I tell them they are a nation in their own right, strong enough to defend themselves. If they want to barter, I say, they must come to me, I shall be their missionary. I’ll mediate for them with the frontier farmers for their cattle and dagga and rounded-up Bushmen. I say I’ll see to it that they’re paid in gunpowder and bullets:
We shall go forth from this place like locusts, brethren, we’ll pillage and take what we can, while we can for as long as we can. Until our names are breathed around every fire. Until the fat of the land is oozing from our lips.
The old men listen and smoke and nod. I ride out of their camp with a full belly, an emptied ball-bag and a brand-new gun. I feel twenty years younger. Revolutions are more fun than ox-roasting.
An aside: My gracious accomplice, this land is one of robbers and raiders. When I’d hardly moved into the Couga, Coenraad Bezuidenhout and Cobus Vry had already understood that the northern border yields more profit than the eternal squabbling at the Fish. Nowadays there’s a soldier skulking in every aardvark lair next to the river. If you want to hunt elephants, they wrote to me, you must betake yourself to the Bastaards. I heard of missionaries who traded so many tusks that they could leave the lost souls to find their own salvation, and retire in comfort and ease in the Cape. On my Couga farm I started gazing into the distance. Bezuidenhout and Vry went to stir up trouble near Ongeluksfontein, and absconded with as many cattle, sheep and Bushman children as they could herd. Some say that they also helped to spread the first smallpox epidemic in that area. Those two were never exactly partial to bathing.
When at last I ventured north of the Colony, all you heard were stories of other looters. This here is a land of robbers. Selah. What would I not give to be a fly on so many walls? A fly on the wall of Jan Bloem, the German deserter from Thüringen who fled the Colony after murdering his wife. A fly on the cheek of Pieter Pienaar, the Hantam farmer and pass builder who meets up with Bloem in the Namaqualand and tells him to go and look after his farm on the Gariep. Who shortly thereafter, with his family, Bloem and a lot of Koranas and Bushmen, starts looting Briqua cattle and children all along the river as far as the Langeberg. A fly buzzing around the heads of the brothers Kruger, counterfeiters who escape from Robben Island and move in among the Koranas, become, along with the Bloems, well-known frontier thugs and nowadays lie in wait on the northern border to plunder wagonloads of ivory. A fly has to be on its guard around the Afrikaner clan. They say that Klaas Afrikaner and his people are brutes such as this country has never seen. They’ll relieve you of your wings in no time. Klaas Afrikaner, the Oorlam Hottentot who goes to work for the selfsame Pienaar in order to avoid military service. Pienaar sends him also to the Gariep as cattle-herd, and here herding cattle includes stealing cattle. The Afrikaners who on punitive commandos against the Bushmen apparently dispatch over six hundred souls.
A fly on the cell wall of the Pole Stephanus, a counterfeiter who prints paper money for himself. Who saws open the cell door with a rusty nail. Who goes to hide out with the Zak River missionaries until they find out who he is. Who passes himself off as a prophet in the Transorangia. A prophet who delivers sermons and then vanishes in a cloud of gunpowder smoke. His followers on their knees before his new religion, part Hebrew and part Greek and wholly dedicated to him. Until a farmer recognises him and he cuts the farmer’s throat and goes to rob and reave with Jager Afrikaner. Stephanus who wants to escape on board a ship on the West Coast but meets and kills a pen-pusher on the way and the ship that sails away and he who gets lost in the interior until one day he too finds himself at the wrong end of a blade.
Thus far the gadflies of the veldt, but what about the houseflies? A wall-eyed fly on the bedroom walls of these frontier thugs, every single one a bigamist who gads across colour boundaries. Pienaar who is said to lie with the women of his Hottentots, also with Klaas Afrikaner’s bitch, until the young Titus Afrikaner slaughters Pienaar and some say also his wife and children. Jacob Kruger with his five wives, a Briqua woman, a Rolong and a Korana or so. Bloem, the old bugger, has some ten wives, a Bushman and one of each of the Korana tribes, a Taaibosch, a Kats, a Links, a Springbok and suchlike whatnots. I’m telling you, a fly on my bedroom wall I swat flat, but I no longer have a bedroom. Damn all walls anyway! Any case, here in the Transorangia I and my assorted women are not as conspicuous as in the coy Colony.
The Bastaards who come to me seeking an opening in the smuggling trade are down at heel. Civilisation has done them no favours. They rob to peddle. They are woebegone and angry. Not only at the Cape and its missionaries, but also at the gravy-grubbing families, the Koks and the Berendses, the Bastaard nobility appointed over them by the missionaries. These are young blades, with the wrong surnames, or the right surnames but the wrong in-laws. They’re no longer Griquas but Hartenaars, the people of the Harts River. Every day more Koranas and Bushmen join them, and everyone is handed a gun, a horse if there’s one to spare. They mutiny against the authorities, against their brothers and fathers who are still living as subjects in Griquatown and planting vegetables. One half of the Griquas want to grow old on the stoep of a square house. The veldt bulbs, the mealies, the sweat of their brows. The other half know the Transorangia is no country to grow old in. These Blasboere, coffee-coloured farmers, become Hartenaars, there to dare or die. The blood, the glory, the radiance of their countenance. Apart from the speeches they don’t speak Dutch within earshot and don’t mention focking English. They no longer greet each other with How are things, because Things are really shit and thank you, everyone knows it only too well. Look it up, later generations of Griquas would call these young blades The Patriots.
I loot and laugh and drink and hunt with them. Maria and Elizabeth brew vast cauldrons for the hungry patriots. I introduce the Hartenaars to the frontier farmers on the Nu-Gariep and the Ky-Gariep with whom I trade. The men embroiled in the Colony are looking for cattle and ivory and labour. For a Bushman and a head of cattle they pay with brandy and gunpowder and lead and sometimes a second-hand musket. The shortcut to money and a feathered nest on these plains is the weaving of a robber’s nest. New trade routes are traced that will never appear on any map, but in the sand you can see the wagon tracks cutting ever deeper. Farmers who used to call in at Griquatown to barter goods for cattle now come to talk to us.
The farmers tell us that things are going awry with a vengeance in the mission state. Since Anderson’s return from the Cape, the town has been emptying out. In Griquatown they no longer build houses. They plant dagga and tobacco that they can trade, rather than mealies and pumpkin that are only good for grazing. Those who don’t defect to the Hartenaars are chronically on the wagon trail bartering and trading with Christian farmers. When I enquire after Campbell’s constitution they lift an eyebrow and ask Whose constitution and what does it constitute?
Oh, just see the violence on the Skietgeweergrens, the Frontier of the Shooting Gun. The new arrivals and their despair, the chancers and those lost beyond redemption. Rapacious rapscallions. All welcome, dregs of crushed communities give birth to new gangs, melt away into other mobs. Mercenaries, warriors, looters, nomads, vagrants, fugitives, pilgrims, who’s to tell. There are two races here, farmers and looters, and they interbreed like the blazes. Beyond the Border we’re all Bastaards, all feral dogs.