by Andre Brink
Whenever life became too complicated the girl would run away, rather than face what she later termed, in a characteristic turn of phrase, a shit-storm. Such a natural impulse: the whole saga of the Great Trek may be seen, at least in part, as a collective escape. But for a young girl to run into the wilderness still infested by predators of all kinds, and snakes and scorpions and other venomous creatures, in a country ravaged almost incessantly by war, can be a hazardous recourse. However, the same instinct for self-preservation that helped Wilhelmina overcome the violence of the Steenkamp tribe prompted her to survive in the dense bush of the Kei territory.
But below the surface of her comings and goings the crisis in her relationship with her mother was growing. If Wilhelmina had not loved Samuel so much – in all respects the opposite of herself – it would not have been so painful; but it was obvious that they could not go on living together. Her disappearances into the wilderness, where no one could follow her, became more frequent, more prolonged. But she needed human company too. Unlike her mother who’d always been something of a stranger to the world – an inevitable consequence, perhaps, of growing up as one of seventeen children all named Samuel – Wilhelmina craved intercourse with people.
That was why she struck the deal with the old German trader. Her mother, perhaps in an attempt to buy off her own conscience, gave Wilhelmina the hoard of gold coins she’d taken, years and years earlier, from the house of her strangled husband, and with these Wilhelmina bought herself into what could easily have turned out a very reckless venture. They travelled to Algoa Bay, newly named Port Elizabeth; once even to Cape Town, in Wilhelmina’s eyes one of the splendours of the world; and then returned into the deep interior to barter their copper wire and iron pots and cloths and jugs and barrels of rot-gut brandy and rolls of tobacco. And, hidden in a false bottom of the middle wagon, guns and ammunition.
For a year or two their trade flourished. An excellent partnership. But in the long run the old German, given to epic bouts of drinking followed by wild outbursts of ranting and raving, became too difficult to handle. This was not the company she desired. These were the circumstances in which, in the vicinity of Somerset East, on one of their trading trips, Wilhelmina met and promptly married Leendert Pretorius, in every respect the most unlikely choice. He was twice her age, a sickly whining creature with myopic watery eyes, obsessed with the Scriptures, and possessed by the dream of becoming a minister of religion. He was also, if the truth must be told, a randy old goat.
It is difficult to single out the consideration that clinched the matter. Did he, with his clumsy fumblings, unleash a latent passion that had lain in wait in her? Did she fall for his extensive library of almost a dozen books? Or was she attracted by his amazing store of ailments and complaints? If this sounds strange, bear in mind that Wilhelmina was a healer. Among the many things she’d brought back from her excursions into the wilderness was a treasury of knowledge about herbal medicines and natural remedies; and among the marvels she discovered on her trips with the German smous were the potions and powders and balsams of a well-stocked apothecary’s chest. Even without these aids, people said, she would have been a healer of repute: a mere laying-on of hands communicated to her the sources of an illness, and to the patient the powers of recuperation. A malicious mind might argue that she could not have been any good at all as Leendert Pretorius remained ailing to the day of his death; but then the man was a walking hospital who could invent three new complaints for every one cured. At the very least he posed a challenge a woman like Wilhelmina found difficult to resist.
She brought him home with her and together they settled on a huge abandoned farm right on the Great Fish River – far enough away from her mother to guarantee independence, close enough for comfort. And promptly she began to direct all her energies towards the enthusiastic exploitation of the three main attractions between them: they had long sessions of reading from his books; she started working on his multifarious complaints; and she set about contributing her bit towards the survival of the species. By the time they left on the Great Trek, a few years after Samuel’s calamitous end, they had four small children.
Leendert’s main motive for joining the Trek was the prospect of becoming a religious leader among the emigrants, something denied him in the Colony because he lacked the qualifications prescribed for such a vocation and had been too sickly ever to attain them. Wilhelmina’s motives were more obscure (another reason why she should have been allowed to tell her own story): they had to do, of course, with a wish to get away from what she must by then have come to regard as a place of evil; but also, no doubt, with the urge to put behind her an unfulfilling life in a remote wilderness and become part of a larger community. She could be of use to them as a healer; her skills in reading might win her some general respect; but above all, as the wife of a religious leader she might at last become part of something great and meaningful, a people’s movement, instead of simply seeing life pass her by in an unpredictable flood. She had too much energy to waste on purely personal pursuits. A larger operational area was beckoning, and she was ready to answer the call of history.
9
IT DID NOT work out quite as expected, mainly because poor Leendert did not measure up to his own confident predictions. He turned out not to be the only man among the Voortrekkers with aspirations to a position of religious authority. There was no ordained preacher among them, as the Dutch Reformed Church had distanced itself from an enterprise it regarded as foolhardy; this should have put all the contenders on an equal footing, but they were not. In the Potgieter group there was Sarel Cilliers, an impressive man by most standards, supported quite openly by his fiery trek leader. In the Graaff-Reinet trek there was the lachrymose sod Erasmus Smit whose claims would have been ludicrous had not his wife Susanna been the sister of the leader Maritz. Leendert Pretorius could count only on the support of his wife, and formidable as she was in her own right she was only a woman. Ironically, she probably derived more authority in the Voortrekker community from her husband’s limited – and ultimately failed – potential than he did from all her qualities as a born leader.
All the candidates’ hopes of further advancement in the field of religion were further thwarted by the discovery that several of the black settlements in the interior were already serviced by fully ordained missionaries, which meant that when it came to the administration of the sacraments, particularly Holy Communion, the trekkers overcame even their ingrained distaste of anything English and preferred to invite these priests rather than risk the wrath of God by allowing unordained hands to defile the bread and wine.
Not that they were entirely sidelined. There was always the odd sermon to be preached of a Sunday (several, in fact, as the incessant bickering among the different factions of trekkers caused each group to cluster round its own preacher); most especially there were the sick and dying to be comforted (or scared out of their wits, as the case might be); and before and after military expeditions against allegedly hostile black communities to avenge real or imaginary depredations, there were invariably services of exhortation or thanksgiving to perform. Few could match Leendert Pretorius when it came to implanting the fear of the living God and of eternal wailing and gnashing of teeth in the bosoms of the unworthy. And unworthy, by God, they were. At least in Leendert’s eyes; he had as much of a vested interest in the damnation of the trekkers as Jonah had had in the annihilation of Nineveh.
The problem was that Leendert himself was not all that worthy a man either. For someone with his weak constitution the Trek was a journey through unmitigated hell. He needed more and more sustenance even beyond the remedies Wilhelmina could provide (it is perhaps not unthinkable that the remedies themselves sometimes aggravated rather than improved his condition); the obvious recourse was drink. And when brandy in the form of the notorious Cape Smoke ran out, as happened all too often, he acquired a taste for indigenous brews, some of which were reputed to be roughly equivalent to a bolt of lightning. On
some of the ever more rare occasions when he was called upon to preach a sermon the congregation had to be informed at the last minute that Leendert was unable to officiate; and to learn afterwards how effectively some mere elder or deacon had stepped into the breach did not do much to bolster the man’s already shaky self-confidence.
Still, Wilhelmina supported him with an animal ferocity that cowed most of his detractors. From the outset she had been the driving spirit in their union. She was the one who, through her contact with the old German smous, had first learned about the planned migration; and having on her earlier forays met the bearded giant Hendrik Potgieter in the Tarka region, she decided that this was the group to join. When no buyer could be found for their huge farm on the Great Fish River, she decided quite simply to abandon it; they still had enough money to equip two wagons, and late in 1835 she and Leendert joined the Potgieter trek at an appointed place and slowly meandered with the others to the Great River, which was in flood. That was the first real shit-storm – and it became an opportunity of demonstrating her prowess, not only in organising the felling of scores of trees to build floats on which the wagons could be transported across the muddy waters, but in carrying in her two arms or on her shoulders logs most of the men couldn’t budge. She was five months pregnant at the time. When one of her wagons threatened to capsize in the flood she was the one who tied one end of a long riem to the frame and jumped into the swirling water with the other end to steady the unwieldy float and its cargo. And when several of the women and children fell ill after the travail of the crossing, some of them ending up with pneumonia, it was Wilhelmina whose remedies, not only potent but downright vile, pulled them through.
Ironically, the only life lost in the crossing was that of her own youngest child but one, aged two, who fell off the float tended by Leendert and was swept away. This was a blow that stunned her, probably because it was reminiscent of her mother’s death four years earlier. And as it turned out it was only the first; near the Vet River her oldest was killed by a leopard; and the first baby she gave birth to during the Trek, in the vicinity of Thaba Nchu, was stillborn. But such setbacks could not permanently dampen her spirits; she even used them as occasions for some strong-armed religious politicking by insisting that Leendert lead the funeral services. As it turned out those ceremonies were the only ones where the poor man ever approached inspired oratory.
Wilhelmina, it should be clear by now, remained undaunted by challenges and tribulations that disheartened most lesser mortals; but what turned her arse-hairs grey (her own expression: she was no mincer of words) was the ceaseless infighting among the Voortrekkers. We were talking about it again just before you came in. ‘What a joke,’ she said, ‘the way people nowadays think of that lot as a bunch of pious pioneers who sacrificed their all for the noble cause of freedom. Never seen such viciousness and pettiness in my life.’ You must imagine the scene in the Thaba Nchu region. By 1837 there must have been over a thousand wagons outspanned across the plains and valleys, representing at least five thousand people, three thousand whites, the rest coloured or black (because obviously, even in the wretched circumstances of the Trek, those farmers had to cart their servants with them). They’d all trickled into those parts in small family groups or larger clans, five or ten wagons at a time – Potgieter had about fifty; the smart-arse Maritz, the most affluent of the lot, a hundred. They’d all been fired by the same urge to get away from the English and become independent, but each group wanted to be independent on its own terms and governed by its own leader. Gradually some of the smaller groups merged, but in the end there were at least four major factions, those of Potgieter, of Maritz, of Retief, and of Uys, each of them conniving against the others. And not only the leaders were bickering, but everybody else joined in. There were quarrels about grazing and water and camping sites and firewood; arguments about religious sects and denominations and about which route to follow to get where; fisticuffs about ammunition and strayed cattle and missing kegs of brandy and lost axes or grease barrels or yokes or God knows what. Only when there was a sudden threat of violence from outside, usually by the Matabele from across the Vaal River, did they temporarily suspend the infighting. Then they’d all scramble to pull the wagons into a circular laager to fight off the enemy; or the men would ride out in a commando to spread death and destruction in retaliation. But the moment the threat subsided everybody was at everybody else’s throat again.
The preachers played an active part in all this: Cilliers by endorsing Potgieter after the latter had been left out of the first government; old Erasmus Smit invoking, in his sober moments, the example of Israel to promote his own cause as a visionary; Leendert Pretorius, frustrated very early by the presence of Cilliers in the same group as himself, floating from one faction to the next trying to incite them against each other, in the hope of emerging as the great peacemaker, but achieving exactly the opposite.
But in a way Wilhelmina flourished. In between her pregnancies, and even right through them, she became the most trusted healer of the Trek, practically plucking the already departed back from death through the fervent administration of unnameable potions and direct appeals to God. These tended at times to be lacking in tact, to say the least: she was reported by eyewitnesses as addressing God as if he were an ordinary obstreperous male: ‘Now you listen to me, God, if this child hasn’t come out of her fever by tomorrow morning, I’m holding you responsible’; or, ‘How many more times do you expect me to go on my knees to ask you for this woman to get better? She’s got a family of seven to look after, we need her down here much more than you do up there, so don’t you think it’s time you pulled finger and did something?’ In one celebrated instance, at what seemed to be the deathbed of a young girl, Sarie Kruger, she was reported to have told the Almighty, ‘This is going too far, God. You’re just not making sense any more. If you really have some grudge against the Krugers, why must you take Sarie? Why don’t you take one of her brothers, there are five of them and they’re a good-for-nothing lot. Here she is, twelve years old, ready to become a woman. How do you expect us to survive on this continent if you don’t allow us to obey your own commandment by being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth? Are you now getting forgetful in your old age? We need every woman and girl. So don’t make it necessary for me to raise this with you again.’ The remarkable thing about this incident was not only that the girl recovered, but that one of her brothers was killed in a hunting accident the very next day.
Wilhelmina was active in many other ways too. In the first pitched battle of the Trek, in the laager at Vegkop late in 1836, only a fortnight or so after losing her stillborn baby, she wielded a gun with the best of the men while Leendert was bedridden with a mysterious fever; but while her male companions were assisted by women and children to measure and sort lead and powder and handle the guns passed on to them for firing, she had to make do on her own. This slowed her down considerably, and as increasing numbers of the attacking Ndebele were by that time so close that they started crawling under and over the wagons armed with assegais she grabbed an axe and began to hack away at anybody who came too close. There were enough severed limbs in that part of the laager, she said afterwards, to set up a butcher’s shop.
But those were exceptional circumstances. After the battle, when the trekkers were stranded for months without sheep or cattle, unable to move, she resumed her old habit of going off into the veld on her own, unarmed, on foot if necessary, on horseback when possible, to return hours or days later with a sheep or a milking cow. As the men had already scoured the environs in all directions as far as the horizon and beyond, no one knew how she could possibly have rounded up these stray animals; but she had a habit of brushing off all enquiries and going about her own business, feeding newborn infants with the milk she’d brought home, or slaughtering the sheep to distribute meat among the most needy.
In due course some new cattle and sheep were acquired, largely through the intercession of Archbell, the
English missionary stationed in the settlement of the Barolong chief from whom the trekkers had acquired the territory between the Vet and the Vaal; and Wilhelmina could turn her energies towards other occupations.
It is known that on at least one occasion, while most of the men were off on a punitive expedition and reports came of an imminent Ndebele attack on one of the most vulnerable outposts where Wilhelmina happened to be residing for the time being, she took her two remaining children by the hands, one of them six, the other three, and strode off in the direction from which the Ndebele were reported to be approaching. About a mile from the camp she came upon them, a group of about two hundred armed men, and approached without hesitation. Bemused, they halted their advance.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she asked in Xhosa, which they understood.
‘This is not your business,’ a spokesman answered. ‘Stand aside, white woman, let us pass.’
‘You will have to kill me and my children first,’ she said. ‘Where I come from, men do not kill women and children. Perhaps you are different.’
‘Your people are invading our land,’ said the man.
‘This land belongs to the Barolong,’ she pointed out, ‘not the Ndebele. We have chief Makwana’s permission to be here. And anyway, we are just on our way through to the sea.’
‘Then why did you kill so many of our people?’
‘We defended ourselves when you attacked us.’
‘Before that. Some of your men came across the river into our land and took cattle. When we tried to stop them they shot us.’
She must have had a sinking feeling: how many times had this happened back in the frontier territory? Was there no getting away from it, ever?