by Zoe Wicomb
On that third evening, sitting on a promontory with his face buried in his knees and resolving to let the mules be, to leave them to their freedom, he heard a voice calling, Andries, Andries, lift up your eyes and see the glory of God. Before him lay a valley of breathtaking beauty and on the horizon a burst sun edged the clouds with its signature of gold. The voice continued: Servant of God, heed your task. Gather the scattered bones of Adam Kok and lead your people out of the wilderness.
The youth trembled. For looking again at the valley he saw that the pebbles were not pebbles and the hills were not hills. Scattered in the valley were acres of bones, bleached bones picked clean by sun and rain. He fell to his knees calling, My Lord, I am your humble servant, but the voice, not without a hint of impatience, said, Rise Andries, rise, and be a man so that you may lead the Griquas out of slavery. Return to Kokstad and announce to your people the death of Lady Kok at sunset tomorrow.
He sprinted for half a mile before the voice returned to admonish him for not taking the mules who, on his return to the promontory, were waiting, clearly wearied by freedom—of which he thought nothing until decades later when he lay propped in bed dictating his broken thoughts to a fool of an amanuensis for whom weariness could never mean anything other than lack of sleep.
Lady Kok’s death at the appointed time established in the eyes of the people the young man’s powers, his special relationship with God. Andries set about pondering the enigma of God’s words. Some elders thought that the bones in the vision meant that he should consult the medicine men of Sigcau, the Pondo chief, but the pious Le Fleur forbade any mention of such savage practices. Patience, he said, and slow, careful thought would reveal its meaning in the fullness of time, and in the meantime they were to turn their thoughts to the building of a Griqua nation. The bones of Adam Kok were scattered far afield, and the nation was one that did not recognise itself as such. It was to him that the task of upliftment and unity fell, and to that purpose he received the gift of tongues, so that his voice dropped an octave to resemble that of God as he discoursed in the many languages that found their way into his preaching.
One of the unexpected benefits of hearing the voice was the sharpening of his vision so that in the weeks of still, deep thought he found solace in the patterns of miniscule seedpods, or in the infinitesimal wing of an insect, a wisp of gossamer crisscrossed with veins. The world was transformed: a casual glance fell nothing short of penetrating the molecular arrangement of things; a pimple, no longer a blemish, became a honeycomb of cells; a path of dust was like the Milky Way stuffed with stars. In his intense absorption with the microscopic world he failed to notice Rachael Susanna Kok. He did not see her slow sad smile, for that lady, in her starched bonnet of mourning with frills as rigid as etched waves, allowed her eyes and mouth to droop sadly after all those deaths. Whilst her hands and feet were indeed of miniature proportions, they were not to be compared with stomata of leaves or spores of dust. But it was while tracing the flight of a concupiscent pollen sac, a fluffy little thing normally quite invisible to the naked eye, as it settled on the virgin crisp bonnet of Miss Kok that he chanced, some weeks after the voice, to alight upon those sad black eyes. And peering into her heart he saw the first stage to the fulfilment of the prophecy and understood his role, for that heart was a well of kindness, docility, and above all obedience which would ensure that history unfolded without a hitch and according to the vision.
Andries had never before found reason to speak to a woman. How was he to secure this wife? He cast his eyes about the troop of willing disciples gathered about him for an emissary, but then remembered the Word. He was to be a man, a leader of men, and therefore had to accomplish the terrible task himself. Which was just as well, since an emissary might well have missed the lady’s assent. Miss Kok had been expecting a proposal ever since he had peered so boldly into her heart and thus by way of reply inclined her head, a barely perceptible nod that was recognised by Andries as a cipher. He took the miniature hand in his own, thanked her courteously, and explained how her nod had triggered off a series of unstoppable events: that he would eventually have to take her away from her beloved Kokstad; that the Griqua bones scattered across the barren wastes of the Free State, the Eastern Cape, and even far-flung Namaqualand had to be gathered. In short, her nod had signalled a life of trekking. But before further discussion he would have to have the Staff of Office which Rachael Susanna had secreted in her voluminous skirts ever since the death of the captain, which is to say the death of old Lady Kok. As she rose and loosened a tie in the deeply carved small of her back, he felt in the swell of her full-grown steatopygia a spirit moving him to husbandhood. She handed over without a word, and without betraying an iota of the fear he inspired in her, the symbols of authority passed on by Adam Kok I.
It was around this time that Andries anglicised his name, a process which in spite of his growing Scoto-Anglophobia occurred without a hitch. (The implications were wider than he could have imagined. Not only did it show that Griquas were in this respect indistinguishable from coloureds, but the practice gained momentum until the next century, when parents realised that children could from the outset be christened with English versions of their forebears’ names or even with brand new American ones. Such defiance of tradition in turn discouraged nationhood, so that Andrew came to regret setting a trend that so undermined his own project.)
Marriage to the freshly named Andrew did little by way of cheering up Rachael Susannah Kok. All his fine talk about the alchemy of marriage stabilising the humours, making things clear for a person, well, it was all stuff and nonsense, more like a conspiracy that she simply did not understand, even though conspiracy was the very thing on which she had been raised. Her new husband’s energetic to-ing and fro-ing exhausted the good lady. Having become Paramount Chief by dint of marrying Adam Kok’s heir, he was given to practising on her patient ear long sermons on the role of duty, industry, thrift, sobriety, and chastity in the upliftment of the people. As for the long lost diamonds in Griqualand West, the farms stolen by missionaries, or British annexation of Griqualand East, these topics made him storm about the place in fresh rage, beating the syllables of re-tro-cess-ion or com-pen-sa-tion on the table with such force that his knuckles surely bruised. She dutifully praised his speeches although she wished for the sake of her unborn child that he would not get so carried away. Her slow sad smile grew slower as his obsession with work left little time or inclination for cheer. (There is some dispute about the distinctive smile. Some say it came after her marriage; others, that it stems from the misreading of a photograph in which a woman with just such a smile sits demurely to the right of the lively Rachael, a lady I identified as Annie Kok, of purer Griqua stock. However, since we have come to know her by this distinguishing feature, to wipe away the smile or to replace it with another characteristic would only add to the confusion of this story.)
Rachael shook her head in the privacy of the room where her husband forbade an afternoon nap. Sleep was the downfall of the Griqua people, he said. As First Lady she had to set an example so that they would no longer laze about in the sun, dither wantonly before time’s tricks, and be caught out once again by history. Only vigorous shaking of the head would stop her eyes from drifting to the pillow. Andrew had fortunately a number of collars to be turned, socks to be darned, coats to be mended, worn sheets to be cut in half and stitched side to side and the monogram of AAS embroidered once again on the worn edge since the seam, having swallowed an initial, left a sorry AS in the centre.
The many letters that Andrew composed every day, demanding justice from governors, all kinds of deputies, secretaries, and even the queen, he dictated to her, or would give to her to check his writing for words missed in haste and passion. When she said at first that no, she was sorry, but she was not so good at reading and writing, that it was not her kind of thing, he looked at her sternly and said, Never again do I want to hear such nonsense. You have a duty to me, to God, and to your peo
ple; your kind of thing is that duty and nothing else.
She noted the order—that he placed himself before God—but said nothing. Husbands and schoolroom talk, she’d had enough for one day. She developed the habit of holding out her bonnet strings like taut reins while he talked, and as he stopped, of tying them into a bow with firm clipped movements which, functioning like an amen, prevented him from starting up again. He took the gesture as a sign of her resolve to obey. She thrilled at the possibility of his wondering how they came to be untied whenever he spoke, but not once did he ask.
It was not that Rachael was unfamiliar with the business of politics. She had after all been a girl when her father, Adam Muis, organised the rebellion of 1878, but that was an exciting cloak-and-dagger affair of midnight gatherings and the gallop of horses carrying brave warriors into danger. And she too had galloped across the hills with her uncle, the Chief, who said yes, of course, she need not wear a bonnet in the veld. Bareheaded on the barebacked Prince, she knew every inch of the valley, roamed freely across the hills around Kokstad, travelled far in the mind to distant countries, to the cross queen’s green England of babbling brooks, where swashbuckling men on horseback—fine men quite unlike the silly captain who had killed her father—annexed picturesque villages, all while her own horse charged through the dry tamboekie grass. She had sat for hours watching a dying sun paint the sky in streaky, miserly gold, watched the night advance with bolder purples and dreamt of wrapping herself in just such an up-to-date colour, for modernity itself was peeking over the fading hilltops. That such a wrap was inspired by the elaborate dress of the Hlangweni chief, whose furtive visits were growing more frequent, she would be the first to admit. But she had also seen ladies fresh from Europe being lifted out of carriages, so that it was difficult to separate out the influences, for there in the twilight, with time in her hands, things grew wonderfully strange as the colours of the sky leaked into one another.
Her new husband—and the newness stayed until the first imprisonment, when she got to know him better in his absence—said that galloping about the countryside was not dignified, and as the grandson of a missionary, she supposed he knew all about dignity and decorum. Dignity, it seemed, meant a bundle of dreary things for a woman: she had to keep her head covered at all times, was not to throw it back and roar with laughter even in private, and above all, was not to venture outdoors after sunset without an escort. A horse was to be ridden for a purpose, to get somewhere that you had to be; cantering idly across the hills was out of the question. A pity, she thought, and just as well that marriage had brought so much to do; otherwise she would not have managed the business of being a dignified wife.
Now her evenings were spent reading the Kokstad Advertiser in lamplight, for more often than not there was something about the Griquas: the vulgar writings of the Reverend Dower, who chose to believe that they could not read; the devious arguments against retrocession; or the vicious misrepresentation of Andrew’s words and actions. These were her task to collect and relay to her good man. But how her eyes strayed to Mitchell & Co.’s notices of the new consignment of fabrics—voiles, shantungs, white piques, poplins, and silks—frocks and dresses promised in the prevailing styles of Europe, finished according to the correct idea of the moment. There was surely no need for a busy and sensible person to look a fright. Oh, she was not going to give up being a modern woman in the matter of dress. Being a deft seamstress, she would peer into those windows and then re-create the imported styles, and he, it seemed, did not mind. Or did not notice, as long as the newspaper was properly scanned and the cuttings carefully filed. For he would take his place in the evenings, in the upright chair with wooden armrests, and ask her to read an article once more. Then she would remember, without having marked the phrases, to leave out again all malicious references to his person while keeping the flow of the sentence. No mean task in the flickering lamplight, but that, she supposed, was what marriage was all about—keeping a woman on her toes.
But the Chief, David’s Ouma Ragel said, came to understand women in the end. All the troubles turned him into a better, a more loving husband. You see, there is nothing like a prison sentence to soften the most masterful of men, also to keep a man out of trouble and intrigue, she whispered, and most important of all, to keep the politician’s hands clean. And so, you see, he came to call his wife Dorie. His voice was always stern as he said my Dorie, which was, of course, not her name, but it was so nice to hear him sometimes say my dearest Dorie.
Why Dorie? David asked. Was that Rachael’s other name?
No, Ouma said, it wasn’t, clipping his ear for the disrespectful use of Rachael’s first name, it was just the Chief’s pet name for our volksmoeder. Who knows, she said, perhaps it’s short for dorinkie—little thorn. A marriage is never what it seems to others, perhaps that sweet and mild woman was a thorn in his side. Or perhaps not. Your own Oupa Gert, bless his departed soul.…
But it was the fantastic stories about the Chief that David wanted to hear. Thus as a boy he learnt the skill of steering a conversation that later came to stand him in such good stead in the Movement, and in a manner so mild and a voice so girlishly soft that he would be the last one to be accused of manipulation.
And Oupa (whom he never knew) was the Chief’s Man in Namaqualand, who brought together hundreds of Griquas from miles around, he recited. I think the Chief said to him, Gert, her name is Dorie because, because she didn’t believe in the miracles.…
Ag no, never; she was the best, the wisest woman in the world, and the Chief came to rely on her more and more. A thorn isn’t always a bad thing, and what’s more my boy, love has a funny habit of speaking in many tongues.
She stopped to cut the daintiest piece of konfyt for their tea. Just the two of them, washing down the sweetness in the still afternoon heat.
Ja, he didn’t speak to women as a rule, but he became, in a way, a special friend of your great-grandmother Antjie. In her presence he was quiet and respectful, spent many hours at our house just quietly drinking coffee.
Come on, get these sticky konfyt hands clean. Ouma held a mug of water over the chipped basin, but before David washed his hands, he would rub a finger—ouch—into the sores on the enamel.
When you grow up to be a politician, you’ll remember that Ouma kept your hands clean, she laughed, And wipe, just here on my apron, she said as she drew him close. So that with his nose pressed against her he gabbled, More, Ouma, more. Please tell another story, another miracle. But the day was getting long in the tooth; she had a million things to do.
No miracles today. Just the plain old Chief being quiet for a change. Yes, he spent many an hour in our house and never did he call your Ouma Antjie anything but Mrs. Klaassen. In that strong voice that somehow made people remember their failings. But he loved children. He was like a father to me.
This world, my good wife, Andrew explained, drawing up his newly patched breeches without a word of admiration for the fine stitching, but with his back modestly turned, This world is not the place we thought it was. Who could have imagined that the Commission of Enquiry for which I have fought tooth and nail could be turned into such a travesty of justice by Stanford. Chief magistrate, my foot! No, we shall have to petition the colonial secretary in London. God has given each one of us the knowledge of right and wrong, yet everywhere we see the taint of Satan, and it is sadly the case that missionary zeal turns out to be nothing other than enthusiasm for the Prince of Darkness. Note the zeal with which our imperial missionary friends, our men of God, have been stealing our land. It was in good faith that Adam Kok put Clydesdale in the hands of the missionaries to be used for the good of the Griquas, where our people would have owners’ rights and titles in their own names. And what do my enquiries bring to light? That in 1883 the bishop registered Clydesdale in his own name, as his personal property. Let me assure you, there is no confusion over title deeds, there is only the swindling by missionaries. Imagine, that arrogant Reverend Dower on the Forty
Years’ Money, and Andrew affected an absurd voice of rollicking rs with which to mimic the little man: Och, I have pursued this matter for your people but there is nay solution. I rather fear that all church registers of marriages, births, and baptisms up to 1861 were uplifted for official purposes, eh, and now have clean, eh, disappeared, so that even if we were able to sort out this very, eh, complicated matter, a just, eh, distribution of the land would be impossible. Och aye, I would strenuously advise you to forget this, eh, business of the past, when so many mistakes were made on both sides. Far too complicated to follow so let’s look, eh, to the future.
Andrew hunched his shoulders and drew in his neck to imitate Dower’s nodding and wagging, but as Rachael’s giggle reminded him of the seriousness of the matter, he leapt up to proclaim, They will not get away with it! As you all know—forgetting that he had an audience of only one wife—I have been blessed with vision that tells me of the great changes to come about in this land, changes that will leave the greedy capitalist gangs squealing in their ponds of avarice. Yes, he repeated, pleased as punch with the image, squealing like piglets in their filthy ponds.
But Andrew, she soothed, you shouldn’t speak like that of missionaries, remember your own grandpapa from across the waters. Then she saw his green eyes blaze with rage, his body grow rigid, while his voice softened—things being always the wrong way round with him—as he finally spoke: Rachael Susanna le Fleur, there is only one thing with which we need concern ourselves, and that is justice. That is our duty. We are Griquas and it turns out that we must fight foreigners for rights in our own land.