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.