THE KAROO ROCKS
It’s a spring day in 2008 andmy wife, Julienne, and I are nosing about theWillistonMuseum in the faraway Northern Cape. Country museums – with their musty dioramas, family knick-knacks, innovative pre-electric kitchenware and rows of shackled wagons – are the best.
What catches our eye is the stonework on display: a set of small-scale corbelled houses and an elegantly etched (never mind the odd spelling mistake) gravestone. There’s a portrait of its creator, a sombre man in a tight suit, his huge hands dangling as if he’s waiting to throttle the photographer for taking too long with the shot.
Meet Cornelius de Waal, the tombstone artist of the Karoo.
The curator at the time, ElnaMarais, bustles over. ‘Sometimes he’d be carving a gravestone for six months,’ she says. ‘Then a corner would chip off and he’d have to start all over again.’
A day out with Elsa
We discover that Williston resident Elsa van Schalkwyk can show us more of these priceless pieces of Karoo folk art. So we find a bed for the night and book Elsa for a day. Early the next morning, aswe cross the Sak River into the rising sun, our guide says:
‘Now we are in the Agterveld.’ She’s talking about the old No Man’s Land that was once just beyond the control of whomever was running things down in the Cape, be they Brit or Dutchman.
Turning on to
