Following the water
TEMBISA: FRIENDLY TOUR GUIDE UNCOVERS ITS HIDDEN SURPRISES
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she follows Tembisa’s underground clues.
Tour guide Walter Msibi discovered many of them himself: he dug through local information and found the hidden surprises that make Tembisa fascinating.
Because neither Heather nor I know the area well, Mozee Tours’ director sends us with his car and driver to meet Walter.
Opposite our meeting spot is the heroes’ acre of Liliba, under fever trees full of weaver nests being lashed in the wind. It’s turning out to be the windiest, dust-stormiest day. Under here lies the artist Thami Mnyele, whose story I’ve read of the Medu group of cultural workers who created art in exile in Botswana. He was killed where he lived when Craig Williamson routed him out. One of his pictures features on his headstone.
We elect, in this extreme weather, to be driven, instead of walking around, as Walter generally prefers and as we would generally prefer too.
Close by is another fenced-in area among dense housing and corner chicken cages.
These burials were much longer ago. One was of a man called Duvenhage. His farm, Zuurfontein. was started in the 1800s, while Tembisa’s people were moved here in the ’50s.
“He traded with water,” says Walter. “Tembisa is on water,” he adds mysteriously as we move up a hillside. This is a communal farming project, furrows running with water from Duvenhage’s underground well.
A man is peacefully bathing his kale plants. Downhill are the notorious hostels, once the scene of bloodbaths.
After visiting the Creative Forum, an artists’ meeting place, Walter leads us through a primary school, where I notice the headgear ranges from taqiyahs to Al Capone hats, behind to the Zuurfontein homestead and also Duvenhage’s original stone dwelling.
We are blown into Winnie’s kota courtyard in Botswana Street – but not before Walter points out a house “where the queen of the Ndebele was buried”. Heather, Walter, Vican and I attack our kotas as a Boeing flies silently through the dust.
“I keep saying Tembisa is full of water,” Walter says. “This is the Water of Life.” It’s a spring, welling from a nook of rocks alongside the road, this one purportedly with healing powers.
A white-robed priest is baptising a young woman.
Sadly, we have to return. As we look west, there’s a strange dust “sunset” way before actual sundown, glowing above the watery and history-buried underground of Tembisa. For more information Mozee Tours: 011-394-7105/ 082-578-0558