The Black Eagle Retreat - Waterval Boven
Deep in South Africa's Elands Valley, two Brits opened a pub in 2003 that gave them a jaw-dropping glimpse into Afrikaner racism. It sounds horrific but they managed to survive and even prosper
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How do I follow last week’s post on racial segregation in 90s London? I did think about a change in tone and interviewing people who drink at pubs near tourist attractions in London - let me know if you like this idea even though it sounds a bit lightweight. Or writing about my favourite pints I've had in desi pubs - maybe I’ll revisit this another week.
But I thought the best option was to look at a similar - but inverted - situation. So instead of having racist landlords I’m delving into a story where the publican was forward thinking but his customers were, sadly, the opposite. For this we have to walk a lot further than the end of my south-east London road and travel more than 8,000 miles to the Elands Valley deep in the South African countryside.
The nearest town is Waterval Boven (or Emgwenya) and we are more than 1,182 metres above sea level, with sweeping views of hills, mountains and wildlife. This is a rock-climbing, safari hotspot and is breathtakingly beautiful - the mountains have green duvets, pierced with rocks that glisten in the sun.
But this beauty is sometimes depressingly skin deep especially if you’re black as this is one of the most racist parts of the world as today’s ex-publican will attest. Husband and wife Steve and Deb Stewart-Keane today work as personal assistants to my friend Steven Fenn (AKA Fenn) in Colchester, but in 2004 they spent £100K to construct a bar and retreat in the heart of an Afrikaner area so that they could attract city dwellers from Pretoria and Johannesburg interested in fishing, hiking and climbing.
The descendants of the Boers - as most people will know - have a long, inglourious history of prejudice by equally hating black people (who they feared would threaten their white rule) and the British - this double racism was a colonial relic but in popular memory manifested itself in apartheid. The Boers saw themselves as pioneers, viewing the British as invaders while both European-origin groups saw themselves superior to the local black South African populations, “whom they considered uncivilised, unproductive, and violent”.
Whatever the origins of their hatred, in the 21st century the Afrikaners - and in this story - live isolated, conservative lives where their interactions with black people were minimal and never positive. What interests me about these white supremacists is that you can see a lot of their behaviour in any white groups that live in the countryside and refuse to integrate. Like last week’s piece the segregation may have legally ended but the colour bar rages inside their heads.
Steve and Deb are a pair who throw themselves into their jobs - they spend a lot of time organising and facilitating amazing beer trips for Fenn despite the logistics of his wheelchair being transported around in an ableist society. And this attempt at a new life was no different when it came to their energy levels despite the downbeat way Steve tells it. But it was a success as Steve is able to tell the tale and show us what we can learn from a couple who challenged racism on a day to day basis.
Last year, when Steve first told me about the Black Eagle Retreat I didn’t really take it in properly. We were at a village pub - a rare inclusive one that sells craft, and local ales - in Suffolk eating charcuterie and cheese and the conversation dipped momentarily from football and politics.
It was at this point where Steve, almost Gatling gun-like, started telling me about the most racist place they had worked in. In the sunshine, among friends, it felt like a tall story but on the train home it finally struck me - Steve and Deb had tried to become pioneers, ironically like the first Boers foraying into South Africa, but they weren’t prepared for the resistance they would encounter.
“All our staff were welcome in the bar,” he says. “And they would play pool even if they didn’t have coins and the Afrikaners would come in and ask for them to be removed because they were black. They would say: ‘Can you get them off the table we want to play pool?’
“I’d tell them ‘put down coins, play them and beat them: then you get the table’. They didn’t think that would apply because [their opponents] were black. Another time they saw someone who worked with me - a Zulu - dancing with my sister and they took exception to black guys dancing with white women and tried to put a cigarette out in his face.”
Steve and Deb didn’t speak Afrikaans and when these incidents occurred the Afrikaners would shout at them in English. However, as I mentioned before their prejudice would work two-ways (anti-British, anti-black) and they often would speak Afrikaans in the presence of the Stewart-Keanes to exclude or even talk about them. One guy even taunted Steve saying “you have no idea what we’re saying about you” and he just calmly replied: “but what you have to know is: I don’t care”.
“They would pay our black staff 20 rand to light their fires or clean their quad bikes,” he says. “They couldn’t be bothered to do any of that stuff. There was a lovely girl who helped clean the chalets and do our ironing and stuff like that - she was very well spoken, always very well presented, and spoke English and Afrikaans.
“One of our customers wanted her to clean their house which was a 40-minute drive away. So they asked me and I said ‘I have no problem with that’. On the day the husband came to pick her up in his 4X4 Toyota pickup truck - he told her to get in the back of the pickup - it was only him in the [passenger] cab. She refused and then he tried to get me to tell her to do it.
“It was staggering.”
Steve and Deb were drawn to this part of the world because they fell in love with the scenery but they had no strong roots in South Africa. Steve had been working as a regional manager for the Prince’s Youth Trust for 14 years, when his paternal uncle started badgering them to come visit after he married a local. They went on holiday and this appeared to be an adventure they sorely craved.
His new life fitted a joke that Steve was told shortly after he moved:
God says he’s going to build the most amazing country, with the most incredible oceans and the most wonderful wildlife - then someone says ‘won’t that be the envy of the world’? God replies: You haven’t seen the government I’m going to create.
Steve sighs and says: “If you’re going to do what we were trying to do then you have to sacrifice your beliefs and morals.”
Before I spoke to Steve about this adventure I really didn’t know much about Afrikaners and the more I learn, the more I pity this group - I do read trashy self-help articles and none say that being insular is a path to happiness. However, Steve really likes people and is very curious about them which meant he tried to empathise with his problem customers despite their objectionable behaviour and outlook on life.
“We had some interesting conversations,” he admits. “ You remember the worst ones - they were the ones that we never allowed back. But we did have lots of conversations and some were very cringing. They were quite well educated and they knew their field [they worked in] but they had totally blinkered thinking.
“They didn’t have TV until the 1970s. Their media was apartheid government [propaganda] but now the internet meant they couldn’t control what they were seeing. This meant they came up with the most idiotic, ridiculous comments, like ‘your blacks are different to our blacks’. They all would come in and say ‘the only exception is my housekeeper’, we’d get thousands of people being racist but they all would have a good housekeeper.”
I laughed nervously during this part of the interview because I can’t imagine Steve ever biting his tongue when someone spouts nonsense. “I could make good money off these people but I wouldn’t if engaging with them would be so horrific. That’s why we packed it up to be honest.”
They ended up selling the place as a going concern in 2011 after eight years and Steve says it’s now permanently shut which is a shame because the other pubs in the area were not in any way inclusive. Steve describes them as like British boozers in the 1970s and when he visited them with friends the interactions with locals were crushing. “As soon as we spoke,” he says. “They would look away. I found their culture very basic, which sounds judgmental, but they don’t welcome outsiders.”
I then wonder how Deb fared working in a place that had to have such a conservative customer base. “They were sexist,” Steve says, “of course. But if it was going to be a violent situation she would deal with it. They knew they met their match.”
So I guess at this point this whole venture sounds like an abject failure - some places are just too racist to be healed by one inclusive pub. But Steve disagrees.
“There were times where we did get people to change,” he says. “People from Joburg and Pretoria would say how refreshing it was - and they would say this is just what the country needs: an injection of new people.”
The biggest success story was a woman called Marie who befriended Deb and then tried to get her boyfriend Adri to visit. She drove him to the pub, revealed it was run by an English couple and despite Adri’s reluctance to enter she managed to bring him through the threshold - the gate at the Black Eagle had a sign with all the languages that would be spoken which scared off many Afrikaners.
He entered. Ignored Steve. Stood silent and angry.
“I put the rugby on the TV,” he says, “that was his passion and we broke the ice that way. And we became the best friends out of all the people we met there. They’ve completely changed. He was brought up to hate the British and black people but now his son is friends with a black kid at school. Some of those people are looking for a way out.
“But he told me that when he goes back to his area he wouldn’t dare mention some of the conversations we have.”
Steve believes the hate-filled views mentioned in this piece will eventually die out as South Africa has more and more black role models which can’t be ignored, while the younger generation follows news from around the world. I then ask Steve for his final thoughts on what happened.
“We do miss it,” he admits. “We miss living outdoors. I miss the time we had a pub full of diverse people who were all getting along - it felt like a tiny corner of the world that somehow made it. But in the end our customer base was made up of too many racists.”