Jock Of the Bushveld by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (Chapter 12 )( Page 4 ) Jim Mokakel

When sober Jim spoke Zulu; when drunk, he broke into the strangest and most laughable medley of kitchen-Kaffir, bad Dutch, and worse English-- the idea being, in part to consider our meaner intelligences and in part to show what an accomplished linguist he was.  There was no difficulty in knowing when Jim would go wrong: he broke out whenever he got a chance, whether at a kraal, where he could always quicken the reluctant hospitality of any native, at a wayside canteen, or in a town.  Money was fatal--he drank it all out; but want of money was no security, for he was known to every one and seemed to have friends everywhere; and if he had not, he made them on the spot--annexed and overwhelmed them. From time to time you do meet people like that.  The world's their oyster, and the gift of a masterful and infinite confidence opens it every time: they walk through life taking of the best as a right, and the world unquestioningly submits. I had many troubles with Jim, but never on account of white men: drunk or sober, there was never trouble there.  It may have been Rorke's Drift and Ulundi that did it; but whatever it was, the question of black and white was settled in his mind for ever.  He was respectful, yet stood upright with the rough dignity of an unvanquished spirit; but on the one great issue he never raised his hand or voice again.  His troubles all came from drink, and the exasperation was at times almost unbearable—so great, indeed, that on many occasions I heartily repented ever having taken him on.  Warnings were useless, and punishment--well, the shiny new skin that made patterns in lines and stars and crosses on his back for the rest of his life made answer for always upon that point. The trials and worries were often great indeed.  The trouble began as soon as we reached a town, and he had a hundred excuses for going in, and a hundred more for not coming out: he had some one to see, boots to be mended, clothes to buy, or medicine to get--the only illness I ever knew him have was `a pain inside,' and the only medicine wanted--grog!-- some one owed him money--a stock excuse, and the idea of Jim, always penniless and always in debt, posing as a creditor never failed to raise a laugh, and he would shake his head with a half-fierce half-sad disgust at the general scepticism and his failure to convince me.  Then he had relations in every town!  Jim, the sole survivor of his fighting kraal, produced `blulus,' `babas,' `sisteles,' and even `mamas,' in profusion, and they died just before we reached the place, as regularly as the office-boy's aunt dies before Derby Day, and with the same consequence-- he had to go to the funeral. The first precaution was to keep him at the waggons and put the towns and canteens `out of bounds'; and the last defence, to banish him entirely until he came back sober, and meanwhile set other boys to do his work, paying them his wages in cash in his presence when he returned fit for duty. "Is it as I told you?  Is it just?"  I would ask when this was done. "It is just, Inkos," he would answer with a calm dispassionate simplicity which appealed for forgiveness and confidence with far greater force than any repentance; and it did so because it was genuine; it was natural and unstudied.  There was never a trace of feeling to be detected when these affairs were squared off, but I knew how he hated the treatment, and it helped a little from time to time to keep him right. The banishing of him from the waggons in order that he might go away and have it over was not a device to save myself trouble, and I did it only when it was clear that he could stand the strain no longer.  It was simply a choice of evils, and it seemed to me better to let him go, clearly understanding the conditions, than drive him into breaking away with the bad results to him and the bad effects on the others of disobeying orders.  It was, as a rule, far indeed from saving me trouble, for after the first bout of drinking he almost invariably found his way back to the waggons: the drink always produced a ravenous craving for meat, and when his money was gone and he had fought his fill and cleared out all opposition, he would come back to the waggons at any hour of the night, perhaps even two or three times between dark and dawn, to beg for meat.  Warnings and orders had no effect whatever; he was unconscious of everything except the overmastering craving for meat. He would come to my waggon and begin that deadly monotonous recitation, "Funa 'nyama, Inkos!  Wanta meat, Baas!"  There was a kind of hopeless determination in the tone conveying complete indifference to all consequences: meat he must have.  He was perfectly respectful; every order to be quiet or go away or go to bed was received with the formal raising of the hand aloft, the most respectful of salutations, and the assenting, "Inkos!" but in the very next breath would come the old monotonous request, "Funa 'nyama, Inkos," just as if he was saying it for the first time.  The persistency was awful--it was maddening; and there was no remedy, for it was not the result of voluntary or even conscious effort on his part; it was a sort of automatic process, a result of his physical condition.  Had he known it would cost him his life, he could no more have resisted it than have resisted breathing. When the meat was there I gave it, and he would sit by the fire for hours eating incredible quantities--cutting it off in slabs and devouring it when not much more than warmed.  But it was not always possible to satisfy him in that way; meat was expensive in the towns and often we had none at all at the waggons.  Then the night became one long torment: the spells of rest might extend from a quarter of an hour to an hour; then from the dead sleep of downright weariness I would be roused by the deep far-reaching voice; "Funa 'nyama, Inkos" wove itself into my dreams, and waking I would find Jim standing beside me remorselessly urging the same request in Zulu, in broken English, and in Dutch--"My wanta meat, Baas," "Wil fleisch krij, Baas," and the old, old, hatefully familiar explanation of the difference between "man's food" and "piccanins' food," interspersed with grandiose declarations that he was "Makokela--Jim Makokel'," who "catchum lion 'live."  Sometimes he would expand this into comparisons between himself and the other boys, much to their disadvantage; and on these occasions he invariably worked round to his private grievances, and expressed his candid opinions of Sam. Sam was the boy whom I usually set to do Jim's neglected work.  He was a `mission boy,' that is a Christian kaffir--very proper in his behaviour, but a weakling and not much good at work.  Jim would enumerate all Sam's shortcomings; how he got his oxen mixed up on dark nights and could not pick them out of the herd--a quite unpardonable offence; how he stuck in the drifts and had to be `double-spanned' and pulled out by Jim; how he once lost his way in the bush; and how he upset the waggon coming down the Devil's Shoot. Jim had once brought down the Berg from Spitzkop a loaded waggon on which there was a cottage piano packed standing upright.  The road was an awful one, it is true, and few drivers could have handled so top-heavy a load without capsizing--he had received a bansela for his skill--but to him the feat was one without parallel in the history of waggon driving; and when drunk he usually coupled it with his other great achievement of catching a lion alive.  His contempt for Sam's misadventure on the Devil's Shoot was therefore great, and to it was added resentment against Sam's respectability and superior education, which the latter was able to rub in in safety by ostentatiously reading his Bible aloud at nights as they sat round the fire.  Jim was a heathen, and openly affirmed his conviction that a Christian kaffir was an impostor, a bastard, and a hypocrite--a thing not to be trusted under any circumstances whatever.  The end of his morose outburst was always the same.  When his detailed indictment of Sam was completed he would wind up with, "My catchum lion 'live.  My bling panyanna fon Diskop (I bring piano from Spitzkop).  My naam Makokela: Jim Makokel'.  Sam no good; Sam leada Bible (Sam reads the Bible).  Sam no good!"  The intensity of conviction and the gloomy disgust put into the last reference to Sam are not to be expressed in words. Where warning and punishment availed nothing threats would have been worse than foolish.  Once, when he had broken bounds and left the waggons, I threatened that if he did it again I would tie him up, since he was like a dog that could not be trusted; and I did it.  He had no excuse but the old ones; some one, he said, had brought him liquor to the waggons and he had not known what he was doing.  The truth was that the craving grew so with the nearer prospect of drink that by hook or by crook he would find some one, a passerby or a boy from other waggons, to fetch some for him; and after that nothing could hold him. If Jim ever wavered in his loyalty to me, it must have been the day I tied him up: he must have been very near hating me then.  I had caught him as he was leaving the waggons and still sober; brought him back and told him to sit under his own waggon where I would tie him up like a dog.  I took a piece of sail twine, tied it to one wrist, and, fastening the other end to the waggon-wheel, left him. A kaffir's face becomes, when he wishes it, quite inscrutable—as expressionless as a blank wall.  But there are exceptions to every rule; and Jim's stoicism was not equal to this occasion.  The look of unspeakable disgust and humiliation on his face was more than I could bear with comfort; and after half an hour or so in the pillory I released him.  He did not say a word, but, heedless of the hot sun, rolled himself in his blankets and, sleeping or not, never moved for the rest of the day.