The word was born to our use with Jan Mandoor on the wintry morning of Friday 16 June 1786 in the Cape Slave Quarters at the foot of Table Mountain.
Jan smiled as he patted the dust off his hessian pants and straightened the lapels of his tunic. He really felt that he was different from the rest as a warden in the jail of the Fort. He was a Cape-born slave and even the surname his masters had given him bore testimony to his job as a slave overseer in the Quarters. In fact, if it wasn’t for his bare feet you would not have recognised him as a slave, a fate he had to endure by official decree to distinguish him from the free.
Then there was Katryn from Batavia, the love of his life for whom he was granted permission to cohabit with as of the next day. There was the matter of her being a minnemoer who had to breastfeed his master’s baby and, although one that had been conceived by the master with her, this was understandable. This was the Cape of Goodhope after all, and one had to live within its law. But she was still very special to him because unlike him, she could read.
And so he found her when he walked out towards the slave fountain in the courtyard to wash his feet. The pained look etched on her face told him that what she was reading from the tract in her hand was not good news. All he heard before she collapsed in tears at his feet, was something about all minnemoers under twenty-five being auctioned on that same day to farmers in Stellenbosch.
Jan dropped to his knees and cradled Katryn, whispering words of comfort in her ear, out of earshot of the Master of the Quarters storming in their direction with his whip at the ready.
“You will also be sold too, you have Bouganese blood,” she said.
Jan jumped up just before the Master lifted his whip to hit him. Its lash ripped open his cheek as he scrambled out of the way of its next swing.
The Master kicked him to the ground: “Bouganese uitschot!”
Jan did not know who had thrown the dagger that fell next to him but he thrust it upwards into the Master’s thigh. The Master fell down, trying to plug the hole that geysered blood into the fountain.
“Mengamok!” Jan kicked the Master off him.
Where did that word suddenly come from, he thought as he ran out of the slave quarters wielding his dagger at anyone in range — probably from the Bugis language of his mother, the battlecry of Bouganese warriors while fighting the Dutch back home on Sulawesi island.
“Jan is running amok!” those who scrambled out of his way warned as he charged towards the Castle of Good Hope. Those who could not, all eighteen of them, including mandoors and Company soldiers, were felled by his stabbing frenzy. Jan stopped at the castle gate and scanned the quivering soldiers steadying their aim of arquebuses at him. Then he charged, shouting “Mengamok” until the volley of musket shot silenced him.
Much later, they blamed the volatile Bouganese blood in Jan Mentoor for his ill-discipline and killing frenzy. In 1806 they decreed that Mozambican slaves are “more useful in the colony for hard labour and all agricultural concerns” and “Malays certainly are much superior in all kinds of work where a ready imagination and genius is required.” As for the Bouganese, they are more useful “for the most disagreeable offices of slavery.”
And so it also came to pass that Katryn was sold to a farmer from Stellenbosch, where she occupied one of “the most disagreeable offices” as his “sporting woman”. He shot her when she ran amok after he had sold her son, the one that Jan Mandoor had fathered.
Jeremy Vearey het grootgeword in Elsiesrivier. Hy was ’n lid van MK en ’n lyfwag vir oud-president Nelson Mandela. Hy is ’n vorige majoor-generaal in die SAPD en was tot onlangs adjunk-provinsiale-kommisaris in die Wes-Kaap SAPD. Vearey se biografie Jeremy vannie Elsies het in 2018 by Tafelberg verskyn. Sy book Into Dark Water: A Police Memoir (Tafelberg 2021) is benoem op die 2022 Sunday Times Literary Awards langlys.
