I have come to take you home

Space to breathe

It is a blustery winter evening, and I am sitting by the fire, fingers wrapped around a mug of Rooibos tea. I am listening to Marie’s stories. Raised in a coloured household on the remote Moravian mission of Wupperthal, Marie left the Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape to work for White men during the apartheid era. As a single mother and democracy activist, she fought to give her son access to the education she had been denied. In the post-apartheid era, she has taken great pleasure in witnessing her son’s contribution to educational reform in Cape Town, and when she retired, he invited her to move in with family. Through all the years of her life, Marie had never stopped longing for the wide-open lands of her childhood, so she returned to the Cederberg instead. Now Marie lives in a spartan cottage in the centre of the mission hamlet of Heuningvlei, located at the base of Pakhuis Pass where arid mountain meets agrarian marsh. Known to all in Wupperthal as Tannie Nuus (Auntie News), Marie is famous for her fierce intelligence and neighbourly spirit. Scrambling to survive on her meagre pension, a small hillside crop of Rooibos, and a micro used-clothing enterprise that is more charitable than profitable, she says that life is bitter, but the Cederberg gives her space to breathe.