in the History department at Rhodes University. I’d met Craig in the course of researching a story on the history of indigenous horse racing in the Eastern Cape a couple of months previously, and on our long drives through the former Transkei we’d discussed the possibility of a walk.
The group had swelled because Craig felt Jako would be up for such an adventure and for weeks we’d haggled about a route. Craig wanted to walk the old wagon road from the hinterland to the coast, an idea I liked, but I was also keen on somehow walking past Theopolis, the now ruined site of a former frontier mission station. The problem with the two ideas, hopelessly romantic as they were, was that both the wagon route and Theopolis were on private land. Eastern Cape farmers are by and large a beleaguered lot, caught between the pincers of government land reform on the one hand and the vagaries of the market on the other. They weren’t going to respond well to slacker writers and leftie academics tramping over their land in search of gravestones and artefacts. Land restitution is a hot political potato in the Eastern Cape and the commonage around Salem had just been returned to the indigenous local community – a landmark case in the high court, with much learned comment on both sides. We weren’t going to tempt fate and so, armed with nothing more sinister than our curiosity and a half-jack of splendidly vile Night’s Watch whisky, we stuttered down to Salem in Craig’s put-upon Golf. The idea was to walk to Bathurst if we could, and if that proved too arduous (it was a walk of nearly 50 kilometres) we would bail at Southwell – approximately halfway. Rain was forecast for midnight on the Saturday and although Jako knew of a local farmer who would allow us to pitch our tent in the grounds of the Southwell Club, secretly we were all hoping that we might somehow find a bed.
Maybe Jako knew something about the local farmers that we didn’t, because he chose to walk in infantry browns, including the hat. His only concession to civilian attire was a white Reebok T-shirt and a pair of takkies, but he immediately spoiled this slight softening of his image as an egte right-winger by bringing a loaf of sliced government white. This he shoved into one of the pockets of his infantryman’s jacket and every so often he would nibble furtively from his rations. ‘If only my liberal Joburg friends could see me now,’ I joked, looking at Jako with mock distaste. We all laughed before trundling up the hill, noting the weight of our packs and adjusting our bodies to accommodate them, feeling the comfort of our feet in our boots and shoes, the simple joy of movement and being gloriously alive.
We made an interesting sight. Our packs were different, our clothing mismatched. I was in shorts, Craig was in jeans, Jako was in browns; I had a cap, Craig had nothing and Jako had his infantryman’s cap with clips on the side so you could fold up the brim. Best of all, we were lugging a five-litre bottle of water. We couldn’t attach this to any of the packs, so we took turns to carry it along. We looked ill-prepared, with grids fastened to pack straps at the last minute and the happy-go-lucky feel of okies on the march. Still, the weather was good and the day bright. The predicted rain seemed a long, long way away, as we trudged beside the single-lane tar road to Port Alfred for nine kilometres, passing the occasional grove of eucalyptus and stepping aside to let the four-by-fours and overloaded bakkies roar past.
We were chirpy in the beginning, walking well and making good time, our five-litre keg of water swinging jauntily from its plastic handle or being passed from hand to hand. After a couple of kilometres we noticed a troop of vervet monkeys, one of them sitting nonchalantly in the middle of the road. The troop were foraging in an old mielie field, the stalks dry and the once green leaves of the corn rustling thinly in the wind. The field was on our right as we walked but the monkeys had swarmed in from our left. If you looked carefully you could see the remnants of their pillage, the hard, golden-red kernels of corn, a discarded cob here and there. In the scrub separating the road and the fields there were corn leaves caught on the thorns, the vervets’ calling cards being nibbled by the wind.
Land restitution claims in this part of the world seemed to have resulted in an awkward truce. Those who lost land were twitchy and embittered (the Salem commonage included the church and cricket pitch, which were now theoretically in the claimants’ hands), while those who had benefited believed a historical injustice had been put to right. The case was interesting because the community had been offered the choice of either financial compensation or the land itself and had plumped for the latter, with a representative being quoted in the Grahamstown press saying they were keen on farming. Evidence on the ground, as it were, was meagre. There were a couple of large, green water tanks on the hills and a sense of low-scale irrigation. White farmers we spoke to later were dubious of such initiatives. They felt an element of the ‘show trial’ result in the high court’s decision but, more importantly, they told us that insufficient distinction was made between subsistence and large-scale commercial farming. The recently returned land was unlikely to produce crops with big enough yields to make sense in commercial terms. While this seemed fair enough, I wondered about the symbolic value of the return. How, emotionally, must the claimants have felt after having been deprived for so long? I imagined that, whatever they did with the land, there would have been a sense of closure, a sense of satisfaction at justice finally having been done.
Then again, this might be so much facile liberalism, maybe something of what John Berger has called ‘infantile proletarianism’. The farmers here were henpecked by legislation and frightened of the future. They graded the roads themselves and faced the ever-present prospect of cattle rustling. They were linked not only by association – the same family names invariably crop up: Amm, Shaw, Bradfield, Stirk, Ford, Keeton – and the fact that they were wizards of technology, but also by history and rootedness. They knew the story of the land and who came from where. They knew of the forts and redoubts, the drifts and the secret river meanders. They also found themselves charmed by my companions. ‘The settlers came from industrial cities, they knew nothing about farming,’ Jako told us. ‘The few Afrikaans farmers on the land found themselves in a quandary because they knew potatoes weren’t planted on top of the soil. Should they be neighbourly and point out the error of the Engelsman’s ways, or should they bide their time and, then, when the farms went bust, buy them up at rock-bottom prices?’
After about two hours’ walking, we reached the gravel-road turn-off. We stopped, drank water, and munched on chocolate and meat sticks. The day was wonderful – warm without being hot, with the tug of a gentle breeze. We eased off our packs and I took off my sweater, suddenly feeling the chill of the pooled sweat in the small of my back. We joked and cavorted, all soberly aware of the road ahead, trying to delay our restart for as long as we could.
Gathering up, it wasn’t long before we reached the turn-off for the Assegai River. The views were bigger and better, the countryside mixed scrub and farmland. We passed family homesteads, the men sitting outside on upturned beer crates, shooting the breeze, the children following us briefly, much amused comment and shaking of heads about the self-evident foolhardiness of walking to Southwell. The deeper we seeped into the countryside, the more removed from Grahamstown and Salem we felt, and so we plunged into the quiet, only our footfalls and the scuffing of our boots on the gravel road to keep us company. At one point we were passed by a mountain-biker, humourlessly intent on getting to his destination. The episode – almost silent, quickly over – had a surreal, Alice in Wonderland-ish feel to it and we laughed as he bounced away, his legs frantically pedalling in that comical, slightly exaggerated way of mountain-bikers. After a long downhill, our legs beginning now to get really tired, we reached the causeway of the Kariega River for lunch, probably the lowest point of our march. Craig and Jako took off their takkies and boots to bathe their feet. We drank Game and wolfed cheese-and-salami sandwiches, and basked in the quiet, gazing tiredly at the creep of winter water as it lazed towards the sea, congratulating ourselves on time well made.
The route immediately after lunch was punishing – a long series of misleadingly torturous climbs off the valley floor. This was dairy-farming country and there were parcels of lush pastureland all around, bright green in the softening afternoon sun. The wind came up and our pace slowed as we slogged back to higher ground. The southern horizon was building up with cloud and my thoughts began to turn to where we might spend the night. We’d manage in a tent, even in rain, although it would
