the past, goggas, and family stuff

Aargh! I somehow deleted the entire blog I had written a few weeks ago and intended uploading today. So I compromise and post this sketch instead. Hope you enjoy!

Many of us listened to family tales as children, but we rarely think to put them out there...
I would like to try to do this, so I started writing a book about them. Actually started years ago, but just couldn't get the format right as fiction. Now I am merely writing down the stories as I remember them.

This one is a short sketch of life in southern Namibia in 1912-1915.

My father, Donald John Stewart, was born at the turn of the twentieth century, 1903, and spent most of his long life in Namibia, previously claimed as Deutsch Sud-west Afrika, later South-West Africa.
When in the right mood, he had many interesting tales to tell. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his memory, nor mine, but this is how he described the place they lived circa 1912 or 1913.

As a young man at his boarding house

“Itsawisis,” he would say, drawing out the word with sibilant s’s and rolling the ‘w’ across his lips as though tasting something not quite pleasant. “You must understand that we lived there for years! As a child I mean.
We might have thought our earlier life in the slums of Cape Town was difficult, but we didn’t know what was waiting for us at Itsawisis. There’s nothing else like it. A mere a train stop in the scrub desert. No town - Keetmanshoop, the nearest, was about 30 miles to the south - no transport, no permanent population.
Our family and a few Nama goat herders, were the only inhabitants. We had only the borehole water provided for the steam engines my father served, and basic rations of maize meal, tea, sugar, soap and tobacco that were traded from the transport riders who passed on the route between Windhoek and the Union of South Africa."

This was the Keetmanshoop Post Office in early days

"The station name, Itsawisis, was etched out on a board alongside the track. One of those square, red, flat metal tanks was lodged on top of a steel tower. My father [his father was a 'strongman' from Scotland] built our little house from stone packed with clay and some wooden shuttering when he could find some. For the rest, the plain on which Itsawisis lies stretches way beyond the furthest horizon – on and on. Itsawisis was the local name of an omuramba (ephemeral river) lined with bushy thorn trees. When the river flowed, maybe three times a season for a couple of hours each time, the trees turned a vibrant green and created a shady oasis for us. Where the Itsawisis River and the railway line crossed, the German railway constructors had sunk a borehole, you see. Always amazed me how one could find water in that dry region. But they, of course, observed where the Nama people found water for their animals by digging in river beds at certain places. This borehole delivered a surprisingly strong and steady stream of water, although slightly brackish. You can always see when someone has grown up around there because they have strong teeth, but stained brown from the water."

[Germany had colonised the area and was set on 'developing' the country, by means they thought honest or clever, but which were often nefarious. They 'bought' or negotiated land from the indigenous people and settled their own farmers in the area, thereby making nomadic life almost impossible.]

"You wouldn't understand what it was like. My Da was always running off, my Ma couldn’t keep our stomachs filled, we had to work like adults as kids in those days – helping with the huge water pipe for the locomotives, digging and weeding in the garden (that’s why I still hate gardening), looking after Ma’s goats, and the heat! My God, the heat was always there. Except in winter of course. Then we couldn’t get enough.
We literally had a cooking stone that stood in the sun. Nice and flat. And at lunchtime you could cook eggs on it. If we managed to get hold of an ostrich egg, we cooked the whole bloody thing on that stone – just lying there in the sun. Scrubbed it a bit first in the morning, though.

You had to do everything in that searing damned heat. You don’t sweat much, because the heat just dries it immediately. I always laughed in the Hollywood films when the soldier staggers through the Sahara and wipes sweat off his face. Never man!
But the salt accumulates and you stink. Very quickly. If you drink too much water, you get dizzy and you must sit, your head pounding. And meanwhile, the flies. Flies everywhere because of the goats of course, and because of the water. Mosquitoes, huge big moths after the little bit of rain that comes once a year, scorpions, hell, you should have seen the scorpions and snakes – always around in summer. The scorpions weren’t these quite harmless things with big pincers and tiny tail. No, by God, they were the kind with a huge black tail. One sting and a biggish dog is dead. That’s how my Laddie died. Nothing we could do. If it stings an adult human, that man has incredible pain. Foot and leg swells up. Terrible! If there’s infection of course he would die. That happened to one of the transport riders that stopped along the way.
Never saw it happen to the Nama people though – they knew how to be careful. Wore the right kind of shoes too, like leather velskoens."

I already knew how hot and full of creepy things southern Namibia was. He hadn’t even got around to the deadly desert adders and puff adders, ghastly things. Nor had he mentioned the sandflies in the clean-looking sand of the southern dry riverbeds, the crawly bugs and bitey things in the trees, things that fell on you and bit you if you sat in the shade. The spiders were another test at night in summer. Huge hairy brown ‘baboon’ spiders with large gleaming eyes that jumped at you if annoyed. Palm sized reddish hairy creatures that resembled spiders but were actually insects with sharp biting mouth pieces. They could run at high speed and loved to run across one’s head when you were sleeping. Sometimes they left a trail of something like acid that burned and festered if not immediately treated. They were called red romans, for their colour.

 I knew all of these interesting little creatures because we had encountered them all when ‘camping’ in river beds or along the road. I put camping in inverted commas, because we merely used to park our car to create a wind barrier and privacy from the road, light a fire and sit on stones around it to cook, eat and drink. Our ablutions consisted of brushing teeth in a cup with a bit of water, or in Dad’s case whisky. Our toilet needs were satisfied by going a little distance from the fire and squatting behind a bush, if necessary using leaves or stones to clean ourselves, and covering the remains with sand, so as not to attract jackals. Dad always called this “walk in the bush” vovelavush, as in “I’m going for a vovelavush”. Then others knew not to go in the same direction.

In story-telling mode

My father continued: "Da’s job was to unhook the locomotive and fill both with water. In actual fact, it was me and Willy had to do a lot of the work, him watching. You know what it meant to water the locomotive? Remember, I was about ten years old, Willy maybe twelve. 
The train would stop more or less next to the tank and then manoeuvre backwards and forwards until the locomotive’s water tank was right next to it. Then we had to untie the pipe. It was huge! About as thick as a young lady’s waist, red reinforced rubber, with a heavy metal clamp at the front end. One of us had to wait on top of the locomotive, along with the driver. The other passed the front end of the pipe to him and he then had to fit it to the opening of the tank.
One of us, usually me, worked the tap on top of the tank. It was a big tap, about a foot, foot and a half in diameter. This bloody thing had to be turned and turned until the water flowed fully, and then turned all the back again, without leaving it leaking.
It was tight as hell and I sure couldn’t do it all on my own at first, so Da would help. I say help, but all he did was put one big hand out occasionally and add a casual pull, then give me a slap around the head for “being a bloody little weakling”. Probably that’s why Willy always preferred being on the other end of the pipe.

Dad's Ma (my grandmother) whom I never met

"Occasionally Ma would sell some of the pumpkins, carrots, tomatoes, and small sour figs from the trees in the river bed, if they flourished. Of course, first we had to eat, and extras were also cooked and bottled for winter. But some of the stuff she sold to train passengers on their three day trip between Keetmanshoop and Windhoek. This was how she sometimes had money.
She also baked bread and made sandwiches that could be sold to passing passengers. But most of her farming attempts were maar a struggle – lots of work, little result. We were living in a goddamn desert, after all! The majority of the goats she bought died - from heat, hunger, thirst, or frost. If it wasn’t the one it seemed to be the other. How the Namas managed, I don’t know.”



Modern Nama women constructing a reed mat hut

"I was ashamed" my father said  "to see how my mom used to run up to the train, trying to sell her vegetables. Even at the market in Cape Town, the women would never behave like that. But my Da made her do stuff like that, digging in the ground, even clambering up on the water tank, like a man. Everyone laughed and the Namas said she was a half man. Later on, when we could count money, Willy, Elaine and I did that job, the train. So there was always work. And it was there my little sister contracted erysipelas. She died."

I used to love listening to stories like this when I was a child. Of course, my next question was what happened then? What was her name? What is eri-, erisi..something? But enough was enough. Usually not as much as I've written down here.