Willow Grange – Underberg – Kokstad
Typical of both the old and the new set-ups in South Africa is our indigenous philistinism
– ‘good taste’ and even better
intentions, sentimentalism, anti-intellectualism and
‘commitment’, mutual moral balls-squeezing and political correctness.
Breyten Breytenbach (1994)
Willow Grange, Natal, 29 November 1994
When I rejoined Chris two days ago Ladysmith’s afternoon temperature was 38°C in the shade. Next morning I set off for Winterton at 4 a.m. to stay with Sheila’s parents, whose warm-heartedness and lively conversation made memorable my sixty-third birthday. Having left Zimbabwe, Liz and Francis built themselves an enchanting home thirty miles from Ladysmith, an L-shaped, whitewashed cottage – ecologically sound, no luxuries – with thick stone walls and a steeply pitched thatched roof. At 7 a.m. I found both hard at work in the garden. They are almost self-sufficient in food and Francis produces the finest home-brewed beer I have ever tasted. On this subject I can speak with some authority, being a home-brewer myself.
This morning a bumpy twenty-mile short cut took me through low, desolate mountains onto the R74 near Estcourt. By 10 a.m. heat-stroke threatened. Soon after turning onto the Willow Grange road, I collapsed under a tree and lay on the rock-hard ground sympathetically remembering Private Frederick Tucker. In his Boer War Diary he wrote, on 5 December 1899, ‘We marched to Willow Grange, a distance of ten miles. I find the marching very hard as it is very dusty and hot, and the country is very hilly. I wish I had my body in a pool and my head in a public house.’
Incidentally, Private Tucker was appalled to discover that the Boer government was being lavishly supplied by a British armaments firm, Ely of London, with explosive .303 dum-dum bullets – the use of which had been formally forbidden during this war. So what’s new!
Now Willow Grange consists of little more than an agreeable hotel in the form of heat-resistant rondavels scattered over grassland high above a trickling river. In the bar a local farmer complained, ‘We’ve no law and order left! In Estcourt last week, on the main street in the middle of the day, they stole a crate of eggs from my very hands – 600 eggs, big money. And nobody made a move to help me – they call it “affirmative shopping”! We all notice farmworkers stealing now like never before. With me, they know they’ve only to ask and they get what they need. But they seem to want to steal, to prove something. In Mandela’s democracy they feel free to help themselves to my property – they feel liberated!’
Loteni, kwaZulu, 30 November
Soon, at this rate, ‘today’ will be starting yesterday; by 3.45 a.m. I was pedalling slowly by starlight up a long, long hill with the street lights of Estcourt visible far below like luminous silver powder spilled on the blackness. Then came level miles overlooking undulating uplands shrouded in a thin cold mist. But the rising sun warmed me on the exhilaratingly fast descent to Mooi River – where begins another tough climb.
An hour later, having turned south, I saw something freakishly unlikely. Although this is summer, the whole distant escarpment of the Berg was gently gleaming – snow-mantled. And all day a strong cool wind refreshed me, while the sky resembled a lake of half-mixed paints – high white thin cloud forming swirling streaks against the deep blue.
Beyond the Loteni signpost the tar continued for some fifteen miles through the ranches of the rich, uninhabited green hills where cattle and zebra – bred for their pelts – grazed together. Then I was on a kwaZulu track that became rougher and steeper as the mountains became wilder and higher and grander, hiding the Berg. For some thirty miles this territory – where I saw neither man nor beast – is securely fenced; it has recently been bought by a Dutch developer ‘with plans for the area’.
This was a special day: traffic-free, offering silence and solitude amidst soaring silver escarpments, deep bushy valleys, red rocky ridges and line after line of dusky-blue mountains piled against the horizon. A two-and-a-half-hour walk took me to the pass – from where I continued to walk. Freewheeling would have meant not daring to take my eyes off the track and I wanted to use them otherwise. Close by on the right rose a sheer grassy boulder-studded mountain, miles long and crowned with columns of grey rock, smooth and stout and regular as the pillars of a Romanesque cathedral. Below, on my left, stretched a confusion of bare brown hills and narrow jungly ravines. And ahead, as we lost height, a profound chasm came into view with another mighty mountain wall beyond, its vegetation dense and olive green. Here, pink and yellow flowering creepers draped the cliffs above the track.
A corner of Loteni appeared then. I had been warned that it has no shop but this is no longer true; on the edge stands a new breeze-block store behind a high wire-mesh fence. Ken, the welcoming owner, moved last year from Estcourt’s township. ‘I couldn’t take the violence any more. I’ve three small kids and I want them to grow up. Here schooling is bad but survival is more important than education. All these changes have done nothing for us Zulu. We never had killing so bad before they let Mandela out.’ He told his beautiful wide-eyed 8-year-old daughter to bring a chair for ‘Madam’ and offered me a Coke. ‘Sorry, no beer – alcohol makes more trouble, I won’t sell it.’ Neither does he sell milk. ‘It’s too expensive, no one here has money like that.’ We agreed there is something very wrong with a country where milk costs twice as much as Coca-Cola.
Explained Ken, ‘We’ve no police station but there’s a Stock Theft Unit, you’ll see it near the bridge. They’ll be happy to give you accommodation. They’ve a lonesome life here.’
Descending to river-level, I again felt the central sadness of the white traveller in South Africa. You must stay in your place – with the only resident whites.
The Stock Theft Unit, balanced on a couple of narrow ledges above a dry river-bed, consists of two concrete rows of monastically furnished rooms for the eight black policemen and a fine bungalow for the captain’s family. Half a dozen sturdy ponies graze nearby, the steeds on which stock thieves are pursued through the many passes leading into Lesotho. In this area – Danie explained, as we sat drinking wine in the kitchen while Nellie cooked supper – thefts are mostly black from black. Many cattle fall over precipices while being driven fast by night up treacherous paths; they die slowly, while scores of vultures gather. Sometimes a police helicopter is summoned by radio and on one such occasion, a few months ago, an armed Sotho was shot dead and two others were arrested. When both received ‘ridiculously short sentences’ the enraged Loteni Zulus abused Danie for not having shot them, also. ‘They couldn’t understand our reasoning. The unarmed thieves weren’t threatening to kill us. Sometimes we can feel very discouraged. Seems we can’t ever get it right, operating between two worlds – white and black, with such different mindsets.’
Last month a local was caught in possession of thirty stolen sheep – hidden in an isolated hut, released at night to graze. He claimed to have found them straying – he was only looking after them while seeking their owner – he grazed them by night because by day he was working and had nobody to shepherd them. This implausible story was accepted in court and he got off, there being no witnesses to the theft. ‘Or if there were,’ added Danie, ‘they’d been intimidated. We’re blamed for being lazy and corrupt and stupid, but when we’re energetic and honest and smart it doesn’t take us far. More often than not we’re outwitted. A European system of justice only works if everyone accepts European standards. If people think nothing of murdering witnesses to a small crime like you do?’ Then Danie quoted his German missionary thirty-five years harvested souls in Tanzania. ‘He knew the blacks – surely he knew them, after so many years! And he always said, “When a black opens his mouth he lies. When he shuts it he stops lying.” With them silence is an admission of guilt.’
Danie, aged 30, did his military service in the Caprivi Strip. ‘But as a teaching officer, no fighting – and that suited me, teaching basic literacy and arithmetic to young men. Really I was doing propaganda, the idea behind the schooling. “Democracy is good! Communism is bad!” That could sound funny to you, us preaching democracy. But then we believed in our mission.’
Danie concedes that in the past the police were often ‘too tough’. But he resents the new ethical code being imposed on SAPS by the Bill of Rights and questions its relevance to ‘ordinary life the way we have to live it in this country’.
Nellie is of 1820s stock, Danie a German-Afrikaner who for two years served in Pietermaritzburg’s Internal Stability Unit, a section of the old SAP notorious for exacerbating instability wherever they intervened.
‘We didn’t deserve our bad reputation,’ asserted Danie. ‘By the time we arrived on a scene it was all out of hand – usually a case of “attack or be attacked”. But the psychology was bad, we were left too long hanging about waiting. Standing by, ready for instant action, all hyped up – and maybe nothing happening and nothing happening … So you got to be longing for trouble and set off with too much aggro inside. That could lead to over-reaction, once I nearly shot a kid for no reason. That scared me and I talked to the colonel, said maybe we should have shorter stand-by periods. But he only stamped on me. It’s not kosher for lieutenants to advise colonels!’
Now affirmative action is angering the SAPS’S white component – officers’ exams have been ‘made easier’. (I can’t believe they were ever very difficult.)
Nellie, a public-health-nurse-cum-midwife, works in three local clinics – near the border, to which many desperate Sothos ride on their ponies for four days in search of free treatment. ‘It’s illegal to give it but how can I turn them away? Some bring poorly babies – usually malnutrition, no specific disease, just like with the Zulus. If the babies haven’t gained weight in a month I know their milk ration was divided amongst other hungry kids. All that makes tension for me with our own people. Zulus hate Sothos and it’s not just around stock theft. Zulus hate Sothos, period.’
As elsewhere, injections are the locals’ preferred – because undetectable by husbands – form of contraceptive. Nellie finds that interest in family planning varies from district to district. Here the women – and even some of the men – are quite ‘advanced’, despite the prevailing poverty. ‘But generally,’ said Nellie, ‘it’s true the birth rate goes down as incomes go up.’
Nellie’s horror stories echoed those I have heard from medical workers all over rural South Africa. Mothers who kill small babies by giving adult-dose emetics, grannies who treat their grandchildren’s internal parasites with Jeyes Fluid, adolescent surrogate mothers who conceal toddlers’ broken bones until a limb has to be amputated – and phoney sangomas who make a fortune on AIDS ‘cures’. AIDS-testing is not available (too expensive) but a soaring TB rate tells the story. However, more and more genuine sangomas are sharing with ‘Western’ health-workers their knowledge of effective herbal medicines and are keen to learn which symptoms indicate that a patient must go to hospital.
One of Danie’s black colleagues has eight children – four illegitimate, for each of whom he regularly pays maintenance at R120 a month. This means he must take on extra jobs and/or demand higher bribes. In rural areas fathers rarely deny paternity, being bound by custom to acknowledge it – and anyway being proud of their procreative prowess. For this reason many women now choose not to wed; maintenance money from various fathers can amount to much more than one husband’s wage. In Edendale township near Pietermaritzburg I met one such mother, a prosperous 47-year-old hawker whose twelve children ranged in age from 30 to 3. Eight fathers were involved and she had only recently heard of AIDS. Nellie recalled the case of a 15-year-old schoolgirl and her school principal in a neighbouring settlement; when rape was followed by pregnancy, the parents refused to charge the rapist lest he might lose his job and be unable to pay maintenance.
Underberg, 1 December
On today’s sensationally rough track it took me six hours to cover twenty-five miles: very beautiful, very hilly, very hot miles. By 5.30 the sun was up in a cloudless sky and, ominously, there was no wind.
Everyone was friendly in the few large settlements en route but no one spoke English. Small boys herded fat goats, youths herded thin cattle. On the lower slopes of steep mountains stand groups of substantial round or oblong huts, securely thatched and brightly painted – lime green, pale pink, dark blue. These are still called ‘kraals’ though no longer wattle-fenced to protect livestock from four-legged predators. Some, however, have new anti-rustler fences reinforced by packs of hunting-dogs.
I visited a new school (seven teachers: 580 pupils) – of course tin-roofed, wired for electricity though the nearest supply point is thirty miles away and with elaborate plumbing though there is little hope of piped water in the foreseeable future. The statutory wayside board lists the Durban architect firm, the electrical engineering consultants, the construction company, the accountants … Will the Reconstruction and Development Programme boffins make any effort to persuade blacks that their South Africa does not have to ape the whites’ South Africa? All the skills and materials are locally available to build a school more suited to this region’s climate at a fraction of the cost, leaving millions over for the training and adequate payment of teachers. Or is it too late to restore the blacks’ pride in doing things their own way?
According to a Zulu TTC lecturer who befriended me in Pietermaritzburg, the only teachers who may safely be appointed to rural schools in this province are IFP-approved locals, at best semi-qualified. These resent fully qualified outsiders who show up their own incompetence and try to teach pupils something about how democracies are supposed to work.
That same friend enlightened me about the sudden puzzling disappearance throughout kwaZulu of The Sowetan, the blacks’ admirably objective English-language newspaper. Because it often criticizes Buthelezi it has been banned – not officially, but following the murders of three foolhardy newsagents who ignored ‘warnings’ it went off the market. No other paper so strongly condemns Buthelezi’s links with the Far Right. The IFP has leaders like Walter Felgate (formerly RTZ’S African Affairs adviser) and Peter Miller (kwaZulu/Natal’s MEC for Housing and Local Government) and Senator Phillip Powell (ex-SAP).
When heat-stroke threatened at 10.15 no shade was available – not a tree, not a bush, not even a boulder. On either side shimmered bare rocky slopes or bare stony veld. As an enemy the sun is very frightening and panic soon sets in. On reaching the tarred road near Himeville, an exclusive holiday-home village, I felt too dizzy to pedal and dragged Chris along a grass verge in the blessed shade of pine trees, then freewheeled the last lap to Underberg. In the hotel my arrival after dark in July ’93 was remembered. This year a new defiant example of racist ‘wit’ hangs behind the bar: ‘Small black man wanted as mud-flap. Must be flexible and willing to travel.’ Automatically I ordered a Castle but felt too queasy to drink it. After a warm bath I lay shivering on the bed for two hours and even now I want to drink only water.
Kokstad, 2 December
A strong cool tailwind helped me to cover sixty-five miles by 1 p.m. despite three hailstorms from which I sheltered under my space-blanket. Small hailstones are said to be much better for the land than torrential rain but these were not small; they tore several holes in my ‘tent’.
Kokstad has a Cape flavour, architecturally, and in atmosphere recalls Matatiele. When this region formed part of the old Cape Province, these little towns were Griqualand East’s dozy ‘white’ market centres. Only in 1976, on the setting up of the Transkei ‘homeland’, did Griqualand East – being commercial farmland – become part of Natal. Then the departure of white merchants from ‘black’ territory transformed both Kokstad and Matatiele into bustling trading centres, attracting Xhosa customers from all over the northern Transkei.
Tomorrow will be a rest day. Last June Fay Rennie called on me in Ireland – we have mutual friends – and offered hospitality on her farm fifteen miles from Kokstad, near the Transkei border. In 1883 the Rennie family purchased 4,600 acres from an English-speaker named Woolridge who had probably bought the land from Griquas. Fay’s grandfather-in-law then entered the history books by importing South Africa’s first herd of Hereford cattle.
By 1860 the Griquas had sold all their land in Griqualand West to the Orange Free State, having for decades been the victims of both British and Boer expansionism. The British then gave them a conscience-salving present of this area, known as Niemandsland (no man’s land). Before accepting the gift Adam Kok, the Griqua leader, sent a delegation to inspect it – in summer, when the treeless pastures were green and all the streams full. Joyfully the Griquas moved, only to discover that in winter their cattle and sheep could not survive here. Soon most of them had sold their farms to whites and settled in Kokstad. In fact this region was not a no man’s land. The winter cold, at 5,000 feet, deterred permanent settlement but generations of Xhosa had used it for summer grazing.
Palmiet Farm, 3 December
This is a magical region, of extraordinary beauty and with a ‘Secret Garden’ feeling. To the traveller it seems (but it isn’t) outside the turbulence of South Africa in transition.
Beyond Kokstad I left the Matatiele road to follow an old wagon-track into the hills. It was a fresh bright morning, the air pure, the sunrise quietly glorious, painting delicate tints above tawny rocky slopes and silent expanses of pastureland that should now be green but this year remain cinnamon-brown. Yet the several dams are quite full and the numerous pedigree herds thriving; white capital and know-how soon transformed Niemandsland into profitable ranching country. When the first Rennies settled, how long did it take them to drive their ox-wagons to the nearest store? But the family would then have been largely self-sufficient, needing only an occasional excursion to embryonic Kokstad.
Palmiet’s short private road leads past groups of thatched workers’ huts set amidst tall pines. Then the original homestead appears, built in 1884 of mud and stone, long and solid and now used as a barn. Its successor was built in 1925: a stately mansion-bungalow with long corridors, high ceilings, a wide stoep, a brick patio. Here live Michael and Jeanette, Fay’s son and daughter-in-law, surrounded by handsome mahogany furniture and the portraits of not-always-handsome ancestors. Fay herself occupies an elegant dower-bungalow overlooking the lake-like dam, its shores home to flocks of Egyptian geese, yellow-bill duck, blacksmith plover and spoonbills. Above the water rises a steep grassy hill, planted a century ago with oaks, poplars, deodars, bluegums. Griqualand East, explained Fay, lacked indigenous trees.
In such a confusing country, where paradoxes cover the political landscape like weeds, one can come to feel quite guilty about failing to maintain a reasonable level of optimism. This seems to put one, superficially, on the side of those who undervalue the comparatively peaceful transition and ignore its positive implications. I therefore needed this Palmiet interlude; to Fay I could confess my scepticism about the majority’s present capacity to function as citizens of a democracy.
Why is it so often assumed that African countries are capable of compressing into a few years what in Europe took several centuries? To try quickly to transform apartheid-maimed South Africa into a Western-style democracy is a brave but rash undertaking. Those who scoff at the notion of blacks ever being able to run a parliamentary democracy, or efficiently manage Africa’s most industrialized economy, may well have a point. But their latter argument is not at present being tested. Behind the elaborate GNU façade, blacks are not being allowed even to try to manage South Africa’s economy for the benefit of the majority.
Fay told me a sad but not unusual story about a neighbour who found his Zulu farm-school teacher inflating attendance figures so that she could claim more rations under GNU’S supplementary feeding scheme for poor children. She then sold the surplus – not her first offence but the most serious. (Why doesn’t GNU compel farmers to raise workers’ wages so that their children don’t need supplementary feeding?) When the neighbour heard of a white teacher interested in the job, he requested the Department of Education to sanction her appointment. Almost immediately the intimidation started – threats against his life, threats to torch his home and the school. Although both parents and pupils pleaded for a white teacher, the Zulu kept her job. Said Fay, ‘It’s very disturbing when professional people think they can do what they like and issue death threats to anyone who has the temerity to gainsay them. And will the next generation of teachers be any better, given the lack of professional ethics by now built into the system?’
As we walked the land in the cool of the evening – wattle plantations on one side, serenely ruminating Herefords on the other – Fay passed on the latest joke: ‘There’s no point in moving Parliament to Pretoria as there will soon be nothing to move!’ Theft within Cape Town’s Parliament buildings has become a major problem; even the press-corps offices have had to acquire security gates. Computers, fax machines, mobile phones, typewriters – ‘Whitey’s goodies, let’s help ourselves!’
Having for long been a federalist, Fay is now ‘beginning to question whether, at this stage of our political development, devolution of important powers to the provinces is feasible’. Whatever the arguments against ‘centralism’, my innate frugality revolts against the running of nine provincial governments – all lusting after governmental status symbols – for a population two-thirds that of France. Eventually this structure may collapse under the weight of its own efficiency. Or it may not – with every year that passes the vested interests at provincial level will become more entrenched.
The same, 4 December
At sunrise I rambled among the huts beneath the pines, being greeted with big smiles by the workers and their numerous relatives. Each family receives a monthly mealie ration, a weekly meat ration and a generous daily milk ration. On special occasions – hatching, matching or dispatching – Michael provides an ox to be solemnly slaughtered and merrily consumed. At present the Palmiet hamlet accommodates fifty-four, of whom twelve are workers. Given the changing economic situation – higher taxes, fewer subsidies, uncertainty about future prices – it is doubtful if this feudal community can survive. A year ago there were seventy-two in residence, then Michael had to insist on some returning whence they came. During the worst period of township violence (1990-93) more and more young cousins, nephews, nieces – and some not so young – retreated to their areas of origin, to farms like Palmiet with a ‘caring’ reputation.
Today Michael pointed out, as others have done, that low agricultural wages are not as unjust as they sound because the value of free accommodation, food, medical care and schooling (such as it is) increases annually. But a system so open to abuse must go, and the ‘agrivillage’ option is now under consideration in Natal, involving higher wages and no perks. Families could build their own homes on their own plots, buy their own supplies from black-owned shops, avail of subsidized water and electricity, send their children to state schools, and generally live as citizens rather than serfs.
At Palmiet one is prompted to consider the rights of the whites – by observation, not by anything anyone says. When Charles Rennie bought this farm he was only doing his best for his family. He was willing to invest all he had in improving the land and to work hard to earn an honest living, like his son and grandson and great-grandson Michael. Other settlers may have come by their thousands of hectares more bloodily but they too worked hard. All those pioneers were ingenious and dogged, making profitable the sort of land from which the blacks, for lack of water, could never have drawn the same wealth. Granted cheap labour formed the cornerstone of white prosperity but in those days that was how the cookie crumbled all over the white-conquered world. And how it still crumbles, in too many places. Incomes in rich countries are now growing three times faster than in poor countries. GATT stands for Greater Anguish Throughout the Third World.
This afternoon, as we bird-watched, Fay commented, ‘Many whites know the only solution to escalating crime lies in the upliftment of the disadvantaged – meaning higher taxation for us. But then attitudes harden when we see vast sums being squandered on gravy train excesses – or disappearing unaccountably. And it worries me how Ramaphosa tried to deflect accusations against certain prominent figures. He claimed the whistle-blowers were trying to divide the ANC – which must close ranks when leaders are accused of corruption.’
Even more worrying is GNU’S foreign policy (or lack of same) being largely determined by the size of certain governmental donations – from Indonesia, Algeria, Taiwan and etc. – to the ANC’S coffers.
Michael joined us then, a most engaging young man but with great sadness, and some anger, behind his eyes. This I had noticed before Fay told me the reason. A year ago, in November 1993, the Rennies’ nearest neighbour – James Baxter, aged 32, one of Michael’s closest friends – was murdered while on a routine milk-delivery run into the Transkei. A Zulu stopped his bakkie and shot him at point-blank range. He died instantly, leaving a widow and three small children. Months later an ‘outsider’ was arrested and charged; rumours abound regarding his origins and history but no one will give evidence against him.
The Baxters, like the Rennies, had long been respected as caring employers and James was an apolitical, hard-working cattle-rancher – which job demands more year-round exertion from white farmers than cane or maize growing. (Michael must dip his thousand cattle every three or four weeks in the summer. Young stock are dosed quarterly, their elders annually.)
While Fay was telling me this dreadful story in her gentle voice, I could hear the Baxter children’s distant laughter as they splashed in the mini-pool; the older two are the same age as Michael’s son and daughter and most afternoons they come here to play.
Such ruthless and apparently aimless killings, and the much more numerous killings of blacks by whites – what must these crimes do to race relations within the hearts and minds of the bereaved? Suddenly my appreciation of the miracle that is the new South Africa was revived. There can be little forgetting but there has been much forgiving. Mainly, it has to be said, on the black side.