Get your guns. We’re going to hunt Caffres.
Maynier is a prick and he prattles and prattles and it’s not going to scare any Caffre off our cattle. Ndlambe also has his knife in for the Caffre rebels who loll around this side of the river and don’t bow to his authority. I regularly go and barter cattle and guns with the chief and we understand each other and he receives me in his hut. Lindeque and I and a whole faction of farmers gather some fat cattle and travel across the Fish to the milk and honey and unfamiliar thighs of Ndlambe’s Great Place. We ride into the kraal. The Caffres are cautious and Lindeque and the other farmers have to wait with the armed warriors. I ride on to the big hut. Ndlambe’s greased belly gleams in the sunlight and the leopard skins and beads judder with every movement. He welcomes me, this rare Christian who brings him guns for cattle. Ndlambe seats himself on the ox skull in the clearing before his hut and I seat myself on the rock under the lion skin. We talk and we laugh as the Hottentot interpreter translates the universal humour of dirty jokes. The chief’s advisers do not laugh at our jokes and keep a wary eye on the farmers at the entrance to the kraal. I switch to Xhosa and the chief dismisses the interpreter. We devise war plans. We get up and shake each other by the hand as the Heathens do it and then as the Christians do it. Ndlambe presses me to his breast and offers me and my comrades all the creature comforts of the kraal. I take two young girls and the other farmers select young girls and we stuff ourselves with the meat and porridge and whey around the big fires and watch the dances and go into their huts and do unto the young women as men do with subject women. Everybody, except Lindeque who all through this night is assuredly wide awake and blinking and pacing up and down in an empty hut.
Only late the next morning on our way back to the Fish River do I inform my comrades that we are now allies of the amaNdlambe and that Christian and Heathen are now as blood brothers together going to wipe out Langa and Chaka. Lindeque blink-blinks and starts having second thoughts. He asks whether it’s too late to abandon the plan, and I laugh:
Indeed, Brother; hopelessly too late.
Oh Lord, deliver us from what we actually want, says Lindeque and I yawn.
You’re lying to yourself and Maynier is lying to himself, I say: War is the only honesty remaining in this waste land.
I’m sitting at the back of the hall, gazing out of the window at Graaffe Rijnet’s dust. Across the road a man is sitting in front of his house chewing tobacco and a riderless horse walks past and somewhere I hear crows. I put my head out of the window for fresh air. I see the slave curing on the gallows.
The meeting creeps through the agenda and I don’t know the date is 6 May 1793 and I think of Nombini and Maria. I haven’t been home for a long time. I think of the Caffre girls in Ndlambe’s kraal and I smile. When Van Baalen announces that Secretary Maynier will be the next landdrost, all the men around me jump to their feet, but I have to stay seated because my breeches are straining across my crotch.
Master Markus the goddam nightingale is also sitting in the back row. He listens attentively, but does not utter a word. When the men start squabbling heatedly, flinging abuse at each other and the Company, I look in his direction again. He is no longer there. Must have walked out at some point when I wasn’t looking. I can’t understand why that man doesn’t get buggered up each and every day.
Captain Adriaan van Jaarsveld, the man with the pomaded hair and the trimmed beard, gets up in the midst of the mayhem. As usual the men fall silent when Van Jaarsveld clears his throat. Everybody knows the story of how in the course of a punitive expedition he came across some Heathens. His men throw out handfuls of tobacco before the Caffres. The Caffres scrabble around among the Christian horses, the assegais forgotten, their hands full of tobacco. Van Jaarsveld gives the order to shoot. He and his men mow down most of the scrambling Heathens. Since then both Caffre and Christian have called him the Redcaptain. He delivers a long address and concludes with He who loves me, follow me! and marches out of the door. The men look at each other; most have sat down again. Then a few heemraden get up and follow their Redcaptain. Every Christian has his own notion of what to do with the Caffres and every one splits off with his own gang. All that they have in common is the conviction that the Caffres must clear off from their farms and that the Company must clear off altogether. I sit back enjoying myself.
Ndlambe sends two thousand warriors to guard the crossings in the Fish River. Lindeque’s commando attacks the Zuurveld Caffres on 18 May 1793 without the permission or knowledge of Landdrost Maynier and drives them back to the river where Ndlambe is lying in wait and that is the start of the Second Caffre War. The skirmishes are brief and only three or four or five Caffres are killed in the campaign and the rest disappear up the kloofs. Many fugitives leave their herds behind in their haste and we loot eight hundred cattle and give Ndlambe four hundred.
Ndlambe is impressed with the Christians and even more so with the cattle. He once again offers me young women, once again I don’t say no, once again we rebel farmers make merry with the Caffres up to the first glimmering of dawn. We have overstepped not only the Fish River border but also the Colony’s law. You make a different kind of merriment when it could be your last.
The next day Lindeque and I talk to Ndlambe. With bloodshot eyes and aching heads and loins we plan a bloodbath. Lindeque, indeed the only one without any notable tenderness of loin, leaves us others wide-eyed at the proposals pouring from his bloodthirsty mouth. The farmers and the amaNdlambe will combine to attack the remaining Zuurveld Caffres and wipe them out utterly. When he sees before his eyes the massacre taking place, Lindeque does not blink even once.
The parched soil is white with frost when our Christian commando sets out that morning to meet up with Ndlambe’s army. The Christians are jovial and curse and boast about how they showed their wives who ruled the roost before they left and how they also showed the Hotnot bitches, whose lips up there and down there are the reddest and smell the strongest. A drunken farmer fires shots in the air. I ride on ahead with Lindeque. We don’t talk. Lindeque is blinking so fast it looks as if his eyes are hurting. Look, he sees the world as a series of flashes with a rosy tint, like blood in a river. I see my dogs running on the perimeter of this node of horses and ruttishness and lead.
Near to the mustering place I hear something like the flapping of thousands of wings and a light thrumming as if the earth is short of breath. A Christian next to me curses and Lindeque swears and bridles his horse and the animal staggers. See, here on the plain where the thorn bushes open up before us like velvet curtains, a sea of warriors are sitting in formation on their shields. They are young and strong and lusting after violence and excited by death as only young men can be and naked and daubed with red clay and some of them sport blue crane feathers on their heads and there are thousands of them and they stamp their feet and seethe like a tempest and chant in anticipation of the blood that must flow and will flow and my fellow Christians see this horde that is as one and they fall silent and then they turn around and more than one pisses himself and they flee and I flee with them and their panic spreads like a pestilence through the Zuurveld and distant farms become deserted farms and farmers fling what they can onto wagons and clear out and the Caffres see the wagons trekking away and the blind terror in the eyes that cannot afford to look back and they know that those guns in trembling hands are not almighty and the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe and all that is Caffre comes down on the Christian homes and herds and Hottentot servants and slaves and burns down the houses and drives off the herds and kills the labourers and slaves and the names of these people are recalled by no one, and go and look, they’re not recorded anywhere and they are just dead and gone and of these raids only statistics remain, like the 4 farms out of 120 that were not plundered and the 40 Hottentots that were killed and the 20 homesteads that were burnt down and the at least 50 000 cattle and the 11 000 sheep and the 200 horses that were stolen and the 25 families fleeing the Zuurveld and the rest that form laagers in groups with 50 heavy wagons in a circle and the thorn bushes in the openings beneath and between the wagons and then Chaka and Langa attack Ndlambe and the corpulent king who cannot understand why his allies deserted him must crawl back across the Fish and in these plunderings four Christians are killed, Johannes Grobbelaar, Juriaan Potgieter, Stephanus Cloete and Pieter Vivier, and the Caffres catch a Christian boy of sixteen, one Stroebel, and nobody ever hears anything about him again and I’m hardly back home when the day breaks that Langa, whose wife is now my wife, takes all my cattle, burns down my farms and house and everything in it and leaves me adrift in poverty.