Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  In the course of the next few days I’m forever being dragged along to the missionaries. Ngqika just can’t get his fill of the new sorcerers. His mood swings between an excited interest in this novelty and an icy regard that intimates that he’s looking forward to seeing them skewered on an assegai. Yese is also more and more twitchy. If anybody is to talk to the rain and the spirits she’ll be the one. She doesn’t trust these pink-roasted preachers. What kind of man keeps on saying no to all the woman-flesh that her son is offering them? she asks. Ngqika feels flattered by the attention of the Christian god and is particularly taken with the strange objects he scavenges from the missionaries’ tent. I, the translator of Caffre distrust and greed and Christian euphoria, must on top of this every now and again stop the other outlaws from blowing the missionaries’ brains out. If there’s one thing the ex-rebels can’t stand it’s a preachifying. Then on top of that it’s the English, the focking English, who have sent these two pious prophets to convert this lot of Heathens. Their blood is boiling and clearly it’s only more blood that will cool down theirs. If Kemp converts the Caffres, it niggles at their peace of mind, what then makes our little raggle-taggle of outcast Christians so different from the Heathens?

  Ngqika is so chronically with the missionaries that he starts conducting his councils of war at Kemp’s tent. The king and his subjects call Kemp Jank’hanna, a hybrid of Johannes and the Xhosa word nyengane – unbreakable rock. Rock-head Kemp who deprecates all earthly delights. Ngqika’s captains and Ndlambe sit around discussing Kemp and Edmonds in Xhosa while the two missionaries have to scurry around serving biltong and rusks and the coffee that Ngqika drinks till he becomes as antsy as a naughty child. His captains argue heatedly whether the missionaries are spies and if they are here to bewitch the king with poisoned wine and murder him. Ngqika stands in the tent and teaches Jank’hanna a word or two of Xhosa. Back in the midst of the gathering he’s greatly pleased with the missionary’s musket and the bag of bullets in his arms.

  I go to check that the poor man has another gun. He is affable, but I can see that he sees straight through my smile that hitherto has blinded everybody. He sees that I am the king of Graaffe Rijnet. Believe me, he sees the coldness and the relentlessness at the back of my eyes. I tell him he must resign himself, Ngqika won’t decide whether they can stay until he’s spoken properly with Ndlambe and Yese and his sister. His sister has been summoned, but she lives far away. I tell him that he should keep it as much of a secret as possible that he’s working for the London Missionary Society. I tell him that it’s possible that I’ve turned the Caffres against the English. When Ngqika spoke to an Englishman for the first time, he couldn’t understand who these people were or what they wanted or where they’d come from. Later Khula explained it to him like this: Imagine the whole Colony is a farm. Then the Cape is the big kraal, the Great Place of their king. The English have taken over the kraal and are now ruling the whole farm. These focking English are not from around here, they are robbers and plunderers; they are the Bushmen of the sea. Kemp starts laughing and I don’t have to apologise overmuch for having slightly complicated his arrival.

  I sleep with Yese in her hut in the Great Place. Early the next morning I set out with the inquisitive to go and see Kemp preach. Kemp is overjoyed to see me there and I’m overjoyed to see the titties bounce while the preacher incites the Heathens to a song of praise of which they don’t understand a single word. After the singing and praying have subsided, Kemp tells me how Hobe again last night came visiting and was very forward and brought them milk and then didn’t want to clear out. He speaks judiciously, his voice precise, his sentences well constructed. He says that he sometimes wishes he could go into a swoon. He is sorry that he can’t just vanish at will. I can see him choosing each word meticulously. He says that he would like to give in to his weakness, that he no longer wants to resist the wounds that the world inflicts on him. He speaks of a different affirmation, to assume towards and against everything a denial of courage, a denial of morality. His voice trembles. What am I to do with such an outpouring other than to tell him that I’m convinced that he was sent by God and that his place is here – between Hobe’s thighs, I’m tempted to add. The next moment he’s talking about his next sermon. I interrupt him and place a hand on his shoulder. My family is far away, I say, but when I have them with me again, I’ll bring them along to his church under the tree. And as soon as I’ve fetched my family, I’ll build him a house. Kemp weeps and clasps me to his bosom, and believe me, he washes less frequently than I.

  2

  Edmonds is puking. The poor fellow doesn’t get off the slop bucket. Top and bottom outlets, and sweating something horrible. Kemp says that apart from the belly runs and vomiting the man’s head is also out of kilter. Believe me, in my time a Caffre kraal and a frontier farmer’s yard were not always the most hygienic places. A plot of ground can take only so much piss and shit and bones and rotten meat and then no more. Sensitive systems like that of Brother Edmonds don’t endure it for long. Even among the most uncouth Christians and the most robust Caffres spurt-shitting was never a rarity. Besides, the wretched Edmonds’ distressed stomach and soul are hardly accustomed to fermented milk, clotted Caffre porridge and half-raw meat, roasted on the coals skin and all.

  In between Edmonds’ shitting and gnashing of teeth Kemp was stuck with Ngqika and me the previous night. At some distance from the tent, so as not to discomfit Edmonds with the smell of roasting meat, Kemp makes a fire. He’s a dab hand with his gridiron and in no time Ngqika starts licking his lips and asks to be given the gridiron. Jank’hanna the diplomat wipes the sweat from his brow with a dirty sleeve and says it’s the only roasting utensil he possesses, but the king must do as the king sees fit. Ngqika replies in equally formal parlance that he has no desire to deprive Jank’hanna of this precious item. The king and his retinue stuff themselves and thank their host and withdraw to their noble huts. I sleep with Kemp and Edmonds and nobody is surprised when a captain turns up before cock-crow to ask Kemp for the gridiron.

  I pour myself some of Kemp’s hellishly strong coffee. I sit in front of the tent and bask myself into a reverie until all of a sudden a shadow falls upon me. My son the king of the Caffres and his mother the queen of carnal delight and cruelty are blocking my sun. Yese does not seem impressed, neither with the puking preacher nor with his barefoot-brother missionary and especially not with me. They are here to receive a few captains from some or other battlefield. Ngqika is losing his campaign, every few months some more of the smaller tribes don’t want to recognise his authority. Perhaps he’s thinking that he will impress his captains by granting them an audience here before the white sorcerers. The confabulations lose Jank’hanna a mirror and a knife to Siko, Ndlambe’s brother, and he also has to weigh in with the roasting, without his gridiron. If all missionaries could serve a roast feast like Kemp, all of Africa would be Christianised by the end of the year. If Ngqika could learn to roast meat like that, he’d rule over a pacific kingdom. Just see Yese’s lips shining with beef fat.

  Ngqika is all charm and smiles. He teaches Jank’hanna another few Xhosa words. He mistranslates a few words and invents a few. His captains laugh at the missionary when he turns to the fire. I assist the man with the meat, but don’t assist him with his newfound vocabulary. The king asks Jank’hanna whether it’s God’s will that he doesn’t wear a hat. Jank’hanna nods and strokes the peeling brow. Yese utters not a word, eats more than any of the warriors. When she excuses herself, she mutters that this white man is no rainmaker. He’s just delirious with sunstroke. The look she gives me says I wouldn’t dare follow her.

  When everybody starts getting drowsy under the trees, Jank’hanna seizes the opportunity to conduct a prayer meeting. The few Hottentots who trekked with him from the Cape sneak up and find seats with the Xhosa captains. He starts with a prayer. When he strikes up a psalm, it’s only a few Hottentots who dare sing along under the glares of the Caffres. A cabal of gigg
les and screams interrupts the awkward laudation. Hobe and her little friends have returned all singing with the calabashes of milk that Ngqika has requisitioned. The maidens dance through among us, their juddering buttocks and songs equally blasphemous. Jank’hanna’s head sinks lower, as if he’s talking to something under the ground. He prays furiously. He prays louder when Hobe rubs her shiny little tummy against his even shinier forehead. The captains laugh; he carries on praying till the storm subsides. Ngqika orders Hobe and her friends to be off. Even he has sympathy with this nut-case Kemp; my Heathen king and son restores the weird decorum of Christian praise. Do you see Jank’hanna wiping Hobe’s sweat from his forehead? Do you see a crooked finger hovering under his nose before he wipes the hand on his back pocket?

  That night Kemp confesses his past. He tells me about a carousing career that would shame even the Bezuidenhouts. He tells about brothels and liquors with strange names. He says he was born in 1747, which would make him barely fifty, not the sixty that he looks. The grandson of a minister, son of a professor of theology and from an early age in the shade of a brother sixteen years his senior, also a theologian. Raised in what he calls the aristocratic bourgeoisie, in the princely republic of the Netherlands. In his youth was even a friend of that noble knob of Orange. Studied philosophy at Leiden, but also anatomy, geometry, chemistry, physics, surgery, obstetrics, botany, metaphysics and logic. He learnt sixteen languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and Sanskrit. In his student days he avoided the taverns, but had a string of relationships with girls and married women. Then something erupted in him. He ceased his studies at nineteen, joined the army as a cavalry officer. The women would not leave him alone. He was attractive in his uniform, he says. When he describes the uniform, his hollow chest expands.

  You should have seen me, he says. The sky-blue cloak with the red collar, the gold waistcoat, the first-rate riding boots, the epaulettes, the high fur cap with the magnificent plume.

  Yes, I say, so that all the world can see you approach and blast you to pieces from behind the bushes.

  That is not how a gentleman wages war, Mijnheer Buys.

  Perhaps not, Kemp. But that is how a gentleman cops it in the bush.

  For a moment he seems lost in thought, then tells me how as a young soldier he almost drowned under a punt and again a few years later almost drowned in the Thames. He checks to make sure that I’m looking at him:

  And for the next sixteen years, Buys, I gorged myself on every blessed godlessness that this world can afford.

  In the course of his regular visits to the poorhouse in Leiden the matron introduces him to needy women and he sees to some of their more pressing needs. In The Hague he nails the wife of a hangman. Under the name of Jans he tups one Annie Paardekop, fresh out of prison, and also her friend who’d been locked up in Zeeland as an infanticide. I ask him whether it was one at a time and he says Sometimes; sometimes not. I question him as to how something like that works, who must do what to whom and what must go where, but he turns dour and prefers to enumerate his other excesses. Kemp the rake gambles and boozes and brawls and whores and in those days is convinced that Jesus was just another Jew and Mary much less of a virgin than she would have her neighbours believe. After his mother’s death he steals a perukier’s wife and keeps her in his room in Leiden while he remains in the garrison at The Hague. His father also dies and leaves him a stack of money, on condition that he give up the woman. He refuses and opts instead to impregnate her. She presents them with what he calls an illegitimate miracle, Antje. He drops the woman and keeps Antje. He meets and marries Christina, a wool spinner.

  Christina?

  Christina, yes.

  That was my mother’s name.

  Was? My sincere condolences, Mijnheer. Did she pass away recently?

  Hope springs eternal.

  He hesitates, then drivels on. Christina was Styntje to him, and his and Styntje’s life together was sober and sedate. His marriage to someone from the working classes disgraced him in the eyes of his family and the orange prince. An officer could paddle the lower classes in the dark, but not marry them. His military career was over. He went to Edinburgh to qualify as a medical doctor. He examined the bodies of drowned people to establish exactly how they met their end. At night he wrote a philosophical treatise with the title Parmenides, apparently based on the name and reflections of a dead Greek.

  His book maintains that there is far greater difference between God and all his mortal creatures than one thinks. There is no being other than God that has anything in common with God.

  I don’t know about that, I understand my God. Well, in the first lot of books I get the idea.

  Our Heavenly Father is inconceivable, Mijnheer Buys.

  I have in common with him an acquaintance with wildernesses, jealousy and especially, Kemp, wrath.

  The missionary smiles patronisingly, as if he and the Lord find me entertaining.

  Mijnheer, let us leave this debate for the bright light of the morrow.

  Edmonds starts coughing something dreadful in the tent and Kemp goes to succour his brother. A few minutes later he comes and sits down again and continues his narrative. Apparently the VOC wanted to appoint him as major and post him to the Cape to come and share his military prowess with the troops here. He refused the post because he always did and still does abhor the VOC’s policies and methods. I pat his hunched-up back.

  The missionary falls silent as Edmonds streaks past us to seek out a bush. Kemp never got ill from eating Caffre food. He did not turn tail when Ngqika gave him such a chilly reception. He seeks inspiration and disquiet, every drop of excitement is squeezed from life. Every blessed impulse is seized upon and driven to its extreme – that one can read in the glittering eyes, sunk deep in the haggard face. He seeks out the wilderness and clothes every frenzy in Biblical language. Edmonds has had it with the Caffres; they are dirty, their food makes him puke, the land is too untamed. He loves nothing here, because everything here can and wants to vanquish him. Kemp the scarecrow is untouchable. For the most part he wears the jacket without a shirt, his feet and head are raw. The more this god-cursed place mucks him around, the more ecstatic it leaves him. He carries on about his shame about his past, but just listen to him holding forth about his days in the dark back alleys of Leiden and The Hague. Listen to the nostalgia driving the self-chastisement, the longing for every whorish cunt, every dram and every punch, every kiss that was a love everlasting while the tongues could carry on their combat. This land isn’t going to get the better of him. His head is indeed like stone, every thorn in his flesh or in his sockless foot is self-inflicted. If the food makes him ill, it’s a test of his mettle that he does not dare fail. Every young woman who brushes up against him is a penance that he has to endure. He can’t get enough. It’s a thirsty land with thirsty people and this Christian is the thirstiest of them all. He is fifty-two years old and older than most people on their dying day. Life is what ages you, not the years. Driven by a divine dementia, he seeks to drink Africa dry. Johannes Kemp is like his namesake the Baptist at home in the wilderness. He will eat locusts and clothe himself in hides as long as the world keeps him enraptured. He feels no pain. Even the godforsaken Bushmen wear sandals. Do you know how hot the rocks sizzle here in summer? Do you know the thorns of this land? I see the smirk on your face at the Christians and their bedtime stories. You’re wondering how I, the savage Coenraad de Buys – the bigamist and murderer and thief and you name it – believe in our Lord and Father when there is only flesh and dust to be seen. And now I’m asking you: Do you know the divine delirium, the glorious frenzy that drives people like Kemp into the wilderness and will one day let him die drained and satiated and with a magnificent smile on his staved-in face?

  Kemp falls silent again. I niggle a morsel of dirt out of my ear. He says his grief led him away from medicine and back to theology and cosmology and on to a rebirth and a calling to minister to Caffre souls. I ask him what grief. I can hardly hear him
when tells how, on the afternoon of 27 June 1791, he and his Styntje and his Antje went out in a rowing boat on the Meuse close to their home. A sudden and violent wind capsized the boat and his wife and child drowned in front of his eyes. He says he was too scared to rescue them. He says his fingers would not let go of the boat. We do as men do and we keep our traps shut and hold fast to the moment and gaze into the fire.