Mr Rod, a friend in toil and play

By Phakamisa Mayaba

It’s Sunday, late February 2022. Not sure whether it’s wanderlust, babalaas, or the invite to a seafood paella in another Karoo dorpie that has me riding shotgun with Tiago Rodrigues in one of his delivery vehicles. It may be all three, along with the restlessness always gnawing at those with nothing to do in these enclaves where little happens at the best of times.

But on payday weekends, Sundays in my township of Kuyasa are much like Friday nights anywhere else. The booze joints are jumping; music blares out of the boots of souped-up CitiGolfs, and nobody is in any rush to close up shop – at least not until the Po-Po pull up, usually around 2 am on Monday morning.

I was spoiling on joining them. Slap a chop on the shisanyama, roll a spliff, and listen to Lucky Dube whining on about no schools or hospitals, only prisons. A middle finger to the then-unlifted Covid state of disaster and the service delivery protests, but mostly to enjoy the fruits of my solitary marijuana tree aptly guarded by five nameless cats out in my backyard.

But Tiago has different plans: a trip to Philipollis, a Mediterranean paella at his brother-in-law’s, a few beers … and then we’ll see …

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To be honest, I’m not that keen. Who counts on anything happening in a one-street town most famous for an old jailhouse (turned B&B) and a Bok prop who hung up his boots decades ago?

But I eventually roll with it, mostly because of Tiago. It’s not every day that one could call a fifty-something businessman who doesn’t drink on weekdays — and once launched an ill-fated campaign for a university campus to be plonked right here in what cosmopolites whizzing past in their luxury saloons call ‘that place with a Shell’ — a friend.

He even provided a potential site for the proposed satellite campus — Southfork, a modest stretch of land in the lee of the witchcraft mountain of Coleskop. Rent-free, because ‘with a university here, and a few thousand students sauntering about for lunch or a drink, I figured I’d make that money back anyhow.’ Reasonable, because – besides some small-scale cattle farming — he’s mainly active in the local drink and food business.

But the bureaucrats in Kimberley pulled up their noses. ‘I was labelled in interesting ways,’ he chuckles; ‘among them, as a roughhide white monopoly capitalist riding on the ubuntu graces of a great black idea.’

Undeterred, and alongside a certain locally domiciled Advocate, the campaign to establish a satellite campus of the Sol Plaatje University (based in Kimberley) took off. (Among others, our legal man of silk is the progenitor of the now defunct Bomela Cup – an annual soccer tournament offering substantial prizes which for a while, drew crowds from all over the province.)

Tiago did the pitches, and the Advocate oversaw the documents and networking. A ragtag army of IT specialists, marketers, and retired journalists crept out the woodwork. Financed from the duo’s own pockets, banners appeared, and jubilant enthusiasts paraded through the town’s ordinarily quiet streets. But the naysayers’ distrust remained mostly unthawed.

Actually, I partly agreed with them. Tiago’s offer seemed too good to be true. Surely there was a catch somewhere. But it’s Sunday, and I’m hung over, so the small-time journo questions can wait.

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And so it comes to pass that, on a murderously hot Sunday morning in late February, we are barreling down a shimmering Karoo blacktop en route to Philippolis, with not another vehicle in sight – me drinking, him talking, and both of us admiring the majestic Vanderkloof Dam, before tossing coins over its railings. Just to make sure the ancestors are listening, I pee over the railings as well, but Tiago takes the more cultured route and just spits over them.

At his swaer’s dinner table, me the sole Xhosa in the presence of six Portuguese, well, what have I to lose? Not because I can’t shell the prawns, say I prefer the sauvignon blanc to the pinot noir, or pick up that his 16-year-old niece has fluffed a note or two of the piece she’s played on the piano. But there are no expectations to meet; a friend has invited me over, and who am I to refuse?

It’s not that, down here, racial/social barriers are still not drawn in khoki pen. The whites-only enclave of Orania is barely one town away, and the town of Vanderkloof is home to the Suidlanders, a paramilitary outfit that fashions itself as the white man’s last defence if the racial apocalypse ever comes. In many ways, the invisible fences of segregation are as real as those that keep those fat and woolly sheep in their expansive camps.

And should one dare to cross over, the unspoken rules subtly reassert themselves. Like a script from a movie about the American Deep South, ‘they’ are there and ‘we’ are here, and nobody is causing any trouble. Today, however, our laagers have opened up, and we fall into a hypothetical embrace.

Earlier, before we hit the road, and both of us heavily hung over, I ingested a Zamalek (Black Label) and Tiago a Castle Lite at Hans’s Tavern in the township. The venerable, smooth-talking, easy-dressing proprietor had died in a car crash the previous week, and notwithstanding the polished wooden counters and shuffling jazz on the juke there was an air of gloom about the absence of the boeppens that had stood so familiarly at the doorway for several decades.

A group of sombre, glazed-eyed revellers join us. They know Tiago. They don’t call him mlungu, bhulu, lahnee – generic racial references to whites that are still very common – but just Tiago. In Hans’s honour, we clink quarts and bleat, ‘long live Thyopho’ (his clan name), bow our heads in a pointless but well-meaning gesture, and off we go.

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Just after 1 pm, in Philipollis, tummies stuffed with rice and seafood, Tiago and I sit perched on stools at bar counter in a local hotel. A local lawyer with a fearsome courtroom reputation generously slides a focaccia in our faces.

Beyond the badass reputation and Miley Cyrus figure, she turns out to be the quintessential Karoo tannie, adamant that drunken men should eat and drink even more – and that, somewhere out there, there are extraterrestrial life forms bent on paying us a visit. That’s why, she argues, they’ve put up all those ‘sci-fi’ radio telescopes in Sutherland, which – by Karoo standards – is not far down the road. And on those starry Karoo nights, when the Karoo is tjoepstil, she reclines on a garden couch and swears she can hear their inscrutable whisperings.

She lines up an equitable playlist; something between sokkie-sokkie treffers, Dolly Parton and Marvin Gaye. Then out come the Jaggies and Springbokkies – double brandies with ice — accompanied by rueful tales of little-town living: the skills exodus to the cities, too many potholes, too much dagga on the streets. In no time, the libations have felled all barriers, Fokofpolisiekar are belting out ‘Hemel op die Platteland’, and everybody has found the raconteur within.

Tipple in hand, Tiago agonises about the university campus that never happened. He feels that he and the Advocate were hard done by; that maybe the urban regents weren’t thinking clearly. In his view, ‘the comrades’ aren’t putting their money where their mouths are.

‘Kimberley,’ he slurs, ‘is a dead town, only buoyed by government departments.’ He and the Advovate had mobilised their energies and invested their own money in the belief that there wa no better placed town for a satellite campus. The Kimberley diamond mines are long gone, and with them the big money. Colesberg is is right in die middle of the country, ‘so how can we talk about rural development but not see the merits of a university in such a strategic location?’

To be sure, the guy is a capitalist, and doesn’t try to pretend otherwise. His father arrived from the island of Madeira as a young man with dreams, only to be landed in a politically insane situation in which he wasn’t quite white enough for the top tier.

For Tiago, there was school. Then there were the subtle agitator tendencies: him, his aunt and sister taking mass at the only Catholic Church in town, which was in the black township. There were also the early entrepreneurial leanings: first working in the family business, and later starting his own arcade game shop. There are also the tales about learning to fight in the township, even though some of those still need verification.

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Today, when upstart artists, wannabe businessmen, schoolchildren, and others need donations, it’s Tiago they turn to. A dedicated member of the Rotary Club, he is known to support this cause or that.

A long-standing admirer of Maeder Osler, and a friend of Toverview, he is always willing to lend a helping hand, whether treating the members of this media collective to lunch in his restaurant, or driving them to cover a story somewhere out of town. (In December, he was the guy who drove a group of townspeople out to Hanglip Farm for David Muller’s one-person performances.) He uses internet wizard Janco Piek to help advertise his businesses on social media, kicks it with Yours Truly for banter, and, yes, he always picks up the tab.

While he is very shrewd around money, he – to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson – doesn’t seem to kill more than he can eat. Though we’ve argued endlessly about ‘privilege,’ I’ll be the first to admit how privileged I’ve been to have his number on speed dial. And, ja, his nickname is Mr Rod. You’re not cool around here if you don’t wear one, and Tiago is a moerse cool dude.

FEATURED IMAGE: The author and Mr Rod at the Vanderkloof Dam.

This is an edited version of an article on Phakamisa Mayaba’s own website, eEparkeni. Used with permission.