Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  At home I bustle to and fro around the place and at night I lie awake. Maria manages after a few days to drag the story out of me.

  And so they let you go just like that?

  They wouldn’t shoot a man for a hyena and a few apes.

  You know they shoot for far less.

  How must I know why they didn’t shoot me.

  You were angling for it.

  I went back for the animals on that wagon. I knew I was going to blast the daylights out of whatever was let loose in that kraal.

  Oh come on, Buys, I know you. You also wanted to see what they would do to you. The Graaffe Rijnet boys.

  I’m silent.

  You didn’t shoot the dogs?

  What for? They’d been tamed already.

  In winter when the river can hardly flush away your piss, my comrades and I and our Hottentots trek through the bushes and kloofs and river to Caffreland and return with cattle from the Mbalu kraals. A few nights later Langa’s people trek through the bushes and kloofs and river and get away with cattle from my kraal. A few days later I trek through the bush-grown kloofs and the dry river and return with Langa’s cattle, and a few days later Langa treks through the overgrown kloofs and the Great Fish River and returns with my cattle. Langa is eighty and he’s always fought and he’ll always carry on fighting.

  When I come home on a strange horse with a herd of strange cattle and a wagonload of ivory, buck hanging from the wagon tilt, and guns – chests full of smuggled guns – Maria comes running out of the house and she takes up position a few paces in front of me and I walk up to her and she steps back and stops when I stop and looks down and closes her hands tightly over her thumbs and presses her hands to her sides and looks up quickly:

  Your child is dead, she says.

  The baby was buried behind the house against a hill, a heap of stones piled on top of her little carcase. Maria takes me to the heap of stones. I have still not said a word.

  You couldn’t have waited? I say.

  How was I to know when you’d be coming home? You’re forever drifting about.

  I am silent. I sit down and pick up one of the stones. I stroke it, knock it against another stone.

  I should have waited with the burial, she says. But I didn’t think you’d mind. You were gone. It was starting to stink.

  That’s all right, I say. It wouldn’t have been of any use.

  I wait for the afternoon to heat up properly. I go and chop wood and ride a distance on my new horse that does not yet recognise my body’s signals. The following morning I’m awake before sunrise. I walk up to the hill with a pickaxe. I hew rocks from the incline that one day when we’ve all copped it will become a mountain. I take out the rocks and split them further until I can pick them up. When my people come and ask whether they can help me I chase them away. I carry the rocks to the heap and pile them on my daughter’s body.

  After a week the pile is higher than the house and wider. Maria comes to stand before me with her arms akimbo.

  You never even gave her a name. You never touched her. She was nothing to you.

  Now she’s become something.

  She wasn’t a heap of stones.

  I can touch the stones.

  In the course of the next few days I spend less and less time with the stones. The new horse is clever. The person from whom the Caffres took him, whoever he was, had taught the animal things that other horses don’t know. The horse is big and dappled, and when he runs, the speckles blend into a snowy nightmare bearing down on you. My flame-haired Elizabeth can’t keep her eyes off the massive animal that runs so fast. It looks as if his hoofs don’t touch the ground, as if he’s going to slide into the air and rend it apart. She draws a picture of the horse in the sand and shows it to me. The horse has eight legs. She names him Glider and I call him, for her sake and despite my aversion to animal names, Glider. I teach my daughter to ride the horse. I teach the horse subtle signals that others won’t notice. I teach the horse to pick up its hooves all the way under its chin and put them down thunderously as the Frenchman’s horse did, but with more fury.

  In these days it comes to pass that a couple of cattle disappear every now and then. When the herdsmen come to complain, I tell them to shoot when they see Caffres wandering around where they have no business to be. I hand out guns. When the number of missing cattle on my farm increases to about twenty, Coenraad Bezuidenhout turns up on my turf. I’ve heard stories about this farmer, one of the most notorious in the district. I offer him a bowl of coffee. He says, Pleased to meet you, we must join forces against the Caffres. He’s heard I can shoot like no Christian in these parts and that my horse can outrun an assegai. He says talents like that should not be hidden under a bushel. Bezuidenhout and I and a few armed Hottentots set out for the Caffre kraals and return a week or so later with more cattle than were missing.

  Elizabeth talks to me about the horse. I’m allowed to lift her onto the horse. In the evenings I go to add more rocks to the pile until one evening I start chucking them down. I climb onto the pile and look around me and then I start breaking down the pile. When all the rocks are lying about around me, I call two Hottentots and order them to cart off the rocks so that nobody will ever see that there used to be a pile here. I leave only the few stones of Maria’s little heap. I walk into the house that evening. Maria is a few weeks pregnant and is salting biltong.

  May I ask? she asks.

  What for?

  That night the little woman holds me tight and strokes my head and slowly rubs me hard. I mount her and she touches me gently and tenderly and that infuriates me. She becomes aware that I’m trying to hurt her; she goes quiet. Later we lie together, careful not to touch each other, like two wounded animals.

  It’s in that year or the next that Gert-who-remembers-the-pigeon absconds. Just check in the Colony’s documentation how the baptised bastard-Hotnot Gerrit Coetzee starts tattling. Read there how the scoundrel in 1793 declares on oath that I, on pretence of hunting elephants, cross the Fish River to the Caffres and rob them of their cattle, as many as I see fit. According to the declaration, I drive the cattle to my farm and if the Caffres object I make them lie on the ground and then I flog them with whips or sticks or whatever. The bastard of a convert declares further that in the course of one such incident I allegedly instructed the Hottentots Platje and Piqeur to fire on the Caffres. The first-named killed five and the last-named four. To this the reborn Hotnot then adds a declaration from Platje that testifies to my so-called mistreatment of my goddam farm labourers.

  Look me in the eye and ask me straight out and I won’t deny any of this. Why should I? I listen to these accusations and I nod. I don’t know and don’t care a damn where he digs up these stories, but don’t tell me that that god-cursed lump of typhoid-turd called Gert ever went along on these raids. That Hotnot couldn’t have hit his own misbegotten foot at close range. I would never have taken him along. He was there about as much as he ever played with Noah’s pigeon.

  On 21 March 1788 I receive a letter from my uncle:

  My heartily commended nephew Coenraad de Buys

  I have to inform you that Langa has let you know he demands payment from your good self for beating his Caffre, otherwise he will immediately attack afresh. He considers it a challenge to himself and the Christians must not think that he is scared of waging war.

  With greetings from us all.

  I remain your uncle,

  Petrus de Buys.

  I don’t receive many letters and I save the letter and read it again and again. While I’m reading it, my fingertips tingle.

  3

  And it comes to pass in these days that there is strife in the royal houses of the Caffres like unto the strife in the royal houses of Europe. While the French start honing guillotines for royal gullets, the Caffres also wipe out one another for new kings and new orders of things, and the horizon in Africa, like that in Europe, is full of smoke and empty of everything else.

  If
I’d known the saga of the eastern border before moving there, I’d never have set foot there. If you want to relocate to the eastern frontier, be sure to bring more munitions than books. You can survive in the here and now if you can shoot straight, but history is going to snap your spine and kick you while you’re down.

  I understand that you want to get to the story; the murk of history surrounding me makes things hazy. But I was part of that bedlam, the bushes and the blood and the young Caffre girls, but also the dates. So let’s keep it short and sweet: Paramount Chief Phalo rejoins his ancestors in 1775. For his sons Rharhabe and Gcaleka, too, life is a thing full of sound and fury that has to rage itself out so that they can depart from it. Gcaleka follows his father three years later. Rharhabe, like so many fathers then and still now, has to see his son and heir, Mlawu, choke on his own blood and die rucking with a spear in his chest. He arises from the corpse of his son and fights on against the Tambookies until he also dies on the same plot of ground and the year is 1782.

  Mlawu’s son is Ngqika and he still sometimes rides piggyback on his mother and plays in the dust and runs around with scuffed knees and cannot yet rule. Mlawu’s younger brother, the great general Ndlambe, assumes a seat on the adorned ox skull before the Great Hut and keeps it warm for the little prince. Ndlambe is a warrior and his people love him for it. He is big and strong and not four years old. He understands war and carries on waging war. He immediately resumes his father’s campaign against the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe, because sons wage war for their fathers. His discourse is muscular and supple like his limbs and drenched in ideas about the never-ending struggle for self-preservation and suchlike crud that in all times has fouled the lips of men who have to rule, but know only how to fight.

  The Caffres have no central authority with whom the Company can negotiate. When the Company in a state of mild confusion declares a river a border and a farmhouse a drostdy and sends a retired Stellenboscher and a handful of mounted constables to guard this border, the Caffres only see a river where the border is supposed to be and they stream across it. On the eastern bank of the Fish River a drought decimates the cattle and the game, and a regent decimates the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe. The Mbalu and Gqunukhwebe and their cattle move in among the Christians and their cattle on the near side of the river. They roam across quitrent farms in quest of pasturage and game and survival, trapped between the belligerent farmers and the battle-ready Rharhabe warriors. The Christians and the Caffres both farm with cattle and both regard their cattle as their wealth. Both dwell in reed-and-wattle huts, have dominion over their wives and pray to their gods who demand similar sacrifices of flesh and fire. The Caffres have the numbers and the Christians have the fancy script of loan contracts and Bible verses. The numbers produce no algebra and the script no pretty poems, nothing but blood. The Christian tribe of Europe gets annoyed and the Mbalu tribe of Langa gets annoyed and the Gqunukhwebe tribe of Chaka melts away into the impenetrable maws of the kloofs.

  Chief Langa is the brother of Gcaleka and Rharhabe and like them also a man with a temper. As tradition dictates, he leaves the stormy environs of the home of his father, the House of Phalo, as a young man and establishes his own captaincy. Langa is a hunter of elephant and rhinoceros. The House of Mbalu, renowned for its bellicosity and bravery, this most warlike tribe on the border, is named after Langa’s favourite ox and in this year of our Lord 1788 Langa at eighty-three still has all his teeth.

  Farmers no longer dare leave their farms. When Cornelis van Rooijen sends his labourers to drag up thorn branches for his cattle kraal not half a mile from his house, a horde of Caffres come rampaging out of the bushes with shields and assegai and chase the wretched Hottentots back to the homestead. He says the farm is no longer his. He says they set fires, they come and ask for food with weapons in hand, they pilfer, they overgraze the veldt, they murder the tame Hottentots and they trample the wheat.

  When Ndlambe and Langa combine to take up arms against the Gqunukhwebe, Chaka’s followers suffer huge losses of man and beast. They trek westward into the Colony and settle down. Langa takes almost all Chaka’s cattle; his Caffres are impoverished, therefore they hire themselves out to the farmers for food and cattle. In the late eighties of the eighteenth century there are thousands of defeated hungry people swarming into the Colony and starting to steal the farmers’ cattle. A godawful mess. Here endeth the history lesson.

  At twenty-six I’m in my prime of life and all the world knows my name. My Hottentot shoots one of Langa’s warriors and the old goat dictates the letter to me that Uncle Petrus refers to. Later in 1788 I am summonsed for three schellings’ overdue tax.

  The pen-pusher, with his clothes that don’t take kindly to dust, brings me the summons and stares unabashedly at the brazen Hottentot woman and the bare-bummed little bastard bustling about my knees.

  Mijnheer, there is also the matter of Chief Langa who charges you with assaulting one of his Caffres? he says.

  I went to retrieve my cattle. The Caffre with the cattle resisted, yes. So I chastised him. Mijnheer.

  Mijnheer Buys, it is the exclusive privilege of the authorities to administer punishment.

  I smile:

  You have no authority over the Caffres.

  I ignore the summons. It comes to nothing. Shortly after this I forge the signatures on a petition against the Company.

  The surrounding farmers get to hear of my shooting skills and my lightning-fast horse. They are told that I can read and write better than any of them. They hear me talking and some of them grumble that I swear something dreadful, but they can see everybody listening to me. They come and drink Maria’s coffee and they blarney and blandish me until I agree to attend their meetings. At one such meeting of aggrieved farmers I say just enough to allow them to think that they were the ones who decided that I should draft a petition to the authorities. I record the farmers’ complaints about the Caffres and ask the authorities to investigate the matter. Five people sign their names to this: yours truly, Lowies Steyn, Johannes Hendrikus Oosthuyse, Pieter Viljee and Hendrikus Vredrikus Wilkus.

  Then I write a second letter. I correct one or two spelling errors and slip in a sentence that wasn’t there before. The farmers are fed up to their back teeth, pissed off, says the sentence. If the authorities are going to do nothing we’ll go and claim back our cattle and drive the Caffres back over the Fish River ourselves. I must confess, below this second petition (dated 11 August 1788) I myself sign the names of nine people: the original signatories, excluding my name, and then also the names of Pieter de Buys, Gerhert Scholtz, Cornelis van Rooijen, Vredrik Jacobus Stresoo and Andries van Tondere. I create a distinctive signature for each of them and, even though mine is missing, every signature is sullied with the flourishes and curlicues of my own name.

  Go and look by all means, the tracks have been covered up. These petitions, original or otherwise, went missing even at the time in the self-perpetuating and proliferating labyrinth of colonial red tape. The letters may have got lost, but the all-seeing VOC finds out that they are forged and they vomit accusations and judgements all over me and my good name. Any orator will tell you that the truth is the best sparring partner. At the next meeting I get to my feet and smile my smile and address the Christian soldiers.

  I stand before the men, solitary amongst the accusing eyes in the front room of a crushed farmer. They look up at me, even the ones standing. I’m the tallest, the biggest man here. I open my trap and believe me, neither my wife nor my friend nor my child, neither my labourer nor my horse, has ever heard me talk like that. My voice is a honeyed bass, not the normal growl. I am voluble and fluent. My voice adapts its pace to the secret rhythms that inflame and enchant people, that persuade them that what they are hearing are lucid and logical arguments, especially where the head and the tail are wrenched as far as possible apart in my serpentine sentences, so that they convince themselves that somewhere some sense must be lurking and that in my euphonious outpouring I’m connec
ting up things that they have never before considered in conjunction, possibly because I end each sentence on a platitude, but one hailing from a totally different sphere to the rest of the sentence, a tail to the sentence like that of a scorpion with a sudden sharp sting at the end, the right words in the right places when they most want to hear them and then a sudden about-turn that leaves them gaping and that then inspires me all the more to new heights and clichés and makes me rampage on at ever-increasing volume while my eyes never release theirs, eyes that gullibly and hazily plead for more, eyes that cannot let me go but don’t see me at all, an audience at my feet gobbling up their own shit – which I merely dish up to them in appetising form – for sweetmeats, and never for a moment wonder about the smile that at times, during pauses in the ever-waxing sentences, fleetingly and involuntarily plays around the corners of my mouth and vanishes, and I can see that not one amongst them considers that one can smile and smile, and be a goddam villain.

  I persuade the burghers that I, before the only and most supreme God, was assured that what I wrote was the truth that indeed has already taken root in the heart of everyone there present. I signed their names in the firm conviction that, had time permitted, and had I had the privilege of their presence, they would have dipped the quill and would have inked in their names themselves under my words, which if the truth be known were also their words.