Resident Alien

Rian Malan

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781868424085
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Resident Alien is a provocative and engaging collection of the best of Rian Malan's writings that have appeared in the likes of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Esquire, since My Traitor's Heart. Crisscrossing South Africa - and further afield - in a quest to understand the land and continent of his birth - Malan does time with an extraordinary cast of characters: from vigilantes and outlaws to beauty queens and truckers; from Sol Kerzner to Jackie Selebi; from JM Coetzee to the last Afrikaner in Tanzania. Never one to avoid getting his hands dirty, nor shy of controversy, Malan's writing has landed him in hot water from just about everyone. Whether taking on the music industry, the government, or spending time with the AIDS denialists, he has earned the enmity of all. But Malan's honesty, his unwavering support for the underdog, and the unique power of his prose, make him one of South Africa's most important writers.

4

Travel

The Last Afrikaner

I stumbled upon this story in late 1993, a time of agonising crisis for Afrikaners. Some were willing to abandon the laager and follow De Klerk into democracy. Others were vowing to fight to the bitter end rather than submit to black rule. Under the circumstances, the parable of Tannie Katrien struck me as a story the Volk needed to hear. Especially the right wingers. Those hard manne thought liberals were laughable, but I thought they might heed the word of a little old tannie whose experience defied at least some of our myths about darkest Africa.

Back in Jo’burg, I tried to convince the SABC’s Afrikaans service to flight a documentary about Tannie Katrien, arguing that her story would alleviate Boer paranoia and maybe even save us from race war. My letters went unanswered, and the Volk never got to meet the only living Afrikaner who could make soap out of hippopotamus fat.

Once upon a time there was a British colonial family named Hartley who had a magical farm in Africa. It lay on the slopes of Mount Meru, a cool green island in a sea of sunblasted yellow savannah. Twice a year, monsoon winds deposited heavy rains on Meru’s leeward slopes, which were clad in dense rain-forest, full of rhino and buffalo and elephant. Several swift, clear streams came tumbling out of the jungle and meandered across a level plain where the soil was so rich and deep that anything you planted bore fruit in astonishing profusion – peaches, apricots, beans, maize, and the sun so close you got two harvests every year.

The Hartleys bought this farm in 1953. Their homestead lay on the shoulder of the volcano, so high that it was often above the clouds. Sometimes they would wrap themselves in blankets at night and sit on the stoep with the clouds at their feet, watching the moon rise over the glittering summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, 40 miles away. In the morning, it would be burning hot again, and you could sit on the same stoep with a pair of binoculars, tracking the movement of elephant herds across the parched plains far below. ‘I loved that house,’ Kim Hartley told me. ‘The stoep was 99 feet across. It had big white Dutch gables, and the previous owner had left a portrait of Hitler in the cellar.’ I didn’t have to ask who’d built it. It had to have been a Boer.

In 1904, in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war, disaffected Afrikaners sent a scouting party up the spine of Africa in search of a place where a Boer could live free of British domination and rid his mouth of the bitter taste of defeat. They found Mount Meru. Two years later, the first ox-wagons came trundling across the savannah, carrying Afrikaners who settled in a giant semi-circle around the northern base of the volcano. At first, they lived by the gun, but in time, they cleared the land, and began to till it with ox-ploughs. In the beginning, they dreamed of linking up with Afrikaners who’d settled in Kenya and resurrecting the lost Boer republics, but there were too few of them, so it came to nothing, and what they had was fine, anyway: perhaps the best farmland in the world.

By the time the Hartleys arrived, the Boers had created a paradise under the volcano. The lower slopes of Meru were dotted with white-washed farmhouses, shaded by bluegums and jacaranda trees. Around them lay a mile-wide belt of orchards and wheatfields, segmented by whitewashed wooden fences and criss-crossed by irrigation furrows. Below the cultivated lands, literally at the bottom of the garden, lay the dusty savannah, teeming with antelope and big game, and on the far horizon, Mt Kilimanjaro.

A few days later, I met Kim’s mother, a grand old white Kenyan, charming, well-preserved, and full of astonishing tales about good chaps who’d been gored by buffalo or died in light plane crashes. Mrs Hartley was fascinated by the Boers, whom she clearly regarded as a subspecies of noble savage, almost as exotic as the Masai. Their leader was General Wynand Malan, a dapper old fellow with a white goatee, remembered for his suicidal commando exploits behind English lines in the war of 1899 –1902. General Malan was rich and fairly civilised. So was Sarel du Toit, the haughty man who built the Hartley’s hilltop mansion and dreamed of becoming governor of Tanganyika. Mrs Hartley was more interested in the wild Boers, the biltong hunters and bywoners on the community’s fringe.

They were tall and strong and very good-looking, she said, but when they smiled, their teeth were black, stained by fluorine in the river. Some had never seen electric light, or talked on a telephone. The men wore funny hats and home-crafted shoes called veldskoens, and women seldom ventured outside without a kappie or bonnet. They were full of obscure bush lore regarding edible plants and geneesblare, healing leaves. They quarried their own whitewash, made their own soap from elephant or hippo fat. They’d disappear into the bush in battered old trucks and return weeks later with loads of biltong and ivory. On market day, they’d pass by in ’30s Fords piled high with wheat, oranges, beans and geese, heading toward Arusha.

Arusha was the nearest town, population 5 000 or so. To get there, you had to cross a plain covered with fever trees, and then follow a rough track through the elephant-infested rain forest. Beyond the rain forest was a region of coffee plantations, and then you came to Arusha, a cluster of white houses with red-tiled roofs, bisected by a rushing stream in which gentlemen cast flies for trout. After market, the richer white farmers would gather at the country club, where the men told hunting stories and drank too much and sometimes played bok-bok, an extremely violent form of indoor leap-frog introduced by the Afrikaners.

Meanwhile, the ladies sat in the ladies’ lounge, rolling their eyes, sipping gin and tonic and talking about children and servants. ‘The Boers had a habit,’ said Mrs Hartley, ‘of twinning their sons with a black boy. They went everywhere together, a little Boer boy with hair this short and his little black companion. But when they grew up, the white boy was expected to be the master, and take a strong line with the blacks.’ Too strong a line, in Mrs Hartley’s estimation. ‘They thought I was stupid,’ she said, ‘because I didn’t know the golden rule: if they did something wrong, you had to beat them. They were very hard on the natives.’

And yet, and yet. African labourers seldom stayed long with English gentleman farmers, but they often stayed with the Afrikaners all their lives. ‘It was curious,’ she said. ‘They seemed to understand each other better than we did.’

Maybe so, but when the wind of change began to blow in the fifties, the Afrikaners of Mt Meru grew unsettled. They thought of Africa as a place where only the strong survived; where a white man had to stand his ground with gun in hand, or else be overwhelmed. Many were convinced they’d be massacred. As soon as independence day was set, they started packing up and heading south in convoys of heavy trucks, laden with furniture and bedding and prize cattle. Some sold their farms, but the market was collapsing, so many just locked their doors and walked away.

A few dozen diehards stayed on after uhuru, but life grew tougher and tougher, and utterly impossible after 1967, when Tanzania committed itself to socialism. The Red Chinese were invited in. Factories and banks were nationalised. Most remaining white farmers – the Hartleys included – were given 24 hours to quit the country. One of the last Boers to leave was a bearded ancient named De Wet, who had come to Meru as a young boy and could not bear to go. But what could you do? There was no appeal. So he loaded his truck and set out for South Africa, only to die of a broken heart two days down the road. And that was the end of the Mt Meru Boers. ‘They all left?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Hartley. ‘They all died, or went back home.’

It might have ended there, but Kim was stricken by longing for the landscape where he’d spent his first years, so he took me on a pilgrimage to Mount Meru. Our first day was dismaying. The Hartley’s old house was a ruin. The surrounding farmland was turning in part into dustbowl. The Boers’ irrigation pumps lay rusting in the dirt. Their fruit orchards had been uprooted and burned. Here and there, an old Boer farmhouse was still standing, inhabited by people who sometimes had vague memories of the kaBuru. ‘This belonged to Bwana Billem (Willem),’ they would say, or Bwana Saru (Sarel) or Bwana Bitchie (Pietie). ‘He was a kaBuru. We chased him away.’

The kaBuru were not always fondly remembered. ‘They were a strong, harsh people,’ one man told me. ‘Like this!’ He balled his fist, and raised his forearm as if to strike me. A greybeard chipped in with an amused demurral. ‘I worked for a kaBuru once,’ he said. ‘In six months, I saved enough to buy a white shirt and a bicycle.’ The first man laughed, clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You are welcome. Do you want to see the kaBuru graves?’

So we piled into the Land Cruiser, our guide and ten others, and headed off through the bush on a goat track. Storm clouds were gathering over the volcano. We came to a narrow bridge that crossed a deep canyon, in the depths of which there was a swift river with deep, dark pools. A little further on was kwaJannie, where Jannie Pretorius had once stayed. His house was still standing in the middle distance, unpainted for three decades and now blending into the dusty grey desolation.

As we stopped, a crowd of young men appeared as if from nowhere, wearing ragged jeans and T-shirts and demanding to know what was happening. I said, I am a kaBuru, I’ve come to see the graves of my people. This did not go down well. There were scowls and unfriendly mutterings in a language I could not understand. Our guide said, ‘Socialism is finished here. Whites and coolies are coming back. Some are reclaiming properties that were nationalised by Nyerere. These people think you have come to take their land away.’

I said, nooit, I’m just a tourist, but they weren’t impressed, so I produced some snaps of a small farm on the Transkei border in which I owned a one-sixth share. I said, ‘I’m not interested in your land, I’ve got my own, in Afrika Kusini.’ The snapshots passed from hand to hand. They were studied very closely. Aha. Nice. Mealies? You know about mealies? Soon everyone was smiling. Their spokesman said, ‘Up there is what you want to see.’

So we walked up the hillside, sloughing through deep drifts of powdery red dust, until we reached a tall thorn tree under which lay sixteen old graves. They were buckling and cracking, sliding slowly into a donga. Only one bore a legible headstone: General Wynand Charl Malan, 1872–1953. Three teenaged waMeru girls were standing beside me. I said, do you know anything about these people? They were overcome by shyness. Two little ones hid away behind the biggest, who giggled and said, ‘We were not born yet. All we can say is, they were kaBuru.’

And that was more or less that. Kim and I returned to Arusha and wound up in a motel called the Tanzanite. The phones were out of order. The power had failed. Toilets wouldn’t flush and there was no toilet paper, but the beer was ice-cold and the company was interesting – a party of Indian diamond-smugglers from Jo’burg, on their way home from an extremely dangerous but lucrative trip to Zaire, and some Zanzibaris who were intrigued to meet a white South African. They assumed I’d come in search of a deal – diamonds, land, a tourist concession, maybe a bit of Swahili pussy. ‘Our girls are taught to play sex from when they’re this small,’ one told me. ‘You should try.’ They were perplexed when I said we were actually looking for relics and remnants of the Boers. The Boers? KaBuru? Blank stares. No one reacted save William the bartender, who said he knew someone who’d heard a story that struck me as wildly implausible. I said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ William said, ‘Come tomorrow, I’ll show you.’

In the morning, we headed out of town on a road clogged with ancient, listing Zolas, all weaving back and forth as if drunk, dodging cavernous potholes. The verges were lined with spaza shops, rickety little wooden shacks with brand-new Coca-Cola signs, vivid splashes of capitalist colour against a prevailing backdrop of socialist grey. ‘I hate socialism,’ said William. ‘Nothing happened in this country for twenty years. Kenya got rich, and we couldn’t even eat.’

After a while, we peeled off on a dirt road, crossed a vast state-owned coffee plantation and passed under a derelict archway saying, ‘Arusha National Park.’ Beyond that, we were in rain forest. The canopy closed over our heads. The light was green. There were still a few elephant, apparently, but they hid away on the volcano, and all the rhino had been shot, apparently by the park’s own rangers. That’s what William said, at any rate. He waved to a strapping young ranger with dreadlocks and a rifle over his shoulder. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘reported his boss for poaching rhinos. What happened was, they put him in jail.’

Thirty minutes later, we emerged onto a broad plain covered with fever trees. The clouds parted, and there was Mt Kilimanjaro, looking just like it does on a postcard, save that there were no elephants or lions intervening. This was not the Africa of coffee-table books. This was the real thing, a densely-populated zone of mud huts, banana plantations and mealie patches. The grass was grazed flat as a billiard table. The limbs of many trees had been amputated by woodcutters. William pointed to a distant clump of bluegum trees, so we left the road and headed in that direction. We forded a shallow river, climbed a short rise and came upon a landscape dotted with mud huts and patches of cultivation. One of the houses was set apart from the others. It was made of mud. It was grey. It had no windows, just planks to keep out prowling night creatures.

Outside the sun was like a hammer. I walked up to the door, upon which someone had scrawled karibuni – Swahili for ‘welcome’. I knocked but no one answered, so I went around the back, into a dusty yard full of goats, rubbish, emaciated dogs and chickens. In the centre of it stood a smoke-blackened hut roofed with banana leaves – a Swahili kitchen. I peered inside. There was a figure within, a withered old crone, hunched over the fire. She had sharp blue eyes and a long sharp nose, the face of a bird of prey. There was an old doek on her head, and down below, a kanga, and dusty feet in plastic sandals. I greeted her in Afrikaans. She came to the door, squinting at me in amazement. Her name was Katerina Odendaal. She had not heard Afrikaans in three decades. She was the last Afrikaner.

The first recorded use of the term ‘Afrikaner’ took place in the village of Stellenbosch on a wild night in March 1707. The magistrate, a German nobleman named Starrenburg, was roused from his slumbers to deal with some drunk youngsters who were causing uproar in the town square. When the magistrate ordered them to desist, a teenager named Hendrik Biebouw told him to get lost. ‘I am an Afrikaner!’ he cried. ‘I will not be silent!’

The Dutch colony at the tip of Africa was barely six decades old at that point, but the authorities were already failing in their efforts to stop their minions going native. Biebouw, for instance, came from a family whose European identity was rapidly fading. His illiterate father cohabited for years with a slave named Diana of Madagascar. At least one of his siblings was a half-caste, as were many of his friends. Young Hendrik was flogged for his insolence, a punishment that surely deepened his alienation from polite white society. In the aftermath, he sailed away on a passing ship, but many of his Afrikaner peers wandered off into the interior, becoming semi-outlaws who wandered the subcontinent like nomads, driving their cattle before them, living in rietdakhuise, hunting with bows and arrows when their ammunition ran out.

In apartheid’s schools, Afrikaans boys were taught to think of those early trekboers as pioneers of white civilisation, carrying the torch of Christianity into places of darkness. This was true for some, I suppose, but for others, it was just the start of a hunting safari that continued for centuries, interspersed with occasional battles against African tribes and nights of ecstatic intoxication on home-brewed liquors. The early wanderings of the Odendaal clan are lost to memory, but the patriarch Piet Odendaal comes into focus in the 1890s, a transport rider and biltong hunter on the wild peripheries of the doomed Transvaal Republic.

When the Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1899, Piet joined President Kruger’s forces and saw action in several set-piece battles during the war’s conventional phase. After that, he joined General Malan’s guerrilla commando, which wreaked havoc on British supply lines in the northern and eastern Cape. Malan’s commando fought until all was lost, and then fought on, refusing to give up until the very last day, when they were cut up in what was probably the war’s very last skirmish.

Peace did not sit well with bittereinders like Odendaal and his General, especially not the bit about crooking the knee to British Empire. They would not hands-up. They would not concede. And so, in the aftermath, they trekked away in search of a place where a Boer could live as he pleased. General Malan loaded his wagons on a ship and set sail for East Africa. Piet Odendaal followed later, heading north in a convoy of four big oxwagons, navigating by the sun and stars. He took a wrong turning in the trackless bush beyond the Zambezi River and wound up in the Congo, where he wandered aimlessly for many years, but that was okay; the life of a trekker was quite sweet in its way; game was plentiful, each day was an adventure, and the land went on forever. A new generation of Odendaals was born on the back of the wagons, among the chickens and gunpowder sacks. They could barely read. Their clothes were made of animal skins. It was 1914 before their father caught up with his old General, who had settled under Mount Meru.

Piet Odendaal got himself a farm not far from the General’s, where he planted mealies and pumpkins and tried to settle down. But all those years of trekking and freedom had spoiled him for civil society. After a year or two, he reloaded the wagons and spent the rest of his life endlessly circling the volcanoes with his goats and cattle, following the rain and the game.

Katerina was born in 1929, the youngest of five. Her mother died when she was 12 days old, and she was brought up by her grandmother, who called her Katrien. She spent a few years at the Dutch Reformed boarding school in Ngare Nanuki, and then rejoined her wandering family. ‘We went here, we went there,’ she says. ‘Sometimes we ploughed and planted wheat for other farmers, but we never stopped long in one place. We had our own sheep and goats and cattle. If there was no meat, we shot game.’

She pulls out some old photographs, yellow with age, the edges chewed ragged by termites. A grinning oaf stands on a featureless plain with a dead buck at his feet, at least eight inches of bare skin between his trouser cuffs and veldskoens. Dashing young men pose with ivory tusks. A young girl sits on the head of a dead bull elephant, surrounded by khaki-clad hunters. It’s Katrien Odendaal. She points to some tiny, half-naked figures on the fringe of the tableau. ‘These little people we called the Dorobo,’ she says. ‘They hunted with poison arrows. They got used to the Boers. When they heard our engines, they’d come out of hiding, and guide us to where the big bulls were. They kept the meat, we kept the ivory.’

‘This was a wonderful place then,’ she says. ‘It was the Garden of Eden. There was game everywhere. There was room for everyone.’ So the Odendaals kept wandering until 1950 or thereabouts, when the Tanganyika frontier finally closed. The population was growing. You could no longer shoot game as you pleased. Farmers were no longer willing to share their grazing. The Odendaals had to sell their livestock and look for jobs in town. Katrien was about twenty. Both her grandparents were dead by now, and her eldest brother Jan was looking after her. He landed a job ...