South Africa
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By A Country Grimace
July 29, 2010 by fred hatman
“The bontebocks, above all appeared in flocks of two thousand at least. I am persuaded that this day, buffaloes, antelopes of all kinds, zebras and ostriches, I had before my eyes at one time more than four or five thousand animals.” – Le Vaillant, the Overberg (1796)
I live in the Overberg. Two hundred and fourteen years later, where and how far do I go to witness such a thing?
And, in 214 years’ time, what real chance do the future inhabitants of Africa, never mind the Overberg, have of seeing just one of these, alive and running free in the wild?
* So I Google “bontebok photo” to bring you a pic… and I find this…
A dead bontebok. Shot. By a hunter. American. Very pleased with his work.
Ain’t that pretty? This photograph was first published on a South Dakota taxidermy website. With this caption…
“Bontebok was the easiest shot of the whole Safari. After a unsuccessful stalk and sitting in an open field, the Bontebok along with another herd bull came walking out of…
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Please try to relax… and brace yourself for the beauty of this image!
July 29, 2010 by fred hatman
You probably don’t need to know this but my best ideas bubble up while I’m on the bog. Bog, not blog. Just yesterday, after completing the Cape Times’ Wordgame, I thought of a saying that I believes holds very true.
“A good picture is worth a thousand words.” I was quite pleased with that. I then dreamt up “Every Picture Tells a Story” which is not quite as profound. It’ll probably be stolen by an ageing Scottish rock star, who also once stole my mop to wear as a wig, and worked into a title of an album. Plagiarism. Sis.
So, I had no sooner thought of these sayings when a photograph came my way which, I believe, is worth no fewer than a million words. It is so utterly and outrageously beautiful that I really don’t mind adapting my saying.
Please try to relax and brace yourself for the beauty of it all…
No caption required. Pic: Allen Walker
So the whole idea is that I don’t now give you a million words, right? OK.
Olivia “OJ” Symcox.…
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Know The Beloved Country – 4
July 29, 2010 by fred hatman
South African stories. What a lot we got. Folklore, fables, strange phenomena, myths, old wives’ tales, tall tales, we’ve heard them all. Or so we think. These make South Africa an intriguing, even mystical, place in which to live.
I heard about “the Tokoloshe” when I was very small. Yes, deep under apartheid. The 60s, babies. Mary was a very large, round woman who lived in what was then called a “khaya” (home) in my family’s backyard. A tiny room with a bed, chair, shower and toilet. Behind the garage where my Dad kept his gleaming white Ford Cortina. With red leather seats. And those kiff tail fins.
Artistic impression of “the Tokoloshe”… fortunately not invisible and, even more fortunately, without its “exceptionally long penis”.
I loved Mary. What I’m about to say may seem patronising but it isn’t. She was one of two mothers that I was blessed to have. My Mom worked all day so Mary looked after me once I got home from school. Fed me lunch, checked on me while I played on the foofie-slide…
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By a Country Smile
July 28, 2010 by fred hatman
So you think that living in the country is easy? That all we do is plough a few furrows before parking the Massey Ferguson under a tree, haul out the old Blackberry and get on to Facebook to sow our oats in Farmville?
Well, yes, that’s exactly what most of us do. That’s how we roll out here in Stanford. But not every day. Take Wednesdays. I have to come over all corporate on Humpday. And what a hump. I can barely get my tractor over it.
I had two meetings today. Two. This entails me getting out of my Barney pyjamas at 2pm, washing my hair front and back of my bald Karoo (sounds better than Sahara) and going down the pub. That’s where we have our “informal tourism group” meetings. Informal being the operative word. No tie required. I was going to say “No Jacket Required” but that’s the name of an album by my least favourite musician of all time.
Not entirely the vibe we have going at our Stanford informal tourism group meetings
The cool…
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For Pest Control, Follow Nature’s Lead
July 28, 2010 by Bernard Pollack
It might feel counterintuitive, but the more varieties of vegetables, plants, and insects that are included in a garden, the less vulnerable any single crop becomes. Mans Lanting of ETC Foundation India wrote in LEISA Magazine in 2007 that the best method of approaching pest control is to learn to live in harmony with pests instead of trying to fight them.
By harnessing the natural state of vegetation and pests, a farmer can create “a system in which no component can easily dominate” and in which soil and crop quality is greatly improved.
In other words, the tendency for traditional farming to give preference to specific crops, to plant in clean rows, to weed out any invasive plants, and to use chemicals to prevent pests and disease is actually creating a need for these pesticides and fertilizers.
Soil fertility decreases when crops are harvested, and growing a single crop means that the soil is further stripped of nutrients with each season, requiring the use of inputs that, according to Lanting, lead to an imbalance in plant nutrition and increase vulnerability to pests and diseases. This introduces the need for pesticides, which…
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William Kentridge on Africa and Art
July 28, 2010 by Simon Barber
CNN’s Robyn Curnow talks to the Johannesburg artist about his work, which is making waves from the Louvre in Paris to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Know the Beloved Country
July 28, 2010 by fred hatman
We are blessed with some stunning proverbs in South Africa. And I’ll stun you with some of them as we walk this Know The Beloved Country path.
“Ngwana a ka feta gare ga molete wa tau.”
No, this does not translate to “Darling, would you mind hoiking the feta out of the fridge, please?”
It’s a northern Sotho proverb which means… “A child can go through the hole of a lion.”
Yes. I was also left wondering whether this was a misprint and they meant “whole” rather than “hole”. Kids do tend to eat a lot these days.
But, if you’ll allow me to get to the nub of all this, this quaint proverb suggests that adults should be open to what children say.
Now I’m a great fan of this thinking. Have been ever since my Dad got into the habit, at the dinner table, of barking at my sister and I: “Only open your mouth to put food in it.” And we were already in our 20s! Only joking.
But, seriously, I think we adults would do very, very well to really listen to what…
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By a Country Smile, Part 2
July 27, 2010 by fred hatman
I never thought anything said by Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts would talk to my soul.
But I was wrong. This does…
“The bushveld is a place where the human element indeed shrinks into utter insignificance, and grips you and subdues you and makes you one with yourself.” – J. C. Smuts, South African Prime Minister (1870-1950).
Er, those dates don’t indicate the time Smuts ruled our country but the length of time he spent on earth. And he clearly spent a great deal of that time close to Mother Nature to reach a place in which he could release that pearl of wisdom.
The longer I live in our great country and the more I gravitate away from the city to the wide expanses of natural magnificence that dominate South Africa, the more Smuts’ words resonate with me.
I have this hunger for my authenticity and I increasingly know that it can only be attained by making myself small and surrendering to the power of the natural world, away from the myriad distractions of the urban conurbation with its noise and self-importance and false illuminations.
Pic: Hatman
Let’s Take a Look at the Lifestyle Choices Available to a Sardine…
July 27, 2010 by fred hatman
Size does matter. But don’t ask a mosquito or a Jack Russell, ask a sardine.
I don’t think their lifestyle is anything near ideal. But I suppose some life-forms, such as worms, prawns and Paris Hilton, are just feeble fodder for something far larger and hungrier.
So you’re a sardine. There you are, hanging with lots of friends and making your way timidly up the east coast of South Africa, checking out the pretty coral reefs and the colourful undersides of surfboards when… wham, your best mate disappears into a gannet.
Damn. But you put it down to bad luck and swim a little faster. Kapow! Your twin sister gets taken by a tuna. Next thing, there’s a sound not dissimilar to a giant Deluxe Supa-Strength Hoover sucking in bathwater and you look around and find your entire family, including a distant cousin and a few hangers-on, have been baitballed up into a nice, juicy orb and swallowed, along with the tuna still digesting your twin sister, by a chuffing Great White.
Where’s the fun in this, you ask yourself, and hook up with a new shoal…
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Know the Beloved Country – 2
July 27, 2010 by fred hatman
We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? Not on this blog, silly! I’m talking South Africa. And, this morning, I’m talking specifically about the old censorship laws under the apartheid regime.
Remember Scope magazine? Well, you won’t if you’re any younger than me. OK. quite a bit younger than me. Scope was like a combo of Mad Magazine, Playboy, Private Eye and Beano all mashed together. And it liked to publish slightly racy pictures of scantily-clad women. Far too scanty for the old Publications & Censorship verkramptes (ultra-conservatives) charged with keeping our morals upstanding. Although I scheme they took all the really nasty stuff home.
A Scope model (after the boys had got to work with the Pro Nutro/Handy Andy star remover, obviously)
Old Dave Mullany, with whom I later worked at The Mercury in Durbs, was editor of Scope and resorted to sticking those infamous black strips over nipples to stop schoolboys from breaking out in a red-faced rash of testosterone at the back of class. It was a hard time to be pubescent in South Africa. And…
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