Peter Dickson >From the foothills of the Drakensberg in the north to Pondoland in the east and the planned new port of Ngqurha in the south, the Eastern Cape was alive with ghosts this week.
First, exasperated teachers being redeployed across the region notched up hundreds of kilometres in the north-eastern Cape trying to find “ghost schools” that do not exist. Then the traditional supernatural struck in the Transkei’s eastern Pondoland area, where ubuthi (bewitchment) and the ghosts of long-dead relatives stalking the roads have been blamed by villagers for a spate of fatal accidents along the notorious Umzimvubu cuttings. And outside Port Elizabeth, where workers are clearing the bush to make oncoming traffic more visible on an equally notorious death bend on the N2 at Coega, where a new port is to be built next month, the unnerving discovery of a forgotten farm labourers’ graveyard has been blamed for the deaths of 15 people in the past three months.
Already last week MEC for Education Stone Sizani, who inherited a department riddled with unknown “ghost teachers” draining the payroll, was under fire in the legislature over financial corruption and morale- draining chaos in the redeployment process. Then five Grahamstown teachers redeployed to schools in the remote Lady Frere district gave Sizani a new headache – schools that do not exist. The Department of Education refuses to reimburse them, claiming the schools do exist – their names were merely misspelt. In Pondoland last Friday, German tourist Guenter Senft (65) was knocked down and killed by a van as he climbed out of a tour bus to cross the N2 at Sibangweni near Libode to take photographs. Police have opened a culpable homicide docket, but locals say Senft’s death is yet another in a long list of witchcraft rife in the area. They blame ubuthi for May’s horror bus crash on the same stretch of road, which killed five Libode Secondary School pupils and injured 77 others returning from a soccer game in Flagstaff. Libode resident Nomsa Ngwenda said road deaths were common and that locals frequently saw the ghosts of dead relatives. At Coega’s killer corner, meanwhile, workers spooked by the graveyard find – the last of 25 burials recorded before the N2 was built next to the cemetery is a makeshift 1971 marker – have fuelled local lore that the bend is haunted. Manager Tim Barnard, whose National Roads Agency subcontracted company is erecting warning signs and installing speed humps on the corner, found it “a little hair- raising”.
“All the accidents are all within about 100 metres of it. I’m not a superstitious person, but when I saw that I became superstitious.”