Literary travels through our troubled and beloved country
One way to escape the holiday madness of December is to travel the country without leaving your house and delve into Justin Fox’s latest book, Place. Masterfully interlacing stories of our land with its literature, Fox invites readers on a remarkable series of adventures across SA’s spectacular landscapes, while diving into the lives of our famous writers. It’s an extraordinary journey.
“Let us, then, set off together on a series of journeys around SA with an old kitbag full of books instead of maps to guide us. Let us follow meandering paths through the landscapes of literature, and celebrate how local authors, characters and readers are shaped and inspired by place,” he urges his readers.
Fox weaves his way through the country’s literary backdrops, revealing how these places have influenced local writers and their imaginations. He begins his pilgrimage in Olive Schreiner’s Eastern Cape Karoo, “the final resting place of the mother of SA literature”.
On Buffelskop, 15km south of Cradock, the novelist is buried alongside her husband, Samual Cronwright, their baby and their dog. Fox’s interest in The Story of an African Farm is the connection between the Eastern Cape’s natural environment and Schreiner’s spiritual beliefs.
“If Nature here wishes to make a mountain,” Schreiner wrote in Thoughts on South Africa, “she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves are larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.”
Next, we journey to Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s Lowveld. In the chapter “Jock Befok”, a young Afrikaans boy leads Fox to the Jock of the Bushveld Plaque at the Macmac Memorial in Sabie where good old Jock is buried.
If, like me, your heart fell to pieces when you read Fitzpatrick’s classic as a child, this is the part where your eyes will well up once more. Jock was mistakenly shot because he was thought to be the dog killing chickens, when he in fact killed the intruding dog. Fox describes the book as a very personal apology from a man to his dog.
In The Soul of the White Ant, we travel to Eugene Marais’ Waterberg, a region of natural beauty and historical significance, particularly in the context of Marais’ life and work.
Marked by rolling hills, rich vegetation, diverse wildlife and distinctive red sandstone formations, the area is a visual feast that is testament to its rich biodiversity. “For Marais,” Fox writes, “this enchanted corner of the Waterberg was an incubator for ideas that were to change the way humans viewed their origins.”
“I like to think of this kloof as Marais’ spiritual home,” says Peet, one of the locals. “Ja,” says his friend Thys, “it’s a fokken lekker spot. We come here on weekends and camp, get vrot dronk, play music and have one helluva opskop.”
It’s this wonderful ability to capture local colour that makes Fox’s travelogue a profoundly moving reflection on the heartlands of our troubled, beloved country.
No book about SA literature would be complete without a visit to Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico. In “Fireside Englikaans”, Fox criss-crosses the Marico searching for phantoms, “the characters and places of old, beloved stories ... experiencing that strange nostalgia brought on by literature, where the line between fact and fiction is deliciously blurred and your phantoms stand foursquare in the road, as real and present as a white donkey-cow”.
In this, his love letter to SA, Fox’s passion for travel and writing has given readers a unique and profound sense of what it means to live and feel a sense of belonging in SA today.
From Dalene Matthee’s Knysna Forest to Zakes Mda’s Wild Coast, Place is not just a literary travelogue, but a deeper exploration of culture, history, social dynamics and sense of identity as reflected in our literature.
“The authors who inspired my literary journeys have all become genii loci, custodians of landscape memory,” Fox says.