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Come and see! The lizard on the rock, white ant in its beak. Its jaws
start churning. It surveys its surroundings, all along the kloof. Its
chomping subsides, its eyeballs roll. The colour of its head and
forepaws proclaims its readiness to mate. It displays its red-brown
back and ruff. It looks up, swivels its neck to the right. The blue skin
of its neck strains and stretches.
See, behind the crag lizard I arise from the rock. I dust my hat,
light my pipe. Behold me: I am the legend Coenraad de Buys. Come,
let me contaminate you, my reader of tainted stock. If you read this,
you see what I see. And I see everything. I am of all time, I am
immortal. Do not call me soul. I have a multitude of names. Call me
rather Coenraad, or Coen if you are my mother or sister. Pen me
down as De Buijs, De Buys, Buys or Buis, just as you see fit. Call me
King of the Bastards, Khula, Kadisha, Moro, Diphafa or Kgowe. I am
all of them. I am omnipresent. I am Omni-Buys. You will find me in
many embodiments. You will come across me as itinerant farmer and
anthropologist, rebel and historian. I am a vagabond, a book-bibber,
a smuggler, lover and naturalist. I manifest as hunter, bigamist, orator,
pillager, patriot, stone-shagger. I am a warrior and a liar; I am a
scoundrel and a teller of my own tale. I am going to blind you and
bewilder you with my incarnations, with my omnipotent gaze. I am
a bird of passage, I am the wind beneath your wings. Stroke the small
of my back and you will know I am no angel. I know you well. I know
you can’t look away.
May I bewhisper you further? The little hairs in your ear vibrate
as my breath comes closer. Migrate with me through human memory,
over the unmarked dusty wastes as far as the primal footprint, the first
built fire, the troop of ape-like creatures heaving erect in the grasslands.
Hear the feet stamping in the caves. See the half-human animals
scratching and painting on rock faces, how they trace the trajectories
from animal to human, voyages between hand and paw, snout and
nose, transitions to the other side.
How far are you prepared to follow in my footsteps? Have you
taken fright already? Behold the scars of my passage, the marks of
my skin on mother earth. Note well: My hide is this dust and sand.
Hear me in every footfall, every hoof-fall. See me reflected in every
eye gazing into a fire: I am both mark and mirror. I am of this land,
bred from stone.
See, the crag lizard swallows the termite, minutely adjusts its foot,
scarcely skims the soil. Listen, history is starting to quake, the dust
of forgotten battles and unrecorded deaths is shaken up, quivering
under the seething surface.
Rush headlong with me in the frantic flight of time to where the
hunters and diggers of roots are shouldered aside by herdsmen and
tillers of the land. Onward, through eras of wandering and settlement.
Hurry past seafarers planting crosses in their wake. Skim past
shipwrecks named for saints, smashed to smithereens on the rude
rock of Good Hope. Come wade with me through the rivers of blood:
pulsing from noses during dances, spurting from bodies, pouring
down hafts and blades of wood and iron, later from bullet wounds,
primordially from the wombs of mothers, from hymens and umbilical
cords; all the blood always slurped back into the soil.