by Andre Brink
‘That is bad,’ she said. ‘I shall talk to our men.’
‘You are a woman,’ he reminded her.
‘That is why I am prepared to talk. If I were a man I would have killed you already. Do you want to see your wives live without a husband and your children grow up without a father?’
‘Men are not scared to die.’
‘I’m not scared to die either. But what about the others who remain behind? Don’t you care about their suffering? And isn’t it better to live in peace than to make war?’
‘You are wasting my time.’
‘War wastes time, not I. I’m trying to save time. And lives.’
‘You are trying to cheat me. You want to hold us up here while your men prepare to attack us.’
‘Most of our men are away,’ she said calmly. ‘You can overrun the camp if you wish, there won’t be much resistance. You can take all the sheep and cattle we bartered from the Barolong. You can kill most of us. And then, when our men come back, they will send a commando to your place and kill all your people and take all your cattle. And then another army of the Ndebele will come against us to revenge it. And another commando will take the field. For how long? Won’t you men ever learn?’
‘That is woman’s talk.’
‘Thank God, yes. Because why should we go on bringing children into the world only so that you can kill them? Don’t you think that is nonsense?’
Was there a hint of wavering in his attitude? Or was he merely getting impatient?
‘Why don’t you bring some of your womenfolk to come and talk to us?’ she proposed.
‘We keep the women out of such things. They stay at home.’
‘Are you scared of sending them to talk to us?’
‘I am not scared of anything.’
‘If you’re not scared you will send them.’
And a few days later a delegation of Ndebele women arrived, escorted by some men. Wilhelmina had great trouble persuading her own people – women, a number of old or ailing men, and particularly the handful of able-bodied youngsters left behind to protect the camp – that the visitors had come at her bidding and meant no harm. It was even more difficult to talk them into leaving this matter to the women; and in this respect the women turned out to be far more diffident than the men. How could they embark on such weighty matters without their husbands at their side to take the final decisions?
‘Because this concerns us,’ said Wilhelmina. ‘It is a matter of our bodies and our children and our future.’
In the end three women, out of the forty or so in the camp, volunteered to risk it. Two of them were elderly widows, the third a hunchbacked spinster with no marriage prospects that could be ruined by the venture. With Wilhelmina herself as interpreter, they sat down with the dozen Ndebele women in the shade of some thorn-trees, watched suspiciously from a distance, the inhabitants of the camp on one side, the Ndebele men on the other.
There were no dramatic decisions, no spectacular outcome. But both sides did agree to ‘talk to their men’. For the moment that was that. Might there have been any significant results in the long term? One would dearly like to know, but all this would be conjecture. Only when the trekker men returned did Wilhelmina learn, with shock, the extent of the vengeance they had meted out on the chief Ndebele settlement, where they’d left behind hundreds of enemy dead (no losses on the Boer side, apart from a few coloured attendants; invariably, in battles of this kind, only enemies are killed), bringing back several thousand sheep and cattle. This must have sent shock waves throughout the Ndebele territory beyond the Vaal, bringing a premature end to whatever beneficial effects Wilhelmina’s peace initiative might yet have had.
Within the ranks of the trekkers, however, there were repercussions of a different kind. Several families let it be known publicly that they would no longer accept any services from a person who consorted with kaffirs. An attempt was made to set her cooking quarters alight; one man, whose child had been cured by Wilhelmina a month before, sent his son to ask back the wether he’d offered her in payment; when she arrived at the deathbed of one of the old widows who had joined her in her talks with the Ndebele, she was chased away by relatives, who called her a witch and accused her of being responsible for the old woman’s imminent death; soon afterwards a message arrived from Hendrik Potgieter himself formally to expel the Pretorius family from his party.
This she could shrug off: by that time it had become obvious that Potgieter was set on continuing his trek to the north, beyond the Vaal, into the territory of the Ndebele (which would require either their annihilation or their forcible eviction), and Wilhelmina had no stomach for the deep interior. The sea was where she wanted to be, even if this meant joining one of the other groups. Maritz was ruled out, as far as she was concerned, by his family ties with that wretched squint-eyed creature Erasmus Smit, Leendert’s adversary. Piet Uys was too aggressive for her liking. But Piet Retief appeared a dependable leader, in spite of a rather shady past as a speculator in Graham’s Town (but as most of his opponents and victims had been English, that was pardonable, even commendable).
Late in 1837, two months after Wilhelmina had given birth to a new son, their trek started crossing the daunting Drakensberg range. A couple of wagons were lost down the precipitous cliffs on the Natal side, but the rest managed the descent in a breathtaking demonstration of strength, skill and sheer bloody-mindedness. Once again Wilhelmina contributed more than her share, on one occasion stepping in under a precariously poised wagon and hoisting the back up on one massive shoulder so that it could be steadied on a rock. This was not far from the sheer cliff on which she proudly painted, with a tin of dark green paint borrowed from Retief’s daughter Deborah, her husband’s name and the date of their passing:
LEENDERT PRETORIUS PASSED HERE 28 NOVEMBER 1837
Which must be the only example of her writing extant. How ironical that she herself should not feature on the inscription. But apart from – literally – pulling her weight during the trek, Wilhelmina was by now intent on playing a much more subdued role than before. She felt guilty, she explained to me (and would have to you if you’d let her), about the negative repercussions her negotiations with the Ndebele had had, not for herself, but for Leendert; she wouldn’t do anything that could further harm his chances of becoming an officially recognised religious leader of the trek. Stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that he was his own greatest enemy, she was resolved to move heaven and earth on his behalf. In a manner of speaking.
10
THE YEARS WILHELMINA and her family spent in Natal represented what one might call the ‘public’ period of her life, but it began most inauspiciously. While Retief and a select commando of men rode off to make history at Ngungundhlovu, the Place of the Elephant, where they negotiated with the Zulu king Dingane to acquire land for the settlement of the immigrant Boers, the rest of his company provisionally camped in a multitude of small groups along the fertile fingers of the Tugela. And there, after the negotiations had unexpectedly resulted in the massacre of Retief and his men, they were attacked by wave upon wave of Dingane’s impis sent out to rid the country of what the Zulus not unjustifiably regarded as the invaders. That was the infamous night of 16 February 1838.
Wilhelmina had been awakened just after midnight by her baby and she was sitting propped up against a wagon wheel feeding the child when the impi swept into their camping site. The child was killed in her arms with an assegai driven with such force that after penetrating the baby’s body the point struck the mother in the left breast. Plucking the weapon from her body and flinging aside the dead child she grabbed a three-legged iron pot from the dying embers of the camp fire and charged the attackers. She killed three of them, splitting open their skulls, before they retreated. By that time Leendert and both her older boys had received stab wounds, one of the children in the buttock, the other in the shoulder, Leendert more seriously in the lung. Wilhelmina herself had suffered most, looking, as she put it, like a bloody
porcupine by the time she could start plucking the assegais from her body: there were no fewer than nineteen, not counting the first one that had been driven into her breast.
She first cleaned and dressed her family’s wounds. Then, recklessly ignoring her own, she grabbed a gun, found a horse (that in itself was a minor miracle as the Zulus had absconded with all the animals they could round up – over twenty-five thousand cattle, apart from horses, sheep and goats) and galloped off to see whether she could lend a hand at any of the neighbouring camps. It was only at the fifth or sixth outspan, along the Bushmans River, that she fainted from loss of blood – an event she regarded as an eternal disgrace. And within hours she was on her way again. Throughout the following days she was something of a huge angel of mercy, bursting into one outspan after the other to seek out the wounded and the dying, applying poultices and balsams, administering herbal potions, killing hares and meerkats to stick the still-warm skins to wounds where inflammation had set in; only exhaustion and the combined efforts of several of the strongest men restrained her from helping the teams of grave-diggers to prepare graves for the more than five hundred people who had been slaughtered. As in previous incidents, about half of these were servants who’d been brought along from the Cape colony to ease their masters’ lives.
She must have been in something of a daze during those first few days when only her massive strength and amazing energy carried her through; not until she was finally strapped down in her own wagon with thongs cut from rhinoceros hide did the effect of her own wounds finally overtake her. It was a miracle that she survived. There had been others who pulled through with multiple wounds, Catharina Prinsloo with seventeen, Johanna van der Merwe with twenty-two; but the strenuous demands to which she submitted her body after the initial shock would have been enough to finish off most other people. Even the horse she had commandeered almost succumbed.
Had Wilhelmina not worried so much about Leendert’s single but extremely serious wound she might well have given up. But she knew he needed her; even though by now, for the first time in her life, she’d begun to despise him for his weakness. At the very least, she said, he should have sat up that night with her when she had to feed the baby; they might have stood a better chance against the attackers. Although, in her more disparaging moments, she admitted that he might have compounded things by shooting either her or himself in the consternation.
She recovered. She set about scouring the surrounding wilderness for new herbs. The most remarkable of her exploits in this time was making friends with a Zulu community among the foothills of the Drakensberg. When Leendert objected, she argued that they couldn’t be blamed for what the others had done. ‘Those were all half-crazed men obeying orders from a mad king,’ she said, ‘these are peaceful country people like ourselves.’ In any case she sought out the old women, not the men; and, finding once again that she could make herself sufficiently understood in Xhosa, learned from them a wealth of remedies that would have cured the most stubborn ox. It certainly cured her. But not Leendert. Which was probably why she also resorted to arsenic to keep his festering wound in check. She bought a fair supply from an Italian smous, Alberto Viglione, who found himself among the trekkers at the time (his wife Teresa had in fact played quite a heroic part in riding about on the night of 16 February to warn various outspans of the approaching danger); and when the paste she concocted from it did not work as speedily as it should, she began administering small doses orally as well This may well have been what finally carried Leendert off a year later; but one hopes it was unintentional.
By that time they were living on a small farm at the mouth of the Umgeni. In the beginning they were plagued, not only by the usual predators, but by crocodiles. But Wilhelmina had always had a way with animals. Lions, leopards and lynxes soon learned to respect her territory. The crocodiles took somewhat longer and more drastic measures were required. She kept a peeled eye on them until one day, on a sandbank near the river mouth, she came upon one of monstrous size that had just caught a sheep. Without hesitation she rushed to the reptile, belaboured it with a hefty kierie, then grabbed it by the jaws and actually pulled them apart, stopping only, she told me herself, when the whole reptile had been torn in two. After that episode they were so tame that, as you already know, she regularly left the children to their care when they were playing on the beach.
A new baby, a girl, had been born to her a week after the battle of Blood River which temporarily concluded the hostilities between Boers and Zulus. This meant that the child must have been conceived not much more than a month after the attack on the Tugela: which says something, either about Leendert’s shameless appetite or Wilhelmina’s determination or both. And by the time he died Wilhelmina, clearly eager to replace the stock lost in the war, was pregnant again; six months after the funeral – a particularly beautiful service, everybody said, by Erasmus Smit, who clearly felt inspired to celebrate the demise of an arch-rival – the baby was born. This, as you may have guessed, was Petronella.
11
SOON AFTERWARDS WILHELMINA’S real troubles began: the Zulus had by then been subdued through the elimination of Dingane and the recognition, by the trekkers, of Mpande as ‘ruling prince’; but the English were beginning to emit ominous rumblings about annexing the territory of Natal in order once again to lay their greedy hands on the recalcitrant Boers. And after all they had gone through you can imagine they were in no mood just to give up meekly the freedom and independence they had finally won.
For several years the uncertainty and confusion continued. By the time it came to a head, in 1843, Wilhelmina, in no mind to put an end to her productive life when numbers were needed, had already remarried. The innocent man was Hansie Nel, ten years younger than herself; he’d lost his wife in the Tugela massacre, and as it happened he’d also made the coffin for Leendert’s funeral, a meek and mild-mannered man who bowed to Wilhelmina’s every wish. The union was a blessed one, up to a point at least. Their first child was duly born a year after the wedding, followed by twins a year later. One of these was the boy Benjamin who later accompanied Petronella on her wanderings.
Unfortunately Hansie did not survive the event. Don’t ask me what happened. All Wilhelmina has ever said was that ‘the bloody clod made me very angry’. By that time her temper had acquired epic proportions, mainly as a result of conflict with peripatetic representatives of the British Empire. It was also a time when she was known to have taken to exterminating vermin on the farm through the indiscriminate use of strychnine.
Before the twins were a month old the long-expected trouble broke out. In Wilhelmina’s terminology this was the worst shit-storm in her life so far. Boers and English had been glaring at each other in Port Natal for some time; the English had brought in more and more reinforcements; then the Boers struck at Congella, one moonlit night when a group of old men standing guard in the bushes on the beach noticed a company of English advancing with a cannon. The English were besieged, but one young gallant galloped all the way to Graham’s Town, a thousand kilometres away, and then a large force was sent by sea to annex the territory. To add insult to injury, this force was commanded by a man from one of the foremost Cape Dutch families, Josias Cloete, who’d now turned against his own kin. Hard on his heels came his brother Henry, appointed commissioner of the new colony. The Boer forces retreated to the place with more letters to its name than it had inhabitants, Pietermaritzburg, and there Henry Cloete met them to negotiate their formal surrender to Her Majesty.
The moment Wilhelmina heard about these developments she left the care of her farm to a trusted Zulu foreman and her older children to the crocodiles that had become ‘the best watchdogs I ever had’, and hurried to Pietermaritzburg, taking with her only the twin babies. She wouldn’t miss the looming confrontation for all the world. She arrived in time to learn that the Boer assembly was actually considering capitulation. That was in May; by early August most of the men had been won over. But not the women. With a baby on
each breast, Wilhelmina made the rounds from wagon to wagon and house to house, exhorting the sisterhood to stand up for the rights and the freedom of the threatened trekkers. If the men were too dastardly then the women should take over. And while they were about it they might just as well demand the vote too, the first women in the world to do so. At first the sisters were hesitant. Then a few broke ranks, among them the hunchbacked spinster and the single remaining widow who had supported her before. And then, one evening, Susanna, the usually demure young wife of the whining preacher Erasmus Smit, came to see Wilhelmina in the small mud house of the old widow she was staying with.
What came out in the course of that long conversation, which lasted almost until daybreak, was quite astounding. Susanna had reached breaking point; she couldn’t take any more. Forced into marriage with Erasmus when she’d been only thirteen, she’d submitted all these years to his emotional extortion, his bouts of drinking, his delirious ravings, his endless depressions, his visions of hell, his sickening physical demands. ‘He keeps me as if he’s a dragon who has bound and robbed me and holds me prisoner,’ she told Wilhelmina. ‘I’ve never been allowed a life of my own. He has a large room all to himself; there he can write his sermons or sleep off his stupors or entertain his visions or abuse his own flesh as he wishes – I’ve found the stains all over the floor and over his papers, and then he expects me to clean up. While I – look at me, Aunt Wilhelmina, I’m still young, I want to live! – I don’t even have the smallest corner I can call my own. I’m no better than a bloody pumpkin, unmoving and unwieldy, waiting to be harvested by someone else.’
She had dreams too, she confided. Sometimes nightmares in which she was assailed by an army of ghosts, small grey-black dogs, cats, monkeys, mice, and swift red beetles, settling on her sinful body in such numbers that she could hardly move, hitting her in the face with their paws, their tails, their wings, flying into her ears, blowing thick smoke into her eyes; at other times there would be visions of heavenly visitors – things that would make people shudder or marvel were they to know about it. But she was not allowed to breathe a word to anyone. When she told Erasmus about it he would shout abuse at her, then blatantly appropriate her dreams and use them in his more inspired sermons. While she, frail and sickly as she was, was expected to do all the housework, with nobody to help her; cleaning up his messes was in itself a full-time occupation. And now she’d had enough. The last straw was seeing him – all the men – meekly submitting to the English and surrendering their freedom: how was it possible? She could not bear to be excluded from what she called ‘working in God’s vineyard’.