The covenant - James A. Michener [134]
The Huguenots shall be scattered across the countryside rather than settled in one spot, and every effort shall be made to stamp out their language. Legal proceedings, daily intercourse, and above all, education of the young must be conducted in Dutch, and no concession whatever shall be made to their preferred tongue.
The threat of a divided colony was not trivial, for although the number of Huguenots was smallonly one hundred and seventy-six in the main wave of immigrationso was the number of Dutch, for in 1688 when De Pre and his first group landed, the entire Compagnie roster listed only six hundred and ten white people, counting infants, and a frightening portion of these were of German descent. At times it seemed that the Germans must ultimately submerge the Dutch, except for two interesting factors: on the rare occasion that a German found a marriageable woman, she was invariably Dutch; and the Germans tended to be ill-educated peasants who readily accepted the Dutch language.
Not so the Huguenots. They were both well educated and devoted to their language, and if left to cluster in xenophobic groups, might form an intractable minority. Since the Dutch did not propose to let this happen, the French were scattered, some to Stellenbosch, some higher up in a place called Fransch Hoek, and others in a choice valley well to the north. But no matter where they found refuge, they encountered this driving effort to eradicate their language, which De Pre was determined to resist. In the letters he dispatched to the other settlements he wrote:
The most sacred possession a man can have, after his Bible, is his native tongue. To steal this is to steal his soul. A Huguenot thinks differently from a Dutchman and expresses this thinking best in his native language. If we do not protect our glorious French in church, in law and in school, we surrender our soul. I say we must fight for our language as we would for our lives.
This was such open subversion that Cape officials felt obligated to send investigators to Stellenbosch, and after brief questioning, these men proposed throwing De Pre into jail, but the Van Doorns protested that he was a good neighbor, needed for the making of wine. The latter point impressed the officials, who lectured De Pre at a public hearing: 'Only because your friends have defended you do you escape imprisonment. You must remember that your sole duty is to be loyal to the Compagnie. Forget your French. Speak Dutch. And if you circulate another inflammatory petition, you will be ejected from the colony.'
Despite this censure, De Pre did gain one of his objectives: the refugees were given permission to build a small church for the minister who had sailed in one of the ships from Amsterdam, and behind its whitewashed walls only French was heard. But the children, and especially Henri and Louis de Pre, continued to speak mainly in Dutch, and it became apparent that the Compagnie's efforts to stamp out French would in the end succeed.
It was agreed between the Van Doorns and the De Pres that the question of language would be discussed no further; each side had made its position clear and only animosity could ensue if the arguing continued. Of course, no one supposed that any peace treaty would be honored by old Katje, and whenever she gave the De Pre boys a goodie she would tell them, 'Say thank you, like a good Dutch boy,' and the boys would say, 'Hartelijck bedanckt, Ouma!'
One night she asked Paul, 'Why did you come to a Dutch land if you don't like it?'
'I do like it,' Paul said. 'Look at my fields.'
'But how did you get here?'
'Your husband's brother sent me to steal the grapevines, as I told you.'
'How is the old thief?'
'Katje!' Willem protested.
'Well, he is an old thief, isn't he?' she demanded of De Pre.
'If he is, he's a smart one,' Paul said. 'He married one of the richest widows in Amsterdam.'
'I'm sure of that,' Katje snapped, and when De Pre revealed the clever manner in which the Widows Bosbeecq had outmaneuvered Karel in the