Are We There Yet?
Page 27
Within two years 50,000 diggers were working the hill while a predictable brouhaha had broken out over which government owned the land. As it had previously been such an arse-end-of-beyond region, no one had bothered to lay formal claim to the place. Now, however, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic both put up their hands, as did the Cape Colony, and Griqua tribe who had lived there for at least seventy years. A British court found in favour of the Griqua, whose chief Nicolaas Waterboer promptly turned to the crown for protection. In 1871 the region became a crown colony and was formally annexed to the Cape in 1880.
The labyrinth of tents that sprang up around the diggings morphed into the city Kimberley, and Colesberg Kopje became the biggest hole in the world. This chasm is the centrepiece of a village-cum-museum which provides a glimpse into a society comprised of paranoid miners prepared to kill to protect their claim, genteel British administrators, grifters, bar flies, diamond dealers, saloon keepers and prostitutes.
The Big Hole is approached along a boardwalk which is enclosed in mesh and juts out ten metres over the edge. Enclosed by steep gradients that drop to sheer faces only to plunge into a pool of luminous lime water, this man-made gouge has a circumference of 1.6 kilometres and is over 182 metres deep. Its true scale is only seen in contrast and semitrailers travelling the highway near the opposite rim looked like Tonka trucks. Aside from its vastness, the most striking aspect of the Hole is the way it absorbs sound making for a sense of desolate peace.
At the peak of operations, 30,000 men worked around the clock in the huge pit. When Anthony Trollope visited, he observed, “The stuff is raised on aerial tramways, wires are stretched taut from the wooden boxes slanting down to the claims at the bottom. As one bucket was taken down empty on one set of wires, another comes up on the other set full of blue. It looks to be so steep down there, there can be no easier way to the bottom other than aerial contrivances. It is though you were looking down into a vast bowl, whole round the bottom are various marvellous incrustations among which ants are working with all the usual energy of the ant tribe.”
When the early miners struck it rich, they lashed out on lavish spending sprees in Kimberley’s dozens of bars and brothels. Raucous laughter echoed through the streets most every evening as instant millionaires lit cigars with bank notes while their ladies of the night literally bathed in champagne.
It was all downhill from there as far as nightlife in Kimberley was concerned. When my family and I came here on holiday one scorching December in the early 80s, rotis-serie chickens passed for live entertainment and things had only picked up marginally since then. Possessing neither the wardrobe nor the inclination to visit the Kimberley Club, which was slipping into decrepitude along with its clients, I headed for the 127-year-old Halfway House bar. It’s not the oldest in town – that honour goes to the Star of the West, South Africa’s first pub, which was established in 1870 and is said to be haunted by roaming ghosts guarding the fortune in gold coins beneath the floorboards. “The Half” was fairly lively with groups of mildly inebriated men watching a boxing match on TV as their girlfriends tore apart the fashion sense of everyone else in the room. All I could think was that people in stirrup pants shouldn’t throw stones.
I had come to the Half because it had a long-standing reputation for excellent service, particularly to one of its early punters who was somewhat vertically challenged. The staff spared Cecil Rhodes the ignominy of mounting and dismounting by delivering his tipple to him in the saddle.
Born in England in 1853, Rhodes was sent to work on a cotton farm in South Africa when he was seventeen because of poor health. A year later he skedaddled to Kimberley where he realised that as the diggings were proceeding ever deeper, serious capital was required to overcome the con-comitant chali enges of flooding and rock falls. Together with CD Rudd, he bought a number of small claims and formed the original De Beers mining company. Other joint-stock companies followed and Rhodes tapped into his easy access to European capital to bring them into the fold.
Rhodes also formed the Diamond Syndicate, harbinger of today’s Central Selling Organisation which oversees almost 80 per cent of current trade and controls the release of stones into the market, thus ensuring it is never flooded and prices remain high.
Another of his company’s innovations was the finetuning of a system of wage labour that exploited impoverished Africans. De Beers was instrumental in establishing “locations” that would prevent black workers from pocketing stones and selling them privately. Enclosed by high walls made of corrugated iron, these compounds were in fact prisons where workers on six-month or one-year contracts were strip-searched daily and subjected to summary justice. At any given time, one in fifteen had smallpox or pneumonia, a figure that contrasts sharply with the one in one hundred rate recorded by Kimberley’s night-soil removers, who supposedly had the most unhygienic job in town. By the time gold was discovered, Rhodes had created a lucrative model for trimming overheads through cheap labour, minimising stock loss as a result of theft, and regulating supply onto the market so that it retained its value.
His lust for wealth was matched only by his fervour for Empire. At twenty-three he declared, “Why should we not form a secret society with but one object – the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British Rule – for making the Anglo-Saxon race one empire”. Within half a decade Rhodes owned half the De Beers empire, was a member of the Cape Parliament (where he eventually became prime minister) and possessed the kind of wealth that allowed him to import scores of English birds to his garden in Cape Town as he believed their songs would rejuvenate his ailing health. Those which survived the journey didn’t so much warble as croak, as did Cecil John shortly thereafter. His legacy is astounding: not only was CJR the first to utter the immortal “Cape to Cairo” vision that caused nocturnal emissions for many an imperialist, he also joined only Simon Bolivar and Amerigo Vespucci in having a nation – Rhodesia – named after him and he established the scholarships to Oxford University that still bear his name.
These days only three mines operate in Kimberley and diamond supply is dwindling. The bustling town where Rhodes reigned has been stripped of the very source of its riches. The plush double-storey clubs adorned with spacious balconies and filigree lacework have long since made way for the concrete headquarters of insurance companies; and where they once occupied block after block, the greatest concentration of bars is now across the windows and doors of homes.
Chapter 16
Where the Street has My Name
Heading north from Kimberley, the town that swelters on a scarred and scrubby plain presented me with an unexpected farewell treat. Marking the boundary between the last fortified cluster of town houses and the bush was a dam teeming with pink flamingos. So thick were they that their massed reflection threw a candy-floss coating over the water through which they waded.
Following the arc of the muddy Vaal River for around 200 kilometres through the towns of Warrenton and Bloemhof, I encountered yet again the most ubiquitous feature of road travel in South Africa: pedestrians.
Even on the most desolate stretches of highway, lone women carrying bundles of wood, washing or shopping on their heads would be ambling along. Often the walkers would appear on the shoulder in groups of two or three: children on their way to school, dawdling teens playing chicken with motorists, immaculately starched congregants en route to church services. Through stinging rain, desert plains, tarmac-melting heat and over muscle-burning hills they plod. As you do when you have only two choices: stay home or not. Often even the modest taxis fees are beyond their means or the region is so remote that there is simply no transport for hire.
Within two hours I arrived at my final destination of the journey. The town of Kroonstad is much like other regional centres that service South African agriculture. Dotted with the churches, parks and sports fields that are the mark of a proud and committed community, it is homely and quietly prosperous. It is also the town in which m
y father was born and where his family played significant enough a role in early community life to have a street named after them. Said avenue no longer exists but the Smiedt Building on the main street still houses the chemist where generations of townsfolk have turned up with snotty noses, inflamed bunions and all manner of complaints that could be quietly shared with the pharmacist in the privacy of his office out the back.
The dispenser in question is Bram Smiedt, last branch of the family tree in Kroonstad and an engagingly eccentric character. I turned up at the store unannounced and a staff member rang Bram to say someone from Australia was here to see him. As you do in country towns, he had gone home for lunch.
He passed on a message that I should hang around as he would be back shortly. Being something of an ornithologist, Bram had arranged a series of high domed birdcages along the aisles of the pharmacy. These were filled with electric-green lovebirds, sky-blue budgies and parrots that brightened the space with their hues and harmonies.
While I was strolling around, thinking the establishment stemmed from an era when pharmacies served myriad functions in a community and slickness was less important than service, Bram returned to tell me he’d figured out who I was. Jovial and engaging company, Bram was patently an esteemed and trusted member of the community he served. He also had a fair streak of the rogue in him and he farewelled a stream of prim and blushing Afrikaner ladies with: “Tell your husband that we now have liquid Viagra in stock so he can pour himself a stiff one”.
His way with a one-liner was probably inherited from his father Cyril who ran the pharmacy before him, conducted eye tests on the premises and alerted the community to this service with an enormous billboard reading: “C Smiedt and see better”.
Despite my best efforts I could not picture my father as a child on Kroonstad’s main street. Aside from mentioning Smiedt Street and his cousin Cyril’s sign, he rarely spoke of the place. Nor did he ever take me there. Perhaps he thought there was little to discover here – about himself or much else for that matter. On the first count he was proven correct. But meeting Bram had been worth the detour my father had never taken.
Looking perhaps a little too hard for echoes of hereditary larrikinism, I farewelled Bram and his wife Barbara to set off for Johannesburg, a mere ninety minutes away.
In a little under three months I had travelled over 8000 kilometres, seeing much that I remembered and even more I would never forget. Glimpses of the old South Africa remained, albeit dressed in new criticisms of affirmative action and government corruption. To my own mortification, I also found myself not entirely free of these attitudes. This I discovered in Pretoria when I asked the only white person in a crowded street for directions and he replied, “I don’t live here – ask one of these guys”.
I had been gladdened by dozens of the new nation’s characteristics. My old schools were now multiracial, the national anthem was prized by all South Africans, and the political correctness that characterised the earliest days of majority government had given way to the more grounded reality of getting on with the business of living together. However, the euphoria that had accompanied Nelson Mandela’s release had not merely been tempered but rendered brittle by chronic violence, spiralling poverty, the government’s indifferent response to the AIDS scourge and an underlying fear that all the mineral resources in the world were not going to stop South Africa’s economy going the way of most other African nations.
A decade after the switch to representative government, some black South Africans are undoubtedly better off and can now afford to cower like whites behind electrified security fences patrolled by armed guards. For most, however, life hasn’t changed all that much.
Thousands are still fleeing to England, Israel, Canada, America and Australia, just as my father did. That said, I am positive about the future of the land of my birth. Just as it witnessed a bloodless revolution despite all indications to the contrary, I saw enough harmony in my travels to give me hope, albeit tinged with the reality that thousands will not live to see the land South Africa could become. It is a nation of rare resilience, ancient communion with the land and a spirit that blossoms under the harshest of circumstances. As Desmond Tutu noted, “Yes, things could be much better in South Africa – but they could be much worse”.
I began my journey in the city where my father died and ended it in the town where he was born. Looking back, perhaps it was naive to think that on some lonely stretch of highway under an African sky I would experience the epiphany of him riding shotgun. Dodging the taxis streaming into Johannesburg, I had to admit to myself that the presence of the late Sydney Ronald Smiedt was not going to materialise. At least not on this trip.
I was, however, certain of two things. The first was that as one of those fathers who viewed travel as an educational experience as opposed to a recreational one, he would have loved this journey. Not least for the fact that I undertook it in his name. More importantly, he was still teaching me the same lesson he had been all along: the more you learn about other people and places, the more you learn about yourself. The second certainty was that although South Africa is no longer home, there’s still no place like it.
Epilogue
On Friday 26 July 2003, my brother-in-law Laurence Niselow was at work in his screen-printing business in the Johannesburg suburb of Jeppe. It was lunchtime and staff were coming and going through the security gates. Laurence was probably thinking of the next meal. For devout Jews the Sabbath dinner is a sanctuary from the working week, a time to give thanks for simple gifts like bread on the table and family around it.
Amid the factory chatter, a conversation Laurence was having with an employee was interrupted by two men neither of them recognised. Voices were raised, intervention was attempted, two shots were fired and Laurence was dead before he hit the ground.
I wrote the first words of this book beside him at the dining-room table early one morning: me bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, Laurence on the way to daily prayers at the synagogue.
Second to his devotion to God was that to his country. A champion of affirmative action decades before it was enshrined in law, he championed black empowerment as many other whites whinged that it was impacting upon their livelihood. While he was under no illusions about the problems facing the coun try he could have left but chose to remain in, Laurence steadfastly believed that these would be overcome. What’s more, he would have been disappointed had I let his death overshadow this book being a love letter to South Africa.
First published 2004 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
© David Smiedt
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Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Smiedt, David
Are We There Yet?: chasing a childhood through South Africa
1. Smiedt, David — Journeys — South Africa. 2. South
Africa — Description and travel. 3. South Africa — Social
life and customs. I. Title.
916.8
ISBN 978 0 7022 3384 6 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5751 3 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5752 0 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5753 7 (kindle)