In the second of three films in the Isuzu Ikhaya Lekhaya series, investigative journalist Anneliese Burgess travels from East London to her family farm in the Eastern Cape interior. She’s working on a book, and there’s something important she needs to find.
It’s a stormy night when we meet Anneliese Burgess for the first time, and the award-winning investigative journalist is sitting in her cosy lounge in the village of Sunrise-on-Sea, just up the coast from East London. Hers is a home full of books – in one room there is almost no space to move, for all the books inside it – and the lounge is bursting with interesting “things”… string puppets; macrame hangers; orchids in radiant bloom; framed posters and pictures; a string of stars.
For more than 20 years Anneliese worked on radio and television, producing and anchoring programmes including Special Assignment and Truth Commission Special Report… but these days, it’s the written word that she’s working with. Anneliese is co-editor of the progressive newspaper VryeWeekblad and is also the author of Heist! South Africa’s Cash-In-Transit Epidemic Uncovered – and right now, on this stormy night, she’s working on a new book. “It’s very different to the hard investigating I did for my previous book… but I would still call this one an investigation – it’s an investigation of the heart,” she explains. “It’s confessional writing, and it looks at all the things that made one become the person that one is.” Her voice trails off, then she adds: “I suppose it’s a kind of memoir.”
Right now, however, there are gaps in Anneliese’s story.
“It’s strange how one’s memory goes. There are many things I can remember as an emotion, but I can’t remember them as an image.”
And so, to get the story straight, Anneliese will be driving back to her childhood home.
In the kitchen there is a basket that Anneliese has packed with a flask, milk, coffee and mugs. Outside, standing resolute in the storm, is a 3.0-litre turbo-charged Isuzu D-MAX – its tank full of fuel, ready for the roadtrip that will take us from the Eastern Cape coast, through farmlands, homelands and heartlands, and into a little town on the fringe of the Drakensberg, called Indwe.
It’s on a farm close to Indwe that Anneliese grew up, and it’s there, on a bookshelf in the house that has always been her family home, that a collection of photograph albums hold the clues she needs to continue with her book.
We leave at first light in the morning…
Follow the three journeys in the Isuzu D-Max and Getaway Ikhaya Lekhaya campaign and you stand a chance to win a spectacular five-night holiday for four people to the Indian Ocean paradise of Seychelles. For more details and to enter, click here. The competition closes at 15h00 on 2 December 2022.
