A reflection on rarity
Many people know the Karoo for something special.
AfrikaBurn in the Tankwa Karoo.
The Stoep Tasting Wine Weekend in Graaff-Reinet.
The Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn.
The spectacular spring carpets of daisies in the Namaqualand.
All these places are pins on the map.
But few really come to fathom just how vast the Karoo is.
The Karoo stretches from Worcester in the Western Cape, northeastward through Beaufort West, up to the border of the Free State and west into the Northern Cape. The distance spans over 400 000km² of land. It’s difficult to comprehend until you see it on a map of South Africa and realise why so many call it the heartland.
Its vastness however, isn’t the only thing that makes it as majestic as it is. There are of course many other regions in the world that are as wide and wild. What sets it apart, is the mystery of it all.
The Khoisan knew it as the “land of thirst.” Paleontologists regard it as a treasure trove of fossils that have shaped scientific understanding of Permian and Triassic life and vertebrate evolution. Astronomers recognise it as the home of The Square Kilometre Array (SKA project) and the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) radio telescope; instruments created to capture the history of the universe as we know it. These, and many other wonders make the Karoo what it is: rare.
That rarity is captivating.
And if you happen to stay a bit longer than you planned, it has a way of drawing you in. Because apart from the many ways in which the Karoo is extraordinary, there are also so many things about it that make the ordinary seem “extra”.
It’s rare that a place of such beauty can also be a place of such barrenness. That at the same time as its vastness threatens to engulf you, a chance encounter with a luminous vygie flower can ground you.
Look a little bit closer and notice the yellow puff balls on an Acacia Karoo thorn tree, the heelwalker camouflaged on a succulent or a toktokkie rolling her ball of dung up a dry riverbed.
It’s rare that a place of such beauty can also be a place of such barrenness. That at the same time as its vastness threatens to engulf you, a chance encounter with a luminous vygie flower can ground you.
Here, Selene Molteno’s exquisitely rare garments are forged in and by harshness. It is, in so many ways, a place of paradox.
What’s also rare is having the opportunity to return to a farm whose buildings and landscape are just as sprawlingly striking as they’ve always been; and to experience this place first as a child and then as an adult.
Nelspoort, a farm that has been in the Molteno family for nearly 200 years still stands on the very foundations upon which it was built. It’s different in certain places, hidden hollows and looming shadows but it’s every bit as rare as it once was. You can see it in family photographs that date back to the 1850s. It was – and still is, a farm that was built with intention, not as a place to survive but a place to thrive.
Charles Molteno and his farm workers mapped water sources, rotated the grazing pastures of his Merino sheep and produced a fibre whose reach would extend far beyond South African borders. Few farms combined that level of foresight with the kind of grit you need to build a kingdom in the rugged Karoo.
Today its rarity is in its quiet continuity. Preserved, revived, cherished. It’s not part of a landscape whose history has been overwritten or forgotten. These walls are a testament to timelessness.
As visionary novelist, Olive Schreiner described in Story of an African Farm:
“The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted karoo bushes a few inches high… all were touched by a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.”
