ONE CLICK AWAY
Just 70km from Cape Town, the San Education and Culture Centre takes Nancy Richards back in time
A LONE ewe provided the welcome. Invisible behind the dense scrub, we heard her before we saw her. Shame. It later transpired she’d been left behind by a previous farmer and was now an honorary member of the !Khwa ttu family.
Her sporadic bleats echoed as we meandered along the indigenous bush trails next to the guest cottage, where we’d hastily dropped off our bags. The sun was dipping and, on a 24-hour getaway, you can’t afford to lose any daylight hours. Weather-worn notices indicate that here is pigweed, and there a tsamma melon, a useful source of water in the Kalahari. Porcupines and wild pigs like to dig for the rhizomes of varkblomme (arum lilies), but they’re toxic to humans; fibres extracted from the leaves of bowstring hemp were used to make rope … but it’s getting too dark to read now. We pick our way back through the cancer bush and sour-fig ground-cover to the renovated old farm cottage to open the bar. We crank up a crackling fire in the big, open hearth, which warms and smokes us out at the same time. Simultaneously coughing, laughing and chatting, we cook up a storm — and hey, we’re cosy. Someone even thought to bring Old Brown Sherry.
Although it’s only 70km from Cape Town, it feels like we’ve come to another world, very far away in time and place — which brings on early fatigue. Soon we’ve distributed ourselves among the three little bedrooms and the lights are out.
!Khwa ttu means water pan in the extinct !Xam language — and it’s a place where not just water, but creatures, plants and most especially San people and their past are precious and prized. And restored.
Creatures make their presence felt at first light the next morning — chirrupping insects and birds skittering in the spekboom join us for breakfast on the rocks overlooking the veld and ocean, with Table Mountain a smudge on the horizon. There’s more walking to be done, around the land and waterblommetjie dam; a photographic exhibition to be seen in the narrow whitewashed gallery; coffee to be drunk in the stone-clad original farmhouse restaurant; and ostrich shell and skin memorabilia to be bought in the craft shop.
But the thing about !Khwa ttu is that it’s also a place where people of San descent from all over the country come to discover their roots and train to be cultural guides. Recently they’ve been accredited with the Culture, Arts, Tourism, Heritage and Sports Sector Education Authority.
Two of us opted to do the tractor trailer tour with three young men from Botswana and Namibia, graduate Ivan Vaalbooi from the Northern Cape at the wheel. Between them, there is a smattering of Khoi, Khwe and Khomani language, which they shyly share with us. In his cool jeans and wedgetoed shoes, it’s a bit anachronistic to see Kerapetse Bantu Peter demonstrate a sprung bird trap with a bent sapling and Sedibo Mmamba pointing out how water stays cooler in a buried ostrich egg. But sitting in the circle of reed huts which make up the traditional village replica, all of us see the funny side of Kerapetse’s story of the little love bow. With it, he narrates, a young man would shoot a tiny arrow into the fleshy buttock of the object of his desire. If she chose to respond, she would pick up the arrow, turn and look at him, holding the arrow to her breast; if not, she would ignore it. Pity the poor punctured backside of the pretty girl with lots of suitors, mused my companion.
In the shade of a gnarled old fig tree and the company of a giant grasshopper, which may have been an ancestral spirit in another life, we sit outside the restaurant for a last coffee and speculate on our shared fleeting experience of San culture. Far away on the slopes beyond the trainees’ accommodation, a distant herd of antelope troop off across the valley like a rock painting come to life, a butcher bird sits on a post waiting for prey, and reluctantly we head for home.