1972 - A Story Like the Wind (64 page)

One day the dread news arrived that uLangalibalela had been on a journey to the sacred hill of his people more than a thousand miles away in the south-east. There a vision had told him that disaster was now inevitable. It was said openly that as uLangalibalela stood on the sacred hill, asking with his heart, even he, uLangalibalela, was frightened because in the clear night sky above him, star after star fell out of position in the ordered procession of the Milky Way. Instead of travelling from east to west as Umkulunkulu had willel them to travel ever since his first praise name was called, the delinquent stars went against their lawful courses, and travelled from west to east, until they were lost in darkness.

Of course there were many who argued that even uLangalibalela could be wrong. But to François the arguments only proved that all men at heart were now deeply afraid.

Even Ousie-Johanna was affected by these rumours of uLangalibalela’s vision. Never before in the history of Hunter’s Drift had her gramophone called on God so often and so deeply into the silence of the night, which now was so heavy and profound that the branches of the bush seemed bent low with its weight.

Then suddenly the Punda-Ma-Tenka, the great old Hunter’s Road, became busy again in a way that none of them could remember. It started being used not just by men making their way in small groups between the remote interior in the north and the mines and industries in the south, but by a steady procession of the most modern trucks. No one could tell what these trucks carried or where precisely they came from, or where they were bound. They were usually driven by Africans of other nations, dressed in smart khaki overalls, apparently as well trained as they were well-stocked with provisions and supplies. Moreover, they seemed to know this long, rarely used route well, or perhaps had been fully informed in advance of how to follow it. They usually arrived at the great outspan by the ford just before dark and left just before sunrise, so that it looked as if they had deliberately arranged their journeys so that they could reduce to the minimum the risk of encounters with curious men.

!#grave;Bamuthi and some of his senior people, with their traditional sense of hospitality, had gone down to see if there were anything they could do to help these travellers. They returned increasingly resentful over the cold, if not hostile reception that they received from the men who drove the trucks, so much so that they finally abandoned their efforts of help.

!#grave;Bamuthi even went so far as to tell François that he would like to prohibit such men from using the facilities of the Hunter’s Drift outspan, moving them on before they took as a right what, after all, was only made possible for them by the generosity of the owners of Hunter’s Drift. But neither François nor Lammie would agree. They thought such men were no more than a sign of the lack of grace of the times, and best ignored. Yet François, nearly a year after Nonnie’s departure, had cause to wonder whether !#grave;Bamuthi had not been right after all.

It came during the rainy season. There happened to be down by the ford for some two hundred yards on either bank of the Amanzim-tetse a stretch of black cotton soil which it was almost impossible for vehicles to cross after heavy rain. In fact François had often seen elephants sink up to their stomachs in this black soil. The short crossing from river bank to firm ground was so difficult that when they finally emerged from the black glue they would stand for an hour or two, limp with exhaustion, to recover their breath before continuing their journey to the bush. On this occasion he was watching seven trucks arriving at the ford in a heavy downpour of rain just at sundown. He was not surprised, therefore, on his way to the milking sheds at dawn the next day to hear the engines of the trucks racing noisily and see the vehicles stuck fast, although numbers of black men were pushing to try and help them along.

All the time François was at the milking sheds, the futile grating noise of engines and the shouting of men at one another, increasingly angry over an ineffective struggle against the intractable African mud, continued. At last François suggested to !#grave;Bamuthi that perhaps they ought to go and do what they would automatically have done a year earlier, and offer to pull the trucks out of the mud with teams of oxen.

To his surprise !#grave;Bamuthi argued vehemently against it, saying that since they knew by now what sort of men they were, ‘dogs of the wind’ and ‘feet of baboons’ (all Sindabele terms of scorn for feckless and treacherous persons) it was not for them to offer help but to wait until the men themselves came to ask for it. However François persuaded him, in the end, to accompany him down to the drift.

The moment the men at the ford saw them approaching they stopped racing their engines. The drivers clambered quickly out of their seats and joined their supporters, about thirty in all, to come walking to meet them in such a truculent manner, that !#grave;Bamuthi warned, ‘See that you have your gun ready, Little Feather. I did wrong to bring you here without
u-Simsela-Banta-Bami
in my hand. Let us stand calmly here and wait prepared for them to come if they will come.’

François did as !#grave;Bamuthi told him and while doing so he noticed that Hintza had stepped out in front. The hair on his coat was rigid and erect and something close to a snarl quivered on his long black lips and from time to time he bared his strong white teeth. They stood there silently while the menacing strangers came closer in a body, until they were only some ten yards away.

Then one man stepped forward and called out in English: ‘Go away, settler boy. Go away. What d’you mean by poking your bloody white nose into our business?’

It was just as well that !#grave;Bamuthi did not understand any English for it is doubtful if his reaction would have been as controlled as was François’s. He, thanks again to Mopani’s training, tended to become calmer the more menacing the situation.

‘We merely came to see whether we could help you,’ François replied. ‘We used to have an expression here that ‘the road is king’ but obviously you would not know what it means. Go back to your trucks and get out of your troubles yourselves. I will only remind you that you are here on our land and this is the last time that I will allow ungrateful men like you to camp for any reason whatsoever on our property.’

‘Your property, you bloody little white settler?’ the spokesman retorted angrily. ‘We’ll see how much longer it’ll remain your property. But just you get back and keep out of our business.’

François felt that a vital principle was at stake. ‘It is not for you to tell me what to do on our land. Just get back to your trucks and see you get away as soon as possible.’

For a moment it looked as if the spokesman would order his men to force François and !#grave;Bamuthi to turn back. Indeed !#grave;Bamuthi was not in need of any translations to know what was going on. The tones and attitudes were quite enough to keep him posted. He turned his back on the men and let out a great Matabele shout, the equivalent of a knight’s, ‘To me! To me!’

The volume of sound alone was impressive. Instantly, from gardens and kraals, men and boys, hurdling over fences and bushes, came running as if their lives depended upon it, sticks, spears and knives in hand, straight towards !#grave;Bamuthi and François.

The shock and dismay on the faces of the men confronting François and !#grave;Bamuthi was so great as to make !#grave;Bamuthi laugh with scorn and to call them some good, old·fashioned Sinda-bele names, like ‘dogs willing to snarl but afraid to bite’. Then he shouted at them: ‘You, less than men who breed like ants and proliferate like rats in holes among the cliffs.’

The greatest insult of all, however, was hurled after the spokesman, who, regrettably, probably did not understand enough Sindabele to appreciate it. Its incomparable Sindabele sound,
u-Sinque-Siname-Kasane
means literally ‘Old-tick-covered-buttocks’, and is a phrase of the utmost scorn for a born trickster. However, whether they understood or not, the men turned and ran for the shelter of their convoy.

Later, however, there was some sort of triumph. At eleven o’clock in the morning the same spokesman who had faced François and !#grave;Bamuthi arrived, khaki cap in hand, at Ousie-Johanna’s kitchen door. She, oblivious of what had happened down by the river at sunrise, was already entertaining the confused and bewildered man, who had obviously expected more insults if not blows, and was treating him to coffee and rusks when François appeared.

The man could not have been more slick or more apologetic. He begged François to excuse him. They had only behaved as they had done because of hostile receptions from other ‘settlers’, as he insisted on calling the farmers whose property they had crossed some hundred miles farther south. He excused himself at great length before he begged François to help them with his teams of oxen.

François trusted this aspect of the man even less than he did the first. He had an odd feeling that !#grave;Bamuthi would never be forgiven by these people for his reaction in siding with him. But, of course, he felt they had no option but to help. In any case François was anxious to see the last of such truculent people as soon as possible.

So a reluctant !#grave;Bamuthi and his helpers were made to produce six teams of oxen and to haul the trucks out of the mire into which their wheels had sunk. Then they had to pull them across the swollen ford of the river and out of the black cotton soil on to firm ground beyond. François was there to help with the operation and it all went smoothly and well, except that none of the picturesque banter or vivid conversation which is usual, rich and fluent on these occasions between African travellers, took place at all. The whole operation, beyond the orders necessary for carrying it out, was conducted in a singularly sullen and ominous silence.

None of this would have mattered very much to François had it not been for a slight incident when he unhooked the last team of oxen to return to the homestead. He himself was leading the team past the truck that they had just drawn on to firm ground. He was level with the dashboard at the rear when he noticed that the tarpaulin laced over the truck was being held apart by what looked to him like a pair of exceedingly pale African hands. Instinctively he looked closer and quickly made out, just above the hands, first the eyes and then face of a man who was obviously assuming that he was invisible in the shadows. The man was watching him intently. François nearly gave himself away, so violent was his start of surprise. He had no doubt that the face he looked at was that of a Chinese, the same face moreover which he had first seen on that outcrop of rock in the depression of the Mist of Death when he and !#grave;Bamuthi were on their way to uLangalibalela.

He said nothing of this to !#grave;Bamuthi for he was overcome by the realization of how wrong he had been not to speak of it all to Mopani before as, at the time, he had promised !#grave;Bamuthi that he would do. He resolved then that, no matter how much it endangered his own special secret life, he was going to confess everything to Mopani, just as soon as he could. He might even have ridden over to his camp that day, did he not know that Mopani was away for another six weeks in Europe, representing the Government of the country at an international conference called for the preservation of world wild life.

There was another incident, on the face of it not so disquieting and yet for François almost more unpleasant because of the distress that it caused Lammie. It came only five weeks after his second glimpse of the mysterious Chinese. The rain and that cotton soil at the ford were again responsible. One evening a solitary truck was stuck in the mud and this time the occupants of the truck did not wait for Hunter’s Drift to offer help, but came soliciting for it. There were four of them, an African driver and three men in clerical dress. They had, François thought, in spite of their clothes, the same grim expressions that he had seen on the faces of the ‘men of the spear’ in the depression, despite the fact that the faces of those men had been Bantu and the faces with them that night at the dining-room were pink, well-fed European ones.

He felt keenly that the dispositions of the men were singularly unresponsive, although they were being provided with some of Ousie-Johanna’s best food and drinking Ouwa’s best wine, and being offered hospitality extended in Lammie’s most gracious way. No matter what conversation François and Lammie tried, their responses remained perfunctory. They offered nothing of their own. Even the oldest of the three, having been invited to say grace and thanks and to read a passage from an English Bible, considerately produced for them by Lammie, did so as if he had been trapped into aiding and abetting his hosts in an act of hypocrisy.

Lammie, vulnerable as only François knew her to be at the moment, at first could hardly believe what was happening at her table. But when the senior member of the mission announced finally that they had been sent out by the World Council of Christian Churches to look into ‘the exploitation of the innocent black people of Africa by you settlers, and to advise on the extent to which it was a Christian duty to help the ‘freedom fighters’ of Africa in their battle against Imperialism and neo-Colonialism’, François could tell from the colour that came to her delicate face that at last she was angry.

It was almost the first natural impulsive reaction that he had seen in her since her return and he was almost grateful to those tight-lipped men for producing it. But it did not endear him to their manners.

He was sorry indeed that he thought them too insensitive to notice the dismissal implicit in the extreme politeness with which Lammie said good night to them and asked François to show them to their rooms, or too unaware to notice that she did not appear when they left in the morning. François, however, who had come rather late from the milking sheds, paused at the breakfast-room door before entering. He was amazed that men who had been so taciturn at dinner the night before could now, among themselves, be so lively and full of things to say. They were remarking how disgraceful it was that one woman and one boy should be living in such great wealth and extravagance in the bush, when all their servants lived so miserably in huts and were obviously overworked and poorly paid. Could they, one of them even asked rhetorically, just before François’s entrance silenced them, have found anything in the twentieth century quite so feudal and so wicked? The sooner they got to the real field of battle, they said, and found out what the men who were fighting against such injustice needed, the better.