Writing the Ancestral River. Jacklyn Cock
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of pilgrimage, a place to journey to receive the river’s spirit and be nourished.
In relation to the lagoon adjoining the east bank of the river, this pearly haze of happy memories is infused with a sense of loss. Like many other local children, I learned to swim in the shallow waters of the lagoon, to drive a car on the lagoon flats and to dance in the adjoining café. This lagoon and an adjoining salt marsh no longer exist. The complex architecture of the salt marsh, a maze of channels kept clear by the sluicing action of the tides, has now been obliterated, replaced by a marina, an exclusive gated community of luxurious houses, many of them holiday homes. In the 1950s, when I grew up, Port Alfred was a very different place, a little fishing village where a horn would blow to signal a catch of fish from the returning boats, fresh produce at the market or the escape of a ‘lunatic’ from the mental hospital below my parents’ house. But the Kowie River and the little town on its banks remain for me a site of density and depth, a connection to ancestral shades and a web of social bonds.
For a long time I have cherished the ambition to traverse the seventy kilometres from the source of the Kowie River to the sea. This ambition to walk and canoe the entire length of the river is inspired by various accounts in river literature. One of the historians of the Thames, Frederick Thacker, maintained that to appreciate ‘the ancient and unspoilt countryside’ you must ‘traverse its roads upon your own feet and pull and steer your craft along its winding reaches with your own arms’.13 Another inspirational example on a grand scale is Jeremy Seal’s attempt to follow the Meander in Turkey for five hundred kilometres from its headwaters at Dinar to the Aegean with his collapsible canoe.14 Another intrepid adventurer was Phil Harwood, who braved crocodiles, giant snakes and angry locals to become the first person to canoe the Congo River from its source in a tiny spring at the base of a banyan tree in the highlands of Zambia until it finally enters the ocean five thousand kilometres away.15
I have drawn on a rich river literature, from T.S. Eliot’s Thames in The Waste Land, (so different from the Thames of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows), Paul Horgan’s Rio Grande, James Joyce’s Liffey, Alan Moorhead’s and Robert Trigger’s Nile, Joseph Conrad’s and Tim Butcher’s Congo, Mark Twain’s Mississippi, Charles Dodgson’s Isis and Joan McGregor’s Zambezi, to mention a few works with which I am familiar. Most scholarly is Simon Winchester’s journey down the Yangtze in The River at the Centre of the World. I was moved by the redoubtable Isabella Bird’s account of her voyage through the Yangtze Gorge and fascinated by Peter Ackroyd’s description of the 250-mile length of the Thames, though the short distance I’ve managed walking along a well-signposted Thames path with cows and green fields could not have been more different from my home experience. I was also inspired by Olivia Laing’s account of her walk along Virginia Woolf’s river, the Ouse, in which she drowned herself. This book is a wonderful account of how history resides in a landscape. I could identify with Laing’s feelings for the Ouse, the ‘river I’ve returned to over and again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy’.16
Following the course of the Kowie through what used to be the Zuurveld and trying to access the ‘deep history’ of the area is also troubling because of my knowledge of what has occurred there, of earlier calamities. As Robert Macfarlane has written of walking through areas of Scotland subjected to the Highland Clearances: ‘The pasts of these places complicate and darken their present wildness … To be in such landscapes is to be caught in a double-bind: how is it possible to love them in the present, but also to acknowledge their troubled histories?’17 At the same time as the Clearances were taking place, the indigenous Xhosa people of the Zuurveld were being driven from their homes and subjected to the same violent process of dispossession as the Scottish crofters. So researching this book has forced me to acknowledge the ‘double-bind’.
Yet, if one can banish these ghosts of the past, the Kowie River catchment (the area of land drained by the river) is a colourful place. In summer the landscape is bright with the scarlet flowers of the coral tree and the pink blooms of Cape chestnut trees. In winter whole hillsides are ablaze with thickets of orange aloes, as well as the crane flower. Orange is the iconic Zuurveld colour, as it is also the colour of the traditional Xhosa dress dyed by using local clay.
Over the years I have explored much of the Kowie by foot or canoe. This was generally marvellous fun, though bad timing sometimes meant canoeing against the wind and tides, and traipsing through dense thickets of bush. The banks of the Kowie are lush in places with giant yellowwood trees and cycads, but elsewhere it is flanked by scrub and thornbush. It is not a showy, dramatic landscape. On one occasion I nearly trod on a cobra but its warning hiss saved me. Another time, in a stupid moment of exhaustion I lay down on my back under a milk-wood on the grassy riverbank and was instantly covered by an invasion of tiny ‘pepper ticks’. Once I set out with two intrepid friends to walk a stretch of the river north of Bathurst from Penny’s Hoek to Waters Meeting. This involved wading across the river (with the fast-flowing water waist-high) and fighting through reeds which stretched over our heads. We stopped frequently to keep our strength up with chocolate biscuits and tea made on a tiny gas stove. Though we carried Google Earth maps of the area, we argued endlessly about our exact location and eventually turned back. Given that our ages varied from 65 to 71 and between us all we were taking medication for high blood pressure, cancer, high cholesterol levels or diabetes, the attempt was a sort of geriatric heroics.
To find the source of the Kowie, I needed the help of a geographer. We eventually located it in a patch of dense indigenous forest in a ravine in the hills surrounding Grahamstown, called Featherstone Kloof. This muddy, leaf-choked spot is not a dramatic birthplace. There was none of the sense of mystery and power sometimes reported of springs and river sources in classical mythology. As Olivia Laing wrote of the Ouse, ‘there was no spring. The water didn’t bubble from the ground … “the source” sounded a grand name for this clammy runnel.’18 But I understood Robert Twigger’s ‘sense of contentment’ as he glimpsed ‘the small puddle in the middle of the jungle in Rwanda’, the spot earlier explorers had decided was the ‘real, true source of the Nile’.19 At the time we made our discovery near Grahamstown, it was an extraordinary thought that the thin, brown trickle of water could transform itself into the tumultuous river which at its ocean mouth has caused fishermen to drown and boats to overturn.
So why should we be concerned about this little river? There is nothing grand or magnificent about the Kowie, though its beauty has been recorded by artists such as Thomas Bowler, Frederick I’Ons and Marianne North. David Harvey answers the question: ‘In the broad scheme of things, the disappearance of a wetland here, a local species there and a particular habitat somewhere else may seem trivial as well as inevitable given the imperatives of human population growth, let alone the continuity of endless capital accumulation at a compound rate. But it is precisely the aggregation of such small-scale changes that can produce macro-ecological problems such as global deforestation, loss of habitat and biodiversity, desertification and oceanic pollution.’20 This book shows how the Kowie River is implicated in such social, political, economic and ‘macro-ecological problems’.
What did the Kowie River area look like in the past? Who were the original inhabitants and how did they live? Who was the Khoikhoi leader Captain Ruyter? Who were Makhanda and Ndlambe and what happened to them? When did the early European travellers – men like Le Vailliant with his plumed hat and his pet baboon and William Burchell with his fifty reference books, his flute and Khoi servants – visit this area and what did they think of it? What role did the 1820 settlers play in the region and, in particular, one of their number who was my great-great-grandfather William Cock? How important was the Kowie River to the development of the Eastern Cape? In recent times, was the breaching of the riverbanks to establish a marina a pioneering model of sustainable growth providing employment for a desperately poor community and making increasing revenue from rates available for development? Or was it a form of ‘ecocide’, which involved the destruction of a significant wetland and damaged the river irreparably? Both the harbour and the marina were established in the name of ‘development’, but did the benefits extend beyond a wealthy elite? These are some of the questions this book addresses.
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Sitting