Street Violinists - Vienna, Austria

The cattle herder made a knopkierie for Peter. The knob was smooth, yellow with marks of a penknife, carefully trimmed from the fork of a tree, and I wanted one. Passionately, at the top of my lungs, with snot, trane, footstamping intensity. No. Women do not own kieries. I cried and hurled the walking stick substitute (for grannies!!). Peter chanted and postured, a man, a warrior. Now, I wonder at the black man's pride that insisted tradition be honored. Did he lose his job? Did he see the girl child as less than the boy child? or, just with a different role.I'd love to have that hand carved piece of wood evoking the long grass that caught at my legs as I ran, panting to the next holidayhouse a valley away. The valley where a line of women balanced buckets on their heads and enacted the centuries old ritual of bringing water back to the kraal. Oupa was the senator for native afffairs in the 1950s, charged with representing these unlettered people of the red blanket and long stemmed , dagga filled pipes. I heard his contemptuous comments many times. "Bloody lazy bastards, sitting in the sun, watching the women do all the work" kinda true, really. Women carved mielie fields out of hillsides, men went off to work in the mines. He seemed a benevolent patriarch, who felt responsible for these people, but with little faith in their ability to transition into the first world. He was a freethinker, despising the hypocrisy of churches. An Edinburough educated attorney, family lore spoke of a blindfolded man sticking pins into a map "whatever part of the globe that this lands on that is pink, that is where I'll settle" Eventually, Senator William Morris Hall Campbell, partner in Blakeway & Leppan, became a biggish fish in the Trans (across) Kei (a river)... see Transvaal.

Reflections