Visits to the Kimberley area farms for preaching or other occasions never failed to be a blessing, both to us and to the workers on the farm. A farm in South Africa was often much larger than the farms we had known in America. They always had a staff of several black or colored families in addition to the white farm manager or owner. There might be both the owner and a manager or even married children living there. Any visitor was a "special event" to all.
As Lynn had a filmstrip projector that worked from the car battery, one trip I remember was an evening visit. We were expected, but still, we made a courtesy call at the house before going on to the area set aside for the African residents. Two, or three, or more families always meant that there would be a number of children. Of course the farmer would want to know who was on his property, and often he and his family also came, especially if it was a Sunday worship service. For that, someone, the farmer or the black families would have a special Sunday dinner waiting. The farmer also often had dogs that needed controlled. One farm we visited was surrounded by rocky hills and baboons lived among the rocks. That farmer had greyhounds, which drove those away from the planted corn and other foods. Left to roam, the baboons would scatter through the corn patch and rip off the ears as they went. They would take a bite or two and discard that one and rip off another doing great damage to the crop. Unfortunately the dogs also attacked strangers and were very vicious.
This being before television had reached South Africa, we could count on almost every able person to attend and listen carefully to all that we had to say through our interpreter. You might think that using an interpreter would slow the speaker greatly. Not at all, if he is a good interpreter and he knows your manner of speaking. Nick Qwemeshwa not only knew where Lynn or I were headed, but he could anticipate and overlap. He was always my interpreter of choice. In the Orange Free State, we were definitely into Afrikaans speaking country, and the farmers often did not understand a word of English. It also took a brave man to go with us to those particular farms, as the farmers were often very suspicious of strangers. That was another good reason to stop at the house first. Nick could interpret into Afrikaans, Xhosa, or Tswana, from English or in reverse when needed. Many Africans from the Northern Cape, where we lived, were afraid to go through the Free State and often would not even get out of the car until we crossed through and into Natal on the other side, or had returned to the northern Cape.
We had a wonderful neighbor next door to us. Bing was an excellent auto mechanic, and he could speak Afrikaans or English fluently. He told me once of a man from the Free State who had brought his car to him for work and who wanted him to speak only Afrikaans to him. Bing knew that the man was not well educated but he agreed and explained everything using the Afrikaans terms for everything. As there were often no well-known Afrikaans words, it has been the custom to coin new words as technology developed so rapidly. Bing used all the proper new words, and soon the bewildered man stopped him, saying "Use the English words, I understand those." The fact was that he was very against anything English, but at the same time, did not know his own language all that well. This was not that many years after the Boer War between the English and the Afrikaans. The English may have won the war, but they then lost control politically afterwards. Unfortunately the English soldiers had burned the farms to the ground during the fighting because they were supplying their fighters their men with supplies. They had then placed the homeless women and children in concentration camps. Since the food source was destroyed, many people died there. A good friend we knew had lost his grandmother in such a camp. He will never forget, nor forgive that she had died there. Winston Churchill had been a reporter in that war as a young man and was a prisoner for a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment