John Matshikiza
I enter Namaqualand from the south, the day before the elections. I have left behind Malmesbury and Riebeeck-Kasteel, small towns in the north of the Western Cape that cling to another age, a hundred years ago and more.
Each town radiates outward from the solid little white church at its centre. Beyond are the farmlands. Everything is in its place.
At Riebeeck-West, birthplace of both Jan Smuts and DF Malan, the first signs of disorder become apparent. In the middle of the seemingly deserted village a group of young coloured men are swarming round a telephone pole. One of them is at the top of a ladder leaning against the pole, attaching a bright green-and-yellow board with the face of the African National Congress president beaming out of it, a late burst of electioneering in the winelands.
As they see my car approaching, they all clench their fists in the ANC salute, grinning with wild confidence. It is the first sign of a fundamental change that is advancing through the heart of rural South Africa.
Rolling north along the two-lane highway, where another vehicle passing in either direction is a rarity, it strikes me how vast and underpopulated this part of the country is. The desertedness adds to the feeling of secrecy, of feelings uncommunicated, of a political terrain that is brittle and potentially explosive. Yet nothing much is happening.
The Citrusdal area is lush with fruit orchards. Beyond Clanwilliam, I suddenly become aware that I am climbing up into a different kind of terrain, the earth red and strewn with rocks. It is even more deserted. I am entering Namaqualand.
Where before, place names were resolutely Afrikaans and English (Darling, Wolseley, Wellington, Witwater, Piketberg, Vanrhynsdorp), the flavour changes. The identity is more uncertain. Now the towns have Nama names: Gariep, Komaggas, Gamoep, Kamieskroon.
The towns are more spare than those I have left behind me. The church is still the centre of the compass, but the buildings are few and functional. There is no room for frills.
In Nuwerus, the tiny coloured location is perched up on a hill, the white town down in the valley. Who is looking down on whom?
High-cheekboned women and children stare out of the doors of their leaning houses as my car weaves through the location. They wave cautiously.
Down in the valley, I stop at what seems to be the only general store, placed bang in front of the police compound, which, for some reason, is heavily surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. They seem to be waiting for the barbarians.
Inside the store, I ask the owner, Hennie van Wyk, for a soft drink. I am the only potential customer in the place, but it has taken him, his wife and the heavily whiskered friend they are chatting with in Afrikaans some time to notice me.
Van Wyk seems jovial enough as he hands me the can and takes my money, but his wife refuses to look up from the items she is sorting behind the counter.
I ask Van Wyk who he is going to vote for. He is a huge man in bush jacket and shorts. He stares down at me. He raises his massive old arms at his sides, in a gesture that could be a threat to me, with my nonsense question, or a despairing sign to the gods. He keeps that position for some seconds before he speaks, staring down at me with thunderous emotions contained inside the muscles of his face.
“Why?” he asks me finally. I thought he was asking me why he should give away the secret of his vote. Instead, he continues, his arms still held aloft: “Why should I vote? What is there to vote for?”
“You mean there’s nobody who represents your interests?” I ask.
“Who?” he asks back. “Who is going to help me?”
There is a massive, suspended anger bouncing all around the shop. Van Wyk has not lowered his arms, and has not stopped staring down at me. I wish him luck and leave. I make a point of saying goodbye in the direction of his wife as well, but she still doesn’t look up.
Standing around the place where the elections will take place the next day are a group of brown-skinned people. These are the ones who, almost in silence, are making Van Wyk lose his fragile grip on this hard- won land. And also beginning to make him lose his mind.
I stop further up the road in Garies. It is like a Western town, as so many of the places are up here. There is one street, a couple of saloons (the signs above the door still defensively say “PRIVATE”) and two forlorn garages. I stop to put in petrol.
A brown man who has been sitting listlessly by the pumps stands up and asks me for a lift up the road. My city-dweller’s suspicion makes me hesitate, but I agree.
As we move on, I ask him who he’s going to vote for. He looks at me appraisingly. “I am going to vote for the ANC, my brother,” he says, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“We were thrown into the corner all these years. It was like we were sitting behind a wall. But now we can see everything properly.”
I drop him off at Karkams, and he thanks me again and again, finally turning off into the scrub by the side of the road and walking into the country.
My destination is Springbok. I arrive there at nightfall. A nice-looking town with a sort of Spanish feel to it. Why do all these places keep reminding me of Clint Eastwood movies?
I check into the Springbok hotel, one of three journalists to rock up there, possibly one of the only three guests in the whole place, because no one else ever appeared, either in the bar or in the breakfast room next day.
The bar, legend has it, is where all the hot news can be found in a town on the eve of an election. It seemed that the whole of Springbok was determined not to give anything away. The bar was dead, and the bar lady, my only companion, at first refused to tell me who she was going to vote for. Then she relented, and said she was naturally voting for the ANC.
She’d been an ANC member all these years anyway, she said. I was beginning to wonder where this alleged coloured support for the New National Party could be.
“When you say all these years,” I asked, “what do you mean?”
“Since 1980,” she said.
“Oh, you were an underground person,” I said.
“No,” she replied. She’d just always been openly ANC. That was that.
The radio journalist, when I met him at breakfast the next morning, was from the Upington area and had left teaching after 21 years for a better life in the media.
The Northern Cape is a rich area, he told me. It has huge copper and iron mines, and of course also has the diamond mines around Kimberley. And yet this vast province, with its small population of only 800 000 people, is desperately poor. Nothing comes back in. Even the iron is smelted down there in Cape Town and then exported into the rest of the world. The people feel divorced from everything.
“I wonder if the rest of the country even needs us,” he said forlornly. “Maybe we should just be broken up and split between the Free State and the Western Cape. Maybe we’d be recognised then.”
By that time I had already been to the polling station, to see the first person casting a vote in Springbok.
It was quite an exercise getting there, because of a small language problem. I stopped at the police station, and asked the ponytailed white police sergeant where the polling station was.
“This is the polling station,” she replied. Oh, I said, but where are the voters?
“You want to vote?” she asked me. I said, no, I was a journalist and I just wanted to see other people voting. Fortunately at that point the captain, a brown-skinned man with a neat moustache, came between me and the policewoman’s hostile stare.
“Hy wil stem [he wants to vote],” she said to the captain. (That much at least I understood.)
I explained to the captain that I didn’t want to stem, only watch people stemming. He directed me down the street.
“So that’s where the polling station is?” I asked as I headed for the door. “No,” he said, “this is the polling station. It’s the voting station that is down there.”
I finally got it. They were assuming this alien word “polling” was the English translation of “polisie [police]”.
In any case, the first person to vote in Springbok was an elderly lady, Mrs E Rhodes, with a distinctly Nama appearance. She seemed quite dizzy about the whole thing, but was very satisfied to be the first person there when the doors opened.
Behind her, more coloured voters, giggling among themselves, and further back, as the queue grew in the darkness, white voters waiting for their chance.
At the village of Nababeep, an appendage of the huge copper mine, I picked up two elderly ladies hitchhiking to Okiep, a few kilometres away. They were sisters, both very dark skinned, both wearing brightly coloured dresses with style.
They giggled when I asked them who they were going to vote for, hiding their faces in their hands. Then one of them pointed at the doek on her head: “That will tell you who I am going to vote for,” she said, still giggling. It was a scarf in ANC colours.
As we drove towards Okiep, she pointed at a group of old and new little houses clinging to the side of the hill above the village. “How can we not vote for the ANC?” she asked me. “Look at what [Nelson] Mandela has brought us. He brought those houses there. The ANC brought us water and electricity. We are old. We have our pensions now, just like the white people. All because of the ANC. That is why we are voting for them.”
It was becoming clear. While those of us who dwell in the urban centres chafe at the apparent slow rate of change, at the slow improvement to our relatively luxurious lifestyles, the people out there, the ones who always had nothing, not even a voice to call their own, have already seen tangible results.
The energy of the organisers that the governing party has put into the field is clear in the responsive faces of these ordinary people. Their vote is their pledge of appreciation, and their unspoken voice of vengeance for the years of stifled silence.
I cast my vote at Pella, 170km away, way off the beaten track, on the eastern edge of Namaqualand. Pella is an extraordinary little village, built like a palm-lined oasis town in the Sahara Desert.
Its central point is a yellow miniature cathedral, raised with optimism by a small group of French monks in the late 19th century. The temperatures reach a furnace- blast 43C in high summer, but in winter the weather is pleasant. It nestles between spectacular mountains, a few kilometres from the Orange River.
One-thousand-one-hundred-and-fifty-eight
people had registered to vote at Pella. When I arrived there, 580 people had already voted, and the presiding officer, an enthusiastic young man called Lesley, was beaming at the prospect of a 100% turnout under his jurisdiction.
The angular-faced residents, descendants of the San and Nama of the area, queued quietly the whole day. Only one drunk disrupted the discipline, and he was quietly escorted out by two men telling him quietly that all he had to do was make his mind up: “Gaan jy Mabheki stem of die NP [are you going to vote for Thabo Mbeki or the National Party]?”
It was a two-horse race in a one-horse town.
I have no doubt about which horse was the winner.