Tales from the Old Karoo

by Guy Butler

  ‘How did that happen? Drought? Surely not!’

  ‘No – the row was intact when we got here. And lovely it looked. It was one of the touches that caught Molly’s fancy. No. Fire. A thunderstorm late one afternoon accompanied by a high wind.’

  He seemed to have difficulty in describing what had happened.

  ‘From the west.’ He indicated the direction with a large gesture. ‘Well – you know what a toddy palm is like?’ And again he pointed. ‘A green head, look, with the older branches withering, and forming that dwindling collar of tinder-dry fibre. A ton of tinder at the top third of each tree. Well, the lightning struck the first tree – there, just short of the front stoep.’

  He stopped, and withdrew into a brown study, which I found too long for my comfort. So I broke it with, ‘It could so easily have been the house.’

  ‘Indeed! If it hadn’t been for that damn high wind. The flames were soon crackling in the head of that tree – turned it into a crazy catherine wheel whirling against the purple of the coming storm. We – Molly and I – stood on the stoep, helpless. How do you put out a fire in the top of a seventy foot toddy palm? Then the wind took a spark into the second tree.’ He paused. ‘Then into the third.’ He paused again, as if reliving the actual time interval between each ignition. ‘Then the fourth.’

  I did not care to interrupt his obsessed rehearsal of what must have been a terrible experience. After the sixth palm was blazing, I said:

  ‘I suppose the destruction ceased when the wind dropped?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, it needed the wind to stop. The fifth tree caught alight after the rain had started pouring down.’

  After a pause, I ohserved. ‘Those sticks of charcoal have a sinister effect on the whole landscape. Shouldn’t you cut them down?

  ‘Maybe. It’s not only the way they look–’

  And he broke off again. This time there was no end to the pause; he turned on his heel, and continued up the dry furrow. I knew him better than to persist against this reticence.

  Beyond the palisade of burnt stems, at some distance from either house, stood a small cottage where Collins, the farm manager, lived: a graceless, modern job, with horizontal steel windows, plywood doors without panels, and too little pitch on its roof. W hereas the other two houses have settled into the landscape, this does not yet belong: it is like a jettisoned cigarette box, and looks as though the wind might blow it away. The charred foreground does not help it.

  The canal was dry, so we walked along its bed, talking of this and that, pausing to look at the riverine lucerne fields to the left, now peppered with guineafowl whose evening rattle came crisp across the cool air; then we climbed out, to the right, and negotiated the slight curve of the krantz.

  Stepping on to the higher ground, we entered another world: nothing but pure veld to a horizon far in front of us. We stopped walking: no evidence of railway, or canal, or building, or powerline, or avenue, or fence. Karoo and sky. We knew each other well enough not to talk for a while. But after we had paid our silent respects to that silence we moved on.

  I picked up a flaked stone core and was soon riding my current hobby-horse – archaeology, the flaked mementoes of the ancient hunters on these plains – the stone-age San, who’d lived on game and bulbs for thousands of years, hunter-gatherers with great skill in their fingers and sweet songs in their mouths; then of their rivals, their near-cousins the Khoi, bigger men, with flocks of fat-tailed sheep; and, later, other Khoi with cattle acquired from the tall black men coming from the north and the east; black men who never reached this part of the Karoo, at least, not as conquerors. This part was conquered by the whites who came from the western Cape with horses, guns and wagons, who built permanent houses, not shelters of reed mats; who planted fruit trees in orchards, big trees in avenues, and ploughed the earth, made furrows, made dams.

  We had walked in a wide arc, and were approaching the main homestead, from the west, down a very slight incline. In the distance were old stone kraals, some corrugated iron sheds, and long thickets of trees of no more than average size: but their colour was not the dark grey-green of our mimosa, but a light yellow-green which I knew I had seen before, but could not place at once, and their shape was equally distinctive. Then one of the buildings, as it were, declared itself – not old stone, nor wood-and-iron, but plastered brick, substantial, taller, squarish, with a small tower in one corner. The proportions and the details of the crenellations were unmistakably eastern, Arabic. I stopped in my tracks, and exclaimed: ‘How did this get here? The man who planted the toddy palms?’

  ‘Yes. It is odd, isn’t it? – a touch of Egypt, the Western Desert, not so?’

  That’s where the sight transported us – San, Khoi, Xhosa, Dutch were all forgotten: we were in the Eighth Army with Pommies and Kiwis, and Aussies and other soldier exiles from the ends of the earth, fighting Gerries and Itis – in another desert arena which had once belonged to other desert peoples, the Senusi and Bedouin. But this building owed its origins not to the Second World War, but the First.

  During the First World War, Ronald Reilly, a young South African millionaire, found his life as a soldier in the Middle East intolerably boring. He owed his sanity to his batman, a bright cockney called Heyns who’d once been a hand at an Ascot racing stable. Together they visited all the horse breeders in Egypt and in Palestine. Their ideas and personalities clicked. They both fell for Arab horses and the healthy middle eastern deserts.

  Back in South Africa, Heyns ran Reilly’s Arab stud for him. In time Reilly lent him enough to acquire Riversbend to set up an Arab stud of his own.

  Heyns did everything to make those Arab horses feel at home in the Karoo. But the building looked awkward, out of place; and pale green mesquite trees had taken hold and were flourishing, and all too likely to become a pest. Then Heyns had disappeared, bankrupt. The farm had forgotten his brief attempt to make his Arabian Nights dream come true. Only the toddy palms flourished. As for his finely designed stables for thoroughbred Arabs, they were now used as a kraal for angora kids. They looked pretty enough, but uncannily white in the melancholy dusk.

  We looked into the ‘tower’ room in the corner. It was quite empty except for an iron bedstead without mattress. The bleating of the kids echoed eerily in its volume.

  ‘I should have someone living here, to keep an eye on the goats. But no one will stay in here. In fact, once the sun has gone down, no one will come near the place. They’ll walk half a mile to avoid it.’

  ‘Haunted?’

  ‘So they say’, he said, pressing his lips together – a habit of his whenever he is sceptical.

  ‘By the breeder of Arab horses?’

  ‘Oh no. By Sinquos.’ And he pulled the door shut sharply, snapped the lock, and turned to go. The way he did it, and his taciturn manner during the walk back to the homestead, discouraged me from pursuing the matter. My attention was captured by the rapid and daring brushwork of the sunset on the enormous canvas of the western sky. The trees stood black against it – an effect opposite to the toddy palms buring against the thunderclouds – as described by James.

  The next day, while James was busy in the lands, I decided to sketch the homestead. The best view was from the roadside near the foreman’s cottage.

  Out of the comer of my eye I became aware of a young man approaching with both legs in plaster. He was handling his crutches like a novice. This must be Terrence Collins, the manager’s son, a not very conscientious university student, injured in the accident a fortnight ago – when James’s double-decker five-tonner, laden with one hundred and twenty Angoras, had left the road on Bruintjieshoogte pass, killing eighty precious goats and fatally injuring the herd. As so often happens, the driver, who seemed to have been culpable, escaped unharmed.

  So here was the convalescent survivor, bored no doubt. He introduced himself.

  ‘Do you mind if I watch?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It’s an interesting old place. But
my father says all that fancy woodwork is very costly to maintain.’

  ‘Well, the new owner likes old buildings.’

  ‘The last visitor spent hours drawing and measuring up the Arab stables. He was an architectural student from UCT.’

  ‘They say it’s haunted’, I said.

  ‘Who says so?’ he demanded, slightly aggressive.

  ‘Apparently none of the farmhands will go near the place after dark, let alone sleep there.’

  ‘That must be recent then. It must be –’

  He broke off. I seemed to be in a world where people failed to complete sentences.

  ‘Sinquos?’ I volunteered.

  Involuntarily he looked at his plastered legs stretched into the dry furrow on whose bank he was sitting.

  ‘Yes.’ He seemed to be quite overcome. ‘It needn’t have happened. At least, but for me, it could have happened somewhere else, with other people, not us.’ There was a pause during which I continued painting and he recovered his poise.

  ‘I don’t need to go to the the stables for Sinquos to haunt me’, he said. ‘You see, I feel partly to blame for his death.’

  ‘Did he live there?’

  ‘Yes, for about a year. He didn’t mix much with the other labourers. He pined all the time.’

  ‘For home?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘His brother, Sipho. Identical twins. Do you know anything about identical twins?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Nor did I, until this – this –’

  Again he could not find the word, so he resorted to telling the story instead of trying to extract its essence.

  ‘It happened this time last year – the long vac. The Scotts had not yet taken over and were moving backwards and forwards between their old place and this. My father was managing this farm, alone. We were in the big house then, caretaking as it were. I was swotting – supposed to be – but Father said there was one job I could do, and that was turn away all the people who came looking for work – all – white, black, grey, Xhosa, Sotho – his complement was full; and, in any case, Mr Scott must do his own hiring and firing now.

  ‘It was neither hiring nor firing. It was just shaking one’s head, and not even listening to their stories or looking at their references; there was no work to give; at the most, it was giving them a little firewood and water, if the time was dusk, and maybe a can of milk if there was a baby. At first glance they all looked alike.’

  He paused; so I said: ‘Poverty does have a monotonising effect.’

  He nodded. ‘But when they come close they break up into a particular man, a woman with baby on back, and, as likely as not, a bun in the oven: thin man, fat woman, you know? She looks strong, twice the man he is.’

  So I said: ‘No two faces are alike. Or figures for that matter.’

  ‘It’s tiring when they come so close so that you see that they are not merely black and poor, but individuals, separate people, unique characters. So when these two Xhosa, absolutely identical in their red blankets – tall, young – came along this road, they made an impression: not man/woman, not parent/child, but brothers. And not merely brothers; but twins, not merely twins; but identical. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘In face and physique they were absolutely similar, but even more surprising was the great care they had taken to see that their costume and equipment matched: the design of their blankets was identical; and they seemed to hang with the very same number of folds. Even their kieries – they each carried two – had similar carvings. And their bearing – one could see they came from deep in the Transkei. Not only did they look different: proud, reserved, careful, but courteous – in a way few local farm labourers do. You know what I mean? Generation after generation we whites have hammered the poor old Hottentots and freed slaves so that they can’t stand up straight any more. They can’t carry their heads or their shoulders in quite the same way, nor look the world straight in the face. Even the Xhosas who’ve been on these farms for one generation, born outside of their tribe, they’ve lost something of the spirit those twins had. Only old Abraham Yose, who arrived here as a young man, still has an unbroken look.’

  ‘The twins sound beautiful’, I said.

  ‘Beautiful? Yes – yes, I suppose they were. It never occurred to me.’ He paused, then continued. I did not interrupt him again.

  ‘Sabenza Nkos’, they said in uncanny unison. Well, I have very little Xhosa, and they had very little Afrikaans, which is the language of labour in this part of the Karoo. They had a little broken English, from the mission school.

  ‘No work. No work. No work!’ I said, shaking my head and signing them off with the flats of both my hands. ‘You must go’, and I pointed the way.

  Then one of them stepped a pace forward and said, smiling:

  ‘No work? Yes, no work. We go.’ And he nodded. ‘But first we see Abraham Yose.’

  Abraham was their uncle, their father’s brother, from Qumbu. They had come looking for work, yes, but also to see their uncle. Their father had said that Abraham was on this farm, and that he would give them good advice.

  The midday bell clanged and old Abraham came up from the lands, with a message for Mother that Father would be a little late for lunch because he’d gone to oil the windmill in the bottom akker.

  ‘Abraham’, I said, ‘these young men come from your brother in Qumbu.’

  He looked at them, and they at him. It was the sort of slow, deep look that makes one understand the African greeting ‘I see you’. Those kinsmen made sure that they saw each other.

  And they shook hands, slowly, as if giving time for a current of affection to flow between them. There was no hassle as to which should receive the first handshake, because the same young man, presumably the firstborn, took the initiative. Uncle and nephew held hands for a long time; the slow, spaced words seemed to be rather like the meaningless croons and sighs mothers and children make when their arms are around each other. I left them to it.

  Later Abraham asked Father if his nephews could sleep two nights at his hut. They had walked a long way. They were hungry and needed feeding. Of course Father agreed.

  It is difficult at this distance in time to remember all that Terrence said during the next hour, sitting there on the edge of the dry furrow: but he was trying to pull his farming background, and the recent drama, into line with the history, and economics, and sociology, which he was learning at university; and finding it very difficult indeed.

  Much depended on the two ‘boss boys’ whom Mr Scott had taken over with the farm – ‘almost like serfs in Tsarist Russia’, he said.

  Abraham Yose, uncle of the twins, was in charge of the stock. Like many Xhosa, he had a feeling for cattle which whites can’t understand – cattle are sacred animals to them, and what animals are sacred to whites? We don’t know the meaning of the word anymore. Anyway, Abraham was headman of the Xhosa families on the farm – just under half of the labour force. In status he was only slightly inferior to Johannes de Bruin, a coloured man with high Khoi cheekbones who’d been born on Vaalkrantz, as had his father before him, and sometimes gave the impression that he believed himself to be the rightful owner of the place.

  His main work was in the lands and the water leading; he was very good with the mechanical end of the farming: tractors, water pumps, ploughs. There was no hard and fast division between old Hottentots and the newer Xhosa or Sotho families. They intermarried and the children all attended the same farm school and belonged to similar religious sects. But there were moments when their different traditions surfaced, and also their different experiences of the white man.

  Across two centuries the Khoi had been smashed, subjugated and turned into servants and labourers by the Boers, whose language and culture they’d adopted. They had lost most of their rituals, and what survived seemed to be decayed bits of European custom rather than the moon dances and the magic of the hunt to which the early tr
avellers referred.

  The Xhosa had been defeated over another century, mainly by the British; and although many of them had accepted some form of Christianity, they were not subservient clients – they still spoke their own language, and were still insistent on certain ritual sacrifices of goats, and sometimes even oxen, on important occasions. Their young men still went to the bush to be initiated.

  As Terrence talked, the landscape which I was attempting to depict developed perspectives and undertones that had little to do with pigment, line, space and light.

  ‘That day of the twins’ arrival’, said Terrence, ‘as luck or the devil would have it, Mr Scott arrived unexpectedly for lunch. The conversation ranged over farming affairs, and his labour force. Father remarked on the reliability of Old Abraham Yose – and then, on impulse, I spoke about his nephews, the twins from Qumbu.

  ‘It’s a pity there’s no work for them’, I said.

  ‘Even if there was I’d never recommend them’, said Father. ‘Twins spell bad luck.’

  Mother added: ‘They’re lucky to be alive.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mr Scott. There was a pause, as though the question displayed unusual ignorance. Then Mother said: ‘Twins are born, but they don’t survive. Well, very seldom.’

  ‘You mean the mother kills them? I’ve never believed that story’, Scott said.

  ‘I don’t know’, said Mother wryly. ‘Maybe she just forgets to feed them.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a Bushman or a Hottentot identical twin’, said Father.

  ‘But why? Why?’ Mr Scott insisted. Father replied: ‘You know how superstitious they all are. Anything out of the way – like an eclipse – scares them as sinister, unlucky.’

  Mother added: ‘If they do survive, it’s because the mother sends one away, quickly, and far.’

  Then Father again: ‘They’ll never get employed together in this part of the world: the people in the huts won’t stand for it.’

  ‘Apart from all the superstition’, said Mother, ‘they’re so similar it will confuse the bosses. They’ll have to be split up for practical reasons.’