Pumpkin and Drankwinkels

Van Zylsrus is at the end of the road.  Well, at the end of two roads, to be precise.   Kind of like a one-block settlement at the end of two roads. “Relax in Van Zylsrus” pronounces the welcome sign.  The Van Zylsrus Hotel is tightly sandwiched between two drankwinkels (Afrikaans for bottle stores, which sounds to me even more like a hangover than babelaas). Unsurprisingly we are met by one of the local drunks on arrival, as well as a variety of dogs of indeterminate breed and ownership.  The hotel is clean and comfy, rooms with automated air-freshener clustered around some artsy courtyards and a pleasant leafy garden.  Afternoon rugby is about to begin, and the bar is filling up with local patrons and some meercat researchers.  There are not enough of them, though, to make much of a difference to a slow autumn Saturday.

Earlier in the day, we passed through a half-street village in the middle of nowhere called Askham, where the Afrikaans manager of the local co-op invited us in for a coffee, in amidst the paint, fertilizer and horse bridlery.  She loves it here: she glows, she is full of energy, she sees beauty in the stark camel-thorns and the endless dust.  She is supersize in body and spirit, joyful, unpretentious, and content with her lot in life.  She confirms (or reassures?) that there are thirty white people in the area, and that they see each other at church once a fortnight. She rattles off the list of annual parties and dances.  Oh, to be a fly-on-the-wall at the Askham Valentine’s Dance.  She almost drools with delight and anticipation telling us about the menu that we can expect at the Van Zylsrus Hotel, in particular the pumpkin which, I later find out, is so sugary and translucent with butter that it is virtually jam.   

I go running and think about all the strange places I’ve been running in the past year (like Bandra Bombay, Gairezi Zimbabwe and Tooting London). It is almost new moon and my uterus aches. I calculate that if I’d lived in Mary Moffat’s time, albeit not in the Kalahari, I might well have had 13 children by now, including allowance for some fallow years in between and perhaps a death or two.  

Gravel beneath my feet, and my shoes make shadows in the late light – like hobnail boots, like wagon wheels, like hobnail boots, like wagon wheels, round they go.  The road is much more uneven under one’s own feet than it is under car wheels, of course.  Like so many things in life, one’s perspective shifts with proximity.  Uneven, undulating, coarse, pushed here and there into little sand peaks, this road is harder to navigate with only my own body-fuel. It is so silent that I stop to listen under a huge void of cloudless sky. Thud of own heart, gravel crunch pause, at least four bird species at different distances. A horse trap passes me, driven by three young country boys, perched side by side.  The trap moves strangely quietly and when I next look over my shoulder it is gone without trace, like maybe it was imagined.  I am nearly back at Van Zylsrus as the sun sets.  Three 4x4s rush past and their dust envelopes the orange.

At dinner I sample the remarkable pumpkin dish whose reputation precedes it. We are the only diners.  There are red-checked tablecloths. The wide-ranging playlist brings us everything from Phantom of the Opera to Belinda Carlisle.  There is a substantial collection of kitsch Christian crosses on the wall above the piano.  We are fussed over by two pretty teenaged waitresses, who double-check every detail.  The food takes its time, as it does in out-of-the-way places.  The girls flutter in and out, doing god-knows-what.  The food finally arrives and it’s very tasty.  Even two delicious gluten-free vegetarian quiches (specially prepared ahead of my arrival – in fact they were already proffering them to me at lunchtime), piping hot, accompanied by green beans smothered in white sauce, and the syrupy pumpkin.  Think of it as a sort of vegetable extension of the koeksister family.  Just in case I didn’t have enough sugar, I round off the meal with a Dom Pedro, that favourite of southern African treats, Kahlua mixed with vanilla icecream in an alcoholic shake that tickles both the adult and child within.  As for which Dom (or was it Don?) Pedro inspired this drink - and when and where - that remains shrouded in mystery.

Salt, Sand and the Heart of the Matter

More on the 2500km road trip.  After Augrabies we headed north towards the Kgalakgadi transfrontier national park, into country with no phone reception and one other car.  To use one of Larry Page’s favourite expressions, this was ‘uncomfortably exciting’ for someone who’s now sadly conditioned to email-and-SMS-on-tap.  The park itself is busier, with visitors converging from all three countries (Namibia, Botswana and SA).  The more-trafficked part was frequented by older-generation white South African 4x4 roadtripper couples with over-equipped vehicles, if not trailers as well.  (Thinking back a few years, the same breed would sometimes show up at campsites in Caprivi with the entire contents of a large house.)

We carefully followed instructions to find our meeting point, cutting it fine in terms of timing, but with a few spare minutes to enjoy yet another rice cake with avocado.  P. knows all about the rice cakes by now.  Two San and Mier guides from !Xaus appeared in a Toyota and accompanied us into the desert wilderness.  In these parts mileage is measured in dunes rather than kilometres, making the lodge 90 dunes from Tweerivier and 34 dunes from Kamqua.   34 dunes is about an hour’s worth of travel.  P. did a fine job of tackling the road, since driving in thick sand is no easy feat.  Only once did our guide have to take the wheel to conquer the largest orange dune at high speed, after which he announced in his singsong accent: “There’s nothing-wrong with this Hilux of yours…”

 

Traversing the dunes is well worth the effort.  The lodge is spectacularly perched on the edge of a giant salt pan, a kilometer in diameter.  You don’t grasp the scale of it until you realize that the dot about two-thirds across is in fact a stately oryx.  The pan is almost perfectly round, but for a small dimple which makes it more like a heart, giving the place its name, !Xaus, which is also said to reflect the spirit of healing and dignity brought by the restoration of indigenous land rights.   

At the start of Brody’s documentary Aftermath, #Khomani leader Dawid Kruiper describes what happened on the day that the land claim was formally signed, suggesting that even nature recognizes justice:

“The day Mbeki came with the helicopter and black car…there [were] lovely loose clouds, here a cloud, there a cloud, and the clouds began to speak…When they speak there, then they speak here…and from the top a faint rain already came. When the rain began to fall hard, the helicopter rose.  Within two days there were pools of water between the dunes.  After 30 dry years, on that specific day, it rained.  Those years when we were forced out were sad.  Then the land was given back, signed for.  And those bad things they did to us, we forgave them. That is why the blessing of rains came that day.”

 

Nor was this rain was not shortlived.  According to other interviewees as well, it was plentiful and extensive.  #Khomani children who’d never seen more than small quantities of drinking water bathed in it for the first time – and white farmers’ houses near the river were in danger of flooding. No rain during our autumn visit, but water is drawn from below the surface of the giant pan.  On a more trivial note than justice, it’s so salty and mineral-rich that it made my skin look ten times better than Lancome could ever aspire to.  I even filled two bottles with this miracle tonic to bring home, in the hope that I could prolong the ‘spa effect’.

The politics of the land claim, of community and identity, are obscure during such a short visit.  It was difficult to get any real sense of what was going on. ‘Shifts’ of people come to the lodge to preside in a ‘traditional village’ where they make crafts to sell, mostly jewellery.   This construction of Bushman-ness made me feel awkward – admittedly I’m over-sensitive to the identity politics, but others would argue that it is no different than any other ‘tourist village’, and a viable socio-economic strategy.  Our San guide grew up speaking Afrikaans, reinforcing what filmmaker Brody has documented among the elders: that the #Khomani language N/u had been strategically ‘buried’ during the process of land dispossession and assimilation into farm labour, because, amongst other things, it was not in #Khomani interests to speak a language which would brand them as ‘lowly Bushmen’ rather than ‘coloureds’.  Brody’s films provide a rich set of testimonies which explore over a decade’s worth of highs and lows, from justice and joy, to community power struggles, financial mismanagement and alcoholism.

Thanks to its remoteness and shelter from light pollution, the lodge is soon to qualify as an official international ‘Dark Sky Place’.  At night, the stars are a tremendous scatter of white sand granules.  You can admire them through the telescope, if the telescope is not being slept on by the tame guinea fowl.  The red dunes nestle amazing biodiversity, including oryx, springbok, wildebeest, ostrich, jackal, tortoise, kori bustard birds, and 9 lions recently recaptured after they disappeared over the fence into neighbouring farmlands for some fine dining. 

The park sees an extreme temperature range: 47 degrees Celsius in summer and -10 in the winter.  On our second day, a wind picked up at lunchtime and blew tirelessly through the afternoon and most of the night.  By early next morning the temps had dropped to 6 degrees.  Outdoor winters on the sandveld are not for the fainthearted. There is little protection in this vast and open environment, so going to bed between four walls was a true luxury.   At last light, on return from our game drive, we catch a glimpse of the silhouette of a male lion not far from our room: a little jolt to remind us about the other custodians of territory round here.

The Road to the Interior, and Other Missionary Wives

P. won two nights at the furthest-away-possible lodge in a raffle.  And so we drove all the way from the edgy city of gold to the Kgalakgadi (the more authentic name for Kalahari) which is tucked into a curious border indentation that you didn’t even know South Africa had.  When I say far, I mean far.  A 2500km round trip.  By some stroke of serendipity this lodge is on the land of the Khomani San, the same people who  lost, mapped, and reclaimed that land in a process documented by anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody, whose New College lecture was the first inspiration for my graduate research.

En route, Kuruman is an unlikely place for the most prolific oasis in the southern hemisphere.  20 million litres of water dribble out of the rocks every day in an unassuming fashion, giving life to thousands of fish, including the largest koi I’ve ever seen.  Here in 1820, a few kilometres from the spring, the Scottish missionary Robert Moffat settled and built an outpost for God.

 The mission houses the oldest European-style buildings north of the Gariep/Orange River. In the late afternoon it holds an unexpected beauty and peace.  This was an ambitious missionary: the church was built to seat 800 and, in the scrublands of the Kalahari desert, the stone walls stood uncovered for 7 years before Moffat found timber long enough to complete the roof.  The beams eventually came from hundreds of kilometers away in the Marico River valley, with the blessing of Moselekatse/Mzilikazi, the Matabele Chief.  Today the church has a postbox-red door, a clay-dung floor in the original style, and a sign that politely asks visitors not to ring the bell.

                                  

In the nearby graveyard, lost in the service of King, Empire and God, a jumble of Boer War soldiers, missionaries, long-suffering wives and dead infants, some of whom lived only briefly.  Birth, death, the succumbing of spirit and heart – all this happened here, including the birth of Howard Unwin Moffat, Southern Rhodesia’s second premier (whose government passed the 1930 Land Apportionment Act, which in a nutshell was one of the ultimate causes of Zimbabwe’s turmoil of the last decade) and the falling-in-love of that other famous missionary and explorer, Livingstone.  In the aftermath of a lion attack, and no doubt some realisations about the fragility of the human condition, Livingstone succumbed to the care and affections of the eldest Moffat daughter, who actually survived the Kalahari to adulthood.  She was called Mary, like her mother.  Not that she had much competition, nor he many options. He proposed to her in the garden now dedicated to Mary senior, ‘and other missionary wives’.

To the Kuruman mission came the printing press that marked the start of a momentous sea change - the spread of Christianity across the sub-continent in a short century or so, which both facilitated and resisted the expansion of Empire.  In the 1850s, Moffat translated and printed a thousand copies of the Old Testament, the very first time this had been done in an African language, seTswana. Half a ton in weight, and transported painstakingly by oxwagon hundreds of kilometres from Algoa Bay on the Namibian Atlantic coast, it sits dull yet resolute in one of the schoolroom buildings, the disruptive Internet of its time.

Reads one of the placards: “It continued to produce Spelling Books and Hymn Books but its chief glory was the Bible, home-made from the start, created out of a language which had no [written] grammar or dictionary, and printed and published on the veld” 

From Kuruman we drove through some of the most extensive manganese and iron ore mining sites in the world to Upington.  From there, along the Gariep (Orange) River valley, where we wound through canal-fed vineyards (yes, vineyards!) and Afrikaner farm stores filled with dried fruit, nuts, tea, rusks. Kakamas was originally a colony for poor white farmers in the aftermath of drought and rinderpest in the 1890s, founded and regulated by the Dutch Reformed Church.  They were only granted property rights in the 1960s.  Here and there are dirt side roads simply signposted with an arrow saying ‘Namibia’.

The Augrabies National Park is a stunning landscape of melting coffee-icecream rock with an almighty surge of water cutting through it, carving a canyon of substantial proportions.  The powerful Augrabies waterfall plunges into a pool that is 120 metres deep.  All around, the lilacs and khakis are reminiscent of Namibia, which is but a hop skip and jump away.  One needs several days to explore, so I hope to return.   More soon on the rest of the trip.