Jank’hanna doesn’t seem too upset about his writing lessons ending in mayhem. When the children have gone home, we three sit under the tree. Ngqika asks the sorcerer how he’s adjusting to life this side of the Keiskamma. He smiles when Jank’hanna tells him about the woman who mistook his flapping tent for an alien creature and took off head over heels and ended up in a pitfall for bush pigs. He laughs out loud when he hears of the Caffre who came upon Jank’hanna and his Hottentots kneeling in prayer with lowered heads. The man thought they were growling at him and were preparing to pounce on him. Ngqika says he himself at first wondered who Jank’hanna was talking to so earnestly under the ground.
You are strange people, says the king. My people are sometimes scared of you and sometimes laugh at you. I’m sure it cuts both ways.
Our people don’t laugh as easily as you, says Kemp.
When the conversation takes a more serious turn, Ngqika asks Jank’hanna to pray to his white god for rain on the maize. Jank’hanna says God will send rain as he sees fit. That night a thunderstorm erupts; the lightning flashes all around us. The next morning Ngqika shakes the missionary to wake him up and find out how his god makes the lightning flashes. Jank’hanna explains to him and to me how electricity works. Neither of us wants to believe him.
I drag Ngqika away from my home where he’s getting far too cosy with Bettie. With winged words I make him see what an important rainmaker Jank’hanna is. The king nods and it seems as if I won’t be losing my friend the lightning conjurer to the Colony any time soon. Then I play a different game. I tell Ngqika that Jank’hanna usually charges a few heads of cattle for such difficult prayers that save maize crops with such abundant rains. The king consents magnanimously. He asks me where he should send the cattle, since Jank’hanna doesn’t have a kraal. I say bring the cattle to my kraal, I’ll see to it that the rainmaker gets them.
Before setting off that evening on a splendid ox, the king declares that Edmonds can clear out any time he wishes, but that Jank’hanna is remaining right here. That if the governor wants to see his rainmaker, he can come and talk his talk here.
On 29 December Edmonds at long last finds himself on the wagon chest behind a team of oxen drawn up ready for the crack of the whip. With the combined and individual blessings of Ngqika and Kemp, he flails the long whip over the oxen, but the only sound is the tongue of the hindmost ox chewing the cud. The two missionaries confer for a long time and then their words dry up. Kemp whistles for the wagon leader. The boy takes hold of the bridle and starts walking. At long last the wagon is on the move. Edmonds’ little plump hand keeps waving till he’s far away, as if he’s taking leave of old friends.
Somebody knocks at my door. The children have been snoring away for a while. Kemp is weepy; he tells me how he stood for more than half an hour on the kopje by his garden watching Edmonds’ wagon disappearing slowly behind the mountains. If you go rummaging in his notes, you’ll see what Kemp wrote that evening to his London superiors:
Our separation is, however, not to be ascribed to a diminution of fraternal love, which I am persuaded is unaltered, but to an insurmountable aversion to this people, and a strong desire to live among the Bengalese. Oh that the blessing of Christ and his peace may follow him. Amen. Amen.
Believe me, only dear Kemp could have missed those pudgy hands – the little fellow who wanted to be a civilising influence in darkest Africa, but vomited all over himself when the light started dawning.
4
Summer is heating up by the time our little gang of Christians and Hottentots start clearing the ground where the missionary’s house is to arise. Nobody was terribly excited about the job. I had to go and kick Krieger and Bezuidenhout out of bed. Nobody sleeps as late as white deserters. The grass is hacked out, rocks thrown on a heap. Holes are dug for the poles on which the house will rest. Kemp is off on his own chopping reeds for the roof. Every now and again you hear a little yelp from the bushes when something slithers over his bare feet.
At the hottest hour of the afternoon we are sitting under a tree, smoking. Kemp comes walking along, one foot treading cautiously. He stands inspecting us, not a shirt in sight. He touches his black Sunday jacket with the white stains under the arms, takes it off and hangs it from a branch. The lot around me try not to stare at the emaciated white-and-red body. A few of them mutter a greeting as he walks past them and sits down next to me.
How are you coming along? he asks.
It’s easy here, the soil is not as hard as on the other side of the river. There is plenty of water in the soil. A week, maybe two.
Thank you, Mijnheer Buys.
Christians have to look after each other here among the Caffres.
But King Gaika says every day that he won’t harm a hair on our heads.
Ngqika likes talking, yes, but his people don’t listen to everything he says. I’m telling you now: The Caffres don’t want us here any longer.
But Mijnheer Buys, it’s not only you and me here either. Surely all your comrades and their Hottentots are here, all of them with guns and horses.
I look at the men around me. Time is gnawing at their faces; convicts age more quickly than freemen. They’re missing the Colony. They lost everything when they were reduced to seeking refuge here. For them it wasn’t a choice as it was for me. It was survival.
This bunch is building you a house because they’re still wary of me, I say. But every single one of these miscreants would cut your gullet if he thought it could improve his lot.
And not you?
Not at the moment. I can talk to you.
We don’t really talk.
I talk more to you than to any of these… these…
I gesture towards the blackguards around us and the empty kopjes over there in the distance when the appropriate abusive epithet doesn’t present itself.
In any case. Thank you. Coenraad. Where can I be of use?
You just carry on chopping reeds, then I’ll make you a roof that will stand up to the Flood.
You’re mocking me, Mijnheer Buys.
And you notice it. As I say: I like chattering with you.
Kemp paces off the plan of the house with his long ostrich legs. It is late in January 1800 and the sun is stifling and the earth is sweating.
It looks right to me, he says. About twenty-four or -five feet by nine or ten.
Is that big enough for you?
Mijnheer Buys, I’m not anticipating many guests.
Sounds familiar, I think. We pack stones on the outline of the house. We sit down in the prospective home, the stones the only markers that this is inside and that is outside.
A fortnight later the house has arisen. A house of branches and reeds like mine and those of the other fugitives. Twenty-four feet by nine. I spared no trouble. The reeds are packed neatly and tightly, the clay plastered smooth and the rocks that we rolled out of the way have been used for a chimney. I must confess, I was foreman, I helped haul things and hollered where I had to, but the actual construction wasn’t mine. Building houses is a skill these hands would never acquire.