Forgotten Places

Date: Sometime in Summer, 1998.
Place: Foothills of the Southern Drakensberg, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.

One of the most unfortunate times in my working years to date has been the couple of years during which I was employed by a well-known chain of furniture retailers in SA. I had been in a dead-end job as a floor salesman in a hardware supply store, working for two miserly little rich boys from Johannesburg and hating every minute of it, when the furniture chain decided to open up an outlet in our beautiful little farming town. Had I possessed a crystal ball, I would have rather continued to enjoy being insulted or ignored by the super wealthy or assisting the super poor to count out the 23 screws they so desperately needed but could hardly afford. However, I didn't have any idea of what I was letting myself in for and assumed that anything would be better than working for the "white rat", as I remember thinking of the major partner.

I went along for an interview and soon thereafter I was informed that I had the job. It wasn't long before I realised that, as assistant manager, it was my job to drive a team of black ladies around the native reserves in the surrounding countryside and see to it that they fleeced as many ignorant, poor and needy people of whatever paltry amount of cash they possessed in exchange for second rate, crap furniture that would never last as long as the exhorbitant terms of credit to which they would unwittingly be coerced into putting their illegible scrawls to. In fact, the retelling of this part is making my blood boil already, so let me skip all that. It's a story on it's own and I will probably deal with it another day. Suffice it to say that I have an interest in history, geography, geology and archeaology that saved my sanity during those terrible two years that I worked for that den of thieves.

The reason these particular interests of mine came to the fore was that there was so much to be discovered out in the native reserves. Besides the traces of the original Bushmen that once inhabited the area there was evidence of stream beds that had had their courses altered by unknown hands, deserted and forgotted old sentinel posts of cut stone left over from the poor souls who did duty on the furthest reaches of the empire, and, if one knew what to look for, traces of old wagon routes winding their way steadily against the grain of nature over the green, endlessly rolling hills.

I had a wonderful rapport with the black people that worked in the shop. Most of them were well known to me through various other jobs I had had in the area, and my interest in them and the surrounding countryside, as well as a penchant for sharing jokes with them in their own language, must have endeared me to them, for they were different people once we were out and away from the young Afrikaner who was our mutual boss and the only other white man in the shop. From childhood I had had a very rudimentary grasp of the Zulu language, and these wonderful people loved to teach me what they called "real" Zulu and what I today would call "High Zulu". This fascinated me, for I already understood enough to understand most of what a white farmer would say to his farm workers in fluent enough Zulu to know that he was using a lot of slang and dialect (called Fanagalo in South Africa), but not enough to speak a clear and grammatically correct sentence myself. A very irritating and confining situation indeed. Today I have again forgotten most of what they taught me back then, but at the time I began to enjoy a reasonably good grasp of the language. I could never bring myself to speak it in the presence of my white friends, who could rattle it off so well and who would, I was sure, take every opportunity to belittle my attempts, yet out in the bush with those ladies and the poor rural dwellers, my reserve melted away and I would experiment with all and sundry.

On one particularly pleasant and sunny day, my ladies promised to show me something I hadn't seen before if we could stock up on supplies at one of the ubiquitous African trading stores along the way and stop for lunch while I explored. Of course, I readily agreed. What they eventually led me to was just up my alley. Leaving the dirt road with its ruts and boulders, we pulled into a patch of veldt and left the vehicle. A short walk into a stand of black wattle trees brought us to the ruins of a hand-built stone farmhouse. The roof was long since gone and the walls were now only knee-high. A large young tree was growing on the hearth where once, a hundred or more years ago, a young family of settlers may have warmed their hands before a blaze on a cold and snowy night. Out in the sparse forest with tangles of undergrowth that surrounded the old homestead, you could picture the green grass spread before the wide verandah whose foundations were so clearly visible in the patch of hard-packed, goat-trodden dirt before the gap in the wall that would have, once upon a time, been blocked by a solid, hand-made wooden door.

Standing in the ruins of that old settler's house on a bright sunny morning I enjoyed a moment of silence, contemplating the surroundings and trying to imagine the story lying dormant in the silent ruins. My gaggle of sales ladies had long since shed their company scarves and smart black company shoes and were sitting in a circle under a large tree in the corner of a small clearing that was probably the remains of a kitchen garden at the back of the old house. They chatted and giggled quietly among themselves as they passed a cooked chicken around, tearing hunks of meat off and wrapping them in a chunk of fresh white bread before stuffing the whole lot into their constantly jabbering mouths. I can still see the grease reflecting off their happy, round black faces as they enjoyed the break from the tyranny in the shop and the peaceful surroundings. I was standing to one side, my own shoes and socks and tie having been removed the moment we left the white people's town, and enjoying the long grass tickling my calves below the rolled up hems of my suit slacks. How ridiculous we must have seemed, us greedy whites out to rob the poor people of their bucks! I think one of the reasons they must have enjoyed me was my disregard for the whole comedy of dress. Our Führer back in the safety of his shop would have had a hernia if he knew what went on once we were out in the bush.

Soon, my musings were interrupted by the sound of goats and their little bells tinkling as they moved through the bush towards where we were holed up. I must mention that the ladies always steered me toward these sort of places, for they knew they were guaranteed an hour or two of peace while I explored and ruminated on the past. When the goats and their ancient minder broke through into the patchy clearing around the ruins, I seized the moment and called out to the old goatherd. By the look of him, he could well have been around when this place was still a working farm! After a few attempts at picking his knowledge of the surroundings, and his vigourous denials of any wrong-doing (a common enough reaction of old black people to young white men in those days) I realised that I wasn't getting through to him. My favourite saleslady, whose Zulu name meant "We give thanks!", saw my difficulties and came over to assure him that this uMlungu (white man) only wanted to know if he had any interesting stories to tell about the ruins. Once the old fellow realised that he had nothing to fear, he indicated somewhere over his shoulder, saying the whites that had lived here had come from there. "From the town?" I asked him, frowning because I knew that the town was younger than these ruins. "No no," he replied, "somewhere else, much further away." I asked if he knew them. "No," he replied, "but my grandfather did. They came here on a wagon and built this house, and my grandfather lived here and worked for them when he was a little boy."
"A wagon?" I asked, raising my eyebrows. "Yes," replied he, "come, I will show you."

Huh? I was beginning to quiver with excitement. For all I knew, this was a story well known to the local whites, but I had never heard it. I followed the old chap through some bush, passing a very thick clump of bright coloured flowers along the way. As I slowed to admire the flowers, trailing a finger over the bright peach petals, he looked over his shoulder and saw what I was doing. Turning, he came back to me and said, "This was where they got their water from." I looked at the clump of flowers and wondered if he was a bit nutty. He leaned forward and ripped a large clump of the beautiful flowers out of the earth. Standing there in front of me, hidden by the tangle of foliage, were the walls of an old well. It was not very deep and completely dry, and I assume that although time had filled it in considerably, there was still a source of water somewhere below the layers of sand, for the flowers were certainly thriving. We continued for a short while, threading our way through patchy trees and occasionally having to step over the last row or two of an old stone wall, until we came to a bright green patch of grass, not more than about ten metres by five. On one side of the little clearing was a massive shrub, of the kind one would find in a suburban garden, but about ten times bigger and bushier. Sticking out from one side was an ancient-looking piece of solid wood, and on closer inspection I discovered that it was the drawbar of a wagon. Not only that, the rest of the wagon was still attached to it! With my heart pounding in excitement, I spent the rest of the afternoon freeing the old wagon from the overgrown bush which had grown next to it and finally hid it from casual eyes. The ladies laughed at my antics, cheering me on from the shade at the other end of the clearing, to which they had moved themselves in order to view the mad uMlungu with his passion for rotting relics.

The old man helped me a bit at first, but soon he had to go. Before he left I asked him what had happened to the family, if they had moved to the town when it was eventually founded. "No," he told me, "they left before that."
"Where to?" A shrug of the shoulders. "Why?" Another shrug. "What was their name?" A blank look. I realised that I was getting nowhere and gave up. After I thanked him and he gave me the customary courteous best wishes, he gathered up his scattered goats from where they were decimating the flora and wandered off into the bush without a backward glance. I remember wondering how much untold history he was taking with him as he vanished from sight. There were many such experiences during those times. I promised myself I would go back one day in the far future and tell the tale of those forgotten people who settled out there in the middle of nowhere in the harsh mountian winters where not even the native tribes were tempted to settle permanently, 'til they were forced there by internal wars or colonial plans. I was loathe to uncover these sort of finds to anybody back in the village, for somehow I believed that they were secrets that belonged to me and the uncaring natives that lived on in these areas, but there was one old gentleman back in the village who shared my passions and who was well-versed in the history of the area and who I trusted with some of my finds. He cast light on some but not all of these mysteries for me, and had indeed combed much of the countryside in his younger days and seen some of my "discoveries" for himself. I never asked him why nothing much was made of these old sites, but I think in retrospect that he was much like myself. He too preferred to keep these things to himself. To me the old wagon was far more glorious in its original setting than it would have been in the little local musuem, glanced at by the uncaring eyes of bored tourists passing through the region for a day. To my mind, it was better off standing there where its owner had last parked it, waiting for the day when it would be pulled out and hooked up to a team of oxen again, ready to take its family of pioneers further along the trail of hope.

When I finally left that little outpost in the middle of nowhere, the sudden African dusk had fallen and my white shirt was stained with green plant juices and smears of red soil. I had reconstructed the layout of the original homestead and its surrounds in my mind by allowing my imagination to form the missing walls, channels, ditches, trails, etc. and encouraged by the little finds along the way that confirmed my thoughts. The little nicks and tears in my smart "work" trousers meant that I would have to buy new ones, and the dirt under my nails would need much scrubbing to remove it in time for work the next day. The spineless (morally and physically) oaf that we slaved for would still be sitting in the brightly lit cavern of a shop, hiding behind locked plate glass doors in the silent and deserted little town, desperately awaiting a non-existent last hopeful who wanted a new lounge suite and preparing his tirade for us when we arrived with less than the expected tally of new credit victims. We laughed that idea off and passed by three of our favourite regulars on the way home. These were very rich black businessman who laughed at the furniture chains attempts to enslave them in never-ending credit. When they or one of their numerous wives wanted something, they would whip out great wads of cash from a deep pocket and pay cash on the spot. Sometimes, such as this evening in particular, they would even buy something that they didn't really want, just to silence the protests of my crew. I wonder just what kind of deals our intrepid sales ladies did actually get up to? Anyway, two of these gentlemen made some very large purchases, and one of them insisted that we sample the quality of our own chipboard-and-cheap-veneer dining room suite while wife number one served us supper. Yet another entertaining experience for another time! By the time we got home, bypassing the shop and the nazi in it to go to our warm beds and sweet dreams, I had a full stomach and many thoughts and memories to ponder and preserve for the future.

Another day had passed. How I wish I could have that particular one over...