‘Seen any swallows recently?’ had become Dad’s catchphrase, but he was not saying it now. Where were they? I had not seen one since late last summer, in Britain. My appallingly expensive, near-unbeatable binoculars, light in their skeletal frame, their lenses hand-ground in eastern Germany, wobbled across crisp blue air.
‘Try the sewage farm,’ said one of the rangers. ‘They come here later.’
Of course, it was mid-morning: insects; hunting. Reeds and roosting are for evening. We returned to the hire car and drove in circles, nosing the unobtrusive little vehicle through a strange, angular world of water, fenced-off settlements and tall trees until we are possibly lost, definitely lost, and then probably on track.
CAPE FLATS WATER TREATMENT WORKS
NO ENTRY
We play our joker again. We have done it before, using the car park and lavatories of the Victoria Hotel in town, because we were white or because our colour gave us confidence, though we did sneak out like thieves, and now, penetrating one set of gates after another because we are birdwatchers and birdwatchers can do this.
‘There – swallow!’ I shout.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, look . . .’
‘Oh so it is – phew.’
They were there for a second, skimming alongside us, between a high bank and the car. We follow the road to another set of gates. We sign in again. A sprinkler is at work, brightening flowers and greening a lawn. Through the gates, behind the works, we come to the treatment tanks. Rows of big, handsome Sandwich Terns sit in line along their edges, barely bothering to eye the car. They have black crests, like tufts of biros behind their ears. We carry on.
DANGER! SNAKES
BOOMSLANGS – COBRAS
PUFF ADDERS
‘Crikey,’ says Dad, mildly. I eye the edges of the track warily. How bizarre to realise that swallows, ‘our swallows’, spend half their time living happily alongside boomslangs and puff adders. If a boomslang bites, you bleed from everywhere until you expire. A good dose of puff adder venom will kill you in half an hour.
Now we are moving into the lagoons. Tracks run along dykes. Wild flowers flatten in the wind, the sea wind, coming straight off the Indian Ocean about 300 yards away.
Every time the path divides the choice is between a rough track and a rougher one, and DANGER! SNAKES boards stand sentry. There are flamingos in the ponds, and ducks, and then there they are, at last.
We barely recognise them: beautiful creatures with bright blue backs, the ferocious sea light whitened their undersides, they are like little arrowheads flinging themselves along ditches below the car, whipping up to our level, battling the ocean wind, peeling back over themselves, and even perching, just close enough to us, on a bush, for Dad to take a photo.
We jump out of the car, looking out for snakes, and meet the birds at the water’s edge. They look different: smaller, paler and more ragged than the swallows I know. I had never seen one in moult. They begin to moult in South Africa, and many continue as they journey north, arriving in Europe completely refeathered, looking their best, ready to court and be courted. The extraordinary thing about the moult is the precision it requires. The migrating swallow must moult symmetrically: if a feather drops earlier or grows faster than its twin on the other side of the bird, flight will be unbalanced, manoeuvrability impaired and the chances of survival slashed. Every swallow is a collection of feather-bent parallel curves, growing in unison.
So though the swallow which landed on a little bush beside us was not a baby, could not have been, it did look like one. Perhaps it was a first-year female. Perhaps it was a first-year female born in our barn or above the front door on top of Mum’s electricity meter, last May.
‘Look at them – so close!’
‘They are wonderful,’ Dad says.
‘Hello, swallow . . .’
‘That’s the one, is it?’ Dad has a sidelong smile.
‘Yes – Hello, sweetheart! Fancy a trip to Wales?’
We drove away, after a while, happy. It starts here, I kept thinking, here. And there is Table Mountain, and there is the sea, and that was my swallow. It has begun.
Two days later we went to the station, passed multiple checks to get to the platform, found my compartment and made our farewells. We made each other laugh. The train was very long and there were so few travellers that we seemed to be alone. He stood on the platform; I squeezed my head through the window. It is a strange thing to look at your father and know you are both thinking I might not see you again and this is just the way it is, this Friday the 1st of February.
‘Bye Dad.’
‘Go well.’
‘I will. You too.’
We stared at each other for an instant, he gave me a nod and a look, turned, and walked away up the platform. Perhaps he could feel me watching his back: he went quietly, unhurriedly, and disappeared.
Right! I thought, with a jumpy queer feeling, this is it – let’s have some fun! I opened and closed my notebook. Three pages were filled already, with Zeekoevlei. From now on I would write every day.
The train began to roll. I rattled around inside the compartment, changed position, stood, sat, pulled out my notebook and a pen, laid them aside and stared out of the window. Other trains went by as Cape Town began to give way to the flats. Just over there were Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain. At the edges of these suburbs the authorities have erected very high lamps, like prison lighting, and a row of tin toilets on waste ground, ready for more residents. People sat tiredly in the commuter trains which had doors missing; young men smoked and stared.
‘High summer,’ Dad had said, and it was. Too early for swallows to leave, of course – except certain males, often young and perhaps skittish, who cannot wait to set out, who drive themselves across continents, turning the migration into a giant contest – part survival competition, and part race: the first home will have the pick of the best nest sites, and therefore the greatest chance of attracting the best mates.
I watched South Africa all day. The train took a leisurely north-east curve out of Cape Town, following the route of the voortrekkers as they pushed north to escape the British. South Africa was first colonised by Bantu-speaking people from the Niger delta two and a half thousand years ago. They lived alongside native bushmen; Khoikhoi pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers. Portuguese sailors paused here on their way to the coast of Mozambique. In April 1652 a party from the Dutch East India company under the command of Jan Van Riebeck founded a settlement where is now Cape Town, the purpose of which was to supply ships of the company on their runs to and from the spice islands of the East. Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians were joined by French Huguenots fleeing persecution in the France of Louis XIV.
The colony began to import slaves from Madagascar and Indonesia. Under apartheid their descendants, mixed with the descendants of their European masters – and the rapidly displaced Khoi-San population – would be known as ‘Coloureds’.
In 1795 the British took the Cape, rather than risk its falling to Napoleon’s France, briefly returned it to the Dutch in 1803, then took it over again in 1806. In 1820 five thousand British immigrants were shipped to the colony. The ruling White world of the Cape divided: the urban elite was now English-speaking, while the Dutch-speakers were largely farmers – ‘Boers’.
The early nineteenth century saw the rise of the Zulu nation under Shaka, and increasing Boer dissatisfaction with British rule. In 1835 groups of Boers, accompanied by large numbers of servants, began to trek into the interior. These were the voortrekkers.
The story of the two peoples, English and Dutch, is written in the names of the stations; Cape Town, Bellville, Wellington, Worcester, Matjiesfontein, which is pronounced Makkeesfontane, after a spring, presumably ‘discovered’ by Matjie.
‘If you get hot,’ Dad had said, ‘think about doing it with a team of oxen, a wife and family and all your worldly goods.’
In the east, in Natal, the voortrekkers fought battles agai
nst the Zulus, but victory brought only British annexation of the Natal region. The British in turn fought the Zulus, and began to import labour from India. Squeezed between native populations and the British, many Boers continued to press north. Eventually two Boer republics were formed: the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
After the great trek this same route, which the train followed, became the road between the Cape and the diamond mines at Kimberley. Everything you thought you might need to make your fortune had to be lugged this way, and perhaps this was the way you walked back, after Cecil Rhodes had bought up your claim and defeat had emptied your pockets. Diamonds were discovered in 1869; Britain swiftly annexed the territory. In 1877 it also took over the Transvaal: a rebellion there led to the first Anglo-Boer War, which began in 1880 and ended swiftly with a Boer victory. The Transvaal became the South African Republic, or ZAR, led by President Paul Kruger. Six years later, gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand, a region of the ZAR. Now it flooded with prospectors and workers, black and white, and the population rocketed. In 1899 the British demanded that 60,000 non-Boer whites on the Witwatersrand be given voting rights. Kruger refused, countering that the British should withdraw their troops from his borders. The second Boer War began.
It was hot. The main street of Matjiesfontein is still wide enough for an ox cart with sixteen beasts in pairs to do a U-turn, Dad had informed me. I peered at it, dutifully. There were small, fast-flying hirundines near the station but I could not be sure of their species. The wind sighed gratefully in tall poplar trees. We wound up through passes and tunnels, along high, dry river beds, the train picking its way through the Drakenstein Mountains. Every now and then we passed massive stone blockhouses beside the track, built by the British during the second Boer War. Pretoria, the last Boer-controlled town, fell in 1900, but the Boers continued to fight for two more years. The blockhouses are enormous, with peculiar out-thrusts on the top corners, throwbacks to medieval castles, permitting defenders to fire down at attackers hard up against the foot of the walls. You would not fancy it. The Boers were notoriously good shots.
The British countered guerrilla warfare with a scorched-earth policy. To deny the Boers ‘on Kommando’ any support or provisions, their families, women and children were assembled in concentration camps. Disease, particularly cholera and tuberculosis, killed tens of thousands – estimates run to as many as 30,000. As I would find out, in many quarters this is neither forgotten nor forgiven.
The only other whites on our tourist-class Shosholoza Meyl train were thin, sun-bitten husbands and wider wives. They looked at an over-friendly tourist the way Londoners sometimes look at their visitors: with a blankness kneaded out of vague familiarity and vaguer irritation.
I slept in the long afternoon and woke towards evening, aware that we had been working our way up through tunnels. The pitch of the wheels had changed, there was a longer, running rhythm from the tracks. It was chilly, suddenly. I jumped up and gasped. I had read about it and seen pictures of it: the Great Karoo. The blue-pink colour of dusk, with red and blonde sand-streaks breaking it like waves, the Karoo was an undulation of short hard vegetation; under a bare sky its rolling contours looked as vast and cold as the sea. We had topped the escarpment and now ran freely on.
A flight of swallows mocked the speed of the train. Where would they sleep? Telephone wires? Surely they would not go down into the scrub, among the snakes. Were they on their way too? The sun purpled the Karoo and darkened its sandbanks; now the sea became a heather moor. A road appeared, made visible by the lights of a vehicle. For a while, whenever we kept pace with a truck or a car, the isolation seemed only to grow around us as our machines kept company.
The dining car was the first mixed-race place I had eaten in; behind me, a table of large men discussed business and put away pounds of thin chicken, fat chips and Coke. We stopped at Beaufort West in the early hours. Smokers drifted up and down the platform. A small boy did a handstand and the station lights were thronged with insects.
Kimberley was cool, briefly, at seven a.m. A man in tattered clothes who lived near the station and happened to be on the lookout for opportunities got out of his car (telling his dogs to shut up and his wife and a daughter that all was well) and drove me to the airport, where he was in charge of security.
‘I do this because I have kids,’ he said. He said a little about what it was like to be ‘coloured’ and talked about his brilliant daughter. Amazing to me, he seemed to pine for the apartheid era – for the certainty of its order, and the strength of its leadership.
‘Things were better before,’ he said, with an awkward laugh. So many said the same in the same way. The ultimate heresy is spoken all but freely, in a kind of chant.
‘At least we knew where we stood.’
At the airport I sat in and out of the sun while it got hotter and waited while the hire car was made ready. The car, a rendezvous in Bloemfontein with a swallow expert and the visas were the only pieces of organisation I had put into the otherwise vastly empty map of Africa.
When it was ready I got into the car, a nondescript thing which made me feel like a travelling salesman, pointed it toward Bloemfontein, and drove. I set out across the vast emptiness of the Free State, feeling myself a tiny speck, smaller than a swallow in the gulfs of space which began at the roadside and lifted over flat land, which rose and filled with nothing but weather light and clouds as far as the furthest horizon. What a privilege and a pleasure it is to be alone in so much space! Tiny and inconsequential in the car, I had nothing to be concerned with, no obligations to fulfil. I felt a strange mixture of freedom and pointlessness. The self-containment of the solitary traveller gives you an other-worldly, off-to-one-side lightness of being. You have not the slightest bearing on events. You cannot even converse about the business of the day, supposing you have heard about it on the radio. You do not matter. The irrelevance of the traveller, your absence of responsibility, most of the time, for anything but yourself is a strange condition. You might as well be a ghost.
The country stretched away without break or end, its vastness echoed and dwarfed by the greatness of the skies. On the horizon low outcropped hills surfaced above the gold-green plains. Here and there was darker land: bare earth absorbs more solar heat, which causes thermals of rising air, but otherwise I supposed it would be as monotonous to fly over as to drive. To imagine a swallow flying across it all: to think ahead, to see the journey in its entirety would be to beat your wings against forever. They must look at the next contour, and surely anticipate the next change in the wind and the air currents, but do they see further? To the next night, the next roost, the next river? Or do they exist wholly in the present, propelled and pulled by urges of instinct?
Crossing the veldt the world seemed distant, as vague and contingent as the day after tomorrow, but I came to Bloemfontein in the early afternoon. I became lost not long after reaching the town, meandering from black areas, where a market filled the road with an Africa I recognised – hundreds of people, colour, buses, exhaust, food stalls, cooking smells and the noise of voices – to white areas, where low houses hidden behind fences were laid out in a spacious, apparently deserted grid. I was rescued by a solicitous couple in a big white bakkie – as pick-up trucks are known here – who led me to a hotel named The Hobbit.
J. R. R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, a fact of which parts of Bloemfontein are very proud. The creator of Bilbo Baggins and father of a billion units – books, games, films, toys – left town when an infant but still managed to create in his wake at least one hotel which encapsulates all the love of comfort, distrust of the world beyond the front door and the ineluctable yearning for adventure which you will find in the first ten pages of The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. My room was a bole of dark wood and white linen, with a green hue of sunlight filtered through clematis.
The television being jammed with provincial rugby – the Six Nations championship was about to start, England playing Wales later i
n the most suspenseful eighty minutes of the year, usually, to a Welsh fan like me – I hit the hotel’s superlative collection of Wilbur Smith.
Wilbur Smith likes guns as much as the next man. He never misses an opportunity to reel off a full specification, including precise ammunition details. The impact of bullets on targets is recorded with a kind of moral faithfulness. He seems to see his role as a popular historian, with a mission to entertain. The struggles of black and white, English, Afrikaner and Zulu, from the First World War to the present form the backdrop to his blockbusters. He is anti-communist, sceptical of imperialists, and the heroes in his stories are always those who most love Africa. The continent itself is perhaps the true hero of his tales, embodied, generally, by some proud and fierce white South African with rippling muscles and a short temper. It is extremely rare to find a Wilbur Smith heroine whose buttocks do not remind their creator of ostrich eggs.
I woke to a call from reception, scrambled up and went down. Standing outside the hotel was Rick Nuttall, confined to the street by a locked gate which could only be opened from reception, Hobbit guests and their cars being spectacularly well defended. I recognised the large, handsome man by his friendly smile and his swallow T-shirt.
Rick is the director of the National Museum in Bloemfontein, and one of Africa’s foremost authorities on Barn Swallows, though he would be too modest to make that claim: he talked reverently of Anders Moller in Denmark, perhaps the world’s greatest expert.
We drove around town for a while, getting me my bearings and unravelling something of Rick’s life and times. From a hill on the edge of town Rick showed me where north, south, east and west were, and we watched weather systems over the veldt. The light lay gold and blue and green on the grasslands, and, to the south-east, rain-black under a storm.
‘I love birdwatching out there,’ Rick said. ‘Just going quietly, and stopping and staring.’
A Single Swallow Page 3