The covenant - James A. Michener [585]
And this might have been Magubane's end except for the work of two men outside the jail who had never met Magubane. The first was Andre Malan, white, twenty-nine, and a reporter for the Durban Gazette. He was a courageous chap dedicated to the high quality of South African journalism and suspicious of why so many Hemelsdorp investigations ended in fatal attempts at escape.
On the day of Matthew Magubane's arrest two black men had slipped into Malan's office and expressed a premonition that the young man was exactly the kind of black who would prove so intractable that Jurgen Krause would be tempted to forget what the regulations said about avoiding undue pressure. 'Watch what happens,' the blacks warned.
So Andre Malan began writing articles about the detention of Magubane, and he asked the police to issue reports of the young man's well-being. In fact, he created so much pressure that officials became irritated and decided to apply one of their laws against him.
There was a law in South Africa which said that BOSS could invade the quarters of any writer at any time without a warrant, and if they found any notes or materials or photographs which might be used to write an article which might be offensive to the government, that writer could be detained indefinitely without any charges being brought against him.
On the morning of the eighth day one of Malan's two black informants ran to his apartment, shouting, 'Get rid of your papers!'
As a newsman who had watched three of his colleagues imprisoned by BOSS, he required no additional explanation; he destroyed the few papers he had allowed to accumulate, even those not relating to Matthew Magubane, then hastily scanned his bookshelves to see if any of the thousands of books banned by the government were there. Reasonably assured, he waited.
The BOSS crew did appear. They did ransack his quarters. And they did find one book published by the World Council of Churches in Geneva, and it was this which justified them in putting him in jail, on no charges, with no warrant, and with no right of self-defense.
News coverage of Matthew Magubane ended. The police were free to continue their probing of his life and beliefs as they wished, except that on a farm near Vrymeer the rebellious young black Jonathan Nxumalo, unemployed now but once a worker at the Golden Reef Mines, had been following in the newspapers the running record of Magubane's detention. Now he heard of Malan's arrest and deduced that Magubane was about to be murdered. Convening four friends, he took an informal vote: 'How many say we try to rescue Magubane?' All five voted yes. 'And then flee to Mozambique?' This time only four voted, the man who refrained explaining, 'My mother . . .'
'No explanations necessary. Tomorrow night we could all be dead.'
'Or on the way to Mozambique.'
Jonathan then cleared his throat and said, tentatively, 'My brother's home on vacation from university. I think we should have his advice.' Someone was dispatched to fetch the professor, and when he stood at the entrance to the small room in which they met, he realized that the men inside represented a conspiracy. To take even one step into that room would make him a part of the criminal movement, with the possibility of a lifetime in prison, or even death. His whole inclination was to turn and run, but the liveliness of their faces made that impossible. These were the young men he had been training, and now they were about to train him. He joined them.
'We're going to storm the jail at Hemelsdorp,' his brother said. 'I supposed that might be it.'
'We've a cache of guns smuggled in from Mozambique.' 'I wish you could do it without guns.'
'This is the year of the gun,' Jonathan said.