Some Hope by Tim Dee

Write what you know. It seems pretty obvious advice. How could you do otherwise? It is difficult to write about people, or a place, or the nature of either, that you don't know. (It isn’t impossible – the imagination has a good track record for mugging the truth: there is science fiction, historical fiction; in fact, there is all fiction…) But, what about non-fiction place writing that doesn’t yet know, that isn’t sure? A writing that is uncertain where it’s at, where it stands, how entitled it feels? Is there value in a writing of questions, before full-sight, without any finish, a writing without answers? Nowadays, being less certain than we have ever been as to where exactly we are, or where precisely we come from, or, indeed, where we are headed, aren’t we drawn more and more to a sort of between writing that is made somewhere on the way to knowing, but has yet to arrive there? Ancient discovery or quest narratives have this quality; certain contemporary embedded journalism does as well. Nature writing must qualify, with its fixation on the ultimately unknowable (“What is it like to be a bat?” – we cannot say, we can only say what it is like to be us, thinking about what it is like to be a bat); and new travel writing too, when it is anxious about tourism, about rapture and summiteering, about creative colonialism and cultural appropriation. We could also consider the fugitive prose genre that might gather on one shelf  books by W.G.Sebald, Geoff Dyer, Sukhdev Sandhu, Hugh Brody, Barbara Bender, Teju Cole, Bruce Chatwin, late John Berger, early Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Kathleen Jamie…

Nowadays, this between status seems to characterise much writing about what home might mean ­– places that once were fixed in our minds and places that people were sure about. At home in South Africa these days, I am certainly uncertain, and the following paragraphs arose from a both a literal and figurative dislocation.

It was unsettling to be in a new place which was required to become my home in ways and at a speed I hadn’t expected. I was bewildered because I didn’t properly know the birds around me, and it has always been birds that have always told me where I was. I was wrong-footed because I was implicated (accidentally but inevitably) in an enduring geopolitical nightmare in a place where my skin colour announced more about me than anything else. I was uncomfortable because I know that hasty words about a place can mask or fog  deeper truths, truths that need time to tell. And, I was in a panic, too, because, like the rest of humankind, I woke up one morning and found myself lodged in the invisible zone of a pandemic, breathing in a strange new life in a necessarily nowhere place. 

Keats admired Shakespeare making use of negative capability, that receptivity to doubts and uncertainties and a willingness to leave matters unsorted. The same capacity might be of value to a writer seeking to make sense of a new place and its new stories. That is where I have tried to begin as a newcomer to South Africa – reporting, I hope, with suggestive incoherence, noting first impressions without expecting them to be my last, camping where I might one day set up shop, looking at marks on maps I haven’t yet been to, and sending notes back to another place I call home, while beginning to understand that I was writing from one as well. 

O brave new world, Miranda says in The Tempest, on seeing new things on her castaway island (young men, mostly). Tis new to thee, says her knowing and grumpy dad. In these postcards, I try to travel somewhere between their ways of seeing.

*

We live at 3 Eland Street. Yesterday, we saw three eland from 3 Eland Street.

 *

In June 2019, I moved to Scarborough, a seaside village suburb of Cape Town, on the Atlantic shore of the Cape Peninsula. Claire, my wife, was expecting our baby in August that year. Cape Town is Claire’s hometown, her home-scar, indeed – the place she is most marked by and the place she has, herself, most marked. In 2014, we raised a loan to buy a two-bedroomed house in Scarborough. Our home, I like to think, is the last but one residence before the Cape of Good Hope. Claire has lived here for some of each recent year whilst working as a biology professor at the University of Cape Town. I have visited annually but had never spent, at any one time, more than a few holiday-like weeks in South Africa. That changed in 2019: my visit, then, was to be for several months, we had a new timetable and a due date.

I imagined staying for six to eight months. In early 2020 – as seen from 2019 – we thought we would to travel north to Europe and introduce our baby to his European family. Adam was born, but nothing else happened as planned. The skies closed; the country I had left in the north was shut to me; the country where I had arrived in the south was hastily boarded up; and, like millions the world over, we were instructed to go home and stay there.  Since I had not long been in our house and not long been in the country, I wondered how I could.  

*

We live on Eland; we might have lived on Seagull (they are here too) or Pincushion (a protea bush, also here). There is one house to the south of us then the first hillside rises up of the Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park. Between our village and the reserve, there is a tall game-fence. But looking beyond it, from that south-facing window, we often see eland – sometimes just three or four, sometimes a larger herd of nine or ten.

Eland are bulky animals, and, when we’ve spotted them, they’ve been browsing and moving slowly, in a kind of heavy-duty concert, through the heathy fynbos vegetation and across the pale scrabble of exposed sandstone. They have no predators beyond the wire, and, in the same southern spring that Adam was born, I watched the herd calve. The young appeared, close to their mothers, soft-skinned and velvet-brown, toy-like at the heels of their more drab, sure-footed and solid parents. Once grown up, they are the largest antelope on Earth.

On earlier visits to South Africa, before I saw these eland families from our house, I had seen striking depictions of them in old paintings made by Bushmen in one or two stony overhangs or rock shelters in the Cederberg Mountains, north of Cape Town (specifically, on the Sevilla trail and at the Stadsaal cave). On another trip, with Claire to the British Museum in London, I had stood in front of the Zaamenkomst panel, a dramatic frieze on a stone slab, showing fifteen or more of the animals running between Bushmen hunters, all crossing a dimensionless space, and all ­– hunters and hunted – depicted as if they had been blown there, like kicked up red earth.

These pictures, even of animals disappearing back into the sandy stone they had been painted as coming through, were so good (recognisable, vivid) at speaking to the arriving truth of the eland, that when I saw some living equivalents walking the hillside, framed by our window, my first thought was how like Bushmen paintings the animals looked.

Eland – gantouw in Khoekhoe means the eland’s path – were hugely important to the life of early Southern Africans. No people anywhere in Africa now live by the animals in the same way; but those pale brown eland I watch from Eland Street, crossing the pale brown hillside, meld, in my mind’s eye, with the painted images I know, and the living animals appear like pictograms of themselves.

The word eland, though, is Afrikaans; in Dutch it means elk (what North Americans call moose). The first Europeans arrived in the Cape in the 1600s and named the largest antelope they saw after the largest deer they knew back home; they imported their animal archetypes with the rest of their baggage. 

*

Though Claire is South African, she rarely sounds South African. She has no accent. There are a few words, only, between us.

– I’ll do it just now, she says, meaning, I wont do it now, but in a minute. Just now.

­– There’s a familiar chat on the garage roof, I say. Is it, says Claire, meaning Really? 

– Lunch is ready, so long, she says. It means not that she’s leaving, but rather in the meantime (and is a translation of Afrikaans so lank).

*

We have a grass growing in our garden and I have spent hours pulling it up. Claire knows it as kweek. It cuts your fingers when you tug at the tough white rhizomes and stolons by which it spreads. No amount of tugging will get it all. It is indigestible too; the garden-resident wild tortoises are joined by others that come under our fence to eat but not one will not touch the grass. Before the lockdown, we were paying a gardener, Jeremiah, to come every week to do more uprooting. He wore gloves.

I began our clearances in the belief that I was purging an alien grass. The kweek is, in fact, a worldwide species, a couch, Cynodon dactylon, native here in Scarborough, and, despite our tugging, it is here to stay, keenly taking invasive advantage of our opened ground. We have a dream of restoration for our garden, so long, and don't really want any grass at all. We’d prefer a fynbos melange of local species sprouting between the rag of rocks that hump and crest through the poor sandy soil of our plot; we’d like our growth to join the wild hillside behind the village, to meet or return to the landscape it was first fenced from. But our being here – our staying here – makes this not so easy to achieve.

*

Where do you stay? – we ask the workers that come daily to the village, like Jerry, when we stop to pick them up at the roadside, or we did when such things could be done.

Thanks to being married to a native, I have a South African Spousal Visa stuck in my British passport. We employed a lawyer to help smooth my application with the government Department of Home Affairs. I can stay for three years. The same legal firm are now working on securing my permanent residence. I might get that in a year or so.

The thought of such documentation makes me wonder whether I will die here. Jerry, in his grass-grubbing gloves, can’t afford the comfort of such questions. I have never been unaccommodated as he is. Or homeless. Today, he has no papers and lives as an illegal immigrant from Mozambique. He stays, with Angel, his five-year-old daughter, in makeshift accommodation at Red Hill, an ‘informal settlement’ (once a squatter camp) of immigrant workers (mostly) living in unlicensed shacks, four kilometres along the road from Scarborough. We give him a lift sometimes. Recently, from a borrowed phone, he sent us a photograph showing the state of his place following a break-in and robbery. The building had collapsed on itself like a cardboard box left out in a deluge.

Questions as to whose home South Africa might be, and who might have rights to live there and who might not, have prompted racial violence and oppression for several hundred years across the country. Scars, if not live wounds, from the past colonial and apartheid eras, are still very evident. Nearest to Scarborough, which calls itself a ‘Conservation Village’, is Red Hill. Ocean View, in the opposite direction, is a ‘coloured' suburb. Coloured in South Africa has a specific and local meaning – it is the widely used and still official term to describe the multiracial ethnic group of people who have ancestry from more than one of the many South African peoples; some people who would thus be classified regard it as a pejorative word, others do not. In a grim joke told by its makers against themselves, Ocean View was named, we were told, by its residents after the place they formerly lived in, further south on the Cape Peninsula. There, they had an ocean view, and it was this that led to their expulsion – white people coveted the view. The second, new, Ocean View has no ocean view. Beyond it, back towards the city is Masiphumelele, a township, formerly known as Site 5, which, during the moribund days of apartheid, was regularly cleared of people who were dumped in Khayelitsha township, across the Cape Flats; since then, Masi, as its now known, has grown to several tens of thousand residents, including many internal South African migrants from the Eastern Cape.

In my first year here, I’ve tried to master these few facts and I’ve talked to several people who live in each place when we’ve given them lifts after they stuck their thumb out at a kerb, but I have never been down any street in these areas, or entered anyone’s home. We are all destined to remain strangers even in our own places, perhaps, when we know only our home and not, as well, any of our neighbours’.

*

It rains in the winter in Cape Town (a drought two years ago is likely to come again, but the last winter was wet enough to go some way towards refilling the reservoirs). It never freezes but it can get cold enough. Very few people have central heating. I put on a down-jacket indoors. In our stove, this coming winter, we will burn what Jerry has cut of our woody bushes. We also have a stack of logs from a woodman called Rosario. We paid for a load and he sent two guys around with a bakkie (a pickup truck) piled high with chopped logs. The wood is olienhout, wild olive, heavy and slow burning and aromatic when it takes. It should give good heat.

Wild olive is a native but when possible we request alien wood from Rosario. In his house in Newlands, back in the city, my father-in-law burns thick logs of European oaks that he salvages from dumps of alien felling. He, like many other conservation minded citizens of Cape Town, is exercised by the wrong sorts of trees that crowd around, the woody legacy of earlier ideas that people had of how to live at the Cape.

There are good ecological reasons to be concerned by the impact such aliens have on the native scene, but the zeal to correct – to ungarden what the white colonisers planted – is surely also an attempted expiation for non-native human historical guilt in general. It’s a way of saying sorry to the place. On mountain walks, our friend Mark goes armed with a folding saw to deal with any alien vegetation he comes across. I have seen him hurry off a mountain path to bend and snap a metre-high Australian wattle-tree growing in the fynbos. We’d been gossiping and he didn't stop talking as he tugged at the tree or when he tossed it to the ground. The battle at his hands was not mentioned; it was an automatic action, a moral parenthesis in the day.   

*

Scarborough is not a gated village. Most people’s houses are fenced, but often only modestly. We’ve just added a wooden slatted fence to our low stone border wall, mostly in the hope of stopping the many village dogs from shitting in our garden. Only a few neighbours have fortified their estates against human intruders. There’s a house on our main road that I run past now and again. Its name is written on a sign on its gate: The Seagull’s Nest. Next to this sign the company that fixed the electric fencing above its wooden palisade have left a sign too. Their business name, cheerfully announced, is SHOCK-O–LOZA. This sounds nasty enough but the name has been wrenched from an altogether different context. The isiZulu word shosholoza means move forward and there is a song which has the word as a refrain. The song became a freedom anthem in the apartheid years and was famously sung to the rhythm of swinging picks by black miners. Now the sign for the electric fence shows a black hand being fried by stinging volts.

*

I remember as a child, being at the side of my mother when she asked greengrocers in our local shops in South London, whether their fruit or veg was from South Africa. My parents had émigré South African friends, and we were boycotting ‘Outspan’ oranges. Outspanning is what the Boers did to their oxen at the end of a day of wagon hauling across mountains or of voortrekking the veld to escape British rule. The beasts were unharnessed but, because they were domesticated and at home with their drivers, they would not wander. Outspanning can claim ground without the need for fencing; and as time went on, the meaning of the word widened, crossing from farm-animals to farmers, such that an outspan became the word for a human rest-stop or a camp, a mobile home.

The word has a relationship, as an anti-rhyme of a sort, with another Afrikaans word: kraal – an enclosure for cattle or sheep. A kraal sounds as round as outspan does, but rather than being described only in the air, or only in the heads of certain people and their compliant animals, it has a solid, often thorny, circumference. Although the word is Afrikaans, what it denotes isn’t, the enclosures called kraals long predated the Dutch. But the new arrivals, like most Europeans, didn't ask, and gave the barricade their own name.

There was, though, a specifically European barrier made for Africa. You can see it still in Cape Town. In the Botanical Gardens at Kirstenbosch, at the base of the eastern flank of Table Mountain, are the remains of what must be the first hedge in sub-Saharan Africa. It was made by (or on the orders of) a white man. It is growing still for one hundred metres or so, and you may walk its line. The shaded ground beneath the tangle of bushy trees is a good place to see lemon doves. Looking for the shy birds allows you time to contemplate the hedge.

In the 1600s, in order to secure its colony, the Dutch administration at the Cape undertook various measures against the Khoekhoen native population. The hedge was among them. It was grown in the 1660s on the instruction of Jan van Riebeeck, Cape Town’s first colonial administrator. At the perimeter of the Dutch outpost, a four metre wide strip of ground was ploughed and then planted with wild bitter almonds (a native species, Brabejum stellatifolium, ghoboom in Afrikaans) and quick growing thorns. The aim was to protect the crops, farm animals and human inhabitants within, by keeping without those who would have otherwise walked there.

The idea of a hedge as a national monument is telling. It was declared one in 1936. How, if at all, should your borders contribute to your central meaning? As well as the first European hedge grown in Africa, van Riebeeck’s trees survive as evidence of the first planting of the European idea of a hedge in Africa, evidence also that since the thicket’s few metres took and grew, the whole continent was marked by an ideological edge within its natural edges, an edge that speaks (and listens – walls have ears, and mishears – ears have walls) of gatherings in and of keepings apart, of common land and of private property.

*

In Scarborough, European starlings (introduced to South Africa in the nineteenth century – Claire calls them eurostars) show up now and again, but never for long enough for me to take any nostalgic comfort – home from home – in their presence. But another bird, that I know of old, is here too, and it is commoner than starlings and doesn’t come and go like the barn swallows. Though it isn’t a native, it is properly, permanently, resident. A pair, perhaps a few pairs (they like little colonies), has set up a home under a neighbour’s corrugated metal roof. From my desk, out of the corner of my eye, I can see the dusty flutter of birds flying to and fro: house sparrows.

They chirrup here like anywhere else. Some appeared in Durban in the late 1800s; perhaps they had hitched a ride on a European ship, or perhaps someone who had decided they would enhance the new city released them. They have since spread across southern Africa as far north as Malawi.

There should be a book about house sparrows around the world. Perhaps there is. Perhaps I should write one. If I did, it would be a book about forgetting as much as anything.

You arrive in a city and on your first morning you wake, without noticing it, to the sounds of sparrows in the gutters and under the eaves. They are a homely sound of the city and, since you’ve already lived in other cities with almost identical sounds, sparrows make you feel at home. And for that reason – familiarity – you don’t register any one part of the sound mix more than another. Our aural compass needs sparrows to signify, but we usually don’t notice them doing so. It goes on like this, chirrup by chirrup, and when you leave the city you often cannot recall whether there were sparrows in it. There were, but they were commonplace, part of the place’s common stuff, its stuffing, its dusty smudges, unnoticed but there.

When I think about it, I am happy that there are house sparrows in Scarborough, but I hardly ever think about it.