Logie takes another delightful look at region’s history

If there are grievances to be aired, it is to the market square that the aggrieved march.

It has been this way for some 200 years in the city formerly known as Port Elizabeth, now carrying the name Gqeberha.

Vuyisile Mini Square at City Hall has played host to an incredible and diverse range of discontent, from beach labourer strikes to service delivery protests.

Many issues have been of an extremely serious nature, others, not so much.

In January 1826, “circumstances of a most lawless and outrageous nature” arose at the then Market Square.

A group of men in a particularly charitable mood had taken it upon themselves to decant tots of wine to any who wanted to partake.

The event was enough to merit the settlement’s only policeman putting a stop to the unsolicited revelry by bludgeoning the offending cask with an axe.

But the crowd, at this stage brimming with Dutch courage, was having none of it.

After angrily chanting up and down the square for a while, they dispersed — only to return with a full cask of brandy.

If the killjoy officer insisted on bringing an axe to a fight, they would retaliate with the hard stuff.

This is only one of the hundreds of amusing accounts contained in Travels with 20/20 Vision: Garden Route and Langkloof, the latest book by former Woodridge Preparatory School headmaster and St Francis Bay author Bartle Logie.

For the past 25 years, Logie has been a prolific chronicler of the Eastern Cape and Garden Route, with their histories, cultures and quirks captured in books like Governor’s

Travels: A journey along the Kouga/Tsitsikamma Coast, —

Sundays Tales from a Winding and River Water in the Wilderness.

The beauty of his efforts is that he backs up his research with extensive field work, meeting people along the way whose oral traditions allow him to fill in the gaps of history.

The results are often surprising, and readers can occasionally be left stunned by what they have learnt about places right on their doorstep.

Logie’s usual excursions were severely curtailed by the arrival of Covid-19, but true to form, when opportunities did arise to get out and explore, he needed no second invitation.

Little-known facts flood each of the 371 pages of Travels with 20/20 Vision, and so delightfully are they told that local history lovers will find it difficult to step away.

The author’s wit and eye for the irreverent is evident everywhere in the book.

He goes into great detail about the origins and production of the popular homebrewed drink, karibier or “just kari”.

Kari is known in other parts of the world as mead or honeybeer.

Logie explains that apartheid president John Vorster is buried on the property of the Kareedouw Dutch Reformed Church, “a handsome building with a traditional rooster atop the weathervane on the steeple”.

“The rooster at one time leaned sideways at a jaunty angle, but we were always assured that this had nothing whatever to do with kari.

“In recent years the rooster has been strengthened, perhaps to emphasise the sobriety of the congregants.”

From Logie’s undertakings it is clear that there is not one area from Gqeberha to the Garden Route that is devoid of such tales.