Ch. 6: Ratelgat

It was my first time at a Khoi Khonnexion performance, and my head and eyes were drooping. This is the group that I am producing an album with over the course of my year here, and I had been anxious to hear them since I found out I would be working with them. Now it was five minutes into the performance and all I wanted to do was sleep. When the beat picked up, though, I found enough strength to play the drum that was in front of me. As we played, Jethro delivered his poetry in an animated voice, shouting against the colonizers that forced their lifestyle on the people of Africa. On the other side of the campfire, the faces of a small group of white South African tourists were lit by flickering light.

This was our second night in Ratelgat (pronounced “rottle-hot”) – a large tract of land given back to the Khoi people after being taken at the barrel of a gun. On it is a living replica of a traditional Khoi village. Around thirty domed thatch huts sleep two each, and a larger hut has a raised platform for a fire and a hole in the roof for smoke. We had come on Friday and were staying until Sunday evening when the band had a performance back in Cape Town. Our host was Jakobus, who came here a few months ago from Vanrhynsdorp, hired by the management to share his music and stories from his Khoi heritage with tourists. He is a small man with a tight face and a stain on his teeth that fits comfortably around a cigarette. His eyes beg you to listen to his hoarse tenor voice, though he speaks little English. “I try very friendly. But some people say, Jakobus, I like you not. You talk too much. Yes, my friend.”

His nephew Jan is a smiling kid about my age, whom Jakobus brought here to help him recover from his addiction to mandrax – a locally popular recreational drug. Jan speaks as much English as I speak Afrikaans – about two or three broken phrases. Yet frequently he would look at me and start speaking Afrikaans, expecting me to understand, which I found strange until I realized I was doing the same to him.

My exhaustion as I played with the group was due to a very short sleep the night before. The drive had been five hours, though Glen had predicted three. The N7 took us through semi-arid plains and past jutting, rocky peaks. When we arrived it was dark, and Jakobus and Jan met us at the gate on a tractor, which they push-started to lead us to the village. The festivities began with a fire, smokes, and stories. Later on, the music started. Jakobus sings and plays guitar in a style called riel. The songs are all his originals, sung in Afrikaans and fingerpicked on the guitar. We joined him on drums and indigenous bows. Sleep came late, and in the morning we were up early.

On Saturday the plan had been to take Jakobus into Vanrhynsdorp before the bank closed, and then come back to Ratelgat to record in a cave. But in the morning three hours proved inadequate time to mobilize, at a pace determined by casual conversation and cups of coffee. The bank was closed by the time we got to town, so we went to his mother’s house to drop off the money. At eighty, she lives in a small concrete block house in a grid with maybe fifty others exactly like it. The ground was pure dust, interrupted only by foundations and feet. Jakobus introduced me to his family as an Englishman from America. I quickly exhausted my canned Afrikaans phrases, and was left to look at faces as speech rattled around me. I snapped a photo of Jakobus with his mother, and he told her proudly that I would take her face to America.

Back at Ratelgat, I anxiously waited to depart for the cave. But it was lunchtime, and it would remain lunchtime for several hours, until the sun was too low in the sky to go to a cave. For dinner, the guys baked bread – burying flour-covered dough directly in the hot ashes. I suggested that we go off and record away from the noise of the generator, with the backdrop of night sounds. They thought that was a great idea, after a cup of coffee. When cups were drained half an hour later, we were invited to play for some tourists. So here I was by someone else’s fire, exhausted and frustrated from having accomplished nothing in a whole day, and beating on an animal skin. When the performance ended, it was decided that we would call it a night.

A nice long rest helped me prepare for whatever level of productiveness might lie ahead. More or less without my nagging, we did finally start off on the trail, carrying mic stands, recording equipment, and an assortment of instruments. The cave was actually little more that a rock overhang, so the light was good but the acoustics were not as dramatic as I had hoped. On the wall were faint stick figures, painted by San centuries ago. The recording went fine, though I later discovered I had lost a good portion of it.

After a few hours for lunch and many good-byes, we were back on the road. We left at 3:30, which would get us home just in time to start the performance, if we used Glen’s prediction of a three hour drive. Just as on the way here, however, his prediction proved to be two hours short, and we reached the theatre at the time the show was scheduled to end. Embarrassed for the band, I mourned the loss of another recording opportunity and funds to send us to Botswana. But no one else seemed to mind much, including the theatre owner, who said, “Man, you can only do what you can do.”

Though my instinct for structure may have been denied consistently throughout the weekend, I got a lot out of the experience. Most notably, I was immersed in the stories and culture of the present-day Khoisan. Glen, Garth, and Jethro made it a point to educate me about the history of the place and the people; Jakobus’s stories gave me glimpses into the mythology of the Khoisan collective consciousness; and my visit to Vanrhynsdorp was an experience of how most Khoisan and others classified as Coloured live – in material poverty. The structures of the apartheid government made material wealth inaccessible to non-whites. “Material want is bad enough,” wrote ANC martyr Steve Biko, “but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.” The Khoisan are not dead, and this weekend I saw some of the spiritual wealth – the music – that has kept them alive. And for the Khoi Khonnexion, alive is not enough. Their plan is to awaken the country to the Khoisan in each of us, both genetically and culturally, and anchor southern Africa in a tradition that has been developing since the birth of humankind.

Pictures from this weekend at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/natepmay.