I’ve never eaten camel, but I found myself wondering what the strange, undulating creature tasted like, while driving along the N10 towards Port Elizabeth last Saturday. I know what mutton tastes like, and I was soon to be rewarded with a vast display of mutton, in motion, further along that same route. Not that I see everything in terms of its food value. Hyenas, vultures and pangolins are safe.

I have eaten puri, though, and patta – I always order it at Port Elizabeth’s Royal Delhi, with a generous squeeze of lemon juice over the compacted yam leaves, though I first ate it at the hand of Devi Moodliar at Chan and Devi Moodliar’s old Talk of the Town restaurant in Cape Town in the Nineties.

We were off to Port Elizabeth to catch a movie and grab a curry, at the end of a week that, for me, had been all about the passing of the one-of-a-kind musical and Struggle hero that was Johnny Clegg. The movie was to be Yesterday, set in the world of the Beatles and one of my musical heroes, Paul McCartney (Yesterday being the song he is most famous for having penned). The curry would be had at the Royal Delhi, one of our favourites ever since we moved to the Eastern Cape nearly five years ago.

We had been at Clegg’s penultimate Final Journey farewell concert in Port Elizabeth in January 2018 (which I wrote about here at the time) before he went off to face his own final journey. I’d just had an emotional week absorbing his death, and reliving his life, and the wonderful man he was, through the publication of my tribute to him in Daily Maverick. It got Facebooked and retweeted hundreds of times. I even ended up being interviewed by Georgina Godwin on her radio show, The Globalist, on Monocle 24, on the phone from London. Listening back, I could discern a choke in my voice. One of those stories when you cannot entirely disconnect. Because it’s a part of your life.

But the story begins much longer ago than Saturday. The story begins on the Orange Rocks, at Uvongo/St Michaels-on-Sea, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1993. We were a family hurting, in mourning for our boy – my stepson – who had left this coil under terrible circumstances earlier in the year, at a tender 19. As a little girl, his mom’s favourite place on Earth had been the Orange Rocks, where one of the other-worldly, misshapen rocks – they look as if they’ve been flung there from a passing galactic chariot and landed all a-jumble – seemed to her to resemble, not a chariot, but a Noddy Car. She’d pretend-drive her car endlessly on hot South Coast afternoons. And for years to come tell us all about her carefree days as a little girl on the Orange Rocks.

Places and natural phenomena can seem to take on a spiritual hue when life hurls one of those massive curve balls at us. The year after Nic’s sudden departure, we took a family holiday that ended up on the South Coast and, finally, the Orange Rocks. One blustery day we determined to braai, at sunset, somewhere among the rocks. Our spot chosen and a fire lit in the sand, we opened the wine and pulled our jackets and scarves tighter as the dark clouds gathered ominously and the light was slowly eaten up. We were quiet, each thinking in our solitary silence about Nic, whose memory we had wanted to bring to these rocks of his mother’s childhood. Before long we were in abject blackness but for the flickering embers at our feet. In an instant, out of the corners of our eyes we suddenly saw a strange orange orb in the blackness far out to sea. It grew and grew into a brilliant orange light, magical and mysterious in its strangeness. We felt as though Nic was somehow showing his presence. The moment has never left us.

I thought of the strange orange sunset at the Orange Rocks again on Saturday.

In the Eastern Cape’s aloe-dotted countryside, you never know where the next surprise is coming from. We were stopped at Golden Valley for a chicken pie and coffee when a pair of camels wandered by. I took a photo with my phone. We drove off, waving at the camels as we went. About 30km further along a man was waving a red flag in the middle of our lane. I indicated to pass right but veered back and slowed when I realised that he wasn’t waving me past but to coast to a stop, while a trio of men shepherded a massive flock of sheep across from one part of a farm to another.

One particular sheep wasn’t having any of it. Maybe he’d heard about what the man in the idling car would do with his hind legs, or what they did with mutton at the Royal Delhi.

What they do with mutton at the Royal Delhi. Photo: Tony Jackman

What to have before the mutton at the Royal Delhi. Photo: Tony Jackman

While the rest of what must have been a few hundred sheep were herded across the highway, one skapie turned around and scurried off in the other direction. There’s an exception to everything, and this beast was the exception to the notion that sheep always follow each other. Later on we saw a sheep make a similar about-turn and make a break for it back to the first field. I like to think it was the same skapie.

If they’d known who the guy was in the car watching all this – and how much lamb and mutton I cook – they might have all scarpered at great speed. Away from me and on to PE. Which we eventually reached.

At our beachfront hotel, the endearing old Humewood, Di pulled her list out. There is always a list, scrawled untidily on whatever scrap of paper is to hand. We were discussing the shopping to be done as per her list on an old A4 sheet when she turned it over. It was the ticket printout for Clegg’s Final Journey show up the road at the Boardwalk, in January 2018. Then we looked out the window and caught our breath. The most vivid double rainbow you’ll ever see, sweeping across, seemingly from the Boardwalk, and into the sea. I’m not saying it truly was an ethereal thing, really, but for us right then it sure felt like it. And isn’t poetry like that. A piece of visual poetry filled in by mind and circumstance, to become something with apparent meaning. Like the orange glow at the Orange Rocks. Like a rainbow falling into the sea as if having emanated from the venue of Clegg’s final show, just as a random scrap of paper had brought him back to front of mind.

We never did get to see Yesterday. In the interim I’d heard that the Australia-South Africa rugby clash would be on in the hotel bar just after 5pm. It kind of pulled us into that bar. I don’t really watch rugby, but what a thrilling match, not least Herschel Jantjies in his first test outing. And at interval, Juluka’s Impi blaring out in the Ellis Park stadium.

Somehow that strangely disjointed Week of Johnny Clegg had been tail-ended by a rainbow and a rugby match, and we were in an Uber and off to the Royal Delhi in Port Elizabeth’s characterful little hillside suburb of Richmond Hill for their splendid house mutton curry special after a starter, as ever, of puri and patta.

We hadn’t seen Yesterday today, but with a triumphal rugby win, a pair of camels, a flock of sheep and a rainbow to colour our day, the Week of Johnny Clegg had ended memorably and on a sweet note, to offset the sadness. DM

There are more tales of the Karoo in Tony Jackman’s foodSTUFF (Human & Rousseau), a cookbook-cum-memoir with essays about life and food, illustrated by 60 recipes, which was nominated for the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (2018) in the category for best food writing. Book enquiries: [email protected]