Onder die Jakarandaboom
(Under the Jacaranda Tree)
'n Suid-Afrikaanse Liefdestort
(A South African Love Story)
by Chloe Tzang
© 2025 Chloe Tzang. All rights reserved. The author asserts a right to be identified as the author of this story. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a review. If you see this story on any website other than Literotica, it's been ripped off without the author's permission.
This story is written for the Literotica 2025 Valentine's Day competition, but before we get to the story itself, here's a bit of background, if you're interested. If not, just skip down to the story:
"Onder die Jakarandaboom"
is set in South Africa and there's quite a bit of personal background to this. My dad worked there for a couple of years back in the early 2000's, just as I was about to start high school. Through the last couple of years of elementary school and right thru high school, I was lucky enough to get to go wherever my dad was working for the North American summer, so there were a few more adventures besides South Africa, but of all of those, South Africa was by far and away the most memorable.
My mom and I went down to South Africa three or four times in all over the time my dad worked down there - a couple of 3-4 week holidays around our Spring Break and Christmas, and then once for the entire North American summer (winter down there). My dad lived in Centurion, between Joburg and Pretoria, but when he was away for work during the week, which he often was, I stayed with friends of my dad's in Pretoria, and most of the families and kids my own age that I met and socialized with while I was there were Afrikaners so I got a crash immersion course in Afrikaans as a bonus.
I was in Pretoria a lot, mostly around Muckleneuk, Sunnyside and Brooklyn, but I also had a friend who lived in Wonderboom (for anyone that knows Pretoria) - while my friend "Danie"'s family lived in Leyd St, just down from the Telkom tower and the SAN Parks headquarters and close to the Portuguese Embassy. Danie's family's house is still there - when I looked on Google Maps and on Streetview it's had a lot of work done, but I can still recognize the place. It was a lovely old house with a huge garden, and it was almost a second home while I was down there. The view over central Pretoria was spectacular and the walk down the hill and into Sunnyside when the Jacarandas were blooming was just beautiful in spring, with the purple blossoms and the scents of all the different flowers from people's gardens. That, and the scent of braai's in the evenings...
While I was there, we did a lot of sightseeing and travelling. I got to visit Cape Town, as well as a farmstay in the Karoo and another in the Northern Transvaal with the grandparents of one of my Afrikaner friends. An entire stretched out week in Kruger National Park, a very looooong weekend at Sodwana Bay (an amazing drive down, and the first and last time I have ever been scuba diving), visiting the Blood River monument in KwaZulu-Natal, and another long weekend at the Cathedral Peak Hotel in the Drakensberg mountains where we did a lot of hiking and I bought a huge basket made from dried grass and recycled packing tape that I still have from some Zulu women on the side of the road outside a gas station. It barely fitted in the back seat of the BMW with me and it's so big I can still fit inside it. LOL
My dad also took us to Zimbabwe for a week - the Matopos, Bulawayo and Victoria Falls but not Harare, as well as Botswana (the Kalahari, as well as the site my dad was working at, which was fascinating for me) and a week in Namibia where we got to the Skeleton Coast and did the most amazing safari trip. Shipwrecks on the Skeleton Coast. Desert elephants. The Kunene River, on the Angolan border. Windhoek for a day... I managed to cover a lot of ground over those visits, thanks to my parents. I also picked up boxes of South African books - even back then I loved books and reading - and those books including just about everything by the greatest of all South African writers, Herman Charles Bosman (disagree if you like, but I think he's the best of them all). There was a flea market in Pretoria in Sunnyside, and a used book stall that I hit every weekend when we weren't doing touristy things.
Anyhow, the "Danie" in this story is more or less based on the real Danie (not his real name), and drawn in part from memory, as is the box of koeksisters. The romance however is pure fiction - I had a huge crush on Danie but he was way older than me and it was mostly his little sister, Maritjie, who I ran around with altho it was Danie who took us everywhere. The house and the garden with the Jacaranda tree in Leyd Street in Sunnyside was real though, as are all the thousands of Jacaranda trees around Pretoria. So's the elephant ivory necklace in the story, which I still have and which "Danie" gave me for my 12th birthday.
It's a beautiful necklace, and importing elephant ivory is totally illegal but I didn't know that, and my parents never knew it was elephant ivory. I wore it right thru US immigration and customs and everything on the way home. My dad's face when he found out was priceless. Anyhow, legal in South Africa - or it was then - they cull elephants in Kruger Park all the time and they don't go to waste. Like I said, when you read this story, apart from the sex and romance aspect, which is totally fictional, there's a lot of reality based on personal experience mixed in.
The trip to the Groot Marico in the story was real too, altho of course no romance. We stayed on an old farm for a long weekend with my parents, and then "Danie" and his real girlfriend and a couple of their friends took Maritjie and I hiking and horse-riding through the bosveld for a few days, as well as camping out for a couple of nights, and I shamelessly stole Oom Schalk in my story from Bosman's Marico stories. The steak and monkey gland sauce for breakfast was very real tho. And so's the rest of the food. Delicious as well. Yum!!!! Koeksisters were to die for! And biltong! It's so much better than jerky. And potjiekos on a campfire! As for a South African braai, you'll have to go there. Or have a South African friend. LOL.
Things have undoubtedly changed. It's been almost twenty years since I was there, but it's still vivid in my mind. It was a marvelous country, a marvelous time, and an unforgettable experience. I'll never forget the people I met, the friends I made, the countryside, the old Cape Dutch architecture, a ride into one of the townships outside Pretoria in a police Casspir (with Danie - the cop was a friend of his dad's) and eating sly vat-vat and shisa nyama with pap and some kind of spicy chunky tomato sauce from a couple of food vendors! Much to the amusement of the locals and the black police we were with. Going into one of the townships like that was a real experience to - a totally different South Africa from the white South Africa, and I really was lucky to experience some of these adventures.
Then there were the farms and the wildlife, the sheer unending vastness of the Karoo, and the amazing experience of standing at the very tip of Cape Agulhas at dawn as the sun rose and waves crashed onto the rocks - the tip of Africa - with nothing south of me but thousands of miles of ocean, all the way to the Antarctic. For a few minutes, I was the southernmost person in Africa! Totally cool experience when you're 12 years old! So many other experiences too - standing on the banks of the "grey green greasy Limpopo" (which was more of a muddy brown and watch out for the crocodiles), watching elephants wading across the mighty Zambezi at Victoria Falls, where we stayed at the Elephant Hills Hotel.
The eeriness of the Matopo Hills in Zimbabwe, where we visited Cecil Rhodes grave and the monument to the Shangani Patrol. Hiking through the veld, looking at an old Bushman campsite with rock paintings, hidden high on a koppie, knowing the paintings were from thousands of years ago, when the Bushmen lived across all of southern Africa. Driving through the spectacular Kruger Park and the lowveld for days on end, with wildlife everywhere, staying in rondavels in the Kruger Park camps, the amazing sunsets, the red dirt and the dust, the clear night skies of the Kalahari and the bosveld, the bushveld, with thousands upon thousands of stars. The sheer emptiness of the Skeleton Coast and the shipwrecks there...
The trees and flowers too - far too many to describe - but what really stood out in my memory are the Flame Trees, and the Jacarandas in bloom across Pretoria, thousands upon thousands of them so that some of the roads were ankle deep in drifts of purple jacaranda blossoms. The summer thunderstorms every afternoon at three thirty, where the sky turned black, along with lightning like you wouldn't believe, hailstorms with hailstones as big as your fist, rain so heavy you couldn't see the front of the car or even hear yourself yell in the ear of the person next to you, the african kraals in the countryside of KwaZulu, the Drakensberg mountains and the highveld, Cape Town and the vineyards of Stellenbosch, Cape Dutch architecture, the southern coast and the old Afrikaner towns and farms, the Little Karoo, Graaff-Reneit with its amazing and very beautiful church and the old Drostdy Hotel where we stayed for a few nights.
It's a truly beautiful country, but thinking back, the most memorable of those many memories for me was discovering the stories of Herman Charles Bosman and his portrayals of Afrikaners, then discovering that Groot Marico and the Marico were actually real places and that Bosman had lived there, it wasn't just fiction. I talked my mom and dad into visiting the Marico, staying on a farm, and exploring the little town of Groot Marico (there's not much to explore LOL) with Danie, his friends, and Maritjie. The Marico was the countryside in which Bosman set many of his short stories. It was a unique experience to visit a farm which could have been the farm of Oom Schalk Lourens, to watch mampoer being distilled (and, very cautiously, tasting the end product - peach brandy in this case) and to camp and hike and horse-ride through the bosveld, keeping a wary eye open for leopards sleeping under Withaak trees (you have to read Bosman to get that one).
