The Pretoria Agenda (Excerpt)

Richard Msechu

Johannes Brensmick sat in room 45 and went halfway through the report.  He was a blue blooded Afrikaner, who had grown up within the system.  The system taught you to believe that you were superior because you were white; that the others were inferior because they were not white.  He had grown up under volk in ‘beweging’ – dedication to the ideal.  He had sacrificed all his life to that ideal. Now… now… His head spun.  He had sat through the meeting in total disbelief, nausea rising within him as the reality of what would actually transpire struck at his conscience. He shook violently as fear gripped him.  His stomach churned and rumbled as acids poured into his bowels touching off a string of pains from his gastric ulcers.  They were going to give his South Africa to the kaffirs!  They were going to overlook the sacrifices that the white man had made since the seventeenth century.  All that would soon go down the drain unless… unless what? Bitter rheum filled his mouth.  A lump blocked his throat.  His hands shook as he closed the half – read dossier and began to cry.  He was lost.  All was lost in the eyes of his oppressive mind. His eyes blurred and the world around him began to spiral in destructive coils that were looped around him, squeezing life out of him.  He stood up intending to rush to the washroom but dizziness assailed him.  He collapsed back into his chair.

Professor Mallan Richeck, who was a member of the national Security Committee by virtue of being the Director General of the Coordination Centre for the Defence of the Republic, read through the dossier.  He had been prepared to serve and protect the old order in any way.  Now it dawned on him that there was no way to save the old order. Hard reality could not be changed.  A new order would come the status quo would be dislodged and destroyed in its totality.  You either metamorphosed into the new order, or got destroyed with the old one.  Could he change?  Could he accept the inevitable? The Professor knew he had believed too deeply for too long in the status quo.  Apartheid was a part of him. He told himself that to change now would amount to self- betrayal of highest order.  Yet he was lucidly aware that to do anything aimed at maintaining the current state of affairs was futile and ethnically suicidal. He also knew that one could fight change by force of arms and other methods.  Yes! You could win some battles, but no amount of arms, soldiers or politicking would win this war. The tides of history were indefatigable.  He accepted that change would come.  It was honourable to fight for what one believed in but it was primitive to refuse to accept the proposed changes since they were unavoidable.  The Professor laughed loudly.  He understood.  But refused to be part of the change.  He chose to remain primitive in that aspect.  He was resolved.  Everything was so clear in his mind that he wondered why he had not thought of it before. He left the room.  To hell with orders that forbade leaving the building.

These people were going to dismantle apartheid and they wanted him to be a party to the endorsement of the destruction.  It was abominable; sacrilegious!  Let history take its course.  He was not going to be part of that course even though he knew that apartheid was inhuman and unworthy of learned and civilized men such as he was.  He had an inbuilt stubborn streak in him which refused to accept change.  He had to get to his office!  He walked to his car in the plaza.  No one challenged him.  The drive to his office was smooth.  He wondered why he had not been caught in the usual lunch break traffic jam that made rush hour driving in down town Pretoria a nightmare.  Now the manuscript of the latest work Apartheid: The March into the Next Century lay nearly piled up in front of him.  It was a masterpiece.  His best work – one, which he had intended to release on Independence Day.

Now…. The Professor laughed again.  Calmly and with the precision with which he was famed for doing everything, he shredded the manuscript, then took out the hand gun – a 375 smith and Wesson automatic that he always kept in his desk drawer to protect himself from any possible Kaffir terrorist attack.  He shot himself through the temple. The steel jacketed hard nose bullet tunneled through his brains, slamming him backwards as it made a clean exit at the back of his head.  The Professor twitched and kicked in instinctive neural motor locomotion.  His dying arms flailed without guidance as his upper trunk slumped onto his desk, his head finding its final resting on the open secret dossier on the dismantling of apartheid.  Two rivulets of dark crimson blood streamed down the document from the self-inflicted wound as his wasted life ebbed away.  His sphincter muscle eased.  He soiled himself and died.