The covenant - James A. Michener [605]
'But under the new laws,' Nxumalo said, 'we must move ourselves to one of our Bantustans ... By the way, ever met any Xhosa?'
'Had two of them working for me in Vwarda. Spoke with clicks.'
'In some ways they're more fortunate than the Zulu; in other ways, not.'
'I'm amazed to hear a Zulu confess that anyone is better.'
'I didn't say better.' Nxumalo laughed. 'I said "more fortunate." ' When he grinned, his teeth were extremely white and his eyes glistened.
'Let me guess,' Saltwood said, for he was growing to like this somewhat cheeky fellow. 'It's something the white man did to the Xhosa and you, something very unfair to the Zulu.'
'You're perceptive, Mr. Saltwood. The Afrikaners have given the Xhosa a beautiful territory, compact and arable. The Transkei. And next to it another cohesive tract, the Ciskei. In that land the Xhosa have a fighting chance to build something good. But what did they give the Zulu? Fifty, a hundred unconnected fragments of land. They call it kwaZulu, and it's supposed to be a homeland for all the Zulu. But it's really a collection of junk. They want us to occupy that broken territory.'
'In time it'll coalesce, if the idea's a good one.'
'The idea's bad and the land's bad, because all the good parts have been preempted by white men.'
'I should think that could be changed.'
'You haven't lived here very long.' He altered his tone completely. Up to now he had been a college professor, outlining a general problem; now he became a human being, lamenting a wrong done him personally: 'In pursuit of their policy, Mr. Saltwood, they insist that we Zulu, who have made good lives in places like Vrymeer and Venloo, pick up all we have, leave all our friends and our ways of life, and move off to one of the fragmented sections of their kwaZulu.'
'I thought you said it was your Bantustan.'
'We don't want it. It was never our idea.'
'You're to be evacuated?'
'Yes, as if a plague had struck our land. As if locusts had eaten our little fields and we had to move on.'
When Saltwood argued that Nxumalo must be telling only part of the story, the professor agreed, heartily: 'I am indeed. And the reason I came to see you is that I wondered if you would like to see the other part.'
'I certainly would.' Philip Saltwood operated on the principle that governed many young scientists these days as they worked about the world: whether they were American or Russian, Chinese or Australian, they wanted to know what was happening in the lands which employed them at the moment, and often they moved far from their basic tasks, investigating possibilities that at the moment seemed remote but which, at some future date, might become all-important.
With Nxumalo as guide, Philip drove west to Johannesburg, where they toured inconspicuously up and down the handsome main streets of that thriving American-style city. Since it was four in the afternoon, the business areas were jammed with people, and half of them black. They were laborers, and messengers, clerks and minor officials, shoppers and dawdlers, and they could all have been in Detroit or Houston. 'Look at them,' Nxumalo said with some pride. 'They keep the wheels of this city spinning.'
At quarter to five he directed Philip to the area around the central railway station, and in the ensuing hour Saltwood saw something that was so shocking as to be unbelievable: from all parts of central Johannesburg streams of black men and women converged, more than half a million of them crowding to leave the city before sunset, after which it would be unlawful to be there. Like swarms of grasshoppers leaving a ruined field, the workers of Johannesburg hastened to that endless belt of steel that ran perpetually out of the city at sunset and back in at sunrise. It was a movement of people of such magnitude that he knew nothing with which to compare it.
At the end