Set in southern Namibia, Great Namaqualand, ‘Bittersweet Karas Home’ is the story of three families, the Hills, Walsers & Hartungs, whose lives merge and intertwine in a semi-arid land that presents both hardship and blessings.
‘Only historical reflection enables us to liberate ourselves from history.’ (Pierre Bourdieu)
People living in the Karas region had to be hardy and know how to survive under challenging conditions. Their bittersweet Karas home demanded it of them. Today, however, we can pass through the region in air-conditioned 4x4s and enjoy the appeal of the semi-desert in comfort. It is almost like watching a film on the screen with the awe-inspiring beauty of rolling sand dunes and savannah hillocks. The temperatures may have been forbidding and the terrain unforgiving for the heroes or heroines, but today we experience them from comfortable seats and in cool cabins, watching the land fly past beyond the car windows.
For modern-day visitors to gain an inkling of what the families went through requires spending more time on the land to become familiar with this harsh, unrelenting area. As we do, we begin to gain an understanding and appreciation for the land and what the people living here experienced.
Over the millennia Karas inhabitants had the arduous task of trying to make the semi-desert bloom. The San hunter-gatherers mastered bushcraft - the art of finding food and shelter on the arid land, if only tenuously. The Khoi used livestock to survive in this unfavourable environment and developed pastoralist lifestyles. Hunter-gatherers and pastoralists spread out very thinly over the landscape to ensure sustainable usage of wildlife, veldkos, pasture and water. People who did not operate within the carrying capacity of the land faced hardship or engaged in raiding as a last resort.
Times have changed from the days of the bone-shaking ox-wagons used by yesteryear’s Karas residents and visitors to present-day 4x4s, and history has revealed how the reins of power were transferred from one group of people to another, and then another. The Khoi and the speakers of Bantu languages overpowered the San; the Oorlams overpowered the Khoi and the speakers of Bantu languages; the Germans overpowered the Oorlams and all other Africans; the British and British Dominion South Africans overpowered the Germans militarily in 1915; the Afrikaners or Boers overpowered the British politically in 1948; and the Namibians and their global supporters overpowered South African colonialism and ended colonialism in 1989/1990, after more than a century of resistance. The land witnessed these various periods, silently. Today, rather than continuing this cycle and the need to contest for power, the present has become a time of balance and empowerment, of people working together for a common cause; a huge leap of perception and purpose.
Namibia’s new government embraced reconciliation when it became independent in 1990 (as did South Africa’s ‘rainbow nation’ in 1994). Colonial administration was not dismantled but rather transformed as economic change was envisaged through education, affirmative action and reformatory legislation, while requiring the formerly privileged white community to use its skills and economic position in the interest of the common good of the country.
The families described in this book arrived as traders and missionaries in southern Africa and in the Karas region. They were multilingual, multinational and multicultural in orientation, so it was no coincidence that they intermarried. Their multinational origins in England, Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and southern Africa, and their multinational experiences in Europe, America and Africa gave them the ability to cooperate when two world wars pitted nations against each other and spread global mayhem and misery. They were forced to take sides when narrow nationalism and group interests eroded the last chances of cooperation.
Namibia’s independence enables us to once again embrace multicultural choices. We can reach back to the unspoiled nature and culture of the past only by moving forward in time and development, away from a past of colonialism towards a democratic, mutually beneficial and truly international country.
The last Walsers in Namibia died in 1941. Walser/Fincham descendants, however, still live in South Africa and have kept their Ukamas memories alive. The Örtendahls vanished from recorded Namibian history when Ivan Örtendahl moved to Cape Town. The Hills were pushed off the Groendoorn farm complex in the 1930s and 1940s and joined urban life in Keetmanshoop and Windhoek as ministers, clerks and teachers, classified as coloureds under apartheid rule. The Hartungs kept the family farm, Enos, but many Hartungs, opting for the academic world, moved into town and became professional educators. Charlie Hartung was employed as a school principal, became a National Independence Party candidate in the 1970s, joined the Nyae Nyae Foundation working for the rights of San people and is now engaged in cultivating the Hoodia plant, a traditional veldkos plant, much sought-after in western societies for its appetite-suppressing properties.
His daughter, Patti Swarts, was the founding director of the National Institute for Educational Development and head of Teacher Education and is now an Africa Development manager in the fields of education, e-learning, instructional technology, research and ICT.
The families’ homes have undergone many changes. Many of the Groendoorn complex farm houses and Zacheus Thomas’s school in Klein Karas have become ruins. The Walser homes have been altered by the subsequent owners: Strauss, Theron, De Witt, Van der Westhuizen, Tonnemacher and Punzul. Enos is the home that has remained most similar to its original structure and is still in family possession.
A portion of the Hill/Groendoorn complex forms part of the Gondwana Canyon Park today, while sections of it are still farmed by sheep farmers. The farm Klein Karas has been allocated to a Nama/Bondelswarts community through the new land reform act.
At the core of the Hill, Walser and Hartung families were strong women like Susanna Rosina and Agnes Hill, Margaret Susan Walser, Wilhelmina Charlotte Hartung and Anna Fries who were the true homebuilders and emotional mainstays. Even if they do not always dominate our narrative, they are its real heroines. And, at the head of them all is the patriarch, Charles Henry Hill, a pivotal character who chose the piece of Karas land as his home more than a century ago, and through him and the solid foundation of the Groendoorn farm complex, the three families were drawn together. His grave lies next to that of his wife, Susanna Rosina, on Groendoorn, once positioned under a large camelthorn tree that died off over the years and now stands with only the sky and stars as shelter, embedded in the stony soil and fringed by bleached tufts of grass.
The land touched the lives of the three families and their lives touched each other, intermingling and then spinning off in their own directions and to their own destinies.
They experienced all the turmoil and tragedy, fulfilment and failure, loss and love that are part of the human condition. But, at the end, the pendulum swung back to the time before people arrived when the canyon land was wild and the animals free - and all the tumultuous changes in the country, the vicissitudes of their daily lives, the trials and tribulations, and the results of years of hard labour crumbled into the land as the human counterparts departed. Grass grew up and springbok nibbled amongst the ruins as the land began to heal. Like the land, the sky absorbed the complex history and hardships of the families into its vast clear blue and released it in wisps of white clouds that briefly dotted the sky and then dissipated.
(Join us next Sunday for the final excerpt of this interesting, sometimes sweet, sometimes heart-wrenching tale.)