The covenant - James A. Michener [140]
Still, the idea of arming even such placid dark men was repugnant, and an impasse was reached between Boeksma, who wanted to do so, and the sager heads, who warned against it. It was the Huguenot De Pre who resolved the argument: 'I seem to remember a passage in our Bible. In the years when Abraham was still called Abram, his nephew Lot fell into trouble, and there was discussion as to how the commando might rescue him. And did not Abraham arm his servants and sally forth to save his nephew?'
None of the Dutchmen remembered this incident, but all agreed that if Abram really had armed his servants, that would constitute permission for them to do the same, so they consulted Willem, who offered his Bible to the worried men, and in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, De Pre found specific instructions telling them what to do, but when he encountered trouble reading the Dutch he almost spoiled things by saying, 'In French it's clearer.' It had never occurred to his neighbors that God's word had ever appeared in any language but Dutch:
'And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them . . . And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.'
What astounded these devout men was that when they added up those servants in the Stellenbosch region capable of fighting, they totaled three hundred and eighteen, and Andries Boeksma shouted, 'It's a revelation a revelation from God Himself! A thousand years ago, nay, ten thousand, He foresaw our plight and instructed us to arm our servants.' And he asked the men to pray, expressing their thanks for this guidance, and when they rose they organized a punitive expedition, and for every animal the Hottentots had taken away, the Dutchmen brought back three.
From then on, no commando sallied forth without its complement of Hottentot-Coloured fighters, and few farmers would venture into the wilderness without their dark families trailing along with them. For generations this alliance would maintain, fortified sometimes by bloodlines when lonely men needed companionship, but more often based on a kind of acknowledged and gentle servitude, for they were, as Boeksma had said, 'Loyal.' As the Dutchmen traveled, the little dark men and women might not be visible, and they never ate at table, but they were there, one step behind the Groot Baas.
Willem did not accompany the raiders, and he refused for a good reason: he still hoped that some kind of peace might be brought about between white settlers and brown. 'You're no longer a good Dutchman,' Andries Boeksma chided when the victorious commando returned. 'You don't think like a man from Holland, and you don't act like a man from Java.'
'I've thought of that myself,' Willem said. 'I suppose I'm an Afrikaner.'
'A what?' Boeksma cried.
'An Afrikaner. A man of Africa.' It was the first time in history this designation had been used, and never would it apply more accurately. And when the day came that Willem's persistent lung disease, incurred by his hours on the horse, attacked and he lay dying, he counseled his grandchildren never to war with the Hottentots: 'Share Africa with them in peace.'
His sickbed stood in the left-hand room facing Bezel Muhammad's first cupboard, and he passed the pain-choked hours by studying afresh the lovely relationship between the two woods, dark and light. They seemed an augury of what the country he had discovered and settled might become.
No amount of Biblical glossing helped