The Magic of the Karoo Flicks

My Father,  Uncle Theo and the Magic of the Karoo Flicks

When I look at this old photograph from about 1925, I see my father, Solly, and his younger brother, my uncle Theo, standing in the dust of the Ladismith district, looking for all the world like they’ve just stepped off a ranch in the American West. They were just young boys then—my father was only about eleven—posed against the gate of their grandmother’s house in Ladismith. This wasn't just a quick game of dress-up; it was a carefully constructed transformation. Looking at the detail of their outfits, I’m struck by the effort that went into them. My grandmother had hand-stitched those cowboy suits herself, using heavy-duty drill and corduroy pulled straight from the shelves of my grandfather Barnett’s general store at the Vywerus outpost at Buffelsdrift. In a time of brutal drought and the lingering hardship of the ostrich feather market collapse, these clothes were a way of stitching together a bit of glamour and grit from the outside world.

The inspiration for this didn't come from books or toys, but from the "magic" of the early bioscope. Back then, cinema was a relatively new and wonderous arrival in the Karoo. I often think about how those films actually reached a remote place like Ladismith. It was a massive logistical feat involving the railway and men like Felix Middleton, a local legend who ran the local bioscope. The film canisters, heavy with nitrate reels, would travel by train across the interior to the nearest sidings. I can almost see Middleton waiting at the station in a cloud of steam, grabbing those canisters and racing his car over the corrugated gravel roads to get to the local halls before the Saturday afternoon crowds lost their patience.

To my father and his friends, these movies were always called "the flicks." It’s a word we still use, but back then it was literal. The projectors were primitive, and the low frame rates made the light on the screen pulse and shimmer with a constant, rhythmic flicker. It must have felt like looking into another dimension. Because the films were silent, the experience was anything but quiet. The hall would be packed and noisy, filled with the smell of hot machinery and the excitement of the town.

One of the most fascinating parts of those early screenings was the "barker." Since the films only had English subtitles and many people in the audience couldn't read them or didn't speak the language, the barker would stand right by the screen and narrate the whole thing. He was the voice of the movie, acting out the parts and explaining the plot with plenty of local humor and flair. Combined with a local pianist hammering out a frantic soundtrack to match the horse chases, it was a total sensory overload. For two boys growing up in the isolated Klein Karoo, watching a Tom Mix Western wasn't just a way to pass the time; it was a window into a world of heroism and adventure that felt both impossibly far away and, thanks to those hand-stitched suits, wonderfully close.

In this photo, my father and uncle aren't just children of a merchant family in a struggling district; they are "projecting" themselves into a bigger story. They were absorbing the athleticism and the "white hat" morality of the cowboy myth, using it to navigate a landscape that was often harsh and unforgiving. This image captures that exact moment when the physical isolation of the Karoo was finally broken by the imaginative power of the bioscope and the reach of the "Makadas" railway line. It’s a reminder that even a hundred years ago, a bit of flickering light in a darkened hall could change the way two young brothers saw their place in the world, turning a dusty corner of the Western Cape into the wide-open frontier of their dreams.