by Willem Anker
I can’t believe my ears when Janssens asks whether either Maynier or Bresler ever attempted to incite Ngqika to attack the colonists sheltering with him. My fabrications have actually floated all the way to the Netherlands and back. Ngqika looks at me and then starts to recite the little rhyme that his Khula whispered into his ear years ago. He says Maynier did indeed send him gifts four or five years ago and informed him that if he attacked and wiped out me and a few of my fellows, he could keep half our horses and all our cattle.
Maynier wanted all our sheep, I add and Platje looks at me and looks away. And the king says he’s incapable of betraying his friends, I embroider forth.
Janssens glances askance at me, before, after an eternity, starting to rifle his notes again for a next question.
Janssens is nobody’s fool, he can see I’m interpreting myself and not the king. My ventriloquism makes things dangerous for my son. I noticed during last night’s meal already: As soon as Ngqika starts talking politics with the governor, his words become conflated with my stories and distortions and moods. While the two carry on negotiating, I hold my peace, as far as possible.
The last item on the agenda is me myself. Behold: I am interpreting the negotiations regarding my own future. Ngqika says he is prepared to chase all the Christians at the Great Place to their own side of the Fish; all of them except Khula. I know his country and I know the Colony and he needs me as mediator. Janssens digs in: I must get out of there and back to De Lange Cloof and my legitimate family. I could remain Ngqika’s friend, as long as a river ran between us. I interpret and for the rest keep my trap shut.
On that day I was a few years past forty; I was sick of hiding from the bunch of Christians and Caffres who on both sides of the border wanted to skin me alive. Believe me, a pardon and a plot of land on which I could plant and forage for more than one season did not seem like an unattractive proposition. A house with walls not built of firewood and wattle, not too bad either. Janssens was highly excited to extricate me from under the Caffres. He even promised me an escort, in case Ndlambe or suchlike obnoxious Caffres were to ambush me on my way back to the fusty embrace of the Colony.
Ngqika signs the document of their agreement. They agree that Ngqika will recognise the Fish River as border. The acknowledgement that he just happens to live on the other side of the river apparently affords Janssens great joy. Ngqika is given more presents. Tobacco, knick-knacks, ornaments. For later delivery there are European cloth, cloaks, a horse with a fancy saddle and bridle and a two-wheel cart. The king distributes whatever he doesn’t want among his subjects. He gives the governor four magnificent oxen. In the late afternoon he sets off on his own to bid the governor farewell. The coxcomb king struts through the ranks of the soldiers, his red cloak fluttering, his assegai glittering and the tricorn hat with the white plume firmly and dapperly displayed on his head. The two of them shake hands and embrace and shake hands again and neither can get enough of the other’s backscratching. Janssens sets off for Graaffe Rijnet, there to be told that France and the English are once again at war. I trek away with the Caffres, back to the Great Place for one last time to set my house in order before settling down in the long kloofs from which I tore myself away so many years ago.
I was proud, yes. Of myself. The governor, the king, the soldiers and warriors, they were all in my hands. I was the only one there who could speak decent Dutch and Xhosa. I knew the fears and perplexities and purposes of both sides like nobody else there or since. The Dutch wanted me there as interpreter and that was what I would be to them. When they sounded me out about my relations with the Caffres, I was as vague and hazy as a Lange Cloof morning. As soon as you realise you’re being used, the game gets interesting.
That sketch of Paravicini is quite charming and not too badly botched, except for two things: Ngqika was on horseback. And I was there, there in the midst of it all. My voice was the voice of both sides. I talked with myself, negotiated my freedom and my confinement with myself in two languages.
A week or so later Cornelis Faber returns from Graaffe Rijnet, where he’d gone to barter two wagonloads of timber. The authorities stopped him in the dusty main street and told him that if he or any of us dissidents put as much as a foot in the Colony without having bidden Caffraria a last farewell, we would be arrested on the spot and dispatched to the Castle.
Come September Ngqika still does not want to let me go. He says it’s unsafe for me to trek back to the Colony past Ndlambe’s hordes with my womenfolk and children. I’m in no hurry. The Colony is delivering angry letters; Ndlambe and the other Caffres on the Colony side of the Fish don’t want to move back over the border before I’ve left there. The rumours I hear about myself make it difficult for me to look in the mirror and see anything. In Caffraria I am Khula, a man with wives and children and cattle, like all the other Caffres. In the Colony I’m a ten-foot monster with eight arms who makes the earth quake when I break wind. Four Christian friends turn up at my house with a wagon and a lot of guns and help me to move back to De Lange Cloof.
Yes, I took a proper leave of Ngqika. We talked for a long time, I embraced him like the son he was to me. He cried. I took leave of Yese too. With a formal handshake and a bow like the gentleman I am. My jaw was clenched; she looked past me.
At Bruyntjeshoogte Faber and the English deserter Jan Naader and I come across Captain Alberti, the commander of Fort Frederick. We assure him that there are now only Caffres left in Caffraria. He starts asking questions and I can see the man is not going to be fobbed off with the usual commonplaces. But too many stories, and not all of them equally true, are even more useless than platitudes. I talk a heap of shit and somewhere inside I hide nuggets of truth. Do you see how he looks me up and down for tokens of honesty, while I’m betraying Bentley and Bezuidenhout and the Lochenbergs? How I blab out everything about their plans to flee to Delagoa Bay? How they’re only waiting for powder and bullets from the Cape? To the devil with them. If I have to behave myself, if I have to go and strap myself into demure good-neighbourliness, how come they get to go and savour succulent tropical women? And as is the wont of his ilk, Alberti all too laboriously records the absolutely nothing that he is the wiser:
I must admit that in this matter I was discomfited. Coenraad de Buys is too little to be trusted to enable one to make use of anything he says, and who knows what moved him to tell all the above.
I’m sweating. See, the demented wanderer also has maps of the heavens in his Flatus book. One with all the Christian constellations – Orion, Leo, the Southern Cross and suchlike – daintily traced out with the names attached. Then there is also a map of the constellations of the Caffres and the Hottentots and the Bushmen, as told to him: Orion’s belt here becomes three dogs chasing three pigs. A crocodile with a star in its jaws. The seven sisters become a man with a spade. Things like that. And then a map with the stars, only stars, no lines connecting them to form an animal or a story. Hundreds, thousands of bare dots spread over two pages. Underneath the first of these dot-speckled pages is written: Make an object that only becomes visible after you’ve looked at it for a while. At the top of the next page: Go into an empty room and make a list of its contents.
In 1803 we trek through the extremities, back through the Zuurveld, back to De Lange Cloof. Farmlands are on fire. Houses are on fire. Almost half the farms have been devastated, a third of the Christians have moved away already. Orchards and vineyards are gravid with rotten fruit. Maize fields have been trampled and are still smouldering. Corpses hang from blackened trees. Everywhere the vultures and the crows and everywhere the dogs. The fleeing farmers are on their way, God knows where to, in battered half-empty wagons. Torn cloth fluttering like white flags where it no longer covers the wagon’s bamboo ribs. Smoke and wrath, stubble, dust and emptiness.
3
In the Couga, at the back of the Attaquas Cloof, farms are named after heart’s desires. I settle on d’Opkomst, the arising, my gift from the authorities, my thirty piece
s of silver. My Uncle Jacob lived here in the 1770s, after that his brother-in-law, then my big brother Johannes, up to more or less 1790, they say. After that the place was in a Scheepers’ name for a few years. And now I. We. This farm’s gates, too, are now locked to you, reader; this land, too, is in your time, in the time of Omni-Buys, a game conservation area. The traces of ruins can still be seen in the grass, but it smells of baboon piss.
D’Opkomst is a frontier farm. On the edge of the Couga, the furthest east of the farms. When I moved in here, the farm was in the Swellendam district, a year or so later in Uitenhage, and nowadays, apparently, I’m living in George. New borders for new districts with new names of new bureaucrats are forever moving the farm around, even though I don’t exactly feel the earth moving here under the tree.
On Brandhoek next door lives Doors Minnie, Christina’s grandson, my step-nephew. We don’t talk much. Especially not after the fellow went and married a Ferreira a few years ago. To the other side lies the kraal of the selfsame Stuurman who caused the Colony so much shit with his rebellious Hottentots who fought alongside the Caffres. He was apparently also given a few morgen to put a stopper on his gun and his big mouth. Seems to me the Batavians post everybody who gives them a hard time to the Couga; in these kloofs you can go ahead and swear and shoot and nobody will be any the wiser. If the black hole in the Castle is full, there are always more remote farms to be distributed. Here where sight and sound vanish without a trace.
When I set foot here, I immediately went to greet big brother Johannes on his farm not far away. His wife wouldn’t allow me into the house. I went to look for my brother in his fields and we shook each other’s hand and after smoking a pipe we didn’t have much to say to each other. We promised each other that we would visit regularly and not become strangers to each other again and that I would come and show him my wives and children. I did not see my brother again.
With our first spring in the Couga I decided one morning that my wives should have a birthday. Not one of them knows on which day she was born. We don’t observe birthdays. Nor the children; we write the dates in the front of the Bible. We’d hardly been here a few months, everyone under one roof, in what is now my and Elizabeth’s house. They are sitting in the kitchen; Elizabeth fills the kettle with water. Maria doesn’t interrupt her story. I say that tomorrow is their birthday. I say we must have a great feast. I hug them where they remain sitting at the table. I say we must start preparing. I’ll provide the meat, they can start preparing the vegetables and the pudding so long. I send Coenraad Wilhelm and Philip out with a new gun. They are more or less twelve, are quite competent hunters already. I get the hell out of the madhouse, go and sit at my table, under my tree. I’m drawing up plans for the farming lands. I make sums for seed. The activity in the house is loud, but not a peep from the womenfolk. Normally all three of them talk at the same time. I’m pleased that they get on so well together.
The following noon the table groans under the weight of meats and potatoes and green stuff and sweet potatoes. I say let’s carry everything out to the outside table, it’s a beautiful day. I bring out the wine. I tell Bettie she must keep the children occupied, I’m making a feast for my wives. I fill their beakers with wine. I address them, how beautiful they are looking today, what good mothers they are, how much they mean to me. I make the jokes and we all laugh. We laugh when Nombini knocks back her wine before the toast has been proposed. We laugh when Maria takes umbrage and throws a handful of pumpkin at me when I say that it’s not cooked through. We laugh when later I miss my chair in sitting down. We laugh when Elizabeth gives everyone a present, me included. For me she’s wrapped two new flintstones in a cloth. We laugh when she says: for our husband and hunter. I suspect these are from the flintstones I acquired last month. I don’t remember very much more of the afternoon. I wake up with my head on my arms, at the head of an empty table. Somebody has placed a lantern next to me, cleared the table. My flintstones are wet with dew. I go and crawl in behind Maria, my arm like a tendril around her body. I press her to me, my head in the hollow where her shoulder turns into neck and her frizz is turning grey. She takes hold of my hand, removes it from her breast.
Many happy returns, my wife, I say against the lobe of her ear.
Dearlordgodinheaven, Buys, she says.
Eleven years later I’m sitting and counting my furniture. At the back of the Flatus Whatever there are blank pages on which I now make lists of what is on the wagon and what is still to come and what can remain. The book is also full of lists. The traveller lists the contents of his wagon chest, so many shirts, so many trousers, too few shoes. Bible, books with Latin titles. He keeps a scrupulous record of every animal that his party shoots. He distinguishes between those shot to be eaten and those killed to be painted and analysed and immortalised. He divides animals and plants into Latin classes. One of the lists has been scratched over, the page torn and over it all, in fresher ink, a messy scrawl: We fear not being able to say everything, therefore we make lists.
I gaze out over my farm. On the verso of the faded lists I write my own. This is what I’m taking with me:
3 wives,
a whole lot of children and their lice hopping from head to head,
4 Hottentots,
7 Hottentot youths,
6 Hottentot women,
7 Hottentot girls,
not a single slave,
2 heavily laden wagons,
1 ox-cart,
innumerable regrets,
2 horses,
24 trek oxen,
121 heads of cattle,
46 sheep,
108 goats and
all the brandy I can carry with me.
And this is what I’m going to set on fire:
4 muids of barley,
35 muids of tares,
4 000 vines,
1 leaguer of wine,
etcetera,
1 barn and
3 homes.
Hardly have I shed my shoes under my new bed or De Mist summons me to the Zondaghs’ farm, Avontuur. Apparently he wants, as Janssens promised, to see me to sound me out about the Caffres. I want to get the chit-chat behind me and on Old Year’s morning 1801 I am in the saddle long before daybreak. My horse is a no-good mare that I rode out of Caffraria. I named her Maynier. All the way over the mountains of the Couga I lash the hell out of her to see how soon I can ride the thing to death. By afternoon I leap off Maynier and land on Zondagh’s farm. I touch her up where it hurts; she kicks Zondagh’s slave who has come to cool her down.
There’s quite a to-do on Avontuur. Every blessed farmer in the area is standing around smoking in his Sunday best. Everyone has a petition under his arm or a complaint in his bosom that the Netherlander must be apprised of. I haven’t even greeted the owner of the farm, when I’ve acquired a tail. A cheeky little chap with frills up to the chin and a cow’s lick of a fringe introduces himself with fingers that crunch in my hand.
Doctor Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, he says with a German accent.
Doctor Coenraad de Buys, I say.
The thin lips under the strong nose cleave open in a laugh.
I feel as if I know you already, Mijnheer Buys. You are a much talked-about man in the Colony. And now I must hear that you are also a doctor?
Nowadays you are all seeking my advice against the Caffre plague. A proper bloodletting is the best medicine.
The fellow smirks excessively and repeats my joke to the next farmer, who blows smoke into his face. I am told that Lichtenstein is the medical officer of the Colony and schoolmaster to the children of Governor Janssens.
Matthys Zondagh the younger is taller than his father, old Matthys, with whom my Uncle Jacob had such a shindy. He is friendly and asks after my family, of whom I probably know less than he. His wife, Adriana, comes bearing rusks. She’s a bit on the thin side, but there is still enough there to get a grip on. I am introduced to Commissioner-General Jacob Abraham de Mist and his half-grown daughter Au
gusta – little breasts with plump nipples rubbing against the thin cloth and making your mouth water, but otherwise pale, with transparent lips and a snub nose so high in the air that you can see all the way into her skull.
When the coffee has been imbibed, the host and the women are left behind in the sitting room. De Mist and a few of his right-hand men lead me to the dining room with the big chairs to talk. The commissioner-general’s eyes are deep-set, his mouth a scab under his nose, the lips cracked and bleeding behind the lumps of spit clustering in the corners of his mouth. His jacket takes issue with his paunch. From his farts I deduce that he is a vegetable muncher. He asks me about my days with Van der Kemp – apparently the two knew each other in the Netherlands when Kemp was a soldier. De Mist is so affable, it makes me puke. I want to bawl into his face, I am guilty! I am guilty, set me on fire and devour me. Skin me alive, oh Lord, but deliver me from these misconceived philanthropists. My hands wander over the armrest, my fingers start tracing the delicate wood carving. De Mist and company ask the strangest questions; at first I think they are playing the fool, until I see the expectant frowns when I hesitate to reply.
Can I get hold of some of the Caffre maps for them?
Are some Caffres the slaves of other Caffres and how do they decide who are slaves?
How are the negotiations between the Bushmen and the Caffres progressing?
How do I see the Christian’s place in Africa?
What I said, I can’t remember. What I wanted to say, was: There is no peace to be made here; there is nothing to be understood here. The only revolution here is that between dust and fire, the only equality the levelling of the land by the elements, the only fraternity a function of a common enemy or a shared disgrace. The only liberty the one that comes from surrendering to your fate.