to the country to tend the herds of cattle and goats that were part of Hendrick's wealth. The more promising boys worked in the butchery shops, the general dealers or the shebeens, while two of them, those especially gifted with intelligence, were law students at Fort Hare, the black university in the little town of Alice in the eastern Cape.
Only Hendrick's younger boys were here to kneel respectfully before him, and of these there were two whom Moses Gama looked upon with particular pleasure. They were the twin sons of one of Hendrick's Xhosa wives, a woman of unusual accomplishments.
Apart from being a dutiful wife and a breeder of sons, she was an accomplished dancer and singer, an amusing story-teller, a person all shrewd common sense and intelligence, and a noted sangoma, a healer and occult doctor with sometimes uncanny powers of prescience and divination. Her twins had inherited most of her gifts together with their father's robust physique and some of their uncle Moses' fine features.
At their birth, Hendrick had asked Moses to name them, and he had chosen their names from his treasured copy of Macaulay's History of England. Of all his nephews they were his favourites, and he smiled now as they knelt before him. They were already thirteen years old, Moses realized.
'I see you, Wellington Tabaka,' he greeted first the one and then the other. 'I see you, Raleigh Tabaka.' They were not identical twins.
Wellington was the taller lad, lighter-skinned, toffee-coloured against Raleigh's mulberry-stain black. His features had the same Nilotic cast as Moses' own, while Raleigh was more negroid, flat-nsed and thick-lipped, his body heavier and squatter.
'What books have you read since we last met?' Moses changed into English, forcing them to reply in the same language. 'Words are spears, they are weapons with which to defend yourself and with which to attack your enemies. English words have the sharpest blades, without them you will be warriors disarmed,' he had explained to them, and now he listened attentively to their halting replies in that language.
However, he noted the improvements in their command of the language and remarked on it. 'It is still not good enough, but you will learn to speak it better at Waterford,' and both boys looked uncomfortable. Moses had arranged for them to write the entrance examination for this elite multi-racial school across the border in the independent black kingdom of Swaziland, and the twins had both passed and been accepted and how were dreading the day not far away when they would be uprooted from this comfortable familiar world of theirs and packed off into the unknown. In South Africa all education was strictly segregated, and it was the declared policy of the minister of Bantu affairs, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, not to educate black children to the point of discontentment. He had told parliament quite frankly that education for blacks should not conflict with the government policy of apartheid and should not be of such a standard as to evoke in the black pupil expectations which could never be fulfilled. The annual expenditure by the state on each white pupil was ?60 while that on a black student was ?9 per annum. Those black parents who could afford it, the chiefs and small businessmen, sent their children out of the country to be educated, and Waterford was a favourite choice.
The twins escaped from the daunting presence of their father and uncle with relief, but their mother was waiting for them in the yard beside the blue and crimson van, and with a sharp inclination of her head ordered them into her own parlour.
The room was a sorceress's lair from which the twins were usually barred, and now they crept in with even more trepidation than they had entered their father's house. Against the far wall stood their mother's gods and goddesses carved in native woods and dressed in feathers and skins and beads, with eyes of ivory and mother-of- pearl, and bared teeth of dog and baboon. They were a terrifying assembly, and the twins shivered and dared not look directly upon them.
Before the family idols were arranged offerings of food and small coins, and from the other walls hung all the gruesome accoutrements of their mother's craft, gourds and clay pots of ointments and medicines, bundles of dried herbs, snake skins and mummified iguana lizards, bones and baboon skulJ.x, glass jars of hippopamus and lion fat, musk of crocodile, and other nameless substances which festered and bubbled and stank so foully that it made the teeth ache in their jaws.
'You wore the charms I gave you?' Kuzawa, their mother, asked.
She was incongruously handsome in the midst of her unholy and hideous tools and medicines, full-faced and glossy-skinned with very white teeth and liquid gazelle eyes. Her limbs were long and gleamed with secret and magical ointments and her breasts under the necklaces of ivory beads and charms were big and firm as wild Kalahari melons.
In response to her question, the twins nodded vehemently, too overcome to speak, and unbuttoned their shirts. The charms were hung around their necks, each on a thin leather thong. They were the horns of the little grey duiker, the open ends sealed with gum arabic, and Kuzawa had taken all the twelve years of their lives to assemble the magical potion that was contained in each of them. It was made up of samples of all the bodily excretions of Hendrick Tabaka, the father of the twins, his faeces and urine, his spittle and nasal mucus, his sweat and his semen, the wax from his ears and the blood from his veins, his tears and his vomit. With these, Kuzawa had mixed the dried skin from the soles of his feet, the clippings of his nails, the shavings of his beard and his pate and pubes, the'lashes of his eyes plucked in his sleep, and the crusted scabs and pus from his wounds. Then she had added herbs and fats of wonderful efficacy, and spoken the words of power over them and finally, to make the charm infallible, she had paid a vast sum to one of the grave-robbers who specialized in such procurements to bring her the liver of an infant drowned at birth by its own mother.
All these ingredients she had sealed in the two little duiker horns, and the twins were never allowed irrto their father's presence except that they wore them hung around their necks. Now Kuzawa retrieved the two charms from her sons. They were far too precious to leave in the children's possession. She smiled as she weighed them in the smooth pink palms of her delicately shaped hands. They had been worth all the expense and the patience and the meticulous application of her skills to create.
'Did your father smile when he saw you?' she asked.
'He smiled like the rise of the sun,' Raleigh replied, and Kuzawa nodded happily.
'And were his words kind, did he make enquiry of you fondly?' she insisted.
'When he spoke to us he purred like a lion at meat,' Wellington whispered, still intimidated by his surroundings. 'And he asked us how we raed at school, and he commended us when we told him.' 'It is the charms that have ensured his favour,' Kuzawa smiled contentedly. 'As long as you wear them, your father will prefer you over all his other children.' She took the two little buckhorns and went to kneel before the central carved figure in the array of idols, a fearsome image with a headdress of lion's mane that housed the spirit of her dead grandfather.
'Guard them well, oh venerable ancestor,' she whispered, as she hung them around the neck of the image. 'Keep their powers strong until they are needed once again.' They were safer there than in the deepest vault of the white man's banks. No human being, and only the most powerful of the dark ones, would dare challenge her grandfather's spirit for possession of the charms, for he was the ultimate guardian.
