Kraal Read online

  Fenek Solère

  Kraal

  Arktos

  London 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Arktos Media Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  ISBN

  978-1-912975-11-2 (Softcover)

  978-1-912975-12-9 (Ebook)

  Editing, cover and layout

  John Bruce Leonard

  For PD

  Kraal

  Chapter 1

  Look at the map of South Africa, and, there, in the very centre of the British possessions, like a stone in a peach, lies the great stretch of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply into Africa?

  — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The family’s small holding lay at the end of a long dirt track about five miles south of town. Ten hectares of dry barely arable grassland. A curling wind-pump creaking as it span endlessly in the sky. Foul-smelling stables and timber outbuildings crowding in around a stone-white farmhouse. As Gijs approached he could hear the wind playing through the galvanised roof. He could see the bodies of the family’s dogs, Corlie and Sindie, lying black and still amongst the clumps of pink geraniums. A spiralling cloud of smoke lifting like a Zulu’s vengeful fist across the veldt.

  There was a police 4x4 parked in the driveway. He watched the languid movements of officers Sentletse Mthethwa and Themba Diakanyo as they emerged like two ebony tribal carvings from under the shade of the stoep into the sunlight, harbingers of the worst possible news.

  ‘Mr de Wet?’ they harmonised in English with a heavy Xhosa undertow.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Gijs demanded to know. ‘Where are my parents, my wife and my daughter?’ He looked on as Mthethwa and Diakanyo’s dark brown eyes first glanced at each other and then turned back to him.

  ‘Well you see,’ Mthethwa began, the whites of his eyes swelling, ‘there is a difficult thing...’

  ‘Very difficult!’ Diakanyo emphasised, his head nodding knowingly.

  ‘An incident you see,’ Mthethwa continued.

  ‘An incident!’ Diakanyo echoed. Gijs pushed past them, running towards the flapping door, a sense of terror rip-sawing through his bowels, tears sliding down his cheeks as he called out his wife’s name — ‘Betje... Betje!’

  Dubula ibhunu! Dubula Dubula!

  — from ‘One Bullet, One Farmer’

  It had all begun earlier that afternoon with Gijs’ taciturn father, Willem de Wet, discovering a group of young boys skulking in his son’s yard. Betje’s German Shepherd bitch was roused by the smell, snuffling and panting at his feet.

  ‘There, there, Corlie,’ Willem reassured the animal, ‘no need to be alarmed.’ He watched while the leader of the young Xhosa gang, wearing a multicoloured woollen hat, shimmied along the white wall, stretching up as high as he could on his bare feet to spy on Betje breast feeding through the nursery window. His hand waving suggestively, daring the others to come and look at the pretty white woman sitting in her underwear in the afternoon sun. It was obvious he had played this covert game before. ‘Dirty little monkey!’ Willem muttered to himself as he opened the kitchen door and released Corlie to chase down her prey.

  The boys screamed and scattered. The pervert at the window gave out a yelp when he realised he had been discovered and tried to run but tripped clownishly over himself, legs wrapped in unslung trousers, his wet black piel slapping against striding thighs. Almost instantaneously the dog was up to him, fangs sinking deep into calf flesh. The target struck out with a clenched fist but Corlie looped and harried her victim, bringing him down in a cloud of dust time and time again.

  Willem was seeing red. ‘Bloody kaffir,’ he shouted, ‘I’ll have you!’ The old man swung a leg, giving the boy a full rugby drop-kick in bony ribs, sending him sprawling sideways. Once he had recovered his breath, the boy twisted up from the floor and screamed, ‘Boskak!’

  Willem made an attempt to lunge for the boy’s collar, to square him up for a punch to his jaw, but even as he did so, Maartje, his wife of nearly thirty years, who was suddenly standing beside him, cut him to the quick:

  ‘Willem, have you gone mad?’ she shouted. ‘Corlie, leave! Get out! Out now!’ Maartje gripped fast on the dog’s leather collar and yanked it with all her strength, temporarily lifting the animal up onto its back legs, its teeth snapping on empty air. Green phlegm was streaming from the nose of the township tsotsi. ‘We kill you!’ he swore, pointing to his now distant troop of teenage raiders standing on the scrubland beyond the gate. Maartje took him in her arms.

  ‘I have medicine,’ she said reassuringly.

  ‘Maartje, for God’s sake be careful, most of these squatter kids are riddled with HIV!’ Willem pleaded. ‘This little bugger was watching Betje feed the baby and masturbating himself!’

  ‘He’s only a child!’ Maartje insisted, shielding him in her maternal way from Willem’s hard-nosed glare. ‘We need to reason with him, not attack him!’ In a single antagonistic movement the boy scrambled out of the grandmother’s grip. Resentfully rising to his full height he stumbled off to join his party, who, growing more confident now their leader had freed himself, had clambered back into the garden to throw stones at the house. The further their hero moved away from the settlers, the more exaggerated his swagger. Performing hip-hop moves for his cackling hyena audience. ‘We will cut the throat of whiteness,’ he screeched, drawing a finger across his Adam’s apple.

  Willem looked at the catatonic expressions on the defiant stone-age faces; while mocking voices rose to threaten them from a distance.

  ‘Reason with them,’ Willem spat. ‘They’re mompies, barely double digit IQs in men’s bodies!’

  ←→

  By late afternoon they had almost forgotten the earlier intrusion when three men came striding towards the house, knocking loudly on the door, demanding to talk to the cuiter. Betje answered them respectfully, asking them why they wanted to see her father, whilst caging her agitated canines behind her bare legs.

  ‘Who are they?’ Maartje called from the kitchen. Willem, partially overhearing the conversation, shrugged and turned the television over to catch the cricket. There was the sound of muffled conversation. Then he heard the dogs fly into a sudden rage and two or three short reports of a carbine. Leaping up from the settee Willem was confronted in the hallway by a flat expressionless face atop a Mandela-emblazoned shirt. The butt of a handgun cracked down on his thinning scalp.

  ←→

  When he came around, Willem was lying face down on blood-stained tiles.

  ‘Maartje!’ he shouted, ‘Maartje!’ But there was no answer. Then Willem was greeted by a large man holding a bottle of bourbon and smoking one of his cigars.

  ‘OK, baas,’ the black ruminated maliciously, ‘want to join the party?’

  ‘Where is Maartje?’ Willem demanded shrilly, struggling to his feet. His tormentor shuffle danced, took a shot from the bottle and pushed him at gun point into the main room.

  ‘We take good care of poeslap, don’t you worry baas!’ he laughed, gesturing to his friends.

  ‘You want these broekies, baas?’ said the one in the Mandela shirt as he played with a pair of woman’s bloodied panties.

  ‘What have you done with Betje?’ Willem croaked. Vocal chords straining to breaking point.

  ‘They be partying with their anties out, baas!’ The bourbon drinker was laughing. ‘They are izifebe!’ Willem knew enough Zulu
to recognise the meaning.

  ‘They are not prostitutes!’

  With that, the semi-naked third man, who had come out of the guest bedroom last, pushed him to the carpet and began pouring lighter fuel from a plastic bottle he had liberated from Gijs’s garage over the broken old white man at his feet.

  ‘You feel cold baas?’ he slurred drunkenly, flicking a zippo, dropping it gently. Willem’s skin crackling like chicken fat in the oven.

  The first thing he noticed upon entering the house was the stale after-taste of unwashed bodies. Then there was the excrement and urine where the insurgents had relieved themselves wherever and whenever they wanted, staining and scenting the property for future possession. He had half expected such animalistic marking, having heard and read of similar acts during farm invasions before, but it could never have prepared Gijs for the feeling of contamination that now overwhelmed him.

  He moved through the kitchen where the refrigerator door hung open, bottles of spilled milk going rancid on the floor. Then kicking aside the mountains of cans and cartons, he found his father, a charcoal figure, hands and legs twisted in torment like an artefact from Pompeii, clothes and flesh reduced to brown ash on the singed carpet. Gijs could tell the braai had been long and painful, while the jackals drank and prodded with a poker. He leaned on the doorframe and vomited profusely.

  Eyes widening with madness he pushed by the overturned chairs blocking the entrance to the guest bedroom. Gijs was sobbing, shouting his wife’s name over and over, ‘Betje… Betje!’ The plastic door handle fell away in his hand, inside the corpse of his mother lay splay-legged, the hilt of a dagger jutting out from between her spread knees.

  Now he knew for sure. The realisation struck him like a heavyweight’s right hook. Betje could never have escaped, could not have run away on her long slim legs across the veldt. She would have stayed with their baby, their newborn, just three months old, and fought like a true Afrikaner woman, punching and kicking out to the last. He dreaded to think what those beautiful blue eyes had seen before they closed that final time, before hope had gone, before —

  Gijs flung himself up the staircase on all fours, scrabbling towards their bedroom. The landing smelled of dagga. The door was wide open, the window ajar and the white cotton curtains were sailing around in the breeze. Just for a moment he caught himself holding out for a miracle, his lungs drawing in the sweet tint of acacia in the air. But then he saw her naked on the piss-soaked bedsheets. Her head was split open, a cleavage running right though her cranium where they had axed her after taking their pleasure. Iron pliers lay on the bedside table. Pearly-white teeth scattered on the crimson-speckled pillow. To his right in an alcove by the en-suite he noticed the crib and shaking peaked over the threaded brim. Little Agetha’s face was blue. A cellophane wrap covering her nose and mouth, tendril blonde curls twisting in the down-draft from the window.

  And then he cried and cried again, until he thought he would do nothing else, ever again.

  ←→

  Everyone was very good, very understanding. The Blood Sisters had come to clean up after the event. All the arrangements were made and the day of the de Wet family funeral came and went without incident. Every pew in the church was filled out of respect, men bowing in sombre suits, women in traditional headscarves and bonnets as colourful as calla lilies in springtime.

  When the service of remembrance commenced the congregation’s ashen faces suddenly turned towards the carved pulpit where the old reverend, Gerhardus Heyns of the Dutch Reformed Church, spoke of the iniquity of mankind and the forgiveness of God. Gijs could see the flashing eyes and the curly white beard of the preacher move back and for before him as he thundered and cursed, arms whirling like a Sjambok in a thunderstorm. But he was not really listening. Forgiveness was without meaning. Gijs could barely function. The sympathetic bush doctor who prescribed temazepam on demand, hoping that things would improve in a month or so, had fortunately provided sufficient sedative to nullify the worst of the pain.

  After the internment a few close friends accompanied Gijs home and sat and ate cold chicken and boiled wild rice around Betje’s dining table in frigid silence. By sunset most had taken their leave, the women kissing his cheek and the men putting their broad shovel-like hands on his shoulder, and then when he was all alone the oppressive reality of Gijs’ situation came back to cocoon him once again in manic moonlit melancholia.

  → Cyril Ramaphosa is confirmed as President for life and announces his leadership council: with Adah Gaster in conjunction with Cebisa Bambani running the central bank; Amram Mena as the Minister of Finance; Fivel Janner as the Minister of Trade and Industry; Chaya Gutnik, overseeing the Land Bank; Betzalel Ronson as the Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry; Eliana Mezvinsky as chairman of the railway system, Spoornet; Oren Bloch as the chief consultant on taxation; Lior Bronfman as the managing director of the police service; and Calev Berman, Dov Ceder, and Ehud Biram presiding over the South African Supreme Court;

  → A veteran opponent of Apartheid reminds the leadership of the ANC of their unspoken Mission Statement by quoting Nelson Mandela: ‘We, the members of the MK have pledged ourselves to kill them, the whites.’ Then supplements his speech by referring to a fellow fighter’s call to members five years earlier, ‘When Mandela dies we will kill you whites like flies!’ adding the prefix ‘Now’;

  → The Minister for Rural Development and Land Reform, repeats his earlier declaration: ‘Colonial struggles are about two things: repossession of the land and the centrality of the indigenous population.’ His speech in Pretoria climaxes with the words ‘the colonial struggle continues and will not be over until the last settlers and colonialists have no role in the future of South Africa, unless it is to manure our crops’;

  → White farm murders average 282 per year and attacks on Afrikaaner rural properties increase by 39% over a three-year period;

  → The South African government cuts diplomatic ties with Australia after comments in Canberra seem to express sympathy for the plight of white farmers;

  → A family gathering to mourn the anniversary of the murder of awhite farmer, hacked to death in Vryheid in Eastern KwaZulu Natal, is disrupted by police on the basis that it is an incitement to racial hatred;

  → A popular Boer singer is arrested for his 2017 Black Monday SOS posting which it is revealed was viewed over 50,000 times;

  → The liberal Afrikaans daily Beeld newspaper is banned for replacing its usual red masthead with a black one in apparent support for the ongoing Black Monday protests;

  → A coloured journalist speaking on Radio 702, demands that Die Stem, the old national anthem, and the former Oranje, Blanje, Blou South African flag should be banned from public display because ‘they are the equivalent of swastikas’;

  → The Suidlanders, a civil defence organization aimed at helping the Protestant Christian Boer minority and Freedom Front Plus, are proscribed as terrorist organizations;

  → A statue of Dr Verwoerd’s assassin Demetrio Tsafendas (1918–1999) is erected in Durban.

  Chapter 2

  The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.

  — Robert Mugabe

  Professor Hastings Mabuza, a rising star among the faculty at Wits, and the son of a popular lecturer at the University of Qua-Qua in the segregated days of apartheid, leaned against the far wall of the meeting room. His suit cut in a debonair Sidney Poitier style of patrician refinement. He had just returned from a European book tour sponsored by the Open Society Foundations to promote his new academic text ‘Why the Scars Cannot Heal: The Ongoing Struggle Against White Privilege’ published by Herschel & Haber. His muscular expression was fixed and earnest under a sloping forehead the colour of fossilized tourmaline, as he spoke to an invited audience about the moral imperative of affirmative action legislation.

  ‘Look, we all understand why a student like Chumani Maxwele poured a bucket of excrement over the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of
Capetown,’ he said off-handedly, his eyes popping out at his crowd, ‘and why his friends carried banners that read “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change and I am changing the things I cannot accept” when they protested against paying fees at Johannesburg University. The Fees Must Fall campaign is, after all, entirely morally grounded. Are we not entitled to challenge the legacy of the Bantu Education Act of 1953? Likewise, the concerns voiced in the short film Luister, produced by some socially conscious media students at Stellenbosch University, are also completely justified. Why, I ask you, do we continue to use Afrikaans as the medium of communication in our centres of higher learning? Do we still live under the dictat of Broederbonders like A.P. Treuernicht, who said of the Afrikaner that it became the logical and compelling demand of his own nationalism that his education should be in his own language? And why should we accept a science curriculum which is inherently racist? And as a consequence of all this, is it not obvious why there is ongoing turbulence on campuses, the length and breadth of this country? Two hundred and fifty million Rand of so-called vandalism is a small price to pay for highlighting the continued academic apartheid people like myself face every day!’

  ‘But the proportion of black research fellows is rising, right?’ came a response from a languid liberal lecturer in Social Sciences bearing the name-badge Chanoch Penzak.

  ‘Yes,’ Mabuza nodded with an indulgent wave, ‘but despite the best efforts of people like yourself, the Unions and donations from philanthropists like Jairus Micula and Shaul Weingart the pace of change is still not fast enough. Even with the recent announcement that forty-four percent of white academics will be retired from their departments over the next five years, we are only talking of something in the order of a threefold increase in black researchers. That is hardly going to make up for a century or more when such latent talent was being overlooked at best and ignored at worst. We need a far more radical shift in numbers and emphasis. A concrete demand needs to be made for funding the study of the Axum, Ajuran, Nri, Ashanti, Mossi, Mutapa, Mapungubwe, Sine and Sennar empires; the evolution of the Ge’ez script along the Red Sea coast; the Benin and Nok cultures; and to the industrial success of the Kingdom of Kush. After all, these are the people that gave birth to civilization — not the Egyptians or the Greeks! What is Alexander the Great, or for that matter Julius Caesar, when you compare them to Sundiata Keita, the Lion King? A ruler even more magnificent than France’s Louis the Sun King ever was, and even more inventive and entrepreneurial than Bill Gates of Microsoft!’