She escaped through the great ostentatious Anreith gateway into the real world of suffering and injustice, where the oppressed masses wept and struggled and cried out for succour and where she felt useful and relevant, where in the company of other pilgrims she could march forward to meet a future full of challenge and change.
The Broadbursts' home was in the middle-class suburb of Pinelands, a modern ranch-type home with a flat roof and large picture windows, with ordinary functional mass-produced furniture and nylon wall-to-wall carpets. There were dog hairs on the chairs, well thumbed intellectual books piled in odd corners or left open on the dining-room table, children's toys abandoned in the passageways, and cheap reproductions of Picasso and Modigliani hanging askew on the walls marked with grubby little fingerprints. Tara felt comfortable and welcome here, mercifully released from the fastidious splendour of Weltevreden.
Molly Broadhurst rushed out to meet her as she parked the Packard.
She was dressed in a marvellously flamboyant caftan.
'You're late!" She kissed Tara heartily and dragged her through the disorder of the lounge to the music room at the rear.
The music room was an afterthought stuck on to the end of the house without any aesthetic considerations and was filled now with Molly's guests who had been invited to hear Moses Gama. Tara's spirits soared as she looked around her, they were all vibrant creative people, all of them spirited and articulate, filled with the excitement of living and a fine sense of justice and outrage and rebellion.
This was the type of gathering that Weltevreden would never see.
Firstly, black people were included, students from the black University of Fort Hare and the fledgling University of the Western Cape, teachers and lawyers and even a black doctor, all of them political activists who, although denied a voice or a vote in the white parliament, were beginning to cry out with a passion that must be heard.
There was the editor of the black magazine Drum and the local correspondent of the Sowetant named after that sprawling black township.
Just to mingle socially with blacks made her feel breathlessly daring.
The whites in the room were no less extraordinary. Some of them had been members of the Communist Party of South Africa before that organization had been disbanded a few years previously. There was a man called Harris who she had met before at Molly's house.
He had fought with the Irgun in Israel against the British and the Arabs, a tall fierce man who inspired a delicious fear in Tara. Molly hinted that he was an expert in guerrilla warfare and sabotage, and certainly he was always travelling secretly around the country or slipping across the border into neighbouring states on mysterious business. ú Talking earnestly to Molly's husband was another lawyer from Johannesburg, Brain Fischer, who specialized in defending black clients charged under the myriad laws that were designed to muzzle and disarm them and restrict their movements. Molly said that Brain was reorganizing the old Communist Party into underground cells, and Tara fantasized that she might one day be invited to join one of these cells.
In the same group was Marcus Archer, another ex-communist and an industrial psychologist from the Witwatersrand. He was responsible for the training of thousands of black workers for the goldmining industry, and Molly said that he had helped to organize the black mineworkers' union. Molly had also whispered that he was a homosexual, and she had used an odd term for it that Tara had never heard before. 'He's gay, gay as a lark." And because it was totally unacceptable to polite society, Tara found it fascinating.
'Oh God, Molly,' Tara whispered. 'This is so exciting. These are all real people, they make me feel as though I am truly living at last." 'There he is." Molly smiled at this outburst and dragged Tara with her through the press of bodies.
Moses Gama leaned against the far wall faced by a half circle of admirers, yet standing head and shoulders above them, and Molly pushed her way into the front row.
Tara found herself staring up at Moses Gama, and she thought that even in this brilliant company he stood out like a black panther in a pack of mangy alley cats. Though his head seemed carved from a block of black onyx, and his handsome Nilotic features were impassive, yet there was a force within him that seemed to fill all the room. It was like standing on the high slopes of a dark Vesuvius, knowing that at any instant it could boil over into cataclysmic eruption.
Moses Gama turned his head and looked at Tara. He did not smile, but a shadowy thing moved in the depths of his dark gaze.
'Mrs Courtney - I asked Molly to invite you." 'Please don't call me that. My name is Tara." 'We must talk later, Tara. Will you stay?" She could not answer, she was too overcome at being singled out, but she nodded dumbly.
'If you are ready, Moses, we can begin,' Molly suggested, and taking him out of the group led him to the raised dais on which the piano stood.
'People! People! Your attention, please!" Molly clapped her hands, and the animated chatter died away. Everybody turned towards the dais. 'Moses Gama is one of the most talented and revered of the new generation of young black African leaders. He has been a member of the African National Congress since before the war, and a prime mover in the formation of the African Mineworkers' Union.
Although the black trade unions are not officially recognized by the government of the day, yet the secret union of mineworkers is one of the most representative and powerful of all black associations, with more than a hundred thousand paid-up members. In 1950 Moses Gama was elected Secretary of the ANC, and he has worked tirelessly, selflessly and highly effectively in making the heart cry of our black citizens heard, even though they are denied a voice in their own destiny. For a short while Moses Gama was an appointed member of the government's Natives' Representative Council, that infamous attempt to appease black political aspirations, but it was he who resigned with the now celebrated remark, 'I have been speaking into a toy telephone, with nobody listening at the other end." There was a btirst of laughter and applause from the room, and then Molly turned to Moses Gama.
'I know that you have nothing to tell us that will comfort and soothe us - but, Moses Gama, in this room there are many hearts that beat with yours and are prepared to bleed with yours." Tara applauded until the palms of her hands were numb, and then leaned forward to listen eagerly as Moses Gama moved to the front of the dais.
He was dressed in a neat blue suit and a dark blue tie with a white shirt. Strangely, he was the most formally dressed man in a room full of baggy woollen sweaters and old tweed sports coats with leather patches on the elbows and gravy stains on the lapels. His suit was severely cut, draped elegantly from wide athletic shoulders, but he imparted to it a panache that made it seem that he wore the leopardskin cloak of royalty and the blue heron feathers in his close-cropped mat of hair. His voice was deep and thrilling.
'My friends, there is one single ideal to which I cling with all my heart, and which I will defend with my very life, and that is that every African has a primary, inherent and inalienable right to the Africa which is his continent and his only motherland,' Moses Gama began, and Tara listened, enchanted, as he detailed how that inherent right had been denied the black man for three hundred years, and how in these last few years since the Nationalist government had come to power, those denials were becoming formally entrenched in a monumental edifice of laws and ordinances and proclamations which was the policy of apartheid in practice.
'We have all heard it said that the whole concept of apartheid is so grotesque, so obviously lunatic, that it can never work. But I warn you, my friends, that the men who have conceived this crazy scheme are so fanatical, so obdurate, so convinced of their divine guidance, that they will force it to work. Already they have created a vast army of petty civil servants to administer this madness, and they have behind them the full resources of a land rich in gold and minerals. I warn you that they will not hesitate to squander that wealth in building up this ideological Frankenstein of theirs. There is no price in material wealth and human suffering that is too high for them to contemplate." Moses Gama paused and looked down upon them, and it seemed to Tara that he personally felt every last agony of his people, and was filled with suffering beyond that which mortal men could bear.