noble people from an older time

Anthea is a coloured woman doing a research PHD on the Khoi San people, said to be the early inhabitants of South Africa. In her day-job she is the manager of the local Mugg n’ Bean, a coffee emporium you will find in most towns here. We met her at the Main Street Market, a new idea in Plett where locals and visitors get together over food and wine and music and where they don’t pay high tourist prices. During the evening you come to notice its cooperative character. All the food stalls share responsibility for supplying plates, cutlery and glasses, tidying up – every little item returns to its place at the end of the evening. Last night featured the blues music of Albert Frost, a well known South African bluesman. I had to take their word for that – he was good, though. Very good.

The Khoi San were two peoples, we are told, and one reared cattle while the other hunted. The hunters were successful chasing their prey on foot because they hid small water containers over a wide area of the bush while the animals, though fleeter of foot, grew tired and thirsty.

There were “fall-outs” between the Khoi and the San. Eventually they came together but were driven west by settlers. Anthea speaks of them with passion and admiration. The men, she says, were real fathers to their families and communities, faithful in the feeding and protecting of their wives and children, faithful, too, in their marriages. One hopes we can learn from these noble peoples from an older time.

Speaking of marriage, the owner of Milkwood Manor asked me if I would “bless” a marriage in a few days time. The local pastor who had agreed to perform the marriage rite suddenly decided to go off on vacation. The couple, by the way, had requested that the pastor should make no mention of God at this wedding ceremony. Yup. Sea without the water, air without the oxygen, Guinness without the collar, The Coffee House with no coffee. The only thing I don’t get is why the pastor didn’t just say “No!”

the sound of thunder in a butterly's wing

It is said that a great storm has its beginning in the silent flap of a butterfly’s wing. In Paternoster, just before I left the Cape in early May, I prayed for a storm. And I wondered if a dream about men being transformed might have wings. Little did I know then that a butterfly had already tilted its fragile frame towards the sun and somewhere in the distance a hurricane was already brewing.

A man’s heart began to change. He had been drinking a bottle of whiskey a day; his marriage was slowly dying, his children drifting away from him for their own protection. One day he prayed, asking his wife for her forgiveness. He stopped drinking suddenly and completely. Four months later, there are twenty five men being transformed. There is a storm raging and the women and children are feeling a warm new wind on their faces. They are saying it is the Holy Spirit.

People of faith and people of none read this blog. Let’s just see where this little butterfly takes us.

Paternoster is as beautiful and as peaceful as ever. This morning began with a drizzle more in keeping with the West of Ireland, finishing this afternoon in bright sunlight. A tortoise ambled across the road not far from where we earlier saw giraffes munching the high branches of scattered trees. We had gone in search of Weskus Mall. We got lost. The tortoise would have made it in better time!

Tomorrow, after we get some time with our friend Sandra from Veldriff, we head for Montague and the lovely Mimosa Lodge.

the festival of eid and the mad pastor

If you turn right up Chiappini on leaving through the gates of the Salesian Institute and carry on up the hill, you enter a warren of brightly coloured terraced houses, red, yellow, green, purple, beige, and maroon. Today the little streets are crowded with women and children sitting on the doorsteps and on the kerbs eating their food. Smartly dressed men come and go in cars, entering and leaving houses, shaking hands, some indulging in extended greetings with each other.
It is a Muslim neighbourhood and today is Eid, a festival day marking the end of Ramadan. An old man coming towards me down the steps of the mosque told me it was their Christmas Day. He was all smiles and shook my hand with great vigour as we wished God’s blessings on each other. In that moment, on Chiappini, on the festival of Eid, the hearts of a Christian and a Muslim were united in the blessings of the one God.

On the other side of the world, a Christian pastor was planning to burn copies of the Koran. I wondered what the old man might think of that. And God. What does He think?

I am sleeping in the cloister of the Institute. It is on the top floor and from the high balcony you can see all the way across the bay to Milnerton and Blaauberg in the distance. On Saturday night you can hear the loud boom, boom from the gay nightclub up the street. It goes on until 5am; long after Cubana on the other side of the road has sent everyone home. During the World cup, the whole thoroughfare of Somerset Road was throbbing and heaving with match day crowds who coursed in and out of the many restaurants.

By comparison, it is now as quiet as a cloister.