I Dreamed a Dream
From Escape from Culloden
by The Chevalier de Johnstone
As there was no longer any safety for us in Glen-Prossen on account of the detachments with which we were continually being surrounded, we unanimously agreed to quit Samuel’s at three o’clock the next morning. Our plan was to return to the Highlands and to fix our abode, for the time being, among the rocks. As a result of this decision, we went to bed at eight o’clock in the evening in order to lay in a stock of sleep before our departure, as we had no hope of sleeping under a roof for some time to come.
I have never been in the habit of giving credence to stories of supernatural intervention, which seem to abound in every country and with which men are deceived from their infancy. Such stories are generally the creations of overheated imaginations, of superstitious old women, or of disordered intellects. That night, however, I had so extraordinary and so incomprehensible a dream that if any other person had related it to me, I should have treated him as a visionary. However, it was later verified to the letter, and I owe my life to the circumstance of my having been so struck with it, incredulous as I was, that I could not resist the impression it left on my mind. I dreamed that, having escaped the pursuits of my enemies and being at the end of all my troubles and sufferings, I happened to be in Edinburgh in the company of Lady Jane Douglas, sister of the Earl of Douglas. I was relating to her everything that had occurred to me since the battle of Culloden, detailing all that had taken place in our army since our retreat from Stirling, including the dangers to which I had been personally exposed in endeavouring to escape death on the scaffold.
When I awoke at six o’clock in the morning, this dream had left so strong an impression on my mind that I thought I still heard the soft voice of Lady Jane Douglas in my ears. All my senses were lulled into a state of profound calm, while I felt at the same time a serenity of soul and tranquillity of mind to which I had been a total stranger since the advent of our misfortunes. I remained in my bed, absent and buried in all manner of reflections, my head leaning on my hand and my elbow supported on my pillow, recalling all the circumstances of my dream and regretting very much that it was only a dream, but wishing to have such dreams frequently, to calm the storms and agitations that devoured my soul owing to the uncertainty of my fate. In the certainty of an inevitable punishment, one can at least resolve to face it with courage and resignation, but what situation is crueller than continual oscillation between hope and despair, a thousand times worse than death itself?
I had passed an hour in this attitude, motionless as a statue, when Samuel entered to tell me that my companions had left at three o’clock in the morning, and to tell me where in the mountains I would find them. He added that he had been twice at my bedside to awaken me before their departure but, seeing me fast asleep, could not find it in his heart to disturb me, convinced as he was of my need to rest before the fatigues I must undergo in the mountains. He advised me to rise without delay, as it was time to depart and his daughter, who would think we had all left, might not be as diligent about signalling the arrival of detachments.
I answered in a composed and serious tone: ‘Samuel, I’m going to Edinburgh.’
Poor Samuel stared at me with a foolish and astonished air, and exclaimed: ‘Excuse me, my good sir, but are you right in the head?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘my head is perfectly sound. I’m going to Edinburgh, and I leave this evening. Go and tell your daughter I’m still here, and that she must continue her usual watch and let me know if any troops arrive in Cortachie during the course of the day.’
Samuel began to tire me with his remonstrances, so I imposed silence by telling him, once and for all, that I had made up my mind, and that it was pointless to raise the subject again.
A Body of Brave and Determined Men
by The Chevalier de Johnstone
On occasions when everything is to be feared, we ought to lay aside fear; when we are surrounded with dangers, no danger ought to alarm us. With the best plans we may fail in our enterprises, but the firmness we display in misfortune is the noblest ornament of virtue. This is the manner in which a Prince who, with an unexampled rashness, had landed in Scotland with only seven men, ought to have conducted himself.
We were masters of the passes between Ruthven and Inverness, which gave us sufficient time to assemble our adherents. The clan of Macpherson of Clunie, consisting of five hundred very brave men, besides many other Highlanders who had not been able to reach Inverness before the battle, joined us at Ruthven. Our numbers increased at every moment, and I am thoroughly convinced that, in the course of eight days, we should have had a more powerful army than ever, capable of re-establishing without delay the state of our affairs, and of avenging the barbarous cruelties of the Duke of Cumberland. But the Prince was inexorable and immoveable in his resolution to abandon his enterprise, and to terminate, in this inglorious manner, an expedition the rapid progress of which had fixed the attention of all Europe.
Our separation at Ruthven was truly affecting. We bade one another an eternal adieu. No one could say whether the scaffold would not be his fate. The Highlanders gave vent to their grief in wild howlings and lamentations. The tears flowed down their cheeks when they thought that their country was now at the discretion of the Duke of Cumberland, and on the point of being plundered, whilst they and their children would be reduced to slavery and plunged, without resource, into a state of remediless distress.
~
Thus did Prince Charles begin his enterprise with seven men and abandon it at a moment when he might have been at the head of as many thousands. He preferred to wander up and down the mountains alone, exposed every instant to being taken and put to death by detachments of English troops sent by the Duke of Cumberland to pursue him. The troops followed him closely, often passing nearby, but he evaded them as if by miracle. He declined to place himself at the head of a body of brave and determined men, of whose fidelity and attachment he was secure and all of whom would have shed the last drop of their blood in his defence. Indeed, this was now their only means of saving themselves from the scaffold, and their families from slaughter by a furious, enraged, barbarous soldiery.
The Highlands are full of precipices and passes through mountains, where only one person at a time can proceed and where a thousand men can defend themselves for years against a hundred thousand. As it abounds with horned cattle, of which above a hundred thousand are yearly sold to the English, provisions would not have been wanting. But it would only have been necessary to adopt this partisan warfare as a last resource, for I am morally certain that in the course of ten or twelve days we could have been in a position to return to Inverness and do battle with the Duke of Cumberland on equal terms. When I reflect on this subject, I am always astonished that Lord George Murray and the other clan chiefs did not resolve to carry on this mountain warfare themselves, in their own defence, as nothing can be more certain than what was once said by a celebrated author, namely that in revolt: ‘when we draw the sword, we ought to throw away the scabbard’. There is no half-measure. We must conquer or die. This would have spared much of the blood that was afterwards shed on the scaffold in England, and it would have prevented the almost total extermination of the race of Highlanders that has since taken place, whether from the policy of the English government, the emigration of their families to the colonies, or the numerous Highland regiments raised and cut to pieces during the Seven Years War (1756-1763).
~
At length the Prince embarked, on the 17th of September 1746, having escaped death a thousand times during the space of five months, and having exposed himself to a thousand times more danger than he would have done if he had acted with courage and perseverance, leading his faithful Highlanders for as long as he could hope to make headway against the English. He should only have resorted to skulking and running about the Highlands without attendants as a last resort, after the passes had been forced and all possibility of opposing the enemy had been destroyed.
But our situation was not desperate. All we can say is that this Prince had embarked on his expedition rashly and without foreseeing the personal dangers to which he was about to expose himself; that in conducting it he had always taken care not to expose his person to the fire of the enemy; and that he abandoned it at a time when he had a thousand times more reason to hope for success than when he had left Paris to undertake it.
The battle of Culloden was lost on the 16th of April 1746 due to a series of blunders on our part rather than by virtue of any skilful manoeuvre on the part of the Duke of Cumberland. By terminating the expedition of Prince Charles, this loss prepared a scene of unparalleled horrors for his partisans and precipitated the ruin of many of the most illustrious families in Scotland. The scaffolds of England were, for a long time, daily deluged with the blood of Scottish gentlemen and peers, whose execution served as a spectacle for the amusement of the English populace, naturally of a cruel and barbarous disposition, whilst the confiscation of their estates reduced their families to beggary. Those who had the good luck to make their escape into foreign countries were consoled for the loss of their property by escaping a tragic death by the hands of the executioner.
A Final Prayer
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From Commando – Of Horses and Men
by Deneys Reitz
A week before a Colonial named Lemuel Colaine had turned up amongst them with a tale that the English had put him in prison at Clanwilliam on a false charge of high treason. He said that he had escaped over the wall one night, and had come in revenge to take up arms. Believing his story, they gave him a rifle and he joined the commando.
Colaine, however, was a spy in British pay, and, after collecting what information he could, he had disappeared. No particular notice was taken of his absence, as the men were constantly riding off to visit farms or look up friends at distant outposts, and it was thought that he had done the same. But the commando had a rude awakening when a body of English horse, with Colaine riding at their head, fell upon them at dawn, killing and wounding seventeen men, including my young friend Michael du Preez.
The attacking force took our men so completely by surprise that the troopers rode through the camp using their swords, and got away safely to the other side before our men could recover their wits. All were fierce in their denunciation of Colaine’s treachery, and hoped that he would fall into their hands. And later Nemesis ran the right man to earth for once.
~
As we went through the rooms, strewn with upturned chairs, etc, in the hand-to-hand fighting, we saw a man in civilian clothing crouched under the arched fireplace in the kitchen. I thought it was the owner of the farm, not yet recovered from his fright, but when I drew Wyndell’s attention to him, he exclaimed, ‘By God! It’s Colaine!’ I did not know Colaine, but Wyndell dragged him from the house, shouting to the men outside to come and see who was here, and soon dozens of angry men were muttering threats and curses at the wretched spy.
He was a man of about forty-five, in appearance a typical backveld Boer, with flowing beard and corduroys. He was brave enough now, for when the men fiercely assured him of his certain fate, he shrugged his shoulders and showed no sign of fear. Commandant Bouwer came up while we were crowding round, and ordered two men to guard him until General Smuts was notified.
~
When I entered the homestead at Aties, General Smuts was in the diningroom talking to the owner, Isaac van Zijl, whose wife and daughters were there too, and before long Colaine, the spy, was ushered in by his guards, who wanted to know what to do with their prisoner. General Smuts had heard the whole story of Colaine’s treachery, and, after questioning the escort to make sure of the man’s identity, he sentenced him to death without further formality. When the General said to the guards: ‘Take him outside and shoot him,’ Colaine’s nerve failed him and, falling on his knees, he begged for mercy, while the women fled the room in tears. General Smuts repeated his order but, as the condemned man was being led out, the Reverend Mr Kriel came in and asked leave to pray for the soul of this poor sinner. So Colaine was taken to a little smithy behind the dwelling-house, and, when I looked in a little later, I saw him and the clergyman kneeling side by side against a plough-tail, deep in prayer.
After a while Andries de Wet of our staff was told to collect a firing party, and, as he disliked the job, he asked me to accompany him. We sent some farm servants to dig a grave out of sight of the house, to spare the feelings of its inmates, and, ordering three men who were off-saddled in the garden to fetch their rifles, we went to the workshop door. Catching Mr Kriel’s eye, De Wet pointed to the prisoner, and the clergyman touched the kneeling man on the shoulder and said: ‘Brother, be a man, your time has come.’
Colaine took the news calmly. He rose from his knees, shook the parson by the hand and, bidding goodbye to the guards, said that he was ready. We led him to where the grave was being dug. On the way he spoke to us. He said he knew he deserved to die, but he was a poor man, and had taken blood-money to keep his wife and children from starving.
The farm servants were just completing the grave when we came up, and the unfortunate man blanched when he looked into the shallow pit. Perhaps he had still hoped for a reprieve, until he saw it. Even now he tried to gain time, appealing to us to send for Mr Kriel to say a final prayer with him. Then he turned to me and asked me to fetch General Smuts, but we felt that the sooner it was over the better, so De Wet blindfolded him and placed him at the head of the grave.
Realising that this was the end, Colaine held up his hands and, in a low tone, recited the Lord’s Prayer while the firing party silently ranged themselves. As he came to the final ‘Amen’, they fired. With a convulsive jerk he pitched backward into the grave, and the frightened servants quickly covered him with earth.
Plenty Afraid
by Deneys Reitz
Early in the year 1900 I was serving with the republican forces in Natal. I took part in the siege of Ladysmith and in the Tugela battles, and when we were at last pushed back, we stood on the defensive on the Biggarsbergen, licking our wounds.
During the lull, I obtained home leave for a few days, and travelled up by rail to Pretoria.
Pretoria is only thirty-five miles from Johannesburg and, as I had never been to the Golden City, my father and I took the train one morning, and ran across. The place seemed deserted, the streets were empty, and doors and windows were boarded.
We walked about for most of the day and then, towards evening, there came a diversion. Suddenly, just as the street lights came on, a terrific explosion rent the air and a huge column of smoke shot a mile high into the sky, where it stood towering like a great mushroom. On all sides we heard the crash of falling masonry and broken glass, and men and women, previously invisible, poured into the streets, making for the scene of the catastrophe. From their shouts we gathered that the government ammunition plant had blown up, and we followed in their wake. Soon we reached a large block of buildings fiercely ablaze; shells and cartridges were detonating, sending spurts of green and yellow flames in all directions.
Some thirty dead men lay in a row on the pavement, and wounded were being carried off. It was a grim scene and it is still a vivid memory, for I was a boy at the time, of an age when things make a lasting impression.
My father and I helped where we could, and late that night we returned to Pretoria. Next morning there was intense anger when an official bulletin was issued, stating that the disaster was the work of a British spy who, it was said, had connected a live wire from the municipal power station in such a manner that, when the town lights were turned on, the factory was set off.
Up through the intervening years I had nursed a grievance over this, for I thought it a dastardly trick.
Now I had fresh light shed on the subject. I had occasion to visit a town in the Eastern Transvaal on legal business, and here I met a man named Begbie. In the course of the conversation, he told me that in 1895 he had erected an iron foundry in Johannesburg, and that he had built up a flourishing concern.
When the Anglo-Boer War broke out, however, President Kruger requisitioned his foundry and, with the help of Netherlands railway engineers, the place was turned into a munition work. Begbie was allowed to remain in the Transvaal, but he was forbidden access to his property; however, he managed to get his Zulu servant, Tom, engaged as a Bossboy, with instructions to report to his master from time to time, as to the treatment the machinery and buildings were receiving.
The Europeans employed in making munitions were mostly Italian artisans, many of whom had flocked to the Rand on the discovery of gold.
A few days before the explosion, Tom had come to Begbie with a troubled look. ‘Baas,’ he had said, ‘old Tom is very much afraid. Them Italian people smoke cigarettes all the time, all the time; and they throw the stompies all over the place. Baas, sometime soon everything will go bang – I’m plenty afraid.’
Begbie allayed his fears and told him to return to duty, and Tom went off mumbling and shaking his head. The plant went up within the week, and poor old Tom went up too.
Begbie said he had not the slightest doubt that this is how the accident happened, and I believe his explanation is correct.
The 1922 Johannesburg Uprising
From No Outspan
by Deneys Reitz
It began with a dispute on a colliery, the workers of which laid down their tools. The strike spread to the Reef and the position became aggravated, as the original leaders were superseded by extremists, who called a general strike – and they resorted to violence.
At the head of the disturbance were Fisher and Spendriff, two Australian communists, and the outbreak assumed alarming proportions. The rank and file of the workers were mainly young Afrikaners from the country districts, brave and reckless, and traditionally prepared to settle their quarrels with a rifle.
Revolutionary commandos sprang up overnight, and as many of the insurgents had relatives and friends in the rural areas, there was a danger that the conflagration might result in nationwide civil war.
In Johannesburg and along the Reef, anarchy reigned. A workers’ republic was declared; dissident rebel forces captured the outlying suburbs and townships; police were shot on sight; and their barracks and stations were besieged and bombed, while incendiarism and street-fighting were the order of the day. Johannesburg was completely surrounded, and our government troops held the inner ring of the city with great difficulty.
As the youngest member of the Cabinet, I bore less responsibility than the others, but it was a trying time.
With Johannesburg and the gold mines practically in the hands of the insurgents, General Smuts proclaimed martial law. Fifty thousand mounted burghers were called up, and he made a dramatic dash through the rebel lines into Johannesburg. He was fired on at close range, but he got safely through, and took command in person.
He attacked them the next day with infantry and guns, and he surrounded their stronghold at Fordsburg with his horsemen. After causing leaflets to be dropped from aeroplanes warning the women and children to evacuate the town, the government commandos closed in under cover of gunfire, and Fordsburg was taken. As our men entered, Fisher and Spendiff shot themselves, and the rising collapsed.
It had been an expensive affair. More than seven hundred people had been killed, and there was heavy material damage. Politically, the effects were disastrous. Our opponents blamed us for having acted too harshly, and our supporters blamed us for not having acted quickly enough, so we were ground between the upper and the nether millstone.
Then, to add to our troubles, came the trial of a number of the ringleaders. They were not prosecuted for high treason, but for the cold-blooded murder of civilians.
As always, a reaction set in. Thousands may lie unremembered on the field of battle, but the public blenches at executions. When five of the worst offenders were sentenced to death, mass meetings were called, petitions were signed, and reprieves were demanded. But we decided to hang these men. They had committed atrocious murders, not in the heat of action, but by deliberately killing non-combatants.
I think we did the right thing in the circumstances, but we paid the penalty that befalls those who do the right thing in a democracy. The revolution cost us heavily in prestige, and the executions in the Pretoria gaol cost us even more.
The hanging of a man named Taffy Long did us the most harm. He was a soldier with a good war record, who had served at Gallippoli and was decorated for courage. Every soldier in the Union clamoured for his release, and Prince Arthur of Connaught (our Governor-General) at first refused to sign the death warrant. Still, he had been found guilty of a brutal murder, and we felt that the better the soldier he had been, the less justification there was for his conduct.
I regretted his fate, although in Cabinet I had voted for his death. He was a brave man. The evening before he was to die, he asked for something to read, and he was given a Bible. He looked at the sacred volume, read its title, and sent it spinning through the open door of his cell into the passage beyond, saying: ‘Bible! Bible be damned! Bring me one of Nat Gould’s novels.’
He went to his doom the next morning singing the Red Flag.
The Wind that Stirs in the Kalahari
From The Rooinek in Mafeking Road
by Herman Charles Bosman
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Then, the year after the drought, the miltsiekte broke out. We all became very discouraged. Nearly all of us in that part of the Marico had started farming again on what the Government had given us. Now that the stock had died we had nothing. We couldn’t even sow mielies because, at the rate at which the cattle were dying, in a short while we would have no oxen left to pull the plough.
It was then that somebody got hold of the idea of trekking. In a few days we were talking of nothing else. Somebody mentioned German West Africa.
‘The blight of the English is over South Africa,’ Gerhardus Grobbelaar said. ‘We’ll remain here only to die. We must go away somewhere where there is not the Englishman’s flag.’
In a few weeks’ time we had arranged everything. We were going to trek across the Kalahari into German territory. Everything we had, we loaded up. We drove the cattle ahead and followed behind on our wagons. There were five families: the Steyns, the Grobbelaars, the Odendaals, the Ferreiras, and Sannie and I. Webber also came with us. I think it was not so much that he was anxious to leave as that he and Koos Steyn had become very much attached to one another, and the Englishman did not wish to remain alone behind.
The youngest person in our trek was Koos Steyn’s daughter, Jemima, who was then about eighteen months old. Being the baby, she was a favourite with all of us.
Webber sold his wagon and went with Koos Steyn’s trek.
~
We had got so far into the desert that we began telling one another that we must be near the end. Although we knew that German West was far away, and that in the way we had been travelling we had got little more than into the beginning of the Kalahari, yet we tried to tell one another lies about how near water was likely to be. But, of course, we only told those to one another. Each man in his own heart knew what the real truth was.
~
After a while there was no more weeping in our camp. Some of the women who lived through the dreadful things of the days that came after, and got safely back to the Transvaal, never again wept. What they had seen appeared to have hardened them. In this respect they had become as men. I think it is the saddest thing that ever happens in this world, when women pass through great suffering that makes them become as men.
~
So far we had followed Gerhardus through all things, and our faith in him had been great. But now that he had decided to turn back, we lost our belief in him. We lost it suddenly, too. We knew that it was best to turn back, and that to continue would mean that we would all die in the Kalahari. And yet, if Gerhardus had said we must still go on, we would have done so. We would have gone through with him right to the end. But now that he had as much as said that he was beaten by the desert, we had no more faith in Gerhardus.
That is why Paul Kruger was a greater man than Gerhardus. Paul Kruger was that kind of man whom we still worshipped even when he decided to retreat. If it had been Paul Kruger who had told us that we had to go back, we would have returned with strong hearts. We would have retained exactly the same love for our leader, even if we had known that he was beaten. But from the moment that Gerhardus said we must go back, we all knew that he was no longer our leader. Gerhardus knew that also.
~
Then we saw that Koos Steyn had become mad. For he refused to return. He inspanned his oxen, and got ready to trek on.
‘But, man,’ Gerhardus Grobbelaar said to him, ‘you’ve got no water to drink.’
‘I’ll drink coffee then,’ Koos Steyn answered, laughing as always, and took up the whip and walked away beside the wagon. And Webber went off with him, just because Koos Steyn had been good to him, I suppose. That’s why I have said that Englishmen are queer. Webber must have known that if Koos Steyn had not actually gone wrong in the head, still what he was doing now was madness, and yet he stayed with him.
We separated. Our wagons went slowly back to Malopolole. Koos Steyn’s wagon went deeper into the desert. I looked back at the Steyns. At that moment Webber also looked round. He saw me and waved his hand. It reminded me of that day in the Anglo-Boer War when that other Englishman, whose companion we had shot, also turned round and waved.
Eventually we got back to Malopolole with two wagons and a handful of cattle. We had abandoned the other wagons. Awful things had happened in the desert. A number of children had died. Gerhardus Grobbelaar’s wagon was in front of me. Once I saw a bundle being dropped through the side of the wagon-tent. I knew what it was. Gerhardus would not trouble to bury his dead child, and his wife lay in the tent too weak to move. So I got off the wagon and scraped a small heap of sand over the body. All I remember of the rest of the journey to Malopolole is the sun and the sand. And the thirst.
Until today I am not sure how many days we were on our way back, unless I sit down and work it all out, and even then I suppose I would get it wrong. We got back to Malopolole and water. We said we would never go away from there again. I don’t think that even those parents who had lost children grieved about them then. They were stunned with what they had gone through. But I knew that, later on, it would all come back again. Then they would remember things about shallow graves in the sand, and Gerhardus Grobbelaar and his wife would think of a little bundle lying out in the Kalahari. And I knew how they would feel.
Afterwards we fitted out a wagon with fresh oxen; we took an abundant supply of water and went back into the desert to look for the Steyn family. With the help of some Bechuanas, who could see tracks that we could not see, we found the wagon. The oxen had been outspanned; a few lay dead beside the wagon. The Bechuanas pointed out to us footprints in the sand, which showed which way those two men and that woman had gone.
In the end we found them.
Koos Steyn and his wife lay side by side in the sand; the woman’s head rested on the man’s shoulder; her long hair had become loosened, and blew softly in the wind. A great deal of fine sand had drifted over their bodies. We never found the baby Jemima. She must have died somewhere along the way, and Koos Steyn must have buried her.
But we agreed that the Englishman Webber must have passed through terrible things; he could not even have had any understanding left as to what the Steyns had done with their baby. He probably thought, up to the moment when he died, that he was carrying the child. For, when we lifted his body, we found, still clasped in his dead and rigid arms, a few old rags and a child’s clothes.
It seemed to us that the wind that always stirs in the Kalahari blew very quietly and softly that morning.
Yes, the wind blew very gently.
Psycho-Analysis II
by Herman Charles Bosman
‘It’s very funny,’ Jurie Steyn said, ‘but all this talk of yours fits in with what Minnie Nienaber said in her letter. That’s the reason why, in the end, she decided to go and get herself psycho-analysed. I mean, there was nothing wrong with her, or course. They say you’ve got to have nothing wrong with you, before you can get psycho-analysed. This new kind of doctor can’t do anything for you if there’s something the matter with you …’
‘I don’t know of any doctor that can do anything for you when there’s something the matter with you,’ Oupa Bekker interrupted. ‘The last time I went to see a doctor was during the rinderpest. The doctor said I must wear a piece of leopard skin behind my left ear. That would keep the rinderpest away from my oxen, he said, and it would at the same time cure me of my rheumatism. The doctor only said that after he had thrown the bones for the second time. After the first time he threw the bones, the doctor said …’
By that time we were all laughing very loudly. We didn’t mean that kind of doctor, we said to Oupa Bekker. We didn’t mean a Shangaan witch-doctor. We meant a doctor who’d been to university, and all that.
Oupa Bekker was silent for a few moments.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said at last. ‘Because all my cattle died of the rinderpest. Mind you, I’ve never had rheumatism since that time. Perhaps all the witch-doctor could cure was rheumatism. From what Jurie Steyn tells us, I can see that that witch-doctor was just old-fashioned. It seems that a doctor is of no use today, unless he can cure nothing at all.
‘But I still say, I don’t think much of that doctor who threw the bones upward of fifty years ago. I was more concerned about my cattle’s rinderpest than about my own ailments. All the same, if you want a cure for rheumatism – there it is. A piece of leopard skin tied behind your left ear. The skin from any ordinary old leopard will do.’
With all this talk, it was quite a while before Jurie Steyn could get a word in. But what he had to say, then, was quite interesting.
‘You don’t seem to realise it,’ Jurie Steyn said, ‘but you’ve been talking all this while about Minnie Nienaber’s symptoms. The reason why she went to get herself psycho-analysed, I mean. It was about the awful dreams she’s been having of late.
‘Chris Welman has mentioned his prize cow, that got chased out of the Rand Show, and At Naudé has told us about his silver-medal bull, and Oupa Bekker has reminded us of the old days, when this part of the Marico was all leopard country. Well, that was Minnie Nienaber’s trouble. That’s why she went to that new kind of doctor. She’d had the most awful dreams – Koos Nienaber told me.
‘She dreamt of being ordered to leave places – night clubs, and so on, Koos Nienaber said. Also, she dreamt regularly of being chased by wild bulls. And of being chased by Natal Indians with long sugar-cane knives. And lately she’s been having nightmares almost every night, dreaming she’s being chased by a leopard. That’s why, in the end, she went to have herself psycho-analysed.’
~
We discussed Minnie Nienaber’s troubles at some length. And we ended up saying that we’d like to know where the Afrikaner people would be today if our women could run to a new sort of doctor every time they dreamt of being chased by a wild animal. If Louis Trichardt’s wife had dreamt she was being chased by a rhinoceros, we said, she’d jolly well have had to escape from that rhinoceros in her dream. She wouldn’t have been able to come to her husband with her dream troubles the next day, seeing that he already had so many Voortrekker problems on his mind.
