Chapter One

The author tells something of himself, his people and the great Promise made by the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair; his expedition abroad and arrival among the English

We are a little people. Light. Lone. Lithe. Scattered wide as the wind. Our names tell of our nowhereness: we call our children Stukkie Ding – ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing’, or ‘Little Nothing’, and ‘Missing’. And we lose our children often. Sometimes to the flu. Sometimes to the farmer, who locks them away in the schoolhouse when they would be more useful to the family by tending the trek donkeys or fetching kindling. Sometimes we lose them to the campfire. (But in the end, as all know, everything falls in the fire.) Some call us Ashbush People, or Trek Folk, or Nomads, or Nowhere Men. Some call us nothing at all but ‘Who goes there?’ and ‘Away with you!’

Once there were other names, names the visitors gave us. Visitors, black and white, who came to our country. And stayed.

These early visitors rose from the sea, crept up the beaches like waves and, looking into our slanting eyes, pronounced us to be ‘Chinese Hottentots’. The longer the visitors stayed, the more names they gave us: we became ‘Egyptian gypsies’, or ‘wild’ Bushmen, as well as vagabonds, foxes, vermin, devils. The visitors stayed to steal our country. They were brave with their horses and guns. But they cried out in terror in their dreams – forced to sleep under the stars, sweating in the open air, fearing our attacks. Any part of the body even grazed by our arrows must be sliced off. Or it died. For our sweet, slow poisons never failed. Driven from our fountains, robbed of our honey, we took their cattle and ran for the hills. Then our enemies hunted us down like rock-rabbits. Crushed us like fleas in an old blanket. Until we were next to nothing at all. Reduced to scraps. Missing.

Or so our foolish visitors liked to imagine. But does the springbuck die when the knife slits its throat and blood pours down? Does its spirit not enter the hunter? Just so have our souls entered the visitors: yellow and brown and black and white. And mingled. So that today when you look into the faces of Baster and Boer, black and white, farmer and mayor and shepherd – ours are the faces looking out at you. We went away – but we did not travel far.

Before the visitors came was our First Best Time. Long behind us now. No roads, and no fences. No police vans, patrolling like yellow cobras, to catch people carrying meat or firewood. We followed giant herds of springbuck, spreading as far as the horizon; the land was fat and all the fountains flowing, loved by the she-rain falling softly from heaven. In our First Best Time we roamed as wide as the wind.

Then came the Boers in their wagons and hunted us, stole our honey and our children. We cried and the god !Kwha heard our cries. For one day there came tall soldiers in red frocks, from across the ocean, servants of the Sovereign of all the English, she who was called the ‘Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair’. These were our Redneck years. When the Red Frocks kicked the arses of the Boer all the way from the Snow Mountains to Murderer’s Karoo. That was our Second Best Time.

The Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair long ago passed into the veld where a thousand eland run each day into the hunters’ arrows and the wine goes around in bags as big as the rhino’s gut. But her going brought her son in her place. (So it is among the English.) And then his son, good King George, who came to see us, to thank us for fighting in his wars, and renewed his promise to kick the Boer to hell and gone whenever we should ask. Our people showed him the old Queen’s Great Promise. And the king said to them, ‘Yes, that is great-granny’s sign. Believe you me!’ So they put the paper back in its hiding place until the day when they would send a messenger to the Queen of England to remind her of her Promise. Believe you me!

Almost alone among the People of the Road, People of the Eland, Men of Men, I can read books. And I can speak the Redneck language. Almost alone among the nomads of the Karoo, I had the luck as a baby to be saved by a kind man, the Boer named Smith. In the white light before dawn he found me crying among the smouldering ruins of my parents’ camp. The fire beside which my family slept had fed itself so fat upon the paraffin with which they watered the flames that it got up and devoured their wooden night shelter, as well as the wiry screen of ashbush that keeps the bitter wind at bay, as well as the family within, father, mother, brothers, sisters. Ashbush is our friend; ashbush is the only roadside plant the wandering people may gather freely. If the ashbush wanderers take anything else along the way, then the police in the cobra-yellow vans will throw them into jail. So we gather ashbush, and sometimes it warms us, and sometimes it burns us.

All my family burned, even the blanket under which we slept, the cart which was our house and on which kettles and whips and bottles were lashed for the daily trek across the endless Karoo flats, from Lutherburg to Zwingli, from Eros to Compromise, from Mouton Fountain to Abraham’s Grave. Even the blackened kettle burned to a blacker nothing in the hungry fire. And the donkeys stampeded far into the veld and were never found again.

The Boer Smith was the only Englishman for two hundred miles. ‘Our Redneck’, the Boers of the Karoo called him, as if he was their pet. Maybe that’s why he saved me. Because a pet needs a pet. He told his grandfather’s stories of the wild Bushmen of the Karoo. Who lived and loved like the animals. Who were impossible to tame. Unless you caught your baby Bushman young. Barbarian monkey men who used a poison on their arrowheads for which there was no cure. But he had caught me young: so I became his ‘tame Bushman’.

My master had a fondness for apricot brandy which sometimes drove him into horrible unhappiness. ‘Kissing the Devil’, he called it and there were times when the Devil made him very angry. At no other time did he beat me. It was all very well, said he, while I was young, to answer to the name ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing’. But it would not do later when strangers wished to know what to call me, and to know that I was a man and not a monkey.

Because he was generous, he gave me no fewer than three names, the first two being what he called ‘good English names’. The last was a name that many people in these plains have come to use. He was sure no one would say I’d stolen it. No more was I to be known as a ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing’; now I was called David Mungo Booi.1

From his old, rich books he taught me to say my letters, and told wonderful stories of horrible darkness and violent death, heathen tribes and disgusting savagery, as related by the great English explorers on their travels through darkest Africa from Bushmanland to Stanleypool, from Bonga’s country to the Mountains of the Moon.

Their names became my hymn; I still mutter them to myself when I wish to sleep: Baines, Baker, Bruce, Burton, Grant, Kingsley, Livingstone, Speke and Stanley … Even now they make, when strung together like beads, a little Anglican necklace.

The Boer Smith faced great trouble from the other farmers when they heard he was teaching me to read. His neighbours sat in his front room and watched me with my book and warned that no good would come of it. It was like teaching a sheep to fly, and while a flying sheep was at least a way of transporting mutton cheaply, a reading Bushman was unseemly and an affront to decent people everywhere. As to my name – a man needed a name, said the neighbours, but a monkey did not. If you gave a Karoo gypsy a name, he would only lose it. Or abuse it. They very much doubted it was legal. And they foresaw a bad end to this foolishness.

Of an evening, when the shearing had gone well, and my master was happy with the great bags of wool stacked in the ceiling of his barn, he would call on his shearers to sit with him, after they had been paid, after they had feasted on his gift of two freshly slaughtered goats with bellies fat as pockets of sweet potatoes. A fire was lit under the stars that powder the face of our father the moon,2 and all would be invited to bring whatever drink they could find: Little John brought sweet white wine, and Pietman his prickly-pear liquor; Old Flip and Sampie the Blacksmith brought along their home-made brews that bite the eyes. Pietman would unscrew his wooden leg. Boer Smith produced his favourite apricot brandy, and they would mix the lot in a zinc basin and stir it with Pietman’s wooden leg. They gathered around the basin like geese at a garden tap in a thirsty month. Little John and Sampie and Pietman and Old Flip would send the white enamel cup with the chipped blue rim around the circle. A little singing, and a little gunplay. Boer Smith loved to practise his target-shooting under the light of a hunting moon. That was how Pietman had lost his leg, having to mark a target for my master; and my master, having dipped the cup into the basin once too often, put a slug through Pietman’s right leg at three hundred metres, and it had to be cut off above the knee. Pietman never blamed him, for this was the sort of thing that happened when the cup went around the fire. Besides, Boer Smith cut him a handsome new leg of the best yellow wood he could find, which Sampie the blacksmith shod with a lively steel tip that flashed like a hare’s eyes in the moonlight. When Pietman took his leave of us, after the shearing season, feeling happy to have passed the cup around the fire, stretched flat on his back in his donkey cart, all you saw was his fine yellow-wood leg waving goodbye.

After the drinking – peach brandy, white lightning, Advocaat, swirling in the enamel basin – after the shooting, then the stories began. My master, being a man of great understanding, loved to tell tales of his own people and to teach us something of their glory and their genius. His learning at these fireside lessons deepened with each scoop of the chipped cup in the old basin. The Boers of the Karoo would have been astonished to know how much their workers knew of the history of England:

England, or Britannia Prima, as it was known formerly, is divided into three parts. These are known as the South-end, the Midland and the savage, uncharted wastes they call simply the ‘North’.

In the very earliest times the first people sailed to England from lands across the sea. These were the Beaker people. They failed in their heartfelt attempt to civilize the aboriginals and died in despair, taking their drinking cups with them to the grave to be buried beside them. Later there arose in the island wild and savage tribes who dressed in animal skins, painted themselves blue and lived principally on milk and meat. They were slow to learn to till the land.

When the Romans came they wept to see the foolishness of the natives, who shared wives among ten or twelve men, worshipped the moon, oaks and mistletoe, and measured out their lives in fortnights. To this day, said my master, the English have great difficulty in thinking in periods of longer than fourteen days. If asked to think a few months into the future, they grow confused and resentful. If asked to think a year or two ahead, they grow mute and wan and retire to their beds or their alehouses.

The Romans took pity on the savages and built for them roads and baths. The natives refused to bath, since it would disturb the blue paint with which they adorned themselves and of which they were so proud, and preferred to scratch their furry parts in sacred groves, worshipping the moon, the oak and the mistletoe. And since they seldom went anywhere, what possible use did they have for roads?

Once upon a time hunting was good in England. There were woolly elephants, hyenas, wolves and even our common and beloved hippopotamus to be found in great abundance. Now there are none at all, said the Boer Smith, and his tears fell into his apricot brandy. Let this be a warning, he used to tell me – we in Africa, with our immeasurable richness of wild creatures, must know that unless we take care to preserve them, we shall go the way of the English.

These and other things I learnt from the Boer Smith. And they were to serve me in good stead.

My master left without warning. He was kissing the Devil one night when the Devil decided to keep him. So the Boer Smith passed to his rest in that land where the fountains flow for ever, and the good live on locusts and honey, where the rains are always on time and hartebeest run into the hunter’s arrows. And he left a bequest to David Mungo Booi: the gift of a dozen sheep.

It was a great day. For who before, amongst the Trek People, had owned twelve sheep? All the Ashbush families came from miles across the Karoo to see for themselves the man who owned twelve sheep. The family Lottering came. And the Pienaars. The Blitzerliks, old Adam and Mina. And the clan of Witziesbek. And we held a great party and sent round a five-man-can of sweet wine and danced until the dust leaped to its feet and danced with us. The stars began singing. On and on we danced into the white light that comes before sunrise.

Old Adam Blitzerlik spoke for all when he rejoiced in my good fortune. I would have to be very careful: I had had good luck, but for the travelling people good luck usually brought trouble. Twelve sheep. Yes – well and good. But what profit are twelve sheep to a man who cannot graze them? Did I own grazing land? The wandering people owned nothing of the land. Everything belonged to others. Blacks from the north and the east took our land. Whites from the south and the west took our land. The fences kept us out. Yellow police vans patrolled all day long so that we might neither stop, nor collect wood for the fires, nor graze our donkeys on an inch of farmer’s land. Or pluck any roadside plant or shrub but for the harsh and bitter ashbush.

Therefore it was time to make a plan. He was calling a gathering of the travelling people from across the Karoo. The time had come for action. The time had come to read the Great Paper.

A meeting was arranged in the hall of the Dutch Reformed church in the coloured township outside Zwingli, though there was a lot of opposition from the township dwellers who hate us even worse than they hate whites. We would steal the light fittings and tear up the floorboards for our fire, they said. Our donkeys would soon be eating all the fodder in the outspan place provided by the municipality.

Our people travelled to Zwingli from all over the land. Gathered together for the reading were the Lottering family, the Pienaars, and the Ruyter clan who remembered losing a child to the English in the time of the old Queen (Klein Seun or ‘Little Boy’ Ruyter had been stolen one hundred years earlier); there gathered, too, the family Witziesbek; and also the Sea-Cow clan from Murraysburg and many Strandloopers3 (though I’m sorry to say that some of them were deep in their cups): several of Harryslot, from Prince Albert Way, and the family /Xam,4 from Victoria East direction; not forgetting old Adam and Mina Blitzerlik; as well as representatives of other travelling bands or their descendants, long ago scattered and dispersed: besides nomads of the Karoo, there were people of the Kalahari, Caprivi, Okavango and Angola; the People of the Soft Sand; People of the Eland; People of the East; River Bushmen and Remote-area Dwellers of Botswana, including also the =Haba, the G//ana, the !Kung, the G/wi, the !Xo – all true people of the First Time.

The Great Paper was being held by the Sea-Cow band, from beyond Murraysburg, safe in a leather quiver adorned with ostrich-shell beads. As the only reader, and the only English-speaker, I was asked to give out again the Promise to our people, then I was to translate the sacred words slowly into Afrikaans, so that those gathered could follow. But most of my listeners knew the Paper Promise by heart – even if they understood nothing of English – and nodded and applauded at certain key moments, as I declared the cherished words:

We, Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, to Our Trusty and well-beloved San People, of the Cape Karoo, Greetings. We, reposing special Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage and Good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be a Favoured Nation and send you Our Sign of Friendship – wherever you are. From the Snow Mountains to the Sourveld. From the Cape even to the Kalahari. Assuring you of Our Patronage and Protection in Perpetuity. Like a Lioness her whelps, so do We, Queen and Empress, draw Our Red People to Our Bosom. Let no one Molest or Scatter them.

By Command of Her Majesty in Council, bearing the date of Eighth Day of June 1877.

Some of the Ruyter clan could not resist reciting the words along with me. The Strandloopers shouted, ‘Hallelujah!’ every now and then. And when I had finished, several members of the Sea-Cow clan called out, ‘Amen!’ as if we were in church.

Then the meeting divided. Some of those present, specifically the representatives of the !Kung, said the time for talking had passed. Now it was time for war – we would approach the Queen and request she make good her Promise. Our lives were trampled like those of dung beetles by black people and whites and browns. Let the Lioness guard her whelps. Let the Great She-Elephant gallop to rescue her children; let her send the Red Frocks to kill the Boer; let her trample our enemies under her great feet, or spear them with her tusks; and let her children sleep safely in the shade of her generous ears.

Others, notably the Lotterings, said the time for war was past. The only fate awaiting Red People, Real People, Little People, was death. Better then to leave and live in England if the place was suitable. England, they had heard, was a rich paradise where there were many more sheep than islanders; farmers could graze their flocks wherever they liked, since it rained every day and grass grew even in the cities; in England – said Pa Lottering – the police carried no guns (this assertion was loudly mocked by the Strandloopers, who said only children believed in policemen without guns).

In either case, the assembly agreed, an explorer, or ambassador, must be sent to put our case to the Sovereign. And since I was the only man among them to speak the English tongue, I would be the natural choice to go on this expedition. I possessed two fine English names, and I had been raised an Englishman by the Boer Smith, and now I so resembled the genuine article that it was doubtful the English would realize I was, in fact, a foreigner.

The family Ruyter asked me especially to find out what had been the fate of the little boy, lost years before to the English when the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair was still in this world. The Red Frocks had stolen the boy and carried him to England as a gift to the Queen, from whence he had never returned. Since ‘Little Boy’ Ruyter had been a gift to the Old Queen, then surely her descendants would know what became of him? If he had been buried in England, then I was, please, to arrange to have his remains returned to the Karoo.

The Witziesbek band said that once the Queen heard my story she would ride to our aid. It was well known that the English were great protectors of weak people in the world and always kept their word. If, however, Her Majesty decided that her soldiers could not come and save us, because they were too busy saving others, then we should consider establishing a colony in England. In order to do so, we must know something of the climate, the terrain, the customs of the people. It was said, for example, that the English feasted on babies at special times of the year. Was this true? They had a special attachment to brass, mirrors, calico. This we knew from their early contact with our cousins, the people of the coast, to whom the English, when they first arrived from the sea, offered trinkets in exchange for sheep, honey and hides.

Now we would do likewise. For as the Dutch and the French and the English, whenever they propose to colonize a country, first send missionaries and explorers to prepare the way, so we would form a Society for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of England. It was as the agent of this Society that David Mungo Booi would be dispatched to visit the Queen of England, to remind her of the Promise made by her predecessor and/or to spy out the land with a view to future settlement.

While the chief object of our expedition was to ask the English Monarch to send her Red Frocks to our aid, there was a secondary objective, and this was broached by the Sea-Cow clan from Murraysburg who instructed me to ascertain the following: what was the likelihood of possible settlement in England, and the opportunities for commercial exploitation, if such a settlement took place?

The impression gained by the only man of our people to have visited the English (a certain abducted beachcomber named Coree) and who returned to tell the tale, was of a savage people who made constant war on their neighbours and frequently fell out amongst themselves.

Therefore, what protection could friendly native chiefs give to commercial enterprises? Were the rivers navigable? And were the tribes along the River Thames (said to be their sacred river, and to run through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea) sufficiently intelligent to understand that it would be to their mutual advantage to maintain a friendly intercourse with the San settlers? What tributes or taxes would be levied by the native tribes for right of way through their country? What was the nature of the produce and the employment opportunities which the natives might be able to exchange for the benefits of Bushman settlement amongst them?

Then Grandfather Harry, patriarch of the Harryslot clan, took from inside his coat the family’s treasure – a beer mug on which appeared a picture of a young woman in a crown, and urged me to study it so I should recognize Her Majesty if ever I found myself in the Royal Presence.

We prepared to vote on the motion that the Society should appoint me as its official representative when Ouderling Basters from the local church, dressed in his toga, arrived to say that our time was up and we were to vacate the premises immediately. Ma Pienaar said he was probably there to count the lightbulbs. But we went away, as we were ordered, as we always do when our time is up.

We left the church hall and moved to the outspan place set aside by the municipality for the donkeys of travelling people, where we concluded the meeting, standing among our carts and beasts. On a show of hands it was agreed that the Society would raise funds for my journey and I was to leave for England as soon as possible.

Old Pa Lottering now objected that owning the Old Queen’s Paper Promise was all very well, but how did we know it wasn’t a lie and a fraud? The word of white people, in his opinion, was worth no more than sheepshit.

The Society resolved to ask Sergeant De Waal of the police station at Mouton Fountain. It was said that he had been to Cape Town, even. So he knew the ways of the world.

Sergeant De Waal, tearing his hair when he saw the Paper Promise from the great Queen, said, ‘This is the sort of thing that made all the trouble in our land. This is the paper that robbed the Boers of their birthright. And will do again!’ And he yelled at us to get out of the station before he kicked our arses to Timbuctoo.

We knew then that the Paper Promise must be true. We sold my twelve sheep and started a fund. Our people collected money together for the first time in their lives. The fence-menders who work all day in the white heat, lining fences against the jackals who steal the farmers’ sheep; the hunters who bait their traps in the bush for the lynx; the shearing gangs who move from farm to farm: all gave to our fund, sure in their hearts that it was not too late to seek a newer world.

Very conscious of the honour conferred upon me, I gave to the Society this promise: I would describe those in England as they were, as I saw them, and as I judged them, free from prejudice … The journey might be long, the country savage, all may be wild and brutal, hard and unfeeling, devoid of that holy instinct instilled by nature into the heart of man. But I, David Mungo Booi, would say what I saw and heard – however dark – among the English.

For my travels I was equipped as follows: a great hat, its brim as wide as an ostrich feather, fashioned from finest buckskin; its cranial capacity very generous, measuring about the same volume as an ostrich egg, lined with three cunning pockets, sewn by Hippo-girl Lottering, with yarn made from the leaf fibres of the green rope bush, and strong enough to snare the wildest guinea fowl.

In the first of these pockets were placed two good strong notebooks, six green Venus pencils, well sharpened, and a small knife.

In the second of these pockets was hidden the flag of our people, which, until it was drawn by Stumpnose Du Toit to show to the English Queen, had not existed. He was so old, this Stumpnose, that he dimly remembered something of the way our people had done these things once. On a good piece of linen, obtained from the General Dealer in Middlepost, Stumpnose painted our mother, the great moon. High in the right-hand corner, sailing golden and fat, as befits our mother. From the left-hand upper corner a swallow departs. The swallow is one of the rain’s things, as we are; and so, as the swallow departs, so we too have vanished from the lands that were once ours. And under the honey-moon, our mother, in the foreground we see two teams of men holding a tug-of-war. The team below is made of white men; for it was from below, from the sea, that the first visitors came to us, those whom we took to be pale Sea-Bushmen. Above is shown a team of Red People. The contest to which this refers took place in the time of the early world, when animals were still people. When the men from Europe arrived in our country they said to us, let us pull the rope to decide who owns the cattle and sheep and goats. And we pulled the rope until it broke, leaving most of it in the hands of the Bushmen. And the white men said: there you are, you have most of the rope, take it and use it to snare game: duiker and eland and springbuck are yours. But we will have the cattle and sheep. You may have tsama melons and dress in the skins of wild animals. But we will wear clothes and sleep under roofs when it rains.

And watching this contest, in the right-hand lower corner, his hand to his eyes, is the praying mantis, the great Kaggen himself, who weeps for his lost Red People.

This flag I was to fly on ceremonial occasions, preferably when the Sovereign and I formally exchanged gifts.

Into the third pocket of my great hat there were placed five thousand rand in old notes, this being the huge sum raised by our people for my expedition. With this money I would pay for guides and porters and provisions, as well as any taxes levied upon the traveller in England.

It was expected that I should be in the country of the English for no more than two months, as the kingdom was comparatively tiny and a man could walk from end to end in that time. Any monies remaining at the end of my safari, of course, should be returned to the Society. I was to outfit a caravan and endeavour to cut something of a figure. For it was only by a grand progress that I would convince my hosts-to-be that my mission deserved the highest attention.

In my baggage I carried gifts destined for the Queen of the Red Frocks, she being the kin-child of the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair: a little bush piano; the one-stringed fiddle; two ostrich shells, crosshatched in filigree engraving; a pair of the finest royal firesticks, cut from the oldest brandybush in the Kalahari, said to be the very bush from which, in the First Times, the High God made the Holy Fire from which all fires descend; also a fine digging stick with which she might search for tubers, roots, melons and grubs on her great estate, when the mood took her; a necklace of ostrich-eggshell beads, each bead carefully gnawed by expert crafstmen; a bow of gharree wood, strung with eland sinew; a set of twelve arrows, six tipped with flint, in the old manner, and six with iron; a supply of three choice poisons (the first was stored in an old ink bottle, a liquid clear as water, tinged with blue, which we pressed drop by drop from the jaws of the yellow cobra and edged with the dainty sting of the pretty black scorpion; the second, more potent still, was a matchbox which held the pinkish paste, squeezed from the belly of the poison-bulb; and, most effective of all, number three, fruit of the grubs who hide beneath the marula tree; a nest of deadly cocoons, stored for safekeeping in a container made from gemsbuck horn, plugged with grass). And, lastly, a parcel of ‘star-stones’, watery pebbles of great significance to the white man, collected from seashore and desert sand, where they lie scattered like gravel. A gift of the !Kung, who assured me that if ever I wished to seduce the aboriginals, I need only produce them; that they were more effective than fish-hooks, more lovely than calico and more lusted after than life itself.

And my people said to me, cross the ocean, David Mungo Booi. Show the Empress of the Rednecks, leader of the Red-frocked soldiers, the Great She-Elephant, child of the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair, this Great Promise. Say that her people are crying … Say that we have been molested and scattered. Say that we remember her; ask her – does she also remember us?

Now the question arose: who would transport me to Cape Town? Prettyman Lottering, his wife Niksie5 and their three children owned the youngest donkeys, and their cart had new wheels. And they were regarded as very reliable – so they were given the privilege. We left the same day for the aerodrome, and England.

It was a slow journey. Prettyman stopped at the farms Good Luck and Alles Verloren,6 where he had shearing contracts; the last of the clipping was followed by the usual party when the five-man-can went around the fire. The parties lasted longer than the shearing and I began to despair of reaching our destination. When at last we glimpsed Table Mountain we had been on the road for a month.

Cape Town was busier than a termites’ nest. Everyone coming or going, always by motorcar, day and night; special roads ensured that the drivers all moved in straight lines without bumping into each other. Where they were going to, or coming from, no one knew or cared. But they were certainly very lively when they approached our donkey cart, sounding their hooters loudly, and waving, which Prettyman Lottering said was a sign they liked us.

I obtained my passport without difficulty after explaining to the clerk I was only the third person, amongst our people, to travel to England. The earlier travellers, Coree and ‘Little Boy’ Ruyter, having been stolen, could not be said to have made the journey freely.

This kindly official expressed his regret that so few of us had left the country, saying that, if he had his way, special funds would be available to ensure that more of my sort went to England.

Next we set off to purchase my aeroplane ticket. To my dismay, this consumed much of the money so painstakingly collected by the Society. When I showed Prettyman the paltry amount remaining, little more than one thousand rand, he advised me to think no more about it, giving as his reasons the following. My expedition was bound to be short, since for experienced travellers of our sort, moving through a country, which he was reliably informed was not much larger than several sheep farms joined, would be child’s play; that the amount of money remaining represented the annual salary of his uncle, a farm labourer and considered well off because he slept in his own bed and was widely regarded as the luckiest man in Abraham’s Grave: finally, I was carrying so choice a selection of gifts for barter and exchange with the English that he doubted I should ever need money at all, and he would be surprised if I did not return home with most of my funds intact. That being so, he asked, and I did not refuse, a small loan with which he purchased a good five-man-can, and we refreshed ourselves before continuing to the airport, and then set about equipping my expedition.

We bought a brown suitcase of the best cardboard to house the gifts assembled for the Sovereign. We earnestly discussed which clothes would be suitable, and in the end we chose a grey suit because it was known that the country was continuously grey and wet. Prettyman explained it thus: the rain is in love with England in much the way it was once in love with the life-saving fountains of the dry desert, in the days when the San ruled in Bushmanland. My suit, being of the sky’s colour, signified our compliment to the heavens, by rendering to the rain the things that belong to the rain.

On the right-hand sleeve of this grand garment there was emblazoned the maker’s name, picked out in golden letters on a green background: MAN ABOUT TOWN. I thought it a trifle ostentatious, and would have removed it, but Prettyman Lottering said it would show the English that I came of a people wealthy enough to equip a traveller in purest polyester. Wearing the name on my sleeve had other useful applications. I did not own a watch, but I could study the label on my wrist, now and again, thus drawing attention to the quality of the garment. Warmer clothing, Prettyman assured me, would be a waste of my limited funds, since the Queen of the English was bound to present me with woollen garments from her sheep, which were said to number more than the clouds in the sky.

I bought, as well, a pair of black rubber boots – for it is said that their country is one long field of mud, except for a few days in the dry season, and the house of the Sovereign possesses carpets wall to wall. And an unknown number of indoor toilets. Its roof is as tall as the Dutch Reformed church in Lutherburg.

My suitcase should have been larger. There was only just room for my gifts for Her Majesty. A good selection of trinkets for the general native populace that I had intended for barter – several good clay pipes, a kilogram of copper wire and some bales of rather pretty calico – had to be left behind in the keeping of the Lottering family, who swore they would be returned to Ramgoolam’s General Trading Store in Loxton, where they had been purchased, and the sum refunded to the Society. I must say that I had some doubts as to whether the goods would be returned but Prettyman swore that his wife would give birth to snakes if he failed to fulfil his promise.

My misgivings received an unfortunate reinforcement when, as the time came to pay for my modest purchases, my companions suddenly vanished. If there is a fault in our people, it is a certain love of trickery; the low cunning of a yellow cobra who sheds his skin in the veld and he who finds it, taking it for a golden belt, is stung as he touches it. At last I located the family Lottering in the bar of the airport, sipping sweet white wine, purchased, I am sad to record, with a bale of calico. Even so, courtesy required that I send the bottle around for a few last times, since, as Prettyman pointed out, weeping generously, there was every chance that they would never set eyes on me again, for I might be eaten by English wolves or drowned in some bog. As he was likely to be the last of our people to see me alive, some consolation was in order. It was my duty to provide at least another litre of consolation, for surely I did not wish to hate myself for leaving them to face my death alone.

And so I went for further refreshments.

As a result I was carried on to the plane with only moments remaining, and my last glimpse of my companions, which is with me still, is of the Lotterings dashing themselves fruitlessly against the barrier in an effort to accompany me to the door of the aircraft; weeping and waving, until chased away by the police, like naughty children. I have no doubt they then returned to the airport bar to fortify themselves for the long journey back to the Karoo.

I remember nothing of my journey except that I was provided with several plates of food, stored in a kind of plastic case, together with a collection of useful plastic tools, which I stowed beneath my seat. Thus it was that I arrived in London, England, in the gloomy hours of the early morning, consulting the label on the sleeve of my new grey suit, carrying my fine new suitcase and shivering a little, for this was springtime.

1	The name ‘Booi’, and its variants, ‘Witbooi’ or ‘Whitebooi’, is well known among the so-called Basters, or ‘Bastard’ people, of Little Namaqualand, a remote territory in the North-West Cape Province.
2	Booi is very free with the moon’s gender. Sometimes the moon is ‘our mother’.
3	Literally, ‘Beachwalkers’.
4	The /Xam were the original Bushmen of the area around Calvinia in the Northern Cape. The family claim to the name, rather like Booi’s association of himself with this group of Bushmen, is rather tenuous. The /Xam have been extinct for nearly two centuries.
5	Afrikaans: literally, ‘Little Nothing’.
6	‘All is lost’.