African Warrior

By Roger Russell

Herman is born in a rainstorm in an African forest. His mother dies giving birth to him and he is handed over to local villagers by his father who wants nothing to do with him. Herman spends four traumatic years learning that he is white and different to his African playmates. He becomes violent and solitary. Finally his father recognises his responsibilities to Herman and arranges for him to learn to speak English and then sends him to a good school in England. He is naturally clever and he is ostracised by the more popular boys in the school. It is difficult but Herman is eventually is accepted by some of the other boys. Because he is very much a loner he spends a lot of time developing his strength and his body. He spends his holidays on the farm in Zambia where he finds acceptance by the wild and its animals. He sometimes meets his father there but otherwise the farm becomes his domain and he learns to be part of its natural environment. His father was trained as a soldier in a Special Forces unit known as 'The Chindits' and his talk of the way to deal with the enemy also contributes to Herman's single minded ability to take care of himself. The message is kill or be killed, the mindless pursuit of your opponent's destruction. Herman takes this terrible philosophy to heart and learns to give himself over to it when things go wrong for him. After his father's death Herman goes to America where he kills a man who attacks him. Later after a strange dream and much soul searching he meets Eteluwa who is a Native American Shaman. Eteluwa gives him seven rules to live by and Herman believes that he can possibly learn to control his nature. He returns to Africa and ends up in Cape Town where he finds satisfaction in building and designing boats. But his past catches up with him and two more people die. He runs away to sea on a cargo boat working around Asia, Africa and the Far East for many years. He makes a friend aboard the boat through boxing. His new friend, Reid, is a Scottish engineer who was a welterweight Navy Boxing Champion when younger. Reid helps him with his mission to learn to control himself through the boxing and he is reasonably successful. Eventually he meets the woman he loves and leaves both the sea and boxing to start a new life in Jakarta, where he plans to marry and have a small boat building business. Although he makes new friends and everything is working out for him, it is not to be…There are powerful forces at work behind the way the world is developing and it is possible that Herman and his dark ability will become a nuisance, a nuisance that must be removed. The story of Amen/Herman explores the existence of evil and asks questions of our inner demons; demons that seek the extermination of beings that are different or threaten our security and social norms. It asks us again, "Does the end justify the means?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roger Russell
• Release date: Jan 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310939877

Roger Russell

Born in 1947 in Eldoret, Kenya Roger attended school in Bournemouth, UK and St David's College in Johannesburg, SA. Roger Russell fell into a long drop toilet when he was three years old, out of a car when he was four. He went on to almost drown himself at six, cut through his left leg when he was seven and crush his right arm when he was nine. By the time he was eleven he had spent over a year in hospital and had been the recipient of many hundreds of stitches. He was banned from playing soccer or rugby and could not run to save his life. He started in the mines at nineteen and lost his finger in an accident before a month had passed. He joined the U/G Rescue team and was gassed, trapped and lost underground within the space of a single year. Roger married in 1968 and is the father of four children by his first wife, Sharon, to whom he was happily married for twenty five years before she died of cancer in 1993. He has since remarried and lives with Cynthia on a 30 foot motor cruiser in Hermitage Marina near St Ives in the UK. They have one child, a boy named Gordon after Roger's father. In 1993, after the death of his wife, Roger walked from Beit Bridge on the Northern border of South Africa to Cape Town, a distance of 2000km. He slept alongside the road and walked alone and un-armed through one of the worst political times the country had ever seen. He saw then and has continued to see immense power in common people. In 1999 he walked right around South Africa to support a much maligned South African Police Services. He was mugged by a squatter camp gang, attacked by a policeman in a remote station in the Transkei and swept away in a flash flood in the Orange Free State. He has seen police barracks that were worse than some prison cells, met and spoken with criminals, saints and politicians. The British media called him a South African hero and Steve Tshwete, the South African Minister of Safety and Security at the time said he was truly a South African patriot. Roger has also walked in America on two occasions, promoting South Africa and cancer awareness to the people of California, Nevada, New Mexico and other states. Roger has written several books all of which he plans to publish with Smashwords in time.

Book preview

THE MAKING

CHAPTER ONE

THE COMING OF AMEN

The beams of the headlights were reflected back from sheets of torrential rain making the road nearly invisible. What could be seen was hardly enough to ease the apprehension the driver felt as he forced the old Ford pickup forwards with all the urgency and speed he could risk. The woman beside him moaned desperately, deep in the oncoming pains of labour. It was not supposed to happen right now. According to the doctor in Kitwe the baby was due in a couple of weeks’ time. But she had been packed and ready to go, ready to wait the final week with a friend in town, closer to the clinic. Earlier when she had moved forward uncomfortably on the couch and he had seen her waters flow, staining her skirt and the seat beneath her, he had known it was now. He had thrown everything she had readied into a suitcase and the suitcase under the canopy at the back of the truck. Then he had gone back to the big tent that served as a home and assisted her through the rain across the muddy stretch of ground to the front cab. It was a mistake; she had been soaked in seconds but there was nothing he could do about it. On reflection he turned and went back to fetch a blanket and a piece of canvas. Wrapping the blanket in the canvas to keep it dry he opened her door again and pushed the blanket from under the canvas into the cab and over her. He picked up the canvas and, as he ran around to the driver’s side, threw it on top of her suitcase in the back of the truck. They had left the farm with the rain sheeting down and the pickup bucking and tossing as it hurtled down the rough track.

The rainy season in in the middle of Africa was known for the huge cascades of water that descended unheralded from the heavens on a regular basis, but this was exceptional, even for Africa. No one with any sense at all would be trying to drive in this but he had no choice. It was either this or chance the unknown territory of delivering the baby himself. He did not want to face that particular challenge. The man hunched over the steering wheel of the pickup was used to poor and almost impassable roads even in wet weather when vast pools of water would suddenly appear in front of you obliterating the sight of any road at all; lakes of brown with sharp peaks rising across the entire surface, thrown up by the huge falling drops striking it with malicious intensity.

But this road was almost all invisible, the trees and grasses on the banks which bordered it, all he had to guide him. He saw the huge pool of water too late and even if he had braked there was little purchase for the tires on the surface under him. The pickup surfed into the middle of the pool, water spraying up in two sheets to the sides. The lights shone like two weak beams from under the surface of the water for a brief flicker and then died with the engine and everything else. The shock of the stop had thrown the woman against the dashboard and her moans became sharper and louder. He tried the starter but the entire system was dead, shorted out by the water that covered the grill and reached the level of the door sills at the cab. She put her hand onto his arm to stop him. It’s coming. She said and tried to hold back the demands to push that her body was giving her.

No, wait, he said desperately, don’t do this to me. I don’t know what to do.

Yes you do. She replied grim faced. Get me into the back of the car.

He climbed out into the knee deep water and went round to her side. Then he stopped and went back, around to the load bed. He crawled into it and started throwing tools and boxes left and right, creating a space. He found a torch amongst the tools and put it in a reachable position. He spread the canvas he had thrown in there earlier across the floor and covered it with baby blankets and soft woolly things from the suitcase she had prepared to make the new arrival pretty; to show off after it was born. There would be no showing off if he did not succeed here, only recriminations and maybe an escalating of the split that was already a part of his relationship with her.

When he was satisfied he went to fetch her. Unable to carry her he had to assist her to wade through the water and around the side of the vehicle. The bottom, under their feet was slimy and soft, their feet sunk deeply into it and within moments he had lost a shoe. Even though the storm filled the surroundings with malice he could see little of it. The rain and the darkness enveloped his world in black, a black that contained a promise of trouble; a harbinger of unavoidable doom waiting for him in the next few minutes.

The rain drove down upon them, almost intentional in its efforts to stop them. When they were at the back she turned and sat on the tailgate and with his help she turned and crawled back along the load bed until he told her she could lie back. She was panting as he crawled in beside her. With the light of the torch he helped her get into as close to a natural position has he could, using the spare wheel as a backrest and positioning her feet onto the boxes and other junk he had thrown to the sides of the load bed. He knelt in front of her, closing his eyes for a brief moment and asking for whatever knowledge he had to stand by him now.

He had had a restless and violent life, born in India with a twin brother to a British woman who had deserted her English husband for a petty Raj soon after their birth. The Raj had a very small kingdom but an immense amount of money. The raj was not particularly interested in the boys so he and his brother had spent most of their lives in expensive but not necessarily well chosen schools far away in the United Kingdom. They had fought and partied across England, Scotland and Wales but finally come out as educated and ready for whatever life might bring. Neither of them expected the war and it was very different to their past. The discipline was inflexible and for the first time the two of them had been split up and lost in a world for which they were not prepared. Arthur found himself in West Africa training as a guerrilla for the Burmese jungle and his brother had gone to the regular army, still not found to this day; apparently missing in action somewhere in Italy and assumed dead. The Special Forces training in West Africa had been brutal and he came out of it able to kill a man in several different ways with whatever came to hand or even without. After the war he had tried to go back to a normal life. Without his brother and changed by his time in the jungle dealing out death to villagers, innocents and sometimes even the Japanese invaders he could not settle into relationships with fellow workers, pub patrons or women. He joined the Foreign Legion drawn by romantic stories of elite soldiers and travel. It was brutal and unforgiving. His fellows were all hardened scum of the earth; weak scum soon disappeared into desertions and dishonourable discharges. Some also left in boxes but if you were not hard, you left; one way or another. None of this had prepared him for what he now faced. As normal as it was supposed to be, the birth of a child was something he had believed reserved for midwives and doctors. His contact with women aside from her and sexual conquest of the most commercial kind had been limited. He looked at her and caught a moment of quiet on her face as she waited for the next contraction. He saw grim determination there and doubt. Determination to do what had to be done and doubt in his commitment to helping her. It was not justified, despite everything he loved her and whatever held for softness in his heart went out to her. He would not, could not let her down.

What followed was long and difficult: she battled with the pain and with the size of the baby. He soothed and stroked, but was, as he had expected, unable to do anything positive in relieving her pain or aiding the expulsion of the child. Finally the head was there as he believed it should be and he relayed the correctness of this to her. With a cry of both stress and relief she made a final push and the child slipped from her onto the baby clothing under her. With the aid of the torch he looked at what was before him. It was still and lifeless, covered in blood and grotesquely wrinkled. The umbilical cord still connected. The sharp and sudden cry of life shocked him and he saw the child’s face contort with anger as if protesting the need for its untimely presence in the outside world.

She lay back but reached for him. You must cut it. she said. The cord, it has to be cut. My bag, in the front, there is a pair of scissors.

He climbed back out of the pickup. The rain fell unabated as he went around, found the scissors and returned. Somehow it seemed impossibly wrong to cut this piece of life that connected the two of them. But her insistent urging drove him on and he did it, first tying the ends off with some cord he found in the toolbox.

Somehow there seemed to be too much blood and it was not stopping. It was not coming from the baby, which had somehow started to breathe. He wrapped it in one of the baby blankets from the floor and gave it to her. Her face was drawn and white and she pushed the child away. She was breathing with difficulty, shallow and irregular. The blood was everywhere, spreading out from under her like a pool of dark oil. The torch flickered and went out. He was totally lost and did not have anywhere to go. It was dark, the child was screaming and everything was wet. She would go quiet and then after what seemed a terrible wait suddenly suck in breath, almost silently but her body shuddering.

He saw to the baby as best he could. Cleaning the birth residue from it by feel and finding dry wrappings. Then he sat with her, not knowing what to do next. Twice he got out of the vehicle and stood in the water looking up and down the road into the rain. Nothing was there but still he looked. The baby seemed to be alright but he knew that he could not leave it with her and walk for help, it would be at least five or six hours before he could get back. He could also not take it with him; the child would not survive in the pouring rain. At the moment the baby was reasonably safe and they were both dry, but she was dying and there was nothing he could do about it. He had no time, no skill or knowledge that could ease the situation. Finally he lay down beside her and drew her into his arms with the child between them. She smiled as if peace had found her and taken charge, she looked at him before closing her eyes. Eventually he too fell asleep.

He woke up sometime later and she was looking at him again with one hand on the baby. Her eyes were piercing, intense, Promise me! she said, promise me you will take care of him. You owe me that Arthur.

Of course, angel, of course I will.

No Arthur, don’t run away from this one. You stand by him and give him a chance. Promise me that you will. Her hand left the baby and clutched at his face drawing blood from his check. Say it, say it again. Say you will take proper care of him. Her eyes almost glowed with the intensity of her need for him to commit.

He knew that she would not accept anything short of the truth. He loved her and had no intention of letting her die without the firm knowledge that the boy would get the best he could give. He took her hand gently in his and held it. Angel, believe me, I mean it with all my heart; I will take care of him for you. You have my word.

She lay back and closed her eyes.

He lay awake for some time. He felt useless and insignificant but closed his mind to the reality of all that had happened. He looked across the child at her. She seemed quiet but was pale and cold. When he woke again the sun was shining in the side window of the canopy. The baby was crying, wet and miserable. She had gone. There was nothing there, her hand lay on the child but was unable to give it anything. There was nothing to give.

It was a long walk back to the farm. Carrying the child made it difficult. After a few strides he kicked off the other shoe to even out his stepping. Soon the stones were cutting into the soft soles of his feet and he tried to find smoother surfaces to walk along than the stony centre of the road. Off centre the road was muddy and slippery and because of his fatigue he stumbled often. The storm was gone as if it had never been; the only sign of its passing was the steam that rose from the wet road, sucked out of the pools by the already fierce morning sun. He was worried about her body lying in the hotbox the back of the pickup would become. Occasionally he was passed by locals on their way to the timber depot, a treatment plant with a few shops and a football field some 6 or 7km in the other direction. It had a small police post that would be manned now so he asked them to tell the police there was a dead person in his car and that they should come out to the farm and see him. He did not feel he could face anybody for a little while and he wanted to get the child to someone who could care for him. There were several families living in the mud and wattle homes on the farm; men and their wives who worked for him. They all seemed to have lots of children and one of the women would know what to do.

Instead of going to the tent he turned off the driveway and went up to the small collection of workers’ huts near the river and into the clear beaten earth arena in the middle of them. Several women and a lot of children were sitting around a small smouldering fire talking whilst something cooked in a dirty black pot. The men must have been somewhere on the farm. He stood there and a hush fell over the group. Some of the younger children ran behind the women and watched him from over and around their shoulders, clutching at the clothes of the women as if the contact would somehow keep the white boss away. They stared at him wide eyed. It annoyed him, he and Margret had lived here for nearly three years and seen most of them grow up. The baby had started to cry.

He was abrupt. Christina come to the house, I need your help.

In the huge tent that had served as their home he laid the child on a couch in the lounge area and left it screaming until Christina came. She went directly to the couch and picked the baby up. Looking at it, she asked, Where is the Madame?

He sat down at the table and put his head in his hands. The Madame is dead; she is in the car on the road. The baby was born in the back of the car in the storm and you will have to help me… I know nothing of babies, what food to give it, what to do with it to stop it screaming. I want you to take it. Find someone with milk or something and just do whatever you have to. He got up and made some coffee whilst he watched her strip the child of its dirty coverings, wipe it down with a face cloth and then wrap it up in a clean towel. It did not stop screaming.

She turned to him with the baby held close, He needs milk; Patience has a new baby and plenty of milk. I will take him now. She smiled down at the child, jigging it up and down. What is his name?

Herman. He stated.

Amen. She repeated.

He nodded. These people seemed to be good with children; all of the farm kids were healthy enough. On the farm they were miles from anywhere. This was not a place where the whims of the spoilt whites and their soft kids were catered for. The kind of care available was what the rural Africans provided for themselves, if it was good enough for the kids on the farm it would be good enough for Herman. Herman, that’s the name she had wanted so that was the name the child would get.

Christina had other ideas. She had heard Amen and Amen was what she called him when she gave him to Patience. Amen was what the people called him. As the child grew older, although he was registered as Herman and went to school as Herman, Amen touched his awareness of himself and gathered him in when he heard it said.

CHAPTER TWO

THE FORMING

Patience was young, attractive and had recently given birth to a son. She was well equipped physically to feed little Amen but frightened by the strange development. She took him reluctantly and put the hungry mouth to her nipple. Amen had no problem with the colour of her breast or anything else and sucked desperately. Within minutes she had taken him to her heart and was crooning to him as he fed. But when she was called to the tent and the foreman came to fetch her she was violently against going. The responsibility of raising the white child was too much and she was not happy to face the white power to which she would have to answer. She only agreed to go when Christina said she would go with her .

He stood and came to her, then looked at the child, opening the coverings to inspect its state. He turned quickly away and she knew that he was deeply disturbed.

Keep it with you, he said. Come here. He took her to the back of the tent to a small section partitioned off from the rest. He pointed; there was a cot, shelves with baby clothes and bedding. Take it! Take it all, you can use it for him and your own baby. She gave the baby to Christina and ran forward excitedly, picking up blankets and clothes as if they would mysteriously disappear before they could be claimed. When she backed out of the tent with the short little bow they all used to show respect, he called after her, Take the cot, take it all.

Patience sent her husband and a friend for the cot but it was not used. It did not fit into their lifestyle or into the small single room in which they all slept. It ended up behind the hut holding a few boxes containing some onions and other assorted dry vegetables. Amen slept on a blanket on the floor with his nursing buddy and two other children. Next to them slept Patience and Jackson, her husband. In the day he lay on a thin cloth outside in the sun. The eldest child in the group was a young girl of about ten years called Dorian. Already taking on the behaviours of a young mother; she taught him to walk and talk. Arthur was too busy. He was more often than not in another country, on another job or just somehow, somewhere else.

Because the mother, Patience, carried the family baby, Dorian carried Amen. She could often be seen, her hips cocked over to take his weight with Amen clutched to her side, walking determinedly behind as Patience went about her work on the farm. In time Amen was toddling everywhere behind her unaware of the differences between himself and the people that surrounded him. He came to learn of these as he grew older and then found out from the other children that he belonged to the white man that lived in the big tent. He did not belong with them, he came to know it and they had always known it. When they teased him or hurt him, his knowledge of this difference heightened the effect it had on him and he soon learned to hate all of them. If he was not with Dorian he played by himself. Before he was three years old he had learned to defend himself by releasing a virulent anger that had him clawing with crooked fingers at faces, arms and everything in range. It became a sport for the children to run in, slap him and then run away laughing while he gritted his teeth, pulled his lips back and rushed at them, hissing and spitting. It was a sport as long as he did not catch anybody. If he did then blood flowed; his rage only stopping when Dorian or one of the adults intervened; grabbing him and holding him until he calmed.

Things changed dramatically for him a year later. Arthur’s mother in India had outlived her Raj and inherited a large sum of money which she now in her own death passed onto to Arthur. Arthur had not ever been possessed of a great deal of his own money but had over time created a niche for himself and milked it. The farm and Margret had become part of it. His business since going to live in Zambia had been developed from his interest in mining which had led him to spares and equipment. His speciality was installing procurement and store inventory systems. Through this field he had met Margret, settled and become happy. They had married and bought the farm. The dream had been to build it up and raise a family on it. Herman had put a stop to that. Arthur had been a rootless and disturbed person before; Herman had made him one again. Since the night she died he had not returned very often to the farm nor had he ever stayed for long. He always accepted contracts far from the farm, even from Zambia sometimes. The week he learned of his mother’s death and the vast fortune she had provided for him he returned to Zambia and the tent. His mother’s death had changed much. It had restored a sense of future to him. Driving on the dirt track to get back he stopped at the place where Margret had died and sat there letting it all come back to him.

…I mean it with all my heart; I will take care of him for you. You have my word.

He remembered with a cold sense of failure the sincerity he had put into those words. His heart wrenched with the thought that those few short years he had been happy had ended so irrevocably. The realisation that he had not made good on the promise to Margret and the commitment to his almost forgotten son shamed him. It was too late to be a doting father but now he could perhaps afford to provide a reasonable life to the boy. Some of the money belonged to the boy; through Margret and his promise to her the boy was entitled to some of it.

He sent Shadrach, the foreman, for Christine. Bring the boy with her. He instructed him. He had seen Herman before but not taken too much notice. He had found it hard to look at him too closely and more comfortable to note that he seemed strong and healthy enough and then move on. This was different; the boy was going have to go to school to learn to be an Englishman. Obviously some preparation was necessary. He needed to assess how difficult this was going to be. Arthur did not for one moment consider how the change would impact on the boy. It was for the boy’s own good and it was for the promise he had made, to appease his conscience.

He was sitting in the wooden deck chair on the veranda of the tent when Christine arrived, curtsied and knelt down in front of him. Behind her was the foreman, Patience and a little girl of about twelve years old. The girl was holding Herman on her hip looking at him boldly as if daring him to take the boy from her. He could not believe what he was seeing; Herman was dirty with dust and grime that must have been accumulated over days if not weeks, His hair was long and black, matted and unruly. There was a mucus trail from his nostrils on both sides running down to his upper lip. He was potbellied and clothed in khaki shorts that were too long and covered his knees, topped by a dirty red T-shirt torn off around his tummy. He was four years old.

Hello Herman, Arthur said. The boy gazed blankly at him.

No English. Shadrach interjected and said something to the boy in Bemba, the local language. The boy stuck his fingers in his mouth and looked down at the floor. Shadrach repeated some of what he had said in a sharper tone.

Arthur interrupted, motioning to him to be quiet. Christine I want you to clean him up, give him a bath for god’s sake and wipe his bloody nose. He took out some money and gave it to her. Send someone to the depot and buy some new clothes for him. Dress him and bring him here tonight. He is going to move back into the house with me. The little girl shook her head, biting her lip and holding the boy tightly, she moved away a few feet. Then she turned and ran; Herman bouncing up and down on her hip. Herman put his arms up in the air and shrieked with laughter but the tears were running down Dorian’s cheeks.

Later at about midnight Arthur went to the hut where Patience and Jackson were sleeping. Jackson, Jackson, wake up.

Jackson came to