Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
'It is only clothing,' Vicky pointed out reasonably.
'These aren't ordinary clothes,' the senior warden protested.
They are the traditional robes of my husband's tribe. He is entitled to wear them." In the end the prison governor was called in to arbitrate and when he finally gave his permission, Vicky complained, 'Your men have been deliberately rude and obstructive to me." He smiled at her sarcastically. 'I wonder how you will treat us, madam, if you and your brothers in the ANC ever seize power. I wonder if you will allow us even the courtesy of a trial or whether you will slaughter us in the streets, as your husband tried to do." When Vicky was at last allowed to hand the parcel to Moses under the watchful eye of four warders, he asked her, 'Whose idea was this?" 'It was mine but Hendrick paid for the skins and his wives sewed them." 'You are a clever woman,' Moses commended her, 'and a dutiful wife." 'You, my lord, are a great chief, and it is fitting that you should wear the robes of your office." Moses held up. the full-length cloak of leopard skins, heavy and glossy golden, studded with the sable rosettes.
'You have understood,' he nodded. 'You have seen the necessity of using the white man's courtroom as a stage from which to shout our craving for freedom to the world." Vicky lowered her eyes and her voice. 'My lord, you must not die.
If you die, then the great part of our dream of freedom dies with you. Will you not defend yourself, for my sake and for the sake of our people?" 'No, I will not die,' he assured her. 'The great nations of the world will not let that happen. Britain has already made her position clear and America cannot afford to let them execute me. Her own nation is wracked by the struggle of the American coloured people - she cannot afford to let me go to my death." 'I do not trust the altruism of great nations,' Vicky said softly.
'Then trust in their own self-interest,' Moses Gama told her. 'And trust in me." When Moses Gama rose before the court in the golden and black robes of leopard skin, he seemed a reincarnation of one of the ancient black kings. He riveted them.
'I call no witnesses,' Gama told them gravely. 'All I will do is to make a statement from the dock. That is as far as I am prepared to cooperate in this mockery of justice." 'My lord,' the prosecutor was on his feet immediately. 'I must point out to the court--' 'Thank you!" Judge Villiers interrupted him in frigid tones. 'I do not need to be told how to conduct this trial,' and the prosecutor sank back into his seat, still making inarticulate sounds of protest.
Heavily the scarlet-robed justice turned his attention back to Moses Gama.
'What counsel for the prosecution is trying to tell me is that I should make it clear to you that if you do not enter the witness stand and take the oath, if you do ndt submit to cross-examination, then what you have to say will have little relevance to the proceedings." 'An oath to your white man's God, in this courtroom with a white judge and a white prosecutor, with white prosecution witnesses and white policemen at the doors. I do not deign to submit to that kind of justice." Judge Villiers shook his head with a woeful expression and turned both his hands palms up. 'Very well, you have been warned of the consequences. Proceed with your statement." Moses Gama was silent for a long time, and then he began softly.
'There was once a small boy who wandered with joy through a beautiful land, who drank from the sweet clear rivers, who listened with pleasure to the song of the bird and studied the antics of the springbok and pangolin and all the marvelous wild things, a small boy who tended his father's herds, and sat at night by the fire and listened to the tales of the great heroes of his people, of Bambata and Sekhukhuni and mighty Chaka.
This boy believed himself to be one of a peaceful people who owned the land on which they lived and were free to move wherever they wished in confidence and joy. Then one day when the boy was nine years of age a curious being came to the kraal at which the boy lived, a creature with a red face and a lordly manner, and the boy saw that the people were afraid, even his father and his grandfather who were chieftains of the tribe, were afraid as the boy had never seen them afraid before." There was no sound nor movement in the crowded courtroom as, Moses Gama described his loss of innocence and how he had learned the bitter truths of his existence. He described his bewilderment as the universe he knew was proved an illusion. He told them of his first journey into the outside world, where he learned that as a man with a black skin there were places where his existence was circumscribed and limited.
When he went to the white man's towns, he found that he could not walk the streets after curfew without a pass, that he could not live outside the areas that had been set aside for his people on the outskirts of that town, but most important to him he found that he could not attend the white man's schools. He learned that in nearly every public building there was a separate entrance for him to use, that there were skills he was not allowed to acquire, and that in almost every way he was considered different and inferior, condemned by the pigmentation of his skin, always to remain on the bottom rung of existence.
Yet he knew that he was a man like other men, with the same hopes and desires. He knew that his heart beat as fiercely and that his body was as strong, and his brain was as bright and quick as any other. He decided that the way to rise above the station in life that had been allotted him was to use that brain rather than employ his body like a beast of burden as most of his people were forced to do.
He turned to the white maws books and was astonished to find that the heroes of his people were described as savages and cattlethieves and treacherous rebels. That even the most sympathetic and charitable of the authors he read referred to his people as children, unable to reason or think for themselves, children who must be sternly protected but prevented from taking part in the decisions which governed their lives.
He described to them how at last he had realized that it was all some monstrous lie. That he was not different, that because his ski: was black he was not unclean or contaminated or childlike. He knew then for what purpose he had been put upon this earth.
'I came to know that the struggle against injustice was my life,' he said simply. 'I knew that I had to make the white men who ruled me and my people understand." He explained how each of his attempts to get the white men to listen had failed. How all his people's efforts had resulted only in more savage and draconian laws, in fiercer oppressions.
'In the end I had to accept that there was only one course left to me. That was to take up arms and to strike at the head of the serpent whose venom was poisoning and destroying my people." He was silent and his audience who had listened in complete and rigid silence for most of the morning, sighed and stirred, but as soon as Moses Gama spread his arms they were completely attentive once more.
'Every man has a right and a sacred duty to protect his family and his nation from the tyrant, to fight against injustice and slavery.
When he does so he becomes a warrior and not a criminal. I challenge this judge and this white man's court to treat me as a soldier and a prisoner of war. For that is what I am." Moses Gama drew his leopard skins about him and sat down, leaving them all shaken and silenced.
Judge Villiers had sat through the entire address with his chin couched in his hand, his eyes hooded with concentration, but-now he let his hand drop and he leaned forward to glower at the prisoner.
