The Big Read: Memories of a one-horse town

16 April 2014 - 02:01 By Tom Eaton
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THE CHANGELING: Greyton is a ghost of its former self
THE CHANGELING: Greyton is a ghost of its former self
Image: ED SUTER/AFRICAMEDIAONLINE

The little hamlet of Greyton, an hour outside Cape Town, isn't known as a centre of learning.

Few of the day-trippers who arrive in town searching for countryfied luxury would even notice the old primary school up on the hill. But for one school term, almost 30 years ago, it was my alma mater.

Leaving the lambswool embrace of my Waldorf school and entering the corridors of Laerskool Uitkyk was a shock. Having lived in a world of no uniforms, no marks, and no belief in either a Middle Eastern god or the modern nation state, I found myself swearing allegiance to the Republic and praying to an Old Testament enforcer to keep us safe from terrorists and English-speakers.

Still, I did learn a fair bit, mainly to do with Voortrekker history and the laws of rugby. I also learned that if these people were the master race, it was a race that had mastery over a terribly small world. Some of my 10-year-old classmates had never been to Cape Town or seen the ocean. Their world map had dark frontiers, marked with warnings: here there be black people.

I recently returned to Greyton, and found my own map hopelessly out of date.

Thirty years ago, Afrikaans was the first and second language of Greyton. I remember hearing it being spoken gently, being made to sound beautiful: words between friends, words of gentle encouragement. I also remember it being swung like a club: the language of the baas, of the hick trumpeting his prejudice to anyone who will listen, of the despairing farm worker, roaring his hopelessness outside the bar of the Central Hotel.

Now, Afrikaans had fallen silent. In this strangely reinvented town, the white people spoke English and the black people spoke Nyanja and French. Of the coloured people who populated my memories there was very little sign. They had been reduced to ghosts; a woman hanging up washing, glimpsed between whitewashed cottages; two children greeting me with rolling "Goeie môrrre, meneerrrr."

Where had all the old families gone? Had they held on in Heuwelkroon, the township behind Greyton, until it was entirely used up and burnt out, and then travelled up the road to Caledon? Once there, had they found it a dying place, being slowly pulled apart by the irresistible gravitational pull of Cape Town?

Whether they had been pulled out or pushed out I couldn't tell, but the town seemed pleased with their replacements. The northern émigrés served cappuccinos politely and one could hear murmurs of approval, about how "good" Malawians were, about how lovely the "Congo accent" sounded. But there was a curious deadness to it all. The antiseptic niceness of the urban shopping mall had finally reached the Riviersonderend. All the old rawness, the deep fissures of place and history, had been papered over, replaced with synthetic humanity and pleasant fantasies. This was Pax Africana, the post-race, post-poverty South African society in which the only thing worse than being racist or elitist was having a meaningful discussion about race and inequality.

Of course none of this is the preserve of Greyton or its new inhabitants. We live in an era of global Biggie Bestification. Where money goes, chintzy prettiness follows, and prettiness can remain pretty only if the world is kept at bay. One also can't blame them for trying to create the village of their dreams. Over the course of a week I overheard five conversations between residents congratulating themselves for transforming the place from a backwater into something modern, sustainable and desirable. Perhaps the rest of us could benefit from such civic enthusiasm. It is not their fault that I found the transformation thoroughly depressing. After all, taste is subjective. One man's country idyll is another man's kitsch.

On my last evening there I went for a walk and found a paddock that had remained unchanged since I was 10. A horse grazed disconsolately in one corner and I called it over. I don't particularly like horses but wanted the company of an animal just then and the stray dogs that used to haunt the place had been cleaned away with all the other mess. I found myself asking: "Hey horse, what happened here?" The horse snorted. Dude, it said, you just went away.

We understand that places change, for better or for worse, or both. No doubt Greyton is better for some people who live and work there. For me, or more specifically, that part of me that hoped it would stay the same, it is worse. But perhaps what made me feel lost wasn't the extent or direction of the change, but simply that it had happened, without my permission. Time had taken all my memories, living fragments that form part of me, and had turned them into yellowed snapshots of a place that no longer exists.

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