“Tell me about him, then.”
“His name is Cyril Kunene; he’s thirty-eight, a Xhosa. He graduated in viticulture thanks to a scholarship offered by an American university. He then entered the wine business and became a buyer. Today, his company handles much of the import of South African wines to the United States. That’s it, in short.”
“A strong C.V., no doubt,” Zoe says watching Georgina bring in quilts and coverlets after having aired them. “What’s his name again?”
“Cyril. Cyril Kunene.”
“From what I can infer Mr. Kunene knows viticulture as well as the marketing side of things?”
“Right after graduating he worked in wineries in California.”
“Is he already working for us?”
“Not yet. He’s a consultant at Mont Rochelle.”
“But they’re our competitors!”
“We’ve had a couple of secret meetings. He’d be willing to join us.”
Zoe looks André straight in the eye: “Yet, you’re not entirely convinced.”
“There’s something else.”
“What else?”
“He’s asking for a percentage of profits.”
“How much?”
“Twenty percent.”
“Would you agree?”
André lets the question linger in the air as she sips her tea.
“I feel we should accept,” he eventually says. “His presence would guarantee us greater exposure to the US market. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, lately. A black director might also attract media attention and have a positive effect, market-wise.”
“Are you telling me you’re buying his image?” It’s the first time she sees her brother in this light: a clever entrepreneur turned into a shrewd opportunist.
“Of course,” André replies, “he knows very well what he’s worth right now.”
“And how is he as a person? As much a schemer as you seem to be?”
Zoe notices André’s jaw tense slightly; then, bending his head to the side, he grins at her.
“I’m not that cynical, ousus. I like Cyril. He’s straightforward, intelligent and knowledgeable. I think it would be nice working with him. Willem and I have never really clicked. Lately, we seem to disagree pretty much about everything.”
“Did you tell him about Kunene?”
“Of course not.”
“He would see you as another renegade eager to melt into the new Rainbow Nation,” she says with a sneer.
“Miserable hensoppers,” André croaks mimicking Willem’s parlance. To this day, many Boers regard as cowards those who during the Anglo-Boer War accepted defeat and surrendered. As much as the bittereinders, those who resisted till the “bitter end” preferring death to dishonour, are commended for their heroism.
Zoe smiles at her brother, basking in their sarcastic camaraderie.
“The British didn’t manage to wipe us out, nor will the niggers,” she says, mimicking Willem herself. Then, after a pause, she adds: “He’s wrong. We’ll be gone ... and the sooner, the better.”
André looks at her, his tongue suddenly dry. She immediately regrets having spoken so plainly. Even more than her words, it’s the harshness in her voice that has struck him. She can see it in his eyes.
“You might have a point there,” he says. “We are destined to become a cumbersome minority. As you can see, I’ve taken note too. Either we reinvent ourselves, or we end up gathering dust in the cellar. Cyril might offer us that touch of exotic novelty required by changed circumstances.” He utters that word — exotic — letting sarcasm do its dirty job.
“You seem to have made up your mind,” Zoe says, not missing the fact that her brother already calls their future black partner by his first name.
“Nee, I haven’t. You have the final say. I trust your instincts. I’ll make sure you meet him before you leave.”
But she has already decided. It will be a “yes.” No doubt about it.
By suggesting a brilliant black man might join the family enterprise, André has involuntarily evoked from her past the ghost of Thabo Nyathi. A South African by origin, Thabo had moved to England thanks to a scholarship that allowed him to bypass the Bantu Education system, which prevented Blacks from attending white universities. After graduating with flying colours, in the mid-1980s he attended a special course in London where he met Zoe.
At the time, Professor Johan Kuyper was in the process of launching a new research unit at the Witwatersrand University and needed young, promising scholars. They both applied for a position there. The choice fell on her — a Du Plessis — and Piet de Vries, another thoroughbred Afrikaner. Thabo, the best among the candidates, didn’t make it. He accepted the verdict with composed dignity. She accepted the posting without venturing to say a word in his favour. They both knew Thabo would be precluded from any further career in the field of paleoanthropology, at least in South Africa.
At that time, not even academia, supposedly the patron of broad-mindedness, was ready to open its doors to Blacks. But even out there in the bigger world, Zoe asked herself then, conscious of this injustice: How many black paleoanthropologists were there? Did they exist? Did they have a voice? Did they publish books? Although the largest number of hominid fossils had been found in Africa, she was not aware of any paleoanthropological research team headed by a black. As in the golden age of safaris, the white bwana commanded and the black porter looked after the luggage.
She hasn’t heard from Thabo since then. But she has never forgiven herself for having kept quiet. The moral wrong has seeped into her, day after day, digging into her. To no one has she confessed her cowardice. For years she has felt this infamy burn inside her. She’s no better than other Whites who, being in the know, kept their mouths shut; who, at seeing a black kicked or whipped with the sjambok, have turned their head away. This sick feeling about herself has grown within her like a consuming cancer — it clogs the pores, deadens the heart. André too may be burning with the same shame. By opening the door to a black partner, he is perhaps trying to free his soul.
7
THE CURSE
“DO YOU MISS him?”
Her brother moves closer while she is leaning against the door frame, on the stoep, and begins massaging her neck and shoulders, stiffened by sleepless nights. Zoe lets her gaze wander over the estate vineyards, which shine motionless in the moon’s milky embrace. Since her arrival, André has never mentioned Dario and she is grateful for that. She answers in a whisper, more to herself than to him.
“Badly.”
It’s her next-to-last night at the Finistère. The idea of leaving this place frightens her. Another forty-eight hours and she’ll have to face life again.
“Stay,” André says, sensing her wavering.
Why? Just to keep on pretending nothing happened?
She lets silence answer for her as it gently descends on them and the night.
Later, alone in her room, she opens Charlotte’s diary again. She has already read the first half, in which her great-aunt, relying upon the oral accounts of the older members of her family, put together their family history and the founding of the Finistère. In her endeavour she tried to be as accurate as possible. Somehow, despite the roughness and the simple needs of pioneering life, Charlotte developed the sensitivity of a historian and poet. The chronicle begins with the arduous sixty-kilometre crossing via ox-wagon that brought Jean-Marc Du Plessis and his family from Cape Town to what was then called Olifants Hoek, the Elephants’ Corner.
The cartwheels of the Huguenots followed the same old path opened by generations of pachyderms across the mountainous interior and into a valley which, in the eyes of those early pioneers, looked like a gift from God: vast and lush, designed by the winding course of a great river, protected on both sides by a tall mountain ridge. Soon the settlement changed its name and became known as Franschhoek, the French Corner. The plot of land that the Company allocated to Jean-Marc Du Plessis ran from the foothills d
own into the valley until it reached the banks of the Berg River. It was south-facing, protected from the Atlantic winds and particularly well suited to receive the two hundred vines that our ancestor had transported, miraculously intact, across an ocean. Jean-Marc Du Plessis decided to build his homestead half-way down the slope, so as to dominate the vineyards below. Initially, he settled for a simple, rectangular one-storey structure with thatched roofs and white-washed walls. Only later would he and his sons add a second floor, the side wings, the elaborately ornate gable and the covered stoep, with its classical columns and benches covered in blue Delft tiles. The name, however, would remain unchanged. When he landed in the Cape, our ancestor thought he had reached the end of the world — the end of the civilized world, at least. No wonder he named the farm thinking of the Finistère, the extreme west of Brittany’s coastline where the Atlantic opens up in its disturbing immensity. Finistère, from the Latin finis terrae — our predikant told me once — that is, land’s end.
Zoe stops reading and lets her thoughts wander. The marine curve of the horizon has always inspired a desire for freedom and adventure: It’s the spirit of the open sea, its invitation to discover what lies beyond.
Many set sail from that Breton coast: pirates, adventurers, merchants, explorers. All, more or less, magnetically attracted by l’ailleur — the elsewhere. A French Calvinist on the run, Jean-Marc fled France and its Finistère only to find, on another Atlantic coast, a new Finistère. Those who leave, always return: if not to the same place, at least to the memory of it.
Zoe looks one more time out of the window into the darkness, chasing her thoughts. Then she resumes her reading.
Almost two centuries have gone by since our ancestor died longing for his French vineyards, and I have come to see things very differently. My roots are here, in this land. For Jean-Marc, his true Finistère, the land of the heart, lay in Brittany; for me, it is here, in this valley suspended at the remote tip of another continent. The British frown upon our wish to belong to Africa, but I am proud to call myself Afrikaner.
The journal is filled with such considerations. More than once Zoe marvels at the depth of reasoning of her ancestor — after all, she was just a humble, late nineteenth-century countrywoman. Yet, the scorched pages are there. She lingers a moment again, but when her eyes go back to her aunt’s writing, Zoe feels the blood pounding in her veins, her hands getting moist. She is reaching the entries that most trouble her.
Franschhoek, January 15, 1897
Today Aunt Adèle, grandfather’s sister, my great-aunt, told me something that, frankly, I can hardly believe. I have always considered her an easily impressionable woman. And bigoted too. However, today she has provided me with a different interpretation of her celibacy. “Dear Charlotte,” she said, “next month you will be eighteen and it’s about time you were made aware of the pitiful fate that unites us.” As an explanation to, I guess, my visibly shocked expression, she rushed to add: “You too, like me, are a first-born female of the Du Plessis family.” Still, I had no clue.
Before saying anything else, though, she made me swear not to tell a word of what she was about to reveal: it would ruin our family. I had never seen her so gravely concerned. Thus, I promised.
Her story-telling started with what her own aunt Desirée, the older sister of my great-grandfather, told her at her deathbed. She just added some bits and pieces when needed, to give me the whole picture. From what I gathered, towards the end of the eighteenth century some members of our family left the Finistère to go into the interior, following the caravans of the Trekboere headed to the North East. They had had enough of the restrictions imposed by the Company and wanted to break free. Among them was my great-great-grandfather Gustave, then twenty years old.
It was a long trek, treacherous and exhausting and Aunt Adèle was keen to provide all the details about it. Several times the Trekboere were forced to disassemble the wagons and transport them on their shoulders across the most challenging mountain passes. After months of trekking, they finally reached a fertile valley marked by the course of the Great Fish River. Gustave — in the meantime he had married Gretel, the caravan head’s daughter — and the other Boer families thought this was a good place to build their homesteads. “Little did they know,” Aunt Adèle said in commenting on this bit of the story. She then explained how the Xhosa, nomadic herders coming from the lands north of the Zambezi River, had also set their eyes on those prairies. In the beginning, both tribes managed to keep a safe distance from each other. But then frictions started to surface, until they turned into open clashes. Boer farmers attacked and were in turn attacked; often they were forced to barricade themselves in their homesteads, while the Xhosa raided their cattle. During one of these raids, Gretel, Gustave’s wife, was stabbed in the throat by a spear while she reloaded his gun.
Mad with rage and grief, Gustave and his commando attacked a Xhosa village slaughtering anyone in their path: old men, women, children. They were about to get away after having set fire to several mud huts when Gustave found his way barred by an old woman wearing a strange headdress. Here I think Aunt Adèle — or was it Aunt Desirée’s fault? — let her imagination run a bit too wild. She vividly described the old woman, covered in blood, how she met Gustave’s eyes as she raised and frantically waved a stick in her left hand, shouting something at him. It was the 23rd of October 1801. Back at the farm, Gustave asked his Khoikhoi slave Noma, who had witnessed the scene and knew the language of the Xhosa, what the old woman had yelled at him. The slave explained that the old woman was an amagqira, a diviner, and that he wouldn’t repeat her words: They contained a terrible curse. Gustave raised his sjambok and Noma had to give in. Here is his translation in Afrikaans: “White Man! From now on, the firstborn females in your family will see their men die before producing offspring. May you all be damned, forever!”
Gustave returned to the Finistère only many years later, and only then did he find out that the husband of his sister Desirée had drowned in the river when she was in the fourth month of her first pregnancy. Shock and grief had made her lose the baby. Troubled by that account, Gustave asked her the exact date and time of when the accident had happened. Desirée complied, slightly puzzled by that question. The date was the 23rd of October of the year 1801, late in the afternoon.
His sister never interrupted him when Gustave told her about his commando’s retaliation raid against the Xhosa village, the blood, the amagqira’s curse, the old woman’s eyes full of hatred and revenge. “I ruined your life,” he finally said. Two days later, he shot himself. Desirée never remarried.
“I too will die a lonely woman,” Aunt Adèle said. I tried to talk some sense into her. I thought it was madness and it probably showed on my face. How could she believe such a thing? No doubt, it was all very tragic, but it might have been a fatal coincidence. “At first, I couldn’t believe it either,” aunt said, on the verge of crying. “Perhaps if I tell you my own story as well, you’ ll understand.”
It was getting late, though; the candle was dying and she looked exhausted. So, she sent me to bed. I’ ll have to wait till tomorrow to hear her story.
Zoe puts out the light, following mentally the gesture that Aunt Charlotte would make to extinguish the candle before sliding under her quilt. She feels very close to her. Her diary entries are brimming with enthusiasm, love of life, youthful hopes; they reveal the first awkward attempts to challenge the strict social rules imposed by the faith of their fathers. Foolishly, perhaps, she feels for this late nineteenth-century girl, with long plaits coiled on either side of her head, meekly looking at her from the family photo album.
8
UNDER THE BIG OAK TREE
THE NEXT MORNING, as Zoe is having breakfast in Georgina’s kitchen, her brother storms in, takes a couple of koekies from her plate and rushes to pour himself a cup of coffee. There’s an unusual excitement in his eyes; for the first time since her arrival, he is trying to break through the desolate composure with
in which she has confined herself.
“Kom ousus, hurry up!” He gestures as if he wanted to drag her from her chair.
“Where to?”
“Cyril Kunene. He’s waiting for us under the big oak tree, by the river.”
She looks away, while André sips his coffee. She’s not in the mood to meet anyone — let alone Kunene. She’s not ready to leave the sheltered cocoon of her apathy; all she feels like doing is crawling back into her bedroom. Yet, she can’t let her brother down. In all these years, he has never asked for her help with the farm. She owes him.
André looks up from his cup and says, almost in a whisper: “Jolly’s already saddled.”
She keeps silent, still uncertain. André turns his back to refill his cup, lowering his head over the pot, as if in prayer. She watches the nape of his neck now laid bare, totally vulnerable.
In a flash, she springs from her chair and darts out of the kitchen, into the courtyard. Two horses are waiting there, as she has expected. Jolly, her mare, snorts when she recognizes her. Out of the corner of her eye, Zoe sees that André is already at her heels. How many times did they rehearse this same scene in their youth?
She finds herself grimacing as she quickly tightens the girth strap. Then she jumps on the horse’s back and rushes down the hill, along the passage that opens between the grapes. Her stirrups, she notices, are at the right length. She is holding Jolly, giving her little rein; but the mare knows that the moment they reach the bottom of the hill her mistress will let her loose. At that point, Zoe tightens her knees against Jolly’s sides and the horse breaks into a wild gallop. Zoe glances over her shoulder and sees André leaning over his steed, urging it faster. They’re down the valley, now, across the field leading to the oak tree. André is gaining ground. She feels her untrained leg muscles giving way and making her lose balance; she races the last few hundred metres clinging with one hand to the horse’s mane. It’s an undignified victory; most of all, it’s a victory that leaves a bitter aftertaste in her mouth.
The Afrikaner Page 5