All her life, Martha Kerneels has had to hop over a fence and disappear behind a ditch to relieve herself. Whenever a family member had taken ill, Martha, gown swathed around her slight frame, would plod to the KFC across the road to place an emergency call. 35 years old, she has never owned a TV set. To charge her weathered handset, she hands it over to a neighbour to charge at the “Missus’s” where the neighbour works as a domestic.
Paradoxically, just across the road from her shack on the N1 highway outside Colesberg is a sparkling little complex. Nothing overly exceptional by worthwhile standards, still, a few restaurants, filling station, fried chicken outlet and – a little further on – a well-appointed three-star resort shimmer near a cluster of tin shanties, gravel thoroughfares and no donkey carts.
On a nameless street, in a randomly numbered, slipshod shack, is where Martha lives. Her windows are cardboard. Roofing hangs low enough to compel a stoop. And the fence – actually shreds of fencing fastened together – is lopsided, only partially demarcating the erf. But at least there’s Optel, a grizzled, hankering little mutt who unconvincingly mans the rest.
Formally, this bush-league settlement – one of at least half a dozen dispersed throughout the Northern Cape is an “outspanning” – home to the Karretjie Mense; woebegone, poverty-stricken nomads of the Karoo if we are to take the many who’ve written of them at their word. https://www.groundup.org.za/article/poorest-poor-karretjie-mense-great-karoo/
These writings tend to wade down a similar narrative: Here are the “Karretjie Mense” (Cart People) – a moniker owed to their nomadic lifestyle – riding on donkey carts as seasonal sheep shearers and fence fixers. Descendants of the /Xam (San/Bushmen) whose history runs Stone-Age-deep. Long before the arrival of the Bantu or Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape or Jan van Riebeeck’s refreshment station of 1652, they were hunter-gathering their way through Southern Africa.
In fact, it is their distant ancestors, in loincloth and animal skins, who animate those early encounters between White and Native in the interior. As late as the 1800s, according to UNISA anthropologist Prof Michael de Jongh, when “the first colonial explorers, travelers, hunters and eventually, pioneer farmers started moving into the Great Karoo, fierce competition for resources was brought about. The regional /Xam (San/Bushmen) perceived those inkommers (newcomers) to be encroaching on their land and to be hunting their game.”
In the intervening years, the /Xam would be savagely hunted and mowed down by hostile Boer commandos who saw them as nothing but a nuisance that stole livestock from white settlers. Eventually “tamed;” the women absorbed as retainers on farm households while the men tended the livestock.
Seemingly, their lot hasn’t made any significant strides post-1994.
Parched, flimsy linoleum barely covers all of Martha’s floor. A cupboard, equally haggard, with doors hanging on hinges is where the monthly social welfare food parcels are stashed. All that buffers her from the hostile Karoo winter – often reaching sub-zero levels – is a miniature paraffin stove and newspaper sellotaped to the rusted zinc sheets of her shack. The chill nonetheless still wafts through obvious gaping holes in the structure.
Five years ago the Umsobomvu Municipality told the SABC that “we request from the province to say ‘can you give us 100 units [of RDP houses]… unfortunately, also their budget is very tight” in regard to the plight of these people. https://youtu.be/_Zj5vg_bTsk
Sadly, Martha is oblivious to such statements because she will likely never see the news reports nor the video clips. There is no electricity here, you see, and the closest thing to clean running water is a lonesome water tank that peers over the low-hung structures. The “toilet” is a nearby ditch. “We,” resident Sam Meyers says, “have been living here since Mandela came out [of prison].”
His barefoot two-year old daughter, tugs at his overalls whilst his wife gets a pot of afvaal going on an open fire outside. When Sam is not scouring for a piecemeal job in town, he is selling maize snacks to make ends meet. He does not even own a bed, just a thin mattress snuck in a corner to be unfurled when the family wants to bed down.
In Afrikaans, Martha laments the indignity of frail, aging residents having to do their ablutions under an open sky, often in full view of children and passersby. “Dis aaklik.” It’s awful, she says, contorting her face into a grimace. In cases of emergency, all they can do is hope the ambulance will arrive on time because only one resident owns a car and it’s been broken for years.
As late as 1996, The Irish Times predicted the inevitable end to this group’s itinerant way of life. In recent years, farmers have opted for shearing teams from Lesotho, who, with their electronic shearers, work more productively. Hence, Sam says, the once characteristic donkey carts of the Karretjie Mense have been sold off and their manual shears are a gnawing reminder of the way things used to be.
Rubbish collection services do not make it this side and the nearest clinic is on the other side of town. But at least the local Lowryville School dispenses a bus for the daily two-way trip for school-goers. Six of them are whipping up plumes of dust pushing draadkarre – toy cars fashioned from wire. Unlike their teenage counterparts from kinder places, you won’t find any designer sneakers or jeans here, just plenty of patched-up pants and oversized shoes – hand me downs from a benevolent charity.
Wire, it would seem, commands high currency.
Just a stone throw away along the N1, other residents are peddling crafts fashioned from it. Miniature windmills, dolls and animals sold to people driving by. For some, not making a sale means there’ll probably be no supper tonight.
General misery notwithstanding, they remain, right next to the rugged, arid landscape, the region’s literary fodder. You seemingly can never spin a believable Karoo yarn without at least weaving them in as a passing footnote. Sunburnt anthropologists, novelists, specially activist journalists have proffered fine prose and tear-jerking documentaries in the name of this most enigmatic of ethnic groups. These too tend to share a commonality: The indigenous “First People” on their rundown donkey carts; itinerant lifestyle; monkish pursuits that elude the rest of us; week-long benders that result in brawls and cussing; and care for little else but when and whence the next dop will come.
Mostly the chroniclers are right. Spot-on right. It would appear that the “Karretjie Mense,” always find themselves on the unkind side of history with the short end of the stick. Strangers wielding microphones, cameras and iPads show up here, shoot their stories then say “agh shame” before driving off into oblivion. I cannot claim to be an exception.
On a late afternoon this April, when the mercury had begun its unforgiving descent, I coaxed one Janco Piek with a preposition: Dude, why not swing by the Plakkerskamp for some pictures and a possible story? All-round nice guy he is, he asked no further questions than to eagerly clamour for his cam and off we went.
From his place, a flowery suburban serenity where the OK’s just around the corner and there’s a man standing there whom you can pay R100 to mow your lawn, the Karretjie shantytown shimmered bleakly on the horizon. That’s how I came to Martha. To the Plakkerskamp; a paradoxical dereliction right next to holidaymakers sputtering by, milk shakes at the Wimpy and no pickles in my burger sir, thanks very much.
In my youth growing up here in the late 80s, the Karretjie Mense were something of a mystery. Narrative always seemed framed around this mystical, wrinkled old-timer on his haggard donkey cart, wife and kids atow, off to some secluded white farm for a few months of seasonal sheep-shearing work. Back then, colluding with whites, especially amabhulu – the so-called Boer farmers – invariably drew the suspicions of the black population. Smoldering car tyres were barricading the township, hippos (armoured military vehicles) were rolling in hard and heavy, and almost everybody was politicised to some degree.
Yet the Karretjie People, notoriously said to be of unconfrontational stock, seemed inured from the chaos and a-changing times. Distancing themselves from the toi-tois, they set up their makeshift shelters on an area called asnek, a sprawling dumping ground just a stone throw away from a befittingly-named Ethuthwini Location – place of ash. Though they lived in some proximity with black residents, they were always shrouded in a cloak of enigma. As a result they often found themselves misconstrued as a docile, uncultured, rootless peasantry.
Enter prof Michael de Jongh. Driving through here one day, the bespectacled then University of South Africa (UNISA) academic fell upon a perplexing sight.
From his rear-view mirror he caught sight of an exodus of people. Entire families with chickens and dogs hobbling off on donkey carts. Who on Earth are these people, he’d have wondered, but made no more of it until he returned years later to find out in earnest. His book Roots and Routes Karretjie Mense Marginalisation of the First People was the book that gradually peeled off the veneer of mystery, a prelude to the media interest that was to trickle in in coming years.
As an anthropologist, his discoveries were not unlike striking a small jackpot. But anthropological technicalities fly way above our lowly intellectual recesses here at eParkeni so for now we’ll just recommend that you get the book. Or Google some of the seminal research findings.
Another book, Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam, by British writer Julia Blackburn has caused a stir in literally circles. Even bagging a glowing review on The Spectator. Beautifully written, it tells the story of the /Xam and how they were dispossessed of their lands and identity by the madness of colonialism. For her book to take the shape that it has, Blackburn has dug deep both from a research perspective and from her sensibilities as an emotive, poetic voice.
Reading the book, written in grey England about an all but forgotten people at the basement of Africa, my mind wandered to Martha. Her tiny frame. Her pained voice. The cold floor on which she sleeps and the irony never escaped me. Her possible ancestors obliterated from their lands, identity and history’s pages. Dying without registering their own side of the record. Now Martha, in a different era, seemingly doomed to the same fate. A silenced voice drowned out by poverty, lack of education and opportunity that steps out of her haggard shack and looks out at restaurants she will never eat in. Gleaming German salons she will never drive roar passed the grim noplace she has called home all her life. Her ancestors, oppressed by violence into silence, she finds herself a victim of another oppression – that of want.
Surely this cannot be how the story ends, that Martha died in a shack and the only way the outside world ever got to know of this indigenous community was because of some curious outsiders who stopped to find out who they were whilst locals looked upon the misery, said “agh shame” and walked away.