Read Zebra Horizon Page 36


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  The next 2 days on the Mooifontein farm were spent recovering from kissimusi and getting ready for Christmas day. After she’d got over her hangover, Ma Saida disappeared into the kitchen to do all the last minute things required for a decent Christmas dinner for 20 people. She was helped at all times by 2 maids, and every now and then by my host sisters and myself. Poppie and Lorah had to get the house ready to accommodate the overnight guests. I was asked to move into Sarie’s room, and also to design and make the place cards. Ma Saida had come up with the idea of a sitting order because some of the expected relatives had to be kept apart at all costs, lest a catastrophe would pop loose, the last thing one wanted on a holy day.

  Pa Saida’s responsibilities included the preparation of the place where we would sit and have the dinner. He got 2 boys to trim the lawn and to rake the ground under the jacaranda trees, the traditional Christmas dinner site. Hummel and Hein helped him to wind kilometres of little fairy lights around the garden vegetation and to rig up a cable with big multi coloured bulbs. They fixed the back rests of some chairs, liberated a table they got out of the barn from spiderwebs and rat shit, and Pa Saida sharpened gigantic knives to be used to carve the meats.

  For some reason Debbie got away with only a few minor tasks. She spent a lot of time on the telephone, listening into other peoples’ conversations on the party line, and kept us up to date with the happenings in the neighbourhood. The hottest news was that the Dreyers from the Skrikkeljaar Farm had kicked their youngest daughter out, because she had decided to marry an ‘Englishman’ from Cape Town. The ‘Englishman’ turned out to be a 6th generation South African, but Pa Dreyer had been heard to say, that he’d rather see his Karina marry a muntu than a bloody rooineck. The rooinecks were just arrogant smart arses, and most of them did not even know the 10 commandments, and hadn’t they killed off thousands of innocent Boere women and children in their bloody concentration camps not even a century ago?

  “I think Old Dreyer has got a point there,” Pa Saida declared when he heard the news.

  Intolerant poep.

  “Why has he got a point?” I asked. “You are a Lebanese South African and Bertha’s got German ancestors and you 2 got married and it looks like it works out well. So why shouldn’t that guy from Cape Town marry a boeremeisie?”

  “Because marriage between different cultures is not an easy thing.”

  I was baffled. “But if you can make a success of it, why shouldn’t they be able to do the same? I’d actually have thought that a Boer and an English speaking South African have got more in common than a Lebanese and a German.”

  Pa Saida thoughtfully lit a cheeroot. “Ja, I guess one could come to that conclusion. After all the Boere and the British came from the same continent, their languages are related somewhere along the line…”

  “And they’ve made up most of a white minority in a black country for donkey’s years,” I said. “They should be good pals.”

  Pa Saida grinned and tapped the ash off his cheeroot. “You know Mathilda, when I did my research about Oom Kruger’s millions I came across some highly interesting stuff about South African history in books you don’t normally get to read in this country.” He winked. “I didn’t only learn that the Xhosas were already living round about where the Transkei is today, when old van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in1652, but I also learnt a bit about the white people who settled here.” He took a luxurious puff and exhaled. “One mustn’t forget that right from the start the Boere and the British didn’t have much in common – on the contrary. They were often fighting over the same territory and, although the Boere gave the Brits hell during the 2nd Anglo Boer war, the British always won in the end. A lot of Boere haven’t forgiven them for that yet. And in 1820, when a huge wave of British settlers arrived in Port Elizabeth, they came from the most advanced country on the planet, the first country to go through the industrial revolution. Here in Southern Africa they came across the Boere, who could hardly read their bibles and had spent more than a hundred years trekking around the place and farming under the most primitive conditions, completely isolated from the rest of the world, backwards like you cannot believe and not interested in progress at all.” Pa Saida flicked some ash off his stompie. “The British have always been the more sophisticated ones with the brains and with the money. The Boere are slow and conservative as hell. They still believe they are God’s chosen people and that the earth is flat, especially the ones up here in the Freestate and in the Transvaal. The Cape Boere accepted British rule and didn’t walk off to do their own thing. In the Cape they are generally a bit more open minded too.”

  Hell, this country is complicated.

  ”If the British are so smart, then how come that a totally Afrikaans party like the Nats has ruled South Africa since 1948?”

  “Ahaa,” Pa Saida exclaimed with gusto. “This is a very interesting question. I’ll tell you why. Because they were very clever about one thing – whitey’s national angst about the Swart Gevaar. You see, the whites were always shit scared of the blacks and long before the Nats even existed there were already pass laws, and with a few exceptions the franchise was restricted to white people, and there was a Native Land Act limiting African land ownership. Then the Second World War came along and a lot of our black guys went to fight in Europe and all over the show. They saw that there were places where blacks weren’t treated like Untermenschen. When they came back to South Africa, they didn’t want to be underpaid labourers of white bosses anymore. They wanted equality and they wanted it in all domains of life…and that led to all sorts of things.” He took a pensive puff. “Let me tell you about the biggest scandal in our dorp just after the war. In those days everybody used to stand in the same queue. So Mevrou van Jaarsveld was waiting for her turn in the post office, when the black guy behind her grabbed her arse. She couldn’t do much about it because the majority in the queue was black, but incidents like that really got whiteys panicking about their future. If the blacks were getting bold enough to grab a white arse, what would they do next? And then the Boere came along with the solution: put the blacks in their own areas and keep the races separated – everywhere and by law. They gave it the name of apartheid. Apartheid means separateness. Once they were in power, they entered the entire population on a central register, and classified people as white, black, coloured or Asian; they came up with a ban on mixed marriages and even…uh…relationships between whites and other races; they allocated separate areas to different population groups – forced removals and resettlements and all. And so it went – from a place that used to be like lots of colonized countries to a totalitarian state. They had some excellent people doing the propaganda, and whitey, including the English speaking crowd, didn’t ask too many questions, as long as the Swart Gevaar was kept under control.”

  I was quite impressed with Pa Saida’s historical knowledge. I had thought that all he ever read was the Farmers’ Weekly and the Playboy.

  “I still don’t understand why that guy from Cape Town and that meisie from the Skrikkeljaar Farm shouldn’t get married,” I said.

  “Because if you look at the daily lives of Afrikaaners and English speaking South Africans, you’ll see that they still haven’t got much in common. They speak different languages, they go to different schools and they go to different churches. The Boere say man is made for the Sabbath, and the English say the Sabbath is made for man. The Boere love rugby, the English play cricket. The Boere read Afrikaans newspapers telling them that the government is doing everything right; the English read English newspapers telling them that the government is doing lots of things wrong. There are hundreds of thousands of Afrikaaners working for the state, in the police, army, post, prisons, railway and harbours and game reserves. You won’t find an Englishman there with a telescope – and why? Because if you don’t speak the right language and don’t go to the right church you just don’t get in. And so it goes. The Boere say the English are soutpiele – one
foot in England and the other one in South Africa and the cock hanging in the sea – and the English say that the Boere are just too…boorish. It’s 2 different cultures. Sometimes one could think they come from 2 different planets. I wouldn’t’be surprised if Bertha and I had much more in common than that guy from Cape Town and that girl from the Skrikkeljaar Farm.”