By the time they had butchered the enormous carcasses darkness had fallen. Rather than risk a night drive back along the game tracks, which were filled with old tree stumps and antbear holes that could smash the trucks’ suspension, they camped on the riverbank. Ishmael prepared fresh buffalo tongue for their dinner, and afterwards they sipped their coffee around the fire and listened to the hyenas, who had been attracted by the smell of buffalo blood and guts, sobbing and shrieking in the dark bush around their camp. Hennie fossicked in his haversack and brought out a bottle, pulled the cork and offered it to Kermit, who held it up to the firelight. It was less than half full with a pale brown liquid.
‘The President don’t allow hard liquor in the camp. I haven’t taken a real drink in a month. What kind of poison is this?’ he asked cautiously.
‘My aunty in Malmesbury down in the Cape makes it from peaches. Its called Mampoer. It’ll put hair on your chest and load your fun-gun with buckshot.’
Kermit took a swig. His eyes opened wide as he swallowed. ‘You can call it Mam-whatever. I call it a hundred-per-cent proof moonshine.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and passed the bottle to Leon. ‘Have a blast of that, pardner!’ He was still euphoric, and Leon was even happier that he had allowed him to claim the buffalo kills. The bottle went around the fire twice before it was empty and all three were in expansive mood.
‘So, Hennie, you’re from South Africa. Were you there during the war?’ Kermit asked.
Hennie considered his reply for a minute. ‘Ja, I was there.’
‘We read a lot about it in the States. The newspapers say it was something like our own war against the South. Damn hard and bitter.’
‘For some of us it was worse than that.’
‘Sounds like you were mixed up in the fighting.’
‘I rode with de la Rey.’
‘I read about him,’ Kermit said. ‘He was the greatest commando leader of them all. Tell us about it.’
The Mampoer had loosened the tongue of the usually taciturn Boer. He became almost eloquent as he described the fighting in the veld, where thirty thousand Boer farmers had stretched the military might of the greatest empire the world had ever seen almost to its limits.
‘They would never have forced us to surrender if that bloody butcher Kitchener had not turned on the women and children we had left on our farms. He burned the farms and shot the cattle. He herded all the women and children into his concentration camps and put fish-hooks into their food so they coughed up blood before they died.’ A single tear ran down one of his weathered brown cheeks. He wiped it away and excused himself brokenly. ‘Ag! I am sorry. It’s the Mampoer, but they are bad memories. My wife, Annetjie, died in the camps.’ He stood up. ‘I’m going to turn in. Good night.’ He picked up his blanket roll and walked away into the darkness. After he had gone Kermit and Leon sat quietly for a while, their mood sombre now.
Leon spoke softly: ‘It wasn’t fish-hooks. It was diphtheria that killed them. Hennie can’t understand that on our side it wasn’t deliberate, but the Boer women had always lived out on the open veld. When they were crowded together they had no idea of hygiene. They didn’t know how to keep the camps clean. They became filthy plague holes.’ He sighed. ‘Since the war the British Government has tried to make compensation. They have poured millions of pounds into the country to rebuild the farms. Last year they allowed free elections. Now a government under the two Boer generals, Louis Botha and Jannie Smuts, runs the country. Never has a victor treated the vanquished with such generosity and magnanimity as Britain has shown.’
‘But I understand how Hennie feels,’ Kermit said. ‘There are many people in the south of our country who, even after forty years, have not been able to forget and forgive.’