Whitethorn (79 page)

‘Tom, I guess all nations have long memories, but Africans never forget and seldom, if ever, forgive. With the Masai their wealth is measured in cattle and the land is communal, but with the Kikuyu more than any of the other forty tribes in Kenya, personal ownership of land is everything. They keep stock but are also maize growers and market gardeners, and they regard the soil as their wealth. Of all the tribes they are the most hardworking and prized among servants, but they are also an independent people and have never regarded the white
bwana
as absolute lord and master.' Mike looked up. ‘Personally I like them for this lack of subservience.' He laughed. ‘As you may expect, this is not a characteristic much admired by some of the settlers.'

I grinned. ‘I guess you can say the same of our Zulu people under Dingaan and Shaka who gave the white man, both Afrikaners and English, hell when they tried to intrude on or take possession of their land.'

‘That was, of course, in the nineteenth century,' he said. ‘Things in your country have been settled, if badly, a fair while now. But in Kenya the injustice is still within the memory of most adults.'

‘I'm not sure about that,' I ventured. ‘History evolves and accumulates and the longer the injustice, the more deeply felt the resentment.'

‘You keep surprising me, Tom, one doesn't come across too many left-wing liberals in the army or anywhere else in Africa for that matter.'

‘There's an old Xhosa saying, “People are people because of other people”,' I explained. ‘What it means is that we all belong to each other and can't exist without the one for the other. As a small child the person I loved the most in the world was a Zulu named Mattress. I think he probably taught me that there is no human pecking order, that God didn't specifically create a bunch of white-skinned people as the Afrikaners around me insisted and tell them they would forever rule the black world. Besides, if the anthropologists are correct, Africa is the cradle of mankind, and so we all started out black anyway.'

Mike spoke often of his imminent return to Kenya, and I must confess I'd wondered how someone as useful as he must be in the state of emergency could be sent to Rhodesia on a passive training assignment. One evening, while enjoying a beer or five in a bar in Bulawayo on weekend leave, he told me that his reason for being a special instructor in Rhodesia was because he was recovering from the accumulated effects of malaria. He then added, with what I took to be a somewhat bitter laugh, ‘And one or two other reasons.'

I waited until a beer or two later before asking, ‘Mike, you suggested it wasn't just the malaria that brought you to Rhodesia and the camp.'

He paused, both his hands clasped around his beer glass, and seeming to look directly into it. ‘It's difficult to talk about it, Tom.' He glanced at me. ‘In the work I was doing I was seeing both sides of the war, and frankly I was pretty disappointed in the way our side was conducting themselves.'

‘You mean the military, the British?'

‘The military only do what they're told to do, they don't generally make the rules, they simply follow instructions,' he replied.

‘What are you saying, the colonial administration . . . Britain tells them what to —?' He didn't allow me to finish.

‘Perhaps it's different in South Africa. I know more than half of the whites there actively hate the British. But in Kenya we have always seen Britain as the home of a benign and fair-minded parent. They are supposed to be an example of how a decent nation should behave towards lesser nations. You know, the whole Rudyard Kipling thing, generally summed up by the expression “It's simply not British, old chap!” Well, eliminate the expression “old chap”, and it is this prevailing sentiment that sums up the way young Kenyan kids like me were brought up to think.'

‘And now in the state of emergency this isn't proving to be the case?'

‘Exactly. Now all that's changed, the white Kenyans are the worst offenders, we've formed the Kenyan Regiment, that is the locals, chaps with whom I went to school. Chris Peterson is the commanding officer, once one of my best friends, now he's the main instigator of the white atrocities against the Mau Mau.' He looked at me, plainly distressed. ‘We, Peterson and myself, were brought up with the Kikuyu. They were our playmates, we trusted them, they trusted us, we never thought of it as a skin thing.'

‘But isn't that the case in any war? You know, throw out the moral scruples, forget the high-flown principles, play dirty and win at any cost?'

‘Maybe you're right, Tom, but there was and is so much we could have done before we started to employ our present tactics. The Kikuyu, as I've told you, have legitimate reasons for rising up in revolt. The maths simply don't work, at this very moment approximately 250 000 Kikuyu are restricted to 2000 square miles of land while 30 000 settlers occupy 12 000 square miles.' He pointed a finger at me. ‘Now remember, Tom, both whites and blacks grow the same things: coffee, maize and vegetables; and both are skilled farmers, and to a Kikuyu man land is everything, without it he becomes a non-person. Now the white settlers didn't buy this land in the first instance, it was granted to them by the colonial administration. The Highlands and parts of the Rift Valley, the two most fertile areas, were simply declared vacant land and taken from the Kikuyu and, in some cases, other tribes and given to the settlers. We're not talking about some nineteenth-century bloody conquest or tribal treaty! We're talking recently, from World War II onwards. We're talking about a stroke of the colonial pen!' He was plainly angry. ‘Ninety-seven thousand African Kenyans, many Kikuyu tribesmen, fought for the Allies in the war and returned to Kenya to nothing, bugger all! Their experience serving alongside white British soldiers as equals gave them a sense of entitlement. This, especially when white Kenyan returned soldiers and immigrating white men who'd fought in the war were given land grants, angered them greatly.'

I sighed. ‘Mike, it's not a unique situation, the apartheid government of South Africa is creating Bantu homelands as we speak. When it's all over, 88 per cent of the land will be owned by 12 per cent of the population who are white, while 10 per cent of the land will be owned by 75 per cent of the population who are black, with the remaining 2 per cent owned by the other 13 per cent of the population who are non-European. Justice and Africa are contradictory terms.'

Mike shook his head. ‘I know, but two wrongs don't make a right; here in Rhodesia things aren't all that equitable between black and white either and I guess that's why we're both here.' He grinned, and picking up his beer, drained it. ‘C'mon, Tom, that's enough politics, there's a dance on at the YWCA, let's check it out.'

‘But you haven't explained the other reasons why you're here,' I protested.

‘Another time! If I tell you now I'll just end up drunk and morbid.' He grinned. ‘Anyway, I'm your senior officer, Fitzsaxby, it would never do to be seen arriving back at the barracks legless, carried past the guardhouse by a bloody rifleman.'

‘Come to think of it, that wouldn't do me a whole heap of good either,' I said. ‘Fraternising with a permanent-force officer wouldn't exactly impress the guys in my hut, much less Sergeant Minnaar.'

Mike grinned. ‘Minnaar, eh, one of the old school, as blinkered as a brewer's horse. Rather die than be an officer, they think as sergeants they run the army and to some extent they're right.'

As we left the bar, Mike Finger put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Tom, I've been meaning to talk with you about that. Colonel Stone is anxious to have some of the brighter guys among your lot go through officer training; we made a list and your name is on it. What do you think?'

‘You mean after I've done my basic training?'

‘Yeah, we'd start after you'd completed the first two months, which is in a fortnight. That's all the stuff every recruit has to know. Then a further three months of officer training. It would mean an extra two months in the army.' We stopped on the pavement outside. ‘What do you think?'

It wasn't a hard decision to make. It would mean two more months away from a grizzly, and only a month before I would be due to leave the mines for good. It would certainly be more intellectually stimulating. I would have to check to see if the mines would continue to grant me my copper bonus. But in life it's never a good idea to accept a proposition too eagerly, that is, unless it is plainly stupid not to do so.

‘May I think about it?' I replied.

‘Sure thing. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it when I'm half-pissed anyway. When it comes from the commanding officer, kindly appear surprised.'

The dance at the YWCA was the usual polite meeting of the sexes with all the girls carefully chaperoned. A stout, somewhat imperious-looking elderly matron with pouter-pigeon breasts moved among the dancers to ensure there was a degree of daylight to be seen between the chests and thighs of each dancing couple. We arrived back at the barracks just before midnight curfew – Mike and I, officer and rifleman, sitting on separate seats in the bus.

You're probably wondering by now what happened when I finally confronted Pissy Vermaak? Well, let me begin by saying every barrack hut has one: the inept and stupid guy who is the butt of everyone's jokes and the bane of every sergeant and, in particular, Sergeant Minnaar who ran our hut. It became abundantly clear in the first month of training that Pissy Vermaak was the cross we were destined to carry. Pissy spent more time on CB, reporting to the guardhouse in full kit, or on
jankers
with full pack or trudging around the parade ground, than the rest of us combined. He was always exhausted, so his kit would be in disarray, his locker untidy and his bunk a mess. Parts of his uniform, such as a single gaiter or a piece of webbing, would go mysteriously missing or he'd forget to shave or to polish his boots and, as well, he possessed two left feet. He used his hands a lot in order to communicate and possessed a high-pitched and simpering tone of voice, coupled with a somewhat effeminate manner, so that everyone was convinced he was a queer. He was also an Afrikaner, where being a sodomite is regarded as the one irredeemable sin in the eyes of God, and meant automatic consignment to hell, repentance and salvation being out of the question. In other words, the poor bastard hadn't a hope in the company of young, mostly Afrikaner guys who, often as not, found themselves on the receiving end of a group punishment brought about by some Pissy misadventure.

I shamefully confess that at first I didn't give a shit. While I don't think I took pleasure at seeing him suffer, I can't say I was over-sympathetic. But after a while it was plain to see that someone had to help the poor bugger. That is, bring some semblance of order into his life. In other words, do what the army was trying to do but was failing miserably in the attempt. In fact, the more Pissy was punished the more exhausted and disheartened he became, and therefore more of a hindrance to the progress of our hut. Carrying Pissy Vermaak was becoming an unacceptable burden.

I guess, as in the School of Mines, it didn't take too long for the guys in the hut to single me out as perhaps a bit more educated than most of them. When Pissy had finally been the cause of both our first and second weekend leave being cancelled, the first two we'd been granted since arriving at Llewellyn Barracks, I knew it was time to do something. The guys were going stir-crazy and were ready to lynch Pissy. I felt I probably had the unspoken authority, so I called a late-afternoon meeting. Pissy, as usual, was running around the parade ground with full pack as punishment for yet another misdemeanour. We all knew the drill, he'd return in an hour or so and lie on his bunk sobbing, and often enough would go without his evening meal. In my opinion he was getting close to a complete mental breakdown.

‘Okay, you guys, what are we going to do about Vermaak?' I asked.

‘Kill the fucker!' someone replied to all-round laughter and a general nodding of heads.

‘No, seriously, it's affecting us all.'

‘He needs a fuckin' nanny,' someone called out.

This was exactly what I wanted to hear. ‘You're right, there's thirty of us in the hut, we've got two-and-a-bit months to go, that's two days for each of us.'

‘What are you saying, man? We got to look after him, wipe his arse? He's a fuckin' queer, man!' a big
boer
named Piet Kosterman yelled out.

I ignored this remark. ‘It's not a big deal, hey. Just see he cleans his boots, check his gear, see he tidies his locker, showers, shaves, his bunk is in order, rifle cleaned . . .'

‘Wipe his nose, take him for a shit, wipe his arse,' Gert Boeman added. ‘I wouldn't touch him with a fucking barge pole, man. The bastard smells of piss!'

‘Look, I'll go first and nanny him for a week, see if it helps, if it doesn't work we'll try something else.'

Piet Kosterman shook his head. ‘I dunno, man. He's a fucking homosexual, why don't we just break his arm, hey?'

At six feet seven inches Kosterman was the biggest guy in our hut and fairly thick, but he had the support of most of the Afrikaners, who comprised two-thirds of us.

‘Because if he blabs to Minnaar we'll all be on a charge, Piet. Grievous bodily harm, that's six months minimum in the bloody military clink, man!'