by Willem Anker
When at last I ventured north of the Colony, all you heard were stories of other looters. This here is a land of robbers. Selah. What would I not give to be a fly on so many walls? A fly on the wall of Jan Bloem, the German deserter from Thüringen who fled the Colony after murdering his wife. A fly on the cheek of Pieter Pienaar, the Hantam farmer and pass builder who meets up with Bloem in the Namaqualand and tells him to go and look after his farm on the Gariep. Who shortly thereafter, with his family, Bloem and a lot of Koranas and Bushmen, starts looting Briqua cattle and children all along the river as far as the Langeberg. A fly buzzing around the heads of the brothers Kruger, counterfeiters who escape from Robben Island and move in among the Koranas, become, along with the Bloems, well-known frontier thugs and nowadays lie in wait on the northern border to plunder wagonloads of ivory. A fly has to be on its guard around the Afrikaner clan. They say that Klaas Afrikaner and his people are brutes such as this country has never seen. They’ll relieve you of your wings in no time. Klaas Afrikaner, the Oorlam Hottentot who goes to work for the selfsame Pienaar in order to avoid military service. Pienaar sends him also to the Gariep as cattle-herd, and here herding cattle includes stealing cattle. The Afrikaners who on punitive commandos against the Bushmen apparently dispatch over six hundred souls.
A fly on the cell wall of the Pole Stephanus, a counterfeiter who prints paper money for himself. Who saws open the cell door with a rusty nail. Who goes to hide out with the Zak River missionaries until they find out who he is. Who passes himself off as a prophet in the Transorangia. A prophet who delivers sermons and then vanishes in a cloud of gunpowder smoke. His followers on their knees before his new religion, part Hebrew and part Greek and wholly dedicated to him. Until a farmer recognises him and he cuts the farmer’s throat and goes to rob and reave with Jager Afrikaner. Stephanus who wants to escape on board a ship on the West Coast but meets and kills a pen-pusher on the way and the ship that sails away and he who gets lost in the interior until one day he too finds himself at the wrong end of a blade.
Thus far the gadflies of the veldt, but what about the houseflies? A wall-eyed fly on the bedroom walls of these frontier thugs, every single one a bigamist who gads across colour boundaries. Pienaar who is said to lie with the women of his Hottentots, also with Klaas Afrikaner’s bitch, until the young Titus Afrikaner slaughters Pienaar and some say also his wife and children. Jacob Kruger with his five wives, a Briqua woman, a Rolong and a Korana or so. Bloem, the old bugger, has some ten wives, a Bushman and one of each of the Korana tribes, a Taaibosch, a Kats, a Links, a Springbok and suchlike whatnots. I’m telling you, a fly on my bedroom wall I swat flat, but I no longer have a bedroom. Damn all walls anyway! Any case, here in the Transorangia I and my assorted women are not as conspicuous as in the coy Colony.
The Bastaards who come to me seeking an opening in the smuggling trade are down at heel. Civilisation has done them no favours. They rob to peddle. They are woebegone and angry. Not only at the Cape and its missionaries, but also at the gravy-grubbing families, the Koks and the Berendses, the Bastaard nobility appointed over them by the missionaries. These are young blades, with the wrong surnames, or the right surnames but the wrong in-laws. They’re no longer Griquas but Hartenaars, the people of the Harts River. Every day more Koranas and Bushmen join them, and everyone is handed a gun, a horse if there’s one to spare. They mutiny against the authorities, against their brothers and fathers who are still living as subjects in Griquatown and planting vegetables. One half of the Griquas want to grow old on the stoep of a square house. The veldt bulbs, the mealies, the sweat of their brows. The other half know the Transorangia is no country to grow old in. These Blasboere, coffee-coloured farmers, become Hartenaars, there to dare or die. The blood, the glory, the radiance of their countenance. Apart from the speeches they don’t speak Dutch within earshot and don’t mention focking English. They no longer greet each other with How are things, because Things are really shit and thank you, everyone knows it only too well. Look it up, later generations of Griquas would call these young blades The Patriots.
I loot and laugh and drink and hunt with them. Maria and Elizabeth brew vast cauldrons for the hungry patriots. I introduce the Hartenaars to the frontier farmers on the Nu-Gariep and the Ky-Gariep with whom I trade. The men embroiled in the Colony are looking for cattle and ivory and labour. For a Bushman and a head of cattle they pay with brandy and gunpowder and lead and sometimes a second-hand musket. The shortcut to money and a feathered nest on these plains is the weaving of a robber’s nest. New trade routes are traced that will never appear on any map, but in the sand you can see the wagon tracks cutting ever deeper. Farmers who used to call in at Griquatown to barter goods for cattle now come to talk to us.
The farmers tell us that things are going awry with a vengeance in the mission state. Since Anderson’s return from the Cape, the town has been emptying out. In Griquatown they no longer build houses. They plant dagga and tobacco that they can trade, rather than mealies and pumpkin that are only good for grazing. Those who don’t defect to the Hartenaars are chronically on the wagon trail bartering and trading with Christian farmers. When I enquire after Campbell’s constitution they lift an eyebrow and ask Whose constitution and what does it constitute?
Oh, just see the violence on the Skietgeweergrens, the Frontier of the Shooting Gun. The new arrivals and their despair, the chancers and those lost beyond redemption. Rapacious rapscallions. All welcome, dregs of crushed communities give birth to new gangs, melt away into other mobs. Mercenaries, warriors, looters, nomads, vagrants, fugitives, pilgrims, who’s to tell. There are two races here, farmers and looters, and they interbreed like the blazes. Beyond the Border we’re all Bastaards, all feral dogs.
If war persists, people keep moving. They don’t sit still for long enough to congeal into Colony. Families turn into gangs. The rules prevailing here are the same as those at the dogfights of Graaffe Rijnet. In these swinish stables a discipline different to that in the ordered military lines. See, here we operate with eternal blackmail, forfeiture or betrayal and a series of ephemeral perceptions of honour. You take, as I told the congregation, what you can, while you can.
Don’t get me wrong. I was on my way out, away. I peddled ideals so that I could smuggle ivory and guns. If the missionaries were to quit Griquatown, the government would get the hell out along with them and I could do business to my heart’s content. And if Anderson were to hive off, the only route to gunpowder and guns would be through me and me alone. He who does not know me will not inherit the kingdom of gunpowder.
If you want to plunder a mission station, you must be more terrifying than the Lord Almighty. See, we rise up over the horizon. We bear down upon Griquatown. A horde too vast and improbable to be contained in the compass of an eye. See, the shards of glass and mirror and copper and iron around necks and arms and on shields, blades and barrels, these all catch the light and shatter it into innumerable impossible suns and our enemies cannot abide our countenance. A legion of abhorrence, hundreds of us, visions of terror astride on horseback, on mules, on warhorses – my sons and I on the fastest horses booty can buy – airborne nightmares, naked or half-naked or garbed in antique vestments almost Biblical or in animal hides and adornments of silk or the leather of the Christians and the fragments of uniforms still stained with the blood of the previous owners, tunics of defunct dragoons, tasselled and fringed cavalry jackets, one with a top hat and umbrella, and a naked red-painted Caffre in white stockings and Danster in a virginal bridal gown and some in tricorn hats or crowned with thongs and feathers and paint, skins of lions and leopards flutter over speeding shoulders, one wears a peeled-open leopard head like a bonnet, Sunday suits like a host of the resurrected, Caffres naked and scarlet and a few vigorous Bastaards in flapping swallow-tailed coats all of them on charging oxen with their horns low and sharpened and a deserter with a washbasin as knightly breastplate strapped to his chest, the tin dented from the blows of other days, and see, my
Bushmen racing along on the ridges who will tighten the noose and my red dogs, my half-hyena dogs swerving criss-cross through the undergrowth, raging and snapping at the Bushmen and horses while loaded guns now sprout from shoulders and eyes narrow in faces motley and comically smudged and smeared and painted like a company of clowns on horseback, yes I could die laughing, and see, we yowl and roar maniacally and we open fire on them like a horde from Hell more abhorrent even than the fire and brimstone of Christian Reckoning, skirling and shrieking, clothed in smoke like those phantoms in regions beyond certainty and sense where the eye wanders and the lip shudders and drools.
Oh God, shouts Anderson the focking missionary.
If you want to get to know a man, you have to study his national bookkeeping. Every pedlar and looter has to know the secret economy of the Transorangia. In these days it’s easier to smuggle the teeth of chickens than the tusks of elephants. Even here in the Gariep the beasts have just about been shot out. The scarcer, the more valuable in the Colony. We barter with the Briquas and Barolong. You don’t barter with the Briqua before they’ve harvested. If you arrive there while the plantings are still standing in the fields, they ask What are we supposed to see with your mirrors? Our fire doesn’t need your tinderbox. Our snot sticks to our forearms just as fast as to your handkerchiefs. Your knives are blunter than those we forge ourselves – so they snarl at us. But at the Briqua harvest festival we barter our tobacco for a heap of ivory.
You buy a sheep in the Colony for two rix-dollars and go and barter it with the Briquas for an elephant tusk. You take this tusk to the Colony and sell it at one or two rix-dollars per pound, and a good tusk weighs anything up to a hundred pounds. I hear of missionaries who traded four wagonloads of tusks with the Barolong for two hundred sheep and a few beads. There are fellows around here who in two years make three thousand rix-dollars from smuggling tusks. If you can survive two journeys with tusk-laden wagons between the Transorangia and the Cape – if the Bushmen and the fever and the lions don’t get you – you can retire to Tulbagh on a wine farm with all the slaves and wine that your heart desires. Believe me, our own dear Anderson himself once traded more than two hundred and fifty rix-dollars’ worth of tusks for twenty rix-dollars’ worth of beads. A focking missionary’s swindle can cost you much more than your immortal soul.
My flocks are big, my children grow tall. I am a rich man and replete. In the mornings and evenings my hands claw up, my legs grow ever more rigid, but for the rest this old reaver is fighting fit. 1815 is a good year. The Buys nation waxes apace: Apart from Danster’s Caffres many of the Hartenaars wander into our camp and don’t wander out again. Escaped slaves pour in from all over. A few English and Scottish soldiers desert to me; warriors from neighbouring tribes desert for exactly the same reason: they see our feasting and the fat around our mouths. Even a few Bushmen, sick of surviving in the hunting ground as the hunted, come and offer their knobkerries and their knobbly limbs.
I’m in the saddle or out in the open all day, yet my belly is getting ever more at odds with my shirt with every night’s feasting. Oh, the lamb cutlets. As my flock and my prestige grow, so too my collection of women. I look after the women who have borne my children, those who are with child; also those I assail with lust every now and again, and the girls I pick out of the herd because I can’t stand the thought of any other man touching them. In the evenings I eat with Maria and Elizabeth and my children. At night I lie with Elizabeth. Nombini doesn’t run away any more. She and her children clear their own campsite. Bettie bears a child. It’s the last fat year of my life. By the end of March 1816 the lean ones are already gnawing at me.
News travels slowly beyond the border. At first rogue rumours that you have to dam up and filter, until a single story, complete with head and tail, seeps through slowly and clearly. The first I hear is that the focking English have hanged Cornelis Faber. The place’s name is Slagtersnek, the Ridge of the Butcher. The story reaches me circuitously and too late. Freek Bezuidenhout, brother to Hannes and Coenraad, has an altercation with a Hotnot labourer and when he refuses to appear in court, a pack of pandours fusillade him in a cave on his farm. Hannes stands next to the grave with old Willem Prinsloo, Faber, who’s come from Tarka to bury his brother-in-law Freek, and a handful of other fellows from the old days of Graaffe Rijnet. The bunch get boozing and Hannes calls for revenge. He calls the Christians and he calls Ngqika’s Caffres. The Christians come, Ngqika stays away. It’s almost funny to hear that I reputedly went to Caffraria with Faber to plead for Ngqika’s support. But I don’t laugh. If I’d known, I’d have been there. And would have been dead by now. The rebellion perishes in its cradle. They shoot Hannes when he refuses to surrender. Faber and four others are sentenced to death. Five men stand on the trapdoor. The trapdoor drops and only one rope holds. One noose breaks one man’s neck. Four ropes break; four men hurtle to the ground. Bewildered and half strangled four men stagger to Cuyler and plead for mercy. The dead man is taken down, the noose is tested. I pray to the distant Lord that it was Cornelis, that he got the strong rope. Because see what happens now: four men, one at a time, one after the other, after the other, after the other, are hanged with the good and faithful rope; the strong rope holds every blessed time. Thank God for the government.
There are days here next to the Hart that the sky is impossibly blue and my toe forgets all about the gout. On such a morning I go riding until I reach a stretch of grassland, out of sight of the camp. I take off my shoes, so that the damned toe doesn’t chafe. I take off my breeches, so that the scuffed leather doesn’t tear. Shirt, underclothes. I jump up and down, limber up the limbs. Then I run.
I pant, the phlegm in my throat thwarts me, I spit out morsels of this morning’s pipe, strings of brown drool flutter in my wake. The earth races from under me. Knees creaking. My heart batters my breast to bits, eyes are watering, toes take hold, feet follow, strides stretch and stretch, hands flick like fins through the thick ooze of air. My head low, my eyes shut; head raised, the world appears, chest burning, suffocating. Then I no longer need breath. The whole body a lung and sweat, in, out, outside inside. Calves contract, spring open. Ankle tendons stretch and knot up into my loins. I am beautiful. I am perfect. My breastbone cleaves open the world. Every muscle contracts into a knot, stretches as far as it can and further. The wind sings through my bones, hollow as the bones of birds. Heels slap against my buttocks, a hand slaps at my ear. I am as wild as God himself; I outrun death, until I stumble and crash down.
The phlegm has been burnt away. A string of drool in my beard. I sit down, legs stretched out in front of me and long. I sit forward, touch my thighs, scrabble the sand out from between my buttocks. What is this thing they call Buys? In the running things were not so clear. I start getting up and twist my ankle. Back onto my arse I sink back into my body; I am a thing that feels its ankle throbbing. Back behind the impermeable prison walls of skin. The greasy burden of cast-off clothing here to one side. My own weight in water and bone – ever sinking under the weight of how I ended up in this body. Dropped from some heaven like a black horse, a bad horse. Did we think up the sky so that we could fall out of it?
See, me, Coenraad de Buys: naked. No marks other than scars. My body disjointed, not merged together with markings and tattoos. The hairy belly. The crumpled penis. The grey streaks in my eyes. The womanly ankles down there. My body is stranger than the body of anybody else. More at home with the least known body under any kaross than with this blinding bareness in the sand. I get to my feet, dust my backside. My body is as open as a plot of ground. I scratch at the mosquito bite. My bald spot scorches. I jam my hat onto my head firmly. The long grass; the sun blanches the sky. The white clamours in my ears. My hands touch and feel my sides. My skin scares me. All this skin. Pleated, folded again and again like a good blade. Unfolded. Skin, through and through and in every orifice: the mouth and ears, the nostrils and the arsehole. I fart. My jacket with smoking materials in its pocket is lying over the
re.
You are a free man if you can sit naked on a rock and light a pipe. This world, stretched out around me. I inhale the smoke. While I’m holding my breath, little waterfalls of smoke stream from my nose. Nothing remains inside. This world with its sun and universe, its rocks, its beehives, its beasts, its mirages.
When I was little, there was only a Buys-thing, the Buys-thing-playing-with-knucklebones-on-the-stoep-after-lunch-thing. That chunk of caterwauling back yard was the Buys-thing. The more my body gives up piecemeal, the more absolute the split: the idea of Coenraad de Buys, Omni-Buys; and an old man tottering into hostile territory. Two figures that never look each other in the eye.
These Buyses in this world: the fossils, the stripes of the zebra, the humanoid beasts, Maynier’s pretty waistcoats, the exact number of petals of that precise protea, the furrow of a bullet through a forehead, the ghosts of rainbows, printing presses. A time when I could run when I wanted to. The snakeskin of the other day, Nombini’s face while she’s breastfeeding, a blade of grass and the cow ruminating it. The eye that moves while you read what I recite. With my thumb and my index finger I remove a thread of tobacco from my tongue. I jump up, run until sight and sound are lost in fury. I put on my clothes and ride back to the camp on my horse with the back and the hooves, the bit and the mane.