Late that afternoon Arend comes to find me. He says his belongings are packed. He’s leaving now. I ask him where to. He says his cattle and ivory are waiting for him at Thabeng. I needn’t worry, by the time I get back home, he’ll have left, back to the Hart. His composure is terrifying. His shirt is weighed down where the blood seeps through on his back, but he’s walking up straight.
Back to the Hart? The commandos will get you. Have you taken leave of your senses quite apart from your goddam ears?
Those Christian bastards are after the price on your head, Boer, I’m just another disfigured runaway slave, says the Caffre as he walks off: We all look the same.
Arend is gone and him, too, I’ll never see again. Find him in your pages and you’ll read how he went and settled himself next to the Hart with his ivory and his cattle, how Campbell summoned him in 1820 to be his guide again, this time in fact to Karechuenya. How he fled before the Mantatees and afterwards pursued that lot again along with the missionary Moffat. In 1823 he was present at the great battle of Dithakong. Then he robbed the missionaries of Kuruman of their tobacco and vegetables. In 1828 he and his three children moved there. Arend looted and raged along with me against the Colony, but yet wanted to be accepted by the Cape civilisation. He used to say that he was thinking of his children. His offspring I never laid eyes on. Did he hide them from his fellow reavers? He said his children shouldn’t grow up in the wilderness and get lost as he did. That, and, in spite of the robbing and boozing, he never turned his back on his Lord. After all, you keep your eye on someone who carries lightning bolts in his hand, he said once. His soul was always the Lord’s, but his body still belonged to that scoundrel Burger. Through the mediation of the traveller George Thompson, Arend could manumit himself for a thousand five hundred rix-dollars. Arend built Moffat a house and church at Kuruman. He’d always wanted to be a builder, and single-handed church-building makes up for a whole lot of guilt. He and his children were baptised on 1 May 1829. On that day he was confirmed as Moffat’s first convert, and henceforth he would be known not as Arend, but Aaron Joseph. In 1849 he delivers a parcel from Moffat to Doctor focking Livingstone-I-presume at Kolobeng. He told his children how he and Livingstone had debated, discussed the right kind of thatch and the sturdiest rafters. That the man had no clue what he was talking about. Aaron was seen in 1850 in the interior and people apparently hunted with him along the Botletle River in 1851. And then he wanders away from under our reading eyes, might it have pleased his Lord, on a destined day to find rest, aged and contented, his children with him, in any place with mountains and vineyards and shade.
One afternoon two days after Arend’s departure I walk to the nearest stone wall and hammer my head against the stones until it’s bleeding profusely and then keep on hammering and they say I shouted but of that I don’t know anything.
4
Rumours of my death are plentiful and some nights I start believing them. Every night when I wake up to piss, my limbs cramp, my toe throbs. But the breath of life persists, albeit gasping.
That damned Sara, old Kemp’s favourite convert from our days with Ngqika, apparently nowadays goes around every mission station telling how I wandered among the tribes murdering and came to grief. And read for yourself: When Anderson heard another rumour, that I and my people had been murdered in the Zoutpansberg, he believed it with all that was left of his heart and soul, and wrote about it to everybody who might be interested.
If I’m not dead, I’m a chief. I wake up at Karechuenya, but the world says I’m dead. See, I’m sitting on my backside on the dusty assembly place of the Hurutshe sharing my beloved sweet potatoes. But the world says I’m living with the Bapedi of Blouberg where I’m pals with their chief Sekwati and they call me Kadisha and I rule as supreme chief with bow and arrow. Am I misremembering? Was I there for a while, on the track of dwindling elephant herds or the even more elusive Portuguese? Who knows; how can you keep track if even your name slips out from under you?
What the buggers do get right is that my gunpowder is running out fast and that I, yes I, Coenraad de Buys, descendant of the Huguenots, big-game hunter and revolutionary, of late, would you believe it, in an idle hour practise the tensing of a bow and the flight of an arrow. What they also get right is that my name drifts ever further from me, that the rumours of the death of what is called Buys are perhaps not so far-fetched. When last did anybody call me De Buys, when last Coenraad, and forget about Coen. Among the Pedi I am apparently Kadisha. Also here in Karechuenya Buys is a thing of the past; here, too, I have been dubbed a new name: Moro – my greeting to one and all when I brew my coffee in the morning. Morning I say; Moro they say. And go ahead, laugh when you read that moro later, after my actual departing of this life, becomes these people’s word for coffee beans. A greeting, an echo, a goddam dish of watery coffee.
One of the Hurutshe women is pregnant with yet another little Buys slip of the prick. I have to tread carefully around the toes of all the chiefs. When they request me and my guns, my horses and men, I do not refuse. Diutlwileng and his warriors lead us to the Tholwane River and Lotlhakane where the Malete live. Diutlwileng says they are a thorn in his flesh, this bunch of refractory tributaries. We shoot them and stab them and burn down their settlement. Some say the Malete were hereafter placed under Senosi’s forceful control and everything was in order again. Others say the Hurutshe couldn’t scatter them. I wouldn’t know. I saw people bleeding and huts burning. My gunpowder had run out. I left the place. I didn’t start this quarrel and didn’t see the end of it either. Merely went and shot out my last munitions on a bunch of strangers. All that I gained from the palaver was another name. Later I would pretend that I didn’t care a fig or a fart when I heard that the Malete called me Diphafa. A rich name, this one: it can apparently refer either to the feathers in my hat, or it can mean Great Vats of Beer. I imagine that the sound of a blow against a beer vat sounds like the crack of my rifle or my roaring when I chase up my men. Or, let’s be honest: perhaps the slim young warriors had laid eyes on my majestic beer belly.
In October, when spring is blooming and pollinating into summer, I miss my wives and trek back to Thabeng. Arriving there, I find that Maria and Nombini have moved in with Elizabeth. When I come riding up, the three are sitting next to each other on the stoep, each with a pipe in the mouth. They blow rings and mutter and no one gets up when I unsaddle. After a week or three I can no longer endure being in that little house with the three witches. One at a time they are lovely, but together they turn into a three-headed dragon. I whisper into Elizabeth’s ear and the following morning she and I and her children are on a wagon and gone. We trek south and arrive at Matloangtloang, the kraal of Moletsane and his Bataung next to the Sand River. Moletsane is ill and summons me immediately. I give him one of Elizabeth’s cures. Thanks be to God he recovers; out of gratitude he tries to keep us there. I’m no physician and from that place, too, we move, some distance to the north and west to Lehurutshe, where we are safe and welcome with the Hurutshe. I don’t lay eyes on a single elephant. Without tusks there’s no gunpowder. In due course we trek back to Sefunelo and Maria and Nombini and the children, all the children, blessed as I damnwell am.