I send my wives and children to my henchman Jan One-hand Botha until I can get another house built. Jan stands with his pipe in his hand and waves me good bye with his stump. While I’m seeking to avenge myself in the course of the next punitive expedition, while I’m wildly hitting out and shooting and chasing after Caffres into the bushes and only returning to the Christian fires late at night, my brother Frederik – who played with me when I was small but now hardly knows me – is severely wounded and my uncle Petrus gets hit in the chest with an assegai. I sit through the night holding my uncle’s hand. I ask him about my father. He says my father was a brave man to stay at home and see that the yard was kept cleared. My father was brave to teach his sons to shoot and ride and not to go hunting too far and to sleep with the same woman, that Christina, he says, every night. By dawn it seems as if Uncle Petrus is going to make it, but then he dies while I’m fetching him water.
I ride into Graaffe Rijnet. There are wagons and tents everywhere between the houses. Children and women are wandering around in the streets. Bezuidenhout scratches at his red beard that reaches almost to his belt and looks at the woman walking past him and looks at the little girl she has by the hand. He tells me that the women are streaming into town because the Caffres leave them alone. They only burn down the farm and take the cattle and torture and murder the men. But the women and the children they leave alone.
We also torture and murder, I say.
But we know better than to leave the young girls alone, Bezuidenhout laughs.
We ride on to the drostdy where Maynier’s commando is to muster. Neither I nor any of my comrades have any time for the new landdrost, but when there’s a commando that wants to drive out the Caffres and take their cattle, we’re ready and willing. In front of the jail one of the militia is tying a Christian to a pole and then he starts whipping him; the man howls like a baboon.
Maynier is highly learned and fluent in Dutch, French and English, but doesn’t understand warfare. The Political Council orders him to avoid violence and to negotiate peaceably with the Caffres. As an immortal I, Omni-Buys, have many an idle hour for my little obsession: the history of which I was part, but of which at the time I couldn’t see anything beyond my own broken nose. I laugh from my immaterial belly when I read in a battered book that for these negotiations Maynier requisitioned the following trinkets from the commissioner, as gifts for the Heathen:
300 pounds of beads,
200 knives,
300 pounds of copper plates,
150 pounds of wire for bracelets,
300 pounds of tobacco,
150 tinderboxes and flintstones,
400 pounds of bar iron and
150 mirrors.
Oh, the wondrous abysm of lists!
The Caffres take the gifts, but want no truck with peace. That is when Maynier receives instructions to drive them from the Colony. He assembles a commando of eighty Christians and thirty-seven Hottentots. Ferreira’s Lange Cloof commando joins us. I read Ferreira’s letter to the commissioner in which before his departure he begs for a few items for the advancement of bloodletting:
1000 pounds of lead,
2000 pieces of flintstone,
hand grenades and
any available field guns.
Believe me, no hand grenades or field guns came our way.
When Bezuidenhout and I arrive at the drostdy, a bunch of men are already standing around in front of the buildings smoking and muttering. Maynier comes walking out onto the stoep. His face and neck are red and full of freckles. He has no chin. His clothes are all show. The shirt with the frills, the breeches, the stockings of silk. The suit was tailored for him in the Cape and belongs in the Cape and won’t last a day on horseback by the banks of the Fish.
There’s no place for a prick in those pants, says Bezuidenhout.
Why should there be?
A man in front of us looks around and clears his throat at our comments on the local authority. Bezuidenhout slaps the pestilential prattler on the back of the head when he turns back. Maynier greets us and reads administrative arrangements from a piece of paper. He asks Redcaptain van Jaarsveld to lead the commando as commandant. Van Jaarsveld tousles his greasy hair and the hair stands up straight and stays like that. He thanks Maynier for the honour and lists his excuses for having to decline:
His horses are not up to the journey and
his wife is ill and
he has too few labourers to keep his farm going.
The men around me snigger at the stylish Van Jaarsveld’s discomfiture. Maynier minces hither and thither and his dandified collar darkens with sweat. He asks Captain Burgers with the ears to lead the commando and Burgers too declines:
He doesn’t have any horses and
he is scared the Bushmen may plunder his farm when he turns his back.
Maynier shakes his head and giggles in disbelief. He offers the command of the commando to all the officers who turned up. Every single one declines this dubious honour. Where Maynier’s chin should have been his face starts trembling. He castigates the officers for their dereliction of duty and all of them persist in their respective lists of excuses. Maynier proposes that he himself should lead the commando. All the burghers agree unanimously. Later in the inn we laugh at the silly pantywaist who wants to muck in among the bushes and the Caffres in his embroidered waistcoat. We’ll all ride along, just to see what the little bantam cock does the first time a wild Caffre or a lion charges him.
I send a Hottentot to One-hand Botha with a letter to Maria telling her they needn’t keep food hot for me. While taking apart my gun, I consider what I’ll do to One-hand if Maria or Nombini doesn’t say no to him loudly and clearly and firmly enough. Because believe me, he’s going to try it on with them, I know it, because I would have. I oil each part separately and when I remember the Bushman we met on our way here, I cut another notch in the butt with the older notches keeping tally.
On Glider I’d easily be able to travel from Graaffe Rijnet to the heart of the Zuurveld in three or four days. Maynier’s commando with the wagons full of provisions and munitions travels mighty slowly. Besides, we have to stop every now and again to fend off Heathens. We don’t encounter many of them. Chaka and Langa – damned Langa – left only a scattering of their men and a few head of cattle on this side of the Fish. This little lot keep track of the commandos and then send their Hottentots through the river to go and report to the chiefs.