by Willem Anker
What’s the matter, Coenraad?
Run.
Windvogel’s eyes instantly brighten again.
You’ve got fat, old Coenraad, you’re not going to catch me again.
Run.
Windvogel nods conspiratorially and grins and jumps up and sprints out of the hut. Nombini watches him go, confused. I get up and stoop out of the hut and load my gun and watch my friend running over the plain. Windvogel turns round in running and laughs and checks whether I’m on his heels yet like so many years ago. Then he sees: This time I’m not running. His laugh is gone. He runs and he cries and he shouts No, no, Master, oh Lord Master, please Master! Swift as the wind, he lives up to his name, the name I gave him, the name he gave his son. Soon he is only a speck in the distance. I take aim and believe me I don’t want to shoot. Every muscle in my body screams at me not to shoot. I shoot. The speck drops.
The moon is shining in through the window. I’m lying on top of Nombini. While I’m ramping furiously over her, she utters little whimpers that convince no one. I’ve forgotten what she smells like. When I thought of her on the lonely nights of commandos and rebellions, I used to think that I remembered her smell, so different to that of any other woman. But now, here with my snout in her neck, my rod rammed into her, she smells like every other little Caffre girl I’ve lain with in the last few years. She doesn’t close her eyes and she doesn’t look away. Nobody has ever looked at me like that. I am absolutely alone.
Bresler is back in Graaffe Rijnet accompanied by John Barrow, secretary to Governor Macartney. Barrow is a man who burns the midnight oil penning observations on the country and its people in little notebooks that he’s never caught without. Yes, I, Omni-Buys, devour even the scribblings of this misbegotten misery. See what the blackguard writes about the English deserter who escaped from the Graaffe Rijnet prison: According to report climbed through the cell’s thatched roof. Was locked up for the dirty jokes he told in public. Well, then, you don’t say. Barrow proposes that a world power should take better care over the maintenance of its prison roofs.
In March 1797 Bresler summonses me to appear in the drostdy in a few weeks’ time. There are complaints that I kill Caffres, abduct their women and assault and detain Hottentots on my farm. I don’t show up. Together with one Delport and a counterfeiter I am declared an outlaw. A reward of one hundred rix-dollars is offered for me, living or otherwise.
While we’re sitting and smoking on One-hand’s stoep one afternoon, he says that Van Rensburg, who hates me with a hatred he normally reserves for Caffres, told Bresler – and Bresler told Macartney – that Chungwa is holding me prisoner. That I am passionately anticipating my hour of liberation in the cage in which I’m held. We have a good laugh. And when Jan then tells me of the rumours that I’m staying among the Caffres and am inciting them against Bresler and Barrow, that I’m going to come and invade Graaffe Rijnet with a horde of Heathens, we laugh once more. But watch closely, this time I’m laughing slightly too loudly. And my eyes are not laughing at all.
Note well: If you stand back far enough, or look closely enough, you’ll see how the magma erupts bubbling through the crust and suppurates into the open. Fragments of the crust subside to fill in the absence of the molten centre. Thus the inside is transformed into the outside and the outside into the inside and the planet renews itself and destroys it all and everything has to start all over again in all eternity. There is life on the surface during the interstices between ice and fire.
According to report Ngqika’s men visit Bresler in October 1798. I am told the landdrost asked after me. Apparently said he wouldn’t rest until the Colony was rid of that scum Buys. They say the Caffres were suddenly silent and stony-faced. They talked among one another. All that Bresler could make out from the conversation was the name Khula.
Another fine story that makes me laugh up my leather sleeve: In April of that year there is apparently an Irishman who hangs around Graaffe Rijnet like a blue-arse fly. A drunken Irishman who tells all who are prepared to lend an ear that he’s a prince and definitely not, as they are later to discover, a deserter. An Irishman who is too loud and can’t hold his liquor. Who late at night tells his drinking pals he is on his way across the Fish, to Coenraad de Buys, king of the Caffres.
There are many places to cross the border with a wagon or two and your wives and children, your cattle and your comrades who have also been declared outlaws. See, at one of these crossings there are tracks in the mud: deep tracks of wagons and oxen and horses following one another in parallel lines, and then, barely visible, over these deeply rutted tracks, a swarm of light, shallow dog tracks that proliferate and coagulate and intricate and disperse.
1799 – 1801
1
How much grey matter have I not seen? How many sheep’s brains have I not devoured? How many human brains have not lain at my feet in my time? A squelchy heap of fleshy mush with deep ravines that slurps and spatters under my sole and is instantly forgotten. It taught me nothing.
Come and look by all means, peering into my eyes gets you nowhere. They are not the windows to anything. Behind them only the moist darkness undulates. My skull is fully occupied with two grey fists. Come in, sneak past the eyes, enter by the ears, or panga your way through the boscage of the nostrils. Dart through any of the tiny cranial apertures into the interior. Chart and annotate to your heart’s content, but don’t feel too secure. Here be dragons. Shoot like a seizure through the multitudinous cells. Each more unfathomable than a beehive. On each of them an inscrutable map of my inbred destiny. Name each flickering and fold. Trace each capillary on your map. You have the words, you have your atlas, but you will recover nothing of me here. There are as many pulsating sparks in my brain as stars in the Milky Way. Words can forget about it and mathematics eternally lags behind. As it is in heaven, so it is in here. This anthill swells and swarms so prodigiously that the whole conglomeration starts reflecting upon itself. The Milky Way starts dreaming herself.
My thoughts wander along elephant trails, trodden generation after generation by forebears with longer arms and teeth and pizzles. Your compass chases its own tail. The paths do not lead anywhere, they merely start up and sprout offshoots and turn-offs. You and I get lost in here. We hear the pumping of the artery that will one day rupture.
Carry on tunnelling, through the lobes, burrow through the landscapes where my tongue finds its words and where my fingers discover their purposes; deeper. It’s dark in here. Cast away your map; grope your way along the slippery chilly walls and beware of precipices. Keep going through the raw offal, until you strike the first vertebra. Like the business end of a knobkerrie, the vertebral stem terminates in a sturdy burl. In this knob, things have been stirring since the beginning of time. Regard it well and you’ll swear you can see a lithe reptile slithering over the cold grey hills of the forebrain. While you’re still staring, the silver sliver slips into the slimy slit. This sly so-and-so hears nothing of what the rest of the brain mutters and grumbles. The lizard knows no metaphysics. A crag lizard has such a knobkerrie in its head, and so do I. So do the dogs who are never far away.
This reptile brain is what drives me. I am at the mercy of the juices in my body and the short circuits in my head. For years a constant sputtering combustion and then smothered in mud. The saps and shocks urge me to mark my territory and defend it. I am what I am. I piss on boundary beacons. I ruffle my fur and curl my lips, baring my teeth. I go courting, clothed in all the colours of the veldt. The prancing parade transports me to violence. Here dwells the germ of cunt-quest and buck-death. Evenings of endlessly squatting by the fire. You’ll say that life on the frontier wounds us, that every mortal creature here staggers through life, struck deaf and dumb and always plundering, with the waters of destruction in his wake. I wouldn’t know. I am what I am. I don’t look back. The slitherer in me learns nothing; it does not utter fine language; it does not adapt. It feeds on the iron in my blood. The devil take table manners – its o
nly need is to yowl and roar. My brain and vertebrae are silted up with the residual ooze of primordial wildernesses.
If you want to see me, you must get out of here. Mount the nearest impulse and ride it out of the brain across the spider’s web of nerves. Let go of the fine threads bearing pain and pleasure. Slam yourself into the flesh clinging to the scaffolding of bone clawing at bone. Tear through the network of sinewy muscle. Drift a while with the blood and listen to the soughing organs and the phlegmy smoke-ruckle. Forge to the outside, to the pelt with its cicatrised lacerations. In the books of the Cape they call me white and of French stock, but here on the surface, between the hair and the pores, only the scars stay white. Get off my skin and begone.
You have to stand well clear to see me speeding. Just see how loosely my moleskin trousers fit over the flanks of the bay. I got thin among the Tambookies, miles and miles east of Ngqika and the border and Graaffe Rijnet. It is September 1799. My family I left with the Tambookies; now I’m galloping back to Ngqika. In these last few months Glider has had to carry me great distances.
I don’t want to bore you. I’d hardly settled in with Ngqika and his mother, or I got mail. Just before Christmas 1798 a run-to-rags Hottentot hands me a letter where I’m outspanning over the border, in the lee of the frowning Amathole Mountains, at the end of the charted world, on the edge of the Milky Way. The letter says they’re going to lock up Adriaan van Jaarsveld and in Graaffe Rijnet the revolution is still smouldering under the red soil. It’s Martiens Prinsloo who’s writing. He asks me if I’m in the mood to fock up the English good and proper. While Maria is still gabbling with the Hottentot, I’m already in the saddle.
Just see me racing, back to the kraal of my sort-of-son Ngqika, my shoulders churning, old Glider’s hooves floating as if the earth had relinquished them. My dogs, my extended shadow, as always behind and next to and in front of me. The new leader’s ridge rises high and his ears lie back and he is pure speed and his bark is as nothing to his bite.
At the end of last year I raced just like this, that time away from the kraal, back to the Colony. Believe me, Caffraria was oozing milk and honey and I had just contracted marriage with Ngqika’s mother. Yese, my gigantic bestial wife, Yese with an appetite that obliged me on those mornings after I’d been with her to mount my horse wearily and all too warily. Maria and Nombini were not charmed with my marriage. When I’m at home, the two are at each other’s throats, except if they’re both clambering on my neck. With Yese my yard is manhandled as no Christian’s has ever been. Not that I’m complaining, but the Lord knows there’s not much to do among the Caffres. Beer and meat are brought out all day long and a man needn’t hunt any more than he’s inclined to. Except if you feel the urge to hunt, because hunting is hunting. I must sit in front of my house smoking my pipe and looking impressive because the king’s mother is now my wife and she milks me morning and night. They say she’s a witch and her darling son dare not piss before she’s nodded her double chin in consent. Then Martiens’ letter arrived. So how does a creature like me refuse the opportunity to go and light a firebrand once again under the communal fundament of Graaffe Rijnet?
Now you have to get out of the way. My horse and I are hardly a speck on the horizon. At times you should be able to make out the colour of my eyes – light grey – but this is not a good time. I’m in a hurry.
With all of January’s sweat in my shirt, I join the rebels on Prinsloo’s farm. Everybody is jabbering at the same time. In between the bragging and the foreign French revolutionary slogans I get a grip on what’s happening. Martiens is hoping to assemble a big commando to claim back cattle from the Caffres this side of the Fish. Same old story. He wants to sort them out once and for all and for that he needs a whole stash of guns and a bevy of belligerent farmers. He knew that Adriaan van Jaarsveld was in trouble with the Cape because of some forgery story or other and that nothing could make a horde of farmers hang together like when the English make out one of their number for a rotten swindler. Six farmers recruit twenty others who want to cause shit and this gang bullies and blusters a whole lot of others into joining up.
So then they tell me how Van Jaarsveld was arrested and manacled and was on his way to the Cape with Secretary Oertel and a few soldiers for the trial, when four days later Prinsloo and a few of the men present here today overpowered the soldiers along the way and gave them a good hiding and freed Attie. So now the heroes of the revolution are lazing around picking their noses and calling it having a meeting. As per usual I am the one who has to come up with the plans. I tell the band of mute mules what we need to do with this gang of focking English in the Cape and Graaffe Rijnet. Prinsloo and I write a few letters requesting the burghers in a firm yet friendly fashion to get their backsides to the drostdy on 12 February. We assemble two days before the event at Jan Bosch’s place to ascertain exactly how many ‘we’ are. The meeting soon falls into disarray and fists are flying. I might just have overplayed my hand slightly when I proposed that, given that I was the Caffre king’s new stepfather, we burghers should combine with the Caffres to take Graaffe Rijnet and drive the English back into the sea. That anybody barring our way should be summarily shot to smithereens and their cattle be divided among the Caffres in recognition of their trouble. Well, yes, the brothers in arms were not exactly taken with this proposal.
I’m not far from Ngqika now. Over there, in front of me, lies the Keiskamma. When I pull up to give Glider a breather, you may just think it’s an opportune time to sidle closer. Don’t. As soon as you can smell my breath – meat and charcoal, tobacco, perhaps sweet potatoes – you must know you’re too close. I’ll saddle my horse and rush away and you’ll end up under the stallion’s hooves. In any case. In the end that revolution of Attie and Martiens’ was no more than a goddam letter-writing exercise.
The farmers of the Sneeuberg were grumbling that they had enough problems with the wild Bushmen, and that the English and the Caffres were none of their concern. So a few shitwits like Hendrik van Rensburg and Thomas Dreyer started thinking that we were getting too rough and tried to calm the lot down. I swear it was one of them who went tattling to Landdrost Bresler.
We postpone the whole business to 17 February, by which time we hoped that the Zwagershoek farmers would have joined us. As if things had not got too heavy to handle, I went and wrote a letter to the Zwagershoekers telling them they’d better turn up or otherwise they’d be traitors to land and nation and whatever else and I sign the thing as De Volkstem. I even got my hands on a letter from Bresler to Van Rensburg insinuating – if you were to read it out to the burghers in a certain way leaving out a sentence here and there – that the landdrost was supplying the Caffres with gunpowder and lead. Then the men started guarding the roads so that Bresler was not accorded any help from outside.
On the 17th we’re on Barend Burger’s failing farm near the drostdy. Probably about a hundred and eighty steamed-up farmers. I try to persuade the rabble to sign an accord I drew up. Some or other battle plan with a few words like fraternity and equality and suchlike crud kneaded in between the lines. Doesn’t matter any more: during the ensuing struggle the thing was torn up anyway. The wretched Reverend Ballot turns up and tries, all nervously and stutteringly, to placate us. We give the fellow a bit of a runaround and then we trap him in the house. I make him write a letter to the landdrost asking that His Worship Bresler should please speak to the governor so that my status as a so-called fugitive and outlaw should be revoked, since our minister can find no evil in me and that in his opinion one day I would make an exemplary burgher of their focking little kingdom. The letter ends up Godknowswhere – probably in the postal Hotnot’s little fire on a cold night – and I remain as free as the birds in the Lord’s heaven to be shot to pieces by all and sundry.
We get word that soldiers are on their way. We go and round up His Honour Bresler and make him, with a gun to his mug, also write a letter. This one to General Dundas. Bresler writes that order has been restored
, that no reinforcements are necessary and that Van Jaarsveld should be pardoned. Then also the following addendum regarding yours truly:
The Burgher Coenraad de Buys has also appeared in the Village and requested that it may please Your Excellency to repeal the order given by the Earl Macartney to the Landdrost by an Instruction bearing date 14th February, 1798, by which he has been declared an Outlaw, we therefore beg leave to join our request to his that it may please Your Excellency to reinstate him in his former Burgher Freedom, he promising to Conduct himself as becomes a good Burgher and to answer this favour, and we being able to assure Your Excellency that the behaviour of the said Buys has in every respect appeared to us to be more than worthy of this exoneration.
These winged words, too, failed to have any effect whatsoever. Since any beggar with an ounce of lead on his person could at any time blast me to kingdom come and be rewarded for it and this revolution was nothing more than a protracted dictation session with intervals for roast meat, I found my way back to Caffraria.
I notice that you persist in peeking. Be wary of wanting to read too much into the beard’s first grizzling, the new wrinkles, or the numbed left thumb and index finger rheumatically feeling each other up. I push Glider till the saltpetre shows yellow in his flanks. See me shooting through the valley that lies simmering green and balmy among the mountains. Waterfalls cascade around me from the Mount of Calves. Here I ride my horse hell for leather to where the Tyume spills into the Keiskamma. See, there lie the huts of the Rharhabe Caffres, over whom my immense bride and I have dominion.