Last weekend Janice and I decided on something of a whim to drive Groot Marico in North West Province (former Western Transvaal) for a ‘Biekie Bosman’ weekend – Bosman being the celebrated South African writer and poet, Herman Charles Bosman. And what a weekend it was. Groot Marico is essentially a two-street town, and allegedly one of only two towns in the entire country that still has a phone operator.
The weekend was organized by the local Literary Society, and took place on white-owned farms that run along the beautiful Marico river. This LitSoc group seems to represent a sort of alternative, hippified Afrikaanerdom that I hadn’t experienced before. One of our hosts, inappropriately named Egbert, looks like a character from Lord of the Rings: a long sinewy man, all arms and legs, with Gandalf-like grey beard and hair. He was perched mostly next to a collection of sizeable soot-coated kettles from which he produced honeybush tea and smoky coffee.
We went walking the first morning with one Koos Olivier to absorb the trees and plants of the riverine belt and the hills beyond. Afrikaaner/English divides were a running theme for the weekend, with Koos describing the enkeldoorn (ankle-thorn) acacia tree as ‘engelsdoorn’ (English-thorn), that is, good for nothing. We nibbled on the cardamom flavours of Berchemia discolor berries (tcindjere in West Caprivi) and saw one of the tallest Shepherd’s trees possible. Brunch was served later on the fire back at the farm – roughly ground locally-grown pap/sadza, onion and tomato relish, a mountain of scrambled eggs, cabbage with feta, and various other tasty delights.
Janice and I napped before taking a furtive skinny dip in the river, and then rushed to catch the afternoon convoy to a local mampoer farm, a few kilometers out of town. Made from fermented fruit, mampoer is a particularly strong home-brewed moonshine, also known as witblits in the Cape. Just in case we were looking for a stereotype, the farm owner was an imposing sjambok-wielding (yes) Afrikaaner with frighteningly blue eyes called Johann. After making a slightly uncomfortable scene around the prettiest girl in the group, he led us past a large barrel of fermenting marula fruit into his distillery barn, stressing that he only spoke English in self-defence. Between lecturing us on the distillation process and the much-debated origins of the term ‘mampoer’, he casually beat his dogs away from a Cape cobra that appeared amidst machinery a few metres away. Some of the more urban guests were suitably alarmed.
Thereafter we sat on the farmhouse veranda and sampled a variety of mampoers and liqueurs, served by the farmer’s somewhat XXY wife, with some of the dogs in the background (‘PH’ (Professional Hunter) and ‘PS’ (Pavement Special). One shot of mampoer was enough to get the entire group chattering rather excitedly, and we wondered what was to become of us after a few more. We were actually surprisingly fine. We equipped ourselves with bottles to take away, as well as homemade rusks and jams (the staples of any half-decent Afrikaaner pantry), and returned to the fireside for Bosman story-readings and stargazing. Our cottage was tucked away in the riverine forest and impeccably dark at night. I did try to convince Janice that we could make it back without a torch, but she was probably right in persuading me otherwise.
The crowd was a slightly indeterminate white middle-aged mix but one of our more bizarre conversations was with a woman whose home doubles up as a sort of animal shelter. We heard all about her tortoise that eats mangoes, and about her albino duck with a malformed beak which nevertheless gets shagged by the boy ducks. On hearing we didn’t have pets of our own, she extended an invitation to come babysit. Why thank you.
Janice and I caused a bit of a stir, we suspect, Janice being the only non-whitey present and a PhD botanist at that… and the two of us generally not fitting any mould that was familiar to these folk. One man asked us whether we were friends. (Janice and I laughed privately afterwards about who should be whose maid.) We later helped him to change the flat tyre on his Toyota, which really flummoxed anyone who had thought we were city gals from Jo’burg.
On Sunday morning we went to the Bosman cultural centre where we heard poetry readings and some history, whilst hymns and organ music emanated from the NG Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) next door. But at midday I had to rub my ears because, sure enough, drifting up from somewhere in the middle of Marico Afrikaanerdom was the Muslim call to prayer. It turns out that Janice and I weren’t the only ones to disrupt assumptions that weekend.
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