Uniondale's Bag of
Tricks
A Getaway Article about Uniondale - March 2000
Uniondale in the Klein Karoo hides a
witblits wizard, a hoard of secret remedies and a novel use for steaming
cowpats. At every twist and turn Robyn Daly was caught by surprise.
"I can give you good fortune, cure cancer, work a court case or divorce. I
can dig into your past and look into murder cases . . . ." Oom Schle said
all this matter of factly, as though he were telling me he could read and
write.
"I learnt everything from the Bushmen. They have superbrains. Even in
their poor lifestyles they were wealthy. They knew where diamonds and gold
were hidden, about wild game and about healing."
Healing is what Steve Fourie (otherwise known as Oom Schle) knows best.
He's Uniondale's white umshcla or traditional herbalist.
"Here's dassie piss for kidney illnesses and colds. A tortoise shell is
for arthritis - you put it in your bathwater." Oom Schle rummaged in his
medicine bag, producing one cure after another from the jumble of vials
and animal parts.
I watched this curious man as he passed out his remedies. He wore denim
shorts, flips flops and a necklace of coral beads, duiker horns, crocodile
teeth and lion fangs. If you knew how to interpret his garb, you'd learn
the story of his life.
"Ah, this is it." He produced a pebble-like object. "What do you think
this is?"
I took the 'stone' from his scabby hand and rolled it between my fingers.
It was round, rubbed smooth on one half, and slightly wrinkled on the
other. "Tell me."
"It's a fossilised Bushman penis."
Uniondale is full of surprises. It seems, at first, a perfectly ordinary
town filled with wholesome people who live in neat little houses
surrounded by mowed lawns and flower beds. And then suddenly you discover
that nearly everyone has a talisman, an artefact, an odd quirk to their
character or a secret from the past.
Take Oom Piet Ackermann for instance. Once a lawyer and deputy sheriff,
now he's a member of the tourism council and a spokesperson for the
Western Cape region on tourism signage.
To all appearances he's a fine, upstanding member of that ordinary dorp I
was talking about but, catch him off guard, and you'll find him hunched
over a copper cauldron of sorts, distilling wicked spirits that take your
breath away. Oom Piet, if you haven't already guessed, is also Uniondale's
witblits wizard.
Tannie Susan van Rensburg runs the neatest tea garden I've ever seen. She
welcomes people at any time and believes that even one visitor is better
than none at all. After meeting Tannie Susan you're bound to wish to stop
for more than just homebaked cream scones, so she'll offer you one of her
immaculate self-catering rooms at The Cottages. Who would have thought
that The Cottages - all spick and span - was once a greasy fish-and-chips
shop? But it's true, nonetheless.
Like the traditional healer, Oom Johannes Loock knows a remedy or two
himself. He's one of a number of Uniondale farmers who breed three- and
five-gaited show horses. "I look for a horse that can carry a man easily
and do it as a pleasure." He's a big man with a big heart so it's no
wonder he adds: "A big, beautiful horse, that's what I like."
Getting back to Oom Johannes's remedies: this third generation Uniondaler
knows a very special cure - one for cold feet. It comes from his boyhood
when he had to walk barefoot to school. "We weren't wealthy and had no
shoes so, to take the bite out of the cold, we used to stand in fresh, hot
cow-dung. It was so nice when it squelched between your toes."
Dave Cummins also seems an unlikely fellow to have secrets. Together with
his wife Trish, he owns The
Townhouse. It's a cosy, friendly guesthouse
which has more pets than guests - a hoard of about 10 dogs and a couple of
cats will greet you at the gate. It's not just animals that the Cumminses
collect, they do hats too. Dave's Den, which is the in-house pub, is
wall-to-wall with peak caps Dave has been collecting for years. If you
stop in the bar, he'll pull out a bottle of Spook Asem made by the
witblits wizard, and guaranteed to give you a ghostly breath.
Oh, I could tell you things about Uniondale. Like what's cooking behind
those pungent smells that waft from the town's
aloe factory or about the
six forts from the Anglo-Boer War (Uniondale is the only town in the
Southern Cape which was guarded by forts), about the graves of soldiers
and about the time when the Boers captured the town's magistrate, locked
him in the jail and threw away the key.
If you wanted to know about Groot Boet and Klein Boet Barkhuizen who
aren't really brothers (and Klein Boet is actually larger than Groot Boet),
I could tell you that too. And about South Africa's shortest telephone
pole, biggest watermill, the world's first heart-transplant patient, and a
unique strain of Cape Mountain Zebra in the Kammanassie Mountains whose
stripes go only halfway round their bellies - yup Uniondale's side of the
Klein Karoo is full of surprises.
But no, you can't pressure me into telling you anything more, not even
about the ghost which is a touchy subject to the townsfolk. They've been
hurt and abused by unfeeling media hype surrounding that story.
I like surprises and, it seems, Uniondalers particularly enjoy surprising
visitors, so I'll leave some things for you to discover. Rest assured,
Uniondale has more than just a supposedly fossilised Bushman appendage in
its bag of tricks to catch you unawares.
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