Murderous by David Hickson (best ereader for comics .txt) 📕

warriors went out to several nearby Voortrekker encampments and over five hundred Afrikaners were killed.”

Piet laid the napkin aside, and produced a bath-towel sized handkerchief from a pocket, which he held at the ready as he continued. “So you see, again, our perspective shifts. That wasn’t really fair play by the Zulus. Now we can understand the motivation behind the Afrikaners’ actions. We understand why they were intent upon attacking umGungundlovu.” The handkerchief swooped in and Piet blew his nose like a trumpet.

“It’s the season,” he said. “All this alternating from hot to cold, I just don’t know where we are. Think I’m getting a cold.”

“So it’s an extraordinary military victory for the Afrikaners?” asked the colonel. “Or there’s another layer?”

“Of course there’s another layer. Why did Dingaan murder the Voortrekkers? We need to understand that. And so we keep moving further back in search of the start of the story. We think that surely in the origins of it all we will discover the truth. But the only truth is that there is no start to any story. My life in the media has taught me that.”

“The start to the story is two different cultures coming together and wanting the same thing,” I suggested. “The land.”

Piet raised a warning finger. “Ah, Mr Moss, you’re about to fling about some pithy, but inappropriate misconceptions.”

“Am I?”

“You cannot mention the word ‘land’ without it. Not in this country.”

“What misconceptions was I about to fling around?”

“You were about to express an opinion over who had the right to the land.”

“Was I?”

“On the Afrikaner side,” said Piet, “we could claim our origins as celebrated explorers, who bravely set out from Europe to find new lands. A few generations later, our pioneering spirit had us travelling north to discover this new land. We were the Christopher Columbuses of Africa. Wonderful stuff. In those days explorers were lauded for their efforts, held in great esteem. Not only for discovering new lands, but for their role in extending and advancing civilisation. At the time our European forebears set sail, they were seen as doing the ‘right’ thing. To this day, missionaries are generally regarded in a positive light.

“On the other hand, the origins of the Afrikaner story could be interpreted as meddling colonialism. The missionaries and explorers who arrived in this land are now condemned. Colonialism has become a dirty word. Descendants of the colonials, which is all of us pale-faced Europeans, including the Afrikaners – despite the fact they rejected fellow colonial powers like you Brits – must now bear the guilt of our colonial forebears, not walk with our heads held high because of the way our forebears brought civilisation to the land. Two ways of seeing the same thing.”

“What guilt?” asked Hendrik, but Piet ignored him.

“The Zulu have sides to their story as well. We can choose to consider the glorious uniting force that they were. The first time in history that African people had been united, as the Zulu nation swept down from the north, and drew all the smaller tribes in. On the other hand, they were brutal, and mostly drew those other tribes in by killing many of them, particularly dissenters. Africa is no stranger to genocide. Entire tribes have been wiped out in the tumultuous history of this continent. It was largely the civilising influence of colonialism that stopped the genocide, but it is considered anathema to express such ideas nowadays.”

“They got here first,” I said. “Isn’t that the accepted root of all this? In any contest over who has the right to the land, it surely comes back to that?”

“Did they? There you go with your misconceptions again.”

“They were there before the Afrikaners. That royal kraal you mentioned was established before the Afrikaners started their trek.”

“Up north, yes, by a handful of years, two handfuls at the most. But if you’re going to argue that the land belongs to who got there first, you will not do the Zulu people any favours. They weren’t first, they came down from the north and took the land from the people they found there. Swazi, Sotho, Khoisan. Consider for a moment our farm in the Eastern Cape. I own that farm, don’t I?”

“It’s our farm,” said Hendrik.

“Because I paid money for it. And the person I bought it from paid the previous owner. But if you go far enough back, you’ll find someone who arrived there and drove a stake into the ground, climbed to the top of the hill and announced that they claimed it as theirs because they ‘got here first’. The ‘empty land’ approach. But it was nonsense because before they drove their stake into the ground the ‘strandlopers’, or ‘beach walkers’ roamed freely over the same land. The nomadic Khoisan people. You don’t get any of them appealing to the courts asking for their land back.”

“Because they’re all dead,” I said.

“Damn right,” agreed Piet. “They were hunted down and killed, every last one of them. You know that? Literally hunted for sport. Not by us, but by you British. That’s something the British like to skip over when they’re polishing their feel-good medals. Trying to establish ownership by going back to who got there first is a difficult path to tread.”

“What guilt?” asked Hendrik again.

Piet sighed and blew his nose.

“It’s the reason we’re at war, Hendrik,” said Roelof without taking his eyes off his mineral water. “We’re at war because of the actions of our ancestors.”

After dinner there was a scene change, with the servants as shadowy stage hands. The glass walls with the view of the ocean which had stood open through the meal were closed in order that no more of the fire’s heat should be lost. The lights were dimmed and sweet wine was produced to be enjoyed with the sugar-dusted cubes of dried fruit that appeared on the table.

“You’ve been very patient with me,” said Piet as he tried to light a cigar with the flame that Roelof held for him. “So