Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  Kemp comes closer once again, takes a long swig at the brandy. My hand carries on mixing, my eyes searching for something that can be bled. Next to me Kemp points his feet so that he gradually rises onto his toes, slightly swaying. Then he swings both his arms, gracefully, slowly, backwards. The arms shoot forward with all the speed and strength in his sinews. He knocks me off the chair. The reed-and-rush wall collapses.

  But you little rapscallion …!

  I leap up and stay down low and my shoulder finds Kemp’s ribs and we fall against the opposite wall and Kemp hits me full in the face and I hit back. We wallop each other right through the wall. The wood and reed and rushes give way. They fall into the house and out of the house. We lie entangled across the boundary of the house and pummel each other as hard as we can in the face. Neither of us fends off any blows. Kemp seizes me with his tendril-like arms, long enough to make eye contact for a moment.

  Buys. Mijnheer Buys, he says softly.

  I get up and dust the bits of clay from my breeches. I mumble something, quite what I don’t know myself. I walk into the house through the newly bashed-in door. By some miracle the table is still standing, the bowl of precious paint undisturbed. I pick up the chair, sit down and carry on mixing. Kemp remains seated among the rushes, just on the other side of the new threshold, and fingers his forehead, the open eyebrow ridge, the closed eye underneath. I don’t look up. Kemp staggers to his feet and comes to stand behind me. He bends over me and presses both hands to the right eyebrow ridge so that blood splashes into the dish.

  Blood, he says.

  I can’t help smiling.

  You bastard.

  I also bend over the bowl. A thick splatter of blood and a molar drop from my mouth into the printer’s ink.

  I watch over Kemp’s shoulder while he slides the packed and framed letters into the press and clamps it in place.

  Buys, it is your privilege to ink our text.

  I press my hands into the brew, as thick as Maria’s bean soup, and spread it methodically over the cold letters while I read:

  And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.

  Kemp wheels the plate with the painted letters in under the screw. He places a sheet of paper into another frame in which a cloth is tentered. He places the second frame on top of the painted letters. He lowers the screw with a lever. He lifts it. He takes out the printed page. I grab the page from his hand and examine it. I touch a finger to the wet ink. I close my eyes and feel the weight of the letters pressed into the paper; the letters are impressed deep into the paper and on the reverse side they bulge out, as if wanting to break out. I let go of the sheet. The draught blows it in under the cot. I walk out to wash the Bushman paint from my hands. The printing press remains standing in the corner; the blood, piss and charcoal congeal on the letters.

  5

  The fat is in the fire. We’re scarcely halfway through February 1800, when One-hand Botha’s wife, Martie, is sitting with me, weeping. I pour her shots that she knocks back one after the other in between the sobs. She chokes when she starts talking.

  On the twelfth Botha went to ask Ngqika for permission to move back to the Colony. The king is reluctant at first, but eventually consents, after Botha has given him forty oxen, four cows and a gun. Ngqika sends a Caffre with him to conduct him and his people safely through Caffraria. Botha’s wagons had already been laden before he went to speak to Ngqika, and on the same day he sets off with Martie and their child, Hannes Knoetze and the wife and child of Frans Krieger – who was off somewhere hunting elephants.

  By the next morning a few of Ndlambe’s Caffres catch up with them and order them to return to Ngqika. They turn back meekly. When they reach one of Ngqika’s former kraals, the Caffres tell them to outspan there among the abandoned huts for the night. A Caffre asks Botha to lend him his knife, and as soon as the creature has the knife in his hand, a bunch of Heathens charge out of the bushes and Botha finds an assegai in his side. He staggers into Martie’s arms, where she supports him and pulls out the assegai. The Caffres are surrounding them. Another assegai is stuck into him. This one he pulls out himself with his single hand. Then they tear him off her and fling him down on the ground in front of her, from which he does not arise again.

  Martie sits with me and relives every moment of that day. Do you see the bit of snot falling from her nose onto her breast? While talking, she rubs it from her dress. Do you see the left nipple perking up willy-nilly?

  He looked like a big pincushion, she says. He looked at her and sighed and died, she says. They plundered and torched the wagon and drove the cattle back to Ngqika. According to report the king was upset when he received the cattle. He says he informed Ndlambe of Botha’s departure and gave his uncle the choice of letting him go or bringing him back unharmed to the Great Place. Martie says Ngqika says none of this was according to his wishes. Apparently Knoetze had been warned in advance by the Caffres that they were going to slaughter someone and the two-arsed ratbag could sneak off in time.

  Ngqika claims damages from Ndlambe and receives from his uncle two female slaves, a gun and two sick horses that give up the ghost two days later. He sends the slaves and gun to Martie and decrees that she and Krieger and Bezuidenhout will move in with me and Kemp. Whether this is in the interests of our safety or to have us all in a bundle so as to mow us down more conveniently, remains to be seen. Kemp offers his tent to the red-haired widow. My wives and children stayed with these people. How kind Martie was to them. I help Martie lift her belongings from her wagon. When I touch her shoulder a bit too compassionately, she says:

  I’m not one of your Caffre women.

  By the end of the month old Ndlambe flees across the Fish along with Siko and a horde of renegade Caffres. The Rharhabe kingdom has been torn in two. Ngqika has long been his own worst enemy. He punishes his people more cruelly than any king before him. Sometimes he claims the whole herd of the deceased, instead of the single head of cattle a king normally demands. Kings who enrich themselves at the cost of their people do not survive long. He threatens and kills his advisers and keeps them on a very short leash. Then there is Ndlambe, the old bull with the real power. Every day the people witness this mighty and proven leader and warrior. Every day they witness an alternative possibility: a king who has no need of Christians, who, if he does cooperate with them, does it from a high throne built of knobkerries and blades – do you remember how we took to our heels the first time we saw Ndlambe’s army? The people say Ndlambe will chase the Christians back into the sea. Long sob story short: Ngqika is insecure and people smell insecurity on a king, as dogs smell fear. And then they bite.

  Yese says a few Caffres tried to kill Ngqika and wounded him before they were battered to death. To hang on to any shred of power, Ngqika now has to petition the goodwill of the Hottentots in the surrounding areas, as protection against his own nation. Ngqika merely sends me word that his people are deserting him, that he fears for his life and is too scared to make the short journey to come and visit me. He can go shit straw!

  I start looking to the north. Every branch that snaps in the night makes me rush out of the house gun in hand. With his nerves as raw as mine, Bezuidenhout the other evening takes aim at a wretched Caffre who after dark is all innocently driving his few cattle past the red-bearded barbarian’s stand.

  I try to bring it home to Kemp that things are getting dangerous here. I tell him that if an uprising were to flare up here, we’d have to help fight the rebels. Otherwise Ngqika would roast all us Christians over hot coals to feed his dogs. Kemp picks listlessly at an infected thorn in his foot.

  Beloved Buys, says the barefoot preacher, Jesus is the true king of the Heathens and they can do nothing to us against his will.

  Well, there you have it.

  By April our little band of Christians is so panicked that we start standing guard again as in the commando
days. I start thinking that just perchance Kemp is the only Christian here who is truly safe. No Caffre would harm a hair on his huge head without bringing down the wrath of the king upon his gonads. At long last Ngqika comes crawling out of his hole. He says he’s been avoiding his dear Khula because he’d been told that I wanted to shoot him. If the backstabbing squirt frustrates me any further with his little civil war that’s rendering my beloved Caffraria just as unsafe as the Colony, I might just prove the tattlers right. Though I am pleased to see my son. We don’t talk about his mother. Truth to tell, we don’t talk much. We’ve both heard so many shit stories about each other that we no longer know where we’re on or off with each other. He excuses himself with great formality and goes off in search of his beloved Jank’hanna. Ngqika wants Jank’hanna to instruct him in the Caffre alphabet that the white sorcerer apparently wrote up in his idle hours.

  Poke around in his notes on the little table and you’ll see how the missionary is battling to get a grip on the language of the Caffres. You’ll see how time after time he starts with an outline and scratches it out and tears it up. He already understands the language sufficiently to save a Caffre heart, but the rules remain obscure. Somewhere between the sheets you’ll find an alphabet of twenty-seven letters, eight of these vowels. Extensive notes point to the differences from the Dutch alphabet. In his report to the London Missionary Society he writes that Arabic script could perhaps be more suited to express the Caffre sounds. There’s a short note on how European readers would struggle with the fancy swirls of the Arabic letters, but how, in their turn, the blessed Caffres also systematically need to get accustomed to the matrix of European script. He laments the fact that he does not have Arabic letters for his printing press. In the report to the focking British Colonisers of Souls you find these notes under the heading Specimen of the Caffra Language. Suchlike general observations are followed by the Vocabulary of the Caffra Language, a glossary as long as my arm.

  The glossary is meticulously divided up into 21 classes and covers any subject you can name. As far as animals, excluding humans, are concerned, he lists 98 words and expressions that can be further divided up as follows:

  Quadrupeds: 38 words, of which 9 refer to cattle;

  Birds: 14 words;

  Reptiles, insects and the like: 21 words, 8 referring to snakes;

  Parts of animals: 25 words, apart from words like ‘horn’ or ‘liver’ and including among others ‘honey’, ‘dung’ and ‘breath’.

  Secondly you find 70 words under the vague heading Of Mankind, under which are found 4 different words for ‘mother’.

  Then, celestial bodies and phenomena: 25 words, including ‘thokoloze’;

  Terrestrial objects: 18 words, including ‘shadow’;

  Vegetables: 25 words, including most of the vegetation of the area;

  Food and drink: 11 words;

  House and utensils: 33 words, for instance ‘assegai’ and the word ‘nadi’, which according to our brother designates both ‘mirror’ and ‘book’;

  Dress: 10 words.

  Under ‘diseases’ you find only 5 Xhosa equivalents for pain, fever, the great itch, smallpox and flatulence. (Note that my lord Kemp pens down chronic farting in its original Latin: crepitus ventris.)

  Hereafter the section on dignities, qualities, etc., starting with ‘lord’ and ‘lady’, followed by ‘Christian’ and ‘magician’; further on you find the same word for a female servant and a Hottentot woman. The glossary concerning the nobility ends on equivalents for ‘rogue’, ‘friend’, ‘enemy’, ‘thief’, ‘liar’, ‘lie’ and, at last, ‘hunger’.

  In addition you find 32 adjectives,

  77 verbs,

  37 pronouns,

  33 adverbs,

  10 prepositions,

  6 conjunctions,

  5 interjections,

  12 numerals,

  4 diminutives,

  9 comparatives and

  84 phrases.

  All in all he mentions 624 words and expressions of the Caffre nation, that on his sole authority, without any proofreading, was published in the Transactions of the London Missionary Society, Vol. 1 of 1804, to be distributed and plundered by plagiarists to the end of time.

  Ngqika and Jank’hanna’s summer of joyful language lessons is of short duration. On 27 April the whole gang of us clears out: I and my people, Kemp, the other Graaffe Rijnet outlaws, the German and English deserters who had joined us in dribs and drabs. Not even this lot of rebels and deserters want to linger in the midst of a civil war. We abandon our houses as they stand with no hope of ever seeing them again and two nights later we outspan on the banks of the Debe. Faber wounds a bontebok; the creature charges the wretched Kemp, but a second bullet floors the buck at his feet.

  I walk in the veldt to cleanse my ears of all the whingeing. The pack comes to greet me while I’m taking aim at a kudu in thick undergrowth. There’s something amiss here. The leader with the pointed ears is nowhere to be seen; now a hyena is leading the pack. Such a thing I’ve never heard of, but I understand. The hyena is no longer young, but bigger than the dogs. His scars say he knows all about fighting. He growls when he sees me. The wagging tails of the others make him calm down. Two of the bitches are pregnant. What kind of monsters will tear their way out of their loins? The hyena makes a wide circle around me and comes to stand before me, behind a rotten tree trunk. He is broad, even for a hyena. One of his fangs is broken. He turns around, the low back quarter speckled like a partridge. He lifts his leg, pisses against the trunk and disappears. Somewhere I hear a dog bark and then yowl. How long will the hyena remain the leader of the pack? The hyena is stronger than the dogs, but he’s the only hyena. I shoot a fat peacock for the pot. My Bettie sticks the feathers in her hair and no Christian can keep his eyes to himself.

  At the end of the month we trek across a mountain and pitch camp again. A week later I send a message to Ngqika where he’s hiding from the rebellious Rharhabe in a Hottentot camp fourteen miles away. The king, my son, no longer trusts me and I him ever less by the day. From Yese I hear nothing, other than that she’s placing curses on me and my wives and children.

  Ngqika arrives with the dawn at our place. With him is the usual retinue of fifty men, each with a kaross over the shoulders and a single assegai or knobkerrie in hand. But all around the stand, I point out to Bezuidenhout, are lying some two hundred naked warriors, with all the shields and assegais that they could carry on them. Ngqika says the despicable Hottentots persuaded him that the Christians were conspiring against him, but our warm welcome was proof that he no longer need fear us. A captain leaps to his feet and takes his king to task: What kind of lying is this about his fear of us? What’s happened to the plan to skin us alive? Our king looks about him all bewildered and laughs nervously. He demands Jank’hanna’s horse and Kemp thank God does not argufy and gives the horse and Ngqika is on the horse and gone. One by one the warriors arise from the bushes and trot after their king.

  In May Krieger, Faber and I, with Bentley, the focking English deserter, saddle our horses and ride to the Colony to barter a few hides and tusks for munitions. I take part of Kemp’s diary and a few letters along for him and entrust them to a kind farmer who is prepared to deliver them to Graaffe Rijnet, seeing that he’s allowed to set foot in that dusty street without being shot to pieces. We return with sacks full of lead and powder, which emboldens the whole gang to move further afield. By June our camp is settled next to the Keiskamma. I mend my ox-cart’s axle, and Kemp marvels at the hippopotami. He is truly chuffed with himself nowadays. At Ngqika’s place he didn’t manage to convert one single Caffre, but since we’ve been camping here Hottentots have streamed into the camp every day, devoured all there is to eat and walked off. Kemp lures the lot with food and then it’s a prayering and a hymning to make up for the wasted time and souls. There are regularly rhinoceros tracks in the mud, but the wretched brutes now know better than to be seen.

  My children fall ill on
e by one. Maria has to come up with cures and herbs. I am kept busy all day listening to and solving every plaint and problem of my fellow fugitives. Maria is fast asleep already by the time I crawl in behind her and press my snout into the back of her neck. In the morning she’s up already by the time I wake up, but her smell clings to me till the afternoon’s sweat washes her scent from me.

  Not a hundred years later Ngqika puts in another appearance with one of his wives and thirty of his Caffres. It seems a terrible fever is raging at the Great Place. He’s coming to seek refuge with us where Jank’hanna can keep the disease at bay with a mighty praying. In no time at all trees are cut down and the king builds a small kraal a stone’s throw from our camping spot. I tell the men it’s time we tested the Colony’s borders. If we fire the first shots there are plenty of Christians who’ll join in the shooting. I’m not going to spend my life sitting around in a goddam Sunday-school class.

  We melt all that is lead or tin and with sacks of bullets that used to be mugs and plates, the other Christian men and I prepare by mid-June to take up arms against the Colony. Bentley remains behind to look after the old missionary and the women and children. Once again I have to cart along a whole mailbag of letters and diaries from Kemp. For somebody who sets himself up as a model of humility with his unshod paws and hatless forehead, it’s a bit of a joke that he wants to jot down every bright idea and bowel movement and send it out into the world.

  Before our departure I tell Ngqika of our plans with the focking English and our friends in the Castle. He seals his blessing on our campaign against the Bushmen-from-the-Sea by offering a few of his Caffres who can shoot. Everything goes swimmingly until we cross the Baviaans.

  In the evenings when the other commando members are snoring away, I can’t help peeking into Brother Kemp’s jottings. The dear chap marvels at every plant and creature. He writes odes to the baboons in the kloofs and the parrots in the forests, waxes lyrical over the stinkwood and yellowwood; he measures the giant aloe and the enormous snails. His awe at ostrich eggs. His amazement at the honeybird that signals with its call that it has found honey and how you can then follow it to the sweetness. He describes sadly how his dogs tear a young steenbok to pieces. When I read these things, I start missing my old friend. And when he mentions that he conducts experiments on chameleons to try to ascertain how they change their colour, I think I must ask him about it as soon as I see him again and I know that I’ll never again come across a man like him in this country.