To hell and gone. C. Johan Bakkes
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through a sea of shifting dunes, we climbed up basalt hills and looked far into our futures, we walked across salt pans to meet our past, we found the shelters of the Strandlopers that are hundreds of years old, we frolicked with seals in the icy waters of Cape Fria and washed up with the wrecks at the mouth of the Khumib, we picked up handfuls of agate and amethyst and let them run through our fingers, we sat around fires till late, encompassed by the starry skies, we laughed and we cried and we discovered, like the travellers of old . . . And I knew we had already calculated the cost: we had rediscovered friendship, brotherhood and camaraderie.
A different kind of Christmas
I was still opening my present (I happened to know it was a Bible), when kleinboet Christian toddled through the glass door on the stoep. In front of my eyes the window shattered and a shard fell from above like a guillotine, piercing his upper lip. He was only two years old and couldn’t understand all the blood and the screaming. It was the first Christmas Eve I can really remember. That evening in my eleventh year I dedicated my life to the Lord – please let Boetie live – as I carefully took the glass spear out of his palate and picked him up and handed him to Ma and Pa like an offering.
My mother, Margaret, believed that Christmas Eve was a Bakkes evening – as a family we would open our presents; we would be together. All her chicks under her wing. But she hadn’t taken into account what she had created, for it certainly wasn’t potatoes that she had planted and raised. Each of us, Marius, Christian, Matilde and I, had a yearning to seek out new horizons and to do things our own way . . .
On Christmas Eve 1982 I found myself in Oshakati, Sector One Zero, Vamboland. A few comrades and I had just liberated three chickens from a nearby village. The logistics men at the bulk supply shed had liberated a bottle or two of booze. Tonight we were going to celebrate Christmas – the troops in the observation towers of Alpha Company were on the lookout and would stop the enemy in their tracks . . .
On the fire the chickens became burnt offerings to Thor as we mounted the Buffels. For the soldiers at Oshivello, Christmas Eve had got off to a blazing start – 61 Mechanical Brigade was under fire and looking for support. It was no “Silent Night” for Swapo. I remember the wild look in my comrades’ eyes – what a Christmas gift it would be to survive . . .
We hung scraps of white paper from the thorns of the acacia that extended its branches like a crucifix over the Kwando flood plains. It would be our Christmas tree tonight. The quiet of the Western Caprivi settled in our hearts.
The elephant herd was unaware of our camp site.They were lumbering towards the river and heading straight for us. It was a large herd – about two hundred strong, the matriarch sniffing, her trunk raised like an antenna. I remember Pottie saying softly: “Don’t fuck with the king.” And then the wind turned and they were upon us and they were charging and trumpetting and we were shouting and beating on pots and lids and we knew if we ran now, it would be the end; and we stood our ground and they veered past. That evening my Christmas gift was a handshake, wrapped in friendship.
A white Christmas. It was bitterly cold – all year round in these parts. We were somewhere on the slopes of Numbur, a sacred mountain for the Sherpas of the Himalayas. We were lying in – actually we were snowed in. There was no escape. Certainly not tonight. Kalie and I lay snuggled up in the two-man tent that was buckling under the weight of the snow. When one hip gave in, we said “turn”, and we turned and faced the other side. “Boeta, do you realise it’s Christmas Eve?” I asked, and he pulled off his gloves and with chapped, frozen fingers and chattering teeth, he cooked barley on the primus – the most delicious Christmas dinner I had ever enjoyed.
“It’s going to be a dry Christmas,” I realised, as the captain in the Mauritanian army stopped our bus and pulled us over. I meant it literally as well as figuratively, for in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania alcohol is forbidden. We got out and the sifting Sahara sand filtered through our desert headdresses.
“Your cholera injection has lapsed,” said the man, as he looked through my papers. I knew he wanted a bribe, for inoculation against cholera was no longer mandatory. Surreptitiously I pressed a few wads into his hand. Not every person can buy his freedom on Christmas Eve . . .
And then? As life went on, and what used to be adventurous and different became tedious, and loved ones who had been away returned . . . you got the team together. “Tonight it’s going to be only us on Christmas Eve, the way my mother taught me.”
And Nanna roasted a leg of lamb and my son, Marc, built the fire and Cara, my daughter, sang. And one more time Mary explained to Joseph why they had to sleep in the stable tonight and men arrived with scented stuff and knick-knacks and even the farmhands left their sheep somewhere in the Ceres Bo-Karoo and Herod was out to kill. And you sat back contentedly and thought: What a different kind of Christmas!
And then Marc walked through the glass door.
The apricot lady of Nouadhibou
Nouadhibou is like an octopus, with tentacles that pull you in time and again.
Ferdi and I once again found ourselves in the dusty streets of this godforsaken place, swaddled in cloths to keep out the Saharan sand and grit that penetrated everywhere. We looked at each other dejectedly. Where to now? A beer would be nice, but where would we find one in this hellhole on the northern border of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania?
A sand-bitten signboard caught our eye: Hotel Magareb.
We looked at each other again and wordlessly began to push against the Harmattan wind . . .
We opened the door of the hotel, and a cool, dark reception area welcomed us. In the dim light I saw a black man behind the counter. Slavery had been officially abolished in these parts only fifteen years earlier, but black people still remained slaves.
Our French was limited to “Bonjour, monsieur . . . bière?”
The man looked up, surprised, and smiled. He motioned to the left and led the way. At a small bar with a few tables he stepped behind the counter, though the liquor cabinet did not contain any bottles.
The barman introduced himself as Yaccob from the Ivory Coast and miraculously produced two cold Dutch beers. We ripped off our Touareg headdresses and gulped down the beer hastily without asking the price. A second round appeared on the counter and Yaccob pushed a cassette into a dilapidated tape recorder – the most beautiful music from his part of the world. On the corner of the counter lay a tattered magazine with Ché Guevara on the cover. It was French, and when I paged through it, I saw an article with illustrations of different sexual positions from the Kamasutra.
We have been “in country” for a long time, I thought . . . We had been trying to cross the border to Morocco for ten days – a dream of travelling through Africa from south to north using public road transport had landed us here. The Polisario Front wanted Western Sahara, but Morocco would not give in.
The desert was full of landmines and the Mauritanians had closed their border posts, we heard on our arrival. After a thirteen-hour journey from hell through Southern Sahara in a packed Mauritanian four-by-four this news was not received well. But a Boer makes a plan, even if he finds himself to hell ’n gone at the back of beyond.
Enquiries about alternative methods of crossing the border put us in contact with the Nouadhibou underworld. “Yes, at a price we’ll smuggle you across the Mauritanian border and past the military posts and take you through the landmines to the Moroccan gun emplacements and army posts.”
Money changed hands. For days we heard nothing from our would-be guides. Then one night they arrived at the place where we were staying and took us to a windowless hovel somewhere deep in a residential area with houses built of mud. We were certain it was the last we would ever see of our money. For forty-eight hours we lay in the dark, sombre house, waiting for further news. We could not go out, for the moment we stuck our heads through the door a horde of Islamic