Darkest England (3 page)

Their names became my hymn; I still mutter them to myself when I wish to sleep: Baines, Baker, Bruce, Burton, Grant, Kingsley, Livingstone, Speke and Stanley … Even now they make, when strung together like beads, a little Anglican necklace.

The Boer Smith faced great trouble from the other farmers when they heard he was teaching me to read. His neighbours sat in his front room and watched me with my book and warned that no good would come of it. It was like teaching a sheep to fly, and while a flying sheep was at least a way of transporting mutton cheaply, a reading Bushman was unseemly and an affront to decent people everywhere. As to my name – a man needed a name, said the neighbours, but a monkey did not. If you gave a Karoo gypsy a name, he would only lose it. Or abuse it. They very much doubted it was legal. And they foresaw a bad end to this foolishness.

Of an evening, when the shearing had gone well, and my master was happy with the great bags of wool stacked in the ceiling of his barn, he would call on his shearers to sit with him, after they had been paid, after they had feasted
on his gift of two freshly slaughtered goats with bellies fat as pockets of sweet potatoes. A fire was lit under the stars that powder the face of our father the moon,
²
and all would be invited to bring whatever drink they could find: Little John brought sweet white wine, and Pietman his prickly-pear liquor; Old Flip and Sampie the Blacksmith brought along their home-made brews that bite the eyes. Pietman would unscrew his wooden leg. Boer Smith produced his favourite apricot brandy, and they would mix the lot in a zinc basin and stir it with Pietman's wooden leg. They gathered around the basin like geese at a garden tap in a thirsty month. Little John and Sampie and Pietman and Old Flip would send the white enamel cup with the chipped blue rim around the circle. A little singing, and a little gunplay. Boer Smith loved to practise his target-shooting under the light of a hunting moon. That was how Pietman had lost his leg, having to mark a target for my master; and my master, having dipped the cup into the basin once too often, put a slug through Pietman's right leg at three hundred metres, and it had to be cut off above the knee. Pietman never blamed him, for this was the sort of thing that happened when the cup went around the fire. Besides, Boer Smith cut him a handsome new leg of the best yellow wood he could find, which Sampie the blacksmith shod with a lively steel tip that flashed like a hare's eyes in the moonlight. When Pietman took his leave of us, after the shearing season, feeling happy to have passed the cup around the fire, stretched flat on his back in his donkey cart, all you saw was his fine yellow-wood leg waving goodbye.

After the drinking – peach brandy, white lightning,
Advocaat, swirling in the enamel basin – after the shooting, then the stories began. My master, being a man of great understanding, loved to tell tales of his own people and to teach us something of their glory and their genius. His learning at these fireside lessons deepened with each scoop of the chipped cup in the old basin. The Boers of the Karoo would have been astonished to know how much their workers knew of the history of England:

England, or
Britannia Prima
, as it was known formerly, is divided into three parts. These are known as the South-end, the Midland and the savage, uncharted wastes they call simply the ‘North'.

In the very earliest times the first people sailed to England from lands across the sea. These were the Beaker people. They failed in their heartfelt attempt to civilize the aboriginals and died in despair, taking their drinking cups with them to the grave to be buried beside them. Later there arose in the island wild and savage tribes who dressed in animal skins, painted themselves blue and lived principally on milk and meat. They were slow to learn to till the land.

When the Romans came they wept to see the foolishness of the natives, who shared wives among ten or twelve men, worshipped the moon, oaks and mistletoe, and measured out their lives in fortnights. To this day, said my master, the English have great difficulty in thinking in periods of longer than fourteen days. If asked to think a few months into the future, they grow confused and resentful. If asked to think a year or two ahead, they grow mute and wan and retire to their beds or their alehouses.

The Romans took pity on the savages and built for them roads and baths. The natives refused to bath, since it would disturb the blue paint with which they adorned themselves and of which they were so proud, and preferred to
scratch their furry parts in sacred groves, worshipping the moon, the oak and the mistletoe. And since they seldom went anywhere, what possible use did they have for roads?

Once upon a time hunting was good in England. There were woolly elephants, hyenas, wolves and even our common and beloved hippopotamus to be found in great abundance. Now there are none at all, said the Boer Smith, and his tears fell into his apricot brandy. Let this be a warning, he used to tell me – we in Africa, with our immeasurable richness of wild creatures, must know that unless we take care to preserve them, we shall go the way of the English.

These and other things I learnt from the Boer Smith. And they were to serve me in good stead.

My master left without warning. He was kissing the Devil one night when the Devil decided to keep him. So the Boer Smith passed to his rest in that land where the fountains flow for ever, and the good live on locusts and honey, where the rains are always on time and hartebeest run into the hunter's arrows. And he left a bequest to David Mungo Booi: the gift of a dozen sheep.

It was a great day. For who before, amongst the Trek People, had owned twelve sheep? All the Ashbush families came from miles across the Karoo to see for themselves the man who owned twelve sheep. The family Lottering came. And the Pienaars. The Blitzerliks, old Adam and Mina. And the clan of Witziesbek. And we held a great party and sent round a five-man-can of sweet wine and danced until the dust leaped to its feet and danced with us. The stars began singing. On and on we danced into the white light that comes before sunrise.

Old Adam Blitzerlik spoke for all when he rejoiced in
my good fortune. I would have to be very careful: I had had good luck, but for the travelling people good luck usually brought trouble. Twelve sheep. Yes – well and good. But what profit are twelve sheep to a man who cannot graze them? Did I own grazing land? The wandering people owned nothing of the land. Everything belonged to others. Blacks from the north and the east took our land. Whites from the south and the west took our land. The fences kept us out. Yellow police vans patrolled all day long so that we might neither stop, nor collect wood for the fires, nor graze our donkeys on an inch of farmer's land. Or pluck any roadside plant or shrub but for the harsh and bitter ashbush.

Therefore it was time to make a plan. He was calling a gathering of the travelling people from across the Karoo. The time had come for action. The time had come to read the Great Paper.

A meeting was arranged in the hall of the Dutch Reformed church in the coloured township outside Zwingli, though there was a lot of opposition from the township dwellers who hate us even worse than they hate whites. We would steal the light fittings and tear up the floorboards for our fire, they said. Our donkeys would soon be eating all the fodder in the outspan place provided by the municipality.

Our people travelled to Zwingli from all over the land. Gathered together for the reading were the Lottering family, the Pienaars, and the Ruyter clan who remembered losing a child to the English in the time of the old Queen (
Klein Seun
or ‘Little Boy' Ruyter had been stolen one hundred years earlier); there gathered, too, the family Witziesbek; and also the Sea-Cow clan from Murraysburg and many Strandloopers
³
(though I'm sorry to say that some of them
were deep in their cups): several of Harryslot, from Prince Albert Way, and the family /Xam,
⁴
from Victoria East direction; not forgetting old Adam and Mina Blitzerlik; as well as representatives of other travelling bands or their descendants, long ago scattered and dispersed: besides nomads of the Karoo, there were people of the Kalahari, Caprivi, Okavango and Angola; the People of the Soft Sand; People of the Eland; People of the East; River Bushmen and Remote-area Dwellers of Botswana, including also the =Haba, the G//ana, the !Kung, the G/wi, the !Xo – all true people of the First Time.

The Great Paper was being held by the Sea-Cow band, from beyond Murraysburg, safe in a leather quiver adorned with ostrich-shell beads. As the only reader, and the only English-speaker, I was asked to give out again the Promise to our people, then I was to translate the sacred words slowly into Afrikaans, so that those gathered could follow. But most of my listeners knew the Paper Promise by heart – even if they understood nothing of English – and nodded and applauded at certain key moments, as I declared the cherished words:

Some of the Ruyter clan could not resist reciting the words along with me. The Strandloopers shouted, ‘Hallelujah!' every now and then. And when I had finished, several members of the Sea-Cow clan called out, ‘Amen!' as if we were in church.

Then the meeting divided. Some of those present, specifically the representatives of the !Kung, said the time for talking had passed. Now it was time for war – we would approach the Queen and request she make good her Promise. Our lives were trampled like those of dung beetles by black people and whites and browns. Let the Lioness guard her whelps. Let the Great She-Elephant gallop to rescue her children; let her send the Red Frocks to kill the Boer; let her trample our enemies under her great feet, or spear them with her tusks; and let her children sleep safely in the shade of her generous ears.

Others, notably the Lotterings, said the time for war was past. The only fate awaiting Red People, Real People, Little People, was death. Better then to leave and live in England if the place was suitable. England, they had heard, was a rich paradise where there were many more sheep than islanders; farmers could graze their flocks wherever
they liked, since it rained every day and grass grew even in the cities; in England – said Pa Lottering – the police carried no guns (this assertion was loudly mocked by the Strandloopers, who said only children believed in policemen without guns).

In either case, the assembly agreed, an explorer, or ambassador, must be sent to put our case to the Sovereign. And since I was the only man among them to speak the English tongue, I would be the natural choice to go on this expedition. I possessed two fine English names, and I had been raised an Englishman by the Boer Smith, and now I so resembled the genuine article that it was doubtful the English would realize I was, in fact, a foreigner.

The family Ruyter asked me especially to find out what had been the fate of the little boy, lost years before to the English when the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair was still in this world. The Red Frocks had stolen the boy and carried him to England as a gift to the Queen, from whence he had never returned. Since ‘Little Boy' Ruyter had been a gift to the Old Queen, then surely her descendants would know what became of him? If he had been buried in England, then I was, please, to arrange to have his remains returned to the Karoo.

The Witziesbek band said that once the Queen heard my story she would ride to our aid. It was well known that the English were great protectors of weak people in the world and always kept their word. If, however, Her Majesty decided that her soldiers could not come and save us, because they were too busy saving others, then we should consider establishing a colony in England. In order to do so, we must know something of the climate, the terrain, the customs of the people. It was said, for example, that the English feasted on babies at special times of the year. Was
this true? They had a special attachment to brass, mirrors, calico. This we knew from their early contact with our cousins, the people of the coast, to whom the English, when they first arrived from the sea, offered trinkets in exchange for sheep, honey and hides.

Now we would do likewise. For as the Dutch and the French and the English, whenever they propose to colonize a country, first send missionaries and explorers to prepare the way, so we would form a Society for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of England. It was as the agent of this Society that David Mungo Booi would be dispatched to visit the Queen of England, to remind her of the Promise made by her predecessor and/or to spy out the land with a view to future settlement.

While the chief object of our expedition was to ask the English Monarch to send her Red Frocks to our aid, there was a secondary objective, and this was broached by the Sea-Cow clan from Murraysburg who instructed me to ascertain the following: what was the likelihood of possible settlement in England, and the opportunities for commercial exploitation, if such a settlement took place?

The impression gained by the only man of our people to have visited the English (a certain abducted beachcomber named Coree) and who returned to tell the tale, was of a savage people who made constant war on their neighbours and frequently fell out amongst themselves.

Therefore, what protection could friendly native chiefs give to commercial enterprises? Were the rivers navigable? And were the tribes along the River Thames (said to be their sacred river, and to run through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea) sufficiently intelligent to understand that it would be to their mutual advantage to maintain a friendly intercourse with the San settlers?
What tributes or taxes would be levied by the native tribes for right of way through their country? What was the nature of the produce and the employment opportunities which the natives might be able to exchange for the benefits of Bushman settlement amongst them?