Islands

1

THE REMAKING OF CHIEF HARRY

One red dawn, ten or twelve years before the Dutchman started building this place, Autshumao became leader of the Goringhaicona. He walked across the dunes to the sea, as if he’d never known the dead or the living behind him. He was covered in blood, robbed, humiliated, as he walked in the half-dawn from the smouldering stubble of burnt grass beside a vlei, under the bitter smoke of charred matting and cattle hides, followed by five children, five women and two old men. Behind them in the smoking rubble were their dead, ahead of them was the sea. They were leaving with empty hands. There was no mat or pot or digging stick to take, no ox or sheep, no milk-bag or throwing stick or dog.The others, the old men and the women, dragged bodies into a cold ditch and covered them with branches. Because they were scared of abandoning this place, the old people burrowed in ashes and rubble, saying a few words, and later followed Autshumao across the low dunes to the sea. The sea was open, and its openness was a kind of security. But he was the first to leave from there, to get away from where he had lost everything.

On the beach he stopped for the woman who was carrying his sister’s child, and continued with the child on his back. He called her his sister’s child; her name was Krotoa. He owed it to her to carry her; a child should rely on help from her mother’s brother. He took her and carried her, that girl, but he did not ask anyone to go with him. When they came near the sea the child was crying inconsolably, and a woman took her to her dry breast. Autshumao did not take the girl back. Looking over thetwelve people he thought of how he’d never asked them to follow him or threatened them to obey him. He hadn’t promised them anything.They had simply followed him and he had become the leader of the Goringhaicona.

There were few of them, and with sea-stuff and food from the veld they could manage for a while. In the hollows among the front dunes, that very day, they chopped harubis with stone, tearing the reeds with nails and teeth, and tied it into mats with rope from rolled grass, and the mats into houses, and set up the houses in a circle among the dunes, surrounded by a kraal of berry-thorn branches.

The thirteen of them, the last of the Goringhaicona, lived apart from the rest of the Koina, between the dunes and the sea, poverty-stricken and mostly ravaged with hunger. The sea gave them its fish and meat, the plain behind the dunes, its meagre wild fruits. Autshumao carried in his heart his longing for cattle and sheep, but he was wary of acquiring cattle. Cattle were clothes and food, and medicine, that was what cattle were, but he had to do without. He was man-alone, it was safer not to own anything. Never again could he put fat and cream on the fire to go up in smoke to Heitsi-Eib’. In order to have peace around him he had to live without Heitsi-Eib’.

At the end of that winter the Goringhaiqua brought their herds of cattle from the Sand Veld to graze in the water pastures along the rivers. Autshumao climbed a hill to check on how many animals his enemies had gained, because without fail so many head of cattle pushed war out ahead of them. From the smoke of his enemies’ transition fires, heavy and reeking with cream and fat, he could smell that they were prospering. It was good to see their mottled white-and-brown cattle standing in the shiny water, and the young herders playing on the grass. Cattle meant power; you could rise up and hit out as you wish, against whomever you wish. He tried to discover his own animals among the strange herds, but couldn’t see them.

Still, at the sea there occasionally was a touch of luck for Autshumao and the Goringhaicona. In a sandy bay near the watering place, white sailors would drag out their boats from time to time. English sailors, their language and their red-striped flag told him.Autshumao received clothes and bread as payment for accepting a letter in safekeeping, and in exchange offered them honey, a tortoise, some ostrich feathers in friendship. Sometimes they were given tobacco. That was why Autshumao chose those low dunes as a place to live, because it was near the watering place and opposite the deep where the ships came to lie. That was the roadstead.

Autshumao and those with him would argue fiercely among themselves about the odds and ends of clothing and ship’s food that came their way, but the brandy was for him only. He had himself rowed on board to eat and drink, and if a turning tide or a change in the wind made it necessary for him to return to shore, he made sure that his hands were empty before he reached his people.Where there is hunger, poverty is generally peaceful.

He was no longer a young man. Once, his stomach filled with bread and brandy, he had been sitting on deck in the winter sun talking to the sailors, and then grew sleepy from the gentle rolling and the hollow booming of the sea against the hull, and on that day the ship London had left with him, off to the Orient. All the skipper said was, ‘Sorry, old chap. Didn’t you notice the weather changing? I have to use this breeze to get off a lee shore. But in a few months’ time I’ll bring you home again.’

It had been a big ship, not as big as some he’d seen under the Dutch flag, but decorated with red and a touch of gold on the transom and along the railings, and around the gallery windows. Below deck two rows of black cannon lay like sleeping dogs behind closed red gates. On that voyage Autshumao had contracted the seamen’s diseases, learned their language, and became Chief Harry.You might hunt him anywhere, Autshumao was no longer there, the ship had carried him to the Orient. Only his heart had turned back early, and went home alone. On that voyage he’d also lost his respect for iron and copper, since it was so cheap and plentiful that the English threw it away. He himself would never accept iron as barter again – his enemies could covet iron, his own time for iron was past. Cattle were money, cattle were food, medicine, beasts of burden, a herd of young hunters, a host of armed warriors. Even Heitsi-Eib’ had to wait.

In the Orient he’d seen, when sometimes the ship had been moored to a quay in a river mouth, how dark men with gowns and long hair would stretch their necks like gannets on a rock to talk up to the ship. Their air was dusty since early morning, their seawater tepid, the food strongly spiced, the stars alien. Thunderclouds would come up every day, and disperse again before dark after heavy rain. Dun-coloured cattle with drooping ears would wander among the people, mainly dried cows and heifers, disconsolate animals without a bull, and lean oxen pulling carts. And there’d be beggars stretching their hands towards him, but because the land folk drove them away from the quay with stones he would shake his head at them. So poverty existed on both sides of the big sea; he was not alone. He’d seen the English trading with the people of the land. Money changed hands, never drink or tobacco.

Behind each quay lay a town, behind each town a green jungle like a wall, behind the jungle there would sometimes be mountain peaks, and behind the mountains the thunder. He stopped looking at it.What was there to see? Those were not the dunes and clumps of reeds of his home. Sometimes shouted threats were exchanged between ship and quay.Then once again the sea.The drinking water was insipid, it caused his stomach to run for days and nights, with blood and pain. He became listless, sitting on deck, smoking and yearning for drink. He felt no inclination to go ashore, but remained restlessly on board, listening to the grinding of the ship against the quay and the anxious creaking of the masts, like old skeletons complaining below ground. Then they would sail on again, and at first there would be sea, blue and deep for days on end, and then there would be land.

Autshumao’s thoughts were with the people he had left behind, with his sister’s child. The world over things were changing. People he had known were dead.Would Gogosoa, the fat murderer, be thinking that from now on his cattle would graze alone in the water pastures? He hadn’t seen yet how the white people’s ships were approaching from all sides, and how they were building stone houses wherever they came ashore. Strange nations would come to live on Gogosoa’s grazing; it was their children who would occupy his land. He could see that in future times it might be better for the Koina to remain friends with the whites, at first to help tend the enemy’s animals and children. Better that way, because the white man would rule and his livestock would fill these parts, from the Cape all the way up the coast as far as the Cochoqua, the Grigriqua, and, in the opposite direction, over the mountain towards the sun: the Chainouqua, the Hessequa and the Attaqua, and across the green hills to the Gouri and the Inqua of the forest. Everywhere the white man’s livestock would be grazing. For the favour of keeping a few cattle of their own, and a chance to build up their strength, the Koina had to keep the peace with them. That way it would be better for the Koina, who had to greet the new rulers without guns and horses.

Such were Autshumao’s thoughts, even before a single Hollander had stuck a spade into Cape soil. Only, he was expecting that it would be the English who would be doing it, not the Dutch; for the ships of the English were criss-crossing the seas, they would meet each other by appointment, at places in the middle of the ocean where there was no sign of which one could say: At such-and-such a place we shall meet on such-and-such a day. And he could hear the English talking about the food and water and firewood of the Cape:‘My dear fellow, a simple takeover. No trouble at all.’ One simply pushed away the stinkers, and took over land, water, trees and grass. ‘The natives are harmless. Like children, really.’

The colour of the sea turned green again. Autshumao, Chief Harry, spent the last days of his months at sea through the steaming tropics on his back, his body pressed against the gunwale so that the sailors wouldn’t step on him, and his face turned away from the gaping hatch in the deck.When he opened his eyes he could see red paint on English oak; when he closed them, there was his niece, and behind her a pale yellow mat of thin reeds in the curve of a harubis house. In his long dream, going on for days and nights, he could smell dry reeds, and cold ashes among the stones, and cow dung.

At night, like most sailors in the tropics, he remained on deck, until near the end of their journey the evening air turned cool and dew was shimmering on the deck and rigging in the false dawn. At night the golden stars hung in a dense weave over them. The thin black fingers of the masts were probing tentatively among them, moved them from one spot to the next, gathering golden stars from the deep blue night, removing others, shifting, shifting, until one night the new sky was complete. He gazed in wonder at the frothing Milky Way. For the first time he knew without any doubt where he was, in which season of the year – that was how far the moon had already wandered across the sky – and which wild fruits would be ripe by now, and how green the pastures, and where the Koina’s camps and flocks would be by this time.

The sailors of the watch looked how Chief Harry got up from under his blanket, and clambered up the shrouds until he found a foothold in the crosstrees of the mainmast. Below him the ship went on digging its face into the flickering water before swinging it out and up like a drinking bull, but Chief Harry climbed higher up the rigging, until he could step on to the maintop yard.With his arms around the mast and his face to the night wind he examined the darkness ahead. He could see nothing but the teeming stars and the slight flickering of phosphorescence far in front of the bows, hear nothing but the groaning of wood and the creaking of new cordage stretching across blocks, and the hissing and churning of seawater along the length of the ship, smell nothing but a cool sea wind reeking of tar and linseed oil as it swept across the deck.With a sigh he recognised in the shimmering field of stars the southern cross, only half risen above the horizon, and he knew for sure that the Cape dunes stretched fresh and fragrant with herbs and shrubs ahead in the glittering night. Heitse!

When he arrived home, there was nothing to be slaughtered. Some of his women had left of their own free will to go to the Goringhaiqua. The two old men were dead, or had been left somewhere for dead, but other old people had joined the group, men and women who had grown thin after the loss of their close relatives. He told them that his new name was Chief Harry, but they wouldn’t believe him. For all his stories, about people riding on elephants, and all his English, he might just as well have said, Listen, an earwig crawled into my head while I was asleep, and I’m seeing and speaking crazy things before I die. So they didn’t ask him any questions. It wasn’t necessary.

His sister’s child was scared of him, and the deaf woman who looked after her kept the child away from him. It annoyed him and he brought the child sweet things, but they made her ill and the deaf woman loudly blamed him. He also started talking about moving camp, and pulled up sticks and rolled up mats until the others did the same, and then he would move a hundred yards this way or that way and plant his sticks in the ground again. The old men and the women patiently followed him over those little distances. He knew they would get up and go when he asked.

Their meagre food was gathered from icy rock pools at low tide. Sometimes there was a seal on the beach, dead for days, covered with sand lice and deeply corroded by crabs and gulls. But in his camp Chief Harry spoke of cattle and saw in their faces the yearning appear for sour milk, butter, meat, and the dark, heavy smoke for Heitsi-Eib’. He spoke of sheep until their eyes shone with expectation, and of cattle: the hides for shoes and caps, a skin-bag, the tuft of the tail for a flyswitch. Blood, pots filled with blood, he mentioned. By the nodding of his handful of indigents Chief Harry knew that he had won their hearts. Memories of good times invariably revolved round cattle: young heifers, cows with huge udders, or a black bull with a heavy chest and narrow hips, or thirty, forty red fighting oxen with wide horns like the open pincers of scorpions. Autshumao’s dream caused old people to see their sons and daughters again, remember huts beside shining vleis where they once lived, pots filled with sour milk. Only the deaf woman didn’t hear him, and the two of them stared away together at the endless movement of the sea. They spoke of cattle, but the cattle stayed away; some of his people died in that expectation. Old age and cold moved in among the group. No children were born. Only his sister’s child was left now.

In late summer and late winter, when the seasons changed and the wind came from a different direction, there were ships. Then they would bring their bundles of firewood, or a skin-bag filled with honey, to the watering place and receive ship’s bread and tobacco in exchange. Chief Harry used his English and would be rowed to the ship. Usually there would be a letter. ‘Give it safely to the first Englishman that comes here. I wrote in here that he must pay you.’ But the stingy Dutch hid their letters under rocks and left a message on the rock, and then Chief Harry would remove the letters and personally hand them over to the next Hollander. He had to make a living.

More new ships arrived in the bay, new flags and new tongues. Swaggering, the white people walked among the bushes and smelled and plucked and tasted. They did not ask Chief Harry about the wood or the mountain. Six or seven men with guns and a glass would go up the mountain to study the land. From up the slope there would be the sound of their axes where they were chopping wood for masts, three or four trees at a time.They also went right past him to discuss animals for slaughtering with the Goringhaiqua at the vleis, and for that they gave his enemies brandy and tobacco. He knew the sailors would want to lie with women, but all he had with him was old women and his sister’s child.Yet he was surprised to see among his people new beads or clothes he didn’t know about.

A strange thing happened: some of Gogosoa’s people forgot about cattle and came to live with Chief Harry. They would have to live sparingly, but they were willing to do that, provided they could be close when the boats were rowed ashore. For them drink was the new way of remaking, but for him it was a new cause of concern, these vultures descending on a bit of tobacco and drink. He himself coveted it. His people already had to walk for half a day to collect firewood, and soon enough Gogosoa’s whole horde would descend on these low dunes to kill them, and chase them off from this place too, just for the taste of tobacco and brandy. Chief Harry heard rumours that Gogosoa’s women offered their bodies in exchange for drink. This was a new thing that was beginning.What was to become of him?

He made no attempt to rule over the growing, unruly crowd who had come to plant their sticks for homes among the dunes next to his Goringhaicona. He didn’t want them. All he had left to barter was his English. He could feel his dream of many cattle fade away; even his desire for them was fading. If the English came to build stone houses at the watering place, he would be the first to pull up sticks to go and live with them.

He had his niece with him, but there was nothing he could do for her. When the time came for her transition feast, he would take her to her father’s people across the mountain, so that they could do the slaughtering her age required. After him, they were her closest relatives. Or if they would not acknowledge her, then on to her sister, old Oedasoa’s wife. And perhaps, should she choose to remain here with the English, when she was big enough to look after infants, she could go into their homes to look after their children, instead of staying among the dunes like the others, yearning after little beads.

As a man without cattle or sons, Autshumao knew that the Koina looked down on him.The deaf woman regarded him as a castrated dog without a home. She, who had lost everything, had undergone the rites of transition no fewer than four times: at her birth, when she became a woman, when she got married, when she had her first child. And every time animals had been slaughtered for her. He knew of others like him, for whom nothing had ever been slaughtered, and who now had to stick together so that the wild dogs would not find them alone, all old people with empty stomachs and empty, hopeless hearts.

Among the English he had seen that one could compare life with the steep shrouds of a ship. Each was a step to the next: one climbed for some distance along the foreshroud, then you reached the foreyard where you would rest; then you went higher up the foretopshroud and you reached the foretopyard; and once again you climbed until you arrived high on the foretopgallant under the truck of the mast. From there you can only look up to the sky, or down to minute figures trapped on a ship in the limitless ocean. He, with his grey hair, had only climbed the first two steps of life. And perhaps this was the new way of doing, that youngsters also abandon their leader and forget about cattle, living without any rites of transition.

Then a miraculous thing happened, as if a new sun had risen over the land. He knew how the sun could dry out, scorch, burn and consume the world, but what came into his mind on that late autumn day was a bright happiness, like a light shining in the night. They stood up to their knees in the low tide, among the glistening wet rocks covered with seaweed and smallish black mussels, shivering with cold. Behind them a strong southerly wind was driving the endless low grey cloud over the mountain, and its cold shadow spread across the bay and the dunes and the scrubland.Then they saw two ships from the East moving into the bay.

They came up from the windward side of the island, and were loaded deep. Ivory, pepper and cinnamon, blue-painted pottery and sweet aniseed arrack, that Chief Harry knew, all tightly packed and sealed in the hold. The wind pushed the ships deep, deep into the bay, and fast, so that they’d reached the opposite shore before they let go their sails. There they turned to come up to the anchoring place, but one ship was pushed back by the wind, as if a man had placed his hand in a child’s face and shoved it away. The ship tried to turn its head this way and that to get loose, but the wind had it in its grip, holding it, and forcing it backwards, a bowshot inside the breaking surf, against a sandbank. One could see the smoke of cannon shots jumping from the sides of the ship as they tried to break loose from the sand. The other ship heard it, turned back and started running anxiously to and fro, like a guinea fowl in front of its wounded mate. Chief Harry stood up to his hips in cold water, staring, and thinking: the wind will carry the sound of the shots far to the north across the scrubland, all the way to where at this time of the year, before the rains, the Goringhaiqua would be moving slowly towards their winter pastures, and if they were to turn back because of the sound it would be like a swarm of locusts descending on that small stretch of beach, to scavenge whatever the sea would wash out.

They boiled the black mussels and ate the white ones uncooked, and left some of the women and children empty-handed at the huts, so that Gogosoa’s people wouldn’t find anything there, as in the early dusk they hurriedly and expectantly started moving up along the beach. Ahead of them, the ship was clearly stuck, toppled over on its side against the shore.Waves were breaking over its hull causing clouds of white water to fly over it like gusts of rain. The other ship lay on three anchors far beyond the breakers.There were boats in the water around both ships, rowers pulling ferociously at the oars. When the Goringhaicona kindled their night fire they could see on the beach in front of them the bright orange sun of another huge fire, the sign of invaders cooking their first meal in a strange land.

The next day they discovered that it was a Dutch ship.They wanted to go closer, but armed sailors moved in between them and the wreck. The beach was littered with stuff washed out. Chief Harry called out to them in English that he would show them where to draw water. A Hollander replied: Yes, water, but also meat and wood. Chief Harry would trek up the coast to try and get meat from his old enemies, the Cochoqua, but first he wanted to find out what the Dutch were prepared to offer. They were generous: they would give him arrack, rice and copper. If Herrie – no Chief Harry to the Dutch – would provide them with firewood every day, and a sheep once a week, they could eat and drink. The ship’s cargo had to be salvaged, they said. They would be settling here to guard their cargo until help arrived. Herrie had to keep his womenfolk away from here; his men, the man said, would be severely punished if they lay with Herrie’s women.

Chief Harry asked the man in English, ‘Are all the women in your land whores then?’ All of this just because the man had talked about women, for he wasn’t sure where this might lead to in future. He considered giving the man a sheep filled with poison, or mussels harvested in a red tide; he also had in mind taking his people away from here, and inciting the Grigriqua or the Obiqua, who didn’t distinguish between hunting and murdering, to attack these sailors at night and kill them all. Chief Harry turned his thoughts over in his mind while the Dutchman was shouting at his men to hurry up with the salvaging, for there was a spring tide coming and a fortune in pepper on board. Then he replied politely in English: That is fine, if the Dutchman kept his men in check the women wouldn’t give any trouble. What was more, they could give a hand carrying the stuff washed out while the Hollanders put up their homes. He pointed around him, to hundreds of wet-brown pieces of flotsam littering the beach to the high-water mark at the foot of the dunes, and how more of it came riding out on every wave.

And so it happened; when Chief Harry and his handful of men went back to the low dunes to dismantle their homes and fetch their women, in order to move to where the ship Nieuwe Haerlem sat stuck in the sand like a dead whale, they found new beads in brightly coloured strings for necks and arms, and an empty wine flask among the cooking things.Yes, that was one thing about the Dutch, they were there now and needed water and wood, and for that they brought beads.The wine was for having shown the Dutch where to draw water.

At the Hollanders’ camp this was the rule: first work, then eat. Because everything was new to the Goringhaicona, they enjoyed gathering in front of the store tent to see what would be unpacked next from the chests, or otherwise they would hold on to the flaps of the cooking tent like a child on its mother’s dress. The cook’s cleaver, his knives, his food raw and cooked, disappeared in this way.Which was why the rule was made about first working, then eating.These people and those had to gather firewood, those and those had to find green provisions for the pot, and cut bedding-shrub to sleep on, those and those had to lug wreckage from the beach to the pepper tent among the dunes. Chief Harry showed them a sluggish spring, and the Dutch dug there and discovered good water, and he showed them the Reed Vlei and all of them together dragged a net through the water and caught a multitude of fish. The Goringhaicona ate well in that place, and picked up weight, each of them was sporting one or two items of Dutch clothing, and tobacco was no longer scarce. Those times were among the best his people had ever known, and they feared the day the Dutch would sail away. When other Koina with sheep turned up near the camp, the Goringhaicona would retreat in among the Dutch. In that way the Hollanders could tell when strange Koina were coming.

They learned each other’s language. The Dutch couldn’t distinguish between the many clicks or imitate them, but they could memorise a few names, and most of the Goringhaicona picked up Dutch words. The one who learned the most was little Krotoa. She was six years old, and like other children picked up a new language with ease. She would spend all day with the cook. She helped to scour the pots with handfuls of wet sand, and when they were alone one could hear her prattling non-stop, but when the leader of the Dutch were to ask her to translate a message to her uncle, she was too shy. The cook made her stand, with a spoon in her hand, beside a large pot which she had to stir, and fed her with the choicest morsels and spoiled her with sweets meant for the officers. Perhaps he was the one who gave her the name of Eva, because she generally went about naked. What is certain, is that he was the first of all the white men in her life with whom she became friends. There was no need for him ever to doubt her love, the child’s eyes were shining with happiness. Regrettably, it was also the cook who prepared veld fruits for her, boiled up with sweet ginger, and who let her taste sweetbread with a syrup of aniseed arrack. From the goodness of his heart, there is no doubt about that either, but since then there was a yearning in her for the cosy kitchens of white people, and the sweetmeats they prepared. And it is difficult to believe that all she cared for were a spoonful of sugar, a gulp of beer, or the bread and cheese she might expect.

After eleven months ships came from the East to pick up the Hollanders and their stowed spices. The Dutchman told Chief Harry: ‘Well, Herrie, the time has come for us to go. I shall tell my superiors that you helped to look after the Company’s possessions, and that this is a good place for ships. I will suggest to them to come and set up a place here to supply our ships with fuel and water. Then there will always be Hollanders here.’

‘Won’t the English come again?’

‘They will. But I want us to be the first to build here.We shall hoist our flag, then it becomes our place. And if the English need something, they’ll have to buy it from us.’

Chief Harry looked about him in silence. Always Hollanders here? Then they’d start getting the wood and water ready for their ships themselves. The whole world would be made different. What would become of him and the child?

After that the world became different. A flag was planted, and from one full moon to the next the ships got their wood and water. Boats with food, salvaged goods and barrels of water moved to and fro over the sea.The sailors were on land with hatchets, saws and water barrels. Some had permission to wash themselves below the watering place, where they combed lice from bodies and beards, and there Chief Harry showed them how to spread their clothes on an anthill, so that the ants could catch the lice. On the even patch behind the watering place officers took measurements. They planted a stick with a white cloth and paced in one direction, piled up rocks, then returned to the stick and started pacing in the opposite direction. A man with a book and a pencil followed. In the end there were many cairns among the shrubs and flattened molehills. Chief Harry could discover no shape or pattern in it. He couldn’t understand what the officers were saying. And he felt he ought to be doing something with his English. If the Dutch were coming to settle here, he’d be worth less to them than his sister’s child.

The Goringhaiqua arrived there like a swarm of locusts driven by the wind, with a lot of noise and a small number of cattle for tobacco. Already they were walking with empty bone-pipes in their mouths, hissing through them like lynxes.When they noticed the Goringhaicona among the Hollanders, they started stirring up trouble and throwing stones, and the women fled in behind the soldiers from where they provoked the Goringhaiqua with gestures. Chief Harry took the child by the hand and stood back, towards the beach, towards open space. His people withdrew after him. The Dutch couldn’t understand why there should be ill feelings between the two small groups of Hottentots, but for the future shipping service it was of no consequence.

When Krotoa was about ten or eleven, something else happened to change the world. A few shiploads of Hollanders with wide breeches made their appearance and threw down planks and spars and bolts of canvas on the grass at the watering place, and carried ashore barrels and boxes and baskets with saplings, and pigs and dogs and poultry in cages. So that was to become the shop. Chief Harry strolled among the foreigners and their piles of baggage. He would like to meet the chief of the Hollanders. But his dog attempted to mate with a bitch belonging to the white people, and when a soldier took aim with a gun at his red dog, Chief Harry, out of pure fright, brought down his stick on the man’s hand. Only his age saved him from receiving a few blows, because the soldier’s curses and vociferous threats and his grip on the old man’s kaross showed that he’d really been hurt.