By Jeremy Witts-Hewinson
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked. “Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
Klaarstroom, as in ‘clear stream’, is a tiny village at the northern entrance to Meiringspoort, the gorge that takes you through the Swartberg Mountains dividing the Great and Little Karoo. Here we have lived for about three decades and watched the world go by. Like the stone in the river, we remain while events, people, stories, ideas – great and small – wash by. Here in Klaarstroom one doesn’t pursue meaning; meaning has a habit, from time to time, of finding you.
We must return to the advice of the King of Hearts. The village of Klaarstroom was established in the early 1860s just after the roads engineer Adam de Smidt, brother-in-law of the renowned Thomas Bain, laid the first road through the gorge. This enabled farmers in the Great Karoo to get their wool to the nearest harbour, namely Mossel Bay. Because there was abundant water, created by melting winter snow, one of the early commercial wool washeries was established alongside the river.
The gentleman from whose farm the village was carved was one Petrus Oosthuizen. He was determined that his legacy should survive him, and called the village Petersburg, as the early maps show. Yes, the English ‘Peter’, as he was apparently married to a ‘grand’ English-speaking lady from the Eastern Cape.
As history shows us time and time again, names are about various kinds of ownership, as well as power. Judeo-Christian writings remind us the Moses was sent away wanting to know who sent him with the bewildering ‘I AM’.
The locals would have none of Petrus’s aspirations, and stuck to ‘Klaarstroom’, the name of the first farm demarcated in the area in the late 18th century. Phakamisa Mayaba addressed the pesky issue of names most eloquently in a recent article.
I recently discussed this very matter with a delightful guest of German origin, who viewed Mzansi’s naming dilemma with amusement. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I grew up in a small village in Germany after the War. We lived in the main street where my father grew up. It was Frederichstrasse when he was a child. Then under the Kaiser it was changed to Kaiserstrasse. When the Nazis came, it was Hitlerstrasse, and after the war it became Adenhauerstrasse. I don’t know what it’s called now. So you are not alone.’
Speaking of guests, we’ve had a guest house here in Klaarstroom since 2003 when we returned from a teaching stint in London. There we taught inner city kids, who couldn’t come to terms with the reality that South Africans could speak English, let alone TEACH them English! How some battled with the suggestion from an African that ‘I ain’t not wanna do it that way’ was not going to find favour with the language progress markers for Year Eights.
Sharon and I slaved away for more than a year, while the exchange rate drifted to R18/19 to the pound for the first time. A colleague of mine introduced me to a visiting teacher: ‘Meet my friend Jeremy, he’s an economic migrant from South Africa.’
Of course, she was quite correct. I was not far from those multitudes dodging their way from the Middle or Far East, or other parts of Africa. I just had another veneer – a conveniently inherited passport.
It was at Hayes Manor Comprehensive near Heathrow Airport where I was reminded that we are not alone. Teenagers are teenagers wherever you find them. Poverty is poverty. Social ‘disfunction’ is universal, while ‘clever’ people all over try to decide what it is to be ‘functional’.
Returning to our beloved Karoo, we attended the Sunday Eucharist at the local Anglican chapel – The Good Shepherd. Here the priest recited the Eucharist in Afrikaans – the same ritual recited at Westminster Abbey. Same, but different! In that great Abbey you were anonymous. You and your Creator. Here, in the crowded chapel on the wonky benches, it was you, a whole chunk of the community – and your Creator!
It was that stay in ‘Blighty that gave us the opportunity to step out of the main stream in some way and live a very ‘real’ life here in the Karoo, where you’re reminded daily that you’re alive, at minus 7 degrees Celsius in winter or 40 degrees plus in high summer. Here we live a Champagne life on a lemonade income, as the world passes us by and feeds us daily.
From our stoep in this Karoo village, we hope to share some of our experiences of and perspectives moulded by our beautiful surroundings from time to time …
Jeremy and Sharon Witts-Hewinson own and manage the Klaarstroom Guest House in the village of Klaarstroom in the Karoo.
FEATURED IMAGE: From the Klaarstroom Guest House website.