Seeking a Welcoming Shore

Seeking a Welcoming Shore

Copyright © 2015 .

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5727-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5728-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014922585

iUniverse rev. date: 12/27/2014

CONTENTS

Preface

West of the Sun and East of the Moon – The Okavango Swamp of the Kalahari

East of the Sun and West of the Moon – Safari to the Okavango Swamps and the N’gamiland Nature Reserve

My Family History

Leaving Portugal

Rhodesian Interlude

The Plague

Growing Up a Girl Foreigner

The Political Climate and the Rise of Apartheid in South Africa

A Matter of Interest

Early Days

Reprieve from a Dull Life

Tom, Tom, Tom!

The Dentist

Saturday Morning at the Corner Store

Durban, Natal, Delight!

Sunshine and Tree Mambas

An Incident at Frankenwald

Life Changes

Olguicha

Going Down Under

Western Australia Odyssey

Decisions, Decisions!

The Abo from Shark Bay

Resolutions and Fresh Beginnings

Adjusting to Canadian Ways

South to Singapore

Family Problems

The Joy of Owning a Forest

Looking Back

It is so small a thing,

To have enjoy’d the sun,

To have lived light in the spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done.

—Mathew Arnold, From the Hymn of Empedocles

Preface

It had been a glimmer of hope, an expectation of a brighter future. It had, in some cases, felt more like a sense of desperation and the overwhelming need to go out in the world to explore its possibilities and to shrug off the present circumstance, which, in some measure, propelled many of my relatives to seek lands which they had only heard about, lands about which they knew very little. It had been, to a large extent, the sense of adventure that had moved them to take the chance on a new place, a new continent, and a new way of life. They were driven by the glimmer of high expectations of a new life and almost magical ideas of a prosperous future.

In the case of my parents, they made the decision to leave their homeland and embark on a journey, one that would lead them to a place where the languages spoken were many and varied, where the colour of the inhabitants’ skin was vastly different, and where the peoples’ customs were primitive and often strange. The land was nonetheless spectacular. The sun shone brightly, and the huge mountain of gold, the largest gold reef in the world, held a promise of endless prosperity.

There was promise of an interesting life ahead, pregnant with possibilities that had not even been imagined in the staid and stuffy land of my parents’ ancestors. The family left behind was mired in the daily routines of the middle class. They lived among old battlefields and vast, overwhelming cathedrals that were constant reminders of an old and demanding religion. Theirs was a place where class lines were rigidly maintained and monuments bespoke of battles that had taken place long ago and still cast irreverent shadows on the present. There is no doubt that those who had been born with the proverbial silver spoon would lead rich and rewarding lives and that the abundance of their lifestyles would be hard to duplicate anywhere else. But for the masses of those whose life was only a daily grind for survival, life was hard. They faced the sameness of each day. One’s position in society was predicated by fixed rules, and the pattern of lives was set in the stone of old monuments, which reminded them of the intransigence of class and an old religion. The place did not augur well for many of the young people’s futures. For the young, leaving home was the best option.

There were only a few places that were regarded as suitable for new immigrants. Brazil was the first that came to mind when Portuguese people thought of leaving home. There was the shiny new country, with its immense forests of the Amazon, its huge landmass, and its minuscule population. Fortunately, the language spoken was Portuguese. It was the place pregnant with possibilities, where everything grew in the sunshine, sugar cane thrived, and tropical fruits fell from the trees. Even the most inept were unlikely to starve in the midst of such abundance. Brazil also had the civilized area of Rio, which was graced with a monarch for a short period of time before the monarchy was abolished. All this held great appeal for my maternal grandfather, who had been titled and had tarnished his reputation when Portugal became a republic. He had wanted to foment a revolution and, as a result, was asked by the police to accept the alternate to prison: an exile to Brazil. He had no choice, so he took his older daughter and left, literally on the next boat.

I had been brought up in the glory days of South Africa, but I was never a South African, despite having been born there. My parents, Portuguese by birth, had continued to be Portuguese by choice. I, too, had been registered as a Portuguese citizen. There was always the feeling that our stay in Africa was not a permanent one. When life started to deteriorate, when the apartheid laws were promulgated, there seemed to be little choice but to consider emigration. In a way, we still wanted to take in whatever we could of the glorious landscapes of Africa. We decided to fill our days exploring the magnificence of the African landscape and going on safaris to spectacular areas we had not had previously seen. We explored the wild places and mingled with hordes of wild animals, the waterways filled with hippos. We spent our last days in Africa in the most glorious setting of the Okavango Swamp, the largest swamp in the world. This was, indeed, the coup de grâce. We spent more time in this glorious wetland which epitomize all that we loved about the wilds of Africa – more than anywhere else. The memories of those magnificent adventures will stay with us forever and make for interesting reading.

Children who are fortunate enough to have been brought up in a foreign country come, over time, to understand, meld, and make themselves part of the new experience. In my case, assimilation and belonging were never going to be options. Those who have been brought up belonging to a distinct culture, sharing experiences and values with their fellow citizens and enjoying a uniformity of language and style, have a propensity to think similar thoughts and have their world shaped by similar biases and attitudes. For a European transplant to an African country, there is an inbuilt and ever-present alienation in interpreting the world in ways that have no relevance to the present circumstance. It is as if the keys do not fit the doors, behind which mundane objects can be scrutinized. It is like looking through keyholes that do not allow a view of the entire scene, only distorted slices of a skewed reality. I was aware that I was viewing things around me from a perspective very different from that of my parents. They had firmly entrenched middle-class values and continued to interpret the world in light of ancient ideas when faced with a new and very different country: South Africa. For them, there was no experience of dissonance. They merely viewed the new landscapes through ready-made prisms, their values remaining intact.

It had occurred to me that what was an unalterably correct response in one language was not necessarily so in another. Values were not set in stone; they were different from one culture to another. This was a monumental discovery for a very young child, the most valuable lesson of my then short life. It allowed me to meander from one language to another, from one culture to another, without hesitancy, as I knew that the rules and explanations of the world around me were not as inflexible as the adults would have me believe. Instead, it was only the shifting sands of cultural perspective. This early recognition of the world around me allowed me to form my own ideas about happenings in my small world and even recognize absurdities.

My father, on the other hand, did not adjust his perspective one iota from the time he landed in Africa to the day he died, nearly forty years later. He accepted all the old myths and values and remained a happy and well-adjusted man. To be buffeted by the different winds of vastly differing perspectives was as valuable a lesson as could be learnt anywhere. It was a soul-expanding experience. I inherited a multicultural point of view and, as I grew, traversed the shark-infested waters of differing cultural values, but I had also learnt my lessons well. My world was a happy place. As I grew older, the turmoil, the dissent, and the apartheid regime all blossomed and cast shadows on the future my parents and I had planned for our lives. There were times when I thought that we might adjust, only to find that the future was too threatening for us even to consider staying. My family members died one by one in the short period before we sailed to a different continent, so the roots we had cherished were all gone in a short period of time. We struggled to readjust our lives without the family I had cherished. The political situation deteriorating by the day, we became accustomed to the idea of leaving. After the shooting at Sharpville, our minds were irrevocably made up. We were convinced that we had chosen the only feasible option.

*   *   *

When married with a family, we carefully examined several alternatives, especially when the situation in South Africa became untenable. We knew that leaving was not an option; it was a necessity. We had not embarked on the decision lightly. Too many dark episodes brought about our appraisal of the reality in which we lived. Because of the way things were going, it became apparent that, sooner or later, we all might just be killed. Leaving was foremost in our daily thoughts. The traumas of everyday life convinced us that the quicker we left, the better for everyone. It was a distinct moment, deciding that I could not go on in the land of my birth. Not only was my life at risk, but also my children’s lives were at risk. I could see no future ahead for my family.

We cast about for ideas and finally decided that we would leave Africa and head to the land down under. There were travels; there was exploration. We considered the possibilities and then finally made the move to a land which I had never considered as a possibility. It was too cold, too snowy, and too far north. Yet there we were, most of our dreams fulfilled. We had found our home at long last. It has been a long road for various members of my immediate family, and a pleasant road for my maternal grandfather, the first to leave the motherland. He was able to land on his feet, continue enjoying the status of minor royalty, and continue his extravagant way of life in Brazil. For my parents, who opted for another continent, Africa, life was hard. They were weighed down with the responsibilities of representing the Portuguese State and took life very seriously, with little time to enjoy the fruits of their labours. They were imbued with a stern sense of duty, conscious that, although they were in a new and beautiful land, they had, in fact, imported all the trials, tribulations, and mores of the land left behind. With them, it was as if the new life was somehow superimposed on the old. They had dragged along the old land of their forebears, which cast a long shadow on their new existence. They saw no need to change. In fact, their jobs dictated that they stay in a fixed niche, promulgating the way of life that they had left behind, but just in another city and on a distant continent.

I, who had been born in the new country and knew no other, found that it was a difficult proposition to navigate between the new landscape of a different culture and the traditional way of life demanded by my family. Before we had an opportunity to consider leaving this land enmeshed in turmoil, we were cast into distressing episodes during our daily lives. The brutality of the lives of the indigenous population, the predatory manifestations of the police, and the incidents that ensued, in which we were physically attacked, were all around us. Plus, the farm we were living on was set alight, endangering our very existence.

Leaving was more easily said than done. We were on the verge of casting ourselves from the continent when we lost family members. With every illness and subsequent death, we postponed our leaving, going instead to the cemetery to mourn the family members who had fallen by the wayside and would not be able to come with us on our proposed exodus to a new and more peaceful land.

Then there was the second generation, who, having decided to cast their fate on the troubled waters of old regimes, suddenly found that life was too dangerous in Mozambique, East Africa, for them to contemplate staying in the region. Like my daughter, they were hustled out of settled lives in the middle of a revolution, only to battle their way to join older members of the family on the far continents where they had chosen to start new and safer lives.

It was a tumultuous exodus. It took several years and many false starts. Certainly, the older members of my family had given moving serious consideration. Those coming from the motherland sampled and explored several countries before casting them aside as wanting. It was not an entirely negative experience. It was a joyful seeking of possibilities on various continents and sampling differing ways of life, and eventually finding what was finally and unequivocally the right fit. It was also a decision to go to places where there were no other family members and where the culture was new, open, and accepting. In time, my family members appreciated these new countries. Those who settled in them, realizing that they had made good decisions, would never have considered going back to the lands from whence they had come. They were in their chosen lands to stay, probably forever.

This, then, is a story of many lands and various members of an extended family who sought and found new habitations and new ways of life, either by choice or after being forced by exigent circumstance. It was the story of events that made staying in the land of their birth no longer possible. It was heartache; it was adventure; it was akin to plunging into the void. It was, in fact, seeking a welcoming shore and, in certain cases, being lucky enough to find it.

Before the final leave-taking, there was a period of reflection. We enumerated all the places that we should revisit, and we said goodbye to the areas we had loved so much in the past. We gathered our thoughts together and went off to say farewell to places that had cast shadows on our souls, with the knowledge that we would never see them again. One area in particular had left us beguiled. Tom, my husband, made arrangements to revisit the Okavango Swamp and Botswana. He was waiting for my school holidays, but he only told me of his plans at the last moment. I went along with mixed feelings. Looking back now, I can say that this adventure was probably the most exciting of all our African adventures and the one that left indelible memories. It was there that we said our final farewells to Africa.

West of the Sun and East of the Moon – The Okavango Swamp of the Kalahari

The Okavango Swamp is the largest swamp in the world. The astronauts saw it from space as a large triangular scar just below the African equator. Here, the land is shaken by enormous earthquakes, which reshape the surface so that it is never the same. The area’s lakes and rivers are built on a fragile infrastructure. In fact, the swamp has no water of its own. In the dry summer months, the waters burst forth from the mountains in the highlands of Angola and fill this desert land with borrowed water, not only to inundate the swamp but also to transverse the land southwards to fill Lake Ngami in the west and the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans in the east.

Earthquakes constantly rumble beneath the surface. Some are so violent that they have been detected as far afield as the Seismological Laboratory in California where, in 1952, as many as twenty-three earthquakes were recorded.

When the earth is at the driest and all is parched in the Kalahari, which is the moment the waters arrive after their long journey from the mountains in Angola. In the summer, the waters trickle and then swell to fill the Okavango Basin for the winter season. When the land itself is dry and there is no rainfall is when the Angolan bounty refreshes and rejuvenates the land to the south, bringing it to life. The change is spectacular. All of a sudden, birdlife increases to the millions, and wildlife by the thousands. The land is supported and nurtured. It is only the anomaly of the waters coming from the north that creates the illusion of lushness in what is basically a desert.

Suddenly, after the rains in the north, huge swells break over the swamp. Rivers, channels, lakes, lagoons, and channels spill into an area which is over fifteen thousand square kilometres wide. Perversely, when the local rainfall ceases, the Okavango is at its most resplendent.

There are no set paths, channels, or even fixed roads in the swamp. These alter year to year, depending on the caprice of the water flow. Nothing is predictable, not even the whereabouts of the huge herds that roam this incredible land and call it home. Small roads run on the periphery of the Okavango, and small villages are to be found dotted here and there on the edges of the waterways.

The swamp breaks up into smaller and smaller channels as it dissipates in the Kalahari sands and travels south to form Lake Ngami. This lake varies in size and complexity from year to year. Its water supply is uncertain and alternates between being a huge watery haven where swarms of quelea are so high in number that they resemble plagues of locusts to resembling nothing more than a muddy depression, which it does in certain years.

Lake Ngami was talked about in Victorian living rooms for the profusion of birdlife and animals it supported.

It was in 1750 that the Yabei tribe moved into the area, but it was in 1849 that David Livingstone walked into this riverscape, being the first white man to reach Okavango’s shores. He reported in his journals that it was indeed a fine stretch of water. The Batawana tribe that moved its cattle into this bountiful area and built its huts on the shores of the lake.

Reports of the extraordinary bounty offered by Lake Ngami reached far afield, at which time hunters pounced on this area and proceeded in very short order to slaughter twelve thousand elephants in an orgy of death.

Then, gradually, amidst all this bounty, the lake began to change. The reed boats that the Africans had used to transport themselves through the swamps were, over time, left abandoned in the waterways of the Okavango. These reeds of papyrus had sprouted once again and had grown to cause massive blockages, which altered the flow of the water channels. The river choked to death and so did the channels flowing southwards into Lake Ngami.

The lake was dying a slow death because of the blockage. As the waters receded, the fish were stranded in the ensuing shallows. Birds descended by the millions to gorge themselves in the feast of a lifetime. Huge flocks of geese, pelicans, fish eagles, herons, cranes, gulls, pink flamingoes, and waterhens attacked and ate the dying fish.

Then a drought ensued. The cattle were stranded, as they needed water every day to survive. As the lake was no longer being fed by the Okavango, it deteriorated and became but a few puddles and mud. These were the very conditions that favoured the breeding of the mosquitoes, which had a heyday, growing into huge clouds and settling on all the inhabitants of the area. By the thousands, Africans died of cerebral malaria. To add to the sudden misery, rinderpest (foot and mouth disease) came to the already struggling cattle and wiped them out. The locals who had survived this calamity planted crops to sustain themselves only to find that as soon as the crops were ready for harvest, quelea ate them. These arrived by the thousands, demolishing the food source.

The Tabawanans were to remember 1896 as the year this fertile lake vanished. The lake was abandoned, as it was now a place of horror and death. For many years thereafter, the lake was deserted.

In 1953, the lake was resuscitated by the slow trickle of the water that had managed to escape the blockages in the swamp and form new channels towards the south. At first, small swirls were reported in the shallows of the lake. More water followed. Suddenly, one could hear the screeching of birds that had come back. Fish swam down the Okavango and into the new lake, but few could survive in the murky waters. Most died. But bream and barbel not only survived but also flourished. At first, the lake looked like green pea soup. It was ugly and smelly, but it was gradually filled with more clean water from the Okavango channels so that the birds were back in the thousands, the quelea swarming in clouds. In fact, there are so many quelea that when they