Yese says a few Caffres tried to kill Ngqika and wounded him before they were battered to death. To hang on to any shred of power, Ngqika now has to petition the goodwill of the Hottentots in the surrounding areas, as protection against his own nation. Ngqika merely sends me word that his people are deserting him, that he fears for his life and is too scared to make the short journey to come and visit me. He can go shit straw!
I start looking to the north. Every branch that snaps in the night makes me rush out of the house gun in hand. With his nerves as raw as mine, Bezuidenhout the other evening takes aim at a wretched Caffre who after dark is all innocently driving his few cattle past the red-bearded barbarian’s stand.
I try to bring it home to Kemp that things are getting dangerous here. I tell him that if an uprising were to flare up here, we’d have to help fight the rebels. Otherwise Ngqika would roast all us Christians over hot coals to feed his dogs. Kemp picks listlessly at an infected thorn in his foot.
Beloved Buys, says the barefoot preacher, Jesus is the true king of the Heathens and they can do nothing to us against his will.
Well, there you have it.
By April our little band of Christians is so panicked that we start standing guard again as in the commando days. I start thinking that just perchance Kemp is the only Christian here who is truly safe. No Caffre would harm a hair on his huge head without bringing down the wrath of the king upon his gonads. At long last Ngqika comes crawling out of his hole. He says he’s been avoiding his dear Khula because he’d been told that I wanted to shoot him. If the backstabbing squirt frustrates me any further with his little civil war that’s rendering my beloved Caffraria just as unsafe as the Colony, I might just prove the tattlers right. Though I am pleased to see my son. We don’t talk about his mother. Truth to tell, we don’t talk much. We’ve both heard so many shit stories about each other that we no longer know where we’re on or off with each other. He excuses himself with great formality and goes off in search of his beloved Jank’hanna. Ngqika wants Jank’hanna to instruct him in the Caffre alphabet that the white sorcerer apparently wrote up in his idle hours.
Poke around in his notes on the little table and you’ll see how the missionary is battling to get a grip on the language of the Caffres. You’ll see how time after time he starts with an outline and scratches it out and tears it up. He already understands the language sufficiently to save a Caffre heart, but the rules remain obscure. Somewhere between the sheets you’ll find an alphabet of twenty-seven letters, eight of these vowels. Extensive notes point to the differences from the Dutch alphabet. In his report to the London Missionary Society he writes that Arabic script could perhaps be more suited to express the Caffre sounds. There’s a short note on how European readers would struggle with the fancy swirls of the Arabic letters, but how, in their turn, the blessed Caffres also systematically need to get accustomed to the matrix of European script. He laments the fact that he does not have Arabic letters for his printing press. In the report to the focking British Colonisers of Souls you find these notes under the heading Specimen of the Caffra Language. Suchlike general observations are followed by the Vocabulary of the Caffra Language, a glossary as long as my arm.
The glossary is meticulously divided up into 21 classes and covers any subject you can name. As far as animals, excluding humans, are concerned, he lists 98 words and expressions that can be further divided up as follows:
Quadrupeds: 38 words, of which 9 refer to cattle;
Birds: 14 words;
Reptiles, insects and the like: 21 words, 8 referring to snakes;
Parts of animals: 25 words, apart from words like ‘horn’ or ‘liver’ and including among others ‘honey’, ‘dung’ and ‘breath’.
Secondly you find 70 words under the vague heading Of Mankind, under which are found 4 different words for ‘mother’.
Then, celestial bodies and phenomena: 25 words, including ‘thokoloze’;
Terrestrial objects: 18 words, including ‘shadow’;
Vegetables: 25 words, including most of the vegetation of the area;
Food and drink: 11 words;
House and utensils: 33 words, for instance ‘assegai’ and the word ‘nadi’, which according to our brother designates both ‘mirror’ and ‘book’;
Dress: 10 words.
Under ‘diseases’ you find only 5 Xhosa equivalents for pain, fever, the great itch, smallpox and flatulence. (Note that my lord Kemp pens down chronic farting in its original Latin: crepitus ventris.)
Hereafter the section on dignities, qualities, etc., starting with ‘lord’ and ‘lady’, followed by ‘Christian’ and ‘magician’; further on you find the same word for a female servant and a Hottentot woman. The glossary concerning the nobility ends on equivalents for ‘rogue’, ‘friend’, ‘enemy’, ‘thief’, ‘liar’, ‘lie’ and, at last, ‘hunger’.
In addition you find 32 adjectives,
77 verbs,
37 pronouns,
33 adverbs,
10 prepositions,
6 conjunctions,
5 interjections,
12 numerals,
4 diminutives,
9 comparatives and
84 phrases.
All in all he mentions 624 words and expressions of the Caffre nation, that on his sole authority, without any proofreading, was published in the Transactions of the London Missionary Society, Vol. 1 of 1804, to be distributed and plundered by plagiarists to the end of time.
Ngqika and Jank’hanna’s summer of joyful language lessons is of short duration. On 27 April the whole gang of us clears out: I and my people, Kemp, the other Graaffe Rijnet outlaws, the German and English deserters who had joined us in dribs and drabs. Not even this lot of rebels and deserters want to linger in the midst of a civil war. We abandon our houses as they stand with no hope of ever seeing them again and two nights later we outspan on the banks of the Debe. Faber wounds a bontebok; the creature charges the wretched Kemp, but a second bullet floors the buck at his feet.
I walk in the veldt to cleanse my ears of all the whingeing. The pack comes to greet me while I’m taking aim at a kudu in thick undergrowth. There’s something amiss here. The leader with the pointed ears is nowhere to be seen; now a hyena is leading the pack. Such a thing I’ve never heard of, but I understand. The hyena is no longer young, but bigger than the dogs. His scars say he knows all about fighting. He growls when he sees me. The wagging tails of the others make him calm down. Two of the bitches are pregnant. What kind of monsters will tear their way out of their loins? The hyena makes a wide circle around me and comes to stand before me, behind a rotten tree trunk. He is broad, even for a hyena. One of his fangs is broken. He turns around, the low back quarter speckled like a partridge. He lifts his leg, pisses against the trunk and disappears. Somewhere I hear a dog bark and then yowl. How long will the hyena remain the leader of the pack? The hyena is stronger than the dogs, but he’s the only hyena. I shoot a fat peacock for the pot. My Bettie sticks the feathers in her hair and no Christian can keep his eyes to himself.