The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Restoration of Dutch rule had one curious side effect: a minor but condescending official came out from Holland to inspect the frontier, and upon finishing his tour he commented on the sad deterioration of speech in the colony: ‘At times I would scarcely know I was listening to Dutch, the way your people mishandle the language.’ From his pocket he produced a slip of paper on which he had noted certain unfamiliar words. ‘You borrow words with a most careless abandon, adopting the worst of the native languages and forgetting your good Dutch words.’ And he read off neologisms like kraal, bobotie, assegai and lobola. ‘You should purify yourself of such abominations,’ he said, proceeding to criticize also the local word orders and mispronunciations. When he was finished, Lodevicus said with some asperity, ‘You make us sound like barbarians,’ and the visitor said, ‘That’s what you’ll become if you lose your Dutch,’ and that was the beginning of the Van Doorn family’s distrust of the homeland Dutch. They were a snobbish, metropolitan, unpleasant lot, with no appreciation of what frontier life involved.

  When the stranger left, Lodevicus called his group together and said, ‘We’ll speak Dutch the way we want it to sound.’ And the result was that they drove an even deeper wedge between their inherited Dutch language and the new tongue they were building.

  Despite these years of uncertainty and war, Lodevicus prospered as a stock farmer, extending his acres far beyond mountain-girt De Kraal. When he required more help and found it impossible to lure Xhosa warriors to work his farm, he grumbled about their arrogance, then drove his wagon to Swellendam, where he purchased slaves: two Madagascans, three Angolans. Because of his visible wealth, he was appointed veldkornet for his district, and he presented a dominating appearance; tall, heavy, white-haired, with whiskers down the sides of his face, he wore substantial clothes, holding up his heavy trousers with both belt and suspenders. When he walked among strangers he strode ahead, with Wilhelmina a respectful four paces behind. In public she always referred to him as the Mijnheer, and he was gratified to see how easily she assumed Rebecca’s role as a driving religious force, but of a different quality. She was amiable, forgiving of minor defections and most eager to be of help to everyone who came past the farm. She sang as she worked and was overjoyed to learn that a real church had been built at Graaff-Reinet, ninety-odd miles to the northwest: ‘We must report to the predikant for our marriage.’

  ‘I can’t leave the farm.’

  Wilhelmina laughed. ‘You call yourself a trekboer?’

  ‘No more. The Van Doorns are through wandering. This is our home.’

  ‘But Tjaart’s got to be baptized,’ she said with such simplicity that he could not refuse her. So the older Van Doorn children were left in charge while their stepmother led Lodevicus and young Tjaart to their religious duties.

  It was a glorious ride, with Tjaart old enough to recall in later years the vast empty spaces, the lovely hills with their tops flattened. He would never forget the moment when his parents halted their horses some miles south of the new village to observe that extraordinary peak which guarded the site: from flat land it rose very high in gentle sweeps until it neared an apex, when suddenly it became a round turret, many feet high, with sheer walls of solid gray granite. And at the top, forming a beautiful green pyramid, rose wooded slopes coming to a delicate point.

  ‘God must have placed it there to guide us to things important,’ Lodevicus said, impressing upon his son the stunning significance of the place, and Tjaart remembered this peak long after he had forgotten his parents’ marriage and his own baptism.

  The boy now had three memories upon which to build his life: that the Dutch way of life must be defended against the English enemy; that Graaff-Reinet was a center of excitement; and that far to the north, as Grandfather Adriaan had told the other children before he died, lay an open valley of compelling beauty which he called Vrijmeer.

  And then, in 1806, when the Van Doorns were congratulating themselves upon having resisted the English threat and preserving the countryside for Calvinism, the final shocking news arrived. Because the ordinary citizens of Holland had joined forces with Napoleon, England felt it must reoccupy the Cape to keep it from falling into French hands, which would cut the life line to India. It was now an English possession, and neither the local Dutch government nor the mother country Holland would exercise further control. All of Lodevicus’ apprehensions about suppression at English hands revived.

  The Cape, having been a stopping place between Holland and Java during the years 1647 to 1806, now became one between England and India, and the indifference with which Holland had always treated this potentially grand possession would now be matched by English imperiousness.

  In these days of change it was inevitable that assessments be made of Holland’s long rule, and it was remarked by certain observers—Dutchmen who had known their country’s holdings in other parts of the world, Englishmen who had fought in the American war, and Frenchmen who knew many parts of the world—that her rule had been almost without parallel in world history. The home country had allowed neither its royalty, its parliament nor its citizens any voice in the rule of this distant possession; control had rested in the hands of a clique of businessmen who made all decisions with an eye to profit. True, these profits had sometimes been widely distributed, with the government grabbing a healthy share, but in essence the colony had been a narrow business venture.

  This had imposed limitations. The surging colonization that marked the French, Spanish and English settlement of North America, with excited citizens pushing exuberantly into the interior, was discouraged in South Africa. Always the Lords XVII preached caution, a holding back lest rambunctious elements like the Van Doorns stray so far afield that they could not easily be disciplined. If one major charge could be leveled against the Compagnie, it was that it restricted normal growth. The borders which should have extended to logical boundaries, perhaps the Zambezi, as Dr. Linnart suggested, never did, which meant that the generic entity never came into being. Absentee businessmen, seeking only profit, do not generate a sense of manifest destiny; indeed, they fear it lest it create movements that get out of hand, and without this spiritual urge, no nation can achieve the limits to which geography, history, philosophy and hope entitle it. Because of Compagnie policy, rigorously enforced through sixteen decades, South Africa remained a truncated state, with only a few single-minded pioneers like the Van Doorns eager to dare the unknown.

  Comparison with North American development was inescapable. In 1806, when the English assumed final control, South Africa had 26,000 white settlers. Canada, which had been started at about the same time as Cape Town and on less favorable soil, had 250,000, and the young United States more than 6,000,000. Mexico, a century older than South Africa, had 885,000. The main reason was simple: the Lords XVII were so reluctant to allow any immigration from which they could not immediately profit that during the entire eighteenth century they permitted only 1,600 new settlers to land! Sixteen newcomers a year cannot keep any new society healthy, or an old one, either.

  But the Lords XVII were not entirely to blame, for on the rare occasions when they did advocate immigration, the response from those already living at the Cape was uniformly negative. ‘It is absolutely impossible,’ those holding land reported, ‘to introduce any more whites into the country because they could find no livelihood.’ What this really meant was that positions of advantage already filled by those in place would not be shared. There were no vacancies for the tough, impoverished migrant seeking a new country and a new chance, because the work that such people would normally start with was already being done by slaves.

  In the time it took the cautious Lords XVII to approve inward movement of a hundred miles, settlers in North America had penetrated a thousand. While the Compagnie grudgingly allowed the establishment of a few small towns like Stellenbosch and Swellendam relatively close to the Cape, the free French and English settlers were already building communities like Montreal and Detroit
far inland, thus laying the foundation for further movement westward.

  It was not that the Dutch were commercially minded and the English not; had the English merchants been allowed to dominate North America they might have duplicated the folly of the Dutch, but English commercialism was never free to dictate to their colonies the way the Compagnie did.

  Wherein lay the difference? The Dutch system of government not only permitted but encouraged its businessmen to rule without supervision, whereas the English government, which started in the same direction, quickly turned matters over to Parliament, a free press, and the innate longing for freedom of its citizens overseas. English businessmen might have wanted to ape the Dutch precedent, but the institutions of freedom forestalled them.

  In no respect did the Dutch deficiency show itself more clearly than in the field of education and the dissemination of culture. Because the population was meager and dispersed over thousands of square miles, the development of large schools was impractical, and those that were attempted in the towns were atrocious. On the veld, where countless children like the Van Doorns grew up, education was left to a group of vagabond itinerants with only a meager knowledge of reading and writing. Usually discharged servants of the Compagnie, these inept clerks roamed from farm to farm dispensing their rudimentary wisdom while they supplemented their income with anything from composing love letters to making coffins. The trekboer Van Doorns were not alone in producing children who were illiterate; one traveler estimated that seventy-five percent of the colony’s children were unable to read.

  This was not surprising, because the Compagnie ran the colony for nearly a century and a half before it allowed the colonists to import a printing press, or publish any kind of book, or print a newspaper. In Canada these things happened almost automatically, and America could not have been the same without its itinerant printers, inflammatory broadsides and contentious newspapers; but it was precisely such potential troublemakers that the Compagnie sought to inhibit, and did.

  In such a climate there could, of course, be no institution of higher learning, and here the comparison with other colonial settlements was shocking. The Spaniards, who conquered Mexico in 1521, had by 1553 opened a major university. They took Peru in 1533 and sponsored a university in 1551. The English, who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1619, had a functioning college at Harvard in 1636, and before the revolution started in 1776 they had sixteen great colleges in operation. During the entire Dutch rule the Compagnie never even came close to starting a college.

  Of course, bright boys at the Cape sometimes found their way back to Leiden or Amsterdam, where splendid universities were available, but an emerging nation needs speculative intelligence bred in local institutions; they provide the fine yeastiness that produces strong new ideas applicable to local situations. The entire history of South Africa might have been modified if there had been a strong school system topped by a university staffed with local luminaries dedicated to the creation of a new society. Instead, fresh ideas either did not germinate or were stamped out.

  Much of the blame must be shared by the church; its leaders were convinced that they could trust only predikants trained in the conservative centers of Holland, and they were terrified of the possibility that a Cape seminary might arise to sponsor alien ideas. Missing in South Africa were those gaunt Pilgrim ministers of New England who cut themselves off from European dictation and initiated a local approach to religious problems.

  ‘The Night of Darkness in which the South African nation had its birth,’ some historians would describe this period of the trekboers, when the merchant mind stifled the scientific, creative and political urges of the citizens.

  But there was another side to this coin, and it shone brightly. A few Dutch children, through assiduous teaching within the family, did gain an education almost comparable to that available in the average European country, and although the Boers lacked an Oxford or a Harvard, they did have their own unique university, and its curriculum was one of the most effective in the history of education. They had a massive Bible, which accompanied them wherever they went; their curriculum was the Old Testament, whose narratives predicted each event that might arise. There were, of course, many trekboer families like the Rooi van Valcks and the Adriaan van Doorns who ignored the Bible, through either illiteracy or indifference, but the majority studied and obeyed.

  Few nations were ever as solidly indoctrinated in one group of principles as the Dutch in South Africa, and this begat a Volk—a people—with tremendous driving force, self-assurance and will to persist. With constant support from this theological university, which each man could carry with him as he moved, the Dutch colony became a conservative, God-fearing state, and so it would remain despite English occupation, English persecution, English wars and the constant threat of imposed English values. In South Africa the Old Testament triumphed over the university because it was the university.

  On one major point Lodevicus was wrong. When he thundered ‘South Africa is Dutch and will always remain so’ he misrepresented the composition of his white community: Dutch ancestry, forty percent; German ancestry, thirty-five percent; Huguenot component, twenty percent; and although this would later be denied by Van Doorn’s descendants, a Malay-Hottentot-black component of at least five percent. This creative mix had produced a handsome, tough, resilient Volk infused with the trekboer spirit, and no English governor would have an easy time trying to discipline them into the ways he wanted them to go.

  The Englishmen who came so late to South Africa, and with such pervasive power, were men of courage, as the Saltwoods of Salisbury, that cathedral town southwest of London, proved. On Midsummer Day 1640, after three years of daring enterprise among the Spice Islands, Captain Nicholas Saltwood of the little ship Acorn came sailing into Plymouth harbor with a bulging cargo of nutmeg, clove and cinnamon. It was so valuable that it made all his partners—who had counted him dead, and their investments lost—men of substantial wealth.

  His own fortune was increased when he sold the Acorn within two hours of anchoring. When his partners, eager to send him forth again, asked why he had acted so precipitately and against his own best interests, he snapped, ‘You invested money. I invested my life against pirates, storms and Portuguese forts. No more.’

  When he was alone with his wife, Henrietta, who had spent these three years in near-poverty, he kissed her vigorously and led her in a small dance about their meager rooms: ‘Years ago, sweets, I saw the cathedral at Salisbury, and I swore that if I ever reached the Spice Islands and made my fortune, you’d have a home in the meadow, beside the River Avon. And you shall!’

  With his bags of silver and his drafts upon the spice merchants of London, he packed Henrietta in a diligence and his household goods in two drays. Taking his position at the head of his armed guards, he led the way through the lovely lanes of southern England until he reached that broad and noble plain in the middle of which stood Salisbury Cathedral. There, on the right bank of the Avon, he purchased nine good acres and the seven swans that guarded those gentle waters.

  Like many a prudent Englishman, Captain Saltwood planted a garden before starting on a house, but since he was a man of vigor he preferred trees, and he located his so that they framed the handsome cathedral on the far side of the river. To the left he placed nine cedars, well rooted, whose dark limbs swept the ground. In the center, but not exactly so, he planted eleven strong chestnuts; in spring they would be white with flowers; in autumn, heavy with fruit for children to play with. Well to the right and safely back from the river, he started a group of slender oaks; in time they would be massive of trunk and stout of limb, and under them swans would nestle when they came ashore.

  Sentinels he called his trees, and that name was given the house that later rose among them. It was notable as reflecting an older style of construction known as hang-tile. It was two-storied, with the lower walls built of conventional brick; nothing unusual about that. But the top story was faced in a most pe
culiar manner: instead of using brick, ordinary roof tiles had been hung vertically! The effect was resoundingly fourteenth century, as if the roof had slipped, abandoning its accustomed place to come down and cover the walls. The true roof was of thatch, sixteen inches thick and carefully trimmed like the hair of a boy about to leave for choir.

  Generations of Saltwoods had gathered under the sentinel trees to discuss family problems while contemplating the spire of the cathedral; under strictures laid down by Captain Nicholas, they continued to be cautious in protecting their investments but daring in investing their profits. About 1710 a Timothy Saltwood had had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of the Proprietor, that gentleman of august lineage who owned much of the region, and before long Timothy was serving as the Proprietor’s agent, an occupation of dignity which passed from one Saltwood to the next.

  One afternoon during the first years of the 1800s, Josiah Saltwood, the present master of Sentinels, sat with his wife on a bench beneath the oaks and said, ‘I deem it time we meet with the boys.’ He paused, as if matters of gravity impended, then added promptly, ‘Nothing serious, of course. Merely their entire future.’

  His wife laughed. ‘They’re all about somewhere. I could summon them.’

  ‘Not just yet. I must ride to Old Sarum with the Proprietor. The election, you know.’ And with his wife at his side, and the swans following, he walked across the lawn to where his horse was being saddled.

  The beautiful cathedral had not always stood in its present location. In the early days of Christianity in England a much different cathedral-castle-fort, keystone to security in this part of the country, had rested on a low hill some two miles to the north, and here devout bishops exercised as much leadership as the masters of the castle would permit. It was called by a bewildering variety of Roman and Saxon names, but in time it came to be known as Sarum, and from it came that set of orders and regulations for worship known as the Use of Sarum, which would be adopted by much of the English church.