by Andre Brink
“I don’t think you understand, Dad,” he said when he finally stopped, looking at me. Outside, the sun was already lighting up the pillars on the stoep. Down by the dairy the calves were lowing violently. He shook his head. “You still don’t understand,” he said.
“Do you really think ‘initiation’ means one thing only?” Perhaps it is characteristic of my generation; I’m not sure. Why should this one particular memory return to me? – the stag party in Thielman Pauw’s house, one weekend when his wife had gone away; thirty of us, each contributing ten rand for the liquor and the stripper. She encouraged us to cover her in oil, the full length of her lithe body, her disappointingly small breasts, between her legs, everywhere, while she was writhing like a snake among us. Obviously knowing her job, she stripped and danced to maximum effect. But the curious thing was that, while one was rubbing the oil into her – the smoothness of her shaven mound – one could feel her trembling under one’s hands, a persistent, incessant shudder; while her eyes were staring vacantly past us, her mouth drawn in a fixed and rigid smile. Almost as if she were terrified of us. Which was quite incomprehensible: we were respectable gentlemen, all of us, no one would think of hurting her. And if she had chosen to earn money in that particular way, there could be no hint of exploitation. In fact, we helped her.
2
THERE WAS NO one in the kitchen when I came in, only the thickset old Kristina, preparing the porridge on the stove with Thokozile’s baby tied in a bundle on her back.
“Morning, Kristina,” I said. “Are you looking after the orphan now?”
“Au, Baas.” She poured me some coffee from the pot on the stove. “Thokozile she don’t even cry out, Baas. We never hear anything. All the years she just take what Mandisi give her. It come from far away, this thing.”
“What’s going to happen to the children now?”
“Thokozile’s ma she come fetch them. The Missus phone early this morning.”
“What’s happened to the Missus now?”
“She go down to the cows, Baas. There’s no man to work on the farm today. It’s only Mdoko.”
“Why didn’t she come and tell me then?” Annoyed, I went to the bathroom to call Louis. He was washing his face, bent over the basin, bare to the waist. A boy’s body still, smooth and lean; but the muscles were sinewy and tough. “Louis, there’s no one to do the milking today, we’d better give Grandma a hand. Kristina will pour you some coffee in the kitchen, then you can come down afterwards.”
Outside the back door three small children were sitting huddled in the sun. Probably Thokozile’s.
“Go and sit in the kitchen by the stove,” I told them.
But they just stared at me with large dark eyes. I gestured towards the kitchen, but they didn’t move. Oh, well. They were probably used to the cold anyway.
The dogs came charging round the corner of the house to greet me with their usual boisterous enthusiasm, and I first had to chase them away before I could go down to the cowshed. From a distance I could make out two figures among the cows, but was unable to distinguish them before I reached the gate of the enclosure: Ma, and a young Black labourer who grinned widely when he saw me, but without saying a word.
In strong, regular movements she sat pulling at the teats as the milk purred into the pail, the foam bulging over the sides in small whispering sounds.
“Why didn’t you call me, Ma?”
She chuckled. “I don’t like to wake sleeping dogs.”
“If I were you, last night’s business would have been the last straw to me, you know.”
She looked up at me from the low milking stool. “Just as well you’re not me then.”
“You’re being difficult.”
“Did you come down to help or to criticise?” Without waiting for an answer she switched to Xhosa: “Mdoko, come and tie up a cow for the Baas. I want to see if he still knows how to milk.”
Pushing aside his pail, her young helper got up to tie a cow to the manger next to Ma’s. He brought me a pail and a stool, and held out the round tin of dubbin for me to grease the teats. Much to my annoyance he didn’t return to his cow straight away but remained behind me to watch.
I had trouble with the first few tugs, unable to get a proper grip on the leathery teats; and the cow fidgeted, swiping with her horns in my direction from time to time. But when the first thin jet came spurting from the udder, missing the pail and squirting over my trousers, she began to calm down and soon I rediscovered the easy rhythm of long ago.
“Well done,” said Ma. “If you go on like that you may still become a farmer one day.”
After a while I didn’t feel the cold so badly any more. The milk steamed from the pail clenched tightly between my knees, and I breathed in the warm, comforting odour of cow and milk and dung and fodder. In a singular sensation of relaxed luxury I felt the weariness slowly draining from my body and my mind.
(As children Theo and I had regularly milked straight from the udder into our open mouths.)
As soon as she’d finished with her cow Ma got up. “Now that you’re here I’m going home to keep an eye,” she said. “I see Louis is also coming down to help. Don’t bother about separating this morning, the calves can drink their milk full-cream for a change.”
“You look like an old stable hand!” said Louis as he came into the shed. “Molo, Mdoko.”
The boy greeted him and they started talking. I was surprised by Louis’s easy way of speaking Xhosa. But of course, he was still young, he hadn’t forgotten what he’d picked up during holidays.
“How come you know his name?” I asked as he sat down on Ma’s stool beside me.
“Don’t you remember him then? We used to play together when I was small. Then he went away.”
“And you recognised him just like that?”
“He came round to the outhouse while I was working on the generator yesterday. It was good to see him again after all these years. He said he’d left because his father had died and so he’d gone to live with his mother’s family.”
It really didn’t interest me, but I made no attempt to interrupt. He still seemed in the expansive mood induced by his long confession about Angola.
“He became a man last year,” said Louis. As the milk rose in his pail the sound became more subtle. “It’s quite a business. Did you know about all their initiation ceremonies and things?”
“You mean circumcision and so on? Yes, I know.” I remembered the light fear with which, in my youth, we’d used to watch the groups of wandering amakweta on the farm, covered in white clay from head to foot and without a shred of clothing, except for a loincloth or a small penis sheath. Usually they’d fled into the bushes at the first sight of us. And what happened there we could only guess. At night we heard the singing and dancing from the kraals, but in the daytime life went its customary way as if nothing had happened.
“Did Mdoko tell you about it?” I asked after a while.
“Yes. He said he’d really wanted to wait until this year, but it was just as well he went through with it last year when the incibi came, because that was before the drought. He says they’re not allowed to be circumcised in times of drought.”
“Who’s the incibi?”
“The old man who comes from the bush to do the job. At new moon, I believe. It’s got to be new moon for some reason.”
I sat listening like a few hours earlier, amazed at rediscovering in him all the enthusiasm of his boyhood which had been absent for such a long time. Even though there was hardly anything new in what he told me, I made no effort to stop him but sat listening passively as he eagerly spoke on. About the amakweta hut built by the men in a lonely place where no one had lived before, and furnished with soft grass inside by the women, like birds preparing a nest. And about the first goat sacrificed in the kraal; the shaving of the amakweta, leaving their heads and bodies as smooth as those of babies, and burying the hair in the veld. Afterwards, one had to submit to the mockery and vituperation of
the old men: and if you so much as blinked, you weren’t allowed to continue. Once you’d passed the first test, you received the ritualistic belt for your waist and an ubulunga for your neck, made from the tail hairs of a pregnant cow. And then you were taken to the secret hut in the bush where the old men sat waiting in a circle of silence.
Next would come the going down to the water, to be cleansed of all your wrongs; returning, washed and smooth and naked, with a kaross over your shoulders, to sit down on the ground with knees wide apart, for the incibi to perform his duties. Holding the prepuce between the fingers of his left hand the assegai in his right hand would move very swiftly to and fro; and if your face revealed the slightest expression of pain you were dismissed. Wiping his assegai on your kaross, the incibi would hand you the severed skin to be exposed on an antheap; and once it had been consumed, you would be required to drink water in which the soil of the antheap had been dissolved. The wound would be bandaged with leaves, and the following day your body would be covered in the white ifuta clay. Now you were ready to go out hunting and looking for food in the veld, far away from all human beings. It might last for weeks, until the next goat had been slaughtered in the kraal. It was then the nightly singing would begin, as the amakweta trekked on from kraal to kraal. And when finally everything was ready, they returned to the water to be washed anew; and each boy received from his father the penis sheath confirming his manhood.
The secret hut would be burnt with all the earlier possessions of the amakweta, so that they could start like newly born, even with new names. In the cattle kraal a great celebration would be held, the Dance of the Big Bull. And covered in red clay the young men would make merry with the girls till dawn – for now they were initiated; now they were men. And round them sat their elders clapping their hands rhythmically and shouting like peals of thunder in the night: Siya vuma! – So be it!
Listening to Louis’s eager narrative, it occurred to me that there was something reassuring about this form of initiation leaving nothing to the initiative or the uncertainties of the individual. It was so much easier than Louis’s, or my own. What had he known about what was in store for him upon entering Angola?
Aided by Mdoko, he chased the cows through the bottom gate down to the veld, even though there wouldn’t be anything for them to graze there. Late in the afternoon they would come home again to be fed.
Remaining behind at the trough of the calves I watched them push and ram each other taking their turns. But my thoughts were still wrestling with what Louis had told me earlier that morning.
We crossed the border at Oshikango in a large convoy after a week at Grootfontein. Jesus, you should have seen the mud up there. We were grey from head to feet. Anyway, then we crossed the border. Strange feeling, you know. Suddenly everything is different. We’d crossed the Kunene a few times during that last week, and that was strange enough, that wretched little concrete bridge over the enormous river: a sudden feeling of really being in Africa now. Still, it hadn’t been all that different. At Ruacana and Calueque one still had the feeling of being among our own people, that sort of thing. But the day at Oshikango it was different. On our side of the border everything was normal. The petrol pumps, the ugly little buildings, the police station protected by sandbags. But on the other side, at Santa Clara, hell! There was almost nothing left, you know. Buildings with roofs torn down, doors missing or hanging on one hinge only, empty holes for windows. Even the petrol pumps in front of the garage were uprooted and burnt. The streets were littered with bottles and tins and paper and junk. And then the slogans: ABAIXO MPLA! Or POVO UNITA! Or POVO SAVIMBI! All over the walls and right down to the tarred road with its potholes.
We pushed on. No one felt like talking. The veld opened up again, but there was something strange, something sinister and horrible in the air. It was very hot and quiet, and the grass and bushes and trees all had this deep sort of venomous green. Here and there we passed a farmhouse, most of them in ruins, doors and windows broken out and blackened by smoke.
In some of the yards we still saw chickens running about. If we’d known what the world looked like farther on we’d have caught them and taken them with us, even though they were just skin and bones. Even a pig in the road. And white-and-black cattle with long fierce-looking horns.
Then we came to Pereira d’Eca with its ramshackle stores looted and plundered, the windows boarded up. And the miserable little houses with their verandahs torn down. A bank building with the whole front missing. Streets ankle-deep in rubbish. And a restaurant with its name still showing – Restaurante Ruacana or something – with painted walls and fancy arches among the rubble. Once again there were slogans everywhere you looked:
VIVA MPLA!
VIVA FNLA!
ABAIXO NEOCOLONIALISMO!
VIVA ROBERTO!
And, in the middle of all this mess, the enormous church with its broken roof, sitting there like a great wreck of a stranded ship, completely out of place.
That’s where we stayed over. Even at that early stage, before we’d fought any battles, it felt as if something had closed up inside one. Still, there was, I don’t know how to explain it, a sort of excitement. Suddenly the “operational area” had got a name, you see. It was no longer just a place far away. It was a country with landscapes and villages. It wasn’t just talk any more. We’d really crossed some sort of border.
But there was something else too. A feeling, well, that there were still other borders to be crossed ahead. Different sorts of borders.
We were still full of talk about how we’d give them hell, all eager to meet the “enemy”. But Jesus, it was a sad place to be in. From the next day there were the refugees, the trucks stranded without petrol along the road, the old toothless grandmothers, the children swarming all over the place gaping at us, the Blacks. Still, we were full of confidence. We thought: Don’t worry, boys, we’re going to clear this mess up for you. We’ll blast the bloody enemy right out of your country.
But as one goes on one sort of talks less. Especially after you’ve seen the enemy face to face for the first time. I mean, it’s all right while you’re lying in your trenches and he’s over there in the bushes; it’s all right if you can get to his PM-46s in time and pull out the detonators. But once you’ve really seen him it’s a different story.
It was just short of Benguela we first found the Cubans. By that time they were already falling back, but here and there they’d dug themselves in. Once, just before we got to the railway line, we were held up for three days. Supplies were running low. In the end we hardly had any food left. Bit of bullybeef we ate out of the cans in the trenches; a gulp of water, that was all. But we blasted them right out of their holes and they started running, leaving most of their tanks and Scanias behind. It was there I saw my first dead Cuban, lying half under one of the abandoned jeeps. Clean shot in the chest. His shirt was soaked with blood, but for the rest he looked just like he was sleeping.
He was very young. My age, I think. Not a day older than nineteen. In his shirt pocket we found a snapshot of a girl. Not particularly attractive or anything, but quite a sweet little face. I suppose it sounds soppy. But it wasn’t. I didn’t even feel shocked or anything. But I can remember thinking: Shit, who’s going to tell her about it now?
While we were pitching camp and fixing trenches in the late afternoon – I was one of a crew digging the latrine ditch for the row of green plastic seats we carted along everywhere we went – we saw a few of those long-horned cattle grazing among the trees, some of them with calves. We rounded them up and started milking into our mouths. A bloody mess, but it was worth it. Two or three of the ous would hold on to a cow while the others took turns to drink. We were covered in milk, our shirts were soaked. It was as if we were trying to bloody well wash ourselves in milk.
That night in my sleeping bag I kept on thinking about the Cuban, although I was exhausted after those three days. I couldn’t help myself. I thought: What was that little bastard doing
so many thousands of miles away from home? Perhaps they hadn’t even told him where he was going or whose war he was going to fight. Just as they never told us. All we knew was that the Angolans were fucking one another up and we had to move in before the Commies took over. But hell, it wasn’t our war either. Like that young Cuban we were fighting someone else’s war for them.
And that was when I knew, that night: Now we’d really crossed a border all right. A worse one than just the Kunene. Now we really were in a strange country not meant for humans. And milk alone wasn’t enough to clean oneself any more.
3
THEY WERE DIGGING the grave, beyond the huts where the slope of the hill was levelling, near the spot where the water diviner had stopped the day before. There was a small enclosure of aloes, tenaciously clinging to the hard earth and aflame with flowers even in that drought. The picks and spades made little impression on the baked red soil, ringing with a loud metallic twang as they struck what appeared to be solid rock. In spite of the early-morning cold the men were working with bodies bared to the waist and shining with sweat, hiccuping at every blow. Here and there within the aloe enclosure lay the small stony humps of older graves.
On the farm of my boyhood friend Gys there had also been a row of old Griqua graves in the open veld among the swarthaak thorn-trees, far from the house – small mounds of stone, piled up and eroded by sun and wind. Once, hunting hares with the dogs, we’d arrived at the graves in a state of near-exhaustion. I was on the point of flopping down on one of the heaps to rest when Gys shouted in panic:
“Hey, Martin! Watch out! Those are graves, man!”
“So what?”
“If you sit on one of those graves the ghost of the Griqua buried there will come and haunt you tonight.”
“Ag, nonsense.” Too tired to care I sat down. Gys and Theo squatted a little way off in the sparce shade of a thorn-tree, staring at me fearfully. In that dazzling sunlight it seemed ridiculous to heed his warning. To prove my disdain, I even peed on the grave before we left, grinning at the dismay of the others.
