MDMD(5): B O N K!

[Michel Ryckx]

B O N K !

Funny thing: I thought no such name existed or exists at the Cape.  Once
again, me being wrong.  Bonk was, and continues to be an actual name
indeed.

The word 'bonk' as a substantive, even now, means in Dutch a physically
strong person. Imagine Captain Haddock in the Tintin comics, he's a real
'bonk'.  A 'zeebonk' is a more or less normal expression for a seaman.
(The word is also used to describe the noise a thing makes, when falling
on the ground.)  It has none of the sexual connotations some slang might
provide. (on the other hand: a gay friend of mine uses it when referring
to attractive men).  Anyway, it expresses force.  And that is how Mason
and Dixon get in touch with the V.O.C.: a brutal and rude man sets out
the rules.

Bonk says about Africa that the continent has as 'little mercy as the
Sea to your backs' and, once lost, there's no 'hope of Salvation'.
There is nothing left but to ply to the V.O.C.'s rules.  The System, or
They, take over.

In a frivolous kind of way, Mason explains why they are here.  He does
this in exactly the wrong tone.  He will be put in a file at the Castle
(the fortification built by slaves in 1666, the year of the London Great
Fire by the way), as will be Dixon, however 'harmless' (59.33) he may be
seem.  It is all, according to Bonk, 'English Whiggery'.

Declaring 'the movements of Heav'ns which taken together form a cryptick
message' is of course exactly the wrong thing to say.  It creates
immediately a boundary (this chapter being full of boundaries, on which
later more) between the system, whose ideology was a kind of religious
fundamentalism, in order to live the strange kind of life the settlers
lived.  It is all right to say such a thing among enlightened British
scientists, and may be considered a definition of Deism --which I've
always seen as a polite word for atheism-- but not the right expression
to be used when at the Cape.