The covenant - James A. Michener [336]
When the new wagon was packed and the five men were preparing to go their separate waystwo Englishmen back to Grahamstown, three Boer families north to lands unknownan incident occurred which seemed at the time to be of no significance, whereas in fact it altered the history of South Africa.
A bold and cunning Xhosa prophet named Mhlakaza, with a ridged scar across his forehead, had taken advantage of the confusion following the war to slip into the area to spy out the amount of damage done in the recent raids. Not realizing that five armed men were ahorse, he suddenly appeared on the horizon in a silhouette so exposed that any one of the men could have shot and killed him.
Automatically Tjaart van Doorn raised his rifle to do so, but his son-in-law Theunis grabbed at his arm and cried, 'No! He's done nothing.' So Tjaart lowered his gun, and the Xhosa, laughing derisively, disappeared from view.
If Tjaart had killed him, and in the presence of two Englishmen, word would certainly have filtered back to London; Dr. Keer would have asked persistent questions; a scandal would have ensued, proving once more the heartlessness of the Boer; and quite possibly Tjaart would have been hanged. So it was fortunate that Theunis restrained him.
On the other hand, if Tjaart had killed this crafty man, the lives of many thousands of Xhosa would have been saved, a noble people would have been preserved at full strength, and the history of this area would have been dramatically modified.
On 15 March 1836 the Van Doorn party, as it came to be called, crossed the Orange Riverthat moody giant between banks of sandleaving the jurisdiction of England and heading into those vast lands which Mai Adriaan had explored seventy years earlier.
Through gradual accretions the group now consisted of nineteen families with seventeen wagons. The latter number was most significant in that it was the smallest number that would allow the formation of a proper cordon, or laager, inside which women, children and cattle could be protected.
The emigrant party contained nineteen grown men, but this included Theunis Nel, deemed largely useless despite his heroic performance when the Xhosa overran De Kraal, and an equal number of mature women, making thirty-eight adults, all battle-tested. They had among them ninety-eight children: some, like the daughter of Theunis and Minna, mere infants; others, like the older sons of some of the families, almost men, well capable of handling a gun.
So there were a hundred and thirty-six white people, but they were attended by two hundred Coloureds and blacks. In most cases these servants had received reasonably good treatment on the farms and had come to accept that they belonged with the Boers, not in the way a slave belongs to an owner, but in a paternalistic pattern, as much a part of the white family as the children.
These servants had remained loyal when others had run off, and they saw no reason to leave the baas now. His life was theirs; they would find no other work they liked better; they were as excited as he by this adventure of heading into unexplored lands. They'd accept an old pair of shoes or a tattered jacket with a smiling 'Dankie, Baas,' a scolding with a great show of misery. And between the good and the bad, if they met with other Coloureds or blacks, they would argue that their baas was the best in the land. To show that they meant it, most were prepared to die for 'their' white people.
Each of the seventeen wagons had a span of from twelve to sixteen oxen, plus half a dozen spares; all men, most boys and many of the Coloureds had horses. And the party as a whole had two thousand cattle and eleven hundred sheep, which explained why the Voortrekkers were lucky if they covered six miles a day.
Of the hundred and thirty-six Boers, only two men could read, Tjaart van Doorn and Theunis Nel, but all could recite long passages from the Bible, and as they prepared to