The Covenant Part 25

In the days that followed, Sotopo became aware that another resident of the valley was taking an unusual interest in his brother's progress; it was Xuma, the attractive girl who lived in the kraal at the far end of the valley. She was fifteen, a year older than Sotopo, with a smiling face, supple lips, and an acc.u.mulation of ear bangles, beads and ankle charms that made her approach a musical interlude. Sotopo had known Xuma all his life and liked her better than any other girl, even though she was older than he and in some ways stronger, and it pleased him that this lively girl, above all others, had focused her attention on Mandiso.

'How do they say, about the lodge?' she asked as she came easily down the path to Sotopo's kraal.

'They say well. He's strong, Xuma.'

'I know.'

It was permissible, in Xhosa custom, for boys who were not yet men to play at night with girls past p.u.b.erty, always mindful that there must not be any babies, and Sotopo was aware that Xuma had begun to go into the veld with his brother, even spending nights with him, so he was not surprised that she should now be inquiring after him, and he was pleased. Because he loved his brother, and cherished the long exploring trip they had taken together, he looked forward to the day when Mandiso would be chief of the clan and he the a.s.sistant.

His family lived in a collection of huts, seven of them, scattered about the kraal in which the cattle were kept. They were dome-shaped, formed by rows of saplings implanted in a circular pattern, bent inward and bound together, then thickly thatched. The huts were handsome of themselves, and when seen against the rolling hills, formed pleasing patterns.

Xuma, honored to become part of this family, volunteered to help collect thatch for replenishing the huts, and often she went down to the river with her sh.e.l.l knife to cut rushes. Sotopo went with her, to help carry the large, but light, bundles homeward, and on one trip Xuma confided that her father had fallen into trouble with the witch doctor and had been forced to pay him excessive gifts.

'That's troublesome,' Sotopo said, not revealing that he, too, had had a minor confrontation with the powerful diviner.

'I don't know what Father did that was wrong,' Xuma said. 'He isn't a man who angers anyone easily, but the witch doctor was most angry.'

It was like that among the Xhosa. As a nation, the tribes were a gentle people, eschewing vast armies for war against their neighbors, but there were clashes with the Hottentots. Some of the conquered little people allied themselves with the Xhosa, intermarrying and occasionally even attaining power within the hierarchy. This interaction with the Hottentots continued through many centuries, and one of the lasting legacies was a unique language: from the Hottentots, the Xhosa borrowed the click sounds, and these distinguished their speech from that of the other southern black tribes.

Although they did not war on the grand scale, no Xhosa warrior ever hesitated to s.n.a.t.c.h up his a.s.segais if his cattle had to be defended, or if he saw a good chance to capture his neighbor's. Cattle raiding was the national pastime; success conferred distinction, for cattle were in many ways more important than babies. Everything depended upon them: a man's reputation derived from the number of cattle he held; the kind of bride a young man could aspire to was determined by how many cattle he could bring as lobola to the girl's parents; and the good name of a kraal like Sotopo's sprang almost entirely from the number of cows and oxen and bulls it possessed. The cattle did not have to be good beasts, nor produce copious milk, nor excellent eating meat; there was no merit in having a prepotent bull which threw fine animals. Only numbers counted, which meant that year by year the quality of the great herds deteriorated, with five thousand beasts needed to perform the functions that nine hundred really good animals could have fulfilled.

So although the Xnosa lived without fear of warfare, they lived in dreadful fear of what might happen to their scrawny cattle, and it was the diviner who established and policed the intricate rules for the preservation of the herd. For example, during her entire lifetime no Xhosa woman could ever approach or lay her hand upon the rocks which enclosed the kraal, and if any dared to enter the sacred area, she would be punished. A boy set to tending his family's cattle as they roamed the hills had better come home with every calf, or his punishment would be savage. There was a time to perform every function connected with cattle, a proper way to handle them. No boy dared milk a cow, and for a girl to do so was a grave offense; of course, in special circ.u.mstances, when no adult males were available, a daughter was permitted to milk a cow, but she was forbidden to touch the milk sac itself. Every act of life, it seemed, was circ.u.mscribed by rules, and Xuma's father had broken one of them. He was, as Xuma intimated to Sotopo, in deep trouble.

But this was forgotten as the time approached when the nine manhood-boys in the lodge reached the end of their confinement, and now a sad thing happened: Sotopo, who had been so close to his brother, became aware that henceforth a gulf would exist between them. Sotopo was still a boy; Mandiso was a man, and his allegiance to the eight others who had undergone the ordeal with him would always be much stronger than his friendship for his own brother, who had not, and it was with sorrow that the boy watched the emergence of the man.

The lectures on manhood delivered by the headman and the guardian were now ended. The intricate rituals, the secrets of the tribe had been shared, and the time for burning down the lodge and all its pains was at hand. But first the nine new men must go to the river in sight of the entire community and cleanse themselves of the white clay that had marked them for the past hundred days. In stately procession, naked, with the mark of their circ.u.mcision plain for all to see, the new-men marched to the river, immersed themselves, and spent several hours trying to clean away the adhesive mud. When they emerged, their bodies, long protected from the sun, were lean and pale. Anointed with b.u.t.ter and red-earth, they glimmered in the unaccustomed light; never again in their lives would they appear so manly, so promising of n.o.ble conduct.

Then came the celebration! Dried gourds, their seeds intact, were rattled in fine rhythms. Musical instruments, consisting of a single cord of cured gut tied tight between the ends of a bowed piece of wood, were plucked, the musician keeping one end of the wood between his teeth, and altering the sound by altering the movements of his mouth. Old women held two sticks, beating them together, and young men who had completed their ritual three or four years before dressed themselves in wild costumes of feather, rush and reed, ready to dance till they collapsed in exhaustion.

Before the manhood-boys were free to join the celebration, their guardian lighted a brand, carried it solemnly to the ceremonial lodge and set it ablaze. Now the nine inductees rushed from their place of seclusion for the last time, dressed in gaudy costumes topped by their elongated hats, which they still wore horizontally. Turning their backs to the blazing lodge, they kept their eyes rigidly forward as they walked away, for if they dared look back, evil spirits would doom them.

Free of the lodge, they became like wild men as they joined their exultant families and friends, cavorting without rule and leaping into the air as if to challenge the fire-bird himself. Then slowly order began to take over, the clapping of hands a.s.sumed a stately rhythm, and all a.s.sociated with the ceremony leaned forward to see which new-man among the nine would step forward as spokesman for the group.

It was Mandiso, and at this moment of honor Sotopo gave a cry of joy and nodded to the diviner, who did not nod back.

'Today we are men,' Mandiso said, and with these words he began the great dance of the Xhosa, keeping his feet planted on the ground but gyrating all parts of his body as if each were a separate ent.i.ty. He was especially adroit at sending his belly in one direction, his b.u.t.tocks in another, and at the moment when he did this to perfection, the other eight new-men leaped in the air, tore about the dancing ground and settled into their version of this dance, so that the entire area was filled with wildly twisting bodies, cries, and the rumble of approval.

The feasting lasted two days. At times both the young men and the spectators collapsed in exhaustion, slept in a kind of daze, awakened, drank large draughts of mealie-beer, and with fresh shouting and renewed vigor, resumed the dance. Dust rose from the kraals; soot from the burned shack was scattered joyously; Sotopo, numb with pride because of his brother's outstanding performance, watched the proceedings from the edge of the crowd and observed how carefully Xuma followed the dancers, never partic.i.p.ating herself but applauding quietly whenever Mandiso performed his solos.

When Mandiso returned to the family kraal, the first thing he did was to ask Sotopo's help in laying out the floor for a new hut; it was not as big as his father's, nor would it be as tall; it was a hut for two people, not ten.

'You can attend the ant hills,' the new-man told his brother, and Sotopo was delighted to be given this honor. Taking a large basket, he circulated among some fifteen large ant hills, scooping up excess earth in which the ants had deposited their larvae, dead bodies and bits of their saliva. This fine, granular earth, when spread in a thick layer and watered down and allowed to bake in the sun, formed a substance harder than most stone, and when polished with cow manure, made the best possible base for a hut. Sotopo, guessing that he was building for Xuma, made a floor that would last a generation.

The young women of the family had to gather the saplings for the walls, but when it came to the thatching, that all-important part, Old Grandmother herself wanted to go down to the fields and cut the gra.s.s, and although she was too weak to gather all that would be required, she did deliver the first bundles and then stood noisily directing the design of the lovely, rounded finish.

It was a jewel of a hut, and now Mandiso was eligible to visit Xuma's parents, but on the eve of doing so, the most disturbing word reached Sotopo via one of his playmates: 'A sorcerer has placed a curse on Xuma's father.' This could be such a fatal impediment to any union of the two families that Sotopo borrowed two of his brother's best a.s.segais and a goat and went directly to the witch doctor, hailing him from a distance: 'All-powerful One! May I approach?'

'Come' echoed the mournful voice.

'I seek counsel.'

'I see that this time you bring only two a.s.segais.' 'But they are better, All-powerful.' 'And a cow?'

'The boy is holding a goat outside.'

'What is the question?'

'Will my brother marry Xuma?'

There was a long silence, perhaps five minutes, during which the old man carefully weighed the complex problems raised by this inquiry. Sotopo's family was one of the most powerful in the valley and could be expected, in the years to come, to provide both leadership and wealth; it would not be wise to affront them. But on the other hand, Xuma's family had long been troublesome and there was good cause to believe that the last flight of the fire-bird had been evoked by malperformances on the father's part. Twice the witch doctor had warned the man, and twice the injunctions had been ignored. Now he was under a curse, and it seemed highly improbable that he would ever be allowed to escape from it, for it was the duty of a diviner to police the health of his clan, to remove all forces that might work against central authority, and Xuma's father was an irritation.

But what to say about this proposed marriage? And the more the old man pondered this difficult question, the angrier he became at this boy Sotopo who had raised it. Why had he dared to come with such an impertinent question? Why had he stepped forth as champion of the girl Xuma, which was clearly his intention in this affair? d.a.m.n him. Sotopo, son of Makubele, a boy to be marked for remembrance.

The old man temporized: 'I suppose that Xuma herself has had no part in her father's misbehavior. I suppose a marriage could go forward.'

'Oh, thank you!' Sotopo cried, but after he had surrendered the two a.s.segais and the goat and had gone running down the footpath, the diviner stared after him, mumbling, 'Two a.s.segais, not three. A goat, and not one of the best. d.a.m.n that boy!'

The wedding ceremonies covered eleven days, and in certain respects they were a triumph for Mandiso, since he got himself a strong, beautiful and darling wife; but in another way they were a disaster, for through her he acquired the enmity of the diviner. As to the wedding itself; there was a good deal of marching back and forth between Mandiso's kraal and Xuma's: he had to take a heifer there as proof of his good intentions; she had to bring rushes here as an indication of her willingness to work; he had to go there in his finest ornaments to dance before her family and break two saplings across his knee, thus pledging that he would never beat his wife; she had to come and dance before his cattle kraal to show that she revered the cows and would show them the respect they merited. And through it all, the old witch doctor watched sardonically, aware that no matter what rituals they observed, nothing good could come of this marriage. It was doomed.

But he did not interfere, and even officiated in certain of the hallowed rites, going so far as to protect the new hut against evil. He did this for good reason: he suspected that within a year Mandiso and Xuma would flee the place, after which he could see that one of his nephews gained possession.

To that end, as soon as the young couple moved into the handsome hut, he began asking questions through the community, never directing them at Mandiso, but always at Xuma's father: 'Who do you think it was that caused the fire-bird to fly?' and 'Have you noticed how the mealies at his kraal have grown bigger than any others? Could he be casting spells?'

Week after week these poisonous suspicions were broadcast, never a substantiated charge, only the nagging questions: 'Have you seen how Xuma's cattle become pregnant so quickly? Could her father be weaving a spell there, too?' The a.s.sumption in this question was most effective; that her father was casting a spell over the new hut was problematic, but that he had done so at his own was accepted: 'He's bringing this valley into sore trouble.'

During this time Sotopo was preoccupied with the last days of boyhood. Having seen his older brother through the twin ordeals of circ.u.mcision and marriage, he returned to those things that gave his own life significance. Beyond the family kraal, at the edge of the river, there was a level place where in the morning the wagtails danced, those delicate little gray-brown birds that bobbed their tail feathers up and down as they paraded. They loved insects, and darted their long bills this way and that, plucking them off dead leaves.

They were the good-omen birds, the ones that made a kraal a place of joy, and Sotopo had always found delight in being with them, he on a log, they on some rock at the edge of the river; he sprawled out on the ground, they dancing back and forth oblivious of him, for they seemed to know that they were protected: 'No one but a man near death from frenzy would disturb a wagtail, for they bring us love.'

He also felt increasingly attached to Old Grandmother, as if, like Mandiso, he must soon move away from her influence. He stayed with her about the house, watching as she prepared the dish he liked the most: mealies well pounded in the stump of a tree, then mixed with pumpkin, baked with shreds of antelope meat, and flavored with the herbs which only she knew how to gather.

'Tell me again,' she said as she worked. 'When you ran away from us, you say you met two boys, one brown, one white?' When her grandson nodded, she asked, 'You say one spoke like us? The other didn't? How could that be?'

She had a dozen questions about this meeting; the men in the family had listened to the story, nodded sagely and forgotten the matter, but not Old Grandmother: 'Tell me again, the brown one was small and old, the white one was young and big. That goes against the rule of nature.'

But when he explained, with increasing detail, for he enjoyed talking with the old woman, she told him what he had heard many times before: 'I didn't see it myself, because it happened before I was born. But men like that boy came to our sh.o.r.e once in a house that floated on the waves, but they died like ordinary men.' It was her opinion that what the white-skinned boy had said was probably true: 'I think there are other people hiding across the river. I don't think I'll ever see them, but you will, Sotopo. When you marry and have your own hut and move to the west . . .'

At this point she would always stop what she was doing and ask her grandson, 'Sotopo, who are you going to marry?' And he would blush beneath his dark skin because he had not yet addressed this problem.

But one day he did ask the question whose answer could reveal the dangers that lay ahead: 'Old Grandmother, why do you always say that when I take a wife, we'll move across the river?'

'Ah-hah!' she cackled. 'Now we're ready to talk.' And she sat with him and said, 'Can't you see that the witch doctor is determined to drive Xuma's father out of the valley? And that when he goes, Mandiso will surely go with him? And that when Mandiso and Xuma flee, you'll join them?'

She had uncovered thoughts which had been germinating deep in the boy's mind; he had chosen to stay by himself, away from the others, to communicate with the wagtails and his other friends of river and forest, because he was afraid to face up to the tragedy that he saw developing in the valley, with families quietly turning against Xuma's father, and by extension, against Xuma and Mandiso. He knew instinctively what he had been afraid to voice: that before this year was out he would have to choose whether to stay with his parents, whom he loved, and with Old Grandmother, whom he loved most dearly, or go into exile with Mandiso and Xuma.

His solution for the moment was to draw even closer to his grandmother, for she was the only person who would talk with him; even Mandiso was so occupied with starting a new family that he had little time for his brother.

'Why does the diviner torment us?' he asked the old woman one day. 'He doesn't. No, he doesn't. It's the spirits. It's his job to keep the spirits happy or they'd devastate this valley.'

'But Xuma's father . . .'

'How do we know what he's done? Tell me that, Sotopo! How do we know what evil things a man can do without the rest of us being aware?' 'You think he's guilty?'

'Of what? How should I know. All I know is that if the witch doctor says he's guilty, he's guilty.'

'And Mandiso must go into exile with him, if he leaves?'

'Oh, now!' She thought about this for some time, sucking at her corncob pipe, then said to her grandson, 'I think the time comes for all of us when we should move on. The field is no longer fertile. The neighbors are no longer kindly. For an old woman like me, death comes to solve the problem. For a young person like you, move on.'

Neither of them said another word that day; they had stepped too close to the ultimate realities of life, and it would require weeks of reflection before complete meaning could be known, but in those days of silence Sotopo became aware that all things had deteriorated sadly in the community. Xuma's father had been found one morning in a ditch with a gash on his head. Xuma's cooking pot was shattered when she left it drying in the sun.

So young Sotopo, now approaching sixteen, gathered the two a.s.segais he had made of dark wood and went for the last time to see the diviner. 'Come in,' the old man said.

'Why is Mandiso being punished?'

'You bring me only two a.s.segais? And a calf, perhaps?'

'I have no more cattle, All-powerful One.'

'But you still ask my help.'

'Not for me. For my brother.'

'He is in trouble, Sotopo, deep trouble.'

'But why? He's done nothing.'

'He's a.s.sociated with Xuma, and her father has done much evil.' 'What evil, All-powerful?'

'Evil that the spirits see.' Beyond this fragile explanation the old man would not go, but he allowed his visitor to sense the implacable opposition all good men ought to show against a member of the tribe guilty of evil practices, even though those practices were never identified.

'Can you do nothing to help him?' Sotopo pleaded.

'It isn't him you're worried about, is it?'

'No, it's Mandiso.'

'He shares the guilt.'

'Can he do nothing?' the boy asked.

'No. The evil is upon him.' And no amount of pleading, no amount of future gifts would alleviate this dreadful curse. The community, through the agency of their diviner, had named Xuma's father as a source of contamination, and he must go.

Shortly after this visit he was found beaten to death at the gateway to his kraal, an especially ominous way to die, implying that even the sleek and growing cattle had been powerless to protect him.

That night Mandiso and Xuma came to the big hut, the wife sitting circ.u.mspectly to the left among the women as the fateful discussion began.

'You must leave us,' Old Grandmother said without any show of sorrow. 'But why must I surrender . . .'

'The time has come to go,' she said forcefully. 'Tell him, Makubele.' And the boys' father referred only to his own selfish interests: 'The old one's right. You must go. Otherwise the curse will apply to us all, won't it, Old Grandmother?'

But she refused to allow her own predicament or that of her family to intrude in this matter: 'What is important, Mandiso, is not what will happen to your father, but what will happen to you and Xuma. What do you think your future is now, with her father killed in that manner, at the gateway to his kraal?'

'If there is one sacred place' Mandiso began, but Xuma broke in: 'We must go. And we must go before nightfall tomorrow.'

'Can it really be so!' her husband said, appalled at the implications of what Xuma had said.

'Isn't that true, Old Grandmother?' the girl asked.

'I'd go tonight,' the old woman said. And it was agreed that before the next sun set Mandiso and Xuma would start for the west, to a new settlement, to a new home. They would take cattle, and skin bags of mealies for seed, and other oddmentsbut they must go, for the consensus of their community, arrived at in complex ways, had decreed that they were no longer wanted.

But where did this leave Sotopo, not yet a man but deeply devoted to his brother and his brother's wife? When the family conclave broke up, he remained with his grandmother a long time, discussing his difficult alternatives: remain, with the diviner probably opposed to him; or flee, when he had not yet been ordained a man? He had absolutely no hard evidence that the witch doctor had declared war upon him, but he knew it had happened and that sooner or later the rumors would begin to circulate against him. But he also knew that to face the future without the sanctions of circ.u.mcision entailed dangers too fearful to contemplate. Having watched his brother's joyous entrance into married life, with a girl as admirable as Xuma, he had begun to sense how awful it would be to have the girls of his community categorize him as less-than-man and to be deprived of their companionship.

This was something he could not discuss with his grandmother, so in the dead of night he crept to his brother's kraal and whispered, 'Mandiso! Are you awake?'

'What is it, brother?'

'I shall go with you.'

'Good. We'll need you.'

'But how will I ever become a man?'

Mandiso sat in the dark with his left hand over his mouth, considering this perplexing question, and then, because he felt he must be truthful, he listed the impediments: 'There'd be no guardian to bless the hut. There'd be no other boys to share the experience. We probably couldn't find clay to cover your body. And at the end there'd be no grand celebration.'

'I've thought of that, Mandiso. I've thought of it all, but still I want to stay with you.' And he added, 'With you and Xuma,' for he was not ashamed of his love for his sister-in-law.

'It seems to me,' Mandiso said, 'looking back on everything that happened, that a boy becomes a man with the pain, with the courage. He becomes a man not with the dancing and the food and the cheers of others. He becomes a man within himself, through his own bravery.'

They pondered this for a long time, during which Mandiso hoped that his brother would speak up, would volunteer proof of his courage, but Sotopo was too confused by this necessity to make at age sixteen a decision more difficult than most men make in their entire lives. So finally Mandiso tipped the scales: 'In the woods that time, when we met the two strange men'in his thinking, they were men, now'it was you, Sotopo, who devised the plan for sleeping in the tree. I believe I might have slipped away.'

'Really?' the boy asked, and the possibility that he had been brave, there in the woods, so captivated his mind that he said no more that night. Nor did he sleep. At dawn he was at the river saying farewell to the wagtails. At full-sun he was watching a pair of monstrous hornbills waddling across the fields, and at midmorning he had collected his remaining goats, falling in line behind five of the young men who had shared the ritual circ.u.mcision with Mandiso and who now elected to go with him because of the profound brotherhood they felt. Three girls who hoped to marry with the young exiles trailed along for a short distance, then turned back tearfully, knowing that they must wait till their suitors brought lobola to their fathers.

In this way units of dissidents had always broken off from the main body of the Xhosa. Perhaps the diviners performed a vital function in identifying those potentially fractious individuals who might ultimately cause trouble in the community; at any rate, the diviners served as the agencies of expulsion. For eight hundred years groups like Mandiso's had broken away to form new clans on the cutting edge of expansion. They never moved far; they retained contact with the rest of the tribe; and they still acknowledged a hazy kind of allegiance to the Great Chief, who existed far to the rear but whom they never saw.

This time the wandering unit proceeded to the east bank of the Great Fish River, which they settled upon because of the vast empty grazing fields on the west bank. 'We'll use those fields,' Mandiso told his followers, 'for the cattle that like to roam.'

In this time-honored tradition the Xhosa innocently launched a westward move which would bring them into direct conflict with the Dutch trekboers, who with equal innocence were drifting eastward. These two great tribes were so similar: each loved its cattle; each measured a man's importance by his herds; each sought untrammeled grazing; each knew that any pasturage it saw belonged to it by divine right; and each honored its predikant or diviner. A t.i.tanic confrontation, worse than any storm the fire-bird had ever generated, had become inevitable.

When, in February 1725, Adriaan and Dikkop approached their farm at the conclusion of their wanderings, they faced none of the uncertainties that had perplexed the two Xhosa lads. True, they had been gone almost four months when only three had been intended; but their people knew what they were doing, and the extended absence was no cause for alarm. As Hendrik a.s.sured his wife several times: 'If the lions don't eat them, they'll be back.'

So when they straggled in, with the dust of distant horizons on their eyebrows, no one made much fuss, for Hendrik, too, had been wandering, six weeks to the north to trade for cattle with the Hottentots. He had returned with two hundred fine animals, the largest-ever addition to his herd. He asked Adriaan to ride with him to the easternmost part of the grazing lands, and from a low hill the two Van Doorns looked down approvingly. 'G.o.d has been good to us,' Hendrik said. ' "All the land that is Canaan He has given to us and the generations which will follow you." ' For a long time they sat astride their horses, watching the cattle, and there was joy in their hearts.

The hartebeest hut had been lived in so thoroughly that it could scarcely be distinguished from the one on the previous farm, and on the perimeter of the holding, Hendrik had placed four more cairns, midway between the compa.s.s points. In less than a year the Van Doorns had themselves a stable farm, six thousand acres well marked and so far removed from any neighbor that intrusion of any kind was unlikely for years to come.

The family was deeply interested in Adriaan's report of the two black youths and this proof that a tribe of some magnitude occupied the lands farther east. Again and again the older Van Doorns asked their son to repeat exactly what he had learned during his four-day meeting with the blacks.

'They speak with clicks,' Adriaan said, 'so they must be of the same family as the Hottentots, but Dikkop understood none of their words. They were a strong, really handsome people, but their only weapons were clubs and a.s.segais.'