Tales of South Africa

by H. A. Bryden

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.