The present publication is an integral translation of the Dutch of Jacobus Coetzee’s narrative and the Afrikaans of my father’s Introduction, which I have taken the liberty of placing after the text in the form of an Afterword. In an Appendix I have added a translation of Coetzee’s official 1760 deposition. Otherwise the sole changes I have made have been to restore two or three brief passages omitted from my father’s edition and to reduce Nama words to the standard Krönlein orthography.
My thanks are due to Dr. P. K. E. van Joggum for suggestions regarding finer points of translation; to the Van Plettenberg Society and Mrs. M. J. Potgieter for assistance in the preparation of the typescript; and to the staff of the South African National Archives.
Five years ago Adam Wijnand, a Bastard, no shame in that, packed up and trekked to Korana country. He had had his difficulties. People knew where he was from, they knew his mother was a Hottentot who had scrubbed the floor and emptied the bucket and done as she was told till the day she died. He went to the Korana, and they took him in and helped him, they are simple folk. Now Adam Wijnand, that woman’s son, is a rich man with ten thousand head of cattle, as much land as he can patrol, a stableful of women. Everywhere differences grow smaller as they come up and we go down. The days are past when Hottentots would come to the back door begging for a crust of bread while we dressed in silver knee-buckles and sold wine to the Company. There are those of our people who live like Hottentots, pulling up their tents when the pasture gives out and following the cattle after new grass. Our children play with servants’ children, and who is to say who copies whom? In hard times how can differences be maintained? We pick up their way of life, following beasts around, as they pick up ours. They throw their sheepskins away and dress like people. If they still smell like Hottentots, so do some of us: spend a winter under canvas in the Roggeveld, the days too cold to leave the fire, the water frozen in the barrel, nothing to eat but mealcakes and slaughter-sheep, and soon you carry the Hottentot smell with you, mutton fat and thornbush smoke.
The one gulf that divides us from the Hottentots is our Christianity. We are Christians, a folk with a destiny. They become Christians too, but their Christianity is an empty word. They know that being baptized is a way of protecting yourself, they are not stupid, they know it wins sympathy when they accuse you of mistreating a Christian. For the rest, to be Christian or heathen makes no difference to them, they will gladly sing your hymns if it means they can spend the rest of Sunday stuffing themselves on your food. For the afterlife they have no feeling at all. Even the wild Bushman who believes he will hunt the eland among the stars has more religion. The Hottentot is locked into the present. He does not care where he comes from or where he is going.
The Bushman is a different creature, a wild animal with an animal’s soul. Sometimes in the lambing season baboons come down from the mountains and to please their appetite savage the ewes, bite the snouts off the lambs, tear the dogs’ throats open if they interfere. Then you have to walk around the veld killing your own flock, a hundred lambs at a time. Bushmen have the same nature. If they have a grudge against a farmer they come in the night, drive off as many head as they can eat, and mutilate the rest, cut pieces out of their flesh, stab their eyes, cut the tendons of their legs. Heartless as baboons they are, and the only way to treat them is like beasts.
The Piquetberg used to be swarming with Bushmen until a few years ago. There were two hordes, one led by a creature called Dam who had been evading the commandos as long as anyone could remember. Nothing was safe from him. When night fell he and his followers used to slip into the gardens next to the farmhouses and help themselves. By dawn they had vanished. As for traps, a Bushman is usually too wary. A farmer from Riebeecks Kasteel once succeeded, though, in a spectacular way. Bushmen had been coming down to a spring on his farm to drink. He learned about this and rigged a gun behind rocks overlooking the spring, loading it with handfuls of powder and a barrel full of swanshot and pebbles. Then he led a tripstring under the sand to a tobacco wallet (Bushmen can’t resist tobacco). Early next morning, over the hills, he heard the explosion. The gun had blown itself to pieces, but it had also blown the face off a male Bushman and wounded a female so badly that she could not move; there was even a third blood spoor leading off into the hills which he did not follow for fear of ambush. He strung the male up from a tree and mounted the female on a pole and left them as warnings. One of the farmers from this area tried the same trap, but Dam was too sly, he broke the string and took the tobacco, perhaps he had heard what happened, the creatures get around a lot, they are like dogs, they can run all day without tiring, and when they migrate they carry nothing with them.
The only sure way to kill a Bushman is to catch him in the open where your horse can run him down. On foot you haven’t a chance, he knows all about guns, he keeps out of range. The only one I ever caught on foot was an old woman up in the mountains: I found her in a hole in the rocks abandoned by her people, too old and sick to walk. For they are not like us, they don’t look after their aged, when you cannot keep up with the troop they put down a little food and water and abandon you to the animals.
It is only when you hunt them as you hunt jackals that you can really clear a stretch of country. You need plenty of men. The last time we swept this district we had twenty farmers and their Hottentots, nearly a hundred hunters all told. We strung the Hottentots out in a two-mile line and at first light sent them beating up one side of the hills. We waited on horseback on the other side, hidden in a little kloof. Pretty soon the troop of Bushmen came jogging down the hillside, we knew they were there, our cattle had been disappearing for months. It was not Dam’s troop, it was the other one that time. We waited till they were in the open and the Hottentots had reached the crest of the hills, because among rocks a Bushman can hide anywhere, he simply vanishes into a crack and you never know he is there until an arrow hits you in the back. So we waited till they were out in the open running from the Hottentots at a nice steady trot, the sort they can keep up all day. Then we broke cover and rode on them. We had picked out our targets beforehand, for we knew they would scatter as soon as they saw us. There were seven men and two boys old enough to carry bows; we split up two to each and left the women and children for afterwards.
In a game like that you must be prepared to risk a horse or two to their arrows. But often they do not shoot, because they know that if they stop you can stop too, and your range is much longer than theirs. So what they do is to keep running and dodging, hoping to double back to the hills where the horses are at a disadvantage. But that day we had the Hottentots in the hills waiting. So we got all of them, the whole band. The technique is to ride down on your man till you are just outside arrow range, then pull up quickly, sight, and fire. If you are lucky he will still be running and it is an easy shot in the back. But they have had experience of our methods, they are cunning, they know what you are up to, what they do is to listen as they run to the sound of your horse’s hooves, so that as you pull up you find them suddenly swinging right or left and bearing in on you as fast as they can. You have perhaps thirty yards to get off your shot, and often your horse is not still yet. If you are one to one, it is safest to dismount and fire from behind your horse. If there are two of you, as we were that day, it is of course easier: the rider who is in danger simply veers off out of range, leaving the other rider an easy shot. My Bushman never had a chance to let an arrow off that day: in the end he simply gave up and stood waiting and I killed him with a ball through the throat. Some of the others kept running until they were shot, some turned and could not find a target, one got an arrow off that scratched a horse, that is the risk you take, and if you treat the horse at once you may still save it: cut the wound and suck out the poison, or get one of the Hottentots to suck it, bind a snakestone in, and the horse stands a good chance of pulling through. The Bushman’s bow is really very weak. He does not like to lose arrowheads because they are so much trouble to
chip, so he shoots with a slack bowstring and the arrow barely scratches its target before it falls. So his bow has no range. There is no excuse for losing men when you are hunting Bushmen. The cardinal rule is simple: to get them in the open and make sure there are enough of you. Good men have died for neglecting that rule. Bushman poison takes a long time to work, but it is deadly. You have to act at once or it will seep into your system. I have seen a man lie three days in agony, his whole body swollen up, screaming for death, and nothing to be done for him. After I had seen that I knew there was no more cause for softness. A bullet is too good for a Bushman. They took one alive once after a herder had been killed and tied him over a fire and roasted him. They even basted him in his own fat. Then they offered him to the Hottentots; but he was too sinewy, they said, to eat.
The only way of taming a Bushman is to catch him when he is young. But he must be very young, not older than seven or eight. Older than that he is too restless, one day he takes off into the veld and you never see him again. If you bring a young one up with the Hottentots he will make a good herder, for he has inborn knowledge of the veld and wild animals. For field work they are even worse than Hottentots, listless and unreliable.
The women are different. If you take a woman with a small child she will stay with you, she knows she has no chance alone in the veld. When a Bushman band moves into the neighbourhood she may try to slip away. At such times it is safest to keep her under lock and key: new moon or a cloudy night and she is gone like a ghost. If you want profit out of women you must make them breed you herders off the Hottentots (they do not breed off white men). But they have a very long cycle, three or four years, between children. So their increase is slow. It will not be difficult to stamp the Bushmen out, in time.
They age quickly, both men and women. When they are thirty they are so wrinkled that they look like old people. But it is pointless to ask a Bushman how old he is, he has no conception of number, anything more than two is “many”. One, two, many, that is how he counts. The children are pretty, the girls particularly, small-boned and delicate. Both men and women are sexually misformed. The men go into death with erections.
Most frontiersmen have had experience of Bushman girls. They can be said to spoil one for one’s own kind. Dutch girls carry an aura of property with them. They are first of all property themselves: they bring not only so many pounds of white flesh but also so many morgen of land and so many head of cattle and so many servants, and then an army of fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. You lose your freedom. By connecting yourself to the girl you connect yourself into a system of property relationships. Whereas a wild Bushman girl is tied into nothing, literally nothing. She may be alive but she is as good as dead. She has seen you kill the men who represented power to her, she has seen them shot down like dogs. You have become Power itself now and she nothing, a rag you wipe yourself on and throw away. She is completely disposable. She is something for nothing, free. She can kick and scream but she knows she is lost. That is the freedom she offers, the freedom of the abandoned. She has no attachments, not even the wellknown attachment to life. She has given up the ghost, she is flooded in its stead with your will. Her response to you is absolutely congruent with your will. She is the ultimate love you have borne your own desires alienated in a foreign body and pegged out waiting for your pleasure.
Journey beyond the Great River
I took six Hottentots with me, a good number for a long trip, for day-to-day work as well as emergencies. Five were my own, one I hired because he was a good shot and you need two guns to hunt elephant. His name was Barend Dikkop and he had been a soldier in the Hottentot Company. I hired him on a three-month contract. But it was a mistake to bring him along. It is always a mistake to bring strange Hottentots in with your own servants, there is too much petty friction. Dikkop thought that having been a soldier he could lord it over the others. And after I began to take him out shooting with me, horse and all, he imagined he held a special position among my followers. Which caused resentment, particularly from Jan Klawer, a much older man who was foreman of the labour on my farm. Long ago I had given Klawer a medal, which he had bored a hole through and hung around his neck. It gave him authority, he said, like that of the Hottentot kapteins who carried staffs of authority from the Castle. So after Dikkop and I had been out with the guns, I would come back and find Klawer sulking, and Dikkop would strut about the camp talking about himself and Mijnheer and about how no one should worry about food, he and Mijnheer would see that there was plenty for all. In the evenings he would wear a big watchcoat he had bought at the Cape, and this made the others even more envious. He thought himself half-way a Dutchman. One day I could put up with it no longer, discipline was going to pieces, so I left him behind in the camp and took Klawer out shooting instead. We shot something for the pot but Dikkop would not eat. He lay on his blanket with his back to us, sulking. The other Hottentots began to taunt him, which was foolish, for he came at them with a knife, jumped up from his blanket and ran at them with his knife. They scattered into the bush, they were terrified, they were farm Hottentots, they lived sluggish lives, they were not used to wild creatures with knives. I pulled Dikkop up and told him he was causing too much trouble, I did not want him any more, I would pay him off in the morning and he could leave. The next morning he was gone, he had not waited for his money but had taken a horse, a gun, a flask of brandy, and sneaked off. Perhaps he thought that because he had a gun we would not dare follow him. But I know Hottentots. I took Klawer and we tracked him down. Klawer was one of the old-time Hottentots who could track as well as any Bushman. By two o’clock we had run him down, as I knew we would. He was lying in the shade of a tree dead drunk. He should never have taken the brandy, that was his mistake, brandy has been the downfall of the whole Hottentot people. I tied his hands to my saddle and ran him back to camp. There I let the Hottentots have a go at him with the sjambok. Then I untied him and left him, this was in the Khamiesberg where there is plenty of water. I am sure he lived. He cost us a whole day.
The narrative. We set out on July 16 and made a steady twelve [English] miles a day for six days. We stopped short of the Oliphants River at a place people call the Gentlemen’s Lodgings, a cave in the mountains, to allow the oxen to rest. Having crossed the river we made slow progress, travelling a day and resting a day, until we reached [Koekenaap], where there was grazing.
Between August 2 and August 6 we covered the fifty miles to the Groene River. The going was hard. We had to force the cattle through the last day. The country is dry and sandy, nor is there game. We allowed the oxen four days to recover.
Two days north of the Groene River we passed an abandoned Namaqua kraal.
On August 15 we reached the river which the Hottentots call the Koussie. Here we rested.
On August 18 we reached the defiles of the Kooperbergen and saw the date 1685 carved on the rocks.
The high ranges end a day’s journey beyond the Kooperbergen and you enter a sandy, waterless plain. At first we moved slowly to conserve the oxen; but on the second day in this desert I saw we would perish if we did not travel faster. We travelled through the night of August 22. Many of the oxen were so weak that they could no longer haul. We rested on the afternoon of August 23, the oxen lowing pitifully for water. All night we crawled along. Five of my oxen lay down and could not be induced to rise. I had to abandon them.
On the morning of August 24 we arrived before a new range which we painfully ascended. Toward evening the cattle scented water. Flowing swiftly between steep banks we came upon the Great River. The cattle had to be restrained from hurling themselves down the banks while we searched out a path.
The Great River forms the northern boundary of the land of the Little Namaquas. It is about three hundred feet wide, in the rainy season wider. In places the banks slope to small beaches where hippopotami graze and where we found traces of Bushman encampments. In most places the current is swift; bu
t Klawer, sent upstream to find a ford, came back to report a sand-shoal where we might safely cross. It took two days to reach, for we had to retrace our way through the mountains and travel behind them parallel to the river.
North of the Great River we found ourselves among stony mountains, and for four days were compelled to follow the course of the Leeuwen River before we emerged upon the level grassy plain which constitutes the beginning of the land of the Great Namaquas.
My Hottentots and my oxen had given me faithful service; but the success of the expedition had flowed from my own enterprise and exertions. It was I who planned each day’s march and scouted out the road. It was I who conserved the strength of the oxen so that they should give of their best when the going was hard. It was I who saw that every man had food. It was I who, when the men began to murmur on those last terrible days before we reached the Great River, restored order with a firm but fair hand. They saw me as their father. They would have died without me.
Early on the fifth morning we saw small figures advancing toward us across the plain. Ever cautious, I readied my party by distributing the smaller pieces to Klawer and a steady boy named Jan Plaatje, with instructions that they load but show no hostility, biding my sign. Plaatje came up behind the wagon with the oxen to ensure that no sudden clamour from the enemy should drive my second span helter-skelter away. Klawer sat beside the driver with his gun ready. I rode out ahead.
Thus we approached each other. We could make out their number, twenty, one riding on an ox. All were men. I inferred that they had heard of our coming, by what means I did not know, and were come to meet us. If need be a wild Hottentot can run all night without stopping. Perhaps one of their spies had seen us. They carried spears. It was a long time since I had seen a Hottentot with a spear. They made no warlike sign, nor did we. On the contrary, we rode out peacefully to meet each other, as pretty a sight as you could wish, two little bands of men under a sun only a few degrees above the horizon, and the mountains blue behind us.