-> G21 AFRICA
 BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you.
VA LOAN INFORMATION and VETERANS' MORTGAGES  KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis
New Orleans is the Lost City of America.A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need.
Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now!
|
To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/africa105.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.
SCAT WRITING AMERICAN DREAMS DAY ONE G21 AFRICA JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. GLOBAL*BEAT HOT LINKS NEW YORK STATE RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES SMOKE & MIRRORS VOX POPULI LAST WEEK's EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. We know you're lazy. Here's a button for a quick translation of this page. Just click on the flag for your country. You're welcome! OR TRY THIS GOOGLE TRANSLATION SERVICE. |
East London, SOUTH AFRICA - To see my country with the heart, to look at it through the haze of nostalgia -- why not? -- and mirror bright reflections of its history, is my intention in these Drifting Homewards pieces.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni It is easy for me to start at PE (Port Elizabeth) because the city is the springboard and the spiritual anchor of my life. There's a place in PE called Bethelsdorp whose fame rests on the fact that it was the first missionary station in the area.
When a place becomes famous, like Bethelsdorp, a certain willful blindness sets in the minds of its admirers. All that matters is its power as an icon. The details that support its myth are pushed to the fore, while those that perplex or disrupt this image are quietly smothered. Such is the ruthless tyranny of fame.
Bethelsdorp is supposed to be a traveller's recount because of its historic association with English settlers of the early ninetieth century. It was there the London Missionary Society established its mission for the Khoyikhoyi in 1803. Since then a horde of famous and infamous settlers and missionaries have been associated and written about the place. From Van der Kemp, Henry Lichtenstein, Thomas Pringle, the Reads to poets like Thomas Baines.
Nothing much of the earlier boom remains at Bethelsdorp in the present day. The missionary site is just a tiny stone cottage with dandruff on its walls. Only aloes with their inordinate capacity for surviving the harshest conditions thrive around the place. The cottage was built on a barren plateau, surrounded by pretentious picnic areas and hiking trails. It now looks stranded and baffled.
Andre Brink recently released a book , The Praying Mantis, partly set in Bethelsdorp, which should have revived the popularity of the place, but it has not happened yet. Comeuppance for missionary sins? If you're one of those people with an ability to see beauty in barrens places, perhaps this is your kind of place. To the rest of us it belongs to the dustbin of history.
Since I was in the area, I decided to travel via Redhouse, that quiet sanctuary of rundown houses with trellised verandas, trees twisted by salt prevailing winds. If you're not the kind of person who treasures quiet village life you've no place there either, except to fish or dig for mudprawns used as bait when fishing.
Should you, like myself, proceed to stand at Fort Frederick and gaze out with heavy tiredness at the Algoa Bay -- I refuse to call it Nelson Mandela Bay for my own silly reasons -- you might learn a thing or two. Imagine what must have went on in the mind of the first Xhosa person who stood on that hill seeing the strange bustle of houses floating on the sea, as they called ships, arriving with white settlers from England in the early parts of the ninetieth century.
I chose Maqoma, the Ngqika chief who was then a thorn in the flesh of settler encroachment on Xhosaland, to be my eyes, ears and voice at that time. The demonology and cult of villainy of colonial history dismissed him as an incorrigible savage. This is what he has to say:
I could not believe my eyes the first time I visited eBheyini [Algoa Bay]. There're wharves alive with clutter, which I later learned were foghorns and calliopes. I had always thought people who reported these things to me were just scallywags and falsifiers who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the chief.? Close by, along riverbanks, kaffir women clothed in white people's dress, standing on smooth boulders, knee deep on the water, were senselessly beating linen on the rocks. I was told it was a way of cleaning the linen.As the mockingbird's chants ripple in the air of history, trembling trees in eerie calm survey the damage and whirlpools of ambition, anger turns in the Baakens River below and I hear another voice: Our blood mixed the mortar the walls of this country were built on.(TO BE CONTINUED)The sea spread out before us to vast distances like a metal mirror. Ships lay stranded on the shallow waters. Up above, on the hill, white people, ever industrious, were erecting a stone fort. They tell it'll be for keeping foreign ships under the gun to protect their merchant quarters. All along the seashore numerous white tents of rude settlement have sprung close together on the shifting dunes. We had to be careful in avoiding some few herdsmen who were stalking the marshes on stilts and tending their flocks. Some men were busy curbing vagabond rivers along the coast, creating salt swamps of insalubrious nature. Great tracts of land were rendered useless because of this and towering dunes began to pile up along the edge of the sea.
Up the hill, more tents, more orderly and pitched reasonably apart unlike the ones scattered between bush heights and sand-hills. By the neat and pleasant situation by which they were placed you could see they belonged to their rich class. White people everywhere were rollicking, frolicking in picnic parties of pleasure with skiffle music, giving themselves to drunkenness and brutal passions.
Unlike the merry lot above, those down below were sitting on boxes and bundles, under the wagons with tents pitched along side, scaring away hungry wild dogs and jackals. Wagons were still a strange phenomenon with us. These wagons were not the kind we see now covered by great tarpaulins and drawn by 16 or 18 full-grown oxen. They were just a wooden body of 12 to 14 feet in length, and about 5 feet in width. Their belly-plank, stoutly put together, rested on the under structure of two strong axles carried by four stout wheels fixed together on the long-wagon and drawn by means of a pole they called the disselboom to which was attached the trekgoed, or drawing gear. The sides of the wagon were made up of strong boughs of wood reaching the heights of 18 to 24 inches. These were bent around and attached to each upper edge of the sides forming a structure that was covered with painted canvas with long flaps covering down to the front and rear.
Trek-tows were created using stout ropes to fasten yokes on them. There were no buckwagons then as is the case now. The wagons were still rudimentary, no chains to gear, axles were made of wood, reims were tied up together to make trek touwen, which were very apt to break, especially in wet weather. It was not an unusual sight to see them capsized with broken disselbom.
We had to know the wagons well, for when we staged an ambush. We had to know exactly where to find what in a hurry.
Under the wagon a thirsty person went for the water-vaatje (water-cask), which was almost always slung there. If you wanted things like firearms, powder horn and bullet pouch, you went for the jager-zakken (bags) on the sides of the wagon. On the front of the wagon were the voorkist (front box), and the achterkist at the back where all sorts of requisites for the journey and daily provisions like sugar, tea, coffee and rusks were stored. This is where a hungry raider went first.
As we sat watching from the bushes not far from eBheyini, we observed their busy mornings of cacophonic wagon derivers, mainly Khoyi, chasing and driving untamed oxen, as wild as bucks. There'd be many knock-downs and kicks, runs after oxen that pulled away, before spanning would properly commence. There would be wailing babies falling off wagons, white women scolding their Khoyi servants, who bore chairs for them.
When the wagons started moving the oxen would start wild, galloping, pitching with their sharp horns and tossing to the air. Those leading them would run like mad, leaving the drivers, passengers and cargo dependent on chance. You could see the backs of oxen were sore, pining with pain from excessive whips.
The drama was when everybody was halloing in chase after the oxen that had joined us in the bush. Puppies, not to be out done, whined for their bitch mothers, horses join the fray by neighing incessantly. When the span of oxen we eventual reduced to a working order, there'd be "Gee, wo't! Trek! Lope! Trek!" Whip crack cutting mercilessly at the back of oxen could be heard all the way to Stoney Valley until the undulating silence of the bush took over. The poor beasts shied and shove their heads in between their legs and tugged on.
Men, in what later I learnt were tailcoats and knee-breeches, sat on veld stools battering their merchandise, which they spread out on planks and mats to beguile the public under every shade. Rich Mfengus, proud as Lucifer, with picturesque heads ornamented with jackal tails, ostrich plumes and girded in kilts of monkey tails were wheelwrights, busy making yokes and skeys, or were brick-makers and builders. It's a boisterous and distressing state of affairs.
Why have they come? I ask myself. On close examination I see our own men from long time in our villages. We had taken them for dead. But there they were, busy like ants on white people's wharves, loading and off loading different materials; kegs of powder, tin boxes, ropes and anchors from the ship whose sails hung loose in the rusted hulks. A thought of recruiting them into contributing their steals (for they were already stealing for personal profit) to our cause entered my mind. Most of them were enthusiastic about the prospects, and in due time they didn't fail me when I sent messengers to collect gunpowder.
© 2005, GENERATOR 21.
E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your snide remarks to rod@g21.net.