Almost imperceptibly the Wheel is turning and spinning into the green of spring. We drove through to another country town to take our puppies to the vet. Stopping en route so that I could admire the wet ditches crammed with white fleshy arum lilies. I stood there with the cold sweet chill of snow in my nostrils, looking at that unearthly white of the sheathed lilies with their fierce yellow stamens and great glaucous blue-green leaves, rejoicing within. Zantedeschia aethiopica, the most beautiful and abundant lily of late winter across the rainy Cape. It is named after Professor Giovanni Zantedeschi, who was born in 1773 and was an Italian physician and plant lover, but arum lilies were introduced to Europe much earlier — there is an elaborate botanical sketch of arums growing in the Royal Garden in Paris in 1664. The leaves have been traditionally used as a poultice and treatment for headaches (there is no plant in Africa without magical or healing properties long-known and respected). White crab spiders and the tiny frog Hyperolius hopstocki make their home in colonies of the arum lily, which mysteriously is neither an arum nor a lily. It is another African plant that defies categorization of name and genre.
The Wheel is turning. Soon there will be baby house martins fumbling their way to pratice flights off the low walls of the stoep, the japonica will be cherry-red alongside the flowering bulbs of ixia and freesias. Already the paper-white narcissus has shimmered and gone. The indigenous confetti bush is dotted with tiny lilac and white flowers. Within weeks farm workers, women and children, will be clambering into icy farm dams and ponds at dawn to harvest the waterblommetjies cooked into a bredie as a local delicacy. I will go into vineyards with a small knife to gather new vine leaves that I can stuff with pine nuts, chopped mint, rice and lemon juice for a version of dolmades more Lebanese than Greek. The bare apple trees have tiny reddening nodules that will become blossom in September. Nature’s secret processes becoming visible.
My small puppies were born last spring and the world is still all new to them — they sniff and race around and get a frsiky look as they scent the libidinal energies of the spring gathering force. There is light bluish snow on the mountains edging the Karoo and much of the valley here is flooded, low bridges under water and water gurgling into cellars and basements. My neighbour stayed up all night in his flooded kitchen so he could keep rescuing a fieldmouse diving into flood waters near the pantry.
And we are planning an August holiday in the Hantam, a day’s drive perhaps, heading towards the Tankwa Karoo. Some of the earliest known Khoi and San (Bushman) folktales were collected and transcribed here on the farm Zovoorbij near the Hantam River close to Calvinia, between 1880 and 1883. They are stories told around the fire at night by Khoi shepherds, recalling the older stories told by the wandering peoples of the great lonely Hantam. In these stories, it is said that the Moon began as a feather, the stars as coals from a white fire, that the evening star is the large eye of dusk. I get goosebumps reading through the folk tales of the /Xam, a people hunted like animals and driven to extinction.
Dancer, the Fire-Man, or the Fire-Maker, was once human and of the ancient race. Light shone from his head, and it was he who put fire in stones, in the wood and in the clouds. Hunters would follow him to see where the game was, but sometimes he was lazy and wouldn’t cooperate. Out of frustration the hunters killed him as he stood near a river. He fell into the water and his light was snuffed out. They hacked off his head and placed it on the river bank, but the light didn’t return. Later, when it had begun to dry out, a woman saw the head and sent her children to throw it up into the sky, and so it became the Sun. The decapitated body is still searching for it’s head, but has withered and became the crab, scuttling about at the water’s edge. And the head searches incessantly for his body – in the mornings he starts searching at the mountains in the east, climbing into the sky until he comes to the mountains at the western side.
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