The covenant - James A. Michener [240]
When word circulated through the farms of the Boer community that the English missionary Saltwood had stolen the slave girl Emma and provided her refuge at Golan, consternation spread among them, and meetings were convened to which participants might have to ride for fifty miles. At each the principal orator was the patriarch Lodevicus the Hammer, who saw more clearly than most the dangers men like him faced.
'I can see the inevitable,' he ranted. 'The English want our Hottentots to live like Boers. Our lands are to be whittled down till we crowd together like Kaffirs. And mark my word, one day our slaves will be taken from us. And then our language will be outlawed and we'll hear predikants delivering their sermons in English.'
A farmer from near Graaff-Reinet, who had seen the fairly amicable relations that existed there between Boers and English officials, said, 'False fears. We can abide the English till they leave again.'
Quiet happenings proved that he was wrong. This time the English invaders showed no sign of quitting the country, and indignation ran through the isolated community when three new clergymen were assigned to remote districts; all were Scotsmen.
'You'd think we had no predikants of our own,' the farmers cried, truly distressed at this radical change.
'It's England pressing us under the heel,' Lodevicus announced, and he refused to send any further tithing to the church.
The fault was not England's. The government knew that frontier congregations longed for predikants who could speak Dutch, and those in charge wanted to send out such men, but there simply were none. Considering all the colonization under way throughout the world at this period, South Africa was the only major settlement in which organized religion failed to provide enough ministers to accompany the outward thrusters. When this deficiency became apparent, the government did the next best thing: it imported large numbers of young Scots Presbyterians who made the easy jump from John Knox to John Calvin; they were fine public servants, men of great devotion and a tribute to their religion.
Lodevicus, of course, was unaware of England's good intentions in this matter, and even if they had been explained to him, he would have damned them; all he was concerned with was that the new predikants were from an alien country, and would be bringing alien ideas. It was clear to him that they had been inserted to destroy Boer influence; one element of his gloomy prediction was being proved true.
Since there were no schools anywhere near De Kraal, Lodevicus was not personally involved in the next scandal, but he was outraged when he heard from farmers in settled areas like Swellendam that English was invading the schools.
'Shocking!' one man told a group of Boers. 'My son Nicodemus goes to school on Mondaywhat does he find? A new teacher. An Englishman who tells him, "From now on we speak English," or something like that. Nicodemus, he don't speak English, so how does he know?'
Bitter resentment developed among the Boers, and many a family, after the Bible reading at night, reflected on the warnings Lodevicus had uttered: 'It's coming around the way he said. First our church, then our school. Next we'll be forbidden to speak Dutch in court.'
This prediction had scarcely been voiced when a farmer near Graaff-Reinet who wanted to lodge a complaint about a boundary was informed that he must submit his brief in English. This provoked further argument, with Lodevicus resuming his role as prophet: 'Most sacred possession a man can have, even surpassing the Bible, I sometimes think, is his native tongue. A Boer thinks different from an Englishman and expresses that thinking in his own language. If we don't protect our language everywhere, church and court, we surrender our soul. I say we must fight for our language as we would for our lives, because otherwise we can never be free.'
Lodevicus, like all the Van Doorns, was obsessed with freedom, but only for himself. When one Englishman argued: 'Historical parallelism, old man. When the Huguenots