To Bite A Python on the Head

And the memory of  “He-who-sees-with-his-hands”

14 April 2000

Friday afternoon again, and time to the record some of the adventures of life on the frontier.

It hasn’t been much of a week. The lions are still playing around the house, and some contractors building a house for a new neighbour, have been kind enough to come and warn that the big cats have been hanging around even during day time, “so please be careful.” OK...

Last night was a bad night. It sounded as if all the critters were having a party on the sandbanks at the river again. A singalong beneath the moon. They had me up nearly every hour since midnight to see just what was going on. Egyptian geese excitedly hollering with voices that bear an uncanny resemblance to that of Rod Stewart, hippos adding an element of baritone and bass that would have put amazing Ivan Rebroff to shame, while the impala went around supplying most of the general tune. The sound of a man whose throat is being cut with a blunt object – such as a wood saw perhaps. That’s the sound they make when they become amorous.

The banks of the Olifants River. It is here - when the wild figs are ripe that the the animals make merry so much that one sometimes cannot sleep at night.

Oh yes, its that time of year again over here. Some of the city-slickers who bought a property a few miles from here excitedly reported that they heard the lions making their “mating calls” all night. Well, it seems that everybody they told the story to at least had the tact and social grace not to burst into hysterical laughter and telling them that those snorts were impala and not lions! (Lions are sort of silent. Sort of eh... more discreet. These impala sounds are more eh... well, let’s just say they make it sound as if mating cannot be fun at all...) Oh, and then there was something knocking on my roof too last night. I snuck around like a nosy old woman, armed with flashlight and a handgun, but saw nothing. Just one of those things, I guess...

Mentioning the moon, brings to mind a visit of some neighbours who usually only stay down here during the cooler winter months. They brought a bit of fresh news which I found interesting, since it comes all the way from my birth land, Piet Retief. There’s a pretty nice mountain not very far from that town, by the name of “Hlangampisi.” In Zulu this translates to “The Meeting Place of the Hyenas.” This mountain is one of those incredibly weird and wonderful places which words just cannot adequately describe. It has an atmosphere that makes you feel as if you’re actually standing on a strange planet from some science fiction movie. The wind makes weird sounds, the light is oddly diffused, the vegetation is completely different, and even the rocks look strange.

Hlangampisi - seen from a distance and not looking remotely as tall as it actually is.

On the eastern side the mountain is even more strange. There is a huge crater, with nearly vertical cliffs all round, except for only one narrow crack, where a river leaves this weird valley. At this point, there are mysterious deep caves, enchanting waterfalls, and beautiful indigenous forests, and the locals call it “Hlangamvula” – the place where the rains come together. And indeed, when it rains, the angry black storm clouds usually seem to gather over this spot, and then expand from there.

The son of one of the German farmers, a fellow called Klingenberg, went hunting for some baboons recently. He was climbing some of those cliffs when his foot slipped and before he could catch hold of something, he went over the edge and fell straight down. Luckily enough, however, the sling of his rifle caught a tree, and it whipped him around and slammed him against the rocks. He managed to hang there, and finally slithered back up to safety, relatively unhurt but very much shaken. Looking down, he said he could see where he would have fallen to his death, fifty metres below where the Entombe river originates. “Quite a spot of good luck there old fellow,” as my British ancestors no doubt would have said...

There is very much to be said about this wonderful region, but I won’t go into too much detail. Maybe just to mention that in those caves there once used to live blood-thirsty cannibals. The last of them were apparently wiped out around 1870 when the German settlers moved in, but in some of the caves, human sculls and bones can be found to this day – still bearing tooth marks and knife-cuts in the bone. On the farm of another Klingenberg, nearby, there is a huge big rock where the victims used to be slaughtered and their heads bashed open with clubs and stones to extract the brains. Curious thing about that rock, and the cliffs behind it is that when you strike them, they utter the most hair-raising sound. It sounds as if everything is reverberating.

Further south from us, there is a place called Marloth Park. This is a property development in a nature reserve where the more affluent members of society like to own property. It is right next door to Kruger Park and the land actually forms a loop, bordered by a river, which cuts into the Park itself – which is always very sought-after real estate. This also implies a relative absence of crime, which counts for much in the New South Africa. But crime tends to follow the rich the way that a reputation seems to follows a bad woman. This is where the lions caught and devoured two bands of thieves last year, which I have reported about previously. Well, the lions have done it again! This time they caught a thief on a bicycle. I’m not sure whether they ate him also, but there’s a local rumour going round that those lions are now praying for more “meals on wheels!” The property owners seem to be most pleased with their new security personnel. And best of all – they don’t belong to any Unions.

Elsewhere, there have been a lot more crime this week, unfortunately. The owner of a small farm store, opposite the valley in which I used to live, has been attacked by robbers and robbed of what little cash he had. Poor Twesh was lucky. He didn’t get killed. Only badly insulted and slapped around.

But in- or near the Orange Free State there was a little incident that was interesting. Another band of robbers attacked this small little country store. They took 86 Rand (that’s about US$15) from the cash register, the owner’s cell phone, and his car keys. They then did the unthinkably wicked act of locking the poor owner into a chest-freezer and absconded. But the locals must have found out what was happening. They were soon tracked down by a horde of black figures which descended on them from all sides and started chasing them.

The robbers obviously knew what would be their fate if caught, for they seemed to have had the fear of death in their minds. Eventually one of them shot himself in the head to avoid being captured and probably also torn apart alive. The second one tried to do the same, but before he got that far the crowd caught him and oddly enough, prevented his suicide attempt. I take it that they did engage in vigorous non-verbal communication though, for it seemed that the fellow got fairly well injured anyway. Only the third one managed to escape to live and tell the tale of every robber’s worst nightmare come true: that of being lynched by a mob. Perhaps this is partly what the communist-indoctrinated masses meant when they used to scream: “We are the people and we want the POWER!”

The neighbour told me something else which I’d completely forgotten about. When we told him about the python that had eaten the waterbuck, he said that it might have been same one which had caught one of his workers two years ago. Apparently the man had gone to the river not far from that very spot, and had been attacked by a huge python. The terrified man said the nightmarish creature had its big coils all around him and was holding him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe. And then he managed to catch hold of the snake’s head. All he could do was bite it behind the head. This seemed to have saved his life, for eventually the snake let go of him and the two of them parted, both much the wiser for the experience. (I just wonder whether the snake got gangrene like that man who was bitten by his wife, I talked about recently...)

When the lucky man’s friends went tracking the snake the next day, they said his track was as wide as that of a vehicle’s tyres! The voice of fear has a habit of exaggerating sizes so I wouldn’t necessarily take it too literally. But still, those snakes to grow quite big. We don’t have too many pythons around here, though. Plenty of black mambas, however. But those are stories for some other time. Sooner or later there’ll probably be one because I’m always attracted to snake stories.

Somehow the conversation also turned to a man whom the old folkies still talk about occasionally. A big frightening man called Mbekizandhla. In Zulu this means “He who sees with his hands.” People were really afraid of him. He was actually not a Zulu at all, but a white man. A man whom people used to call “Doctor Potgieter” – despite the fact that he wasn’t a medical doctor. Mbekizandhla’s main claim to fortune was that he could heal people with his hands. They used to come to see him from hundreds of miles away. He would let them stay in special rooms which he had next to his house. Every morning he would get up at three, and start “treating” people by holding his hands next to their bodies, and very forcefully stroking up and down – yet never actually touching the bodies.

He would really work himself into a state doing this, and by nine o’clock he would be completely drained to such an extent that he had to stop. Some said you could literally feel some kind of “strange power” between his hands, and claimed that he had healed them almost miraculously. My neighbour said he went three times, but apparently “He who sees with his hands” could do nothing for his back problems... But that’s what makes life in the country so interesting. The kinds of people that you encounter here are often of the kind that make your jaw drop. Mbekizandhla eventually retired to some hellish spot on the Mozambique border and nobody has ever heard from him since, yet even today, nearly 20 years later, people still mention his name with superstitious awe.

News from Zimbabwe continues to be bad. There are now about 1,000 farms that have been invaded. Some farmers have been attacked and assaulted. It is terribly sad to see one family after another packing up what worldly possessions they can fit onto their vehicles, and moving off to the safety of the cities, while the mobs are cheering and jeering at them, waving their fists, dancing and singing “liberation songs.” Most of those beautiful, productive farms had been burnt down during the civil war, and those farmers had built them up from the ashes. Many had been bought from the current Zimbabwean government, so there is no truth in the accusations that they had “stolen the land.”

The Zimbabwe high court has again ruled that the police has to forcibly evict all these hooligans and that the farmers have rightful ownership of the land, but as before, the police seems to be refusing to obey in the least. The president has told the squatters they can and should stay, and while he is having meetings in Cuba at the moment, the deputy-president has simply decreed that “it is no longer necessary to occupy farms, since the law has just been changed, enabling the State to seize private farms without compensation.” Zimbabwe has also told Great Britain that if she should attempt to interfere, they are prepared to protect their independence with whatever force might be necessary.

They have in actual fact, had the insolence to unofficially threaten the UK with war if she should try to intervene! In the meanwhile, our South African farmers near Pietersburg are reported to be preparing their farms for receiving the Zimbabwean farmers if they should be kicked out the country. I believe that Great Britain has also agreed to offer the displaced white farmers British citizenship if they should be thrown out the country. At the same time the land-hungry masses near Wakkerstroom in the south-eastern Transvaal, South Africa, (where some of my family still farm), have also threatened to start invading farmland.

These people have a curious view on the ownership of land. They dogmatically and emphatically maintain that just as nobody can own the air or the sky, cut of a piece of it and say: “This little piece here is mine,” nobody can cut of a piece of land and say it belongs to only one person. To their logic, land is something that belongs to “the people.” This generally means that you can’t really deny others access or living rights on your property. This kind of stone age thinking is of course, ideal for political exploitation. President Mugabe has to hold new elections within the next month or two, but so far he has refused to announce an election date. Will Zimbabwe turn out to be the next in a long line of militant, extreme-socialist dictatorships?

This is becoming “old hat” now, but in neighbouring Mozambique, yet ANOTHER cyclone seems to be brewing up. That poor country is seeing no end to their miseries this year! This is now attributed to the El Nina effect, which is supposed to be the opposite of “El Nino.” It is also apparently what has been causing hundreds and possibly thousands to starve in renewed catastrophic droughts in Ethiopia and northern Kenya.

Oh, and there’s this town called “Middelburg” which I always drive past en route to Johannesburg or Pretoria, and where one of the other locals live, who own property close to us. There a sixteen year old delinquent has stolen an aeroplane for the SECOND time from the airport, and had buzzed his own school. This created such a panic that the entire school had to be evacuated in great haste. His father just shrugged and said that his son is as passionate about flying as other kids are about riding a bicycle. Somehow, the logic in his explanation escapes my poor, tired brain. But I think I like that kid. And I think I like his dad too.

I could got on a good deal longer, but I figured four pages is about enough. As I said, this has been a quiet week.

Many regards,

Herman