Freedom Rider.
FREEDOM RIDER by Kevin Davie (Jacana)
There are few rural spaza shops in the Eastern and Western Cape, according to Kevin Davie, although they are plentiful in the provinces of Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal.
While pedalling up, down and around the fortress-like mountain range that dominates most of these provinces, a range of “crushing beauty” known as uKhahlamba in isiZulu, Intaba Zokhahlaba in isi-Xhosa, Maluti in Sesotho and Drakensberg in Afrikaans and English, Davie would often stop for a drink, usually a Coke.
In September 2009, well into his five-year-long bicycle journey along dirt roads, jeep tracks and animal paths awaiting the taming influence of civil engineering, Davie, an endurance sport enthusiast and business editor of the Mail & Guardian, switched brand allegiances. It happened near Kaapsehoop in Mpumalanga.
“At one shop I was sold Fanta Grape because there was no Coke.” The horror. “After this, I switched to drinking Fanta Grape, finding over a few days that I seemed to develop an addiction for it.”
This is the least of his addictions. In 2006, Davie set off for Worcester on a 600km cycle trip from Prince Albert, the solitary Karoo dorp sustained by a liquid gift dispensed by the Swartberg. The ride introduced him to the idle pleasures of empty landscapes and rural anecdote, which, offers Davie, are best encountered at “bicycle pace”.
Over the next five years he cycled roughly 10 000km. Freedom Rider chronicles his mechanical dawdle from Musina to Cape Point. Davie undertook his remarkable journey in segments, often with companions, occasionally alone, often repeating previously cycled routes.
Along the way he encountered three eland, a solitary aardvark, 3 500 Amur falcons, a jackal standing on its hind legs, nightjars, bad weather, wrong turns, Bushman paintings and the uncomplicated generosity of ordinary South Africans. Davie’s book is filled with many acts of kindness, their repetition contesting the now standard national narrative of blight.
Like JM Coetzee, who in 1995 wrote about his cycle trip through France a year earlier for Leadership, Davie also employs the linear form of a travelogue to marshal the great many kilometres of encounters he had into a coherent narrative.
“The key to good narrative,” says Davie near the end of his journey, again sipping Coke, “is to give the reader an insight into how one is coping emotionally with the challenge of extreme endurance.”
He does this only infrequently. In 2011, Davie found himself alone on a farm called Staanleegte, which literally means stand empty, near Prince Albert. A strong headwind and the fine-grained sand he was traversing forced him to raise the white flag. He bedded down. The empty Karoo landscape unhinged him. (In a “bare land”, Coetzee once wrote, “it is hard to keep secrets”.)
“This was one of the few times on the trip when I was acutely aware of being alone,” reveals Davie. Initially he refuses to explore this loneliness, but a few days later, while negotiating the rocky folds near Tulbagh, Davie rationalises that he was not so much “emotionally neutral” as “zoned down”, an empty vessel possessed with a “Zen-like calm”. The analogy is instructive: expedition cycling is a kind of extreme yoga for adults with wanderlust.
Workmanlike approach
Though economical in trading with his emotions, Davie’s narrative is littered with details that alert us to the difficult bodily labour he undertook, one that he argues is linked to our “encoded” ancestral ability to hunt by endurance. That this necessarily justifies the repeated inclusion of his dietary intake — burgers, milkshakes, biltong, Liquorice Allsorts, Coke, Fanta Grape — is a moot point.
In 1974 Bruce Chatwin famously sent a telegram to his employers at the Sunday Times: “Have gone to Patagonia.” He spent six months adventuring. Then he wrote a luminous book that included descriptions of a woman whose legs were “a mesopotamia [sic] of varicose veins” and a marine landscape where “sooty albatrosses wheel effortlessly, like knives flying”.
The Karoo, long a refuge for insubstantial storytellers, is in every sense equal to Patagonia. Davie, however, adopts a workmanlike approach to describing this bare, flood-prone expanse. For the most part, he distantly appraises people and places throughout. We are never told about cycling adventurer David Waddilove’s grassy blond hair and sloping shoulders, though he is a central protagonist. And offering that “the views coming into Baviaanskloof are out of this world” is not laconic — it is just lazy.
Despite these gripes, Freedom Rider is an engaging read. Drawing on his journalistic smarts, Davie packs his breezily told story with intriguing details.
Some are book-learned, and return one to the times of colonial adventurism, but the best are those he witnessed while pedalling. They include Eastern Cape farmer Bertus Coetzee’s account of how to build a road on a mountain.
First, load up some donkeys with heavy weights and then despatch them up the mountain. Watch where they go: their self-defined route will be the new road. It reads like a summary of Davie’s extraordinary adventure.