He’s the Crow Man, the Junkyard Guy or the Master Baker of the Karoo. Above all, Dirk van Rensburg has the precious gift of storytelling.

We’ve been hanging around Karoo scrap a lot lately. Ancient car wrecks, in particular. My family was into the second-hand metal business back in the 60s and I grew up across the road from our scrapyard. Ace Metals in Pretoria was my childhood palace, fortress and battleground.

My wife, Jules, likes scrap because she’s an environmentalist who thinks one should use stuff many times over before junking it. She loves it that Karoo people make art out of junk. Outa Lappies from Prince Albert Station is one of her favourite Karoo people.

So we like scrap. We often bring it home and display it proudly on our bookshelves. That’s why when our Williston mate Pieter Naudé told us about the famous baker of Calvinia and his predilection for the old, charming and broken, our ears pricked up. At the time we were sitting in the Naudés’ colourful  ‘scrapyard’, called The Williston Mall, drinking very pleasant red wine out of a bag – which could later be used as a silver balloon.

About halfway through the papsak, while we were admiring a rusty wheelbarrow full of flowers, Pieter said, “You think I’ve got the collecting disease bad? You should see my friend Dirk van Rensburg over in Calvinia. He’s really sick, man.”

The minute I meet Dirk van Rensburg and his delightfully hippie-chic wife Sonja, I know there’s going to be a party. And so there is, with us dwelling around another papsak at their kitchen table after having walked through (and I know these are fighting words) the funkiest backyard in the Karoo. In between Bakes Bakery and the Van Rensburg home is a collection of almost-priceless enamel signs garnered from farms, far-flung chicken runs and dusty township homes. Dirk collects anything: old cards, photographs, road signs and ancient farm implements – all arranged into a colourful display of throwaway art.

The more you stroll down the rabbit hole of collectibles with Dirk, the more you realise he’s simply crazy about his wife, his kids, his baking and his junk. And when you hand the mike over to the amiable man, you find out why.

“I grew up in the Kalahari,” he says, sipping on his nine millionth beer, eyes and speech clear as anything (while my treads are beginning to thlip).

“I lived with my father in the Sand Kalahari on a piece of land that initially had no water. My brother and sister were packed off to boarding school and it was just Dad and me. We built a one-room shack with a sand floor, grass walls and a corrugated iron roof and called it the Duinebos Hotel. On clear nights we would drag the single bed out, lie on it and look up at the stars.

“Borehole people were constantly drilling for water so Dad could start farming. We washed ourselves in the water that had been used all day to sharpen and temper the drill bits. Once the borehole people had left for the day, we’d jump in and wash. All we ate was springbok biltong and cream from our cow. (Yum, I think blearily, because I haven’t had supper yet.)

“We lived wild.”

Dirk’s love for baking was born when a woman named Ou Liesie came to work for them and prepared roosterkoek, a typical Kalahari-Karoo special.

“Listen, a loaf of bread is not just a loaf of bread. It’s more than that. And pies? ‘Oom Daan’s Pies’ are the best. Heartburn? What heartburn? As the people say over here in the Hantam, ‘if you get heartburn from an Oom Daan’s Pie, Dirk will refund you your money’.”

Enter Sonja, stage left, bearing plates heaped with Oom Daan’s Pies. We tuck in. Hmm, most tasty. Who is/was Oom Daan? Is/was he of the Colonel Chicken ilk – possibly a mirage man?

“Oh no,” says Dirk. “Oom Daan actually existed. He was a real character who made great pies using a secret recipe. We tried in the early days to buy the recipe from him but he wouldn’t budge. A year later, though, he came to us and said he was ready to sell. The transaction happened and we took a photo of Oom Daan to use on the packaging. A couple of months later, Oom Daan passed away.”

The evening grows late but we will not be budged. That’s all right by the amazingly sober Dirk van Rensburg – he can tell you stories until the sun comes up.

“Ask him about his crow,” Pieter Naudé had urged me earlier in Williston. So I do.

“That was Meraai die Kraai,” sighs Dirk. “We found her as a tiny thing. Her mother had died, wrapped up in a tree with baling wire. We raised Meraai and she became a beloved bird here in Calvinia. On sports days, she’d fly over to the schools and shout her support for the home teams.

“Oh, that Meraai. We took her on holiday to our secret coastal spot near Koekenaap – it’s called Blikkiesdorp, but don’t bother looking for it on a map. The people loved her, the dogs loved her, the cats loved her – then one day she was killed by Nature Conservation and sent to the McGregor Museum in Kimberley as some kind of sample.”

Men came to blows over the crow, there was a court case – but Meraai was long gone . . .

There’s silence around the kitchen table. The suave old gent looks down from the Flag Cigarettes advertising board on the wall, his two blue-eyed girlfriends on the sideboard saying nothing. Jules breaks the gloomy papsak silence with a story about UFOs:

“In 1961, a Wisconsin chicken farmer saw a UFO land in his yard. Two figures emerged (the farmer testified that they ‘looked like Italians’) and they proceeded to make pancakes. Then they disappeared. The pancakes were sent off for analysis. They contained the usual mix of flour, milk and eggs – but there was proof that the pancakes were slightly burnt.”

More silence. Then we all burst into post-midnight gales of laughter. This scrapyard is fun. The Van Rensburgs think so too. And out here in the Hard Man’s Karoo you speak of UFOs quite openly – they’re part of the furniture.

“Where are you going from here?” Dirk and Sonja want to know. We tell them about the Afrika Burn Festival down in the Tankwa Karoo, a kind of New Age creative get-together. Laptop hippies with matches and incredible design skills. Possibly the finest desert festival in sub-Saharan Africa.

“We’ll see you there,” says Dirk, finishing his last beer and shooing us out.

The next morning I’m having focus issues while Dirk van Rensburg is disgustingly perky. We’re in the township named Calvinia West, visiting some of the locals who’ve caught the ‘junk bug’ from Dirk.

Tony Koopman lives on Skema Street and works for Dirk in the bakery, which we’d stumbled through last night and seen them whipping up 550 fresh loaves in one shift. Here on Skema Street, Tony’s yard says it all: farm implements, old stoves, enamel potties, broken guitars, an aloe in a kettle, little headless figures and a paraffin burner. He and a mate are somehow trying to turn two rakes into one rake when we pitch up.

“I like coming out here into the garden in the morning, doing a thing here and moving a thing there,” says Tony.

Down in Dikgetse Street, Neels Tieties has lined his fence with clear plastic bottles of the type that once contained the cheap white wine which they call rooiproppie (red top) in the Upper Karoo. Dirk starts talking about when people go kloontjies. “That’s when you get so drunk on cheap wine that you have long conversations with invisible people.”

Kind of what I’m doing right here for a living, I guess. Just without the rooiproppie.

Not far from Neels Tieties lives Oom Stoffel Koopman, and he’s got an Austin Mini delivery van (1963 vintage) resting in his back yard. But don’t be fooled, he warns me. “Last year I took five very large people down to Ceres in that Mini. The policeman who stopped me said I was mad, I’d never make it. Three hours later we were back from Ceres – how’s that?”


Dirk emerges with a grin after rootling around in a pile of junk at the back, brandishing an old bakelite railway lantern.

“How much?” he wants to know.

“It’s not for sale,” answers Oom Stoffel, later amending that to, “you can have it for nothing if you bring me some soetkoekies.”

“Deal!” yells Dirk. And then suddenly the conversation veers to rugby and the clash between the local Young Blues and Calvin United of Williston, and how the young Willistonians throw stones when their team is losing.

“And boy, can they throw stones!” says Dirk. “A Williston kid can throw a five cent piece off a flat stone from here to there. I’ve seen it.”

We leave town and, four days later, Dirk and Sonja appear before us at Afrika Burn like cheerful mirages. I see he’s holding a bottle of beer. I also see it’s the alcohol-free kind. And then I realise why this party animal never gets hangovers . . .