The Great Trek

IN the thirties of the last century, the Boers, after over a hundred years of sporadic trekking, set out. as if by an obscure animal instinct, to seek by thousands a Promised Land to the north, the Great Trek winding its way out of Cape Colony into the Transvaal, through veldt, desert, and jungle, amid hostile tribes of Kaffirs and Zulus, its progress as slow as that of the flocks and herds that followed, but as irresistible as a natural force. They were moved as much by racial restlessness as by desire for freedom from English domination; their one book was the Old Testament, and their faith in the God of battles was only equaled by their belief in the necessity of cattle breeding and the getting and bearing of children. They not only recognized their resemblance to the Israelites of the Exodus, but shaped their own exodus by the Biblical story. Stupid and brave, tender but cruel, drawn together by common peril but still hard-headed individualists, they often survived desperate hardships only to succumb to their own private jealousies and enmities.

The Great Trek is the subject of Francis Brett Young’sThey Seek a Country (Reynal and Hitchcock, $2.75) and the background of Stuart Cloete’sThe Turning Wheels (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), It is rather too bad to have to review the books together, because doing so compels comparisons; and we know what comparisons are. The fact is, however, that They Seek a Country impresses me as a good professional job, but weak in central fibre, and The Turning Wheels as an astonishingly fresh, lusty, powerfully masculine product of natural talent.

They Seek a Country suffers from the fact that it is built round a pair of lovers who do not dominate the plot. In the first quarter of the novel, the hero John Oakley is introduced as an idealist and revolutionary of whom one expects great things. The scenes in England, leading up to his transportation, and those which follow, on the convict ship, are the best in the book. But after he is cast by chance upon the African coast and joins a family of Dutch trekkers, he becomes so inconspicuous and ineffcetive that the reader wonders just what the purpose of the prologue was, unless it was intended to prove that Darkest England might be worse than Darkest Africa.

At any rate, the love affair of John and Lisbet Prinsloo is almost swamped by history and local color, to emerge at times very feebly. The Trek winds its way in a rhythm of marching, battle, and pause, under a counterpoint of private loves, hates, jealousies, and loyalties, until it culminates in the attack of the Kaffirs which forms the climax. As a prelude to this, the account of the punitive expedition of Piet Retief — a historical incident — and of his tragic betrayal by the Zulu chief Dingaan is quite superbly told. In so far as They Seek a Country is a depiction of a strange social upheaval, it is an illuminating and moving story.

If The Turning Wheels is a first novel — and apparently it is — it is a remarkable one. While the African setting of Mr. Young’s book seems faithfully worked up, that of Mr. Cloete’s seems the fruit of vast knowledge and experience. The latter is tough-fibred, brutal, and melodramatic, but is as luxuriant as the jungle and at times as terrible and beautiful. Everything South African is caught in its capacious net: veldt, desert, and jungle; savages, animals wild and tame, and animal-like vegetation; mysticism and magic, horror and humor, danger and daring. The outstanding quality is gusto, and yet the complex story is most artfully handled.

The passions of Sannie van Reenan and her four lovers, Herman and Hendrik van der Berg. Otto von Rhule, and Zwart Piete Duplessis, are central, and all the rest of the novel is fed by them. The Wife of Bath philosophy of the immensely comic Tante Anna; the mixture of wisdom and charlatanry of Rinkels, the amusing Kaffir witchdoctor; the fidelity of Jackalaas and his pet lion; the tragedy of the girl Sara — each is projected in the round and each has its own complete story. There are scenes so horrible that they stick to the mind like burrs, but they are a part of Africa. they are a part of Africa. Nobody survives except Tante Anna, Rinkels, and Jackalaas, who are preserved by an earthly wisdom. The rest live hard and die by bullet, assegai, beast, or chance.

Sex, love, reproduction, and death are the theme, but zest of living is the spirit. It’s not a pretty story, but I did not find it depressing. Whatever else it is, it is a grand yarn.

R. M. GAY