time the lorry came, the driver told us what the doctor at Bekkersdal had told him was wrong with Oom Tobie. For it was a human disease, this time. And it would almost appear as though the Cape Coloured man, Pieterse, really was to some extent Slams. Moreover, we ourselves had been in somewhat close contact with Oom Tobie, and so we did not feel too comfortable about it.
It looked as though Oom Tobie had landed a winner, all right, and it was not impossible that the bonsella bananas had played a part in it.
All the same, it’s queer how frightened everybody gets when you hear the word smallpox.
II
Onlookers at the New Year’s eve dance of the Mamba Klub of the Dwarsberg Boerevereniging’s Boeresport. 31 December 1965
News Story
“The way the world is today,” At Naudé said, shaking his head, “I don’t know what is going to happen.”
From that it was clear that At Naudé had been hearing news over the wireless again that made him fear for the future of the country. We did not exactly sit up, then. We in the Dwarsberge knew that it was the wireless that made At Naudé that way. And he could tremble as much as he liked for the country’s future or his own. There was never any change, either, in the kind of news he would bring us. Every time it was about stonethrowings in Johannesburg locations and about how many new kinds of bombs the Russians had got, and about how many people had gone to gaol for telling the Russians about still other kinds of bombs they could make. Although it did not look as though the Russians needed to be educated much in that line.
And we could never really understand why At Naudé listened at all. We hardly ever listened to him, for that matter. We would rather hear from Gysbert van Tonder if it was true that the ouderling at Pilanesberg really forgot himself in the way that Jurie Steyn’s wife had heard about from a kraal Mtosa at the kitchen door. The Mtosa had come by to buy halfpenny stamps to stick on his forehead for the yearly Ndlolo dance. Now, there was news for you. About the ouderling, I mean. And even to hear that the Ndlolo dance was being held soon again was at least something. And if it should turn out that what was being said about the Pilanesberg ouderling was not true, well, then, the same thing applied to a lot of what At Naudé heard over the wireless also.
“I don’t know what is going to happen,” At Naudé repeated, “the way the world is today. I just heard over the wireless –”
“That’s how the news we got in the old days was better,” Oupa Bekker said. “I mean in the real old days, when there was no wireless, and there was not the telegraph, either. The news you got then you could do something with. And you didn’t have to go to the post office and get it from the newspaper. The post office is the curse of the Transvaal …”
Jurie Steyn said that Oupa Bekker was quite right, there. He himself would never have taken on the job of postmaster at Drogevlei if he had as much as guessed that there were four separate forms that he would have to fill in, each of them different, just for a simple five-shilling money order. It was so much brainier and neater, Jurie Steyn said, for people who wanted to send five shillings somewhere, if they would just wrap up a couple of half-crowns in a thick wad of brown paper and then post them in the ordinary way, like a letter. That was what the new red pillar-box in front of his door was for, Jurie Steyn explained. The authorities had gone to the expense of that red pillar-box in order to help the public. And yet you still found people coming in for postal orders and money orders. The other day a man even came in and asked could he telegraph some money, somewhere.
“I gave that man a piece of brown paper and showed him the pillarbox,” Jurie Steyn said. “It seemed, until then, that he did not know what kind of progress we had been making here. I therefore asked him if I could show him some more ways in regard to how advanced the Groot Marico was getting. But he said, no, the indications I had already given him were plenty.”
Jurie Steyn said that he thought it was handsome of the man to have spoken up for the Marico like that, seeing that he was quite a newcomer to these parts.
Because we never knew how long Jurie Steyn would be when once he got on the subject of his work, we were glad when Johnny Coen asked Oupa Bekker to explain some more to us about how they got news in the old days. We were all pleased, that is, except At Naudé, who had again tried to get in a remark but had got no further than to say that if we knew something we would all shiver in our veldskoens.
“How did we get news?” Oupa Bekker said, replying to another question of Johnny Coen’s. “Well, you would be standing in the lands, say, and then one of the Bechuanas would point to a small cloud of dust in the poort, and you would walk across to the big tree by the dam, where the road bends, and the traveller would come past there, with two vos horses in front of his Cape-cart, and he would get off from the cart and shake hands and say he was Du Plessis. And you would say you were Bekker, and he would say, afterwards, that he couldn’t stay the night on your farm, because he had to get to Tsalala’s Kop. Well, there was news. You could talk about it for days. For weeks even. You have got no idea how often my wife and I discussed it. And we knew everything that there was to know about the man. We knew his name was Du Plessis.”
At Naudé said, then, that he did not think much of that sort of news. People must have been a bit simpel in the head, in those old times that Oupa Bekker was talking about, if they thought anything about that sort of news. Why, if you compared it with what the radio announcer said, only yesterday …
Jurie Steyn’s wife came in from the kitchen at that moment. There was a light of excitement in her eyes. And when she spoke it was to none of us in particular.
“It has just occurred to me,” Jurie Steyn’s wife said, “that is, if it’s true what they are saying about the Pilanesberg ouderling, of course. Well, it has just struck me that, when he forgot himself in the way they say – provided that he did forget himself like that, mind you – well, perhaps the ouderling didn’t know that anybody was looking.”
That was a possibility that had not so far occurred to us, and we discussed it at some length. In between our talk At Naudé was blurting out something about the rays from a still newer kind of bomb that would kill you right in the middle of the veld and through fifty feet of concrete. So we said, of course, that the best thing to do would be to keep a pretty safe distance away from concrete, with those sort of rays about, if concrete was as dangerous as all that.
We were in no mood for foolishness. Oupa Bekker took this as an encouragement for him to go on.
“Or another day,” Oupa Bekker continued, “you would again be standing in your lands, say, or sitting, even, if there was a long day of ploughing ahead, and you did not want to tire yourself out unnecessarily. You would be sitting on a stone in the shade of a tree, say, and you would think to yourself how lazy those Bechuanas look, going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, with the plough and the oxen, and you would get quite sleepy, say, thinking to yourself how lazy those Bechuanas are. If it wasn’t for the oxen to keep them going, they wouldn’t do any work at all, you might perhaps think.
“And then, without your in the least expecting it, you would again have news. And the news would find a stone for himself and come along and sit down right next to you. It would be the new veldkornet, say. And why nobody saw any dust in the poort, that time, was because the veldkornet didn’t come along the road. And you would make a joke with him and say: ‘I suppose that’s why they call you a veldkornet, because you don’t travel along the road, but you come by the veldlanges.’ And the veldkornet would laugh and ask you a few questions, and he would tell you that they had good rains at Derdepoort … Well, there was something that I could tell my wife over and over again, for weeks. It was news. For weeks I had that to think about. The visit of the veldkornet. In the old days it was real news.”
We could see, from the way At Naudé was fidgeting in his chair, that he guessed we were just egging the old man on to talk in order to scoff at all the important European news that At Naudé regularly retailed