Over one thousand kilometers away, former major Kurt Bergmann was watching BBC when the newsflash about The Guardian’s story came and some of the less gory pictures were shown. He sent his coffee mug flying in the haste to pick up the phone, but he managed to sound very cool and collected when he called his friends, who were invited to his house that evening. He then asked his South African guests to prepare their presentation again, telling them they’d be believed this time. Henk van Jaarsveld and Johan Aarsen had been depressed for a week now, and thought he was messing with them until he explained what was on the news. The guys turned to Kurt’s TV, watched the end of the segment and called their wives. They all sat there in silence, with tears streaming down their cheeks, any doubt about the idea which drove their madcap exit from South Africa removed forever. That evening, Kurt Bergmann’s short driveway was clogged very quickly and cars parked on the street, annoying some of the neighbors. With over 30 people in the house, the lounge proved to be inadequate, so they moved to the garden. There Aarsen stood silently as van Jaarsveld told his eager audience about what they had worked out with their friends and showed them the letter which authorized them to seek help and organize whatever they could on the Namibian side. It wasn’t exactly like the diplomatic credentials issued by a government for its ambassador to another country, but the names, former ranks and occupations of the Exodus Consortium’s members went some way to convince the guests that at least some people had been looking at the problem and tried to organize. They also recognized that in the days to come there would be a need to have figures of authority to speak to, and absent a bona fide South African government in exile, this was as close as they could get.
The visitors undertook to do everything necessary to get an audience with the Namibian minister of foreign affairs for the two members of the Exodus Consortium. They also promised to put their European contacts to use after the meeting, but it was essential to first get in touch with the government. Not only to give the state a heads-up that it was about to become an unwilling host to possibly more than 4.000.000 refugees, but because it had the most resources and powers to deal with them and approach world governments for help. At that moment, the Namibian cabinet was meeting to consider the implications of what was happening in South Africa, but they hadn’t gotten around to asking themselves what would happen if the whites came to them looking for asylum, or what they would do once that happened. Their first problem was territorial security because this crisis had the potential to destabilize their country too, and that very quickly. Just those who got out of Cape Town could alter the ethnic and racial balance in the country and the political as well as security risk this posed frightened the hell out of the ministers and president. They knew it was a tough problem. The Namibian military didn’t have the numbers to secure the border, and there weren’t enough cops either. Faced with God only knew how many whites with guns, the army would either have to kill everybody at the border, or try to contain them somewhere. Any way the government looked at it, there were serious concerns this could turn into a damned nightmare. Beyond that, there was the matter of water. Their country was drier than an Egyptian mummy’s tit and the population relied on boreholes. These were already under pressure with 1.200.000 people, but if another 4.000.000 came, it would be a disaster. One thing was for sure- if they came, the whites could not stay in Namibia for very long.
Until then, they had to consider quite a lot of things, one of them being whether to close the border. The cabinet realized immediately that wouldn’t matter because the whites would just cross illegally and then they’d have even fewer reasons to trust the Namibian government. Pissed off and desperate, they were bound to be uncooperative and very likely dangerous. It was better to look at creating temporary camps outside two or three major cities and direct incoming refugees there, where the government could keep an eye on them and coordinate aid. The Namibians had had a tough history with the South African whites. Many of the ministers had either fought against them as teenagers, or had lost relatives in their struggle for independence. They didn’t like the whites very much, but were also not willing to be known as monsters like the ANC had begun to be called within the last few hours, so it was decided to keep the border posts open and beef up the staff complement with some of the whites who still worked in the government bureaucracy, so that the refugees’ hostility could be lessened by a putatively friendly face. Not that they had many people, but it was also decided to send reconnaissance teams into the Western and Northern Cape provinces of South Africa, made up of two or three soldiers and at least one intelligence officer per vehicle dressed in South African military uniforms and carrying R4 rifles, to report what they saw on the roads to Namibia. Orders were to operate only in an observation capacity and not engage or become involved in any way unless directly threatened. Even then, they were to run first and open fire in self-defense only if there really was no other way.
The entire Namibian Defence Force was called up, soldiers assigned sections of the border to patrol, the air force sent every operational jet and helicopter they had to fly reconnaissance missions and the navy was deployed to provide fire support on the approaches to the ports of Luderitz and Walvis Bay, though most of the little navy was concentrated just off Oranjekopmund, where Namibia’s alluvial deposits of diamonds lay, with orders to kill anything and anybody who entered the area without authorization. In that they were directed by the mine security forces which operated constantly in the area, and a few hundred vehicles would burn for blundering in Namibia’s holy of holies until security teams managed to redirect the refugees around and towards Luderitz. The town of around 15.000 souls was about to get bigger… The ministers of defense and intelligence were ordered to monitor the situation over the border with every means at their disposal and to buy from American private intelligence companies satellite pictures of what was happening in South Africa. The minister of foreign affairs was directed to fire up his ambassadors at the U.N and in South Africa with orders to relay the Namibian government’s request that the South African government stop its madness before it destabilized the region and caused a humanitarian disaster. Over the next few hours the Namibian requests would be ignored and the blacks kept pursuing the whites.
By dawn, tens of thousands of whites were approaching the southern border of Namibia, most of them riding overcrowded vehicles because many had left with whatever fuel was in their tanks and it proved insufficient to make it across the 750 kilometers to the border. The front of the human wave coming out of Gauteng from Johannesburg and Pretoria approached Upington and people were struggling to refuel as well as evade black civilian and military attackers from the nearby 8 SAI who came towards them. A lot of them realized they could not enter the city and went around its southern edge, often off-road, which damaged hundreds of cars designed for proper roads in the city. Those who could, climbed on 4x4s which coped better with the terrain, but the added load strained the engines and increased fuel consumption. Many ran out of fuel while they tried to go around Upington and before long hundreds of people were walking towards Namibia. At the current rate of progress, it would take them anywhere between three days and a week to get to the border, but by then they’d be finished physically and mentally- and that assumed they survived the relentless pursuit…
As it turned out, thousands would not. Many died from exhaustion brought on by the constant walking combined with lack of food and water. In desperation, a lot of people emptied out abandoned vehicles’ radiators and drank. Hundreds who did ended up dying horrible deaths from the tetanus caused by the rust they were unable to filter out. Millions of desperate people had been praying since the attacks started, but it seemed like no help was coming from above, not even rain. As a beautiful sunrise graced the sea of misery, cops and soldiers close to major cities began to form road blocks to catch stragglers, and they added to the already considerable carnage. Just when the beleaguered whites began to believe God had abandoned them, something happened in Pretoria which would change everything…
End of Part 9. To be continued…
Mircea Negres
Port Elizabeth
South Africa
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