I scratch my crotch and search for something to shoot. Game has been scarce these last few weeks. Strings of Klaarwater Bastaards cross the river every day and trample the antelope trails. They don’t mess with us, but the groups get bigger and more and more of them flock together in one spot. Danster regularly dispatches a few red-painted scouts to cast an eye. The Redcaffres report that at night the people talk loudly and angrily around the fires.
I ride to the river to have a drink of water. I lead my horse through the bushes and reeds. Downriver an unearthly swearing erupts. Women’s pelvises and God’s wrath collide and explode and make love in extended sentences of Dutch such as I’ve never heard. My eyes are not what they used to be, but I could swear I see a straggling of people standing and yelling on an oasis in the middle of the river. I ride up to them.
The river is shallow, but the bottom is invisible. A wagon’s wheel can get stuck between rocks under the muddy water. The wheel can break if the startled oxen try to dislodge the wagon by force. The wheel is particularly liable to break if it’s burdened with a whole damned forest.
I wade into the stream. I greet the people: an old Bastaard, a young one with a hump like an ox, an old woman and four little girls in dresses of the same blue cloth. On the wagon towers a luxuriant jungle with the lushest dagga trees and tobacco, the dagga heads downy and rust-coloured. The bushes protrude over the toprail, and tease-tickle the water. In between the dagga arises mouthwatering golden tobacco. See, the Flying Gardener has built a scaffolding on which is perched a second garden with the taller plants. The four poles on the corners of the wagon are hidden under the lush growth of the trees. The poles keep the upper storey up, full of shallow bowls of soil in which the trees are planted. So not the forest that I observed from the bank, but two gardens, neatly packaged for transportation.
When the young Bastaard notices me, he lowers his hump and clumsily manoeuvres the gun around his shoulder and into his hands and takes aim at my forehead. My gun is on my back and my hands are in the air. The children have stopped crying. Everything except the river is dead quiet until I’m standing in front of them, up to my waist in the water, with an extended hand wavering in the air before the hunchback. He lowers the gun and takes my hand.
The little band is quite amicable when I introduce myself. I help the men to wiggle loose the broken wheel. Two felloes sink, two spokes float away, the whole damned wheel is river fodder. We lift the wagon so the oxen can haul the other three wheels through the stream. It’s a bloody business. Two of us have seen better days, the marrow shrunk in our bones. The young Bastaard is a lean lad under the hump, one who swears with vigour rather than grips with conviction.
They tell me that they’re moving away from Griekwastad, Griquatown. I tell them I don’t know such a place. They say it’s the new name for Klaarwater. The lad is not built for Colony uniforms, so now they’re clearing out. I say, wait a bit, begin at the beginning. The old man doesn’t swear as colourfully as his son, but he spins a good story. In between the wagon-lugging and tripping over my own big feet – the pestilential toe is throbbing again today – I am informed that all that is pot is boiling over at the mission station.
The oldster tells that Brother Campbell – the very one after whom the Campbell station is named, apparently a bigwig in the focking Missionary Society – went on a tour two years ago to all the little cherished flocks here at the foreskin of Africa. Apparently never braves the daylight without his little parasol. He visits every mission station and pronounces blessings as appropriate. Of course names a godforsaken town after himself. When Campbell ended up in Klaarwater last year, the light of Heavenly inspiration struck him like a migraine. He hears the people calling themselves Bastaards. And, what’s more, quite proud of it. Surely that cannot be, must not be. He is profoundly insulted, in his own being, but especially on behalf of the wretched dumb Heathens themselves. He assembles the little congregation and allows the Bastaards to choose themselves a name. Somebody remembers a name from his ancestors, Griqua or some such. By teatime every Bastaard, Korana, Hottentot and Bushman at the station has been dubbed a Griqua, and by suppertime Klaarwater is called Griquatown. The mouth of God’s envoy drools with fervour. Right there and then he devises a constitution, as you can read in the writings of our learned ameliorator: In the history of the world there was no account of any people existing and prospering without laws. Thus do you create a pedigree, a nation and a state in one afternoon.
On dry ground we examine the wheel properly. There is not much to be salvaged. Smashed to the nave. We break off branches and devise a sled for the buggered axle tree to rest on. They say they still have some distance to travel. To family awaiting them. About half a day’s journey from the Buys nation and the Redcaffres. With all our yelling every blessed buck and hare this side of the Gariep has been scared off, so I offer to accompany them for a while. A travelling garden of smoking materials is not something you behold every day.
With his mouth behind his hand, as if the stones had ears, the lad tells me about Griquatown’s missionary. Focking William Anderson: was on the point of getting married, but then opted to come and live with the Gariep Bastaards for almost twenty years instead. The lad says Anderson must be over forty, but he has no wrinkles from shouting or laughing.
One of the little blue-frocked girls starts bawling to her mother. The old father sees to her with a reed cane while interrupting his eldest and only and deformed son with a tirade about the Society.
The missionary is the eyes and ears and lips and I’m telling you Whiteman also the teeth of the Cape. God take their teeth and curse their spit!
Go and see for yourself in the archives how these bureaucrats could hone their words. In 1809 the Lord focking Caledon writes to Anderson that every possible assistance will be rendered him by the Cape, not because God’s word is being brought to the Heathens, but on account of the mission stations’ most beneficial effects in recalling the Natives to habits of Industry and Regularity, without which it will ever be impossible to bind them in Society. Behold, we put bits in the horses’ mouths, indeed!
The father and the hunchback son keep interrupting each other while we make a fire at dusk. They tell me about the crazy Hottentot who came to preach at Klaarwater. Kupido Kakkerlak was his name, Cupido Cockroach. The lad says Anderson was fulfilled with Heavenly wrath when the Hotnot broke into song between the huts every night at nine o’clock until the whole congregation bleated along with him. The wauling then carried on till the next morning. Anderson was highly upset that, while some were singing, there was also much talking and laughing, which according to him would open a portal to impurity and immorality; and that it bred, the morning after such exuberant nights, a certain slothfulness among the flock. Anderson says he has no objection to singing, but does it have to happen late at night?
A congregation that get too carried away with the Lord sometimes forget to work their fingers to the bone, says the oldster.
Goddam phthisis-tool! I shout.
My spirit also pukes with a joyful noise, the hunchback pipsqueak affirms.
They say that Kakkerlak did not last long in the State of the Griquas and apparently soon left for Dithakong. The Hottentot missionary sounds like a rare bird, indeed. Sorry I never met the fellow.