Last weekend, we wanted to go for lunch to a wine farm that we’d never been to before (but heard a lot of good things about): Zevenwacht. It’s in the Kuils River area, which was not familiar to us, so Google Maps was the solution. But it seems that even Google Maps doesn’t know Kuils River very well and at one point Google led us on a wild goose chase through some pretty dodgy territory before it recovered its bearings and then unapologetically pretended that it had known where Zevenwacht was all the time.
Finally we got to Zevenwacht – and then we understood the problem: everyone in that area has jumped onto the bandwagon – everything has “Zeven” in its name – Zeven-this and Zeven-that, Zeven-up and Zeven-down, from an expensive and well-manicured retirement village (“That’s a good idea” - I said to Simone - “lets come and live here – no-one will ever find us again!”) to farms and all sorts of semi-rural type places. It was interesting, sort of.
At one point, when we had obviously blundered right off the tarred roads and were practically beating our way through the bushes (bloody Google!) we chanced upon what at first looked like a camp site. As we got closer, I realised that it was just a few lonely, bashed-up, old-fashioned camping caravans from last century. They had flat wheels and had obviously been there for some time. They were interspersed with huts and shacks, some covered with black refuse bags for waterproofing, others not. In other words, a squatter camp. Two women were sitting on wooden crates and talking to each other while peeling vegetables and they were surrounded by a swarm of little children running around like mad things and playing in the dust between the shacks. I didn’t notice at first but suddenly it dawned on me: these were white women.
I am an old South African, born and bred in Apartheid South Africa, so accustomed to the sights and ways of Apartheid that I had never even thought that that separateness was strange when I was a kid. I had never seen the inside of a “location” (a black or coloured suburb) - that was an experience that remained open for discovery when I was a university student, and even then, and right up to this, my sixty-eighth year, I have never seen a white person living in a squatter camp. I'd house, or flat, or some other kind of middle-class accomodation. I'd got close to something like a squatter camp, once before – but never like this. Apartheid created job reservation for white people, so that you would have had to be practically brain-dead not to find a job, and the system was rigged (for want of a better word) to keep it that way - and if you have a job, you have a house or flat or permanent home of some kind.
How did I get close to it before? - Well, when my son was about twelve, we were starting to run out of ideas for themes for birthday parties and it’s a difficult age – being on the brink of your teens – and a friend of mine had arranged a hugely successful camping party (one night in a nearby camp sight) for his son and friends (of about the same age) and it turned out to be just the thing and we decided to do the same: a boys-only one-night camp-out in a safe holiday camp site. It was total chaos, it was cheap, and the boys loved it. But one thing which I have never previously raised but which I did notice at the time, was that the camp site wasn’t one of those luxury sites up along the South coast, where the equipment freaks show off their big new four-by-fours and caravans the size of apartment blocks with all the mod cons and the women sit in the sun in expensive camping chairs doing their nails and the kids play with drones and remote control cars while dad makes a braai on his “braai machine” while keeping an eye on the rugby game on his TV – oh no – this was a pretty humble camp site with small old caravans which looked like they’d been there forever and old folks were padding around as if they’d also been there forever. So it was closer to what I was looking at now than to the sort of campsite that you would see at The Bakke in Mossel Bay in the December holidays, for example.
I haven’t really given those earlier memories a thought until now, but it’s coming back to me … but this is way worse. This isn’t even pretending to be a camp-site. This is a squatter camp.
So we pulled up next to the two women. One was younger (not young-just younger) and had overdone her make-up and the other had a hard face. It spoke of hard living. We asked for directions, and they put us right. Google, you’ve got stuff to learn! And then I couldn’t help noticing the kids, disappearing and reappearing between the shacks and caravans, coming out to peer at us and then running away. They were all colours of the rainbow. That tells you a whole lot of things which I do not intend to analyse save to say that Mandela was right – kids do not notice skin colour (or do not know the implications of skin colour) until it is pointed out to them by adults – and then they learn fast, and in South Africa particularly (although I’m sure it’s the same all over the world) – that stays with them pretty much for life, unless they deliberately set about un-learning all the bullshit their parents told them.
Zevenwacht was nice. The last outpost of white supremacy. But I’m not a wine-farm guy. I’m far more at home on a whine-farm …
© HARRY FRIEDLAND Nov 2022
See my blog MARIMBA (https://hjfriedland.blogspot.com/)
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