The Covenant (53 page)

But he did not interfere, and even officiated in certain of the hallowed rites, going so far as to protect the new hut against evil. He did this for good reason: he suspected that within a year Mandiso and Xuma would flee the place, after which he could see that one of his nephews gained possession.

To that end, as soon as the young couple moved into the handsome hut, he began asking questions through the community, never directing them at Mandiso, but always at Xuma’s father: “Who do you think it was that caused the fire-bird to fly?” and “Have you noticed how the mealies at his kraal have grown bigger than any others? Could he be casting spells?”

Week after week these poisonous suspicions were broadcast, never a substantiated charge, only the nagging questions: “Have you seen how Xuma’s cattle become pregnant so quickly? Could her father be weaving a spell there, too?” The assumption in this question was most effective; that her father was casting a spell over the new hut was problematic, but that he had done so at his own was accepted: “He’s bringing this valley into sore trouble.”

During this time Sotopo was preoccupied with the last days of boyhood. Having seen his older brother through the twin ordeals of circumcision and marriage, he returned to those things that gave his own life significance. Beyond the family kraal, at the edge of the river, there was a level place where in the morning the wagtails danced, those delicate little gray-brown birds that bobbed their tail feathers up and down as they paraded. They loved insects, and darted their long bills this way and that, plucking them off dead leaves.

They were the good-omen birds, the ones that made a kraal a place of joy, and Sotopo had always found delight in being with them, he on a log, they on some rock at the edge of the river; he sprawled out on the ground, they dancing back and forth oblivious of him, for they seemed to know that they were protected: “No one but a man near death from frenzy would disturb a wagtail, for they bring us love.”

He also felt increasingly attached to Old Grandmother, as if, like Mandiso, he must soon move away from her influence. He stayed with her about the house, watching as she prepared the dish he liked the most: mealies well pounded in the stump of a tree, then mixed with pumpkin, baked with shreds of antelope meat, and flavored with the herbs which only she knew how to gather.

“Tell me again,” she said as she worked. “When you ran away from us, you say you met two boys, one brown, one white?” When her grandson nodded, she asked, “You say one spoke like us? The other didn’t? How could that be?”

She had a dozen questions about this meeting; the men in the family had listened to the story, nodded sagely and forgotten the matter, but not Old Grandmother: “Tell me again, the brown one was small and old, the white one was young and big. That goes against the rule of nature.”

But when he explained, with increasing detail, for he enjoyed talking with the old woman, she told him what he had heard many times before: “I didn’t see it myself, because it happened before I was born. But men like that boy came to our shore once in a house that floated on the waves, but they died like ordinary men.” It was her opinion that what the white-skinned boy had said was probably true: “I think there are other people hiding across the river. I don’t think I’ll ever see them, but you will, Sotopo. When you marry and have your own hut and move to the west …”

At this point she would always stop what she was doing and ask her grandson, “Sotopo, who are you going to marry?” And he would blush beneath his dark skin because he had not yet addressed this problem.

But one day he did ask the question whose answer could reveal the dangers that lay ahead: “Old Grandmother, why do you always say that when I take a wife, we’ll move across the river?”

“Ah-hah!” she cackled. “Now we’re ready to talk.” And she sat with him and said, “Can’t you see that the witch doctor is determined to drive Xuma’s father out of the valley? And that when he goes,
Mandiso will surely go with him? And that when Mandiso and Xuma flee, you’ll join them?”

She had uncovered thoughts which had been germinating deep in the boy’s mind; he had chosen to stay by himself, away from the others, to communicate with the wagtails and his other friends of river and forest, because he was afraid to face up to the tragedy that he saw developing in the valley, with families quietly turning against Xuma’s father, and by extension, against Xuma and Mandiso. He knew instinctively what he had been afraid to voice: that before this year was out he would have to choose whether to stay with his parents, whom he loved, and with Old Grandmother, whom he loved most dearly, or go into exile with Mandiso and Xuma.

His solution for the moment was to draw even closer to his grandmother, for she was the only person who would talk with him; even Mandiso was so occupied with starting a new family that he had little time for his brother.

“Why does the diviner torment us?” he asked the old woman one day.

“He doesn’t. No, he doesn’t. It’s the spirits. It’s his job to keep the spirits happy or they’d devastate this valley.”

“But Xuma’s father …”

“How do we know what he’s done? Tell me that, Sotopo! How do we know what evil things a man can do without the rest of us being aware?”

“You think he’s guilty?”

“Of what? How should I know. All I know is that if the witch doctor says he’s guilty, he’s guilty.”

“And Mandiso must go into exile with him, if he leaves?”

“Oh, now!” She thought about this for some time, sucking at her corncob pipe, then said to her grandson, “I think the time comes for all of us when we should move on. The field is no longer fertile. The neighbors are no longer kindly. For an old woman like me, death comes to solve the problem. For a young person like you, move on.”

Neither of them said another word that day; they had stepped too close to the ultimate realities of life, and it would require weeks of reflection before complete meaning could be known, but in those days of silence Sotopo became aware that all things had deteriorated sadly in the community. Xuma’s father had been found one morning in a ditch with a gash on his head. Xuma’s cooking pot was shattered when she left it drying in the sun.

So young Sotopo, now approaching sixteen, gathered the two assegais he had made of dark wood and went for the last time to see the diviner. “Come in,” the old man said.

“Why is Mandiso being punished?”

“You bring me only two assegais? And a calf, perhaps?”

“I have no more cattle, All-powerful One.”

“But you still ask my help.”

“Not for me. For my brother.”

“He is in trouble, Sotopo, deep trouble.”

“But why? He’s done nothing.”

“He’s associated with Xuma, and her father has done much evil.”

“What evil, All-powerful?”

“Evil that the spirits see.” Beyond this fragile explanation the old man would not go, but he allowed his visitor to sense the implacable opposition all good men ought to show against a member of the tribe guilty of evil practices, even though those practices were never identified.

“Can you do nothing to help him?” Sotopo pleaded.

“It isn’t him you’re worried about, is it?”

“No, it’s Mandiso.”

“He shares the guilt.”

“Can he do nothing?” the boy asked.

“No. The evil is upon him.” And no amount of pleading, no amount of future gifts would alleviate this dreadful curse. The community, through the agency of their diviner, had named Xuma’s father as a source of contamination, and he must go.

Shortly after this visit he was found beaten to death at the gateway to his kraal, an especially ominous way to die, implying that even the sleek and growing cattle had been powerless to protect him.

That night Mandiso and Xuma came to the big hut, the wife sitting circumspectly to the left among the women as the fateful discussion began. “You must leave us,” Old Grandmother said without any show of sorrow.

“But why must I surrender …”

“The time has come to go,” she said forcefully. “Tell him, Makubele.” And the boys’ father referred only to his own selfish interests: “The old one’s right. You must go. Otherwise the curse will apply to us all, won’t it, Old Grandmother?”

But she refused to allow her own predicament or that of her family to intrude in this matter: “What is important, Mandiso, is not
what will happen to your father, but what will happen to you and Xuma. What do you think your future is now, with her father killed in that manner, at the gateway to his kraal?”

“If there is one sacred place—” Mandiso began, but Xuma broke in: “We must go. And we must go before nightfall tomorrow.”

“Can it really be so!” her husband said, appalled at the implications of what Xuma had said.

“Isn’t that true, Old Grandmother?” the girl asked.

“I’d go tonight,” the old woman said. And it was agreed that before the next sun set Mandiso and Xuma would start for the west, to a new settlement, to a new home. They would take cattle, and skin bags of mealies for seed, and other oddments—but they must go, for the consensus of their community, arrived at in complex ways, had decreed that they were no longer wanted.

But where did this leave Sotopo, not yet a man but deeply devoted to his brother and his brother’s wife? When the family conclave broke up, he remained with his grandmother a long time, discussing his difficult alternatives: remain, with the diviner probably opposed to him; or flee, when he had not yet been ordained a man? He had absolutely no hard evidence that the witch doctor had declared war upon him, but he knew it had happened and that sooner or later the rumors would begin to circulate against him. But he also knew that to face the future without the sanctions of circumcision entailed dangers too fearful to contemplate. Having watched his brother’s joyous entrance into married life, with a girl as admirable as Xuma, he had begun to sense how awful it would be to have the girls of his community categorize him as less-than-man and to be deprived of their companionship.

This was something he could not discuss with his grandmother, so in the dead of night he crept to his brother’s kraal and whispered, “Mandiso! Are you awake?”

“What is it, brother?”

“I shall go with you.”

“Good. We’ll need you.”

“But how will I ever become a man?”

Mandiso sat in the dark with his left hand over his mouth, considering this perplexing question, and then, because he felt he must be truthful, he listed the impediments: “There’d be no guardian to bless the hut. There’d be no other boys to share the experience. We probably couldn’t find clay to cover your body. And at the end there’d be no grand celebration.”

“I’ve thought of that, Mandiso. I’ve thought of it all, but still I want to stay with you.” And he added, “With you and Xuma,” for he was not ashamed of his love for his sister-in-law.

“It seems to me,” Mandiso said, “looking back on everything that happened, that a boy becomes a man with the pain, with the courage. He becomes a man not with the dancing and the food and the cheers of others. He becomes a man within himself, through his own bravery.”

They pondered this for a long time, during which Mandiso hoped that his brother would speak up, would volunteer proof of his courage, but Sotopo was too confused by this necessity to make at age sixteen a decision more difficult than most men make in their entire lives. So finally Mandiso tipped the scales: “In the woods that time, when we met the two strange men”—in his thinking, they were men, now—“it was you, Sotopo, who devised the plan for sleeping in the tree. I believe I might have slipped away.”

“Really?” the boy asked, and the possibility that he had been brave, there in the woods, so captivated his mind that he said no more that night. Nor did he sleep. At dawn he was at the river saying farewell to the wagtails. At full-sun he was watching a pair of monstrous hornbills waddling across the fields, and at midmorning he had collected his remaining goats, falling in line behind five of the young men who had shared the ritual circumcision with Mandiso and who now elected to go with him because of the profound brotherhood they felt. Three girls who hoped to marry with the young exiles trailed along for a short distance, then turned back tearfully, knowing that they must wait till their suitors brought lobola to their fathers.

In this way units of dissidents had always broken off from the main body of the Xhosa. Perhaps the diviners performed a vital function in identifying those potentially fractious individuals who might ultimately cause trouble in the community; at any rate, the diviners served as the agencies of expulsion. For eight hundred years groups like Mandiso’s had broken away to form new clans on the cutting edge of expansion. They never moved far; they retained contact with the rest of the tribe; and they still acknowledged a hazy kind of allegiance to the Great Chief, who existed far to the rear but whom they never saw.

This time the wandering unit proceeded to the east bank of the Great Fish River, which they settled upon because of the vast empty
grazing fields on the west bank. “We’ll use those fields,” Mandiso told his followers, “for the cattle that like to roam.”

In this time-honored tradition the Xhosa innocently launched a westward move which would bring them into direct conflict with the Dutch trekboers, who with equal innocence were drifting eastward. These two great tribes were so similar: each loved its cattle; each measured a man’s importance by his herds; each sought untrammeled grazing; each knew that any pasturage it saw belonged to it by divine right; and each honored its predikant or diviner. A titanic confrontation, worse than any storm the fire-bird had ever generated, had become inevitable.

When, in February 1725, Adriaan and Dikkop approached their farm at the conclusion of their wanderings, they faced none of the uncertainties that had perplexed the two Xhosa lads. True, they had been gone almost four months when only three had been intended; but their people knew what they were doing, and the extended absence was no cause for alarm. As Hendrik assured his wife several times: “If the lions don’t eat them, they’ll be back.”

So when they straggled in, with the dust of distant horizons on their eyebrows, no one made much fuss, for Hendrik, too, had been wandering, six weeks to the north to trade for cattle with the Hottentots. He had returned with two hundred fine animals, the largest-ever addition to his herd. He asked Adriaan to ride with him to the easternmost part of the grazing lands, and from a low hill the two Van Doorns looked down approvingly. “God has been good to us,” Hendrik said. “ ‘All the land that is Canaan He has given to us and the generations which will follow you.’ ” For a long time they sat astride their horses, watching the cattle, and there was joy in their hearts.