THE BEST OF THE (NORTH) WEST

Sometimes you need to visit a maligned corner of the country to be reminded of South Africa’s beauty. Come and explore the North West, where you can play international volleyball and stand on sacred ground.

Adust cloud settles on my bakkie as I roll onto the tar. There’s a small building on my left with the word “Broedersput” painted on a wall, next to a faded CocaCola sign. It could be a shop. I check Google Maps to find out where on earth I am. It turns out that the dirt road has spat me out on the N14, somewhere between Vryburg and Delareyville. I’m on my way somewhere even more remote: the village of Kameel. Have you ever heard of the place? Neither had I until a few days ago, when I started planning this route. I noticed a tiny dot on the map named after a camel and I decided I had to go there. The north-west of the North West juts into Botswana like an anthill, home to other forgotten settlements like Stella, Piet Plessis, Vergeleë, Tosca, Bray, Vorstershoop, Heuningvlei and Tlakgameng. I cross the N14 and follow a white gravel road through tall grass and camel thorn trees. It’s early September and the farmers will soon start eyeing the sky for signs of rain. Gravel meets tar again near a red-brick building. A horse cart and two bakkies are parked outside. Inside it’s a farm stall, the shelves stocked with a little bit of everything. There’s a cash register on the counter with a ledger detailing the day’s sales. Packets of cigarettes stand upright behind the glass. Behind the counter are the owners, Annie and Koos Pieterse. “Is this Kameel?” I ask. Koos laughs. “The southern suburbs of Kameel, you could say.” Kameel itself is about a kilometre or two away, with a co-op and a primary school. The railway line that runs through was once part of Cecil John Rhodes’s project to connect Cape Town with Cairo. Koos says the name of the settlement was probably inspired by the camels that the police used to patrol the area in those days. Annie and Koos both grew up here, but lived and worked in Pretoria for years. The crime in the big city prompted them to move back in 2001. Koos bought a farm and Annie started the shop. “When I was at school, my dad always told me to study hard or else I would end up working in the Delareyville Spar,” she says. “Guess what? I ended up in a shop anyway!” At the NWK co-op in Kameel, floor manager Ansie Brits chats to me in short bursts, in between answering the phone, taking orders, managing the accounts and greeting farmers coming in. She has lived in the area for 30 years and says that life is governed by rain and drought. Her husband is a farmer. “The current drought is horrible,” she says. “People seem to lose hope and the co-op also has a tough time. But when it rains and the harvest looks good, we braai and everyone is in high spirits.” Kameel Primary School is across the road from the co-op. Principal André Swanepoel and his wife Saronja live on the property and have done since André was appointed mid-way through 1993. Before that, the Swanepoels lived in Vorstershoop, which is even smaller and more arid than Kameel. “I love the Kalahari,” André says. “But it can be hell for some people. It’s wild and far from everything.” Kameel Primary School has 24 pupils. To compete in sports, they join up with pupils from Piet Plessis, Bray and Tosca to form an amalgamated team called Molopo. The kids don’t train together because the villages are too far apart. “We get better as the season progresses,” André says wryly. He tells me a story about a weekday morning a few years ago when not a single pupil showed up for school: “An elephant had escaped from who knows where and the kids were following it around. Eventually it was darted in the quarry behind the school.” André knows that it’s nearly time to pull up his roots. “I’ve been teaching for generations,” he says. “I look forward to fishing at the seaside one day soon, but I’ll miss the people here. They tell you how they feel. There’s no pretending.” It’s getting late and I still need to get to Stella, where I’ll spend the night. I say goodbye to André and hit the road. The sun sets and I arrive after dark. Stella looks ragged in my headlights and my chosen guesthouse is not for the faint of heart. I braai my dinner in the parched garden while a car patrols the halftarred streets. Every now and then a spotlight skims over my chops.

A shortage of wives

Next to the gravel road between Stella and Piet Plessis, I notice a general dealer called Dirkiesrus

and a tavern next door called Good Luck. Both are closed. The road becomes sandy and the veld is full of camel thorn trees. Where farmers have felled the trees for grazing, hip-high grass flows past in yellow waves. The first thing you see as you enter Piet Plessis (besides the NWK co-op) is the primary school rugby field, where sheep graze on the patchy grass. Piet Plessis is so small that you wouldn’t be able to host a Parkrun in its streets. The camel thorn trees are in bloom. While I’m taking a photo of one on a street corner, a man comes out of his front door. “This tree looks so good because I take such good care of it,” he says. His name is Andries van Rensburg and he’s wearing a cap embroidered with the word “Marijuana” under a big green dagga leaf. “My son-in-law gave me the cap as a joke, but I like to wear it to keep people guessing about what I grow in my garden,” he says. Andries used to work for Transnet and moved to Piet Plessis when he retired. “Where will you find a place as peaceful as this?” he says, gesturing at the empty street, the police station across the road and the bee-eaters flying around the camel thorn trees. “It’s beautiful here, but wild. Full of lions…”

At the local general dealer you can buy a Wilson’s toffee for 30c or a bicycle for R1 300. There’s no one inside when I visit, but Johan Enslin and his brother Dries van der Walt say they’re expecting a stampede later. “The government pensions are paid today,” Johan explains. “People will soon start queuing.” The shop is for sale. Johan wants to move to a bigger town and Dries wants to retire – right here in Piet Plessis. “I’ve never seen a better place,” he says. “I don’t think there is one.” Three horse carts and a bakkie pull up outside and suddenly the shop is full of people. I leave before I get trampled.

Vergeleë is north-west of Piet Plessis – a rock lizard’s hop from the Botswana border. I pass through during lunch hour and the small NWK co-op is closed. I carry on to Tosca. Looking at the map, you might think that Tosca is a biggish town because there’s a tar road running through, but you’d be mistaken. There’s not much more than a co-op, a Dutch Reformed church, a butchery, a general dealer and a guesthouse. I see movement on the primary school’s sport field and pull over. Tosca Primary principal Marius Vermeulen tells me that the Molopo cricket team is playing against Vryburg. Molopo is fielding, trying to defend their score of 76. “When are they getting a water break?” Christa van den Heever complains. “I’m thirsty and I’m not even playing!” She waits for a break between overs and runs onto the field with bottles of Powerade. Christa and her husband farm near Tosca and their son attends the primary school. Their daughter is a boarder at a high school in Bloemfontein, travelling 1 000 km every weekend to visit home for a day and a half. “It’s not always easy living here, but we enjoy it,” Christa says. Molopo loses the match in the final over. The tension is almost too much for another Tosca teacher called Ewald van der Merwe. “That was blêrrie close!” he says. “It’s the closest we’ve come to winning a game.” Ewald is from Port Elizabeth. He decided he wanted to teach in the platteland, but when a placement in Tosca arose, he had to look at a map to see where it was. “It’s very far from the sea!” he says. The people seem to make up for the lack of waves. “You feel right at home,” Ewald says. “They welcome you into their community. It will be hard to leave one day, but I might have to if I want to find someone to marry…”

Toyi-toyi and tennis

The people of Tosca warned me about the road to Bray. They were right. There are deep potholes and ditches and my bakkie encounters the middelmannetjie more than once. I take it easy and watch as the landscape slowly transitions to fully fledged Kalahari. I try to appreciate the silence, filling my reservoir until such time that I have to deal with traffic, bad news and cellphones again. Entering Bray, I see a burnt-out truck in the road. Natie Rens at Molopo Motors tells me that the village experienced its first protest about two weeks ago. “We had a good toyi-toyi,” he says. “The police had to get help from Vryburg. They even fired a few stun grenades.” The protest was all because of the disastrous Tosca road. The community has asked repeatedly for it to be tarred. Natie reckons a tar road would make a big difference: “Trucks don’t want to drive out here any more,” he says. “We have to bring our own food and fuel into town. Then