Just finished reading Kipling's KIM - after years of avoiding it's djin like seductions from the darker recesses of my library shelves. Kipling apparently is back in vogue (according to the Kipling Society: http://www.kipling.org.uk). His work was dismissed as too conservative and seeped in Empire (He was a friend of Rhodes, Jameson, as well as Lord Milner and a close confident of his king.)
What's difficult to accept though is the disdain for the datedness of his attitude in spite of such evident admiration and close observation of the people of India:
(From Kim, Ch4) "They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels. These people kept their own side of the road, moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes gave them ample room; for the Sansi is deep pollution. Behind them, walking wide and stiffly across the strong shadows, the memory of his leg-irons still on him, strode one newly released from the jail; his full stomach and shiny skin to prove that the Government fed its prisoners better than most honest men could feed themselves. Kim knew that walk well, and made broad jest of it as they passed. Then an Akali, a wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh devotee in the blue-checked clothes of his faith, with polished-steel quoits glistening on the cone of his tall blue turban, stalked past, returning from a visit to one of the independent Sikh States, where he had been singing the ancient glories of the Khalsa to College-trained princelings in top-boots and white-cord breeches. Kim was careful not to irritate that man; for the Akali’s temper is short and his arm quick. Here and there they met or were overtaken by the gaily dressed crowds of whole villages turning out to some local fair; the women, with their babes on their hips, walking behind the men, the older boys prancing on sticks of sugar-cane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as they sell for a halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their betters from cheap toy mirrors. One could see at a glance what each had bought; and if there were any doubt it needed only to watch the wives comparing, brown arm against brown arm, the newly purchased dull glass bracelets that come from the North-West. These merry-makers stepped slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle with sweetmeat-sellers, or to make a prayer before one of the wayside shrines— sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman— which the low caste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality"
In some way, it reminds me of Herman Charles Bosman's writing - avoided for it's use of irony that may look racist on the surface, but which offers too much to ignore. When will South African society be ready to approach Bosman again - for his work to be back in vogue?
Sunday, January 9, 2011
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The Daily Maverick
Thulamela - ancient site in the Northern corner of the Kruger Park
As the marketing spiel goes,
Take, for example the appellations: ‘Shangaan’ and Tshivase (Sibasa). The first is rooted in the fallout that occurred between two leaders within the Tsonga community a hundred or so years ago. One group beat a retreat towards
Thulamela, accessible from the the Kruger Park’s Pafuri or Punda Maria gates, hasn’t enjoyed the kind of press that has accumulated around the World Heritage Site of Mapungubwe, but it is also only one of many archeological sites in the region that mark the ancient foundations of a society related to the Northern Vhenda and Shona groups. (Other sites include Mukumbani, referred to by the king as a living cultural centre, rather than a defunct ‘heritage site’, Dzata and the Dhlo Dhlo ruins).
The isolation of the royal family within the confines of a walled palace was first developed at Mapungubwe, continued at Great Zimbabwe (and Khami – nearby in Bulawayo) and later at Thulamela, before groups moved further south, carrying with them the legacy of the earlier social hierarchy and palace design.
Land rights become a tenuous issue - at least one reason for the denial of ancient settlements by the previous National government. It couldn’t have been politically expedient to talk of cultural heritage on this scale. My school history books covering matters this far north involved the heroism of the Boer nation, rather then the sovereignty of previous indigenous kingdoms which had settled here over 1000 years ago, not to mention the San presence which goes back 100 000 years.
I’m at the Pafuri gate at the
As with the other sites, an elite ruling class and ‘divinely appointed’ king had grown with the affluence that accrued to the society as a result of trade with Arab merchants from the east coast. This site marked the stone wall headquarters of one of the groups that had moved across the Limpopo from the
The site was discovered by a ranger who noticed the unusual arrangement of stones on the perimeter of the hill. A group of archaeologists from the
According to tradition, the monoliths would be placed near the entrances to ward off evil, and would have been erected on top of magical ingredients. ‘Even people who’ve lived nearby quite recently, talk of hearing drums being played here in the middle of the night, and would be too afraid to come near.’
We sit under the shade of a baobab as he speaks. There is evidence of previous social life here: two big squares had been cut out of one of the flatter sides of the tree. Roofing for a hut may have been cut here – or, because the bark is really fibrous - it would have been a useful source for rope or whips.
It was at the discovery of the burial sites that an anatomist from
In contrast, the male skeleton is fragile and shows signs of a handicap in one of the legs. Its fragility suggests that the man probably never needed to exert himself with any laborious tasks, and that he may never have had to leave his sacred enclosure. This may have related to his role as a shaman. The age of the skeleton probably fits with the notion of a second burial: he had lived around 1450, which means that Thulamela might never have been his home either - one theory is that the body was brought across from Great Zimbabwe. The guides refer to a traditional expression that ‘a crocodile never leaves his pool’. They also make some attempt to explain the relevance of ‘the king’s stone’, a token of bone fide inheritance of the throne. A successor would have to swallow the stone vomited up by the previous king. In the case of the man found here, the guides say, the stone was still inside his body when he died, suggesting that he’d been stabbed. At this point the vagaries of translation and superstition veil the story. Both skeletons were reburied in 1996 during an official opening of the site and ritual ceremony.
We meander along the outline of the site, along the ledge which drops towards the elephant trail below that leads 350km north, we pass the midden dump and a whetting stone for hunting spears, and then move down through the lower enclosures that possibly belonged to the king’s brother.
Back at the Pafuri River Camp where I stay for the night, just outside the Pafuri gate, manager Dave tells me about some of the evidence he has seen of the old Muslim trade routes into the interior from the east coast. ‘You look across the
Mad-a-Gas-Car
Let me pick up part of the story at Mahajanga (Western Madagascar) - just because flying over Tsingy was the highlight of the trip:
The coastline has become an attractive alternative to the European lifestyles of some of its mostly French ex-pats. One of the neighbours has made good on chillis, another has semi-retired on mangoes. Bob a French dental surgeon is an advocate of eternal summer. He farms sunflowers in Toulouse, where he will eventually settle. But for six months of the year, he lives in Africa: Senegal, Congo, and now more recently in Madagascar. Bob (‘Burb’ in French) also happened to be the only available pilot for a day trip to the limestone rock formations called Tsingy.
We meet him on the Mahajanga runway, his cigarette dangling lackadaisically from his lips. (The airport is provincial but services a weekly flight on the national carrier twice a week to the capital.) Bob pulls the last drag from his Feel Good filtered and stubs it on the tarmac, and we’re off. “I always wanted to be a fighter peelot” he says non-chalantly, as we bank and dive along the massive Betsiboka river basin just south of the town, where the French offensive began in 1895. The 40th Battaillon de Chasseur à Pieds marched by way of the Betsiboka River to the capital, taking the city’s defenders by surprise in what was named the Franco-Hova War. Twenty French soldiers died fighting and 6,000 died of malaria before the War ended.
But it was a convincing enough defeat to justify the French Parliament vote to annex Madagascar in 1896. The 103-year-old Merina monarchy ended with the royal family sent into exile in Algeria.
I tighten my belt, for what it is worth. Down below the landscape is familiar. It’s like a National Geo panorama shot of the Amazon. A fisherman in a dugout canoe looks up from his net and waves. We pass over remote fishing villages and then turn inland away from thick green coastal forest into starker, drier land towards a rural landing strip near the Tsingy formation at Namoroka. The GPS marks out the Tsingy range, but cloud cover makes it impossible to see.
Our landing is a zig-zag feat of Bob’s aeronautical ingenuity on a red soil strip dotted with termite hills. We’re walled in by hundreds of children as we come to a stop. The next hour or so involved lots of singing and interaction, as Bob haggled for motorbikes to take us to the rock formations. After an arse bruising odyssey along knee deep muddy tracks, we arrived at the cave-like pathways cut into water eroded limestone. A phenomenon that gets its name form the Malagasy word “mitsingitsigina” (walking on tip toes), the clusters of rocks taper upwards into needle points that are really only appreciated from the air. At its most popular, accessible position, the Bemaraha National Park, there are suspension bridges and walkways that make this one of UNESCO’s world heritage sites worth visiting.
“Let me take you to L’avenue Champs ELysee” Bob says through the comms after take off, and swoops over a mass of rock needles that look like the gothic spires of a million Notre Dame de Paris jammed up together, and arranged in perfectly straight avenues that would be the envy of any city planner. Millenia ago, a Limestone seabed rose from the sea to form a plateau, and was eroded by heavy rains into forbidding needle sharp points. It is now the sanctuary of Lemurs, away from the intrusion of developers and foresters.
The coastline has become an attractive alternative to the European lifestyles of some of its mostly French ex-pats. One of the neighbours has made good on chillis, another has semi-retired on mangoes. Bob a French dental surgeon is an advocate of eternal summer. He farms sunflowers in Toulouse, where he will eventually settle. But for six months of the year, he lives in Africa: Senegal, Congo, and now more recently in Madagascar. Bob (‘Burb’ in French) also happened to be the only available pilot for a day trip to the limestone rock formations called Tsingy.
We meet him on the Mahajanga runway, his cigarette dangling lackadaisically from his lips. (The airport is provincial but services a weekly flight on the national carrier twice a week to the capital.) Bob pulls the last drag from his Feel Good filtered and stubs it on the tarmac, and we’re off. “I always wanted to be a fighter peelot” he says non-chalantly, as we bank and dive along the massive Betsiboka river basin just south of the town, where the French offensive began in 1895. The 40th Battaillon de Chasseur à Pieds marched by way of the Betsiboka River to the capital, taking the city’s defenders by surprise in what was named the Franco-Hova War. Twenty French soldiers died fighting and 6,000 died of malaria before the War ended.
But it was a convincing enough defeat to justify the French Parliament vote to annex Madagascar in 1896. The 103-year-old Merina monarchy ended with the royal family sent into exile in Algeria.
I tighten my belt, for what it is worth. Down below the landscape is familiar. It’s like a National Geo panorama shot of the Amazon. A fisherman in a dugout canoe looks up from his net and waves. We pass over remote fishing villages and then turn inland away from thick green coastal forest into starker, drier land towards a rural landing strip near the Tsingy formation at Namoroka. The GPS marks out the Tsingy range, but cloud cover makes it impossible to see.
Our landing is a zig-zag feat of Bob’s aeronautical ingenuity on a red soil strip dotted with termite hills. We’re walled in by hundreds of children as we come to a stop. The next hour or so involved lots of singing and interaction, as Bob haggled for motorbikes to take us to the rock formations. After an arse bruising odyssey along knee deep muddy tracks, we arrived at the cave-like pathways cut into water eroded limestone. A phenomenon that gets its name form the Malagasy word “mitsingitsigina” (walking on tip toes), the clusters of rocks taper upwards into needle points that are really only appreciated from the air. At its most popular, accessible position, the Bemaraha National Park, there are suspension bridges and walkways that make this one of UNESCO’s world heritage sites worth visiting.
“Let me take you to L’avenue Champs ELysee” Bob says through the comms after take off, and swoops over a mass of rock needles that look like the gothic spires of a million Notre Dame de Paris jammed up together, and arranged in perfectly straight avenues that would be the envy of any city planner. Millenia ago, a Limestone seabed rose from the sea to form a plateau, and was eroded by heavy rains into forbidding needle sharp points. It is now the sanctuary of Lemurs, away from the intrusion of developers and foresters.
Oubaas Smuts
Smuts's House, Irene
If you had to put a finger on a fictional time-line between King Arthur's mentor, Merlin and Leonardo Da Vinci, you'd probably end up in Jan Smut's study. The jumbled books of magic and mystical clutter presided over by the wizard and his owl, Archimedes in the setting of T.H White's book ('The Sword In The Stone'), and the penetrating scrutiny in Da Vinci's studio as he bent over his Vetruvian sketch would possibly have had the same afterglow of Rennaissance Man that lingers in the Smuts study. The only difference would be the lack of clutter here.
The first time I heard about Irene or Jan Smuts was from my grandad. In 1930 he'd just found a locum post as a GP in Bothaville and needed driving skills for his house calls. His instructor was Marie Geldenhuys who 'lived at the farm "Emmarentia"' and whose father had been a member of the Union Parliament with Smuts. The two arrived at the 4000 acre farm called Doornkloof on a sunday afternoon in a model T Ford, when the servants had the day off and a relative of 'Ouma's' served tea. "General Smuts", said grandad, "was out on the farm".
The approach to the Irene nowadays (from the R21 or alternatively 'the road to Pretoria on which the local speed merchants are often to be found in action' he'd said of the early N1) is heralded by a monstrous development of faux Italian mansions before the road narrows and nudges its way into an avenue of Poplars, Planes and old Oaks. Perhaps the idyllic notion of country cottages tucked away into fruit orchards is naive. Thankfully the Smuts Museum house (an Edwardian take on a prefab structure of wood and iron) is preserved as a national monument, along with the surrounding farmstead. It's signposted and easy to find especially if you're in an Irene Market Day traffic queue. Smuts had had bought it for 300 pounds from the British and had it transported in pieces from Middleberg in 1909 to take on its second life as a family home. Its first was as an officer's mess that was commissioned by Lord Kitchener.
Exactly what Smuts was preoccupied with at the time of grandad's visit in about November 1930 is conjecture - his second term of office was only to happen three years later after the gold standard crashed. But it seemed to be common knowledge that when he needed to weigh up some matter of state or other, 'Oubaas' would take his contitutional along a well-worn path through indigenous forest and veld that lead towards a small koppie. By 1930 his book 'Holism and Evolution' had already resonated around the thinking world, and possibly as a result he had been offered the rectorship of St Andrew's University. The 'Oubaas Walk' is signposted about fifty meters from what is now the House Museum. It's a 2.3 km amble through the same forest and ends at a viewpoint where a concrete marker indicates where the great man's ashes were scattered with his wife, Isie's.
"In the large white chair over there" a museum curator points to a section of the lounge in the front of the house. "Heart attack" she tells a visitor who'd asked. The entrance to the house leads through the reception towards Ouma Smuts's enclosed balcony just outside her bedroom. An invitation to this part of the house was an indication that you'd been accepted as part of the family. Scattered across the small sewing table are English Woman's Weekly magazines from 1939 and the early forties, offering advice about how to make the ultimate pie crust, and announcing the advent of internal sanitary pads that do away with straps and pins. A heavy black machine in one corner is marked as a sock machine, which Ouma used as part of her war effort over and above meeting her own domestic needs. A pine box filled with perlemoen shells served as a toy box for the grandchildren.
The adjoining bedroom is filled with family photos, portraits and books in three languages: 'Von Wald und Welt Eichendorf' stands alongside Dickens' 'Bleak House', George Eliot's 'Adam Bede', Elizabeth Aubyn's 'The Silent Shore' and 'Gedigte van A.G. Visser' among others. When Ouma died she left behind historical caches that were packed into cupboards and shelves and pasted into scrupulously tended scrapbooks. "Where are we going to find a place for this, Ouma?" Smuts would ask. The task of archiving her husband's newsclippings and correspondance was hers. She'd set a precedent on this as the Boer war broke in 1900. The Smuts's were living in Pretoria while Oubaas was State Attorney for the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, and were raided by British troops searching for state documents. They found nothing of importance: it was all hidden in the bamboo curtain rods that hang now in the museum lounge.
I am transfixed by the worn-out saddle on display in one of the spacious rooms which now serve as galleries. (The couple's own, separate bedrooms are left in more or less the state they were found in the forties, as are the kitchen, the guest room - once used for the convalescence of special friends such as Emily Hobhouse and Denys Reitz - the lounge and the study.) Smuts had commandeered a successful guerilla incursion right across the western part of the country and into the Cape on this very saddle. A picture of the small band of Boer desperados hangs above it. Smuts stands as straight as the muzzle of his Mauser rifle in the middle of the group which also included a very young Denys Reitz on his haunches bottom left. Smuts's expression betrays neither apprehension nor over-bearing confidence, but is as fixed as it is in most of the portraits that cover the walls. Reitz, in his war diary 'Commando', refers to General Smuts as having 'personality and influence over men' . These were neccessary qualities that saved his troops from 'going to pieces during the difficult period upon which we were now entering' (near Jamestown). The kind of qualities that secured Churchill a place as Prime Minister during the Second World War. (Even to Churchill the encounter with Smuts seemed to have left a reverential impression: there is a framed letter in the same room, written by Churchill to his wife, Clementine that refers to Smuts's intellect and his re-assuring knowledge of the war in Italy.)
Before entering the study, I park a surreptitious backside on the steel bed that stands in the enclosed corridor outside the sombre bedroom that he would have slept in. During the summer he preferred to sleep out here in the night air. I try to imagine the fragments of memory that would have filtered back to him with the night on his face. Would they have included the desperate trek through the Swartberge? Or the Great War efforts chasing around the elusive German guerilla leader Von Lettow-Vorbeck in German South West Africa? Before turning in he'd apparently clear his throat very loudly to indicate that all lights had to be turned out because he was going to bed - regardless of whether anyone else wanted to retire to bed or not.
The threshold to the study is about all one can cross before the glass barrier prevents further exploration. Bookshelves are arranged methodically from floor to ceiling, although the titles are mostly illegible from this distance. I can only make out the closest ones to the door: Demosthenes' 'Orations' stands near J.B.S. Haldane's 'Heredity and Politics' in one category while Animal Genetics, The Universe Surveyed and a biography of Einstein lean against each other in another. He'd ask his grandchildren to pick out any book from the thousands and read from an arbitrary page, then quote them the title and author. Signs indicate which items in the library were donated by significant world leaders - a solid oak desk, pen and ink sets, chairs. Under the formidable desk though sits a wicker basket which was lined with cotton by Ouma Smuts 'to stop his orange pips from falling through the gaps and littering the floor'. The home was governed by an even more supreme power!
Outside, the market stalls are being disassembled. I was counting on a homemade curry after my museum visit, but have to settle for date rusks. It's a quick sale before they're tossed back into a trailer. The Smuts Cadillac (an enormous ship of state that must weigh tons) glowers remorsefully from under its carport, hinting at a more austere affairs of the past. Since this is a forty something model, its offical outings had not yet arrived when grandad negotiated the Model T along the farm road and back towards Johannesburg with Marie Geldenhuys.
The next time grandad saw Smuts was in Cape Town, from behind the lens of a shaky 8mm movie camera about ten years later while on honeymoon. The footage has that fumbling urgency of the tourist who'd stumbled into a moment of history that he'd realised too late to frame and focus with any clarity at the time. But, amidst the throng gathered beneath the municipal buildings, he captured the ceremonious wave from a balcony clustered with Union Party bunting. In the centre of that grainy black and white frame, while the crowds cheer in silence, you can't help taking that wave personally. We may have been very different people; the country may have become a very different sort of place without Jan Smuts. Whichever way you see it.
If you had to put a finger on a fictional time-line between King Arthur's mentor, Merlin and Leonardo Da Vinci, you'd probably end up in Jan Smut's study. The jumbled books of magic and mystical clutter presided over by the wizard and his owl, Archimedes in the setting of T.H White's book ('The Sword In The Stone'), and the penetrating scrutiny in Da Vinci's studio as he bent over his Vetruvian sketch would possibly have had the same afterglow of Rennaissance Man that lingers in the Smuts study. The only difference would be the lack of clutter here.
The first time I heard about Irene or Jan Smuts was from my grandad. In 1930 he'd just found a locum post as a GP in Bothaville and needed driving skills for his house calls. His instructor was Marie Geldenhuys who 'lived at the farm "Emmarentia"' and whose father had been a member of the Union Parliament with Smuts. The two arrived at the 4000 acre farm called Doornkloof on a sunday afternoon in a model T Ford, when the servants had the day off and a relative of 'Ouma's' served tea. "General Smuts", said grandad, "was out on the farm".
The approach to the Irene nowadays (from the R21 or alternatively 'the road to Pretoria on which the local speed merchants are often to be found in action' he'd said of the early N1) is heralded by a monstrous development of faux Italian mansions before the road narrows and nudges its way into an avenue of Poplars, Planes and old Oaks. Perhaps the idyllic notion of country cottages tucked away into fruit orchards is naive. Thankfully the Smuts Museum house (an Edwardian take on a prefab structure of wood and iron) is preserved as a national monument, along with the surrounding farmstead. It's signposted and easy to find especially if you're in an Irene Market Day traffic queue. Smuts had had bought it for 300 pounds from the British and had it transported in pieces from Middleberg in 1909 to take on its second life as a family home. Its first was as an officer's mess that was commissioned by Lord Kitchener.
Exactly what Smuts was preoccupied with at the time of grandad's visit in about November 1930 is conjecture - his second term of office was only to happen three years later after the gold standard crashed. But it seemed to be common knowledge that when he needed to weigh up some matter of state or other, 'Oubaas' would take his contitutional along a well-worn path through indigenous forest and veld that lead towards a small koppie. By 1930 his book 'Holism and Evolution' had already resonated around the thinking world, and possibly as a result he had been offered the rectorship of St Andrew's University. The 'Oubaas Walk' is signposted about fifty meters from what is now the House Museum. It's a 2.3 km amble through the same forest and ends at a viewpoint where a concrete marker indicates where the great man's ashes were scattered with his wife, Isie's.
"In the large white chair over there" a museum curator points to a section of the lounge in the front of the house. "Heart attack" she tells a visitor who'd asked. The entrance to the house leads through the reception towards Ouma Smuts's enclosed balcony just outside her bedroom. An invitation to this part of the house was an indication that you'd been accepted as part of the family. Scattered across the small sewing table are English Woman's Weekly magazines from 1939 and the early forties, offering advice about how to make the ultimate pie crust, and announcing the advent of internal sanitary pads that do away with straps and pins. A heavy black machine in one corner is marked as a sock machine, which Ouma used as part of her war effort over and above meeting her own domestic needs. A pine box filled with perlemoen shells served as a toy box for the grandchildren.
The adjoining bedroom is filled with family photos, portraits and books in three languages: 'Von Wald und Welt Eichendorf' stands alongside Dickens' 'Bleak House', George Eliot's 'Adam Bede', Elizabeth Aubyn's 'The Silent Shore' and 'Gedigte van A.G. Visser' among others. When Ouma died she left behind historical caches that were packed into cupboards and shelves and pasted into scrupulously tended scrapbooks. "Where are we going to find a place for this, Ouma?" Smuts would ask. The task of archiving her husband's newsclippings and correspondance was hers. She'd set a precedent on this as the Boer war broke in 1900. The Smuts's were living in Pretoria while Oubaas was State Attorney for the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, and were raided by British troops searching for state documents. They found nothing of importance: it was all hidden in the bamboo curtain rods that hang now in the museum lounge.
I am transfixed by the worn-out saddle on display in one of the spacious rooms which now serve as galleries. (The couple's own, separate bedrooms are left in more or less the state they were found in the forties, as are the kitchen, the guest room - once used for the convalescence of special friends such as Emily Hobhouse and Denys Reitz - the lounge and the study.) Smuts had commandeered a successful guerilla incursion right across the western part of the country and into the Cape on this very saddle. A picture of the small band of Boer desperados hangs above it. Smuts stands as straight as the muzzle of his Mauser rifle in the middle of the group which also included a very young Denys Reitz on his haunches bottom left. Smuts's expression betrays neither apprehension nor over-bearing confidence, but is as fixed as it is in most of the portraits that cover the walls. Reitz, in his war diary 'Commando', refers to General Smuts as having 'personality and influence over men' . These were neccessary qualities that saved his troops from 'going to pieces during the difficult period upon which we were now entering' (near Jamestown). The kind of qualities that secured Churchill a place as Prime Minister during the Second World War. (Even to Churchill the encounter with Smuts seemed to have left a reverential impression: there is a framed letter in the same room, written by Churchill to his wife, Clementine that refers to Smuts's intellect and his re-assuring knowledge of the war in Italy.)
Before entering the study, I park a surreptitious backside on the steel bed that stands in the enclosed corridor outside the sombre bedroom that he would have slept in. During the summer he preferred to sleep out here in the night air. I try to imagine the fragments of memory that would have filtered back to him with the night on his face. Would they have included the desperate trek through the Swartberge? Or the Great War efforts chasing around the elusive German guerilla leader Von Lettow-Vorbeck in German South West Africa? Before turning in he'd apparently clear his throat very loudly to indicate that all lights had to be turned out because he was going to bed - regardless of whether anyone else wanted to retire to bed or not.
The threshold to the study is about all one can cross before the glass barrier prevents further exploration. Bookshelves are arranged methodically from floor to ceiling, although the titles are mostly illegible from this distance. I can only make out the closest ones to the door: Demosthenes' 'Orations' stands near J.B.S. Haldane's 'Heredity and Politics' in one category while Animal Genetics, The Universe Surveyed and a biography of Einstein lean against each other in another. He'd ask his grandchildren to pick out any book from the thousands and read from an arbitrary page, then quote them the title and author. Signs indicate which items in the library were donated by significant world leaders - a solid oak desk, pen and ink sets, chairs. Under the formidable desk though sits a wicker basket which was lined with cotton by Ouma Smuts 'to stop his orange pips from falling through the gaps and littering the floor'. The home was governed by an even more supreme power!
Outside, the market stalls are being disassembled. I was counting on a homemade curry after my museum visit, but have to settle for date rusks. It's a quick sale before they're tossed back into a trailer. The Smuts Cadillac (an enormous ship of state that must weigh tons) glowers remorsefully from under its carport, hinting at a more austere affairs of the past. Since this is a forty something model, its offical outings had not yet arrived when grandad negotiated the Model T along the farm road and back towards Johannesburg with Marie Geldenhuys.
The next time grandad saw Smuts was in Cape Town, from behind the lens of a shaky 8mm movie camera about ten years later while on honeymoon. The footage has that fumbling urgency of the tourist who'd stumbled into a moment of history that he'd realised too late to frame and focus with any clarity at the time. But, amidst the throng gathered beneath the municipal buildings, he captured the ceremonious wave from a balcony clustered with Union Party bunting. In the centre of that grainy black and white frame, while the crowds cheer in silence, you can't help taking that wave personally. We may have been very different people; the country may have become a very different sort of place without Jan Smuts. Whichever way you see it.
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