The Water Carriersby Lorraine Nevin |
Part 1 appears in this issue. |
| conclusion |
He looked so serious and so unusually quiet that the people who knew him believed him, and although the ancestors’ request seemed wasteful — no, sinful — my father and the other families in our kraal followed suit.
My father made a great fuss of killing our meagre herd but said it was to show solidarity with Mhalakaza and to prove his faith in the ancestors. My mother cried and said we would starve to death.
Before long, the neighbouring kraals, seeing more and more of the white men traversing our farms, joined us in showing their belief, and a deadly frenzy began that would continue for weeks. It spread slowly from our kraal outwards in all directions across the valley and into the hills, stopping only when the spilled blood of our cattle reached the oceans.
By mid-summer, the people spoke of nothing but the unfolding miracle. All over the kingdom, the smell of death and rotting flesh filled the air and fuelled the madness of a people weakened by hunger and entranced by the promise of redemption.
Thandi was elevated to the position of Most Revered Prophetess, Thandiswe, niece of the Great Mhalakaza, Seer of the Ancestors of the Water Carriers and I, Nongqawuse, who had also seen the ancestors but to whom they had not spoken, was her personal servant.
My family moved our homestead closer to the royal compound and were treated as royalty at this time. We were fed and cared for by the Chief’s people. My mother seemed happier and smiled again. Wherever I went, mine and Thandi’s story was repeated a thousand times a day. It was inescapable.
At times I felt important, more so than any boy in the kraal could ever be, but at night as I closed my eyes, I realised that there was no escaping it now, this prophecy had become real. What I still thought of as a prank, the simple teasing of a favourite cousin, had gone too far. I kept Thandi close by my side in case she chanced to regain control of her tongue and wondered what had entered her head that night at the river.
But something haunted me and prevented me from sleeping: could it be true that she had indeed received a message from the ancestors? She certainly seemed not to be wracked by the same doubts as I; or at least, never indicated so. Was she truly unable to speak? Even to me?
My uncle Mhalakaza had moved with us to the royal compound and was revelling in the nationwide recognition the prophecy had brought him. He consulted daily with the ancestors through the throwing of bones and thus learnt of men known as ’Russians’ who were also enemies of the British.
These Russians, ancestors of our own warriors, had black skins like us Xhosa and wore great black coats and would arrive by sea. My uncle proudly announced to the elders news of a recent battle won by these ghostly saviours against the British — the Crimean War — and the elders passed it down to the kraals. Now our saviours had a name. It was almost as good as a sign.
Hundreds of our people moved their scant belongings to the wild southern coast of our country to await the Russians. Long, hot months of summer came and settled on our hills and valleys and when the Russians still failed to arrive, our people became anxious.
Uncle Mhalakaza reported a visitation from the ancestors, who no longer needed the water carriers to deliver their message. “The Russians are not convinced that every last cow is dead. They will not come to our aid until our faith is proven,” he declared.
Chief Sarili ordered an investigation into the herds of cattle still standing. Unbelievers, and frightened families who had thought it wise to keep a bag of grain or a milk cow secreted for their unborn children’s sake, were rooted out and beaten in public. There were rumours of people boiling their skin shields and bags and even resorting to eating their own dead as a means of staying alive in those first, desperate months.
Weeks passed and neither the Russians nor the ancestors made any further appearance. Chief Sarili decided the hungry crowds should be distracted and suggested hosting a celebration. It was agreed that Thandi’s readiness for marriage should be announced. My uncle and her husband to be, none other than the great Chief Sirili himself, together planned a great and urgent festivity.
The gathering was held at the River Gxara, at the very place on the riverbank I had first claimed to have seen saw the ancestors appear before me. Beer gifted by the Russians was distributed to the crowd and fresh grain from the ancestors cooked.
As the sun set over the river on the eve of Thandi’s wedding, Chief Sarili’s own dead boy-child by his fifth wife, and a favourite stallion, appeared before him. The ghosts of his beloveds spoke to him that night, and he ordered his staff to immediately dispose of his own numerous herds of cattle and stores of grain.
In return for the Chief’s sacrifice, the ancestors spoke to Uncle Mhalakaza again too, informing him of the exact time and place the Russians would arrive to free us. He would announce it to the people when the time was right, he said to those of us inside the royal compound.
I was very afraid. What if the Russians didn’t come? Would we starve to death? Would my mother’s new child die at her breast? I longed to ask Thandi if she had really heard anything that night, but we were no longer friends, it seemed.
“Tell that Nonga I no longer want to see her face,” she told another of her servants on my last attempt to find a reason to be alone with her in her hut. It was strange that her tongue worked on that occasion and I said so.
“Do not question the Prophetess!”
“Get out of here, nobody!”
“Can’t you see she no longer knows you?”
Thandi lay on her bed of many skins and sucked sugar beet and drank infusions of flowers while she amused herself with the replica of a human child my uncle had traded with the white men. He called it ‘idoll’. I thought it grotesque with its dead eyes and cold, hard skin, but Thandi would not let go of it. I remembered a time when she would have shared it with me.
Young women, those that could muster energy still, swung their bare, withered breasts around the fire in celebration of my cousin’s marriage. They girated their grass-skirted, bony hips and shook their skinny arms so that their bangles clanked metallically in the sparks. They chanted the wedding prayers, a goat was slaughtered, and Thandi was married.
Her husband drank the Russians’ beer and danced in his finery until he could stand no longer. Then he fell in a drunken stupor and slept on the red African earth he ruled over. I sat at Thandi’s feet under the palm-leafed thatch and watched and waited in trepidation.
The Chief’s other wives cooed and clucked over Thandi. She was their darling; soon to be their pawn for sure, but for now, Thandi was oblivious to it and lapped up the attention. I was fourteen then and Thandi, seven. What did she know?
Over the following days and nights, night and days, the celebrations continued and the pilgrims arrived at the river. Hungry, desperate, they ate what was left from the wedding table and demanded the miracle they had been promised.
“Our children are starving!” they cried. “Our elders have already died.”
I knew this to be true; my father was among the dead. Stories of pregnant mothers found to be hiding maize in a hole in the ground or a goat’s pen being sought out and flogged reached royal ears. Sarili had exhausted his possibilities. My uncle had reached the end.
What now? Were the Xhosa people to fall, broken, into the hands of the British for lack of the Russians he had promised them? Were they to surrender their land to the British in exchange for a few ears of corn and a vat of cheese? Were they to lie on their beloved earth at the foot of the world and die? I watched my cousin Thandi grow fat and lazy and hoped with all my heart she would be visited again by the ancestors.
But as the months passed, it was clear that Thandi was to have no more part in the prophecying. She had served her purpose and now, again, the serious business of appeasing the masses would fall to the men. She was returned to my mother’s care, where she was to learn to cook and serve the senior wives. It was during this time she would often look at me with eyes so narrow, I thought the crows had pecked them out that day by the river.
As the days grew shorter and winter’s spirit began to make itself felt in the morning air, my uncle Mhalakaza, after lengthy consultations with Chief Sarili, delivered a speech.
“The ancestors are not happy!” he proclaimed.
The crowd prayed and chanted. “How could this be?” they asked.
“Until the last remaining cow is slaughtered, the ancestors will not come! The Russians will not come! Some of you are hiding milk cows, saving them for your newborns. The ancestors can see them! They can see your lack of faith. Go, slaughter them now!”
“These defiant individuals are preventing the salvation of our people!” decreed Sarili standing up and coming forward from his throne on the platform to stand beside my uncle. “Death to them!”
The crowd roared. Never in the history of my people had they been asked to turn on their own kind. It was unthinkable.
“We were farmers, not warriors!” shouted one man from the back of the crowd and others cheered him. Others simply sat on the hot, dry earth and hung their heavy heads.
Mhalakaza then proclaimed the date: the date of the arrival of the Russians. At last! The people would no longer wait without an end in sight! They had only to survive until... the next full moon! It was tangible. It was something to hold on to. It was real!
“Two false suns will appear in the sky and there will be a celestial cataclysm. The white men will walk into the sea from whence they have come and will drown there,” shouted my uncle Mhalakaza, shaking his stick with its goat’s skull high above his head. “Their path will lead them to Hell, and any Xhosa who has disobeyed the ancestors’ commands will find himself drawn into the sea in the wake of the Englishmen, to rot in Hell forever.
“The next morning, the true sun will rise, bringing with it thousands of new heads of cattle for the faithful,” my uncle announced. “You will wake to find your stores bursting full of grain, your pots full of food and your wives pregnant with sons. The sick will be well and the well will be free of the white man.”
The crowed mustered a cheer, but to me it seemed weaker than before and somehow... threatening.
The night of the full moon was a night of great revelry. Amongst the cacophony of thundering drums, ringing bells and chanting voices, Thandi found her tongue and whispered to my mother. Without a word, under cover of the celebrations, my mother, Thandi and I escaped to the nearly British encampment where a certain General ordered us porridge from his kitchen and a bed to be made up for us in the servants’ quarters. It was the last time I was to see my uncle or my cousin’s husband.
When the sun rose on the morning of August seventeenth 1856, the people were angry. There had been no miracle. My uncle Mhalakaza tried to say that he had mistaken the date of the coming. Some men faithful to the chief claimed they could see the first of the Russians arriving from the sea and setting up camp on the shore, but following to their claims was poorly subscribed.
The British General, whose spies had returned to camp with an accurate account of the goings-on of the previous evening, sent a posse to the riverbank to offer assistance, food and medicaments; but his army was driven to return to camp as much by the swarms of circling vultures and the stench of rotting human and bovine flesh as by the remaining few Xhosa warriors guarding the land. Reports of a hundred thousand carcasses reached the British officer, and twenty thousand heads of cattle, but the most shocking news of all was that Chief Sarili had walked into the river to meet his ancestors.
Six weeks later, the remaining Xhosa people that had not starved to death huddled close to the British encampment, unspeaking, proud, the walking dead.
I watched their movements from the window of the female quarters as they cried dry tears and accepted plates of gruel from the soldiers. They were no more than walking skeletons in bangles and beads and feathers, and their bones pointed at me in accusation. I was embarrassed for them. How gullible they were! How simple! I no longer considered myself one of them. But then again, I was not one of them.
I was not as honourable as the least of them.
I glared at my cousin whenever I glimpsed her in the narrow passages of the British settlement. I saw only a sweet little girl with bent curls who scorned me and ran away from me. The jagged white line where her front teeth were beginning to show through her pink gums reminded me that she was just a child.
Once always by my side, now rarely within the same set of rooms as me, I missed my cousin, my friend. She met my gaze and held it on these occasions, if that was her whim, as if to challenge me to call her a liar. More often, she pursed her lips and ran away, her pale pink doll tucked under her chubby arm.
It was after one of these brief encounters with Thandi that I asked my mother what had become of my uncle Mhalakaza, whom I had not seen or heard of for days.
“What more could God want than the Messenger himself?” she replied.
We stayed in the British compound the rest of the winter. As one of the water carriers, the carriers of the false prophecy, my mother was afraid for me. I had not Thandi’s youth and innocence to hide behind. More and more often, I hid in one of the dark corners of the army base and pretended I no longer existed.
One day, months later, from the safety of my hiding place, I spotted Thandi wandering amongst the crowd of Xhosa people living in and off the British settlement. She was flapping her arms about her wildly and shrieking silently at imaginary crows. Her face was caked white with earth, tiny particles of it resting on her eyelashes and giving her a ghostly appearance. She was no more than a shadow; the shadow of a water carrier I once knew.
Copyright © 2009 by Lorraine Nevin
