Sonnie Cloete's Tales: The Rooi Hel, the Plateau Sport Klub and the Belfield Scouts

An overview of a set of stories by Sonnie Cloete published in Habari 1988, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. The original is in Afrikaans. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not a translation.

Sonnie Cloete of Concordia, near Sergoit, was one of the great storytellers of the Plateau. The archive already carries some of his tales. In Habari 1988 he sent in another collection, signed simply "Sonnie", with a promise that he would stop writing after the year 2000 because by then his true stories would run out and he would have to start lying.

The Rooi Hel

He retells a transport rider's story, told in the voice of a driver called Koos, of taking a heavy Merryweather wagon with eighteen oxen on the road to Londiani and reaching the "Rooi Hel" (Red Hell), a stretch of deep red mud where wagons stood stuck all around, with men shouting and swearing. Everyone told him the oxen would drown. He stood on the front of the wagon, spoke to his oxen and drove them straight through, the leaders disappearing into the mud while the wagon kept moving. On the other side he had to stop and wash the mud out of the oxen's eyes. His reward was the brandy at the Londiani Hotel.

The Plateau Sport Klub

Around 1928 a group of young people met at Oom Koos Barnard's and started the Plateau Sport Klub. Koos Barnard gave a piece of land near the road from Broederstroom to Haji's Drift, about six or seven hundred paces from the Broederstroom hostel. They laid out a rugby field and a tennis court, and every Saturday people came from Sergoit, Broederstroom and Plateau to play and talk. The joining fee was ten shillings a year, payable a shilling at a time. Sonnie tells of a boy who arrived swinging an inflated ox bladder, because his big brother had said he must practise with that before touching a rugby ball, and who later became a good player.

His favourite story is of a young teacher, Emsie, who boarded at the hostel run by Tant Dori Boshoff and her husband. She came to tennis one day in a beautiful new dress of a new kind of material from Alibhai's clothing shop, and all the other women were envious. Then it rained. As the players ran back to the hostel the dress shrank tighter and tighter until it was four inches above her knees and she could hardly bend to crawl through the fence. In the end the other women had to cut her out of it with scissors.

The Belfield Scouts teach the Lancashires to ride

During the First World War the Belfield Scouts, mostly Boers from British East Africa, were ordered to teach the men of the Lancashire regiment to ride the horses sent up from South Africa. Sonnie describes "mounting day", with the Lancashires flying through the air, the porters shouting "panda, panda" (climb on), soldiers of the Cape Corps cheering, and Charlie and Laurie Pohl using thorny twigs to get stubborn horses moving. He also tells how Soon Snyman would quietly sell a Lancashire soldier back his own "lost" horse and saddle, a story Eddie de Waal loved to tell. Sonnie notes the sad end: thousands of porters, mostly from near Lake Victoria, died of dysentery and malaria in that campaign, and most of the fine horses died of horse sickness.

Other stories

The collection also includes a fox hunt by British officers at Nanyuki that ended in the bushes of Raymond Hook's farm, a description of the caves and waterfalls of Mount Elgon and the Sabei people, a meeting with a bongo on the moorland, and a farewell to Ds Lieb Loots, whose Volkswagen Kombi, registered with the letters KK, was nicknamed "Kibogo". Sonnie ends with a greeting in Swahili.

Source: Sonnie Cloete, stories in Habari 1988, pages 16 to 22 of the PDF, Friends of East Africa. Read the original issue (Afrikaans). See also the archive's posts Sonnie Cloete's Tales and Mills, Quaggas and Ox Wagons, and the guide to settler stories in Habari.