It is fair to say David Stuurman could look after himself. The swashbuckling Khoi chief escaped twice from Robben Island - walking 700km to the Gamtoos River after his first jailbreak - and defied the dragnet of the British empire for more than a decade.
But even the "Brown Pimpernel" cannot escape his unmarked grave in Sydney, where he died in exile in 1830. He will need some logistical support to find his way home. Enter a team of South African activists who will not rest until his remains are repatriated.
Talks are in progress between the South African and Australian authorities, and the Aussies are keen to help, but the challenge is to find the chief's grave - and confirm his identity with a DNA match to his kin in South Africa.
A reciprocal return of the bones of an Australian has been discussed - possibly a soldier killed in the Anglo-Zulu war - but the Australian high commission ruled it out this week.
Stuurman was transported to the colony of New South Wales in 1823 as punishment for his second escape from Robben Island. The Xhosa prophet Makhanda drowned in heavy surf at Bloubergstrand, Cape Town, during the same breakout and Stuurman was arrested on the mainland.
But he was spared the noose because he had saved the life of a whaler called Bryant, whose boats he commandeered, by commanding his fellow fugitives not to kill him. "You must not harm this man. He has done nothing to you!" yelled Stuurman.
Little is known about the chieftain's time in Sydney. But, for six years, he was an indentured labourer for the colonial government - precisely the status that sparked his rebel zeal as a young man in the Gamtoos Valley after his family's land was seized and allocated to trekboers.
Veteran historian Candy Malherbe, an authority on Stuurman, said dozens of other Khoi convicts were shipped down under and some fled into the outback, forming vagabond "bushranger" gangs with Aboriginal and Maori escapees.
But Stuurman was cooperative enough to be released as a free labourer in 1829, a year before his death at the age of 57.
He may have converted to Catholicism.
Although Stuurman's name means nothing to most South Africans, he is extremely important to the here and now - both as an icon of a resurgent Khoisan identity and as a pioneer of nonracial struggle against injustice.
For the government, the story of Stuurman's alliance with the Xhosa offers a symbolic antidote to the complex tension between coloured and black communities.
Sonwabile Mancotywa, CEO of the National Heritage Council, which is guiding the repatriation project, said: "We want to build social cohesion - use the story to forge a common identity."
But that vision assumes a widespread coloured identification with Khoi history.
Colin Abrahams of the South End Museum in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, which sparked the repatriation campaign, said coloureds had long been divided between an impulse towards ethnic pride and a fear of being cornered into a reductive identity, be it Khoiness or colouredness. "There is still a reluctance to identify with the Khoi among urban so-called coloureds, because of the derogatory usage of the word hotnot in the past," Abrahams said.
"Although I've got Khoi, Mfengu and Scottish heritage, I don't see myself as coloured. I'm a South African."
Abrahams said much of black and white South Africa was spiced with Khoi genes. "Just as Nelson Mandela has stated that he has Khoi blood, so do many whites. When the trekboers left the Cape, many Khoi women travelled with them and the children they had were assimilated. And even all the click sounds of the Nguni languages come from Khoisan languages."
Stuurman's return could help coloureds to shed their sense of being a "floating community", said former Port Elizabeth mayor Errol Heynes. "Many coloured people believe they face as much discrimination from this government as they did during apartheid. And while there are real experiences of prejudice, there is also a victim mentality," he said. "Bringing back Stuurman may help conscientise those who feel 'I don't belong'. They may realise that maybe they belong more than anybody else."
If Stuurman needed any conscientisation in 1808, his first imprisonment without trial, on a charge of "suspicious conduct", did the trick. Two of his children died at the castle in Cape Town while he was on the island - his entire family had been jailed.
After his successful escape, he walked by night from Table Bay to the Xhosa frontier, marching from defiance into radical rage.
By the time he joined the Zuurveld Xhosa, he was the Khoi answer to Che Guevara, minus the Marxist jargon.
He spent the next decade with the Xhosas, bringing guns, horses, deserters and military skills to the Gqunukhwebe chiefs Chungwa and Habana. Together they raided and burned the frontier farms on the lands the Khoi had lost.
Cape governor Sir Francis Dundas feared that this potent Xhosa-Khoi alliance would "expose the whole country to ruin" - driving the trekboers all the way back to the Cape and ending the strategically vital meat output of the frontier districts.
Dundas struck a deal with the Xhosas, "granting" them the Zuurveld in exchange for peace. But the Khoi got no deal: their only choice was to return to hated servitude. And their political clout crumbled when Stuurman was recaptured.
Cut to the present and little has changed for the Khoi people of the Gamtoos, said Johannes Maarman last week. "How on earth can it be possible that there isn't a single Khoisan person owning a farm in this region?" he asked.
Rotund and fiery, Maarman is a former farmworker turned pastor and activist for Khoisan land rights and a member of the Gamtobaqua Khoi-San Council. He was born and raised on Andrieskraal, the farm that once belonged to David's brother, Andries Stuurman.
Eight generations of labourers preceded Maarman, working under eight generations of white farmers - a near-feudal cycle of servitude that infuriates him.
"We know how to run farms - we're doing it all the time - but we end up without even a pension," he says. "It can't work like that. The day will come when our people say: 'This is ours.' We can also shoot back."
Maarman is connected to David Stuurman by a distant murder: in the 1790s an ancestor, a Khoi man named Magerman, was killed by a party of boers - a crime that provoked his friend, the young Stuurman, to desert the Vermaak farm and become an outlaw. It did not help that the farmer had also lashed Stuurman to a wagon, sjambokked him, salted the wounds and left him in the sun.
These days, the Gamtoos is rich not in cattle but in oranges - in good years, local citrus farmers make juicy export profits.
"They claim they can't afford the R105 minimum wage, but they never show us their income, only their running costs," said Maarman. "Some are scared about land claims, but they don't need to be. If we sit down, we can look at alternatives. But they don't want to do it of their own free will."
For Maarman, the return of Stuurman's remains will revive Khoi pride and loosen the local power structure. He took me to a koppie overlooking the town of Hankey and the flood plain of the Gamtoos (which means "roaring lion" in Khoi). At the summit is the final resting place of another famous child of the valley - Saartjie Baartman, whose bones were repatriated from France. Maarman wants Stuurman to be reinterred alongside her.
As we drove up the koppie to the grave site, a government-registered sedan blocked the track. Maarman approached the car to ask the driver to move aside - and found an official and his mistress enjoying a sneaky afternoon bonk.
"During taxpayer's time nogal! [what's more]" snorted Maarman as he scribbled down the registration number. The sense of insult to Baartman's memory persisted at the grave site: she is hemmed in by a grim palisade fence and two bronze dedication plaques have been stolen.
Perhaps too much hope and meaning is being invested in Stuurman's return - even the most powerful bones cannot shift the leaden weight of history.
Still, Stuurman's spirit needs a view of the Gamtoos, for his own sake.
