This diptych of memoirs, set respectively in South Africa and Argentina, frontally address a subject that most in the west would prefer to forget – the legacy of colonial genocide. The novelists J.M. Coetzee and F.M. Siccardi, both products of settler societies, recount uncannily similar memories of childhood visits to their family haciendas – one in the Karoo, the other in Patagonia – and of their complicated admiration for the indigenous men who laboured there. Their searching and unconsoling texts are drawn from Un mal Salvaje, a co-written book, which appeared in Spanish this April.

Karoo – South Africa
J.M. Coetzee

Sometime in the 1920s my grandfather, Gert Coetzee, bought a farm in the Karoo, the vast arid plateau in the centre of the country now called the Republic of South Africa. When he died he passed on the farm to his eldest son, who in turn passed it on to his eldest son. The next of the eldest sons in the line was not interested in a lonely life in the Karoo; in the 2020s the farm was sold to a stranger. Thus after a century the farm ceased to be the Coetzee family farm, the farm where, if you were a Coetzee, you had the right to be welcomed.

The farm was 5,000 hectares in extent. On 5,000 hectares you could pasture 5,000 sheep in a good year, a year in which there was rain. In the years of drought, when there was no rain, you sold off as many of the sheep as you could and hoped for the rain to return.

On my earliest visits to the farm, while my grandfather was still alive, all the barnyard animals in my storybooks were there: horses, donkeys, cows with their calves, pigs, ducks, a colony of hens with a cock that crowed to greet the sun, a bearded billy goat with his harem of nanny goats. But after my grandfather’s death the barnyard began to dwindle. First the horses were sold, then the pigs were turned into pork (I watched my uncle shoot the last pig: the bullet took it behind the ear: it gave a grunt and a great fart and collapsed, first on its knees, then on its side, quivering). After that the cows went, and the ducks. In the end, only the sheep were left, merinos, shipped in from Spain in the nineteenth century. They flourished in the harsh Karoo as they had flourished in harsh La Mancha.

The old way of farming was dying because of the rapid rise of the wool price. The Japanese were paying two pounds sterling for a kilogram of wool. Sheep farmers were suddenly rich. Now it was easier to buy a tractor than to keep horses, easier to drive to the railhead and buy frozen butter and powdered milk than to milk a cow and churn the cream. There was money for a new car, money for their wives and daughters to buy new outfits.

The burden of tilling the earth could be shed, too. The only crop that needed to be grown was alfalfa, for the sheep.

The farm was called Voëlfontein, fuente de los pájaros. I spent every winter school vacation there, with my father, on what we called hunting expeditions: hunting the tiny antelope of the Karoo. Neither of us was a good marksman; rarely did we bring anything home for the pot. But on these fruitless hunting expeditions I learned to know and to love every stone of the farm, every bush, every blade of grass, to love the birds that give it its name, birds that as dusk fell gathered in their hundreds in the trees around the fountain, calling to each other, murmuring, ruffling their feathers, settling for the night. Though half a century has passed since I last trod that earth, my love of it has not been lost.

There were two families of farmhands on Voëlfontein, each with a little thatched-roof cabin of their own. There was also, near the dam, the cabin where Outa Jaap used to live. I myself saw Outa Jaap only once: an old man with milky-white, sightless eyeballs and toothless gums and knotted hands, sitting on a bench in the sun, to whom I was taken in order to be blessed.

When I asked what was special about Outa Jaap, the answers that came back were unclear. Outa Jaap belonged to the olden days, I was told, when shepherds had to live with their flocks night and day, guarding them from the jackals. What was special about that? I asked. Outa Jaap was from a vanished generation, I was told. Outa Jaap was on the farm before the Coetzees. That was all.

Because Outa Jaap was special, there was no question of getting rid of Outa Jaap’s son Ros, though Ros was not a particularly good workman. It was accepted that Ros would live and die on the farm as his father had, and be succeeded by one of his sons.

Freek, the other hired man, was younger and more energetic than Ros, quicker on the uptake and more dependable. Nevertheless, he was not of the farm: it was understood that he would not necessarily stay.

Freek was gentle and soft-spoken. He owned a bicycle with fat tyres and a guitar; in the evenings he sat outside his cabin and played his guitar to himself, smiling his rather remote smile. On Saturday afternoons he cycled off to the railhead, thirty kilometres away, and stayed there until Sunday evening, returning long after dark: from kilometres away one could see the tiny, wavering speck of light that was his bicycle lamp.

It seemed to me heroic that one could cycle such vast distances. I would have hero-worshipped Freek if that had been permitted.

Freek was just a hired man. He was paid a wage; he could at any moment be given notice and sent packing. Nevertheless, seeing Freek sitting on his haunches, his pipe in his mouth, staring out over the veld, it seemed to me that Freek belonged on this land more securely than the Coetzees ever had. The Karoo was Freek’s country, his birthplace, his home; the Coetzees, drinking tea and gossiping on the veranda of the farmhouse, were like swallows, seasonal, here today, gone tomorrow, or even like sparrows, chirping, light-footed, short-lived.

Of Ros I was a little afraid. I had watched, fascinated, as he castrated the new lambs. First the lambs and their mothers were rounded up and penned. Then Ros moved swiftly among them, snatched one lamb after another by the hind leg, pressed it to the ground under his knee while it bleated in terror, and slit open its scrotum. His head bobbed down, he caught the testicles between his teeth and tugged them out. They looked like two little jellyfish trailing blue and red blood-vessels.

When the entire job was done, the lambs stood sore and bleeding by their mothers’ side, who had been powerless to protect them. Ros folded his pocket-knife.

Once, Ros let me hold that pocket-knife, showed me how easily it cut a hair. The hair sprung in two at the merest touch of the blade. Ros sharpened the knife every day, spitting on the whetstone, brushing the blade across it back and forth, lightly, easily. So much of the blade was worn away with all the sharpening and all the cutting that only a sliver of sharp steel left remained.

Now and again, in private, my father and his brother would refer to Ros as “a real Bushman”, and shake their heads. They never spoke of Freek in this way.

Why did they call Ros a Bushman? I knew little about Bushmen. There had been Bushmen at the Cape when the Dutch arrived in 1652, then the Bushmen retreated from the scene and were heard of no more – that was all I knew, from school. Ros was dark and short of stature, he spoke in a singsong way, with long pauses – did that make him a Bushman?

In the winter of 1955, when I was fifteen, we took Ros and Freek on a drive of four hundred kilometres to the sea, which they had never in their lives seen. I have photographs of the two of them taken on Strandfontein beach on the Cape Peninsula, gazing out over the waves. They are wearing the castoff clothing of their masters; they huddle against the cold wind. In the race classification system of South African apartheid, both of them would have been designated Coloured. The word Coloured denotes a person of mixed race (mestizo), usually Caucasian mixed with Khoi or San or African (Nguni, Sotho) or Indonesian or Indian. Looking at Ros and Freek in those photographs, I see no ‘Coloured’ men. Ros and Freek look like Khoi or San men in ethnographic photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century, who in turn look like most of the people from isolated Central Karoo communities in the twentieth century. They look like survivors of two genocides: the genocide of the San, which meant to wipe them from the face of the earth and nearly succeeded, and the genocide of the Khoi, which meant to destroy their culture and their way of life and turn them into serfs.

Ros and Freek are dead by now, and I, who was then a small boy, am now an old man. Though I was not supposed to, because he was ‘Coloured’, I admired Freek and looked up to him. I would not have had the words to express it, but he seemed to me a person of greater integrity than any of us, the Coetzees. Now, today, I see him as more than that. I see him as a tragic figure, a survivor from the pre-colonial past lost in the present.

Of course Freek did not see himself as a tragic figure, did not even see himself as a survivor. To see yourself as a survivor of the past you must have a firm conception of that past, you must know where you come from; and Ros and Freek had no such historical consciousness. First, they were illiterate. Second, it was of the essence of the genocide which they had survived that communal memory was erased.

If I were magically able to return to the 1950s and tell Freek about the Khoi who had pastured their stock at the Cape for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years before the Dutch came and laid waste to their society, about a people who were his ancestors, he would have thought it was just a story I was making up. Genocide is not just the destruction of a people, it is also the obliteration of that people’s store of memories and, with it, the destruction of their ability to see themselves historically.

Patagonia – Argentina
F. M. Siccardi

Reyes’s hands, veiny and brown, mixed flour and water to make tortas fritas with the same gentleness they stuck a knife into a lamb’s throat. From Chiloé he’d brought a way of talking that dropped letters in many words; and memories of his father carving a canoe out of a tree trunk, of a stone mill turning wheat into flour, of circles of women spinning wool and singing: Images from a faraway fertile land that, in the dry steppe where he lived now, seemed to him like fantasy. Not for me fishing and canoeing, hooks and nets, he used to say. But if you paid enough attention, you could tell from what he didn’t say that a part of him wanted to go back.

Reyes worked for my grandparents at their sheep station by Lake Cardiel in southern Patagonia. He arrived alone in the 1950s, and died alone some fifty years later. His coffin sits in our family vault in Piedrabuena, next to Grandpa Eladio and Grandma Angelina. He called himself a Chilote, and so did everybody else, a euphemism whose meaning I didn’t know back then. He told me of a dinosaur skeleton hidden in a cave. He told me of a cave painting of a one-horned bison on a rock wall as tall as a mountain. He told me of a lady in Punta Arenas named Margot with whom he had fallen in love.

Reyes was old enough to be my grandfather. I have no recollection of my mother’s father. I vaguely remember Grandpa Eladio. But I remember Reyes as if he were still right here, offering me a maté.

My grandparents’ sheep station lies on a windy and arid meseta. In contrast to the Patagonian postcard pictures of snow-capped mountains and lush forests, it sits on a tableland of low thorny bushes and grasses with yellow tips and dark roots. It is a desert of sorts, an expansive terrain that entrances the mind and always brings on a calmness in me.

It was originally an open territory where for centuries indigenous groups lived freely. In the early 1900s, it was subdivided by the Argentinian government, once the occupation of southern Patagonia was complete. Early on, the best land fell into the hands of the Braun-Menéndez tycoons and other powerful landlords, mostly British. The remaining acreage was subdivided into lots large enough to support a few hundred sheep and a household, and was sold at favorable rates or simply assigned to families or men willing to put up fences, build houses and barns, and work hard to reap the fruits of the land: mutton and wool.

My grandparents Eladio and Angelina purchased the estancia in 1946 from the first white man to hold title there, a Spaniard like my grandfather.

Barrientos was more than twenty years younger than Reyes. He wore dark shirts with a white kerchief around his neck, and bombacha trousers with a knife tucked into the waistband. His cheeks and nose were reddish, his eyes black and somber. As a memento of an old fight, one of his front teeth was missing. He liked retelling the story of that fight. You could tell he liked it by how he lowered his voice and threw punches in the air. He spoke like an Argentine, but where he came from was never mentioned. Some people called him paisano, another word that hid something I didn’t discover until much later.

As Reyes grew older, Barrientos took over the butchering. His knife had a silver pommel with engraved flowers and traces of blue paint on the petals. I kept him company while he slaughtered. He showed me how to hang the carcass upside down so the blood would drip from the hole in the throat. He taught me to dress the carcass by sliding the knife between the flesh and the inner lining of the skin. Once he asked me to slip the knife in above the belly and work my way down slowly. He helped me haul the guts out – our hands covered in hot blood – and throw them to the dogs. The lungs were red. The stomach, green. The dogs growled at each other over the feast.

The first day of every summer visit to the farm, Grandma Angelina sent me to the despensa to pick out a pair of espadrilles. Sliding my feet into the espadrilles, feeling the hard hemp soles and the soft denim, transformed me. I turned into a rougher version of myself: a gaucho, a true Patagonian, a real man. At the time I was attending an all-male Salesian school where playing the guitar, reading books and shying away from fights was met with insults and beatings. So those espadrilles, in my mind, turned me into an equal of Reyes and Barrientos, men tougher than the toughest of my classmates. And believing I was like them for a while let me forget what people back home told me I was.

As I grew older, I let more summers pass between my visits to the sheep station. After an absence of more than ten years, I finally returned. By then, my grandparents, my uncle, Reyes, and Barrientos were dead or gone. Now, my cousins and Aunt Ursula (my uncle’s widow) were in charge of keeping the sheep station running.

Around that period, as I did research for my novel Los hombres más altos, a story about the Tehuelche people, I began to delve into the horrors of the Argentine occupation of Patagonia: the killings, the rapes, the raiding of settlements, the concentration camps, the appropriation and reduction to servitude of indigenous men, women and children and then the invisibilisation of tens of thousands of people under the fiction of a white nation, without Indians, that most Argentines are still happy to accept.

As I dismantled for myself one by one the official narratives of what is still called the ‘Conquest of a Desert’ and replaced them with the reality – a blatant invasion of a foreign territory half the size of the original Argentina, inhabited for centuries by indigenous nations with complex lives and interrelations more humane than the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies ever had – it became clear that Argentina, infected by the colonial disease of the North it had fought so bravely to free itself from, had turned into an even crueller coloniser. I began to discern new Norths and new Souths.

When I arrived at the sheep-station, after so many years, I noticed the house of the peons had been upgraded. There was a new tin roof and a larger bathroom, but I could still recognise the green bench where I used to sit and talk to Reyes, the oval table where we played cards with Barrientos. I knocked and walked in like I used to. A stocky man, wearing a black beret and a red waistband, was seated by the wood stove listening to the radio. His name was Pocho. We shook hands and I grabbed a chair. I didn’t seem to need the magic of the espadrilles – as soon as I started talking, my accent changed and I knew what to ask. We first discussed the national rodeo competition, then I asked about his dogs (two furry mongrels I had seen outside) and his horse (which I hadn’t seen yet). He fixed a maté and told me about his last visit to town, how he lost his second horse betting on dice. It wasn’t a very good horse, he said. We were both feeling increasingly comfortable.

At some point, I asked Pocho where he was from. He told me he was Tehuelche. My heart started to race. I looked at his narrow eyes, at the whiskers growing on his chin. I looked at his hand as he passed me the maté gourd, the nail of his middle finger turning purple. I was momentarily lost for words, and then all I was able to talk about was the novel I was writing, the research I’d been doing about the Tehuelche. I explained their rituals and hunting methods. Pocho smiled and said nothing. Then I ranted against the Patagonian invasion, against Argentina freeing itself from the metropolis only to turn around and kill, displace and subjugate tens of thousands of indigenous people.

Pocho kept smiling, but I was not sure he understood why I was telling him all this. Pocho’s silence told me to shut up. He went back to the topic of the rodeo, we drank a couple more matés and I left.

Back in the house, Ursula was baking bread. The aroma coming from the oven was different from Grandma’s in ways I couldn’t explain. I asked her about Reyes and Barrientos, but I already knew the answer. Most peons in our family’s sheep station have been indigenous, she says matter-of-factly, but we never called them that.

Clouds drifted sluggishly over the lake. Pocho’s dogs were howling in the distance. It was almost sunset, and the blues of the waters, the ochres and oranges of the cañadones, the browns of the meseta were getting brighter and brighter.

My gaze wandered through the window, towards everything and nothing, while I thought of the hands – the hands that helped me up onto a towering horse, the hands that taught me how to shuffle a deck of cards, the hands that scythed the alfalfa and sheared a sheep – the work, the habits, the repetition of care. Hands that helped me see myself differently from what the school bullies told me I was.

It may have been the same white-European-male system that hurt us all, a system that conceived and built just one world, with little room for different strands of humanity and less for indigenous people. And yet to think of that only highlights my privileged position: barely grazed by shrapnel, tended by the heavily wounded.