted no more of the Golden Reef. What he would do, he didn't know.

AT DEATH.

Old Bloke, who delivered lawyers' letters at the Cheston Building in Johannesburg, was only fifty-four years old, but his life had been so demanding that he looked older than he was. His name was Bloke Ngqika, and in his early years he had worked at heavy labor in industry, where he had acquired numerous skills that could have been utilized in several advanced positions, but since he was a black he was prohibited from taking any of them.

After an accident in a tool-making foundry, which left him with a shuffle, he was extremely lucky to land a job delivering important papers by hand. It paid little, and the hours it took to commute to work and back home were intolerable, but he dared not quit because of a peculiar law which was severely enforced: it was possible for a black to qualify for a legal pa.s.s to remain in Johannesburg and permission to occupy a house in Soweto, but to do so he had to work for one employer only for a period of ten years. If he quit or was fired, he lost the endors.e.m.e.nt in his pa.s.s book, lost his house and his right to remain in Johannesburg. He was like a medieval serf, bound perpetually not to the land, as the serf had been, but to a specific job. This meant, obviously, that his employer could pay him scant wages, and he was powerless to protest, for if he were fired, he would lose not only his job but his entire pattern of living. As his employer often reminded him, 'Bloke, it isn't only wages I'm paying you. It's your house, your pa.s.s, the permission for your wife to be here too. Mind your step.'

He did not mind his step one bl.u.s.tery August day when he stepped off a curb in Commissioner Street into the path of a truck, not immediately in the path, for the driver might have avoided him had he been attentive. As it was, the truck hit him hard, and the last words he heard before he fainted were the familiar ones: 'b.l.o.o.d.y stupid Kaffir.'

He did not have to die. He could have been saved, except that the first ambulance on the scene was marked whites only whites only, and of course it could not help. It did radio for a non-white non-white; however, Old Bloke lay on the sidewalk for nearly half an hour before the proper ambulance arrived, and on arrival at the non-white casualty ward of Jo'burg hospital he was certified dead.

The anguish that showed on his face just before he fainted was not caused, as some thought, by extreme pain; nor was it resentfulness at the muttered cursing of the truck driver, for he got that all the time. It was his instant realization of what his death might mean to Miriam, his wife of more than thirty years. In a flash he saw her patient acceptance of the hards.h.i.+ps thrown her way, the years of separation, the hard work of rearing children alone. Whole decades had pa.s.sed with only brief visits from her husband; she could not join him, apartheid laws forbade that. So she had lived a meager life in one part of South Africa, he in another, and when Bloke at last gained the right that enabled her to live with him, she was so grateful that she advised him to accept any injustice regarding hours and wages: 'We got each other at last. You do the work, we say nothin'.'

On the third day after the funeral, Miriam was summoned to the office of Pieter Grobbelaar, director of the subdivision in Soweto where the Ngqika home was located. He informed her that since she was no longer married to a workingman with a legal right to remain in Soweto, she had become what the law called 'a superfluous appendage,' and as such, lost all right to remain in Johannesburg. He used the language well and outlined the steps of her expulsion.

'You can stay here to collect your things, but then you must leave for Soetgrond.'

'I've never been there. I don't even know where it is.'

'But you're a Xhosa. Your papers say that.'

'But I was born in Bloemfontein. I never been in Xhosa country.'

'The law says that you are now a temporary sojourner . . .'

At least ten times that first day Mr. Grobbelaar used the phrase 'the law says.' On every point raised by Mrs. Ngqika the law had antic.i.p.ated her. Did she want to hold on to a house which she and her husband had occupied for ten years and had improved significantly? Mr. Grobbelaar could cite a law which said that the widow of a man lost all her rights when her husband died. Did she want to stay for six months in order to find some alternative place to stay? Mr. Grobbelaar could quote a law which said that he could order her to clear out within seventy-two hours. Did she want permission to take with her the new kitchen sink which Bloke had given her last Christmas? Mr. Grobbelaar had a law which said anything attached to the walls of government-owned property had to be left behind.

The first interview had miserable results. When she left Mr. Grobbelaar with his pile of papers, Mrs. Ngqika wept for two hours, then sent a young boy into Johannesburg to find her son, who had a 'location in the sky,' that is, quarters atop the apartment block in which he worked as cleaner. When this young fellow heard that his mother was being dispossessed and s.h.i.+pped off to a country location which she had never seen, he hurried out to Soweto.

'Mom, they can't send you to a place like Soetgrond. That's just a bunch of shacks in the veld.'

'Super says I got to go.'

'To h.e.l.l with Super. I won't let you go.'

'He told me to come back to his office next week. You talk with him?'

And there was the difficulty. Her son's right to stay in Johannesburg, where he had not been born, depended upon his remaining invisible to the law. Were he to complain to Super, his papers would be inspected, the police would be summoned, and he, too, would be banished to Soetgrond. He was powerless to help his mother.

'Mom, there ain't nothing I can do,' and he was off to his location in the sky. If he could somehow hang on for ten years, he might earn a pa.s.s permitting him to remain in the area.

On the second visit Mr. Grobbelaar was as patient and as understanding as he had been on the first. He listened quietly to each of Mrs. Ngqika's frantic requests, then leafed through his gray canvas notebook till he found the relevant law and quoted it. He never raised his voice, and spoke not in Afrikaans, which she might not understand, but in English. He merely leafed through his papers and produced the law. When she got home she felt weak, and now she had only three weeks before she must quit this place into which she had poured so much of herself.

She was not being evicted because Bloke had been careless with his money; he had even gone to Super to ask if he could buy their little home, but the law book was explicit: 'No non-white may own land in Soweto.' And since Johannesburg non-whites were forbidden to live anywhere but Soweto, home owners.h.i.+p was impossible. As Mr. Grobbelaar explained: 'Bloke, you are allowed to remain here only so long as you do meaningful work to help the whites. And your wife is welcome only so long as your pa.s.s remains valid.'

That evening a group of black ladies met in Miriam Ngqika's kitchen to console her and to bid her farewell, and there was an awesomeness about the gathering, for each of these women knew that when their husbands died, they, too, would be exiled to some distant black spot which they had never seen and with which they had no affiliation whatever except by dictate of the new laws.

There was, however, in the group a schoolteacher who said, 'The Black Sash ladies have been asking us to find a case which they could fight. I think this is it.'

'I don't want to fight,' Miriam said quietly.

'But we got to fight,' the teacher said, and she warned the black women that it could become ugly and that reputations could be injured. 'Is there any scandal in your family?' the teacher asked, and the women stayed late at night, reviewing Miriam Ngqika's history, and it was blameless.

Early next morning the schoolteacher reported to the Black Sash society, and it happened that Mrs. Laura Saltwood was in attendance at a meeting of the national board, and when she heard the facts in the Ngqika case she exclaimed, 'Just what we've been waiting for!'

The committee agreed that Bloke Ngqika's fine record would be an a.s.set in protesting this eviction, and the respectable manner in which he and his wife had lived would also help. Miriam Ngqika had an admirable reputation in the towns.h.i.+p, and it was a.s.sumed that Superintendent Grobbelaar would not be able to testify adversely against her.

He didn't. He listened carefully as Mrs. Saltwood made her plea, then in good English explained that the law . . . Here he turned the leaves to the applicable law: 'Mrs. Ngqika was always well behaved ...' He sounded like an elementary-school teacher reporting on some infant; in fact, he was saying that he approved of the conduct of a woman fifteen years older than himself: 'She was neat, didn't drink, and I had no occasion to reprimand her.'

'Then why can't she stay?'

'Because all the Bantu are temporary sojourners, in a sense. She has become a superfluous appendage and must go.'

For an hour Superintendent Grobbelaar patiently glossed the laws, patiently explained that when a non-white family ceased to be useful to the white community, it must get out.

'But she's never been to Soetgrond,' Mrs. Saltwood protested.

'That may be so, but the law says that we must begin to get those non-useful people back to their own homelands.'

'Johannesburg is now her homeland.'

'Not any more.'

Mrs. Saltwood became almost offensive in her pressure for a humane concession, but Grobbelaar never lost his temper. When Mrs. Saltwood cried in moral outrage, 'Can't you see, Mr. Grobbelaar, that this is a great human tragedy?' he replied gently and with no bitterness, 'Mrs. Saltwood, every decision I have to make, week after week, involves what to the people concerned seems a great human tragedy. But we're trying to get our society sorted out.'

'At what human cost!'

'The cost may seem excessive to you, now. But when we have everyone in his place, you'll see that this is going to be a splendid country.'

With a wave of her arm she asked, 'Are you going to evict a million people here in Soweto?'

Superintendent Grobbelaar smiled. 'You English always exaggerate. It's five hundred and fifty thousand.' 'You don't count the illegals?' 'They will be dealt with.' 'You're going to evict them all?'

'Certainly not. Those who are essential to the operation of our businesses and industries will be allowed to remain. The rest? Yes, we'll evict them all. They'll have their own cities in their homelands.'

'How many black servants does Mrs. Grobbelaar have?'

'Two, if that's relevant.'

'You'll allow those two to stay?'

'Of course. They're essential.'

'Mr. Grobbelaar, can't you see that if you evict the blacks, Johannesburg will collapse?'

'We'll keep the ones we need.'

'But not the wives? Nor the children?'

'We want to avoid the clutter. They'll stay behind in the homelands.'

'Is there no appeal I can make in this matter?'

'Mrs. Ngqika is what the law calls a temporary sojourner, and she must go-'

He would make no concession. Never raising his voice or showing any irritation, he rebuffed every suggestion this difficult woman made, but when she was gone his face went livid and he roared at his a.s.sistant, 'I want three men to look into every aspect of that Ngqika woman's record. I'm going to teach that pair a lesson.' And forthwith he phoned a friend in the Security Branch: 'I suggest you take a close look at this Laura Saltwood. She consorts with Kaffirs.'

In the case of Mrs. Saltwood, secret police in various cities turned up only the facts that had appeared in newspapers. For some years she had been a thorn, defending non-whites against the just application of the new laws, but she had always acted in the open, so that no reasonable charge could be made against her.

'We'll keep close watch on her,' the Security Branch a.s.sured the Johannesburg police. 'One of these days she'll trip.'

In the Ngqika case something was found; a black living in Soweto informed the police that Miriam had a son occupying a location in the sky, but when they went to the address given they found that living there was an official of the government, whose wife protested that Miriam's son was the best and strongest cleaner she had ever employed and his continuance in the job was essential, so he was allowed to stay in Johannesburg, for the time being.

On a night in the third week, the last that Miriam Ngqika would spend in the house she had possessed for more than ten years but which she had not been allowed to own, the black women met in prayer and consolation. Afrikaners believed and tried to indoctrinate foreigners with the thesis that blacks of South Africa could never coalesce because they were tribal, with one group hating the other, but on this sad night Miriam's kitchen housed Xhosa, Zulu, Pondo, Sotho, Tswana and Shona. True, they were sometimes suspicious of one another, the way a respectable Episcopalian worries about a hard-sh.e.l.l Baptist, or the way a Catholic looks askance at a Jew, and sometimes that mistrust flared into faction fights, but that they were engaged in mortal combat was preposterous. These women shared a common destiny, and they knew it.

But as the night wore on, a remarkable event occurred. The schoolteacher who had enlisted the futile aid of the Black Sash crept through the streets leading a white woman, whose presence in Soweto was illegal and whose willingness to come at night was downright revolutionary. 'This is Mrs. Saltwood,' the teacher said. 'You've heard of her.'

The women had, especially the Shona woman who had been paid by Superintendent Grobbelaar to attend this meeting; she would report this criminal act, and the dossier on Mrs. Saltwood would note that at last this dangerous English woman had stepped across the boundary line from open defiance to criminal conspiracy.

What did the conspiracy consist of? Mrs. Saltwood told the black women, 'There are women all over the world who are fighting to stop such injustices. We've lost this battle, and Mrs. Ngqika will have to go this time, but...' Suddenly her stalwart manner vanished and she came close to tears, but she controlled herself, thinking: Tonight they need no white woman's tears. In a low voice she said, 'Miriam, we shall pray for you. In our hearts you will always have a home, even if they take this one . . .' Now she was almost crying, but she bit her lip and sat silent, the black women taking no notice of her emotional reactions.

In the morning Superintendent Grobbelaar appeared with a government truck, and Miriam's possessions were thrown into the back. Grobbelaar checked to be sure she did not take the kitchen sink, which was now government property, and at ten o'clock the truck pulled away, with Mrs. Ngqika and two other dispossessed women sitting atop their goods.

When the truck reached the Johannesburg railway station, the driver was surprised to see Mrs. Laura Saltwood waiting to accompany Mrs. Ngqika to her new home. She would, of course, have to travel in the whites only whites only coach, but there was nothing to prevent her watching over the dispossessed woman; if Mrs. Saltwood wanted to waste train fare to cry over one black woman no longer needed by the white community, that was permitted; but the driver did make note of the fact, and when he reported it to the superintendent, Grobbelaar had this latest evidence of rebellion forwarded to the secret police. coach, but there was nothing to prevent her watching over the dispossessed woman; if Mrs. Saltwood wanted to waste train fare to cry over one black woman no longer needed by the white community, that was permitted; but the driver did make note of the fact, and when he reported it to the superintendent, Grobbelaar had this latest evidence of rebellion forwarded to the secret police.

It was a tedious trip south; in the rude third-cla.s.s compartments provided by the South African Railways for their black customers, women from various towns, whose husbands had died, were heading for homelands they had never seen. Young men who had tried to establish themselves in cities like Pretoria and Johannesburg were being sent back into their Bantustans. Most pitiful, in many respects, were the young married women who had wanted to live with their husbands in a real home, but who had been sent away; their husbands would work in Johannesburg for six or eight or ten years without their wives. In the end they might get legal papers; they might not.

'What is so wrong,' one young woman with a college education obtained in the black nation of Lesotho said, 'is that in Alexandra the government will build a six-story building for black men working in the city, and a mile away, surrounded by a high fence, another six-story building for black women, and they honestly believe that they can keep those men locked up at night in their building and the women locked up in their building, with no communion between them. And this is supposed to continue forever. Men and women aged twenty are to live like bees in these cells, without love between them, in a temporary sojourn that could be prolonged for forty years.'

Late on the second day the train reached a small stationHilary Siding in eastern Cape Province, and there the women destined for Soetgrond were ordered into trucks. Mrs. Saltwood was determined to stay with Miriam, but a white policeman said that that was impossible, and he refused to allow her to ride on the government truck. So she watched in angry silence as Miriam's few belongings were thrown on the ground. Then she phoned the Saltwoods at De Kraal to borrow one of their cars, and when it arrived, she drove with Miriam sitting beside her.

They followed the route of the truck to its miserable destination, and shuddered as they saw how bleak the area was. Soetgrond became even more forbidding as rain began to fall and darkness deepened, with the car sliding this way and that in the gla.s.sy mud.

They came at last to a village, some two hundred flimsy houses recently erected on eroded land, without a tree, without one square of gra.s.s or garden. There was a store, lit with kerosene lamps, and the beginning of two roads, mostly mud. Evacuees who had been moved down during the preceding year gathered to greet the newcomers and give them such encouragement as was possible. A government official took note of names, and when he came to Mrs. Ngqika he said, 'You have Lot Two-four-three.'

'Where's that?' Mrs. Saltwood asked.

It was now evening, and the official pointed down one of the dark and muddy roads. 'Down there. You'll find a placard.'

'Is there anyone to help us with these things?' she asked.

'Help?' The official laughed. 'You carry your own. Down there.'