West of the Kei
Homes #4 (Part 2): East Cape Elementals
Second part of a reflection that began HERE!
And both of these are now available as a lengthier podcast edition, East of the Tsitsikamma. In other news, I’ve also uploaded more poems from the back catalogue, to the Thickly Mulched Words section of the website: More Medium Matured Pomes, audio version on the way…
A few weeks back and considerably west of the Transkei, on a sultry afternoon, we passed other university grounds, students milling, meeting, lying on well-maintained lawns, that colonial inheritance of ambivalent value (like so many others). This proud institution once trained Mandela, and for a long time was the only University in South Africa open to ‘natives’. It also trained Buthelezi, Mugabe, and a host of other independence leaders of more dubious and conventionally what’s-in-it-for-me political traditions, aided by learning European history no doubt. The University of Fort Hare, two hours north-east of Makhanda, began before and continued long after the demise of the “Ciskei”. (The Eastern Cape had the misfortune to be the only South African province to have to absorb two “fully independent” homelands in 1994, Transkei and Ciskei, leaving a new provincial government with three bureaucracies, three sets of laws, far too many ghost workers too quickly and staring potential bankruptcy in the face from the word go).
The town of Alice which hosts UFH had the misfortune to fall into “Ciskei” – (meaning ‘this side of the Kei’) – a strip that was basically an apartheid ‘project’ with intense overcrowding and poverty from that time. Bisho was labelled Ciskei’s capital and subsequently became the political capital of the whole province: though it was essentially a satellite township of King William’s Town over the ‘border’, another classic settler name. (I know, rather uselessly perhaps, that this dates the founding of the town to the 1830s, the last time there was a William on the British throne). Now the name’s been wiped away, replaced recently with Qonce, a name with two clicks for those damned settlers to get their tongues around. Fort Hare university continued, however, and has strong connections to that tree-lined ‘hill station’ further inland: Hogsback.
Three mountains rise up at this edge of the formidable Amathola range, with spiny backs that reminded some of warthogs from the plains. But the vibrant afromontane forest below, hiding so many stories and secrets, is an altogether different kind of place. As the light dances across the paths, I find a river crab on the hillside, somewhat disoriented in her distance from the stream. It’s yet again a place for cultures and times to collide and coexist. If Alice, down in the valley, herself conjures up that subconscious Victorian need for fantasy, wonderland, magic to return; Hogsback provides it in spades. The last time I was here was before Google maps existed; now the app is telling me everything is laid out differently to what I recall. Perhaps, I ponder, it’s the real topography of Hogsback that has moved, so slowly that nobody else has noticed. The first time I camped here, in 1997, was at a venue called The Shire. Tolkien looms over the place, his landscapes inspired perhaps by the spiny peaks; though that’s a slippery half-truth, for the young boy, jealously claimed as South Africa’s most popular writer, was born in Bloemfontein of all places and left soon after to spend most of his life in Britain, most likely before ever heading south to the Hogs. Though perhaps it crept into his childhood dreams. It’s a magnetic place of life seen and unseen, calling for sacred pilgrimage, to many of us around the province and the country. This time around, as we descend from a waterfall lined with wild strawberries, as well as cute little red mushrooms that look like they’re trying to be mistaken for strawberries, we hear a politician’s voice booming out briefly from the speaker system at Hobbiton. Then pass a big yellowwood, that started growing 800 years ago, when Wolfram von Eschenbach was telling enraptured European audiences the epic of Parzival, taking the medieval listeners into a magical journey with the Holy Grail. Who knows what magic was happening down here then in this ancient forest; it might have blown Tolkien’s mind and maybe even Eschenbach’s.
Some of our walks began under oak trees and near gigantic redwoods. Hogsback has an Arboretum on the slopes: a kind of zoo for trees, which I've encountered in other parts of the country too. That desire to bring together curiosities from around the globe probably got going in Cape Town’s original Company Garden: a starting point for plant stories, for observing plant forms, even if their lives are also spent wondering why they're in this particular climate. A grey lourie calls from the brush. Then we rise, through leaf and trunk and branch vibrant with growth.
Hobbiton was originally set up as a home for war orphans, which makes me think of C.S. Lewis more than Tolkien. I can imagine the two writers puffing a pipe outside the bar at Away With The Fairies in the town. The herbalist running that hostel saw a fairy enter the premises last year, I’m told. Elsewhere, Lothlorien appears as another place to stay these days; along with Imagine Dragons, one for the millennials. Walking on damp forest tracks, even under the summer heat, you can sense the elementals; the unseen energies, in this province of ancestors. You can hear them in the trickling waters coming down the waterfalls. One has an impossible natural sculpture sticking out: some ancestor called it “Madonna and Child”. Umama nomntwana perhaps, for she is definitely not some sort of retiring Mary figure. Blackberries grow beside the forest track. On the other side of the road is Hunterstoun, the retreat centre belonging to the university. The Scots name is one of those that pop up across South Africa, from that weird time when the ruling Brits tried to lean into their Celtic fringes, and claim their own wild tribal heritage while dismantling other people’s; while the Scots themselves began a fine and ongoing trade in tribal tartans, invented in the Victorian period to benefit from the craze.
Here in Hogsback, looking out at the mysteries of the forest valley, is a new retreat space, named for a Cape Town dancer who moved here in her last year of life and poured her love into it before becoming ancestral herself. She’s remembered in a labyrinth spiral too; her photo already faded like a guru’s. I walk around it, asking myself questions that might only receive answers as the year unfolds. We walked too around the great labyrinth at The Edge, where each turn greets me with another of the plants I have seen in the shady zones, and where my daughter sat and meditated of her own accord (at the age of 9) many moons ago. The rocks whisper epics at us. New friends eat with us on their lawn, fresh blueberries and plums, while a crown crested eagle sits and performs for us on a nearby tree. And on departure, at last, a local Xhosa man runs up with a stylized warthog for sale, fashioned from the deep brown clays of the forest. The quality has improved since I was last here 13 years ago: that was certainly the hope and intention of the potters here, whose rustic theatre is on the verge of renewal, a cultural spring perhaps after much composting. Hogsback is enchanting, and perhaps enchanted. Difficult to leave. The first time I ever did so it was on the hairiest alternative dirt road I’ve driven on, and I was grateful the hire company couldn’t see what I was doing with their vehicle.
We head out, and west, towards the drier parts of the province, where the great leopard tortoises amble in ancient stillness across the road and the temperatures suddenly rise to desert levels. I’ve talked previously of Nieu Bethesda and the Karoo. The Eastern Cape has, relatively speaking, just a sliver of that landscape, but it’s a powerful one. In the lush preserved places in the east, the kinds and cultures of unseen beings must surely be as rife as the numbers of psychedelic, edible, poisonous and medicinal mushrooms available in damp spots (all of which are listed on a poster at our Hogsback campsite). The west of the province, by contrast is a land where God is mostly One, like the Sun. Yet even here it’s clear the ancestors are doing their work. Helen Martin forged her eerie cement cosmology in the back garden of the Owl House, the owl spirit-beings watching over her as she carried on, painfully, rejected by the old NG Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church). Since her horrible death, art has flourished, Fugard himself has moved into the dorpie in his old age, and craft too: those she trained have handed their wisdom on. We buy an owl from the grandson of her assistant. In Hogsback there used to be a fairy garden, statues amidst leaves of different elemental souls, though they've apparently been packed up for now and removed to the tamer trees of Bathurst. Few trees in Nieu Bethesda, though the cacti were blooming: a genuine blessing, since that happens for just one day in a summer.
Furrows, small canals, cleverly divert water around the village, including the remaining pastures which punctuate the quiet houses, like medieval common land. Except that it’s all owned by the old Afrikaans families, for now. Art galleries with an abundance of styles and mediums. Fine food in dining rooms full of curios. The Karoo aesthetic here is, of course, abundant: ancient farm machinery, wagon wheels, and the skulls of beasts, with wind-battered woodwork. But alongside it, there’s an awareness of what the land brings: stone people, out of town, sculpted to make us stop and reflect and breathe into the stories of the kloofs. A bookshop to get lost in, offering more treasures, gathered from generations. My partner reflects that this gathering, hoarding, is somehow a Euro-African response to the traditional tribal desire to move on and let go. Collecting is a habit that perhaps has behind it the original sangoma’s bag of bones; objects imbued with the power of talismans, of place, of spirit; perhaps Helen Martin’s yard is a dramatic version of that too, casting its spell to ensure that something new is ushered into being, continually, here, even below that potent Sun that is so constant. There amidst the cement and under the blue sky, there are flowers creeping.
Some of the roads are shown on the map as tarred when they’re nothing of the sort. Perhaps somebody pocketed the money and claimed that it had been done. Though in the village there’s a fight going on to keep the night sky open, against a provincial demand for street lights to be installed, centralising safetyism at work; they’ve at least so far kept the tar at bay here where it’s not wanted. The road back west to Willowmore is one of the strangest I’ve driven on: a single-lane concrete track, with dirt passages either side, and on which I’ve headed west between the mountain ranges on many occasions; idiosyncrasy a virtue in provincial places. Near here is where our ancestors watched springbok in their thousands, charging annually across the vlakte. Some of them watched with bows and arrows; others from their stoeps. Some dream of recreating this enormous ‘corridor’ for the herds to return; today there are inquisitive euphorbias but also plenty of sheep, around Jansenville, where the mohair industry is based. These days the main wilderness is to the south, into the Baviaanskloof, where there’s a bunch of spring flowers, dinosaur-imitating rocks, tree houses, baboons, tortoises and rebels. Not to be revisited on this trip. But of course I will go back to the Eastern Cape: it’s too full of story not to return.