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Eksteenfontein and the blerrie bakkies(Business Day (South Africa) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Eksteenfontein and the blerrie bakkies CHRIS MARAIS eavesdrops on the fringe of SA's latest World Heritage Site SO HERE I am, in my Isuzu bakkie, parked in the middle of the frontier village of Eksteenfontein (which once featured in an Isuzu television ad), the hot heart of the Richtersveld. Feeling pretty chuffed with how my vehicle's been performing of late. And speaking of white men and 4x4s, interjects a jovial man called Bompie Somebody as I'm chatting with Tannie Kowie Uys and her son Dirkie, a cheerfully handsome man with a pirate's glint in his eye. They come here in their 4x4s and boast about their performance. Ha! They should try making the trek up here in donkey carts and oxwagons in the middle of winter, no roads and lots of goats trailing behind. Then they can boast about their performance. I muse on this and have to agree. However, Dirkie spears Bompie with the politest of glares and firmly guides our conversation back to living in a World Heritage Site and the happy prospect of tourists sampling the rather Spartan fleshpots of Eksteenfontein. But I am hooked on the mental image of scores of pioneer Baster families coming to live in these rocky outcrops all the way from Bushmanland, so Dirkie gives me some personal history. I was four years old when we came here in 1948, he says, while his mother darts out to the back of the house to fetch a traditional kappie for a photograph. The Nationalist Party was just in harness, but the situation began long before them. The Bosluis Basters (more to do with the name of a farm near Pofadder than bosluise ticks) were the children of British and Dutch settler men who had set up home with Khoekhoe women. The pure whites of Bushmanland, fearing their kids would get up to tricks with the Baster kids and marry them as their ancestors did, pressured the new government to move the Bosluis people. My grandfather was a white man, and it led to some very strange dynamics. One day a census man accosted my grandfather as he was crossing the Anenous Mountains (between Springbok and Eksteenfontein) in his wagon, heading for their new home. I suppose I should enter you in as white, the official said. He looked at the rest of the Uys family members, who were decidedly browner than the patriarch. No, said Dirkie's grandfather. If you make me a white, I'll have to go back to where we came from. Only Hotnots can live here. So you'd better make me one too. Even so, when the church was built in Eksteenfontein, Grandfather Uys sat apart from his family in the pew directly in front of the dominee, while everyone else clustered behind. This was the birth of grand Apartheid, and there was great upheaval in SA. The Basters, who essentially lived as darkish-tinted Afrikaners, were now told to go and live among the Namas of the Richtersveld. And because of the social pecking order (born in colonialism, given a name in Apartheid), the Basters regarded themselves as superior to their host nation which, quite understandably, got right up the Namas's noses. Often, when paying respects to a Baster household, they were received at the back door. The dry, humour-laced way that Dirkie tells this saga smacks of Tom Sharpe at his satirical best. Tannie Kowie looking as cute as a button in her bonnet weighs in: It was a tough trek across from Bushmanland. The water along the route was brackish and gave everyone diarrhoea. There were no service stations in those days. And the travelling Basters gathering racial outcast members by the day were not exactly made welcome on the farms as they are in the more recent Jinne mense, kom in Klipdrift ads. Move on, was the grim-faced message to these people. Tannie Kowie again: And there was this young girl who fell sick shortly after we arrived here. They had to carry her off to the hospital in Port Nolloth across the hills on a stretcher dragged by a donkey. She survived, thank the Lord. Today, Eksteenfontein can still not be mistaken for Sandhurst. It's a poor village where, if it rains, you might fall into a pothole. But it's set in the cleft of the beautiful Stinkfontein Mountains (which deserve a nicer name) and in the spring, this is where you want to bring your city soul. The flowers that bloom between the white rocks on the hillsides and the succulents that guard them all year round are simply mesmerising. And when the kids begin to dance the Nama Stap, which is like a Richtersveld Line Dance, it looks like something from a movie set in Macedonia as the girls' dresses billow, their doekies flap and the boys lead them in that I'd-rather-be-playing-football manner perfected by teenagers the world over. Back to the Basters and the Namas. Why did they not end up ripping each others' throats out, which seems to be the accepted international social norm? This place became the refuge for the people that Apartheid did not want, says Dirkie. All those who were marginalised by the new government. And while the Basters were building clay houses that kept falling apart at first, the transhumance culture of the Namas (following their flocks from winter to summer grazing) flowed about them. These are still the original pastoralists who died out in the rest of SA when the boer and his dreaded barbed wire arrived. There have been clashes over the years, to be sure. But the two groups have settled down now. Long before Mandela, says Dirkie, we were learning to live together. Now we're marrying and we live happily together. We're like a model for the rest of the country. The next morning I drive out past the Stinky Fountain Mountains and into the Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape, our latest World Heritage Site. Having just spent the week swerving around Springbok, Port Nolloth, Alexander Bay, the craggy rough-riding ridges of the Ai-Ais- Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, Khuboes and Lekkersing, I am sold on this place. And at sunrise, with clouds lacing the tops of the mountains, a chilly breeze shivering the daisies in the valley and first light peering in from the east, you don't really need to be anywhere else on Earth. Mamadess, my guide, has slept in, so his brother Obees (which stems from another nickname, Aubrey, although his real name is Benjamin, and no one can explain the nickname) takes me out to where his folks are manning their stock post of goats and Dorper sheep. When Obees is not chasing goats, he's in town chasing a soccer ball for Eksteenfontein's local team, Xhobes United. We pass their stony soccer field. This is not a good place to fall down, agrees Obees with an early-morning smile. Out at the stock post, in the delicious apricot dawn, we give Tannie Sarah and Oom Kous Joseph some of my travelling tucker: two-minute noodles, fast pasta, tinned chakalaka and beetroot in a bag. Tannie Sarah thanks me then shoots the funny food a certain look and I realise condensed milk, coffee and flour would have done the trick. Next visit, I'll get it right. I spend the morning at their stock post with Tannie Sarah in front of her igloo-shaped matjieshuis and Oom Kous with his goats, learning about their life on the range. And wanting to be a cowboy all over again. nwww.richtersveldguesthouses.co.za nwww.south-north.co.za nwww.richtersveld.net They come here in their 4x4s and boast about their performance. They should try making the trek up here in donkey carts and oxwagons in the middle of winter, no roads and lots of goats trailing behind. Then they can boast about their performance MESMERISING: The unfortunately named Stinkfontein Mountains within the World Heritage Site near Eksteenfontein in the Richtersveld. Picture: CHRIS MARAIS GOAT WATCHERS: Tannie Sarah and Oom Kous Joseph manning the stock post's sheep and goats. LIVING LEGEND: Dirkie and his mother she's wearing the hat whose mixed ethnicity has led to some 'strange dynamics' in the Richtersveld. Pictures: CHRIS MARAIS STEPPING OUT: Eksteenfontein teenagers at a formal Nama Stap Dance get together, something like a Richtersveld Line Dance. Pictures: CHRIS MARAIS Copyright 2007 Johnnic Communications, Source: The Financial Times Limited |