Chapter 4: Namaqua Memories
I found Oom Kallie Gagiano back in 1981 on the outskirts of a town with a name that sounds like a car horn with a nasal condition: Nababeep.
It was so dry out there that the goats were kissing each other to get their lips wet. Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze was blaring away on the old Good Hope Radio station’s Housewives’ Hour as I drove into that remote copper town and asked for directions to the Gagiano residence. I’d heard about Oom Kallie’s donkey troubles from a barman in Pofadder.
“Turn left at Pretorius’s place near the Caltex station. Then go on to the Scholtz house, you really can’t miss it, and head off past the firing range.” Those were the pump attendant’s directions, and they were dead accurate.
The 76-year-old man crept out from a corrugated iron lean-to, followed by three puppies, their eyes squinting in the harsh Namaqua sunlight. Oom Kallie slapped one of his curious donkeys on the rump and shouted: “Grasveld! Grasveld! Must you always be in my way? Hey? Must you?”
He sat on the bonnet of my hired car and looked me up and down. His beard was so white, his face so wrinkled, he could have passed for a desert Santa. Willie Nelson was singing Till I Gain Control Again on the radio and I silently marvelled at the Cape housewives who were requesting music from my heart, like they knew my very soul.
Oom Kallie Gagiano in a nutshell: a prospector for most of his working life, he did his time on the diamond fields from Lüderitz to Hondeklip Bay, keeping company with his beloved donkeys and whittling his social skills down to a bare minimum. Nearly 25 years before this day he’d returned from a field trip and moved into a tin hut 3 km out of town.
“I’m a bachelor, always have been,” he told me. “I’m not snipped and neither are my donkeys. They roam the veld as I did when I was a young man, dancing and kissing the girls. You see all those other donkeys down there in the valley? Who do you think fathered them? Grasveld. No one but my dear Grasveld.”
His current donkeys were the children of the beasts that had walked the hard road with him, through a country so biblical, burnt-amber and beautiful that its images remain lodged in your dreams forever.
“I’m going blind, you know. I have a sister in the town and I really love her. She wants to look after me. I would like to live in town for a change, where there are nice gardens. Instead of this pile of rubbish,” Oom Kallie gestured about him in disgust. I asked him why he couldn’t just pack up and move back to Nababeep, and so he told me the story.
Some time back, in the drought (is there ever anything else out here, except for a few delirious days each year when rain brings this land to life?), Grasveld and his four brothers were starving. Kallie began staging a series of midnight raids into Nababeep. He used to lead his donkeys into town and open the gates of well-tended properties belonging to people he did not know (or like) well.
The beasts ran amok among the painstakingly watered gardens and gorged themselves. Until, that is, the night Grasveld got his hoof caught in an old tin while foraging in a yard. He made an awful noise escaping down the road (step-step-step-clunk) and the homeowner woke up.
Oom Kallie’s donkeys were banned from Nababeep. He was allowed in, but only he. This was his dilemma. I asked the old prospector about his tin house, and why he had been under the lean-to when I arrived earlier.
“I lost the key to my house two days ago. I’m damned if I can find it,” he said. We spent the better part of an hour looking for the key and then Oom Kallie said not to worry, it would turn up sometime.
“But did you know that I used to play the fiddle? I was good. And then the fiddle neck broke. They (pointing at his donkeys) used to love my music.”
Oom Kallie Gagiano is no doubt looking for diamonds (and perhaps his key) somewhere in the Milky Way these days, with Grasveld et al getting in his way. But I’ll never forget him, because this old man showed me a glimpse of the true nature of Namaqualand.
Then came the court case in Upington, where I got to see a little more Namaqualand for my money. I also learnt about the Gariep River and what a totem it is. Not only to the riverside locals living off its bounty, but to the whole South African nation.
The facts of the case were, initially, simple. Gariep River farmer gets into financial trouble. Takes a loan from a rich senator and signs his lush family ground over as collateral. Defaults on his loan payments, loses his land and his senses at the same time. Shoots the senator dead one moonlit night in a desperate gun battle on said farm.
I spent three weeks covering the case for my newspaper back in Johannesburg, the Rand Daily Mail. In that time I got to know all about dank little country hotels. I got an inkling of small-town politics. And I fell in love with the Afrikaans language all over again, via the highly musical and entertaining lilt of Namaqua-speak.
Apart from being served a string of heart attack-inducing breakfasts by silent hotel staff and trying to tickle court secrets out of a judge’s pretty secretary (and failing), I also learnt a bit about the heat in Upington. Every morning at the tea recess I would climb into my parked and sunbaked car and watch as the plastic of the steering wheel moulded itself around my fingers. Then I would yell out loud and startle the main street.
In the evenings I would travel around the river oases that make up much of the Upington community: Keimoes, Kakamas and such. At Keimoes the café man had wondrous sweets. He said they came from a travelling Greek who found them somewhere in the Transvaal. I’d never seen rocket-shaped bull’s-eyes before. The café man’s only gripe was that his newspapers were selling out too fast.
“I never get a chance to read about the case,” he grumbled. So I filled him in on what I knew.
But it was only as I was leaving Namaqualand on an SAA flight, after the death sentence (later commuted) had been passed on the luckless farmer, that I realised what was indeed at the heart of the murder trial. Below me, the scrub desert of Namaqualand spread out for an eternity. The brown monotony was broken only by the Gariep River, cutting a lush, verdant line through it.
If you own land on this river, you’re a made man. A couple of hundred metres away and you’re nothing but a dirt farmer. Or a karakul king who needs huge tracts of scrub – and the attentions of a fickle overseas market.
During the trial I had to entertain staff photographer Noel Watson, a colourful man with the attention span of a Boland Skollie butterfly, to stop him from chasing the married ladies in town and getting us into a world of trouble. So I took him off through the desert, over the Anenous Pass and finally into Port Nolloth – diamond country.
Port Nolloth looked like an opium smoker’s den after a police raid as we drove in. It was smothered in fog and quiet as a crypt. Little figures disappeared in the coastal milk, slipping off to the shanties on the outskirts as an angry rooster crowed and Ou Willem rose to meet us. Tatty tail erect as a bushpig’s aerial, he was the sentinel of Divers’ Row.
We met his owner, one Alf Wewege, the self-proclaimed Mayor of the Divers. Alf waved us into his modest home, pressed beer glasses into our hands and told us of his life and the “spinklers” he and his mates lived in hope of finding. He also told us of the loneliness of living in Port Nolloth, and of one particular weekend with a Lonely Hearts Club girl.
“I found her in a magazine. She was from Sabie. I paid for her ticket and she took the train out to meet me.” The girl arrived at the Bitterfontein railroad siding, where Alf was waiting. “She was 15 years older than her picture,” he said. “But she had two bottles of mampoer.”
They spent a glorious weekend together. Alfie showed her the western ocean sunset across the fleet of diamond boats moored in the bay. She showed him some Lowveld charm and the mampoer showed them both just how frail the head can be in the morning.
“On the Monday, I took her back to Bitterfontein.”
That first encounter with the diamond divers of Port Nolloth only whetted our appetites for more. A few years later we did the trip again. Our first stop this time was the Scotia Inn bar, where we hoped to find some more of the adventurous souls who wrest stones from the seabed under nearly impossible conditions.
The gods were with us. Not only did we come across some amenable divers, but one of them turned out to be an old schoolmate, Louis Kriel. He said the seas were too rough that week for serious diving, but that he would take us out anyway for a few days, to get a feel of it all.
Everyone knew everyone else in town. Especially the divers. And when we headed out the following morning in Louis’s boat, the Gemini Star, the rest of Port Nolloth wanted to know if the Jo’burg boys were seasick yet.
We, in the meantime, learnt to cook bacon and eggs in the captain’s cabin in the midst of a vicious storm, huge breakers bearing down on us, dolphins following us up the coast and the Rolling Stones doing their thing on the eight-track stereo. In a dancing catamaran, the simple art of frying an egg becomes a feat of agility and balance. Opening a tin of bully beef and forking it out onto a pan to heat requires the timing and skill of a short-order cook and part-time juggler.
At night we slept below decks. After that experience, I believe I know just what it is like to be trapped inside a washing machine during its rinse cycle.
In the early 1990s, I had a burning need to visit Namaqualand in The Season, when more than 3 000 floral species erupt from impossibly barren ground and you’re suddenly enveloped in a world of aloes, succulents, lilies, lichens, herbs and daisies in their billions.
The timing of the trip was left to my mate Les Bush, and on a certain day in August we planned to set out towards the western horizon.
“Are you sure the daisies will be out?” was all I asked – and received a frosty glare.
“Yes,” came the terse reply. “Three more sleeps and then we’re gone.”
Our first major stop out of Jo’burg was the Eye of Kuruman, where, under a Voortrekker memorial stone, were carved the immortal words: “Moenie vir mekaar kwaad word op die pad nie – Genesis 45:24.”
Which basically means do not get tetchy with your travelling partner on the road. Words to live by.
Les had found us accommodation in the town of Springbok, where I picked up a self-published book by boxer-turned-Hitler-fan Robey Leibbrandt.
“This is a boarding house,” I said when we arrived at our overnight stop.
“No, it’s a guest house. And it comes cheap,” snapped Les.
Within a few hours, we were settled. We shared a country house overlooking one of the town’s main streets with half of the Namaqualand Old Folks Society and everyone nodded politely at one another as we each put our cheese, beers and sweet wine into various nooks of the fridge.
Then the owner’s sister, who looked a bit like Meryl Streep, came to invite us to a game of blackjack in the main dwelling. We sat down in the lounge with our beer and our whisky and said hello to two linesmen from the telephone company and their three buddies from the local prison. Betting was restrained at first, then things took a serious turn. Bush was raking in the bucks for a while there, but suddenly Meryl Streep had a second wind and cleaned us all out.
At five the next morning, after exactly 30 minutes’ sleep, I stumbled through to the bathroom. I was mugged en route by five old folks who accused me of keeping them up all night. I ran for my life, feeling more than slightly liverish.
“And besides,” they shouted after my retreating form, “you idiots missed the daisy season by weeks. It’s all over. Ha, ha …”
Undaunted, we went out to the Goegap Nature Reserve, where, the drunken prison warders had assured us, we would definitely find some kind of floral display.
Les spotted a solitary daisy, nestled cutely into a fold of rock. He planned to lie right in front of this flower with his wide-angle lens and create the impression of abundance. I, on the other hand, hurled myself out of the car and threw up. On the last remaining daisy in Namaqualand.
Some years later, Jules and I travelled out there in the flower season to celebrate the noon-blooms.
We stayed in the copper town of Okiep, in the annex of Narap Lodge. Our window looked out on what came to be known as The Garden of Good and Evil. At night we could hear the township folk sloughing off a day’s work with a bottle of wine and a howl at the moon.
After the turn of the New Millennium, I took Jules off to Port Nolloth, which in boys’ terms is the equivalent of showing your girlfriend the inside of your tree house. Like most things in life, the little port had changed radically in the past decade or so. Definitely more of a cappuccino town these days.
Before heading back, I had to show her The Bus out at MacDougall’s Bay.
Way back then, Noel Watson and I had discovered a double-decker bus parked in the middle of Mac Bay village. Although it was locked, we could see signs of habitation. It especially fascinated Noel, who grew up in an Irish tinker’s caravan in the back yard of his parents’ home in Knysna. We took photographs.
The bus was still there. No one had bothered to give it even a lick of paint, however. It seemed to have done duty as a bush bar at some stage, but now stood derelict and faded. Like memories of four days at sea, one egg in the pan, one egg on the floor and a helluva big wave on the way.