Some time in 2006, I met a retired gold miner who called himself Bungityala in his home village on the coastline of eastern Mpondoland. Bungityala's village is among the most stunning places I have ever seen. The hills that surround it somehow manage to seem gently pastoral and yet exhilaratingly wild, for sometimes it is as if the wind is sweeping through you and lifting you off the ground and you are about to fly. In part it is because the topography is so unpredictable; you can turn a corner and suddenly find yourself staring way down at hilltops and you wonder how it is that you got so high. In the early evenings, I would sit in the spaza shops and the shebeens in little hillside sheds, drinking stout beer with the elderly people of Bungityala's village. I can vouch that these elderly people are capable of drinking a lot of stout beer. They grow drunken and coarse and all sorts of venom and humour and amusement come tumbling from them and you can learn a great deal about a place by insinuating yourself into these snug sheds of inebriation.

Sitting in one of these sheds in the early evening, drinking stout beer with two elderly women, I looked out of the shed's open door and I saw the legs and the torso of a great, athletic horse pass right by, just inches from the door. I stepped outside the shed to find an elderly man in sharp riding boots atop a magnificent racing horse. He looked down at me imperiously and smiled to himself, his eyes quite bloodshot, which struck me as odd, because he had not even sat down to his beer. I was to discover later that Bungityala had spent the entire afternoon taking his horse from one shebeen to another, that he already had a great deal of stout beer in his veins and this was his last stop on his way home, which was across the beach and on the other side of the lagoon.

Bungityala tethered his horse and entered the shed in his heavy riding boots and ordered a stout beer. He was a short man and his riding boots came almost up to his knees, which made him look even shorter, for it was hard not to imagine that the man only began where the boots ended.