Against a backdrop of drought, the rinderpest pandemic, the South African War, the burgeoning gold-mining industry and the complex birth of the exploitative system of recruiting migrant labour, Shades explores the growing tensions between cultures in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century and the deepening awareness of the black mission-educated elite, empowered by the printing press, of the need to articulate their political and spiritual beliefs.
“IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when Walter returned to the retreat house. Father Charles walked with him to the gate, carrying a lantern. He raised it up and lighted Walter’s face. He said, his hand on Walter’s arm, ‘I have not even asked you how you’ve been.’
‘Do not speak about Mbokothwe now,’ said Walter.
‘That bad?’
‘Most times.’
‘I need you here. You can see what an old man I’ve become.’
‘No doubt they will send you a zealous young priest when one is available.’
‘I had one once and he left me for Mbokothwe.’
‘There was little choice.’
Father Charles nodded. The hand holding the lantern shook. The broad shoulders were stooped, the alpaca coat that he had always filled so vigorously hung about his limbs, the great lion-like head, the straight, grey brush of hair, the clipped beard, were still the same but the eyes were old and their outward droop which had given his expression its unique humour, made his face look frail and weary. ‘I wish I knew,’ he said, ‘what had happened to our son. I wish I knew what he’d been thinking.’ Walter waited. ‘I wonder, if I’d known, if I could have counselled such despair.’ He turned from Walter and he said, ‘God bless, old friend. How glad I am to have you home tonight.’
Home. Walter might have smiled – with something close to bitterness – to hear the word. He watched the old man walk away and then he took his tobacco pouch from his pocket and he went, not to the retreat house where a bed had been prepared for him, but to the long veranda of the
curate’s lodge. He trod the length of it, passing the doors of the small, plain rooms. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. The last had once been his.
He sat on the step outside it and lit his pipe. He looked up at the sky.
“He had decided, long ago, that his God – his most dependable, predictable Creator – had retreated in defeat before the God who had invented this.”
How many times he’d done it in the past. How unfamiliar it once had been: how well he knew the Southern Constellations now. The stars were large and clear, the incandescent green of planets, dimmed by neither dust nor light. He could feel the silence of the Amatolas pressing in around him: aloof, distant, covered with blackgreen bush. There was no poetry in any of his books to describe such a landscape – no poetry, no words. He had decided, long ago, that his God – his most dependable, predictable Creator – had retreated in defeat before the God who had invented this. One day those same dark-sapped bushes would march in and reclaim the mission and its cultivated lands.
He was sure of it. There was nothing like the ruins of settlements to underscore the impotence of man against a place like this. The great church, buttressed in stone, would one day be the haunt of owls.
He knew it now and he had known it then for he had written in his journal on his first night at the mission – listening to the secret dark behind his window: ‘January 27th, 1898: At St Matthias Mission there is an odd sense of predestination. It is strange how strongly I feel it . . . what it is I do not know but I shall leave before it takes me in. I shall leave before I am its victim.’
And yet, despite the clarity of his perceptions, despite some instinct shouting in his head, he had not left. He had written those words and then he had put them away. For two and a half years they had lain in his journal unrecalled. And now he was leaving – fighting a rising desolation: not a victim eager for escape, but an exile sent from home.
The catastrophic game had ended as he knew it must. It had claimed them all. Tom, Reuben and Sonwabo gone. Crispin gone – dragging himself out into some remote and hostile darkness. And if Benedict Matiwane was still here, he had ensured a distance more divisive and complete than death. Tomorrow, when the funeral was over, when Crispin had been buried beneath the oak at the east side of the church, then he himself would go, a passenger in Klaus Otto’s transport wagon.
No inducements and no remembrances would keep him back.
No inducements.
No remembrances.
He stood and walked towards the corner of the curate’s lodge. He looked across the drive and yard towards the mission house. The last time he had stood like this, he had watched the moon’s reflection in the panes of Frances Farborough’s window, the night she’d gone away.
Then, he’d felt a primal cry, rising like a flame in his throat. Now he stood in quietness, hearing only the breathing of the trees, the shadows grey and still across the shutters of her empty room.”
Extracted from Shades by Marguerite Poland, out now.
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