Clare Houston: An Unquiet Place

Hannah went back to Gisela’s notebook and found the place where she had stopped reading. The page overleaf was titled ‘Tannie Rachel’ in Gisela’s neat handwriting.

My father told me stories about Tannie Rachel’s baking. When he was a small boy, she lived in the Ou Huis and cooked for the family. She baked bread every morning and he would wake to that warm yeasty smell wafting through the house. She made special treats for him, ginger bread men with currants for eyes, syrupy koeksisters, and sweet biscuits which she cut into stars. He would sneak into the Ou Huis and sit with her while she told him stories about his father as a little boy on the farm. His mother didn’t like it, so they kept these times secret.

My father said Tannie Rachel laughed a lot. She was not a maid or just a cook. He told me she was part of the family because she had come to Silwerfontein as a little girl, an inboekseling child. I did not know that word and it is only recently, when I started this research, that I found out.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a Boer practice of taking African children into their households as servants, or perhaps more accurately, slaves. Most often, children were kidnapped and sold to Boer families, though it grew into a process of exchange with African tribes, particularly in the Northern Transvaal. Children were exchanged for goods and then taken away to the farms and registered as ‘inboekseling’ with the local magistrate. They were tied to the family until they came of age at twenty-five years old, though often, as the family was all they knew, they would remain in the household. The practice had largely stopped by the end of the 1800s, but in parts of the country, like the Zoutpansberg, it still occurred from time to time. From what I can gather, my great-great-grandfather, Jakob Badenhorst, brought home a little girl called Rachel. I do not know why or how he came by her, but she was registered in 1890 in the Bethlehem magistrate court as ‘inboekseling’. Perhaps I am not cynical enough, but I would like to believe she was loved by the family. The fact that she stayed on the farm as an adult and lived in the Ou Huis rather than with the servants tells me she was different. The letters from Rachel to Wolf, which I found only recently, reveal so much more. I grieve for the pain this country has caused and endured. Love fractured and broken. People torn apart by fear. I only pray that South Africa’s future is different, that it can move beyond the barriers which Wolf couldn’t bring himself to confront.

My father took me to visit Tannie Rachel once. I was a little girl of perhaps seven or eight, but I remember it clearly. She lived in the township outside Bethlehem called Bohlokong. Her little block house was painted yellow with a bright blue door, and she had planted tubs of flowers under the windows. It stood out on a dry, colourless street. She was a tall woman, beautifully dressed with smart shoes and stockings, her hair coiled into a scarf that looked so elegant to me. She pulled my father into her arms and I remember him lifting her feet off the floor and she laughed. She must have been in her fifties then. She had made soetkoekies for me, just like she had for my father when he was little. They were cut into stars and hearts and flowers, and dusted with castor sugar. When we left, she handed my father a letter and, as we drove away, I looked back at her standing in the street. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she did not wipe them away. My father said that ‘Bohlokong’ means ‘the Place of Pain’.

Hannah felt she was going to burst into tears. She turned the page. Pasted alongside was another photocopied letter. Rachel’s writing had aged, and tremored a little. The letter was dated May 1942.

Dearest Wolf,

Life has been cruel to both of us, but we are alive and healthy. We have food in our bellies and houses to call our own. We have lived through worse times.

I am not going to beg; I know it must distress you and I wish you no further pain. I accept you will not fetch me home and, as much as that hurts me, I want you to be happy above all else. I have always loved you, and I now wrestle with the thought that you never did love me in return. Perhaps you did once. Perhaps that idyllic time on Silwerfontein was a desperate dream born of the horror of war. Perhaps the state of our country is too heavy for you; perhaps being together would cause untold grief for you and your family. Your silence keeps me in the dark, Wolf. I can but guess.

I will not write again but, Wolf, I am still here. You hold my heart and that is the way I want it to be.

Below the letter, Gisela had added a post script:

I heard Rachel passed away in 1952, eight years after my grandfather, Wolf. They were never reconciled.

Hannah sat on her bed, her leg straight in front of her, and laptop balanced on her thighs. She was looking for cemeteries in Bohlokong. Maybe she could find Rachel’s grave at last.

A soft knock had her looking up to see Alistair in the doorway.

‘You have a visitor,’ he said, standing back for Joseph to come into the room.

Joseph perched at the end of her bed. ‘How are things? You feeling stronger?’

‘Every day a little bit stronger, though I’m wiped out after today. I had an interesting afternoon, which we need to talk about.’ She smiled at him, and gestured for Alistair to come in too. Alistair settled into a chair under the window and Hannah then noticed Joseph’s face, a bit awkward, like he needed to tell her something but didn’t know how to go about it. ‘What is it, Jose?’

‘You know we’ve been chugging away at the site while you’ve been’ – he waved a hand over her leg – ‘you know.’ Hannah nodded, puzzled at his tone.

‘Remember, up on the site, I told you there was something strange about the camp? That we weren’t finding things we expected to find?’ Hannah nodded again and he continued, ‘The penny dropped for me today that perhaps we were coming to the site with one big wrong assumption, based on who we think Rachel is.’

Hannah let him continue, though she knew now where this was going.

‘If we compile what we have found so far, the lack of ration tins, the lack of military buckles, shells, saddlery, the seeming absence of tent encampment, the absence of grave markers, and then the remains of a farming operation, we end up with a very different picture to the Boer camps we know about. Hannah…’ He paused. ‘This wasn’t a Boer camp.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘it was a black camp.’

Joseph gaped at her. ‘How did you know?’

‘I was at Silwerfontein today and I found a picture of Rachel. She was a black woman.’

‘But,’ said Alistair, stunned, ‘I thought you had seen a picture of her as a child with the Badenhorsts.’

‘So did I, but then looking back I can see now that the child was Paul, the second son. They dressed their toddlers in white smocks, boys and girls. I saw a curly-haired blonde toddler in a white dress and assumed it was Rachel.’

Joseph was looking out the window, the back of his hand drumming on his thigh. ‘This changes everything. The old concentration camp narrative is all about the terrible suffering of the Boers. And it is true – they did suffer horribly, but I don’t think people understand how much worse it was in the black camps. They weren’t fed or given shelter. They had to work or starve. They died like flies up there, Hannah. We’re looking at a crazy-high mortality rate if our estimate is correct.’

‘And it wasn’t even their war,’ said Alistair.