Shorelines
Page 21
“The rain arrived,” he said, and you could hear the party in his voice. “The fires died just in time and missed the village.” We said goodbye as we entered what looked like the set of The Truman Show.
The morning sun lit up the Port Alfred marina in a dozen pastel hues. Fluffy clouds drifted overhead. Canvas-covered boats bobbed gently on blue water and the air was still.
We were in Port Alfred’s pre-Christmas lull, guests of the founder and developer of the Royal Alfred Marina, Justin de Wet Steyn. Within weeks, most of the 200 mansions that made up this slice of seaside heaven would come alive with upcountry families. Endless rows of Christmas lights would shine into the skies of settler country and Santa would ride the canals in a ski boat laden with presents. Canoes would forage up the Kowie River; deep-sea fishing boats would head out into the Indian Ocean for bigger stuff. And no Smileys would be served here, either.
“This is the lifestyle people dream about,” said the developer, who had made his earlier fortune from fried-chicken franchises all over southern Africa.
“Me, not so much,” I confided to my wife as we detoured inland. “I’d prefer something in a shabby little Mozambican beach bar one day.”
The bar we were headed to was the Pig ’n Whistle in Bathurst, a settler village with a history of frontier wars and house-to-house battles with the “rampant Xhosa”. On our travels I had found a very strange book called Camp Life & Sport in South Africa by one TJ Lucas, who had been a Grahamstownbased hussar in the early 1850s.
Lieutenant Lucas had a rough time of it at first. Pranksters sold him a vicious horse that ran him straight into a stone wall at high speed, causing half his flowering moustache to shear clean off. Then a new commanding officer, named, for reasons of propriety, “Colonel S”, arrived. The little colonel particularly hated wearing his hussar’s shako, a kettle-shaped helmet fancied at the time. After various parades, he could be spotted kicking the poor shako about his office floor with gusto.
Colonel S once took them out on patrol, and they were beset by a huge swarm of locusts. One of the locusts flew directly into the colonel’s eye, distressing him greatly.
“I’ll serve you out for that, you little beast,” the colonel shouted, snatching the locust up in his fingers and turning around to his troops. “Now who has a pin for me?”
Someone produced a pin and the colonel shortly had the offending locust skewered.
“You’ll hit me in the eye, will you, will you?” he yelled at the writhing locust while giving the pin “a vicious twirl”. Both locust and pin were then placed in one of his saddlebags and they rode on, into the scrub. But whenever his eye pained him, the colonel would have the little locust withdrawn and “subject to fresh torments at the hands of its remorseless captor”.
Like the frontier wars that took place between Xhosa and colonial, the book has its deadly-serious side. We were to find out more about that later, but our next item of business lay in the Buffalo City itself: East London.
We stayed overnight with Lew Elias, a senior journalist from the Daily Dispatch newspaper. Joining us was a mutual friend, the photographer Les Bush, who had grown up in East London with Lewis. With Lew and Les as our guides, we travelled around the city where the late Janis Joplin would have felt at home. Everyone, it seemed, owned a brand-new Mercedes-Benz.
Daimler-Chrysler practically owned the town. Staff had great incentives to buy themselves C-Class Mercedes coupés.
“So you’d get spray painters and the like driving to work in these very expensive cars,” said Lew. “Any stranger to East London would think there was some serious money here somewhere.”
We went for breakfast to a great spot on Latimer’s Landing. Opposite us stood rows and rows of different models of Mercedes.
“There’s more than R46 million in cars watching us have breakfast,” said Lew, who, one suspects, was a bit of a petrol head.
While we waited for our food, I read from an advertising leaflet fixed to the middle of the table:
“Private Investigations. Confidentiality Guaranteed. Spymaster
specialising in hidden cameras, bugging and de-bugging”
“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”
– Henry Ford
“Don’t upset me. I’ve run out of places to hide the bodies.” – Anon.
Latimer’s Landing had been named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who first discovered a dead coelacanth (aka Old Four Legs), a fossil fish that once left the sea to stump around on land and decided hell no, this isn’t for me, returning swiftly to the waters. But it still had those stubby little legs.
Marjorie was called down to the East London docks one day in 1938 to check out a load of sharks that had just come in on the boat Nerine. She noticed a strange-looking blue fin sticking out from the pile of otherwise pure shark.
“I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” she told author Samantha Weinberg in A Fish Caught in Time. “It had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy-dog tail.”
The part I liked in Weinberg’s book was the struggle Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had in handling the rather bulky coelacanth. Firstly, the taxi driver wouldn’t have “that stinking fish” in his cab. He finally allowed her to put it into the boot.
The only place to store such a large fish was the mortuary, she reckoned. But the mortuary officer thought she was mad. The people at the local cold-storage depot also refused the coelacanth entry. So she and a local taxidermist decided to preserve it in formalin, keeping it wrapped in copies of the Daily Dispatch and her mother’s double-bed sheet until it could go off to Professor JLB Smith from Rhodes University.
Lew, knowing we’d be looking for something more than regular tourist snapshots of East London, took us to a place in the local harbour where more than a kilometre of hardwood – worth about $25 million – stood piled. These trees had been cut from the first-growth forests of equatorial Africa and loaded onto a boat called the Kiperousa, destined for south-east Asia and life as millions of strips of veneer.
But the Kiperousa had sunk just south of East London, and these huge logs had drifted off into the sea lanes. Some had beached themselves, others were still out there, waiting to smash into a passing yacht.
But a bigger problem lay before us. There had been a wave of criminal attacks on tourists along the Wild Coast in 2005. Jules and I were driving into another kind of fire. Snatches of the Daily Dispatch headlines were beginning to worry me:
• May: Three men shoot dead a security guard at Mbotyi River Lodge and wound the manager, Charles Lamb; Eight elderly tourists attacked – two are killed – by hijackers outside Port St Johns;
• July: A group of tourists attacked at knife point by youths while on a hike outside Port St Johns;
• October: Four foreign tourists escape with their lives when armed gunmen open fire on two vehicles near Coffee Bay.
Jo’burgers live and sleep in a hotbed of crime. There’s always someone getting shot, hijacked, robbed or raped back home. And yet, when we go on holiday to the country’s poorest province, we expect safe passage, warm welcomes and good fishing. And the weather had better play its part, too.
I was 21 years old again, sitting in the rain on the back of a bakkie on the way to the Stormberg, with my old Neil Young song and my fear. I desperately needed a bottle of sweet wine, a length of boerewors and some reassuring words. Failing that, an armed escort up into the Wild Coast …
Chapter 26: Morgan’s Bay to Trennery’s
A Walk on the Wild Coast
When I think about the Morgan Bay Hotel, a cockatoo called Baldy and a woman called Dodo spring to mind.
We’re trying to have a beer in the courtyard of this old hotel, shortly after checking in. A sulphur-crested cockatoo is doing his nut in the corner, screaming like a midnight drunk. He whistles and yells and spins and performs daring somersaults around the rope inside his cage.
Baldy’s been ther
e for 17 years now, shouting the odds at no one in particular. They sometimes let him roam through the hotel like a maddened banshee. And if one neglects to compliment him on his magnificent singing voice or hairstyle, Baldy does odd things like ripping the rubber trim off the windows.
He is often to be found in the bar after supper, scrounging peanuts from the guests. Give him an opened tin of tomato cocktail and he’ll grip it firmly in his beak and down the lot. And then you must applaud his drinking expertise.
This hotel was all about serious repeat business. The icon of the ‘come-again’ crowd at the Morgan Bay Hotel was one Mrs Dodo Wilmot. The Wilmots had been vacationing here for six decades. Every year, they booked Room No. 2. Mrs Dodo Wilmot, now a widow, arrived here and met up with her son, who flew in from his home in the USA for a two-week family holiday.
“Mrs Wilmot is the first in for breakfast and supper,” the owner-manager Richard Warren-Smith told us over tea one afternoon in the expansive old sitting room with the sea view, where, on a good day, you could see hundreds of dolphins leaping up through the breakers. “She’ll stand there tapping her foot if we’re one minute late.”
After World War II, Richard’s grandfather Ivan returned from hostilities and wanted nothing more than to run a beach hotel on his beloved Eastern Cape coast.
He chose Morgan’s Bay, which had been a holiday village since the early 1900s, when settler families trekked here in their ox wagons, bringing ‘food on the hoof’ in the form of cows and sheep. In 1920 a retired hospital matron opened a boarding house in Morgan’s Bay. She tried selling it, but there was no shortage of shysters in the area, so she had to take the house back a number of times. And then came Ivan Warren-Smith. He caught a bus up from East London, walked to the top of the hill overlooking the bay and fell in love with it all. Maybe the dolphins were showing off that day.
Ivan paid the matron £4 000 for her boarding house, parked his Oldsmobile and caravan on the premises and began turning it all into his dream hotel. It morphed into the Warren-Smith family business over the generations. As a young man, Richard went to London to work in the hotel trade as preparation for eventually taking over the Morgan Bay Hotel. It was just too damned cold over there for the boy from Kei Mouth.
“When I came back in 1990, my father Jeffrey just passed me the braai tongs at a hotel lunch and said carry on,” laughed Richard. Thus he joined the hotel’s management team.
The Morgan Bay Hotel was “like coming home” – true to its motto. South Africa lost something from the ’60s onwards, when many of its family hotels gave way under the onslaught of franchise operations. Jules and I were delighted to run across establishments where the dining rooms were still vast, the menus short and the manager not too snooty to sit down and have a drink with the guests. Where you stepped over sleeping old dogs at the entrance, the hotel cockatoo ruled the roost and the information booklet requested “the more jubilant guests” to be quiet at the poolside in the early afternoon.
The next morning we left on our Wild Coast ‘amble’ across Kei Mouth and up to our next stop, Trennery’s. A cheerful young man called Bongani Colonial Mlilwane, who had 15 siblings and lived nearby, was our guide for the first half of our 14-km walk.
Colonial said he was in heaven every day.
“I used to work as a school security guard on the Cape Flats,” he said. “I lived in a shack. I saw gunfights and shack fires until I thought no, it’s time to go home. Now I walk up and down the beach, talking to my guests. What could be more pleasant?”
Prompted by various sightings of abaKwetha along the way, we asked Colonial about his personal initiation to manhood, which involved a painful bush circumcision.
“I was with a group of friends all doing this thing together. Our wounds were bound by absorbent leaves, which were changed every 15 minutes. We were each given a new white blanket with red stripes. We were warned: the headman does not want policemen or ambulances coming here.
“You are not a man if you have to go to a hospital, they said. By the fourth day, you feel so much pain and you have no strength and you do not care if you die.”
In the first week, the initiates covered themselves with white clay and slept in designated huts. Sisters could bring them food or firewood but on no account were they to see their mothers. After four weeks – God willing – they were healed.
“A goat is slaughtered and prepared for you,” said Colonial. “You drink beer and you are allowed to cross the river and hunt. It is a big thing to become a man. No woman would think of marrying you if you were uncircumcised. And if you are not, you remain a boy, no matter how old you are.”
We were suddenly at the swine-fever control point on the Kei River Mouth. I’d been living in Colonial’s head for more than an hour, viewing out-takes from his world. We came across a jovial, middle-aged squad of South African and Brit hikers, heading south on the ‘amble’. They were doing the long trek from Kob Inn to Morgan’s Bay. Colonial took over their group from Eric Nkonki, who became our guide.
We crossed the Kei River by ferry, a large-bottomed boat expertly manhandled by a team who twirled giant wheels attached to rudders and outboard engines.
Then we were in the old Transkei. And the weather was also from another country. It turned grey and foul and windy in no time at all. The morning’s jaunt had turned into The Lost Patrol. We trudged, looking down and saying nothing in case of sand-in-mouth, against a vicious headwind. We were joined by Eric’s friend, a guy called Amos, who wore very fancy leather shoes. So fancy that, when we crossed little rivers and streams, he prevailed upon Eric to piggyback him across.
“Here is the Gxara River,” announced Eric. “Do you know this place? Up the river is the pool where the Nongqawuse went, where she was given the vision.”
We’d been reading Noel Mostert’s epic Frontiers, detailing the demise of the Xhosa nation in British colonial times, and The Dead Will Arise by Jeff Peires, which told the story of the infamous cattle killing of 1857.
Reel back to just before 1820, as more than 300 000 unemployed soldiers who’ve fought Napoleon’s armies sit idle in grubby, disconsolate, post-war Britain. An advertising campaign is launched to encourage at least 5 000 Britons to come and live in South Africa, “the most precious and magnificent object of our colonial policy”, according to The Times of London.
They’re supposed to be agriculturalists, destined for the border lands of the Eastern Cape. But many tradesmen, artisans and mechanics pretend to be farmer types and make it onto the transfer list. A fair number of them fail as farmers, but end up building magnificent settlements such as Grahamstown instead. These families, faux farmers and genuine, are the buffer zone between the Cape Colony and “the warlike Xhosas”, as some like to call them.
Now fast-forward 34 years through a number of bloody frontier wars to 1853 and to the landing of a smallish herd of Friesian bulls from Europe at Mossel Bay. They’ve all got the dreaded lung-sickness and are rotten from the inside out. Within two years, this disease has spread all over the colony and up through Xhosa country.
Three years later we’re in April 1856, at a pool on the Gxara River in the company of two young girls, Nongqawuse and Nombanda. Something happens at that pool on that day, something that is still the subject of heated debate today, nearly 150 years on.
Nongqawuse’s uncle, Mhalakaza, has been working for the Archdeacon of Grahamstown, Nathaniel Merriman, on the cleric’s travels in the hinterland as his travelling advisor and translator. Mhalakaza has cherry-picked more than his share of biblical Christian knowledge, imagery and philosophy from his boss. He blends this with his inherent set of Xhosa principles and becomes something of a grand speechmaker himself. Merriman’s wife insults Mhalakaza one day and the Xhosa leaves their employ and goes back to his homestead on the Gxara River.
We’re with the girls at the pool, and Mhalakaza is lurking somewhere in the dramatic background. Two men claiming to be long-dead Xhosas materialise from the bushes. They tell the
girls to pass on the message: there is going to be a ‘rising up’ and a rebirth of the Xhosa nation. All cattle are to be killed. The cultivated fields are to be burnt. Corn storage bins are to be trashed. Fresh kraals are to be built. ‘New people’ will rise from the sea with healthy herds of cattle for everyone. Whites and Fingoes (who side with the British) will be swept off to sea and disappear forever.
The Xhosa nation is divided into believers and non-believers. The believers destroy their food stores and their cattle herds. You can smell rotting meat all over the frontier. Fires rage all over the Eastern Cape. A nation waits. The non-believers say, What? You want me to do what? Kill my precious cattle? Burn my food? Believe a couple of teenage girls and their angry uncle?
Various appointed days “of the two suns rising red” come and go. Mixed in with all this prophecy and madness is the news that the Russians have smacked the Brits in the Crimea and that those same Russians are on their way to help clear out the governor, Sir George Grey, his cronies and his ‘buffer zoners’.
Nothing happens. Mhalakaza manipulates the situation. He says the ‘new people’ aren’t quite ready. Vision begets vision. The tips of thousands of cattle horns are spotted just under the reeded wetlands, supposedly waiting to emerge in their boisterous, bellowing masses. King Sarhili is sucked into all of this. He, like his people, is so desperate to see the backs of the white settlers and their soldiers that he’ll believe anything.
By January 1857, doubt sets in. This is partially dispelled by a new edict from Sarhili announcing that unless all the cattle in the Xhosa kingdom are slaughtered, the prophecy will not come about. More killings. But who’s actually in charge around here? Sarhili or Mhalakaza, who is starting to sound a little like a crazed egomaniac?
Sarhili tries to commit suicide but is stopped in time by his councillors. And on January 17 he speaks up at a beer-drinking session: