By GG ALCOCK
This extract is from Born White Zulu Bred by GG Alcock, published by Tracey McDonald Publishers and used by permission.
Real Estate, Msinga Style
My mother and father chose to leave successful and financially comfortable lives to live in one of Africa’s harshest places, in a candle-lit mud hut with no running water, beds built on mud platforms, a cooking area under an acacia tree. We started life in Msinga in two tents perched on top of the cliffs overlooking a breathtaking expanse of the Tugela as it wound its way down the valley. The termites chewed incessantly at the tent and as they rose and the daylight began to enter the chewed sides we placed our packing cases in the gaps. The chewed sides rose ever higher and the turkeys raided our meagre supplies and shat on our sleeping bags. So we moved.
There were great plans for our new home of rock, fireplaces and windows opening out on to the vista fifty metres vertically below us, but they took second place to our work on the taming of the land, fencing to contain cattle, farm roads, a dip for the animals, and fending off the relentless cattle thieves. And so a thatched roof was built and under this the same packing cases were stacked to form walls. The boxes kept the turkeys out, but not the cold. Later we replaced the packing cases with huge thick rock walls and the welcome fireplace. It was only one room, though. We boys were moved into an ‘attic’ close under the thatch and my parents’ bedroom was also the meeting room or the family lounge by day. The kitchen was still a gas stove under an acacia tree and the toilet a hole in the ground a couple of metres down a narrow pathway. One became adept at throwing stones down the toilet hole to dispatch the horse flies before sitting down. If you did not do this they rose in a huge buzzing swarm and attacked your bum like fighter bombers attacking the Death Star. The path to the toilet and kitchen was littered with snakes. At night we tapped the ground ahead of us like blind people and by day we became skilled at leaping into the air, up and over an angry cobra, while keeping the coffee from spilling out of the hot tin mugs!
Our bathroom was the river below us. We clambered down the vertical goat path, towels and soap in hand, and while my mother washed our clothes on a flat rock we soaped ourselves and then leapt into the rapids. Our hair was often infested with lice and we would hang our heads over the frothing water while my mother poured paraffin into our hair, rubbing the stinging oily mixture into our scalps and combing the dead and dying lice out with a steel comb. It was the most stunning bathroom in the world in summer, a giant Jacuzzi all to ourselves. In winter, however, we hated it and resisted washing until our parents drove us, protesting, down the hill.
The view from the ‘top house’, as it came to be called, was incredible, but climbing the vertical goat path from the river took its toll on my dad when he became sick. So we moved from the top house perched on the cliffs above the river down to the foot of the cliff, closer to the cool river breeze, and converted the old pump house – a large thatched workshop with a huge home-made waterwheel – and that became our home for the next seven years. Our tables and chairs were huge, almost immovable flat stones brought up from the river on wooden rollers by heaving Zulu men, much the same way the pyramids and Stonehenge were built. In fact, our home was rather like Stonehenge – or something from The Flintstones. Hand-woven old woollen cushions thrown on to the flat rocks served as chairs.
In summer the temperature hovered around forty degrees and we would throw the cushions off the giant ‘couches’ and lie on the cool rock, the pocking of its sharp edges ignored in favour of the coolness. Ill-fitting wooden shutters six feet wide and six feet high rolled into place off steel chains hooked into the roof. Once again, the kitchen was a single gas cooker under a thorn tree. Water was fetched from the river or, on the odd occasion when the diesel pump worked, it spurted out of a garden tap, muddy and full of tadpoles, straight from the river into our coffee cups. Even inside the candles bent into U-shapes in the heat and margarine liquefied. There was no fridge, no cupboards or modern appliances, just tin cups on a stone ledge and cheap tin knives and forks stored in an old coffee tin. I guess the advantage was that we could sharpen the old breadknife on the stone table between slices of bread. My mother began to develop arthritis which miraculously disappeared one summer; she swore it was because of the scores of bee stings she got as she washed the dishes in a tin bowl under the flowering acacia tree. The bees swarmed from the tree to the dirty water and gave her hourly doses of arthritis cure.
I was thirteen when this house burnt down in 1981 – or, more accurately, someone set it on fire. Later the flooding river would wash away the house we rebuilt over the stone furniture. The first time we lost our home we had been away on a rare visit to the city. We arrived home one night to see sparks rising lazily from the roof. We ran madly to put them out . . . only to stop, gulping for breath, at the sight before us. The sparks were what was left of a blazing, unquenchable fire. As we ran out of the dark into the glow left by smouldering beams, we found a pitiful group of our staff sitting there. Blackened, bruised, seared, and now just sitting in the afterglow, they mourned for us while they awaited our return.
As Khonya and I sobbed and my dad gazed in shock at our charred home the local people just sat there, compassion and pain on their faces, desperate for us, desperate that they could not kill the fire, and desperate because they had managed to save so little. They had risked their lives dragging out what they believed was important. They had braved the fire to rescue my mother’s tatty gardening dresses but not her precious books, her thousands of pages of research. They ran into the flames over and over again, rescuing what they could, gagging on the flames and smoke. Towards the end, they thought they heard a helicopter coming to douse the flames and they had run out, gazing upwards and filled with hope, only to realise forlornly that it was the sound of a gas bottle exploding in a huge jet of fire. Only then did they give up and run, some hiding behind rocks, others leaping into the river and others just lying prostrate on the hard ground, the ants biting the hell out of their ankles. It was over when we got there. My father’s right hand man, ex-detective Elijah Mhlongo, crept along the river banks following the trail of the army boots which had sneaked up to our home and then sneaked away, a job well done for the local white farmers. The communist was paying for the justice he was trying to bring to their desperate slaving employees . . .
We washed the soot off our ‘furniture’ and rebuilt the house in the ashes around it. Like the old one, the new house stood on a ledge ten metres above the water, higher than the highest known flood level. When the river came down in flood it roared just below us and the sound drowned out all conversation. As kids we would jump off our ‘patio’ into the swirling giant waves and shoot down this thundering roller coaster before swimming to shore and walking back to the house. I guess it was inevitable that in the floods of 1987 the waves would eventually crest the patio and pour into the house, tearing down rocky walls and filling the rest with sand right up to the roof. My father had died four years to the day when this happened and the last of his physical legacy, the great walls of rock he had built stone by stone, was washed away in one sad cleansing wave of the great Tugela. We cleared the sand and the broken walls, once more the great stone tables and couches remained unmoved and once more we sat in our lounge, now a great open-air braai area. Only these great thrones of rock survived the fire, the flood and the passage of time, and still stand today, mute testament to our family memories and my father’s last home.