by Peter Rimmer
Elijah heard the dove and knew the soldiers were not coming back. Inside the maize field, his family crouched with their few possessions.
“It is time to go,” he said to his three wives and four of his children. “The soldiers have taken the food.”
“Where are we going?” asked his third wife.
“Home.”
“This is our home.”
There were fourteen of them hiding in the stand of maize that grew about the women’s heads, the youngest child asleep, wrapped on her mother’s back with a piece of cloth. Elijah and two of his remaining sons carried hunting rifles and water skins. It would take them many weeks to walk to the coast where the river washed into the sea.
“What about the woman?” asked his second wife who was the same age as Helena.
“It is better we go. There is no food. Her God will look after her. The preacher always said that God was on his side. You are my family. They were our masters. Now we must be our own masters and go back to the tribe.”
“But I am not Xhosa,” said the three wives together.
“You as my family will be welcome.”
“We are afraid,” said the senior wife.
“It’s the war,” said Elijah, “each must look after his own. We are going home. Come, before the dogs find us again.”
And Elijah, with his gun at the trail, led them out of the maize field and by nightfall they were off the land he had ridden around so many years before with Ezekiel Oosthuizen.
“We could have stayed,” said one of his son’s wives.
“And your men would have been digging trenches for the Boers,” said Elijah, “When the British come to take back Kimberley they would have killed your husband for helping the Boers. This is a white man’s war. Let them kill each other.”
Two days after Alison had a miscarriage with their fourth child, Barend came home from the neighbouring farm with his right eye shut and swollen and Tinus Oosthuizen knew that his peace and quiet was over. The boy’s nose had been bleeding and his shirt was torn down the back. The boy was eight years old and already in the wars. His young sister looked at her father with acute disapproval.
“This is all your fault,” said four-year-old Tinka and Tinus had to suppress a wish to laugh at the brazenness of the little girl looking up at him with her hands on her hips. Instead, he picked her up to get a closer look into the slate-grey eyes below the big eyelashes. “Put me down,” she screamed and pulled his beard.
“What happened?” he said gently, putting her on the garden table that sat alone with a bench under the oak tree.
“Thys du Plessis beat him up.”
“But Thys is twelve. His father would never let him fight an eight-year-old.”
“Barend started the fight.”
“Tinka, don’t tell stories. A year, two years Thys will be a man.”
“He said you are for the British. That our mummy’s British. That your mummy was British.”
Barend, talking for the first time since the beating, looked at his father. “I said you were for the Boers. That many Oosthuizens are fighting for the Boers. Then he said you are a coward for not going to fight like his father and I hit him.”
“Has Magnus joined Scheepers?”
“There’s going to be a big battle near Kimberley. The Boers have men down here looking for recruits. The British are sending train after train to the front with soldiers. Thys said Cape Town was full of British troops and it wasn’t fair. If I was older, I would go and fight for the Boers.”
“It’s not our war, Barend. We are British subjects living in the Cape which is a British colony. Any British subject caught fighting for the Boers become rebels and are hanged if they are caught. The British Empire is the biggest empire the world has ever seen. We Boers are not only fighting Britain. There are Canadian and Australian troops with Roberts right now. Never start a fight you can’t win, son, however right you are. It’s the first principle of survival. Afterwards, you find a way to get your own back and if you are right, you will. The British are going to win this war however clever the Boers have been up till now, and any Cape Boers going out with Scheepers will be hanged by the neck.”
“Then Thys was right. You are a coward.”
“Barend, you are my son.”
“No, I’m not anymore.”
With his hand in his sister’s and his dignity intact, the boy turned his back and walked away towards the gabled house.
“Oh my God,” said Tinus sitting heavily on the wooden bench. “Now what do I do?”
As was his habit, Tinus walked, but the problem grew larger as he thought through the alternatives. In frustration, he longed for the solitude of the lone hunter before Sebastian had joined him in the hunt. The months of uncomplicated happiness were never as well appreciated at the time. There had been no one to look after or worry about other than himself, and the two blacks who followed his trail and cut the great tusks from the elephant carcass and sat wordless but comfortable with him at night around the fire, listened to the symphony of Africa without a worry in any of their minds, the great heaven of stars high above them, layer upon layer in the universe of God. And when the men spoke it was men’s talk of hunting and finding food, and the problems of other people were nowhere in their minds. In the early times, he had stayed out in the bush for two years without speaking English or Afrikaans, as content as the herds of animals that roamed the great empty space of Africa. Now his wife was miserable, his half-made child buried in the earth, his eldest son was black and blue defending his honour, his daughter thought she hated him, the one half, the McDonald half, was fighting with the other half, the Oosthuizen’s half, that made him who he was and the dilemma was tearing him apart. All he wanted was to be alone in peace on the banks of the Zambezi River with the fish eagles calling and the river running smoothly by his side.
At the stables he saddled his horse and rode out away from the house, trying to run away from his problems, but the further and harder he rode, so the problems stayed and festered in his mind.
After two hours and without a solution he turned his horse and rode back to face his troubles. There was life and death, these were certain; and then there was honour and duty, right and wrong, hope and despair, and these were the ones he no longer understood.
The curtains were drawn tightly, hiding the day, but light seeped into the big room with the great bed and canopy, and Alison felt more miserable than at any time she had ever known and the tears flowed on and on. All her life had gone with the child she yearned to hold and comfort but had buried deep in the dark earth like the tomb she wanted for her room to become in the depth of her pain. She wanted to die. If life made so much pain, she wanted to die. If so much beauty turned so quickly to so much pain, she wanted to die. The tap on the door was far away and then he was standing beside the bed and she hated him. The cause of her pain.
“Go away,” she said, loud and clear and turned her wet face into the pillow, hiding her words. Her child was dead. There was nothing he or anyone else could do.
The day moved on to its own conclusion and the sun set behind the mountains and the valley darkened with the shadow of the sun and the birds called; the black ibis flew high in flocks, their loud, harsh cries accompanying their flight. The light faded and the day was gone and no one came to his bench under the oak until it was very dark in the hour before the moon had risen and the stars had found their power of light. The words behind him came like the words of God, and for a long moment he listened before he turned.
“I have a message from your brother Ezekiel, Tinus Oosthuizen. Your people need you. A skilled hunter like you. You must come with us north. The volk is going north to fight… You can’t stay here any longer. You know that yourself. You’ll feel much better when you are committed. Magnus du Plessis and the others are waiting for us. The wives will look after each other. Bring your horse and rifle. When the moon rises we ride for Kimberley. Now, let us pray, you and I.”
“W
ho are you?”
“GJ Scheepers. The British call us the Cape Rebels… Now, let us pray that God will deliver us and our people.”
5
February 1900
Whilst six thousand British cavalry led by the 9th and 16th Lancers with pennants snapping above the swirling dust were cutting through the Boer line of defence opening the way to Kimberley, Kei was opening the first box of Martini-Henry rifles that Zwide had helped to carry into the cave seven years earlier. Sarie’s dog sniffed at the oily paper covering the guns and lost interest. The skeleton wrapped in a black ox-skin sat behind the rifles against the wall, and alongside was a leopard skin and an induna’s head-ring. For all that day while General John French’s cavalry was sabring the Boers and then riding the last miles to relieve Kimberley, Kei and his four companions, with flaming torches looking into every crevice and cranny, searched for the gold of Lobengula, last King of the Matabele. All they found of the king’s wealth was three huge tusks of ivory left around the king’s burial shroud.
At the mouth of the cave, the five men made camp looking north to the Zambezi River. Carried on the wind came the sound of continuous thunder.
“The spirit of the king is warning us to go away!” said the man the British had called Shaka. The Zulu was terrified of the ancestors. He spoke in Afrikaans, their common language.
“It’s a big river,” said the Ndebele.
“What big river?” asked Bow-legs, the Sotho.
“The Zambezi. I had a friend who had a friend who saw the river plunge over into the great hole in the ground, sending the river water into clouds. You hear the smoke that thunders.”
The second Sotho shook his head in disbelief. “It is God speaking.”
They were all silent as the sun sinking behind them poked yellow and red fingers through the clouds, leaving pale patches of duck-egg blue, clear and ethereal. Somewhere towards the sound of thunder, now a constant roar as the wind turned full in their direction, a lion roared and was answered from afar. As the sky behind them lost its colour, the lions roared on and on. Many birds in the mopane forest below the cave called to tell their partners where they were. When the birds of the day were quiet, the owls began to hoot. Kei fed the fire in silence and the flames rose, drawing light up the gnarled tree that had grown out of a crack in the rock and would shade their camp from the sun during the day. The dog Sarie had given Kei sat panting away from the fire at the rim of the light, its tongue hanging limp and dripping sweat.
While General French was drinking iced champagne with Cecil Rhodes in the Kimberley Club (the Boers having melted away from their siege trenches once the heavy cavalry had punched a hole through Cronjé’s miles of defence), the five men agreed the black ox-skin covered the king and that the gold of Lobengula had never existed. They cooked the small buck Kei had shot and skinned at first light. By the time the moon rose, all five men and the dog were fast asleep.
When Kei woke with the sun on his face, the fire was white ash and the dog was nowhere to be seen. Expecting the dog to bound back at any moment, Kei led the five horses down to the stream that flowed out of the side of the hill and let them drink. Two eagles circled the sky silently looking for prey.
“Where’s Blackdog?” asked Shaka.
“He’ll be around,” said Kei more confidently than he felt. Then he called for the dog at the top of his voice, the name echoing far into the king’s burial cave.
After a while of calling, Blackdog trotted out of the cave looking pleased with himself. In his mouth was Zwide’s head-ring which he dropped at Kei’s feet.
“It’s an omen,” said Shaka. “The dog is telling us something. The ancestors have spoken to the dog. Why would an induna leave his head-ring behind, the symbol of his power? He would never do that at the time of the king’s burial. He must have come back. And why did he come back? To take the gold. Any Matabele warrior will recognise the ring. There is gold or why did he come back and leave his head-ring as a symbol of his right? Whichever induna wore that ring on his head knows where he put the gold. He moved it, you see, to stop anyone from the king’s burial party coming back and stealing the gold.”
“You think a Matabele will tell me anything?” asked Kei.
“They will tell me,” said the Ndebele. “We are the same tribe.”
Tatenda, Harry’s childhood companion, had turned twenty-four at the time war broke out between the Boers and the British. After years of humping carcasses on his back, his shoulders had grown broad and his jet-black skin shone with rude health. The butchery had grown and was the largest in Bulawayo and if the pay was poor, the pickings were good and none of his friends went hungry. The new town of Bulawayo, some miles from the dead king’s kraal, was flourishing, spurred on by British agents buying supplies for the biggest army that had ever left British shores.
When the word reached the butchery, spreading like wildfire down the wide main street, Tatenda knew that deliverance was not to come from a British defeat at the hands of the Boer. Kimberley had been relieved and Cronjé’s army was caught in a loop of the Modder River. With Cronjé crushed there would be nothing to stop the British from capturing Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State, and after that Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal. Tatenda knew it was the beginning of the end and he cursed as the yoke of the British Empire dropped more firmly over his neck. Each day he translated the English papers for Zwide, never once thanking Emily for teaching him to read and write. With the first Chimurenga a distant memory, the bitterness of defeat had soured to a constant pain. All that kept him working was the knowledge of Lobengula’s gold, the wealth that would one day buy them guns to win the second Chimurenga and chase the British out of Africa once and for all.
They had built their huts along a small stream a half-hour walk from Jack Slater’s butchery, the one-time temporary administrator turned businessman. After dropping Harry’s .410 shotgun and fleeing across the Mazoe River, Tatenda had wandered through the bush living as best he could, one of many fugitives fleeing the wrath of British justice and the certainty of being hanged by his neck from the nearest tree if they knew he had attacked the white man’s compound. He ate locusts and mopane worms to keep himself alive and a year later thought it safe enough to look for a job in Bulawayo, far enough away from Salisbury and the Mazoe Valley. His bitterness in defeat came to Zwide’s attention as nothing that happened in the black village that grew next to the new wealth in Bulawayo was lost to the old induna and quietly, without Tatenda knowing the reason, he was told to walk to Jack Slater’s butchery where he would find a job chopping and humping the white man’s meat. Only after six months of hard work was he told that Zwide had been Lobengula’s general and the seed of liberation still burnt in the general’s heart. By the time French relieved Kimberley, Tatenda was one of three people who knew where Zwide had moved the king’s gold and the gold was to be used to liberate the Matabele and the Shona from the grip of Cecil Rhodes. Under oath to the ancestors, Tatenda swore to keep alive the dream of the liberation… Emily’s kindness in bringing up an orphan had been returned with hatred. To Tatenda, the kindness was patronage and if there was one thing Tatenda hated more than anything else in his life, it was being patronised.
Jack Slater had worked out that administering a small part of the British Empire was not going to make him rich and, despite the social stigma back in England, he had gone into trade. After a brief fling working for De Beers in Kimberley, and a year after hanging the ringleaders of the Shona rebellion, he had resigned from the employ of Cecil Rhodes and found his way to Bulawayo where he had spent six months getting drunk in three out of the four bars, the Cecil having thrown him out for bad behaviour. He had grown a thick beard, his hair was down his back, and no one would have believed him if he had told the drunks he sat with that back in 1896 he had taken over the administration of Rhodesia while Jameson was fanning the flames of what was now the war raging south of the Limpopo River. Every old timer and quite a few young timers had storie
s of glory in their past when the alcohol made them brave and before they ran down the last of the evening into maudlin drunkenness.
By the time Kimberley was relieved he was thirty-three, called himself Jack Slattery for safety when he remembered, never wrote to his family in Tonbridge, and was rich and getting much richer. By the time he was forty, he would have enough money to go home, shave off his beard, find his family, revert to Jack Slater and buy himself a nice country estate in the middle of Kent. The Jack Slater when he finished would appear from nowhere and become a country gentleman and ride to hounds. With his wealth, he would then look for a rich wife, have a large family and forget Fran Cotton… He always thought of her as Fran Cotton, single, instead of Fran Shaw, married, to assuage the guilt of having an affair with a married woman that broke all the rules he had once so carefully lived by and had thought so essential.
The day Kei and three friends walked into Bulawayo trailed by a black dog, he had decided the only rule that mattered in life was being rich.
Kei had wisely left the horses and tack in an abandoned Matabele village with the guns. Shaka had been left behind to look after the animals.
The first Matabele to be shown the head-ring ran away without saying a word. The second tried to grab at the ring and was hit hard in the face by Kei’s right fist. A day later one of the horses went lame and had to be shot. Blackdog, sensing the animosity, took to whimpering at the sight of strangers. On the fourth day, the Ndebele who had been asking the questions was found dead hanging from a tree. In the dark of the night, Kei, his three remaining friends and Blackdog left town making a trail pointing south and back to the raging war. Five miles from the nearest hut, Kei found a small stream that would serve his purpose. Leading the way in the light of a sickle moon he turned the horses north, the hanging and the dead horse convincing him even more of the existence of Lobengula’s gold. Still in his pocket was Zwide’s head-ring. The lust for gold was so strong he could see the yellow coins.
