The covenant - James A. Michener [277]
They had fallen victims to that terrible affliction which brings certain crucifixion: they took religion too seriously; they trusted Jesus Christ; they believed that the bright, soaring promises of the New Testament could be used as a basis for government; and they followed these precepts unfalteringly in the one part of the world where they would cause offense to three powerful groups of people: the old Boers, the new English, the timeless blacks.
In one of his most perceptive sermons Hilary had told his mission: 'The perpetual problem of government remains, "Am I safe at night when I go to sleep?" ' Like many others asleep in South Africa, he had not been safe.
It was an act of God, many alleged, that the three Saltwood children were absent when assassins struck. They were trekking in the Great Karroo with a Hottentot family, gathering ostrich plumes for sale in Paris. When they returned, their parents were already buried, and there was heated discussion as to what should happen to them. Some said they should be freighted down to Grahamstown on the next wagon heading south, but word was received that they were not wanted there. So there was some talk of sending them along to LMS headquarters in Cape Town, but they already had a flood of Coloured orphans and abandoned children. It would be quite improper to ship them off to England, where their ancestry would damn them.
Put simply, there was no place for them. No one felt any responsibility for the offspring of what from the start had been a disastrous marriage. So the children were left with the Hottentots with whom they had hunted ostrich plumes.
For a few years they would be special, for the older ones could read and write, but as time passed and the necessity for marriage arrived, they would slide imperceptibly into that amorphous, undigestible mass of people called Coloured.
The boy Nxumalo, like his distant ancestor, the Nxumalo who left the lake for Great Zimbabwe, had been reared to believe that what his chief said was law, no matter how contradictory or arbitrary. 'If the chief speaks, you leap!' his father told him, and the boy extended this sensible rule to all who gave orders. He was born to obey and trained to do so instantly.
One bright, sunny day in 1799, when he was eleven, he learned the real meaning of obedience. It would be an especially bitter lesson, since it came about because his father, an energetic man who loved the bursting flowers of spring, felt such a surge of joy that he could not keep from whistling whenever he walked through the fields near the kraal.
The sound of Ndela's happiness reached the ears of a suspicious woman who had concealed herself next to the footpath. A gnarled hunchback, she was the most powerful diviner in the region, a woman who held in her hands the balance of good and evil, of life and death. Now satisfaction spread across her face, for the spirits who lived in darkness had finally given her a sign. 'Ndela whistled!' she cackled to herself. 'Ndela whistled!' At last she knew why sickness lay like a cloak of winter mist over the herds of the Sixolobo. She was ready to act.
That afternoon the entire Sixolobo clan was summoned to the chief's place and the exciting word was passed: 'The diviner is going to smell out the wizard who has infected our cattle.'
Ndela arrived with no reason to suspect that he might be connected with the sick animals, but even so, when the divination began he behaved with his usual circumspection, because there was always the possibility that it was in his body that the evil forces hid without his knowing it.
A divination was a fearful experience. The old woman's body was smeared with a loathsome mixture of animal fats; her arms and parts of her face were streaked with a whitish clay; her hair was rubbed with red powder; and about her neck hung strings of roots and bones. Animal bladders dangled from her waist and in her hand she carried a weapon of dreadful power: a switch of wildebeest tail. About her shoulders, obscuring