• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1471 0

in that small patch of bush. ‘There you are,’ says the farmer, coming to stand by us. ‘We don’t know why that plant has decided to grow just there, why it likes just this bit of soil. But look…’ And he stands feet apart, and lifts up a double handful of the earth, which is a mix of soil crumbs, leaf mould, birds’ droppings, and minerals washed from the stones. He gazes down at the earth in his hands. ‘There, that’s real soil,’ he says. ‘Not the rubbish we have in our fields, full of chemicals, that’s not soil. If you saw them without plants…the soil is like brick rubble, it’s dead. No, that’s not earth. This is it.’ His hands hold the bush soil delicately, with respect. We stand for a while in silence. The sun is down behind the trees, outlining them in yellow, and the birds’ voices make the transition to evening sadness. ‘There, look at it,’ says he, ‘just look.’ And he lets it trickle through his fingers, back on to the floor of grasses and flowers and weeds. ‘There, you see? I’ve disturbed the balance just doing that. We stand here and we don’t know what damage we are doing with our feet, what organisms we are killing, what pests we have brought in from the road. We are going to step back on to the road and Nature will have to work hard to put right the damage we’ve done. Before the whites came the blacks moved about in the bush but they didn’t harm it, not until they started turning the soil over and planting crops. What crops? Most of them are imports. Look at maize. How do we know what bugs the Portuguese brought in with maize? We don’t know! We don’t care! Well, don’t care was made to care…you ought to be able to stick a finger easily into real soil.’ He bends and does so. ‘See that? Better have a good look, because with what we are doing to the world we won’t see that anywhere, soon.’

The farmer’s wife silently indicates some Christmas lilies on an antheap. They are also called spider lilies. Each bloom is like a delicate red and yellow claw and once we used to pick them in armfuls to decorate our houses at Christmas. No one would pick them recklessly now. She shows us another plant. ‘The horses like this one. We don’t know why. When they come in from the bush you can always smell the plant on their noses.’

The men stride off into a field. The farmer’s wife and I stand looking at the reddish gold light of sunset touching the white flowers on a bauhinia tree. These flowers are delicate, like the spider lilies or the orchids: the high veld’s flowers are never heavy and damp and solid-fleshed like those of the tropics. They are fragile, and light, and their smell is dry, teasing, spicy.

The sunset leaps up the sky in a wash of reddish gold. The trees are black and silent and the birds, if they are awake, have nothing to say. We walk in silence along the farm track. A long way behind us the farmer’s lament can just be heard, but now it is hard to distinguish it from the voices coming from the farm township over the ridge–where, of course, side by side with the farm workers, live so many other people who officially are not there at all.

We walk companionably back to the house in the dark. An owl…another. The smell of horses. A soft whinny greets the farmer’s wife and she calls softly to them. There is a rush of hooves in the dark, and for a while she stands by the fence, a small dark figure reaching up to the horses’ heads, brought into sight by white-fringed ears, or the blaze on a forehead.

We join the men as the farmer is saying, ‘The blacks are not interested in our ideas about efficiency. Look…’ A man on a bicycle emerges from the dark. The farmer commands, ‘Stop.’ The man’s dark shape becomes defined as he halts, one foot on the ground. He is smiling. ‘Have you got brakes on your bicycle?’ asks the farmer. ‘No.’ ‘I can see you haven’t got a light.’ No reply. ‘All right,’ says the farmer, ‘that’s all, off you go.’ ‘Good night,’ says the man, and pedals off.

‘There must be dozens of bicycles on the farm and not one of them has lights, not one has brakes that work. They ride the bikes everywhere, through the