Walk the Line (Fragments Anthology: Part II)

Unearthing the invisible histories of a rural Swartland community through mixed media and fragments. As the second part of this ongoing writing anthology, these texts gather what is recorded in local archives and trace how those quiet layers linger on the ground today.

A container that ventures outside the safety of the studio must bear the weight of the terrain.

The Walk: Bearing Witness
The long paper scroll was not a passive surface meant to catalogue the journey neatly, but a living body that interacted with the landscape. It fought the fierce valley winds; it was rolled out on the gravel, pressed against harsh ballast, and wrestled into the back of my car when the weather turned. The resulting tears, holes, and creases are not mistakes or accidents—they are the environment forcing its way into the vessel. By allowing these disruptions to remain, the scroll stops being just a map of the walk and becomes a physical manifestation of the walk itself. It honours the messy, beautiful gap between the private lived experience of my body and the fragmented history embedded in the tracks. I want all of these memories and marks to exist in the conversations to follow.

The work became a lived experience. I felt the heavy rail and shifting ballast under my feet, touched the local plants, and watched the weeds and Renosterveld slowly reclaiming the gravel, working to hide the lines. I walked enveloped by birdsong and heard the distant call of a fish eagle, never to be seen. I felt the gentle rustle of dry grasses, wondered about how Spring would look, and caught glimpses of bat-eared foxes darting away, leaving behind their sunbathing beds—small, circular couches of flattened grass.

And as my body attuned to these sensory perceptions—what Vargiu calls aesthesis—the walk shifted from a personal meditation into a socio-political act of bearing witness. The railway line in this valley is not merely neutral transport infrastructure; it carries the scar of state-enforced trauma. In 1965, the Group Areas Act ensured that this rail line served as a strict physical barrier to engineer segregation. Standing on the tracks opposite where the Riebeek West station used to be, I realised that the geography of Riebeek West tells the story of an architecture of exclusion that relegated most of the non-white community to the periphery, alongside the iron rails and below the main road.

The station buildings are mostly demolished, in a state of neglect, though some of the houses are still rented. I met one of the tenants, who has been living there for two years. She proudly showed me her vegetable garden and remarked that she enjoys living on the periphery rather than in the village—it offers a quieter, less crowded life. She uses the line as a walkway, like many others, and through her I learned you can walk all the way to Riebeek Kasteel, five kilometres further down.

By choosing radical slowness—walking, stopping, and bending down to make frottage rubbings of the tracks—I am refusing the speed of the train that blurs this history. A train flashes past boundaries without feeling them. But the walker feels every stone and can stop to listen and look. Through the indexical trace of a rubbing, my hands extract a physical print of a landscape used to separate us. The rust and iron transferred onto my paper scroll are the literal skin of a border.

The Weight of History and Material Rubbings
This work does not tell a single linear story. Like a carrier bag, it holds fragments gathered along the way. Ultimately, the fragility of the paper scroll mirrors the history it attempts to hold. I suggest that a viewer can enter according to their wish and assemble their own path along the line.

When I first set out to walk the rail line, I wanted the work to be a vessel—a safe bag to carry the wildflowers, the sketches, the birdsong, and the rhythmic textures of the track. But the landscape of the Riebeek Valley demands a different kind of honesty. You cannot walk alongside the history without acknowledging that this terrain is fractured. The violent architectures of Apartheid tore communities apart, leaving deep, unhealed gashes in the social and physical fabric of this place. Development and agriculture have likewise left their mark, leaving many native flora species endangered. Realising and discovering this context is deeply humbling and painful. It convinced me that not everyone has been equally free to gather and return home safely.

This piece draws primarily on archival and museum sources; direct conversations with those who hold this history are still to come, and any account offered here remains provisional. The story of displacement belongs to the community to tell in their own time, and Fragments stays honestly incomplete on this point.

It feels entirely right, then, that my scroll did not return to the studio pristine.

The tears, the holes, and the frayed edges of the paper are not failures of technique; they are a direct resonance. The paper cracked because the wind was real, the ballast was sharp, and the history was heavy. I picked up feelings of rejection, loss, and disrespect, but also hope for a better future. To smooth out those imperfections or to cover up my “misrepresentations” of distance and trauma would be an act of erasure. It would repeat the cold, clean lie of a surveyor’s map that ignores human and ecological suffering.

I am letting the paper hold space for these broken memories. The work remains an open vessel—imperfect, weather-beaten, and vulnerable—because that is an honest way to bear witness to a landscape that still carries the scars of its past.

A Chemical Drift and Ecological Corridor
The line of iron rails was never built for human feet—it is no pedestrian walkway. Yet it tells a quiet story: of a time before our current speed, and, in the overgrown ballast, of nature slowly reclaiming the space. More than that, the line remains an unyielding reminder not to forget. In the local museum, a handwritten comment from a member of the Oukloof community reads: “Mense moet nooit vergeet nie, hulle moet aanhou om daaroor te praat en daarop voort te bou”—a plea that people must never forget, that we must keep speaking of this history of displacement, using memory to build strength and seek justice.

On my walks, I found evidence of both human and non-human travellers. I treasure these physical encounters: bat-eared foxes darting away, owls, rabbits, and small duikers. As the season shifted from Autumn to late Winter, I encountered Renosterveld plants in early bloom—species now listed as endangered due to habitat loss from agriculture and invasive aliens. Seeing these plants cling to life on the rail line made me wonder how we can best protect these narrow verges. Broad-spectrum herbicides and agricultural sprayers threaten the native vegetation trying to reclaim these abandoned corridors. Yet shale-derived clay soils beneath the tracks support fragile understoreys of geophytes, annuals, and perennial grasses. These decommissioned linear spaces can serve as vital ecological pathways for pollinators and small fauna moving through heavily farmed landscapes.

Practising the “art of noticing,” I treat a bird’s nest in a signal box or a vine strangling a telegraph pole as semiotic signs of nature reclaiming territory. Less than 5% of original Renosterveld remains intact, making every linear remnant crucial for preserving regional biodiversity.

During a recent walk with my cousin, we came upon a thick stand of grasses. One in particular caught my eye, and I logged it on iNaturalist to confirm its identity—a wild oat species (Avena fatua).

To me, this was a quiet, almost uncanny moment. I had been thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction—the framework that shaped how I understand my own practice of gathering fragments—and here it was, growing wild on the ground beneath my feet. Before I found the plant, I was already reaching for that image: like a carrier bag, it holds fragments gathered along the way. Now, the physical wild oats had appeared on the line, closing the loop between theory and terrain in a way I couldn’t have staged if I tried.

Yet Avena fatua carries a dual identity. It thrives precisely in these disturbed, industrial margins—the ballast, the compacted soil, the places left behind. But to neighbouring wheat fields, it is an invasive threat, a competitive weed. The rail line becomes both a shelter for wild survival and a potential vector for agricultural disturbance. This realisation deepens the work: I will keep walking, learning, and logging what I find, because noticing must lead to conservation.

Standing there on the iron bed, it struck me that the train itself was the ultimate shape of the “killer story.” It was built for single-direction velocity—a rigid, heavy arrow of industrial progress that cuts through the landscape without feeling what it crosses.

My walk, and the writing it produces, is a deliberate attempt to tell the other kind of story.

Instead of a single, triumphant track, this scroll of text—torn, rust-marked, and non-linear—is my own small, gathering gesture. It does not aim to build a monument or arrive at a grand thesis. It is simply a bag being filled, step by step, with everything that mattered enough to pick up and carry home: the wild oats, my cousin’s company, accidental meetings with non-human life, ecological tensions, and the quiet spaces in between.

This whole time, I have laid no track. I have just been filling a bag.