Things I grew up with - 1

KARKOER

Karkoer

Citrullus lanatus, also known as wild watermelon, karkoer, t'sama/tsamma, bitter waatlemoen, bitterboela or makataan is endemic to the arid regions of southern Africa.

My first encounter with what I then got to know as a bitterboela was outside Petrusville in the Nothern Cape on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1962. The grownups were having their usual post-prandial snooze and I decided to go for a ride on my bicycle. Now I was very proud of my bike, because it was the only Triumph Sport in the village. OK, the thinner tyres were not ideally suited to the gravel roads of the area, but when we hit harder roads the other boys on their fat-tyred bicycles couldn't keep up with me!

On this particular Sunday afternoon, as I was about to leave, my brother woke up from his nap. He was four years old at the time and really cramped my style.... understandable, because I had been the only child for seven years prior to his arriving on the scene! I decided to take him along for the ride, because otherwise he'd wake up my parents and then I would have been in trouble for not looking after the tyke. 

So we set off on my Triumph with the thin wheels. My brother was astride the crossbar and holding on to the handlebars of the bike. All went well and we were zipping along at a fair old pace on the hard gravel road leading out of town. I remember clearly that I has a Matchbox toy in the right side pocket of my shorts, a model of a red London double-decker bus. 

Suddenly I saw this round, greenish thing in the road - a bitterboela. Hey, I said to my brother, watch how I split this thing with my front wheel!

Of course it did not work out the way I had planned it; a bitterboela has a really hard skin, and so instead of the bike's front wheel neatly splitting the fruit, it instead was sharply deflected by the hard, round ball... The front wheel went to the left. The bicycle followed the front wheel. I went to the right. And my brother followed. So we all went down. First the toy bus hit the hard road, followed by  my right hip, the bicycle's crossbar and lastly my brother. All except my hip were unscathed, unscratched and otherwise undamaged. 

And I learned to respect a bitterboela.

Later, when we arrived in Vredendal (which is on the edge of Namaqualand in the far west of the Western Cape, I discovered that a bitterboela was called a karkoer there. In Namibia it's known as a Tsamma or T'sama, and the Khoi and San people use the fruit as a source of water, while the seeds are roasted and ground to a fine meal. Even the stalks and leaves are eaten. So a very useful plant all in all, just don't try and split one with your bicycle's front wheel!

1960s Triumph Sport Bicycle