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| "Better Now?" by Gerhardt. |
We were on our way to a friend´s game reserve, situated on the banks of the Mokolo river in the Waterberg area. We took the N1 North from Johannesburg, off-ramped towards Modimolle and continued to the god forsaken town Vaalwater.
We needed to fill-up before we hit the gravel roads and stopped at the last garage, quite litterary the last out post before the bush.
The sun was covered by a dusty disc and outlined by a perfectly circular rainbow, I think it might be called a sun ring. My husband Paul wandered off to capture it on camera, our daughter bought an ice-cream and I was taking in the "social scenery". With us was our family friend and Guru Fezile, a Xhosa speaking vegan and Buddist who has spent four years in an Ashram in India.
Vaalwater is white man´s country. The clock has stopped here; It´s like time froze in 1984, a few days prior to the then Apartheid president PW Botha´s Rubicon speech where he promised/threatened that some changes were inescapable.
Then, out of the blue really, a man with piercing light blue eyes, donning a camouflage cap, threw a cup of coffee at us. My first thought was that he must have tripped and that it was an accident. But I only needed to take one look at his eyes to "get it".
Fezile asked him what he was doing, and the he answered angrily that we were standing in the "wrong place". This, the wrong spot, most likely meant "standing together": A black man, a white woman and a brown child.
"So were do you want us to stand?" Fezile asked.
The man grabbed his shirt, fist hanging mid-air. My husband, who had picked-up on the commotions, were approaching. The man fled, jumped into his car and sped off.
This is how it is here. A black person who has the audacity to talk back will be beaten into to pulp. I feel immensely sorry for the poor African population in the countryside, conditioned to live like the 27th of April 1994 never happened.
I feel equally sorry for the little girl, standing in the front seat of the bakkie, waiting for her dad, the man with the light blue eyes and camouflage cap.
As we were to leave, another white man walked past, whispering, without stopping that "that was so unecessary".
That´s bravey in a small, conservative town like Vaalwater. Talking to "the others" is enough to be branded a traitor. I would like to think that he´s a farmer. He had that tanned, wrinkled, leathery skin. And if so, that, my friend, is the sliver of hope of my story.
