Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
Each day from before dawn's light until after sunset, Ndlame gave them instruction and taught them their duties as members of the tribe, as husbands and as fathers. They learned to endure pain and hardship with stoicism. They learned discipline and duty to their tribe, the ways of the wild animals and plants, how to survive in the wilderness, and how to please their wives and raise their children.
When the wounds of the circumcision blade had healed, Ndlame bound up their members each night in the special knot called the Red Dog, to prevent them spilling their seed in the sacred initiation huts. Each morning Ndlame inspected the knots carefully to ensure that they had not been loosened to enjoy the forbidden pleasure of masturbation.
When the three moons had passed, Ndlame led them back to the river and they washed away the white initiation clay and anointed their bodies with a mixture of fat and red ochre, and Ndlame gave them each a red blanket, symbol of manhood, with which they covered themselves. In procession, singing the manhood songs which they had practised, they went to where the tribe waited at the edge of the forest.
Their parents had gifts for them, clothing and new shoes and money, and the girls giggled and ogled them boldly, for they were men now and able at last to take a wife, as many wives as they could afford, for the lobola, the marriage fee, was heavy.
The two brothers, accompanied by their mother, journeyed back to Drake's Farm, Wellington to take leave of their father, for he was going on to take holy orders, and Raleigh to remain at his father's side, to learn the multifarious facets of Hendrick Tabaka's business activities and eventually to take the helm and become the comfort and mainstay of Hendrick's old age.
These were fascinating and disturbing months and years for Raleigh. Until this time he had never guessed at his father's wealth and power, but gradually it was revealed to him. The pages in the ledger turned for him one at a time. He learned of his father's general dealer stores, and the butcheries and bakeries in all the black townships spread throughout the great industrial triangle of the Transvaal that was based on the gold-mines and the iron-deposits and the coal fields. Then he went on to learn about the cattle herds and rural general dealer's stores in the tribal reservations owned by his father and cared for by his myriad brothers, about the shebeens and the whores that operated behind the front of legitimate business, and finally he learned about the Buffaloes, that ubiquitous and shadowy association of many men from all the various tribes, whose chief was his own father.
He realized at last just how rich and powerful his father was, and yet how because he was a black man, he could not display his importance and could wield his power only covertly and clandestinely.
Raleigh felt his anger stir, as it did whenever he saw those signs 'Whites Only - Blankes AileenIlk' and saw the white men pass in their shiny automobiles, or when he stood outside the universities and hospitals which were closed to him.
He spoke to his father about these things that troubled him and Hendrick Tabaka chuckled and shook his head. 'Rage makes a man sick, my son. It spoils his appetite for life and keeps him from sleep at night. We cannot change our world, so we must look for the good things in life and enjoy those to the full. The white man is strong, you cannot imagine how strong, you have not seen even the strength of his little finger. If you take up the spear against him, he will destroy you and all the good things we have - and if the gods and the lightnings intervened and by chance you destroyed the white man, think hat would follow him. There woukt come a darkness and a time without law and protection that would be a hundred times worse than the white man's oppressions. We would be consumed by the rage of our own people, and we would not have even the consolation of these few sweet things. If you open your ears and your eyes, my son, you will hear how the young people call us collaborators and how they talk of a redistribution of wealth, and you will see the envy in their eyes. The dream you have, my son, is a dangerous dream." 'And yet I must dream it, my father,' said Raleigh, and then, one unforgettable day, his uncle, Moses Gama, returned from foreign lands and took him to meet other young men who shared the same dream.
So, during the day Raleigh worked at his father's business and in the evenings he met with the other young comrades of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
At first they only talked, but the words were sweeter and headier than the smoke of the dagga pipes of the old men.
Then Raleigh joined the comrades who were enforcing the decrees of the African National Congress, the boycotts and the strikes and the work stoppages. He went to Evaton location with a small task force to enforce the bus boycott and they attacked the black workers in the bus queues who were trying to get to their places of employment or who were going to shop for their families, and they beat them with sjamboks, the long leather quirts, and with their fightingsticks.
On the first day of the attacks, Raleigh was determined to demonstrate his zeal to his comrades and he used his fighting-stick with all the skill which he had learned as a child in faction fights with the boys of the other tribes.
There was a woman in the queue for the bus who defied Raleigh's order to go home, and she spat at him and his comrades and called them tsotsies and skelms, gangsters and rogues. She was a woman in middle age, large and matronly, with cheeks so plump and shiny that they looked as though they had been rubbed up with black shoe polish, and with such a queenly manner that at first the young comrades of Umkhonto we Sizwe were abashed by her scorn and might have withdrawn.
Then Raleigh saw that this was his opportunity to prove his ardour and he leaped forward and confronted the women. 'Go home, old woman,' he warned her. 'We are no longer dogs to eat the white man's shit." 'You are a little uncircumcised boy with filth on your tongue,' she began, but Raleigh would not let her continue. He swung the long supple fighting-stick, and it split her shiny black cheek as cleanly as the cut of an axe, so for an instant Raleigh saw the bone gleam in the depths of the wound before the swift crimson flood obscured it.
The big woman screamed and fell to her knees, and Raleigh felt a strange sensation of power and lurpose, a euphoria of patriotic duty.
For a moment the woman kneeling before him became the focus of all his frustration and his rage.
The woman saw it in his eyes and held up both arms over her head to ward off the next blow. Raleigh struck again, with all his strength and skill, using his wrist so that the fighting-stick whined in the air and the blow landed on the woman's elbow. Her arms were wreathed in layers of deep fat. It hung in dewlaps from her upper arms and in bracelets about her wrists, but it could not cushion the power behind that whistling stick. The joint of her elbow shattered, and her forearm dropped and twisted at an impossible angle as it hung helplessly at her side.
The woman screamed again, this time the sound was so filled with outrage and agony that it goaded the other young warriors and they fell upon the bus passengers with such fury that the terminus was strewn with the wailing and sobbing injured and the concrete floor was washed sticky red.
When the ambulances came with sirens wailing to collect the casualties, the comrades of Umkhonto we Sizwe pelted them with stones and half bricks and Raleigh led a small group of the bolder ones who ran out into the street and turned one of the stranded ambulances on its side, and when the petrol poured from the tank, Raleigh lit a match and tossed it on to the spread pool.
The explosive ignition singed his eyelashes and burned away the front of his hair, but that evening when they got back to Drake's Farm, Raleigh was the hero of the band of warriors, and they gave him the praise-name of Cheza which means 'the burner'.
