1972 - A Story Like the Wind (11 page)

Most depressing of all, there appeared to be no name for the condition of François’s father. If only one could put a
name
to it, François felt, one could do something about it. But without a name one was lost, like a hunter in a mist in the bush at night without even a star to guide him home.

!#grave;Bamuthi, the other herdsmen and servants and even Ousie-Johanna, who seemed to combine without spiritual discomfort a certain petit-bourgeois Christianity in the head and an active Amaxosa paganism at heart, were convinced that it was all due to some form of witchcraft. They had already tried to enlist François as an ally, and begged their Lammie to get their master to consult one of the most eminent witch-doctors who lived over the hills in another wide valley, in the midst of a well-to-do Matabele clan. People came from far and wide to consult him and, according to !#grave;Bamuthi, if he were paid well enough he had never yet failed to cure the worst afflictions of Bantu man.

François, indeed, had already had several discussions with !#grave;Bamuthi on the matter because he was not at all inclined, as his parents were, to dismiss witchcraft as the cause of his father’s decline. Both his youth and a pagan environment which accepted witchcraft as a great fact of life, predisposed him to believe in magic. The great objection to this explanation was that he could not think of any human enemies who might have put a fatal spell on his father which, as one European doctor after another failed them, appeared to be more and more likely. Pierre-Paul, though by pagan standards a shade too austere, was so obviously a good man that as far as François knew he had not a single enemy in the world around Hunter’s Drift.

He had indeed confronted !#grave;Bamuthi and Ousie-Johanna with this obvious flaw in their theory that his father was bewitched, and protested indignantly. ‘You cannot be bewitched unless you have enemies! Tell me, Old Father and Old Mother, who in this world in which we live hates my father enough to put such a spell on him?’

!#grave;Bamuthi and Ousie-Johanna had shaken their heads, saddened that François, even for one so young, could be so naive. Of course, they told him, they knew his father had no enemies among Matabele, Barotse, Shangaan or Mashona, or any of the people who came and passed through the remote world of Hunter’s Drift. No, he had a far more powerful enemy, though far away. He had the Government.

‘The Government!’ François exclaimed. ‘But !#grave;Bamuthi and Ousie-Johanna, do you know what the Government is, that you could say such a terrible thing about it?’

Of course, they knew perfectly well what the Government was, they replied. They were not inexperienced fools. The Government was a very tall, severe, old Red Stranger, a tyrannical person with a long white beard and a very clever head. Once every year he packed all his best clothes in a suitcase, took the train to the great water, crossed it in a ‘water-wagon’ and went to see the great white paramount chief on the other side of the water, to come back with his head full of ideas for strange new laws to inflict on people like themselves in the bush. Everybody knew that François’s father had fallen foul of this formidable old gentleman, refused to go on in his service and had come to live here in the bush as far away as possible from him, to help people like the Matabele who needed it because, ever since the days of Lobengula, the Government had refused to listen to the voices of even the wisest and greatest Matabele Indunas, so that he ruled them no longer like his own children but still like troublesome impis of ‘Mzilikatze who might rise again in rebellion against him at any moment.

François, young as he was, had a slightly more sophisticated idea of the complex institution that was modern government in the remote capital. Yet he immediately understood what had given them the idea. He himself did not know the full story. He only knew that his father, as Director of Education in that vast territory, had had such serious differences with the Government over their education policies that he had felt compelled to resign from the service, before François was born. Knowing nothing of the details of his father’s quarrel with the Government, he was aware only broadly that it was because his father could not stomach the official neglect of African education, although the Africans hungered for it and needed it even more than the Europeans.

Pierre-Paul Joubert had originally been appointed Director of Education when he was only in his late twenties because he had grown up among the Amaxosa, and so knew Bantu Africa as few Europeans did. Apparently all his life he had felt specially tied to them, and when he left the university in the far south he had gone straight to work as a teacher among them. He had done so in spite of the fact that he had inherited, right on the Amaxosa frontier, a rich farm which had been in his family for two and a half centuries, and had been expected, as had been all the elder sons, to carry on the family tradition of work on the farm. Part of him would have liked nothing better than to do just that because he loved the land. Few things gave him greater pleasure than struggling with the unpredictable African seasons and making beautiful and fruitful the difficult Cinderella earth of Africa. Yet, he was also a born teacher, a person of instinctive vision and utterly convinced that if the future of Africa were to be creative and not become increasingly destructive, as it showed signs of becoming already in his youth, it could be so only through a sustained process of education of both Africans and Europeans for a common non-racial destiny.

When he was prevented from carrying on the work of education in this spirit by the reactionary Government which came into power in southern Africa after the War, he left the Education Service in the south and turned to the world north of the Limpopo. There a more liberal approach in these matters still seemed the rule. All the signs were that a person with his academic qualifications, with knowledge of a key African people like the Amaxosa, and already a reputation that would not have disgraced an educationalist at the end of his life, let alone a youngish man, would be made most welcome. So he had sold his farm, and he and his young wife, who felt about these things exactly as he did, had gone north, deeper into the interior of Africa.

They had arrived there full of hope, plans and abundant energy and within a year all their expectations appeared confirmed when he was put in charge of African education. But within a decade he was faced with a repetition of the discredited pattern of racial policies that had made him leave his native country. He fought hard to change it all in his new sphere of activity. But when it was clear that he could no longer do so, and was becoming in his own eyes an accessory both before and after the fact of what appeared to him another disastrous trend of discrimination, he resigned from the service.

Using the gratuity which he applied for instead of a pension and, of course, the considerable sum he had received from the sale of his family’s valuable farm in the south, he had moved to the western frontier of his new country. There, on the Amanzim-tetse river, he had established Hunter’s Drift. He had chosen this particular part of the country for many reasons. One was because here, where the hills came to an end and the land began to level out towards the great desert in the west, there appeared in the bush natural wide open spaces covered with rich veld grasses, that made them ideal grazing areas for cattle. He had already proved this to his satisfaction on one of his regular vacations one year before with Mopani. Once a year he accompanied Mopani, who was an old friend of his from the War, on his patrols in the immense bush. On these expeditions he had been deeply impressed by the vast herds of eland, hartebeest, tssessebe, roan antelope and sable, who made their home in those remote and sheltered pockets of grassland, because they all had the same feeding habits and needs as any civilized old cow. Indeed, nowhere else in all his many travels in the course of his service throughout that great territory had Pierre-Paul seen more natural country for cattle.

In addition there were, close by, the sweet waters of the Amanzim-tetse river. Water, as even the tiniest African child knew, was the greatest problem for everyone, white, yellow, red or black, in that part of Africa. Where these animals did so well he knew that cattle with such abundant water, with care, could do even better. As these facts, which appeared unknown to others, settled deeper in his imagination, the thought that he would like to end his days there had by the year become more compulsive.

Another reason was that he had already discovered a clearing and an ideal site for a homestead. This was due to the fact that one of these open pockets of land faced the broad ford over the Amanzim-tetse which gave Hunter’s Drift its name. It was precisely there that the
Punda-Ma-Tenka
road (literally the Lift-and-Carry road, obviously so-called because the people who first used it had had porters to lift and carry their baggage for them) crossed the river. This was one of the greatest tracks in the history of Africa, older by far than any tribal memory. It ran from the Cape of Good Hope in the far south, by places with names which were full of romance: Molopo, Mafeking, Lobatsi, Mahalapye, Bushman Pits, Old Copper Mine, Francistown, Makari-Kari, Nata, then on by desert fringe and through densest bush until it crossed the Amanzim-tetse at Hunter’s Drift. Thence it went north, past
Msuyhi-tonyi
, the Smoke-that-Thunders, as the Africans called the Victoria Falls, on to Kazungula on the broad reaches of the Zambezi, where this great river again could be crossed and the track on the far bank branched out and away in all directions: west to the swamps and mountains of Angola; north through the bush to Broken Hill, so on beyond to the Mountains of Fire and Smoke; east by way of the Bangwelo swamps, between the great lakes of Malawi and Tanzania on to the Indian Ocean, there to meet the great Oriental world at harbours like Tanga, Dar-es-Salaam and Kilindini.

It was, in fact, the very route that all the great explorers and hunters in African history had followed on their way into the interior and which appeared marked ‘Hunter’s Road’, on British maps. Men like Livingstone and Selous had used it when leaving the civilized world of the Cape for the unknown interior. The coming of the railways and, since the war, aeroplanes, had put an end to much of the usefulness of the road for Europeans. But it was still, despite all its appearances, the main road for Africans as they continually travelled in thousands from the underdeveloped and impoverished north to look for work in the rich, developing south. This fact had counted a great deal with Pierre-Paul. He knew he could always keep in touch with the civilized world by reading newspapers and through extensive correspondence by letter. But here he could also keep in touch with the Africa of the interior that he loved. Here, at Hunter’s Drift, news could be gathered from the lips of living men to keep him close to this other greater Africa that he had tried, in vain, to educate into the modern world.

But the last and greatest practical consideration of all, however, was the fact that the railway which travelled from the Cape by way of Bulawayo and the Victoria Falls to the rich copper belt in the far north, made a wide curve through the hills which brought it within nine miles of Hunter’s Drift. On its way it also passed the greatest coal mine in Africa which had produced a large, modern industrial centre in the heart of the bush. This centre had coal and minerals to spare but no earth worth cultivating and no grass for grazing near at hand.

Pierre-Paul decided that if only he could persuade the railway authorities and the mines to make a train stop at the point nearest Hunter’s Drift, he would have almost on his doorstep, an immense and rich market for all his cattle and produce. And this, indeed, proved to be the case. So great was the centre’s need for fresh supplies that he had no difficulty in persuading the mines to put pressure on the railway authorities and within a few years the train stopped every night at what became known as ‘Hunter’s Drift Siding’, to be met by mule-wagons loaded to the full with fresh vegetables and fresh meat for the mines.

He was convinced, further, that if only he could make Hunter’s Drift an ideally self-supporting farm, the men coming and going through it, camping at the old ‘outspan’ by the fords and seeing it for themselves (while being made thoroughly welcome in the process), would begin learning how to live in the modern age, since they, like himself, were all at heart fanners and cattle-men, however primitive their methods appeared to be. Moreover near and all around Hunter’s Drift, to the north and to the east, in valleys and isolated clearings in the bush, there were already numbers of Bantu outposts. He thought that if he recruited as many of these as possible, they could share in the development of Hunter’s Drift, not just as servants but as partners, who would find security and receive regular wages as well as a share of the profits, which he hoped to make out of his ranch. In this way he could create, in miniature, a tiny model of the non-racial Africa that he had visualized as an educationalist. This hope indeed was so compelling that he and his wife felt no resentment for their personal defeat by the Government. Was there not after all the Sindabele proverb: ‘The greatest and sweetest of marula trees grow out of only a single little stone?’

With all this in mind, Pierre-Paul Joubert had gone first to
u-Nothloba-Mazibuka
, the traditional Keeper-of-the-Ford.

He had already, several times before, met the old gentleman and he now spent a week with him in his kraal,
Osebeni
(On-the-River-Bank) in another clearing by the Amanzim-tetse. He took a week because he knew the deep mistrust that all Africans had of doing things in haste. From dawn to dusk he waited on the old Matabele gentleman who wore like a halo around his grey head the metal ring which was a badge of his rank as an Induna, Great Counsellor and Advisor of Kings. Without the least temptation to impatience, Pierre-Paul had explained elaborately to the dignified old gentleman all that he had in mind. He had answered a thousand and one penetrating questions with the meticulous sense of the importance of detail natural to an inspired teacher. At the end of the time, the old man had given his answer in a way far more convincing than mere words could have been. He had just summoned his eldest son, !#grave;Bamuthi, and in front of’all his clan called to meet Pierre-Paul, he had told !#grave;Bamuthi that he was to go and henceforth make his home with him.