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Authors: Christopher Hope
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in the campfire, and takes new-born lambs and pregnant ewes and sends the farmers crazy. Then we must send for John Jacobs, the jackal-hunter, who comes with his windhounds, Napoleon and Caesar, and sets his traps for the jackal; a little jackal piss makes his potion, skullbone of rock-rabbit and a perfumed leaf, scattered on the layer of earth that hides the newspaper under which waits the steel trap. Surely nothing so cruel lay buried in this peaceful garden?
Pressing a finger to his lips and giving a fierce look to signify that what he was about to show me was, as they say, âstrictly confidentialâ, Minehost led me deep into the cellars beneath the Royal Palace of Detention. The cries of the trapped creatures grew louder at every step until at last we stood before an iron door. Lifting a flap of metal that snapped snugly against the door, as an eyelash upon a cheek, my guide invited me to press my eye to a cunningly concealed spy-hole.
I saw three men lying on their beds. I call them âmenâ, in a manner of speaking. Three twisted and damaged creatures were confined there; one had no legs; another was without arms; their faces reminded me of those rough sketches children scratch in the sand with their fingers: an eye here, a sort of nose, a hole where the mouth should be.
Minehostâs revelation of the identity of these creatures was a further surprise; these were, he hissed, enemy soldiers. And his face turned red as the flower we call the âcannot-kill-aloeâ: a sign of real anger in these pale natives.
Looking back, I cringe with embarrassment when I think of how naive I must have seemed in the early days ofmy expedition. How many of my first English must have felt sure that David Mungo Booi and his wandering brethren in the Karoo understood little of the subtle power and beauty of their customs!
Minehost was very patient. Although he could not bring himself to name the place from which these soldiers came, he managed to nod in that direction. Over there, said the nod. Across the water. Place of blood feuds, cruelty, killing, maiming. His country was out of it â thank God! As if to console himself, he broke into a snatch of âGod Save the Queenâ, explaining he would rather hum a single verse of the National Anthem than sing so much as a bar of that filthy foreign muck so prized by frightful Fritzes and Jesuitical Jacques across the water. Time and again his country had gone to the rescue of Gallic ingrates, Hunnish hordes, Iberian aboriginals, only to be repaid with malice and ingratitude. The flower of English youth lost in the weed-choked charnel-house âover thereâ. And so nothing was more unpopular among them now than the notion of their soldiers fighting and killing in some foreign place â unless it was the notion of their soldiers dying in some foreign place.
My perplexity grew. At the risk of appearing obtuse, I asked what soldiers were supposed to do if they were not fighting. And if they were fighting, how could they be prevented from dying?
The answer was as beautiful as it was logical. You left the killing, wherever possible, to others, and, by this means, you left the dying to others. This was advanced military strategy.
But what would happen, I asked, if their enemies employed old-fashioned military strategy? And tried to kill his people? I had in mind our own experience in Bushmanland.First the black man and then the white man encroached on our game and murdered our women and children as if we were so many fleas ⦠We, the Red People, the Real People, the First People, found ourselves trapped between white and black in their hatred to destroy each other. While they, devils that they were, paused in their mutual destruction only when they turned their attention towards destroying us. We had spoken to them in tongues of peace, and they had replied with tongues of lead. What would happen if their enemies mistook civility for weakness?
My
Pressing a finger to his lips and giving a fierce look to signify that what he was about to show me was, as they say, âstrictly confidentialâ, Minehost led me deep into the cellars beneath the Royal Palace of Detention. The cries of the trapped creatures grew louder at every step until at last we stood before an iron door. Lifting a flap of metal that snapped snugly against the door, as an eyelash upon a cheek, my guide invited me to press my eye to a cunningly concealed spy-hole.
I saw three men lying on their beds. I call them âmenâ, in a manner of speaking. Three twisted and damaged creatures were confined there; one had no legs; another was without arms; their faces reminded me of those rough sketches children scratch in the sand with their fingers: an eye here, a sort of nose, a hole where the mouth should be.
Minehostâs revelation of the identity of these creatures was a further surprise; these were, he hissed, enemy soldiers. And his face turned red as the flower we call the âcannot-kill-aloeâ: a sign of real anger in these pale natives.
Looking back, I cringe with embarrassment when I think of how naive I must have seemed in the early days ofmy expedition. How many of my first English must have felt sure that David Mungo Booi and his wandering brethren in the Karoo understood little of the subtle power and beauty of their customs!
Minehost was very patient. Although he could not bring himself to name the place from which these soldiers came, he managed to nod in that direction. Over there, said the nod. Across the water. Place of blood feuds, cruelty, killing, maiming. His country was out of it â thank God! As if to console himself, he broke into a snatch of âGod Save the Queenâ, explaining he would rather hum a single verse of the National Anthem than sing so much as a bar of that filthy foreign muck so prized by frightful Fritzes and Jesuitical Jacques across the water. Time and again his country had gone to the rescue of Gallic ingrates, Hunnish hordes, Iberian aboriginals, only to be repaid with malice and ingratitude. The flower of English youth lost in the weed-choked charnel-house âover thereâ. And so nothing was more unpopular among them now than the notion of their soldiers fighting and killing in some foreign place â unless it was the notion of their soldiers dying in some foreign place.
My perplexity grew. At the risk of appearing obtuse, I asked what soldiers were supposed to do if they were not fighting. And if they were fighting, how could they be prevented from dying?
The answer was as beautiful as it was logical. You left the killing, wherever possible, to others, and, by this means, you left the dying to others. This was advanced military strategy.
But what would happen, I asked, if their enemies employed old-fashioned military strategy? And tried to kill his people? I had in mind our own experience in Bushmanland.First the black man and then the white man encroached on our game and murdered our women and children as if we were so many fleas ⦠We, the Red People, the Real People, the First People, found ourselves trapped between white and black in their hatred to destroy each other. While they, devils that they were, paused in their mutual destruction only when they turned their attention towards destroying us. We had spoken to them in tongues of peace, and they had replied with tongues of lead. What would happen if their enemies mistook civility for weakness?
My
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