‘I have been able to arrange for your release, Doctor. You will be allowed to return in the Dakota.’ He came back to stand before me, and then he changed from English into Venda. ‘My heart cries out to see you go, Machane, for you are a man of gentleness, and strength, and great courage. Once I hoped that you might join us.’
In Venda I answered, ‘My heart weeps also, for a man who was a friend, one I trusted, one who I believed was a man of goodwill, but he is gone now into the half-world of the criminals and the destroyers He is dead to me, and my heart weeps.’
It was true, I realized. It was not just an attempt to shame him. Beneath my hatred and anger, there was a sense of sorrow, of loss. I had believed in him. I had seen in a man such as he was, a hope for the future of this poor tormented continent of ours. We looked at each other wistfully, regretfully across a space of four feet that was as wide as the span of the heavens and as deep as the chasms of Hell.
‘Goodbye, Doctor,’ he said softly. ‘Go in peace, Machane.’
They took us in the covered back of a three-ton truck to the airstrip, bare-footed and stripped to our underclothes.
They formed a double line from the truck to the Dakota, There were perhaps 200 of them in paratrooper uniform, and we were forced to walk down the narrow aisle with jeering black faces on each side of us. There were Chinese instructors with them, their lank black hair flopping out from under the cloth uniform caps, grinning hugely as we passed. I was bitterly aware of the mocking eyes and jibes aimed at my crooked exposed back, and I hurried towards the refuge of the Dakota, Suddenly one of them stepped out of the ranks in front of me. Deliberately he spat at me, and a storm of laughter went up from them. With a thick gob of yellow phlegm plastered in my hair, I scrambled up into the cabin of the aircraft.
The Air Force Mirages picked us up an hour after we crossed the Zambezi river and they escorted us to the military airfield at Voortrekker Hoogte. However, my almost hysterical relief at our safe home-coming was shortlived. Once a doctor had cleaned and dressed the clotted and suppurating gashes in my head, I was hustled away in a closed car to a meeting with four unsmiling, grimly polite, officers of the police and military intelligence.
‘Dr Kazin, is this your signature?’
It was my recommendation for the issue of Timothy Mageba’s passport.
‘Dr Kazin, do you remember this man?’
A Chinaman I had met when I visited Timothy at London University.
‘Are you aware that he is an agent of the Communist Chinese government. Doctor?’
There was a photograph of the three of us drinking beer on the tow-path beside the Thames.
‘Can you tell us what you spoke about, please, Doctor?’
Timothy had told me that the Chinaman was an anthropology major, and we had discussed Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai Gorge.
‘Did you recommend Mageba for the Sturvesant travel scholarship, Doctor?’
‘Did you know that he went to China and received training as a guerrilla leader?’
‘Did you sign these order forms for twenty-seven drums of fuller’s earth from Hong Kong, Doctor - and these customs declarations?’
They were standard Institute forms, I could recognize my signature on the customs form across the desk. I did not remember the shipment.
‘Were you aware that this shipment contained 150 lb of plastic explosives, Doctor?’
‘Do you recognize these, Doctor?’
Pamphlets in a dozen African languages. I read the first line of one of them. Terrorist propaganda. Exhortations to kill, burn and destroy.
‘Were you aware that these were printed on your press at the Institute, Doctor?’
The questions went on endlessly, I was tired, confused, and began contradicting myself. I pointed out the wounds on my head, the rope burns at my wrists and ankles, and the questions went on. My head throbbed, my brain felt like a battered jelly.
‘Do you recognize these, Doctor?’
Machine-pistols, ammunition.
‘Yes!’ I shouted at them. I had pistols like that against my head, in my belly!‘
‘Did you know that these were imported in cases of books addressed to your Institute?’
‘When you obtained police clearance for the Dakota flight, Doctor, you stated—’
‘They jumped me after the phone call, I’ve explained that a dozen times, damn you!’
‘You’ve known Mageba for twelve years. He was a protege of yours, Doctor.’
‘Do you mean to tell us that you were never approached by Mageba? Never discussed politics with him?’
‘I’m not one of them! I swear it—’ I remembered the blood spraying against the cabin roof, the crunch of steel biting into the bone of my skull, the spittle clinging in my hair. ‘You’ve got to believe me, please! Oh God, please!’ And I think I must have fainted, it went all dark and warm in my head and I slumped sideways off the chair onto the floor.
I woke in a hospital room, between clean crisp sheets - and Louren Sturvesant sat beside the bed.
‘Lo, oh thank God.’ I felt all choked up with relief. Louren was here, and it would be all right now.
He leaned forward, unsmiling, that marvellous face cold and hard as though it had been cast in bronze. ‘They think you were one of the gang. That you set it up, that you were using the Institute as the headquarters for a terrorist organization.’
