Life, Love and Death in the Lowveld

By Wilf Nussey

This collection of stories, rooted in truth and legend, from a forgotten time in South Africa’s past, the Forties, and a little-known part, the Lowveld, is a window into a magical time when people were uncluttered by philosophical baggage and worked for one purpose: to make a living to enjoy life.
“An enchanting collection of Lowveld tales, packed with eccentric characters, bush lore and African magic. Wilf Nussey’s considerable talent as a raconteur has produced a great read, filled with humour and charm.”
—Jo-Anne Richards, bestselling author of The Innocence of Roast Chicken, Touching the Lighthouse, My Brother’s Book and The Imagined Child

• Language: English
• Publisher: 30 Degrees South Publishers
• Release date: Oct 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781928211341

Wilf Nussey

Wilf Nussey spent much of his youth in the Lowveld. He was a full-time journalist for forty years, all but four in Africa, most as a foreign correspondent, first for British newspapers during the Mau Mau conflict, later as reporter and for thirteen years editor with the Argus Africa News Service, created by the Argus Group to bring Africa news to South African readers. His assignments took him to many corners of Africa and frequently into conflicts, although he dismisses the appellation ‘war correspondent’ as flamboyant. He specialized in southern Africa while directing reporters in several bureaux in East, West and Central Africa, being particularly close to events in Mozambique and Angola. After retiring, he returned to the Lowveld to spin his tales from his favourite corner of Africa. He now lives in the Cape and writes books.

Book preview

Chapter One

The Lowveld

An elephant casually plucks the ripe purply mangos from the tree in the backyard, ignoring us. A kudu stands on its hind legs, its delicate front hooves poised against the stem of a pawpaw palm, to nibble the fat fruits destined for market. A mongoose somehow gets into the egg incubator and stuffs itself with half-formed embryos before it is discovered and escapes in a brown streak. A lioness hoists a dead heifer over her shoulder as if it were a feather and leaps clean over the wall of thorn bushes around the cattle kraal. The Leghorns scatter in clucking panic when a tawny eagle boldly dives on them in broad daylight. Aunt Aggie blasts away at it with her 9mm Luger, scaring the hell out of everybody. The baboons … those bloody baboons … tear through the mealie field, leaving trails of half-eaten cobs and destruction.

In the middle of the night there is an eerie rustling outside, like dead leaves blown in the wind, only there is no wind. In the beam of the torch the garden hedge writhes with life: it is dense with cockroaches, uncountable thousands of new hatchlings. In minutes, they will be flying everywhere, into the bush, into the house. They are wild and thus clean, unlike their urban brethren, but they are still cockroaches.

On most days there’s a new problem, a new challenge, often a new mess to clean up, but that’s what life was like in the Lowveld in those wonderful days.

They fell between the two world wars, nearly a century ago, a time almost forgotten now. The world was desperately trying to get over the horrors of the Great War in which millions of young people died brutally and pointlessly because of the stupidity and cupidity of their leaders. There was a curious hiatus then: a Europe just emerged from the Great War struggled to survive the Great Depression, an equally depressed America was turning into a giant dust bowl, and an impatient restlessness was just beginning to stir in the vast empires of Britain and France.

It was the time when people sought frenetic escape in gin and the new music craze called jazz. Flappers in short skirts and bobbed hair danced to it. The fame of names like Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Boris Karloff and Shirley Temple surpassed those of any politicians.

Many people, especially the younger, chose to move away from Europe’s misery in search of new lives and fortune in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa. They were drawn by the lure of opportunity, adventure and challenge.

The South African Lowveld at that time was a frontier where the march of development had been met and slowed by the power of nature. Few people ventured there; they were mostly small parties of Africans in the vanguard of the slow southward migration of black peoples from mid-Africa. The first wave, more a gentle flow over generations, had been roughly 1,600 years ago, followed by another some 800 years later. After that, the story of the Lowveld is largely blank.

The first European to enter was a Dutchman, Francois de Kuiper, sent by the Dutch East India Company. Like the Portuguese, the Company’s masters had heard the legends of the gold—the wealth of a mysterious kingdom named Monomotapa—and true to their greed, they wanted a slice.

It didn’t work. De Kuiper trekked inland from the pestilential port of Lourenço Marques in Mozambique. He had barely crossed the not very formidable Lebombo mountain range between the littoral and the Lowveld and travelled some 30 kilometres when Africans attacked him near the Crocodile River. He retreated in haste.

For the next century, the Lowveld remained a wilderness unknown except to the rampaging regiments of Zulu, Swazi, Shangaan and other tribes surging through it to fight or simply plunder, seldom stopping. The few black people who lived there must have been very hardy: they managed to survive not only the waves of continuous warfare but also invisible enemies they could not begin to understand—malaria, bilharzia and the tsetse fly.

In the days of the old Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek, before it was conquered by the British in the Anglo-Boer War and incorporated into the new Union of South Africa as the Transvaal province, the Boers had established small outposts in the northeast quarter of the Republiek. But Nature fended off even these rawhide tough characters, killing them with weapons they could not see, against which their legendary bush wisdom and their Mausers were no defence—malaria, bilharzia, and the tsetse fly, again, and also horse-sickness.

The frontline was the Great Escarpment, the long range of ragged mountain formed by the western wall of the Great Rift Valley, winding all the way down Africa from the Red Sea to the Eastern Cape. This was the barrier between the healthy plateau of the Transvaal Highveld, up to seven thousand feet above sea level, and the hot, humid Lowveld, a few hundred feet above the coast.

In some parts the escarpment rises almost sheer for several thousand feet, cracked and split by gorges and canyons embellished with thready white waterfalls and plant life clinging to almost vertical rock. Elsewhere it descends in long low tumbles of humps and valleys like the collapsed walls of an old castle, seamed by furtive streams feeding little ponds and falls, and blanketed by grass, forest and impenetrable clusters of dense jungle filling deep clefts.

In the middle of winter, when the Lowveld’s defending diseases were nearly dormant, the Boers would ride down from the chill plateau plains and camp for weeks in the bush to hunt. The Lowveld teemed with wild animals that roamed far and wide between sea and escarpment and north and west into today’s Zimbabwe and Botswana.

The Boers filled their ox-wagons with the produce of their fine marksmanship: hippo hide for its legendary toughness, buffalo and antelope horns to decorate the walls of their Highveld homes, buck hide to make leather for a multitude of uses, zebra skins for floor mats, jackal and impala skins for karosses, and tons of venison biltong, a staple food. Nothing was wasted.

Even in winter, the Lowveld was risky. Some visitors died. In 1844, Hendrik Potgieter and his party of hunters were away for so long that their families, waiting beside a small river up on the escarpment, gave them up for lost. They named the river the Treur, meaning ‘to mourn’. As they prepared to trek home, Potgieter and his group appeared on the far bank of a larger river into which the Treur flowed, ending their misery. So they named the larger river the Blyde, or ‘joy’.

The Lowveld’s ancient insularity evaporated with dramatic suddenness in 1870 when a wandering adventurer named Edward Button discovered gold in outcrops of rock on a terrace just below the main Highveld plateau, at a place called Spitskop near the tiny Boer outpost of Lydenburg. The word spread fast.

The lust for gold, in those days every fortune-seeker’s ultimate dream, overrode any obstacles, even malaria, bilharzia and tsetse flies. Within months the Lowveld gold strikes were swarming with prospectors from all over the world—Australians, Americans, Irish, Hungarians, Canadians and others of every creed and culture. But few Afrikaners, to whom real wealth was land, livestock, space and the freedom to do whatever they wished.

Gold was found along the escarpment and in the steamy depths of the Lowveld, giving birth to towns like Barberton, Pilgrim’s Rest, Lydenburg, Kaapse Hoop and a place near a spectacular waterfall named Mac Mac for all the Scots who dug there. Sheba, one of the earliest and richest gold mines, is still going strong and is the oldest in the world.

The rush matched that of North America’s Klondike. The gold seekers were followed by a horde of more cunning folk who prospected the prospectors: confidence tricksters, pub-keepers, prostitutes, pimps and madams, dancers and fast-talking dealers in everything.

Life in the new Lowveld communities was fast, furious and dangerous. Liquor and violence took as many lives as disease. Guns were as commonplace as shovels. Consignments of gold from diggings to the banks sprouting behind corrugated-iron walls in small towns were routinely robbed. When the diggers caught the robbers they dealt with them summarily; a bullet was cheaper than a trial and anyway the arm of formal justice wasn’t long enough to reach here.

There were no railways then, except for a very short narrow-gauge track to transport people and materials between the Sheba mine and the road through the Queen’s River valley below. It derailed once, killing some twenty nurses who were on board, many of them Australian. Their graves are still there beside the new road up to Sheba, in a sad patch of ground with a few markers carrying barely readable names, next to a dusty little chapel.

The transport riders were the blood in the Lowveld arteries: they travelled the wheel-rutted tracks between the goldfield settlements and the Highveld to the west, as well as to the port of Lourenço Marques in Mozambique to the east. On horseback or on foot they guided their big flatbed ox-wagons up and down the tortuous escarpment trails and through the fierce bush to the Indian Ocean coast.

They freighted everything: food, booze, clothes, tents, picks, shovels, dynamite, corrugated iron, beds, baths and even some surprisingly large machinery like ore-crushing stamp mills.

Their journeys took days, sometimes weeks, always at great risk of malaria for themselves and tsetse-borne nagana for their oxen. They lived on venison, canned goods and mealie meal. They had to shoot lions attacking their cattle. They were an exceedingly tough bunch, made famous by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick in his classic book Jock of the Bushveld. None seemed to make a fortune from the business of transportation, but they all seemed to like the life and they left their permanent mark as the pathfinders for today’s roads and highways.

In the late 1880s, new strikes were made farther to the northwest of the Lowveld in a region stretching between today’s Tzaneen, below the escarpment, to the Mozambique border, more or less along the flow of the Letaba River. It became known as the Selati gold fields, after a local chieftainess. The Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek under President Paul Kruger, decided to impose some kind of control there and in 1890 founded the town of Leydsdorp at a mining camp, as an administration centre.

Like the others farther south, it mushroomed almost overnight into a disorderly mass of corrugated iron, pisa de terre mud and wooden buildings housing pubs, boarding houses, brothels, trading stores and shacks, even a couple of brick buildings.

The gold seekers were not to know it, but the region was rich in a variety of other valuable minerals discovered later, like manganese, mercury and platinum. In their digging for gold, though, they did find emeralds. They were of no great size or quality, but in enough quantity for a clever woman, nicknamed ‘Emerald Lil’, to make a small fortune by garnering them from miners in pubs in return for services rendered after dark.

And just like the other Lowveld strikes, those around Leydsdorp dwindled fast. It was easy to mine the veins of gold in the rock protruding from the surface and to sift nuggets (some huge) from the few streams, but once they had to start digging deeper the miners became disillusioned. It was hard, hot work. There never was much gold dug out. The shining veins of the yellow stuff visible in fracture reef make grown men drool, but the veins vanish suddenly—cut, fractured and hidden by ancient shifts of the earth’s crust. There was still gold someplace down below, but nobody knew how to find it and mine it without crippling expense. Some set up companies to go deep. Few survived: costs were high and the gold appeared and disappeared unpredictably.

The fatal straw came in 1886 after a stonemason named George Harrison discovered a rich outcrop of gold on a distant Highveld farm named Langlaagte in the Witwatersrand. That was the birth of Johannesburg, centre of the world’s biggest and richest goldfield.

The fortune-seekers abandoned the Lowveld. In a space of months most of the gold digger camps were empty of prospectors, diggers and their entire entourage, all rushing to the glitter of the new Witwatersrand goldfield. By 1890 only Sheba and a few other mines were still operating.

A delightful thing happened. The Lowveld returned to its placid somnolence, inhabited by wild animals, a few Africans and some of the fortune hunters seduced by its wild beauty and peace, in spite of its armour of diseases and heat. Bigger towns like Barberton shrank but survived. Most communities shrivelled and died. A few clung on desperately, like Leydsdorp. So did another former boomtown nearby, Salvation City.

And that’s where we came in, my families and friends.

Salvation City was named soon after Leydsdorp when a bearded, luckless old prospector in tattered khakis happened to stumble on loose rock while leading his pack mule around the flank of a bushy koppie close to the Selati railway. Cursing, he picked himself up, raised a leg and kicked at the stone that had tripped him. His battered boot broke off a piece of stone and the bright yellow glow of a vein of pure gold dazzled him.

I am saved! I am saved! he yelled, waving his arms at the heavens, frightening his mule. He hastened to Leydsdorp to register a claim, shouting his joy to anyone who would listen.

The word spread fast and by the time he got back to his strike the next day, nursing a hangover bought with the proceeds of his first few bits of gold, the koppie was swarming with other prospectors, bashing rocky outcrops and swinging picks at the hard ground. They camped below the koppie. Thus was Salvation City born. It rapidly swelled into yet another ramshackle town of thousands.

The surface gold petered out soon. The populace moved on to new pickings. The tin town shrank to a hamlet with about fifty times more citizens six feet under the ground than on it.

A handful of people stayed and kept it going. It had a trading store, a few shops and a small hotel and bar. Importantly in this rather remote wilderness, it also had a small clinic hospital with a nurse and was visited by a travelling doctor.

The aftermath of the First World War brought the end of the Lowveld’s seclusion. When people were trying to recover normal lives and populations were shifting, the South African government decided to open the Lowveld for settlement. The idea was to simultaneously lure immigrants, find work for returning soldiers by making land cheaply available, expand the nation’s agriculture, and extend development into a long-neglected region.

My Uncle Hal and one of his close wartime comrades, my ‘uncle’ Will took up the offer at one shilling and sixpence a morgen (a measure of land equal to about 0.8 hectare or two acres). So did a group of Britons who put their demobilization grants together to form a company, the Officers Colonial Land Corporation, or Ofcolaco for short. They created a little English enclave in the wild African bush, started a club and brought with them many of the customs and skills of their homeland. Ofcolaco is still there, going strong, with some of their descendants on the farms.

Uncle Will bought a large tract of land he called a ranch because he intended to raise beef cattle there for the city markets. It was bordered by the Letaba River, a muddy, quite strong flow transformed into a roaring torrent by the summer rains. His cattle would always have water. He was delighted. So were the crocodiles.

Uncle Hal bought an equally large stretch of bush with seasonal streams fed from a short, low range of gloomy black mountains, almost bare of vegetation, which encroached on one side of the farm. He did not know until much later that those hills were rich with minerals.

Neither man had seen their land before buying it. It was shown to them on state survey maps which were partly guesswork. They travelled by train from Pretoria to the Selati railway siding at Salvation City, an almost moribund hamlet, and from there by hired wagon to their new lives. They were equipped only with tents, camping gear, sleeping bags, picks, shovels, buckets, bags of mealie meal and other supplies, and the ubiquitous .303 Lee Enfield rifles that the army had allowed them to keep.

Their plans were the same and simple: set up a secure home, buy livestock, make sure that good clean water was available, then sit back and watch their fortunes grow.

It didn’t work out quite like that. It took Uncle Hal several months to build a house of sorts on the farm he named Thornveld. It was a rambling structure of saplings cut from the bush to support walls of mud mixed with chopped grass and cow dung. The whole was roofed on raw mopani beams with a thatch covering shaped liked a frozen ocean wave—untrimmed at the edges to the joy of a host of bats, lizards, spiders, small birds requiring nest materials, and of course snakes.

For several months while working on this model of Lowveld architecture Uncle Hal found it prudent to sleep on a platform he built into the branches of a big spreading marula tree close to the house. In that time he shot nearly forty lions, some from the platform, which had challenged his ownership and tried to eat his cattle. And him.

A small village of Africans of the Shangaan tribe lived on the land, which bothered neither of them. Although the Africans had never heard of such strange concepts as land being sold, they welcomed Uncle Hal and he treated them with respect. They thought this white man was wrong in the head for erecting such a huge, strangely shaped hut when one of their small, thatched rondavels was enough for a family, which he did not have.

They watched him with interest though. Never had there been such entertainment in the wilderness as watching a man work, a white man at that. At first, when he tried to hire them to help him they were reluctant. Work was not a main feature of African life beyond building a hut and small granary and tending livestock—the first mostly a woman’s job and the second for young boys. But they did eventually agree to hire him herd boys.

They also welcomed him because of the protection he provided against predators, including hyenas, jackals and occasionally packs of wild dogs. It was a win-win situation, the farm was big enough for both.

Uncle Hal was quite alone until the building was done and his elder sister, Aggie, came to live with him to look after the household.

Social life was non-existent except on Saturdays when the new settlers visited Salvation City to buy stocks and fetch mail. At first they trekked in light wagons, carts and buckboards drawn by mules or, for those fortunate enough to have them, ‘salted’ horses which had survived horse-sickness and were immune. Later came the motor cars and light trucks: Chevrolets and Fords, mostly, some Dodges, all big boxy machines with oblong windscreens, canvas side flaps for windows, running boards carrying toolboxes, and spare wheels mounted in the front mudguards.

It wasn’t long before Aunt Aggie met Uncle Will and within a couple of months, married him and moved to his Letaba River ranch, Riverview, leaving Uncle Hal alone again.

He retaliated by travelling all the way to Pretoria to propose to an old flame, wed her and bring her back into the wild. His crude male version of housekeeping returned to normality and, again to the surprise of all, Christine took to Lowveld life like a buck to rosebuds.

She loved it. In no time there were chickens scratching about the yard, several largish dogs of singularly anonymous ancestry followed her around, mosquito mesh appeared in the unglazed windows with chequered curtains inside, woven grass and buckskin carpets decorated the floor of beaten earth, the kitchen gained a wood-burning Dover stove, and outside an oil drum over a fireplace served as a hot-water geyser.

It was into this environment that Uncle Hal’s barefoot brood was born. I entered it at an early age when I was sent from the Highveld to live with Uncle Will and Aunt Aggie, who were childless. For a boy well short of his teens it was an unsurpassable adventure, better than anything I could read, like Peter Pan and Wendy. During the week I went to a small primary school the new settlers had started in Salvation City and lived with an elderly townsfolk couple. Most Saturdays we went home, to return on Sunday evening.

Except in mid-winter, when nights could be so cold people slept under sheets, Salvation City sweltered. The first summer rains turned it into a sauna. Sun-boiled air sodden with humidity seeped sluggishly from the river through the village, into the shops, hotel, clinic, homes, the one-man police station, everywhere. Heat was as much part of village life as the gold rush that gave birth to it. We were used to it. We’d learned to tolerate it instead of fight it, so we lived slow and easy in midsummer to save energy. In December, life was in slow motion.

For the village the settlers’ trade was a last minute reprieve. It was on the verge of expiring. Now the few shops, trading post and sagging hotel perked up. It became a place again after decades of dormancy, with real visitors and real business.

A couple of grizzled old prospectors continued to potter about the bush and rocky hills, more for the way of life than for a living. Now and then some bent and bearded character wandered into Saloojee’s shop or Jimmy’s ‘Everything From A Pin To An Anchor’ Emporium to trade a small nugget or tobacco pouch of dust for cash, then spend it on supplies and booze.

Salvation City drowsed in the African sun, going nowhere but content. It marked time while the world grew up and passed it by. Not many strangers came this way. It was well off the beaten track, hidden among hills thick with thorn, marula, kiaat and baobab trees on a dead-end gravel road a long way from the main highways, near a sluggish river and the Selati line that carried freight to and from Delagoa Bay. The people liked it that way—quiet, peaceful, no stress.

That railway is what brought Nellie here, all hot and cross in her tight skirt and high heels, the extraordinary personality who injected fresh life into the village.

Chapter Two

The Village

On the west side of the village’s one main road was a short row of wood-and-iron shops linked by a sidewalk of sun-bleached planks under a curled tin roof for shelter from the bucketing summer rains. There was nothing on the east side, just thorn bushes and trees and tall grass. The biggest store in town was Jimmy’s Emporium, a corrugated-iron shed on cement-and-stone legs down near the railway where the road came in. Some folks said little Jimmy was waiting right there in his first mud-and-thatch store when gold was found and the first diggers came charging in. That was just legend. Jimmy was old, but not so old.

The state vet had his clinic along the sidewalk and the bank agent, optician and lawyer who visited from town all used rooms there.

Old Nick Wraith, the district surgeon, looked after our health on regular visits to the little fly-screened clinic at the end of the road, just past the hotel. Not that he had much to do; we were a pretty healthy lot.

The only other official building was adjacent to the clinic with a square blue lamp outside. That was where Sergeant Kobus Papenfus sat, with his Sam Browne belt loosened for comfort, pecking out his reports on his old typewriter when not doing his rounds.

Kobus was a big wise fellow in his late fifties, stolid and solid, the law for a long way around. For years he fought off transfers and promotions because he and his wife, the nurse at the clinic, grew up in Salvation City and it was their hometown. There was no council and no mayor and everybody agreed Kobus filled the gap pretty well. There was a barred cell behind his desk that was not much used, except for fishing rods and riding tack, because the villagers were a quiet and law-abiding bunch. It was usually too hot to waste energy doing anything, especially something that might bring Kobus around. He didn’t like being bothered.

Occasionally, men from a small mine about fifteen miles away occupied the cell. They were paid once a month on a Friday and started drinking at noon the next day. Most of them never made it past the roadside pub, halfway to Salvation City, but some reached the little public bar at the back of the hotel. If they became rowdy or paralytic, Sergeant Kobus dumped them in the cell with a bucket of water for company. Early on Sunday a truck would come from the mine to fetch them.

We had no church— the gold diggers were too busy digging holes to build one and now there weren’t enough people to make a congregation. About once a month a minister, priest or dominie came to hold a service in the peanut shed or the fodder store, whichever was the emptiest. Then he went off to give family services on farms.

The houses in the village were mostly gold rush leftovers, much-patched bungalows of corrugated iron on wood frames resting on stones or leadwood blocks to keep them out of termite reach, with wide screened verandas. Some had been shipped out from India during the gold rush days.

That’s about all there was to Salvation City. It was hard to believe this was where thousands of men once worked and fought and played around the clock, where stamp mills pounded all day, where the dancing girls in the bars auctioned themselves off every evening, where life was cheap and disputes were settled with fists, knives or pistols.

The bush had long ago swallowed all of that. The last reminders of the past were faded photographs in the hotel of a Zeederberg stage coach drawn by a team of zebras which paused here, and of groups of wide-hatted, droop-moustached miners posing stiffly—and two large bullet holes in the front of the reception desk had been left by some celebrating digger.

We were close to nature. Not that anyone took much notice except when a leopard seized a dog, lions killed a steer, or a few passing elephants made free with someone’s fruit. There were always a few hippos gronking down in the river and we all knew better than to swim there because of the crocs. But by and large we went our way, the wild animals went theirs.

Mondays to Fridays, the village dozed through the hot hours of day. The galvanized-iron roofs crackled in the heat, ceiling fans chunked and whirred indoors and sensible people moved as little as possible. A few men went out, grumbling, if a train chose to stop at the siding to offload goods. In the late afternoon when the sun cast long shadows and the air began to cool, people strolled to the hotel to wet their throats.

Every Saturday morning the village readied itself for the invasion of scrubbed and smiling farmers in fresh-pressed khaki shirts and trousers and their wives in bright frocks, trailing flocks of excited, nut-brown children, some barefoot. It was their day to meet and relax after a week of hard work on the land with only their spouses to talk to.

When the weather was good you could see the dust of their coming from far away. They arrived in work-worn pickups and cars and parked any old where across the road in the shade of the paperbark and marula trees, hailed each other as if they hadn’t met for a year, gossiped, and complained about the weather, the crops