The Covenant (97 page)

“You owe us no sheep,” Carleton replied. “You helped us start our colony. We help you start yours.”

“I think we should have a prayer,” Theunis said, and from Exodus he wrenched four timely texts about Israelites moving across the Red Sea and toward their promised land. “We are the new Israelites,” he said, whereupon the men who had fought together so many times started their farewells.

When the new wagon was packed and the five men were preparing to go their separate ways—two Englishmen back to Grahamstown, three Boer families north to lands unknown—an incident occurred which seemed at the time to be of no significance, whereas in fact it altered the history of South Africa.

A bold and cunning Xhosa prophet named Mhlakaza, with a ridged scar across his forehead, had taken advantage of the confusion following the war to slip into the area to spy out the amount of damage done in the recent raids. Not realizing that five armed men were ahorse, he suddenly appeared on the horizon in a silhouette so exposed that any one of the men could have shot and killed him.

Automatically Tjaart van Doorn raised his rifle to do so, but his son-in-law Theunis grabbed at his arm and cried, “No! He’s done nothing.” So Tjaart lowered his gun, and the Xhosa, laughing derisively, disappeared from view.

If Tjaart had killed him, and in the presence of two Englishmen, word would certainly have filtered back to London; Dr. Keer would have asked persistent questions; a scandal would have ensued, proving once more the heartlessness of the Boer; and quite possibly Tjaart
would have been hanged. So it was fortunate that Theunis restrained him.

On the other hand, if Tjaart
had
killed this crafty man, the lives of many thousands of Xhosa would have been saved, a noble people would have been preserved at full strength, and the history of this area would have been dramatically modified.

On 15 March 1836 the Van Doorn party, as it came to be called, crossed the Orange River—that moody giant between banks of sand—leaving the jurisdiction of England and heading into those vast lands which Mal Adriaan had explored seventy years earlier.

Through gradual accretions the group now consisted of nineteen families with seventeen wagons. The latter number was most significant in that it was the smallest number that would allow the formation of a proper cordon, or laager, inside which women, children and cattle could be protected.

The emigrant party contained nineteen grown men, but this included Theunis Nel, deemed largely useless despite his heroic performance when the Xhosa overran De Kraal, and an equal number of mature women, making thirty-eight adults, all battle-tested. They had among them ninety-eight children: some, like the daughter of Theunis and Minna, mere infants; others, like the older sons of some of the families, almost men, well capable of handling a gun.

So there were a hundred and thirty-six white people, but they were attended by two hundred Coloureds and blacks. In most cases these servants had received reasonably good treatment on the farms and had come to accept that they belonged with the Boers, not in the way a slave belongs to an owner, but in a paternalistic pattern, as much a part of the white family as the children.

These servants had remained loyal when others had run off, and they saw no reason to leave the baas now. His life was theirs; they would find no other work they liked better; they were as excited as he by this adventure of heading into unexplored lands. They’d accept an old pair of shoes or a tattered jacket with a smiling “Dankie, Baas,” a scolding with a great show of misery. And between the good and the bad, if they met with other Coloureds or blacks, they would argue that their baas was the best in the land. To show that they meant it, most were prepared to die for “their” white people.

Each of the seventeen wagons had a span of from twelve to sixteen
oxen, plus half a dozen spares; all men, most boys and many of the Coloureds had horses. And the party as a whole had two hundred cattle and eleven hundred sheep, which explained why the Voortrekkers were lucky if they covered six miles a day.

Of the hundred and thirty-six Boers, only two men could read, Tjaart van Doorn and Theunis Nel, but all could recite long passages from the Bible, and as they prepared to enter a new land, they compared themselves constantly with the ancient Hebrews who appeared in the Book of Joshua. Night after night, when the wagons were assembled, not in laager, for there was as yet no enemy, Theunis Nel, in the manner of a predikant, would read from that chapter and apply the lessons of that noble journey to conditions faced by the Voortrekkers. Inevitably the Boers came to believe that they were a reincarnation of Joshua’s army and that God watched over them, too:

One other characteristic of the Voortrekkers applied particularly to the Van Doorn party: all the adult men, except the unfortunate Theunis Nel, had had more than one wife, and he was lucky to have any. If one took seven leaders of seven representative groups, the number of their wives would be 2-2-3-3-3-4-5, and seven typical ages for the brides would be 13-13-14-15-29-31-34, the first series proving that men liked their wives young, the last indicating that no woman was allowed to remain a widow long. When men were Old Testament patriarchs, as these men were, they used up their women.

They were in general an intransigent, opinionated group of Dutchmen whose isolation had caused them to turn their backs on the liberalizing influences of the eighteenth century, except that Tjaart himself had quoted from the American Declaration of Independence in laying forth his reasons for emigrating. They felt no need for Rousseau, Locke, Kant or the German theologians who had begun to expose the mythological elements in the Old Testament. They were
satisfied with the fundamentals their Dutch and Huguenot ancestors had brought with them in the middle 1600s and rejected any new ideas imported by the English. Above all, they were self-confident, so that when one Voortrekker came upon a little stream running due north, he had no hesitation in announcing, “This is the beginning of the Nile River,” even though that body lay a good two thousand miles away—and forthwith he christened it Nylstroom (Nile Stream).

The wagons in which they would live for the next two or three years were special affairs, not at all like the great lumbering things that crossed the American prairies. They were small, only twelve to fifteen feet long, and rather low to the ground, except that when a canvas shelter was thrown over the top, they appeared higher. They were surprisingly narrow, and were so packed with family possessions that there was no room to sleep inside, except for the mother, who made a rough bed for herself atop the baggage. The iron-banded wheels were invariable: small front ones with ten spokes, larger back ones with fourteen.

A superior feature of the Voortrekker wagon was its disselboom, the pivoted main shaft that was so fixed to the front axle that it provided maximum flexibility in both guiding and in riding easily over the bumpy trail. But only the last pair of oxen were harnessed to the disselboom; all others pulled against chains and harness that were attached to the wagon in various ways.

Since nearly two thousand wagons would participate in the early move to the north, trails became marked across the veld, but many parties like the Van Doorn struck off on their own, making their way over the veld from one conspicuous flat-topped hill to the next.

It was a habit of the Voortrekkers to linger at any congenial spot, sometimes for a week, at other times for a month. Then the wagons would be brought into proximity, but not in laager, and the men would ride far afield to hunt while the women tended to sewing, and the making of needed articles, and the baking of special dishes. Jakoba was particularly pleased when the wagons halted at some spot which contained a good supply of ant hills, for as a girl she had learned how to utilize these remarkable constructions that rose two and three feet above the veld, shining like little red-sand mountains.

Selecting a sturdy one off by itself, she would take a heavy stick and break open a small hole at the spot where the side of the dome touched the earth; she was careful not to disturb the upper part of the ant hill, for it was this dome which ensured fruitful use. When the
hole was broken, a flood of small black ants scurried about the landscape and soon disappeared. Then the opening was crammed with sticks, leaves and other flammable debris and set afire; for an hour or so it blazed and smoldered, becoming in due course an effective, excellent oven in which all kinds of food could be prepared.

Jakoba liked to bake her bread in such ovens, but she also knew how to prepare a delicious toasted curry dish made of antelope strips bathed in a sauce flavored with dried onions. The men were so fond of this that as they traveled they kept an eye alert for ant hills, and the women learned that when such were plentiful, there would probably be a restful halt. And if there were no hills, they prepared a bobotie.

The determined movement of these Voortrekkers must not be thought of as a gallop across the landscape toward a known, specific destination; it was more like the slow displacement of a small village—with all the utensils, the babies’ cribs, and the cattle moving patiently along.

But in one startling aspect the trek did not resemble the slow displacement of a town: among the fourteen thousand Boers who would ultimately travel north, there was not one clergyman. The Dutch Reformed Church, which had played, and would play, so significant a role in the history of the Boers, refused to sanction the mass exodus, and for substantial reasons: it suspected that the exiles represented a revolutionary spirit, and Calvinism could not tolerate that; it feared that the farmers were moving away from church influence, and this had to be opposed; and it felt uneasy about unauthorized movement into unexplored territory, since in such unfamiliar land the dominance of the church might be diminished. Resolutely the church turned its back on the emigrants, castigated them as revolutionaries and ignored their pleas for assistance.

More remarkable was the fact that in the most significant event in South African history, individual predikants also cut themselves off from the people, with many dominees flatly refusing to accompany the wanderers. The Voortrekkers, one of the most religious people on earth, with a profound reliance upon the Bible, were thus rejected by their own church. There could be no baptisms, marriages, solemnized burials, or even weekly services, yet at the end of the travail the Voortrekkers would be even more solidly supportive of their church than they had been at the beginning, and after having refused the travelers the services of religion, the Dutch Reformed Church would gather
the emigrants back into its hands, converting the whole nation into a theocracy.

The man who suffered most in this strange development was Theunis Nel. Acutely aware of the Voortrekkers’ spiritual needs, and grieved by the refusal of his church to help, he volunteered at various intervals to serve as substitute predikant, but invariably the majority rejected him on the grounds of his blemished eye and crookbackt.

He did not complain. Patiently he bore his wife’s scorn, the ridicule of his fellow travelers, the lack of support from leaders like Van Doorn and De Groot. He tended the sick, tried to teach the children, and recited prayers at the graves of those who died. At one funeral, when an old man was being buried short of the new home he had hoped to reach, Theunis was overcome by emotion and launched into a graveside homily, a sort of informal sermon about the transitory nature of human life, and after the burial party had left the site, Balthazar Bronk, who took religion most seriously, asked Theunis and Tjaart to stand aside, and when the others had left, he berated the sick-comforter.

“You’re not to preach. You’re not a predikant.”

“We were burying a poor old man.”

“Bury him. And keep your mouth shut.”

“But, Mijnheer Bronk—”

“Tjaart, tell this simpleton to obey the rules.”

And when two young people from another party wanted to marry and came to Nel soliciting his assistance, he was willing to comply, but again Bronk intruded: “Bedamned, I’ve warned you five times against posing as a predikant.”

“But these young people want to start their new life—”

“Let them wait till a real minister comes along.” And he was so adamant that the couple had to depart, their union unsanctified. But when Bronk was not spying, Theunis rode after the pair and told them, “God wants his children to marry and multiply. I name you man and wife, and when a true predikant does arrive, ask him to bless your marriage properly.” When one did come after three years, he was able to baptize two children also.

Where was this exodus heading? No one worried. The families were more concerned with leaving English rule than with their destination: some proposed to cut east across the Drakensberg Mountains, which had hemmed Shaka’s empire. Others, like Tjaart van
Doorn, were determined to head north, cross the Vaal River and settle in remote valleys.

But where in the north? One of Tjaart’s earliest memories was of the tales told about his grandfather Adriaan, who had gone into that northland with a Hottentot named Dikkop and a tame hyena named Swarts: “He said he grew frightened at the Limpopo River and turned back, and found a lake which he called Vrijmeer, and on its bank he buried Dikkop.” Tjaart believed he was destined to reach that lake.

But regardless of whether a Voortrekker elected Natal as his destination or the unexplored north, all trails converged at the foot of a mountain with a fanciful name, Thaba Nchu. The Voortrekkers called it
Ta-ban’-choo
, and so many wanderers found rest here that for some years it formed a major settlement.