The Covenant (105 page)

Still the amazing Zulu pressed on; the ground was littered with broken bodies, but on they marched, throwing themselves against the wagons, trying in vain to move close enough to use their stabbing assegais, and falling back only when they were dead.

At the end of two hours the black generals sought to rally their regiments by gathering in one spot all White Shield survivors and giving them the simple command: “Break through and slay the wizards.” Without hesitation these splendid warriors adjusted the shields, borrowed extra assegais, and began a stately march right at the spot from which Ou Grietjie had been removed. They came in panoply, they fought in glory. Wave after wave marched almost to the wagons and fell to the blazing guns. Yet on they came, men trained all their lives to obey, but when the final ranks hit the wagons, they accomplished nothing. Silently the generals signaled retreat and the
punished regiments withdrew, defeated but still obedient to command. A new power had replaced them in Zululand, and it had come to stay.

Before dusk the Voortrekkers came out of their laager to inspect the battlefield, on which they counted over three thousand dead. Another seven hundred died of wounds at a distance and could not be verified. Still others would die later.

What can be said of a battle in which the casualties were over four thousand dead on one side, a cut hand on the other? Not one man in the Voortrekker laager was killed; not one was seriously injured; counting even the scratches, only three were touched in this incredible battle. Four thousand-to-nothing, what kind of warfare is that? The answer would come years later from a troubled Dutch Reformed minister: “It was not a battle. It was an execution.”

But Blood River, terrible though it was, must not be considered by itself; it was merely the culminating battle in the campaign that included the massacres at Dingane’s Kraal and Blaauwkrantz. If those unwarranted deaths are counted, plus the many casualties at unprotected farms, the real nature of this continuing battle can be apprehended: at first, overwhelming Zulu victories; at the end, a Voortrekker triumph so one-sided as to be grotesque; but on balance, a ferocious battle with many casualties on each side.

The real victor at Blood River was not the Voortrekker commando, but the spirit of the covenant that assured their triumph. As Tjaart said when he led prayers after the battle: “Almighty God, only You enabled us to win. We were faithful to You, and You fought at our side. In obedience to the covenant You offered us and which You honored, we shall henceforth abide as Your people in the land You have given us.”

What the Voortrekkers failed to realize in their moment of victory was that they had offered the covenant to God, not He to them. Any group of people anywhere in the world was free to propose a covenant on whatever terms they pleased, but this did not obligate God to accept that covenant, and especially not if their unilateral terms contravened His basic teachings to the detriment of another race whom He loved equally. Nevertheless, in obedience to the covenant as they understood it, they had won a signal victory, which confirmed their belief that He had accepted their offer and had personally intervened on their behalf. No matter what happened henceforth, men like Tjaart van Doorn were convinced that whatever they did
was done in consonance with His wishes. The Boer nation had become a theocracy, and would so remain.

General Pretorius knew he must not allow King Dingane a chance to regroup his regiments; he realized that Zulu learned quickly and that in the next great battle they would present him with difficult tactics, so he scoured the landscape, seeking the devious ruler who had committed the murders. He did not catch him. Before fleeing, Dingane set fire to his famous kraal, destroying the treasures accumulated since the reign of Shaka. Among the items found by the Boers in the kraal were two cannon, a gift from a treaty-seeker. They had been allowed to rust, unused; had they been operating at Blood River, they might have offset Ou Grietjie and her three sisters.

Dingane fled far to the north, where he established a new kraal and waited in fright for the Boers to come seeking retribution. A younger brother, Mpande, seized the chance to ally himself with the Boers and suggested a joint expedition against his brother’s battered regiments. But before this campaign could be launched, Dingane sent his chief councillor, Dambuza, and a subordinate to the Voortrekkers, offering them two hundred of his finest cattle.

“Dingane seeks peace,” Dambuza entreated. “The lands Retief sought are yours.”

Mpande, who attended this meeting, always seeking an opportunity to increase his standing with the whites, screamed at Dambuza, “You lie! There will be no peace if Dingane lives. Who are you to speak, Dambuza? Were you not at his side when he killed Retief and his men? Were you not shouting, ‘They are wizards’?”

So ferocious was Mpande’s indictment that Pretorius ordered the envoys stripped naked and cast into chains. Shortly, both were on trial before a military court, where the chief witness was Mpande. On his testimony, both envoys were sentenced to death, even though they were diplomats visiting a host country, as it were.

Dambuza did not beg, but he did plead for his subordinate: “Spare him. He’s a young man with no guilt.”

There was no mercy. Tjaart van Doorn, present throughout the hearing, saw Balthazar Bronk, eager to serve on the firing squad, prepare his rifle. The two condemned blacks were dragged into the open, and Bronk’s marksmen lined up.

“Wait!” Pretorius cried. Striding swiftly toward the envoys, he
said, “Dambuza, you must ask forgiveness from God. Tell Him you’re sorry, and He’ll listen.”

The tall, powerful black said slowly, “I know not your God, Boer. King Dingane is my chief. I did what he ordered. But I do plead for my aide. Release him.”

“Shoot them,” Pretorius barked, turning away from the scene of execution.

Bronk and his men assumed position. Their gunfire splattered, and the two blacks fell. Then the miracle happened. Councillor Dambuza, only slightly wounded, rose to his feet.

“He is spared,” someone shouted. “God has saved him for his courage.”

“Reload,” Bronk shouted.

Tjaart van Doorn said not a word as Dambuza faced the firing squad for a second time, but he did think of a grim day long ago at a place called Slagter’s Nek, and in his mind he saw a scrawny English missionary, brother to his friend in Grahamstown, pleading for mercy for men whom God had reprieved when the ropes at their necks broke.

“Fire!” Bronk shouted, and this time the aim of the executioners was sure.

Within months Dingane himself was dead, assassinated perhaps at the instigation of his brother Mpande, who ascended the throne with the help of his Boer allies. It had been Dingane’s fate to wrest the kingdom from his half brother Shaka at the time in history when confrontation with a new and powerful force was inescapable, and he had never had a glimmer as to how adjustments should be made. He was an evil, pitiful man; he was also a powerful, wise and cunning manipulator; and the best that can be said of him is that his errors did not destroy the Zulu people. On the ashes of Dingane’s Kraal a mighty nation would arise, powerful enough within a few decades to challenge the British Empire, and within a century to contest with the Boer nation for the leadership of southern Africa.

When victory was complete, Tjaart studied the situation carefully; desperately he wished that Lukas de Groot were still alive so that he might compare assessments with that sage farmer, for he needed help. He also missed Jakoba, whose stubborn advice had always been so sensible; she would have been a good one to talk with, but her successor,
Aletta, was quite hopeless. Whatever Tjaart elected to do suited her; her principal concern was finding enough cloth and stiffeners to make a sunbonnet large enough to keep the sun’s rays from her face, which she hoped to keep as fair as possible.

Once, in dismay, Tjaart said, “Aletta, I think we ought to go back over the mountains to land we know. I don’t like it here. Sooner or later the English are going to come at us …”

“That’s a good idea,” Aletta agreed, but when he took the first steps to effectuate the plan, she whimpered, “I wouldn’t want to carry our wagon back up those cliffs.” He did not remind her that she had carried precious little down, but he was confused by her vacillations, and one day he asked, “Aletta, where would you like to spend the rest of your life?”

The bluntness of this question startled her, for she had not reached the age when the phrase “the rest of your life” had any meaning; it was then that she awakened fully to the fact that she was married to a man over fifty years old and that he had only a limited number of years remaining. But where would she like to live? “Cape Town,” she said honestly, whereupon he ended the discussion.

He had about decided to stay in Natal with General Pretorius, whom he admired immensely, when two trivial things intervened: an English merchant came up from Port Natal with news that an English force would soon be arriving to take the port under their command; and young Paulus, now a tall and vigorous lad, said casually, “I would like to go hunting lions.” And the vision of an untrammeled veld came back to haunt Tjaart. He appreciated Natal, especially these good fields along the Tugela River, but like many Voortrekkers, once he had seen the vast open sweep of the Transvaal, all other land seemed puny. He, too, longed to see lions and rhinoceroses and perhaps the sable antelope. He was homesick for loneliness, and the presence of so many Boers erecting villages and towns oppressed him.

Even so, Aletta’s obvious preference for the maturing life of Natal might have kept him there had not a ridiculous situation developed: one morning he was awakened by a clatter outside his tent, and there was Balthazar Bronk, a man he despised. “Van Doorn,” he said as soon as Tjaart wiped the sleeping-sand out of his eyes, “what they say is true. ‘Wherever a ship can sail, an Englishman will come.’ I think we ought to get out of here.”

“To where?”

“Back up on the plateau.” From the tent, young Paulus cried, “Hooray! We’ll go back and hunt lions.”

The more Balthazar talked, the more sense he made, and by the time Aletta got out of bed, the two men had convinced themselves that they must start quickly toward the mountains; Natal was not for them. But when Aletta heard the decision she began to pout and said that she did not intend to help carry this wagon back up those hills. “No necessity,” Bronk assured her. “There’s a good trail now. General Pretorius crossed the peaks in three days.”

“Why didn’t we use it?” she said.

“It wasn’t known then.”

For a three-day period it looked as if Aletta might leave Tjaart; she was not legally married to him yet, and there were other men in the new settlements who needed wives. It was her strong desire to remain here with the other women and not climb back to the highveld where her life would be lonely and short. But then an American missionary—a gawky young Baptist from Indiana—wandered into the settlements, and the hunger of the Voortrekkers for a predikant manifested itself. Tjaart joined a committee of five which interrogated the young man to see if he might be willing to perfect his Dutch and transfer his allegiance to the Dutch Reformed Church.

“I am not too good at languages,” he said in English.

“Did you attend a seminary?” Tjaart asked in Dutch.

“Yes.”

“And were you approved?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can learn.”

“But you ought to have a Dutch minister.”

“That’s right,” Tjaart said, “but the Dutch ministers have outlawed us,” and he showed the young man the latest copy of the Cape Town newspaper,
The South African Commercial Advertiser
, in which spokesmen for the church reiterated the charge that the Voortrekkers were fugitives acting in disobedience to organized society, that they were no doubt spiritual degenerates and should be shunned by all good people.

“Of course it would be better if we had Dutch predikants,” Tjaart summarized, “but what we want to know is can you accept our doctrines?”

“Well,” the young fellow said brightly, “seems to me that the
Dutch Reformed Church is pretty much what we in America call Lutherans.”

“Nothing of the kind!” Tjaart roared. “That’s Martin Luther. We’re John Calvin.”

“Aren’t they the same?”

“Good God!” Tjaart grumbled, and he took no further part in the interrogation, but when the other four had completed their questioning, it became apparent that here was a true man of God, called to the frontier from a vast distance, one who would grace any community. Without consulting Tjaart, they made him a definite offer, and he finally accepted.

But it was Tjaart who gave him his first two commissions: “Will you perform a marriage?”

“I would be proud to do so, Mr. van Doorn.”

“I’m never a mister,” Tjaart growled, whereupon the young minister said, “But you are a man of strong calling, and that I like.”

The two men walked to Tjaart’s wagon, where Aletta was summoned, and when she heard that this strange fellow was a minister she turned pale, for during the past several nights she had been secretly meeting a young man whose love-making she fancied, and she had been about to inform Tjaart of her new preference. He, seeing her paleness, surmised what the situation might be, for he had met with her when she was married to another and he knew her irresponsibility; but he also knew that moving to the north without a wife would be impossible, and he was still captivated by her beauty. So he reached out, grasped her harshly by the wrist, and pulled her before the new predikant.

“Marry us,” he said, and there in the Natal sunlight the new clergyman performed his first ritual, knowing well that it was somehow faulty and that this was not a good union.

His second rite was a strange one. Tjaart, with the approval of some of his neighbors, asked the missionary, “Sir, can you honor us by ordaining a dead man?”

“Quite unheard of.” But when Van Doorn led the party to a narrow grave marked by a few stones and explained to the new predikant who Theunis Nel had been, and how he had died, and why he had always wanted to be an ordained clergyman, the young fellow said, “He won his ordination of God. It would ill behoove me to deprive him of it.”