our Lord 1788 Langa at eighty-three still has all his teeth.
Farmers no longer dare leave their farms. When Cornelis van Rooijen sends his labourers to drag up thorn branches for his cattle kraal not half a mile from his house, a horde of Caffres come rampaging out of the bushes with shields and assegai and chase the wretched Hottentots back to the homestead. He says the farm is no longer his. He says they set fires, they come and ask for food with weapons in hand, they pilfer, they overgraze the veldt, they murder the tame Hottentots and they trample the wheat.
When Ndlambe and Langa combine to take up arms against the Gqunukhwebe, Chaka’s followers suffer huge losses of man and beast. They trek westward into the Colony and settle down. Langa takes almost all Chaka’s cattle; his Caffres are impoverished, therefore they hire themselves out to the farmers for food and cattle. In the late eighties of the eighteenth century there are thousands of defeated hungry people swarming into the Colony and starting to steal the farmers’ cattle. A godawful mess. Here endeth the history lesson.
At twenty-six I’m in my prime of life and all the world knows my name. My Hottentot shoots one of Langa’s warriors and the old goat dictates the letter to me that Uncle Petrus refers to. Later in 1788 I am summonsed for three schellings’ overdue tax.
The pen-pusher, with his clothes that don’t take kindly to dust, brings me the summons and stares unabashedly at the brazen Hottentot woman and the bare-bummed little bastard bustling about my knees.
Mijnheer, there is also the matter of Chief Langa who charges you with assaulting one of his Caffres? he says.
I went to retrieve my cattle. The Caffre with the cattle resisted, yes. So I chastised him. Mijnheer.
Mijnheer Buys, it is the exclusive privilege of the authorities to administer punishment.
I smile:
You have no authority over the Caffres.
I ignore the summons. It comes to nothing. Shortly after this I forge the signatures on a petition against the Company.
The surrounding farmers get to hear of my shooting skills and my lightning-fast horse. They are told that I can read and write better than any of them. They hear me talking and some of them grumble that I swear something dreadful, but they can see everybody listening to me. They come and drink Maria’s coffee and they blarney and blandish me until I agree to attend their meetings. At one such meeting of aggrieved farmers I say just enough to allow them to think that they were the ones who decided that I should draft a petition to the authorities. I record the farmers’ complaints about the Caffres and ask the authorities to investigate the matter. Five people sign their names to this: yours truly, Lowies Steyn, Johannes Hendrikus Oosthuyse, Pieter Viljee and Hendrikus Vredrikus Wilkus.
Then I write a second letter. I correct one or two spelling errors and slip in a sentence that wasn’t there before. The farmers are fed up to their back teeth, pissed off, says the sentence. If the authorities are going to do nothing we’ll go and claim back our cattle and drive the Caffres back over the Fish River ourselves. I must confess, below this second petition (dated 11 August 1788) I myself sign the names of nine people: the original signatories, excluding my name, and then also the names of Pieter de Buys, Gerhert Scholtz, Cornelis van Rooijen, Vredrik Jacobus Stresoo and Andries van Tondere. I create a distinctive signature for each of them and, even though mine is missing, every signature is sullied with the flourishes and curlicues of my own name.
Go and look by all means, the tracks have been covered up. These petitions, original or otherwise, went missing even at the time in the self-perpetuating and proliferating labyrinth of colonial red tape. The letters may have got lost, but the all-seeing VOC finds out that they are forged and they vomit accusations and judgements all over me and my good name. Any orator will tell you that the truth is the best sparring partner. At the next meeting I get to my feet and smile my smile and address the Christian soldiers.
I stand before the men, solitary amongst the accusing eyes in the front room of a crushed farmer. They look up at me, even the ones standing. I’m the tallest, the biggest man here. I open my trap and believe me, neither my wife nor my friend nor my child, neither my labourer nor my horse, has ever heard me talk like that. My voice is a honeyed bass, not the normal growl. I am voluble and fluent. My voice adapts its pace to the secret rhythms that inflame and enchant people, that persuade them that what they are hearing are lucid and logical arguments, especially where the head and the tail are wrenched as far as possible apart in my serpentine sentences, so that they convince themselves that somewhere some sense must be lurking and that in my euphonious outpouring I’m connecting up things that they have never before considered in conjunction, possibly because I end each sentence on a platitude, but one hailing from a totally different sphere to the rest of the sentence, a tail to the sentence like that of a scorpion with a sudden sharp sting at the end, the right words in the right places when they most want to hear them and then a sudden about-turn that leaves them gaping and that then inspires me all the more to new heights and clichés and makes me rampage on at ever-increasing volume while my eyes never release theirs, eyes that gullibly and hazily plead for more, eyes that cannot let me go but don’t see me at all, an audience at my feet gobbling up their own shit – which I merely dish up to them in appetising form – for sweetmeats, and never for a moment wonder about the smile that at times, during pauses in the ever-waxing sentences, fleetingly and involuntarily plays around the corners of my mouth and vanishes, and I can see that not one amongst them considers that one can smile and smile, and be a goddam villain.
I persuade the burghers that I, before the only and most supreme God, was assured that what I wrote was the truth that indeed has already taken root in the heart of everyone there present. I signed their names in the firm conviction that, had time permitted, and had I had the privilege of their presence, they would have dipped the quill and would have inked in their names themselves under my words, which if the truth be known were also their words.
The burghers gape at me. I feel bigger than my seven feet, I am kindled by my own voice. My words trickle over them like gum from a thorn tree and render the world viscous and glossy until they’re persuaded that the forgery was a forgery in form but not in spirit. Later I am informed that my audience told the pen-lickers that even though their names were forged they wholeheartedly agree with the contents and that they would at any time upon request come and furnish their names under any such document. I excuse myself as soon as I can and go and pull my pizzle under a tree.
The VOC is a company on the verge of bankruptcy with a kicked-open anthill for headquarters, and the charge of forgery, as well as the complaints contained in the offending document, leads, as in the case of my overdue rental and tax, absolutely nowhere.
In September 1789, without cancelling the lease on Brandwacht, I register in my name also the quitrent farm De Driefonteinen on the Bushman’s River, and six months later also Boschfontein, near the Sundays River Mouth.
Brandwacht has for a long time been trampled by Caffres who come here to hunt and to graze their fat cattle. In 1790 I get a licence to hunt elephants and I pack my stuff to leave. I’ll take my family to Boschfontein, where the grazing is still good and the Caffres are not so much of a nuisance. Then I’ll venture into the bundu on the track of elephants. We are busy throwing the last of the furniture onto the wagon when a cocky little man in a preposterous hat and a ruffled shirt comes riding up. With him are a few Hottentots clutching their flintlocks and their reins. This little whippersnapper introduces himself as Captain Ruiter.
I’ve
