A VIEW FROM THE TRAIN

- a memoir of South Africa -

Civilization, is before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilized, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset - The Revolt of the Masses.

‘But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare ; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The titihoya does not cry here any more.’
Alan Paton - Cry the Beloved Country.

‘It reminded me of my ‘white’ Trinidad contemporaries who, as dispossessed and as destitute as the rest of us could only fall back on the bogus aristocracy of colour to preserve their self-esteem.’
Shiva Naipaul - North of South

‘During my lifetime I dedicated myself to this struggle of the African People. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony, and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’
Nelson Mandela.

‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence, but an idea; an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.’
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

PROLOGUE

I was nine years old standing on a hill beneath an old pepper tree; not Navel Hill the shape of a load of sand tipped from a wheelbarrow with the whitewashed horse on its side, but a smaller hill, almost as steep, in the relative quiet of a post-war South African day, listening with the disembodied detachment of youth to the sounds of a town: the far-off whine of a car, a turtle dove cooing and pumping its neck, the harsh shouts of a Sotho woman calling in Sesotho to her friend in the street, a Rhodesian ridgeback growling and snapping at the heels of a delivery boy, the heavy tremulous clap of iron-shod Clydesdale hoof upon the tar, to the eternal ringing of an icecream cart, lament of a dying day. It was after school, soaking up the time before supper when I realized for the first time that something was wrong in South Africa.

Of course, I was also thinking – as I did every waking minute, of the Afrikaner school up the road whose last marroon-jacketed pupils had already left for the day, and that tomorrow I would have to pass the school again in my blue jacket and bear their savage taunts, “Blarry Rooineck.... donderse vokken Engelsman.” And if I came at speed and saw pursuit was unlikely, shouting defiantly in reply, “Bladdy Hairybacks!” The Rooinecks and the Hairybacks, side by side, one country; and in the shadows, the black man, waiting.

Coming up the hill I had been thinking of the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule in far-off Kenya, an insurrection freely reported in The Friend, the daily paper where my mother worked, pushing my Rudge bicycle and looking down at the black tar, at the gravel on the verge, at my long grey socks, listening to the whirring of the chain over the sprockets, seeing the clouds in the pale blue Orange Free State sky, once the Orange River Colony sky, where great-grandfather Gordon (my mother’s maternal line) had Irish navvies and stonemasons cut the khaki sandstone for the house from the Maluti mountains. About me was the town, Bloemfontein, the judicial capital of the Union of South Africa, yet no more than a dorp, to which I had come a few years before in 1946 with my mother, both of us deserted for ever by my RAF, Irish father. Yes, I was thinking, something is wrong: race and tribal hatred blights our lives; and what of the future, what of the excitement of things to come, of following the path laid out by our heroes of the past. But it was the absence of real heroes that worried me most as I had taken note that people like Jan Smuts: Boer War kommando leader, General in the East African campaign against Von Lettow Vorbeck, Field-Marshal in the Second World War, Father of the League of Nations, botanist, originator of the concept of Holism, author, former Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, had been replaced in 1948 by some faceless people in ill-fitting suits with strange ideas, ideas which seemed more in tune with the people whom we had just defeated. And they definitely did not fit the mould of my heroes set by Henty, Haggard, Johns & Co.

Then this boy I see down the long river of the years licks the end of the string and winds it tightly about the yellow cone of his wooden top, tongue clenched between teeth, small brown fists turning about, then lunging down, whipping the top upon the one spinning slowly on the hard packed earth.
Now, years later - in 1984, a man blessed with a wife and children, I had returned to take my rail journey of discovery, to glean what was happening on the platteland – the other country of small dorps and farms of the hinterland, to see how the forgotten people lived. It would not usher up the full truth, but it might allow me to understand this South Africa of 1984, this South Africa of all times.


CHAPTER FOUR

Donside by the Caledon


An old full bearded man balding in a chair in a bare earthed farmyard. The picture faded a sepia memory of a huntly gordon scot on donside africa cane in brown hands dog laddie about black booted feet horses nearby in the brown stone of their stable and oxen and their wagon long dusssel boom warmed by chickens and shy winters sun. Waiting. Remembering the basuto wars the rush and clamour of ten thousand mounted masutho horsemen and later the boer war. A house cut from the mountain by irish navvies on walkabout laid one atop the other the house of yon celt come from the banks of the don via nova scotia and shipwreck and the woman he saved. And the jumping of ship. To the mountains. Any mountains. Just dassies and scotsmen. Not sassenachs ye noo. Hard men. Steel hands meeting out ready justice. Thou shalt watch over thy neighbour. Oh come with me up yon slope to the sheer sandstone face to the cave of the fish forever interred in cliff face of the white-backed and bearded vultures lammergeyers one far above holding you in the cup of his eye to the caledon river to the swirling muddied cool waters and the guinea fowl fretting at sunset across the river by horse to leribe to buthe buthe to an effulgent mountain pool to generals nek in the trap across the wooden bridge rattling milk cans to fetch the mail and the whiskey scots of course. Long skirted tight bodiced flappers of the farm in the dickey seat or on an oxwagon sixteen strong witman bles jonker and their ilk and half men voorloper picannin bare foot about the earth down to the caledon for a picnic a war coming.
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At Generaalsnek station are the giant firs and across the valley to the mountains and the Caledon river, a view of the old family farm. A thin scavenger of a conductor gets down from the train: “Kom, kom, kom aan julle!” he moans, exhorting people burdened down with head bundles to hurry.

Here, down below, lay the territory conquered from Moshesh, the granary of the Free State, where my mother’s family farmed for three generations - including my mother who had managed the farm, Knighton through the war years while her father and mother went to Basutoland, to Mafeteng, to release a younger man for the front, just herself and old and very loyal Masuto retainers whose names, like the bend in the river or a particular mountain, she still remembers. As a small child I watched the ox wagon and the oxen, all sixteen of them, toiling along in the lee of a flat topped sandstone mountain where white-backed vultures nested, all that is left of the elysian fields long ago. Beyond the river lay the Leribe district of Basutoland, a mountain fastness of scattered villages and blanketed horsemen with straw hats.

Moshesh, one of Africa’s greatest leaders – the one arguably with the most impressive and sustained record of leadership ever in South Africa’s history , and the founder of what was to become Lesotho, came to prominence in the 1820’s, a period of great tribal disruption in South Africa. At the time of the scattering of the tribes - probably brought about by many years of drought, when a series of skirmishes and wars broke out, he was living near the farm but across the Caledon on the Hlotse river. Finding his position there difficult to defend from Sekonyela, he moved to nearby Buthe Buthe and took up a position on a hill, which I remember still from school holidays spent with my ever jovial Uncle, Harry Palmer, continuously exhorting, “Jack it up! Jack it up!”, his house and store standing in full view of the mountain.

My time in Buthe Buthe resonates still: there were few people about and the district had numerous dams under the care of Uncle Harry, a keen fisherman. With rod and pellet gun, I wandered the cannibal - and now ritual murder free, vales and hills alone, hunting doves and fishing for blue-gill and bass. I also rode occasionally, an old long-hoofed nag constantly in search of lost change belonging to the much beloved Dr Dyke, a fourth generation Basutolander whose forefather, Rev. H. H. Dyke had come to the country with the Paris Missionary Society, later acting as secretary to Moshesh.

Moshesh’s enemy were the Tlokwa – ‘People of the wild cat’, seasoned warriors led by Chieftainess Mantatsi – famous for her war-axe throwing skills, and her battle leader, her son, Sekonyela, who lived on two mountain fortresses in the area of our farm. Formidable fighters, they forced Moshesh to move his forces sixty miles south to another mountain fortress, soon to be famous, Thaba Bosiu (the hill of night). The area was then infested with cannibals, Peete, Moshesh’s grandfather, being caught and eaten by them as he lagged behind his grandson. The move to Thaba Bosiu is the true birth of the Basuto nation.

Moshesh’s reputation as a fighter and negotiator spread; recruitment from other clans was rapid. The fact that he paid tribute to the Zulu paramount chief , Dingane, starting with women, skins and feathers and eventually ending with arms, ammunition and horses, meant he was left alone to gather strength, the Zulu armies which continuously laid waste the Caledon Valley, concentrating on other fare.

In the early 1830’s, at the time of the Great Trek of the Dutch and Khoikhoi, the fighting methods of the many clans who came together to be known as the Basuto were to undergo rapid transformation. Hordes of Khoikhoi, mounted on Cape horses, first brought to the Cape in 1653 from Java - and added to by Arabs brought from Persia in 1689, soon entered the area now know as the Free State. The Khoikhoi were superb horse and cattle men, and being armed with muskets, found the Basuto easy prey, making lightning guerilla raids and driving off their cattle. Eventually, however, there came the first Basuto victory. After killing the Khoikhoi riders the Basuto victors sat and watched the Khoikhoi horses as they grazed until quite certain that the explosions of musket fire came not from the horses themselves. This was the start of the breed, the Basuto pony, first called by them, khomo ea haka ‘the cattle called haka’ – the khoikhoi name being hacqua. Within a few years, Moshesh united the various clans into a nation of formidable cavalry, giving up their distinctive light shield and making use of their battle axe and assegai, with muskets slung behind their backs. No other tribes adopted this method.

The horses, although added to by the importation by the missionary, Casalis, of Irish thoroughbreds in 1869 - given the harsh conditions of the Malutis, soon became a 14 hand pony, surefooted and of great endurance. Great numbers were bred, some exported to India, 12 000 sold to British forces in the Boer War, and many used in other wars (Omdurman) and expeditions, including the pioneer column which brought western ways to the area now called Zimbabwe. But the drought of the 1930’s and the motor car put paid to them. Today the breed no longer exists, its closest genetic survivors being the Boerperd, the Nooitgedacht – developed in 1953, and the American Morgan.

In 1831, Mzilikazi and the Matabele carried out their last attack on Moshesh before heading off on the journey, which was to see them establish their suzerainty in present day Zimbabwe. They stormed Thaba Bosiu but were repulsed by showers of rocks. In June of 1831 the first whites appeared, four of them, meeting with Moshesh somewhere in the region of present day Ladybrand. Moshesh, soon met with other Europeans and heard of this new breed of men called missionaries. This excited him, prompting him to send a gift of cattle to the French missionaries at Philapolis. It was not too long after that three members of the French Evangelical Society arrived, among them Casalis and Arbousset who were to have a major impact on the building of a future Basutoland. In 1837, Piet Retief met with Sekonyela at Imperani, at their second meeting handcuffing the chief and telling him that he would be freed only when cattle taken from Dingane had been returned. Once the cattle had been released, Sekonyela was freed. This had a massive negative effect on the Basuto and on Moshesh, accentuated by the summary execution of a delegate sent by Dingane to another trekker leader, Andries Pretorius. The loss of trust between Boer and Basuto was permanent.

Finally, in 1853, having seen off the British forces of General Cathcart, Moshesh, despite British warnings, moved against Sekonyela’s Tlokwa and his force of some 800 men, reinforced by 100 mounted Khoikhoi, forcing him to leave for the Cape, many of his men being absorbed by Moshesh. However, two short wars followed with the Orange Free State, leading to the acquisition of Basutoland by the Colonial office and the breaking of Basuto power in 1868. The following year the grainlands of the Caledon valley were taken over by the Free State.

It must have been sometime after the death of Moshesh in 1870, that Hugh William Gordon came to the district, taking up land at about the time that the towns of Ficksburg and Fouriesburg were declared, on land taken from Moshesh and the Tlokwa and known as the conquered territory. Most of the 1870s was a period of great prosperity, particularly for the Basuto who traded and worked at the Kimberley diamond mines, acquiring many rifles as a result. This was the time, first of the Zulu wars of 1878-9 and the early British defeats - particularly the defeat at Isandhlwana, and the start of the disastrous Basuto Gun Wars of 1880-2.

The first sign of the latter was the treatment of Langalibalele, ruler of the Hlubi, a semi-sacred personage, a rainmaker famous throughout southern Africa. Refusing to hand in his guns he took refuge in the mountains with a large herd of cattle. The Government persuaded Molapo, one of Moshesh’s sons and chief of the area across the river from the farm, to bring in Langalibalele, in return for a share of the cattle. This Molapo did, sending his son Jonathan with a small force to guide him to Leribe. Two thousand head of cattle were given to Molapo, an act of treachery, which scandalized all the tribes.

The chiefs were instructed to hand in their guns, Jonathan, Moshesh’s grandson, complied, but his brother Joel, and other chiefs did not. Formerly a friendly and cooperative people, strongly pro-British, they now became sullen and unresponsive. Jonathan and a small following remained loyal however, moving himself and his small band of supporter to a mountain near Leribe. Joel began to gather his forces for attack, brother against brother. A local Free State farmer, Stanton, came to the British Resident’s and Chief Jonathan’s assistance at Leribe (Hlotsi) with a group of irregulars, defending the mission station, to this were added a small force of Cape Troops, the Diamond Field Horse, the Transvaal Horse and a native contingent. Numerous battles ensued, Joel attacking both Jonathan and the settlement. Here the Basuto cavalry, formidable opponents, were seen in action for the last time, one of their axes coming into Hugh William’s possession – now in mine. A purely Colonial war, the sheer cost of the fighting brought it to a halt and a peace treaty signed, the Basuto agreeing to hand over large herds of cattle and their guns. But no such guns or cattle were forthcoming. Joel now immediately attacked Jonathan, a number of hand to hand battles taking place, but by 1883, Joel’s power was finally broken and peace ensued.

And all this across the river. I remember Leribe: just a few houses and stores, one large one with colonial verandah and garden in which lived the District Commissioner, Fox, a family friend, and his daughter, the beautiful Desiree, who lives in my memory for the first kiss of passion stolen in the garden at all of six years old. And on the heights above the Hlotse/Caledon confluence was the old Anglican mission founded by the Rev. John Widdicombe in 1876, the mission almost destroyed in the Basuto wars.

I have a picture of Hugh William Gordon as an old man dressed in a long sleeved shirt and waistcoat and longs - probably close to his death at the age of 89 in 1924, a gaunt face of great character, balding with a full white beard, gnarled hands clasped together, legs crossed, a thick walking stick leaning against his thigh, and behind him a sandstone thatched squarehavel joined to a square building with a tin-roof overhang, and his beloved pug, Laddie, nearby, awaiting a walk. The buildings I don’t recognize as it was taken at old Donside house, the new house being built in 1899 closer to the Caledon. Obviously he must have stayed on there, his son Phillip moving in to the new house. There is nothing now left of old Donside - bar a few stones - and the newer house was burnt down about a hundred years after the first was built, but nearby is the family graveyard where he is buried, and his first son - also Hugh William, who died young, and his wife. Like many a Scotsman, being Presbyterians, they had a close affinity with the Dutch Calvinists, like the Murray family, who built up the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. Hugh William married Maria Oosthuizen and had a son and four daughters – one of them my grandmother. Maria died young in 1895, Hugh William bringing up the children.

Although it could not have been my great-grandfather or great-grandmother – given the dates, Dr Henry Taylor’s memoir records the following during the period he lived at Leribe between 1877 and 1882: “Living near Brandwater was an old Scotchman, who had married a Dutch wife. He was a most intelligent man, and very hospitable, and as I had to pass his farm on my road to Brandwater, I often called in to have a cup of coffee, a pipe, and a chat with him. They had a child which was born with a large naevus (a swelling of vascular tissue) on its forehead, and it was arranged that, when the baby was a little older, I should operate and remove it. One day our conversation happened to turn to Boer superstitions, which my Scotch friend heartily ridiculed. He told me that his wife was a great believer in them, and among other things was firmly persuaded that the naevus could be cured by placing the hand of a dead child on it. A short time after, I was called to see the child of a Dutchman, a neighbour of my Scotch friend, who with his wife had called to ask after the sick baby. The poor baby died shortly after I got to the house, whereupon my friend took me on one side and said, “Doctor, my wife has gone home to fetch her baby, so that she can put the hand of the dead child on its naevus. Of course, you and I know that it is all rot, but my wife is a good soul, and I didn’t want to run counter to her wishes, so I let her have her way.’

The baby was presently brought into the house, and the hand of the dead child solemnly placed on the naevus, amid the dead silence of a large party of Boers who were present. Some time after, I was calling at the Scotchman’s house, and suggested that it was now time for the operation on his child.

‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘ a very curious thing has happened. From the day that the dead child’s hand was placed on it, the naevus began to wither away, and it has now disappeared entirely.’ The two wise men looked at each other in silence.

I had the child brought in, and inspected it. The naevus had quite disappeared. To save our faces we both declared that the cure of the naevus was a mere coincidence, but I saw a twinkle of triumph in the wife’s eye as she said that she ‘knew better’.”

During the Boer war, so the story goes, Hugh William had hidden his son, Phillip in the loft when visited by the Boer patrols, for they would have taken him with them as a recruit. There is also a record of Philip having attended school in Bethlehem, where he would have had to board.

Hugh William remains a mystery. There is so little known, the beating of the generations not preserving that which I ache to know: his parents had lived at Huntley (his mother was Christine Cobham) and had later moved to Aboyne where they became great friends of the Airlie Ogilvie family – he for a time living somewhere near Balmoral; he had served in the Gordon Highlanders, had been a sailor – on the way to Canada being shipwrecked and saving a woman passenger, the only survivors; had sailed to South Africa, jumped ship and earned his living for awhile as a cabinet maker – a skill he had taught himself. Later came the call from Scotland to take up his inheritance – land presumably, but he declined and never did go back. And when it was cold, the wind and rain thrashing the trees outside, he would stare fixedly at the fire, shake his head and mutter, “Oh! The poor sailors in that awful wind !” So little known, so maddeningly little.

Only two documents penned by him survive: one, a fragment of a letter written during the Boer war in 1900 to someone unknown, another, a letter at the outbreak of WW1 to my grandmother. The 1900 letter gives some idea of what it was like to live in the countryside as a Briton during the war, but also throws some light on what happened to the cattle captured from the Boers at the nearby Brandwater basin by Generals Rundle and Campbell.
‘ …whole day, the next afternoon hearing where they had camped I went to report about the oxen but they had already gone. I think it can hardly be supposed that I would be able to keep these oxen when the boers had possession of the whole district.

I was continuously an object of suspicion of the boers and my house was several times ransacked by them looking for papers, saddles, clothes etc, and then I was ordered to join the laager but did not go and lived in dread until General Rundle came and while a patrol was on my farm, gave me leave to go through the Caledon.
Sept 7, 1900…re account of Government oxen left by General Campbell with me, all of them in a very exhausted state. Same week 3 died, next week 2 died, next week 3 died and 1 got drowned in a mud hole.
Oct 14th. 3 boers came and took 32 of these oxen, the foreman’s name was Pretorius. He said he was sent by Veldkornet E. van Niekerk. He would give me no receipt. The others being too poor they left them. 4 of the remaining oxen strayed to my neighbours farm J Schalkwyk but I could not take them back as they had got amongst lung sick cattle and the boers gave orders to him that he must keep the oxen by him until they wanted them.

Oct 31st. A boer corporal named Greyling (?) who used to live in Ficksburg came and took remainder of oxen left. He said he was sent by Commandant Steyn. He also gave no receipt, neither of these men gave any receipt, but they as well as Mr Schalkwyk are well known and if not killed will be able to prove what I state. Also there is here at Leribe a neighbour of mine J. Rensburg who saw the first lot of oxen 32 which the boers took past his farm and they told it was English oxen they had took from me.

I may be accused of negligence in not writing but the English were only a few days gone when the boers came, the post was not open for me and my parole confined me to my farm, besides I had no horse left me, the boers took all of them and there was a boer patrol day and night above my house, and my native servants had all fled through the Caledon. I was left alone with my daughters on the farm.

On 18th Feb 1901 a column came from Ficksburg and fought near my house the …when cattle went through Caledon took at once to Thlotse counted and examined all had my mark HG and no other are still in Basutoland and be seen any day.’

He was later to put in a claim for compensation, Britain – like the Marshall Plan of more recent times, being exceedingly generous to Boer and Briton alike, though probably far less so to the Bantu.

At the end of the war, Commandant Steyn and Veldkornet E. Van Niekerk and five others were jailed. Dr Taylor, by then the Mayor and district medical officer, visiting them every day. At their trial the evidence against them was damning, a hanging being fully expected. However, at the last minute they were reprieved by the terms of the peace which stated that any Boer combatant could not be held responsible for actions committed during the war. Years later, Dr Taylor quotes a letter received from E. van Niekerk in 1913:
“Dear Doctor,
I have treated thee dishonestly re your account against me. I have stolen your money through deceive. The Lord Almighty has showed me my transgressions. I have sinned against thee. However, I am not abel to pay you yet, hoping to do so when I am abel. Oh, do forgive me my trespasses against thee, forgive me please.
Your humble servant,
E.van Niekerk’

Hugh William lived for 29 years as a widower, single- handedly bringing up his children. When my grandmother, Christian, had moved with her husband and young children to develop a ranch in the Vryburg district at the beginning of WW1, he wrote:

Donside 28th Sep

My Dear Chrissie,
It is over a month since I got your letter and I feel rather small about not answering it, but better late than never you know. I am a lazy one to write letters and the ink is quite done. You wrote of wind and dust. We have had the same thing here. Some time ago we had some rain and snow and we thought the drought was broken but the last little rain we had was too little to do much good and now the grass is completely done and no sign of rain. How it is going to be with the cattle I don’t know. I have used all my chaff and 5 bags of crushed mealies, besides a lot of forage on the milk cows and poor cattle, but now I have nothing left and they must take their chance. You very kindly invite me to go and see you all at Stranraer. I would like very much like to go but there is no money coming in and always some going out that I will have to put it off until some other time when things improve. I do long to see you all and Jim especially, he must be a fine fellow. I am glad to hear that he does a lot of mischief, it is a sign that there is some life in him.

This is a terrible war in Europe, a war not of thousands but millions. It is terrible. That Kaiser has a great deal to answer for when the war is over. I think they will yet get the beating they deserve, challenging the whole of Europe when he thought the French and English were in difficulties.

That fellow Beyers is a fine fellow to give up his command of the defence force the way he did, the whole Hertzog lot ought to be put with the German prisoners at Pretoria and left there. I don’t think you need fear any of the natives rising, there is no sign of that, on the contrary they seem willing to help if they could. We are having terrible warm days and not a cloud in the heavens, if clouds do come there is always a strong wind to blow them away.

Will you be able to come and see us at Christmas, we should all be so glad to see you and Alex and the children. I expect it will be the last I will have the pleasure of spending with you, anyway I am getting very crankie. Kiss the children for me and love to you all and Alex. How does he like farming?
Father

Philip, Hugh William’s only son, I remember well, as my mother and I were frequent visitors to Donside. He married an Afrikaner woman, Ellie, the sweetest and kindest woman of creation, whose children, though carrying the name Gordon, are Afrikaners. My mother and I would often drive down to see them for a long-weekend. They were retired, living quietly in the old stone house - their son Hugh having built a house elsewhere on the farm. The old house lay to the south of a mountain in which white-backed vultures nested. In winter, icy cold, one waited for the sun on the verandah and the magnificent breakfast which was to come; in the evening we would sit about the fire with a large drawing of Major Wilson’s Last Stand (commemorating the fight with the Matabele on the Shangani river in far away Rhodesia) over the mantle piece – for there was no television then and no electricity, the conversation of times past punctuated by the occasional impatient ringing of the party line – both curse and blessing. My earliest memory of the house was of sharing a room with my beloved Grandmother and of her long hair being set afire by a candle, fortunately hurriedly extinguished. I remember too a dog come from Basutoland after the sheep, being caught and swiftly relieved of his testicles and sent howling off back from whence he had come. Life was tough on the mountain, and rustling and theft had always been a problem on the border as the Masutho considered the grain lands their property – a legitimate claim.

When they were both elderly, I drove my Great Aunt and Uncle on a visit to Aunt Ellie’s relatives on the Rand; the last they took together. When I left the country, mother and my cousin Jennifer continued the visits until Aunt Ellie died. Uncle Philip was placed in an old-age home miles away soon after, and like his sisters, and like most people of those times, he one day simply expired, alone.

Next to Donside was Riverland – a leased farm, where my Grandfather Alex Andrew’s and my grandmother farmed after the failed attempt to ranch cattle at Vryburg. Alec had been a trader in Basutoland and married my grandmother at Donside in 1907. They spent the years on either side of WW1 there – separated by the Vryburg venture, a life of slow and measured pace - one mimicking the passage of the ox wagon, the house always filled with house guests and wonderful food. My mother had a tutor at home, but her brother, Mac and two sisters, Marion and Eileen, for a time being taken across the river on horseback to be taught by a lady at Leribe. Since Hugh Williams arrival there had always been close relations with Leribe (Hlotse Mission), particularly with the French missionaries and members of the British administration. Our maid, Sarah, who is part of my earliest memory, named me after Paramount Chief Seeiso, who ruled briefly but sent large numbers of auxiliaries to the war front – a massive gesture of solidarity with the protectors of his people, the British.

Leaving Generaalsnek, we carry on and pass through Mount Morkel. The Henchman has taken up his position in an overhead bunk and is playing patience while the beautiful vistas of the Malutis slide past him and out of sight. It is late afternoon and the land is a soft moulding of greens and light browns. We pass through Meynell - named for Mrs Meynell, a dear family friend, dead now. A fiscal shrike bears down upon an insect, catches it, then swings back to his perch. His is a reassuring friendly figure dotting the scenes and pictorial vignettes of my journey. Yellow Leader sticks his head into the compartment. “I’ll check you now,” he says, to no one in particular.

At Fouriesburg, a steady stream of people make their way from the canteen to the train. ‘They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we just grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn’t give a stuff for us. They just don’t want to get upset. They want to sleep feeling good,’ writes Coetzee, the words carrying a terrible menace here on the train with Yellow Leader and his half sane sensibilities.

The three of them stand in the corridor and play the last touch game of children, giggling, reaching forward to touch, the half-hearted attempt at escape. Their overweening need is palpable and sad. The Henchman comes into the compartment and stares out at them, and they back at him. His claims on the girl are diminishing.
Two of the jockey’s young brothers and sisters traipse into the compartment. Yellow Leader, the girl and the Henchman sit down to play with them. But their play now becomes cruel and obscene. The children are made to say things, which in their simple fresh minds are transposed into an obscenity. Yellow Leader’s face lights up in a glow of sheer unadulterated joy. To black out this painful sight I start listening to Sarah Vaughan singing ‘April in Paris’. And night comes.

The train surges on ‘hubbahubba hubba…’ In a valley down below are strung the lights of Bethlehem. It grows cold. The journey now enters into a new phase where the present traveling company is joined by an invasion of Afrikaner high school girls on their way to Ladysmith. They crowd into the second class compartment oblivious of the fact that I want to sleep. Yellow Leader produces a bottle of brandy and the Henchman some cokes. The school girls titter and begin drinking. One of them lights a cigarette in the compartment. I have now become the quintessential 20th century man adapting to steadily declining conditions, eventually living in a broom cupboard and liking it. When I tell her to stop they all file out into the cold of the corridor and then just as I am on the verge of sleep they traipse back in again to top up on brandy. One of the girls reels against the small table and spills coke over me and into my open brief case. I journey deeper into the broom cupboard. From here anything can happen, and man will not blink.

In the dark we pass Harrismith, long the site of a British garrison after the Boer war where the one time commander, Lt General Sir H.M.L. Rundle was also Vice-President of the Harrismith Golf Club, on his death in England in 1934 he left the club money.

My relief at reaching Ladysmith at midnight stops just short of a euphoric screech as I part for ever from Yellow Leader and the Henchman, who have by now placed each other in Coventry. In the bitter cold I make my way over to the station to catch the train for Glencoe. It leaves at 4 o’clock “No. You can’t buy your ticket now. Youse must wait until 4 o’clock,” insists the stationmaster.

It is cold; bitter cold. Outside, ranged against the station wall, are numbers of blacks seeking shelter. The canteen for blacks is open, the white canteen closed. I find a waiting room for first and second class passengers: ‘Whites Only’ insists the sign. The room is small but wonderfully warm and like the station itself has been here for a long time, perhaps since the siege of Ladysmith. In the corner is a small iron fireplace with three rough benches set against each of the walls and a large table taking up much of the space in the middle. Two men occupy a bench each; one a genuine railway traveler: unhealthy face, two knapsacks hanging from his back on which are tied two white enamel cups carrying its own complement of traveling ants; the other man is a tramp come out of the cold. I stretch myself out on the vacant bench. The door suddenly opens ushering in a young man dressed in a dark overcoat and carrying a suitcase. I sit up and move over. He looks dead tired.
“What train are you waiting for?” I inquire.
He lifts his thumb, “Hitching,” he mumbles. “Came in to get out of the cold.”
Tomorrow is Good Friday. South Africa is on the move.

The man spreads himself upon the table and is soon fast asleep. Crash. The door bangs open, “Kom julle! What train are you waiting for?” It is the stationmaster, confronting each of us in turn. I have the impression I may still be in the army, or perhaps on the way to the front in the Great War. But, recognizing me, he says nothing, “Uit, uit!” he brusquely commands the others and sends them out into the cold. “Dis nie vir mense wat die spoorwee nie gebruik nie.” ‘It’s not for people who don’t use the railway.’ I fall asleep again. Crash, the door flies open. It’s the stationmaster again. Has he changed his mind? I prepare for battle.
“The bus to Glencoe is going now,” he announces. “Do you want to go by bus?” I hesitate for a moment.
“Yes. What has happened to the train?”
“It’s been rerouted through the OFS.”

Outside the station some tweny-five whites stand huddled among their suitcases. We board, piling the luggage in the aisle. It is bitterly cold. Numerous cigarettes light up in the confined space; 4 o’clock in the morning, the journey now revealed as an escape from a holocaust. A middle-aged man dressed in a safari jacket and shorts with a bulging stomach stands near the driver, clearly our self-appointed master-of-ceremonies.
The bus heads towards Elandslaagte, remembered for the rout of the Boers in the Boer War by the British in a fierce tropical downpour, one leaving many casualties on both sides – notably among the Gordon Highlanders.
After some tacking about on back roads, a large crowd of blacks loom out of the dark.
”Whoa!” shouts a deep voice.
“Whoa yourself. Jy’s verdwaal,” mutters the driver. (‘You’re lost.’)
“It’s a coon,” observes a man behind me.

The blacks shoulder their luggage and head towards the door. The man in the safari suit announces, “This is not your bus.” The crowd resigned to its fate, retreats. The bus turns and heads back for Glencoe. Why had we gone to Elandslaagte in the first place? Finally, we are at Glencoe and a train awaits. And this is the same station where the Boers moved in on the newly vacated station, recorded by Dietlof Van Warmelo in his book, On Commando, “I entered the stationmaster’s house, a well-furnished house with beautiful pictures, books, and mirrors. Some massive silver mugs and other articles of value were lying about. The family had only just dined, for the cloth was still laid. I ate of the food on the table, wrote a letter home with pen and ink, and left the house. Later on, when I returned, it had been thoroughly looted and some of the mirrors smashed.”

In the morning when I wake the sun is out shining on long yellow vistas of grassland dotted with sleek Brahman cattle. We pass through Bloodriver, so long the Boer incubus of their Afrikaner nationalist hegemony, commemorating the 16 December 1838 when, under Pretorius, they killed some 3,000 of Dingane’s Zulu in retribution for the massive slaughter of their own people in February of that same year – including women and children, at Weenen, now commemorated as the public holiday, Dingane’s Day. From this melancholy place we clatter through Scheepersnek and, as Paton writes, ‘Thunder … over battlefields of long ago.’

At Vryheid there are only a few Europeans amongst the many blacks milling about on the station. I walk up to the ticket office. A white woman is busy serving a black man at his appointed counter. She is impatient, “Come on, come on!” she commands, rattling her pen against the steel bars. The man begins again, leaning further down to be able to see under the piece of paper pasted on the small glass window at his ticket counter. I take a taxi up town to a hotel for a wash and breakfast, and later seat myself in the lounge and read Michael K. Two rough looking women enter and are joined by two younger men. They order a double round of drinks. An elderly man, a cripple, enters and seats himself in the corner. The two couples begin talking in sentences of mixed English and Afrikaans. The more voluble of the two men, the one with black, greasy hair, babbles, “Hey! I had me a 1000 cc iron. Another ou by the Lucia Mall, we sommer came together when we pulled away. Hey. I felt such a poepall.” Then with barely a pause, he continued. “Hey! When I was in the airforce I wanted to go twenty-three miles. Ronnie, my mate spokes to him a question?”

Then he gazed at the ceiling while his brain booted up and clarity returned.
“My mother worked all her life long. She scrubbed other peoples floors, she cooked food for them, she washed their dishes, she washed their dirty clothes, she scrubbed the bath after them, she went on her knees and cleaned the toilet. But when she was old and sick they forgot her. They put her away out of sight. When she died they threw her in the fire. They gave me an old box of ash and told me, ‘Here is your mother. Take her away, she is no good to us.’”

Back at the ticket office I find a white man now commands the counter. I inquire about a ticket. Behind us a drunk black man hoves into view and rattles a coin against the window. “Wait, man!” calls the ticketmaster in exasperation, “Can’t you see I’m busy.” He turns towards me once more, “Bloody Kaffirs”, he growls. Late that night I wake, and we are at Breyten.


EPILOGUE

It is January, 2006, twenty-two years since I passed here on my rail journey, Thaba Nchu mountain on my right, on my left the silent railway line - now no longer in daily use, and beside me my 90 year old mother set on a visit to the places of her childhood; perhaps for the last time.

Thaba Nchu – the Black Mountain guarding the spirit of the great man, Chief Moroka, his illustrious family and the Rolong tribe, is a four hour drive from Johannesburg, the road passing through the old boer town of Winburg, and down to Thaba Nchu, now no longer part of the Bophutatswana homeland of yore, the time of separate development, of apartheid. We book in to a modern hotel with a casino, built in what once was the town park, and after some tea drive the short distance back to the town, past some old houses, unoccupied, fallen into disrepair, thence to the town centre itself, shop after shop – most of them selling furniture, many well dressed blacks strolling about in leisurely fashion, clearly with money, provided perhaps in the form of welfare payments made by the ANC Government to eleven million of its people in South Africa.

We take the road to Tweespruit, skirt the great mountain, then turn off to the Orchison farm lying close by. Finding Cynthia out, as well as her son and his family, we return to the hotel.

I then drive back to the town centre, in search of MacDonald Moroka, grandson of that great man, Dr James Moroka, founder president of the ANC and grandson of Chief Moroka. I am directed to a small set of rooms on the main street where MacDonald practices as an attorney. Greeting the Rolong waiting inside, I take a dining chair, cross my legs and await events. But, as is the custom, being white – and obviously a member of that slice of mankind who are always in a hurry, I am shown almost immediately into MacDonald Moroka’s office.

The office is dark, a curtain drawn to keep out the glare of light from the main street. A short man, his colour that of any person in the waiting room, giving no hint of his part European background, inquires as to what he can do for me. He tells me of growing up in Thaba Nchu, of his opposition as a student to the Bophutatswana regime. He produces some colour photographs, stark evidence of the torture performed on him and his fellow activists by the police while he attended the University of the North. Before that he had left school and gone into hiding for two years, later moving to the Cape to do his matric. All of this is told with no hint of anger – though he mentions that he would like his torturers to be brought to justice one day. He picks up the phone and speaks to his mother who lives nearby in the old family home.

Driving back the way I had come, and collecting my mother, I soon enter the driveway of an old Cape Dutch house built in 1922 by the medical doctor, James Moroka, a small sign proclaiming the house to be a national monument. We are met by McDondald’s mother, Gladys. A friendly and hospitable woman, she leads us into the sparsely furnished house and gives us tea. Her doctor father-in-law, I learn, had encouraged her marriage to his eldest son, despite the fact that she was a Xhosa and his son a Rolong. For he – like that great man Chief Moroka, his grandfather, had wanted to see all South Africans living in harmony, with tribal and racial divisions set aside. Then I learn something not suspected before. James Moroka was actually the son of a Scot, Dr Daniels, who had practiced in Thaba Nchu for years and had carried on a secret liaison with one of the Princesses. I am led to a portrait of her, a beautiful and striking woman dressed in the European fashions of the day. What had happened to her, how had she ended her years. Dr James had followed native custom and taken five wives. Gladys escorts us out onto the broad stoep.
“During World War Two, his wives used to sit out here and sow clothes for the troops up at the front”.
Later, back in the town, I inquire of the present Chief Moroka. His name, I learn, is Albert, an ineffectual chief with a drink problem.

I stop at the Second World War Memorial Gate standing a little back from the road. Someone had half levered off one of the memorial plaques; grass surrounds the cracked pillars, the gate rusts, untended. No sense of history here, no sense and value of what Thaba Nchu has to tell the world.

Back at the hotel I call Cynthia, to learn that my childhood friend, Roly Ross, had died a few months before. And so we drive out again to Cynthia’s farm, for lunch, the farm where I had spent many happy hours as a schoolboy with her and her husband, Angus, dead at the age of thirty-five. Angus’s father had come out to South Africa on the Milner settlement scheme after the Boer War, building a small stone house in an endless vista of grassland. Here Angus and his brother, Hamish, grew up. When their father died, Angus - being the eldest, gave Hamish first choice of which part of the farm to take; he chose the undeveloped part – since sold by his children, some of whom live in the nearby hamlet of Tweespruit.

I tell Cynthia of the prosperity of blacks in Thaba Nchu and learn from her that they cannot find staff, that no one comes to the farm anymore to look for work, and that in the last five years they had already lost four tractor drivers to HIV/Aids. So her son and daughter-in-law now have to drive the tractors themselves; this in a land of massive unemployment.

In Ficksburg, we book in to the hotel, then drive the few hundred yards up to Erwee Street. But Grandfather Andrews’ house is now a memory, and gone too, Polly’s boarding house. And so out on the road towards Fouriesburg, passing the flat-topped hills where the People of the Cat, the boers and the English fought not so long ago. We call in at the home of the current owner of Donside and Riverland, a man called Pretorius, his small modern house and garden laid out on the side of the tar road, and ask permission of his wife to visit the farms (for they do not live there, it being too dangerous with the Basuto ever in raiding mode), then drive to the Mountains and Caledon river of my early life, and of my mother’s, perhaps the only truly happy period of her long life. We try the road up to old Donside house, but it is untended and in one part simply merges into plowed land; and so round the curve of the hill and on to the Riverland house, now a ruin since Cathlin, Bronwen and I had visited years before. Across the river in Lesotho, in the distance, the Maluti’s rise steeply; a settlement clings to the lower slopes, sparse of grass, scarified.

Mother is silent. I stop on the lonely road to tend an overheating problem and trudge back the way I had come to a small dung encrusted pond where I extract water for the radiator. A few birds sing, but shorn of its people, its family of land carers, gloom descends upon me. We make our way back to the tar and drive on to Fouriesberg for lunch. At the petrol station I make the acquaintance of two Masuto, over for the day in their jalopy to buy Lucerne for their cattle at R80 a bale.

It is time to go, back to Joburg via Rodendal and Senekal, scything the loveliness of the Witteberge, our land of memories and childhood innocence.

And driving through this old land I am assailed once more by the memory of that young boy come with a jolt upon consciousness on that hill in Bloemfontein more than fifty years ago, where once, for the first time, the wretchedly ill South Africa had been revealed to him. And now, all these years later, here he was again; and little had changed: the Afrikaner hegemony merely replaced by that of the Black African National Congress, the scramble for gold of Uitlander and Afrikaner now transmogrified into a frantic politically correct harvesting of production by the favoured ANC few, where violent crime had driven well-off South Africans into their own Legoland laagers of fake Tuscany housing and golf estates - these walled, security encircled prisons of their own making, or had sent them packing for Perth, for London, anywhere that is where they could be free of racial prejudice and crime, and where they could live without the mustard gas stench and eternal ennui of the black/white problem. And what of the poor blacks in their shanty towns and their endless night of rape, murder, muggings and social dislocation.

And I had sent myself packing again as well, weary family in tow, ready for another lurch back to old, unfenced Pleistocene Africa, beautiful of course, but increasingly plundered by its own leaders, witchbound, bereft of the promise it once held out for the advancement of civilization in Africa, confirming – as if I did not know it, that the waPajero don’t really want us there either.

But there will come a time, I’m sure, when the trains will once more whoop with delirium upon the rail, where young boys and girls will again be consumed by that delicious end of school-term feeling that only a train journey truly creates, and where the odious appellations, black and white, will forever be left behind in their derelect siding.

The End