With greetings from us all.
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 Langa’s favourite ox and in this year of 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.