Atop a Mountain, South Africa’s Ghosts

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High up in the Amatola Mountains in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, the village of Hogsback sits atop a plateau, surrounded by mist and a primeval forest. It’s a small place, with one main road, a handful of shops and a large, aching history.

For as long as Alexia Webster can remember, she has visited Hogsback with her family at least once a year, driving nine hours from their home in Johannesburg to a cluster of cabins her great-grandfather built nearly a century ago. To a young child, Hogsback was a mystical place full of ancient trees and twisted foliage, like something out of a J. R. R. Tolkien novel. In fact, Hogsback has often been misidentified as Tolkien’s inspiration for “Lord of the Rings.”

“I remember being very little and walking through the forests,” Ms. Webster said. “It was really fertile grounds for the magic.”

But Hogsback’s story is painfully real.

Long before white settlers arrived, the land was home to Xhosa tribes who lived in the valley and grazed cattle on the mountain, where tradition held that their ancestral spirits resided. In the 1880s, after the Xhosa people had lost much of their land to the British during the Frontier Wars â€" a series of bloody battles that spanned a century â€" an English couple arrived in Hogsback. Enchanted by the cool, misty climate, which was much like Britain’s, they began cultivating the land, planting fruit orchards and berry bushes from their homeland.

The hamlet grew. The pioneers’ sons married Xhosa women, and for a brief time, a mixed-race family thrived in Hogsback. Years later, as South Africa’s apartheid laws took hold, the family was labeled “colored,” stripped of its land and driven off the mountain into exile. By the 1960s, Hogsback was a predominantly white village.

“It became this kind of strange construction,” Ms. Webster said. “Like an odd little England existing high up above the rest of South Africa. There were tea parties and boating clubs, but because it’s such a beautiful place, it also became a refuge for hippies.”

Ms. Webster’s childhood memories of Hogsback revolve around her extended family, whose South African roots are forever entangled with their British ancestry.

Alexia Webster A non-indigenous pine tree.

“We would have these huge family gatherings where all my grandparents’ children and grandchildren would come together,” she said. “There was no electricity. It was very rustic. We were all peeing into potties and making fires in wood stoves. In the evenings, we would gather outside, somebody would build a huge bonfire, and my grandmother would bring out her guitar and start singing old British folk songs.”

Otherwise, Ms. Webster spent her time in the forest. “There’s a really strong sense of there being more there â€" something more to the world and to life,” she said. “But there’s also this kind of anxiety, these ghosts.”

One night, when she was 17, Ms. Webster was attacked while walking alone in the woods. Her childhood naïveté about Hogsback disappeared.

Her recent photographs â€" which are part of a book series that begins publishing this month, “POV Female,” featuring five photographers from Johannesburg â€" are an effort to capture her complex feelings about the village.

Ms. Webster was lucky; she struggled free from her attacker. But the violent episode made her acutely aware of the inequalities that still haunt Hogsback. Under apartheid, black South Africans were not permitted to own land on the mountain; they lived as temporary workers in the backyards of their white employers and were separated from their families in the valley below. Although they are free to settle in Hogsback today, most cannot afford to live there.

“There’s a growing hostility or tension because things aren’t changing,” she said. “There’s definitely a desire on the part of some white residents to keep it the way it is, and obviously black residents are getting quite frustrated.”

Ms. Webster also began to consider her own role in Hogsback’s history, as the descendant of a white family that helped colonize the land, and one with a deep and abiding love for the place. On the one hand, Hogsback feels like an ancestral home, she said, because so many of her forebears passed through there. On the other, it feels like “stolen land.”

“I’ve never known how to make peace with that feeling of being at home in one way, and in another way, an intruder in the place,” she said.

Photographing Hogsback has helped Ms. Webster connect to the village in a more realistic way. “Before, I felt part of the spiritual space, and now I feel like part of the community, and also invested in making it work,” she said. “If Hogsback can come together and work as a holistic and viable society, then that means that it can work in South Africa, and that means that I can work.”

Slowly, things are changing on the mountain, despite a stubborn colonial nostalgia. There are job-creation programs and low-cost housing, but nothing has fully ameliorated the lingering injustices.

“Hogsback feels like a metaphor for a lot of what’s happening in South Africa now,” Ms. Webster said. “At the moment, there’s a real sense of pessimism, a sense that there’s a lot still to do, a lot still left over from apartheid that hasn’t been addressed, a lot of change that still needs to happen. White South Africans still run the vast majority of businesses and the vast majority of land, and there hasn’t been a proper transfer. It isn’t an equal society. It’s a very unequal society.”

Ms. Webster said she had just begun to photograph the village. “If a small little community like Hogsback, which seems so broken in some ways, can be healed,” she said, “then maybe it can be a place to look to for answers, and a place of hope.”

Alexia Webster Peeking through an ocean of clouds, the village of Hogsback in the Amatola Mountains sits more than 4,500 feet above sea level.

Along with Ms. Webster, the “POV Female” series, out this month, showcases photographs from Tracy Edser, Nadine Hutton, Lisa King and Nontsikelelo Veleko.

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