If Charles Dickens was still alive and would pen down our experience at the Colonial Manor it would be one of the best selling books in his literature career, after of cause Oliver Twist. My journey to South Africa and my stay in South Africa is one of the most interesting life stories one can ever tell their grandchildren. We have so many expectations about foreign countries well; some of my expectations were met with Joy, Disbelief, Anger and Racism…… Some of these experiences made me realize that home is always best no matter what.
After spending more than six months working at a local Hotel in the small towns were I was working as a waiter I decided it was time to cast my net into deep waters I decided to quit. There was only one problem to such a move “were would I get a job in this very small, remote and Isolated town of Cradock. Well staying in a small town has its advantages ad has also its disadvantages, fro me one big disadvantage or obstacle was getting a new job. I had a number of options that I could put into action but these actions had their limitations. Well I was clever enough not to quit before I had a new job because I knew it would bring a lot of problems in the long run. So what I did was during my stay at the hotel I was doing a vigorous job search but it was really fruitless I must say. My first port of call was Wimpy a local eating house which is Franchised by…I don’t know, and really don’t care. “Why”, u would ask I bet, well upon arrival at Wimpy the ladies in the joint thought I wanted to buy something so they offered me a table, which I refused politely because I had an alternative motive. As a prospective waiter at the place I put on my best smile and asked for the manager. A colored lady was called by one of the girls behind the counter. We greeted and I introduced my self in the very most polite way one could ever do, I was so humble, cheerful and I put on a very “NO CAVITY SMILE”, which is one of my specialties. “Hoe gaan dit”, well I felt like I was blind or I had just landed in Mars and one of the Aliens were speaking in their language which I didn’t quite understand. I made it clear to her that I was not well versed with Afrikaans. I spoke to here in English and asked her if I could leave my CV’s with her so that if they had an opening maybe they would consider me. Well she made it clear to me point blank that she doesn’t employ men. Very sexist I thought, but hey that’s their policy, ‘sick policy’.
So back to the drawing board, I met up with a fellow Zimbabwean guy whom I told my quest and he told me he has a friend who is looking for someone who owns a successful safari and was looking for guys to work for him, preferably Zimbabwean. So back at my house I was sharing with Wayne who was also looking fro a job and we had the same interests and we both worked as Chefs/ Waiters in our recent experiences. So our friend referred us to Richard, who was the owner of this particular safari, immediately we gave him a call and we made an appointment with him and the appointment was due in 45 minutes of our conversation because he was getting into town and he was eager to meet us. Me and Wayne rushed to town and waited fro him at the shopping mall. We waited, and waited….and waited and waited…. Ok, ok you get the point; we waited for him for more than 3 hours until we finally called him on his mobile. He wasn’t apologetic but sounded busy so he directed us to his mother’s house were he was and we immediately trotted off. We got to his to the house were we were directed to and upon arrival we were met by a very healthy looking dog which was unattended and looked rather vicious. We made our way to the door and before we could ring the door bell, a bald, sun tinted young man in his mid thirties white man opened the door for us.
With quite good instinct he went for Wayne’s hand and greeted him,” You must be Wayne?”, and onto me “and you must be Kennedy?” WOW I said to myself, this guy must be a very good tracker, or he should play lotto or something because he got it point on. He went on to say, “is it?” We answered in a choir kind of chant ‘Unison’, the choristers would call it, “Yes sir “. He grinned and he said “Richard Cawood, but you can call me Richard.” We got into the house and he directed us to the lounge, “Richard, is it the guys, are the Zimbabwean guys here”, a falsetto Female voice sounded from were I presumed the kitchen was, because of the aroma which was coming form that side. Richard went to the kitchen and mumbled something to the lady, couldn’t quite get what he said. Mean while Wayne and I were still in disbelief, in subdued voices we talked about this and pretty much knew that this was our chance. “Patty, I am Patty, and you are?” These were the words of an old woman maybe in her Mid sixties, working this out we came to the conclusion that this was Richard’s mom. “I am Richard’s mum”, oops almost thought she had raid my mind there. Richard and his mum sat down with us and there was our interview. We were asked about food preparation, what we dishes we could prepare and if we had any Bartending experience. We were fairly brisk in answering their questions and we answered then with expertise. We got on the right footing I guess because after that Patty invited us to join her for Sunday lunch preparations as she and her family were having a luncheon. As for Richard he offered us jobs as Chef cum Waiter positions. He offered us good money and he explained to us how it was off season for hunting and how he just had 2 clients coming to the safari. It was festive season December and everyone was in a rush preparing for Christmas and the New Year. Well it was good news for sure, but I hadn’t quit my job at the hotel as yet and as luck would have had it, the Hotel Manger called me in for a duty but I had to lie through my teeth that I was not feeling too good and I needed a week off. I was given some time off and we planned for the trip. Patty explained to us the history of the safari and how it is run by her other son Chris who we were yet to meet and his wife, who Patty didn’t like very much from the way she was describing her to us on the first day.
Sunday morning we headed off to the Cawood residence were we were again met by this very big fairy mutt, called SCAR. Quite a good dog I must say, very disciplined as well. We headed straight to the kitchen after the maid had opened the door for us. Patty was waiting for us and was having a cup of tea. She offered us some coffee as well and after a brief chat and coffee it was cooking time. We helped her out and in fact after that day she in fact told us how much she had doubted our capabilities. Well back to the luncheon day, a Blonde woman came in and headed straight for the pots, she was really surprised to see to black guys wearing aprons and chatting with Patty, and the fact that Patty was actually asking for these two dudes’ advice counsel. “Guys this is Lynne my daughter, she stays in Johannesburg, Lynne this Wayne and Kennedy, Richard’s new chefs for the Safari.” We greeted with Lynne and she left another woman came in and now she also looked bowled over with the same reason that astounded Lynne. Apparently this chick was Richard’s chick, Karen and she had been promised by the mother in law that they would prepare the lunch together so that they could have mother I law and daughter in law bonding. She made it clear to Patty about our presence which really didn’t go down well with her. Patty explained how she wanted to examine our cooking skills and food preparation skills, which we all know was a lie, she enjoyed our company. The two were now having more like a hen fight but it was kind of verbal and indirect. Richard was watching some cricket and he sensed this tension and quickly came to the rescue. He asked his mother if she still needed our services and if not we could be dismissed.
We got paid and we were dismissed, Patty was having too much of a goodtime with us that she had divulged a lot to us. She had told us about how she and her late husband used to own a thriving safari which she later on gave to her older son and her daughter in law, and how these two fought everyday and a whole lot of gibberish. I rather found it very peculiar because I thought to myself why she would wash her family’s dirty linen in public, I mean what if we were from MTV’S ‘ You got served?’. But I thought there might have been a motive as well for such disclosure. Maybe she didn’t have anyone to disclose such information to or maybe she needed some kind of support, but hey we didn’t even know the people she was talking about. Two days after the luncheon was the day we were supposed to leave for the safari, we packed or clothes and bed linen, which we almost didn’t carry because Patty had offered us some, but we just thought just in case. We made off to the Cawood residence were we had to wait for Richard because he wasn’t there yet. We waited……till he came. We jumped up into his Bakkie and we were off to the safari, on our way he explained to us about ownership of the safari, he had to source his own clients and pay a bit of royalty to his brother to use the Safari though it was said to be a family business. Our first port of call was a house enroute to the safari which was Richard’s house. We delayed there a bit and finally Richard told us that he was buying time so that his brother would leave because he was supposed to go to his holiday home in some port about 300km away, but apparently Chris wasn’t leaving the place before Richard had come because he wanted to have a word with him. We were forced to drive to the safari to meet up with Chris and so we did.
Christopher, he was this muscular well built gentleman. He met up with his brother and went up to the house. We were left sitting outside at the garden and in was just a serene environment for a holiday getaway. It was away from all the hustle and bustle of town. We sat there, me and my best friend admiring the natural world we had just entered. We talked and two beautiful girls emerged from the house and they were wearing a uniform, they were carrying some food and they came and greeted and gave us some food. They sat as well on the garden chairs and we chatted, we spoke in our own language and we thought this was going to be the longest 5 days of our lives, with such beautiful chicks at the safari, no headmaster, no parents, no dorm master and the best part of it on funny old matron to stop us from having fun. We conversed about a lot of stuff and after a while they told us they were not staying at the safari, they were Christopher’s child minders. This was one of the most dream shattering news I had heard in a long time. I mean we had already planned who was going to take who, and Wayne and I are usually fighting about the good stuff but in this case we were in agreement, instead of the two beautiful maidens we were left with two ……not so…well I really don’t want to get into detail, but they were poles apart with the two that were going. That really didn’t matter anymore because it was a different tune. We introduced ourselves to the two ladies and they were so happy to be working with us. Chris left and Patty came in from town with some groceries and bar stock. We offloaded everything and we then our work had officially started.
Patty showed us the guest house which is an 1890’s colonial kind of house with 5 bedrooms 3 with en suite and a wooden noisy floor, which I think foreign nationals who came to this place just adored. It was filled with objet d'art from ages ago. Amongst these artifacts were old guns, hunting hats, bow and arrows and daggers. Also of particular interest were trophies of Kudus, Jackals, Owls, Springboks, and Rhino bones. I liked the mirrors strategically placed in the house/Colonial Manor. Patty gave us a tour of the house and showed us how she would want things to be run in the house. She also gave us a tour of the house and we made sure that it was clean. There was one thing we hadn’t seen yet and we were really wondering were it was, THE BAR. As a free spirited person I asked and we exited the house and went outside to subterranean vault were we were given an exceptional tour of an old bar with a salon door and hide as the carpet. This room looked divine, it was stuffy though but ideal for a safari. It had a collection of wines, whiskeys, beers and of particular interest were two things a tray with a collection of bullets form the golden era to modern bullets and a collection of foreign currency stuck on to a beam as a well as a collection of golf caps. We were invited into the house for Client briefing, our client was going to be a black business man from Johannesburg and his wife and they were said to grace us for 8 to 10 days. This guy was supposedly intended to arrive at around 8 pm so we had to prepare a light dinner for him and his wife, and oh, the wife was white. Before we could prepare dinner we were taken to our rooms and I bet Robben Island is better than this place we were taken to. It was a 3 roomed uninhabited house which had a very unwelcoming reek; you have thought that someone had been using the old room as a toilet. The room and spider webs all over and it had litter all over the place, I was wondering, maybe it was a dumping site that we were just given for the mean while. The floor was made out of dung and the there were no windows and neither was there a door, we had to beg for electricity from the farm manager who was Mathebese a Xhosa gentleman who was in his mid 30’s and was as the grape vine has it, he was born at the farm. This was horrifying, terrible, atrocious, shocking, horrendous, you name it. Imagine at a safari with wild animals, snakes…oh man they give me the shivers and in the middle of no where, without a door …. And we didn’t have a toilet as well, and any source of water; we were in for it for sure. But being with Wayne there made me think of Michael Jackson’s song ‘You are not alone.’ I was really never alone at it, but anyhow it wasn’t what we had expected and it was some sort of mistake. Or “was it?” We were given one small campers mattress that could only fit one person, we couldn’t even think of sleeping on it so we decided we would rather make it our pillow.
The Colonial Manor was like 10 minutes away from were the workers stayed and we were divided by a security gate. The safari is situated on a mountain and which is a conducive place to breed lions, or rather the Big Five. We returned to the Manor were we were supposed to wait for the guests until they arrived and welcome them, serve dinner and prepare their lunch packs. After waiting for a long time the telephone rang and it was Richard who had called to tell us that Mkhululi was not coming with his wife anymore. Mind you it was around 9pm and we had not eaten as yet because the boss had not left us any food to eat. Richard called again and we asked him about our supper and he advised us to maybe, bake some bread or prepare pap which is a Zimbabwean everyday kind of staple diet. The four of us sat there, very hungry and in state of surprise with what the boss had told us to do. The two ladies were so adamant in what the boss had said and they just had coffee, Wayne and I were so hungry and we were used to taking something solid in the evening, we prepared some dough for bread and we made some. We chatted with the ladies and compared notes about our little bungalows, and they laughed their guts out when we told them about our house. The reason they laughed was, they had good accommodation and they were kind of used to it because they apparently worked at Richard’s farm. We were straight form town over dressed and we had a expected to get A1 treatment. The two ladies were staying at the farm manager’s house which one of the best, not to my standards though but, SAFARI standards well it was A2, after A1 which was the Colonial Manor.
The ladies retired to their house and we had to wait for the client and the boss. Wayne and I sat there and we talk about everything, we were in such disbelief that we couldn’t moan about it because we had close to 8 more days at the safari and we just had to make the best out of it. We noticed something as well, the ladies did not refer Richard by name but they addressed him with a colonial title which was “MASTER RICHARD”, we couldn’t help ourselves but laugh, this was just totally preposterous, I couldn’t call someone “Master”, especially if he is not God, definitely no. We chuckled about it, naughty as we were we had agreed to pretend as if could not understand Xhosa and we spoke in English with the two ladies. We understood Xhosa a lot and no one could really talk about us in the language because we would hear everything. The telephone rang and it was Master Richard who had called to tell us that they were on their way and we had to start heating the food, we switched off the television which was in the kitchen because according to the ladies it was something that was forbidden to do, and you really get it if you were caught. We prepared the table in the way Patty had showed us earlier on, after a few minutes a bell sounded outside and we ran outside to meet our guest. We carried the man’s bags and we put them in the room in which he was using, he immediately rushed off to his room to take a shower. Meanwhile Richard sat with us in the kitchen as he explained why Mkhululi’s wife couldn’t come. After a while the client walked in and excused himself from dinner because he had to rest… This dealt a heavy blow to us because we had prepared the food wholeheartedly, Richard sent us off to bed and now. The problem was we had to be at work at 5am and it was already past 11, we didn’t have a torch to go to our little house and we were afraid. We braced our selves and prepared for the worst.
A strong piercing alarm sounded in my ears and I felt like I hadn’t even slept a wink, we woke up and it was already 4.30am, we took our towels and we headed for another farm worker’s house to take a bath. We thought he also had a bathroom in his house but apparently he didn’t have, “Gosh how did these people bath, “I thought to my self. So we did passport size bath and I would rather save the other detail… we headed off to the house and we started cleaning up and preparing lunch packs for the two. Around 6am the two had finished preparing and they were off. Again Richard hadn’t told us what to prepare for breakfast for ourselves so like the previous day we prepared some home made bread and coffee and we helped ourselves to it, by then the ladies were already here and were helping us clean up. At around 9 am the hunters came back and they didn’t manage to shoot anything, they were empty handed. We made breakfast for them and they rested in their respective rooms. On the farm there were also some farm workers who worked outside in the garden and some of them were skinners.
Days went by and this was the same routine that we had to follow and at time we would go to bed at 1 am, and wake up at 4.30 am and just follow the our monotonous schedule. As all these days had passed we hadn’t bathed and used the toilet because we were not allowed to use the bathroom in the manor and we never asked about the toilet. It way too much so one of the fine days we decided to be naughty and everyone went out, Richard and MK went out hunting and the girls went back to their room, Wayne went in first in one of the en suites and he bathed whilst I was on look out and after he finished, I went in as well and the rest is history. It felt so right tough we were not allowed, after that we went to sleep until Richard an MK came back at around 4 pm. The last two days of the safari were really interesting in a way, this is because Lynne and Karen had were joining us, these two really didn’t quite get along but you could see they were trying to work on it. They would come to the kitchen and discuss on what we would prepare for dinner, Lynne would suggest what she wanted and Karen would suggest what she felt like eating as well, it had become more of a cat fight but the only difference was the cats could talk and they could drive and they spoke English and Afrikaans. Lynne was more like the mother really understanding and she would listen to us the chefs whilst Richard’s girlfriend had an awful persona, it seemed this lot was really comfortable with washing their dirty linen in public. Working at the safari for this period was sort of an eye opener because it was just an experience of a lifetime that both Wayne and I had never experienced. We really felt like we had passed our 10 day conscription course at camp Cawood. The last day came and it was time to pack up and clean up. We had to clean up everything and leave it as it was left to us by Christopher before he had left for his holiday. Well I was eyeing this chocolate cake which was in the refrigerator, it appears as if Lynne had the same thought in mind, she wanted me and Wayne to have this cake so she sliced it and gave it to everyone including the girls. Karen was also eying this cake as well and she almost had a fit when she realized that her cake had been eaten by the ‘servants’’ as she would call us. “Lynne, Lynne, Lynne come here please, who gave these people this cake? I wanted it for the farm because Richard’s fridge is empty.” Then she went on to call us “you people”, which I feel is a demeaning word during the colonial era referring to the black community. She was really cross with us and she rushed off to tell her boyfriend who in return told her off. After we finished doing all the cleaning, it was time to head off to Cradock and there were 3 cars a Volvo, very spacious which belongs to Lynne, a VW polo, which is Karen’s car and the Bakkie, Richard’s car which doesn’t have a maximum carrying capacity? How many people were there, Richard, Karen, Lynne, Wayne, the two ladies which we worked with and I totaling to 7. Karen made it totally clear that she did not want anyone in her car for reasons known to her self, and Lynne’s car was full because the Ladies had been accommodated in the car. Richard’s Bakkie had all the food left over and the guns. So it meant that me and Wayne had no choice but to sit in the back of the Bakkie. We drove off to Richard’s house which is along the road and we dropped of the food and the two ladies had reached home, because they stayed at Richard’s Farm. So it was just Richard, Karen, Wayne and I. The two love birds put us in the back of the Bakkie and the sat in front though it was a double cab Bakkie. This particular treatment is for dogs, and besides who says dogs don’t need good treatment as well. Back home in my country this section that we sat in is called the ‘DOG SECTION’, very Colonial.
We went back to Cradock and got paid our monies; Richard was so impressed that he even extended an invitation to Wayne to join him at their annual outing with his friends. After all had been said and done we were home at last and Wayne was excited to join them for their New Year’s Retreat. I also wanted to join them but the invitation was not extended to me because they had to pay Wayne a daily wage and couldn’t afford to pay the both of us. We spent our money wisely because it was hard earned cash and we made sure that we also showered ourselves with Christmas goodies. Life had been really tough for us and with the little money we had got paid was like striking a 25 carat diamond stone. Life though had to carry on and with the services we had offered Patty promised to put in a word for us to her son Chris who was in need of staff when the hunting season was on. This is just what we needed and she even promised us better accommodation at the farm and good remuneration as well, no bills, free accommodation and as well as free food, I mean what more would you want when you are promised such a beautiful offer? This is what we just needed, or was it? We were yet to see…………..
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