Music and landscape: two tales of borehole drilling in the Karoo

After returning from an excursion to the edge of the Karoo in 1836, Charles Darwin famously declared that he ‘had never seen such an uninteresting country’. ¹ ‘The aspect of the country on the way by rail to Beaufort West, through … the hollow of the Karoo’, echoed Robert Wallace 60 years later, ‘is at the season referred to desert-like and uninteresting in the extreme, with hardly a tree to be seen, and only a scanty covering of dwarfish and closely-eaten Karoo bushes to represent vegetation.’ ² ‘All day the train has been traversing the Karoo’, writes Erskine Childers in his diary of 1900, ‘a desert seamed by bare rocky mountains, and without a sign of life on it, only vast stretches of pebbly soil, dotted sparsely with dusty-green dwarf scrub.’ ³

On the horizontal beam of an old diesel powered percussion drill, stenciled white letters pronounce its ownership: ‘Slabbert Drills’. A mobile number was envisioned directly below, before the idea was abandoned. It would have been of little use anyway. Theo Slabbert’s movements through the Karoo are not traceable along maps of mobile coverage. The Slabbert family owns a piece of land near Klipplaat – a small settlement in South Africa’s Eastern Cape with a name meaning ‘stone slab’. This is not, strictly speaking, their home anymore. Theo currently manages a farm between Aberdeen and Murraysburg. When Theo, his wife Lynn and their one-year-old daughter return to Klipplaat every other weekend, they often find the house and yard ravaged by baboons. On weekends Theo travels around the Karoo cleaning boreholes or sinking new ones.

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‘The Karoo,’ reports a member of the British Association after a tour of the Colony in 1905, ‘gives the impression of a vast waste; mile upon mile of light brown sandy soil, through which at points the bare rock shows, like a skeleton breaking through the tight-drawn mantling skin. And that same soil is little concealed by the very discontinuous growth of heath and shrubs – mesembryanthemum and euphorbias for the most part, together with Acacia horrida. There is nothing to rest the eye; everywhere hard, straight lines even on the summits of the occasional kopjes, and a general feeling as if one were crossing some enormous Highland stony fallow field.’ ⁴

Klipplaat lies on the border of the Karoo proper and an area around the town of Jansenville called the Noorsveld. Legend goes that way back towards the morning of time much of the area which today makes up the Jansenville district was a lake which drained off as the adjacent gorge eroded through the Klein Winterhoek mountains. And as the land was laid dry there arose in time a type of euphorbia which the first settlers found here and which they called ‘noors’. When, during October, noors shows signs of coming into blossom, farmers are agreed that a drought lies immediately ahead. The shrub has a milky juice with a severe burning taste. It is said that a man who gets a drop of the juice into an eye will have no rest for the next 24 hours, but after the burning has passed over the eyesight is wonderfully clear. ⁵

Elsewhere in the colonial world, imperial landscapes and their tropes of ‘empty space’ and ‘virgin land’ spoke of untapped economic potential, of land lying ready to be husbanded and to bear forth her fruit. The Karoo – an area comprising two thirds of the Cape Colony towards the end of the nineteenth century – refused to come into focus as a landscape; as somewhere where a man could rest his eyes. In colonial discourse the emptiness of the Karoo is not merely a matter of land under symbolic erasure as a vast unknown to be conquered and subjugated. ⁶ The expanse of nothingness induces a crisis of representation as the imperial language of landscape – one predicated on vision, vegetation and the vertical sublime – proves ineffectual in penetrating its meaning. ⁷

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Let us not talk about landscape for now. Consider instead the expansion of scale as the name of an individual thorny shrub – noors – becomes that of a geographic area – Noorsveld. And suspended between this smallness and largeness, a demonym – Noorsvelder – denoting not merely someone who dwells in that particular locality, but someone sharing in its very character. ⁸ And at this point of suspension, where, as Terry Eagleton suggests, ‘the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces’ and ‘takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world’ – there occurs everyday life. There one encounters Theo Slabbert now sinking a borehole with a percussion drill, now playing a tune on his concertina, and occasionally doing both at the same time. For, as Theo believes, the drill and the concertina have some fantastical connection.

The struggle to translate the Karoo into an imperial landscape was not only lost on the level of poetic representation. Colonial officials of the nineteenth century, who saw hydraulic engineering as the ‘most essential adjunct to agriculture and husbandry in a semi-arid climate’, stood disappointed at the repeated failure of large-scale irrigation schemes. ⁹ Where similar programs elsewhere in India and Australia seemingly transformed arid areas into prosperous agricultural land, irrigation proved ineffective in the Karoo, where rivers flowed only seasonally and heavy flooding made dam building an expensive and risky endeavor. ¹⁰ Towards the end of the nineteenth century scientific interest had shifted significantly from re-engineering the topography of the land, to surveying its geological depths.

A central contradiction belies everyday life: that it is constituted both by process and excess, boredom and mystery. ¹¹ It is the overlapping distinction between the relentless everyday routine of dwelling, and encountering the everyday as a strange country that always eludes representation. One finds this contradiction in the name of Theo Slabbert’s band ‘The Noorsvelders’ and in the titles of the tunes he composes: ‘Far off in the Noorsveld’, ‘Deon’s dance’, ‘I stare into the distance’, ‘Jug-eared Jackal’. These compositions are a mapping of Theo’s processual movements through the Karoo, a dreary catalogue of remembered places perhaps constitutive of a landscape. They are also excessive in their banal overflow. They draw undue attention to the residue of everyday life and the unruly, noncausal sediments of the world upon music, and music upon the world. Naming the everyday musically sounds its banality and its transfiguration.

The existence of subterranean water reserves in the Karoo had long been the stuff of legend. The discovery of blind fish in the area reportedly indicated not only ‘extensive water channels under the surface’, but the existence of ‘fossil water’ – water as old as the dinosaurs themselves. ¹² After the British government’s failure to harness the rivers for irrigation, officials like Bernard Ritso, the Colony’s Chief Inspector of Boring, advocated a thorough geological survey. Ritso believed that it would reveal ‘the existence of imprisoned waters percolating through the pores and fissures of the rocks in exhaustless volumes’. ‘No spectre of a withered and barren country need haunt the progress of the boring work of the Colony’, Ritso wrote, ‘nor should the fear of depleted reserves retard the exploration of deeper water levels, which if successful, may so change the arid and sunburnt Karroo as to transform it into the garden of South Africa.’ Ritso saw the future of the rural economy in the sinking of thousands of boreholes, envisaging a time, much like the present, when the Karoo would be ‘studded with windmills’. ¹³

‘I once had a dog called Bitterbos’, Theo tells me. ‘A border collie’.

‘Bitterbos is a type of shrub one finds in the Karoo.’

‘It’s a good name for a dog, innit?

You can’t call it something like Fluffy or Sniffy. Then it won’t listen to you.

You must give him a proper name

so that you can call him nice and loud.’

‘I had a tune once … when I … in an instant … it just came to me …

I walked into that guy’s house one morning.

It was around seven.

Still early.

Man, I don’t know if the concertina just lay there on his kitchen table … I can’t remember … he was a friend of mine.

We used to … we played together at some point.

And I pick up the concertina.

And I play.

And in runs the dog.

Bitterbos the dog, runs in and lies down at my feet. And I call out

“Neels, bring’ie kitaar – I have the thing in my head now.”

And we play the thing right there.

Perfectly.

The first time.

And then I said, we’ll call it Bitterbos Polka.’ ¹⁴

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On page four and five of the 1898 Report of the Chief Inspector of Public Works of the Cape of Good Hope, appears a map of the conglomerate of British territories and Boer Republics at the Southern tip of Africa. ¹⁵ It offers no charting of the topographical features of the land. It indicates, one ascertains after a closer reading of the map, the average depth at which water had been found by borehole drilling. The map represents what officials referred to as the Colony’s ‘water horizons’. ¹⁶

For Theo the connection between drill and concertina resides in two sonic memories of when he was four or five years old. In one memory Theo and his father are listening to a boeremusiek programme on the radio when he becomes entranced by the sound of the instrument and the movement of his father’s head leaning in and out as the short-wave radio loses and regains its signal. The other memory is of walking up to a percussion drill: ‘I’d hear those … those gears … the-the-the boring gearwheel. The resonance of those gears. It was a beautiful sound. The thing has a soul, you know’. ¹⁷ These moments, which for Theo are uniquely his own, belong at the same time to a commonplace childhood of sounds. Yet Theo’s insistence on the primacy of sound – focusing not on the look of the drill or its water-finding function, but on its resonance – transforms the routine into the exceptional. The point at which Theo’s language resorts to the immortal but outcast word ‘soul’, at that point the unruly omnidirectional reverberation of the everyday asserts itself. ¹⁸ And in this reverberation, place and self are set into motion. ¹⁹

From the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Geological Commission, Cape of Good Hope, 1909, a summary of the nature of the rock brought up from the depths at the Zwartkops borehole near Port Elizabeth, based on specimens in the keeping of Mr G.W Smith. ²⁰

25 ft Slightly calcareous sandstone with fragments of shells.

82 ft–270 ft Blue sandy clay with small pebbles of quartz and quartzite

276 ft Blue clay with small indeterminable gasteropods

400 ft Soft red clay

620 ft Whitish-red clay

‘A concertina is a living thing, you know,’ says Theo Slabbert.

‘You can sculpt its resonance – how loud or how soft you want it to play.

The thing must breath in sync with your own breathing.’

900 ft Piece of brown ferruginous, loosely-cemented sandstone

1360 ft Red and greenish clay with a streak of red sandy rock

2040 ft Grey sandy clay

2670 ft Grey clayey shale with fossils. Fragments of Modiola and other lamellibranchs. Bythinia or perhaps Viviparus, with depressed spire.

‘Often you’ll find it easier to play a note when pushing in. But then … then the note is actually an out-note. It’s precisely the same note, but it sounds completely different on the push and the pull. You know, when you look at the chambers inside of a concertina – they are calculated to a fraction of millimeter. If you change these dimensions even slightly, the character of the tone changes too.’ ²¹

3380 ft Coarse yellowish sand

3456 ft Fine-grained quartz sand with small bits of slaty and gritty rock; much yellowish- brown clay with sand.

Water at 124° Fahr. issued at the rate of 124,000 gallons a day.

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The sound of the percussion drill signals a collision between the colonial history of subterranean water in the Karoo and Theo Slabbert’s affective transfiguration of the everyday. ²² What both these stories do is to shift the focus from thinking about landscape along surfaces, areas and territories, to taking into account the vertical and volumetric alignments between subject and world. In this reorientation, emptiness can no longer adequately be portrayed in two dimensions as an uninterrupted view towards a horizon.

In the colonial story this results most obviously in a vertical geopolitics. The volumetric landscape that emerges from geological surveys and the search for subterranean water takes the equation between the colony and an earthy, moist female body to its crudest articulation. Landscape is no longer defined by a male gaze conquering an empty landscape, but takes shape through a modernist-technological register of prodding, piercing and violent penetration. ²³

In this feminist-postcolonial interpretation, a mere tilt of the head is required to view the concertina, likewise, as a bulging instrument of expansion. It is this interpretation that would present itself most forcefully in South African academic contexts today. It would be all too easy to recast Theo Slabbert as the figure of a white man at the centre of a wide, empty expanse called the Karoo; a man sounding out his instrument into the night sky. The sound would travel far and uninterrupted like a primitive form of space exploration.

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Such an interpretation, however, would stop short of the fundamental reconfiguration of subject and world when area becomes volume. One senses this reconfiguration in the haptic qualities of the colonial geological survey as the grain of the soil meets the human hand, rubbing it, testing it between the fingers. One notices it in the engine oil that has permanently stained Theo Slabbert’s nail beds, and has seeped into his pores. In the unsubtle poetry of the concertina as a living, sympathetic, breathing thing, world and subject become conjoined.

In its stubborn material residue, Theo Slabbert’s music exceeds the feminist-postcolonial interpretation. In his reconfiguration of the everyday as subsisting in sound, empty space ceases to be a void awaiting fulfillment by a disconnected and radically different subject. Emptiness is not where ‘the subject comes to make himself heard’. ²⁴ Hollows and empty spaces are not voids, but reverberation chambers. ²⁵ For to listen, as Jean Luc Nancy has posited, is to enter the spatiality by which, at the same time, one is penetrated. ²⁶ In the sonic reverberation of Theo Slabbert’s world, the reed cavities of a concertina, the hollows of the human body, the water funnels of boreholes, and the star-domed Karoo at night move collectively in a roughly choreographed, lopsided dance. ²⁷ Coterminous with the deep historical structure of the Karoo, Theo Slabbert’s landscape reverberates as congruent, yet irregular and unperiodic ‘common place’, ²⁸ articulated within and around the passages of the everyday.

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