'Listen, kid,' said Desmond Blake. 'One little fart doesn't make a whole sewage farm. In future I don't want you pushing copy over my head. Every bit of shit you write comes across my desk, get it?" 'I'm sorry, Mr Blake. I didn't--' 'Yeah! Yeah! I know, you didn't mean it. Just don't go getting a big head. Remember whose assistant you are." The news of Moses Gama's reprieve threw the newsroom into a state of pandemonium that didn't subside for almost a week. Michael was drawn in and some of his days ended at midnight when the presses began their run, and began when the first papers hit the streets the next morning.
However, he found that the excitement seemed to release limitless reserves of energy in him and he never felt tired. He learned to work quickly and accurately and his way with words gradually assumed a deftness and polish that was apparent even to himselfi Two weeks after the reprieve the editor called him into his office.
He had learned not to knock, any waste of time irritated Leon Herbstein and made him bellow aggressively. Michael went straight on in, but he had not yet entirely mastered the pose of world-weary cynicism which he knew was the hallmark of the veteran journalist, and he was all radiant eagerness as he asked, 'Yes, Mr Herbstein?" 'Okay, Mickey, I've got something for you." Every time Mr Herbstein used his Christian name, Michael still thrilled with delicious shock.
'We are getting a lot of requests from readers and overseas correspondence. With all the interest in the Gama case, people want to know more about the black political movements. They want to know the difference between the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress, they want to know who's who - who the hell are Tambo and Sisulu, Mandela and Moses Gama and what do they stand for? All that sort of stuff. You seem to be interested in black politics and enjoy digging around in the archives - besides I can't spare one of my top men on this sort of background stuff. So get on with it." Herbstein switched his attention back to the work on his desk, but Michael by now had sufficient confidence to stand hi: ground.
'Am I still working under Mr Blake?" he asked. He had learned b this time if you called him 'sir' it just made Leon Herbstein mad.
Herbstein shook his head but did not even look up. 'You are or your own. Send everything to me. No hurry, any time in the nex five minutes will do nicely." Michael soon discovered that the Mail's archives were inadequate, and served merely to initiate him into the complexity and daunting size of the project he had been set. However, from them he was a!
least able to draw up a list of the various black political groups and related associations such as the officially unrecognized black trade unions, and from there to compile a list of their own leaders and officials.
He cleared one wall of his bed-sitting room and put up a board on which he pinned all this information, using different-coloured cards for each grouping and press photographs of the principal black leaders.
All this achieved was to convince him of how little was known about the black movements by even the most well-informed of the white section of the nation.
The public library added very little to his understanding. Most of the books on the subject had been written ten or more years before and simply traced the African National Congress from those distant days of its inception in 1912 and the names mentioned were all of men now dead or in their dotage.
Then he had his first inspiration. One of the Mail's sister publications under the banner of Associated Newspapers of South Africa was a weekly magazine called Assegai after the broad-bladed war spear that the impis of Chaka the Zulu conqueror had wielded. The magazine was aimed at the educated and more affluent section of the black community. Its editorial policy was dictated by the white directors of Associated Newspapers but amongst the articles and photographs of African football stars and torch singers, of black American athletes and film actors, an occasional article slipped through of a fiercely radical slant.
Michael borrowed a company car and went out to see the editor of Assegai in the vast black location of Drake's Farm. The editor was a graduate of the black university of Fort Hare, a Xhosa named Solomon Nduli. He was polite but cool, and they had chatted for half an hour before a barbed remark let Michael know that he had been recognized as a spy for the security police, and that he would learn nothing of value.
A week later the Mail published the first of Michael's articles in its Saturday magazine edition. It was a comparison of the two leading African political organizations: the Pan Africanist Congress which was a jealously exclusive body to which only pure-blooded African blacks were admitted and whose views were extremely radical, and the much larger African National Congress which, although predominantly black, also included whites and Asians and mixed blood members such as the Cape coloureds, and whose objectives were essentially conciliatory.
The article was accurate, obviously carefully researched, but, most important, the tone was sympathetic, and it carried the by-line 'by Michael Courtney'.
The following day Solomon Nduli called Michael at the offices of the Mail, and suggested another meeting. His first words when they shook hands were, 'I'm sorry. I think I misjudged you. What do you want to know?" Solomon took Michael into a strange world that he had never realized existed - the world of the black townships. He arranged for him to meet Robert Sobukwe, and Michael was appalled by the depth of the resentblent the black leader of the Pan Africanist Congress expressed, particularly for the pass laws, by his enormous impatience to effect an upheaval of the entire society, and by the thinly veiled violence in the man.
'I will try to arrange for you to meet Mandela,' Solomon promised, 'although, as you know, he is underground now, and wanted by the police. But there are others you must talk to." He took Michael to Baragwanath Hospital and introduced him to the wife of Moses Gama, the lovely young Zulu woman he had seen at the trial in Cape Town. Victoria was heavily pregnant, but with a calm dignity that impressed Michael deeply until he sensed the same terrible resentment and latent violence in her that he had found in Robert Sobukwe.
The next day Solomon took him back to Drake's Farm to meet a man named Hendrick Tabaka, a man who seemed to own most of the small businesses in the location and looked like a heavyweight wrestler with a head like a cannonball crisscrossed with scars.
He appeared to Michael to represent the opposite end of the black protest consciousness. 'I have my family and my business,' he told Michael, 'and I will protect them from anybody, black or white." And Michael was reminded of a view that his father had often expressed, but to which Michael had not given much consideration before this. 'We must give' the black people a piece of the pie,' Shasa Courtney had said. 'Give them something of their own. The truly dangerous man is one with nothing to lose." Michael gave the second article in the series the title 'Rage' and in it he tried to describe the deep and bitter resentment that he had encountered on his journeys into the half-world of the townships. Iended the article with the words: Despite this deep sense of outrage, I never found the least indication hatred towards the white person as an individual by any of the bla leaders with whom I was able to speak. Their resentment seemed ton to be directed only at the Nationalist government's policy of aparthe while the vast treasure of mutual goodwill built up over three hundrc years between the races seems to be entirely undiminished by it.
He delivered the article to Leon Herbstein on the Thursday an found himself immediately embroiled in an editorial review of it th lasted until almost eight o'clock that evening. Leon Herbstein calle in his assistant and his deputy editor, and their views were divide between publishing with only minor alterations and not publishin at all, for fear of bringing down the wrath of the publications contrc board, the government censors who had the power to ban the Ma and put it out of business.