"The Boers used to call this place 'Die of Thirst'," she tells me in word-perfect Afrikaans, which is tinged with a Spanish accent. For a long time they lived in tents and tried to do what they knew best -- work the land -- but the climate in this far corner of the Earth is cold, arid and unforgiving.
The Boers were among the first settlers to arrive in Comodoro. The population in 1903 was just 140; now it's the biggest city in Patagonia with a population of 300 000. They soon began to build roads and telegraph lines so that they could link their land, as well as schools, bridges and dams -- all through their own efforts and resources. They worked hard, subsisted poorly and lived up to their hardy reputation.
In 1907 the Boers' pleas to the Argentine government to search for water were heard and a drilling machine was sent down from Buenos Aires. But instead of water they hit oil, vast deposits of it, much of it on the land they had been given. The drive from Comodoro to Sarmiento today is littered with mechanical giants, limbs reaching into the earth to pump 25% of Argentina's total oil deposits. Had the regulations been different, the Boers may well have developed into an elite enclave of Argentine society, but Argentine law decrees that all mineral rights belong to the state.
"The story of the Boers in Chubut is a remarkable one, in terms of privation, hardship and loss," says Tony Leon, the former Democratic Alliance leader and now South African ambassador to Argentina, who, with his wife, has been living in Buenos Aires for just over a year.
Many Boers trekked further into the hinterland, reaching Sarmiento, where they found arable land and running water. The area is an oasis compared with the harsh Patagonian semidesert surrounding it and reminded the Boers so much of their abandoned South African farmland that they decided to set up camp permanently. They planted willows and elms for windbreaks and to prevent erosion, and Sarmiento bloomed.
Lekker op die plaas
In Bruce Chatwin's 1977 seminal text on the area, creatively named In Patagonia, the renowned travel writer describes the Boers as such: "They lived in fear of the Lord, celebrated Dingaan's Day and took oaths on the Dutch Reformed Bible. They did not marry outsiders and their daughters had to go to the kitchen if a Latin entered the house." De Langer is quick to dispel this notion. The Boers were forced to acclimatise to their new land, they had to learn the language and the customs of the native people. Certainly, these days Chatwin's assertion holds little weight. Every Boer descendant the Mail & Guardian spoke to had married an Argentine. If their politiek, as Chatwin claims, was once separatist, it is no longer.
Back at the Blackie house, a DVD is put into the machine and the whole family gathers round to watch a documentary made in the 1970s about this intriguing sect of Argentine society. Schlebusch points at the TV: "Those are my brothers," she says in Afrikaans, gesturing to three men seated on a bench. "The one in the middle is dead. The other two still work on the farm, but they struggle a lot." At one time there were several families living on their sheep farm -- about 30 to 40 people in total, Schlebusch says -- but now her brothers are the only ones left.
The documentary comes to an end and a home video of the yearly Afrikaans fiesta is put on. Every February until 2005 about 300 Boer descendants gathered in the veld near Sarmiento, setting up their tents in a big kraal for a weekend of athletics, rugby, braai vleis and sokkie(dancing). In the video an elderly man sits on a stage playing Sarie Marais on his accordion while the youngsters whirl around the dance floor.
Up until a few years ago it was typical for many Boer families to live on a single farm. The festival was a way to bring all the Boers in the region together and because many of them lived in relative proximity it was easier for them to get together. But families gradually began to leave the farms -- their children often got jobs in the city -- and the festival's attendance dwindled. By 2005, with so few families willing to make the trek and attend, it, more than anything else, just petered out.
108 years of solitude
At one time the Boer community in Patagonia was the biggest community of Boers living outside South Africa, but exactly how many Boers now live in Comodoro and its surrounding areas is unclear, although Graciela Àguila Hammond, another third-generation Boer, claims a 2008 survey puts the number at about 1 200. Martin Blackie puts the number at about 500.
Leon says "the embassy has no accurate estimation of the number of Boer descendants, simply because, according to our records, none of them are South African citizens. However, during my visit to Comodoro Rivadavia last November, I met about 35 Boer families and was told by them that the community numbered 'several hundred'."
Leon went to Comodoro to address the Boer community shortly after he was made ambassador in August 2009. He said to the congregation (in Afrikaans, of course): "I hope that this community and its heritage and language will survive in Argentina" and was fed some of Hammond's melktert. Hammond runs Die Kleep, a koffiehuis in the town. She started the place eight years ago to mark the centenary of the Boers' arrival here.
At the time the first-generation Boers had almost all died out and she wanted to find a way to preserve Afrikaans culture. She did it through soetkos. On the menu are treats you'd be likely to find at any tuisnywerheid: melktert, koeksisters, konfyt, ardekoekies, sjokolade koek and such. The worn linoleum, the plastic chairs and the warm welcome remind you of a goodvetkoek paleis in die Vrystaat, although no vetkoeks are for sale here.
In Hammond's home-cum-coffee shop she proudly displays a bottle of Amarula, some kitsch tribal masks and a print of a lion, all trinkets her cousin brought back when she visited South Africa on holiday last year. Her Afrikaans is almost unintelligible through her thick Spanish accent and the Spanish words she frequently throws into sentences, but she manages to get her point across in her congenial manner, stumbling when she tries to think of an Afrikaans word she can't remember.
"I learned Afrikaans at home -- it was my 'kitchen language' -- but now I speak mostly Spanish," she says. At 18 she left home to study, got married to an Argentine soon after and spoke Afrikaans only at Boer gatherings. Spanish became her new kombuistaal and her children never learned it. Juan Wright (69) lives in Sarmiento. He spoke Afrikaans when he was a child, but has long since forgotten the language. All he can remember are the bad words.
"Damn it!" he shouts suddenly. "What does 'damn it' mean?" The closest approximation I can offer in my sketchy Spanish is diablo -- or devil -- although I know the essence is lost in translation. "I never knew what it meant. My father used to say it when we had done something wrong," he explains through our interpreter, Luis, raising the back of his hand in a mock swipe.
His niece, Ana Wright, says her grandparents didn't allow her father to learn Afrikaans. "Spanish lessons cost a lot. My grandfather said he didn't want to waste his money on his children learning a language if they weren't going to use it." Juan Wright chips in: "When my mother and my aunt came here, they couldn't speak any Spanish. When they went to the shops, they had to point at the things they wanted. Our parents wanted us to be Argentinian so that we didn't have to go through that."
The Argentinian Boers left South Africa before the language was formalised. As a result, none seems to know how to read or write in Afrikaans, although the community hopes to get an Afrikaans teacher to keep the language alive -- at least for one more generation. "Last year we asked Leon for an Afrikaans teacher but we still haven't heard anything," says De Langer. Leon says the embassy is working on it, but in the past year, promoting the Fifa World Cup took priority.
Martin Blackie, Juan's seventysomething uncle, a second-generation Boer whose mother was among the first batch of settlers and whose father was detained in a concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer war, was honorary vice-consul of the Boer descendants in Chubut for 20 years, a position he held with much pride, but with the decline of an authentic Boer community there was no longer need for a consul and his position fell away last year. His children also speak little Afrikaans.
Though the language may disappear, he is right in thinking the Boer descendants in Patagonia will retain many aspects of Boer culture, even if in "20 or 30 years Afrikaans is not spoken here".
They are losing their language, but they express the vibrant spirit of their culture in the Spanish they were thrown into. Their forefathers, with stubbornness and gall, had the courage to venture across the Atlantic in a rusty vessel and today's Boer descendants in Patagonia are following their example, burgeoning forward in a country at once emphatically foreign and completely theirs.
Entrades
