Not sure whether to chalk it up to wanderlust or babalaas or an invite to a seafood paella in a gustblown Karoo dorpie that had me riding shotgun in Tiago Rodrigues’s delivery van. Might’ve been all three, along with the languid boredom that’s always gnawing at the restlessness of those with nothing to do in these enclaves where little happens anyway.
But on payday weekends, Sundays in my Kuyasa township look much like Friday nights anywhere else. The booze-addled joints are jumping; music blares out of popped, souped-up VW boots and nobody is in any particular rush to close up shop. At least not until the Po-Po have pulled up, usually around 2am.
I was spoiling on joining them. Slap a chop on the shisanyama, roll a spliff and listen to Lucky Dube pining about no schools or hospitals, only prisons. A middle finger to the then-unlifted Covid national state of disaster, the riots and service delivery protests, but mostly to just enjoy the fruits of my solitary marijuana tree – aptly guarded by five nameless cats out in my backyard.
Tiago had different plans: Philipollis – A Mediterranean paella at his brother-in-law’s, a few beers then we’ll see…
I wasn’t really sold. Who counts on anything happening in a one-street town most famous for an old jailhouse (now turned B&B) and some Bok prop decades in retirement?
Despite my scepticism, I hangered-on, mostly because of Tiago. Not everyday that one would call a corpulent 50-something-year-old businessman, not prone to drinking on weekdays, and who once advocated an ill-fated campaign for a university campus to be plonked right here in a vestige that cosmopolites wheezing past in sportscars call, “ja, that place with a Shell,” a friend.
He’d even allocated land to the idea. Southfork, a modest stretch of land set at the lee of the witchraft mountain Coleskop, rent free, because he claims his “books are healthy and with a university here, a few thousand students sauntering about for lunch or a drink, figured I’d make that money back howmanyfold anyhow.”
At this, he says, bespoke-suited beurocrats twitched their eyebrows. “I was given interesting labels” he chuckles; “a roughhide white monopoly capitalist riding on the ubuntu graces of a great black idea.”
Undeterred, alongside a certain Advocate the campaign to have the Sol Plaatje University campus in the bundus of the Northern Cape took off. You’d remember our legal man of silk as the benefactor of the now defunct Bomela Cup. That annual soccer tournament, for a while the biggest sporting event down here, with the most lucrative prizes would draw generous crowds from all across the province.
For the campaign Tiago did the pitches, the Advocate oversaw the documents and networking. A ragtag of IT specialists, marketers, retired journalists crept out the woodwork and from the duo’s own pockets, banners appeared, parades of jubilant enthusiasts lined the town’s ordinarily quiet streets but naysayer distrust remained mostly unthawed.
I somewhat agreed with them! His offer seemed too philanthropic. Too good to be true. Surely there was a catch somewhere but it was a Sunday, I was hungover, so the callow small-time journo questions could wait. So, on an achingly sunny February afternoon there we were once again roaring on steaming karoo blacktop, – not a car in sight – me drinking, him talking, and both of us admiring, before tossing coins over the meadival railings that haunt that majestic Vanderkloof Dam. And just to make sure the ancestors were listening, I peed over, but Tiago took the more cultured conclusion – spitting.
At his swaar’s dinner table, me the sole Xhosa in the presence of six well-worn Portuguese, well, what had I to lose? Not because I couldn’t deshell the prawns, or say I preferred the sauvignon blanc to the pinot noir or that I’d picked up that his niece, 16 years old, had fluffed a note or two on that piano score she was playing. But there were no expectant first impressions to be observed; a friend had simply invited me over and who was I to say nay?
It’s not that racial/social barriers are not still in khoki pen down here. Orania, the whites-only enclave is barely one town away. So too is Vanderkloof, home to the Suidlanders, a paramilitary outfit that fashions itself as the white man’s last defence if the racial apocalypse ever comes. In many ways the fences of muted segregation are as perceptible as the rolling hills that animate the rugged landscape. And should one dare to cross over, the unspoken rules subtly reassert themselves. Like a script from a movie on the American Deep South; “they” are there and here “we” are and ain’t nobody causing anybody no trouble. Today, however, common purpose had opened up our respective laagers and curiously we fell into a hypothetical embrace and let ourselves right in.
Earlier that morning, before we’d hit the road, both reeling from bouts of hangover, I was nursing a Zamalek and Tiago a Castle Lite at Han’s tavern in the township. Hans, the establishment’s venerable proprietor; a smooth-talking, easy-dressing swell had crashed his car the previous week and is no more. His tavern, notwithstanding the polished wooden counters and shuffling jazz on the juke, whinced an air of gloom in the absence of that boeppens that had so familiarly stood at that doorway all these decades.
A group of sombre, glazen-eyed revelers joins us. They know Tiago. They don’t call him mlungu, bhulu, lahnee – generic racial references to whites still very common in SA – he is just Tiago. And in Hans’ honour we clink quarts and bleat, “long live Thyopho,” (his clan name) bow our heads in a pointless but well-meaning gesture and then off we go.
Just after 1pm, in Philipollis, tummies stuffed, Tiago and I sit perched at some hotel bar counter. A local lawyer with a fiery courtroom reputation generously slides a focaccia in our faces.
If you excuse the badass reputation and Miley Cyrus figure she turns out to be the quintessential Karoo tannie, adamant that drunken men should eat, drink even more, and that lurking somewhere out there, are extraterrestrial life forms bent on paying us a visit soon. That’s why, she’s unequivocal, they’ve put up all those “sci-fi” radio telescopes in not far-off Sutherland. And on those starry Karoo nights, the whole world noisy, the Karoo tjoepstil, she reclines on a garden couch and swears she can hear their inscrutable whisperings.
She lines up a rather equitable playlist; something between sokie-sokie treffers, Dolly Parton and Marvin Gaye. Then out come the Jaggies and Springbokkies, dubbel brandewyns met ys complemented by the rueful tales of little-town living: The skills exodus to the cities, too many potholes, too much dagga on the streets. In no time, the libations have felled all compos mentis and Fokofpolsiekar are belting Hemel op die Platteland and suddenly everybody has found the raconteur within.
Tipple in hand, Tiago agonises about the university that never came. He feels himself and the Advocate were hard-done, that maybe the urban regents weren’t thinking clearly. In his estimates “the comrades” aren’t putting their money where their mouths are. “Kimberly,” he slurs, “is a dead town, only buoyed by government departments.” Him and the Advovate had poured all their energies, invested their own money, faithful that there was no better placed town for a university campus. The Kimberly diamond mines, he continues, are long gone and with them all the big money. Colesberg forms the nucleus of the country, “so how can we talk ‘rural development’ yet not see the merits of a university in such a strategic location?”
The guy is a capitalist, to be sure, and he doesn’t try to spin it otherwise. His own father arrived from the Island of Madeira a young man with dreams, into a political insanity where even he wasn’t quite white enough. For Tiago there was school. Then there were the subtle agitator tendencies: him, his aunt and sister taking mass at the only Catholic Church in town, which was in the black township. There were also the early entrepreneurial leanings: first working in the family business and later starting his own arcade game shop. There were also the tall tales about learning to fight in the township even though some of these still need further verification. In his later life it is his depot business that upstart artists, wannabe businessmen and kids needing donations turn to. A dedicated member of the Rotary Club, he is known to pop up to support this cause or that.
As a long-standing admirer of Maeder Osler and a friend of Toverview, he is never too far off to offer a helping hand. Whether commissioning a story, treating the lads to lunch or driving them out to cover a story somewhere out of town. For ads, he often procures the creativity of Janco Piek, for some banter he kicks it with Yours Truly and, yes, he always picks up the tab. And although particularly shrewd around money, he, – to paraphrase Hunter S Thompson – doesn’t appear to be all that into killing more than he can eat. And, though we’ve argued endlessly around ‘privilege,’ I’ll be first to admit how privileged I’ve been to have his number on speed dial. And, ja, his nickname is Mr Rod. You’re simply not cool enough around here if you don’t wear one and Tiago is a moerse cool dude.