1999 - Ladysmith Read online

  December, 1938

  Gandhi

  I was never given the chance to explain that my supporters would not actually help the Japanese if they invade India, only resist them passively. The Viceroy sent police to pull me from my bed in the early morning. They have taken me to this prison: one of the Aga Khan’s palaces near Poona, a ludicrous and desolate place to be incarcerated.

  As soon as they had locked me up, the people began rioting—setting fire to police stations and government buildings, breaking up railways and killing a number of British officials. The Viceroy presents it all as my fault, printing some grossly inaccurate statements in the newspapers. I used to feel able to see myself as others see me—but now I am not so sure. None of them make themselves sure of their facts; everything is distorted and misrepresented.

  I suspect that I will soon have to fast—crucify the flesh by taking only water, with a little salt. If the Viceroy calls it political blackmail, then so be it. I believe a Higher Tribunal will say otherwise; and if I perish, I will face the Judgement Seat with innocence in my heart.

  August, 1942

  Churchill

  MOST SECRET CYPHER TELEGRAM FROM PRIME MINISTER TO VICEROY OF INDIA

  BEGINS.

  Thank you so much for your most interesting letter of April 29. I was sure you would find the problems set you of absorbing interest, and everyone here thinks you are addressing yourself to them with extraordinary energy and tact. I am fully aware of the weakness of the machine which you have at your disposal, but this is largely due to the great diminution in white officials which has marked the last twenty-five unhappy years. I assented to your letting Gandhi out on the grounds of his grievous state of health. He seems to have recovered a good deal of political vitality since then.

  He is a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fibre, largely in the hands of the native vested interests and frozen to his idea of the hand spinning wheel and inefficient cultivation methods for the overcrowded population of India. I look forward to a day when it may be possible to come to an understanding with the real forces that control India and which, at any political settlement, will be allied with a marked improvement in the wellbeing of the masses, whom the reformers often forget, but who constitute for us a sacred duty.

  ENDS.

  Sent: 27.5.44

  Copyright: Public Record Office

  The Biographer

  It is twilight, and the summer air above the bay is stirred only by the gulls. Peace: I think I will have myself a gin on the terrace before the boy comes. The eve of the election, and with Germany defeated and the Allied leaders gathered in Potsdam, it seems sad that the British people will repay Winston’s heroism with ingratitude by voting in the Socialists.

  Still, maybe it is time for a change, and a well-deserved rest for him. The sad thing is how he does not seem to be able to let go of the romance of Empire, the whole nineteenth-century edifice, however modern and practical he is in other respects. There is no chance of us staying in India, of course; we will be out of there pretty sharpish once the Japanese war has ended, in my opinion.

  I recently saw a newsreel—they’ve got a bit fancier since my retirement—of Winston giving his V for Victory sign as he disembarked from an American plane, a Fortress or Liberator or some such name. He was still wearing an aviator’s oxygen mask as he came down the steps—and smoking his cigar! He had the mask specially adapted.

  History’s impresario. I remember him on the long trek to Ladysmith all those years ago: even then, as time was fashioning him for the struggles ahead, he was the consummate showman. But he saw the action right enough too, and transmuted his experiences of personal danger into a philosophy of imperial greatness, at the heart of which was the vital importance of Britain’s survival.

  Courageous, indefatigable, bloody-minded: sometimes it seemed as if nothing but his lion’s roar stood between us and the Nazi threat. That was the illusion, anyway, and like all the best ones, it worked. I do not mean to denigrate his statesmanship. Forged on the steel of instinct, tempered in the waters of experience, it struck a blow for freedom that will reverberate through the history of mankind. Yes, this Vulcan let you know he was hammering. Yes, he was a self-dramatist. But no one else could have done what he did.

  July, 1945

  Wellington

  Kaffir, waar’s jou pas? Nigger, where’s your pass? I heard that as a young boy in the mine shanty. I heard it—albeit spoken in English—at Ladysmith. I have heard it ever since. If there is one thing that has characterized the oppression of native people in South Africa, from before the Union between Cape Colony and the Boer Republics and afterwards, it is the iniquity of the pass system. On March 21 of this year, 1960, that history fulfilled its bloody legacy, with the cold-blooded gunning down of sixty-nine people outside the police station at Sharpeville, gathered there only because of the Pass Laws.

  I was not there. A few days after those tragic events (as I sit in my cell, some two hundred people are being treated for bullet wounds), I joined Chief Luthuli, who like me had been giving evidence as one of the accused at the so-called Treason Trials, and followed him in publicly burning my passbook before the press cameras. Now I am in gaol, along with many others of my brothers in the ANC. Why they should see an old man like me as a threat, I cannot say.

  We are still organizing, concerning ourselves greatly with the planned boycott of South African goods by the rest of the world. Not everyone is supporting us, of course. The other day a strange tale came into the prison about Viscount Montgomery, of Alamein fame, who has been visiting the country. We had hoped he would come and talk to us, but he did not, consorting only with members of Dr Verwoerd’s government and the representatives of big business. Apparently he has now asked the world ‘to give Dr Verwoerd a chance’, as Chief Luthuli put it. I cannot understand how such a valiant enemy of Nazism can take such a position.

  Every now and then they drag us from the cells to attend further sessions of the Treason Trials. Our defence is now being conducted by two young leaders of the Congress, themselves also accused, Duma Nokwe and Nelson Mandela. They are young but resourceful, although the legal proceedings are so farcical (even in court the seating arrangements follow the apartheid rules) that I do not believe they will be able to help us very much. Privately, Nelson has confided to me that if he is released he will call for the use of violent tactics. Luthuli holds to his line of passive resistance, sharing Gandhi’s old view that moral weight will prevail.

  I am not so sure. This morning I was slapped about by a white policeman, and I cannot say that the gentle approach did me much good. I am fearful as to what will happen. Outside, the government is sending our people to the so-called Bantustans. Tourists are being taken to selected villages to see the plump noble savage in his element, but it is all faked. The truth is bony animals, parched fields full of stones, and sub-human conditions in the huts. There are reports of barbed-wire enclosures in Pondoland.

  I find myself thinking much of Ladysmith and its siege, just over sixty years ago. Perhaps it is the feeling of being in prison. I often wonder how life treated that man and woman I helped to escape. I remember watching—from that bowl of trees—their balloon rise up into the pure depth of the night and thinking, it cannot be as easy as that. I was right. For one like myself, at least, the siege has never really ended. I suppose that is just politics, which I have made my life; which is why what I see, right now, is bars across a little square of blue.

  A few months after my father was buried, I walked from Ladysmith to Groutville, where I joined the mission school. Mother remained in Ladysmith, at first working for the sister of the balloon woman, and then running a little shop of her own. Before she passed away, I used to visit as often as I was able. Whenever I went back, I would return to the site of the old hospital camp at Intombi where my father died. There is just grass there now, acres of it, studded with clumps of mopani trees. Underneath one lies his body, and also the new isivivane I built in
his memory. It does not state who he was or how he died; but I know, and my children know.

  Last time we were in Ladysmith—which is a big modern town these days—we made a discovery of a Bushman cave in one of the hills outside the town. We were having a picnic; it was the nearest place we were allowed to do so, without the police chasing us away. The edges of the cave’s entrance were obscured by tall grass and saplings, and I do not think anyone had been in there for many years. It smelled very musty. On striking a match inside, we found it to be full of paintings. Drawn on the walls in ochre paint, they depicted the First People in little groups, hunting eland and gazelle with bows and spears. They were like ghosts, those pictures, the wind in the cave seeming to mimic the voices of the dead men and women as we stood looking at them, striking matches until our thumbs blistered. We were glad to make our way outside, my children and I, following the oval gap at the mouth of the cave, as it drew the sky towards us.

  THE END