Face of platinum’s bulldozers

move and wishes to be buried in Ga-Sekhaolelo, where his father and grandfather lie buried. If he should move, he says he would settle for the ruins of his father’s old homestead not far from his house. He makes it very clear that he cannot live anywhere else but here.

He was so determined not to leave the village that, when the rest of the residents accepted the offer to move, he cut ties with them and cancelled the power of attorney he had vested with their lawyer, Richard Spoor, when they agreed to move.

“If I die I will at least get some rest from this thing,” says Ramatsobane, squinting his eyes in the harsh daylight.

He walks in painfully slow steps, holding on to the walls of his house for balance. His eyesight is poor. His only companion is a scrawny cat with faded fur that exposes a rough skin covered in sores. Its forehead has fresh bloody wounds. The cat circles around Ramatsobane feet, constantly rubbing its head against his boot, much to his irritation.

The cat mews constantly, seemingly in pain or itching from its scarred skin.

“This is a stupid cat. There are plenty of rats around here. But he finds it easier to irritate me by stealing my food,” he says.

Ramatsobane’s hair is woven into thin dreadlocks hidden under a hat. His jacket shines with a layer of dirt and he uses it constantly to wipe away the gunk on the edges of his eyes and lips.

“I will not leave this place. I will die here in my father and mother’s land,” he responds when asked whether he is content with the solitude of life here.

He has no cellphone or any other means of communication. The only time he gets to interact with other people is when a driver arrives to take him to collect his monthly state pension or when Anglo staff deliver water.

“This is the fourth week I have not seen any other person,” he answers to a question about the last time he spoke to anyone.

He is adamant that no amount of money or material things would get him to leave. His house has no electricity or running water. He stores the water delivered by Anglo trucks in a myriad containers in his kitchen. The kitchen, a one-room structure detached from the main house in which he allows no strangers, is a sorry mess.

The dry hides of a warthog and an aardvark hang on wires tied to the tin roof darkened by exposure to smoke from wooden fires. Before his eyes started troubling him, he hunted in the veld and in the hills. He lived off the land, harvesting wild fruit and herbs, planting his own crops in his yard and in the fields. But he can’t see further than a few metres now.

In his kitchen a stained black coal stove sits on the right side of the creaking wooden door. The floor is littered with firewood, dust, ash, used plates, pots, pieces of wire and other rubbish.

“I have remained here because of my father and my grandfather. They told me they had worked for this land and there is no way they can be separated from it,” Ramatsobane says.

He points to the north where he says the ruins of his grandfather’s homestead stand and where his own father was born.

“They were moved from there by the Boers many years ago. I was born here and I don’t want to promise anyone that I would ever leave. They [his father and grandfather] told me this is the land from which they survived and I must never leave.”

Ramatsobane says the issue of the land is causing him much agony. He believes that the spirits of his father and grandfather are restless because of the mining in the area and the threat that their homestead could be demolished.

He says he needs to perform a ritual to appease their spirits and to ask for strength. He needs to brew beer, sacrifice a bull or a goat and feed the people he would invite to the ceremony. But he has lost all his cattle. He is left with only three sheep and several donkeys, and they are in the care of Matjiu’s family in Motlhotlo.

Matjiu, who has been trying to find work for a long time without success, also believes her luck will turn if she makes a sacrifice to the ancestors. In 2014, she was shot in the face by mine security guards when the residents of Motlhotlo marched to the mine in a bid to discuss unfulfilled promises with its management. She still bears the scar on her upper lip. After she was shot she was arrested together with other residents.

While she was in police detention, her grandmother died from natural causes. Now she is troubled by visions and dreams in which her grandmother asks her to perform a ceremony. But, being unemployed and with children to raise, she cannot even begin to raise the money needed for this sacred ritual.

The land remains at the centre of the need for these spiritual sacrifices, as articulated in the novel Hold My Hand I’m Dying by John Gordon Davis.

The novel, set in the then Rhodesia in the 1960s, articulates the pain, anguish and anxiety of the people of the Zambezi Valley who faced the prospect of leaving their ancestral land to make way for the Kariba Dam.

Gordon writes about one frantic elderly man who, during this period of uncertainty, knelt at the graves of his ancestors and pledged his loyalty to them, saying: “I swear I will never leave you my ancestors … for that is a shameful and a foolish thing.”

It may be a shameful and foolish thing also for Tsebe, Ramatsobane and Matjiu to leave their ancestral lands. But just like the people of the Zambezi Valley those many years ago, it appears it will not be too long before they also lose the battle. — Mukurukuru Media