A week-long museum conference is hardly the sort of place a small-time writer with no skin in the game would consider a hangout – content as he tends to be in the quietude of his own thoughts rather than the orderly goings of more purposeful human beings. Phones going off, laptops clattering, registers passed around. Too many faces. Lots of big words.
But here we are, thanks to the Karoo Development Foundation (KDF), at Bloemfontein’s Anglo-Boer War Museum rubbing shoulders with through-and-through heritage afficionados at the opening of the SA Museums Association conference. These guys all think of museums, computers, and heritage as a big deal. In the distance, an effigy of General Louis Botha’s horse, one hoof aloft, his wife calling out at his side. Creased eyes wide open, the general’s gaze looks every bit like the guy who wants to start something. Probably a scrap.
On the capacious lawns – manicured, not an autumn leaf in sight – a trio of marimba cats are bobbing; feline taps as they snap on the instruments. Nothing quite like live music to get even a pessimist warmed up to things. At first one is able to get away with not drawing too much attention on himself. But these are artists – curious, loquacious, with big hearts. So when one of them slides up to you, two virgin cocktail glasses in hand and a wondering ‘don’t I know you from somewhere?’ on her lips, the thing to do is to smile back and say ‘I doubt it but thank you.’ Ice broken. You’ve made a friend.
That’s when you realise the jig is up – the keeping to yourself won’t get you anywhere – and now we must saunter inside. The carpets are deep. The wood is ancient and glistening. Prof Doreen Atkinson is blushing. Outside of God, the Anglo-Boer War occupies a particularly sacred place in her heart. For ten years she’s gone through gallons of midnight oil researching and writing a book on it. The KDF’s trustee and project manager’s ‘work of passion… a story of stories.’ What a beautiful way to phrase it. Outside of that, she was taken aback by Hendrik Snyder’s talk on South Africa’s sports heritage and the virtual museum. Before the conference, frankly she ‘never thought that sports heritage is very significant. And this guy made me change my mind. I think it is great when we celebrate aspects of ordinary life.’
Everybody has a place in this museum; the lionheart Three Burgers. SEK Mqhayi, the illustrious poet and writer, probably the finest in the Xhosa language. There’s a history of a country; from wars and rifles and concentration camps right up to a nation realising that democracy was the way to cull the hate and bloodshed. In dribs and drabs the delegates of the Conference spill in. All eager to make your acquaintance and tell you what’s their business here. KwaZulu-Natal has the lion’s share. Respect!
We are digressing. The brief was a write-up on the KDF and our province, the expansive Northern Cape, rugged – and recently – there is government talk of green hydrogen being produced on the Namaqualand coast. Here you’ll find the massive SA Large Telescope (SALT) in Sutherland, the now-protected Karoo Lamb courtesy of the KDF, and if the energy minister gets his way, oil and gas exploration possibly taking off in the Great Karoo. If the press reports are anything to go by, not everybody’s happy about that last bit, though.
The A Team
Then we meet people like Johannes Stuurman, a direct descendent of the last Khoi San chief, Dawid Stuurman, who escaped imprisonment on Robben Island three times before he was shipped of on a convict ship bound for Australia. So Mr Stuurman’s question on the day is particularly close to home: ‘What could be done about the indigenous chiefs and especially how to repatriate the remains of my ancestor, believed to lie buried under the Sydney Harbour Bridge?’
In an earlier incarnation, Mr Stuurman used to work for Thembsi Madikane, one of Colesberg’s earliest political successes when she was MEC for Transport Safety and Liason. Nowadays he is a punctilious hand in the development, tourism and heritage space when he’s not standing at the pulpit mending the nets. Despite his mature age, the man is hard to pin down for a brief interview. One moment he’s nibbling on a cocktail sausage after a lengthy conference session, the next he’s on a late-evening flight attending to some urgent business in Kuruman. Barely a week earlier he was dancing at a newsworthy church conference in Botswana.
In a brief moment, where everyone was getting tucked in on the prepared delicacies, Prof Atkinson slipped a book into my hand. A book written by a writer ‘that you perhaps need to talk to.’ Kagiso R. Molema is young man of royal blood who dresses and sounds the part. His book We are World Creators is something you might expect from Tony Robbins, the famous motivational speaker from the US, than a young man from gustblown Kuruman. It’s a literary offering between what a father might tell his beloved son and a means to get one’s mental attitude in shape.
Tina Coombes is an archeologist by training but reminiscent of an unpretentious farmer’s wife – heavy on the bakkie’s accelerator. On our way back she shortened our route by a good twenty minutes, this whilst chatting away about rugby and growing up in the Karoo where she’d watch a hunchback TV operated by a car battery from the floor. As per her qualification, she was particularly intrigued by Mudzunga Munzhedzi and Justine Wintjes’s paper entitled Poisoned Arrows. This KwaZulu-Natal Museum duo presented on the complexities of storing and preserving poison-tipped arrows left behind years ago by the so-called Bushmen warriors.
Having barely hugged the loved ones back home, the KDF team are already having the bakkies serviced and the cooler boxes brimming with padkos for an even bigger adventure. The inaugural tour of the Forgotten Highway Heritage Route which spans from Tulbagh in the Western Cape going all the way up to the Witsand Nature Reserve in far-flung Northern Cape has for years been in the making. This year, thanks to the Northern Cape Department of Tourism, it is finally happening.
The odyssey retraces the early treks of white colonialists into the Northern parts of the interior where they inevitably encountered the indigenous communities. In parts they put up missionaries and sometimes they bumped heads, but this history needs to be documented and remembered in the Great South African book. It is with this view in mind that the KDF has been partnering with various stakeholders and government to bring attention to these chapters in the country’s history.
With my outsider role in this story concluded, I unexpectedly meet up with Dr Terrence Bellingham. The Terrence I once knew was a reticent medium-pace bowler, hair parted at the side. The one I meet at the conference lives up to the caricature of the textbook academic; balding, and so at ease at his field that he deploys the simplest words to explain complex concepts. And doesn’t mind taking the mickey out of himself by comparing his love of motorbikes to that of Velaphi Mjongeni – a massively popular black television show from the eighties. Not without bias, I’m immediately taken by his paper A best way forward to the organization of entomological training courses in Sub-Saharan Africa. His studies have taken him to the deep jungles of Africa where his team’s work was pioneering and just because he’s a celebrity of another kind, we just had to take a selfie.
Over the coming weeks, eParkeni will be covering the Forgotten Highway Heritage Tour, with all its ups and downs. It’s rugged terrains, arid plains, potjiekos under starry skies and the koppies that ensure a unique landscape to these parts of Mzansi. We hope you’ll tag along with us on this journey.