Shaka II Read online

  I called in sick, we arrived in Ulundi the next afternoon, Robert registered his party and announced his candidacy, and then we took a room in a hotel that was one step above being a flophouse.

  The next morning Hector ole Kunene failed to show up at a small breakfast for the party faithful. He didn’t appear for a noon interview and an afternoon rally, and in fact was never seen again.

  And twenty-seven days later Robert ole Buthelezi, representing the Zulu Party, won an uncontested election for the office of Clerk of Records.

  It didn’t seem like much at the time, but years later historians would want all the details, however insignificant.

  4.

  When Robert took office, he gave me an imposing title-Vice Chairman and Confidential Advisor-but I was just a glorified filing clerk. I suppose I should have quit after the first week and gone back home, but my paycheck after that week was more than I made in a month as a teacher. I couldn’t figure it out-I was clearly a flunky, nothing more-but somehow when Robert put through the voucher for my salary no one argued with him. Which was probably just as well; Robert did not lose very many arguments. I sent half of my check to the school, and decided to stay.

  Ulundi wasn’t Johannesburg or Pretoria, but it was still far more sophisticated than the town where I had been living. A monorail circled the city, two matching skyscrapers reached for the clouds, and the city’s power was now supplied by nuclear energy.

  Each evening I stopped by a local restaurant on my way back to my rented room. From time to time Robert would choose to eat there, but never alone. Invariably he was in the company of men I did not know. Some were very well-dressed, and often had their government ID tags still affixed to their tunics. Others were poorly-dressed, and made no attempt to hide the fact that they carried weapons. It made no difference to Robert; he was equally at home with all of them.

  Well, perhaps I should reword that: he was equally comfortable and self-contained with either group. I don’t know for a fact that I ever saw him actually enjoy another man’s company. I know that he enjoyed the company of women, but not in that way and not in public.

  We had been in Ulundi for about four months when he finally invited me out to dinner. It was the first meal we had eaten together since we had arrived in the city. He took me to a posh restaurant, where all the staff seemed to know him (as did many of the diners), and we were escorted to a table in the farthest corner of the room.

  “This is my regular table here,” he said as we sat down. “I do not believe any other diners can overhear me here as long as I keep my voice down.”

  “I would think they have very little interest in governmental record-keeping anyway,” I said.

  He laughed, the first laugh I had heard him utter since he returned after his ten-year absence.

  “If there was any doubt that we are brothers, that eradicates it,” he said. “Our father had a sense of humor too-or so I have been told.” Neither of us remembered much of Buthelezi, who had wandered off one day and never returned. In truth, we had no idea if he was still alive.

  “I am sure it will be a very fine meal,” I said, “and I will speak so softly no one can possibly overhear me, but I still don’t know why I am here.”

  “To make plans, of course.”

  “Just me?” I asked. I stared at him curiously. “Am I being fired?”

  “No, and no,” he said. “But if we are to move to Pretoria in a few months, we must prepare.”

  “Are we moving to Pretoria?”

  He nodded his head. “I told you we would not be in Ulundi for long.”

  “You have found a better job?” I asked.

  “I have served my apprenticeship,” he answered. “It is time to become President.”

  “Based on three medals, two of which aren’t yours, and four months as Clerk of Records in a backwater province?” I said.

  “It is a backwater province,” he replied. “It is time to leave it.”

  “I have no problem with that,” I said. “But to think you can become the President of all South Africa…”

  “It is the logical next step in the progression.”

  “The progression?” I said, surprised. “You mean there’s more?”

  He looked at me rather sadly, the way you might look at a pet that will never understand what you are trying to teach it.

  “There is more.”

  “The Presidency of South Africa”-an impossibility in itself-“isn’t enough?”

  “When Tchaka became king of the Zulus, Zululand was perhaps ten square miles,” he shot back. “Was that enough?”

  “He controlled only ten square miles; the President controls hundreds of thousands,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

  “Only in degree,” replied Robert. “His world covered the southern tip of Africa. Mine extends as far as the eye can see.”

  “So did his,” I argued.

  Robert gave me another sad smile reserved for pets of limited intelligence. “He never looked up.”

  5.

  Lloyds of London had the odds against him at 200-to-1 with eleven weeks to go. The one casino in Las Vegas that booked bets on it lowered it to 175-to-1 in case there was a sympathy vote for the poor clerk who had the temerity to buck the entrenched political machine. Robert borrowed a thousand rands and bet on himself.

  Two months before the election there was a debate between the three leading candidates. Well, actually, the two leading candidates and Robert. It was held in a stadium in Cape Town, rather than a holo studio, and some forty thousand people were in attendance. It was a bright, sunlit day, as almost all days on the Cape are, and it was estimated that more than eighty million people, in South Africa and elsewhere, were watching on their Tri D’s and their computers’ holoscreens.

  They were about half an hour into the debate when it happened. Three gunmen-one armed with a laser gun, two with projectile pistols-burst onto the floor of the stadium. They must have been hiding in the laundry facilities in the back of the visiting teams’ clubhouse, and had killed half a dozen security men along the way. They raced onto the field where one of the network anchors was acting as moderator for the debate. One of them started yelling something-the sound system couldn’t pick it up-and then they began firing their weapons. The guards were taken by surprise, and soon lay dead on the stadium floor.

  One man fired a shot at Robert, who threw himself to the ground. The bullet hit a woman in the stands. She screamed and pitched forward, dead.

  The President was crouching down behind his podium, and the man with the laser pistol was burning his way through it. Two shots tore into the other candidate, blood spurted out of his throat, and he collapsed, writhing and twisting frantically for a few seconds, then lay absolutely still in an ever-increasing pool of his own blood.

  And then, just as everyone thought there was more slaughter to come, Robert got to his feet and raced to the man with the laser, hurling himself against the man’s back and sending him sprawling. Somehow he got his hand on the gun as the two went down in a heap and he came up firing. The first blast of deadly light turned one of the pistols to molten metal, the second went right between the third man’s eyes. The man whose gun had melted threw himself at Robert, which was all but suicidal: I don’t think Robert had ever lost a fight since he began building his body up after that one experience as a boy. He reached out a long, powerful arm, grabbed the man by the throat, lifted him off the ground until the wild thrashing became feeble twitching, and then literally threw him away.

  The first gunman, the one with the laser whom he had disarmed, got up, took one look into Robert’s eyes, didn’t like what he saw, spotted some police running onto the field, and raced to them, his arms in the air, screaming that he surrendered.

  Robert walked over to where the President cowered behind the podium, gently lifted him to his feet, and kept a steadying arm around him until the medics arrived about a minute later.

  It was not only an act of extreme herois
m, but it had been seen by eighty million people, two-thirds of them eligible to vote in the upcoming election. That night Lloyds lowered his odds to four-to-one, and within a week, when matched against the President, it was six-to-five pick ‘em. By election day Robert was an odds-on favorite, and he won the way a heavy favorite should.

  The morning after the election he issued executive pardons to the two surviving would-be assassins. There was some brief outrage in the press, but he pointed out that if he, who had literally risked his life to prevent them from killing the President, was willing to forgive them, what right did anyone else have to hold a grudge?

  “That was a remarkable act of generosity,” I said when he and I were briefly alone in his office. I had been appointed his Chief of Staff, but it was entirely for show; he saw who he wanted, when he wanted.

  “You have no idea,” he replied with an unfathomable smile.

  “I think the people will love you all the more for it: a hero-but a hero with compassion.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” he said dryly.

  “I can’t get over how serendipitous it was,” I continued. “I think you were actually winning the debate, and it probably wouldn’t have won you ten extra votes. But those crazed killers showed up and suddenly you’re the biggest hero we’ve had since…well, Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa, so…since Shaka himself.”

  “His name, as I keep telling you, was Tchaka,” replied Robert. “And the most serendipitous thing in the past month is that Lloyds paid off promptly.”

  “I didn’t know you needed money.”

  He shrugged. “If I hadn’t been elected, I wouldn’t have needed it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You will,” he replied. “The day after tomorrow Dlamini and Gumbi”-the two surviving assassins-“will be released. We’ll give the press a few days to ask them the usual endlessly stupid questions. Then, by next week, when the interest and the crowd have died down, you’ll pay them a visit.”

  “And?”

  “And give each of them half of my Lloyds winnings.”

  “You hired them?” I said, wondering why I didn’t feel more shocked at the revelation.

  “Be a realist, John,” he answered easily. “What killer in his right mind commits murder-or tries to-in front of eighty million viewers?”

  I stared at him for a long moment. “Welcome to the wonderful world of politics,” I said bitterly.

  He shook his head. “No, John,” he corrected me. “Welcome to winning.”

  6.

  I was Robert’s first major appointment-the Postmaster for all South Africa. I have to admit that he was an exceptionally effective President for the first year. The unions had a stranglehold on labor. He broke it. Not with armies of thugs as unions had been fought in the past, but with the carrot and the stick.

  Every government agency, from the spaceport traffic controllers to the servants in the Parliament’s private dining room, was run with union labor. He went out of his way to antagonize the unions, and every time a union struck, he would fire all the members who were working for the government, declaring that that particular union or brotherhood of unions could no longer expect government contracts in the future. Then, a week later, he offered work to the same employees who had been fired, usually at twenty percent more than they had been making-and that came to even more money when they realized they did not have to pay union dues.

  When the mine owners began to speak about running a candidate to oppose him in the next election, he nationalized the biggest mining company, and the rest of the owners took the hint.

  Namibia, to the west of us, opposed a trade policy. He cut off all trade until they decided the policy wasn’t so bad after all.

  He was a masterful politician, adept at all forms of power politics. In less than two years he had the shining, modern capital of South Africa-and indeed the whole country-running like clockwork. Not all the people were happy, not all the businesses were prospering, but he had enough of both on his side that he had nothing to worry about. I thought this would give him an incentive to relax and slow down, but it seemed to have just the opposite effect.

  For two years he had a map of South Africa on the wall to the left of his desk. Then one day it was gone, and was replaced by a map of the lower half of the African continent. That afternoon I was summoned to his office.

  “Yes, Mr. President?” I said, for I always referred to him by his formal title.

  “John, my brother,” he said, “I think your talents are being wasted. You are my Postmaster, and yet hardly anyone uses the post office any more. It’s been decades since anyone sent a letter, even a legal document, by mail rather than electronically, and as for parcels, we are competing with half a dozen carriers. Our postal service is an anachronism; I foresee better things for you.”

  I remained silent, trying to figure out what he was leading up to, since we had never discussed my future, only his, and only in grandiose if non-specific terms.

  “As of this afternoon, you are my ambassador to Mozambique.”

  “Mozambique?” I repeated, surprised. It was an impoverished neighboring country, and our primary interaction with them was turning back thousands of illegal immigrants at the border every day.

  He nodded. “Don’t look so disappointed. This is a very important posting.”

  “Perhaps you will explain what makes it so?” I said, for in my mind it was actually a lesser position than Postmaster, which wasn’t much to begin with.

  He smiled. “Take a week to find your way around Beira. Play some golf, visit the casino, do a little sailing.”

  “It sounds easy enough,” I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “At the end of the week, you will pay a visit to the President of Mozambique and deliver this.” He handed me an envelope bearing the official seal of the President. Another smile. “It will be your last duty as Postmaster.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Our demand that they turn over their half of the Kruger National Park to us. It was unfairly divided centuries ago.”

  “Do we care?” I asked. “Are you planning on building a city on park land?”

  “Certainly not. It is home to the last wild animals on the continent. I wouldn’t dream of changing it.”

  “Then I repeat - what is this all about?”

  “We want restitution for all the centuries that they have profited from land that should legally have been ours,” said Robert.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “The land was divided by a treaty that was ratified and signed by both countries.”

  He shook his head. “It was signed by white squatters who took the land and the government away from the indigenous peoples. It is not a legal treaty.”

  “Mozambique has no money,” I persisted. “What can they be making in park fees? Three thousand rands a year, if that?”

  “I know. That is why we will not ask for money.”

  “I thought you said you wanted restitution.”

  “I do,” he replied.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He walked to the map and pulled a pen out of his pocket. “This is approximate,” he said, drawing a line across the lower third of Mozambique. “This will constitute our restitution.”

  I stared at the map in silence for a moment. “You can’t be serious,” I said, although I knew he was.

  “It is prime pastureland,” replied Robert. “There are rivers than can be diverted to South Africa during droughts. There is a huge population that has been trying to cross our border for generations, and will be happy to work for whatever wages we offer them, however minimal-and that in turn will keep our own people in line.”

  “Mozambique will never agree to it,” I said.

  “And we have a well-trained army,” he continued, “an army that needs something to do.”

  “It’ll be a slaughter.”

  “It will be a good training exercise.”`

>   “You sound like there’s more,” I said.

  “We have treaties with Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Angola…”

  “Just how far north do you plan to go?” I demanded.

  “Have you ever seen the Mediterranean, my brother?” he asked. “It is quite beautiful this time of year.”

  “There have been wars of conquest on this continent before.”

  “Led by madmen and fools,” he replied. “I am neither.”

  “You really mean to do it?”

  He gestured toward the letter. “It is done.”

  “Then let someone else deliver it,” I said. “I’ll stay where I am.”

  “My mind is made up,” he said. “You will be my ambassador to Mozambique.”

  “Why me?” I asked. “You have generals and hirelings who would love to make the President of Mozambique squirm.”

  “That is precisely why I want you,” said Robert. “You are a compassionate man who will sympathize with him.” He shot me a triumphant smile. “I know you give most of your salary to local orphanages. You even feed stray dogs and cats. You cannot hide your nature from me, my brother, and you will not be able to hide it from him.”

  “What has that to do with anything?”

  “When you tell him, truthfully and in some detail, exactly what will befall him and his people should he refuse my demands, when he sees that you actually care, that you do not want his country to become a smoking junk-heap, he will know that I mean what I say, and further, he will know precisely because of your reaction, that I have the power to do what I say.”

  “Am I then to become your ambassador to every other country you wish to conquer?” I asked bitterly.