Droëland – In Memory of my Mother
My mother, Carol Kathleen Ehrhardt, was born in Athlone in December 1950. In 1958, under the Apartheid government’s Population Registration Act, her family were reclassified ‘white’ and moved to a white residential area. My grandfather was a brilliant businessman, and in his ‘new life’ he quickly became a millionaire, enabling him to drive a Rolls Royce, travel the world first class and send his children to the best white schools. My mother always resented this new way of life. When she was eighteen, she saw her parents’ offer to send her to finishing school in Switzerland as a way of escaping her identity as a ‘white’ South African. She lived in Switzerland for twenty years, studying for a doctorate in psychology and working as a social worker. In 1979, the year before my birth, she chose to be reclassified ‘coloured’. My younger sister and I grew up with her songs and stories of home, surrounded by the snowy mountains of Switzerland. We moved back to South Africa in 1988 and my mother went in search of her lost ‘coloured’ family. She met my stepfather, who was trading in scrap metal and picking buchu in the mountains for a living. Together they bought the farm Droeland (Droeland literally means ‘Dry Land’), outside Ceres, and had two daughters. Their dream was to have a piece of land that would be both a sanctuary and a place of emancipation for the coloured people of South Africa. My mother began to work with the farm workers, an oppressed and largely illiterate community. She became a counsellor to them and a dispenser of medicine. She held church services with them, buried them and delivered their babies by candlelight. ‘Droeland’ is the story of the first baby my mother ever delivered on the farm. After that, pregnant women in the community chose not to go to hospital to give birth; instead they sent for her, trusting her able hands and soothing words. On 26 May 2007, my mother, my stepfather and my seventeen-year-old sister, Gypsy, were killed in an accident on Michell’s Pass, outside Ceres. It is to my mother that I dedicate this story, because I miss her so. * It is the middle of winter and the middle of the night. The wind moans and rain rips through the sky, stinging the windscreen, making it impossible to see. My mother drives slowly along the farm road. The bakkie (pick up truck) bumps and rattles over the rocks.Streams have turned to torrents of water, nearly impassable, and mud splatters the windscreen. She is driving down to one of the farm labourer’s cottages, where Hester is in labour. She has her little enamel saucepan with her and the knitting cotton she bought back in Switzerland in the 1980s. She also has black bags, towels, baby clothes, needle and thread, and a pair of scissors. Hester is Willem Prins’s wife. She is twenty-three, small and pretty, with high-cheekboned Bushman features. She had arrived a week earlier from Sutherland, heavily pregnant and travelling on a donkiekar(donkey cart) with her husband. My mother drives into Ou Vloer (Old Floor), the bottom part of Droeland, the part which dips into the Klein Karoo. She continues through the gateposts and past the dam, full now from the rains. She stops next to the little clay house with its lone pomegranate bush, grabs her bag of goods and the saucepan, and dashes through the rain. Willem Prins opens the door looking nervous. “Naand Mevrou.” (“Evening Madam.”) He lets her in. Inside the little house it is snug and warm and clean....
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