Are We There Yet? (16 page)

My lingering had thrown the itinerary into chaos and I had a daunting number of kilometres to cover before reaching my overnight accommodation at the Blyde River Canyon. Shortly after crossing a bridge over the swift and dark Olifants River, I caught my first sight of the muscular Drakensberg mountain range. So named by the early settlers for its resemblance to the ridges on a dragon's back, it stretches down most of the nation's eastern flank for 320 kilometres and marks the swooping border of the vast inland plateau that occupies the bulk of South Africa's land mass. Millennia of erosion have etched bands of phosphorous yellow and terracotta into the flat-topped peaks so that they resemble massive slices of multilayered cake.

Moments after passing through the JG Strydom tunnel, I pulled over by a roadside market for a few horrendously cliched sun-setting-over-the-peaks shots. Here I was accosted by a woman brandishing a patently fake $20 greenback who asked if I would exchange it for the local currency. When I refused, she reached into the car, grabbed my can of cola and promptly drained it before my disbelieving eyes.

Through dusky light setting the valleys which plunged away from the roadside into picturesque relief, I made my way to a hotel complex perched on the edge of the world's third-largest canyon. I had stayed in a dormitory here during a school excursion and was mildly delighted to see that the place had hardly changed. It consisted of two dozen or so cottages made from rough-hewn stone topped by pyramids of slate tile. The resort also boasted a free-form pool, trampoline, minigolf course and a host of other charmingly nostalgic embellishments – here it was forever 1975.

Upon checking in, I was told that the resort prided itself on its dinner buffet and so once again I found myself in a restaurant where the staff significantly outnumbered the guests. And once again, the candle on my table was promptly lit to illuminate my solitude. For R70 (around AU$16) I was presented with a team of half-a-dozen impeccably uniformed chefs invading my tastebuds with ten starters, a handful of salads, a selection of stews, several curries and a dessert tray that was duly wobbled over the table when I could no longer rise from the chair under my own steam.

I slept the sleep of the supremely satisfied and mildly bloated.

* *

I'd been told that, on a clear day, dawn over the canyon was a sight one would treasure henceforth. I awoke to a pea-souper which offered all the visibility of draping a white sheet over one's head. When it cleared, the sun had risen high enough to burn away the fog and I drove the kilometre from my room to the lookout point.

Following a sign along a rocky pathway overhung with foliage, I made my way towards the lookout, pausing only for a minor coronary as a troupe of baboons screeched then scattered as I approached. Please believe me when I tell you that a fully grown male shares the dimensions and attitude of a psychotic Rottweiler.

I couldn't believe that I had been to a place of such magnificence before but could hardly remember it. Twenty-six kilometres long and higher than Sydney's Centrepoint Tower with the Harbour Bridge jammed onto its pinnacle, the canyon messes with your eyes, brain and ears as you struggle to comprehend the sheer scale and vacuum-packed silence of the panorama. The focal point of the canyon is a trio of conical peaks known as the Three Rondawels, which resemble enormous newly sharpened pencils. These are wrapped in a thick swathe of navy in the form of the Treur River which created the whole shebang through millions of years of erosion and empties into a glistening dam. It is a view so spectacular that you have to remind yourself to breathe.

The only other vista which had prompted such an awestruck reaction in me was the Grand Canyon, and although Blyde River Canyon was admittedly more intimate in terms of dimension, I wasn't viewing it from behind a wire fence jammed elbow to elbow with oooohing Nikon-toters.

So vast, humbling and beautiful was the scene before me that I wished I had someone to exchange gobsmacked exclamations or reverential silences with. Viewed through a pair of binoculars thoughtfully chained to a post, the sheer quartzite cliff faces lost the velvet smoothness imparted by distance. Fissures the length and breadth of football fields had been hacked into the sedimentary rock formations like knife wounds, while a softer shale strata led into the wooded inclined slopes at their base. With the sun still rising, the arid north-facing rock walls morphed in colour from ground cinnamon to deep honey. Those that faced south, however, wore an evergreen coat whose tails trailed into dozens of valleys that crisscrossed the canyon.

Beneath a pair of martial eagles making what the musical theatre fraternity would term “lazy circles in the sky”, I returned to the car and set out for my next destination: a geological curiosity known as the Bourke's Luck Potholes. These potholes are in fact a series of cascades, whirlpools and rapids, the result of the strong-flowing Treur River slamming into solid rock formations at its confluence with the Blyde. Through millions of years the water-borne sand and rocks caught in these strata indentations have scoured smoothsided, perfectly cylindrical holes from the riverbed. It looks as if the area has been shaped with a butter knife, resulting in a Martian landscape of rich ochre and tumbling white water.

The experience was somewhat dampened by the final entry in the visitors' book. Peter and Petra – suspicious names to begin with, and hailing from the UK and Germany respectively – described their visit as “marginally interesting”. Honestly, some people deserve to be bitch-slapped into next Tuesday.

The road between the potholes and the town of Graskop could have starred in innumerable television commercials where a young couple in a convertible, flushed with the excitement of an imminent shagfest, tool down languidly curved stretches of tarmac.

Thick rafts of leopard trees emblazoned with sulphur-yellow flowers stood sentinel in dense patches, while the odd stream drew one's eye like the first broken capillary on a young alcoholic's face. A few kilometres later the road climbed to a spot known as the Devil's Office. Pine plantations sprung up around me as a cold fog banished the sunshine through which I had driven for most of the morning. At times the precipitous road bent sharply, leaving nothing but an edge and an infinite grey murk, the fog was foreboding enough without it momentarily clearing to reveal sheer drops and I could have done without the curtains of thick cloud that blew across the tarmac reducing visibility to such a degree that I wondered whether I had just set a record for contracting glaucoma.

Eventually the road plateaued, the seething maw receded and the swirling fog gave way to leaden, pregnant skies. Located conveniently close the Devil's Office was God's Window. One of the most famed lookouts in South Africa, it is framed by a deep cleavage of rocks that hang like tied-back curtains before a valley. On a clear day it must have spectacular. It wasn't and it wasn't.

The road to Graskop hugged the lip of the canyon then arced its way through the mustard plains after which Graskop is named and onto Pilgrim's Rest, a restored mining village that is not so much a town nowadays but a glorified tourist bus stop. It's essentially a single street flanked by corrugated-iron stores laden with scented candles, packets of fool's gold and the saving grace of locally produced fudge that's richer than Bill Gates with a winning lottery ticket.

The town was declared a national monument in 1972 but its contrived gentility and picturesque charm belies a history marinated in bloodshed, greed and depravation. Scottish miner Alex Patterson's 1873 discovery of alluvial gold in the creek which runs beside the town saw a wave of fortune-seekers descend on what was then a remote location bounded by mountains and choked with bush so thick that an hour's hacking saw explorers advance less than a metre.

So arduous was the terrain that one prospector reported taking forty-eight days to get from San Francisco to London to Cape Town then finally onto Durban – while his trip between Durban and Pilgrim's Rest lasted sixty-eight.

The travel seemed like a pleasure cruise once they arrived. Aside from the rampant theft of ore and frequent murder for claims, the alluvial gold was buried under three metres of topsoil and enormous boulders of quartzite. Scarcely a day went by when some fortune-seeker with poor reflexes wasn't rendered two-dimensional by one of these orbs rolling through the diggings.

I returned to my car after an amble around the town to find it glistening. Scam alert. As I was preparing to drive off, an impish face sporting a grin and a half appeared at the driver's window. “Hello baas,” beamed the teenager. “I washed your car.”

That was all he said, despite the clear implication that he was hopeful of more than a polite thank-you on my part. In most instances where I am requested to cough up for a service I didn't request I become such a miser that, to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, if you shoved a lump of coal up my arse, you'd have a diamond in a fortnight. Not this time. His strategy of performing the task without any guarantee of remuneration was as risky as it was admirable – all he could do was the best job possible and hope that his prospective client agreed. I did and handed him a crisp note, then added another.

I spent the night in Nelspruit, a prosperous yet characterless city where I was made to pay for brochures at a government tourist office staffed by personnel apparently recruited from Surly Indolents R Us. After checking into my hotel, I was shown to a distant granny flat that might have been designed for a particularly trying mother-in-law with a bad hip and a vicious tongue. The airconditioner was on the fritz, the cable was down and the evening carvery was replete with items bearing the same cadaverous shade and texture as the shoes worn by the risk-management analysts that had converged on the hotel for a conference.

The clinical accommodation and the tepid town only heightened my anticipation for exploring a province where Gandhi and Churchill shared battlefields, whose major city regards itself as “the last outpost of the British Empire” and from whose bosom arose a bastard of a warrior so fierce that entire tribes fled their ancestral homes at the mere mention of his name.

Chapter 8

A Tribe Called Quest

“There is lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills.” So begins Alan Paton's novel,
Cry the Beloved Country,
which every South African schoolchild read at some point (and deluded ourselves that we were racially progressive as a result). Driving through KwaZulu-Natal, the province in which it was set, two things swiftly became clear: that Paton's statement could be applied to almost every stretch of tarmac in the place; and why it is known by the local Zulu tribe as the Kingdom of the People of Heaven. The dramatic cliff faces that marked the border of the highveld yielded to endless undulations of jade green embroidered with rippling streams. Small herds of black cattle grazed in the grassy valleys where smudges of mist lingered. Traces of fragrant woodsmoke from the whitewashed rondavels that dot the hillsides scented the air.

Yet these serene surroundings have seen more bloodshed per square kilometre than any other region in the country. In the first postapartheid election campaign, hundreds were hacked to death in conflicts between Zulus and Xhosas aligned to opposing political parties. Here, too, the bastard son of an inconsequential chieftain created the fiercest fighting force in African tribal history.

Revolutionising everything from weaponry to training and tactics, Shaka exacted a gruesome toll on rival clans, Voortrekkers and British forces (the latter of whom eventually turned on each other). Consequently, a network of battle sites runs through KwaZulu-Natal like cracks in a shat tered windowpane.

The town of Dundee was touted as the ideal base from which to explore the battlefields, but even despite being surrounded by hills that once echoed with the sounds of musket fire and blade meeting flesh, it was worth a tarry. Set in the gumdrop hills of the Biggarsberg range, it was once termed Coalopolis because of the enormous collieries on its outskirts. However, it hardly feels like an industrial town but rather a diamond-shaped grid of oak-shaded streets lined with handsome homes, candy-apple-green churches and inviting parks in which vine-clad pergolas threw soft shadows onto still ponds. It was all relentlessly genteel.

Until this point in my journey small-town streets were named after either Voortrekker leaders or just called plain “Voortrekker”, but these bore labels such as Union, Gladstone and Browning. This was an English-and-proud town, a fact crystallised when the pair of ladies manning the information centre didn't have to make the obviously draining mental switch from Afrikaans when dealing with my request for accommodation, as they had done everywhere else.

The next morning, as the sun gilded farmland that rose and fell like a sleeping child's chest, I made my way to a scene of slaughter more prolific and barbaric than any British army had ever suffered before.

Isandlawa is a dust-choked plain that extends for twenty kilometres and at the centre of which stands a monolithic fist of rock. To the British soldiers camped in its shadow, it looked like the sphinx that sat on their collars as a reminder of their victory in the Egyptian campaign in the Napoleonic wars.

They were here thanks to a blatant land-grab on the part of the forces of Empire; the Zulus, however, were having none of it. On 17 January 1879 Zulu chief Ceteshwayo addressed a vast contingent of warriors at the enormous military kraal at Nodwengu instructing them to repel the whites “who have invaded Zululand and driven away our cattle”.

By the day of the battle, the Zulus had reached a valley some six kilometres south of the pinnacle of rock where I now sat, but they decided against any attack as tribal lore dictated that the night's full moon was not an auspicious sign. A small party of scouts did, however, venture out of the valley and were spotted by a handful of British cavalry who gave chase. One can only imagine the stupefied terror these mounted Brits felt on reaching the lip of the bowl in which 20,000 warriors were crouched in utter silence. It was on for young and old as the Brits turned tail and the Zulus gave baying-for-blood pursuit.

Despite having had twenty-four years' military experi-ence, the British commander made the fatal assumption that the regiment's stay at this location wouldn't be long enough to warrant digging trenches or forming a defensive laager of wagons. Charging in their ox-horns formation, the Zulus overran the British soldiers. As the ground shook to the sound of 40,000 stone-hard feet slamming into the dirt, the battleground was thrown into eerie darkness by an eclipse. Hostilities ceased for a few minutes in which all the combatants could make out were the gurgling screams of the dying.

Aside from protecting their homeland, the Zulu warriors found additional motivation in sex and drugs. Traditional lore stated that no man could take a wife until he had “dipped his spear in blood”, and some scholars suggest that although the training regimen of Zulu warriors undoubtedly provided them with the stamina to run a half-marathon then mix it up on the battlefield, they were also assisted by powerful herbal
mutis
concocted to boost their aggression levels while inhibiting fatigue receptors.

Recalling the battle, Kumbeka Gwabe, a member of the uMcijo regiment, said, “I myself killed only one man. Dum! Dum! went his revolver as he was firing from left to right and I came beside him and stuck my assegai under his right arm, pushing it through his body until it came out between the ribs on his left side. As soon as he fell I pulled the assegai out and slit his stomach so I knew he would not shoot any more of my people.”

By the time the battle was over two hours later, this process had been carried out 1357 times. “You could not move a foot either way,” wrote a British officer who arrived at the battlefield later, “without treading on a body.” Every British soldier would have been disembowelled in accordance with the Zulu tradition of releasing the enemy's spirit once he is slain, while the Zulus were felled with bullets designed to flatten on impact, cause massive tissue damage and splinter bone lengthways. Piles of white stones now stand sentinel over the mass graves that dot the battlefield.

One thousand Zulus died at Isandlawa. Their monument lies at the gate to the battlefield and consists of a four-metre-wide replica of the Isigqu necklace warriors would receive from the king in recognition of their feats in combat. Fashioned from copper and set against a granite slab, it is shaped like the traditional oxen horns battle formation with one pincer advancing quicker than the other. No plaques or epitaphs are required.

Even in bright sunshine, a sombre and poignant air hangs heavily over the valley. You can somehow feel that thousands were butchered here, and the soil seems soaked in the memory of lives cut short.

The defeat at Isandlawa sent shockwaves of humiliation through the British military, which desperately sought to salvage some pride from events unfolding in Zululand. Its spin doctors received a godsend in the form of a battle that took place a few hours later, some ten miles east at a mission station called Rorke's Drift. Consisting of a chapel, homestead and cattle enclosure, it was here that a handful of British troops saw off a 4000-strong Zulu cont ingent over a twelve-hour attack. It was a display of gallantry that military historians still get misty-eyed about over 130 years later.

A record eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded but the uncommon valour displayed at Rorke's Drift was sullied by a general feeling among the higher-ranking British officers that these were not genuinely deserved but were being doled out to deflect attention away from the disaster at Isandlawa. Some of the upper brass charged with pinning these medals on the recipients couldn't even be bothered getting off their horses to do so.

The final stop of the day was Blood River. For anyone attending a South African government school in the 1970s and 80s, few historical events were more mythologised and glorified than the battle that took place here. With a name that rings of boy's own adventure, it was presented to us as a tale of revenge that was not only justified but rubber-stamped by God Himself.

Nine months before the battle a Voortrekker leader named Piet Retief had conducted what he thought was a successful land transaction with the Zulu chief Dingane. In exchange for sixty-three head of cattle plus eleven rifles, the Zulus would hand over the territory between the Thukela and Mzimvubu rivers.

When Retief returned to the kraal after the initial negotiations, he had brought the beef but not the bullets. Dingane then invited the party inside for a drink and – hello! – requested that they leave their guns outside. Their Voortrekker corpses were discovered shortly thereafter along with a land deed signed by Dingane. This document formed a crucial part of the story drummed into us at school but many historians never believed the deed existed and it apparently mysteriously vanished during the Anglo-Boer war.

A tall pistol-toting farmer by the name of Andries Pretorius, who accessorised his well-cut suits with a cutlass, was chosen to lead a punitive mission to avenge Retief's death. Shortly after setting out on 9 December 1838, Pretorius reportedly climbed onto a gun carriage before 468 heavily armed commandos whom he asked to join him in a vow before God. The basic gist went like this: if the Big Guy made sure they won, the day of victory would be commemorated in his honour. Recent research has questioned whether this vow actually took place, and the promised commemoration certainly wasn't observed in the years immediately following the battle. But not wanting to let the truth stand in the way of prime propaganda, the apartheid regime's education department consistently painted this vow as a powerful backdrop to the events that unfolded at the end of the rutted dirt road I followed past the endearingly named Fort Mistake.

With the rain settling into a persistent pelt and no way that I was going to leave without exploring the battlefield, I thrust my hands into my pockets, launched into the sulky walk that most of us have but rarely admit to, and slouched down a slippery mud trail towards the Afrikaner equivalent of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Arranged in the D-shape that Pretorius pulled his wagons into when scouts spotted a Zulu column nearby are fifty-seven life-size replicas cast in steel and bronze.

Had the Zulu chief Dingane not offed his half-brother Shaka ten years before, the battle that changed the course of South African history would probably not have happened. A few unsuccessful skirmishes had taught Shaka that the chances of storming a laager of wagons were not only slim but inevitably came at the cost of massive casualties. Only on the grounds that is was Shaka's theory, Dingane chose to treat it with contempt, and in the early morning fog of 16 December Zulu warriors attacked the wagons in their standard horn formation. Three waves of attackers were in the words of one observer “literally mown down” by muskets and grapeseed.

The combination of solitude, inclemency and charcoal darkness punctuated only by the pair of lanterns that hung from poles at the front of each wagon charged the battlefield with a maudlin eeriness. Soaked through and standing by a dripping cannon that had faced the bulk of the Zulu onslaught, I recalled the words of Boer chaplain Sarel Cilliers who after the battle noted that “the word of the Lord was fulfilled”, before adding “the Kaffirs lay on the ground like pumpkins on a rich soil that has borne a large crop”.

Those who fled were ruthlessly hunted down. Over 400 Zulus found hiding in a nearby ravine were systematically executed and those who attempted to escape across the river were picked off by the Boer sharpshooters. Many of the 3000 warriors who died that day did so on the river's banks or midstream. “And that,” as my history teacher Mr Hockey would say in a tone most often associated with the phrase ‘and they all lived happily ever after', “was how the battle got the name Blood River.”

On the opposite side of the river is another monument built by the South African government in 1999 to honour the Zulu nation and those who paid the ultimate price in battle.

Having squelched back to the car and smelling like a roll of corduroy that had been soaked then abandoned in a musty attic, I drove to the museum to get a different perspective on an event whose details I had learned by rote at school. Here is the sum total of what I discovered. The river was known by the Zulu as the eNcome – “praiseworthy” – due to its constant flow and evergreen banks. And I only know this because it was etched into a board by the locked entrance booth above which was a closed sign.

In the course of a single day I had stood where thousands of men had lost their lives in the name of God, greed and pride. Desolate places where bloodshed means tourism and tourism, hopefully, means understanding.