This Was the Old Chief's Country Read Free

to the farm and, in talking of the old days, used that phrase again: ‘This was the Old Chief’s country,’ he said. ‘It stretched from those mountains over there way back to the river, hundreds of miles of country.’ That was his name for our district: ‘The Old Chief’s Country’; he did not use our name for it – a new phrase which held no implication of usurped ownership.
    As I read more books about the time when this part of Africa was opened up, not much more than fifty years before, I found Old Chief Mshlanga had been a famous man, known to all the explorers and prospectors. But then he had been young; or maybe it was his father or uncle they spoke of – I never found out.
    During that year I met him several times in the part of the farm that was traversed by natives moving over the country. I learned that the path up the side of the big red field where the birds sang was the recognized highway for migrants. Perhaps I even haunted it in the hope of meeting him: being greeted by him, the exchange of courtesies. seemed to answer the questions that troubled me.
    Soon I carried a gun in a different spirit; I used it for shooting food and not to give me confidence. And now the dogs learned better manners. When I saw a native approaching, we offered and took greetings; and slowly that other landscape in my mind faded, and my feet struck directly on the African soil, and I saw the shapes of tree and hill clearly, and the black people moved back, as it were, out of my life: it was as if I stood aside to watch a slow intimate dance of landscape and men, a very old dance, whose steps I could not learn.
    But I thought: this is my heritage, too; I was bred here; it is my country as well as the black man’s country; and there is plenty of room for all of us, without elbowing each other off the pavements and roads.
    It seemed it was only necessary to let free that respect I felt when I was talking with old Chief Mshlanga, to let both black and white people meet gently, with tolerance for each other’s differences: it seemed quite easy.
    Then, one day, something new happened. Working in our house as servants were always three natives: cook, houseboy, garden boy. They used to change as the farm natives changed: staying for a few months, then moving on to a new job, or back home to their kraals. They were thought of as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ natives; which meant: how did they behave as servants? Were they lazy, efficient, obedient, or disrespectful? If the family felt good-humoured, the phrase was: ‘What can you expect from raw black savages?’ If we were angry, we said: ‘These damned niggers, we would be much better off without them.’
    One day, a white policeman was on his rounds of the district, and he said laughingly: ‘Did you know you have an important man in your kitchen?’
    â€˜What!’ exclaimed my mother sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
    â€˜A Chief’s son.’ The policeman seemed amused. ‘He’ll boss the tribe when the old man dies.’
    â€˜He’d better not put on a Chief’s son act with me,’ said my mother.
    When the policeman left, we looked with different eyes at our cook: he was a good worker, but he drank too much at week-ends – that was how we knew him.
    He was a tall youth, with very black skin, like black polished metal, his tightly-growing black hair parted white man’s fashion at one side, with a metal comb from the store stuck into it; very polite, very distant, very quick to obey an order. Now it had been pointed out, we said: ‘Of course, you can see. Blood always tells.’
    My mother became strict with him now she knew about his birth and prospects. Sometimes, when she lost her temper, she would say: ‘You aren’t the Chief yet, you know.’ And he would answer her very quietly, his eyes on the ground: ‘Yes, Nkosikaas.’
    One afternoon he asked