A BOER FROM THE PAST POP’s OUT OF THE ETHER

Many years ago when I first fled a habit into the bush, one of the foremost characters that washed up was a large, a very large chap with a bushy mustache, a real farmer with a pipe, real tractors and a bona fide desire to feed Africa, and a hell of an attitude.
Right from the start we were in friendly conflict.
It all started in the shower one morning. I had built myself an outdoor one, that overlooked the fields that had inspired the name of the farm, Cosmos, which grew in profusion on those long neglected lands, however that morning as I diligently scrubbed my bits, I noticed with horror that the gorgeouse pink and white fields were now brown plowed lands! Someone had come onto my place and plowed all my flowers into the ground!
I was infuriated.
Well after a couple of calls it was ascertained that a certain fellow down the way was the party to confront over this blatant misuse of my place, and I was all fired up to have it out with him.
We met bristling on the drive in our 4x4’s, and from the very first we knew that we came from opposite sides of the universe. He from the darkest reaches of Afrikaner conservatives and I from the loony left, it was a marriage made in heaven.
It turned out that he had negotiated with a well know villain in the area, who had told him that my land was in his gift and had taken payment in kind for the use there of and so on and so on. In short a long and likely story that was deeply rooted in the web toed parley prevalent in the area. It seemed I would get nothing but a plowed field instead of the weed infested one I had enjoyed to date and would have to further more be imposed on for coffee and conversation for the foreseeable future.
Johann was equally delighted to enjoy the benefits of my lands that he managed to avoid paying for, ever.
So having been thrown together as neighbors and being frankly, mutually intrigued by each other, we entered into a relationship that got intense enough for us to come to blows.
I was, in those distant days, completely isolated from the world, no electricity and only a wind-up phone, at the bottom of a very bad road, deep in the unvisited badlands on the edge of the escarpment. I had retreated from the city with fear and loathing in my heart, empty handed and desperate. I was at the point of total implosion, it was one of those pivotal points in a life led at full volume, where the wise drug warrior knows that the path from here on, will teach no more lessons and that the end has come.
I was an injured hippy/ and bankrupt, hanging onto the edges of sanity, after a long journey into the unknown. I was tired and wounded. I really don’t know how I survived those weeks and months where life itself seemed to hold no value. Food had no taste and no water could sweeten. Into this morass of conflict entered the Boer.
Johann hefty, in body and presence, a seriously robust chap going head to head with the planet, with his steel machines; he was everything anyone would imagine an Afrikaner farmer should be.
He had it all, from an extensive family, many dogs, gun on the hip, khaki outfit and a big smelly pipe Jan was 100% Boer. He and I disagreed on everything.
From then on he visited me regularly and sometimes weeks would go past where he was the only white face I would see. Our chats covered a wide variety of subjects, for he was not like most the people who live out here and had a assortment of experiences that the average Boer sure did not, from a gay brother who died of AIDs to working as an ice skater in Europe, which alone put him way beyond most locals, who think Swaziland is over seas!
But for all that he nonetheless clung to archaic ideas about women, dogs, religion and sex. He used the K word with embarrassing frequency, and thought that President Malan was a traitor let alone De Klerk who I suspect, if the opportunity had raised itself, he would have shot.
I will never forget the look on his face when I took a tray of tea and biscuits to a bunch of black women that were working for me. I never lived that down. He really knew after that that I was beyond redemption politics wise.
Though a handsome a rugged fellow he had the ability to send every woman I knew into a rage, he just oozed such arrogance towards them, that without saying a word he drove them to distraction, we all felt sorry for his missus.
Black people just kept right out of his way, they knew, just knew, that within a 20 meter radius of this wild man apartheid was well and still the law, and he was a scary chap with his beefy legs and massive firearm. Not to mention the mustache! His politics are somewhere to right of Genghis Kan, in fact he made that Mongolian warlord look a little soft, he had no doubts about the superiority of his racial group, god and community. He drove his wife and children mercilessly and himself too.
He had purchased a large tired farm down the road that he was bringing back to life so in that we were both in our own way pioneers carving out new territory. He was hell bent on making serious loot through the propagation of thousands of acres of corn and tons of beef, in pursuit of which he plowed and scattered with wild enthusiasm, swiftly proving to me as I watched him toiling up and down on his big tractor in the mud, that I was no farmer but he did everything well and with enviable thourghness and seemed to be achieving his dream.
So we spared and bickered over world affairs, the state of the town and drank gallons of coffee as me mutually puffed at our weed and tobacco and the truth be told that though we never really agreed with one another we grew to like each other.
Then I discovered Five Assegais and the distance parted us and precluded our regular chats, we no longer saw much of each other. By this time he had expanded his operation and had built an abattoir and a feeding lot on his property, which if the local gossip was true was his undoing and combined with some shady deals and other strange happenings caused him to suddenly disappear from the area.
I missed him and mourned his passing.
So the other day having downloaded Skype I was delighted when he appeared on the screen, he is now in the darkest reaches of the antipodes where he is doing I know not what, as before I could delve into the depths my computer exploded losing me my contact with him, and others, including all records of bookings taken for the lodge that I had negotiated over the last couple of months (if you reads this Johann get hold of me) causing me no end of strain as I have no idea who is coming when, a big problem, as double booking has to be the worst thing a lodge owner can do.

THE PATRIARCH DIES

This day the 25th August 2006 I became the older generation, thankfully not the oldest in the family but close enough, with the passing of my Mothers Brother, Uncle Herbert, at the ripe and spectacular age of 95.
What can one say “but well done and long life” and wish for the same, so in that rare sense this is an occasion to celebrate a life well lived rather than to mourn times missed as is so generally the case.
Good old Herby, a long life!
As you expect from a man who has lived so long, he seems to have always been there, he was my mother’s rich big brother who lived on the hill, and visited for occasional Sunday lunches, a distant and rather formal presence in the background of my life, the sole male of the family who sadly saw in me, my father, whom he detested, for the shabby way he treated his sister and for being a Catholic to boot, both unforgivable sins.
He only really featured for me after we returned from England after my parents protracted and loveless separation with all the injury and disgrace this entailed, sentencing us to a position as mere supplicants to the cold charity of the exalted Unky Herby, who was furthermore tiresomely gracious and kind, which just rubbed salt in the wound.
He and I had many an embarrassing interview, particularly after I was released from the confinement of my boarding school onto an unprepared world, which reacted with all the predictable rage and irritation that a longhaired hippy engendered in those dark days of the 60’s! He had to bail me out of some deep poo poo for which I should be eternally grateful, but what with his inevitable and predictable inclination to make me feel like the biggest stupid arse hole that ever lived, he elicited little more than grudging civility.
Shabby on my side.
The truth be told I harbored a strange and illusive ill will to this fine Jewish gentleman, which within the scope of his personality, water under the bridge and my intransigence, was perhaps misplaced. As I grew older and I hope a little wiser I found my own attitude towards him less and less appropriate, but nonetheless I was never able to put aside the feeling that he owed me something. What, I did not know, but I imposed on him an expectation of something that even I did not understand. Damn odd.
So we bickered and pecked at each other over the years with no real outcome, and even got to amuse each other with our mutual distrust, when our paths crossed, which we were both thankful for its rarity!
And so there it would have stayed had not my dear friend Howy invited me to attend his eldest unmarried son’s Barmitzfa.
At this point I need to digress to a little background material. Being a Jew boy, born and bred, mothers Jewish, that’s that so are you, it’s a tribal thing, my father was a Catholic which even confuses them, so in the end I was christened Church of England under the logic that ‘ if you are Catholic or Jewish you got problems but no one gives a shit about the Cof E.
I was initially inducted into my fathers family of soldiers and the white memsahib of the British Empire, of which I had been promised a privileged place, if I would but speak proper, play rugby and cricket, and tolerate the constant flogging the young and the privileged that empire received before being put in charge of the heaving masses. Cool think I and just as I am getting my teeth into that, I was taken away with no consultation and sent to a military rugby school in South Africa where I was persecuted by boys and masters alike for being a mouthy cheeky very small and skinny little turd, I was not pleased, but as there seemed no choices, I stiffened the lip and plotted vengeance on who I knew not, but someone had to pay. I am sure you know the feeling.
I soon got it into my head that I was alone and not part of any tribe or nation and only a token and vaguely tolerated member of a family, the English crowd were far away and distanced further by the indifference of my father, who consisted of two quid for Christmas, not a formidable presence, so one way or another for better or worse I drifted, it is true quite gaily, through a life that had no commitments or responsibilities on the edge of society, in retrospect a good thing but still lonely, boo hoo.
So back to the barmitzfa where for the first time I attended an actual public service at a Jewish Temple on a Friday night, quite an experience, never before had I been in a room with so many Jews before, and the scary part was that I could recognize them all, and saw for the first time that I was after all a part of something bigger than my group of one, that I could be one of them if I wanted. Suddenly I realized what I had missed for all these years. Came as quite a shock to the extent that I was quite struck down with a deep, deep feeling of being bereft of something of great value, of having been denied my birthright. I finally understood what I resented old Unky Herby for.
It was his job as the bloke and boss man of the family to have made sure that I became inducted into the society of Jews.
So the next time I saw him I confronted him with this reality, and bless me if this fine old fellow agnoledged his failure in this and a great weight fell from me, this small conversation took from me a weight that had burdened me for so many years, and I think for the first time he and I became friends and forgave each other.
Thank god I already had a circumcision, not that I was about to buy a seat at the schule, learn Yiddish or at this late stage become a practicing Hebrew, but it was good to feel that I was a member of the pyramid builders and Red sea pedestrians. I will never really understand the services like I do those of the goyem but if I wanted to make the effort that comfort zone was mine for the taking, so Salaam and long life to a great old guy, Herbert Meyersfelt my Uncle.