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had been something natural about it. Our village barber had also
been the undertaker: and often it happened, when one arrived for a
haircut, that his shop would be empty then the accepted thing to
do would be to go through to the backyard surrounded by a tall, red,
corrugated iron fence, a real scrapyard filled with the wrecks of old
cars, a decaying lathe, jacks, piles of firewood, tarred beams, sheets
of iron and rolls of wire. Chickens. And wild birds. Oom Koot had
the most remarkable collection of birds I d ever seen, and when one
arrived in the backyard all those hundreds of birds would be singing
their little heads off and hens would be cackling behind the pepper
trees in which cicadas were shrilling uninterruptedly. From the row
of tumbledown iron garages one would hear the sound of hammer-
ing. That was where one invariably found Oom Koot in his black
trousers and waistcoat and greasy dotted tie with a gold pin, the top
buttons of his shirt undone. One had to pick one s way through the
rows of coffins the expensive black ones with silver handles, sim-
pler brown or stained ones, and the cheap pine ones for Blacks. The
corpse would be laid out on a trestle table, and there Oom Koot
would be working, whistling or humming like a truly happy man.
Come for a haircut? I ll be with you in a moment. Just hand me
that hammer. No, over there, beside Uncle Dirk s left hand. He
always referred to the dead as if they were still alive; sometimes,
working on a corpse, he would address them directly and carry on
long one-sided conversations with them.
Usually I stood on the threshold waiting for him to finish and to
put on the white dustcoat he wore for cutting hair. What held me
spellbound was not Oom Koot s fascinating activities but the
collection of pinups on his iron walls, among the coffins and the
tools of his macabre trade. There was no titillating literature
available in our village in those days (the hours it took to find a
picture even remotely sexy in one of the agricultural magazines or in
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A NDRÉ B RI NK
Ma s Femina, to stimulate one s pubescent fantasies! a glimpse of
anything above the knee was enough to raise a hard-on, a bare
midriff was paradise; the mere sight of bra or panties almost
unthinkable): my only contact with that world of forbidden delight
was Oom Koot s garage those cuttings from old calendars or
imported magazines brightening up the unsightliness of his walls
among the stacked coffins.
And when I found myself standing beside Dad s coffin that day,
so many years later, the night with Bea fitted curiously into the whole
situation, taking the place, as it were, of those pictures of my boyhood.
The memory didn t bring Dad any closer where I sat on a stone
beside his grave. The distance between him and me remained
unbridged. If I couldn t even reach out to touch the man who d been
my father, what about all those others who had preceded him? I had
to make the effort. I had to make sure, I suppose, what I was really
giving up in abandoning the farm which had been ours.
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4
HE FOUNDER OF OUR TRIBE, Marthinus Wilhelmus Mynhardt
by name, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1732 as a
Tstandard-bearer in the employ of the Dutch East India
Company. A restless spirit, no doubt, for within a year he deserted
from the service of the company and, leaving behind him his young
pregnant bride, joined an inland expedition in search of Monomotapa,
that fabled ancient kingdom of gold somewhere in the heart of
Africa. We have no record of his death: he simply disappeared.
Perhaps he found his golden city. More likely not. What matters is
that he rooted our tribe in the land. And, I suppose, that he left us
the substance of his dream.
His only son, Marthinus, became the Nimrod of our race, a man
who stood nearly seven feet tall and lived to the age of ninety. In his
youth Cape Town was a wild and merry place, the little Paris of
the vast commercial empire, drifting towards bankruptcy while the
burghers enjoyed every moment of it. Marthinus, however, had no
taste for town life. Eloping with what was reputed to be the prettiest
girl at the Cape, he moved to a frontier district and became a stock
farmer, which meant that he had to spend his life trekking this way
and that, his wanderings determined by available pasture, the
onslaught of Bushmen or predators, and rumors of rain which lured
him inland as surely as Monomotapa had done with his father.
A NDRÉ B RI NK
As an old man, after the death of his wife, he returned to the Cape
with his twelve or thirteen children. But he soon ran into trouble with
the new British authorities of the colony and went off on his own
again to measure off a vast farm in the barren North-Western region
of Namaqualand. The image I have of him is of a deaf and nearly blind
old giant sitting in front of his wattle-and-daub cottage, an open Bible
on his knees, a mere speck on the endless plains. And at regular
intervals he would grope for his gun, and blindly take aim, and pull
the trigger, just in case anybody was approaching from the horizon.
After the shot, when the chickens and goats had settled down again,
everything would once more become deadly quiet, except for the
shrilling of the cicadas and, in the kitchen, the gentle bustling of the
solitary slave woman who kept house for him.
In the meantime, his two oldest sons had moved to Graaff-
Reinet to stake out farms in Bruintjieshoogte, the most turbulent
part of the frontier district. The elder brother was soon killed in an
expedition against the Bushmen. The second, Wilhelm, married a
cousin of the Van Jaarsveld who later became the noted rebel leader.
A feature of the wedding was that invitations were addressed, not to
Mr. or Mrs. or Miss So-and-So, but to citoyen or citoyenne:
incredible, the way in which germs of the French Revolution had
spread to that outpost of the civilized world. Wilhelm, in effect,
played a notable part in the upheavals of the following years and it
comes as no surprise to learn that, in 1801 or 1802, he spent nearly
a year in the Dark Hole of the Castle in Cape Town. Upon his
release, as irrepressible as ever, he went into Kaffir Land to
negotiate with the Xhosa chief Ngqika some scheme for a joint
attack on the British rulers.
But he returned to find his farm deserted the cattle stolen, his
house and kraals burnt, his family massacred by the marauding Black
tribes of the Suurveld. Only three of his sons had been saved by
neighbors.
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R UMORS OF R AI N
Beside the grave of his wife and children Wilhelm took an oath
of vengeance; and without waiting for the funeral meal, he jumped
on his horse and galloped off towards the Suurveld, where his body
was found a week later, bristling with assegais.
The three orphans were brought up by the neighbors, a
Badenhorst family, until they were old enough to acquire their own
farm near Uitenhage.
The middle one, Lewies, happened to be in Algoa Bay for some
buying and bartering when the first British settlers of 1820 were
brought ashore; and his wagon was among those commandeered to
convey the immigrants to their farms in the interior. He was
reluctant to comply, but the journey proved to be the turning point
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