by Rowan Johnson
Winding through a desolate “hinterland” of South Africa known as the Karoo and into the sandy dunes and grasslands of the Kalahari Desert, there is an ancient trail that is known to some as The Forgotten Highway. Stories of this hinterland from the 1800s, set between the lush mountains of the Cape and the vast Orange River, would surely make for some epic historical movies. This place is where some of the earliest Voortrekkers (original Afrikaner settlers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State who migrated from the Cape Colony in the 1830s) often found themselves trying to escape British colonizers in Cape Town. This was certainly not easy terrain to cross in a rickety wagon. Fresh water would have been a constant issue and the rugged battle for territory with dangerous wild animals must have been an arduous struggle. Moreover, the “phalarope” Voortrekkers all too often also found themselves clashing with the native Khoi and San tribes of this area.
A “phalarope” can be described as a small migrant wading bird, occasionally straying from the coasts to inland waters. Too Late the Phalarope is the second novel by South African author Alan Paton, published in 1953. Paton uses rhythmically lyric, almost Biblical, prose to masterfully describe the true ethos of the Voortrekkers and the Afrikaner people as well as their most important values, especially within the context of some of their underlying opposition to the often-arbitrary rules of their political system. As in Cry, The Beloved Country, the novel offers rich descriptions of the land and the wildlife that makes up such an important part of the visceral experience of Africa:
He knew all the trees and the ferns and the flowers, the sharp-tasting water plant that children chewed for its sour juice, and the magic never known again, save in memory, for duty and law and custom closed on you, and work too, and you did what thousands had done before you and thousands would do after you, so that something could continue that had no magic or wonder at all.
Too Late the Phalarope tells the story of a white Afrikaans policeman, a pillar of his community, who has an affair with a native woman in South Africa. Pieter van Vlaanderen struggles between his responsibilities as an officer and his private lust for Stephanie, a young black woman of Khoisan descent. The Khoisan people of South Africa are an ancient ethnic group with a long and fascinating history, believed to be the oldest human inhabitants of Southern Africa. His attraction for the woman violates the Immorality Act, one of South Africa’s most stringent apartheid laws of the time governing relationships between the races. Paton explains the Immorality Act as such:
Whether you’re old or young, rich or poor, respected or nobody, whether you’re a Cabinet Minister or a predikant or a headmaster or a tramp, if you touch a black woman and you’re discovered, nothing’ll save you.
After violating the Immorality Act, Pieter van Vlaanderen struggles against the censure of his inflexible society, his family, and himself. During those days, there was plenty of this typical lust that crossed racial lines, and new clans were built and destroyed constantly. It must have been trying for Voortrekkers and tribal people to live in such close quarters. But this dynamic is very much the story of the development of South Africa as a country, as described in rich detail in The Inheritors by Eve Fairbanks that deals with politics, economics, finance, modern history, and current affairs in post-apartheid South Africa. Filtered through the lens of a white feminist American woman who now lives in South Africa, Fairbanks presents a whole swath of South African history that portrays the evolution of the country quite well and succinctly. The book is written extremely well with a wealth of research and input from a wide swath of people; not just the “politically valuable” ones… which is refreshing.
As a white South African man living in Georgia, I appreciated the level of frankness and recognition presented in the book. Fairbanks states:
I sometimes like to tell people recent South African history loosely collapses two hundred and fifty years of American history into about thirty—from our antebellum era into our future.
This is also a prevalent theme of Alan Paton’s better known novel Cry, the Beloved Country. A constant refrain of that novel is to document the detrimental effects of the constant turmoil and resultant fear that exists within all the disparate characters and societies of South Africa:
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.
And to be sure, much like Paton’s tale of Pieter van Vlaanderen in Too Late the Phalarope, life on the frontier was full of dramatic displays of bravery, atrocious acts of cruelty, and plenty of drunken foolhardiness. It is unfortunate that so much of this exciting period of South Africa’s history is often only recounted in dry government documents, in dreadful handwriting, by Dutch colonists.
In 2005, Nigel Penn, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cape Town, examined some of these ancient government records The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century. The government records dealt mostly with matters of trade, finance, and law. There were also written reports from veldwachtmeesters — kind of sheriffs who, somewhat like Christo in The Inheritors, were raised to protect colonial interests. However, according to Penn, these reports were “barely legible, written by barely literate people, whose language was neither Dutch nor Afrikaans but something in between, and whose style was innocent of punctuation, orthography or grammar”.
Although the hinterland offered up plenty of religion, drama, comedy, brutality, and tragedy, there indeed were very few writers to record the turmoil. Unlike the American western frontier which has had so much of its history immortalized and mythologized in books and movies, the South African hinterland remains largely a frontier that was bereft of writers. The only real literature legacy came later, in the form of diaries full of sketches and paintings, from European explorers who travelled north from the Cape, and who benefitted from the efforts of those earlier tamers of the hinterland.
The hinterland is where slaves often fled from their owners and started their new lives, where clans fought with bows and arrows, with swords, muskets, and flintlock rifles. Here, where the desert lands of the Karoo cross into the desert lands of the Kalahari, the banks of the Orange River quickly filled up with rebels, pirates, elephant hunters, horse thieves, and cattle rustlers. The rich wildlife and the fertile plains were attractive draws for hunters as well as for livestock farmers. Inevitably, there were constant clashes between all the competing groups.
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In May 2023, my American wife and I embarked on the famous Blue Train from Cape Town to Pretoria. The Blue Train route is a 54-hour, all-inclusive journey of 1600 kilometers (almost a thousand miles) that travels through some of the most diverse and spectacular scenery in Africa. We were pretty apprehensive about the trip because we were not entirely sure the train was still even in operation. The travel agents were very vague and non-committal, especially once they had received our money. In fact, as late as August 2022, the official Blue Train’s own website even stated that the trains were suspended until further notice.
It got to the point that I started relying on external reviewers to get some factual information about whether the train was running or not. Mark Smith, “the Man in Seat 61”, is an Englishman who has been deeply involved with British Rail for the best part of his life. Smith’s website seemed authoritative enough and his coverage of the South African rail system, at least, offered some assurance that the trains were running. On his website, Smith offers the following bit of classic Blue Train history:
A fast train called the Union Express northbound and the Union Limited southbound was introduced in 1923, to link the Union Castle steamers arriving at Cape Town from Southampton with the gold fields of Johannesburg and the Transvaal capital at Pretoria. The original wooden coaches were replaced in 1937 with steel coaches built in Birmingham and painted a smart blue. Before long, the train became known colloquially as ‘that blue train’, and its name was changed officially to ‘The Blue Train’ in 1946. Two new sets of coaches were built for the Blue Train in 1972, and both were beautifully refurbished in 1997.
So, fortified in the knowledge that the train itself was not just some mythical hinterland creation, we dutifully checked in at 10 am and relaxed to a live jazz performance with gourmet canapes, snacks, and drinks. The Blue Train is said to be one of the most luxurious train rides in the world and it is billed as “a window to the soul of Africa”.
At Cape Town station we were promptly greeted by a bellman and butlers who gave us sleek navy and gold boarding passes while escorting us to the plush seats and fully stocked bar of the pre-boarding lounge. The train manager introduced himself and the crew, gave us all the information we needed and escorted us to our carriage. We did indeed depart from Cape Town at around noon and traveled over two nights before arriving at Pretoria station.
We set about enjoying the amenities of our room, a “Deluxe suite” with two sprawling armchairs that folded out to two single beds, and a private full-size bathroom and shower. Besides being able to order anything at any time from our butler, there were also lounge cars serving drinks and afternoon tea, as well as a bottle of champagne already chilling in the silver ice bucket in the room.
On the second day of the journey, the Blue Train arrived at Kimberley Station where we boarded a bus to the Kimberley Open Mine Museum Tour to see the famous Big Hole, highly revered for its rich yield of diamonds. It was this kind of valuable loot that initially made this area so attractive to miners and dream-seekers of all sorts. The mining industry has been largely abandoned by now in Kimberley but tourism remains a vital “slice of life” to all that live in this part of the country. It would be nice if the mining companies would put more effort into promoting the town better as a tourist destination.
It’s sad that mining companies like De Beers destroyed so much of the landscape of Kimberley in their quest to extract diamonds from the earth, and they are now simply moving on to other more “fertile” areas. They claim to be restoring their former diamond mines to nature, but this claim is dubious at best. Besides the impressive size of “the Big Hole” and a reasonably informative museum, there seemed to be little else for tourists to do in the town. Our group completed the full tour and were put on the bus back to the Blue Train within two hours.
After leaving Kimberley, the train tracks made it squarely out of the Karoo region and into “the grass country”, just on the outer fringes of the Kalahari Desert, as described so well in Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope:
The mist had gone and the stars shone down on the grass country, on the farms of his nation and people, Buitenverwagting and Nooitgedacht, Weltevreden and Dankbaarheid, on the whole countryside that they had bought with years of blood and sacrifice; for they had trekked from the British government with its officials and its laws that made a black man as good as his master, and had trekked into a continent, dangerous and trackless, where wild beasts and savage men, and grim and waterless plains, had given way before their fierce will to be separate and survive. Then out of the harsh world of rock and stone they had come to the grass country, all green and smiling, and had given to it the names of peace and thankfulness.
It was almost time to enjoy another gourmet meal along the likes of steak and lobster and luscious Cape wines in the dining car. We donned our formal wear and set off for a five-course feast to the rhythms of a talented saxophonist. For cognacs and other drinks after the hearty meals, I settled into the Club Car which offered plates of biltong snacks as well as various Cuban cigars served by dapper barmen behind the fully stocked bar.
While savoring the rich drinks and pondering the scenery outside the train, I reflected deeply on Cry the Beloved Country for the first time in about 30 years, when I read the novel in my mid-teens. I’ve always been especially struck by Alan Paton’s rich description of all the hillsides and general geography of the country, and I marveled at the natural beauty of the South African landscape, as described in passages such as this one:
The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more.
But then I pondered, also, the multitudes of sorrows and defeat ingrained in that same garish landscape, and ingrained deep within the layers of rock and rich human history of the southern-most country in Africa:
This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country… Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.
With Paton’s pronouncements echoing through my mind, I slowly fell into a gentle slumber amid the clouds of cigar smoke, the fumes from my cognac, and the peaceful rocking of the train, trundling doggedly through the stark African night.
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In June 2023, shortly after the Blue Train journey, I read a fascinating article by Julienne Du Toit called “Travelling the forgotten highway of South Africa’s hinterland”. The article described a new heritage route called The Forgotten Highway, spanning the Karoo and Kalahari deserts, and revealing some of the most dramatic history of the 18th century.
I quickly realized that the Blue Train had taken a very similar path. The train had travelled partly from Ceres to Kimberley, a trip which almost traces the route of the Forgotten Highway as depicted below.
Professor Doreen Atkinson of the Karoo Development Foundation, based in Loxton, has examined the Anglo-Boer history of the region and the complex relationships between missionaries, trekboers, authorities, the San and the Griqua people. Since this “Forgotten Highway” route traverses some of the most obscure and least-travelled sections of the country, Atkinson has been trying to pull all these disparate bits of history together to construct a new tourism route.
Some modern trailblazers have recorded the hardship and beauty the early explorers, hunters, and escaping slaves must have experienced. For example, Piet Coetzer, a famed horse-and-cart pioneer, completed a seminal journey along the Forgotten Highway with his horse-drawn wagon between Sutherland and Griquastad in November 2022. Coetzer noted that for tourists, the area would surely seem quite desolate, with its deserted roads, erratic bandwidth connections, low population densities, and near ghost towns.
After Coetzer’s findings, a group called the Forgotten Highway Summiteers was formed. Professor Atkinson devised a summit to flesh out the Forgotten Highway concept and route in late May 2023. “The Forgotten Highway Summiteers” are a group of academics, area boosters, and regional government specialists who are trying to provide more context on this forgotten frontier and the people who traded, farmed, and hunted here.
The Forgotten Highway is crucial to a confluence of South African cultures since it sprawls across such a vast area. In Fraserburg, fossils still show some miraculously preserved tracks of animals from 250 million years ago. The Wonderwerk Cave between Danielskuil and Kuruman preserves an intact sequence of sediments that accumulated gradually over a period stretching back almost two million years. The story of the cave incorporates stone tools, animal bones, and botanical materials that provide evidence for shifts in the activity and the ecological context of the earliest human ancestors. Wonderwerk Cave is one of the greatest archives in the world, preserving fragile evidence of human history reaching far back into the past, such as the Kathu Pan Handaxe, made from banded ironstone about a million years ago.
Land surveyor Claus Riding of Ceres discussed how he was compiling the old wagon routes of Carl Thunberg and William Burchell from 1815 and overlaying them on current topographical maps. Riding also explained that “The Forgotten Highway” was not a new name, since a man by the name of Mossop had already described the difficult route from the Cape as such, in a book called Old Cape Highways in 1927.
Other “Forgotten Highway Summiteers” include Denzil Kruger, a direct descendant of ancestors who included elephant hunters and forgers. Mpho Molema, a direct descendant of the BaTlhaping tribe near Kuruman, described how the tribe had great herds of cattle that often overwhelmed the early Cape colonists. Tour guide and photographer Thabiso Macheoane of Postmasburg discussed how preserving heritage and natural beauty has been a difficult task in a land where mining takes precedence over all else.
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In numerous places along the train route between Beaufort West to Kimberley, it quickly became obvious that the overhead traction wire had sometimes been stolen by copper thieves. On the day of our journey, the train, in fact, departed a little late due to theft of the wiring in Worcester (about two hours from Cape Town). It is a full-time job to keep the Blue Train running and to ensure that the route remains safe for modern, well-heeled travelers. The business of keeping the train running can only become easier with further development of The Forgotten Highway tourism route and the resurrection of the stark desolation of a land that was once so bountiful. It would be nice if the mining companies would step in to help a little more, but as is so often the case, it seems that the bulk of the restoration process will lie in the hands of ordinary citizens like the Forgotten Highway Summiteers.
Thanks largely to their ongoing effort, the interprovincial journey of The Forgotten Highway has now attracted a degree of national attention from the Department of Tourism in Pretoria. It is hoped that many more of the local museums will someday be renovated, refreshed, and made more relevant to modern travelers. In this way, it is hoped that the route can be strengthened section by section to increase tourism overall and generally help uplift the impoverished towns in the region.
In Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton’s words ring especially true in the context of this noble attempt to restore the glory of The Forgotten Highway:
Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who indeed knows why there can be comfort in a world of desolation? Now God be thanked that there is a beloved one who can lift up the heart in suffering, that one can play with a child in the face of such misery. Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal. Aye, even the name of a river that runs no more. Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Who knows what keeps us living and struggling, while all things break about us?
The Blue Train railway trip can offer travelers an incredible geographical overview of parts of South Africa that are so often overlooked. As the name “Forgotten Highway” implies, very few travelers have ever seen this part of the country. Even fewer have seen the starker little shanty towns with rows and rows of tin shacks that can be safely taken in by travelers only from a train on a winding railway line. Generally, the Forgotten Highway can be seen as another example of the striking income disparity that is so widespread in South Africa: a disparity that was so visibly jarring from the luxurious interior of the Blue Train.
Those parts of the journey were sometimes a little depressing, especially when seeing the mountains of trash strewn in and around abandoned stations like De Aar, with wild foliage growing through the railway platforms; the hordes of gaunt, barefoot people staring up at the passengers in “that blue train”; and the clustered mounds of round grass huts with their pitiful and bare plantations of maize and beans and sweet potatoes. The trip, indeed, turned out to be a true window into the soul of Africa.
Rowan Johnson holds a doctorate from the University of Tennessee as well as an MA from the University of Nottingham, England. His work has been published in Two Thirds North, 4ink7, Passing Through Journal, Wordriver Literary Review, GFT Press, and the Writers’ Abroad Foreign Encounters Anthology. He has also written numerous travel articles for SEOUL Magazine.
References
Atkinson, Doreen. Karoo Development Foundation (KDF).
Du Toit, Juliette. Travelling the forgotten highway of South Africa’s hinterland.
Fairbanks, Eve. The Inheritors.
Mossop, Eben. Old Cape Highways
Paton, Alan. Cry the Beloved Country.
Paton, Alan. Too Late the Phalarope.
Penn, Nigel. The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century.
Smith, Mark. The Man in Seat 61.
Photo Credits
Baker, Sybil
Johnson, Rowan
Marais, Chris
Smith, Mark
