Rush on, to the second half of the century. Do you see the dens of robbers down there, how patiently they wait to attack suddenly? Are you also thinking of the flicker-fast tongue of the lizard? Do you see the plains devouring and growing in all directions? It’s the freebooters that make the open spaces grow: as soon as you kick off your shoes, they’re on top of you. The robbers create the open spaces as the plains create them. Fly lower and see how the grass and bushes burgeon after sudden rains. Do you see how the shepherds on the open plains migrate, following the sprouting of green grass tufts? It is not a country, it is mere soil. Something to wedge your feet into.
Fly where you will and see how everything becomes and decays. See how innocent. See, it’s all a game on a level board. Create and destroy; becoming, outward, eternally. The robbers and the plains. Do you see the lovely tension? Like that of a bow, a lyre.
Settle on any living body in any year and see the deserters and the runaway slaves and failed farmers and freebooters and Hottentots and Caffres and Bastaards stream across the border and see them screw each other senseless and into new incarnations. Settle on any jacket and see how the Colony’s rags and tatters and gunpowder and lead and ways of doing have already begun to sully also this soil.
Circle the valleys beyond the Gariep and see the raids intensify, how the looters band together in ever larger gangs and flatten settlements, hundreds by hundreds of marauders with enough lead for the whole damned Africa. Take care not to be swallowed by a vulture. Fly higher and see the plundering causing a flood of refugees to well up and stream eastward, all along the great Gariep that Christians are now starting to call the Orange, after the colourful name of a royal house.
You’ve been flittering since for ever and you will know: The Colony has always been there. It starts up anywhere if you don’t guard against it. The Colony burgeons from nowhere, always already in full bloom where yesterday there was nothing, like a poisonous flower in the Karoo.
The Colony’s borders explode, blast open in the direction of the Transorangia, there where the nomads roam and rob and shoot off into the cosmos at their own speed and at the dictates of their own desires. Fly in between these roilings and ructions and reports and silences all the way to the day when the Second Colony traps the drifters in the crucible called Klaarwater, the place of clear water. Settle with your proboscis on the shoulder of a missionary and smell in him the fetid fused power of church and state. Do you feel how his chill breath cools and congeals everything that boils and bubbles and battles?
Walk on the missionary skin. Smell with the hairs on your body. Do you smell the rotten food and old excrement and half-chewed bones that tell you that there are people stuck here? Do you smell how their shit and sweat seep into the soil, how the diseases start breeding and the walls start pressing? Do you smell the sweet tobacco and civilisation in the missionary’s cheek? Do the little hairs vibrate when you smell his fear? He who here, hundreds of miles of barren plain from the border, prepares the people for civilisation with his droning, drawling voice. He who wants to wash every Bastaard white as the driven snow and outfit him with British vestments; the pious panoply of diligence, regularity and cleanliness. Shepherds who should cease their wanderings and rather, to please God, sit down on their arses by their orchards and munch cabbage on the little stoeps of their European stone cottages – solid, safe and square. Do you see, beloved Fly, who only deigns to settle on that which stinks, how the stone solidifies into church and Klaarwater becomes Colony?
The cattle farmers and robbers still follow their routes as before, from one fountain or watering hole to the next. They know every well, outspan there only to leave it behind again at the break of day. Did you see, ancient Fly, all those many years ago, how the Bastaards and the Koranas and the Bushmen could stop at these fountains, one after the other? And do you see, Fly of yesterday, how by 1803 the Griqua State assumes possession of the line of fountains? The line of survival points extending for fifty miles, south-west and north-east from Klaarwater: Klooffontein near the Gariep, through to the wells of Rietfontein, Witwater, Taaiboschfontein, all the way to the northernmost point and Ongeluksfontein.
Fear not, Fly, there is still plenty of refuse and remains for you to suck at. I understand you. I myself also fear the peace of the Colony much more than the constant wars outside its gates. We, the desert brigands, carry the mark of Cain with pride on our scorched heads, like plumes in our hats. Do you see me down there, Fly? Do you see me trek, how I can only truly settle when I’m in the saddle? The looters overrun the farms with their neatly squared little gardens. Enraged, they trample the beans and watercourses. The Colony, as you know very well, will vanquish them – us – and write up the history. Before there were Colonies there was no history, merely geology.
Fly over these plains one last time and seek the heated herds, the fiery flocks that keep erupting outwards like fragments of creation, faster and further, before the Great Coagulation that is always panting icily down our necks. Fly forth and come and settle on my cheek here where, somewhere in the Nieuweveld, I am shaking the hand of a man named Danster.
We left the last of the wagon tracks behind us so many days ago. There is no end to the Nieuweveld, the New Territory. There is no horizon here, only a haziness where the soil starts liquescing and the sky dusts over. The hordes of little table mountains make me crack my whip over the oxen; we’re not yet far enough away from the Cape. The skin around my big toe is purple, it looks putrid. The trek is dawdling and in the evenings I want to scream when the kaross touches my toe.
The gout started at fifty. The pain comes at night. It’s the glow in your foot that wakes you up. The big toe feels swollen and dead, but if you dare touch it, you gnash your teeth. It doesn’t recede till dawn. Over the next few days the sore subsides. On such days I stay off my foot.
I abandoned the Colony in the company of two northern sheep farmers, David de Kooker and Hans Opperman, two louts whose eyes sparkle when you say Elephant Tusk. And every day since then more souls join us. Any lost or fed-up wretch who sees our wagons and horses and guns gathers up his own little bundle and signs up. Quite a few runaway slaves, deserters, a bunch of Hottentots, a few Caffres and windfall women, succulent new bodies that I take as concubines. Together with De Kooker and Opperman’s families and my Buys clan we make up a fine little flock, sometimes up to a hundred, sometimes I stop counting at twice that; a small army on the march to oblivion. Nombini runs away one night. I catch her the following morning and tie her to the wagon until she calms down. For weeks we roam around. Then we get stuck at one watering hole for months. In the mornings, when the attacks subside, the skin around the toe itches and then peels off.
When, one evening at the butt end of 1814, we were outspanning, the Redcaffres were upon us. I kick at the buggered-up disselboom, then the shouting is everywhere. We are surrounded. Caffres, all of them painted red and naked under leather karosses greased with red ochre and fat. Assegais, but also a plethora of guns, shiny in the setting sun. Three hundred or so of them, on horseback, on oxen, most of them on foot. The Redcaffres, the Blootcaffres, the bare Caffres. Among them also quite a few Hottentots and Bushmen, most of them in Christian clothes and every single one with a Colony gun. Ever since arriving in the Nieuweveld I’ve been hearing stories about this gang of plunderers. If half the stories are true, few of us will see the light of day tomorrow. I’m ready with the double-barrelled flintlock, then I see the smiles. These Blootcaffres aren’t picking a fight. A flamboyant little chap alights from his ox with sharpened horns and comes to meet me.