Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗

As Raleigh was accepted into the middle ranks of the Youth League of the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe, so he gradually understood the cross-currents of power within them and the internal politics of the rival groups of moderates and radicals - those who thought that freedom could be negotiated and those who believed that it must be won with the blade of the spear, those who thought that the treasures so patiently built up over the years - the mines and the factories and the railways - should be preserved and those who believed that it should all be destroyed and rebuilt again in the name of freedom by the pure ones.

Raleigh found himself inclining more and more towards the purists, the hard fighting men, the exclusive Bantu elite, and when he heard the name Poqo for the first time, he thrilled to the sound and sense of it.

It described exactly his own feelings and desires - the pure, the only ones.

He was present in the house in Drake's Farm when Moses Gama spoke to them and promised them that the long wait was almost at an end.

'I will take this land by its heels and set it upon its head." Moses Gama told the group of intense loyal young warriors. 'I will give you a deed, a sign that every man and woman will understand instantly.

It will bring the tribes into the streets in their millions and their rage will be a beautiful thing, so pure and strong that nobody, not even the hard Boers, will be able to resist." Soon Raleigh came to sense in Moses Gama a divinity that set him above all other humans, and he was filled with a religious love for him and a deep and utter commitment. When the news reached Raleigh that Moses Gama had been caught by the white police as he was on the point of blowing up the houses of parliament and destroying all the evil contained in that iniquitous institution, Raleigh was almost prostrated by his grief, and yet set on fire by Moses Gama's courage and example.

Over the weeks and months that followed, Raleigh was exasperated and angered by the calls for moderation from the high councils of the ANC, and by the dispirited and meek acceptance of Moses Gama's imprisonment and trial. He wanted to vent his wrath upon the world, and when the Pan Africanist Congress broke away from the ANC Raleigh followed where his heart led.

Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress, sent for him. 'I have heard good words of you,' he told Raleigh. 'And I know the man who is your uncle, the father of us all who languishes in the white man's prison. It is our duty - for we are the pure ones to bring our message to every black man in the land. There is much work to do, and this is the task I have set for you alone, Raleigh Tabaka." He led Raleigh to a large-scale map of the Transvaal. 'This area has been left untouched by the ANC." He placed his hand over the sweep of townships and coalfields and industry around the town of Vereeniging. 'This is where I want you to begin the work." Within a week Raleigh had conditioned his father to the idea that he should move to the Vereeniging area to take charge of the family interests there, the three stores in Evaton and the butchery and bakery in Sharpeville, and his father liked the idea the more he thought about it, and he agreed.

'I will give you the names of the men who command the Buffaloes down there. We can begin moving the shebeens into the Sharpeville area. So far we have not put our cattle to graze on those pastures, and the grass there is tall and green." Raleigh moved slowly at first. He was a stranger in Sharpeville and he had to consolidate his position. However, he was a strong and comely young man, and he spoke fluently all the major languages of the townships. This was not an unusual achievement, there were many who spoke all the four related languages of the Nguni group of peoples, the Zulus, the Xhosas, the Swazi and the Ndebele, which make up almost seventy percent of the black tribes of South Africa and whose speech is characterized by elaborate clicking and clucking sounds.

Many others, like Raleigh, were also conversant with the other two languages which are spoken by almost the entire remainder of the black population, the Sotho and the Tswana.

Language was no barrier, and Raleigh had the additional advantage of being placed in charge of his father's business interest in the area, and therefore was accorded almost immediate recognition and respect. Sooner or later every single resident of Sharpeville would come to either Tabaka's bakery or butcher shop and be impressed by the articulate and sympathetic young man who listened to their worries and troubles and extended them credit to buy the white bread and fizzy drinks and tobacco; these were the staple diet of the townships where much of the old way of life was abandoned and forgotten, where the soured milk and maize meal were difficult to procure and where rickets made the children lethargic, bent their bones and turned their hair fine and wispy and dyed a peculiar bronze colour.

They told Raleigh their little troubles, like the cost of renting the township houses and the hardship of commuting such distances to their place of work that it was necessary to rise long before the sun.

And then they told Raleigh their greater worries, of being evicted from their homes and of the harassment by the police who were always raiding for liquor and pass offences and prostitution and to enforce the influx control laws. But always it came down to the passes, the little booklets that ruled their lives. The police always were there to ask 'Where is your pass? Show me your pass book." The dornpas, they called them, 'the damned pass', in which were stamped all their details of birth and residence and right to reside; no black person could get a job unless he or she produced the damned pass book.

From all the people who came to the shops, Raleigh chose the young vital ones, the brave ones with rage in their hearts, and they met discreetly at first in the storeroom at the back of the bakery, sitting on the bread baskets and the piles of flour bags, talking the night through.

Then they moved more openly, speaking to the older people and the children in the schools, going about as disciples to teach and explain.

Raleigh used the funds of the butchery to buy a secondhand duplicator, and he typed the pamphlets on the pink wax sheets and r/n them' off.on the machine.

They were crude little pamphlets, with botchy typing errors and obvious corrections and each one began with the salutation, 'This is /'we of which it is said--' and ended with the stern injunction, 'P, qe has said this thing. Hear it and obey it." The young men whom Raleigh had recruited distributed these and read them to those who could not read for themselves.

At first Raleigh allowed only men to come to the meetings in the back room of the bakery store, for they were purists and it was the traditional role of the men to herd the cattle and hunt the game and defend the tribe, while the women thatched the huts and tilled the earth for maize and sorghum and carried the children on their backs.

Then the word was passed down from the high command of Peqt and PAC that the women were also part of the struggle. So Raleigh spoke with his young men and one evening a girl came to their Friday-night meeting in the bakery storeroom.

She was a Xhosa and she was tall and strong with beautiful swelling buttocks and the round sweet face like one of the wild veld flowers.

While Raleigh spoke she listened silently. She did not move or fidget or interrupt and her huge dark eyes never left Raleigh's face.

Raleigh felt that he was inspired that night, and though he never looked directly at the girl and seemed to address himself to the young warriors, it was to her he spoke and his voice was deep and sure and his own words reverberated in his skull and he listened to them with the same wonder as the others did.