The Covenant Part 43

By the end of the first week they had become a resolute band, skilled in improvising the weapons and tools needed for the endless journeys ahead. They traveled slowly, stopping at likely refuges, and they foraged brilliantly. Thandi, the youngest, was especially good at thievery from kraals they pa.s.sed, and kept the family in a reasonable supply of food.

They ate everything, killing such animals as they could and gathering berries and roots like grubbing creatures in a forest. At the end of the first month they were a tight, dangerous group of travelers, and when one of the men caught himself a wife from a small village, they became twelve.

Like thousands of homeless blacks in this period, they had but two ideas, to escape what they knew and to grasp at anything that would enable them to exist. Nxumalo hoped to overtake Mzilikazi and take service in some capacity with a king who promised in almost every respect to be superior to Shaka. 'Not as handsome,' he told his wives, 'and not as brave in battle, but in everything else a notable king.'

From time to time the little family stopped at some kraal, risking the dangers involved, and by so doing they discovered that Mzilikazi had moved far to the west, so they set out in serious pursuit.

And then they learned the meaning of the word Mfecanethe crus.h.i.+ng, the sad migrations, for they came upon an area, fifteen miles wide and stretching endlessly, in which every living thing had been destroyed. There were no kraals, no walls, no cattle, no animals, and certainly no human beings. Few armies in history had created such total desolation, and if Nxumalo and his family had not brought food with them, they would have perished.

As it was, they began to see signs indicating that hundreds of people had been slain, their bodies left to rot; for mile after mile there would be strands of human bones. Nxumalo thought: Even the worst destruction wreaked by Shaka could not compare with such desolation. And he began to wonder what kind of all-consuming monster had wrought this ravishment.

It was half a year before he found out. With an instinct for preservation, he led his family back to the east, and after a hurried march, went beyond the swath of total destruction; here in the wooded area where streams ran, only the kraals had been destroyed, not the land itself, and one afternoon they came upon the first surviving humans. They were a family of three living in trees, for they had no weapons to defend themselves against the numerous wild animals that prowled their vicinity at night. They were so wasted they could hardly speak, but they did utter one word that perplexed the travelers: 'Mzilikazi.'

'Who was pursuing him?' Nxumalo asked.

'No one. He was pursuing us.'

'Mzilikazi?'

'A monster. A life-eating monster.'

'Feed them,' Thandi said. 'Don't question them when they're starving.'

So Nxumalo's men caught antelope for the wretched ones; they ate like beasts, the boy gulping the raw meat while he protected his portion by covering it with arms and legs. When the family slowly returned to human condition Thandi allowed Nxumalo to query them again, and he said, 'Surely Mzilikazi did not do this.'

'He slaughtered everythingtrees, dogs, lions, even water lilies.'

'But why?' Nxumalo asked, unable to comprehend what he was hearing.

'He summoned our group of kraals . . . told us he wanted our cattle. We refused . . . and he started the killing.'

'But why slay everyone?'

'We didn't want to join his army. When we ran away he didn't even send his soldiers after us. They didn't care. They had enough to do killing those at hand.'

'But what was his purpose?'

'No purpose. We weren't useful to his moving army. In his rear we might cause trouble.'

'Where was he marching?'

'He didn't know, his soldiers saidthey were just marching.'

After long consultation with the men in his group, and also with his wives, it was agreed that the family should be allowed to join them; the man could help with the hunting and the boy could prove useful later on, but when the enlarged group had been on the road three days, the new man died. Nxumalo a.s.sumed that one of his own men had killed him, for immediately the wife was taken into that man's care, without much protest from her.

When they had traveled as a unit for several weeks, they came upon the ultimate horror. They had been traversing mile after mile of total desolation fifteen kraals without a sign of life, not even a guinea henwhen they came upon a small group of people living in a half-destroyed hut, and after a cursory inspection Thandi came to Nxumalo, trembling: 'They have been eating one another.'

The miserable clan was so desperate that they had resorted to cannibalism, and each wondered when the next would die, and at whose hand.

For these people there was no hope. Nxumalo would have nothing to do with themthey were untouchable. And he was about to leave them to their misery when Thandi said, 'We must stay and make them some weapons so they can kill animals. And our men must bring back some antelope to give them fair food.'

So at her insistence the group halted, and the men did go hunting, and after a while the cannibals, fourteen of them, began to fill out from their eating of antelope, and with their spears they now had a chance of fending for themselves. But despite Thandi's pleading, Nxumalo would not permit this group to join his, and when the family moved north the former cannibals stood at the edge of their desolate village, looking after them with strange expressions.

After a long time the signs of destruction diminished, and then stopped. Mzilikazi's armies had moved sharply westward, and for this Nxumalo was grateful, for it meant that he could now proceed northward without running the risk of overtaking the dreadful devastators or being caught in one of their chance sweeps to the rear. Of course, even this new land contained no people, for Mzilikazi had slain them allhundreds upon hundredsbut there had been no general devastation, and the wild animals had returned.

Finally, after more than a year of this wandering, with two additional children being born to Nxumalo's wives and two to the other women, they came to a chain of low hills that looked much like the lovelier parts of Zululand, except that rivers did not flow through them. There were small streams, and Nxumalo began to think that beside one of them he might stop and build his kraal, and then one day as he came out of a valley he saw a pair of hills shaped like a woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and they seemed a symbol of all the joys of the past and his dreams for the future: the deep love he had borne Thetiwe, his first wife; the tenderness he felt for his second, killed because of her cat; the pa.s.sion he had known with Nonsizi of the Matabele; and the delight found in his two surviving wives, who had accepted the hards.h.i.+ps of this journey without complaint. His six children were prospering and the men who had joined him in the flight had made themselves indispensable. The family deserved a halting place; it was with hope that he ascended the pa.s.s between the two hills, and when he reached the high point he looked down upon a lake and saw beside it the marked grave of the Hottentot Dikkop, buried there sixty years before by that wanderer Adriaan van Doorn.

'This has been the living place of men,' Nxumalo said, and with joy he led his people down the hill to take possession.

The Mfecane that raged through southeast Africa in the early decades of the nineteenth century produced excesses which went far in determining the development of an immense area.

The rampaging of the two kings, Shaka of the Zulu and Mzilikazi of the Matabele, set in motion sweeping forces which caused the death within a short period of time of huge numbers of people; chronicles unfavorable to blacks estimate two million dead within a decade, but considering the probable population of the area in those years, this seems grotesquely high. Whatever the loss, and it must have been more than a million, it was irremediable and accounted in part for the relatively weak defenses the surviving blacks would put up within a few short years when white men, armed with guns, began invading their territory. Starvation, cannibalism and death followed the devastation of the armies, while roving bands of renegades made orderly life impossible. Entire clans, which had known peaceful and productive histories, were eliminated.

The princ.i.p.al contributor to this desolation was not Shaka, whose victories tended to be military in the old sense, with understandable loss of life, but Mzilikazi, who invented the scorched-earth policy and applied it remorselessly. Why he slaughtered so incessantly cannot be explained. Nothing in his visible personality indicated that he would follow such a hideous course, and there seems to have been no military necessity for it. He killed, perhaps, because he sought to protect his small band, and the surest way to do so was to eliminate any potential opposition. Young men and male children became targets lest when they matured they seek revenge against the Matabele.

The widespread slaughter did not seem to alter Mzilikazi personally. His manners did not become rough, nor did he raise his voice or display anger. The young English clergyman who came out to Golan Mission in 1829 to replace Hilary Saltwood stayed there briefly, then, like his predecessor, felt obligated to move into the more dangerous northern territories, where he became a permanent friend to Mzilikazi; of him he wrote admiringly after the Mfecane had run itself out: The king is a likable man of only medium height, fat and jolly, with a countenance so serene that it seems never to have known vigorous events or dangers. He speaks always in a low voice, is considerate of everyone, and has proved himself most eager to cooperate with white men. He told me himself that he wanted missionaries to come into his domains because he felt that at heart he had always been a Christian, even though as a boy he could have known nothing of our religion. Indeed, he gave me for our mission one of the finest pieces of land in his capital city and sent his own soldiers to help me build it. Detractors have tried to warn me that I must be on guard, because Mzilikazi's soft ways hide a cruel heart, but I cannot believe this. He has known battle, certainly, but in it, so far as I can learn, has always conducted himself with propriety, and I consider him the finest man I have met in Africa, whether Englishman, Boer or Kaffir.

It must not be supposed that Mzilikazi and Shaka were personally responsible for all the Mfecane deaths. In many instances they merely set in motion vast dislocations of people whose ultimate exterminations of minor tribes occurred at distances far from Zululand. If ever the domino theory of inter-tribe and inter-nation response to stimulus functioned, it was during the Mfecane. A few hundred Zulu started to expand in all directions, and when they moved south they disturbed the Qwabe, who themselves moved farther south to disrupt the Tembu, who moved on to dislocate the Tuli, who encroached upon the Pondo, who pressured the Fingo, who impinged upon the secure and long-established Xhosa. At that moment in history the land-hungry trekboers were beginning to encroach upon territory which the Xhosa had long used as pasture; and caught between two grinding stones, the Xhosa sought relief by attacking kraals like Tjaart van Doorn's, whose owners brought pressure on Cape Town, which caused questions to be asked in London. Similar chains of dominoes collapsed in other directions as tribes moving outward dispossessed their neighbors of ancestral lands.

That Shaka slew hundreds with merciless ferocity is historical fact. That the Mfecane set in motion by Shaka and Mzilikazi caused the death of mult.i.tudes is also fact. But the behavior of these kings must be judged against the excesses which others, sometimes better educated and Christian, had perpetrated along the sh.o.r.es of the Indian Ocean. In 1502, when Vasco da Gama, the enshrined hero of Portugal, was angered by the officials of Calicut, he slaughtered a s.h.i.+pload of thirty-eight inoffensive Indian fishermen, dismembered their bodies, packed heads, arms and legs into a boat and sent it drifting ash.o.r.e with the suggestion that the ruler 'boil the lot into a curry hash.'

The results of the Mfecane were by no means all negative. When it ended, vast areas which had formerly known only petty anarchy were organized. The superior culture of the Zulu replaced less-dynamic old traditions. Those who survived developed an enthusiasm they had not known before and a trust in their own capacities. In widely separated regions, deep loyalties were generated upon which important nation-states could be erected.

For example, the Sotho, who were never attacked by Shaka, consolidated a mountain kingdom first known as Basutoland and then Lesotho. The Swazi anch.o.r.ed themselves in a defendable redoubt, where they built their nation of Swaziland. One tribe, under terrible pressure from both Shaka and Mzilikazi, fled north into Mocambique, and helped form the basis of a state that would attain its freedom in 1975.

Even in that year the lasting effect of the Mfecane could not be determined, since the vast movement was still having its repercussions, but perhaps the princ.i.p.al result was the forging of the Zulu nation under Shaka, who took a small tribe with only three hundred real soldiers and about two hundred apprentices and within a decade expanded it with such demonic force that it conquered a significant part of a continent. In area the Zulu kingdom magnified itself a thousand times; in population, two thousand; but in significance and moral power, more like a million.

Had Shaka died before his mother, he would be remembered in history only as another inspired leader who, in accordance with the harsh customs of his time, had brought discipline to an unruly region; his accomplishments would have been respected. But he died after his mother, and the savage excesses of his Dark Time, plus the heroic manner of his death, elevated him beyond mere remembrance and into the realm of legend.

In the most remote corners of southern Africa huddling blacks would dream of the day when mighty Shaka would return to lead them into their heritage. His military prowess was magnified; his prudence as a ruler exalted. Out of his personal tragedy Shaka offered his people a vision.

At Vrijmeer, well north of Zulu power and safely south of Mzilikazi's burgeoning kingdom, Nxumalo, one of the few men who had known both kings intimately, came to realize as he grew older that the really glorious time of his life had been when he led Shaka's iziCwe into battle in its new formation of body-arms-head. Then he and his men, held in vital reserve with their backs to the fray, waited for the imperial command to storm forth. 'What a moment!' he told his children as they sat beside the lake, watching the animals come down to drink. 'Spears flying, men hissing as they killed the enemy, consternation, turmoil, then the calm voice of Shaka: "Nxumalo, support the left flank." That's all he said. And with a cry we leaped to our feet, turned to face the battle, and sped like springboks to destroy the enemy.'

The children were ordered to forget the rest: Shaka's murder of their mothers; the savagery of the Dark Time; the terrible denouement when a.s.sa.s.sins stalked the king in order to save the nation.

'The thing to remember,' Nxumalo said one evening in 1841, when he had white hair and his children were older, 'is that Shaka was the n.o.blest man who ever lived. The wisest. The kindest. And never forget, Mbengu. Carry yourself tall, because Shaka himself was once married to your mother Thandi.'

When the children asked why, if he loved Shaka, he had not returned to Zululand, he explained: 'You've heard the old rumors. Dingane murdering his own brother Mhlangana, who had helped him gain the throne. If we had gone back, Dingane would have murdered us, all of us. He was always treacherous.'

He preferred n.o.bler thoughts: 'When our nation falls into trouble, Shaka will return to save us, and we'll shout "Bayete!" and if you are men and women of character, you'll respond and Zululand will throb with marching feet, for he will always be our great leader.'

'But didn't you kill him?' a grandson asked.

There are some questions that cannot be answered intelligently, and Nxumalo did not try.

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IN 1828 Tjaart van Doorn was about as happy as a man could be. His farm at De Kraal was nouris.h.i.+ng. His second wife, Jakoba, had begun to soften her harsh ways. And his daughter Minna was as pleasing a child as a father could have in his middle years. He was thirty-nine, stout, stocky, with a full black beard that started near his ears, covered his cheeks and chin, but left his upper lip clear. He wore heavy clothes: short jacket, calfskin vest, tieless s.h.i.+rt and stiff pants made of moleskin, with a huge flap that came across his middle and b.u.t.toned at his right hip. The pants were held up by a wide belt and stout suspenders, but the characteristic that identified him immediately, wherever he stood, was a low-crowned hat, with a very wide, sloping brim, whose underside was bright blue. 1828 Tjaart van Doorn was about as happy as a man could be. His farm at De Kraal was nouris.h.i.+ng. His second wife, Jakoba, had begun to soften her harsh ways. And his daughter Minna was as pleasing a child as a father could have in his middle years. He was thirty-nine, stout, stocky, with a full black beard that started near his ears, covered his cheeks and chin, but left his upper lip clear. He wore heavy clothes: short jacket, calfskin vest, tieless s.h.i.+rt and stiff pants made of moleskin, with a huge flap that came across his middle and b.u.t.toned at his right hip. The pants were held up by a wide belt and stout suspenders, but the characteristic that identified him immediately, wherever he stood, was a low-crowned hat, with a very wide, sloping brim, whose underside was bright blue.

Since he was a man of few words most of the time, having been overawed by his volcanic father Lodevicus, he gave the impression of a gruff, grumpy man with a firm-set countenance. He did not, however, seem a large man; there were many in his district who were taller, but few were more st.u.r.dy.

He had a right to take pride in his farm; from the fine start his father had given, he had augmented De Kraal in all respects. The basic holding was still that splendid valley set within protecting hills, with the copious stream running from the southwest right through the middle of the land to an opening at the northeast, from which it wandered on to make junction with the Great Fish River some miles farther on.

What Tjaart had done was to acquire from the government the right to use pasturage beyond the hills, and with the proceeds from his large herds, add to the clay-and-stone buildings that formed the heart of the farm. The house now had a s.p.a.cious kitchen in which Jakoba could supervise the cooking; the servants and slaves occupied a chain of eight small huts linked together; calves had kraals with stone walls; and hay was stored in a s.p.a.cious barn. Smaller buildings had proliferated for the safe holding of farm tools, feed and chicken roosts.

The farm contained the original nine thousand acres within the hills, but it now controlled an additional sixteen thousand acres to which he did not have legal t.i.tle, but which his Coloured stockmen could use in herding cattle and flocks of sheep. Although he rarely saw much formal money, he had made himself into a man of considerable wealth and could look forward to a prosperous and placid old age.

Of course, most Boers grumbled about the English administration, its creeping modifications of law and custom, but such complaints were offset by the fact that the stalwart English settlers were now sharing the dangers of frontier life. The struggle had been harsh, as one Englishman noted in his diary: My wheat, two months ago the most promising I ever saw, is now cut down and in heaps for burning. The rust has utterly destroyed it. My barley, because of a grub which attacks the blade and the drought, produced little more than I sowed. All my other crops have practically been destroyed by the caterpillar and lice. My cows are dry from want of gra.s.s. Twenty of my flock of twenty-seven sheep were killed in a single night by a pack of wild dogs. My little girl has been bitten by a snake. I stood for a moment thinking of my misery, of my dying child, of my blasted crops, of my ruined flocks. G.o.d's will be done! I have need of fort.i.tude to bear up against such acc.u.mulated misery.

And always there were the blacks invading the lands of Boer and Englishman alike. Tjaart, veldkornet of his district, had frequently taken his men to Grahamstown to help those settlers repel cattle raiders, and in many actions, had fought beside Richard Saltwood, ivory merchant, and Thomas Carleton, master wagon builder. He had found them an honorable pair and had invited them to hunting parties at De Kraal. Saltwood had proved himself not only a fine shot but a congenial guest who lacked all the mannerisms that irritated the Boers. He had even told Tjaart on departing at the end of the last hunt, This must be the best farm I've ever seen,' and with that he handed Mevrouw Jakoba two bottles of Trianon wine he had been h.o.a.rding.

And then the camaraderie was endangered. Lukas de Groot, Tjaart's neighbor nineteen miles to the north, stopped by one day on his way home from the port on that wild stretch of coast at which the English settlers had come ash.o.r.e, and shocked Tjaart by showing him a copy of the Grahams-town newspaper: Dr. Simon Keer, the philanthropic leader in London, had published his second book, called The Infamy of the Dutch Slaveholder, The Infamy of the Dutch Slaveholder, and its appearance was guaranteed to cause trouble, for it was a savage a.s.sault against South African life and a shameless emotional appeal to the English Parliament to pa.s.s laws which Keer had long been advocating. and its appearance was guaranteed to cause trouble, for it was a savage a.s.sault against South African life and a shameless emotional appeal to the English Parliament to pa.s.s laws which Keer had long been advocating.

Keer's pressure came at a time when agitation for abolis.h.i.+ng slavery throughout the British Empire was gaining momentum; it signaled the beginning of the final battle to demolish what many Boers considered their G.o.d-granted right: that all men of color should labor for them six days a week and sometimes seven, whether slave or free.

Keer's grand strategy of waging this war with propaganda in England had thus triumphed over Hilary Saltwood's tactic of cheris.h.i.+ng and saving souls on the spot. The inspired lecturer with his flaming oratory had vanquished the modest missionary who had actually married one of his charges to prove that he loved them all. What Keer said in his new book was this: The oppression of free persons of color under the yoke of their Boer masters makes the idea of English fairness and justice a mockery. From birth till death the suffering native is held in bondage through a system of apprentices.h.i.+p of his children born on Boer farms and through a contract that binds him and his family to Boer servitude. He is unable to move freely about the land, he is unequal in the eyes of the law, he is without protection from the scourge of Boer tyranny.

Was there any truth in these charges? Some. Was there gross exaggeration? A great deal. But from the indictment came a law which radically altered life on the frontier. 'Look what Keer and his fellow saints have done to us!' De Groot raged as he showed Tjaart the new provisions. 'It makes the Coloureds, the Hottentots, the Bushmen the exact equal to us Boers. They have all the rights we have. No further apprentices.h.i.+p of the young. No work contracts. They don't have to have fixed abodes. Magistrates can no longer whip them as won't-works. From now on, d.a.m.nit, Van Doorn, a man of color has all the rights I have.'

'That's terribly wrong!' Jakoba interrupted as the men talked. 'That's not what G.o.d intended at all.'

What Reverend Keer intended was a softening of the harsh laws that restricted servants; what he got was a disastrous dislocation; and the immediate burden fell on Lukas and Rachel de Groot, for when their herders and farm hands got word of their new status, twenty of thirty-six laborers took off, and it was a group of these homeless, roaming vagrants who ravaged their daughter.

To the big Boer she was Blommetjie, 'Little Flower,' a fragile girl of fourteen who spent most of her time among the trees and blooms of the veld. The three men found her beside a small stream, humming softly. She did not get home for the midday meal, and when she still wasn't back by late afternoon, De Groot went looking for herand found a wild, deranged creature dragging herself across a mealie field.

He left the child with Rachel, said not a word and asked no one to accompany him as he rode out at dusk. Two of the guilty men had fled and would never again be seen in that district, but the third lay drunk in one of the deserted huts on De Groot's farmand when the Boer discovered him, he pulled the man into the open, and for a moment stood over him.

'Get up, you devil!' he said grimly, and the man stood, swaying unsteadily, looking dazedly at his baas. With a wild cry of anguish, De Groot brought his gun up, and then the man realized what was happening, but as he backed away, a bullet slammed into his chest. He fell to the ground, not quite dead, and as he lay there De Groot pumped bullets into him, again and again.

As veldkornet, it was Tjaart's duty to report on the incident, and he duly swore that the vagrant had been shot while attempting to flee after having stolen mealies. The case was closed, but the wound in De Groot's heart remained open.

The seasons pa.s.sed and no one said much about Blommetjie; they trusted that one day soon she would be able to move about the veld again. There was no improvement, either, in the labor situation, and increasingly Tjaart and his sons had to go out with the herds, much like the Van Doorns of four generations ago. And then, on a certain day in October when spring flowers made the veld a garden, Tjaart said at table, 'We shall go to the next Nachtmaal.'

The news created wild happiness among the women: Jakoba would be able to see friends she had not talked with for two long years; the slave women who would go along to do the cooking would enjoy the chance to meet with other slaves and to cook dishes they preferred; and little Minna, now thirteen and already worrying about how she would find a husband in this great emptiness, conjured up visions of a bright lad named Ryk Naude, whom she had last seen at the Nachtmaal: 'May I have a new dress, Mama? I mustn't go in my old one.'

So the slave women, who cherished the girl, set about the pleasant task of fitting her out for a dress which would compare favorably with the fas.h.i.+ons in Grahamstown: turned-down collar, wide sleeves fastened at the wrists, flounces around the lower part of the skirt, and a general sauciness to catch the eyes of young men. As they worked, Tjaart saw how much joy his daughter was deriving from the process. She was not a beautiful child, no one had ever claimed that, but she was a fine stout la.s.s, strong in body and character. The fact that she was illiterate did not mean that she was stupid, for she could recite long pa.s.sages from the Bible. There was little in the repertory of a good Boer vrouw vrouw that she could not do, and whereas in the western part of the colony girls her age often had two or three slaves of their own and never raised a finger except in rebuke, Minna was an industrious young woman, adept at anything from making soap and candles to spinning her father's wool into strong thread. that she could not do, and whereas in the western part of the colony girls her age often had two or three slaves of their own and never raised a finger except in rebuke, Minna was an industrious young woman, adept at anything from making soap and candles to spinning her father's wool into strong thread.

By rumor she had learned that several of the girls she had met at the last Nachtmaal were already married at ages fourteen and fifteen, and two were mothers, so it was understandable that she should become apprehensive about her prospects. She had only one, really, the Naude boy from a farm far to the northeast, and she began to worry each night when the family went to bed that the Naudes might not be attending this Nachtmaal, and one night when Tjaart could not sleep he heard her whimpering and strode over to her room: 'What's the worry, Minnatjie?'

'I dreamed it was already Nachtmaal and Ryk Naude didn't come.'

'Don't you worry, little lady. Lukas de Groot a.s.sured me he'd tell Ryk.'

'Oh, Father!' That her father had antic.i.p.ated her concern without her voicing it was most unexpected and it pleased her greatly. Grasping his hand in the darkness, she brought it to her lips and kissed it. 'Such a Nachtmaal we'll have! And I with a new dress.'

Touched by her childish grat.i.tude, he bent down and kissed her twice. 'Did you think Mama and I would forget the necessary things?'

The next days were marked with butchering and the first steps in making an abundance of biltong for the trip to Graaff-Reinet, ninety-two miles to the northwest. Tjaart owned three transport wagons, long flat-bedded affairs, and he kept them in fine condition for journeys to market, but the family wagon was a rickety bone-shaker. As it was being washed down and greased, Tjaart instructed the servants as to how they must mind the farm during his absence and care for his mother, Ouma Wilhelmina, who would remain behind.

When all was ready, an English settler came posting in with disturbing news: a band of Xhosa had broken across the Fish and were committing depredations. The messenger said that Lukas de Groot was collecting Boers to the north and would meet Tjaart halfway to form a substantial commando for a.s.sistance to Grahamstown.

Without hesitating, Tjaart saddled up, called for four of his Coloureds to join him, and galloped east. Counting the ma.s.sive battle of 1819, when he had helped save Grahamstown, this was the sixth time he had joined with fellow Boers to quell a border disturbance.

There were two reasons for their being so willing to help defend the English. As sensible men, they knew that in protecting the forward English farms they were protecting their own. But also, there was the acknowledgment that deplorable English mistakes, such as Slagter's Nek and the recent turning of Coloured servants loose to become vagrants and banditti, were the acts of English officialdom and the philanthropicals and not those of Englishmen on the frontier. Indeed, the settlers in Grahamstown suffered as much from these laws as did the Boers, which is why they cheered whenever the Boer commandos reported. There was harmony of interests.

The Stevens Affair of 1832 was a brief, fierce clash, and as unfortunate an incident as could have been devised. On a small farm six miles west of the Great Fish, there was an outcropping of red-paint earth with such a powerful impregnation of pyritic elements that it glowed handsomely when dried on a black man's skin. For generations untold the Xhosa had come to this spot to collect the clay treasured by circ.u.mcision boys and warriors, and the fact that a family from rural England had crossed the ocean to establish Stevens Farm did not diminish their desireone might say spiritual needto sc.r.a.pe up the earth and carry it back across the Great Fish.

Usually the expeditions were silent affairs, a few warriors braving considerable dangers to penetrate what had become English property and sneaking away without having done the white men harm. But in the spring of 1832 careless Xhosa, some drunk on Kaffir beer, had gone to the Stevens farm to collect not only red earth but also quite a few white sheep. A scuffle had ensued, with dead bodies, and now the Xhosa must be punished.

'What we'll do,' Major Saltwood of the Grahamstown Irregulars proposed as the men a.s.sembled, 'is ride east, cross the river at Trompetter's Drift, and take them in the rear.'

But the local Xhosa who rallied to the defense of the raiders were a battle-hardened group, a hundred veterans of many skirmishes with the English and Boers, and were not likely to be surprised by any flanking action. So when Saltwood led the men forward at a gallop, Xhosa warriors in ambush peppered them with spears and bullets from the few guns they had been able to beg, trade or capture.

That was the first skirmish, with the white men losing. The second was inconclusive, but the third was quite a different affair. Major Saltwood, Tjaart van Doorn and Lukas de Groot concocted a plan that would smash the Xhosa from three sides, and everything worked to perfection except that a hiding spearman stabbed Thomas Carleton deeply in the left thigh, dragged him from his horse, and was about to kill him when Van Doorn saw the danger, wheeled in midnight and roared back to brain the black with his rifle b.u.t.t. It was a near thing, and when Carleton realized that he was saved, and that the wound in his leg was much bigger than he could tend, he quietly fainted in Van Doorn's arms, and the two men stayed on the ground till Saltwood and some others doubled back to find them.

When they returned to Grahamstownvictors, but with serious losses Carleton was so effusive in his praise of Van Doorn's heroism, and repeated it so often, that Richard Saltwood told his wife, Julie, with some asperity, 'You'd think he'd let it rest.' Then he added, with no malice, 'But of course, poor Carleton's not a gentleman. He hasn't had the training.'

'Nor am I a lady,' Julie snapped. 'So I can't be expected to know, either. And I think it's a thrilling story. So does poor Vera, because without it she'd be a widow.'

'But you must admit, he does overplay it, rather.'

'If I'm in trouble, first I'd want you to come riding up to rescue me. But next in line, Van Doorn.'

The victory celebrations were so congenial, with many of the English volunteers offering toasts in reasonably good Dutch, that Van Doorn and De Groot lingered, and this delayed their arrival at the Graaff-Reinet Nachtmaal.

When De Groot and Van Doorn, accompanied by their Coloureds, who had fought bravely, prepared for the ride home they were joined by a veldkornet who had conducted himself, as always, with notable dignity. It was Piet Retief, a farmer from the Winterberg far north; thin, tallish, with a small beard, he was a friendly, outspoken man in his fifties, but when Saltwood and Carleton came out to bid the Boers thanks and farewell, he stood apart.

Carleton hobbled over to Van Doorn's horse, grasped Tjaart fervently, and said, 'Old chap, you carry my life in your saddle. May G.o.d bless you for what you did.'

'I'd expect the same from you,' Tjaart said, and the Boers left town.

For a day and a half they were accompanied by Retief, and came to understand the perplexities that gnawed at him. He was a strange mixture, an esteemed commando leader from a Huguenot family, but also a reckless business adventurer who seemed destined to overreach himself. 'The English sued me when the barracks collapsed,' he grumbled, referring to a disastrous construction venture in Grahamstown.

'But you had it complete,' Van Doorn said, 'I saw it, and you did a fine job on the magistrate's office.'

'I ran out of money. And do you know why I hadn't any? I was always absent fighting the Xhosa to protect the very people that sued me.'

'You lost everything?'

'Everything. It always seems to happen that way.'

Van Doorn thought it best not to ask about the other disasters; what he wanted to hear was Retief's att.i.tude toward the English government, for he was a man whose voice was being heard more and more. He spoke often about what he considered 'the persecution of the Boers.'

'The English will never give up until farmers like the three of us are ruined. Finished.'

'Why would any government adopt such a policy?'

'Because Keer will make them. His pressure will never cease until the Kaffirs control all the land. Look at your servants running wild over the veld ...' His voice tapered off at the sight of De Groot's expression. 'They're not satisfied with robbing us of belongings and blood. They want to steal our good name, too. I see that as the English program.'