SIMONSTOWN, FALSE BAY, SOUTH AFRICA
Where the dual carriageway to Simonstown
is nearest the bay some cars were parked
on the hard shoulder and some folk were standing
on the stony beach. A Southern Right Whale
had calved near the shallows. We stood with strangers,
in the silence, watching the suckling baby
and the mother in their huge gentleness.
False Bay is wide as a sea, as deep,
so-called because sailors without charts
thought it was Table Bay twenty miles west.
Simonstown was one of the last to accede
to Apartheid. A colonial port,
way station to the East, British dockyard,
it became a diverse place of Dutchmen
and Lascars, Jews and Muslims, entrepreneurs
and runaways, Xhosa guides, and Khoisan
strayed the few miles from the heather of the Cape.
Opposite our guesthouse was a cove where whales,
at the end of the breeding season, came,
like ships of the line, to scrape off barnacles,
before their journey to the sounding oceans.
As we left town we passed the main car park,
and, at its edge, eight young men in white
and navy blue from Khayelitsha township
singing a capella: ‘Nkosi
sikelel’ iAfrika’.
Jeff Teasdale
February 4, 2023A revitalising vision of a journey we made there, sans whales, so we could only imagine them. Now I can see them. Thank you!
However, on that drive there was a passing tortoise about which my wife still speaks, which though unsung, nimbly crossed the road in front of the car, and made me think of my ‘Joey’ who lived for some years in our Manchester garden when I was eight, and like your Madagascan lemurs in Chester Zoo, was far from home. Bought from a famous Tib Street pet shop, he gorged on dandelions and lettuce, had a tic, (which we removed) and was befriended by next door’s dog, who amicably followed him around very slowly and licked his shell.
Also on that drive, gulls were dropping what I took to be stones on the quiet road in front of us. I discovered these were whelk-like crustaceans, which on being driven over and crushed by the car wheels, the birds were swooping behind to eat the exposed meat. I thought this fascinatingly inventive, if not a little inefficient, so drove slowly back and forth several times to crush the rest for them. They ate well that day, as did we later, in a guest house filled with displays of art made in Africa….. I could have spent a week there looking at it all and drawing. But we had to move on…
What a country!