97) Kwa-Zulu

A little while after we moved into our house in Inchanga our landlady came to see us about something. She brought her son with her, a boy of about ten year old with the most stunning red hair I have ever seen. He took one look at Muffin, our dog and just froze. His mother told him to go and wait in the car and off he went at the double. She told me that he was terrified of dogs, he had been bitten by a small toy dog of some kind and since then he was just unreasonably frightened of any kind of dog so it was not wonder that he should be scared of a big dog noisy dog like Muffin. A few days later the lad came again but this time with his father who was more sympathetic about the little boy’s problem and tried to get him to make friends with Muffin. As I have said before, when someone besides the immediate family came into the house she made a terrible noise until she had been properly introduced, then she was fine. I explained this to the lad and told him I would hold Muffin until he was in the room and sitting on the settee and that I would not let her hurt him in any way. I am not sure that he believed me but he did agree to come into the room and sit down. I took Muffin over to him and let her sniff him all over and she was then very friendly. The boy was not so sure though, he sat dead still and hardly breathed. Muffin ended up with her head on his lap and as I was still holding her collar the boy very timidly put out his hand and touched her head. She was such a clown and just loved attention of any kind so they were beginning to make friends and I could let go of her collar. I sat beside him and Muffin got friendlier and friendlier. First putting a paw on his lap then the second paw and eventually climbing right on to his lap and putting her head on his shoulder. I asked him if it was alright or if he wanted me to make her get off. He was so proud of himself that he had a dog sitting on his lap. He said “I wish my Mom could see me now” I asked him if he would like me to take a photograph of it and he was thrilled. It was before the days of digital cameras so we had to wait until the film was developed and printed but then we posted it to him. He told us later on that when he got home he had told his mother that he had had a big dog sitting on his lap and that he was sure that she did not believe him but of course when the photo arrived it was all the proof he needed. He loved to come and visit Muffin after that and although he was still a bit nervous of other dogs he told me that he was not so bad as before and that he was growing out of it.

Jonny was running the fencing side of Pat and Ken’s business as their son Buddy, who had been running it, had gone to live in England. Sometimes when Jonny needed to do some welding for the hinges or gates for the job he would work at one of their hardware stores.
They had two shops, one in the centre of Hillcrest and another one at a place called Riverview. Once when Jonny was driving away from Riverview he said to one of his African assistants. “We are very high here, we should be able to see the sea from here.” The assistant answered, “We can but you are looking in the wrong direction” No wonder he could not see it. Of course he got teased about that.

Pat, Ken and I in the Hillcrest Hardware Store

There were times when I would help out at the hardware store. The Riverview store was closer to the Valley of a Thousand Hills and the customers there were mostly African. Ken ran a delivery service into the valley, he had an African helper who knew the valley and was the navigator on the delivery runs. Most of the roads were just dirt tracks and the villages were just a cluster of huts grouped together. There was no town planning or a street map of the area. It was often hard to get an address from the customers. They would say things like “I live next door to the school in the village near the second road after the big tree” or “ My house is opposite the fig tree that got struck by lightening the year before last” or worst of all “I live three houses down from the lady you delivered two bags of cement to last month, you remember her she was the one who came here with her daughter and her sister’s son” As you can imagine addresses like this made delivering goods rather difficult so Ken’s assistant started to draw his own map of the area. It was a wonderful map, a work of art. He had drawn all the roads and the small villages, but as few of the roads had names he had put in landmarks. He had marked things like clumps of big trees or big out-crop of rocks. A European style house, as they were rare, could also be a landmark, as could a stream or a fallen tree. He also marked places that he and Ken remembered for a particular reason, ‘The place where we got a puncture and had to change the tyre’ or ‘where we got stuck in the mud and had to get the tractor to pull us out’, and he had drawn these incidents where they had happened. The map was kept under the counter at the Riverview store and if a customer wanted something delivered and did not have an address they were asked to show, on the map, where they lived.
This was a rather troubled time in South Africa as Nelson Mandela had been released from prison in February 1990 and it was obvious to most people that the end of apartheid was in sight. There still had not been a universal franchise election in the country and everyone was waiting to see what would happen. The black people were impatient that the negotiations for one-man one vote and equality for all was going too slowly and there were many problems. The Zulu’s of Natal are the largest tribe in the country and they felt it was their right to rule the country. Nelson Mandela is from the Xhosa tribe but he was a very popular leader and so there was a great deal of inter-clan fighting. It was particularly fierce in Kwa Zulu Natal. We often heard of the violence in the African villages, houses burnt, cattle stolen and many people killed. It became harder and harder for Ken to do deliveries into the valley and some of the fencing work that he had been doing there was no longer safe. Also many of the young men who had fought in the terrorist war were comeing home again, but there was not much work for them and so many of them used the skills they had learnt during the war, violence and killing, to make their living. We looked forward to the elections that were to be held in April 1994 hoping that they might be able to bring some peace and stability to the country.