DELORIS KOAN | Donald Woods waits down the road for sanity to arrive

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Cheesecake and Transkei.

Though not in that order: a giant caramel-drizzled slice at Shelley’s after the longest, most awesome, awful road into the Kei — that is my journey today.

There is a place at the end of my road where Donald Woods ran around in his diapers, if at all. It was his happy place and so too, it was to be mine.

The Donald Woods Centre is an extraordinary place awaiting all our discovery.

Clever people, his family with my friend, took the old Woods trading store at Hobeni and made it a part of our future.

Hobeni is at the end of a long, confusing road.

We cross the Kei bridge and enter the deregulated world of Transkei — yes the government wants us to stop using that word, but it lives on in the minds of so many as a geographical, cultural anchor.

We can call it “east of east of east” but everyone knows it as the Kei.

And that reason becomes apparent with every line we cross, turning we make onto potholed clay roads, and suddenly a long stretch of fabulous tar, and finally a little black pig rolling in the puddle in the middle of the road left by yesterday’s rain.

I do not say this lightly, for there are few places in this province which rocked me back on my heels like this university-styled place with its tall, history-bedecked atrium of Donald and Steve Biko, probably more about Steve, a fabulous leather-chaired library, lecture hall, breakaway rooms, a large floor for administration, a safe, kitchen, loos.

And outside under massive original, gnarled trees, one big enough for us to link hands around 10 or more strong are benches, and thick lawn stretching away over the hills yonder in the north where people call, dogs bark, children play, and cattle low.

Sorry, I must tell you I just saw a Gonubie dog walker getting pulled at runaway pace by two Dobermans which spotted their open bakkie and leapt in, almost taking him in head first!

Back in Hobeni, I have ridden the last 9km to The Haven at the sea where regardless of outsider gangsters wreaking havoc on the Wild Coast there are 10 guests in situ, some of them government health workers, nurses, a social worker, a crew in two large minivans emblazoned with public health messaging.

Not sure what time works starts because it’s 8.30am and the team is dribbling into the breakfast room before heading out to the most rural areas of desperation where, one tells me, the children are hungry.

Well, none of us are going hungry this morning, though in my defence, I am having journalist peak (and treat) after a few hard days’ working finding sad, older people who must feed small children on half-empty buckets of flour and soup mix.

But tar-and-feather me too, for here I am looking out at the lovely Indian Ocean, a pool nearby, the most friendly chef and staff, a gate keeper charging me a nominal fee for bike and bod and the ride! The ride through the Dwesa-Cwebe forests, phew! So good! 

Can’t wait for those “outsider” gangsters to get bust — maybe they and their corrupt cop buddies will be taken down by an armoured column for there is a huge military camp going up on the N2 outside Dutywa.

Glad to see those soldiers doing it SA-style — smart sedans parked outside their canvas 6x6m, or 6x12m tents , the very same ones I used to erect for SADF officers in Angola in 1979 and wished they would collapse on them.

If I am not mistaken, the new camp in the Kei is surrounded by a long precast wall which once proclaimed that people were tired of waiting for government to do something, and they just made their own facility.

In Hobeni, we leave the conference centre and stroll back to the Woods trading store homestead, now transformed into 35 really nice rooms, simple bed, cupboard, shower, two comfy chairs, but done in great taste. 

Everywhere we ride in this district, people speak with respect about the health project which once filled the Donald Woods Centre with action and purpose, mapping out the community and its health needs, training community outreach health workers, and generally being a house of light and hope.

But funding from a global corporate apparently ended and so did the momentum.

Now the centre sits like a couple all dressed for a big day out but with nowhere to go. It even has three triple-decker “huts” for crafts, traditional meetings, and the like.

My friend, Barbara Briceland, manages the upkeep as everyone ponders what to do with this massive socioeconomic gift, steeped in local history, which was given a false start.

Something has got to happen since in the Kei, time and tide waiteth for nobody.

I stroll through the bookshelves, Biko and Woods of course, but Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu lead the others.

So many marvellous SA tracts, lovely green reading lights, wow, who would not want to spend days here writing that PhD or feature, or corporate brief, or whatever. 

You know, it is easier to build something like this in a city. But this took raw courage.

Finally, the caretaker opens up the old trading store shop itself, and it is now a long bar filled with memorabilia.

Donald and his brother Harland in Bobby socks and vellies carrying a large pot of umqombhoti and then on their knees, facedown in the wholesome brew.

The afternoon light breaks in through the blinds, and you can imagine the motes and rich yellow glow of sunset flowing in from the west, clasping a chilled brew.

This is not tourism, this is not government, this is not even NGO, this is quite unlike anything you will find elsewhere in this bonkers Eastern Cape. 

Beyond the gate of the centre, speckled with dust of rust, like everything else here, there are the spazas, the taverns, a school, a clinic up the hill still showing signs of a vegetable garden and working quite well.

But it’s tough. Too many young men are grooving around, stories of teens leaving their babies at home while they struggle to finish school, and the battle to keep the grant money going until they can hold out no more and it is time to deposit the ID at the storekeeper and buy R300 of samp on tick.

Up the road, the old traditional trade store lives on, except now it is has morphed into a designer warehouse-style with two fences to negotiate, and behind the final gate a man in raised guard hut, under zinc, face shaded by a smart cap and a semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.

Many of us have deep memories of the Kei, but I also believe these have been updated as the area has changed.

Money has crept in along the hills, tendrils, fingers, spreading fuelled by cash from the cities.

There are run down homes, but there are also many new, designer homes, boxy yes, but smart with dash cornices and those smart pillars.

The low-bed trucks laden with illegally mined river sand rumble along, their spades sending a quivering array of handles into the sky.

People want to come here to retire, I am told. Yet, a lot of the old people I see on the road look unlike swanking retirees.

They look strong, simple and wearing skirts, wraps and head gear.

At the clinics, I was started at how smart the young moms were — their babies beautifully wrapped.

Even saw one poppet get immunised and I was triggered, as you know, since I was the one ordered off to the clinic down the road in Bez Valley, Johannesburg, and told to get our six-week old precious jabbed.

She says she has forgiven me, but I have never recovered.

So this area is populated in the most inventive and stoic way. We inch down a gutter used as a road to the home of a young woman who is helping me out.

It is three separate buildings on a saddle, hill and vale all around. She and I head down the hill through the gate, into her vegetable patch which is row upon row of spinach, onions, beet, cabbage, dill, you name it.

Here she and her husband spend days, backs bent tilling this brown earth, putting fresh wholesome food on the table for their three children.

Today, she is working so it’s chic and smart, with a hat and a new fashion peccadillo — one lip only with bright lipstick! 

In one RDP-looking home we find a grandmother, L-shaped on the floor sitting on coils of grass rope, gripped between her large toe and the next toe as she weaves. It is sold as a home décor item for R600. It looks like a tremendous amount of work for not so much money.

But it is all relative. That’s a lot of rice and samp which can be bought by the carefully stacked pile at the “warehouse” on the hill, apparently owned by some guys in Cape Town or Durban.

The cheapest pile was R809.99 and you get four hefty bags of staple and a large bottle of “fish oil” — the local term for sunflower oil.

If ever SA felt caught in the limnic zone waiting to explode onto its next donga-filled road — with the emphasis on waiting — then this community is the living example of that suspended animation.

The local hospital is shabby, a school is terrible, but there is always a project nearby — a new hospital being built out of the old, a brand new set of VIP toilets for the children who have horrible classrooms and no kitchen, and a health net that works to catch the hungry children, except when it doesn’t.

Why would we blame the Transkei for the violence that wreaks itself upon all of SA?

Those gangsters and their corrupt system elements will be outed, we have to believe this. And the tourists will return.

Or else there is skulduggery at play too ghastly, orchestrated and too brutal to contemplate.

I am a visitor really, and, but for one or two people being silly, I had a marvellous reception. Special really, because the Transkei is the most special place.

Now can somebody please do something about the Donald Woods Centre which awaits just you, that special person.