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. Over the next few months, we would like to share this bittersweet saga with you from the (as yet) unpublished book.
Leaving Walsersbrunn
In 1916, the Walsers had returned to what would become a very challenging situation. Roydon and Phyllis were too young to fully understand this and would remember a carefree youth at the edge of the Kalahari.
The matriarch, Susanna Rosina Hill, died in 1920 and was mourned by her extended family. Margaret Susan inherited Signalberg. It was exclusively hers as the Walsers were married out of community of property. She spent more and more time there but was forced to sell the farm four years later.
Two of the Walser daughters would marry middle-class South African men. Rosa Agnes married James McDermott, and Margaret, Paul de Ville Roux. They lived the lives of the moderately affluent in the Cape Town suburbs of Tamboerskloof and Plumstead, far away from Walsersbrunn and their childhood past. Leslie Wilhelmina married the constable, Herbert Brooks, and lived in Tsumeb and later on in Swakopmund. Cecilia Dinah was a working woman in Cape Town and remained single. In the attempt to be close to her daughters, Margaret spent more and more time in Cape Town. She would, eventually, die in Cape Town in 1950.
The daughters remained childless. This may have been motivated by race considerations and the fear that their children may have been darker than their parents under the norms of the society of the day. The loneliness and poor prospects of Walsersbrunn frustrated Sarah Elizabeth, Charles Adrian’s wife. She moved to Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape in 1929 with her children, Roydon and Phyllis. She would live there for the rest of her life. (She died on 1 January 1973, aged 83, and was buried at Port Alfred’s Settler Church.) Charles Adrian divorced her for wilful desertion and died 32 years before her.
Margaret Susan shuttled between her daughters in Cape Town and her husband and son in Walsersbrunn. She also visited her sister, Agnes Hill, in Groendoorn and was engaged in family matters. She assisted whenever she was able to and loaned £1500 to Charles Adrian in 1940. Sarah Elizabeth’s children received their education in South Africa, far from the solitude of the Kalahari. Phyllis became the family historian who assisted Swiss and South African researchers. She described her childhood in Great Namaqualand with fondness: ‘When I was young it seemed like a wonderland. I would like to go back one day. My memories of it are inclined to haunt me, and I would like to try and lay the ghost [to rest].’ She had vivid memories: ‘Only once did I see the veld in a garb of green. After years of drought there was a small shower of rain that fell only on Walsersbrunn and nowhere else for miles around. Masses of duiweltjies appeared within a week and the veld was a sea of green sprinkled with star-like flowers. Hundreds of springbok came in from the Kalahari and grouped themselves round the Walsersbrunn homestead, feeding on the greenery. I remember standing on the front stoep and watching the springbok leaping all the way to the horizon.’
Phyllis and her husband, Patrick William Coates, did eventually visit her childhood home many years later. Although she remembered the springbok that once had roamed across the veld and the wild horses that had gracefully glided down the dunes, by the time of their visit the land had been fenced and the horses slaughtered.
On the Walsersbrunn farm, Roydon had played with San children who taught him how to run in a steady lope, dropping the weight of his body from one foot to the next in a leisurely movement that did not strain breath. This running style enabled him to run faster and longer distances than the boys in the Orchards boarding school he attended, but he was banned from interschool competitions because the teachers thought his style of running too unorthodox and uncivilised.
The crises in the Walser family were far from over in the 1920s. There were seven years without a single raindrop falling on Walsersbrunn. South West Africa was also not spared the global economic Depression of 1929–1933.
Carl Wilhelm gradually slid into blindness, a fate he shared with his brother, Otto. His son, Charles Adrian, died in 1941, a few months before Carl Wilhelm. Charles Adrian’s sisters, Cecilia Dinah and Leslie Wilhelmina, witnessed their deaths. The spinster and the daughter who had made her home in Tsumeb were the family representatives keeping them company in their final hours.
The popular South African writer, Lawrence Green, had this to say about the landscape: ‘If I were asked to name the most forbidding solitudes occupied by white farmers in South West Africa I would select the lonely places along the Kalahari frontier. … it is sometimes impossible to avoid an impression of tragedy. … Carl Walser, surrounded by dunes and desolation, was lord of the frontier indeed. He used to sit on a high dune for hours at a stretch, dreaming over his huge domain. His son Charles formed the same habit. They loved this isolation, and even when they were ruined by seven years of drought they refused to leave. All the wars of the century left them unshaken in this resolve. The [Khoi] respected the Walsers as neutrals and left their property untouched.’
Carl Wilhelm did not aspire to frontier-type heroism, however. He also had no illusions about the uselessness of huge stretches of land if nature worked against you. He and his brother-in-law, Karl Arthur Örtendahl, sold Kinderdam, releasing funds that bought the Örtendahls a shop in Klein Karas and kept poverty at bay in Walsersbrunn for some time. The Swiss option had disappeared; his parents had died, the family home had been sold and his siblings resided in an old-age home. Carl Wilhelm never gave up hope, even in the demanding circumstances of the time. In his last letters to his brother Otto he wrote about karakul, the new breed of sheep that had been imported from Kazakhstan by the Leipzig fur trader, Thorer, and farmer-traders like Ernst Luchtenstein who had made a fortune from them. The farming world was abuzz with talk about pure sheep breeds and cross-breeding and Carl Walser had a keen interest.
He retained his Swiss citizenship and his 1940 identity document classified him as an alien in the country he had called home for 58 years. (Swiss neutrality may have appealed to him when he faced the second world war of his life.) All of his children and grandchildren were South African citizens.
When his eyesight failed, walking was out of the question. Without hands guiding him he would bump into bushes and stumble into warthog burrows. So, he took his mind on walks - uphill and downhill through lush meadows and snow within reach of the majestic Alps of his youth. He walked through London’s multitude of people, vehicles and noise and he saw his friend, Fred Cornell, thrown out of the motorcycle sidecar. He walked through the broad cross section of humankind at the foot of Table Mountain, followed the shores of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, watched sea gulls flapping and dolphins frolicking. He walked alongside wagons and carts to Keetmanshoop, Vryburg and Kimberley on dusty roads, through the veld with its ochre, grey and brown pebbles and its red sand, which could break into gorgeous bloom at the touch of a few raindrops. He watched hornbills, guineafowl, weaver birds and vultures. He could stop anywhere and eke out a living as he had done in Ukamas and Kinderdam, but the war and the vagaries of climate could undo all the work and improvements he had sunk into the soil and sweated for. In his mind, Carl Wilhelm walked with Charles Adrian and Roydon, and Fred Cornell along the Bak River to the Orange River and through the mountains trailing the Great River looking for the Great Snake with a jewel on its forehead. He felt happy and proud that he had walked his life with a wife, children and friends who were beautiful, humane and intelligent, even though his last walk was a lonely one.
Carl Wilhelm had a wireless radio and listened to broadcasts of soap operas of love and luck, news about the German war machinery spreading destruction across the globe and, occasionally, his favourite music by Schubert and Beethoven. He had no son fighting in World War II to trouble him in his old age.
Looking back on his life’s work he did not have a lot to show for all his efforts: a failing farm, two children who had died in the prime of their lives, a dispersed family and the blindness of the last years of his life. He had started young adulthood as a bright business mind, had crossed the Great River to begin anew, had repeatedly confronted devastating setbacks in his life and had put up a much better fight than you would expect from a spoilt upper-class child. He also managed to keep his integrity as a human being and he had shared his life and energy with good people. He knew that fate had been unfair to him but he was not defeated. Carl Wilhelm occasionally drowned his sorrows in sherry. When he faced death, however, he was calm and collected. He had lived through terrible times and had done as much as can be expected from anyone.
With Carl Wilhelm’s death, the Walser presence in South West Africa came to an end. When the Walser farms were sold, the lawyers’ fees had been subtracted and debts paid there was only £1 300 left for each heir.
(Join us every Sunday to take a step back in time and follow the interesting, sometimes sweet, sometimes heart-wrenching tale.)