by Andre Brink
And when I found myself standing beside Dad’s coffin that day, so many years later, the night with Bea fitted curiously into the whole situation, taking the place, as it were, of those pictures of my boyhood.
The memory didn’t bring Dad any closer where I sat on a stone beside his grave. The distance between him and me remained unbridged. If I couldn’t even reach out to touch the man who’d been my father, what about all those others who had preceded him? I had to make the effort. I had to make sure, I suppose, what I was really giving up in abandoning the farm which had been ours.
4
THE FOUNDER OF our tribe, Marthinus Wilhelmus Mynhardt by name, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1732 as a standard-bearer in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. A restless spirit, no doubt, for within a year he deserted from the service of the Company and, leaving behind him his young pregnant bride, joined an inland expedition in search of Monomotapa, that fabled ancient kingdom of gold somewhere in the heart of Africa. We have no record of his death: he simply disappeared. Perhaps he found his golden city. More likely not. What matters, is that he rooted our tribe in the land. And, I suppose, that he left us the substance of his dream.
His only son, Marthinus, became the Nimrod of our race, a man who stood nearly seven feet tall and lived to the age of ninety. In his youth Cape Town was a wild and merry place, the “little Paris” of the vast commercial empire, drifting towards bankruptcy while the burghers enjoyed every moment of it. Marthinus, however, had no taste for town life. Eloping with what was reputed to be the prettiest girl at the Cape, he moved to a frontier district and became a stock farmer, which meant that he had to spend his life trekking this way and that, his wanderings determined by available pasture, the onslaught of Bushmen or predators, and rumours of rain which lured him inland as surely as Monomotapa had done with his father.
As an old man, after the death of his wife, he returned to the Cape with his twelve or thirteen children. But he soon ran into trouble with the new British authorities of the colony and went off on his own again to measure off a vast farm in the barren North-Western region of Namaqualand. The image I have of him is of a deaf and nearly blind old giant sitting in front of his wattle-and-daub cottage, an open Bible on his knees, a mere speck on the endless plains. And at regular intervals he would grope for his gun, and blindly take aim, and pull the trigger, just in case anybody was approaching from the horizon. After the shot, when the chickens and goats had settled down again, everything would once more become deadly quiet, except for the shrilling of the cicadas and, in the kitchen, the gentle bustling of the solitary slave woman who kept house for him.
In the meantime, his two oldest sons had moved to Graaff-Reinet to stake out farms in Bruintjieshoogte, the most turbulent part of the frontier district. The elder brother was soon killed in an expedition against the Bushmen. The second, Wilhelm, married a cousin of the Van Jaarsveld who later became the noted rebel leader. A feature of the wedding was that invitations were addressed, not to “Mr” or “Mrs” or “Miss” So-and-So, but to citoyen or citoyenne: incredible, the way in which germs of the French Revolution had spread to that outpost of the civilised world. Wilhelm, in effect, played a notable part in the upheavals of the following years and it comes as no surprise to learn that, in 1801 or 1802, he spent nearly a year in the Dark Hole of the Castle in Cape Town. Upon his release, as irrepressible as ever, he went into Kaffir Land to negotiate with the Xhosa chief Ngqika some scheme for a joint attack on the British rulers.
But he returned to find his farm deserted – the cattle stolen, his house and kraals burnt, his family massacred by the marauding Black tribes of the Suurveld. Only three of his sons had been saved by neighbours.
Beside the grave of his wife and children Wilhelm took an oath of vengeance; and without waiting for the funeral meal, he jumped on his horse and galloped off towards the Suurveld, where his body was found a week later, bristling with assegais.
The three orphans were brought up by the neighbours, a Badenhorst family, until they were old enough to acquire their own farm near Uitenhage.
The middle one, Lewies, happened to be in Algoa Bay for some buying and bartering when the first British settlers of 1820 were brought ashore; and his wagon was among those commandeered to convey the immigrants to their farms in the interior. He was reluctant to comply, but the journey proved to be the turning point of his life, because one of the members of the family he transported was a young girl, Melanie Harris. He first really noticed her when an old chair fell from the wagon and was broken – irreparably, it seemed. The chair, with barley-sugar legs and exquisite woodcarving, was an heirloom Melanie had inherited from her grandmother and the girl was grief-stricken. But Lewies promptly set to repairing the damage, using his hunting knife to cut pieces of indigenous wood which he inserted so skilfully among the splinters of the chair leg that it was impossible to feel the joint with a finger. In the process, inevitably, he won Melanie’s heart. And today the chair has pride of place in my study, after the many years Dad used it in his outbuilding.
Within a year Lewies and Melanie were married. For a while they prospered, but the proclamation of Ordinances 49 and 50 brought a radical change in their lives: Kaffirs were no longer restricted to their own land beyond the Fish River, and Hottentots could roam throughout the Colony without a pass. After the brothers had twice lost all their possessions in raids, and after Sybrand had been shot dead by a Hottentot he’d tried to scare away from his kraal, the two remaining brothers and their wives moved across the border. There they bought a piece of land from a friendly Xhosa tribe and settled on the farm which was to remain in our family for nearly one and a half centuries.
But Lewies became restless. On his regular business trips to Grahamstown he met Piet Retief; and when Retief and his company decided to trek in search of a Promised Land of their own, Lewies joined them. And in the end he, as well as three of his four children, shared Retief’s fate in the massacre of Trekkers by the Zulu impis of Dingane.
After the annexation of Natal by England in 1843, Melanie was among the women who insisted they’d rather cross the Drakensberg barefoot than live under British rule again. With her only surviving son, Hermanus, then a young man of nearly twenty, she once again loaded the wagons and moved off to the Transvaal. But on the way she fell ill and soon after their arrival at Potchefstroom she died.
Hermanus, true to his history, didn’t settle down easily and soon moved off on his own. For many years he made a life as a big-game hunter in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, allegedly penetrating as far as Kilimanjaro. In the end he did return with a wife he’d found on the way: curiously enough, Dad never spoke about her. Hermanus became involved in the political strife of the young Transvaal Republic but soon withdrew in disillusionment; and after the death of his wife he loaded his meagre possessions and his two children on a mule-wagon and rode off, lured by incredible tales about the diamond fields of Kimberley.
It was an alternation of good times and bad. A few sound diamonds; then nothing for months on end. After an altercation with his Griqua helper, resulting in the latter’s unexplained death, Hermanus had to flee from justice – which he did none too reluctantly, as by that time rumours were rife about a new annexation by Britain.
One day in 1880 or thereabouts he and his sons arrived back on the Eastern Cape farm his father had left so many years before. His uncle had died long ago and the latter’s son Gert had inherited the place. It was a joyful reunion with the old wanderer, who promptly accepted the invitation to stay on. But the newly found peace lasted for less than a year. Then there was a hunting accident. Going off into the bush with his elder son in search of a lion that had killed two Black children on a neighbouring farm, Hermanus came staggering back home in the last daylight carrying on his broad shoulders the body of his son. He got as far as the stoep. There he was felled by a stroke; and he died, weeks later, without having uttered a word.
The remaining son, Karel, didn’t remain o
n the farm for very long after his father’s death. Attracted by rumours of gold in the Transvaal, where, in addition, it was possible to breathe free air again after the First War of Liberation, he loaded his wagon and went off.
In Potchefstroom he stopped for a few months, long enough to meet and marry Helena Wepener, the daughter of a wealthy farmer; then he proceeded to Pilgrim’s Rest in response to the old call of Monomotapa.
Life in the gold fields turned out to be hectic, depressing and unprofitable, and soon Karel was following the example of most of the other diggers, spending more and more of his time in the canvas-covered tavern known as “Stent’s Cathedral”. What finally pulled him to his senses was the death of Helena’s first baby. The local doctor, who also acted as barber and tentmaker, was drunk most of the time and nearly succeeded in knocking off Helena too.
Still, Karel wouldn’t heed his wife’s pleas to return to the tranquil farm life of Potchefstroom. When news came of a new gold reef discovered at Barberton – it was in 1884 – he set off in search of his fortune once again, with all their earthly possessions in a single iron trunk on a donkey cart.
This time he struck it rich. And before the end of the year, just in time for the birth of their son, they were able to leave their tent and move into a corrugated iron cottage.
In less than three years the Barberton reef was exhausted. The locust-swarms of fortune seekers packed their carts and wagons or set off on foot with their bundles on their backs; the drink stopped flowing, the prostitutes flocked to the Witwatersrand, and once again silence descended on the little ghost town in the Eastern Transvaal.
At last Helena had her way and they returned to the district of her parents to buy their own farm near Boskop. Their wanderings seemed to have come to an end. Then came the October night in ’99 when a neighbour knocked on their bedroom window to announce that war with England had broken out.
In the beginning the prospects looked good. But within a few months of Magersfontein and Colenso and Spioen Kop the tide turned. Kimberley was relieved. Pretoria was taken without a shot. It became a foretaste of hell. Riding on horseback on the hard white winter veld, attacking and withdrawing immediately afterwards, shivering with cold in the rainy nights, stumbling along for days on end without food. Still the tattered group of men went on, singing, mornings and evenings, their dark hymns of hope and despair and listening to the commandant reading and praying with sombre, sullen faith. Then back to the horses.
At the end of 1900, when Karel’s commando was back in the Western Transvaal, he was allowed to return home for one night. But there was no farm left. The house was a blackened, burnt-out heap of rubble, the fields destroyed; on his approach vultures rose up like a swarm of flies from the chickens and pigs and sheep slaughtered by British bayonets and left to rot. Only much later did he learn that Helena and her five children were still alive, in the concentration camp at Heidelberg. But a fire had been extinguished inside him. Perhaps he no longer cared. Whatever it was, just after Christmas he and his companions were surprised by the enemy and taken prisoner. In open cattle trains in the violent summer sun they were transported to Durban, where they were herded on the boats to Bermuda.
On the barren, rocky island where they were dumped, he spent his days writing in a leatherbound book, committing to paper the history of his life and of those of his father and grandfather, as far back as he could remember. After the war the book was brought back by friends and restored to the family, for he himself had died before he could finish his story.
Three of Helena’s children belong to the statistics of 26,000 who died in the concentration camps of the war. The two who came out with her after the Peace of Vereeniging were mere skeletons, but with the help of her mother they survived. Times were terrible. Helena wanted her children to have a proper education, but at school they were branded “dirty Dutch” and forbidden to speak their own language. The last straw was the death of her mother.
In her distress Helena took a desperate decision and returned to the family farm in the Eastern Cape, now managed by cousin Gert’s bachelor son Johannes. He welcomed them with open arms and when Helena died in 1904, never having recovered fully from the effects of concentration-camp life, he adopted her children as his own: by that time Coen was eighteen and Lenie only seven. Soon after Coen’s marriage about two years later he was allowed to take over the management of the farm. In this way it returned to our line: for Coen was, of course, my grandfather.
He appeared to thrive as a farmer, but when war broke out in 1914 and the rebellion started against the government’s decision to support England, the ancient fire flared up in him. Leaving his wife behind with four small children to look after, Coen took the train to the north and joined General Beyers.
But, of course, everything was over so soon that he never even took part in a proper battle. The commandos were disorganised and confused, and after a few half-hearted skirmishes Grandpa and his group were taken prisoner. After a year in jail he returned to the farm. It was not the end of his restlessness, however. Whenever the old family urge got hold of him, every ten years or so, Grandpa would simply pack his things and go off. Grandma soon learned to let him have his way. He always came back, usually after a couple of months or at most a year. Once he stayed away for two years, but that was the last time. It was during the Second World War, and what he did then and where he went, we still don’t know. Most likely it had something to do with the underground activities of the Ossewa-Brandwag, but Grandpa would only smile if one tried to prod.
He always remained something of a lovable rogue. All his life he continued to prepare his illegal white lightning down in the kloof, distilling peaches and prickly pears and even onions, a brew more potent than battery acid. Still, he had a feeling for “higher things” and he acquired a formidable reputation for his skill in interpreting the Bible. When he died in 1949 there weren’t many unfulfilled prophecies left in his reckoning, and he was pleased at the prospect of not having to lie in the earth for too long before Judgement Day.
Because he’d never had a “full-mouthed education” himself, he made sure that his sons received one. The eldest, Aalwyn, was sent to the agricultural college at Elsenburg as it was a foregone conclusion that he would take over the farm one day. The second, Dad, was earmarked as a dominee, but after heated arguments he was allowed to go to training college.
But there was something curious about Dad as a teacher. Although it was obvious at a glance that he would never make out as a farmer, he himself always spoke wistfully about his desire to become one. He probably felt quite safe, knowing Uncle Aalwyn had been destined to take over the farm. There was something depressing and almost unnerving about the way Dad would talk about his silly dream, as if he’d been cheated out of an ideal and so decided on teaching as an alternative.
Then, of course, the blow struck, when barely a year after Grandpa’s death Uncle Aalwyn landed under a tractor and was killed. Both of the sisters had settled elsewhere long ago. In order to save the farm there was only one way out: Dad had to give up teaching and become a farmer. Everybody was elated for his sake: after all, he’d dreamed about it all his life. But it struck him like a life sentence. He’d needed the farm to dream about, not to cultivate it. Now he was no longer its master but its slave. And as the years went by we saw him going downhill slowly and sadly, until he finally came to rest in that grave, below the ostentatious headstone which said:
WILLEM JACOBUS MYNHARDT
Born 5.9.1908 – Died 11.5.1975
5
LOOKING BACK ON it now, the impression I have is not so much that the vagueness of myopia causes one to feel isolated and remote from everything, but rather that one is exposed to space and left without any protection against objects invisible in the distance. It was almost in panic that I began to look among the graves for the spectacles I’d thrown away, until I found the right-hand section of the frame with the lens still intact; and, after a while, among some shrivelled weeds, the o
ther, empty, eyehole. I realised how futile it was, nevertheless I clung to the pieces as if that would ensure a grasp on the world.
This time I closed the gate very carefully. I didn’t expect ever to return that way. What had I come to look for in the first place? Whatever it had been, I certainly hadn’t found it. Sooner or later, inevitably, one had to discard one’s tribal romanticism. A form of liberation, Bea might have called it.
Who and what had they been, anyway? Losers, all. Every one in his own way a victim of the land.
I fastened the gate with a length of wire to make sure it would stay shut.
The sun was much higher now above the grey hills in the distance. It made the day look even more bleak than before; and from behind a thin wind was cutting into me.
As I passed the cowshed, the dogs came running down from the house, barking and jumping up against me.
“That’s enough, now, go away!” I scolded them.
The noise brought Ma from the kitchen.
“Oh, it’s you.” She laughed at my helpless anger, surrounded by the wretched beasts. “I was wondering what had become of you. Come on, Bull, come here! Leave the Baas alone, will you?”
Tongues hanging out and tails wagging, they ran up to her. She fondled their ears and stroked their enormous heads.
“All right, all right, good old doggies, down you go.”
“One of these days they’ll kill somebody,” I said, annoyed.
Ma laughed. “I don’t know what I would have done without them.” she said. “And they adore their Madam.” She went on fondling them for a while before she looked up. “But what’s happened to you, sonny? Where are your glasses?”
Pulling my hand from my pocket I showed her the broken pieces.
“Shame,” she said sympathetically. “That’s bad, isn’t it? Just as well you won’t need them this weekend.”