Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  Upon my arrival I was greeted by a rotund Afrikaans woman in a floral smock and Crystal Carrington do who was just about to lock up for her lunch break. Having convinced her that doing so would deprive an international visitor of a unique cultural experience, she wanly introduced herself to me as Hendrina, rolling her r’s extravagantly as she did so.

  “I’ll be back in an hour. If you need to know something before then, ask one of the ladies,” said Hendrrrrrrina with a wave in the direction of two elderly black women. “I don’t know if they’ll be able to answer your questions, but they’ve been here for fifteen years, so they must have picked up something.”

  The driveway was littered with the decaying carcasses of tractors, hoes and ox wagons. One building was given over to the formidable archaeological heritage of the area. Another focused on the domestic environment endured by the early settlers. Between 1903 and 1910 the typical house in the area was either made from stone, clay and sods or baked bricks. The walls were washed with lime, the roofs were pitched and the floors were smeared with dung, which must have proved pretty useful when someone baked an air biscuit over dinner and there was no dog to blame.

  It was the start of a faecal theme that culminated in the following room where there was an exhibit of the bush remedies developed by the settlers. Apparently bee stings were best treated with “warm faeces”. Note the temperature specification. I could only imagine some poor farmer enjoying his morning constitutional in the outhouse only to be disturbed by his wife beating on the door and yelling, “Push, Harry, push – the kids are swelling up like balloons”.

  When I finally caught up with Hendrrrrrrina, she got me tanked and came over a touch Mrs Robinson.

  In a stroke of genius that museums around the world would do well to emulate, the Arend Dieperink had installed a distillery out the back in which the South African equivalent of moonshine was manufactured. Utilising the most gloriously tenuous of pretexts, Hendrina justified the sideline by pointing out that the still used was an original nineteenth-century artefact. With that she ushered me into her office, shut the door and proceeded to clear a space on her desk which was piled with yellowing photographs from the 1950s and dusty manilla folders. She then fished a pair of shot glasses from her top drawer and plonked them down one-handed.

  “First,” she said, “we’ll try the witblits.”

  Literally translated as white lightning, this is not so much a top-shelf spirit as an under-the-counter one. Seems the Voortrekkers were less than impressed with wine’s measly 13 or 14 per cent alcohol content and decided to turn things up a notch by producing a drink from grapes that was to be slugged not sipped and could kick you into next Tuesday.

  Boasting a 75 per cent proof rating, the shot of witblits I threw back under Hendrina’s watchful eye singed my sinuses, transformed my gullet into a fire trail and had my brain bobbing around my skull like an olive in a martini.

  “That was what you might call an entree,” purred Hendrina as she edged her chair closer to mine. “Now for the main course.”

  This turned out to be three shots of a drink known as mampoer. Made from seasonal fruit and proudly proclaiming an alcohol rating of 60 per cent proof, Hendrina joined me in accounting for a tot of orange mampoer followed by one of peach. Sweet without straying into the sickly stickiness of ouzo or sambuca, the mampoer was magnificent in a vowels-overpowering-my-consonants way. How ever, the piss de resistance was marula mampoer. Made from a native berry that tastes like the result of an untethered geneticist’s attempt to create a guanana, it had the spin rooming and brought out in Hendrina a coquettishness I was unprepared for.

  With each slam of drained shot glass on mahogany, she had inched further towards me so that our knees were now separated by no more than a layer of denim and the thinnest of surgical hose. I’ll let you guess who belonged to what.

  “Do you want to taste the fruit?” she asked with a hint of slur and a disturbing tone which suggested a foray into metaphor.

  “Okay,” I responded, my intended air of politeness hijacked by a tentativeness which manifested itself in an upward octave change between syllables.

  Hendrina reached into a plastic bag behind her and retrieved a cumquat-sized berry with a lime-green tinge. Not content with simply handing it to me, she manoeuvred her hand towards my mouth in a motion so agonisingly slow that the full horror of its implications was not merely played out but ticked over one frame at a time.

  “You have to bite gently to get the juice,” she continued with an expression that screamed, “Boy, I’m gonna curate you senseless.” Clumsily intercepting her fingers with mine, I fed myself the fruit and overcompensated for the awkwardness of the moment by asking what other alcoholic treats Hendrina had in store.

  Cue the liqueurs. One was the kind of creamy coffee number most often favoured by teenage boys for getting prom dates out of their shot taffeta and onto a back seat. The other was a sweet diversion delicately flavoured with a tart local tea called rooibos.

  Combined with the mampoer and witblits shots, these tipped Hendrina from mischievous to maudlin.

  “You know,” she said, her eyes suddenly far away, “we whites did many things wrong in the past, but why does that have to mean our culture should be allowed to die? I have had a black boss for six months and, aside from the archaeology, he can’t see the value in this museum. Since apartheid ended, my budget has been ripped apart, I have had to let most of my staff go, and important historical items are rusting in the front garden because there is simply no covered space left.”

  It was at this point that Hendrina’s train of thought was derailed by the alcohol bandits. Betraying the suspect attitudes of anyone who feels compelled to start their sentences with “I’m not a racialist, but”, Hendrina continued, “Blacks just don’t value white cult ure, which developed hand in hand with the Bible. They don’t believe in a God that will punish them.

  “It’s not only me,” she said. “Hundreds of small museums around the country will disappear over the next few years. It’s a part of our history the new government feels is no longer relevant and should be done away with. But how can I convince a victim of apartheid that it’s as much a part of South Africa as his culture?

  “Even the names of places are changing because the government feels they have associations with the Great Trek, which lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of blacks.”

  Summoning a trio of her staff, Hendrina then named a number of towns to which they replied with the new government-approved appellations and shared small smiles as she attempted the pronunciations. Pretoria became Tswane. Warmbaths became Bela Bela. Nylstroom became Modimolle.

  Hendrina’s logic couldn’t be faulted on this count. It was an utter crock. The exercise had cost millions of rands, which could have been far better spent trying to reduce the disparity between rich and poor that a decade after the fall of apartheid is only trumped by Botswana and Brazil.

  After a slurred excuse pertaining to a fictitious interview and two strong coffees on the main road, I bade Potgietersrus and its coy curator farewell. I had lingered longer than I had intended and by the time I reached my overnight destination of Pietersburg (Polokwane), all that remained of the sunlight was a razor cut on the horizon bleeding orange.

  Nursing a 6pm hangover, I checked into a motel located so close to the highway that I could overhear truck-drivers’ CB radio conversations as they whizzed past. I made short work of a pizza so greasy that the bottom of the box had become transparent by the time the delivery arrived, and then did what I could to steel myself for the next day’s first destination: a concentration camp.

  At the end of the nineteenth century Britain’s once invulnerable economic might was being eviscerated by the parvenu across the Atlantic and Germany. The extent of her empire meant that Britain had become the centre of world finance and banking, but the status quo could only be maintained if more – lots more – gold could be found to bolster the thinning ingot quota that was held
in the Bank of England’s vaults and which underpinned the value of the pound. British eyes turned northwards towards the independent Transvaal republic and acquired the unmistakable lust for acquisition.

  Having fled the Queen’s rule in the Cape, Paul Kruger’s renegade republicans were hardly likely to be seduced by diplomatic efforts to be brought back into the fold. A bloody and bitter conflict flared up in 1880-1881 and erupted into full-scale war from 1899 to 1902.

  Adhering to the fervent – and not entirely unfounded – belief that the Brits were advancing on a homeland they had fled to long before any traces of gold were found, the Boers immediately put paid to any thoughts of gentlemanly conduct in the field of battle. They obeyed commands only when they agreed with them, thought nothing of galloping away to resume the fray under circumstances where the odds weren’t so drastically stacked against them, and had a penchant for picking off British infantry from concealed positions as they marched in tight formations along the veldt.

  The Brits responded to the subterfuge of the Boers’ guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy. Between 1900 and 1902, 30,000 farmsteads were razed and crops torched as they attempted to starve the Boers into surrendering.

  Many did just that and were placed in what were termed “refugee camps” to protect them from other Boers who viewed their actions as treacherous. Later, the suddenly homeless wives and children of Boer combatants were also concentrated at designated areas around railway lines and water sources. And lo, the concentration camp entered the pantheon of British invention.

  Little thought had been given to how the refugees would be accommodated and managed once they had been contained in these camps. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of women and children they had forced to abandon their burning homes, the British military continued to cram thousands into tent cities. Their ranks were soon thinned. Pneumonia, chicken pox, dysentery and measles ran rife, and by the end of the war 28,000 Boers had died in these camps.

  Located in a light industrial area on the fringes of town, Pietersburg’s concentration camp was appropriately solemn and utterly disr espected. The size of a modest suburban cricket oval, it had been home to over 4000 people. Of the 657 who never left, 523 were children.

  Beyond a black metal gate savaged by decay and expletiveladen graffiti lay row upon row of half-buried stone coffins, many no longer than my forearm. Save for a few streaks of sickly grass and the odd knotted acacia, it was a litter-strewn dustbowl. So extensively vandalised was this graveyard that what few fragmented tombstones were left were haphazardly affixed to a nearby shrine of remembrance. There was also a plaque that once bore some solemn sentiment. Or at least I think it was as a plaque. Now nothing but a silhouette remained and the engraved face had been ripped from its bolts for a few rand from a scrap-metal dealer.

  Scanning the perimeter from a nearby wall that had been veneered with granite slabs bearing the names of those who died here, it struck me that after all these years this place was still bounded by razor wire.

  Where there were fifty-five of these camps for whites, sixty-six were established for blacks. If the Afrikaans inmates did it tough, those of darker hue lived in conditions vomited up from the depths of purgatory.

  A chill wind from Buchenwald seemed to have dropped the temperature by ten degrees. Aside from what those who lived and died here suffered, what moved me most was how their memory was being allowed to wither with neglect. Disconsolate and hungry, I ventured into the centre of Pietersburg which had all the charm you might expect from an administrative and economic regional centre whose population almost doubles during the workday but is swiftly decimated come quitting time. It’s one of those places people have to come to as opposed to want to.

  Heading northwest, the landscape erupted in outcrops of boulders that sat like pumpkins in a thick soup of green foliage and flourishes of aptly named candelabra trees leapt from the undergrowth. These soon gave way to leafy hillocks that pierced the plain.

  They turned out to be appetisers for the sumptuous main course that was the Soutpansberg range, a 130-kilometre arc of sandstone magnificence that straddles the Tropic of Capricorn. Ruggedly mesmerising from through a car window, it was the kind of terrain that could break resolve by sundown at ground level. Yet it played host to Stone Age rock art from the San people, and the nearby Limpopo River was once routinely plied by dhows with Arab and Indian traders at the helm, who bartered beads and ceramics for the gold and ivory – sounds fair – of the ancient African kingdoms.

  By the time I rolled into the town of Louis Trichardt, I was thoroughly smitten. Set against wine-bottle-green hills, it looked out over a sporadically wooded grassland that shimmered into liquid on contact with the horizon. It boasted the ubiquitous white church cheerily embellished with blazing beds of pansies and was populated by locals with the easy familiarity that comes with having either slept, gone to school or prayed with everyone in town.

  In what was once a staunch bastion of Afrikaaner pride, the townsfolk were now getting on with life in the new South Africa.

  Where there were previously separate stores for separate races, consumers were now being presented with goods they might never have seen before as they appealed to the other group’s vanities.

  Nowhere was this more evident than in the field of hair care. Beside one another on the desegregated shelves of the Louis Trichardt chemist lay the usual array of shampoos, conditioners and gels making outrageously lustrous promises, as well as products formulated specifically for African locks.

  Packet after packet featured cocksure models sporting Lionel Richie circa ‘85 ‘fros and bore branding such as American Look Two-Step Shampoo. Another unguent was titled Dark & Lovely, beneath which was the slogan “now with even more cholesterol”. Perhaps the idea was to bloat your tresses to such a degree that cowlicks or haphazard parts inevitably collapsed never to be revived again. The most intriguing potion was a “hair relaxer” called Special Feeling, which I was sorely tempted to purchase.

  This is because I have Jewish hair, which is neither straight nor curly and sits perilously close to the steel wool end of the fine-coarse spectrum.

  “Thousands of years of religious persecution and you’re bitching about the hair?” I hear you cry. Actually, I hear my mother cry, so we’ll pause for the inevitable. “You know there are children in Russia who don’t have hair?”

  Yes, but they didn’t grow up in an era where no girl would look twice at you without Kevin Bacon (in Footloose) hair and some fancy dance moves to go with it. Not even the combination of half a pot of gel that hardened to bullet-deflecting strength could help and to this day a part of me still yearns for the kind of fine stray locks that fall seductively over the bronzed foreheads of men with one-syllable names and starring roles. Instead, I got hair that falls upwards, is receding like the Zimbabwean economy and a surname that has a silent d.

  The hair relaxer was making me tense, so I headed out of town to the Ultimate Guesthouse.

  I’d found the listing in an accommodation guide in town and, thoroughly sick of cheap motel chains where the bedspreads were suspiciously crusty and the bars were filled with regional reps who divided their commission between Johnny Walker and their children’s orthodontia, I prepared myself for an establishment that couldn’t possibly live up to its name. I couldn’t have been more wrong had I answered the question “What’s the square root of nine?” with “Caracas”.

  After proceeding in fits and stops between two of those enormous petrol tankers you see making sedan sandwiches on the news, I turned onto a rocky dirt road that pounded out a samba on the car’s undercarriage. Flanked by broad ribbons of corn under a pale sky, the track was intermittently broken by the odd driveway and a sign alerting anyone who’d like to know that they were passing by the residence of Paul and Hettie Labuschagne. One of these notices directed me down a dappled driveway to the guesthouse and, call me an old Semite, but from the time I saw the word “shalom” above the front door, flanked by bloa
ted gilded cherubs no less, I felt immediately at home.

  The place was run by Mona Du Plessis, who had only recently fled from Zimbabwe with her husband and two children. Diminutive as she was warm, and radiating the kind of hospitality no hotel school could ever teach, she instantly called to mind that cool older sister of a friend who would scrape together our combined pocket money and buy us a bottle of Southern Comtort before disappearing into the night in a veil of Impulse Body Spray and a Datsun 120B.

  Hacked into a subtropical hillside, the Ultimate looked across a valley bisected by a willow-laced stream. Beyond this stood an imposing hill. Anchored by a raft of blue gums, above which rose a belt of granite, it was crowned by a dusting of leopard trees festooned with sulphur buds. I’m sure that the flora was not all native and that telephone cables lurked amid the gum trunks, but from a distance it appeared unmolested by humanity. It was one of those views that are best shared and Mona arrived on cue with a beer and self-deprecating “Not a bad backyard, is it?”

  The recipe for contentment was completed by three things. A distant radio reporting the frequent fall of Pakistani wickets in the face of the Australian pace attack. The intermittent spray of palm-size butterflies with wings of Rorschach amber splotches against a midnight blue sheen. And a black labrador who would drop by every few minutes for a scratch.

  In light that flared then faded, I was joined on the verandah by a friend of Mona’s. Clinton Baes was a gruff, fortysomething engineer who serviced jets at a nearby air force base and was clearly fond of three things in life: his family, his stubby holder and the expression “as slippery as snot”.

  After a series of the perfunctory sheep-shagging jokes that Australians tend to make about New Zealanders, I asked what had drawn Clinton to Louis Trichardt.

  “I was born here and it’s my place as much as anyone else’s,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” The last sentence was delivered with a trace of the traitorous contempt I hadn’t heard since making the mistake of sharing our emigration plans with my year 12 maths teacher. After which she lectured the class about how “people were turning their backs on a country that had given them so much”.