Marketing meteors – 1

“Why do we speak of ‘meteoric rise to power’ when, in actual fact, meteors crash down to the earth, wiping out all life in the vicinity?” my mother asked from the back of the car, with a hand on each of the front seats.

Marketing meteors – 1
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I was at the wheel, trying to miss potholes on the part of the M35 that passes Block B. My father, in the passenger seat, was absorbed in a book on local geology.

“You’re right, it’s a strange adjective,” he said, not looking up from his book. “Not quite an oxymoron, though. It designates speed, or brilliance.”

“Yah, yah,” said my mother, sitting back.

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“Take our meteor for example, the one we’re going to visit,” continued my father. “The book says it was no bigger than a house, and yet it made a crater 1km across and 200m deep. The thing was travelling so fast its impact released the energy of 100 Hiroshima atom bombs.”

“Block B gone,” said my mother.

“Pretoria gone!” said my father, clapping the book shut for emphasis. “Pretoria, Tshwane, call it what you like. It won’t make a difference when the fireball hits.”


Meteor_tswaing: Opened in 1995 – and called a ‘revolutionary concept’ – this is how the Tswaing Crater Reserve and museum looks now.

I struggled to suppress a terrible vision: the whole crazy, lopsided mess – the shanties leading away from the M35 in every direction, the elite safari lodges to the north-east – vaporised by a giant meteor from the Nemesis constellation.

Fortunately the mood in the car was cheery. We’d resolved that nothing – not the country’s waxing social tensions or the sky-rocketing petrol prices – would undermine a trip we’d been talking about since the opening of the Tswaing Crater Reserve and museum in 1995, which former Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Ben Ngubane had called “a revolutionary concept… a place close to my heart… which I think will force us to re-examine how we think of our heritage and its worth.”

Ngubane saw the project acting as a catalyst for community development in an area that had seethed with violence as a result of the apartheid government’s social meddling. The site was to be managed ‘holistically’. Tswaing was, in fact, to be the country’s first true eco-tourism endeavour, designed to serve all ecologies, be they human, mineral or vegetable.


Meteors_offering: One of the Ash Wednesday offerings at the crater. ‘Meteorite cults’ used to be common in Christianity, thanks to Jacob’s experiences in the desert.

The road wasn’t particularly well-signposted, but we found the turn for the museum and entered an avenue leading to a compound of thatched buildings with pink walls. Climbing out of the car, we crunched over drifts of dust and gravel towards the sole display – a papier-mâché model of the crater, painted green, glazed and already collapsing.

A young man approached us with a photocopied pamphlet and three receipts for our R15/head entrance fee. He felt no need to lie about the patent neglect. “It’s because of fighting,” he said. “Fighting over money. Fighting over work. I tell them to cut here but they don’t cut. I tell them to clean but they don’t clean. Maybe if you visitors write these things down, then something can happen here.”

No guide was available but the map on the pamphlet was clear enough, and we easily found the parking lot where the trail around the crater rim begins. Approaching an unseen depression in the earth is exciting, and although the Tswaing crater is no Victoria Falls or Kimberly Hole, what it lacks in dimension it makes up for in uniformity.


Meteors_religious: More religious offerings at the Tswaing Crater.

“Like a child’s drawing of a crater,” said my mother, which was apt, because after Arizona’s famous Barringer crater, Tswaing is probably the most visually impressive crater on earth. Its circular ridge undulates only ever so slightly and descends in a thinning charge of trees down to a bright disc of water.

Right from the start there was mystery, though: puzzling artefacts had been placed on the concrete slabs where the information boards should have been nailed. A silver urn here, a brightly painted clay bowl there, a piece of broken mirror by a thorn branch, and then the giveaway item: a crucifix on a yellowing page of Die Son, dated Wednesday, 13 February.

“An Ash Wednesday ritual,” said my father, a little smugly. “It’s good to see Christianity still harbours a few meteorite cults. They abounded once upon a time, you know. In the Bible Jacob is supposed to have laid his head down on a bit of meteor when he’s in the desert. You don’t believe me? That’s how come he was able to see a stairway to heaven, all the way to God’s throne. Afterwards he was so impressed with his bit of rock he built a temple around it.”


Meteors_tswaing: The beautiful Tswaing Crater. But the meteor that hit here was no bigger than a house and released the energy of 100 Hiroshima atom bombs.

We then made our way down to the algae-fringed pan from which, our pamphlet informed us, Tswana and Sotho communities have filtered salt since 1200 (hence the name Tswaing – pronounced ‘swaai-ing’ – a Tswana word meaning ‘Place of Salt’).

Puddles of melted candle atop hexagons of cracked mud showed where the Christians (Apostolic, I later learnt) had performed some sort of ritual by the side of the pan. I also learnt later the local Tswana believe the crater waters harbour a giant serpent known as Kokwana, meaning ‘old woman’.

The legend of the snake is linked to a concept developed by generations of Tswana traditional healers to explain gastro-enteric diseases. According to local lore, Kokwana is placed in the stomach by witchcraft. It devours the food of little children and, ultimately, if inflamed, the children too. Local healers journey to the crater to try and appease Kokwana so that she might take mercy on children afflicted with stomach ailments.

Should anyone foolishly arrive at midday or midnight, when Kokwana is most active, it’s believed the old serpent will devour them and stash their bones in a secret cave somewhere on the north slope.

None of this fascinating information is included in any source written for visitors. I can only hope the guides, who are drawn from the local community, bring it up unsolicited, because this, I think, is what Ben Ngubane meant when he talked of the need to preserve the “intangible, living cultural heritage” of the communities.

The site also has significance for paleontological climatologists. But again, there’s nothing about this in the pamphlet.

All in all, I found the visit unsettling. That nervy feeling that comes of approaching the lip had been with me from the moment we turned off the N1 to begin weaving through the sprawl of townships north of Pretoria. The sense of apprehension and claustrophobia was almost inverted when I was inside the crater. Inside the crater, by the side of the pan, it was as if we were in an entirely unpopulated landscape.

But, of course, this was an impossible leap, because the crater is sunk amid a welter of poverty. We’d meant to visit it in 1995, and it was now 2012. The crater was there, as it had been for millions of years. Little else had gone to plan.