Woman in the dunes

There is a place on the Namaqualand coast that is so remote and obscure that no one has ever bothered to translate its name into English, even though the original Afrikaans name is long, unwieldy and guttural. Groenriviersmond.  Yes, “Green River Mouth” would flow more easily off the tongue, but very few people seem to care that the name remains more-or-less unpronounceable.

Possibly because it’s a place – not a town, not a village, no, just an estuary and a beach and a series of quickly vanishing waves – that gets hardly any visitors.  It has wind, dunes, the distant curving horizon of the Atlantic, sea fog, a lighthouse and a SANParks office a few hundred metres inland.  No café, no petrol station, nothing to buy and nowhere to buy it. To get there, you first have to arrive in the vicinity of Garies, which lies somewhere along that desolate stretch of the N7 between the dry, forbidding, featureless Knersvlakte and the only slightly less forbidding Namaqualand. 

Knersvlakte is a name that has also not been widely translated into English. “Kners” means to grind, and “vlakte” is a plain, so we can assume the 17^th century travellers who named it were inspired by the slow, grinding progress of their wagons over the quartz gravel wilderness.   But, as thirst, hunger and despair drove these travellers deeper into derangement, they would also have had the maddening tinnitus of grinding teeth in their heads.  Even today the place name Moedverloor survives in these parts. Along with “Douse-the-Glim”, bizarrely.

Once you are in vicinity of Garies, you can look for the signpost to Groenriviersmond, which will direct you to a dirt road that after 60km and many, many corrugations will deliver you to your destination.  You will pass the occasional farmhouse, grey, dusty, functional structures that raise nagging  questions. How do people survive here? Why would they want to? It’s arid, the sheep look miserable, the wind sandblasts the landscape and everything on it. Surely only great misfortune could be the reason anyone had to live here.

So I arrived in aka Green River Mouth absorbed by thoughts of loneliness, isolation, and the plight of those reduced to scraping a living out of nothing.  Exactly the right frame of mind to meet Zanne MacDonald.

Zanne (short for Suzanne) is 81 and lives alone. Or, more accurately, she lives without other humans.  She has her cocker spaniel Donny, who is about the same age as her in dog years, and she communes with the coastal birds and the passing whales and dolphins.  It turns out she is a perfect living example of how to thrive with only yourself, a dog and the creatures of the wild for company. 

It helps that her home at Groenriviersmond is surrounded by breathtaking natural beauty. It is a small wooden hut of three rooms on the rocks above the breaking waves. It is small but conspicuous, a large plastic water tank towering above it, the only habitation along this stretch of coast. Zanne has the pristine succulent biome behind her, and all of the Atlantic in front.  The bay at the river mouth stretches to her right, sea-smoothed boulders to her left.   

It was different when she first visited this spot in 1990. Her husband John was still alive then, and they lived at Oranjemund on the Namibian border, where he worked on the diamond mine.  At that time the Groenriviermond bay was a strange kind of squatter camp of seaside holiday homes inhabited mainly by white Afrikaans farmers from the surrounding region.  About 80 cheap shacks lined the bay, erected cheek by jowl. The farmers went fishing, made braais, and drank lots of sundowners.

John and Zanne joined the settlement, but had little to do with their Afrikaans neighbours because they were “English”.   Ten years later, John retired from his diamond mine job and they moved into their Groenriviersmond cabin full-time.

One day John was up on the roof, painting, when a neighbour came over. “Wat maak jy?” he asked.

“Wat dink jy? Ek verf die donnerse dak,” John replied.

His use of Afrikaans broke the ice with the farmers, Zanne says.

Then one of the farmers got involved in the sale of a car to a woman in Pretoria who only spoke English. “He asked me to help him translate. I knew then I had been accepted, that I was useful to the farmers.”

In the years after the MacDonalds moved in permanently, the government started evicting the farmers and demolishing the shacks to make way for a national park. The MacDonalds were allowed to stay, because they were the only full-time residents, and had no other home to go to.

So it was just the two of them living at Groenriviersmond; until John died in 2012. He is memorialised by a plaque on one of the boulders in front of the house. Did Zanne think of leaving then, and going to live somewhere less isolated?

“No.” She shakes her head emphatically. “We both loved it here.”

How does she pass the days?

“Sudoku, crosswords. I read, mysteries. And I go for walks.”

The estuary is far from the national power grid, so she has solar panels for lighting and to provide an hour or two of TV before bedtime. Her closest farm neighbour, Kolie Nieuwoudt, who lives 5km away, brings water to fill her tank.

There is no cellphone reception, and she has no internet or email connection, but she does have a landline phone to connect her to the rest of the world. Kolie comes round to fix the cables when mice chew through them.

“I don’t kill anything,” Zanne says. “But the mice kept eating the cables. I put down poison.”

I spent three days at Groenriviersmond in October 2017, staying in a self-catering Wendy house on Kolie's  farm, and whenever I saw Zanne on the beach she invited me in for tea. She loved having someone to talk to, in English, but there was one subject she did not want to touch.

“So are you just going to go on living here forever?” I asked.

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “My family want me to leave.”

“Oh,” I said. “When will you go?”

She looked away, at the ocean horizon, and said nothing.

“Don’t want to talk about it?”

She shook her head, and looked like she was about to cry.

We sipped our tea in silence.

After I went home, I thought about Zanne a lot, living alone with a spaniel and the birds and dolphins. She was one of the most contented people I had ever met.

I had taken photos of her and Donny, and I wanted to send her prints. I also bought a novel to send her. I thought she would like to have the pictures of herself with the sea behind her if she ever had to leave. I wanted it to be a surprise, so I called Kolie to find out what her postal address was.  “Tannie Zanne is not here at the moment,” he said. “She has gone to her family in Hermanus for Christmas.” 

After Christmas I tried to call her in Groenriviersmond on her landline, but never got the ringing tone. I wondered if the mice had eaten through the cable.

As the months went by I thought about her less and less, until in November 2018 a friend went to spend a couple of days on Kolie’s farm. Zanne was gone, he reported.