1972 - A Story Like the Wind (43 page)

The songs were at once gay and nostalgic. Moreover they were played and sung with immense spirit and a kind of joyful energy even at their saddest and most nostalgic pitch.

They were all songs that François himself knew well. He never knew whether they made him want to dance or cry, so charged was the music with all the ambivalence of the joyful tidings of the sorrow of the history of man in southern Africa.

They were songs one is compelled to render in English since the dialect in which they were sung is not at all widely known nor easily translated. They sang for instance:

Thisis a place I can no longer endure

Because nothing is left for me here
.

The tortoise now is my king
,

The road of the wagon my home!

The mention of the tortoise being their king always touched a special nerve in François’s heart, because wherever one went in Africa one saw these little tortoises carrying their great chessboard homes on their backs. Scraggy necks and heads stuck out, paws wide apart, they were always walking from one unknown place behind them towards some even greater unknown ahead; the perfect symbol in fact for people who are compelled by life to be for ever on the move.

They also sang another song with a particular gusto, as if competing with the mopani-beetle eisteddfod, raging in the bush around them. It had for François a rousing pilgrim, almost biblical, note to it and began:

There comes the wagon.

The four-horse wagon;

It has no name as yet
,

It still has to be named.

Turn a tillienkie!↓

Come about in state!

There, far away, down by Table Bay
.

≡ A particular whirl in a Cape folk dance.

The last wagon produced perhaps the greatest, most nostalgic one of all:

Take your goods and trek, Fereira!

Behind the bush there are some horses;

Take your goods and trek!

They are heavy to carry, Fereira
,

They weigh you downon one side, Fereira
,

But pack up and go
.

Fereira, as François knew, was originally a Portuguese name but had become a common family name not only among the Cape-coloured people but also among Europeans in the far South.

Although this encounter was by no means the most significant of the two encounters of the day it was the one that helped most to restore François to his natural context of spirit. As a result it possessed a certain healing quality and he reached the leader of the train feeling almost a member of his team.

The man, although hardly more than another version of the one in charge of the rear wagon, did have a certain air of authority about him. He greeted François effusively, apparently most grateful to him for appearing at a moment when the promise of a camp not far ahead was most needed, saying, ‘The blerrie oxen are dead tired. One snort of a lion, little master, and my old bones tell me we might hear the old master [lion] growl at any moment now and the whole blerrie lot of them will drop dead in their yokes.’

‘Well, you’ve not got far to go,’ François assured him.

Leading his horse on foot and ordering Hintza to scout ahead, François walked beside the wagoner, hearing all he had to tell him about how they had been engaged by the Moncktons to build a house for them by some river with an unpronounceable ‘kaffir’ name. The pejorative ‘kaffir’ was still the discredited term that the Cape-coloured people, out of pride in their measure of European blood, fanatically adhered to when speaking of the Africans of the land. They had not gone far before François not only knew the man’s objective, his whole history, his ailments, the names of his wife, children and all his relations alive as well as those who had died of malnutrition and infection, such as dysentery, malaria and bilharzia.

In addition François learned a great deal about the Moncktons, including the most important fact of all (in Francis’s order of priorities), namely that the girl had earned the approval of them all to such an extent that they called her a true ‘little old impala lamb’, their highest name of praise for a girl. Further, that for a ‘rooinek’ (literally red neck, and the traditional term for an Englishman) Monckton was a ‘white gent, first class, third water and incorruptible by sand’. How these phrases ever came to mean anything François did not know. All he knew was that they amounted to the highest form of approval of which such people were capable in words.

There was only one awkward moment. Round about four in the afternoon where the road crossed a sudden mound of earth in the brush, there was revealed away to the west a large, natural clearing ending against an apparently inviting clump of trees with livid red stems and broad spreading sulphur green tops. The wagon master immediately declared it the ideal camping site and straight away wanted to take his team there so that he could prepare for the night in good time, as did all sensible travellers. But François would have none of it. He told the wagoner quite firmly that he could not have picked on a worse site. The wagoner, who had obviously taken to François, none the less was so concerned for the state of his oxen and the fatigue of his people, arguing that they had been on the road since dawn without a break, that he obstinately rejected François’s advice. The exchanges between them were becoming heated on his rather than François’s part, because François, in his life with the Matabele, had learned that there was nothing so powerful in argument as patience and courtesy. But the wagoner in the quick, vivid, temperamental way of his people, could not imagine airing any difference of opinion without an appropriate heightening of emotion and was close to a passion of anger, when the sound of the Monckton’s truck and caboose hurrying near reached them.

The moment he heard the sound, the wagoner stopped arguing to say to François: ‘Well! There is the great master himself at last. We’ll let him decide.’

So they stood there uneasily silent until the truck, trailer and caboose drew up beside them. The Moncktons, father and daughter, immediately jumped down, but not Amelia. She was sitting in her padded seat beside the driver, in front of the caboose, like a queen on a throne. She had achieved this position with considerable difficulty and obviously nothing which did not hold out the sure promise of greater sustained comfort and dignity was going to make her abdicate.

The wagon master immediately broke into an excitable account of his difference of opinion with François. François remained silent until he had finished, uncomfortable both over explaining his reasons for objecting to so apparently attractive a camping site; and the possible nature of the reception of his reasons by the great Monckton.

Even when the wagon master had finished, François remained silent until Monckton, who believed in his capacity for knowing his own mind and was by nature and training quick in translating it into decisive action, remarked, not without a stirring of impatience: ‘Well, young fellow, that all sounds perfectly reasonable to me, so why do you object?’

François knew precisely why he objected. Even so, as his upbringing demanded, he gave the matter further thought in case he had overlooked something important. This slowness in answering, so starkly in contrast to his swift, accurate physical reflexes in action, did not endear him either to the wagon master or his employer, particularly the latter, for François noticed a tightening of the muscles at the corners of Sir James’s blue eyes as if he was beginning to feel irritated.

None the less, François answered only when certain of his words. ‘I know sir, that it looks a very attractive place for a camp. But I promise you something bad always happens to people who camp there. We have always avoided it ourselves. You wouldn’t get any of our own Matabele people even if you offered them a whole span of these beautiful oxen as a reward, to camp there for a single night.’

‘But why?’ Sir James asked.

François knew then that there was no help for it. He would have to enter what he knew from sad experience to be dangerous and forbidden territory to the rational, sceptical minds of grown-up Europeans. Speaking even more deliberately than before he said: ‘You see, sir, those trees look very nice. But they’re not really nice at all. They are not only fever-trees but blood trees as well. Our Matabele people,’ he felt an awful coward blaming it on the Matabele and excluding himself, ‘say that those trees are inhabited by powerful magicians at night. They say that if you were to cut the bark of those trees at night with an axe, they would run red with human blood. As a result, the other magicians immediately combine to revenge themselves on the people who have caused the injury to one of them. But even if they are not hurt themselves, they do not like people near them at night in case they overhear the plans for magic they gather to discuss there.’

‘But surely that is sheer, superstitious rubbish!’ Sir James came as near to what novelists call snorting as so well-bred a person could. Now he was sure that he had been right from the start in suspecting François to be superstition-prone. And, like all persons convinced of the absolute Tightness of their judgement, he was somewhat aggressive.

‘You don’t mean to tell me you really believe such nonsense?’ he asked in a somewhat inquisitorial voice, ‘I am certain your father, from all I have heard of him, would have taught you better.’

At this the girl, who had been watching this encounter between her father and François with something akin to alarm, clearly felt that her father was oddly out of character in referring to François’s father, who was being buried perhaps at that very moment. For all his habits of authority, he was a sensitive and naturally kind person and before she knew why, she had exclaimed, distressed, ‘Oh Fa, please, must you?’

What the
please
was precisely aimed at remained undefined, but the exclamation obviously neither pleased her father nor endeared François more to him. François, however, was unaware of the change in climate of the argument. He was far too busy trying to convey earnestly to his interrogators the truth as he saw it. He knew, of course, that he was dealing in the idiom of what he himself had been taught was superstition. But the pagan influences in his life, his recent experience with uLangalibalela, his own sense of guilt over his omission in the matter of preventing Ouwa’s death, the whole new process of turning his own back on the world to which he was at the moment emotionally committed, came to a point in something Mopani had said to him many times. ‘Little Cousin, always remember in Africa that what we Europeans call superstition, is just the wrong explanation for the right truth. It is, in fact, an attempt to draw attention to mysterious facts and laws of nature which Europeans ignore because they cannot explain them with their brains.’

Fortified in these recollections, he stood his ground and proceeded to give wagoner and employer a number of dramatic examples of the misfortunes which had overtaken travellers who had camped by those trees. One example in fact was only three months old. A party of European hunters on their way into the interior had insisted on camping there, against the advice of their African servants. In the middle of the night, they had been woken with shouts of alarm. Rushing out of their tents they found their African servants in the act of cutting down one of their number from a branch of one of those trees where he had hanged himself. They had done it just in time to save his life. Asked why he had tried to kill himself, he had answered: ‘How could I help myself, my masters, when all night long those trees were ordering me to hang myself in that way from that very branch?’

‘The man must have been mad,’ Sir James declared, impatiently.

‘No sir, he wasn’t mad,’ François insisted quietly. ‘I saw the man myself the next day when they arrived at Hunter’s Drift. I heard him tell the story to my father. He was as sane as you or I. But that was not all, sir…In the morning one of the white hunters getting out of his sleeping bag was bitten by a puff adder. We only just managed to save his life. All the Africans with the hunters insisted that he, too, had been bitten because the trees had commanded the puff adder to bite him.’

‘Sheer coincidence,’ Sir James declared. ‘If that’s all you’ve to say against the site I really don’t see why the wagon master shouldn’t pitch camp there here and now, if he wishes to.’

However, at this point François found himself unexpectedly supported by numbers of unlikely allies. While they had been speaking, the women, children and men from the other wagons had come forward and gathered round to listen to the discussions.

At this precise moment, several of them called out simultaneously to François in their own dialect: ‘Are you telling us, little master, that the place down there is ‘be-gooled’?’ (bewitched).

Despite their Christian pretensions the Cape-coloured people believed in wizards and an even more sophisticated form of witchcraft than the Africans. François had only to explain to them in their own tongue what he had been saying for them to announce, firmly, that nothing would induce them to camp at such a place.

Moreover, the girl herself at once joined in, to exclaim: ‘Oh Fa, why are you always so anti-magic? Even Mummy thought you carried it a bit far, you know.’

She had hardly finished when the wagon master, seeing that a majority of his people were turning against him and perhaps because he also shared something of their submerged belief in ‘goolery’, settled the matter by announcing that on reconsideration he would agree to follow François to this other camp of water of which he had spoken.

As for Sir James, feeling let down by his own daughter, he was not amused. Also, he was confirmed in his judgement of his employees as being an unpredictable, even fickle, though love-able people. Yet his whole adult life had been spent administering unpredictable people and as a result he accepted their conclusion philosophically. But-one suspects that François’s role in the matter from then on would not get the benefit of Sir James’s philosophical attitude.