Leaving Hogsback Village in the Eastern Cape again.

I left the little wooden cabin in the earliest light of the day. Crisply cold air pinched my cheeks but my body was warmly ensconced in the leather jacket. Once at the dirt road I took a left turn, heading away from the lightening eastern sky towards the small village of Ball Point. I was confused. Angry at the treatment I had received in Hogsback Village in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Once again, I would move on, having been misunderstood. Misrepresented. I shrugged off these self-indulgent thoughts and paced my stride to accommodate the hip that always hurt me. Many things about my body needed special accommodation these days. A small hernia, some arthritis, the old occasional flare up of the spinal trouble I had suffered as a youth. Maybe something else. When I arrived at the ramshackle and graffiti-ed wooden shelter at the four way intersection that marked the entrance to Ball point I tried to use my less than perfect Xhosa to ask the people standing there about my chances of finding transport to the forty kilometre distant town of Alice. One lady answered me peremptorily and I took the time to charm her a little and try to learn some more Xhosa in response to her interrogation regarding where I had begun my day. Uyaphi? Uhlahlapi? Something. I can never remember. She tried to teach me how to say ‘I come from over there’ It seldom takes. Maybe white people are different. It’s hard to tell. After a couple of cigarette’s time a small bakkie slowed and was hailed by all of us who waited there in the dust and the morning. I had failed to understand much of the interaction between the locals and the driver so I had to approach the driver’s side window and ask if he was headed for Alice. I indicated that I had forty rand to spend and he said “It’s right’ in that peculiar anglicisation of the Afrikaans, ‘dis reg’.I hauled my embarrassingly large backpack over the back of the bakkie’s tailgate and climbed in after, wedging the boxed, lengthy sculptures I carried with me against the corner of the load bed and the canopy, hunching my outsize body over as small as I could so as not to take up too much room.The vehicle rumbled down the steep slope to Hogsback Village and I was glad to be concealed within the back hidden amongst the black strangers among whom I still feel more comfortable than I do among the other people in South Africa with whom I share minimal melanisation and even less culturally. The previous occasion on which I had left the Hogsback Village environs I had been surreptitiously observed by one of the awful creatures who had made me feel so unwanted. So unwelcome. The paranoid white lady who owned from a local hotel who had conspired with other addled folk to attempt to photograph me in a compromising position not of my own making. The attempt to intimidate me with security personnel. The people who conceal their hate under a façade of tolerance while indulging the very human preference for bullying that is my most disliked element of the human condition.The drive was fantastic. Had I been a normal white I suppose I would have freaked myself out imagining that I was being kidnapped since the driver took a thirty five kilometer detour through some of the most beautiful rural landscapes I had ever seen. Light that gradually strengthened through the hour or so on the dirt roads, opening my mind to the bucolic existence the Xhosa people of Khayalethu had available to them. I hope they know what they have, because the rest of the country is not like that. Not so clear, so plain, so simply nice. Revving and grinding through muddy ruts in the road we toured through a succession of farmsteads and villages, apparently simply to make sure that the drivers good friend made it all the way home in safethy before turning around and back tracking through all the same scenery to rejoin the tar road to Alice and finally make some actual progress in the direction of the first destination of my day’s travels where I knew from the several preceding trips that I would have to make my way to the other side of the small South African university town (the University of Fort Hare is situated in Alice, it doesn’t have a particularly good academic reputation but then who am I to judge…I dropped out of school thirty years ago and went hitch hiking with the family dog for my education)When the bakkie finally jinked to a halt on the triangle of brick that separated the three roadways entering Alice I was the last occupant to creakily uncurl myself from the back and straighten out alongside the driver who patiently held the canopy hatch open for me to extract my art and my massive backpack, a shoddy affair from the ‘panda store’ a South African chain operated and owned largely by Koreans I think although I may be wrong. White South Africans are almost universally confused about people’s race. We were all brainwashed in our youth and I just try to be polite about it and apologetic when necessary. Anyway, they sell all manner of weird and wonderful goods, some crap, some fantastically high quality…one never knows which until one tries it out. This pack has been serviceable but has required me to stitch up tears time after time. At this stage I guess I could actually claim to have manufactured the backpack myself. SO a half possibly Korean, half South African artist crafted backpack.In the last stages of this ride I had been alone in the bacl of the bakkie with a younger man who had chatted briefly with me. He said he was on the way to town to sell fruit at the taxi rank. I explained that I made paintings and carving and tried to sell them to whoever I could persuade to buy them. The two of us heartily agreed that self employment was indeed far better than the sort of jobs available to people with incomplete educations in South Africa but that times were tough. I felt the familiar urge to share what I had with the man, since he was black and I was white, but caution prevailed. I was not flush and was on the way to ask the help of a friend to accommodate me while I sought medical help. For what? Another story. I’m sure we’ll get there if I keep typing long enough.I digress. Often. Get used to it. I have had to. The morning was still crisp and I shouldered the hodge podge pack and wedged my sculptures under one arm to begin the march to the other side of Alice. Glad to at least be out of Hogsback Village’ for the time being. I had first visited Alice about ten years ago while riding a rattly old bicycle around the country several times. A small but busy place. In these years Alice, like many other towns in my country including Hogsback Village had dilapidated considerably despite the modern intrusion of cell phones and gamer’s shops. There were several ruins. Burned out husks of houses and other buildings that would never be worthwhile to repair but that seemingly no one was ever going to demolish. These types of structures have to be watched because they often harbour desperate people who have nowhere to go and who could hardly be blamed for predating on a lone white with a bulky backpack. I knew I would return to Hogsback Village’, but first I had to take care of myself. Get into the kind of condition I needed to be in in order to continue my work at the top of the hill above that awful place. Not that Hogsback Village itself is awful, just the unfortunate narcissistic social milieu that dominates it.