TAFELBERG
Introduction
We all walk for different reasons. Charles Dickens rambled at night because of insomnia, getting up the moment he lay down. His walks brought him ‘into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object [than to stay awake] every night of the year’. They busied his feet as they opened his soul, curing him of the scourge of wakefulness.
Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey, Modestine, bashed across the Cévennes to ease Stevenson’s love-troubled heart, while Camilo José Cela, the Spanish novelist, walked in the spirit of contrariness. ‘The Alcarria is a beautiful region which people apparently have no reason to visit,’ he wrote in his picaresque Journey to the Alcarria. Then, gently, and at what one might call walking pace, he contradicted himself, charming the region into life in the pages of his wistful book.
I suffer from neither sleeplessness nor a broken heart, so I walk, like Cela, out of curiosity. I wanted to look at South Africa in a different way – from a different angle – and so took to the rhythms of the gravel road, the path and the train track in the hope that such walks would tell me something interesting about my sometimes tortured country. I was tired of the media’s white noise. I was distrustful of the soothsayers, the received wisdoms and the platitudes. I come from a family of walkers (Dad was a happy, carefree hiker) and wanted to look at things afresh. The result of taking to the path is this book – a eulogy to South Africa’s beauty and the fineness of her people, her indefatigability and the jewel that is her new democracy. It is a book of cautious hope.
Finally, a word on sourcing and fact-checking. I have attempted to verify and second-source my facts wherever possible. In certain cases – the chapter on Modderfontein, for example – this has been exceedingly difficult. My only defence is to point out that this is not an academic study written by a professional historian. Rather, it is a book written by a journalist for a popular audience. For all of its fidelity to the truth, it is also a book full of stories.
Luke Alfred
Kensington, May 2016
1
THE STORY OF THE ‘CARTRIDGE GIRLS’
Hope Road, Mountain View, opposite the Victory Theatre, to Modderfontein Dynamite Factory – about 12 kilometres
There is a seldom-visited part of Mountain View that remains idyllic – full of jacarandas with soft shadows and sandstone garages with old, weathered doors. Occasionally, you might notice a feature from a bygone age: a carved wooden spire on the apex of a roof, an outhouse, perhaps, or a sash window. There are converted stables and the sprawl of subdivision and alteration, calmed by a profusion of trees and greenery. Walking here, at the beginning of Hope Road, just off Louis Botha Avenue, is invigorating and spicy. The temperature is lower because of the tree shade, and the trees themselves seem to sponge away some of the suburb’s wearying noise. Everything has a drippy, children’s hideaway kind of feel, a world of tree houses and secret retreats at the bottom of the garden. It was here, early one Sunday morning in mid-autumn, that I decided to step out and find South Africa.
Hope Road was empty at this early hour. There were no cars rushing down its one-way system along the base of the Mountain View ridge and the road was mine, giving me a feeling of well-being and mild propriety. The first person I saw was a homeowner on the other side of the street, out with his Weed Eater as he trimmed his square of lawn. He was wearing a white vest and I could see him through a jagged maze of barbed wire as I tumbled past, feeling my daypack (oranges, pens, notebooks) as it settled on my back, the pleasing rise and fall of my legs in my boots. As I walked quickly down Hope, feeling the vitality that comes from purposeful walking, the barbed and razor wire became more noticeable; the seemingly endless categories of domestic defence gave the suburb an embattled, dug-in feel. It was also dirty. I drive my wife mad because my instinct is always to pick up litter but there was so much of it as I approached the foot of Sylvia Pass that it made this task too awkward. There were too many casually discarded beer bottles and cans of Coke, chip wrappers and bottle tops.
Not to be downcast, I looked for beauty and detail. I noticed a carved wooden door, paint fading like a retreating tide, that wouldn’t have been out of place in Goa. There were mosaic street numbers and the magical sound of Zen fountains, heard but not seen, bubbling away on the other side of a wall. As I swerved through the kink east of Sylvia Pass, I was greeted by a platoon of planes, their brown leaves crinkly in the breeze. I was now walking more north than east. The aspect changed, the sun suddenly more insistent. As I walked along Ninth Avenue, out of the shade of the planes, I found myself stopping. I turned to face the sun, marvelling at the luxury houses perched on Linksfield Ridge, more impressive than one realises when one drives through the area in a car.
Runners and ramblers began to emerge as I walked down Ninth Street. I noticed a pair of joggers, bright with the latest gear, and a lean man on the opposite side of the street running past me, backwards. I saw a group of three 60-something walkers, chicken legs protruding from baggy shorts, briskly launching themselves into their Sunday-morning ritual. A man came towards me with the Sunday papers under his arm, talking on his mobile, before disappearing slowly into the shadows, looking cold and half asleep. I passed a group of stout, severely pruned trees. Ginkgos or mulberries, they were thick, with trunks like powder kegs. Looking at them in their mute rootedness made me boyishly happy, and I strode out, past the Yiddish kindergarten, down through the avenue of planes and the orange leaves of autumn, heading for the Jewish enclaves of Fairmount, Sydenham and Glenhazel.
Johannesburg’s first powered flight took place slightly east of where I was walking, across the grassy cusp of what used to be called Sydenham Hill. Frenchman Albert Kimmerling had shipped out from Southampton on the Kenilworth Castle in 1909 as a representative of biplane manufacturer Voisin. His intention was to be the first man to fly in Africa, and he would hopefully pick up orders for the Voisin along the way. Improbably, he and a mechanic decided that East London was the best place in which to make their grab for immortality and Africa’s first recorded flight duly took place at the Nahoon Racetrack just after Christmas in 1909. Early the following year, Kimmerling crated his plane up to the Rand. What the Rand Daily Mail called ‘a special garage’ was built on the edge of the Orange Grove flying grounds, and by February he was ready to test the Highveld’s thin air in his rickety craft, part pterodactyl, part kite.
The occasion was well organised. Tickets could be bought from the Central News Agency and a flotilla of trams was laid on for spectators to ship down Louis Botha Avenue (then called Johannesburg Road) to Orange Grove. It was an event with a certain shimmer. Flying was the rage in Europe. The year before, John Moisant, the son of an American sugar baron, had dropped in unannounced before 250 000 bewitched spectators at a Paris air show. Here in South Africa, there was less transparent showmanship, although, unlike Paris, refreshments would be served. ‘The public will be notified of the conditions as follows,’ reported the Rand Daily Mail of 1 February 1910. ‘A red flag will be flown from the Corner House buildings, the Carlton Hotel and Messrs Cuthbert building at an early hour on Saturday to denote that conditions are good and the flights will take place as advertised between 3–6pm. Should there be no red flag, the flight will not come off.’
February must have been exquisitely frustrating for Kimmerling because it took until the end of the month for the red flag to eventually be raised. On the 26th, watched by a crowd of thousands, Kimmerling shovelled his unstable biplane after what in all likelihood would have