If war persists, people keep moving. They don’t sit still for long enough to congeal into Colony. Families turn into gangs. The rules prevailing here are the same as those at the dogfights of Graaffe Rijnet. In these swinish stables a discipline different to that in the ordered military lines. See, here we operate with eternal blackmail, forfeiture or betrayal and a series of ephemeral perceptions of honour. You take, as I told the congregation, what you can, while you can.
Don’t get me wrong. I was on my way out, away. I peddled ideals so that I could smuggle ivory and guns. If the missionaries were to quit Griquatown, the government would get the hell out along with them and I could do business to my heart’s content. And if Anderson were to hive off, the only route to gunpowder and guns would be through me and me alone. He who does not know me will not inherit the kingdom of gunpowder.
If you want to plunder a mission station, you must be more terrifying than the Lord Almighty. See, we rise up over the horizon. We bear down upon Griquatown. A horde too vast and improbable to be contained in the compass of an eye. See, the shards of glass and mirror and copper and iron around necks and arms and on shields, blades and barrels, these all catch the light and shatter it into innumerable impossible suns and our enemies cannot abide our countenance. A legion of abhorrence, hundreds of us, visions of terror astride on horseback, on mules, on warhorses – my sons and I on the fastest horses booty can buy – airborne nightmares, naked or half-naked or garbed in antique vestments almost Biblical or in animal hides and adornments of silk or the leather of the Christians and the fragments of uniforms still stained with the blood of the previous owners, tunics of defunct dragoons, tasselled and fringed cavalry jackets, one with a top hat and umbrella, and a naked red-painted Caffre in white stockings and Danster in a virginal bridal gown and some in tricorn hats or crowned with thongs and feathers and paint, skins of lions and leopards flutter over speeding shoulders, one wears a peeled-open leopard head like a bonnet, Sunday suits like a host of the resurrected, Caffres naked and scarlet and a few vigorous Bastaards in flapping swallow-tailed coats all of them on charging oxen with their horns low and sharpened and a deserter with a washbasin as knightly breastplate strapped to his chest, the tin dented from the blows of other days, and see, my Bushmen racing along on the ridges who will tighten the noose and my red dogs, my half-hyena dogs swerving criss-cross through the undergrowth, raging and snapping at the Bushmen and horses while loaded guns now sprout from shoulders and eyes narrow in faces motley and comically smudged and smeared and painted like a company of clowns on horseback, yes I could die laughing, and see, we yowl and roar maniacally and we open fire on them like a horde from Hell more abhorrent even than the fire and brimstone of Christian Reckoning, skirling and shrieking, clothed in smoke like those phantoms in regions beyond certainty and sense where the eye wanders and the lip shudders and drools.
Oh God, shouts Anderson the focking missionary.
If you want to get to know a man, you have to study his national bookkeeping. Every pedlar and looter has to know the secret economy of the Transorangia. In these days it’s easier to smuggle the teeth of chickens than the tusks of elephants. Even here in the Gariep the beasts have just about been shot out. The scarcer, the more valuable in the Colony. We barter with the Briquas and Barolong. You don’t barter with the Briqua before they’ve harvested. If you arrive there while the plantings are still standing in the fields, they ask What are we supposed to see with your mirrors? Our fire doesn’t need your tinderbox. Our snot sticks to our forearms just as fast as to your handkerchiefs. Your knives are blunter than those we forge ourselves – so they snarl at us. But at the Briqua harvest festival we barter our tobacco for a heap of ivory.
You buy a sheep in the Colony for two rix-dollars and go and barter it with the Briquas for an elephant tusk. You take this tusk to the Colony and sell it at one or two rix-dollars per pound, and a good tusk weighs anything up to a hundred pounds. I hear of missionaries who traded four wagonloads of tusks with the Barolong for two hundred sheep and a few beads. There are fellows around here who in two years make three thousand rix-dollars from smuggling tusks. If you can survive two journeys with tusk-laden wagons between the Transorangia and the Cape – if the Bushmen and the fever and the lions don’t get you – you can retire to Tulbagh on a wine farm with all the slaves and wine that your heart desires. Believe me, our own dear Anderson himself once traded more than two hundred and fifty rix-dollars’ worth of tusks for twenty rix-dollars’ worth of beads. A focking missionary’s swindle can cost you much more than your immortal soul.
My flocks are big, my children grow tall. I am a rich man and replete. In the mornings and evenings my hands claw up, my legs grow ever more rigid, but for the rest this old reaver is fighting fit. 1815 is a good year. The Buys nation waxes apace: Apart from Danster’s Caffres many of the Hartenaars wander into our camp and don’t wander out again. Escaped slaves pour in from all over. A few English and Scottish soldiers desert to me; warriors from neighbouring tribes desert for exactly the same reason: they see our feasting and the fat around our mouths. Even a few Bushmen, sick of surviving in the hunting ground as the hunted, come and offer their knobkerries and their knobbly limbs.
I’m in the saddle or out in the open all day, yet my belly is getting ever more at odds with my shirt with every night’s feasting. Oh, the lamb cutlets. As my flock and my prestige grow, so too my collection of women. I look after the women who have borne my children, those who are with child; also those I assail with lust every now and again, and the girls I pick out of the herd because I can’t stand the thought of any other man touching them. In the evenings I eat with Maria and Elizabeth and my children. At night I lie with Elizabeth. Nombini doesn’t run away any more. She and her children clear their own campsite. Bettie bears a child. It’s the last fat year of my life. By the end of March 1816 the lean ones are already gnawing at me.
News travels slowly beyond the border. At first rogue rumours that you have to dam up and filter, until a single story, complete with head and tail, seeps through slowly and clearly. The first I hear is that the focking English have hanged Cornelis Faber. The place’s name is Slagtersnek, the Ridge of the Butcher. The story reaches me circuitously and too late. Freek Bezuidenhout, brother to Hannes and Coenraad, has an altercation with a Hotnot labourer and when he refuses to appear in court, a pack of pandours fusillade him in a cave on his farm. Hannes stands next to the grave with old Willem Prinsloo, Faber, who’s come from Tarka to bury his brother-in-law Freek, and a handful of other fellows from the old days of Graaffe Rijnet. The bunch get boozing and Hannes calls for revenge. He calls the Christians and he calls Ngqika’s Caffres. The Christians come, Ngqika stays away. It’s almost funny to hear that I reputedly went to Caffraria with Faber to plead for Ngqika’s support. But I don’t laugh. If I’d known, I’d have been there. And would have been dead by now. The rebellion perishes in its cradle. They shoot Hannes when he refuses to surrender. Faber and four others are sentenced to death. Five men stand on the trapdoor. The trapdoor drops and only one rope holds. One noose breaks one man’s neck. Four ropes break; four men hurtle to the ground. Bewildered and half strangled four men stagger to Cuyler and plead for mercy. The dead man is taken down, the noose is tested. I pray to the distant Lord that it was Cornelis, that he got the strong rope. Because see what happens now: four men, one at a time, one after the other, after the other, after the other, are hanged with the good and faithful rope; the strong rope holds every blessed time. Thank God for the government.