Obie Oberholzer wrote on Facebook:
In 2005, I worked on my book titled Long ago way, in the footsteps of Alphons Hustinx, for a Dutch publisher. Alphons Hustinx was a Dutch photojournalist, and I was assigned to retrace his journeys around South Africa that he undertook in 1933. A staunch Catholic, he also photographed many Catholic Missions. Back then he photographed a religious procession near the hills that lie on the outskirts of the small town of Pietersburg. In contrast I wrote the following to illustrate my photograph of the hill of crosses.
***
Polokwane is the hub and the buzz of the Limpopo Province. It used to be named Pietersburg, but we no longer look back at what used to be. The place is a city now, with traffic lights, parking attendants, art museums, pickpockets and the odd traffic jam. I had given up trying to match anything vaguely like Mr. Hustinx’s image of 1933, of an African religious procession on the outskirts of Pietersburg. You don’t really get many Catholic processions in the new South Africa. Polokwane does host the largest religious festival in Africa – its own kind of Pilgrimage-to-Mecca event. Every Easter weekend, 3 million members of the Zion Christian Church gather at their Zion City Moria, about 40 kilometres east of Polokwane. I drive a slow loop around the city centre, along Nelson Mandela Drive, Paul Kruger Street, Thabo Mbeki Street and Voortrekker Street. It’s quite a strange sensation driving forwards but going backward through our history. It’s Sunday, so there’s that typical feeling of abandonment and forlornness that you get in our cities over the weekend.
In the grounds of a Dutch Reformed church, I see the activities of a church bazaar. Trampolines, food stalls, and the smoke from various braai fires. I’m intrigued to observe that these conservative and God-fearing people are now having a dop on a Sunday. Soon I am also standing in the queue for the bar. I whiff a mix of Brandy and Coke fumes as I nose my eyes up the church steeple. It turns out it is Saturday, not Sunday: a clear reminder that a traveller can easily become disoriented in the “gramadoelas”. (If you are ignorant of the word “gramadoelas”, then you’ve never been in a bar queue with farmers in the Limpopo Province wearing short-sleeved khaki shirts with light blue pockets made by Makoni or Boerboel Wear.)
Now, with a dop in one hand, I listen to a group of Afrikaans farmers talking. There is nothing new – our rugby is still political, our soccer is shit, the government is corrupt, and the blacks are ruining the country. I hope that Hustinx’s spirit is not around to hear these scathing remarks, doomsday predictions and racist comments all intertwined with terrible swear words. This kind of talk would depress any decent spirit that springs forth from a religious body. A young burly farmer, after torturing and boozing out the fact that I was a photographer, tells me to visit the “Hill of Crosses” outside the city. The crosses commemorate each farm murder that has occurred over the last 15 years. I don’t want to know about this. He tells me, anyway. I don’t want to hear about this. He says it again and again. 1,775 people murdered on South African farms from 1991 to 2006. I want to go away and never come back.
He tells me that it’s a genocide against his people. I tell him that I am a wedding photographer. He tells me again. I look for the swallows in the blue sky. Then he says something that still rings in the dark side of me: “I am a Boer; I am a white farmer. I have the most dangerous occupation in the world.”
(Written twenty years ago)
The post Seen elsewhere: The hill of crosses first appeared on LitNet.
The post Seen elsewhere: The hill of crosses appeared first on LitNet.