When I started this novel four years ago, I had this notion to tell a nice little story set in the Karoo in the 18th century. I had no idea what I was in for. My thanks go first to two great brothers: Ghalick and Hymie, for all those special favours, and never saying no. Dan Sleigh, for giving me the names of Twa and Smoke in the Eyes. The people of Calvinia, especially Alta Coetzee who arranged for me to stay in the Karoo Boekehuis, and Danie Poggenpoel and his wife who told me many stories. The Richvale Writers’ Club in Toronto for being the first to encourage me to ‘tackle’ historical fiction and listening to the opening scenes. My daughter, Zaida, who was there the whole time behind me on the bed doing homework. And a special thanks to my South African publisher, Annari van der Merwe, who after a first reading, said, ‘this book is too eurocentric’ and forced me to look at it differently. This book could also not have been written without the wonderful stories and information contained in numerous books on animal behaviour and the history of the early Cape. I am especially indebted to the following works: Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1702, The First Fifty Years of Dutch Colonisation as seen by Callers, translated with notes by R. Raven-Hart, Vols I, II, A.A. Balkema, Cape Town, 1971; Journals of Jan van Riebeeck, 1651–1662, Vols I, II, III, edited by H.B. Thom, A.A. Balkema, Cape Town, Amsterdam, 1952; The Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbours, edited by Lee and DeVore, Harvard University Press, 1974.
I have decided to tell the story the way it is. It is a book of fiction, after all, and sometimes we go too far with all this de-labelling. In the words of the late Oupa Regopstaan who responded to a question of mine in 1994 on whether he liked being called San, ‘Wat is San? Ek is ‘n man van die bos.’
Rayda Jacobs
September, 1996
Chapter One
It was an intensely still night, the radiance of the moon spilling into the back of the lonely little house on the rise. Inside the house were four beds, and in one of them, a boy stirred in his sleep. Some noise had scratched into his dreams. He opened his eyes and listened. Had the servant entered the house? Sanna was practically his mother the way she fussed over him, part of the family. She was always stumbling into things, especially with the baby strapped to her back. Pa? Oupa Harman? He didn’t think so. It had sounded sudden and far away. Outside was mile upon mile of dry and broken land studded with kareebome, skaapbos and vygies, the house on the slope of the rant with its sheep kraal and huts breaking the monotony of the vast, featureless plain.
Then he heard it again, the growling of Ratel and Riempie, and sat up, looking at his brother asleep in the next bed. A sudden scream made him throw off the covers and run to his father’s bed. Willem Kloot already had the loaded musket in his hand.
‘Sounds like trouble out there.’
Roeloff ran out after his father without bothering to put on his veldskoene.
The soil was warm under his feet as he ran in the direction of the kraal, arriving to find a dead sheep with arrows in its back and Ratel and Riempie at the neck and arms of two Bushmen boys twisting about in the dust.
‘I’ll kill you!’ Willem pointed the gun down at their heads.
‘No, Pa!’
Willem turned at the voice of his son, a sprightly boy of twelve with blue eyes, and hair the colour of Karoo sand when the sun arched directly overhead.
‘What are you doing out here?’
‘Don’t shoot. Twa can talk to them.’
Willem kicked the intruders viciously in the ribs. They balled up like caterpillars, but made no sound of their pain.
Roeloff turned to run to the servants’ huts and saw the old Bushman, dressed in skins, come limping up.
‘Pa wants you, Twa. Come quickly!’
‘Ask where their camp is,’ Willem barked.
A proliferation of click sounds knocked at the roof of his mouth as Twa addressed the boy trapped under Willem Kloot’s boot.
The boy tucked his head between his knees and refused to speak.
Willem aimed the gun.
Twa kneeled down on his good leg and tried harder, waving his hands angrily in order to make them understand the seriousness of their crime.
‘They won’t talk,’ he said finally.
‘Tell them to stand.’
When they were up on their feet, Willem shot one of them point blank in the chest. The boy was lifted from his feet and fell back with a thud, blood snaking from the wound under his heart.
Roeloff looked at his father in horror.
‘Ask him if he wants the same.’
Twa addressed the other boy. With the gun pointed at his head, he spoke quickly. He didn’t know the gun needed reloading before the white man could shoot again.
‘A waterhole near the hanging rock, he says. Behind the Hantam.’
‘Tie him up. Tomorrow he goes to Joubert. Joubert will know how to tame him. And bury that bosjesman before he attracts other animals.’
‘You killed him, Pa.’
Willem looked at his son.
‘He’s a thief. That’ll teach them to come here and steal. Now go back inside.’
David had heard the shot and was up when Roeloff returned.
‘Pa killed a bosjesman.’
‘What were they doing on our land?’
‘Looking for food.’
‘Stealing, you mean. The kommando should get the lot of them. Last month they raided Maatie Muller’s kraal and killed six sheep. Just killed them and left them there.’
‘Pa’s getting dangerous. He’s changed since Oom Jan came. Oom Jan should have stayed in Roodezand. If it was so green and wet where he was, why’d he come north? Pa wouldn’t have done it if Ma were alive. And I heard Oom Jan talk about the kommando the other day. He wants Pa to join up. Pa’s thinking on it.’
‘The kommando protects us. The Hottentots come at us from one end, the bosjesman from another. At least a Hottentot respects cattle and sheep. He’s not going to kill out of revenge. A Hottentot with two sheep will make six, you get some clever Hottentots. A bosjesman will kill both and shove it all down his gut in a day.’
‘That’s not true. He only kills what he can eat, he respects animals, Twa said. He says all this land belonged to his people.’
‘Belonged?’ David laughed in the dark. ‘They’re thieves and savages, all of them. How could anything have belonged to them? What have they done with the land?’
‘There were many animals before we came. We scared them off.’
‘Scared them off?’
‘Yes. With our guns. Our loud noises. We have disturbed the harmony of the veld. Even the bees, he says, are making their homes far away.’
‘You spend too much time listening to that jong. What does he know, an old bosjesman like him? Now, stop all this nonsense and go to bed.’
Roeloff listened to his brother’s even breathing, haunted by the face of the dead boy, the cold-hearted calm of his father. What was it about his brother that sometimes made Roeloff dislike him? He liked all the people on the farm, he almost loved Twa. Twa was a friend, a teller of stories, a provider of food. Left for dead by the kommando who’d wiped out his camp decades before, Twa, the ‘thin man’, was picked up by Roeloff’s grandfather, Oupa Harman, behind the Hantamberge, the two almost killing each other in the process. Twa became Oupa Harman’s voorloper and tracker in 1765, and later, Willem’s. Twa had never done a day’s work in his life, David always said, and sometimes the sheep got taken out and the manure transported to where Willem Kloot wanted it, and sometimes Twa just squatted on his heels like an old king at his small fire, fixing the tension on his bow, saying he’d worked the previous day and was tired. When he got like that nothing budged him, and Sanna, the Koi-na servant, refused him food from the three-legged pot. But Twa had a different understanding of work. To him, hunting was work, and hard work at that, not looking after sheep who knew what they had to do anyway. What did he know about sheep? Some Sonqua had sheep, but his tribe had never looked after them. That was white men’s work. White men had the magic of their fire sticks if they wanted to hunt large animals. The Sonqua relied on instinct and a big heart and the poison on the tip of his arrow. Roeloff agreed. Twa was a wonder to him, more intriguing than the travelling German teaching the unlettered farmers and children how to read and multiply. Twa’s stories were full of animal people, trickster gods, and ancestors advising on everything from the burrowing habits of the porcupine to when to expect rain. So far the rain god had miscalculated and they were barely surviving on the brackish dribble in the well, but Twa waved this off with the explanation that that god had many areas to cover and wasn’t always nearby.
Roeloff’s grandfather, too, could tell a tale, especially about the trekboer and the original settlers at the Cape, but Oupa Harman’s stories, true and courageous as they were, didn’t touch Twa’s for magic and lifting you out of the sameness of the Karoo. It wasn’t only their fantastical nature, it was how Twa told them: laughing, gesticulating, retelling the same story many times, embellishing greatly on the original. A story could have several endings, depending on the point he wanted to convey, but however it turned out, the little yellow-skinned hunter always emerged the victor.
They had learnt each other’s language, much to the consternation of his brother who couldn’t understand Roeloff’s association with the bosjesman, and Twa could now speak Dutch, and he, !Khomani. Twa looked after him. When the two of them were out in the veld with the sheep, Twa would never let him go hungry. ‘Hey, Kudu,’ he would call to him. ‘You hungry?’ And he would get out his bow and arrow or set a trap. Before the sun dipped in the sky, they would be sitting at Twa’s small fire, watching the meat sizzle on the coals. He didn’t always want to know what Twa brought down with his arrow—Twa knew he ate kolganse, kraanvoëls, and ostrich—and had even tried tortoise, which he liked, and porcupine, which he didn’t. His father’s musket worked much faster than the tiny arrow, and they had blesbok any number of times, but it was more satisfying eating with Twa who could spend days tracking an animal and hunting it down. Roeloff didn’t have this closeness with his brother. His brother was his brother and that was it. David had no time for him.
