Every December, my family and I make the same journey. It’s the great ‘trek’ down to the coast.
It takes two days of driving to get from Eswatini to Stilbaai, a small coastal town in the Western Cape. Two days of road and distance and anticipation, until finally there is the smell of salt air, the sound that swallows everything else, and the ocean — vast and indifferent and somehow exactly what I needed. I find a rock. I sit. And something in me, something I’ve been carrying since January, slowly falls away.
December: Ingongoni
The wildebeest have their young during this season, which also heralds the big iNcwala ceremony, celebrating unity, harvest and the kinship of the Swazi people.
November is a dark quilt. It is the month my father died in a fatal car accident, and though years have passed and years do their quiet work of healing, I never forget. November will always carry that weight. The quilt I made for it November: Lweti: When it Rains seems to unravel at its base, its squares falling away, held only by fine rainbow-coloured threads. There is grief in it, and there is also hope.
When the twelve quilts were finally hung at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Braamfontein, November and December were placed on either side of the altar. Loss on one side. Rest on the other. The altar between them.
December’s quilt is, on its surface, about peace. But I find I cannot write about it honestly without also writing about the discomfort folded into that peace.
Stilbaai is a predominantly Afrikaans holiday town. We arrive each year as the Engelsmense — the English people — welcomed into a community that is warm and family-oriented and deeply familiar. ‘Ons voel tuis’, we say. We feel at home. And we do. And yet I am also aware, sitting on my rock by the ocean, of everything that has made it possible for me to sit there. The access that comes with work, with whiteness, with access to a holiday house by the sea.
I think, when I look at this quilt, of my friend and colleague Dirobo, from Mali, whose husband collected the round Joko teabags for me at home. His contribution central, stitched into the fabric of a place he has never visited. At least, I tell myself, my Stilbaai has that: cultural diversity sewn into its fragile being.
The word holiday comes from holy day. I did not know that until I began this research. But it makes sense. Rest, when it is genuine, has something sacred about it. The way the ocean restores what the year has taken.
What sustains me?
I’ve found the answer is the coast in December. It is the family that makes the long drive worth it. Staring out to the waves, I find rest and peace after a year of storms.