KOBUS' STORY; THE TREK BEGINS
KOBUS
To anyone hitching around South Africa I would suggest avoiding the towns of Standerton and Volksrust. Both have wide roads leading out of town, beside which there are broad swathes of open ground inviting motorists to pull over. You would think. No such luck. I stood in both towns for hours, waggling my thumb with mute weariness at solitary men in otherwise empty cars. According to the lore of hitching men on their own are more likely to pull over. If they don't then they indicate with embarrassed hand gestures their intention of turning down some side road just beyond you. You know this is bullshit, but at least taking the time to make an excuse.
In Standerton and Volksrust, instead of looking embarrassed, the beefy faces of the men passing me darkened into distrustful scowls. I'd left Secunda a bit late, but by the time I neared Ladysmith it was almost five. I'd managed to get a ride with a friendly mechanic in a pick-up truck reeking of oil - a good deal of it coating his overalls. In the middle of nowhere we passed a tall, gaunt figure trudging along with a travel bag slung over each shoulder. The mechanic pulled over and he climbed into the back. A frayed fedora was clamped over long hair and his suit jacket was equally frayed. A huge grey beard waggled in the cold air sweeping over him. Whenever I turned to look back he grinned and gave me the thumbs up. He looked homeless, and I found myself hoping we wouldn't be dropped at the same spot. He was bound to ask me for a few bob, or to hitch alongside me, which would diminish any chance I had of getting a ride.
My luck was out. The mechanic dropped us both at an intersection on the far side of Ladysmith, just beyond the army camp. The bearded hobo trudged up the road in the direction of Cape Town; I trudged down the road in the direction of Durban. Forty five minutes later we both trudged back to the intersection in the dark. We were surrounded by bush - no streetlights here - and in these conditions, with a car coming along only every twenty minutes or so, there was no chance of a ride. We were stuck together.
'There's a church up the road here,' he said, pointing back towards the army camp. 'We can spend the night inside the entrance. We'll be hidden, and dry if it rains.'
I thought: right, but walked back with him anyway. I could make my excuses and get away in due course. We chatted as we walked. He spoke with a strong Afrikaans accent, in a pleasantly deep voice. The recessed church doorway, when we came to it, was indeed hidden from the road behind a hedge, but I still had zero intention of spending the night in there with a total stranger.
And that was Kobus' story. I don't want to romanticise what must be a brutally hard existence, but he made it sound almost appealing, in a picaresque kind of way. We found a spot opposite the caravan park, beneath a big spreading oak, and bedded down for the night. I used my backpack as a pillow and fell asleep around eleven. I remember waking with a start when Kobus turned over suddenly. He made a soothing, clucking noise, reprimanding me for my anxiety. He was right. I'd woken thinking he was about to attack me.
Around four in the morning the wind picked up and it became too cold to sleep. I didn't have much on to keep me warm - two t-shirts and a thin hiking jacket, but he had even less: a thin shirt under his grey jacket. We got up and crept past the one-man sentry box at the entrance to the camp. I'm not sure if anyone was inside there but we took no chances and made no noise. Then we snuck into the ablution block and had delicious hot showers. When he undressed his torso was covered with those crude blue tattoos you get in prison. We passed the soap back and forth over the tops of our booths. Then we snuck out and walked down the road towards the intersection On the way we'd planned too make a fire but we never got round to it. We sat on a log instead and smoked. With grey light seeping over the horizon we parted at the intersection - he heading up, me down. The last I saw of him, skylighted on the top of the hill, he was climbing into the back of another pick-up truck. He waved as he sank down over the top of the hill. I got my ride about half an hour later, all the way to Durban.
THE TREK BEGINS
I left Durban around nine in the morning and headed up the N3, trying to absorb the sights instead of driving in the unseeing dreamy dwall that I usually fall into behind the wheel. I had my journal perched on my lap and I was developing the knack of writing while I drove, looking down to spot a line every now and then. Past Pietermaritsburg I left clear skies and drove into rolling cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon like grey cat's fur.
Soon I was passing Mooi River. I decided to have a look at Bruntville township. It was layed out in depressing pink and blue rows, like little monopoly houses, on a hill opposite the town. These were the modern Reconstruction and Development homes made from hollow cinder blocks. They looked far better in their drab but honest original grey than they did painted the horrible mock-happy pastel pinks and blues.
I was determined to drive around the townships to get a balanced view of the country. What I really felt, once I was inside, was ridiculous. I trundled down dirt roads beneath this depressing unbroken cloud cover and peered into peoples homes. They were hanging up their washing and sitting around their front doors in ripped out car chairs with the springs popping out. They stared blankly back at me as I drove past. I felt cheaply voyeuristic, so obviously like a white man come to check out how the Natives live. To get around this I tried to look distracted while I trundled around - like a quantity surveyor say, or - with my Cannon out - like a roving photographer for Life magazine. All this did in the end was make me feel more ridiculous.
I passed drab, teetering conglomerations of rusty shacks thrown together with patchwork corrugated iron. They and the monopoly homes, as impersonal as pump-houses, sat on barren patches of red earth. An occassional rectangle of scraggly vegetables passed for a garden.
A pre-primary school the size of a small scout hall was painted a brave buttercup yellow. 'Education Is Freedom' was written in large black letters on one wall. In the distance I saw a larger two storey high-school. It's red bricks looked raw and new jutting out of the grungy groundcover of shacks. I passed goats roaming the dirt roads, the bells around their necks clonking dolefully. Spud, with the upper half of his body protruding outside his window, went taught with excitement whenever we passed one. I had to grab him by the tail to prevent him from baling out the window. The goats watched him nervously with those demonic yellow eyes of theirs, with the horizotal black slots for pupils, and clonked quickly away down the road. (Spud lost it a few times later in the trip. I'd be cruising slowly along a dirt road when he'd go scrabbling over the window sill with a little squeal and find himself in the middle of a herd of unimpressed cows and the odd bull. All I had to do was pull over and open the door and he would come scuttling back with shocked flat ears and a look that said
Groups of dudes standing on the roadside beside the open doors of battered taxis gave me knowing, jaundiced looks as I cruised past. But after this initial look, if I passed them again, they ignored me. As I was leaving, driving over the bridge spanning the highway, I passed a grizzled old man trudging towards Bruntville. His once blue overalls were faded grey. He was holding a sickle blade, worn down to a thin rind from repeated sharpening. When I pulled over to take a photo of him he told me he had helped build the monopoly houses. He said they took about a week to build. Although the light was bad for taking photo's - the low cloud cover muted the hills and Bruntville and Mooi River across the way with a gloomy drabness - I gave him R5 and asked him to pose beside the bridge railing. A row of pink monopoly houses were in shot behind him. As I took the photograph a coloured man in a panelbeaten blue Mazda 323 passed us heading into Bruntville. His head whipped around and he did a squealing u-turn and rushed back to where the Uno was parked on the shoulder of the offramp.
'Ay Bra!How's it going! Taking photo's?' he asked, leaning out of window and yelling at me, like he was a chommie; but also with a proprietory air, like he was on the town council and had a right to know. He had a large, meaty head with quick, alert little eyes. He looked like a family man who had braais with his choms but got mean with a few quarts inside him. A skinny boy sat beside him, probably his son.
'I saw you back there too,' he went on, pointing at Bruntville. 'Do you work for the papers?'
'Yes,' I said, trying for a friendly professional demeanour.
'Which one?' he asked.
'The Daily News.'
'Ya? So what are the photo's for?' His head gave a little questioning backward nod, still friendly: I'm not interrogating you chommie, I'm just shooting the breeze here.
'For this article I'm doing, ' I said lamely, putting the lens back on my Cannon and shuffling cagily to the Uno. I could feel I wasn't up to carrying this lie off. My township experience had not gone well; my famed photojournalist persona needed bolstering with a few Stouts.
'Ya? What's the article about?' he asked, giving another backward nod of his head, slower this time, more measured and questioning. His little black eyes had settled on me. It felt like he was cornering me into admitting that I'd been slumming it, peering through kitchen windows at how the other half lived. And the thing is, that is exactly how I did feel. If I was there to build houses or write an article fair enough. But to just drive around, a white pleb from the Burbs, creeping fearfully around the savage township, peering into people's homes - it just wasn't on somehow. Beside me the old man was hovering on the grassy verge, his hands clasped before him, holding his worn out blade. He was watching us with rheumy eyes, his head cocked attentively to one side.
'It's just an article I'm doing,' I said weakly.
He peered at me dubiously, waiting for more. I said nothing and climbed into the Uno.
'And what about the dog?' he asked me.
I looked at Spud for a few seconds, then back at him; but he stared right back with a half smile, giving another backward nod of his head, along with a playfull flicker of his eyebrows: I'm just shooting the breeze here chommie. Spud had his head out of the window, ears cocked, listening to the sound of the goats clonking their bells in the field beside us. When one bleated he hung his front legs outside his window and his arse quivered. The old man lost interest in proceedings and began to shuffle wearily up the road towards Bruntville.
'The dog?' I said. 'He keeps me company.'
'Ay, now that's a fierce dog man! Those dogs bite people. Tell me' - he grinned again - 'does he keep you safe while you drive around?'
His son had been sitting bored beside him. Now he looked around his father's shoulder at me and grinned. Dad was tuning this white oke!
'He's a friendly dog. He's never bitten anyone,' I said. This was true. 'He likes goats though.'
'Ya, I can see that. Tell me, which paper do you work for again?'
Fuck this prick. I'd had enough. 'The Daily News. Have a good day mate.'
I plonked my Cannon, which I'd been stuffing into its bag, onto the dashboard and started the Uno. The man's face tightened. He had kept his engine running. Now, keen to be first off the mark, he rammed it into gear and took off in a tight half circle, engine screaming, back towards Bruntville. As he did so he stuck his head out the window and yelled, putting his disdain into it now that the polite groove of the conversation was over, 'Ya Bra! I hope that dog keeps you verrry safe!
As the Mazda came round his son gave me a receding look that said, Whiteys, slippery customers, you can't trust them. Dad thrashed the Mazda quickly into third and then back into second as he almost skidded to a halt beside the old man. The old man leant over, speaking into the passenger window, while the father leant across, his large well-fed head - community man - framed in the gloomy rectangle of the rear window. The old man bobbed with gratitude and climbed into the back seat, and as he did so the large head turned back to look at me: See Chommie, life is hard but we take care of our own here. Take your dog and fancy camera and fuck off.
I looked Bruntville up on the Internet. In two massacres there, in 1989 and 1991, Inkatha hostel dwellers killed over thirty UDF supporters. In 1997 a white lawyer from Kloof (a small, posh suburb outside Durban) was given a R24 million contract to build 1400 low-cost RDP houses in Bruntville: the pastel monopoly horrors. The lawyer ran this building company as a sideline to his law business. A profitable sideline, as it turned out. The project was billed as the flagship of the RDP housing scheme in Natal. The lawyer took a R22 million payment and emigrated to New Zealand. He left the majority of houses without concrete foundations, water, electricity, toilets, windows or proper roofing. The SA Minister of Housing at the time estimated it would cost another R22 million to repair the houses. He vowed to extradite the lawyer, who it seems is still living in comfort in the land of the long white cloud.
To anyone hitching around South Africa I would suggest avoiding the towns of Standerton and Volksrust. Both have wide roads leading out of town, beside which there are broad swathes of open ground inviting motorists to pull over. You would think. No such luck. I stood in both towns for hours, waggling my thumb with mute weariness at solitary men in otherwise empty cars. According to the lore of hitching men on their own are more likely to pull over. If they don't then they indicate with embarrassed hand gestures their intention of turning down some side road just beyond you. You know this is bullshit, but at least taking the time to make an excuse.
In Standerton and Volksrust, instead of looking embarrassed, the beefy faces of the men passing me darkened into distrustful scowls. I'd left Secunda a bit late, but by the time I neared Ladysmith it was almost five. I'd managed to get a ride with a friendly mechanic in a pick-up truck reeking of oil - a good deal of it coating his overalls. In the middle of nowhere we passed a tall, gaunt figure trudging along with a travel bag slung over each shoulder. The mechanic pulled over and he climbed into the back. A frayed fedora was clamped over long hair and his suit jacket was equally frayed. A huge grey beard waggled in the cold air sweeping over him. Whenever I turned to look back he grinned and gave me the thumbs up. He looked homeless, and I found myself hoping we wouldn't be dropped at the same spot. He was bound to ask me for a few bob, or to hitch alongside me, which would diminish any chance I had of getting a ride.
My luck was out. The mechanic dropped us both at an intersection on the far side of Ladysmith, just beyond the army camp. The bearded hobo trudged up the road in the direction of Cape Town; I trudged down the road in the direction of Durban. Forty five minutes later we both trudged back to the intersection in the dark. We were surrounded by bush - no streetlights here - and in these conditions, with a car coming along only every twenty minutes or so, there was no chance of a ride. We were stuck together.
'There's a church up the road here,' he said, pointing back towards the army camp. 'We can spend the night inside the entrance. We'll be hidden, and dry if it rains.'
I thought: right, but walked back with him anyway. I could make my excuses and get away in due course. We chatted as we walked. He spoke with a strong Afrikaans accent, in a pleasantly deep voice. The recessed church doorway, when we came to it, was indeed hidden from the road behind a hedge, but I still had zero intention of spending the night in there with a total stranger.
We decided to sit for a while on a grassy verge with a tea-room on one side of us and a caravan park on the other. Campers were moving around inside their lit caravans, and tramping to the ablution block with dishes to wash.
His name was Kobus. He brought out a packet of tobacco and rolled a cigarette in old newspaper. We sat there smoking it. In these surroundings, after a shitty day of hitching, it was one of the best cigarettes I've ever tasted. Then he suggested buying some slapchips, along with bread and milk at the tea-room. I was literally broke. I'd been meaning to draw some money with my Absa cashcard, but the nearest machine was in town, miles away.
'No problem,' Kobus said. 'It's on me.'
Inside the tea-room the coloured woman behind the counter gave us a funny look; we must have been an odd looking couple. In the bright light, with his gaunt, deeply tanned face, he looked even wilder than he had out on the road. His ragged suit was reasonably clean, but it was obvious he slept in the open. He'd told me on the verge that the two bags slung over each shoulder were for keeping his clean clothes separate from his dirty ones. As for myself, with my trendy hiking boots and spotless backpack I looked like a boy from the burbs who'd gotten himself lost.
'No problem,' Kobus said. 'It's on me.'
Inside the tea-room the coloured woman behind the counter gave us a funny look; we must have been an odd looking couple. In the bright light, with his gaunt, deeply tanned face, he looked even wilder than he had out on the road. His ragged suit was reasonably clean, but it was obvious he slept in the open. He'd told me on the verge that the two bags slung over each shoulder were for keeping his clean clothes separate from his dirty ones. As for myself, with my trendy hiking boots and spotless backpack I looked like a boy from the burbs who'd gotten himself lost.
Back on the grassy verge, eating our slapchips, Kobus told me how he'd ended up on the road. One day he'd gone home early to find his wife sleeping with another man. He killed the man - he didn't say how, and I didn't ask - and then phoned the cops himself. When he finished his term - I think he said fourteen years, reduced to seven for good behaviour - he said he couldn't adjust to normal society. So he hit the road, and he'd been on it ever since. He had daughters scattered around the country, and he dropped in on them now and then. When he did he said they intentionally got him drunk on Old Brown Sherry to get him to tell his road stories. He carried a wicked looking panga, curved like a Gurkha knife, in one bag. He said in all his years of roving around he'd picked up very little trouble. He avoided the big cities like the plague. In the towns that lay on his route around the country he had regular customers who employed him, or found work for him. On the walk back from the intersection he'd pointed out a house where a woman paid him for cutting her grass. Down in Simonstown, where he was bound, he said someone always found him work in a fish factory.
And that was Kobus' story. I don't want to romanticise what must be a brutally hard existence, but he made it sound almost appealing, in a picaresque kind of way. We found a spot opposite the caravan park, beneath a big spreading oak, and bedded down for the night. I used my backpack as a pillow and fell asleep around eleven. I remember waking with a start when Kobus turned over suddenly. He made a soothing, clucking noise, reprimanding me for my anxiety. He was right. I'd woken thinking he was about to attack me.
Around four in the morning the wind picked up and it became too cold to sleep. I didn't have much on to keep me warm - two t-shirts and a thin hiking jacket, but he had even less: a thin shirt under his grey jacket. We got up and crept past the one-man sentry box at the entrance to the camp. I'm not sure if anyone was inside there but we took no chances and made no noise. Then we snuck into the ablution block and had delicious hot showers. When he undressed his torso was covered with those crude blue tattoos you get in prison. We passed the soap back and forth over the tops of our booths. Then we snuck out and walked down the road towards the intersection On the way we'd planned too make a fire but we never got round to it. We sat on a log instead and smoked. With grey light seeping over the horizon we parted at the intersection - he heading up, me down. The last I saw of him, skylighted on the top of the hill, he was climbing into the back of another pick-up truck. He waved as he sank down over the top of the hill. I got my ride about half an hour later, all the way to Durban.
THE TREK BEGINS
I left Durban around nine in the morning and headed up the N3, trying to absorb the sights instead of driving in the unseeing dreamy dwall that I usually fall into behind the wheel. I had my journal perched on my lap and I was developing the knack of writing while I drove, looking down to spot a line every now and then. Past Pietermaritsburg I left clear skies and drove into rolling cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon like grey cat's fur.
Soon I was passing Mooi River. I decided to have a look at Bruntville township. It was layed out in depressing pink and blue rows, like little monopoly houses, on a hill opposite the town. These were the modern Reconstruction and Development homes made from hollow cinder blocks. They looked far better in their drab but honest original grey than they did painted the horrible mock-happy pastel pinks and blues.
I was determined to drive around the townships to get a balanced view of the country. What I really felt, once I was inside, was ridiculous. I trundled down dirt roads beneath this depressing unbroken cloud cover and peered into peoples homes. They were hanging up their washing and sitting around their front doors in ripped out car chairs with the springs popping out. They stared blankly back at me as I drove past. I felt cheaply voyeuristic, so obviously like a white man come to check out how the Natives live. To get around this I tried to look distracted while I trundled around - like a quantity surveyor say, or - with my Cannon out - like a roving photographer for Life magazine. All this did in the end was make me feel more ridiculous.
I passed drab, teetering conglomerations of rusty shacks thrown together with patchwork corrugated iron. They and the monopoly homes, as impersonal as pump-houses, sat on barren patches of red earth. An occassional rectangle of scraggly vegetables passed for a garden.
A pre-primary school the size of a small scout hall was painted a brave buttercup yellow. 'Education Is Freedom' was written in large black letters on one wall. In the distance I saw a larger two storey high-school. It's red bricks looked raw and new jutting out of the grungy groundcover of shacks. I passed goats roaming the dirt roads, the bells around their necks clonking dolefully. Spud, with the upper half of his body protruding outside his window, went taught with excitement whenever we passed one. I had to grab him by the tail to prevent him from baling out the window. The goats watched him nervously with those demonic yellow eyes of theirs, with the horizotal black slots for pupils, and clonked quickly away down the road. (Spud lost it a few times later in the trip. I'd be cruising slowly along a dirt road when he'd go scrabbling over the window sill with a little squeal and find himself in the middle of a herd of unimpressed cows and the odd bull. All I had to do was pull over and open the door and he would come scuttling back with shocked flat ears and a look that said
Groups of dudes standing on the roadside beside the open doors of battered taxis gave me knowing, jaundiced looks as I cruised past. But after this initial look, if I passed them again, they ignored me. As I was leaving, driving over the bridge spanning the highway, I passed a grizzled old man trudging towards Bruntville. His once blue overalls were faded grey. He was holding a sickle blade, worn down to a thin rind from repeated sharpening. When I pulled over to take a photo of him he told me he had helped build the monopoly houses. He said they took about a week to build. Although the light was bad for taking photo's - the low cloud cover muted the hills and Bruntville and Mooi River across the way with a gloomy drabness - I gave him R5 and asked him to pose beside the bridge railing. A row of pink monopoly houses were in shot behind him. As I took the photograph a coloured man in a panelbeaten blue Mazda 323 passed us heading into Bruntville. His head whipped around and he did a squealing u-turn and rushed back to where the Uno was parked on the shoulder of the offramp.
'Ay Bra!How's it going! Taking photo's?' he asked, leaning out of window and yelling at me, like he was a chommie; but also with a proprietory air, like he was on the town council and had a right to know. He had a large, meaty head with quick, alert little eyes. He looked like a family man who had braais with his choms but got mean with a few quarts inside him. A skinny boy sat beside him, probably his son.
'I saw you back there too,' he went on, pointing at Bruntville. 'Do you work for the papers?'
'Yes,' I said, trying for a friendly professional demeanour.
'Which one?' he asked.
'The Daily News.'
'Ya? So what are the photo's for?' His head gave a little questioning backward nod, still friendly: I'm not interrogating you chommie, I'm just shooting the breeze here.
'For this article I'm doing, ' I said lamely, putting the lens back on my Cannon and shuffling cagily to the Uno. I could feel I wasn't up to carrying this lie off. My township experience had not gone well; my famed photojournalist persona needed bolstering with a few Stouts.
'Ya? What's the article about?' he asked, giving another backward nod of his head, slower this time, more measured and questioning. His little black eyes had settled on me. It felt like he was cornering me into admitting that I'd been slumming it, peering through kitchen windows at how the other half lived. And the thing is, that is exactly how I did feel. If I was there to build houses or write an article fair enough. But to just drive around, a white pleb from the Burbs, creeping fearfully around the savage township, peering into people's homes - it just wasn't on somehow. Beside me the old man was hovering on the grassy verge, his hands clasped before him, holding his worn out blade. He was watching us with rheumy eyes, his head cocked attentively to one side.
'It's just an article I'm doing,' I said weakly.
He peered at me dubiously, waiting for more. I said nothing and climbed into the Uno.
'And what about the dog?' he asked me.
I looked at Spud for a few seconds, then back at him; but he stared right back with a half smile, giving another backward nod of his head, along with a playfull flicker of his eyebrows: I'm just shooting the breeze here chommie. Spud had his head out of the window, ears cocked, listening to the sound of the goats clonking their bells in the field beside us. When one bleated he hung his front legs outside his window and his arse quivered. The old man lost interest in proceedings and began to shuffle wearily up the road towards Bruntville.
'The dog?' I said. 'He keeps me company.'
'Ay, now that's a fierce dog man! Those dogs bite people. Tell me' - he grinned again - 'does he keep you safe while you drive around?'
His son had been sitting bored beside him. Now he looked around his father's shoulder at me and grinned. Dad was tuning this white oke!
'He's a friendly dog. He's never bitten anyone,' I said. This was true. 'He likes goats though.'
'Ya, I can see that. Tell me, which paper do you work for again?'
Fuck this prick. I'd had enough. 'The Daily News. Have a good day mate.'
I plonked my Cannon, which I'd been stuffing into its bag, onto the dashboard and started the Uno. The man's face tightened. He had kept his engine running. Now, keen to be first off the mark, he rammed it into gear and took off in a tight half circle, engine screaming, back towards Bruntville. As he did so he stuck his head out the window and yelled, putting his disdain into it now that the polite groove of the conversation was over, 'Ya Bra! I hope that dog keeps you verrry safe!
As the Mazda came round his son gave me a receding look that said, Whiteys, slippery customers, you can't trust them. Dad thrashed the Mazda quickly into third and then back into second as he almost skidded to a halt beside the old man. The old man leant over, speaking into the passenger window, while the father leant across, his large well-fed head - community man - framed in the gloomy rectangle of the rear window. The old man bobbed with gratitude and climbed into the back seat, and as he did so the large head turned back to look at me: See Chommie, life is hard but we take care of our own here. Take your dog and fancy camera and fuck off.
I looked Bruntville up on the Internet. In two massacres there, in 1989 and 1991, Inkatha hostel dwellers killed over thirty UDF supporters. In 1997 a white lawyer from Kloof (a small, posh suburb outside Durban) was given a R24 million contract to build 1400 low-cost RDP houses in Bruntville: the pastel monopoly horrors. The lawyer ran this building company as a sideline to his law business. A profitable sideline, as it turned out. The project was billed as the flagship of the RDP housing scheme in Natal. The lawyer took a R22 million payment and emigrated to New Zealand. He left the majority of houses without concrete foundations, water, electricity, toilets, windows or proper roofing. The SA Minister of Housing at the time estimated it would cost another R22 million to repair the houses. He vowed to extradite the lawyer, who it seems is still living in comfort in the land of the long white cloud.
posted by Krisstoffel at 9:23 AM
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