Venda Sun 13
December 18-31, 2004
December 18-31, 2004
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| At Caroline's wedding - Grace (sitting, centre) her daughters and Giya |
Here is a wedding when the meat is
ruined, a baking hot Christmas when a goat is slaughtered, a view of the sacred
lake and a child's funeral. Imagine too, the priest on top of the hill praying,
his prayers falling into the valley. For many reasons it was pivotal, emotionally charged, a turning point, all of it in extreme heat.
December 18
Caroline’s wedding. Up at dawn to sort
out clothes, wash and get ready. Hard task, looking half decent with so much
red soil around, but we manage after washing in shifts. R goes to wash in the
river, we’re at the church in plenty of time but it’s baking hot and they have
marquees rather than use the church.
Bridesmaids are amazing in white and
black dresses with Zulu shields on. They dance into the marquee where there's a
frilly sofa and PA system for speeches. Then…speeches! We leave about 12.30
when the priest has been ranting for about an hour. R wants to go. We look for
a café and find one miles away, very English – quiche and salads on the menu!
But we stay ages and by the time we’ve gone to Louis Trichart for fuel and
bread and driven back to the wedding it's over. The meat has to be thrown away because the priest went on so long. It felt like he recited most of the old Testament. The women had been preparing the food the whole day before but even in the shade meat doesn't keep. Later R and Giya took Caroline to her new home, Mrisi and I
stayed behind.
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| Relaxing after the service |
The wind increased. We had to put out
the fire and we went into the zozo but it was hot inside. The bags that line the wooden walls
were rattling and rustling, lizards scampering sideways in silhouette, the door
banging and monkeys shrieking, branches falling on the tin roof like stones,
the mouse I disturbed nibbling my hair.
Sunday 19
We walk around the land, climb a tree,
swing off a vine. Jasmine and citronella plants, cactus trees, a marula tree,
rocks and twisted tree trunk, roots growing over an enormous rock. Views of the
mountains, goats and cows around the village. Pip playing and getting fatter,
laughing around the fire, the moon the wrong way round, sitting on its curve.
Tuesday 21
How I’ve missed listening to water,
being able to turn the tap on, even in J’burg there’s a tap in the garden. We
use three barrels a day we use, more maybe and it’s carried up the hill by some
women in wheelbarrows. Running water, waterfalls, streams, I washed my shorts
in the swimming pool, it was wonderful to swim, to be in water, to feel cool
and independent.
Wednesday 22 - Friday 24
The days merge. We walk up around the
land, calmer but there are flashpoints. R’s very stressed trying to do too much
and I sit around not understanding. But we went to Nwamatatane to see the chief
and R translated properly so I could take part in a conversation. Chief’s wife
told us how she was trying to find a wife for a man in his 50s from J’burg and
six women turned him down. She went from house to house but he didn’t want an
older woman, he wanted a woman with one or two young kids who would see him as
their father. He sounded very dodgy and she thought so too. We buy a load of
fruit and veg to take there because it’s so dry and very little grows. It’s
half an hour away but not fertile like this valley. The chief’s being inaugurated on 7 January.
On Thursday we walk to the top of the mountain
and there are women, kids and a priest (ZCC) praying. I can’t believe they
managed to get up there. It's baking. They are staying there overnight, have
water but are fasting. The spring’s dry. The priest’s making noise like an
animal.
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| A view of Mashau from the top of the mountain |
In the evening we go to Sibasa, past
Thoyandou, to see the secretary to the minister in his holiday home. White
villa, lawn, palm trees, swimming pool, cold beer, a toilet and proper kitchen,
white sofas, TV. He’s enormous, drives a 4 x 4. The pool’s tantalizing but we
have no costumes. On the way, the road’s mad. It’s dark, there are cars with no
lights/one light/overtaking on blind bends/speeding. It feels lawless like
Lesotho, and dark. People are everywhere, by the side of the road, invisible
until the lights find them. Conversation is obscure. He talks in spin, he’s a
political animal or a shark.
Friday 24
All the men have arrived for the goat
slaughter. Grace and her husband and kids arrive. R goes off to Mrisi, Giya and
Randu to do the shopping, buy beer and chicken. Grace starts cooking the maize
meal – a vast pot on the fire – and I prepare some veg, a tomato sauce, lentil
stew and salad. It’s hot and sweaty. Petrus, T and Maribathi want to kill the
goat before R comes back, I stop them as they’re leaving the zozo with knives. I’m
irrirated by them all. Men take the benches and go to sit at the top by the
wall and do nothing, just talk. As soon as the beer arrives, they drink.
R kills the goat when he gets back and
Mrisi watches. Giya makes a little shrine for it with a candle and a cross. I
feel ashamed that R and I haven’t had more consideration for the kids' feelings
during these horrendous few days. Cockroaches, ants, ticks, beetles, moths. I
like the lizards.
Saturday 25
Petrus is here but not Grace and the
kids. R goes to collect chief while I cook again. While he’s away Vonani and
three others arrive. The chickens have started to smell and there are small
flies all over one of them, but no eggs, so I take the risk and wash them
before sticking them on the fire, hope that if they’re well enough charred
they’ll be okay. Vonani’s sister and one of his friends don’t eat goat, nor do
Mavis and Mavis’ friend from the village who explains that the reason so few
people in the village eat goat is because a local guy used to rape them,
breaking into peoples’ kraals to do it. He was eventually caught for child
abuse. It reminds me of one of Vonani’s poems. His work is disturbing.
Cooper, R’s cousin is here too, chief arrives
with R and Cooper and another guy who turns out to be a sangoma, who knows all
about herbs. I spend much of the day cooking and washing dishes but R’s mother
arrives eventually with a big box of biscuits.
Petrus gets stuck into the vodka punch
that R made. Chief is heavily into the booze too. Chief was delayed because a
child in the village was having a fit and he took him to hospital in Elim, but
the father and boy’s uncle left the boy and the mother there so they could go
back home and carry on drinking. R was appalled.
Great crowds outside bottle stores,
women too with little kids. The poverty is compounded by booze. The dynamic
churches offer a way out. Women are very
self-sufficient and enterprising, but men are stuck. Not all, but even
the guy in Sibasa called his wife to pick up a beer can on the grass just a
yard from his feet because he was too fat to lean over and pick it up.
We chase everyone away when it’s dark.
Vonani and his friend Temba save the day with 2 packs of beer and ice. Vonani’s
friend Temba is looking into why land reform hasn’t worked, why people are
doing nothing with the land they’ve been given back. He started with the brief
of seeing if it was anything to do with HIV/Aids but has already concluded it's
more to do with skills and commercial approaches, access to tools and money to
farm on a big scale.
Local people realise water and power are
critical issues. It’s a struggle just to fetch and carry all day long and even
small children carry 20 litre drums on their heads. We must use about 60 litres
a day, certainly today and yesterday with all the washing up all day long, drinking
and cooking and washing hands. I can see how people become ill.
As Xmas day ends we sit under a full
moon and watch cars on the road to Elim and Levubu, the mountains behind.
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| Risenga's mother and Pip the puppy |
Sunday 26
Swim in Makhado. I fall asleep in the
grass by the pool. I enjoy the shower as much as the swim. It’s a long drive
for this but it’s so hot it’s the best place to be and everything else takes
second place, even here, though, the legacy survives.
Young men who can’t swim are harangued
by an enormous Africaaner woman who looks after the pool and they are told to
stay in the shallow end while younger kids and white kids do their lengths. I
understand, there’s no lifeguard and she’s not capable of fishing them out of
the pool if they drown.
But this place is draining. I know why R
wants us to see how he was brought up and the poverty he suffered but. On the
way out of the village there’s a party. R says it’s a girl’s circumcision. I can’t
engage. Giya wants to know what it means but I can’t explain. R says its
different here but it can’t be that different. There’s no justification for
anything which goes under this name, so we don’t talk about it. Another potential
flashpoint. I’ve had enough of them.
R’s mum stays at the house while we go
out. She cleans the zozo. It’s immaculate when we get back. Nearly a proper
night’s sleep. Giya wakes up twisted in the mosquito net. There are ants around
the walls.The cow dung hasn’t really helped. In fact I think it make things
worse; the ants are burrowing out of the dung floor and in places it’s already
breaking up. Any scrap of food attracts them.
Monday 27
Lake Funduzi and the Dzata ruins. A
couple of wrong turns and we end up taking the main road to Louis Trichardt and
through the mountains, onto the road the map shows is the way to the ruins and
Funduzi. But the ruins aren’t where the map says. The map has left out
villages, got roads wrong and doesn’t even mark where roads converge. It takes
three hours or so to reach Dzata and there’s nothing – a gate, a wall and a
security guard who says he can’t leave until his colleague arrives, so he walks
up the hill a bit to fire a gun which he says will bring his colleague.
Then they call a guy from the village who’s
looking after the museum. When the number 2 arrives he walks us through an
avenue of cactus trees like R has on his land and explains the sap is deadly
and can blind you.
He tells us Venda people were nomads who
came from Congo and settled in t the mountains, that on the way they fought and
captured women who carried stones for the king’s village all the way from
Congo. That children were put in a drum and when it was beaten their cries sent
enemies to sleep so they could be killed easily. That in Funduzi you can hear
them crying – they’re in the river which doesn’t mix with the lake water.
On the way to Funduzi we go through a
lush valley with hundreds of white butterflies just before we get to a tunnel.
Mrisi says it should be called soul valley because once I told him about
butterflies being the souls of people who’d died.
Funduzi is off the tar road towards
Sibasa in the dip between dry mountains. There are masses of villages
everywhere. People seem to be able
to build wherever they want. Every sign has Coca Cola on it. The roads are
bumpy. There are a few cars, reeds, cows that move out of the way reluctantly,
people fishing. It’s fed by a small river which must be a torrent when it
rains. There are deep gorges cut by rainwater.
It’s like a hand held out to catch rain
water. It’s low, you can see marks on the rocks where the water was. We bring a
bottle full of it for Mani, Giya’s idea. We’re in the car all day. Stop off at
the Venda Sun on the way back but we can’t use the pool and sit on the terrace
sweating, feeling grubby. Tonight we have mosquito coils which work, so we
don’t all use the nets, only Giya, and it’s better because the ants and
cockroaches have gone, temporarily.
Tuesday 28 Dec
I’m here alone. One of the goats was
screaming, the sandy one. It was wrapped up in its rope, lying down, almost
choking. I got it free and the other one escaped, I couldn’t catch it. I was
worried about snakes and scorpions in the grass. Ngara the girl from next door
and a little boy caught it eventually and tied it to a tree but the sandy one
isn’t eating, it’s just sanding under the tree doing nothing. R has taken Giya
and Mrisi to Nwamatatane to see chief and take Mani to Cooper’s house.
Now there are four kids, including
Ngara, sitting in the comfy chairs chatting away and trying out English words,
after I give them a tennis ball and bats to play with. My eyes are closing and
I want to sleep. I woke up at dawn. The birds had brought the river. It ran
over the stones in their beaks.
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| At Noria Mabasa's home and studio in Venda |
Weds 29 December
We book 5 nights at a mountain retreat
in the Soutpansberg, about two hours away. We’re off on New Year’s Day. Last
night R took me to Masia bottle store on the road to Giyani where there were 20
traditional dance groups performing. It was a dusty car park and all the
dancers in woolen skirts. I was the only white person there…mlungu, baasss…hmm.
A friend of R shepherded us around because I think he was aware of some
tension. He was then very clear that when it was dark we needed to go. R met up
with an old friend called Material. The moon was red again when we arrived back
at the zozo. Last night we watched it rise, red, out of the Luonde mountain
range. It’s still full. Seems to have been full for ages. We found a herb that
keeps mosquitoes away. It smells like sage.
The sandy goat’s ill. R’s just fed it
cooking oil which will give it the runs and hopefully sort out whatever’s
bloating its stomach. G’s making a green concoction with leaves that she
insists is paint. Mrisi’s been sketching and made a page of colours today from
the land.
Temba invited us to a party on New
year’s eve. A woman cam earlier to collect quartz stones for traditional healing
but I wonder if it was an excuse to look at us. Rang mum, she’d been worried.
The sky was full of stars. No moon tonight.
Thursday 30 Dec
I wake up early hearing people outside
on the path to get wood. Tomorrow we have to go to the funeral of a small boy
in the village. There are lots of people here with fathers who had 2 wives but
it’s frowned on now. It was in the days when men had to go to Jburg to work and
stayed most of the year. Brenda, the pregnant woman tells us her grandfather
did that and the family eventually refused to have him back because he’d built
a house in J’burg, had six kids and neglected the country family.
Pip’s running through the grass with an
old cob of corn in her mouth to chew. I can hear Vho Green’s cows along the
lane. The other day we saw buckets of frothy milk straight from the milking.
The mountains change all the time.
Three black and white storks in the
reeds at Funduzi, a red and black bird behind the zozo, yellow and black
sparrows, small finch birds with red beaks, butterflies – orange and yellow,
bright yellow, bright blue, black and yellow, wild citronella by the path, wild
guava trees...heat rising from the path to the loo, a swarm of bluebottles.
Friday 31 Dec
Mango for breakfast, up early to see
Noria Mabasa’s house. It’s down the road near Vuyani. She’s possibly the most
famous in SA. One of her sculptures of Hector Pieterson has been cast in
bronze. Another was commissioned by the government for the union buildings in
Pretoria. It gave her enough money to build and enormous house by the river
where she lives and works. At each side of the gate is a man and woman. There are
people in the walls round her roundhouse and sculptures everywhere. Pots, too,
traditional red, grey and white. She takes us around her place, shows us a
sculpture she’s making in wood about the woman who gave birth in a tree during
the Mozambique floods and another of a crocodile eating a person. She found the
wood in the river after the floods. She’s busy pumping water from the Levubu for
her corn as we arrive.
Back to Mashau for the boy’s funeral. We
have to go to the house for a service and walk back up the hill to the grave on
Vho Green’s land, just over the fence. The body’s already in the grave, we
don’t see it lowered in but they fill it and cover it with cement and white stones.
All the family throw in earth and the boy’s mother sits covered in a blanket. There’s
no crying, just singing.
We go to Shirley Village for New Year's
Eve with Vonani, his friend Temba. It’s a quiet house near Elim but we don’t
arrive back at Mashau until midnight and Giya’s crying because she thought we’d
be back earlier.
A
list of birds we’ve seen:
pied
kingfisher (bw), malachite kingfisher (turquoise & red), lilac breasted
roller, ground hornbill, southern yellow hornbill, red billed hornbill, African
hoopoe, euroepan swallow, pied crow (jburg) pintailed whydah (long tail)
jobrug, red billed quelea, red collard widow (jburg) southern masked weaver,
red winged starling, black eyed commong bulbul, yellow backed widow, melba
finch, glossy starling, speckled mousebird, night jar, barn ouwl, grey louri,
the go away bird, sandpipers, helmeted guinea fowl, ostrich, natal francolin,
black sparrowhawk or African hawk eagle, black kite, buzzrds, martial eagle,
African fish eagle, bataleur eagle, Lappet faced vulture, hammerkop,
saddlebilled stork, yellow billed stork, black egret, great white egret, cattle
egret, grey heron, black headed heron, goliath heron