Blog post 9

Thurs 24 – Sat 28 Feb 2015

Road trip: Well, we ain’t no Thelma and Louise

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N.B. A small photo gallery of some Forbes-related places is at the end of this blog post.

Mon to Weds… The last 3 days in the NAD panned out as thought about in blog post 8. But goodness, working at that pace and reading and recording 150, 170 letters a day turns the brain to something odd: a dull trance-like state on the surface, and the teeming inside of a termite mound within. Wednesday was particularly weird, as my eyes started feeling strange with nasty flashing sensations. But by dint of breaking the rule of always recording on the spot, with instead the 1/5 sample letters being JPEGed but not extracted from, and with Sue taking the JPEGs rather than me, I finished the last box planned with 85 minutes to spare. Yipee! School is OUT!

More ‘what is it’ thoughts

Pre-road trip, sat on the stoep again on Wednesday evening, some ‘what is it?’ questions returned to plague me with a vengeance:

  • Forbes is singular and internally undivided, and consists of a scriptural economy of people involved largely in a common set of enterprises…
  • Shreiner-Hemming-Brown looks like it is tripartite, but is actually either singular (Ettie Stakesby-Lewis) or dual (Ettie SL and Arthur and Effie Brown), and consists of the remnants of an empire of activities, and a deeply interpersonal exchange…
  • Pringle family is either dual or singular, for it looks on the surface as Pringle and familial, but is actually mainly documents connected with Harriet Townsend and a commercial busines.
  • Robert White (Cory 40 + Bodleian 80) is singular, one side of a correspondence to one other person, Robert Godlonton, and adds up to an intelligencer, as the concerted provision by White to Godlonton of detailed information about local commercial and political networks in Grahamstown and some connected locations including London…

But also I can think of other ways to characterise each of these sets of letters, which bring them closer together or further apart in a classificatory sense. They all consist of letters, while the ratio of letters to related epistolary items to other kind of documents of life differs considerably between them. They each read very differently – and so do, from last year’s great Cory Fieldwork Trip, Bessie Price’s letters-cum-journals, and Mary Moffat’s extended disquisitions in not/writing to children and friends in Britain alike. They each have, or do not, organising features (e.g. scriptural economy, intelligencer) and those that do not are interesting in other ways. Few epistolary edifices are as clear and indivisible as the Forbes epistolarium; most are muddied confusing waters to navigate. And so the mind chugs and putters on, a little steamship chugging its cautious way between the rocks, inching its way upstream.

The road trip: Distance, the post, time and landscape Three hours of solid driving at 110kms ph and we arrive, sort of. We’re staying in Ermelo (pronounced er-MEh-lo, which is thriving, the largest place in this large district, but a bit grim in terms of how it looks. The surrounding area is mainly flat, has tens of miles of maize fields above, and beneath are many colleries (open cast mixed with shafts) so HUGE double coal juggernaughts crowd the road from the N4 turn to the N11 through to Hendrina, some distance from Ermelo, itself another long distance from New Amsterdam (the former New Scotland). We reccy Ermelo and where we’re overnighting, hit a Mugg & Bean for coffee, then three more hours on the road. The road now is to Amsterdam, around 80kms away, and takes well over an hour, for there are many large potholes and also we briefly stop each time we spot a Forbes-related farm name.

First to appear are Nu Scotland, Athole Forbes itself, then Amsterdam. This latter is in a wonderful place, just under some stunning hills, but also rather grim. On for another hour and a bit to Glen Aggy and Westoe, then to Chrissiesmeer, with the Lake in the distance (but alas somehow Lake Banagher, smaller and tucked away, was missed). Then another long distance on another road back to Ermelo from Chrissiesmeer. Sound looooooong distances? Precisely so, and even by car this area feels huge, remote, its own. ‘Back then’ in the Forbes’ day, until the first cars staggered through, contemplating distances in terms of the time they would have taken is eye-popping. As a consequence, the Forbes’ local, district, wider South African and international travels are all the more notable. There was no railway until after 1902; the first cars are mentioned in letters around 1908, 1909. From the Forbes Estate farm at Athole to Amsterdam would itself have been a hefty distance – no wonder connections there wrote to offer sleeping space (‘shake-downs’ for the men) and toileting facilities when social events were held and the settler farming families descended en masse for jollification. And Ermelo, goodness how long going there by horse or a Scotch cart would have taken, so no wonder things were written in letters and posted.

BUT, writing this about letters and the post begs more questions than it answers. ‘The post’ involved one of the Forbes workers (How? By foot? By cart?) taking their post to or fetching it from Amsterdam; and from there the ubiquitous pony cart service most likely did a regular weekly service in transporting post to and from Ermelo, Carolina, Barberton and the like (all shown on maps of the now-Mpumalanga, then the south eastern Transvaal). However, many letters indicate something more bespoke although without specifying precise detail. A lot of them in the earlier period, for instance, have at the top ‘per Kaffir’, with the later word now a deeply offensive term, while used then always with a capital and as a general term for someone who might be Zulu, Swazi or Tswana, and so a kind of ‘per black person’. A little later, openings to various letters contain such comments as ‘I have sent a Boy (now another equally offensive term) with this’, or ‘Your Boy arrived… I shall start him off tomorrow with this’. But how did these messengers travel these long distances and do their long journeys, and where did they stay en route, for they could be away for days or weeks? And even more elusive, what on earth did they make of the oddities of the white folks perched in their midst?

Little trace of ‘the land’ as the Forbes knew it, lived on it, loved it, worked it, is in evidence now, for the area of their (many) farms is mainly given over to plantations (ironically, plantations of the wretched pines that also obscure much of Scotland). Who says landscape is a fact? People have been sculpting and resculpting it for millennia, this vast social construction we call the land. The Forbes grew maize and some other crops as the changing market indicated they’d get handsome returns on them, had a home farm which grew vegetables etc for their own supply, put in fruit trees, and yes, also put in small plantations of blue gums and wattles in the 1910s. But mainly they kept and bred stock – oxen, large herds of cattle, goats, many many sheep, donkeys, and large numbers of very expensive horses. The walled dense phalanxes of plantation trees now cover the open landscape that would have existed back then and on which these animals would have grazed for much of the year. Ah, time! No going back! What has the road trip provided, then, that hasn’t been realisable from materials in archival situ? I guess, fairly much the things I always think about South Africa, from have travelled so much of it over the last 20 year, but this time with a particularly Forbesian twist to them:

  • The immensity of the distances involved – if this is so now in a fast car, how much more so then
  • The isolation of places – drops and small towns isolated in different parts of a vast area, which is topographically and in other ways from other areas in South Africa
  • The sense of remoteness – even now, these seem small worlds with their own local concerns which map uneasily and partially onto ‘national’ and ‘general’ ones
  • The bizarre quality of the white/European presence – that they treated the place like it was Perthshire but with sun and beasts and discomfittingly dissimilar people

Gallery of Forbes-related places… 

New Scotland New Scotland

Amsterdam Amsterdam

Forbes Athole

Forbes AtholeForbes Athole 2

Westoe

WestoeWestoe 2

Last updated: 28 February 2015


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