Ulundi, and food—precious, life-sustaining food. The thrill of these tidings of salvation was still making itself felt. And now the information about natural resources was almost an unbelievably fortuitous development. “The icing on the cake,” as one engineer put it, rubbing his hands together briskly.
Pieter Kemm was almost finished, but not quite, and nobody seemed about to cut him short. “Most interesting of all,” he continued, “at least from an archeological point of view, is the laterite near Empangeni, which as Kelvin said, is right next door to where we are. This laterite is a weathered rock, rich in iron oxide, close to the surface, easily accessible. It is not a high-grade ore, but it was used by early native tribes in the manufacture of iron spears and other implements. Archeologists have long been interested in the entire Richards Bay area, where there are outcroppings of various porous stones rich in iron. Studies indicate that these materials were used by native ironworkers more than a thousand years ago. Incidentally, in the early days, charcoal rather than coal was used in the smelting process, and we’ve had a thriving charcoal-burning industry right in this very area. Black wattle wood grows all over the place—it’s something of a nuisance plant really—but it’s excellent for making charcoal.
“The point is, the iron is here, available in large quantities—inland in conventional mine settings, and right along the coast in the sands and stone deposits. The coal is here, and wood for charcoal. So, if our group is half as clever as it’s supposed to be, we should have a thriving steel industry going in short order.”
“Hey, Pieter,” an unidentified voice called out. “You’ve got electrical people in your audience, and we’re waiting to hear you say something about copper.”
“Well, the copper is mostly up north, at Phalaborwa, five hun dred kilometers away, and Messina, which is even farther. However, I know there’s a small deposit near the surface at Nkandla, just seventy kilometers inland. It was mined briefly at the beginning of the last century, and then abandoned as economically unviable. But it should be enough to give us something of a start.
“Finally, when we talk about distances, let’s not forget that when the Boers trekked inland from the Cape Colony to the northeast in the 1830s, they covered more than a thousand kilometers, taking cattle and all their possessions, fording rivers and traversing mountain passes, using ox-wagons. And then, for many decades, they carried on active trading between the coast and their inland domains, also using that same slow but steady mode of transport.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Captain Nordstrom rose, seeming refreshed after having sat with closed eyes through these last reports, “this must conclude our introduction to the resources of our new homeland. Encouraging indeed, but I want to be sure that we do not get carried away. First of all, I share General White’s worry about the immediate needs of our group. I don’t like to see us all excited about iron in the ground when we don’t yet have a roof over our heads. But let us assume that we’ll handle these mundane problems and manage to build ourselves a serviceable camp. What I am really concerned about as we look to the future is not so much KwaZulu Natal’s basic resources, which I am happy to know are abundant, but rather its people, about whom I feel much less sanguine.
“Our small company of twenty-five hundred souls is not about to work farms, excavate mines, build machinery, and otherwise create Detroit or Pittsburgh—or even Oslo, which I would prefer—on this shore of the Indian Ocean. What do we do if the survivors in this very strange corner of the world do not care to join with us in our enlightened enterprise? Officer Gustafsson reports that he has had a cordial meeting. Well and good, but that is just one meeting.”
Captain Nordstrom paced back and forth for a moment with his hands behind his back. Suddenly, he looked off into the distance, pointed upward into hills, and asked, “What do we do if a hostile band of Zulus suddenly comes charging down that ravine over there, brandishing spears and chanting war songs? Or, how about the Afrikaners, one of the more eccentric groups of people in all of history? What if they decide that this catastrophe is a special sign from their Calvinist God, and that our entry on the scene is not welcome? What if black and white, in a classic end-of-the-world scenario, start to fight with each other and we get caught up in the carnage? What I’m trying to say is, let’s forget about the resources for a moment and think about something even more important: the people.”
FROM THE JOURNAL OF WILSON HARDY, JR.
The people. What can I say about the people of KwaZulu Natal? Only this, and without exaggeration: No novelist or playwright could have dreamed up a more fantastic, exotic, implausible cast of characters than those who awaited us in this foreign land. And—more to the point, in light of our perilous circumstances—no technocrat or social planner could have conceived a group with better survival skills. At least I dare to hope that this is the case.
Before I found myself cast away on these shores, I knew hardly anything about this part of the world. I still know very little. But once I realized that this is where world civilization is fated to be reborn, I figured that I’d better try to correct that deficiency. My father, as I have related, has directed me to keep a record of our group’s experiences and activities. But I can’t make much sense going forward without giving some account of what has happened here in the past. I’ve tried to learn about the past, not so much for its own sake—although I do love the historical narrative—but more for the light it sheds on our present situation and our future prospects.
I’ve read any number of books and talked with many people, both ordinary folk and so-called experts. What follows is an admittedly casual recapitulation of facts, impressions, and assumptions. It would drive my history professors to distraction, I’m certain. But I’m not working on a Ph.D. thesis any more. In a sense, this sets me free.
If the human race is to endure and reconstitute itself, there is an appropriate symmetry to having this occur in Africa. Most paleontologists have agreed that this is the continent where our forebears emerged, evolving from apelike creatures into hominids over a period of some four million years. Remains of anatomically modern
These human ancestors of ours, established in clans of about one hundred and fifty individuals, gradually made their way to the northern part of the continent, and then ventured across the Isthmus of Suez. This momentous migration commenced, according to current thinking, about one hundred thousand years ago, and eventually extended to the farthest corners of the globe. Descendants of these wanderers were destined to return to the mother continent time and again through the centuries, coming with a variety of purposes, most of them not to the advantage of the people who had stayed behind.
One of the most fateful of these returns occurred in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company authorized a certain Jan van Riebeeck, with a party of ninety, to set up a provisioning station at Table Bay on the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape had first been rounded in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese navigator; and as maritime trade developed between Europe and the Indies, the need for such a station became apparent. Neither the company nor the Dutch government planned on colonization by Dutch citizens. But, once established on shore, some of the pioneers started thinking about making this new world their permanent home. Within ten years, more than two hundred and fifty Dutch settlers were living near the Cape, farming and beginning to move inland. In 1689, they were joined by two hundred French Huguenots fleeing from government persecution. By 1707, there were almost two thousand freeholders of European descent.
This was three centuries ago, not long in the grand scheme of things, but a very long time when we think in terms of historical change. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, St. Petersburg was just being built, George Washington’s father was a boy, Johann Sebastian Bach was starting to write his music, and Isaac Newton was the newly elected president of the Royal Society. In Southern Africa, Negroid tribes—the Bantu—descending from the North, had not completed the process of replacing small bands of hunter-gatherers—the so-called San Bushmen. The white settlers at the Cape—called Boers, which is the Dutch word for farmers—occupied portions of the land
