The Covenant (63 page)

This was so similar to his own experience, when Predikant Specx, now dead three years, had preached to scores who did not listen, and to one who did, that Lodevicus had to be impressed, and when he looked at the flaxen-haired girl, so smiling and so different from rigorous Rebecca, he was tempted.

It was really quite simple. Wilhelmina pointed out that since she could not very well return to the south, having run away, there was no alternative but for her to stay at De Kraal, and this she did, moving into the room that Adriaan and Seena had once occupied; and on the third night, as she slept, her door opened and Lodevicus said, “Are you willing to be married of God? Without a dominee to enter it in the books?” and she replied, “Yes,” and nine months and eight days later the boy Tjaart was born.

• • •

In 1795 news reached De Kraal which stunned the Van Doorns, news so revolutionary that they had no base for comprehending it. A courier from Cape Town had dashed across the flats to Trianon, then over the mountains to Swellendam, then along the chain of farms to De Kraal, and wherever he stopped to give his report, men gasped: “But how could this have happened?”

“All I know, it’s happened. Every Compagnie holding in South Africa has been surrendered to the English. We’re no longer attached to Holland. We’re citizens of England and must be obedient to her.”

It was incomprehensible. These frontier farmers had only the vaguest notions of a revolution in France or of the new radical republic that now controlled Holland. They knew that France and England were at war, but they did not know that the new government sided with France while the old Royalists supported England. They were bewildered when they heard that their Prince of Orange, William V, had fled to London, and from that refuge had ceded the Cape to his English hosts.

And what they heard next was even more confusing: “The English warships stood in the bay. But Colonel Gordon behaved valiantly.”

“Was he English?”

“No, Scot.”

“What was he doing in the fort, fighting the English?”

“He was a Dutchman, fighting for us.”

“But you just said he was a Scot.”

“His grandfather was, but he came to live in Holland. Our Gordon is a born Dutchman … joined something called the Scots Brigade.”

“So the Scots made him a colonel, in Scotland?”

“No, the Scots Brigade is Dutch. We made him a colonel, and he was in command at the Castle.”

“Did he drive away the English?”

“No, he surrendered like a craven. Never fired one of our guns and invited the English to take everything.”

“But you said he was brave.”

“He was. Brave as a tiger defending her young. Because after the disgrace of surrender, he blew his brains out, as a brave man should.”

Lodevicus and Wilhelmina asked the courier to go over the details again, and at the conclusion the courier returned to the astonishing truth: “This colony is now English. You are all to be confirmed in the ownership of your farms. And English soldiers will be here soon to establish peace on the border.”

When the young messenger rode on, to spread his confusion among the other trekboers, Lodevicus assembled his family, and with little Tjaart upon his knee, tried to pick out the truths that would govern their new life: “What do we know about the English? Nothing.”

“We know a great deal,” his wife contradicted, bowing quickly to ask forgiveness for her impertinence. “We know they don’t follow the teachings of John Calvin. They’re little better than Catholics.”

That was bad enough, but soon a man rode in from Swellendam announcing himself as a patriot, and he lectured the Van Doorns about America, where England had once had colonies and where the citizens had risen in revolt against English rule. “What I learned when I was in New York,” he said, “is that when English magistrates come ashore, English troops are always ready to follow. Mark my words, you’ll see Redcoats on your frontier before the year is out. They’ll not have Lodevicus van Doorn telling them how to handle Kaffirs.”

From a corner of the room, where he had been sitting with Tjaart, Lodevicus spoke of the real problems facing the Dutch in Africa: “New rulers who have not our traditions will attempt to alter our church, recast it in their mold, destroy our ancient convictions. To preserve our integrity, we shall have to fight ten times as hard as we fight against the Xhosa. Because the English will be after our souls.

“Since they do not speak our language, they’ll force us to speak theirs. They’ll issue their laws in English, import books printed in English, demand that we pray from their English Bible.” Pointing like an Old Testament prophet at the various children in the room, he said with an ominous voice, “You will be told that you must not speak Dutch. That you must conduct your affairs in English.”

In later years Tjaart would say, “First thing I remember in life, sitting in a dark room while my father thundered, ‘If my conqueror makes me speak his language, he makes me his slave. Resist him! Resist him!’ ”

And when the Redcoats came, followed by the magistrates, the Van Doorns did resist, and looked very foolish for having done so,
because within a few years everything was thrown again into wild confusion, for the same messenger came galloping eastward over the same route with news more startling than the first: “We’re all Dutch again! England and Holland are allies, fighting a man called Napoleon Bonaparte. You can ignore English laws.”

So the Redcoats were withdrawn; Van Doorn’s fears proved groundless; and life resumed its orderly way, which on the frontier meant without any order at all. Guzaka continued his raids across the Great Fish, and Vicus hammered him for his insolence. Killing became so commonplace that often it was not even reported to Swellendam.

Restoration of Dutch rule had one curious side effect: a minor but condescending official came out from Holland to inspect the frontier, and upon finishing his tour he commented on the sad deterioration of speech in the colony: “At times I would scarcely know I was listening to Dutch, the way your people mishandle the language.” From his pocket he produced a slip of paper on which he had noted certain unfamiliar words. “You borrow words with a most careless abandon, adopting the worst of the native languages and forgetting your good Dutch words.” And he read off neologisms like
kraal, bobotie, assegai
and
lobola
. “You should purify yourself of such abominations,” he said, proceeding to criticize also the local word orders and mispronunciations. When he was finished, Lodevicus said with some asperity, “You make us sound like barbarians,” and the visitor said, “That’s what you’ll become if you lose your Dutch,” and that was the beginning of the Van Doorn family’s distrust of the homeland Dutch. They were a snobbish, metropolitan, unpleasant lot, with no appreciation of what frontier life involved.

When the stranger left, Lodevicus called his group together and said, “We’ll speak Dutch the way we want it to sound.” And the result was that they drove an even deeper wedge between their inherited Dutch language and the new tongue they were building.

Despite these years of uncertainty and war, Lodevicus prospered as a stock farmer, extending his acres far beyond mountain-girt De Kraal. When he required more help and found it impossible to lure Xhosa warriors to work his farm, he grumbled about their arrogance, then drove his wagon to Swellendam, where he purchased slaves: two Madagascans, three Angolans. Because of his visible wealth, he was appointed veldkornet for his district, and he presented a dominating appearance; tall, heavy, white-haired, with whiskers down the sides
of his face, he wore substantial clothes, holding up his heavy trousers with both belt and suspenders. When he walked among strangers he strode ahead, with Wilhelmina a respectful four paces behind. In public she always referred to him as the Mijnheer, and he was gratified to see how easily she assumed Rebecca’s role as a driving religious force, but of a different quality. She was amiable, forgiving of minor defections and most eager to be of help to everyone who came past the farm. She sang as she worked and was overjoyed to learn that a real church had been built at Graaff-Reinet, ninety-odd miles to the northwest: “We must report to the predikant for our marriage.”

“I can’t leave the farm.”

Wilhelmina laughed. “You call yourself a trekboer?”

“No more. The Van Doorns are through wandering. This is our home.”

“But Tjaart’s got to be baptized,” she said with such simplicity that he could not refuse her. So the older Van Doorn children were left in charge while their stepmother led Lodevicus and young Tjaart to their religious duties.

It was a glorious ride, with Tjaart old enough to recall in later years the vast empty spaces, the lovely hills with their tops flattened. He would never forget the moment when his parents halted their horses some miles south of the new village to observe that extraordinary peak which guarded the site: from flat land it rose very high in gentle sweeps until it neared an apex, when suddenly it became a round turret, many feet high, with sheer walls of solid gray granite. And at the top, forming a beautiful green pyramid, rose wooded slopes coming to a delicate point.

“God must have placed it there to guide us to things important,” Lodevicus said, impressing upon his son the stunning significance of the place, and Tjaart remembered this peak long after he had forgotten his parents’ marriage and his own baptism.

The boy now had three memories upon which to build his life: that the Dutch way of life must be defended against the English enemy; that Graaff-Reinet was a center of excitement; and that far to the north, as Grandfather Adriaan had told the other children before he died, lay an open valley of compelling beauty which he called Vrijmeer.

•  •  •

And then, in 1806, when the Van Doorns were congratulating themselves upon having resisted the English threat and preserving the countryside for Calvinism, the final shocking news arrived. Because the ordinary citizens of Holland had joined forces with Napoleon, England felt it must reoccupy the Cape to keep it from falling into French hands, which would cut the life line to India. It was now an English possession, and neither the local Dutch government nor the mother country Holland would exercise further control. All of Lodevicus’ apprehensions about suppression at English hands revived.

The Cape, having been a stopping place between Holland and Java during the years 1647 to 1806, now became one between England and India, and the indifference with which Holland had always treated this potentially grand possession would now be matched by English imperiousness.

In these days of change it was inevitable that assessments be made of Holland’s long rule, and it was remarked by certain observers—Dutchmen who had known their country’s holdings in other parts of the world, Englishmen who had fought in the American war, and Frenchmen who knew many parts of the world—that her rule had been almost without parallel in world history. The home country had allowed neither its royalty, its parliament nor its citizens any voice in the rule of this distant possession; control had rested in the hands of a clique of businessmen who made all decisions with an eye to profit. True, these profits had sometimes been widely distributed, with the government grabbing a healthy share, but in essence the colony had been a narrow business venture.

This had imposed limitations. The surging colonization that marked the French, Spanish and English settlement of North America, with excited citizens pushing exuberantly into the interior, was discouraged in South Africa. Always the Lords XVII preached caution, a holding back lest rambunctious elements like the Van Doorns stray so far afield that they could not easily be disciplined. If one major charge could be leveled against the Compagnie, it was that it restricted normal growth. The borders which should have extended to logical boundaries, perhaps the Zambezi, as Dr. Linnart suggested, never did, which meant that the generic entity never came into being. Absentee businessmen, seeking only profit, do not generate a sense of manifest destiny; indeed, they fear it lest it create movements that get out of hand, and without this spiritual urge, no nation can achieve the limits to which geography, history, philosophy and
hope entitle it. Because of Compagnie policy, rigorously enforced through sixteen decades, South Africa remained a truncated state, with only a few single-minded pioneers like the Van Doorns eager to dare the unknown.

Comparison with North American development was inescapable. In 1806, when the English assumed final control, South Africa had 26,000 white settlers. Canada, which had been started at about the same time as Cape Town and on less favorable soil, had 250,000, and the young United States more than 6,000,000. Mexico, a century older than South Africa, had 885,000. The main reason was simple: the Lords XVII were so reluctant to allow any immigration from which they could not immediately profit that during the entire eighteenth century they permitted only 1,600 new settlers to land! Sixteen newcomers a year cannot keep any new society healthy, or an old one, either.

But the Lords XVII were not entirely to blame, for on the rare occasions when they did advocate immigration, the response from those already living at the Cape was uniformly negative. “It is absolutely impossible,” those holding land reported, “to introduce any more whites into the country because they could find no livelihood.” What this really meant was that positions of advantage already filled by those in place would not be shared. There were no vacancies for the tough, impoverished migrant seeking a new country and a new chance, because the work that such people would normally start with was already being done by slaves.

In the time it took the cautious Lords XVII to approve inward movement of a hundred miles, settlers in North America had penetrated a thousand. While the Compagnie grudgingly allowed the establishment of a few small towns like Stellenbosch and Swellendam relatively close to the Cape, the free French and English settlers were already building communities like Montreal and Detroit far inland, thus laying the foundation for further movement westward.