The Manuscript

V

Moses in the Village of Heaven

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Chapter XII

Achievement of a Puritan

In Michener's draft, Detleef van Doorn first sees the squalor of Sophiatown going with Micah Nxumalo to take relief supplies to the Afrikaners during the Rand Rebellion. At the end of the rebellion, the family of Troxel, a poor white Afrikaner, returns to Vrymeer with Detleef and occupies the de Groot lands. In the 1930s, Micah's son, Moses Nxumalo, is living in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. Moses works as a house servant for the liberal-minded Saltwoods of New Sarum in a northern suburb of the city.

Moses gains much from attending meetings of African intellectuals similar to those that actually took place at the Bantu Men's Social Club in Eloff Street. Returning from one of the meetings, Moses is attacked and stabbed by a gang of tsotsi thugs. He survives and during his recuperation evaluates his experiences in the city, including his perception that the poverty and dispossession of Africans and the Afrikaner poor are similar. The contact with young African intellectuals makes Moses vow that if he has a son, he will enroll him at Fort Hare, then the only university college for Africans.

Jim ended the section there. I saw an opportunity to send Moses from Johannesburg to Hemelsdorp, the Village of Heaven, showing what life meant to the black people of Johannesburg twenty years before the advent of "grand apartheid." The story begins when Moses walks down Eloff Street and is stopped by the police.

Michener Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 111

ELU notations, preliminary edits)

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Uys Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 111

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Michener Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 132-133

ELU notations, preliminary edits

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Uys Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 132-133

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