* * *
One cold Saturday morning a couple of weeks later, I drove back to Modderfontein to nail down the final plank of the story. I was met by security at the entrance to the dynamite plant and escorted inside before leaving my car and being chaperoned to the factory cemetery. The graveyard was large and dusty, neither perfectly tended nor completely ignored. There were shrivelling flowers on some of the graves, and although the grass and weeds hadn’t taken over completely, everywhere time was going about its earnest work, nudging the crosses in the faraway black section of the cemetery over the perpendicular, nibbling away at the headstones and the masonry. There were glum cypresses inside the wrought-iron gate, some jacarandas with yellow-green winter leaves and a bottlebrush or two. The colours were muted. We instinctively whispered, gesture and word being squared-off to the minimum. You could feel the early-morning chill muzzle about your legs, and the cloying sadness of the place was impossible to shake.
I was here because in April 1898, approximately two years after arriving from Avigliana, a group of 15 cartuccere lost their lives in an explosion. Their precautions, like wearing pinafores and working in bare feet, had been of no use, for they were obliterated. So poor were the families from which they came, and so reluctant the factory authorities to contribute anything to their gravestones or memorial, that only three of the 15 are commemorated in the cemetery. Two are sisters – Margarithe and Anna Tonda; the third a young woman called Margarithe Gugno, who lies next to the sisters in numbered grave 161. The granite memorial erected to commemorate them is dominating but simple, with the words ‘Qui riposino – killed in an explosion’ stencilled down one side. As I wandered down the pathways, looking half-heartedly for the other graves, it became clear that these early artisans faced daily danger of a kind unheard of today. I noticed two gravestones for Alfred Pleitz, who died on Christmas Day 1896; Bernard Schmedding and Theodore Volkmann both died two years later. Maria Columbino, buried nearby, lost her life in 1907. Everywhere were the dead and their losing battle with oblivion – one that is likely to be escalated in the near future because much of the land has been sold to a consortium of Chinese property developers with big plans for residential compounds and even a university.
My guide, Peet Hattingh, from plant security, kindly pointed out several things that I had missed. The ornate wrought-iron fence wrapped around the Tonda memorial came from HCE Eggers and Co., Hamburg. It, the memorial stones, and the cost of transportation, must have been significant. He pointed out the tiny Italian flags on the Italians’ graves and told me how the plant had shrunk since his arrival way back when. As he drove me back to my car in one of the plant security’s bakkies, I could see the neurotic order in which the factory and surrounds were still preserved. Now it looked more like a beautifully maintained industrial museum than a functioning plant. Once it had been thriving. Goods wagons rolled into the heart of the factory to take the gelignite directly to the Rand mines.
Such was the site’s importance that, until 1948, the country’s weather forecasts came from Modderfontein. Padding round the museum one weekday morning I’d seen photographs of the weather station, a strange raised structure that looked like a Tyrolean cabin, all pitched roof and ornate exterior woodwork. Looking at the photo inspired me to imagine the weatherman, surrounded by his barometers and wind vanes. He was standing on his balcony, looking south at the cumulus clouds, stacked like purple grapes in the sky, wondering when the storm would arrive and, if it did, where lightning would strike.
2
One ‘meneer’ of a walk
Salem, south-west of Grahamstown, to Southwell – about 24 kilometres
A couple of days before my walk in ‘frontier country’,I met a pilgrim, my first. For technical reasons, our flight to Port Elizabeth was delayed and the pilgrim and I had found ourselves close by, stranded back in the departure lounge, wondering if we could grab a quick coffee before being called to reboard. Although I have forgotten his name, there was something about him I liked. He seemed uninhibited in a trustworthy, vaguely shambolic kind of way, a man without narcissism or artifice. We got chatting and he mentioned that he had jetted in overnight from Tel Aviv (I noticed a wodge of Israeli postcards jutting out of his daypack) after spending three weeks in Jerusalem visiting churches, meeting clergy and proselytising.
About seven or eight years ago he had nearly died, he told me with careless intimacy. Several specialists had advised that the tumours (one behind the eye, one buried deep in his brain) were too invasive and therefore inoperable, and he had shrivelled up at the news, frightened and depressed. There was a hereditary predisposition in his family, he said, to high blood pressure and blockages, and there was nothing to be done. He couldn’t afford to go overseas for treatment, and the local specialists – he named them – were rude and jocularly dismissive. He knew he was going to die.
One night, he heard voices, and jerked out of bed. The voice was close and not unfamiliar, very real to him in an almost physical, reach-out-and-touch kind of way. It bade him to convert and open his heart to the Lord, which he did. Miraculously, his health improved, and after having been given only months to live, he had now been healthy for years. He had gone to Israel to share his story but found it a challenge because, for some reason I can’t now remember, he had difficulty walking. There was something wrong with his foot, and he found the Jerusalem taxi drivers money-grabbing and ill-mannered. He compared himself to John the Baptist, one of the Bible’s famous walkers, and, like him, he was now a disciple. Although he bubbled with a busy fervour that was not mine, he seemed happy, and somehow unburdened and unashamed. What he said was less important than how he said it. He was zealous, yes, but also radiantly calmed. He wasn’t a sophisticated man but, without being able to exactly articulate why, I felt pleased to have met him. We were called to board through a gate on the level above us and although I looked for him, he was nowhere to be found. I didn’t see him on the flight and, although I looked again, he wasn’t at the luggage carousel either. I sometimes wonder if I met him at all.
* * *
A couple of days later, on a mild Saturday morning, three of us started our walk from the hamlet of Salem, which is nothing more, really, than a Methodist church and a frost-crusted cricket pitch with a pink gush of bougainvillea between the two. My two companions were Craig Paterson and Jako Bezuidenhout, postgraduate students in the History department at Rhodes University. I’d met Craig in the course of researching a story on the history of indigenous horse racing in the Eastern Cape a couple of months previously, and on our long drives through the former Transkei we’d discussed the possibility of a walk.
The group had swelled because Craig felt Jako would be up for such an adventure and for weeks we’d haggled about a route. Craig wanted to walk the old wagon road from the hinterland to the coast, an idea I liked, but I was also keen on somehow walking past Theopolis, the now ruined site of a former frontier mission station. The problem with the two ideas, hopelessly romantic as they were, was that both the wagon route and Theopolis were on private land. Eastern Cape farmers are by and large a beleaguered lot, caught between the pincers of government land reform on the one hand and the vagaries of the market on the other. They weren’t going to respond well to slacker writers and leftie academics tramping over their land in search of gravestones and artefacts. Land restitution is a hot political potato in the Eastern Cape and the commonage around Salem had just been returned to the indigenous local community – a landmark case in the high court, with much learned comment on both sides. We weren’t going to tempt fate and so, armed with nothing more sinister than our curiosity