by Willem Anker
At daybreak I leave the missionaries at their tent. Edmonds’ stomach has calmed down. The little chap looks a bit lighter and more contented, as if he’d had to vomit out his last little bit of baby fat to adapt here. He’s no longer sweating and is no longer delirious and is his old timid self. His tiny fingers are still fat. I leave the missionaries to their own devices in the hope that Kemp will nail Hobe and get it out of his system and I tell him this.
My dear Buys, did you hear nothing of what I told you last night?
I smile my smile, the one that says I know things he doesn’t know, and saddle my horse.
Jank’hanna! I shout at him as I ride off. Indulge your guilt on top of that little thing! I wish you all the guilt you’re capable of!
On the 3rd of October Ngqika marries for the third time. He can still not decide whether the godbodies may stay or must return to the sea whence they came. I’ve been trying for the last week to wring an answer out of him, but don’t get a chance to talk to my son. I ask Siko to talk to our king. I hear nothing. I look in on Kemp on the wedding day; have they heard anything yet? Apparently Ngqika was there the day before, looked around again but took nothing, offered a milk cow for a few buttons and two old handkerchiefs. Kemp’s faithful Hottentot Bruintjie wants to go back to Graaffe Rijnet; he says things are getting too heated hereabouts. This king has no use for them here; the people are looking at them askance. Edmonds also wants to push off, to Bengal.
Mijnheer Buys, he says, this soil is not suited to the seed of the word of God.
I ride to the Great Place. Ngqika does not want to see me. I ride back to Kemp and make a fire. Ngqika can go and fart figs! He can get married till the cows shit copper coins, I’m going to celebrate with the missionaries. By dusk Kemp is once again bombarded with the whinges of his Hottentots and of Edmonds. They grumble and gripe to him about the leopards and the Bushmen and the sun. Kemp says the hand of the Lord has thus far protected them from the cunning wiles of Satan. Kemp says the doors that the Almighty unlocks with the key of David, no man dares bolt again. Edmonds moans about the savage Caffres. He says they’ll never be at home here. Kemp says they followed him of their own free will.
When I set foot on this shore, this I’ve told you before, Brother Edmonds, I knew that I was doing so with the death sentence already in me.
Edmonds with his trembling lower lip is on the verge of saying something when a captain appears at the tent opening with Hobe and another young girl. He offers the fillies to the missionaries and invites them to come and partake of the festivities. Edmonds explodes and abuses the Caffre and curses his name as the scheming spawn of vipers and seducers and chases them all away. The missionaries kneel immediately to conceal the bulges in their pants and start praying against the beguilements of the flesh. I wonder how Kemp would deal with such beguilements, on these sultry nights, if brother Edmonds were not sharing a tent with him. I bid them good bye; the two are so engaged with the Lord God that they don’t hear me. On horseback I follow the captain with the young girls and accept the offer on behalf of Jank’hanna and load Hobe and her little friend on the saddle in front of me and go make them rejoice greatly by the riverside. I take them with me to the feast and I claim my place by the fire near my son the king. Yese does what she’s supposed to do with a singing and a sprinkling of herbs and then disappears again. I go and seek her out in her hut. She says I can lie with her, but no touching. She says she’s tired. She says I may hold her. A few years ago she would have joined in the dancing outside. She would have sneaked off into the bushes with me. We would have come back to the fire and laughed with the people and drained a calabash of beer and there would have been no end to us. She says she wonders about her son; she starts talking about her people and their future. I stroke her tummy and can’t find the navel. I stroke lower till I come across a frizzle. She slaps my hand away. She snores.
The fires are still burning bright; Ngqika has gone to initiate his bride. I summon the soberest captain and tell him to go and tell the king that if he wants to treat me – his interpreter and adviser and husband of his mother – with so little of the respect due from a son to his father, then I’m getting out. Then I’m going back to the Tambookies and I’m taking his white sorcerer with me.
Beyond the flames the two young girls of earlier are dancing. In a haze of beer and meat I shepherd them out of the kraal. See me thrusting myself into the second one, even though everything I had to offer has already been spilt on Hobe’s tummy where the little muscles dimple and flex. Did you see her roar with laughter when my seed spurted over her navel? I carry on ramming into the second one until she’s weeping. I am the king here.
When the sun rises over the 5th of October I am with great display and blaring of trumpets inspanning my oxen so that every Caffre in Caffraria will know that Coenraad Buys, the great Khula, is not to be treated like a dog by any little whippersnapper. The next-to-last ox is still waiting for his yoke when Ngqika and his advisers are next to the wagon. The king demands to know what this inspanning is all about.
You have said, oh king, that I am your father. But that is not how a son behaves. You have asked me for the hand of my daughter when she comes of age, and I have consented. I am your father and future father-in-law. I am nobody’s goddam subject.
The chappie is all of a sudden ten years old again and inspects his feet and is full of apologies. I seize the opportunity and rip into him. Why does he distrust Jank’hanna? Why does he spit on the man’s loving-kindness? The king mutters that the wedding occupied him. All the ceremonies, the arrangements, the preparations. I chase him back to Kemp. The advisers stay out of my way. On the way to the Christian tent one of the elders tries to warn me. Ngqika is cruel when he punishes, his people fear his temper and would rather eat his shit. They damnwell don’t know the wrath of Coenraad de Buys. The king seats himself majestically before Kemp and delivers a long-winded address that I translate verbatim into my best Dutch. He gives the missionaries leave to choose a stretch of veldt on the other side of the Keiskamma and to occupy it. He swears that he will never insult or harm Jank’hanna. He takes copious leave and promises Jank’hanna three oxen.
The king and his retinue have hardly disappeared behind the nearest bushes when the missionaries start packing up. The next morning we find that five of Kemp’s oxen are missing. Not all the Caffres are delighted with Jank’hanna’s moving in. I go and look for the oxen, find them in a small kraal and go and lambast Ngqika about these transgressions. He orders the chancers to hand back the oxen. It rains and thunders without cease. I drive the oxen in Kemp’s wake and catch up with them on the other side of the Keiskamma and the Debe. On 16 October, that accursed day, a few Caffres on horseback charge towards us and one jumps off and runs to me and tells me that my house and wagon with the Tambookies have been torched and that one of my Hottentots’ horses was lying dead there and that my wives and children were missing and clears out before I can bash his skull in.
You cry to impress others. Every tear screams: Look what you’ve done to me. If you cry when you’re on your own, then you cry to prove to yourself that your sorrow is not an illusion. With your tears you tell yourself a story of sorrow. With your crying you start to make yourself at home in your sorrow. I think of Maria and Nombini and immediately of Yese. I think of Elizabeth and how I will never give her to Ngqika. I see Maria in our hut on Brakkerivier. I wonder if Nombini lies as still under whoever now lays hands on her at night. I don’t cry.
Two days later Stoffel Botha comes charging up on a dog-tired horse and shouts at us from a distance. He’s raced from the Tambookies to come and tell me that Maria and Nombini and the offspring are alive. The Tambookie captain rescued them. I ask Kemp to pray with me. I howl so that the dogs start howling in response. I weep until Kemp, too, is moved to tears. When he consoles me, I believe myself.
The rain and thunder don’t stop. Botha and I and the Hottentot Henry and Thomas Bentley the English deserter ride ahead to make su
re that Kemp’s ramshackle wagon follows the easiest and safest route in between the eleven smaller kraals, through the territory that slowly and relentlessly rises, this grassland bordered with forests. At five o’clock on the afternoon of 20 October the wagon draws up in front of my house. Kemp is quite taken with what he calls my oblong hut. He tells of the hyenas that at night sounded like the pleading of women and children and the laughter of men. He says one of the beasts two nights ago ripped apart one of the thongs on their wagon and ran off with a jukskei.
The next morning lightning strikes all around us. We stay inside with Kemp who leads devotions in my house. I give him to understand that it’s a novelty – as long as he believes he’s saving a soul, the old chap is happy. After a day or so the weather clears somewhat. Kemp and I reconnoitre the piece of land and he chooses a spot where he wants his house to be. By afternoon I find him turfing out grass to establish a vegetable garden. I go and look for something to shoot for supper and leave Kemp among the tussocks he’s digging up, where every so often he leans on his spade and gazes out over the green fields and icy Mgqakhwebe River at the foot of the hill, the giant trees in the mighty mountains. I leave him where he’s singing psalms about harts panting after water brooks and whatever. When I dismount from Glider to stalk a buck, my hands are clamped around the reins, frozen in cramp. My horse is still faithful, but in my body already the first betrayal.
The warm arum lily leaves tickle my hands. See, the once slender fingers are now claws criss-crossed with lesions.
When I woke up this morning under Yese, my front paws were crumpled up like dead spiders. She stroked them, picked them up and held them to her breast.
We are growing old, Buys.
I wanted to get away from the pity. She got up and left the hut. Perhaps she could see I’m not yet poor enough for alms. My beloved witch, if you start pitying me, it’s all over.
I stretch out on the oxhide, try to open and close my hands, and drop off to sleep again. I wake up with my hands in a bowl of warm water. The bowl is full of arum lily leaves. She washes my hands carefully. She has never yet felt so soft. Here on her knees, with my hands in her lap, she’s never been so submissive. See, there’s nothing the matter with my loins. She smiles when she sees my yard tensing up in my pants, strokes over it. Yese folds the claws across my breast and drapes arum lily leaves over them.
Keep still, she says.
I don’t move. She boils an arum lily’s rootstock in the bowl, mashes the thing fine and pours honey over it.
Eat, she says.
The stuff is poisonous, I say.
The poison has been boiled out. Eat.
I eat.
Chew the root and spit it out when you no longer taste anything. Chew until your hands relax.
Where do you learn all these things?
I know old men.
People say that when Mlawu, Ngqika’s father, went to fetch Yese from the Tambookies as a young woman, she appeared to him in a cloud of mist on a mountaintop. You know as well as I that she screwed the old dunderhead so silly that he couldn’t see straight. People say that she paid lobola for her next husband and that they called him her wife.
I like arum lilies. When the water dries up, they die back to nothing and when the rains return, they erupt again from the rootstock. For months they can lie slumbering underground and then one day there they are once again. If you don’t dig up the stubborn roots, you’ll never get rid of them. People think themselves different from plants, because they don’t look for long enough. Life is a series of eruptions. Like these flowers that get eaten by the pigs, I, too, come and go, I, too, lie in wait, I, too, erupt. Even here in the first heat of summer, in the late morning, lazy in the hut of my queen with my useless hands, my bud is un-nippable. She laughs at me where I’m lying with my pulsating frustration and my hands chastely on my chest under the pigfeed. She unlaces my breeches. My mouth crammed with leaves all chompingly adjusts to the rhythm of her hand’s pumping. Soon it is as if I’m watching myself, the outsized farmer and the outsized Caffre queen.
I, Omni-Buys, have read all the writings concerning me. I know the world thinks Yese and I lusted after power and shared also the other lusts. We were reputedly as ruttish for each other as for the power that we shared here with Ngqika. You might not say it now, when you see me heave up my hips to bump against her hand, but it was something much less and much sadder that drew us to each other for that while.
On this morning in her hut we are both around forty, veterans of the flesh. My blond hair is going grey and straw-like, my hands are scrunching up. Her body expands as her power over the Rharhabe shrinks. When we’re together, we do not age; here there are no young bodies to mock us with our own dying; here we don’t have to promise anything.
It’s barely light, the sky is open and bleak. The two Bothas and I and Faber and Steenberg and Krieger and of course Bezuidenhout ride out with a group of Caffre hunters. A bevy of Caffre women wave at us as we ride out of the Great Place. Ngqika wants me to show his warriors how Christians hunt. We do his bidding. We are more dependent by the day on the king’s good graces. The crowd from Graaffe Rijnet are guests here and I, too, nowadays feel more like a guest than like the father of the king. After I left Yese, I sat for a long time last night with my musket, oiling it thoroughly, making sure that the gun didn’t malfunction like my hands. Our horses and our guns are the only things that the Caffres value about us. I’ve told Ngqika on occasion that one armed horseman is worth at least one hundred warriors. If I want to stay here on my own terms, I can’t afford to prove myself wrong today.
The veldt is dry, the sun filling the whole of the white sky. My dogs are nowhere to be seen. I shoot a kudu that slumps down more than a hundred paces away. The Caffres seem impressed. Glider remains calm after the shot and that surprises them even more. I ride out in front of the group, the horse’s hooves lifted in a practised trot that few onlookers have witnessed. Tonight they’re going to tell their wives about this. We stop for lunch under a few thorn trees, drink water and whey. The Christians gnaw at strips of biltong. When we first arrived here, we would all have eaten together, but with minds more troubled by the day, the two groups sit apart looking at each other, the jaws chomping.
When the sun shifts past the midday line, we move on over the plain. Botha and Faber each shoot a springbok and the Caffres pot three themselves. As soon as the hunt gets under way, the bunch get more at ease with one another. Every Christian on the frontier is fluent in Xhosa and the Caffres with Ngqika have also picked up a few Dutch words, especially the dirty ones. Do you see the camaraderie among the hunters? A bond beyond smooth talk that is found only among men in the open veldt sharing in the slaughter of animals. We are boys playing in the veldt and we are men caring for our wives and we are gods with the power of life and death over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
In the course of the day we move in a lazy circle, a trajectory not one member of the hunting party has ever followed before. On the return, the sun low behind us, one of the scouts signals to us to stop. He runs back: Over the next ridge is a Bushman camp. The wretches will certainly have spotted us already. They’re lying low hoping we’ll move on, past them, contented with the carcases we’re carrying with us. Everybody glances around, suddenly tensed up; nobody spots anything in the ridges. Bushmen decide when they want to be seen. Sometimes they’re human when they have to make haste, but for the most part they’re nothing more than bushes with shallow roots.
The Caffre captain in charge of the hunt doesn’t want to let slip such an opportunity. As soon as we get near their camp the Bushmen will show themselves to defend it and their arrows will be powerless against the tanned oxhide shields and the range of the rifles.
If you want to come closer to peer into the burning eyes of Bushmen hunters, you’ll be trampled. The deserters and warriors who are now slowly encircling the creatures on this green plain
are driven by primordial and complicated stirrings at the back of their heads, and they crave, with a dreadful craving, blood. Believe me, my semblable: Complication and extermination both become more palatable at a distance.
The plan is simple. The party immediately deploys in a long line, the horsemen distributed among the warriors. We surround the ridge behind which the cluster of screens shelters. Without any signal everyone charges at the same time. The first Bushman arrow finds its mark; a Caffre screams next to me. The man is still standing upright, looks down at where the arrow has barely grazed him and knows he is dead on his feet. Faber shoots the Bushman through the chest. Then we’ve crested the ridge, the shields judder with arrows and ahead of us the camp. The women and children try to escape into the undergrowth, but they are surrounded already. They run and crawl and retreat to the shelters and screens. The men’s arrows shower down on us from behind and from the front, with little effect. We murder them one by one with lead bullets and assegais. The circle around the shelters contracts, the cloud of dust thickens. My eyes burn. A young Bushman bumps against me. I get a fright; he gets a fright. He wants to step back, I kick him in the chest. He falls, I step on him, bend down and slit open his throat.
Silence falls. I can see through the dust. The Bushman males are all lying dead around the huts. Those who ran away will keep running. I see something red in the bushes. Are my dogs waiting to scavenge? Among the corpses the hunting party walk looking for fresh sweat. A corpse does not sweat. Here and there an assegai or a hunting knife is pressed into a chest or a throat to make sure that what looks dead remains dead. I wipe my knife clean and replace it in its sheath. Apart from the warrior who was hit by the arrow earlier, nobody else of the hunting party has been injured. He stands staggering in the centre of the camp, his eyes already empty; everybody ignores him. A few women and children, here and there an older Bushman, peek out of the huts and then wish they hadn’t.