Stephen Gray : Unspoilt places
‘Prickly pear”, I suppose I knew, was the homely way to refer to that flat, jointed, paddle-leaved plant which holds its barrel- shaped fruit aloft like sore thumbs. If pushed, I could have volunteered its botanical label: Opuntia – a suitably blunt name for the gawky, invasive alien that should have stayed in Mexico, where for all I know it is still used as cattle-fodder and shade.
In Dutch East India Company days at the Cape, it was imported as a spinous hedge to deter livestock-rustlers. But at Christmastide those swollen, orangey globes would attract baboons, whose upset stomachs shot the multitudinous seeds like shrapnel into the remotest krantzes. Hard to reach and remove, it infested the landscape. In Xhosa the name for this choking pest became tolofiya, a reworking of the rather ambivalent Afrikaans invention turksvy. So it was a fig now, and Turkish to boot and, as is the way with idiom, the word has picked up a fine second meaning: sowing confusion.
I knew that by 1900 this ungainly, rampant cactus was threatening to take over the poorest part of the country, the Eastern Cape. As an emergency operator, the valiant cochineal worm had to be introduced to gobble it all up. So much for keeping the prickly pear under control and its lousy reputation.
Today I have had to swallow not only my ignorance with regard to the magical fruit in question, but also many helpings of this exotic succulent that South Africans have made their own. Served in sections, frozen … well, as it squidges on your tongue you can indeed, as the slogan says, “taste the sun”.
There are several types to sample, too, with appealing names, from the Algerian (that is the bruised and bloody one) through to the Zastron (with the more meaty texture). To cut a long connoisseur’s story short, there are four basic colours in the prickly palette: pinkish, yellowish, whitish and greenish.
Leaning over the counter the producer’s son, with behind him an entire busload of the crop, packed so as not to bruise, was explaining the subtle differences between the morado and the gymno carpo. Then which was the one unforgettably called “Skinners Court”, which so thrives in our highveld winters? At first glance it is another streaky bladder with speckles. Yes, but it has more pips, it is even sweeter. Just taste on a knifepoint. Phlegm of the gods.
As a child I seldom dared steal these weird growths because their spines would go subcutaneous, work their way like magnetic needles into the bloodstream, and years later without warning pierce the heart. But all that bad propaganda has been utterly stopped. On the contrary, nowadays prickly pears cut right down on cholesterol. In geometric shapes they garnish and nourish, their skeletons form loofah-like decorations, they may be converted into chutneys and jams, syrup and soap and, you better believe it, distilled into a luscious beer and into fine liqueurs.
In fact, nowadays they are so rich in vitamin C and fibre that they are not even called “prickly pears” any more. I was sombrely informed that it has been agreed (read: some promoter in Arizona has declared) that henceforth it is internationally to be known as the Cactus Pear. To alter its status from a weed to a sort of recently adopted step-fruit, to elevate it to the level of that other poor man’s boon, the common cling-peach, there is even a local Cactus Pear Growers Association. They are given to lobbying on behalf of this watery cuke and to much quotation from journals of nutrition. Welcome the cactus pear into the economy.
But still I drew back from a mouthful of prickles. So a demonstrator convinced me just to put my hand between the plastic brushes as he switched on his device. After a mechanical tingle and suction, my hand indeed came out hairless. Now I can unpack the stately cactus pear, fearlessly with the best of them.
This fun folk cornucopia was all on display at South Africa’s unique Cactus Pear Festival, an annual event on the enterprising calendar of the Willem Prinsloo Africultural Museum. It’s a wild country affair, where farmers with moustaches on their big toes, and their wives with double chins in front and behind, exhibit wonderful rural fare to fatten on, and at old-fashioned prices.
Try their genuine ginger-beer (with floating raisins), or that makataan preserve (another cleaned up word that used to be kaffir-waatlemoen). Under the oaks and eucalyptus, around the duck dam, are all the colourful stalls. Endlessly silly songs are on the public address, along the lines of “Eselfontein” being such a “lekker plekkie”. This is Afrikanerdom at its most nostalgic and benign, become a living exhibition.
Non-Afrikaners, I was assured, are welcome at the Mampoer Festival on Saturday May 2, at the Vintage Tractor Rumble on September 4 and at the celebration devoted to the Art of the Sosatie on Heritage Day (September 24). And to round off the rich year, no less than a Barn Dance in the old wagon house on New Year’s Eve.
The Willem Prinsloo Agricultural Museum is 45km east of Pretoria on the N4 to Witbank. At exit 27 turn off to Rayton and follow the signs. Open daily from 8am to 4pm. Contact 083 271-5761 for more information