Table Mountain XI

A serious hazard in this kartograffickle game is the need to update maps before you reprint them. Maps go out of date on their first day in print, because the Earth and its human environment is a dynamic, ever-changing thing, and it’s downhill all the way from there. By the end of its three to four year shelf life the printed map will have several “errors” caused by changes on the ground.
I say “hazard” because, even with carefully-kept stats and projections, the day the last box of maps from the warehouse empties itself is an unpredictable thing. With little warning you have to drop everything and dust off the files, tear around taking GPS readings and cursing Google Earth because their more recent air photos are fuzzy and dark and much worse than their older out-of-date ones.
Which is why this kaartmaker spent most of the happy holiday season slaving away in the dank depths of his studio over Table Mountain. The map, of course, but also that marvellous mountain itself. TM is not a mountain to be trifled with – it’s a small mountain on a grand world scale, but all too few understand that it’s composed of three very large squarish rocks with near-vertical sides, arranged in an H-shape with the city of Cape Town nestling between the uprights. It’s the near-vertical sides of the lower part that are the problem, because there is literally only one single route up and down [apart from the cableway] where, as far as I know, there has never been a fatality or serious injury.
Which makes the mapping thereof a rather responsible thing, and why we don’t like the TM map to be out of print – ever. 
A related hazard is the extraordinary number of people who never update their collection of maps. “Oh,” they will say, “I’ve got a copy of that, I don’t need a new one.”
Which is a bit like using Fra Mauro’s 1450 ‘Mappa mundi’ to find Harare, Zimbabwe. “Here be beasties”, the map probably says. Indeed – that’s true; Mad Bob lives there.
In an attempt to thwart the update-denialists, Table Mountain XI is the first map we’ve published that carries a “Best Before” date. 

Sounds like a funny idea, but we mean it most sincerely. We get too many emails that say things like “I’ve used your 1974 map of Table Mountain for the past 39 years and I have to tell you how disappointed I am that there is an error on it. It shows a path called the ‘Trolley Track’ but when we tried to go that way all we found was a lot of old rusty barbed wire and no path at all ...” etc etc. They never mention that they also met Rip van Winkle and the Ancient Mariner on their hike. 

Quite apart from all that, it’s a simple safety precaution for you to make sure that your map is the most up-to-date available.
Nonetheless the redrawing was fun, and a riffle over the latest air photos [fuzzy or not] revealed a couple of interesting things. Like if you live in one of those very large pads at Ruyteplaats or Kenrock, at the north end of Hout Bay, you should be jacking up your fire insurance. Same applies across the valley at all those only-slightly-more-modest homes on the western slopes of Vlakkenberg (wake up, Cousin Robert!). 

Three-and-a-half centuries after the introduction of home ownership to the Cape you’d have thought that everyone would have learned the simple truth by now – there is never a question of ‘if’ fynbos will burn – there is only an absolute 100% certainty that it will, some time. This year, next year, in ten years’ time, it’s gonna happen ... and if it’s lekker old stuff growing taller than your house, well, you’re in for a lovely whoosh!

New features on Table Mountain XI:

* Distances and estimated times shown for all paths above the Contour Path or Pipe Track
* GPS coords in DD MM SS format at important junctions
* Completely revised vegetation distribution
* Some vanished paths removed; some new ones added
* Three Firs, Oudekraal Ravine and Constantia Corner routes upgraded
* Clearer depiction of many features, including dangerous routes
* All the features for which the map is famous are still there.

The price of Duraflex waterproof paper has forced a price increase on this edition, but NB NB NB – all copies sold online up to the end of Feb 2013, including those in the complete TMNP set, will be at the old price – so grab yours fast!

In the past I have used this blog for items of more personal reflection and even family history. I’ve decided to continue those, in a new blog and keep Maps for Afrika for more directly map-related stuff. Go to the new one to find out about an amazing herpetological discovery concerning Dink, the family tortoise ... Notes for a Novel and occasional anger-dumps around the extraordinary range of fat, rude, racist, stupid and corrupt politicians who with yawningly predictable frequency conspire to muck up our fair land, may crop up there too from time to time. 

Kaartman, Januarie 2013

Smitswinkel Dogged

Another great New Year’s Eve it was, but this year the Smits weather was churlish, with a Strong Winds to Moderate Gale keeping us battened down indoors, doing Sudokus, reading out of date newspapers and struggling with a 1000-piece jigsaw ...

There were fishermen ...

But no fish.

There were giant oil rigs ...

But no oil.

There were girls ...

But hardly any belles [just a few].

There were boys ...

But no SuperBoy.

There were scads of dogs ...

But no SuperDog.

And then we saw him, leaping giant granite boulders in a single bound ...

THE REAL THING AT LAST!!!

Kaartman – Happy 2013, hey. 

And the winners are ...

Lynne Smit

Enjo Nature Farm

Andrea Bruns*

Vanessa Boyd
Rudi de Lange

Well done! ... and thanks to all who participated. We’ll post to the winners as soon as the office is up and running again and there are no more mince pies or turkey left-overs.

*Andrea has pointed out that she’s the same as Enjo Nature Farm, and has asked that we pass the second map on to another winner. Thanks, Andrea! The next lucky person in the draw is

JP Watson

Well done all, and a Happy Happy 2013!

from all at Chez Kaartman

Season’s Greetings: Win a Prezzie

It’s been a good year for the Kaartmans [on the whole] – we don’t go for all the gloom n doom stuff that so many people seem to love wallowing in – so we thought we’d end our blogs for the year with a free gift for you. Or at least a chance at a free gift. 

Send us a message with your name and postal address [South Africa only] and on Friday 21 December at 12 noon we’ll draw five messages out of the hat and send the winners each a copy of our brand new, waterproof Cape Peninsula map. Ordinary postage, it should reach you by New Year!  Send your message via: http://www.slingsbymaps.com/contactus.aspx 

If you’re on Facebook you could double your chances of winning by liking our page there (http://www.facebook.com/slingsbymaps?ref=hl) and sharing the news of this giveaway. Every share will count as an extra entry.

And to you, whether you’re a winner or not, all the very best for the Season and the whole of 2013!

Kaartman, Krismis 2012

Notes for a Novel #3: About snakes

Time for some light relief before moving on. There’s an elephant in the room that needs to be winkled out – apartheid, a prodigious pachyderm if there ever was one – but it can wait for next time. 
      Not everything in the life of a rural child was – is – unutterably dreadful. There’s a lot of humour, too. As anyone who has ever worked with kids (or had their own!) knows, children of all ages come packaged with a hugely generous dollop of good humour and a massive subscription of smiles.
The Kaartman Kids were rural children, too, of course, with some tales of their own. When our oldest boychild, Kaartmannetjie (Manne for short) was about seven he and a ragtag of tiny mates, including his own younger brother, used to go out into the veld near our Plumfoot house to catch taddies. There was an open sandy break there, a place where cables or pipes had once been laid, known to the kleintjies as the “Sandy Track”. The winter rains would fill the sandy depressions with clean, clear water, breeding grounds for frogs of several kinds. For weeks the puddles would be filled with thousands of wriggly tadpoles, all desperately growing and metamorphosing before the early summer sunshine dried up their nurseries and turned the unlucky ones into tiny shreds of biltong.
Manne and his mates would squat at edge of a puddle, their homemade nets hopefully scooping the water for hapless pollywogs, glass jars of pond water waiting to take home the catch. It was one of the truly great privileges of a rural childhood that even kids so small could enjoy that kind of freedom, unsupervised but within earshot of Mrs Kaartman’s voluble call that would summon them to the next meal, or baths, or whatever. So it was that one bright September morning the small people were well-established at their puddleside posts when Dickie, a neighbour’s kid, poked Manne in the ribs and whispered, “Mannetjie, what’s that?”
Manne looked up and froze. “Keep very still,” he whispered to the others; “If you keep absolutely still it won’t see you and it will go away.”

They all sat very, very still as a very large puff adder sidled slowly down across the sand, its black forked tongue flickering in and out of its clamped mouth, its deadly fangs hidden beneath its broad, pig-flat nose.
“Shhh!” whispered Manne softly as the fat, yellow-chevronned snake sniffed the water with its tongue, then immersed half its head and drank, long slow gulps that rolled and pulsated down its scaly sides. The serpent blew a few bubbles from its submerged nostrils, then withdrew from the water and slowly turned around. It was huge, one of the biggest snakes any of them had ever seen, and for a few moments its yellow, unlidded eyes met Manne’s. Then it turned and oozed away – puff adders don’t wriggle, they sort of ooze with subtle, peristaltic waves of ribs through patterned hide. Some people are repulsed by them; herpetologists love ’em.
When the snake had gone Kaartmannetjie stood up. “What was it?” whispered Dickie.
“It was a puff adder,” Manne breathed; “and if any of you ever tell Mum that we saw it here, I promise I’ll kill you!”
The manifest sincerity in Manne’s threat clearly impressed the ragtag, for nary a word of this was ever spoken by any of them, either to Mrs Kaartman or their own mamas. Manne confessed to his mother just last year, for the first time. It might have been his 33rd birthday, a full quarter-century post facto, but Mrs K was undeterred. “If I ever catch you going to the Sandy Track to catch taddies ... ever again ... I’ll tan your hide, young man!”
Of course the junior Kaartmanne were amongst the privileged rural kids. That was an accident of their birth, not their fault, and, as we shall see, lack of privilege did not prevent a great many funny things happening amongst the less well-off. Nevertheless, despite the freedoms the Kaartman Kids enjoyed they did have a few disadvantages, compared to city kids. Mrs K once landed on the first floor of the Golden Acre building in Cape Town, with an urgent bus to catch on the ground floor. The only apparent way down was via the escalators. The littlest Kaartman, these days an urbane, well-travelled scientist of growing repute, had never seen an escalator in his life and nothing, not even the loving arms of his mama, could persuade him to descend a machine that regurgitated and then swallowed its own steps. It took them half-an-hour to find the fixed stairs, and by then the bus had long gone ...
I have tales of rural waifs visiting the big city, too, but those will have to wait for another day.

Kaartman, December 2012

Fat Dog’s Last Walk

Mourning Minnie

Minnie’s book, “Walks with a Fat Dog”, went out of print in April 2012. Minnie outlived her book by just eight months.

All the Kaartman dogs have been the Best Kind: indeterminate Faithfuls just as totally descended from wolves as any snooty pedigreed woossies with bad hips and pink bows in their just-as-smelly powdered hair. The Official Birthday for all our dogs is July 5th. On July 5th this year Minnie turned 15. That’s supposed to be 105 in Dog Years, a helluvan age when blindness and deafness are just so very excusable, and manageable too.

Minnie came into our lives by mistake. Annie, her predecessor, chewed up some organo-phosphates left by a callous farmer to thwart his jackals, and died in agony in the vet’s arms in Vredendal, up the West Coast. Days after the Kaartmans returned home fighting tears a friend phoned. A friend of the friend had a dog, a brakkie that had stopped the traffic on the N2 near the airport. Fleeing in terror through squealing tyres from several overweight traffic cops, the brak had jumped eagerly into the opened door of the friend’s friend’s car. 

She was filthy and shaggy with dreadlocks, but the vet said that she was in good shape, a well-kept dog, probably just lost or stolen, a properly spayed bitch who had had at least one litter of pups. He cleaned her up and got her hair cut, and the friend’s friend called her ‘Sophie’ and set about finding a home for her because they already had five pooches of their own.

We renamed her Minnie because she was so like Annie that we kept using that name, and ‘Minnie’ seemed closer to ‘Annie’ than ‘Sophie’. Besides, she didn’t look much like Meryl Streep. She was the soppiest dog we’ve ever known, with a most fetching habit of snuggling her head up against you if you picked her up. 

Minnie had wondrously soft fur; we later discovered that, if not a thoroughbred, she was so like a breed called a “wheaten soft-haired Irish terrier” that she had to have lots of that amongst her varieties. She was wheaten coloured, soft-haired and, if truth be told, not the brightest spark as doggies go, but she was incredibly faithful and loving and a brilliant walker, too. She was never really fat, but her soft fur grew very rapidly and if not groomed every three to four weeks she blew up into a furry ball. We couldn’t call our book “Walks with a Fat Wife”, could we? – and Minnie didn’t mind being the patsy. 

Her white and wheaten coat would get pretty smelly and descend into that grubby-pyjamas look that tends to turn visitors into stand-offs, but whenever she’d been groomed everyone loved her. She was a helluva flirt, chasing the boy-dogs whenever she saw them, but toys like tennis balls were quite beyond her understanding.

The sadness that goes with your beloved pets’ short lives is a cliché, I guess, but you can’t avoid it. Unconditional love, forgiveness, hope, affection are tough things to lose. This morning when Minnie came into the kitchen I knew it was Time. Her legs just wouldn’t work properly; she’d messed herself; she couldn’t see me or hear me. She wagged her tail when I touched her, but she howled in pain when we tried to clean her.

“You’ll know when it’s time,” the radio vet had said. “Always remember this – you can do a kindness for your pet that you can’t do for your human loved ones. And your beloved pet will never hold it against you, either.”

Totsiens, hondjie.

Kaartman, November 30 2012

Being Abroad

Spent most of September 2012 in the United Kingdom, visiting family and parts previously unknown to us – Scotland and the Western Isles, northern Wales, the Northumberland coast ... a fabulous trip when Mrs Kaartman and I spent only one night of thirty out of the company of excellent friends or family.

The Cutty Sark [London];
the 1400-year old Chapel of St Columba [Mull of Kintyre]

It was an absolute treat. Travel leads to interesting reflections – despite being a born and bred Suid-Afrikaner with African roots snatching back to the 17th century, I find myself strongly drawn to those northern isles. I love them, even their grotty bits (and they have ’em!) – but I could not live there. Not sure why. Too cold? I love the sun-soaked, dry interior of my country – it speaks to me with very persuasive voices. I love empty spaces, too. We found one in the UK – I’m sure there are more. Rannoch Moor is remote; in the middle of it is a railway siding that is reached by a single, dead-end road. It is the place that is the furthest from anywhere else in the whole of the British Isles. It’s bleak, lonely and lovely, but it has not the colours, the skies, the scents of the remote Karoo. It’s too different: I loved the visit, even the proliferation of dank and cheerless Scots monuments, but I could not live there.

A gloomy Scottish B&B: no toilets;
A pale and gloomy Scottish knight

You might say that it’s too cold and wet, and there are too many people, so many that to accommodate them all and their cars the motorway lanes are terribly narrow, the houses small and viewless, the supermarkets inhumanly vast, the traffic always and everywhere congested. But we did not complain. Congestion is what happens when a country has too many people (imagine China or India!), and when you know you’re merely a visitor you love the lovable, you ogle and gasp, and you embrace a bit of a branch – it’s only one of many branches, hey – of your cultural roots. It’s not your place as a visitor to complain, to criticise; you don’t live there, your four weeks are too short for you to contribute anything at all. My fierce maternal grandmother always said that the rudest, most uncouth thing a guest could do was to complain about the house and household of his host. Her name was Grace; she was not a person one easily crossed.

Good thing Poms can’t read Afrikaans;
Was that really Mrs Gripper’s first name?

Which is why I was perturbed by an email recently received from a friend of many years standing; and why I need to address some remarks to you, John. It seems daft and improbable that we were in England, unknowingly, only a few miles from where you now live, and even more daft that when, a few weeks later, you appeared in South Africa, we were away in the desert. So sorry to have missed you, old friend, and to have missed the chance to interrogate why and when you left SA – apparently with your boys? I have no problems with your emigration, your adoption of England as a your new home. Time was when we might have done the same – the Kaartmans even contemplated Australia, until we decided that we could stay here if – a big ‘if’ of course – we could contribute meaningfully to change. But that’s our story, for another meeting. This one is about you. 
Down the ages people have uprooted themselves and moved, given the chance. Down the ages people have rejected the “take root or die” option, and sought greener pastures. It’s why human beings occupy our entire planet, after all! Without that urge humanity might, for better or worse, have remained squatting around the fading firelight in Klasies River Cave, gnawing at an endless diet of blue mussels and half-done porcupine. I have no problems at all with your re-location.

Re-located Romans:
Kaartman inspects Hadrian’s defences; apartheid failed there too!
Kaartman being sacrilegious in the Sacrum 

But having relocated of your own free choice you’re now a Brit, and you’re a guest when you visit South Africa, a guest as Granma Grace described. Yet you wrote to me (and others), “I now desperately want to get home to the UK ... ”
Why were you, our guest, so desperate to get home to the UK? Because, as you also wrote, most B and B’s you stayed in in SA were like ‘toilets’? The Kaartman’s mapping takes us all over our country; we’ve stayed in a huge variety of lodgings, but hell man, you had bad luck – none of ours were like toilets. In fact, every single one of them was as good as anywhere we stayed in in the UK – and I include the Welsh Georgian hotel at £250 per night (for the same price, in Wales you could go ‘glamping’ in a luxury tent sourced from Cristy Sports, in Diep River, Cape Town, or bathe in a Sundance pool imported from Somerset West ... but I digress ...)
While in the UK we stumbled upon a Scottish Nationalist rally in Edinburgh; elsewhere, in Bristol, it was Party Congress time; and somewhere in London a cabinet minister told a policeman that he was a ‘peasant’. A man called Miliband made a speech on TV that had the media in raptures; another man, a Prime Minister perhaps, made a speech about the stumbling economy; the Scottish Nats made speeches about Perfidious Albion. The level of fatuous inanity in every one of these politicians’ sundry utterances made George Bush II seem like an admirable orator. Later, we passed through Campbeltown in Kintyre, a filthy, shabby place that was made the worse by the realisation that all its dirty, indigent inhabitants have enjoyed the benefit of a century and a half of free education and full democracy. And while they were enjoying that, their compatriots, masters, apparatchiks and idols were busy denying the same benefits to the majority of South Africans ...

Windsor Castle: Kaartman inspects this early British Nkandla;
Rannoch Moor: no toilets there either

On neither issue did we ever complain, either to ourselves or our generous, lovely hosts. Petrol might have been R20 per litre, bus fares out of sight, house prices beyond belief, TV licences over R1700 per year, but we did not complain. We were guests, and we behaved like guests, and in our emails to our friends we thanked them truthfully and sincerely for a really wonderful holiday, filled with hospitality, leaving us with great, great memories.
So I’m sorry we missed you in Cape Town, Johnno, old friend. You clearly needed a bit of cheering up, and if WP winning the Currie Cup didn’t do it for you, mebbe we could have – in our home, of course, not in a ‘toilet’. Next time maybe we won’t be away basking in the desert sunshine, relishing its empty spaces ... ? 

London: They must have imported this vaatjie from the Western Cape;
London: a typically warm, sunny day

Kaartman, November 2012

Notes for a Novel #2

... so I carried the smaller one to the house, while the other one followed me with small snivels through the dark garden. Mrs Kaartman put them both into a warm bath while I sorted out some soup and bread. Mrs K dressed them in two adult T-shirts; they supped their soup in silence, watching our every move with large, deep brown eyes.
We put them to bed in the spare room; Mrs K had the presence of mind to equip the bed with a plastic undersheet, a thoughtful move. Our own babies slept on; the dog was long in her own basket; the cat stalked outside somewhere in the night. By midnight everyone was asleep except Mrs K and I; we lay awake staring at the ceiling, our next move long talked out.
The morning was bleary but we felt it was necessary to find out what the story was. The father was a large man, an ex-policeman who had been fired from the force, not so much for his heavy-handedness with his arrestees as for being drunk on duty. It was a Friday night, of course. The children had been asleep in bed; the father was drinking with his poacher-friends around the outside fireplace; the mother was ... well, who knows. Wanting a bed for a friend who could no longer stand up, the father had woken the kids and chased them out. Discovering that one had wet the bed, he had started to take off his belt, whereupon the kids had escaped his grasping hands and run away.
The situation was dire; it was a very dark, moonless night and the streetlights of Plumfoot were, well, few and far between. The smaller boy had abandoned his wet, chafing onderbroekie, the better to run fast enough to keep up with big bro. With nowhere to go, the eldest had remembered coming to our house some weeks before, with his mother, on a begging expedition. It seems we already had a reputation of the “there be sandwiches” kind. 
They’d arrived breathless, tearful and probably terrified and, they said, knocked on the back door, but no one had answered.
They must have knocked very softly, very timidly, because we had not heard them at all – and nor had the dog. With no options left they had decided to ‘nest’ under a bush in our garden ...
Well, we had to find them some clothes etc etc etc, and we sent them on their way, noting their names and addresses for the social worker who, if they were lucky, would visit Plumfoot some time in the next month or so.
We called them ‘the waifs’, and over the next decade and a half we would encounter some forty of them, mostly boys, one little girl. They had varying and different stories, though alcohol abuse was a common theme. Most came to us unbidden; some were reported to us by others, runaway kids who had built nests in the bush somewhere, and we had to winkle them out and persuade them to return to the real world.
Friday nights were the most common, and if we were away we would leave the outside room unlocked with blankets on the bed and plate of fortified biscuits. The biscuits were always gone when we returned; the bed slept in. One small boy spent an entire week at our house, alone, while we were on a trip. I don’t know what he ate; he never explained.
Saturday nights were less common, but did occur. Thursdays became frequent for a while, too, which surprised us until we realised why. Thursday was not a drinking night, but Thursday was the day before pay day. By Thursday the money had run out and there was no food left in the house. There would be food at the Kaartmans, of course.
Our youngest waif was four years old. He knocked loudly on the door late one Friday evening; the dog exploded. We opened the door; Bessie – his nickname, it means ‘berry’ in Afrikaans – was so small that at first we did not see him. He was the size of a two year old and weighed 9 kg. In the morning his mother came looking for him, anger in her bloodshot, hungover eyes.
“Kom!” she screamed at Bessie.
“Nee!” screamed Bessie, aged only four, “Ek wil nie ’n dronk ma hê nie!” [No, I don’t want a drunk mother].
 The most we ever had all at once was six, but generally they appeared in a long, unbroken queue – sort out one or two, within days another would fill the vacant niche. They all came from unspeakably poor homes; they all had to be taught to use a flush loo – when you only have a bucket loo you stand on the seat, not sit – and warned not to jump into a hot bath until they’d tested the water. They were all terribly undersized and many were ill. One seven year old was literally fading away – he was riddled with TB and was too weak to feed himself. Our eldest son would hold him like a three  year old on his lap – he weighed 11 kg – and spoon-feed him.
I have many more waif stories, but in the meantime South Africa was rapidly unravelling. In 1978 P W Botha took over from John Balthazar Vorster as Prime Minister and from there it was down hill all the way. Unrest at schools and universities continued; in May 1980 Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” was banned. Bombs were going off all over and opposition politicians and press were being suppressed wherever the apartheid state could find them. In 1981 Desmond Tutu was arrested and his passport confiscated; Mandela and most of the ANC old guard were still firmly incarcerated on Robben Island. Our waif problems were finding no resolution in the face of a complete lack of interest by any form of ‘welfare’ authority. By 1982 we’d had enough; we went to the embassy and collected the forms. We took them home to Plumfoot, filled them in, and began to plan the logistics of emigrating, lock, stock, three kids and a small scruffy dog, to Australia.

Kaartman, November 2012

Notes for a Novel #1

My favourite blogger, C is for Cape Town [and see Blog], recently encouraged us all to Help a Rural Child, a fantastic project that I fell instantly in love with.
Like C we too spent many years in the rural hinterland of the Cape, and Mrs Kaartman and I and the junior Kaartmanne were not uninvolved with the rural children of those times. There’s a story to be told here ... the occasional Kaartman blog might indulge. I have no fear of being sued, but I will say that I’m sure that all my characters are entirely fictitious, at least the guilty ones. Tuesday 13th November is an important anniversary in our particular struggle, too, as may eventually be revealed, if I remember.

Here’s the background. A few months after the 1976 Soweto tragedy the Kaartmans relocated to Plumfoot, a small rural town on the Cape coast. Its real name is, geographically speaking, just as dom as Plumfoot – you can call it Pruimvoet, if that sounds more authentic. The Kaartmans’ move had nothing to do with Soweto, but everything to do with some mapping contracts for the all-new National Hiking Way.
Don’t get me wrong – we were not politically naive, we’d had our share of the Cathedral steps, Twickenham protests, student unions, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd, but we were frankly absolutely skint with a small child, and there was a family holiday home going cheap at Plumfoot. We were almost, but not quite, remittance men [actually man, woman and girlchild].
We rapidly discovered that full-time living in Plumfoot wasn’t quite the same as our childhood holiday experience. For starters the social hierarchy was quite beyond our ken. At a crude level it went like this:
1. Afrikaners, with obligatory membership of the NG Kerk and the National Party; the “ruling elite”, like today’s ANC fatties.
2. Germans, mostly retired from Namibia, mostly living on pensions from the West German government;
3. Engelse like us, a teeny sprinkling of entrepreneurs and remittance men.
4.
5.
6. The Coloured population, the labouring class with a few self-employed poachers.
Each of these categories could be further subdivided several times: 
in category 1, depending upon favourite social activities; religious groupings in category 6; 
native or foreign born in category 2; 
and, in our category 3, age, income, dress habits and the probability that you were a secret communist. 
      There were no categories 7. Asians, or 8. Black Africans because neither of these population groups were represented. Actually there was a solitary Black African, who lived in a small tin shack at the bottom of the garden of a prominent retired Afrikaans professor, but he didn’t really count. He had no friends or social contacts at all and I always felt that for him life in Plumfoot must have felt exactly as it would if you were a solitary human, captured by aliens and forced to live amongst weird monsters in a galaxy far, far away.
Asians were completely unknown in Plumfoot. Many years later we landed in Durban with a bunch of Plumfoot kleintjies; to feed the hungry masses we ducked into a KFC. After a few minutes I felt a tug on my elbow.
“Pietta,” [my name] whispered Sandy Khoikhoi [his nickname], pointing to the shop attendants, “is dié almal Mexikane?”
The Plumfoot political breakdown was unspeakable. If there were any liberal, apartheid-hating Afrikaners at all we never came across them; of course, the entire community we knew must have died by 1994 because in that year there were no apartheid supporters at all still alive in Plumfoot.
The German community remained stolidly indifferent to all local and national politics. Secure in their multi-Deutschmark pensions they could no more contemplate getting politically involved in SA than fly the East German flag. Besides, some of them were ivory and diamond smugglers, of which more anon.
The Engelse kept their heads down and the Coloured community did not squeak. There was no tri-cameral parliament yet and resistance movements such as the ANC were but improbable rumours on the wind. The school children of the Scheme, the township, had not risen up in 1976 to confront the apartheid police.
The mayor of Plumfoot was a retired policeman, a surprisingly short, chubby little fellow, Colonel Johannes Jacobus Knoetze. Everyone knew him as “Kolonel” and in our first year at Plumfoot, in his Christmas message to the holiday makers who annually streamed into the village he placed his cards firmly on the table by describing Plumfoot as an “Afrikaner Seaside Resort” [his actual words were “Boere Kusdorp”]. This despite the fact that the majority of residents were Coloured, German or Engelse, in that order, and at least 50% of the holiday makers were Engelse, too, but facts, then as now, were not important if you were part of the ruling elite.
The elite’s racial attitudes were, to us, unfathomable. There was a retired dominee in the town – one of many, and we’ll meet more of them later – whom I always found to be a charming, educated and cultured man. Dominee Gysbert was tall and aristocratic; his family were part of the old Stellenbosch aristocracy and his brother was a prominent Advocate. Dominee Gysbert had won gold for South Africa throwing the javelin at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. He had been personally congratulated by the Fuhrer and had shaken Hitler’s hand; he was often rumoured to have been a personal acquaintance of the traitor, Robey Leibbrandt. 
Gysbert played a prominent role in the town’s White social life; he was a conservationist of note, but he was not known for charitable work amongst the poor and oppressed. I once asked him for a donation – he was a wealthy man – towards a bursary fund that sent impoverished Coloured children to high school.
“One thing you must understand,” the good dominee said to me, pulling himself up to his full, aristocratic, refined, educated, god-fearing height, “is that the Coloured people are still children. They might not be ready for high school education, they might be better off not reaching for heights which they cannot attain.” He declined to donate; he died before 1994, which I have always felt was a real pity. Maybe his god had mercy upon him.
There it is. May these notes set the scene, for what I hope will be an unfolding story of hope as much as its bizarre dramatis personae might allow. There was plenty of humour in Plumfoot as well as pathos; bathos as well as inspiring stuff. So what, prithee, does this all have to do with the rural child?
Well, there came an evening in Plumfoot when I put the dog out to wee before closing up the house for the night. From the bottom of the garden the dog, a small hairy mongrel, barked and barked. I took a torch, expecting to find a treed cat, a snared buck or even a snake. I found two tiny shivering children, boys, one seven, one eight, hiding in the bushes, staring out with huge, frightened eyes. One was wearing a dirty sleeveless vest and underpants; the other was wearing just a vest. That’s where my tale can rest, until another time.

Kaartman, November 2012

Incredible Rip-offs

Last week Microsoft released Windows 8. That’s not so much a rip-off as a small deception. Many of us started with Windows 3.1, back in about 1990. Windows 95 was really Windows 4; Win 98 was really Win 4.1 and Win XP was version 5. The awful Vista was version 6 ... now here comes the rub. Windows 7 isn’t, it’s really Windows 6.1, and 8 – believe me, it’s there in the works – is actually Windows 6.2.
But that’s not my beef. Last week a prominent computer chainstore sent me a glossy adsheet which announced that I could save an incredible R1800 by buying Windows 8 at the incredible price of R699.95 [= R700, they haven’t heard about 5c pieces yet]. “Limited to one customer; no dealers,” they puffed magnanimously. “Reduced from R2499.95.”
Isn’t that strange? Go to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8 and there you can download the upgrade for $40. That’s R345.60 at today’s exchange rate – or a cool R354.35 less than the incredible offer above. It’s a 2Gb download so it takes a while, but if you have a 4Mbps ADSL line it shouldn’t take more than about 15 minutes. Mine took nearly an hour, but I chose a busy time. If you don’t want to download it you can pay an extra $14.99 and they’ll airmail you a DVD; mine took 5 days to arrive. The total – equal to R475.03 – is still an incredible R224.92 cheaper than the incredible offer above ... and what’s more, you can buy up to 5 licences on this real special offer!
And so to maps. We recommend retail prices to our outlets, but we can’t compel them to charge those prices. We haven’t raised our wholesale prices since 2009, but we recently found that many of our retailers nevertheless put up their prices on a regular basis. How about that! You wonder how many retailers do that for how many other products! You should not pay more than R99.90 for our Table Mountain map – you can get it for that from us online, or for even less at Kirstenbosch or the National Park HQ, but at some retailers the price has crept up to an incredible R150 [of which this Kaartman, who put his heart, soul and effort into making the thing, is lucky to clear a huge R42!] 
Buy online – saves you money, and it’s 100% secure.
My incredible product plug is over, next time I’ll go non-commercial again. All the best.

Kaartman, Oktober 2012

Arguing with the ANC

A large part of politics is all about debate, the cut and thrust of fine arguments, the use of reason tinged with lots of bullshit in attempts to sway your opponent’s beliefs ... 
Years ago the old Nationalist regime ran out of arguments, reason and even bullshit and it became impossible to argue with them. If you tried you were simply dismissed as a Catholic, a Liberal, a Fellow-traveller or a Communist in that order of increasing opprobrium. It’s thus interesting to observe that, now that the African National Congress has happily abandoned any pretence at morality, or the practice of higher forms of thought, or indeed even the operation for which they were elected, viz. basic governance, they too are becoming increasingly difficult to argue with.
In essence, whatever you say, they have three responses, in this order, trotted out without consideration for such silly concepts as relevance ...
1. You’re suggesting that life was better under the previous apartheid regime;
2. You’re suggesting that nothing has been achieved since 1994;
...  and, the ultimate stinger, the thought-killer to tear apart any remaining threads of debate:—
3. You’re a racist.
For my sins I recently entered a mild email debate around the merits of a contention by Howard Zinn, that ‘civil disobedience’ is actually a Good Thing. I wrote:
“I think Mamphela Ramphele got it right when she said that SA’s problem is that the Codesa negotiators never set any sort of civil education in place. None of them ever sat down and said to each other, ‘but SA’s never been a democracy, the people don’t understand democracy.’ They thought it would be enough to put a great constitution in place and use the IEC to teach everyone how to vote. They forgot that very few Africans had been brought up to an understanding of modern democracy or civil rights or civil whatevers. The ‘mixed race’ peoples came from different cultures that had all been strangled during the slavery era, and left with a kind of depauperate Westernism and strongly authoritarian religions in place of those cultures; the Afrikaners came out of a tradition of paternalistic and religious authoritarianism second to none, and the Engelse were by-and-large either descended from the entreprenurial merchant class or from Irish navvies, and either way ‘rights’ were something you had in the home counties and need not worry about here in case the Boers or the Darkies wanted them ...
“That’s why we are ruled by an authoritarian, militaristic ‘liberation movement’ that has no understanding of democratic politics or civil liberties ...” etc etc. 
Well, I had no idea of the politics of my audience until one lady sent this as part of her first reply:
“There is a preoccupation in SA to point fingers especially at the new government and the fallacy that things were better before ...”
ANC Argument #1 ... 
I responded and duly received the following as part of her second reply:
“Are there any achievements and progress in our country? I can clearly see them. Why are they not evident [to you]?”
ANC Argument #2, right on schedule.
It was a bright sunny Sunday afternoon and I decided at that point that I really wasn’t prepared to spoil my day, so I abandoned the debate.
Now I’ll never know if I am a racist or not.
Damn!

– Kaartman, October 2012

G is for Grandparenting

Came across a truly wonderful blog the other day. It’s called C is for Cape Town, written by a young mum, a sunny, creative person who is housebound with her two small childers. It’s full of helpful stuff for young mums – experiences to share, coping with fractious kleintjies, holding birthday parties, getting play-dough out of hair and ears, watching important little people developing and growing up in a world that belongs entirely to them. Nothing mundane about it either – it’s as brightly-lit as its creator, and full of lekker, evocative photos too. C’s observations are more than a guide for parents – there’s a profundity to them, reflections upon life itself, thought-provoking stuff for any age.
C is for Cape Town has two little girls, fivish and two-and-a-halfish, and they are so like the junior generation of Kaartmans that it’s uncanny. She calls her girls Friday and Sunday – I’ll call ours February and September. Because if there can be such creative value in a blog about parenting, then maybe there can be a little in one about grandparenting.

Postman Pat Re-run with two small wrigglies

Not that I have a snowball’s hope of being as creative as C, but I guess a couple of our observations might be useful for those of you planning for your own future tribe of smalls.
Just as one’s own kids did so very long ago, grandchildren start out as warm, immobile little lumps that gaze at your wrinkly old face with slightly glazed eyes, then suddenly crease their sweet little faces into enormous smiles that would turn the hardest of hearts into goo. This is frequently accompanied by a fairly unsubtle sense of dampness and followed almost instantaneously by odours of an indescribable kind.
It’s at moments like these that you gain important insights into why humans are biologically designed to breed while young. The older generation – ourselves – are there to observe and impart wisdom, while the younger are there to change nappies, to suckle, to prepare bottles of milk formula and bowls of unspeakably bland porridges. Quickly, pass the smelly baby to its mum.

As the grandchildren grow older they become rapidly mobile and distinctly noisier. By the age of two they can reach any precious object in your home, no matter how high above the floor it may be, how deep the cupboard recess, how firmly locked the office. They can outrun any grandparent, and they can definitely outconverse them too, albeit sometimes in languages that only they can understand. But if you think that the crying of a newborn is a noise, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

They even boss the boss's dog ....

Mrs K and I played host to Feb and Sept the other day. Mr K – that’s me – is inclined to indulge in a short post-prandial nap in the middle of the day, something that is surely the birthright of any sixty-something. Mrs K also takes to the couch sometimes, but with F n S running around maybe she didn’t. Whatever the case, the girls devised a game involving large empty plastic barrels. Each barrel was loosely filled with small hollow brass spheres, each containing a number of loose steel ball-bearings. Feb and Sept then ran competitive races complete with loud cheers and cries, rolling said barrels up and down the rough-screed concrete stoep immediately outside my bedroom window.
A full description of the effect is beyond my creative powers. I swam up out of the deepest sleep, desperately planning to seize my wallet, back-up harddrive, dog and wife in that order and flee like the wind to higher ground before the origin of the magnitude 10 earthquake impinged on befuddled brain. As I sat up in despair February ran over September’s small bare foot with her plastic motorbike and the resulting shriek, more of anger than of pain, caused twenty-seven hadedas to abandon their systematic stripping of the neighbouring field of endangered frog spawn. They took off on hectic flapping wings but even their uncouth, importunate cries were no match at all for September’s max-decibel wails.

Grandad's boyhood dream; Share my toast, Grandad

I love them. There’s no greater pleasure than indulging in yet another rerun of Postman Pat, with two small wrigglies warmly sharing your space. There’s that small, warm hand in yours as you walk down to the pond to feed the ducks. The gentle touch on your shoulder as you peer myopically at your computer screen, and the soft little voice behind you that says, “Grandad, Granny says you must come for your lunch.”

Dunno why, but Granny has a predilection for gazing
into water (or whales) with the smalls ...

When did someone last bring you your dog’s leash [apart from the dog, of course] and ask, “Grandad, would you like to take a walk?” When did you last finish off the small plastic bowl of luke-warm macaroni cheese, the half a toasted sarmie, the marmite sandwich with the crusts cut off?
I love ’em. And that’s why we have ’em, of course. So’s we can love ’em.
Thank you, C is for Cape Town. Thank you F and S.