You are Buys and I am Danster the Dancer. We must eat and drink and smoke and talk, he says in fluent Dutch.
I shake his hand with a flabbergasted and cramping hand.
Danster is wearing a tricorn hat with ostrich plumes fanning out, a blue jacket with the epaulettes and polished insignias of rank of a captain in the Waldeck cavalry, gold rings and pieces of copper on a richly festooned thong around his neck. On his feet brand-new top boots that reflect the sky. All that marks him as one of the Blootcaffres is his mask of red ochre. Under the clay his face is deeply grooved, the eyes dark unfathomable gashes. On his upper lip a moustache that he twirls obsessively.
I make a proper fire and get out the brandy and introduce him to Opperman, De Kooker and my wives. The two farmers don’t have much to say and go and stoke their own fires. Danster tells his tale and I tell mine and in between we drink.
Danster laughs incessantly as if he finds the world a joke. Every so often he gets up and stretches his legs with odd little shuffle steps and then sits down in a different place next to the fire. He doesn’t really hang on to the thread of his story. His thoughts cavort and tussle with each other, like my pack of feral dogs that nowadays scavenge in our wake on the abundance and superfluity.
Danster says his name was once Nzwane. He says he’s the younger brother of the old stud bull Ndlambe. Under his moustache Danster sports a crooked grin. Initially he speaks more Xhosa, but as his biography leaves Caffraria behind, the narrative becomes ever more Dutch.
He tells how, after the turn of the century, the Colony guards the eastern border day and night with the new British money. How the Rharhabe, nowadays the lapdogs of the focking Empire, expand and extend their territory to the Fish River, till the smaller tribes no longer have a foothold. Like pimples they are squeezed out from one side by the index finger of the Colony and on the other side by the thumb of the Rharhabe, northwards. Little detachments of Caffres hive off to the Gariep in search of ivory and freedom. They remain Xhosas, he says, they wear their clothes and speak their language, but they also learn to live and to loot like the people of these parts. He says here you have to look twice some days to see who is a Xhosa and who is Oorlam or Bastaard or Christian.
In the hurly-burly of the Gariep River he baptised himself Danster. Here you have to make a name for yourself, he says. Your old name you leave behind in the Colony. You find a name and you blow it up as large as you can, with all the sound and fury at your command. The next prick you come up against watches his step, unsure whether you’re dangerous or crazy or both.
I tell him about my years in De Lange Cloof and Graaffe Rijnet and Caffraria and the Couga. Throughout my chronicle he nods and grunts in affirmation, as if he’s heard it all before. It’s only when his hat falls off his head after a vehement nod that I realise that he is paralytically pissed.
He says he was a son in the House of the Right Hand of the Rharhabe, but he took his small gang and went tusk harvesting along the Baviaans River in the Winterberg up to about a quarter of a century ago. After this his name traced a criss-cross course between the Gamka River, the Cape, Bushmanland beyond the Sneeuberge as far as the bank of the Gariep and back to the Colony, away from the Bushmen and the droughts. In the Nieuweveld the gang rented themselves out as farm labourers until they could buy enough guns to hunt elephants and make war. By 1800 they were armed to the teeth and back in the Gariep.
Initially Danster’s gang keep themselves to themselves around a great fire that towers over all the others. As the evening wears on, my Hottentots and Caffres start mingling with them. This crowd breathes new life into a company that in the last few months have seen more than enough of one another. And most certainly tonight new life is being breathed into quite a few young laps under and behind the wagons.
Together with Jager Afrikaner they plunder the Colony, the Bechuanas and the Koranas until there’s a squabble and Afrikaner abducts all the women and children of the Danster gang. Danster takes revenge with his depleted gang, but Afrikaner is too strong. They manage to rescue only the women; the children have to be left behind with that abominable Hotnot. Danster flees to the Gariep River islands and later back to the Langeberg where they’d lived originally. There they join forces with the gang of Olela, a dethroned chief, and Gola, a son of Langa’s.
That time was honey, says Danster. Nobody could stand up to us. I was captain, nobody talked back at me. We were Xhosa and Bushmen and Korana and Christian, any man with his own gun or spear was welcome. We traded in sheep, tobacco, ivory and brandy. And by trading I mean taking, he says.
When the night turns cold and the fire burns low, Danster wriggles himself into a thing somewhere between a kaross and an overcoat, assembled from rags of cloth and hide. The cloths were selected with an eye to their gaudiness and to their degree of shine. In the flames the cloak scintillates in reds and yellows and blues like suns and stars perpetually exploding.
Only the Bastaards we steered clear of, he says, primed with genever courage.
With Klaarwater they didn’t meddle; the mission station had too many guns and horses. But the rest of the Transorangia got hit hard. Klaarwater’s missionary, Anderson, was reportedly so terrified of Danster that he even went to the Cape to beg Baird, the acting governor, for protection. Danster leaps up and trots around the fire and falls flat on his backside with his boots in the coals. The fine tissue of betrayal and honour wears thin. Danster falls out with Gola and Olela and moves back to Caffraria to recruit a new gang.
It is late at night when with slurring speech he tells about the time he was eventually caught. For sheepstealing he had to go to the Castle. Caledon loaded him and his followers on a ship to Algoa Bay to be posted back to Caffraria from there. Somewhere between Fort Frederick and the Fish River they overpower the soldiers and escape. He rustles up a gang anew and by 1811 he and five hundred men are back at the Gariep. He says they looted sheep and goats and cattle. The Briquas, the Batlhaping, as the lot call themselves, apparently were given such a hard time that eventually they quit that muddy ditch called Kuruman and went to squat at Dithakong. He says every single marksman in his gang could trade a man’s eyes for bullets from a hundred paces, even more. He swears, he says.
Just before he rises to his feet one last time, just before he then stagger-dances, just before he falls face first in the sand, and just before I cover him with his coat of many colours like one who is dead, he jumps up, comes to squat before me and grabs me by the shoulders. The dark slits where his eyes should be are pure flame:
Once, Buys, for three days on end we kept shooting and murdering and bleeding and pegging it and the only ones sleeping were the men dressed in dust. But by the evening of the third day the sea of cattle belonged to us, as far as the eye could see, and the ground we could no longer touch, because we were dancing on corpses.
Maria says we have long since become too ingrown into each other to let go now. We’re together till we keel over, she says, but her body is no longer mine. Children we are no longer vouchsafed, and since leaving the Couga I have rounded up a veritable herd of young buck for myself.
Godknows what you want, Buys; I’m no longer playing your game. If you want to start something, you can go and lie with your Caffre women.