When we came near enough to make out each other’s faces I held up my hand and the wagon stopped. The Hottentots stopped too, the mounted man in the middle, the others shuffling up in a cluster around him. I should doubtless interpolate here something about man in his wild state. Let me only say that the wild Hottentots stood or sat with an assurance my Hottentots lacked, an assurance pleasing to the eye. A Hottentot gains much by contact with civilization but one cannot deny that he also loses something. In body he is not an impressive creature. He is short and yellow, he wrinkles early, his face has little animation, his belly is slack. Put him in Christian clothes and he begins to cringe, his shoulders bend, his eyes shift, he cannot keep still in your presence but must incessantly twitch. No longer can you get a truthful answer to a simple question, his only study is in how to placate you, and that means little more than telling you what he thinks you want to hear. He does not smile first but waits until you smile. He becomes a false creature. I say this of all tame Hottentots, good ones like Klawer and spoiled ones like Dikkop. They have no integrity, they are actors. Whereas a wild Hottentot, the kind of Hottentot that met us that day, one who has lived all his life in a state of nature, has his Hottentot integrity. He sits straight, he stands straight, he looks you in the eye. It is a pretty thing to see, this confidence, for a change, for one who has moved so long among the cunning and the cowardly, though based on an illusion of course, a delusion of strength, of equivalence. There they stood before us in a clump, twenty of them gazing at six of us; there we stood before them, three muskets, mine loaded with swan-shot, the others’ with ball; they secure in their delusion, we in our strength. So we could look at each other like men, for the last time. They had never seen a white man.
I rode out slowly toward them. My men stayed back, obeying orders. The mounted Hottentot rode forward, matching his step to mine. His men moved up behind him, their feet dusted with the ochre of the plains. Flies buzzed about the ox. Where the ring entered its nose the foam stood out. We breathed in unison, all living beings.
Tranquilly I traced in my heart the forking paths of the endless inner adventure: the order to follow, the inner debate (resist? submit?), underlings rolling their eyeballs, words of moderation, calm, swift march, the hidden defile, the encampment, the gray-beard chieftain, the curious throng, words of greeting, firm tones, Peace! Tobacco!, demonstration of firearms, murmurs of awe, gifts, the vengeful wizard, the feast, glut, nightfall, murder foiled, dawn, farewell, trundling wheels, the order to follow, the inner debate, rolling eyeballs, the nervous finger, the shot, panic, assault, gunfire, hasty departure, the pursuing horde, the race for the river, the order to follow, the inner debate, the casual spear in the vitals (Viscount d’Almeida), the fleeing underlings, pole through the fundament, ritual dismemberment in the savage encampment, limbs to the dogs, privates to the first wife, the order to follow, the inner debate, the cowardly blow, amnesia, the dark hut, bound hands, the drowsing guard, escape, night chase, the dogs foiled, the dark hut, bound hands, uneasy sleep, dawn, the sacrificial gathering, the wizard, the contest of magic, the celestial almanac, darkness at noon, victory, an amusing but tedious reign as tribal demi-god, return to civilization with numerous entourage of cattle—these forking paths across that true wilderness without polity called the land of the Great Namaqua where everything, I was to find, was possible.
Sojourn in the land of the Great Namaqua
We came in peace. We brought gifts and promises of friendship. We were simple hunters. We sought permission to hunt the elephant in the land of the Namaqua. We had come a great distance from the south. Travellers had spoken of the hospitality and generosity of the great Namaqua people, and we had come to pay our respects and offer our friendship. In our wagon we brought gifts which we understood the Namaqua people prized, tobacco and rolled copper. We sought water and grazing for our oxen, which had been weakened by an arduous journey. We wished to buy fresh oxen. We would pay well.
I spoke slowly, as befitted the opening of negotiations with possibly unfriendly powers, and also because I was unsure whether my Hottentot, picked up at my nurse’s knee and overburdened with imperative constructions, was compatible with theirs: might I not, for example, precipitate hostilities with one of those innocent toneshift puns, [!nop4] “stone” for [!nop2] “peace”, for which my countrymen were so mocked? My words were heard with attention by the man on the ox; but followers of his began to sidle away while I spoke, drifting out of my firm but friendly line of vision. Prudence compelled me to drop the diplomatic manner and wheel from my interlocutor to shout a clipped warning in Dutch to my men to be on their guard.
As well they might be. Those Hottentots who had circled round me were now disappearing behind the wagon, and Jan Plaatje, watching over the second span of oxen, stood panicstricken and irresolute: should he fulfil the letter of his charge to guard the oxen or abandon them in defense of the tent-flaps or fire upon the newcomers and initiate a massacre? The Hottentots were plainly intent on finding a rear way into the wagon to investigate and perhaps ransack its contents, and their leader was doing nothing to restrain them: he sat placid on his ox staring at me, waiting for my speech to resume. There was nothing left but to act. Plaatje was unequal to his tactical dilemma. Leaving my amazed touleier, one of two indistinguishable slow-witted boys named Tamboer, to confront the ox-rider, I rode into the cluster of Hottentots at the tailgate flourishing my whip and shouting “Back! Back!” Nimbly they fell back and regrouped with sparkling eyes. Was I dealing with adults? I wondered.
The configuration in which the palaver had begun was now jumbled to the advantage of the Hottentots: instead of facing our discreet guns in a knot they opposed both our leaderless head and a vulnerable flank. So I performed the only reorganization possible, ordering up Plaatje and his oxen tight against the wagon. Plaatje was confused and abject. While I fretted and the Hottentots giggled and scratched themselves, he exerted himself frantically to bring the cattle up. But, impenetrably stupid that day, the cattle first huddled under his lash, then with rolling eyes broke away and might have lumbered to the four winds if with yelps and waving arms the obliging Hottentots had not headed them off. Thus after minutes of confusion in which the paths of shamefaced friend, grinning foe, and scrambling beast were forever confused, the cattle stood milling in a neat ball at the tail of a wagon in whose seat, alter-Tamboer the driver having clutched his hat and jumped to aid in the roundup, sat Jan Klawer, stern watchfulness on his countenance and gun at the ready, such being the breed, now dying, of the old farm Hottentot.
From the outskirts of this mêlée I kept a prudent watch for the first sign that the encirclement of the wagon now achieved was not an hilarious epiphenomenon but the first move in a plan of diabolical indirection. I was prepared to yield my life to spare myself the farce of my wagon and oxen commandeered and trotted off into the blue while I chased behind rending the air with impotent threats. But there was no such plan in their minds. For the man on the ox now approached me where I glowered and fairly addressed me.
We were welcome in the land of the [Khoikhoin], the people of people, who were always glad to receive travellers and eager to hear what news they brought. There would be refreshment for us and water for our cattle. We should follow him. We were welcome to stay among his people as long as we wished.
“I am grateful for your welcome”, I replied. “But your followers are making my men nervous. Can they not be restrained?”
“We will do you no harm”, he said. “Will you give us our presents?”
All around his alert men took up the cry. “Presents, presents!” they clamoured, and one thrust his way forward and began a little dance in front of my horse, an odd dance in which his chest stuck out before and his rump behind and his feet appeared to walk though he did not move from the spot. “Presents!” he sang, “We want presents! Presents! We want presents!” His comrades took up the chant, clapping their hands in time and shuffling on the sp
ot. I tried to attract the attention of my servants but could not make myself heard above the noise. Plaatje was hiding his shame somewhere. Adonis was staring at the spectacle and grinning with pleasure. The Tamboer brothers had joined in the mesmeric clapping. Only Klawer was still under control. He sat stiffly on the seat of the wagon, his face as closed as a stone, his eyes on me. I beckoned. He jumped down and began to push his way toward me holding his gun before him and closed behind his back, one miming his wooden tread and the rest breaking off their dance to screech with affected laughter.
“Break open the box of tobacco and give each of them two inches”, I told him. “Two inches. No more”.
The crowd again parted before him, chanting this time the magic hunting song “Step into my snare, wild goose, put your long neck in my snare, and I will feed you woodborer grubs”. Plaatje had reappeared, and he and my other servants were laughing too, though behind their hands.
Klawer climbed into the back of the wagon and emerged with the six-pound box of rolled tobacco and a crow. He prised off the lid and slowly began cutting two-inch joints and passing them into the outstretched hands of the Hottentots. There was scrambling and jostling in the crowd, and a murmur which resolved itself into the cry “More! More!” The ox stood cropping at my side. Its rider was among the men fighting for tobacco. Klawer cast an indecisive look at me. “No more!” I bellowed to him. He heard me. A Hottentot began to clamber his way up into the wagon. Klawer kicked his fingers and he fell back. Someone else snatched the tobacco box between his legs. He clutched at the thief and missed. For a moment the box floated from hand to hand high above the throng. Then it tipped and twenty men were scrambling for the pickings. Klawer dived in, fighting no doubt for justice. “Leave them!” I shouted, and took advantage of the confusion to trot over and deal the lead oxen smart lashes. They snorted and began to heave. I rode down the span lashing the oxen and stamping their noses with the stock of my whip. The wagon jolted forward. There were shouts from the Hottentots. My men scrambled to their places of duty. Klawer appeared, hatless and panting. Most of the second span of oxen were lumbering up behind us; a few had been cut off by the Hottentots. I abandoned them: we were not fleeing, merely regrouping, we would recover what was ours in the fullness of time. We were moving as fast as we could, at the pace of a walking man. But the Hottentots were now running after us shouting and yipping. I judged it inadvisable to fire on them. They were displaying no organized antagonism. “Come back!” they were shouting. I ordered the driver to pay no heed. Then I fell back to take up position behind the retreating wagon facing the oncoming savages. I held up my hand. They trotted up to my horse’s nose, stopped, and began chattering softly among themselves, looking at me with curiosity, squinting into the sun like little slave-boys. I kept my silence till they had all come up. Behind them my four lost oxen were spreading out after the grass of their choice. Behind me my wagon receded toward safety. I began.
“We have come with peace in our hearts to the land of the Namaqua people. Many tales have reached our ears of the wealth, the generosity, and the prowess in hunting of the Namaqua people. For many years we have longed to meet the Namaqua people face to face and convey to them the greetings of our great Captain, whose abode is at the Cape where the great seas meet. And to prove that we came in peace we brought with us many presents for the Namaqua people, tobacco and copper and fireboxes and beads and other things as well.
“All that we sought of the Namaqua people was the right to travel unmolested through their country and hunt the elephant, whose tusks my people prize.
“But what do we find, having crossed deserts and mountains and rivers to reach the country of the Namaqua? We find our servants treated with scorn, our cattle driven off, our gifts trampled underfoot as of no value. What report of the Namaqua should we carry back to our own people in the south. That they do not know how to welcome strangers and lack all hospitableness? That they are so poor that they must steal the miserable trek-oxen of every passer-by? That they are envious children who squabble over gifts? That they have no leaders whose authority they respect?
“No, I would be a liar if I carried back such reports. For I know that the Namaqua are men, men of men, powerful, generous, blessed with great rulers. This morning’s unhappy events will be passed over, they are a dream, they have not happened, they are forgotten. Keep what you have taken. But let us resolve henceforth to behave like men, to respect each other’s property. What is mine is mine—my cattle, my wagon, my goods. What is yours is yours—your cattle, your women, your villages. We will respect what is yours, and you will respect what is mine”.
This schoolmasterly threat in the tail I judged permissible when, watching their eyes for a fiery response, I saw by the third paragraph only gathering boredom and inattention. The irony and moralism of forensic oratory, uneasily translated into Nama, were quite alien to the Hottentot sensibility. They did not flare into action, nor indeed did my speech receive any reply. The ox-rider, lacking both pipe and spark, was chewing his tobacco. The silence grew. It began to embarrass me. The Hottentots were still squinting at me in a curious and not unfriendly way. Perhaps on my horse and with the sun over my right shoulder I looked like a god, a god of the kind they did not yet have. The Hottentots are a primitive people.
“In which direction is your village?”
This jerked them into happy animation. “There, there!” and they pointed after the ponderously fleeing wagon. Thus was one tedious revision spared me.
“Far?”
“Not far, not far!”
“Then I will be happy to go with you in friendship! Let us forget what has passed! Drive the oxen!” And with the laughing savages trotting at my heels and hanging on the stirrups, I set out after the wagon full of the dangerous euphoria of a man who has made up his mind.
The Hottentot camp was laid out on the bank of one of the streams that feed the Leeuwen River. It consisted of perhaps forty huts arranged in a rough circle with outliers, plus five set quite apart across the stream. These would be the huts for menstruating women, who during their flux are permitted congress with neither husbands nor cattle. The huts were of uniform construction: bark mats and animal skins spread over hemispheres of supple branches that had been thrust into the ground and lashed together at the apex. The apex is open, allowing the Hottentot abed a barred view of the night sky. It has led to neither a special relationship with the sky-gods nor a Hottentot astrology. It is nothing but a smoke-hole.
One of the band had raced ahead of the wagon to bring news of us to the camp. When we hove into sight a stream of boys and dogs deranged with excitement poured forth to meet us. In the camp women with babies at their hips and comely ten-year-olds skulking behind their legs stood squinting at us, neglecting the discipline of the cooking-pot. Smoke of course ascended in thin trails into the sky.
Fearing that my wagon would be stripped bare by predatory juveniles unless I took unusual precautions, I halted well short of the camp, removed certain necessaries, and had my men lash our supplies down under canvas. Leaving them at this task, with orders to guard wagon and cattle with their lives but to provoke no incident, I rode into the village, some scraps of my savage retinue still at my heels.
I had forgotten the terrors that the communal life of the Hottentots can hold for the established soul. A skeletal hound thumped the earth with its tail, its neck tied to a rock with a thong too thrifty for its teeth to reach. Odours of the slaughtering pole drifted on the air. Desolate stupidity in the women’s eyes. Flies sucking mucus from the lips of children. Scorched twigs in the dust. A tortoise shell baked white. Everywhere the surface of life was cracked by hunger. How could they tolerate the insects they lived amongst?
I rode into the clearing at the centre of the camp and stopped. The circle of Hottentots closed around me. My escort moved gaily about the crowd talking and laughing. Some of the sullen women bandied words with them. I judged that there wer
e two hundred people. Boys wriggled to the front of the circle and squatted staring appreciatively. I was being called Long-Nose. Patiently, like an equestrian statue, I waited for their chieftain to receive me.
The Hottentots have no feeling for ceremony and show only the most perfunctory reverence for authority. Their chieftain could not receive me. He was an old man, sick, perhaps dying. I asked to see him nevertheless. I insisted. I dismounted and took my offerings out of my saddle bag. They shrugged shoulders and smiled at each other and conducted me, the whole whispering horde, to the open door of a hut. I crouched and stepped in. They followed me, as many as could. The air inside was thick with flies and stank of urine. A man was lying on a pile of skins. I could make out nothing more in the gloom. A girl sat at his head waving flies away with a frond of jacaranda. A little man nudged my elbow and slid a bowl into my free hand. I looked at him. He smiled and nodded. I sipped the liquid. It was sour milk with something flavouring it, honey. “He is sick”, a man at my shoulder whispered. “What is wrong with him?” “He is sick”. I put the bowl aside and crouched over the bed. I had begun to see better. The sick man was sleeping. His hair and beard were grey. “Where is he sick?” I said. “His leg”: the man slapped his own leg. The figure in the bed was covered from chest to ankles. “Do you give him medicine?” I looked at the girl. She would not meet my eyes. She was too young to speak to men. I looked at the people around me. “Yes, yes, many medicines”. “Will he live?” “Yes, he will live”. Smiles. I could get no truth out of them. He was dying, likely of the cancerous Hottentot sickness. They were washing his sores in urine and perhaps giving him infusions. At the foot of his bed I placed the roll of wire, the tobacco, the tinderbox, and the knife I had brought. Then I turned and strode to my horse. These people could be ignored.
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