Tales of South Africa

Chapter Five.
A Boer Pastoral

It is dim early morning, and upon the vast plains of Great Bushmanland, in the far north-west of Cape Colony, the air blows fresh and chill, though the land is Africa, and the time summer. At 4:15 precisely the bright morning star shoots above the horizon, and rises steadily upward in a straight, rocket-like ascent.

Now a ruddy colouring tinges the pale grey of the eastern sky, to be followed by broad rays in delicate blues and greens that strike boldly for the zenith. The changes of dawn in Africa are swift and very subtle. Presently these colours fade, and a pale, subdued light rests upon the earth; the air is full of a clear but cold brightness. Soon follows the full red-orange, that so gorgeously paints the eastern horizon, and closely foreruns the sun; and then suddenly the huge burning disc itself is thrust upon the sky-line, and it is, in South African parlance, “sun up.”

The plains here stretch in illimitable expanse to the horizon. Far to the west is a range of mountain, forty good miles away, which, in the clear morning air, stands out as sharply as if but a dozen miles distant. You may see the dark lines and patches of the time-worn seams and krantzes that scar its sides. This translucency of atmosphere is very common in Southern Africa.

The rains have lately fallen, and everywhere around the dry plains have started at the breath of moisture into a splendid, if short-lived, beauty. Miles upon miles of flats, all glowing and ablaze with purple and a rich, flame-like red, are spread around. The wonderful Composites are in flower, and the barren, desert-like flats are for a few brief weeks transformed into a carpet of the noblest colouring and pattern. Look closely, and you may see the bleached and blackened limbs of former growths of low shrub, which stand amid the gallant blaze – gaunt reminders of the transitory existence of African flower life.

Near at hand lies a vlei, a shallow temporary lake recruited by the recent rains. At the end of this vlei, farthest removed from the group of wagons outspanned there, is gathered at this early hour a notable display of bird life. Duck, geese, widgeon, and teal are there, cackling and crying in a joyous plenty. Stints and sandpipers whirl hither and thither, and graceful black-and-white avocets, with their singular, upturned, slender bills, and long, red-legged stilt-plovers, haunt the shallows. Upon the plain some small birds have been afoot some time. You may see and hear the lively, inquisitive Jan Fredric thrush, with his pleasing song, and his curious note – “Jan-fredric-dric-dric-fredric.” He is racing swiftly hither and thither through the shrub and flowers, bustling for his food supply. There, too, are the thick-billed lark, the Sabota lark, with its clear, ringing call, and a few other – but not many – small birds. Aloft an eagle is already on the move, and a hawk or two, no doubt meditating descent upon some of the wildfowl on the vlei. Out upon the plains, half a mile distant from the wagons, are to be seen a knot or two of graceful springbok busily feeding in the choice herbage. But now there is a stir at the wagons yonder. For half an hour past “Ruyter,” a little wizened Hottentot, has been busy blowing up the embers of the half-dead fire, and making coffee for the baas and meisje.

From the biggest of the wagons descends a vast, uncouth figure – that of Klaas Stuurmann, the Trek-Boer. Almost at the same moment the achter-klap (flap) at the hinder part of the wagon is thrown back, and the figure of a young woman, rather dishevelled – for, like her father, she has been manifestly sleeping in her day-clothes (night-clothes they have none) – descends. The two approach the fire, greet one another in stolid, almost mute fashion – the father kissing impassively the girl’s proffered cheek – and then, standing, they drink the coffee handed to them by the little Hottentot man, and eat a few mouthfuls of bread. Watch them well, these two figures; they are the representatives of a type slowly disappearing from the Cape Colony – the race of Trek-Boers, nomads, who for generations have had no home but their wagons, and who live (more often than not from absolute choice) the free vagrant life of the veldt, with their flocks and herds around them.

The man, Klaas Stuurmann, is a Boer of loose, ungainly frame. He stands six feet one; is about fifty-two years of age; has a broad, deeply tanned face, in which are planted two watery-blue eyes; a shock of hay-coloured hair; and a long beard of the same uninteresting hue. He wears veldt-broeks (field-trousers) of soft home-tanned skin. He is about the last Dutchman in Cape Colony to use these old-world garments; but his father and grandfather wore such clothes, and they are good enough for him. He has no socks or stockings, and a pair of rude, home-made, hide velschoens cover his feet. He has a flannel shirt to his back, and over that a short jacket of much-worn corduroy. Upon his head is the usual tall-crowned, broad-brimmed, felt hat, which carries a hideous band of broad, rusty crape in memory of his deceased wife. The man’s face is dirty, to be sure; but, besides the dirt, there is a dull, vacant, unthinking look, rather painful to see. It is the look of one bred through dull, listless generations of men, self-banished from their own kind, whose only interests have been in sheep and goats and trek oxen, their only excitement an occasional hunt, or a scrimmage with Bushmen in time gone by. Such a listless and vacant look you may see even now in some of the more remote dals of Norway, among the poorer of the peasant-farmer folk. It is the look of men who gaze always without a spark of interest upon the silent face of nature around them, and who for generations have seldom exchanged an idea with their fellows.

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.