Girl's Weekend

Four Cellists!

To celebrate the achievement of completion of her doctorate, Dr Terry , Peta Ann and Emakhazeni Highlands Lass set off for a girl’s weekend in the Mpumalanga Highlands...of course!  This all sound rather simple – not so!  Peta Ann’s work schedule as professional cellist with the JPO (Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra ), Terry’s lecture and marking commitments in the Social Work Dept at UJ (the University of Johannesburg), and my too-ing and fro-ing between Gauteng and Mpumalanga took a lot of co-ordinating.  Finally, following the wonderful concert by the JPO on Thurs 19^th May, after the post concert drinks with the orchestra, and  photo of 4 cellists (with varying degrees of competency from top professionals Dmitry Kouzov and Peta Ann, to ‘fit for Alex McCall Smith’s Really Terrible Orchestra’ Terry & I), we rattled off at around 11pm in Terry’s Landrover Defender.  Arrival at Absolute Leisure, Machadodorp at 2am was celebrated with a bottle of sparkling wine, and once we had run out of our many words for the day, we retired to bed around 3.

A late start on Friday took us to Kaapsehoop Horse Trails for a beautiful stroll along the scenic escarpment, overlooking rolling valleys www.horsetrails.co.za .  No, we weren’t saddled up on the wild horses of Kaapsehoop – heaven forbid!!!! – I was terrified as it was, having not sat on a horse since I was a child.  Kaapsehoop is famous for its wild horses, which graze peacefully around the hamlet, eating up the local residents’ flower gardens and grass.  The horses are believed to have been left by the gold rush folk who arrived in their masses in Kaapsehoop in the 1800s when it was rumoured that there was “gold in them there hills”.  The other theory is that they were left by the British soldiers from the South African Wars of 1900, when they returned to Britain after defeating Oom Kruger and sending him off into exile in Switzerland.   Whichever, it’s a beautiful sight to behold these free spirits wandering around the village in small family groups.  But back to our horses – which were very big, and also thankfully very placid – it was a wonderful two hours of relaxed stroll, with the more experienced riders having a good gallop back to the stables.  Interestingly Peta Ann had family ties with the area, her family having had ownership of one of the gold mines, but alas, things did not pan out (groan!) quite as well as the Oppenheimers!

  Part of our weekend’s journey was to share each others’ personal stories.                                                                                                       Following graduating as a Social Worker, Terry lived in a commune in the 1980s and practised social work in Soweto. She was under surveillance by the Security Police, being a suspected ANC terrorist in the days when the ANC was a banned organisation, and it was illegal to enter Soweto as a ‘white’ person without a permit. 

  One night at 0300hr her commune was raided and she was taken into custody, and interned in solitary confinement for 60days.  How did she survive the ordeal?  She said she just did not know how long she had been in there as one day drifted into the next.  She was interrogated daily, and just had no contact with the outside world.  Her Mother, who was dying of cancer at the time,  persistently phoned the authorities to try to find the whereabouts of her daughter, and this, Terry believes, was the reason they finally released her and dropped charges.  This experience resolved her to help even more with the struggle!

Peta Ann is from a highly achieving musical family, and spent her childhood and teens immersed in music, learning cello and ballet.  Her choice to become a professional cellist took her to the US to study further, before returning to South Africa.  Her Mum was an accomplished pianist who played and composed music as well as teaching.  Peta Ann remembers how her Mum was forever travelling  in and out of Soweto and other townships in the 1980s to play for black choirs.  Peta Ann herself is part of the JPO Cadet project, and teaches a number of young cellists from disadvantaged backgrounds, helping them to reach the high standards required for a professional career in music.

And as for Highlands Lass, my goal is to be a social healer within South Africa; to build trust between our rainbow of peoples and to help massage away the knots caused by South Africa's history.  In the rural Mpumalanga Highlands communities there is much low self esteem, poor education, hopelessness, fear of the unknown, fear for the future and anger, which all contribute to mistrust and division of people.  And what better vehicle to use than tourism! Tourism offers employment and business opportunity to people of all backgrounds. Traditional and township people can offer their cultures and ways of life, crafters can sell their wares. Dance, drama and music groups can perform.  And with further education we can have tour guides for culture, history, environment and ecology, as well as hotel and lodge owners and managers from the very communities that currently see no future for themselves.       

Following the horse ride and a fine pub lunch in Kaapsehoop, I took my friends to visit the site of the Mozambican train disaster of 1949 in Waterval Boven, our region’s only piece of Struggle Heritage.  Ploughing through the long grass, we arrived at the commemoration plaque – sadly there is still a lot of work to be done to bring this epic story to our tourism visitors.  But it will be done.  Just last year through the Dept of Heritage, I met one of the train disaster survivors, a dignified Mozambican pastor in his 80s.  In 1949 he was travelling home in the fated train after working 18 months as a labourer in the South African gold mines.  He remembers waking in the river after the train had fallen a good 100meters from the track over the escarpment down into the valley below.  He was taken to the Witbank hospital where he stayed for 6 months while his broken leg and back healed.  On being discharged from hospital, he was given the same blood encrusted, dirty clothes he had been cut out of, to return home to his family.  He was lucky.  63 of his fellow passengers are buried in the ‘black’ graveyard in Emgwenya township, Waterval Boven.

For our evening’s entertainment I had chosen the Wee Jazz Pub ( +27 72 915 7378 / +27 13 255 0726) in Siyathuthuka township, Belfast.  Now it’s not routine for 3 middle-aged ‘white’ women to got jolling (partying) in the ‘black’ township, especially in the Emakhazeni Highlands of Mpumalanga  but that is precisely why we went. We met Winny and some of her friends outside the Wee Jazz and chatted for a while in the street. Sadly for us, Winny, the business owner of Wee Jazz, had been up for the last 60 hours counting votes at our Municipal elections as part of the Independant Electoral Commission, being a thoroughly upright citizen.  She was not up to an evening of revelry so the Pub was closed.  Conventionally we returned to Belfast and tried out the newly opened Moulin Rouge Restaurant (+27 82 099 3849 / +27 84 430 5169) in Belfast.  Their De Luxe Pizza ‘Moulin Rouge’ I would highly recommend, and the ambiance was good.

Saturday morning saw us in the front garden of Absolute Leisure praising God through a 6 meditative symbolic movement sequences as taught by Terry:

1 Letting go of anger ( mimicking a bird flapping its wings)

2 Opening our hearts to new relationships (extending our hands outward from our hearts)

3 Painting a rainbow in the sky (just that)

4 Offering the Earth up for global peace (lifting a large imaginary ball up to the sky)

5 Playing with the world (bouncing a large imaginary ball between hands and feet)

6 Flying like Geese (or like an aeroplane while circling the garden)

So this was yet another confirmation to Machadodorp village of my off-the-wallish-ness.  Being different takes courage and conviction, but its worth it for the greater good.

I had yet another tourist attraction to take my friends to in Machadodorp in the limited time we still had.  The Machado Butchery, where Marina makes the best biltong (spiced and dried raw meat) in the whole of South Africa! People come from far and wide and take kilos of Marina’s biltong with them wherever they go.  Her phone number is +27 13 256 0323.  I have watched Marina’s kids grow up from babies in this wonderful shop.  Marina does her best to get me speaking Afrikaans, having heard that I was on my 3^rd attempt to learn a couple of years ago, but alas, it seems like I’m a hopeless case!  Saturday saw us return to Johannesburg revitalised and refreshed, and ready to get back to........things.