Windmills of the Karoo

Whenever you see them, they go…”

Motto of the Aermotor Windpump Company

Text & Photographs by CHRIS MARAIS

Sunset Special

If you are ever on a lonely road in the Great Karoo at the day’s ending, find the nearest windmill (more precisely, a ‘water milling wind pump’) and stop beside it. You will hear, in the far distance, the call of the blue crane. In the middle distance is the raucous good night bark of the baboon. Right here, next to you, fresh water gurgles out of a pipe and into a cement dam. Above you, the old Southern Cross creaks and groans as the day cools, hot metal contracts and meerkats pack their pups away for the night. And then a monster Mack truck belonging to Pietie Potgieter & Sons comes thundering past and knocks your sundown reverie for six. Welcome to the Heartland…

If you have become a lover of the Karoo, then the sight of a windmill anywhere in the world will always remind you of the vast open spaces between Oudtshoorn and the Orange River. You think lamb chops, Victorian houses, craggy mountain ridges, dirt roads and donkey carts. And there’s always a snaggy-toothed old windmill around to hold the landscape together.

The Great Matchmaker

Of course, life out here is always about the water. The windmill is the Great Matchmaker between the marriage of the land and the water beneath it. Some children in the Karoo have never seen the rains. But when it comes, let me tell you, there is no better place on Earth to be.

The skies darken, as velvet folds of cloud swoop down from Angola, across the Kalahari. First drops pock the dust, that ineffable scent rises, fragrant and welcome as fresh bread. So delicious is the aroma of new rain that some Karoo people are known to pick up smears of earth on their fingers to taste it.

The dead lands come to life. Within days, within hours, this part of the Karoo is dancing again.

“The rain comes on legs,” say the Bushman. Which is a blessing and a curse for a Karoo farmer. Oftentimes, a set of rain clouds will walk through a valley, dropping life as they pass. Then they will hopscotch over the next one, leaving the lands as parched as they were before.

Have You Ever Seen The Rain?

Karoo people have their particular ways of foretelling rain:

• The tortoises are more active;
• The ants are busy on the ground;
• The Queen of the Night cactus comes out in bloom;
• The langasem (or gysie) grasshopper begins his little diesel generator call three nights before rain;
• The nights are too hot, even for stoep-sitting;
• The blue cranes fly high and the swallows swoop low over the ground;
• The bloukopkoggelmander faces north.

Hunting Windmills with Jaco

It’s a perfect day for hunting windmills with Jaco Moolman of Nooitgedacht Farm out past Samenkomst. All week, a potent heat wave has rolled through the Karoo Midlands, but there is a breeze in the air today and the clouds are waltzing about the sky. There is the promise of rain.

There are four of us in the Isuzu bakkie: Jaco, his mother-in-law Helen Schulze, my wife Julie and me, the photographer.

Jaco grew up with the clunk, the creak and the groan of an old Aermotor near the family house, bringing clear drinking water up from Middle Earth. As we drive around, however, it’s clear he does not regard a windmill as a thing of romance.

The young farmer spends his days working in these these Agter-Sneeuberg Mountains, so he knows each windmill well. And if he’s not driving past them, he’s fixing them. And, as any Karoo farmer will tell you, fixing a windmill is not for sissies.

He has his favourites, like Laurel and Hardy, the brace of smooth-working, no-hassle windmills out on Lorraine Farm. And he has his enemies – one of them being a snaggle-toothed old giant his simply calls Kopseer (headache).

“You can just leave me a couple of aspirins up there at the top,” he laughs. “This one is nothing but trouble.”

Old Kopseer is acting demurely today, however. Its dam is full to the brim with clear mountain water. I remark upon its great character, as it stands there in all its gap-toothed glory.

“It might have character,” says Jaco, “But it’s not a character I like very much.”

At Bouershoek Farm, Jaco and I climb out to fetch water from a windmill dam. While Jaco tends to some nearby livestock, it is up to me to fill the empty bottle and take it back to the ladies at the bakkie. But, being a bit of a kortgat (shorty), I can’t reach the dam pipe.

I look at the water in the dam. It appears to be clear enough, so I fill the bottle directly from the dam and return to the car.

Julie takes the first sip, and can immediately detect a faint eau de platanna (froggy taste). Before Helen drinks, however, Jaco arrives and saves the day.

He takes the bottle firmly from Jules, empties it and strides off to a nearby dam, fed by a solar-powered pump. There, even I can reach the pipe. Soon, everyone is drinking water plucked recently from its ancient caverns amongst the mineral-rich rocks. No municipal water ever tasted as sweet as this.

On the drive home, we talk about the Miguel Cervantes novel, Don Quixote. Jaco wants to know the precise meaning of ‘tilting at windmills’.

“It means to face in impossible task,” I reply. “To fight the unbeatable foe, so to speak.”

“Hmm,” says Jaco. “Sounds a bit like farming in the Karoo…”

Lovin' Carnarvon

Going westwards into the Hard Man’s Karoo, I find myself in a sitting room in Carnarvon, surrounded by six local men.

“You are the only guy in this room who cannot fix a windmill,” the Oom says to me. Out here, you have to know your story around these lovely old steel flowers.

Up the road in Carnarvon is the King of the Windmills: Leon Swanepoel. He’s been fixing them and carting them around for more than 50 years. He calls himself The Water Doctor of the Karoo. And he makes house calls.

“Here’s a farmer, OK? He depends on a certain windpomp to deliver water for his house. That windpomp is suddenly plucked apart by a strong gust of wind. He can’t cook, wash, flush or drink. Let’s say his other windpomp supplies skaapwater (water for livestock), and it breaks down. The animals are going to die of thirst if I don’t get out there.”

Carnarvon itself is a town of windmills. There used to be 115 of them flashing about all over, but half their number have died and some have been dismantled. Still, 50-odd windmills turning in a small Karoo town is nothing to sniff at. Leon Swanepoel points down the road at an old Defiance Butler windmill – it’s been faithfully turning since 1924.

“People don’t know how valuable their windmills are until they break down.”

It’s like they say: you don’t miss the water till the well runs dry…

The town of Loeriesfontein  in the Northern Cape boasts the Fred Turner Museum, which in turn boasts a collection of 27 windmills. Check www.loeriesfontein.co.za

The windmill crafters of Cradock, Middelburg and Colesberg have been making little wire windmills for decades. It’s worth stopping, buying a couple and supporting their cause – the windmills are mostly fashioned out of recycled junk.

The authors have set up an exhibition of windmill photographs (Steel Flowers) in their home town of Cradock next to Mila's Restaurant in Durban Street.