by Chris Marais
The amiable De Beers public affairs manager, Gert Klopper, arrived at the gates of Kleinsee to help us through Security. Suddenly, from the rowdy roughand-tumble of Port Nolloth, we were in a neat, box-like, litter-free town where people kept to the speed limit. There was not a Nigerian drug dealer in sight.
On the mine tour, we heard that De Beers was rehabilitating its disturbed areas.
“In 50 years’ time, people won’t even know there was a mine here,” we were assured.
Back in the late 1920s, while diamond fever was sweeping the northern reaches of the West Coast, a teacher called Pieter de Villiers was on another mission. He was building a farm school near the mouth of the Buffels River at a place called Kleinsee. One day, by chance, he kicked a diamond out from the ground.
And so Kleinsee Mine was born, with Jack Carstens as the pit manager. He tells of the nights when ‘the crooks’ would arrive at the diggings to steal the diamond gravel from under their noses. His Namaqualander guards carried electric torches, their ‘wizard devices’. The guards thought you could immobilise a man if you shone your torch on him.
In A Fortune Through My Fingers he relates a conversation he once had with a guard called Jan. Jan tells Jack about some ‘crooks’ he had found in the section called the Main Area:
“I torched them and they didn’t fall over so I went quite close to them and then they ran away and I couldn’t catch them.”
Other crooks who escaped with Kleinsee diamonds had it easier. They didn’t have to endure any form of the quaint ‘Namaqua Torchlight’ torture. In July 1932, a consignment of 10 000 diamonds worth about £53 000 was nicked from the Bitterfontein post office on the way to Kimberley.
Dressed like dude miners, we climbed into a bus and drove past the faceless, windowless, final-processing plant, where no human skin touched a diamond. It was all done with conveyor belts and quarantine gloves under the constantly watchful eyes of many cameras. Not a touchy-feely kind of process.
Further along, we came to the bedrock, where the diamonds were. Massive suction units were being used to hoover up the gravel. Our guide, Mariska Theunissen, said the workers here were encouraged not to bend down.
“And if they do, it’s considered very good manners to immediately hold up their hands to show what they’ve picked up.”
We came to the main event of Kleinsee: the dragline, a monster machine that loomed above the skyline and needed its own transformer station to power it.
“Every Sunday, when they start it up, the lights all over the town of Kleinsee go dim,” said Mariska. The dragline saved a lot of spadework – its 36-tonne bucket could eat 72 tonnes of soil with every bite. Every year, it was stripped down and serviced from top to bottom by 150 technicians.
As we toured the massive mining area, we learnt more about working and living in Kleinsee. For one thing, there were no speed freaks on the diggings.
“Every driver has a magnetic ID device that he must use whenever starting a vehicle,” said Mariska. “This monitors how long he idles, how fast he drives, how much the engine is revved and whether he’s hard on the brakes.”
Back at the Welcome Centre, we asked Gert about Kleinsee’s water source. Most of it came from the Gariep River, he said. But they also took water from the nearby Buffels River, which was notoriously brackish.
“Let’s just call it water with attitude,” smiled Gert.
“People get used to the brackish taste,” added Jackie Engelbrecht, his colleague. “When they leave Kleinsee, some of the older people like to add a pinch of salt to their coffee because they’re so used to the mineral taste of the water.”
We saw the museum, founded only after a local farmer had shot a leopard. He had it stuffed and then discovered there was no place to display it. So the raccoon-eyed leopard now stood stiffly next to a diorama of brown hyena and a collection of startled stuffed birds.
Jules and I drove over to the Houthoop Guest House, about 15 km out of Kleinsee. While we were unpacking the bakkie, a large group of German bikers arrived in a cloud of dust and bonhomie. They stripped off their leathers and settled themselves in sunlight, knocking back beer after beer. It turned out they were a swashbuckling gang of gay dentists and doctors from various parts of Germany. Every year the Dauntless Docs took themselves off on motorbikes to some exotic part of the world.
The grounds of Houthoop were festooned with homespun homilies in the form of dozens of signs. In the course of five minutes, I learnt that:
• “A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist”
• “Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again”
• “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away”
• “Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night”
Veronica van Dyk, the owner-manager of Houthoop was, we discovered, the compiler of the wisdoms. For dinner, this incredible woman gave us steaks, salads, rosemary potatoes, pumpkin fritters and all the garlic prawns we could eat.
The next morning, it smelled like France wherever we went. Floors Brand was on hand to guide us on a great field trip through the De Beers estate – a trip that, thankfully, would at last have nothing to do with a diamond. This was day eight of our Shorelines adventure, and almost every single waking moment had been about diamonds. And they’re not really forever. I read somewhere that if you dropped them at just the right angle onto a hard floor, they could shatter. But enough, already, about diamonds.
“Sorry about the garlic,” Jules told Floors.
“Don’t worry,” he assured us. “I had garlic all over my mashed potatoes last night.” Bonjour, then.
The tall, grey-haired Floors was the retired estate manager for Kleinsee. Only 12% of the 400 000 hectares owned by De Beers in these parts was under mining. The rest of it was dunes, shipwreck coast, succulent gardens, seaside hideaways, secret smuggling bays, old legends, mystery stories and, at this time of the year, hundreds of bonking tortoises who had suddenly discovered a dash of speed. Like I said, no diamonds. Thank you, Lord.
We parked at the wreck of the Border, which went down in dense fog at high tide on 1 April 1947. All that was left of this cargo ship was a rusty hull on the beach. But the weather was stormy and grey that morning – with the West Coast at its least forgiving. The perfect atmosphere for a shipwreck tour. I photographed a hardy Mesembryanthemum crystallinum (its English name was lost to me) battling through the layers of thick rust on the deck of the Border. Life escaping out of the dead.
I heard crunching and swung about in alarm, one of my Canon cameras nearly taking my nose off. It was the good wife, who had discovered the joys of jumping on a bed of dry, black mussel shells in her hiking boots. Like a little girl who has found a large sheet of plastic wrapping paper that pops. Floors, bless his soul, didn’t bat an eyelid. Knowing we’d had one mine tour too many, he just let us play with our rust-bed succulents and dance on our crunchy mussel beds.
We drove on and stopped at one of the many bays, where drifts of plovers ran up and down at the edge of the wild, breaking waves. Scouring winds drove the warmer surface water away so that the icy water deeper down was forced upwards, carrying plankton and nutrients with it.
“This is the Benguela Current, what they call The Upwelling,” said Floors. “This is what makes the waters off the West Coast so rich.” This, obviously, was why so many seals regarded the area as prime coastal property.
We continued and found a Strandloper midden where the ‘old people’ used to quaff piles of limpets. Floors showed us how to tell the difference between ‘natural death’ limpets and ones that had been hammered open by hungry protohumans.
On the way back to the vehicle, he called us over to observe the difference between Gazania lichtensteinii and Gazania meyerii (one leaf is slightly larger than the other).
“The best way to appreciate Namaqualand is on your knees,” said Floors.
Weeks after the shipwreck, a heavy storm blew up, leaving the beaches covered with luggage from (and pieces of) the Piratiny, which included quantities of dress materials and bolts of silk. Several months later, at the church-communion service, all the local children came uniformly dressed in clothes made from the Piratiny flotsam.
We found Noup, a tucked-away cove where diamond divers used to hole up in a collection of eccentric, weather-beaten cottages – all facing the noisy sea.
“I’ve slept here from time to time,” said Floors. “It feels like the ocean is just waiting to burst in through the front door.”
Driving through the De Beers game farm, we encountered a number of very preoccupied male angulate tortoises intent on crossing the road at high speed in search of willing womenfolk from their tribe. Normally when one shoves a wide-angle lens into a tortoise’s face, he withdraws into his shell. Not these fellows. They glared up at me like movie stars dealing with paparazzi: if you value your big toe, you’ll get out of my way …
Floors was concerned with questions of land ownership in the area and with making sure that the sandveld had every chance of recovery and survival. He was acutely aware that De Beers was unpopular in the region. Many local farmers suspected the company of acquiring land here in the past in underhand ways. Floors had also been De Beers’s man in negotiations to hand over the area between the Groen and the Spoeg rivers to the National Parks organisation to be part of one massive conservation district.
It was a day of miracle and wonder with the grizzled, amiable Floors, whom we’d come to like a lot. He also showed us that the oft-maligned De Beers (and there are many reasons to take issue with this diamond giant) had, ironically, kept a huge section of the South African coastline pristine and free (for the time being) of developers and their grubby little millionaire condo-plots.
Time spent in the company of Floors was also a window into the soul of the true Namaqualander. Like the hardy succulents of his region, Namaqualand Man is minimalist, stripped down by the elements of his environment, living by his own rules.
His is not a world of duvets, wide-screen TV sets or sushi bars. Just give him a karos (buckskin blanket), a sad old song and a plate of stormjaers – little doughball dumplings rolled and fried in fat.
That night, the threat of stomach bombs was far from our minds. Our hostess gave us chicken tortillas – and some parting words of wisdom:
“Most of us go to the grave with the music still inside us.”
Chapter 5: Hondeklip Bay to Doring Bay
Misty Shores
Summer, 1855. The old jetty at Hondeklip Bay at low tide. Chained to its piers are three miserable souls, part of a drinking club that tore up the town the night before. Their mates are in the local lock-up, also suffering the effects of too much Cape Smoke brandy.
It all begins the day before, and sounds like a damn good idea. The group of men, copper drovers who have battled across the sands from Springbokfontein (now Springbok) with their loads, invest in a 16-gallon cask of brandy and form a drinking circle around it on the beach. At first, there is much merriment. Then they all fall into a deep depression, have another round and become ‘general disturbances’, making sleep impossible for the few locals.
The magistrate, a large and powerful man called Pillans, is rousted from his bed and emerges from his hut a very angry person. Grabbing torches and a couple of deputies, Pillans soon has the drunken drovers rounded up. He has most of them thrown into the small goal and the trio that can’t fit in are hauled back down to the beach and chained to the piers. They watch the morning sun through a haze of Cape Smoke and remorse. And there’s also the small matter of rising waters.
Winter, 1866. The old jetty at Hondeklip Bay at high tide. Roped to its railing is a ship’s captain with a death wish. He waits for the right wave and flings himself down into the sea, one end of the length of rope tied to his waist and the other to the jetty. Hours later, his lifeless body is found bobbing in the waters around the pier.
Captain Johan Daniel Stephan had brought the Jonquille to the mouth of Hondeklip Bay, where it lay at anchor. It was a great mystery to everyone that the Jonquille had run aground on one of the reefs – the young captain was familiar with the bay.
But no lives were lost, some of the cargo was recovered and the rest was well insured. It seemed a small matter, something that happens practically every day along this unpredictable West Coast.
On 4 August 1866, the Argus newspaper in Cape Town reported thus:
“Readers will remember that, a few days since, we reported the wreck of the schooner Jonquille at the mouth of Hondeklip Bay. We now regret having to add that Captain Stephan, her late commander, died by his own hand on Thursday last. We are not aware of the precise cause, which led the unfortunate man to terminate his existence, nor are we aware that any censure had been passed upon him for the loss of his vessel, but it would appear that the fact must have weighed upon his mind and led him to the commission of this rash act.”
Letters between Captain Johan Daniel Stephan and his father, head of the shipping company, were found:
Dear Father,
I had sooner expected my death than that I should lose the schooner, and as I was so certain I have been sadly disappointed. I am the lost son, and you will see me no more …. Believe me, I am sorry, but my time has come, and I shall go where the schooner has gone.
Captain Stephan’s father receives this letter and replies:
Dear Son,
Come on by the first opportunity direct to Cape Town. Be not much concerned about the loss sustained, as long as your brother and yourself have retained your health. What gladdens me most is that you and the crew have been saved. You will continue as ever, like all the others, one of my beloved children.
By the time the father writes this letter, the son has been dead for two days. Much later, it emerges that one of the flukes on the Jonquille’s main anchor had mysteriously snapped, leaving the vessel free to run onto the reef. It wasn’t Stephan’s fault at all.
We had no clue of this deeply moving historical background to Hondeklip Bay on the day Jules and I drove in. This information came to us later via a retired skipper with a sharp ear for history. For now, all we saw as we approached the harbour at low tide was a collection of brightly painted little houses, with a ghostly mist descending.
A man with a collie dog walked past on the beach. The collie headed straight for a beached fishing boat, peed joyously on the propeller and trotted off after its owner.
The sea line, only metres away from us, became invisible. The cloak of mist lifted slightly and revealed a flotilla of bobbing tuppies with their suction pipes hanging aft like large intestines. Hondeklip Bay has its own mad diamond-diving fraternity.
An ancient mariner of sorts arrived and sat down near us. He wore a blue worker’s overall and a white cap bearing a South African flag and the words:
“Put Children First Now”.
His name was Ivan Don. By day, he fished. At night, he was the guard at the old lobster-packing factory. Which was a bit sad, because the rock lobsters were fished out of this area more than 20 years ago. Even the West Coast Upwelling could not withstand the constant overfishing.
“Now there’s just a couple of rowing boats that go out for hotnotsvis, harders and a bit of snoek,” he said. We asked about the jetty, which seemed to be absent.
“A big storm came in 2002 and washed it away,” he said. “The surge killed three men in a rowing boat, then crossed the road to the Post Office and ruined the petrol pump forever.”
Jules an
d Ivan chatted away casually, with the fisherman giving colourful insights into life in Hondeklip Bay, until she asked him about the fishing quotas in the area. He told her about his fishing permit, but when she threw in a few more questions, he clammed up and gazed out at the misty coastline.
“Don’t worry, I’m not a Fisheries inspector,” she assured the man. But the brief connection was over, and we drove on. Hondeklip Bay. Dog Stone Bay. How did that name come about?
John M Smallberger explains it in A History of Copper Mining in Namaqualand. It seemed there once was a stone around here, a large boulder shaped like a dog. Then a bored traveller painted the stone red. Time passed and foul weather removed most of the paint but for small traces in the crevices of the stone. A prospector came by, looking for copper. He saw those remaining red paint spots, knocked off what was the ‘dog’s ear’ and sent it back to his employers for analysis.
There’s no record of that particular prospector’s later progress in life. He probably found himself another day job shortly afterwards.
We drove past a house where an old woman stood on her porch, keeping her head down and steadfastly ignoring us.
“Maybe she also has a fishing permit that needs checking,” I joked. But, really, fishing permits are a serious matter all along the SA coastline. You’re only a dumb townie if you joke about them.
We left Hondeklip Bay and drove past mining grounds that looked as though they had never seen a rehabilitation programme. On the Waterval– Kotzesrus road, we came upon a farm that sorely needed a break from the hundreds of sheep and goats that had grazed it bare. This place was crying out to become part of a national park for a millennium or three.
And then we were at Groen Rivier Mouth amidst a collection of Zozo dwellings, construction huts and steel igloos. Even the lighthouse was tatty and painted an uninspiring combination of dirty yellow and black. Gullies ran rich with empty beer bottles. Rotting caravans were parked within sight of the breakers. Their owners sat under shade cloth, eating and talking in low tones. As we drove past, sundry strips of netting twitched as hands moved them aside for a better view of us. Deliverance By The Sea.
