I have just returned from a richly invigorating few days away from Grahamstown.
Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t invigorating simply because I wasn’t in Grahamstown but rather because it involved a stimulating visit to Cradock to attend an annual literary gathering – the Schreiner: Karoo Writers Festival.
I have just returned from a richly invigorating few days away from Grahamstown.
Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t invigorating simply because I wasn’t in Grahamstown but rather because it involved a stimulating visit to Cradock to attend an annual literary gathering – the Schreiner: Karoo Writers Festival.
Thursday evening’s Karoo launch of I Write Who I Am, the 2011 poetry anthology written by 19 young Grahamstown poets as part of their involvement in Shireen Badat’s Upstart programme, opened the event in some style. Sanele Ntshingana, Sindi Dingana, Mfundo Jacobs and Lwando Manyonta shared their work with a rapt and attentive audience, the poets introducing themselves with poise and confidence before explaining how poetry has helped them deal with so many experiences of life and of growing into adulthood.
It was humbling to be present.
This was followed by a stupendous performance by a younger generation of Upstart members – their interpretation of Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, directed by Pumelela ‘Push’ Nqelenga.
The all-day workshops in poetry and art that followed on Friday were equally inspiring, with schools from Cradock and Queenstown joining the Grahamstown contingent in producing some startlingly creative work, all expertly choreographed by NELM’s Basil Mills.
Then on Saturday we re-launched For Rhino in a Shrinking World to a warmly receptive group of literary people at Albert House, near the town centre.
Throughout my stay, as a relative newcomer to the Eastern Cape I found myself entranced by the vibrancy and energy of this festival, a paean to a quite remarkable region – the Karoo.
When I was a youngster in England, the word ‘Karoo’ meant almost nothing to me. Indeed, even the history of the Anglo-Boer War, much of it fought in the Karoo, remained something of a mystery to me. I had heard of it, of course, but not much more.
Then last year when I stayed for a few days on a farm called Ganora, near Nieu Bethesda, climbing the glorious heights of Compassberg with my friends Roddy and Kate, suddenly I began to appreciate what a very special region this is. Its farms and scatterings of small, often isolated communities – not to mention its stunningly beautiful landscapes – make the Karoo a unique place, well worth celebrating.
I am reminded of Thomas Hardy’s famous poem ‘Drummer Hodge’, written at the time of the Anglo-Boer War. Hardy never visited South Africa but imagined a simple country lad from rural South-West England (which Hardy called Wessex) conscripted into the British Army and suddenly, without quite knowing how, finding himself far from home and fighting a supposed enemy consisting of people just like himself: farmers and country folk whose every fibre cried out in closeness to the earth.
I love this poem, not least because it was so memorably performed by our own Don Maclennan at his final public appearance – fittingly in the open air – at Reddits Poetry in October 2008.
Drummer Hodge
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
– Thomas Hardy
