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.