Drive out of King, towards Peddie, on the road I know so well. The road I used to travel to and from University every holiday for those years. And so often since. The road to Cape Town. The road to Grahamstown.The road home.

Pass the turn off to the Steve Biko Garden of Remembrance and wonder once again whose idea it was and who is supposed to maintain it. Pass the garage where the bus stops. Under the railway bridge and on, to the open road.

It’s late summer and everything is green. The grass is long, ready for winter. The thorn trees are rich, dark, close to the ground. It’s been a good summer.

Past houses and open veld, a graveyard near the road. Past men working to build a fence around a patch of ground.

Around a bend and there, a small settlement beside the national road. Beside a dam. Behind a fence. I can’t remember it clearly from the early days. I think it was smaller. Just one or two huts visible from the road. Now it is more built up. Houses with gardens. Fields. A sign on the main road – turn-off to a Zimbaba. A real place with a real name on an official name-board. How much of a difference does that make?

We turn off, across the grid, onto the dirt road. A couple of hundred metres on, the road T-junctions at a medium-sized dam. The water is calm and blue on a beautiful, sunny day. Rippling across the day. Gum trees line the other side. They’re invader-trees and are technically no longer welcome in SA but they’re still beautiful beside the dam.

The dirt road is not bad, especially considering the recent rains. We pass some rugby fields. A few soccer posts lie, stricken, overturned, obviously unused, but the rugby field is newly mowed and freshly marked. This part of the world is rugby country.

Turn right after the sports fields and follow a poorly-graded road. Just as we leave the first settlement, three horses are grazing in a paddock not far from the road. They look rich and well-kept after the good season of rain and grass. All the animals look healthy and well.

Along the road, driving slowly on the gravel, we pass sheep and goats. A lamb looks back at me before its mother hurries it over a small rise beside a pool of water. We stop while three donkeys take a leisurely (and reluctant) stroll from the middle of the road. One is a young one, with a shaggy coat in many colours and mournful, watching eyes.

At the village, we pass the high school. It looks well-kept – fresh white paint on the walls, a row of new toilets. Someone must have run a school garden project here once but the garden has gone to grass and weeds. The fence around the school is all intact and shiny and the gates are closed and locked during the school morning. A few younger children watch the car pass from the verandas of their homes.

Brick homes, often with several buildings on each property. And glass windows. Such a contrast to the stark desperation of urban poverty. Poverty here is more subtle, less spoken of, carefully hidden away from the prying eyes of a small community. No less deadly. We pass a house with a 4×4 in the driveway. I wonder who lives there.

Most houses have animals of some sort. A sheep or two grazing in the garden. Some chickens wandering the yard. A goat in the vegetable patch. Cattle. Donkeys. Pigs. There is something so real, so normal about it. My heart sings just a little. This is how the world should look.

Beyond the houses and gardens, the chicken hoks and goat-herds with their animals, past the kraals enclosed with poker-red flowering aloes and the full farm dams, the yellow-green hills of the Eastern Cape roll away into the distance and a thunderstorm begins to gather on the horizon.