A Drink of Dry Land Read online

  So we really stirred things up, Jules and I, as we came barrelling down the Dedeben farm road in our grubby bakkie towards the village of Olifantshoek, where, the legend goes, there may once have been a great African elephant graveyard.

  We stopped on the side of the calcrete road and waited for a dot in the distance to join us. That dot soon became a little Kalahari family, their donkeys and their goats. We introduced ourselves and, in the manner of the region, they reciprocated via the patriarch.

  “Thank you for asking, sir. My name is Matewis Bezuidenhout, sir. This is my wife Anna. And our little niece, Minna.”

  I requested permission to photograph them.

  “Thank you for asking, sir. Yes, of course, you may take some pictures.”

  I enquired, in mid-shoot, where they might be going.

  “Thank you for asking, sir. We’re going to the auction to sell our goats. We hope to get R300 for each of them.”

  Mr Bezuidenhout had won me over. There’s normally not much respect around for us travelling paparazzi types. It’s usually bugger off, how much are you paying me, I’m in a hurry or I don’t photograph well from where you’re standing. Here was the stately Matewis thanking me for showing an interest in his life – and in the future of his rather nervous goats.

  And then suddenly the Kalahari boiled over in a dusty cavalcade of muscle trucks, 4x4s and old, low-slung Mercedes-Benz veterans from the days of Jim Reeves and Elvis Presley, hooting and hollering as if they were on a serious snipe hunt. They were all heading off to the country auction near Markramsdraai. There would be brandy. There would be delicious boerewors. There would probably be more than a dash of manly Kalahari farm humour. But somewhere in that party mix would be the Bezuidenhout family, with rich ancient San Bushman blood yet bearing a proud Afrikaans name, flogging their beautiful brace of goats.

  In the shop window at the filling station in Olifantshoek were two posters announcing the imminent musical performances of Wynand Windpomp (enquire at Langeberg Abattoir) and Jurie Els, who was booked to perform at the Show Hall on 3 September. I love these platteland shows, mainly because I used to sing bluegrass for the Silver Creek Mountain Band and we were part of the dry country circuit. The odd policemen’s ball here, a high-school charity show there. Ah, the constant problems with lighting, three-point plugs, reverb and the enigma of that very fat fellow in the tight khaki shorts with a girlfriend who makes eyes at the bass player with the rings on his toes. The Olifantshoek Show Hall – you’ll find its equivalent all over the world, where there’s very little water but loads of beef, hard liquor and a strange attachment to the Old Testament.

  I slipped in a tape of Dixie Chicken by Little Feat, the best band in the world, as we climbed onto the back of the N14 to Upington, desert safari oasis of the Northern Cape and the capital of Gordonia. We cranked up the volume and were outside the Upington police station photographing their “camel cop” statue in no time at all.

  The police camel patrols of the Northern Cape used to walk at a “sand shuffle” of 12 km an hour, covering as much as 70 km in a day. They would be on the lookout for river pirates, diamond crooks and general outlaws. But camels, especially the Australian-bred “Ghan” types, were also used to carry the mails through this harsh land.

  Upington excites me immensely. It lies on the Gariep (formerly Orange), South Africa’s mother river. From here, you head north to the glorious Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, west to the flower fields of Namaqualand, east back home to Jo’burg or south to Verneuk Pan (Deception Pan), where Jules and I once trance-danced a weekend away with the fire-weavers, the flame-breathers, the Goths, the hip-hoppers and a very naked and extremely stoned lady who insisted on mooning the moon.

  Being a baby boomer with a lust for the music styles of Jimi Hendrix, ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the aforementioned Little Feat, I cannot be accused of being a rave bunny. But you’ve got to look at a thing at least once, as they say. So, back in the summer of 1996, off we went, Jules and I, in the company of grizzled senior photographer Les Bush and the youthful Lorna Phillips, our “spirit guide and mentor”, to the rave in the desert at Verneuk Pan, where Malcolm Campbell once tried to beat the world land-speed record in a Bluebird.

  We pitched our tent and partied until dawn, when Les came barging in to announce that he’d seen a huge black chicken at the edge of the desert. We went to have a look, and his black chicken turned out to be a lean-to shelter made from ebony silk. A short lunar eclipse was on the go at the time, and in the beguilement of moon and desert, the flapping contraption had eerily taken on the shape of large poultry.

  But the contents of this chicken really gobsmacked us: a naked woman in a yoga stance, upside down, with her pert bottom exposed to the likes of us and the big black moon in the royal blue sky. She remained in this impossibly rude yet almost erotic position for ages. Then she flicked on some rave threads and danced off into the distant mirages.

  Later that day, a Cessna Caravan arrived at the “Desert Storm” gig, landing nearby and taxiing right up to the tent town. It disgorged a dozen shaven-headed fellows in camo pants, who immediately set to work on their dwellings. Just after lunchtime, when the heat was starting to get really silly, a Cessna 210 taildragger landed and out climbed a long-limbed woman passenger wearing aviator glasses and high boots, with an overnight togbag slung over her shoulder. “Gucci Girl” strode into what was by now affectionately known as Barter Town and disappeared into a cloud of dry ice.

  Desperately in need of a bath, we drove out to the nearby town of Kenhardt. At the exit gate, officials were handing out pass-outs. One young man with a yellow bandanna came over and gave us three pass-outs.

  “But there are four of us,” I protested. “You’ve only given us three.”

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, ever so politely, and very slowly. I knew instantly that he hailed from Cape Town. “I thought you were a cushion.”

  “What? And cushions don’t get pass-outs?” I asked, as if we were having the world’s most normal conversation. I must confess right now that I had been stroking my tent flaps affectionately all morning. I didn’t really know why. Maybe a naughty youngster had dropped something strange in my tequila, was the current theory. Anyhow, my brain was merrily frying away.

  “I see your point,” the official said, flipping a luminous green Frisbee out into the scrub desert towards no one I could see. “Sorry. Here’s another.”

  The barman at the Kenhardt Hotel pub, whither we freshly laundered adventurers repaired for beer, had his own theories. By his lights, anyone who was going to pitch a tent in the desert and hop about to industrial clamour was one Calamata olive short of a cocktail party. While he was telling me this in no uncertain terms, my eyes could not help wandering up to the wall space above his head, where the heads of dead warthogs and meerkats were on display. The Lion King lives – or not – in Kenhardt. Every third beer turned into a toast to Timon and Pumba.

  Meanwhile, locals from near and distant Northern Cape settlements like Keimoes, Kakamas, Springbok, Grootdrink, Pofadder and Putsonderwater had jumped in their pickups and rushed out to Barter Town. When they got there, however, most of the boere were, understandably, a little wary of one-on-one contact with the tribes in their Celtic body paint, hammering away on their bongos, sucking mournfully on their didgeridoos and feeling their partners in full Ecstasy mode. You don’t just walk up to these guys and say Howzit. They might eat you.

  So the boere just circled the camp slowly in their Japanese trucks, pointing out the occasional naked breast and cracking up at the trance-dreamers baking themselves brown in the Kalahari sun. They looked like an advance team of de-programmers just waiting to pounce on a cultists’ cabal. They sat on the backs of their pickups in folding chairs, drinking beer and enjoying the strangest show they’d ever seen (far better than King of the Kalahari, Wynand Windpomp, even in full cry). And then the idea hit me. One day I would stage a Kalahari Elvis Contest, perhaps even in this famous space called Ver
neuk Pan, and it would be a world event. A plan that’s still in the pipeline.

  I rummaged around in our car and found something simply called The Paper, published out of Upington. There was a piece about aliens from Jupiter that were expected on Earth shortly. They were, according to this newspaper’s sources, coming to promote the Afrikaans language. Jupiterians, said The Paper, received Afrikaans TV soaps on the space-waves and had grown to love the language. Well, and why not, I thought. I moved on.

  “A Cape Town man has stunned the world press by announcing that an evil alien held him down in a bar-room brawl and stole his face,” another story informed me.

  Les returned once more, recounting a rural urban rumour that reeked of mischief:

  “They say one of the farmers around here tried some Ecstasy two nights ago. He said he’d never drink brandy again. He went home and hugged his family for hours. Now he wants to farm llamas.” And off he buzzed, to find more scurrilous anecdotal material.

  “Say, Les,” I called after him. “Have a look at this newspaper I found. They’re looking for a chief photographer.”

  I left Les engrossed in The Paper and went over to meet the happiest man in Barter Town, a certain Mr Haffejee.

  Mr Haffejee had driven all the way from Durban in a huge refrigerator truck packed with bottled water. He was selling small bottles of still water to dehydrated ravers at R5 a pop. He was also allowing them two minutes in the freezing darkness of his truck at R1 a minute. They were queueing in their hundreds for access to Mr Haffejee’s Chill Room. I removed my baseball cap and saluted a very smart man, after a ten-minute interview with him in the frozen darkness.

  Back to Upington, 2004:

  “And do you remember when we went north?” Jules asked, as we drove to a massive spares shop and parked between two overloaded Land Rover Discos. On the advice of wiser folk, we were going to buy another spare tyre and some fuel jerry-cans for the six-week odyssey that loomed before us.

  I nodded. God, who could forget that drive up on the R360 past Hondejaag, a series of sociable weavers’ nests that resembled big hairy toffee apples on the telephone poles and the Caution: Bat-Eared Foxes Crossing sign? I also remembered my friend, the photographer Doug Lee, telling me about meeting the Jannewaries up here somewhere. Isak Jannewarie was 92 and his son Niculaas was a sprightly 70. They had not seen rain on their farm, “Louter”, for decades. A nearby windmill managed to draw something wet from the water table for the Jannewaries, however. They told Doug about their weggooikind (throw-away child) called Boet, whom they had found orphaned and abandoned on the desert fringes of the then Kalahari Gemsbok National Park.

  They treated Boet as one of their own. In return, he grew up in this hellish sand box to be a strapping young man, fiercely protective of Isak and Niculaas. And so they lived. I told Doug I thought a monster of a movie script lurked in the background of this story, but then it might well have been the whisky talking that night down at the pub.

  Many years ago, Jules and I found our very own Jannewaries near the park, as they were struggling to inspan two donkeys, literally shoving the sulky beasts into the traces. They were slightly less courteous than Matewis Bezuidenhout, but understandably so in the light of their current crisis. Donkeys can be so bloody-minded at times.

  The park? Well, Jules and I were yuppies on safari back then. We had a fancy Toyota bakkie on loan from the manufacturers, all shiny and silver, we had savoury boil-in-a-bag wild rice, avocadoes stuffed with sardines and peppadews and carrot salad. Bush tucker fresh from the northern suburbs of Jo’burg. We drove around with the air-conditioner full-blown, playing Santana and Enya at low volume while springbok, wildebeest, Kori bustards, oryx, kestrels and pygmy falcons frolicked about in the vastness.

  We played gin rummy at night, and ate stir-fries made of broccoli, patti pans and ratatouille. But the best parts involved our blue igloo tent and the delightfully mischievous Kalahari mistral wind that tried its level best to blow us all the way to Kansas. Or at least to Lekkersing. We ended up tying the tent strings to the barbecue stand on the right, the thorn tree on the left and the Toyota in the front. It was not elegant.

  Even less cool, however, were two English girl-tourists in their little hired sedan, who giggled their way around the Kgalagadi with no equipment to speak of, perhaps a tot or two of peach schnapps to hand and a little pocket torch for their inevitable night-time arrivals in camp. They were having such a helluva Thelma & Louise of a time, however, that our hearts went out to them almost instantly. The thoroughbred camping types around us, weighted down with everything an adventure store could legally hurl at them, were a little headmasterish about it all.

  The Kgalagadi is easy on the eye and restful on the soul. Get there before the ground squirrels and the Camping Style Police take over.

  Chapter 4: Namaqua Memories

  Lawyers, Guns & Donkeys

  I found Oom Kallie Gagiano back in 1981 on the outskirts of a town with a name that sounds like a car horn with a nasal condition: Nababeep.

  It was so dry out there that the goats were kissing each other to get their lips wet. Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze was blaring away on the old Good Hope Radio station’s Housewives’ Hour as I drove into that remote copper town and asked for directions to the Gagiano residence. I’d heard about Oom Kallie’s donkey troubles from a barman in Pofadder.

  “Turn left at Pretorius’s place near the Caltex station. Then go on to the Scholtz house, you really can’t miss it, and head off past the firing range.” Those were the pump attendant’s directions, and they were dead accurate.

  The 76-year-old man crept out from a corrugated iron lean-to, followed by three puppies, their eyes squinting in the harsh Namaqua sunlight. Oom Kallie slapped one of his curious donkeys on the rump and shouted: “Grasveld! Grasveld! Must you always be in my way? Hey? Must you?”

  He sat on the bonnet of my hired car and looked me up and down. His beard was so white, his face so wrinkled, he could have passed for a desert Santa. Willie Nelson was singing Till I Gain Control Again on the radio and I silently marvelled at the Cape housewives who were requesting music from my heart, like they knew my very soul.

  Oom Kallie Gagiano in a nutshell: a prospector for most of his working life, he did his time on the diamond fields from Lüderitz to Hondeklip Bay, keeping company with his beloved donkeys and whittling his social skills down to a bare minimum. Nearly 25 years before this day he’d returned from a field trip and moved into a tin hut 3 km out of town.

  “I’m a bachelor, always have been,” he told me. “I’m not snipped and neither are my donkeys. They roam the veld as I did when I was a young man, dancing and kissing the girls. You see all those other donkeys down there in the valley? Who do you think fathered them? Grasveld. No one but my dear Grasveld.”

  His current donkeys were the children of the beasts that had walked the hard road with him, through a country so biblical, burnt-amber and beautiful that its images remain lodged in your dreams forever.

  “I’m going blind, you know. I have a sister in the town and I really love her. She wants to look after me. I would like to live in town for a change, where there are nice gardens. Instead of this pile of rubbish,” Oom Kallie gestured about him in disgust. I asked him why he couldn’t just pack up and move back to Nababeep, and so he told me the story.

  Some time back, in the drought (is there ever anything else out here, except for a few delirious days each year when rain brings this land to life?), Grasveld and his four brothers were starving. Kallie began staging a series of midnight raids into Nababeep. He used to lead his donkeys into town and open the gates of well-tended properties belonging to people he did not know (or like) well.

  The beasts ran amok among the painstakingly watered gardens and gorged themselves. Until, that is, the night Grasveld got his hoof caught in an old tin while foraging in a yard. He made an awful noise escaping down the road (step-step-step-clunk) and the homeowner woke up.

  Oom Kallie’s donk
eys were banned from Nababeep. He was allowed in, but only he. This was his dilemma. I asked the old prospector about his tin house, and why he had been under the lean-to when I arrived earlier.

  “I lost the key to my house two days ago. I’m damned if I can find it,” he said. We spent the better part of an hour looking for the key and then Oom Kallie said not to worry, it would turn up sometime.

  “But did you know that I used to play the fiddle? I was good. And then the fiddle neck broke. They (pointing at his donkeys) used to love my music.”

  Oom Kallie Gagiano is no doubt looking for diamonds (and perhaps his key) somewhere in the Milky Way these days, with Grasveld et al getting in his way. But I’ll never forget him, because this old man showed me a glimpse of the true nature of Namaqualand.

  Then came the court case in Upington, where I got to see a little more Namaqualand for my money. I also learnt about the Gariep River and what a totem it is. Not only to the riverside locals living off its bounty, but to the whole South African nation.

  The facts of the case were, initially, simple. Gariep River farmer gets into financial trouble. Takes a loan from a rich senator and signs his lush family ground over as collateral. Defaults on his loan payments, loses his land and his senses at the same time. Shoots the senator dead one moonlit night in a desperate gun battle on said farm.

  I spent three weeks covering the case for my newspaper back in Johannesburg, the Rand Daily Mail. In that time I got to know all about dank little country hotels. I got an inkling of small-town politics. And I fell in love with the Afrikaans language all over again, via the highly musical and entertaining lilt of Namaqua-speak.

  Apart from being served a string of heart attack-inducing breakfasts by silent hotel staff and trying to tickle court secrets out of a judge’s pretty secretary (and failing), I also learnt a bit about the heat in Upington. Every morning at the tea recess I would climb into my parked and sunbaked car and watch as the plastic of the steering wheel moulded itself around my fingers. Then I would yell out loud and startle the main street.