The road stretched out ahead as far as the eye could see following the contour of the land like a switchback up and down continuing on and on into the hazy, horizon segregated blue sky. In this relatively treeless landscape, earth burnt brown by the summer sun, scrub bush dotted about as far as the eye could see. Amongst it all, clusters of rondvels, the round huts in which the pastoral African lives his quiet unassuming life, goats and mielie meal interwoven between the huts, the people scarcely bother to lift their gaze as the car speeds past on its way to cities and towns the pastoralist will never see.
Two worlds, the one rising and falling to the sun and the other impervious to any limit other than the next fuel station. At root it's a matter of horizons, be they the confine of what you can see around you or what your unleashed imagination allows, neither is superior to the other but it's the bedrock on which each society builds its life.
This scene is a far cry from the green hedgerows and the drystone walls of my childhood each obscures, to some extent the lives we lead. We are a private people hidden away in our small homes with tiny gardens, the path to the door, the door proclaiming our right to refuse admission. We like the pastoral African have our priorities and phobias, we are less self reliant, less in tune with what is happening around us.
I remember as if it were yesterday having broken down in my car, waiting for daybreak. As the light filtered in I realised I had stopped in a cutting next to a village. As the light of a new day broke the village slowly came alive. The sound of the animals released to graze, the sound of water being drawn and food being prepared brought morning into mystical proportion. My broken car became a thing of respectful interest, like a beetle which crawls in I was accepted as simply being there and adjusted in their minds with the issues of getting things ready for another day. From the silence to the sound of human endeavour, not the endeavour of rushing off to be somewhere else, not the cacophony of city life but the endeavour of living your whole life in one spot, raising a family and when the time came, dying respected by the people you had lived your whole life with.
I was an onlooker to a different proposition, of living a life outside the collision of the city and I was enthralled by its rhythm and slow purpose. In this unenclosed landscape, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing to inhibit the eye, the land rolled on and on with more huts on the horizon, more dwellings with a similar social structure, neighbours far enough away to be disregarded.
A landscape huge, but emptied of people had, for someone recently out of crowded UK a tremendous sense of freedom and space but did it represent a country, or was it too diverse, too full of contradictions as people in the city build their kraals not of thorn bush but of high walls topped with glass and barbed wire. The ideological barriers run much deeper in the African city dweller than the pastoralist, as the novel, 'Cry the Beloved Country' describes in such sympathetic detail.
"There is a loverly road which runs from Ixopo into the hills The hills are grass covered and rolling and are loverly beyond any singing of it." "The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke and from there, if there is no mist you can look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa and below, the Umzimkulu river on its way from the Drakensberg to the sea".
These were the hills through which I drove, the roads switchbacking up and down and for a 'rooinek' like me, they were a long way from home. A nights drive from Matatiele to Johannesburg, the headlights piercing the pitch black, sensing the corners rather than seeing them, always alert for animals on the road, blinded by the lights of the occasional oncoming car the trips were an experience. These journeys emerging eventually out of a rural African nightscape, onto the main road between Durban and South Africa's city of gold, Joburg, to the bright lights of Johannesburg and the comfort of our home.
The contrasts were surreal and whilst Johannesburg has metamorphosed beyond all comparison, I doubt that the village to which I accustomed my eyes, all those years ago, has changed at all and indeed, why should it.
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