Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  Hardly have we set foot on the other bank of the Baviaans, than our little commando runs up against Chungwa’s army. They give us a good drubbing. Most of the Caffre riflemen perish. Stoffel Botha is captured and Chungwa drags him to the drostdy. There the blackguard blurts out all our plans. How we wanted to drive the English from the Colony, how we would drag all the commissioners all the way to Caffraria and there do unto them what was done unto our comrades in the Castle and how, in the new Englishless republic, Krieger would be general and I would be king.

  After our defeat against Chungwa we wipe our bloody noses. We’re not too shamefaced: We were not even ten Christian guns and a handful of Caffres against a whole horde. We ride back to our camp on the Keiskamma, back to the goddam hallelujahs.

  If you as much as look askance at the grass, it catches fire. Our cattle are lean; food is scarce. I haven’t even unsaddled, when Kemp comes running up to me to jabber about Sara, Bezuidenhout’s wife. The little converted Hottentot girl is inseparable from Kemp these days. Even now I can see her standing and spying on our talk. She, too, is the one who dares tell Kemp what no one else, myself included, feels up to telling him: how the Christians, every time he goes to piss or pray in the bush, slip into his tent and rob him – smaller stuff than what Ngqika is forever absconding with, but more chronically. Bezuidenhout’s little wife is quite appealing, I can see why Kemp is so taken with her. She hovers about him like one of his flies, zooming incessantly and fluttering on about sin and hell and punishment and everything that tickles a preacher’s prick.

  I see the other Christians watching when I’m talking so earnestly with Kemp. The soul-scavenger tells me excitedly that in my absence Maria also decided that she was in need of salvation. Kemp just can’t stay away from a married woman. To each his own, I suppose. But he’d better watch himself if he wants to meddle with Maria’s soul. When I go and look up my family, Maria and Nombini say I should get out of the way, they’re cooking lunch. The children don’t seem to have noticed that I was gone.

  On 11 August we trek on to a site lower down on the Keiskamma. That night the Christians sit around a fire squabbling about what to do with Kemp. They are still smarting from the defeat against Chungwa and another revolution gone to glory. The war is raging about us, they say. Why does the missionary lure all that is Hotnot and Caffre to us in order to convert them? He sows strange seeds in their wives’ heads. Claims not to want to baptise Faber’s child because he and his woman Leentjie carry on like Heathens. He must die, they say. It takes all my sweet-talking to have the old man’s life spared. On the 16th we move four miles to the east, still further down the river, cross it twice and eventually camp on the lusher left bank. Late at night the whole of the camp to a man is wielding torches to scare off the plaguy hippopotami.

  The mighty Keiskamma is little more than a trickle nowadays. The only moving things are the whirlwinds that toss about our tents every late afternoon. Deep into September even Yese is heard of. I don’t think of her very much any more; all that I retain are faint twinges of jealousy and shame. Yese sends word that she doesn’t get any rain made. There are malign sorcerers in the vicinity who stop up the hole from which the rain falls, she says. She says Jank’hanna must make rain, please. Later that week it’s Ngqika’s brother-in-law who comes to plead with Jank’hanna to dance for rain.

  Bezuidenhout, Oosthuizen and Steenberg come upon four Caffres and a woman sitting next to the road roasting the hindquarter of a cow. They say they found the carcase in the veldt. Look, they say, here the Bushman arrows are still sticking out. We’re just roasting it because we’re hungry. We haven’t stolen it. Steenberg shoots the spokesman in the head. The other two Christians are also obliged to shoot, so that the truth may be left lying here next to the road. They shoot the woman and two of the Caffres, but one escapes and comes tattling to Kemp; the woman, it seems, was his sister. Once again I have to sweet-talk and lie and connive or my friend the philanthropist will also get a ball of lead between the eyes.

  I hear an unearthly screaming from Kemp’s tent and go to investigate. He’s bleeding an elderly Caffre. The man has rheumatism, he says. This bloodletting is reputed to help. I rub my fingers against one another, feel if they can still feel, praise his healing powers, and make my getaway.

  A man can’t walk two steps without bumping into a Hottentot tittle-tattling. The latest news is that three castaways emerged from the sea on a piece of plank and when they set foot on shore were immediately captured by a lot of Ngqika’s Caffres. The men tried to escape but were caught again and beaten to a pulp with knobkerries. One of them lay still pretending to be dead, but when he saw the Caffres slitting his comrades’ throats to make sure they would lie still for good, he jumped to his feet and dived into the river and escaped. When we sound Ngqika out on this, he shrugs his ever-fatter shoulders and says they’re like the hyenas of the veldt, they’ve got no business here. Bezuidenhout gets hold of the two bags of raw coffee beans on which the castaways survived and now we have coffee three times a day.

  When Kemp finds out that Bezuidenhout is planning to move to the sea, he gets anxious about Sara’s soul. On 15 October he baptises the woman and her two daughters in the Keiskamma. Maria is so overjoyed at her friend’s access to Eternal Life that, without asking me, she slaughters a sheep for the woman. On the 19th Kemp also baptises Sara’s oldest daughter as Christina. As if there weren’t enough damned Christinas in this world.

  Ngqika gets to hear of Bezuidenhout’s plans and with great ostentation makes sure that my pal and his household understand that this is Caffraria and that Ngqika will decide who lives where. Kemp is overjoyed that Sara will not be taken away from him. He knows all too well that his diary will be read by the whole of the London Missionary Society, and yet he betrays himself in his scribblings. Jank’hanna and Kemp increasingly diverge into two distinct people. Just listen to the musings of a ruttish preacher on the 23rd of October of the year of our Lord 1800:

  I now rejoiced in the prospect that I should again have an opportunity to feed her soul with the milk of the word of God.

  At the end of October we trek away from the Keiskamma and her hippopotami with the protruding ribs. The king of this parched land once again comes pleading for Jank’hanna to pray for rain; the witchdoctors are being threatened and executed. Ngqika promises him two milk cows and their calves. Jank’hanna says he’ll pray and the king can keep his presents, but he should bear in mind that God’s ways are mysterious and unfathomable and whatever else.

  That evening we arrive at our old living space. All this trekking in pursuit of nothing, with Ngqika breathing up our bungholes all the time, and now once again back where we goddamwell started out from. Kemp says there’s a Greek who maintained that Achilles would never catch up with a tortoise and that an arrow never really moved. I ask him whether he’s ever shot with a bow. The Caffres who used to live here, the eleven kraals full of people and cattle, have all moved on in search of food and pasturage. They burned down the grass before clearing out and Kemp’s branch-and-reed house, which I helped build with these two cramped hands and in the sweat of my brow, has perished in the process. My friend is in tears and on his knees.

  Next to the chimney, which is all that is left towering over the veldt, stand the cows and calves that Ngqika promised. The rainmaker sends the herdsmen away with the gifted cattle and pitches his tent again, bolts together the printing press once again, makes his bed and sows the last of the vegetable seeds in the blackened grass.

  I leave him there and run after the herdsmen. I tell him that Jank’hanna will definitely accept the king’s gift, on condition that it’s larger. The next morning the herdsmen come walking up the hill with another twenty cows. I take the cattle from them and say Of course I’ll see to it that Jank’hanna receives the gift and send my love to my son and Jank’hanna’s thanks to the king.

  Jank’hanna prays fervently, his head banging the ground. He prays until the Lord’s temper has been tried
beyond endurance and in a fit of wrath he opens up his heavens and the whole of Caffraria is flooded. Ngqika and all his people flee before the deluge. The lightning flashes so fiercely that Ngqika sends to ask the white rainmaker: Tell your god that if he wants me to listen to him, he must stop deafening me with thunder. Day after day it pours down. People flee the low-lying areas.

  The red barbarian Bezuidenhout seizes his opportunity in the midst of the mayhem, and at the beginning of November he and his people trek to the banks of the Kabusie. He takes Sara along, and Kemp starts cultivating some other woman’s soul. Maria is with Kemp all day and every day, babbling on about her heart and soul. One night a tempest rips the missionary’s tent to shreds. Maria wants him to move in with us. I say he can muck off, if the two of them want to blacken the good name of my house they can go and wash her as white as driven snow outside in the rain. Since the houseless Kemp contracts an acute case of belly-run, Maria’s soul does after all remain in my house and out of heaven. Hardly has my own soul attained serenity, towards mid-November, or the Caffres start stealing my cattle. When Faber and his Leentjie also make for the Kabusie, even I, the father of Ngqika, start thinking it’s time to clear out.

  These days I’m avoiding both my friends. I don’t have the stomach for squitter-shitting and puking. Kemp is permanently on his bucket and Ngqika is also out of sorts. He does not respond to my complaints about the cattle rustling. All that I hear are strange rumours making him out to be demented. Apparently Ngqika wanted to buy horses from two deserters. When the horses were in his kraal, he attacked the two men. It seems he pulled and pushed them around and cut the buttons off their jackets. When the poor fools asked him to return two buttons to button up their jackets against the cold, he pointed out the tree from which he was going to hang them. The two of them cleared out quickly. One of them arrives at my place badly dishevelled that evening, looking for Kemp. He says he lost his friend somewhere in the bush. The next morning the other one turns up on my doorstep and he looks even worse. Apparently six or so Caffres attacked him during the night. That same night a young shepherd is devoured by a pack of hyenas.

  As December runs its course, we Christians keep to ourselves. There are whisperings and suppressed curses and plans made and abandoned. All that becomes clear is that we are on our way, and quickly. We are informed that Ngqika has survived his fever and is lively as a cricket again, but even more unpredictable. We start slowly gathering our few possessions and stealthily packing. The plan is simple: Get out of Caffraria and fight our way through the eastern Bushmen. And after that? you ask. After that nobody knows.

  It’s a battle to persuade Kemp to come with us. Messengers from Maynier bring him a pile of letters and a bag full of clothes. They’ve hardly left or he distributes the clothes among the Caffres. One of the letters mentions that the Reverends Read and Van der Lingen have arrived at the Cape. They are looking forward to ministering to the Heathens with him, but for the time being they’re remaining in the background until things calm down on the frontier. The evening before our departure I sit and talk to my friend for a long time. He agrees at long last to leave Caffraria when he is told that Sara and the other converted Hottentot women are leaving with us.

  My labours under the Caffres were not exactly a success, he says. I should rather throw in my lot with the few women for whom I do mean something.

  He gazes for a while in the direction of the Great Place.

  I must be led in my life choices by my weakness, he says, not my strength. I must acknowledge my wounds, make my frailty my armour.

  Why should I at this moment think of Geertruy and childhood writing lessons under the giant tree? Kemp drones on:

  Do you respect this, Buys, you who get stronger by the day? You who are led by your strength?

  Respect? In this wilderness you mustn’t go looking for respect, Kemp. Here there is only meat and blood and cunt.

  We let Ngqika know that we are going to shoot a few elephants and will bring back the finest tusks for him and on the last day of 1800 we clear out of Caffraria.

  6

  We trek to the Colony by one hell of a detour. What a cock-up this outing turned out to be. We had to travel in a wide north-western arc to avoid Caffraria and to forge our way through inhospitable and trackless landscapes. In the course of the next four months and some weeks we would travel in a half-moon, from the Kabusie down next to the west bank of the Kei as far as the Stormberg, then west to the Bamboesberg and at last south to Schapenkraal in the Tarka district.

  Yes, Ngqika, we’re going to hunt elephants. What do you mean, of course we’re coming back. We’re going to fetch Bezuidenhout and Faber from the Kabusie and then we’re going to disport ourselves merrily in your kingdom with our guns. Yes, thank you for sending a whole gang of Caffres with us to help us with the hunting; thank you for not being over-friendly and mistrustful. Damn.

  On New Year’s Day 1801 we and our wagons cross the mountainous and invisible border between Caffre and Bushman. From the mountain we survey the whole of Caffraria, all the way to the sea. It’s beautiful here, and wild. We sleep in the river sand of the Kabusie. The next morning I kick the lot awake, where they’re snoring away, half buried in the sand like tortoise eggs. There are quite a few of us; every single Christian and deserter and outlaw has joined our trek. We must get going early if we want to do a day’s journey in a day. Our flight needs to be swift, before Ngqika’s mind changes again, like the fickle weather of his country. Into the saddle and through the river. Kemp leads his horse by the bridle. He falls, the horse gets a fright, stumbles and falls on top of him. The horse tramples him badly; I pull him out from under the floundering animal just before it’s too late. The missionary is once again in tears. Nowadays if he’s not puking he’s bawling.

  I could see them under the flood, Buys. I saw my Antje and Styntje. Rest awaits me in the waters, Buys. They await me.

  Come on now, Kemp. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today.

  As we ride away, Kemp keeps looking back over his shoulder, back to the river.

  By afternoon we have crossed the nek and reached the stands of Faber and Bezuidenhout. I’m almost glad to see the old bellwethers again.

  The veldt here is teeming with lion and wildebeest, with us in the midst of this ancient confrontation. People who use their eyes to gaze heavenward sometimes see earthly things differently to those of us with our eyes to the ground. See what our missionary writes in his report: He says the wildebeest is so called in Dutch because it is indeed a wilde beest, a wild beast, a creature made up out of segments of different animals. It has the rump of an ox, the mane of a horse, the fringe of an eland, the horns of a buffalo, the tail of a quagga, the beard of a goat and the paws of a reindeer.

  On the sixth we get rid of Ngqika’s Caffres. Up to now they’ve trekked along with us with the few cattle they wanted to barter for tusks. We come across two Bushmen who are on their way to Caffraria to trade two tusks for a cow. We give them a cow and take the tusks. They are young tusks and freshly cut. There are more elephants around here and they’re close. The Bushmen ask for another calf before they’ll divulge where they found the elephant. We go and look for the troop and shoot two big bulls and pile the Caffres’ arms high with tusks and hides and fat and feet. We give them an ox-cart and say Keep your cattle, these are gifts. I say we’ll carry on hunting until our wagons are also full of tusks. I send them and their cattle back to their king with all good wishes and a prosperous New Year.

  Without Ngqika’s gawkers the group of wanderers is now composed as follows:

  4 Dutch rascals – yours truly, Bezuidenhout, Faber and Krieger,

  2 Dutch women,

  2 Dutch children,

  5 English deserters,

  1 German deserter,

  13 little bastards,

  1 Caffre,

  1 Caffre woman,

  4 Hottentots,

  6 Hottentot women,

  15 or so Hottentot children,
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  2 little Caffre girls,

  1 Tambookie boy,

  1 slave and

  1 missionary.

  Only in these parts would such an assortment of oddities huddle together for the sake of survival. For the rest:

  a flock of sheep,

  a herd of goats,

  300 cattle,

  25 horses,

  3 wagons,

  1 ox-cart and would you believe it,

  1 printing press.

  The aloes grow high here and look different to those in Caffraria. The plants branch out luxuriantly, sometimes with fifty heads to as many branches of the same tree. The sap is richer, the leaves sparser, the leaf edges less curved and the teeth sharper. Cycads are everywhere in the veldt between grazing eland and wildebeest. On this day a herd of bontebok numbering more than four thousand moves past.

  We cross a stream and spend another night on the bank, where Bushmen attack us before dawn. The Bushmen are driven back with a few shots. The only soul to get wounded is the Englishman Bentley, in the way as always. Kemp is immediately on duty with bandages and ointments that he conjures up from nowhere. The first arrow just glanced Bentley’s head. The second remained lodged in his forearm – near the lower join of the radius and the ulna, if our doctor is to be believed. Kemp has been here with us in the bush for how long and he still believes that you can cure anything if you know the words for a man’s component parts. The doctor manages to extract the shaft of the arrow, but the point has penetrated too far to be removed safely. He leaves the arrow point inside the Englishman and bandages him. I wait for the poison to start doing its job, but nothing. The deserter is evidently immune, or the Bushmen have run out of poison. The creatures also pot a dog and a cow.