Tragic Trek

WILD CONQUEST (309 pp.)--Peter Abrahams--Harper ($3).

When hot-blooded, race-conscious Koos Jansen saw the African slaves coming back from a secret meeting on the mountainside, he boiled with the knowledge that the worst had happened: the news of their emancipation by the British had finally seeped through from Cape Town.

In 1835 the news was already a year old, but to the Jansen brothers and their slaves, isolated on a mountain-rimmed farm in the wilds of Cape Colony, it was still red-hot. After the embittered slaves had declared themselves free, there was only one course for the outnumbered Jansens to take; round up their cattle, hitch up their oxen, and join the great trek of dispossessed Boers to the savage, wild north. There, though they might be plagued by Matabele warriors, they would be free of British humanitarianism and British rule.

Bloody Pathway. Kasper Jansen, a kindlier, more contemplative man than his fiery younger brother Koos, laughed a "bitterly defiant laugh" as he left the valley farm he loved. His pregnant wife Anna was more apprehensive. Anna detested violence. Like some of the other Boers with whom the Jansens joined forces in the drive into the north country, she wanted her children to grow up in a peaceful world stripped of racial hatred. But when the Boers reached the Matabele kingdom the natives resisted, and the Boers carved a bloody pathway with their rifles. Anna, giving birth just before the battle began, screamed "Killer!" at her husband, and died.

She died ignorant of the fact that among the Matabele there were men & women who felt just as passionately about peace as she did.

Author Peter (The Path of Thunder) Abrahams, himself a South African Negro, makes this clear in his persuasive, homespun novel. As the Boers marched north, the beer-guzzling Matabele King Mzilikazi teetered in confusion between the war & peace factions of his court. Yet even his favorite pacifist counselor advised him to fight when the Boers invaded Matabele territory: "The land is ours. Let us call forth our soldiers and fight for it."

Worldly Wise Man. By deserting the Boers' historic trek and devoting half his book to life among the Matabele, Author Abrahams sacrifices continuity but hones both sides of a worthy theme: men of all races are brothers who seal their own doom when they resort to violence. "It is not only our people who are in darkness . . . who are made drunk by words and blood," declares a Matabele wise man with philosophical worldliness. "It is so everywhere, among all the nations . . . So mourn not . . . for the Matabele. If you must mourn, mourn for our world that is in darkness . . ."

For all its lopsided plot and sketchy characterization, Author Abrahams' discovery of profound trails of meaning in the tragic Boer trek makes Wild Conquest outstanding in the year's crop of historical novels.

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