Christopher Hope - Kruger's Alp

‘What the Regime had been unable to achieve, my daughter accomplished. Some of you will be familiar with the extraordinary events surrounding the elopement of my daughter, Mabel, with Sunshine Bwana, the black taxi driver. When Mabel and her lover set up house in open defiance of the laws against interracial cohabitation, the pressure on me of course increased. Some of you will perhaps have read my Letters to a Daughter of the Revolution, in which I tried to set out, as calmly and dispassionately as I could, the difficulties which her behaviour had caused me. Mabel’s reaction was to give an interview to a Government paper in which she identified people like myself with “liberals who thought left and lived right”. We owned large comfortable houses in the white suburbs, preached racial harmony to our black servants and were in reality the true enemies of the revolution. Mabel said she preferred the Regime to us, that if she were made to choose she would have found more in common with those who ruled the country than she did with these vague and sentimental politics, these liberal chimeras, these values of a damp English rectory. But of course Mabel knew the thing was not to talk about the world but to change it. And so, though perhaps this is not widely known, my daughter Mabel led a second charge on her father’s house at the head of a gang of black youths, and they attempted to set it on fire. Considerable damage was done. The Regime’s newspapers took pleasure in reporting this, as you can imagine and there was a lot of speculation at the time, probably mischievously put about, that I was thinking of selling up at last, leaving the country and moving to a home for retired clergy on the Isle of Wight. It was then that I made my declaration — emigration is death! Well then, you must be asking yourselves, what is he doing here in this room full of fugitives? What drove him? I’ll tell you what drove me. What I wasn’t prepared for, what I think many of us were not prepared for, was the impact of what are called the Young Turks, or sometimes the New Men, or the Pragmatists, or whatever term you chose to designate that dangerous breed personified by the likes of Minister Gus Kuiker and Trudy Yssel. What was at the heart of their programme? It was to talk to us, persuade us, delude us into the belief that substantial changes were under way. It depicted a new deal in race relations in which people of goodwill and of good sense were seen working together in a society based on synchronised ethnicity, equal freedoms and plural balances. So it went. New names, old ideas. You might have laughed. I might have laughed. But my daughter accepted the challenge and that wasn’t amusing. She took a job in Gus Kuiker’s Department on the understanding that she was totally free to work for its destruction from within. She justified her job by saying she was genuinely interested in power and since this was the case it made sense to get as close to the centre of it as possible. If working for Kuiker meant getting her hands dirty, well that was too bad. Working with power meant coming to grips with it. That’s what I didn’t understand, she told me. That’s what I was too frightened, too pure to grasp. Was there any greater test of a man’s resolve than to realise he was fighting a regime ready to die for the sacred right to segregated lavatories? Well, yes, actually there was. As Mabel said: what I couldn’t face was the fact that they had no intention of dying at all! Well, that’s when I went away. You understand I couldn’t take that. I think I would’ve preferred my daughter to shoot me, it would have been kinder than preaching at me from the Government benches.’

There were sighs all around the dining hall and an evident feeling of sympathy translated itself into an audible hum. Several diners wiped their eyes with their sleeves. Savage sat at his table clasping and unclasping his hands, a look of intense puzzlement on his nut-brown, wrinkled, intelligent, simian face. Every so often he shook his head and they knew the rage to understand what had happened to him still went on inside him.

Next there arose two ladies who introduced themselves as the Misses Glynis Unterjohn and Moira Schapp, the noted lesbians. They rose, not to tell their own story, at least not then, but to introduce a third friend, the journalist Marie Hertzog, whose pioneering study of the working conditions of black domestic servants entitled Matilda: Venus of the Servants’ Quarters had caused a considerable stir some years before. The study had been notable not only for its original work on the conditions in which black women were forced to live but also because Hertzog herself was a card-carrying member of the ruling Party. Her book, which revealed the women she studied to be serfs in a male-dominated world, victims both of their drunken, brutal husbands as well as of their white mistresses and masters, had been promoted by Trudy Yssel and Minister Kuiker, both at home and abroad, as an indication of the new mood of liberalisation and self-examination sweeping the country. The book was held up as an example of the way in which members of the Regime were turning the microscope upon themselves, fearlessly analysing their weaknesses, changing the system from within.

Marie Hertzog spoke in a low, angry growl. ‘It was my feminist investigations that took me to the Misses Unterjohn and Schapp because they came and complained to me that their houses were being raided by the police. Imagine my horror one Sunday morning when I discovered a photograph on the back page of the paper. This photograph purported to show what was described as “an illicit love-in” in a house of sin. It showed leather-clad women scrabbling suggestively, and among the tangled legs and tongues and other phantasmagoric elements I glimpsed my own face. No names were printed beneath the photograph, I wasn’t identified. But then it was hardly necessary. Those who printed the photograph knew I would recognise myself. Quite obviously someone had decided to discredit me and since they were unable to do so publicly — my uncle was after all Attorney General for many years, and my connections with the Party were good — they had turned to this means. Naturally I suspected the Bureau, for what reasons I couldn’t be sure, but it smacked of their taste and planning. Naturally I said so, right out loud. I had no intention of keeping such news to myself. The Bureau immediately denied it and to prove their good faith to a loyal daughter of the Party, offered to investigate themselves. They did. And they produced the culprit.’ Marie Hertzog’s head drooped, she found it difficult to continue. ‘It turned out to be my own domestic servant, Joy, whom I’d invited to the party believing that she was as much entitled to go as I was. It seems she took along a camera, just because she thought it might come in useful. And it was. The picture she took turned out to be worth a lot of money and poor Joy needed money. She had a sick mother, she was a working girl. What else was she to do?’ Marie Hertzog threw back her head. ‘Friends and colleagues, everyone of you has lived through a similar experience. That isn’t what’s brought us here. No, I’m afraid the trouble with us is that we’ve all expected to win. We’re on the right side, we said, so we’ve got to win. Well that sort of dreaming is all right I suppose provided you win. You can say a lot of things about us. You can say we’ve been foolish, that we’ve been sentimental, we’ve been misled, we’ve been badly treated. Maybe all these things are true, but truer than them all, simpler, ordinary, horrible, is the truth that given the way things are — we’ve been dead wrong.’

Many were the stories they heard that night, terrible, heartrending. Consider the tragedy of Maisie van der Westhuizen, a singer synonymous with local opera, a well-loved soprano, ‘Our Maisie’, a familiar figure, somewhat bulky in flowing electric blues and acid greens, with elaborate black bangs and her huge sapphires, a wonderfully successful artist, best known of our singers abroad, making regular appearances with the Vienna State Opera. Fame and a soft heart and an excellent command of German; thereby hung her tale and her downfall. For Our Maisie was one of the chief supporters of the Benevolent Fund for Forgotten Germans, which, as everybody knew, was a front organisation for the support of elderly Nazis, a group of demanding old pensioners for whom, generally speaking, holidays were difficult to arrange. To this end Our Maisie had founded a group of sunshine homes on the South Coast to which these loyal old soldiers could be flown for a few weeks, to bask in the sun in the evening of their lives. Maisie told her story: