Free Rage by Wilbur Smith Page B

alley cats. Though his head seemed carved from a block of black onyx, and his handsome Nilotic features were impassive, yet there was a force within him that seemed to fill all the room. It was like standing on the high slopes of a dark Vesuvius, knowing that at any instant it could boil over into cataclysmic eruption.
    Moses Gama turned his head and looked at Tara. He did not smile, but a shadowy thing moved in the depths of his dark gaze.
    â€˜Mrs Courtney – I asked Molly to invite you.’
    â€˜Please don’t call me that. My name is Tara.’
    â€˜We must talk later, Tara. Will you stay?’
    She could not answer, she was too overcome at being singled out, but she nodded dumbly.
    â€˜If you are ready, Moses, we can begin,’ Molly suggested, and taking him out of the group led him to the raised dais on which the piano stood.
    â€˜People! People! Your attention; please!’ Molly clapped her hands, and the animated chatter died away. Everybody turned towards the dais. ‘Moses Gama is one of the most talented and revered of the new generation of young black African leaders. He has been a member of the African National Congress since before the war, and a prime mover in the formation of the African Mineworkers’ Union. Although the black trade unions are not officially recognized by the government of the day, yet the secret union of mineworkers is one of the most representative and powerful of all black associations, with more than a hundred thousand paid-up members. In 1950 Moses Gama was elected Secretary of the ANC, and he has worked tirelessly, selflessly and highly effectively in making the heart cry of our black citizens heard, even though they are denied a voice in their own destiny. For a short while Moses Gama
was an appointed member of the government’s Natives’ Representative Council, that infamous attempt to appease black political aspirations, but it was he who resigned with the now celebrated remark, “I have been speaking into a toy telephone, with nobody listening at the other end.”’
    There was a burst of laughter and applause from the room, and then Molly turned to Moses Gama.
    â€˜I know that you have nothing to tell us that will comfort and soothe us – but, Moses Gama, in this room there are many hearts that beat with yours and are prepared to bleed with yours.’
    Tara applauded until the palms of her hands were numb, and then leaned forward to listen eagerly as Moses Gama moved to the front of the dais.
    He was dressed in a neat blue suit and a dark blue tie with a white shirt. Strangely, he was the most formally dressed man in a room full of baggy woollen sweaters and old tweed sports coats with leather patches on the elbows and gravy stains on the lapels. His suit was severely cut, draped elegantly from wide athletic shoulders, but he imparted to it a panache that made it seem that he wore the leopard-skin cloak of royalty and the blue heron feathers in his close-cropped mat of hair. His voice was deep and thrilling.
    â€˜My friends, there is one single ideal to which I cling with all my heart, and which I will defend with my very life, and that is that every African has a primary, inherent and inalienable right to the Africa which is his continent and his only motherland,’ Moses Gama began, and Tara listened, enchanted, as he detailed how that inherent right had been denied the black man for three hundred years, and how in these last few years since the Nationalist government had come to power those denials were becoming formally entrenched in a monumental edifice of laws and ordinances and proclamations which was the policy of apartheid in practice.

    â€˜We have all heard it said that the whole concept of apartheid is so grotesque, so obviously lunatic, that it can never work. But I warn you, my friends, that the men who have conceived this crazy scheme are so fanatical, so obdurate, so convinced of their divine guidance,