British Kaffraria, in which a new model for relations between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa was so rapidly being forced into existence, was the only military colony in the British Empire. The martial law at Colonel George Mackinnon’s disposal meant that he and his assistant commissioners could be as arbitrary as they wished on civil Xhosa matters and they were when it suited them.
Noel Mostert, Frontiers (1992)
I left Obs at the seventh hour on the seventh day of the seventh month which should have been auspicious timing but wasn’t. The Mother City chose to send me on my way as she had greeted me – only more so. By the ninth hour a strong tailwind had become a gale, its gusts up to 150 m.p.h. Dismounting, I walked the last five miles to the home of an Irish friend on the outskirts of Somerset West. Often I had to stand still, leaning hard on Lear, forcing my feet to stay on the ground. Branches were being ripped off wayside bluegums – some thirty feet long yet whirling high in the sky like autumn leaves. All day the storm continued, killing eleven people and doing millions of rands’ worth of damage.
Next morning a normal tailwind helped me on my way. But soon it was raining again – heavy cold persistent rain – and upon the famous Sir Lowry Pass sat a cheating cloud, hiding the view across False Bay to the Peninsular mountains. Then the gale resumed, forcing me to walk almost twenty miles on an exposed road undulating between low mountains, heathery and uninhabited. There was no traffic; those gusts could overturn a vehicle.
At dusk a Coloured township appeared below the road. I looked down speculatively at its little houses and biggish hotel. Outside the bar door drunks were singing and shouting and quarrelling and I decided against … Had they been black, that same rowdiness would not have deterred me. Even now, after six weeks on the Cape, I cannot feel quite at ease with Coloureds. Going on my wet and weary way, I thought about this. Why, despite so many instances of impetuous hospitality (‘Come now to my home!’) do I find them, in general, more difficult to get on with than blacks? Some unforeseen and baffling barrier exists. On the whole it is easy – much easier than with blacks – to establish a superficial, chatty relationship. Then suddenly one realizes just how superficial it is, how much higher stands this barrier which at first seemed lower. All the exceptions I can recall have been chip-free academics: so is the barrier in fact built of Coloured chips? Not even the most deprived blacks seem as insecure as this community.
In Hermanus, a favourite seaside resort of the rich, most hotels are several-starred. The exception, the Astoria, is closed for the winter, apart from its grotty bar where all the men were AWB types with foot-long bushy beards, collar-length hair, narrow eyes, aggressive voices and guns in their belts. Then Dan arrived, an extrovert young Capetonian who soon decided I must stay with friends of his, an 82-year-old New Zealander and his English-speaking wife. Both are good company and seem to enjoy having a guest. Life must lack variety in midwinter Hermanus; many of the permanent residents are retired couples or lonely widows and widowers.
Today the gale continued relentlessly. Venturing out at noon, I found that no one else was being so rash. In the Victoria Hotel bar sat a young Afrikaner couple from Jo’burg, also storm-bound. Hendrik runs a textile-printing business and is equally happy to take orders from the ANC, the AWB, APLA, the Nats. ‘I work fourteen hours a day, average,’ said he. ‘Now we gotta get off our backsides, face up to the new competition. I say Mandela’s right about affirmative action – why not? Those poor bastards, they’re waiting long enough for jobs. I’m no liberal, just a realist. We’re living already in the new South Africa. It’s not in the future and maybe something we can avoid. Plenty of my age think the same but you don’t hear about us, we’re not news.’
Yesterday’s long climb from Hermanus, on a quiet narrow road, took me inland. Here were chunky mountains, their summits half-clouded, and deep woody glens, and small steep green fields hedged or stone-walled. A brown flooded river raced noisily to the Indian Ocean, carrying vegetable debris and a few dead sheep, swirling and churning between rocks, often overflowing bluegum-lined banks. The occasional isolated farmhouse had its date over the main door or on a gable: 1709, 1726, 1748.
Then comes a transmogrification; beyond the chunky mountains I might have been back in central Transylvania. All around rose high smooth emerald ridges grazed by enormous flocks of merinos or sown with new wheat – a brilliant green dusted over the red-brown richness of the soil. In three hours I saw only one person, a farmer checking his flock, driving a motor-buggy such as American golfers use. I fumed at this idyllic scene being polluted visually, aurally and olfactorily by the latest walk-avoidance gadget. Then I tried to be reasonable. Without a buggy it would be necessary to ride a horse across these vast pastures. And by now most Boers have lost that skill, once central to their way of life.
Last night was spent in Stormsvlei, an aptly named dorplet; as I arrived another storm suddenly blew up, after a calm sunny seventy-mile ride.
This morning, outside the Sabbath-dead dorp of Bonnievale, I paused to view a river wildly in flood: a pinkish-brown torrent, quarter of a mile wide, loud and fast, dotted with the tops of bushy green trees. As I watched, two trees were uprooted and several nearby bungalows were being inundated, the water higher than window-level and still rising.
Pedalling on through a magnificence of mountains – all naked jagged red-brown rock – I wondered why predictions of civil war are becoming so much more frequent. Between now and the elections increasing violence is to be expected – but that is something else. South Africa’s political scene is too incoherent for civil war which, like any other war, needs organization. And the economic scene is too coherent; those senior officers now organizing a covert dirty war against the ANC will never attempt a military coup post-elections. That would require the go-ahead from South Africa’s corporate mentors. In this context, the dominant materialistic ethos has its short-term uses. Everyone knows on which side their bread is buttered and civil wars butter no loaves. The various ideologies, ideals and principles – paraded as precious, sacred and immutable, with much talk of dying in their defence – are in reality less important than staying within reach of the butter dish.
Montagu, an attractive little town on the edge of the Klein Karoo, is a popular summer-holiday resort but this evening there are only two other guests in its enormous Edwardian hotel. Wayne and Betty, English-speakers about my own age, are born-again Christians heavily into evangelizing. When I at last succeeded in turning the conversation from my own rebirth, Wayne told a story to illustrate how well whites understand blacks. In the 1950s, as a junk-jewellery salesman, he employed a Xhosa youth to carry boxes of samples, polish the van, make morning tea and so on. Once the youth overslept and Wayne gave him ‘a sound beating’. When he spilled tea over the bedclothes he got an even sounder beating. And when he forgot to load a box ‘I stopped the car, dragged him out on a verge and gave him a hiding so he was stiff for a week. Result? He’s a fat cat now, with a Mercedes! You with me? It’s like training puppies. You got to thrash ’em some to get any good of ’em.’
Although the Klein Karoo is topographically more conventional than the Great Karoo, its vibes are no less eerie, its light is no less brilliant, its ancient silence no less solemn. During yesterday’s mountainous sixty-five miles I met no one; beyond the highish and very steep Ouberg Pass the extreme ruggedness of the terrain precludes even sheep-farming.
This year’s early rains have brought out an abundance of flowers in mid-July. Often I stopped to climb steep slopes, marvelling at the strangeness of these plants; many, before they flower, imitate the surrounding rocks and stones in shape and colour. Usually the petals are tiny and close-set, glowing in patches of magenta, mauve, burgundy, purple, pale yellow, dark blue. At the base of a low ridge, on a level expanse of cinnamon earth, I was lucky enough to see one of the rarest plants in the world, the many-headed euphorbia. From a little distance I mistook it for a rounded boulder. It was some six feet by four and perhaps three feet high, the solid rubbery surface olive-green, faintly pink-tinged. When of these proportions the many-headed euphorbia – a succulent – is likely to be hundreds of years old.
In mid-afternoon, turning the shoulder of a mountain, I saw the first dwellings since leaving Montagu. The Coloured hamlet of Anyberg, a dozen mimosa-shaded cottages, lay in a spectacularly deep gorge made noisy by a flooded river.
That long descent took me into an area well wooded by local standards. Here were trees as strange as the flowering plants – some not true trees (what is the definition of a ‘true tree’?) but giant succulents, their thick silver leaves also serving as seeds. Anything is possible in the Karoo … Now the karee trees are fragrantly in flower, minute yellow-green blooms clustering densely on the tip of each branchlet. Here too were many witgats, the benign ‘shepherds’ trees’, standing about twenty feet tall with very thick and silky smooth off-white bark. These have countless uses, as a source of both sustenance and medicines for humans and animals. Traditionally, all the peoples of the Karoo so valued witgats that their felling was forbidden and happily they remained protected by a colonial law.
Another climb followed, onto a plateau from which the mountains stood back, allowing pasture-space for sheep. Here were two farm entrances, ten miles apart, both homesteads invisible from the track.
After a perfect day – cloudless sky, warm sun, cold breeze – suddenly at 5.30 a gale sprang up, driving inky clouds from the west. Camping on the veld no longer seemed a good idea. At this altitude, during winter, Karoo storms often bring lethal hail, capable of killing not only humans but oxen. A normally severe hailstorm (not freakish) produces stones the size of cricket balls with jagged needle-sharp protuberances which shatter car windows and wreck the rest of the vehicle. In olden times travellers used their saddles to protect their heads and, if they were lucky, could afterwards crawl home – frequently leaving a dead horse behind. The unlucky were badly concussed and died hours later, where they had fallen, of hypothermia.
I scanned the plateau through my binoculars, hoping to see a grove of windpumps and trees. None was visible, nor was there any natural shelter of any kind. My anxiety level rose as I hurried on, the gale behind me, the sun setting. Then deliverance came – a rather grand farm entrance, with two crescent walls on which were painted, in letters large enough to be read by twilight, WILLEM ERASMUS. Elated, I turned left towards Mr Erasmus but soon had to dismount; the track’s surface failed to match the grandeur of the entrance.
As I walked into the darkening bush just one long streak of red remained in the western sky and, ahead of me, black clouds were piled over low hills. How far to the homestead? Hereabouts it could be eight or ten miles.
Forty minutes later – by then it was pitch dark, starless dark – a distant golden glimmer deceived me. Alas! this was only the workers’ compound, a line of cinder-block shacks. My shouted greeting brought a Coloured man to a doorway; he stood silhouetted against the lamplight within, excited small children clustering around his legs. Our conversation was inconclusive but his gestures told me to continue along the track. Here one cannot suggest staying with workers – which anywhere else in the world would be the natural thing to do, after dark in the middle of nowhere.
A mile or so further on I arrived unexpectedly at the homestead – unexpectedly because it was unlit, deserted but for a Rottweiler bitch. Instead of enhancing the reputation of her breed by savaging the intruder she fell in love with me at first sight. (Or is it first smell in the case of dogs?) In a huge barn/shed – its side door was open – I spread my flea-bag on the diesel-scented concrete floor. The bitch snuggled down beside me as I ravenously chewed biltong, remembering all those commandos who lived on it for months at a stretch during the Anglo-Boer War. I was almost asleep when my companion uttered a joyous yelp and raced away to meet her master.
The workers had warned Willem that a man with a bicycle had gone towards the homestead. ‘But I think you’re a woman!’ he exclaimed, peering at me by torchlight. He is a burly young man with crinkly brown hair, kind brown eyes and a big happy smile. He apologized for not asking me to stay, he himself had to spend the night with friends nearby – that is, an hour’s drive away. This was a momentous night. His land must be irrigated when the flood came down at about 4 a.m. – or maybe 3 a.m. – a ‘boy’ would be on guard all night watching the river. However, Retha and Tertius could give me a bed, not only for the night but for a week – or a month, should I wish to make an in-depth study of the Klein Karoo. As the nearest dorplet (offering no entertainment) is twenty-five miles away, and there are on average twenty miles between farms, this boundless hospitality is understandable.
When Willem heard where the flood had got to by 3.30 p.m. – I had to remove the panniers and take off my trousers to wade through it – he was able to calculate, almost exactly, its time of arrival on his land. Yet he described himself as a novice farmer, brought up in Pretoria. His father, a heart surgeon, never showed any interest in farming though the family had been settled on these 30,000 hectares since the 1870s. Willem moved here three years ago and relishes every aspect of his new life; he hopes his city-bred wife will soon come to do likewise. Their first child, a son, has just been born in Pretoria and will in due course inherit the farm, or so Willem plans. It seems he doesn’t feel threatened by the new South Africa’s land-redistribution policy.
Retha and Tertius have recently retired to their family farm; in Stellenbosch Retha was a librarian and Tertius a civil servant in the Native Affairs Department. While glorious wine flowed copiously, three handsome and lordly cats sat together on my lap. Retha’s meal was one of the best I have eaten in South Africa and the party continued until 1.30 a.m.
This morning I was tempted to rob a bank in Ladismith – not to be confused with the more famous Ladysmith further north. It is my practice to collect cash in dorplets where there are no queues. In Ladismith there was no staff either, just a wide-open bank and much hammering overhead. Eventually I found the staff (all two of them) in a café across the street. The roof had been blown off during last night’s gale and, irritated by the noise consequent upon its replacement, they moved to the café.
While pushing Lear up the long steep slope beyond Ladismith I passed a lone ragged Xhosa, a young man carrying a cattle-stick over his shoulder. He civilly returned my greeting but could speak no English. Moments later an elderly Afrikaner couple in a Mercedes overtook me, then stopped to offer a lift – though loading Lear would have been troublesome for them. ‘It’s dangerous’, said the husband, ‘to be on a lonely road with that black fella.’ I should have denounced their assumption that black men are more likely than not to be criminal. But that would have seemed ungracious.
The next twenty-eight miles wound through mountains whose like is to be found in only two other locations, somewhere in South America and on a South Sea Island. They are known scientifically as the Enon conglomerate and locally as the Red Hills, a prosaic name for one of the wonders of South Africa. From profound inaccessible ravines rise sheer red cliffs – mighty walls, miles long, of glowing rough sandstone and glittering quartz. Their vegetation (what one can see of it by the roadside) is sparse but fascinating: improbably shaped succulents, many of them unique to this tiny area. On the long descent from the pass I stopped at each hairpin bend to sit and gaze. Once a hawk came into view, circling above a ravine – quite close, at eye-level. It was Africa’s only polyandrous bird of prey, the pale chanting goshawk who shares his mate with another male. I could clearly see the grey back, pure white rump, bright orange legs – and soon a second appeared, further down the ravine. Perhaps his co-husband?
Calitzdorp is a pleasant little town, intent on luring tourists away from the famed Garden Route but, so far, not having much success.
Seven miles beyond Calitzdorp I was tempted by another gravel road and went off on a fifty-mile detour through the Swartberg. This bone-shaking track carries little traffic as it rises and falls, always steeply, going from valley to valley – small fertile valleys, irrigated from rivers filled by the rainfall of other areas. The long-established irrigation system looks Asian but these valleys’ overall pattern is oddly European: rich ploughland, trim vineyards, lush meadows, verges green enough to recall Ireland in May. Then come many ostrich farms as the track rises – leaving fertility behind – onto expanses of stony veld overlooked by the dark blue precipices of the Swartberg. Several giant bluegums were uprooted the other night; one fell on a farmhouse, smashing the roof and seriously injuring the sleeping farmer and his wife. The rains rarely reach here but gales blow regularly.
Ostriches roamed over most of South Africa when van Riebeeck arrived and he sent several supposedly tamed specimens as gifts to Oriental rulers. Otherwise the Europeans paid scant attention to these bizarre birds, apart from using their plumes as fly-whisks, wielded by slaves while the family ate. Then, in the 1860s, a Karoo Boer named Booysen began to breed ostriches and sell their plumes to Europe’s richest ladies. As the Klein Karoo was then about as far as you could get from the world of haute couture (it’s not much nearer now) this inspiration is one of life’s minor mysteries. Within a decade ostrich feathers were fetching £100 per pound, a lush sum in those days. By the 1880s one pair of young adults cost £200 and all Mr Booysen’s neighbours were frenziedly hatching ostrich chicks. Rapidly the market expanded; plumes were in, globally. Spacious manor houses – I passed a few today – replaced more humble dwellings and the region’s economy was transformed. Calitzdorp and Oudtshoorn’s prosperity was founded on ostrich plumes; the latter town’s imposing Victorian mansions are still known as ‘feather palaces’. But fashion is fickle: the liberated, cloche-hatted young ladies of the Roaring Twenties spurned ostrich plumes and suddenly the boom was over. As suddenly, some seventy-five years later, ostriches again became Big Biz – bred for their meat and their skins which are used to make purses, wallets, belts, handbags, shoes and (if you’ve inherited an oil well) tunics. Most plumes are now sold as cheap feather-duster souvenirs but have retained their ‘special’ value for one piquant purpose – to dust the most delicate bits of electronic equipment made in such places as Silicon Valley. It pleases me to think of our high-powered boffins depending on those plumes – as the Khoikhoi did to control vast cattle herds, using a technique even more baffling than microchips. The cattle were trained to graze and then lie ruminating around a bunch of plumes set upright in the earth, representing the herdsman. This left him free to take time off knowing his animals would not stray. So many feathers went into the making of each bunch that it was equivalent in value to a young ox.
Hereabouts the ostrich population marks this as the industry’s birthplace. Some flocks, living a more or less natural life on ample expanses of veld, look healthy and happy – insofar as ostriches are capable of looking happy. Others, owned by the greedier farmers and crowded into bare smelly little paddocks, look wretched – their plumage bedraggled, their demeanour dispirited, their interpersonal relationships very obviously embittered.
Today I enjoyed several long wayside discussions; the friendliness of the local Boers makes up for their hesitant English. It seems the casualty rate among ostrich-minders is quite high. One farmer has lost two ‘boys’ within the past three years, both killed by the same cock – disembowelled with one swift kick. (They kick forwards, not backwards.) Your average cock is eight feet tall and weighs several hundredweight; being armed on each foot with two long claws, resembling thick curved steel nails, he is much more likely to kill than to maim. Some birds – hens as well as cocks – complete the job by kneeling on the prone body, splintering their victim’s bones. Their own bones are virtually indestructible. Eve Palmer records one instance of an 18-month-old chick breaking a gap through a two-foot-thick stone wall by charging it; the chick suffered no ill effects. And without difficulty an adult can snap a thick pole of sneezewood – one of Africa’s toughest woods – by running into it.
Recently a local farm was put up for sale, something almost unknown hereabouts. The asking price is R5.5 million and now rumour has it that an American bought the place a few days ago, intending to stock it with 8,000 ostriches – though my informant asserts it should carry only 4,000. The thought of an American (or any uitlander) farming their land outrages the locals. But what else can you expect with the blacks taking over?
By 5.15, when I came to a T-junction and a tarred road, habitations and farms had been left far behind and all around rose the austere, sublimely beautiful Swartberg. It was piercingly cold and the familiar evening phenomenon of heavy dark clouds obscured the Swartberg Pass. My plan to cross it and sleep in Prince Albert no longer seemed feasible. Reluctantly I turned and freewheeled down to this nasty ‘Mountain Retreat’ where the artificial lake is empty, the shop is almost empty, there is no bar, there are no other guests and the staff are sullen. But my self-catering chalet costs only R30.
This morning’s long descent took me past the famous Cango Caves into an area reeking of tourism. I paused only to admire Oudtshoorn’s fine public and domestic architecture – the ‘feather palaces’ – then pedalled on to this endearingly dopey little dorp. At 4 p.m I found the hotel empty, like the bank in Ladismith. I could have helped myself to whatever I fancied from the bar and sped away. It’s soothing to come upon these relaxed corners of South Africa where political troubles are but items on the TV news and the attitude to security is normally rural.
Here my only fellow-guest is Mr Pelotti, a middle-aged man whose family migrated from Calabria in the 1950s. (At first I mistook him for a Coloured.) He lives in Germiston but is negotiating to buy De Rust’s takeaway, the PWV violence having broken his nerve.
Over supper Mr Pelotti told me that in the 1950s the verkramptes opposed the Nats’ indiscriminate encouragement of white immigrants, seeing an influx of Papists as a source of moral corruption. The DRC then organized not very successful evangelizing missions among the white heathen and my companion recalled with entertaining irreverence being pursued as a child by those zealots.
All immigrants, unless settled in dorps exclusively Afrikaans-speaking, eventually joined the English-speakers. Socially, however, merging was limited, apart from those who made their way into the academic, artistic or corporate worlds. The original English-speakers regarded the southern Europeans as lower class (a term still used freely here, PC being optional) though few English settlers were themselves escutcheoned. Also, many of the newcomers preferred to remain within their own close-knit communities.
Post-war immigrants (Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Cypriots) own many of the small stores and takeaways where I pause for sustenance and we often talk while I drink my amasi or eat my fish-cake. Most oldies claim to have been not at all ‘colour-sensitive’ (!) when they arrived, to the great alarm of the ruling class. But they soon became so – and, as is the convert way, often extremely so. One meets few ANC supporters among them: Mr Pelotti is an exception.
On the Meirings Pass, not far from De Rust, the weather turned vicious. Over sixty-five miles to Willowmore I had to battle with a gusty crosswind while it rained from a low sky restricting visibility to a hundred yards. Such conditions – recalling brown bogs, gorse, heather – make the Klein Karoo’s aloes and karees, dwarf acacia and euphorbia look quite wrong.
In Willowmore’s scruffy hotel bar several Coloureds and whites, listlessly playing cards together, seemed to regard my arrival as a welcome diversion. According to Mr van Imhoff – old and stiff but mentally vigorous – this region’s race relations have always been good. Even Verwoerd didn’t spoil them; as the Coloureds already lived in their own locations, forced removals never became an issue. And in that well-regulated era there were few blacks around though now they are moving in ‘like locusts’. The Coloured card-players then tried to outdo their Afrikaner friends in expressions of contempt for the newcomers, an easy way to boost self-esteem and emphasize cousinhood.
Mr van Imhoff’s card partner, a 33-year-old ex-train-driver from Graaff-Reinet, was sacked last year because of a drink problem. He now mends blades in the local sawmills, perhaps not the most appropriate job; horrendously scarred hands suggest that he still has his problem. The future fills him with foreboding: ‘My kids will never find work.’
Yesterday’s ninety-five miles from Willowmore to Jansenville were covered in seven and a half sunny hours, yet on arrival I felt as though I had been loitering along the way. Viva tailwinds Viva!
Beyond Willowmore stretches a level grey-brown plain with unbroken mountain-walls, low and dusky blue, quite close on either side. Here I saw jackals at dawn, several troops of vervets and a herd of wild springbok. As usual, a few jackal corpses – and numerous other motor-victims, small unidentifiable mammals – lay on the road providing breakfast for large black-and-white crows. One lost springbok kid – panic-stricken – got caught in a fence and his little heart was hammering so fast when I lifted him free that I wonder he didn’t die of fright.
The only dorp on my route was Steyletville where I failed to find fresh milk, amasi or biltong. In all such places the Coloureds look miserably down-at-heel and the few stores are poorly stocked. Here I turned west and for forty miles a good gravel road took me over or between low, round, parched mountains – no hint of spring green – and across wide tracts of semi-desert sprinkled with sheep and Angora goats. I passed scarcely half a dozen farms and not many more vehicles.
In contrast, today’s forty miles presented another endurance test as a strong headwind drove fine, icy rain across uninhabited uplands. On arriving here at noon my hands were too numb to sign the register.
Since crossing the Limpopo, I have been regularly warned to ‘avoid the Transkei’. Now these warnings are becoming more frequent and, given the rising tension, it’s hard to decide what to do. The Transkei’s APLA activists are reputed to be seriously into killing whites – indiscriminately, not hand-picking their targets. At the end of March the security forces sealed off the boundaries ‘to protect South African citizens from cross-border attacks’. In April four whites, including two German tourists, were badly injured in ambushes as they motored through. There have since been nine more ‘incidents’, with three whites killed – a casualty list not long enough to justify the hysterical public reaction. As most attacks have taken place on the N2 motorway, I decided this evening on a compromise: the Maclear to Matatiele gravel road, which crosses the Transkei at its narrowest.
This is D-Day: Defeat Day for Dervla who, in difficult circumstances, took a thirteen-mile lift. Seemingly an insignificant aberration, during the 3,120-mile (to date) cycle from Karoi. Yet, absurdly, it worries me. Cyclists of my generation have a superstition about taking lifts and this break in the rhythm of our journey feels like a bad omen.
Between Pearson and Cradock the map shows two passes but when I set out at 7 a.m. I imagined arriving in mid-afternoon – it’s only fifty-five miles. However, I’d reckoned without ‘exceptional conditions’. Most Karoo tracks are really private roads, servicing a few farms, and today’s specimen was not gravel but deep sand, converted by yesterday’s downpour into a sticky sludge. Pedalling or pushing, against yet another icy gale, was literally nightmarish – that feeling of uselessly exerting oneself to the utmost. The first climb begins at Pearson and those eleven miles to the pass took three and a half hours. But almost always the Karoo provides compensations. Like this morning’s sombre dawn of heart-stopping beauty above infinitely varied mountain crests – flat-topped or sharply peaked, smoothly curved or serrated. In a sky of low torn clouds Light and Darkness battled as the rising sun thrust pale-golden spears into the gloom – briefly dispelling it, creating a luminous lake of pearly cloud – then being defeated by heavy masses of blackness.
As I struggled slowly upwards an old red-roofed homestead was visible in the sheer-sided valley on my left, below a wall of naked wrinkled grey-brown rock. Long white clouds went drifting and coiling through that valley and between the complex of ridges on my right. Those clouds seemed substantial and animated, each separate, going its own way – at first level with the track, then below it as I approached the pass.
In fact this is not a true pass: there is no matching descent. Ahead lay many miles of chaotically broken terrain, uninhabited and overlooked from both sides by long sheer ridges, their lower slopes olive green, their crowns of fluted silver granite. Vast expanses of coarse grassland were separated by narrow shallow valleys where strange dwarf trees lined stony watercourses. The sun never shone yet under a metallic sky the light was clear, the colours vivid. And the air was very cold, too cold for me to sit while chewing my lunch of spicy ostrich biltong.
The thickness and stickiness of the sludge compelled me to walk for hours down a gradual descent to the wide valley of the Little Fish River, which rises nearby and was in flood. Here the track turned west and the full force of the headwind gave me that irrationally self-pitying feeling of being personally attacked. Crossing a lowish though steep pass at 3.30, I assumed it to be the second marked on the map. Not so. By 4.30 our track could be seen soaring straight up a massive mountain that from my exhausted perspective looked like Everest. And I mean soaring straight up – these farmers’ tracks eschew wimpish hairpin bends. Fervently I hoped for a farm entrance, then rejoiced to see a herd of Angoras.
Not long after, their owner drove onto the track and rescued me. The notion that human beings have guardian angels perhaps arose, over the centuries, because of such coincidences; had I been five minutes later, I would have missed Mr Hofmeyr. And his entrance is unmarked and his homestead invisible.
At once I warmed to Mr Hofmeyr; unlike most South Africans, he didn’t see my form of transport as a symptom of mental illness. In his distant youth he and his brother, when boarders at a Cradock school, cycled home on Saturday evenings and back to town on Monday mornings – ‘Unless it was snowing, we often get snow here, it’s coming tonight.’
As we crawled up the perpendicular mountainside Mr Hofmeyr remarked, ‘A bakkie couldn’t do this, we have to run a Land Cruiser.’ He calculates that when opposed by the local gales a vehicle uses 25 per cent more fuel than normal. Therefore, he deduced, I must have used 25 per cent more energy today. Allowing for the sludge, I would have reckoned 50 per cent more …
Mr Hofmeyr – ‘We’re fourth generation here’ – loves his region as I love West Waterford. His Coloured workers are ‘loyal and dependable, not infected by Communism’ and whatever the future may hold he feels he can continue to trust them. In Cradock, however, life is not so simple any more. There ‘the blacks are intimidating our people and offering phantom bribes’ – promises of land after the elections if they vote ANC. ‘And you must understand,’ said Mr Hofmeyr, ‘they couldn’t use land productively, they need someone to give them orders.’
By Karoo standards Cradock is quite large, occupying high ground above the gorge of the Great Fish River. Like so many South African towns, it began as a military post and was still a village when Paul Kruger lived here before taking off, aged 12, on the Great Trek. As we approached the centre I seemed to be hallucinating: St Martin-in-the-Fields stood ahead. Mr Hofmeyr explained – this replica was built to cheer up the homesick wife of a British governor. He then pointed out the carefully restored tuinhuisies, Cradock’s main tourist attraction, and advised me to stay in one. These were used when Boers converged on a dorp from faraway farms, for the quarterly Holy Communion service, arriving in ox-wagons laden with goodies for parties – this being a great social as well as religious event. By the beginning of the nineteenth century many Boers owned enormous cattle-herds and contemporary travellers noted the towers of dung in front of each farmhouse door – a boastful display, indicating the size of their scattered herds.
The smallest and cheapest town house (self-catering) is excellent value at R50. All the living-room and bedroom furniture is ‘authentic’ and several ancestors keep me under surveillance: sour female faces with compressed lips, unyielding bearded male faces with watchful eyes. Can they really have been as humourless as they look? I fear the answer is yes. Similar faces are not uncommon among their descendants.
Here I am appreciating how apolitically relaxed were all those little Klein Karoo dorplets. It seems Cradock has been unrelaxed since June ’85 when Matthew Goniwe, aged 38, and three other ANC activists disappeared. Eventually their mutilated and charred bodies were found in the bush near Port Elizabeth. Last March, documentary evidence from police files confirmed what every black already believed: SAP officers had ordered the ‘permanent removal from society’ of those four young men. This crime, like the killings of Steve Biko and Chris Hani, deprived the new South Africa of a gifted political leader. And it left Cradock’s black community doubly devastated, grieving over their loss of an inspired school principal whose matric pupils habitually achieved As and Bs in maths and science.
Early this morning I set out to visit the graves of the four in the Lingelihle township cemetery. But an ANC community leader, met on the way, turned me back. ‘Mama, take care! Anger is too hot here after Hani. This township is big, 13,000, impossible for us to control – and with many factions! Two weeks ago PAC kids burned a bread-van, though their own families need bread! Why? A white owns the bakery! Last week a good friend of ours was attacked, a white guy detained and tortured in the ’80s for helping us. He often visits and drove in to look for his plumber. They stoned his car to bits, all the windows smashed, sixteen gashes on his face. Before Hani, I would have introduced you to Matthew’s family – and maybe in the future? Come back after the election!’
In 1775 the Great Fish River was proclaimed the eastern border of the Dutch East India Company’s territory. Beyond lay ‘Kaffirland’ and it took the whites, reinforced by Coloured and Khoikhoi recruits, another century to vanquish the Xhosa and totally destroy their well-regulated society. Yet none of the nine Kaffir Wars (1779–1878) damaged the Xhosa as much as their self-inflicted Cattle-Killing Movement (1856–7) and the resultant famine. This extraordinary phenomenon was for long attributed to ‘native ignorance, superstition, and hysteria’. Now we know, thanks to J. B. Peires’s researches, that it emerged from the complex responses of a war-demoralized population to infectious cattle lung sickness.
One of the saddest chapters in Africa’s colonial history was written here in the Eastern Cape though few South Africans know the true story. While nosing through Cradock’s library this morning I came upon a typical South African history book, The Story of the British Settlers of 1820, published in Cape Town in 1957. The author, Harold Hockly – a Settler’s great-grandson – gives the Authorized Version:
The most formidable native tribes to oppose the onward march of the Europeans were the Kaffirs, a branch of the mighty Bantu race which was slowly advancing southwards down the eastern side of Africa. These people were barbarous savages whose lives were ruled by ignorance, cruelty and superstition, the stock-in-trade of clever witch-doctors.
Even now many believe that as whites were moving up from the Cape, blacks were moving down and the two groups met hereabouts. This is an important white myth – both groups on the move, each equally entitled to whatever could be conquered by force of arms. However, pottery used by the Bantu in the seventh and eighth centuries has been found near East London. And by the end of the sixteenth century the ancestors of the present-day Xhosa-speaking peoples, with their vast cattle-herds, were long established in ‘Kaffirland’ – from where, around 1700, they began to expand into territory later coveted by the trekboers. Incidentally, the ‘barbarous savages’ killed only men, despite white families being often at their mercy, and despite the provocation of both Boers and British regularly slaughtering Xhosa women and children.
Cradock’s Great Fish River museum is strong on local history, social, military and political. A caption under a portrait of Lieutenant-General Sir John Cradock, Governor of the Cape Colony, noted his popularity among both white communities. We can only guess how he was viewed by the Khoikhoi when he decreed, in 1812, that all Khoi children maintained to the age of 8 by their parents’ masters must be ‘apprenticed’ to those masters for the next ten years. Whole families were thus reduced to serfdom for long periods while successive children grew up. Already the Khoikhoi had been deprived of their land and their right to possess land. And the first Pass Laws, promulgated by the Earl of Caledon in 1809, tied them to a ‘fixed place of abode’ – their masters’ farms.
The museum’s curator, a middle-aged Afrikaner woman, needed no prodding. ‘You’re the first overseas visitor this year and I don’t blame them. Our country is doomed. Cradock’s been suffering for years past, we know what to expect. In ’85 they burned down the Family Planning Clinic, wanted more “soldiers for the freedom struggle”, wouldn’t let their women use contraceptives. Then they burned our garden-huts in our veg plots by the river. And now all our store managers must hire ANC blacks or they’ll be boycotted. A Coloured working for the council had his store burned in May. Even my husband’s been threatened. He runs the petrol station, stops people on foot using the toilets – they make such a mess, they’re not used to our toilets, the place must be clean for motorists. So in April they petrol-bombed it and if the pumps blew up everyone would be dead.’ Neither the ’86 murders nor the Hani assassination were linked by the curator to any of this violence. An uninformed tourist would be left with the impression that ‘they’ are prone to mindless eruptions of anti-white hatred.
Then for the umpteenth time I heard about the legendary ANC leaders who are collecting R10 monthly from their followers, this payment guaranteeing possession of a white’s house, fully furnished, the day after the elections. An elaboration on this theme describes ‘madam’ finding her maid measuring the windows for the curtains she plans to hang after the change of ownership. Other legendary creatures are the countless maids who ask their madams, ‘When did the government give you that TV?’ Indignantly, madam explains that whites have to work hard to earn money to buy their TVs. Whereupon her maid insists an ANC leader has revealed that whites get free TV sets, a privilege soon to be transferred to blacks.
While the curator made coffee in a back room I studied a wall-map of the Zuurveld (1820–35), naming the various Settler families and showing the exact positions of their allocated farms. (They have awarded themselves a capital S.) The year 1820 saw the planting along this border of some 5,000 British Settlers whose emigration had been officially encouraged to stiffen white resistance to the ‘Kaffirs’. This scheme, half-baked in a Whitehall oven by civil servants ignorant of local conditions, soon fell apart. Most of those innocent pawns – from every social class, many immigrating en famille – were ill-equipped, both mentally and materially, to survive in untamed bush infested with wild animals. At first they suffered much hardship. Families were given 100-acre quit-rent farms (the average Boer farm was then 4,000 acres) though the majority knew nothing about farming. And slavery, the secret of the Boers’ economic success, was forbidden. Within three years most had moved to the embryonic towns, including Cradock, where they prospered as artisans and traders – and, in later generations, as professionals. The rest extended their acreage, set about breeding merinos and founded a woollen industry that still flourishes, merinos now augmented by Angora goats. Would a cross-section of contemporary British society, confronted with an equivalent of the virgin Zuurveld, cope as successfully as the Settlers did? I doubt it. No wonder their descendants are so keen to let one know ‘We came in 1820’.
A significant gulf existed between the barely literate Boers and the Settlers – fresh from a country where a new political breed had recently emerged, resonating to America’s Declaration of Rights. British demands for administrative reforms upset the Boers and provided one of several motives for the Great Trek. Yet the Settlers’ liberal campaigning was never on behalf of non-whites – with the exception of a few derided individuals. Similarly, seventy years later, Gandhi campaigned exclusively for the benefit of his fellow-Indians, urging them to fight with the British against the Zulus in a shameful punishment exercise – too unequal to be called a ‘war’ – that left 3,500 Zulus dead. This image-denting fact has now been discreetly forgotten as new statues of the Mahatma pop up all over the country commemorating him as a champion of ‘human rights’.
To the white stranger, Cradock is warmly welcoming and outside the Olive Schreiner House Mrs S—, an Afrikaner high-school teacher in her forties, spontaneously invited me to supper. She lives in what was the family tuinhuis, built in 1845 and furnished from the farmhouse, now sold. The small sitting room is made to seem even smaller by two tallboys, three long carved chests and a burnished copper vat for distilling home-made spirits – alas! no longer in use. We sat sipping sherry by a window overlooking an avocado-shaded lawn, across which strutted several rare-breed bantams – red, green and gold – wearing pantaloons and ankle socks. Then Mrs S—’s second sherry undammed a flood of ‘urban legends’.
After the elections mobs will surge out of the townships, looting and killing and burning homes. Blacks are being told that once Mandela is in power they will be entitled to steal white property; no one will oppose them. All guns and vehicles will be stolen, leaving whites unable either to defend themselves or escape. Maids are being incited by ANC leaders to kill each other’s madams, but not their own. (Whoever is conducting this campaign must realize that no madam could believe in her own maid’s capacity for homicide, whereas an unknown black is believed to be capable of anything.) When I queried the source of these legends Mrs S— admitted there might be some slight exaggeration – ‘But there’s no smoke without fire!’ Whatever else may happen, she is convinced rampaging blacks will reduce Cradock to a smouldering ruin. Yet, in all other respects, she seems a perfectly sensible, intelligent woman. It is impossible to imagine her equivalent, in any European country, being so destabilized by such scaremongering. And destabilized she is, her fear real enough to be almost infectious.
Today I have directly benefited from another urban legend, one of the few to produce a measurable result. Oranges are being sold in all Cradock’s shops at R1 (20p) for bags of forty. Why? Because of a countrywide rumour that many oranges have been injected or sprayed with HIV-positive blood. Either an AWB member has injected oranges with his labourers’ infected blood, or a right-wing Natal farmer has sprayed his orange crop with his own infected blood. (Anyone who imagines that South Africa is not a lunatic asylum writ large is quite wrong.) Since mid-June this belief has been sweeping the county, reducing orange-farmers to tears. It is said to have emanated from around Port Elizabeth, where someone chanced to buy a bag of blood oranges. By now it has so seriously damaged the nation’s citrus industry that an emergency press conference was called yesterday in Jo’burg to explain that blood oranges occur naturally, though they amount to less than 1 per cent of South Africa’s annual crop. Said Jasper Coetzee, Outspan International’s marketing manager, ‘Now we hope the story will die a natural death.’ Perhaps it will, but how soon before some other equally preposterous belief replaces it?
This morning my departure was delayed by Lear’s need for a new back tyre.
Cradock’s large cycle shop stocks scores of sturdy no-frills bicycles imported from Taiwan for the farmworker market; given the extent of Karoo holdings, it pays a farmer to use mounted labour. The young cycle merchant is one of four graduate brothers who have failed to find ‘degree jobs’ but are doing quite well as traders in their hometown. However, being mainly dependent on non-white custom they are vulnerable to the increasingly frequent ANC boycotts which have made the nearby dorp of Hofmeyr a ‘ghost town’. My informant, though reticent about the root cause of Hofmeyr’s conflict, gave graphic details to illustrate ‘how intimidation works’. One poor lady who defied the boycott was set upon by ‘township savages’ and forced to drink a bottle of detergent which killed her. These ‘savages’ are marvellously mobile; I have heard about them in dorps all over South Africa. Invariably they do their dastardly deeds in another dorp, never where you happen to be, within reach of the poor lady’s grieving family.
This region is enduring its third drought-stricken year – the dams shrunken to muddy pools, the stream-beds baked hard, even the bore-hole supplies threatened and many of the stock moved elsewhere if their owners have suitable contacts.
I was halfway to Tarkastad, freewheeling between high cliffs, layered red-brown, when Bernie overtook me. I had noticed his farm entrance (only the second since leaving Cradock) a mile back: ‘Bernard & Virginia Viddicombe in their Villa-on-the-Veld’. Bernard is an impulsive, outgoing character; soon he had deflected me from Tarkastad to the villa. He was going to fetch a bakkie-load of shearers but would soon be back. Virry is visiting the children in their Port Elizabeth school but the maid would provide beer.
A five-mile ‘private road’ – thick dust, big loose stones, deep ruts – crosses undulating pale brown veld, now supporting only thornbush and karee trees. On either side, in the middle distance, stretch rocky ridges. Far ahead, lavender blue against a cloudless sky, rise rounded, smooth-crested mountains. Once, the track dipped to cross a narrow river-bed paved with long slabs of light grey rock, flood-polished. Occasionally I glimpsed Angoras, standing on their hind-legs to reach the few remaining leaves.
The villa looks incongruously urban. In 1950 Bernie’s father demolished a dignified old farmhouse and replaced it with this high-roofed bungalow, the size of a small factory, overlooking a fifty-metre swimming pool glinting between a tennis court and a bowling green. ‘We came in 1820’, from Yorkshire. In the 1860s great-grandfather, starting as a magistrate in Grahamstown, gradually accumulated vast tracts of land. Bernie and his four brothers now farm about 8,000 hectares each, in various parts of Natal and the north-eastern Cape.
Nearby – nearer than is usual, within sight of the villa – are six workers’ cottages, small but solid, of whitewashed breeze-block. Father started a farm school for the Xhosa workers’ children, now attended by children from two other farms. ‘But why do I keep it going?’ wondered Bernie. ‘It’s a farce, pretending they can learn like white kids.’
At present Bernie feels he has his economic back to the wall. In 1989 the Angora-wool price dropped from R22 to R8 per kilo. And now the drought … Most of his stock are with a brother in comparatively lush Natal, the remaining few hundred were being sheared this afternoon, in a huge shed, by Pondos who have ‘got stroppy about pay since that fella was let loose’. Never have I witnessed such bloody shearing; those Pondos wouldn’t be allowed near an Irish sheep. Yet Bernie took all the nasty nicks for granted.
Decadence set in last evening, as I was about to retire. The villa’s long, over-furnished drawing room is redeemed by a handsome manorial stone fireplace where the Coloured maid lit a log fire while the Xhosa ‘boy’ was stocking the refrigerator at the bar end of the room, complete with counter, stools and spirit-laden shelves. Evidently Bernie expected me to tell Travellers’ Tales for my supper.
On South African beer inebriation is not easily achieved but at 2 a.m. – or so – I wobbled en route to my room.
Three hours later was compulsory getting-up time; before leaving for Port Elizabeth at 5 a.m., Bernie had to co-ordinate the villa’s ingenious security systems. Aroused from a drunken stupor, I was shattered by my first South African hangover. While walking to the road, in dissipating darkness, each stumble over a stone or rut sent another set of white-hot needles through my head. I reached the entrance as the first glimmer of dawn, touching the long white thorns on the leafless bushes, created an illusion of hoar frost.
Every mile of the twenty-five to Tarkastad felt like one hundred. Each slight incline felt like an Andean pass. The wages of sin is debility … Arriving in this congenial hotel at 9.30 a.m. I fell onto my bed and slept for six hours.
Tarkastad has the usual wide streets – some untarred – a few stores currently badly hit by ANC boycotts, an English-village-style war memorial and, decorating one corner, a battered little cannon captured in East Africa by some local heroes during the First World War. The white natives number less than 900; many are retired urban couples or elderly Wenwes drawn by low house prices. A ‘nice home’ may still be bought for R10,000–15,000.
The Royal Hotel (c. 1890) is long and low, freshly painted white and grass-green, its many windows flanked by outside shutters in the Cape Dutch style, its deep pillared stoep a mini-museum of obsolete agricultural implements. Last year it was taken over by English-speaking Jill and Hugh (Jo’burg-bred) who describe themselves as ‘refugees from the rat-race and pollution and violence’. Said Jill, ‘We liked Tarkastad’s clear air and tranquillity – nobody warned us about the local farmers! You’d think they owned the town and the hotel! They know they underpin the local economy, there’s nothing else. Some weekends they get mad drunk, breaking the place up, shooting at the ceilings, throwing wads of money on the floor to pay for the damage – then reeling off shouting for their wives to drive them home. They’re like naughty nasty children – not normal. Cheap labour and subsidies spoiled them long ago. I’ll not weep if the blacks get bits of their farms.’
On impulse, this morning, I decided to visit Zola, Tarkastad’s township (population about 7,000) and en route I passed the Coloured location (population about 700) where the two-storeyed homes of affluent traders are conspicuous among a cluster of tiny red-brick cottages. It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine a spatially desegregated South Africa.
In 1962 Tarkastad’s blacks were moved from a site close to the dorp, where they had been allowed free grazing near their shacks. Since then they have had to lease grazing for which, by now, they are paying R10 per animal monthly to a white farmer. I observed that the several groups of Zola folk walking into town looked not particularly well disposed towards Whitey.
A long steep ridge – its flanks of naked brown earth, its crest of fluted grey rock – hides hundreds of shacks and quite a few small bungalows, scattered over the stony dusty veld. In summer Zola must be hellish; even today I sweated under a cloudless sky.
At the end of the two-mile rough-track approach road stands one of those outwardly impressive new secondary schools – securely fenced, its high metal gate kept locked after school hours. The security guard, his weapon discreetly holstered under a padded anorak, advised me to seek out Mr M—, a retired plumber and community leader who knows all about Zola’s needs and woes.
Mr M— lives in a modestly comfortable little bungalow, complete with bathroom and WC in expectation of piped water arriving one day – perhaps soon after the elections? He despairs of Zola’s youngsters. ‘If they attend church it’s only to smash up the place, they’ve vandalized two churches here.’ His wife, a retired nurse, added that stock theft flourishes, mainly sheep and goats for lack of the means to organize cattle-rustling.
Recently Mr M— endured ‘just the most terrifying ordeal’. A Port Elizabeth NGO, funded from overseas, set up a food programme for Zola’s poorest families and R43,000 were banked in Queenstown to be administered by Mr M— in his capacity as a community leader. A fortnight later ‘four thugs’ threatened to torch his bungalow unless he immediately handed over this money to be divided between all Zola’s residents. They forced him to drive to the bank and deliver the cash in ten-rand notes. ‘And if I’d resisted I’d be homeless now. The police don’t care what happens out here, we’re left at the mercy of tsotsies!’
An hour later, in a shack on the far side of Zola, I was hearing a startlingly different version of this story from Hamlet, a youngish unemployed car mechanic. Mr M—, he was convinced, had staged this ‘terrifying ordeal’, paying the ‘four thugs’ some small sum and transferring the rest to his own account. Those youths were not Zola residents and no one knows where they came from.
Hamlet appointed himself my minder – ‘It’s not good for you to walk around alone’ – and introduced me to an ANC Youth League leader who observed that Mr M— was an excellent plumber in his day but has now ‘gone odd’. Since 1984, the M—s have been running Zola’s taxi service and allegedly Mr M— promotes local boycotts for personal gain. When Tarkastad’s shops are out of bounds, taxis must be used for the eighty-mile round trip to Queenstown, the ANC paying the fares of the boycotters who themselves could not possibly afford this journey. The latest boycott, to force the town council to provide Zola with a post office and improved services (electricity, water, sewerage), came to nothing because the ANC Youth League, as part of their feud with Mr M—, called it off.
I asked Hamlet and his wife Becca, an unqualified teacher, what would happen now if black families could afford to move into ‘white’ Tarkastad. Becca laughed and replied that she for one wouldn’t want to move because there would be no neighbourly feeling, only silent nods – if that – when she emerged from her home. ‘We live in different ways. White people like to rest in the afternoon and they say our kids playing and singing and shouting disturb them. We only want our own areas improved, brought up to white standards, we don’t want to live among them.’
Zola’s nursery school, subsidized by an overseas NGO, is adequately housed but inadequately staffed; two untrained women look after forty 3-to 6-year-olds, warmly clad in donated garments. Western swings, climbing frames and roundabouts amply furnish its spacious playground. (At least space is not lacking in Zola.) As usual, the foreign visitor triggered pleas for ‘more funding from your country’. South Africa’s ‘dependency culture’ has put down deep roots; in Cape Town I noticed how much this worries responsible ANC leaders.
At the secondary school surprisingly few pupils were dispersing as I arrived. The principal, from Lingelihe, is a youngish Wits graduate – tall, handsome, elegantly dressed, eloquent. ‘I’m battling here,’ said Mr K—. ‘Battling with frustration, almost despair. How can I motivate my staff when the kids are unmotivated? We’ve rarely more than a 50 per cent attendance. On Monday this lot don’t turn up, on Tuesday another lot is missing, on Wednesday maybe only one-third appear. They don’t believe in learning. But they do believe in “education”’ – his forefingers supplied the quotes. ‘They expect to pass matric as a human right and then get degrees and good jobs. I can’t go on much longer, we’re not earning our salaries, we’re only pretending to run a school. I’m not picking on Zola, it’s only average nowadays, OK, black education was always underfunded. But even on our poor resources, look what Matthew Goniwe achieved. He taught me for a year, then became my model. Coming here two years ago I thought I could revive the culture of learning, I was all enthusiasm – or was it conceit? Many parents support me but they’re scared of their own kids. What’s going to turn it round? The elections, Mandela for President? I don’t believe so. Mrs Tambo says we mustn’t talk about the Lost Generation, we mustn’t give up on them. In principle I agree, that’s why I’m here. But they’ve given up on themselves – though we’ve talent in Zola, no shortage of degree material. But too many kids are too destabilized to use their brains. My mother says I should make more allowances, they’re victims of the Struggle. Is she right? She’s a wise woman – and teaching herself since before I was born! Only now something tells me to be hard on them. We’re into a new struggle. But of course the old Freedom Struggle appealed more – defiance, aggro, justifiable law-breaking. Marches, rallies, funerals – all action and suspense and excitement. The new struggle needs discipline, routine, hard work – boring! So now we must concentrate on the little ones, make sure they don’t get infected …’
As Mr K— unlocked the gate he said, ‘Thanks for listening’ – and suddenly there were tears in his eyes. I walked away loaded with his distress.
Tarkastad’s residental area has flower-beds in mid-road and handsome Cape Dutch bungalows and one gracious colonial two-storeyed house – Irish Georgian but for a long porch, its white trellis-work of delicate wrought iron. Here I passed a score of black youngsters wearing the Zola school uniform and noisily having fun – recalling Becca’s comments. Their game would have puzzled any onlooker unaware of the ‘AIDS infection’ legend; oranges were being thrown, juggled with, kicked to and fro.
The new South Africa allows the destitute to see how the rich live, a privilege previously enjoyed only by those in Whitey’s employ. All day, blacks of all ages hang about Tarkastad’s streets: strolling to and fro, standing around corners, sitting on kerbs and steps – for whites a disconcerting phenomenon. When the jobless were invisible you could forget about them; now, as they wander all over the place, impatiently awaiting a black government, the sense of expectation is palpable. And the whites react as to an invasion by hostile forces, a feeling heightened in boycott-afflicted dorps like Tarkastad where white livelihoods are already at risk.
Normally hotels are deserted at dawn. This morning, however, the Royal Hotel was all bustle as I wheeled Lear from my room. People hurried to and fro bearing jugs of coffee, plates of sandwiches, six-packs, bottles of brandy. From the kitchen came the smell and sound of sizzling boerewors. TV sets blared in every corner. The lounge was crowded, mostly with men and boys – the latter waving small South African flags. Obtusely I asked, ‘What’s going on?’ Everyone stared incredulously at the zombie. How come I didn’t know the Springboks were playing in Australia at 6.30? Didn’t I want to watch? Quickly I thought of a plausible excuse for not watching; it had to be plausible, the Afrikaners are sensitive about their rugger team – about rugger as a quasi-religious rite.
During the forenoon a traffic-free gravel road took me past three distant farmsteads, their dams glinting beside small patches of green, their cattle and sheep grazing level miles of golden-brown grassland. On low but steep koppies, round red boulders were set amidst euphorbia, aloes and thornbush. Many aloes are in bloom, looking from afar like motionless flames burning in grotesque candelabra of long pointed leaves – leaves grey-green and fleshy, their edges spiked. Like so many Karoo plants, aloes are multi-purpose. By retaining both soil and water they deter erosion. Their dried sap is used as a purgative, and to alleviate toothache and rheumatism. Their burned leaves, added to snuff, give it that little extra. The nectar held in abundance by the flowers is a narcotic to which both children and baboons become addicted, sometimes to their detriment: an overdose can cause paralysis.
By noon uninhabited mountains surrounded me, their shapes fantastical, their colours – under a cloudless sky – varying from violet to powder blue to pinkish-grey to royal blue. Higher and higher I climbed, the silence broken only by bird-calls, through the Stormberg’s ranges of flat-topped or ‘pudding’ mountains, sometimes overlooking deep brown valleys below long silver-crested ridges.
Coming to a crossroads, unmarked on the map, ancient signposts set at indeterminate angles confused me. Then, as I sat undecidedly chewing biltong, the day’s only vehicle approached. It was driven by a lone woman who, when I tried to stop her, smiled nervously and accelerated. At 6,000 feet the wind felt icy and I could sit around no longer. Luckily my guess was right; soon we had joined a tarred road five miles from here. Freewheeling through the dusk I could see the township’s supper-fires scattered like rubies on a wide mountainside opposite the dorp.
Dordrecht’s enormous Highveld Hotel – a superb balconied building (1892) – proves this dorp’s past prosperity. Now its location on the Transkei ‘border’ has made it a backwater and the hotel’s interior is agreeably shabby. Less agreeable this evening was the bar, smelling of vomit and overcrowded with young men who had been drinking non-stop for twelve hours, drowning their sorrow. (The Springboks lost by one point.) At first these louts mistook me for a man and shouted remarks like, ‘We don’t want fuckin’ beggars on bikes!’ When this misapprehension had been corrected they tried to maul me: ‘So it’s a woman, find her tits!’ I bought two six-packs (tomorrow is the Sabbath) and retreated to my room.
Today’s gravel road, along the Transkei ‘border’, often overlooked the ‘independent homeland’s’ densely populated, arid hillsides – while all around me the land was populated only by sheep. These flocks occupy a magically beautiful region: miles and miles of tall grass, shimmering in the wind, some expanses a rich auburn, others pinkish-gold or purple-tinged. And beyond the nearby low ridges rise high mountains, range after range, their slopes and peaks tinted an improbable variety of pastel shades.
Midway a bakkie stopped beside me, with three ‘boys’ in the back. The driver got out to express his concern – was I going into the Transkei? If so, I shouldn’t. My plans must be changed, whatever the inconvenience. We talked for some fifteen minutes, then he drove on.
As the bakkie disappeared, I realized something deeply disturbing. I hadn’t reacted to the three men in the back though they had reacted to me – leaning curiously over the side, trying to follow the conversation. Talking to my fellow-white, I had ignored them. They weren’t there, or only there as the bakkie was. I had behaved like a white South African. Have I picked up the apartheid virus? Now I’m trying to analyse that incident, transposing it to Europe. If a vehicle stops in Ireland and the driver engages me in conversation, do I interact with his unknown passengers who are not directly involved? Maybe I don’t, if I’m concentrating on the topic under discussion. But were the Irish passengers interested in what was being said, is it conceivable that I wouldn’t register their presence? No, that is not conceivable. South Africa is corrupting me; during that conversation I was the driver’s accomplice in excluding fellow-humans with a natural interest in what was going on. How has this happened? This is not me – yet it was me, then and there. Are there excuses, if one digs deep enough? Not really. Only the feeble excuse of adapting to the local mores out of supine politeness; had I drawn the ‘boys’ into our argument, their baas would have been both outraged and bewildered. He was that sort (‘those Transkei kaffirs are treacherous’) though his stopping to advise me had been prompted by genuine kindness. But too often such kindness is labelled ‘Whites Only’.
Elliot stands at 4,500 feet in the as yet ‘undeveloped’ foothills of the Drakensberg. On the outskirts I saw two gigantic SADF armoured vehicles slowly rumbling towards the ‘border’ a few miles away. In this apparently tranquil and sedately attractive dorp they looked both sinister and absurd.
When the Hurters, from Pretoria, bought the Stanford Hotel (Jim had just retired from ‘the Bantu Department’) they seemingly got a bargain. Traditionally commercial travellers used to base themselves here, then go into the Transkei on day trips. (Whites were forbidden to stay overnight in black areas.) But now both tourists and ‘reps’ keep well clear of Elliot. As so often happens in these dorps, I am the only guest and was invited to share (no charge) the Hurters’ evening meal, eaten around the TV set in a large dismal lounge. This hospitality is touching; one could forgive these hard-hit hoteliers for overcharging their rare guests. But then, most of them are not ‘professionals’. It’s odd, how many elderly couples have recently bought rural hotels on retiring from urban jobs. Perhaps it shows faith in the new South Africa’s tourist appeal, post-elections.