‘Kinship with the nonhuman’ — reflections on bike riding and being

Sunset at Em’seni (Photograph: Mark Heywood)

3 Dec 2024

In an era when many people are turning a blind eye to the human horrors of a genocide, are complicit in ecocide and normalising the abnormal every day, there’s clearly something going badly wrong with human compassion and solidarity. To rediscover our connections with one another, we need also to rediscover our connections to the earth.

Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe terms our age as that of “the fabricable being in a fabricated world” and observes how “human beings are now traversed, from one side to the other, by objects that work us as much as we work them.” He calls these objects (think your smartphone, smart TV, Siri etc) our “psycho-prosthetic” limbs.

In the themes of her latest novel, There are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak suggests that if we are to counter self-capture by our machines, we need to develop strategies that consciously seek to re-establish our relationships with one another and with nature. We need to reconnect ourselves to the Earth, literally.

Subconsciously this may have been why, in mid-September, on the spur of the moment I decided to take up an invitation to ride the Old Mutual Go2Berg.

Go2Berg is an annual mountain bike race, sponsored by Old Mutual – which has renewed its sponsorship for 2025 – that takes place between Frankfort, a declining agricultural town on the edge of the Wilge River in the Free State, and the Champagne Castle sports resort in the middle of the Ukhahlamba Drakensberg. Its 500 off-road kilometres are an invitation to get down and dirty with the surface of a large swathe of our beloved country. That’s time and miles enough for intimacy with nature, to think and feel a connection with the Earth.

I have written about the organisation, people and ethos of this race before. I have marvelled at the beauty of its route.

Read more: From my saddle I saw South Africa in its Sunday best

But this time I want to offer a homage to the nonhuman experience it offers. I want to try to describe the feelings and thoughts that arose whilst surrendering my body to touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing.

After all, much as we neglect them, these five basic senses are vital to our being. They stimulate our thoughts, evoke wonder, and release joy and love.

Bodyfulness is a key to mindfulness and vice versa. Journey with me in my attempt to find words for those feelings.

Bike life

Bike with a view: looking back towards Spion Kop. A week later this pass was blanketed in snow. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

These are some of my observations as I rode my bike across the beloved country, witnessing, absorbing and internalising whilst using my legs and lungs to turn the wheels, my eyes to hold to the path, my balance to navigate over and between rocks, trying to keep my two-wheeled friend astride.

The physicality and spirituality of hills: the sedentary man has forgotten the shape of our landscape and its feel, but ah, our land is so full of shape; big hills, small hills, gentle ones, violent ones, shy ones and brazen ones.

A hill is never just a hill. One hill is never the same as the next.

The colour of the light that falls upon hills in the morning is different from the shadows that spread out of them in the evening. The luminous morning sun that bounces off the sandstone of the Maluti mountains is different from the silhouettes of the Berg as the sun withdraws behind them.

On a bike, a hill in the morning with fresh legs feels different from a hill in the evening with tired legs. The climb up a sandstone Mesa, Mount Paul (a hill most people will never have heard of) bouldered, but largely stripped of vegetation, is different from the climb up Spioenkop, a dense wilderness of plant and animal life.

Mbekhseni Kunene, a respected builder of single-track MTB routes, has engineered a pathway through the dense bush up the steep north side of Spioenkop, the infamous mountain where one of the decisive battles of the Boer war was fought in 1900.

The trail rises through 49 switchbacks. It cuts a tunnel through the tangled treescape, as you labour your way upward to the summit.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a huge climb, less than 200 metres, in fact. But as you ride the last few metres to reach the mass graves and war memorial that adorn the peak, you exude the intimacy of your engagement with the land and the gradient it put you through.

Once this was a place where several hundred soldiers died in hails of bullets. Today, the wars have moved elsewhere. On these trails death now happens by nature: slowly, unobserved, life goes into reverse. In minute but perpetual movement branches wither and dry, bark peels off, new shoots and saplings idle their way to the sun. A perpetual intertwined dance of birth, life and death.

In the few valleys where no roads run, nature has been left to its own devices. Their slopes are forested with communities of mountain aloes (Aloe Marlothii), whose trunks are a testament to their ages. The aloes live here, always, mute (or so we think) markers of time without measure and life without humans.

Dotted among them is the cabbage tree (Kiepersol), its darker green foliage making it stand out against the burnt brown of the bush. The Kiepersol (who goes by different names in different languages), is a more solitary species. Holding its own – gnarled, fire resistant, ponderous and pondering.

The wind and its caress

Day three of Go2Berg is a long 100-plus kilometre ride between Clarens, a tourist village nestled in a protective cluster of Maluti mountains and the historic Windmill Farm, sitting exposed on the edge of the Oliviershoek Pass. Once it was a solitary farm, now it sits on the edge of the R74, at the head of the road’s plunge from high to low veld.

On that day, the riders battled a headwind all the way. It made the bike feel heavier, taxed the legs and buffeted your face.

When the wind is behind you, you can sail. When it’s coming at you from the front you toil. It reminds you of your place in the world, literally! You loathe and love it in alternate measures. But you are always aware of it.

In day-to-day life, we mostly ignore the wind or treat it as a nuisance. Yet the constant sound of wind, its rush and push, is beautiful. The wind is a wonder of the world.

Water, water, everywhere (and nowhere)

Elif Shafak’s latest novel, There are Rivers in the Sky, has a wonder of water as its central theme. She describes it as “the oldest and most common substance ever known. Older than the earth. Older than the sun. And millions of years older than the solar system.”

As it gets scarcer, humans are learning how we have taken water for granted. Old Mutual Go2Berg helped restore its presence in my being.

On the third day, after riding across the thirsty lands of the Free State, you suddenly come on what feels like a biblical inland sea.

The Sterkfontein dam, fed by the streams that flow off the Drakensberg, is a vast freshwater body. When we arrived at its edge and rode across the 4km earthen dam wall (said to be the longest in the world), the day’s strong winds had made waves on the water’s surface, giving it the vitality of a choppy sea, sans seagulls and sea smell.

The water stored in the Sterkfontein dam doesn’t come in plastic bottles. Before it’s tunnelled to feed the taps of Gauteng, it gives life freely to all the species that live in it, fly above it, feed off it.

A day’s ride later at the foot of Spioenkop is a dry riverbed that Mbhekseni cleverly incorporated into the riders’ trail. It’s a ghost of rivers past. Its steep banks, twists and turns, narrowings and openings, were formed by powerful flows of water off the hillsides. Riding through it is like taking a roller coaster.

Hold on to your handlebars.

Spion Kop’s Grand Canyon: ghosts of river’s past. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

The next day you ride out of the overnight stop at Em’seni along the banks of the great Tugela/Thukela river. The Thukela has its head in a stream high in the Drakensberg mountains, that falls off a cliff’s edge.

By the time the riders encounter it, the river is mature and wide, moving slowly across the land. As it goes about its own business it gives off nothing of its rich human and natural history. It’s a river of multitudes, a life force you can never hope to comprehend.

I paused my pedals for a few minutes and stopped to pay it respect.

There was no noise, but the sound of bird chatter, wind and the responsive murmuring of trees.

Before tea, coffee and Coca-Cola, long before we learnt to flavour our drinks and were made addicted to sugar, there was water. For millennia, water was what sustained human life. It still does. But we mistreat it.

Today, there are few places in the world left where you can drink water from a natural source. The streams of the Drakensberg are one of those places. After hours of riding the taste of water to slake the thirst is second to none.

Snakes and single tracks

As I was riding down from the summit of Spioenkop a puff adder was crossing the path in front of me. Our encounter lasted less than three seconds. Its dappled brown body slithering across the path, my rapidly approaching wheels. A sudden burst of fear about what would happen if we had collided was quickly replaced by wonder at the improbability of our encounter. It went its way. I went to mine.

Although we live in an age of greed and self, although the middle class and upwards use money and privilege to lock themselves away behind walls, in truth humans crave camaraderie and contact. They joy in others’ joy. They marvel at individual endeavours.

Go2berg works with local public schools along its way to assist them with essential fundraising. They run water stations and organise overnight villages and the rider’s registration fees pay them a good night’s fee for doing so. It’s usually their biggest fundraising event of the year.

After hours of pedalling a bike, there’s a strange joy in arriving at a water point being run by schoolchildren, keen to fill water bottles, provide sweets and succour, infectious in laughter and smiles, dancing on the finish line of a long day.

When your body has been made really hungry by exercise, a piece of chocolate or boerewors never tastes so good. But a child’s smile, or a heartfelt word of encouragement, is just as energising.

Sunset at Em’seni (Photograph: Mark Heywood)

Before I conclude, let me say that what I have tried to describe owes itself to the science of a few centuries ago, the bicycle.

Once upon a time, the bicycle was a revolutionary development in transport and technology. But since then, our addiction to the internal combustion engine hasn’t just destroyed our environment and driven climate change. It has also disoriented our sense of distance and scale, as well as our appreciation of the constant roll of the land and awareness of everything on it.

In the rising heat of the Anthropocene, it would do no harm, and a lot of good, if we found our way back onto it both as a mode of local transport and a source of personal pleasure.

Feeling human again – breathing, dissolving yourself in the bigger scheme of existence – knowing our physical limitations and possibilities, is essential for restoring human feeling and agency, for reestablishing connection.

It reminds us of the miracle of ourselves, that the body and mind are self-sufficient for joy, their own treasure trove.

The moral of this story is not that everyone can, could or should go out and find a race like Old Mutual Go2Berg – although for those that can I would highly recommend it (you can see the 2025 route overview here).

Bodyfulness can just as easily be found at a weekly 5km Parkrun of which there are now 217 in South Africa.

Rather, it is that there is value in rediscovering our kinship with the Earth, the air. And that may be vital to our ultimate survival. DM

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