Islands: A Novel - Hardcover

Sleigh, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 043620620X ISBN 13: 9780436206207

Publisher: Secker & Warburg, 2004

Synopsis

Islands covers the first half-century or so of Dutch settlement at the Cape, opening with a view from the inside of a Khoi nation, the Goringhaicona, under the leadership of Autshumao, dubbed chief Harry by early English visitors. For the indigenous peoples it is the beginning of the end of a way of life in close interaction with the subcontinent, its seasons and rhythms, its harshness and abundance. It was during Autshumao's time that the first key woman of South Africa's post-colonisation story makes her appearance: she is Autshumao's niece, Krotoa, brought into Commander Van Riebeeck's household as Eva, go-between and interpreter between the Europeans and the Khoi. When she is drawn into the first 'mixed' marriage of the new colony, one of her children is Pieternella, who becomes the pivot of all the action in this unforgettable epic. Each of the sections of the novel is focused on a man involved in one way or another with Pieternella. defined in one way or another by the central female character - the reader is offered an understanding of the vast historical forces at work in the shaping of the world in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Each of these brings a whole new geography, a new dimension of experience, into the novel. Behind these 'little men', who are not allowed any choice by history, loom the ones who apparently take the decisions, the commanders and governors and captains and the still greater, more shadowy, potentates, the Lords Seventeen who are in charge of the Dutch East India Company. For it is the Company that ultimately decides the fate of all the millions ruled by it; it is as inexorable, and as mindlessly cruel, as Nature itself. unpredictable turns and contortions, too rich with lived experience, too staggering in the scale of its adventures - from the unimaginably cruel to the profoundly moving to the outrageously burlesque - to let go for a moment.

About this title

About the Author

Dan Sleigh works as a researcher in the National Archives in Cape Town. Islands is his first novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

THE REMAKING OF CHIEF HARRY

One red dawn, ten or twelve years before the Dutchman started building this place, Autshumao became leader of the Goringhaicona. He walked across the dunes to the sea, as if he’d never known the dead or the living behind him. He was covered in blood, robbed, humiliated, as he walked in the half-dawn from the smouldering stubble of burnt grass beside a vlei, under the bitter smoke of charred matting and cattle hides, followed by five children, five women and two old men. Behind them in the smoking rubble were their dead, ahead of them was the sea. They were leaving with empty hands. There was no mat or pot or digging stick to take, no ox or sheep, no milk-bag or throwing stick or dog.The others, the old men and the women, dragged bodies into a cold ditch and covered them with branches. Because they were scared of abandoning this place, the old people burrowed in ashes and rubble, saying a few words, and later followed Autshumao across the low dunes to the sea. The sea was open, and its openness was a kind of security. But he was the first to leave from there, to get away from where he had lost everything.

On the beach he stopped for the woman who was carrying his sister’s child, and continued with the child on his back. He called her his sister’s child; her name was Krotoa. He owed it to her to carry her; a child should rely on help from her mother’s brother. He took her and carried her, that girl, but he did not ask anyone to go with him. When they came near the sea the child was crying inconsolably, and a woman took her to her dry breast. Autshumao did not take the girl back. Looking over the twelve people he thought of how he’d never asked them to follow him or threatened them to obey him. He hadn’t promised them anything.They had simply followed him and he had become the leader of the Goringhaicona.

There were few of them, and with sea-stuff and food from the veld they could manage for a while. In the hollows among the front dunes, that very day, they chopped harubis with stone, tearing the reeds with nails and teeth, and tied it into mats with rope from rolled grass, and the mats into houses, and set up the houses in a circle among the dunes, surrounded by a kraal of berry-thorn branches.

The thirteen of them, the last of the Goringhaicona, lived apart from the rest of the Koina, between the dunes and the sea, poverty-stricken and mostly ravaged with hunger. The sea gave them its fish and meat, the plain behind the dunes, its meagre wild fruits. Autshumao carried in his heart his longing for cattle and sheep, but he was wary of acquiring cattle. Cattle were clothes and food, and medicine, that was what cattle were, but he had to do without. He was man-alone, it was safer not to own anything. Never again could he put fat and cream on the fire to go up in smoke to Heitsi-Eib’. In order to have peace around him he had to live without Heitsi-Eib’.

At the end of that winter the Goringhaiqua brought their herds of cattle from the Sand Veld to graze in the water pastures along the rivers. Autshumao climbed a hill to check on how many animals his enemies had gained, because without fail so many head of cattle pushed war out ahead of them. From the smoke of his enemies’ transition fires, heavy and reeking with cream and fat, he could smell that they were prospering. It was good to see their mottled white-and-brown cattle standing in the shiny water, and the young herders playing on the grass. Cattle meant power; you could rise up and hit out as you wish, against whomever you wish. He tried to discover his own animals among the strange herds, but couldn’t see them.

Still, at the sea there occasionally was a touch of luck for Autshumao and the Goringhaicona. In a sandy bay near the watering place, white sailors would drag out their boats from time to time. English sailors, their language and their red-striped flag told him.Autshumao received clothes and bread as payment for accepting a letter in safekeeping, and in exchange offered them honey, a tortoise, some ostrich feathers in friendship. Sometimes they were given tobacco. That was why Autshumao chose those low dunes as a place to live, because it was near the watering place and opposite the deep where the ships came to lie. That was the roadstead.

Autshumao and those with him would argue fiercely among themselves about the odds and ends of clothing and ship’s food that came their way, but the brandy was for him only. He had himself rowed on board to eat and drink, and if a turning tide or a change in the wind made it necessary for him to return to shore, he made sure that his hands were empty before he reached his people.Where there is hunger, poverty is generally peaceful.

He was no longer a young man. Once, his stomach filled with bread and brandy, he had been sitting on deck in the winter sun talking to the sailors, and then grew sleepy from the gentle rolling and the hollow booming of the sea against the hull, and on that day the ship London had left with him, off to the Orient. All the skipper said was, ‘Sorry, old chap. Didn’t you notice the weather changing? I have to use this breeze to get off a lee shore. But in a few months’ time I’ll bring you home again.’

It had been a big ship, not as big as some he’d seen under the Dutch flag, but decorated with red and a touch of gold on the transom and along the railings, and around the gallery windows. Below deck two rows of black cannon lay like sleeping dogs behind closed red gates. On that voyage Autshumao had contracted the seamen’s diseases, learned their language, and became Chief Harry.You might hunt him anywhere, Autshumao was no longer there, the ship had carried him to the Orient. Only his heart had turned back early, and went home alone. On that voyage he’d also lost his respect for iron and copper, since it was so cheap and plentiful that the English threw it away. He himself would never accept iron as barter again – his enemies could covet iron, his own time for iron was past. Cattle were money, cattle were food, medicine, beasts of burden, a herd of young hunters, a host of armed warriors. Even Heitsi-Eib’ had to wait.

In the Orient he’d seen, when sometimes the ship had been moored to a quay in a river mouth, how dark men with gowns and long hair would stretch their necks like gannets on a rock to talk up to the ship. Their air was dusty since early morning, their seawater tepid, the food strongly spiced, the stars alien. Thunderclouds would come up every day, and disperse again before dark after heavy rain. Dun-coloured cattle with drooping ears would wander among the people, mainly dried cows and heifers, disconsolate animals without a bull, and lean oxen pulling carts. And there’d be beggars stretching their hands towards him, but because the land folk drove them away from the quay with stones he would shake his head at them. So poverty existed on both sides of the big sea; he was not alone. He’d seen the English trading with the people of the land. Money changed hands, never drink or tobacco.

Behind each quay lay a town, behind each town a green jungle like a wall, behind the jungle there would sometimes be mountain peaks, and behind the mountains the thunder. He stopped looking at it.What was there to see? Those were not the dunes and clumps of reeds of his home. Sometimes shouted threats were exchanged between ship and quay.Then once again the sea.The drinking water was insipid, it caused his stomach to run for days and nights, with blood and pain. He became listless, sitting on deck, smoking and yearning for drink. He felt no inclination to go ashore, but remained restlessly on board, listening to the grinding of the ship against the quay and the anxious creaking of the masts, like old skeletons complaining below ground. Then they would sail on again, and at first there would be sea, blue and deep for days on end, and then there would be land.

Autshumao’s thoughts were with the people he had left behind, with his sister’s child. The world over things were changing. People he had known were dead.Would Gogosoa, the fat murderer, be thinking that from now on his cattle would graze alone in the water pastures? He hadn’t seen yet how the white people’s ships were approaching from all sides, and how they were building stone houses wherever they came ashore. Strange nations would come to live on Gogosoa’s grazing; it was their children who would occupy his land. He could see that in future times it might be better for the Koina to remain friends with the whites, at first to help tend the enemy’s animals and children. Better that way, because the white man would rule and his livestock would fill these parts, from the Cape all the way up the coast as far as the Cochoqua, the Grigriqua, and, in the opposite direction, over the mountain towards the sun: the Chainouqua, the Hessequa and the Attaqua, and across the green hills to the Gouri and the Inqua of the forest. Everywhere the white man’s livestock would be grazing. For the favour of keeping a few cattle of their own, and a chance to build up their strength, the Koina had to keep the peace with them. That way it would be better for the Koina, who had to greet the new rulers without guns and horses.

Such were Autshumao’s thoughts, even before a single Hollander had stuck a spade into Cape soil. Only, he was expecting that it would be the English who would be doing it, not the Dutch; for the ships of the English were criss-crossing the seas, they would meet each other by appointment, at places in the middle of the ocean where there was no sign of which one could say: At such-and-such a place we shall meet on such-and-such a day. And he could hear the English talking about the food and water and firewood of the Cape:‘My dear fellow, a simple takeover. No trouble at all.’ One simply pushed away the stinkers, and took over land, water, trees and grass. ‘The natives are harmless. Like children, really.’

The colour of the sea turned green again. Autshumao, Chief Harry, spent the last days of his months at sea through the steaming tropics on his back, his body pressed against the gunwale so that the sailors wouldn’t step on him, and his face turned away from the gaping hatch in the deck.When he opened his eyes he could see red paint on English oak; when he closed them, there was his niece, and behind her a pale yellow mat of thin reeds in the curve of a harubis house. In his long dream, going on for days and nights, he could smell dry reeds, and cold ashes among the stones, and cow dung.

At night, like most sailors in the tropics, he remained on deck, until near the end of their journey the evening air turned cool and dew was shimmering on the deck and rigging in the false dawn. At night the golden stars hung in a dense weave over them. The thin black fingers of the masts were probing tentatively among them, moved them from one spot to the next, gathering golden stars from the deep blue night, removing others, shifting, shifting, until one night the new sky was complete. He gazed in wonder at the frothing Milky Way. For the first time he knew without any doubt where he was, in which season of the year – that was how far the moon had already wandered across the sky – and which wild fruits would be ripe by now, and how green the pastures, and where the Koina’s camps and flocks would be by this time.

The sailors of the watch looked how Chief Harry got up from under his blanket, and clambered up the shrouds until he found a foothold in the crosstrees of the mainmast. Below him the ship went on digging its face into the flickering water before swinging it out and up like a drinking bull, but Chief Harry climbed higher up the rigging, until he could step on to the maintop yard.With his arms around the mast and his face to the night wind he examined the darkness ahead. He could see nothing but the teeming stars and the slight flickering of phosphorescence far in front of the bows, hear nothing but the groaning of wood and the creaking of new cordage stretching across blocks, and the hissing and churning of seawater along the length of the ship, smell nothing but a cool sea wind reeking of tar and linseed oil as it swept across the deck.With a sigh he recognised in the shimmering field of stars the southern cross, only half risen above the horizon, and he knew for sure that the Cape dunes stretched fresh and fragrant with herbs and shrubs ahead in the glittering night. Heitse!

When he arrived home, there was nothing to be slaughtered. Some of his women had left of their own free will to go to the Goringhaiqua. The two old men were dead, or had been left somewhere for dead, but other old people had joined the group, men and women who had grown thin after the loss of their close relatives. He told them that his new name was Chief Harry, but they wouldn’t believe him. For all his stories, about people riding on elephants, and all his English, he might just as well have said, Listen, an earwig crawled into my head while I was asleep, and I’m seeing and speaking crazy things before I die. So they didn’t ask him any questions. It wasn’t necessary.

His sister’s child was scared of him, and the deaf woman who looked after her kept the child away from him. It annoyed him and he brought the child sweet things, but they made her ill and the deaf woman loudly blamed him. He also started talking about moving camp, and pulled up sticks and rolled up mats until the others did the same, and then he would move a hundred yards this way or that way and plant his sticks in the ground again. The old men and the women patiently followed him over those little distances. He knew they would get up and go when he asked.

Their meagre food was gathered from icy rock pools at low tide. Sometimes there was a seal on the beach, dead for days, covered with sand lice and deeply corroded by crabs and gulls. But in his camp Chief Harry spoke of cattle and saw in their faces the yearning appear for sour milk, butter, meat, and the dark, heavy smoke for Heitsi-Eib’. He spoke of sheep until their eyes shone with expectation, and of cattle: the hides for shoes and caps, a skin-bag, the tuft of the tail for a flyswitch. Blood, pots filled with blood, he mentioned. By the nodding of his handful of indigents Chief Harry knew that he had won their hearts. Memories of good times invariably revolved round cattle: young heifers, cows with huge udders, or a black bull with a heavy chest and narrow hips, or thirty, forty red fighting oxen with wide horns like the open pincers of scorpions. Autshumao’s dream caused old people to see their sons and daughters again, remember huts beside shining vleis where they once lived, pots filled with sour milk. Only the deaf woman didn’t hear him, and the two of them stared away together at the endless movement of the sea. They spoke of cattle, but the cattle stayed away; some of his people died in that expectation. Old age and cold moved in among the group. No children were born. Only his sister’s child was left now.

In late summer and late winter, when the seasons changed and the wind came from a different direction, there were ships. Then they would bring their bundles of firewood, or a skin-bag filled with honey, to the watering place and receive ship’s bread and tobacco in exchange. Chief Harry used his English and would be rowed to the ship. Usually there would be a letter. ‘Give it safely to the first Englishman that comes here. I wrote in here that he must pay you.’ But the stingy Dutch hid their letters under rocks and left a message on the rock, and then Chief Harry would remove the letters and personally hand them over to the next Hollander. He had to make a living.

More new ships arrived in the bay, new flags and...

Edition details

• Publisher: Secker & Warburg
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 043620620X
• ISBN 13: 9780436206207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 758