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The Swallow. Matopos Hills. Zimbabwe, Africa. African Stories..||.Oberholzer: Right then, here we go. Smaller footprint, fresher air, greener breathing, less electrical power, more solar, less coal, more wind harnessing, less fuel, more spirituality and a lot more walkabouts. I tell you, straight as the road between Brandvlei and Kenhardt, that if you remove those years of diesel and dust clogging my head space, I'd be a free as a swallow, whirling and swirling in the wide blue above. If I just subtract all that other stuff, then I'd be back to the Aboriginal Man that I was all the lives before this one. With no planes and trains and power around, I've been practicing this new dimension of imaginary thought travel. The name I've coined for it is ‘Houdinitrilist'. The Houdini bit escapes one from local captivity and the ‘Trillist' bit beams one to another place. Make no mistake, this takes long and hard practice. Much of the initial beaming I tried only brought me to the bathroom with stomach cramps. Then after many trials I landed on the other side of town, then over the mountains, then to places of mystery and intrigue. One day I beamed up with such force that I found myself screeching over the Limpopo River and landing on a rocky outcrop in the Matopos Hills in Zimbabwe. This was lekker, as there was almost no fuel and power there anyway. I remember coming here a long while ago, here between the huge boulders. Near the top, sunken into pure granite, is the grave of one of The British Empire's biggest colonial scoundrels, Leader Star Jameson. My body was rocking back and forth with good-good-good vibrations. Watching the swallows doing aerial acrobatics in the sky above made me dizzy. Sky drunk, I flopped down on my chair, only to find a laughing pretty woman sitting there. Laughing, if you get me, laughing at everything that I was thinking. Brought up as a conservative Calvinist, it took a while to let my eyes wander down from her pretty face to her neckline and shoulders. This extremely mischievous behaviour brought forth half a swallow tattooed on her breast. I know that for sailors the swallow symbolizes their love of the world's oceans. I know this because my uncle joined the merchant navy and came back after thirty years with a swallow tattooed on each pectoral. Stopping this woman laughing was more difficult than catching a swallow in flight. For a short terrible moment, I wondered what was on her other breast, but my thoughts were whooshed away by more wondrous laughter, and the sound of the whistling wings of low flying barn swallows. Somewhere, back in reality, I had met this woman before. Was she not the famous chef who cooks for the richest of the rich on some of the world's snazziest ocean-going yachts? Then she vanished, quick as a swallow and I remained, just for a few moments longer, high on that granite koppie, the happy ‘Thrilltrillist'. (KEYSTONE/LAIF/Obie Oberholzer)