• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

'When you court a girl in a strange land, seriously, I mean . . .'

'I know what you mean. I could see.'

'Well, it jolts you down to hard-rock common sense. Seeing those eland hiding off in a valley had the same effect. Christ, Nxumalo, what's going to happen to this land?'

'It has its own force, you know. The great revolving of the earth. The inescapable numbers of people. There are limits beyond which we can't go. And there are directions in which we must go.'

'Are you a fatalist?'

'No, a determinist.'

'A Marxist?'

'No, but in certain analyses Marx does make sense. Just as Frantz Fanon does. Or Thomas Jefferson.'

'What do you see happening?'

'Would I share my vision with a white man?' When Philip looked at him in astonishment, Nxumalo said prophetically, 'Must I not take into account the possibility that I will be arrested one of these days and that you will be required under oath to report what I said to you one summer morning as we rode to see the rhinoceros?'

Philip sat silent, acknowledging the heavy truth of what this man was saying: with a black, everything of day and night, of work and relaxation was subject to interrogation, with death and life hanging in the arbitrary balance. He was under no such constraints, not in his own country or in any other he visited, and that was the terrible, inescapable difference between being a white man in America and a black man in South Africa.

'Can you not imagine the prosecutor hammering at you: "Why in the world, Mr. Saltwood, were you going with this suspect black to see a rhinoceros?" except that he would call it renoster. And what could you say?'

Philip did not try to answer; instead he asked, 'What will be the future of the Coloureds?'

'Why do you ask such a question?'

'Because Frikkie and Jopie warned that once you blacks took control, the Coloureds were finished.'

'Frikkie and Jopie are right. There'll be no place for them. They had their chance to work with us, but stupidly they clung to the hope that one day the whites would accept them. They wanted to move up to catch the whites rather than down to work with us, and their decision was fatal.'

'Could it be corrected?'

I think not, but maybe they will be given another chance to save themselves.'

'The Indians?'

'Who in Africa has ever solved the problem of the Indians? In Malawi, in Uganda, in Burundiout! They've tossed them out. I could see something like Viet . . .' He stopped. He was confiding too much. Recently he had visualized crowded boats leaving the Natal coast burdened with Indians expelled from the country. England would no longer have them. No African nation would permit them entrance. Madagascar would fire upon the ships if they attempted to land there. And certainly homeland India would refuse them, for it already contained three bodies for each available space.

'How's your brother in Mocambique?'

That was another question that had better not be answered.

'Do you see any permanent place for the white man?'

'For the true Afrikaner, yes. He belongs to Africa and can learn to live with us. For the others, I'm afraid not. They'll never commit themselves to our soil.'

'What language will you be using?'

'Now, there we are.' He rapped his knuckles against the car door and blew out a heavy breath. 'It ought to be Afrikaans, really. That's a splendid, functional language. Most of my friends speak it, even though they don't like it. I'll tell you what Afrikaans is. Do you know Fanakalo, the made-up language of the mines? Afrikaans is the gentleman's Fanakalo.'

'Then you'll drop English?'

Nxumalo abruptly changed the subject: 'Did you follow the case of Mrs. Saltwood down in Johannesburg? She must be a distant relative of yours.'

'She is. Afrikaners who despise her behavior keep reminding me of it.'

'Accept her, Philip. Embrace her. She's one of God's rare women.'

Fleetingly, Philip thought of Craig Saltwood's request, and felt a twinge of guilt. 'But she's banned, isn't