Walking Back to Happiness…

December 3, 2022 / stidyatkusane / 4 Comments

: If you are in a bad mood go for a walk, if you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk.”-Hippocrates

I can feel the sun on my back, already warm as toast, as I set out through the farm gate following the road that leads down to the protea field and then past the tall pines where a clamorous row of black crows are having a huge argument over which direction to fly. I know in a general way where I am headed and what I will most likely encounter along the way although each day always brings its subtle differences. I don’t, normally, wonder too deeply about my motivations for doing what I am doing. Going for a walk is just something I do and enjoy. I find it healing. Outdoor therapy. It helps me to think. It is my form of meditation. If I am feeling down in the dumps it gets me – mostly – back on the right track.

There are no limits to where I walk. I am quite happy to keep exploring the same patch of ground because over time you develop a sense of intimacy with it that comes from an accumulation of particular observations. Likewise, there is a special fascination in testing one’s expectations in less familiar backgrounds. The important point, I think, is to be able to relish both the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The habit of walking manifested itself at a very early age. When I was about three years old my father, an airline pilot with a yen for country life, decided to relocate us from our house in the then Salisbury (now Harare) to a smallholding in Umwindsidale, about thirty kilometres outside town. He chose to call our new home “Dovery” after the crooning Cape Turtle Doves that were such a feature of the place. For me, their call remains one of Africa’s most beautiful, evocative and comforting sounds.

My main memory of the property is the view which was spectacular. From our front verandah, we looked over an open stretch of land, extensively cultivated, along whose edges the Umwindsi (now Mvinzi) River flowed, its path marked by an outline of dark green. Beyond this fertile plain stretched a further succession of hills and valleys, blue and hazy, each one becoming successively paler, in turn, as they rose to meet the sky. From an early age, I liked to create worlds of my own, in which I could slip away unnoticed and undisturbed and the countryside that surrounded our home provided plenty of places where I could do just that.

*Umwindsi (Mvinzi) river with my brothers and sister. I am on the left*.

The Umwindsi was a lovely little rivulet that tumbled and crawled and blundered its way through a network of rocks, roots and tall shady trees. For a young child, it was a magical place and I spent a lot of time adventuring up and down it, playing in the pools and exploring its secret places to see what lay hidden there.

It was also the ideal preparation ground for our next grand adventure – a move to a remote farm at the northern extreme of the Nyanga mountain range.

The farm occupied a broad stretch of land, mostly valley but bordered on two sides by mountains. Jutting out from the main range were several castellated buttresses which stood like imperious guardians, mute witnesses to the goings on below. Along the floor of the valley stretched miles of grassland with woody patches, winding rivers which fed into one another and soft hills inset with elephant-coloured boulders, many covered with old stone walls, left behind by some forgotten people. Over it hung the intense blue sky of Africa.

*The Old Dutch Settlement Road, Nyanga. Our farm was at the end of the range*.

The land on our farm hadn’t been worked for many years and felt wild and untamed. At the night the wind would howl down from the mountains and the very air seemed to seethe with phantoms, both good and bad. They whispered to me as I lay in my bed with only a flickering candle, on the table next to me, to keep the shadows at bay. In the moonlight, the whole landscape beyond my window seemed to possess a strange alchemy all of its own, a spirit ancient and impassive permeating the land.

My brother Pete, bird-watching on Muchena Mountain…

There was much to discover and endless opportunities for exploration. Most mornings when the sky was clean and ready for whatever lay ahead I would set out into the wilderness to see what I could find. I learnt to watch, wonder and recognise all the landmarks: the curves in the road, the shape of the hills, the twists and turns of the mountain streams, the outlines of the fields, the size and weird contortions of the baobab trees. No horizon seemed too far away. The more I saw, the more the place insinuated its way into my soul. It deepened my love for Africa. Sometimes I would go with my elder brother Pete – an avid birder even back then – mostly I would go on my own with just the farm dogs for company. My memory of these walks and the years on the farm have never left me.

It wasn’t just at home that I walked. Bastions of robust sportsmanship, all three of the boarding schools I attended -REPS in the Matopos, Plumtree on the Botswana border and UBHS in the Eastern Highlands – encouraged healthy outdoor activities, seeing it as an essential element in character-building. Most weekends would find me exploring the surrounding countryside.

*On the summit of Cecil Kop, Umtali (now Mutare). I am in the middle. My brother Pete is on the left and my friend Stu Taylor is on the right.*

Eventually, the idyll came to an end. My life took a turn for the worse. Bad replaced good. War broke out. I got called up.

As an ordinary foot soldier in the army, I got to do a great deal of walking although most of it was not voluntary or even pleasant. Having bullets and mortar bombs whizz past me didn’t add to the enjoyment.

Getting shot at or mortared was not the only thing which occupied my mind patrolling in the stupefying heat of the Zambezi valley. On foot in Africa, one will sooner or later have a hair-raising experience with a wild animal. Of them all, I think it was the lone Black Rhino I was most scared of. To have one suddenly come crashing through the bushes is not an experience I want to repeat too often although I had my fair share of scrapes with this cantankerous character.

Still, the army toughened me up, got me superbly fit and introduced me to some wonderful new scenery so I mustn’t grumble.

The Rhodesian Bush War finally dragged on to its inevitable conclusion. I got discharged. Like all wars, the conflict marked our lives. It left a lasting legacy. In my case, I don’t think I emerged from it suffering from Post Combat Stress Syndrome or anything as dramatic or personality-changing as that. Still, it did leave me with a vague sense of melancholy, restlessness and an inability to settle down. Unsure what to do, the horizons seemed to close in around me. I felt trapped and constricted.

Bored stiff with my office job in the Mining Commissioner’s office in Gweru, I resigned and moved onto my parent’s new farm at Battlefields, near the Midlands town of Kadoma. Needing time to think, I walked and walked. By the end of it, there was hardly an inch of the farm I didn’t know. Walking had, once again, become my solace, my cure. It also made me realise it was time to move on. To go somewhere new. To start my life again in a place where I wasn’t surrounded by the constant reminders of the futility of what I had been through.

And so I packed my bags and moved to South Africa. With me went my nostalgia for landscape which I quickly transferred to my new surroundings. I set about exploring the country. I went on birding expeditions to Marakele, Mapungubwe, Kruger and the Richtersveld. I trundled through the Little Karoo and Baviaanskloof. I walked on the Wild Coast to the sound of crashing breakers. With my sister, the artist Sally Scott, and her family I made countless trips to the Drakensberg. We slept in caves, hiked along numerous mountain trails and plunged into icy rivers.

The Drakensberg had a different feel from the mountains I had grown up amongst in Nyanga. Higher, more precipitous, austere, jagged, cold and with fewer trees they were inhabited by a different set of gods and mountain deities. I loved it all the same. Climbing them, I always felt I had risen above the material plane and entered another, more enchanted, realm. The scenery and views left me breathless.

*Mont-aux-Sources, Drakensberg, with my nephew Craig Scott*.

When I wasn’t out walking, I worked as a political cartoonist in Pietermaritzburg. As I got older, I grew increasingly disenchanted with city living. Some friends suggested I move up to their farm, high on a hill overlooking the Karkloof Valley. Viewed through the soft, filtered light of the swirling mist, there was something dream-like about its beauty; my heart was immediately smitten with delight. I accepted.

*The Karkloof Valley*. The view from our farm.

Moving into the country changed the shape of my life. It helped renew my sense of deep connection with the natural world. I spent many happy hours tramping over a familiar circuit of paths, seldom meeting a single person en route. Revelling in the sense of discovery and freedom that comes with this, I developed an increasingly close and intimate relationship with the local flora and fauna. However, nature still managed to spring surprises on me.
Lockdown came. I had always thought that the advances in modern medicine would provide a solution for everything but Covid, at least initially, proved me wrong. The virus transported us all back to the fear-ridden, helpless days of the Great Plague. It reminded us of just how vulnerable we still are and demonstrated that we are still at the mercy of the whims of nature.

Over the next two years my life – like many others – took on a slightly surreal aspect. As part of the locked-down community, I found the days blurring together. Whether it was Monday or Friday came to hold no interest for me. Alone in the house, isolated from the world, I lived in silence and solitude, with only the sound of birdsong, the whistle of a reedbuck, the howl of a jackal and the croaking frogs to sustain me. When I went to town, which was not often, I talked through a mask to other people wearing masks. It felt a little weird and dehumanising at first but I got used to it.

The national confinement stretched on through the months that followed with intermittent breaks. In the end, I learnt to get used to a world with little direct communication, so much so that I almost began to prefer it that way. Again, it was my walks which brought me the most relief, gave meaning to my life, helped me feel less trapped and provided me with a sense of quietude which conquered despair. I was lucky living in the country because the people living in town weren’t permitted to go beyond their front gates whereas I had our entire farm to roam over.

*Heading out*…*Pic courtesy of Craig Scott*.

If you had to ask me then why I walk so much, I would have to concede that – apart from the obvious health benefits – it stems back to a longing to be the boy I once was, innocent again and seeing the world for the first time. My walks remind me of a more carefree period of my life. More than that, though, they have become part of a growing awareness of myself, an increasing reflectiveness and a developing sense of my place in the world and the environment. It nourishes my sense of self-sufficiency. It makes it easier to exist in these tumultuous times.

Time has, of course, dissipated some of my innate restlessness but while I still have the energy in my legs and air in my lungs I intend to keep walking…

Counting my Blessings on Longclaw Lane

June 19, 2021June 19, 2021 / stidyatkusane / 6 Comments

“How sweet I roam’d from field to field,

And tasted all the summer’s pride,

‘Til I the prince of love beheld,

Who in the sunny beams did glide.”

William Blake

To say we have had little to cheer about over the last few years would be an understatement. As a political cartoonist, whose jobs involves trawling through the daily news headlines looking for somebody or something to lampoon, I can safely vouch for this. Faced with the endless litany of woes – climate change, Covid-19, lockdown, a collapsing economy, state capture, rampant crime, decaying municipalities, crumbling infrastructure and corrupt, venal, and singularly inept politicians – it is often very difficult to see the funny side of it all.

In my doubting mind, it sometimes feels like I will never escape the dark shadows closing in on me on all sides.

But there is hope even if it is fleeting and ephemeral. A country mouse at heart, I continue to search for and find solace in nature and simple delights. Don’t get me wrong! I am well aware that my love affair with the wilderness may not be reciprocated and that it includes a degree of anthropomorphism, the great bogey of science.

That doesn’t stop it from having meaning for me. I see no need to expunge these feelings from my interaction with nature.

I don’t have to go far to look for this alternative world. Since I moved up to Kusane Farm and started planting lots of indigenous trees and bushes and flowering shrubs – my contribution to saving the planet– I have gathered a flourishing population of birds and other wildlife in my garden.

Every morning the Village Weavers gather in noisy, scraggly groups at the bird feeder. They are, in turn, joined by several varieties of sparrow, pigeons and doves. Plus, in summer, the very tiresome, testosterone-loaded male Pin-tailed Whydah who makes a nuisance of himself by trying to drive all the other birds away from the food table – just so he can claim it for his wife (in winter he loses his beautiful plumage and his stroppy attitude and becomes a submissive little nobody you barely notice).

As part of my daily routine, I also put out a little grated cheese on a rock that brings in the Red-winged Starlings, the Cape Robin, the Cape Wagtail, the Southern Boubous, the Black-capped Bulbul, the Olive Thrush and the Speckled Mousebirds. In winter, I sometimes add a little Jungle Oats porridge to go along with it, just to warm them up.

The news about the easy pickings has swiftly spread and other birds have started pulling into my roadhouse. A much-welcomed newcomer has been the Sombre Greenbul. Its name is something of a mystery to me for its call (described by SASOL Birds of Southern Africa as “a piercing ‘weeeewee’, followed by a liquid chortle…”) is one of the most cheerful you will hear. Colour-wise it is perhaps a little on the drab side but no more so than a host of other dull-coloured birds. Preferring to call from deep within the canopy of a tree, it is a bird you hear more often than see.

It has been joined in recent months by a Dusky Flycatcher, a tiny bird with the typical flycatcher behaviour of making short dashes up into a cloud of gnats or other flying insects before returning to its favourite perch. Endearingly happy little characters they can, over time, become quite tame.

The large corrugated-iron barn I live in has also provided the right sort of habitat for a host of other birds to call home. In the cold weather, the Rock Pigeons like to sit and warm themselves on the pipes that lead to the solar panel and geyser on the roof (they also nest in the rafters). Wagtails strut past them, tails endlessly bobbing. The sparrows make a home in all the nooks and crannies. In summer our resident pair of Greater-striped Swallows like to sit on the railings and twitter away, especially just before they are about to undertake their perilous journey North.

For the last three seasons, I have also had an Amethyst Sunbird nesting on the Air Plant which hangs on my balcony. I feel a distinct sense of triumph that it has elected to live and raise its family with me. I like to think of it as a blessing from the gods, a portent of happiness (that’s me getting all anthropomorphic again!)

The beautiful Malachite Sunbird is the other common sunbird in my garden, especially in winter when the aloes I planted are in bloom. This dashing, shiny bird often chooses to sit on some prominent point from where it twitters happily away while keeping a sharp eye out for any rival male which it will quickly chase off.

My birding is not, of course, confined to the garden. I have several particular patches of ground I like to visit regularly throughout the year.

Today, I elect to head down the familiar route that takes me through our front gate and past the house with the gumtrees and horde of barking dogs. At the next gate, I come to, just past the cattle crush and sorting pens, I take an abrupt left turn down Nicholson Highway. Despite the name we have bestowed on it, is not a highway, just a nondescript, muddy, farm road that leads through a large, cow-inhabited, rectangular field to a slightly better maintained road on the other side.

*Going for a stroll down Nicholson Highway.*

The big field slopes upward, South to North, from the old stone wall built by the Italian POWs during WW2 for purposes unknown – other than giving them something to do, I suppose. At the top of it, one has a breathtaking view over the entire Karkloof Valley with its regularised grid of big fields, forests and dams. The very distinctive, leonine-shaped Loskop and the purple-tinged Karkloof hills provide a suitably dramatic backdrop to this ever pleasing vista.

The Field, looking South with mist drifting in.

There are subtle changes here, every day and every season. Close your eyes in summer and you could almost imagine you are in Ireland because of all the vibrant greens, low scudding clouds and mysterious mists. In winter, when the fields are covered in stubble and the colours are more subdued, there is a stark, minimalist beauty to the landscape.

As I enter the field, via Nicholson Highway, I scan the grass with my binoculars. A bird flies up calling, a plaintive, drawn-out ‘wheeee…’ It is the appropriately named Wailing Cisticola. A little further on I see another Cisticola. A smaller one with a slightly fanned-out tail. It is known as the Zitting (formerly Fantailed) Cisticola because – you guessed it – of the ‘zit’ it makes at the crest of each undulation during its display flight…

It is open country here and – I suspect because the cattle who sometimes graze here provide good manure – the grass is longer and more luxuriant than our wiry, unpalatable, stuff next door. Because of this, it has become a haven for grass-loving species. They like it because it has ground cover and it has food.

My alternate name for Nicholson Highway is Longclaw Lane because this is very much their kind of country (the Yellow-throated is our common Longclaw). The bird’s plaintive, fugitive call, as it lifts into the sky, always sets my veins a-tingle. Likewise, several varieties of the Pipit have staked their claim along the road. I have seen both African and Plain-backed on many occasions.

Widely but locally dispersed across South Africa, the Secretary Bird makes the odd stop-over in the field. Taking its name from the long, quill-like, feathers protruding from its head, the Secretary bird is, in fact, an eagle with very long legs. It puts these legs to good use. My battered old copy of Roberts Birds of South Africa describes this succinctly: “After landing runs for some distance with wings outstretched. Snakes are attacked with violent blows from the feet while the wings are held outspread as a shield. Great care is taken to make certain the snake is dead before it is swallowed, whole if it is small...”

In the past, the field has yielded some other surprises. Bustards are very shy and wary, so it is a privilege to encounter them anywhere in the wild. You can imagine my excitement, then, when I came across not one but THREE Denham’s Bustard, feeding in the upper end of the field. The Denham’s is the second-largest bustard in South Africa (prime honours go to the Kori Bustard, the largest flying bird in the world) and is listed as NEAR THREATENED.

Cranes are equally rare across the world so I also consider myself lucky to have seen all three of the South African species (the Wattled, the Grey-crowned and the Blue), at various times, here. They are special. Stately, regal and a little otherworldly, their elegant courtship rituals are one of the great wildlife spectacles.

Having made a mental count of all the birds I have seen so far, I continue down the winding road until it comes to a T Junction. On the opposite side, in a paddock, a couple of horses are being put through their paces at the local riding academy. Another noisy dog lives here too. A big black one. We didn’t hit it off when we first met so I prefer to avoid it.

I accordingly turn and follow the fence line down to a farm dam (and away from the big, black dog). The grease-gleen of the early morning sunlight glitters romantically on its water, as three dabchicks create patterned artworks as they swim away from me towards the far shore. A large White-breasted Cormorant lifts itself out of the water and flaps noisily off. The Blacksmith Plovers, I saw earlier, are now patrolling the edge of the water. As soon as they see me they give their characteristic loud, ringing, metallic ‘tink, tink, tink’ alarm call, from which they derive their name.

They don’t seem to want me around either. They are not alone in their antipathy.

On the far side, partly concealed in the long grass, a pair of male reedbuck follow my movements with worried eyes. An uninvited intruder in their private domain, not wanting to scare them, I high tail it along the dam wall, hoping they won’t take fright. They retreat a little further up the inlet but don’t runoff.

There is another panoramic view from the wall, one that shows more dams and more fields full of hay bales and groups of contented cows grazing on the sloping hillside you look across to. In winter frost often clenches the ground below the wall, the relentless summer rain can turn it into a muddy quagmire in which animals get stuck.

Once over the wall, I follow the now faded path that leads back to our side of the field. The path used to lead to a farm shebeen on the next door property but that was closed down for security reasons.

Although now cropped low, the grass is still plentiful at this end of the field. At certain times of the year, there are eruptions of flowers amongst it which draw the insects in. Bees and flower-visiting wasps buzz about. Butterflies too. For three days, two-years ago, this area was alive with flickering wings as the annual midsummer migration of the thousands upon thousands of Brown-veined White Butterfly (also known as Pioneer Caper White) took place.

The distance these tiny creatures cover on this epic trek (depending on climatic conditions their numbers vary each year. This year it didn’t seem to happen or, if it did, I missed it) are mind-boggling. Starting on the cold shores of the South-west Cape, they fly as far as sub-tropical Mozambique.

Walking along the fire break that leads back home I keep my eyes peeled. I have seen Serval here twice before, returning home from a night out hunting. I don’t see one today but it doesn’t bother me. The fact they are so seldom spotted only adds to their mystery and allure.

For the rest, I am happy to just be wandering along this path, enjoying this small moment of fleeting time. Out here I can get a kind of feeling of belonging and recognition, a level of engagement, a sense of purpose, an appreciation of beauty that has absolutely nothing to do with the latest news stories or the world beyond these hills.

And for that, I feel blessed…

No Room for Slippage: Cartoons for September and October, 2020

December 5, 2020 / stidyatkusane / Leave a comment

In the face of a fierce and vitriolic fightback by the agents of corruption in the ANC, President Cyril Ramaphosa appeared to achieve a tactical victory at a meeting of the NEC with members finally committing to act against comrades accused of corruption. He now faced the challenge, however, to give effect to the resolution, no easy task in a party riddled by factionalism and internal power plays.

The Democratic Part (DA) wrapped up its annual policy conference by adopting numerous policies, including one that said race was not a proxy of disadvantage when dealing with issues of redress. This was followed by reports that the party risked yet another exodus of senior members after opening investigations against several leaders with the intention of charging them, while others were planning to leave because they were disillusioned with the direction the official opposition has taken.

Six months after lockdown measures were imposed, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the country would move to lockdown level 1 from Monday September 21. He also announced that an Economic Rescue Plan was being fast-tracked which was only to be expected given the contraction in the economy and the fact that the country was, by his own admission, now effectively bankrupt…

According to various sources, South African National Treasury officials reluctantly complied with orders to find funds to bail out the state airline, fearing they may erode the nation’s fiscal credibility. Finance Minister Tito Mboweni had long argued that the government can’t continue funding the national carrier, putting him at odds with the top leadership of the ruling ANC and Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan, who insist it must keep flying,

The high profile sweep on officials and businesspeople implicated in the R255 Million Free State asbestos audit deal scandal was universally welcomed because there has been an overwhelming perception among the public that thievery, as the modus operandi of the tenderpreneurs, would remain unchecked. According to opposition parties, however, the arrests marked just the tip of the iceberg and further investigations were needed to bring all those involved to book.

Meanwhile, the Evangelical Alliance of South Africa said that the practices at the KwaSizabantu – which involved allegations of human rights abuses and money laundering – were damaging to the reputation of other churches…

Msunduzi administrator Scelo Duma described the SAP financial system as “the Achilles heal of Msunduzi”. The top-of-the-range software package, installed in 2016 to integrate the management of finances, had already cost the municipality over R251 Million and had continued to be plagued with problems.

South Africa wouldn’t be able to meet its finance ministry’s debt targets and it may be undesirable for it to attempt to do so at a time when the economy is being battered by the fallout from lockdown, according to an advisory panel appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa. In a more than 100-page document advising the government on an economic recovery programme that Ramaphosa was due to unveil the Presidential Economic Advisory Council said spending cuts would hold back growth and have adverse consequences.

The news that Health Minister Zweli Mkhize and his wife May have tested positive for Covid-19 was a reminder that people are still vulnerable despite the diminishing rate of infection in South Africa. It was especially sobering considering what is happening in the US and Europe where infection rates have begun to soar again as part of the ‘Second Wave’ of the pandemic.

Tabling his mid-term budget Finance Minister Tito Mboweni stressed the country was in trouble and that something needed to be done. Acknowledging that there was “no room for slippage” he promised to put a break on expenditure and rein in civil service salaries – something that would have to be seen to be believed, given that he lost his SAA arguments and had been forced to extend a R10,5billion lifeline to the bankrupt national airline.

Smoothing Ruffled Feathers: The Charm of Chickens (and a small Dutch Quacker Duck)

August 29, 2020 / stidyatkusane / 8 Comments

Now that I look back on it, I see the one thing that has stopped me from sinking too deeply in to the Slough of Despond during the long, lonely, months of lockdown has been my chickens. At a time when the whole world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket, they have continued to provide me with a sense of normality, comfort and reassurance. Quite indifferent to the great human drama being played out around them they have stuck to their daily routines – eating, drinking, sleeping, fornicating, scratching around in the straw, attending to their ablutions, egg-laying, crowing, clucking – with cheerful insouciance.

In fact, you can take it from me: kooky, sassy, loveable and sometimes just plain hilarious, chickens make wonderfully entertaining companions. Chickens are cool! Chickens rock (why else would one of my favourite old British Blues groups call themselves Chicken Shack?)!

Okay, so they may lack some of the attributes and superior skills possessed by other members of the bird world. They are not as big and strong as an Ostrich. They are not as stately and graceful or have the elaborate courtship rituals of the Grey-crowned Crane. They can’t sing like a White-browed Robin-Chat, nor do they possess the exquisite beauty of Narina Trogon. They can’t suck nectar out of flowers while hovering like sunbirds. They can’t fly or dive as fast as a Peregrine (in fact they are downright clumsy aviators who should be prohibited from taking off unless in an emergency) and – unlike the fierce, regal, Eagle – you probably won’t find them featured on any countries’ coat of arms. Nor can I imagine any Roman legion marching in to battle with their standard bearer carrying a stylised replica of a chicken mounted on a metal pole.

On the other hand, they do do make excellent weather forecasters which is why you often find them positioned on top of wind vanes. Chickens have other virtues and talents that might have escaped your notice – they are easy-going, respond to kindness, produce high-quality garden fertiliser and have an unmatched ability to lay prodigious quantities of healthy, wholesome eggs.

A lot of folk think chickens are stupid, with beady eyes and pea-sized brains. That is not my opinion at all. In their domestic arrangements and social gatherings they are actually remarkably organised. Like humans, there is a clear-cut, ladder-like, social hierarchy with the ones on top enjoying clear advantages and special privileges denied to the others – like prime position at the food trough and first choice of roosting spot.

Proof that chickens have aesthetic sensibilities…

The order of dominance is usually established by one hen giving another hen a quick peck. Hence the term “pecking order” coined, back in 1921, by the Norwegian ornithologist Thorlief Schjrelderup-Ebbe, a man who spent a lifetime immersing himself in barnyard politics.

When you introduce new members to an existing flock they usually spend couple of days sizing each other up. Once they have worked out who fits in where, they live in surprising harmony thereafter. President Donald Trump could learn a few lessons from a chickens ability to accept strangers and integrate with one other.

*Top of the pecking order – Rowdy the Rooster.*..

Chickens form alliances and cultivate social networks. They learn who to avoid and who to cosy up to. They pick special individuals to sit close to. My two beautiful Bosvelder hens, for example, always roost together in the same spot every night. They are clearly very fond of each other, affectionately huddling together and clucking contentedly before falling asleep.

It is very easy to slip in to the anthropomorphic trap of attributing birds with human emotions but I do think they are capable of friendship, empathy and grief. And who cares if the scientists don’t agree with you or look with scorn on such misdirected displays of sentimentality? I sometimes think the boffins would benefit from getting away from their test tubes and cold laboratories and getting a little more romantic in their theories…

Of course, I am talking exclusively about hens here. Roosters are another matter altogether.

I actually have two chickens runs. The first is the domain of The Red Brigade – the descendants of the Rhode Island Reds who formed the nucleus of my original flock. The second belongs to The Motley Crew – the non- Rhode Island Reds (although a few Reds have infiltrated their ranks).

Originally each run had it own rooster but in the end the combined racket became more than I – and our guests – could stand. Roosters can be incredibly competitive in their attempts to outshout each other. The principle function of this non-stop crowing is, of course, the proclamation and defence of territory, as well as impressing their multitude of wives. More than that, they seem to take an aesthetic pleasure in their own performances, always looking immeasurably pleased with themselves after another ear-shattering outburst.

Vain, pompous and boastful – and definitely not as smart as their female counterparts – it is very easy to see why many authors have chosen to satirise human society by endowing roosters with human qualities. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest Tale, for example, the fox plays on Chanticleer the Rooster’s inflated ego and overcomes his instinct to run by insisting he would love to hear him crow, just as his amazing father did, standing on tip-toe with neck outstretched and eyes closed. Although he succumbs to this flattery, Chanticleer finally manages to outwit the fox by playing his own trick back on him.

Alas, Motley-Fool Too, the son of the original Motley Crew Bosvelder rooster, Motley-Fool One, was not nearly as crafty or as lucky as Chanticleer.

It happened like this. I had chosen to let the Motley Crew out to forage in the garden one glorious, sunny, afternoon. While all the hens were doing sensible hen-like things – hunting for seeds, chasing grasshoppers, pecking at invertebrates – Motley-Fool Too, as every bit as raucous as his late father, was staging his own concert under the Avocado Pear tree. Suddenly, there was an almighty commotion which cut him short right in the middle of what would turn out to be his Requiem to Himself…

By the time I got to where he had been standing, all that remained was a few fluttering feathers and a lingering cloud of dust demarcating the spot that Motley-Fool Too had just claimed as his own. After a search, Michael Ndlovu, our farm manager, found his lifeless body crumpled up in a nearby rock outcrop.

If I was a nature detective I would say the perpetrator of this violent crime was probably a Caracal as I have seen them around the chicken run before. Or maybe a Serval. We get them too. They like chickens in whatever shape or form they come.

Although he had plenty of good examples to learn from – including Maestro Rufus in the adjoining run and Nicholson’s noisy rooster, down the road, on the next door farm – Motley-Fool Too never quite mastered the signature Cock-a-Doodle-Do of his species. What we got instead was an abnormal, strangulated, high-pitched, almost unrecognisable version. Repeated again and again ad nauseum…

After Motley-Fool Too got himself snuffed out, in the very prime of his life, I often found myself wondering whether the culprit – whatever it was – found his hysterical banshee wailing as irritating as I did and decided to put a stop to them once and for all. Or maybe it just got sick and tired of Motley- Fool Too’s overweening vanity. Hubris and falls, and all that…

Having discovered a ready source of fast food, the predator kept returning to the scene of the crime putting my entire flock of some forty-odd hens and one remaining rooster in huge panic. This left me with no other choice but to place my chickens in Level Five lockdown, banning all movement outside their designated runs.

Unlike the late, unlamented, Motley-Fool Too, I must confess I have a real soft spot for Rufus the Rhode Island Red rooster, mostly because he is sufficiently comfortable in his own manhood not to feel the need to constantly assert himself (President Trump could learn from him too). Which means I get to sleep at night. He is also very protective of his harem. I approve of that too.

Holding up my end of the deal, I provide my little work-force of breakfast manufacturers with amusement as well as food. I relish my role as Chicken-Whisperer. It is very satisfying and helps keep me grounded, especially in the midst of the current anxiety. Way back in time – before the river of life started hitting all the jagged rocks and tree trunks and whirlpools and waterfalls – my parents handed me the responsibility of looking after their chickens. Thus there is a nice sense of continuity and coming home about what I am doing now. This is my heartland. I have returned to my farming roots.

Two of the hens in the Motley Crew run were acquired in rather unusual circumstances. My sister, a Social Anthropologist living in Mpumalanga, had been invited to attend a Xhosa ritual in Grahamstown. As part of her contribution to it, she purchased two bush hens from a seller on the side of the road, just outside Mbombela. While she was overnighting with me they laid two eggs. I decided to put them in the incubator. Abracadabra – 21days later out hatched two chicks who I promptly named Penny and Susan.

Like my sister, I can not help but think they were a gift from the ancestors (I am sure my parents had a hand in the selection). They both grew up to be exceptionally good mothers, forever going broody, so whenever I want to hatch a clutch of eggs, in the natural manner, I invariably use them.

There is another oddity in my flock and that is Plucky-the-Duck-Who-Thinks-He- is-a-Chicken. How he came to be in my run is a story in itself – his was the only duck egg to hatch in an incubator full of hatching chicken eggs. Chicken is all Plucky has ever known and all he wants to be. A brief attempt to reunite him with his own kind ended in dismal failure (completely traumatised by the experience, he flew off and hid in the bush for 24-hours before making his way back to the chicken run. When we repeated the experiment, he did the same).

Plucky hero-worshipped our original rooster, the larger-than-life and boisterous Rowdy, and followed him around with all the devotion of a religious convert. He has kept a much lower profile, however, with his two successors, Randy and Rufus. I think he is a little wary of them or else he thinks they don’t have quite quite the same charisma.

Plucky went through a brief but rather trying period when his hormones suddenly got the better of him. He became obsessed with the idea of finding a mate with whom he could mate. In his case: a chicken mate.

He is at a serious disadvantage in this respect because, being a Dutch Quacker, he is much smaller than the hens. Undeterred, he waited until one hen was flapping around in a dust-bath and then leapt on her and had his wicked way. He also developed a hopeless crush on another hen, trailing around after her with a moonstruck look on his face. He even insisted on sharing the nesting box with her whenever she wanted to lay an egg, getting very excited when she did so.

*Plucky has his wicked way. Note hens look of utter humiliation…*

For her part the hen grew increasingly agitated with his unwanted affections. In the end Plucky began to make such a nuisance of himself I was forced put him in the other run to give his passion time to cool off. Luckily, it did…

As he has matured and grown older, Plucky has adapted a more fatherly, protective, proprietorial attitude towards the hens. As a long-serving member of the Parliament of Fowls, I think he now sees his role as that of an elderly senior statesman whose job is to lend a guiding hand. He takes his duties very seriously. As the sun is abdicating each day, he stands at the hen-house door and waits until he has been able to mark off every hen, as present and accounted for, before entering the chamber himself. Usually, with much pleased-as-punch quacking…

Despite the fact he is clearly not a chicken (but don’t tell him that!), the rest of the flock have accepted Plucky’s presence with equanimity and good grace. For his part, Plucky is quite content to go on living in his totally deluded state. I envy him that ability. Every night when I go to lock them up I see him huddled up happily amongst all his chicken pals.

Once again, they provide a shining example of interspecies bonding and acceptance of social diversity. Chickens may not be as intelligent as some other birds – crows for one – but flock life has propelled the evolution of bright, adaptable creatures, teaching them how to co-exist peacefully, smooth ruffled feathers, gauge the consequences of their own actions (apart from Motley- Fool Too), manage relationships, care for their young, and share their space.

*Chickens and Helmeted Guineafowl- no xenophobia here…*

Chickens may be descended from slow-witted dinosaurs but that doesn’t mean they haven’t adapted to varying circumstances or learnt a few tricks along the way. Happily ensconced in their cooperative colonies, fed and cared for by humans (although I am not sure I would want to be a battery hen), in some ways they are smarter and more tractable then we are…

…

Mind-travelling in Lockdown

August 15, 2020 / stidyatkusane / 8 Comments

If there is one thing lockdown has done it is to force us to redraw the parameters of our lives. Suddenly, everything has shifted, the familiar signposts have been removed, the old sense of continuity has gone. Instead, I am faced with the difficulty of navigating differences over such issues as the wearing of masks, social distancing, how much contact to have with others and whether I can risk eating out?

In short, every decision I make is weighted in moral ambiguity. Cast adrift from my usual moorings, I find myself torn between the need to stay safe and a desire to escape.

It is not the being alone that bothers me so much as having my freedom taken away from me. I have always been happy to embrace solitude provided it was on my terms. With lockdown that has all changed. Now it is being imposed by decree from above with the government taking increasing control over things and placing limits on our movements

While I can understand the need for some of them, being bogged down in this murky mire of regulations has bought out all my anti-authoritarian tendencies, as well as my fear of being trapped. Suddenly it is like I am back at boarding school where all the rules are designed with the naughty boys in mind. For example: because there are quite a few delinquent drinkers in south Africa, a blanket ban is imposed on alcohol sales which means all of us are collectively punished irrespective of own behaviour.

With the pandemic shrinking our horizons, my fear is finding myself confined to a cramped, parochial lifestyle. I worry about sliding in to passivity.

I have always lived a fairly nomadic life, ready to hit the road whenever I have felt that familiar build up of stress and anxiety, like a smoldering fire, inside me. I think this restlessness can be attributed, in part, to a childhood spent among the beautiful Nyanga mountains and a deep-rooted urge to retrieve that part of myself in a far-off place. Also, I like to feel I still have some control over my life. That I am able to exercise my skill in being free.

As lockdown progresses I have found myself fantasising about trips I want to make, as well as recalling some of the ones I have made in the past. I play them over and over again in my imagination, remembering bits I had forgotten.

I pour over my old AA maps planning possible new routes. I formulate plans which will probably never come to fruit. I look at photographs of trips I have made in the past. Because of the circumstance I now find myself in, their memory suddenly seems more precious than ever. There is a sadness too. In some cases the pristine places the photographs have captured are disappearing. Others I will never see again.

It is hard to pick a favourite journey but, if forced to do so, I would probably settle for the Great South African Traverse, I undertook in September, 2003, with my birding partner, Ken, just because of the sheer diversity of countryside we passed through.

Umhlanga Rocks, Indian Ocean. Pic courtesy of Mark Wing.

Wanting to do it by the book, we started off by dipping our feet in to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, at Umhlanga Rocks, and then drove across the breadth of South Africa and did the same in the freezing Atlantic, at Alexander Bay. Along the way we stopped at Vaalbos National Park near Kimberley and also at the Augrabies Falls.

I had never been to the Northern Cape before but the first thing that struck me about it was how straight and long and empty the roads are. Much of the landscape between Kakamas and Springbok is flat and featureless too but the N17 does take you through Pofadder which is a place I have always wanted to visit because of its quintessential South African name. There is not much to the town apart from all the huge communal nests of Sociable Weavers on either sides of it but I did buy a lump of rose quartz, in the local café, just to prove I had been there. I still have it.

The further west we drove the drier the countryside became and the fewer trees there were until, finally, we entered a landscape that consisted mostly of stones. This was the Richtersveld, South Africa’s only true desert – or rather mountain desert.

Wedged right up in the north-western most corner of the country along the border with Namibia it is a wondrous place, a truly mystical landscape of moulded, multi-coloured, rock and drifting sand. The sky is a strange intense blue, limitless and criss-crossed with lazy scrawls of thin, vaporous, cloud.

For our first few days we camped at Pokkiespram on the Orange River. It is an enchanting spot with the water idling languidly past while the mountains on either side rise up to naked peaks of rock.

Next on our itinerary was Kokerboomkloof. The road to it was marked on our map as 4X4 only but we decided to risk it in our small blue Ford sedan, heading up through the Helskloofpas – the name should have tipped us off as to what we could expect – in to Tatasberg mountains. We were probably foolish. It is not the sort of country you want to break down in because there is no water, no communications and you never know when the next traveller might chance along.

Also, our spare tyre had a puncture.

The road snaked its way between colossal boulders, around cliffs, ravines and barren gullies until, finally, on the other side, we found ourselves looking out across a vast, pale, plain, that appeared devoid of all vegetation. Along its horizon stretched another range, perhaps even higher that the one we had just crossed. Certainly the peaks seemed steeper and more pronounced and as desolate and devoid of life as anything we had seen. I was obviously not the only one to find them scary and intimidating. Consulting the map, I discovered some early cartographer had named them Mount Terror.

The road skirted the edge of the plain before winding its way up a rock-strewn kloof amongst which grew the strange-looking Kokerbooms – or Quiver Tree – that had given the place its name. Because of all the twists and turns and the numerous humps which, for some reason, had been put across the road our progress continued to be heartbreakingly slow. When we finally reached the top I felt a mixture of relief and exhilaration and was only too happy to stand there, absorbing the silence and sense of solitude.

With its dead, dry, moonscape setting, Kokerboomkloof is as about as far as you can get away from the cooped-up space of the cities. When the night closed in around us, I really did begin to comprehend my own insignificance in the vast scheme of things. Curled up in our sleeping bags under an enormous star-studded sky, you could hear no sound other than the occasional gust of wind blowing from nowhere to nowhere.

Kokerboomkloof, Richtersveld. Note Quiver Trees.

Another journey I would rank high in my hierarchy of ones to be remembered is the trip I made with my sisters and their kids, across the arid, thorny badlands of the Great Karoo and then down the West Coast to the mountain wilderness of the Cedarsberg.

Once a vast lake, the Karoo is now a place of extremes, hard and waterless. The early Trekboers who settled here – and those who followed – had of necessity to be tough for it is a harsh, unforgiving part of the world.

The white population has thinned out over the years, as the younger generations has drifted off to the cities. Many of the old farmhouses stand abandoned, there presence demarcated by a few ancient gumtrees, the skeletal remains of a windmill and the rusty wrecks of cars.

This particular trip was to have a spiritual dimension to it. My sister, who was then working on her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, was keen to visit the Doring River, hoping to find out about the local belief systems, especially those pertaining to water. I volunteered to join her, driving on the dusty road that crosses the Pakhuis pass and then descends through ever drier country down to the river.

Strangely enough, there was a donkey dutifully waiting for us when we arrived on its banks, like he had been ordained as our designated guide. As soon as we got out the bakkie it turned, as if signaling us to follow, and proceeded to lead us down a hoof-pocked track, past fleeting pools that reflected the blue sky above until we came to one large, reed-lined one where it stopped. This, my sister decided, must be the spot.

Leaving her to make contact with the mythical giant snake and the mermaids that might inhabit its depths, I set off to explore the surrounding sun-blasted, cave- riddled cliffs.

On a knoll overlooking the river I came across one that had several faded San paintings on its wall.

Sitting in this ancient cave where, a few hundred-years ago, members of a vanished race of hunter-gatherers also hunched up I could feel the great stillness of this African landscape seeping in to me. A sense of place is often bound up with the history of the people who once lived there so it was saddening to think of the areas former occupants who had been hunted down or driven to even harsher climes.

In a continent the size of Africa you would have expected there would be space for all.

The Little (or Klein) Karoo, which falls mostly on the eastern side of the imposing Swartberg – and which I am much more familiar with – has a similar lonely, sparse, windswept feel. Like its larger neighbour, it is a haunting landscape of low trees, flat plains and ranges of lavender and purple mountains.

Back in the times when the Karoo was mostly lake and swamp, millions of reptiles lived and died here leaving their fossilised remains behind in the shale to give the palaeontologists lots to argue about much later. The Karoo is manna to such scientists.

Although I am not from these parts I have always felt a strong connection with this parched and ancient land too. It fills some unarticulated need in my soul.

I get a similar feeing whenever I visit the Langeberg, in the Western Cape, although, in this case, it could be imprinted in my DNA since my Orkney Island ancestors settled here back in 1817 and their descendants still farm the land.

The Richtersveld, Boesmanland, the Hantam Karoo, the Plains of Camdeboo, the Valley of Desolation, the Suurveld, the Langeberg – all have lodged themselves inside me. There is one other place, though, that has prior claim to my heart – the Bushveld. Each time I go there it is like a nostalgic journey in to my past.

Opinions differ as to where it actually begins. Some say it is where you start seeing Marula trees. Others, a particular bird (in my case it’s the White-crested Helmet-shrike). Mostly, it is just an instinctive, gut thing.

Marakele, where I also went with my friend Ken, certainly feels like it is in it. The park falls in part of the Waterberg and is dominated by the pyramid-shaped Kransberg. An interesting fact about this mountain is that the architect Gerard Moerdijk, who had a farm nearby, is said to have based the Voortrekker Monument on it. There is also a butterfly that occurs only on this mountain.

You can actually drive to the summit via a narrow, twisting road, the views from which are superb. It is a road you need to go carefully on. We had the harrowing experience of being chased down it, in reverse gear, by an enraged elephant bull. How we didn’t end up, a crumpled wreck, at the bottom of the valley I shall never know.

When I go seeking the Bushveld, my favourite escape route is, however, the Great North Road although we usually skip the freeway and take the old main road. This way you don’t miss out on the old platteland towns.

If you branch off at Polokwane on to the R521 you follow roughly the same route the Pioneer Column took on its way up to what would become Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). When you reach Vivo, my advice is to take a left turn at the crossroad, taking the road that leads to one of South Africa’s hidden gems, the Blouberg Nature Reserve. If you love plants as well as birds this is the place to for not only do its step mountain slopes contain the biggest colony of nesting Cape Vultures in the country but also probably the widest variety of trees for a reserve of its comparative size.

Blouberg. Vulture colony cliffs. South side of mountain..

Here, as much as anywhere, you feel you are in the true heart of the Bushveld.

Rejoining the R521 we then usually head north through Alldays to Mapungubwe where an isolated stone-working community once lived amongst the red sandstone cliffs that border the Limpopo river. Their civilisation was linked to trade routes that stretched all the way to the Indian Ocean and beyond. Mapungubwe is now a game reserve but driving through the hot, dry, strangely eroded countryside you still get a fleeting sense of its former inhabitants ghostly presence.

There are many tall, beautifu,l trees along the Limpopo as well, but move a few hundred yards inland and they are replaced by miles and miles of scrubby mopani, that accompany you eastwards all the way to Pafuri and beyond.

But the Kruger, the rest of Limpopo province and Mpumalanga, where I also often go, are a story in themselves, a tale for another time…

Sentenced to no more travel for the duration, it often feels those journeys were undertaken by someone else; or perhaps it is my life in some parallel universe. Longing for beautiful scenery (not that there is anything wrong with the view from my balcony) but unable to take a holiday because of Covid-19, I am forced to do the next best thing. I delve in to my collection of travel books.

I gain a lot of comfort from them. The older I get, the more it occurs to me that I am not going to to be around forever. I no longer have the time to visit a fraction of the places on my bucket list. This is my way of short-circuiting that. Reading about other peoples travels and adventures, is a fun way to live vicariously through them by snooping on journeys you are probably never going to be able to make.

Plus it is a lot cheaper and you don’t have to worry about leaving any carbon footprint…

Accessing the Past in Lockdown

July 18, 2020 / stidyatkusane / 10 Comments

“Somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people”

R.L.Stevenson

Maybe it has something to do with the current uncertainty, the depth of longing for all to be well again, but as lockdown drags on I find my thoughts drifting back, more and more often, to my youth. Right now, it seems a much safer place to be. At least you have the comfort of knowing what happened and how it all worked out.

I think there is more to it, though, than a mere desire to retreat to the warmth and innocence of childhood. All our lives are an amalgam of past, present and future. Trying to see clearly and to record what has been seen helps me work out how I got from there to here.

It is also a chance to meet my parents again, back the way they used to be. Each generation passes on something to the next and by looking afresh at what they did and thought is a way of discovering how they have lived on through me.

The difficulty of doing this is, of course, being able to gain access to one’s past. Over the years my memories have grown hazy and dim. The further back I go, the more fragmentary they become.

Sometimes they takes on the aura of a dream, a few tangible threads emerge from the miasma that is my brain. I clutch at their dim outline. At other times, just looking at an old photograph or reading an old letter, will bring long-forgotten things back to the surface.

What I am certain of is that the pivotal event of my early life occurred when I was about nine-years old. It was the year my father decided to relocate us from our smallholding outside of Salisbury to a remote farm in the Eastern Highlands of Nyanga. If anything can be termed a life-changing experience for me, this was it.

The property he purchased was in an incredibly beautiful part of the world.

I can still recall, with pin-point clarity, the journey there, driving up through the granite hills and miombo woodland, along a winding road to a crest where the small Nyanga Village lay. From here, the trail dropped down, with sudden abruptness, in to a huge valley, speckled with rocks, bushes and shadows, shimmering in the parchment dry heat as it receded in to the far haze.

Along its eastern flank rose the solid wall of the main Nyanga range. Running parallel to it, on the other side of the enormous valley, ran the Nyangombe River, which would later join the Ruenya which, in turn, flowed in to the mighty Zambezi. Beyond that lay more hills and mountains.

In contrast to the sweltering valley, the plateau on top of the mountains was cool and covered in open moorland and icy streams and seemed hardly Africa. In the rainy season, waves of multi-shadowed clouds would come rolling ponderously over them in never-ending processions.

For a boy of my romantic disposition it was like entering an enchanted world. All was mysterious, unexplored, rich with infinite possibilities. I loved the wildness, the sense of freedom.

Years later, as an undergraduate, I would read Wordsworth’s poem, “The Prelude”. It struck an immediate chord in me:

“Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear;

Much favour’d in my birthplace, and no less

In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,

I was transplanted. Well I call to mind

(‘Twas at an early age, ere I had seen

Nine summers) when upon the mountain slope

The frost and breath of frosty wind had snapp’d…”

The mountains Wordsworth was writing about were those of the English Lake District. Mine were distinctly African ones.

There were many of them. On the Eastern side of the farm, the great brooding presence of Mount Muozi rose abruptly up from the plain to its castle-like knob. Even when covered in cloud you could feel its presence; its spirit seemed to permeate the very air. There was something ancient and troubling and mysterious about it which undoubtedly explained why it was held in awe by the locals and had become the focal point for an important rain-making cult.

*View from old lands towards Muozi mountain*. *Note baobab*.

The closer you got to it, the higher it towered above you. Again, the words of Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” seemed to fit:

“…growing still in stature, the huge Cliff

Rose up between me and the stars, and still,

With measured motion, like a living thing,

Strode after me…”

Looking north, from the top of the castle, the main range surged away to Nyangui (“The Place of Shouting”), the big, bulky, colossus that marked the end of the Nyanga range, as well as serving as our corner boundary. It was also the mountain from which our farm took its name.

*Nyangui (“The Place of Shouting”) mountain*. Picture courtesy of Patrick Stidolph.

If Muozi looked like a vessel striving to break loose of its moorings than Nyangui was the bulwark that anchored it back.

Like Muozi, though, it could, when the mood took it, get quite spooky, radiating an air of almost tangible menace, especially when the skies grew sullen and arbitrary bolts of lightning started slashing through the sky. At certain times of the year the wind would grow wild and angry and come hurling down its slopes with an almost end-of-the world fury.

The other mountain which looms large in my childhood memories is Sedze although it was not actually on our farm but situated further back, towards the Nyanga village.

At the one end of it, just above Bende Gap, rose two great rock pinnacles, steeper and more pronounced than any others in the range. From the innermost of the two towers, the mountain sloped upwards in to a massive, domed, bulky, behemoth of rock fitted with clefts and rib-like fissures that gave it the appearance of some ancient animal afflicted by a strange lethargy.

Because of its resemblance to a sleeping pachyderm we always called it the “Rhino” mountain.

Returning from boarding school I always felt elated and light-headed to see the “Rhino” and yet at the same time near to tears because it meant I was almost home again.

Although it slopes were steep and uninhabited, the valley floor below was littered with scores of thatched huts and cattle kraals and patches of cultivated lands. Straggling along the top of one ridge, along which the road traversed, was a cluster of little shops with corrugated iron roofs. This was the Sedze Business Centre. For some reason these old buildings imprinted themselves in my mind; so much so that years later I felt compelled to do a painting of them.

Sedze mountain. View from Business Centre. Painting by Anthony Stidolph.

Our own house was a low rambling affair, close to a stream that ran down from Muozi. Later, my one brother, Paul, would build a slightly more elaborate and stylish homestead near a rocky outcrop, using white quartz for the walls and thatch for the roof. Positioned next to an old baobab, it commanded tremendous views over the surrounding mountains

Having laid idle for years, turning this stretch of Africa back in to a farm was hard work. There was plenty of bush to clear, furrows to dig, fences to put up. Because we were always short of cash, all the children were expected to chip in during the school holidays.

We were always a close family. The bond between us all, already strong, was strengthened during the Nyanga years.

In some ways it was a cloistered childhood. Outside my siblings and the farm mutts I had no companions or acquaintances to share it with. This did not make me unhappy or fretful. Nor did it bother me that I was not able to participate in all the entertainments and amusements – movies, parties, dating, sport – that other teenagers took as a matter of course.

Being so restricted and yet so active actually had its benefits even if I didn’t always fully appreciate them at the time. I developed an early love of nature which has never left me. I created a world of my own in to which I could slip away unnoticed. I learnt how to fall back on my own resources.

When I was not on the farm, I was away at boarding school, an institution I hated because it took me away from my beloved mountains. What strikes me now is the narrowness of life in it.

Ours was, of course, a segregated society and only white boys were allowed to attend the school. Beyond the cleaners, the ground staff and the kitchen workers we had little personal contact with the local African population.

It was a life, into which the great affairs of the world seemed hardly to intrude. Nor did any of us ever really bother to question the racial and quasi-Imperial doctrines of the time or the fairness of the system in to which we had, as relatively privileged white children, been born.

It was only during my final years at boarding school that the world of politics began to force its way in to my life.

In elections held in December, 1962, the right-wing Rhodesian Front, who had promised to deal ruthlessly with the nationalist menace and to entrench white rule permanently, had swept to power. One of their first demands was that the country be granted independence.

For the next three years the RF Government would be engaged in a series of fruitless negotiations with the British. With the situation at stalemate, it had become more and more obvious that we were headed for some sort of showdown. As young and ill-informed as I was, even I had become aware that, beneath the carefree surface of my life, the political sands were shifting fast.

On the 11^th November, 1965, it finally happened. For weeks beforehand there had been much talk and speculation and an atmosphere of considerable excitement had built up, even among us schoolboys. Now, before a hushed nation, Smith made his big announcement – Rhodesia had declared its independence from Britain.

The effect was dramatic. Suddenly, politics occupied the minds of everybody in the country from the remote farms to the government offices, from prospector to priest.

It was an epochal event. Not only did it change the course of all our lives but it would eventually trigger a lot of soul-searching for me.

Caught in the same fusion of fear and excitement as everybody else, slowly, hesitantly, my attitudes began to change. Over the following years I would increasingly find myself wondering about the wisdom of the course of action the RF government had embarked on, especially once the Rhodesian Bush War began to exact its heavy toll.

I also started to look more critically at the society I had grown up in. Cut off as I was from the mainstream, even I could see that Rhodesia was not exactly a centre of cosmopolitan artistic energy and progressive thinking.

My family background, no doubt, played a factor in this growing awareness of the world around me. As a pilot, my father had travelled the length and breadth of the continent, as well as working in Arabia and Europe. Unlike many of his fellow countrymen who were hidebound, conformist and set in their ways of thinking (little realising they represented an age that was passing) his exposure to other people and cultures had left him relatively open-minded and tolerant about politics and race.

*My parents and youngest sister: Monica, Nicky and Reg Stidolph. Nyangui in background*.

Although he exuded a natural authority, my father was also at heart, something of an outsider, a maverick, a free thinker. While I may not have inherited his unwavering self-confidence, I like to think I did get a dose of his individualism, curiosity and refusal to be pigeon-holed.

In other areas we were different. I was the fourth son in a family of seven children and this undoubtedly impinged on my temperament. Whereas my three elder brothers were practical like my father I took after my mother, inheriting her artistic side. Unlike my brothers, too, I had no aptitude for the sciences.

Looking back at it all now, from the perspective of old age, I realise how much of my character and how many of my views and attitudes were forged back then. It also makes me realise how lucky I was to have the childhood I did.

Living in those beautiful surroundings helped foster my imagination. It taught me to see things and to value solitude and worship the ordinary dirt that sustains us. It also showed me that without peace and quiet you can miss your inner voice.

In that sense, those early years of deprivation and isolation helped prepare me for life under lockdown. I grew up used to keeping my own counsel and finding my way through the thickets.

Of course, the fact that I now live in one of the most breathtakingly scenic parts of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands – the Karkloof – also made my incarceration a lot easier to bear…

*Sunset over Kusane Farm in pre-Lockdown days*. Myself, sister Sally and her daughter-in-law, Tammy. Picture courtesy of Craig Scott.

Booking out in Lockdown

July 4, 2020 / stidyatkusane / 14 Comments

If there is one thing the Covid-19 pandemic has bought in to sharp contrast it is the deep divisions within society. Whereas some, have grown weary in the face of the protracted lockdown and adapted a devil-may-care attitude towards it, others have continued to shy away away from any form of social contact, concerned the virus is still raging.

Like many people, I have, at times, found myself perplexed by the ANC governments handling of the crisis. Some of its more stringent rules and regulations, for example, seem to have very little to do with logic or rationality or protecting our health. By the same token I can understand the need for caution and am reluctant to take any unnecessary risks which might expose me to Covid-19.

In part this stems from hard experience. Because of my compromised immune system (in my case damaged lungs) I have suffered from three bouts of pneumonia in the past. The first was so debilitating there were times when I wondered whether I was going to make it through.

It was, without doubt, the most frightening experience of my life and cured me of any appetite for misplaced displays of false bravado.

Which has meant that I have spent most of my lockdown time incarcerated alone at home. It is not something that has bothered me too much. There is solace to be found in solitude.

One of the few things I have missed, though, is my weekly trip to the Karkloof Farmer’s market. For me it has become a regular Saturday morning ritual.

Normally, I like to rise early and set off across the valley when it is still flooded in a honey-tinted light. No matter the time of the year, it is invariably beautiful then, with the sun’s rays lancing the plain in shafts, creating long shadows behind the rocks and trees.

The air is fresh, too, with a tingling, clean smell and the grass seems to dance as the wind ruffles through it. On the other side of the valley, the Karkloof hills rise up blue and purple and mauve and pink against the soft, early morning sky.

Sometimes, if I am really lucky, I might even get to see some cranes.

Once inside the large, metal-framed hall, my first order of business is to visit the coffee stand. The lady who works behind the till knows me so well I don’t even need to give her my order – one Americano with hot milk. I then take my cup of steaming coffee out to the verandah where I sit and watch the dairy cows grazing in the pasture below.

My next port of call is the artisan bread stall and then the Greytown cheese maker whose mature Boerekaas cheese I love. After that I might buy a steak for my evening braai.

The final and – by far – most important part of the ritual involves browsing through Huddy’s second hand book stall, in the far corner of the hall. Over the years it has proved to be a veritable treasure trove for me and I have uncovered many gems.

I have always loved the war poets, especially Wilfred Owen, so was thrilled to pick up an excellent biography on him by Jon Stallworthy, as well as one on Siegfried Sassoon written by John Stuart Roberts.

In similar vein, I was also able to obtain John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War.

All three books are meticulously researched and exceptionally well written, describing, in detail, not only Sassoon, Owen and Tolkien’s experiences in the trenches of the first world war but showing how each, in turn, tried come to terms with the horrors they had seen.

While, obviously, not the most cheering of subjects to read about at a time when we are faced with our own insistent drums of doom they do serve as a reminder that troubles are constant, a given in life.

Perhaps because my father worked there, I have always been fascinated by the legend of “Arabia” and in tracing its development in the successive stories of the explorers who helped to create it.

Although these early travellers were, for the most part, men, one of the exceptions to the rule was the indefatigable Gertrude Bell. Wanting to find out more about what drove this exceptional woman, I was very pleased to be able procure a copy of Janet Wallach’s Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell.

A woman of fierce intelligence and focus- she was the first woman to graduate from Oxford with a history degree – her bold expeditions deep in to the Arabian desert led to a passion for the Middle East that lasted to the end of her life (she is buried in Baghdad). Her sensitivity towards its people and their culture set her apart from many of her era. Finding an ally and kindred spirit in TE Lawrence, of Lawrence of Arabia fame, she would go on to play an instrumental role in the creation of the modern state of Iraq.

When I was going through my Kenya colonial history phase, it was at Huddy’s I found Elspeth Huxley’s marvelously evocative The Flame Trees of Thika, The Mottled Lizard, Out in the Midday Sun and Nellie: Letters from Africa; as well as James Fox’s White Mischief and Beryl Markham’s superb West with the Night, which Ernest Hemingway bluntly described as a “bloody, wonderful book.”

When this endless source of good books dried up because of lockdown, I was forced to fall back on my own resources. I decided now might be a good time as any to give my private library a revisit.

I began by dipping in to the four-edition Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell because I felt that if anybody could help me make sense of our confused and unsettling times it was him.

I discovered Orwell at a relatively early age and he has remained a strong, if not always comforting, presence in my life ever since. With his unflinching honesty and clear, precise, prose style he has, over the years, proved an incomparable guide for me.

As a young man, Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War and subsequently wrote about it in Homage to Catalonia. The experience left deep emotional scars but also provided him with a valuable insight in to two of the major social dislocations of the Twentieth Century – in the shape of the former Soviet Union and the former Third Reich who, in supporting the opposing sides in the civil war, fought what has been called a “world war by proxy”.

Orwell’s fear of the dangers posed by autocratic leaders and absolutist governments would later find expression in the two books for which he is most famously remembered.

In his allegorical fable, Animal Farm, he showed just how easily those who have toppled a repressive regime can take on its trapping and habits. Having lived through a couple of revolutions myself, this is something I have got to see, first hand, in both Zimbabwe under ZANU-PF and in South Africa under the ANC.

There are other interesting parallels with today. Decades before “political correctness” and “cancel culture” became recognisable concepts, Orwell battled to get his trenchant masterpiece published because it was so obviously aimed at the Soviet Union who had been Britain’s ally during the second world war.

Orwell’s bullying boar, Napoleon, was transparently Stalin; his intellectual idealist rival, Snowball, obviously Trotsky. The prophet of revolution, Old Major, was a compound Marx and Lenin.

His usual publisher, Victor Gollancz rejected the book, as did Faber and Faber whose then director was no other than TS Eliot. Jonathan Cape also turned it down because he thought it unduly offensive to make the Bolsheviks pigs. Orwell responded by writing “balls” in the margin of the rejection letter.

The book was eventually published by Secker in August, 1945.

In his last, chilling, work, 1984, Orwell offered a similarly scary scenario, opening a horrific vista in to a suffocating world of party tyranny and non-stop surveillance.

Orwell’s writings would, in turn, influence a new generation of writers who picked up his torch of idealist humanitarianism. Amongst these is Margaret Atwood whose own books – such as Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Year of the Flood – have offered fictional excursions in to a nightmare world that could be just around the corner.

The warning signs are certainly there. It is not news that something is badly wrong with America, to say nothing of what is going on in both China and Putin’s Russia.

Indeed, with state surveillance back with a vengeance and fake news everywhere, I often find myself wondering what Orwell would have made of our times and how he would have reacted to the likes of Donald Trump, a man whose greed, small-mindedness, lack of empathy for the sufferings of others, promiscuous lying and abuse of language, encapsulates so many of the vices he warned us against.

Before sitting down to write both Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell obviously posed himself the question – what happens if we continue down the road we are already on? At a time when the dumbness of the many plays in to the hands of the scheming few it is perhaps something we ought to be asking ourselves now…

Having reacquainted myself with Orwell, I decided I might as well go the whole hog and read some Atwood too, so got out my copy of Curious Pursuits, a collection of her essays and journalism from 1970 to 2005.

Despite Atwood’s own dystopian visions of our future, her writing in this book is full of humour, charm and telling detail. A common theme in many of her essays is how women negotiate society’s obstacles.

Not too surprisingly, the book also includes an essay on Orwell in which Atwood acknowledges the debt she owes to the author and talks about the influence he had on her own writing.

Also, of great interest to me, was her Introduction to ‘Roughing it in the Bush‘ by Susanna Moodie because Moodie was married to a distant ancestor of mine.

Atwood is obviously an admirer, having also brought out The Journals of Susanna Moodie (first published in 1970), regarded by many as her most fully realised volume of poetry.

Hoping that it, too, might reveal some concealed truths about our topsy-turvy times, I also dug out my copy of Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark,

For some reason, I have always found it more accessible and much funnier than Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books.

For those unfamiliar with the poem, it describes the adventures of nine tradesmen (all of whose professions begin with the letter ‘B’) and a beaver who embark on a quest to capture a “Snark”. There search is not made any easier by the fact that none of them actually knows what a Snark is although there is a worry it could be a “Boojum”, an equally mysterious creature which can “suddenly and softly vanish you away”.

Their method of luring the Snark out of its hiding place is eccentric, to say the least:

“They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;

They pursued it with forks and hope;

They threatened its life with a railways share;

They charmed it with smiles and soap”.

Making a hard task even more difficult is the fact that the map they are using to look for the Snark is completely blank…

The Hunting of the Snark was originally illustrated by Henry Holiday. Again, I must confess, I prefer the more recent, 1976 ,Ralph Steadman drawings because his wonderfully warped, ink-splattered style seems custom-designed for Carroll’s off-the-wall, phantasmagorical tale..

Another odd fact about the poem is that Carroll reputedly wrote it backwards, writing the last sentence first.

There have been numerous theories as to what it all actually means. Some see the voyage as a search for truth and meaning; others think it is about the pursuit of happiness (a view Carroll, himself, apparantly favoured). There is another view that it deals with our existential angst.

This last theory ties in with my interpretation of the poem – that what they are desperately seeking is a cure for Covid-19.

Why else would they hunt it with soap?

Slowing Down in Lockdown

June 13, 2020 / stidyatkusane / 16 Comments

When lockdown was first introduced in South Africa I went along with received opinion. I washed my hands thoroughly. I practiced social distancing. Realising I was in the at risk category, I only left the farm twice in the first seventy-eight days and when I did I wore a mask. I made sure I got in to town just as the shops were opening and didn’t spend any more time in them than I needed to.

In the same spirit, I tried to make lockdown a positive experience. Over the months I found different things to focus on. I developed interests I never had before. I re-established my connection with the living world.

Indeed, with hindsight, I think one of the most important things lock-down – and retirement for that matter – gave me was time to slow down and start noticing things. The sheer scale of the global catastrophe forced me in to a kind of retreat, a moment of reflection.

I began studying my immediate surroundings with an even greater interest.

For example: each day, since lockdown began, found me patrolling my garden forensically, in the manner of an East German border guard back in the Cold War era, except what I was on the look-out for was not defectors but butterflies. Instead of an assault rifle, I carried my old Canon.

As winter progressed so their numbers dwindled but every now and again I would come across one, fluttering along in all its flowery grace and fragile beauty. With every new butterfly I identified I felt a mounting sense of elation and achievement.

Determined to remain upbeat, in spite of the grim trajectory the virus was taking, I deliberately limited my intake of news to what I deemed necessary for me to be able to produce my one topical weekly cartoon. It wasn’t always easy. At times the line between tragedy and farce grew very fine.

Like most people, I accepted the logic and rationale behind the initial lockdown but as the weeks stretched in to months I found my faith beginning to waiver. Having done its best to scare us in to staying indoors the ANC government began to flounder on some of its own draconian rules.

These included a ban on the sale of cigarettes and alcohol, both of which were based on a rather convoluted logic, as well as some sloppy and outdated science. Many of the other regulations – like what sort of clothes you could or couldn’t buy under Level 4 of the lockdown – were just plain nonsensical, verging on Kafka-like.

My suspicions that there was something both insidious and wrong with the handling of the pandemic was reinforced when the Judge in the High Court of Pretoria declared that many of the regulations failed the “rationality test” – and were also unconstitutional and invalid. Indeed, as the crisis dragged on, it became increasingly apparent that many of the government ministers were using the pandemic as a cover to pursue their own hidden agendas and conduct their own personal crusades – and that these often had very little to do with our health.

As so often happens in South Africa, ideology had trumped common sense…

*Police Minister Bheki Cele and COGTA Minister Nkosana Dlamini-Zuma applying the screws*…

Not that our problems were necessarily worse than anywhere else. The US, for example, was typically overconfident in its exceptional-ism and paid the price.

When the news seemed overwhelming, however, nature provided a balm. It became my escape. My therapy. My reminder of how much I have to be thankful for.

I am lucky to live in the country. In many ways my life carried on as it had before lockdown; there was no real adjustment required. I could still go for daily walks. There was my garden to work. My chickens to feed.

Nor was I all that bothered about being cut-off from the rest of society. As a cartoonist I am used to the solitary life. I have always worked from home so self-isolation is a habit for me.

I won’t pretend there weren’t things I missed – a cup of coffee with a friend, a simple hug, the freedom to drive where I liked.

By way of companions, I had the birds. There is not a day in my life that is not improved by seeing my resident pair of Boubous bouncing along or hearing the Cape Turtle Doves calling from the trees.

*Resident male Southern Boubou, bouncing along.*..

The migrants were, of course, long gone. I missed them but we still had our regulars in my garden. Each morning I would wake up to the Cape Robin and the Olive Thrush singing outside my window. If I got up early enough I sometimes caught our skittish pair of Natal Francolin making a dash for it across my lawn.

With the breeding season over the weavers had lost their masks but still gathered on my food table every morning chattering away like excited schoolboys. They would be joined by the rock pigeons, doves and sparrows.

The South African lockdown officially started just as autumn was giving way to winter. I love winter. With the rains over everything begins to dry out and a smoky haze veils the sky, dulling the light and robbing the landscape of contrasts. Dust coats everything near the road, even the trees and houses.

*Sunrise over the valley with pockets of mist*.

There is a stark, minimalist beauty to the countryside at this time of the year. Sometimes Jack Frost comes calling overnight, leaving little patches of white icicles clenching the ground. On other occasions, a chill wind blows in the mornings and as I set off to take stock of the local state of nature the leaves that autumn stripped from the trees crunch and snap beneath my feet.

Across the valley thin sheets of mist hang suspended above the hollows. On the saddle path, the sun’s rays catch the dew drops hanging on the funnel spiders’ webs.

You can smell the crisp, frosty, dryness in the air.

It is my favourite time of the year for walking. The icy cold appeals to the Spartan in me. I find it invigorating and oddly purifying. It sharpens my senses.

In the afternoon the light and temperatures fade early. By five-thirty the chickens have already put themselves to bed.

Sitting on my balcony, at twilight, sipping one of my hard-to-come-by-beers I could feel the breath of winter on my neck. It was cold. The soft evening skies at this time of year are beautiful though.

Below me I could sometimes hear the jackal calling as they set off on another night of hunting for food. In the moonlight the defoliated trees are silhouettes. The wind blowing up the rocky slopes rattle their branches.

There were other pleasures. Winter is also aloe season and with their beautiful orange-red flowers came the sunbirds (mostly Amethyst, Malachite and Greater Double- collared). It is also the time when the Wild Dagga (Leonotis leonorus) bushes flower, another sunbird favourite. I deliberately planted both species to try and seduce birds in to my garden and it has done the trick.

Winter is not all good. It can also be a time of violent drama. From where we are, safe in my sanctum overlooking the valley, you can often see huge fires sweeping across its floor, destroying countless creatures as it goes. I cannot imagine how many insects, reptiles and rodents must get enveloped and killed in the flames. This, in turn, impacts on the raptors that hunt them because it means less food. Winter can be hard on predator and prey alike.

At such times the sun turns a pale yellow behind the plumes of smoke and the air is bitter with the smell of ash and burning debris.

This got me thinking about conservation, loss of biodiversity and what we are doing to the world. Thanks to agribusiness, agrochemicals, artificial fertilizer, farm mechanization and an intensification of arable farming much of our natural fauna and flora is being destroyed. Looking out over our urban landscapes, too, I see an ever-expanding mass of railway tracks, petrol stations, cement blocks, pylons and factories pumping effluent in to our streams and poison in to the air. And piles of plastic.

As a keen twitcher, I have noticed the steady decline of wildlife over the years. I grew up, for instance, with guineafowl abundant and all around; after harvesting, the fields were fill of them, pecking their way through the stubble in search of dropped mielie seeds. In the decades since there numbers seem to have grown less and less. It is like someone came along and removed them all.

*Our resident guineafowl flock. We raised them from chicks*.

It makes me very sad. And angry. Far too much of our wildlife is teetering on the edge of the ecological cliff.

Paralleling that has been the steady spread of invasive plants. Vast acreages have been given over to sterile pine, wattle and gum plantations inside which very little lives.

Nor is it confined to that. One of the biggest problems we face on Kusane is eradicating the bramble, an alien, invasive, species that creeps over the grasses and crawls over the plants. It is like a cancer and a nightmare to fight your way through because its thorns shred your legs.

Likewise bugweed. Our neighbour has a veritable forest of these and the seeds are picked up by the birds and dropped on our farm where they easily germinate and spread.

Invading our grasslands, all these plants reduce water run-off, and increase the severity of wildfires. It has been estimated that alien trees consume 5% of our scarce water and are a direct threat to almost half of the 1600 natural species listed in South Africa’s Red Data List.

Ruminating on this, I find my mind returning to lockdown. I can’t help but see the Covid-19 pandemic as a portent, an omen, a warning and a reminder of how much our economies, our livelihoods and our well-being depend on the health of nature. That seems to me to be our problem – we have become alienated from the natural world.

We need to re-learn that we are part of nature, not above it. Destroy it, in our blind pursuit of profit, and we destroy ourselves…

I will do my little bit to try and stop that. I am a tree man. To help make a greener world, I have opened up a new patch of ground, alongside Rubble Row, where I have already planted yet more indigenous species (Paperbark thorn, Tree Fuschia, Cheesewood, Ouhout). I know I won’t live long enough to see them mature but that is not the point. I am doing it for the next generation, a generation who face a far scarier future than ours did.

Part of my self-planted indigenous forest.

Lockdown has taught me other lessons. Being forced to stay at home made me realise that – as frugal as I like to think I am – I used to waste a lot of money on unnecessary shopping trips in to town.

It has also induced the waste not want not attitude of my parent’s generation. With the supermarket shelves rapidly emptying because of panic-buying I decided I needed to resurrect my vegetable garden. Luckily I have a source of manure both from our chickens and sheep, as well as the stables down the road. We also have our own compost heap.

There is something very comforting and rewarding about tending your own vegetables and eating the result. Growing your own food reminds you that you are part of a system and that everything we eat comes – in one way or another – out of the earth.

That is something we need to keep in mind long after lockdown ends. Or else we may face an even worse environmental and human catastrophe…

Stidy's Eye

The artwork and writings of award-winning cartoonist, Anthony Stidolph

Lockdown