birth.' 'Pa,' Manfred said soly. 'You aren't telling me the truth, are you'?' He spoke as though to a naughty child. 'The woman you call my mother, the woman who was your wife, died years before I was born. I have a copy of the death certificate signed by the English doctor in the concentration camp. She died of diphtheria, the white sore throat.' He could not look at his father as he said it, but stared ahead through the windscreen, until he heard a soft choking sound beside him and with alarm turned quickly. Lothar was weeping, tears slid down his withered old cheeks.
Tm sorry, Pa.' Manfred pillled the Chevrolet off the road and switched off the engine. 'I shouldn't have said that.' He pulled the white handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to his father.
Lothar wiped his face slowly, but his hand was steady, and his wandering mind seemed to have been concentrated by the shock.
'How long have you known that she was your real mother?' he asked, and his voice was firm and sure. Manfred's soul quailed, he had hoped to hear his father deny it.
'She came to see me when first I stood for parliament. She blackmailed me, for her other son's sake. I had him in my power.
She threatened to expose the fact that I was her bastard son and destroy my candidacy if I acted against her other son. She dared me to ask you if it was not true, but I could not bring myself to do it.' 'It's true,' Lothar nodded. 'I'm sorry, my son. I lied to you only to protect you.' 'I know.' Manfred reached across and took the bony hand as the old man went on.
'When I found her in the desert, she was so young and helpless and beautiful. I was young and lonely - it was just the two of us, and her infant, alone together in the desert. We fell in love.' 'You don't have to explain,' Manfred told him, but Lothar seemed not to hear him.
'One night two wild Bushmen came into our camp. I thought they were marauders, come to steal our horses and oxen. I followed them, and caught up with them at dawn. I shot them down before I was within range of their poison arrows. It was the way we dealt with those dangerous little yellow animals in those days.' 'Yes, Pa, I know.' Manfred had read the history of his people's conflict with and extermination of the Bushmen tribes.
'I did not know it then, but she had lived with these same two little Bushmen before I found her. They had helped her survive the desert and tended her when she gave birth to her first child. She had come to love them, she even called them 'old grandfather' and 'old grandmother'.' He shook his head wonderingly, still unable to comprehend this relationship of a white woman with savages. 'I did not know it, and I shot them without realizing what they meant to her. Her love for me changed to bitter hatred. I know now that her love could not have been very deep, perhaps it was only loneliness and gratitude and not love at all. After that she hated me, and the hatred extended to my child that she was carrying in her womb. To you, Manie. She made me take you away the moment you were born. She hated us both so deeply that she wanted never to set eyes on you. I cared for you after that.' 'You were my father and my mother.' Manfred bowed his head, ashamed and angry that he had forced the old man to relive those tragically cruel events. 'What you have told me explains so much that I could never understand.' 'da.' Lothar wiped fresh tears away with the white handkerchief.
'She hated me, but you see I still loved her. No matter how cruelly she treated me, I was obsessed with her. That was the reason why I committed the folly of the robbery. It was a madness and it cost me this arm/ He held up the empty sleeve. 'And my freedom. She is a hard woman. A woman without mercy. She will not hesitate to destroy anything or anybody who stands in her way. She is your mother, but be careful of her, Manie. Her hatred is a terrible thing.' The old man reached across and seized his son's arm, shaking it in his agitation. 'You must have nothing to do with her, Manie. She will destroy you as she has destroyed me. Promise me you will never have anything to do with her or her family.' 'I'm sorry, Pa,' Manfred shook his head. 'I am already tied to her through her son,' he hesitated to give voice to the next words, 'to my brother, to my half-brother, Shasa Courtney. It seems, Papa, that our bloodlines and our destinies are so closely tangled together that we can never be free of each other.' 'Oh, my son, my son,' Lothar De La Rey lamented. 'Be careful please be careful.' Manfred reached for the ignition key to start the engine, but paused before he touched it.
'Tell me, Pa. How do you feel for this woman now - for my mother?' Lothar was silent for a moment before he answered. 'I hate her almost as much as I still love her.' 'It is strange that we can love and hate at the same time.' Manfred ..... shook, his__head_ slightly- with-vender.--',-hate- her- for- w'oat - she -has done to you. I hate her for all the things she stands for, and yet her blood calls to mine. At the end, when all else is put aside, Centaine Courtney is my mother and Shasa Courtney is my brother. Love or hatred - which will prevail, Papa?' 'I wish I could tell you, my son,' Lothar whispered miserably. 'I can only repeat what I have already told you. Be careful of them, Manie. Mother and son, they are dangerous adversaries.' For almost twenty years Marcus Archer had owned the old farmhouse at Rivonia. He had purchased the five-acre smallholding before the area became fashionable. Now the fairways and greens of the Johannesburg Country Club, the most exclusive private club on the Witwatersrand, backed right up against Marcus' boundary. The trustees of the Country Club had offered him fifteen times his original purchase price, over ?100,000, but Marcus steadfastly refused to sell.
On all the other large plots that comprised the Rivonia Estate, the prosperous new owners - entrepreneurs and stockbrokers and successful doctors - had built large pretentious homes, most of them in the low sprawling ranch house style which was the rage, or with pink clay tile roofs, imaginative copies of Mexican haciendas or Mediterranean villas, and they had surrounded the main buildings with paddocks and stables, with tennis courts and swimming-pools and wide lawns that the winter highveld frosts burned the colour of cured tobacco leaves.
Marcus Archer had re-thatched the roof of the old farmhouse, whitewashed the walls, and planted frangipani and bougainvillaea and other flowering shrubs and let the grounds grow wild and unkempt, so that even from its own boundary fence the house was completely screened.
Although the area was now very much a bastion of the wealthy white elite, the Country Club employed a large staff of waiters and kitchen helpers and groundsmen and golf caddies, so black faces were not remarkable, as they might have been on the streets of some of the other wealthy white suburbs. Marcus's friends and political allies could come and go without arousing unwelcome interest. So Puck's Hill, as Marcus had recently renamed his farmhouse, gradually became the rallying ground for some of the most active of the African Nationalist movements, the leaders of black consciousness and their white compatriots, the remnants of the defunct Communist Party.
It was only natural, therefore, that Puck's Hill was chosen as the headquarters for the final planning and coordination of the black disobedience campaign that was about to begin. However, it was not a unified group that came together under Marcus Archer's roof, for although their stated final objective was the same, their separate visions of the future differed widely.
Firstly, there was the old guard of the African National Congress headed by Dr Xuma. They were the conservatives, committed to plodding negotiation with white civil servants within the unyieldin established system.
'You people have been doing that since 1912 when the ANC was formed,' Nelson Mandela glared at him. 'It is time to move on to confrontation, to force our will upon the Boers.' Nelson Mandela was a young lawyer, practising on the Witwatersrand in partnership with another activist named Oliver Tambo.
