CLASSIC READ
Place
by Bridget Hilton-Barber and Pat Hopkins Zebra Press, 2007
You might be wondering why we’re labelling a book published in 2007 as a “classic”. Well, it’s a highly enjoyable and informative collection of South African travel and landscape quotations, some of which date from more than a hundred years ago. In the book’s introduction, Laurens van der Post is quoted from his book The Lost World of the Kalahari:
Ever since I can remember I have been struck by the profound quality of melancholy which lies at the heart of the physical scene of Southern Africa. I recollect clearly asking my father once: “Why do the vlaktes and koppies always look so sad?” He replied with unexpected feeling: “The sadness is not in the plains and hills but in ourselves.”
The authors set out to examine this relationship between ourselves and our environment. They cast the net wide: Pioneers, trekkers, early travellers, hunters, military men, missionaries, wanderers, poets and writers all feature in the anthology. The chapters are arranged according to our nine provinces, and an extra one for the Great Karoo. It’s an insightful book to dip into, with hundreds of extracts, like this one about early Johannesburg by Herman Charles Bosman:
You can still come across lots of people who can tell you about the spirit that prevailed here in the early days when Johannesburg was a roaring, wide open mining camp, in which every citizen was imbued with the one laudable desire of making all the money he could in the shortest possible time. It was an all-in scramble with no holds barred. The place teemed with short cuts to a gaudy opulence. Adventurers from all parts of the world heard that there was money going in Johannesburg, and they flocked here to get some.
It makes you wonder how much has changed! Antjie Krog is quoted from her award-winning book Country of my Skull, writing about the Free State:
This is my landscape. The marrow of my bones. The plains. The sweeping veld. The honey-blond sandstone stone. This I love. This is what I’m made of. And so I remain in the unexplainable wonderous ambuscade of grass and light, cloud and warm stone. As I stand half-immersed in the grass crackling with grasshoppers and sand, the voices from the town hall come drifting on the first winds blowing from the Malutis – the voices, all the voices of the land. The land belongs to the voices of those who live in it. My own bleak voice among them. The Free State landscape lies at the feet at last of the stones of saffron and amber, angel hair and barbs, dew and hay and hurt.