We’re tooling down the N2 highway in the heart of the Garden Route past Mossel Bay towards the great Tsitsikamma Forest and there’s not much of a fynbos fiesta going on. Recent developments, including the great fires of 2005, have begun to threaten the region. fynbos loves a bit of flame, however – that’s how it regenerates every decade or so. But it cannot withstand the peri-urban creep of the ‘little white ball’ – the mushrooming walled-off golf estates where rich folk of all colours and nationalities have come to make their last stand.
Before the golfing community takes up its designer pitchforks and lava lamps and comes hunting me down, please understand that I just don’t get it. Except for nine half-drunken holes at the Grahamstown Golf Club in my student days, I’ve never raised a putter in anger. I don’t empathise with golfers. Where they see a fairway to heaven, I see a boring expanse of over-irrigated grass.
You know when you’re trying to explain the glorious concept of five-day cricket to an American and his eyes glaze over? Well, that’s what happens to me whenever someone goes chittering on about golf. I am a Golfing Gobi Desert. But I do want to enquire of the Tiger Woods Wannabe Society:
“Dudes, who stole my Garden Route?”
I also want to put that question to whoever is behind the boom in squatter camps down here. And those developers who build their ticky-tacky look-alike holiday homes and flog them to upcountry suckers who use the place once a year for barbecues and pissups by the beach. They could have stayed home, switched on the sprinkler and had an even better time for much less than the fortune they just forked out for a flawed dream. It’s just not good enough for my Garden Route.
We weren’t all supposed to move down and live on the Garden Route, for heaven’s sake. We were supposed to preserve its pristine state for generations to come, visit it occasionally in a managed way and then head home again.
So, as an outsider driving slowly along the so-called Garden Route, what I saw looked less and less garden-like and increasingly tacky. There were about 18 golf courses and the developers wanted to build more. And every year the grubby, sprawling squatter camps and the crime rate grew larger. There were golf balls rattling into tin cups to your right. And beggars rattling tin cups to your left. And here we were, as middle class as you could get, not really welcome on either side. Just keep on trucking up that N2, folks. There’s nothing for you here.
Jules and I seethed and decided to visit some officials in the know, to find out just how bad things were on the so-called Garden Route. We arrived in George, found the town’s tallest building and Jules went up to see them while I car-guarded the Isuzu and its contents. What they had to tell her was no food for comfort, either.
“Where’s the Garden?” she wanted to know from Dr Steve du Toit and Niel Lambrechts, who worked for the Western Cape Provincial Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning.
“It’s slipping away from us, thanks to these developments,” said Steve. “The problem is that up until now there has been no overall plan or policy protecting the Garden Route from development, nothing that actually safeguards what tourists have come to see. The developers arrive with a vision, but the authorities haven’t had a coherent counter-vision.”
There were 12 big developments pending, each one with a capital cost of at least R500 million. The average project involved more than 500 houses, one or two golf courses, a shopping complex “and an optional runway for private planes”.
“And you know what gets me more than anything else?” demanded Steve. “These guys come from the city to the coast, and all they do is carry on watching satellite TV. They don’t even look at what is around them. How do you explain that?”
In December 2005, the Western Cape government finally came out with development guidelines to control urban creep and the development of golf and polo estates along the Garden Route. But they may as well have been throwing a mouse to the vipers. A true range war was on the boil. Developers and rich residents were squaring up to an alliance of nature lovers and landless people.
And to make matters worse, most of the developments seemed to have a tame politician in their pockets – or the relative of one.
The biggest issue concerned water. Each golf course used about two million litres of water a day – enough for 80 000 people at the daily minimum of 25 litres. All the major rivers in the region were stressed, according to a national river-health assessment report. All surface water was overcommitted, with barely enough to enable Nature to function properly.
In a state of shock, we went off to stay with an old mate, Rod Hossack, in his Victoria Bay guesthouse called Land’s End. We always loved waking up in this Cape Cod-style house, where the former owner’s wife was now a ghost who had her own breakfast table laid for her every morning. Rod also consulted the ghost-lady on major issues in his life. The sight of those Vic Bay waves breaking on the rocks in the moonlight had always been one of the enduring joys of a visit to the Garden Route.
“You Jo’burgers,” Rod said, semi-serious. “What have you guys done to control development up in your neck of the woods? Me, I’d rather see a golf course than a smokestack – any day.”
He was right. But did it always have to come down to that: smokestacks or golf courses?
“Yep, Jo’burg – now there’s a place for you,” he continued, ironic twinkle in his eye. “I went there recently for some medical treatment (after taking a tumble while surfing in Bali) and boy, the billboards! They’re the best scenery you’ve got. I can understand why you lot want a piece of this world.”
But when we started talking about the poverty-wealth gap along the coast, Rod grew serious.
“It’s a volatile situation,” he said. “Imagine you’re a poor person, suffering from cold night after night under a leaking roof. But over the hill are empty holiday houses, used for maybe a month or two every year, containing every comfort you can possibly imagine.” It didn’t take rocket science to figure out the rest.
The water shortage in the area? Was that not a natural deterrent to over-development?
“These guys are so rich they would not be able to comprehend that a simple lack of water stands between them and their golf course,” said Rod. “They’d just say: find the water, ship it in somehow, bugger the cost. The stakes are high, my friend. Money’s on the move and the rates are low. Everyone wants to play golf. Why, they tell me there’s a town in Spain surrounded by 64 golf courses.”
Yes, but did that Spanish town have a Floral Kingdom? Or such a first-rate forest system as ours? Did it have a chronic water shortage? And if they had 64 golf courses already, then why didn’t everyone go chase their little white balls up in Spain, already? Sorry. No empathy.
The next day, we entered Knysna, where my jaunty hero François le Vaillant came a-wandering back in the late 1700s in search of a decent elephant-foot breakfast and a specimen of Knysna turaco. He was shocked to see how the colonists lived in their buffalo-skin-roofed huts when they could have built timber palaces. But when he arrived at a place called Pampoenskraal, Le Vaillant fell in love with the forest and built an open-air dwelling for himself.
He declared that his spot at Pampoenskraal was far superior to the “sumptuous grottoes of our wealthy financiers, the magnificent villas of the English citizens, nabobs and plunderers”. Those “grottoes and villas” took a couple of centuries to arrive. So did the “English citizens, nabobs and plunderers”.
Knysna, as we drove in, was very busy, even in the doldrums of the pre-Christmas season. “Money on the move.” A far cry from the scenes recorded in the journals of Hjalmar Thesen, great-grandson of the timber entrepreneur whose family line ran deep in the area.
When the Duke of Edinburgh visited Knysna in 1867 to bag a couple of the local elephants for his trophy wall back home, the village consisted of 25 “European homes” and a wharf. The real cowboys of the Knysna forests were, of course, the woodcutters. They lived off honey, sweet potatoes, wild boar, fish, pumpkins, bushbuck, bread and coffee – and the kind of food you’d only find in a very special deli today.
Another legendary Knysna character was George Rex, who may or may not have been the illegitimate son of England’s George III. Anyway, it didn’t hurt to have that kind of rep in those days. Rex did what most men in the district would do: he kept ostriches, hunted elephant and cut timber. He also persuaded the authorities in Cape Town to turn Knysna into a proper port. Interestingly enough, records showed that one of his descendants was the circus clown called Stompie, who partnered the equally famous midget called Tickey. Not to be confused with the hero of Marianis Mini Sirkus, which once played to limited crowds at Alexander Bay.
We shopped for victuals and went off to our digs, the Endlovana Coastal Hideaway near Belvidere. It was a tented camp in a world of fynbos and milkwood, a short walk from the beach. Working on this family property and learning a few environmental lessons along the way had turned its owner, Susan Campbell, from “arrogant and ignorant” lawyer into someone dedicated to low-impact living. She was certainly not on the side of the rampant developers of the area.
After the first night in Endlovana, Jules wrote in her journal:
“It makes you wish your childhood-holiday memories had been of this. Being in a tent exposes you. You feel the coastal winds, and the light veil of mist on your face. It changes your hair and the texture of your skin. You feel sleepy more often. You eat well. Last night we used the open-air shower on the top deck, bathing in warm water in cold night air, watching the stars. This is a generous place.”
The next afternoon found us up at the Pezula Estate, which Steve du Toit had recommended as one of the more “positive developments” along the Garden Route. Pezula’s owner-developer, Keith Stewart, looked a bit like the late movie director John Huston. There was also an air of the hungry wolf about him. But The Big Pezula wasn’t out to eat us that day.
Keith Stewart didn’t open up shop here because he needed the money. He’d made his fortune from inventing photocopier add-on equipment during the 30 years he’d spent in the USA. He bought the 630-hectare hilltop land overlooking Knysna and cleared the plantations, reintroduced fynbos to the property and sold large plots where houses could be some distance from one other.
“I had the luxury of time, so I cut no corners,” he said. “Now we have some of the most valuable real estate in the country.” (Hence the price tag for one plot of about R14 million. That’s land only. Mansion extra.)
But the laws of living in Pezula seemed to ensure that, for once, a coastal development would be a thing of value rather than an environmental eyesore. The homes of Pezula would have fynbos occupying their garden space. If you were in love with an exotic plant or flower, then you had to keep it in a courtyard under strict quarantine conditions.
It was most definitely a millionaires’ playground in the offing, but Pezula employed local people (and not just as waiters), was restoring some of the indigenous environment and was sorting out its water-usage issues.
You could always find someone willing to sell you dark secrets about Pezula in a dimly lit bar somewhere – but that, we were discovering fast, was standard issue for all developments along the so-called Garden Route. We were planning to gently sidestep this particular den of slithers but had to ask Stewart how he felt about the proliferation of poverty co-existing with all this wealth.
“There is no excuse for the shanty towns you’re talking about,” he said. “Government is just not doing enough. There is a skills fund worth billions of rands – and it’s not being used. In this area, there are 40 000 people living in poverty. I say to the local municipality, let’s take a chunk of the land you own. I’ll build 500 houses on a piece of it for free. Let’s get the other developers to build the rest.”
As we were preparing to wind up our time with him, Stewart said:
“Just remember, I’m here for the long haul. And, unlike most developers, I live on the property. You know where to find me.”
From riches to Rasta. The next day we drove through Knysna for our appointment with Maxie Melville in the township of Khayalethu, more precisely, the precinct of Judah Square.
Seen from a distance, Khayalethu had a stylish woodcutter thing going for it. Every building was handmade with planks, there were vegetable gardens and shops painted garishly. It looked like a large, rather funky, forest village where real people hung out. Poor, granted. But guaranteed to be interesting.
It was Saturday. Kids were playing cricket in the streets, using tomato boxes for wickets and crude bats. Near Judah Square we saw the ‘Rastamuffins’, preteens in their dreadlocks, goofing around near a wall of Rasta quotations.
Maxie’s home was not a dagga den. It was a small, clean house with timber add-ons. Someone had been baking. You could smell that ‘Granny’s just been and she left something for pudding’ aroma about it. There was nary a trace of a spliff, joint, bong or Rizla rolling paper.
Maxie, 40-something, lanky, dreadlocked and square of jaw, bade us sit.
“At one time the Rastas of Knysna lived apart, dotted about Khayalethu,” he said. “It was awkward. We’re vegetarians and don’t drink alcohol. People had meat braais around us, there were shebeens, drunks on the street. Then we got up a petition with 2 000 Rasta signatures, asking the authorities for our own space. Welcome to Judah Square.”
We had to ask about the dagga, which was part of the Rasta culture.
“All our households have a plant,” he said. “In summer they’re visible, because they grow above the fence line. But we have no crime. There is no rape, no robbery and no assault in Judah Square. We never pick up a gun. We never take hard drugs. To us, ganja is like food. It is our inspiration. It is the herb of herbs.”
As members of the general Knysna population, how did Maxie and his group feel about developments along the Garden Route?
“It’s a bit much. We’re worried about the nature. Development takes away our space, our beauty and our privacy. They say they’re bringing jobs but they only last a short while. The developments only benefit the rich. Our natural areas are getting smaller and smaller, and they’re pushing us out. They say it’s job creation and betterment, but is it really?
“We need more balance. Here, there is great wealth and great poverty close to each other. But there is no love.
“Besides, Rasta don’t play golf …”