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has been travelling around the country, in fifty different disguis consolidating that leadership. I must confront him, and wrest t leadership back from him very soon, or it will be too late and I be forgotten and left behind." 'What will you do, my lord? How will you unseat him? He riding high now - what can we do?" 'Mandela has a weakness - he is too soft, too placatory towar the Boers. I must exploit that eakness. He said it quietly, but the W was such a fierce light in his eyes that Victoria shivered involuntaril and then with an effort closed her mind against the dark images 1 words had conjured up.
'He is my husband,' she told herself, fervently. 'He is my lord, or whatever he says or does is the truth and the right." The confrontation took place in the kitchen at Puck's Hill. Outsic the sky was pregnant with leaden thunder clouds, dark as bruis that cast an unnatural gloom across the room and Marcus Arche switched on the electric lights that hung above the long table in thei pseudo-antique brass fittings.
The thunder crashed like artillery and rolled heavily back and fort] through the heavens. Outside the lightning flared in brilliant crackling white light and the rain poured from the eaves in a rippling silve curtain across the windows. They raised their voices against tumult uous nature so they were shouting at each other. They were the higt command of Umkhonto we Sizwe, twelve men in all, all of then black except Joe Cicero and Marcus Archer - but only two of theft counted, Moses Gama and Nelson Mandela. All the others wer silent, relegated to the role of observers, while these two, like dominant black-maned lions, battled for the leadership of the pride.
'If I accept what you prolose,' Nelson Mandela was standing, leaning forward with clenched fists on the table top, 'we will forfeit the sympathy of the world." 'You have already accepted the principle of armed revolt that I have urged upon you all these years." Moses leaned back in the wooden kitchen chair, balancing on its two back legs with his arms folded across his chest. 'You have resisted my call to battle, and instead you have wasted our strength in feeble demonstrations of defiance which the Boers crush down contemptuously." 'Our campaigns have united the people,' Mandela cried. He had grown a short dark beard since Moses had last seen him. It gave him the air of a true revolutionary, and Moses admitted to himself that Mandela was a fine-looking man, tall and strong and brimming with confidence, a formidable adversary.
'They have also given you a good look at the inside of the white man's gaol,' Moses told him contemptuously. 'The time for those childish games has passed. It is time to strike ferociously at the enemy's heart." 'You know we have agreed." Mandela was still standing. 'You know we have reluctantly agreed to the use of force --' Now Moses leapt to his feet so violently that his chair was flung crashing against the wall behind him.
'Reluctantly!" He leaned across the table until his eyes were inches from Mandela's dark eyes. 'Yes, you are as reluctant as an old woman and timid as a virgin. What kind of violence is this you propose - dynamiting a few telegraph poles, blowing up a telephone exchange?" Moses's tone was withering with scorn. 'Next you will blow up a public shit house and expect the Boers to come cringing to you for terms. You are naive, my friend, your eyes are full of stars and your head full of sunny dreams. These are hard men you are taking on and there is only one way you will get their attention.
Make them bleed and rub their noses in the blood." 'We will attack only inanimate targets,' Mandela said. 'There will be no taking of human life. We are not murderers." 'We are warriors." Moses dropped his voice, but that did not reduce its power. His words seemed to shimmer in the gloomy room.
'We are fighting for the freedom of our people. We cannot afford the scruples with which you seek to shackle us." The younger men at the foot of the table stirred with a restless eagerness, and Joe Cicero smiled slightly, but his eyes were fathomless and his smile was thin and cruel.
'Our violent acts should be symbolic,' Mandela tried to explain, but Moses rode over him.
'Symbols! We have no patience with symbolic acts. In Kenya the warriors of Mau Mau took the little children of the white settlers and held them up by their feet and chopped between their legs with razor-sharp pangas and threw the pieces into the pit toilets, and that is bringing the whtte men to the conference table. That is the type of symbol the white men understand." 'We will never sink to such barbarism,' Nelson Mandela said firmly, and Moses leaned even closer to him, and their eyes locked.
As they stared at each other, Moses was thinking swiftly. He had forced his opponent to make a stand, to commit himself irrevocably in front of the militants on the high command. Word of his refusal to engage in unlimited warfare would be swiftly passed to the Youth Leaguers and the young hawks, to the Buffaloes and the others who made up the foundation of Moses' personal support.
He would not push Mandela further now, that could only Moses some of his gains. He would not give Mandela the opportunity to explain that he might be willing to use harder measure: in the future. He had made Mandela appear a pacifist in the eye,.
of the militants, and in contrast had shown them his own fierce heart.
He drew back disdainfully from Nelson Mandela and he gave soft scornful chuckle, as he glanced at the young men at the end all the table and shook his head as though he had given up on a dul and stubborn child.
Then he sat down, crossed his arms over his chest and let his chin sink forward on his chest. He took no further part in the conference.
remaining a massive brooding presence, by his very silence mocking Mandela's proposals for limited acts of sabotage on government property.
He had given them fine words, but Moses Gama knew that they would need deeds before they all accepted him as the true leader.
'I will give them a deed - such a deed that will leave not a doubt in their hearts,' he thought, and his expression was grim and determined.
The motorcycle was a gift from his father. It was a huge Harley Davidson with a seat like a cowboy saddle and the gear shift was on the side of the silver tank. Sean was not quite sure why Shasa had given it to him. His final results at Costello's Academy didn't merit such paternal generosity. Perhaps Shasa was relieved that he had managed to scrape through at all, and on the other hand perhaps he felt that encouragement was what Sean needed now, or again it might merely be an expression of Shasa's guilt feelings towards his eldest son. Sean didn't care to consider it too closely. It was a magnificent machine, all chrome and enamel and red glass diamond reflectors, flamboyant enough to catch the eye of any young lady and Sean had wound it up to well over the ton on the straight stretch of road beyond the airport.
Now, however, the engine was burbling softly between his knees, -- andasthey reac"nd the crest of th'filll he switched off the headlight and then as gravity took the heavy machine, he cut the engine. They free-wheeled down silently in darkness, and there were no street lights in this elegant suburb. The plots of land around each grand home were the size of small farms.
Near the foot of the hill Sean swung the Harley Davidson off the road. They bumped through a shallow ditch into a clump of trees.
They climbed off and Sean pulled the motorcycle up on to its kick stand.
'Okay?" he asked his companion. Rufus was not one of Sean's friends whom he could invite back to Weltevreden to meet the folks.
Sean had only met him through their mutual love for motorcycles.