South Africa's many paths, tracks and roads are long and winding. They twist from the familiar to the uncharted. And so do their stories. Luke Alfred spent more than a year travelling South Africa's highways and byways on foot, exploring the contested history of the country's cities and countryside. From Johannesburg to rural Eastern Cape, down the literal and figurative road to Freedom Park, Alfred stumbled on fascinating places and characters. Written with deep insight, Alfred's eloquent and quirky personal observations are engaging and entertaining. This book offers fascinating little-known stories about our past and our present, and even a hopeful outlook for the future.
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Luke Alfred. Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step out and Find South Africa
Introduction
1
THE STORY OF THE ‘CARTRIDGE GIRLS’
2
One ‘meneer’ of a walk
3
The many majesties of Thomas Pringle
4
Pereira of Paton country
5
Fear and loathing on the Fish Hoek boardwalk
6
Sofasonke City
7
‘There was no magic about the shorts’
8
The man who draped his jacket over the Alexandra Dam wall
9
A long weekend
10
Blue square in the Marico
11
The sandalled spectre – a will-o’-the-wisp called Gandhi
12
The melancholy turnpike: A trample along reconciliation’s road
CHAPTER 1 – Mountain View, via Orange Grove, to the Modderfontein Dynamite Factory
CHAPTER 2 – Salem to Southwell
CHAPTER 3 – Ramble on the farm Eildon – Baviaans River Valley
CHAPTER 4 – Carisbrooke via Stainton to Ixopo, Alan Paton country
CHAPTER 5 – Muizenberg station to Simon’s Town
CHAPTER 6 – Mooki St, Orlando, to Credo Mutwa Centre and the Oppenheimer Tower
CHAPTER 7 – Makapanstad ramble with Philip Kgosana
CHAPTER 8 – Kloof Nek to Kasteelpoort cableway via the Overseer’s Cottage
CHAPTER 9 – Eikeboom in the Cederberg to the tableland up above
CHAPTER 10 – The Tara Rokpa Centre ramble, Marico country
CHAPTER 11 – Following Gandhi’s footsteps from Museum Africa to the Hindu Crematorium
CHAPTER 12 – Voortrekker Monument to Freedom Park via ‘Reconciliation Road’
Acknowledgements
Notes and references
Summary
About the author
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We all walk for different reasons. Charles Dickens rambled at night because of insomnia, getting up the moment he lay down. His walks brought him ‘into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object [than to stay awake] every night of the year’. They busied his feet as they opened his soul, curing him of the scourge of wakefulness.
Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey, Modestine, bashed across the Cévennes to ease Stevenson’s love-troubled heart, while Camilo José Cela, the Spanish novelist, walked in the spirit of contrariness. ‘The Alcarria is a beautiful region which people apparently have no reason to visit,’ he wrote in his picaresque Journey to the Alcarria. Then, gently, and at what one might call walking pace, he contradicted himself, charming the region into life in the pages of his wistful book.
.....
After touching the metal wings and admiring the fact that the several colours of paint hadn’t faded completely from the fuselage, I walked onwards. There was a seen-better-times bowling club on the other side of the Jabula parking lot, with that overgrown, boarded-up feel of holiday houses in winter. Everywhere in this part of Sandringham at this time of a Sunday morning I was pricked by a sadness borne of neglect. There was too much that was once full of life; there was too much that was empty or abandoned, too many relics and ghosts. The bowls club would once have been a happy place, full of the civilised lyrics of the greens, the buttery-slick woods, the jack rolled into place underneath the crêpe sole of a white bowls shoe, the jolly mayhem of the bar. Now weeds were marching across the once pristine verges. The Highveld sun was cracking the paint, time obstinately levering open the doors, the suburb’s music sombre and receding.
After the kosher deli and the Zimbabwean vendor, I walked down a gentle slope towards Sandringham High School, heading east through the obscure little suburbs of Glensan, Glenkay and Fairvale. Sandringham itself, on the opposite side of the road, was built to accommodate returning servicemen after World War II, and the names around me seemed to pay homage to imperial Great Britain and the Crown. There were streets called Victoria Road and, although I didn’t see them, consulting the map afterwards, I noticed Elizabeth and Wellington avenues. This neck of suburbia had clearly escaped the rage for renaming, although an official with too much time on his hands will shortly be inspired to call Sandringham Julius Nyerere Township and the R25 as it heads towards Edenvale Hospital, Ujamaa Way. Then again, who could fail to see the latent potential in a suburb called Fairvale? Simply add a ‘y’ and in ‘Fairyvale’ you’d have one of the smallest and Peter Pan-like of all Johannesburg’s suburbs.
