The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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a bluff old Africa hand called Major Tudor Trevor, who knew my great-great-grandparents well. It concerned her two pet lions – Saul and Deborah. According to the major, these two lions, which Henry Loxton had given to his wife as cubs, had a game. They would wait at the garden hedge, which ran along the pavement and around the street corner, until someone came walking by. When the walker was halfway along the hedge, one of the cubs would slip through the foliage, drop onto the pavement and silently trail the unwitting pedestrian until he or she turned the corner. There the other cub, who had previously slipped through the hedge on that side, would be waiting. It would let out a kittenish roar in the face of the astonished walker, who would then turn and find the other cub behind, roaring too. While the cubs were still small, and could be run off with a shout, the burghers of the town tolerated their game as a charming, harmless local eccentricity.
Around the time that Saul and Deborah were half-grown (‘as big as mastiffs’, wrote Trevor Tudor), a new predikant, or Minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, arrived in town. One Sunday after church, while sitting on the porch with the Loxtons, the major saw this new priest coming up the road, formally turned out in frock coat, black topper and gloves, with a Bible under his arm. ‘At that moment,’ he wrote, ‘out from behind sprang Deborah. She crouched low. The parson heard the thud of her landing and turned round as if to greet a parishioner … then we heard a kind of drawn out sob, his hat fell off, his Bible dropped, and in a flash he turned and ran off down the street …’
Deborah caught up with him in a few easy bounds and, first with one swipe, then another, ripped off his flying coat tails. The predikant put on a spurt, rounded the corner at a gallop, whereupon out jumped Saul, roaring. With a squeal like the air being squeezed from a bagpipe, the predikant crumpled to the ground. Saul climbed onto his chest and began licking his face, intermittently snarling at Deborah to leave off what he considered his kill. The major, meanwhile, was running to the rescue. Coming up on Saul where he lay, pinning the priest to the road, he fetched the half-grown lion a vicious kick in the ribs. But instead of backing off as expected, Saul turned, slashed at the major’s leg and made ready to spring. It was my great-great-grandmother who saved the day, arriving seconds later with a heavy sjambok (giraffe- or hippo-hide whip), ‘at the first stroke of which’, wrote Trevor Tudor, ‘and a stream of abuse in Dutch, the cubs went flying.’ The major remained, ever after, in awe of my great-great-grandmother, referring to her always as ‘that magnificent woman’.
But Henry Loxton could match his wife’s legendary feats. Fording the Komaati River on his horse one night (the river lies at the southern end of what is now the Kruger National Park), he was attacked by a large crocodile but, so the story goes, managed to beat it off with his stirrup iron. Arriving at the little town on the other side, he stamped angrily into the bar of its one, small hotel, and demanded to know what the devil they meant by allowing such a dangerous beast to infest the ford. For answer the barman told him, apologetically, that nobody in town had a rifle of sufficient calibre to tackle the croc. The only big gun was owned by a German tailor who was short-sighted, could barely shoot, and was holding the weapon as a debt for unpaid services. Hearing this, Henry Loxton rushed over to the tailor’s house and demanded that he accompany him to the river.
Once at the ford, Henry got straight down to business: ‘I’ll go and stand in the middle, and when the croc comes I want you to shoot it.’
‘But I can’t shoot,’ protested the unfortunate tailor. ‘What if I hit you? What if I miss?’
Henry considered a moment, then took the man by the shoulders and frog-marched him into the water. ‘Stay there,’ he said menacingly: ‘If you move before the croc comes I’ll shoot you.’ So the tailor waited, trembling, until sure enough, the croc came gliding silently out from the shore. The gun went off, the croc reared up, then collapsed back into the water with an almighty splash, and the tailor sprinted, howling, for the bank. The great reptile was dead. Thanking his reluctant assistant, Henry Loxton gave him back the rifle and continued on his way. Legend has it that, next morning, the tailor’s hair turned white.
Henry and Agathe-Celeste had four sons, all of whom grew up to fight on opposite sides of the Anglo-Boer War (one of them even mustered his own irregular cavalry unit, known as Loxton’s Horse). And it was into this line that Allen, my mother’s father, was born in 1906.
Before the war however, Jesse, one of Henry and Agathe-Celeste’s elder sons, had gone back to the Karoo and founded a small, dusty town which, predictably, he had named Loxton. He married and had a son, Frederick, who, being a chip off the old block, resolved to mark out a private domain for himself, just as his father had done. Frederick set off first for the Eastern Cape, where he married, had children, and tried to settle. But the lure of the wild, empty north where he had been born proved too strong. Soon enough, he abandoned his young family and rode away to the Orange River country, southernmost border of the Kalahari, then the absolute frontier of civilisation.
But even then, in the 1880s, this part of South Africa (still known today as Bushmanland) was fast being tamed, not by whites but by people of mixed white and Khoi blood – the Griqua, Koranna and Baster* – who had trekked away from their white masters some decades earlier. Skilled riders and marksmen, these coloured pioneers had claimed the river’s fertile flood-plain, a corridor of green winding through the vast dryness on either side, making fortresses of the many river islands, from which they raided each other’s camps and enslaved the local Bushmen, occasionally attacking the Dutch and British settlements to the south. By the time Frederick Loxton arrived mission stations had been set up and the old raiding culture was giving way to a more settled farm life. But for a white man with a little money, a good horse and a repeating rifle, there remained a free, frontier possibility to the Orange River country. Ignoring the fact that he already had a family back in the Cape, he met and fell in love with Anna Booysens, the striking daughter of one of the Baster kapteins (leaders). When, some years later, news came of the first wife’s death, Frederick married this woman, and was given a dowry of flood-plain land near the present-day town of Keimoes.
On his death in 1894, Frederick left his farms to his three Baster children and they, when they died, left them to theirs. ‘We have coloured cousins?’ I remembered asking my mother. Indeed we did. But where they were now no one in the family knew. Through the decades that preceded and paved the way for apartheid, the white and the coloured Loxtons had drifted irrevocably apart. Cousins with KhoiSan blood. Almost Bushmen. I pictured them as lean, wild-looking people in a barren landscape of red and brown rock cut through by an immense, muddy river.
As childhood turned to adolescence, it became less comfortable to be caught between cultures, to be part English, part African. The stories, artifacts, white African friends and relatives that constituted my life at home began to clash more and more with the reality of living and going to school in England. I didn’t fit in. Was our family English or African, I would be asked? Neither and both, it seemed.
I was restless in London, and began to long for the open air. We had a great-aunt with a farm in Leicestershire, a horsewoman, who spotted the horse gene in me and taught me to hunt and ride across the Midlands turf on an old thoroughbred that she let me keep there.
Though I made friends with some of the other Pony Club children, I continued to feel like an outsider. Still, it was oddly consoling to think of that great network of ancestors and relatives. Somehow the Kalahari, the dry heart of the sub-continent, seemed central to that inheritance and identity that I was – however unconsciously – trying to find.
So, when I was nineteen, I told my grandfather Robbie over Christmas lunch that I wanted to go to Africa again. The following summer, he sent me a plane ticket.
* Also known as rock rabbits, they are small creatures similar in appearance to the guinea pig. Curiously, their closest known relative is the elephant.
* A corruption of the Shona word muntu, meaning ‘people’.