Mountains and memories

And what lies beyond the blue mountains? The Baviaanskloof and more mountains. And beyond that? The Karoo that is flat and dry. Long ago children of the Langkloof learnt the relevant geography lessons from few wise old locals prepared to talk about big world matters. And beyond the Karoo? Oh, that’s too far, never been there!

Today it’s different. There’s a tarred road through the Langkloof with white and yellow lines; and lots of fast cars going places. Children of the Kloof are now educated by learned people in far-off institutions and often don’t return. And there’s TV. The radio is no longer powered by a car battery charged by wind turbine. The blue of the Kouga Mountains is no longer out of reach, reserved for grandpa and friends to go hunting once a year in winter when there’s snow on the peaks. 

Upcountry places like the Langkloof and the Kouga received civilisation in return for farming crops The changes came in well-spaced instalments over several centuries. Every generation thought deeply and argued endlessly about only a few of the life modifications. Their children dealt with the next round.

First the indigenous San and Khoi tribes lost control in the wake of European newcomers called incomers from the west, and African ones from the east. Early farmers had sheep, wheat and what-not, eking out small, mixed-farming existences determined by water availability. All of that happened long before innovations like apples and berries were introduced in the Kloof, citrus and goats in the Kouga. Outsiders coming into the Kouga Valley no longer get typhoid fever from the drinking water.

The Langkloof farm, Somerset’s Gift, changed hands in the same family for generations. It kept the name from the days that Governor at the Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, gifted the land to a farmer after sleeping over in the neighbourhood in the 1820s, en route to inspecting the Cape Colony border situation with the Xhosas in what is today the Eastern Cape.

Progress is insidious. It discovered the Kloof and all the old things changed, first slowly and then dramatically after more than the next century. Big scale commercial farming and countless apple trees in bigger orchards required the old buildings and fences to be removed. A child borne on Somerset's Gift, visiting the region later, had to judge from landmarks in the hills to figure out in which rows of apple trees the old family homestead and the farm school once stood. His grandchildren won’t even know where to look.

This story is spread with modifications across farms the world over, repeated over time in generational increments of planned improvement and unexpected loss. The roots of societies are only so many generations deep.