A Trojan Affair

by Michael Smorenburg

  “How many versions of just Christianity are there? It’s unstable because it constantly splinters. The interpretations of holy books are too wide open to agenda; I don’t like that.” It seemed like he’d finished, but before Chris could respond, Dara summarized it. “That’s why the modern world is made by scientists, not by theologians.”

  “You’ve taught him some pretty tight reasoning,” Chris was impressed.

  Marsha was impressed also, and a little taken aback, though not shocked, by the impromptu speech her son had just given. “Not in so many words,” she admitted. “But we all only know what we’ve learned, so I’d like to think I put some of those thoughts in this baby.” Still in her arms since she’d hugged him, she kissed his head. “But they’re his words. I was always careful to teach him how to think, not what to think,” Marsha added.

  Chapter 9

  Oom Karel had the skin of a parched lakebed.

  Oom was an adopted word from white Afrikaans culture—it meant ‘uncle’, but was widely used in the generic sense to indicate any older male.

  The Oom was a small man with the darting eyes of a marmoset. But those eyes were becoming glassy now, opaque with years.

  The more gaunt his features grew with age, the more prominent his high cheekbones became, making him look more Oriental with each passing season. It was another of the hallmarks of his Bushman heritage.

  He loved to be asked his age. “I am as young as the most beautiful wish in my heart,” he’d declare, “and as old as the unfulfilled longings in my life.”

  Empty bags of skin hung in gathered folds all about his withered body that in his advanced years had become scarcely more than a sack of bones. Yet, he put in a full day’s work five and a half days a week. People often remarked that if he ever grew back into all those wrinkles he’d be a giant, and it never failed to send him into paroxysms of laughter that always ended in a hacking cough. He’d eventually choke on it, bring up something colourful and spit it into the dirt.

  Always into the dirt—he was never not in the dirt with his bare feet. He lay or squatted in the dirt under the sun or a tree, even if there was a level of cast cement and comfortable chair alternative, in the dirt he’d remain by choice. He proclaimed that contact with the soil was his roots and nourishment. “You never find plants growing on rock bed in a cave,” was his mantra.

  It was the wild tobacco and whatever else he packed into his ancient yellow ivory pipe that kept him hacking and spitting. The putrid smoke that engulfed his head much of the day fortified him against the cold of the winter and fierceness of the summer’s heat. Against the pangs of hunger and agonies of teeth now rotted away.

  Most of all it killed the pain of loss, the loss of dignity and freedom, and the loss of his culture and kin, nearly all gone now.

  “My boy,” he told Dawie, “it is soon my time to go.”

  “Your time is a long time off,” Dawie assured him. The old man had looked the same and said that same thing for as long as Dawie could remember.

  “It is different now, Dawie. I know I have said it many times, but I didn’t really mean it. I have loved my life. It has been hard, and I have seen many things. But my family are now all gone.” Oom’s brother had died two months before and it had cut him deeply.

  “We are your family,” Dawie reminded and assured the old man.

  “You are, my boy, all of you are. I am proud of you all and happy to have lived my last days with you. But my real world has passed—has passed long ago. When I was a boy, I had great grandparents and brothers and sisters. And there were cousins, and later came the children of these, all my family, yes. But they have gone now, all gone. They were the people who knew me as I was, when I was a man. Strong! I could run all day. I could track an animal on the run for three days without sleeping or eating. They knew that me. Now I am alone in remembering that man; I am the only one still alive who knew the real me.”

  Dawie was about to protest, but Oom stopped him.

  “No, my boy. I am not sad; I am happy. I am not complaining—this is as it should be, that the old leave a new world for the young. The world is changing, and you are like a green branch that can bend with it. Look at me…” he held out a withered old arm that looked like it belonged to a mummy. “I can no longer bend. I can’t adapt to the changes. I must go while I have dignity and my memories.”

  He went on, in the Bushman tradition of word of mouth history, reminding Dawie of the clan’s remote past, its folklore; of how they outsmarted the newcomers for so long, until the newcomers had taken their livelihood—their game—shot it out, penned it in behind fences.

  He disappeared into the dreamstate, his eyes glazing, travelling far back through time. He marvelled at the springbok that he saw as he went—the native antelope of the territory, moving in herds that spanned from horizon to horizon, millions in number—now all gone. All hunted to near extinction in his lifetime.

  Now their sustenance and staples were owned by others; he sighed. Everything reduced to a commodity with a profitable value.

  And his mind was gone again, dredging the painful memories of times when they too were hunted; his people hunted, a bounty on each head, out in the deep bush. Their crime: no traceable linage recounted in the Big Book—the Bible—the only law the Trekboer frontiersmen carried or cared about. It designated the First People, as they had subsequently come to be known in our more enlightened era, to be numbered among the animals back then.

  Now they too were owned, he admitted; just a commodity with a profitable value in menial labour… and perhaps more than that.

  Back then, before the game were gone, even the authorities—the British and German colonial masters—had sold licenses to hunt and shoot the ancestors; whole families, men, women and their children on the run from hunters with guns, a practice only abandoned in the 1920s.

  Dawie had heard it all countless times before, but culture dictated that he should drink it all in as if it was the first time of hearing. And so he did, sitting with his grandfather under the shade of a thorn tree deep into the late afternoon.

  “There are big ears coming to our land soon,” he told Dawie, “steel ears with roots into the ground, listening to the sky. The Dominee came to tell me this.”

  It snapped Dawie out of his stupor of listening to oft-repeated accounts of their place in history. Oom Karel hated the Dominee—he had never capitulated to the angry Christian god that they had tried to threaten and bribe him and the clan into revering.

  “The Dominee says?” Dawie’s shock was unmaskable.

  “Yes, my boy. He and the Baas and some others came to see me. I have been thinking about what they said. They told me of what you also told me—about the big ears to listen to the sky.”

  Dawie always fed a constant stream of news from the village and school back to the farm where his grandfather and family still toiled. The SKA and its giant dish antennas—ears—was a hot topic of course for him. The younger members of the family imagined that they would somehow see their lot improve immeasurably, what with the new tar roads, construction, airstrip and countless other exciting-sounding developments coming to town.

  That not one of them and nobody they knew had personally ever been in an airplane, driven a car or done more than shop for the basics seemed to elude their minds. If these things were coming, surely—they reasoned with their timeless optimism—they would participate in it?

  Now Dawie wondered, what was up with the Dominee bringing this news to the old man? What did he want? This was unprecedented. The masters never came to the servants to engage them or seek their opinion. Yes, sometimes they came to get support, maybe to win election votes; but that was dished out as an instruction leaving no doubt that an “or else” consequence stood behind it.

  The way the old man was talking now though, it seemed that the Dominee wanted something; not demanding, but seeking help, almost like an equal.

  It was most suspicious.

  “The Dominee said they a
re going to listen to the sky with the big ears,” Oom Karel was repeating. “And the Dominee said that his God has already put His voice in the Big Book so these troublemakers can now only hear what the Devil wants them to think.”

  “And you believe this, Oupa? Grandpa?” Dawie quizzed carefully.

  “Hell no….” the withered old man chuckled. “That Dominee is mal—he’s crazy! He always thinks there’s a devil behind every bush and shadow, but I’ve never heard him say the Devil is also in the sky! That is where his God lives, that’s what he usually says. So, who knows? Maybe the Devil is visiting his God up there?”

  He broke off into peals of laughter that ended in hacking and spitting.

  “I believe they are listening for what you told me they are listening for; a different kind of light—light we can’t see, like sound we can’t hear, even though the sound is there.”

  The culture worked both ways. The old listening intently to the children and parsing what they heard through the filter of possibility to see if it could defeat any dogma they held; it was the only way to survive nature.

  “What does he want then Oupa? Why did he come to you, to us?”

  “He says that the ears are going onto our land and that we must fight it and stop them.”

  “Our land?” Dawie was stunned and disbelieving. “The Dominee said it is our land? Ours…? What does he mean?”

  “Yes, my boy. It is our land now. His people’s farms are now on our land because it was our ancestor’s land. Lands he says they are protecting for us with their laws… or we would otherwise destroy it all because we are backward. He says he can show us how to protect our heritage with their laws, with the new black man’s laws, he says. That is the claim he makes, but we all know it is only their interests they want us to protect.” He laughed again. He laughed a lot. There were very few things he didn’t laugh at.

  Dawie instantly gauged and understood what was afoot. The country was rife with land claims under the new Constitution of South Africa—groups of mainly Nguni tribes and clans laying claim to pockets of land that their ancestors had farmed before the white man had arrived. Successful claims on land by Bushmen were pitifully rare; unless it was settled, the courts were disinterested in establishing the rights of those that wander. It was a farmer’s law, not a huntsman’s law.

  “So, are they handing the land back, then?” Dawie asked shrewdly.

  “You are a clever boy. That was my first question,” the old clan leader said.

  “You asked the Dominee that?”

  “Of course not!” The old man’s eyes twinkled. “That was the question I asked myself. When you find your eland, do you race unchecked over open ground to kill him immediately?”

  The eland is Africa’s largest antelope, large and rare. They occupied a deeply mythical realm in Bushman lore. A Bushman, certainly not by an elder of Oom Karel’s standing, did not lightly pose an analogy to an eland.

  “When we hunt, we don’t let our quarry know that we are a threat.”

  “Did the Dominee also go to the Xhosa for their help?” Dawie asked.

  The first community of farmers to permanently settle in the area was a Xhosa faction under leadership of Gert Kaffer. By all accounts, the Cape government of his era had cordial relationships with the Xhosa people and wished to use them as a buffer between the colonists and the troublesome Bushmen.

  In 1839, the Cape Governor, Sir George Napier, officially granted 98,000 morgen of land to the Xhosa people. Before the end of that year, 110 Xhosa families had settled in this area.

  “The Boere are too cunning to take it to the Xhosa,” the Oom predicted. “The Xhosa run the government and they will make it their own idea and cut the white man out completely. The Dominee thinks he is safer with us yellow men; he thinks he still controls us.”

  He started to laugh again until he choked and spat.

  Chapter 10

  “Karel is on board,” Gert, the Dominee, assured them all.

  A group of half a dozen men of the older generation were over at Andre’s house, sitting about the kitchen table while their women folk sat apart in the lounge. Sonja was in the scullery washing dishes from dinner. She’d volunteered for the chore even though the house staff would normally handle it the next morning. She took her time, carefully avoiding any noise so that the men forgot she was present.

  This was not an arbitrary group of friends; it had a purpose. A self-styled militia, though now only loosely formulated. But once, not long ago, it had had a formidable reputation for influence.

  They were a brotherhood—a shadow and husk of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the once secret, exclusively male, Calvinist Afrikaner organization dedicated to the advancement of Afrikaner interests in South Africa and their influence abroad.

  The Broederbond was founded in 1918 and was known as Jong Zuid Afrika, Young South Africa. Two years later, it adopted what became a chilling name for any who opposed them: Broederbond.

  For most of the 20th century, the organization had enjoyed a vice-grip over the South African political system and its leaders. In this, it may reasonably be compared to Freemasonry, or at least the legend of what Masons are according to conspiracy theorists.

  But the Broederbond was no illusion; it was all too real. They achieved their greatest heights during apartheid, the divisive racial system that was a Broederbond brainchild in the first place.

  Officially, the organization no longer existed.

  Though these men had lost the power that their fathers had wielded, they had not lost the attitude or self-assurance.

  They maintained an iron-clad conviction that the Afrikaner volk, its people, had been planted in the country directly by the Hand of God; destined to survive as a separate volk, apart from all other influences with its own calling directly from the gospels. It was a meme that gripped and held them in its grasp, a meme they were determined would live on in their children and grandchildren. They worked hard at cementing it there.

  “Could that old Bushman even grasp what you wanted?” Jan de Villiers, a Kommandant under the former government’s army infantry asked.

  “It would be a mistake to think that one is stupid, Jan,” Willem Bauer, owner of the farm on which Karel lived and worked cautioned. “He’s as crafty as a bag full of monkeys.”

  “You are right,” the Dominee agreed. “Karel is like a clever bobbejaan. The first he’ll go to with this news is to his nephew, that donner… Bennie Pieterson.”

  Tjaardt’s uncle, Bennie Pieterson, the town’s Burgemeester or Mayor.

  A coloured of mixed race and distantly related to Oom Karel, Bennie had been a prominent member of the ruling government until he’d been forced out of favour to the backwaters under a cloud of rumour and intrigue. And even as the town’s coffers strained under the weight of the drought, Pieterson flaunted newfound wealth that seemed to be steadily growing.

  Much as Bennie claimed to be a scapegoat, that he had taken the fall for illegal shenanigans that went up to presidential level, the group gathered here this evening and the white community at large would hear nothing of it. Ordinarily, they would love to see the President brought down by a small fry like Pieterson, but it suited their local agenda to perpetuate the distrust in Pieterson in spite of these claims of Presidential collusion.

  In short, they wanted Pieterson out, at any costs. He wielded too much local power and influence for their liking.

  “I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday,” said the Dominee, adopting a cunning expression. “We’ve out-thought him already. I chatted to Willem earlier. He’ll see to it that this can’t happen.”

  Willem Bauer was Oom Karel’s employer. He nodded, endorsing Gert’s words.

  “The coloured who outwits me has not yet been born, and we have an ace up our sleeve,” Gert smiled.

  “The Discover Group…?” Andre blurted, then checked himself. Developments with the American-based Discover Group had been on his mind since Gert had discussed it with him in pri
vate the previous week.

  The Dominee shot him a glare.

  “Discover Group?” Jan asked cautiously.

  “We may need cash to do this,” Gert pointed out. “Enough said.”

  “Understood.” Jan nodded. “It’s need to know....”

  “It’s not that you don’t need to know, Jan. It’s just best to keep our powder dry as the rooinek says. I’m working on something.”

  “So long as the Boesman is with us, I think that’s all the powder we’ll need.”

  “Old Karel says he must meet with his ‘advisors’.” They all laughed at the notion. “But I’ll buckle the old fool, yes. Willem can put some pressure there too,” the Dominee assured.

  “It’s not like it used to be in the old days, manne. But I still have some influence,” Willem suggested with a smirk, and the way he’d said it made the men laugh again. “But my concern is when the Xhosas get wind of it? You know the way they’re going everywhere else—next thing you know they will think this is a clever idea, an idea just perfect for them.”

  “We have the claim over them all—we have the documentation, they only have stories,” Gert assured them. “And I’m reading this from the official history of this area.”

  He opened a giant old dusty book he had already marked for the meeting.

  “The first documentation of the pre-history of Schietfontein—of Carnarvon—comes in the form of the official granting of grazing rights by the Cape government to Pieter Hugo on 26 September 1758. For this privilege, an annual rent of ‘20 rijksdaalders had to be paid’… and-so-on, and-so-on.”

  He stopped reading. “Now, that’s a hundred years before anyone recognized the Xhosa in the area, so they are out of the claim when it comes to land ownership. It is only the Bushman’s right to protect the land from development we’re motivating, only the usage of the land and their claim to a spiritual priority. We must stay far away from any notions of an actual land claim and ownership. They just deserve heritage status so their spiritual wellbeing is not damaged.”