African queens
GILL MARTIN met inspirational women forging a future in tourism on a visit to starkly beautiful Western South Africa
IN THE shade of a salt bush tree on the banks of the Orange River, Mama Elisa Namases kneaded a ball of dough to make us traditional African ash bread. A wood fire glowed red on a slab of stone, an iron cooking pot simmered vegetables, another with a stew of sheep’s head and tripe. A troupe of baboons ran for cover when their guard barked an alarm.
After pummelling the dough and fashioning it into rolls to accompany spicy lamb chops, she wiped her hands on a purple pinafore and revealed the secret of her culinary skill.
“I work with my brain – I don’t measure a thing,” she grinned. “And the ash from the fire keeps your gut healthy.”
Her two lean dogs sniffed the air in anticipation, as did we. This was an authentic taste of South Africa, thanks to a 63-year-old grandmother with a history of heartache and hardship that steeled her resolve to survive and thrive by running her modest guest house.
Her story encapsulates a chapter of South Africa’s troubled apartheid past. She was forced from her home in the Northern Cape, one of those expelled to neighbouring Namibia and the Eastern Cape, separating families and leaving them facing hopeless poverty.
“I was just a teenager when my family was forced to move,’ Elisa told me, her usually beaming face clouding at the memory. “We were promised houses and schools, and land for our animals. Instead, we had tents and no schools. The lions ate our goats and donkeys, and the elephants flattened our crops.
“I was 17 when I left, and 57 when I moved back to the land where I was born and bred.”
The massive 200-year-old camel thorn tree in her drought-dry garden was half its present 10 metres when her family was expelled. Now, three metres of its roots are exposed by soil erosion from strong winds that once whipped the roof from her Damas Guest House, an enterprise that has propelled Elisa to chairperson of the regional small businesses economic organisation.
Undeterred, she soldiers on. Abandoned by her husband, she lives alone, next to the graveyard where many relations lie and where she wishes to be buried.
“Sometimes I feel I will run away,” she admits. “But no, I will complete the guest house I have slowly built for everybody, for travellers who ask where they can eat.
“When you are not happy, you need to go back to your mother’s house, to smell the smoke and eat her bread, even when she is no longer there.”
We returned to rather more luxurious accommodation at Khamkirri River camp, where we canoed down rapids for three kilometers. Then, under the imperious gaze of fish eagles and Goliath heron, we sipped sundowners on a river cruise before hearty campfire fare.
The camp, with its thatched lodges on stilts, was well sited to visit the Augrabies Falls, named ‘place of great noise’ by the early Khoi inhabitants for its thundering Orange River waters plunging 56 metres into a granite gorge. There’s no bungee action in this national park!
You can, however spot a family of Rock Hyrax sunning themselves and the massive straw nests of the sociable weaver bird, which builds its communal home up high away from snakes, and so heavy they bring down telephone poles.
The Big Five were never on our itinerary but it was a thrill to spot zebra, springbok, seals, ibis, and ostriches that would give the wild horses a run for their money.
The last species I expected to encounter in the Western Cape, however, was penguins. But there they were, far from the Antarctica, on sunny Boulders Beach, doing a passable impression of waddling waiters before diving, sleek as arrows, into the Atlantic rollers.
South Africa is a land of contrasts: forests, mountains, waterfalls and wine lands, cosmopolitan cities and townships, farmland and national parks, coastal dunes and desert, diamond and copper mines.
We dipped our toes in all. We drove through the Majestic Quiver tree forest (its timber used for tribesmen’s arrows), near the Kamies Mountains in whose shadow we visited a nomadic herders’ post and ‘helped’ the bushmen mill grain for bread.
The diet of the sheep farmer who invited us to lunch was richer. “Welcome to red meat land,” chuckled Bertu Archer, whose family have farmed here for six generations. “That’s what we eat three times a day. If we want a salad we kill a chicken or a pig.”
To make his point, he produced a roast lamb’s head from his
Sometimes I feel I will run away... But no, I will complete the guest house I have slowly built for everybody, for travellers who ask where they can eat. Mama Elisa Nameses
kitchen range, prised open its jaw – “It’s OK, I cleaned its teeth” – to carve the tongue, then cracked the skull to extract the brain. Our vegan friend blanched. I tucked into the delicacy, including chewy lambs’ tails.
There’s still evidence of the country’s rich natural resources. Copper, or fools’ gold, was mined at Okiep where a Cornish-made beam pump stands redundant. The local Okiep Country Hotel was originally a hostel for mining managers, and there’s a rich history as evidenced in sepia photograph.
From copper to diamonds, we headed for the Diamond Coast on the Northern Cape, a rugged land where illegal diamond diggers risk imprisonment for trying to eke out a living finding gems. The area, 100km west of Springbok, is heavily policed, with spotter planes combing the coast to spot dodgy diggers. You enter only when accompanied by a mining company official and our every movement was monitored on arrival at Noup Camp, primitive accommodation once used by mining officials.
When the generator was switched off, we relied on hurricane lamplight, candles, hot water bottles and log fire. Showers were, to put it kindly, erratic.
Our stone-clad asbestos and corrugated iron cottages were blasted by Atlantic winds and spray from crashing waves and swirling currents that have shipwrecked many a mariner. Rusting hulks litter the shore, stark testament to the ocean’s power. Cape weather, they say, is like a baby: windy or wet.
But the spectacular sunset, ink-black skies, sparkling starlight and silver moon made up for any lack of modern conveniences. And the braai dinner – the South African word for barbecue – with fruity wines was a treat.
As was the dinner cooked by Abigail Mbalo, a Masterchef contestant who ditched her dental technician career to open the 4Roomed ekasi Culture & Foods enterprise in Khayelitsha township on the outskirts of Cape Town. This inspirational mother-oftwo mixes fine dining, quirky décor and nostalgia for the home she spent her youth. She’s an award winner with a passion for food and social cohesion, determined to leave her mark: “When I’m gone, my soul can look down on this and see the legacy I’ve left.”
Both she and Mama Elisa have both left their mark on me as symbols of hope for the future of South Africa.