Lucinda and I leave early in the morning, trusting ourselves to Gibson, the driver, who wears a smart uniform, a blue safari-suit, and a nautical cap. Off we go into the hopeful morning, heading north along the coast. Already some surfers are out. The sea has a blue-green colour this morning. It is more tropical than where we come from. The waves are small, the sea calm. Little knots of men, standing at the water’s edge, are casting with huge rods, deep into the waves. A fisherman pulls in a large silver fish, struggling hopelessly. In that instant we fly by and the fish story is incomplete, for ever a fleeting image.
We are soon travelling through sugar-cane plantations. Way inland we can see a thunderstorm; the distant rain has given the sky a cross-hatched appearance. Gibson says it is moving, towards the Drakensberg. I wonder how the trekkers coped on those mountains in their wagons when these fierce thunderstorms struck.
‘Those are the mountains that Piet Retief came down when he was looking for somewhere to settle. Over in that direction.’
‘Why are you doing this, Dad? Really?’
Lucinda’s face is sleepy and clouded and warm, and she sits with her legs folded under her and her head on my shoulder. I wonder if she has recovered completely; I hope that this is not just a period of remission. It has been a terrible hell to see my beloved daughter slipping into irrationality; who would blame me if I chose to believe that she will soon be herself again?
‘Why do you ask?’
‘You are a sly old fox, aren’t you? You have always had your own private thoughts and ideas. What’s this Zulu outing really all about, Daddy?’
‘I don’t have a secret agenda. Or any fixed agenda. It’s just that, as time goes by, I feel the urge to make my peace. I have been thinking about it almost every day. Going to see my – our – ancestor’s grave may help. I believe in serendipity, so I am sure it will be worthwhile. But the truth, darling, is that I am basically just curious. I always want to get a sense of what a place is like.’
‘Are you ashamed of being Piet Retief’s descendant or are you kinda pleased, like people who are related to Billy the Kid or Bonnie and Clyde?’
‘Look, Retief was a bankrupt who left the Cape Colony, recklessly taking his children and followers with him; his son, Cornelis, was one of the seventy killed, followed by another hundred or so servants, women and children, all because Retief was naïve, convinced he had a real treaty with Dingane, and also because he thought that God was on his side. Unfortunately, neither was true. I am pretty sure his plan was to take Dingane’s country. Does that sound to you like someone I should admire?’
‘Probably not.’
Perversely, I do value my relation with Retief, as if it gives me some substance, some authenticity, some purchase on this land. For better or for worse I am descended from pioneers. In its own way it is like having ancestors who landed at Cape Cod in the Mayflower. (Although they had intended to land in Virginia.) ‘And, by the way, there is some evidence that the treaty a party of Boers claimed to have found months later was a fake.’
The landscape unrolls, gloriously.
‘Do you love Nellie?’
‘What a strange question.’
‘Not so strange. I think she is great. Like the best thing that could have happened.’
She holds my hand just as she did when she was a child, with a light but persistent grip. And now I can see her as a four-year-old, eager, always cheerful, building houses with cushions and chairs and blankets to hide in, and singing loudly and raucously from inside her hide-away.
And soon after her fourth birthday, Georgina and I started our war.
‘I do love Nellie, darling. Yes. She has made me calm after all those years with your mother. I have never blamed your mother, by the way, it was just that we were a total mismatch. I am as much to blame. Maybe more so.’
‘Dad, I have wanted to ask you this for a long time …’ I brace myself. ‘Did my drug phase have anything to do with the break-up?’
I take comfort from the words ‘drug phase’ because it suggests she thinks it is all over.
‘No, darling. It was never your fault. You watched, appalled. I thought you went off the rails because of our rows. Was it awful for you at home?’
‘It was pretty bad but I was always on your side, Daddy. You know that. Mum seemed to like enjoy arguments. Whatever we said, she contradicted us or she had a better idea. Whatever I wanted to do, even finger painting when I was three, she would like take over and tell me how to do it properly. And she always wanted me to dress like her, boots and furs and big necklaces even when I was five or six. Beautiful mother with beautiful daughter. I was just an accessory.’
‘I am so sorry.’
I know it’s true.
She is looking out of the window now towards the storm. It has moved away so that all we see of it is a smudge on the horizon. As we turn off the coastal road and head inland, Gibson says we have another hour and a half to go. I ask him about his family and his home. He glances at me in the mirror.
‘I am from Ladysmith, sir. I have four children.’ (He pronounces it ‘chill-ren’.) ‘Two boys and two daughters, sir.’
We stop for a break above a river, shaded by a single tree. Gibson says there are still a few crocodiles down there. On the other side of the river is a kraal of round, traditional, thatched huts and a few mud huts with corrugated-iron roofs, held in place by rocks. Startlingly bright kingfishers dive into the water from their perch on a dead tree. They are like bright Christmas decorations. Chill-ren emerge from the kraal and hop across towards us on huge, worn, red boulders. A small grey dog swims across, paddling fiercely and optimistically. I hope there are no crocodiles just here. Gibson has sandwiches and water for us in a coolbox and some sweets and drinks for the children. But when they ask for money he is severe, and they retreat, chastened. They watch us from within an anxious little circle. Lucinda is all for digging into her tote bag for money, but Gibson says it is not good for them to beg. Lucinda gives the remains of a sandwich to the dog, which has correctly identified her as a soft touch. The dog suddenly shakes itself violently, wetting Lucinda. She laughs. Gibson is concerned and produces a roll of kitchen towel. He warns that some of these dogs have rabies.
On we go, blissful. Lucinda is sleeping; it is the sleep of the innocent; I am almost convinced that she is recovering. Of course I can’t judge whether the effects of drugs will linger, nor if her brain has been altered for ever in some way. The brain is a mystery to me, both in its workings and in its symbolism. Scientists say it has a mind of its own.
While my troubled daughter sleeps, I watch the landscape unfurling; for my own amusement I try to name birds and spot weaver-bird nests hanging over water and I look out for meerkats and old farmhouses and early roads and abandoned cement bridges that are now bypassed, and trading stores and Nguni cattle and signs of Voortrekker roads and mission churches and women walking stoically as we throw up dust around them and the darting leaping flight of impala and snakes on the road and ant hills and donkeys ridden by children or pulling carts and school children in uniform and the signposts to farms and millenarian missions. There are plenty of missions of this sort. It seems that the poorer you are the more you are likely to turn to bogus religions for some sort of comfort. It may be that my ancestor and those who came after him destroyed a thousand years of belief and custom, which interpreted and contained all that was required for the life the Zulus lived. Denigrating the indigenous peoples and their customs was one of the worst crimes of colonialism.
‘Are we nearly there?’
‘Oh, hello, sweetheart. Yes, nearly there.’
‘Lovely sleep. I read somewhere that sleep is a brief respite from mortality.’
‘I like that.’
She places her head on my lap and I stroke her hair. I am seized by optimism; I feel it is me as much as Lucinda who is coming alive after a long hibernation.
We drive down a very bumpy track, past a mission, and stop under some trees. Gibson leads us on foot in the direction of Dingane’s kraal. We pass through a palisade of large dried branches. Gibson says that the kraal is being re-created as accurately as possible. The kraal, the isigodlo, the heart of Dingane’s kingdom, was huge. About ten beehive huts have been built so far. It is wonderfully evocative. Once there were hundreds of beehive huts, for a thousand of the King’s trusted warriors and his five hundred women. At the centre of the isigodlo was the enclosure for his revered cattle. The King’s house is twice as big as any other, and is built exactly on the original site, as indicated by the remains of the wooden posts that held up the beautiful beehive structure. There are no people around at all, but I can easily and vividly imagine the place as a bustling Zulu metropolis.
We look down the hill to the mouth of the isigodlo. Eight hundred yards away is the hill called KwaMatiwane, the killing fields. Here thousands were killed over the years. Death was only separated from life by the breath of the King. He could kill on a whim, and did.
‘That’s where our ancestor died. Young William Wood wrote that Piet was the last one to be clubbed to death, so that he was forced to watch his followers and his son being killed.’
‘I don’t want to go down there,’ says Lucinda.
Gibson drives us to the memorial for Piet Retief and his comrades. It is placed on the crown of a small hill. It is strangely similar to hundreds, even thousands, of memorials in British towns; it is essentially a Victorian memorial in the shape of an obelisk, bearing the names of the seventy Boers who were murdered by Dingane’s warriors. A few sentences place the blame on the Zulu king. The citations are written in Dutch. The word ‘moord’ – murder – is used.
I hold Lucinda’s hand as we gaze at the grave, not communing with our ancestor, but simply overwhelmed by the quietness and emptiness of the landscape and the palpable sense of tragedy, a double tragedy, that took place here. This awful massacre has drained the life out of the surroundings. I am reminded of Terezín, which has a deathly quiet, unable to sustain the weight of its own ignominy. Although the Boers all died, this was also the beginning of the end for the Zulus. I think that this is the birthplace of the notion of the ‘swartgevaar’, the black menace, which justified so much cruelty and repression.
On the way to Blood River, I ask Lucinda if she wants to hear my theory.
‘Sure. Why not? Your theory about what?’
She looks surprisingly interested in what I have to say.
‘About apartheid. I think it was the product of fear. The whites were terrified of the blacks, particularly black men, and the massacre right here was the confirmation the Boers needed that you couldn’t trust black people. Never mind what the whites did to the blacks over time, they retained this fear. Retief complained about unruly “Caffres” in his manifesto. When he arrived here, hoping to steal Dingane’s land and enslave his people, his worst fears of unruly Caffres were realised.’
‘I don’t want to spoil your fun, Dad, but the whole Negro slave era was just the same. There are tons of theses and books about it.’
‘Yes, I know, but I am saying that this was the moment, the moment critique, that sparked it all off here, a long war, like Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Right here on February the 6th, 1838, at an exact moment of time and history, something happened that had terrible and lasting consequences.’
‘And our ancestor was to blame.’
‘I think he was the catalyst; he blundered in, miscalculated completely, and this fear and loathing led to apartheid and the idea that you needed to control black men at all times or else they would chase you into the sea after raping all your women.’
Subdued, we drive on towards Blood River. I may be imagining a growing closeness between me and Lucinda. I am longing for it.
I give her the background: Blood River was the place where Dingane tried to finish off the Boers for ever. It went very badly for him. The Boers, under Andries Pretorius, had drawn up their sixty-four wagons in a circle, protected on two sides by the Blood River. The Zulus attacked in waves but the Boers fired repeatedly until the Zulus were lying in piles in the river and around the wagons. Three thousand Zulus died while only three Boers were lightly injured, one of them Pretorius. To them this miracle was God’s doing and they entered a covenant with him. As a schoolboy I was supposed to acknowledge the Day of the Covenant. It was a holiday; we acknowledged it by taking the day off to surf at Muizenberg, where Bertil had his surfing lessons. In those days nobody had heard of great whites.
The first sight of the sixty-four bronze wagons, full-sized, startles Lucinda. For a few moments she thinks they are real wagons. The wagons are placed in a circle on the bank of the river to commemorate this great day. Each wagon is identical to the others. A small boy of about eight is fashioning clay heads of cattle beyond a fence. As I approach him, he holds up the clay models. I buy them both and give him ten times what he is asking. His little, desperate face collapses. He starts to run in the direction of a village. I don’t tell Lucinda that it is in remembrance of the children on Tannie Marie’s farm.
An elderly Afrikaner is in charge of the museum. He is wearing the sort of clothing I recognise from my childhood, not so much out of fashion as dredged from deep time. Diffidently he offers to run a short film of the battle, made forty years ago. Yes, please.
When they are shot it’s striking how enthusiastically the extras behave in this old film. The Zulu extras pile into the river and fall back into the water dramatically. They attack, futilely, but wholeheartedly. Before they are shot, they hurl their assegais with intent as if they are enjoying a rerun of the original battle. I wonder if they were carried away by the opportunity of a return fixture. The script demands that they fall and play dead, which they do with gusto. The pretend-injured hobble away clutching their wounds on shattered legs. The film is in black-and-white so the eponymous blood is not available, but we can imagine it. For all its old-fashioned technique, the film, like the old man’s clothes, touches me.
‘Great value, Daddy, two massacres in one day.’
‘Don’t be so cynical, Lucinda.’
‘You have to laugh in the face of disaster. Dad, I have had a great time being with you, and this has been incredible, like absolutely amazing. Just you and me.’
‘I’m glad, darling. It’s always been you and me.’
She turns away from the landscape to me.
‘I know you have been very worried about me.’
‘Yes, I have been very worried about you. But that’s my job.’
‘I am over it, Daddy. I promise. I can see that there is much more to a life. When you are taking drugs you just like lose all proportion. You are looking for smack all day long and it’s like nothing else matters. People think heroin is difficult to get off, but it is not so difficult to get off at all, the only thing is that it is much more enticing than real life. When you are clean you feel absolutely useless. It’s totally crazy.’
She hugs me and I hold her vulnerable body close. I am careful, as if her body could snap like a twig. As a parent you must console your children at all times.
Gibson, who is a naturally solicitous man, says it would be best to be off these dirt roads before it is dark. Lucinda and I get into the car and huddle together on the back seat, complicit in our special knowledge, all the way to the coast. Gibson passes us the picnic hamper. We tuck in to the sandwiches.
I was elated when Lucinda said she was definitely over her drug phase; all the taut air left me in a rush, like a maverick balloon at a children’s party. Now I look at her lovely face, which always recalls the young Georgina. The flickering light catches the bolts in her nose. I say nothing, although I hope she will have them removed.
‘I will get rid of them,’ she says, seeing me looking too obviously, my gaze, like a moth’s, drawn to the light.
We are tired out by important thoughts, unexpected emotions and huge skies. We sleep the sleep of the just, although nothing more than a father and a daughter together again.