#lowveld

Where do we go from here?

Innibos 7-8 July 2017. Annual festival in Nelpsruit, South Africa.

Because who doesn’t want to see thousands of Afrikaners of all ages watching a concert on a rugby field while sitting on their camouflage camping chairs?

Really it’s weird. My European side would expect a concert held in such a venue to be all exciting, filled with people jumping up and down, but here? Nope. You sit comfortably in your chair, with a blanket on top of you, listening to the oupa behind you’s inappropriate comments on the performers. It’s different, I like it. If you’re in the mood for a different crowd, just go one of the other stages to breathe in the smoke of the weed-heads next to you at the MKStage, or sokkie-along at the Arena. 

Along with the music, explore the craftsy stalls to find your mom’s birthday gift or the next painting that will adorn your living room wall. 

Of course, the best is always the food. And maaaan is there a selection to choose from. Typical market food: boerie rolle, chip sticks, curry and rice etc., but also pizza cones, sushi, all kinds of roosterkoek, Serbian burgers, you name it. Choosing was TOUGH.

Epigraph: Through the highveld haze and into the escarpment’s descent, a minibus falters on loose bolts, prophecy threads through wildflowers, and the Bridal Veil in Sabie whispers its spray across the pass. Reunion carries its bouquet—an embrace at the threshold of generations. What falters in disruption gathers again, woven in a cradle of memory, where myth and family entwine.

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.

YD6-91 (ZA-2) Honeymoon: A Failed Disruption, Finding Its Wrap in the Lowveld Lair

In the Volkswagen minibus, we passed the foot of mine dumps, where years before, on outings with Lionel and Gavin, the rear doors had swung in a breath—a fleeting sigh loosing my little cubs. I followed to the wayside, standing by as their little hands and feet climbed, flea-like, through arid revegetated tuft grass the pelt of a yellow mammoth across the mountain’s flank. A few dry pools of rainwater berms clung to their palms—I too experienced with–sun-glittering gold dust oozing from the pores. But they descend with cupped palms and wealthy smiles, able to carry only a handful of mine sand back into the orange Mercedes. The door's grip at hand left culprits’ magic traces, trailing latent gold along the leather rear bench, the footwell—their joy from closing. 

The dashboard vents blow air as Victoria leaves an awesome tethered gaze behind. Before us, efflorescent concrete, tarnished by engine-oil drips and rubber tracks, slips in shame beneath the still wiper blades tethered to the upright windshield—almost useless against a moonscape of boulders. Prides of lions frozen in the grass field stretching to the horizon. In the hush of the ghostly southern bypass, Johannesburg's scattered villas nestle and prick through the field of rocks, poking the Lion’s golden-tan den. We ride along with the comfort of an airstream, twine with a circumspect rat-gnawing noise: a canned echo, creepy in our company—not from the bussing specter of the empty seats, nor from the Volkswagen’s whining air-cooling engine, but through the chassis, riding with us.

The wind dies, the clanging rises under Victoria’s seat, and the downhill before us I wished to see a wave’s swell ahead. The clang grows harder, more definitive through the wheel, flashing me back to our teens—surfing the hills on our racing bikes. My brother Igor had his school rhythm, ending at two; I worked on the Pretoria construction site until five before heading toward Kyalami. Still we shared the same second-last hill. I free-spin my road bike, the rear cog rifling its dry metallic music, a rest before the slog lifted the road in my face, sweeping over the Blue Hills into twilight, into a backwash before home in the valley.  

Leaving home the morning after, treadling our bikes, sunlight laid its golden touch on the hillside where swathes of tires swept off the asphalt, launched across the dirt shoulder, ripped through grassland tufts of grass before tumbling. This left behind the flattened rest of an elephant bull leaning on the farm’s barbed-wire fence. A priest among a busful, on Sunday, met the bifurcation of his demise—when a tire blew. My imagination, nurtured from a bike puncture, rehearsing what I would have done—now reaped years of practice, and under the umbrella I bear, shielding Victoria’s naivety from cosmic maleficence. I pray the rear engine tugs while the slope draws the minibus spooling—when touching brakes biting is fatal. 

I jolt back to the fatal incident, reasoning through the throttle release, the pedal sequence of steps changing down gears for a safe landing on three wheels—yet inhibited with a curse, a malediction. Rose Delbruyere gave no names, only the odd one out lingering in retreat, a presence in nearness. I’m left with a course cast onto the prolonged downhill, the incident as a moral issue of a soul. In the hush of my relief, floating, feathering the brakes, coasting, shunting the continuous yellow line until we halt in the security lane. 

I slip down the seat, circle by the Volkswagen’s flat nose to face the wheel. Under Victoria's naive gaze, to my disbelief, the wheel nuts sit loose—catching a fright at the thought of stripped threads, of possible damage, our journey east across the Highveld in jeopardy. My mind steadies; I open the door and plead with Victoria. She scoots over. Behind the seat I find the wheel wrench beside the jack. The dilemma of where we stand mounts, yet I step back and crouch before the wheel. 

I brace the wrench, turn, and the nut tightens, pressing the wheel firm—with a sigh. ‘It holds—the lug nut is sound.’ Preoccupied with which brother to curse—high and hellbound—my mind flickers back to the Black mechanic in the workshop earlier, perhaps forgetful when changing wheels. My fear eases as each lug nut threads firm, balancing into hold. Circling the minibus, I take a stance at each wheel, bracing the wrench, standing with full weight—each jerk of my body securing the nuts—before I imagine myself back at the Volkswagen’s wheel, steering us onto the highway. 

Victoria seems assured I know the way, a theatric presence seated abreast, before a panoramic silver screen of the Highveld—unfolding stretches of sun-bleached concrete highway, hypnotic through the grassland. My mind stretches ahead, seeking ghost tracks across a still sea of wavy landscapes, reminding me of the old tracks I followed—fledging in my early twenties. After dispatching a messenger into the homelands to summon Black laborers for my construction sites. Then the road asserts itself, folding back to our spot. 

My foot floors the throttle, as if the minibus tug heavier than air, dragging a buffer in its wake—the four pistons falling to boredom, the engine refusing to spark dynamics as I shift into top gear. Between the blind rise of the right highway and our course, a new development presses into the narrowing wedge, drawing both roadways into overlap. Ahead, where the exit to Witbank flares, the shanty town imposes—a shameful sight to new visitors. It flashes my childhood memory of the Belgian Congo’s rain forest, where canopies dripped and music cascaded down elephant-ear leaves to splash on the ground, villagers’ happiness blooming around thatched rondavels. I imagined huts sprawling deep into Witbank, not lives frying under corrugated iron sheets.   

Witbank behind, the sun presses us forward, casting a leading shadow, as the slipping median draws to a close and the lanes fold into an apparent slower two-way asphalt thoroughfare. In the hush of the countryside a single rig rises against the sky, nearing where the earth lies ripped open, the overburden heaped alongside. Large swaths of grasslands stretch between, a conveyor belt crossing the way. The mine's apparent abandonment is belied by multiple-tandem-axle trucks gleaming against the deep dark of stockpiled coal. Golden grassland folds back, the road cuts through a shallow valley. In the trough, the long-awaited Shell in bright colors breaks the milieu—Middelburg. We veer off, pull up at the Black pump attendant. Victoria steps out. After filling up, I draw the minibus into Ultra City, lock up, and with her step into the stopover restaurant.

Victoria’s eyes animate as an Afrikaner ash-blond girl—her accent so akin to Flemish, her country gait and homely no-nonsense stiffness—serves us a bite to eat. We rise, pass by the cashier, and stroll out to the Volkswagen minibus. We pull off, exiting the stopover, and veer to face the wave of a hill, the roadway rising out of the valley, while frightful trucks descend with heavy cargo. Over the hill, the road stretches through the hush of the country, into the Boers’ open-air museum—a back-way where Afrikaner farmhouses linger, leading toward a west gate into Hazyview. The two-way lane—an illusory asphalt mat unrolled across graded grasslands, edges frayed onto the dirt shoulders, fluttering to the Lowveld straight through Nelspruit, the south gate along the stretch launching itself at the Indian Ocean’s coastal resort. I dare not dwell on the folly of my youth, a weekend drive into Maputo, where Jean and her sister Rita had gone on vacation for ten days. 

The staggered pools of dams signal our approach. Then, in this Afrikaans countryside, the corner sinks to a farmhouse crouched beneath the graded road. We crawl into a launching stretch of hill, its slope pitched like a lean-to roof against the sky. We pull over at an outspan tuft in the mammoth legs of eucalyptus trunks—a shade amid thoughts of pioneer-driven ox carts under a sun that scorches the earth. Victoria, in disbelief, brushes her hand along the surviving bark of curled-up peelings, standing among this herd of trunks in the lush green grass springing from the veld ravaged by flames. We drive on, heeding the crest—the awesome plateau, sprawling with koppies, hiding Voortrekker trails that thread through their bushveld toward the horizon.

We ride bushveld hillsides until Lydenburg—“town of suffering”—emerges, its corrugated-iron-roofed farmhouses stooping toward the road. The grid of streets gathers us in. We pull up by the lean-to-roofed stoop, shade a hotel crowd of farmers from the outlying veld. Stepping out, we glance around the far corner across the main street: at the town’s heart, a medley of colors, a car park alive with dusty Bakkies in the glare, storefronts plastered in supermarket publicity. We drift toward the phantoms of a pioneer outpost, shaded under a gabled parapet terrace. Stepping past the paddock handrail frontage, we take a seat among locals in safari suits; one steps over, notes our order—eager to move on, returns with soft drinks and snacks, before we are on our way again. 

We step up to the high seat of the Volkswagen cabin, daylight weighed against the distance still ahead. Pulling away, turning from the panned-out town, the handle of the road pokes at the looming Drakensberg, stifling the sky to a sliver. The retailers release their grip from the corner, leaving us among broad-breathing suburban properties, the draught of grassland slipping onto the piedmont. At a gateway’s engraved sculpture—the Afrikaner Museum—the engine whines through the curve as the road brushes the escarpment flank, dragon’s tail softens with gentle green bush. My palm wraps the gear lever knob as I ceaselessly change up and down, mischievous turns deflecting us from the void, threading a passage through the mountain clefts of another generation of hills. Reaching the crest, the road disappears into its scales, opening to a dorsal passage of mystical fog. Victoria calls out: "Pull over—I want to get out." 

In the rear the engine idles, while I watch Victoria's mysterious intentions unfold. In her summer mauve jumpsuit, she paces ahead of me left behind in the glass bubble. The verge swelling with foliage that tugs her arm inside. She straightens with a wild white trumpet lily in hand, then slips back inside the minibus. We drive off breaching the hush. “Stop!” she calls. Her figure press into eden’s wayside, I follow her through air that tolls cold against my bones. She lingers among scattered white and purple Turk's cap flowers—no wild mind would imagine protected—her bouquet swelling in her left hand, as if anticipating a meeting at the road’s end. At last she turns back, crawling into the comfortable interior of the minibus, her bundle latent, fragrant, alive. 

The horizon lifts its hazy veil as we approach the ridge, to the roof of the world, overlooking the Lowveld. The roadway bends into vertigos, down the escarpment, the engine choking on its brake, luring us into the dark scaly wall anchor us down the stretch. Before sweeping around the pinnacle through the Long Tom Pass, lowering through the piedmont woods toward the spread of houses. Just before Sabi downtown at the crotch of roads, we turn as instructed, off into the woods, I orient ourselves as the shade morphs into the twilight, slipping through banana plantations, following the back-road to the Sabie River downstream. Winding through the hill, we emerged, joining the Nelspruit main road. 

A fresh earthcut leads us onto a slip carved into the hillside, where a train wagon perched on a terrace ledge tickled our curiosity. We pull up, step out, and look through a cleft at the distant low grounds—Hazyview awaking an evening constellation of flickering lights. Then back to the minibus, to the main road. We are not to reach the town, we creep inland, until we veer off the asphalt, a roadside apron through a gateway. 

In subtle pursuance of the faithful dirt tracks, evanescent in the skirt of Nyx, headlights sweep shadows rolling behind shredded umbrellas of leaves, hiding into the spilling banana groves. Ahead, a specter stirs—etching a structure, fast-morphing members across an abysmal trench, headlights wiping the planks of a deck onto the proceeding tracks. We catch our way leaning right. A few distant flares pulse through the windshield into our eyes, Morse-like, our reward. Windows glint, betraying our approach, as the cottage flushes out of the darkness. From its front door, a figure, half-blinded, emerges amidst the windows.  

We pull up aside the lair, headlights dying into shadow, sketching itself from the darkness. We step out. I move around the minibus’ nose, meeting Victoria at the foot of the perron, the shadows of De M’ma and P’pa rush from the side. We pass the flocculent ground crown at the middle, align with the spill of light from the gaping front door, and rise up the steps—inherent to De M’ma’s exultant cry from afar: "[Flemish] Ze zijn hier—ho, jullie zijn hier—They're here—Ho, you are here. . .” –at last!  

Victoria didn't kid now, nor stall me with my mumble-jumble of Antwerp Flemish, Afrikaans, and scraps of “General Civilized Dutch.” She didn't press De M’ma, as I’m told she once did with her mother—Flemish from the east of Belgium. Like a grandchild's call, in her natural High Flemish: "[Goedenavond, Bomma, goedenavond, Bompa. Hoe gaat het met u]–Good evening, Grandma, good evening, Grandpa. How are you?” And after greeting, they slip into an easy chat.

My old folks, curious enquirers—De P’pa keeping a silent watch, De M’ma twinkles in her eyes, words rolling out thoughtless. They lead our entry into a soft light. Victoria holds a bouquet of wildflowers, fuzzy in De M’ma’s eyes, for her world is already full of exotic, bright colors. Yet, she doesn’t overlook the bouquet; she’s eager, waiting to be swamped in life’s jolly-stories. Victoria lays the bunch on a corner of the dining table. Life seems to last, in these moments of reunion, to sit around a naked table for the whole family. Space over the shoulders. Their houses always spilled with room—De M’ma always ready to accommodate another family.

Surrounded by tokens of his stamp collection, and by a lifelong search into the origins of our name, he seems to neglect the derivatives—loose, dangling trails. There is a quiet despise for his in-law family, the Somers. Victoria flips up: “August Somers was my adoptive father—before my mother remarried.”

“We should go and visit Tante Carla,” De M’ma blurts. With people only a stone’s throw away, so is Graskop. 

She stirs my mind into my childhood—she who had her fingers in the earth, planting and tending branches, reaping the fruits, enriched the people who came after her, when she moved on, leaving behind young gardens. The Lowveld night closes in, the banana grove’s hush enfolds us, De M’ma breathes again. “We can go and visit her over the weekend.” 

You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style?

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted…