Tales from the Old Karoo Read online

  Guy Butler

  Tales from the Old Karoo

  AD DONKER PUBLISHERS

  Johannesburg & Cape Town

  Table of Contents

  Origins

  1 Concertina Gate

  2 Water Diviners

  3 The Rebel with a Price on his Head

  4 The Miracle Gate

  5 Lambs, Aasvogels, Zebras and the Day of Judgement

  6 Groot-Piet’s Dream of Heaven

  7 The Death and Resurrection of Henry Rock Pigeon

  8 The Mountain Tortoise Cure

  9 The Musical Policeman

  10 SAR & H

  11 The Jerboas of El Adem

  12 The Case of the Immortal Mackintosh

  13 The Remarkable Vermaaks

  14 Twins

  15 Olive, Johanna and Cron

  About the Book

  Imprint Page

  Origins

  The SABC asked me to write a nine-part TV documentary on Olive Schreiner, her parents and siblings. Their lives are marvellously various and interesting.

  Take Het, Ettie, or Henrietta, for instance – my favourite among them, a strapping blonde Germanic type, different in all things from Olive, who was a short, dark, glowing coal of a girl. Henrietta was a Bible-punching preacher of the temperance gospel, and married a man called Stakesby-Lewis. They had no children. When one of her many sisters died, leaving four orphans, the good woman adopted the whole brood. She spent most of her life looking after the unmarried mothers, orphans and incurable alcoholics of Cape Town. Her severe, freethinking brother-in-law, Cronwright Schreiner, regarded her as a saint.

  ‘She was the most saint-like person I have ever been brought into close contact with,’ he wrote. ‘She really loved the outcast; she did not pretend to. A person swarming with vermin, reeking foully with dirt, perhaps drunk, would be brought to the “Home” that she ran at The Highlands (Cape Town) for some time; she would put her arms round him, beam ecstatically in his face, call him “brother” and welcome him with all the love of her great mother heart; she would put him into a mud bath, which was one of her cures; she would give him unfermented fruit juice; she would wash him, clean him up, put clean clothes on him.’

  She was a sort of protestant Mother Theresa. And when she died there were ten thousand at her funeral. None of the other Schreiners came near ten thousand. Olive, of course, had to be different. She got buried in Maitland, next to Het; but Cron dug her up and buried her a second time, on the top of Buffelskop, Cradock.

  Or take their youngest brother William Philip, ‘W.P.’, two years Olive’s junior, born 1857, who came top of every examination he ever wrote. In 1881 he was first in the Cambridge Law Tripos and Chancellor’s Medallist. By 1893 he was Attorney General under Cecil Rhodes, the then Prime Minister of the Cape whom he greatly admired – only to be utterly disillusioned by his part in the Jameson Raid. He was Prime Minister of the Cape from 1898 to 1900 during the outbreak of the Boer War when his brother-in-law, F.W. Reitz, was President Kruger’s Secretary of State. According to Olive, Will started off as conservative, imperialistic and anti-native. He told Olive that his change of heart on the native question was like a religious conversion. After the Zulu rebellion, in order to defend the Chief, Dinizulu, ‘he gave up his great practice in Cape Town, without any remuneration whatever, to fight magnificently for a barbarian,’ wrote Cronwright. ‘And he never spoke of this great deed, which makes us think better of humanity’. He fought in vain both in South Africa and Britain against the colour bar clauses in the Act of Union, which he regarded as a betrayal of our African population. During the First World War he became High Commissioner in London. He died in 1919 on the day of the Declaration of Peace. His funeral, like Olive’s and Het’s, had symbolical dimensions. The whole allied and imperial establishment was represented. ‘There stood round the coffin men who embodied much of the history of South Africa, all of them mellowed by the years and wartime experience,’ writes Eric Walker in W.P. Schreiner – a South African Among Others: ‘Lord Milner, Generals Botha and Smuts, once Milner’s resolute foes and now his fellow councillors; Sir James Rose Innes; Sir Francis Newton and Otto Beit.’ And so many other mighty men. Also his wife, Fanny Reitz, and his sister, Olive. The spectrum was completed by the presence of Sol. T. Plaatje, J.T. Gumede and other South African black leaders who had come to England to plead for a revision of the South African constitution which would grant Africans a voice in the affairs of their own coµntry. At the Cape Bar someone quoted Marcus Aurelius: ‘Whatever he said, all men believed him, that as he spake so he thought, and whatever he did, that he did with a good intent.’

  Or take Theophilus, their big brother. No, we won’t take Theo, except to mention that when a young schoolmaster in Cradock, he played father to this remarkable trio – Het, Olive and Will – in a little house in Cross Street, from 1867 to 1870 – a house which has recently been turned into a small museum.

  (When I was a boy it was inhabited by two Misses Lizzel, who grew lovely tomatoes for sale. When they had filled our baskets, they would give us a glass of cool gingerbeer. This meant that we ate tomatoes with great enthusiasm, in order to get more gingerbeer.)

  The more I studied that family, the deeper I got into the mire of South African history – everything from the first Great Trek through to the arrival of the second lot of 1820 Settlers in 1920. The material is incredibly rich – all those public-spirited Schreiner brothers and sisters taking different political sides, and playing leapfrog through most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth: but I saw that it would be a full three years’ work in libraries and archives. Nevertheless, I was for a time industriously content as one of a growing army of researchers in the Schreiner field, and happy to help others when I could.

  Take the case of an eminent Australian historian of the nineteenth century who was on his way from Canberra to Harvard to study feminism in the nineteenth century, a movement in which Olive is a key, possibly a prime, figure. Instead of flying direct to Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had made the long detour via Johannesburg. He then drove all through the Orange Free State and the Karoo to Cradock, an important Schreiner place: He had allowed a couple of hours for a visit to her grave.

  He’d been badly misled about the accessibility of this grave by the novelist Dan Jacobson, who, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Story of an African Farm (1971), writes that Olive is buried on a koppie outside Cradock, which he claims to have climbed at the age of eight or nine. ‘The view beneath was of a red and brown expanse stretching flat to the horizon on all sides, interrupted only by kopjes like the one on which we were standing.’ But the landscape of Cradock is any thing but flat. There are impressive ranges of high mountains to both east and west; and the farms on which Olive was governess and wrote her books are among them, as is her grave on Buffelskop.

  Well, this Australian academic got to Cradock about midday, and went to the library to look at Olive’s manuscripts. He was shocked at the careless way they were housed. Then he asked where the koppie was on which she was buried. No one in Cradock knew for sure. Someone pointed vaguely to the south, to a massive range of mountains, none of which looked like a koppie to him. A koppie, according to his dictionary, the Shorter Oxford, was quite unequivocally, ‘a small hill’.

  He persisted with his enquiries. At dusk he and his wife found themselves contemplating three miles of rocky veld stretching to the foot of Buffelskop, one head among several in a massive mountain chain rising steeply fifteen hundred feet into a cold sky. He knew he was licked. He was very angry – not with Dan Jacobson, but with all Cradock, and South Africa generally for not knowing the whereabouts of the grave of the only original mind they’d produced t
o date.

  He turned round, and drove south. Hungry and cold, he pulled into the hotel at Middleton for the night. At that time the Middleton Hotel was not the place for anyone to pull into, least of all an angry Australian. He phoned me from Middleton at ten o’clock, when I was already asleep. I didn’t know who he was, but he’d heard of me so thought he could give me an earful for neglecting Olive, and for landing him and his wife at the foot of a mountain in the cold dusk, and then in a hotel like the one at Middleton. He was kind enough to come and have tea with me the next morning. When we’d exhausted the topic of Olive’s burial, I asked him where Patrick White was buried. And he said: ‘Unfortunately he’s still above ground.’

  I offered to organise a trip up the mountain the next day, taking in a visit to Klein Gannahoek, the farm on which young Olive started writing The Story of an African Farm but unfortunately he’d a plane to catch from Port Elizabeth for Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  This is not the place for stories about other Olive fans whom I did take up that mountain to Olive’s grave including Athol Fugard, Stephen Gray, Richard Rive, Chris Mann and Don Maclennan.

  But I will tell you about one colleague, Professor Christopher Heywood, from Sheffield. In 1983 – the centenary of the publication of The Story of an African Farm – he visited me. No, he didn’t want to go up the mountain to her grave – either he’d been before, or he had his priorities right: he wanted to go to Leliekloof and Ratelhoek, two remote farms on which young Olive had been governess when she wrote most of the work on which her reputation rests. And I was happy to take him. I’d not been to them myself.

  Heywood is very good company. He spends most of his life proving to his friends and the world at large that English literature is deeply indebted to Africa, particularly South Africa. He makes out a good case for the Bushmen (via the Bleeks and Jan Juta) having inspired D.H. Lawrence, in his pyjamas for the heat, to write that marvellous poem about a Sardinian snake drinking at his water trough while Mount Etna was smoking. And he argues plausibly enough that the smouldering hero of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, was not so much an emanation of the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution as of the Lancastrian slave trade with Africa. And then, of course, he’ll tell you about Tolkien, who was born in Bloemfontein, whose hobbits are really footloose Free Staters in disguise. And then he’ll mention Sir Laurens van der Post, another Free Stater – a sort of honorary sage to the British royal family.

  After a couple of hours of his company you realise that some scholars and critics have better imaginations than many novelists and poets. By suggesting this trip to Leliekloof, he exposed me to someone who restored my memory of what sort of stories could be heard in the Karoo: stories that might have a better claim on my time than re-telling the well-documented lives of the Schreiners. He certainly helped to loosen a little the grip of the Olive documentary on my mind.

  The approach to Leliekloof is really rather impressive – miles of dirt road, dusty, corrugated, deserted, along which we saw, at intervals, farmers’ wives gliding in big, beautiful air-conditioned cars at great speed, and not looking like farmers’ wives at all. We also saw their husbands, looking just like farmers, tearing about in open trucks and bakkies as though they were practising as stunt men for the movies. Before the dust had settled, the veld silence washed back again.

  The signposting was not good, but by dint of studying the map we took the correct turn southwards. The mountains drew close, and divided; then led us into a valley, and a long, wandering, increasingly steep ascent, now close to rockface and boulder, now through scrubthorn or mountain shrub, shedding the world, releasing the mind for new impressions, on the high plateau above.

  We reached Leliekloof, and were most warmly welcomed by Mr and Mrs J.M. Coetzer. We were told what they knew of the traditions relating to Olive’s stay there. Mr Giochi (pronounced Goggie), Coetzer from Almansfontein would arrive shortly and tell us more. They took us to the room in which Olive had lived and worked, upon whose floor she would lie to write when the summer heat was intolerable. We photographed the buildings from all points of the compass – and always, there were mountains in the background. It was a somewhat arid world whose vegetation must have changed during the past century. Indeed, when Olive visited the farm after an absence of several years, she exclaimed in shocked surprise: ‘But what has happened to the reeds? Where have all the lilies gone?’

  Giochi Coetzer – Oom Goggie – is a marvellous repository of the folklore of those mountains, and someone should go and live with him with a tape recorder and switch it on whenever he starts talking. His wife is the daughter of J.B. Kaggelhoffer, my Afrikaans and history teacher, to whom I owe my abiding interest in both subjects.

  Oom Goggie did not claim to know much about Olive’s stay with the Fouches. There was, however, a story about a cheque. Olive had sent a cheque to Oom Goggie’s uncle, L.C. Coetzer, who owned Leliekloof after the Fouches, but he had not cashed it because he wanted to keep it as a memento. But it had disappeared.

  What had not disappeared, however, were the stories of things that had happened on Leliekloof or the road leading up to it – stories which Olive might well have heard – and he let them spill from his mouth with that blend of irony, hyperbole and understatement which many of the best storytellers in the Karoo employ.

  Outside the main house is one of the biggest, blue-blackest cypress trees I have ever seen; and Giochi Coetzer had stories about it, and/or its predecessor, which had stood more or less where the present tree stands.

  The first story was about a clever runaway slave (that must have been before 1835, the date when the slaves were freed). Well, he’d hidden in the dark heart of the tree until his master and son, baffled at the lack of tracks, set out on their horses on the route they thought he’d taken. He then descended, and slipped off in the opposite direction, over the mountains into the Baviaanskloof where the newly-arrived Pringles were. It was safer there. The British Settlers were forbidden to own slaves.

  Then there was the touching story of a deserter from the Royal African Corps who was taken pity on by the daughter of the house. He had to live quietly in the tree for six days while the search party billeted itself on the farmer. It was a touch-and-go business because the Sergeant also fell for the daughter of the house, and as he was a much finer specimen than the deserter up the tree, she was sorely tempted to betray him. In later years she would announce to her guests what a fool she’d been not to hand the useless parasite, her husband, back to the Queen of England.

  Olive could not have heard the story of the next three refugees because that was during the Boer War, long after she’d left Leliekloof and become famous in England. Still, it was a good story, about one of the Cape Rebels with a price on his head. He’d passed the time up there, quietly, carving his name in the bark. Oom Goggie had seen it up there himself during his own, admittedly short, time up the tree. He was hiding from the dominee who’d come on a couple of hours’ huisbesoek. He then observed that trees had a way of getting into stories somehow. Had not Edgar, in King Lear, hidden from his brother in a hollow tree? All over England, so he’d heard, there were oak trees in which Charles I – or was it II? – had found shelter from the Roundheads.

  Oom Goggie also said Olive was almost bound to have heard about Die Jood se krans – The Jew’s Cliff – on the left-hand side of the descending road. It is about fifty feet high – not much really; in all directions there are taller cliffs, but none had a road running so close to its rim. Well, Abraham Sholowitz, in his Cape cart, drove off the edge at a gallop.

  It was a very difficult business recovering his body. Goggie’s father, a boy at the time, had to climb up from below, to keep the jackals and vultures from the old chap. He’d had quite a task, but fortunately they got a rope down from the clifftop while the birds were still busy cleaning out the chest cavities of the horses.

  Nobody knows how the accident happened. Something made the horses bolt, but what? Lightning? It was a clea
r day. It remains a mystery.

  Oom Goggie told another story, also about a cart accident. It happened to Tant Soetkoekie Smit, by all accounts the fattest woman who had inhabited the frontier. Her husband usually brought her into town for Nagmaal on the bokwa. They took the back wheels off, so that she could climb on to the bed of the wagon, and then they’d jack it up again. But this time she insisted on going in the Cape cart. As her husband was bedridden at the time he could do nothing to stop her nonsense.

  Tant Soetkoekie was in her best black, going into town to give one hundred golden sovereigns to the bank manager to pay off the bond on the farm. Her man had counted them carefully into a small tin, five rows of twenty: by some fluke they filled the tin almost exactly to the brim. She tied the tin up in a cloth, to secure the lid, and clutched it firmly in both hands in her ample lap.

  All went well until they came to the second drift from the bottom, which the road entered at an angle. Arrie, the old Bushman driver, who was as small as Tant Soetkoekie was large, took the corner into the drift at too great a speed. With a nasty cracking sound, the wheel spokes on her side splintered like matchsticks, and the cart overturned. It emptied the good woman onto nice soft river sand. Arrie landed on top of her behind, which provided an even softer landing than the sand. The way she swore at him assured him that she was fit and well, if cross. He leapt up, and got the horses free. He was pleased to see they were not hurt in any way; so he tethered them under a kareehout, and then turned back to the miesies. She was crawling about on the sand in an inexplicable fashion.

  Arrie had not noticed an important detail of the mishap: the precious tin had not only lost its cloth and lid, but, with the force of the fall, had sprayed its golden sovereigns in a wide arc into the sand. Tant Soetkoekie was looking for them. She summoned him to help. Gradually the tin filled up. It seemed at last to be full. But she couldn’t be sure. Why didn’t she count them, you ask? Well, it must be admitted that she couldn’t count up to twenty, let alone one hundred. And as for Arrie, well, Bushmen can only count up to twenty by doing a major computing job with the aid of all their fingers and toes.