by Chris Marais
Rietfontein had been good to the Dorsland Trekkers in many ways, and I understood why. There was abundant water. I saw more than 500 zebra come down to drink. The mares bickered, the colts carefully observing the protocol, shying away from those ladies with pinned-back ears, as one should always do. The lead stallions of each group paused in front of their families before proceeding, stopping every few metres to check for predators.
I imagined the guns of the Dorsland Trekkers waiting in bushes nearby. The men were skilled hunters, and shooting for the pot would have been a breeze out here.
All along our Dry Lands trip, even as far south as Keetmanshoop, Jules and I had encountered small reminders of the various Dorsland Treks, testaments to amazing endurance, obdurance, innovation, stupidity, hope and despair in equal measures. A well-preserved wagon here, a small green Trekker girl’s kappie (bonnet) there, a farm implement, a family Bible, a hunting knife and a gravestone – these were all signposts to the past.
You’d think that by 1875 the Boers had done enough trekking to last them an eternity. They’d been streaming up from the Cape and away from the stifling atmosphere of British colonial influence for decades, and the Transvaal looked to be their final stop. But President Thomas Burgers of the Transvaal Republic was not everyone’s cup of tea. His ways were seen to be too liberal. Add to that the fact that the British had googly eyes for the Transvaal and you get the feeling that there was much unease north of the Orange River. The more conservative elements of the Boer community looked to the west, greased up their whipstocks and checked their ammunition.
Many who write about the phenomenon that followed say it was all about a thing called trekgees (the spirit of trekking), that the Boers were just itching to leave their comparatively lucrative farms in the Transvaal and swap their comfortable lives for uncertainty on the road. They had, no doubt, heard all about the blonde plains of German West (as it was then), filled to the horizon with game for the taking.
You can just imagine the adventurers in the family returning to the family farms with stories of famous hunts in Ngamiland or the Kaokoveld, their eyes gleaming with memories of ivory and skin, lonely campfires and friendly tribesmen. There was a farmer up in the Ghanzi area of Ngamiland, Hendrik van Zyl, whose exploits alone must have ignited many Transvaalers’ passion for the open road. In one year, he shot an estimated 400 elephant. According to another account, Van Zyl and his cronies were said to have killed more than 100 elephant in a single day.
With each story a little embellishment was added, like Tabasco to a traveller’s meal, and by the time the anecdote was served across the Crocodile River, it usually had all the accompaniments of a fine old banquet. In those days, real men dressed in elephant skin and ostrich feathers and ate hippo foot for supper; some of them must have come across as utterly camp carnivores of the very worst kind.
The travel writer Jonathan Raban hunted down an interesting clipping from an 1893 edition of Atlantic Monthly for his book Bad Land, in which one EV Smalley talks of Europeans settling in the Dakotas:
“An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie states among farmers and their wives. In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnish the largest contingent to the asylums. The reason is not far to seek. These people come from cheery little farm villages. Life in the fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome. Think for a moment how great the change must be from the white-walled, red-roofed village on a Norway fjord, with its church and schoolhouse, its fishing boats on the blue inlet, and its green mountain walls towering aloft to snowfields, to an isolated cabin on a Dakota prairie, and say if it is any wonder that so many Scandinavians lose their mental balance.”
Well, the Boers differ from the Scandinavians in that they actually relish the solitude of being out of sight of their neighbours. Living on top of one another was, in fact, the very thing that would most likely drive them mad. Not for them the bucolic little “village green” fantasy. They prized space above all else, and so when Gert Alberts and his 82-year-old adviser Johannes van der Merwe came up with a plan to lead a small group of runaway pioneers westwards, there was no shortage of takers.
Alberts took ten families across the Kalahari in ox wagons. Think about it. Most people would shrink from doing the trip in an air-conditioned SUV these days, even if you offered them fizzy flavoured water and as much fine Ghanzi biltong as they could eat.
Alberts and Co took 50 wagons and more than 1 400 cattle right past Lake Ngami, where they met the notorious Van Zyl and asked for access to his wells. He refused. Some might think him harsh, others would deem him sensible. A lot of oxen can cause havoc with a watering point out here in the desert.
A while later, Van Zyl grumpily agreed to let them have water, but by now the Dorslanders had the measure of their man. They just didn’t feel very welcome, so they pressed on to another Rietfontein, on the border with German West. The Alberts convoy was well planned, travelling in small groups so there was no ox-jam at the waterhole.
Michael Main, in his excellent book simply entitled Kalahari, says the dreaded Van Zyl stood up for those Dorslanders in a rather dubious way. Upon learning that one young trekker had been killed by Bushmen, he took the law into his own hands. Van Zyl invited the local Bushmen to a get-together, where there would be free Skaaplek and Cape Smoke brandy, and they inevitably arrived in large numbers. At a given moment in the proceedings, he had them tied up and dragged off to where the youngster had been killed. And there, he executed more than 30 Bushmen. For a man who once, allegedly, helped shoot a huge herd of elephants trapped in hardening mud, this was probably just another day’s work out in the desert.
The second convoy, led, according to Lawrence Green, by a hunter called Jan Greyling (others record that a man called Louwrens du Plessis was the boss), was a total disaster. Apparently, Alberts’s success inspired the rest of the disgruntled Boers back home, and they took to the desert like locusts on the fly. Nearly 500 people in 128 wagons were just too much of a load for the Kalahari ecosystem, marginal at best, to bear. Thousands of head of cattle went crazy out there in the desert, clogged up what scant waterholes were available and died in great numbers. The most prevalent historical image from that particular disaster is of cattle licking the shiny rims of the wagon wheels, mistaking the sun’s reflection for water – the strangest, saddest mirage on record.
And as they crossed the Kalahari, the parched travellers would drop off items like furniture and wakiste (wagon chests), even abandoning wagons in a bid to lighten their loads. Of course, the Bushmen who roamed these vast sands as if they were lords living on Easy Street had (except for those in the vicinity of the villainous Van Zyl) benefited hugely from the embattled Dorslanders. Suddenly, an ostrich egg filled with cool water from God knows where took on immense value, and the bartering was on. Your entire wagon for this egg. That kind of stuff.
So far, however, no one had died. Alberts, at Rietfontein, was contacted and he rescued a number of the Dorsland II cast. Others went back to the Transvaal, realising that old Burgers and the Brits were a doddle compared with the Kalahari sands. And the Rietfontein group moved up to the Okavango, where malaria began to strike them down. Pretty soon, the death toll reached 200.
Enter one Axel Eriksson, trader, collector of specimens, adventurer and soon-to-be philanthropist. Stunned by the misery of these downtrodden people before him, Axel wrote to the Cape newspapers of their plight:
“It is a bitter and heartrending story. It is hard to see them now, poor and sick, dying, in distress. Many have neither dog nor fowl left. Many children, driven by hunger, eat earth and die almost immediately. Here a few rave for food, there another frightens away the birds of prey from some putrid carcase [sic] that he may regale himself on what a hyena would disdain.”
These reports bred another great story. All of Cape Town was concerned for the Dorsland Trekkers (except, maybe, for some of Her Majesty’s colonial subjects who probably thought it served them
right for creating such a fuss and running away) and more than £5 000 were raised.
In 1879 two ships, the Swallow and the Christina (to be fair, they were of British origin), were loaded with rescue supplies for the Dorslanders. They made their way up the west coast to Rocky Point, near Cape Cross on the Skeleton Coast. Landing there was impossible, so they returned to Walvis Bay. Dorslanders, hearing of this great gesture of kindness from the Cape, sent wagons off to Walvis. The goods were picked up and taken all the way back to Etosha, and the trekgees pumped once more.
An interesting aside here. Captain WB Warren of the Swallow, while scouting around the Cape Cross shoreline for a possible landing spot, actually saw the very padrão left here by officially the first white man in southern Africa back in the mid-1500s, Diogo Cão.
Possibly the most colourful account of life in the Dorsland laager is a work of fiction written by prominent South African author WA de Klerk, entitled The Thirstland. He writes of the group’s carpenters, who made wooden chests, benches, yokes, wheel rims and, tragically, a lot of coffins. They were mainly members of the Holtzhauzen family, and they used “teak from the north” in most of their work.
Then you had the gunsmiths, the agriculturalists, the ironsmiths (working with fired leadwood, their “black figures looming up through the clouds of steam”) and the leatherworkers, who made veldskoens and whips for the convoy.
But, for me, the most powerful image is De Klerk’s description of the way the women worked a hippo carcass after a day’s hunting on the Kunene River:
“The prospects were that the great fat-hunger of the Trek would eventually be appeased,” De Klerk writes. “Under the trees, at roughly constructed tables, the womenfolk stood cutting up hunks of fat into strips, trimming it, washing it all to a shiny whiteness. The young girls carried the strips on wooden trays to sunny flats, setting them out on the grass. There it lay, like snow on the Cape mountains. The Himbas, hacking at the carcasses, fought noisily with each other for choice titbits. The hunters, tired after a hard day’s work, sat under the anas. Clouds of tobacco smoke hung in the lifeless air. There they sat, drinking coffee, cleaning their guns, talking, and ever talking.”
But it wasn’t all Hippo Heaven on the Kunene up in the Kaokoveld. Apart from the malarial mosquitoes, you had your Nile crocodile, a menace that exists to this day. One night, young Nellie le Grange of the Dorslanders went swimming up near Swartboois Drift. A juvenile crocodile took her by the leg. She screamed, but the rest of the camp thought it was just a bunch of girls having a good time by the river. Finally, one Cillie van der Walt and some other Dorsland women dragged both Nellie and the crocodile onto a sandbank and threw sand in the big lizard’s eyes so it would release its grip on the girl. Nellie was saved, but the leg was slow in healing.
An interesting character had entered the world of Dorsland Trekking by now: William Worthington Jordan, a young man of colour from the Cape. How these hardened old Calvinists with rather racist views on life took to a non-white fellow is one of the great Dorsland mysteries, but it was so. He won their confidence and became their spokesman. Jordan knew all sorts of places and languages, including Portuguese, and interested them in crossing the Kunene and setting up home in Angola. Which they did, from about 1880 onwards. They were now the Angola Boers, living on the Humpata Plateau. And it was also there that WW Jordan set up a little trading store for himself. I don’t get the sense Jordan was an exploitative man, no more so than most of us. He was just quite good at setting up a win-win situation.
And when the settlers became edgy up on the Humpata, it was Jordan who found them a home back in German West, this time in the Grootfontein area. Although many Boers stayed on in Angola until well into the twentieth century, the Grootfonteiners came and set up what they called Upingtonia: a new world for a restless people.
Upingtonia was a complicated place. The local tribes were opposed to a new state in their midst, and so were both the Portuguese and English colonial powers. What wizardry would these hard-faced Boers be up to now? Bismarck, that “German of Germans”, wouldn’t even lend them a little cannon to defend themselves. There were battles with the Hereros, the Owambos and even the Hottentots. Eventually, Jordan was murdered by a prominent Owambo and the spirit seemed to leak out of the Upingtonia Utopia.
The Angola Boers had, to an extent, integrated with their unlikely colonial masters, and had even waged some successful battles on behalf of the Portuguese. The Dorslanders also, unfortunately, declared war on the elephants of the region and chased most of them down for their tusks. Ivory was the trade of the day, and somebody had to pay for that coffee and tobacco …
Chapter 24: Owamboland
Dog Biscuits
“When you were about seven years old,” I said to Jules, as we drove east out of Etosha, “I was a soldier up here. Certainly not the best soldier, and not even in uniform. In fact, I wore an oil-spattered khaki overall most of the time and did as little as possible.”
She raised an interested eyebrow, so I took her back more than 30 years to the early seventies …
“Just as the rainy season began in Owamboland, the Dakota transport plane dropped us near the German bakery town of Grootfontein. We’ll be there tomorrow.
“I arrived like a scrubbed little altar boy. Within a week I had become Shrek. I didn’t shave, didn’t make my bed, didn’t give a damn. No one really noticed.
“They had tried to make me an army officer. Despite the fact that I hadn’t distinguished myself at high school. Tie that up with ‘poor sportsman’ and the reality that the only war I liked was up there on the movie screen, and you had yourself a National Service loser, for sure.”
“I’ve always thought you were more of a movie fan than a Captain Caprivi,” said Jules.
“Teenage years, who needs ’em?” I replied. “Back then, my ‘Sunshine Corner’ entry would have read: ‘White Anglo-Afrikaans teenager. Plays good pool until the third double. Writes up in his room to escape the world of pimples, maths and Abba. Looking for a girl. Looking for a life. Is there anyone out there?’ Not great officer material for any army.”
“Couldn’t you just refuse?”
“Well, you did have a choice. You could always go to jail for six years instead. But that would have been a bit of a jolt for a privileged white boy like me. So I thought hey, let me go for the lesser of two weevils and lurk in a military store for nine months. Preferably somewhere near the back where they stack the blankets.”
“Why didn’t you just go overseas?”
“Short answer? I didn’t have the confidence,” I replied, as we drove through Owambo country.
“My dad was a decorated member of a bomber corps in World War II. He fought Hitler, he was motivated. He returned a war hero. I didn’t feel much like a war hero. I couldn’t get my head around the Total Onslaught propaganda. What was that? Like, another bad hair day down at Pooh Corner? Rabbit thinks Kanga’s a spy. Piglet’s shadow looks like the Giant Woozel. Lookout, here comes Tigger. Join the army. Fight blacks and Russians. Why?
“In fact, if I were to shoot anyone with an assault rifle, it would probably have been someone white and closer to my everyday life at boarding school. Like that fat bully from the far north who took two years of my high school and turned them into a nightmare, just because he could. I’d have been made Marksman No 1 on the firing range if that bastard’s face had been on the target. Then you would have seen me go. Oh yes, please.”
Intrigued, my wife urged me to tell her more about my army daze up here in northern Namibia.
“We have to backtrack to South Africa for that, to the day my Ma drove me out to the little town of Heidelberg, south of Johannesburg, where a kindly-looking corporal pointed out ‘my flat’ to us, like an estate agent on show day.”
Ma, ever the trusting soul, was delirious with joy that her son would be accommodated in such smart quarters. I did, however, see the fellow smirk behind his hand. I knew something nasty was afoot. The minute she dro
ve off in her V-6, thinking happy thoughts about her boy in browns, the corporal turned to me and said:
“Nice flat, hey? See how much you like it by next week.”
My corporal was hard to love. But not as hard as that flat. At first I called it Luxury. Six weeks later its name had become Hell Hole. You had to keep the place reflector-shining, so you could constantly see your sad little self on the spotless floor. You couldn’t sleep on the bed because it had to be ironed square every night for inspection. You had to put milk cartons into socks to square them off. Was there nothing round in this man’s army?
My privileged white boy status meant little here. Damn, I even had to learn to iron my own clothes.
Every night, we worked into the small hours chasing dirt from our flats. Sometimes it was real dirt, sometimes it was the dirt that lurked purely in the minds of the inspecting officers. But dirt it was. And slowly, our little band of do-nothings began to form. The Sixteen Slackers. The kind of guys you’d probably find in AA meetings, Smokenders gatherings, Weigh-Less conventions and the back-benches of Parliament.
Three months crept by in slow seconds. I learnt to march in step, leopard-crawl up to my dreaded flat, turn corridor floors into mirrors with my ass, carry huge logs about like on-board luggage and grow really intimate with my FN rifle.
I ate up the entire smorgasbord of seventies military service: received a Dear John letter in the first month, trimmed down to nearly nothing, learnt a whole new range of curses, became a whizz at keeping boots shiny and then made the near-fatal mistake of singing Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock at a Delta company braai with an impromptu group called The Cape Town Sonofabitch Boys Blues Band.
Somehow, we were living American lives in South Africa. We fell in with US culture, clothing and music. We listened to what our American counterparts were saying over in Vietnam, where they, too, were “winning the war”. We couldn’t even come up with our own slang. Instead, we called our enemy “gooks” and, just like the Yanks, in the course of running around in the bush we mostly shot ourselves.
