The covenant - James A. Michener [147]
'Let him do it. Bezel likes nothing better than to start carpentering a new building.' The wings that De Pre had sketched could easily be erected between seasons, but Annatjie guessed correctly that he would not start until the farm was more securely in his grasp.
Trianon now comprised about three hundred and eighty acres, all with access to water. It owned more than thirty slaves from various parts of Africa, the eastern ocean and Brazil. Fifty Hottentots and Coloureds worked also from five-thirty at dawn till seven at night, receiving no wages; they were given food, tobacco, an occasional blanket, and the right to graze the few animals that remained from their once-vast herds. Once each day they would queue up with the slaves for a splendid reward: a pint of raw wine.
One evening Farmer Boeksma arrived to buy a cask of Trianon at the very time the slaves and servants were lined up for their tot, and he observed, 'Maybe they have bartered away their freedom, but what a marvelous way to forget the past.' Marthinus, thinking of what old Willem had told about Jango's lust for freedom, and the prices he had been willing to pay, said nothing.
And then the Bushmen struck. The little brown people had watched with dismay as white farmers kept extending their holdings farther into traditional hunting grounds. At first they had merely observed the invasion, retreating ten miles ahead of the plow, but now they were beginning to fight back, and on many mornings a farmer on the outskirts of Stellenbosch would awaken to find his kraal broken, a prize ox slaughtered in a gully, and the spoor of Bushmen leading north toward the open country.
Every tactic had been used to combat the voracious raiders: armed Hottentots had been sent against them, commandos had been mounted, guards had been posted on twenty-four-hour duty, but the little men loved animal meat so much, and the placid cows of the Dutchmen were so inviting, that they circumvented every device the farmers tried. Losses were beginning to be intolerable, and in August of 1702 most of the farmers of Stellenbosch decided they must eliminate the pests.
They were led by Andries Boeksma, who argued that since the Bushmen were not human, they could be wiped out ruthlessly. Others, guided by Marthinus van Doorn, contended that Bushmen did have souls and must not be shot down like wild dogs; he was willing to have the worst offenders disciplined and even hanged if they persisted, but their basic humanity he defended. At first the community divided evenly, the tougher old men insisting that the Bushmen were not much different from dogs or gemsbok, the younger granting that they just might be human.
After a week of debate it was agreed that the argument be settled by recourse to the Bible, but no guidance could be found there, because little people with enormous bottoms and poisoned arrows had never molested the Israelites. When a vote was taken, it stood eleven-to-six in favor of exterminating the Bushmen, since it was decided that they were animals and not human. But before the commando could be started north, young Hendrik van Doorn, twenty-one years old, startled the assembly by volunteering a special piece of evidence:
'When I was tracking with the Hottentots we followed a rhinoceros for some days, and when we had it well located in a valley, we went to bed expecting to shoot it in the morning, but when we reached its resting spot, we found that the Bushmen had slain it in a pit. This angered us, and we started tracking the Bushmen, and at last we came upon where the clan was camped, and we saw that they had tame dogs with them, and we concluded that if they could tame dogs, they must be human beings like us and not animals as many had proposed.'
His evidence stunned the eleven men who had voted to kill off all the little people in the way hyenas were destroyed if they came too near a farm, and Andries Boeksma said gravely, 'If they can tame dogs, they're human, and we cannot shoot them all.' To hear the leader