The covenant - James A. Michener [331]
Cries came from inside, then women running out: 'A beautiful baby girl!'
Brushing people out of his way, he rushed into the hut, then slowly went to the cot and picked up the naked infant. Holding it aloft by its heels, he inspected it from all angles, satisfied himself that it was perfect, then returned it gently to Minna's arms: 'Thank you, daughter. Not a blemish. I must tell Theunis.'
He galloped the miles to the school, where he crashed into the room, shouting, 'Theunis! It's a girl. Perfect in every detail.' Then he pointed at the Du Toit boy who had led the disturbances: 'You, fetch some water.' For although Theunis was grinning happily, it was apparent that he might faint.
The Boer frontiersmen could have withstood the drought and resisted the renewed Xhosa incursions, but now the English government insulted them with the disgraceful business of the slave payments. The Van Doorns and their Boer neighbors had been long prepared for the ultimate freeing of their slaves, and they did not object in principle, but they did sometimes wonder why England was so insistent when countries equally moralHolland, the United States, for examplewere content to hold on to their slaves.
What happened was difficult to explain and impossible to justify. The English Parliament, even though Sir Peter Saltwood, M.P., as manager of the bill had promised otherwise, refused to provide the £3,000,000 which would have compensated the Cape slaveholders for their financial losses. Such a miserly amount was voted that Tjaart would receive for his six legally owned slaves not the £600 promised, but a grudging £180. And then, because the rules were mindful of London-based magnates with vast holdings in the West Indies, it was stipulated that no Cape farmer could receive even his diminished allowance unless he traveled personally to London to collect it.
'I don't understand,' Tjaart said, endeavoring to unravel these incredible instructions.
'It's simple,' Lukas de Groot said as he listened to the law with a group of Boers. 'Instead of six hundred pounds, you get one-third. And to get this, you have to trek to Cape Town, six weeks, then take a ship to London, four months, then back by ship, then trek back home. Better part of a year.' And the reader added, 'Look at this line at the bottom.' There it was: Any claimant who comes to London must pay a filing fee of £1-10-6 per slave to cover the cost of drafting the papers.
Tjaart was outraged. Under these insane regulations, there could not be in the entire region east of Stellenbosch one Boer slaveowner who could collect the compensation due him, and it became obvious that this had been London's intention. Who could absent himself from his farm for most of a year? And who, if he did get to London, could argue before the claims court in English, the required language?
It was such a gross injustice that it encouraged a brood of unsavory types to circulate through the hinterlands, offering to buy up the farmers' rights at nine shillings to the pound; some of these scavengers were Englishmen who had failed at proper work and who saw this as a device for paying their passage back to London. The chances that any Boer would receive his funds from this gang of thieves was remote. 'But look, Tjaart,' one of them weasled, 'I make the trek to Cape Town for you. I sail to London for you. I spend days in the claims courts and urge your case in English. I earn my fee.'
'But the government owes me the whole amount,' Tjaart argued in Dutch. 'Why should I have to pay you more than fifty per centum?' 'Because you will be here, on a farm, and I'll be in London, in court.' 'It's so