Jack, my dachshund and I were off on a trip to Kleinsee to visit my daughter Susan. My first overnight stop was at Kuruman where I was delayed by a defunct clutch plate. Luckily I was at my planned overnight stop at Kalahari Hide. What a find! Just outside the town in a rural setting, this spread must have been a farm at some time. It is owned by Janet West and her husband and their troop of Yorkshire terriers not forgetting the two great Danes.
Kuruman was the home of Robert Moffat who had a mission station there. He was self sufficient with his own printing press. His daughter Mary married David Livingstone and they lived there for a while before leaving for Ngamiland in what is now Botswana.
I had booked a room with Janet but when the clutch went she moved me to a little cottage that was less expensive and her son in law who has a workshop on the property, fixed the clutch in two days while there Janet and I became friends. She brought me supper every evening as I had only snacks with me and sat and had a good chat.
Janet kindly put the Great Danes, one of which does not like strange dogs, away for a few hours a day so that Jack, my dachshund could have the run of the place. While I was there her husband who writes poetry, won a prize for one of his poems. I could imagine how chuffed he was although I never spoke to him, knowing how difficult it is to get published. They are a musical family and everyone plays some sort of instrument. There are two cottages and a few rooms and I can really recommend this stop. I will put the details at the bottom of the blog.
Clutch fixed, Jack and I departed on our run to Pofadder, a long one this, with some 200 ks to get under our belts before reaching Upington. Some seven hours later we were there having gone through Upington’s verdant vineyards on stony arid ground along the roadside, desperate for a loo but no friendly garage stop could be found! Upington is the capital of this agricultural heartland situated all along the banks of the Gariep River, previously called the Orange River, the third largest in Africa. Racks of drying grapes abound as Upington produces raisins as well.
Finally the green grass at the Caltex fuel station at Kakamas appeared and Jack could not get out of the car fast enough. He learnt how to negotiate the turnstile to the toilets in the shop with some help from the counter staff as to juggle a stick, my handbag and Jack through the turnstile was challenging! This is a good stop with friendly staff and clean ablutions.
The Hottentot pastoralists called the place Kakamas meaning poor pasture. In 1895 the government in the Cape decided to settle poor people on land and the Reverent Schroder remembered his old mission there. At a meeting in Worcester he recommended that this would be the ideal place being as it was on the banks of the Orange River and suitable for irrigation. Reverend H.P. van der Merwe sent cuttings of sultana vines and this became the staple crop for the farmers of the Orange River area. As you drive along you can see the rows of drying racks. Kakamas is also famous for its peaches. This area produced the cultivar Kakamas Peach still used today for canning.
Off for the next leg to Pofadder now through arid land and heat that sits on the tar creating mirages. I had soaked a towel to put over Jack but he was comfortable behind my seat and took that leg well. We passed Onseepkans, where Susan managed to drive up a boulder with her new Opel, being unable to turn in the sand road. Onseepkans is on the Gariep River and has a border post to Nambia, then Pella with its wonderful cathedral also near the Gariep too far for me to make a detour. Nobody actually knows how Pofadder, such a small town set in a vast dry area, got its name. Some say it was named after the lazy fast striking very poisonous puffadders others that it was named after a Koranna bandit who operated along this section of the Gariep.
Pofadder is some way away from the river and dusty and dry. There is nothing to see there, a basic Save it store and a display of iron sculptures opposite the garage. I bought a little warthog there for Susan one year and when I arrived at her house there it was alongside the steps. Mazelda at the Caltex garage gave me the key to a spacious flat enclosed by a fence so that Jack could run around. She invited him to get on the bed and he was a happy chappy! I bought a couple of the pepper steak pies from the garage, a bit skeptical but they were delicious! On the way out the next day I bought two more for lunch, so large that Susan and I shared one!
We refueled in Springbok and I will do a separate blog on this historic town and the role it played in mining in the area. Then we climbed the Spektakel Pass and truly the vistas are a spectacle, tier upon tier of blue mountains finally disappearing into the distance. Descending, we arrived through a smaller pass at Kommagas where Susan was due to meet me. Kommagas is a small settlement of Nama volk, their houses climbing up the hill and a dusty street with little shops The tale goes that It was two men from this small town who found diamonds but Jack Carstens is generally believed to have done so. I tried to sms Susan to no avail so proceeded onto the gravel road and I must say Emily (the name my grandson gave my little Toyota Yaris) took it in her stride.
The gravel road joins a long tar road along the coast leading to Hondeklip Bay (Dog Rock Bay) a little Port further south with a rock that has the shape of a dog and Kleinsee to the north. All around are arid low sand hills leading down to the Prussian blue Atlantic on the left.
The town has not changed since I last visited. In fact one section about half the size of a rugby field at the end of the tar road before the town entrance supported eight thousand illegal diamond diggers a short time ago. When I arrived there was a bit of blue wood lying there, all that remained of Jack Carstens’s hut. Springbok Police moved them on but the remaining illegal diggers sit below a sign on one of the municipal buildings drinking cheap wine or brandy. Some wear sacks, some have dreadlocks, all are cheerful. They call out “Hallo Gogo!” Gogo means grandmother.
Kleinsee (meaning small sea) lies just south of Grootmis on the mouth of the Buffels River 72 km east of Port Nolloth and 105 km west of Springbok. The small sea refers to a lagoon at the mouth of the Buffels River that is dry most of the time. Legend has it that a teacher named De Villager and his friend Alberts from a local farm school needed some lime for limewash for the new school they were building. They were looking for lime deposits when they kicked up a diamond. This was the first alluvial diamond found here and the two men found in total diamonds worth six hundred pounds. This resulted in a crater being dug along the lines of the Big Hole in Kimberley.
Jack Carstens was appointed as the pit manager. He tells of nights when crooks arrived with the intention of stealing diamond gravel from under his nose. Jack’s Nama guards carried electric torches, their magic devices. The guards believed they could immobilize a crook if you shone your torch on them. Jack relates a conversation he once had with a guard called Jan, in the book ‘A Fortune through my Fingers.’ Jan tells Jack about some crooks in the Mine area. “I torched them and they didn’t fall over so I went quite close to them and they ran away but I couldn’t catch them.”
Garnets are found in diamond bearing gravel and the tale is told of a farmer’s children finding a pretty stone in their back yard. They used the stones for skimming across the river. However the boy looked twice at a particular stone and put it in his pocket in the spring of 1867, He carried it home and dropped it on the farmhouse floor. His father took no notice as the children were forever playing with this pretty stones. A flash of light caught the children’s mother’s eye who told her neighbour, Mr. Van Niekerk about the curious stone. The children that turfed it into the dusty yard but upon searching the stone was retrieved. Mr. Van Niekerk offered to buy it but the lady could not understand why anyone would pay money for a people. She told him to keep it.
He thought it might be valuable and asked a travelling smous or salesman, John O’Reilly, what it was. John did not know but undertook to find out. Nobody thought it worth anything until it came under the eye of the acting Civil Commissioner at Colesberg, Mr. Lorenzo Boyes. He found that the stone could cut glass and pronounced that he believed it was a diamond. Nobody believed him and the stone was sent by ordinary post to Dr. W. Guybon Atherstone a mineralogist in Grahamstown. He found the stone to be a diamond of twenty-one and a quarter carats and worth five hundred pounds.
Last evening I watched the movie Blood Diamonds, truly a violent description of diamond mining in West Africa. I remember chatting to a diamond diver in Port Nolloth who told me to watch the movie as it was very near the truth. He knew as he had worked up there. Whether it still is like that, I couldn’t tell you. It seemed to me to be the right thing to watch as Kleinsee sits on the edge of the diamond fields that belong to De Beers mining. Years ago I visited Kleinsee when De Beers owned the area and had to have a permit and be escorted to see the seal colony along the coast. The whole area was considered Sperrgebiet, forbidden territory. De Beers no longer mines around Kleinsee although still owns the diamond fields north of the town.
Here I would be remiss if I did not tell you some of the history of De Beers. The company was first formed by two Dutch brothers Diederik and Arnoldus De Beer in the eighteen hundreds. They had a farm called Vooruitzig that ultimately became the hole in Kleinsee. In 1871 the British Government forced them to sell their farm to merchant Alfred J. Ebden.
Cecil John Rhodes started off renting water pumps when the Star of Africa 83.5 carat diamond was found in Hopetown that started a diamond rush. Rhodes purchased small claims and he and Barney Barnato merged their small companies expanding them into De Beers Consolidated Mining Company in 1888. Alfred Beit and London based Rothchild & Sons bank financed the new company. They agreed to the London based Diamond Syndicate’s suggestion of control and stabilization of the diamond industry giving them control of all mining in South Africa.
Alfred Beit was suspected of price fixing, trust fund misuse and of not releasing any industrial diamonds to the United States during World War two. In 1925 Ernest Oppenheimer a British and then South African immigrant founded Anglo American consolidating a global monopoly.
Before leaving, De Beers buried their landrovers with earth moving equipment, closed and did the same to the swimming pool, only the bowling club remains in disrepair. There are a good few tales about the days when they were here. All personnel had to go through a strict security procedure when leaving the Sperregebiet and their cars were left outside too. There is a lovely tale of a scheme to liberate some diamonds. Springbok had a pigeon racing club so some miners asked De Beers if they could start one. Diamonds were loaded on the pigeons that flew the smuggled stones out to the Pigeon Club in Springbok. Unfortunately the smugglers overloaded one and he battled to fly so alighted in front of the Post Office in the Sperregebiet. The post mistress investigated and discovered the diamonds. That was the end of that scheme.
I pass the small shopping centre that has a little grocery shop and a liquor store and Max’s shop. He is a Bangladeshi and carries anything from a needle to an anchor. The car park never has more than 4 or five cars at any one time. The road goes down towards the golf club and I take the right turn, another right and am at Susan’s house, one of the many mine houses that abound, some empty. The larger ones were for the mine managers.
Susan rents one of these houses, plain but roomy with three bedrooms all with high ceilings for the heat, lounge dining room, kitchen, scullery, large grounds with a fig tree, a pomegranate tree and guava tree in the back yard. Plenty of space for her and her housemate, Ricky’s dogs. Ricky is the son of my great friend Joy Bianchi who now lives in the UK. Joy was born in the Isle of Wight and came out to Zambia when she was seventeen. She met the charming Con Bianchi who worked on the mines whose twinkling eyes captivated her. They lived in the bush there and this young woman had four children in next to know time. Later they moved to Botswana which was where I met her.
Fifi, Susan’s dog is a mixed greyhound with lovely markings. Fifi came up to Susan one day when she was at the shopping centre and would not leave her. There was something wrong with her legs and the vet in Springbok told Susan that the dog had been kept in a cage too small for her. She has grown into a lovely animal and there is nothing wrong with her legs now. Ricky has rather plump Jack Russel type bitches. They were only too happy to welcome handsome Jack. I was amazed that Jack knew exactly where we were when I pulled up at the gate. I was 4 years since we had last been there. He jumped out and greeted Susan with a wriggling body and a wagging tail before doing the same to Ricky and ‘the girls’.
I had arrived at ‘wine time’ so I quaffed dry white while Susan had a gin and tonic. We chatted up a storm about family and her four children. Jaques, her eldest is married now to a delightful lass, Danielle. They have opened a new branch of the events company they worked for in Cape Town so I am seeing quite a bit of them. Shaun the second eldest is in Australia working on wind turbines and is off to Chile shortly. Michele is in Botswana running a lodge in the Okavango delta and Ryan is in Cape Town working for the same outfit as Jacques and Danielle. Hard to accept that they are all so grown up when I remember how I dragged them through Southern Africa as children but they enjoy telling the tales.
After a couple of glasses and our pepper steak pies from Pofadder I had a lie down. The bed in my bedroom looks straight out at the passage. I propped up my pillows intending to read but looked up to see a figure of a woman in dark clothes walk down the passage, disappear and walk down once more. This was no surprise to me as having had one grandmother who was born in Cornwall and the other Irish I have been ‘fey’ from a young age. Susan says there are many ghosts in Kleinsee.
Susan works as the barmaid at the Golf Club and Ricky runs the bar at the Angling Club on the coast. They have a friendly rivalry going as to who has the most customers! So Jack could run on the beach in front of the Angling Club each day and have another run on the golf greens. I enjoyed taking Jack to the Angling Club, having a midday glass of wine or two with Ricky interspersed with walks on the beach that is covered with broken black mussels with their insides a lovely blue. We collected some small round stones for my friend Heather to put around her pots in her small garden.
I watched rugby at the Golf Club one Saturday when the Springboks were playing and a group of Nama youngsters were on holiday from boarding school in Springbok. They were quaffing beers and cheering the ‘Boks’ on. In the end Rudi, the owner of the pub reprimanded them sternly and they obediently quietened down. The local Nama people are a peaceful bunch and very friendly. Both pubs are patronized by the locals but different groups, each has its characters. One of these is Q who launches his boat from the slipway at the Angling Club. A good looking guy with a naughty eye, he breeds oysters and then puts them into the ocean to develop.
Abalone is also bred but within the diamond fields and unfortunately I could not visit the site due to security. Q very kindly brought three dozen oysters for Susan and I. They were large, fresh and juicy but I could only manage six. I never discovered his full name.
Ricky was friends with a couple of private pilots who had a Piago Albatross at the airfield left behind by De Beers. This is a twin engined long range aircraft with a range of 2,130 km designed and built by Piago Aero in Italy. South Africa ordered 20 of these planes and they were used to patrol the coast of the country. Several were based at Langebaan Airforce Base and in fact my daughter-in-law Maud’s father who served in the Airforce flew them.
The plane takes four passengers and Ricky, Susan and I were joined by Gino, a fellow Kleinsee resident. We flew over the coast, the pilot dipping his wing to reveal this forbidding coastline with sharp rocks, inland an arid expanse of semi desert with dunes of grys. These dunes are the remains of clean dunes that have been worked for diamonds. They have huge holes among them that Susan says the diamond workers dread having to work in with the huge dunes above threatening them and the insufferable heat.
Truly a forbidding coast that is the graveyard of many a ship one, not long ago where all hands were saved by De Beers helicopters. We then passed the seal colony, the animals quite spread out along the beach before turning inland again over the diamond fields and finally landing back at the airstrip. A trip that was the highlight of my stay.
One day at the Golf Club I met Susan’s friend Ush, an illicit diamond digger. He was sporting a broken arm from running away from the police. Ush is an Ovambo and he told me something about himself. Ovamboland is in Northwest Namibia and Ush’s real name is Inenkela that means trust. Ush trained as a driver and was employed by transport firms one of which was owned by a Diamond mining company. Ush learnt a lot about diamonds and ultimately decided to dig for himself. He has a house in Port Nolloth where his daughter stays with him. He told me that the best gems are to be found in the estuaries.
Well these parts have always thrown up characters of note. Susan has a friend who shall not be named and was very shy of having his photo taken. He pulled a jacket over his head! He it was on greeting me remarked “Wow! you have clothes on!” I must admit the last time I was there I had my birthday celebrations at the Angling Club and was dared to strip! I compromised by taking off my top and baring my boobs to the Atlantic! These days my boobs have moved south after long stays in hospital! No more escapades like that!
Three weeks flew by and Jack and I were headed back home retracing our steps with lots to write about and many a tale to tell.
Molly's Musings On Life And Travel 