I saw you through the glass and rain

Wearing a white dress, at my gate

You said we would talk it over,

But, again, you have made me wait.

…

Words & picture: Fred Hatman

We fight and we fight, we fight to find our flight to the light,

But, so quickly and without warning, we submit to your might…

RIP Guid Man.

Words & picture: Fred Hatman

This is what happened when a baby elephant saw the sea for the first time.

Just beautiful.

I do believe this video would cheer up Van Morrison.

Earlier this year, on February 2, Anene Booysen was taken from David’s Sports Bar and Grill in Bredasdorp to a nearby housing development. To a sandy passage between two small RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) houses, and alongside a deep culvert.

There, the 17-year-old girl, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister and a friend of some and known to many, was gang-raped and murdered. Inbetween those two events, she was disembowelled. Not just her body but Anene herself… because she died much later, after she was found by a security guard, her blood sinking into the sand.

A week later, with South Africa seemingly rising up in protest over the grotesque invasion and mutilation of Anene’s body and life, I went to join the demonstration outside the Bredasdorp Magistrate’s Court, where three young men appeared in connection with the crime. I also went to the spot where Anene’s dignity and life were taken from her…

… and found these flowers. And a wooden cross. And I found the horror. I found it on people’s faces. I felt it in the heat of a midsummer’s day. Between two unoccupied houses.

The horror had its own home between two tiny, empty houses built on sand. And I felt it snaking through my body.

I went back on Saturday. May 25, 2013. Exactly 16 weeks later.

I returned to the home of horror…

At first, I stood back. To absorb what I saw. What I felt. To feel. To feel what had changed.

Nothing had changed for me. The horror lived on.

I immediately noticed that the flowers and the cross had been removed. I had expected that.

I saw that front doors had been installed in the houses. And I noticed that people had moved into their new RDP houses…

into every house but the two that flanked the place where a child of their community had been raped and torn apart.

I breathed deeply and moved closer…

Grasses and plants (gardeners would call them weeds) had grown where the flowers once lay dying…

… and a lamb was eating them.

A lamb. It peered at me through barbed wire. I moved closer to photograph it. It bleated at me.

I don’t do bleating very well. So I did the tongue-click thing I do near animals whose voices I cannot mimic.

And the lamb stayed, munching happily on the greenery growing on what, to me, feels like the grave of Anene Booysen…

Her grave. Upon which dogs now shit.

Shit.

A small girl appeared. On the other side of the culvert. A girl growing up like Anene once did.

She was joined by a friend in the culvert… and posed for the camera…

Tinka and Mikala. Putting out a gangsta vibe. For my camera.

Wanting money for their show. Of hopelessness.

On the exact spot where Anene was raped and murdered.

I asked the two little gangsta-girls if they knew Anene. Knew of Anene.

They didn’t.

The flower was gone. Gone, gone, gone…

…

but I found something, a symbol of hope, to lift me up…

Next to the house where nobody wants to live… little yellow flowers… for Anene…

… to help lift her up… and lift her up…

… again… into the consciousness of those of us…

… who seem not to care.

RIP Anene Booysen.

Child of the Nation.

…

* According to last week’s Mail & Guardian, all charges against “Accused One” (Jonathan Davids) in the case of the rape and murder of Anene Booysen have been dropped – due to lack of evidence.

You can read more about the trial here.

I’ve spent the past two days feeling the biggest love. Now I’ll try to share it.

The love feeling is so large that I don’t know where to start to spread it. Like mulch. So, obviously, I will start at the end.

Me and Lucille (by now you know that she is my Grand Old Lady of The Road) crested the rise just near Grootbos, but even closer to midnight.

The half-moon that had blessed the blissed at Greenpop’s Reforest Fest at Platbos now hung over Walker Bay before me. The supreme blackness and my headlight beam of just seconds before was replaced by a shimmering silver path on the sea. It was a sight that simply served to send my spirits soaring even higher, if that were possible.

It was. I stopped Lucille. I looked. My heart sang. It sang of one of the most beautiful days of my life. I expelled a frighteningly discordant and quite primal whoop, not a thing of beauty at all but one that yelled of a man set free of the chains of ordinariness. I was alone. And it was mine. I was heading home to my bed.

I left my heart somewhere among the good and happy and carefree people who had planted three thousand trees on the edge of Africa’s southernmost indigenous forest. And my sole remained in the rich and reddy-brown earth which would help those trees grow. I have never had a problem distancing myself from a crowd. But I was already missing the three hundred-odd and somewhat odd people who had gathered for “Friends Fest”, truly a union of friends who had never really been strangers but were now forever unified in the spirit of nursing the planet. And their own souls. And those of each and all of us.

I’m not going to dig around (almost unintended) for superlatives that won’t do this thing justice. Let it be. Be. You had to be there. But, if you weren’t, I offer you some pictures. Pictures in the mirror of a can’t-be-told story of people being beautiful. In a green and golden forest… a most precious place.

I’m nearly there…

 Ironic?

And just about the first person I see is a friend. Lovely Janika, whose face expresses the gentleness and joy of what is to come…

What is to come? Oh, yes…

 Goldenness…

And, of course, greenness…

… with a red alert of the danger of losing it all…

Which leads us to the message for the day…

Pffft. More like THREE thousand, bro… hehe.

So let’s swing into it…

We swung to cupcakes?

Yes, because I want to relay a little story. About these cakes, a little boy and Alaska.

There was a little guy at the Fest, in our clearing around the fire in the forest, and he was selling these cakes.

That he had made. So he could go to Alaska.

I spoke to his dad, Steve. “There was this nature programme on TV about Alaska,” he said.

“And Nathan was looking at the glaciers and the polar bears catching fish through the ice and his face was all lit up and he turned to my wife Sally and said… ‘I want to go’.

‘I want to go to Alaska.’

“And that was it. His mind was made up. So we talked about it and said if he raised a certain amount of money for his flight,

we would contribute the rest and his mother and he could go to Alaska…

typical of my boy… he chooses the place that is about the furtherest place you could go on Earth!”

I love that story. You just have to love Nathan. Here he is…

He’s up a tree… and dreaming of glaciers. Of bears catching fish.

Thank you for your patience. Now, where were we?

Oh, yes… planting trees.

Spades and saplings and soil and sweat… and dig the sunflare light chakras!

… which mesmerised Asana.

Groovy strides, brother…

… and I totally dug SisterYellowHair Michelle…

… and 300 people digged and they dug… and they digged… until 3,000 trees were introduced to our earth…

… and it was time for…

… it was time for the children to take over and plant the 3,000th tree,

under the guidance of Platbos owner, Francois Krige.

“Teach your children well…” (CSN&Y).

But, wait. “Just one more thing…” (Colombo).

Enjoy this… all the happy shiny treeplanters cheering their efforts…

Nice. But hang on. Aim your eyes top right!

What is this? Let’s get a bit closer to this tomfoolery…

What, is this character overwhelmed and on his way down? Next frame…

Yup, sure looks that way… and he’s taking his sunflare chakra beauty down with him! Bless.

Bless us all. THREE THOUSAND TREES… in one golden day.

And a total of 5,000 trees planted over the two weekends of “Family Fest” and “Friends Fest” .

That’s some significant reforestation.

Thank you, GreenPop and  Platbos Forest.

And thank you to Holiday Murray, who entranced and folk-rocked us into a love-bubble around the bonfire in a magnificent forest all night long…

Nice one, Ellis.

It was… like Woodstock… with a whole lot of new wood.

And, yes, we can now see the trees… growing.

So here is a reminder so wondrous that it is impossible for me to describe…

You’re welcome.

Music by Ohdae-soo.

Rain, rain drops. Like cut-out tears glued to my eyes. Stuck here.

Obscuring vision. Frozen. Unseeing. Unable to move.

The invitation of the road is glimpsed. Open. Then closed. Reopened.

It’s slippery out there. Wet. Beyond the high gate of my mind’s eye.

Wet. Cold. Wet road. Cold hearts. Stainless steel dragonflies.

Flitting. Fey.

The silver highway slips and slides, slaloms into uncertainty.

Behind me, my well-worn dirt track, dusty and brown.

Sandy. Rocky. But warm to the feet of my understanding.

I’m leaving now. The rain won’t stop.

Dripping. Drops down my cheeks.

Slipping. Sliding. Clearing.

Shoop… shoop.

The windscreen to my memory, wiping.

Wiping. Wiped clean.

But it is still so painful

.

Words and pictures: Fred Hatman

I had to see this for myself. Cue a “Hatman and Lucille Roadtrip”. But we never got there. Actually, we did. Eventually. For a whole, wholly unpleasant 90 minutes. I really tried. I tried to find accommodation. But there was something that just didn’t work for me. What really didn’t work was when I was subjected to a tannie (elderly Afrikaans woman) behind reception at one of the joints slagging off the “country house” next-door and saying it was awful and that I should book into her place.

No. This wouldn’t do. I had just spent two days in the zow-wow zen gardens of a tranquil retreat in McGregor and this vrou was dissing her neighbours and harshing my Temenos mellow. I gave Mrs Reception a smile radiating with the karma of forgiveness, with only one corner of my mouth slightly curled in utter contempt, and gunned old Lucille back to McGregor.

Temenos gave me a huge happy-to-have-you-back hug. I swam, I meditated, I head-swam, I meditated in the swimming pool at golden hour, I watched David Attenborough slobber over chimps, I watched a peacock flirt-fan his ridiculous tail at female guests, I bought a delicious tart at the down-home Saturday morning market, I fell asleep on the Temore Chapel’s multi-coloured dreamfloor, I psychedelitated, I watched a warm-bodied German woman with oak-brown skin and impossibly perfect teeth build a labyrinth, I spent an almost impossible amount of time ruminating about life, mine and ours, and I drank seemingly impossible amounts of wine with an old journalist friend at Green Gables.

I still feel the warm, loving embrace of Temenos. And much gratitude.

Out of The Hat column, Stanford River Talk, May 2013.

I can see it now.

Queen Victoria Street, Saturday morning… people milling about at the morning market, Brydon’s lemon tart in one hand, Elsa’s mozzarella in the other, and complaining in a genteel and socially decorous manner about what happened to Tracy’s trees and the fact that the Municipality sat fatly by and did diddly-very-squat about it.

Then a hush falls over the small gathering. A lemon tart makes a ka-plop as it falls, lemony side-down of course, on cold, hard concrete. A Yorkshire Terrier squeaks as the weight of a Stanford Info leaflet drifts gently past its ear.

Many faces all turn sharply in one direction and reflect absolute horror. Well, OK, not horror… more a face-mash of wonder and consternation, lightly garnished with escalating anxiety.

Stanford’s children, practically all of them and from every corner of the village, are coming down Queen Victoria Street. And not just strolling, as they usually do in that somewhat directionless we’re-not-quite-sure-where-we’re-going-but-we-are sure-we’re going-to-have-fun way that Stanford’s children appear to have perfected. No. Not at all. Not today.

Some are on bikes, some on skateboards, and others on those J-things. One blond boy is trundling along, his bare feet powering a home-made cardboard tank hastily painted in camouflage colours. And the few that are walking have broken out in a warlike version of Gangnam-style. This is serious.

The kids mean business. The business of revolution.

And, as we have all suspected for some time now, the revolution will be WhatsApped. And BBMd. Flicking frenetically on their smartphones, Facebook updates and tweets globalling, the YouTube video viralling as this community coup unfolds, the children are heading purposefully towards the Municipality building.

In the market quad, one biddy says to another: “Good Lord, do you think we should call the constabulary?”

John Williams roars from the depths of Mokoro Garage: “Ye gods, what on earth is going on?” When told, he immediately abandons his post, orders loads of sugary drinks and NikNaks from the Spar and joins in the march, hoisting Tank Boy aloft on his shoulders.

Biddy 2 turns to Biddy 1 and says: “I telephoned the constable on duty and told him what was going on. He asked if they had any perlemoen on them and when I said that it didn’t appear to be the case, I heard him begin to snore and then the phone fell to the floor. We’re on our own with this one, Doris.” A spinach and feta quiche plummeted to the pavement, the sound of which was drowned out by the children chanting “We don’t need no adult committees, we don’t need no skateboard control… hey ADULTS, leave us kids alone!”

The doors of the Municipality have been reached but, of course, nobody is working. The door is locked. Curtains are drawn firmly across the windows. There is a half-brick lying seductively nearby.

But these are Stanford children rioting in the streets. Tank Boy asks Tallulah Twinkle-Star for her hairpin and within seconds the door is open. Forty-three children storm the boardroom. Some Fanta Grape is spilled on the table so somebody goes to look for a damp rag.

John Williams is told to “keep chips” at the door while the children, without forming any committees and electing chairchildren of any sort, democratically and almost effortlessly agree on an agenda.

1. We must be allowed to ride our bikes, skate on our boards and, for that matter dance Gangnam-style, wherever we want, and on any road, without hindrance, threat of arrest and without fear of cars travelling over 30 km/hr knocking us over.

2.  Loads and loads of trees must be planted throughout the village and never cut, “trimmed”, chopped down or harmed in any way. Because we like climbing them. And because they look pretty. And because they attract birds and bees and other wildlife to our village.

3. And because, actually, when we grow up, we’d like there to be some trees in our village for OUR children to climb.

4. You adults are just messing it up. You are all herewith relieved of any powers and decision-making, leaving you with even more time to drink wine.

First meeting over, the Children Of Stanford Want Action group (COSWA) cleaned up after themselves, for they have been well brought-up, locked the door and appointed the first adult they saw cowering behind the electricity box (where a tree once stood) to be their Swimming Safety Monitor and headed down to the river for a nice goof. Stanford-style.

Fred Hatman

redhatmann@gmail.com

I made this rainbow at home.

And, the more I think about it…

I think… I think I understand

that our Rainbow Nation…

will be created in our homes,

and in the revealing of

home-made rainbows

in our hearts…

and minds.

Rainbow Elation (Fred Hatman, 2013)