A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

He is dead now. In me he lives. Time thwarted.

  Such a brief hour, so dark, so light. But in that most private of acts, unacknowledged by the shamed world, we entered history: we are here. Look, we are free. We can reassume the burdens of our separate conditions. A brief shout against silence, a parenthesis, an almost imperceptible stay—between the vulgar irruption into the house and the flight into the stern innocence of the mountains—but that was life enough: a vision, an illumination, forked lightning, agony, terror, joy. I bear the future in my womb, predestined in that insignificant moment when I dared expose myself to him and he said, I think it was he:

  Galant

  “Come,” I think it was she, and together we went up to the loft. How many times had we approached this moment?—but always thwarted, not from outside, but by ourselves. Free woman; slave. But this time it was different. In that loft I was free: a man; and she a woman. And for this moment, so fleeting and simple, it was perhaps worth while to be born, to live, to suffer, to be in the dark, and then to die.

  All right: so it was not the freedom we dreamed of, open and visible, and shared by all. In that sense we failed. But perhaps freedom can never really be other than this, a small and private thing? If this is so, we had indeed no hope of succeeding. And yet we had to do what we did! No doubt about that. We had to. Take that away, and what happened in the loft would have been no more than a man-and-woman thing. And without her our rising up together would have been madness and defeat.

  For the first time I think I’m beginning to understand what the lion man in Tulbagh meant. I have committed the greatest crime of all: and even if they never find out about it that would still be the reason why they will have to kill me in the end. This is the one freedom that truly threatens them.

  Murder is easy. Any man who works himself up into a rage can commit it. But to choose, with open eyes—even if it is in the dark!—willingly to bind oneself to that tomorrow which does not yet exist, but which is brought into being by the choice itself: that is perhaps the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. Perhaps this is freedom. When I was a slave, the Baas took care of everything. I never worried about tomorrow: there is neither yesterday nor tomorrow for a slave. Now, in that moment when, in the silent loft above the thundering house, I found the woman who had always been mine, I freely took up the burden of yesterday as I chose tomorrow for myself.

  This is what I know now. My last night in these mountains has not been in vain. What lies ahead is that end Nicolaas told me about: the death of the man who’d run amok with his axe. To be hanged on the gallows with its three crossbeams; and then the beheading, and the head stuck up on a pole in the place where the man comes from, until only the skull remains, staring into the wind. Let it be so. I can get up now and wait for them to come, whatever lies ahead: Cape Town, and death.

  Only through killing can I, perhaps, be heard. I have no other voice.

  Free? No, I’m not free. But at least I know what freedom is; what it might be. I have glimpsed it.

  The sun has been pushing up from below for a long time. Now the plains are filling up with light, like a great dam, burning in transparent fire.

  There are many swallows about. They’ve always been here, since the mountains began. When I go down the slope just now, they will still be flying overhead, this way and that, darting and swerving and skimming over the rocks, free to go as they wish. Later, as the summer reaches its end in the first frost that shrivels up the brittle grass, they’ll gather in flock upon flock. And one day, all of a sudden, all of them at once, they’ll take to the open skies and fly away. I don’t know where they go when it grows cold. Perhaps there are distant places where it’s warm. All I know is that they leave—and that they come again as soon as it’s summer. Dependent on the seasons, they freely come and go.

  And some defied the seasons.

  My time to go is nearly there. I won’t come back. Not this Galant that’s sitting here. And yet all cannot be over when I die. Perhaps I planted my life in her womb. I’ll never know for sure. But whether it’s so or not, whether we have a son or not—and if he’s born he shall be free, for she’s his mother—something of what is now departing will return. Something remains on the earth. Something will come back. My skull will stare across these highlands even if its eyes are empty. The eggs of the Lightning Bird remain in the earth for a long, long time: but one day they’ll hatch and bring the fire back over these mountains without beginning or end, where my footprint remains forever proudly trodden in the stone.

  I’m going down now. In a way I suppose I’m burnt out. But the fire: the fire remains.

  Verdict

  After due investigation and having heard the claim of the R.O. Prosecutor together with the prisoners’ defense, and having taken into consideration everything which deserved attention or could move the Court administering Justice in the name and on behalf of His Britannic Majesty in this Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, we the undersigned members of the Court declare as follows:–

  It is a lamentable truth which experience has taught us, that when once the idea of being oppressed has entered into and taken root in the human mind, whether groundless or not, it will oftentimes carry men to unthought of extremities.

  As long as every man is satisfied with his station in life, peace and contentment reign in the mind, and no rupture of the existing tranquillity is to be feared, however unequal the situation of the one may be from that of the other; but scarcely does man feel that his inequality with those whom fortune has placed in more favorable circumstances affords him reason of discontent, and that he conceives he has to bear a burden which is unjustly imposed on him, than his passions begin to work, peace is banished from his mind, and he will leave nothing undone to find an opportunity to throw off his load.

  The Country in which we live has alas! already in our time afforded proof of this truth, and Heaven protect us from witnessing any more.

  Can a greater inequality of the human station exist than that between the Freeman and the Slave?—the latter bound, without his consent, to appropriate the entire portion of his life to the service of his free Master—and yet we have not found in the whole history of the Colony a single instance, previously to the year 1808, of the Slaves ever having cherished or entertained the least idea of breaking their bounds by force.

  Taught by the moral lessons of our Holy Religion to obey their masters, they did not withdraw themselves from this obedience without well knowing to have failed in their duty; and the punishment of their offense left no other impression on their minds than that they had brought it on themselves by their own bad conduct. This impression was necessary as tending to preserve order and tranquillity in the Land.

  We by no means speak as advocates for slavery in the abstract, but we speak under the circumstances of the Colony as they actually exist, a Country which is cultivated by the labor of the slaves, and of which the free Inhabitants, or Colonists properly so called, have been allowed by the laws from the earliest period of its colonization, and encouraged by the example of their own Magistrates, to invest a very important part of their means and their welfare in the purchase of Slaves. Under such circumstances that impression by which Slaves are bound to obey their Masters was and is absolutely necessary for the good order and the well being of the State.

  In the year 1808 however some evil disposed and wicked persons, whose evident object was to involve the whole Country in Anarchy and Confusion and hence to derive great advantage to themselves, found means to remove that impression from the minds of many of the Slaves here, whom by a most culpable and criminal perversion of the benevolent object of the British Legislature to abolish, not slavery, but the slave trade, they made believe that they were kept in Slavery contrary to the will of our Sovereign in England, where no Slaves are.

  It is not yet effaced from the memories of the Colonists what a dark cloud hovered over their heads when the pernicious poiso
n of strife and discontent was infused into the minds of the slaves by those wicked men, and how easily it penetrated and corroded their bitter feelings.

  The example which was made of the ringleaders of those Criminals, and the inability to execute a plan of general Rebellion, withheld the Slaves from again attempting a similar enterprise, but whether the spirit of discontent at their situation which then began to reign among them was quelled is a point which one has much reason to doubt. At least since that time the complaints of slaves against their masters for ill-treatment have considerably augmented; and notwithstanding that much has been done on the part of the Government to ameliorate considerably the state of Slavery in this Colony, still however the fire of discontent at the frustrated hope of a general freedom appears to have been smoldering under the ashes, so that the smallest blast of wind is but necessary to make the flame burst out again more violently than ever.

  This disappointed hope was the cause in the year 1808 of the rebellion among the Slaves which we then witnessed. But whereas on that occasion the lives of the Christian Inhabitants were spared, it was but a short time since the cause of those disasters which befell one of our South American Colonies of Slaves; and now we hear for the first time in this Colony also the cry of murder at the disappointed hope of freedom, raised by a slave, who speedily collected a gang of adherents, and who, had he not been timely stopped in his career, would perhaps at this very moment have plunged this Country into the deepest mourning and sorrow.

  Three victims of his fatal rage were already felled when he was stopped in the progress of the murderous tragedy which he had but then commenced.

  It is necessary that we should take a nearer view of the causes that have led to the crimes of which the prisoners have been accused, not only because they may be considered to have an influence on the culpability of their acts, but also that we may not be thought to have been mistaken in our judgment of the case.

  We shall begin with the head of the gang, the slave Galant, accused of having laid the whole plan and instigated the gang to commit the most murderous and bloody scenes, and to make a beginning with his own master, the playfellow of his early years, and whose life he has now brought to a termination in the most cruel manner. When we hear his statement, one will be easily led to suppose that he had been obliged to sigh under a continued chain of successive ill usage at the hands of his Master. How unfortunate it is for the impartial investigation of the truth that the man whom these accusations regard, now lies low and cannot refute them, and that his widow, who is likewise implicated in the charges, although she still lives, cannot possibly appear before this Court without suffering too much under the consequences of the wound so cruelly inflicted on her. However, we have the evidence of the prisoner’s co-accused and of those witnesses who have appeared before us, to stop the mouth of the slave Galant about these charges. The Landdrost to whom he complained in the past about the bad usage to which he had allegedly been subject; found him in the wrong; his fellow prisoners declare that he was favored above them all by his Master, and who, when warned by the Hottentot woman Bet that Galant had laid a plan against his life, paid no regard to the information because he could not conceive it possible that such a dreadful thought could enter into the heart of a slave whom he so favored, whom he considered as it were a member of his family, for whom he felt an attachment in his own heart because he was brought up and had grown up with him, and to whose irregularities he had even shewn indulgence by allowing him to have two Concubines instead of one.

  Of victuals and drink the other prisoners complain nothing, although they signify that it would have been by no means disagreeable to them if they had got more than they were actually allowed. But let us hear what Joseph Campher says, a free man and a Christian and consequently entirely trustworthy and who, all accusations against him having been found groundless, is herewith discharged unconditionally. He states that in harvest time the slaves got wine four times a day and more bread than they could consume, besides soup with peas and beans twice, and a little meat. Is that want of victuals and drink? How many thousands are there among the fortunate Inhabitants of free Europe who would not thank the Almighty on their bare knees had it fallen on their lot to suffer the same kind of want? Yet this food was too mean for Galant and because they were not allowed during the Harvest as much meat as would satisfy their appetites without bread, he stole no less in the short space of six days than four sheep, and certainly not the poorest, from his Master’s flock, which he and the other people belonging to the place Houd-den-Bek consumed by night.

  But it was not the ill treatment which Galant alleges to have suffered that brought him to the step, as he calls it, of fighting himself free; no, it was his disappointed hopes of freedom that induced him to it. We take his own words. When in his confrontation with the Witness Bet she says that Galant told her before the commencement of the present year that he should wait until the New Year, and if he were not made free then he would begin to murder, what else did Galant do then but to acknowledge the truth of what Bet said and to refer to persons unnamed from whom he had heard last year in Cape Town that at the New Year a general freedom of the Slaves should take place? See there the pivot upon which the whole machine guided by his hand turned.

  Such like false reports appear to have prevailed for some time. It is impossible to say how long they have been in circulation, but they have been communicated not only to the slaves but to the owners of slaves. No wonder then if some credulous and misled Masters, imagining that their right of property to their slaves, which next to their lives they considered as most sacred, would be disputed, now and then expressed themselves in language characteristic of the bitterness of their internal feelings; and that the slaves who listened to such discourses or found an opportunity of getting a knowledge of them should on their part become exasperated against their owners from the opposition to their freedom which they supposed they met with at their hands. It is in this point of view that we consider the statement of Galant with regard to the reluctance of the Masters to communicate to their slaves the news contained in the papers which they received from time to time, and also with respect to his fishing out discourses which he says were held between his Master and others. For why should we doubt that such discourses have actually been held by slave owners who, supposing that they were at once to be deprived of all their slaves, were driven by such an idea to the very borders of rage and despair?

  It is not our task to endeavor to trace out the authors of such evil reports. It is sufficient in the present instance that such reports did prevail, and that they were the leading cause, as Galant states them to have been, of his undertaking.

  The second of the gang, namely the prisoner Abel, who says that he was the Corporal while Galant acted as Captain, although he chiefly screens behind the information which he received from Galant and therefore knows of no other propagators of such reports, or does not think proper to name them, he however did not hesitate to say (as appears from the deposition of the widow Cecilia van der Merwe in the preparatory information) at the moment he was about to give the death shot to Jansen, that no Christian should have pardon, for that the report was that the slaves were to be free at New Year and that this not having taken place they would make themselves free. Nothing more is necessary for us to accept that this prisoner was also led by the same misguided cause to take a principal part in the tragedy.

  It is true that he states other reasons also, such as ill usage and that his master had threatened to shoot him; but as he was apprehensive that his body would be examined and his lies thus detected, he cunningly adds that his master flogged his slaves in such a manner that no marks were left; and the threat of shooting refers to one occasion when his Master in a moment of passion threatened to fire at him merely to frighten him into obedience. Many a free Servant has heard a similar threat from his Master in a moment of anger, without attaching the smallest weight thereto, because they well knew it
was not meant.

  How much less can the hasty expression to a Slave from his master, whose property he is, and with whose loss he must lose a part of his means, awaken any fear or anxiety? We do not say that Slaves have never been killed by their Masters; but there are also examples of fathers having murdered their children, and yet where can a child be safer than in the arms of his father? Or how can a father be better protected than by the love of his own offspring?

  If we compare the examples of murders committed on slaves by their masters with the number of those committed on and by others, we shall soon see that the Slave is almost as safe under the protection of his Master as the child under that of the father; and especially those slaves intimately attached to the home, of which description both Galant and Abel are, with respect to whom the natural feeling of affection combines with self interest to make them find true friends and protectors in their masters.

  With respect to the other Prisoners we do not need to say much. They were all seduced. The Hottentots among them, namely Rooy, Thys and Hendrik, could not have been driven to their crimes by a sigh after freedom, for they were already free. No desire for revenge for long protracted emancipation could have actuated them, for that was no case of theirs. It is true they were under the subordination of masters, and that fired by the hope of being Masters in their turn they might have been induced, by the craft and subtlety of Galant, to become the enemies of their masters, from whom they undoubtedly enjoyed fewer privileges than are allowed to slaves in general. The hope of plunder and booty may also have had some influence on their mind, but essentially we consider them as instruments only of which the ringleaders Galant and Abel availed themselves to attain their object.

  In respect of the 3rd Prisoner Rooy there is an additional factor to be considered, namely his age, which to this Court appears to be as under fourteen, or at all events (as we are obliged in rebus dubiis, in primis in criminalibus ad admittendam benigniorem sententiam) much nearer 14 than 18. This Prisoner appears really to deserve more pity than contempt for the acts which he has committed, and which he has not only openly and frankly, but even with a childish fear and anxiety, confessed. And should he have committed a premeditated crime, even then must be applied to him what we find in Lex 37 ff de minor in these words: In delictis autem minor annis vigintiquinque non meritur in integrum restitutionem, utique atrocioribus; nisi quatenus interdum miseratio aetatis ad mediocrem poenam judicem produxerit. Besides this, we have seen how this prisoner Rooy from the very beginning was obliged and compelled by Galant to ride after him as his postillion and coerced to shoot the wounded Verlee. Who will for a moment doubt what would have been the lot of this Prisoner (whom we may well call a child) had he not complied with the order of Galant?