floor, using dusty cushions as makeshift mattresses, surrounded by faded posters and team photos, and long-outdated calendars from the Port Alfred butchery.
We must have walked around 15 kilometres at this point, perhaps a little more. We were stopping more frequently but such were our relations with each other – I knew Craig reasonably well, Jako not at all – that the dictates of machismo forbade any admission of fatigue. So we soldiered on, plodding gently upwards, only to find that we had reached a false rise, which meant that we had to do it all over again. Talk here centred on the South African historians they admired. There was slight grouchiness about Charles van Onselen, although this was trumped by grudging admiration, and we fell into discussion about Noel Mostert’s Frontiers, the epic story of ragged conflict between the settlers and the Xhosa people. ‘That’s a meneer of a book,’ said Jako in his droll Eastern Cape way, and we laughed, the mirth taking our minds off our sore feet and the increasingly heavy weight on our backs.
There were nine so-called ‘kaffir’ or ‘frontier’ wars fought over land like this between roughly 1780 and 1880, which amounted pretty much to a hundred years of constant war, with periods of watchful truce between. Jako and Craig’s sympathies would vacillate between the oppressors and the oppressed, sometimes finding that there weren’t clear distinctions between the two. They knew, for example, that the settlers had been forsaken. They often came from big industrial cities (there was a strong Luddite component in the settler community, Craig said) and had little knowledge or experience of farming. Their skills were few, their hearts frightened, their nights dreadful. Contrast this with the Xhosa, who felt invaded and therefore belittled, fearful that this was a beginning of something that wouldn’t end. Was there enough land for them all? Would the heathens soon be on their way? Skirmishes and cattle rustling were year-round sports and the mutual incomprehension was stark. The Xhosa didn’t understand how men could wear blouses and watch the night sky for portents, while the settlers couldn’t comprehend how you could move cattle across land in search of sweeter grazing, not fencing them in pens or corrals. They looked at each other from across the bluffs of rivers like the Kariega and were united in misunderstanding and fear-crazed loathing.
Craig and Jako’s ambivalence was deepened, I would hazard, by the fact that the settlers left behind material remains. The imaginative engagement with the past is in some sense tactile, predicated on being able to walk in a church graveyard or run the palm of your hand across a collapsed gravestone. Culturally, they were closer to the settlers – we all were – but they also felt aggrieved on the Xhosa’s behalf. Reflexively, they didn’t like the idea of dispossession but neither did they like the idea of distant Cape Town elites using the settler farmers as a bulwark against the tribes. It seemed too shamelessly cynical. ‘These guys were just fed to the wolves,’ Jako said at one point, and I agreed.
But it was also more complicated than straightforward ambivalence. Jako was writing his MA thesis on the forced removal of communities in Kouga, Colchester and Klipfontein to a patch of barren land called Glenmore on the edge of the old Ciskei. In 1979 the apartheid government dubbed these indigent and unemployed people ‘redundant’, and they were rounded up, herded into trucks and dumped as far away from anyone else as possible, an eyesore as far as white South Africa was concerned. The government attempted to sanitise the move by spinning a yarn that the removed communities would find decent schools and clinics, parks and community halls. Glenmore was to become, in effect, ‘a model township’. It became nothing of the sort.
Many years later, the new post-apartheid government eventually offered ‘the redundant’ compensation amounting to about R130 000 per removed family, just as long as claims were submitted within the stipulated time. With the help of human-rights lawyers, the former Klipfontein residents managed to lodge their claim on time, whereas those originally from Kouga and Colchester failed to meet the deadline. Although the deadline was extended, those from Kouga and Colchester once again failed to meet the cut-off date, while those from Klipfontein were by now receiving their compensation. What you had, therefore, was the creation of a group of ‘haves’ within the Glenmore community, while those originally from Kouga and Colchester remained ‘have-nots’, unable to muster enough resources or energy to complete the paperwork.
According to Craig and Jako, all this disappointment and anger were concentrated in one person, an old man from Glenmore who was dubbed a ‘serial window breaker’ by Grocott’s Mail, Grahamstown’s weekly newspaper. His name was Ben Mafani and every two years or so he would catch a taxi from Glenmore to Grahamstown, a trip of about 50 kilometres one way, and walk to the back of the high court. Once there, he would find a rock and in full sight of passers-by, lob it through one of the court windows. His first experience of one-man protest resulted in arrest and temporary imprisonment, although the case was eventually dropped. Several years later and after letters aplenty to the government and public protector had been ignored, he refined the democratic process by painting the rock he lobbed through the high-court window: white to symbolise freedom, black ‘because my people are sitting in a bad place’ and red because ‘my people are crying blood’. For this act of political audacity, Mafani was re-arrested and released on R300 bail, according to the South African Press Association’s parliamentary correspondent, Ben Maclennan, who has heroically followed the Glenmore case since the very beginning. Mafani’s trial resulted in the government belatedly taking the case of those dumped at Glenmore seriously and finally brought the issue of compensation into the foreground, although I have been unable to ascertain whether Mafani’s was a generalised protest or one specifically on behalf of those who couldn’t complete the requisite paperwork.
Later research confirmed that Glenmore was more than simply a twilight zone for the unwanted. Soon after the removals started, they stopped, because it was belatedly realised that without employment opportunities the model township would never take off. For those already relocated, the situation unfolded like a cruel farce. They couldn’t return to Colchester or Kouga because they had no homes to which to return. They were hardly likely to experience much of a future in Glenmore either because the social experiment they were once part of had officially been terminated. And so they hung in a kind of absurd suspended animation: unable to go back and incapable of going forward. Much like the original settlers, they were the damned and the forsaken – weightless people in placeless places, eternally trapped in a country-and-western ballad by Kenny Rogers or Merle Haggard.
According to a monograph published by Maclennan for the South African Institute of Race Relations in 1987, the folk trapped in Glenmore found themselves for the most part in poorly made or incomplete houses. The slats that passed for walls were seldom nailed cleanly to their frames and neither were the walls plastered. Often the walls didn’t reach the asbestos roof, meaning heat was lost in winter and the houses were draughty all year round. Water piped from the Fish River was impure and gastroenteritis was rife, as were malnutrition, septicaemia and keratomalacia (the clouding of the cornea due to vitamin deficiency). There were very few shops in the area but the few that were there mercilessly jacked up their prices. A bag of mielie-meal, which sold normally for R8.40 at Boesmansrivier, cost R14.60 when bought from the store at Tyefu. Bread usually cost 17 cents a loaf but prices were raised to 20 cents by shopkeepers with stores closer to Glenmore.
The community also discovered that, with the move from the coast, their buying power contracted. Employment opportunities had been by no means abundant where they came from but people understood their environment and knew their neighbours. There were circuits of patronage and networks of support. Scarce though it was, money could be made, which wasn’t the case in Glenmore. People stared at their hands and watched their children wither away, believing themselves to be cursed. ‘In this place we are all hungry,’ Maclennan quotes a herbalist as saying. ‘Soon we will have to eat our children like pigs.’ As they became hungrier and sicker, they realised that there was ample free supply of one thing they hadn’t considered – coffins. A consignment had been trucked up from Grahamstown and housed in the superintendent’s office. ‘So when a person or child died you just went to the superintendent and took the size of coffin you wanted, free of charge,’ Maclennan quoted a resident as saying.
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