After Spring

By Karen Jennings

 

We had come to Namaqualand too late in the year for flowers, so that what remained to us was an abundance of rock and heat.

 

At Letterklip there are names written on the rocks. Names of the dead, the living, the bored and young. There is a coat of arms too – the family crest of a fresh Englishman sent to South Africa to quash the Boer forces. It is his garrison that hunted for rocks in the surrounding plains until they had enough to build a fort around the boulders. Their job was to protect Garies, a town so small and unyielding that it need never have existed, nor be defended. The ground at Letterklip is now covered in dassie1 middens. Trees grow in the shelter of boulders. Spy holes in the stone walls made for shooting at enemies are the only reminder of the violence that once existed in this place. Otherwise all is still. The neighbouring veld is brown with haze. The heat vanishes under the large rocks where we stand. My husband smokes beneath the hang of a boulder. A pillar of aged soot-stain rises behind him; his actions echoing those of the named soldiers: A. Colyn, A. Moffat, H. Schapera who had lived there once. Yet Dylan looks out of place. “Let’s go,” he says. 

 

Some 30km away on the road to Kamieskroon, under a large thorn tree lies the grave of Lieutenant D.J. Darter, an unremarkable British officer killed during the Anglo-Boer war. The grave site still belongs to Britain, making the few square metres of its length and width the smallest registered piece of foreign land in South Africa. It is unmarked by signposts and requires climbing a wire fence into the land of a cattle farmer to access. A cow pat on the grave further confirms its insignificance. Nobody cares that this small patch of Namaqualand is “forever England”.

 

It is hot. Small insects settle on my lips and the corners of my eyes. All that remains now of the flower season are vast fields of stalks, caterpillar-laden, browning in the heat. Both the temperature and the caterpillars make walking unpleasant. We pause from time to time to flick them from our trousers, our shoes. Dylan is complaining. He keeps swallowing midges. His jeans are making his legs itch. His back is sweating. He worries that we will be arrested for trespassing first on private property, and then on foreign soil. The heat of Namaqualand goes unnoticed by its inhabitants. They wear the same clothes as they might in winter, neither observing the change nor affected by it. It is only to us visitors that the warmth is unbearable. 

 

A few days later we are in Springbok, capital of Namaqualand. The centre of town boasts Monument Koppie2, a squat pile of boulders which Boers wrested from the British during the war. It is home to several monuments to Boer heroes over the decades, as well as three prancing reindeer and a star traced out in lights. The hill is encircled by a spiked fence and locked gate. We could not climb to the top if we wanted to. But there is no real need. We can see everything we need to from the pavement of this strange traffic island. Ugly buildings stretch to left and right, before and behind us. A gigantic screen, left over from the Soccer World Cup in 2010 looks out over the bus terminus, broadcasting rugby games long since played and forgotten. Underneath it vendors gather, selling namebrand knock-offs; the same tired garments that can be seen on any day in Cape Town and elsewhere in South Africa. The roads are not busy, but a regular flow of large farm bakkies3 and off-road vehicles passes us. Labourers in their blue overalls walk on the pavements, cross the streets. Unemployed men and women sit outside stores in the sun, sleeping or chatting. Before us, a little to the left, are the wide front windows of the smoking section of the Springbok Lodge restaurant where we have just eaten lunch. From these windows the sun-browned faces of farmers and their wives stare out at us. Even if they hadn’t heard us speaking English earlier, they would have known our foreignness simply by sight. It is visible to them in our facial features, the way we wear our clothes, our hair. The fact that we are third and fifth generation South Africans respectively matters little to them. In this place the English inhabitants are known simply as rooinekke4, or more kindly as Engelsmanne5. Their names need never be known.

 

It is some time past midday. The worst of the heat is on top of us. Even sunglasses cannot keep off the glare. I want to find the Blue Mine. The map we received for free from the information centre makes no sense and shows the Blue Mine only as a star-enclosed circle outside of the town, without a suggestion of how to get there. It could be any distance away. I guide Dylan away from the Koppie towards a dusty road that leads out of the valley and up into the hills that surround the town. Several times we stop, ask people about the mine. No one has heard of it. Yet it exists in guidebooks and on a postcard I bought somewhat pre-emptorily at the information centre. It seems impossible that no one should have heard of it. The Blue Mine was the first commercial copper mine in the country. It is the mine that gave rise to the town in 1852. All the buildings and roads joined here in this dusty valley as a result of that mine. In fact, other than a few decades in the early twentieth century, the mine continued to be worked until the 1970s. Perhaps unemployment makes people forget such things as the beginnings of towns and an industry no longer wanted.

 

Dylan is getting irritated, I know. It was not his idea to come here. He despises heat, walking, the discomfort of it all. If he had had his way we would again be spending our holiday at one of the many guest houses on the coast, where he could lounge all day reading and drinking whiskey. A view of water and a cool breeze are all he wishes for. More than the heat, though, it is the poverty he hates. He has indicated as much enough times. He despises the poor, yet spends his time reading Marxist manifestos and talks of the worker as though they are brothers. A brother he would shun in public. In defence he quotes Engels - paraphrasing possibly, I am never sure: “A few days in my father’s factory have shown me the beastliness of the worker. It is impossible to carry on communist propaganda on a large scale and at the same time engage in working with these people.” He references it continually. He did it again at lunch today, in love with the sound of the words coming out of his mouth. Afterwards, he inhaled smugly from his cigarette, exhaling his self-importance.

 

As the incline grows, we meet a Nama man, his wife and daughter coming down from a further hill, along a path made by their bare feet. Each carries a large bundle of bracken on their heads. Where could it have come from? There is only low scrub as far as the eye can see. I test my Afrikaans on them, first with a greeting, and then to ask whether they know the location of the Blue Mine. The man shakes his head stiffly under his burden, “Nee, ons weet nie van so ‘n ding nie. Ek sal nie kan sê nie.” No, we don’t know about such a thing. I couldn’t say.

 

He repeats, “Ek sal nie kan sê nie.” As though it is some secret that Dylan and I may not share in. I thank him for his time, smiling at his wife and daughter who have watched placidly as we spoke. Turning away, he stumbles on a loose stone, making no sound as the bracken falls loosely from his head and onto the ground around him. The man slowly moves his neck, adjusting it to the loss of weight, then he bends down. His wife and daughter deposit their own burdens and help him to gather the scattered sticks. Dylan lights a cigarette and watches between slit eyes. Again there is something self-important about his exhalation. The man, his wife and daughter heave the bracken back onto their heads. Steadying themselves, they walk on. The daughter waves at us shyly. Neither of us waves back.

 

“We could have helped,” I say.

 

“Charity’s insulting. They don’t want our money.”

 

“I didn’t mean money. I meant helped to pick up the firewood.”

 

Dylan is bored, “Ah, he’d have been offended or something. You know these people. Anyway, what’s it got to do with us? I didn’t come here to pick up sticks.” He flicks the cigarette end away, begins to walk back down the incline. The search for the Blue Mine is over.

 

I follow behind him, my footsteps muted by the dust of the road. The hill seems enormous. I am walking up and I am walking down in one inseparable moment, as though the journey has both ended and begun. Something has been lost, gathered, lost again. I watch Dylan light another cigarette, inhale sullenly. 

 

The following day we drive to Nababeep. It is another ex-mining town, where neighbourhoods of people have grown up having never entered a pit. They live on government grants and the few Rands made from selling stones and fossils to whatever tourists might make their way through the town. The carcasses of Nama huts and worker’s cottages lie forgotten in backyards of brightly coloured government houses. Each has the same dimensions, the same number of rooms and windows. At these windows people glance out at us. Their doors are ajar, dogs lounge before them. Through the openings we witness worn out furniture, tacky porcelain figurines. Nothing that can be resurrected. Yet the streets are clean, the people sober. I don’t bother pointing this out to Dylan. He is driving, tuning the radio to find a station that does not exist.

 

There has been little conversation between us since the man with the bundle of firewood. In the night we made love cursorily, barely touching. I made excuses for us both. Tired by the heat, the long day. I did not tell Dylan about the feeling of losing and gathering, losing and gathering that I had had on that hill.

We stand on the outskirts of town, atop a great mound of mine detritus a century or more old. Below us is a vast pit that has become known as The Glory Hole. Several hundred metres deep with tunnels leading away into the earth and rock, there is nothing glorious about it. Though the tunnels and pit are a memory only. Over time it has filled with dark water which reflects back at us our small faces, side by side, peering down. Until recently children swam here, drowning regularly, their bodies never found. Now they have erected a fence.

“Just see how long it will keep them out,” Dylan scoffs. He drops his cigarette end over the fence into the water. Below us, our faces become separated by ripples. They stretch away from one another, each ripple pulling them further apart. Despite the disturbance, I can still see myself, drawn out wide across the pool. Dylan has become unrecognisable. There are few places where you can look into the earth and see a life stare back at you so clearly. Water and rock reflecting nothing but distance.

In the past, people left Namaqualand by steamship from Port Nolloth. They sailed for several days on stormy seas before reaching the Cape. Now there is really only one way to return south – by car on the N7. The road is smooth and well-tended. Without stops it is possible to make it back to Cape Town within 5 hours. 

We leave Namaqualand behind in stages determined by the landscape. The green-tinged Koperberge, the mountainous Kamiesberge. Next the wasteland of the Knersvlakte, followed by the verdant Swartland. Finally, there is no more landscape. Only industria and the smog of a city working hard are left to cross. It is raining as we approach Cape Town. Headlights reflect back at us off the rain-darkened road. From the passenger window, I stare down at the tarmac, reminded of other reflections. Of ripples dividing, drawing us out towards caverns, into tunnels that never meet. 

  

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1. Dassie – southern African rock rabbit, also known as Hyrax

2. Koppie - small hill  

3. Bakkies – pick-up trucks 

4. Rooinekke – rednecks (when the British first arrived in South Africa they could be recognised by their fair-skinned necks which had been burnt red by the hot South African sun) 

5. Engelsmanne - Englishmen

 

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Karen Jennings was born in Cape Town in 1982. She holds Masters degrees in both English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. In 2010 her short story 'From Dark' won the Commonwealth Short Story Competition for the African region. In 2009 'Mia and the Shark' won the English section of the MML short story competition and is now studied in schools. Karen’s stories have been published nationally and internationally, from Greece to Australia. In 2012 she began a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal under the supervision of Kobus Moolman. Her debut novel, Finding Soutbek was be published by the UK publisher Holland Park Press.