his bag. Inside was an assortment of old bottles with wooden stoppers. He lifted one out.
The white man snatched it. He drank feverishly, his eyes never leaving them. He swallowed and swallowed, and the two men watched him fearfully. He drank the bottle dry, then threw it down. He held out his hand for another. It was given to him. He drank half of it. Then he said:
‘Swakopmund!’
The Damaras understood. Neither of them had ever been to the white man’s town faraway to the south, but they had heard about the extraordinary place at the mouth of the river which is almost always dry. The Damara who was called Jakob pointed down the hostile coast.
The white man picked up their bows and motioned them to start leading the way.
In less than an hour he knew it was hopeless: he had to struggle to keep up, and tonight, when he fell asleep, the two men would disappear. He could not afford to leave witnesses, and when the sun began to get low he decided to kill them so that he could throw himself down and sleep. First, however, he wanted them to make a fire.
There was plenty of driftwood. He called a halt, and motioned them to put their slingbags at his feet, before indicating that he wanted a fire. The Damaras set to work. The white man collapsed in the sand. He opened one of the slingbags and found dried meat, which he began to chew ravenously.
The two Damaras made the fire. Jakob took a straight stick, the size of a pencil, out of his bag, and a piece of flat wood. He put a pinch of sand on the very edge of the wood, and some kindling underneath. Then, holding the straight stick vertical, he rubbed it between his palms onto the sandy wood, very hard, until the friction caused smoke. A tiny glow fell off the wood into the kindling below. The other Damara, called Petrus, blew on it, whilst Jakob ground the stick, and the kindling blossomed into a little flame. They scuttled about on their haunches, getting more kindling, crouching to blow. Then Petrus suddenly gave a gasp and pointed down the beach; the white man turned to look, and Jakob hit him.
Jakob seized a piece of jagged wood and swung it with all his might and the white man flung up an arm. The wood crashed against his wrist and gashed it to the bone, and he sprawled. His wallet jerked out of his pocket and the gun went flying. Jakob bounded and swiped the man’s mouth, and his lips split and his front teeth smashed off at the roots. Jakob raised his club again and the man cried out, trying to cover his head. Jakob threw down the stick and snatched up his slingbag, and Petrus snatched up the bows and the man’s wallet. They ran away into the dunes, leaving one slingbag behind in their panic.
A thousand miles down the Skeleton Coast is the Cape of Good Hope, ‘The Tavern of the Seas’ on the route from Europe to the East, with its oaks and its vineyards and its fruit – the Fairest Cape of All, it is said. Further to the east are the mighty Tsitsikama forests, and then come the rolling hills of the Ciskei and the Transkei, the homelands of the Xhosa people beneath the mountain stronghold of Lesotho, the kingdom of the Basuto people; then come the lush green hills of Natal where the sugar cane grows, the home of the Zulu people, who were a mighty warrior nation. Then across the magnificent towering Drakensberg mountains lie the farmlands of the Orange Free State, the vast highveld and the bushveld of the Transvaal, the land of rich goldfields, the strongholds of the hard people of Dutch descent, who are called Afrikaners. They live surrounded by many tribes: the Swazis in their mountain kingdom, the Tswanas, the Vendas, the Matabele. To the west of this country is the Kalahari desert and beyond that lies the vast desert country called South West Africa-Namibia, with its Skeleton Coast, where live the Ovambo people, and the Himba and the Herero, the Damaras and the Bushmen, to name but some, as well as Germans and Afrikaners. There are many different countries in this dramatic land of southern Africa, with many different climates, and many different peoples, and many languages and many different customs, but the most dramatic country of all is the one known as The Land God Made in Anger, the desert land called South West Africa-Namibia, or more commonly simply Namibia, where this story began.
Legally, Namibia is not part of the Republic of South Africa. It is a former German colony which was handed to South Africa by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War under a mandate to govern in the best interests of the natives until such time as it was appropriate to grant the colony independence. Halfway up is the little enclave of Walvis Bay, the only deep-water harbour in the whole vast coast, which is legally part of South Africa. It was to this unusual part of the world that James McQuade came back forty years after Jakob and Petrus saw the two men erupt out of the sea and fight to the death on the burning shore.
James van Niekerk McQuade once served twelve months in prison for contravening the Immorality Act, but do not be too alarmed by that because it happened like this: in those days, when he was starting a trawler-fishing company in Cape Town, he sailed to the Antarctic every year on the whaling fleets to make extra money, and down at the Ice he fell madly in love with the ship’s nurse, a South African girl who happened to have some Malaysian blood. She was only one-sixteenth Malay, but that was enough to make her a Coloured under South Africa’s laws in those days. When they got back from the Ice she was pregnant and he unlawfully married her. When they were charged for breaching the racial laws, he packed her off secretly to England to have her baby. The magistrate sentenced him to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour, and he never saw his wife again. She wrote to him in prison saying that she had miscarried, that she had ruined his life and that he should forget about her. There was no address. When he came out of prison he moved his fishing company to Walvis Bay to get away from his wicked past, put a skipper in charge and hurried to England to look for his wife. After six months he had given up and emigrated to Australia to start life again, an embittered man. No way was he going to go back to goddam South Africa.
Nor did he, for twelve years. He hated the place. Not the country – for it is a wonderful country – but the government with its Apartheid laws. But he still had connections with South Africa. There was his house, which returned a reasonable rent, mortgaged to pay for his trawler, and there was his fishing company, which most years showed a reasonable profit. While in Australia, he had formed Sausmarine, a small, one-freighter shipping line that plied between Australia, South Africa and Ghana, a route that became profitable when the Australian Dockworkers’ Union refused to off-load South African cargo. Australian businessmen document their cargo as bound for Ghana, and your understanding Sausmarine off-loads it in Cape Town. And vice versa. You’d never believe the mistakes these shipping clerks make: South African exports get misloaded into crates bearing Ghanaian labels. (Sausmarine never went near Ghana – her ship was called Rocket because she did the putative trip so fast.) And to make confusion more confounded, Sausmarine was registered in Panama. But, during all those years, McQuade did not sail to South Africa: Kid Childe, Tucker and L. C. Brooks ran the ship, and McQuade ran the company from a one-roomed office above a Greek café on the Adelaide waterfront. It was not bad business until sanctions against South Africa heated up and the competition with other sanction-busters became too sharp. McQuade had not the slightest compunction about beating the Dockworkers’ Union at their own commie game, but he drew the line at more prison. Finally he decided to sell up Sausmarine, go back to South Africa and work the fishing company hard with a skeleton crew, then sell it and put the money into a small passenger ship to ply down the Great Barrier Reef, from Cairns to Sydney. That’s a lovely part of the world, and there was a crying need for that service.
There was another good reason for getting his investments out: called 435. United Nations’ Resolution 435 ordered South Africa, the polecat nation of the world, to grant independence to South West Africa-Namibia. For years South Africa had been fighting a war with SWAPO, the South West African Peoples Organization, a terrorist Marxist movement, and had no intention of handing the country over to them: but now SWAPO had thirty thousand Cuban soldiers to help, and McQuade saw the writing on the wall. The same writing that had spelled out the collapse of Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies and the Congo and the rest of British Africa: you win every battle but lose the war. God knows McQuade had no love for the South African Government but he had much less love for communists, and certainly
