THE HARD KERELS OF THE KNERSVLAKTE
After Bedford I headed North, to Uppington, and then West all the way to Springbok. I stopped to look at Augrabies Falls, situated in the middle of a livid, angry landscape of barren rock. Then I headed South, roughly parralell to the Atlantic coastline. It was a strange stage in the journey, really hot and unforgiving. I flew down this incredibly jagged white mountain range early one morning and arrived at Kamieskroon. It nestled - an overused but appropriate word here - amongst weird dolerite domes like massive black-grey turtles. The town was absolutely dead, but a plump Boermeisie at a tiny bottle-store assured me it became lively in the evenings, when people ventured from their homes. I found this to be a feature of the hot, dusty towns I'd passed through here and further back in towns like Poffadder: everyone hid from the heat, except the coloured men, who sat around looking like they were dying; or the coloured girls, who giggled at Spud hanging out the window and openly flirted with me, flashing their yellow thighs.
After Kamieskroon came Karkams and then Bitterfontein, where I stocked up on my supply of Stouts. I took a photo of three local coloured men beneath a Bols Brandy sign. The sign was on the wall of a bottle store, which was closed - at 11.30 on a Wednesday morning. The men had been lounging around when I'd arrived, and had approached me for money. This unemployment and begging was a feature of all the towns in this area - coloured people listlessly roaming the empty streets, constantly looking to catch your eye so they could score a buck. In Poffadder even the petrol attendant had hit on me for five rand. Of the three men posing, one had recently been beaten up and stitches bristled from his face. They stared sourly at the camera, showing their disdain for this touristy activity. As I was about to leave a white man drove up in a Toyota Hilux and opened the store for me. As soon as I'd bought my Stout he locked up and left.
Beside the dirt road leading into the next town, Nuwerus, there was a small dam. I opened the gate, carefull not to let the goats out, and parked the Uno at the waters edge. I undressed to my skants and left my clothes and towel hanging from the open doors. My Stout and tinny sounding transistor radio went on the roof. This was a well rehearsed drill - Spud and I had swum in every river and open patch of water we'd come across. While I was scouring my crevices out in the middle, and Spud was cooling his belly in the shallows, a bakkie veered off the road and skidded up to the gate. The window rolled down and a beefy red face beneath a floppy sun-hat stared at us in amazement. 'Niemand,' he yelled, 'het ooit in die geskiedenis van hierdie dorp in daai dam geswem! Niemand!'
Ya well. Once he'd gotten over his amazement, and I'd reassured him that Spud wasn't about to kill the goats, and that I would be sure to close the gate after me, I asked him where the local bottle store was. I was buying a cold quart at a time, to prevent spare ones heating up in the car. There is no bottle store in Nuwerus, he informed me. But I could try my luck at the local tea-room. The owner was a friend of his.
The tea-room was a large, low stone house with a stoep encircling it. The front half of the house was the shop section. This consisted of a counter facing a large room containing plastic tables and chairs. Leaning against the counter was the same farmer er who had driven up to the dam. On the other side of the counter was the tall, pot bellied owner and his surly, brow-beaten looking wife. It turned out I was the topic of conversation.
'Dis die Engelsman! Die een wat geswem het! Nog nooit in die geskiedenis - '
Once the story of my swim had been retold the farmer, shaking his head in disbelief, drove off. The owner, barefoot in shorts, with a red drinkers nose and raw gnarled hands and clublike feet, seemed to take a wierd shining to me. When I asked for a beer he dug around in one of the large freezers behind the counter and hauled out a can of Lion Lager. He wouldn't hear of me paying for it. As I sat by the counter and drank it two coloured kids, a boy and a girl, came in to ogle the large, sticky looking sweets in glass jars on the counter.
'Pasop!' He yelled at them. 'Hierdie hond speel nie! Kyk na sy kakebene! Hy weet jy wil steel. Hy gaan jou vreet!'
When they ran out shrieking nervously he turned to me, his jowls quivering with earnest conviction , and said, 'The problem with these people is, they don't want to work! They're worse than the baboons!'
I'd seen a baboon as I approached the town, sitting like a sentinel on top of a jagged rock strewn hillside. This area is called the Knersvlakte - after the gnashing noise the wagons made in the old days when they trekked over all the rock and quartz on their way to the Cape and back. As the overhead fans droned and flies buzzed around crusts of food on the plastic tables ou Hendrik reeled out his creaking racial philosophy for me: the Kaffers and Hotnots are lazy and shiftless, without ambition or drive or the need for hygiene - 'unlike a baboon, which cleans itself!' They rape and steal and have no value for life. Left to their own devices, without whites to guide them, they will revert to a sort of animal existence. The only way to guide them is with a good beating.
'It's the only thing they understand! Vragitg, you can't talk sense to these people. They're animals! If you catch them stealing you beat them so they know never to come and rob you again. It's the only way. Otherwise they will steal you blind.'
No ya. I used wonder at how people can go on retelling these stories of hate day after day. Then I figured out that tirelessly repeating how useless the kaffer is serves the function of constantly affirming how valuable and worthy the white man is. The one is a mirror image of the other. I found myself thinking of the Hexagon I'd seen in Queenstown - the central defensive position around which the rest of the town was built in the Settler days. It's still there, in the middle of the town. I sat with Spud in the park beside it and tried to imagine the Settler terror as hordes of crazed Xhosa warriors closed in on them. Then I swopped positions and tried, in the simplest of empathetic shifts, to imagine the feelings of the Xhosa as they stormed in: fear and rage at this strange white tribe, with their powerful weapons and clever, deceitful ways, robbing them of more and more land.
No ya. Saying these things seems to solve them in some way, make them less weighty; but when I go back to them after a while there they are, as solid and impenetrable as ever. And yet I can't stop going back to them. It's like trying to force my thoughts through a kink in a pipe - they won't go, and I keep coming back to where I got stuck, as clueless as ever. Is it guilt? I dunno. But as I followed Hendrik into the gloomy, stuffy interior of his house I could feel this imaginery kink in me. I wanted to say something, but really, what would be the point? It wouldn't make the slightest dent in his beliefs. It would only serve to validate my own beliefs. Did I need to do this, to believe in myself as a decent person? Was keeping quiet merely a form of weakness? If I didn't verbalise my views, make them known, could I even lay claim to them? Maybe, just maybe, my silence was a tacit form of agreement with the likes of Hendrik. Could I be deceiving myself to this extent?
'Now here,' Hendrik was saying, in a darkly curtained room fusty with age and mothballs and dreary old wooden furniture, 'are the kerels.' On the wall two horizontal rows of photographs, four in each row, showed the Nuwerus rugby teams. The first few photographs were in black and white. The men in them wore baggy pants and sported short hair and large moustaches. The rest were in colour. The men in these wore tight pants and had some truly memorable mullets. But there was one thing they all had in common. They all looked tough and confident, and there was an impenetrable air of afikaanerdom about them - of belonging to a rugged frontier tribe and sharing a history that was uniquely their own.
Ou Hendrik layed a big, bony hand on my shoulder and told me proudly how these kerels never trained; they were good enough to just turn up at the matches and thump the Bitterfontein team - who did train - ever time. We stood for a while and gazed at these images. In the quiet room his breathing sounded heavy and laboured. He pointed to himself in one of the black and white photos; then he pointed out his son in the most recent photograph: a chunky redhead seated in the front row. I turned to look at him and a distant, dreamy look had softened his face. On the way back down the narrow creaking corridor to the daylight at the shop counter I found myself wondering why he'd shown me, a stranger and an Engelsman to boot, these photographs and this side of his life.
I was still asking myself this when an eighteen wheeler bellowed and wheezed to a stop outside the shop. From the dust storm he'd created emerged the same chunky redhead from the photograph. He wore veldskoens without socks and his large freckled thighs were dented by the seams of his way too tight black boxer shorts. This was Johannes, son of Hendrik. He bounded into the shop and gave me a crushing handshake. When he heard about my swim in the dam he smiled at me wonderingly, as if I was a simpleton. There was a dot of rot right between his two front teeth. He had recently been to Australia, where he'd apparently shagged a lot of Sheilas, because this is what he kept on alluding to: 'Ya, I was shagged out, aye!' Whenever he said something like this he and his father shared deep, masculine chuckles; the surly mom grimly swabbed the counter and ignored us all.
My failure to join in these chuckles quickly led Johannes to conclude that I was not much of a kerel - even by an Engelsmans diluted standards. He started to pull my leg about how soft city people were, and about how we wouldn't last a day out here on the Knersvlakte. He kept chuckling and sharing these secret sly looks with his father - as if to say, jurrie, but we're showing this sorry Englishman how real manne behave. For my part I kept quiet and sipped my second horrible tasting Lion - which Hendrik had once again insisted on handing me for free. And although he chuckled and joined his son in playing the role of hard frontier kerel to my soft ineffectual city boy, he looked slightly ill at ease doing so. It occurred to me then why he'd taken me into his house to show me those pictures. It was because I was English.
The English had won the war, but they had taken a tremendous spanking in doing so. They had never belonged on the veld, in their red uniforms, beating their silly drums.
And in a way, out here in the harsh environs of the Knersvlakte, it felt like we were re-enacting this historical scene. I was the slightly daft Englishman, swimming in dams and driving aimlessly, going nowhere slowly; Hendrik and his son were the hard, practical manne of the veld. Johannes was right. I wouldn't last out here. He looked at me now and leered, 'Ya, I really loiked those Sheilas!'
His Dad chuckled. He leant across the counter and clapped me on the shoulder and said. 'No Ya!' Remember when you go back to the city to tell your friends about Boer hospitality!'
After Kamieskroon came Karkams and then Bitterfontein, where I stocked up on my supply of Stouts. I took a photo of three local coloured men beneath a Bols Brandy sign. The sign was on the wall of a bottle store, which was closed - at 11.30 on a Wednesday morning. The men had been lounging around when I'd arrived, and had approached me for money. This unemployment and begging was a feature of all the towns in this area - coloured people listlessly roaming the empty streets, constantly looking to catch your eye so they could score a buck. In Poffadder even the petrol attendant had hit on me for five rand. Of the three men posing, one had recently been beaten up and stitches bristled from his face. They stared sourly at the camera, showing their disdain for this touristy activity. As I was about to leave a white man drove up in a Toyota Hilux and opened the store for me. As soon as I'd bought my Stout he locked up and left.
Beside the dirt road leading into the next town, Nuwerus, there was a small dam. I opened the gate, carefull not to let the goats out, and parked the Uno at the waters edge. I undressed to my skants and left my clothes and towel hanging from the open doors. My Stout and tinny sounding transistor radio went on the roof. This was a well rehearsed drill - Spud and I had swum in every river and open patch of water we'd come across. While I was scouring my crevices out in the middle, and Spud was cooling his belly in the shallows, a bakkie veered off the road and skidded up to the gate. The window rolled down and a beefy red face beneath a floppy sun-hat stared at us in amazement. 'Niemand,' he yelled, 'het ooit in die geskiedenis van hierdie dorp in daai dam geswem! Niemand!'
Ya well. Once he'd gotten over his amazement, and I'd reassured him that Spud wasn't about to kill the goats, and that I would be sure to close the gate after me, I asked him where the local bottle store was. I was buying a cold quart at a time, to prevent spare ones heating up in the car. There is no bottle store in Nuwerus, he informed me. But I could try my luck at the local tea-room. The owner was a friend of his.
The tea-room was a large, low stone house with a stoep encircling it. The front half of the house was the shop section. This consisted of a counter facing a large room containing plastic tables and chairs. Leaning against the counter was the same farmer er who had driven up to the dam. On the other side of the counter was the tall, pot bellied owner and his surly, brow-beaten looking wife. It turned out I was the topic of conversation.
'Dis die Engelsman! Die een wat geswem het! Nog nooit in die geskiedenis - '
Once the story of my swim had been retold the farmer, shaking his head in disbelief, drove off. The owner, barefoot in shorts, with a red drinkers nose and raw gnarled hands and clublike feet, seemed to take a wierd shining to me. When I asked for a beer he dug around in one of the large freezers behind the counter and hauled out a can of Lion Lager. He wouldn't hear of me paying for it. As I sat by the counter and drank it two coloured kids, a boy and a girl, came in to ogle the large, sticky looking sweets in glass jars on the counter.
'Pasop!' He yelled at them. 'Hierdie hond speel nie! Kyk na sy kakebene! Hy weet jy wil steel. Hy gaan jou vreet!'
When they ran out shrieking nervously he turned to me, his jowls quivering with earnest conviction , and said, 'The problem with these people is, they don't want to work! They're worse than the baboons!'
I'd seen a baboon as I approached the town, sitting like a sentinel on top of a jagged rock strewn hillside. This area is called the Knersvlakte - after the gnashing noise the wagons made in the old days when they trekked over all the rock and quartz on their way to the Cape and back. As the overhead fans droned and flies buzzed around crusts of food on the plastic tables ou Hendrik reeled out his creaking racial philosophy for me: the Kaffers and Hotnots are lazy and shiftless, without ambition or drive or the need for hygiene - 'unlike a baboon, which cleans itself!' They rape and steal and have no value for life. Left to their own devices, without whites to guide them, they will revert to a sort of animal existence. The only way to guide them is with a good beating.
'It's the only thing they understand! Vragitg, you can't talk sense to these people. They're animals! If you catch them stealing you beat them so they know never to come and rob you again. It's the only way. Otherwise they will steal you blind.'
No ya. I used wonder at how people can go on retelling these stories of hate day after day. Then I figured out that tirelessly repeating how useless the kaffer is serves the function of constantly affirming how valuable and worthy the white man is. The one is a mirror image of the other. I found myself thinking of the Hexagon I'd seen in Queenstown - the central defensive position around which the rest of the town was built in the Settler days. It's still there, in the middle of the town. I sat with Spud in the park beside it and tried to imagine the Settler terror as hordes of crazed Xhosa warriors closed in on them. Then I swopped positions and tried, in the simplest of empathetic shifts, to imagine the feelings of the Xhosa as they stormed in: fear and rage at this strange white tribe, with their powerful weapons and clever, deceitful ways, robbing them of more and more land.
No ya. Saying these things seems to solve them in some way, make them less weighty; but when I go back to them after a while there they are, as solid and impenetrable as ever. And yet I can't stop going back to them. It's like trying to force my thoughts through a kink in a pipe - they won't go, and I keep coming back to where I got stuck, as clueless as ever. Is it guilt? I dunno. But as I followed Hendrik into the gloomy, stuffy interior of his house I could feel this imaginery kink in me. I wanted to say something, but really, what would be the point? It wouldn't make the slightest dent in his beliefs. It would only serve to validate my own beliefs. Did I need to do this, to believe in myself as a decent person? Was keeping quiet merely a form of weakness? If I didn't verbalise my views, make them known, could I even lay claim to them? Maybe, just maybe, my silence was a tacit form of agreement with the likes of Hendrik. Could I be deceiving myself to this extent?
'Now here,' Hendrik was saying, in a darkly curtained room fusty with age and mothballs and dreary old wooden furniture, 'are the kerels.' On the wall two horizontal rows of photographs, four in each row, showed the Nuwerus rugby teams. The first few photographs were in black and white. The men in them wore baggy pants and sported short hair and large moustaches. The rest were in colour. The men in these wore tight pants and had some truly memorable mullets. But there was one thing they all had in common. They all looked tough and confident, and there was an impenetrable air of afikaanerdom about them - of belonging to a rugged frontier tribe and sharing a history that was uniquely their own.
Ou Hendrik layed a big, bony hand on my shoulder and told me proudly how these kerels never trained; they were good enough to just turn up at the matches and thump the Bitterfontein team - who did train - ever time. We stood for a while and gazed at these images. In the quiet room his breathing sounded heavy and laboured. He pointed to himself in one of the black and white photos; then he pointed out his son in the most recent photograph: a chunky redhead seated in the front row. I turned to look at him and a distant, dreamy look had softened his face. On the way back down the narrow creaking corridor to the daylight at the shop counter I found myself wondering why he'd shown me, a stranger and an Engelsman to boot, these photographs and this side of his life.
I was still asking myself this when an eighteen wheeler bellowed and wheezed to a stop outside the shop. From the dust storm he'd created emerged the same chunky redhead from the photograph. He wore veldskoens without socks and his large freckled thighs were dented by the seams of his way too tight black boxer shorts. This was Johannes, son of Hendrik. He bounded into the shop and gave me a crushing handshake. When he heard about my swim in the dam he smiled at me wonderingly, as if I was a simpleton. There was a dot of rot right between his two front teeth. He had recently been to Australia, where he'd apparently shagged a lot of Sheilas, because this is what he kept on alluding to: 'Ya, I was shagged out, aye!' Whenever he said something like this he and his father shared deep, masculine chuckles; the surly mom grimly swabbed the counter and ignored us all.
My failure to join in these chuckles quickly led Johannes to conclude that I was not much of a kerel - even by an Engelsmans diluted standards. He started to pull my leg about how soft city people were, and about how we wouldn't last a day out here on the Knersvlakte. He kept chuckling and sharing these secret sly looks with his father - as if to say, jurrie, but we're showing this sorry Englishman how real manne behave. For my part I kept quiet and sipped my second horrible tasting Lion - which Hendrik had once again insisted on handing me for free. And although he chuckled and joined his son in playing the role of hard frontier kerel to my soft ineffectual city boy, he looked slightly ill at ease doing so. It occurred to me then why he'd taken me into his house to show me those pictures. It was because I was English.
The English had won the war, but they had taken a tremendous spanking in doing so. They had never belonged on the veld, in their red uniforms, beating their silly drums.
And in a way, out here in the harsh environs of the Knersvlakte, it felt like we were re-enacting this historical scene. I was the slightly daft Englishman, swimming in dams and driving aimlessly, going nowhere slowly; Hendrik and his son were the hard, practical manne of the veld. Johannes was right. I wouldn't last out here. He looked at me now and leered, 'Ya, I really loiked those Sheilas!'
His Dad chuckled. He leant across the counter and clapped me on the shoulder and said. 'No Ya!' Remember when you go back to the city to tell your friends about Boer hospitality!'
posted by Krisstoffel at 12:38 AM
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