the Boer has got to shift. I’ll pack up my wagon and make coffee, and just trek first thing tomorrow morning.”
Most of us laughed then. Koos Steyn often said funny things like that. But some didn’t laugh. Somehow, there seemed to be too much truth in Koos Steyn’s words.
We discussed the matter and decided that if we Boers in the Marico could help it the rooinek would not stay amongst us too long. About half an hour later one of Willem Odendaal’s children came in and said that there was a strange wagon coming along the big road. We went to the door and looked out. As the wagon came nearer we saw that it was piled up with all kinds of furniture and also sheets of iron and farming implements. There was so much stuff on the wagon that the tent had to be taken off to get everything on.
The wagon rolled along and came to a stop in front of the house. With the wagon there were one white man and two kaffirs. The white man shouted something to the kaffirs and threw down the whip. Then he walked up to where we were standing. He was dressed just as we were, in shirt and trousers and veldskoens, and he had dust all over him. But when he stepped over a thorn-bush we saw that he had got socks on. Therefore we knew that he was an Englishman.
Koos Steyn was standing in front of the door.
The Englishman went up to him and held out his hand.
“Good afternoon,” he said in Afrikaans. “My name is Webber.”
Koos shook hands with him.
“My name is Prince Lord Alfred Milner,” Koos Steyn said.
That was when Lord Milner was Governor of the Transvaal, and we all laughed. The rooinek also laughed.
“Well, Lord Prince,” he said, “I can speak your language a little, and I hope that later on I’ll be able to speak it better. I’m coming to live here, and I hope that we’ll all be friends.”
He then came round to all of us, but the others turned away and refused to shake hands with him. He came up to me last of all; I felt sorry for him, and although his nation had dealt unjustly with my nation, and I had lost both my children in the concentration camp, still it was not so much the fault of this Englishman. It was the fault of the English Government, who wanted our gold mines. And it was also the fault of Queen Victoria, who didn’t like Oom Paul Kruger, because they say that when he went over to London Oom Paul spoke to her only once for a few minutes. Oom Paul Kruger said that he was a married man and he was afraid of widows.
When the Englishman Webber went back to his wagon Koos Steyn and I walked with him. He told us that he had bought the farm next to Gerhardus Grobbelaar and that he didn’t know much about sheep and cattle and mealies, but he had bought a few books on farming, and he was going to learn all he could out of them. When he said that I looked away towards the poort. I didn’t want him to see that I was laughing. But with Koos Steyn it was otherwise.
“Man,” he said, “let me see those books.”
Webber opened the box at the bottom of the wagon and took out about six big books with green covers.
“These are very good books,” Koos Steyn said. “Yes, they are very good for the white ants. The white ants will eat them all in two nights.”
As I have told you, Koos Steyn was a funny fellow, and no man could help laughing at the things he said.
Those were bad times. There was drought, and we could not sow mealies. The dams dried up, and there was only last year’s grass on the veld. We had to pump water out of the borehole for weeks at a time. Then the rains came and for a while things were better.
Now and again I saw Webber. From what I heard about him it seemed that he was working hard. But of course no rooinek can make a living out of farming, unless they send him money every month from England. And we found out that almost all the money Webber had was what he had paid on the farm. He was always reading in those green books what he had to do. It’s lucky that those books are written in English, and that the Boers can’t read them. Otherwise many more farmers would be ruined every year. When his cattle had the heart-water, or his sheep had the blue-tongue, or there were cut-worms or stalk-borers in his mealies, Webber would look it all up in his books. I suppose that when the kaffirs stole his sheep he would look that up too.
Still, Koos Steyn helped Webber quite a lot and taught him a number of things, so that matters did not go as badly with him as they would have if he had only acted according to the lies that were printed in those green books. Webber and Koos Steyn became very friendly. Koos Steyn’s wife had had a baby just a few weeks before Webber came. It was the first child they had after being married seven years, and they were very proud of it. It was a girl. Koos Steyn said that he would sooner it had been a boy; but that, even so, it was better than nothing. Right from the first Webber had taken a liking to that child, who was christened Jemima after her mother. Often when I passed Koos Steyn’s house I saw the Englishman sitting on the front stoep with the child on his knees.
In the meantime the other farmers around there became annoyed on account of Koos Steyn’s friendship with the rooinek. They said that Koos was a hendsopper and a traitor to his country. He was intimate with a man who had helped to bring about the downfall of the Afrikaner nation. Yet it was not fair to call Koos a hendsopper. Koos had lived in the Graaff-Reinet District when the war broke out, so that he was a Cape Boer and need not have fought. Nevertheless, he joined up with a Free State commando and remained until peace was made, and if at any time the English had caught him they would have shot him as a rebel, in the same way that they shot Scheepers and many others.
Gerhardus Grobbelaar spoke about this once when we were in Willem Odendaal’s post office.
“You are not doing right,” Gerhardus said; “Boer and Englishman have been enemies since before Slagtersnek. We’ve lost this war, but some day we’ll win. It’s the duty we owe to our children’s children to stand against the rooineks. Remember the concentration camps.”
There seemed to me to be truth in what Gerhardus said.
“But the English are here now, and we’ve got to live with them,” Koos answered. “When we get to understand one another perhaps we won’t need to fight anymore. This Englishman Webber is learning Afrikaans very well, and some day he might almost be one of us. The only thing I can’t understand about him is that he has a bath every morning. But if he stops that and if he doesn’t brush his teeth any more you will hardly be able to tell him from a Boer.”
Although he made a joke about it, I felt that in what Koos Steyn said there was also truth.
Then, the year after the drought, the miltsiek broke out. The miltsiek seemed to be in the grass of the veld, and in the water of the dams, and even in the air the cattle breathed. All over the place I would find cows and oxen lying dead. We all became very discouraged. Nearly all of us in that part of the Marico had started farming again on what the Government had given us. Now that the stock died we had nothing. First the drought had put us back to where we were when we started. Now with the miltsiek we couldn’t hope to do anything. We couldn’t even sow mealies, because, at the rate at which the cattle were dying, in a short while we would have no oxen left to pull the plough. People talked of selling what they had and going to look for work on the gold mines. We sent a petition to the Government, but that did no good.
It was then that somebody got hold of the idea of trekking. In a few days we were talking of nothing else. But the question was where we could trek to. They would not allow us into Rhodesia for fear we might spread the miltsiek there as well. And it was useless going to any other part of the Transvaal. Somebody mentioned German West
