Another Year Of Eunuch Life In Transkei

I find it hard to believe that we have been living here in Qolora for a year already. What have I learnt during that time you might ask? Well something interesting is that many roosters get castrated. It’s a special skill, practised by a couple of trained grandmothers or old men who know which part of the internal bits to remove. They turn the bird over, deftly slice under the ribs, pop out the goonies and slice off the unwanted bits. Where I come from, people take their poor cats and dogs to the vet where they leave their testicles and their dignity behind and return home docile and less likely to roam the neighbourhood. Loosing your manliness would take the wind out of your bag I guess. Anyway here in Qolora, all the dogs are brown, scrawny, hungry and from the same stock. Having more than one cock on your property is more of an issue though as they will fight each other to the death to put claim to their roost of hens. Turns out our hen, the one who doesn't lay eggs, but occasionally squawks a pathetic sort of crow and doesn't partake in any recreational fowl play around the yard other than an occasional dash, isn't who we thought she was. After she grew tail feathers, I asked a Xhosa woman who probably thought I was as thick as a plank for not knowing the basic facts of life, to identify our unique fowl. Turns out our eunuch chicken has been under the knife which explains his behaviour and why he’s getting so fat. He is meant for the pot but Theo doesn't seem to be making a move to slaughter it as he’s too busy figuring out what to do with only one egg per day. Meanwhile the eunuch rooster doesn't know where it fits in, the functional rooster is getting cockier every day and the hen is getting laid more often than she is laying eggs.

Besides learning about the schematics of our chickens, I've also learnt that facebook is addictive. I was probably one of the last people to succumb to its web of exploit. Now, every time someone has an epiphany or comes across a quote proclaiming peace and happiness it seems I'm also informed along with the rest of the world. I've joined an Anti Animal Cruelty group and I'm horrified at my response of being reminded daily that I belong to the same human race as those repulsive people who abuse animals, yet I do nothing about it. I've become bored with the window into other peoples lives but I still find myself scrolling down daily looking for something but goodness knows what it could be.

Naturally, the two most important things I've learnt while here in Transkei is the Xhosa culture (which is an ongoing quest) and the Transkei education system, the first being intriguing and the second being shocking. Here, the Xhosa style of cooking is not very imaginative and copious amounts of oil and Aromat are the only flavourants used. All cuts of meat are chopped into hunks and boiled in their own juice or braaied. Xhosa people share their food readily and when feeding visitors, the correct etiquette is to fill your guest’s cup and plate to the brim. People always carry left overs home. Xhosa women enjoy their tea or coffee very hot and use a tablespoon to sip from their cup. Umfino is a bitter leafy wild vegetable boiled with pap and oil. Vegetables can be chopped into minuscule pieces without using a chopping board or a mixer. Much less preservatives or additives are eaten in the Xhosa diet so people don’t suffer as much from cancer and other modern diseases.

I've learnt that getting my tongue to click at different angles in my mouth at the same time as pronouncing a bunch of syllables is difficult. I've learnt that Xhosa people are in no hurry to get anywhere and they love singing while doing chores, walking, visiting, partying or any occasion. Gospel tunes are favoured. Night time singing while walking home through the hills makes one feel braver in the dark. Ululating and repeatedly flicking out your hand towards someone is a show of appreciation and handshakes are a three part ritual which has nothing to do with rappers. The colour of the beautiful, beaded, traditional outfits of wraps, skirts, aprons and headgear worn by older women often vary from area to area. A new bride’s patience is tested as she is expected to serve her inlaws hand and foot for the first few weeks of her marriage. A man with a foreskin is still a boy. A medicine person treats patients without asking them to describe their ailments as opposed to a regular doctor who does, thereby exposing their incompetence for having to extract the ailment from the patient. A medicine person also treats cases of bad luck and psychological ailments.

Xhosa superstitions are different to western superstitions. Black cats, ladders, Friday the 13^th, 7 years of bad luck from broken mirrors, salt over your shoulder, lucky charms which keep one safe or help you rugby team win and number 3, 7, 13 or 666 are not considered. Sitting on your front step blocking your front door is considered unlucky because you are preventing a family member from returning from whatever place they have travelled to for a length of time. Dangling a needle over your pregnant friend’s stomach to find out if she’s carrying a boy or a girl isn’t practised but if you have twins it used to be recommended to plant a Euphorbia (Naboom) which is a hardy plant and as long as the plant grows strongly, so will the children be healthy.

I’ve learnt that funerals are a very big part of Xhosa life and that if a young man disrespects his tradition by not attending, (which also leaves less men to dig the hole) he can be fined as much as R500 by the elders. I’ve learnt that important family decisions are made based on people’s dreams and that even ancestors can get very jealous of each other. I’ve learnt that killing a cow sorts out a lot of issues.

The most important aspect of Xhosa culture is the traditional belief in ancestors. This is changing and unfortunately as younger people are drawn to a more modern lifestyle in cities, so their customs are being forgotten.

And then there’s the education system. Where to start. Well, the whole system sucks. Teachers, themselves struggling with the English language, ineffectively teaching in schools without sufficient desks, chairs, books, working toilets, jammed into overcrowded classrooms, regular absenteeism and led by principals without any management training is the norm. I’m learning to go with the flow but seeing the system fail the learners on a daily basis is frustrating.

I think the most important thing I’m learning is that the way I view my world determines my place in it. I’m here in Transkei to observe not to judge.

Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye

Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye


It was time for us to go. After restoring my mothers house and the garage to somewhat resemble its previous orderly fashion, although the pots would never be the same, we were ready to head off to the old Transkei. After contacting a few people up in the Eastern Cape who were involved in upliftment programmes, nothing concrete materialised as to an income but teaching English and sharing our knowledge in rural villages about covered the general idea and we would wing it. We were mentally ready. We packed the truck and squeezed in as many things a person might need for an indefinite period of stay in rural Transkei. We packed the obvious fishing gear, extra canvas for a makeshift tent to extend from the truck, two massive hammocks which I had made but which we never got around to testing and in fact we were under the impression that there weren’t any big strong trees out there. Our spade got strapped back onto the side of the truck, the panga inside, 10 different kinds of chilli seeds and a handful of butternut seeds and we were about as set as space would allow in our efforts to being self sufficient, which was our ultimate aim. We once again had loads and loads of spices although I swore we wouldn’t take as many this time round but somehow it never happened. In fact this time we even had Miso, Dashi, Tomyum paste and some other funny Japanese stuff, not 1 but 2 sushi mats, 5 litres of soya sauce, and enough salt which was left over from my seaweed products to spike the whole of Coffeebay’s blood pressure off the chart for the next 5 years. Then there was the cast iron hand mincer, why?! well, you never know what might come in handy. We squeezed in bags and bags of books, files and files of English lesson plans and even a blackboard. To keep my crafting desires stimulated I packed bags and bags of leather scraps which I could use to make more bags or even plait around a walking stick with a few beads, bags and bags of fabric scraps including 10 meters of left over wedding organza to weave into bags or make flowers or such things, 1300 wooden skewers left over from our corn dog days which could be turned into a shit load of flower stems or woven into more sushi mats in case people in rural villages fancied a bit of sushimi. We also wedged in the welder and angle grinder, both electric but you never know. We were prepared.

My mother’s hyena club wished us well and with a blessing and a prayer from them, we set off.

We made a detour to say our farewells to Theo’s family before following the road up the East coast. We were in no hurry to get anywhere and I wanted to adjust to being on the road again. Theo and I had not been communicating very well the year we’d been in Cape Town and we needed time to work on it. His habitual hours of facebook, constantly checking on line news about things such as what Lady Gaga wore to bed and his senseless daily dose of Judge Mathis on TV bugged me endlessly. The more perfect I became the more he retreated. He refused to change to my idyllic lifestyle and I realized I was drowning him with my constant pushing, which I thought was a dam clever observation but I didn’t know how to fix it. Like I said, I was almost perfect.

A few days on the road with no city life distractions and short before long we started opening up and sharing our thoughts. We were happy again. Happy with each other and excited about our adventure. Staying on the N2, ticking off the kilometres didn’t offer very scenic pullovers but was more cost effective diesel wise. At Groot Brak we found an old but still maintained day camp site at the river mouth so we stayed for 2 days while Theo fished and I hauled out our “Introduction to isiXhosa” booklet and we practised greeting each other and how to buy meat which Theo deemed more important. We also practised Poi. I’ll explain what Poi is in case you haven’t heard about it. Basically you attach 2 balls, each onto a piece of string or wedge them into the bottom of a pair of long socks (I put bags of salt in my socks since I had an endless supply of the stuff). Then you swing them round and round in different directions trying to avoid knocking yourself over the head. It’s cool. Except the bruising part. The heavier the ball, the more you bruise as I soon found out. Theo kept whacking himself in the knackers and my glasses sat at a strange angle on my face giving me a distorted view of the world. We loved our new pastime and soon we had a good rhythm going with the balls. The tutorials at www.playpoi.com were a great help but we had quite a way to go before reaching the final stage of swinging fire balls to music and I wasn’t ready to light my socks just yet. Apparently Poi is an old Maori custom which was part of the haka and warriors used to swing rocks tied to the end of a rope in order to strengthen their muscles and prepare themselves for war. These days it’s sometimes practised by trance party goers who spin their glow in the dark or fire balls to music pulsating through every nerve and muscle as they prepare themselves to dance through the night.



We stopped at Sedgefield and Knysna and leisurely strolled through a few craft markets which got me all inspired to make things with wire and fabric. Oh yes I forgot to add that I had also packed 3 big rolls of telephone wire which we found in my mothers garage ceiling which I planned to strip and make things with. We spent a night at a cool free picnic pullover in the forest between Knysna and Plett. We went for a stroll, me with my coffee cup in hand, in search of edible mushrooms. We got so enthralled with the jungle-like mangrove forest with ferns twice the size of a man, that before we realised it, we were lost and it took us three hours to find our way back to the truck.



Closer to East London we passed loads of river estuaries tucked away in dense natural forest vegetation with a couple of houses dotted here and there overlooking the sea and river mouth. What beautiful places. How awesome it must be to live there I thought. The hills, which there were many of, were all covered in thick dense thorn tree vegetation spreading for miles, reaching the horizon in every direction. Further along we passed game farms and the narrow road was flanked with lush thorn trees but we still spotted loads of Gemsbok, Nyala and Springbok close to the road.

We stopped for free at another cool free beachfront braai spot at Kidds Beach, 30 km’s before EL. We stayed there for 3 days waiting for the weekend to pass, going for long walks, drinking Pinacolada, (well Theo’s home brew Vodka liqueur), making love at midnight and even got caught in the rain. Every morning at 7 o clock we watched a pod of a hundred or so dolphins leisurely pass by in their morning patrol, surfing in the waves and having themselves a great time. On Monday we set off for East London to do some business and shopping. We needed to take the truck through road worthy which passed YEEHAA and then get the new yearly licence. It’s quite a rigmarole and moerse expensive (R5000) to keep our truck on the road.

We pulled in at Nahoon Caravan Park, and met the weirdest couple ever. Off the chart odd balls. They cornered us as we drove in and within minutes Theo and I started making excuses that we desperately needed a proper shower which by the way wasn’t a lie. The husband had a beard and was going for the Jesus look except he combed his hair from his left ear across his bald head all the way to the right side. He dashed around, alternating between playing his homemade pan flute and preaching nonsensical gibberish. He reminded me of a toothless, scrawny guy who lived in a pit, surviving on Juniper berries in a Monty Python comedy. He had a serious A.D.D. problem and we struggled to follow his gist but I caught the word Jawe, Zeus, and penis and I tried really hard to follow since it showed potential interest but I couldn’t grasp the plot. His wife told me that we were in the final season for the end of the world and that they were prepared by stocking up with dozens of tinned food and a solar panel. This was within 2 minutes of meeting us, and that’s when I moved upwind, lifted my arms and flapped them a few times in the hopes that my exposed armpits might distract her and give me the gap to disappear. After our first meeting, every time we needed the loos we sneaked passed the Evangelists’ camper home, which by the way was very nicely equipped and even had a big organ.

A much more pleasant meeting was getting together with John, who I had contacted from Cape Town before leaving and hoped he could give us some assistance or ideas about our plans. He was a really nice person and thought our idea of living in a rural village, assisting with teaching and any skills which we could offer the community was wonderful. His church and community work took him to rural villages so he was able to give us some direction as to where to find unspoilt rural villages that we could settle at. He suggested that Coffee Bay did not fall in the above category as the influx of tourists there had brought drugs, alcohol and polluted beaches. He suggested alternative places, gave us a map and told us God would guide us to the right village. We chatted about the people, fishing, road conditions and our ideas. His quiet calmness left us assured that we had made the right decision.



The next day we excitedly broke up camp, packed up our fantastic new sputnik washing machine which I’d used with squeals of delight, and headed into an unknown territory of Xhosa people, goats, mud houses and the Tokkolosie.