The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Had Shaka died before his mother, he would be remembered in history only as another inspired leader who, in accordance with the harsh customs of his time, had brought discipline to an unruly region; his accomplishments would have been respected. But he died after his mother, and the savage excesses of his Dark Time, plus the heroic manner of his death, elevated him beyond mere remembrance and into the realm of legend.

  In the most remote corners of southern Africa huddling blacks would dream of the day when mighty Shaka would return to lead them into their heritage. His military prowess was magnified; his prudence as a ruler exalted. Out of his personal tragedy Shaka offered his people a vision.

  At Vrijmeer, well north of Zulu power and safely south of Mzilikazi’s burgeoning kingdom, Nxumalo, of the few men who had known both kings intimately, came to realize as he grew older that the really glorious time of his life had been when he led Shaka’s iziCwe into battle in its new formation of body-arms-head. Then he and his men, held in vital reserve with their backs to the fray, waited for the imperial command to storm forth. ‘What a moment!’ he told his children as they sat beside the lake, watching the animals come down to drink. ‘Spears flying, men hissing as they killed the enemy, consternation, turmoil, then the calm voice of Shaka: “Nxumalo, support the left flank.” That’s all he said. And with a cry we leaped to our feet, turned to face the battle, and sped like springboks to destroy the enemy.’

  The children were ordered to forget the rest: Shaka’s murder of their mothers; the savagery of the Dark Time; the terrible denouement when assassins stalked the king in order to save the nation.

  ‘The thing to remember,’ Nxumalo said one evening in 1841, when he had white hair and his children were older, ‘is that Shaka was the noblest man who ever lived. The wisest. The kindest. And never forget, Mbengu. Carry yourself tall, because Shaka himself was once married to your mother Thandi.’

  When the children asked why, if he loved Shaka, he had not returned to Zululand, he explained: ‘You’ve heard the old rumors. Dingane murdering his own brother Mhlangana, who had helped him gain the throne. If we had gone back, Dingane would have murdered us, all of us. He was always treacherous.’

  He preferred nobler thoughts: ‘When our nation falls into trouble, Shaka will return to save us, and we’ll shout “Bayete!” and if you are men and women of character, you’ll respond and Zululand will throb with marching feet, for he will always be our great leader.’

  ‘But didn’t you kill him?’ a grandson asked.

  There are some questions that cannot be answered intelligently, and Nxumalo did not try.

  In 1828 Tjaart van Doorn was about as happy as a man could be. His farm at De Kraal was flourishing. His second wife, Jakoba, had begun to soften her harsh ways. And his daughter Minna was as pleasing a child as a father could have in his middle years. He was thirty-nine, stout, stocky, with a full black beard that started near his ears, covered his cheeks and chin, but left his upper lip clear. He wore heavy clothes: short jacket, calfskin vest, tieless shirt and stiff pants made of moleskin, with a huge flap that came across his middle and buttoned at his right hip. The pants were held up by a wide belt and stout suspenders, but the characteristic that identified him immediately, wherever he stood, was a low-crowned hat, with a very wide, sloping brim, whose underside was bright blue.

  Since he was a man of few words most of the time, having been overawed by his volcanic father Lodevicus, he gave the impression of a gruff, grumpy man with a firm-set countenance. He did not, however, seem a large man; there were many in his district who were taller, but few were more sturdy.

  He had a right to take pride in his farm; from the fine start his father had given, he had augmented De Kraal in all respects. The basic holding was still that splendid valley set within protecting hills, with the copious stream running from the southwest right through the middle of the land to an opening at the northeast, from which it wandered on to make junction with the Great Fish River some miles farther on.

  What Tjaart had done was to acquire from the government the right to use pasturage beyond the hills, and with the proceeds from his large herds, add to the clay-and-stone buildings that formed the heart of the farm. The house now had a spacious kitchen in which Jakoba could supervise the cooking; the servants and slaves occupied a chain of eight small huts linked together; calves had kraals with stone walls; and hay was stored in a spacious barn. Smaller buildings had proliferated for the safe holding of farm tools, feed and chicken roosts.

  The farm contained the original nine thousand acres within the hills, but it now controlled an additional sixteen thousand acres to which he did not have legal title, but which his Coloured stockmen could use in herding cattle and flocks of sheep. Although he rarely saw much formal money, he had made himself into a man of considerable wealth and could look forward to a prosperous and placid old age.

  Of course, most Boers grumbled about the English administration, its creeping modifications of law and custom, but such complaints were offset by the fact that the stalwart English settlers were now sharing the dangers of frontier life. The struggle had been harsh, as one Englishman noted in his diary:

  My wheat, two months ago the most promising I ever saw, is now cut down and in heaps for burning. The rust has utterly destroyed it. My barley, because of a grub which attacks the blade and the drought, produced little more than I sowed. All my other crops have practically been destroyed by the caterpillar and lice. My cows are dry from want of grass. Twenty of my flock of twenty-seven sheep were killed in a single night by a pack of wild dogs. My little girl has been bitten by a snake. I stood for a moment thinking of my misery, of my dying child, of my blasted crops, of my ruined flocks. God’s will be done! I have need of fortitude to bear up against such accumulated misery.

  And always there were the blacks invading the lands of Boer and Englishman alike. Tjaart, veldkornet of his district, had frequently taken his men to Grahamstown to help those settlers repel cattle raiders, and in many actions, had fought beside Richard Saltwood, ivory merchant, and Thomas Carleton, master wagon builder. He had found them an honorable pair and had invited them to hunting parties at De Kraal. Saltwood had proved himself not only a fine shot but a congenial guest who lacked all the mannerisms that irritated the Boers. He had even told Tjaart on departing at the end of the last hunt, ‘This must be the best farm I’ve ever seen,’ and with that he handed Mevrouw Jakoba two bottles of Trianon wine he had been hoarding.

  And then the camaraderie was endangered. Lukas de Groot, Tjaart’s neighbor nineteen miles to the north, stopped by one day on his way home from the port of that wild stretch of coast at which the English settlers had come ashore, and shocked Tjaart by showing him a copy of the Grahamstown newspaper: Dr. Simon Keer, the philanthropic leader in London, had published his second book, called The Infamy of the Dutch Slaveholder, and its appearance was guaranteed to cause trouble, for it was a savage assault against South African life and a shameless emotional appeal to the English Parliament to pass laws which Keer had long been advocating.

  Keer’s pressure came at a time when agitation for abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire was gaining momentum; it signaled the beginning of the final battle to demolish what many Boers considered their God-granted right: that all men of color should labor for them six days a week and sometimes seven, whether slave or free.

  Keer’s grand strategy of waging this war with propaganda in England had thus triumphed over Hilary Saltwood’s tactic of cherishing and saving souls on the spot. The inspired lecturer with his flaming oratory had vanquished the modest missionary who had actually married one of his charges to prove that he loved them all. What Keer said in his new book was this:

  The oppression of free persons of color under the yoke of their Boer masters makes the idea of English fairness and justice a mockery. From birth till death the suffering native is held in bondage through a system of apprenticeship of his children born on Boer farms and through a contract
that binds him and his family to Boer servitude. He is unable to move freely about the land, he is unequal in the eyes of the law, he is without protection from the scourge of Boer tyranny.

  Was there any truth in these charges? Some. Was there gross exaggeration? A great deal. But from the indictment came a law which radically altered life on the frontier. ‘Look what Keer and his fellow saints have done to us!’ De Groot raged as he showed Tjaart the new provisions. ‘It makes the Coloureds, the Hottentots, the Bushmen the exact equal to us Boers. They have all the rights we have. No further apprenticeship of the young. No work contracts. They don’t have to have fixed abodes. Magistrates can no longer whip them as won’t-works. From now on, damnit, Van Doorn, a man of color has all the rights I have.’

  ‘That’s terribly wrong!’ Jakoba interrupted as the men talked. ‘That’s not what God intended at all.’

  What Reverend Keer intended was a softening of the harsh laws that restricted servants; what he got was a disastrous dislocation; and the immediate burden fell on Lukas and Rachel de Groot, for when their herders and farm hands got word of their new status, twenty of thirty-six laborers took off, and it was a group of these homeless, roaming vagrants who ravaged their daughter.

  To the big Boer she was Bloometjie, ‘Little Flower,’ a fragile girl of fourteen who spent most of her time among the trees and blooms of the veld. The three men found her beside a small stream, humming softly. She did not get home for the midday meal, and when she still wasn’t back by late afternoon, De Groot went looking for her—and found a wild, deranged creature dragging herself across a mealie field.

  He left the child with Rachel, said not a word and asked no one to accompany him as he rode out at dusk. Two of the guilty men had fled and would never again be seen in that district, but the third lay drunk in one of the deserted huts on De Groot’s farm—and when the Boer discovered him, he pulled the man into the open, and for a moment stood over him.

  ‘Get up, you devil!’ he said grimly, and the man stood, swaying unsteadily, looking dazedly at his baas. With a wild cry of anguish, De Groot brought his gun up, and then the man realized what was happening, but as he backed away, a bullet slammed into his chest. He fell to the ground, not quite dead, and as he lay there De Groot pumped bullets into him, again and again.

  As veldkornet, it was Tjaart’s duty to report on the incident, and he duly swore that the vagrant had been shot while attempting to flee after having stolen mealies. The case was closed, but the wound in De Groot’s heart remained open.

  The season passed and no one said much about Blommetjie; they trusted that one day soon she would be able to move about the veld again. There was no improvement, either, in the labor situation, and increasingly Tjaart and his sons had to go out with the herds, much like the Van Doorns of four generations ago. And then, on a certain day in October when spring flowers made the veld a garden, Tjaart said at table, ‘We shall go to the next Nachtmaal.’

  The news created wild happiness among the women: Jakoba would be able to see friends she had not talked with for two long years; the slave women who would go along to do the cooking would enjoy the chance to meet with other slaves and to cook dishes they preferred; and little Minna, now thirteen and already worrying about how she would find a husband in this great emptiness, conjured up visions of a bright lad named Ryk Naudé, whom she had last seen at the Nachtmaal: ‘May I have a new dress, Mama? I mustn’t go in my old one.’

  So the slave women, who cherished the girl, set about the pleasant task of fitting her out for a dress which would compare favorably with the fashions in Grahamstown: turned-down collar, wide sleeves fastened at the wrists, flounces around the lower part of the skirt, and a general sauciness to catch the eyes of young men. As they worked, Tjaart saw how much joy his daughter was deriving from the process. She was not a beautiful child, no one had ever claimed that, but she was a fine stout lass, strong in body and character. The fact that she was illiterate did not mean that she was stupid, for she could recite long passages from the Bible. There was little in the repertory of a good Boer vrouw that she could not do, and whereas in the western part of the colony girls her age often had two or three slaves of their own and never raised a finger except in rebuke, Minna was an industrious young woman, adept at anything from making soap and candles to spinning her father’s wool into strong thread.

  By rumor she had learned that several of the girls she had met at the last Nachtmaal were already married at ages fourteen and fifteen, and two were mothers, so it was understandable that she should become apprehensive about her prospects. She had only one, really, the Naudé boy from a farm far to the northeast, and she began to worry each night when the family went to bed that the Naudés might not be attending this Nachtmaal, and one night when Tjaart could not sleep he heard her whimpering and strode over to her room: ‘What’s the worry, Minnatjie?’

  ‘I dreamed it was already Nachtmaal and Ryk Naudé didn’t come.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, little lady. Lukas de Groot assured me he’d tell Ryk.’

  ‘Oh, Father!’ That her father had anticipated her concern without her voicing it was most unexpected and it pleased her greatly. Grasping his hand in the darkness, she brought it to her lips and kissed it. ‘Such a Nachtmaal we’ll have! And I with a new dress.’

  Touched by her childish gratitude, he bent down and kissed her twice. ‘Did you think Mama and I would forget the necessary things?’

  The next days were marked with butchering and the first steps in making an abundance of biltong for the trip to Graaff-Reinet, ninety-two miles to the northwest. Tjaart owned three transport wagons, long flat-bedded affairs, and he kept them in fine condition for journeys to market, but the family wagon was a rickety bone-shaker. As it was being washed down and greased, Tjaart instructed the servants as to how they must mind the farm during his absence and care for his mother, Ouma Wilhelmina, who would remain behind.

  When all was ready, an English settler came posting in with disturbing news: a band of Xhosa had broken across the Fish and were committing depredations. The messenger said that Lukas de Groot was collecting Boers to the north and would meet Tjaart halfway to form a substantial commando for assistance to Grahamstown.

  Without hesitating, Tjaart saddled up, called for four of his Coloureds to join him, and galloped east. Counting the massive battle of 1819, when he had helped save Grahamstown, this was the sixth time he had joined with fellow Boers to quell a border disturbance.

  There were two reasons for their being so willing to help defend the English. As sensible men, they knew that in protecting the forward English farms they were protecting their own. But also, there was the acknowledgment that deplorable English mistakes, such as Slagter’s Nek and the recent turning of Coloured servants loose to become vagrants and banditti, were the acts of English officialdom and the philanthropicals and not those of Englishmen on the frontier. Indeed, the settlers in Grahamstown suffered as much from these laws as did the Boers, which is why they cheered whenever the Boer commandos reported. There was harmony of interests.

  The Stevens Affair of 1832 was a brief, fierce clash, and as unfortunate an incident as could have been devised. On a small farm six miles west of the Great Fish, there was an outcropping of red-paint earth with such a powerful impregnation of pyritic elements that it glowed handsomely when dried on a black man’s skin. For generations untold the Xhosa had come to this spot to collect the clay treasured by circumcision boys and warriors, and the fact that a family from rural England had crossed the ocean to establish Stevens Farm did not diminish their desire—one might say spiritual need—to scrape up the earth and carry it back across the Great Fish.

  Usually the expeditions were silent affairs, a few warriors braving considerable dangers to penetrate what had become English property and sneaking away without having done the white men harm. But in the spring of 1832 careless Xhosa, some drunk on Kaffir beer, had gone to the Stevens farm to collect not only red earth but also quite
a few white sheep. A scuffle had ensued, with dead bodies, and now the Xhosa must be punished.

  ‘What we’ll do,’ Major Saltwood of the Grahamstown Irregulars proposed as the men assembled, ‘is ride east, cross the river at Trompetter’s Drift, and take them in the rear.’

  But the local Xhosa who rallied to the defense of the raiders were a battle-hardened group, a hundred veterans of many skirmishes with the English and Boers, and were not likely to be surprised by any flanking action. So when Saltwood led the men forward at a gallop, Xhosa warriors in ambush peppered them with spears and bullets from the few guns they had been able to beg, trade or capture.

  That was the first skirmish, with the white men losing. The second was inconclusive, but the third was quite a different affair. Major Saltwood, Tjaart van Doorn and Lukas de Groot concocted a plan that would smash the Xhosa from three sides, and everything worked to perfection except that a hiding spearman stabbed Thomas Carleton deeply in the left thigh, dragged him from his horse, and was about to kill him when Van Doorn saw the danger, wheeled in midflight and roared back to brain the black with his rifle butt. It was a near thing, and when Carleton realized that he was saved, and that the wound in his leg was much bigger than he could tend, he quietly fainted in Van Doorn’s arms, and the two men stayed on the ground till Saltwood and some others doubled back to find them.

  When they returned to Grahamstown—victors, but with serious losses—Carleton was so effusive in his praise of Van Doorn’s heroism, and repeated it so often, that Richard Saltwood told his wife, Julie, with some asperity, ‘You’d think he’d let it rest.’ Then he added, with no malice, ‘But of course, poor Carleton’s not a gentleman. He hasn’t had the training.’