‘The dawn breaks across the Serengeti landscape. The dew glistens on the pristine greens and the air is crisp. The early morning sunlight catches the faint mist rising once more … Another beautiful day unfolds at The Whistling Thorns.’ These words appear in white text on an image of rolling fields of grass punctuated by sparse tree cover. A few of the trees are reflected in a small body of water in the middle ground of the image. The grass is well manicured, and in the foreground a section of the grass is slightly lighter than the rest. This section offers a clue to what is meant by ‘pristine greens‘: it is part of the golf course on the Serengeti Golf and Wildlife Estate, a decade-old gated community in Kempton Park, near Johannesburg's O.R. Tambo International Airport. The image appears in an advertisement for a new sectional title scheme called Whistling Thorns being developed on the estate. Allusion to the celebrated Serengeti National Park in Tanzania illuminates the developers’ attempt at marketing to its residents a kind of African ur-landscape – despite the obvious human interventions that go into creating a golf course, and despite the fact that references to an unadulterated landscape are paradoxically being used to market forms of human habitation.

At a conference of gated estate managers that was held on the estate, I had a chance to learn exactly what is whistling through the thorns. I and about twenty other delegates sat at three large round tables covered in white cloth on a portion of grass just outside the clubhouse. While others played a golf tournament, we non-golfers were gathered for a wine tasting that served as an alternative welcome activity. Halfway through introducing the first wine, and just as he was describing its bouquet of ‘strawberry with strong floral notes’, the representative from the wine estate paused. Perhaps prompted by the attention he was drawing to aroma, he crinkled his nose, frowned and switched from English to Afrikaans: ‘Dit ruik hier soos ‘n plaas’ [It smells like a farm here]. The other delegates sniffed, noting the distinct stench of manure that saturated the air.

Kempton Park, like the rest of the Highveld, is dry and dusty at the end of winter.