Neck-stretching in Oudtshoorn

By MAEDER OSLER

I only recently learned that one should not rely on keeping safe from an ostrich attack by covering one’s head in the sand. So, now we are, looking out and about, slowly and carefully, a good distance from our Colesberg crossways base – as it happens to Destine Nde’s delightful multi-shop discovery in the land of multi-coloured ostrich feathers.

This of course is partly to remind one of the endurances of days passed in the present for futures. Hiding from such all-seeing eyes reminds me also that non-accountabilities can be as unprotected as, say, avoiding a necklacing by desperately pouring sand over the eyes of a victim, as happened in the late 1980s during civil disturbances at Colesberg. These eyes see what they see. There are always some eyes which can look and really see.

Before Destine re-visits, or we go much further, Maeder is also reminded of visiting the renowned Cango Caves during the 1970s as a reporter for The Argus. He was sent there to cover a Cape provincial municipal conference, which interestingly enough began to anticipate a newer South Africa, even at the height of repression.

Taking time off from such a long slow process, he paid for and strode lonely as a cloud of dust down one of the two racially segregated tunnels leading into the Caves – only to find that, some 50 paces further down, and beyond the public gaze, the two separate streams blended seamlessly into a single human river — to enjoy the secret and floodlit wonders of a country’s diversity, so obsessed by stalagmites and stalagtites as its seams still might be.

For more about the fascinating town of Oudtshoorn, try this link to Wikipedia. Meanwhile, all this somehow reminds me of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats – also greatly respected in our country — who might have had such caverns and their visitors in mind in the following poem:

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.