Dusk, the autumn sky pink and grey, and the braai fire well on the way down at the River. Where better to contemplate the Coronavirus and lockdown?
As I have been more or less confined to barracks for six weeks following knee replacement surgery, I am well used to isolation. On my tod with just dogs and bottles for company.
The first thing you notice is that life is not as hectic as before. You realise how much time is taken up with driving to town, working out at the gym, going to the pub, visiting family and friends and so on.
So what to do with all these extra hours? And then it struck me that I have always wanted to write but was always too busy to get into the swing of it.
Now I have no excuse! Engage right brain and get to work!
So this is the first of a series of blogs about the Village of Redhouse. It is not necessarily a true history, because truth is an elusive thing, and sometimes I make things up.
For those imaginary readers who may never have heard of Redhouse, you will find it on the banks of the Swartkops River, 20 km north of Port Elizabeth, which is the loveliest city in South Africa, if one excludes the City Council.
It makes sense to start the story at the earliest time when humans (well, sort of) may have lived in the Village.
Not very far away, in the caves at Klasies River Mouth near Humansdorp, about 125 000 years ago there lived some people who, according to the boffins, may have been anatomically modern but not necessarily “behaviourally” so, unlike the next lot to move in 50 000 years later.
The first mob apparently trampled the garbage underfoot in the caves, whereas the later arrivals made a point of dumping it outside. Upon this evidence the scientists calculate the degree of civilization.
Evolution does strange things. Sometime during the approximately 2000 generations between the two sets of tenants, a mutation occurred in the female DNA. One day, Mrs Klasie just had enough of this tramping dirt into the carpet and threw her toys out of the cot. As the mutation took hold, so did the volume of screaming, shouting and nagging.
You would think that natural selection would have favoured those females less noisy, given that males prefer some intervals of peace and quiet.
My theory is that it worked the other way round. Males realised that they got to escape the cave to take the garbage to the midden. Once they were out, they could skive off to see their mates and have a Middle Palaeolithic beer.
However, let’s move forward in our time machine and position it above the spot where a long time in the future the Village would arise. We are now at about 18 000BC.
I don’t think the River flowed in its current position then. Rivers change over time, sometimes rapidly. It’s reasonable to think of its main course running along the foot of the escarpment opposite the Village in those days.
And it wasn’t a tidal river, at least not at Redhouse. The sea was 125m lower than at present. The weather was about 6 degrees colder on average than today.
This means that the shoreline would have been way beyond the latitude of Bird Island, then just a kopje in the veldt.
The reason for this astonishingly low sea level is called the Last Glacial Maximum. Here we shall have a digression into the suddenly forgotten topic of conversation, Global Climate Change.
You will be pleased to know that we are living through the splendidly named Quaternary Glaciation, which started a mere 2.58 million years ago, and was preceded by at least another four glaciations.
During this time, the planet has endured cycles of cooling and warming, on average 100 000 years of chill and 40 000 years of bikini weather. The Last Glacial Period began about 115 000 before the present and reached its maximum about 22 000 years ago. The amount of water locked up in the ice sheets around the world caused the sea level to drop dramatically.
Then it slowly began to warm up, although there have been periodic relapses of varying severity from time to time.
For example, the River Thames used to freeze quite frequently. The citizens would hold Frost Fairs on the ice. The first on record was in 695 AD. The last one was in 1814.
Great fun was had by all. 1683 was a particularly cold spell. The River froze from 20th December until 6th February, during which time a whole street of shops was established, coaches plied the “streets”, much sport was enjoyed, including bull-baiting, and small boys played football on the ice.
On 2nd February (Candlemas day) they roasted an ox. King Charles II and his Queen came to the braai.
Sometimes, the ice melted rather too fast. In 1789, a ship anchored to a pub next to the River sank down as the ice melted, pulling down the pub and crushing five tipplers to death.
End of digression. Back to the Swartkops River.
Now we are getting closer. By 3000 years ago the sea level had stabilized at more or less its present height and didn’t alter by more than 0.2mm per annum until about 1880, when it started to climb to an average of 1.8mm pa. No doubt due to the industrial revolution burning a prodigious amount of coal.
Who lived in the Swartkops valley then? No doubt wondrous herds of game, aardvarks and antelope, heffalumps and hippos, lions and leopards, San and their cousins, the Strandlopers.
We now need to shift our focus northwards, to Ancient Egypt, where reigned from 610BC to 595BC Pharaoh Necho II, an ambitious fellow who, amongst many other projects, made the first but unsuccessful attempt at building the Suez Canal to foster trade between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.
He also managed to get a mention in the Bible for killing King Josiah of Judah at a battle at Megiddo in 609BC.
Most importantly for our story, he sent Phoenicians around Libya (as Africa was called in those days) from east to west.
The Greek historian, Herodotus, said it took them three years before they returned through the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar).
He personally doubted the story as they said the sun rose to the north of them, which of course would have seemed strange to someone living in the northern hemisphere.
Many years ago, I was told by a very wise old amateur archaeologist that there was a strong possibility that the Phoenicians wintered over in the Swartkops River valley. There would have been plenty of fresh water, game and salt. A beautiful place to chill for the winter.
It makes lots of sense. The Swartkops River would have been deep and wide and unobstructed by the dreadful bridges that have caused it so much damage over the last 150 years. They would have sailed in through the mouth with a fresh south easterly on the port quarter and proceeded upstream until they found a fairly flat piece of shoreline (where the Redhouse Yacht Club is situated) before dropping anchor.
The other reason to stop at that point might have been the presence of a San community close by. The reason for surmising this is the presence of one !Click (well, he has to have a name) found buried in a sitting position six years ago, with a hole in his head, not far from this landing place.
There may well have been a San encampment where the famous Zwartkops Rowing Club (ZRC) is situated on slightly higher ground, just above the probable landing point.
You can imagine the scene. The San are sitting around digging up grubs for lunch, they look up and suddenly see this large boat, an apparition totally strange to them. They would have been transfixed in astonishment!
Apparently, the San use as many as twenty different click sounds when they talk. The excited conversation about this entirely new experience in their lives must have sounded like a knitting machine convention.
Then a large fellow shouts at them in a strange language – all he wanted was a cold beer – and they take to their heels in fright, whereupon the thirsty one shoots an arrow after them and down goes !Click!
Or perhaps !Click belongs to a later era. We shall see as this series unfolds.
It’s interesting to speculate on the type of ship the Phoenicians might have used for his expedition. They probably wouldn’t have used one of their long, narrow warships fitted with a bronze ram, which would have been a bit scary to sail in the open ocean.
They had big cargo vessels called Gauloi, which were wider than the warships and had curved and rounded bows and sterns and would have been easier to handle in a swell. They had one massive mainsail and probably weren’t all that fast. They had a steering oar rather than a fixed rudder.
The helmsmen must have been pretty fit fellows!
They would have had no problem sailing such a ship up the Swartkops River. It had a decent depth of water in those days.
The fishing must have been magnificent. Add in natural salt pans, plenty of fresh water and loads of game to hunt.
In 1907 the bowling green next door to the ZRC used to be Mr Stead’s orchard. Perhaps this was where the Phoenicians grew their fruit and veg.
I have long wondered whether there are any Phoenician artefacts lurking about.
There is a large silver, three-handled mug with a glass bottom at the ZRC, of unknown provenance, much used in the past for drinking Black Velvet (Guinness and Champagne) and sometimes for decorating the ceiling with same. But sadly I think it belongs to the time of Queen Victoria.
Now that the Club is deserted due to lockdown, and all Villagers are obeying orders and are out of sight at home, this might be the time to dig up the bowling green in search of relics!
Finally, enjoy the lockdown and please refrain from uxoricide!
