1972 - A Story Like the Wind (13 page)

The contrast in living was particularly stark in !#grave;Bamuthi’s own kraal. Old—that is, old by François’s exacting measure—`Bamuthi had installed his fourth and youngest wife in his kraal at Hunter’s Drift; the other three had been left with the grown-up children at Osebeni to look after his land and cattle there. Within the stockade of thorn which surrounded the huts in a wide circle to protect their cattle against lion and leopard at night, it was a world where !#grave;Bamuthi was king. His wife and children, even his own mother who visited him from time to time, were his obedient subjects. He ruled them sternly according to a tribal law passed on, by example, over thousands of years of forgotten history. The assumption was that fear and authority, above all male authority, were both the beginning of wisdom, and the basis of all law and order in a Bantu community.

This was not fear in a negative sense but a kind of holy awe expressed in the impressive word,
Ukw-seba
, uttered far down in the throat in a sonorous bass tone. This awe was instinctively accepted as a bridge between the spirit of children and parents; parents and grandparents; grandparents and Indunas; Indunas and sub-chiefs; and so on up to Paramount Chief. Finally it existed between the Paramount Chief and the great
Umkulun-kulu
, the first spirit of all things.

In this world from the moment a child could walk, the only school was one of practical work according to capacity. After sunset it was one of an imaginative recital of colourful stories, myths, legends and the lip-to-lip history of the Bantu peoples. Any failure on the part of a child to fulfil his share of duty in this prescribed pattern of tribal behaviour was severely punished by !#grave;Bamuthi and his wife.

In fact François was often amazed that !#grave;Bamuthi who was so obviously a man of feeling could also be so ruthless when a mere child in his kraal did not measure up to his idea of tribal etiquette and expectation. Little as François had seen of the world of his own people outside, he had seen enough to realize how ludicrous were its conceptions of Bantu life, and how vast the ignorance on which they were based. There was no nuance of life in the kraal that was not determined by tribal etiquette; every child knew exactly how it was expected to behave towards older people; how to conduct itself at meal times; how to respect the belongings and dignity of others. The overwhelming importance of courtesy, cleanliness, self-respect and constant work was reinforced in them by a routine of order and orderliness. The Matabele wife, like !#grave;Bamuthi’s, set the example, above all by treating the smaller children with the utmost consideration; and sharing whatever came their way with everyone else.

This sharing applied as much to hard work as it did to the humble gifts of the bush. François, indeed, was always amazed to find on his visits to the kraal, that ever since dawn each little black boy and girl had already been hard at work. The smaller ones who had only just learned to walk would be looking after the babies, since their mothers, who were the hardest worked of all, would be away tilling the fields. Their elder brothers were out herding and protecting the cattle, sheep and goats. The older girls would be busy cleaning the kraal, sweeping the hard-baked earth around the huts with hand brushes made of golden Aminzim-tetse reeds and sprinkling it with water. This they had to fetch and carry in buckets from the river so that the dust could be securely laid around the dwellings for the rest of the long, hot day. Some of them would be pounding corn or millet in the great wooden mortars that stood in each kraal like antiaircraft missiles on their pads ready for launching into the air.

The melodious sound of the regulated pounding was always there to tap out the rhythm for the chorus of birds, turtle doves and sun beetles, singing in the bush with ecstatic voices and with an even greater and more quicksilver intensity as the sun rose towards its peak. It was a sound that did to the human ear what a glimpse of fire does to the eyes of someone wandering lost in some wilderness at night, signalling beyond all possible doubt that there was order, home and organized sanctuary for life in that savage, chaotically abundant world of nature.

Very often François would see !#grave;Bamuthi’s oldest girl, barely ten, combining pounding with the care of her baby brother. She carried him securely, tied to her slim, long back in a shawl, while she lifted the enormous wooden pestle, almost twice her own height, high above her head to crush and recrush again and again the purple millet in the mortar. So at home would the black baby be there that although its head wobbled in the process as if it would fly from its neck, its eyes remained shut in the happiest of sleeps. No child was ever too small to be included in the life of family and tribe, and François never saw an infant excluded or left to its own devices, no matter how early the morning or late the night. Everybody belonged absolutely to everybody else in a way that passed all European understanding, until one is compelled to wonder whether the sight of all this did not cause François, in the depths of the unknown in his own heart, to feel some kind of envy, a twinge perhaps of having been left out of some subtle but essential scheme of things, despite all the manifest good fortune of his own upbringing.

Compared with the girls, the boys of François’s own age appeared on the surface to have an easier time because, when they were barely old enough to walk, they had to join in the task of herding the cattle, sheep and goats. This gave them opportunities for a great deal of play which disguised the exacting and responsible nature of their work so well that it was only when something went wrong and they failed in their duty that François saw it for what it really was. Indeed he had gone for some years fancying that, compared to his own life, !#grave;Bamuthi’s boys and their friends had nothing but fun herding the cattle in the bush. It is true that one of the older boys had to be continually on watch for wild animals about to raid their herds, as they so often tried to do. For this purpose the look-out and all the boys with him had to learn from an early age to read all the signs of life in the bush as François had to learn to read his father’s books at home.

There appeared, he soon discovered, not a movement or a sound of a bird or insect that did not have its own special meaning for his black companions. Yes, the bush was another great book to them; its vocabulary the sounds of birds and insects; its script the movement of animals, from scorpions, centipedes, lizards, chameleons, snakes, rock rabbits and the smallest gazelle of their world, the graceful little flickering steenbuck (adored by !#grave;Bamuthi’s clan because it was supposed to be a bringer of rain), to the most imposing of antelope, such as the sable and eland.

It was all like some hieroglyphic code of which the Europeans had lost the key. So François just had to sit down as humbly as he did in front of his father during school hours and learn the archaic cypher from his friends. So good were they at reading this script of nature that François was never tempted to feel superior to them, as might perhaps have been expected of a son of the man who was the acknowledged chief of them all. On the contrary, there were times when he came near to developing an inferiority complex because he had consistently failed to read a message of the most immediate importance in the sounds and movements of the bush which had been perfectly obvious to the youngest among them from the start. It had continued thus to appear only too easy for them until one bright spring afternoon, when François was barely nine.

The sun was just on the edge of its long, steep slide down its shining blue slope to the flawless horizon of the great desert in the west. He had joined his friends some hours before at noon, when a dozen different groups of boys had come together in the process of watering their separate flocks by the river. It happened to be a place where the river was joined by a tributary that ran only in the rainy season but was dry at the moment. The eroded banks of the tributary consisted of thick layers of the red potter’s clay which the women from the kraals used for the making of water jugs, milk jars, pots and other domestic utensils. The boys, however, would use it for modelling armies of miniature fighting men, ochre-stained Matabele warriors of the vanished Impis of ‘Mzilikatze and Chaka, or herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats. Meeting in such unusually large numbers at this place of all places seemed a natural opportunity too good to miss, since they were all within reach there of the material needed for one of their favourite games.

Once each group had fashioned its own herd of miniature cattle, the animals would be drawn up in a crescent, in front of which a bull of Mithraic power would be placed to be manipulated by adroit hands into challenging the bulls of the other herds for the right of grazing near that part of the bank of the river as well as for possession of the cows of the others. The bull whose horns and legs crumpled first in the battle of horns which followed, was declared the loser and the winner entitled to have all the cows of the vanquished assembled to swell the crescent of clay cattle at its back.

As François had learned to his cost, a great deal of thought, experience and natural art went into the making of a bull which would stand up best to this kind of make-believe fighting. Indeed the favourite subject for argument and discussion between the boys, as they sat by their fires in the kraal at night waiting for the closing meal of their long day, would be precisely about the best means of constructing a champion bull. For instance, was it better to use spit or water in mixing the clay? Which cemented clay best, saliva, river water or a combination of the two? And did the addition of grass, or even some thin pliable twigs to the clay, help to make the body of the champion less brittle and more resistant to shock, not to mention the reinforcement of horns by a piece of European metal wire, which some cad in a neighbouring kraal—of course such a thing at Hunter’s Drift or Osebeni would have been unthinkable—was reputed to have used once against a team matched against it by a generation of their older brothers? Whatever the method used, it was extraordinary to François with what art these black boys shaped cows, bulls, calves and armed warriors. He tried hard himself but he never did it half as well. In that fact, was another stimulus for preserving a wholesome sense of proportion to prevent him from feeling himself a cut above his companions.

On this placid, shining, yellow afternoon, owing to the exceptional number of herds and bulls involved, the fight for the championship lasted longer and was far more exciting than any that François had ever seen before. In fact, it became a little too exciting for the older boy, the look-out, who had been left high up on a boulder to watch over all the herds while the battle of the bulls was being fought out on the river bed below. He became too interested in the game to do his duty properly. This was not surprising, because as the game approached its climax, both the movement and din down below were terrific. Onlookers and participants were making the contest more realistic by shouting out challenges to one another, lowing like cows and roaring like bulls, pawing the earth, and throwing up handfuls of dust behind them to make the exercise more realistic.

When it came to the decisive battle, with only two bulls left in the contest, the look-out’s curiosity became too much for him. He jumped from the boulder and hurried down the slope to join in. The two bulls, after a great deal of skilful feinting, each trying but failing to get his horns into the flanks of the other, had just been compelled to meet in the classical manner, heads down and horns locked together so securely that simultaneously the dread shout had issued from the throats of all the onlookers, soaring up in one great glittering cry: ‘At last, the washing of the horns!’

That cry meant that the moment of truth in the spectacle had come. The horns of one of the bulls were about to be washed in the blood of the other. This shout would no doubt have been repeated on an ascending scale if two other sounds, far more fearful and imperative, had not broken in on the game. First, there cut through the noise of the battle, killing it instantly, the high and razor-sharp bleat of a goat, quickly dying away into a strangled cough from the river bank just beyond the boulder. It was followed by the characteristic snorting of a lion just as it pounces, to be followed by the drumming on the earth of the hooves of cattle scattering in a panic.

All the boys stood, grimly silent, looking at one another in horror. Then in the direction of the bush they saw spurts of red dust rising into the air, unmistakably from the death-kicks of a cow no doubt pinned to the earth by a lion. The sight of the fateful dust brought the boys out of their trance of shock. Quickly snatching up the hunting sticks and staves which each boy had laid on the earth beside him while he watched the game, they forgot all about their clay cattle and hurtled over shrub and thorn to the rescue of the real animals. Splitting instinctively into two groups, shouting and crying out now not in pretence but in real fury, they left François well behind.

It all happened so quickly and confusingly that he himself made first of all for the boulder. Having climbed up it, quick as a rock-rabbit, he looked round him fearfully because there had been no mistaking the intent to kill in that lion’s roar. He was just in time to see the smallest group of infuriated little boys fearlessly beating a huge, armour-plated crocodile over the head in order to force it to let go of a goat which it had by the throat and was slowly dragging backwards towards the river. At the same time another and larger group of boys had just reached the far end of the clearing and were beginning to pelt a huge, titian-haired lion with stones and sticks, shouting curses and challenges as it lay growling over the limp neck of the cow it had just savaged.

Soon the crocodile was so bewildered that it was forced to loosen its grip since its jaws, as all Bantu boys know, are in any case not very strong. The little black boys, who had the goat firmly by the hind-legs, were able to pull it clear. They were not in time to save its life. Even François, at a distance, could tell that it was dead. But they could preserve it for their own, rather than the crocodile’s larder.