Look, it’s not exactly French Riviera idyllic. Still no better setting could come close for the backdrop of a low-grade horror flick. Special effects or elaborate Hollywood-style peppering for who? Coming as it does with all the apparel that works: a shadow-draping koppie that leers over a sporadically-lit street. There’s a dilapidating church shrouded in myth that nobody seemingly wants gone. Or renovated.
But the most formidable prop lies just a stone’s throw away. Hold your horses, though. Before we get on with this part of the excursion, it’s only befitting that we seek inspiration from oosbonda, the regents who’ve been keeping an unrelenting eye on things for over two lifetimes. Who’s to say amongst them we won’t stumble on a writer? Hopefully one whose epitath is engraved in an unpretentious countryside farewell. ‘He wrote but made nothing from the work.’ Or: ‘Oom Willie was a skrywer maar almal se hy was n beter Boer. What better plotline for writers to fumble the stupidity of it all, get through the writer’s block only to find themselves as incidental farmers than in this town where life assumes the feline trot of bovine on the graze?
Where your eyes slowly unravel to the Karoo sun peeping through the curtain and the ears thump to the patter of summer rains on the corrugated iron roof. You could whistle up the dogs and stroll to the abattoir for the freshest cow liver with bits of stomach fat. The butcher’s a fossil; he calls it netvet. Doesn’t sound like much, ja, until this layman’s delicacy is sputtering over cool coals and it’s time to eat it up fast. Or maybe we’d find a soldier, we’d hoped. One who took a bullet in the fabled skirmishes up on the nearby ‘witching mountain’ Coleskop.
Funny how much of the people – the quietest in town – at the old cemetery are old hands. Merchant husbands and real farmers’ wives with strong legs and calloused hands. Paler than me but still personify the quaint and benevolent habits of die ou dorp. Shaded by towering pepper trees, occasionally they suffer the disturbance of feeding goats and the odd vagrant roughing it in town. For the most part, these members of the Long-Gone Club mostly go about their business in relative quiet.
Been a while since a lawnmower or a welder has paid the joint a visit. Looks mostly presentable, ’cause in small towns (hopefully everywhere else where good men might be found) decent people never annoy the dead. The marble heirlooms upright. History books will say Colesberg officially became a ‘town’ circa 1830 but here Mr Samuel Parker (1837 – 1882) lies. Born in England, could the man have been a part of the 1820 settler trek they taught us about back at school?
He might’ve been a regular at the adjacent Toverberg Hotel, in its former incarnation a segregated watering hotel but is today home to several foreign-owned shops. They might have also picked up some essentials at nearby Hoeg Stoep or bought simple sofas at de Wits. They might’ve also prayed in the Methodist Church, where during the South African War, congregants dug a tunnel in case the enemy paid the flock an unwanted visit.
If the hunger pangs start tampering with your tour around town, you can grab some pub grub at The Horse and Mill on the storied Bell Street dotted by stylish homes built in the characteristic Karoo and Cape Dutch architectural style. Though the name sounds a tad British, here it takes on a literal note. Inside, you’ll find a massive horsemill dating back many decades and you could ask the waitron for a ‘koki’ to scrawl something like ‘Louis Armstrong blew best’ on the bar’s wall.
If you have the legs for it, pop by at the local tourism office, rent a tour guide like Mbulelo Kafi and ask for a pamphlet of the walking trails. These will take you around the local veldt and if you have a set of binoculars you might catch a glimpse of the plakkerskamp at a distance, its residents fashioning all sorts of trinkets with wire and old tins.
But the most intriguing thing about this small town is how, even amongst Europeans, supernatural fetishism seemingly was not snuffed out in the Age of Enlightenment. Here God, the ancestors and even voodooish superstition share common spiritual space, seemingly without stepping on each other’s toes. Locals are known to sacrifice all sorts of animals to the ancestors on a Saturday only to be seen taking mass on Sunday.
Spirituality is a big deal. Take Bishop Dr J Bolana’s visit a few weeks ago. In the Bantu Church of Christ, uTat’waseBhayi (the father from Port Elizabeth – now Gqeberha) as the faithful affectionately refer to him is something of a papal figure. So when he paid his Colesberg congregants a visit, Kuyasa Township came to a virtual standstill and some 50 sheep were put to slaughter. Spiritual tourism is nothing to be sneezed at in towns where virtually everybody believes in something.
Remember that ominous church we mentioned earlier? Well a white acquaintance of mine believes it was the venue for clandestine meetings amongst the Freemasons. There are supposed sightings of ghosts. With such clear starry skies, you can expect others to swear that they’ve seen UFOs and all sorts of other extraterrestrial claims. And while you marvel at the horsemill up in Bell Street, there’s an entirely different mill grinding on: the one of gossip. It’s a small town, Dear Reader, to make life interesting, skinnering across the fence is a popular pastime here. Should you ever decide to pull through, it’s advisable to take whatever is whispered on the sly with a pinch of salt.