The covenant - James A. Michener [550]
In darkness the Van Doorns sat silent, contemplating the nemesis that seemed at times to hang over their nation: a splendid patriot assassinated in the halls of government; foreigners making accusatory speeches at the United Nations; blacks obstinately refusing to accept their assigned positions; and Marius married to an English girl.
In the days that followed, Detleef's tightly organized world seemed to fall apart, because the very laws which he had structured to defend the state had been used to destroy its elected leader. 'It seems as if God Himself willed this tragedy,' Detleef wailed, and in mounting fury he shared the evidence with his wife.
'Who killed him? A man who should never have been allowed entrance into the country. A nobody from Mozambique.'
'How did he sneak in?' Maria demanded, voicing the anger of two and a half million Afrikaners.
'You won't believe it, but four people I trained myselfimmigration officials who were supposed to check all entering aliens. The man had a criminal record. It was in his papers and no one saw it.'
'But how could such a man get a job as messenger, right in the heart of Parliament?'
Detleef shuddered. 'His papers specifically stated that he was half-white, half-black. Everyone in Mozambique knew it. Our embassy knew it. But what happens? He walks in here bold as brass, and my office gives him an identity card stating that he was white. After that, everything was easy.'
'But why did he want to kill our prime minister?'
Van Doorn lowered his head and covered his eyes. He did not want to answer this ugly question, but in a weak voice he confided: 'He said he became bitter over the fact that as a man with a white card, he was forbidden to have sexual relations with a Coloured girl he liked.'
In a sullen rage Detleef stormed about the kitchen in which his early lessons had been learned. He could hear the voice of old General de Groot, who had never stopped fighting. He listened to Piet Krause, who had such a clear vision of the future. And from the corner came the powerful voice of his sister Johanna, who had been the backbone of the family and of the nation. He was embittered by the sardonic trick whereby his own laws had been used against him, but he could find nothing wrong with those laws.
'What we must do,' he told his wife, 'is pass stricter laws. And then enforce them better.'
The complex fabric of old custom and new law woven by Detleef van Doorn and his peers came to be known as apartheid, a classic example of the misfortune Afrikaners had in naming things. The word meant apartness, and did not appear in older dictionaries of the language; it was invented, and reflected their belief that God willed the races be kept separate, each progressing properly at its own speed within its own confines.
The word should have been pronounced apart-hate, appropriately ominous, but by foreigners it was usually apart-hite, which is merely ugly. Either pronunciation was unfortunate, for it connoted offensive intentions which its authors did not contemplate.
As the years progressed, so did the names used to describe apartheid: guardianship, separate development, separate freedoms, separate amenities, indigenous development, multinational development, self-determination, plural democracy. No matter how diligently they tried, the architects of these laws were unable to erase the first, correct name they had given their grand design.
No one could study the instrumental role played by Van Doorn in drafting these laws without being impressed by the planner's oft-repeated assertion: 'I acted from the best and most honest motives, and without personal rancor, in accordance with His will.'
He certainly wished no harm to the Coloureds, Asians and blacks whose lives he circumscribed; he often said, 'Some of my best friends are the Bantu who work on my farm,' and although it was true that he had always refused to alter