Finding Little Switzerland

Still from Week End (1967), written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

It is a love affair. I want to end it. It is an affair without love. After all, the thing I love is just a thing, a handful of stones. A landscape.

Predictably, it all ends with a photo. Actually, there are two of them. One – not the one I love (small “l”) – shows a view from inside a moving car. The car is travelling along a dusty Free State road. It is somewhere near Onverwacht/Botshabelo, 1997. It will always be 1997 for the fucked-up taxi approaching Santu Mofokeng. But this is not the photo; there is another, a photograph that will take me to Little Switzerland, the end of the journey, my journey. It was taken in 1996, at a place called Little Switzerland. Santu Mofokeng was driving a U-Drive Rent-A-Car. At some point he stopped. He was nearing New Switzerland, a resort somewhere in the KwaZulu Natal Drakensberg. He took out his camera and made something I would tentatively call a photograph. It doesn’t offer much, just a car door, half ajar, and beyond it an imprecise landscape. That's pretty much all. Except for the door, everything is out of focus, present yet somehow also missing.

How to find this present but missing place, this landscape?

There are some obvious possibilities: a car key and music player, time and a library card, ritual and tradition. The last of these is perhaps the most revealing. Tradition dictates the route.

1. Church Street Cemetery: my inheritance lies here. Stand at the grave of J.H. Pierneef and look east, as he did 80 years ago. Touch the tree close by. Feel the scar from the Tshwane metro bus that smashed through countless graves to get here. It happened on July 7, 2008. The bus didn’t kill the father.

2. Drive the Ben Schoeman to Joburg. Do it again, ad infinitum. Make notes – unqualified, observational sketches – preferably by SMS, while driving: “Two pieces of pine planking, tapered, like large splinters; bits of plastic bumper; cigarette butts; a crumpled piece of paper; more cigarette butts; glass from a shattered window; other things less easily described, all fleetingly observed from the car at stationary intervals. You look at them; their placement and location is random, determined by accident – an unfortunate word. They say nothing about the congested frustration, the waiting.” (June 5, 2006)

3. Read JM Coetzee’s White Writing (1988) at the Star Stop in Midrand. Ask yourself, “Am I just a victim of sentiment?”

4. Phone Clive Chipkin. (I have his telephone number.) Ask him about Bridge 6, better yet, ask him if you can drive him to the south end of Joburg’s city centre, End Street, so he can narrate its story. (Optional reading here is Chipkin’s book Johannesburg Transition (2009): “The new peripheral elevated road system took an amorphous spread-eagled city on the plains, tied it together in an urban package and provided a sense of recognition for visitors and locals alike.”)

5. Get stuck in traffic, again. SMS yourself, again: “A fat woman in a red shirt, next to her a skinny man, both seated in fold-up chairs at the Buccleuch interchange. Are they studying the traffic? What do their clipboards prompt them to look out for? Nearby, the new electronic sign reads “NO INCIDENTS AHEAD”. Less than a 100 metres on, in the fast lane, a pulverised Honda is parked near a dump truck angled into the concrete barrier. “FUCK DA POLICE” reads graffiti on the rear of the truck. An orange Metro Police car, a Mercedes, pulls up to the scene.” (October 4, 2006)

6. Read William Kentridge’s 1988 essay ‘Landscape in a State of Siege’.

7. Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967): it pre-empts the obvious, JG Ballard’s Crash (1973). Time Godard’s accident scene. Mourn Ballard’s absence: “Joseph Conrad once said that it’s necessary to immerse yourself in the most destructive elements of the times, and then attempt to swim…” (Ballard, 1976).

8. Look at other photographs of highways and industrial landscapes. Edward Burtynsky. Toshio Shibata. Catherine Opie. In 1994, Opie, best known for her large-format colour portraits of Los Angeles’ gay and lesbian community, ditched her clunky camera and made small, intimate little photographs of Los Angeles highway overpasses. The work is unpretentiously titled Freeway. It is an archaeological record of now. So too are Jo Ractliffe’s photographs of the N1, photographed at every hundred kilometres. Made in 1999, Ractliffe calls her nothing scenes of straight lines and featureless veldt “blandscapes”, which is not her being urbane. The camera describes surface, not feeling.

8. Google “S’busiso Leope” and “257km/h”.

9. Make a road mix (or playlist), limiting yourself only to songs that offer place names. (Big Black: Jordan, Minnesota. Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto: Berlin. Kalahari Surfers: Free State Fence. And so on.)

10. Locale, locality, location, locus, point, position, site, spot: all synonyms for place.

11. Revisit the archive. Find that letter William Plomer wrote to the editor of The Natal Mercury in 1925: “We are in danger of too many veld-yearnings, too much Karoo-urge, too frequent sunsets on the Drakensberg, and moonrisings on Groot Constantia. A little less landscape and a little more portraiture would be highly stimulating.”

12. Look at Santu Mofokeng’s photo again and dissolve into the landscape.