Darkest England Read online

  (For an explanation of the Khoisan click sounds which occur in the languages of the Bushmen people, and which give ex-Bishop Farebrother so much trouble, the reader is referred to the list given on page 282.)

  The notebooks of David Mungo Booi are published as they stand, with occasional notes. The travels they document may be dated as having taken place, roughly, in the spring and summer of 1993.

  Christopher Hope

  March 1995

  The Life and Strange,

  Surprising Adventures

  of David Mungo Booi

  who lived among

  the English.

  As told in his own

  Words and written

  down by Himself.

  Chapter One

  The author tells something of himself, his people and the great Promise made by the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair; his expedition abroad and arrival among the English

  We are a little people. Light. Lone. Lithe. Scattered wide as the wind. Our names tell of our nowhereness: we call our children Stukkie Ding – ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing’, or ‘Little Nothing’, and ‘Missing’. And we lose our children often. Sometimes to the flu. Sometimes to the farmer, who locks them away in the schoolhouse when they would be more useful to the family by tending the trek donkeys or fetching kindling. Sometimes we lose them to the campfire. (But in the end, as all know, everything falls in the fire.) Some call us Ashbush People, or Trek Folk, or Nomads, or Nowhere Men. Some call us nothing at all but ‘Who goes there?’ and ‘Away with you!’

  Once there were other names, names the visitors gave us. Visitors, black and white, who came to our country. And stayed.

  These early visitors rose from the sea, crept up the beaches like waves and, looking into our slanting eyes, pronounced us to be ‘Chinese Hottentots’. The longer the visitors stayed, the more names they gave us: we became ‘Egyptian gypsies’, or ‘wild’ Bushmen, as well as vagabonds, foxes, vermin, devils. The visitors stayed to steal our country. They were brave with their horses and guns. But they cried out in terror in their dreams – forced to sleep under the stars, sweating in the open air, fearing our attacks. Any part of the body even grazed by our arrows must be sliced off. Or it died. For our sweet, slow poisons never failed. Driven from our fountains, robbed of our honey, we took their cattle and ran for the hills. Then our enemies hunted us down like rock-rabbits. Crushed us like fleas in an old blanket. Until we were next to nothing at all. Reduced to scraps. Missing.

  Or so our foolish visitors liked to imagine. But does the springbuck die when the knife slits its throat and blood pours down? Does its spirit not enter the hunter? Just so have our souls entered the visitors: yellow and brown and black and white. And mingled. So that today when you look into the faces of Baster and Boer, black and white, farmer and mayor and shepherd – ours are the faces looking out at you. We went away – but we did not travel far.

  Before the visitors came was our First Best Time. Long behind us now. No roads, and no fences. No police vans, patrolling like yellow cobras, to catch people carrying meat or firewood. We followed giant herds of springbuck, spreading as far as the horizon; the land was fat and all the fountains flowing, loved by the she-rain falling softly from heaven. In our First Best Time we roamed as wide as the wind.

  Then came the Boers in their wagons and hunted us, stole our honey and our children. We cried and the god !Kwha heard our cries. For one day there came tall soldiers in red frocks, from across the ocean, servants of the Sovereign of all the English, she who was called the ‘Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair’. These were our Redneck years. When the Red Frocks kicked the arses of the Boer all the way from the Snow Mountains to Murderer’s Karoo. That was our Second Best Time.

  The Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair long ago passed into the veld where a thousand eland run each day into the hunters’ arrows and the wine goes around in bags as big as the rhino’s gut. But her going brought her son in her place. (So it is among the English.) And then his son, good King George, who came to see us, to thank us for fighting in his wars, and renewed his promise to kick the Boer to hell and gone whenever we should ask. Our people showed him the old Queen’s Great Promise. And the king said to them, ‘Yes, that is great-granny’s sign. Believe you me!’ So they put the paper back in its hiding place until the day when they would send a messenger to the Queen of England to remind her of her Promise. Believe you me!

  Almost alone among the People of the Road, People of the Eland, Men of Men, I can read books. And I can speak the Redneck language. Almost alone among the nomads of the Karoo, I had the luck as a baby to be saved by a kind man, the Boer named Smith. In the white light before dawn he found me crying among the smouldering ruins of my parents’ camp. The fire beside which my family slept had fed itself so fat upon the paraffin with which they watered the flames that it got up and devoured their wooden night shelter, as well as the wiry screen of ashbush that keeps the bitter wind at bay, as well as the family within, father, mother, brothers, sisters. Ashbush is our friend; ashbush is the only roadside plant the wandering people may gather freely. If the ashbush wanderers take anything else along the way, then the police in the cobra-yellow vans will throw them into jail. So we gather ashbush, and sometimes it warms us, and sometimes it burns us.

  All my family burned, even the blanket under which we slept, the cart which was our house and on which kettles and whips and bottles were lashed for the daily trek across the endless Karoo flats, from Lutherburg to Zwingli, from Eros to Compromise, from Mouton Fountain to Abraham’s Grave. Even the blackened kettle burned to a blacker nothing in the hungry fire. And the donkeys stampeded far into the veld and were never found again.

  The Boer Smith was the only Englishman for two hundred miles. ‘Our Redneck’, the Boers of the Karoo called him, as if he was their pet. Maybe that’s why he saved me. Because a pet needs a pet. He told his grandfather’s stories of the wild Bushmen of the Karoo. Who lived and loved like the animals. Who were impossible to tame. Unless you caught your baby Bushman young. Barbarian monkey men who used a poison on their arrowheads for which there was no cure. But he had caught me young: so I became his ‘tame Bushman’.

  My master had a fondness for apricot brandy which sometimes drove him into horrible unhappiness. ‘Kissing the Devil’, he called it and there were times when the Devil made him very angry. At no other time did he beat me. It was all very well, said he, while I was young, to answer to the name ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing’. But it would not do later when strangers wished to know what to call me, and to know that I was a man and not a monkey.

  Because he was generous, he gave me no fewer than three names, the first two being what he called ‘good English names’. The last was a name that many people in these plains have come to use. He was sure no one would say I’d stolen it. No more was I to be known as a ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing’; now I was called David Mungo Booi.1

  From his old, rich books he taught me to say my letters, and told wonderful stories of horrible darkness and violent death, heathen tribes and disgusting savagery, as related by the great English explorers on their travels through darkest Africa from Bushmanland to Stanleypool, from Bonga’s country to the Mountains of the Moon.

  Their names became my hymn; I still mutter them to myself when I wish to sleep: Baines, Baker, Bruce, Burton, Grant, Kingsley, Livingstone, Speke and Stanley … Even now they make, when strung together like beads, a little Anglican necklace.

  The Boer Smith faced great trouble from the other farmers when they heard he was teaching me to read. His neighbours sat in his front room and watched me with my book and warned that no good would come of it. It was like teaching a sheep to fly, and while a flying sheep was at least a way of transporting mutton cheaply, a reading Bushman was unseemly and an affront to decent people everywhere. As to my name – a man needed a name, said the neighbours, but a monkey did not. If you gave a Karoo gypsy a name, he would only lose it. Or abuse it. They very much doubted it was legal. And they foresaw a ba
d end to this foolishness.

  Of an evening, when the shearing had gone well, and my master was happy with the great bags of wool stacked in the ceiling of his barn, he would call on his shearers to sit with him, after they had been paid, after they had feasted on his gift of two freshly slaughtered goats with bellies fat as pockets of sweet potatoes. A fire was lit under the stars that powder the face of our father the moon,2 and all would be invited to bring whatever drink they could find: Little John brought sweet white wine, and Pietman his prickly-pear liquor; Old Flip and Sampie the Blacksmith brought along their home-made brews that bite the eyes. Pietman would unscrew his wooden leg. Boer Smith produced his favourite apricot brandy, and they would mix the lot in a zinc basin and stir it with Pietman’s wooden leg. They gathered around the basin like geese at a garden tap in a thirsty month. Little John and Sampie and Pietman and Old Flip would send the white enamel cup with the chipped blue rim around the circle. A little singing, and a little gunplay. Boer Smith loved to practise his target-shooting under the light of a hunting moon. That was how Pietman had lost his leg, having to mark a target for my master; and my master, having dipped the cup into the basin once too often, put a slug through Pietman’s right leg at three hundred metres, and it had to be cut off above the knee. Pietman never blamed him, for this was the sort of thing that happened when the cup went around the fire. Besides, Boer Smith cut him a handsome new leg of the best yellow wood he could find, which Sampie the blacksmith shod with a lively steel tip that flashed like a hare’s eyes in the moonlight. When Pietman took his leave of us, after the shearing season, feeling happy to have passed the cup around the fire, stretched flat on his back in his donkey cart, all you saw was his fine yellow-wood leg waving goodbye.

  After the drinking – peach brandy, white lightning, Advocaat, swirling in the enamel basin – after the shooting, then the stories began. My master, being a man of great understanding, loved to tell tales of his own people and to teach us something of their glory and their genius. His learning at these fireside lessons deepened with each scoop of the chipped cup in the old basin. The Boers of the Karoo would have been astonished to know how much their workers knew of the history of England:

  England, or Britannia Prima, as it was known formerly, is divided into three parts. These are known as the South-end, the Midland and the savage, uncharted wastes they call simply the ‘North’.

  In the very earliest times the first people sailed to England from lands across the sea. These were the Beaker people. They failed in their heartfelt attempt to civilize the aboriginals and died in despair, taking their drinking cups with them to the grave to be buried beside them. Later there arose in the island wild and savage tribes who dressed in animal skins, painted themselves blue and lived principally on milk and meat. They were slow to learn to till the land.

  When the Romans came they wept to see the foolishness of the natives, who shared wives among ten or twelve men, worshipped the moon, oaks and mistletoe, and measured out their lives in fortnights. To this day, said my master, the English have great difficulty in thinking in periods of longer than fourteen days. If asked to think a few months into the future, they grow confused and resentful. If asked to think a year or two ahead, they grow mute and wan and retire to their beds or their alehouses.

  The Romans took pity on the savages and built for them roads and baths. The natives refused to bath, since it would disturb the blue paint with which they adorned themselves and of which they were so proud, and preferred to scratch their furry parts in sacred groves, worshipping the moon, the oak and the mistletoe. And since they seldom went anywhere, what possible use did they have for roads?

  Once upon a time hunting was good in England. There were woolly elephants, hyenas, wolves and even our common and beloved hippopotamus to be found in great abundance. Now there are none at all, said the Boer Smith, and his tears fell into his apricot brandy. Let this be a warning, he used to tell me – we in Africa, with our immeasurable richness of wild creatures, must know that unless we take care to preserve them, we shall go the way of the English.

  These and other things I learnt from the Boer Smith. And they were to serve me in good stead.

  My master left without warning. He was kissing the Devil one night when the Devil decided to keep him. So the Boer Smith passed to his rest in that land where the fountains flow for ever, and the good live on locusts and honey, where the rains are always on time and hartebeest run into the hunter’s arrows. And he left a bequest to David Mungo Booi: the gift of a dozen sheep.

  It was a great day. For who before, amongst the Trek People, had owned twelve sheep? All the Ashbush families came from miles across the Karoo to see for themselves the man who owned twelve sheep. The family Lottering came. And the Pienaars. The Blitzerliks, old Adam and Mina. And the clan of Witziesbek. And we held a great party and sent round a five-man-can of sweet wine and danced until the dust leaped to its feet and danced with us. The stars began singing. On and on we danced into the white light that comes before sunrise.

  Old Adam Blitzerlik spoke for all when he rejoiced in my good fortune. I would have to be very careful: I had had good luck, but for the travelling people good luck usually brought trouble. Twelve sheep. Yes – well and good. But what profit are twelve sheep to a man who cannot graze them? Did I own grazing land? The wandering people owned nothing of the land. Everything belonged to others. Blacks from the north and the east took our land. Whites from the south and the west took our land. The fences kept us out. Yellow police vans patrolled all day long so that we might neither stop, nor collect wood for the fires, nor graze our donkeys on an inch of farmer’s land. Or pluck any roadside plant or shrub but for the harsh and bitter ashbush.

  Therefore it was time to make a plan. He was calling a gathering of the travelling people from across the Karoo. The time had come for action. The time had come to read the Great Paper.

  A meeting was arranged in the hall of the Dutch Reformed church in the coloured township outside Zwingli, though there was a lot of opposition from the township dwellers who hate us even worse than they hate whites. We would steal the light fittings and tear up the floorboards for our fire, they said. Our donkeys would soon be eating all the fodder in the outspan place provided by the municipality.

  Our people travelled to Zwingli from all over the land. Gathered together for the reading were the Lottering family, the Pienaars, and the Ruyter clan who remembered losing a child to the English in the time of the old Queen (Klein Seun or ‘Little Boy’ Ruyter had been stolen one hundred years earlier); there gathered, too, the family Witziesbek; and also the Sea-Cow clan from Murraysburg and many Strandloopers3 (though I’m sorry to say that some of them were deep in their cups): several of Harryslot, from Prince Albert Way, and the family /Xam,4 from Victoria East direction; not forgetting old Adam and Mina Blitzerlik; as well as representatives of other travelling bands or their descendants, long ago scattered and dispersed: besides nomads of the Karoo, there were people of the Kalahari, Caprivi, Okavango and Angola; the People of the Soft Sand; People of the Eland; People of the East; River Bushmen and Remote-area Dwellers of Botswana, including also the =Haba, the G//ana, the !Kung, the G/wi, the !Xo – all true people of the First Time.

  The Great Paper was being held by the Sea-Cow band, from beyond Murraysburg, safe in a leather quiver adorned with ostrich-shell beads. As the only reader, and the only English-speaker, I was asked to give out again the Promise to our people, then I was to translate the sacred words slowly into Afrikaans, so that those gathered could follow. But most of my listeners knew the Paper Promise by heart – even if they understood nothing of English – and nodded and applauded at certain key moments, as I declared the cherished words:

  We, Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, to Our Trusty and well-beloved San People, of the Cape Karoo, Greetings. We, reposing special Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage and Good Condu
ct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be a Favoured Nation and send you Our Sign of Friendship – wherever you are. From the Snow Mountains to the Sourveld. From the Cape even to the Kalahari. Assuring you of Our Patronage and Protection in Perpetuity. Like a Lioness her whelps, so do We, Queen and Empress, draw Our Red People to Our Bosom. Let no one Molest or Scatter them.

  By Command of Her Majesty in Council, bearing the date of Eighth Day of June 1877.

  Some of the Ruyter clan could not resist reciting the words along with me. The Strandloopers shouted, ‘Hallelujah!’ every now and then. And when I had finished, several members of the Sea-Cow clan called out, ‘Amen!’ as if we were in church.

  Then the meeting divided. Some of those present, specifically the representatives of the !Kung, said the time for talking had passed. Now it was time for war – we would approach the Queen and request she make good her Promise. Our lives were trampled like those of dung beetles by black people and whites and browns. Let the Lioness guard her whelps. Let the Great She-Elephant gallop to rescue her children; let her send the Red Frocks to kill the Boer; let her trample our enemies under her great feet, or spear them with her tusks; and let her children sleep safely in the shade of her generous ears.