1972 - A Story Like the Wind (12 page)

Soon, Hunter’s Drift had as fine a collection of herdsmen and other servants as perhaps that part of Africa had ever seen. They were persons all the more committed because the concept of the enterprise basically was of a pattern dear to so communal a people as the Bantu, and one they had followed in essence for millenniums.

It was indeed significant how all visitors to Hunter’s Drift felt it was more a family affair than the usual servant and master set-up. Accordingly many disapproved of it strongly, roundly declaring behind Pierre-Paul’s back that he was ‘spoiling everything’ for others; ‘letting the side down’ and so on and on. Even worse, there were the occasional high-minded idealists from overseas who, after enjoying Hunter’s Drift’s hospitality to the full, would dismiss it all as too ‘paternalistic’—the favourite term of abuse of the intellectual of the day—and would even write letters to the newspapers to that effect on their return home. That hurt Pierre-Paul far more than the Government, because they did not have the excuse of being caught, as he often put it, ‘in a trap of their own history, as my people are’.

The news of Hunter’s Drift’s success spread throughout the territory. European ranchers came from far and wide to try and follow Pierre-Paul Joubert’s example. But he had already taken the precaution of seeing that all the free land in that part of the world had been claimed and registered for ever in the names of his neighbouring Bantu friends. There was only one irritating exception. A large area between him and the railway nearby had already been bought, apparently some years before Pierre-Paul came to Hunter’s Drift, by some mysterious European called Monckton.

Pierre-Paul had tried in vain to find out all he could about this person who was apparently even more far-sighted than he had been, but all he learned was that Monckton had once been a very junior District Commissioner in the Colonial Service, responsible for keeping an official eye on that part of the bush, over a term of three years. Since then he appeared to have vanished on other duties into the British Colonial Service, which in those days was still immense. All Pierre-Paul knew was that there, almost within reach of his hand, was a piece of land perhaps finer than his own and strategically even better placed, with an owner apparently so indifferent to it that he never even bothered to visit, let alone develop it.

As the years went by, Hunter’s Drift prospered so that it merited expanding to double if not treble its size. The whole of the clearing around the homestead became a precious emerald green from vast vegetable gardens and orchards watered by irrigation from the river. The homestead, an exact replica of the graceful gabled old Dutch farm with green shuttered windows and half-doors, complete with bronze latches and knobs shining like gold, which the original Jouberts, fresh from Huguenot France, had built in the far south, began to look as if it had grown out of the soil rather than been imposed upon it. Its elegant white walls, rising above the wide stoep of yellow stone, looked more and more inviting as their dazzling surfaces were increasingly brindled and dappled with the shadow of the rapidly growing trees, creepers and vines planted around it. Seeing thus what could be done, François’s father became so irritated by the vision of the great tract of Monckton country lying unused next door that he conceived a powerful prejudice, if not active hatred for a man he had never even seen. However, there was nothing that he could do about it except to cultivate his own garden with even greater vision and energy than before.

Into this world François was born. His parents had already been married for twelve years and his coming was not only unexpected but, coming so late, inevitably produced an unusual relationship between the three of them. His parents were profoundly attached to each other. Their relationship in fact was so complete that they were utterly content in each other’s company. The arrival of a child in their lives, unlike those of normal married couples, could have appeared irrelevant, if not perilously near to an intrusion, had it not been for the fact that they were both unusually loving, caring as well as sensitive and imaginative persons. They were absolutely delighted with François from the start but delighted in a way which was suspect in the prevailing concept of parent-child relationships in the European Africa of the day. They never defined their attitude for their own benefit or that of their friends because it was for them a matter of personal feeling and a groping after a process of growth rather than of reason and preconceived theory. Yet their actions implied in all sorts of ways, right from the beginning, that they had no marked parental attitude in the conventional sense of the term, to their son. In fact Lammie unintentionally made this only too clear at the time of François’s christening in the capital.

She did so by asking her friends to attend the christening party so that they could meet ‘the other little person’ who had joined their lives. Those who were truly close to the couple knew that this phrase ‘the other person’ did not imply any coldness or lack of love for François. They saw it clearly as an expression implying that their child was not going to be merely an egotistical extension of their parental personalities but rather someone with a unique nature and personality of his own. Both Pierre-Paul and his wife had an instinctive horror of the way many parents’ tried to compel their children to live a life they would have liked to live themselves; but had failed to do. Pierre-Paul had seen enough casualties from this approach in his own schools.

This of course did not mean that François was not brought up with discipline. His father, in particular, was too good a teacher to be ignorant of the importance of discipline. As he so often had put it, no true self-expression was ever possible without discipline. So François, from his earliest memories, was subject to a strict upbringing designed, as Pierre-Paul put it to his wife, when her tender heart was disturbed by some unusually severe line taken with François, ‘not to blur the edges but to give shape to the personality’.

She would accept this with a nod of her beautiful head. Nevertheless the last word was always hers. ‘All the same, whatever we do, we must never drive this urgent little spirit underground, as we see parents doing all around us in this terrible Calvinist world of ours.’

It was not surprising, therefore, that François could not remember a time when he had addressed Pierre-Paul as ‘father’ and Lammie as ‘mother’. He did so only when talking about them to others. Although there may have been a time in his cradle when he had made noises like ‘Pa’ and ‘Ma’, the moment he was capable of uttering proper words his mother had always been Lammie and his father ‘Ouwa’.

This last was the name he took over from old Koba. She unfailingly called Pierre-Paul Ouwa because this apparently was the name by which he had been known to her and her people in the far south. It meant, literally, Old Wagon, ‘ou’ meaning old and ‘wa’ wagon.

When François, at a more analytical period of his growth, asked Koba why they had chosen so odd a name for Pierre-Paul, she said that it was because ‘like a wagon, he carried many people and their troubles with him through life’.

‘But why
Old
Wagon, Koba?’ François piped up, not without a twinge of indignation, because to him his father was young and handsome, unlike the many flabby and florid fathers of others he had met.

‘Because old, my Little Feather,’ old Koba had answered, so amused by his touchiness that her smooth yellow Mongolian face creased finely all over with smiles, ‘because old is our greatest Bushman word of respect.’

This absence of formalities between parents and son may have been their own private affair but it did not prevent Pierre-Paul’s official enemies from making a note in their dossier of his failings to calm their guilt-ridden consciences, and strengthen the feelings that they had done well to rid themselves of so nonconformist a civil servant.

This aspect of François’s relationship with his parents has been described in some detail, because it helps to explain why he was not sent away to boarding school. Obviously, his parents cared more than most that their son should be well educated. Yet they had not just a fear but an absolute conviction that the sort of schooling at even the best schools available in the country would be so unaware of ‘the other person’ in children that François would be cut down to a common pattern and leave school like the human equivalent of a machine coming from a remorseless conveyor belt in a large factory, exactly like thousands of others.

Although the law of the land made education compulsory for all European children, François’s father decided not to send him to school. The authorities, the moment they became aware of the fact, did their utmost to force him to send François to what they called a recognized school, but Pierre-Paul was able to resist them successfully. He may have ceased to be official Director of Education but his professional qualifications as a schoolmaster remained and could not be denied. There was, he was able to demonstrate, no law against private schools. So all Pierre-Paul had to do was to claim that he had opened a private school at Hunter’s Drift. That it had only one pupil was no fault of his. If any other parent would like to send their children to his school, make arrangements for their board and lodgings and were prepared to pay the requisite fee, he declared that he was prepared to receive them. No one, of course, was either near enough or sufficiently in love with Pierre-Paul’s attitude to take advantage of his offer.

However in law his claim was held to be valid, to such an extent that once a year an official inspector was compelled to undertake the long and arduous journey from the capital to Hunter’s Drift, just in order to verify that François was receiving a proper education within the meaning of the Education Act, and to put him through the prescribed examinations. To do the inspectors justice, they enjoyed the break in their dreary and monotonous routine enormously, and would look back upon the week which it took them to accomplish their duties at Hunter’s Drift with delight. Some of them were even known to have admitted, over their whiskies and sodas in their clubs in the capital, that ‘there was some wisdom in that Joubert fellow’s madness’.

But none of them enjoyed it nearly as much as François’s parents, who were human enough to feel satisfaction in getting their own way, as well as a windfall of, for once, having the joke on the Establishment.

Still, one has to wonder whether François himself might have been as happy in his family situation, had he been able to compare his life with the lives of children in other European families. May he not in his secret heart of hearts have experienced a greater sense of belonging, if the attitude of his parents had been more proprietary, and he were privately treated and addressed more emphatically as their son? There was no doubt that in the order of their trinity, his father came first for his mother, equally Lammie came first for Ouwa. None of the displacement of emphasis in affection from husband to child, which is commonly supposed to take place in a woman when she becomes a mother, had occurred in Lammie. Pierre-Paul remained her sun; she and François were satellites and no one could suspect that the priorities of Pierre-Paul’s affection were not exactly the same.

So it is just possible, one believes, that there may have been at work in Franpois’s disposition an unacknowledged longing to come first with both, producing in the process a certain degree of isolation and aloneness too early in his life. One suspects something of this from his reaction to the coming of Hintza. There could be no doubt that François found more reassurance and comfort from the fact that he, and he alone, came first with Hintza, than he or anyone else would have thought possible.

Was this not then the secret of his great love for old Koba? There was no doubt that she had put him first and had been known to round on his parents like a leopard when she suspected them of being more just than loving with him. Perhaps the trouble was that there was no disproportion or flair in relationship with his parents. There was undoubtedly a great protection for him in that exact balance of love and reason. But does anyone, let alone a child, want perfection? Do we all not secretly long for more love than reason, more pardon than justice, more impulse than calculation, more heart than head and altogether for an asymmetrical slant in our favour in our lives? One asks these questions not in a spirit of criticism of Lammie and Pierre-Paul, but because they are believed necessary for understanding why François became what he was so early in life and why he behaved as he did in the series of desperate events that he was to encounter.

He himself was superficially unaware of any such reservations, happier by far than the most claimed and spoilt son of any other family. None the less at heart there lay the shadow of an intimation that he may have been called upon to play the man on his own perhaps a shade too soon. There were no other European families within a hundred miles or more of Hunter’s Drift. He hardly ever went to the capital or the nearby mining city with his parents. So he had no standard of comparison in these matters except with those of the children of !#grave;Bamuthi and the other herdsmen. They were his only playmates. But in that wild and savage environment he found their company so stimulating and enjoyable that he did not consciously long for companionship of children of his own kind. He was a frequent and welcome visitor in their kraals, particularly in !#grave;Bamuthi’s kraal.

Compared with them he seemed to be singularlyundisciplined. All he had to do was to work for two hours in the early morning before it got too hot, at the lessons set for him by Pierre-Paul, who had always maintained that the normal school hours were far too long. He was convinced that teachers made far too great a mystery of what they had to teach; and that intelligent children could do the work in a third of the time they were given for accomplishing it. Once his lessons were learned, François was always free to join in the life of the ranch until the evening, when he had an hour of homework to do for the next day’s schooling. Even Pierre-Paul was astonished how his theory was confirmed in practice, and what a rewarding process teaching his son became for both. But once school was over, François would make straight for the Matabele kraals.