I page on. My eye falls on a female thigh. On this map dragons and piles of skulls proliferate instead of rivers and mountains. In the top right-hand corner is the pelvis of a woman sitting with legs spread as if arising from the map. He draws so well that I start drooling. Her right leg frames the top edge and her calf caresses Mozambique. From the colossal cunt like a sublime black sun slithers the serpent’s tail on which, between the pale scales, is written Gariep. The traveller didn’t know how rivers flow, because this Gariep serpent is slithering up into her. If you look closely, you see a little forked tongue peeking out of her navel.
Maria comes waddling over the yard. I press her to me, my little old wife, nowadays even shorter, all belly and dugs. She struggles free with her knotty arms, punches me in the chest and rages on, scolding and scuffing. When she calms down, I ask her whether she’s coming along.
Where else am I supposed to go if not following you, Buys?
She shakes her head and regards me with her hide-and-seek eyes and grabs me around the waist, her head in my belly. She stuffs a yellowed sheet of paper into my hand.
There, you’re going to have to pin this to your hat so the Christians don’t shoot you.
My pardon, the rescindment of my outlaw status; my citizenship. It is from this piece of paper that I now want to escape. Maria is a cunning vixen. She’s handing me this thing so that I should reflect on what it’s cost me to be able to squat here in peace for eleven years. Maria does not throw the bones of my fate, but packs them out all too neatly and then persuades me that I’ve done the throwing myself.
It was like that wayback time again, she says, when we were living by the sea and you just lay around. You’re not lazy, not a bit. When you get like that, then you play dead, like a thing lying in its hole waiting to bite.
She is my first wife. She’s known me from always. I’ve long since ceased to have any defence against her. I look at the paper in my hand. Yes, I fought a long time for this sheet calling me Citizen. But in the end it cost nothing more than sitting through a long goddam meeting.
2
I was with Ngqika when the Batavians took over the Cape in 1803. I was shouting at and shrinking from my wives when the letter from Lieutenant-General Janssens arrived on one fine day in June. The new governor asks me to meet him in Algoa Bay. Apparently I can be of great help in the negotiations with Ngqika’s indigenes. Janssens flatters as only a bureaucrat can. He appeals to my help as a friend of my country, the Dutch colony in South Africa. Would like to ask the man in what sense a colony is a country; more of an anthill, if you’re asking me. He writes that he’s convinced that I’ll rush to his aid – since I suppose that the welfare of the Country in which you were born and in which you spent the greater part of your life will always be dear to you.
He had a point there: I do flatter easily. I send a Hottentot back and inform him that I’ll meet my honoured governor at such-and-such a drift on the Fish River on the agreed-upon date. I tell Ngqika that if we can win over the new authorities, they may well be less of a nuisance than the focking British. Ngqika is not having any.
I saddle my horse, along with three Polish deserters from the ninth Jägers battalion, an English deserter and a few of Ngqika’s strongest captains, and go and pay a visit to the governor at the drift border crossing, where he’s been dismounted for a few days. On 14 June Janssens’ uniform is without a wrinkle, his buttons buffed that morning. I’m sure he’s been rehearsing his welcoming address every morning to the little ears of the few hippopotami that haven’t been massacred yet.
Janssens is as friendly as he is strict. He has a firm handshake and looks me in the eye more squarely than any landdrost or official that I’ve yet come across. He has either nothing or plenty to hide. He’s almost of my height, but his shoulders are less stooped than mine. His nose and neck are long, the corners of his mouth permanently turned up, as if he finds the world amusing. I ask him to meet my son and king in five days’ time at the Kat River. The king feels threatened by his enemies and doesn’t want to venture so far from his home. Janssens surveys the bunch of deserters with me. I plead on behalf of Ngqika that the deserters will surrender themselves, but that the king would regard it as a great honour to himself if they could be pardoned. Janssens orders them to be manacled and sent to the Cape to be tried there.
The governor tells me that he has met the other Caffre chiefs and what a cock-up it was and how they stank. He says that they refuse to move across the border before Ngqika surrenders me. They say Ngqika is a thief and a murderer and they think he is under my thumb and furthermore also in cahoots with the Colony. I say that Ngqika for his part has gripes about the rebel chiefs who steal from him and the annoying offensives they launch against him. We reach an agreement that I’ll try to persuade Ngqika to make peace with the rebels and that I’ll clear out of Caffraria if it will bring about peace among the Caffres. Janssens presents a few gifts to Enno, Ngqika’s son-in-law, the biggest of the strongest captains, and we decamp back to the Great Place, the Poles and the Englishman with pale faces and fettered feet watching us leave.
The wagons fill up quickly. My family scurry around, rinse bowls, fold clothes, wrap crockery in cloths. My stuff has been packed, I can say good bye to the Couga in my own time. I page through the Flatus Vocis, look at the pictures of unicorns. He writes that he saw the unicorns in the caves where the Bushmen danced. He says that if it was drawn, there must be such creatures; Bushmen have no imagination. He hears stories of an animal the size of a gemsbok, with the spoor of a zebra and a single horn on the forehead. Here, too, in the Couga, there are many stories meandering around in circles, unrecognisable when they return to source. Here, too, in the Couga, there are Bushmen paintings. In the open caves of the Braam River, in the deep ravine, there are many paintings. If you want to see them, you have to swim through pools between narrow and high rock faces, as if you were being born again.
Ngqika’s messengers go and request Janssens to send soldiers to meet the king with a wagon or cart for his fat mother who wouldn’t be able to manage such a long walk. Janssens sends the cart and a few officers and on 22 June they await us in the road. Ngqika rides out ahead of us on an unsaddled horse. The stallion stops when it sees the colonisers, inspects them. Ngqika asks me and the advisers whether it’s safe. He whistles and his retinue of more than a hundred and fifty comes into motion. Yese clambers into the cart. Ngqika and I remain on horseback and the rest follow on foot.
Janssens meets us with all the pomp and circumstance he could rustle up. In a clearing between the bushes, on the lush grass next to the river, with dense forest and rock faces around us, there he meets us. The neat rows of soldiers’ tents on the grass plot with the Batavian flag fluttering in front of the big tent of the governor. The wagons and goods concealed against the background of brushwood.
On one bank of the Kat River the lines of white tents in the green grass with all the showy formality, discipline and complacency of Europe. The Waldeck infantry is drawn up in a rigid rank. Their blue coats like a wave threatening to break; the blinding line of bayonets fixed to the muzzles of muskets towering over so many shoulders. From somewhere at the back the cannon salute erupts, then the beat of the drum binding every boot to the measure of the drill. On the opposite bank the prancing horses and the sign language of flashing sabres raised aloft in the fine-boned hands of officers. Here in the narrow pathway, between the sabres, the governor awaits the king of Caffraria.