PEACE AT LAST
Nick Yell finds his stay on this historic Northern Cape farm worth the four-year wait
‘MY people were hunted by the brown men who tamed cattle, and by the big black people who came out of the rising sun, and by the white men with their guns who came out of the sea. We fought them all. But they destroyed our world.”*
Sitting in the overhang that once sheltered Bushmen (San), I ruminated on /Xam’s description of the cultural holocaust that started from the time immigrants from the north, east and south clashed with South Africa’s first people.
Although these words were said by a fictitious character in a historical novel I was reading, their accuracy was indisputable.
How, I wondered, could the outcome have been different? When property-owning, better-armed and numerically superior pastoral societies clash with nomadic hunter clans, there is surely little chance of the latter’s survival.
I’d set off in the soft light of dawn just 30 minutes earlier and was already examining my first prehistoric artefact — what looked like an axe symbol on the roof of an overhang, drawn in red pigment.
The well-marked 12km circular hiking trail I was on guides walkers through wind- and rain-sculpted sandstone formations to the seasonal waterfall that spills into the Oorlogskloof during winter. But, with the waterfall not running and because I’d planned a guided tour to the gorge later, I was content to experience just a few kilometres of the trail and then return to my cottage for breakfast.
Having waited almost four years to get a booking here — if you want to visit in the flower season, it’s best book a year or two ahead — I was lapping up the history and the peaceful aura of Papkuilsfontein Guest Farm.
Even though some of the pastures around the restored bywon
er’s cottages are a little drab in the later summer months, without their seasonal floral coatings, the distant vistas of fynbos among the natural sandstone sculptures are still highly memorable.
But it was the prehistoric and more recent artefacts that fascinated me most, and all of them were well-marked in-situ or documented in files found in the cottages.
Additional information was passed on to us by the knowledgeable Willem van Wyk, patriarch of Papkuilsfontein.
On our lateafternoon 4x4 tour to the Oorlogskloof view site, Van Wyk told us the history of the farm and showed my friend Ian Huddlestone and me the scattered plantings of rooibos, plus the many geological formations and vegetation types en route.
Named after the fierce skirmish that took place in these parts during the Frontier War of 1739, the spectacular Oorlogskloof is about 180m deep and is home to a number of highly acclaimed hiking trails, which start in the north.
The fact file in my cottage revealed that the activities of one of the early Van Wyks in the region was one of the contributing causes of the war between the colonists and the Khoi and San people. After taking a Namaqua chief’s daughter for his wife while on a cattle-raiding expedition in Namaqualand in 1738, Willem van Wyk and his companions apparently murdered his new father-in-law and some of his followers, then made off with their livestock.
Standing on the edge of the precipitous drop, Van Wyk pointed out the spot where the waterfall runs after the winter rains. It’s certainly one of SA’s most impressive canyons and we stood there spell- bound for some time, watching the black swifts and rock martins make vertiginous dives into the kloof.
But the highlight of the tour — in terms of man-made prehistoric artefacts — was still to come. Some kilometres from the kloof, Van Wyk invited us to clamber up a boulder-clad koppie. After winding our way through a labyrinth of rock-lined alleyways we were suddenly faced with a stone “bar counter” with commanding views of the plains below.
Thinking this was where we would have our sundowners; I unzipped the backpack with our beers in it and prepared to toast the sunset. Yet, Van Wyk had disappeared around a corner and we heard him calling us to come and look. There, against the rock face, was an exquisite collection of art: symbols; shamans and serpents all in one tableau. Suddenly, the idea of toasting the sunset seemed a little ordinary.
* From Blood on the Path by Harvey Tyson. Springbok Press, 2009