The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘Did the Dutch object?’

  She put down her cooking pans and turned to face Hilary. ‘You must keep one thing in mind, if you’re to be an effective missionary. We English have been here four years. The Dutch have been here a hundred and fifty-eight. They know what they’re doing and they do it well.’

  ‘Keer says that what they do so well is slavery.’

  She placed her two hands on Hilary’s and pleaded, ‘Don’t use that word. Reverend Keer was given to exaggeration. He lacked education, you know.’

  ‘He’s translating the Gospels.’

  ‘Oh, he was excellent at identifying himself with the Xhosa. He could stay up all night transcribing their words.’

  ‘I thought it was my duty to do the same.’

  ‘To bring them Christ, yes. To become their advocate against the Dutch, no.’

  ‘You speak harshly.’

  ‘The Xhosa killed my son. They’d have killed me, too, except that a Dutch commando arrived in time.’

  ‘And you stay?’

  ‘It was an incident. We were at war and our troops had killed their people. Simple retaliation.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  ‘I am, and you will be, too. And pray God that you don’t get caught up in it.’

  As he penetrated farther into the country he became increasingly aware of how different the long-established Dutch were from the lately arrived English, and in his first letter home he shared his observations with his mother:

  The Dutch speak of themselves in three distinct ways. Those in the environs of the Cape call themselves Dutch, although many of them have never seen Holland or ever will. In truth, they speak harshly of the old country, holding in contempt those real Dutchmen who came out from Holland to lord it over the locals with sneers and assumptions of superior education. Some of these long-time Dutch have taken themselves a new name, for they are more of Africa than of Europe. ‘We are Afrikaners,’ they say, but where I am traveling now these Afrikaners are named Boers (farmers). But farther east toward the lonely perimeter of the country, where the roughest of the Dutch dwell, they call themselves trekboers (migrating graziers), which is appropriate, for they are constantly moving on with their herds, until I am reminded of Abraham and Isaac. My mission is to be established in the lands of those trekboers who have stopped their wanderings.

  At his next halt, where only Boers lived, Hilary received his harshest view of Reverend Keer: ‘Arrogant, stupid man. Kept saying he loved the Xhosa and the Hottentots, but every action he took damaged them.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Made them dissatisfied with their lot.’

  ‘What is their lot?’

  ‘At school in England, did they teach you the Book of Joshua?’

  ‘I’ve read it.’

  ‘But have you taken it to heart? God’s story of how the Israelites came into a strange land? And how they were to conduct themselves there?’ It was obvious to the Boer listeners that the new missionary knew little of Joshua, so the oldest farmer took down his huge Bible and slowly leafed the pages until he came to the familiar instructions, which he translated roughly for the newcomer:

  ‘You shall not marry with the daughters of Canaan … You shall keep yourself apart … You shall destroy their cities … You shall hang their kings from trees … You shall block up their graves with stones, even to this day … You shall take the land, and occupy it and make it fruitful … One man of you shall chase one thousand of them … You shall keep yourselves apart … And they shall be your hewers of wood and your drawers of water … And all this you shall do in the name of the Lord, for He has commanded it.’

  Closing the big book reverently and placing his hands upon it, he stared directly into Hilary’s eyes and said, ‘That is the word of the Lord. It is His Bible which instructs us.’

  ‘There is another part of the Bible,’ Hilary said quietly, leaning his thin shoulders forward to engage the debate.

  ‘Yes, your Reverend Keer preached quite a different message, but he was an idiot. Young friend, believe me, it is the ancient word of God Himself that we follow, and you will break your teeth in this country if you contradict it.’

  Across the southern plains of Africa, wherever he stopped, Hilary found himself engaged in argument over the merits of Simon Keer, and the Boers were so forceful in their rejection of the little redhead that in his quiet moments Hilary began to read Numbers and Joshua, finding in them not only the passages which his first Boer mentors had cited, but scores of others which applied directly to the position of the Dutch who had come into this land like the Israelites of old, who had entered their land of Canaan. The parallels were so overwhelming that he began to see local history through Dutch eyes, and this was a salvation when he opened his own mission.

  The spot selected for him lay on the left bank of the Sundays River, four hundred miles from Cape Town. When he reached it, not a building stood, not a roadway existed. The river, suffering from drought, carried little water, and there were no trees. But the spot itself was congenial, perched on a broad bend of the river and graced with level fields acceptable to plowing. In the distance was a forest with an abundance of usable wood; and at hand, enough stones to build a city. Hilary, visualizing what this bleak spot might become, named it from a passage in the twentieth chapter of Joshua, where God instructs His people to erect cities of refuge to which any accused could flee and be assured of temporary safety:

  And on the other side Jordan … eastward they assigned … Golan … that whosoever killeth any person at unawares might flee thither, and not die … until he stood before the congregation.

  This will be Golan, my city of refuge, Hilary thought, and when the last members of his caravan disappeared, leaving him majestically alone in the heart of a strange land, he prayed that he might be allowed to build well.

  The first night, as he lay on the ground close to his belongings, he listened to strange sounds, and the darkness of Africa assailed him with a wild discordance, a sense of awe and anticipation rather than fear. When he awakened at dawn, he found a group of brown people watching him, squatting on their haunches a hundred feet away. For months there had been rumors that a missionary was coming.

  Hilary beamed at the sight. Surely the Lord Himself had brought this little gathering into the arms of His servant Saltwood. Dusting himself off, he rose to greet them, overjoyed when one man spoke to him in broken English.

  ‘We stay with you. We your people now.’ His name was Pieter, son of that Dikkop who had traveled with Mal Adriaan. It was ten years since he had lived with the Van Doorns; he had run away after a beating for eating a melon from the family garden. He had drifted from farm to farm, working just enough to avoid being classified as ‘Vagrant Hottentot,’ which would allow his being assigned arbitrarily to any farmer who wanted him.

  In truth, Pieter was a man who saw virtue in idleness; he could happily pass an entire day with his back against a tree, eyes firmly shut.

  But before sunset that first day the Hottentots had shown Hilary how to dig a foundation to keep out rain, and by the second nightfall they had cut enough saplings to frame out a dwelling. Hilary saw in his imagination how Golan should look: rows of huts facing each other, a meeting hall and a church to close off one end of the rectangle.

  He was pleased with the rapid growth of his little community—six Hottentots to forty within three weeks—and within a short time Hilary and his followers had the mud-and-clay walls of a mission church in place. Before the thatching of the roof was complete he preached a message of dedication inside the little structure. Having mastered several words of the Dutch-like language these people spoke, and some Hottentot with its click sounds, he delighted his congregation by offering the benediction in their language. In the days that followed he heard members of the mission saying gravely to one another as they worked, ‘Peace be unto you.’

  Peace was a commodity almost unknown. Young Xhosa warriors persisted in raiding cattle from w
hite men’s farms, and not long after Hilary’s first sermon English troops, fortified by a Boer commando, had launched a massive attack against the black men, driving twenty thousand of them back across the Great Fish River and liberating, as they phrased it, vast herds of cattle. The gallant leader of this rout would be honored by having a newborn town named after him: Grahamstown.

  Hilary was untouched by these events; but it grieved him that after six months he had not met one Xhosa, and he began to fear that he had made a mistake in locating Golan here. During his studies at Gosport he had imagined himself bringing Christianity to black savages, wrestling with their pagan beliefs and finally welcoming them to Jesus. Instead he was surrounded by brown Hottentots, more than ninety in the huts that faced the rectangle, while all the Xhosa lurked far across the river, a gang of cattle thieves.

  In his reports to the LMS he called his flock ‘my Hottentots,’ knowing that few were of the pure strain; they ranged from light, yellow-skinned half-Malays to very dark half-Angolans. They were not inclined to hard work, and a distressing number loitered about the mission doing nothing. But Hilary always remembered the name he had given this place, Golan the refuge, and he believed that these ‘mild and peaceable folk,’ as he wrote of them, merited all the sanctuary they could find. Many had come to him with terrible tales of beatings, chains, and years of labor without pay from Boers who made their lives a misery. Simon Keer’s impassioned indictment of the colonists echoed in his ears, and he saw it his duty to succor the weak.

  Even his hopes for the Xhosa soared when a black man finally came to Golan, an elderly fellow from a kraal to the east. He proclaimed himself to be a Christian, stating in halting English that he had been baptized by a missionary with red hair called ‘Master Keer,’ and he indicated that his village contained several other blacks who had been converted by ‘our dear little man who could speak Xhosa.’

  His Christian name was Saul, and Hilary promptly sent him back to Xhosa lands to spread joyful news about Golan, and because of Saul, at the end of six months the mission was home to one hundred and forty Hottentots and twenty Xhosa. The latter taught Hilary the traditions of their people, and he developed respect for the ease with which they adjusted to life at Golan. As he worked with them he found himself constantly referring to the practical instructions he had acquired from young Simon Keer, rarely to the theological indoctrination of the older LMS clergymen. ‘Missionary work,’ Keer had predicted, ‘is one-tenth disputation, nine-tenths sanitation.’

  The first white man Hilary met was a Boer living at a remote spot twenty-eight miles to the northeast, across hills that separated the Sundays River from the Fish. He rode into Golan one afternoon, a tall, rough-clad, white-haired old man who looked like someone from the early books of the Bible, his beard trembling in the wind. ‘Name is Lodevicus,’ he said in halting English. ‘Lodevicus van Doorn.’ He had come to warn Hilary not to allow any Hottentots from the north to take refuge at Golan.

  ‘Why not?’ Hilary asked.

  ‘They … my laborers … they signed papers,’ he growled, obviously disliking the necessity of speaking in a foreign tongue. ‘They to work … not pray.’

  ‘But if they come seeking Jesus Christ …’

  Lodevicus showed his irritation that Saltwood made no effort to address him in Dutch: ‘If you here … missionary … damnit … learn Dutch.’

  ‘I should! I should!’ Hilary agreed enthusiastically, but to continue the conversation it was necessary to find someone who had both languages, which put Lodevicus in the awkward position of lodging a complaint against Hottentots through the agency of a Hottentot. It was fortunate that Lodevicus did not recognize the melon thief, and insensitive to the impropriety, went on talking, with Pieter listening respectfully and saying ‘Ja, Baas’ at least once a minute.

  ‘Baas say, “His Hottentots not come seek Jesus. They run away from work his place.” ’

  ‘Tell him that even so, if any of his workmen were to come seeking refuge with me …’

  No sooner had the interpreter started this sentence than Lodevicus interrupted.

  ‘Baas, he say, “My goddamn workers come here, no trouble for you. I come gettim.” ’

  ‘Tell him that if any Hottentot or Xhosa seeks Jesus Christ …’

  Once more Lodevicus issued a string of threats, only some of which the Hottentot bothered to repeat. So this first meeting between the Boer and the Englishman ended in disarray, with Lodevicus shouting as he remounted his horse that Saltwood was no better than that damned idiot Simon Keer. He sputtered what sounded like curses, and Hilary was told: ‘Baas say damn-fool Master Keer come back, he meet him with sjambok.’

  ‘Assure him that Reverend Keer is safely in London and will not be seen again in these parts.’ When this was delivered, Lodevicus directed the Hottentot to say, ‘Damn good thing.’

  As a Christian, Hilary could not allow his first acquaintance with a neighbor to end so poorly, and with a complete change of attitude he said to the Hottentot, ‘Ask Mijnheer van Doorn if he will join us in evening prayer?’

  This sudden switch to the Dutch mijnheer softened the old man somewhat, but only for a moment, for he soon realized that the prayers would be conducted in English, whereupon he spat: ‘I pray Dutch church.’ And with that he galloped off, even though night was almost upon him.

  And that was the way things stood between the mission station of Golan and the nearest white man to the north until the end of the first year—when the Reverend Simon Keer burst upon the South African scene with a reverberation that would last for two centuries, making his name accursed. He did not appear in person, which was prudent, since he would have been whipped, but a booklet that he published in England did arrive by ship. It bore the pejorative title The Truth About South Africa, and was a compilation of accusations against the Dutch so horrendous that the civilized world, meaning London and Paris, simply had to take notice.

  It charged the Boers with having already killed off the Bushmen, annihilating the Hottentots, and beginning to abuse the Xhosa—expropriating their land, stealing their cattle, and killing their women and children. It was especially harsh in allegations that the Hottentots and Coloured brethren were being tricked into slavery and denied ordinary decencies. It was a blanket indictment, its charges so melodramatic that they might have been ignored had he not added one accusation which more than any other inflamed the Christians of England and Scotland:

  The Boers refuse to allow their Hottentots to attend mission schools or to convert to that one true religion which could save their immortal souls. Indeed, one gains the impression that the Boers refuse to believe that their laborers have souls, and each day that dawns sees Jesus crucified anew in order for the Boer to gain a few more shillings through the toil of these mild and peaceable people forced into a servitude worse than that of the true slave.

  Such charges ignited action throughout England, especially since that nation now had responsibility for the governance of South Africa, and protests of the most vigorous force were launched. What made government intervention inevitable was Reverend Keer’s closing statement that he personally could indict a hundred Boers for forced enslavement, criminal abuse and even murder.

  When the four dozen copies of The Truth About South Africa reached the Cape and were distributed, with Dutch translations being rushed to the frontier, a sullen resistance developed. Even prospering townsmen in Cape Town and Stellenbosch who had clearly benefited from the English takeover protested that Keer had unjustly maligned the entire colony. And the frontier Boers! Each man felt that he was being specifically accused, and wrongfully. Pamphlets were prepared, rebutting the absent missionary, and practically the entire population combined to defend South Africa’s reputation.

  But the power of an inspired missionary to inflame English public opinion would always be great, and while at the Cape a few people were defending South Africa, in London a multitude called for action, and before long, commissions were on their wa
y to the Cape to look into Keer’s charges, and the mournful day came when formal accusations had to be lodged against some fifty Boers, who were commanded to stand trial before judges who would circulate throughout the colony. The Black Circuit, this exhibition would be called, and in due course it would reach Graaff-Reinet, several days’ ride to the northwest, and there Lodevicus van Doorn would be tried for physically abusing his Hottentots, starving them and denying them the right to attend religious services. He was also accused of murder.

  Before the Black Circuit reached Graaff-Reinet, Lodevicus, convinced that no judge appointed by the English would accord a Boer justice, swallowed his pride and rode back to Golan, where he found that Hilary could now speak moderately good Dutch. The two men conducted an impassioned conversation.

  ‘All I ask, Saltwood, is that you come with me, now. Look at my farm. Talk with my Hottentots and slaves.’

  ‘I’ll not be party to this lawsuit.’

  ‘It’s not a lawsuit. It’s a charge of murder.’

  ‘And other things, if I hear correctly.’

  ‘And other things. Trivial things. And it’s those you must inspect.’

  ‘I’m not a witness, Mijnheer van Doorn.’

  ‘All men are witnesses, Dominee.’

  The sudden use of this Dutch appellation caught Hilary’s imagination, and he had to admit that in a situation so grave, all men were witnesses, so that even though Van Doorn had been an unpleasant man, if he now appealed for help, it had to be given. On the spur of the moment he said, ‘I’ll ride with you, but I’ll not testify in court.’

  ‘No one asks you to,’ Lodevicus said gruffly.

  Leaving Golan in care of Saul, Hilary left for the north, finding a ride with Van Doorn a moving experience: ‘These vast lands with no markings—how do you find your way?’

  ‘The look of things,’ Lodevicus said, and Hilary thought: That’s what I’m being asked to judge—the look of things.