I woke to the news on the last day of 2018, that Wupperthal in the Cederberg Mountains was in flames.
On New Year’s Day, at least 45 family homes were gutted, leaving at least 200 people homeless, without electricity, food or fresh water.
The Moravian Mission Station that held the community together for decades, the clinic, the only shop, and the town hall were completely destroyed.
This was a tragedy for a village that has lived off the parched land, in near isolation, since 1830 when the German Rhenish Church established a mission in the Cederberg, and named the place after the town of Wuppertal in Germany.
I planned to spend a few days in the village between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I never did make it ... My relationship with Wupperthal goes back three decades.
A couple of weeks before the fire, I returned to the village, 31 years after my first visit in 1987.
My first visit was just after I had been released from a third spell of detention.
I should not dramatise this too much, not under current circumstances, but I was on the run, quite literally, and ended up in as remote a place I could find.
That place was Wupperthal. I don’t recall how, exactly, I ended up there. I guess the wind just kinda pushed me that way.
I do remember that the people of Wupperthal, unaware of my tribulations, allowed me to pitch a tent on the edge of the village, and kept me safe from the police and from the network of spies who worked in state apparatuses, agencies and enterprises at the time.
The employees of what was then Spoornet, the post office, the police and military, everyone turned on activists, and on those of us described as “opstoker joernaliste”.
Several years after those dreaded days, a small group of white photojournalists dramatised the story of our times (their stories) in the film The Bang Bang Club.
That was fine, for them. Some of us had family and friends who were under siege in the townships.
We could barely afford objectivity, or indulge in self dramatisation and apostasy.
That was when I learned that if you had principles and adhered to ethical conduct, you needed to live them – even if it meant losing everything you had worked for.
I dropped out of work for a few months, not prepared to compromise and be governed by the media regulations of the state of emergency.
It was an intensely difficult time, but I would do it all over again.
We were always on the run during those days. But I was safe in Wupperthal.
While I was in the village all those years ago, I photographed very many of the people – adults and children – of the village.
And when I returned late last year, two weeks before the fires gutted the village, I began to trace all the people I had photographed in 1987.
The children in the photographs are all, now, grown up, with children of their own.
They welcomed me back; only a single person remembered “die man met die rooi doek” – but only vaguely.
I always did, and still do, cover my sweaty pate with a red bandana.
It may have helped with the sweat and the sun, at the time, but it made me stand out.
Officials of the old Bureau for Information who enforced the state of emergency regulations referred to me as “die joernalis met die doek”.
I returned to Wupperthal in early December to write, reflexively, about my relationship with the village, and the story of how the people took care of me – without wanting an explanation of what I was doing in a remote village in a valley in the Cederberg Mountains.
I cannot go back to Wupperthal any time soon.
I would feel like a voyeur preying on the misery of a people who have been ignored, neglected and alienated.
My original project was on memory and photography, on the village and on the children who grew up in Wupperthal.
The book was to be about their stories, told through old photographs I made all those years ago.
For several years now, I have drifted away from photography.
I felt dirty for gazing at other people’s misery like the voyeur who is happy only if the act being photographed, war or love-making, continued.
I have become acutely aware, also, of the way – as Susan Sontag explained – that “social misery inspired the comfortable-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them”.
Wupperthal is too close to my heart and to my kith and kin.
I know the poverty, and what it means to be a coloured person living on the edges of society, and when the world looks at you only when there’s a fire.