A day of historical discoveries

I wasn’t particularly interested in the life of Hans Bezuidenhout at the time. Remember, he was Freek Bezuidenhout’s older brother who had sworn revenge over the grave of his brother. The same Hans who insulted my great-great-great-great grandfather Frans Labuscagne and Great Willem Prinsloo at the funeral when they showed their disinclination to rebel against the British occupation.  The Oracle had told me about him, however. And Barry and Ernest Pringle had also told me about him. In fact, it seemed that everyone I talked to felt that I should make a point of visiting his grave.

There was another reason. His monument was on my way home, and I had passed it several times over the past ten years without seeing it. The final reason was that although his role in the Slagtersnek rebellion is adequately described in history, the exact places where it had all taken place were ill-defined. The places were usually called by their original Dutch names. Many of these names no longer existed, since they were replaced by Scottish settler names. I felt that it would be a historical contribution if I were to find and mark these sites with GPS coordinates so that other historians could pinpoint them exactly.

And so I left Braeside and retraced my steps a few miles. They told me I had driven past the monument where it stands against a mountainside near some poplars where the road crossed the Sakrivier. Those were practically the only directions I could get from everyone. It wasn’t much, but I was resolved to try.

After a while “just a few miles up the road,” started to feel like I was on the wrong road. I reached the Tarka/Bedfort/Cookhouse junction and stopped. I took the Tarka road, and then turned around less than a mile further. It instinctively felt wrong. There was a farmhouse by the junction, and the signboard said “Mickey Doo,” but I couldn’t see a sign of life so that I could enquire. I thought about turning left again, but I had already been there twice. I was certain turning right was wrong, but I went there anyway. At least this was the only stretch of road that I hadn’t been on the previous day.

I meet Scott of the Karoo

The scenery was charming, but I felt ill at ease with my direction of travel. After a goodly distance I began to drive more slowly, so that I could think faster. I felt I must have missed a clue somewhere. Then, in the distance I saw a thin line of dust appearing. It looked like a toy locomotive on a track. I could see that it was a man on a motorcycle, which I found strange, because you don’t encounter much traffic around these parts, and I don’t think I’d ever seen a bike here before. It was more than just a man on a motorbike, however. It was actually a dog on a motorbike with on the back. Well, in my romantic imagination that is how it seemed to be. The Jack Russell terrier on the petrol tank, with ears flapping in the wind, while its owner did the driving.

As he approached, I saw him slow down, so I did likewise. When I lifted my flipper in salute, I could see that the gentleman wanted to have a talk with the stranger with the outlandish license plate. I think he asked me whether I was lost or something. I forced a dignified expression and began to explain my quest. At hearing the name of Hans Bezuidenhout, the ruddy face cracked a smile and extended a hand of welcome.

“Chappy Scott’s the name” he said. “I live right back there.”
He motioned with his thumb across his shoulder to a farm which seemed to be half-hidden amongst some brilliant green trees up the road. I smiled back and met his grip.

“Herman Labuschagne,” I grinned back. “All the way from George.”

In his eyes I could see at once that I had just met an interesting man, and that he was interested in my quest as well. But first there was the matter of protocol and pleasantries. If you haven’t grown up in the country you wouldn’t understand. The object when two total strangers meet is always to first attempt to establish common ground. You explain who you are, you explain where you come from. Then you explain where you are going to. Those are the base essentials. If you really want to score points, however, you should now see if you have any kin in common. If you do, you make an instant transition from being regarded as a “potential friend,” to being so to speak a “ long lost brother.”

I knew this of course, and so I deliberately ventured: “My people lived here before the Great Trek, and they were involved in the Slagtersnek rebellion. I’m on a journey to trace their footsteps.”

From Chappie’s expression I could tell that I had spoken the magic words. We weren’t exactly family, but sharing common roots in this spot of wilderness counted as practically the same thing. I knew that all the strangeness was now something of the past.

Chappie wasted no time in starting to tell me what he knew about the history of the region. He told me his farm still had an old water powered mill which was used in olden times to grind flour for the local farmers. He himself, he explained, has been a professional hunter since the 1960’s. He seemed to have travelled the whole world over the years, and had been to the United States a great many times. He had even once partaken of a dog sled race across Canada, he said. Chappy also told me that I was lucky to have run into him, as he is not often home. I found it strange to think that a man like him in a place like this could be such a citizen of the world at large. But I forget how much the earth has shrunk.

When I told my mother about him a week later, she immediately smiled and said: “Oh I remember Chappy! We always used to see him at the Professional Hunter’s Association banquets in Sun City.” Later still, one of my business partner’s saw his picture on my Facebook page, and expressed with astonishment that he knew Chappie too. Chappie used to be a friend of his late father. Many people will know Chappie as the celebrated “Scott from Africa” who also operates a professional hunting school. His website is www.scottofafrica.co.za

This left me quite astonished. We had no modern ties with the Winterberg at all, and I would have wagered money that no-one there would have had a chance of knowing anyone that I knew. And yet, it was certain now that my father and Chappy must have met on many occasions.

A big cattle truck with a trailer passed us and went rumbling up the mountain road, leaving us full of dust.

While we talked, an SUV pulled up and a lady rolled the window down to squawk: “You look slightly lost.”

Chappy laughed, and said something like, “you reckon?”

I listened to two neighbours talking and enjoyed observing how people still had time for one another in the deep countryside.

I looked at what I had written in my journal beneath the blue wisteria that morning.

“There is a sense of timelessness here,” I had written. “Life feels colonial. It feels as if Nelson Mandela is still in jail on Robben Island for no-one looks down, servants seem respectful and people appear to have money. Not oceans of it, but certainly enough to live dignified and gracefully. I look at how these people live and I feel we’ve lost something. I keep trying to think what it is, but ultimately I think it is ourselves…”

After a while Chappy told me to follow me as he would go and show me the site of Hans Bezuidenhout’s grave. And so off we went, Chappy on his motorbike, with the dog on the petrol tank standing with his nose in the air and his ears flapping merrily. I trailed behind, feeling out of place, yet totally at home in this strangely familiar world. When we finally found Bezuidenhout’s grave, it was roughly where I had thought it should have been, but unlike at least two people had told me, you can practically not see it from the road. Perhaps if you knew exactly where to look, but to the eye of a passing stranger it was certainly invisible.

Chappy draw the fence wires apart for me so I could step through, and then I did the same for him. This too, is country protocol. These were the things you know simply for having been born there, for no-one teaches you how to behave like country folk, except time and observation. Another sign which silently distinguishes country folk from new intruders, is the way that country people have of holding branches and gently letting them go behind them when you file along a brush-lined trail. Townsfolk are not even aware of it, but they invariably pass and let the branches sweep back to hit the guy behind them in the face. So there are a dozen or a hundred little things that together combine to separate people who are in touch with the land from those who simply exist upon it.

We enjoyed the view, and Chappy told me about Bushman paintings in the cliffs. That’s another country characteristic, peculiar to modern times. We know that when you’re told where Bushman paintings are, you don’t reveal it in public. This is information that country folk share with country folk alone, lest the city folk should come to take their pictures, and spray Coka Cola on the precious drawings so that the pictures would look better.

I get to meet the Philips family

By the time Chappy wished me well and turned back to his farm, I had scribbled notes about several places and pictures down the road to Tarka which he suggested I should see. My schedule did not include more stops, but I was tempted to cheat a bit by lingering a little longer. And so when I drove on, I could not help myself. I had to turn in at the old stone house of Malcolm Philips. Chappie said he might know a thing or two, and he could give me directions to someone down the road who also knew a lot about the local history. I would thank Scott of the Karoo afterwards for this good suggestion.

If you’re used to country ways, you could have predicted what happened next. I introduced myself to Malcolm’s son. He said to come with him as he was sure his dad would like to meet me. That’s how I met Malcolm. Malcolm insisted I should come in for tea. There he introduced me to his wife, and together they introduced me to Willem, a boy who was spending the holidays with them on the farm.

We exchanged the usual country talk, which meant that within ten minutes it felt like we’d known each other all our lives. Malcolm’s son showed me his guns, and we talked about farming and hunting and the “bloody drought” that seemed to last forever. Malcolm told me how his father had lost his family farm in a drought of many years ago. He returned eventually and bought it back, as well as the farm next door. But times had not always been so bad. There also were some good years.

Consider, for example, the celebrated wool boom years, when all the sheep farmers had earned large profits. Such were the good times during which Malcolm’s beautiful old sandstone house had been built. Those where the years when wool fetched “a pound-a-pound,” or one pound sterling for each pound of wool. Wool was so expensive in these times, my grandmother once told me, that they used to walk along the barbed wire fences to collect even the barbs of wool upon the barbs. Malcolm smiled when I told him my story and nodded cheerfully. “That’s exactly how it was!” he confirmed.

As is the custom in the country, when it is meal-time, people invite visitors to join in. Even when they weren’t expected. Custom dictates that the stranger should protest and say that he would rather not, and fumble some excuse. Then the host is supposed to respond with, “nonsense! I won’t hear a word of it. You’re going to join us for a meal, provided that you don’t mind that it is just something simple.”

I have been part of the phoney modern world for long enough to feel a little uncomfortable to be imposing on people’s hospitality like this, but at the same time declining an invitation can be precariously close to insulting one’s host. Malcolm wanted to show me Hans Bezuidenhout’s monument again, plus a few other things, however, and he wanted to have lunch first. This it came that I had to join the family in the kitchen for a splendid country meal.

Malcolm had a universe of breathtaking country stories to share. There was, for instance, the story of horse trainer who used to work for his grandfather. He was an Irishman named John Towers. This man was so reclusive that he only went to town twice a year. When he did, he would not ride his horse. Instead, he used to lead the animal on foot so that he could roll away every sharp stone in the road which he thought might injure the hooves of his beloved beast.

The curious thing about the Irishman was that when in town, he would invariable go on a binge of epic proportions. By Monday he would be so drunk that he could no longer walk, and had to ride back to his farm draped across his patient horse like a wet rag. By then the horse would simply have to find his own way across the jagged stones.

People loved their horses in those years. Malcolm’s grandfather, he told us, would sometimes amuse everyone by riding his magnificent stallion into his grand stone house. Fortunately the house was more than big enough. The passage alone, seemed almost big enough to me to accommodate a small car.

To illustrate how confusing the matter of farm names had become over time, Malcolm told me that his farm is called Arendsberg on the title deed. It was, however, known as Klipheuwel by the locals. Within living memory, however, that had changed to Oxford. This is not the only example. It is no wonder, therefore, that historical places have become hard to find along these parts. Malcom said his grandfather had bought the farm from an old Voortrekker for the price of a trek waggon and a span of oxen, plus a few sheep and a bit of cash. That seemed expensive to me. Many of the Voortrekkers simply gave their farms away to their British neighbours. Or abandoned them. Or as in the case of the splendid Murray farm near Graaff-Reinet – traded it for a large cast iron cooking pot.

Visiting the old De Witt farm

After lunch we tumbled into Malcolm’s pickup and set out on my tour. I felt vaguely guilty at having clearly taken over the family’s whole day, but everyone seemed cheerful and excited about the outing, which set me more at ease. I wanted to return to the Bezuidenhout grave, but Malcolm wanted me to see other things. I was in no position to make demands.

Time and experience had taught me that there is within country folk a deep rooted desire to share the memories that they are the custodians of. It is not as if they merely want to treat a visitor to their stories. Instead, they sense an opportunity to pass them on. It is as much an act of sharing something that they treasure, as it is a subconscious attempt to pass on some of their custodianship. This is my theory and I think that I am right. If I am, I would be pleased, because it signifies a good thing. People want the tales of olden days to live on. And so they wrap each one in the cotton wool of ordinary conversation and basic pleasantries, before slowly handing it over to an interested visitor. The ceremony is cloaked in ordinariness, but there should be no mistake when understanding that it is a profound act. Something that should be valued and respected for the precious gift that it contains.

We drove down the river to where there was a very old house, which seemed to date back to somewhere near the Voortrekker times. It had been a simple pioneer’s cottage originally, but had later been converted to a barn. This farm used to belong to the De Witt family, which have long since vanished into the modern world. Malcolm said he wanted to show me something. Drawing up at the weathered old stone buildings, he tugged at a door of a building that was now being used as a hay shed.

When we stepped in we were greeted by the sweet warm scent of lucerne hay. The bales were stacked right to the beams, and from there even higher up into the roof space. We climbed up the tower of baled to the top where there was a gable window from which we could look out across the farm.

“Those were poplar beams,” Malcolm told me. “But the amazing thing is how they were joined.”

I followed his finger and then I saw it. I could not see a single nail in the entire roof structure. Where the beams were joined, holes had been drilled, with wooden pegs driven through. This had held the structure securely together for perhaps a 150 years. Even now they showed no sign of needing any maintenance. I was impressed. Something else which impressed me was the fact that even though I looked carefully I saw no sign of wood borer damage.

Malcolm explained that poplar timbers were useless outside, but as long as you kept them dry they were unusually long-lasting and durable for construction. Funny how these casual remarks from an older generation can sometimes explain the things we see around us without questioning them. It instantly made me understand why there were poplar groves across the entire Karoo region.

In this largely treeless land, the pioneers had to build homes which required timbers. Clearly they had learned that poplar was ideally suited, being very hardy for surviving the droughts, baking summers and freezing winters, and also being faster growers that would resist insect pests. I was starting to be glad that I had allowed Malcom his initiative.

Next to me Willem was staring out the window. I smiled when I considered him. He told me he was 15 years old. A townsboy from Queenstown who was visiting for a farm holiday. His father had brought him for a hunt the previous year, and he had quietly fallen in love with this wild and rugged landscape. He told me he hoped that he could become a farmer one day. He seemed an unlikely candidate with his spotlessly neat clothes, flawless white skin and china blue eyes. And yet, there was something of the pioneer about him.

I think I saw it in the way that he looked out the window as the sun was streaming through it, drawing long streaks in the floating dust. I knew he saw something that afternoon. Perhaps it was just a dream that was materializing. Or hope.

What do we see when we are 15? My world looked entirely different at that age. Life did not have as many dimensions. Or maybe it had more. Either way, I somewhat envied him his ability for still seeing like I thought he did. At the same time I also pitied him, knowing that he would lose it one day – just like we all do. It is one of life’s unappreciated gifts that we don’t see the realities of the future for what they are while we are young. In the meantime Willem was a pleasant curiosity. He spoke not a word of English, but he could understand it easily. Malcolm mostly spoke English. There were exceptions, though, when he wished to emphasize part of a story so that he could be sure that Willem would understand. Then he would speak Afrikaans in that peculiarly pleasant accent which is characteristic of the English farming folk. He chose his words slowly and carefully, like someone who had a respect for grammar, and who knew that words contain more meaning than dictionary might suggest.

The dogs enjoyed the hay loft, jumping about and sniffing into recesses for the scent of mice and rats. Malcolm then took us to a slight rise just behind the old house. There he pointed to a very large circle of stones.

“Willem, what do you think this is?” he asked the boy.

Willem squinted with concentration and then admitted that he had no idea.

It was a threshing ground. Many modern people would have no idea what this is. Such ignorance would have been unthinkable only 60 years ago. The site looked as if it might have some bedrock that might have been covered by sand and stones over time. Often such a threshing ground would be levelled out with a slab that was plastered with a mixture of clay and cow dung. This is also what the pioneers used as flooring in their homes. The mixture would be dry, smooth, pleasant to the touch, warm beneath bare feet – and completely odourless. There was nothing primitive about this ancient form of homemade concrete.

I knew exactly how threshing worked, but somehow I enjoyed it to hear Malcolm’s animated explanation to the lad. Threshing floors, he said, were always built on a high rise so that they would be exposed to the prevailing winds. Sheaves of wheat or grain would then be scattered across evenly across the surface. A horse or some similar animal would then be lead in circles across this carpet of grain. Gradually it would trample the stalks until most of the grain would separate from their stalks. After a while the farmer would then use hay forks to cast the stalks into the air. The grain seeds, being heavy, would then fall to the ground, while the lighter chaff and stalks would be blown away by the wind.

“The wind can’t be too weak,” Malcolm said, “and it cannot be too strong. It must be just right.”

This is how grain was threshed since time immemorial. The Bible speaks of the same practice several times. Our ancestors did it like this, and in third world countries the practice still continues. Afterwards the grain would be gathered into bags or baskets so that it could be stored or perhaps sent to Chappy Scot’s old stone mill to be ground into flour.

The De Witt graves

I wondered about this De Witt family. De Witt is a well-known Karoo family name. Malcolm drove down into the alluvial fields next to the river to show us two old lonely graves. One gravestone was smashed to pieces so that there was no inscription to read. The other was a cross which was still intact. We cleared some branches and deciphered the Dutch inscription which read:

Andries Johannes Jacobus De Witt geboren den 27 Junie 1877 en ont slapen den 31 October 1897. Ouderdom van slechts 20 jaren 4 maanden en 4 dagen. – “Andries Johannes Jacobus De Witt, born the 27^th June 1877 and deceased the 31^st October 1897. Age of only 20 years 4 months and 4 days.”

It seemed such a shame to me. At 20 life has barely started for a country lad. You can tell how precious time is from how his age was presented to the last day and month. Someone loved this young man. Someone grieved for him. Someone used to tend his grave. And now he is unknown to history. I wondered how he died? It could have been sickness, a fall from a horse, snakebite or a Bushman arrow. In frontier times life was a gentle flame that was always flickering before the draft of possible extinction.

While we were pondering this, I noticed ant bear holes around the graves and casually wondered why they often dug near graves. I would soon know the answer, and I will share it later.

A Boer fighter who was buried and ploughed under in the dead of night.

Meanwhile Malcolm drove to another part of the farm again. He wanted to show me the original settler’s fields where grain and vegetables used to be grown, but where he now plants alfalfa, or lucerne, as we call it in our country. The fields used to be irrigated from a very long irrigation furrow that had been dug by hand from far up the river so that the water could be fed by gravity. Along the banks of the furrow the pioneers had planted fruit trees. Although they were now extremely old, there were still a few gnarled quince trees, figs, apples and some bottle pear trees which bore pears of a size that we no longer see.

I could imagine that once upon a time it must have been a bustling farm, full of the sounds of animals and children, with everyone working together towards a common goal. Times have changed, however. Families have grown small. Young people are drawn to the cities, droughts have drained the energy of the original old souls who once lived there, and farmers have been forced to convert to more profitable mechanised endeavours. Life was still good, but I could see that in the process we had lost something. We had grown further from our roots, to where they were less able to feed us properly.

It was in one of the fields, however, that there lay a piece of history which Malcolm particularly wanted to share with me. During the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 he said, there had been a skirmish between the Boers and the British higher up the farm. In the process one of the Boers was wounded. Being too badly injured to travel, his companions brought him to the De Witt farm so he could be nursed. This was a very dangerous thing to do, for if they had been found aiding and abetting what the authorities considered to be the enemy, they would have been severely punished.

Unfortunately the wounded fighter died that night. Perhaps this really made things easier for the De Witts, except that now they had a new problem. How to dispose of the body without being seen? At the time it was common for farm labourers to be compulsive tale bearers, and everyone knew that the story of a wounded Burgher would find its way to British ears. It was subsequently decided that the man would be buried in the darkness of the night, somewhere in the family’s field.

The next morning early, the labourers were given the day off and told to go and enjoy themselves somewhere else. The farmer then took his oxen and set about to plough the field. In this manner the lonely grave of a Boer fighter became lost. Today the exact position of his grave remains unknown, and no-one even has an idea what his name was. It is possible that only Malcolm and his family knows the story, and if do not write it down, then in time it will probably be lost to the history of man.

This, I thought, illustrates to me that there is value after all in being what I consider myself to be sometimes – a minor league amateur historian who has spent his life slowly recording microscopic pieces of history that should ideally be preserved. They may not be of tremendous value, but I think they are worth salvaging. Let the big league historians write about the major battles and significant landmark events. I will pause to collect the little pebbles – and try to tell something about ordinary lives from extraordinary times.

Discovering the scene of an ancient Voortrekker tragedy

From the fighter’s grave, we bade the old De Witt farm adieu and headed up the road again. Malcolm was still not ready to go on to Hans Bezuidenhout’s monument. He had something else that he was saving for me. On the eastern side of the road, he finally turned in by a rusty farm gate. Bumping and squeaking we drove into the veld across the stones and dry Karoo bushes. We were heading for a delta-shaped valley that lay between the toes of the mountains. He wanted to show me a piece of history that has, as far as we know, never been recorded. It was the scene of a tremendous tragedy that has almost entirely been forgotten.

At a spot where old abandoned fields finally surrendered to rocky slope where the mountain starts to rise, Malcolm stopped the pickup and we got out. He walked over to some scattered stones and pointed at them. The story that he told was sad and frustratingly short, because the told people who had known the full story had long since passed away. Yet, even though the details have been lost, one cannot fail to be moved when one imagines what the circumstances must have been like. It proved the discovery that I would remember most about my entire journey.

During the time when Great Trek started, Malcolm said, the Voortrekkers chose this very spot to outspan their waggons and let their livestock graze. Little did they know it at the time, but this would mark the spot where the angel of death would come harvesting their field. It started when a dreadful plague broke out, as quietly as plagues invariably do. A rash or a fever here, a flickering candle in a tent late at night over there, and a family dressed in black in the morning. That’s how it must have begun.

They must have thought that it would be over soon, but they were wrong. The sickness soon began to spread from tent to tent. Whether it was smallpox or measles Malcolm doesn’t know for certain anymore. What is sure, however, is that the effect was devastating.

The first casualties were buried somewhat lower down where the soil was softer. Soon there was an entire row of graves, which ended where a rocky patch made digging difficult. The pioneers started a second row. And when that row was full, they started a third. So they kept on adding graves until they were at the base of the mountain. That is where the dying must have ended finally. It seemed poetically ironic that the dying stopped when the earth became too hard to dig anymore.

It was difficult to identify the graves today, because nature was reclaiming the last of the little piles of stones. Year after year, for decades and generations, baboons have been turning all the stones that can be moved along the mountain sides. This is what they do in their search of scorpions, which is a delicacy that all baboons prize. Unfortunately this has also had the effect of slowly destroying the graves.

Malcolm said that originally the rows could be seen more clearly. He reckoned there used to be roughly a hundred graves per row – and there had been more or less three rows. 300 people. I was not sure that there would have been as many as that, but what does it matter? Life was precious on the great frontier, and the border community could not afford to lose a single one. 12 would have been a tragedy. 50 would have been disaster. And there were more than 50 graves here. Perhaps, indeed, two or three hundred. One could not help but feel touched by gentle evidence of whispering tragedy in this solitary place.

I have visited a great many sad places in my life before. I’ve been to very many cemeteries where thousands of people lie buried. I’ve seen mummies in museums, foetuses in bottles, and military graves. This quiet and forgotten place, however, seemed to me the saddest place that I had ever visited. It made me want to sit down by one of the little piles, and press some flowers into the soil. Just so that humanity might show that it still cared about all the wasted human potential that was buried there. But it was dry again, as it always seemed to be, and there were no flowers. All you can do is stand and stare. Listen to the silence. And imagine that you hear the voices of vanished people who once upon a time had been no different at all from you and I.

I tried to imagine the dreadful trauma by imagining the valley filled with tents and waggons and thousands of head of sheep and cattle before my mind’s eye. The Voortrekkers had known death and fear for generations. They were used to it to some extent. They must have been both sad to leave their homes, and also excited at the great adventure that lay ahead. They must have been looking forward to rebuilding new lives with more happiness and dignity. That makes it to me all the more tragic to think that at the very doors of leaving a dark past in search of a brighter future, they had to be struck so dreadfully.

There was nothing that they could have done. Invisible germs killed without discrimination. Folk remedies, mountain herbs and Dutch patent medicine would have had no effect. There were no doctors, and even if there had been, they could only have tried to make the patients comfortable until they died. The pioneers could do nothing more than nurse their loved ones, bury them when their breath went still, and sing their melancholy psalms when the angel of death was done.

There were no inscriptions on the stones. The rock was too hard to be carved. There was no time to import proper stones. It was not even part of the custom of those times. Mothers and fathers simply prayed by the graves of their loved ones, watered the bitter soil with their tears, and then walked away into a brooding future. They would never see those little piles again. They knew they had to leave them behind where they would be framed by the golden hills and the blue sky. To be tended by the citizens of the mountains until they were made level with the ground once more. They had to leave the dead behind so that they living could find life ahead.

The Voortrekkers were cheerful people, though. They had to be. The routes of their migrations were marked with graves in the wilderness. If they did not have the faith of their religion and an ever-present sense of humour, I don’t think they would have made it. Had they known that there would yet be other acres of tragedy similar to this one – although not necessarily due to disease – they might have turned around and gone back home again. Fortunately, though, we do not know the ways of the future. And so, driven by the thirst for freedom, and sheltered by ignorance of not knowing how much more suffering they would encounter, they continued. Perhaps this doesn’t even count as bravery. Perhaps they were just like we would have been. Following the road of life that seemed to be the best at the time – mostly because it appeared to be the best out of a range of bad alternatives.

The plough of God

Later, when I returned home again, I wrote a piece about an ecological observation which we made near the graves and posted it on Facebook. I thought I might share it here.

“In the Eastern Cape there is a region around the towering Winterberg mountain, where you can vanish into a circular region of wilderness valleys in a forgotten circle of loneliness where time has partly been forgotten.

When my ancestors went on the Great Trek between 1836 and 1838 the British settlers who came in 1820 gradually took over the area, and their descendants still farm the region to this day.

After I had nursed my car across the torturously bad tracks that cross the Winterberg, I stopped at a beautiful 100 year old Victorian sandstone farmhouse to ask directions. A friendly man named Malcolm Philips came out to greet me. I was invited to lunch - and despite the fact that I had other plans, he kept me there for the rest of the day. Such are country folk in the faraway places of the world. They are somehow just more human than most.

Malcolm had with him a 15 year old boy named Willem Van der Linde. He was a townsboy from Queenstown, but he and his father had hunted with Malcolm in the past, and as he hoped to be a farmer one day, he had been sent to spend the holiday in the Winterberg. Willem spoke Afrikaans and Malcolm spoke English - just as the custom had been when my ancestors still lived there in the 1820's.

While Malcolm was showing me some ancient graves, Willem pointed to some patches of disturbed ground and wanted to know what caused them.

Malcolm, who had grown up in the mountains, immediately replied, "oh that is the plough of God."

I was mystified. I couldn't decide whether he was serious or confused. I had never heard the expression before.

Then Malcolm explained. When it is dry, like now, the baboons dig up large patches of grass, looking for grass and sedge roots to eat. In the beginning he used to be annoyed at this disturbance of his grazing and he used to shoot the baboons. But over time he came to realize that they fulfilled a unique purpose which was very much in his favour.

When Malcolm inherited the land from his father, and bought some adjacent portions, the farms had been severely overgrazed for many years. Sheet erosion had meant the washing away of topsoil so that large patches had become bare of vegetation, with the soil being hard and sterile just like porcelain. Even where vegetation did grow, it was mostly confined to inedible bushes and prickly grasses of low nutritional value.

Over the years, however, he noticed that whenever the baboons dug up patches, the soil would remain loose and soft for a long time. When grass seeds blew onto it, they worked their way into the ground where they would germinate. When it rained, the water would soak in, instead of simply running off. Malcolm showed us several patches where healthy stands of Themeda triandra - or Rooigras - had become decidedly dominant on the digging patches of previous years. In this manner, nature restores itself.

Willem was a contrast to the land. He was very fair-skilled and looked like a typical city boy, whom I would have rather expected to see with a skateboard under his arm at the mall, and out here in the perfect wilderness. Yet, in the violet blueness of his eyes, I could tell that he saw something in the dry and barren land which other did not. He had what I call "seeing eyes." I have noticed eyes like that before. They see more than just the world before them. They see into the past, and far beyond the past into the future. In his dreams, I thought, he was walking on land such as he would own himself one day.

I asked Willem if he knew that grass seeds drill into the ground? At this, Malcolm became excited and tried his best to find some seeds from last season. It is one of the wonders of the world that so few people know about. Many grasses have seeds that have a sharp-tipped head, about half as big as a match head. Attached to this would be a tail of up to the length of a matchbox, which is often comprised of one or more thick and hairy strands.

These strands, when they become moist, rapidly twist and turn. If you take a strand and moisten it in your mouth, you can see it twist and curl before your very eyes. When dropped onto the ground, the seeds will writhe and slowly bore their way deep into the ground. It is a miracle of nature, and a beautiful element of design in the complex machinery that God designed to keep the world alive and well.

Sharing the secrets of nature is one of the great privileges of life. As we stood there upon the sun-baked plains, we were childlike in our enthusiasm to share the knowledge with a new generation. I told Willem what I knew, and Malcolm told him what he remembered. We were exchanging jewels of country knowledge, not just with each other, but with ourselves that afternoon. There was a sense of discovery, just in finding that we knew as fact that things that the other explained to the listening youngster.

These were things my father taught me, which he had been taught by his father, and his father's father. It was the same with Malcolm. We were paying forward what we knew. We were letting nature speak with human voices. Willem didn't say much, but he listened with close attention to every word. Perhaps, if time and opportunity directed it this way, he would be telling his own children what he had learned from two nostalgic fuddy-duddies on a sunny afternoon one day.

It has taken Malcolm 30 years to restore his farms, and still the job is not complete. When the first bulldozers arrived in 1957, his predecessor had spent a thousand pounds to create a contour in this one valley alone, so that the water would not wash the soil away so fast. My father always told me, you can destroy the land in just a few short years, but it will take you 20 years or more to build it up again. And that was in the sour veld, which recovers far more quickly than here in these sweet veld parts. I told Malcolm this, and he agreed. The job of restoration would probably take until both of us are dead one day.

When we drove homeward late that afternoon, we were tired, thirsty and slightly sunburnt. I asked Willem if Malcolm's Labrador was going to ride back on the pickup.

"No, she's too fat," he said.

She would have to jog home, the way she came.

I smiled. Everything made me smile out here. I saw myself in Willem. I saw the future in him. I also saw myself in Malcolm, and recognized between us something that there used to be between my father and I. They were the same age, incidentally, Malcolm and my dad. Life brings you there, eventually. When 15 year olds start calling you "uncle," according to country custom, and when you start realizing that you must share what your father taught you, so that the world would have a future. Malcolm and I understood that. One day Willem will understand it too.”

Next instalment: The desperate gunfight in which Hans Bezuidenhout, his wife and his 14 year old son defended themselves against a unit of Pandoers; locating the grave of the fallen Hottentot soldier; learning about stone and the hidden smiles that 

The rebel who died beneath a rock

I was following the river again, forever winding and twisting back and forth across it. I had to hurry now because I had promised Alex Pringle that I would pay a visit to his home – and I hadn’t had that on my schedule.

The road up the Baviaansriver valley, which crosses the river 27 times.

You have to drive carefully along these roads. I have previously lost two tires on a single stone along a deserted country road and had no desire to repeat the ordeal. My thoughts were elsewhere, though. They were marching with a troop of soldiers who was travelling this very road on the night of 9 October 1815. They were on a murderously hard mission to travel most of the valley’s length before the sun came up so that they could surprise one of the frontier’s toughest men. History will recognize the name of Freek Bezuidenhout.

The death of a rebel frontiersman

Freek Bezuidenhout was my great-great-great-great grandfather’s neighbour. He was a wild and restless man who feared nobody and seemed to merely want to be left alone. He was one of the few frontiersmen who had abandoned the conventions of regular life to a large extent. After the death of his first white wife, he imply cohabited with a brown woman, with whom he had a son called Hans.

At this time in history my ancestor’s youngest son, Adriaan, was working for Freek on his farm. Freek knew that the law would come for him one day. It started after a series of complicated arguments with a labourer of his by the name of Booi. The matter involved a dispute of livestock and wages, and looking at it now it is clear that both of them had acted wrongly. Booi, however, resolved to try to use the law against his former employer, knowing that the British authorities were at the time unusually biased in favour of the natives. He therefore went to complain to the authorities in Graaff-Reinet, who accepted his version of the story the way he told it.

Sir Andries Stockenstrom - the landdrost who sentenced Freek Bezuidenhout to a month's imprisonment in his absence, who ordered his arrest, and who had to preside of the eventual trials of the rebels of Slagtersnek.

When the law demanded that Freek had to come and explain himself, Freek essentially told the law to get lost, and gave Booi a thrashing to emphasize his dissatisfaction. Booi, of course, went and lay charges once again. The law summoned Freek to court a second time – a summons which he once again ignored.

This compelled the landdrost to sentence Freek to a month’s imprisonment in his absence. Freek sneered at the news and responded by making it clear that if the law wanted the honour of his company (it was probably a three week journey to Graaff-Reinet), the law could come to him. In all fairness it has to be granted that the law had dealt extraordinarily patiently with Freek Bezuidenhout throughout this drama.

There was by then an unexpected twist to the story, which history has sometimes missed, but which might help to explain Freek’s stubbornness in part. The fact is that Booi had become involved with the wife of another native, who then resolved the matter by murdering the intruder to his marriage. Freek knew about the murder, but since the outcome suited his purpose well-enough, he saw no reason to report it or make a fuss about it. Booi’s death should have ended all the drama. Unfortunately it made it worse instead, for it soon became apparent that news about the murder had leaked, and there seemed to be a chance that the authorities might consider that Freek must have had a hand in the murder. He was apparently quite innocent, but to Freek his indictment seemed to big a risk to bear.

The entire matter had taken two years by this time, but even Freek must have known that the matter was destined to come to a head eventually. The problem was that everyone was afraid of Freek. Even the district’s elected leader – field cornet Opperman – told the landdrost that he refuses to try to arrest Freek. It would simply be too dangerous.

So it came on this fateful night that a contingent of 12 Hottentot soldiers, called “pandoers” were sent to go and arrest the wild frontiersman at first light. They were under the leadership of a British lieutenant called William MacKay, a Hungarian mounted policeman named Gerrit Lemke, and a Dutch sheriff of the court called Londt, and soon also to be joined by a Lieutenant Rousseau.

27 times they crossed the Baviaans that night, no doubt nervous about what would happen when they finally met the man who defied all authority. I could well imagine that the Baviaans river valley must have been a scary place at night. With sleeping baboons barking their alarm from the cliff tops, or the sudden snort of a rhino in the riverine bush, their nerves must have been raw. They reached Freek’s farm just when dawn began to smile upon the world.

Two days previously, after he returned from a visit to my great-great-great-great grandfather, Freek had told the boys who worked for him to keep an eye open for the law. Adriaan Labuscagne, together with Freek’s son Hans, and another Erasmus lad were already working in the fields when the soldiers made their first appearance. Adriaan was 17 (he later lied about his age and said that he was 15), Hans was about 20 (he did not know his own age), and Jacobus Erasmus was 18.

By reading all 1,000 pages of the trial transcripts which later followed, as well as other sources, I was able to piece together the events that followed in considerable detail.

Freek was the first who noticed the arrival of trouble when he observed to the boys: “Here come the soldiers who want to come and take me away.”

What Adriaan did exactly I could never find out, but it seems that at this point he must have made himself scarce. Freek’s wife brought guns, however, and these were pressed into the hands of the two boys, Hans and Jacobus. Freek shouted at the soldiers not to come any closer, but they either did not hear him or deliberately ignored him.

“Bezuidenhout! Give yourself up! Don’t be a blood fool, man!” lieutenant Rousseau shouted.

To this Freek bellowed in return: “Never!”

Rousseau then ordered his men to spread out and charge with bayonets, but with the instruction not to shoot.

Freek had other plans, though, and soon shouted at his son to open fire.

For a while Hans could not bring himself to shoot, and so an argument ensued between him and his father. Soon, however their position became so threatened that the boys felt obliged to open fire at the soldiers, along with the determined older man.

It took a while before the officer decided to finally answer the fire. As Freek’s trio of defenders retreated up the river’s course, with Freek’s wife was carrying a heavy bag that contained an astonishingly large amount of ball and powder. They were definitely prepared for a considerable resistance. Freek’s health was apparently not so good, though, and being greatly plagued with gout he retreated to the shelter of a cleft rock at the edge of a cliff that overlooked the river.

The monument marks the place where Freek Bezuidenhout fought his last battle against the Hottentot pandoers.

At this point Jacob Erasmus somehow abandoned the scene, leaving the stubborn Freek and his loyal woman and frightened son in their rocky fortress. The officers tried to convince Freek to surrender but he would not hear of it.

Even when Hans pleaded with him to give in, he replied that, “even if I present myself I will be hanged for it. Shoot me dead. If they shoot me dead – that’s when they’ll get me.”

The firefight resumed, and when it died down again, a Hottentot pandoer approached to try and reason with Freek.

“Who are you?” Freek demanded.

“Joseph,” the pandoer replied, upon which he asked if he could approach.

“No, stay away from me!” was Freek’s reply.

“Master Freek, lay down your gun; I shall do the same with mine, then we can talk about it,” the pandoer persisted.

“Don’t talk to me again,” Freek shouted back. “Stay away from me!”

Eventually, after much pleading from Hans, Freek reluctantly agreed that if he was allowed to exit his stronghold safely and was given a horse, he would ride to my great-great-great-great grandfather Frans Labuscagne, where he would presumably agree to cooperate.

Unfortunately their assurance did not sound so convincing, and suddenly Freek became suspicious.

“No, I can see it,” he roared. “You want to arrest me. Damn it – I won’t come out! You can have me if you kill me. Now I’m not saying another word…!”

After this the fighting resumed, with the soldiers firing into the crevasse, and throwing rocks into it.

Suddenly, however, Freek gasped, “Son, my arm is broken!” before falling to the ground.

A bullet had struck him in the chest so that it exited at the back of his shoulder blade. It had gone through the heart. For the wild frontiersman the world dissolved into a blur and then turned black as he exhaled his last breath. Freek Bezuidenhout had fought and lost his last battle.

The lonely grave of Freek Bezuidenhout, near where the rebels swore revenge.

This did not end the drama at the frontier, though. In fact, unbeknown to all the actors in this dramatic scene, the trouble had barely even yet begun. The next day all the neighbours in the valley assembled on the sad little plain where Freek would be laid to rest. They were all men of the veld – toughened by the elements and hard as iron in their desire to be independent and to survive. Men who could hold a gun were precious on the frontier. Even wild characters like Freek Bezuidenhout – and the frontier could ill afford to lose them.

My family was there, of course, but the mood was sombre where the dark-clad figures huddled upon the windswept plain. When Freek’s coffin was finally covered they all retired to his house to talk things over. The Bezuidenhout family was furious about what happened, and his brother Hans seemed most upset of all.

When he noticed that the mood was getting ugly, Great Willem Prinsloo asked my great-great-great-great grandfather Frans to take a walk with him in the garden sine he had a feeling that matters were heading in an unpleasant direction. He didn’t want anything to do with it, and so he hastened to eat, upon which he returned homeward down the valley.

The rocky cleft where Freek Bezuidenhout fought and died.

Soon Hendrik Prinsloo, Christiaan and Diederick Muller, Cornelis Faber, Stephanus and Louw Bothma all vowed to take revenge, with Hans Bezuidenhout being the loudest of them all. He then singled old Frans Labuscagne and Lucas Van Vuuren out and declared that they were “worse than hyena turds.” He even went so far as to blame field cornet Opperman. Being thus insulted, my great-great-great-great grandfather walked away in disgust. He had resolved that he would have no further part of the rebellion.

By the time I reached the place where Freek was buried, I had already relived the entire frontier drama in my mind and seen it played upon the surrounding landscape like a mental movie. I had always felt sorry for Freek Bezuidenhout. He had been in the wrong completely, but he had touched my heart with his simple desire to be left alone to mind his own business. It was an ambition with which I could strongly identify.

Freek Bezuidenhout's last stand as seen from the north-east.

At the site where Freek was killed, the wind comes rushing down the valley bottom, hits the cliff face and then blows your breath away with the unexpected updraft. I always look down into the crevasse with a mix of curiosity and caution. You cannot really see down to the bottom for the shadows are too deep. It was a dramatic place for a frontiersman to die. In a way I’m glad he lost his life in this picturesque spot, instead of in some British prison. More than likely he would have been thrown into the black hole, as the dungeon in the Castle at Cape Town was called. There, the man who had known nothing but the open plains since the day that he was born would have wept and withered until he joined the shadows that were darker than night itself. Freek died as he had lived. Wild, stubborn and completely free.

Monument at the place where Freek was shot.

The church at Eildon

Beyond the place of the tragedy the road suddenly dips lower, and then winds deeper into the mountains. Finally it reaches a junction where a simple sign on a farm gate announces that you had finally reached the place that I was heading towards. It was the old Faber farm, which now bore the Scottish name of Eildon.

Road towarrds the Winterberg.

Immediately upon my left, there stood a settler’s church, build of neatly dressed sandstone. This was the old Scottish Presbyterian church which serves the handful of remaining inhabitants to this day. Alex Pringle had invited me to explore it at length for I would find the door unlocked. He was right. The door swung open easily at my approach.

The Scottish settlers church at Eildon.

I found the church to be quite small, and guessed that it would seat about fifty people. It was clean and cool inside, with everything in order. An arrangement of withered flowers reminded me that the previous day had been Sunday. It was very quiet as the sun filtered through a stained glass window and bathed the floor in amber glow. It seemed like a world within a world, half removed from full reality.

It almost felt as if I shouldn’t be there. As if I was an intruder from a different environment who would spoil the untouched sanctity of this gentle place. 

Church interior at Eildon.

The big old Bible lay upon a pedestal, begging to be opened, inviting the traveller to read a passage. Seeing a Bible of its size and weight, I’m sometimes reminded that perhaps this is one reason why older generations used to take the word of God so much more seriously than people do today. It just seemed so imposing, so substantial – and so impressive – in such massive form. Maybe we unwittingly miniaturized God in our own minds when our printing presses succeeded in shrinking Bibles to a size that could more easily be carried in our pockets.

Bibles were large when people still had respect for the word of God.

Around one corner hung a hand-painted portrait of Thomas Pringle, who had been awarded the farm after the revel Faber had been hung at the execution which followed Slagtersnek. Beneath the sandstone slab, lay the bones of Thomas Pringle, re-interred here after his death in England. He was buried in the ground that had once belonged to a man who had believed that he would fight to set it free.

Beneath this slab, in the Scottish settlers church, the bones of Thomas Pringle lie.

Poor Faber. Poor everybody who had played a part in this sad drama. In the end it struck me that practically everyone who participated in the events that followed the death of Freek Bezuidenhout seemed to have emerged as victims of this deadly tragedy. Even Landdrost Stockenstrom and Landdrost Cuyler, who had to prosecute the rebels, yet also did their best to obtain clemency for them – even they were victims of the ironic hand of fate.

View towards the south-east from one of the windows in the Scottish settlers church at Eildon.

The aftermath of Freek's death

The tale which followed the funeral of Freek Bezuidenhout is far too long to share here, but I will briefly summarize. When the funeral was over, Hans Bezuidenhout and his companions began a campaign to stir up a large-scaled insurrection across several of the gigantic frontier districts. It was about far more than just the death of his brother, if you understand the context of events. The frontiersmen had suffered years of being terrorized by neighbouring tribes, during which first the Dutch colonial authorities, and later the British authorities usually showed themselves to be perplexingly on the side of the attackers, instead of the side of their own colonials. For decades the Dutch administration had been inefficient and corrupt, and when it was replaced by British rule, the settlers found them to be approximately just as bad, or sometimes even worse.

Hans Bezuidenhout selected a very novel strategy, which however original it might have been unfortunately also proved to be the undermining of his scheme. He namely went to the Xhosas in the east and tried to form an allegiance, aimed at overthrowing British rule at the Cape and driving the occupiers back into the ocean.

While many of the frontiersmen supported his initiative at first, this attempt at bonding with an enemy which had caused the settlers years of death and misery simply proved too much to accept. It cost him and his ringleaders critical support which they would eventually pay for with their lives. My great-great-great grandfather Leonard and his little brother Adriaan joined the rebels in the beginning stages, but as the drama unfolded and the bitter root of the allegiance began to reveal that it was doomed to failure, they managed to disentangle themselves from it just in time.

As it was, they still found themselves charged along with the other rebels, after the Government forces defeated the rebels at the place called Slagtersnek – or Butcher’s ridge. They were lucky, however, and escaped merely with a fine. The five ringleaders, on the other hand, were hung until they were dead.

The poet's shepherd tree 

I was now on the farm that Thomas Pringle had received, thanks to the vacuum of ownership after the rebels had been executed. He could not have known it then, but already the frontiersmen had had enough and were dreaming about leaving the British colony. It was 1820 when Pringle arrived, and by 1836 my family would join the first of the Voortrekkers to leave the country.

When they realized that they would spend the rest of their lives living in war and subject to pillage and plunder, they just packed their waggons, abandoned their farms, and rode away into the limitless no-man’s land that lay beyond the Orange River. With them came hundreds, and later thousands of other emigrants – tired to death of fighting both against their enemies, and being persecuted and humiliated by the authorities who ruled over them.

Painting of Thomas Pringle in the Pringle home at Eildon.

Thomas Pringle was the son of a Scottish farmer, who having a handicap to his walking, had not been able to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead he became a poet, a writer and a journalist, before finally accepting a resettlement grant to relocate to the eastern frontier. Little did he or his fellow immigrants know it at the time, but the government’s sorry purpose was to bring more men into the conflict zone that had to function as a buffer between the Xhosa raiders and the interior of the colony. Instead of a mild and generous agricultural paradise, they discover a wild and savage land where the land yielded its produce grudgingly and everything around them was conspiring towards their destruction.

Thomas Pringle, however, did not seem so phased about it. Perhaps that was because ultimately he only lived seven years in South Africa before returning to England, and probably because Africa had charmed his soul just as she charmed the lives of all the men who came to love her. Still, the times he spent at his farm, which he now called Eildon, appear to have been happy ones.

I arrived before the brilliant white twin gables of an imposing old colonial house, feeling as unsure as I generally do when imposing myself upon strangers. I keep forgetting however, that in the wilderness there are no strangers. There are only friends whom you have not met before. Here, where people are even scarcer now than they used to be during the 1800’s, visitors seemed welcome. And the Pringle household proved to be no exception.

The stately manor of Eildon.

On the broad veranda I was met by a charming woman with a graceful bearing who extended her hand and introduced herself as Barry Pringle. She asked if it was alright if we talked while she was watering the garden. She would be hosting a gardening event next weekend and was expecting the arrival of a thousand people. It was important that the garden should look good, even in the baking heat of early spring.

Talk soon turned to the life of Thomas Pringle. I was told that her husband Alex, actually descended from Thomas’ brother, who had remained behind in South Africa, and who founded a dynasty whose roots trace back to this very house. She then asked if I had ever seen Pringle’s shepherd’s tree. I was mystified. I thought I knew a fair amount about history, but I had certainly never heard about this tree.

Formal gardens of Eildon.

So it came that Barry and I took a farming pickup and drove past the old family cemetery, down the slope and across a stream to where the original settler’s cottage was still standing. Her son now lives there, but even though the house had been restored over the years, it was still the same old settler’s cottage from generations ago. At the time that Thomas Pringle arrived, however, there was no house at all. Instead, he had himself built a native beehive hut, constructed from grass. Cool in summer and snug in winter, these beehive huts were very traditional, and very practical to live in at the time.

Next to the hut he had a shepherd’s tree, which most South Africans prefer to call the “witgat” tree. These are utterly remarkable trees. Firstly because there are relatively few of their kind. Secondly because of their pleasing appearance which is often umbrella-like in shape on account of how the animals tend to prune the succulent branches along the trunks.

The shepherd's tree at Eildon.

And thirdly because it is such a downright useful tree. The leaves can be eaten as a vegetable, and the roots are habitually roasted and ground to make popular substitute for coffee. It was under this tree, I was told, that Thomas Pringle used to sit and compose his poems, or write his fantasy stories about an imaginary world.

I don’t think Barry realized how enchanting I found this ancient tree. When I compared its current size to that depicted in a very old photographs of the same tree and house which must surely date from the 1800’s, it seemed almost no older at all. The witgat grows extremely slowly. It is an imminently patient plant, so very much in character with Africa itself.

Thomas Pringle would have been pleased if he could have seen a modern generation growing up beneath his trusty tree. Barry’s little grandchildren were playing the garden. Their mother apologized for what she called a mess, but what seemed to me to be just a delightfully homely country scene. She complained about the bushbuck that were eating her pansies and even the lavender bushes as fast as she could plant them.

The Shepherd's tree in olden days.

The shepherd's tree today, looking largely unchanged after perhaps a century.

I listened, but kept stealing glances at the shepherd’s tree. I’m not much of a poet, but for the sake of a romantic heart, I dearly wished that I too, could have spent an hour with my back against its trunk. To dream, to think, and perhaps to write a few paltry verses that would seek to capture something of the beautiful simplicity of this valley and its pleasant people.

Back at the manor house, Barry took her time to show me her graceful formal garden. Words can seldom describe the feeling of delight that one has in the wilderness of Africa whenever one comes across such an old haven of colonial splendour. Somehow it just seems to accompany the spirit of this ancient land so perfectly. With flowing gestures, she showed me her priceless painting by the famous painter, Thomas Baines. It depicted the Pringle house, probably around the 1840’s as seen from a distance.

A painting of Eildon by Thomas Baines, presumably around the 1840's.

Baines had a wonderfully unique talent to paint scenes that intimated animation. You always get the feeling that if you look away and suddenly look back at one of his pictures, you might be just in time to catch one of the figures still moving. While I enjoy good art immensely, you will always find me lingering the longest in front of the rare and wonderful paintings of the romantic explorer that was Thomas Baines.

Beautiful pieces of Victorian furniture, large old silver serving dishes with their plating worn away just slightly. Very tall ceilings and ancient panes of glass, through which the world is never as it is, but always rippled in impressionistic style. This was the house which the home of the Oracle. His son, David, told me more about the settler generation’s days. When I explained that I was still trying to find the exact place where my ancestors would have lived, he volunteered to introduce me to his father’s cousin, whom he described as a hugely interesting man whom he was sure I would enjoy greatly. I found him to be right on that account.

The butterfly collector 

On our way to the neighbouring farm of Ernest Pringle, David told me that Ernest had the biggest private collection of butterflies in the southern hemisphere. Originally an attorney, Ernest seemed more interest in life itself, and had spent much time discovering several unique new butterfly species, a number of which he had named after himself.

“Unless you plan to spend the rest of the day here,” David cautioned me, “I’ll advise you not to speak of butterflies.”

I took his advice, but I was tempted not to.

We found Ernest in a very large old house that seemed as if it had been caught in a time bubble from the 1950’s. Everything breathed the kind of world I had last experienced when I was a little child. Ernest invited us in with one of those extra wide and friendly smiles that you would come to expect among the best of country folk. He seemed surprised and slightly delighted when he heard about my quest.

It was not long before he vanished into the cool dark caverns of his house, only to return with an ancient hand-drawn map of the surrounding farms, done so beautifully that it might as well have been a picture in a gallery. Stories both related and completely unrelated to my quest poured fourth like water from a bubbling brook, and I knew that I was going to risk running out of daylight soon.

But when you meet people such as these good folk, you consider the risk only briefly, and then decide that you can sleep in your car for one night, if you really have to. Listen while you can when you find yourself in such a situation – for often times such experiences present themselves but once.

Across the map was scrawled in the hand of some legal clerk a case number and the words: “Pringle vs. Pringle.”

“What is that?” David asked his uncle.

“Oh that,” David smiled shyly, “is an unfortunate incident which we normally prefer not to talk about…”

For all its great mystery, however, Ernest proceeded to tell us the tale of an ancient feud between two family neighbours. A will, a contested property boundary, and water rights. It is a story as old as farming history itself – and it sounded all too familiar to me.

David told me about one solitary grave of a Boer fighter on the crest of one of the mountains on their land, which he thought nobody probably knows about. He said he had once almost driven into it with his pickup when he was fighting a runaway fire. It was in a place where no stones are to be expected, and he had completely forgotten that it was there. Together, we all wished we knew its history.

Then the conversation turned to farming. Fighting land claims was consuming much of Earnest’s time, while David and Alex were very concerned about the marauding jackal which he said, claims the lives of 500 of their sheep every year. The life of a farmer seems to have become no easier over the past 150 years.

I listened and I learned, while Earnest’s old Labrador lay by my feet, sleeping the slumber of a tired old beast that looked old enough to have been born when Thomas Pringle’s tree first sprouted. I knew that I would have to go soon and already felt sorry about all the information that I would not be able to absorb. It was a world which sounded so familiar to the one that I had come from. The same kind of people, the same kind of old-worlde homes, the same kind of conversations. It felt as if I had been invited to drink from a stranger’s pond, only to find that the waters tasted exactly like those which flowed from my own brook.

The road towards Winterberg.

And so we pointed our vehicle back towards Eildon where we arrived just in time to meet the Oracle himself as he returned home from towm. Alex smiled as we told him about our visit to his neighbour, and was glad to hear that I had seen the little chapel that he and the other farmers maintain so well, the shepherd’s tree – and the ancient world upon which the footsteps of my ancestors seemed to be only lightly covered by the sands of time.

It was time to go, for the sun was low by now, and I had yet to cross the Winterberg. The road gets at its worst along the berg, they told me, but as long as it was dry, my car would probably make it.

“Just take it slowly as you can,” I was told by one and all.

And so I took leave of the kind and generous people of the Baviaansriver Valley. With a feeling of contentment I turned eastward once more, and began the long and exhausting assault on the high land mass whose summit is always cold – the one so aptly called Winterberg – the Winter Mountain.

Next blog posting: I get lost, but am found by a man with a dog on a motorbike who helps me to find the place where Hans Bezuidenhout was killed.