by Willem Anker
Now the slaughter commences. Do you see how the women and the elderly are tortured and maimed and murdered? I told you to stand clear. Do you see now? How breasts are sliced off? How genitals are crushed? How sucklings are torn away from their mothers and thrown in a heap among the huts? How straw from the huts is thrown on top of the wriggling and wailing heap and how it’s set alight and how the colour and smell of the smoke is like nothing that you or I have seen or smelt and how the slaughter carries on and how my comrades join in, in a trance of unbridled bloodlust? How Steenberg plucks off a child’s arm, how a Caffre carries on wielding a knobkerrie at a heap of flesh that has long since ceased being human; how the butchers look around panting, their hands on their knees, and how the killing then is replaced by something far more calculating? Do you see?
The survivors are herded into a huddle, too tired and dazed for further resistance. One by one they are plucked out of the huddle, thrown down, pinned down and the soles of their feet sliced off. It takes longer than one might think; there is more scream left in these people than you can imagine. Then they are left there with the corpses and the burning heap of babies, not capable of walking any further, of hunting, capable only of sitting there and dying of hunger.
I suppose I should have warned you: If you want to see me, you must be prepared to see too much. I know what you want to read. I know what to whisper to you, what excites you, because that is what makes my breeches bulge. We’re not that different. In fact, we become more and more alike. But beware, there’ll come a point on this road we’re so companionably walking together when it will be too late to turn around.
Not that I want to scare you off. Come, see, believe me, the worst is over. We travel back to our king. Some of the Caffres and Faber and Krieger and Bezuidenhout have strung ears and noses around their necks as mementoes. Behind us the first vultures descend on the Bushman camp. At the Great Place we are given a heroes’ welcome and as if at a wedding buck are roasted and great fires are made and as always the young Caffre maidens dancing in the light. We old rebels sit huddled together and drink too fast and laugh too loudly.
I inspan my oxen and saddle my horse and go to fetch my family. The Caffre dogs bark themselves into a frenzy when the pack of feral dogs take up position at the edge of the trees with lolling tongues, ready to follow me. I promise once again to build Kemp a house as soon as I’m back. Kemp immediately drops to those well-worn knees of his to thank God and his heavenly host for my help in guiding him through the perils of the land to this place of rest. He prays that one day there will be a church here that will blazon forth the Gospel to the far ends of Africa. He prays for altars and sacrifices and the light of civilisation and flames reaching up to heaven. He prays that God will have dominion over Africa. I want to tell him Just go and have a look around the corner, there is already a large enough altar of smouldering babies stinking to high heaven. I want to tell him My dogs and I, we have dominion here. But I keep my trap shut and go forth.
3
On 14 December 1799 I’m back with Ngqika. Maria drives the one wagon, I the other. Nombini rides on Glider. My children walk or sit on oxen. The wagons judder under the weight of the ivory and hides and the few sawn-off elephant’s feet like tree trunks of skin and bone and ripe meat. I’m almost forty and to date I’ve lost three teeth, but my smile reveals no gaps.
And goddammit! I’ve hardly lifted my rump off the wagon, when I have to hear that none other than the motherfocking Maynier wants to see me at the Great Place. Go fock your fundament, shitstripper! I thrash the Caffre bringing me the news with my quirt and bellow at the bastard to get out of my sight. I shout that Maynier can lick my wagon-worn butt. The colonial cunt of a cur, nowadays Commissioner Maynier, is now apparently residing at the Great Place as the envoy of Dundas.
The house is still standing, but Maria and Nombini and the children take a while to feel at home again. While they were away with the Tambookies, I cleared away everything of theirs and piled it up in corners. They weren’t here. They wander around the house and yard in a daze, searching for their stuff, fingering the furniture and walls, so that they can permeate the place again and make it their own. By evening the children are hard at play again and the women ganging up against me. Elizabeth has in the meantime started calling herself Bettie. Her hair has been cut short, it flares up on her head like a burning bush. She is prettier than ever. She is not meant for Ngqika; when she marries she’ll be the one and only wife of the lucky chap who makes it past me.
On the sixteenth Bezuidenhout and Botha and their families come to greet us. We are sitting under the tree in front of my house when Edmonds and my friend Kemp come walking up. They have been to the Great Place to talk to Ngqika and the typhus-hound Maynier. I clasp Kemp to my chest. Bezuidenhout spits in his coffee and empties the mug next to him. The Man of God tells me how he’s teaching Christian and Caffre kids to read and write, how he’s planting vegetables where his house will arise. He tells me about Edmonds who wants to clear out; the man has been standing apart all the time anxiously regarding all the yelling bare-bummed kids. I can see Kemp wants to talk out of earshot of others. We go and inspect his vegetable garden.
He’s been busy in my absence. With the aid of four or five Caffres he’s dug up a plot of ground overlooking the mountains and the seedlings are sprouting all over. He shows me the carrots and potatoes and lettuce. He tells me about the letters Maynier has given him. How Dundas wants him gone from here for his own safety’s sake, that he should rather go and preach in Graaffe Rijnet and to Chungwa’s Caffres. And see, over there the red and black berries, the gooseberries and raspberries. He asks me to speak to the king regarding their departure. Apparently Ngqika refused point blank and was not exactly well mannered to Maynier. Here lie the calabashes, cucumbers and pumpkins. When the king heard that Khula refused to see the arsehole he apparently was all for wiping out the prick there and then. Evidently Ndlambe and Yese had to sweet-talk to save Maynier’s worthless life. Kemp points the ragged nail of a big toe at where the peach and apricot trees will flourish.
Trees don’t flourish overnight, Kemp, I say. It looks as if you’re planning a long stay.
I go where the Lord seeks me.
Dundas is not the Lord.
He drops the subject, shows me where the seeds are planted that an English captain brought from an island called Tahiti. He shows me the oven he built. I say I’ll speak to Ngqika. For Edmonds I don’t care a fig, but I’m not that taken with the fact that my only friend is planning to leave me here among the Caffres and a few rockspider farmers who can think no further than their foreskins. For a moment we stand still looking at each other, then he takes off.
Come, Mijnheer Buys, I must show you! he shouts when he’s just about made it to the thorn trees.
When I catch up with him, he’s on his knees and scrabbling in the soil. He asks me for my knife and slices open the root that he’s dug up. A turbid sap oozes into his hand. He holds up the hand for me to see. When he gets no reaction, he jumps up, stains my shirt with the black muck while shaking my shoulders:
Ink, Mijnheer! Ink!
You have to extend your garden, I say. The stuff can’t grow all squashed up together like that.
Maria and I are having a barney when, a few days later, a tall thin fellow comes hammering at my door. He introduces himself as Tjaart van der Walt. I trust nobody who calls himself Tjaart. He says he’s from Tarka where Dundas pitches his tent these days. He says he’s come to take me back to the Colony. He’s come with a full pardon. My outlaw days are over, I can move into civilised society once again.
I’m pleased at first and then filled with wrath. I shoulder him away from the door, grab hold of a loaded gun, and when our Tjaart finds the barrel under his nose, he turns tail and takes off across my yard.
What initially inflamed my wrath was my immediate thought that the arse-wipe wanted to lure me back to the Colony only to lock me up in the Castle along with the other rebels. But
when later that afternoon I went out to take potshots at the congress of baboons making pests of themselves again, I started rethinking the whole business of my freedom: Here in Caffraria life is easy. And who’s to say I’m not free here? Here it’s only Maria and Nombini messing about with my freedom. Here I’m the leader of the other outlaws and deserters. Here I am father to the king, his counsellor, spouse to Yese, the most powerful woman since that Caffre queen from Sheba who screwed Solomon. For the time being. The noose is tightening all the time around this mode of survival, this migration between Christian world and Caffre world. These shifting alliances are getting ever more dangerous, ever more distrusted by both factions. But on this day at the end of the eighteenth century I can still survive in the interregnum. Here I can hunt and have all the powder and lead and coffee and brandy and what have you that my crooked heart desires, smuggled from the Colony for a bit of ivory and a few hides. Back in the Colony I’m just another failed farmer. A miserable cattle farmer without a friend on this earth, all because I’m not interested in puffy pasty white women. Women who can’t wiggle their behinds under all those layers of dresses. The meek and mousy little women who are forever at prayer and yes-my-lord no-my-lord in front of the congregation, but behind the scenes stealthily and exceedingly slowly nag you into the grave because you can’t and damnwell won’t give them a vineyard in Stellenbosch. The bitches with their lips piously pursed and their legs chastely crossed that you have to skewer through a hole in the sheet.
The sun flares scarlet before it’s extinguished. I walk home with the warm gun over my shoulder. A straggling of Caffres greet me and we share a joke that none of the dumb white shits around here would get – except of course Kemp, but you don’t make jokes like that with him. I laugh with the warriors and walk up the grass slope to my home. It’s too late to return to the Colony. I’ve got nothing left to lose on the Cape side of the border. But it’s only when I look down upon the Great Place in the distance that I realise: The bunch of bureaucrats feel little for my earthly happiness and my troubles with whatever neighbours. The pest-plagued windbags are scared! Drop dead in ditches! Shit in your britches! Die! They want to destroy my connection with Ngqika. We are too dangerous; Khula is more dangerous than Coenraad.
There’s no word from Ngqika. My son has not come to greet me since my return. Nor has Yese. I say to Kemp I hope they don’t think we’re abusing their hospitality. He is the king and she reigns. I am her husband, and yet I’ve now dragged my other wives here and I don’t sleep with her any more.
Our queen is highly sensitive for such a thick-set person, I mutter to Kemp. A hippopotamus doesn’t even feel a knife.
Kemp suggests that she’s not in fact a hippopotamus but a woman. I say So what?
Ngqika sends a few Caffres to fetch the elephant tusks that I brought with me. It seems they belong to him. I don’t say a word and I walk to the wagon that’s still groaning under my booty and return with one cracked tusk and fling it in the face of the nearest Caffre and kick the nates of the second nearest and chase them away.
On Christmas morning my son the king comes to visit with the broadest smile his dial can handle. He rattles off his apologies. He didn’t give Jank’hanna and his crowd permission to clear out, because Maynier’s presumption had irritated him. Furthermore, he didn’t want to send them with Maynier. He could see, after all, that this man was just going to get into trouble with other captains and chiefs who are not as merciful as he. I ask him straight out whether he’d be prepared to let the missionaries go now. Then he turns all sullen again. He says he’ll give his answer tomorrow. What is it about this forlorn fellow Kemp that everyone wants to keep him for themselves?
It’s good to see Ngqika again. I ask him about the game in the area, but from the new rolls around his midriff I can see it’s been a while since he’s been hunting himself. In the course of the afternoon we stroll across to where Kemp is teaching the children. Ngqika doesn’t even greet Jank’hanna when he sees the children. One moment the little ones are sitting still listening to the master, then the king is down on all fours among them, roaring all the while. He chases them around and flings them up in the air till they crow with delight. I have to laugh myself when the king follows Faber’s little bastard up the tree and sits up there with the little brat taunting us with monkey gibber.
I watch them closely, my son and my friend. Ngqika is as much younger than I as I am younger than Kemp. Do you see the powerful Ngqika scrambling up the tree? For how long can we carry on living like this? For me and Ngqika it’s a world fading and vanishing, for Kemp with his alphabet and science and morality a world that can’t change fast enough. See, the shiny-eyed Ngqika in the tree with the children, already a figment of the past. See there the old man Kemp, with his rod and his chalk and his stooped shoulders, the man of the future. And do you see me going to squat on a rock, between the two?
Jank’hanna doesn’t seem too upset about his writing lessons ending in mayhem. When the children have gone home, we three sit under the tree. Ngqika asks the sorcerer how he’s adjusting to life this side of the Keiskamma. He smiles when Jank’hanna tells him about the woman who mistook his flapping tent for an alien creature and took off head over heels and ended up in a pitfall for bush pigs. He laughs out loud when he hears of the Caffre who came upon Jank’hanna and his Hottentots kneeling in prayer with lowered heads. The man thought they were growling at him and were preparing to pounce on him. Ngqika says he himself at first wondered who Jank’hanna was talking to so earnestly under the ground.
You are strange people, says the king. My people are sometimes scared of you and sometimes laugh at you. I’m sure it cuts both ways.
Our people don’t laugh as easily as you, says Kemp.
When the conversation takes a more serious turn, Ngqika asks Jank’hanna to pray to his white god for rain on the maize. Jank’hanna says God will send rain as he sees fit. That night a thunderstorm erupts; the lightning flashes all around us. The next morning Ngqika shakes the missionary to wake him up and find out how his god makes the lightning flashes. Jank’hanna explains to him and to me how electricity works. Neither of us wants to believe him.
I drag Ngqika away from my home where he’s getting far too cosy with Bettie. With winged words I make him see what an important rainmaker Jank’hanna is. The king nods and it seems as if I won’t be losing my friend the lightning conjurer to the Colony any time soon. Then I play a different game. I tell Ngqika that Jank’hanna usually charges a few heads of cattle for such difficult prayers that save maize crops with such abundant rains. The king consents magnanimously. He asks me where he should send the cattle, since Jank’hanna doesn’t have a kraal. I say bring the cattle to my kraal, I’ll see to it that the rainmaker gets them.
Before setting off that evening on a splendid ox, the king declares that Edmonds can clear out any time he wishes, but that Jank’hanna is remaining right here. That if the governor wants to see his rainmaker, he can come and talk his talk here.
On 29 December Edmonds at long last finds himself on the wagon chest behind a team of oxen drawn up ready for the crack of the whip. With the combined and individual blessings of Ngqika and Kemp, he flails the long whip over the oxen, but the only sound is the tongue of the hindmost ox chewing the cud. The two missionaries confer for a long time and then their words dry up. Kemp whistles for the wagon leader. The boy takes hold of the bridle and starts walking. At long last the wagon is on the move. Edmonds’ little plump hand keeps waving till he’s far away, as if he’s taking leave of old friends.
Somebody knocks at my door. The children have been snoring away for a while. Kemp is weepy; he tells me how he stood for more than half an hour on the kopje by his garden watching Edmonds’ wagon disappearing slowly behind the mountains. If you go rummaging in his notes, you’ll see what Kemp wrote that evening to his London superiors:
Our separation is, however, not to be ascribed to a diminution of fraternal love, which I am persuaded is una
ltered, but to an insurmountable aversion to this people, and a strong desire to live among the Bengalese. Oh that the blessing of Christ and his peace may follow him. Amen. Amen.
Believe me, only dear Kemp could have missed those pudgy hands – the little fellow who wanted to be a civilising influence in darkest Africa, but vomited all over himself when the light started dawning.
4
Summer is heating up by the time our little gang of Christians and Hottentots start clearing the ground where the missionary’s house is to arise. Nobody was terribly excited about the job. I had to go and kick Krieger and Bezuidenhout out of bed. Nobody sleeps as late as white deserters. The grass is hacked out, rocks thrown on a heap. Holes are dug for the poles on which the house will rest. Kemp is off on his own chopping reeds for the roof. Every now and again you hear a little yelp from the bushes when something slithers over his bare feet.
At the hottest hour of the afternoon we are sitting under a tree, smoking. Kemp comes walking along, one foot treading cautiously. He stands inspecting us, not a shirt in sight. He touches his black Sunday jacket with the white stains under the arms, takes it off and hangs it from a branch. The lot around me try not to stare at the emaciated white-and-red body. A few of them mutter a greeting as he walks past them and sits down next to me.
How are you coming along? he asks.
It’s easy here, the soil is not as hard as on the other side of the river. There is plenty of water in the soil. A week, maybe two.
Thank you, Mijnheer Buys.