The Furrow

by John Buchan, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I was twenty-seven in the spring of 1902, and I believed, as every young man in Johannesburg believed that year, that a country could be made the way a dyke is made: by drawing the line straight and setting enough men to dig. I had come out from the Temple with a good second and no briefs, and Lord Milner's people had found a use for me in the Land Settlement, which was then four rooms above a saddler's in Rissik Street and a great many maps. Our business was to buy farms that the war had emptied and put British settlers on them, so that the high veld should be held, in the next generation, by men who voted as we did. It was a large idea. Most of us were in love with it.

My part was humble. I rode out with a valuer's book and a theodolite I could barely use, and I wrote down what the Board was buying: so many morgen of arable, so many of grazing, the state of the homestead, the water. Water was the whole of it. A farm on the high veld without a sure water is a farm only on paper, and we had bought a good deal of paper.

It was in October that I was sent to Welgevonden, in the hill country east of Middelburg, where the plateau begins to break up into kloofs and the grass goes from yellow to green within a mile. The farm had belonged to one Hendrik Venter, who had gone out with his commando in the first year and had been killed in the winter of 1901, somewhere in the bush towards Lydenburg. His widow had come back from the camp with two children and a cough, and had sold to the Board for nine hundred pounds, which was a good price, and I was to see whether we had been fools to pay it.

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I rode out from Middelburg with a Cape boy to hold the horses and a mule carrying the instrument, and we came over the last rise at about four in the afternoon. I remember that I pulled up, because the thing I saw was not on the paper.

The homestead was a shell. Our columns had burned it in the drive of 1901, as they had burned every house in that district, and the roof-beams lay in the dining-room like the ribs of a dead ox. That I expected. What I had not expected was the green. Below the house, on the slope that fell to the spruit, lay forty acres of land under mealies and pumpkins and a patch of wheat, all of it as bright as a Lothian field in June, and along the shoulder of the hill above it, cut into the red earth as clean as a line ruled in a ledger, ran a furrow.

I followed it with my eye. It came out of the kloof to the north, where a stream fell in white water among tree-ferns, and it crossed the face of the hill for the better part of two miles, curving in and out of every fold of the ground, never rising, never dropping more than it had to, until it came out above the lands and let its water down through a dozen little sluices of flat stone. I have seen the lades of the old Border mills, built by monks who had nothing to do for four hundred years but get them right, and I tell you I have not seen better.

The Board's papers said that Welgevonden had a furrow "partly constructed, condition unknown." Venter had begun it, the widow said, in 1898, and had got perhaps two hundred yards before the war took him.

"Who made that?" I asked the Cape boy, who was called Piet and knew the district.

He looked at me as though I were simple. "It is Molefe's furrow, baas," he said.

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I found him at the head of it, where the water came out of the kloof. He was setting a stone in the intake, up to his knees in the stream, and two boys were handing him sods. He did not stop when he saw me, but finished the stone, and stamped it, and looked at the water going past it, and only then came up the bank and took off his hat.

He was a man of perhaps forty, a Mosotho by his speech, tall and thin, with a grey beard cut short and a face that I can only describe by saying that it was a face of authority. I had seen that look on the faces of ministers in my father's Assembly, and on two or three judges, and on one sergeant of the Black Watch. It is the look of a man who expects to be listened to because he has generally been right.

"You are from the Government," he said, in good English with the vowels of the Paris Mission. "You have come about the farm."

I said I had. I said I was there to value it for the Board, which had bought it from Mrs Venter. He nodded. He knew it already, of course. A thing like that goes across the veld faster than any telegraph.

"Then you will want to see the furrow," he said. "Come. It is better seen from the water than from the house."

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We walked the length of it together in the last of the light, and he showed me how it was done, and I have never forgotten the lesson.

Venter had started from the house and tried to bring the furrow to the water, which is the way a man starts who thinks of the house first. He had dug it by eye, and at the second fold of the hill it had begun to climb, so that the water would have had to run uphill to reach him, and there it had stopped. Molefe had begun at the other end. He had built himself a frame of three poles lashed in the shape of a letter A, with a plumb-line hung from the apex and a mark on the crossbar. When the two feet of the frame stood level, the line hung on the mark. He had walked that frame across the hill, foot over foot, a mile and three-quarters, putting in a peg at every step, and where he wanted his fall he had put a flat stone the thickness of a finger under the downhill leg, every ten paces, no more. Then he had dug to his pegs.

"Eighteen months," he said. "My sons and I, and my brother's sons, and the old men when they could. The ground was hard after the fires. In the winter we could not dig at all."

"During the war?"

"During the war." He said it without any expression. "Your columns came through twice. The first time they took my oxen. The second time the officer looked at the furrow and said it was a fine bit of work, and took my wheat."

I had nothing to say to that, and he did not seem to expect anything. We had come to a place where the furrow crossed a gully on a little causeway of packed stone with a wooden trough in the middle, and he stopped and put his hand on the wood.

"This is the hardest place," he said. "Here the water wants to go down the gully. It is like a horse that wants to go home. You must not fight it. You must give it a better road."

I wrote in my book: Furrow complete, approx. 1¾ miles, in excellent order. Irrigable land 40 acres under crop, a further 60 acres commanded. Then I looked at the figures, and I saw what I had written. The furrow had trebled the value of Welgevonden. It was the reason we had paid nine hundred pounds and not three. And the Board had bought it, along with the burnt house and the dead man's name, from a widow who had never seen it finished.

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He gave me supper that night in his own hut, which stood a little way below the lands in a kraal of four or five others. His wife was there, and a married daughter, and some grandchildren who stared at me from behind the doorpost. We ate mealie-pap and a stew of pumpkin and a little mutton, and afterwards he took down a book from the shelf above the door and asked me whether I knew it. It was a Sesotho Pilgrim's Progress, much read and much mended.

I said that my father had preached on it. That was true; my father preached on Bunyan as other men preach on the Gospels, and I had sat under him in Fife and in Glasgow for twenty years.

"Then you know," said Molefe, "where Christian loses his burden."

"At the cross. It falls from his back and rolls into the sepulchre."

"Yes," he said. He turned the pages to the place, and laid the book open on his knee, and did not read from it. "I have always liked that it rolls," he said. "He does not have to carry it to the grave himself. It goes down by its own weight. It is like water."

I have thought about that remark more than about many speeches I have heard in parliaments. At the time I only thought that I had met a remarkable man, and that I was going to do him a great wrong, and that there was no road out of it.

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For I knew the law, and so did he.

Under the old Republic no native could hold land in his own name in the Transvaal. We had come to the country promising better things, and we had kept that law, as we kept a great many things of the Republic's that happened to suit us, until the country should be settled. Molefe had farmed Welgevonden before the war on the old terms, with half his crop going to Venter for the use of the ground. Mrs Venter, coming back from the camp, had let him stay because there was no one else, and because the lands were the only thing on the place that was not ash. She had never asked him for anything. She had very likely never walked up to the furrow.

The Board's settlers were two brothers named Hebblethwaite from the West Riding, ex-Yeomanry, with a bit of capital from their father's mill and a lively notion that Africa was a place where a man rode about on a good horse and told other men what to do. I had met them in Johannesburg. They were decent enough lads. They were due at Welgevonden in December, and my instructions said, in a sentence I had copied into fifty valuation books before that one: Natives in occupation to be given notice to remove, or to be engaged as labour on terms agreeable to the settler.

I put it to him the next morning, as plainly as I could, because it seemed to me that a man who could set a fall of one finger in ten paces deserved to have the thing put plainly. I told him the farm was the Government's. I told him the settlers would come at Christmas. I told him he could stay as a servant if they would have him, or go, and that I would do what I could about compensation for the crop.

He heard me out standing by the intake, with the water going past his feet.

"And the furrow?" he said.

"The furrow goes with the land."

"Yes," he said. "Water goes with the land. It has always been so." He looked down the line of it, along the hill, to where the green began. "Those two men from England. Do they know how to set the sluices?"

I said I doubted it.

"In the dry months you must close the upper four and open the lower ones in turn, one each day, or the top lands drown and the bottom lands die. And you must clear the trough at the gully every week. The baboons sit on it."

"You had better tell them yourself," I said.

He looked at me then, for the first time that morning, full in the face, and I saw in his eyes neither anger nor appeal but a kind of patient assessment, such as a man gives a horse he is thinking of buying and has decided against.

"I will write it down," he said, "and you will give it to them. They will not listen to me. They may listen to paper."

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I did what I could. I would like to say that I did a great deal, but it would not be true. I went back to Middelburg and wrote a minute to the Board, five pages long, the most careful thing I had written since my Bar examinations. I set out the history of the furrow. I said that the Board had paid for an improvement that was not the vendor's to sell, and that justice and policy alike required that the man who made it should have some interest in the land: a lease, a portion of the lower ground, at the least a payment for his labour at the rate the Public Works paid for dams. I said that a Government which had come to the country under the banner of fair dealing could not begin its settlement by taking a black man's work and calling it a white man's improvement.

I was young, and I wrote it well. I had a reply in three weeks from a man I much admired, who has since been a Governor in two colonies and is now a peer. He thanked me for my interesting minute. He said the Board fully appreciated the merits of the native in question. He said that to grant any interest in settlement land to a native occupier would be to establish a precedent which the Board, in the present temper of the country, could not contemplate, and which the Boer population, whose reconciliation was the first object of policy, would regard as a betrayal. He authorised a payment of thirty pounds for standing crops and goodwill. He added a postscript in his own hand, saying that he hoped I would come to dinner when I was next in Johannesburg, as there were some people he wanted me to meet.

I took the thirty pounds to Welgevonden myself in the first week of December. I am not sure why. A cheque would have gone by the post-cart.

---

He had his oxen inspanned when I came over the rise. He had got two spans together again from somewhere, and a wagon with a canvas tilt, and the household gods were in it: the pots, the bedding, the shelf of books, a plough lashed on the side, the grandchildren on top of the load like birds on a fence. His wife and daughter were walking ahead with the goats. They were going, he told me, to his brother's place in the Waterberg, which was Crown land, where a native might squat on sufferance until someone found a use for it.

I gave him the money. He counted it, and thanked me, and put it in a leather bag inside his shirt. Then he gave me a paper folded in four, written in pencil in a round mission hand, and I saw that it was the rule of the sluices: which to open, which to close, in which month, and the trough at the gully every week because of the baboons.

"Give it to the Englishmen," he said.

"Molefe," I said, and I found I had no idea what I meant to say after it. I believe I said that I was sorry. I know I offered him my hand, which in that country in that year was a thing a white man did not often do in front of servants, and he took it, briefly, as a man might accept a courtesy he did not much need.

Then he did a thing I have never understood, though I have had thirty-six years to think about it.

He walked up the hill to the head of the furrow, and I went with him, not knowing why. The stream was low; it was the end of the dry season and the rains were late. The upper sluices were shut and the furrow was running thin, with the water lying in brown pools between the stones. He went down into the stream as I had first seen him, and moved two stones in the intake with his hands, and the water came round into the furrow in a body, cold and loud, and went off along the hill.

We stood and watched it go. It went the whole length of the shoulder, round every fold he had pegged, across the causeway at the gully, and down through the lower sluices into the lands that the Hebblethwaites would take over at Christmas. It is a slow thing to watch water travel a mile and three-quarters. Neither of us said anything.

When it reached the lands he came up out of the stream and dried his hands on his trousers and went down to his wagon. I heard the whip go like a pistol-shot, and the wagon creaked and began to move, and I stood by the intake until it was over the rise.

---

I have sat since then in a good many rooms where the fate of countries was settled by men who had seen less of them than I had seen of Welgevonden. I have helped to make some of those settlements, and I would make most of them again. I believed then, and I believe still, that our coming to South Africa was on the whole a better thing for its people than our not coming would have been. I have learned to say "on the whole" without blushing. That is what a career is.

But I am an old man now, and I govern, in the King's name, a country larger than the one I helped to settle, and it is a curious thing what an old man keeps. I have forgotten most of what I said in my minute, though I once had it by heart. I have forgotten the price per morgen of grazing in the Middelburg district in 1902, which I once knew to a farthing. I have not forgotten the shape of a fall of one finger in ten paces, nor the sound the water made coming round into the furrow when he moved the stones.

The Hebblethwaites did not keep the sluice-rule. I heard years later that they lost the upper lands to waterlogging in the second summer and sold out to a syndicate in 1906. The paper is in my desk here in Ottawa, folded in four, in a round mission hand. I took it out of my pocket the morning I gave them the farm, and I meant to give it to them, and I did not.

I have it under my hand as I write.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iohanne Buchanō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Buchan, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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