Welcome to Goodlove Castle: Africa in England: the conservation of fauna: the life of the True Pulse: Lord Goodlove amongst his women
Struggling out of that darkness into which I had been plunged by the ugly barb fired into my shoulder, mouth dry, eyes sticky with sleep, I realized I had been manacled to the steel floor of a moving vehicle reeking of dog, rubber boots, shot-gun cartridges and over-ripe game bird, a species I reckoned to be something like our korhaan.1
Once again on my English travels I had come to my senses to find myself a prisoner. Hands and feet strapped as tightly as the ant-bear who, trussed with sinew by the hunters, is slung from a spear, and marched home to the cooking pot. In my drugged state I wondered if I had been taken by cannibals.
The hunter who had brought me low – his rifle propped against the dashboard – bent over the steering wheel. I could not see him clearly, for a mesh of steel protected his driving compartment from my prison. But I could smell him well enough, for his dung signature rose pungently above the competing scents of birds and boots. He blended whisky, honey, cow-dung, tobacco and ashes.
I studied his neck. And learnt a great deal. A stiff neck; a proud nape; a neck that knew no bounds: and felt itself to be head and shoulders above all rivals. And was pleased to say so. It was no mere mute column of flesh and bone this neck, but an oratorical advocate of its own grace and strength. I had known such necks. I had heard their speeches before: high and mighty words that led one ever downward – to the prison cell and to the grave.
Strange are the meetings that evoke memories of one’s native land! And make a terrible joy. The steel mesh, the gun and the burly driver, far from depressing me, gave me a surge of happy recognition. How many times had I not made a similar journey? Trussed hand and foot, on the floor of a police van? Homesickness of a kind replaced my fear and, finding my voice, I bade my kidnapper a loud Good Day!
Swearing a mighty oath to the founder of his religion, he brought the van to a skidding halt. Hurrying from his seat, he threw open the rear doors of my prison, and stared at me in astonished delight.
A huge man, dressed in oily hunter’s uniform,2 all rough green, from boots to hat. Much of his head seemed made of hair, out of which his face peered like a rabbit caught in a thorn-bush; a great brassy thatch, like the upside-down-tree3 which wears its roots on its head; below his jaw, it trailed like the branches of the willow which stoops to wash its face in a waterhole.
Indeed, this paragon was bedecked, as Kaggen is my witness, with as much hair below his head as above, it hung in a curtain from his chin, so dense small fowl might happily have nested there. Here then was a warrior as bold in his plumage and his pride as in the bloodcurdling ferocity of his manners. He spoke as if raised up on some lofty pedestal, from which eminence he was accustomed to addressing not only the hard of hearing, but also the weak of eye, for he spoke boomingly, moving his lips around his words very slowly, followed by a belligerent gleam of the eyes, as if his words were wasted on his audience far below. His teeth flashed gold. He was, I swear, as fine an English buck as ever I saw. Even if I was obliged to observe this choice specimen from an enforced recumbancy upon the cold steel floor of his vehicle.
Let me say, too, that I managed, discomfited though I was, to solve several small mysteries about the natives. Firstly, it is claimed that it is only the English abroad who are fat. Everyone will be familiar with the old maxim – if you would war with the English do it after dinner. For as the !Kung rightly observed, they eat not to live but to sleep. They are observably amongst the most adipose of the pale strangers who invaded our land. However it was long believed by our sages that in their own country they were bred for running and hunting, as are proper people everywhere. I can confirm that this is not the case. They tend to the rotund, even in their natural habitat. My captor was shaped rather like the blood pudding we make of the giraffe’s second stomach; much liquid inside a thin skin. His girth was as round as the moon’s, as full as the flooded waterhole’s, as prodigious as that of the hippopotamus. We may infer that this innate tendency to spread, corporeally as well as territorially, is no less pronounced At Home, than Abroad. And that, in their order of values, weight is a component of status.
Then, his colour. I stress that only his uniform or cloak, vest and boots, were green. We were familiar from childhood with tales that there lived in England troops of green men, hairy and wild, half-gods, half-apes, who fed on honied liquor in forests of oak and alder, and worked magic or murder, as primal whim moved them. It seems to me entirely probable that our misinformation about such verdant manikins, gnomes, wodwos or forest sprites, is based on tales related by travellers after encountering individuals such as the prodigy who shot and imprisoned me. I can well understand that myth may be the only refuge of a shocked sensibility, for truly one imagines, on first meeting certain varieties of native, that one had discovered some new and alarming species, only distantly related – if at all – to civilized beings.
Watching this enormous distended barrel examining me, I was suddenly made aware of the reason way this island race is fond of referring to their land as ‘the old country’. The island is full of old people! My hunter was no exception. At an age when most men are beside the campfire or have long since departed to the land of locusts beyond the Orange River, elderly souls continue to pretend that they are as flush full of youth as young lions: cheer themselves for avoiding at home the corruption, venality and debauchery rife in less fortunate lands across the water; declare they will fight like tigers if Johnny Foreigner dare show his face, and do almost anything to maintain the illusion of youth and strength. And having seen the fate meted out to the old of the tribe I think we can understand why this should be so.
These fruitful reflections were interrupted by my captor, rifle in hand, looming above me like an overfull raincloud and addressing me as if I were an entire tribe, not a trussed and helpless prisoner on the floor of his van. He demanded my name and, when I answered, his delight increased all the more. With trembling finger he lifted my upper lip and studied my teeth, as we do with a donkey to determine its age; prodded my tongue, as if scarcely believing that I had the power of speech; and fell to examining my bow, quiver and arrows. Fortunately, he did not think to look inside my hat.
Introducing himself as Goodlove, Lord of all I surveyed, he declared he would have been happy to shake my paw, had said paw been available. But perhaps I might like to confirm that I was, in fact, by golly, a true specimen of the San people? One of the far-flung, far-gone, decimated bands of foragers who inhabited the hot, dry wastes of Southern Africa?
I replied that I preferred plainer speech. The term ‘San’ meant no more than a rogue and vagabond. I was a Bushman.
And from which bushy region, precisely, did I hail?
To such a strange question, I gave the obvious answer: from Home.4
Out of the hairy hole of his mouth a laugh clapped like happy thunder. From henceforth, he vowed, my home would be in Goodlove Castle.
When Farebrother had announced that he had acquired a genuine Bushman, he’d laughed. To be frank, he’d yelled his head off. Farebrother might be a living bridge, a descending angel amongst the dregs and the destitute and all that. But blind. A busted flush – not so? A floored flier; the sort of bloke who could not recognize a real San hunter-gatherer if one bit him in the backside. He might be sound in the God department, but in the matter of the Life of the True Pulse, the holy originals of existence, he was a joke. So how could one be sure of my authenticity?
At last I began to understand. A test had been devised?
A most efficient test, confirmed the bearded one. Only a genuine specimen of the San people would have cooked that ostrich egg as I had done. By their omelettes ye shall know them, my captor intoned. My cooking skills had given me plain away. After that it was only a matter of acquisition. He had offered Farebrother large rewards, but the batty old apostle had turned them down. So he had watched and waited.
I remembered the hidden watcher observing my movements. The eyes in the darkness. And now here he was. A wild and booming man who shot passers-by and locked them in the back of his police van.
Farebrother, said the hairy gunman, had rejected all offers. He had gone bloody religious on him. Insisting that he had promised his Bushman a visit to the Queen, and it was vital that we all dealt in a fair manner with the developing world, and other stomach-churning sermons.
He had very nearly despaired of laying hands on me, said my kidnapper, when, Lord be praised! Farebrother changed his tune. Claimed that his daughter Beth was planning to run off with his San lodger. And while he was determined to keep faith with the developing world, he was not having his daughter wed a Bushman from the Karoo who fancied his chances of marrying into a passport and living the life of Riley off the back of the family fortunes. And so on. All of which ex-Bishop Bonkers had sworn was about to happen ever since his daughter had stripped off and begun running around his garden in a mini-skirt, flaunting her not inconsiderable posterior at the moon.
It was then, said my captor, that he presented himself as the answer to a Bishop’s prayer. Did I savvy?
Certainly, I had begun, as he put it, to savvy. Beth had been traded for me?
Exactly.
I had been lured into a trap.
Got it in one.
And where was Beth now?
Back home, he very devoutly hoped and prayed. In the bosom of the busted Bish. Fair exchange no robbery. And not a moment too soon. Appalling woman.
And all this – he waved a hand towards the horizon – was mine. His estate was at my disposal. To hunter-gather in to my heart’s content.
I was about to reject his dubious offer when I seemed, once more, to lose consciousness. For a moment I felt as one does in the Trance Dance, when the spirits of the animals, who were once people, rise up and dance in your heart. For I beheld an unbelievable sight, yellow-and-black, lovely, long necks arching up as if they would bite their way through the grey clouds, so low over their graceful heads, a wondrous, impossible sight – a family of giraffe at play in the muddy green field of the Lord.
Now it was my turn to laugh in astonished joy.
And, propping me up in a corner from where I could see better the marvels of his castle, my hairy captor leapt back into the driver’s seat and we continued on our way.
We had barely set off when our vehicle was again halted, this time by a herd of elephant crossing the road. Next, as naturally as if they were galloping across the hot sand of the Karoo (rather muddy, it must be admitted, but undoubtedly the genuine bird), came a procession of ostriches, with their slow, tall step and exasperated look, turning their heads from side to side as if they had lost something of great importance.
Better still was to come. For there, grazing quietly upon a grassy incline – oh, the skip of my heart, the dance of my hooves, the swing of my dewlap – I spied a family of eland, children of Heaven, sisters of God, adorable people with their broad shoulders, fine horns, and meat for a month. No wonder I had heard the roar of the hunting lion before the dark descended: in this place was food for all! Here was Africa – in England!
More and more, they came – our people! My heart sang as there floated past, most graceful of all, a herd of flying springbuck. And I felt again, as always when hunting, the dark stripe that divides its pretty face, running, as if it were my own, from my eyes to my mouth. The buck’s hair was red, which is its winter colour, the reason being to warm their blood. In our land it grows white again in spring when the sun returns. But these wore their red coats still. I felt sorry for these little persons, since all their lives in England must have seemed one long winter.
Next a flock of blue cranes, most beautiful of birds, who wear their disguises so well that you can no longer see – unless you know the truth – that once long ago they were girls, in the Early Time when animals were still people; yet the truth is there to be spied in their long thin necks, delicate voices, the modest trailing of their blue-grey tail feathers along the ground, like women sweeping the earth. Elder sisters of the god Kaggen, protector of children, friends of frogs.
A miracle! That great-walled, black-gated park teemed with our relatives from Africa. Perhaps the grass was too green, the sky too low, the rain too frequent and the mud too plentiful; but, even so, here were baboons who like to imitate men, and then attack them for laughing at their crooked tails or their straight foreheads. Hyena, which we do not eat. And hartebeest, the heart of which pregnant women may not eat. Hartebeest which is the prey, some say, that the moon hunts and from whose hide makes a new cloak for himself; but each morning the moon’s troublesome wife plucks and fidgets with the new coat, fraying it down to nothing in no time at all – so the moon must be out again each night hunting a new cloak.
The Lord of Goodlove Castle declared himself delighted by my delight. He clapped me on my shoulder, saying he welcomed me as one conservationist to another. He had dedicated his energies and his fortune to preserving, within the safe enclosure of Goodlove Castle, all creatures who lived the life of the True Pulse. He collected not only endangered specimens from Africa, he had also been instrumental – in his own small way – in rescuing many indigenous forms of island life as well.
Not animals alone, but where there rarity warranted it he conserved human specimens also. He drove me now to the brow of a small hill from where we looked down upon a village – a poor place, stone huts, blackened by smoke, occupied by shuffling figures wearing orange helmets over curiously begrimed, sooty faces.
He had built for these remnants an original village, the sort of habitat only they lived in, and therein he gave sanctuary to a community who were once to be found – if I could believe it! – in vigorous breeding colonies throughout England. Fearsome warriors. Capable, in their prime, of bringing the kingdom to a standstill, but now, alas, almost extinct. They had once lived in happy warrens, delving deep underground like moles to extract a treasure no one today wanted any longer. Very sad. These men had been a terrifically successful example of adaptation to harsh habitats. But their holes had been closed by an uncaring generation, their skills despised. And with the destruction of their environment, this fine example of English wild life – the miners – had dwindled until they existed only in isolated pockets. Why, cried the Lord, there were today English children who had never seen a miner in his natural habitat! Hence his decision to set up this protected haven in the grounds of Goodlove Castle.
I was moved by his passion. I was reminded, by these remaining miners, very much of our white rhino, the slaughter of which people felt able to oppose only after the bulk of the tribe had been destroyed. And there was the black-maned lion of the Karoo, extinct for want of wisdom.
Exactly! the Lord agreed. And the thing was to get in first, before it was too late. Many other groups were threatened too. They would go the same way as the quagga, the dodo and the miner if we were not bloody careful.
He was very concerned, for example, at the poor survival rates of the traditional English clergyman. He planned an ecclesiastical reserve where these gentle, inoffensive creatures might safely graze, in all their vivid plumage, free from harassment. Numbers had shrunk so drastically, they were as endangered as the red squirrel or the Iberian wolf or the black-maned lion of the Karoo. He had found it impossible, thus far, to locate suitable breeding pairs. But he would scour the kingdom, for English life would be immeasurably impoverished without the local vicar – a horrible thought: as bad as England without muffins or the monarchy!
For exactly the same reason – the Lord smiled fondly down at me, trussed like the ant-bear – he was determined to save what he could of the remaining San. In our small way, had not we lived the life of the True Pulse as authentically, if not quite as successfully, as the Zulu?
Such foreign specimens also deserved protection. Here he beamed at me again. If I settled down, he would set off to Bushmanland, there to find me a mate, a little Bush-woman with whom I would create the first Bush infants born in England!
His journey to Bushmanland, I told him, would produce nothing of the kind. He might walk for a hundred days in Bushmanland and glimpse nothing but thorn-trees, or the little white-and-purple-striped flowers we call ‘baboon shoes’. He might see a hundred thorn-trees flower and know from it, as all civilized people do, that the honey will be fat. And not find a single Red Man to lead him to the honey. He could ask the jackal, that clever person whose hair turns silver when the moon is on his back. And receive no reply. Or the baboons, the people who sit on their heels, and learn nothing. He might whisper his question into the pointed ears of the quick, red cat.5 But he will only blink his green eyes and say nothing. He could ask the blue crane that sings as it walks, ‘A white stone splinter, a splinter of stone so white!’ The blue crane who walks the walk of peace will tell him little. It might confess that when the animals were people, in the First Time, it had the form of a lovely girl. But it will have nothing to say of the Red People. Let him ask the little honey guide who hovers before the overflowing hives of the yellow people who thrust their honey fists into the rock cliffs; or interrogate the ant-bear who sleeps underground. None will point him to those he seeks; so few and far are we, and vanished the lands where we dwelt.
He received this information with silence and a disbelieving look, started the engine, and we continued on our way. We came at last to an ancient castle, surrounded by a moat. Crossing over the drawbridge, we passed beneath a triumphant arch of elephant tusks, and entered through a gateway guarded by lions carved from black marble. He helped me out of the police van, and urged me to make his home my home. African Bushmen were probably the living link between animals and humans. Which aspect was uppermost in me was anyone’s guess. But I was free to roam the grounds, as the animals did. Or, if I preferred living under a roof, then indoor facilities had been prepared. The choice was mine.
I replied, rather pointedly, that I was bound and chained. Imprisoned. What was the good of offering choice where I had none?
He looked pained. Imprisoned! But I had not been captured; I had been collected. On no account was I to think of him as my captor.
He had shot me, roped me and transported me like a goat to the butcher, I cried: that made him my captor.
He had selected me humanely, came the reply. Using a tranquillizing dart guaranteed to have no lasting ill effects.
If he was not my captor, I demanded, then what on earth was he?
And, as if to prove his kindness, he unbound me and fixed around my neck a leather collar with a large cardboard tag, of much the sort the farmers in Zwingli use to designate sheep bound for the abattoir. On it he wrote in a fine aristocratic hand: ‘Bushman David. Collected in the vicinity of Little Musing. Property of Goodlove Castle.’
I understood something then. Africa was not so much a place as an adventure, which they made up as they went along. And truth was never allowed to interfere with the pleasures of certainty. This wise policy ensured their progress in Africa for generations, their ideas so firmly fixed that no subsequent experience was allowed to disturb them. How else does one explain how they succeeded so well, and saw so little?
I declared then, without more ado, that his welcome amounted to detention and he had better tie me up again, or I would escape at the first opportunity.
He responded amicably that at Goodlove Castle wild life took precedence over humans. Though visitors were permitted, they were warned to observe the rules of the Castle. Yet people would not learn. Inquisitive children were regularly savaged by hyenas. The screams of those taken by lions were clearly audible in the nearer villages. Every year some simpleton clambered in amongst the gorillas and was hugged to death. Lord Goodlove often found himself angrily condemned for his commitment to the Life of the True Pulse. But he stuck to his beliefs; the greatest threat to life was man!
However, it was only fair to point out his writ ran only inside his walls. In the surrounding countryside a certain dislike, even hatred, was felt for the creatures of the Castle. Any item of his collection – and my collar and tag marked me as such – found beyond the walls might be shot on sight. He hoped I took his drift?
Then he begged me to excuse him. His women were greatly excited by my arrival, and a grand reception awaited me later, when I had settled in.
The quarters he had prepared were commodious. My room was the length of six donkey carts, with a bed broad as a ship, surmounted by four great masts to which were attached richly brocaded sails of red velvet, as large, I swear, as the great curtains that cover the screen in the bioscope in Lutherburg.
When the green, hairy Lord left me, I flung myself into my great ship of a bed and wept bitterly. If golden lads and girls all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust, so too then Bushmen! I was still as far from the object of my journey as I was from the endless plains of my country. My role from now on, it seemed, was to amuse the madding crowd, just another exhibit in that green and menacing Africa, a curiosity a little less interesting than the ostrich, a little more amusing than a monkey.
The sole consolation I drew from this grim state of affairs was another morsel of enlightenment about the tribe among whom I found myself. I recalled ex-Bishop Farebrother’s treachery with fearful admiration. He had sold me to the good and the great of the land for half the latter’s fortune. This had made him feel good. I had once believed that the English are a rare people, in that they believe that having money adds moral status, yet that status increases when you give your money away. But they also believe it increases when you do not give your money away. And the good ex-Bishop had now sold me into a menagerie for the price of his daughter’s happiness – and must have felt morally better than ever!
However, a warning, offered by the former flying Bishop, had proved true: it really was a jungle out there. Just as I had been warned. Now I had run into a horse of a very different colour.
Later that evening, when I had rested, Lord Goodlove sallied from his quarters, accompanied by a host of guards, pages, hangers-on and other supplicants, and, passing by my room, sent one of his servants to request my presence. I made myself as presentable as my few poor garments allowed, brushed my hat and followed the retinue to the lake where cranes played and hippo frolicked and where the Lord held court, in the open air, seated on a bench of full, fat leather, much padded and puckered and broad as an eland’s back. He was the centre of a large crowd of concubines, or ‘wifelings’, as he described them.
They wore loose garments based, he said, on his own design taken from the warrior queens of old England, and designed to free the limbs for battle or love or childbirth.
Two dozen sets of lustrous, humid eyes focused on my person, at which the Lord, at first, laughed and said how eagerly his wifelings looked at me because they expected to see me accompanied by a woman of my own colour. But he was not jealous and invited me to sit beside him. But now the cause of their excitement became very evident; they stared quite shamelessly at the flap of leather which preserved the loins.
Their Lord now smiled less, and called them to order.
Not for the first time, I concealed myself as best I could behind my great tawny hat, while his flock of wifelings, chirruping and pecking, endeavoured to jostle for the best view.
Their Lord and Master, grown suddenly angry, demanded to know, in a huge voice, what should cause them to stare like idiot children. Was there anything present in David Mungo Booi, besides his slanting eyes, yellow skin, peppercorn hair and tiny stature, that they had not seen more nobly present in their Lord?
I am sorry to say the answer was stifled laughter, which I can only describe as indecent, bordering on the downright lewd. He commanded silence – but the merriment continued in the ranks. And I saw that they were as much prisoners as I was. There was something in them that did not love their Lord. Something that pledged itself to silent disobedience. But they lined up for inspection like a guard of honour for a foreign head of state. And that was exactly the way the Lord described the ceremony. He inspected the ranks, but the mocking smiles persisted.
He took me down the line of women, pointing out an ankle here, there a buttock he considered particularly admirable. He was, explained the Lord, a hunter, a hedonist, an artist, a polygamist, a gambler and a conservationist. His wifelings were chosen for their genetic endowments. Each was expected to be ready at all times for the summons to one of the Lord’s weekly seedings. He asked me to notice how his wifelings had been trained to fall on one knee as he approached and at no time to look him directly in the eye: this was the Zulu manner. He was a Zulu ‘By Appointment’, as it were, a privilege conferred on him by the King of the Zulus and an honour which had been accorded to no other living Englishman. He showed me his assegai, his knobkerrie and his cowhide shield with which he had been presented at his induction into the tribe. The Zulu were among the last who lived the life of the True Pulse, who washed their spears in the blood of enemies and died happy. The English, once upon a time, had enjoyed a blood-brotherhood with the Zulu, based upon the finest compliment nations might pay; they had gone to war and killed each other. Nothing quite so cemented a friendship. Did I not agree?
I might have replied that the Red People made war on no one – except those whose cattle ate our land – but I remembered where I was, and held my tongue.
The life of the True Pulse, to which he had devoted himself, beat to a stern drum. Each day of the week saw some solemn ceremony.
There were for example, his art Mondays. In his private apartments every available surface, the ceilings, the walls and even the floors, were daubed with his ‘cave art’. How very grateful he would be for any help I might give him in this regard, knowing as he did that Bushmen held the premier position in the painting of rocks and walls of caves. In these images resided the secret religion of his pagan forefathers, the fruit of a lifetime’s dedication to the life of the True Pulse. In truth, most of the pictures depicted his Lordship naked, sometimes painted blue, frolicking with his wifelings in vales, verdant dells and dingles of an earlier, merrier England, or fornicating among oaks and holly. His qhwai-xkhwe might be shown in full promise, adorned with a sprig of mistletoe (for that is their sacred plant); or he was dressed in the hunting or soldierly costumes they hold to be closest to divinity. In others he was naked on horseback wearing only the peaked hunting cap, blowing a small trumpet. Allegories, he said, for the sacred blood sports, hunting, shooting and fishing.
On Tuesdays, Lord Goodlove became a White Zulu. In leopard skins and cowhide shield, assegai in hand, he was up before breakfast, practising short, stabbing movements on the front lawn. Later in the day he would invite me to teach him to hunt like the Red People. Without the support of his own tribal hunting regalia, tools and animals, his progress was slow, and painful the death of his victims (once a giraffe). But I turned his child-like efforts to good account and, amazing him, from time to time, with a reminder that we kill out of necessity, not for our diversion, I would demonstrate how to convert slaughter into a sustaining meal. But, as ever, he had much to teach me in return.
When he moved around his estate, he was followed, a couple of paces to his rear, by a young man carrying a plastic bag which held a damp dishcloth. It was the duty of the young man, Lord Goodlove explained, to cleanse his posterior parts, whenever the need arose.
In days gone by, the great Zulu Kings, said the Lord, were always accompanied by an officer whose privilege it was to perform this intimate service. It was one of the lovely coincidences that their blood-brothers, the English, in their own special way, had long practised something very similar.
Since I had no experience of the ways of kings, I wondered whether he found it difficult to attract young recruits. Where was the nobility or the profit in so debasing oneself?
Debasement? Rubbish! came the good-natured reply. People competed for the privilege. It was one of the few remaining things that made the country truly great. A trait so deeply ingrained, he doubted it could ever be rooted out. It was the basis of the monarchy, as well as of a properly functioning aristocracy based on wealth, land and breeding, and of the least corrupt civil service in the world. Thank God! Others had tried to emulate the practice and failed. It was a tradition. It flourished naturally. His country, he was proud to say, still produced people willing to roll up their sleeves and do the necessary. People who fully understood the importance of carrying the towel. Difficult as it might be for me to understand, to get ahead in England, one generally started off by bringing up the rear. For this reason ambitious parents put down the names of their offspring at birth in the hope of winning a place in special academies where youngsters acquired the training essential to correct performance, of which there were complex variations, probably impenetrable to the non-native: how to judge the precise position of the towel relative to the job, of the carrier relative to the king; the business of acquiring the all-important demeanour – cool, reserved, discreet; proper application of the towel, never to be overestimated, always downward and towards the carrier, never towards the great one, so that in the event of an accident it was always one’s mentor who enjoyed the sweet smell of success and his towel carrier who accepted the load of responsibility. This was the essence of good rearing. He was proud to say that many of those numbered amongst the movers and shakers of the nation had learnt their trade by wielding the ceremonial towel on his Zulu Tuesdays.
On Fox Wednesdays, he became the Master of Hounds.
Early one morning I was set in a tower of the castle to watch this ancient ritual. His wifelings began preparing glasses of strong drink to fortify the hunters. I saw the horses, neatly groomed, being led from the stables. I saw the hunters meet in the misty hour and mount their horses. I was entranced, at first, to notice that they wore red coats, not unlike the coats that the English wore when they came to the aid of our people and kicked the arses of the Boers from the Snow Mountains to Murderer’s Karoo.
It was beautiful, the tongue-pink beauty of the coats, the black, pod-like peaked helmets of the huntsmen, the sun bright on their little bugles, strange instruments that give off a sad cracked tootle, not unlike the harsh croak of the blue crane, though nothing like as lovely.
The hounds, once unleashed, boiled like newly made tea, their nostrils seeking the scent which hung in the air in tiny droplets. The hunters carried no arms, and I wondered how they planned to dispatch the prey. Suddenly, skipping through a hedge like a red shadow, the quarry was sighted, and hounds and hunt were off in hot pursuit. The fox is regarded as being very clever, and they need to make sure he has little chance of escaping them. He will use any hole to go to earth, they say. And so they stop all those he might think of using.
To some extent they see this creature as a mystical animal, blessed with the cunning we attribute to the divine joker, Kaggen, the mantis. From my captors talk of the Zulus, I realized that it was part of their religious sense to believe that nothing more dignifies your adversary than having sport with him. Unless, of course, it is killing him.
I saw from my tower the hunters slipping like pink smoke across the damp green fields. I felt the fox’s heart beat inside my breast. And I remembered my home and my mission. I heard the little cracked bugle ring out, and the excited baying of the hounds, and I had no need to ask what had caused the excitement far across the fields.
And I heard the song of my red brother. He sang an old truth. That among these people the saving of life is death. And the preservation of dying species, and the keeping of wifelings, and the celebration of brother warriors, and the admiration of Bushmen – all is death. And the salvation of miners, and the redemption of clerics, and the costumes and the customs and the life of the True Pulse are all of them – death.
The song of my red brother woke me from a fatal dream. I had travelled in England to find freedom, a new life, a living faith. I had found those who wished to help me, hold me, advise me, guide me, teach me, save me – but all their helping, holding, advising, guiding, teaching and saving amounted to was a tearing of living flesh, the small cry, the long darkness.
All this the fleeing Red Man sang. His death was our death, this other Red Man, running before the hunters’ dogs. Our fate was to be chased from kopie to kranz by soldier and farmer and traveller and collector. Driven from our water-holes. Robbed of our honey. Smoked out of our caves. Parted from our children. Cursed for our tricks. Feared for our arrows. Shot down in our hundreds.
They say of the fox that he is very cruel. And so it was said of us. That he will take what he cannot eat, six lambs at a time. And so they said it of us. That he kills for the fun of it. And so, they said, did we. That he is cunning, dangerous, dirty. So, they said, were we. That the hunter who destroys him is friend to all.
These memories and pains sat heavy in my heart as I watched from the tower and heard the fading screams of the dying fox as the hounds tore him to pieces.
By the time the Lord and his party returned, jubilant from the kill, I had remembered my manners sufficiently. It was only right, surely, that an explorer in a foreign land should not stand in judgement but try wherever possible to understand their native customs? But it was right, too, that a traveller in this antique land should be aware of the dangers, lest he be killed by custom, or kindness.
Afrikaans in the original: tr. guineafowl. In fact, probably pheasant. |
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I suspect this ‘oily’ uniform is, in fact, no more than the typical country fashion of Barbour and galoshes. |
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Probably the baobab tree. |
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This reply is less ‘obvious’ than it may appear. For Booi is alluding, or perhaps dimly recalling, another lost Bushman, the convict known as //Kabbo, a member of the /Xam Bushmen of the Cape. The prisoner//Kabbo, when asked by a friendly interrogator in the 1870s ‘What is your place, its name?’ gave this answer: ‘I come from that place, called Home’ (see Stephen Watson’s wonderful renditions from the original/Xam: The Return of the Moon, Cape Town, 1991). |
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The lynx – a common predator in the Karoo. |