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 The fashions at the Castle are apparently almost a decade out of date, but the seditious ideas from France make landfall here faster than any new dress patterns.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 of the Fish. Every hunting expedition becomes longer, every elephant scarcer and older and more enraged, every punitive commando more brutal. Around us families congregate in laagers. The authorities don’t send the munitions they promised. I’m quite happy staying where I am. Maria no longer misses me when I’m not at home.
I lie with my wife and she rubs my head. I look up through the roof beams. I miss the swallow’s nest in the rafters at Brandwacht. My sons Philip and Coenraad are born to me. Just spit and clay, I think. I turn on my side and look at Maria. She’s carrying low, the next one is going to be a son again. There is a new hair growing out of the mole on her ear.
Graaffe Rijnet at last acquires its first minister, Jan-Hendrik Manger. On Sundays he preaches twice in High Dutch in the school that used to be a stable. When Woeke fails to turn up for a meeting in the Cape, the Company sends Captain Bernard Cornelius van Baalen as acting landdrost. He writes a wordy report about the disorder and corruption, which nobody, with the exception of course of yours truly, Omni-Buys, ever reads. Most people who don’t have to stay in Graaffe Rijnet, he writes, have long since cleared out.
I and Christoffel Botha with the rotten teeth, and the Bezuidenhout clan and a few Prinsloos smell blood and riches.
Smell! I tell them.
What do we smell, oh great Buys? they ask.
They call me their friend; I call them whatever I have to call them to keep them trotting along in my dust. We persuade all that is a veldwagtmeester to launch a punitive commando. I tell Officer Barend Lindeque and Veldwagtmeester Thomas Dreyer that it’s all the fair weather that causes deserts and that drought can be broken only by storms. I tell them how I caught a thief red-handed. The Caffre was slaughtering one of Botha’s cattle, but when I dragged him to the chief by the scruff of his scrawny neck, the Caffres sent me packing and the pestilence stood there laughing at me. Our cattle are now disappearing every day, but if you go on commando with me, you always return with more cattle than were stolen. They say that on punitive expeditions my gang and I shoot a bit too freely among the Heathens. And apparently we shoot the Caffres who hunt on our farms. But we are big men and strong and what we aim at we hit. We are indispensable on every commando.
If you mess with us, we mess with you: Langa, whose kraal is now situated on burgher Scheepers’ farm, goes hunting with his warriors. When they get to Campher’s homestead, he locks Langa up in his house. They say the old warrior hasn’t slept for years on account of the pain in his back. Campher takes Langa’s shield and assegais and knife and knobkerrie from him and holds him hostage until the old chicken thief has to buy his liberty with cattle. Hannes Bezuidenhout keeps the sons of two Caffre captains captive on his farm until the captains pay him a ransom of four oxen. Then there’s Hannes’ brother, the scoundrel Coenraad. His brothers I call by their first names, but he is plain Bezuidenhout – he’s the one responsible for the stories about the Barbarous Bezuidenhouts. If you know him as I know him, you know he’s the Bezuidenhout; he is the legend. And besides, there’s only one Coenraad around here. The very Bezuidenhout who farms a different farm every month. He who, when the mood takes him, threatens that he’ll thrash to death every goddam wretch next to the Swartkops River; he who that year locks up Chungwa in his mill and hitches him up like a mule and teaches him with a horsewhip how one makes the thing go around.