Up Against the Night Page 4

  The Reverend Francis Owen and his wife have also been watching the cattle stream down from the escarpment, sticking close to their hut, and this probably gives them a false sense of security. Owen’s time in Zululand is more or less up; Dingane allowed him to preach once but he could not see the point of any of it and in particular he rejected the notion of sin and hell-fire. Who would sign up for that? This was Owen’s one and only sermon.

  William leaves Snowy with one of the servants and goes in to speak to Owen. The Reverend is talking to his wife. They look up, a little flustered, and smile unconvincingly, as people do when they are caught in private conversation. William sees that they are not suited to this life in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Ah, Will, did you talk with Mr Retief?’

  ‘I did, sir. He has gone to make camp.’

  ‘I saw them. There are at least eighty of them. Did you speak to their leader?’

  ‘He was busy with the wagons and the stolen cattle, and only wanted to know where he should outspan.’

  William knows that the Reverend Owen is deeply disturbed. These Boers – strange, brave people who have descended on them – are in terrible danger. And so is his small household. At the best of times, Dingane will kill anyone on a whim and if Owen tells the Boers that Dingane is planning to kill them, which he and William believe the King is intending, Dingane will know that it was he, Owen, who warned them and then he and his family will be swept up in the inevitable horror.

  Half a mile from the huge royal kraal and facing the Reverend Owen’s hut is the killing ground, KwaMatiwane. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who have crossed Dingane have been killed and eviscerated there. Random killing appals the Reverend Owen: he doesn’t believe that the view from his home is suitable for a man of the cloth. The basics of Christianity have not taken hold here, and Owen wonders if they ever will. He is certainly not going to wait to find out. Since he was allowed to deliver his only sermon, Owen has not made a single convert. Now he is faced with an appallingly stark dilemma; if he warns the Boers, he and his household will almost certainly be killed; if he doesn’t, the Boers will be killed. It is an ethical dilemma of the sort that professional philosophers like to wrestle with. Owen has searched his Bible for a precedent he can follow, and failed.

  The question is stark: are the lives of his family more valuable than the lives of a hundred Boers and another hundred women, children and servants?

  Owen is wracked.

  Dingane receives Retief and invites him and his men to a ceremony in the kraal in a few days, to thank him for the return of the cattle. To celebrate, Retief’s men gallop around on their horses firing their guns, perhaps showing off their power, unless it is nothing more than an ill-judged celebration of the return of the cattle. There is a delay; William hears whispers that Dingane is summoning his regiments from outlying villages. Two days later Retief and his men are asked to come to the kraal, and to leave their guns outside: it would not be appropriate to bear arms at a celebration in the presence of the King. The guns are stacked at the entrance of the kraal. The Boers are seated in the vast open space at the centre of the kraal, the isibaya esikhulu. There will be feasting and three traditional dances from Dingane’s warriors. Dingane has seated Retief near him. The warriors are armed only with their short knobkerries, isagilai, which are something like a shillelagh and are used for ceremonial dances. The Boers look on, amused, but perhaps also with rising apprehension, as the Zulus stamp and leap and shout and advance ever closer to the Boers, so that the earth beneath them seems to shudder. Suddenly, on a signal from Dingane, more than a thousand warriors of the amabutho, the King’s own regiments, stream into the kraal. Dingane stands up: ‘Bulalani abathakathi,’ he calls out – ‘Kill the wizards’. The warriors surround the seventy or eighty Boers, and club them with their sticks. One of these is Cornelis Retief, aged thirteen, who is now never to meet William Wood. Some of the Boers fight back with pocket knives, killing three or four Zulus, but they are soon overwhelmed. The warriors drag the Boers eight hundred yards from the royal kraal to KwaMatiwane, the place of killing, where the warriors finish off the living with their clubs. Zulu oral accounts relate that Retief was the last to be killed, so that he would be obliged to watch the agony of the massacre. I sometimes think of young Cornelis and I try to imagine how his father felt watching his son’s death. I am related to Cornelis too.

  Piet’s heart is removed and taken to Dingane before being buried under the path leading to the kraal, a practice designed to keep the spirits of the dead at bay. The warriors jog some distance on towards the camp where the women, children and servants are waiting for the men to return; they are helpless as they hear the impis coming closer. The noise made by a Zulu impi running to battle is terrifying and said to be like the sound of waves on a beach. It is produced by the agitation of the porcupine-quill anklets all the warriors wear. The women, children and servants are killed. In all, one hundred and fifty Boers and their retainers die. The bodies of the women and children and servants too are dragged to the hill, KwaMatiwane, the place of killing, and left there for the lions and the hyenas and the smaller scavengers like jackals and bat-eared foxes and, in the daytime, vultures.

  The Reverend Francis Owen and his household, including William Wood, watch in horror and fear. William has not told Owen that he has spoken to two of the Boers and warned them of the danger they are in. He has been unable to keep the secret. The men chose not to believe his warning; Dingane, they said, was a fine fellow.

  Two years later William described the massacre in a written account. His father was on the expedition sent a few months after the massacre to punish Dingane. This expedition was routed and William’s father was one of those killed. William records his father’s death in a very matter-of-fact way. There is no eulogy and no expression of emotion. I wonder if he was traumatised. I think of my daughter and her troubled mind.

  The vultures and the hyenas are busy on the killing fields for many days. At night the hyenas squabble over the bodies, whooping and screaming in their disturbed fashion. Lions also arrive to feast on the bodies. As dawn breaks, the male lions roar in turn, a sound that indicates that they are going to lie up in the shade, sated. Their roars broadcast a threat to interlopers, a threat which carries right up to the slopes of the high mountains. With daylight, the vultures – great hooded birds – circle once more before falling clumsily on the remains of the Boers, ripping and tearing at the flesh with their huge beaks, which are shaped like bill-hooks.

  Soon after the massacre, Dingane spoke to Richard Hulley, a trader and translator: ‘I see that every white man is an enemy to the black, and every black man an enemy to the white. They do not love each other and never will.’

  In his last meeting with Owen, Dingane asked the very nervous missionary, ‘Do you not see that I have done a good thing in killing my enemies in one stroke?’

  Soon, Owen and his household are given permission to leave uMgungundlovu, although William waits some days, feigning nonchalance in case the King should think he is in an unseemly hurry to get away to Port Natal.

  Owen admits in his diary that he went along with the King:

  Two of the Boers paid me a visit this morning, and breakfasted, only two hours before they were called into another world. When I asked them what they thought of Dingaan, they said, ‘He was good,’ so unsuspicious were they of his intentions. To Dingaan’s message this morning I sent as guarded a reply as I could; knowing that it would be both foolish and dangerous to accuse him, at such a season, of perfidy and cruelty. However, as his message to me was kind and well-intended, showing a regard to my feelings, as well as to my safety, I judged it prudent and proper to thank him for it.

  Later Hulley wrote:

  It appears clear from Mr Owen’s evidence that, rightly or wrongly, Dingaan thought the Boers intended to kill him, and that he meant to anticipate their plot by killing them.

  Owen wrote up his every day’s happenings. But what does n
ot appear in his diary is any guilt for dooming the Boers to be ‘called to another world’.

  It is clear to me that Dingane believed that the piece of paper he had signed two days before the massacre was a ruse to steal his land. Under Zulu custom, the land belongs for ever to God and not even a king has the right to give it to others. When I read that Dingane shouted to his waiting warriors, ‘Bulalani abathakathi’ – ‘Kill the wizards’ – I wondered what, exactly, he meant. I remembered from my first – and only – year at Oxford that Wittgenstein said, ‘Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings.’ And I discovered that the term ‘abathakathi’ indicates not sorcerers or wizards in general, but those whose intentions are always malign. I have learned that there are terms in Zulu for black and white wizards, a concept similar to white and black witches in Europe. In fact I remembered a painting by Cranach the Elder that depicts witches on horseback. So Dingane’s sight of galloping horsemen firing guns, led by Piet Retief, may have suggested frightening supernatural powers.

  Retief – cloaked in righteousness, blessed by God, free of his creditors – had undoubtedly arrived in this land in order to take it. And despite the fact that he was still just about living on the cusp of prehistory, Dingane understood what was in store for his people. His conversation with Hulley confirms it, and the subsequent history of South Africa bears witness to the fact that whites seldom observed the treaties they had made.

  In December Dingane sent his warriors against another group of trekkers, who were led by Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius. Dingane’s warriors attacked the circle of wagons on the banks of what came to be called Blood River. It is said that, without a single Boer being killed, three thousand Zulus died that day. The Boers saw it as a sign from God that they had his approval for their biblical journey into the wilderness. And I think it established the idea of necessary violence that the Boers adopted wherever they went.

  On 29 January 1840, a combined force of disaffected warriors and followers of Mpande, Dingane’s half-brother, along with English irregulars from the coast and Pretorius’s Boers, defeated Dingane’s warriors. In a rage, Dingane had his general, Ndlela ka Sompisi, executed. But soon after, the King was driven into the forests, and was assassinated at Hlatikulu. For the Boers, victory was complete, but I wonder at what cost to subsequent history.

  The kingdom of Zululand still exists, but in reality it was finally crushed by the British in the Zulu Wars of 1879. Both sides suffered appalling casualties. Yet the allure of the Zulus as the warrior nation persists.

  One of the most moving plays I have ever seen was the Zulu Macbeth, Umabatha, staged in Johannesburg. When the Zulu warriors bounded onto the huge stage, the audience began to cheer and ululate; it was clear that the actors and the audience understood with a passion that this was also the history of Zulu regicide and violence; Duncan was Dingane. At that time the Zulus were holding out against the first free elections and Johannesburg was tense. I was there as an official observer. There had been a huge explosion near the Town Hall, which killed nine people. I had the sense of being in a war zone, in part thrilling, in part terrifying. At the time it seemed to me to be one of those experiences which change you for ever.

  5

  Notting Hill has a raffish elegance. Bankers have long ago caused property prices to rise way beyond the means of the vast majority. Once it was run down, but now the gleaming stucco houses advertise wealth and entitlement. They are encased in so many coats of white paint that they look like huge chunks carved from an iceberg. I was lucky – I bought here cheaply more than twenty-five years ago. Once again property prices are in the news. London is obsessed with property prices. Are they too high? Is the bubble going to burst? An apartment was sold recently for £140 million. Earlier inhabitants think that Notting Hill has been ruined.

  Winter has come. I am off to Cape Town where I was born. Every year as the northern winter arrives, I leave for my house on the sea. It takes ten minutes to walk from my front door to the Underground, past the old Coronet Cinema, where I spent hours out of the cold when I first came to London. Down here, on the Central Line, deep under London, maverick blasts of warm air reach us. I look at my fellow travellers and make a sort of assessment, as though I am mandated to make these judgements: are there more Chinese than usual? Are there many more Eastern Europeans? Are those men with the sticky-up haircuts hedge-fund boys heading for the City? Are these men in cheap tracksuits asylum seekers? Is this worried man, leafing backwards and forwards in a dog-eared book, perhaps looking desperately for inspiration, a novelist? I see no theme today: there is just resignation in dulled eyes. The passengers are subdued: depression hangs over them as if they were Iceland, to misquote. Beneath the skin around their noses and on their eyelids, I see a chafed redness emerging determinedly. It is like a pentimento, the earlier pigments fading, to expose what is underneath. Today the summer pigment is fading, to reveal the faces of winter.

  A woman of about forty-five years old is holding a compact and using a brush on her eyelids. She has to peer out of one eye as she works on the other; she cocks her head and moistens her mouth; unsatisfied, she touches up her lashes with a second, stronger, application of eyeshadow. Time and again she looks at herself in the mirror, improving her work. Now she is applying some glittery material, perhaps mascara, to her brown smoky eyelids with a brush. I feel for her; she seems to be very anxious, as if she is going for a job interview. Or she may be trying to look young and alluring. In its small scale, it contains a tragedy. My ex-wife – how welcome the ‘ex’ is – would have said I was patronising, but I know that women have a more difficult path through life than men. Childbirth is profoundly important for women and it endows them with arcane knowledge, not accessible to men.

  I admire the English and I believe I almost understand them. I have a few paintings, among them an Ivon Hitchens and a Paul Nash. I like to think that I haven’t bought them for any reason other than because they speak to me of their Englishness. I have tried to surround myself with beauty, and sometimes I think that it is the only important thing that money has given me.

  In South Africa my family had two numinous paintings by the Afrikaner painter, Hendrik Pierneef, which celebrated the Boers and their remote farms. These paintings contained a message for the Afrikaners of divine blessing in their search for a new Eden among the heathens. My father said the paintings were ‘of their time’. In those days quite a lot of things were excused by this phrase.

  The economy has improved, but people complain about the cost of living. When I arrived in London in 1982 I had nothing. Now I am fairly wealthy; I have the house in Notting Hill, a farmhouse in the New Forest, where I am the friend of New Forest ponies, deer and many types of bird; I know where to find the secret hiding places of chanterelles and parasol mushrooms. Also, I have the beach house a few miles south of Cape Town, a house that is inspired by Martha’s Vineyard: it is pale blue and white with a broad, bleached deck overlooking the sea and a garden that tumbles down the hill.

  I am going to pick up the Mercedes, which has been serviced, and then I will drive down to the New Forest to lock up for the winter before I fly to Cape Town where we will meet Lucinda, my daughter. Nellie, my lover, is coming too, possibly with her son, Bertil.

  I emerge from the Underground at Marble Arch and I walk down Park Lane. According to the London Mail this is now the bridgehead for Romanian gypsies whose presence has been exercising the editor. According to her, Hyde Park will soon be a gypsy encampment, with barefoot urchins gathering unspeakable bits of meat from bins outside restaurants, to be boiled for hours on fires fuelled by chopping down the ancient oaks of Hyde Park at night – the oak, England’s symbolic tree, for God’s sake. Bulldogs, oak trees, bobbies, all on the way out as symbols, along with standard English. At the moment I can count just four people who could be Romanians, no doubt the advance party, the pathfinders, for the masses to come.

  It is true of al
l great cities that they have many faces. Most of the time I love London immoderately, but when the afternoons darken and close, I feel a claustrophobic depression descending on me. Today the sky is clear and still, so still that Hyde Park is frozen in a landscape painting – a day, an hour, a moment preserved. The grasslands are coated in frost. I can see horses cantering reluctantly on the bridleway. I know horses. Livery horses move wearily because they are bored with the endless circuits; they live without the possibility of novelty. The English feel they have a special bond with horses; more upper-class women are killed falling off a horse than in any other causes, including road crashes and drug abuse. I love horses for their decency.

  The Christmas lights on the trees and on the grand buildings of Park Lane are struggling to be seen, so clear and low and adamantine is the afternoon light. Anything is possible today, I think.

  I speak to Nellie from the car. She is already there, busy in the house. She asks me if I am happy. She always asks me this question and it always warms me. There is ease and tranquillity between us, something I have not experienced before. I say yes, thanks to you, I am happy, even ecstatic, although at the moment my happiness has a persistent undertow of anxiety: my daughter has been discharged from rehab in California and is coming to Cape Town to stay with us. Her drug-taking, I am convinced, was a reaction to my break-up with my wife. Maybe all broken marriages cause cracks to open in the self-esteem, and even in the souls, of children. The pain my ex-wife and I caused our daughter will be on my conscience until the day I die.