So at Bruyntjeshoogte the rabble run up against the focking government’s guns and Prinsloo and a hundred and fifty dust-farters all too readily lay down their arms before Vandeleur’s shiny booties. When they are questioned, the scumbags jabber and gabble and spill their wettest dreams about Coenraad Buys who is raising a Caffre army against the English. Must have been affrighted of the general; he was reputed to have dealt one of his own soldiers eight hundred lashes for a bit of light plunder. Caffre armies were at the time the last thing on my mind. I merely wanted to get away from these farmers who sit all day chewing the cud and having endless meetings and then after all the grazing and guzzling don’t manage to squeeze out a single seditious turd. They deserve the focking English. Needless to say, the whole lot of losels surrendered or took to their heels without firing a single shot. A few of them, the best of the worst, ended up here in Caffraria by the skin of their backsides.
So we learn later that Vandeleur was too shit-scared to come and look for us. He sends the so-called Commandant Hendrik van Rensburg to come and blast us full of holes – that would be me, Bezuidenhout, One-hand Botha, Christoffel Botha, Jan Knoetze, Gert Oosthuizen, Piet Steenberg and Frans Krieger. On top of that the focking government places a thousand rix-dollars on each of our unoffending heads. The bumcrack-boil of a Van Rensburg was according to report looking for a few men stone-stupid enough to come and turf me out here when the Third Caffre War broke out. My rebellious chums and I were clean forgotten, because behold: The border is on fire all over again, some say as far as De Lange Cloof. But at Ngqika’s the grass was lush and the fleshpots overflowing.
What does truly itch my arse is what I read some two centuries later in my incarnation as Omni-Buys. About how the whole cursed war was supposedly also my doing. Goddammit, at the time I and my brood and Stoffel Botha’s crowd were on our way to go and look for the Portuguese on the East Coast and that too was a bugger-up that forced us to outspan for quite a few months with the Tambookies, way off in the bundu, where not even letters or lies about the war reached us. It was among these very Tambookie Caffres with the prettiest daughters – I earmarked one for myself there – and the fattest cattle – I earmarked quite a few for myself – where I had to abandon my wives and children when my high-born stepson let me know that I had to stir my stumps, because there was crap in the land of the Caffres.
And so it is back to Ngqika’s Great Place that Glider and I now gallop at breakneck speed. Oh, it’s a beautiful place through which we bolt. From fleshy grey elephant grass the blood-red flowers of Caffre trees spike at intervals, and the pale prickles of the lushest thorn trees. The veldt gets greener with every step, a lighter land with brim-full streams flowing from the thickly wooded mountains. I curse my horse past the blesbok and blue duiker and this morning a leopard disembowelling a monkey.
The Great Place extends over a green hill with a long slope gradually descending to a stream. Clusters of huts and cattle kraals and in between the fine web of footpaths. Between the homes there are no trees, the soil is trodden solid. In the centre a reed hut larger than the others, the king’s hut, and on either side of that the huts of his wives, in deferential rows to left and right. In front of the larger hut is an open plot of ground where the king and his advisers meet and where he holds court. And it is here, a stone’s throw from the kraal, where I rein Glider in and from where my stallion slowly trots through the people with hooves gracefully lifted and firmly and dignifiedly set down. I leap from the horse and ignore the crowd and walk straight to where I can see Ngqika sitting with two sunburnt palefaces in comical Sunday suits. The king of the Caffres gets up from the anthill and approaches with a flash of white teeth.
If you’d lost sight of me for a while, this must be where you catch up with me. Here, on the 20th of September 1799, with the rolling hills like the haunches of hogs for ever and beyond. As in all times, everywhere the droning of parrots and tree dassies and loeries and baboons. It is here where you now see me embracing the king, this son of mine, almost as tall as I. You’ll try to read my face, but remember: What you take for emotion is just the contraction of muscles.
Ngqika is young and strong and comely. He wears a long garment of leopard skin. On his head is a diadem of copper and another of beadwork. His cheeks and lips are painted with red clay and in his hand is an iron knobkerrie. The king takes his seat again on the anthill, the knobkerrie across his knees. I stand next to him and his captains come and sit around us. Behind us the king’s wives, further back a hundred or so of his people.
Whatever was happening here before my arrival has upset everybody. The Sunday suits gawk at the Heathens surrounding them and then they gawk at me. One of them is tall and thin and tattered with an almighty forehead and the other is short and sweaty with fat fingers. Ngqika whispers that they are here because a god spoke to them. He wanted me here before he spoke his mind to these sorcerers. I praise him for his circumspection. The king puts out his hand and shakes the hands of the Sunday suits as I taught him. He asks the missionaries, through my mouth, for whom the tobacco box full of buttons is intended. The older missionary, evidently of the two the senior emissary of the Lord, replies that it’s the king’s own tobacco box. They are returning it to him in token of the fact that they are indeed the men to whom he sent it when they requested permission to step onto his land. They did not want to return it empty. He speaks in dour pure High Dutch. Ngqika thanks the men in Xhosa and I thank them in the expanding and contracting Dutch of these parts. The king says he is overjoyed to note that the government realises that he’s the greatest leader beyond the Fish, since they’re sending their sorcerers exclusively to him. Furthermore he’d like to know what their intentions are and what they want from him. I translate the second half of his speech. The missionary replies that it is their intention to instruct the king and his people in matters that will render them blessed in this life and also after death; that they are merely asking his permission to settle in his land, and expecting his friendship and protection, as well as the liberty to return to their own land when they should want to do so. As who would not. I convey the essentials to Ngqika.
While the missionary is talking, I scrutinise the fellow. A scrawny old man, probably in his sixties, solidly built, with a slight stoop, a delicate skin scorched red, the enormous forehead peeling, no hat or socks in sight. Balding, with long brown hair in his neck, a dusty black suit, the shirt and shoes in tatters. His face is long and finely honed, sharp nose with a network of bloody capillaries, small eyes, set wide apart under high dense eyebrows. A delicate sensitivity, as of somebody from a liberal-minded world, a world that can exist only as a corollary of war and imperium. A mildness that can flourish only in a sheltered life. Above the dark rings his eyes are watery. In them I read an instant and instinctive trust, something that you rarely see in those who carve out an existence threshing and thrashing on this soil. But the way this wretch carries his body testifies only to a struggle, something that claws and bites, that gnaws at him if he doesn’t feed it. The missionary bows deep and extends his long-fingered hand.