They are the remnants of an ancient hunter-gatherer society — and they’re still on the move, in carts that carry their homes. Sheep-shearing is their livelihood, and their life is often harsh and violent. But it is also gradually disappearing. Eddie Koch visited the
Something about the word “verge” best defines the life that Johanna Ackerman and her family live under a bridge on the Seekoei River. She is among the oldest of a few thousand nomadic sheep-shearers, relics of an ancient Bushman society, whose history has scattered them around the roads and riverbeds of the Karoo.
The word describes their physical conditions and it captures their fate: Ackerman’s family live like gypsies in donkey carts on the edge of a gravel road that crosses the river near Colesberg; the men trek from farm to farm searching for work on the margins of the agricultural economy; women and children find food by scouring the side of the road for animals killed by passing cars.
And when we found the matriarch sitting in the shade of a thorn bush, her body bent by age into the shape of a question mark, she began the interview by saying her heart was sore because there was something coming that would push the lifestyle of her karretjiemense (people of the cart) to the verge of extinction.
Evidence suggests the karretjiemense of the Karoo are descendants of San children who were captured as slaves and forced to work on sheep farms in the early part of the 19th century when trekboers began pushing across the northern frontiers of the Cape Colony.
A hunter who visited the Seekoei River near Colesberg in the 1850s described how San clans resisted European encroachment by stealing and slaughtering the boers’ livestock. “This naturally so incenses the owners that they never show the Bushmen any quarter, but shoot them down right and left, sparing only the children whom they tame and convert into servants,” said RG Cumming in his memoirs.
Oral traditions collected from white farmers describe how Bushmen were still hunted as poachers and “vermin”, in the Seekoei River in the early 1900s and the children captured in these operations sometimes sent as gifts from members of the white Colesberg community to relatives in the Western Cape.
“The Bushmen gradually underwent a transformation from nomadic hunters to ‘tame’ Bushman farm-labourers who retained their mobility, first on foot, later with pack animals and eventually with donkey carts,” says Mike de Jongh, professor of anthropology at the University of South Africa.
“Their means of livelihood both utilises and necessitates perpetual geographical mobility which allows them to diversify their economic activities and maximise the sporadic opportunities, especially shearing assignments, that present themselves.”
No official census has been taken of the karretjiemense, but De Jongh estimates there are a few thousand of them living in various districts of the Karoo.
A typical family owns a donkey, a cart, some dogs and chickens, a trunk filled with bedding, clothing and cooking utensils, and (if they are lucky) a radio that may or may not work — possessions that have allowed them to create an itinerant lifestyle that is finely adapted to conditions of almost total deprivation and
The men are highly skilled shearers, trained from birth to use manual cutters that cause less damage to the sheep and the wool than electric razors, and they use this skill along with their donkey carts to exert some control over their lives.
If the men disagree with a farmer over wages and working conditions, they can threaten to pack up and trek over to the next farm — an effective negotiating tactic during the end-of-winter season when farmers need to shear their flocks while
their wool is at maximum length.
When police harass them for squatting on the verge of the road or stealing a sheep, as they regularly do, the karretjiemense simply pack up and leave for another spot. In this way they take advantage of a law that allows people to stay for at least 24 hours in any public space. They are also fiercely racist, a characteristic that appears to reinforce the hostility that has left them in the interstices of the sedentary society that surrounds them.
“It is a set of mechanisms,” says De Jongh, “that they can use to ease the stress and pain of their negative situation.”
But there are signs that the system is beginning to break down. The karretjie outspans are marked by high rates of alcoholism and violence. Men regularly beat their wives in drunken sprees and sons fight with fathers over family disputes.
Some of the children now go to farm schools in the area where they learn novel ideas that increase the conflict between parents and children.
The new town council in Colesberg has created a squatter site close to town for the karretjiemense and equipped it with basic toilets and water points. It has attracted some of the younger people away from their parents’ outspans.
And all this, says Johanna Ackerman, is associated with the social changes that began with the election of a non-racial government last year.
“Hulle se daardie nuwe kaffir is so kwaai. (They say the new black man is very cruel),” she says. “Hulle gee nie om vir ons. (They do not care for us). Daar gat a ding kom wat ons sal breek. (There is something coming that will break us).”