‘We plan to preserve your inflatable landing craft as a memento of your visit,’ the Mayor said. ‘When you next meet the American military, please tell them that if ever they plan a fresh humanitarian intervention — or a short, sharp surgical strike in some distant, deserving corner of the world — they are welcome here, whenever their busy schedule permits.’
So it was on the tenth of May 1994 — a decade after Jimfish had left for what Soviet Malala called ‘the outside world’ — that the flight from the Comoros, carrying Jimfish, Soviet Malala, Zoran the Serb and Deon Arlow, touched down in Johannesburg. They found the airport teeming with presidents, kings, queens, princes, pop stars and potentates, and they very soon understood the reason for the excitement. Their timing could not have been more auspicious: Nelson Mandela was about to be inaugurated as the first freely chosen President of South Africa.
The travellers joined the cavalcade and were swept along in the human tide of tens of thousands, making their way by road and rail and on foot to the swearing-in ceremony, which was to take place in Pretoria at the Union Buildings, a ponderous, red-roofed government office which reminded Zoran of similar piles in his native ex-Yugoslavia.
‘It looks to me,’ said Zoran, ‘like a cross between a giant penitentiary and a mammoth post office.’
Soviet Malala explained to Zoran that the Union Buildings had been designed by the British at the end of the Boer War, after they had destroyed the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Free State, thereby securing South Africa’s immense gold and diamond reserves for the city of London. It was a triumphal statement in sandstone.
Deon Arlow was pleasantly surprised to hear Soviet Malala taking this view.
‘I never expected to hear you sympathizing with the suffering of Afrikaners in the Boer War,’ he said.
‘But it wasn’t really a war — it was more of a smash-and-grab robbery,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘The British saw themselves as aristocrats, when, really, they were simply armed thieves, highwaymen hungry for loot. They saw the Boers as troglodytes, brute Neanderthals who never evolved into a higher order of humanity. They were a problem to be solved. Finally. So the British solved it by burning their farms, and then trucked their women and kids to concentration camps, where thousands died of disease, hunger and heartbreak.’
Deon Arlow was so moved to hear the fate of his people described with such sympathy by a black Communist that he could only nod vigorously as he fought back his tears.
‘Wasn’t it a crying shame, then,’ Soviet Malala continued, ‘once the British left and handed the country back to your lot, that Boers treated blacks in exactly the way the British had dealt with them? Now it was us who were your barbarians, troglodytes, Neanderthals, hewers of wood and drawers of water, useless appendages, monkeys, menials, miscreants or servants. Or caged pets kept for your pleasure. Or slave labour in what you liked to call a “Union” — where we did the work, while you lot prayed and picnicked in front of this triumphant erection in sandstone we see right here, always telling yourselves you were God’s Chosen People.’
Anxious to calm things down on such an auspicious day, Jimfish said, ‘Well, what better place to begin the new South Africa? The old order is gone. Defeated. The British robbed the Boers, and then they did in the blacks. Now that’s all over. Finished. No one needs to be done in any more, right?’
‘It was never a defeat!’ Deon Arlow shouted. ‘We got here through a negotiated settlement. It was a truce between us whites, who decided not to fight to a standstill, and you black guys, who didn’t have the capacity to win. It was a compromise.’
‘It was the victory of the lumpenproletariat — fighting under the banner of the glorious liberation movements — over the neo-liberal, semi-fascist, racist, white-settler entity!’ cried Soviet Malala.
‘Pretty damn useless liberation movements! You guys couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag! Or run a bath — never mind a revolution!’ retorted Deon Arlow.
‘It sounds to me very like a typical stitch-up between elites,’ Zoran the Serb suggested. ‘When a nasty civil war tears a neighbourhood apart, the neighbours get busy and kill each other. When it’s over and the dust settles, those at the bottom of the heap find they’re still there and the guys who did the deal are swigging champagne in the name of the people.’
Soviet Malala’s response was lost in the jubilation as Nelson Mandela took the oath and the long-term prisoner whose name no one had been allowed to mention was transformed into a president to whom everyone pledged their love and respect.
When Mandela said, ‘Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all. Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all,’ he spoke to the heart of the country.
When he saluted his predecessor, F. W. de Klerk, once his jailer, who had made for himself a place in history, everyone cheered.
When he promised, ‘Never, never and never again shall it be that our beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another,’ strangers hugged each other.
And when he declared that neither white nor black would ever again rule over the other, but that a Rainbow Nation was to be forged from old hatreds, he summed up what the country wanted to hear more than anything in the world.
In the great amphitheatre of the Union Buildings, across its vast lawns, in the streets, suburbs and townships of the capital, and across the country, citizens danced, prayed and sang.
At last Jimfish felt he had arrived at that moment on the right side of history. But what had brought him to this point? Not the high-octane rage that is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat. There was no anger in Mandela and no recrimination.
Jimfish would have liked to ask Soviet Malala for his frank opinion of just what all this meant. But his old teacher was watching Fidel Castro with intense concentration, as if hoping he would say something to inject a little revolutionary fire into the hazy delirium of rainbows and reconciliation. But El Commandante, who sat on the podium, among queens, princes, presidents, civil rights leaders, prelates, pop stars and a brace of bemedalled dictators, kept his counsel, and so did Soviet Malala.
CHAPTER 29
Jimfish had just one goal now: to be reunited with Lunamiel. Helped by Soviet Malala’s connections in the new government, being a devout member of the Communist Party, Jimfish soon knew the name of the good Samaritan who had rescued Lunamiel in Monrovia and brought her back to South Africa. Now a minister in the presidency, he lived in a grand house in the tree-lined northern suburbs of Johannesburg, behind tall walls topped with razor wire and electrified fencing, patrolled around the clock by armed guards.
Having announced their presence on the intercom, Jimfish and his friends waited while the CCTV cameras checked them over. The automatic steel gates opened, the dogs were kennelled, they were signed in by the gatekeeper in his wooden sentry box, passed through the metal detectors, and a bodyguard escorted them into the minister’s study.
‘It is very like visiting a prisoner,’ said Zoran.
‘Better,’ said Deon. ‘State-of-the-art electric fencing, lovely-looking razor wire, serious firearms on the guards and infrared beams. I’ll bet they’ve got sound sensors buried under the walls to keep out tunnellers.’
‘But it’s all perfectly normal around here,’ said the minister, clearly embarassed. ‘As a member of the new government I had to move into a neighbourhood that was once the sole preserve of our former masters. To show the flag. But I felt a lot safer when I lived in a black township.’
Jimfish sympathized. The man had been parachuted into the world of the rich white classes — at once so pleasurable and so like a prison.