{"id":1204,"date":"2012-05-14T02:42:51","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T02:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue12\/?page_id=1204"},"modified":"2012-05-14T02:42:51","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T02:42:51","slug":"richard-msechu","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/writings\/fiction\/richard-msechu","title":{"rendered":"Richard Msechu"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pretoria Agenda <\/strong> (Excerpt)<\/h1>\n
Richard Msechu<\/h6>\n

Johannes Brensmick sat in room 45 and went halfway through the report.\u00c2\u00a0 He was a blue blooded Afrikaner, who had grown up within the system.\u00c2\u00a0 The system taught you to believe that you were superior because you were white; that the others were inferior because they were not white.\u00c2\u00a0 He had grown up under volk in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcbeweging\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c dedication to the ideal.\u00c2\u00a0 He had sacrificed all his life to that ideal. Now\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 now\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 His head spun.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 His stomach churned and rumbled as acids poured into his bowels touching off a string of pains from his gastric ulcers.\u00c2\u00a0 They were going to give his South Africa to the kaffirs!\u00c2\u00a0 They were going to overlook the sacrifices that the white man had made since the seventeenth century.\u00c2\u00a0 All that would soon go down the drain unless\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 unless what? Bitter rheum filled his mouth.\u00c2\u00a0 A lump blocked his throat.\u00c2\u00a0 His hands shook as he closed the half \u00e2\u20ac\u201c read dossier and began to cry.\u00c2\u00a0 He was lost.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 He stood up intending to rush to the washroom but dizziness assailed him.\u00c2\u00a0 He collapsed back into his chair.<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 He had been prepared to serve and protect the old order in any way.\u00c2\u00a0 Now it dawned on him that there was no way to save the old order. Hard reality could not be changed.\u00c2\u00a0 A new order would come the status quo would be dislodged and destroyed in its totality.\u00c2\u00a0 You either metamorphosed into the new order, or got destroyed with the old one.\u00c2\u00a0 Could he change?\u00c2\u00a0 Could he accept the inevitable? The Professor knew he had believed too deeply for too long in the status quo.\u00c2\u00a0 Apartheid was a part of him. He told himself that to change now would amount to self- betrayal of highest order.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes! You could win some battles, but no amount of arms, soldiers or politicking would win this war. The tides of history were indefatigable.\u00c2\u00a0 He accepted that change would come.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The Professor laughed loudly.\u00c2\u00a0 He understood.\u00c2\u00a0 But refused to be part of the change.\u00c2\u00a0 He chose to remain primitive in that aspect.\u00c2\u00a0 He was resolved.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything was so clear in his mind that he wondered why he had not thought of it before. He left the room.\u00c2\u00a0 To hell with orders that forbade leaving the building.<\/p>\n

These people were going to dismantle apartheid and they wanted him to be a party to the endorsement of the destruction.\u00c2\u00a0 It was abominable; sacrilegious!\u00c2\u00a0 Let history take its course.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 He had an inbuilt stubborn streak in him which refused to accept change.\u00c2\u00a0 He had to get to his office!\u00c2\u00a0 He walked to his car in the plaza.\u00c2\u00a0 No one challenged him.\u00c2\u00a0 The drive to his office was smooth.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Now the manuscript of the latest work Apartheid: The March into the Next Century lay nearly piled up in front of him.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a masterpiece.\u00c2\u00a0 His best work \u00e2\u20ac\u201c one, which he had intended to release on Independence Day.<\/p>\n

Now\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. The Professor laughed again.\u00c2\u00a0 Calmly and with the precision with which he was famed for doing everything, he shredded the manuscript, then took out the hand gun \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a 375 smith and Wesson automatic that he always kept in his desk drawer to protect himself from any possible Kaffir terrorist attack.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The Professor twitched and kicked in instinctive neural motor locomotion.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Two rivulets of dark crimson blood streamed down the document from the self-inflicted wound as his wasted life ebbed away.\u00c2\u00a0 His sphincter muscle eased.\u00c2\u00a0 He soiled himself and died.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pretoria Agenda (Excerpt) Richard Msechu Johannes Brensmick sat in room 45 and went halfway through the report.\u00c2\u00a0 He was a blue blooded Afrikaner, who had grown up within the system.\u00c2\u00a0 The system taught you to believe that you were superior because you were white; that the others were inferior because they were not white.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":96,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1204","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1204"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1207,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1204\/revisions\/1207"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/96"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}