‘If a man wants to live here,” said Oom Joos Combrink thoughtfully, “he must live upon stones.” He kicked the earth with his velskoens. “In the Marico we take sustenance from stones. Our roots are wrapped around stones. One day when the good Lord sees fit to punish our sins and withhold the rain until even the grass leaves to find an easier home, we will have stones to eat.”
If that sounds melodramatic in English, in Afrikaans it sounded like the audible voice of the veld, the voice you hear below the slow hum of bumblebees and the soft rasp of acacias scratching the blue sky as you lie in the shade of a withaak tree, waiting for midday to pass. Beneath the stillness of the Marico is a deep, persistent voice, and it seemed to me that it spoke with the tongue of Oom Joos Combrink.
Oom Joos’s farm lies down a long track winding between maroelas and citrus groves. In the yard, Marico dogs chase each other round a lemon tree while ducks and puffed-up turkeys watch from the slim shade of a stone shed. Oom Joos slapped the walls of the farmhouse, built of russet-coloured stones bound with hard Marico clay. “It’s hard to farm a place with little to offer but stones and the sun,” he said, drawing thoughtfully at his pipe, “but I would rather have the Marico’s stones and sun than all the fortunes of the world.”
The hamlet of Groot Marico lies north-west of Johannesburg, past Swartruggens and Koster, hours by car, lifetimes in the imagination. The Marico region stretches northwards, following the green valley of the Marico river, a tributary of the Limpopo. It stretches up over Zeerust, past Nietverdiend, Zwingli, over the crocodile-spine of the Dwarsberg to the Botswana border. It’s a hard land with a haunting beauty that burns itself into the back of your eye so that you still see its moods and images days after you have left, as though you have been staring too long into the sun.
Herman Charles Bosman came to the Marico in 1926 to teach at a small farmschool at Heimweeberg. He stayed only six months but carried away with him enough of the stuff of life to sustain nearly 150 precisely crafted stories. For Bosman, the Marico was a place of half-heard voices and echoes and strange figures under the new moon; a patient land older than time which cannot be surprised and which has already seen all that humans are capable of.
I asked Johann Moolman, former Johannesburg lecturer in fine art and now Groot Marico’s resident sculptor, what brought him here. He looked at the shadows moving beneath the trees. “There are old spirits here,” he said. “The Marico forces new values upon you. They come up out of the earth.”
Moolman’s old spirits are not only the shades of early boers, who first started settling about 1815. The Marico is studded with koppies and sheer rises of scrub and stone – high on the crown of many of these, invisible from below, are the ruins of stone kraals. Kaditswene, high in the nearby Enzelsberge, was the largest iron age settlement south of the Limpopo. In 1820 it held a population of 20 000 Bahurutshe, renowned as stone masons and smelters of iron and copper.
I asked Combrink about the ruins. He sipped his mampoer and winced contemplatively. “Some say it was the Setswana who first made them. Some say the Matabele, on their way north.”
He poured another tumbler and eyed it appreciatively. “I once met a man in the bioscope at Zeerust who told me the Chinese built them, long ago.”
He poured me another tumbler and I eyed it apprehensively. “The Chinese?” I said.
“You can never tell with Chinese,” said Combrink. After another mampoer I was ready to agree. Of course, we weren’t drinking Oom Joos Combrink’s home-distilled citrus mampoer, made in the old boer tradition with a sturdy still of copper pipes and wooden casks and plastic vats. Combrink doesn’t make mampoer, because he doesn’t have a licence to do so, so to make it and drink it would be illegal. Which is sad because, says Oom Joos, “Good mampoer is made by the law of the Bible, not the law of the land.”
So we didn’t stand in the Marico sun, sipping Oom Joos’s mampoer, and then we didn’t retire to the stoep and sit on a riempie stool and drink and watch the land change complexion. But if we had, no doubt a strange sensation would have crept over me: a sensation of becoming one with the grass and the trees and the sun falling heavy on the koppies, momentarily becoming a motionless part of this hot, hard piece of Africa.
There’s an official mampoer industry in Groot Marico, with commercial distilleries and tours for visitors, but for the real mampoer, and the real flavour of drinking it, you must sit with an old-fashioned moonshiner and punish yourself in the leopard-coloured stillness of the afternoon. If you can find an old-time moonshiner, of course. Which I couldn’t. In the distance I heard Oom Joos’s voice: “If a man wants to live here, he must become a little like a stone himself.”
Mampoer is as unflinching as the men who make it. It’s nature boiled down to its essence, and its essence is 75 percent alcohol. Mampoer makes no promises and tells no lies, and that is as it is in the Marico. It is a land that generates legends and stories, but although they may not be facts, the stories are never untrue.
The Marico is a place of contradictions that tell a truth. It is a place where the locals welcome visitors with astonishing warmth, but where – as a lonely young man complained that night in the hotel bar – it is possible to live for 15 years without being accepted as a local. It’s a place where Flori-Anne Esterhuyzen made me a guinea-fowl pie in a wood-burning oven, but where andalusite is mined to provide material for the space shuttle. It’s home to Johan van As, the local NGK dominee who’s also webmaster of the official Groot Marico website, and to Egbert van Bart, who lives in a house without electricity and stood with me under a star-choked night sky, pointing out Magellanic clouds and explaining what a pulsar is.
You cannot understand the Marico in a weekend. I didn’t even have time to meet Oom Piet Roets, the whip-maker, or hike to where Egbert saw a leopard walk out of the tall grass, or to swim in the clear, deep waters of the Eye of the Marico. I wanted to stay, but as I drove away under a silver moon, the Marico smiled, as it always has at human whimsy and high ideals. It has seen people like me, in various disguises, come and go.
Because I am not, in the end, like a stone.
Sunday Independent, June 2001
