The Covenant (89 page)

Even in that year the lasting effect of the Mfecane could not be determined, since the vast movement was still having its repercussions, but perhaps the principal result was the forging of the Zulu nation under Shaka, who took a small tribe with only three hundred real soldiers and about two hundred apprentices and within a decade expanded it with such demonic force that it conquered a significant part of a continent. In area the Zulu kingdom magnified itself a thousand times; in population, two thousand; but in significance and moral power, more like a million.

Had Shaka died before his mother, he would be remembered in history only as another inspired leader who, in accordance with the harsh customs of his time, had brought discipline to an unruly region; his accomplishments would have been respected. But he died after his mother, and the savage excesses of his Dark Time, plus the heroic manner of his death, elevated him beyond mere remembrance and into the realm of legend.

In the most remote corners of southern Africa huddling blacks would dream of the day when mighty Shaka would return to lead them into their heritage. His military prowess was magnified; his prudence as a ruler exalted. Out of his personal tragedy Shaka offered his people a vision.

At Vrijmeer, well north of Zulu power and safely south of Mzilikazi’s burgeoning kingdom, Nxumalo, of the few men who had known both kings intimately, came to realize as he grew older that the really glorious time of his life had been when he led Shaka’s iziCwe into battle in its new formation of body-arms-head. Then he and his men, held in vital reserve with their backs to the fray, waited for the imperial command to storm forth. “What a moment!” he told his children as they sat beside the lake, watching the animals come down to drink. “Spears flying, men hissing as they killed the enemy, consternation, turmoil, then the calm voice of Shaka: ‘Nxumalo, support the left flank.’ That’s all he said. And with a cry we leaped to our feet, turned to face the battle, and sped like springboks to destroy the enemy.”

The children were ordered to forget the rest: Shaka’s murder of their mothers; the savagery of the Dark Time; the terrible denouement when assassins stalked the king in order to save the nation.

“The thing to remember,” Nxumalo said one evening in 1841, when he had white hair and his children were older, “is that Shaka was the noblest man who ever lived. The wisest. The kindest. And never forget, Mbengu. Carry yourself tall, because Shaka himself was once married to your mother Thandi.”

When the children asked why, if he loved Shaka, he had not returned to Zululand, he explained: “You’ve heard the old rumors. Dingane murdering his own brother Mhlangana, who had helped him gain the throne. If we had gone back, Dingane would have murdered us, all of us. He was always treacherous.”

He preferred nobler thoughts: “When our nation falls into trouble, Shaka will return to save us, and we’ll shout ‘Bayete!’ and if you are men and women of character, you’ll respond and Zululand will throb with marching feet, for he will always be our great leader.”

“But didn’t you kill him?” a grandson asked.

There are some questions that cannot be answered intelligently, and Nxumalo did not try.

I
N
1828 T
JAART VAN
D
OORN WAS ABOUT AS HAPPY AS A MAN
could be. His farm at De Kraal was flourishing. His second wife, Jakoba, had begun to soften her harsh ways. And his daughter Minna was as pleasing a child as a father could have in his middle years. He was thirty-nine, stout, stocky, with a full black beard that started near his ears, covered his cheeks and chin, but left his upper lip clear. He wore heavy clothes: short jacket, calfskin vest, tieless shirt and stiff pants made of moleskin, with a huge flap that came across his middle and buttoned at his right hip. The pants were held up by a wide belt and stout suspenders, but the characteristic that identified him immediately, wherever he stood, was a low-crowned hat, with a very wide, sloping brim, whose underside was bright blue.

Since he was a man of few words most of the time, having been overawed by his volcanic father Lodevicus, he gave the impression of a gruff, grumpy man with a firm-set countenance. He did not, however, seem a large man; there were many in his district who were taller, but few were more sturdy.

He had a right to take pride in his farm; from the fine start his father had given, he had augmented De Kraal in all respects. The basic holding was still that splendid valley set within protecting hills, with the copious stream running from the southwest right through
the middle of the land to an opening at the northeast, from which it wandered on to make junction with the Great Fish River some miles farther on.

What Tjaart had done was to acquire from the government the right to use pasturage beyond the hills, and with the proceeds from his large herds, add to the clay-and-stone buildings that formed the heart of the farm. The house now had a spacious kitchen in which Jakoba could supervise the cooking; the servants and slaves occupied a chain of eight small huts linked together; calves had kraals with stone walls; and hay was stored in a spacious barn. Smaller buildings had proliferated for the safe holding of farm tools, feed and chicken roosts.

The farm contained the original nine thousand acres within the hills, but it now controlled an additional sixteen thousand acres to which he did not have legal title, but which his Coloured stockmen could use in herding cattle and flocks of sheep. Although he rarely saw much formal money, he had made himself into a man of considerable wealth and could look forward to a prosperous and placid old age.

Of course, most Boers grumbled about the English administration, its creeping modifications of law and custom, but such complaints were offset by the fact that the stalwart English settlers were now sharing the dangers of frontier life. The struggle had been harsh, as one Englishman noted in his diary:

And always there were the blacks invading the lands of Boer and Englishman alike. Tjaart, veldkornet of his district, had frequently taken his men to Grahamstown to help those settlers repel cattle
raiders, and in many actions, had fought beside Richard Saltwood, ivory merchant, and Thomas Carleton, master wagon builder. He had found them an honorable pair and had invited them to hunting parties at De Kraal. Saltwood had proved himself not only a fine shot but a congenial guest who lacked all the mannerisms that irritated the Boers. He had even told Tjaart on departing at the end of the last hunt, “This must be the best farm I’ve ever seen,” and with that he handed Mevrouw Jakoba two bottles of Trianon wine he had been hoarding.

And then the camaraderie was endangered. Lukas de Groot, Tjaart’s neighbor nineteen miles to the north, stopped by one day on his way home from the port of that wild stretch of coast at which the English settlers had come ashore, and shocked Tjaart by showing him a copy of the Grahamstown newspaper: Dr. Simon Keer, the philanthropic leader in London, had published his second book, called
The Infamy of the Dutch Slaveholder
, and its appearance was guaranteed to cause trouble, for it was a savage assault against South African life and a shameless emotional appeal to the English Parliament to pass laws which Keer had long been advocating.

Keer’s pressure came at a time when agitation for abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire was gaining momentum; it signaled the beginning of the final battle to demolish what many Boers considered their God-granted right: that all men of color should labor for them six days a week and sometimes seven, whether slave or free.

Keer’s grand strategy of waging this war with propaganda in England had thus triumphed over Hilary Saltwood’s tactic of cherishing and saving souls on the spot. The inspired lecturer with his flaming oratory had vanquished the modest missionary who had actually married one of his charges to prove that he loved them all. What Keer said in his new book was this:

Was there any truth in these charges? Some. Was there gross exaggeration? A great deal. But from the indictment came a law which radically altered life on the frontier. “Look what Keer and his fellow saints have done to us!” De Groot raged as he showed Tjaart the new provisions. “It makes the Coloureds, the Hottentots, the Bushmen the exact equal to us Boers. They have all the rights we have. No further apprenticeship of the young. No work contracts. They don’t have to have fixed abodes. Magistrates can no longer whip them as won’t-works. From now on, damnit, Van Doorn, a man of color has all the rights I have.”

“That’s terribly wrong!” Jakoba interrupted as the men talked. “That’s not what God intended at all.”

What Reverend Keer intended was a softening of the harsh laws that restricted servants; what he got was a disastrous dislocation; and the immediate burden fell on Lukas and Rachel de Groot, for when their herders and farm hands got word of their new status, twenty of thirty-six laborers took off, and it was a group of these homeless, roaming vagrants who ravaged their daughter.

To the big Boer she was Blommetjie, “Little Flower,” a fragile girl of fourteen who spent most of her time among the trees and blooms of the veld. The three men found her beside a small stream, humming softly. She did not get home for the midday meal, and when she still wasn’t back by late afternoon, De Groot went looking for her—and found a wild, deranged creature dragging herself across a mealie field.

He left the child with Rachel, said not a word and asked no one to accompany him as he rode out at dusk. Two of the guilty men had fled and would never again be seen in that district, but the third lay drunk in one of the deserted huts on De Groot’s farm—and when the Boer discovered him, he pulled the man into the open, and for a moment stood over him.

“Get up, you devil!” he said grimly, and the man stood, swaying unsteadily, looking dazedly at his baas. With a wild cry of anguish, De Groot brought his gun up, and then the man realized what was happening, but as he backed away, a bullet slammed into his chest. He fell to the ground, not quite dead, and as he lay there De Groot pumped bullets into him, again and again.

As veldkornet, it was Tjaart’s duty to report on the incident, and he duly swore that the vagrant had been shot while attempting to flee after having stolen mealies. The case was closed, but the wound in De Groot’s heart remained open.

•  •  •

The season passed and no one said much about Blommetjie; they trusted that one day soon she would be able to move about the veld again. There was no improvement, either, in the labor situation, and increasingly Tjaart and his sons had to go out with the herds, much like the Van Doorns of four generations ago. And then, on a certain day in October when spring flowers made the veld a garden, Tjaart said at table, “We shall go to the next Nachtmaal.”

The news created wild happiness among the women: Jakoba would be able to see friends she had not talked with for two long years; the slave women who would go along to do the cooking would enjoy the chance to meet with other slaves and to cook dishes they preferred; and little Minna, now thirteen and already worrying about how she would find a husband in this great emptiness, conjured up visions of a bright lad named Ryk Naudé, whom she had last seen at the Nachtmaal: “May I have a new dress, Mama? I mustn’t go in my old one.”

So the slave women, who cherished the girl, set about the pleasant task of fitting her out for a dress which would compare favorably with the fashions in Grahamstown: turned-down collar, wide sleeves fastened at the wrists, flounces around the lower part of the skirt, and a general sauciness to catch the eyes of young men. As they worked, Tjaart saw how much joy his daughter was deriving from the process. She was not a beautiful child, no one had ever claimed that, but she was a fine stout lass, strong in body and character. The fact that she was illiterate did not mean that she was stupid, for she could recite long passages from the Bible. There was little in the repertory of a good Boer
vrouw
that she could not do, and whereas in the western part of the colony girls her age often had two or three slaves of their own and never raised a finger except in rebuke, Minna was an industrious young woman, adept at anything from making soap and candles to spinning her father’s wool into strong thread.