by Willem Anker
The king and his family and I are invited for supper at the governor’s table. I am proud of my son. He doesn’t know the food and he doesn’t know the knives and forks, but he learns fast. The women struggle. Ngqika likes the strange rich meat sauces and he appreciates the wine. With every new dish set before him he sends a portion over his shoulder to the taster. When he is satisfied that it’s not poisoned, he makes a great to-do about the culinary skill. The governor thinks he likes the food so much that he wants to share it with his people. We don’t disabuse him with the truth.
Janssens says the trek to the Kat River was arduous. The road was bad or non-existent, the streams many and not easy to traverse. But game was plentiful. He boasts about the thousands of pounds of meat they shot in those five days of travelling. Ever since the first stone was cast, man has learnt to kill at a distance. I’m starting to wonder whether the new musket bullets don’t increase the distance unduly. When you can no longer see a creature’s eyes when you shoot it, you start weighing meat by the pound.
A day’s journey away from the Kat River Janssens’ party came across a few farmers from Bruyntjeshoogte. They were in pursuit of the Caffres who had stolen their cattle. They’d caught up with the thieves and retrieved their cattle and shot two of the Caffres. Janssens tells the story hesitantly, anxious that this incident could further sour public relations. Ngqika shakes his head and smiles broadly, his gob stuffed with beef. No, he says, he can find no fault with the actions of the farmers.
The thieves got what they deserved, says the king in Xhosa.
Welcome to the other side of your border, General, I interpret.
Ngqika’s wives pour themselves more wine and clink glasses until the red juice makes the starched table cloth look like a battlefield. Janssens raises a hand for more napkins. He wants to know from me whether all the colonists, that is to say Dutch Christians, are as terrifying as the crowd that travelled with him. He tells me that when they were outspanning at the Sundays River, one of the Christians was sleeping on a wagon. A freshly slaughtered sheep was suspended from the wagon to bleed dry. The carcase attracts a hyena that starts eating the sheep from below. The farmer stealthily takes his gun and pushes the muzzle down the carcase into the hyena’s mouth and blasts away the creature’s head. I want to say that the Christians hereabouts are mostly about ten feet tall and spit fire and can get women with child at a distance, but the governor is droning on excitedly. He tells of the forests through which the road winds at times. The troops of monkeys yelling at them when they pass under the trees. The colonists then nimbly scramble into the trees, as if they themselves had long tails and four hands. They grab hold of the monkeys and break their necks and roast them. Some of them are cute enough to be kept as pets, until they steal food and are then also roasted.
I prefer dogs to animals with thumbs, I say.
Janssens stops chewing, regards me quizzically.
Most colonists of my acquaintance aren’t really great tree-climbers, I say.
While paging through the traveller’s insane book, I stroke the dog at my feet. I have two dogs about the place, big black creatures with long tails and even longer legs. The price tame animals pay for lounging about the house with full bellies is that their owners baptise them with unpalatable names. Unless you deserve your anonymity, you are expected to leap up and wag your tail whenever you hear your name. Until they prove the contrary to me, I call the yard dogs Janssens and De Mist, after the two functionaries who barked so loudly but could get nothing bitten.
I still sometimes see the pack of stray dogs when I’m in the veldt, and at night their eyes gleam on the edge of the clean-swept yard. Yes, they’re still around, with the bodies of the young ones more and more favouring hyenas. But they keep far away from civilisation, as if they are scared of contamination. When Janssens and De Mist smell them, the tails are between the legs and they come and lie whining by my feet. Hear my song: Dogs are the descendants of the first wolves who could tolerate humans for long enough to be fed by them.
After rattling on in every detail and with the necessary Latin nomenclature about the build of the wildebeest’s penis and thereupon the structure of the Hottentot women’s nether lips, the traveller also tells about his pet monkey. The dumb creature scoffed all the insects the traveller had collected, including the pins he’d stuck them down with. The traveller laments the loss of the many hours he spent taming and training the monkey, as well as the wasted hours spent ordering and classifying nature.
I abandon the plaint of the failed scientist to lend a hand where my youngest sons are struggling to lift the large cooking pot onto the wagon.
Ngqika’s wives are sozzled after the second glass of wine and laugh raucously. At their feet lie the shards of their glasses. At the Great Place they are queens, but here you see them for the spoilt little tipsy girls they are. Janssens gets up before the dessert and excuses himself. I hear him muttering outside about the damned stink. He is back soon with a handkerchief soaked with sweet perfume that for the rest of the evening never hovers very far from his face.
The Xhosa ruler can’t stop enthusing about the pretty uniforms of the occupiers. Janssens says he has just the thing for the king. He’d wanted to hand over the present at the end of the meeting, but why not now. An officer is beckoned up and returns minutes later with a new uniform. Ngqika touches and caresses the lapels and wants to put on the thing there and then. The meal is forgotten; a gaggle of officers help him into the uniform. The garments are hopelessly too small for him; his forearms and calves almost totally bare; immediately a rip down the spine. The king disengages himself from the eager hands of the soldiers and goes to parade before his warriors in his new apparel. They egg him on. The too-short sleeves and trouser legs make him seem even bigger and stronger. He delights in how the soldiers gawp at the Caffre king bursting out of their largest uniform. As soon as he notices the admiring exclamations and glances starting to taper off, he takes off the uniform, but he keeps the hat with the feather and the cockade on his regal head. Now he demands Janssens’ voluminous cloak, but this is blushingly refused. Even the governor finds it hard to say no to Ngqika. He promises to send him a cloak just like his.
After supper Ngqika disappears to his wives in the tents that have been prepared for them. Janssens disappears to his paperwork. I wander about among the soldiers gathered in groups around fires. At a fire smoking dismally they offer me wine. Most of the pipsqueaks in the circle have hardly started shaving. They break green leaves off a cycad and throw it on the flames. Not used to making their own fires. They talk about all the game they’ve seen. On the dry plains on the other side of the Sundays River there were buck by the thousands upon thousands, even a lot of quaggas. In one day the governor’s hunters shot fifty-four buck that they call mountain buck and many more that they didn’t count. They tell about buck moving in herds of thousands, how beautiful it was to see these hosts fleeing before the horses of the hunters. They tell how these antelopes leapt, as if they were flying rather than running, animals who in their flight sought to break away from the earth and the slaughter. I say we call them springbok. The soldiers say that makes sense. Now they know what they were hunting. I drink their wine and teach them the names of plants and antelopes and all kinds of other things they will be devouring here. A captain tells of the white antelope in the herd of three, no, he swears by the only God, surely four thousand grey buck that on another day sheered past them unrelenting and vast as a glacier. I ask him about glaciers and believe nothing of what he tells me. The captain says the governor immediately wanted to have this rare snow-white buck and a handful of the younger men set off in pursuit. The antelope stood out from its fellows and they separated it from the herd, which now all looked alike and indistinguishable. They surrounded the white rarity and tired it out until they could capture the animal with their bare hands without firing a shot. You can go and have a look, Janssens gave that white hide to Monsieur Perron who on his return from the South S
ea Islands stopped over at the Cape. Perron donated it to the Museum of the National Institute of Paris where it is daily being gawked at by Parisians, indistinguishable in their powdered wigs.
When the moon is high, I wander to Yese’s tent. I stand outside and prick up my ears. I walk back to the fires.
Maps are as old as mankind. Ever since the first scrawlings of the migratory patterns of game on the walls of caves we have been drawing lines and living within them. Every line becomes a knot that tightens around you. On the map now stretched out on the table before me, the writer has abandoned the power of knowing and binding. Rather, here in the middle of the Flatus Vocis, he starts opening up. Layer upon layer of ink, a black sea of experiences and routes and fever dreams. Only here and there sketches and words glimmer through, the map as crammed and incomprehensible as life itself: rivers, mountains, huts, kopjes, screams, birds, clouds, earthquakes, fire, Christians, winds, the horseman himself, states of mind, sexual organs, graves, corpses, gallows, sea monsters, smoke, laughter, Heathens, sunsets, dust, seasons, predators, battles, quarries, stars, elephant trails, yowls, grass, water maidens, mud, thorn trees, bushes, ageing, outcries, stone, young girls, sand, wagon routes, leaves, tortoises.
At sunrise Janssens is standing in front of his tent waiting for Ngqika so that the interview may commence. The king is late, as is the divine right of kings, and I keep the governor company. Janssens goes to sit down in the cool tent, starts paging through his paperwork to get his facts straight for the day. I smoke. He says he believes in two things: that the Caffres must be driven out of the Zuurveld and that, when every Caffre in the Colony is on the right side of the Fish, the colonists living among the Caffres, people like yours truly, must also clear out of there. All intercourse between Christian and Caffre must cease. That is all that will make this country work, he says. Look at you spluttering in your coffee.
Janssens tells me of the trouble the rebellious Hottentot Johannes Stuurman is stirring. The Hottentot uprising is making everybody uneasy, he says. The farmers are scared and are starting to shoot or clear out. Even Van der Kemp can’t manage to placate these wild Hottentots. Old Klaas and his comrades are too wily to be circumvented. All that will work with such a Hotnot, he says, is bribery. Janssens sighs exaggeratedly and when he looks up, I feel compelled to sigh in sympathy. He touches my shoulder, I his confidant whom he does not know from Adam. Then there is the dreaded Ndlambe, he says, lying this side of the Fish. Also the Gqunukhwebe, the Mbalu and the Dange are digging in between the Sundays and Fish Rivers. It is for these reasons, he says and sighs again, that he’s undertaken this journey, to bring peace and prosperity to us here in the eastern districts.
Thank God for those he has set over us, I say.
He leaves his work for a moment, looks up at me and then carries on underlining notes. His quill is new. Not a drop of ink is spilt. I open my knapsack and take out my papers. A multitude of letters and petitions that I’ve been keeping for the last few years, precisely against such an opportunity as this. In the pile that I unpack on his desk is a petition listing the injustices perpetrated upon me and my fellows by the focking English; also two letters from the Reverend Ballot urging me to return to the Colony and two from Van Rensburg describing how he’s trying to mediate my case with the authorities.
And what is this? Janssens demands without looking up.
Paperwork, General. It shows that I behaved myself under the Caffres. That the fo– the English and Maynier blackened me. My name, I mean. I am still as white as the lilies of the field.
More red than white, Mijnheer Buys, he smiles while starting to rifle through the letters.
I read the look in his eyes. He is polite, even cracks jokes, but behind that curved-up smile I see the distrust. I am a prominent gent here on the other side of the border, charming but dangerous. Something for the museum or the gallows, but not something to walk about freely. I plot and scheme with the Caffres. My existence is not exactly convenient for the Colony. The Christians hate me, all the chiefs except Ngqika hate me. My fellow rebels, even Hannes Bezuidenhout, call me a good-for-nothing and a shit-stirrer when they are questioned in Graaffe Rijnet.
How do you feel about coming home, Mijnheer Buys?
Home?
Back to the Colony? A farm in De Lange Cloof?
Home? I must go home. My days with Ngqika are numbered, that I know. Everybody knows it, except the king. I say I would like to go back to De Lange Cloof if it suited them. Janssens says it suits them exceptionally well. He wants me to go and tell his commissioner-general, one De Mist, what the Caffres are all about. I can see him making a mental note to warn his pal against me as soon as I’ve left. Later, as Omni-Buys, I’ll read the letters of this fellow with the flapping epaulettes, how he, shortly after our conversation, calls me, Khula, the most dangerous man in the Colony.
How does one go home, I wondered that day and am wondering again today. Nombini is standing next to the nearest wagon. Look how pretty: she in the hand-me-down dress that Maria has made her wear these last few years – Godalmighty, woman, cover yourself. Can’t you see the place is full of half-grown boys? She who stands on her toes, the calves showing. Under the dress her breasts still hold their shape, those majestic nipples spring to attention for the breeze. She is ageing beautifully. She is quieter, keeps herself to herself, and still, after all these years, doesn’t know how, when I gaze at her, the world around us ceases to exist. She places her birdcage on the wagon, carefully packs it between two crates, wrapped in a blanket. She plaited the thing years ago for an orphaned weaver bird that she raised. She looked for a long time at the weaver nests hanging from the trees in the yard. She plaited her cage in the calabash shape of the nests. So that the little one should feel at home, she said. When the bird grew up and escaped, the cage housed other little birds that had fallen out of nests or broken their wings. In the last year or so the cage has been hanging empty in her house. The revolving shadows of the straw lattice form patterns against her walls.
Each one of my wives’ homes looks different. Nombini doesn’t often allow me into her house. She says I walk and talk too loudly. Her nest can’t take it. Her house is full of trinkets, delicate little things that she and her children make. If you see the house, you’ll think it’s a hodgepodge, but it contains unfathomable patterns and refrains, as fragile and intricate as the spider’s web spun in every corner. I stay away.
Have you seen how birds build their nests? Humans can do everything except build a bird’s nest. Humans are always less at home in their houses than animals. Birds build nests without tools, it assumes shape from the inside, like a shell. The bird presses and stretches the material with her breast until it becomes pliable. The nest takes the shape of the bird’s body. The female hollows out the nest and eases back the walls constantly until they become soft and warm. The house is her passion. Every blade of perfectly plaited grass in the nest has been pressed back innumerable times with laboured breath, with heartbeats. A pressure from inside, a physical, dominating intimacy. The nest is a burgeoning fruit challenging its limits.
Nombini makes sure that the cage is settled snugly in the wagon. How does one go home? I’m on my way once again, after eleven years during which I dwelled mainly in Elizabeth’s house, sometimes slept over in Maria’s house and now and again could go and lie, pussyfoot, on Nombini’s plaited rug. My shelter, my shack on Shit-face Senekal’s farm, that hole in the ground, was that my home? My first and only home? To that I can’t return; it’s been covered over, the wattle rotten. How I catch myself whistling again the tune that I used to warble in those years while lying in my jackal lair.
I go and stand behind Nombini, my chin on her shoulder, while she’s fitting her plaited and painted knick-knacks in between the guns and flour and powder and sugar. I place my hands on her little pot-belly, which after little Windvogel’s birth has never tightened again. I whistle what I whistled when all those years ago I lay gazing at my wattle roof with unseeing e
yes, my prick in my hand, the world small and the stars close by.
The interview is stately, more ceremony than conversation. Ngqika, having shed the uniform and at home again in his little animal skin loincloth and cloak, sits next to his mother and four of the oldest advisers. Janssens sits on his own on the other side of the table. I and the Bethelsdorp Hottentot Platje, who is interpreting for Janssens, are seated on either side of the table. The riempie stool is too low. I have to get up every now and again and walk around the table to stretch my legs. The tent flaps have been opened again, the retinues of both parties are seated outside. When there seems to be no end to the talking, the audience gradually drifts away as the winter sun warms them into drowsiness.
The governor starts proceedings by announcing the reason for his journey: Peace is possible only if each holds to his permitted bank of the Fish, as it pleases the VOC, the focking English, the Batavians and God the Father himself. Ngqika assures him that it is a great pleasure to lay eyes on the ruler of the Colony. He says he’s always been a friend to the Christians. That is exactly why the Caffre rebels are taking up arms against him in hordes, from all directions from which the winds blow and the sun and moon rise and set. Can you hear me sweetening the king’s words with honey so that they can slither sweetly and slickly into Janssens’ bony ear?
By afternoon the interview is still dragging on. Janssens knows only one tune: Ngqika must see to it that all the Caffres move east of the Fish. Ngqika turns to Yese and the elders. When the whispering gets heated, they go and stand in the corner of the tent and talk as if they were alone and the governor far away in the Cape. Ngqika looks at me pointedly and says he has no control over the renegade Xhosas. But since he lives east of the Fish in any case, he himself has no problem respecting the border. Janssens nods, satisfied. What exactly he’s so damned pleased about, heaven alone knows: Ngqika is offering him absolutely nothing.