by Andre Brink
‘If only I’d been a man,’ she lamented, ‘not a woman. To put a knapsack on my back and stride through the land and be witness to the wilderness blossoming like a rose!’ There was a tone of hysteria in her voice as she spoke; a woman possessed. And now, she finally came to the point, she’d heard about Wilhelmina’s exhortations; and leaving Erasmus at home crying in his own vomit she’d come to offer Wilhelmina whatever help she could give.
Wilhelmina was no fool. She immediately saw the advantage of having this woman – hysterical, perhaps, but powerful in her rage – on her side. She’d always loathed the creepy Smit; and because Susanna had never spoken a word, keeping herself at her husband’s side like a cringing mouse, no one had ever suspected such depths of anger and energy in her frail body. But now it was different. And with the increasing status her husband had acquired, in spite of himself, since Retief’s death, with Maritz in a position of high authority, Susanna could act as a powerful magnet among the restive women of Natal.
That was exactly what happened. Led by Susanna Smit, with Wilhelmina and her twins right at her heels in formidable support, nearly four hundred women marched on the hall where Henry Cloete was waiting to hear the outcome of the Assembly’s decisive vote. They had with them a petition, drawn up the previous evening by Wilhelmina and her new protégé (Erasmus being once again, most usefully, incapacitated), in which they argued that no decision taken by the Assembly could be regarded as final as it would have been taken by men only; and in consideration of the battles in which they had been engaged they were now entitled to a voice in all matters concerning the state of their country. This right they now claimed, and in ringing phrases – in which one recognises both the visionary inspiration of Susanna and the rage of the more practically minded Wilhelmina – they announced their ‘fixed determination never to yield to British authority’. They were painfully aware, they said, that resistance might be of no avail; but they wanted to make it clear ‘that they were ready to walk across the Drakensberg barefoot, to die in freedom, as death was dearer to them than the loss of liberty’.
In the beginning Cloete, robed and bearing the insignia of his office, treated the irruption as an amusing diversion, but as the time went by and the women became more frenzied, he was getting nervous; if they succeeded in imparting that rage to their menfolk, the whole enterprise might yet founder. He broke into a long speech, inspired by his own eloquence (‘I must impress upon you that such a liberty as you seem to dream of has never been recognised in any civil society, and I sincerely regret that as married ladies you claim a freedom which even in a social state would be unthinkable; and however much I may sympathise with your feelings I must tell you that I consider it a disgrace on your husbands to use this kind of language’); but they soon cut him short. ‘We’re not here to listen to you,’ Wilhelmina told him in a tone of voice that left no doubt about the state of her mind, ‘but to make you listen to us!’
He continued to offer what was subsequently described as ‘a vigorous and manly protest’, but this was drowned by a volley of jeers. By this time a number of men had also begun to drift into the hall, among them Erasmus Smit himself, hauled from his cups by a well-meaning neighbour; and hearing ‘the vulgar and most abusive epithets’ hurled at Cloete (as a male correspondent of The Graham’s Town Journal reported subsequently), the man of God, shaken almost out of his senses, started expostulating at his wife over the heads of the crowd that separated them. In the beginning it was a mere mumbling, but gradually it rose in volume as he began to sob in distress:
‘Quiet, Susanna, for God’s sake, my child, be quiet, come now, my child –’
To which she shouted back, ‘You shut up, you squint-eyed dragon! All these years you’ve done nothing, so don’t try to stop me now. I’m not your child. Today I am putting on the breeches!’
By this time Cloete was so exasperated that he tried to break up the meeting. But the women would net let him go. To save face, for a while at least, he placed himself in what the paper described as ‘an easy attitude’, taking up some documents and affecting ‘to beguile the time occupied by his tormentors in their continued narration’. But then it became too much for him – ‘The plain truth,’ Wilhelmina said, ‘was that he shat in his breeches’ – and suddenly he jumped up and tried to make a quick escape. This was prevented by a surge of women all around him. Some threw their aprons over his head so that he couldn’t see where he was going; others started tearing at his clothes, while Susanna Smit, ‘that small specimen of humanity’ (the paper’s words again), attacked him with her fists. It was only by the exertion of great physical strength that he finally made his escape through the side door, nearly choking from lack of air and no doubt from fear.
Later the same day the Assembly announced its decision to capitulate to Great Britain on Cloete’s terms. The women had been stabbed in the back by their own menfolk. Humiliated and dejected, most of them crept back into the seclusion of their domestic existence; Susanna Smit never appeared in public again, at least not without her husband (and that only after several weeks had elapsed, presumably the time the bruises on her face required to heal); whatever else she had to say in future she would confide only to her diary.
Wilhelmina felt betrayed. Two days after the event, as she was preparing to return to her farm at the mouth of the Umgeni, she heard a wagon rumbling past in the wide street. She recognised Cloete on the front kist, beside the driver. Suddenly she was seized by what she herself described as a fit of madness. She ran out into the street, in front of the wagon, pushed aside the boy leading the oxen and pulled the team to a standstill. Cloete rose in protest. When he saw who it was, he became pale. Perspiration broke out on his clean-shaven upper lip.
Wilhelmina went up to the front seat and shouted at Cloete, in terms that would make a fish-wife’s curses sound like a sermon, to come down; he declined, inviting her up to his level instead. She complied, fuming.
‘Madam,’ said Cloete, ‘I am sure we can come to an amicable understanding –’
Wilhelmina did not deign to answer. With a single right hook she dislodged him from the wagon. He thudded into the dust like a shot vulture.
Regrettably, the confrontation made no difference at all to the course of history. It was not even recorded.
From that day, she withdrew from the public eye, returning to the isolation of her farm, where she gathered her remaining children and possessions (including the coffin of her dear departed mother, which she’d lugged all the way through the wilderness) loaded everything on three wagons, herded together the cattle she had been given in compensation for her losses and in recognition of services rendered to the now defunct republic, and joined one of several groups of trekkers, back across the Drakensberg, towards a new wilderness where, even if it could boast no sea, she knew she would at least end her life beyond the reach of the British Empire.
12
WILHELMINA TURNED TO eating. She had always had a hearty appetite, but that was because her impressive constitution needed sustenance; now, on the intricate meanderings that took her, with one group of trekkers after another, across the Drakensberg into what would today be the North-Eastern Free State, and from there to the remote Northern Transvaal, there was a compulsion about her eating which at first amused, then astounded, her family. At her peak she could start a meal with a dozen eggs and a loaf of pot-bread before proceeding to the enthusiastic consumption of half a fat sheep; she didn’t care much for vegetables, except for pumpkin, of which she could down a fair-sized one at a time on a sideplate; and she might add a chicken or two by way of a salad if she felt peckish.
She began to put on weight at an alarming rate. At ten Wilhelmina was sturdy; at twenty-four, when she married Leendert Pretorius, she was hefty; by the time she went on the Great Trek, at thirty, one might call her solid; and when she left Natal at just under forty she was massive. But this was nothing compared to what she became in the course of that long journey which only came to a halt, two
years after leaving Natal, among a group of wild religious fundamentalist visionaries who had set out in search of Jerusalem. By the time she and her family settled beside what they took to be the river Nile, she was the size of a young hippo, and still expanding. Initially, the rigours of travelling might have restricted her gain in weight, but what to her was the sedentary existence of a settled farmer boosted an almost daily expansion of her girth.
Within a few months of reaching the Nylstroom region she took to husband a puny man, Bertus Lingenfeld, one of the zealots who had offered her family shelter. He was possessed by a religious fervour that outdid by a long chalk the devotion of the late Leendert Pretorius. A real mouse on a sugarloaf, people sniggered; but he could read beautifully, and that must have clinched what otherwise would have been an incomprehensible mismatch. When it came to matrimonial embraces he had to content himself with doing it in instalments; it was, he once confided to a friend, who in turn reported it to Petronella, like wallowing in mud. Very much, one imagines, a matter of hit or miss; but from time to time he must indeed have scored a palpable hit, because they had three children, in 1846, 1847 and 1849. Sadly, all three were wiped out, within months of their birth, by the fever that raged in those regions, as were two of the offspring engendered by the late Hansie Nel, leaving alive, from that union, only the retarded Benjamin.
In 1851 Bertus Lingenfeld himself succumbed, not to the fever, but to the ardours of love. He died in the act, which was quite embarrassing for the children (two remaining sons and two daughters – including Petronella – from the marriage with Leendert Pretorius; Benjamin from the second marriage) as they had to be summoned to help. The problem, Petronella reported years later, was retrieving the body, which was more or less embedded in the bulk and the folds of his wife’s flesh.
There was little to occupy Wilhelmina. The tribulations of the Great Trek were over; the exhilaration of those heady days when she led the women against the English had dwindled to a memory that should be constantly reinvented in the telling, except that apart from her daughter Petronella no one was really interested in listening. There was no call for her services as a healer any more, because the sect in whose midst they had settled already had a medicine woman, the inspired and widely feared Tante Mieta Gous who had taken Petronella under her wing. As a woman Wilhelmina’s role was played out. At most she’d become the Fat Woman, a freak at whom visitors, attracted by the growing fame of her daughter Petronella as a seer, might sometimes stare, from a safe distance, in awe. The discovery that her command of Xhosa and Zulu was worthless among the blacks of this remote region deprived her even of the easy intercourse with the indigenous peoples which previously had come naturally to her. Her only response to all these disappointments and frustrations was to eat more; and then still more.
Had Wilhelmina settled into the placidity and ease one would imagine in a person of those dimensions life might have been more bearable. But even though she withdrew increasingly from the outside world, she also became more and more irascible and violent, something of a terror in the neighbourhood; and visitors had to keep a safe distance. Her eruptions were vesuvian, and in spite of the explicit warnings issued to the curious, several too intrepid souls were maimed, and, it was rumoured, two killed, by heavy missiles hurled at them when they ventured too close.
At the time of constructing their house of timber and rough-hewn stone, Wilhelmina, who did most of the building single-handed, took the precaution of installing a front door large enough to let a wagon through; and for quite a while this sufficed to allow her access and egress. But as she steadily grew more and more voluminous, reaching elephantine proportions during the last five or six years of her life, her body could no longer squeeze through the opening. To widen it would not be prudent as the wall supported much of the weight of the house. This meant that Wilhelmina was now confined indoors. In many respects this was a boon to her children, and on one or two occasions it might well have saved their lives as it allowed easy escape from her legendary eruptions of fury. But it also created headaches, the most important – and embarrassing – of which had to do with sanitation.
The series of longdrop outhouses erected over the years, solid constructions of stone and ironwood over huge pits, and moved along a circular path around the house as one pit after the other was filled, had been built to accommodate an elephant; but now she could no longer go out. No commode would carry that weight. The only solution, which must have been a first in the country’s history, was to move the facility indoors.
The problem, to phrase it as delicately as possible, was that Wilhelmina’s output was directly commensurate with her intake. And as she would have nothing to do with malodorous buckets or barrels carried in and out all day, she insisted on the digging of an indoor pit. Vacating, first, a room at the back near the kitchen, a gigantic hole was dug in the floor and a sturdy seat constructed over it. In a matter of months it was full.
The hole was covered up with beams and plastered with dung, and the whole process was repeated in the adjacent room. Then the next; and so on, until they’d completed the round and were back, quite literally, at square one. By that time, according to their calculations, the first hole would have properly ‘settled’, allowing them to begin another round. Not a fragrant business, but it worked.
Wilhelmina spent more and more time on the massive stone-carved seat of the longdrop. Why bother to move to and fro if motion was so difficult? During her last year or two she even took to sleeping there, leaning over sideways, propped up against the wall. The only visitors allowed inside were selected members of the sect: Mieta Gous, one of the Enslins, a Greyling, and Petronella’s fellow student in the art of prophecy, the young Petrus Landman, people so transported by their faith that they didn’t mind sitting, one or two at a time, on the floor of the room where Wilhelmina now permanently held court.
And from there, too, she continued to rule her household with a hand of iron. The sons were forbidden to marry; suitors for the daughters were turned away. The primary obligation of her children was towards her, the great queen bee ensconced on her solid seat. It was the centre of their little universe, and from there ripples and reverberations, both literal and figurative, spread through their lives, through the region, through the length and breadth of the new-fledged republic of the Transvaal.
Petronella’s visitors were received in a shed converted into a kind of consulting room, because Wilhelmina would not allow them into the house. Perhaps she begrudged her daughter the fame (although in between violent flare-ups the two remained surprisingly close). Perhaps she simply did not wish to be gawked at by strangers in the state to which she had been reduced, as she slowly made the rounds from room to room, huddled above one pit after the other.
Early in 1859 they started on the third round of excavations. And perhaps it would have succeeded had it not been for the torrential rains that struck the region that late summer. The farmyard was one soggy swamp. The water filtered in under the walls which had already been weakened by the continual digging. Below the surface of beams supporting the dung floor a morass developed. The foundations were literally resting on effluent. One night, in the midst of a thunderstorm, Wilhelmina responded to a call of nature. Slowly, as she sat enthroned, she saw the floor beginning to move and sway and gently rock, heaving and subsiding like a sea. She stared, unable to stir, thinking at first that it was a dizziness which would soon pass. Then she discovered that the sturdy seat itself was trembling, juddering like a ship that had struck a rock. As it capsized, the walls too began to shudder and prepare to fold in on her. In slow motion the whole house crumbled below her, around her, on top of her. The children, awakened by what they took to be an earthquake, ran out into the pouring rain. But Wilhelmina was buried under the rubble, sinking down, down into a seemingly bottomless pit, like a whale returning to the deep. It was her final shit-storm.
13
IT HAS BEEN a long spell, interrupted many times, as Ouma grew too weak and fal
tering, to revive her with a sip of glucose water, a breath or two of oxygen. Sometimes she simply remained silent for up to half an hour at a time, breathing erratically through her open mouth. But the moment I tried to rise and tiptoe away, there would be ominous creakings from the bed where the invisible woman reclined, and Ouma would open her eyes. ‘It’s not finished yet.’ And then resume.
Now she sleeps, and the bed no longer sags, leaving me to pick my way through the maze of her narrative as once I crept through the corridors and dead-ends of this fantastic house, exploring its treasures and banalities; and again I have the impression that the more secrets are disclosed the more impenetrable the mystery becomes.
‘Kristien?’
It is Trui, in her petticoat and curlers, come to relieve me. I should be glad to abandon myself to sleep. Yet once again I find that the moment I lie down and turn off the light I am wide awake. How intense the life below the surface of these days. And, as on other nights, everything runs together: Anna’s dark glasses that cannot hide their secret, Lenie behind the floral curtain, a baby girl tended on a beach by crocodiles, Michael tracking down his footnote, Thando’s belly a cushion for my tears, a woman bristling with assegais like a porcupine in rage, Nomaza in her green head-dress: ‘To the women. A luta continua’, a white girl dancing with a black man at the edge of the abyss, a whale buried in a sea of shit, the birds taking flight with the leftovers of Ouma’s life, her fables scattered in the wind, a handful of feathers – a whole day revolving around the emptiness of Sandile.
