Chapter 6: Springbok to Namibia
I learnt a deep respect for the Great Namaqua Highway a long time ago, on a black, moonless night as my mate Noel Watson and I headed west out of Upington.
The murder case we’d been covering was adjourned for a few days and I wanted to see if far-off Port Nolloth had a real lighthouse. I suppose one well-placed phone call would have told us all we needed to know, but we both needed a long drive in the country. We filed our story, had a couple of drinks with the defence lawyer, packed a bag and left town.
Within the hour, Noel was snoring lightly in his seat and I concentrated on the blacktop before me. Someone had requested an old Neil Young song on Radio Orion and it sounded perfect for the occasion. As a white boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, I’d been conditioned to love things American, like rock ’n roll, the denim artistry of Levi Strauss, roadhouse milkshakes and Hollywood Westerns.
Then I travelled around the USA for many months during 1980–81, driving literally thousands of kilometres in an old blue van across the vast heart of America. I drank with colourful trailer-park folk, I partied with Sunset Boulevard vampires, I played pool with rock ’n roll survivors in Montana and, sweet lord, I had three LSD-filled Mardi Gras days in New Orleans and I survived it all. I even helped the municipal cleaners pick up the after-party trash down Bourbon Street.
But for me back then, nothing beat cherry-picking the chewy bits of American culture and enjoying them back home in southern Africa. These days, however, African culture has revealed itself to be as sweet as anything that ever emerged out of America, so my loyalties are more local. But on that fateful night, I was listening with relish to Mr Young’s After the Goldrush and fondly remembering a little town in New Mexico called Truth And Consequences, when suddenly my Namaqua nightmare began.
Somewhere between Aggeneys and Springbok a face covered in blood, eyes wide in terror, flashed past in the headlights. I drove on for a short while, then stopped the car, my heart pounding. A ghost? Couldn’t be. Then what? I woke Noel, and we turned back.
A young army corporal in uniform stood at the roadside, his head bleeding and his right arm hanging limply. We jumped out and ran to him.
“I killed my father. I killed my father,” he groaned, again and again.
In my headlights I saw the soldier’s wrecked car in the veld, and then the body of an old man, about 20 metres away. We rushed over and felt for vital signs. There was so much blood that his breath came shallow-gurgling out from his mangled face.
I left Noel cradling the father’s head in the veld, while I took the boy back to Aggeneys for medical attention. We literally flew. I was more worried about the soldier’s guilt at falling asleep behind the wheel than his physical injuries. The medics at the Aggeneys clinic packed their ambulance and put the boy’s arm in a sling and we returned in convoy to the crash site.
I will never forget the next scene. Our headlights sliced into the blackness and picked up the loneliest image on Earth: Noel, far out in the pitch-dark, totally silent Namaqualand scrub, holding a stricken old man in his arms. As we loaded him into the ambulance, we heard his death rattle.
“And that’s just where it happened,” I told Jules in 2001, as we passed an innocent-looking curve in the road. We arrived in the town of Springbok a short while later. We wanted to shop for provisions on this Saturday morning before driving up to Port Nolloth. As usual, we got sidetracked by people.
At the filling station, we saw a group of Rastamen, dressed in well-tailored sackcloth. The reek of Old Richtersveld (the local marijuana) hung in the air around them, as did the strong tang of fresh garlic from their stall-display of roots and ’erbs. They were Rasta doctors, it turned out, flogging roots, tubers, stems and plants that apparently sorted out everything from high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer to stress and midnight flatulence.
“Where do you live?” we asked.
“In a ghetto in de hills outside town,” said the Rasta called Ruben, who was holding a small potato stuffed with Old Richtersveld and taking deep drags on it for inspiration. His accent carried a rich overlay of Bob Marley.
“Where do you grow this wonderful stuff?” Jules enquired, staring pointedly at the whacky backy.
“No sister, we grow nuttin’. Jah gives. Life is as it always was. Wherever dere is smoke, dere Jah is. Sun shall not smite you by day, nor de moon by night.”
I wanted to photograph this group of cheerful characters. They asked for modelling fees in the region of R10 000. We settled for buying a bag of their cure-alls (unfortunately the Old Richtersveld was not on the market) for R20 instead – with a photo thrown into the deal.
Travelling north from Springbok to Okiep, we met Francois Jansen, one of the trainee guides on the South-North Tourist Route between Cape Town and the Namibian border. He took us to the Goegap Nature Reserve (where I had disgraced myself years before by puking over the last remaining photo-op daisy in Namaqualand), and we discussed far more than flowers.
Francois, a Baster who hailed from Rehoboth in Namibia, said he had grown to love the people of Namaqualand, whom he called Manakwalanners.
“Apartheid laws could never be properly enforced in Namaqualand,” he said. “Everything is just too far away from everything else. This is a frontier full of all sorts of people – Basters, Nama, San, Afrikaner trekboers, Irish, Cornish, Scottish and even folk from St Helena Island. We are friendly, open, inquisitive, proud and short-tempered.”
Between forays into the succulent garden to discover plants called Sigaretvygie, Vetvinger, Noordmannetjie, Bobbejaan t’neitjie, Asemsnak Malva and Bokrambos (who needs poncey Latin names when you’ve got good old “Namafrikaans” to work with?), Francois told us a juicy tale from the days when Jannie Smuts launched the Siege of Okiep during the Anglo-Boer War:
“It used to be a risky business, going to the Okiep Hotel bar for a drink, with Boer snipers shooting through the windows. However, there was a gentlemen’s agreement in place: women and children would not be shot at. But then the Brits began dressing like women so they could sneak into the bar. And when the Boers caught on, they began shooting at butch-looking women in skirts.” War is not only hell, it’s downright rude.
On the 2004 gig, we headed straight for Goegap. OK, you’ve read this far. You deserve to know a secret. The Goegap Nature Reserve has a perfectly charming guest house and I think it’s among the finest accommodation establishments in Namaqualand, especially perfect for the flower season. The guest house is of simple pre-fab construction, but the beds are comfortable, the taps work and it keeps out the cold. Also, it’s not very expensive. And here you’re staying in the middle of a flower reserve, full of daisies and a myriad succulents with cute names, and all the major Namaqua sights are less than a day’s drive away. See. You’ve got more than your money’s worth, already.
But the one drawback is the Crazy Goegap Cat. It suddenly appeared in the house one afternoon, a cross between a tabby and a wildcat, with a reddish cast to its stripy pelt and an attitude that could open tin cans. It was Dr Cute and Mr Bite-you-in-the-Ass Monster rolled into one. Purring frantically one minute, as if starved for affection and ready to give it. Then snarling and doing cornered-leopard impressions the next.
He bit me and I sat down immediately, waiting for the onset of rabies. Jules emptied a can of tuna into a dish and took it outside, while my assailant danced and twirled for the fish like a circus star. She then rushed back inside, slammed the front door and we made sure all entrances to the guest house were barred. The cat appeared shortly thereafter at various windows, begging for entry, but we knew better. It had those jiggly eyes – never a good sign.
Did I have rabies? Over the next few days, Jules kept waving bottles of water in my face.
“What’re you doing that for?” I demanded to know.
“If you were rabid, you’d be seriously hydrophobic,” she replied. “You would not only bite me, you would fear water like nothing else. Have a sip.” I did, and we went out to look at the flowers. No cat in sight. And I didn’t bite Jules.
I began to take photographs at the quiver tree garden on the reserve, when a cold front from Cape Town arrived and spoilt the session. So we found a bottle of sherry, pulled out the playing cards and held a quick Namaqua Rummy Championship, while outside the mad little lion head-butted the front door and then mewed piteously like an abandoned kitten.
The next day we realised that Flowers in the Rain was to be the theme tune of this year’s Namaqualand experience. Cool. So we drove down to the Skilpad Reserve outside Kamieskroon. There I had a ball, photographing drenched goats, droplets on daisies and the baby bloomers getting their act together for the upcoming tourist season.
I love taking photographs of the Namaqua fields in the spring – all of it, the getting there, the close-ups, the wide-angle sweeps and the roadside floral displays that can turn a squatter hut into a king’s palace overnight. But, for my money, the boss of all the Namaqualand photographers is Colla Swart of the Kamieskroon Hotel.
Colla was past her middle years when, in 1978, she was asked to take photographs with an old Instamatic of a two-headed tortoise. She enjoyed the experience. Her husband Coenie then bought her a Pentax, and she began capturing her back yard on film.
One night, Coenie suggested that Colla give a slide-show of her images to hotel guests after dinner. One of the guests was Freeman Patterson, a famous Canadian photographer who would change her life forever. He came up to her after the show and gave her a book on photography. She stayed up most of the night, reading it. Just before dawn she realised that the author was Freeman himself. It was the beginning of a famous friendship. Freeman inspired Colla to start running photographic workshops from the Kamieskroon Hotel.
Jules and I attended one of her slide-shows. We sat in the dark as the pictures flashed and merged on the screen, depicting southern Namaqualand through all its seasons. Tears rolled down both our faces. They were far more than photographs.
“The spring flowers are only the lipstick on the face of Namaqualand,” she told Jules. “I love it all. It’s like seeing my father’s face. I didn’t just love his smile. I loved all of him.”
We had the honour of meeting another legendary Namaqualand photographer once, a Japanese fellow by the name of Shin-Ichiro Sawano. Shin first visited South Africa because of a single photograph he’d seen in an old SA Tourism pamphlet. It was of a carpet of flowers stretching as far as the eye could see, captioned “Namaqualand in Spring”.
He came to South Africa in 1991, went looking for Namaqualand and missed the blooms. He did, however, meet sheep-farmer and botanical conservationist Neil MacGregor from the town of Nieuwoudtville.
“A month ago,” Neil teased him, waving at some barren-looking farmland, “this was a mass of pink Senecio blooms. Next time, come when the flowers are out. And bring your family.”
Which is just what Shin did. He stayed for three months, entranced by Namaqualand. More than 1 000 rolls of slide film later, Shin produced Forgotten Paradise: The Eternal Heritage of South Africa, a quirky-beautiful coffee-table book on the region. He still returns regularly, bringing eager groups of Japanese tourists in his wake, buzzing around in their rented cars in search of the blooms. And when he goes back to Tokyo, he holds Namaqua slide-shows and serves his guests Cape wines and rooibos tea.
On the way back from Kamieskroon, we spied a little meerkat family trying to cross the N7 highway. They had two sentinels, tails up, a kind of small-mammal crossing guard. Fast cars approached from both sides, either resort-horse-keen to get home to Cape Town or in a flower-driven rush to Springbok. The meerkats waited for a gap in the traffic and ushered the little meerkids across to safety on the other side. Jules made up thought-bubbles for each of them, imagining their frantic conversations to herself. I said it was time she drove the bakkie. I wanted to bone up on the eighteenth-century wanderings of Francois le Vaillant, whose life proves that, in explorations, there is a very thin line between “intrepid” and “mampara” (silly). The jury’s still out on this guy, but I found myself intrigued by his misadventures, as related by Jane Meiring in The Truth in Masquerade.
In 1783 Le Vaillant and his entourage were in these parts. He told the world at large he was heading for Cairo and, eventually, home to Paris. What a route. Along the way, his beloved baboon Kees seriously pissed on his battery by stealing all the hens’ eggs for himself. He was caught out one day when Le Vaillant spotted him running off to raid a hen’s nest.
Aware that he was being spied on, Kees, according to his master, “assumed a careless attitude, balanced himself on his back legs and, winking his eyes with a silly air, walked backwards and forwards several times … employing all his cunning to divert my attention.”
Somewhere between Nababeep (a Nama word meaning Place of Giraffes) and the Gariep River, Le Vaillant shot a giraffe and skinned it. His band of Hottentots feasted on the huge animal and he enjoyed some of its cooked marrow. According to the local histories, giraffe once used to hang out in these dry parts in great numbers. Now, of course, you don’t see them at all.
“There used to be a lot of acacia trees in this region,” I remembered our guide Francois saying. “They were much loved by the giraffes. Then copper was discovered here and all the trees were cut down to feed the smelters. So, no more giraffes.”
Pretty soon, Jules and I were barrelling up the Copper Highway through the arid Richtersveld to the Namibian border. Hugely excited we were, barely able to contain ourselves at the prospect of a whole month of swirling through the magical spaces of Namibia. And then the cellphone bleeped with an SMS, out here, in the middle of vast nothing and dry places. It was a text message from a movie company in Sandton, Jo’burg, offering us a free pizza slice with every ticket purchased. We were so not interested …