The half-Hottentot-half-Bushman deserter servant who went and squatted on the Fish River with a gang of thugs from both the races boiling in his blood. Ruiter’s gang of freebooters plundered the Caffres, until the yellow-arsed gang deserted and left him there to make peace. Not too long or he’s Chaka’s pet poodle. Now Ruiter and his Gonna Hottentots have also, like the Caffres, come and wormed themselves in among the Christians.
Captain Ruiter with a great show of formality requests permission to stay on on my property. I’ve had it with this botheration.
You stay here, what’s it to me, I say. I’m clearing out in any case, this land has been trampled to dust.
Later I will hear what a terrible nuisance the Gonnas were, how the Caffres and the commandos both apparently came to look for Ruiter on my land, and then I will laugh.
I walk into the empty house; outside, the pregnant Maria cracks the whip and the wagon jolts into life. I stand in the centre of the front room, look up at the rafters, the swallow’s nest empty and crumbling, tap my foot on the anthill floor. I built this house and lived here for almost five years and it was home and now it’s an empty shell of reeds and stone and brittle and cracked clay. I kick a chunk of slate until it gives way and a section of the wall caves in. I tap the floor again lightly, then walk out fast. I think of the earth under the house, the immeasurably heavy weight just under the thin layer of loose anthill soil. I feel something pre-human and stupendous. I ride after the wagon.
On Boschfontein there is a homestead already, a largish house that doesn’t need much work. The previous farmer left not long ago. Probably back to De Lange Cloof because the Heathens were beginning to graze too close by. Windvogel and I fix the roof and stamp the floor solid and at night I dream of dark waters under the house, stagnant black water without ripples, the smooth surface that is not disturbed, the measureless depth without end.
Houses on the frontier plain are not rooted in cellars or foundations, these huts of Christian and Heathen alike barely graze the dust, do not penetrate the earth. The hut is deposited on the soil like a nest in the veldt.
I don’t stay on Boschfontein for long. I see to it that my people are settled, and then I go to see what the sea looks like. I’ve never seen the sea. In De Lange Cloof people sometimes ventured over the treacherous rock faces of Duivelskop to go and fish, but the Buyses and the soft-bellied Senekals never developed a taste for shell snails or fish scales. For my people it was always the bush that beckoned. I stand on a dune and gaze over the water. Thought the sea would be bigger. The water is saltier than I thought. The Hottentots are minding the cattle, Maria is minding the house, I gaze into the distance.
Maria says she’s tired of forever cleaning up after everybody. She scolds me vigorously when one morning I wrap all the food in the house in a cloth and throw it onto the wagon and try to kiss her and walk away to where my human herd is waiting for me. She looks them up and down: my shadow Windvogel, Coenraad Bezuidenhout, his windbag brother Hannes and Van Rooijen who’s forever whingeing.
We venture into the kloofs to go and goad elephants. If an elephant is angry enough, you feel pins and needles all over your body and the hair on your neck stands up straight and your whole skin comes alive. Then you shoot. At home you stare into corners. Curl yourself up like an animal in its hole.
News from Europe is slow coming to the Cape. The fashions at the Castle are apparently almost a decade out of date, but the seditious ideas from France make landfall here faster than any new dress patterns. The words liberté, égalité and fraternité are insubstantial and vague enough to fly over here at speed. In Paris the citizens storm the Bastille in the name of liberty and on the eastern frontier there’s nothing left but liberty. Indeed, as is always the case with messages that have to travel too far, the French slogans have a totally different look when they arrive scurvy ridden and scuffed in Graaffe Rijnet.
After 1789 the farmers no longer even pretend to heed the Company’s death rattles or the drunken musings emanating from the drostdy. The Caffres, the Bushmen, the Christians – every last one of them more frantic and more violent by the day. Farming families flee to Graaffe Rijnet to devour the last supplies. Landdrost Woeke shilly-shallies and swills. Secretary Wagenaar resigns and the Company appoints Honoratus Christiaan Maynier in his place. Let them all muck up together!
Alliances are struck and severed; now Ndamble wants to take up arms against the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe with the Christians, then he combines with Langa to hunt down Chaka and Chungwa. The Gqunukhwebe disappear ever deeper into the bush of the river valleys, all along the coast as far as the Gamtoos. See, the Gqunukhwebe and Mbalu are crushed like mealies in a stamping block, like so many other people in so many other places where overripe and overblown powers press up against one another.
The Caffres soon get the message that a horse and a gun don’t make a Christian immortal. Before long they also notice that the scraps of copper and iron and the strings of beads that the Christians offer for their cattle are a swindle. The destitute leave their kraals and come to work on the farms. If the farmer neglects to pay such a Caffre, or thrashes him too often or straps him to a wagon wheel and takes a few turns with him and then horsewhips him, the Caffre goes to complain to his chief and the farmer is plundered and his house burnt to the ground. At this time many Hottentots in their turn abscond from the farms and go to stay with the Caffres because the farmers mistreat them. When the farmers come to look for their stray Hotnots in the Caffre kraals, sometimes on their own farms, the Caffres chase them away. In 1789 more than sixteen thousand Caffre cattle and a few thousand Caffres are tallied on one quitrent farm. The Christians are spoiling for a fight, but the Caffres cluster together in hordes, not one by one like the Christians who can’t tolerate their neighbours. They no longer beg for food; they now take it.
I oil my gun. I apply the wood oil liberally. Then I start polishing it slowly. Only two fingers, till both fingers are numb. Elizabeth plays around my feet in the front room. Maria is outside, jabbering with Windvogel. The window is narrow, a strip of sunlight shatters in shards over the rough-hewn table.
A bureaucracy understands maps, not land. A Company does not understand war, it flourishes in meetings. If you have the patience, come and rummage with me in the archives of the bureaucratic Colony: Woeke, ever leaner and drunker, is told to negotiate with the Caffres. The plan is to buy out all Heathen claims to land to the west of the Fish River. Negotiation follows upon meeting follows upon deliberation. Chaka and Chungwa go nowhere. They allegedly bought the land between the Fish and Kowie Rivers from one Captain Ruiter for fifty head of cattle. Nobody knows from whom Ruiter bought the land. Oh, bugger off! The other Caffre captains say they’ll clear off out of the Zuurveld – if everybody clears off, Heathen as well as Christian. Woeke trots home and writes more letters to the Political Council and the Council says Let the Caffres be for the time being, just keep the Christians within our jurisdiction. The Council whispers: We have no paperwork for the other side of the Fish. The Company does what it does best and appoints a commission, consisting of Woeke, the retired secretary Wagenaar and new secretary Maynier, to go and talk to the Heathens. The commission does not succeed in persuading the Caffres of the principle of private property of land. We find your culture charming, says the commission. We’d love to be friends, but please just stay on your side of the river. Once again gifts are exchanged and the pen-lickers sit with slavering mouths and tongues lolling from wet lips and make notes about the physique of the Heathens and the condition of their teeth and the size of the bulges under their loincloths. The retired and reappointed Wagenaar is left on the border on his own, without a single soldier, to maintain the dignity of the authorities and to intimidate all of the Caffre Kingdom with his wig and his stockings.
Caffres wade through the river and come to collect my cattle; they’re hardly back in their kraals when I go and collect my cattle and a few more. Few places on earth are as busy as the banks
