Roberts Nomad Heart

Adventures on and off the set
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-77619-355-4
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Actor and musician Ian Roberts is something of a South African icon, renowned for his roles as the rugged Boer fighter Sloet Steenkamp in the TV series Arende and as Boet in the immortal and immensely popular Castrol advertisements. Ian had an unconventional youth, running wild on his family's citrus farm in the Eastern Cape. There he grew a love of nature and first learnt the art of communicating with an audience through song and story. A master storyteller with a wicked sense of humour, Ian offers a highly entertaining glimpse of how actors make the magic happen, whether on a theatre stage or before the TV cameras. Drawing on a career that runs from Long Street to Los Angeles, and from Shakespeare to Tsotsi, Ian provides a masterclass on the art of acting, making his life story a vital guide to aspiring actors. His no-nonsense and fearless approach to life means he has never hesitated to tackle challenging roles and to do things in his own, unconventional way. Today, as frontman for Die Radio Kalahari Orkes, he continues to follow his heart.

IAN ROBERTS is an award-winning actor, playwright and musician. Ian shot to fame in the late 1980s for his roles in hugely popular television series such as Verspeelde Lente, Arende and Inkom' Edla Yodwa, opposite Henry Cele. Apart from his role in the Oscar-winning South African movie Tsotsi, Ian has also played in many international movies that were filmed in South Africa such as The Power of One, King Solomon's Mines and Jane and the Lost City. His performance as Boet in the long-running Castrol Can of the Best advertising campaign made him a household name. He is also the lead singer of the band Die Radio Kalahari Orkes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roberts, Ian

Leseproben

1

We, the Hunter-Gatherers

I GREW UP WITH MANY scary things on the doorstep of my childhood home at Baddaford Citrus Estates in the foothills of the Katberg mountains of the rural Eastern Cape. Some kids grow up having to face far worse things, such as war and all its horrific brutalities. As a farmer’s son, I was brought up in the supposedly idyllic world of orange orchards and irrigation furrows.

But, even as a small child, I knew that the ghosts of violence hung in the air. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. In 1879, only eighty years before my birth, the Frontier Wars over the land came to an end, with the Kei River accepted as the boundary. I was to discover that possession of the piece of land now called Baddaford Citrus Estates, covered by the peaceful-looking orange trees my great-grandfather had planted in the early 1900s, had once been hotly contested by Xhosa pastoralist-warriors, British settlers and the Boers.

When I was a child, nobody ever told me about these conflicts. It has been said that Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, described how, after landing at the airports of certain countries, he could smell blood in the air – a fact that would make him cancel his visit and fly straight back home to Switzerland. It was as if this same smell hung in the air of the Eastern Cape world that surrounded me.

One evening, when I was about four years old, I was woken in the deep of the night by a violent hammering on our kitchen door. My father, Llewellyn, opened it to find a Xhosa woman on the doorstep. Her husband had sliced her open in a drunken frenzy. As my father drove her down the dirt road to the hospital, eight kilometres away in the town of Fort Beaufort, the poor woman’s intestines had to be held in her stomach cavity by my mother. Luckily, the woman made a full recovery.

Best clothes, best hair, best smile. A photo of me as a young boy.

I also recall one Saturday afternoon when I watched a fight between a coloured man we called Lawiesh (his name was actually Louis), who was armed with a knife, and a Xhosa man called Mzwandile, who was armed with a kierie (a knobbed stick; isigweba in Xhosa). Their confrontation took place at the farm labourers’ huts. Everybody had been drinking a lot of booze and their blood was hot for violence. The women screamed and wailed, while the winds of a brewing thunderstorm blasted the bushes, shaking them violently and whipping up clouds of dust, all adding to what seemed to me a frenzied madness. Fortunately for my innocent young eyes, Lawiesh was hit by such severe blows that he crumpled to the ground before he could stab and draw blood, and the fight ended. Still, I felt numbed by this vista of violence. If I had been given the choice right there and then, I might have liked, even as a delinquent, to have made like Jung and left that place for good.

My parents, Llewellyn and Lynn, outside St Andrew’s College chapel on their wedding day.

In the 1830s, my great-great-grandfather, Daniel Roberts, had the temerity and good faith to trek eastwards from the Albany district, where most of the 1820 Settlers had established themselves, generally as farmers. He set up a trading store on or near the banks of the Peddie River. He was also a lay preacher for the Wesleyan Church in the Grahamstown district. It was in this capacity that Daniel played a part in organising, and paying for, a son of the Xhosa chief Ngqika to travel by ship to Scotland to attend boarding school there.

In 1837, the Xhosa rose up and invaded the Cape Colony from the east. (If you ask me, the authorities in England should have been more honest with the 1820 Settlers, who were sent to a strange, dangerous land basically to act as a buffer between the Xhosa and the Cape Colony.) Early one morning, the house of my great-great-grandfather was surrounded by a horde of young warriors. While his trading store was being plundered and burnt, he was asked to send his wife and children away: unlike the Zulu under Dingane, the Xhosa never killed the women and children of the Settlers. The same cannot be said of Mzilikazi’s impis, who, during their breakout from Zululand, wiped the eastern foothills of the Drakensberg clean of people.

(Recently, a journalist who was writing an article phoned me with a question: ‘Mr Roberts, as an actor who was raised in an English family, how do you feel about having acted in so many TV series in the language of the oppressor?’

‘Look, I’ve only acted in two TV series in Zulu,’ I responded.

A pause followed.

‘Excuse me? No, I’m talking about Afrikaans.’

‘Yes of course, I know you are. But Afrikaans is not the only language of oppression. Zulu is too.’)

But the Xhosa were not like this. With Daniel’s young wife and small children having been sent to safety, the warriors told him they were going to kill him and burn his house.

‘On whose orders am I to die?’ Daniel asked, playing his last, desperate card.

This proved to be a perplexing question, as no one seemed sure. The raiding party hadn’t been sent by the king. They were on their own mission of retribution against the settlers.

‘Who is your king?’ Daniel then asked.

They answered that his name was Ngqika.

‘Well, then, you must first ask Nkosi Ngqika if Daniel Roberts is to be killed.’

Because Ngqika was not far away, a runner was sent. While they waited for the runner to return, the young warriors became impatient and began nicking Daniel’s skin with their assegai points, saying, ‘When the runner comes back and says the nkosi tells us to kill you, that is where I am going to sink my blade into your pale white skin.’

After a while, streaks of blood were running down his body. The runner came speeding back in great haste shouting, ‘Yekani! Inkosi ithethile umthetho wayo!’ (The king has spoken!)

My entry for the annual art competition at St Andrew’s Preparatory School.

Ngqika’s response was that if one hair on the head of Daniel Roberts was disturbed, he would have all the warriors killed.

Daniel was allowed to retreat to the shade of his house, while some warriors tried to put out the fire raging in his trading store. The truth was that the leader of the insurrection was a son of the king – and the same son whom Daniel Roberts had helped to go and study in Scotland! Yet he had returned from his studies still full of war.

This incident was mentioned to us children as an example of how uncertain the chances of survival were for the Roberts clan in those days. Several years ago, I went to the Albany Museum in Grahamstown (today Makhanda) and, under the guidance of the librarian, found an article in the Grahamstown Journal from 1837 that proved the story told to me by my parents was true and correct.

After this, Daniel decided to leave the frontier area and head westwards, and he became involved with a Wesleyan Church farming project near the settlement of Salem. Here, struggling Africans were given a place to settle and work on land bought by the Wesleyans, and it was here that Daniel built a church, which stands to this day.

It is my good fortune that the Roberts family survived the violence of the Frontier Wars. Life was slightly easier for my great-grandfather, Llewellyn James Roberts, who was an inventor-farmer. He was the first man in the world to construct a gate by bending steel tubing without weakening or disfiguring it. Having patented this technique, he made good money for a while building gates at his factory, located on a railway siding called Kroomie, between Fort Beaufort and Adelaide.

After buying the farm in 1903, he decided to build a house to his own design. The position of the house was dictated by where the blue granite boulders stopped rolling after he’d dynamited a cliff high up on the mountainside. The boulders were cut into building blocks by British stonemasons who had been commissioned by the Cape government to build a bridge over the Kat River at Fort Beaufort. The bridge has withstood many raging floods of the Kat River.

Llewellyn’s house accommodated the steep slope of the hill and consisted of three storeys with no internal passageways. All the living areas radiated from a large central room, which was (and still is) called ‘the Court’, created by raising the middle of the corrugated-iron roof, with two rows of windows added to allow the sun in. Llewellyn built a grand stairway, with a curving wooden balustrade, leading from the top floor down into the Court, and the rooms were exquisitely wood-panelled.

Sadly, the house burnt down in the 1930s and the two young men who were staying there at the time could save only two things: a magnificent Steinway baby grand piano and a three-quarter-size billiard table. The fire had started because the gardener had left a paraffin lamp burning in the cellar. The blue granite walls, however, still stood gaunt but proud when the smoke cleared, and the house was rebuilt – less grandly finished than before but still magnificent. We called it ‘the Big House’ and this was where I grew up.

My great-grandfather Llewellyn died young, at the age of 54, a result of burns sustained in a freak accident near Douglas, a far-off town on the Vaal River, where he had been installing a pump. This pump, designed by an Englishman, HA Humphrey, had to be placed in a pit dug down to below the level of the river. The water in the vertical...