Stillwaters

Stilbaai, via Wikicommons

I am driving to stillwaters, to Stilbaai. Driving a narrow dirt road along wide empty land that bears sign of scars. White wash farm homes stare blank at open veld. Shutter-style windows and empty doorways gape like jackal jaws locked in rigor mortis — the life inside long gutted out. Mounds of stone that once guarded thick wall is rubble in many places. It is a beautiful stone. A soft roan-rinse the same colour as warm pus.

What am I doing driving to Stilbaai? The sleepy coastal village is not my home. It is barely on the Garden Route — South Africa’s famed 190-mile stretch of conservative fill-up and go dorpies. I am following a path. I steer the jeep deep into old wounds. Into the heart of South African slave society. The Western Cape. Here, you can still taste the rich tannins and long citrus finish that enslaved Khoi, Malaysian, Indonesian, Mozambican, Angolan, Filipino, Malagasay, and other stolen people first planted on old estates. Here, their descendants still till the earth. And until as recently as 2013, hired hands could still earn partial wages on the dop system — an exchange of bottom barrel wine dregs for hard labour.

In a meandering conversation along the Garden Route, a lovely Christian woman asked me rhetorically, Why are my fieldhands so partial to alcohol? I said nothing about dop. I said nothing about men like her father’s father. How could they pay pregnant women cheap wine over wages? I did not ask her, How did your farmer father and all your forebears sleep at night watching foetal alcohol syndrome spread throughout this outrageously beautiful coastline like a virus on the vines?

The road to Stilbaai is long. The land buckles where the murram has softened, where tight-packed earth has risen like dough. The car takes these dips and craters on the chin; she pushes on. Into the static rot that masks vanquished country.

I am here to reclaim our land. To ride her ridges and hug her coastline, which is bare naked sand and wild wind on waves that rush with fever to meet

I must be six or seven when I enter South Africa’s occupied territory, a landlocked and near-foreign country. I must be small framed and all-knowing; knowing me, I am already grown. I must be nervous, but excited. I must have eaten something that morning, chewed down whatever advice my parents offered. My father must have driven me. Or was it my neighbor’s mother?