Howsoever, to conclude this preface and preparatory chapter: sixteen years ago Josias Brandt showed up here with his spouse Laetitia. (Him already with a failed marriage or two under his belt. Fuming fathers-in-law in every province; Josias was never your common or compliant son-in-law.) The children must have been small then. With his new young family he occupied the military storage depot (administered by Public Works). He settled in with flair, with flamboyance, with charm, with green fingers, with a deeply rooted faith in the earth mother and in his own natural genius.
He immediately started keeping chickens and goats, built up a veritable props factory and in a jiffy transformed the place into something between a farm, a habitat and a movie set. Any grievance or complaint from the Tamboerskloof bourgeoisie he handled with humour and inflexibility. His fame as champion of the rejected, the evicted and the dejected, person as well as animal, started spreading. Things, plants, animals and human beings were placed in his care here. Rare frog species made their appearance.
The damaged and the endangered of every persuasion started gravitating here. Older children turned up with their younger siblings on their backs (I’ve told you about Nomalizo). More foster children were taken in. Trees were planted. Gardens were laid out. When things started getting out of hand, with children baying at the moon from temporary bamboo towers and shitting in the hedges of surrounding bourgeois residences, the Department of Public Works intervened bureaucratically and flattened the bamboo structures. When foster children were taken in, Welfare naturally started taking note. But all institutional responses were deflected point-blank by Josias — he quite often read the riot act to enraged civil servants. Sir, with respect, go forth and sin no more and keep your nose out of matters that don’t concern you.
And of course Josias made art. Jung would perhaps say that the bomb bunker in which I live (hall one of five) represents Josias’s subconscious as artist and genius. Oddly enough, the basis of our friendship was never our shared artistic interests and activities — not previously and not now.
Strange things happen here, radical transformations are effected. I look at Thamsanqua walking down the street in her school uniform, and I remember a photo of my mother in school uniform and beret in the streets of Johannesburg. My neighbour, Lizeka, returns from work (neo-domestic career that includes walks with the family dog). In Tamboerskloof well-rounded black nannies and domestics promenade with giant wolfhounds and broad smiles. A common sight. Lizeka is an uplifting presence, physically and spiritually inexhaustible, and without a trace of bitterness about her fate in life. She saw her father for the first time at eighteen, and moved on. Her young son is living in Bloemfontein with her parents. He’s a sickly child, born with a hole in his heart. When the weather is thundery, he hides under the bed, not because he’s scared, but — he points to his heart — because the weather hurts him. (As if it shakes up his sensitive heart painfully.) She gets around. On foot, if needs must, and that is indeed as they usually must. Churchwoman or not, one evening at seven o’ clock I came across her on a vibrant corner of Kloof Street, clad in her black tracksuit with white stripes along the legs, cell phone to the ear. We waved at each other and moved on.
It’s young South Africa, the tables have been turned, there goes my neighbour in her black tracksuit with dreaded braids and African cheekbones. But at nine o’ clock her light is out and she sleeps the sweet sleep of the salt of the earth. At the level of relationships there are so many developments that fall outside my existing frame of reference. And at the same time a déjà vu experience of relationships. Familiar territory approached from an unfamiliar angle of incidence. I sometimes see myself as vertical invader, as old John Berger described Picasso way back.
*
Now I have to tell you about Josias Brandt and myself, Jakobus continues, about the road we have travelled together. Josias, my friend the pig farmer and neo-colonist, virtual trapeze artist and knife-thrower of the imagination.
We were good friends, and then it came about that we didn’t speak to each other for seventeen years. During that entire period not a word, letter or syllable passed between us. I wanted to know nothing about him, I averted my gaze from reports on him.
How did it happen? It was the start of a very bad period in my life. Actually a cataclysmic time, my prospects on every level — emotional, financial, artistic — were not good. There were problems at home. Alliances were formed (alliances and conspiracies); my personal life was a war zone. I spare you the details. You don’t know all the dramatis personae in any case. (A formidable cast; some of the actors would shape very well as Cape Flats gangsters, Renaissance conspirators and assassins, and Mafia henchmen.)
Josias tried to intervene. I misread his motives. I believed I was the wronged party. In retrospect I realise that it wasn’t a sinister move, as I assumed at the time, just bad timing on his part. It was all-in-all a situation that hardly brought out the best in people — everything had a kind of psychotic edge and nobody was above suspicion. That’s how I experienced it. I banished Josias summarily from my life on the grounds of his interference. (‘Take thy hated back from this our kingdom.’)
At this time I had terrifying dreams. My father stands headless in a godforsaken industrial plot, dressed in a dour jacket and flannel trousers, such as he wore to my rugby matches.
Then, seventeen years later, thanks to the intervention of another friend, I came here on one autumn morning. We’re going to visit Josias today, my friend had said. What made the reunion easier was the fact that this friend and Josias in fact couldn’t stand each other. That made me realise that he had done it for my sake; there are larger forces at work here.
That was three years ago. That day I was wearing red tracksuit pants, with a white stripe down the leg, a brown paramilitary jacket (good sub-economic apparel) and army boots.
Josias welcomed me as if I’d never been away — the lost brother — with aplomb and exuberance. He plunged into one of the chaotic chambers and brought out a few of my sculptures. Good grief! The friend whom I had banished from my kingdom had seen to it that some of my work was preserved. If it had depended on me, nothing would have remained of it, because once, on a destructive binge, I destroyed everything I’d ever made.
A gigantic black pig, looking more like a wild boar, started sniffing at my boots. (Last year, on my birthday, this self-same animal walked up the mountain with me to far above the settlement — because yes, that is what this place is in a certain sense — and down again. My totem animal.)
That day Josias took us on a guided tour of the establishment. I had ere then seen him create and inhabit imaginative, even phantasmagoric interiors, seen him plant things, seen him tame and raise by hand skunks and sparrows, but here everything was on a larger scale — a newer, more total onslaught.
Josias played the concertina and executed a Cossack dance with a pig. (The pig was crazy about it.) Every pig had a name. I met Nomsa Ndlovo, she was seven at the time. In her I saw a different, newer face of Africa: urbanised, cosmopolitan.
Josias let rip with a stream of anecdotes about the origin and growth of the farm. In truth he has not stopped to this day. He doesn’t remember in the same way as I. He remembers a different kind of detail. His memory attaches itself more closely to incidents. Somebody hanged himself in the uninhabited military watchtower; a well-known journalistic figure had to be kicked in the balls to restrain him, after he’d grabbed the keys from Josias and tried to seize command of the place. A low-life entrepreneur occupied one of the halls for his own profit and turfed Josias out. Various unprincipled types disappeared with precious loads of wood, drained the frog ponds, chucked 127 yellowwood saplings into the dustbin.