DEVIL’S FORK
There was a time when a lot of English visited Bloemfontein (Oom Willie declared), like the one I met at Slightly Nutty. My wife’s Oupa on her mother’s side would tell how the khakis came here on their way to Pretoria after he and General de Wet taught them not to wear red. The khaki uniform did not help when they stood in shock at Kornspruit drift and saw their wagons captured in the water and the Boers sending them Mauser invitations to stay a while. There were many that stayed permanent and you can see their stones today in that small walled-in cemetery by Sanna Pos station.
You’ll remember the little museum there that Marthinus van Tonder used to open every day from eight until four, even though no one ever came for his history talk but only on the train from Bloemfontein for a picnic perhaps. At least he kept it clean and if you did go there, just to see if he was still making peach brandy, he’d give you a little book in Afrikaans and English, which told all about the battle of Sanna Pos. That was before the miracle of ’94 and the trains stopped going to the station. The new people removed old van Tonder and put one of his gardeners in his place. Ag, that man drank the brandy that was left and burned those little books to keep warm in the first winter until he got a new job in the Arts and Culture department. When he left, he put the big padlocks and chain on the museum doors that are still there now. That’s what the Englishman told me anyway and this is the man I started to speak of.
It was the World Cup he’d come for. Just the kind of tourist the government said would arrive by the million; but I think he was the only one in Bloemfontein. All these new roads, built just for him and all these hotels and homes opened up and waiting to see which one he’d pick to stay in. Junior Botha believed the government and he paid big fees to the FIFA, built six new holiday flats on his farm, even fifty kilometres down the dirt roads away from the city and I think he hoped someone like this English would take every one. But Junior’s rooms stayed empty and instead the man chose Mzansi Lodge for his ten days. Now Junior’s goats use the rooms but of course they will not pay what he gave to the FIFA to be approved. And the gangs are digging up the new World Cup road by the airport because they had to work quick and cheap to get it done by the deadline for the blue-light convoys to carry important people to the games and the corners are already potholes.
The English took his rental car up Navalsig to see the giraffes and get a good view over the city. He went to the Women’s Memorial and the War museum and learned that his people invented concentration camps and killed thousands of women and children. Someone captured his little Anglo flags from off his wing mirrors while he was inside. He went to Sanna Pos and found the closed museum and all those English soldiers called ‘unknown’. He came here to Slightly Nutty for lunch and that’s where I met him, sitting on the lapa overlooking the reed bed and watching the Red Bishops puffing up their feathers and trying to get the woman birds to notice their excellent but empty nests. It reminded me of Junior.
He told me his name this English but I have forgotten it. There were many things about South Africa he didn’t understand. Why did we call our black workers names like “Jankie” when they had African names like “Thabo”? Why were the restaurants full of white eaters and black waiters? I told him these are waitrons now and he must not be a sexist for we have a Constitution that has fixed everything nicely from the bad days before, as he could easily see. I told him that people from outside, perhaps from as far away as England, can not come here and understand what took years to bring about and will take many more to change. I told him he should be careful about what he said to people and avoid talking so much about things he didn’t understand.
His safest question was about the green devil’s fork fence all the way around the Mzansi Lodge. Why did each section have some white plastic feed bag tied to it, blowing in the breeze most untidily and ruining the aesthetic? I had to look that one up but it’s what he said. I considered my reply for there is no one as gullible as a rooinek, except perhaps for Junior. In the end, I told the truth. It is because they have new animals, springbok and kudu, and these will otherwise kill themselves dashing against the iron fence for they cannot see it in their panic. The flapping bags keep them from running into trouble. And you see, he didn’t take my advice about not speaking without knowledge and he didn’t really understand that danger signs are not always physical things like flapping bags. I never saw him again after that lunch at Slightly Nutty. But I did hear news about him from Johannes Oosthouzen, who lives over there near Mzansi Resort.
The Englishman liked to breakfast on their lapa too – the one with the view of the dam. He watched the fish breaking the water and the brown Modder impatiently held back by the concrete walls, carrying small mats of vegetation and the occasional plastic bottle drifting in the wind and the back flow. Every morning he’d see an old black man ride a grass cutter along by the water, heading out to do some work and every morning he’d stop that little machine, get stiffly down and go to the edge of the water. He’d look around carefully and then pull up a line with hooks baited to see if there was a fish. If it was empty, which so far was always the case, he’d throw it back in. Now the English had an idea this was not a fair way to catch fish, especially with the line tied to the sign that said “No Fishing” in Afrikaans and Sotho and even English. But he had sympathy with a poor old man trying to get a little to eat. And he thought other people should feel this way too. So in his straightforward way he described what he’d seen to the owner of the game lodge, Paulus Kruger. This you see was even though I’d told him all about fences and flapping bags.
Paulus of course had told old Jankie many times not to fish and he also knew that he hadn’t stopped. So Paulus pretended it did not happen and everyone was content. In the old South Africa that kind of thing was the natural order. But now here was this English, eating his eggs and bacon, the only World Cup tourist who’d come to stay at the empty lodge, after all the advertising and FIFA expense, and he was telling Paulus quite openly that his orders were not obeyed. There was no choice but to give the old man the sack on the spot, ban him from the grounds and let him learn to feed his grandchildren without a job. It was a great satisfaction to Paul that the Englishman was much horrified by this apparent confirmation of his worst thoughts about South Africa and also by his own share in bringing it about.
Paulus told it to Johannes who told me and I will tell you that he made a plan to bring the old man back after the English moved on the next day. Jankie had worked for his family for so long that Paulus thought of him almost as family too. But he was distracted just then by some question about the new bokkies and forgot to tell Jankie of this plan and slip him a few rands to keep him going. He could not know that Jankie would try during the dark night to catch his fish from the tangled banks of the Modder upstream.
And so it was on that last morning, as the English sat down to his eggs and bacon on the lapa overlooking the dam, that he gazed down on the drifting patches of vegetation and a white plastic bag and the body floating face down in the water. Perhaps in that moment before he ran from the table he felt a little like those khaki boys surprised at Sanna Pos and who never left.