A Sin of Omission Read online

  A promise had been broken – the bargain between the Warden of the Missionary College in England and themselves: that Stephen would teach Albert Xhosa and Albert would coach Stephen in the Classics.

  The perfect partnership. Comrades in their great crusade.

  But Albert had always been less than diligent. ‘Let’s go and play cricket,’ he would say, rummaging for his bat and ball as Stephen appeared with his primers. ‘There will be lots of time to teach you Latin at the mission. We will have nothing to entertain us in the evenings and nowhere to go.’ And because Stephen was so skilled a bowler and loved the chance to throw off his jacket, flex his arms and stride out across the field, he had always acquiesced.

  Mzamo had seated himself on the only chair in Stephen’s parlour while Stephen prepared a pot of tea, glancing furtively through the window, afraid of watchers in the yard. Mzamo had held his fighting sticks across his knees – alert – and shifted his blanket on his shoulder. ‘There is nothing I can do if our kinsmen smash your bell,’ he said.

  ‘I have no bell to smash.’

  ‘A church without a bell?’ Mzamo laughed.

  That old derision, that vexing patronage. Stephen glanced away, said, almost apologetically, ‘You are a mission-educated man, Mzamo. How can you allow it?’

  ‘I am not a chief’s son to be obeyed, like Duke or Gonya.’

  ‘One thing I beg,’ Stephen said, despising his age-old tone of supplication when speaking to his brother. ‘Even if they burn my church and turn me out because I have no bell, ask them to spare Albert Newnham’s mission.’ He cast about, acutely conscious of a possible disloyalty. ‘He’s a good man. He will never be a threat to your cause.’

  ‘As you well know,’ said Mzamo, ‘I have my own reasons for sparing Mr Newnham and his bell. Moreover, I have every intention of returning the money that I owe him. I will take it myself, despite the risk. As I am not an Englishman, I do not forget my obligations.’

  ‘Or perhaps,’ Stephen said, his voice rising at last, ‘it has little to do with obligation. Mhlawumbi sisazela.’

  An unquiet conscience.

  ‘No, Mntakwethu! It is you who have an unquiet conscience and know that you have failed our father’s house. It is you who have forgotten your language. Even now, when you speak, you sound more like a white man.’ Mzamo paused. ‘Or an Mfengu.’ The intended insult stung. ‘Yes – you are just like the other Amahlungulu, with their white collars and their black suits.’

  White-necked ravens, collared priests, cawing from their pulpits.

  Stephen turned away. Was his deacon’s work to feed on carrion – the dregs and remnants of his people, devastated by war, torn by different loyalties, yoked by their dependence for work on farmers, tradesmen? Missionaries?

  Mzamo gazed at him with shrewd appraisal, so familiar and yet so disconcerting. ‘Our father,’ Mzamo continued, ‘always had you weighing on his heart. Up until the day he disappeared he had our mother crying, “Why did you give up my son to the missionary? It would have been better if he had died than to be lost to us, a vaga-bond, never herding his father’s cattle.” And our father said, “There are no cattle in the byre to herd.”’

  ‘Perhaps their loss was greater than the loss of his son,’ Stephen had replied.

  ‘Perhaps it was.’

  Perhaps it was.

  Stephen knew this. He knew the loss had been greater. It was a burden he had carried since he was a child of nine, abandoned at the mission after Basil Rutherford had sent out the catechist, Mjodi, to enquire if anyone had missed a boy.

  Shrewdly, his father, Mzamane, had claimed him as his son, parleyed through Mjodi when Rutherford’s Xhosa failed him, then retreated, giving him into the care of the priest and his acolyte.

  Stephen had been too young to grasp the exigencies of need and opportunity, the logic of his abandonment. He had only watched in wretchedness as his father had walked away, a gaunt shadow-man, taking the wagon track that led past the door of the church. He had never heard his mother’s keen lament, the fearful ubulanzi – the unassuaged and lonely longing – for her younger son. But it was something that he knew himself.

  Ubulanzi. The word defied translation.

  His father had simply said to the missionary, Rutherford, ‘There is no food.’

  ‘I am hard-pressed here,’ Rutherford had replied. ‘There are so many who are starving. I have thirteen children already.’

  ‘We are being banished from our lands,’ Mzamane had continued. ‘We have been told to leave our homesteads and go beyond the Kei. Where will our goats and sheep graze? Where will the cattle that are left find pasture? We leave behind the graves of our people and there will be corpses all along the road to that distant place. What will we eat? Where will we shelter?’

  Rutherford frowned as Mjodi translated. ‘If you had heeded the Magistrate’s warnings, not sinned and killed your cattle …’ he retorted but Mzamane kept on speaking, a lament that did not need an answer. ‘Will not those cattle turn their heads towards the Amathole, lowing? How can they graze the pasture of a stranger’s herds? No. Zibutisana! They will lie down together to die.’

  He shifted his gaze to the missionary’s face. ‘They have imprisoned our chiefs esiqitini – on Nxele’s island. Maqoma, Siyolo, Xhoxho.They will die there and we will have no one to lead us. Now, any man who can lift a pick must leave his home and work on the Governor’s roads.’

  ‘Those chiefs were warmongers,’ Rutherford had said irascibly enough for Mzamane to catch the tone before Mjodi had translated. ‘They brought it on themselves. It is because of their foolish wickedness that you are starving.’

  ‘Ndingumphakati. I am a councillor …’ said Mzamane.

  ‘He is an important man,’ said Mjodi. ‘Unesithunzi.’

  Rutherford had waited for him to continue, one brow raised.

  Mzamane had ignored the slight. ‘A councillor is not a common man,’ he had resumed. ‘I have heard it said that the Governor is anxious to take away the sons of chiefs and make them Englishmen so they can teach their people to be servants of the English.’

  ‘Indeed. But only the sons of chiefs.’

  ‘No chief will ever give you the heir.’

  ‘They have said they would.’

  Mzamane had snorted, gazed off across the pasture. ‘What man would be so foolish as to send his ancestral beast to another man’s byre?’

  He had scrutinised Rutherford a moment, then said, ‘Since the cattle are killed and the crops are burned, there is no food. We were betrayed by those who failed to believe and now we are all starving. I have many wives and many children, but this child’ – he indicated Stephen by the tilt of his head – ‘is the younger son of my Great Wife. I intend to bring you his elder brother – my heir. His name is Mzamo. He will be councillor after me. Make them amagqobhoka. Teach them to be Christians as the Governor has said. Perhaps they will learn to be missionaries like you. That will please the Governor very well.’

  ‘The infernal impudence!’ Rutherford had fulminated to his wife. ‘As if it were he who was doing the Governor a favour!’

  But he knew the man to be right: councillors were as important to the purpose of Christianising the heathen as the chiefs. A grip on the frontier could only be sustained through wide political influence. Perhaps that influence could be gained more thoroughly through the councillors than through the whims or insecurities – or even the largesse – of an individual chief. He had heard all the arguments from his fellow clergy: wisdom from the Bishop and the Vestry, noted in the Quarterly Review:

  – Of course, this cattle killing, wretched as it is, is really an unforeseen blessing!

  The Chancellor of the Cathedral, ever eager to agree: How else could we persuade the chiefs to hand over their sons to the missions?

  – And now, as churchmen, we will have all the influence that we could wish in bringing a new generation to God. This from the Archdeacon.

  The plight of a decimated people coul
d have a dozen different interpretations at Vestry meetings in the Cathedral in Grahamstown but not – Rutherford grumbled to his wife – for missionaries whose relentless lobby to both government and Church for money, medicines and supplies to aid their starving people went unheeded. How could they imagine the sights and scenes these isolated men had known?

  Once, on a round of duty to his outstations, Rutherford – to his horror – had seen a starving dog nosing at a corpse at an abandoned homestead. He had turned away retching, soiling the front of his suit, gasping into his handkerchief. He had tethered his horse and searched in vain for an implement among the debris in the empty yard to dig a grave. And the dog, barely flinching at his curses or the hurled stones, had darted in again as soon as he, defeated, had mounted his horse.

  Within days of Stephen’s rescue, Stephen’s father appeared at the mission accompanied by his elder son, Mzamo. Seeing them approach, Stephen ran to them with a great cry. His father ignored him and pushed Mzamo forward as Rutherford came out onto the porch. ‘Here is my son, Mzamo,’ he said.

  Mzamo was sullen, barely acknowledging the missionary. Incomparably thin, he glanced fleetingly at Stephen’s trousers, boots and jacket and haughtily hitched his own frayed blanket up about his naked ribs.

  Their father, Mzamane, said, ‘Unengqondo.’ He is clever. ‘Unesibindi.’ He is brave. ‘You will teach him well.’ He had looked at Mzamo for a long moment, then beckoned Stephen to him and put his handon his shoulder. ‘Their mother is moving west with our people.’ He raised his stick. ‘I go to dig the roads.’

  ‘And these children?’

  ‘They are yours,’ Mzamane had said. He stood, stick across his shoulders, arms bent up to grip it. He gazed silently at his sons. They gazed back at him until he turned away.

  Although Mzamo was thirteen, Stephen knew he was afraid even though he had never cried and seemed indifferent. He had paid no attention to Stephen’s shrill reproaches about leaving him in the bush on the day when Mfundisi Rutherford had found him. He retaliated, saying that it was Stephen who had wandered off – not he who had abandoned him. He made no answer to questions about their mother, except to say, ‘Mothers weep.’

  It was not only mothers.

  At night, in the dormitory hut, Stephen cried in the darkness.

  Despite Mzamo’s presence and having no idea of where his mother was, he had tried to run away. Mfundisi Rutherford had sent Mjodi in pursuit before he’d reached the boundary of the mission lands and when he had caned him – guilty of ingratitude – he used the opportunity to lecture the other abandoned boys on the foolishness of the Ngqika people for laying waste to their herds of cattle.

  – If they are hungry it is their own fault.

  – It is a punishment from God.

  – It is a work of Satan.

  – ‘It is an unforeseen blessing’: he had read the Bishop’s comments in the Quarterly Review three times.

  It was not just Stephen’s father, Mfundisi Rutherford said, who had given up his sons. Many chiefs and important men, humbled by their wickedness, were offering their children to the missions all through British Kaffraria. Not just to the English Church but to the Wesleyans and Scots and other Dissenters. ‘But you are fortunate boys, indeed, that you have been given sanctuary by the English Church,’ the Mfundisi had said, speaking very slowly so his words would have their weight and the interpreter, Mjodi, could emphasise each point. ‘It is the Church of the Governor and it is possible that the most worthy among you may’ – he lifted his great finger in emphasis – ‘may be sent to the new Native College in Grahamstown to be educated as teachers and catechists, perhaps even priests!’ He had looked around at the upturned faces while the interpreter waited respectfully. ‘It is your duty, therefore, to remain here until you are sent for – not run off like goats into the undergrowth!’ He had cast an eye on Stephen. ‘You are under the protection of our Father, God, in atonement for your own fathers’ folly.’

  Stephen had gazed back – uncomprehending – intent only on the missionary’s large, protruding ears. They were tufty as an owl’s.

  If the Governor had been brisk in turning tragedy to opportunity by proposing asylum for the children of high-ranking men with the chance of a Christian education, the Bishop, into whose care they had been delivered, had been ambivalent: he was perfectly aware of the Governor’s more worldly motives in wishing to create Native Colleges in the name of the Church both in Cape Town and in Grahamstown.

  Saved for God by the Bishop; salvaged by the Governor in the interests of Empire.

  At a meeting of the more prominent citizens of Grahamstown, the visiting Governor had said – in deference to the Bishop – ‘Education is the surest way to Christianise the native.’ He had turned to the wider audience, remarking, ‘Choose the child with care and teach him. Keep him from the influence of home, especially from the heathen chiefs. Six to twelve years under rigorous supervision will transform the savage. It will ensure the peace and prosperity of this colony in future years and supply willing servants of the state.’

  ‘It sounds as if you mean to take them hostage,’ the Bishop had said, a touch austerely.

  ‘Ah,’ the Cathedral’s Precentor had murmured to the Chancellor, ‘a step ahead of the Dissenters who would see no practical sense in isolating these youths from their families.’

  ‘It is the purpose of the Church to bend the plant, to train the vine, to nourish and invigorate,’ returned the Chancellor complacently.

  That the Governor’s speech had little to do with the Church had escaped them both.

  Stephen would have had no idea of what a hostage was. He only knew that tears were useless. In time, the hills to the east where the track led up the pass no longer promised the vision of his mother hurrying down in search of him. Those he saw – men in their blankets trudging west – were not transformed by his eager gaze into her thin, angular frame. In the end, he ceased to look for her; in the end, the mother’s voice became the voice of Mrs Rutherford.

  ‘What a pious little fellow Stephen is,’ she very often said to her husband. ‘You should hear him say his prayers at night. “God bless Stephen whatever-it-is and make Stephen a good boy.” Such a quaint character! Quite different from his brother. I fear we will have rebellions there unless we curb him carefully. He has come to us too old. It would be so much better if children were put into our care as infants. We could mould them from the start.’

  ‘I am entrusting my son to your care,’ Mzamo had said on the night he came to Stephen’s parsonage to warn him about the bells. ‘As soon as it is safe to fetch him you must go to his mother and bring him here. Teach him. And when he is old enough send him to Grahamstown and to England.’

  ‘Why would she give him up?’

  ‘Our mother gave us up when we were children. Why not her?’

  Stephen began to object. ‘It was our father, not our mother …’

  Mzamo cut him short, holding up his hand to silence him. ‘There are two other matters, Malusi.’ He pulled a leather pouch from the cord at his waist and extracted a paper, its folds brown with age. ‘This is the letter from the Bishop about the grant of land which we were promised when we were still at the Native College. Eight years on and nothing done. Eight years!’ He opened it, pointed. ‘Look at the date.’ And thrust it into Stephen’s hand.

  Stephen held the sheet to the candle and scanned it. December 1870.

  ‘Did you not get such a letter yourself?’ asked Mzamo impatiently.

  ‘I was in England then. No one wrote.’

  Mzamo snorted. ‘Of course they didn’t! Only those who have begged and threatened have heard. All this time and we are still waiting for the land to be surveyed.’

  ‘Why are you giving this to me?’

  ‘Because that paper will be safer with you than with me. It may happen that one day you must claim the property for my son.’ Mzamo tied the pouch to his belt and let his blanket fall. ‘And now’ – he lowered his voice
– ‘where is my gun?’

  Stephen put the letter on the table, his back to his brother. ‘It is not your gun, Mzamo. It is still our father’s.’ A relic, not a weapon.

  ‘He is long dead,’ said Mzamo. ‘So it is mine.’

  Stephen did not reply.

  ‘Did you hand it in, Malusi?’ Mzamo took a step forward and Stephen almost flinched – a child again, knowing the tone, expecting a cuff across his head.

  ‘It’s the law to hand it in.’

  ‘What have you done with it?’

  ‘If you’re caught with a gun …’ Stephen spoke in English then, asserting himself and brushing past his brother.

  ‘What have you done with it?’ Mzamo grasped his shoulder.

  Stephen hesitated, detached himself from his brother’s grip. ‘It’s in the church,’ he said. ‘Under the altar.’

  Mzamo almost laughed. ‘Under the altar?’ He clapped Stephen on the back. ‘Kanti – but you’re a sly one. Wait ’til I tell our comrades about this.’

  ‘You will say nothing!’ Stephen said. ‘Absolutely nothing! It is there,’ he resumed in Xhosa, ‘because it is our father’s gun. Kept to honour him. If there was no danger to you on this journey I would have lied and told you I had handed it in but I cannot see you travel only armed with sticks. There are patrols all up and down the valley along the river. The people here are Mfengu. They would betray you if they saw you. There are some who might kill you even though you are my brother.’ Stephen went briskly to the door. ‘Wait here,’ he said and let himself out into the yard.

  He looked about. The wind thrashed in the old tree so that the iron bell-pipe hanging from its branches gonged every now and then. A candle flame still flickered in the window of the churchwarden’s house beyond the garden. Stephen crossed the yard and slipped inside the church. His footfall on the dung floor was soundless.

  Had it been sacrilege to lay his father’s firearm under the wooden casing of the altar in the gap between its base and the floor? He had had no safer choice. It was the only place where none would dare to pry. It had lain there ever since a mission circular had come from Mfundisi Rutherford in Grahamstown, a prelude to the Peace Preservation Act, declaring: No native may carry arms.