The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,103

the monument was inaugurated on 16 December 1938, the centenary of the battle of Blood River, and the monument was formally opened, in the presence of a crowd of 250,000, on 16 December 1949 by D. F. Malan, in the first full year of the apartheid policy he and his Nationalist government had laid down for South Africa. It was an Afrikaner monument, a monument of African defeat, and it is easy to understand why Fatima and people like her were not allowed to visit the monument.

The architect, Gerard Moerdijk, said he had built a monument that would last a thousand years. He should have been more careful. It is too easy in a place as fragmented as South Africa to see what one wants to see and to commit oneself to building on sand. Times of course have changed. Moerdijk’s Afrikaner monument has become a national monument, part of the national patrimony, and is allowed to live on. But no one can really be sure what the future will bring.

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RIAN MALAN introduced me to the writing of the Afrikaner writer Herman Charles Bosman. Just before I left he gave me a copy of Mafeking Road, one of the writer’s four collections of stories. It was a South African publication and gave no indication of the writer’s career and dates. I felt as a result that I was reading blind. I had only a quote from Roy Campbell to hold on to, and he had died many years ago. Bosman’s talent was a humbling one. He writes about simple or retarded country people, near the end of the nineteenth century, and the stories build up, add to one another. They create a community, and the simple manner of the writer can take him far, to many moods. He can do comedy; the same simple voice can create great beauty. There is a story about a leopard who appears to the narrator, sniffs menacingly almost up to his face, but then behaves almost like a dog. The narrator begins to boast about his leopard. His neighbours don’t believe him. One day the narrator sees the leopard sleeping like a dog on the road, with crossed paws. A closer look reveals the gash caused by a Mauser rifle on the animal’s chest. The Mauser is the weapon of choice in the village. The narrator’s boasting, and the cruelty of his oafish neighbours, have brought about the death of the magical creature.

The biggest story in the collection is about a mimic trek. The great trek from the Cape is part of the folk wisdom of these simple people; in their imagination it is something that’s open to them all to attempt. It takes very little now, at the end of the Boer War, which has been lost, to persuade them that they are about to be oppressed by the British where they are and they should trek to freedom, to Namibia, German South-west Africa, where they will find Germanic people more like themselves. But this trek will be across the terrible Namib desert. Not many of them know about the desert and how to find water in the desert. But their folly makes light of the trouble to come.

They load up the ox-wagons, like the earlier trekkers, and start; the calamities follow almost at once. There are no false leads in Bosman’s writing. After the first watering of the cattle the water runs out. Later a muddy hole is found, but the poor tormented cattle sink to their knees, get no water, and find it hard to rise. In their delirium the trekkers, after only a couple of days, persuade themselves that the crossing of the desert is almost done. One morning they find that their African servants have deserted; this is like a death sentence for the group. Detail adds to detail: Bosman’s understated style rises wonderfully to the pain and majesty of its terrible subject. Some of the would-be trekkers decide to go back, but in a strange twist (though it is now clear to everyone that the trek across the desert is a horrible mistake) the people who seek to go back lose their moral authority; they have let the side down. One man, the first promoter of the trek, goes mad. He presses on and is later—when the survivors go back and can count the missing—found dead by Bechuana African trackers.

I have bracketed Bosman’s stories and the Vootrekker Monument because they share an ambiguity. The ambiguity lies in the