The Xhosa ruler can’t stop enthusing about the pretty uniforms of the occupiers. Janssens says he has just the thing for the king. He’d wanted to hand over the present at the end of the meeting, but why not now. An officer is beckoned up and returns minutes later with a new uniform. Ngqika touches and caresses the lapels and wants to put on the thing there and then. The meal is forgotten; a gaggle of officers help him into the uniform. The garments are hopelessly too small for him; his forearms and calves almost totally bare; immediately a rip down the spine. The king disengages himself from the eager hands of the soldiers and goes to parade before his warriors in his new apparel. They egg him on. The too-short sleeves and trouser legs make him seem even bigger and stronger. He delights in how the soldiers gawp at the Caffre king bursting out of their largest uniform. As soon as he notices the admiring exclamations and glances starting to taper off, he takes off the uniform, but he keeps the hat with the feather and the cockade on his regal head. Now he demands Janssens’ voluminous cloak, but this is blushingly refused. Even the governor finds it hard to say no to Ngqika. He promises to send him a cloak just like his.
After supper Ngqika disappears to his wives in the tents that have been prepared for them. Janssens disappears to his paperwork. I wander about among the soldiers gathered in groups around fires. At a fire smoking dismally they offer me wine. Most of the pipsqueaks in the circle have hardly started shaving. They break green leaves off a cycad and throw it on the flames. Not used to making their own fires. They talk about all the game they’ve seen. On the dry plains on the other side of the Sundays River there were buck by the thousands upon thousands, even a lot of quaggas. In one day the governor’s hunters shot fifty-four buck that they call mountain buck and many more that they didn’t count. They tell about buck moving in herds of thousands, how beautiful it was to see these hosts fleeing before the horses of the hunters. They tell how these antelopes leapt, as if they were flying rather than running, animals who in their flight sought to break away from the earth and the slaughter. I say we call them springbok. The soldiers say that makes sense. Now they know what they were hunting. I drink their wine and teach them the names of plants and antelopes and all kinds of other things they will be devouring here. A captain tells of the white antelope in the herd of three, no, he swears by the only God, surely four thousand grey buck that on another day sheered past them unrelenting and vast as a glacier. I ask him about glaciers and believe nothing of what he tells me. The captain says the governor immediately wanted to have this rare snow-white buck and a handful of the younger men set off in pursuit. The antelope stood out from its fellows and they separated it from the herd, which now all looked alike and indistinguishable. They surrounded the white rarity and tired it out until they could capture the animal with their bare hands without firing a shot. You can go and have a look, Janssens gave that white hide to Monsieur Perron who on his return from the South Sea Islands stopped over at the Cape. Perron donated it to the Museum of the National Institute of Paris where it is daily being gawked at by Parisians, indistinguishable in their powdered wigs.
When the moon is high, I wander to Yese’s tent. I stand outside and prick up my ears. I walk back to the fires.
Maps are as old as mankind. Ever since the first scrawlings of the migratory patterns of game on the walls of caves we have been drawing lines and living within them. Every line becomes a knot that tightens around you. On the map now stretched out on the table before me, the writer has abandoned the power of knowing and binding. Rather, here in the middle of the Flatus Vocis, he starts opening up. Layer upon layer of ink, a black sea of experiences and routes and fever dreams. Only here and there sketches and words glimmer through, the map as crammed and incomprehensible as life itself: rivers, mountains, huts, kopjes, screams, birds, clouds, earthquakes, fire, Christians, winds, the horseman himself, states of mind, sexual organs, graves, corpses, gallows, sea monsters, smoke, laughter, Heathens, sunsets, dust, seasons, predators, battles, quarries, stars, elephant trails, yowls, grass, water maidens, mud, thorn trees, bushes, ageing, outcries, stone, young girls, sand, wagon routes, leaves, tortoises.
At sunrise Janssens is standing in front of his tent waiting for Ngqika so that the interview may commence. The king is late, as is the divine right of kings, and I keep the governor company. Janssens goes to sit down in the cool tent, starts paging through his paperwork to get his facts straight for the day. I smoke. He says he believes in two things: that the Caffres must be driven out of the Zuurveld and that, when every Caffre in the Colony is on the right side of the Fish, the colonists living among the Caffres, people like yours truly, must also clear out of there. All intercourse between Christian and Caffre must cease. That is all that will make this country work, he says. Look at you spluttering in your coffee.
Janssens tells me of the trouble the rebellious Hottentot Johannes Stuurman is stirring. The Hottentot uprising is making everybody uneasy, he says. The farmers are scared and are starting to shoot or clear out. Even Van der Kemp can’t manage to placate these wild Hottentots. Old Klaas and his comrades are too wily to be circumvented. All that will work with such a Hotnot, he says, is bribery. Janssens sighs exaggeratedly and when he looks up, I feel compelled to sigh in sympathy. He touches my shoulder, I his confidant whom he does not know from Adam. Then there is the dreaded Ndlambe, he says, lying this side of the Fish. Also the Gqunukhwebe, the Mbalu and the Dange are digging in between the Sundays and Fish Rivers. It is for these reasons, he says and sighs again, that he’s undertaken this journey, to bring peace and prosperity to us here in the eastern districts.
Thank God for those he has set over us, I say.
He leaves his work for a moment, looks up at me and then carries on underlining notes. His quill is new. Not a drop of ink is spilt. I open my knapsack and take out my papers. A multitude of letters and petitions that I’ve been keeping for the last few years, precisely against such an opportunity as this. In the pile that I unpack on his desk is a petition listing the injustices perpetrated upon me and my fellows by the focking English; also two letters from the Reverend Ballot urging me to return to the Colony and two from Van Rensburg describing how he’s trying to mediate my case with the authorities.
And what is this? Janssens demands without looking up.
Paperwork, General. It shows that I behaved myself under the Caffres. That the fo– the English and Maynier blackened me. My name, I mean. I am still as white as the lilies of the field.
More red than white, Mijnheer Buys, he smiles while starting to rifle through the letters.
I read the look in his eyes. He is polite, even cracks jokes, but behind that curved-up smile I see the distrust. I am a prominent gent here on the other side of the border, charming but dangerous. Something for the museum or the gallows, but not something to walk about freely. I plot and scheme with the Caffres. My existence is not exactly convenient for the Colony. The Christians hate me, all the chiefs except Ngqika hate me. My fellow rebels, even Hannes Bezuidenhout, call me a good-for-nothing and a shit-stirrer when they are questioned in Graaffe Rijnet.
How do you feel about coming home, Mijnheer Buys?