by Andre Brink
‘It’s about this spaceman who comes down to earth and then takes Langenhoven and his family to the moon?’
‘That’s right. Can Miss imagine that? – he comes all the way from the planet Venus and he lands in the garden of an ordinary house in Oudtshoorn, right here in the Little Karoo. What makes it so special is that of all people he found Mr Langenhoven, who could write it all up so he could tell the whole world about it. I can’t wait to read it again.’
It takes him another fifteen minutes to wind up, all the while caressing the book like a cat on his lap. By this time the accumulated fatigue sits heavily on my eyes; and leaving him to his Langenhoven I drag myself up the stairs to my room. If Ouma has another tale to tell tonight I’d better catch some sleep.
11
‘THIS TIME WE must go further back,’ says Ouma Kristina.
‘Why don’t we start at the very beginning?’
‘And what do you think is the very beginning?’
‘The arrival of the first Müller at the Cape?’ I suggest, ‘Or the first Basson? Or the first Wepener?’ I’m aware of the provocation in my answer; my only aim is to get her going.
‘What have the Müllers got to do with it?’ she asks, irritated. ‘Let’s keep the men out of this. They came with verse and chapter. Our story is different, it doesn’t run in a straight line, as you should know by now. You and Anna come from Louisa, your mother; she from me. And I’ve already told you something about the ones who came before me.’
‘Rachel. Petronella Wepener. Wilhelmina – what was her surname?’
‘The surnames are of no importance. Those have all been added on, you can’t rely on them. Every time a man becomes a father he’s all too eager to get his surname into the picture. But how can he be sure that what he put in is the same as what comes out? We’re the only ones who can tell for certain, and sometimes we prefer to keep it secret. It’s us I’m talking about. The womenfolk. I told you it’s my testament. And now that I’m getting close to death this is all that really matters.’
‘How far back do you know the story?’
‘Far enough. In our family we’ve been fortunate in always having storytellers around. You have me, I had Petronella, she had Wilhelmina, and so on, far back, all the way to the one who had two names, Kamma and Maria. That makes nine of us all told, if I remember well.’
‘So Maria-Kamma was the first?’
‘Of course not. Aren’t you listening? No one knows where we began. We go back to the shadows. I think we’ve always been around. There are some old stories about a woman deep in the heart of Africa who came from a lake with a child on her back, driving a black cow before her. Or from a river, the snake-woman with the jewel on her forehead. Or from the sea. One day a small wave broke on the beach and left behind its foam and in the sun it turned into a woman. But that we don’t know for sure and I prefer to talk only about the things I know.’
‘This Maria you spoke about?’
‘It’s a useful beginning.’
‘Was she the same Maria you told me about years ago?’
‘The same.’
‘But in those days you never told me she was family! I thought it was just a story.’
‘You should have known better. Nothing is just a story.’
I need time to grasp what she has said; I’m beginning to catch a glimmer of why she felt this urge to bring me back to her. To foretell the past, the way prophets foretell the future.
‘That’s why you had to come home,’ she says as if she’s read my thoughts. ‘To know where you come from. To have something you can take with you. Perhaps to help you understand.’ Her crooked hand contracts into a small fist, then relaxes again.
‘How long ago did this Maria live, Ouma?’
‘How must I know? Does it matter? My memory doesn’t depend on dates and places. If you really must know, I’d say it was somewhere up along the West coast, but far away, where it reaches the desert, where earth and sky meet. And long ago. In the time the first colonists began to travel up that way to barter and hunt and kill and lay waste, measuring out their farms further and further away from the Cape, you know what it was like, riding on horseback from sunrise to sunset, in a wide circle, returning to where they started from.’
Slowly she moves into the telling of her story. And I write as she speaks. This afternoon, after I’d been to see Jacob Bonthuys, I slept for an hour; I’m ready now.
Maria was a name the whites gave her, much later. In the beginning she was Kamma – the word the Khoikhoi, the People-of-People, had for water. That’s why I believe that one way or another she must have been born from water, but we can’t say for certain; it might have been one of her foremothers. The first that was known of her was when a group of trekking farmers reached her people’s settlement. They’d come all the way from Cape Town, with wagons loaded to the canvas tops with beads and copper wire and brandy and tobacco and other stuff they used to barter for ostrich feathers and eggs, ivory, musk, tortoise shells, cured hides, honey, and of course for as many wide-horned cattle and fat-tailed sheep as possible. They were also eager for information about good grazing beyond the colony’s frontiers, and rivers with a steady water supply.
On this trek trouble broke out between the Khoikhoi and the farmers – a heathen lot, if you ask me, with long beards and short tempers, always ready to pick a quarrel and use their fists or grab for their guns. You see, there were different tribes among the Khoikhoi, some of them well-disposed and rather spoiled by years of lucrative bartering with the people at the Cape; but the further you moved away from Cape Town, the more difficult it was to get along with them. And during the last month or so of the trek things had been going from bad to worse, because the tame Hottentots the boers had brought with them had begun to get fed up and were absconding at every opportunity; and the cattle were dying of thirst. That was more or less the stage they’d reached when they met a tribe that had never had any contact with whites before. Language served almost no purpose. Misunderstanding was rife.
As I have it, those Khoikhoi wanted the trekkers to remove themselves as soon as possible, which the boers refused to do before they’d acquired a large herd of cattle; and this the Khoikhoi were not interested in. To complicate things further several of the men, weary and frustrated with months of travelling, were getting randy, and the Khoikhoi were possessive of their womenfolk. With good reason too, as that tribe was reputed to have the most beautiful of all indigenous women.
And the most ravishing of these was the daughter of the headman. The very Kamma we spoke about. She was also known, for good reason, as The Little One Who Sings, but I have now forgotten the indigenous name for that. Kamma was a girl to whom praise songs had been composed, comparing her to t’kamkhab the new moon, or khanoes the morning star; a girl with the grace of a gazelle, lithe as a reed, all those poetic phrases, you name it. One can understand that the boers were hot for her, and day after day they pestered her father with ever more generous offers, but she was not for sale. Not only because the father was obstreperous, but because Kamma herself was too proud. The man who won her would have to be a prime specimen, not one of those unsavoury ruffians.
That charged the men up even more, and you can imagine the kind of dreams that were dreamed around the camp fire at night; it was said that for years afterwards nothing would grow on the spot. But in a dry land in summer, sooner or later, desire tends to burst into flame, and that was how the trouble started.
One evening a few of the boers abducted a woman from a hut which was set somewhat apart from the others. It also looked different. Whereas most consisted merely of a framework of branches covered with reed mats, this one was covered in skins. What the boers didn’t know was that it was the taboo hut, the t’nau hut as it was called, that is the hut in which women were segregated for their monthly bleeding. That, of course, made matters even worse.
A short distance away from the huts was a small water course with dense vegetation along the banks. Th
is water was one of the reasons why the boers had decided to make a halt there, and one of the reasons why the Khoikhoi didn’t want them there. That was where the abductors had their rough way with the woman, after which they simply abandoned her.
During the night, crawling painfully up the slope, the woman found her way back to her people and told them what had happened. Some of the men wanted to attack the boers on the spot and massacre the lot of them, with their cattle and all. You must understand that it was a deadly sin to have intercourse with a woman who was t’nau. But others were more refined. They overpowered a boer who was sleeping a few yards away from the rest, dragged him to the very spot where the woman had been raped, and there deprived him of his manhood.
Now it was his turn to crawl back to the wagons, and at daybreak war was ready to break out. It began with angry posturing on both sides, until one of the boers got so carried away that he grabbed his gun and shot one of the Khoikhoi. Some of the others followed his example; but their comrades managed to subdue them. An armistice was observed, at least until nightfall. But in the dark – it was new moon and light was scant – the Khoikhoi crept to the wagons and set them alight. Two were destroyed totally, with three men inside.
The next day the furious negotiations began anew, difficult as it was with only signs to go on. The boers demanded compensation. But the Khoikhoi stood their ground: if compensation had to be paid, they should start with the woman who’d been raped. That could not readily be calculated in economic terms, but what about ten cattle and thirty sheep for a start? Then what about the castrated man, countered the boers? Twenty cattle and fifty sheep. The inevitable result was a new outbreak of violence, another five or six Khoikhoi killed. That night the boers stayed awake to avoid being surprised again. What they didn’t know was that the Khoikhoi quietly poisoned the waterhole where the boers’ cattle used to drink; the outcome was devastating. Moreover, the boer who’d had his candle snuffed blew out his brains with a pistol – not so much for the pain, it was said, as for the shame. Which immediately fired up the rest again.
If ever war was close, this was the day. Kharab they called it: blood-vengeance. And it was more than likely that the whole lot, boers and Khoikhoi alike, would have been massacred right there had a woman not intervened. A very young woman, practically a child still, one might have thought at first sight as the Khoikhoi are so slight of build. This was none other than Kamma, the headman’s daughter.
Don’t expect me to repeat the whole argument, I wasn’t there; but the point she made, as it was later handed down to her offspring, was that the men should stop before everybody, white and brown, man, woman and child, was killed. If it would prevent bloodshed, she was prepared to offer herself: the boers could choose anyone from their midst to kwêkwa with her, that’s what the Khoikhoi called it; afterwards each group was to pack up and move as far away as possible from this place, the Khoikhoi to the north of the setting sun, the smooth-haired men, the honkhoikwa, to the south of the spot where it rose.
Consternation among the Khoikhoi. This was unheard of. Kamma was the pride of the land; her motion in the dark was like a string of glowing embers, a line of fireflies, like tsaob, which was what they called the Milky Way. To lose her would be worse than abandoning themselves to the fury of Gaunab, the evil god of the black heavens. But Kamma was adamant. Surely the life of the whole tribe was worth more than a single girl’s maidenhead. The old women warned her to be careful: one doesn’t speak of such things lightly; intercourse with a girl might lure the Dusky-feet, the hei noen, to the tribe. Look, there in the distance a sarês was churning up dust, a whirlwind, harbinger of death; and high overhead the death-bird was wheeling. After the women the old men took over. Then the young ones. But no one could persuade Kamma to change her mind. And already the boers were getting restless: further procrastination might lead to disaster.
Another commotion followed when the boers elected their man. He was Adam Oosthuizen, the tallest of them all, a man like a tree on the plains, with a shock of unkempt blond hair and a red beard, a giant who’d once strangled a leopard with his bare hands. No, no, said Kamma’s father: this was murder. His daughter wouldn’t survive the ordeal.
If Kamma could turn pale, she would have rivalled the moon in its last quarter. But she persisted. ‘My word is my word,’ she said, ‘and if I can help to avert war, so be it.’
About the rest of that night Ouma Kristina is reticent. This is not the way I’ve come to know her. I remember a previous occasion when she told the story – admittedly it was after several glasses of jerepigo – and turned it into a spectacular account of the Khoikhoi and the boers forming a wide circle around the two, and the epic night that followed. How the girl, for the sake of what Hollywood would call special effects, had caught a skin bag full of fireflies which she set free in little spurts, one or two at a time, as the night went by, greeted with enthusiastic applause by the spectators who took them for sparks. And how, at the final climax, she released the whole remaining bunch: it was pitch dark by then, and all one could see was this rain of sparks like when a great trunk erupts into flames – and how the assembled people broke into prolonged cheering for a performance the likes of which they had never seen.
Ouma has often gone right over the top with her stories. But tonight she is subdued. What she tells me this time is that when the huge boer took hold of Kamma she started singing to him, the songs she’d picked up from the tribe since childhood, the way other children collect coloured pebbles or birds’ eggs or feathers. Songs about the Moon and the Dawn, about the Chameleon and the Hare and Death, about the Water Maidens and the Dusky-feet that walk in the dark, about the girl who made the Milky Way by emitting sparks from her sex when she made love with the great hunter-god Heitsi-Eibib, about Tsui-Goab the god of the red dawn. Adam Oosthuizen was so enchanted by the cadences of her voice that he fell asleep; and nothing further happened. But by then it was so dark that no one could see, and the only sound in the night was that of the Khoikhoi singing their saddest songs to Tsui-Goab to spare their child.
The following morning the girl returned to her people. But this was really the worst: they refused to take her back. Whatever had happened had not been her fault, they admitted; but having consorted with a stranger she was now, according to the customs of the tribe, t’nau for seven winters.
12
WAS IT WITH a kind of crude compassion, or from spite, or in a flush of triumph that the boers took Kamma back with them? One will never know. All she took with her was a couple of mahems, you know, those long-legged birds with the beautiful golden crowns. Sometimes they followed Adam Oosthuizen’s wagon; otherwise they sat perched on either side of the girl, standing guard over her. She was seriously ill. The cause would depend on the version of her story one chooses: if Adam Oosthuizen had indeed had his way with her on that night of the flying sparks, she might have been suffering from the inevitable consequences; but her sickness might just as well have been one of the mind, following her rejection by the tribe. Whatever the cause, she was close to death, and the two mahems kept watch.
The trek made slow progress. The cattle that remained after the poisoning of the water had to keep up with the wagons, and the oxen were worn out. After a number of weeks the boers began to disperse. Those who’d come all the way from Cape Town continued on their journey. The rest, who had already measured out their farms along the coast, returned to their desolate abodes. Among those was Adam Oosthuizen; and he took Kamma with him.
If he’d had any inclination during the journey to use her again, her condition would have made it impossible. Once or twice in fact she was so bad that they had her taken from the wagon to leave her body behind on the veld; and high up in the sky, drained of colour and curdled like sour milk, the vultures were making their clairvoyant loops.
But if they were, then this time they were mistaken. With her thin arms Kamma kept hold of the legs of the man who tried to get rid of her; it was impossible to shake her off. Like
dung to a veldskoen she clung. And the mahems would turn on him too; and out of the clear sky other birds would make their appearance – hawks, sparrowhawks, falcons, peregrines, even eagles of various kinds, and secretary birds – diving down to the wagons and causing such havoc that Adam was forced to give up and take her all the way back to the farm with him. That might have been on the banks of the Olifants River, but don’t take my word for it.
It was a complicated family Adam Oosthuizen took the girl back to. He had a wife and something like thirteen children, but there were no strict demarcations between the generations. He couldn’t read, which made it easier to get along with the Word of God. While the old State Bible, inherited from his ancestors or his wife’s, lay holier than thou on a rough chest in the voorhuis, the brass clasps neatly closed on the dark brown leather binding, Adam visited his daughters as regularly and as enthusiastically as he did his wife. Which wasn’t all that unusual in those days: according to one tradition Adam himself was his oldest sister’s son. Everybody had something going with everybody else, all in the family; no wonder that some of his children were beginning to show the consequences. One more generation like that and they might start walking on all fours again. So what? Those were times when a man’s only wealth was land and cattle, perhaps a field of wheat along a river; this required hands, and it was cheaper and more reliable to produce these from one’s loins than to buy or hire them.