The covenant - James A. Michener [530]
'We must think of something,' he told Johanna as they came home from a meeting of schoolteachers, 'that will stir up the nation and remind the Afrikaners of their heritage.' They discussed a master rally at the site of Blood River, but that location was so far removed from major centers of population that only a devoted few would be able to attend. They thought of a celebration at Blauuwkrantz, but since that lay in Natal, which was notoriously pro-English, they quickly dropped it.
In fact, they could think of nothing original, and then one morning Johanna read that a committee of Afrikaners was considering the erection of a massive monument on a hilltop outside Pretoria, a memorial to Blood River and the covenant that was entered into on that sacred day. This excited Piet, and the couple talked of inviting huge numbers of people, even from Cape Town, to the dedication of this proposed monument, and when they saw a sketch of how the building might looka splendid, blunt affair reminiscent of the structures at Great Zimbabwethey became positively dedicated to the task of making this a historic affair.
Johanna said, 'We must see that all parts of the nation cooperate, all the Afrikaner parts, that is,' and she began to construct patterns for the celebration. As a woman, she was of course not allowed to participate in the Broederbond, but since her husband talked everything over with her and respected her opinions, it was easy for her to feed her ideas through him. She suggested a convocation of religious leaders from all over the world, but discarded this when Piet pointed out that she would have to invite the Pope and certain rabbis. 'What we could do,' she countered, 'is ask the leaders of the Dutch and German churches to join with us.'
On and on went the planning, and then one day Piet suggested the best thing of all: 'What might be a splendid ideawe could see if any of the old ox wagons still existed. There'll be plenty of oxen. Why not build replicas of the old wagons, we have their dimensions, and have two or three of them travel from Graaff-Reinet to the monument. People could dress in the old stylemen could let their beards grow like Piet Retief and Gert Maritz . . .'
For two days the Krauses imagined this cavalcade winding north over the old route, and then Johanna proposed a brilliant concept: 'Piet! Not a cavalcade. Five or six separate wagons. Each starting from a major point.
Detouring slowly to every small town en route. And all converging on Pretoria on December 16. Every Afrikaner in the nation would have to be there.'
It was this plan which Piet Krause presented to the Broederbond leadership, and he was astonished to find that several prominent members of the railway cultural society had proposed an identical program, except that they visualized only two ox wagons starting from Cape Town. The advantages of Piet's scheme of five or six were recognized and he was assigned the task of organizing the 1938 trek.
'It can be,' Reverend Brongersma predicted to an English newspaper, 'a great outpouring of the Afrikaner spirit. It can at once both unite and ignite.' To a reporter he said, 'It will rejuvenate Afrikaner politics as nothing else could do. I expect wonders from this trek.' In private he added that if sufficient spirit were generated, the Afrikaners might at last succeed in taking South Africa out of its present Union status, making it republican. To any Afrikaner who asked, he said, 'That is the goal we seek,' and if they asked further whether this would mean an exodus or expulsion from the British Empire, he replied, 'Not necessarily. England might like us better as completely equal partners.'
There was, however, one question which he never answered frankly. One night Piet Krause, flushed with his success in launching the wagons, asked, 'Dominee, this time will we join Germany when war comes?' Brongersma did not like to discuss this ticklish situation, for he saw much in contemporary Germany which bothered him. In 1914, like many intelligent Afrikaners, he had felt strongly that his country's