Tales of South Africa

For 150 years Klaas Stuurmann and his ancestors have led the wandering life of the Trek-Boer, knowing no hearth but the pleasant camp-fire, no roof but the glaring blue of the unchanging African sky and the tents of their wagons, no floor but the wild veldt. Many among the more settled Dutch farmers wonder how these uneasy nomads, with their shiftless ways and habits of unrest, first came to pursue such an existence. In the present instance it happened much in this wise: Klaas Stuurmann’s great-great-grandfather, a restless spirit, farming near the old settlement at Cape Town, became, like many others, tired of the petty and exasperating restrictions of the then Batavian governor. And so he trekked in search of fresh pastures, beyond the reach of taxes and monopolies. He was a sportsman, and the land opening before him disclosed the most wonderful and redundant fauna the world has ever seen. Still carrying his flocks and family with him, the Boer wandered from veldt to veldt, always in a country virgin to the hunter, and teeming with the noblest game.

Year after year went by, his family grew up around him – how, he himself would have been puzzled to explain – and still the open-air, hand-to-mouth existence pleased him, the splendid liberty, and the free, unfettered chase in that vast, crowded, game preserve. At the beginning he sometimes cast his eye here and there in search of a farm, but somehow no plants suited him. He wandered ever farther in search of his ideal, and finally the veldt life had so bitten into him that he preferred to live and die in it. If he wanted powder and lead, some coffee and sugar, or a piece of stuff for his wife’s and daughters’ gowns, or a new roer (gun) for his growing lads, he had but to trek with a load of ivory and feathers to “Kaapstad” (Cape Town), and get what he desired. For the rest, the earth and her plenty sufficed to him. And so the years rolled on. The old Karel Stuurmann died, and was buried near a fountain on the wild karroo, and his sons and daughters became Trek-Boers, or the wives of Trek-Boers, after him. For many a year all went well: the game was still there to pursue; the land was lonely, yet pleasant; and the verdoemed uitlander (accursed foreigner) was as yet unknown. But presently came the British, and after them percussion-guns, and later the deadly breech-loader. The game began to vanish, the country became more settled, and, except for the remote wildernesses of the north-west, the Cape Colony was no longer the Trek-Boer’s paradise. Slavery was abolished, and even the native servants, the Hottentots and Kaffirs – nay, even the captive Bushboys, mere baboons the Boers called them, torn young from their slaughtered parents – could no longer be treated quite as of yore. Many of these Trek-Boers joined the emigrant farmers, and passed beyond the Orange and the Vaal Rivers. Some of them helped to found the Orange Free State and Transvaal Republics; some of them still pursued the old wandering life, and, as elephant-hunters, dared the unknown wilds and the dangers of the remote regions towards the Zambesi. But still a leaven of them clung to the old Cape Colony. The life became ever more sombre and less alluring. The great game had gone; only the springboks and smaller antelopes remained to remind them of the teeming plenty of the brave days of smooth-bores and flint-locks. These Trek-Boers of the colony sank lower in the social scale; they had to depend only on their scant flocks and herds; their more settled and richer neighbours learned to look upon them with dislike and even hate, for the reason that they often, by means of their flocks and herds, carried disease – scab and lung-sickness, and red-water – from one farm to another. And so in these latter days the Trek-Boer of the Cape Colony is looked upon as little better than the gipsy of Europe. Many of them are miserably poor; their flocks are reduced and deteriorated from disease and in-and-in breeding; their wagons are battered and dilapidated; they themselves look degraded and sunken and miserable. Some of them burn ashes from certain of the karroo bushes, and sell them to the settled farmers to make soap with. Some collect salt from the pans, and with a few springbok skins earn a trifle to eke out their wretchedness. Some few, like the Stuurmanns, still have decent wagons and fair flocks. But in the Cape Colony they are a declining race, and twenty or thirty years more will see the last of them. Yet even the poorest of them still retain their pure European blood, still lord it over their miserable native servants, and at times – perhaps thrice in the year – still trek to the nearest village for Nachtmaal (communion). And still the great Bible, more often than not two hundred years old, is carried in the wagon-chest and cherished. For these Trek-Boers of Cape Colony, the unpeopled solitudes of Bushmanland – that is, the northern portion of the divisions of Little Namaqualand, Calvinia, Fraserburg, and Carnarvon, bordering on the Orange River – are still a last stronghold. Here, after the rains, they can range freely with their flocks and pursue the trekking springboks, and live the old wild life. Elsewhere, if they halt for the night on the farm of another, they must pay for the privilege, and a goat or sheep or two have to be handed over in exchange for pasture and right of water.

I have hinted at the darker aspect of the latter-day life of the Trek-Boers of Cape Colony. Let us glance at the more pleasant part of it.

Their coffee finished, Klaas Stuurmann moves to the temporary kraals, a hundred yards away, where his flocks are confined for the night. There are two kraals – one for the sheep, one for goats – and they are simply made of bush and branches of the acacia and wait-a-bit thorns, fashioned into a light ring-fencing, just sufficient to keep the flocks within and prowling hyaenas and jackals without. Already the native herd-boys are there waiting for their charges; and the hungry kraal-denizens, knowing their breakfast-hour is nigh, bleat loudly for the near freedom of the veldt. The tall Dutchman now plants himself by the entrance of the sheep-kraal, from which a herdsman drags away the thorns. Forth flock the impatient sheep, and as their stream issues through the narrow exit, Klaas Stuurmann numbers them head by head. As a rule the Boer is a bad hand at figures; but in the necessary ancient custom of counting flocks night and morning, he can reckon with as much skill as any man. Practice makes perfect, and so Klaas Stuurmann finds no difficulty in taking his fleecy census, fast as the sheep pass forth.

The sheep – 600 of them – are checked and found in order, and the same process is gone through at the other kraal, whence, to the number of 800, the goats go forth, in the ancient African fashion of five thousand years, to pasture in the wild. The warm air, full of the rich, aromatic scent of the veldt vegetation, now springing in its prime, comes alluringly into the nostrils of these nomadic flocks, and soon they are scattered upon the plain feeding vigorously, their silent, patient herd-boys tending them for the hot, livelong day.

What do these dusky herd-boys think of, day after day, as they follow their flocks? Heaven knows! As well ask the bird and beast of the great plains what are their thoughts! Sometimes in the days of the Pharaohs there sprang a great warrior or statesman from the brown-skinned herdsmen and hunters of the far Land of Cush; nay, Egypt herself was ruled not seldom during these remote ages by almost pure Ethiopian blood. But nowadays there be no black Hampdens, or yellow Miltons, still less, possible Pharaohs, from among the lazy Kaffirs and poor besotted Hottentots of the Cape Colony.

Refilling his pipe from colonial tobacco, carried loose in his jacket-pocket, and relighting it, the big Boer moves massively back to his wagon, near which his daughter is busily engaged in a wash at the welcome vlei. There are three other wagons outspanned by the pool: one of them belongs to the Boer’s two sons; one of them is inhabited by yet another Trek-Boer, whose vrouw is engaged in the same task of washing, and whose children – five of them – young, merry rascals, are playing in the strong sunlight upon the edge of the water.

Their voices sound pleasantly upon the sweet, warm air, and recall, even to Klaas Stuurmann’s unimpressive mind, the younger days of his own children and his now dead wife. The recollection brings an unwonted tenderness to his rugged soul, and as the noisy imps, busy at their games of wagon-and-oxen, play and clamour about him, he goes to his wagon, opens his sugar-bag, fills a kommetje (A small common earthenware basin, universally used by the Boers instead of a tea or coffee cup) with the dark-brown treacly stuff, and calls the tanned and ragged little company about him. Jan, Katrina, Hendrik, Gert, Jacobina, and the tiny, toddling Jacie, all receive their morsel of the sweet-stuff – not without some awe and wonderment, for the grim, burly Boer man seldom unbends so far.

The oxen are feeding quietly round the vlei; the Boer’s eye follows them with contentment, for water and the rich veldt have brought fat and sleekness to their great frames. His daughter’s toilet catches his eye, and he watches the girl with an air of grave and secret pleasure, for she is the last survivor of three girl children, and by no means an ill-looking maiden in a Dutchman’s eye. Ruyter, the Hottentot, has brought an iron bucket from the wagon, and at the margin of the vlei he fills it with water for the meisje, who already has soap, a towel, and a comb. Taking off her sun-bonnet, she washes her face and hands, then, unfettering her stout plait of fair brown hair, she leans forward, and using the calm surface of the water as a mirror, combs out the somewhat tangled locks. Again the brown hair is coiled into a neat plait, drawn tightly from her temples, and her toilet is complete. As she ties on her sun-bonnet again the Boer comes up, pats her broad back, and looks admiringly at the now refreshened face. Two hundred years of South Africa have little altered the old Batavian type. The eyes are blue, but of small brilliancy, the cheeks too broad and flat for English taste, and the young figure is already stiff, waistless, and heavy. Yet in this far-off back-country women folk are scarce, and in much request, and already, at eighteen, Anna Stuurmann has found a mate. Next to her brothers’ wagon there stands the wagon of her betrothed – Rodolf Klopper – who is just now away in the grass plains a little to the north, shooting springboks with the younger Stuurmanns. This wagon is newly repaired, smart, and gaily painted, and is destined in another month or two, after the flocks have been well recruited in the Bushmanland Trek-veldt, to become the home of the Boer maiden. The combined families are to trek to Calvinia village, where the marriage will take place, and thenceforth Anna becomes mistress of her own man and wagon.

His daughter’s modest toilet complete, the big Boer dips a corner of the not over-clean towel in water, runs it carelessly over brow, cheeks, eyes, and mouth, dips his hands, and the trick is done. The proximity of cleanliness to godliness is no axiom of the Cape Dutch farmer, still less of the roaming Trek-Boer. A dry, parched land, and lack of water, have doubtless had a good deal to do with this trait.

At eleven o’clock, sitting in the shade of the sail suspended between two wagons, father and daughter partake, after a long grace, of the usual meal – pieces of mutton, swimming in sheep’s-tail fat, boiled rice, coarse bread, and the eternal coffee, which, however, is just now, thanks to the sweet herbage, plenteously tempered by a supply of bokke melk (goat’s milk). Again the big Dutchman lights his pipe, and presently, yielding to the heat and the effects of his meal, falls to sleep, sitting on the sand with his back against the wagon-wheel – a moving picture of pastoral listlessness, or, if you please, pastoral sloth. The hot day wears on. At three o’clock Anna mounts to the wagon-box, and, shading her eyes from the intense glare, scans the hot plain, now dancing and shimmering with mirage. The flocks have turned for home – she can hear the far-off tinkle of their bells, borne drowsily upon the warm air; but it is not the flocks she searches for. In another half-hour she looks forth again. This time, far in the north, she picks out from the shimmer and tremble of the atmosphere a tiny cloud of dust. That is what she is expecting, and she now gives orders to the Hottentot and another boy to tend the fire, get the pot and pan in order, and fill the great kettle.

In a while you may catch the steady trample of galloping hoofs, and presently three Boers – the girl’s brothers and her betrothed – each guiding a led horse, canter up to the wagons. Following at their heels is a Hottentot after-rider, also with a spare horse heavy laden. The men are hot, dusty, and sweat-stained. Ever since yesterday morning they have been away in the grass veldt, following a trek of springboks, and their display of venison and jaded nags prove that they have hunted hard, successfully, and far. Seventy miles have they ridden; a dozen springbok have they brought in; and, greatest luck of all, the flesh, skin, and horns of a great cow gemsbok decorate the led horse of Rodolf Klopper. The gemsbok (Oryx capensis), one of the noblest of antelopes, is rare indeed in Cape Colony nowadays, even upon the verge of the Orange River, and Anna’s betrothed is proportionately elate. The gemsbok is protected, too, under heavy penalties, in the Cape Colony; but what boots this to the wandering Trek-Boer in these wild solitudes, where the echo of laws can scarce be heard, and gamekeepers are not?

At five o’clock the party are gathered beneath the wagon-sail, feasting merrily, and with some noise and laughter, on titbits of venison: the rest of the meat meanwhile being salted, to be dried for billtong on the morrow. As they sit at meat, the hunting scenes are re-enacted for the benefit of Anna and her father, and, in particular, Rodolf’s desperate chase of the gemsbok. Meanwhile, as the sun nears the horizon after his day’s tramp, the flocks, bringing with them a cloud of red dust, come in for the night. First, they drink deeply and long at the vlei, which now reflects upon its glassy surface the ruddy glories of the sunset. Then the tired creatures are kraaled, their masters rising to count them as they file in.

Darkness falls swiftly; the huge vault of sky assumes its deep indigo hue of night; the stars spring forth in glittering array; there is a wonderful and refreshing coolness in the air; the cry of one or two night birds may be heard – the dikkop and kiewitje plovers – and the distant wail of a prowling jackal.

The Boer and his sons now move their squat wagon-chairs nearer to the warm blaze of the camp-fire; they smoke vigorously, and occasionally cast stolidly a sentence at one another. Anna and her heavy lover stroll a little beyond the firelight by the edge of the vlei; their voices intermingle curiously with the clang of water-fowl – duck, geese, widgeon, and teal – from the other end of the pool. Theirs is the old, old story, told perhaps in a rougher and less romantic fashion than in Europe; yet is its refrain as earnest and its aftermath at least as kindly as in northern lands. The South African Boer makes a true and constant husband, and a good father – some people say he is a trifle too uxorious.

At eight o’clock the day is done. The party separates for the night, after a longish melancholic prayer and a chapter of the great Bible from Stuurmann. Anna goes to her kartel-bed at the end of the big wagon, lets down the achter-klap, takes off her shoes and sun-bonnet, loosens a button or two at the throat of her gown, pulls her blanket and sheepskin kaross well over her sturdy frame, and is almost instantly asleep. Her father snores loudly from the forepart of the wagon; the whole camp (including the native “boys” huddled beneath the wagons) is hushed; while all around broods the wonderful silence of night on the plains of Bushmanland.

Chapter Six.

Piet Van Staden’s Wife

It was the year 1877. For months past the wagons of the Trek-Boers had been standing idly outspanned on the banks of the Crocodile River, (The Limpopo River is known universally in South Africa as the Crocodile) waiting for the word to move north-westward and plunge into the unknown and dreadful deserts that lay between the trekkers and the far-off land they sought. Scattered among the great trees and bushes that margined the noble river, the white wagon-tents of these strange people might be discerned dotting the landscape for the space of a mile and a half and more. Here were gathered the wildest, toughest, and most daring spirits of the Transvaal. Elephant-hunters, who longed for new and virgin lands in which to procure that ivory for which they had risked their lives so often; broken farmers, upon whom the vicissitudes of the African pastoralists’ existence had fallen heavily; and sour Doppers, whose grim religious views reminded one of the savage tenets of the Israelites of old, and who now looked eagerly across the desert for a new land of Canaan.

With these men, living in wagons and tents, were their wives and children, and such furniture and worldly gear as they could carry with them. Around them, scattered over the veldt for miles, grazed the oxen, horses, sheep, and goats that should accompany the trek. Pigs and poultry littered the encampment, and were to be seen near every wagon. All the people – elephant-hunters, malcontents, broken men, and Doppers – were animated by one and the same sentiment. They were sick of the Transvaal. There had been too much fighting – and badly managed fighting – with Sekukuni and other Kaffirs; too many commandos; taxes, those hateful creations of civilisation, were increasing, and were actually being enforced; President Burgers had been too go-ahead, too hoogmoedag (high and mighty); the seasons had been bad; and the English – those hateful English – were slowly finding their way to the north. And so the great Promised Land trek – a trek talked of for years past – was at last gathered together.

Some of these Boers, the Doppers, and they who had lived farthest from the rude semi-civilisation of that day, were possessed with the wildest beliefs. They imagined that Egypt lay just across the Zambesi River, not so very far to the north; they were convinced that they were setting forth to a land somewhere in the dim north-west, beyond Lake N’gami, where ranged snow-clad mountains beneath which sheltered a veldt rich in water, in cattle, and in corn and pasture lands, where the great game wandered just as plentifully as they had wandered in the Transvaal and Free State forty years before, when their fathers had crossed the Orange River and possessed the soil. Seventy wagons and more now stood beside the Crocodile, whose owners, heartily weary of the delays that had taken place, now anxiously awaited the return of two deputies sent to Khama, Chief of Bamangwato, through whose country they first had to pass.

One afternoon about this time a great wagon lumbered in to swell the already unwieldy proportions of the trek, and outspanned under a big tree. Word went slowly round the camp that Piet Van Staden, from Zoutpansberg, with his wife and child, had come in. Piet’s arrival in itself would have created no great stir, for Piet was a very average type of Transvaal Boer – big, not ill-looking, heavy and inert, and with very little to say for himself – but Piet’s wife was no ordinary person. She was a woman of striking beauty, far surpassing the dull ruck of South African Dutch vrouws, and possessed, moreover, of so much originality and determination of character as to have scandalised more than once her sober-minded countrywomen.

The men of Zoutpansberg swore by her. Had she not taken a rifle and ridden out time after time with her husband into the low veldt towards Delagoa Bay, and shot with her own hand giraffe and buffalo – ay, and even the mighty elephant itself? Rumour had it that on more than one occasion Hendrika Van Staden had hardened her husband’s heart at close quarters with a troop of half-mad elephants; and it was certain that she herself had, as they said, a “heart of steel,” and feared neither lion nor elephant nor fierce Kaffir.

Hendrika was a busy, active woman; and the oxen were no sooner outspanned than she got out her poultry from the bed of the wagon, extricated a table and some wagon-chairs, set one of the native boys to light the fire and prepare for the evening meal, and then, taking her six-year-old son, little Barend, set out to call upon one or two neighbours and inspect the camp. Barend, who inherited his mother’s good looks, her yellow hair, and deep blue eyes and clear complexion, was a fine, sturdy little fellow, and, clad in his short coat and loose trousers of soft mouse-coloured moleskin, a flannel shirt, and wide felt hat, looked a typical little Dutchman, a small counterpart, even to the clothes he wore, of his sturdy father. The two set off together, Barend flicking his little hide whip as he walked, and chattering to his mother with keen excitement as the various camps and outspans came into view. While his mother was engaged in conversation with some friends from her own district, the little fellow suddenly caught sight of his father walking to the next group of wagons, and toddled hastily after him.

In half an hour Hendrika had finished her gossip and extracted as much news as could be gleaned. She had not yet been down to the water; and, as the sun was declining and she wished to set eyes on the long-sought Crocodile before dark, she turned to the left hand, and, following a cattle-path, quickly found herself on the margin of the great river. Just at this point there was a bend or hook, and the stream, now at its low winter level, ran deep and swiftly only near the farther bank, leaving a broad spit of sand exposed upon the hither shore. A little higher to the left the stream again broadened into a great reach of shining water, now painted with a warm and ruddy hue by the glow of sunset. To the right, down the course of the river, a beautiful island, laden with trees and a wealth of bush and greenery, and fringed with tall yellow reeds, met the eye. Everywhere great forest trees abounded. Yellow-billed hornbills flew hither and thither among the acacias; gem-like bee-eaters flashed among the reeds; gaudy parrots, clad in blue and green and yellow, darted with shrill whistle overhead; and pearl-drab plantain-eaters uttered their loud, human-like cries at the advent of the solitary figure. Francolins down for their evening drink were calling to one another in scores, and doves cooed softly among the branches. It was a beautiful picture; but Hendrika cared little for the aesthetic aspect, the glamour of the hour, the glowing mantle of sunset. Her heart warmed, it is true, at the sight of the noble river, flowing with strength and volume even at this season of winter, and amid a parched country. But hers was the true, practical Dutch mind: she appreciated the scene only for the assurance it gave her of illimitable watering power for flocks and herds. Two hundred yards beyond, a troop of oxen came down to drink. A Dutchman was with them, and Hendrika bent her steps that way to learn whose the cattle were. The man’s back was turned, and it was not till she was within thirty yards that he heard her approach and faced her. There was a start of recognition and hesitation on either side, and then the man, a tall, good-looking Boer, furnished with a big straw-coloured beard and moustache, and dressed with rather more care than the average Transvaal farmer, came forward, and the pair shook hands in the impassive Dutch fashion. The Boer first spoke.

“And so, Vrouw Van Staden, you have come to join the trek. I scarcely looked to see you and your husband here. I had thought you were well settled on your farm in Zoutpansberg.”

“No; we are tired of that country. Our farm was good enough, and the winter veldt in the low country near at hand; but there is too much fever, and the Kaffirs are very troublesome; and as the President for years has been fighting Sekukuni, we have no strength ourselves for commandos in our own country. Cattle-stealing is worse than it has been for years. And so we thought we would join the trek and try a new country, where the game is more plentiful, and one is not to be pinched up on a farm of three thousand morgen.” (A morgen is rather more than two acres. The usual Boer farm averages three thousand morgen, more than six thousand acres.)