Stephen Gray : Unspoilt places
All Souls’ Day, November 1997. Not much of a blip on the spiritual calendar of most South Africans, but in the Roman Catholic church the day appointed to pray for fellow mortals lost in purgatory. In the Italian community, more specifically to commemorate their prisoners of World War II, those who died in Zonderwater Prison.
Two hundred and fifty of them, from the Alps to Reggio Calabria, lie buried in the cemetery there, amid forlorn cypresses in the bare, waterless waste.
Still today you are on property of the Department of Correctional Services, though the enclosure is a national monument. Visitors may have access to the museum there, opened in 1990 and not listed in any guidebook I could find.
This year, as representatives of the Italian community, the South African National Defence Force and the air force band moved in for a spectacular open-air mass, an extraordinary, even bizarre, event was about to occur.
Probably the country’s most famous living sculptor, Edoardo Villa, was to unveil the work he has donated to remember the camp dead. Only one other survivor from those days was present, and they could recollect carrying the first corpse on their shoulders to this lost grove.
From June 1940, when Jan Smuts declared war on the Roman Fascists, these choir-echoing slopes filled with youths surrendered in the Italian African empire. Villa himself (born in Bergamo in 1915) was a qualified artist, recruited as a soldier, run over by a tank and left for dead.
In the Transvaal, reading Schopenhauer and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, he was prisoner number 4433. Duly he was allowed a tent studio. By Mussolini’s defeat in October 1943, there were 90 000 such cases held in the Zonderwater Block, the biggest prisoner-of-war camp in the world.
Relics of this all-male Italian city on the highveld are preserved on display: poignant emblems of liberty, like drawings of horses and eagles, model cars and futuristic trains. The inevitable clandestine radio, photo albums of Tripoli and Eritrea. They were permitted to sell artefacts: miniature sailing-ships, inlaid trays.
The camp had an astounding 30km of roads, boxing-rings and gyms, 16 soccer fields, school-rooms for the Duke of Aosta’s literacy lessons.
How many theatres, in which hairy-chested belles in paper costumes tittuped to Rossini – well, there were no less than 17 performance venues. A distillery to convert urine into grappa. Hospitals and the morgue. The Zulu guards with assegais. One embroidery shows the place all enclosed in butterflies: barbed-wire.
Once Italy turned on the Nazis, for some it was time to reconcile with their warders, seek a new homeland. “Dal pi alto cielo azzurro, al profondo del nostra mar” – the Italian version of Die Stem.
Behind the museum is a chapel dedicated to Italian partisans who lost their lives over there, smuggling South African prisoners of war to freedom. It holds a huge modelled Christ, done in clay by Villa while interned for all of six years, 55 years ago.
The speakers talk of a “stupid, painful past”, of “never again living like slaves in fear”. Carnations blood-red on the fountain. A heart-rending, long-drawn last post …
The new Villa sculpture is disclosed: a welded construction of steel plates, suggesting the human spirit locked in bayonets and bars. Called The Prisoner, it is a ferocious monument, all about how only the soul may at last be released.
From the N4 east of Pretoria, take the R515 northwards. Between Rayton and Cullinan the Cimitero Militare Italiano is signposted, through the guardposts of the new Zonderwater prison