From the Mysterious to the Legendary – Jane Eliza Hasted.

The deed registry confirms that the fifth person to own this small piece of mountainside called “Blue Gums” was Jane Eliza Hasted. First there was P.E. Hugo and then there was the Reverend Leonard Green, who built the Stone Castle, which is now my home. When the Reverend died he left the property to the Boy Scouts who used it as a camp for a little over a decade. After that came Dorothy ____ who owned the place for about the same length of time.

Jane Eliza (left) and Dorothy at Blue Gums – mid 1960’s

 Jane Eliza’s arrival on the scene was idiosyncratic and eccentric, and heralded a  forty-four year alignment between person and place that, as far as Blue Gums is concerned, remains the benchmark for all who will follow.

This is how Jane Eliza herself remembered the moment.

“The very first time I came out in fading light, and a dubious jalopy, along the unknown mountain road it was like coming home. We came first up the outside path, the one hanging above the road, and that road itself hanging over the sea. The late afternoon was timeless on the waters and the great gum trees were still. So then I walked in and was home.”

 “The road itself hanging over the sea”. When Jane Eliza first arrived it was a gravel road. (Note Spider Gum infestation on the sea side)

It took some negotiation for reality to align with Jane Eliza’s feelings and intentions. It appears, however, that Dorothy responded quizzically but positively to an offer to purchase that came from a stranger who had simply wandered up her path on a late afternoon. The property changed hands but Dorothy remained a regular guest and part-time resident for years to come. Still, it was not long before Blue Gums and Jane Eliza Hasted’s identities became inseparable. It is not surprising, given these events, that Jane Eliza regularly proclaimed that “Blue Gums chooses its own”.

This was a typically obscure literary reference on her part, this time to that prolific early twentieth century man of letters, Hillaire Belloc, a graduate of Balliol College in Oxford, who loved his college so dearly that he coined the phrase “Balliol chooses its own”.

One of Belloc’s poems includes the verse:  “Balliol made me, Balliol fed me/ Whatever I had she gave me again”. One can readily imagine Jane Eliza saying the same about Blue Gums.

“Debating with Mr. Belloc is like arguing with a hailstorm” – H.G. Wells

 Before we leave Hillaire Belloc behind for good, it is not possible to resist the temptation to point out that in addition to being a devout Catholic and a dogmatic creationist he regarded Islam as a “great heresy”.  There is a rich irony here. The second-most legendary owner of Blue Gums, the Reverend Leonard Green, an ordained man of the cloth, builds a Muslim prayer niche in the north-west corner of his house. The most legendary owner of Blue Gums, Jane Eliza Hasted coins the phrase “Blue Gums Chooses Its Own” in deference to a man who called Islam a “great heresy”.

It is also thanks to Jane Eliza that many have come to believe that Blue Gums is haunted. It is she who wrote: “It is a haunted house we all think.” But how interesting it is that she continues by saying “Haunted mostly by an attitude of mind. It owns rather than is owned, and all the many folk it owns seem to think alike.”

Jane Eliza outside the Stone House at her beloved “Blue Gums”

 It is almost time to ponder what those who have been and are currently owned by Blue Gums think of the invasive alien trees after which it has been named. On this topic it is unlikely that the many folk it owns will be found to think alike, for attitudes of mind are fickle things and what was considered acceptable in one generation, as South Africans ought to know only too well, may indeed be a great heresy in the next.

Blue Gums Most Enduring – and Endearing – Mystery

Whenever Lalu Abdul tethered his horses to P.E, Hugo’s gums he would have looked up to the flat promontory where the stone house now stands. Surely he would have been lured there by the sweeping views of the sea and the towering cliffs of the mountain and decided this secluded spot, halfway between the farms of Cape Point and the village of Simon’s Town, was the perfect place to break his journey. Perhaps after washing in the perennial stream that Hugo’s gums depleted but seldom staunched, he would lay out his prayer mat, face the “Qiblah” and recite his prayers. Given the fact that dawn is the time when the Blue Gums sky is often a fiery red, and the fact that as a fugitive Lalu Abdul would have travelled under the cover of darkness, it is tempting to think that more often than not it was the dawn prayer, “Fajr” that he recited here.

Blue Gums Sunrise

The question still remains: how did the padre know that there once was a Muslim holy man who prayed on the flat ground, seventy metres above the sea, where he later decided to build his house? The Padre was a worldly man, and as a result perhaps less constrained by convention than most of his fellow white South Africans. Who knows? His ecclesiastic interests may have been non-sectarian, and when he encountered the members of the Muslim community of Simon’s Town he may have shown more than a cursory interest in their experiences and they may have told him a bit about their own history of this part of the world.  But exactly why a priest chose to build a “mihrab” in his mountainside house must remain, for now, one of the secrets that Blue Gums will not give up.

In my mind’s eye I see the ghost of the old priest turn away from his fellow carousers and nod his head ever so slightly towards a turbaned phantom leading a white horse down the watercourse, and then heading up the road to Simon’s Town.

Oh and one last thing … it seems as if the story of Lalu Abdul, the sultan from Indonesia, brought to Simon’s Town in chains, only to escape and live at Antonie’s Gat in Cape Point, is a fiction. Then again, one does not have to believe in ghosts to use them to reconstruct a more balanced history of our past. There were indeed Sultans and Imams who became runaway slaves living in the Mountains of the Cape. There is a Kramat above Runciman Drive in Simon’s Town. There is a hidden history of Simon’s Town – the history of the descendants of slaves.

And Blue Gums is just the kind of place where spiritual renegades make their mark … but there still remains the mystery of the “mihrab” that was meticulously laid out and built by a Christian priest.

The Mihrab Built by a Christian Cleric

What does this story of Lalu Abdul have to do with Blue Gums and its ghosts, you well may ask? The thread that connects this fascinating history of religion, rebellion and runaway slaves to Blue Gums, leads us to the corner of the stone house that faces north-east, across the blue-grey waters of False Bay to the mainland of Africa, and to Mecca beyond.

This corner of the stone house is unmistakably designed as a “mihrab”, an Islamic prayer niche. It is positioned with incredible accuracy, in the direction of the “Ka’aba” in Mecca. All Muslims around the world face the “Ka’aba” during prayers. (This is called facing the “Qiblah”).

The Mihrab in the North-East Corner of the Stone House – as it Appears Today

 The stone house was built in the early 1920’s, by Padre Green, to replace the tiny barracks that he built when he first arrived here and fondly called “The Good ‘ole”. The stone house was a very simple structure: two square buildings, the smaller one closer to the mountain, and the larger one closer to the sea. The “mihrab” in the north-east corner, overlooking the sea, was all the more striking because of the simplicity of the rest of the house. The longstanding and utterly plausible assumption, offered as evidence for decades was that the Reverend Green, being a navy chaplain, who had travelled the seas for many years before settling at Blue Gums, based his design of the stone house on a West African slave fort.

 

Blue Gums Stone House Modeled on a West African Slave Fort?

But this explanation does not quite fit with the dedication to detail that accompanied the inclusion of the “mihrab” into the simplistic design of the remainder of the house. Before the entire living room floor had to be replaced in 2001 because of incessant flooding, there were three jade stones, positioned in a triangle in the middle of the “mihrab”, exactly where a Muslim, in ritual prayer ,would place his palms and his forehead (“sajdah”).

 For the first few years of my stay in Blue Gums I would often wonder why a Christian Cleric had gone to such lengths to reconstruct a Muslim prayer niche in his house. It was not likely that Muslims would have been part of the first generation of Blue-gummers, who visited the place at the Padre’s invitation during the two world wars. South Africa’s racial segregation would have made that extremely improbable.

Blue Gums Prayer Niche – Facing the Qiblah.

The mystery continued to perplex me, until my dear friend and Blue Gums benefactor, Dr. Adnaan Mia, got me interested in the history of the Imams and runaway slaves of the “deep-south”.

And that is where horses make their return to the Blue Gums saga. There is a story that Lalu Abdul befriended one of the farmers who had been given land at Cape Point, and that every few months he would borrow the farmer’s white horse and ride into Simon’s Town to see his family and his followers. Perhaps the very shaded grove that P.E. Hugo created fifty years earlier was what first drew the fugitive from Indonesia to this place. The Blue Gums, now stately and tall, offered Lalu Abdul’s horse the shade they were intended to provide to the horses of the self-same colonists who had posted notices saying that the runaway slave had to be captured at any cost.

 

Lalu Abdul Dea Koasa

Based on the information I have been able to gather over the years, Blue Gums ghosts, if they existed, would be a very gregarious, sociable bunch. But there would be one ghost who would visit occasionally and although he would be polite to the carousers he would always remain aloof.

In an exquisite piece of dramatic irony the current inhabitants of the southern-most section of the Cape Peninsula, (either deliberately or out of a genuine ignorance of the history of  American Slavery), refer to this area as the “Deep-South”. Without knowing it, they are alluding to the hidden, rather than forgotten, history of False Bay, south of Simon’s Town.

The States in Dark Red Comprise the American Deep South, the “Cotton States” that depended on Slavery for Plantation Labour.

 The solitary ghost that haunts Blue Gums, usually just before dawn, is the ghost of Lalu Abdul Dea Koasa.  On those nights, just before sunrise, soft sounds of prayer are said to emanate from the north-east corner of the living room in the Stone House.

Who is this man, and why do I like to imagine that on some nights, the whisperings of the wind before dawn, is Blue Gums’ way of paying homage to the times, over 150 years ago, that he may have laid down his prayer rug here and faced the direction of the “qiblah”?

The Holy Qiblah, Mecca, Saudi Arabia

The year was 1752. The Island of Sumbawa, Indonesia was under occupation of the mighty Dutch East India Company – the self-same company that first colonized the Cape of Good Hope.

Dutch East India Company Coin

 

Oppressed, but with their inner strength unconquered, many resolute islanders rose in defiance and fought fierce battles with the Dutch. Two leaders of the rebellion, Lalu Abdul Dea Koasa and his son Lalu Ismail Dea Malela were eventually captured. Shackled and chained, they were banished for life as political exiles – to South Africa.

They were brought to Simon’s Bay and incarcerated in the Slave Dungeons at the Old Court House. After three years of wasting away in the cold, dark dungeon, Lalu Abdul managed to escape by digging a hole through the wall. He took one of the boats that had been tied alongside the prison, and headed out to sea.

Slavery at the Cape

Lalu Abdul eventually landed close to Bordjiesdrif, just north of Buffels Bay. Word eventually got out that he had been seen in the Cape Point Mountains. Lalu Abdul lay low for several years – spending time in what is now known as “Antonie’s Gat”, a cave near the beach at Buffelsbay.

Local Capetonian families claim to have discovered ancient books, apparently written by Lalu Abdul; books that the Muslim community of Simon’s Town has passed from generation to generation. One passage reads, more or less, as follows: “”When (I) stood on Cape Point Mountain and watched the mesmerizing views of the Atlantic Ocean on the left and the Indian Ocean on the right, I would think this was a perfect place that had been chosen for my safety; isolated and far away in distance and in time from the memory and the danger of imprisonment in the dreaded underground prison room for slaves in Simon’s Bay. At Cape Point I could feel peace through walking every day through the environment, studying, mountains, flora, fauna, wildlife, and capturing my observations with notes and drawings in my diary.”

Beautiful Shoreline Near Antonie’s Gat

 It is believed that the slave community of Cape Town’s “deep south” would come to Antonie’s Gat to receive their teachings from their spiritual and political leaders.

 When Lalu Abdel died he was buried in Simon’s Town. There are those who believe that it is he who was buried in the Kramat just above Runciman Drive in the vicinity of Goede Gift, where to this day Muslims from far and wide come to pay their respects.

The Simon’s Town Kramat

They Say That Blue Gums is Haunted

I have been told on a number of occasions, and by different people that Blue Gums is haunted by friendly spirits who have been associated with the place at some or other time in the past. There are P.E. Hugo’s horses in the ravine, neighing and stamping their hooves, especially on moonless winter nights when the north-wester is howling and a cape storm approaches. There are the sailors in their hammocks swinging gently from hooks suspended from the living room ceiling, placed there by the late Reverend Green. The Reverend himself has been a resident of the spirit realm for over fifty years and supposedly carouses  every night with his erstwhile guests in the “Good ‘Ole”, which is the name he gave to the very first house at Blue Gums – a hobbit like structure that he carved into the mountainside.

“The Good ‘ole”, as it Looks Today. 

My wife, who is much more spiritually inclined than I am, is convinced that we share our home with these and many other phantoms. I am not sure that she has ever seen them, but like former residents, who are now themselves a part of Blue Gums’ spiritual retinue, she makes them welcome and invites them into our house and into her meditations.

Many people who visit Blue Gums are quick to ascribe a spiritual quality to it. This is not surprising. The sweeping grandeur of the ocean at its feet and the majestic mountain soaring behind it make it into a cathedral of natural beauty.

Blue Gums from the Swartkop Peak

But it is the grove of blue gums themselves that have given some people reason to believe that “Blue Gums” is not only a spiritual place, but a place of spirits. When the south-easter whistles through the tree tops it does indeed sound like the howl of phantoms; while on still, moonless nights the gentle gurgle of the sea against the rocky outcrops some fifty metres below the house can easily be mistaken for the merry-making of departed souls.

While I do not believe in the spirit world myself I embrace the mythology, for it is a wonderful metaphor that binds the dead to the living and populates our present with the richness of Blue Gums’ past.

It is time to get to know Blue Gums’ phantoms a little better, and in the process find out more about its history.

The Rev. Green, First Person to Own a Title-Deed for Blue Gums. Now One of the Ghosts that Frequent it?