Whitethorn (91 page)

On the way to the Odendaal farm in the Karoo, a journey that took up most of the remainder of the day, the subject of
Skattebol
,
Oom
Jannie and
Tante
Hester's youngest daughter, who he'd once earmarked for me, came up. In fact, I brought it up myself, wanting to stack the decks early in case he still harboured the ambition of having me as his son-in-law. ‘And what news of
Skattebol
?' I asked.

Oom
Jannie turned to
Tante
Hester. ‘You see, this one never forgets!' Then he glanced at me briefly before returning his eyes to the road. ‘
Ag
, Tom, it's a sad story, but then again also a happy one, our
Skattebol
also did what Anna went and did. Remember?'

‘Became pregnant out of wedlock?' I said, putting it as politely as I could.

‘
Ja
, but this time, even worse, it happened with a
Rooinek,
a student from Cape Town University. He's a nice boy but he can't even speak Afrikaans. He's from London and is this architect out here studying Cape Dutch houses. Why does a man want to study old buildings, hey? They can't build them like in the olden days, it's just all this modern rubbish they going in for nowadays.' He seemed to be thinking, then said, ‘The Odendaal family has been in this land a long time.
Skattebol
is the ninth generation and in the family Bible only one
Engelsman
.'
Oom
Jannie then quoted the words in the family tree in High Dutch, which, roughly translated, were, ‘Samuel Thelonius Morris, Sea Captain, Cornwall, 1749, husband to Johanna Maria Odendaal, no issue'. ‘That time we were lucky, the good Lord cut off that branch so we wouldn't suffer. We got an
Engelsman
who fired blanks! You'd think we should have learned our lesson the first time, hey? Now we gone and made the same mistake again.'

‘What?' I asked, not understanding. ‘I thought you said
Skattebol
was pregnant?'

‘No, the baby is here already, a nice healthy child, thank the Lord,'
Tante
Hester said calmly.

‘So what's the unhappy part?' I asked.

‘This time the
Engelsman wasn't
firing blanks!'

We all laughed and then I asked, ‘And the happy part?'

‘Three happy parts. It's a boy child and they in love, two turtledoves
and
they married, so no disgrace. But the
Dominee
says, “No more shotgun weddings, Jannie. Two times is enough, God is not mocked, you hear!” '
Oom
Jannie chuckled. ‘I told him, “That's orright,
Dominee
, all the bullets have been fired, I haven't got any more daughters.” '

I spent two weeks with
Oom
Jannie and
Tante
Hester, and by the time I left these two dear and lovely people and met members of their family who came to visit, I felt thoroughly grounded. We'd spent the warm summer nights around the Steinway and I'd become re-acquainted with all the old
boere
musiek
and songs. I was back home among a unique breed, Afrikaners, a people that were big-hearted, generous and loyal to a fault on the one hand, and narrow as a cut from a razorblade on the other.

Oom
Jannie and
Tante
Hester exemplified all that is kind, loving and good in their people, yet it was readily apparent from the way they talked and behaved that they shared the Afrikaner racial antipathy towards the black people. This was despite the fact that they were paternalistic and caring to such old family retainers as Martha and several of the older men who worked on the sprawling Karoo sheep farm.

Three hundred years in Africa had turned them into the white tribe I had heard so often described from the pulpit by the
Dominee
in my childhood. Like all tribes, the
Volk
were more African in their ideas and attitudes than those they retained from distant European roots. The
laager
mentality and conquest that had won them their new tribal lands still existed. In their minds the ox wagons remained drawn in a tight circle against the black hordes and the God-given superiority and rights of the white man were to be defended at any cost. The concept of equal rights for all of the people of South Africa was anathema, as the doctrine of apartheid so stridently testified.

Of course, I knew all of this instinctively and it was just that I'd been away from it for a while, and it was different in its blatancy and openness to the rancorous and secret racism I'd experienced in Kenya. Britain's assumed right to expropriate the best land from the Kikuyu and give it to the whites, then to hold it at gunpoint and by murder, was disguised and explained by an elaborate exercise in obscurantism. They had devised a propaganda machine that pumped out high-quality mendacity to vindicate thousands of acts of institutional barbarism. The public hanging of over 1000 black men testified to this and was only one small example of it. They nevertheless continued to extol the virtues of decency, fair play, God, Queen and Empire, whereas the Afrikaner attitude, inexcusable as it was, was openly practised and vaingloriously defended.

Racism, wherever and however it occurs, is a repulsive, endemic and deeply atavistic human characteristic that appears to be present in most of humankind. Whether racism is openly practised or hidden, it is inexcusable. I felt that I had a better chance of obtaining justice for Mattress, a Zulu pig boy in South Africa than I would ever have for a Kikuyu goatherd in Kenya.

If, on the one hand, I found myself returning to my roots and the comfortable presence of
Oom
Jannie and
Tante
Hester, on the other my old ambivalence for the
Volk
returned. I had been with my host a week when late one afternoon, while enjoying a beer with him on the
stoep
of the homestead, the conversation inevitably turned to politics. What followed was not very different to all the other discussions I'd been involved in over the years. The blacks needed to be kept in their place, as they were growing much too cheeky for their own good. The African National Congress was a terrorist organisation and communist-inspired and should be hunted down and eliminated to the last member. The Nationalist Government policies were the right ones and the new
Bantustans
planned were a testament to this correct thinking and exemplified the principles of
baasskap
, leadership and the correctness of apartheid. The concept that the majority of the land rightly belonged to the white man as only he could keep it productive, and that sharing it equally with the
kaffirs
was as good as destroying it forever, was a notion I'd heard since the cradle. ‘If you give baboons good land all you get back is soil erosion.' And so on,
ad infinitum
.

South African political views held by the majority of white people at that time, with a few notable and brave exceptions, were predictable and seldom polarised, even among the new Liberal Party that had opened its membership to all races and demanded equal rights for non-whites. But as usual there were qualifications and the old paternalism reared its ugly head. These so-called ‘equal rights' would only be given to ‘all civilised people', a neat cop-out that allowed the Liberals to have a bet each way. It was just that the Afrikaners were less subtle and more strident about expressing their racist views, while many so-called liberal whites sat wobbling on the political fence ready to fly off in whatever direction the wind blew.

Although, I don't suppose I could talk. I was back in my own country, which was on the verge of becoming a police state. I knew that I would soon be called on to make a stand. But I also knew that if I was to bring the Van Schalkwyk brothers and Mevrou to trial, a difficult enough task, I must steer well clear of the immediate taint of politics. I must be seen to be demanding
justice
for a humble farm worker and, at the same time, to be squeaky clean on the political front. In any other society my actions would not be questioned, but in South Africa, my ulterior and, in particular, political motive would be the cause of immediate speculation.

Listening to my host extolling the usual line of political cant, I decided that I couldn't continue to lend credence to
Oom
Jannie's blustering and bombastic jingoism, although I knew that I would achieve absolutely nothing by attempting to contradict the dogma
Oom
Jannie so vehemently proselytised. A
Boer
is by nature a stubborn creature but in politics he becomes intractable. I knew if I could bring the Mattress case to the High Court it would probably get national newspaper coverage, specifically in the Afrikaner press. So I decided to test the reaction to such a trial on my host. He was, after all, a salt-of-the-earth type, an Afrikaner to his bootstraps.
Oom
Jannie was, politically speaking, the Afrikaner equivalent of the English settler, of Jack Devine and Gladys the Man-eater of the Thika Club.

I waited for an appropriate time when the talk of politics seemed to have wound down.
Oom
Jannie sat quietly puffing on his
meerschaum
, looking out into the rapidly concluding sunset. ‘
Oom
Jannie, I would like to ask your advice on a matter.'

The old man looked surprised. ‘
Jinne
, man, if it's about a woman don't bother, hey? No man understands what's going on in a woman's head. If it's about sheep,
that
I know. Also I know there's nothing going on in a sheep's head.'

I laughed. ‘No, it's about being an Afrikaner, about the
Volk
. It's about bringing an attitude to peculiar subject matter.'

‘Tom, I don't know about attitude to peculiar subject matter. You the educated one around here. I'm just a sheep farmer.'

‘
Oom
Jannie, I want to tell you a long story. I'll try and make it as short as possible, but I'm warning you, it could go on for a while.'

‘Then I better go get some more beer, hey?' He rose heavily, and with a sigh from his
riempie
chair, went into the house, returning with two large bottles of lager. ‘Now we got electricity the beer is nice and cold for a change,' he said, smiling as he handed me one of the quart-sized bottles.

For the next hour I told him the story of The Boys Farm, of Mattress and Tinker, Pissy Vermaak, Fonnie du Preez, Mevrou, Frikkie Botha, Meneer Prinsloo, Sergeant Van Niekerk, and finally the murder of Mattress and how it had all occurred. I left out such details as the canned-fruit jar containing Mevrou's grisly brandy-pickled exhibit and Meneer Prinsloo's role as a paedophile. Then I told him about the sabotage attempt by Frikkie and the six Van Schalkwyk brothers in the
Stormjaers
, and the fact that they'd admitted to him that they'd murdered Mattress. I outlined how they'd planned to derail the train from Rhodesia and the subsequent explosion that had left Frikkie without a face and with a twisted and permanently broken body, and how the six brothers had left him to die under the railway culvert.

‘I'm sorry to have been so longwinded,' I apologised, coming to the end of the story.

‘No, man, you told it very good. You a born storyteller, Tom. What can I say? Such a terrible thing happening to you. I can hardly believe it.' He reached over and extended his hand and I shook it. ‘Tom, from the first time I saw you I liked you. You a
ware Boer
.' Then suddenly growing misty-eyed, he added,
‘
I would be proud to have you as my son and Hester thinks the same.' He drained the last of his bottle of beer from his glass in an attempt to hide his emotion. ‘
Skattebol
, when she came the other day all the way from Cape Town to say hello to you, you could see she was sorry she didn't wait.
Ag
, I should have given her a blast of birdshot up the arse so then she couldn't lie on her back for that Cape Dutch
Rooinek
! But what can you do? These days children don't listen to their parents, they always know better.' His free hand flew up into the air. ‘
Boom
! Another shotgun wedding happens!'

‘Thank you,
Oom
Jannie,' I laughed, handing him the bottle he'd given me, which was still two-thirds full. ‘I would also be proud to
be
your son. But I must remind you, I'm
not
an Afrikaner . . . and that's where all the problems began.'

‘If anyone tells you that you not a
ware Boer,
you tell them to come and see me, you hear?' He shook his head slowly and refilled his beer glass. ‘How can somebody call a boy
Voetsek
?'
Oom
Jannie clucked his tongue. ‘That's terrible, man!'

Oom
Jannie was plainly feeling sorry for me but not quite knowing how to adequately express his feelings. Before he could sympathise any further and at the risk of sounding impolite, I said, ‘Now,
Oom
Jannie, as an Afrikaner and a
boer
, I have to ask you an important question.'

‘You the lawyer, Tom. Feel free, ask away,' he said, grateful to escape the prolonged task he may have felt sympathy for me demanded.

‘That's just it, you see. I intend to bring the Van Schalkwyk brothers to trial for murder. Do you think this is the right and just thing to do?'

Oom
Jannie looked momentarily puzzled. ‘But they didn't kill him! He just lost his face in the explosion and they didn't make that explosion happen, he did that himself, an accident. No, man! No way, Tom! They
Stormjaers
, they
our
freedom fighters in the war, hit and run!' He drew a quick breath. ‘Frikkie Botha took his chances, in war bad things happen.' He paused. ‘But I admit they shouldn't have run away and left their comrade lying by the railway.'