A Sin of Omission Page 6

  Both of them bridled at the restrictions of the College, both had been mission-trained too late to have forgotten the freedoms of their homes. Even at their rural missions they had been allowed to hunt with sticks within the grounds. They had explored the pastures and the bush and helped milk the cows.

  Here, the nearby veld was out of bounds, nor were students allowed home until they had finished their education. They were to speak English at all times. They were called by Christian names, baptised by the Principal, Mfundisi Turvey, and blessed by the Bishop. Each was supplied with a blue serge jacket to wear to church. Rice or porridge was served morning and evening. Midday dinner was potatoes from the College garden and meat every second day. There was soup on Thursdays and a pudding made of dough and raisins after church on Sundays. They did their lessons in the morning and were instructed in carpentry or printing for two hours after school.

  On Saturdays, once they had done their laundry and cleaned the school and dormitories, Mfundisi Turvey coached his pupils in cricket, reliving his youthful triumph as a batsman at the Missionary College in Canterbury. A local curate, along with the cowhand, the carpentry master and his assistant, Eleazor Mbanda, made up the numbers on Turvey’s team. With enthusiasm Turvey arranged matches with the local colonial schoolboys and their masters. He was a shrewd manager, determined to temper the hostility of his neighbours for running – on their very doorsteps and within the walls of the College for their sons – a mission institution for Africans. He also knew the value of games and the benefits of playing in a team. He rejoiced when his XI won, knowing their success did not go unnoticed in the town. He was proud of their behaviour on the pitch, their respectful sportsmanship.

  On Sundays the students trooped behind his broad, bearded figure to the first Bishop of Grahamstown’s small stone Memorial Chapel in the cemetery and, on weekday afternoons, they worked together in the vegetable garden while he, shaded by a large straw hat, sat at the edge of the bean beds in a folding chair, one eye on his newspaper, the other on the students digging with their hoes.

  The boys who had come from their own homes in Kaffraria, and not from a rural mission station as Stephen and Mzamo had, complained that planting, weeding and harvesting was women’s work. No man tilled the land. Stephen did not complain. He was used to working in a garden. At Mfundisi Rutherford’s mission he had been sent into the fields with the other boys, young as he had been. And, in time, he had been allowed to weed around the fruit trees in the orchard.

  ‘Ah, Stephen,’ Mrs Rutherford had once said, sadly inspecting the wasp-stung peaches, ‘this is not like an English orchard. We will never harvest a decent crop.’

  ‘I wish to see England.’

  ‘It is very far away and much too cold for a native.’

  ‘It is often cold here too.’

  ‘But it’s always wet in England. The damp gets into the chest and eats it away. Little children are often carried off.’ Stephen had gazed at her, perplexed. ‘Their guardian angels take them to God.’

  Alarmed, he had questioned her, and Mrs Rutherford had reassured him that a guardian angel was uniquely his, associated with his baptism, his growth and his salvation: one who could be appealed to at any time, more accessible, it seemed, than God. Stephen wondered then if the child’s body rose from the grave to be borne away in the secret hours of dark, nestled between huge feathered wings like those of the angels pictured in a print beside the altar in the church.

  Mzamo held another view.

  ‘You are confusing angels with ancestors,’ he said. ‘It is they, not angels, who watch over you from birth. Angels were never human so why should they care for you more than your grandfathers who are your family?’

  ‘Ancestors do not have wings. They cannot fly. How can they reach God who is in Heaven?’

  ‘The ancestors live under the earth or in great pools. They have homesteads and herds of fine cattle. There is no need to fly.’

  ‘I don’t believe in ancestors and nor should you,’ Stephen had replied doggedly. ‘We are not heathens.’

  Besides, there was evidence of angels everywhere. They were in the mission church, they were in the illustrated Bible, they were sung of in hymns and when he was sent to school in Grahamstown, almost the first thing Stephen had noticed was the angel in the hall of the Principal’s house, painted white from head to toe. But, mostly, angels were in the cemetery on the hill above the town, carved in marble or cast in bronze.

  He had often been one of a party of students coerced, once a month, to weed the graves in the section set aside for Anglicans. Along those sequestered rows he had made the acquaintance of every kind of angel: militant angels with drawn swords; weeping mother angels; baby angels with wings as small as a sparrow’s. Many had lost their limbs, victims of vandals. There was one whose helmeted head perched on his foot, his glare unquenched.

  All of them were English, like the pictures in the Bible. But it was no use to point that out to Mzamo. Nor to Vuyo Tontsi. They would only laugh.

  But even if they laughed, neither wished to tarry among the angel-guarded gravestones in the cemetery. The Mfundisi’s promise of one free afternoon a term to any boy who offered to weed there had failed to raise a single volunteer. No one dared, fearing to be sent alone. After that, it became compulsory for everyone.

  The students would trail through the town under the supervision of the carpentry master, picks over their shoulders, spades and sacks wheeled in a barrow. The cemetery was, to most of them, a fearful place. Here the dead waited in rows, a great company, without the comfort of a byre full of cattle or a homestead busy with passers-by and the smell of cooking. The tall, gaunt cypresses along the perimeter were fearful too, dry and scaly, no haven for the birds. Once, Stephen had encountered a chameleon clinging to a frond: an emissary of the dead. He had turned from it in fear, hastily finding a fork to pry weeds from a nearby mound.

  He had studied the fading letters on the stone, brushing the sand away. It was a soldier’s grave, a relic of a distant war:

  Killed by barbarous Gaika Kaffirs, 1839.

  There was nothing barbarous about Julius Coventry Naka even though he was a ‘Gaika’.

  He was an object of awe.

  Newly returned from four years in England, another of the Bishop’s ‘lions’, he had been educated in the hope of training him for Holy Orders. On his arrival, he was invited by Mfundisi Turvey to address the students at the Native College.

  Polished and assured, with a white waistcoat and cutaway jacket, he stood before them in the refectory and told them of St Nicholas’s Parish in Nuneaton, of the Reverend Dr Savage, the trains, the ships, the horse-drawn carriages. And of the death of George Maqoma, who had been one of his fellow African princes in Warwickshire.

  ‘He was the grandson of our great General,’ Julius had said. ‘Confined as he is esiqitini.’ On the prison island. ‘My friend George would have been a Ngqika chief, a man to bring the word of God to all our people. But,’ snapping his fingers, ‘he was called in a wink to appear before his Creator.’

  ‘We heard that it was while chasing vandals in the churchyard that he fell and struck his head,’ Mfundisi Turvey remarked.

  ‘That is what they like to say,’ said Julius. ‘It is better than admit his lungs have been the cause. England is not a healthy place.’ He laughed. ‘There are times when the smoke and soot made everybody’s faces black and I did not feel so different myself!’

  Mzamo looked sceptical. ‘How is it the English do not suffer with their lungs?’

  ‘They do,’ replied Julius. ‘The poor people suffer very much.’

  ‘Are there poor Englishmen?’ Vuyo was astounded.

  ‘There are some so poor they are kept in what is called the work-house.’

  ‘What work do they do?’

  ‘They break stones.’

  There was a murmur of disbelief among the boys, a collective sigh, rippling across the row of upturned faces.

  ‘No white man breaks stones,’ returned Mzamo boldly.

  ‘Oh yes they do,’ said Julius. ‘Mostly if they are Irish.’

  ‘Mfundisi Turvey is Irish.’ Mzamo turned to look at the Principal with his bland, broad face.

  ‘Especially if they’re Irish!’ snorted Mfundisi Turvey. ‘How right you are.’

  There was a silence. Then Vuyo Tontsi said, ‘Can you teach us to make guns, brother?’

  He was cuffed by a master for impertinence.

  Julius Naka was kept on at the Native College as a teacher. He did not prove satisfactory.

  The Dean was offended by his coming to Communion in the Cathedral instead of accompanying the students of the Native College to the first Bishop’s Memorial Chapel in the cemetery.

  ‘It is a subject of much triumph to the Dissenters,’ he said to the Bishop, ‘when these educated lads strut about the town and give them a chance to ridicule us for our folly. Did you notice what he wore to church? Black gloves which he waggled about for all to see in a most ostentatious manner.’

  ‘My dear Dean,’ replied the Bishop, ‘you cannot imagine the trials and confusions a young man like Julius has been exposed to – cut off from old habits and associations.’

  ‘My Lord.’ The Dean was impatient. ‘This young man with his fanciful name has been petted and spoiled. I heard him describing the dinners and croquet parties he had been to with the gentry of the land. It’s preposterous. I don’t know why Turvey allows it.’

  ‘I believe it’s high time you invited Mr Turvey and his students to the Cathedral for a service,’ said the Bishop, enjoying the Dean’s displeasure.

  ‘What?’ The Dean’s voice rose. ‘If you will forgive me, my Lord … I cannot allow Turvey to preach in my Cathedral. He drops his haitches like a common w
orkman. He has a brogue that no one understands. It would be a scandal.’

  The Bishop regarded him quizzically.

  ‘I believe,’ continued the Dean, affronted, ‘that he was educated in a Clergy Orphan School.’

  ‘That may be,’ said the Bishop quietly. ‘But he is the best missionary in the diocese, make no mistake.’

  Mzamo and Vuyo were entranced with Julius Naka. As they were among the older students at the College, they were housed not in the dormitory but in a small brick shed near the carpentry master’s cottage. In the evenings after prayers, when none of the masters were about, they and the apprentices would invite Julius in to talk to them, eager to hear more.

  Often, he would tell of his voyage, of Coventry and Nuneaton – quite unimaginable despite his eloquence, his grand gestures of height and scale and volume – and of the Missionary College in Canterbury, the ‘Foreigners’ Building’ shared by the students from China, India, Burma and other countries of which none of them had heard.

  ‘Were there many?’

  ‘Not many – but we were all taught English together, to speak like gentlemen, to mind our manners and write letters to our sponsors.’

  ‘Did you ever travel on a train?’ asked Vuyo Tontsi.

  ‘How does a train go?’ Another, interrupting.

  ‘Is it drawn by horses or oxen?’ Yet another, recently arrived from an isolated mission station.

  Supercilious though he was with the ignorant, Julius Naka was expansive. Mzamo, alert to every nuance of his speech, learned never to ask a question which might expose his ignorance. He listened intently. He watched. And he envied Julius Naka’s fine hat, his slim-toed boots, the wing collar and the fob watch he wore tucked in his waistcoat pocket. It was a trinket Mzamo had asked to see – carelessly, as if it didn’t matter one way or another. But Julius was eager to confide. ‘Given to me by a lady,’ he said, dangling it above Mzamo’s casually proffered palm. ‘There was a place called Fortune’s Alley.’ Julius slipped the watch into his pocket again, tipped back on his heels, breathed in deeply.

  Mzamo caught his eye, inclined his head, grinned, seemingly complicit. He had no idea what Fortune’s Alley was. But one day – when he was chosen to go to England – he would know. In anticipation of that time, he gleaned from Julius Naka, in an easy camaraderie, the tricks and pitfalls of making his way in England, of finding fellows worth imitating: the signs of distinction, Julius said, were not difficult to recognise.

  ‘They make a great fuss of rajahs and princes and the sons of other great men. The old ladies like it especially. They shower gifts on those with rank.’

  Mzamo’s father was isandala sokunene, a great chief’s councillor. There would be no need to recall that he was a labourer breaking stones on the Governor’s road.

  It was also from Julius Naka that the students at the Native College learned most about the chiefs and headmen banished esiqitini, to the island just across the bay in Cape Town where once Nxele, the prophet, had been held and had drowned trying to swim to the mainland.

  ‘It is a place the white people call Robben Island. Not long ago the students at the College in Cape Town sent a memorial to the Governor to ask for their release. There were many of us whose fathers were prisoners on that island, living in shame and poverty with only seals and wild fowl and lepers for company.’

  ‘What is a memorial?’ asked Vuyo Tontsi.

  ‘It is a document we all must sign saying that we, as the sons of chiefs and councillors, demand the release of our fathers.’

  ‘But what use was it to ask for their release?’ said Vuyo. ‘They are still there.’

  ‘We must not stop asking,’ said Julius. ‘Our chief, Maqoma, is old. He will die soon. Now his grandson, George Maqoma, is dead too and they say George’s brother, who was also in England, has disease in his lungs as well. What are our people to do? The white men are making fools of us. It suits them very well to have us die. And we must send another memorial too, asking for our farms.’

  ‘What farms?’

  ‘Before I went to England,’ said Julius, ‘when I was at the College in Cape Town, the Bishop there promised each and every one of us that we would be given land in recompense for what the government took from our fathers in the last war. I have a paper to prove it. You must get your paper too. A bishop cannot break a promise.’

  It was not the Bishop of Cape Town who had broken his promise. It was the Governor, Sir George Grey. Letters had been written, title deeds prepared, the Governor flushed with his own largesse. But, when he left for New Zealand, the land had been left unsurveyed and the matter had been quietly postponed.

  ‘I wonder how many natives in New Zealand will be promised land?’ the Bishop had said acerbically to his wife.

  ‘And how many will be baptised George!’ she had replied.

  The new Governor in the Cape was not concerned with the land claims of the sons of incarcerated chiefs: he would never have been foolish enough to have ventured the proposal in the first place. The Bishop of Cape Town could complain all he liked of the government’s broken promises – it was not he who had gone back on his word. Besides, bishops should be kept at a prudent distance. They were always after funds.

  When Julius Coventry Naka left the Native College in Grahamstown for a distant mission – hustled off reluctantly by the Bishop who fore-saw a disturbing influence at work – the students relapsed into their accustomed diffidence.

  Except Mzamo.

  He had had no scruple in asking Mfundisi Turvey to explain to him the way in which a memorial could be composed.

  ‘To whom do you wish to write a memorial, sonny?’ asked Turvey.

  ‘To the Governor,’ said Mzamo.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blessed!’ Turvey hid a smile. ‘And what, my good lad, do you have to say to the Governor?’

  ‘That our chiefs must be released from the prison on Nxele’s island. That place – esiqitini. They have been there too long. Their graves will be in the middle of the sea where their people cannot honour them.’

  Turvey sighed and put his hand on Mzamo’s shoulder. ‘The Bishop in Cape Town has often made the same request,’ he said. ‘In vain.’ He searched for the right words. ‘The law and what is just is not always the same thing. Governors and bishops are obliged to obey the law.’

  ‘Whose law is that?’

  ‘The laws of England.’

  ‘We are always told that the English are the most just people on the earth.’

  ‘As we, the Irish, are also obliged to believe,’ Mfundisi Turvey murmured to himself.

  It was some months after that that Mzamo was sent away from the College by the Bishop for insubordination: twenty years old, his education put aside, his examinations suspended.

  It was a Saturday in summer and the heat was unrelenting, the air so still only the uppermost leaves of the trees twitched in the hot wind. Clouds thrust up, dissolved and disappeared. The students rose early. They trailed in reluctant relays to the washhouse. The stragglers hurried for roll-call, pulling on their boots. They had been told after prayers the night before that the Bishop had sent a notice instructing them to walk to Southwell for service at St James Church.

  ‘How far is Southwell?’ they wanted to know.

  Mfundisi Turvey did not seem too eager to reply. At length he had said, ‘We will set out tomorrow morning, which will give us all day and plenty of time. Accommodation has been arranged in the schoolroom for the night but we must take our cooking pots and blankets. There will be two services on Sunday. You will return on Monday.’

  Vuyo Tontsi was the only one who knew of Southwell. ‘It’s many, many miles away!’ he exclaimed once the principal had left. ‘I do not know why we should have to go to Southwell for church! When Mfundisi Turvey goes there he takes a horse and is gone all day and often for the night.’

  ‘The Bishop wants him to show off our singing,’ said Mzamo.

  ‘To a crowd of farmers? They will probably chase us from their church and we will go without dinner.’