September 24 is Heritage Day and September 27 World Tourism Day. Stephen Gray wonders whether South Africa is ready for all those tourists who want to visit our heritage sites
Being in the vicinity of that very famous Taung, north of Kimberley, I thought I should check out that part of my proud heritage.
It was an anniversary: 75 years ago, in a limeworks near a siding on the great railway northwards, was uncovered that “missing link” skull that cleared up the Darwinian mystery of man’s descent.
Overseas, Taung is an African location as renowned as the pyramids, Tutankhamen’s tomb and, these days, Olduvai Gorge. In Time’s recent cover story on our evolutionary predecessors, there she is, still holding her place in the gallery: Australopithecus africanus.
Once we arrived in this former enclave of Bop, it seemed reasonable to inquire for directions at the Sun Hotel. The quarry is not road-signed. For history and other old stuff we have to cross the village sprawl to the Mmabana Cultural Centre. There we are informed that we should return to the casino: find Sam.
We do at last find Sam, duly harvesting the fruit machines. On the back of his girlfriend’s cigarette box, he draws a map to the old Buxton Lime Quarry, 20 minutes away. An hour later we drive up to the world-renowned Taung Heritage Site.
We pay the gate fee of R5 to North-West Parks. Amos Koloti most obligingly escorts us up to that monument, right above the disused shafts, blistering with glare. He points out the cairn; it is all tumbling down.
And where are its plaques, designed by palaeoanthropologist Phillip Tobias, to commemorate the “first of Africa’s gifts to the study of man’s origins”? They have gone – for manhole covers, scrap metal, pawned?
And the key to the gate of that adit leading down to the Blue Pool? We need the key just so that we may clamber down into the past a bit, and we have paid to do that, after all. Ah, the key, last seen last Tuesday.
I am determined on some spiritual experience, so Ipush through the reeds to scoop up some clear water from the stream. Opposite me is a female baboon. Nice brow ridges, quite gracile and erect, keeper of our ancestral home. Also thirsty, she scoops up water, but with her lower jaw.
When Raymond Dart had chipped the Taung Skull free of the calcite with his wife’s knitting needle over Christmas 1924 it was the worldwide scientific scoop of the decade.
He had to endure terrible humiliations. In England he was not considered pukka enough, being colonial-born (in Australia), and no northern scientists would concede any African origin to the human race. “Who was that ugly girl I saw you out with last night,” they taunted him in the music halls. “Was she from Taung?”
Now we accept as conventional wisdom that under the skin we are all Africans. Here at Taung we first became bipedal, dextrous, developed speech, harnessed fire.
The North-West Tourism Council has moved to have the skull repatriated to the spot. To a room with broken windows, where the only pamphlet available is dated 1993. Evidently in palaeoanthropology we have to take the long view.
To witness this national disgrace, from the town of Taung take the R372 towards Reivilo, turn off left at Mokgareng towards Pampierstad, follow the hills and signs to Norlim/Buxton, where the site is at last indicated