The Covenant by James A. Michener
Krause, as an obedient member of the Broederbond, came down from Johannesburg, but as soon as he saw that Reverend Brongersma was with Frykenius he bristled: ‘Dominee, we do not seek your counsel.’
‘Piet,’ Frykenius said, ‘sit down.’
But even after the two older men had spread before him their analysis of the harm he was doing, he refused to accept their rebuke: ‘Have you two any idea of the great forces set in motion by the ox wagons? This country is seething with patriotism.’
‘Don’t use anything as precious as patriotism for a wrong purpose,’ Brongersma cautioned.
‘Dominee, there’s to be a great uprising!’
When he heard these words the predikant sat back, his hands folded in his lap. He knew that what Piet had just said was true: there was going to be a tremendous uprising of the Afrikaner spirit, so vast that it would sweep Jan Christian Smuts and his English ways right out of office and keep them out forever, so vast that every aspect of life in the country would be modified. Because of the spirit generated by the ox wagons, the Afrikaner was on the verge of victories which only the idealist had dreamed of. South Africa would quit the empire. No more would bands play ‘God Save the King,’ no more would Englishmen sit in the cabinet. The Afrikaner nation would be free to solve its racial difficulties in its own just way. And strife would end.
‘Piet,’ the predikant said softly, ‘you’ve won your victory. Don’t contaminate it with violence.’
‘Dominee, the real victory is just beginning! Herr Hitler is about to sweep the English from the seas. America can do nothing, he’ll sink their ships. His principles will rule this land.’
When Frykenius tried to soften this tirade, Piet cried, ‘You men have a choice you must make in a hurry. Are you for the revolution that’s breaking, or against it?’
‘Piet,’ Frykenius reasoned, ‘you know what the aims of the Broederbond have always been. Of course we’re for an Afrikaner triumph. But not on your violent terms. The rioting in the streets, that’s got to stop.’
Piet drew back as if dissociating himself from the timid approach of the Bond. ‘You men in the Broederbond. I see your kind in Pretoria and Johannesburg all the time. You’re like a pretty girl who gives a boy a kiss, three kisses, a dozen, then runs away when he wants to get down to business. Well, I’m getting down to business. I have work to do, and I doubt that we’ll be meeting any more.’
In a frenzy he dashed out and went to Vrymeer, burst into the kitchen and presented Detleef with an ultimatum: ‘Either you join us this night or you miss your chance to lead the nation when we triumph.’ When Detleef asked for details, Piet thrust a typed card into his hand, crying excitedly, ‘Take this oath. Now. And tonight you ride with us … if we get instructions from Berlin.’ Before Detleef could respond to such a commitment, Piet said with urgency, ‘I must use your radio,’ and through the shortwave screeching he listened to Radio Zeesen:
‘Good evening, dear and loyal friends in South Africa. This is your favorite program, By Kampfuur en Ketel [By Campfire and Kettle]. Today our glorious Führer has enjoyed victories on all fronts. The decadent democracies cringe and crumble. [Here came a series of coded instructions, at which Piet Krause leaped with excitement.] Trusted friends in South Africa …’
Neither he nor Detleef heard the final words, for Piet snapped off the radio and asked bluntly, ‘Well, Brother, do you join our revolution?’ and faced with that moment of decision, Detleef finally concluded that he distrusted Adolf Hitler and doubted his ultimate victory.
‘I can’t accept such an oath,’ he said.
‘Heroes can,’ Piet said, and he was off.
He drove recklessly from Venloo to Waterval-Boven, where he picked up two conspirators who had taken the oath, then west to Pretoria, where Wyk Slotemaker, the one-time actor eager to assassinate Smuts, joined them, then down to an army base south of Johannesburg, where they were scheduled to blow up a major ammunition dump. When the actor saw the intricacy of the barbed wire, he drew back, and this also deterred the other two, but Piet, inflamed with memories of Nuremberg and Berlin, and visualizing the same kind of glory breaking over South Africa, crept forward alone, dynamite strapped to his back.
His careless use of wire clippers activated a warning bell in the guardrooms, and seven sharpshooters streamed out as huge searchlights flashed on. An Afrikaner from Carolina who had volunteered for Smuts’ army drew a bead on the dark figure creeping toward the ammunition, and fired. His bullet struck the package on Piet’s back, detonating it and blowing him to shreds, but even so, Krause gained a limited victory, for he had reached a spot so close to the dump that his explosion ignited combustibles—and through the long night shattering concussions threw flames far into the sky.
In 1946, when Detleef and Maria van Doorn were once more peaceful farmers at Vrymeer, they were visited by his sister Johanna, a widow with a minor job in Johannesburg. She came with a proposal from a group of persons much interested in the welfare of the nation, and although Detleef was suspicious of almost anything she did these days, he had to listen, for whenever he met with her his first impression was of that evening in the camp at Chrissiesmeer when she apportioned the food delivered to the dead Tant Sybilla, and weighed it in her pale hands, giving him the larger share. He was alive today because of her courage and generosity.
‘Detleef, and this concerns you too, Maria. In business the English are proving much more clever than we suspected. We’ve made almost no headway in penetrating their offices of power. We just don’t have enough trained young men. Damnit all, our best people go down to Stellenbosch, and what do they study? Religion, of which we have far too much. Philosophy, which is of use to no one. Some history. Some literature. A little science. What we need is accountants and bankers and managers.’
‘I certainly have no capacity in those fields,’ Detleef protested.
‘Of course you don’t. Because you wasted your time at Stellenbosch. Playing rugby.’
‘Wait a minute! Don’t you say anything against rugby.’ When she had railed against religion a few moments before, he had remained silent, but he could not do so if she spoke against rugby.
‘Forget that. We’ve decided that what we must do is place men like you who can speak good English … Well, what I mean is … you must take one of the permanent secretaryships with the committees in Parliament.’
‘That pays nothing!’
‘Of course it doesn’t. That’s the point. We slip you in there. Nobody notices because no Englishman would want the job. And you serve there twenty-five or thirty years …’
‘I’m already fifty-one.’
‘So you serve twenty years. In time you make enormous inroads. It’s you who will be drafting the laws. And we will gain by indirection what we can’t win head-on.’
She had with her a list of some forty inconspicuous vacancies, not one of which would be mentioned in the newspapers when it was filled: a series of jobs which might have tempted a boy out of high school, but not Detleef. They were mostly in agencies of the government dealing with financial or business affairs, in which he felt no competence, but as he was returning the paper to her, his eye fell upon one line, off to itself, relating to an office so small it provided only one vacancy: Commission on Racial Affairs. Idly he said, ‘Now, if a man had to accept an assignment …’
‘Which?’ she pounced.
‘That one.’
‘A man could do much good there, Detleef.’
‘No! No!’ He dismissed the invitation absolutely and would say no more about it, so dutifully she gathered her papers, smiled at Maria, and left.
Three days later Mr. Frykenius summoned him to Venloo. The two Broederbonders had grown so close since the deplorable death of their mutual friend, Piet Krause, that they attacked any subject without formalities: ‘Detleef, they want you to take the position with the Commission on Racial Affairs.’
‘I can’t leave the farm.’
‘But you can. The Troxel
‘Really, I can hardly …’
‘So many times have you and I discussed what to do with the Bantu and the Coloureds. Here’s a chance to put our principles into operation.’
‘I don’t want to leave Vrymeer …’
‘Detleef, you and I have only a limited number of years remaining. Let’s spend them on things important.’ When Van Doorn hesitated, the butcher said, ‘Remember when you told me about your vision for this country? The sun striking the glass of jellies. Each on its own level, clean and separated? Now you have an opportunity to achieve that dream.’
‘I shall have to speak with Maria.’
‘Detleef, on crucial matters, leave the women to themselves.’
‘But how did you hear about this job? Surely it was my sister Johanna who told you.’
‘I never speak with women. This came as an order from Pretoria.’
Detleef smiled and thought: But who told Pretoria to send the order? It had to have been Johanna, and he remembered the debt he owed her: She broke the rations in half, then added to one portion and gave it to me. She kept me alive. She helped form my beliefs.
‘So the problem we have is of our own making,’ Frykenius was explaining. ‘In order to get the little jobs in government, we insisted that every employee must be bilingual. It worked. We got all of them because the English wouldn’t bother to learn Afrikaans. But now the big jobs are opening up and we damned Afrikaners have too few bright people who can speak English well. We’ll get them when our universities get going. But right now we must depend on people like you.’
When Detleef remained silent, the butcher said, ‘I have written this letter for you, accepting the assignment. Sign it.’ And he pushed forward the document that would ultimately make Detleef van Doorn one of the most influential men in the nation.
Because there had been fierce antagonisms among cities when the Union government was established in 1910, each insisting that it be the capital, Detleef’s new position required him to maintain three homes: the permanent farm at Vrymeer, a six-month home in Cape Town, and a year-round pair of rooms in a Pretoria hotel. Fortunately, he had the funds for such extravagance.
The reasons for this proliferation were complex. The contest for the capital had been solved rather neatly: Pretoria housed all executive operations; Cape Town hosted the Parliament; and Bloemfontein had the Appellate Court. Financial and business interests, although not forming a recognized branch of government, more or less ran the country from Johannesburg, which left poor Natal with nothing except a semi-tropical climate and breathtaking views of the Indian Ocean.
As a consequence, the South African government resembled the Indian, which during hot months moved entirely from steaming Delhi to cool Simla in the Himalayas. During the half year that Parliament was in session most of the executive branch boarded trains and went down to Cape Town, and during the other half, parliamentary offices moved up to Pretoria.
The Commission on Racial Affairs was in those years a trivial Cape Town operation dealing mostly with housing; it was chaired by an elected member of Parliament and staffed by officeholders of little distinction. There was a secretary, an Englishman who had held the position for twenty routine years, and a pettifogging assistant of equal service whose resignation because of failing eyesight had created the opening which Detleef was filling. His salary was £900 a year, scarcely enough to live on if one had to move back and forth between the cities.
In 1946 the commission had so little work to do that Detleef slipped into place with no notice of his appointment appearing in any newspaper, but in early 1947 an event occurred which projected him into permanent attention; after that, whatever his commission did attracted notice.
In that year Jan Christian Smuts, as filled with honors as a man could be—Prime Minister of South Africa, Field Marshal of the British Empire, Chancellor-elect of Cambridge University, sponsor of the United Nations and co-drafter of the noble preamble to its charter—decided that to cap his career and at the same time increase his chances for reelection, he would invite the King and Queen of England to visit their dominion; and he had the happy idea of asking them to bring along their two charming daughters. All four accepted, and when they landed at Cape Town there was an outpouring of loyalty to the royal family by all but a determined group of Afrikaners who were working assiduously to take South Africa out of the empire.
Detleef became involved in the royal tour when his prize bull, a gigantic beast called Oom Paul, won the blue ribbon at the Rand Agricultural Show. This meant that Vrymeer could charge sharply increased fees for Oom Paul’s services, and Detleef was delighted.
But then he found that to receive his blue ribbon, he must accept it from the hands of King George VI, who would be attending the Rand show, and this infuriated him. As Maria said bitterly, ‘My father was executed by soldiers of the king. Your father was shot by his soldiers. How could you accept a prize from his bloodstained hands?’
‘It was soldiers of King George V,’ Detleef corrected, but this was unfortunate, because Maria said, ‘The English killed most of your family at Chrissiesmeer.’
The word inflamed him: ‘Chrissiesmeer! Do you know how they spell it on their maps? Chrissie Meer. They’re even stealing our names from us.’
‘Detleef, you cannot accept a prize from that man.’
Painfully aware of the money he was sacrificing, Detleef stormed down to the cattle pens and told his manager, Troxel, ‘Take Oom Paul home.’
‘But the blue ribbon!’
‘I will accept no prize from the hands of a bloodstained king.’
A newsman heard the fracas and recognized Detleef as a former rugby great. Sensing a great story, he shouted for his cameraman, who was photographing sheep. When the man ran over, he quickly grasped the situation and dragooned Detleef into posing beside his champion. At that moment Oom Paul, irritated by the commotion, assumed a sneer almost as contemptuous as Detleef’s. The scene was frozen on film: an honest Afrikaner and his bull defying the empire.
As the 1948 election neared, the stately English homes in Johannesburg suburbs glowed with color portraits of the royal family standing with Jan Smuts, while the Afrikaner homes displayed the shot of Detleef standing with Oom Paul. When the agricultural attaché from the American embassy visited eastern Transvaal to check crops, he listened for two days to the scathing accusations lodged against Smuts, then broke into laughter. ‘You people feel about him the way my father in Iowa feels about Roosevelt. Smuts won the war for you, and now you want to kick him out. Roosevelt won the war for us, and men like my father wanted to hang him.’
The voting took place on 26 May 1948, and that evening the Van Doorns invited to their Vrymeer home their sister Johanna, Mr. Frykenius and their dominee, Reverend Brongersma. As a cool autumn night descended over the lakes, the five people sensed that this could be a day of majestic change. The king and queen were going to be banished. Slim Jannie Smuts’ party would be tossed out. The days of smug Englishmen like the Saltwoods were numbered. And those wavering Afrikaner families, like the Van Doorns of Trianon, half Dutch, half English, would be forced to make up their minds and nail their colors aloft for others to see.
Frykenius spoke: ‘I see a tremendous nationalism assuming power in this country tonight. Smuts? Forget him. The king? He’ll be gone in ten years. The English language? Now it falls to second place. Tonight we take revenge for Slagter’s Nek and the concentration camps. I pray we have the energy to capitalize on the victory we’re about to win.’
When the first returns came in they were from strongly English areas, and Smuts’ tenure as prime minister seemed to be secure, but as the night wore on, startling upsets were reported, with men who had been in internment camps during the war because of their pro-Hitler stance winning astounding victories. When it became clear that Daniel Malan’s National party was winning, Detleef began to cheer, and said to his
Toward two in the morning, when neighbors dropped by to share sandwiches and coffee, the really glorious news reached them: ‘Jan Christian Smuts has lost even his own seat at Standerton. The field marshal leaves the field of battle.’
‘Thank God!’ Maria Steyn van Doorn cried, and she knelt. Johanna joined her, and the two women prayed in thankfulness that they had seen the fall of this man who, they believed, had hurt them so grievously.
When they rose, Frykenius turned to Brongersma and asked, ‘Dominee, would you lead us in prayer? This is a night to be remembered.’ And the tall man, who would shortly leave Venloo to occupy the pulpit in the leading Pretoria church, asked his four listeners to pray with him:
‘Almagtige God, ons dank U. From 1795 when the Dutch first lost their colony at the Cape, through vicissitudes untold, we have fought to establish a just society in this land. In those troubled years You extended a covenant to us, and we have been faithful. Tonight You bring us great victory, and our only prayer is that we may prove worthy of it. Help us to build here a nation in Your image.’
Fervently the others cried ‘Amen,’ and that very afternoon Detleef and Maria headed for Cape Town, where with a new majority in Parliament they would begin their arduous work of reorganizing the nation.
The first thing Detleef did was to make life so miserable for his superior, the senior secretary to the Commission of Racial Affairs, that the only sensible thing that Englishman could do was to resign. For several weeks he tried to avoid this drastic step, trusting that the new member of Parliament who was taking over the chairmanship would protect him, but this man was a tough-minded farmer from the Orange Free State, and instead of defending the aggrieved secretary, he treated him even more contemptuously than Detleef had, and in disgust the man quit. He left government altogether, beginning the hemorrhage that would drain every department until the civil service at all levels became almost totally Afrikaner-minded and -managed.