Once again I am sitting in amber light with all the windows cast open to the sunset, listening to the sea roll onto the beach. The 4am start and 12 hour flight down to Cape Town have been forgiven in exchange for 2 hours of restful contemplation on a warm shore. I am surprised by the wash of memories that being back in South Africa has already triggered. It is, I suppose, a point to point comparison of my life as I was last here 14 years ago, a new graduate on the looking to avoid the drudgery of a 9-5 commute into Aberdeen, or worse, London which I had just escaped after 3 months. I had a vain hope of doing some kind of environmental based work, certainly work outside, but casting around quickly found that even to volunteer with some organisations required a phD, such are the numbers in the UK of people who really don’t want to be stuck in a suit and will do what they can to avoid it. By happenstance a South African colleague of Dad’s was staying at the house around this time of my indecision and suggested he could place me as a volunteer in a game park. That was about all the suggestion I needed. My 3 months of salary were spent on a plane ticket. The game park never happened for one reason and another, but he did find me a room in Gordon’s Bay with a family whose elder daughter had gone to be an au pair in the States. They expected I would stay a couple of weeks. So did I. In the end I stayed nearly 7 months and gained an education not found in universities.
Bob and Jackie were a bit of an odd couple, both on their second marriages, he much younger than her in the days long before Demi had divorced Bruce, though his Captain Bluebeard hairiness and excessively large beer gut aged him and later killed him prematurely (the gut and drink that is, not suggesting excessive facial hair contributed). He was some kind of businessman and often away. Looking back, I think Jackie was lonely and liked to have a chance to talk and I just soaked it up. It was my first insight into alcoholism, or at least, a seriously alcohol lead community. Bored women ticking away time at the exclusive yacht club before the first white wine spritzer could go down, at least wait until 11am. Sometimes I’d get in the car with them after a night out and just pray we’d make it home as the driving became more and more ‘roughly’ according to any rules or physical road structure. The geography made the roads weave and heave enough round hairpin bends and up steep mountains without added influences.
This was a home with no TV though. Instead there was a massive and challenging library which Jackie steered me through. She had a degree from Witwatersrand in English and Music so as well as pressing copies of Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged and many English classics into my hands, also played and played in the mornings and if not playing herself, let the radio or record player sing out loud. I stayed in a kind of granny flat attached to their home. My memory of their living space is very distinct; low ceilings, big open windows overlooking the bay, hardwood furniture, green velvet curtains and large brass pot plants with huge ferns and leafery. To me it had the feel of a billiards room. Not that I’ve ever been in a billiards room, but many of those English novels have scenes set within them and the atmosphere reminded me of their home; intellectual, alcohol in cabinets and always dark despite the brilliant sun. It made it moody, like knotted eyebrows brewing up a storm. Many a morning I would go through to use something from their fridge and the sink would be overflowing with dishes, lipstick lined glasses and cigarette butts. Not that they were slovenly, but they did party and mornings were taken very steadily.
It was also my first experience of the awkwardness of a white girl from an extreme non-diverse area brought up on a diet of BBC news of Mandela and Soweto riots innocently living in not so newly post-apartheid South Africa. I refrained from the debate usually, choosing instead just to listen to opinion, but well remember the twist in my stomach as the lay of the land was explained to me, usually with a sentence that began “I am not a racist but....”. Well more time in Africa has taught me issues are not so simple as I probably perceived them back then, but equally, I paid no heed to being told not to walk alone in the hills and to keep my windows closed at all times. The potential only hit home when a friend and I had been for a walk on some sea cliffs a mile or so from a holiday camp ‘for’ Cape Malay. I say ‘for’ because there was no sign saying no one else could go, but no one else did go. We returned to find the windows smashed up, radio taken and the car not working. A couple of men who were on the way to the airport stopped to help us. In fact, they missed their flight to make sure we got out of there. They seemed unnecessarily concerned. A week later two white women were killed during a carjacking in the exact same spot. It was part of a pattern of violence that, people told me, was spreading from Johannesburg. At the time I could not imagine how it could be necessary to not only alarm the house, but alarm every individual room, have barred windows, keep several dogs with an extreme sense of territory, a contract with a local armed protection unit and probably access to your own fire arm too. I found the stories of Johannesburg largely beyond comprehension having never lived under any sort of threat or fear and with all the Scottish countryside I wanted to explore at my disposal, day or night. Most of all I could not understand at all why anyone would continue living in such circumstances and why they did not just leave. As I heard many times in Cape Town then, South Africa and Cape Town in particular was a bit of Europe, not ‘real Africa’. I had no idea what they could mean at the time but had it repeated so often had to accept that it must be true. Now of course, I can look back and understand exactly. Not that I equate Africa with violence, but rather my experience of South Africa then was almost entirely stratified, kept within gentle white communities living in lovely white towns which black and coloured people only came through to clear gardens, collect rubbish and dig up roads. I doubt I thought too long and hard about this because my home community was all white too so there was nothing unusual in this and I had not yet had any exposure to the moral conundrums and social complexities that steamrollered me in Uganda. Yes I had been to India, but there I was a foreigner in a foreign land and expected to be it the minority. Despite driving past the massive shanty town of Khayelitsha many times on my way into Cape Town, I’m not sure I really understood I was also the minority in South Africa. It was easy to forget. The Western Cape then, for me, was just a playground of mountains to climb, beaches to walk and great characters. I’m not sure I remember having a single conversation with a black or cape malay person that wasn’t behind a shop counter or attending a car park. The most intimidated I got was when a pack of baboons started throwing rocks at me and chased me off a mountain.
As we were driving here to Langebaan this morning, we passed two places which lit me up with fondness; the San people cultural centre and Koeburg Nuclear Power station. In my life, these two are intimately connected because of my being a camp cook.
As I say the game reserve didn’t work out, but other things did and one of those was the chance to be camp cook for an archaeological dig that Cape Town University was undertaking at Koeburg Nuclear Power station ahead of a new building phase. Anyone who knows my cooking will find the fact that I did actually cater for 22 people, 3 times a day, for 6 weeks, without killing anyone, quite amazing. It was one of those opportunities I got bounced into during one of Bob and Jackie’s many dinner parties. Luckily all I really had to do was make endless tea and coffee, sandwiches, make sure there was breakfast stuff and light the fire for the braai. BBQ and sundowners pretty much every night made my life very easy, easy enough that after I had done the dishes and laid out for the next course, I got to join in the dig. From memory a large pit had been dug out around 2m below present day surface, which aged the site at 120,000 years ago. This work was part of a much larger study trying to establish whether man had spread from one place in Africa or several. History was not my subject at school, but much to my amazement, I found the whole process of the dig utterly fascinating. We had our paintbrushes and trowels and fastidiously cleared the meter block we were allocated of sands that varied in colour from buttermilk yellow to ochre red. A metallic scrape over a hard surface had the heart pounding with excitement. It was like creating a painting, carefully placing each stroke on the canvas but without any control over the outcome. Slowly, and with great care, the object would reveal itself; a piece of tortoise carapace, a stone tool, a jaw from a cow. It was a lottery who found what in any given square. I hit it lucky. I found several stone tools and the ribs, pelvis and spine of what turned out to be a new sub-species of bison or buffalo, some kind of bovine anyway. Each new lump and bone shard was recorded in pinpoint accuracy with theodolites, time, date, depth and position in the grid square. A field sketch was made too. It is amazing to think that only then, in 1997, we did not have GPS or digital cameras or lasers and results were put into notebooks not laptops and I didn’t write a single email home because then I had neither computer nor email address , or had ever used the internet. Instead I wrote and sketched and cellotaped flowers into notebooks and copied favourite descriptions over and over into different letters in an unplanned editing process that sometimes saw me also copy a nice description or summary of my time back from a letter into the notebook, so rather than gushing my thoughts out fast and sending in an easy click as I do now, they became mulled over and refined letter by letter.
The Professor who led the dig, who’s name escapes me now but was obviously of some repute as I had kept a national geographic article about him for many years afterwards, was utterly enchanting. I would guess he may even have been in his 70s, with wild white hair and a quiet manner that belied an adventurous life. He told me about his running away to sea and ending up working in a coal mine in Yorkshire for a period. I remember being very fond of him and loving his company so I even went to stay at his home in Cape Town during a conference that he invited me to about how to preserve the fading languages of the many tribes of southern Africa. I have no idea why I was asked if I wanted to go, perhaps I just showed interest. But I remember his house as being the contrast to Bob and Jackie’s, with high windows and large comfortable chintz settees and my bed having lace around its crisp white pillow cases and being left a jug of water and crystal glass on the stand next to it and a small kettle and silver tea set with homemade shortbread appearing after breakfast. Everything about the house oozed colonial comfort and hospitality.
So at Cape Town I found myself among tribal people from all across Southern Africa as they stood up and made their case and concerns in English and then their own wonderful languages. Some, I was very lucky to hear because those native speakers were the last and their oral legacies were being recorded for posterity but their fight for longevity was as hopeless as Canute and the tide. Here I heard the Koi San clicks that were famously and hilariously portrayed in the film ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’. I call it the tick tock language. I’m not sure if I was told that or it is my own memory that created that description. Somewhere buried in my chest of travel writings I have notes about the Koi San language and its people and history scribbled in excitement during that 2 day conference. Perhaps the Professor thought I might become an archaeologist. Looking back I probably showed more interest that his students, but then, I didn’t have to face the drudgery of all the data collation and analysis and report writing, and my time in the pit was in short bunches between sandwich making chores. It was certainly a brief insight into an entirely different world.
I think though South Africa was more influential than I credited it for at the time. Because the game volunteering work didn’t happen, my memory was largely of extended periods of going for very long walks and reading or writing on the beach because Gordon’s Bay was a small town encased in high mountains which people got excited about if I wandered too far on my own. But I met people who offered entirely different versions of living to what I had every experienced before. I was told to go and meet a friend of the man who had brought me to South Africa. He told me I would enjoy him and he was right. Again, without my notes I forget his name, but I remember his stories and his huge hands because he was a potter. I had never been inside a pottery studio before and it had all the atmosphere of a romantically crumbling art studio that I could hope for. He was, of very considerable repute, listed in many art galleries and museums and on the cusp of retirement. The pieces we bought were among his very last. Pottery is one of those peaceful looking crafts, like breadmaking, that lulls me into thinking I’d be very happy doing it all day long. As he wandered about his garden in a pair of jean dungarees that he’d probably worn the last 20 years, he certainly seemed to have had a happy life. He had a knowing twinkle in his eye and I think enjoyed telling his stories to a captivated 20 something. I’ve no doubt I sat by him starry eyed as he worked and told me about his time on a whaling boat off the coast of Tierra del Feugo, watching blue whales breeching. My university room walls were covered in photos cut from nature magazines and national geographic. Both Chile and blue whales were very high on my list of things I’d love to see (and still have not) along with tree frogs and the view from behind a waterfall. It’s little wonder being a daydreamer I didn’t attend a single career event at university.
Perhaps the person, or family, with most influence over the long term, were the Deutschlanders. The majority of my very good friends, I can remember the day I met them and even the first conversation we had – or at least I think I do! With Guni, I am definite. I had somehow got myself signed up with the Cape Town mountaineering club and had hitched a ride for a weekend trip with a very sincere and serious Afrikaaner who told me I was a good Christian woman, even though I had never been christened and rarely stepped in a church, a point we had just had a long conversation about. Peter de Clerk I think his name was. He was an amazing source of knowledge about the extremely diverse natural history in the Cape and it was he who led on a trek up Table Mountain, under the cable car, one hot and humid Saturday morning. He was always in Khaki shorts and short sleeve shirt, with a tilly hat and binoculars with a sandy coloured moustache, neatly trimmed hair and had fair colouring with a smattering of freckles. I remember being slightly concerned even then that despite being probably 20 years older than me, he perhaps considered me wife material, but his manners were too robust to even start to make a move. Anyway, I had a lift with him up to wherever the weekend meet was, about 4 hours from Cape Town so we arrived in dusk. As I made my way from the truck to the falling down shed we slept in, I met the profile of Guni, which was memorable because she had several large feathers sticking out the back of her hair. She turned to me and said, ‘don’t the peacocks sound amazing’, and so started a long friendship and another unexpected voyage of the soul for me.
