“You say as a result of this case, you began to question your laws,” said Viliki, “but you remained in the party for the next thirty years. Why?”
“To change it from within. People like de Klerk and I changed the National Party from within. That is why today the National Party is the party that brought about the new dispensation in South Africa.”
Viliki laughed for a long time. Until Adam de Vries got irritated.
“So it’s really you who brought us this freedom we are enjoying today?” asked Viliki, still laughing. “All this time we thought it was the Movement and the other organisations. What were we doing fighting for freedom in the underground when you and de Klerk were here all along to free us?”
“Listen,” said Adam de Vries, not bothering to hide his annoyance, “I am busy. I cannot sit here all day listening to your idle talk. Don’t you have any work to do at the council?”
“You know, Meneer,” said Viliki as he made to go, “these days it is very difficult to find a white person who ever supported apartheid.”
We watched Viliki walk out of Adam de Vries’s office. We knew that whenever he was bored, whenever he had had his fill of the Seller of Songs’ music that tingled in his veins, making his body hot to the point of explosion, he sauntered off to Adam de Vries’s office in town. We wondered what it was that had drawn these two together. At least Popi and Lizette de Vries were drawn together by their work. But Viliki and Adam de Vries?
When the inquisitive quizzed him about it, Viliki would only say, “He is a nice guy, although a white man will always be a white man.”
The likes of Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit said that Adam de Vries was Viliki’s puppet. It was not enough that his party had sold out the Afrikaner; Adam de Vries was now dancing to the tune of the blacks who were taking the country down the sewer. Otherwise what would an Afrikaner lawyer have in common with an unschooled township boy?
The people of the Movement said de Vries was the puppeteer and Viliki the puppet. The Pule Siblings no longer represented the interests of the people of Mahlatswetsa Location in the council chamber, but those of the rich Afrikaners of Excelsior.
We, on the other hand, were not bothered by these friendships. We put them down to the old love affair between black people and Afrikaners that the English found so irritating. Even at the height of apartheid, blacks preferred dealing with Afrikaners to the English-speaking South Africans. The English, common wisdom stated, were hypocrites. They laughed with you, but immediately you turned, they stabbed you in the back. The Afrikaner, on the other hand, was honest. When he hated you, he showed you at once. He did not pretend to like you. If he hated blacks, he said so publicly. So, when you dealt with him, you knew who you were dealing with. When he smiled, you knew he was genuine. One could never trust the smile of an Englishman.
We never questioned what informed these generalisations.
VILIKI WALKED aimlessly down the main street of Excelsior, which was really the only street of note in the town. The rest of the streets were lined with residential houses. The street was bustling with excited people. There was a carnival atmosphere as men, women and children walked from one shop to the next with plastic bags full of groceries. Other people gathered at the Greek café, which was really a Portuguese café, to treat themselves to Russian sausages and chips.
It was payday in Excelsior. The aged who were on old-age pensions had received their monthly grants. And their children and grandchildren were out to spend the money on both necessities and luxuries. Payday always caused such excitement. Even children knew when it was payday, because most families depended on the money that the government gave to the aged for being old. The most fortunate families were those that had one or two mentally or physically disabled members. Their disability grants, paid on the same day as the old-age pensions, fed entire families.
Viliki became part of the buzz of excitement, joining some friends from Mahlatswetsa Location who wanted to have a few beers at the off-sales liquor outlet, or bottle store, adjacent to the only hotel in town. They bought the beers and sat on the window ledge outside the bottle store, as was the custom. The owner allowed them to sit on the inside window sill in front of the counter when the weather was not conducive to imbibing outdoors.
They watched as Afrikaner men and women walked in and out of the pub at the hotel. Viliki and his friends had never been inside that pub. The thought never even entered their heads to drink there. It was the domain of the Afrikaners of Excelsior. And everyone left it at that.
Viliki saw Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit climb out of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, singing boisterously. Jacomina followed, reprimanding them for making too much noise. They only laughed at her and sang even louder, dancing clownishly around her as they walked into the pub.
Viliki had not seen Johannes Smit for quite some time. Since the time he had burst into the council chamber to complain about the increase in rates a year ago. To cheers of derision from the Movement council members and of admiration from Tjaart Cronje, and to the bemusement of the National Party members, he had stood up in the gallery, and had shouted out of turn, “I am a farmer! I feed South Africa! The very Mandelas and Mbekis cannot survive without me!”
Viliki sipped his beer from the one-litre bottle and wondered why people like Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit were so angry. Were people like Viliki, Popi and Niki not the ones who should be angry? Were they not entitled even to a shred of anger? Why should the Afrikaner hoard all the anger?
30. POSKAART/POSTCARD 2
STREET SIGNS INDICATE that this is a crossroad. He pulls the two-wheeled unhooded cart across the crimson soil like a rickshaw man. His red hair has been tied into a big bun that hangs like a cap over his face. It is a small delicate face connected by a thick neck to a small delicate body clad in golden-yellow overalls. His grey boots have patches of red from the soil. His body is bent slightly forward from the weight of the cart. He pulls it among golden-yellow sunflowers. On the cart sits a brown Mother Mary with a brown Baby Jesus in her arms. She looks like a nun in a blue veil. Three giant candles burn in the cart: one in front, two at the back. A white giant star of Bethlehem spreads its white light between the puller of the cart and its riders. Sunflowers flourish on the crimson soil. Three giant sunflowers grow out of the blue and white sky.
Kersfees in die Karretjie. Xmas in the Small Cart. By: Father Frans Claer-houut. Popi read the bottom of the postcard and laughed. She had never noticed before that they had misspelt the trinity’s name. They had added an extra u, which served him right, as he had mastered the art of distorting everything. Houses. People. Donkeys. Rickshaws. Sunflowers and cosmos. Even holy personages like Jesus and Mary. It was poetic justice that the printer had distorted his name too. A man who could be possessed by such beautiful madness that he placed road signs in the middle of a sunflower field deserved to have his name distorted.
It was Christmas in Excelsior, too. Popi had taken out her exercise book to look at the postcards. She wondered if the trinity would be painting on Christmas Day. Maybe the picture on the postcard was created on Christmas Day. She remembered her last visit to the trinity’s studio many years ago. As a fourteen-year-old freckled girl. Before she became a woman of thirty whose tall slender frame was burdened with anger. She felt an urge to go to the mission house in Tweespruit to see him again. To bathe her troubled soul in the colourful canvases that surrounded him.