Gunship Over Angola

From the time of our arrival from Northern Rhodesia in December 1963, one of my favourite pastimes on the farm was to sit on my haunches with Jim around his cooking fire, dipping bantam-egg-sized balls of stiff maize porridge into beef, chicken or goat stew while listening to him recount the stories of his life and absorbing his lessons on all manner of subjects. Jim could live entirely off the land, even in the peri-urban environment of the Wonderboom farm.

When asked how old he was, Jim would always reply ‘One ninety ouhty one’, which we came to accept as being his expression of the year of his birth, 1901 (although it could also easily have been 1891). We never quite knew for sure. He related that he had lived through the era of ‘Oxpicky baggies’ (Oxford bags trousers of the 1920s) and ragtime.

Jim Serobe was my other grandfather. He called me Maloui (pronounced Ma-loo-wee), which I understood to mean ‘restless’ or ‘energetic’ in Shangaan.

At one stage Jim had had seven wives and countless children, all of whom stayed at his kraal in Mozambique near the Lebombo/Ressano Garcia border post. Jim would often tell me that he preferred that the family stayed there. He was proud of his peacemaking ability when he would return home annually over the festive season, and bring a semblance of order to what he described as the chaotic situation that prevailed whenever he was away even for a short period. ‘Chaotic’ often meant that he would feel duty bound to kick out an errant wife or acquire a new one, or accept paternity for progeny sired by any number of locally resident contenders for their absent headman’s throne. As the years went by and his prowess as a warrior chief waned, Jim gradually shed more wives than he gained.

Each time he went on leave, I looked forward to his return, as he would regale me with stories about what had happened at his traditional home and how many wives were still left, as well as matches, hatches and dispatches and all manner of interesting titbits. I came to feel that I knew each member of his family, even though I’d never really met any of them.

In 1973, he came to live with us in Valhalla, because, at the age of 72-ish, the job on the Wonderboom farm had become too much for him. But he wasn’t yet ready to accept a pension and retire.

‘I am still young, Maloui, my third wife just had another son,’ he told me.

Dad felt it best that he was closer to us.

He didn’t actually live at 58 Viking Road but rather across the road in digs on Laureston Farm, which was owned by the Billett family. There he earned his keep by turning Mrs Billett’s kitchen garden into a paradise of herbs and fresh vegetables.

Jim was a man of relatively few words, but those he used were very descriptive. Shortly after being awarded stewardship of the vegetable garden, Mrs Billett called Jim and asked his opinion of the tomato bushes that she’d painstakingly nurtured and of which she was immensely proud. After years of dedicated work, the tomato patch had finally produced its first tomato, which, if the truth be told, was a rather shrivelled specimen.

‘My tomatoes are producing very nicely now, don’t you think, Jim?’ suggested Mrs Billett.

‘Dis tamaties (tomatoes) is fucked!’ Jim retorted.

One day when Mark, Jim, my dad and I were busy building a swimming pool on our property, Dad broke wind loudly. Without interrupting the rhythm of what he was doing Jim looked up and said, sagely, ‘It will rain… I can hear the thunder.’

Each Saturday, as soon as he was paid, Jim would take a walk down to the general dealer’s shop located at the little Wierda Bridge Shopping Centre nearby. Afterwards, he would invariably go to a shebeen in the bush behind the shopping centre for a pint or two of a wicked, home-brewed traditional liquor called skokiaan. Skokiaan was rumoured to contain such exotic items as rotting roadkill, insects and birds, and was fortified with battery acid. Drinking it required a very strong constitution indeed.

One Saturday afternoon, as Jim left the shebeen, he was set upon by a gang of eight young louts who were widely suspected of being complicit in a spate of recent muggings and housebreakings in the area. He was relieved of his week’s supplies of maize meal, stewing meat and assorted tinned foods. Then they chased him up the road, taunting and teasing the old man as he stumbled along. Laughing loudly, they finally turned around and went back to the shebeen.

In my memory of that day, I vaguely recall Jim shuffling his way towards and into his room at Laureston Farm. He emerged just seconds later armed with his traditional fighting sticks and knobkierie and made a beeline back to the shebeen. I wish that I had been a fly on the wall to witness the events that unfolded in the ensuing five minutes.