What the Land Holds
(Part III of an anthology of writings alongside the mixed-media installation Walk the Line, exploring place, deep time, and the layered histories of a rural Swartland community.)

What the Land Holds — Before the Rails

The Weight of History
Before the introduction of industrial farming and before these iron rails were laid, this land was never an ‘untamed wilderness.’ The San hunter-gatherers and Khoikhoi pastoralists moved across this soil for millennia, relying on extensive networks of walking paths for seasonal migrations, gathering, tracking wildlife, and pre-colonial trade. Footpaths connected coastal regions to the interior, facilitating the exchange of salt, copper, and essential commodities.

The San and Khoikhoi practised a form of land stewardship that left a subtle, regenerative imprint. To encourage the growth of edible geophytes (bulbs) and attract game with fresh green shoots, they used controlled fire as an ecological tool. Seasonal movement was bound to water from the local river, known today as the Berg River.

I sought historical Khoi-San names for this area, acknowledging that indigenous place names are among the oldest words spoken on this continent. Archaeological findings indicate that modern humans have inhabited Southern Africa for at least 170,000 years, with Khoi-San history spanning back into the Later Stone Age. The Khoikhoi did not hold a single, modern administrative name for vast regions, but identified with specific clan territories. Here, the Cochoqua grazed their large herds of cattle in the fertile valleys stretching between the mountains of present-day Malmesbury and the Atlantic coast.

The name we use today, Swartland (Het Zwarte Land, recorded in 1701), was a descriptive title given by early Dutch explorers because the indigenous Renosterbos vegetation appeared dark across the hills after winter rains. My walks have allowed me to look closely into this endangered biome and witness the desperate state of remaining Renosterveld, squeezed into narrow verges by agricultural expansion.

As I walked, it was easy to imagine the San following the migration of Eland and Quagga over this land, watching how these animals carved deep “paths of least resistance” through the veld. Early colonial roads—and eventually sections of the railway itself—were often built directly over these ancient animal tracks, adopting the terrain’s most efficient contours. The rail line exists because of the fertile soil that farmers cultivated with wheat and vineyards, but the route itself was carved much earlier.

Lines and Life Lines
On the WALC site, I learned about Lines Lost (2013–14), a project by walking artist Stuart McAdam. McAdam interrogated historical and cultural resonances through documented walks along decommissioned rail cuts in Northern Scotland, exploring how these cuts impacted the development and decline of outlying communities.

In our valley today, public transport is virtually non-existent; movement relies on private vehicles or walking. School buses travel these roads mainly to transport farm children, while local taxis offer a service to those without cars. Most farm labourers and their extended families walk to town or rely on weekly transport provided by employers on Friday afternoons.

By the early 20th century, Riebeek West had a prominent railway station serving the farming community. This branch line from Hermon into the Riebeek Valley was a late addition to the Cape rail network, driven primarily by the Swartland wheat boom. A branch line, by definition, is a secondary line extending from a trunk line, enabling produce and passengers to move from regional districts to major urban ports and markets.

Archival records from the line’s heyday illustrate its function as an economic artery. A parliamentary journal from its first year of operation records the traffic along the branch:

Passengers transported: 14,000

Livestock transported: 8,800

Tonnage of goods: 26,420

Tonnage of coal: 500

Local oral histories reveal a more intimate relationship with this schedule. Because the train passed through the village only once a day, residents crossed the tracks almost intuitively, timing their lives around its singular arrival. A favourite local story tells of a young woman taking her driver’s license test along Station Road. She drove straight across the railway tracks without stopping. When the testing officer pointed out her error, she replied with complete local certainty: “Why stop? The train has already passed for the day.”

Bearing Witness
The rail line is not the first path this valley has known. Long before iron and wooden sleepers, rhinoceros, eland, and quagga wore their own lines into the fynbos—paths of least resistance that hunter-gatherers, farmers, and later engineers merely widened rather than invented.

To walk this line slowly is to tread the latest layer of an ancient habit. This land has always been crossed, by hoof and by foot, long before it was ever fenced. Today, I regularly spot animal tracks entering one side of the fence, zig-zagging along the rail corridor, and exiting into farmlands or vineyards.

Recently, while parked near the tracks planning to check on a stand of Lachenalia flowers, a Duiker ram appeared, grazing peacefully in front of my car. I sat quietly for a few moments, watching him. Unbothered, he gracefully leapt the wire fence and disappeared into the vineyards.

Walking here forces an encounter with both the non-human life healing the earth and the human memories of displacement that the rails still hold. I remain in awe of these quiet moments of gathering.

CODA
I feel suspended between places.

Walking this line and riding a train along it are not the same act, wearing different speeds—they are opposing purposes. The rail’s original purpose was to erase the deep time of the path: to turn a lived, multi-species route into a fast conduit for goods and produce, stripped of the connection that walking once held. What I did, walking it, was a kind of undoing and discovering.

I was not passing through the village the way a train passes through. I was inhabiting the space between. Not slowness against speed, but the rail as a symbol of connection and progress set against the valley’s history of disconnection and displacement. It left me with a feeling of discomfort and unease.

The suspension I feel is not simply between two towns. It is between two entirely different ways this land has been moved through—the deep-time walked route, and the modern engineered one—with me standing in the seam.