The Covenant (149 page)

This second visit had one by-product neither Detleef nor Piet had intended; Micah, left in charge of the three empty wagons, drove
them out to a different section of Johannesburg where his people clustered. It was called Sophiatown, and when Micah came back to tell Detleef where he had been, Van Doorn decided to go with him to see how urban blacks lived.

Sophiatown had come into existence some two decades earlier, planned as a suburb for whites but spurned by them when a sewage works was located nearby. It was only four and a half miles from the center of Johannesburg, and the owner of the land had to do something with it, so he started renting and selling land to the blacks who were pouring in from the countryside to fill jobs in the postwar industrial boom.

For Detleef it was a journey into hell, for Sophiatown had no proper streets, few proper houses and no proper water supply. It was a mélange of prostitutes, tsotsis, and decent mothers trying to maintain a home against phenomenal odds while their husbands worked ten and twelve hours for a daily wage of twenty pennies.

When Detleef looked at Sophiatown he saw a festering sore, dark and malignant, threatening to spread over a clean white city. It reached dangerously toward Afrikaner communities, as if it intended to engulf them. He was shocked to learn that blacks could actually own land here, which meant that they could stay permanently. “A hideous sore,” he muttered to himself. “It must be removed.”

This conclusion was intensified when he saw the home Nxumalo’s relatives occupied. The Magubanes had a house with walls of real wood and a secure watertight roof made of paraffin tins. One of the Magubanes told him, “Yes, when our people get the money they will make a lovely place of Sophiatown. Just like the homes of the rich people in Parktown.”

“Where do your people work?” Detleef asked.

“Offices, factories. And if the new rules come for the mines, thousands of our people back in the kraals will be eager for jobs. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand if you need them.”

So Detleef left Sophiatown with the certain knowledge that the blacks would insist upon improving their lot, but he saw that this would be possible only at the expense of the white Afrikaners already trapped in poverty. He found that Troxel and the other white miners were willing to express themselves quite forcefully: “We want this to be a white nation run by whites and not a black nation run by blacks.” Detleef could not imagine the huddled blacks of Sophiatown running anything; they would be lucky if they survived. His sympathies
lay with the white miners, and when the callous owners announced even more stringent rules which might cost four thousand additional white men their jobs, he knew there would have to be a strike, although he himself did not want to support any moves which might turn this country into a soviet.

When the strike began, he knew he ought to hurry back to the safety of Vrymeer, but he was hypnotized by the intricacy of the struggle and curious to see how it turned out. So Piet Krause, whose job made it logical for him to stay on the scene in Vrededorp, asked the Troxels whether he and Detleef could board with them during the trouble, and the destitute Afrikaners were eager to have paying guests.

This was a battle much more fundamental than the pro-German rebellion of 1914. Miners were fighting for survival; owners were fighting for financial control; and the government, led by Jan Christian Smuts, was fighting for continuation of an orderly society. The hatred Krause and Van Doorn felt for Smuts clouded their vision of what was right, and they tended to cheer for whatever group opposed him.

It was real combat. Detleef turned a corner and saw sixteen civilians mowed down by machine-gun fire. A government building was dynamited and fourteen soldiers were killed. Police were gunned down, and on one awful day airplanes flew over the city, dropping bombs on concentrations of miners.

The death toll was fifty, then a hundred, then a hundred and fifty, with food running low and arson becoming common. There was talk of shutting off water, and children in the streets were slain by stray bullets.

“Why are Afrikaners fighting Afrikaners?” Detleef asked in anguish, and Troxel growled, “Because we Afrikaners want to keep this nation white.” He was a brave man, and when General Smuts in total frustration warned that heavy artillery would shell the heart of Vrededorp at eleven the next morning, he refused to move his family. “Shells matter nothing,” he muttered, but when they began to fall, monstrous things intended for shattering forts, he quivered. Detleef, comforting the Troxel children, could not believe that his government was doing this, and as the dreadful concussions continued he thought: This is insanity. There must be a more sensible way.

In the midst of the barrage, Troxel left his shelter and ran directly across the open square where the shells were falling. He was heading
for strike headquarters, and when he returned through the smoldering debris he was weeping: “They committed suicide!”

“Who?” Detleef asked.

“Our leaders. The Englishman, the other. Pistol shots through the head.”

The armed rebellion was over, with the competition between the very poor Afrikaners in Vrededorp and the totally poor blacks in Sophiatown no closer to settlement than when the strike began. Only one poverty-stricken Afrikaner came out of the affair better than when he went in: after the fighting, when Nxumalo reassembled the three wagons for the trip back to Vrymeer, and Detleef saw them standing empty, he impulsively ran to the Troxel house and said, “Come with me. This town is no place for an Afrikaner.” And on the spur of the moment he and Piet Krause threw into one wagon the pitiful collection of goods this family had accumulated after ten hard years in the city; it did not begin to fill it.

“They can use the De Groot place,” Detleef said as the bewildered cavalcade started eastward. He had seen Johannesburg and was appalled.

One Sunday, Detleef received the distinct impression in church that Reverend Brongersma was preaching directly to him, not in the long ordinary passages of the sermon, but whenever something of special import had to be said. Then Brongersma would stare in his direction, sometimes looking at others in his vicinity but again and again coming back to Detleef to make his points.

He said nothing about this to Maria and even doubted if she had been aware of it, but when on two following Sundays the same thing happened, he asked casually on Monday night, “Did you notice anything strange in church yesterday?”

“No, except that Reverend Brongersma seemed to be preaching to you more than anyone else.”

“You noticed it?” When she nodded, he said, “Did you not see it on the past Sundays?” and she said that she had. “Why didn’t you speak?” he asked, and she said, “I thought that perhaps you had done something wrong and would tell me at such time as you deemed best.” In some anger he asked her what she thought he had done wrong, and she laughed.

“Detleef, I only said
perhaps
. You’re not the kind of man who
does wrong things. And if you have done something, it couldn’t be very big.”

“There you go. What have I done?”

“Detleef, I only said
if
.”

But he was troubled, and every time his brother-in-law visited the farm and asked probing questions, Detleef became even more irritated, especially since the dominee continued preaching at him.

He was about to confront his two tormentors when Piet said abruptly one day, “Detleef. Can you come to a special meeting tonight?” Hoping that the mystery would be revealed, he said quickly, “Yes,” and that evening he was taken to a house he had never taken much notice of before, where the owner, a man named Frykenius, sat waiting, with Reverend Brongersma standing by a table.

“Sit down, Detleef,” Frykenius said. “We want to ask you some questions.”

“What have I done?”

“Nothing, except being a good citizen. We want to find out how good.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!” Detleef protested, and this was ignored.

“Tell me,” Frykenius said. “In the rebellion against the war in Europe, would you have fought on, even though your father was killed?”

“I would have fought the English forever.”

“Do you speak Afrikaans in your home?”

“Nothing else.”

“Do you insist that your children speak it?”

“I allow them to speak no English.”

On and on came the questions, covering all aspects of what might be called his political, emotional and patriotic life. At the end his three interrogators asked him to step out in the yard, and while he looked at the glorious stars of the Southern Cross, they whispered among themselves. After about fifteen minutes Piet Krause came out and said with obvious pleasure, “Detleef, please come in!”

When he entered the room, both Frykenius and Brongersma rose to greet him: “Detleef. You are one of us.” When he asked what this signified, Frykenius said, “Sit down, Brother.” And when he was in his chair the three men, speaking alternately, informed him that a powerful and secret band of brothers, a Broederbond, had been quietly operating for the past five years, accomplishing much good.
After the most careful investigation of his credentials by men in Pretoria, he was being offered a chance to join.

“Are you members?” he asked.

Frykenius said, “I helped start it.” This seemed strange to Detleef, for he could recall no instance in which this quiet man had ever played a major role in anything; he knew that he attended church, but was not even an elder. He had heard that he had ridden with the Venloo Commando but had accomplished nothing of note. He ran the butcher shop in town, but obviously never made much money. And he never spoke in public. But it was clear that he was now in command.

“Reverend Brongersma has belonged almost from the first,” Frykenius said, “and Piet here, one of our best, has been with us for three years.”

“What would I be supposed to do?”

“Advance the Afrikaner,” Frykenius said.

“I already try to do that. But how?”

Piet was eager to explain, but was interrupted by Frykenius: “I already know the answers to these two questions, but we must have sworn statements. ‘Have you ever been divorced?’ No. That’s good. ‘Is your wife English?’ No again. You’re eligible.”

“Morally, we’re very strict,” Piet said.

Satisfied that Detleef had committed no serious breaches, the three men placed before him a program of simple integrity: “Whatever you do, from this moment till you die, must work toward making the Afrikaner supreme in this country. In politics you must elect men who will carry us away from English domination.”

“That I would like,” Detleef said.

“In education you must insist that every teacher become an agent for the supremacy of Afrikaans. They must teach our national history in the patterns we provide.”

“In the armed forces,” Krause said excitedly, “we must remove every English officer. In government we’ve got to clean out the English officeholders.”

“But it’s in the spiritual realm,” Brongersma said, “that we must do our hardest work. Cultural societies. Work groups. Festivals. Patriotic gatherings. If there is to be a speaker, it must be one of us.”

“You saw the fighting in Johannesburg,” Frykenius said. “Jan Christian Smuts using Afrikaner soldiers to fight Afrikaner workmen. That must never again be allowed.”

“Can we drive Slim Jannie from office?” Detleef asked.

“We must,” Frykenius said. “Are you with us?” When Detleef nodded, as enthusiastically as if he were going to war with General de Groot or to a rugby game against New Zealand, Frykenius in his dry, unemotional voice administered the oath of the Broederbond, and Detleef swore to uphold its secrecy, advance its purposes, and live each moment of his life so as to achieve the dominance of the Afrikaner. That night he rode home with a greater sense of mission than he had ever before experienced. The other war that General de Groot had so often referred to was under way and he had enlisted for life.

In the weeks that followed, Detleef developed an enormous respect for his brother-in-law. He was no longer the somewhat flighty schoolteacher or the man who had quit the Vrymeer farm after discarding responsibility; instead, Piet Krause showed himself as a fine strategist. Frykenius was a staunch administrator and Brongersma a source of the spiritual strength which such a movement needed, but Krause was downright brilliant: “Let us look honestly at the condition of the two groups. The English are educated; we aren’t. The English control the money; we don’t. The English are in command of the armed forces; we hold no high appointments. The English know how to manage; we don’t. And above all, the English are supported by an entire empire; we stand alone.”

When Frykenius protested that the Afrikaners had strengths, too, Krause brushed him aside, and Detleef noticed that whereas Frykenius issued operational commands, which Piet obeyed, in the field of ideas Piet accepted guidance from no one. “Yes, we have strengths,” he agreed impatiently, “but not the ones you think.”

And he outlined a program of daring character: “We can’t take control of business away from the English. They’re too clever to allow that. And we can’t dictate in politics yet. But I can see two areas which employ a lot of people where we can dominate. Trains and schools. From now on, every trainman who is hired must be an Afrikaner. Every schoolteacher, too.” He explained that if the Broederbond could control the railway union, it would have a solid base from which to operate; and if it controlled the teachers, it could monitor what the young were being taught: “Out of a hundred boys leaving school, ninety would be potential Broederbond members.”

“No, our membership must always be restricted,” Frykenius said, and when Detleef was taken to meet with cells in other areas, he
found that this was true. Of a hundred members, thirty were schoolteachers, thirty were predikants, and the other forty were mostly farmers of solid position in their communities. There were, of course, no members who were bankers, lawyers or elected officials, for few Afrikaners had yet attained such positions.

After three years of the most exciting participation, Detleef saw with satisfaction that every teacher appointed in a vast area had been an Afrikaner, and eleven of the best had been permitted to join the Broederbond. Of a hundred new employees of the railway system, all had been Afrikaners. There had been musical exhibitions arranged by the Bond, art displays, barbecues, lecture series and sports events. Whenever an Afrikaner in rural South Africa stepped out of his house, he fell unwittingly under the influence of the Broederbond, but it was the new proposal offered by Piet Krause to a plenary session in Pretoria that moved the Bond onto an even more effective level: