Saturday is barbecue day on the teeming streets of Masiphumelele Township, just over the hill from Simon’s Town.
The avenues are fogged with braai smoke as the aromas of beef steak and lamb chops and home-made marinades fill the air. Cheerful township women are roasting their mealie cobs and meat on makeshift sidewalk grilles while kwaito music blares out from the open windows of battered cars as young men in dark shades pass slowly by. An old fellow in a red jersey three sizes too big for him comes ambling up, waving a bowl containing six hard-boiled eggs and two canisters of Aromat in our faces.
“Cheap snacks. Cheap snacks. One rand, one egg. Spice for free.”
Like a schooner in full sail through this cheerful sea of township road life is our escort, Charlotte Swartbooi. A busload of tourists comes trundling by, and for once I feel what it is like to be on the ‘zoo side’ of life. I see faces peering out from behind tinted glass, no doubt listening to the bored intonations of their tour guide as they sit in air-conditioned sterility. Too scared to venture forth and shake a township dweller’s hand. Why did they even bother coming here?
“The people don’t like it when tourists do that,” said Charlotte. “It’s better when they walk through the township and meet us.”
Charlotte, one of the community leaders in this hard-scrabble enclave of about 24 000 souls, had an open smiling face and wore a bright red turban on her head. Her husband had died in a car accident some years back, leaving her with three children and a township shack. She was making ends meet by showing visitors how this mainly Xhosa settlement survived.
“Not everyone passes through here in sealed buses,” she laughed. “A lot of people – many of them foreigners – have donated what they could to Masiphumelele.” She took us to the Bicycle Empowerment Network, operating from a set of containers off the main road.
“We get old and broken bicycles from England, Switzerland and Germany,”she said. “And they are fixed here and sold cheaply to the locals.”
As we walked, we could sense something close to an air of contentment in Success Township. Maybe it was the weekend starting to wash over us, but we also detected a mood of determination and an ethos of self-help, something we often found to be in short supply in the sprawling, dormitory ‘locations’ that accompany almost every town in South Africa.
We passed a European-funded clinic where people were tested for AIDS and, if found positive, were offered free antiretroviral treatment.
There was an orphanage for AIDS children, a vegetable-garden project for the township women and a Habitat For Humanity home-building project, sponsored in part by an American couple who had visited Masiphumelele. This was the best kind of community help – where individuals made carefully monitored direct contributions that never saw the inside of a Big Wig’s back pocket. Those Big Wigs with their bottomless back pockets were killing Africa.
A man with dreadlocks crossed the road to speak confidentially to Charlotte, smiled at us and walked off.
“He said to tell you how friendly the Xhosa people are,” she said. “How we should introduce you to more people who will demonstrate this to you.”
I walked into a shebeen where two guys were playing pool badly. I was dying to put down my cameras, order up a beer and a double Jack and teach these fellows the finer points of ‘sticks’. And they seemed up for it – until Jules and Charlotte walked in. The pool players bristled with hostility.
“No, it’s not you,” Charlotte assured me. “That’s a men-only club. No girls allowed.”
We were all, however, very welcome at our next stop, the Maranatha Kiddies Club Beauty Contest in a tiny church nearby. A woman was singing a feverish hymn, accompanied by a serious-looking man who played the Roland electric organ with the jazz-cool of a Paris club musician. The reverend’s wife was far from detached as she made the opening speech to the tiny competitors and their families crowding the room:
“The children Hallelujah! are very important Hallelujah! They may be small Hallelujah! but they are like the postage stamp Hallelujah! which makes the letter go to its destination Hallelujah! Help your mothers and fathers at home Hallelujah! and always stick to the job. Hallelujah.”
The beauty contest turned into a dance extravaganza and a stunning display of vocal talent as a group of teenage singers had a full go at the harmonies on offer in the songs. And then – before saying goodbye – Charlotte took us to The Wetland. It was more like The Swamp of Despond.
A natural drainage stream flowed out of a culvert between ramshackle dwellings looped and laced with electricity cables – deadly spaghetti. Children played in the muck, others clambered over the rusty hulk of a car wreck as if it were the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. This wetland – which was now a breeding ground for diarrhoea and typhoid – was no water meadow in anyone’s language.
Two days later, Jules and I were on the opposite side of the huge False Bay at another wetland – a more upmarket one – right in the centre of the idyllic coastal village of Pringle Bay.
A few centuries ago, this stretch of coast was occupied by the drosters, gangs of runaway slaves and general deserters from the Cape rule of law that had been set up by those fine, civilised colonial masters who chopped off noses and sliced off breasts and such as part of their penal system.
The drosters lived in caves at nearby Hangklip, surviving on shellfish, small game and stolen cattle in a hog heaven of thick melkbos populated by steenbok, wild cat, greywing partridge and the occasional leopard. The history books, at this stage, do not mention the presence of our friend, Mr Chacma. Maybe the baboons moved in later.
Back in the early 1900s, Oom Stoffel Albertyn and his wife would head out from Bot River to Hangklip for their annual holiday. The drosters had long been cleared out and were now consigned to the roles of bogey man in children’s bedtime stories. The Albertyns loaded up with “a cask of good wine, coffee, a bag of boeremeel for bread, eight airtight paraffin tins of boerebeskuit and plenty of ox-biltong,” says Lawrence Green in South African Beachcombers.
The visiting family lived well at Hangklip. Oom Stoffel sometimes shot a grysbok for meat, or his wife made stews from fresh-water terrapins (good only if you remove the stink gland first). They netted springers and mullet in the shallows, fished for red steenbras, geelbek and tuna, spearing dozens of soles around Pringle Bay. The odd sea turtle that strayed up the beach was swiftly dispatched to Mrs Albertyn’s vast cooking pot.
They plundered the washed-up cargoes of wrecked ships and hunted for treasure. “Those were the good old days,” said Oom Stoffel. “Later on, the place opened up and there were all sorts of restrictions. We really knew freedom. We took the cream off the milk.”
We met Jenny Berrisford, who ran an indigenous-plant landscape company and a B & B overlooking the mouth of the Buffels River in Pringle Bay. She was a child when she first came here with her father.
He was besotted with the place back before World War II. There was no road in those days. He loved outdoor adventures and would hike all the way there from nearby Gordon’s Bay. Others came by boat.
As her regal Persian cat Misty purred quietly next to her on the sofa, Jenny recalled the old days.
“I still remember the man who used to come around in his little truck and sell milk from the can, and best of all, the old corrugated-iron shop next to Stony Point Whaling Station at Betty’s Bay. bokkoms hung from the roof, and the locals bought salt and sugar in newspaper twists, measured out from huge sacks. I remember my dad telling me this was history, and we wouldn’t see this kind of thing again.”
Back in the 1950s there were no more than six houses in Pringle Bay, Jenny remembered.
Pringle Bay had only become accessible after a road was built by Italian prisoners of war in the 1940s. It didn’t take long for people to see the potential of the place, and it became what many believed to be South Africa’s first planned beachfront holiday development, called Hangklip Beach Estates.
“This is where the rot started,” the more jaundiced amongst us commented.
“Somewhere around here I still have a hand-drawn map from 1946,” said Jenny, scrabbling around in the lounge. “They sold property in Rooi Els, Pringle Bay and Betty’s Bay.”
The erven were large – about 1 500 square metres – and there was a building code involving natural rock, fawn tones and roofs of slate or thatch so that they would blend into the sandstone and fynbos. One or two still remained in Pringle Bay. They contained three bedrooms with a big old fireplace, somehow reminiscent of old Natal Parks Board cottages in the Drakensberg. They did not shout, “Look how bloody rich I am! Aren’t I just too bloody marvellous for words! Look at my bloody expensive new car! Now look at my wonderful golf swing!” They were modest and middle class and, observed in the 20/20 light of hindsight, just perfect.
Decades later, Hangklip Beach Estates went bankrupt. Several property developers took aerial pictures of the bays and chopped them up into little stands for resale, with no regard for natural drainage or seepage, something of an eco-disaster, since most of the area was an estuarine wetland.
And, unfortunately, the old building code was never written into the title deeds, so the architecture had become self-centred and incoherent in the persistent style of many South African coastal towns.
Jules and I drove through Pringle Bay, goggling at the beauty of the natural setting and at the wayward architecture. Nestled between the spectacular Cape folded mountains and a sculpted coastline thick with fynbos were houses in the style of Road Builder Igloo, Busking Tuscan, Brakpan Baroque and Apartheid Adobe.
Reassuringly, there were also a few Cape Cod-style houses. They looked superb in the morning light.
Jenny had told us, with a mischievous grin on her face, that a tour guide in nearby Kleinmond once offered visits to the “interesting and unusual architecture in Betty’s Bay, Pringle Bay and Kleinmond”.
Many of the houses, we were startled to find, were surrounded by wetland sedges and bulrushes. Annemarie Breytenbach of the Pringle Bay Eco-Centre told us that developers in the 1980s and 1990s would shamelessly sell ‘wet plots’ and ‘dry plots’ – the former being the cheaper option. Buyers would simply fill up the little vleis with building rubble, drain away the water, and plant kikuyu. The lowland fynbos with all its frogs and creatures was under serious attack, she said.
It was still going on, to some extent. We had a look at a property that was being readied for the construction of a small shopping centre. It was undoubtedly located in the remains of a wetland, and the water was being channelled away. “But this is a wetland,” we spluttered. “Oh, no, only a partial wetland,” offered a resident airily. “Anyway, it won’t be when the water is drained.”
Still, the place was beautiful. Populations of endangered African black oystercatchers were thriving on the beaches. Jenny said she often saw grey rhebok, porcupines, civets, mongooses, klipspringers, steenbok and otters in wet places. Between Kleinmond and Bot River, a herd of wild horses ran free.
Up in the hills were dassies and black eagles. There was great excitement recently when a resident found two leopards fighting on his lawn.
But the real animal action over here came from the hills above, in the form of the local baboon troops. They haunted Pringle Bay. A local newspaper advertised two different cleaning services that would come and mop up homes after baboon raids. One was, inevitably, called Monkey Business.
All the houses in the village had been baboon-proofed. The little general dealer down the road had a sign saying that it was open and that the door was only closed to baboons. A guy called Rob, who ran the shop, served us a couple of wondrous meat pies and said the baboons often snuck into the shop while his back was turned.
“They seem to go for the avocadoes, the potato chips and the bread,” he said. “But my new security door has them stumped.”
For how long, we wondered. These crafty baboons had already learnt how to lift sliding doors off their tracks and remove them so the glass didn’t shatter. They opened doors in packs of two: one hung from the handle while the other took a flying leap at the door frame. They could open fridges and stoves with ease. They were probably one good Food Channel programme away from baking bread.
Don’t laugh. Freya Stennett, founder and owner of the Ticklemouse biscuit factory in Pringle Bay, told us one of the best baboon stories ever:
“My husband, son-in-law and I were busy packaging rusks around the table one day. We were pretty intent on what we were doing: one was cutting, one was packing and the other one was labelling. My son-in-law Luther kept passing the packages of rusks to his left. Suddenly, something made us all look up at once.
“There, sitting next to Luther, as quiet as anything, was a huge male baboon. He had joined the production line. He would take a package, open it, remove a rusk, put it into his mouth and place the rest of the package on a growing pile nearby.”
Insert a suitably loud scene of pandemonium here, with departing baboon stopping just long enough to lay claim to his own pack of Ticklemouse rusks. And who could blame him? I certainly could not resist anything baked in that little factory in Pringle Bay.
The baboons had no respect for human females. The women of Pringle Bay said the beta males were the biggest criminals in town. They had already been kicked out of their troops and were behaving like typical street gangsters.
“I once walked in on a very skinny baboon eating bananas I had just bought for a batch of biscuits,” said Freya. “Every time I took a step towards him, he growled at me. So I had to stand there and watch him eat 7 kilograms of bananas. He was quite round when he finally strolled out.”
We joined some of the locals at Barbeyond, a watering-hole and restaurant where the conversation drifted to people for whom status symbols, designer clothes, décor and expensive cars were important.
“We used to be those people,” said Nicola Lloyd, an estate agent. “We’ve seen it, done it and it doesn’t impress us any more. How many chairs can you sit on? It’s the quality and genuineness of the people out here that really attracted me.”
Great sentiments. But it still failed to explain why she and her mates were all waltzing around in Day Glo plastic clogs that came in a selection of “slurpy colours”, from lime green to fire-engine red to Barbie pink.
“Oh,” she laughed. “These are Crocs. They’ve got good grip, never slip, massage the feet and can be rinsed off after walking in the sea. People who spend a lot of time on their feet, like chefs and waiters, swear by them. They are so comfortable, once you’ve tried them, you’ll be hooked.”
Perhaps the real reason everyone wore lurid, laid-back shoes in Pringle Bay lies with the local legend that many of the long-time residents were fond of a cocktail of gin steeped in marijuana – to be drunk behind closed doors every morning. Which was definitely one way of dealing with the baboon problem …