The world did end for those who stood still and a few who did not, but roads were places of highly mobile warfare. Not every black man had a gun, but enough did to cause problems. As the trucks and buses drove into town, they would shoot at the fleeing whites. Sometimes they’d dismount and attack, trying to stop the traffic which headed out. When that happened, whites would fight back, shooting, driving over or through the obstacles. If a vehicle was stopped, there’d be a fight. If the whites died, others came from behind and fought some more, taking over the driverless vehicles if they could, pushing them to the side of the road if they couldn’t. The pressure from behind was immense, and the blacks couldn’t stop it, but they did try. It was early in this thing, this monstrous thing. No matter how much each side hated the other, neither had training for this. The blacks had never been a militarized nation and with the exception of white men in their sixties and seventies, the vast majority didn’t know what to do either- and it was the lack of organization on the part of blacks that helped so many of them to escape.
In Pretoria the Exodus Consortium fared better. They had been waiting for this and were ready to go immediately. The men and their wives got out very quickly, and were nearly 100 kilometers west of the city when they stopped for a powwow. Colonel van Reenen knew he was a dead man walking. Well, driving right now. He vaguely recalled a slogan from a TV ad about cancer which said “Cancer CAN be beaten”. With a cynicism similar to Daniel Iancu’s, he’d been telling himself whenever hope tried to torment him “Not stage 4, you can’t”. Armand missed Dan, the youngster so many had thought crazy because of his unconventionality and often counterintuitive ideas. He didn’t know where the guy was, but not a day went by without wishing he was by his sons’ side because he lived for war and reveled in things which scared shitless most of humanity. He kept thinking “If only Dan was here now. We could’ve used him on this one.” Staring death in the face changes you. It frightens one one hand and liberates on the other. With his end approaching slowly, one cell at a time, the colonel often found himself thinking to a conversation they’d once had. He was on an overseas deployment when the unit chaplain came to tell him his youngest son had committed suicide. One weekend, three or four years later, Dan had come to visit him with a bottle of 3 year-old KWV brandy and an envelope.
After many drinks, they began to talk about his youngest son, and then Dan mentioned he had a very strong feeling his son was courting death, but after what happened to him in the army he was scared to mention anything. He blamed himself for not doing or saying anything. Eventually he shared what happened to him when he died, and it was that story which gave the colonel hope he would one day see his boy again. The cancer was spreading from his lungs and nothing could stop it. The end would come, perhaps in nine or ten months. A former soldier, all he wanted in his old age was a meaningful death instead of an ignominious one in some hospital ward, so he told his friends what he was going to do. While everybody else drove to Namibia, he would take a car and head for Cape Town in the hope of bumping into his other son and at the same time tell as many people as he could to go to Namibia, where people were trying to get everybody out. The old men were stunned. They knew what it could mean, but also understood what drove Armand. His wife went nuts, crying and shouting for him to change his mind, that there were hospitals in Windhoek and hope. One of the men volunteered to take his wife along; all they had to do was to move her things over to his car. While they were doing this, another two men decided that it was worth doing, and they too told their wives to move their things to other cars. A few hugs and a lot of tears later, the group split- two cars headed west towards the Kalahari desert, the other split in three directions, each man going his own way. The colonel went to Cape Town, the other two headed for Durban via Bloemfontein and Port Elizabeth. In a world gone to hell, in a country without a working phone network, this was the only way they could spread the word. Thus three men headed towards danger and a place in the history books.
Over the next few hours they drove and wherever possible flagged down passing cars to encourage them to head for the Namibian border, where there was hope. The colonel and his logistical skills had come through again, because each man had a map of the South African road network and a notebook on which they wrote directions for the desperate people they’d met, and asked them to pass the message on at every roadside stop. It went well in the daytime, but at night the pervasive fear of the fleeing people along with pursuing police and military units got all three killed. One was caught near Colesberg at an impromptu road block and shot by squad of soldiers, who riddled his vehicle with over 40 bullets. Another was heading towards the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal when a tire burst sent him rolling down a precipice. It wasn’t deep, only about seventy meters or so, but it was enough to mangle the car and crush him. The colonel came across two cars off the road, barely concealed by the bushes. He went to them and in the darkness he heard a shot from his left, then fell down. The people were scared and one had panicked. As the colonel lay on the wet grass struggling to breathe because the 9mm bullet had shattered his ribs, angled upwards, tore through a lung and exited through his clavicle, he thought of his son and hoped Dan was right. A little over two minutes later Armand van Reenen felt no pain, fear, doubt or cold. He looked down and to his surprise he saw the guy on the ground was him. Then he felt an impulse to rise, which he did, and saw a long line of lights towards Cape Town. At that moment he realized his young friend had been right, and with a smile nobody saw, he went up into the darkness between the stars thinking “Riaan my boy, wait for me, I’m coming!” It was a tragedy, but they had done their jobs. People were heading to Namibia in droves and word was spreading from mouth to mouth, along with some hope.
End of Part 8. To be continued…
Mircea Negres
Port Elizabeth
South Africa
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