He saw the imposing, grave, great little figure, holding out his hands to them. At once Hintza was up on his haunches and condescending to hold out a burnished paw. He found it gently accepted and himself addressed in French, which to his annoyance he had not yet acquired: “Et enfin, le voila! Hintza, le redoubtable, lui-même. Sois bienvenu, notre cher grand chien, qui mente tant de nous tous!”
Then the paw was released and two sensitive hands went out to Nonnie and François. Speaking in slow, deliberate French which Nonnie translated for François, he said in the low, soft voice, that the dignity of the oldest dynasty in Africa, if not the world, demanded: “Welcome, my children, welcome. We are profoundly happy to see you here, because we now can ask you ourselves on behalf of Africa to forgive us for what was done to you. We are permitted to ask you this because it is not something that we have not asked of ourselves. We too have seen our own country brutally invaded. Our own people too were slaughtered and killed in thousands by Europeans and we ourselves like you lost many beloved ones as a result of it. Moreover—we were driven into exile before you were born. We endured years of a life that was existence more than living, in a foreign country where we were ignored and neglected, and only after a bitter and long struggle were we allowed to come back to our home.
“But on the day we returned to our capital we kept our people and a delegation of generals waiting so that we could first pray in a chapel in the pass that leads to this city. We had to pray there alone with ourselves lying prostrate on the ground and—you will both understand, I am sure of it—crying with gratitude at such goodness of life after such suffering. We prayed so that all bitterness could be taken from us and we could start the life for our people again without hatred. We knew out of our own suffering that life cannot begin for the better except by us all forgiving one another. For if one does not forgive, one does not understand; and if one does not understand, one is afraid; and if one is afraid, one hates; and if one hates, one cannot love. And no new beginning on earth is possible without love, particularly in a world where men increasingly not only do not know how to love but cannot even recognise it when it comes searching for them. The first step towards this love then must be forgiveness. Will you, can you, therefore, forgive us all?”
Listening to him there, looking into their own hearts, they were amazed to see that there was no need even to forgive, that in having pursued to its true end the journey so harshly thrust on them, there was nothing of hatred or resentment left, but only a desire like flame to live on, so that no such journeys should ever be necessary again, a flame so great that in a sense it hardly needed urging on from this descendant of the Lion of Judah, the Solomon that was wise and the Sheba that was beautiful, but an urging which nonetheless was profoundly evocative, since it came from the only authentic royal voice of Africa, so that Nonnie and François could truly say together in voices low with emotion, “Majesty, there is no need to forgive and we can only thank you.”
And there we must leave them for the moment, leave them looking out of the great palace windows into the blue of Africa, blue as if the blue swell of the Atlantic itself were breaking over the blue of the mountain beyond, because at that moment the light of which Mopani had spoken, the meaning of all that had happened, came to them like the story of a wind from a far-off place, and at last they felt it.
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First published September 1974
Second impression September 1974
ISBN 9780701203863
© Laurens van der Post, 1974
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A Far Off Place Page 48
