Broken River Tent Page 14

  ‘The wind from the coast was troublesome to us,’ said Maqoma introducing himself with a bang.

  Perhaps it was the rustle of alcohol in Phila’s brain that had summoned the old man; or maybe he’d been sitting there all along. The words, however, resonated immediately. That was it! That would be a great epithet to put on Mandela’s statue: The wind from the coast was troublesome to us! He smiled to himself in satisfaction.

  ‘The wind brought the landing of British settlers and redcoats.’ Maqoma looked panicky and darty-eyed.

  ‘Good afternoon to you, my warden. How has it been in your wanderings around the earth, bottling winds and kicking storms?’ Phila attempted sarcasm, to which, of course, Maqoma had been impervious from the beginning.

  ‘We don’t have much time left. I cannot fail.’

  ‘Always, I, I, I,’ Phila feigned irritation.

  Maqoma looked at him as if to investigate his state of mind, licked his lips and continued with his talk.

  ‘The wharves, alive with clutter, foghorns and calliopes, have always made me nervous.’ He spoke in uncharacteristic tip-toeing tentativeness, looking around all the time as if fearful that someone would see him. Something strange was beginning to happen to Phila. He was now also feeling Maqoma’s moods directly in himself.

  ‘People we had given up for dead were here. As serfs, wagon drivers, tailors, cobblers, smiths, woodcutters, wheelwrights, herders, farm overseers, foresters, gardeners and so on. I had always thought people who reported these things to me were just scallywags and falsifiers who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the chief. But then I could see with my own eyes that everything they said was true. Kaffirs clothed themselves in white people’s dress; their women stood on smooth boulders on river banks, knee-deep in water, senselessly beating linen against the rocks. I was told it was a way of cleaning it.

  ‘It’s amazing how industrious the white man can be – erecting stone walls and dikes to arrest the pride of the ocean. All along the seashore the white tents of rude settlement sprang up, close together on the shifting dunes. I could not believe what I was seeing: white people everywhere, frolicking in picnic parties of pleasure, playing skiffle music, giving themselves to drunkenness and brutal passions. Up the hill, more tents, but those were better ordered, neater and pitched reasonable distances apart.’

  The echolalic noise of rap music drifted down from Prospect Hill, a sign that the denizens were now black middle class.

  ‘Unlike the merry lot above, down below others sat on boxes and bundles, under the wagons, with tents pitched alongside, scaring away hungry wild dogs and jackals. Wagons were a strange phenomenon to us then. Even those that later became common, the ones covered with great tarpaulins and drawn by sixteen or eighteen full-grown oxen.

  ‘Those wagons were wooden bodies of twelve to fourteen feet in length then, and about five feet in width, in white man’s measurements. Their belly-plank, which was stoutly put together, rested on the under-structure of two strong axles carried by four stout wheels fixed together on the long wagon, and drawn by means of a pole – the disselboom – to which was attached the trekgoed, or drawing gear. The sides of the wagon were made up of strong boughs of wood reaching a height of eighteen to twenty-four inches. These were bent around and attached to each upper edge of the sides, forming a structure that was covered with painted canvas, with long flaps covering the front and rear. Trektouwen – riems tied up together to make strong ropes – were used to fasten yokes. There were no buck wagons then, just rudimentary stuff; no chains to gear, and axles were made of wood. The ropes, strong as they were, were apt to break, especially in wet weather. It was not an unusual sight to see a wagon capsized, its disselboom broken.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot of detail about these wagons for someone who just called them a “strange phenomenon”,’ Phila remarked, downing the remains of his draught beer.

  ‘We had to know the wagons well for when we staged ambushes,’ explained Maqoma. ‘We had to know exactly where to find what in a hurry. A thirsty person went under the wagon for the water-vaatjie, which was almost always slung there. If you wanted things like firearms, powder-horns and bullet-pouches, you went for the jager-zakken on the sides of the wagon. On the front was the voorkis and at the back the agterkis, which was where all sorts of requisites for the journey as well as daily provisions like sugar, tea, coffee and rusks were stored. The agterkis was where a hungry raider went first.’

  As the beer kept coming Phila’s mind wandered away from Maqoma’s monologue in a duality of his own thoughts that were still obsessively caught up with coming up with an epithet for the proposed Mandela statue.

  Deny the past and soon despair of the future.

  ‘As we sat watching from the bushes on the hilltop of eBheyini we observed their busy morning, heard the cacophony: wagon drivers, mainly Quena, chasing and driving untamed oxen, wild as buck; many knockdowns and kicks, and running after oxen that pulled away before inspanning could properly commence; hollering from their white masters; wailing babies fallen off the wagons; white women scolding their Quena servants whose job it was to bear them aloft on chairs. When the wagons started moving the oxen became wild, galloping, pitching with their sharp horns and tossing their heads. Those leading them, running like mad, leaving the drivers, passengers and cargo dependent on chance. You could see the backs of the oxen were sore from excessive whipping.’

  Obsess with the past and soon get lost in its labyrinth.

  ‘The most drama and noise came when everybody went hollering in pursuit of oxen that had run into the bush. Puppies, not to be outdone, whined for their bitch mothers while horses joined the fray with incessant neighing. When the span of oxen was eventually reduced to working order, there were satisfied exclamations and cries: “Gee! Wow! Trek! Loop! Trek!” The crack of whips cutting mercilessly into the oxen’s backs could be heard all the way to Stony Valley. Then the undulating silence of the bush took over. The poor beasts shied, shoved their heads between their legs and tugged on.’

  Whatever happens to the past will happen to it posthumously.

  ‘Meanwhile, there was much activity down below. Men in what I later learnt were tailcoats and knee-breeches sat on veld stools bartering their merchandise, which they spread out on planks and mats to beguile the public under every shade. Rich Mfengus, proud as peacocks, with heads ornamented with jackal tails, ostrich plumes and girded in kilts of monkey tails were the wheelwrights, busy making yokes and skeys. Some were brick-makers and builders. It was a boisterous and distressing state of affairs.’

  ‘Not too different from now, I guess,’ Phila said as he finished his food.

  Despair patrols a grieving heart.

  ‘I recognised many of those men down there on the white people’s wharves, busy like ants, loading and offloading different materials onto their boats: kegs of powder, tin boxes, ropes and anchors from the ship whose sails hung loose in the rusting hulks. A thought of recruiting them into contributing their steals (for they were already stealing for personal profit) to our cause against the white man entered my mind as I observed from where I sat. And, as it happened, most of them were enthusiastic about the prospect; and in due time, when I sent messengers to collect gunpowder, they didn’t fail me.’

  ‘Tomorrow I shall leave this village city,’ said Phila. ‘I’m grateful to it for many things, but it is too mono-dimensional for me. I am rotting at my moorings here, and circling the drains as I drown.’

  ‘Geography in itself isn’t the change of anything,’ said Maqoma, who, unexpectedly, seemed for once to be listening to what Phila was saying.

  ‘But it’s a start.’

  Phila woke with the birds the following day. He wanted to visit a few last historical sites before he left. He started at Sacramento, where some Portuguese in the mid-seventeenth century, travelling on Spanish warships, ran into some serious rock trouble that wrecked their ship.

  The Old Seaview Road in Port Elizabeth was an ench
anting one that smelled of the sea. He parked among the boulders, carved over centuries out of the rock-face by pounding waves. Morning mist fell softly, like the memory of a departed one. The wind whistled cold notes to brush away the dust of past years. The rising sun robed everything in golden fire. After a while, something about the sea’s ancient effort, ebbing and flowing, drawing breath, now in rage, now in serene overlays, wearied Phila, so he left, ditching his plans to visit other areas.

  The day was getting warm by the time Phila got going and had filled up his tank and bought a bottle of water.

  The freeway out of Port Elizabeth bisects Bluewater Bay, a secluded residential area of psychedelic colours before it climbs over the Swartkops estuary and skirts the fynbos-clad hills that conceal the black township of Motherwell and the pounding sea that floods the freeway when Poseidon boosts the rim of the ocean. It proceeds through the salt hills of Ingqurha towards the giant sand dunes and bushy hillsides around the Sundays River. You lose the sight of the city as you climb the hills.

  To wait out the plugged wires of the blinding morning sun Phila stopped at Sundays River, which the Xhosas call iNqweba, and admired the dunes. For a while he lay on the car bonnet, resting his back against the windshield, reading. A car, driven by a white lady somewhere in her late forties, took the parking bay next to him. Probably deciding that no one who reads books could be physically dangerous, she opened the door of her car, coming closer to investigate what Phila was reading. She was the sandals-and-socks type, with a long swishing skirt, most probably a lecturer in the humanities department of the local university.

  “What are you reading there?” she asked, with what Phila took to be genuine interest. He closed the book in silence and handed it to her.

  “Campbell? Interesting,” she said. “Do you understand it?”

  Phila, trying not to be rude, ignored her.

  “If you want a better feel of how the white settlers suffered to build this place, try Pringle too,” she suggested, undeterred. “He was one of the 1820 settlers. Then at least you’ll see we didn’t just come as parasites. Perhaps that will stop all this talk of land, this land that you people think is a solution to everything.”

  Nothing put Phila out of mood like the term ‘you people’ in white South African parlance. He refused to spoil his morning mood, so he reclaimed his book, excused himself and drove off.

  With the sun almost high above him now, he started feeling sentimental as the city sank in his rear-view mirror. At the immediate summit of the hill he noticed, late, a black lady, with a child hemmed on her skirts and another on her back, hitchhiking on the side of the road. He decided to stop. Having already passed her, he had to reverse while she collected her plastic bags and sauntered to the car.

  “Siya eRhini, bhuti,” she said, more in question than declaration.

  “Hop in.”

  “Heyi usincedile, besesinexhala lokuba late,” she said as she settled what looked to be a three-year-old boy with drooping eyes, before taking the one on her back down and sitting him on her lap on the back seat. It took her some time to get settled in the car. Phila, who had never found out the origins and meaning of the Xhosa word for Grahamstown, eRhini, decided to try his luck with her.

  “Lithetha ntoni sisi eligama lithi Rhini, kudala ndifuna ukulazi?”

  “Yhuu! Hayi, bhuti, undibuza ukwenda kukamama kengoku. Ndiza yazelaphi mna lonto?” She laughed in amused embarrassment because, as she said, it had never occurred to her to ask the meaning of the word, hence her proverbial answer that Phila was asking her mother’s wedding day. Phila always marvelled at the Xhosa practice of speaking in proverbs when under some form of pressure. Hence the British officials, most of whom had no knowledge of Xhosa to speak of, and even those who had a rudimentary one, didn’t have enough to understand the deeper meaning of proverbs. So they just treated the phrases as childish gibberish. Asking someone about their mother’s wedding day was concomitant to mystery or futility since they would, traditionally, not have been born then.

  In need of what Kant called the “quickening art”, Phila took the opportunity to put on some music. As they drove off he realised he had another hitchhiker.

  ‘At times when our wars with white people were stagnant,’ Maqoma said from beside him in the passenger seat, ‘I liked to visit their homesteads, especially the missionaries and amajonis. It’s amazing what you can learn from a man who is in his cups. The white man’s alcohol makes a person foolish; and it’s highly addictive.’

  ‘As such you did not heed your own caution?’

  ‘I’ve always been of the belief that he who commands his mind commands the day; but even myself, I’d constantly lapse into my curmudgeonly ways after a nip or two, and thus reveal my revengeful resentments. When the white man’s spirits get into your head it confuses you. Perhaps it’s because our ancestors don’t agree, and that’s what makes the head spin.

  ‘I remember one day attending one of the social missionary gatherings at the Kat River Settlement, or so I gave as the official reason for my being there. I can’t recall. In truth I just wanted to see the land that I held dear above all in this country, the Ngcwenxa area. It was during our banishment, when they had exiled us, giving our land to the KhoiKhoi. We were under strict orders never to travel beyond our allotted lands without permission from the magistrates of our regions. The missionary in my area was a certain blasé gentleman by the name of Kayser. He was so stolid not even other missionaries liked him. He spoke funnier than the rest, with an explosive fricative and robust manner. Others even excluded him from their gatherings.’

  “Uyathetha, bhuti?” The lady from the back seat got concerned when she noticed Phila seemingly talking to himself.

  “Ndiyazithethela nje.” Humming to the song, he replied.

  ‘I was made bold by my needs. The missionaries at the Kat River Settlement let me dine with them now and then, which in turn satisfied my tippling needs and quenched my reserves. Once, a sergeant by the name of Sant, if I remember well – he was from the group of Cape Mounted Rifles, my permanent enemies – unceremoniously interrupted one of these dinner arrangements with my white German friend. The young man, bleary-eyed from drink and slurring his words, made a scuffle with me. He demanded I make myself scarce from the vicinity of the colony, post haste. Because I had, on me, no magistrate’s permission to be on what he called colonial land.

  ‘“Just as soon as I finish the tea these wonderful people have placed before me, young man,” I replied, remaining seated.

  ‘“Damn you, if you don’t move from that table, Macoma!” he said, pointing a loaded musket at me and pronouncing my name in that English way. I could see that he was furious and nervous, so I didn’t want to give him an excuse to do something foolish. I stood to leave as he had ordered. He came closer, touching me with a flask of brandy, demanding to know if I wanted to sample his stuff as he had heard that I was partial to it. What the origin of his grudge against me was I honestly had no idea, but then again there must have been a lot of white people then who wanted a piece of me because of our success in resisting them in the previous war. I appealed to my missionary friends not to afford Sergeant Sant opportunity for staging a quarrel with me, which, I was sure, would no doubt compel him to shoot me. To tell you the truth, I was scared as a rabbit. There were many dangers I was willing to face, but a bullet in my back was not one of them. So my missionary friends accompanied me to the border of our lands and there we cordially parted, to the chagrin of Sergeant Sant, who was certainly spoiling for a fight. Many people claimed I was hot tempered. Maybe so. But I knew how to control my temper. And knew also how to bide my time. As for the white man’s spirits, the muse of fire – yes I was partial to those, but spirits never made me do something I didn’t want to do, or caused me to lose control. If anything, it cemented my resolve by putting iron in my will.’

  “Ungasimisela wethu, bhuti, apho ngasegaraji. Nazi ilekese zakho, bhuti, usincede kakhulu.”

  “Hay
i, sisi, uthengele untemekana izinto ezimandi ngayo. Nihlala kweyiphi ilokishi? Ndinga nibeka kuyo.”

  “O! Ungaba undicedile nabantwana, nalemithwalo. Sihlala eFingo wethu, bhuti. UThixo akusikelel!”

  Phila declined the fare the woman offered, a legacy of his father who always refused to charge people he helped. He also offered to drive her and her children to the township of Fingo where they stayed.

  Driving back to town Phila could hear the wheel of history turn in creaks like a chariot of dusk. He had resisted the urge to ask if the woman, like him, was Mfengu. He knew that the original people who stayed in Fingo were the descendants of amaMfengu who’d fought on the side of the British during the Frontier Wars, hence the proximity of that township to the main town of Grahamstown; while the township of Tantyi, the traditional Xhosa area, was on the periphery.

  Makhanda

  AFTER DROPPING OFF HIS HITCHHIKERS, Phila went into the town centre for a drink, settling for the first bar he could find after parking in Market Street. He remembered seeing it when Nandi and he had bought groceries at Shoprite. The bar was squeezed between a rough stone building that hosted a bookshop on one side and the supermarket on the other. The bookshop was mostly where he waited for Nandi, browsing the shelves of books he had no wish to buy, mostly about and by dead white men he had read about ad nauseam.

  Phila was relieved to escape the stiff breeze of the streets as he entered the bar. He had never been inside before. The place had the forlorn atmosphere of an American Midwest movie, and the smell of decay. Most of the patrons were ageing white men with weather-beaten faces, drinking Castle Lager draughts and betting on racehorses. They lifted their heads at the sound of the door chimes. Their gazes lingered in the realisation of Phila’s race. They looked like they were decaying in sync with the town and their bar. The bar synopsised their lives. Most, Phila suspected, felt degraded by the nature of things, like having to be governed by kaffirs and told how to run their farms; resented being made to share their watering hole with them; hid their disgust by ordering more brandies and Coke, washing them down with Castle Lager. And most, later on, would take out their anger on their vroue en swart plaaswerkers.