Darkest England (2 page)

Best of all, added Mina, in the new world everyone would be given houses, and in the houses there would be free telephones. No more would the travelling people, the People of the Ashbush, the Trek Folk of the Karoo, suffer at the hands of the Boer. The red dresses of the English soldiers were needed no longer. From now on the wandering beggars would be kings of the Karoo. Therefore it had been decided that I should take possession of the notebooks that Booi had written on his journey through England. I would be returning to that country, would I not? Should I meet him, I could restore the notebooks to him. Or to the Queen, if I preferred.

I said I did not understand about the free phones.

Old Adam gave me a pitying look. He pointed to the stars, blazing beaches of light now, in the black oceans above our heads. People would talk to each other, without wires, through the help of the stars. And there were more stars in the Karoo than anywhere in the world. He hoped the star phones reached England soon.

When I got back to the Hunter's Arms, Clara took one look at my parcel and begged me to leave it outside in the backyard until the ‘ceremony' was over. The ballot boxes were about to be locked away for the night. I stood the parcel on the kitchen step and she advised gloves before I opened it.

I told her about the phones. ‘For crying in a bucket!' Clara said. ‘Don't they know that Lutherburg is on a party line – one line between thirty farms?'

Her beehive had listed to the left, a little like the Leaning
Tower of Pisa. ‘Who will they call on these star phones?' she demanded. ‘Each other?'

We all went into the bar. Although the UN had declined to declare the Hunter's Arms a safe haven, after negotiation it had been decided that while the ballot boxes were being transferred to a place of safety, Jean-Paul would assume a prominent position in the window wearing his cap and his blue waistcoat. Any mad right-wing farmer who thought of shooting up the place would know that the UN had taken the hotel under its auspices.

The ceremony began. Election monitors, members of peace committees and various foreign observers assembled in the street. What Clara called ‘our official UN party' gathered in the bar and watched through the windows, as the officials began transferring the ballot boxes into wheelbarrows, to be transported to the post office, where they were to be solemnly locked up overnight before being taken the next morning under guard to the counting station. When it was discovered that the official sealing-wax had vanished, Clara saved the day by giving the observers – who had begun blaming each other – a bottle of her nail varnish. The ballot boxes were sealed with bright-orange paint called Namaqualand Blush, and the procession of barrows rolled rustily down the street, and everyone clapped. Clara said it made her proud to be South African.

When I returned to the hotel, I found a policeman, with an enormous belly held in check by his gunbelt, on guard outside the kitchen door. He demanded to know if I had left an unattended parcel on the hotel premises. Notebooks, I said. There was blood on the paper, he retorted. I was very lucky it had not been destroyed in a controlled explosion. I would have to wait now – for morning. My parcel had been locked away.

There was enough starlight for me to peer through the barred windows of the post office. The ballot boxes were lined up like soldiers. Beside them, a sort of lesser relation – but sealed in blood, not nail varnish – was the parcel. Waiting for morning.

In the notebooks of David Mungo Booi, long passages in English frequently gave way to the vivid, earthy Afrikaans of the Karoo nomads, or ‘Ashbush People', who travel on their donkey carts from farm to farm looking for work. In moments of excitement, Booi sometimes forgets himself and lapses into his mother tongue. He is unusual among the travelling people of the Karoo in speaking any English at all. There seems little doubt that he is largely self-taught and picked up the language in the library of the farmer who adopted him. The circumstances in which this man, ‘the Boer Smith', as Booi calls him, found an orphaned child among the ashes of the fire that claimed the lives of his parents and the other members of his family are poignantly recalled
.

It is from Smith that the young Booi's earliest ideas of England derive. It is always and only of ‘England' that he writes. As if he is quite unaware of Scotland or Wales or Ireland. He never speaks of Britain. Of course, this sort of selective focus on England, to the exclusion of other parts of the United Kingdom, is not unknown, even in Britain today, and may reflect a similar prejudice on Smith's part. However, more likely still, is the possibility that although the old farmer was known to the local Afrikaner families as ‘our Englishman', he had himself never in fact set foot in Britain. If his father or even his grandfather had come originally from Britain, this would have been enough for the locals to regard him as irredeemably ‘English'
.

Booi's first names are revealing. By calling him ‘David Mungo' I suspect Smith was combining the names of two of his heroes: David
Livingstone and Mungo Park – the great explorers of the Dark Continent. By this evocative and effective device he dignified the little orphan boy he found among the ashes of the burnt-out camp
.

As to Booi's true ethnic provenance, it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure. Certainly, he considers himself to be a descendant of the Bushmen or San hunter-gatherers. He talks lovingly of the ‘Red People'; those truly indigenous South Africans
–
the Cape Bushmen. His references to particular religious practices suggest an affinity with the /Xam people who once inhabited the area around what is today Lutherburg and Zwingli. But the /Xam are extinct now. For Booi, however, they linger on in the Trek People to whom he belongs and in whose faces and restless spirits, he maintains, one can detect glimpses of his vanished ancestors. There are times, indeed, when he seems to argue that they never died out at all
.

For a clue to the origins of Booi's prose style, and his subsequent career, we must imagine the sorts of book which the boy might have found in the library of the Englishman, Smith. Mostly, these would have been accounts of travels in Africa, for works by Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley, among others, are frequently referred to in the journals, and Booi draws heavily on the experiences of the great explorers when planning his own expedition. That he had read Livingstone's
Missionary Travels
and Stanley's
In Darkest Africa
as well as the journals of his namesake, Mungo Park, and even Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
is plain. He was not only familiar with these explorers, but he felt that he was following, quite literally, in their footsteps, with the same mixture of courage, faith and at times – it must be said – crusading ignorance
.

(For an explanation of the Khoisan click sounds which occur in the languages of the Bushmen people, and which give ex-Bishop Farebrother so much trouble, the reader is referred to the list given on
page 282
.)

The notebooks of David Mungo Booi are published as they stand, with occasional notes. The travels they document may be dated as having taken place, roughly, in the spring and summer of 1993
.

Christopher Hope
March 1995

The Life and Strange,
Surprising Adventures
of David Mungo Booi
who lived among
the English.

As told in his own
Words and written
down by Himself.

Chapter One

We are a little people. Light. Lone. Lithe. Scattered wide as the wind. Our names tell of our nowhereness: we call our children
Stukkie Ding
– ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing', or ‘Little Nothing', and ‘Missing'. And we lose our children often. Sometimes to the flu. Sometimes to the farmer, who locks them away in the schoolhouse when they would be more useful to the family by tending the trek donkeys or fetching kindling. Sometimes we lose them to the campfire. (But in the end, as all know, everything falls in the fire.) Some call us Ashbush People, or Trek Folk, or Nomads, or Nowhere Men. Some call us nothing at all but ‘Who goes there?' and ‘Away with you!'

Once there were other names, names the visitors gave us. Visitors, black and white, who came to our country. And stayed.

These early visitors rose from the sea, crept up the beaches like waves and, looking into our slanting eyes, pronounced us to be ‘Chinese Hottentots'. The longer the
visitors stayed, the more names they gave us: we became ‘Egyptian gypsies', or ‘wild' Bushmen, as well as vagabonds, foxes, vermin, devils. The visitors stayed to steal our country. They were brave with their horses and guns. But they cried out in terror in their dreams – forced to sleep under the stars, sweating in the open air, fearing our attacks. Any part of the body even grazed by our arrows must be sliced off. Or it died. For our sweet, slow poisons never failed. Driven from our fountains, robbed of our honey, we took their cattle and ran for the hills. Then our enemies hunted us down like rock-rabbits. Crushed us like fleas in an old blanket. Until we were next to nothing at all. Reduced to scraps. Missing.

Or so our foolish visitors liked to imagine. But does the springbuck die when the knife slits its throat and blood pours down? Does its spirit not enter the hunter? Just so have our souls entered the visitors: yellow and brown and black and white. And mingled. So that today when you look into the faces of Baster and Boer, black and white, farmer and mayor and shepherd – ours are the faces looking out at you. We went away – but we did not travel far.

Before the visitors came was our First Best Time. Long behind us now. No roads, and no fences. No police vans, patrolling like yellow cobras, to catch people carrying meat or firewood. We followed giant herds of springbuck, spreading as far as the horizon; the land was fat and all the fountains flowing, loved by the she-rain falling softly from heaven. In our First Best Time we roamed as wide as the wind.

Then came the Boers in their wagons and hunted us, stole our honey and our children. We cried and the god !Kwha heard our cries. For one day there came tall soldiers in red frocks, from across the ocean, servants of the Sovereign
of all the English, she who was called the ‘Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair'. These were our Redneck years. When the Red Frocks kicked the arses of the Boer all the way from the Snow Mountains to Murderer's Karoo. That was our Second Best Time.

The Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair long ago passed into the veld where a thousand eland run each day into the hunters' arrows and the wine goes around in bags as big as the rhino's gut. But her going brought her son in her place. (So it is among the English.) And then his son, good King George, who came to see us, to thank us for fighting in his wars, and renewed his promise to kick the Boer to hell and gone whenever we should ask. Our people showed him the old Queen's Great Promise. And the king said to them, ‘Yes, that is great-granny's sign. Believe you me!' So they put the paper back in its hiding place until the day when they would send a messenger to the Queen of England to remind her of her Promise. Believe you me!

Almost alone among the People of the Road, People of the Eland, Men of Men, I can read books. And I can speak the Redneck language. Almost alone among the nomads of the Karoo, I had the luck as a baby to be saved by a kind man, the Boer named Smith. In the white light before dawn he found me crying among the smouldering ruins of my parents' camp. The fire beside which my family slept had fed itself so fat upon the paraffin with which they watered the flames that it got up and devoured their wooden night shelter, as well as the wiry screen of ashbush that keeps the bitter wind at bay, as well as the family within, father, mother, brothers, sisters. Ashbush is our friend; ashbush is the only roadside plant the wandering people may
gather freely. If the ashbush wanderers take anything else along the way, then the police in the cobra-yellow vans will throw them into jail. So we gather ashbush, and sometimes it warms us, and sometimes it burns us.

All my family burned, even the blanket under which we slept, the cart which was our house and on which kettles and whips and bottles were lashed for the daily trek across the endless Karoo flats, from Lutherburg to Zwingli, from Eros to Compromise, from Mouton Fountain to Abraham's Grave. Even the blackened kettle burned to a blacker nothing in the hungry fire. And the donkeys stampeded far into the veld and were never found again.

The Boer Smith was the only Englishman for two hundred miles. ‘Our Redneck', the Boers of the Karoo called him, as if he was their pet. Maybe that's why he saved me. Because a pet needs a pet. He told his grandfather's stories of the wild Bushmen of the Karoo. Who lived and loved like the animals. Who were impossible to tame. Unless you caught your baby Bushman young. Barbarian monkey men who used a poison on their arrowheads for which there was no cure. But he had caught me young: so I became his ‘tame Bushman'.

My master had a fondness for apricot brandy which sometimes drove him into horrible unhappiness. ‘Kissing the Devil', he called it and there were times when the Devil made him very angry. At no other time did he beat me. It was all very well, said he, while I was young, to answer to the name ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing'. But it would not do later when strangers wished to know what to call me, and to know that I was a man and not a monkey.

Because he was generous, he gave me no fewer than three names, the first two being what he called ‘good English names'. The last was a name that many people in these plains have come to use. He was sure no one would
say I'd stolen it. No more was I to be known as a ‘Scrap-of-a-Thing'; now I was called David Mungo Booi.
¹

From his old, rich books he taught me to say my letters, and told wonderful stories of horrible darkness and violent death, heathen tribes and disgusting savagery, as related by the great English explorers on their travels through darkest Africa from Bushmanland to Stanleypool, from Bonga's country to the Mountains of the Moon.