by Willem Anker
I’m one of a small group of Christians staying behind after the show is over. In front of us stand the Hottentots who came to complain of us to Maynier for maltreatment. We take the Hottentots behind the buildings and belabour them with fists and whips and sticks until we’ve had enough. Meanwhile Hannes is standing to one side regarding the Hottentot who used to work for him. After the rest of us have had our revenge on our labourers, he speaks softly to me and his brother Coenraad. The three of us tie the Hottentot down and fling him over a donkey and ride out of town with him. In the hills, from where you can see the town basking in apparent tranquillity, and see the inhabitants tracing their usual routes like ants as if the Company’s rule hadn’t just been overthrown, we kick the Hottentot to death and dig a shallow grave and cover him up and level the soil.
The next day the whole town knows that Maynier and his family have left for the Cape from fear for their lives and that he departed with his wagon and his convictions and nothing else. We also kick out the officials who supported Maynier’s peace negotiations with the Caffres. I’m one of those who kick hardest. Reports reach the town that a member of the Political Council, one De Wet, a true man of The Law if his name is to be believed, has been sent to visit Graaffe Rijnet and report back to the government. My pals and I sit in front of the drostdy and watch the wagons creaking by. After a few days there are not very many people left in the town. The few who stay, stay indoors. Now and again you see a curtain or a screen briefly lifting and the white of an eye peeping through.
The men occupying the town and dubbing themselves Patriots, we farmers who are now squatting in the drostdy or camping in the town, rouse one another to a raging carousal. The freedom so suddenly dropping into our hands and the terror at what may follow, that of which no man dare speak, drive us to a mighty swilling. For more than a week my friends and I hit and howl and drink and laugh and frequently pass out. Van Jaarsveld and the youngest of the Triegard brothers punch each other to a pulp in the street until neither one can stand up straight any more. With a last blow from Van Jaarsveld Triegard stays down. The Redcaptain squats down astride him and brushes his lovely hair from his face and starts punching afresh until a few Patriots drag him off. Triegard’s jaw is broken and he’s bitten off the tip of his tongue. He looks for it and picks it up and then collapses again.
When the Patriots sober up, most of them realise that they’ve signed nothing and have no inkling as to what is actually written in the Te Samenstemming. The men drink a little water and lots of coffee and when the headaches have subsided the Patriots collect two hundred and seventy-six signatures on a petition charging Maynier as a tyrant and his wife as a wanton. Believe me, I, Coenraad de Buys, and my fellow Caffre-copulating Patriots, accuse the officials of indecencies with Heathens. Etcetera the rebellion.
I stay in and around Graaffe Rijnet, sometimes sleep on the floor of the drostdy, sometimes in the veldt. Now and again I stay over on the farms of friends. The ground is hard. In the mornings it’s more of an effort to get up than when I was minding Smut-face Senekal’s cattle. I don’t go home. I no longer have a home. I have too much of a home. After two months De Wet comes riding into Graaffe Rijnet. His retinue – an officer, a secretary and a penman – pitch their tents in front of the drostdy. Olof Godlieb de Wet looks older than his fifty-six years. He questions the burghers politely and is shocked at the crudity of the bush and veldt and farmers. Rumours abound that there’s a government commando on its way to come and murder all the white farmers. I take up position in the street and raise my voice and proclaim:
France stands by all nations that overthrow their rulers!
Here on the frontier you can holler what you like. Stories and rumours wipe one another out. The only facts are the bushes and anthills and bullets and blades.
In June word reaches us of another rebellion; in Swellendam there are apparently also Patriots. Then the news of nine British men-of-war that have anchored in the Cape. A month later word reaches us that Swellendam has already surrendered again.
De Wet quarrels with a farmer about his way of dealing with his Hottentot; on the 16th of June we kick him out of town as well. I stop the Patriots who want to tackle old De Wet. But when they get stuck into his retinue, I participate. My knuckles bleed, skulls crack. Everything blurs, it’s just me, here, now, and the body in front of me.
On the 6th of July Willem Prinsloo and six other farmers proclaim a Citizen’s Government and hoist the revolutionary flag of France. The white and blue remain and the orange turns red and the rebel leaders elect the Representaten des Volks, the representatives of the people, on behalf of De Volkstem, the voice of the people. They refuse to pay taxes to the Company, and to the devil with its laws! They call their government the National Convention. The Patriots, in a spirit of civic goodwill, suggest that Van der Poel, the new landdrost appointed by De Wet, should also, like Maynier, pack his bags and relocate to the Cape. They appoint Jan Booysen in his stead, and in August a local man, David Gerotz, takes over. He is the landdrost and he is the Head of the National Convention and the people are starting to refer to the Republic of Graaffe Rijnet, even though there is no authority whatsoever in charge. Everybody wants to rule and nobody wants to follow and the whole lot has been bankrupted by the Caffres and the drought. They request that the Reverend Manger should stay on to marry people. He tarries a while; then, one fine day, our Lord’s spokesman also vanishes without a trace.
On 16 September 1795 the English officially assume command from the goddam VOC and Viscount Macartney becomes the first British governor at the Cape.
Exactly a year after the uprising our latest landdrost – who’s keeping tally? – turns up at the drostdy: Frans Reinhardt Bresler. The Reverend Manger greets us gawkily. The Cape has smacked him on the wrist and summarily sent him back with Bresler. Despite our threats, seventeen burghers, so help me God, welcome the new landdrost. Gerotz checks the street up and down to see whether my gang is anywhere to be seen, then hastily escorts the landdrost into the drostdy. During the monthly meeting of the National Convention – verily, revolutions end up making bureaucrats of the most hardened rebels! – we summons Bresler to come and explain his presence to us. Bresler sends word that he will speak to us at two o’clock. By that time he’s already hoisted the British flag and rung the drostdy bell. He tries to persuade us to take the oath of allegiance to the British. Not a soul stirs. Through the window I see a young man scrambling up the flagpole. His two friends are egging him on from below. He yanks down the flag and they run away with it. Bresler stops talking when the whole crowd jump to their feet and come to stand at the window and laugh and cheer on the young bucks running down the street with the flag. I get up and walk out and nobody stops me.
The Graaffe Rijnet summers are long and a man gets thirsty and bored. I and a few familiar faces carry a table and chairs out into the street. We load the tables with the last flagons of brandy and genever and glasses and jugs from the drostdy and start whiling away the long hot afternoon. When Bezuidenhout starts target practising on the house across the street, the owner of the house comes running out and lambasting us. My mates first look him up and down and then apologise for our conduct. We ask him what he has that would be in order for us to shoot at. The man instantly makes for his house, but before he can shut the door, we’ve crossed the threshold. We rummage in the house, but don’t find that many targets. Then we hear the bantams crowing in the back yard.
Half an hour later a row of fowls are dotted across the street, buried up to their necks. We take turns to blast off the little heads with their red combs. The man and his sons stand ready next to the street and as soon as one of the little heads explodes, one of them runs up and reclaims their chicken from the ground to go and cook it so that the loss won’t be total.
I take aim. Before I can pull the trigger, a shot cracks over my head. See, the chicken-neck fountain. I turn around and Bresler approaches with a smile and a gun. He is thirty, his wig just as powde
red as that of any other pen-pusher, but his eyes have more of a spark.
What does Mijnheer prefer, a thigh or a breast? I ask.
What is one without the other? Bresler asks.
I’m the only one who laughs, the others look at one another, uncertain what the landdrost wants.
I don’t want to interrupt your feast, says Bresler.
It’s not a feast, it’s just what we do. You must visit more often, Bezuidenhout ventures into the conversation and comes to stand next to me.
While he was sleeping off his hangover, someone plaited his beard like a girl’s hair with a ribbon at the far end. He left it just like that and has been using it all day as a stalking horse for increasingly dirty jokes.
And what is a pirate doing so far from the sea? Bresler asks.
The men gape at him, uncertain whether they’re being mocked, praised or swindled. He puts a hand on my shoulder.
Buys, we haven’t spoken yet.
Can I pour you something?
Please. This heat …
He rubs his red neck. We go and sit at the table while the pirates carry on beheading the chickens.
How can I help?
I’m just coming to shake your hand. Seems to me nobody can administer the law here without your blessing.
I look down at him. He looks up at me, but in a way that doesn’t feel like looking up. My height bothers him not at all. I take a swig from the flagon, Bresler swigs as well. I fill two bowls. I drain mine, Bresler his. Bowl for bowl is drained and Bresler doesn’t twitch a muscle as the liquor swills down his throat swig after swig.
The goddam law is ruining this country, I say.
I thought you were the law … you, the Patriots?
Am I imagining things, or do I see a smile?
The Company was a joke, I say. I could have taken this town on my own. But the English, I hear they’re worse than the Bushmen and the Caffres combined. The Company didn’t govern any goddam thing, they just kept the books. I hear the English guns in Algoa Bay can blow a man off a flagpole in Graaffe Rijnet.
The fucking English yes. They don’t talk, they shoot. That’s why I want to come and talk to you.
The what kind of English?
Fucking. Fuck. The only useful word in the English language. It’s like a good knife. You can use it for everything.
What does it mean?
It refers to something which you fornicate or mess up.
Is it the English for a fokkery? To fok animals, to breed them?
The same word yes, but the English take it out of the stable into the house. Into the bedroom, says the landdrost.
The focking English.
Just so, says Bresler.
He takes the bottle and pours us both a shot. He looks up at the yells of the men. Another bantam has bitten the dust.
Buys, he says, while filling two more bowls: I’m told the Portuguese girls in Mozambique are as pretty as ever and getting prettier all the time.
I look at Bresler and Bresler looks at me.
Aren’t you growing stale hanging around here, Buys? Perhaps a year so on the East Coast won’t be such a bad thing.
I smile at him. We look at each other. Another two bowls of brandy go down. I load my rifle.
Buys, can I talk straight?
Never thought I’d hear such words from the mouth of a landdrost.
The government wants you gone from the Colony.
Are they telling me or are they asking me?
I’m asking you. They’re telling.
I take aim and blast the head off the last chicken.
Goddammit, Buys! Van Rooijen bellows.
Bresler doesn’t look up from his brandy.
And as soon as the English have got their act together, I’m going to have to make you move.
What does it feel like, to sell your soul to the English? The focking English.
It feels as if times have changed.
Times maybe. Not me.
Bresler gets up, drains the bowl and slams it down on the table.
Stay, I say, the bottle is hardly half.
I don’t drink, says the landdrost and walks to his office.
Why are you fidgeting so uncomfortably? Of course it never happened. The truth is never like anybody’s gaudy fantasies, it’s always greyer: Bresler confronted me in the street and said I’d better get out or he was going to have to lock me up – something along those lines. I kept on walking and immediately put the conversation out of my mind.
Doctor Woyer wanders around town in the afternoons and jumps on every soap box in sight and proclaims that a fleet of Dutch and French ships is on its way to the Cape. At the next meeting, on 22 March, the Patriots tell Bresler that we’ll negotiate, but on our terms. Bresler sits listening to the conditions and then he starts cleaning his nails. He pours himself some of the genever on the table. While one Patriot is elucidating his insights into the future of Graaffe Rijnet – phantasms distilled from Woyer’s revolutionary babblings, drunken ramblings with his friends and his hatred of Caffres – Bresler gets up and walks out. Three days later Bresler and the minister are on their way back to the Cape.
Gert Rautenbach and I and a bunch of obstreperous Patriots think it’s nonsense that the Swellendammers caved in so easily before focking Britain. We decide to go and liberate Swellendam on behalf of us and ourselves and nothing comes of this except stirring speeches, an evening’s piss-up and a few bruises.
On 14 June I address a meeting of militia officers, heemraden and Landdrost Gerotz. I say that I have travelled to the kraals of the Caffres and appeased the Caffres as far as possible. The meeting thanks me for my trouble and requests me please to continue these negotiations and nobody seems very interested in my methods. They are without munitions and nobody among them would venture in like that among the turbulent Caffres. Around the end of that year a Hottentot turns up at the drostdy who fled from me because I supposedly beat him. The Hottentot reports that I’m not appeasing the Caffres on the Colony side of the Fish, am rather inciting them against the Christians. I was with the Caffres to barter. All I know is that their beer and women were to my taste. How am I supposed to remember everything that I spouted there?
Shortly after Bresler cleared out, the rebels also leave Graaffe Rijnet. The ridged dogs see the settlement is emptying out and start trespassing across the town limits at nightfall in search of carrion and pet lambs. Campagne gets arrested and deported. Woyer in the meantime has gone to Batavia and apparently persuaded the governor-general there that the burghers in Graaffe Rijnet are in need of munitions. He travels back to the Cape with a shipload of supplies. In Delagoa Bay the focking English are lying in wait for his ship. No aid is forthcoming from overseas. The government embargos all supplies and munitions to Graaffe Rijnet. A small military force under Major King prepares to come and subjugate the district. Forty burghers, under whom Van Jaarsveld, no longer feel up to sustaining their own republic without supplies and without outside support. They write a letter to Macartney and request the return of Bresler and the Reverend Manger. The letter reaches the Cape shortly before King’s scheduled departure. Around me every last burgher subjects himself to the focking English. Amnesty is granted to all burghers except Woyer. Even old Martiens Prinsloo tells me that day:
It’s no use any more resisting like that.
It’s no use, no.
I hold my peace, look around me, my fingers snapping faster and faster.
So what are we to do now? I ask him.
Go home, Buys.
You go home.
We laugh. Somewhere a dog barks.
After two years of absence and silence I ride back to my wives and children where they are still staying with Jan One-hand. The saddle chafes through my ragged breeches. When I see the homestead, I dismount in the veldt. I look in the saddlebag for my rusty needle and I darn the breeches for what it’s worth. Maria says Elizabeth became a woman last month. I missed that as well. My son Coenraad Wilhelm is darke
r than Maria and six and almost as big as she. Johannes must be almost five and has ants in his pants. Maria doesn’t say much but shows me our new daughter, Maria Magdalena de Buys, fat and brown and yowling and born in my absence. Nombini has moved in with Windvogel. I see the one or the other peeking out of the hut, but neither of them risks coming out. I’ve been pondering it for two years. I’ve rehearsed it over and over. The story always ended in the same way. I roam around the farm for two days, then I can no longer put it off. I go and sit in the hut and wait for them to come home. Both of them swear in their own language when they see me. I invite them into their hut. They sit down.
Good day, Windvogel.
Master.
Stop your nonsense.
Coenraad.
A man gets lonely, I say. I know. And she’s a pretty bitch. I know.
Windvogel looks up. He almost ventures a smile, then looks down again.
We are friends, Windvogel.
We are, Coenraad. I’m sorry, Coenraad.
I also took her from another man. Where’s the child?
Must be playing.
Nombini doesn’t stir.
Bring the little mite. Let me see.
Nombini gets up and Windvogel and I sit gazing out in front of us and after a while she returns with the little half-Caffre.
Come here, little one.
We call him Windvogel, says Windvogel. Windvogel the younger.
I hold out my arms. The little boy comes to stand next to me. I touch his arms, feel his legs.
A strong little guy.
He’s going to be big, Coenraad. Big.
I slap the child playfully on the bum and he runs out and falls and runs on. Windvogel watches his child go. I look at my friend. He is proud. He smiles. Windvogel turns to me and something he sees wipes the smile off his face.