The bakkie: SA’s sweetest icon

I just couldn’t figure out what to call a bakkie when I left SA to roam the world. I struggled to bring my tongue around words like UT, yoot, pick-up truck. A bakkie’s a bakkie, a naartjie a naartjie, a braai a braai, lekker is lekker, and, sexist version or otherwise, a doos is a doos. I have met quite a few of the latter and funnily enough they thought the same of me. Isn’t it food for thought hey, that when we think of someone as an arsehole or a doos, they usually smugly think the same thing of us? I live in your projections, you live in mine.

Dooses aside, one thing that many South Africans, ex-pats or otherwise, nostalgically love, is the iconic bakkie, emblem of parties, pub crawls, boozy one-night stands, Mom’s taxi, camps out in the bush, farming, and handy for picking up and delivering just about anything. My friends helped me move house in a bakkie on more than one occasion.

One of the best ways to travel through game reserves is in the back of a bakkie with a crate or two of beers, standing up from time to time with the wind against your face, zebra sprinting ahead, a Castle or Windhoek beer cascading down your throat.

In a bakkie, weather permitting, the bar can open anytime. When I cycled through the Magaliesberg, if I got lost I would stop and ask okes in bakkies by the roadside for directions. Invariably they would be in vests or T-shirts, kortbroek and sockless vellies, lounging with arms folded over the side of the bakkie, having a leisurely dop (it’s five PM somewhere in the world) the brandy and Cokes or beer nestling in an icebox inside the back of the bakkie, the sun warm on their backs as they enjoyed the blue day and waved me in the right direction. I love the SA name for brandy and Coke: spook and diesel.

The Chinese very rarely use bakkies, at least here around Shanghai. They don’t know what they are missing. Mind you, bakkies go with countryside and an African sun as intimately and naturally as beach sand and butt cracks. And what’s a shower after a day at the beach without bending over and firmly spreading the cheeks under the sluicing water for at least ten seconds while perhaps giving the rear a shake and jostle?

One of my earliest memories of a bakkie was falling off one while it was travelling on a dirt farm road when I was twelve. I was trying to impress with acrobatics an eleven-year-old, sparkly-eyed lass I had my eyes on who was also in the back of the bakkie with several other kids. My less than skilful attempts at romance and seduction earned me a lot of laughter and a sore backside. As soft as the dirt road was, I hit it with a thwack.

When I was in the army back in ’82 I spent some time in military detention for AWOL. We had a few ragged copies of those old RP photo-comic books as an excuse for reading material which included police and spy stories for the semi-literate: you know, for those whose lips move as they slowly read with their finger keeping them on their place in the text and who concentrate more on the smudgy photos. One inmate, Francois, fancied himself quite a literary critic, and whose ambition in life was to pass standard eight before he left the army so he could join the police force. When RP’s simpleton, skulduggery stories were set in “romantic”, “mysterious” Europe he bemoaned his astuteness because he could see the bakkies’ number plates in the stories were all Durban ones and therefore the stories were really not set in fabled, faraway Europe. Agh, shame hey? I loved the army just the way I love the daft Chinese: my self-esteem has soared in the last few years and I feel like Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one.

Anyway, a main reason for writing this blog is to introduce to readers one of the best pieces on SA’s iconic bakkie I have ever read. Here is friend and fellow writer Robert Berold’s magnificent piece from a book he recently launched.

My bakkie

1984 was a big year for me. Wally and I started the Power Station, I went to fetch Max as a puppy from Bennie Strydom’s farm, my first book was published, and I bought my bakkie. My own brand-new Toyota Hilux 2.0 long-wheelbase smooth-running bakkie costing R10 000, its strange canopy with square bumps like a medieval castle.

I drove it every day from Cross Street to the Power Station, drove it to Joburg on our first sales trip selling wooden toys, drove it to Cape Town, to Durban, to the Kruger Park to sell crafts to the buyer in Skukuza, to Joburg again many times, to the township hundreds of times. I lent it to people I trusted and people I didn’t trust, people with and without drivers’ licences.

I drove with tears in my eyes, Max by my side, camping in the bakkie with Patricia at Dwesa, watching the eland on the beach, knowing glumly that this was the end of us together. A month later my bakkie was crashed into by a police van in George Street while Patricia was moving her stuff. The passenger door was stoved in almost up to the gear lever. I had to drive it with no windscreen to Pretoria to have its body straightened out at the Toyota factory in Silverton.

I let the guys on the farm drive it. One day they dared Nceba, the youngest, to drive while it was loaded full of stones, and he overturned it. The roof had to be pushed back into shape by Alfredo the panelbeater with a hydraulic jack. I got my VW beetle, Max died, my bakkie started losing power on the hills. I demoted it to farm work only.

A few years later while I was far away, in another country, Nceba convinced Johann that his pregnant wife was unable to walk up the hill, and Johann lent him my bakkie. Nceba crashed into a cow or a tree depending on whose story you believe. The bonnet was completely buckled. I had to decide whether to scrap the bakkie or to repair it properly, and I had it repaired, using the money from the UN job. It was promoted back to being my own. I didn’t lend it to anyone any more.

One summer evening I came back with the groceries and parked on the slope outside my house. As I switched on the kettle I saw my bakkie rolling down the hill. I shouted to it “Hey! Where the fuck you going?” but it didn’t listen, just carried on rolling over the veld, demolishing a fence post, crashing slowly into one of the big logs anchoring the nursery.

On the fourth day of the Grahamstown Festival, July 2003, on the way home to the farm, the clock turned over 300 000km. I stopped right there. It was just me and my bakkie, the sunset and the dust road.

That was one of the best SA poems, a prose poem, I have ever read. The book, All The Days, is a must for lovers of SA iconography and nostalgic recordings and also for its depictions of Robert’s stay in China. I will always remember him and me sitting in a café in 2005 on Hangzhou’s bewitching, postcard-lovely West Lake in Zhejiang province, brimming with its lotuses, legends and koi fish, while we talked about poetry. And I remember that big bakkie of his when I first met him in Grahamstown back in ’85.