“You may as well spend the night with me,” he said to Gert Bekker. “No man can drive his trek-animals past a certain spot near the Molopo drift after dark. The Molopo is nearly eight miles from here. You won’t make it before nightfall.”
Gert Bekker, unlike myself, did not guess what was coming. So he said, no, while he was grateful for Jurie Snyman’s offer of hospitality, we had arranged to stay over with Faan Cronje, who lived just across the drift. Faan was his wife’s sister-in-law’s second cousin on the Liebenberg side, Gert Bekker explained, and he dared not be neglectful of the social obligations when it came to the more intimate kind of family ties.
“But after your mules get a fright there, just before the drift, and they won’t go any further,” Jurie Snyman said, “then don’t sleep out on the veld, but come back here. I’ll be expecting you in any case.”
Gert Bekker, not guessing what it was all about, looked at Jurie Snyman in some surprise. So I was glad that I was at last presented with an opportunity for enlightening Gert Bekker, instead of having had, until now, to receive all kinds of unwanted information and advice from him. For although I might be a stranger to that small part of the Marico around the Molopo, I was not a foreigner when it came to recognising a story, and in the few remarks that Jurie Snyman had made I detected all the signs of the Transvaal’s oldest and most worn kind of ghost story.
“The ghost of a tall woman dressed all in white haunts a spot near the drift,” I announced, “and no horse will go past that spot at night.”
“And she carries a baby at her breast, and the baby cries,” Jurie Snyman added.
“And no grass grows there,” I said.
“And around the woman’s waist is a long black girdle whose ends reach almost to the ground,” Jurie Snyman said again.
At last Gert Bekker was able to find words.
“But how do you know all these things?” he called out to me in astonishment. “I thought you were a strange –”
“It’s all to do with a murder of long ago,” I replied airily. “Shake the reins.”
Before he realised that he was taking instructions from me, Gert Bekker had cracked his whip and the mule-cart began to move off along the road. He waved goodbye to Jurie Snyman.
“You’ll be back here this same night,” was the last thing we heard Jurie Snyman shout.
There was something in Jurie Snyman’s tones that made the afternoon seem later than it already was.
We had driven past the school building and the thatched roof, and past the house of Ouma Theron, the midwife, and past the new Indian store that was about half a mile around the bend, before Gert Bekker again spoke to me. And then I thought that I noticed in his voice a certain measure of respect that had not been there before.
“I suppose it is – it’s all just nonsense, Schalk, about – about that woman in the white dress?” Gert Bekker asked me. “And do you think it really is a white dress, or is it just that all ghosts look white?”
“I am sure I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t know these parts around the Molopo at all. You know what it is when one is a stranger to a place. I thought you were familiar with –”
“I didn’t know all that,” Gert Bekker answered. “And do you think that a murder really was committed there?”
I told him that I didn’t know about that, either. I had merely guessed.
“We should have asked Jurie Snyman more about it,” Gert Bekker said, “before we drove off in such a hurry. We can’t just go by guesswork in a thing like this. When it comes to ghosts you’ve got to have hard facts. Like how the ghost looks, and everything.”
Afterwards, when the shadows began to lengthen, I also started feeling that it would perhaps have been as well if we had asked Jurie Snyman a few more questions …
A little further on Gert Bekker again broke the silence.
“Perhaps we don’t need to go all that way, across the drift, to spend the night with my wife’s relatives,” he said. “We can call on them in the morning. I sometimes think that we Afrikaners lay too much stress on family attachments. It is something that becomes unhealthy if it gets overdone. We can perhaps just camp out next to the road, this side of the drift.”
“Even a good distance this side of the drift will do,” I answered.
“I’ve got some mealie-meal and coffee and boerewors in the back of the cart,” Gert Bekker said again.
“And we can scoop up water out of the next jackal-hole we come to,” I said.
We also said that it would be a good idea to pitch camp while there was still plenty of daylight. We would be able to get together a large quantity of dry branches for the fire.
“And a couple of dead tree-trunks,” Gert Bekker supplemented. “A dead tree-trunk, if it’s a good one, keeps burning all night.”
I did not care for the thoughtless way in which Gert Bekker kept on repeating the word ‘dead.’
After we had eaten the boerewors and drunk our coffee, and had tethered the mules, we crept in under our blankets beside the fire. I wanted to talk about the thing that was uppermost in my mind, but I could sense that Gert Bekker was afraid to talk about it, and that made me also afraid to broach the subject. It is a peculiar thing that when you are alone at night in the company of a person with an ignorant mind, your own sensible outlook becomes clouded by the other person’s superstitions. That was what I felt was happening to me, lying there in the night with Gert Bekker only a few yards away from me.
And, of course – as I learnt afterwards – when Gert Bekker spoke about that night, he always said that if it hadn’t been for my absurd kaffir beliefs, which gradually undermined his own sound understanding and education, he would not have been afraid to sleep right next to the drift, on that very spot, even, where the grass did not grow. He didn’t mind sleeping on the hard ground, he said.
I mention all this so that you can see from it what an impossible sort of person Gert Bekker always was.
Anyway, we couldn’t sleep. We talked about things in which neither of us was at all interested. And we did not speak much above a whisper.
I can’t remember when it was that I first sensed something. I turned my head to one side and what I saw then made me dart one swift glance at Gert Bekker, to find out if he had also seen it. I concluded that he had. Because in a single wild movement he pulled the blankets right over his head. I didn’t see what he did after that, because at almost the same time I pulled the blankets over my head as well. After all – as Gert Bekker had taken so much care to point out to me – I was a stranger, comparatively speaking, to the Molopo area, and I could therefore do no better, in an emergency of this nature, than to follow his example. He had been on the road to the Molopo before, and he would naturally know that the right thing to do, when you get a sudden glimpse of a spectral shape a few feet away from you – a woman all in white and with the fire-light flickering on her ghostly features, and on the child held in her arms – is to pull the blankets over your head very quickly.
I lay a long time in the dark, too frightened to move. The blankets pressed close around my face, but I knew that I wouldn’t suffocate: I was afraid to breathe much, in any case. And I knew only one thing, and that was that nothing on earth would induce me to gaze voluntarily upon that ghostly shape again.
I hadn’t looked, either, to see if she was wearing a black sash reaching to her feet …
I only felt that we had pitched our camp much too near to the drift, after all.
For a long time I heard nothing but the beating of my own heart. I lay like that for hours, it seemed. Then, through the padding of the blankets, I thought I heard – laughter. I listened. No, I couldn’t be mistaken. It was, indeed, laughter of a sort. I would know the sound of Gert Bekker’s empty guffaws anywhere.
The explanation was simple enough. The wife of Piet Haasbroek was in labour. Piet Haasbroek had left for Rustenburg a few days before by donkey-cart, the family’s only form of conveyance. And since there was n
o one else to send, Rena van Dam, the young school-teacher who boarded with the Haasbroeks, had set out in the dark to call on Ouma Theron, the midwife, whose house we had passed in the afternoon. Rena van Dam had seen the camp-fire and had walked up to get our help.
The mules were quickly inspanned and the three of us drove off to fetch Ouma Theron. An hour or so later the midwife alighted from the mule-cart in front of the Haasbroek home. Gert Bekker and I helped in the kitchen, keeping the fire going for hot water. We also sat around in the voorkamer and smoked.
About all of this, however, there still remained one thing that puzzled me – and it was something that I was shy to ask about. I was on the point of mentioning the matter to Gert Bekker on a few occasions, when we were alone together in the voorkamer and the three women were in the bedroom. And for the reasons I have already given you – to do with Gert Bekker’s gross superstitions – I each time restrained myself. And I had the peculiar feeling that Gert Bekker wanted to ask the same question of me, but that something that was almost like fear was holding him back, also.
Round about midnight Mevrou Haasbroek’s child was born. Of course, Gert Bekker and I asked to be allowed to see the baby. And, somehow, it seemed to me that the birth of a child in that house, a little while before, and the murder at the drift, long ago, were in that moment equally lonely and solemn things.
We heard voices in the bedroom, and few minutes later Rena van Dam came out, carrying the child wrapped in swaddling-clothes.
And this shows you what a strange thing the imagination is.
For when Gert Bekker spoke then, he uttered the very words that I wanted to say. And he brought up just that thing that I had been worrying about all night.
“That’s like the child you had in your arms when I first saw you by the camp-fire,” Gert Bekker exclaimed, “before I pulled the blankets over my head.”
From her answer, it appeared to me that Rena van Dam had been a school-teacher in the Molopo area somewhat too long. It must be the influence of the neighbourhood that affected her, I decided. And I felt sad to think that an educated girl should suffer like that from self-delusions.
“When I got to the camp-fire,” Rena van Dam said, “you were both of you already lying with your heads under the blankets. I saw the two of you by the light of the fire when I was still a long way off.”
Bush Telegraph
Boom – boom – boom – boom – boom – boom – those kaffir drums (Oom Schalk Lourens said). There they go again. There must be a big beer drink being held in those Mtosa huts in the vlakte. Boom – boom – boom – boom. Yes, it sounds like a good party, all right.
Of course, that’s about all the kaffirs use their drums for, these days – to summon the neighbours to a dance. But there was a time when the sound of the drums travelled from one end of Africa to the other.
In the old days the drum-men would receive and send messages that went from village to village and across thick bush and by deserts, and it made no difference what languages were spoken by the various tribes, either. The drum-men would know what a message meant, no matter where it came from.
The drum-man was taught his work from boyhood. And sometimes when a drum-man got a message to say that a cattle-raiding impi sent out by the chief was on its way back without cattle, and running quite fast – some of the fatter indunas throwing away their spears as they were running – then the chief would as likely as not be ungrateful about the message, and would have the drum-man taken around the corner and stoned, as though it was the drum-man’s fault.
Afterwards, however, when we white men brought the telegraph up through these parts on the copper wires, there wasn’t any more need for the kaffir drums.
I remember the last drum-man they had at the Mtosa huts outside Ramoutsa. His name was Mosigo. He was very old and his face was wrinkled. I often thought that those wrinkles looked like the kaffir footpaths that go twisting across the length and breadth of Africa, and that you can follow for mile after mile and day after day, and that never come to an end. And I would think how the messages that Mosigo received on his drum would come from somewhere along the furthest paths that the kaffirs followed across Africa, getting foot-sore on the way, and that were like the wrinkles on Mosigo’s face.
“The drum is better than the copper wire that you white men bring up on long poles across the veld,” Mosigo said to me on one occasion.
He was sitting in front of his hut and was tapping on his drum that went boom – boom – boom – boom – boom – boom. (Just like the way you hear that drum going down there in the vlakte, now.)
Far away it seemed as though other drums were taking up and repeating Mosigo’s pattern of drum-sounds. Or it may be that what you heard, coming from the distant koppies, were only echoes.
“I don’t need copper wires for my drum’s messages,” Mosigo went on. “Or long poles with rows of little white medicine bottles on them, either.”
Now, this talk that I had with Mosigo took place very long ago. It happened soon after the first telegraph office was opened at Nietverdiend. And so when I went to Nietverdiend a few days later, it was natural that I should have mentioned to a few of my Bushveld neighbours at the post office what Mosigo had said.
I was not surprised to find that those farmers were in the main in agreement with Mosigo’s remarks. Gysbert van Tonder said it was well known how ignorant the kaffirs were, but there were also some things that the kaffirs did have more understanding of than white men.
Then Gysbert van Tonder told us about the time when he had gone with his brother, ‘Rooi’, to hunt elephants far up into Portuguese territory. And wherever they went, he and his brother ‘Rooi’, the kaffirs knew beforehand of their coming, by means of the drums.
“I tried to get some of the drum-men to explain to me what the different sounds they made on the drums meant,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “But that again shows you the really ignorant side of the kaffir. Those drum-men just couldn’t get me to understand the first thing of what they were wanting to teach me. And it wasn’t that they didn’t try, mind you. Indeed, some of the drum-men were very patient about it. They would explain over and over again. But I just couldn’t grasp it. They were so ignorant, I mean.”
Gysbert van Tonder went on to say that afterwards, through having heard that same message tapped out so often, he grew to recognise the kind of taps that meant that his brother, ‘Rooi’, had killed an elephant. And then the day came when an elephant killed his brother, ‘Rooi.’ And Gysbert van Tonder listened carefully to the drums. And it was the same message as always, he said. Only, it was the other way around.
As I have told you, the telegraph had only recently come up as far as Nietverdiend. And because we had no newspaper here in those days, the telegraph-operator, who was a young fellow without much sense, had arranged with a friend in the Pretoria head office to send him short items of news which he pinned on the wall inside the post office.
“Look what it says there, now,” Org Smit said, spelling out the words of one of the telegrams on the wall. “‘President Kruger visits Johannesburg stop Miners’ procession throws bottles stop.’ Now, is there anything in that? And what’s the idea of all those ‘stops’?”
“Why, I remember the time when the only news we had was the sort the drum-men got over their drums,” Johnny Welman said. “And it made sense, that sort of news. I am not ashamed to say that I brought up a family of six sons and three daughters on nothing else but that sort of news. And it was useful news to know. I can still remember the day when the message came over the drums about the three tax-collectors that had got eaten by crocodiles when their canoe capsized in the Limpopo. I don’t mean that we were glad to hear that three tax-collectors had been eaten by crocodiles –”
And we all laughed and said, no, of course not.
Then Org Smit started spelling out another telegraph message pinned on the wall.
“‘Fanatic shoots at King of Spain,’” he read. “‘King unharmed sto
p. This enrages crowd which flings fanatic in royal fish-pond stop.’”
“What’s the good of news like that to white farmers living in the Bushveld?” we asked of each other.
And when the telegraph-operator came from behind the counter to pin up another little bit of news we told him straight out what we thought. It was just a waste of money, we said, bringing the telegraph all that way up to Nietverdiend.
The telegraphist looked us up and down for a few moments in silence.
“Yes, I think it was a waste,” he said, finally.
Boom – boom – boom – boom – boom – boom. Getting louder, do you notice? The whole village down there must be pretty drunk by now. Of course, why we can hear it so clearly is because of the direction of the wind.
Anyway, there was that other time when I again went to Mosigo and I told him about the King of Spain. And Mosigo said to me that he did not think much of that kind of news, and that if that was the best the white man could do with his telegraph wires, then the white man still had a lot to learn. The telegraph people could come right down to his hut and learn. Even though he did not have a yellow rod – like they had shown him on the roof of the post office – to keep the lightning away, but only a piece of python skin, he said.
Although I did not myself have a high opinion of the telegraph, I was not altogether pleased that an old kaffir like Mosigo should speak lightly of an invention that came out of the white man’s brain. And so I said that the telegraph was still quite a new thing and that it would no doubt improve in time. Perhaps how it would improve quite a lot would be if they sacked that young telegraph-operator at Nietverdiend for a start, I said.
That young telegraph-operator was too impertinent, I said.
Mosigo agreed that it would help. It was a very important thing, he said, that for such work you should have the right sort of person. And then Mosigo asked if I could not perhaps put in a word for him in Pretoria for the telegraph-operator’s job. He would one day – soon, even – show me how good he really was. It was no good, he explained, having news told to you by a man who was not suited to that kind of work. And Mosigo spat contemptuously on the ground beside the drum. You could see, then, how much he resented the competition that the telegraph-operator at Nietverdiend was introducing. Much as he would resent the spectacular achievements of a rival drum-man, I suppose.
The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories Page 38