Читать книгу Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step out and Find South Africa - Luke Alfred - Страница 8

Salem, south-west of Grahamstown, to Southwell – about 24 kilometres

A couple of days before my walk in ‘frontier country’,I met a pilgrim, my first. For technical reasons, our flight to Port Elizabeth was delayed and the pilgrim and I had found ourselves close by, stranded back in the departure lounge, wondering if we could grab a quick coffee before being called to reboard. Although I have forgotten his name, there was something about him I liked. He seemed uninhibited in a trustworthy, vaguely shambolic kind of way, a man without narcissism or artifice. We got chatting and he mentioned that he had jetted in overnight from Tel Aviv (I noticed a wodge of Israeli postcards jutting out of his daypack) after spending three weeks in Jerusalem visiting churches, meeting clergy and proselytising.

About seven or eight years ago he had nearly died, he told me with careless intimacy. Several specialists had advised that the tumours (one behind the eye, one buried deep in his brain) were too invasive and therefore inoperable, and he had shrivelled up at the news, frightened and depressed. There was a hereditary predisposition in his family, he said, to high blood pressure and blockages, and there was nothing to be done. He couldn’t afford to go overseas for treatment, and the local specialists – he named them – were rude and jocularly dismissive. He knew he was going to die.

One night, he heard voices, and jerked out of bed. The voice was close and not unfamiliar, very real to him in an almost physical, reach-out-and-touch kind of way. It bade him to convert and open his heart to the Lord, which he did. Miraculously, his health improved, and after having been given only months to live, he had now been healthy for years. He had gone to Israel to share his story but found it a challenge because, for some reason I can’t now remember, he had difficulty walking. There was something wrong with his foot, and he found the Jerusalem taxi drivers money-grabbing and ill-mannered. He compared himself to John the Baptist, one of the Bible’s famous walkers, and, like him, he was now a disciple. Although he bubbled with a busy fervour that was not mine, he seemed happy, and somehow unburdened and unashamed. What he said was less important than how he said it. He was zealous, yes, but also radiantly calmed. He wasn’t a sophisticated man but, without being able to exactly articulate why, I felt pleased to have met him. We were called to board through a gate on the level above us and although I looked for him, he was nowhere to be found. I didn’t see him on the flight and, although I looked again, he wasn’t at the luggage carousel either. I sometimes wonder if I met him at all.

* * *

A couple of days later, on a mild Saturday morning, three of us started our walk from the hamlet of Salem, which is nothing more, really, than a Methodist church and a frost-crusted cricket pitch with a pink gush of bougainvillea between the two. My two companions were Craig Paterson and Jako Bezuidenhout, postgraduate students in the History department at Rhodes University. I’d met Craig in the course of researching a story on the history of indigenous horse racing in the Eastern Cape a couple of months previously, and on our long drives through the former Transkei we’d discussed the possibility of a walk.

The group had swelled because Craig felt Jako would be up for such an adventure and for weeks we’d haggled about a route. Craig wanted to walk the old wagon road from the hinterland to the coast, an idea I liked, but I was also keen on somehow walking past Theopolis, the now ruined site of a former frontier mission station. The problem with the two ideas, hopelessly romantic as they were, was that both the wagon route and Theopolis were on private land. Eastern Cape farmers are by and large a beleaguered lot, caught between the pincers of government land reform on the one hand and the vagaries of the market on the other. They weren’t going to respond well to slacker writers and leftie academics tramping over their land in search of gravestones and artefacts. Land restitution is a hot political potato in the Eastern Cape and the commonage around Salem had just been returned to the indigenous local community – a landmark case in the high court, with much learned comment on both sides. We weren’t going to tempt fate and so, armed with nothing more sinister than our curiosity and a half-jack of splendidly vile Night’s Watch whisky, we stuttered down to Salem in Craig’s put-upon Golf. The idea was to walk to Bathurst if we could, and if that proved too arduous (it was a walk of nearly 50 kilometres) we would bail at Southwell – approximately halfway. Rain was forecast for midnight on the Saturday and although Jako knew of a local farmer who would allow us to pitch our tent in the grounds of the Southwell Club, secretly we were all hoping that we might somehow find a bed.

Maybe Jako knew something about the local farmers that we didn’t, because he chose to walk in infantry browns, including the hat. His only concession to civilian attire was a white Reebok T-shirt and a pair of takkies, but he immediately spoiled this slight softening of his image as an egte right-winger by bringing a loaf of sliced government white. This he shoved into one of the pockets of his infantryman’s jacket and every so often he would nibble furtively from his rations. ‘If only my liberal Joburg friends could see me now,’ I joked, looking at Jako with mock distaste. We all laughed before trundling up the hill, noting the weight of our packs and adjusting our bodies to accommodate them, feeling the comfort of our feet in our boots and shoes, the simple joy of movement and being gloriously alive.

We made an interesting sight. Our packs were different, our clothing mismatched. I was in shorts, Craig was in jeans, Jako was in browns; I had a cap, Craig had nothing and Jako had his infantryman’s cap with clips on the side so you could fold up the brim. Best of all, we were lugging a five-litre bottle of water. We couldn’t attach this to any of the packs, so we took turns to carry it along. We looked ill-prepared, with grids fastened to pack straps at the last minute and the happy-go-lucky feel of okies on the march. Still, the weather was good and the day bright. The predicted rain seemed a long, long way away, as we trudged beside the single-lane tar road to Port Alfred for nine kilometres, passing the occasional grove of eucalyptus and stepping aside to let the four-by-fours and overloaded bakkies roar past.

We were chirpy in the beginning, walking well and making good time, our five-litre keg of water swinging jauntily from its plastic handle or being passed from hand to hand. After a couple of kilometres we noticed a troop of vervet monkeys, one of them sitting nonchalantly in the middle of the road. The troop were foraging in an old mielie field, the stalks dry and the once green leaves of the corn rustling thinly in the wind. The field was on our right as we walked but the monkeys had swarmed in from our left. If you looked carefully you could see the remnants of their pillage, the hard, golden-red kernels of corn, a discarded cob here and there. In the scrub separating the road and the fields there were corn leaves caught on the thorns, the vervets’ calling cards being nibbled by the wind.

Land restitution claims in this part of the world seemed to have resulted in an awkward truce. Those who lost land were twitchy and embittered (the Salem commonage included the church and cricket pitch, which were now theoretically in the claimants’ hands), while those who had benefited believed a historical injustice had been put to right. The case was interesting because the community had been offered the choice of either financial compensation or the land itself and had plumped for the latter, with a representative being quoted in the Grahamstown press saying they were keen on farming. Evidence on the ground, as it were, was meagre. There were a couple of large, green water tanks on the hills and a sense of low-scale irrigation. White farmers we spoke to later were dubious of such initiatives. They felt an element of the ‘show trial’ result in the high court’s decision but, more importantly, they told us that insufficient distinction was made between subsistence and large-scale commercial farming. The recently returned land was unlikely to produce crops with big enough yields to make sense in commercial terms. While this seemed fair enough, I wondered about the symbolic value of the return. How, emotionally, must the claimants have felt after having been deprived for so long? I imagined that, whatever they did with the land, there would have been a sense of closure, a sense of satisfaction at justice finally having been done.

Then again, this might be so much facile liberalism, maybe something of what John Berger has called ‘infantile proletarianism’. The farmers here were henpecked by legislation and frightened of the future. They graded the roads themselves and faced the ever-present prospect of cattle rustling. They were linked not only by association – the same family names invariably crop up: Amm, Shaw, Bradfield, Stirk, Ford, Keeton – and the fact that they were wizards of technology, but also by history and rootedness. They knew the story of the land and who came from where. They knew of the forts and redoubts, the drifts and the secret river meanders. They also found themselves charmed by my companions. ‘The settlers came from industrial cities, they knew nothing about farming,’ Jako told us. ‘The few Afrikaans farmers on the land found themselves in a quandary because they knew potatoes weren’t planted on top of the soil. Should they be neighbourly and point out the error of the Engelsman’s ways, or should they bide their time and, then, when the farms went bust, buy them up at rock-bottom prices?’

After about two hours’ walking, we reached the gravel-road turn-off. We stopped, drank water, and munched on chocolate and meat sticks. The day was wonderful – warm without being hot, with the tug of a gentle breeze. We eased off our packs and I took off my sweater, suddenly feeling the chill of the pooled sweat in the small of my back. We joked and cavorted, all soberly aware of the road ahead, trying to delay our restart for as long as we could.

Gathering up, it wasn’t long before we reached the turn-off for the Assegai River. The views were bigger and better, the countryside mixed scrub and farmland. We passed family homesteads, the men sitting outside on upturned beer crates, shooting the breeze, the children following us briefly, much amused comment and shaking of heads about the self-evident foolhardiness of walking to Southwell. The deeper we seeped into the countryside, the more removed from Grahamstown and Salem we felt, and so we plunged into the quiet, only our footfalls and the scuffing of our boots on the gravel road to keep us company. At one point we were passed by a mountain-biker, humourlessly intent on getting to his destination. The episode – almost silent, quickly over – had a surreal, Alice in Wonderland-ish feel to it and we laughed as he bounced away, his legs frantically pedalling in that comical, slightly exaggerated way of mountain-bikers. After a long downhill, our legs beginning now to get really tired, we reached the causeway of the Kariega River for lunch, probably the lowest point of our march. Craig and Jako took off their takkies and boots to bathe their feet. We drank Game and wolfed cheese-and-salami sandwiches, and basked in the quiet, gazing tiredly at the creep of winter water as it lazed towards the sea, congratulating ourselves on time well made.

The route immediately after lunch was punishing – a long series of misleadingly torturous climbs off the valley floor. This was dairy-farming country and there were parcels of lush pastureland all around, bright green in the softening afternoon sun. The wind came up and our pace slowed as we slogged back to higher ground. The southern horizon was building up with cloud and my thoughts began to turn to where we might spend the night. We’d manage in a tent, even in rain, although it would be cramped. But it wouldn’t be my first choice, and I wondered if perhaps we might find ourselves on the clubhouse floor, using dusty cushions as makeshift mattresses, surrounded by faded posters and team photos, and long-outdated calendars from the Port Alfred butchery.

We must have walked around 15 kilometres at this point, perhaps a little more. We were stopping more frequently but such were our relations with each other – I knew Craig reasonably well, Jako not at all – that the dictates of machismo forbade any admission of fatigue. So we soldiered on, plodding gently upwards, only to find that we had reached a false rise, which meant that we had to do it all over again. Talk here centred on the South African historians they admired. There was slight grouchiness about Charles van Onselen, although this was trumped by grudging admiration, and we fell into discussion about Noel Mostert’s Frontiers, the epic story of ragged conflict between the settlers and the Xhosa people. ‘That’s a meneer of a book,’ said Jako in his droll Eastern Cape way, and we laughed, the mirth taking our minds off our sore feet and the increasingly heavy weight on our backs.

There were nine so-called ‘kaffir’ or ‘frontier’ wars fought over land like this between roughly 1780 and 1880, which amounted pretty much to a hundred years of constant war, with periods of watchful truce between. Jako and Craig’s sympathies would vacillate between the oppressors and the oppressed, sometimes finding that there weren’t clear distinctions between the two. They knew, for example, that the settlers had been forsaken. They often came from big industrial cities (there was a strong Luddite component in the settler community, Craig said) and had little knowledge or experience of farming. Their skills were few, their hearts frightened, their nights dreadful. Contrast this with the Xhosa, who felt invaded and therefore belittled, fearful that this was a beginning of something that wouldn’t end. Was there enough land for them all? Would the heathens soon be on their way? Skirmishes and cattle rustling were year-round sports and the mutual incomprehension was stark. The Xhosa didn’t understand how men could wear blouses and watch the night sky for portents, while the settlers couldn’t comprehend how you could move cattle across land in search of sweeter grazing, not fencing them in pens or corrals. They looked at each other from across the bluffs of rivers like the Kariega and were united in misunderstanding and fear-crazed loathing.

Craig and Jako’s ambivalence was deepened, I would hazard, by the fact that the settlers left behind material remains. The imaginative engagement with the past is in some sense tactile, predicated on being able to walk in a church graveyard or run the palm of your hand across a collapsed gravestone. Culturally, they were closer to the settlers – we all were – but they also felt aggrieved on the Xhosa’s behalf. Reflexively, they didn’t like the idea of dispossession but neither did they like the idea of distant Cape Town elites using the settler farmers as a bulwark against the tribes. It seemed too shamelessly cynical. ‘These guys were just fed to the wolves,’ Jako said at one point, and I agreed.

But it was also more complicated than straightforward ambivalence. Jako was writing his MA thesis on the forced removal of communities in Kouga, Colchester and Klipfontein to a patch of barren land called Glenmore on the edge of the old Ciskei. In 1979 the apartheid government dubbed these indigent and unemployed people ‘redundant’, and they were rounded up, herded into trucks and dumped as far away from anyone else as possible, an eyesore as far as white South Africa was concerned. The government attempted to sanitise the move by spinning a yarn that the removed communities would find decent schools and clinics, parks and community halls. Glenmore was to become, in effect, ‘a model township’. It became nothing of the sort.

Many years later, the new post-apartheid government eventually offered ‘the redundant’ compensation amounting to about R130 000 per removed family, just as long as claims were submitted within the stipulated time. With the help of human-rights lawyers, the former Klipfontein residents managed to lodge their claim on time, whereas those originally from Kouga and Colchester failed to meet the deadline. Although the deadline was extended, those from Kouga and Colchester once again failed to meet the cut-off date, while those from Klipfontein were by now receiving their compensation. What you had, therefore, was the creation of a group of ‘haves’ within the Glenmore community, while those originally from Kouga and Colchester remained ‘have-nots’, unable to muster enough resources or energy to complete the paperwork.

According to Craig and Jako, all this disappointment and anger were concentrated in one person, an old man from Glenmore who was dubbed a ‘serial window breaker’ by Grocott’s Mail, Grahamstown’s weekly newspaper. His name was Ben Mafani and every two years or so he would catch a taxi from Glenmore to Grahamstown, a trip of about 50 kilometres one way, and walk to the back of the high court. Once there, he would find a rock and in full sight of passers-by, lob it through one of the court windows. His first experience of one-man protest resulted in arrest and temporary imprisonment, although the case was eventually dropped. Several years later and after letters aplenty to the government and public protector had been ignored, he refined the democratic process by painting the rock he lobbed through the high-court window: white to symbolise freedom, black ‘because my people are sitting in a bad place’ and red because ‘my people are crying blood’. For this act of political audacity, Mafani was re-arrested and released on R300 bail, according to the South African Press Association’s parliamentary correspondent, Ben Maclennan, who has heroically followed the Glenmore case since the very beginning. Mafani’s trial resulted in the government belatedly taking the case of those dumped at Glenmore seriously and finally brought the issue of compensation into the foreground, although I have been unable to ascertain whether Mafani’s was a generalised protest or one specifically on behalf of those who couldn’t complete the requisite paperwork.

Later research confirmed that Glenmore was more than simply a twilight zone for the unwanted. Soon after the removals started, they stopped, because it was belatedly realised that without employment opportunities the model township would never take off. For those already relocated, the situation unfolded like a cruel farce. They couldn’t return to Colchester or Kouga because they had no homes to which to return. They were hardly likely to experience much of a future in Glenmore either because the social experiment they were once part of had officially been terminated. And so they hung in a kind of absurd suspended animation: unable to go back and incapable of going forward. Much like the original settlers, they were the damned and the forsaken – weightless people in placeless places, eternally trapped in a country-and-western ballad by Kenny Rogers or Merle Haggard.

According to a monograph published by Maclennan for the South African Institute of Race Relations in 1987, the folk trapped in Glenmore found themselves for the most part in poorly made or incomplete houses. The slats that passed for walls were seldom nailed cleanly to their frames and neither were the walls plastered. Often the walls didn’t reach the asbestos roof, meaning heat was lost in winter and the houses were draughty all year round. Water piped from the Fish River was impure and gastroenteritis was rife, as were malnutrition, septicaemia and keratomalacia (the clouding of the cornea due to vitamin deficiency). There were very few shops in the area but the few that were there mercilessly jacked up their prices. A bag of mielie-meal, which sold normally for R8.40 at Boesmansrivier, cost R14.60 when bought from the store at Tyefu. Bread usually cost 17 cents a loaf but prices were raised to 20 cents by shopkeepers with stores closer to Glenmore.

The community also discovered that, with the move from the coast, their buying power contracted. Employment opportunities had been by no means abundant where they came from but people understood their environment and knew their neighbours. There were circuits of patronage and networks of support. Scarce though it was, money could be made, which wasn’t the case in Glenmore. People stared at their hands and watched their children wither away, believing themselves to be cursed. ‘In this place we are all hungry,’ Maclennan quotes a herbalist as saying. ‘Soon we will have to eat our children like pigs.’ As they became hungrier and sicker, they realised that there was ample free supply of one thing they hadn’t considered – coffins. A consignment had been trucked up from Grahamstown and housed in the superintendent’s office. ‘So when a person or child died you just went to the superintendent and took the size of coffin you wanted, free of charge,’ Maclennan quoted a resident as saying.

As the afternoon shadows lengthened, so we, too, became trapped and forsaken. All we wanted to do was sit down but we realised that by sitting down we might never be able to get up, so we resisted the temptation and plodded on in that slightly tentative, pain-wracked way of men dying on their feet. It wasn’t a very active form of resistance (we were too tired to actively resist anything), more like a grumpy form of limited passive resistance. Given that we were barely able to put one foot in front of the other by this point, very soon our resistance crumbled and, without perhaps even realising it, we were again sitting down. We hadn’t discussed sitting down. It was more like sleepwalking, or a kind of zombie seance. Suddenly we were on our bums, happy in the silent knowledge that we weren’t walking. But the problem with sitting down wasn’t only that we mightn’t be able to get up again – it was far more fundamental. It meant that we were getting no closer to our destination. This was our terrible problem, and a qua problem; it was something we actively tried not to think about. The problem was therefore compounded because problems can only be solved – what would the correct verb be in the circumstances? – by the application of one’s mental faculties. As we were sitting down, numbed by tiredness, there was very little that was active at this point about mind, body or spirit. We were, to coin one of Jako’s many colourful Eastern Cape phrases, vrot with fatigue, particularly the creeping and insidious mental fatigue that comes from not thinking about what we should be applying our collective mind to. We were a bright lot, after all. We had many postgraduate degrees to rub together, and papers, articles, books. We were very, very learned. Yet at this point we couldn’t think, couldn’t even think about thinking. We were too tired. Our walking had, in fact, crippled us in every sense. Yet we had no alternative but to walk because only by walking could we stop walking, if you see what I mean. It was a predicament of veritably Glenmore-type proportions.

During one of these frequent stops, when we were trying not to think about the consequences of stopping, we happened to sit down beside what we thought was a field of bright-red salad tomatoes. Craig investigated and discovered that what we’d seen were, in fact, dinky little pimentos. We passed a pimento or two round, wondering if this was dinner for the night. We would all sit here, drink the last of our water and quietly collapse, possibly removing our packs, but probably not bothering. Thankfully, one of us had the presence of mind to reach out into the wider world and it was roundabout here that Jako felt the time had come to phone his farmer contact. Craig and I listened to the conversation carefully. The farmer said we were pretty close to the edge of his property. Just a kilometre or two down the road on the left-hand side was a fort he was busy restoring. We didn’t have far to go, he said, with the galling brio of drivers underestimating distance because they spend so much time in their cars. He’d meet us there shortly. Of course, we didn’t realise then how long it would take us to walk the last stretch, so with what remained of our energy and good humour we lugged our packs onto our backs and headed off. It couldn’t have been more than 20 or 25 minutes before we met Colin Stirk, the farmer, and his wife, Lyn, but it seemed like a lifetime – a lifetime of pain.

After preliminaries and handshakes, Colin insisted on showing us his restored fort or, to give it its official name, the Woodlands Fort. It once had a fig tree creeping through the roof from inside, he told us, and showed us the new timbers and plasterwork, the new shiny roof. Colin was proud of the restoration, and I noticed, despite my tiredness, that his chest seemed to puff out a couple of inches as he narrated the tale, a quickening of his tone and timbre. The fort had been on the property for well over 150 years, he said, and in his family for as long. It was interesting listening to him talk because I sensed he almost felt obliged to restore the fort, without being able to fully understand why. There was no great financial advantage to be gained. He wouldn’t house people or attract tourists. It was simply something that needed to be done, a primal duty or rite of passage. He needed to make his mark and place himself and his family in the folds of the surrounding land and therefore history. Restoring the fort was a means of nailing it all down.

I encountered much of this impulse in frontier country – the desire to locate and understand. It had the shape and charge, I think now, of something almost metaphysical, a spiritual longing to establish something continuous and intact, a tradition, perhaps, or a story. This urge to write things down, to preserve them and put them in a frame on the wall has always been important for the descendants of the settlers. It was more so now, I would hazard, because they felt besieged. Colin had just lost two of his prize cows, he told us later. The thief had been a trusted and well-liked member of staff, who had expertly cut them up and shuttled them quickly to Umtata. Colin and Lyn had attended the trial in Grahamstown and noticed the former employee couldn’t look them in the eye when he was taken down to the holding cells. They were comforted by the fact that they knew who had butchered the cows only because a watchful member of staff had become suspicious, and she had had the courage to tip them off.

In retrospect, I realise that Colin and Lyn didn’t quite know what to make of us. They didn’t often encounter three dishevelled walkers (one of them in army browns) pounding in from Salem and, although they were curious, they remained watchfully hospitable for an hour or two as they made up their minds. It helped when Colin asked me as we were bouncing along in his bakkie on the road back to the farmhouse if we’d like a bed for the night. I’d long cast false modesty aside and said yes, we would, with unseemly haste. Before long we were each shown comfortable, tastefully appointed bedrooms, with a shower at the end of the corridor. When we next looked, there was a beer in our hands. Colin fired up the braai and we got to know one another. Craig and I silently exchanged glances as Jako started charming Lyn with stories of his brother’s challenged years as a teenager. He blew up postboxes and ran an informal plumbing business on the side, redirecting sink outlet pipes when the fever gripped. Once he even forced a neighbour to flee to Cradock because of a threatening note he stuck to his door. I don’t know what Craig was thinking, but I was thinking that we’d landed pretty well. We could have been looking for dry wood and grilling wors on a verge outside of the Southwell Club, wondering if, snug in our sleeping bags, we were going to be woken by rain in the middle of the night.

Soon Colin snapped open his laptop and we were looking at Google Earth images of vacant fields outside of Port Alfred. If you looked carefully you could see wagon-track fingers pointing into the interior. Some overlapped, some were separate, yet they were all clear and remarkably consistent, pointing in the general direction of where we were now. The wagons would have been loaded when the Kowie River was still deep and navigable enough to support a small functioning harbour. Lighters used to flutter in from Port Elizabeth or Cape Town, and maybe even Knysna or George, and discharge knots of apprehensive settlers on the quayside. I can only imagine their trepidation, the Bibles and muskets, the bags of flour and seed, perhaps a hoe perched on top of their pile of meagre possessions. The settlers would have squinted into the harsh African sunlight and noticed the sharply defined shadows, the call of the wild in the dense green bush, and wondered what on earth they were doing.

The following morning, just after breakfast and the best sleep in the world, we all met Colin’s dad, Lynn. Colin had phoned him the night before, in the first flush of excitement after our arrival, and wanted him to pop round. Colin’s old man told him that he couldn’t come because, although it was only 8 p.m., he was already in bed. Standing close by, admiring some old photographs as I overheard their conversation, I smiled inwardly. Colin so desperately wanted his excitement to be his old man’s, yet there was something hit-and-miss to his strivings, as there so often is in family situations. As a middle-aged man with a mother who had recently died and a father who was beginning to show signs of neediness, I understood the exchange deep in my heart. I understood that the roles of father and son were now inverting. Despite the fact that Colin would have to wait, there was something tender here and universal. It made me like Colin more than I already did.

Sipping coffee around the big kitchen table on Sunday morning, Lynn told us that he was trying to write a book, an autobiography of sorts. It was not going well. He found himself in quicksand, unable to move, but he hoped that our visit to Theopolis later that morning would provide inspiration. First, though, we needed to visit St James’s church, swing past Southwell’s old school hall and have a look at the old clay tennis courts at the Southwell Club, with their quaint, salt-painted tramlines. The foundation stone at St James was laid in August 1870 and little more than a year later the church was officially opened by a reverend called Stumbles. ‘After a cold lunch,’ records Doris Stirk in her Southwell Settlers, ‘the bishops and clergy left for Grahamstown in their buggies and traps, while the remainder, in spite of the rain, partook of a sumptuous tea which was provided by the Southwell ladies, and a sale of fancy articles, which together with the offertory, brought in the sum of £61 to pay off debts accrued on the building.’

We walked around the little church and the graveyard, noticing the thick-set old lemon trees and casually abundant hydrangeas. I pocketed two lemons, comfortingly fat and knobbly, to take home to my wife, and we poked around the graveyard, Craig and Jako poring over collapsed headstones as we tried to picture how things were, looking for a way to access the graveyard as one might open a book. I stood for a quiet minute in the free-standing bell cubicle next to the church, noticing a plaque bearing an inscription to George Ford and his wife, Doris May (née Stirk), erected by their children in 1969. Everywhere in settler country, I noticed, was the same gyre of names looping back through space and time, the circles and ceaseless continuities. They spun back to Southwell, the village in Nottinghamshire from which these settlers came, yet admitted none but their own, the circle closed to other names and deeds and histories. Names associated with ‘coloured’ people and, to use the historical colonial term, the ‘Hottentots’ (the Khoikhoi), like Whitbooy Levellot and Ruyter Apollos, appear in records and books from round about this time. As a rule, however, the names of black people do not. As far as they are concerned, there are seldom written records and certainly no church graveyards. Their dead remain sharply forgotten, bones in the veld, neglect begetting further neglect.

In the graveyard we discovered a headstone commemorating the life of one William Gray – ‘… killed in action near the Karraa by the rebel Hottentots of Theopolis …’ – and, then, less than an hour later, found ourselves on the farm on which Theopolis was situated, currently the property of the generous Howson Long, a wiry man with greying hair and a gunslinger’s moustache. We were hoping to find a small group of graves, particularly those belonging to the family of the Reverend George Barker. The reverend and his wife, Sarah Williams, were married in London in 1815 and arrived in South Africa the following year. Their intention had been to serve in Robert Moffat’s missionary station in Kuruman, but Sarah’s ill-health prevented her from making the journey north. They joined Rev. Ulbricht as members of the London Missionary Society at the Theopolis Mission instead.

By all accounts, Barker was an enterprising and warm-hearted man. He made his own nails in the smithy and whenever he was asked to provide support to Presbyterian or Methodist flocks scattered nearby, he willingly did so, either jumping onto his horse or walking to their parish, cheerfully on the lookout for quagga and elephant as he bundled down bridle paths spidery across the hills. Despite the family’s hand-to-mouth existence and the questionable spiritual commitment of the Khoikhoi and a group then referred to as ‘Fingoes’ to the tenets of Christianity, there were glimpses of paradise. ‘He [Barker] was also a keen gardener and planted black and white mulberries, as well as orange and peach trees, which he procured on his various journeys to Lombard’s Post and elsewhere,’ writes Stirk. ‘He frequently rode down to the Kasouga river mouth with family, friends and visitors, where they bathed, rode along the beach and fished.’

While Barker survived the Khoikhoi’s splendid indifference and the deluge of 1826, he didn’t cope with the death of his wife. Ten years after the great, destructive flood, she died in childbirth and, with Long’s help, we managed to track down her grave and at least one other. Colin came along with his dad, and the farmer’s family trudged along with us. We parked the bakkies on the edge of the thicket and stumbled around for five minutes before finding the headstones. It was a strange moment, neither anticlimactic nor profound. It seemed the act of finding the graves was more important than thinking about them or trying to wrap our heads around what it all meant, because soon most of the party were heading back to open ground, perhaps too awkward to remain around the graves for long. As the main group departed, Jako and I found what we thought was probably the stillborn child’s grave, listing hopelessly beneath a covering of leaves. We knelt down to make out the inscription, surmising that this was probably the Barkers’ stillborn child, but weren’t finally sure. We couldn’t make out time’s illegible scrawl.

Within two years Barker had left the mission, heading for the slightly more civilised confines of Paarl. He lived there for the rest of his life, remarrying and eventually becoming blind before he died in 1861. By moving to Paarl, Barker missed the disintegration of his beloved mission – and the action that took Gray’s life. In 1851 a group of Khoikhoi men staying at the mission conspired to overthrow the station and return the land to the Xhosa. From what I can gather, the Theopolis economy was faltering. They had little water for irrigating crops and no lime (a scarcity throughout this section of the Cape Colony, according to Thomas Pringle), an important ingredient in concrete. Economic activity was confined to felling local trees for wagon parts and charcoal. Few crops survived the pestilence and rust, baptisms were down and morale was low after the death of Reverend Sass, Barker’s successor. The religious vacuum and the prevailing harshness of the times forced some of the mission residents to look for alternative alliances and this is what led the Khoikhoi to kill some of their own before fleeing. News of the sedition reached the surrounding forts, while those who remained at Theopolis were evacuated under protection to Grahamstown. Under their leader, Kiewit Piqueur, the rebels made off with what they could, camping in the bush, and although some of them were killed in subsequent actions, others escaped to continue to harry Theopolis for another day. Gray was killed in one of many inconclusive skirmishes, as the rebels and their pursuers played a prolonged game of cat and mouse across the hills. It was the beginning of the end for Theopolis. Very soon it returned to dust.

We had lunch at the Pig ’n Whistle in Bathurst and discussed the controversial state of land reform. As we tucked into our burgers, Colin mentioned that government had appointed intermediaries to help new farmers find their way. It seemed like a wise initiative, although such cosy positions often went to the wrong people: farmers who had themselves failed at farming or those with little knowledge or empathy to offer. He spoke of a well-connected man down country who’d managed to finagle a farm through his political connections. The farm was once used for producing pineapples but that had long since ceased. It was marginal anyway, whether it had been repatriated or not. Perhaps it looked better on a spreadsheet of returned farms than it did in the flesh. Not for the first time on our walk through frontier country, I felt confused and depressed, aghast at the shallow predictability of it all.

After dropping off Jako at his parents’ house in Kenton-on-Sea, we trundled back to Grahamstown. The rain we’d heard about – and successfully missed – began to flush down the Golf’s windscreen. Close to the Salem turn-off we noticed a stationary car’s hazard lights on the other side of the road and, in the middle of it, a man sitting down. We stopped and went across to him to find that he was not only hopelessly drunk, but uppity with it. Still mildly drunk ourselves, Craig and I grinned through his protestations and yanked him off the road, walking him to a ditch a couple of metres back. As we got back into the car, he sort-of abused us, kind-of thanked us, and we chuckled as we went on our way, darkness falling, the rain making us feel dry and warm inside the car. We hadn’t got very far when we noticed in the rear-view mirror that he was up on his feet, swaying happily back down the road. We turned around, bundled him back into the car and went in search of the turn-off to home. We found it easily enough and put him on his way. The man, giggling as he lurched through the remaining light, seemed happier when we left him the second time. We felt quietly pleased with ourselves, Samaritans in the gloaming. It was a good way to end a memorable weekend.