In Memoriam: Ed Eastwood.

I began my blog this week with the idea that I would comment on the momentous changes sweeping the planet at this moment. In the world at large the biggest story is the global financial meltdown that will change the world, as we have known it, irrevocably.

It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.

At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.

However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and apparently died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.

I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed. I count few persons among my friends.

I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to marketing networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.

Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.

Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.

He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.

Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the 'wild fastnesses' of the region meet the equally 'wild fastnesses' of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.

He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.

After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies, both liquid and solid. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins and speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings. I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again.

Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.

Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.

Splitting Rooikrans Logs

Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma

Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.

Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP