Such foreign specimens also deserved protection. Here he beamed at me again. If I settled down, he would set off to Bushmanland, there to find me a mate, a little Bush-woman with whom I would create the first Bush infants born in England!
His journey to Bushmanland, I told him, would produce nothing of the kind. He might walk for a hundred days in Bushmanland and glimpse nothing but thorn-trees, or the little white-and-purple-striped flowers we call ‘baboon shoes’. He might see a hundred thorn-trees flower and know from it, as all civilized people do, that the honey will be fat. And not find a single Red Man to lead him to the honey. He could ask the jackal, that clever person whose hair turns silver when the moon is on his back. And receive no reply. Or the baboons, the people who sit on their heels, and learn nothing. He might whisper his question into the pointed ears of the quick, red cat.5 But he will only blink his green eyes and say nothing. He could ask the blue crane that sings as it walks, ‘A white stone splinter, a splinter of stone so white!’ The blue crane who walks the walk of peace will tell him little. It might confess that when the animals were people, in the First Time, it had the form of a lovely girl. But it will have nothing to say of the Red People. Let him ask the little honey guide who hovers before the overflowing hives of the yellow people who thrust their honey fists into the rock cliffs; or interrogate the ant-bear who sleeps underground. None will point him to those he seeks; so few and far are we, and vanished the lands where we dwelt.
He received this information with silence and a disbelieving look, started the engine, and we continued on our way. We came at last to an ancient castle, surrounded by a moat. Crossing over the drawbridge, we passed beneath a triumphant arch of elephant tusks, and entered through a gateway guarded by lions carved from black marble. He helped me out of the police van, and urged me to make his home my home. African Bushmen were probably the living link between animals and humans. Which aspect was uppermost in me was anyone’s guess. But I was free to roam the grounds, as the animals did. Or, if I preferred living under a roof, then indoor facilities had been prepared. The choice was mine.
I replied, rather pointedly, that I was bound and chained. Imprisoned. What was the good of offering choice where I had none?
He looked pained. Imprisoned! But I had not been captured; I had been collected. On no account was I to think of him as my captor.
He had shot me, roped me and transported me like a goat to the butcher, I cried: that made him my captor.
He had selected me humanely, came the reply. Using a tranquillizing dart guaranteed to have no lasting ill effects.
If he was not my captor, I demanded, then what on earth was he?
My curator, said the Lord.
And, as if to prove his kindness, he unbound me and fixed around my neck a leather collar with a large cardboard tag, of much the sort the farmers in Zwingli use to designate sheep bound for the abattoir. On it he wrote in a fine aristocratic hand: ‘Bushman David. Collected in the vicinity of Little Musing. Property of Goodlove Castle.’
I understood something then. Africa was not so much a place as an adventure, which they made up as they went along. And truth was never allowed to interfere with the pleasures of certainty. This wise policy ensured their progress in Africa for generations, their ideas so firmly fixed that no subsequent experience was allowed to disturb them. How else does one explain how they succeeded so well, and saw so little?
I declared then, without more ado, that his welcome amounted to detention and he had better tie me up again, or I would escape at the first opportunity.
He responded amicably that at Goodlove Castle wild life took precedence over humans. Though visitors were permitted, they were warned to observe the rules of the Castle. Yet people would not learn. Inquisitive children were regularly savaged by hyenas. The screams of those taken by lions were clearly audible in the nearer villages. Every year some simpleton clambered in amongst the gorillas and was hugged to death. Lord Goodlove often found himself angrily condemned for his commitment to the Life of the True Pulse. But he stuck to his beliefs; the greatest threat to life was man!
However, it was only fair to point out his writ ran only inside his walls. In the surrounding countryside a certain dislike, even hatred, was felt for the creatures of the Castle. Any item of his collection – and my collar and tag marked me as such – found beyond the walls might be shot on sight. He hoped I took his drift?
Then he begged me to excuse him. His women were greatly excited by my arrival, and a grand reception awaited me later, when I had settled in.
The quarters he had prepared were commodious. My room was the length of six donkey carts, with a bed broad as a ship, surmounted by four great masts to which were attached richly brocaded sails of red velvet, as large, I swear, as the great curtains that cover the screen in the bioscope in Lutherburg.
When the green, hairy Lord left me, I flung myself into my great ship of a bed and wept bitterly. If golden lads and girls all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust, so too then Bushmen! I was still as far from the object of my journey as I was from the endless plains of my country. My role from now on, it seemed, was to amuse the madding crowd, just another exhibit in that green and menacing Africa, a curiosity a little less interesting than the ostrich, a little more amusing than a monkey.
The sole consolation I drew from this grim state of affairs was another morsel of enlightenment about the tribe among whom I found myself. I recalled ex-Bishop Farebrother’s treachery with fearful admiration. He had sold me to the good and the great of the land for half the latter’s fortune. This had made him feel good. I had once believed that the English are a rare people, in that they believe that having money adds moral status, yet that status increases when you give your money away. But they also believe it increases when you do not give your money away. And the good ex-Bishop had now sold me into a menagerie for the price of his daughter’s happiness – and must have felt morally better than ever!
However, a warning, offered by the former flying Bishop, had proved true: it really was a jungle out there. Just as I had been warned. Now I had run into a horse of a very different colour.
Later that evening, when I had rested, Lord Goodlove sallied from his quarters, accompanied by a host of guards, pages, hangers-on and other supplicants, and, passing by my room, sent one of his servants to request my presence. I made myself as presentable as my few poor garments allowed, brushed my hat and followed the retinue to the lake where cranes played and hippo frolicked and where the Lord held court, in the open air, seated on a bench of full, fat leather, much padded and puckered and broad as an eland’s back. He was the centre of a large crowd of concubines, or ‘wifelings’, as he described them.
They wore loose garments based, he said, on his own design taken from the warrior queens of old England, and designed to free the limbs for battle or love or childbirth.
Two dozen sets of lustrous, humid eyes focused on my person, at which the Lord, at first, laughed and said how eagerly his wifelings looked at me because they expected to see me accompanied by a woman of my own colour. But he was not jealous and invited me to sit beside him. But now the cause of their excitement became very evident; they stared quite shamelessly at the flap of leather which preserved the loins.
Their Lord now smiled less, and called them to order.
Not for the first time, I concealed myself as best I could behind my great tawny hat, while his flock of wifelings, chirruping and pecking, endeavoured to jostle for the best view.
Their Lord and Master, grown suddenly angry, demanded to know, in a huge voice, what should cause them to stare like idiot children. Was there anything present in David Mungo Booi, besides his slanting eyes, yellow skin, peppercorn hair and tiny stature, that they had not seen more nobly present in their Lord?
I am sorry to say the answer was stifled laughter, which I can only describe as indecent, bordering on the downright lewd. He commanded silence – but the merriment continued in the ranks. And I saw tha
t they were as much prisoners as I was. There was something in them that did not love their Lord. Something that pledged itself to silent disobedience. But they lined up for inspection like a guard of honour for a foreign head of state. And that was exactly the way the Lord described the ceremony. He inspected the ranks, but the mocking smiles persisted.
He took me down the line of women, pointing out an ankle here, there a buttock he considered particularly admirable. He was, explained the Lord, a hunter, a hedonist, an artist, a polygamist, a gambler and a conservationist. His wifelings were chosen for their genetic endowments. Each was expected to be ready at all times for the summons to one of the Lord’s weekly seedings. He asked me to notice how his wifelings had been trained to fall on one knee as he approached and at no time to look him directly in the eye: this was the Zulu manner. He was a Zulu ‘By Appointment’, as it were, a privilege conferred on him by the King of the Zulus and an honour which had been accorded to no other living Englishman. He showed me his assegai, his knobkerrie and his cowhide shield with which he had been presented at his induction into the tribe. The Zulu were among the last who lived the life of the True Pulse, who washed their spears in the blood of enemies and died happy. The English, once upon a time, had enjoyed a blood-brotherhood with the Zulu, based upon the finest compliment nations might pay; they had gone to war and killed each other. Nothing quite so cemented a friendship. Did I not agree?
I might have replied that the Red People made war on no one – except those whose cattle ate our land – but I remembered where I was, and held my tongue.
The life of the True Pulse, to which he had devoted himself, beat to a stern drum. Each day of the week saw some solemn ceremony.
There were for example, his art Mondays. In his private apartments every available surface, the ceilings, the walls and even the floors, were daubed with his ‘cave art’. How very grateful he would be for any help I might give him in this regard, knowing as he did that Bushmen held the premier position in the painting of rocks and walls of caves. In these images resided the secret religion of his pagan forefathers, the fruit of a lifetime’s dedication to the life of the True Pulse. In truth, most of the pictures depicted his Lordship naked, sometimes painted blue, frolicking with his wifelings in vales, verdant dells and dingles of an earlier, merrier England, or fornicating among oaks and holly. His qhwai-xkhwe might be shown in full promise, adorned with a sprig of mistletoe (for that is their sacred plant); or he was dressed in the hunting or soldierly costumes they hold to be closest to divinity. In others he was naked on horseback wearing only the peaked hunting cap, blowing a small trumpet. Allegories, he said, for the sacred blood sports, hunting, shooting and fishing.
On Tuesdays, Lord Goodlove became a White Zulu. In leopard skins and cowhide shield, assegai in hand, he was up before breakfast, practising short, stabbing movements on the front lawn. Later in the day he would invite me to teach him to hunt like the Red People. Without the support of his own tribal hunting regalia, tools and animals, his progress was slow, and painful the death of his victims (once a giraffe). But I turned his child-like efforts to good account and, amazing him, from time to time, with a reminder that we kill out of necessity, not for our diversion, I would demonstrate how to convert slaughter into a sustaining meal. But, as ever, he had much to teach me in return.
When he moved around his estate, he was followed, a couple of paces to his rear, by a young man carrying a plastic bag which held a damp dishcloth. It was the duty of the young man, Lord Goodlove explained, to cleanse his posterior parts, whenever the need arose.
In days gone by, the great Zulu Kings, said the Lord, were always accompanied by an officer whose privilege it was to perform this intimate service. It was one of the lovely coincidences that their blood-brothers, the English, in their own special way, had long practised something very similar.
Since I had no experience of the ways of kings, I wondered whether he found it difficult to attract young recruits. Where was the nobility or the profit in so debasing oneself?
Debasement? Rubbish! came the good-natured reply. People competed for the privilege. It was one of the few remaining things that made the country truly great. A trait so deeply ingrained, he doubted it could ever be rooted out. It was the basis of the monarchy, as well as of a properly functioning aristocracy based on wealth, land and breeding, and of the least corrupt civil service in the world. Thank God! Others had tried to emulate the practice and failed. It was a tradition. It flourished naturally. His country, he was proud to say, still produced people willing to roll up their sleeves and do the necessary. People who fully understood the importance of carrying the towel. Difficult as it might be for me to understand, to get ahead in England, one generally started off by bringing up the rear. For this reason ambitious parents put down the names of their offspring at birth in the hope of winning a place in special academies where youngsters acquired the training essential to correct performance, of which there were complex variations, probably impenetrable to the non-native: how to judge the precise position of the towel relative to the job, of the carrier relative to the king; the business of acquiring the all-important demeanour – cool, reserved, discreet; proper application of the towel, never to be overestimated, always downward and towards the carrier, never towards the great one, so that in the event of an accident it was always one’s mentor who enjoyed the sweet smell of success and his towel carrier who accepted the load of responsibility. This was the essence of good rearing. He was proud to say that many of those numbered amongst the movers and shakers of the nation had learnt their trade by wielding the ceremonial towel on his Zulu Tuesdays.
On Fox Wednesdays, he became the Master of Hounds.
Early one morning I was set in a tower of the castle to watch this ancient ritual. His wifelings began preparing glasses of strong drink to fortify the hunters. I saw the horses, neatly groomed, being led from the stables. I saw the hunters meet in the misty hour and mount their horses. I was entranced, at first, to notice that they wore red coats, not unlike the coats that the English wore when they came to the aid of our people and kicked the arses of the Boers from the Snow Mountains to Murderer’s Karoo.
It was beautiful, the tongue-pink beauty of the coats, the black, pod-like peaked helmets of the huntsmen, the sun bright on their little bugles, strange instruments that give off a sad cracked tootle, not unlike the harsh croak of the blue crane, though nothing like as lovely.
The hounds, once unleashed, boiled like newly made tea, their nostrils seeking the scent which hung in the air in tiny droplets. The hunters carried no arms, and I wondered how they planned to dispatch the prey. Suddenly, skipping through a hedge like a red shadow, the quarry was sighted, and hounds and hunt were off in hot pursuit. The fox is regarded as being very clever, and they need to make sure he has little chance of escaping them. He will use any hole to go to earth, they say. And so they stop all those he might think of using.
To some extent they see this creature as a mystical animal, blessed with the cunning we attribute to the divine joker, Kaggen, the mantis. From my captors talk of the Zulus, I realized that it was part of their religious sense to believe that nothing more dignifies your adversary than having sport with him. Unless, of course, it is killing him.
I saw from my tower the hunters slipping like pink smoke across the damp green fields. I felt the fox’s heart beat inside my breast. And I remembered my home and my mission. I heard the little cracked bugle ring out, and the excited baying of the hounds, and I had no need to ask what had caused the excitement far across the fields.
And I heard the song of my red brother. He sang an old truth. That among these people the saving of life is death. And the preservation of dying species, and the keeping of wifelings, and the celebration of brother warriors, and the admiration of Bushmen – all is death. And the salvation of miners, and the redemption of clerics, and the costumes and the customs and the life of the True Pulse are all of them – death.
The song
of my red brother woke me from a fatal dream. I had travelled in England to find freedom, a new life, a living faith. I had found those who wished to help me, hold me, advise me, guide me, teach me, save me – but all their helping, holding, advising, guiding, teaching and saving amounted to was a tearing of living flesh, the small cry, the long darkness.
All this the fleeing Red Man sang. His death was our death, this other Red Man, running before the hunters’ dogs. Our fate was to be chased from kopie to kranz by soldier and farmer and traveller and collector. Driven from our water-holes. Robbed of our honey. Smoked out of our caves. Parted from our children. Cursed for our tricks. Feared for our arrows. Shot down in our hundreds.
They say of the fox that he is very cruel. And so it was said of us. That he will take what he cannot eat, six lambs at a time. And so they said it of us. That he kills for the fun of it. And so, they said, did we. That he is cunning, dangerous, dirty. So, they said, were we. That the hunter who destroys him is friend to all.
These memories and pains sat heavy in my heart as I watched from the tower and heard the fading screams of the dying fox as the hounds tore him to pieces.
By the time the Lord and his party returned, jubilant from the kill, I had remembered my manners sufficiently. It was only right, surely, that an explorer in a foreign land should not stand in judgement but try wherever possible to understand their native customs? But it was right, too, that a traveller in this antique land should be aware of the dangers, lest he be killed by custom, or kindness.
1
Afrikaans in the original: tr. guineafowl. In fact, probably pheasant.
2
I suspect this ‘oily’ uniform is, in fact, no more than the typical country fashion of Barbour and galoshes.
Darkest England Page 16
