Are We There Yet? (12 page)

“Have you heard?” asked the woman behind the counter as she handed over my remote control deposit. It's a fairly open-ended question, especially when put to a person prone to bouts of morning sarcasm. Stifling the urge to respond with “on numerous occasions”, I was intrigued by the combined tone of glee and gravity that accompanied the question. “About what?” I replied.

“Shane,” she clucked earnestly.

Sensing my confusion, she added a helpful, “The sheik of tweak”. It seemed the boy who had been missing for twelve years and had lobbed into a police station sprouting allegations of slavery had been bumped to page two in the wake of a certain Australian spinner testing positive to a banned diuretic on the eve of his team's first World Cup match. Unable to conceal their glee at the prospect of Australia's strike weapon being sent home in disgrace, the staff took a smirk break as I threw my gear into the car and my car into gear.

Continuing northwards, I cruised by endless paddocks used for the cultivation of maize, wheat and the crop that sounds more like a dental complaint than anything else: sorghum. At this time of year, however, they lay fallow. The area was known as Springbok Flats, named after the rivers of gazelle which crisscrossed this plain before the settlers began blasting the bejesus out of them for land clearance, but were still so numerous that they continued to attract the odd lion with a venison hankering up until the 1930s.

Beyond the bucolic blandness to my left lay the Marakele National Park, home to cycads older than Zsa-Zsa Gabor and 800 breeding pairs of Cape vultures, a species which has been observed to glide the currents for over twenty minutes at a time with a single wing flap.

My destination was the town of Nylstroom. I wasn't hoping for much and this dreary hamlet delivered in spades – as you might expect from a town whose welcome sign is sponsored by the local liquor outlet. The town's main drag was a wide affair bounded by single-storey discount furniture outlets, feed stores and the kind of clothing shops favoured by menopausal women who attend a lot of funerals.

The town offered precisely two highlights. The first was its name. According to a group of devoutly religious Voortrekkers, this region was the Promised Land of the Southern Hemisphere. Known as the Jerusalem Travellers, they fled the Cape in the 1860s in search of a Holy Land unblighted by Brits. When they eventually reached this region, they put two and two together and got three.

Encountering a stream flowing north through fertile land at the eastern tip of the Waterberg plateau, the parched settlers thought it appropriate to give this source of fresh water a name. Searching about for inspiration, their eyes were drawn to a nearby hill referred to by the local tribe as Modimolle (Place of the Spirits). Dominating the landscape and vaguely conical, the trekkers concluded that what they were in fact staring at was a pyramid. Which naturally meant that they couldn't be anywhere but Egypt. Therefore the stream already had a name – the Nile. Hence they christened the new settlement Nylstroom and have pretty much been embarrassed ever since.

The second of Nylstroom's delights was that it was the location of my first Afrikaans conversation in fifteen years.

While refuelling the car, I was accosted by a man weighed down by an overstuffed plastic laundry bag slung over his shoulder who asked if I would be interested in buying a leather jacket. At which point I surprised myself by wrenching a coherent declination from a lexicon that had not been utilised since George Michael was a heterosexual sex symbol.

He then proceeded to yank from the bag the kind of double-breasted number most frequently sported by the underlings of
Miami Vice
drug lords. An impassioned sales pitch followed in which he countered my every point with a slick retort. I'm one of those types for whom haggling carries all the fun of a barium meal, but although I had zero intention of purchasing, the fact that I was conducting the negotiation in Afrikaans led to it lasting longer than it should have.

Having ascertained his chances of making a sale were slimmer than that of a Beatles reunion, the mobile boutique was eventually hoisted onto the salesman's back and he trudged off in the direction of the main street.

A dozen of years of mandatory Afrikaans study has guaranteed most white South Africans a degree of bilingualism. However, besides making Dutch street signs somewhat easier to decipher – a handy skill in the wee hours having extensively sampled Amsterdam's finest diversions – the language is of no use outside the nation's borders. However, despite being synonymous with a regime of soul-sapping discrimination and possessing such an abundance of gutturals that fluency makes one appear to be trying to dislodge a moth from the windpipe, Afrikaans is a language with its fair share of soul and beauty. It has spawned poetry of rare insight and depth, authors such as Herman Charles Bosman who mastered the twist-in-the-tale short story half a century before Roald Dahl published
Tales of the Unexpected,
and a vocabulary with an idiosyncratic charm all of its own. An accident, for example, literally translates as an “unlucky”. A cemetery is a “burial farm”.

The road north to Potgietersrus gently arcs its way through vine-wreathed paddocks and fragrant melon farms along a valley floor with the watercolour grey Waterberg Mountains on the left and the charcoal Strydpoort range on the right.

Where Nylstroom was slipping into a coma from which it didn't look likely to recover, Potgietersrus had an air of quiet languidness about its wide streets overhung with tropical bowers. Apart from a nearby cave network from which has emerged everything from the bones of extinct sabre-toothed predators to a hearth system indicating that between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago the controlled use of fire was a sophisticated endeavour, the town's primary tourist attraction was the Arend Dieperink Museum.

Upon my arrival I was greeted by a rotund Afrikaans woman in a floral smock and Crystal Carrington do who was just about to lock up for her lunch break. Having convinced her that doing so would deprive an international visitor of a unique cultural experience, she wanly introduced herself to me as Hendrina, rolling her r's extravagantly as she did so.

“I'll be back in an hour. If you need to know something before then, ask one of the ladies,” said Hendrrrrrrina with a wave in the direction of two elderly black women. “I don't know if they'll be able to answer your questions, but they've been here for fifteen years, so they must have picked up something.”

The driveway was littered with the decaying carcasses of tractors, hoes and ox wagons. One building was given over to the formidable archaeological heritage of the area. Another focused on the domestic environment endured by the early settlers. Between 1903 and 1910 the typical house in the area was either made from stone, clay and sods or baked bricks. The walls were washed with lime, the roofs were pitched and the floors were smeared with dung, which must have proved pretty useful when someone baked an air biscuit over dinner and there was no dog to blame.

It was the start of a faecal theme that culminated in the following room where there was an exhibit of the bush remedies developed by the settlers. Apparently bee stings were best treated with “warm faeces”. Note the temperature specification. I could only imagine some poor farmer enjoying his morning constitutional in the outhouse only to be disturbed by his wife beating on the door and yelling, “Push, Harry, push – the kids are swelling up like balloons”.

When I finally caught up with Hendrrrrrrina, she got me tanked and came over a touch Mrs Robinson.

In a stroke of genius that museums around the world would do well to emulate, the Arend Dieperink had installed a distillery out the back in which the South African equivalent of moonshine was manufactured. Utilising the most gloriously tenuous of pretexts, Hendrina justified the sideline by pointing out that the still used was an original nineteenth-century artefact. With that she ushered me into her office, shut the door and proceeded to clear a space on her desk which was piled with yellowing photographs from the 1950s and dusty manilla folders. She then fished a pair of shot glasses from her top drawer and plonked them down one-handed.

“First,” she said, “we'll try the
witblits.”

Literally translated as white lightning, this is not so much a top-shelf spirit as an under-the-counter one. Seems the Voortrekkers were less than impressed with wine's measly 13 or 14 per cent alcohol content and decided to turn things up a notch by producing a drink from grapes that was to be slugged not sipped and could kick you into next Tuesday.

Boasting a 75 per cent proof rating, the shot of
witblits
I threw back under Hendrina's watchful eye singed my sinuses, transformed my gullet into a fire trail and had my brain bobbing around my skull like an olive in a martini.

“That was what you might call an entree,” purred Hendrina as she edged her chair closer to mine. “Now for the main course.”

This turned out to be three shots of a drink known as
mampoer
. Made from seasonal fruit and proudly proclaiming an alcohol rating of 60 per cent proof, Hendrina joined me in accounting for a tot of orange
mampoer
followed by one of peach. Sweet without straying into the sickly stickiness of ouzo or sambuca, the
mampoer
was magnificent in a vowels-overpowering-my-consonants way. How ever, the piss de resistance was marula
mampoer
. Made from a native berry that tastes like the result of an untethered geneticist's attempt to create a guanana, it had the spin rooming and brought out in Hendrina a coquettishness I was unprepared for.

With each slam of drained shot glass on mahogany, she had inched further towards me so that our knees were now separated by no more than a layer of denim and the thinnest of surgical hose. I'll let you guess who belonged to what.

“Do you want to taste the fruit?” she asked with a hint of slur and a disturbing tone which suggested a foray into metaphor.

“Okay,” I responded, my intended air of politeness hijacked by a tentativeness which manifested itself in an upward octave change between syllables.

Hendrina reached into a plastic bag behind her and retrieved a cumquat-sized berry with a lime-green tinge. Not content with simply handing it to me, she manoeuvred her hand towards my mouth in a motion so agonisingly slow that the full horror of its implications was not merely played out but ticked over one frame at a time.

“You have to bite gently to get the juice,” she continued with an expression that screamed, “Boy, I'm gonna curate you senseless.” Clumsily intercepting her fingers with mine, I fed myself the fruit and overcompensated for the awkwardness of the moment by asking what other alcoholic treats Hendrina had in store.

Cue the liqueurs. One was the kind of creamy coffee number most often favoured by teenage boys for getting prom dates out of their shot taffeta and onto a back seat. The other was a sweet diversion delicately flavoured with a tart local tea called
rooibos
.

Combined with the
mampoer
and
witblits
shots, these tipped Hendrina from mischievous to maudlin.

“You know,” she said, her eyes suddenly far away, “we whites did many things wrong in the past, but why does that have to mean our culture should be allowed to die? I have had a black boss for six months and, aside from the archaeology, he can't see the value in this museum. Since apartheid ended, my budget has been ripped apart, I have had to let most of my staff go, and important historical items are rusting in the front garden because there is simply no covered space left.”

It was at this point that Hendrina's train of thought was derailed by the alcohol bandits. Betraying the suspect attitudes of anyone who feels compelled to start their sentences with “I'm not a racialist, but”, Hendrina continued, “Blacks just don't value white cult ure, which developed hand in hand with the Bible. They don't believe in a God that will punish them.

“It's not only me,” she said. “Hundreds of small museums around the country will disappear over the next few years. It's a part of our history the new government feels is no longer relevant and should be done away with. But how can I convince a victim of apartheid that it's as much a part of South Africa as his culture?

“Even the names of places are changing because the government feels they have associations with the Great Trek, which lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of blacks.”

Summoning a trio of her staff, Hendrina then named a number of towns to which they replied with the new government-approved appellations and shared small smiles as she attempted the pronunciations. Pretoria became Tswane. Warmbaths became Bela Bela. Nylstroom became Modimolle.

Hendrina's logic couldn't be faulted on this count. It was an utter crock. The exercise had cost millions of rands, which could have been far better spent trying to reduce the disparity between rich and poor that a decade after the fall of apartheid is only trumped by Botswana and Brazil.

After a slurred excuse pertaining to a fictitious interview and two strong coffees on the main road, I bade Potgietersrus and its coy curator farewell. I had lingered longer than I had intended and by the time I reached my overnight destination of Pietersburg (Polokwane), all that remained of the sunlight was a razor cut on the horizon bleeding orange.

Nursing a 6pm hangover, I checked into a motel located so close to the highway that I could overhear truck-drivers' CB radio conversations as they whizzed past. I made short work of a pizza so greasy that the bottom of the box had become transparent by the time the delivery arrived, and then did what I could to steel myself for the next day's first destination: a concentration camp.

At the end of the nineteenth century Britain's once invulnerable economic might was being eviscerated by the parvenu across the Atlantic and Germany. The extent of her empire meant that Britain had become the centre of world finance and banking, but the status quo could only be maintained if more – lots more – gold could be found to bolster the thinning ingot quota that was held in the Bank of England's vaults and which underpinned the value of the pound. British eyes turned northwards towards the independent Transvaal republic and acquired the unmistakable lust for acquisition.