I’m sitting on a jetty overlooking the Berg River at Velddrif waiting for the sun and feeling a tad peckish. Last night’s supper of bokkoms and bourbon is but a careless burp in the wind. I would really like Mrs Hildagonda Duckitt to appear live from the pages of Cape history and serve me breakfast. Boy, did this auntie know how to cook.
She was the Martha Stewart of the late Victorian era in the Cape, the lifestyle guru everyone listened to. And you always wanted to travel with her, because Mrs Duckitt came well stocked. For instance, when she visited a farm on the Berg River (recounted in the rarely found Hilda’s Diary of a Cape Housekeeper), her picnic hamper contained: “bread, butter, hard boiled eggs, corned breast or ribs of mutton; frikkadels, that is minced mutton, with bread-crumbs, spices, etc, made into little balls and fried – they are excellent for travelling”.
In the midst of this cosy pre-dawn cuisine dream, I watch the fishermen chug in and cheerfully begin unloading the night’s catch of harders, hotnotsvis and yellowtail. Is that a snoek before me, down in the hold? The fishermen are laughing and mocking one another and competing and singing softly while they work. A truly beautiful sight, and I’m getting ready for that sunrise so I can take postcard pictures of this lot and march off with my iconic images of the typical Cape fishermen bringing home the bounty from the sea.
In Fishermen of the Cape, Frank Robb says:
“The Cape Coloured fisherman is … a small man with a hardbitten face deep-etched by sea and sun and too often further ravaged by shoreside dissipations, with a mordant wit admirably expressed in the vivid ‘Capey’ dialect, and with a fish-wife who is a bold, flaunting harridan-witch with a gift for invective enabling her to hold her own in any slanging match.”
This quote – which would probably not win Robb any PC points in the New South Africa – was ferreted out by Lance van Sittert, writer of the excellent thesis Labour, Capital and the State in the St Helena Bay Fisheries (1856–1956). Robb continues:
“In South Africa too, fishermen have acquired a novelty value on a par with ‘Bushmen’ and other ‘primitives’ whose lives appear … intertwined with Nature. This association, in the case of fishing, sustains a thriving local tourist-, coffee-table publishing- and amateur art industry, dedicated to faithfully reproducing in curios, postcards, books, paintings and photographs the essentially timeless nature of fishing.”
What I think he’s saying is that the tourist industry – for example, outsiders in general and populist hacks like me – buys into the myth of the Cape fisherman without giving a shit about his real life, his real problems and the question of who puts food on the table when his quota is retracted or the fish don’t run.
There are also a couple of centuries of background to consider: alcohol abuse, labour abuse and the ever-present Company Store. You know how it goes. Work for me, here’s a tin shanty for you and your wife to make lots of little future fishermen in. Here’s a berth on a boat and a credit note for my shop nearby. If you run over your limit this month, don’t worry. We’ll write up a tab for you. And you’ll work forever to try to catch up with your debt to the Company Store. By the way, here’s some extremely cheap liquor to drink on that one day off when you’re not out at sea pulling in fish for me. Welcome to the family. Like any family, it will occasionally be hell on earth. But you will always get just enough to eat, just enough to exist on.
In this way, the employer’s money never leaves the homestead. It just circulates from the boss to the fisherman to the Company Store and back into the boss’s pocket again. And they’ve been doing it all over the world for centuries now.
But it wasn’t always a case of dronkverdriet (alcoholic melancholy) and hard times in the local fishing community. Robin Lees wrote the classic on the industry, called Fishing for Fortunes. She tells of the boom times of the late 1940s, when crews were making big money out at sea.
“For the first time in their lives, the fishermen had money to spend, money to squander as recklessly as they wished. They spent it on sweets and sometimes on shoes for their children; on smart clothes and shiny gadgets. They spent it in the new cinemas and shops that had opened in every village … and in the bars, peppermint liqueurs and expensive whiskies were ordered in large glasses instead of cheap wine by the gallon.” They would buy a brand new car, crash it and walk back to the dealership for another one. Happy days. Briefly.
In the St Helena Bay district, a mysterious tragedy played itself out – more than once. In 1936 nearly five dozen false killer whales beached themselves on the sands around the bay. It happened again in 1981, when 65 false killer whales came ashore. Of these, most were females, with worm encrustations around their ear holes.
One of the theories explaining the bizarre beachings is that the whales had erroneously swum up the deep Cape Submarine Canyon, which runs perpendicular to the coast and ends near St Helena Bay. But the real question is why, once beached, the whales persistently refused to return to the sea – even when they lay exposed and literally cooking under the hot sun.
“And let me tell you about another bloody tragedy,” I raved as we drove on. “It’s called Paternoster.”
Back in the 1980s, my late friend the photographer Herman Potgieter came here and shot classic images of fishermen’s cottages around Paternoster, a sleepy little village. These photographs stuck in my brain and, a decade later, lured me all this way to the West Coast. When I arrived, I was devastated. I could not find Herman’s cottages anywhere. Yuppie suburban rot had eaten most of the village. Prince Tourism had simply ridden up on his big white 4x4 horse and kissed Princess Paternoster to life.
“And then she immediately turned into a cane toad,” I said as we drove in from the east.
The bourgeoisie were still well represented in Paternoster, riding around in lycra-wrapped family packs on purple mountain bikes and sipping cappuccinos on the porches of their ‘fisherman-style’ shuttered homes amidst the faux seine nets and chintz.
Today the Somerset West Photo Club was out en masse, cheerily stalking the main beach and fish market in search of iconic shots – as I was – of those wizened old fishermen and their boats.
But we had been to Strandfontein. After the pre-Christmas ghostly sterility of Strandfontein, Paternoster was just fine. At least some fishermen still lived in the village among the moneyed encroachment of weekend warriors from Cape Town. At least the ‘Shoo Wah Brigade’, with their Land Rovers and their private-school kids and their red setters, had mostly built their homes in the West-Coast fisherman style.
“And there’s always the Panty Bar,” I exulted as we parked outside the Paternoster Hotel and walked in according to Pat Hopkins’s instructions. But we were early for opening time, so I read some Hopkins, Eccentric South Africa, to Jules:
“The crowded pub is decorated with such appalling taste that it takes on an appeal of its own. Signs like ‘Fuck the seals. Save the fishermen’ and ‘Traffic cops are proof that prostitutes do fall pregnant’ compete for space with panties and G-strings collected from honeymooning brides, plastic flowers, rubber breasts, penis candles …”
At Saldanha Bay we checked into a self-catering spot for mice that offered ‘generous duck frontage’. As we packed our nine million pieces of luggage into the tiny space, three dark-eyed ducks came waddling up for a scratch on the head. And maybe something from one of our tucker boxes. They blinked happily in that mindless smiley-beaky way that ducks have. I closed the sliding door on them. They began pecking insistently on the glass and then, to really get our attention, commenced to crap all over the show.
Jules and I had been room-trapped by possums in Tasmania, a brown hyena in Botswana and a crazed (I still think it was rabid) cat in Springbok. Three small ducks were not going to get the better of us. I went off to Management and requested their removal. Done.
We drove up to the top of a hill overlooking Saldanha Bay, where we encountered a man smoking the largest dagga spliff in the world. It looked like a giant steaming carrot wrapped in the day’s newspaper headlines and it seemed to make the bearer very happy as he weaved across the tracks of the Great Sishen – Saldanha Railway Line.
Saldanha Bay was first famous for its lovely guano, stashed on Mad Goose Island nearby. In the 1830s, Mad Goose Island was a blur of activity as the guano hunters bustled about, shovelling shit for a living.
The mainland settlement used to be a motley pile of impoverished fishermen’s shacks. Then the fishing industry discovered the bounty of the Benguela Current and the town grew. The South African Navy built a base there and, after drinking water was piped in from the Berg River, an exporting harbour was developed. And the millionaires’ yachts began arriving in the bay, on wings of craven canvas.
By lunchtime we were ensconced at The Slipway Restaurant down by the jetties. The dress code said “no overalls”, but you could smell the wealth as the moguls puttered in on skiffs from their ocean-going palaces to come and mingle with the common folk. Feeling pretty Greekish, we drank beer and ate a medley of snoek, hake, calamari and garlic mussels while Abba sang ‘Mamma Mia’.
We dozed off in the sun as beady-eyed gulls kept a watch over us. Then there was a slight commotion inside. A couple in their seventies lurched out of the restaurant as pissed as fowls. Their table heaved with empty wine bottles. She was on a collision course with a wall when her grinning partner – red face, mariner’s cap at jaunty angle – grabbed her elbow and steered her straight.
“Let me tell you something, buddy,” she roared at the old guy. “They won’t forget us here in a hurry.” Oh, please let that be us in 20 years’ time, we prayed.
Feeling reckless after a great session at the seafood trough, we headed off for a place called Tieties Bay, just for the drive. But we got sidetracked by a sign to Jacobs Bay. Wanna go there? I asked. Jules nodded and off we went.
We drove around a corner and found a colony of white mansions on the left. To the right was a perfect little bay, with five tiny fishing boats bobbing in the water like bathtub toys. A restaurant nestled into the rocks on the other side of the bay, dangerously close to the waterline. We went in. Perhaps there was ouzo on offer. Inside, we heard sales talk from the bar:
“Now onto that you add the commission, and the final figure you’re looking at is …” There was a table packed with brochures and what looked like completed deeds of sale. Jules picked up one of the flyers:
“Beachfront Properties. We sell: Pristine Properties, Development, Apartments, Homes, Plots with stunning beachfront views in all coastal regions of South Africa.”
“Let’s run away,” I muttered to my wife.
“Can I help you?” A large man with slate-grey eyes and a big aura approached.
“Are you the manager?” was all I could muster.
“No, I’m the owner. Wynand Odendaal’s the name.”
We explained ourselves. Couple on the road, writing a book on the coast, just arrived out of the blue, yadda yadda. Wynand Odendaal, clearly on a marketing high, expansively showed us around his restaurant and the clump of chalets outside at the back.
“Here’s the chapel. And here are my cards.” One said he was the CEO of Beachfront Properties. The other identified him as the pastor of Select Ministries. Pastor Odendaal had a big fish inside the restaurant, signing an offer to purchase the property for a lot of money. He told us how he’d made a killing here, but it was just another day at the office for him.
“In my church, I teach people how to make money God’s way,” he said. “In Jeremiah, it says ‘Come not with money. Come with faith and anointing.’ That’s what I do. You never use your own money – that’s the overemotional thing to do. Use the bank’s money. If they commit themselves to your project, you know it’s going to work.”
How had he become so successful, we wanted to know.
“Because I was once poor,” he said. “I own a Mercedes-Benz sports car but I’m not sentimental about it. If one of my missionaries wants to use it, he can. You know, the more I give, the more I get. It’s a nightmare,” he laughed.
What made him choose to go coastal?
“God spoke to me. He said Buy Beachfront.”
I have never been able to hide my emotions. My craggy old face is an open book. So the good pastor spotted my disbelief instantly, and in turn displayed just a small degree of ‘irk’.
“I know God’s voice.” And who were we, really, to argue? We were the people down there in the diesel bakkie, he was the guy in the big German car.
Why, we wanted to know, did so many people own second houses by the sea? Houses they hardly ever lived in?
“When the Saambou group collapsed at the Millennium, a lot of Afrikaners lost faith in banking,” said Wynand. “They put their money into property instead. Coastal property.” So these sad little manicured-yet-unpeopled seaside villages along the West Coast were all sound investments. We obviously had so much to learn.
As we drove off, Jules observed:
“In the old days of St Helena Bay, the rich whites lived up on the hill and the poor coloured fishermen lived next to the sea. Now it’s the other way around.”
There was no one to sell us tickets at the entrance to the Cape Columbine Nature Reserve, except for a stuffed penguin lurking on the desk inside the office, staring out at the Atlantic with glazed eyes. At the lighthouse we met up with a Mr Piet Steyn of the Somerset West Photo Club. We took him to our stuffed office penguin and he was delighted.
The next day (still no ducks in sight) we went to a resort called Club Mykonos for lunch and ran away in terror from the crowds and the prices and the uninterested waitresses. We stopped off at a wonderful spot called the West Coast Deli Shop and loaded up on oriental snacks, chilli-bite biltong and Mrs Ticklemouse’s chocolate crunch.
Our afternoon was spent driving through the glorious West Coast National Park. Thank God for this place up here, a piece of natural beauty preserved among the insane sprawl of uninhabited holiday mansions of Langebaan. More than 70 000 birds flew down to this lagoon from Russia every year, we were told. In fact, when we stopped at the Geelbek Information Centre in the park, two Russian women were wandering about inside, utterly entranced by the displays. Chewing on more Ticklemouse products, we proceeded to Kraal Bay, where the 117 000-year-old Footprints of Eve had been discovered. Two ancient beach bunnies draped on nearby rocks told us we could find the original footprints in the Cape Town Museum. So off we went …