The Everlasting Plateau: Basutoland

by ENID BAGNOLD

1

THE English have a shipping line, tremendously monopolist, which, though its ships increase in size every so many years, carries in its customs almost intact the flavor of eighty years ago. As the passengers from English fogs are rolled across the Bay of Biscay in December or January, and in four days repack the tailored dresses and begin to pant towards the equator, morning tea at eleven gives way to ices, and stewards change on a given day from navy blue to white ducks. Deck games start on the first cotton-dress day, and shrinking dislikes-at-sight melt into extraordinary friendships. The Fancy Dress Dance takes place on the hottest night of all. So, seas solidifying into a deep oil of blue, the ship, painted pale mauve like a hill in a dream, glides towards the Cape. At five in the morning, by starlight, on the edge of sunrise after a thunder and rumble of chains, there comes that sudden stillness which is land at last, and Table Mountain, outlined in the dark, stands over the Bay.

The whole of South Africa is a plateau, three to five thousand feet high, which only comes down to the sea in scenes of intense drama. It is cut down to the sea — as one cuts a cake; a fierce bony plateau, and for some geological reason every mountain is beheaded, Table Mountain most strangely of all. When Africa was thrown up out of the larva of Time it came up bones first. Or it was so savagely attacked in the revolutions at the beginning of the world that the delicate tips usual to mountains were flung boiling down their sides. Table Mountain, seen suddenly from the sea at dawn, froze the hearts but lighted the imaginations of early explorers. They did not know it was the terrible prow of an everlasting plateau. It looked more like God’s wall between them and another world. Cape Town — which used to be a leisurely and cultured Colonial town, colonnaded in its streets, its architecture exactly what grows from families who are rich and religious and have the books and buildings of Europe in their hands and minds — is now (pinched as it is between the mountain and the sea) a long, gay, flimsy ribbon of suburb, running out among vineyards from the Old Town. It is friendly, flashy, gregarious; it bathes and cocktails; it lives on the hope that the whites are there forever; and if it gathers to breathe that they aren’t, it is done on the painted breath of drama.

The great central trains from Cape Town drag themselves up onto the plateau above and behind it, which is all Africa, groaning and winding, first round the remnants of the valley of vines, and then onto the rock, scrub, sand, dancing heat, and hissing of a caldron of a million million insects. The African grandeur is terrific up there. Mountains rise like sugar cones direct from their bases, and the setting sun and the curving train play games with west and cast. Out of indigo shadow the train pursues the rolling cask of the sun; and round another mountain base the train is drowned in a green light with a silver star. This vast unborn ground, which could be alive at a touch of water, is the size of two days and a night. The freshness in the early morning is the beginning of the world. The heat of the great rolling day is its travail. The dying evening, the sudden appearance of night, is its reward. The train grows more and more dear —a dear beast. It stops where there are two men and a water wheel, and parcels are exchanged. The train stoops and drinks like a horse, and the man by the water wheel gets a box of peaches.

At each man ‘s single water wheel, almost homemade— and if not homemade then of an antique, an Egyptian simplicity— up pours the green from the ground, in plumes of bananas or Kaffir corn, in bushes and roses by the single hut. Where are the great inventors who will desalt the useless ocean and bring it up by suction and feed the world? Here is all the earth waiting for the water. And all the water was left behind at the Cape. And all the phosphates and all the nitrates and all the things we want, washed into that water long, long ago. There are things still to be done.

The train arrives at Bloemfontein and goes to be oiled and nursed up in a shed. Now there is another train, which will take all day to do two hundred miles.

And at last in the leisure of a wayside station, whose corrugated iron roof is shrinking and swelling in the heat and making a noise like drops of rain, a ear drives up, and the evening dresses, the highheeled sandals, the Bay of Biscay clothes crumpled at the bottom — the fantastic luggage that will never be needed —arc all piled in.

Two miles out on a sandy road there is a double wooden road bar, two arms canted by hand. A native soldier in khaki uniform takes the number of the car. You sign and swear that you are bringing in no spirits. The soldier — of the Basutoland Mounted Police — opens the bar, and this, within, is Basutoland, the home of the Bnsuto nation.

An island stuck into the heart of the Union of South Africa, it has been a British Protectorate (protected by my country) since the days of Queen Victoria. I know that it will he your immediate thought — as I am writing for Americans — that what the British protect they also exploit. As a matter of fact, that is probably the beginning of all colonization, American or British, But in the ease of Basutoland, however venally a mantle was first thrown round a kneeling people, yet this wild, bony, exquisite, biblical country baffles exploitation. It is or would be much more exploitable for the Union, for it is the watershed of South Africa, llow we hold it —why we hold it, how illogically, and how intensely we hold it—is something odd and obstinate, eccentric and passionate. It is not at all events greed. It costs us the earth. And literally the earth. For, being a watershed, which in a fierce country means water fiercely sent, 1 lie earth and its juices, its whole recipe for making things grow, are tumbled out of ibis country and down the rivers. And in tumbling they carve horrors called dongas that look like hell. They are gangrenous gashes, sometimes half a mile long, and sometimes lying in family hordes like a collective wickedness, full of a dried and humusless earth that stands up in broken walls like old gums from which the teeth have fallen. The cracking of the earth is too terribly like the cracking of a wound that will not heal. Across the washes of indigo and old green that make up the middle distances between the pale dance of the mountains on the horizon and the shadow of a near-standing hut, the blood-red dongas strike in curves like rivers, crusty and gaping with red shadows and splitting the cultivation.

2

THE dongas have their own officer. The officer of the erosion. When you meet him . . . But there should be a broader introduction.

There are nine white families here, from where I’m writing. Four Traders and their wives (the touch of exploitation! — but there is very litile to trade with in the real sense of “trade”), an Anglo-Catholic Missionary Lather, a sub-AngloCatholie Missionary Lather, a Doctor, a Captain of Police, a District Commissioner, his assistant, and the Erosion Officer. They too, as at the Cape, give cocktail parties. But ns there is no electricity, there is no ice, and only a thing called a Tilly lamp, with a plunger, which hisses. By this you talk when it grows dark. And as there are so few people and they live so close to one another, there is no light talk of the oddities and frailties of friends. So they talk of their jobs. And in the mouth of the Erosion Officer it is of the battle of the vanishing humus, the healing of the dongas, the consultations with chiefs to agree to contour plowing; planting, to turn water courses; treks by horse and mule for days into the interior to make agreements, to persuade men who think in terms of numbers of cattle to keep fewer and less starved ones. In the mouth of the Doctor there are strange admissions of cures by witch doctors, cautious and qualified slories of secrets and results. There is a native chloroform, unknown to white men. There is this. There is that. Tantalizingly admitted, and often drawn back. In the mouth of the Anglo-Catholic Missionary, who has been here most of his long life, there is an oil of indulgence that runs near to involving odder things than are laid down strictly in his religion. In the mouth of the Captain of Police there are ritual murders.

Since I was in Basutoland five years ago they have been hanging here like anything. The jail down at Maseru has nine in the death cell now. They hang for terrible things. One man slew his mother, He withdrew her intestines with a forked slick while she was still living. Ears and lips and eyelids and slices from the armpit are always taken while alive. It is the rule. It is the magic. It is done for power. The pieces taken undergo a ritualistic cookery and become a powder that Is smoked in a pipe. They catch, try, and condemn and hang these men, but the perplexing thing is that they hang good men. Good men who are guilty. Enlightened chiefs who have cooperated, who have planted as they were advised, who have called their men together and agreed with good plans and made further ones, men of some philosophy, often of great dignity, men who in conversation frequently show a witty and gay appreciation of subtleties of thought.

Five years ago I saw two of these men, great chiefs, tried; or rather I was present at the preliminary hearing before the court hearing. The two men were the Chief Bereng and the Chief Ghabashane. There were eleven accused. Bereng was a great man in stature. He had a face like a huge black knee, a fat man’s light gaiety, rolled lips that pursed as gaily as Maurice Chevalier’s, a way of nodding that commented on the stupidity of the world, but without spleen. Ghabashane was dressed like a playboy on the Riviera, in pink shirt and turquoise tie. Bereng wore a black blanket with signs of the zodiac in gray. The witnesses for the prosecution shivered and turned from Bereng’s mocking eyes as these perched like half-moons on the are of his lower lid.

The prosecuting counsel, to one witness: “Would you too have killed?”

“ If my chief said so.”

“Would you have killed your mother?”

“ If my chief said so.”

On Bereng’s lace, without movement, came a flash, as from a god.

They were hanged sometime after I left. But before that they were forcibly rescued from the jail. Standing in the dust outside the jail Bereng said, “ This is foolish!" Both men walked into captivity again — Bereng only asking if he might pay lor silver handles to his coffin.

Witch doctors are supposed by law to be purely medical. And many are now too alarmed to be anything else. But deep in the mountains of this halfpenetrable country the witch doctor practices his magic subprofession and whispers promises in the ear of his chief. For a hundred years, since Moshesh, the founder of the Basuto nation, freely offered his country that it might lie in the folds of the gown of the Great white Queen, the chiefs have ruled their villages or areas under unwritten laws, feudal but well understood and not disputed. Grazing has always been communal. Small cultivated patches descended from father to son — not owned, but not interfered with so long as no bad farmer was born. Sex and religion followed strict customs. All this had no chart. But with the growth of a Colonial Service there must always be some paper to show for it. A service without flies is a mockery. That was one trouble. That — and the mines.

3

THE wealth and the excitement and the lust of South Africa are its gold mines. They have to he manned. In every native territory, built at key points to every area, stands a tin and brick shanty with N.R.C. printed on it—Native Recruiting corporation. Down from the high mountains, filing through the aloe-blue valleys, ride the horsemen, blankets fluttering, thin horses tripling (a threelegged run peculiar to this country), the figures seated in the saddles as still as stakes against the sky, bundles tied on either side of the withers. At the Recruiting Station a quarter of the company of horsemen turn back, driving loose horses before them, and regain the mountains. The dismounted figures, the remainder, make the long journey, by bus and train, to Johannesburg—to work for a stated period, to be paid, and to be returned again.

Naturally they do not take their women. Nor are they accompanied by their chiefs. They meet everything at once — free women for the taking, the streets of civilization in a city so new the paint is hardly dry on its soul, a city more careless, more hardened than any other city, thinking gold, breathing gold, sneezing gold dust. Althrough Africa runs the shuttle system. The men are delribalized, filled with new thoughts. The chiefs lose power. They have lost power too because we, the white advisers, pressing a shade beyond advice, have curtailed their systems of distraint and usury, feudal systems embedded in the roots of their ancestry. Even the woman who rules the country, the Paramount Chieftainess, a woman of strength and character, feels the tug on her treasury.

It is then to the chiefs that the witch doctor whispers. The pipe is empty. It must be filled. It needs the small god-related sections of a human being, cut from him living. The Chief knows the risk. He knows the hunt will be on. He knows the jail is full. But sitting in the shade of his decorated hut, or in the “garden" (a necklace of aloes in a ring at the back) at night, he listens and he nods. He lets fall a question. There is an answer. In monosyllables a victim is chosen — some inconspicuous man whom it is imagined no one will miss. The “hounds" are picked by name, this man, that man. The Chief will take no further part. Presently he will, with infinite ceremony and in silence, smoke a pipe with the powder of promised glory in it — and await the future.

In the case I listened to, the victim was the lover of a married village woman, and while her husband was away in the mines he stole over a ridge nightly. The slow story, questions and answers made in Sesuto and translated into English to the Bench, rose and fell in the stiffing heat of a large tent at the back of the jail.

“So you were sent?”

“ I was sent.”

“With many others?”

“ With many others.”

“How many others?”

“I do not know.”

“Do you know their names?”

“It was dark.”

“But you must have seen them?”

“There was no moon.”

“Who caught the deceased?”

“We all laid hands upon him.” “But you are his uncle! Did he say nothing?”

“He called out, ‘Oh, my mother’s brother! Why do you do this to me?’

“And did you reply, ‘The Chief sent me’?”

Silence. The witness, standing black against the open flap of the tent (and in the gap an inky thunderstorm) drew his blanket tight around him and turned his back upon Bereng in fear. The deceased, the lover, was given the native chloroform, which enabled him to walk for a time but took from him his power of speech, He was conducted to a hut and left with a guard for three nights. On the third night Ghabashane and others arrived with torches. The partial flaying and dissections were done within the hut in silence (by the much-trusted Basulo assistant to the English surgeon in the local hospital, and with gloves and knives borrowed from the surgery) and the witness was asked: “Did you see the deed?”

“There were too many. I was at the crack of the door.”

“But you saw through the crack of the door?”

“There were too many at the crack of the door.

I was pressed back and could not see.”

There was the scene — the torches, the figures fighting for the crack in the dark, the privileged horror within — there before the eyes of everyone. The eyes stared, in the court. Bereng drew his blanket round him and looked every inch a king.

So Bereng was hanged, and nothing has lessened. The witch doctors move silently, without their gongs, the enlightened and almost Europeanminded chiefs still drop their monosyllables. The white judge who comes up on circuit is baffled.

But to walk alone in Basutoland, to sit and paint at the foot of a village, to leave one’s bedroom door open straight onto the darkness at night, one is still a hundred times more safe than in Kensington or Mayfair. Or in New York.

And when each day breaks again, what a scene on this tableland! An endless line of mountains on every side which, in the day, hang light as a wash of indigo, shelf-high to heaven, are now born in black iron in front of flames. And as the sun itself rolls up and over the top the dun-colored plateau flickers and moves; then, strapped with blue shadows from mountaintops that still ward off the attack of the light, it burns softly for half an hour in sage green, pale turquoise, and rose madder, before it sinks again into the universal dun of full light.

In the afternoons the mountains are picked out in sudden storms. One will step forward, as green as a ghost against a blackened range. A far rainstorm, as local as a water can, looks like black muslin suddenly torn down from a transformation scene; cracks of crooked cactus-lightning leap between rocks and heaven. If the rain rushes to the ridge here, a wild-sage smell swamps in through doors and windows. Then it is gone, and all the Prussian blue in the paintbox won’t paint the sky.

No one is here. The British Government allows no white man to build or own a house in Basutoland beyond the few houses occupied (but not owned) by officials. The country is empty of tourists. There are no roads into the real mountains; and to ride, one has the greatest difficulty to get horses. It can be done but it needs a week of wirepulling and persuasion. For all the strong horses are needed for government treks, and the officer who is head of the agriculture (and alone can sanction the horses, tents, and baggage) is up to his eyes in work.

I have been on a jeep as far as one can go, and I have stayed with the Fathers at the Roman Catholic Mission at Roma in the foothills. The foothills roll and sway as they spring to the mountains, and are covered with flowers. A small type of wild arum lily grows along the cracks of the dongas. Red gladioli grow common and wild. A sort of cistus, a sort of Californian poppy, scabious, red-hot pokers, and a little further away I have seen that huge white waxen thing we call in England Hyacinthus candicans. The round huts of the Basuto themselves are like flowers. They are colored from the colors of the soil, sage green and rose red, beaverhatted with thatched reeds, windowless, with an open door to the east (not from a sense of religion,

I believe, but to be called on time by the rising sun). Nothing at all is inside the huts except a neatly rolled-up bed-blanket and four or five round pots of earthenware. The Basutos seem to own nothing but their cattle, their horses, and the clothes they ride in. They live on mealies, cooked outside the huts communally, at dawn and sunset. Then the blue smoke rises from every cranny in the folds of the foothills and there is gay talk, and at sunset a few girls dance with weav ing movements to a slipping minor song like a rivulet at night.

Three huts, five huts, seven huts will make a village. And always round it and near it two brilliant colors, the blue of the aloe necklace that keeps out (or in) the cattle, and the emerald green of a small square of Kaffir corn from which they live. The mealie is eaten by man, the husk by the animal. There is no tin, no match end, no rag, no lid of grocer’s box, no empty bottle — no dustbin. And if you ask tentatively to go inside, or show by your face or your hands that you would like to, then their two hands stretched out. together invite you liberally and gravely and with extreme pleasure, and they use phrases of honor done to them which must come from the beginning of history. Open the Bible and lay your ear to the noise of an old wind that blows from it straight into these valleys and foothills. Here walk Ahab and Ezekiel. Murderers and adulterers, or good men; kind, or objectively cruel as a wild animal, with a passionless cruelty — yet they seem simplified, like an antique frieze seen on a horizon early in the world, as with gestures, and a proud, grave courtesy, they offer the immense wealth of a beautiful empty hut for you to see.