At the end of the month we trek across a mountain and pitch camp again. A week later I send a message to Ngqika where he’s hiding from the rebellious Rharhabe in a Hottentot camp fourteen miles away. The king, my son, no longer trusts me and I him ever less by the day. From Yese I hear nothing, other than that she’s placing curses on me and my wives and children.
Ngqika arrives with the dawn at our place. With him is the usual retinue of fifty men, each with a kaross over the shoulders and a single assegai or knobkerrie in hand. But all around the stand, I point out to Bezuidenhout, are lying some two hundred naked warriors, with all the shields and assegais that they could carry on them. Ngqika says the despicable Hottentots persuaded him that the Christians were conspiring against him, but our warm welcome was proof that he no longer need fear us. A captain leaps to his feet and takes his king to task: What kind of lying is this about his fear of us? What’s happened to the plan to skin us alive? Our king looks about him all bewildered and laughs nervously. He demands Jank’hanna’s horse and Kemp thank God does not argufy and gives the horse and Ngqika is on the horse and gone. One by one the warriors arise from the bushes and trot after their king.
In May Krieger, Faber and I, with Bentley, the focking English deserter, saddle our horses and ride to the Colony to barter a few hides and tusks for munitions. I take part of Kemp’s diary and a few letters along for him and entrust them to a kind farmer who is prepared to deliver them to Graaffe Rijnet, seeing that he’s allowed to set foot in that dusty street without being shot to pieces. We return with sacks full of lead and powder, which emboldens the whole gang to move further afield. By June our camp is settled next to the Keiskamma. I mend my ox-cart’s axle, and Kemp marvels at the hippopotami. He is truly chuffed with himself nowadays. At Ngqika’s place he didn’t manage to convert one single Caffre, but since we’ve been camping here Hottentots have streamed into the camp every day, devoured all there is to eat and walked off. Kemp lures the lot with food and then it’s a prayering and a hymning to make up for the wasted time and souls. There are regularly rhinoceros tracks in the mud, but the wretched brutes now know better than to be seen.
My children fall ill one by one. Maria has to come up with cures and herbs. I am kept busy all day listening to and solving every plaint and problem of my fellow fugitives. Maria is fast asleep already by the time I crawl in behind her and press my snout into the back of her neck. In the morning she’s up already by the time I wake up, but her smell clings to me till the afternoon’s sweat washes her scent from me.
Not a hundred years later Ngqika puts in another appearance with one of his wives and thirty of his Caffres. It seems a terrible fever is raging at the Great Place. He’s coming to seek refuge with us where Jank’hanna can keep the disease at bay with a mighty praying. In no time at all trees are cut down and the king builds a small kraal a stone’s throw from our camping spot. I tell the men it’s time we tested the Colony’s borders. If we fire the first shots there are plenty of Christians who’ll join in the shooting. I’m not going to spend my life sitting around in a goddam Sunday-school class.
We melt all that is lead or tin and with sacks of bullets that used to be mugs and plates, the other Christian men and I prepare by mid-June to take up arms against the Colony. Bentley remains behind to look after the old missionary and the women and children. Once again I have to cart along a whole mailbag of letters and diaries from Kemp. For somebody who sets himself up as a model of humility with his unshod paws and hatless forehead, it’s a bit of a joke that he wants to jot down every bright idea and bowel movement and send it out into the world.
Before our departure I tell Ngqika of our plans with the focking English and our friends in the Castle. He seals his blessing on our campaign against the Bushmen-from-the-Sea by offering a few of his Caffres who can shoot. Everything goes swimmingly until we cross the Baviaans.
In the evenings when the other commando members are snoring away, I can’t help peeking into Brother Kemp’s jottings. The dear chap marvels at every plant and creature. He writes odes to the baboons in the kloofs and the parrots in the forests, waxes lyrical over the stinkwood and yellowwood; he measures the giant aloe and the enormous snails. His awe at ostrich eggs. His amazement at the honeybird that signals with its call that it has found honey and how you can then follow it to the sweetness. He describes sadly how his dogs tear a young steenbok to pieces. When I read these things, I start missing my old friend. And when he mentions that he conducts experiments on chameleons to try to ascertain how they change their colour, I think I must ask him about it as soon as I see him again and I know that I’ll never again come across a man like him in this country.
Hardly have we set foot on the other bank of the Baviaans, than our little commando runs up against Chungwa’s army. They give us a good drubbing. Most of the Caffre riflemen perish. Stoffel Botha is captured and Chungwa drags him to the drostdy. There the blackguard blurts out all our plans. How we wanted to drive the English from the Colony, how we would drag all the commissioners all the way to Caffraria and there do unto them what was done unto our comrades in the Castle and how, in the new Englishless republic, Krieger would be general and I would be king.
After our defeat against Chungwa we wipe our bloody noses. We’re not too shamefaced: We were not even ten Christian guns and a handful of Caffres against a whole horde. We ride back to our camp on the Keiskamma, back to the goddam hallelujahs.
If you as much as look askance at the grass, it catches fire. Our cattle are lean; food is scarce. I haven’t even unsaddled, when Kemp comes running up to me to jabber about Sara, Bezuidenhout’s wife. The little converted Hottentot girl is inseparable from Kemp these days. Even now I can see her standing and spying on our talk. She, too, is the one who dares tell Kemp what no one else, myself included, feels up to telling him: how the Christians, every time he goes to piss or pray in the bush, slip into his tent and rob him – smaller stuff than what Ngqika is forever absconding with, but more chronically. Bezuidenhout’s little wife is quite appealing, I can see why Kemp is so taken with her. She hovers about him like one of his flies, zooming incessantly and fluttering on about sin and hell and punishment and everything that tickles a preacher’s prick.
I see the other Christians watching when I’m talking so earnestly with Kemp. The soul-scavenger tells me excitedly that in my absence Maria also decided that she was in need of salvation. Kemp just can’t stay away from a married woman. To each his own, I suppose. But he’d better watch himself if he wants to meddle with Maria’s soul. When I go and look up my family, Maria and Nombini say I should get out of the way, they’re cooking lunch. The children don’t seem to have noticed that I was gone.
On 11 August we trek on to a site lower down on the Keiskamma. That night the Christians sit around a fire squabbling about what to do with Kemp. They are still smarting from the defeat against Chungwa and another revolution gone to glory. The war is raging about us, they say. Why does the missionary lure all that is Hotnot and Caffre to us in order to convert them? He sows strange seeds in their wives’ heads. Claims not to want to baptise Faber’s child because he and his woman Leentjie carry on like Heathens. He must die, they say. It takes all my sweet-talking to have the old man’s life spared. On the 16th we move four miles to the east, still further down the river, cross it twice and eventually camp on the lusher left bank. Late at night the whole of the camp to a man is wielding torches to scare off the plaguy hippopotami.