And Our Fathers That Begat Us — Koos Prinsloo (translated by Louis Greenwood Lüthi)

At the top of the mountain pass near Tierkloof, the man pulls over to the side of the asphalt road. The Ingagane power station lies before him, in the night, and he gazes for a long time in its direction—at the dimly glowing fiberglass panels (orange and sea-green), the yellow streetlamps beyond the station, and the little white lights of distant houses. The power station’s four cooling towers and two smokestacks are difficult to make out.

(When I was a child, this view invariably put me in mind of the Italian passenger ship that took us from Mombasa to Beira. It was in 1962 that we got out of Kenya. “Got out” was how my father put it. At the time, he said, he’d had the urge to set fire to the farmhouse and then stand back and laugh. The Mau Mau Uprising had recently ended. Dad had sold a portion of his land on the Uasin Gishu plateau—near Moiben, a settlement north of Eldoret—to his Elgeyo foreman, who later became a prominent farmer. “I owe that kaffer (Note 1) a lot,” Dad always said. “He was as loyal to me as a slave.” 

We stayed the night at our English neighbors, Peter and Jean Holmes. Peter had taken over Ray Farm, the land Dad purchased from Wallington in the early 1950s. They later emigrated to New Zealand, but Peter suffered a heart attack during the voyage and was buried at sea. 

We set out early that morning. It was late March. The sky was full of locusts. Men and women with burlap sacks slung over their shoulders picked the insects from the trees. After Nairobi, the red dirt road to Mombasa was flanked by an expanse of white flowers; we passed a tractor hauling an acacia tree.

In the harbor of Mombasa, we watched from the ship’s deck as a crane hoisted our blue-and-white Chevrolet on board. There was a children’s playroom on the ship, and a swimming pool. 

From Beira we went to Grandpa and Grandma Ben in Gwelo, and then, crossing the border at Beitbrug in our heavy-laden Chevy, to Hekpoort in the Moot region, where we stayed at Aunt Loel and Grandma Prinsloo’s for eighteen months while Dad crisscrossed the land in search of a place to farm. Aunt Loel was Dad’s older, unmarried sister, who suffered from epilepsy. Kenya gained independence the following year. 

Dad bought land in Ingogo, close to Newcastle in Northern Natal. A year later, a hailstorm destroyed the sorghum and buckwheat harvests. He sold the sheep and went to work at the power station as a turbine mechanic—an “operator,” as the children at school said. That was in 1965. He’s worked there since, except for the year we went to Rhodesia to farm (1968). Grandpa and Grandma Ben both died that year: Grandpa of a stroke and Grandma after a long illness. Aunt Loel also died that year. Dad sold the farm in Gatooma shortly after, and we returned to the power station.)

The man starts the car and drives cautiously along the main road as far as a stand of pine trees, where he turns off. To his left is a state school, to his right a mine store (Note 2). A conveyor belt runs behind the store, supplying coal from the Kilbarchan mine to the power station. He drives across the new bridge over the Ingagane River, past the power station and the slag heaps and through a residential district with brick houses until he reaches the leisure center, where he turns right onto Sixth Street, stopping two blocks down at number 16, under the overhang of the garage, its gray paintwork bleached by the sun.

His mother is waiting on the enclosed veranda with the blue awning. (Mum was born on June 17, 1924 in Gwelo in Southern Rhodesia, the fifth of nine children. She has a lame foot, in all likelihood caused by a mild bout of polio in her childhood, and sometimes suffers from asthma.) He gets his weekend bag from the trunk of the car and approaches the house. The lawn is already wet with dew. 

Hello son. She kisses him. How are you?

Good.

Her chest wheezes slightly. He follows her into the house through the veranda, past a sewing machine under its plastic cover. A white plastic Christmas tree stands in the living room with the fireplace, between two cannon shells and two ivory tusks, each of which is mounted on an elephant’s foot.

(The brass souvenirs are engraved at the bottom with “GUN 37” and the years 1941 and 1942. Dad bought them after the war at an army “salvage dump”—another one of his turns of phrase.

The tusks are hunting trophies from the last elephant Dad ever shot, while on safari in Kenya with my late Grandpa and Uncle Martiens Nel. This photo of Dad, on the elephant that Grandpa shot and killed, was taken then:

In Pioneer Days and Adventures on Safari in Kenya, a chronicle of his hunting exploits written shortly before his death, Grandpa describes this last hunt as follows: 

Then I still really wanted to shoot a greater kudu, but you never see them in the places you’re allowed to shoot, only in the places you’re not, or not without a hunting permit from the Governor.

So I applied to the Governor for a permit and indicated that I had forty big licenses already and really wanted to add a greater kudu to my set, and I was denied. Well, then I just got another elephant permit.

Then I met Martiens Nel. I said, You know, I only need to shoot an elephant to complete my trophy collection. He said, Alright, Uncle, we’ll go together, I’ll take you to a place where you can shoot an elephant without too much difficulty. 

So my son Daan and I went with him to the Tana River, close to the Tanganyika border. After we set up camp, he surveyed the veld with his binoculars. Then he said, Uncle, there are three by those trees and two over there. Now, you want the tusks of a handsome elephant, right. I’ll go and have a look first. You should rest a bit. No need to worry, you’ll bag one, there are plenty of elephants out here.

He was a good distance from the camp when he took off his shirt and shoes and hid them in a tree before going on. He gets close to the elephants, takes a good look at them, and comes back. It must be at least two miles from camp. The elephants are sleeping in the shade. 

After resting a while, he says, Let’s go, Uncle.

We start walking, but I can hardly keep up with the man. He waits every time he notices I’m trailing behind. He halts about ten paces from the elephants, and says, Can you see, Uncle? The middle one has the nicest tusks.

One is a poena (Note 3). I look at them but can’t make up my mind. He throws a stick and says, That one there.

They startle awake, prick up their ears, and run away. Then I shoot the middle one and it’s on its back. We then both shoot at the same time and the elephant is lying there dead.

Then we had to cut off the tusks and feet and take them back to the camp. After that, I was too exhausted to carry on. Daan also shot an elephant but we couldn’t find it, and more than anything else I just want to spend my birthday with my wife. 

So we left Daan’s elephant. Martiens promised to track it down and bring back the tusks for Daan, which he did.

Then we covered the three hundred and fifty miles home in one day.)

On top of each foot, around the base of the tusk, is a slab of partridge-wood. On one of the slabs there is a desiccated elephant’s tail, and on the other an ashtray commemorating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953.

The man walks down the hallway, past a certificate from the Rhodesia Pioneers and Early Settlers Society that reads, in script: “This is to certify that Dora Prinsloo is the granddaughter of Dawid Schalk Pretorius, an 1894 pioneer of Rhodesia.” 

He enters the room with the Tretchikoff (Note 4) prints on the wall and sets his bag on one of the twin beds with light pink sheets.

He walks into the kitchen.

You must be starving, says his mother. 

She bakes two eggs and serves them on a Pyrex plate with a slice of white bread and some canned frankfurters. 

Pilletjies Pretorius’s wife probably has cancer, she says. She’s not long for this world.

She fills the electric kettle with water and plugs it in. 

Your father will be here any minute now. 

When he is done eating, he puts the dirty plate in the sink. A motorcycle stops outside. The screen door bangs and his father enters. (Dad was born on February 18, 1922, on the Verbrandebos farm near Kipkabus, a settlement south of Eldoret in Naivasha province, eight thousand feet above sea level. It’s why he has such strong lungs, Dad maintains: the thin air of Kenya.) He removes his yellow helmet and sets it down next to the electric stove, along with a small tin box. His face is covered with sweat, and soot is smeared across the front of his overalls.

Evening. He greets his son with a kiss on the cheek. Good trip?

Yes, thanks. How are you?

So-so. Shift work is still a pain in the backside. 

The man’s mother serves coffee. Well, it’ll only be us three this Christmas, she says.

It doesn’t look like things will work out between your sister and brother-in-law, says his father. 

All we can do is hope and pray, says his mother. 

His mother wakes him on Christmas morning. Merry Christmas, she says, setting a cup of coffee on the dressing table, next to the bedside lamp his father made: an eagle’s foot mounted on a piece of wood.

He drinks the coffee, then gets up from the bed. When he is done shaving, he goes out to the living room, where he and his parents exchange gifts. On the coffee table are bowls with sweet and savory snacks.

He gives his mother a book published by Daan Retief, Polfyntjie (its subtitle reads “For the Refined Woman”), and he gives his father God boer met genade by pastor Dr. Murray Janson. He gets handkerchiefs, socks, and aftershave.

At nine o’clock he takes a bath, while his parents listen to a sermon on the radio. They have tea with homemade shortbread at eleven. An hour later his mother calls his father into the kitchen to carve the turkey. 

Are you ready for the feast? asks his mother as they take their seats at the dining table. On the wall above his head hangs a print of an old man saying grace over a loaf of bread, a bowl of soup, and a Bible.

Before serving up the food, the man and his parents pull open three Christmas crackers. A small whistle, a ring, and a toy Santa fall out, and his mother arranges them on her side plate. His father reads aloud one of the parlor game instructions that also come with the crackers. Then he says, What are we meant to do with all this?

They eat in silence. There is a knock at the kitchen door and his father goes to open it.

Boss Daan! Merry Christmas! yells one of the men at the door. His father tells them to wait and goes back to the dining room. 

They’re well-oiled already, he says; they shook my hand. Not that I mind. They’re used to getting a little something from us on Christmas.

When he is done eating, he gets up and mixes dessert wine and brandy in a plastic bowl. He takes the bowl outside and pours each of the men a drink in a small tin cup. The man and his mother remain seated at the table. They eat the dessert. 

His mother brings the dirty plates to the kitchen. His father comes inside and retires to the master bedroom. 

The man goes and lies down on the bed in the light pink room. As he masturbates, he looks at the prints in their gilded frames: Lost Orchid and The Weeping Rose. Before he can climax, he turns onto his side and falls asleep. 

After waking up, he lies in bed for a long time staring at the ceiling. Then he gets up and washes his face in the bathroom. He walks into the dining room and rummages through a cardboard box under the sideboard. He takes from the box a plastic bag full of family pictures and two photo albums bound in black leather. He browses through the photographs and stuffs two portraits of his father into his shirt pocket. 

(This photo of Dad in his army uniform was taken in 1942 in Gwelo, where he completed his military service and met Mum.)

(Dad is around 22 here. This was taken in the Indian photographer’s studio in Eldoret, after Dad had completed the mail-order Sonny Boy Groot Super Strength Workout by Dr. Rex Ferrus of the Mara Institute in Bloemfontein. On the back of the photo is written, in faded blue ink: “From your blue-eyed man.”)

After that, the man leafs through the photo albums. He discovers two letters at the back of one of the albums and removes the yellowed writing paper from the envelopes:

Verbrandebos
January 15, 1944

Dear Son, 

We are still alive but I am in bad health. I could die from this wretched pain in my throat and chest. Your Mum is also feeling poorly. Your sister Lalie has been laid up in bed for the last 5 days because of her throat. She can’t go to school. Mum does nothing but rant and rave.

I’m still busy helping old Tom with the threshing. His old wheat is so bad that an acre of it only yields two sacks. And you want to sow the same rubbish.

Well, Daan, the main reason I am writing to you is this: you left me in the lurch with nearly half of the harvest to reap. Let me be very clear, son, I will not tolerate your gallivanting in Southern Rhodesia for the remainder of the war. This has happened for the last time.

I am giving you three options. Either you marry, split up with your girl, or wait until after the war to see each other again. 

Daan, I hope you realize I mean exactly what I say. I told you from the beginning that you should marry. This isn’t just about the work being inopportune, think of all the expenses you’ve incurred. And you’ll be back only in late February. Everyone else is ploughing nonstop. 

I will not touch your wheat. You’ll have to come harvest it yourself.

Last week your brother Koos shot two buffalo near his house. It must be nice to be out in the open veld. 

Jan Steenkamp lost his hand in a grain mill. I feel so sorry for the big guy. It was his right hand too.

Daan, I will end this letter now because I am tired and it’s Sunday. I wish you and your girl good health. 

Best wishes,
Your Father and Mother and Sister

Manor Hotel
Mombasa
January 15, 1950

Dear Children, 

We are still alive. For that we thank the Lord. We’re hoping the best for you too.

We arrived here in Mombasa just this mornin. I was sick all night. I reckon I am close to death. I hope this vacation will at least do us some good. We will return on the 29th, if we’re alive. 

Daan, I spotted that crook Martiens Nel in Eldoret. He kept his mug out of my sight. I asked Aunt Sarie if he brought the harrow with him. She said he’s far too conniving to have done that. You’ll have to get it yourself, or else never see it again. That is, if he hasn’t sold it yet.

Daan, I am ill. I hope to start fishing to morrow mornin. 

Give our best regards to our brother-in-law and sisters and best regards to yourselves. 

Your Parents,
J. P. and E. C. Prinsloo

A newspaper clipping in one of the envelopes flutters to the floor. The man picks it up and reads the following notice, which appeared in The Uasin Gishu newspaper on April 13, 1950:

He puts the photo albums and plastic bag back in the cardboard box and shoves it under the sideboard. Then he walks into his parents’ bedroom. They’re sitting on the bed drinking coffee. Above the bed hangs a family portrait—taken at the Stella-Nova photo studio—and a wedding photo of his sister and brother-in-law.

The man leans against the doorframe. Show me Grandpa’s rifle, he says. Outside, the sun is shining brightly on the grassy lawn. His father rises from the bed and pulls out a rifle from under the blankets in the built-in cabinet.

My late father gave it to me after we went elephant hunting with Martiens Nel up by the Tana, he says. Look, you can remove the barrel.

The man reads the mark neatly engraved on the metal: Westley Richards 425. He rubs his hand over the ornaments on the stock. 

What kind of man was Grandpa? he asks.

A remarkable man, but a man who was always in a hurry, says his father. He even pissed while walking. He laughs. And he was never in debt to anyone. 

Were you?

Yes, says his father. Then he tells the story of Ray Farm, the farm next to theirs in Kenya, and how he, Daniel François Prinsloo, borrowed the money to acquire it. 

After the Second World War, Major Wallington, his wife Agnes, and Colonel Simmonds settled in the White Highlands of Kenya as co-owners of Ray Farm, a farm with a large wine cellar and beautiful horses.

He, Daniel François Prinsloo, entered into an agreement with them to build a reservoir on the boundary between the two farms. The day they made the agreement, Simmonds gave him a bottle of champagne. The wire over the cork had already rusted. The colonel, it turns out, was very ill, and he died before the reservoir was built. 

Yet Agnes Wallington was a flighty woman—she could hardly wait for the old man to die, says his father.

Ten days later. The man is sitting in his flat at 2 Ingelby St. in Crosby, Johannesburg, writing a story about how his father came into possession of Ray Farm:

A horse carrying a rider gallops along a country road, past a clay tennis court and a rose garden in the shade of a stand of pine trees. The rider reins in the sweat-drenched horse and stops at the back of a stone farmhouse (the handiwork of Italian prisoners of war). 

Mum opens the top half of the stable door in the kitchen. Her pregnant belly bulges beneath a dressing gown, around which is tied a self-made apron. The woman in the saddle holds the reins tight. The horse whinnies. Its muscles are trembling. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Wallington,” says Mum, opening the bottom half of the door. 

“Morning, Mrs. Prinsloo,” says the woman breathlessly. She does not dismount the horse. “The colonel has died. We will bury him at Ray Farm at midday.” Without another word, she pulls the horse around sharply and rides away at a gallop. 

Mum turns back to the Aga cooker, tosses in two pieces of wood, and stirs at the fire with the poker. Then she walks briskly across the hardwood floor to the bedroom. She goes and stands at the foot of the bed. 

“Dad…” She strokes the mother-of-pearl inlays on the copper bedstead. 

“Dad!”

Dad opens his eyes. 

“Old Simmonds has died. Agnes Wallington came to tell us. The funeral is at noon.” She walks over to the windows, draws the curtains, and lifts open the heavy wooden sash. 

Dad comes in from the fields at eleven o’clock. It’s harvesting season. He washes his face, hands, and upper body using the earthenware bowl on the washstand, then dresses in a black double-breasted jacket. Mum dons a hat. Before they drive off, she picks a bunch of white roses, binds them together with a ribbon, and places them on the back seat of the Chevrolet, next to a bowl of rice pudding. 

The neighboring farm is a short distance away. They drive slowly by the fields, in which a green John Deere combine harvester is steadily making its way through the crop of grain. At the small bridge over the storm drain, Dad says, “And the reservoir isn’t even done yet.”

A few cars and horse carts are already in the yard when they arrive at Ray Farm. Wallington is waiting to receive them at the big cedarwood door. Dad walks ahead with the pudding. Mum carries the roses. 

“The funeral has been postponed,” says Wallington, without a word of greeting. Someone pushes him aside from behind. Wallington disappears into the dark house. The large figure of Uncle Piet Steenkamp appears in the doorway. 

“Simmonds isn’t dead yet,” he says, thrusting the stump of his right arm into his coat pocket.

“The old man died two days later and was promptly buried.”

“And Mrs. Wallington?” I asked.

“Shortly after Simmonds’s death she began to mess around with Aggett,” said Dad. 

“Who’s Aggett?”

“A good-for-nothing who farmed in the area.” 

Mum rose from the bed and put the empty cups on the tray. 

“It wasn’t long before she divorced Wallington and married Aggett,” continued Dad. “That sure did made for awkward business arrangements at Ray Farm.”

“Wallington and Aggett even used to play for the same polo team,” said Mum, before going into the kitchen to make more coffee. 

No one knows why the doctor wasn’t called, and the birth of the boy, three months after Aggett and Agnes were married, was only announced some time later, according to Dad. 

Aggett himself assisted at the delivery that evening. The birth must have been a difficult one, because it was her first and she was already past forty.

The farmhands apparently claimed that Aggett and Wallington buried her together the next morning, alongside old Simmonds in the cemetery by the acacia trees.

Dad stood up and walked over to the windows. “Like I said, she was a co-owner of the farm, so settling her estate was a messy business.” He lifted the latch and pushed open the steel frame window.

“Wallington wanted rid of the land. I borrowed two hundred pounds from Mother and the rest from the Landbank (Note 5),” said Dad.

I looked up from the rifle in my lap. “Dad…”

He turned his head slowly from the window. I couldn’t see his face.

“Stow the rifle away,” I said. 

The man gets up from behind the typewriter. Dusk is setting in. Below his window, children are running in the street. He walks out onto veranda, across the smooth black cement, and past the clotheslines in the small yard out back. By the entrance to the apartment block, he takes a blue envelope from the battered mailbox.

The man gets up in the middle of the night. He walks over to the window and draws back the curtains. He gazes for a long time at the Brixton Tower, brightly illuminated on the hill. At the top of the tower, a little red light is blinking.

The man goes to the kitchen to make coffee. Then, cup in hand, he goes back to the bedroom, switches on the bedside lamp, and rereads the letter he received that afternoon: 

16 Sixth Street
Ingagane
Near Newcastle
January 4, 1981

My dear son,

Everything is going well with us. I have the weekend free and am resting up. 

The wife of our neighbor, Mr. Pretorius, is in a bad way. Vomits up everything she eats. I give her two months at the most. She doesn’t seem to realize that this is the end. It’s probably for the best. 

Well, lad, I am glad we buried the hatchet. It was a bitter pill for me to swallow, but I am so grateful that you’re not hiding anything from me. Sometimes I imagine how I would feel if you were blind or deaf or mute. Yes, I have a lot to be grateful for.

I accept it but I don’t approve of it, but who am I to judge. Our Father sent his Son into the world to take our place and I do not doubt the genuineness of your faith. I also believe that my prayers will be heard and that you will receive help from Above. 

I didn’t tell your mother about our revealing conversation and I want to ask you to keep this strictly between us.

Well, I have to stop writing now, because I want to watch TV.

Your loving Dad.

***

1 A racist term for a black African. In 1999, South Africa introduced the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Bill, which specifically prohibits the use of the term under section 8 (e), “language which is recognized as being, and is intended in the circumstances to be, hurtful and abusive.” “And Our Fathers That Begat Us” was originally published in Prinsloo’s 1988 short story collection Die Hemel Help Ons (Heaven Help Us). (Translator’s note.)

2 Owned by the mining companies, mine stores essentially had a monopoly on foodstuffs and consumer goods in and around the collieries. Miners were paid in tokens, which could only be used at the mine stores. (TN.)

3 An animal without horns or tusks. (TN.)

4 Vladimir Tretchikoff (1913–2006) was a Russian-born South African artist, known as “the king of kitsch.” (TN.)

5 Established in 1912, the Landbank, or Land and Agricultural Development Bank of South Africa, is a government-owned development bank. (TN.)

Koos Prinsloo (1957–1994) was an Afrikaans writer. He published four books of short stories: Jonkmanskas (1982), Die Hemel Help Ons (1987), Slagplaas (1992), and Weifeling (1993). Radically intimate and unsparingly brutal, his writing chronicled the violence inflicted on queer bodies in apartheid-era South Africa. He died of HIV-related causes in 1994.

Louis Greenwood Lüthi is the author of On the Self-Reflexive Page II (Roma Publications, 2021). He teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.