Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step out and Find South Africa. Luke Alfred
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