Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 7 No. 3 | Fall 1985 (Seattle) /// Issue 13 of 24 /// Master# 61 of 73

FREEDOM RISING (fin Excerpt) By James North Illustration by Isaac Shamsud-Din CROSSING THE TUGELA Far up in the Drakensberg Mountains, the Tugela River begins its three-hundred-mile course eastward to the Indian Ocean. Halfway to the sea, before plunging down the escarpment to the coastal sugarcane region, the Tugela passes through the Msinga District, an isolated area roughly thirty miles long that you can reach by only a single dirt road. On the south side of the Tugela, the thick thorny bush is interrupted regularly by spacious farms, which are glistening, emerald-green jewels of irrigated splendor. Tractors chum to and fro across vast fields of cotton, maize, oranges, and alfalfa, here known as lucerne. On the north side of the Tugela, the panorama is completely different. Clusters of round, mud-walled huts cover a desolate, barren landscape. The thorn bushes have almost all been cut for firewood, and only an occasional bedraggled plot of stunted maize is under cultivation. To the south of the river, the handful of whites live in tidy farmhouses, with the accompanying barracks for the black farmworkers situated off to one side. To the north, thirty thousand black people live along the river itself, while another eighty thousand live up in the rugged hills. To cross the Tugela here is to go from the spacious equivalent of Iowa to the teeming equivalent of Haiti, or Java. The south side of the Tugela is, by law, part of “white” South Africa, the 87 percent of the country in which black people are not permitted to own land and are allowed to enter only to work, as “temporary sojourners. ” The north side is part of the Kwa-Zulu Bantustan, one of the ten such areas, which cover the remaining 13 percent of the country, in which black people are supposed to “develop separately.” One of the farms on the “white” south side of the river is markedly different from its prosperous, irrigated neighbors. You have to exercise your imagination strenuously to see it as a farm at all. The stony hillsides are covered only with cactuses and spiky thornbushes. Much of the top- soil has long washed away into the Tugela, so there is little ground cover. The farm is called Mdukatshani, which means, in Zulu, “The Place of the Lost Grasses.” A number of paths hacked through the brush lead off the dusty main road to round huts, identical to the dwellings that are visible across the river. There is no electricity. Thin dogs slink about abjectly. The several dozens of black people who live here are almost all old, women, or children. They are dressed extremely shabbily, in an assortment of aging woolen caps, shredded shirts, patched trousers or skirts, battered cheap tennis shoes, and sandals. A number of the women and children are barefoot. Some of the children have open sores on their legs. The hairstyles of some of the women are unforgettable. Reddish discs rising gracefully nearly a foot above the head, or flaring winglike structures, also reddish, look at first like exotic, inorganic headdresses. They are actually carefully sculpted combinations of hair and dried mud, and they provide a striking, elegant contrast to the tattered clothing. Down toward the river, in a small clearing, is an unpretentious crafted stonewalled house with a low thatched roof. This is where the “the Numzaan " a white man called Neil Alcock, lives with his wife and two youngsters. “ TXt was in the days before the discovery of penicillin. One of my father’s farmworkers was in a fight, right around Christmas, and he got the entire side of his head crushed in by a knobkerrie. The witchdoctor was called in. He studied the wound, and then covered it with a plug of cow dung.” Neil Alcock paused and tilted his head slightly. “In a few weeks, he removed the dung. The wound was healing properly.” Alcock stopped again, and shrugged. “Penicillin is a mold that is found in things like cow dung. Those witchdoctors— their knowledge is so great in a certain sphere that we just don’t come near it.” The Numzaan related this story in a low key but nonetheless proselytizing tone. He is in his early sixties, tall, lean, and gray-bearded, with a spiritual and prophetic manner. His similarity to the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is in some respects striking. Like Tolstoy, Neil Alcock started life as a large landowner, the heir to a family estate. Also like Tolstoy, Alcock gradually moved to renounce his privilege, and he has sought to create an ethical community with the very people he used to rule over. To complete the parallel, Alcock even refers to the black farmworkers as “serfs,” bitterly biting off the word every time he utters it in another reproach to himself and his kind. His first language is Zulu. He thinks in Zulu, and at times searches his mind for the English translation. “I was reared by Africans,” he explained. “My loyalty to them is not paternalism, but a feeling of family. I became theirs. My own parents were typically lazy white South Africans, who had time for their social activities rather than for their children.” His grandfather came from Yorkshire, England, and bought a farm in Natal. “My father inherited the farm, and because of the work of his serfs, he became even wealthier. I took over the descendants of some serfs who had worked for my grandfather. They were no better off than their ancestors. In some cases, they were worse off. We whites are like the Romans; after a few generations of slaves—there is really no other word for it—we can’t exist without them.” As a youth, Alcock preferred to mix with the farmworkers rather than to go to school. “My most worthwhile education came from those black people. I would disappear at dawn with those naturalists, the shepherds, who would take and show me where things like honey could be found. I got a tanning from my parents when I got home at night. But whatever capabilities I have I got from those black people, those philosophers; I got damn- all at school from the white teachers in their high-heeled shoes.” Clinton St. Quarterly 25

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz