The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  * * *

  When reports of the cattle killing reached government agencies at Grahamstown, there was initial disbelief that such hysteria could ensnare an entire people, especially on the word of a child who could not possibly know where Russia was or what the name represented, but a tremor did run through the colony, for twice before, fanatic prophets had incited the Xhosa masses, whipping the kraals into a frenzy and leading them to disaster. In the first attack on Grahamstown a prophet had assured his people of victory, and not long ago another prophet had convinced his warriors that white men’s bullets would be no stronger than raindrops if only the Xhosa killed all cream-colored cattle.

  Now the government received proof indisputable that entire villages were engaging in an orgy of cattle slaughter, and serious attention had to be paid, for the people in Grahamstown had now lived side-by-side with the Xhosa for two generations and knew how much they revered their cattle. ‘If they’re actually killing them, something desperate’s afoot,’ a new district officer said, and Major Saltwood of De Kraal was sent for.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ he asked when he reported for consultations.

  ‘A crazy prophet named Mhlakaza has been preaching that the Xhosa must slay their cattle.’

  ‘Mhlakaza?’ Saltwood asked. ‘Isn’t he that fellow who gave us so much trouble over access to one of the rivers? Ten, fifteen years ago?’

  ‘The same. This time he claims his niece, a stupid little girl of fourteen or fifteen … I’ve seen her. Squinched-up face. Doesn’t weigh ninety pounds. She claims she was visited by all the dead Xhosa chiefs—Hintsa, Ndlambe, the lot. She says they told her to slay all the cattle, burn all the crops, and they’d come storming back to throw us English into the sea.’

  ‘What’s this about the Russians?’ Saltwood asked. He was sixty-eight years old, tall, lean, white-haired, very much an English military man in retirement, and because of his service on the Afghan frontier, perpetually interested in Russian trickery.

  ‘Oh, Mhlakaza seems to have picked up some nonsense about the Crimean War. All he knows is that Russia fought against us. Because of our loss at Balaklava, he’s convinced himself that Russia won and that she wants to invade Grahamstown to complete her victory. Frightful mess he peddles.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate their prophets,’ Saltwood warned. ‘They can whip a countryside into frenzy.’

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘They’re in cahoots with the schemers and plotters in the nation. Men like Kreli. I’ve survived two wars launched by fanatics, and it’s serious business. If they do kill all their cattle, they’ll have to find others. I hardly need tell you where they’ll start looking.’

  ‘What about the little girl?’

  ‘She’s a mystic of some sort. Hears voices. He’s using her.’

  ‘As simple as that?’

  ‘Carson’s the only one who’s actually seen her. What’s your story?’

  A young Oxford graduate, whose first job had been at Grahamstown, had made a minor name for himself by learning the Xhosa language and something of the tribe’s internal politics. The Xhosa trusted him, and on one of his recent trips into the heartland of the region they had allowed him to talk with Nongqause. ‘She’s illiterate, has no idea of our government at Cape Town, and couldn’t possibly have any concept of Russia. But she has been remarkably consistent in her visions and has told only one clear story: “Kill everything, burn everything, and the spirits will come to free us.” ’

  ‘Does she speak specifically against us?’ Saltwood asked.

  ‘Never heard her say as much. She has only a generic enemy, but it’s got to be us.’

  ‘She’s not preaching armed rebellion?’

  ‘The spirits are going to handle that end of it. But of course, the living Xhosa must be prepared to follow them, so I suppose that in the end we must expect armed invasion.’

  ‘Good God,’ the new district officer said.

  ‘Do you take it that seriously?’ one of the officials asked Saltwood.

  ‘I do. You must remember, gentlemen, that these men you’re talking about have been fighting us for nearly half a century. They’ve learned all the tricks. They’re brave, and when their prophets preach a holy war they can become quite fanatical. I think we’re in for trouble.’

  * * *

  Saltwood’s perceptive observation about blended heroism and fanaticism gained such wide circulation that the government asked him to see what he could do to minimize or even halt the cattle killing, and he left Grahamstown with two Xhosa men who worked for him at De Kraal to enter the regions where Nongqause’s preachments were having their strongest effect.

  He was not prepared for what he saw. Entire fields lay covered with dead animals, and anyone who knew the Xhosa had to be appalled at this wanton sacrifice. On two different occasions his Xhosa companions broke into tears at the sheer waste, but when Saltwood talked with the men who had done the killing, he found them in a state of euphoria—smiling, happy, marking time till the eighteenth of February when every dead animal would be returned a hundredfold.

  ‘Tell them it cannot happen,’ Saltwood urged his men, but when they endeavored to persuade the other Xhosa not to kill any more cattle, the tribesmen smiled benignly and said, ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ and the slaughter continued.

  At the end of five days Saltwood had seen more than twenty thousand dead animals, and he sent one of his companions running back to Grahamstown with this brief message: ‘The rumors we heard were one-tenth of the story. I truly fear that all cattle may be slain and that thousands of people will face starvation. Begin to assemble foodstuffs immediately.’

  Distraught, uncertain, he decided to seek out a village where one of his former workers lived, a man named Mpedi, fine and trustworthy, hoping to use him as a wedge into the heart of the problem. But when he reached Mpedi’s hut he found the man, a sensible fellow in his sixties, mesmerized by the glorious thing that was about to happen: ‘Baas, you cannot know what we shall be doing. All the great chiefs coming back to help us. A hundred … a thousand warriors waiting in the rivers to rise up and lead us into our inheritance.’

  ‘Mpedi, wake up!’ Saltwood begged. ‘Do you think your dead cattle will be replaced? Do you think food will come from the sky?’

  ‘It will come, Baas.’

  ‘Can’t you see that you’re about to starve?’

  ‘There will be food for all, Baas.’

  ‘Goddamnit!’ Saltwood raged. ‘Open your eyes!’

  ‘They are open, Baas. And on the eighteenth of February yours will be opened, too!’

  Saltwood shook his old herdsman, a man who loved cattle. ‘Mpedi, if you kill the rest of your cattle, you’re going to starve.’

  ‘Baas,’ the herdsman said with deep affection, ‘I want you to leave this village and go back across the Great Fish, where you belong. Go to De Kraal and get your family. Hurry to Port Elizabeth and get aboard a ship and go away. Because the risen chiefs are going to march right to headquarters and kill all the white people who have stolen our land from us. I don’t want you to die, Baas, because you’ve been a good man to us.’

  Saltwood was so shaken by his inability to bring sense into the discussion that he tried a new tack: ‘Mpedi, I’m not here as your friend. Remember how many times I went out on commando against your men.’

  ‘Ah!’ the herdsman said with a broad smile. ‘That was war, Baas. I shoot you. You shoot me. Who cares? It was in peace that you were so good to us. Now please leave.’

  And while Saltwood stood there, this man whose life had centered upon the building up of a small herd of cattle went back into his fields and resumed slaying the docile creatures whose existence represented the only chance of keeping that village alive in the awful days that loomed.

  During the first two weeks of February, Saltwood penetrated to most areas of the western Xhosa, and what he saw sickened him so that he returned to Mpedi’s village, now stripped of all food except wha
t was in the pots for the few days remaining till the miracle. ‘Can you take me to Nongqause?’ he asked his former workman.

  ‘No good, Baas. She sits by the pool waiting for the generals to rise from the waters.’

  ‘I must talk with her.’

  ‘No good, Baas. She just sits there, waiting!’

  ‘Damnit, Mpedi. I’m trying to save enough animals to keep you idiots alive.’

  ‘No good, but if you want to hear from her own lips …’

  He led Saltwood a day’s journey eastward to the Gxara River, where a delirious crowd of Xhosa had gathered to be near the prophetess when the chiefs rose to greet her, and enough people knew Saltwood’s good reputation to allow him to pass through the multitude to talk with the little girl. She had a pinched face, no beauty whatever, and large watery eyes. She was quite oblivious of the furor she was causing, and when Saltwood had been in her presence only a few minutes he was satisfied that she did indeed see visions. When he spoke to her, she did not respond coherently but rather with a dreamy indifference, for she knew that the day of revelation was at hand.

  ‘Nongqause, there’s still time to save enough cattle to feed the people during the coming winter. Stop the killing, I beg you.’

  ‘When all are dead, then the new will arrive.’

  ‘Can’t you see that you’re bringing desolation to the Xhosa?’

  ‘When the grain is all burned, the new will arrive.’

  ‘Nongqause! You’re destroying your people.’

  ‘When the chiefs arise, it is the enemy who will be destroyed.’ She pointed to the calm, dark surface of the pool as if she expected Saltwood to see what she saw: the cattle waiting to fill the pastures, the boundless supplies of grain, the great chiefs dressed in battle array, with the Russians somehow behind them.

  ‘Do you know where Russia is?’ Saltwood asked.

  As soon as he said this word, an older man moved in to insert himself between the little prophetess and this English intruder. It was Mhlakaza, but neither he nor Saltwood was aware that they had met one fateful morning back in 1836 on the hill at De Kraal when Tjaart van Doorn was prevented from shooting him.

  ‘Why do you come here?’ he asked in good English.

  ‘I come to beg the little girl to stop the cattle killing.’

  ‘The spirits demand it.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Saltwood asked.

  ‘Mhlakaza, he who speaks for the spirits.’

  ‘Don’t you realize that you’re all going to starve?’

  ‘There will be two hundred cattle for every Xhosa.’

  ‘Don’t be a damned fool. Your meadows couldn’t hold them.’

  ‘There will be food for all.’

  Saltwood was so disgusted with this crazy man that he tried to return to the little girl, but this Mhlakaza would not permit. Keeping himself face-to-face with the Englishman, he nudged him farther and farther away from the pool. In desperation Saltwood asked, ‘Mhlakaza, do you know who I am?’

  ‘Are you Saltwood of De Kraal?’

  ‘Yes. And Mpedi here will assure you that I’m a friend of the Xhosa. I’ve fought against you in clean battle. I’ve worked with you. Tell him, Mpedi.’

  Mpedi nodded, whereupon Saltwood asked, ‘Mhlakaza, do you know where Russia is?’

  ‘The ships are already on the sea, coming to join us.’

  ‘But do you know what it is? A city? A town? A group of kraals?’

  ‘It is Russia,’ the prophet said. ‘They will be here next week.’

  ‘And what will you do?’

  ‘Greet them at the shore. Then march to Grahamstown.’

  Having said this, Mhlakaza spoke in Xhosa to Mpedi: ‘Take this man away. See that he reaches home safely.’ In English he said, ‘Saltwood, hurry home and leave the country. We do not wish to kill you when the Russians come.’

  In frustration and despair Saltwood left the Gxara River and its magical pool. Wherever he moved through Xhosa land he saw the slaughtered cattle, the burning piles of grain. He calculated that about twenty-five thousand blacks would starve in the months ahead, and that figure represented only the western lands which he had seen. In the eastern areas, where white men rarely penetrated, there would be, he supposed, perhaps another fifty thousand. Mpedi would surely die, and Nongqause the innocent cause, and Mhlakaza the effective cause. The Xhosa nation would be so prostrated that it could never recover, and this was happening in the year 1857 when sensible nations ought to be able to halt such insanity.

  When he returned to Grahamstown he dispatched reports to Cape Town and London, warning the governments that by the first week in March starvation would be rampant and that at least fifty thousand deaths must be anticipated. He urged immediate shipment to Grahamstown of all surplus food supplies and suggested that they be doled out slowly, for the starving period was bound to last at least a year and a half.

  Tired, weak from inadequate food and sleep, he felt both his advanced age and the dreadful tragedy about to descend upon this region. He wanted very much to hurry back to De Kraal and prepare his farm for the wandering skeletons who would soon be spreading over the countryside, but he felt obligated to go back among the Xhosa, and he was at Mpedi’s desolated village on the evening of 17 February 1857. It was one of those calm, sweet summer nights when birds sang and the earth seemed impatient for the coming of dawn.

  The eighteenth was a bright, clear day, with visibility so unsullied that every mountaintop stood clear. If ever there was a day for beneficent miracles, this was it. The sun rose without a cloud across its face; the air was quiet, with no hint of storm; and had any cattle been alive in the valleys, they would have been lowing.

  Ten o’clock came, and the sun reached toward its apex, increasing in strength. Since it was generally believed that the dead would rise at high noon, crowds began to gather, looking in various directions to catch the first sight of marching armies and the arriving cattle.

  Noon came, and silence. Slowly the sun passed its zenith and began its long descent to the horizon, and with every hour the suspicion grew that neither the chiefs nor the cattle were going to arrive. By five o’clock, when shadows were conspicuously lengthening, Mpedi came to Saltwood and asked, ‘Will they come in darkness? They wouldn’t do that, would they?’

  ‘They are not coming,’ Saltwood said, his eyes touched with tears.

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘I mean that when the hunger strikes, old friend, come back to De Kraal.’

  At six, while there was still plenty of daylight if the chiefs and the Russians wanted to fulfill their pledges, everyone became anxious, and by seven there was panic. When the sun vanished and the fateful day was gone, many began to wail, and by midnight there was consternation throughout the little villages. All food was gone; the Russians had not come; and slowly the Xhosa realized that on the morning of the nineteenth they were going to face problems more terrible than any they had so far imagined.

  The next two months were horror. To the headquarters in Grahamstown came reports that chilled even the most hardened veterans: ‘I visited six villages and found only seven people alive.’ Entire river systems, including even their tiny branches, had not a single person surviving along their banks. Corpses of people rotted in the veld beside the older corpses of their cattle. The land lay devastated, as if Plague had swept in with his Scythe.

  Many who survived owed their existence to Richard Saltwood, who marshaled his inadequate food supplies with brilliance, squeezing the maximum good from the mealies allowed him. He organized relief teams, went himself into the bleakest areas, and prevailed upon his neighbors to accept on their farms as many wandering Xhosa as they could.

  He became inured to death, and hardened himself to make decisions which meant that this village would survive and that perish. For vast numbers in the Xhosa heartland, there was simply nothing to be done; there death was universal.

  When he surveyed the western areas in late April he found that his estimates of
the tragedy had been accurate: at least twenty-five thousand corpses could be seen lying about unburied; and he had been correct in guessing that a greater number lay dead in the eastern areas to which he could not go. Seventy, eighty thousand of the finest blacks in Africa had probably died, some two hundred thousand cattle were slain, because a little girl had visions which her unscrupulous uncle had used to reach for goals not even he could fully understand.

  In the midst of this desolation Saltwood kept thinking of his old friend Mpedi; the herdsman had not reported to De Kraal, where some fifty Xhosa were being sheltered at Saltwood’s expense, so he set out to rescue Mpedi—if he still lived.

  The journey to that village was one he would later try to strike from his mind: corpses scattered in the sun like dead autumn flowers; pastures forlorn and empty of cattle that should have been producing calves; stench and dust and loneliness. But at the village itself the ultimate horror, for there he found six adults who had survived, and Mpedi off in a hut by himself, trembling and near death from starvation.

  ‘Old friend,’ Saltwood cried, tears coming to his eyes despite the fact that he had seen thousands of others dying. Mpedi was an individual man, a good herdsman who had tended De Kraal cattle faithfully, and his death would be a personal grief.

  ‘Old friend,’ Saltwood repeated. ‘Why are you not sharing the food with the others?’

  Shivering in terror, the herdsman drew back. He could not trust even his old baas. He wanted only to die.

  ‘Mpedi!’ Saltwood said, somewhat irritated at this rebuff. ‘Why do you lie here alone?’

  ‘They are eating their children,’ the old man said, and when Saltwood stormed from the hut and kicked the ashes under the pot and upset everything, he saw human bones.

  Mpedi starved to death, as did the fool Mhlakaza, responsible for it all. Nongqause did not starve; as a frail child she required little food, and her admirers supplied that. She lived another forty-one years, a curiosity gossiped about but rarely seen, for the Xhosa eventually realized that she was the instrument of their disaster. In the midst of a later famine she fled for her life when her identity became known. Among her intimates, however, she was pleased to talk about the great days when all the world listened to her preachments, and she seemed to have no realization of what she had done. In later years she assumed a new name, which she felt was more appropriate to her position. She rechristened herself Victoria Regina.