sand and shows it to me. The horse has eight legs. She names him Glider and I call him, for her sake and despite my aversion to animal names, Glider. I teach my daughter to ride the horse. I teach the horse subtle signals that others won’t notice. I teach the horse to pick up its hooves all the way under its chin and put them down thunderously as the Frenchman’s horse did, but with more fury.
In these days it comes to pass that a couple of cattle disappear every now and then. When the herdsmen come to complain, I tell them to shoot when they see Caffres wandering around where they have no business to be. I hand out guns. When the number of missing cattle on my farm increases to about twenty, Coenraad Bezuidenhout turns up on my turf. I’ve heard stories about this farmer, one of the most notorious in the district. I offer him a bowl of coffee. He says, Pleased to meet you, we must join forces against the Caffres. He’s heard I can shoot like no Christian in these parts and that my horse can outrun an assegai. He says talents like that should not be hidden under a bushel. Bezuidenhout and I and a few armed Hottentots set out for the Caffre kraals and return a week or so later with more cattle than were missing.
Elizabeth talks to me about the horse. I’m allowed to lift her onto the horse. In the evenings I go to add more rocks to the pile until one evening I start chucking them down. I climb onto the pile and look around me and then I start breaking down the pile. When all the rocks are lying about around me, I call two Hottentots and order them to cart off the rocks so that nobody will ever see that there used to be a pile here. I leave only the few stones of Maria’s little heap. I walk into the house that evening. Maria is a few weeks pregnant and is salting biltong.
May I ask? she asks.
What for?
That night the little woman holds me tight and strokes my head and slowly rubs me hard. I mount her and she touches me gently and tenderly and that infuriates me. She becomes aware that I’m trying to hurt her; she goes quiet. Later we lie together, careful not to touch each other, like two wounded animals.
It’s in that year or the next that Gert-who-remembers-the-pigeon absconds. Just check in the Colony’s documentation how the baptised bastard-Hotnot Gerrit Coetzee starts tattling. Read there how the scoundrel in 1793 declares on oath that I, on pretence of hunting elephants, cross the Fish River to the Caffres and rob them of their cattle, as many as I see fit. According to the declaration, I drive the cattle to my farm and if the Caffres object I make them lie on the ground and then I flog them with whips or sticks or whatever. The bastard of a convert declares further that in the course of one such incident I allegedly instructed the Hottentots Platje and Piqeur to fire on the Caffres. The first-named killed five and the last-named four. To this the reborn Hotnot then adds a declaration from Platje that testifies to my so-called mistreatment of my goddam farm labourers.
Look me in the eye and ask me straight out and I won’t deny any of this. Why should I? I listen to these accusations and I nod. I don’t know and don’t care a damn where he digs up these stories, but don’t tell me that that god-cursed lump of typhoid-turd called Gert ever went along on these raids. That Hotnot couldn’t have hit his own misbegotten foot at close range. I would never have taken him along. He was there about as much as he ever played with Noah’s pigeon.
On 21 March 1788 I receive a letter from my uncle:
My heartily commended nephew Coenraad de Buys
I have to inform you that Langa has let you know he demands payment from your good self for beating his Caffre, otherwise he will immediately attack afresh. He considers it a challenge to himself and the Christians must not think that he is scared of waging war.
With greetings from us all.
I remain your uncle,
Petrus de Buys.
I don’t receive many letters and I save the letter and read it again and again. While I’m reading it, my fingertips tingle.
3
And it comes to pass in these days that there is strife in the royal houses of the Caffres like unto the strife in the royal houses of Europe. While the French start honing guillotines for royal gullets, the Caffres also wipe out one another for new kings and new orders of things, and the horizon in Africa, like that in Europe, is full of smoke and empty of everything else.
If I’d known the saga of the eastern border before moving there, I’d never have set foot there. If you want to relocate to the eastern frontier, be sure to bring more munitions than books. You can survive in the here and now if you can shoot straight, but history is going to snap your spine and kick you while you’re down.
I understand that you want to get to the story; the murk of history surrounding me makes things hazy. But I was part of that bedlam, the bushes and the blood and the young Caffre girls, but also the dates. So let’s keep it short and sweet: Paramount Chief Phalo rejoins his ancestors in 1775. For his sons Rharhabe and Gcaleka, too, life is a thing full of sound and fury that has to rage itself out so that they can depart from it. Gcaleka follows his father three years later. Rharhabe, like so many fathers then and still now, has to see his son and heir, Mlawu, choke on his own blood and die rucking with a spear in his chest. He arises from the corpse of his son and fights on against the Tambookies until he also dies on the same plot of ground and the year is 1782.
Mlawu’s son is Ngqika and he still sometimes rides piggyback on his mother and plays in the dust and runs around with scuffed knees and cannot yet rule. Mlawu’s younger brother, the great general Ndlambe, assumes a seat on the adorned ox skull before the Great Hut and keeps it warm for the little prince. Ndlambe is a warrior and his people love him for it. He is big and strong and not four years old. He understands war and carries on waging war. He immediately resumes his father’s campaign against the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe, because sons wage war for their fathers. His discourse is muscular and supple like his limbs and drenched in ideas about the never-ending struggle for self-preservation and suchlike crud that in all times has fouled the lips of men who have to rule, but know only how to fight.
The Caffres have no central authority with whom the Company can negotiate. When the Company in a state of mild confusion declares a river a border and a farmhouse a drostdy and sends a retired Stellenboscher and a handful of mounted constables to guard this border, the Caffres only see a river where the border is supposed to be and they stream across it. On the eastern bank of the Fish River a drought decimates the cattle and the game, and a regent decimates the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe. The Mbalu and Gqunukhwebe and their cattle move in among the Christians and their cattle on the near side of the river. They roam across quitrent farms in quest of pasturage and game and survival, trapped between the belligerent farmers and the battle-ready Rharhabe warriors. The Christians and the Caffres both farm with cattle and both regard their cattle as their wealth. Both dwell in reed-and-wattle huts, have dominion over their wives and pray to their gods who demand similar sacrifices of flesh and fire. The Caffres have the numbers and the Christians have the fancy script of loan contracts and Bible verses. The numbers produce no algebra and the script no pretty poems, nothing but blood. The Christian tribe of Europe gets annoyed and the Mbalu tribe of Langa gets annoyed and the Gqunukhwebe tribe of Chaka melts away into the impenetrable maws of the kloofs.
Chief Langa is the brother of Gcaleka and Rharhabe and like them also a man with a temper. As tradition dictates, he leaves the stormy environs of the home of his father, the House of Phalo, as a young man and establishes his own captaincy. Langa is a hunter of elephant and rhinoceros. The House of Mbalu, renowned for its bellicosity and bravery, this most warlike tribe on the border, is named after
