The covenant - James A. Michener [309]
The farm contained the original nine thousand acres within the hills, but it now controlled an additional sixteen thousand acres to which he did not have legal title, but which his Coloured stockmen could use in herding cattle and flocks of sheep. Although he rarely saw much formal money, he had made himself into a man of considerable wealth and could look forward to a prosperous and placid old age.
Of course, most Boers grumbled about the English administration, its creeping modifications of law and custom, but such complaints were offset by the fact that the stalwart English settlers were now sharing the dangers of frontier life. The struggle had been harsh, as one Englishman noted in his diary:
My wheat, two months ago the most promising I ever saw, is now cut down and in heaps for burning. The rust has utterly destroyed it. My barley, because of a grub which attacks the blade and the drought, produced little more than I sowed. All my other crops have practically been destroyed by the caterpillar and lice. My cows are dry from want of grass. Twenty of my flock of twenty-seven sheep were killed in a single night by a pack of wild dogs. My little girl has been bitten by a snake. I stood for a moment thinking of my misery, of my dying child, of my blasted crops, of my ruined flocks. God's will be done! I have need of fortitude to bear up against such accumulated misery.
And always there were the blacks invading the lands of Boer and Englishman alike. Tjaart, veldkornet of his district, had frequently taken his men to Grahamstown to help those settlers repel cattle raiders, and in many actions, had fought beside Richard Saltwood, ivory merchant, and Thomas Carleton, master wagon builder. He had found them an honorable pair and had invited them to hunting parties at De Kraal. Saltwood had proved himself not only a fine shot but a congenial guest who lacked all the mannerisms that irritated the Boers. He had even told Tjaart on departing at the end of the last hunt, This must be the best farm I've ever seen,' and with that he handed Mevrouw Jakoba two bottles of Trianon wine he had been hoarding.
And then the camaraderie was endangered. Lukas de Groot, Tjaart's neighbor nineteen miles to the north, stopped by one day on his way home from the port on that wild stretch of coast at which the English settlers had come ashore, and shocked Tjaart by showing him a copy of the Grahams-town newspaper: Dr. Simon Keer, the philanthropic leader in London, had published his second book, called The Infamy of the Dutch Slaveholder, and its appearance was guaranteed to cause trouble, for it was a savage assault against South African life and a shameless emotional appeal to the English Parliament to pass laws which Keer had long been advocating.
Keer's pressure came at a time when agitation for abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire was gaining momentum; it signaled the beginning of the final battle to demolish what many Boers considered their God-granted right: that all men of color should labor for them six days a week and sometimes seven, whether slave or free.
Keer's grand strategy of waging this war with propaganda in England had thus triumphed over Hilary Saltwood's tactic of cherishing and saving souls on the spot. The inspired lecturer with his flaming oratory had vanquished the modest missionary who had actually married one of his charges to prove that he loved them all. What Keer said in his new book was this:
The oppression of free persons of color under the yoke of their Boer masters makes