Sipho the goatherd

No self-respecting African male is complete without a convincing herd boy experience in his past. It’s very “previously disadvantaged”. If you didn’t grow up in the rural areas and thus couldn’t have herded anything larger than a skinny township chicken, you can supplant the herd boy past with a taxi boy past. Truth be told though, the taxi boy history doesn’t quite smack of “previously disadvantaged” as much as herd boy history does.

The herd boy story is often used to show just how far you’ve come as a previously disadvantaged African. From cow’s bottoms, dung and cracked heels to Dolce & Gabbana, BMWs and finger foods at cocktail parties. It’s an awards function favourite. Before you get the wrong impression, I must mention at this moment that I’m far from what most would call successful. I’ve still got a long, long to go before I can bankroll my own herd-boy past. But I’ll get there, eventually. So I hope you bio writers are paying attention. This is the story you’ll be recalling with relish one day when I’m an accomplished and celebrated human being.

It was about 10 years ago and for some random reason my family was spending a week in the Tugela Valley, about 100 kilometres north of Durban. Imagine your dad deciding to spend the holidays in Tweebuffelsfontein. This is the KZN equivalent. The Tugela Valley is beyond quaint. It’s … well, Zulu and very rural. Girls still wander around with their bosoms flopping about for the world to see. Men still carry traditional weapons and kill bulls with their bare hands every spring.

My mother thought it would be a good idea if my brother and I got roughened up a bit. You know, live on the edge — that stuff. So she asked a local herd boy to take us out for the day. He promptly agreed, no doubt relishing the opportunity to make two, pampered town boys squirm. She packed us a cow-dung cooked lunch (Niknaks and hot dogs) and told us to come back home as tough guys. We were eager to please.

We were supposed to drive a herd of about 15 goats to a grazing area along the Tugela River. It sounded straightforward enough, except the chap omitted to mention that there was a huge cliff between the grazing pastures and the river below. Do you know what goats do when they see a cliff? They play tag up and down the drop. We decided that this was probably dangerous for the goats, so we spent the morning chasing the goats along the cliff, and cackling insanely whenever they fell down the cliff face. Obviously it wasn’t a sheer drop. It was terraced. But still, it was extremely dangerous. Our wonderful game came to an abrupt end when I accidentally put my foot through a wasp’s nest.

My brother and I were then told, after having strategically manoeuvred away from the angry wasp locale, that our herd-boy experience wouldn’t be complete without a skinny dip in the fabled Tugela River. I say river when in actual fact it was a flow of brown silt. For the record, cold mud is one of the best wasp-sting balms in the world. Also for the record, cold mud getting into all those bodily nooks and crannies is not that awesome. But we didn’t care about that. We splashed about madly, shrieking at the top of our voices. Then the bona fide herd boy froze suddenly. “What?” we asked. “Oh, nothing. I thought it was a crocodile. There are many crocodiles in this part of the river, you know. When they want to eat you, they knock your legs with their tails … Hey, where’re you going?!”

Having spent the better part of two hours in the river, we emerged to discover that the goats had disappeared. I needn’t go into the ramifications of losing a herd of goats where the local commercial system is based on livestock. Let it suffice for me to say, the poo had literally hit the fan. We had no idea where to start looking. And it was getting dark. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go far. We found them about 3 kilometres downstream. They were in the local chief’s cabbage patch. And he was waiting for us, sjambok in hand. It was at that moment that I decided that I wasn’t really cut out for this herd-boy racket.

I could tell you about the time I was almost in a fist-fight with an actual warrior-in-training, or when they tried to teach me how to milk a cow without getting decapitated by its flying back hooves. I could tell you about that one time we went stealing sugar cane, and almost got killed by the guard dog. But a man’s got his pride to think of.