The House on the Hill

32 - mostly retired - people live in Haga Haga. These include the couple that run The Store – the only grocery in the village – and, of course, Mark and Liz, the gracious owners of the House on the Hill.

The Hill can only be reached by a gravel road that winds through a fenced area on either side for some fourteen kilometers of up-and-down, before sliding towards the sea and losing itself among houses, and a solitary hotel. Like everything else, the hotel overlooks the ocean that sweeps gentle breeze through its portals, caressing table cloth in an open bar, where later I was to wash down a mean Lasagna with an unapologetically sweet Martini.

There are no street lights in Haga Haga; indeed there are no streets beyond brown etchings on the slope. There are very few sign posts either and Mark, who magically appeared out of dark in his bakkie to receive and guide us, confided that the community wants to keep the landscape as unspoiled as it can.

The community in question is also very warm and friendly but there is no unanimity for pining for more tourists. That might attract crime to this haven, some feel. Right now Haga Haga is an island of peace where its inhabitants are happy to remain unseen by passing ships wanting to berth. The worst that can happen here is an occasional petty theft by men or monkeys clambering over walls. Dogs, even benign ones, ward off both.

The original visitors came here more than a century ago, farmers from Transkei and elsewhere, caravans of wagons snaking to the hill. They parked themselves on the slopes while their oxen grazed freely. Legend has it that commandeering those animals to water needed vocal persuasion; shouts of ‘haga haga’ were found to work the best. There are stranger ways a village can acquire its name but this is right up there among the quaint.

Mark is of Irish lineage and is quick to assert that he is a South African first and last. Liz was born in Scotland. On our request they join us for a drink and we are rapidly and interestingly made richer in our understanding of a microcosm of South Africa. We also hear what we have heard before – most Whites did not support apartheid. They might have been beneficiaries of that abominable system but that often fails to reflect the fact that many never supported the authors of this practice, the National Party. They are proud South Africans, not visitors to a distant land. I detect no rancor in their description of the changes that have come about since 1994. But more than once, I feel a pulsating unease of the approaching unknown.

We walk the beach on a cloudy and cool day. The dog from the house accompanies us with the studious air of a reticent guide. Once he senses that we are not visibly grateful for this effort, he jettisons our company for a while and swims in a lagoon. The water is cold and he enters it gingerly, bringing memories of my own childhood winters when I would skirt the shower till I could no longer defy my mother's stern encouragement from outside.

The sea is in low tide, baring a forgotten battlefield of black coral reef. The sand is pleasantly damp all the way to the hill, marking the impressive nocturnal reach of high tide. Inland, two young men wade through a lagoon, carrying strange contraptions. I join them to learn how to catch sand crabs for fish-baits. You push a giant tubular syringe shaped squirt-gun into soft sand beneath still waters and suck up as much sand as you can. Decant it into a net and voila, you have a few captive crabs, tremulous and confused by the sudden change of light and air.

Another older couple complete the instant demography. The man is standing in knee-deep water waiting for fish to take the bait. There has been no luck so far, he tells me but I sense from his sun-beaten face that he has seen enough not to be disappointed over it.

His wife Elizabie sits on a rock, watching birds. She has an illustrated book in Afrikaans to help her. They are farmers, she tells me, and were neighbors of the recently killed white supremacist leader Terry Blanche. I ask her if it was true that he was butchered over pay dispute. She rubbishes it out of hand and offers me a credible alternative argument that masquerades as evidence of darker designs. She would not say who engineered the murder but there is apprehension pealing through her voice like a distant fire brigade engine.

They are farmers and this is not the first time in the past year and a half that I have noticed stark uncertainty among this community over the trajectory their future might take. There has been no Zimbabwe style attempt to grab and redistribute land in South Africa. No horrors of the sort that Peter Godwin chronicled in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. Yet, there is a palpable throb of anxiety that neither bursts nor disappears. Incidents like the gruesome killing of Terry Blanch and the diatribe of some youth leaders of ANC in its wake can hardly help.

Elizabie slowly warms up to me and reveals such remarkable layers that in turn warm the cockles of my heart. She is quite clearly a serious bird-watcher. She points out a seagull to me, identical in detail both on the sand and on her page. She is a farmer and tends 150 cattle-heads. She is also a tennis coach and only recently decided to lay down the racket after 32 years of smashing the ball around. She has 18 gold-medals for cross country wins. “I am quite well-preserved” she tells me, “and I still run with these legs.” But now her effort is limited to 4-km races, she says with sincere regret. After all, she is in her mid-sixties now.

Elizabie knows a great deal about India. She agrees to pose for me and insists on writing down my name in her book, next to the seagull she had introduced me to.

Farmers are not the only ones that live in uncertainty. In post-apartheid era, business owners were asked to have black-partnership in their enterprises. Some were forced to transfer majority shareholding and a few chose to give up painstakingly built businesses instead and took up fresh vocations. Even large grocery stores were affected. These had traditionally ‘supported’ the community by offering wares on soft loans. Once the store was no longer viable, the owner quit. It was like taking away the oars of the entire community.

Yet, the post-apartheid South Africa is a miracle, conjured by that ultimate magician, Nelson Mandela. There are ripples and undercurrents but the ocean is largely serene.

I watch a brilliant dawn as sky breaks into beautiful azure and bright pink-byzantine, slowly sponging all the blackness out of the sea.

I hope dawns over South Africa always remain the same.