The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  But when you have grown old, nobody is very much interested in the manner of your dying. Nobody except you yourself, that is. And I think that your past life has got a lot to do with the way you feel when you get near the end of your days. I remember how, when he was lying on his death-bed, Andries Wessels kept on telling us that it was because of the blameless path he had trodden from his earliest years that he could compose himself in peace to lay down his burdens. And I certainly never saw a man breathe his last more tranquilly, seeing that right up to the end he kept on murmuring to us how happy he was, with heavenly hosts and invisible choirs of angels all around him.

  Just before he died, he told us that the angels had even become visible. They were medium-sized angels, he said, and they had cloven hoofs and carried forks. It was obvious that Andries Wes­sels’s ideas were getting a bit confused by then, but all the same I never saw a man die in a more hallowed sort of calm.

  Once, during the malaria season in the Eastern Transvaal, it seem­ed to me, when I was in a high fever and like to die, that the whole world was a big burial-ground. I thought it was the earth itself that was a graveyard, and not just those little fenced-in bits of land dotted with tombstones, in the shade of a Western Province oak-tree or by the side of a Transvaal koppie. This was a nightmare that worried me a great deal, and so I was very glad, when I recovered from the fever, to think that we Boers had properly marked-out places on our farms for white people to be laid to rest in, in a civilised Christian way, instead of having to be buried just anyhow, along with a dead wild-cat, maybe, or a Bushman with a clay pot, and things.

  When I mentioned this to my friend, Stoffel Oosthuizen, who was in the Low Country with me at the time, he agreed with me wholeheartedly. There were people who talked in a high-flown way of death as the great leveller, he said, and those high-flown people also declared that everyone was made kin by death. He would still like to see those things proved, Stoffel Oosthuizen said. After all, that was one of the reasons why the Boers had trekked away into the Transvaal and the Free State, he said, because the British Government wanted to give the vote to any Cape Coloured person walking about with a kroes head and big cracks in his feet.

  The first time he heard that sort of talk about death coming to all of us alike, and making us all equal, Stoffel Oosthuizen’s suspicions were aroused. It sounded like out of a speech made by one of those liberal Cape politicians, he explained.

  I found something very comforting in Stoffel Oosthuizen’s words.

  Then, to illustrate his contention, Stoffel Oosthuizen told me a story of an incident that took place in a bygone Transvaal kaffir war. I don’t know whether he told the story incorrectly, or whether it was just that kind of a story, but, by the time he had finished, all my uncertainties had, I discovered, come back to me.

  “You can go and look at Hans Welman’s tombstone any time you are at Nietverdiend,” Stoffel Oosthuizen said. “The slab of red sandstone is weathered by now, of course, seeing how long ago it all happened. But the inscription is still legible. I was with Hans Welman on that morning when he fell. Our commando had been ambushed by the kaffirs and was retreating. I could do nothing for Hans Welman. Once, when I looked round, I saw a tall kaffir bending over him and plunging an assegai into him. Shortly afterwards I saw the kaffir stripping the clothes off Hans Welman. A yellow kaffir dog was yelping excitedly around his black master. Although I was in grave danger myself, with several dozen kaffirs making straight for me on foot through the bush, the fury I felt at the sight of what that tall kaffir was doing made me hazard a last shot. Reining in my horse, and taking what aim I could under the circumstances, I pressed the trigger. My luck was in. I saw the kaffir fall forward beside the naked body of Hans Welman. Then I set spurs to my horse and galloped off at full speed, with the foremost of my pursuers already almost upon me. The last I saw was that yellow dog bounding up to his master – whom I had wounded mortally, as we were to discover later.

  “As you know, that kaffir war dragged on for a long time. There were few pitched battles. Mainly, what took place were bush skirmishes, like the one in which Hans Welman lost his life.

  “After about six months, quiet of a sort was restored to the Marico and Zoutpansberg Districts. Then the day came when I went out, in company of a handful of other burghers, to fetch in the remains of Hans Welman, at his widow’s request, for burial in the little cemetery plot on the farm. We took a coffin with us on a Cape-cart.

  “We located the scene of the skirmish without difficulty. Indeed, Hans Welman had been killed not very far from his own farm, which had been temporarily abandoned, together with the other farms in that part, during the time that the trouble with the kaffirs had lasted. We drove up to the spot where I remembered having seen Hans Welman lying dead on the ground, with the tall kaffir next to him. From a distance I again saw that yellow dog. He slipped away into the bush at our approach. I could not help feeling that there was something rather stirring about that beast’s fidelity, even though it was bestowed on a dead kaffir.

  “We were now confronted with a queer situation. We found that what was left of Hans Welman and the kaffir consisted of little more than pieces of sun-dried flesh and the dismembered fragments of bleached skeletons. The sun and wild animals and birds of prey had done their work. There was a heap of human bones, with here and there leathery strips of blackened flesh. But we could not tell which was the white man and which the kaffir. To make it still more confusing, a lot of bones were missing alto­gether, having no doubt been dragged away by wild animals into their lairs in the bush. Another thing was that Hans Welman and that kaffir had been just about the same size.”

  Stoffel Oosthuizen paused in his narrative, and I let my imagination dwell for a moment on that situation. And I realised just how those Boers must have felt about it: about the thought of bringing the remains of a Transvaal burgher home to his widow for Chris­tian burial, and perhaps having a lot of kaffir bones mixed up with the burgher – lying with him in the same tomb on which the mauve petals from the oleander overhead would fall.

  “I remember one of our party saying that that was the worst of these kaffir wars,” Stoffel Oosthuizen continued. “If it had been a war against the English, and part of a dead Englishman had got lifted into that coffin by mistake, it wouldn’t have mattered so much,” he said.

  There seemed to me in this story to be something as strange as the African veld.

  Stoffel Oosthuizen said that the little party of Boers spent al­most a whole afternoon with the remains in order to try to get the white man sorted out from the kaffir. By the evening they had laid all they could find of what seemed like Hans Welman’s bones in the coffin in the Cape-cart. The rest of the bones and flesh they buried on the spot.

  Stoffel Oosthuizen added that, no matter what the difference in the colour of their skin had been, it was impossible to say that the kaffir’s bones were less white than Hans Welman’s. Nor was it possible to say that the kaffir’s sun-dried flesh was any blacker than the white man’s. Alive, you couldn’t go wrong in distinguishing between a white man and a kaffir. Dead, you had great difficulty in telling them apart.

  “Naturally, we burghers felt very bitter about this whole affair,” Stoffel Oosthuizen said, “and our resentment was something that we couldn’t explain, quite. Afterwards, several other men who were there that day told me that they had the same feelings of suppressed anger that I did. They wanted somebody – just once – to make a remark such as ‘in death they were not divided.’ Then you would have seen an outburst, all right. Nobody did say anything like that, however. We all knew better. Two days later a funeral service was conducted in the little cemetery on the Wel­man farm, and shortly afterwards the sandstone memorial was erected that you can still see there.”

  That was the story Stoffel Oosthuizen told me after I had recovered from the fever. It was a story that, as I have said, had in it features as strange as the African veld. But it brought me no peace in my broodings after that
attack of malaria. Especially when Stoffel Oosthuizen spoke of how he had occasion, one clear night when the stars shone, to pass that quiet graveyard on the Welman farm. Something leapt up from the mound beside the sandstone slab. It gave him quite a turn, Stoffel Oosthuizen said, for the third time – and in that way – to come across that yellow kaffir dog.

  Graven Image

  Yes, I know those wood-carvings that the kaffirs used to make long ago (Oom Schalk Lourens said). They were very silly things, of course, and I had a good laugh at them myself, more than once. Several of my neighbours, including Karel Nienaber, had a good laugh at them, also, at various times. In fact, when you come to think of it, the one particular thing about those figures that the kaffirs used to carve out of soft wood like kremetart or ’ndubu was that you could always get a good laugh out of them.

  And it is singular how into these mirthful incidents there got tangled part of the darker being of Louisa Wessels, a girl who did not laugh. And she seems almost as reluctant now to enter the story as she was then about becoming Karel Nienaber’s bride. I can picture Louisa Wessels yet, shy but firm in her withdrawing, and as still as blue water.

  It was all right, of course, as long as those wood-carvers stuck to chiselling certain kinds of animals that they knew well. The way they could carve a giraffe, for instance: his long neck, cut out of a piece of mesetla wood with a blunt knife, and the whole of him covered in black spots burnt with a red-hot iron, and his pointed head turned to one side, half upwards – why, you could see that giraffe. It was almost as though you could see the leaves of the tree, too, that he was pulling down and eating for his breakfast.

  Although we knew that the whole thing was cut out of a piece of Bushveld wood by a lazy Bechuana, who would have been better employed in chopping up that wood and bringing a bundle of it into a farmer’s kitchen, nevertheless, we could see that, for all his ignorance, the Bechuana kaffir knew how to carve a giraffe so that it looked really life-like. Because we Marico farmers knew a giraffe when we saw one. And when one of those wood-carvers brought along a model of a giraffe, we would smile to think that that kaffir was so uneducated, but we would also know that the thing he had carved was exactly like a giraffe. Some­times we could even tell, from the way that the giraffe was standing, as to what particular kind of tree he was eating his breakfast from. Just from the way his head was turned, and the position in which his hind legs were placed, and the manner in which he would droop his shoulders to miss the thorns.

  And the wood-carvers would also cut out, joined together on a piece of stick, three wild ducks swimming one behind the other. That was one of their favourite pieces of carving. The way that the ducks sat on the water was very true to life, the front duck swimming with his head high up, since he was naturally proud to be the leader. The only thing that was wrong was that those three wild ducks were held together by a piece of stick. That used to give us a very good laugh. I mean, we had often seen three ducks swimming in a row in that particular way. But they had never been tied together on a piece of stick.

  It was when an old Bechuana wood-carver named Radipalong, in Ramoutsa, began carving what he said were the images of vari­ous white men living in the Marico, that we really started laughing.

  I suppose you know that a kaffir wood-carver will never cut a figure of another kaffir. He’s not allowed to. Because, if that kaffir finds out about it, there will be a lot of trouble in the kraal. The kaffirs believe that if you have got an enemy that you want to get rid of, then what you have to do is to make an image of him: it doesn’t matter if it is a good likeness or not, as long as you yourself know what is meant by it: and then you hammer something, a strip of brass or an iron nail, into that part of your enemy that you want to get stricken. And the kaffirs say that it always works, when you do that. They say that that is the reason, for instance, why many an unpopular chief has been known to die prematurely, going to his death with a sudden pain in his belly, for which there has been no explanation. And then, later on, in the hut of some enemy of the chief, there has been found a little wooden image with an iron nail driven through its stomach. And how they knew that it was the chief was because something that belonged to him, like a piece of his kaross, was attached to the wooden image … And, also, of course, because the chief had died …

  For this reason a kaffir is not very happy when a wood-carver comes along to him with a piece of wood fashioned in the likeness of a human being, and informs him, “This is you.” Even when the image hasn’t got a piece of brass driven into its belly, the ordinary ignorant kaffir, confronted with his own likeness cut out of wood, will bid the wood-carver tarry a little while in front of the hut – while he goes round to the back to look for his axe.

  All of this brings me to that wood-carver in Ramoutsa, Radi­palong, who, because the kaffirs would not allow him to carve likenesses of themselves, took it into his head to cut what he thought were images of white people.

  There is no doubt about it that when Radipalong, who was very old and emaciated-looking, confined himself to cutting the figures of animals from soft wood – the softer, the better, because you had merely to look at him to see that he did not like exerting himself too much – then what he carved was quite all right. He could carve a hippopotamus, or a rhinoceros, or an elephant, or a yellow-bellied hyena – the more low sort of hyena – in such a way that you knew that animal exactly, through your having seen it grazing under a tree, or drinking at a waterhole, or just leaning against an ant-hill without doing anything in particular.

  But it was when Radipalong started carving what he imagined, in his kaffir ignorance, to be the likenesses of Boer farmers in this part of the Marico, that we commenced laughing differently from the way we laughed at his wild ducks. Our laughter now seemed to have more meaning in it.

  For instance, Radipalong carved what he said was the image of the Dutch Reformed Church missionary at Ramoutsa, Rev. Kriel. That was one of the first good laughs we had, Rev. Kriel joining in loudly – although I thought that his laughter came from rather too deep down.

  “See how silly that kaffir, Radipalong, makes me look,” Rev. Kriel said to us, one day, after he had conducted a service in Jurie Bekker’s farmhouse. “I brought along this carving that he made of me. I brought it along just for fun. I gave him one shilling and ninepence for it, also just for fun. Look how foolishly he makes my collar stand up, right under my ears. And my eyes – so close together. Have you ever seen such a dishonest-looking pair of eyes before? And the way he makes my chin slope backwards from my bottom teeth… You should have heard how my wife laughed when I showed her this carving. In fact, every time she sees me now, she laughs. I suppose she feels how incredible it is that, in these times, you can still find as benighted a heathen as that old Radipalong is. And the funny part of it is that he seems to take his ridiculous wood-carving seriously. As though he is carving out a career for himself, I said to my wife. Ha, ha.”

  We all laughed at that. Ha, ha, we said.

  After that, Radipalong made an image of Karel Nienaber. Once more we laughed a good deal. That was in the Nienaber voorhuis, where we were drinking coffee. Old Piet Nienaber’s son, Karel, was engaged to be married to Louisa Wessels, and Louisa and her parents, who stayed at Abjaterskop, were on a visit that afternoon to the Nienaber family. A few neighbours had dropped in as well, and, as I have said, there was much laughter when young Karel produced Radipalong’s latest piece of wood-carving. The wood that the image was made of was so soft that it was more like cork. Almost like a piece of sponge, I thought. It seemed that Radi­palong was getting lazier than ever.

  “Just see how low he makes my forehead,” Karel Nienaber said, and we all laughed again, at the idea that that kaffir, who could carve a leopard exactly like it was, should be so ignorant when it came to making the image of a white man.

  “And look at my ears,” Karel added, “the way they stick out. They look as though they have been made for a person twice my size.”

  Again we
all guffawed. All of us, that is, except Louisa Wes­sels. I noticed that she was not laughing at all. Naturally, this circumstance did not at first appear singular to me. It was only right, I felt, that a young girl should not laugh at seeing her lover made to look ridiculous – even though that kaffir wood-carver did not mean to poke fun at Karel, of course. Radipalong just didn’t know any better.

  Nevertheless, there was something in Louisa’s manner that disturbed me. She seemed too quiet. And when Karel Nienaber said, “Just look at my ears,” she had not looked at the wooden likeness that he was holding in his hand. Instead, her dark eyes went actually to her lover’s face. For a few moments she appeared to be studying Karel’s ears, which did, somehow, in that instant, seem to be somewhat too large for the rest of him.

  “And what do you think of the way he has done the rest of me?” Karel Nienaber asked again, and by this time he could hardly talk, he was laughing so much at the kaffir’s absurd misrepresentation of his figure. “Why, he makes my body look all clumsy, like a sort of pumpkin. To move, I would have to go on wheels.”

  Once again I noticed that Louisa Wessels looked at Karel Nienaber and not at the carving. And this time, too, she did not laugh. And so I remembered that young man who had been courting Louisa in the past, and to whom her parents had objected, because they wanted their daughter to marry Karel Nienaber. And I wondered what thoughts were going on behind Louisa’s expressionless features, when Karel came up to her and laughingly placed the image in her lap.

  “You can look after this for us,” Karel said. “I gave Radipalong a piece of roll-tobacco for it, just for fun. I asked him why he used such a white piece of wood to carve my image out of, and what do you think he said? He said, ‘Well, but you are a white man, baas Karel.’ And I said, well of course, I was white but I wasn’t sick. And then I asked him why he had made me out of such soft wood. And – you know what? – he just didn’t answer me at all.”