by Chris Marais
“You realise you can touch holiness at any time. It is always there. Eventually everything is holy, and your will to see it is granted. The more you give up, the more you gain. Your vulnerability and openness make you stronger than steel.”
I could not think of a single wise word in reply. Instead, I came out with:
“Do you think we’re currently staring at the Southernmost Fairground Pony in Africa?” And left it at that …
Chapter 18: Arniston and Elim
Shipwreck Coast
It’s 30 May 1815, and a thick fog has set in on the coast around Waenhuiskrans in the Overberg about 40 km north-east of Cape Agulhas.
The British East Indiaman called the Arniston is approaching the coastline in convoy. Most of the passengers on board are wounded British soldiers from six regiments stationed in the East. A squall brews off the Agulhas Bank and the resultant hurricane drives the Arniston towards the land. By dawn, it is clear that the ship lies in the eye of a storm, surrounded by breakers.
Taking the advice of his staff and a Royal Navy agent on board, Captain George Simpson heads the vessel towards land, hoping to beach her. The Arniston, according to reports, hits a reef more than 1 km out at sea and begins to break up.
It later emerged that Captain Simpson had mistakenly taken this part of the coast for Table Bay, but once the currents began dragging her towards the beach it was too late. Among those who drowned were 14 women, 25 children and Lord and Lady Molesworth.
We found a plaque near the beachfront that read:
“Erected by their disconsolate parents to the memory of Thomas, aged 13 years, William Noble, aged 10, Andrew, aged 8, and Alexander McGregor Murray, aged 7 (the four eldest sons of Lt Col Andrew Giels of HM 73rd Regiment) who, with Lord and Lady Molesworth, unfortunately perished in the Arniston transport, wrecked on this shore the 30th day of May, 1815.”
The “Sale Notice Of Goods Salvaged From The Transport Ship Arniston” read:
“[A] quantity of Goods, saved from the Wreck … consisting of:
“122 Casks, containing Wine, Arrack etc;
“580 empty ditto, of different sorts;
“1 Bellows;
“2 Casks Pitch and various pieces of Cordage and Rattans.
“The Sale will commence at 10 o’clock in the morning of each day, and be held on the Beach near the Eilands Valley Caledon, 23rd of July, 1815.”
This part of the coast was home to Strandloper communities as long as 120 000 years ago. Shell middens have revealed bone fish-hooks, stone sinkers, sheep bones and clay pots, evidence that Khoi herders lived here as well. These days, the village of Arniston (which was formerly called Waenhuiskrans) boasts houses that are being sold in the R5-million bracket. Cape Town uses Arniston as a weekend getaway, and we soon found out why.
After four weeks on the coastal road, Jules and I collapsed gratefully into the world of the Arniston Hotel, a welcoming universe of excellent showers, a great double bed, satellite television, room service offering fresh kob, vegetables, baby potatoes and ice-cold lager. That night, after delighting in the total nonsense of a Hollywood teen-thriller movie, we literally passed out. Jules dreamt that a Lambert’s Bay gannet had become our travelling companion and, when there was no fresh fish, it was happy to be fed bread soaked in milk. I always marvel at the exquisite detail of my wife’s dreamtime.
In the morning we breakfasted on homemade bread, smoked salmon, cream cheese, a fruit fantasia and pots of strong coffee. And then we walked up to Kassiesbaai, the fishing village on the hill that gave Arniston all its seafaring appeal. In a bid to keep developers at bay, so to speak, Kassiesbaai had been declared a national monument.
We heard that there’d be a service at 10 o’clock at the little Anglican Church in Kassiesbaai. For some strange reason (we are not regular churchgoers) Jules and I both wanted to attend, so we rushed back down the hill to get properly dressed.
We sat at the back of the simple building, which was soon quite full. A few women, their heads covered, came in, genuflected and crossed themselves.
Outside, five girls in red-and-white smocks waited for the service to begin. One of them twirled an incense burner over her head, as if it were one of those fire-dancing tools you see at trance dances.
At ten exactly, with an air of great ceremony, three priests walked in, led by the altar girls bearing crosses, candles, the holy communion wafers and a small bell.
It was Holy Eucharist, and Father Eli Murtz led the service. His message revolved around the story of the Good Samaritan.
“Take a good look around,” he said. “See who your real neighbour is.”
Perhaps he had noticed the two pale faces at the back of the church, because he continued:
“We have to help people of all races and backgrounds, and see everyone as our neighbour.”
We prayed for the community, and the priests asked the parishoners to remember Americans suffering in hurricanes (Katrina having recently had her way with my New Orleans) in their prayers.
They also offered a special prayer for anyone who wanted to come forward for a particular reason. A man asked to have his young son specially blessed because it was his birthday. The priest prayed with his hands on their heads.
There was a slow build-up to the drama of the Holy Communion. First there were readings. The priest was surrounded by the altar girls, who held up the Bible, illuminated it with candles and held a cross high.
The incense was lit, and the burner swung back and forth. The priests gathered round the small altar. A woman holding up the book from which Father Eli read rested her hand over her heart.
The spiritual tension kept building. The community had now completely forgotten about us, and was entirely focused on the tableau before them. There was a hushed reverence. The church had become wreathed in incense and was lit with candles and fervent, almost-tangible prayer.
The people gave the moment their full attention, and breathed its holiness. Everyone was uplifted at the moment Father Eli held up the Host, and one of the altar girls rang a bell.
The singing after that was joyous. It was not just another ‘Kumbaya moment’. In layman’s terms, it rocked.
Everyone around us reached out to shake our hands, and we smiled shyly at one another. Peace. Peace. Peace.
Afterwards, we spoke briefly to Father Eli at the doorway of the church.
“The community is not doing too badly,” he said. “The fishing is weak, but the hotel and the missile-testing site at De Hoop employ some of our people.”
“Do tourists come up here?” we wanted to know.
“Yes, but they don’t seem to want to speak or engage with anyone,” Father Eli said ruefully. “They just look at the buildings as though the people aren’t there.”
We walked back to the hotel and went onto the delightful patio for beer shandies and bacon-and-Brie ciabattas with pesto and balsamic vinegar. We kept stealing glances up the hill at Kassiesbaai and that other life. And remembered the incense, the altar girls, the open-hearted singing and one transcendent moment in time when everything seemed holy, even to professional cynics like us.
Just after lunch, in the lounge we met Derek Drew, the hotel manager, beneath a strange trophy of a fish with horns. This was the famed ‘bokvis’ we’d heard about.
“It’s a trap,” I warned Jules. “Set for travel journalists and naïve tourists. Like the miniature kangaroo of the Kalahari, which is actually a spring hare. And the jackalope (or is that antellabit?) of Arizona, USA, that rabbit with the antlers on its head.”
“Who just arrived by helicopter on the front lawn?” was our first question.
“Oh, someone rich,” shrugged Derek.
In the mid-afternoon, we drove into the hinterland towards the mission village of Elim.
The first time we passed through the tiny Moravian settlement was back in the false summer of 2001, and we hardly noticed the place. Granted, the weather had turned foul and a bitter coastal wind was whipping us of
f to Arniston, where smoked snoek, Government port, roaring fires and deliciously trashy paperback novels beckoned. And marshmallows too.
Elim was a washed-out grey ghost out there beyond the windscreen wipers, its cottages bleak and shut tight against the elements. Yet something told us to track down the local tourism offices and take some numbers for a return trip. Even in this disgusting pea-soup weather beloved so much by coastal-Cape types, the village had a seductive, Thomas Hardy feel to it. And so, the next year, we returned in sunshine …
Beaulah Pontac of the Elim Tourism Bureau personally escorted us to Die Gastehuis, a beautiful old building with grey walls, white trim, thatched roof and green fences. Julienne and I wandered around the place, which could easily sleep a dozen, and finally chose a room for ourselves. Our lodge hostess, Bridget Jonathan, popped in and apologised for the fact that, due to the metre-thick walls, we could only catch the SABC 1 and 2 television channels. We assured her all was well: we weren’t even going to switch the thing on.
As the sun dropped over the Bokkeveld mountains and Bridget bustled about inside preparing a delicious meal of mutton chops with rice and vegetables, we sat on the steps outside, eavesdropping on the village of Elim. A few metres away stood the magnificent church, the proud centrepiece of the settlement around which everything revolved. From inside we heard the strains of a brass band. Down the road a motorcycle that had long lost its silencer came roaring up in the twilight, its teenage rider yelling with glee. Then the sound abruptly disappeared, and the brass band in the church struck up again. Kerkstraat, the main drag, stood lined with gingerbread cottages, mostly thatched, that seemed to stretch way beyond sight. The weather was balmy, and the stable doors of the cottages were half-opened, revealing Elimmers involved in the time-honoured custom of stoep-talk.
Elim was a very special place. You could not just buy a plot, build a face-brick nightmare, pull in and party with your millionaire buddies. Besides having to be a member of the Moravian Church, you also had to negotiate many other stages of approval before you would be accepted in the community. And, unlike most places in South Africa, the community always had the last say in matters here.
In 1824, the farm Vogelstruyskraal was bought by Hans Peter Hallbeck of the Germany-based Moravian Church. It was settled by former farm labourers from the area, who proceeded to build a church-protected community that was blessed with the sweet waters of the Nuwejaars River and the 70-odd magical, medicinal varieties of fynbos that abounded between Wolwengat and the Kouberg to the east.
Eight years later, a British barque sailing from Liverpool to Bombay was wrecked on a reef near Dyer Island. Two years later, hull planks from the wrecked ship were used in the building of the main church in the former farmstead of Vogelstruyskraal, now Elim.
The church clock dated back to 1764, when it had been installed in a small town in south-east Germany. After nearly 140 years of service in Europe, the clock was brought to Africa and, in 1911, was donated to the Elim church.
We heard it was the oldest working clock in South Africa. Then there was the church bell, which was probably the reason the village had never burnt down, even though most of its roofs consisted of highly flammable thatch.
“If there’s an emergency, someone just rings the church bell and everyone comes running”, said lifelong resident Christina Afrika, who ran a coffee shop at the old Water Mill. “And if someone dies, all the people of Elim gather around to comfort and to help with tea, sugar, cake. The support is always there, and people are upset if they aren’t informed of a situation they could have helped with.”
“Hell, in Jo’burg I could disappear for months and my neighbours wouldn’t notice,” I joked to some of the women of Elim as we drank coffee at Christina’s. I could see they thought I was a bit of a sad bugger.
The next morning I was up before the dawn. I set up a wide-angle shot of a sleeping Elim – not a soul was astir – timed for the precise moment when the sun hit the two rows of gingerbread cottages. Good cloud in background, Bokkeveld looking handsome in the distance.
First light duly arrived, accompanied by a glorious blast of rainbow from the heavens, starting somewhere at Cape Agulhas and dropping smack dab into the end of Kerkstraat.
After breakfast, Beaulah told us about the thatchers of Elim, world-famous men who travelled the globe practising their craft. “They’ve gone to places like Spain and Dubai on thatching projects,” she said. “They teach their sons how to lay thatch and so the custom goes on. In the week, however, you just see women, old folks and children in Elim. The men are out working as thatchers or on the farms. They come home at the weekend.”
I asked about perlemoen poaching. The newspapers had been bristling with tales of coastal poaching, Chinese Triad connections and the fact that if you spoke about it you could end up sleeping with the kelp.
They told me how a gang had infiltrated the sleepy little village in the late 1990s, seducing the local girls with cellphones and money and moving into some of the cottages. One Sunday the whole community of Elim gathered and marched to the houses involved, and warned the owners of the houses that they would have to evict the gang members or face leaving the village themselves. One of their pastors, Dominee Freddie Hans, spoke to the gang leaders and after that, they all moved out and into another, more welcoming, community …
I wanted to meet this amazing Freddie Hans, but the dominee was getting ready for the Sunday activities, where the newly confirmed members of the church shared a very special and private service. “It’s as if you’re really sitting at The Lord’s Table,” Beaulah beamed. “The men and women sit apart, dressed in either white or black. The women cover their heads with white cloth. The doors are closed and the curtains are drawn.” And anyhow, the gang affair was over and done with. More important than that was Eternity Sunday, being celebrated this weekend. As in small towns all over Europe, festivals like these keep the community bonded.
While Beaulah was escorting us around the village, showing us, amongst other things, the only monument to the abolition of slavery in the country, the village was heading to the cemetery to spruce up the family graves. Every year at this time, the plots were lovingly cleaned and decorated with flowers of the region, many of which are found nowhere else.
We joined the Elim community in their first service of the Sunday, just before the service. Inside the church, all was white, symbolising simplicity and purity. The organ, brought up from Three Anchor Bay in 1964, was a magnificent machine. And when the power failed, the brass band took over. I asked Beaulah why there were no crucifixes in the church.
“The members of the congregation carry their crosses in their hearts,” she replied …
Chapter 19: De Hoop to Witsand
When Oysters Attack
The floods of 1906 – well, who can forget them? Across the 36 000 sprawling hectares where the De Hoop Nature Reserve stands today, the low-lying fynbos is completely submerged. On Sundays, the extremely sociable farmers of the area visit each other by lifeboat, skiff or, in some cases, crudely built rafts.
This is where the farm Melkkamer once flourished, under the talented and eccentric hand of one John Henry (Biddy) Anderson.
So back to the floods. After seven days of constant rain, with water levels ever rising, the Wilsons of nearby Skipskop Farm decide to visit Biddy Anderson to see if he wants a bite and some help bringing his livestock to higher ground. Their arrival has to be unannounced, because all ‘coms’ are down. So the Wilsons pack a picnic lunch, jump in their lifeboat and row over to Melkkamer.
Biddy and his building partner, a man called Dickson, have been hard at work, putting up a loft in the stables. But the rain has temporarily halted all construction and the flood level is cause for concern. Biddy, for some reason, has a piano in the stable. He and Dickson manoeuvre it upstairs to the newly built loft. Biddy looks out the window at the world of water and decides what the heck. So they head back downstairs and bring up a case of whisky.
; And this is how the Wilsons find Biddy Anderson and Dickson: in fine whisky-high spirits up in the loft, tinkling the ivories without a care in the world.
Jules and I had arrived at De Hoop to stay the night and, possibly, head up to Koppie Alleen and watch 60-tonne whales breaching exultantly out of the sea below us. De Hoop was one of South Africa’s most important whale sanctuaries, especially for southern right cows and their calves. It was also a great place for mucking about with a macro lens in the aforementioned fynbos.
The only slight problem was the missile-testing range right next to De Hoop. And when we arrived at our little self-catering cottages, there was a note to say that the Overberg Testing Range would be firing missiles the next morning. Please don’t go up to Koppie Alleen. You might encounter a problem. Or something to that effect.
So it all looked like a bit of a bust, really. The weather was turning into a dog, all grey cloud and thunder-boomy in the distance. Pretty soon it was bucketing down and we found ourselves in the tiny De Hoop museum with nothing to do but wander disconsolately around the modest displays and sulk.
Then Jules found the Books. Oh yes, the Books. They were two tatty old scrapbooks full of memories and we fell on them like meerkats at a grub-feast. In one of them was The People of De Hoop Nature Reserve: A Cultural-Historical Heritage, compiled by Ann and Mike Scott of the Overberg Conservation Services. A demure title, considering the sexy old stories it contained.
This was where we read about Biddy Anderson, but before him came a slave called Februarie, originally from Hangklip near Pringle Bay. Februarie was a droster, a runaway slave, who chose to live as an outlaw instead of at the foot of a colonial master. He wandered up the coast (they weren’t firing missiles over your head in those days) some time in 1850 and set himself up in a cave on the north-west corner of what later became the Melkkamer property.
Initially, Februarie was well liked. He lived by hunting and taking out honey where he could find it, exchanging the sweet dripping combs for food with workers on surrounding farms. But then he got sly, and then the trouble began.