Andre Brink

Thinking back now, in this luxury hotel with its plush and velvet, blue-grey and gold, its Victorian prints on the walls and – I swear to God – Sir Joshua’s Age of Innocence above my bed, it appears to me, however distant in this setting, that all my life I’ve been surrounded by violence. Not in the way any of my quite long line of pioneer forefathers experienced it, leaving their velskoen tracks through history – the uprising of Graaff Reinet, Border Wars, Great Trek, Boer War, Rebellion, or the Ossewa-Brandwag underground movement of the Second World War. Without exception they were themselves the agents, the doers, and often the victims: men who landed in the Dark Hole of the Castle, who were killed by the spears of Kaffirs or the bullets of Englishmen, or who found their farms raided and their houses burnt, so that every time they had to start again from scratch (which, somehow or other, with the Bible on their hearts, they managed to do). My experience is different. I am surrounded by violence, yet untouched by it myself. Unlike my ancestors on their via dolorosa as Dad liked to call it, I realise only too well that I have always gone scot-free. (With the exception of that one afternoon with Bea.)

Charlie Mofokeng: “Of course I hold you responsible. You and every other White in the country.”
“Now you’re being unreasonable, Charlie. I inherited this situation exactly as you did. Neither of us can be blamed for what our forefathers did.”
“That’s not what I’m blaming you for. What gets me is that history didn’t teach you anything at all.”
“My history provided me with the means to survive in this land!”
“That’s what you think. All your history taught you was to mistrust others. You never learned to share anything or to live with others. If things got difficult you loaded your wagon and trekked away. Otherwise you took aim over the Bible and killed whatever came your way. Out in the open you formed a laager. And when you wanted more land you took it. With or without the pretext of a ‘contract’.”

Charlie and I might have become close friends had we met abroad; as, years ago, I’d known Welcome Nyaluza. That friendship had been made possible not only by the lack of social pressure but mainly by a spontaneous urge attracting us like iron filings in a magnetic field. We had in common a dislike of the English (now shared by Charlie). But it went further than that. If once again I may romanticise a bit, I’d say that in the cold northern hemisphere we managed to preserve, for and through each other, the warm reality of our southern world. So far away from home we were not only bound by the land we shared but also strangely freed from it. Inside us, like chromosomes, lay the memories of acrid shrubs in the Karoo, coarse heather in the mountains, bleeding sunsets and nights filled with stars, of orchards and vineyards and wind-blown mealie-lands, of rocks covered by the lichen of a thousand years, the steel and concrete of modern cities and the dust of villages, of blue lamps in front of police stations and the carefree tunes of pennywhistles, of guinea-fowl clicking in the early morning grass or the delicate tracks of the sandpiper, the smell of buchu and veld fires: together we missed it and recalled it, talking about it for hours on end, often at night as we sat on a kerb drinking cartons of milk from a slot-machine.