Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 3 - final)

(Continued from Part 2)

On Sunday morning we had breakfast with Theo Ngubane and his brother Owen, and Owen told us something of his history. He had kept a shop for a while and then gone overseas to England, where he drove buses in London, based at Ealing, but he had been there after me, when it was Transport for London, not London Transport.

Owen & Theo Ngubane, Steve Hayes

So we had something in common, but with a time lapse, so we compared notes. Owen said the buses he drove were fully automatic and could almost drive themselves. I drove RT buses with preselector gearboxes -- you selected the next gear you thought you were going to need, but it wouldn't actually change until you pressed the gear pedal with your left foot. A little later we got Routemaster buses, which had automatic gearboxes, but not very good ones, because they only changed at certain speeds. so late at night one would have to travel long distances slowly in a fuel-wasting low gear. because to change to a higher gear one would have to travel faster and so get ahead of schedule.

The London we lived in was also very different. If anyone is interested in my reminiscences of the Swinging London of the 1960s, you can find them here.

Deacon John Aitchison reading the Gospel, St John's

After breakfast we went to Durban to St John's Church in Clark Road. John Aitchison was serving as deacon, and they had 3 New Testament readings, one of which was St Peter's vision of clean and unclean foods, and John preached on that. They sung hymns to a piano accompaniment, and John read the Gospel from the middle of the church, surrounded by servers swinging incense.

Afterwards John told me something about the arrangement of the stained-glass windows, how they surrounded people with saints, the disciples of Jesus, his friends, and others. We asked the Rector, Themba Vundla, if we would use the chapel to sing the Hours and Obednitsa, and we read our own Gospel of the Samaritan Woman. There are not many Sundays after Pascha left when we can sing the Paschal hymns. so we did not want to miss this one.

Gammage Family, Pinetown 19 May 2025

On Monday 19 May we went up to Farningham Ridge to see Val's cousin Arthur Gammage, who was celebrating his 74th birthday. Arthur's younger brother Douglas and his wife Margie and their son Ken was also there, so it was a fair-sized family gathering, with Arthur's wife Jenny and their son Keith.

They talked about their children and foster children and adopted children. Both families had adopted or fostered children with various disabilities, and Hilda, who had been adopted by Arthur and Jenny was now in a home, where she could be cared for. 

Arthur Gammage, 74th Birthday

Doug and Margie had adopted Hilda's brother Richard, who had even more problems than Hilda, and they said his behaviour would worsen at the time of the full moon. Nowadays many people seem to think that is a silly superstition, I had noticed that much the same thing had happened with someone I had worked and shared a house with 50 years ago. He could be very pleasant and affable sometimes, but then he would start getting fits of the sulks, and would do all kinds of petty spiteful things. I sometimes wondered if I was just imagining things, or perhaps was going mad -- more recently I discovered that this kind of behaviour is called "gaslighting" After a few months I noticed that his sulky phases seemed to coincide with the full moon. I don't know if Richard's behaviour was similar, but it did seem to be affected by the moon.

After the birthday party we went to Durban North and again went to the Spur Steak Ranch for their pensioners' special. That particular branch of the Spur franchise was in the grounds of a sports club, and we parked next to an abandoned bowling green.

Blacksmith plover at Durban North

There we saw a blacksmith plover, like the ones we have in our garden at home. This one had a sore foot, and, perhaps because it was more difficult for it to run away, stood still and let me take a photo of it. It seems that several species of birds that used to be quite wild and rarely seen, and then only out in the country, are becoming urbanised and even domesticated. Hadedas became urbanised about 1990, and plovers and dik kops a few years later. At first it was crowned plovers we saw in our garden, but now the blacksmith plovers seem more common. The are called that because their cry sounds like a hammer hitting an anvil. There were also a couple of babies, and the one with the sore foot appeared to have a mate on the other side of the bowling green.

We sat by the window overlooking a hockey field with astroturf, and some schoolkids were practising on it. Four schoolboys came in, aged about 11-13; two Indian, one coloured, one white, They sat at a table nearby, and we wondered how they had enough money to buy lunch at such a place. Maybe they were here after school to practise some sport, and their parents might have arranged for them to have lunch first.

Nora Saneka, Noreen Ramsden, Val Hayes

We went on to see Nora Saneka, now living in Roseglen with her widowed mother Noreen Ramsden. We had known the Ramsden family in Durban North in the 1970s, and it was good to see two of them again

They were having their fibre telephone cable repaired, as the municipality had cut the grass and cut the cable as well. Nora showed us photos of their family -- her husband Mike Saneka, who had died a couple of years ago after an operation for a cancer resulting from smoking too much. Her daughters Rebecca and Pascal, Pascal was a doctor, and specialised in trauma, and had gained a great deal of experience through the disasters that had struck Durban in recent years -- the Zuma riots, bringing in gunshot wounds; the floods, with drownings and so on. She said her brother Richard was in Sydney, Australia, where he was a kind of consultant, and he was the one member of the family that never seemed to be mentioned in our communications with them on Facebook.

Mexican Sunflower?

Her mother Noreen came in in a wheelchair, now in her 90s and suffering from Parkinson's disease, which made it difficult for her to talk. Her father, Bill Ramsden had died a few months ago, and had been disappointed that he would not last long enough to get a letter from King Charles on his 100th birthday, as he never made it that far, but tried to pretend he was older than he actually was. There was, however, a commendation from Queen Elizabeth hanging on the wall.

Nora said she belonged to St Mary's Anglican parish in Greyville where she seemed to be quite active. She said the rectory had been sold to become a pizza parlour, and the adjacent shops were used by a group of businessmen who wanted to take over the church hall as well, but the parish had started a nursery school, which the businessmen seemed anxious to close. Nora was worried that the Archdeacon of Durban seemed to support the businessmen, as he thought the sale of the hall would bring in some money for the church. Nora argued that the church should use its buildings for the benefit of the community rather than just selling them off to raise funds.

Val Hayes & Peter Gunning, Ballito Beach

On Tuesday 20th May we had breakfast with Theo and Owen Ngubane, and left Nagina at 9:15 am, to head up the North Coast and stopped nearby to take some photos of the ubiquitous yellow roadside flowers. They only seem to grow along roads with heavy traffic, so it's difficult to take photos of them. Carl Brook told us they were Mexican sunflowers and were an invasive alien species, but we thought they looked rather pretty and looked them up on the Web, and found that they are useful for fertilising the soil.

We drove down to Umngeni and along Riverside Drive and up the old North Coast Road. We turned off at Casuarina Beach, where there had once been an old house we liked as we passed it when we lived in Melmoth and travelled to Durban back in the 1970s, but it had long been demolished, and modern ugly blocks of flats were being built in its place, and most of the Casuarina trees had vanished and we saw only a few palms.

Melvain Donyes at iHlozi Lodge

I went to a toilet there, but only the shell remained. It was full of rubbish, and all the fittings had been nicked. As we were leaving a bloke in a car stopped, and said it wasn't safe there; old people had been attacked, and we should rather go on to Westbrook Beach, which was further on.

We went on to Ballito, where we called on Peter Gunning, who took us to coffee at a beachside kiosk. We sat on a bench overlooking Ballito Beach and Pete spoke of Bible study groups he had participated in, some of which had old St Martin's people in them, including Alison Bastable, whom he said had wanted to see me, but we did not have her contact info. He talked about the millennialists in Bible study groups who waited for the end of the world, and were fans of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. I wasn't aware that there were people who were still interested in that, and Pete said that they had changed the ending to put forward things that Hal Lindsey had predicted would happen, but hadn't happened as predicted, so they moved them further into the future.

IHlozi Lodge. Kuleni Estate, near Hluhluwe, KZN

We went on our way up the coast, using the R102, and avoiding the N2 toll road, partly because of a conscientious objection to toll roads. In the past all roads had been paid for out of the Road Fund, which was replenished by the tax on petrol, which seemed a pretty fair "user pays" way of doing things, but the then National Party government wanted to rob the Road Fund for its attempted conquest of Angola, and so toll roads were introduced. Another reason for avoiding the toll roads was that they are full of big 26-wheeler trucks, which make driving unpleasant.

Along the R102 at every settlement or village there were speed bumps in the road, often not well marked. But though the road makings had faded, you could often tell where they were because of the sugar cane that had bounced out of trucks as they went over them. The road was otherwise in good condition.

Melvain Donyes

We crossed the Tugela (uThukela) River on the old N2 bridge, which had been washed away in floods some years ago, so we had had to take a detour via Mandini when we travelled this way before, but the bridge had now been replaced. looking much as it had before, and from there to Empangeni the road was much as it had been 40 years ago when we lived in Melmoth and travelled down to Durban. Here it was the new toll road that was nearer to the coast.

We filled up with petrol for the third time on our trip at Mtubatuba. We drove on to Hluhluwe and reached Kuleni Estate at sundown. We went on to iHlozi Lodge, where our friends Melvain and Lynette Donyes welcomed us and we had supper with them and chatted. Melvain and Lynette had bought iHlozi Lodge out of their retirement savings and run it as a guest house to support them and their ministry as evangelist/teachers in the Pentecostal tradition. Melvain was one of the pioneers of online communications in South Africa, having set up one of the first BBSs and importing some Christian networks. One of the forums we started back then is still functioning, now as an email mailing list. It's called Offtopic, because it's a relaxed sort of place where you can discuss things that might be considered "off topic" in more specialised online forums. If you know us and would like to stay in touch, feel free to join us there -- you can find out more about it here. And if you're looking for a place to stay in northern Zululand near the coast, click here to find out more about iHlozi Lodge.And for more places to stay run by our family or friends, see here.

Melvain Donyes, Val Hayes, Lynette Donyes

On Wednesday 21 May we spent the day with Mel and Lynette, driving into the small town of Hluhluwe to have lunch at a small cafe there, and chatting about old times and old friends sitting around the fire in the evening.

On Thursday 22 May we said goodbye to Mel and Lynette and headed for home, and again had problems with poor road signage. Perhaps the roads authorities think that road signs are not needed because nowadays everyone listens to the plastic auntie giving directions on GPS, but we found that doesn't work too well, at least not on our cell phones. It shows you approaching a turnoff, but by the time is shows you have reached it, you've already passed it, so the signs would be useful. So we drove up the N2 for about 5 kilometres looking for the R69 to Vryheid, and had to turn back. It turned out to be a rough gravel road, but soon climbed into the hills with some spectacular views over the Pongola Dam.

View from Magudu, KZN

Then the map showed we had to join the R66 and travel 3 km south towards Nongoma before continuing along the R69. This time there was a sign, but it was actually a "short cut" and we should have carried on along the unmarked road. Eventually we saw a sign to a place that was on the map, the small village of Magudu, perched high on a hill, with splendid views in every direction -- well worth a visit.

And from there it was a zig-zag run (to avoid potholes) to Vryheid via Louwsburg (off the road and unseen) and Hlobane, a rather unromantic coal-mining town. Stopped for lunch at a Wimpy in Vryheid, and then on to Utrecht, where we had lived in 1976/77. 

St Michael's Anglican Church, Utrecht, KZN

The small church of St Michael & All Angels, built by British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, looked much the same as ever, but there was nothing to indicate what denomination it belonged to or the times of services. When we had been there there was an amazing carbon-filament light bulb in the entrance, which had probably lasted the 77 years since the church was built. Perhaps, after another 48 years, it is still working.

 We had a quick look around the town, which seemed little changed from nearly 50 years ago, before heading on home via Volksrust, Standerton and Leandra -- 710km in 13 hours, tired from avoiding potholes, for which Steve blames Maggie Thatcher, who started the mania for deregulation of road transport which has led to the deterioration of both the road and rail infrastructure. But hey, it was an enjoyable trip, and we saw a lot of old friends and met a few new ones.

Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 2)

 (Continued from Part 1)

Val Hayes & Cath Stempowski

On Wednesday 14 May we had tea with Huberto and Cath Stempowski at Cowies Hill. We had met them at Clarens, where they had also gone for the memorial to Peter Walters. 

Cath is an artist, and worked in various media, and showed us some of her pictures. She said she would be interested in playing with a possible illustration for the cover of the second edition of my children's book Of Wheels and Witches, which is being prepared for publication by Shack Simple Press in Texas, and she suggested some styles that could be used.

The story is about four children who have adventures in the Southern Drakensberg back in the time of apartheid, and spend some time riding around on horses, so the illustrations could show them on horseback or on foot, at any point in the story. Cath had one picture of a horse that suggested one possible style that could be used.

We drove down from Cowies Hill into Pinetown, and there found Sandy's Supermarket, which had been there forever. In the same shopping centre was a Spur Steak Restarant, so we had lunch there. We had their old folks special -- coffee; 124g steak with salad and chips, and ice cream, for R129.00, which was less than half the cost of the single course we had had at Granny Mouse's Country House the previous day.

Revd Theophilus Ngubane

Back to Theo Ngubane's place for supper, and more talking afterwards about old times together in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand in the 1970s and 1980s. Theo was amazed that Steve remembered the names of many people that he had forgotten, and said that most of those we had known had died. The only one left was Hamilton Mbatha, who had been Rector of KwaMagwaza Parish and rural dean of the Mthonjaneni Deanery when we had been there. Hamilton, Theo said, was still active in his retirement, and was often asked to preach in various places. Remembering names was easy because it was a close-knit community, and people often gathered at the diocesan conference centre at KwaMagaza. It was a place where we had many friends, and felt closer to people than in the big city. Once the burglar alarm went off at our neighbour's house in Kilner Park, in the Great City of Tshwane, and we phoned the neighbour to let him know, and he said he had moved away two years previously. Big cities are very anonymous places.

Perhaps one thing that has made it easier to remember people's names is that we had taken photos of many of them, and looked at the photos occasionally to remind ourselves of them.

Nagina, near Pinetown, with yellow roadside flowers

On Wednesday Theo asked us to lead morning prayers, so we read the Hours of Pascha, with its repetitions of "Christ is Risen". After breakfast Theo took us in his son's car, a Yaris that was newer than ours, up to Maritzburg, up a back road from Nagina near Pinetown, where Theo lives, , the M61 West via Shongweni Dam, where we could see all the houses built on what until quite recently were bare hillsides. The hills were very steep, and there were lots of yellow flowers at the sides of the road, a bit like the orange zinnia-like ones in Gauteng, except that these were a bit more like daisies.

At one place Theo pointed out sewage pipes coming out of houses and emptying into the gutter of the road, and said that people bribed the municipal inspectors for such things. Up at the top,just before joining the N3, there was a new shopping mall, Westown, a huge affair out in the veld, with access roads being built to it from Hillcrest and other places.

Macrina Walker, Val Hayes, Carl Brook, Theo & Steve

From there we drove along the N3 to Hilton, and much of it being worked on, so it was reduced to 2 lanes, with the left lane being mostly occupied by 26-wheeler trucks. We went to Sweetwaters to see Carl Brook and his wife Elma. He is now head of ESSA (the Evangelical Seminary of South Africa). after having worked in Swaziland for a while. We had last seen them in 2008 when they were living down the South Coast. I had first met Carl online back in the 1990s and he was researching monastic and other intentional communities in southern Africa, and we had later met face-to-face a few times.

Val Hayes & Macrina Walker at Macrina's new cottage

After a while Macrina Walker, who lives just down the road, joined us, and we took her to lunch at a place called "The Upper Millstone" where they served sandwiches and coffee which for the four of us cost little more than lunch for one at Granny Mouse's Country House.

 Macrina took my book of St John Chrysostom's Liturgy and said she would rebind it for me. She was looking for an apprentice  of sorts to do that kind of work, as she is now mainly binding new books that she sells overseas, through her bookbinding service Annesi Bindings.

 Macrina is another person we had first met online, when she was a Roman Catholic nun in the Netherlands, and thinking of becoming Orthodox.

Theo Ngubane, Linelle Irvine, Val Hayes

We went across to Hayfields to see Linelle Irvine, who had been at varsity with Steve back in the 1960s, and hadn't seen each other for nearly 60 years.  She was living at the Lutheran Gardens Retirement Home, opposite the Lutheran Church. She had spent most of her working life as an English teacher.

We were very much having a "seeing people" holiday, visiting old friends and family that we hadn't seen for a long time, as many as said they would like to see us.

Darryl & Anne Honey, Val Hayes. Sarnia, 15 May 2025

On Thursday 15 May we visited another old friend, Darryl Honey. He had been a neighbour of Steve at Culemborg Flats in Sandringham, Johannesburg, and later in Cheltondale. And we reminisced about old times and people we had known. We had found him on Facebook -- he was one of the people Facebook said we might know, as we had a mutual friend Tony MacGregor. Darryl said he had actually been friends with Tony's brother Chris MacGregor, through his interest in jazz, and said he had had a jazz guitar when he was younger, but when his bike was stolen his father had refused to get him a new one, and he had swapped his guitar for a bike. That is one of the main uses of social media web sites like Facebook -- they help you to re-establish contact with people you had lost touch with.

Val Hayes, Tim & Celia Sparks

In that afternoon we had tea with more old friends, Celia Sparks and her son Tim. Steve had first met Celia when a mutual friend, Martin Goulding, had commandeered her garage to repair Steve's old car, a 1961 Peugeot 403 station wagon, which needed new main bearings, not a job which could be done out in the street. 

Tim had been interested in Orthodoxy, and had visited a monastery near Pretoria. He is now a poet, and we talked mostly about books of Charles Williams. 

On the Saturday we left Theo’s home in Nagina and went to the other side of Pinetown to visit Val's sister Elaine and her family.

Val Hayes, Elaine Machin, Wyatt Anderson

They have an interesting family arrangement as Val's niece Lesley and her husband Jay have a house with a small second house on the premises and their mothers live together there. This gives security to the ladies and also provides for baby-sitting for their mutual grandchild Wyatt, who certainly does not suffer from the lack of love and attention from two grannies.

Elaine has not been well for the past few months, and also had a very bad fall which left her face bruised and cut . I had been very concerned for her, but was happy to see that she is well and recovering. She is very artistic and I encouraged her to pick up her paints again and spend time doing something she really enjoys.

They spoiled us with lovely tea/lunch and it was great to catch up on so many years since we were last together (13 years). Wyatt is a beautiful, active, enquiring little boy.

Wyatt and his other granny, Averil Anderson

 

(continued in Part 3)

Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 1)

In May 2025 we went on a holiday trip to the Free State and KZN, the first time we had been outside Gauteng for ten years. In 2015 we went to the Northern and Western Cape, which you can read about here, if you are interested. This is a kind of travelogue, people and places we saw in our travels.

This time our journey was initially sparked off by family concerns. A cousin of mine, Peter Walters (alias Peter Badcock-Walters) died a year ago, and we went to Clarens in the Free State to have a memorial gathering on the anniversary of his death. Its a route we have taken a few times before -- from Kilner Park in the Great City of Tshwane we head south-east down the R50 to Delmas, which the road by-passes, and from there to Devon, Balfour, Villiers, Frankfort, Bethlehem and finally to Clarens.

Sibusiso Gama - a kind young man

But, we find, the Province of Mpumalanga doesn't do road signs. The turn-off to Devon is not marked, and we can't remember it from the last time we passed this way 12 years ago. I tried to check the Google maps on my cell phone, but didn't know how to work it properly and trying to type something in while bouncing along avoiding potholes was too difficult. So we continued on to Leandra, formerly known as Leslie and now called something else, and took the road to Devon from there. A few kilometres on, we hit an enormous pothole. Val was driving, and with a 26-wheeler truck coming the other way, there was nowhere to swerve to, and bang there was a flat tyre. We stopped at the first place where it was possible to get off the road, and had to remove all the luggage to get at the spare wheel, and fumble under the passenger seat to find the jack, and we had just started to jack up the car when a very kind young man, Sibusiso Gama, stopped to help us. One thing we have found is that if you have car trouble, people are generally kind and stop to help. The road from Balfour to Villiers had many more potholes, and we very drove slowly as another flat tyre would mean we'd be stuck.

Villiers looked a bit like a ghost town, since the highway now by-passes it, but the volume of traffic can barely manage the toll plaza, and the single-lane bridge into Villiers would never cope. The Vaal River at Villiers looked pretty, so we took some photos. 

The Vaal River at Villiers

We made it to Clarens without any further problems. Peter Walters and his wife Toni ran a guest house, Clarens Country House which they had converted from an old sheep shearing shed. Peter & Toni's son Craig returned from Greece to help Toni run the guest house after Peter's death, and their other son, Ross, came up from KwaZulu-Natal with his wife Susie and son Tom for the gathering.

The next morning we drove back to Bethlehem to get the flat tyre seen to. It turned out that there was nothing wrong with the tyre, but they couldn't mend the wheel, and got a second-hand one from somewhere, and as a result we now have two mismatched front wheels. Farming communities are very good at fixing things.

More friends arrived and on the Saturday morning we all went to have breakfast at a cafe on a farm surrounded by herb gardens, and all meals served with their homemade cheese.

Susie, Ross, Craig & Toni Walters, Steve & Val Hayes

 

At the memorial gathering itself, Peter's friends came, and there were about 30 people there. Several shared their memories of Pete. He was an artist and book illustrator. He did the illustrations for an edition of the work of Herman Charles Bosman, He was also an educational reformer, and gave a lot of time to educational reform in South Africa. We concluded with the shortest and simplest form of the Orthodox Memorial Service (with the blessing of our parish priest, Fr Danil). This is usually done on the anniversary of a person's death, or the closest Saturday to it.

Craig Walters presents Tom with his granddad's kilt

This was followed by a buffet supper at which Craig passed on to young Tom his grandfather's kilt in the MacFarlane tartan (Peter's and my great-grandmother was Ellen MacFarlane (1858-1933), from Glasgow). 

On Sunday morning we sang the Hours and Obednitsa with Toni and Craig, and Craig, who had heard Orthodox services in Greek, quite enjoyed hearing it in English. These are the services used in the Orthodox Church when there is no priest present, and the Obetnitsa, or Typika, is like the Divine Liturgy, but with the priest's parts left out. 

On Monday 12 May we left Clarens for KwaZulu-Natal. Last time we passed this way the Oliviershoek Pass over the Drakensberg was said to be impassible, so we had avoided it. This time we were just told it was bad, with detours and wash-aways, but it was much better than we expected, and we enjoyed the autumn colours of the trees along the route, especially in Winterton. We avoided the toll roads as far as possible, driving through Estcourt, Mooi River and Nottingham Road. Beyond Balgowan we saw a sign saying that Granny Mouse's Country House was open for lunch, so we went in. I expected a thatched cottage surrounded by hollyhocks with a few tables and maybe tea and cream scones. It turned out to be a rather large hotel, with a very expensive, though tasty, curry lunch. It cost over R600 for the two of us.

Jacelyn & Hannes Zwart, Gary & Cheryldene van Schoor

On leaving there we stopped to take photos of the Lidgeton Falls on Lions River, then bypassed Pietermaritzburg, and visited another cousin, Cheryldene van Schoor (nee Bradbury). I had not met her before, and had last seen her father, Michael Bradbury, when I was 7 and he was 12, in Ingogo, so it was good to meet his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren!

Our common ancestors were John and Adelaide Cottam, from Manchester in the UK, They came to Durban in 1863, with John Bagot Cottam as accounted to the Natal Cotton Plantation Company, which didn't succeed in growing much cotton. Manchester at that time depended on its cotton miles, and the cotton supply had probably dried us as a result of the American Civil War, which was probably what brought J.B. Cottam to Natal.

We went on to Pinetown, and drove past Mariannhill through an endless traffic jam going down the hill to Nagina, where we stayed with an old friend, Theophilus Ngubane. Forty-five years ago we had worked together in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, training self-supporting priests and deacons. We sat around talking until 1:00am catching up on news from the past.

Addington Beach, Durban. 13 May 2025

The next morning Theo insisted that the first thing we must do in Durban after not having been there for a long time was go to the beach, and so he took us on a tour through some of the southern suburbs. Seeing it in daylight we were immediately struck by the proliferation of yellow flowers at the side of the road. We had never seen such flowers in Durban before (our last visit was in 2012). They grew on quite tall plants. But about a month ago we were struck by similar plants in the Great City of Tshwane, but there the flowers had been orange.

Addington Beach, replanted with coastal bush

Theo took us to Addington Beach, which had been done up since we had last seen it, and one noticeable improvement was that someone, presumably the eThekwini Municipality had restored the indigenous coastal bush along the edge of the beach, which helped to stop beach erosion. This also gave the feel that you used to get along the coast of walking the narrow path through the bush, and encountering the beach and the sea. Another interesting observation was that I follow a couple of Facebook groups where people post historical pictures of old Durban, and there are usually numerous comments from white racists about how nice and clean Durban and its beaches were in the "good" old days of apartheid, and how filthy and rubbish clogged the place is now. But we could see no sign of the alleged filth and rubbish, and it all looked clean and well maintained to us.

Steve Hayes, John Aitchison, Theophilus Ngubane

Theo took us to the King Shaka Ocean World, which again was new to us. We had lunch at Macdonalds, where they no longer had printed menus. and you were expected to order through a phone app. None of us had the app, or any room on our phones for it, so the black waitress pressed buttons on a big screen, and was a bit taken aback to discover that Theo was buying lunch for his white friends. 

We went on for afternoon tea at the Windermere Centre, where we had afternoon tea with another old friend, John Aitchison, who had been at university with Steve in Pietermaritzburg, and we has worked together on Theological Education by Extension (TEE).

(continued in Part 2)

 

 

 

Travelling through southern Africa in the 19th & 21st Centuries

Footing with Sir Richard's Ghost by Patricia Glyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Patricia Glyn, having heard about the travels of her great grand uncle Sir Richard Glyn, decides to walk the trail of his 19th-century journey from Durban to the Victoria Falls. This is the diary of her journey, with excerpts from his diary, and notes on the places they passed through, and historical events that had taken place there.

Sir Richard Glyn and his English companion were that comparatively rare species of traveller, the British "sportsman", who came to Africa primarily to hunt animals for sport, and left with their trophies. Though comparatively rare, however, unlike most other travellers they kept comparatively good written records in the form of diaries, and so their travels are better documented than most.

The book was a toss-out from the Alkantrant Library, probably a donation from a deceased estate. I hope the reason that the library tossed it out was that they already had a copy, and not just that they didn't think they needed one because it would be a pity if this book were not available. Just as her relative's diary is a valuable account of how people travelled and lived in the 1860s, so hers is a record of how people travelled and lived in the same parts of the world in the early 21st century.

In the 1860s the travellers relied of paid local guides, accounts of other travellers, or local advice or knowledge. In the 21st century this was supplemented by cell- and satellite phones and more accurate maps.

One of the reasons I found it interesting was that in 2013 my wife Val and I went on a similar journey, following in the footsteps of her great-great-grandfather Fred Green, who travelled through much of the same region, and also that to the west, from the 1850s until his death in 1870. Unlike the Glyns, he was not a sportsman, but a professional hunter, trader and explorers, his main source of income being ivory for which he hunted and traded. Unlike Patricia Glyn, however, we did not walk, but drove by car, taking three weeks instead of five months.

The book is illustrated with photos and maps, and has side panels with historical and geographical notes drawn from a variety of sources, which are all listed in the copious bibliography.

View all my reviews

The Caliban Shore: anatomy of a shipwreck

The Caliban Shore by Stephen Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There have been many shipwrecks on the coast of southern Africa over the centuries, but only four stick in my mind -the wreck of the Grosvenor on the Pondoland coast in 1782, the Birkenhead just east of Cape Town in 1852, the Dunedin Star on the coast of Namibia in 1942, and the Oceanos in 1991, a little south of where the Grosvenor was wrecked. I learned about the first two at school -- they made it to the history books as being among the most famous shipwrecks on the southern African coast. The wreck of the Birkenhead was famous for establishing the principle of "women and children first", and the wreck of the Oceanos was famous for the abandoning of that principle.

All aboard the Dunedin Star and the Oceanos were rescued. Many of those aboard the Birkenhead died, but their fate was known. But the wreck of the Grosvenor became the stuff of legend, because the fate of the majority of its passengers and crew remains unknown to this day, nearly 240 years later. And that is what Stephen Taylor explores in The Caliban Shore -- what happened to the ship and the people in August 1782. In doing so he reveals some interesting facets of the history of India, southern Africa, and the UK.

The fascination of the story is partly in the mysteries. We quite enjoy watching the TV series Air Crash Investigation, where the interest is in the search to discover what happened and why. It is a puzzle to be solved. Was it a mechanical error or a human error, or an event outside human control, like weather, or a volcanic eruption? If it is a human error, it is sometimes caused by human relations -- what were the relations of the crew members? It can also be poor training and skill. These issues are explored in the TV series in a formulaic way, but in the case of the wreck of the Grosvenor, Stephen Taylor does it much more thoroughly.

We learn something about the economics of India, and especially of the trade between India and the UK, which the British East India Company sought to monopolise, but though it dominated the trade, it did not control it completely. We learn, for example, that of the 740 tons of cargo that the ship could carry, the Captain was entitled to use 58 tons for his own personal trade. The Captain also decided who could be passengers, and how much they should pay.

In addition to the mystery of what led up to the fate of the ship, there is the mystery of missing persons. The fate of the majority of people on board remains unknown. The nearest port where they could hope to get a ship to continue their journey to Britain was Cape Town, 800 miles (1290 km) away, measured by modern roads, but in those days there were no roads for about half the distance. There were young children, pregnant women and sickly old people among the survivors of the wreck, and most of them did not survive the journey, or else gave up.

[author Stephen Taylor] examines all the known remaining records of the event to trace the lives and careers of those who were aboard to ship, to try to piece together what happened to each. Some are known to have died on the journey. Others were abandoned by their fellows in circumstances where they were assumed to have died. The route to Cape Town passed through a war zone; it was the beginning of the 100 Years War between the Xhosas and the Cape Colony, though history usually divides it into nine "Frontier Wars". And the Dutch who controlled the Cape Colony were at war with the British, so British ships did not call there. A few of the survivors managed to get on Danish ships. But some decided to stay put and settle where they were, among the local Pondo people, others may have done so, but it is not certain who they were, or where they settled.

 The news of the shipwreck took a long time to reach Britain, and when it did it was sketchy and gasve rise to sensational and highly speculative press reports. The voyage from Britain to India in  the 1780s usually took 6-8 months. Much was made of the anxiety of the families of those involved, who lacked what the media nowadays call "closure". For many, it seems, the good news would be that their relatives had died, for to be marooned among a strange and unknown people was seen as "a fate worse than death". 

For the local people, the wreck was both an opportunity and a threat. Pondoland had no deposits of iron ore, so people in the vicinity of the wreck, ignoring the castaways and their plight, set about burning the wooden wrekage of the ship to retrieve nails and any other bits of scrap metal they could find. When the castawats tried to approach them, they drove them away, and this was seen and portrayed as evidence of the "savagery" of the local people, though it seems that in our day people who are shipwrecked while travelling from Africa to Europe are treated just as badly by Europeans, who seem to be equally savage, 

With hindsight, and research, Taylor explains this -- August, when the ship was wrecked, was the end of winter. The grazing was poor, the cattle were thin, and the previous season's crops were almost exhausted, so the prospect of 140 uninvited guests for dinner was just too much. Later, when the shipwreck survivors had split into smaller groups, they were treated more hospitably.

Another interesting thing is that the ship carried a report on corruption in the British East India company and its officials. Both the report and the bearer failed to make it to Britain as a result of the wreck. I found this interesting because I studied a related incident in history at university -- the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. This book made a great deal more sense of what he was impeached for and why, and perhaps also helps to explain some events in our own time, when the Gupta brothers engaged in state capture in South Africa, and promoted corruption in business, the civil service and in state-owned enterprises. It seems that the British East India Company was very much into state capture. I'm not sure whether they started it or just passed on what they had received from others, but it seems that the Guptas were heirs of that tradition, and have passed it on to the RET crowd in South Africa.

The books explores the history, the legends and the rumours, and tries to establish, as far as possible, what actually happened. So there is history, an investigation into a shipwreck, a survival story, and a search for what happened to missing persons as well.







View all my reviews

Travelling in Tibet in the 1990s: colonialism and neocolonialism

Naked Spirits: A Journey Into Occupied Tibet by Adrian Abbotts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently read Magic and Mystery in Tibet, written by a western visitor who illegally entered Tibet in the early 20th century. This book is about a couple of western visitors to Tibet 75 years later, when it was under Chinese occupation. And at the same time I was reading Orientalism, on how to deconstruct western views of "the Orient".

The earlier visitor, [author Alexandra David-Neel], had a couple of advantages. She could speak Tibetan, and she had also spent several years in Tibetan monasteries. And though she was an illegal immigrant, she was seeing a relatively independent Tibet, where Tibetans were free to be themselves. She was, nevertheless, also seeing Tibet through western eyes, and even, at one point, described herself as an Orientalist.

But the authors of Naked Spirits were tourists in the 1990s, when Tibet had been under Chinese rule for 40 years, and while foreign tourists could roam relatively freely in China proper, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) was closed to all but expensive organised tour groups, who were kept isolated from the Tibetan people, and only allowed to see what their tour guides would allow them to see. Adrian Abbotts and his wife Maria therefore spent a great deal of time applying for permits to go to this or that place, and describe their dealings with Chinese officialdom and bureaucracy, and at that point it all seemed very familiar indeed. Tibet under Chinese rule reminded me of nothing so much as Namibia under South African rule, which I experienced from I went to Namibia in 1969 until I was deported from there in 1972.

The parallels between Chinese rule in Tibet and South African rule in Namibia were amazing, especially the attitudes and reactions of government officials to whom one applied for various permits and permissions to visit or travel through places. There were many parts of the book where I thought "Been there, done that." And Adrian Abbots and his wife evidently learned the lesson that we learned in Namibia: it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Also similar was the naked racism. The white South African rulers thought themselves superior to the native Namibians just as the Han Chinese rulers saw themselves as superior to the native Tibetans, and tried to make their language dominant.

There are differences too. In Namibia the South African rulers at least pretended to a kind of respect for local cultures, and encouraged them to "develop on their own lines" (the lines, of course, being lad down by the South African government). In Tibet there was no such pretence. Within Tibet all higher education was in Chinese and for Chinese. Tibetans who wanted higher education had to travel to China proper, and be immersed for several years in Han culture before they could return home, a policy that seemed more akin to that of Sheldon Jackson in Alaska than to the South African Department of Bantu Education.

So the book was particularly interesting to read in the light of the recent growth of Chinese economic activity in Africa, which looks suspiciously like neocolonialism. This includes the destruction of Namibian forest by Chinese logging, and, just over the border in Botswana, the threat of fracking in the Okavango Delta by a Canadian mining firm. It doesn't matter if the neocolonialism is Western or Eastern, there is little difference.






View all my reviews

On holiday, Free State and Eastern Cape

Last Tuesday we left Pretoria for a holiday, travelling around seeing people and places. On the first day we drove to Clarens in nthe Eastern Cape, where the trees, especially the Lombardy poplars, were in their yellow atutumn beauty.



On Wednesday we drove to Graaff Reinet, to spent a couple of nights at Villa Reinet, run by Steve's cousins Nick and Ailsa Grobler. Thursday spent visiting the Valley of Desolation and Nieu Bethesda. where real ale was available.



The Karroo Ale is brewed on the spot, and one drinks it in a room that feels like something out of Tolkien, The sign of the pracninbg pony at Bree, perhaps.

Since Lion Ale was withdrawn from the market by South African Breweries some 20 or more years ago, no ale has been available, until these guys at Nieu Bethesda starteds brewing this -- on the l;eft is Honey Ale, which Val had, and the right Karroo Ale, which I drank.

The end of the earth: book review

End of the Earth by Peter Matthiessen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Peter Matthiessen writes about two journeys to Antarctica, one from Tierra del Fuego in South America to the shore of the Antarctic Peninula west of the Weddell Sea, and the second from Tasmania to the Ross Sea, almost on the other side of the continent.

On both occasions he travelled on Russian ships, which, because of the economic situation in Russia, no longer ply the northern coast of Russia, but find tourist trips at the other end of the world more profitable.

Matthiesen describes not just the journeys, but the history of the places they visit, most of which have no permanent human inhabitants. He describes the wild life (most of the passengers of the ships are keen bird watchers), and the highlight of the second trip, the Emperor Penguin, the only bird species on earth that never lives on land, and breeds on the ice shelf.

I would probably not have given the book a second glance if it had not been going cheap at a sale, and two things made me buy it. Last year I went to a gathering at African Enterprise in Pietermaritzburg, where Michael Cassidy showed slides of a trip to Antarctica that had been a 70th birthday present. He had followed more or less the route of Matthiessen's first trip from Tierra del Fuego, and having seen the pictures I was quite interested to read about it. A second reason that I had read and enjoyed a couple of other books by Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard and At play in the fields of the Lord.

I thought this would be a book that I might dip into, and read a few interesting parts of, but as I read I became quite absorbed in it. It is more than just a travelogue, but it is also the story of our planet.

View all my reviews

The vanishing hitchhiker

No, I'm not talking about the well-known urban legend (Legends from a small country: Legends that go bump), but about the fact that one no longer sees hitchhikers on the road. It came up in a discussion on the alt.usage.english newsgroup, where someone asked why one doesn't hitchhikers on the road any more. Was it paranoia on the part of motorists, cops cracking down, or what?

I used to hitchhike and give lifts to hitchhikers in the past, but no more.

Paranoia?

Perhaps, but I think the change came when hijacking became a popular method of car theft, possibly due to the increased effectiveness of car anti-theft devices.

Until about the mid-1980s I think most car thefts were of unattended vehicles, and robbery was rare. But with electronic ignition systems and satellite tracking that has become more difficult, so robbery, and especially armed robbery, has become far more common. People are reluctant to pick up hitchhikers, and hitchhiking has become a futile method of getting from place to place.

Concerning the urban legend, I found this interesting:

The first possible variant of the urban legend The Vanishing Hitchhiker occurs in Acts 8: 26–40 with the conversion of an “Ethiopian” by the hitchhiking apostle Philip. More recent variants in the Gambia and Somalia exhibit a different plot, but retain the vanishing hitchhiker motif. A female hitchhiker spends time with a man, who is later unable to locate her, but who finds his coat on her grave. The found-coat variant is part of a widespread cycle of vanishing hitchhiker legends. Could the story have originated in Africa? This article deals with this issue and with widespread occurrences of this legend.

But back to the actual vanishing hitchhiker.

Hitchhiking could be quite interesting. One sometimes met interesting people that way, though sometimes one also met very dull ones.

In 1960 I was told a story of an Anglican monk, Fr Victor Ranford SSM (of the Society of the Sacred Mission) who was based at Modderpoort in the Free State, and used to hitchhike wherever he needed to go. One driver who picked him up told him he knew he was an Anglican and not a Roman Catholic. Fr Victor asked him how he knew. "I can tell by your socks," the driver said.

In 1964, when I was at university in Pietermaritzburg, a friend and I decided to hitchhike to Grahamstown, 500 miles away, on a long weekend. We got as far as Ixopo, 50 miles away, and no one gave us a lift, so we walked back into town and took a bus to Springvale Mission, where we hoped to get a bed for the night. The bus was supposed to be for blacks only, but the driver allowed us to board. The priest of Springvale, whom we knew, was away, but someone let us into the house and we spent the night there. There was a lot more trust in those days.

The next morning we hitchhiked to Highflats village, and planned to go down to the coast and up to Durban where my friend lived. Our first lift out of Highflats was from a witchdoctor in a pre-war Packard. We sat in the spacious back seat and watched the gall bladders and goat horns and other paraphernalia that festooned the car swinging as he drove rather erratically along the winding road. He took us as far as Hlutankungu, where he turned off.

From Hlutankungu we walked, waving our thumbs at passing cars, but they were few, and none stopped for us. After an hour we reached Jolivet, which was at the third mile, so we knew we walked at three miles an hour. There was a station on the narrow-gauge railway, and we heard a train whistling and could see it coming winding in and out shosholoza through the hills, so we waited for it at the station, and asked the guard if we could get a ticket to the terminus at Umzinto on the South Coast. He said the train no longer carried passengers. It seemed that the information in Alan Paton's novel Cry the beloved country was out of date -- he describes someone travelling one one of these narrow-gauge trains. But eventually the guard took pity on us, and allowed us to travel in the guard's van at the back of the train, sitting among the mail bags. That was the only time in my life I managed to hitchhike a ride on a train, and it reminded me of the hero of Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma bums. It's my favourite Kerouac novel, and on that trip I felt a bit like a Dharma bum.

Four years later, as a student in England, I hitchhiked with another friend from Durham to Manchester, where we stayed with his parents in the village of Saddleworth. Then we went to Liverpool, and took the ferry across the Mersey and stayed with another friend in Cheshire, and from there down to South Wales.

A couple of years after that I was living in Namibia, and we had a visitor, an English guy who had been teaching in Tanzania, and when his time was up and he had to return to England, he discovered that if he paid 30 shillings (R3.00) more, he could change his plane ticket to go from Johannesburg instead of Dar-es-Salaam (those were the days!) He did so, and hitchhiked from East Africa to southern Africa, and saw quite a lot before going to Johannesburg and getting the plane back to the UK.

So people hitchhiked quite a lot in those days.

But I rarely see hitchhikers nowadays, and if I do, I don't stop. I think it's rather sad.

It's time to abolish toll roads, not extend them

Toll roads were introduced by the National Party regime so that they could rob the Road Fund to pay for the invasion of Angola and the destabilisation of neighbouring countries.

Part of the democratic transformation process should see the phasing out of toll roads, and the restoration of the road fund. The fairest way to pay for roads is through a tax on fuel. And in that way all roads can be maintained, and not just a few selected ones.

African Energy News Review - Poor will be most affected by N1/N2 toll road proposal

Capetonians have until 30 April to comment on the National Roads Agency's (Sanral) controversial plans to build toll roads on the N1 and N2 freeways outside Cape Town.

The move would further increase transport costs, which are already rocketing because of significant fuel price increases.

Sanral expects to put out the project to tender with the aim of starting construction within two years if the plan is approved by Minister of Transport Jeff Radebe.