I first spotted the old ox-wagon abandoned in a deserted farmyard while I was driving on the dusty roads of southern Namibia. The ancient wagon glimmered with the romance of adventure. When I stopped at the neighbouring farm to enquire about it, I learned that it belonged to a man by the name of Oom Jannie van Niekerk, who was living at a retirement home in Karasburg. I decided to see if I could meet Oom Jannie and hear the ox-wagon’s story. I had a feeling it was going to be a good one.
The next time I passed Karasburg I arranged to visit Oom Jannie. Besides being eager to hear his story, I wanted to ask him if I could buy the old ox-wagon to display at Gondwana’s Canyon Lodge. But Oom Jannie was adamant, the ox-wagon was not for sale. Seeing my disappointment, he smiled and said: “Seun, ek verkoop hom nie, maar ek gee hom vir jou as ‘n geskenk.” (“Son, I will not sell it, but I will give it to you as a gift.”) There was a condition however, he wanted to escape from the retirement home for a day and return to his beloved farm. This would be my pleasure. We spent the day together driving around the farm where his family’s memories circled over the hectares like homing-pigeons. Over the kilometres and hours Oom Jannie recounted the long tale of the trusty ox-wagon.
The story went back in time to the late nineteenth century when ox-wagons were the primary mode of transport and families trekked north looking for land, a livelihood and a place to call home. The sturdy wagons were built by only two wagon builders in the Cape and were highly-prized for their ability to traverse densely wooded kloofs and rugged terrain. This particular ox-wagon was ordered by Izak van Niekerk, Oom Jannie’s father, and it travelled by steam train to Namaqualand where Izak and his young bride, Susanna, waited with a span of oxen that Susanna had received from her father as a wedding gift.
It soon became their means of transport, home and a way to earn a living when the couple and their two young children left Izak’s father’s farm to seek their fortune elsewhere. They carried all their possessions with them: candles and cooking pots; spades that hung at the back of the wagon; supplies like sugar, rusks and spicy sausage; a kettle and a small chicken coop. They slept in a ‘matjieshuis’ made of bulrushes which was rolled up and stored in the ox-wagon during the day. On the move, ‘trekgees’ gradually took over the family, a restless pioneering spirit and passion for the open road. The ‘trekpad’ took them northwards to the Molopo River, an area north-east of Upington where the only bleak prospects were to become a ‘bywoner’, a sharecropper or tenant on a farm, or to ‘smous’, hawking commodities from farm to farm. They chose the latter and transported salt along the scorching Kalahari-Upington route until the trekgees once again called them northwards. There they crossed the flowing waters of the Orange River into the harsh and beautiful country of Namibia, never to leave again.
They camped on farms in the south where the hazy, purple Karas mountains beckoned and finally in 1924 arrived at the farm, Garub, in the Karasburg district which belonged to a Mr Jan Louw, nicknamed ‘Krippel Jan’ for his crippled leg. The Van Niekerks had arrived home. They later bought the south-western portion of Garub and named it Groenrivier. It was a farm that tested their courage and resilience as they faced the challenges of farming in the semi-arid region.
The farmhouse was built with wagon-loads of stone conveyed by the aging, dependable ox-wagon. For a brief period, before the market collapsed, the Van Niekerks also transported fluorspar mined on the farm to the railhead at Karasburg. By the 1940s most of the building operations at Groenrivier were completed and the ox-wagon’s demanding life slowed down. Besides the occasional trip to Karasburg, it was only used to deliver loads of wood to the farmhouse for the wood-burning stoves.
In 1952 Izak and Susanna left the farm to spend their remaining days in town and their son, Jannie, their ninth-born, took over the running of Groenrivier. When gas replaced wood for the stoves, the ox-wagon was moved out into the farmyard. Left to its memories, it collected the sand of the ages blown by the dust-devils and the dry winds that sweep through southern Namibia.
After that initial visit I met up with Oom Jannie a few more times as we became friends and I had the good fortune of hearing more about his life and the generation of farmers who farmed karakul sheep in the dry south. I invited him to visit the canyon, where a memorable day was spent at Canyon Lodge, the new home of his old ox-wagon. When Canyon Village was built, the time-worn wagon was proudly installed in the dining-room.
I heard of Oom Jannie’s passing on my car radio one day while I was on the road watching the blonde landscape melt into the horizon. It felt like the end of an era, the end of an age when people trekked with all their possessions over thousands of miles, covering the vast distances that could now so easily be traversed in a day or two. They experienced and participated in everything along the way: hunting for the pot, grazing the trek animals, finding water, enduring the sweltering heat and bitter cold, confronting the dangers and becoming part of the landscape they travelled through.
The old ox-wagon is testimony to this period, before the onset and rush of the twenty-first century, when travelling was still a way of life and hours turned to years on the dusty tracks. A century of hopes and dreams, adventures and experiences lie ingrained in its weathered timbers.
I learned more than the tale of the ox-wagon from Oom Jannie. I was reminded that you can’t buy everything in life, some things just aren’t for sale, and that there are more important things in life than money.
The ancient well-worn wagon at Canyon Village reminds us of all these things.