Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
Although his hair was blond, his eyebrows were dark and thick and his eyes were yellow as those of a leopard. Raleigh knew then box he had earned his nickname. Those pale eyes were underscored wit[ smudges of fatigue and horror, dark as old bruises, and his lips wer dry and cracked.
They stared at each other - the black man kneeling in the dus with the dead woman in his arms and the uniformed white man wit the empty sten gun in his hands.
'I didn't mean it to happen --' said Lothar De La Rey and hi, voice croaked, 'I'm sorry." Raleigh did not answer, gave no sign of having heard or understood and Lothar turned away and walked back, picking his wa) amongst the dead and the maimed, back into the laager of wire mesh.
The blood on Raleighs clothing began to cool, and when he touched Amelia's cheek again he felt the warmth going out of it also. Gently he closed her eyelids, and then he unbuttoned the front of her blouse. There was very little bleeding from the two entry wounds. They were just below her pointed virgin breasts, small dark mouths in her smooth amber-coloured skin, set only inches apart.
Raleigh ran two fingers of his right hand into those bloody mouths, and there was residual warmth in her torn flesh.
'With my fingers in your dead body,' he whispered. 'With the fingers of my right hand in your wounds, I swear an oath, my love.
You will be avenged. I swear it on our love, upon my life and upon your death. You will be avenged." In the days of anxiety and turmoil following the massacre of Sharpeville, Verwoerd and his minister of police acted with resolution and strength.
A state of emergency was declared in almost half of South Africa's magisterial districts. Both the PAC and ANC were banned and those of their supporters suspected of incitement and intimidation were arrested and detained under the emergency regulations. Some estimates put the figure of detainees as high as eighteen thousand.
In early April at the meeting of the full cabinet to discuss the emergency, Shasa Courtney risked his political future by rising to address a plea to Dr Verwoerd for the abolition of the pass book system. He had prepared his speech with care, and the genuine concern he felt for the importance of the subject made him even more than usually eloquent. As he spoke he became gradually aware that he was winning the support of some of the other senior members of the cabinet.
'In a single stroke we will be removing the main cause of black dissatisfaction, and depriving the revolutionary agitators of their most valuable weapon,' he pointed out.
Three other senior ministers followed Shasa, each voicing their support for the abolition of the dompas, but from the top of the long table Verwoerd glowered at them, becoming every minute more angry until at last he jumped to his feet.
'The idea is completely out of the question. The reference books are there for an essential purpose: to control the influx of blacks into the urban areas." Within a few minutes he had brutally bludgeoned the proposal to death, and made it clear that to try to resurrect it would be political suicide for any member of the cabinet, no matter how senior.
Within days Dr Hendrik Verwoerd was himself on the brink of the chasm. He visited Johannesburg to open the Rand Easter Show.
He made a reassuring speech to the huge audience that filled the arena of the country's largest agricultural and industrial show, and as he sat down to thunderous applause, a white man of insignificant appearance made his way between the tiers of seats and in full view of everybody drew a pistol and holding it to Dr Verwoerd's head fired two shots.
With blood pouring down his face Verwoerd collapsed, and security guards overpowered his assailant. Both bullets, fired at point-b3-/tnk range, had penetrated the prime minister's skull, and yet his most remarkable tenacity and will to survive combined with the expert medical attention he received, saved him.
In -ittle more than a month he had left hospital and had once more ken up his duties as the head of state. The assassination attempt seemed to have been without motive or reason, and the assailant was judged insane and placed in an asylum. By the time Dr Verwoerd had fully recovered from the attempt on his life calm had been restored to the country as a whole, and Manfred De La Rey's police were in total control once more.
Naturally the reaction of the international community towards the slaughter and the subsequent measures to regain control was heavily critical. America led the rest in her condemnations, and within months had instituted an embargo on the sale of arms to South Africa. More damaging than the reaction of foreign governments was the crash on the Johannesburg stock exchange, the collapse of property values and the attempted flight of capital out of the country.
Strict exchange-control regulations were swiftly imposed to forestall this.
Manfred De La Rey had come out of it all with his power and u position greatly enhanced. He had acted the way his people expected him to, with strength and forthright determination. There wasn doubt at all now that he was one of the senior members of th cabinet and in the direct line of succession to Hendrik Verwoerd. H had smashed the Pan Africanist Congress and the ANC. Thei leaders were in total disarray and all of them were in hiding or ha, fled the country.
With the safety of the state secured, Dr Verwoerd could atlas turn his full attention to the momentous business of realizing th golden dream of Afrikanerdom - the Republic.
The referendum was held in October 1960, and so great were th, feelings, for and against, engendered by the prospect of breakin with the British crown that there was a ninety percent poll. Cun ningly, Verwoerd had decreed that a simple majority, and not th usual two-thirds majority, would suffice, and on the day he got hi..
majority: 850,000 to 775,000. The Afrikaner response was an hysteri of joy, of speeches and wild rejoicing.
In March the following year Verwoerd and his entourage went to London to attend the conference of the Commonwealth prim ministers. He came out of the meeting to tell the world, 'In the ligh of opinions expressed by other member governments of the Commonwealth regarding South Africa's race policies, and in the light all future plans regarding the race policies of the South Africar government, I told the other prime ministers that I was withdrawin my country's application for continued membership of the Commonwealth after attaining the status of a republic." From Pretoria Manfred De La Rey cabled Verwoerd, 'You have preserved the dignity and pride of your country, and the nation owes you eternal gratitude." Verwoerd returned home to the adulation and hero worship of his people.
In the heady euphoria, very few, even amongst the English-speaking opposition, realized just how many doors Verwoerd had locked and barred behind him and just how cold and bleak the winds that Macmillan had predicted would blow across the southern tip of Africa in the coming years.
With the Republic safely launched Verwoerd could at last select his praetorian guard to protect it and hold it strong. Erasmus, the erstwhile minister of justice who had acted neither as ruthlessly nor as resolutely as was expected during the emergency, was packed off as the ambassador of the new Republic to Rome, and Verwoerd presented two new ministers to his cabinet.
The new minister of defence was the member for the constituency of George in the Cape, P. W. Botha, while Erasmus's replacement as minister of justice was Balthazar Johannes Vorster. Shasa Courtney knew Vorster well, and as he listened to him make his first address to the cabinet, he reflected how much like Manfred De La Rey the man was.
They were almost the same age and, like Manfred, Vorster had been a member of the extreme right-wing anti-Smuts pro-Nazi Ossewa Brandwag during the war. Whereas it was generally accepted that Manfred had remained in Germany during the war years although he was very mysterious and secretive about that period of his life - John Vorster had been interned in Smuts' Koffiefontein concentration camp for the duration.
