The first British military ‘kibbutz’ ever established with a big difference was my destination on one occasion 61 years ago when I was working in Africa as a foreign correspondent and journalist.
This establishment was on the largely uninhabited Limpopo Highveld of what was the Northern Transvaal in South Africa and was known as OFCOLACO, built shortly after the First World War by demobilised and retired British Army officers from India. The name they gave to their new remote wilderness outpost was an acronym for a retirement business registered as the Officers of the Colonial Land Company.
The idea of setting up a kibbutz came about during an officers’ mess meal in Calcutta in 1917 when a small group of hardy senior British soldiers decided they did not want to return to the cold winters of post-war British suburban life after having tasted the freedom of the warm and wide open spaces of the Sub-Continent.
Without further ado, they were persuaded by one of their kind, who had fought during the two Boer Wars in the late 1800s, that the wide open spaces of sunny South Africa’s northern mountain-strewn Highlands was just the place for them to establish themselves for the rest of their ebbing lives. Their informant had excited their imaginations by explaining that the area of his choice had already been described as the mysterious’ Land of the Silver Mist’ due to its high altitude above sea level.
As long-time professional soldiers, this adventurous group of single greybeards immediately set about travelling by sea to South Africa and eventually journeyed by old Ford Model T cars, an ox wagon and other antique means to their chosen and remote Limpopo district. There, they bought a large tract of bush land and built their kibbutz, just as they would have set up a military camp on some desolate foreign frontier.
I visited OFCOLACO on my way to South West Africa to climb deep within its high granite Brandberg Mountains in search of an archaeological art treasure believed to be within a hidden rock overhang and dubbed as “The White Lady.”
But I first needed to satisfy my intrigue by knowing how the officers’ kibbutz was faring in the face of the spreading tentacles of modern society in the 1950s, so very distant from life in India so many years before. When I arrived at the officers’ settlement, I was initially kept at bay by a semi- locked gate, a sentry box and an old notice demanding privacy.
Fortunately for me, however, I managed to talk my way into this hidden sanctum from the outside world to discover a no-man’s land of cheerful eccentricity.
To my amazement, the retired troopers had set up a complete village on the style of an army camp with an officers’ mess in a combined club and church building, a regimental headquarters and a NAFI- style grocery with individual houses erected just as the troopers had raised army tents in their former serving wartime capacity.
Old, tattered Union Jack flags and regimental colours adorned flagpoles on the property, and one was greeted by very stern manly handshakes and salutes with khaki pants and shirts being the fashion of the day. An old bugler was also summoned to give me an official welcome by several members of OFCOLACO’s ex-military flock.
After getting to know some of the original moustached and straight backed old soldiers, I was told how the military kibbutz was built near the hippo-filled Selati River and how these bulldozing animals had continuously had to be fought off from flattening the kibbutz’s initial stone and mud walls. At first, wandering lions had also to be frightened away by volleys of bullets fired by old army rifles and even older well used trigger fingers.
In order to make a living, rather than having to rely on their meagre army pensions, the men of war behind this old-style commune had planted citrus and semi-tropical fruit orchards which they exploited commercially. They also grew their own food staples and were literally self-sufficient at a time when basic items were hard to come by from the distant small town of Tzaneen.
A fascinating aspect of the OFCOLACO recruits-cum-shareholders was the fact that they had for a time initially decided that no women would ever be allowed to enter their newly-created male territory but this strict order was soon dropped as loneliness overtook them — causing some of the regimented kibbutz villagers to start smuggling in girlfriends from the outside world.
As time went by, the old soldiers married their younger sweethearts and young families were sprouted to provide the basis of OFCOLACO town today, still inhabited by some of the former soldiers’ descendants. Love had eventually won through the tough armour of stern military life.
When I bid farewell to OFCOLACO and to the handful of surviving old warriors from the 1914-18 war and their family members, I realised the truth of the historic saying that “no man is an island unto himself,” whether it is in India, in Britain or in the wilderness of far-flung Africa.
Today, the small military settlement of OFCOLACO is a small town reportedly well known for its avocado and mango orchards planted by the men from the Sub-Continent so many years ago. Its main buildings are now a petrol station, a supermarket and bottle shop with houses still carrying evidence of their early military beginnings.
After this interesting adventure to OFCOLACO, my next important port of call was in the foothills of South West Africa’s mighty Brandberg Mountain where I had to meet a student associate of the well-known French anthropologist, the Abbe Henri Breuil, who a few years earlier had startled historians over a rock painting called “The White Lady of the Brandberg Mountains.” Breuil had established that the painting was over 2,000 years old, and he believed it clearly showed that it was identical to cave paintings in Crete, suggesting that ancient Greek explorers had visited Africa long before the continent was known to the Western European world.
I accompanied Breuil’s young student on a rock climb of intensity up the craggy side of South West Africa’s highest mountain. We eventually found the rock shelter where some bushman artist had meticulously drawn a picture of a white woman leading a tribe of dark skinned people.
This immediately made me think of the famed Queen of Sheba who ventured down Africa from Ethiopia. But I was instantly reminded by Breuil’s young scholar that my contention was totally wrong and that the painting by ancient dwellers in the area was really an archaeological dilemma with no scientific answers.
This extraordinary very large rock painting has still not been seen by many people as its exact location is currently kept under wraps these days and its heritage site is protected and heavily guarded by iron bars. To view the “White Lady” also involves an almost heroic mountain gorge climb.
When I scrutinised the painting, I could clearly distinguish a White woman holding a hunting bow in one hand and, dressed as a Sharman of old, leading the way among wild African antelope at the head of an energetic troupe of Black male followers.
From my close inspection at the time, I still believe “The White Lady” could be the Queen of Sheba who, it is said, mystically travelled with a caravan of supporters down Darkest Africa in search of diamonds and gold for her lover, the biblical King Solomon, by whom she is supposed to have had a child.
Although I have continuously been told I am very wrong with this possible explanation, it is interesting that ancient scriptures recall a “queen of the south” who travelled through Africa with a great retinue carrying gold and precious stones.
Many people in Africa’s more northern countries, such as Nigeria, still stoutly believe that the Queen of Sheba was an adventurous woman determined to find treasure as gifts to the all-powerful King Solomon who later seduced her and by whom she had a god-like child later crowned Emperor Menelik l of Arkum and Ethiopia.
After my initial visit to OFCOLACO and my arduous climb to meet the “White Lady,” I had twice discovered within one amazing week that love has always been eternal and to love even only once is to live forever, even if it is in a rocky African cave.