DAY 3 - THE GROOT MARICO DANCE HALL

One of the books I'd brought along with me was Bosman's Road To Mafeking. Since I was going there, I thought this was quite appropriate. I actually drove along this road, or the modern equivalent of it, on the third day of my trip. After two days of almost continuous rain I arrived in Zeerust in the early morning and sat in the Uno while rain drummed on the roof. As I was leaving the rain stopped, the sky cleared dramatically and Abjaterskop reared up on my left like a huge green breast. It was crisply delineated in the rain washed blue, its sides dense with thorn trees. Oom Schalk Lourens used to stumble over this mountain on moonless nights with too much mampoer inside him, on his way home after courting the local farmers daughters.

I drove for about an hour through a sea of green hills undulating beneath a hot, still sky ... and then there, poking through a hollow in the green sea, were a few roofs: Groot Marico. This was the town where Bosman based most of this stories; all of those crusty Dutchmen he wrote about were Groot Marico locals, and I think it was here where he taught school. The town itself was full of trees - Withaaks possibly, thinking back to one of Bosmans's stories - and all this greenery took the sting out of the heat.

The town had a dreamy somnolent air, sitting quietly in its hollow in the warm green sea. I parked the Uno in the main street and squinted through the glare at a decrepit little concrete block not much bigger than a garden shed. It had a single door in the front and two tiny windows in the side walls. Someone had tried to paint it a festive red, but the result was a deeply gored shade like dried ox blood. Groot Marico Dance Hall was written in yellow across the front - the letters squashed into the space and crudely ornate with curlicued endings and scrolled flourishes. Surely the work of a proud local housewife. But who the fuck was going to fit in there? The local Dutchmen were huge, with melons for calves and brandewyn kegs for legs. They stood around supporting bellies the size of boulders, with perhaps a stubborn pap stain there where a button had popped to show a diamond of straining flesh; and they all had these massive Kruger beards waggling away beneath their chins, no doubt concealing the odd koeksister crumb or two ...

No swaar, surely that little Dance Hall was the towns one concession to the Nuwe Suid Afrika. Santie down there at the phone exchange got this directive from this new government to build the local kaffers a place where they can run their own affairs. But as everyone knows, if you put a group of kaffers together in a room they are going to get drunk and start singing and dancing and fighting. So Swaar, what better place to give the kaffers than a Dance Hall for their meetings? Jacobus' old Pap En Vlies store was just fine. You could fit fifteen kaffers in there if they all stood up. And Stoffels wife Hendrina even went so far as to paint if for them!
Ya. So I parked in Groot Marico for a while. I soaked up the sleepy atmosphere and peered at the heat-drugged winkels and slaghuises and at these genuinely eccentric looking Afrikaaners. Their rugged Hilux bakkies, mud-spattered and thorn-raked - no poncy Luxury Utility Vehicles here - were parked in the bright street while they stood chatting in the shade offered by the winkel awnings. Now and then they interrupted the sage waggling of their beards - Rinderpest, Luiperds, uppity kaffers - to look at me with mild suspicion: an Uitlander, poor Godless soul, taking a break from anxiously scurrying around his city ... and with a varkhondjie, nogal.