FREE STATE
Soutpan is a tiny village on a salt pan in the Free State, basically in the middle of nowhere. Come meet the people who weather floods and droughts in this far-flung place.
Take a turn past the tiny village of Soutpan, where the residents have survived droughts and floods.
The R700 between Bloemfontein and Bultfontein is not a road that many tourists will ever drive. It’s a straight Free State road, mostly driven by local farmers on their way to the city to buy tractor parts, to take their kids to school, to attend an auction, or to visit Kloppers. Kloppers is a big department store that stocks everything under the sun. It’s a Free State institution, like the red-soil fields along the R700, and the Modder River. After I’ve crossed the river, about 10 km towards Bultfontein, a sign on the left points to Soutpan. The corrugated dirt road takes me past a red-brick Dutch Reformed church on a low hill. Then there’s a stop sign, the only one around. No one stops here. I can tell by how the road is worn; just a quick glance to the right and an acceleration through the bend to the left. I pass one or two houses surrounded by dusty white veld. It’s late summer but the landscape looks like winter. Halfway up the ridge, a small police station stands guard. Next door, some sheep are in a camp in front of the house. Next up is the Soutpan Boerediens, a small co-op with two fuel pumps, one of which is out of order. If you drive past Soutpan Boerediens, you’re basically leaving Soutpan, so don’t. Pull over and walk inside. If it’s a Saturday and there are a few bakkies parked outside, you might find people in the co-op talking about farming, church bazaars and politics. If it’s summer and it’s as dry as it is now, rain will be on everyone’s lips. People are worried. The co-op is owned by Willie van Straaten, along with his daughter Sue Greyling and Sue’s husband Barend. They don’t like to brag, so they probably won’t tell you that Soutpan Boerediens works with ultra-modern farming
implements, used for precision farming. They also build and sell electronic diesel logbooks to make life easier for farmers. There are fresh prickly pears in the fridge, next to the milk, cheese and mageu, and 50 post boxes used by the local residents.
Worth your salt
When Willie van Straaten asks you if you want to take a drive with him, you don’t ask where he’s going, you just get into his Hilux. He’s a man of few words, so he won’t tell you either way. White pyramids of salt are heaped next to the pan. The sun is beating down and the reflected light is blinding. “The work happens early in the morning,” Willie says. “Otherwise the sun will burn you until there’s only a grain of salt left.” He says that Soutpan’s salt comes from groundwater. “The water under these pans has a high salt content. We pump it onto a level surface and wait for the sun to do its job. The water evaporates and the clean salt stays behind.” There’s fresh water further away from the pans. In the late 1970s, Soutpan had about 600 windmills extracting the salt water – the highest concentration in Africa. “The industry has dwindled since then,” Willie says. “Salt doesn’t make much profit any more, and we also have to pay for mining rights. Does it look like we’re mining here?” It’s a rhetorical question. It’s Willie’s way of saying that people here have used the sun to extract salt from water since 1880. But in 1997, the government decided that the water no longer belonged to them.
The main reason why Soutpan doesn’t have hundreds of windmills any more is rain – rain that fell in February 1988, to be specific. Krona Fourie remembers it well. “It rained more than it did during Noah’s flood,” she says. “Everything was under water. We couldn’t get to Bloemfontein to go to school for days. The salt pans were under water for three years. No
one could work. It brought the village to its knees. The people who made a living off the salt had to move away.” Krona grew up in Soutpan and went to primary school here. The school, with the motto “Be the salt”, closed down years ago. Krona and her partner Liza de Wet (originally from Lady Grey) have known each other since they were in Standard 8. They worked in the UK for a few years, and in 2001 they returned to Soutpan – to buy a salt pan. They made bath salt and sold it at festivals around South Africa, but criss-crossing the country with bags of salt is no easy matter, so they decided to open a shop in the village. “If you want to buy a house in Soutpan, you have to wait for someone to die,” Krona says. “There are only so many buildings to go around. We had to wait until 2009 to open our shop. It’s called Truksvy, after the way that people pronounce turksvy (prickly pear) around here.” Before long, Krona and Liza realised that visitors to the shop would also probably want something to eat. “Heerlikheid!” Krona says. “Neither Liza nor I can really cook. But we gave it a go and made traditional dishes like our mothers and grandmothers did. People started driving through from nearby towns to have lunch here on Sunday afternoons. It never gets crazy busy – we’re not a mall – but in Soutpan terms it’s a big affair. If you arrive here and you expect to find a restaurant, you’ll be disappointed. We’re like an old-fashioned farm shop. And we prepare the food ourselves. If you want to chat to me, you’ll wait longer for your food because you’ll be keeping me away from the kitchen.” “Soutpan feels like a big farm,” Liza says. “Everyone farms with something. Everyone owns at least one sheep. We have a small flock, a few chickens and a pack of dogs.” “Make no mistake,” Krona chips in. “If three houses are having a braai and everyone’s music is on, it gets wild.”
The spirits of Florisbad
You’d think a holiday resort with hot and cold pools would bring the crowds, but Florisbad, about 7 km south of Soutpan, is quiet most of the time. The resort is also a wedding venue and the floor of the chapel is covered in coarse salt. It seems that some couples like the idea of starting their marriage with a reference to the Afrikaans idiom, Om ’n sak sout saam op te eet. When you eat a bag of salt together, it means you’ve experienced a lot together; you’ve shared your troubles and your strife. “There used to be a natural spring here and people would come and swim,” says Johnny Steyn, the barman at Florisbad and local DStv installer, who runs the resort with his wife Didi. “People travelled to Florisbad from all over the place. They believed the minerals in the water would cure their ailments. Then some fossils were discovered and Florisbad became a museum.” Indeed, the spring was closed to the public in 1980 and the place became a research station managed by the National Museum. Discoveries include a human skull dating back 260 000 years and other fossils, some as old as 500 000 years. “The place gives Didi the chills,” says Johnny. “She can sense things, like when there’s going to be a car crash. I don’t take her feelings lightly.” Didi says she avoids the museum completely. “There are enough spirits moving around the resort. I’ve come across a few of them, but they’re harmless.”
For a spiritual experience of a different kind, visit the Dutch Reformed church on a Sunday morning. Even though the congregation is small, members still use pillows with their names on to reserve their seats. The third pew to the right in the gallery is for Louis, Luhané, Hester, Louis Jr and Hesmé. Below the gallery, you’ll find E Maré and Awie. There’s a pipe organ, and the yellow ceiling hangs low overhead while farmers pray for the dust to die down and the mielies to grow. After the service, outside on the steps, the people of Soutpan will greet you and ask where you’re from and where you’re going. Someone might invite you over for coffee, or for lunch. That someone will probably be Gert van Rensburg. Gert lives among mielie fields with his wife Linda, and he knows all about eating salt. “We had a poor harvest in 1992,” he says. “I lost everything except for my wife, my child and my bakkie. I worked at the feedlot for a few years to get back on my feet.” He can’t remember the last time they had good rain. “Probably the flood of 1988!” he says.
Linda tells me about all the times their December holidays at the coast were cut short when it rained in Soutpan. “If Gert hears of rain, he wants to get back to the farm immediately to sow mielies.” “That’s how it works!” Gert says, even though he no longer farms. “Never again. No, the droughts break your spirit. I decided if I can’t beat the drought, I’ll work with the drought. So I bought a borehole drill. The drought has been so bad over the past few years that we can’t keep up with demand. I have three drills now. It’s still hard. I deal with farmers who are desperate for water. I know the feeling. It’s a terrible feeling.” Gert rents out the fields on his farm and travels around South Africa to drill boreholes. He doesn’t have to live on his farm near Soutpan any more, but he also can’t bring himself to say goodbye to it. It has been his home for 62 years. His hair looks like the veld in August, and the red dust must taste like home. He will always hope for rain when the easterly wind blows. “I still have all my farming implements,” he says with a sparkle in his eye. “If I ever feel like farming again, I can put a few seeds in the soil.”