2
Booi is very free with the moon’s gender. Sometimes the moon is ‘our mother’.
3
Literally, ‘Beachwalkers’.
4
The /Xam were the original Bushmen of the area around Calvinia in the Northern Cape. The family claim to the name, rather like Booi’s association of himself with this group of Bushmen, is rather tenuous. The /Xam have been extinct for nearly two centuries.
5
Afrikaans: literally, ‘Little Nothing’.
6
‘All is lost’.
Chapter Two
He receives a right royal welcome to England; is accommodated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure; learns why English wit is the best in the world; the ingratitude of Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty
The aerodrome of the English is very big: at least twice the size of the landing field outside Lutherburg. It will seem that I say the twisted thing when I write that not since the last hunting season, when farmers from across the Cape descended on the Karoo for the annual springbuck hunt, landing like flocks of Egyptian geese on the gravel strip beside the Lutherburg municipal shooting range, have I seen so many aircraft.
Most amazingly, our craft did not make low passes over the field, as is the custom, but descended directly. This puzzled me until I reached the following conclusion. The machine need not first dive on the field, as is usual in my country, since there are no donkeys, grazing on the landing strip, that must be sent running before the plane can land.
During our descent I noticed what I took to be groups of pebbles scattered across the green landscape. Lying directly beneath the aircraft’s path, they looked from the air for all the world like the sun-split rocks that crowd the slopes of the low hills in the Karoo. As we dropped lower I saw that they were, in fact, thousands upon thousands of human dwellings, glued closer to each other than the cells of the honeybee. Why should people live directly beneath such roaring engines? In a moment the answer came to me. The English probably reserved their best grazing land for animals. The proof was there to be seen below me. They preferred to let their own people endure the howling, noxious tumult of the great planes rather than inflict such suffering on pets or livestock.
Was there ever such a people! As the machine swam ever closer to the ground, I told myself that David Mungo Booi would rather be an Englishman’s dog than a Boer’s best friend!
Thick was the sky with other craft as a pepper tree is with sparrows; they fluttered to earth like feathers. Stepping from the door of the aeroplane, we were guided along a tunnel into a shed as big, at least, as the town hall in Compromise. Inside the shed were a number of holding pens where travellers waited, much as flocks must wait before shearing. Unsure which group to join, I hesitated until a man, waving his arms like a small windmill, in the manner that shepherds command vagrant sheep, directed me into the longest line.
And in the way that beasts are guided by the farmer towards the dipping trough, so the lines were kept moving forward, scrutinized by shepherding officials who prowled the ranks, sniffing and snapping at the loiterers and maintaining strict order. It was a long time before the object of our longer line came into view: more officials, at tables tall as pulpits, sat in judgement on each visitor.
We, patient supplicants of the longer line, were mostly Children of the Sun, citizens of the Old World, dusky and dun or honeyed by our father in heaven. Whereas visitors from the New World, those lands where the sun barely showed his face, were directed into the shorter line. I realized these people were related by blood and tribe to the indigenous population and, as such, expected and received special treatment, as kinship demands. I found nothing surprising in this arrangement, since this has long been a custom in my land, where the Boer rulers long ago decreed that their families should receive the best game, land and milk. Such an unexpectedly familiar sight made me ache a little for my motherland.
As happens at hunting parties and shooting parties, one finds unlikely friends. I made the acquaintance of someone quite overcome with excitement. He was a little round man, just ahead of me in the line and shaped very much like an egg, who wept silently but copiously, his tears splashing on to the floor in such a profusion that those coming after us in the line frequently slipped in the spreading pools until at last one of the herders approached him and directed him to ‘put a sock in it’. This was how I learnt his name; for the herder addressed him as ‘Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty’.
As we drew nearer to the place of scrutiny, Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty began shaking, and his tears increased. Seated at a high table, rather as a cashier in the Jackal’s Dance General Dealer is enthroned upon a tall stool, the guardian of the island was studying each applicant with terrible gravity, picking through his papers in the way a baboon will groom the fur of a mate, catching a tick here and a nit there. And holding it to the light before swallowing it.
Our herder now shook his head and said if Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty did not put a sock in it, he would have to leave the line. My companion, looking for all the world like a well-dressed ostrich egg, or a fat locust on legs, took our keeper at his word, for he immediately sat on the floor and removed one of his socks, poor affairs, holed and threadbare, and pushed it into his mouth. Then he removed the other and, with it, he began mopping up his tears.
The herder or shepherd or guardian who had occasioned this behaviour shook his head once again, and expelled the wind from his mouth in much the same sound as you will hear when the belly of the kudu is pierced with a hunting knife. Then he returned to his ceaseless patrolling of the line, muttering and mouthing to himself and giving every sign of his continuing displeasure. (Wind, I was to discover, is an obsession among these people. Its retention and explusion, through one or more orifices, is raised amongst the English to an art. And not only in their personal, private inspirations but, as I was to learn, also in their politics the movement of air is most important, especially in the winds of change that blow about their island kingdom and which chill and discomfit them, for they believe winds from elsewhere, the wider world, the Countries of the East, of the Sun, and of the European mainland, signify the end of all that is great. Thus do the English place enormous importance on flatulence – hot air, as they call it – used as a private recreation but also as a method of political analysis for diagnosing what is wrong with themselves.)
In the holding pens both lines, long and short, moved at their own pace towards the guardian at the high table. Looking at this fresh-faced judge I recalled that when I was a child and the Englishman rescued me from the fire and taught me to read, he showed me pictures of an angel carrying a fiery lance, sent to guard the gates of Eden after our first parents had been expelled from God’s garden of happy delights. That angelic sentry did not seem anything like as fearsome as the guardian of the gates to our English Eden, seated at his high table, wearing a sports coat of grey wool, the colour of ostrich bile, and a tie as pink as a duiker’s tongue.
Beside me, my round friend wept and mopped. Hoping to comfort him, I offered him a little refreshment from my small store of provisions in the plastic case I had been given on the aircraft. We shared an apple, Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty and I, though I had difficulty in persuading him to take the sock out of his mouth.
How pleased he was to eat, having been sick with fear since leaving his homeland, which lay beyond the edge of the ocean. He came from a people, he assured me (though I had to struggle to contain my disbelief that such oddity should exist in the world), who ate no meat and whose gods exceeded the stars in the sky. His face, though as richly coloured as mine, showed none of the lines of wisdom found among our people. He looked altogether like some tall infant. I felt him to be a simple soul, lost in the world, and gave thanks in my heart that he had landed in the land of the free, which welcomes to her bosom the lost and confused and protects them like a mother lion does her whelps.
All through our meal my companion wept. But if our herders noticed his continuing distress, they chose not to remark on it. As I was
to come to realize, this was one of the most cunning hunting patterns among natives of Albion; when faced with some present or future event they find unpalatable, they lift their noses to give the most marvellous simulation of ignorance. So convincing is this feigned ignorance that it is scarcely to be distinguished from the real thing. I have noticed something similar in the behaviour of black bush pigs when faced by the ravening hyena. The pig affects ignorance even while it is being devoured. Thus it maintains its sense of superiority during its destruction. The hyena may murder the pig, but the victim never condescends to notice.
At last, my lunar friend and I stood before the high table of the recording angel. Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty, forgetting himself to be in a land where none of this was necessary, and probably imagining himself to be in his home country, faced by an official who had in his hands the power of life and death, flung himself on his knees and began kissing the guardian’s hand. The young man blushed very red at this; the strolling herders in the holding pens smiled to see this expression of devotion, and called cheerily, asking if perhaps my poor moon friend had mistaken the guardian of England for the King of Bongo-Bongo-Land? (As I was to discover, they were fascinated by this distant country, to which they frequently referred in tones of astonishment and awe. I am of the opinion that since David Livingstone’s travels through Bonga’s country, west of the Zambesi, Bonga’s name seemed to have stuck in English folk memory in its simplified or corrupted form of ‘Bongo-Bongo’.)
We stood patiently before the official. Here was my first Englishman and I was determined to study him carefully. A young specimen, his skin was of the faintest pink, such as you may see in the last of the sun as it sets over the Snow Mountains. The surface of his face was pitted and somewhat pustular. Later I was to discover that his complexion is something that many of them strive to achieve from babyhood, often devoting themselves to a special diet of fat, sugar and fried potatoes, which, though we might find it nauseating, is highly popular. Clearly he must have shown great promise in the schools to have been put in this position of authority so young. One had only to see how expertly he extracted his hands from the desperate lips of my terrified companion. It was evidently a custom among them that those employed by the Crown should wield considerable power with very little or, better still, no experience whatsoever. This undoubtedly instils modesty and reminds them of their debt to their Sovereign. His face was soft and long, and much of it appeared to have slipped beneath his chin, where, you might say, it waited on developments. He wore, through his left nostril, three small gold rings, which I took to be a sign of his Royal Service.
When I showed him my Paper Promise with the great Royal Seal, and read sections of it to him, his eyes grew large, and an expression of tender pain crossed his face. He sctratched his hair in the way a child will do when it searches for lice. And when he spoke, his voice was high and trembling, like the cry of the kiewiet.
He agreed that my promise had indeed been signed by the Queen Empress and sent to her beloved San of the Karoo. The old She-Elephant had made many such promises. That was a Royal Tradition. And her children, kings and queens in their turn, had given similar promises to many people in colonies, dominions and protectorates on which the sun did not set. But that had been in distant lands in olden times. For, like a true mother of mountains, the Queen Empress had gathered half the world at her feet and looked out over oceans. But she had never intended that her distant children would all come to visit her one day. In ancient English Royal Tradition, one might visit others, but others did not visit one.
But if people who did not know the rules suddenly turned up on one’s doorstep, claiming kinship, then it became necessary to distinguish between sheep and goats, truth-tellers and liars, friends and frauds. Did I take his point? If one allowed into the country every Tom, Dick and Harry one could shake a stick at, then the indigenous natives, upon whom people of my sort relied for help, would feel themselves swamped. Even extinguished. And, instead of welcoming us, would hate us and reject us and injure us. And we did not want that, now did we?
I saw his point. How very different the history of our people would have been if we had done the same. Once we hunted and roamed through all Bushmanland where the rains loved the earth and game crowded the veld. Then the visitors came, black and Boer and English; and where we had hunted the springbuck, now they hunted us. After the Boers came the Red Frocks of the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair – many of whom went by the names of Tom, Dick and Harry – and they hunted the springbuck and the Boer. And us. But today the Bushmen, like the running game, have dwindled to little bits of nothing. If only we had behaved as wisely as they had done!
Now Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty and I were requested to show him our passports. My egg-shaped companion began again to weep. To calm the poor man, I told the guardian we had come in peace. He welcomed this. He seemed to mean it, for no sooner had he glanced at our papers than he ceremonially delivered us into the hands of an official welcoming party who wore distinctive black caps, shaped like elands’ udders, which meant, said my first Englishman, that they were officers of the Crown dedicated to keeping the Queen’s Peace. My heart leaped. We had come in peace and we were received in peace. What better evidence could there be that our arrival had been foreseen by Her Majesty? This happy thought was further confirmed when my first Englishman told us that we were to be lodged in special accommodation pending Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty did not grasp the good news. Was his mind too limited by the barbarism of his upbringing? Or, perhaps, he was so badly frightened by the sight of the welcoming party in their fine nippled hats that he failed entirely to understand the honour we were being paid. All I can say is that his hair stood up on his head like the bottle-brush flower. He flung himself on the ground and began kicking and screaming. It was then that our welcoming party were forced to take measures to protect the poor deluded soul from injuring himself, and to prevent him from lashing out at other applicants in the queue behind him, some of whom were visibly distressed by his childlike tantrum, and began wailing themselves, giving out sobs and groans until all that great receiving shed was awash and the air filled with lamentations.
The soothing of Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty by the peace-keepers was swift and gentle. A leather belt snapped fast around the waist, a pair of steel bracelets about his wrists. Blind to the fact that they intended him nothing but kindness, he cried on the great Queen to save him, not realizing that her agents were already endeavouring to do so. This further distressed those who heard it, and so the welcoming committee had no choice but to close his mouth by giving him, to chew upon, a leather pad about the size and colour of a mare’s tongue and, mercifully, his cries subsided. And, in this pacified condition, we were chauffeured in a large van to the place of Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
We were, in the courtesy vehicle taking us to our Royal Guest-house, twelve in all: apart from us there were a family of five Bengalis, two elderly Pathans, three young women from Istria who had fled the tribal wars in that country. Their good fortune at our right royal welcome cannot have dawned on them, poor souls, for their faces were as white as the petals of the Chinkernichee, and their teeth chattered loudly. My friend, his head bandaged where he had dashed it into the wall at the aerodrome, was weeping again, the tears coursing down his eggy face. Luckily he could not be heard, or my companions in the van might have been even more greatly disturbed.
The generous arrangements for our comfort at Her Majesty’s Apartments showed everywhere. Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty and I were placed in a room together, and our hosts removed his restraining belts with great good humour, intimating with many a wink and a nod that they intended him no harm. A wonderful portrait of Her Majesty graced the wall of our room, and it was most humbling to know that she watched over us and would no doubt summon us to her Palace when she felt so disposed. I was given, for my own use, a table and a chair which, I was astonished to learn, would be left in my room overnight, even though they must ha
ve feared I might have yielded to habit and chopped up my furniture to make a cooking fire.
Thrice daily we were escorted to a room where we were handed a steel tray, scooped like a tortoise shell into a series of craters, and into these metal depressions were deposited a most alarming selection of materials which our hosts regarded as very desirable.
But when I looked down at my tray what I saw was a mound of wet, grey leaves, beside a pool of semi-stiffened porridge, below a hill of dry leather. Food, said my guardians, you lucky people! And I learnt that the leaves were greens and the porridge whipped potato, and the hill of dry leather had once been part of a pig.
For a short time I believed this meal also contained something even less to my taste, since our people place great store by donkeys and our guardians kept encouraging us not to look a gift horse in the mouth. But I was relieved to learn that this was one of their proverbs and not an allusion to an equestrian element in our diet.
I found, however, that I could not eat this food, free as it was. My eggy friend did no better, saying he preferred death by starvation to being sent back home. I sympathized, but I had no intention of starving to death on the verge of a royal summons.
Luckily, I discovered, on our daily walks around the private walled courtyard of Her Majesty’s Lodgings, a garden well stocked with tubers and even a useful supply of ants’ eggs, the English variety being a little saltier than our beloved Bushman’s rice but tolerable if eaten fresh.
Our attendants were amazed but tolerant. If guests of Her Majesty preferred to dine off ants, or starve themselves to death, then that was their privilege. This I took to be a ‘fine instance’ of their forbearance, their desire to live and let live.
I was also given a small, free-standing lavatory. Our host was proud of his accommodation and fittings. Was there ever such a place, where I came from, where everyone was given his own WC and an endless supply of paper? I had to agree. If similar accommodation were offered in the Karoo, every police station between Zwingli and Pumpkinville, from Eros to Jackal’s Dance, would be crammed with Ashbush People fighting to get in. Then, too, in our country, the supply of running water is so jealously guarded that our people are lucky if the farmer offers a waterpipe once in twenty miles. In England you may flush the toilet as many times as you wish. I imagined it had something to do with the rain, which, we are reliably informed, ‘raineth every day’. They study the weather even more carefully than we do. It holds a sacred significance for them. If the rain fell for more than a week, our attendants declared a flood, and feared for their huts. If no rain fell for a fortnight, they declared a drought, and stopped washing themselves.
Darkest England Page 4
