Stephen Gray attended the clannish celebration of writer, doctor and cook Louis Leipoldt in the Cedarberg area. On a warm winter West Coast long weekend … over an old Republic Day … ‘ Twas nostalgia all the way … the village churchbells chimed and rimed. Season to commemorate the folk poet with the jug ears and slept-on hair again, still the staple of Afrikaans language drill. Within a vista of eroded sandstone and suikerbossies, the tug of being once more with a nation- builder.
Clanwilliam organises its clannish anniversaries extremely well: in 1927, when it was a century old; in 1980, when it was the 100th of the birth of its most famous son, the Dr C Louis Leipoldt in question; and this month, by a lucky mathematics, the 50th of his death. Who could resist those autumnal gardens; the volkies right in the main street, fuelled on vaaljapie, knocking their front teeth out on the bottle; the sedate Cedarberg valley where once some O’Callaghans and O’Kennedys were washed up, stoere Boere today?
For this Leipoldt Festival no less than John Kannemeyer arrived as well, with a packed coach-load on one of his cross-Cape literary tours. As he is currently completing the first biography of Leipoldt, his walk-through of the young man’s town was richly informed – its Queen Victoria park here; and there the bougainvillaea- covered, Dutch Reformed tombstones of his feuding parents; the dumpy Criterion Hotel, where their prodigious, other-minded son returned in his last days to search for a particular wild orchid along the Jan Dissels River.
To the Leipoldt-Nortier library, where his bust was presented with an old ramkietjie, and to the gaol, centrepiece of the town, to view in the fine museum no less than a third Leipoldt exhibition.
But nowadays what old founding fathers boil down to most is menus. This wise old dietician actually set about preserving the more sensible regional cuisine in print, so that even our programme was in the form of a medically correct recipe-book. We ate our way right through it. This was not just cultural tourism; it was sweating with the land. We duly launched a restorative rooibos tea liqueur, with that familiar birdshit tang. Leipoldt wrote a history of wine as well. Don’t ask.
On the sober side, Andr Brink came warmly to praise Leipoldt for the continuing interest of his literary work in Afrikaans, and I had my say on how wrongfully neglected his work in English was, and still is. Ernst van Jaarsveld listed his botanising feats (over 100 plants are named Leipoldtiana).
And then Peter Veldsman the gourmet traced how the man ousted Mrs Beeton from the kitchen. The secret agent was his grandfather, the Rhenish missionary from Sumatra, who brought along his own personal Malay cook. Hence those poetical dishes like smoorsnoek and roosterkoek, bobotie and bredie, and many other delicacies. Over the festival dinner (game pie, curried tripe, stewed ox-tail with quince), Laurika Rauch spanked the diners with some more Leipoldt marching-songs.
The Sunday sees us contritely laying a wreath on his grave, 50 years later, in a wilderness area under a shelter along the magnificent Pakhuis Pass. Among the buchu and oxalis, wild olive and chinkerinchees. Suitably non-denominational. On the rockface above our gathering, only the ghost of an elephant and its baby, and a dancing group, rusty shadows of a Bushman gallery. The site is superbly above it all.
We process over the dusty pass to where in 1830 those austere Saxon shoemakers established the remotest, flower-wrapped Wupperthal Mission Station. We are welcomed in the T-shaped church, where the message- giving preacher is definitely the centre of attention.
We are to re-open the thatched Leipoldt House, with its leg-of-mutton gable – restored by Lanok of Paarl – as a tourist office and tea-room, with one day a museum alongside. The tiniest drum majorettes are out – the wriggling Tamboernooientjies – pursued by the village brass-band. Dominees and choirs leap into declamation. Kannemeyer unveils the plaque. Lunch with hymn-singing and donkey-cart rides.
A last impression. How astute C Louis Leipoldt was to see an area’s common history is made not of deeds, but of words: kanniedood, katjiepiering, waterblommetjie, velskoen, Hantam, mis. For the cultural tourists to come, such terms are going to be hard to render. The fragrance of the pot-pourri gets lost in the translation.