Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  The burghers gape at me. I feel bigger than my seven feet, I am kindled by my own voice. My words trickle over them like gum from a thorn tree and render the world viscous and glossy until they’re persuaded that the forgery was a forgery in form but not in spirit. Later I am informed that my audience told the pen-lickers that even though their names were forged they wholeheartedly agree with the contents and that they would at any time upon request come and furnish their names under any such document. I excuse myself as soon as I can and go and pull my pizzle under a tree.

  The VOC is a company on the verge of bankruptcy with a kicked-open anthill for headquarters, and the charge of forgery, as well as the complaints contained in the offending document, leads, as in the case of my overdue rental and tax, absolutely nowhere.

  In September 1789, without cancelling the lease on Brandwacht, I register in my name also the quitrent farm De Driefonteinen on the Bushman’s River, and six months later also Boschfontein, near the Sundays River Mouth.

  Brandwacht has for a long time been trampled by Caffres who come here to hunt and to graze their fat cattle. In 1790 I get a licence to hunt elephants and I pack my stuff to leave. I’ll take my family to Boschfontein, where the grazing is still good and the Caffres are not so much of a nuisance. Then I’ll venture into the bundu on the track of elephants. We are busy throwing the last of the furniture onto the wagon when a cocky little man in a preposterous hat and a ruffled shirt comes riding up. With him are a few Hottentots clutching their flintlocks and their reins. This little whippersnapper introduces himself as Captain Ruiter.

  I’ve heard of this gentleman. The half-Hottentot-half-Bushman deserter servant who went and squatted on the Fish River with a gang of thugs from both the races boiling in his blood. Ruiter’s gang of freebooters plundered the Caffres, until the yellow-arsed gang deserted and left him there to make peace. Not too long or he’s Chaka’s pet poodle. Now Ruiter and his Gonna Hottentots have also, like the Caffres, come and wormed themselves in among the Christians.

  Captain Ruiter with a great show of formality requests permission to stay on on my property. I’ve had it with this botheration.

  You stay here, what’s it to me, I say. I’m clearing out in any case, this land has been trampled to dust.

  Later I will hear what a terrible nuisance the Gonnas were, how the Caffres and the commandos both apparently came to look for Ruiter on my land, and then I will laugh.

  I walk into the empty house; outside, the pregnant Maria cracks the whip and the wagon jolts into life. I stand in the centre of the front room, look up at the rafters, the swallow’s nest empty and crumbling, tap my foot on the anthill floor. I built this house and lived here for almost five years and it was home and now it’s an empty shell of reeds and stone and brittle and cracked clay. I kick a chunk of slate until it gives way and a section of the wall caves in. I tap the floor again lightly, then walk out fast. I think of the earth under the house, the immeasurably heavy weight just under the thin layer of loose anthill soil. I feel something pre-human and stupendous. I ride after the wagon.

  On Boschfontein there is a homestead already, a largish house that doesn’t need much work. The previous farmer left not long ago. Probably back to De Lange Cloof because the Heathens were beginning to graze too close by. Windvogel and I fix the roof and stamp the floor solid and at night I dream of dark waters under the house, stagnant black water without ripples, the smooth surface that is not disturbed, the measureless depth without end.

  Houses on the frontier plain are not rooted in cellars or foundations, these huts of Christian and Heathen alike barely graze the dust, do not penetrate the earth. The hut is deposited on the soil like a nest in the veldt.

  I don’t stay on Boschfontein for long. I see to it that my people are settled, and then I go to see what the sea looks like. I’ve never seen the sea. In De Lange Cloof people sometimes ventured over the treacherous rock faces of Duivelskop to go and fish, but the Buyses and the soft-bellied Senekals never developed a taste for shell snails or fish scales. For my people it was always the bush that beckoned. I stand on a dune and gaze over the water. Thought the sea would be bigger. The water is saltier than I thought. The Hottentots are minding the cattle, Maria is minding the house, I gaze into the distance.

  Maria says she’s tired of forever cleaning up after everybody. She scolds me vigorously when one morning I wrap all the food in the house in a cloth and throw it onto the wagon and try to kiss her and walk away to where my human herd is waiting for me. She looks them up and down: my shadow Windvogel, Coenraad Bezuidenhout, his windbag brother Hannes and Van Rooijen who’s forever whingeing.

  We venture into the kloofs to go and goad elephants. If an elephant is angry enough, you feel pins and needles all over your body and the hair on your neck stands up straight and your whole skin comes alive. Then you shoot. At home you stare into corners. Curl yourself up like an animal in its hole.

  News from Europe is slow coming to the Cape. The fashions at the Castle are apparently almost a decade out of date, but the seditious ideas from France make landfall here faster than any new dress patterns. The words liberté, égalité and fraternité are insubstantial and vague enough to fly over here at speed. In Paris the citizens storm the Bastille in the name of liberty and on the eastern frontier there’s nothing left but liberty. Indeed, as is always the case with messages that have to travel too far, the French slogans have a totally different look when they arrive scurvy ridden and scuffed in Graaffe Rijnet.

  After 1789 the farmers no longer even pretend to heed the Company’s death rattles or the drunken musings emanating from the drostdy. The Caffres, the Bushmen, the Christians – every last one of them more frantic and more violent by the day. Farming families flee to Graaffe Rijnet to devour the last supplies. Landdrost Woeke shilly-shallies and swills. Secretary Wagenaar resigns and the Company appoints Honoratus Christiaan Maynier in his place. Let them all muck up together!

  Alliances are struck and severed; now Ndamble wants to take up arms against the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe with the Christians, then he combines with Langa to hunt down Chaka and Chungwa. The Gqunukhwebe disappear ever deeper into the bush of the river valleys, all along the coast as far as the Gamtoos. See, the Gqunukhwebe and Mbalu are crushed like mealies in a stamping block, like so many other people in so many other places where overripe and overblown powers press up against one another.

  The Caffres soon get the message that a horse and a gun don’t make a Christian immortal. Before long they also notice that the scraps of copper and iron and the strings of beads that the Christians offer for their cattle are a swindle. The destitute leave their kraals and come to work on the farms. If the farmer neglects to pay such a Caffre, or thrashes him too often or straps him to a wagon wheel and takes a few turns with him and then horsewhips him, the Caffre goes to complain to his chief and the farmer is plundered and his house burnt to the ground. At this time many Hottentots in their turn abscond from the farms and go to stay with the Caffres because the farmers mistreat them. When the farmers come to look for their stray Hotnots in the Caffre kraals, sometimes on their own farms, the Caffres chase them away. In 1789 more than sixteen thousand Caffre cattle and a few thousand Caffres are tallied on one quitrent farm. The Christians are spoiling for a fight, but the Caffres cluster together in hordes, not one by one like the Christians who can’t tolerate their neighbours. They no longer beg for food; they now take it.

  I oil my gun. I apply the wood oil liberally. Then I start polishing it slowly. Only two fingers, till both fingers are numb. Elizabeth plays around my feet in the front room. Maria is outside, jabbering with Windvogel. The window is narrow, a strip of sunlight shatters in shards over the rough-hewn table.

  A bureaucracy understands maps, not land. A Company does not understand war, it flourishes in meetings. If you have the patience, come and rummage with me in the archives of the bureaucratic Colony: Woeke, ever leaner and drunker, is told to negotiate with the Caffres. The p
lan is to buy out all Heathen claims to land to the west of the Fish River. Negotiation follows upon meeting follows upon deliberation. Chaka and Chungwa go nowhere. They allegedly bought the land between the Fish and Kowie Rivers from one Captain Ruiter for fifty head of cattle. Nobody knows from whom Ruiter bought the land. Oh, bugger off! The other Caffre captains say they’ll clear off out of the Zuurveld – if everybody clears off, Heathen as well as Christian. Woeke trots home and writes more letters to the Political Council and the Council says Let the Caffres be for the time being, just keep the Christians within our jurisdiction. The Council whispers: We have no paperwork for the other side of the Fish. The Company does what it does best and appoints a commission, consisting of Woeke, the retired secretary Wagenaar and new secretary Maynier, to go and talk to the Heathens. The commission does not succeed in persuading the Caffres of the principle of private property of land. We find your culture charming, says the commission. We’d love to be friends, but please just stay on your side of the river. Once again gifts are exchanged and the pen-lickers sit with slavering mouths and tongues lolling from wet lips and make notes about the physique of the Heathens and the condition of their teeth and the size of the bulges under their loincloths. The retired and reappointed Wagenaar is left on the border on his own, without a single soldier, to maintain the dignity of the authorities and to intimidate all of the Caffre Kingdom with his wig and his stockings.

  Caffres wade through the river and come to collect my cattle; they’re hardly back in their kraals when I go and collect my cattle and a few more. Few places on earth are as busy as the banks of the Fish. Every hunting expedition becomes longer, every elephant scarcer and older and more enraged, every punitive commando more brutal. Around us families congregate in laagers. The authorities don’t send the munitions they promised. I’m quite happy staying where I am. Maria no longer misses me when I’m not at home.

  I lie with my wife and she rubs my head. I look up through the roof beams. I miss the swallow’s nest in the rafters at Brandwacht. My sons Philip and Coenraad are born to me. Just spit and clay, I think. I turn on my side and look at Maria. She’s carrying low, the next one is going to be a son again. There is a new hair growing out of the mole on her ear.

  Graaffe Rijnet at last acquires its first minister, Jan-Hendrik Manger. On Sundays he preaches twice in High Dutch in the school that used to be a stable. When Woeke fails to turn up for a meeting in the Cape, the Company sends Captain Bernard Cornelius van Baalen as acting landdrost. He writes a wordy report about the disorder and corruption, which nobody, with the exception of course of yours truly, Omni-Buys, ever reads. Most people who don’t have to stay in Graaffe Rijnet, he writes, have long since cleared out.

  I and Christoffel Botha with the rotten teeth, and the Bezuidenhout clan and a few Prinsloos smell blood and riches.

  Smell! I tell them.

  What do we smell, oh great Buys? they ask.

  They call me their friend; I call them whatever I have to call them to keep them trotting along in my dust. We persuade all that is a veldwagtmeester to launch a punitive commando. I tell Officer Barend Lindeque and Veldwagtmeester Thomas Dreyer that it’s all the fair weather that causes deserts and that drought can be broken only by storms. I tell them how I caught a thief red-handed. The Caffre was slaughtering one of Botha’s cattle, but when I dragged him to the chief by the scruff of his scrawny neck, the Caffres sent me packing and the pestilence stood there laughing at me. Our cattle are now disappearing every day, but if you go on commando with me, you always return with more cattle than were stolen. They say that on punitive expeditions my gang and I shoot a bit too freely among the Heathens. And apparently we shoot the Caffres who hunt on our farms. But we are big men and strong and what we aim at we hit. We are indispensable on every commando.

  If you mess with us, we mess with you: Langa, whose kraal is now situated on burgher Scheepers’ farm, goes hunting with his warriors. When they get to Campher’s homestead, he locks Langa up in his house. They say the old warrior hasn’t slept for years on account of the pain in his back. Campher takes Langa’s shield and assegais and knife and knobkerrie from him and holds him hostage until the old chicken thief has to buy his liberty with cattle. Hannes Bezuidenhout keeps the sons of two Caffre captains captive on his farm until the captains pay him a ransom of four oxen. Then there’s Hannes’ brother, the scoundrel Coenraad. His brothers I call by their first names, but he is plain Bezuidenhout – he’s the one responsible for the stories about the Barbarous Bezuidenhouts. If you know him as I know him, you know he’s the Bezuidenhout; he is the legend. And besides, there’s only one Coenraad around here. The very Bezuidenhout who farms a different farm every month. He who, when the mood takes him, threatens that he’ll thrash to death every goddam wretch next to the Swartkops River; he who that year locks up Chungwa in his mill and hitches him up like a mule and teaches him with a horsewhip how one makes the thing go around.

  The sky is pressing down when in 1792 after an exchange of cattle I ride home with the cattle and the woman I took from Langa. I am thirty-one and have three farms, a wife and four children, a whole bunch of Hottentots working for me, a multitude of cattle and now also a Caffre princess, barely sixteen with a skin stretched tight and glossy like stinkwood. She says her name is Nombini. She sits up proudly on the wagon as if she’s laced and corseted. Her two offspring can’t let go of the big nipples. The pack of ridged dogs run up and down next to the wagon. They chase one another, snap at each other in play, and drive the oxen mad. In the clouds the first thunder is crackling. When we crest the ridge and see my farm on the plain, the Sundays River shines like a Milky Way and my house with the candlelight in the window and the fires of the Hottentots working on my farm and the fires of the Caffres who graze their cattle on my farm are scattered like smouldering stars in the dark grass. When we get closer and ride in among the fires, the constellation disintegrates into mere points of disconnected light.

  There’s no end to the rain. The thatched roof at first keeps out the water and then no longer. Whoever used to live in the house before knew how to build a decent chimney. Maria is sitting with the new-born Johannes at her breast, Elizabeth with little Philip and Coenraad Wilhelm on her lap in her usual place next to the fire. Coenraad Wilhelm is sucking at her thumb. Then also Nombini and her children.

  I chase the chickens up into the rafters and scrabble a place open for myself between the cat and the other cat and the pig that nobody can keep out of the house any more. Maria and Elizabeth are scared of the thunder. Elizabeth is sobbing. Maria busies herself placing the few basins under the leaks, so that her hands shouldn’t tremble. Nombini and her brood are dead quiet, look around them at the mealies and the biltong and tobacco and pots and pans hanging from the purlins. The animals make only the most essential movements, so as not to lose warmth. Nombini gets up and looks at me and Maria and picks up a porcelain bowl from the table and sits down again and holds the bowl in both hands and rotates it slowly between her fingertips. Maria lets go of the basin and grabs the bowl from Nombini’s hands and puts it back on the table. Nombini comes to sit with me where I’m trying to file down an ingrown toenail with a wood file. The children look at one another and look at the adults and are quiet and then they all start howling in unison. Maria trips over the cat. The cat yowls and the children get a fright and break the rhythm of their crying and then carry on howling.

  Goddammit, Buys, there isn’t room for everybody here.

  I press Nombini to me and say something in her ear and she goes to sit with her children. Maria cooks meat, throws sweet potatoes into the pot. The few tin plates I haven’t yet melted down to harden my bullets are set out on the table. My wife and children and I seat ourselves. My new wife and her children go to sit in the corner. I tell them to come and take a seat. We eat. Nombini licks her fingers clean and her mouth is anointed with fat. Maria watches me watching this stranger wrapped in her kaross, the long legs. I speak to her in Xhosa and she do
esn’t say much. I speak to my children in Dutch and now and again I peep at Maria.

  I take the Bible from the shelf.

  Come let us worship.

  I undo the copper clasp and open the great book, dust puffs up into the air. Some pages are missing. Things get left behind if you carry on moving. I read solemnly. I watch Maria closely, knowing how with each holy word I try to soothe and placate her, and seeing how the damn words don’t achieve a thing.

  Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah, I read out.

  Nombini’s fingers once again grope for the cold porcelain. She takes a red bead from the folds in her kaross, drops it into the bowl and watches the bead spinning around on the base. Is she wondering who is rubbing the hurt out of Langa’s back tonight? She turns the bowl round and round, looks at the fine blue patterns in the porcelain without beginning or end. I understand only too well, with the coming of evening people feel sorry for themselves, but she’s got to stop this bullshit. I see that little lower lip tremble. Should I feel sorry for her? The Caffre woman has never in her life seen a plate of food such as the one she’s just devoured. Poor thing, does she see in her Heathenish mind’s eye the Christians cantering into her kraal on their great horses, the hooves kicking dust into the calabashes of water that she and the other young women fetched from the river?

  And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah.

  The girl is strong, her lip is no longer trembling. Still, while I read, I wonder about my new wife’s faraway eyes. Whose little bead is she rattling like that in the bowl? I know what you’re thinking: She’s scared, she’s a child and she’s far from home. Rubbish! You haven’t spent days on end with her on a wagon. You don’t know what’s swirling around in that pretty little head. I read, but all I see is how she rubs old Langa’s shoulders, how his back relaxes under her hands, how she lies listening to him snore. All the nights she spends lying against that skin that death has already started picking from the bones. Does she see stars when he spurts in her? Was she proud of her husband when he came forth from his hut and stood up straight and took off his kaross and pushed out his old chest and walked towards us, the Christians?