A Karoo windpump in all its functional, frustrating glory
It’s a thing of life-giving beauty in the arid landscape, but few farmers will wax lyrical about it
Not one bit
of sheep spared, and everything homemade
The making of an activist: Kumi Naidoo’s
memoir
In the far distance, you may hear the call of the blue crane. From a nearby hill comes the raucous good-night bark of the baboon. Right here, next to you, fresh water gurgles out of a pipe and into a cement dam. Above you, the old Southern Cross spins as hot metal cools and contracts. Meerkats pack their pups away for the night.
And then a monster truck comes thundering past, bedecked from stem to stern with colourful Mexican cantina lights, knocking your sundown reverie for six. Welcome to the Heartland.
Life in this arid zone is all about the water. Windpumps are the great matchmakers between the sky, the land and the aquifers beneath it.
It is profoundly satisfying to watch them pinwheeling above the veld, the steady spin of the flashing blades driving the rods up and down, cylinders lifting a cupful of liquid at a time, over and over. Maybe it’s also the sound – the metallic sigh of the gears and the creak of the windrose turning into the evening breeze, the soothing whirr of the vanes, the blessing of water splashing into a round dam.
The windpump is a beautiful, functional, life-bringing machine, as mesmerising as a steam locomotive chuffing across the veld.
Loeriesfontein’s Windpump Museum
There is no better starting point to explore the history of the windpump in South Africa than Loeriesfontein in Namaqualand. More than 30 old windpumps arrayed there twitch and groan in the wind, straining at their chains outside the Fred Turner Museum.
Their rudder-like steel tails proclaim many brand names that have passed into memory:
Gearing Self-Oiled, Ace, Atlas, Massey
Harris, Conquest, Hercules, Spartan,
Vetsak President, Gypsy Wonder, Springbok, Mogul, Eclipse, Malcomess, North,
Beatty Pumper, Nimric, Dandy, and nearly a dozen more.
James Walton, a leading light in vernacular architecture, was the reason there is a Loeriesfontein windpump museum at all.
In 1996, he’d written a series of articles on windpumps for a weekly supplement to Die Burger newspaper, and among them had issued a plea that a museum be set up somewhere to preserve them. Loeriesfontein was the only town to respond, as recorded in his book Windpumps in South Africa, written with the collaboration of Andre Pretorius.
Published by Human & Rousseau in 1998, it was unexpectedly popular and went swiftly out of print. If you can track one down, snap it up – it’s a treasure.
Oom Leon’s workshop
In the course of a 50-year career, Leon Swanepoel of Carnarvon has worked on nearly every kind of windpump that ever drew water in the country. His favourite machine is a Climax for its endurance and dependability, but he respects the others and their quirks. The oldest one he ever tended to was a venerable Defiance Butler Oilomatic, still spinning after more than 70 years.
“Do you think a solar pump would ever last that long? I doubt it,” says Swanepoel.
In the workshop, pump gears, heads and blades lie in controlled chaos. When parts are unavailable, they are fashioned from scratch.
The place is like a mash-up of a metal art studio and a nursing home for old windpumps.
When Swanepoel answers the telephone, he generally ends the conversation scowling ferociously. Most Karoo farmers know how to do basic repairs on their machines, so if someone calls with a “big problem”, it’s normally an emergency.
Most farmers are certainly not moved to poetry by their windpumps. Balancing high above the earth on a narrow platform while surrounded by obstinate steel parts is no joke.
Farmer Jaco Moolman, at Samenkomst farm outside Cradock, calls one particular windpump Kopseer (Headache).
“It always gives me hassles. I might as well just leave a bottle of aspirins up there on its platform.”