Confusing vocabulary

Question

Hello, I can't understand the meaning of this sentence, can you help me?

A slope is a football field because racing youngsters are using it for that purpose, and marks one of the 'rehabilitation' villages established to control landless people and soil erosion caused by random grazing: several hundred rounds of mud and thatch instead of hilltop crowns of two or three, the new tin flash of a windmill, kilometers of wire fencing.

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

Where did you find this text? What is the wider context?

Clive

Katrinarc · Answer

It's an essay by Nadine Gordimer, written in 1977. Here there is a bit more of the text:

A torch-light procession of hundreds of winter-blooming aloes – red-flame, blue-flame, white-flame – passes a church upon a hill in an infinity of empty hills. A range of shadows – the Drakensberg Mountains that form Transkei's north-east border – fades with the light that is leaving a feminine lands cape of classical curves broken here and there by ravines intimately furred with virgin forest. Where this has been replaced by afforestation already there is the inappropriate European dusk gathered by Northern pine. A slope is a football field because racing youngsters are using it for that purpose, and marks one of the 'rehabilitation' villages established to control landless people and soil erosion caused by random grazing: several hundred rounds of mud and thatch instead of hilltop crowns of two or three, the new tin flash of a windmill, kilometers of wire fencing. Many women carrying across their heads loads of wood twice their height, and one or two elderly men in old business suits on horseback are making their way along concourses undefined as the football field. Broad tracks made by ox-drawn sleds lead only to sources of firewood and water. For me, on the way to places with onomatopoeic names, Tabankulu, Lusikisiki, there is the one fierce road. Stones and ruts; no signposts. As if to confuse an invader – but the invader is merely one who doesn't know the signs of the terrain so firmly staked within the lifetime range of the people who live here that they walk alone, in the dark, old, female, as surely as and much more securely than western contemporaries find the way home from a suburban bus stop.

Clive · Answer

Hi,

It's an essay by Nadine Gordimer, written in 1977. Here there is a bit more of the text:

A torch-light procession of hundreds of winter-blooming aloes – red-flame, blue-flame, white-flame – passes a church upon a hill in an infinity of empty hills. A range of shadows – the Drakensberg Mountains that form Transkei's north-east border – fades with the light that is leaving a feminine lands cape of classical curves broken here and there by ravines intimately furred with virgin forest. Where this has been replaced by afforestation already there is the inappropriate European dusk gathered by Northern pine. A slope is a football field because racing youngsters are using it for that purpose, and marks one of the 'rehabilitation' villages established to control landless people and soil erosion caused by random grazing: several hundred rounds of mud and thatch instead of hilltop crowns of two or three,

Perhaps each round of mud and thatch refers to each primitive hut that has been built as part of the 'rehabilitation villages. Perhaps the hilltop crowns are the hills that were formerly there before the soil erosion, possibly with forest trees on top.

the new tin flash of a windmill, kilometers of wire fencing. Many women carrying across their heads loads of wood twice their height, and one or two elderly men in old business suits on horseback are making their way along concourses undefined as the football field. Broad tracks made by ox-drawn sleds lead only to sources of firewood and water. For me, on the way to places with onomatopoeic names, Tabankulu, Lusikisiki, there is the one fierce road. Stones and ruts; no signposts. As if to confuse an invader – but the invader is merely one who doesn't know the signs of the terrain so firmly staked within the lifetime range of the people who live here that they walk alone, in the dark, old, female, as surely as and much more securely than western contemporaries find the way home from a suburban bus stop.

Clive

Katrinarc · Answer

Thank you very much!!

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