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Article - When the windmill vanished… Eve Hemming
As a child reared on a Freestate farm on the Lesotho border, windmills were my symbolic edifices – they loomed high, were stalwart and rotated hypnotically. They brought water to the surface, glinted in the sunlight and offered some sort of omnipotent benevolence.
We’re back in South Africa for a brief visit and my windmills come to mind. They’re my Eiffel Tower, my Sydney Opera House, my Auckland Sky Tower.
We arrive after a marathon journey, fatigued and grimy after hours in transit. The desire to soak in a bath beckons. Now 28 hours later, it’s still effectively the same day, having flown from east to west.
It’s all so de ja vous– the evening bustle at the airport in Durban – stepping out into a humid autumn night, taxis hooting and the mesmerising sounds of an African language. We’ve climbed though Alice in Wonderland’s looking glass – and with astonishment plummeted down the rabbit hole back into Africa.
Here we are, bathed and sipping coffee with family, as though we’ve never been away. The familiar sounds are welcoming – we wake to the shriek of the primeval Hadeda and later listen to the soothing coo of doves, reminiscent of my Freestate childhood.
It’s astonishingly effortless being lulled back into a state of near ecstasy; the indolent sun shedding its rays across a late afternoon garden. We nibble Biltong, because no other Biltong’s quite as good. And sip a mellow Cape Merlot, its vintage ironically pre-dating our immigration.
We eat out with family and friends at favourite haunts. Wherever we go we bump into old buddies, colleagues and acquaintances. Folk tell me, ‘Hey, we miss your articles in the paper…’ It’s a sharp reminder that in Auckland one can walk the length of a shopping mall and possibly only bump into one acquaintance. Here it’s someone in every shop – folk way back from school or whom I studied or taught with.
A family weekend in a Berg cottage snuggled below Rhino’s Horn caresses my soul into a state of euphoria. The mountains, sky scape, customary sounds and odours taunt me. A soft breeze whips my hair across my face. I close my eyes and imbibe faraway sounds and breathe in Africa’s essence. I want the moment to freeze and to eclipse it into my momentary eternity.
We enjoy an idyllic few days at the coast – bathing in the Indian Ocean; drifting in the swells, feeling transported back to the past; almost as though the beatific new life in New Zealand was a mere ethereal dream. We listen to the waves crashing on glacial rock, which reinforces the antiquity of this continent. And from my window I gaze at the stooped coral tree, its sharp orange blooms emblazoned against the shimmering azure backdrop and I drink in each precious moment.
Some ghastly reminders impinge on what’s otherwise my momentary metaphorical heaven. I reflect from my room with its resplendent view. I watch my sun- kissed grandchildren splashing in a tub under the shade of the tree. I hear their joyful banter.
On our arrival we received news that a dear friends’ son was senselessly killed in a high jacking in Johannesburg the same day that our plane touched down there. It’s one too many when one has insufficient fingers to count the names of innocent folk one knows, who’ve been murdered.
And whilst I floated in the waves under a balmy African sun, I’d already almost erased this tragedy from my conscious mind, was playing contortionist mind games about how I could clone myself, so as to stay with my beloved S.A.family, whilst also returning to my equally precious N.Z. family… But a moment later it was again reinforced. We bump into old friends on the water’s edge. They’d recently been high jacked, had three vehicles stolen, and their son had been attacked and ‘cleaned out.’ And now their fences and cattle are stolen on a regular basis. It’s reminiscent of J.M Coetzee’s satire, Disgrace, in which a woman, violated and impregnated from a violent rape refuses to budge from her land… Then the other day their neighbour’s entire windmill vanished – dismantled and removed in the dead of night for scrap metal. Gone was my African emblem…
It highlighted for me the paradox of our land – its agony and ecstasy. Its profundity magnetically draws one back, like the moon’s tug on the waves, but the waves ruthlessly lash against and erode away at the landscape, where violence has insidiously become ingrained.
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