consensus
 

In the late 1950s, the area around White River was still under the fading influence of those waves of colonialism in which Boers had dispossessed the original users of the land, and the British victory in the Anglo-Boer War had added a further layer of confusion. South Africa was still ruled by the Queen, and her likeness, looking to me curiously beheaded, appeared on our coinage, along with that of her father and others of her family on older coins, also beheaded as though they were being held up before the crowds around the guillotine after some latter-day version of the French Revolution.

In the decades immediately before the collapse of the British Empire, many men retired from the colonial services and, accompanied by their wives and families, settled in the area. It was the last wave of pukka colonial settlement (from Hindi pakka, ripe), along with the British expansion into the recently conquered territories of Tanganyika and Kenya. The unoccupied Lowveld presented one of the last stretches of virgin land, lying in wait for the eager husbandry that the colonial project was to bring. Some of these settlers had double-barrelled names, or military rank. At least one, Sir Colin Garbett, had a knighthood.

Sir Colin was very tall, had blue faded eyes with a faraway look, and had translated Rumi from Persian into metrical English. He was an enthusiastic Freemason, a staunch Anglican, and had an Indian guru whom he had met during the course of his colonial duties in the Punjab. John Home-Rigg kept owls, and had a butler dressed in white with red piping and a fez. Maitland Maitland-Nimmo had rheumy eyes and dabbled in watercolours. There were even a few famous pioneers who still lived on: Col. Stevenson-Hamilton’s side-kick Harry Wolhuter, a local hero for his role in the early history of the Kruger Park, visited the White River Primary School. He was thin and bent and looked ancient. Every last man of them had received a classical education back ‘home’ and perhaps some had read Pliny’s letters from his colonial post in Bithynia-Pontus, south of the Black Sea, where at the age of fifty, in September 111, he was appointed Legate.

Now the British Empire was in its dotage, and these oncepowerful old men were all that remained of a bygone period of rule. The country was in the fist of apartheid nationalism, and was being remade in the image of the dreams of Malan, Verwoerd, and others like them.

Most of the area occupied by white farmers was given over to citrus, and the valley below Luitingh’s Guest Farm was lined with neatly laid-out orchards, their dark leaves gleaming. When the oranges blossomed, which was at different seasons according to whether they were navels or Valencias, the entire valley was suffused with their scent, so that even on the highest point of the koppie overlooking the farm, the fragrance filled our senses.

Out of sight, on the other side of a high range of hills, lay the location or labour dump. While the small farms of White River were covered with tropical fruit, the location was riven with dongas. It was a dark and dangerous-seeming place, and we did not go there. The Africans, called by the entire list of undignified names dreamt up by the apartheid mentality, were almost universally subservient, under threat, as I was to learn, of the sjambok, of the police, of jail and torture. They bore all the indignities of their circumstances, no doubt, as best as they could. To the whites, the black workers were boys who ate boys’ meat (the least attractive cuts) and wore house-boy, kitchen-boy, garden-boy or farm-boy uniforms, which were allowed to get very ragged before being replaced. The women were called girls, but only when in actual servitude, as the term was synonymous with ‘house-maid’. The black workers called the whites baas and miesies. White children were called kleinbaas or kleinmiesies, even on Luitingh’s Guest Farm which had been in English hands since the 1920s, and where the majority of the residents were English-speaking.

All in all, there was a broad consensus among the governing classes about what was going on, who owned what, and how the natives should behave; and the rest were obliged to make what peace they could with this. My mother, a listed Communist, did not fit this consensus.