(Part III of an anthology of writings about an installation with mixed media, called Walk the Line. This work is about place and, in part, about the discovered layers of history of a rural community in the Swartland area of South Africa.}
What the land holds – Before the rails
The weight of history
Before the introduction of farming and before these rails were built, the land was not ‘untamed wilderness’: the San lived as nomadic pastoralists on this soil. They relied on extensive walking paths for seasonal migrations, gathering, and tracking wildlife. Pre-Colonial Trade also used the expansive networks of footpaths that connected coastal regions to the interior, facilitating the trade of salt, gold, and other commodities.
The San hunter-gatherers and Khoikhoi pastoralists practised a form of land stewardship that left an imprint. To encourage the growth of bulbs (geophytes) as well as to attract game with fresh green shoots, regular controlled burning, by using fire as a tool, existed. Water from the local river, today called the Berg River, was also part of this seasonal movement in the area. I tried to find historical names for this area, as it is important to acknowledge that Khoi-San names of places are amongst the oldest in the country. Archaeological findings indicate that modern humans have inhabited Southern Africa for at least 170,000 years, with the Khoi-San’s history spanning as far back as the Later Stone Age, from about 40,000 years ago. The Khoikhoi did not always have a collective name for large regions, but instead identified with specific clan territories. For example, the Cochoqua (or Goringhaiqua) were known to graze their large herds of cattle in the fertile valleys between the mountains of present-day Malmesbury and the Atlantic coast.
The name we use today, Swartland (Het Zwarte Land, translated as The Black Land), was first recorded in 1701 and was a descriptive name given by early Dutch explorers, because the indigenous Renosterbos vegetation appeared black from a distance after the winter rains. My walks have allowed me to look into this biome, called Renosterbos and learn about the desperate state it is in due to lack of space for the natural veld to grow – development has taken its toll.
As I walked, it was easy to imagine the San following the migration of Eland and Quagga over this land and how these animals carved deep “paths of least resistance” through the fynbos. Interestingly, early colonial roads—and eventually some railway sections—might have been built directly over these ancient animal tracks because the animals had already found the most efficient way through the terrain. And considering the choice to build this rail line, it becomes clear that the rail exists because of the soil that the farmers cultivated with wheat and vineyards.
Lines and Life lines
On the WALC site, I learned about a work by a walking artist, Stuart McAdam, Lines Lost, 2013-14. In his writings, McAdam interrogated the historical, cultural and contemporary resonances through a series of documented walks on lines that were cut in Northern Scotland. His main concern was the impact that the cuts had on the development and decline of the many towns and villages that lay along the historic routes, routes that were often lifelines for outlying communities. To comment on this, in our village, public transport is not provided. I know of school buses that travel on this road to town, mainly for the farm kids. There are taxi services people without cars can use. The majority of the farm labourers and their extended families walk to town, or rely on weekly transport by their employers. This mostly happens on Friday afternoons when the town is a beehive of activity.
By the early 20th century, Riebeek West had a prominent railway station which served mainly the farming community. This branch line from Hermon into the Riebeek Valley was a late addition to the Cape rail network, primarily driven by the Swartland area’s wheat boom. To give this more context, I share the following I read: “By definition, a branch line is a secondary line which branches off a trunk line, that enables rail traffic (either passenger or produce) to be carried onward from the country districts to the major centres (ports or markets).”
Stories from archives I could access are about the heyday of freight train transport and show that this line transported agricultural produce, schoolchildren, and labourers, serving mostly the surrounding farms. An old journal of a paper read in parliament stated that the traffic during the first year of working was estimated as follows:
- passengers transported: 14 000
- livestock transported: 8 800
- Tonnage of goods: 26 420
- Tonnage of coal: 500
I learned from local stories that the train passed through the village only once a day—people crossed the tracks almost intuitively, knowing its exact schedule. A favourite story tells of a local young woman doing her driver’s license test, and passing Station Road. She drove straight over the railway tracks without stopping, and when the traffic officer pointed out her mistake, she simply replied that the train had already passed for the day.
Bearing witness
The rail line is not the first path this valley has known. Long before iron and sleepers, rhinoceros, eland and quagga wore their own lines into the fynbos — paths of least resistance that hunter-gatherers, farmers, and then much later, engineers, likely only widened rather than invented.
To walk this line slowly is to walk the latest layer of a much older habit: this land has always been crossed, by hoof and by foot, long before it was ever fenced. I regularly see lines across, entering one side of the fence, zig-zagging inside the rail line area, and leaving again at the other side, into the farmlands or vineyards. Recently I was parked in my car, next to the line, with the plan to ‘visit’ the Lachenalia flowers and check in on how they were doing. In front of me, a Duiker ram stood grazing, not at all stirred by my appearance. I had a few seconds just to look at him, telling him in my mind that I was coming to visit the flowers, and then he graciously jumped the wire fence and walked away into the vineyards.
Walking here forces an encounter with the non-human life that is healing the earth and the human memories of displacement that the rails still hold. I stay in awe of these moments of gathering.
CODA
I feel suspended between places.
Walking this line and riding a train along it are not the same act, wearing different speeds—they are opposing purposes. The rail’s original purpose was to erase the deep time of the path: to turn a lived, multi-species route into a fast conduit for goods and produce, stripped of the connection that walking once held. What I did, walking it, was a kind of undoing.
I was not passing through the village the way a train passes through. I was inhabiting the space between. Not slowness against speed, but the rail as a symbol of connection and progress set against the valley’s history of disconnection and displacement.
The suspension I feel is not simply between two towns. It is between two entirely different ways this land has been moved through—the deep-time walked route, and the modern engineered one—with me standing in the seam.