Coffee Bay

The coast between the Kei and the Mzimvubu has been Xhosa-speaking country for centuries, farmed and grazed by Thembu and Bomvana communities living in scattered homesteads rather than towns. The shore was known to sailors long before it was settled by outsiders: the run of reefs and river mouths wrecked enough ships to give the coast its name, and survivors of those wrecks were sometimes absorbed into local communities.

The village's own name is explained by one of those wrecks: a ship is said to have lost a cargo of coffee beans off this shore, and the coffee trees that grew from them gave the bay the name it has carried since 1893. British control reached this country late, after the frontier wars of the nineteenth century, and the district was governed as part of the Transkeian Territories, where colonial magistrates ruled alongside chiefs. Under apartheid the area became part of Transkei, declared a nominally independent homeland in 1976 and recognised only by South Africa and the other homelands. It was reincorporated into South Africa in 1994 as part of the new Eastern Cape province.

Coffee Bay itself grew from a trading store and a pair of resort hotels into a stop on the backpacker route, with lodges on the bay and shuttles up to the N2. Tourism now sits alongside farming and remittances as one of the few sources of cash in the district. Roads, electricity and water have arrived unevenly, and plans for coastal development and for a new highway through the region have been contested for years by residents and conservationists alike.

Life here is Xhosa life, and specifically that of the former Transkei, where custom remained strong through the homeland years. Homesteads hold extended families, cattle are wealth as well as food and are central to ceremony, and decisions are taken in meetings with headmen and chiefs as well as elected councillors. Ancestors are addressed at important moments, and church-going and traditional practice usually run side by side in the same family.

Visitors see some of this from a distance. Young men returning from initiation in the hills, their faces and bodies marked with white clay, are a familiar sight in the winter and summer seasons; the rite is private and not a spectacle. Women wear printed cloth, headscarves and beadwork for ceremonies, and the ochre-dyed dress associated with the region appears at weddings and funerals.

Music and dance are part of everyday gathering rather than performance: clapping and call-and-response singing, drumming at ceremonies, and the umrhubhe mouth bow and uhadi bow that gave Xhosa music its characteristic sound. Around the lodges a second culture has grown up, of surfers, hikers and long-stay travellers, and the two meet at guided village walks, football matches on the beach and the informal economy of guiding, cooking and craft that tourism supports.

Only a few hundred people live in Coffee Bay itself, with a much larger population spread through the surrounding homesteads and the villages inland, in a district where poverty and poor health are pervasive. Households are often headed by women and grandparents, because many working-age adults live in Cape Town, Gqeberha or Gauteng and send money home; government grants are the other main income.

The economy is subsistence farming — maize, pumpkins, vegetables, cattle, goats and chickens — plus fishing and gathering from the shore, small shops and the lodges, which are the biggest local employer. Craft work, guiding and transport fill in the rest. There is no bank and only limited electricity supply, and mobile signal is patchy across the hills.

Days follow the light. Cattle are taken out to graze in the morning and brought back at dusk, water is fetched from taps or the river, school children in uniform walk long distances over the hills, and the minibus taxi to Mthatha leaves early and returns in the afternoon. Grant day fills the road. The persistent local issues are the state of the access road, water and electricity supply, distance from clinics and hospitals, and the argument over how far the coast should be developed.

Xhosa cooking is the everyday food. Umngqusho, samp — stamped maize kernels — simmered for hours with sugar beans, is the staple dish, and umphokoqo, a dry crumbly maize porridge, is eaten with amasi, thick soured milk. Imifino, wild greens gathered from the fields, are cooked with maize meal, and amagwinya, fried dough balls sold warm from roadside tables, are the common snack. Meat is eaten mainly at ceremonies, when an animal is slaughtered for the family and the ancestors.

The sea provides the rest. Mussels are prised off the rocks at low tide, crayfish are caught in the shallows, and line fish taken from the rocks and the river mouths are grilled over coals or cooked into a potjie, the slow stew of the three-legged pot. Lodge kitchens combine the two traditions, serving seafood, curries and braais alongside samp and beans.

Umqombothi, the thick, sour home-brewed beer of maize and sorghum, is made for ceremonies and shared from a communal container, and commercial beer and brandy are sold at the shops and taverns. Tea is drunk strong and sweet throughout the day, and rooibos, the red bush tea of the Western Cape, is widely available.