Those of us old enough to remember travel before toll roads, highways and all-in-one petrol, food and ATM pit stops, are privileged — although we may not have thought so then.
The landscapes and buildings of individual towns became the markers of our journey. There was always, as David Kramer knew, a Royal Hotel, where the drapes in the foyer and the ornate taps on the basin above the stained wallpaper harked back to better times, or pretended to. Now the highways, with their identical ultra-clean stops, have sidelined these towns.
Earlier this year a colleague and I turned left off the N1 to the Gariep Dam area. The dam, once named after Hendrik Verwoerd, was part of the grand Orange River Project of the late 1960s. The main resort still sits in a time warp reminiscent of this era. An incredible feat of engineering, the project aimed to harness the Orange river for irrigation, hydroelectric power and to control flooding.
The creation of the largest dam in South Africa named after the late prime minister, flooded vast tracts of farmland. From it, a 83km tunnel channelled water south to the Fish and Sundays river valleys.
According to the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s website, this ”water-transfer scheme” was also supposed to ”provide new irrigation along the Orange river and various other areas within reach of the river”, and to ”promote economic activity and development” in these areas.
The dam has since become a recreational feature and recently had a name change — it is now officially known as Lake Gariep. The uniqueness of this egg-shaped, inland sea lies in its artificial nature, the context of its construction and the changes it wrought as it came into being.
Before our visit we undertook some research on the dam, which included visiting two tiny, wind-blown towns, Venterstad and Oviston. The Hendrik Verwoerd Dam was a major statement of the apartheid government’s technical and ideological power.
Construction companies (including French and Italian partners) used job reservation and pass laws as well as the Group Areas Act to facilitate the building of the dam and clearing of farm land.
Ironically, the dam brought about the near-collapse of the prosperous, 100-year-old Venterstad as the rising waters displaced half its farming community. Now it has almost no access to water.
In contrast, Oviston owed its existence to the construction of the Orange-Fish tunnel. The inlet to the tunnel is a spectacular feature on Oviston’s waterscape.
It offsets the drab remains of a largely male, segregated construction workers’ compound of prefabricated structures.
Nevertheless, people are living there and their rich heritage provided us with a dividend for our trip off the map. Venterstad is a welcoming town, steeped in cultural and political history. In the town hall, and in the townships of Nozizwe and Lyciumville, we put up a small exhibition of our research, enlarging maps, photographs and documents.
Young, old, Xhosa, Sotho, coloured, Afrikaner, fisherman, farmer, craftworker, librarian, educator and minister all responded enthusiastically. An elderly woman identified her father-in-law as the author of a 1948 letter from the ”Location Residents Association”.
A councillor recognised his grandfather as a ”troublemaker”, circa 1959. Some traced the names of the submerged farms — Beskuitfontein, Zeekoegat, Rietfontein — remembering the cataclysm, ”toe die water gekom het [when the water came].”
Humorous and stark tales of ”swaarkry en deurkom, leef en oorleef [suffering and overcoming, living and surviving]” abounded.
Schoolchildren sang. Women declared their expertise in cooking, intricate weaving and beer brewing. Elders yearned to rekindle cultural traditions in the young, while contemplating the enticing and contradictory offerings of tourism.
These people wish to be on the map again, utilising the legacy of the dam that nearly wiped them away forever, and the creativity and fortitude that kept them there.
We fear that reinventing the dam as Lake Gariep might remove these delicate voices forever from the landscape, reinforcing the watery devastation of 40 years ago.