Heartwarming, authentic insight into local colour.
South Africa has been a headline in a lot of contemporary newsmaking
for a number of years — while it was entrenched under apartheid rule and
as it emerged into a new democracy. But always, the picture of a
nascent and burgeoning culture is painted broadly, and in the news, almost
always negatively. A Place Called Vatmaar, however, presents an
in-road into a South Africa which circumvents intellectual platitudes or
generalisations. Cast as a novel, it is the debut work of A.H.M. Scholtz,
who wrote it at the age of 72, armed with a primary-school education,
the taint of poverty, the experience of having weathered a difficult
life of much hard manual labour and having fought in the Second World War
"so my family could eat," and went on to garner three local literary
awards: The M-Net Prize, the Eugène Marais Prize, and the CNA Literary
Award in South Africa.
A Place Called Vatmaar is partly autobiographical, but rather than
framing the text itself quasi-historically, it represents a personal
insight, a social overview, a warm and honest account of the mindset that
make the 'coloured' people of South Africa distinctive. The term
'coloured' was an apartheid-induced pejorative expression, but one which the
people came to be proud of. These were people born of mixed parentage.
People who didn't directly belong in any pre-established community and
who, not being directly white or black, bore the brunt of the ugliness
and the contradictions of apartheid. At no point, however, does the
book deteriorate into an exercise in self-pity or rose-tinted
illusionism. The characters are three-dimensional and they love and hate with
passions, and make foolish and eloquent gestures as is the universal wont
of human beings.
Vatmaar is divided into over sixty short vignettes. They all
interrelate, as do the characters themselves. The stories told are stories
within stories and the writing does leaps and turns upon itself in
bringing out a broader tale as rich in idiosyncrasies and pathos as it is in
documenting a South Africa from within.
Set just prior to the turn of the twentieth century, Vatmaar began as a
settlement, and something that presented the option of home for the
book's first narrator, Ta Vuurmaak, a person of Griqua heritage, coerced
to help in the Anglo-Boer War, and given a disused water tank after the
War's end. This water tank becomes his house, and the setting for many
of the stories told in the first third of the book. The stories are
placed in the mouth of Oom Chai, another elder of the community. They
are structured historically and are presented as tales told to the
young boys of Vatmaar. But as the novel unfolds and the reader is
introduced, by way of incident, story and anecdote, to many of these boys and
their families and how they came to live at Vatmaar, we look beyond what
Ta Vuurmaak had to offer, because Vatmaar is an organism, something
that began to grow and multiply as soon as Ta Vuurmaak called it 'home'.
Indeed, towards the middle of the book, both elders die, but the
stories continue in different voices.
This book is unputdownable, not because it has an exciting plot, but
because of how it is told. The reader becomes a part of the dynamic of
the community and its concerns and foibles, lusts and tears. The
consummate skill with which it has been translated from the original
Afrikaans is such that the local accent of the people is present in its English
reading. Indeed Vatmaar is like a soap opera, but a gritty
unpolished one, devoid of the niceties that make narrative conform to
expectations, but full of the kind of beauty that warms an outsider to
them: "Ugly faces there were none, and they always treated a stranger
with respect". And so we read of the problematic but happy marriage
between Lance-Corporal George Lewis and his black wife Ruth; of Tant
Vonnie, originally of German stock whose life turns the full circle; of
gentle but wily Sis Bet who established herself and Oom Flip in Vatmaar
through a certain amount of ducking and diving around white-imposed law
and white folly and bigotry; of Chan Lee, who cashed in on the illegal
lottery game of fahfee and became a rich and prosperous
well-respected man; and Kaaitjie, who dies in childhood and of a broken heart at
the age of 22, because her white madam was recalcitrant in the passing on
of a message. The many characters that populate the pages of this book
are
extremely colourful and splendidly articulated. They proliferate and
develop in the nooks and crannies of a South African landscape, but this
book is a great rollicking feast of their circumnavigations, their
plots, their realities, more than the backdrop of Africa behind them.
This is not an exercise in propaganda on any level. No holds are
barred and the reader is exposed to many different kinds of social pain and
injustice inflicted — sometimes with retribution, and sometimes
without; sometimes from within the community, and sometimes from without.
Indeed the deepest pathos of Vatmaar is the reality from which it
draws. South Africa may be freshly emergent as a new democracy, but still
it remains with much of the stigma of racial prejudice, social
injustice, unemployment and crime. A Place Called Vatmaar is a
Dickensian foray into an undocumented terrain. It is a positive, moving,
real account of the complex and streetwise creature that constitutes the
mavericks in South African society: the people who are given untenable
circumstances but who use them wisely and creatively in constructing a
life.
