by Willem Anker
So at Bruyntjeshoogte the rabble run up against the focking government’s guns and Prinsloo and a hundred and fifty dust-farters all too readily lay down their arms before Vandeleur’s shiny booties. When they are questioned, the scumbags jabber and gabble and spill their wettest dreams about Coenraad Buys who is raising a Caffre army against the English. Must have been affrighted of the general; he was reputed to have dealt one of his own soldiers eight hundred lashes for a bit of light plunder. Caffre armies were at the time the last thing on my mind. I merely wanted to get away from these farmers who sit all day chewing the cud and having endless meetings and then after all the grazing and guzzling don’t manage to squeeze out a single seditious turd. They deserve the focking English. Needless to say, the whole lot of losels surrendered or took to their heels without firing a single shot. A few of them, the best of the worst, ended up here in Caffraria by the skin of their backsides.
So we learn later that Vandeleur was too shit-scared to come and look for us. He sends the so-called Commandant Hendrik van Rensburg to come and blast us full of holes – that would be me, Bezuidenhout, One-hand Botha, Christoffel Botha, Jan Knoetze, Gert Oosthuizen, Piet Steenberg and Frans Krieger. On top of that the focking government places a thousand rix-dollars on each of our unoffending heads. The bumcrack-boil of a Van Rensburg was according to report looking for a few men stone-stupid enough to come and turf me out here when the Third Caffre War broke out. My rebellious chums and I were clean forgotten, because behold: The border is on fire all over again, some say as far as De Lange Cloof. But at Ngqika’s the grass was lush and the fleshpots overflowing.
What does truly itch my arse is what I read some two centuries later in my incarnation as Omni-Buys. About how the whole cursed war was supposedly also my doing. Goddammit, at the time I and my brood and Stoffel Botha’s crowd were on our way to go and look for the Portuguese on the East Coast and that too was a bugger-up that forced us to outspan for quite a few months with the Tambookies, way off in the bundu, where not even letters or lies about the war reached us. It was among these very Tambookie Caffres with the prettiest daughters – I earmarked one for myself there – and the fattest cattle – I earmarked quite a few for myself – where I had to abandon my wives and children when my high-born stepson let me know that I had to stir my stumps, because there was crap in the land of the Caffres.
And so it is back to Ngqika’s Great Place that Glider and I now gallop at breakneck speed. Oh, it’s a beautiful place through which we bolt. From fleshy grey elephant grass the blood-red flowers of Caffre trees spike at intervals, and the pale prickles of the lushest thorn trees. The veldt gets greener with every step, a lighter land with brim-full streams flowing from the thickly wooded mountains. I curse my horse past the blesbok and blue duiker and this morning a leopard disembowelling a monkey.
The Great Place extends over a green hill with a long slope gradually descending to a stream. Clusters of huts and cattle kraals and in between the fine web of footpaths. Between the homes there are no trees, the soil is trodden solid. In the centre a reed hut larger than the others, the king’s hut, and on either side of that the huts of his wives, in deferential rows to left and right. In front of the larger hut is an open plot of ground where the king and his advisers meet and where he holds court. And it is here, a stone’s throw from the kraal, where I rein Glider in and from where my stallion slowly trots through the people with hooves gracefully lifted and firmly and dignifiedly set down. I leap from the horse and ignore the crowd and walk straight to where I can see Ngqika sitting with two sunburnt palefaces in comical Sunday suits. The king of the Caffres gets up from the anthill and approaches with a flash of white teeth.
If you’d lost sight of me for a while, this must be where you catch up with me. Here, on the 20th of September 1799, with the rolling hills like the haunches of hogs for ever and beyond. As in all times, everywhere the droning of parrots and tree dassies and loeries and baboons. It is here where you now see me embracing the king, this son of mine, almost as tall as I. You’ll try to read my face, but remember: What you take for emotion is just the contraction of muscles.
Ngqika is young and strong and comely. He wears a long garment of leopard skin. On his head is a diadem of copper and another of beadwork. His cheeks and lips are painted with red clay and in his hand is an iron knobkerrie. The king takes his seat again on the anthill, the knobkerrie across his knees. I stand next to him and his captains come and sit around us. Behind us the king’s wives, further back a hundred or so of his people.
Whatever was happening here before my arrival has upset everybody. The Sunday suits gawk at the Heathens surrounding them and then they gawk at me. One of them is tall and thin and tattered with an almighty forehead and the other is short and sweaty with fat fingers. Ngqika whispers that they are here because a god spoke to them. He wanted me here before he spoke his mind to these sorcerers. I praise him for his circumspection. The king puts out his hand and shakes the hands of the Sunday suits as I taught him. He asks the missionaries, through my mouth, for whom the tobacco box full of buttons is intended. The older missionary, evidently of the two the senior emissary of the Lord, replies that it’s the king’s own tobacco box. They are returning it to him in token of the fact that they are indeed the men to whom he sent it when they requested permission to step onto his land. They did not want to return it empty. He speaks in dour pure High Dutch. Ngqika thanks the men in Xhosa and I thank them in the expanding and contracting Dutch of these parts. The king says he is overjoyed to note that the government realises that he’s the greatest leader beyond the Fish, since they’re sending their sorcerers exclusively to him. Furthermore he’d like to know what their intentions are and what they want from him. I translate the second half of his speech. The missionary replies that it is their intention to instruct the king and his people in matters that will render them blessed in this life and also after death; that they are merely asking his permission to settle in his land, and expecting his friendship and protection, as well as the liberty to return to their own land when they should want to do so. As who would not. I convey the essentials to Ngqika.
While the missionary is talking, I scrutinise the fellow. A scrawny old man, probably in his sixties, solidly built, with a slight stoop, a delicate skin scorched red, the enormous forehead peeling, no hat or socks in sight. Balding, with long brown hair in his neck, a dusty black suit, the shirt and shoes in tatters. His face is long and finely honed, sharp nose with a network of bloody capillaries, small eyes, set wide apart under high dense eyebrows. A delicate sensitivity, as of somebody from a liberal-minded world, a world that can exist only as a corollary of war and imperium. A mildness that can flourish only in a sheltered life. Above the dark rings his eyes are watery. In them I read an instant and instinctive trust, something that you rarely see in those who carve out an existence threshing and thrashing on this soil. But the way this wretch carries his body testifies only to a struggle, something that claws and bites, that gnaws at him if he doesn’t feed it. The missionary bows deep and extends his long-fingered hand.
Doctor Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp. The title was gained in the study of medicine, but I am here to gain souls, he laughs.
I don’t laugh. He gradually unbends himself from his ludicrous obeisance:
I assume you are Mijnheer Buys and I hope you understand that the Lord has sent me to proclaim the gospel to these people, as soon as I have mastered their language.
I speak to Ngqika and Ngqika talks to me and I tell this Van der Kemp that the gospel must indeed be proclaimed to each and every one of God’s creatures, but that they have arrived at a sorely inconvenient time. That the whole country is on fire, but that Ngqika, the true king of all the Xhosas, who desires nothing but peace and calm, is not in any way embroiled in the hostilities between the British and some of the Caffres.
Ngqika says the missionaries can’t settle with him. He says he can’t protect them, just as he can’t protect his own people a
gainst his enemies. Kemp says there are only two of them and under the aegis of no flag; they will look after themselves. He says that there is nothing to be done about the disasters of war, other than to endure them in patience. That they are not asking for any other protection than what the king provides the least of his subjects, like, the blighter adds, the protection enjoyed by Mijnheer de Buys himself.
The king grants permission for them to outspan and pitch their tent. Van der Kemp hands out the rest of the trinkets he brought along to the king, his mother – Yese, oh Yese, you lusty witch, my splendid bride with the big belly and the softest behind and besmeared all over with clay – and his uncle Ndlambe, who nowadays under coercion bows his head to Ngqika. Old Ndlambe is leaner, the muscles are showing again. The royal family inspect the presents minutely. Yese drops a length of dress fabric. She summons me, she talks urgently. I grab hold of her hand and drag her away before Christian blood gets spilt. Behind me I hear Kemp and Edmonds – the smaller, younger and quieter missionary – scurry to distribute more buttons and knives and other things left in the wagon, until Ngqika and his uncle vouchsafe a smile. When Yese, somewhat mollified, walks back to her hut, I shoulder my way back through the curious onlookers and speak in Ngqika’s ear.
Kemp gives me a letter of introduction from the babbling Reverend Ballot. In the two crumpled pages the minister asks why I didn’t reply to his letter, in which apparently he jubilantly proclaimed that he’d arranged a pardon for me. Which god-forgotten letter? My self-professed friend Ballot laments the fact that I had trumpeted my distrust of the authorities so loudly that even Dundas in the Cape had heard of it and had rescinded the reprieve. But not to fret, the preacher writes, he has procured a second pardon for me. The only condition is that I should deliver up the other fugitives. Here, too, the dear Ballot assumes that he knows what I think: Since I would surely not sell out these friends of mine – friends, he says – he is sure that all – all – that is necessary for their reprieve is that they should write in humility to Dundas and confess their guilt. Go forth, evildoer, miscreant and robber! He concludes his letter by singing the praises of the anointed bearers thereof and asking that I should provide them with all assistance within my power – ‘since that I deduced from your converse at Graaffe Rijnet that you hold the service of God in high regard’. Goddammit. This world is run by letter writers, and all their fancy calligraphy will in the end never suffice to clean up the heaps of ordure it causes. I grasp Kemp by the shoulder:
Understand me well, churchman. I’m not Graaffe Rijnet’s tame Hotnot who’s going to interpret your preachings and empty your slops in the morning.
He frowns and steps back.
Late that night the old misbegot will write about me most diplomatically in his report to the focking London Missionary Society:
He said, that he found himself obliged to declare that he could by no means meddle with our affairs, nor give us any assistance.
The last peg of the tent, like some great white wild bird in the veldt, has hardly been hammered home or the brethren Kemp and Edmonds receive their first guests. The missionary had better learn Xhosa quickly; I’d rather be digging bulbs with the women than translate Ngqika’s profundities day after day. My king stands with a warrior on each side in the small tent and fingers and fiddles with everything. The cots, the crates, the spectacles and tobacco and tin wares, the plumes and ink. The king notices a little mirror by Edmonds’ bedside. He whispers in my ear.
The king says that glass is bigger than the one you gave him, I say.
That is Brother Edmonds’ mirror, says Kemp.
I advise you to forfeit the mirror, Brother Kemp.
Kemp signals to Edmonds, who hands the mirror to Ngqika. The king takes the mirror and hands it to a warrior. Kemp’s forehead reddens.
Tell him he must promise to deliver the smaller mirror to Brother Edmonds.
For a moment I stare at him.
As you wish, I say.
I say something to Ngqika in Xhosa. The king mumbles something in reply, takes a plug of missionary tobacco from the bag on the table.
The king promises, I say. But I wouldn’t remind him if I were you.
Note well: This world doesn’t grind to a halt when a missionary turns up. In the fields little groups of women labour, between the huts they stack wood for the cooking fires, children run around, and if you look well, you may catch sight of a few men sitting fast asleep in the shade against the walls of huts. The missionaries unpack, you don’t miss much here. Rather go and find a kopje with a view and watch the sun travelling past. At dusk you’ll see the women returning from the fields, others carrying water from the stream, children driving cattle to the kraals and fires being lit under the cooking pots.
The next morning Ngqika and I are once again in the tent of the missionaries. We have coffee with the Sunday suits. At my insistence Ngqika tries their rusks and immediately demands a recipe. I myself stuff two into my pocket.
Later that afternoon I’m sitting with a chunk of rusk in my cheek curing a blesbok hide when Yese turns up at my house. With her is the Bengali runaway slave who swivels his buttocks like a woman. He was already installed here in the kraal when my comrades and I arrived. How he ended up here, heaven only knows. Yese keeps the slave around, because apart from yours truly he is the only soul here who speaks Dutch. I don’t like the way the greased prick ogles me. I make him sit down under the tree. I take Yese by the hand and go into the murky little house.
Are your people still not back, Buys?
She alone among the Caffres calls me by my name. To her son and his people I am Khula – The Big One. But not to her.
I had to charge back to come and hold your son’s hand while he’s talking to the crows of God, I say. I left my people with the Tambookies.
It’s good that you are here, she says.
I press her to me and smell the sweat in the folds around her neck. When I’d just arrived here among the Caffres, she’d dragged me into her hut and felled me and I’d thought it was a gigantic fat bonanza. The next evening there was a feast with a plenitude of dancing and gorging and guzzling and bigger, ever bigger, fires. Believe me, the crystals of her eyes mirrored the devastation of the flames, their inspired labours and the paradise in the ash. When I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was married. It remains a sporadic felling and little more.
We grab and grope and kiss and lick and bite and collapse onto the heap of hides that makes up my bed. She lifts me from her and flings me to the ground and says something like I’m not lying for you, in Xhosa. She sits down on me and pulls down my pants and puts me inside her and her fluids instantly plash over my legs. She stuffs a tit into my mouth and she rides me ever faster while I’m instructed to suck ever harder and then to bite and just before I shoot my load she climbs off and straddles me with her shiny thighs and flattens my yard against my stomach with her foot and I spill all over myself and in making her exit she says I must take the Bengali to Kemp, there are things she wants to know from the white sorcerer.
I find Kemp and Edmonds in the wagon carefully covering up the few crates that won’t fit into that tent. The Bengali scratches at an insect bite on his stomach.
Mijnheer van der Kemp, this … slave … brings you the good wishes of Yese, the mother of the king and my wife in marriage according to the law of the Caffres.
Kemp and Edmonds introduce themselves. The Bengali snot-monkey with the little sly eyes and the smooth skin immediately starts questioning the missionaries. I’m convinced the fellow has dealings with Yese when I’m not around. The whoreson has the nerve to ask whether Kemp was sent by the British. Kemp remains nice and calm and sits back on the riempie chair and runs his fingers through his hair and strokes his majestic brow and says no he was sent by the God of heaven and earth who instructed him to come and proclaim his name under the mighty amaGaika. The slave, with a skimpier beard than Yese, his fright fired up by Kemp’s calm, becomes aggressive. He churns on a
gain about the focking English until I pick him up by the scruff of his neck and show him in which direction he must scram. Kemp jumps up and runs into the tent and emerges with a handkerchief and shouts after the young prick. He hands him the handkerchief as a gift to Yese. I apologise for the whippersnapper’s arrogance. I help Kemp and Edmonds to move the wagon so that it will deflect the worst of the wind from the tent and then I chop them some wood and whatever I do, all that I see is Yese sprawling and panting under the smooth-skinned bumble-ballsack bouncing on top of her.
I’m still faffing about the missionaries when a few Caffres turn up with a fat cow as a gift from Ngqika and also the smaller mirror, which Edmonds receives with bent head. The little junior missionary is a pleasant soul, but too finely strung for this place. Kemp is a cultivated fellow himself, but underneath all the manners and placidity there is something in him, I don’t quite know what – obsession, ferality.
That evening I share their evening repast of sweet potatoes and dried fruit and biltong. As I get ready to leave, two young Caffre maidens turn up giggling at the tent. The younger of the two is Hobe, Ngqika’s buxom sister with the perky buttocks. They are bringing the missionaries calabashes full of clabber and junket. The missionaries take the calabashes and blushing and babbling try to get rid of the nymphs as quickly as possible. The girls see it and enjoy it. Later, when it starts raining, they’re outside again, keening. They plead with Kemp to let them in. The poor God-elected wretches have to ward them off at the tent flap. Hobe strokes Kemp’s claw and complains that her hut is leaking. He gives her a cowhide and then they’re gone, only the giggles remain suspended in the stuffy tent.
I ride home, behind me the tent that’s being washed away in the rain. Then I change direction and take up position outside Yese’s hut and try to figure out if she’s alone and turn away. She calls me in and dries me. Her body spreads all over me, her mouth is everywhere. I’m scarcely inside her or I spurt. She churns me up again and I can’t stop thinking of what other men have done to her and how they did it and if it hadn’t been me outside her tent, would she have invited any passing dangler in and what she would have done differently with him that she doesn’t do with me and this time I don’t last much longer and she smells of paint and clay and the third time I’m more up to it but roaring in my head resounds the sound of her telling me about how when she was young and a friend of Ndlambe appeared in her hut one night when she woke up and that he tupped her and that she doesn’t know why she didn’t say no or couldn’t say no even though she was of noble birth and her virginity inviolable and even though the merest word from her would have had the man’s head on a pole and that she’s so ashamed that he could simply take what he took and I ram into her and she looks at me and I close my eyes and all I can think of is how she felt all those years ago when she did not yet have this immense lap and had not borne children and was not yet mother of the goddam nation and free to have come and gone with me – gone so far away – and why it had been so easy for that dog’s-dick and she seizes me by the shoulders and I wonder why the hell I had asked so many questions and all that I see is how the young Yese can’t say no and doesn’t want to say no to him who staggered drunkenly into her hut and just takes what he wants and this time I am sure she also spends her savings and Godknows why it matters to me, but I’m not asking.