Category: Storytelling

The Hell, officially Gamkaskloof (or “Lion’s Valley” in English), is a long, narrow valley in the Swartberg mountains of South Africa. It was settled by whites in the 1830s, and for 130 years a small community lived there in near total isolation, with the only way in or out being a hellish trek on foot or by donkey. Then, in the 1960s, a road was roughed in and one by one the residents left, drawn by the electric lights of the outside world. By 1992, the valley was abandoned.

For me, the story of The Hell evoked the strains of “Duelling Banjos” and visions of drooling, three-eyed freaks, which was all I needed to convince me to go.

After a pre-dawn breakfast in the pretty, small town of Prince Albert, I packed for the day’s adventure: a camera, a big bottle of water, a hat to keep off the sun. The Swartbergs are in a semi-desert region where it gets cold quickly after sunsets and warms slowly after sunrises, so I put on a jacket. Then I hesitated. My guide would be driving me in his vehicle, so I wouldn’t need the keys to my car, but South Africa has an astronomical crime rate and the B&B didn’t have a safe… I shoved the keys into a jacket pocket and walked out to the front veranda to wait.

A few minutes later, a white pick-up truck pulled to a stop at the curb. The driver stepped out and introduced himself as my guide, Henk. He was short and muscular and had the red-faced complexion of a man who’d spent fifty-plus years in the sun. Tufts of white hair stuck out from under his faded baseball cap.

As we set off, Henk told me a bit about himself. “I am a product of the Venters, the De Beers and the Philips. We’re all mixed here,” he said laughing.

The joke was that Venter and De Beers are common surnames in the white, Afrikaans-speaking community, and Philips is a common surname in the white, English-speaking community. So Henk was “mixed” across the language line, not the race line. And this is “funny” given the history of South Africa, a racially-diverse country where a tangle of laws kept the races apart and the white minority in control until 1994.

I laughed along with Henk’s joke in the spirit of light-heartedness.

A few minutes outside town, he pulled to a stop by a sparkling mountain stream. “The water is so pure here,” he said dipping his bottle in, “It’s like drinking brandy.” Drinking brandy, I would come to learn, was a particular interest of his.

Shortly thereafter, the mountains, like ground beef marbled with fat and dotted with parsley, closed in on us. We were on the Swartberg Pass, a serpentine gravel road built by convicts in the 19th century.

Some passes meander through the bottom of valleys with the mountains towering overhead. Swartberg Pass isn’t one of them.

The Swartberg clings to the sides of the mountains, held in place by nothing more than stacked rocks. It is painfully narrow, barely wide enough for one car; and in spots the retaining wall has washed away giving an unobstructed view of the valley far below.

The thing is, I’m afraid of heights, so every muscle in my body began to flex, and every orifice to tighten. Eventually, I stopped looking out the passenger side window altogether and fixed my stare straight ahead, where there was often a small level surface in front of us.

Blissfully unaware of my rising level of tension, Henk had been rhapsodizing the beauty of countryside the whole time. “Michael, you’ve got to see this,” he said, gesturing with both hands while driving straight toward a cliff edge. 

I snapped. “Keep your fucking hands on the fucking wheel!” I snarled, stomping on the non-existent brake on the floorboard in front of me.

“Okay, Michael,” Henk said soothingly while putting his fucking hands back on the fucking wheel. “But this is Teeberg… Everyone wants to see Teeberg.”

* * *

Teeberg is a lookout point from which you can see mountain range after mountain range rolling away toward the horizon, and the clear, blue sky beyond. There are no guardrails, so you can stroll right up to the cliff’s edge and look 300 m straight down. If you are so inclined.

“I didn’t know you were afraid of heights, Michael,” Henk said as we got back in the truck. There was an odd, distant tone to his statement, like he wasn’t fully there, like a big part of him was somewhere else trying to solve a very complex puzzle.

A few minutes later, we arrived at a T junction. A sign for those turning right warned: “Dangerous Road for 48 km! Use at own risk!”

We turned right.

It was another gravel road, but this one was wider and there were no precipitous drop-offs. I started to relax a little and enjoy the view: in the foreground, low, spiky scrub poking through golden dust; in the background, grey-green mountains.  

Henk stopped so that I could get out, crunch through the dirt and take photos of proteas with their pointed, pink-tipped petals. We continued on and he pointed out a boulder that looked vaguely like a human skull, then another that looked like a dinosaur skull, complete with two rows of tiny, jagged teeth. Further on still, he pointed out a klipspringer. It was tawny like the soil, so I might not have noticed it without his help.

This was the rugged, wild Africa I had been hoping for and it brought a smile to my face.

Then, suddenly, we were on another cliff edge. I could see the road ahead descending through a series of tight switchbacks into a narrow, green valley far below.

We had arrived at Elands Pass, which is described at Mountain Passes of South Africa as follows:

The drop-offs are sheer, extreme and unprotected. Take it very, very slowly down this pass. The road bed is barely wide enough for one vehicle… It should be noted that there are absolutely no safety barriers whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I only discovered this description after the fact.

With my breathing shallow and the knuckles on my left hand turning white around the door handle, I considered telling Henk to turn back. But I knew there would be food in the valley and I wanted my guide to be well-fed, well-watered and clear-headed when he drove us back.

I asked Henk what he did before becoming a tour guide. I wanted to keep the conversation flowing and take my mind off the situation.

“I was a commercial farmer,” he said. “I started with five-thousand Rand and built a model farm.” [That’s about $500 at the current exchange rate.]

“So why did you stop?” I asked.

“My wife,” Henk said. He drew a deep breath and continued. “How can I live somewhere, where every time my wife goes into town, I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again?”

I waited for him to explain.

“You’ve heard about the farm murders?” he asked.

I had heard about the farm murders. There had been reports of violent attacks on white farmers in South Africa for many years. The white minority dominates commercial farming in the country, in part because of a law, now repealed, that reserved 87% of the land for them. In the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising that white farmers would be the main victims of farm murders.

“More white farmers are murdered in South Africa every month than soldiers die in Iraq,” Henk said. “But you never hear about it because the farm murders are part of a plot to drive whites from the country.”

“It’s right there in the African National Congress slogan,” he said. “The Land is Ours.”

The image of a night time invasion of a farm is chilling. Large commercial farms tend to be isolated, so even if a farmer is able to call for help, the only thing left to do when help finally arrives is cart away the bodies and clean-up the blood. The problem was, I wasn’t sure it was an accurate image. I listened intently and made sympathetic sounds, but tried not to get too drawn in. 

“You see,” Henk continued, “The black doesn’t want what you’ve got, but he doesn’t want you to have it, either. That’s why nothing changed in Africa for thousands of years before the white man came. The village was fed and that was good enough.”

I wasn’t shocked by what he was saying, since I’d read variations on the theme before. But I was shocked by the fact that he was saying it in the twenty-first century.

I could have argued with him, I suppose, but my life was in his hands and I didn’t want to do anything to distract him from his task, so I let him continue.

Henk told me about the differences he’d perceived between the various black ethnic groups in the country—the proud ones, the peaceful ones, the lazy ones. About the “lazy” group he said: “A man will ask his wife to bring him a chair to sit on while he watches her and his kids do all the work. They are the worst of all; and we’re stuck with them.”

* * *

At the bottom of the pass, a sign welcomed us to The Hell. Henk understood the comedic value of a tourist posing next to the sign and offered to take a photo of me doing so. It was torrid in the valley at noon, so I took off my jacket, threw it behind the sign and posed with sweaty armpits and a wan smile.

That done, we drove along the valley bottom, which was lush with greenery, quite unlike the mountains above it. The small, boxy cabins of the settlers, some of which had been restored for tourist use, were scattered here and there. We stopped for a look inside one. It had a shiny white gas stove circa 1970 and a black, cast iron wood stove circa 1870. Five rusting metal plates painted with simple floral patterns were affixed to the wall as decoration.

Back outside, Henk walked toward a nearby garbage can and resumed the monologue he’d stopped a few minutes earlier. “Blacks just can’t be commercial farmers,” he said calmly. “There has never been a successful black commercial farmer.”

“A baboon cannot open a baboon-proof dustbin,” he continued, standing over the garbage can with a wad of paper cradled between his bicep and ribs. Then, making sure to catch my eye first, he pushed down a lever with one hand, pulled up a bar with the other and let the paper drop into the open can. “A baboon can’t, but a chimpanzee can.”

We got back in the truck and drove on in silence.

Just beyond another clutch of restored cabins, we saw a pick-up truck parked with its gate down. Three men were setting up a barbecue nearby. Henk stopped and we got out to say hello.

The conversation was conducted in Afrikaans, but Henk translated bits and pieces, which is how I learned the men represented three generations of a grape-growing family from the Cape Town area.

At one point, the middle-aged, moustachioed one tilted his head in my direction and said something that sounded like it included the word “cock.” Like any execrable tourist, I’d taken the time to learn the key Afrikaans swearwords in advance, so I knew that the word kak, pronounced “cock,” was a shitty thing to call someone. I asked Henk about it.

“No, Michael,” he said soothingly. “He called you a khaki. That’s what we call the English.”

They all laughed heartily.

In the spirit of merriment, the oldest of the three, about Henk’s age, broke out a bottle of booze and offered us some. I’ve never been a fan, so I declined. As my guide, the person in whose hands I’d placed my life, I assumed that Henk would do likewise, but he enthusiastically accepted the offer.

Here we were, at the bottom of a treacherous, 50 km-long climb on a gravel track with no guard rails, and my guide was fixing to get shit-faced. I could not hide my disgust.

“But this is very special brandy, Michael,” he said.

I assented with my head bowed, my hands outstretched and my lips pursed.

Henk took a sip, let out a satisfied sigh and the conversation continued in Afrikaans without me.

* * *

Not long after, we arrived at a house-slash-restaurant-slash-gift-shop, where we were greeted in Afrikaans by a wiry, twenty-something ginger and his wife, whose ancestors, I was told, were actually born in the valley. The woman ushered me inside and motioned for me to sit at a table. She returned with a plate of bobotie for me. Bobotie is similar to shepherd’s pie, but curry-flavoured and topped with custard instead of mashed potatoes. Like a lot of South African cuisine, it shows the influence of slaves brought to South Africa from Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

I was hungry, but didn’t want to dig in before Henk. Frankly, I felt guilty about my behaviour and was hoping for an opportunity to redeem myself a little with good manners, some small talk and maybe even an apology or two, so I got up and walked out to where he and the ginger were still talking.

“You’re not eating, Henk?” I asked.

“No, Michael,” he said mildly. “Go ahead.”

I returned to the dining room table and ate under the watchful eyes of the family cat, a black-and-white mix. 

While I ate my lunch, I could hear Henk and Piet (the ginger) talking. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I was pretty sure it was something like this:

Henk: He’s afraid of heights.

Piet: This is the wrong place for a person who’s afraid of heights.

Henk: Quite… He’s a nervous wreck.

Piet: What’re you gonna do?

Henk [looks back at me, smiles reassuringly, then turns back toward Piet]: We can say he just wandered off and we couldn’t find him.

Piet: He’s that bad?

Henk nods.

Piet: So why did he want to come here?

Henk: Like the rest of the khaki bastards, he probably just wanted to see the isolated valley where our ancestors fucked each other for generation after generation to create a race of drooling, white monsters. He was probably hoping to find Dresie and Casie here. I don’t think he understood there’d be mountains involved.

Piet [after glancing back at me]: If we slice his throat, the mountain lions will start eating there, where the blood is, so there wouldn’t be any evidence left.

Eyes down, I redoubled my focus on the bobotie, which was quite good, actually.

* * *

The ride out of the valley was mostly a blur, or at least as much of a blur as it could be at 15 km per hour. I kept my eyes forward much of the time, as I had on the way down, but for the most part I wasn’t holding onto the nearest fixed surface with blanched knuckles.

As I relaxed, Henk seemed to relax, too. He conceded that education for blacks under apartheid was poor. Still, he couldn’t warm to Nelson Mandela. “There is something sinister behind his smile,” he said.

Henk told me that he believed Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC), was actually run by Robert Mugabe, the despotic President of the neighbouring country, Zimbabwe. “Africans always listen to the most senior man,” he explained. And Mugabe, who had held onto power for more than three decades, in part by killing his opponents, was definitely senior.

Mugabe had presided over the violent transfer of agricultural land from white Zimbabweans to black Zimbabweans, which doubtless heightened Henk’s apprehension. That Julius Malema was then a rising star in the ANC, was weighing heavily on him, as well. Malema, according to Henk, had recently visited Mugabe to learn how to “Get the whites off the land.” Malema had also taken to chanting something that translates roughly as “Kill Whitey” at public rallies.

*     *     *

Just before leaving Swartberg Pass, Henk asked if I would be willing to stop and share a beer with him in one of his favourite places. I was relieved that the ordeal was almost over and eager to make as much peace as possible, so I enthusiastically agreed.

We stopped on a small quadrangle of flat, dusty land, just off the road. It was clearly the favourite place of other people as there were empty beer cans, cigarette stompies and other detritus everywhere.

Henk let down the gate of his truck, pulled two tall cans of beer out of a cooler and handed me one. He returned to rhapsodizing the countryside as we drank and watched late afternoon shadows crawl across the rocks.

“I said all that stuff back there just to get your mind off the heights, you know,” he said after several minutes.

*     *     *

In the home stretch, just out of sight of town, we caught the second flat of the day. Since he’d already used his spare, Henk called his wife to bring another.

She arrived less than ten minutes later and, at Henk’s suggestion, drove me the rest of way into town while he swapped the tires out.

I was drained and fell immediately onto my bed at the B&B, where I closed my eyes and replayed the events of the day in the dark, sticky-floored theatre of my mind.

After a few minutes I forced my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up to make a plan of action for waning hours of the day.

I decided to take a shower, which meant that I would need to get a change of clothes from my suitcase, which was in the trunk of the car, which meant that I would need the keys, which were…

*     *     *

Two hours of panic and several phone calls later, I learned that Piet, the ginger, had found my jacket on the ground, next to the sign at the entrance to The Hell, right where I’d thrown it before posing for the “funny” photograph several hours earlier. Unfortunately, Piet wasn’t planning to come to Prince Albert in the near future—it is a full day’s trip there and back, after all—but he said he’d send it along with someone else, if they had another visitor who was willing.

* * *

In the years since my trip, I have learned that some of the things Henk said were probably accurate, some were definitely not and others are open to debate.

By some estimates, the murder rate among commercial farmers in South African is three or four times the already prodigious rate among South Africans as a whole. And, given that most South African commercial farmers are still white, it’s probably also true that most of the murdered farmers are white. Henk was probably right about that.

It is less clear whether Henk was right about the murders being racially motivated. A 2003 study found that robbery was the primary motivation for nearly 90% of farm invasions. White farmers are targeted for robbery because of their wealth relative to the less-white people around them and because their isolation means that law enforcement is unlikely to intervene on time. Still, as Jonny Steinberg suggests in Midlands, a book about one specific farm murder, long-simmering resentments may be involved, as well. Land now occupied by whites may be perceived by some as having been stolen decades or even centuries before.

However, Henk was definitely wrong about the slogan, “The Land is Ours.” It is not a slogan of the ruling ANC, which consistently draws more than 50% of the vote in elections, but it was once a slogan of the Pan Africanist Congress, which consistently draws about 0.2% of the vote.

But maybe Henk knew that all along. Maybe he really did say all that stuff just to get my mind off the heights. Then again, maybe he was just saying what he thought the wide-eyed khaki wanted to hear.