The Black Diamond

At that moment, the sky seemed to illuminate, a shooting star crossed the limpid firmament above Vrymeer and, from the highest peak of one of the two enormous mountains that sheltered the beautiful valley, and everyone’s eyes followed the descent of the meteorite, until it sank into the immense lake. Both human beings and animals stood dumbfounded before such splendor and beauty, startled, the flamingoes flew off, the black antelopes lifted their lovely heads, adorned with shapely, yard-long horns, the moonlight made it possible to admire the whiteness of their bellies and the deep darkness of their eyes.

Leaning against her grandfather’s broad chest, little Tineke heard Aunt Rite’s soprano tone of voice. “Pray and make wishes, I am sure God will grant them all,” she said.

Children and elders, women and men kept quiet for a few seconds, they all stopped thinking about their problems to concentrate, earnestly, on what they most yearned for. A tumult of hopes paraded in front of each individual mind, their hearts started beating rapidly, their hands joined together, every one of them looked up to the heights, piously, and pleaded to the God of the Voortrekker. The descendants of the first Calvinists –Dutch and French- who had arrived in Africa believed that THEIR CREATOR guided them and would always protect them, as they were his only children.

Willem van Diemen gazed at his first-born. The wind was ruffling Tineke’s long, blond hair, lashing it against her grandfather’s already ashen beard. Without her knowing it, the moonlight was reflecting her small hands in the majestic lake, and made her body look as though it covered the whole firmament. The little girl stopped listening to the patriarch, who was, once again, giving his account of the battle of Blood River, as he had done so many times before.

“Only a handful of Boers were necessary to defeat the powerful Zulu people,” said Frans van der Weyden, her grandfather. “Over five thousand of those brave Negroes succumbed before the forces of God, without our losing one single man,” he boasted.

Tineke closed her eyes, bluer than the blue of the sea in June, and broke off from her conscience, knowing that she possessed a pair of wings, as magical as her mind, she set out to fly all over Africa. In her reverie, the girl traveled through all the periods, and examined all the centuries and all the history of her people. Something inside of her made her different from the rest of the Afrikaners. When she was born, the midwife had assured that she would be a visionary that her mind would penetrate other minds and her spirit would understand other people’s feelings.

Two hundred years had gone by since the first Dutchmen had reached the Cape of Good Hope. They had arrived with the firm conviction that their Creator was sending them to their promised land, and all of the vast territories of the immense African continent would be theirs forever. When they got there, they found extraordinary climate and prodigal Nature, thousands of different plants and remarkable animals, which, according to them, existed only to belong to the Dutch.

The only tribes that inhabited those lands were the Hottentots and the San. Since these individuals did not resemble the Europeans, the white men had debated whether they were thinking beings or mere animals, concluding that they were neither one thing nor the other, so therefore, they defined them as sub-human. The aborigines, both men and women, did not grow taller than five feet, their skin was dark yellowish, they were neither fat nor brawny, and they all looked like old papyrus, as their skin was flabby and dry and deep wrinkles crossed their faces. Their outer skin had the texture of black lava extinguished by time, and it covered their entire bodies, except for their meaty, blood-colored lips, like the mouth of an erupting volcano, so the Europeans decided that these natives came from the depths of the earth.

The Hottentots’ buttocks were always lean and dry in times of famine but, after a great feast, they filled with fat and became prominent and beaming. When they ate abundantly, their features also changed, their wrinkles disappeared, and their complexion shone like a bright torch. This genetic trait allowed the Bushmen, as they were also called, to roam around the desert almost without water or food, like camels. Today, these little men are extinct, but their spirits still fly over the deserts and their bones have mixed with the sand, whereas the descendants of the Dutch continued their expansion northwards, seeking their destiny.