Tag Archive

The only driving I’ve done for the past year of Covid restrictions is up and down the main road of the dorp of Hermanus, at a sedate 60km/h. Now I’m suddenly in traffic, and I need to shake this geriatric mode and get up to speed. Back when I worked in Fordsburg, Rosebank was about as far north as I ventured. But now I’m on this endless thing called Beyers Naude road (or the M5,) wending my way past shopping malls and car dealerships, dodging potholes and taxis.

It’s nondescriptland, a hodge-podge of familiar brands and flailing smaller enterprises. Middle America perhaps, except for a slew of orange-overalled men in orange hard hats at the intersections, handing out flyers for an insurance company. The main arterials to the north of Joburg are strangely interchangeable to me: the same featureless urban sprawl that eventually peters out in a squatter camp or a wedding venue, a scrapyard, a nursery of sorts. It occurs to me that I actually met Beyers Naude once, back in the 1980s. He was a dissident Afrikaner who’d fled the fold of the Broederbond and the grand Apartheid delusion. As a result, he’d been “banned,” which meant he was virtually under house arrest and visitors were restricted. We went to speak to him about a subversive project we were planning, and I have this fleeting image of old “Oom Bey” sitting in his garden in one of the suburbs near here, a calm and dignified presence despite the scrutiny of the “system.”

The road heads North West, and I’m aiming for Muldersdrift. On both sides of the road, the forest of suburbia spreads out forever. The streets are named after heroes of the Volk like Boer General Christian de Wet, and less heroic chaps like Jim Fouche (anyone remember him?) and John Vorster. Now I have another recollection: A National Party election rally in the 1970s, with the Prime Minister himself as the headline attraction. I had to see for myself, so there I stood, aged nineteen, at the back of a large marquee while BJ Vorster thundered on into the microphone. My mustachioed white compatriots roared in approval, but I thought the whole thing was totally uncool. Which is why I ended up in Oom Beyers’ camp, I suppose.

I see that some of the streets have been named after artists. The sculptors Anreith and Van Wouw are immortalised in the curbstones of Linden, and I think surely there must be a Pierneef Street. But there isn’t. Not far away though, there’s something called Pierneef Park. He had a whole suburb named after him! I’m keen to see what that looks like, but not today, so I get back onto Beyers. Crossing the NI western bypass, I glimpse the new corporate HQ of FNB/Wesbank, risen from the veld like some gleaming intergalactic starship of capitalism. Then more Afrikaner suburbia thinning out as we go, and then Lagos – like stuff, skirting the edges of the Zandspruit shackland. Minibus taxis gathered on the side of the road, makeshift workshops, street vendors braaing mielies. A universe of stuff to draw. Not a white face to be seen here, and not too many wearing the mask either.

Onward, past the Happy Island Waterworld, past the one-man hamburger hut, past the Khoi Empire. Finally, crossing over the highway to Pretoria, I get a sense of the open country. I turn off onto a small tarred road past the old Muldersdrift Clinic. There’s a curious mix of vegetation here – we’re just getting into “bushveld”, so there’s a hint of grassland with arbitrary aliens like poplars and pine trees. Mixed into that are what’s left of some distant plot -dweller’s schemes, the purpose now obscure.

A kilometre of small tar road and I’m at the gate of Watermark Farm, home of the writer and equestrian Anne Biccard. Once inside, there’s the reassuring sound of gravel crunching underwheel, and a wonderland of indigenous trees: paperbarks, acacias, fever trees. There’s a big sky overhead and huge cumulus clouds building for an afternoon storm. There’s just something about the Highveld in summer that speaks to me like nothing else. A quick cup of tea, and I’m reaching for my pencil and sketchpad…