'Kitty?" she insisted. 'These policemen. You don't seem --' she broke off as she remembered something. The previous afternoon on the way to the beach, Kitty had asked her to stop outside the Humewood post office because she wanted to send a telegram. However, from across the road looking through the post office window, Tara had seen her slip into one of the glass telephone booths. It had puzzled her at the time.
'You!" she gasped. 'It was you who warned the police!" 'Listen, darling,' Kitty snapped at her. 'These people want to get themselves arrested. That's the whole point. And I want film of them getting arrested. I did it for all our sakes --' she broke off and cocked her head. 'Listen!" she cried. 'Here they come!" Faintly on the dawn there was the sound of singing, hundreds of voices together, and the group of policemen in the station entrance stirred and looked around apprehensively.
'Okay, Hank,' Kitty snapped. 'Let's go!" They jumped out of the Packard, and hurried to the positions they had chosen, lugging their equipment.
The senior police officer with gold braid on his cap was a captain.
Tara knew enough of police rank insignia from first-hand experience.
He gave an order to his constables. Two of them began to cross the road towards the camera team.
'Shoot, Hank. Keep shooting!" Tara heard Kitty's voice, and the singing was louder now. The beautifully haunting refrain of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika carried by a thousand African voices made Tara shiver.
The two constables were halfway across the road when the first rank of protesters marched around the nearest row of shops and cottages and hurriedly the police captain called his constables back to his side.
They were twenty abreast, arms linked, filling the road from pavement to pavement, singing as they came on, and behind them followed a solid column of black humanity. Some of them were dressed in business suits, others in tattered cast-off clothing, some were silver-haired and others were in their teens. In the centre of the front rank, taller than the men around him, bare-headed and straightbacked as a soldier, marched Moses Gama.
Hank ran into the street with his sound technician following him.
With the camera on his shoulder, he retreated in front of Moses, capturing him on film, the sound man recording his voice as it soared in the anthem, full and magnificent, the very voice of Africa and his features were lit with an almost religious fervour.
Hurriedly the police captain was drawing his men up across the whites-only entrance, and they were hefting their batons nervously, pale-faced in the early sunlight. The head of the column wheeled across the road and began to climb the steps, and the police captain stepped forward and spread his arms to halt them. Moses Gama held up one hand. The column came to a jerking shuffling halt, and the singing died away.
The police captain was a tall man with a pleasantly lined face.
Tara could see him over their heads, and he was smiling. That was the thing that struck Tara. Faced with a thousand black protesters, he was still smiling.
'Come on now,' he raised his voice, like a schoolmaster addressing an unruly class. 'You know you can't do this, it's just nonsense, man. You are acting like a bunch of skollies, and I know you are good people." He was still smiling as he picked a few of the leaders out of the front ranks. 'Mr Dhlovu and Mr Khandela - you are on the management committee, shame on you!" He waggled his finger, and the men he had spoken to hung their heads and grinned shamefacedly. The whole atmosphere of the march had begun to change. Here was the father figure, stern but benevolent, and they were the children, mischievous but at the bottom good-hearted and dutiful.
'Off you go, all of you. Go home and don't be silly now,' the captain called, and the column wavered. From the back ranks there was laughter, and a few of those who had been reluctant to join the march began to slip away. Behind the captain his constables were grinning with relief, and the crowd began to jostle as it broke up.
'Good Christ!" Kitty swore bitterly. 'It's all a goddamned anticlimax. I have wasted my time--' Then on to the top steps of the railway station a tall figure stepped out of the ranks and his voice rang out over them, silencing them and freezing them where they stood. The laughter and the smiles died away.
'My people,' Moses Gama cried, 'this is your land. In it you have God's right to live in peace and dignity. This building belongs to all who live here - it is your right to enter, as much as any other person's that lives here. I am going in - who will follow me?" A ragged, uncertain chorus of support came from the front ranks and Moses turned to face the police captain.
'We are going in, Captain. Arrest us or stand aside." At that moment a train, filled with black commuters, pulled into the platform and they hung out of the windows of the coaches and cheered and stamped.
'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika!" sang Moses Gama, and with his head held high he marched under the warning sign WHITES ONLY. 'You are breaking the law,' the captain raised his voice. 'Arrest that man." And the thin rank of constables moved forward to obey.
Instantly a roar went up from the crowd behind him. 'Arrest me!
Arrest me too!" And they surged forward, picking Moses up with them as though he were a surfer on a wave.
'Arrest me!" they chanted. 'Malan! Malan! Come and arrest us!" The crowd burst through the entrance, and the white police constables were carried with them, struggling ineffectually in the press of bodies.
'Arrest me!" It had become a roar. 'Amandla! Amandla!" The captain was fighting to keep his feet, shouting to rally his men, but his voice was drowned out in the chant of, 'Power! Power!" The captain's cap was knocked over his eyes and he was shoved backwards on to the platform. Hank, the cameraman, was in the midst of it, holding his A rriflex high and shooting out of hand.
Around him the white faces of the constables bobbed like flotsam in a wild torrent of humanity. From the coaches the black passengers swarmed out to meet and mingle with the mob, and a single voice called out.
'Jee!" the battle cry that can drive an Nguni warrior into the berserker's passion, and 'Jee!" a hundred voices answered him and 'Jee!" again. There was the crash of breaking glass, one of the coach windows exploded as a shoulder thrust into it and 'Jee!" they sang.
One of the white constables lost his footing and went sprawling backwards. Immediately he was trampled under foot and he screamed like a rabbit in a snare.
'Jee!" sang the men, transformed into warriors, the veneer of western manners stripped away, and another window smashed. By now the platform was choked with a struggling mass of humanity. From the cab of the locomotive, the mob dragged the terrified enginedriver and his fireman. They jostled and pushed them, ringing them in.
'Jee!" they chanted, bouncing at the knees, working themselves up into the killing madness. Their eyes were glazing and engorging with blood, their faces turning into shining black masks.
'Jee!" they sang. 'Jee!" and Moses Gama sang with them. Let the others call for restraint and passive resistance to the enemy, but all that was forgotten and now Moses Gama's blood seethed with all his pent-up hatred and 'Jee!" he cried, and his skin crawled and itched with atavistic fury and his fighting heart swelled to fill his chest.
The police captain, still on his feet, had been driven back against the wall of the station-master's office. One epaulette had been torn from the shoulder of his uniform and he had lost his cap. There was a fleck of blood at the corner of his mustache where an elbow had struck him in the mouth, and he was struggling with the flap of the holster on his belt.