With regard to these four deaths and what others occurred, I will say the following, if any expiation explanation palinode be needed.
How do I know that Johannes Plaatje, or even Adonis, not to speak of the Hottentot dead, was not an immense world of delight closed off to my senses? May I not have killed something of inestimable value?
I am an explorer. My essence is to open what is closed, to bring light to what is dark. If the Hottentots comprise an immense world of delight, it is an impenetrable world, impenetrable to men like me, who must either skirt it, which is to evade our mission, or clear it out of the way. As for my servants, rootless people lost forever to their own culture and dressed now in nothing but the rags of their masters, I know with certainty that their life held nothing but anxiety, resentment, and debauch. They died in a storm of terror, understanding nothing. They were people of limited intellect and people of limited being. They died the day I cast them out of my head.
What did the deaths of all these people achieve?
Through their deaths I, who after they had expelled me had wandered the desert like a pallid symbol, again asserted my reality. No more than any other man do I enjoy killing; but I have taken it upon myself to be the one to pull the trigger, performing this sacrifice for myself and my countrymen, who exist, and committing upon the dark folk the murders we have all wished. All are guilty, without exception. I include the Hottentots. Who knows for what unimaginable crimes of the spirit they died, through me? God’s judgment is just, irreprehensible, and incomprehensible. His mercy pays no heed to merit. I am a tool in the hands of history.
Will I suffer?
I too am frightened of death. I too have spent wakeful nights computing the percentage of threescore years and ten already devoured and projecting myself into the day after my decease when the undertaker’s understudy will slit me open and pluck from their tidy bed the organs of my inner self I have so long cherished. (Where do they go, I wonder, does he throw them to the economic pigs?)
Yet the truer truth is that my death is merely a winter story I tell to frighten myself, to make my blankets more cosy. A world without me is inconceivable.
On the other hand, if the worst comes you will find that I am not irrevocably attached to life. I know my lessons. I too can retreat before a beckoning finger through the infinite corridors of my self. I too can attain and inhabit a point of view from which, like Plaatje, like Adonis, like Tamboer & Tamboer, like the Namaqua, I can be seen to be superfluous. At present I do not care to inhabit such a point of view; but when the day comes you will find that whether I am alive or dead, whether I ever lived or never was born, has never been of real concern to me. I have other things to think about.
Afterword
Among the heroes who first ventured into the interior of Southern Africa and brought back news of what we had inherited, Jacobus Coetzee has hitherto occupied an honourable if minor place. He is acknowledged by students of our early history as the discoverer of the Orange River and the giraffe; yet from our ivory towers we have smiled indulgently too at the credulous hunter who reported to Governor Rijk Tulbagh that fable of long-haired men far in the north which led to the dispatch of Hendrik Hop’s fruitless expedition of 1761–62. Mere circumstances, notably the truncated account of Coetzee’s explorations hitherto current, have conspired to maintain the stereotype and hide from us the true stature of the man. The account hitherto received as definitive is the work of another man, a Castle hack who heard out Coetzee’s story with the impatience of a bureaucrat and jotted down a hasty précis for the Governor’s desk.1 It records only such information as might be thought to have value to the Company, which is to say information about mineral ore deposits and about the potential of the tribes of the interior as sources of supply. We can be sure that it was only commercial second nature in the Company’s scribe that led him to note down for our eyes the story on which Coetzee’s slight fame subsists, the story of people “of tawny or yellow appearance with long heads of hair and linen clothes” living in the north.
The present work ventures to present a more complete and therefore more just view of Jacobus Coetzee. It is a work of piety but also a work of history: a work of piety toward an ancestor and one of the founders of our people, a work which offers the evidence of history to correct certain of the anti-heroic distortions that have been creeping into our conception of the great age of exploration when the White man first made contact with the native peoples of our interior.2
Jacobus Janszoon Coetzee (Coetsee, Coetsé) was a great-grandson of Dirk Coetzee, a burgher who emigrated from Holland to the Cape in 1676. The generations of the Coetzees illustrate well the gradual dispersal into the hinterland which has constituted the outward story, the fable, of the White man in South Africa, trekking ever northward in anger or disgust at the restrictiveness of government, Dutch or British. There is much that is anarchic in our people. We believe in justice but have never taken gladly to laws. Dirk Coetzee migrated to Stellenbosch; Jacobus Coetzee, seventy years later, trekked to the Piquetberg where he lived as grazier and hunter. It was from here, from his farm near the present village of Aurora, that he set out on his elephant-hunting expeditions, among them the expedition of 1760.
To understand the life of this obscure farmer requires a positive act of the imagination. Coetzee was part of a gathering tide of people turning their backs on the south. For many farmers of the interior, the monthly struggle to meet the demands of a voracious Company for meat, grain, fruit, and vegetables for its East Indiamen, provisions which had to be carried to the Cape by ox-wagon over poor roads, had become too much. Such men turned their eyes to the naked plains of the interior, seeing themselves lords of their own lives. Stand at the very tip of the Cape and stare out to sea. What do you think of? The South: black seas, ice, whiteness. Leave the Cape, on horseback perhaps, and for miles you are still escaping the South. Then, click, at a distance from the coast variously specified you are free of the South. You enter a treacherous neutral zone free of the feeling of destiny. Then as you move further north, click, you are in a second zone of destiny, bound to the North. There is nothing but North. Coetzee trekking northward saw, as it were, with the spherical eye of a frog or toad: all that was around him (frog) was ahead of him (man). In historical terms, this was the future he had created in giving up a Company contract for wheat and vegetables in favour of cattle.
From such foreign visitors as Vaillant, Sparrman, Kolbe, even that supercilious English gentleman Barrow, we get a fair idea of the quality of this frontier farmer’s daily life. We picture him in his rough year-round working clothes and lionskin shoes, with his round-brimmed hat on his head and his whip sleeping in the crook of his arm, standing with watchful eye beside his wagon or on his stoep ready to welcome the traveller with hospitality which, in the estimation of Dominicus, was rivalled only by that of the ancient Germani. Or we picture him in a tableau on which Barrow spat much contempt but which to innocent eyes has its own pastoral beauty: seated of an evening with his family about a water-basin having the sweat of a day’s toil washed from his feet preparatory to evening prayers and connubium. Or dropping from his saddle, first the right foot then the left, beside the carcase of a freshly killed gemsbok, the cobalt smoke from the muzzle of his gun perhaps by now wholly mingled with the lighter blue of the sky. In all these scenes he strikes us as a silent man. We have no contemporary portrait. Doubtless he was bearded.
The Company was interested in easy profit. Van Riebeeck himself had sent expeditions inland in search of honey, wax, ostrich feathers, elephant tusks, silver, gold, pearls, tortoiseshell, musk, civet, amber, pelts, and anything else. These desirables were the objects of barter. In return the Company’s agents gave commodities for which the White man’s name was whispered all over Africa: tobacco, spiritous liquors, beads and other glass artefacts, metals, firearms and powder. We will not indulge here in the easy sarcasm of commentators of our day about the trade. The tr
ibes of the interior sold their herds and flocks for trash. This is the truth. It was a necessary loss of innocence. The herder who, waking from drunken stupor to the wailing of hungry children, beheld his pastures forever vacant, had learned the lesson of the Fall: one cannot live forever in Eden. The Company’s men were only playing the role of the angel with the flaming sword in this drama of God’s creation. The herder had evolved one sad step further toward citizenship of the world. We may take comfort in this thought.
The Castle was interested in easy profit, but only so long as it did not bring added responsibilities. “We beg to request the Directorate to allot a further 25 Hessians to our command. The depradations of the Bushmen are such, and the length of the border of the Colony has grown such, that it has become imperative to establish a post to protect the road from Graaf Reynet, along which two weeks ago Willem Barendt a free burgher and his sons were killed with their servants, and two thousand head of cattle driven off”. We can imagine the squirmings of a Commandant required to pen such a letter, and therefore the mistrust with which applications were scrutinized from burghers requesting grazing rights ever further from the Castle, further to the North. We may marvel that such rights were granted to Coetzee in 1758. With what trust must he not have been regarded. While some frontiersmen did not visit Cape Town more than once in a lifetime, donning their black best and rolling off in their ox-wagons, their brides following behind in their own wagons for propriety’s sake, to be married in the Groote Kerk, Coetzee was there every year or two with a load of skins and tusks. Then off north again, a phlegmatic man, his oxen plodding a steady two miles an hour, two casks of gunpowder strapped down in the back, tea, sugar, tobacco, the long hippopotamus-hide whip erect in its socket. At an appropriate point I will describe his wagon.
Barrow accuses the colonists, whom he miscalls a peasantry, of barbarous games of mutilation with their animals. He records an instance of a farmer lighting a fire under a weary span of oxen.3 Barrow was the victim of many of the enthusiasms and prejudices of Enlightenment Europe. He came to the Cape to see what he wanted to see: noble savages, a lazy, brutal Dutch peasantry, a wasted civilizing mission. He made his recommendations and left: China done, Africa done, what next? But Barrow is dead and his peasantry survives. In any event, Coetzee, a humble man who did not play God, is unlikely to have tortured his animals. (In this context I cannot refrain from quoting that most eminent of British missionaries John Philip, whose words reveal only too well his co-religionists’ collusion in the imperial mission: “While our missionaries are everywhere scattering the seeds of civilization, social order, and happiness, they are by the most unexceptionable means extending British interests, British influence, and the British Empire. Wherever the missionary places his standard among a savage tribe, their prejudices against the colonial government give way and their dependence upon the colony is increased by the creation of artificial wants”.4 Yes: the savage must clothe his nakedness and till the earth because Manchester exports cotton drawers and Birmingham ploughshares. We hunt in vain for a British exporter of the virtues of humility, respect, and diligence. In the things of this life, said Zwingli, it is the labourer who stands nearest to God.)
Coetzee was, as I have said, known and trusted at the Castle. Hence his land grant, hence too his licence to hunt beyond the boundaries of the Colony. For though the Colony still abounded in wild life, larger animals such as the elephant and the hippopotamus had been pursued with such zeal that they had retreated into the wilds of the north. The ivory trade therefore depended on barter and on hunting expeditions of no small danger: in Burchell we read of a hunter, one Carel Krieger, being pounded into the earth by a maddened bull, at a time when (census of 1798) the adult White male population was 5546.5 Krieger was far more of a loss, proportionately, than one of the thousands of bastards fathered upon slave women by the wild Scots progenitors whom slave-owners maintained for the good of their stock.6 We may in passing pause to glance with sorrow at the pusillanimous policy of the Company in regard to White colonization, with regret and puzzlement at the stasis of the Netherlands population during the eighteenth century (sloth? self-satisfaction?), and with wistful admiration at the growth of the United States, which in the same era increased its White population geometrically and checked its native population growth so effectively that by 1870 there were fewer Indians than ever before. No one was expendable in the early Cape Colony. Yet in 1802 Coetzee’s own son was murdered by his slaves, only his wife being spared of all his family.7 It is to be hoped that she remarried.
On 14 July 1760, in mid-winter, Coetzee set out on his northern expedition. He took with him six Hottentot servants and twenty-four oxen, two spans, for his wagon. Travelling by night so that the cattle might browse by day, and in shifts of twelve hours, he followed the route of Van der Stel’s expedition of 1685. He made slow progress through country of strange pyramidal sandstone hills and sandy plains where his wheels sank axle-deep. Worn away by wind and rain, the hills present a gnarled and melancholy aspect. The sand valley of Verloren Vallei took three days to cross. The travellers subsisted on the sheep they slaughtered (the Cape sheep with the fat tail) and on what fell to their guns, perhaps the gregarious springbok. Coetzee’s Hottentots had not discarded their old eating habits. They would cut steaks out of the dead animal and slit them into spiral strips rather as one peels an apple, if one peels one’s apples spirally. These strips they tossed into the ashes of the fire and ate half-raw. Another habit, perhaps of religious origin, though it is difficult to see what could be dignified with the name of religion among the Hottentots, had fortunately disappeared: the habit of slitting a sheep’s throat and belly to let the blood pour into the viscera, the mixture being stirred with a stick and drunk with gusto to the presumed benefit of the spirit. When we meditate upon such practices we may indeed be thankful that in the intercourse of European and Hottentot the exercise of cultural influence was wholly by the former upon the latter. We shall have occasion below to animadvert to other cultural practices of the Hottentots, when the force of my remark will be more fully felt.
(“..Ãten tãten tãten”, sang the natives of the Cape to the shipwrecked sailors of the Haerlem, “ãten tãten, ãten tãten”, and danced in 2/4 time.8 Hence the appellation Hottentot.)
On July 18 Coetzee crossed the Olifants River at latitude 31°51’. This perennial river was running strongly, and one of his weakened oxen was swept to a watery fate. Within ten years of Coetzee’s passage the banks of the river would be settled by farmers cultivating rice. Although technically in the land of the Bushmen, he had as yet met no one. He turned in a north-easterly direction to avoid the coastal desert. With all oxen spanned in he made the crossing of the Nardouw Mountains. These mountains have been eroded by the passage of time into grotesque chambers, arches, and colonnades. From eyries high above the pass suspicious eyes watched the party. These would have been the eyes of Bushmen lying on their bellies on high ledges, their little bows in their left hands, their quivers of 70–80 short arrows sticking out from their hips at an angle. Such Bushmen had reason to keep a respectful distance from the guns of colonists. Living as hunters and collectors of edible roots and berries, they had been sorely afflicted by the decrease in the antelope population and had turned to lurking on the borders of settlement waiting their chance to raid an unwitting farmer and make off with his herd. Stolen animals would be barbarously treated. With the Eskimo the Bushman shared the repugnant belief that animals have been placed on this earth not only for man’s sustenance but also to gratify his most perverse appetites. From the living flesh of a wounded animal the morbid area would be gouged with a blunt stone knife. The haunch of a stolen ox would be hacked off and eaten before the beast’s agonized eyes. And if ever it seemed that the pursuing farmer might catch the thieves, his cattle were pitilessly hamstrung and abandoned. To protect themselves against such depredations, farmers had organized themselves into protective commandos whose purpose it was to create a
neutral zone or free belt between the farms and the wilds in which the Bushmen roamed. Lacking the resources to police this zone, the instrument they reluctantly adopted to keep it free was terror. Woe betide any Bushman who was seen on the borders of settlement. No matter how fleet of foot or skilful with the bow, he soon learned that he was no match for the guns of the mounted commando. Driven ever northward by this unyielding pressure (and ever westward by the invading Bantu), he found his safest refuge in the Kalahari scrub, where to this day he maintains his ancestral ways.
Bear it in mind, however, that the policy of terror was not indiscriminate. While adult Bushman males proved incapable of adapting to field-work, their children were usually tractable, male children, with their uncanny knowledge of the veld, making excellent herds, while widows and female children soon became docile enough to work about the house. The commando expeditions were thus in no sense genocidal. Even some adult males survived in captivity. Wilhelm Bleek, the famous student of Bushman languages, met his two principal informants as old men labouring in irons on the Cape Town breakwater.