by Paul Theroux
He was right about Touwsrivier, a distressed-looking community of poor houses and ragged yellowish Africans, in the Witteberg of the Little Karoo. The people were Khoisan, ‘coloured,’ the marginalized people of the provinces. The fields were full of ostriches, some of them roosting on the ground, others prancing next to the train. And then some men on the platform came to my window and pressed their faces against the glass and pointed to a dish of chocolates wrapped in foil on a little shelf, each man’s gestures indicating I want one.
De Dooms was partly a slum in a mountain valley, some of it looking very desperate – metal box huts made of roughly cut corrugated sheets; and poor scrap-wood houses. On the other side of the railway line, the white side, a bigger church, better houses. From the vexed oriental look of the men frowsting by the tracks I took them to be Khoisan, their faces feline. Some of them hoisted wooden impedimenta at the train windows, which were boxes of overripe grapes. Beyond the town were vineyards, so I took these squatter camps to be the settlements of grape pickers and winery workers.
At one time, only male workers had been allowed within these town limits. Workers’ hostels and workers’ huts were the tradition, a male society of lonely and hardworked drunken men. As part of his pay, on Fridays each vineyard worker got two liters of wine, a drip-feed system of alcohol that had turned most of them into winos. Perhaps this explained the squatter camps, most of which had sprung up after Mandela came to power, and which were composed of whole families. In the past, the women had been left in the villages, as Nadine had described in a sad but perceptive paragraph of July’s People:
Across the seasons was laid the diurnal one of being without a man; it overlaid sowing and harvesting, rainy summers and dry winters, and at different times, although at roughly the same intervals for all, changed for each the short season when her man came home. For that season, although she worked and lived among the others as usual, the woman was not within the same stage of the cycle maintained for all by imperatives that outdid the authority of nature. The sun rises, the moon sets; the money must come, the man must go.
At the prosperous town of Worcester – beautiful villas and trim houses, a tall steepled church, football fields, tennis courts, schools, lawns, flower gardens – big pleading black men begged at the windows of First Class, gesturing to their mouths and pointing to their stomachs, saying, ‘Hungry, hungry’ and asking for money.
I bumped into the English couple in the lounge. Without my asking, the man volunteered that he was not planning to emigrate.
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘We’re retired.’
They lived in a suburb about fifteen miles north of Johannesburg. Of course, there was crime there, the man said; there was crime everywhere. He gave me an example.
‘I was coming home a few years ago and stopped in my driveway. I got out of my car to open the gate and was surrounded by three chaps. They had guns. They were shouting at me – they wanted my car. My wife heard the noise. She thought I was talking to the neighbors. She came out with our two dogs.’
‘So you were safe?’ I said.
‘Not a bit. The dogs were useless. They thought we were going for a ride. They wagged their tails. My wife was pistol-whipped and I was hit hard. We both needed stitches. We lost the car. But, you see, that could have happened anywhere.’
‘Anywhere in South Africa.’
‘Quite.’
They got off at Wellington, to head for Paarl and the wineries. Wellington was another lovely place with a huge hut settlement joined to it – acres, miles perhaps of flat-topped shanties, becoming simpler, cruder, poorer, more appalling the farther they were from town. The squatter camps seemed a weird disfigurement but I made a note to myself to visit one when I got a chance.
For hours there had been mountains to the south of the railway line, great rocky peaks, but at Belleville I got a glimpse of a single bright plateau ahead, standing in the sunshine, and I knew we were at the city limits of Cape Town.
The cold gusting wind, and the frothing sea, and the sunny dazzle on Table Mountain’s vertiginous bulk looming behind it, made Cape Town seem the brightest and least corrupt city I had ever seen in my life. That was its appearance, not its reality The high wind was unusual for the Africa I had traveled through but not for this coast, my first glimpse of the Atlantic. The wind was usually blowing twenty knots, and often gusting to forty, enough to tear the smaller limbs from trees and send them scraping along the pavement. The huge mountain and its precipitous cliffs made the city seem small and tame, and unlike Johannesburg which had a city center of dubious-looking people whose stare said I can fox you, Cape Town was provincial-seeming and orderly, the train station looked safe. I wanted to be near the sea, so I took a taxi and found a good hotel on the waterfront.
After making the usual inquiries, and receiving the usual cautions, I went for a walk along the waterfront and sauntered into the town and through the museums. Nearby were the Company Gardens, dating from 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, had planted them with the idea of provisioning Dutch ships. On their arrival at the Cape, the Dutch had found various groups of people, Khoisan among them, scouring the beach for shells and edible seaweed. They called them ‘beachrangers’ and ‘Hottentots.’
Yet some of the natives they met spoke broken English – ones who had been in contact with the English, who had come ashore years earlier. From the first, these ‘beachrangers’ were put to work, as van Riebeeck wrote in a memo, ‘washing, scouring, fetching fuel, and doing odd jobs. Some of them have even placed their little daughters, who are now dressed after our fashion, in the service of our married people.’
That had been the reason for Cape Town’s existence: it had been founded as a port for supplying cattle, vegetables and water to the ships of the Dutch fleet headed for Batavia and the Indies. After ten years at the Cape, van Riebeeck himself went to the East Indies, where he died. The interior of Africa, unknown land, had held no interest for the Dutch or anyone else. The hinterland had been named ‘Kaffraria’, a translation of ‘Quefreia’, on a sixteenth-century Spanish map. The Spaniards had gotten this word for infidels (‘people who live without any religious laws or sanctions’) from the Muslims who had occupied Spain. The word appears on all early maps. For example, on an eighteenth-century French map that I bought while living in Kampala, I find among the descriptions of the natives, ‘Peuples cruels’ and ‘Anthropophages’ and ‘Sauvages’ and ‘Hotentots.’ The word ‘CAFRERIE,’ printed big, covers a large blank area from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Equator. In 1936, van Riebeeck’s biographer naively explained, ‘Today, the term kaffir, with its invidious connotation utterly forgotten, is attached solely to the Bantu, and as a matter of fact it was never colloquially applied to the Hottentots.’
When the Huguenots arrived with their enological improvements and enlarged the vineyards, life was just about perfect and it remained so, for the whites anyway – winebibbers and wog-bashers – for over 150 years. The Dutch were content to remain in this Mediterranean climate of the Western Cape until the early nineteenth-century, when the British took charge of the Cape Colony. Under pressure from the missionaries, the British abolished slavery, and promoted the idea of racial equality. Feeling crowded by the British, and insulted in their belief in white supremacy, and robbed of their workforce of serfs and slaves, the Boers decided to abandon their fertile farms. In 1838, in what is known as the Great Trek the Boers headed north into the interior, across the Orange River and the Vaal to dispossess and enslave local blacks, and create their own white states. Among the ostrich skin wallets and zebra skin cushions in the curio shops of Cape Town, were supple leather sjamboks. It was impossible to see these whips and not think of them as the very symbol of South African history
What impressed me in Cape Town was its smallness, its sea glow, its fresh air; and every human face was different, everyone’s story was original, no one really agreed on anything, except that Cape Town
, for all its heightened contradiction, was the best place to live in South Africa. No sooner had I decided the place was harmonious and tranquil than I discovered the crime statistics – car hijackings, rapes, murders, and farm invasions ending in the disemboweling of the farmers. Some of the most distressed and dangerous squatter settlements of my entire trip I saw in South Africa, and without a doubt among the handsomest districts I had ever seen in my life – Constantia comes to mind, with its mansions and gardens – I also saw in this republic of miseries and splendors.
Not long after I arrived I called Conor and Kelli, fellow travelers, whom I had last seen on the faltering Kilimanjaro Express. I used a telephone number they had given me. I was curious to know what had happened to them after I had gotten off the train at Mbeya.
‘Paul, it was incredible. Come over and we’ll tell you all about it,’ Kelli said. They were both in town, staying at the house of Kelli’s mother, somewhere up the side of Table Mountain.
The house on the slopes of Devil’s Peak was so buffeted by the powerful westerly that parked cars trembled on their tires, and window panes distorted reflections like fun house mirrors because the glass was pressed and sucked by the gusts. House doors flew open and slammed, plastic bags shot through the air and snagged and whipped on tree branches, trash barrels spun from the sidewalks and banged and clattered down the street.
‘Look who’s here,’ Conor said. He was clean-shaven and tidier than he had been on the train but otherwise his exuberant Irish self. ‘Oh, God, after we left you in Mbeya the whole trip went downhill.’
The Norwegian woman got sick at Kapiri Mposhi and needed to be hospitalized. They were stranded there for a few days. And then the bus that Conor and Kelli took south from Lusaka kept breaking down.
‘By breaking down, I mean we hit a donkey and he flew through the windscreen and died in the driver’s lap, and some Boers on the bus said, “Aye, let’s have a braai and grill the bastard and eat ’im” – can you imagine?’
In Conor’s Dublin brogue this was a marvelous manic lilting sentence.
Instead of barbecuing the dead donkey they pressed on to Chinhoyi, where they got stranded again. ‘No one had Zim dollars, so we were really up a tree. We gave up in Harare and just flew home to Cape Town, bugger the buses. How about you?’
I summarized my progress from southern Tanzania but my conclusion was bugger the buses, too. I said I preferred the trains, especially the Trans-Karoo Express.
‘We were on the Karoo two weeks ago for a weekend,’ Conor said, getting up from his chair so that he could fling his illustrating arms around in precise Irish gestures. ‘A little hotel run by a gay couple. We reckoned on a little hiking in the hills, good food and a bit of rest. Jaysus, it turned out to be a nightmare, from the moment we arrived – Kelli, her mum, and me. I said, “Let’s watch the football in the bar.” It was one of those strange Afrikaner bars, a lot of drunken farmers on a Saturday afternoon. The barman was weird, too – he had been a soldier in Angola and was half-mental because of it. Some blacks in the corner, looking unwelcome. Anyway, I switches on the telly and a big drunken farmer lurches over and looks me in eye.’
Imitating the lurching farmer Conor goggled into my eye.
‘Football’s a kaffir sport. Either watch the fucking rugby or turn it off! No fucking kaffir sports in this bar!’
‘We’d only been there five minutes, see. Anyway, he went on yelling at us because I wouldn’t turn the telly off. Then the farmer said, “Look, he’s a kaffir!” – and he hugged one of the blacks in the corner who looked horribly embarrassed – “though he’s my friend, my kaffir friend.” He goes on, “But these bloody people are making us suffer. Nine hundred and fifty farmers have been murdered since ’94!”As he said it, Kelli – who’s pretty impatient, as you know – put her hand over her mouth and pretended to yawn.
‘The Boer went ballistic! He made a lunge for Kelli, and I tried to grab him.
‘Then the barman – well, the barman must have done some pretty strange things in Angola, because he was really mental, I mean, he showed us his paintings later. You should have seen them, like some Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress. They were really upsetting. The barman starts saying, “Nie vrou! Nie vrou! She’s a woman, you can’t hit a woman!”
‘But the crazed Afrikaner was trying to hit Kelli with a pool cue and I was trying to drag him down, and me mother-in-law is screaming and the telly is too loud.
‘The mental barman went ballistic too, just as one of the gay guys comes in and says, “What is the matter?” And that was the awful part, because the Boer was bellowing in Afrikaans, “Shit! Fuck! Kaffirs!” and missed Kelli and hit the gay guy in the face with the pool cue.
‘The gay guy began to cry. The barman vaulted over the bar and hauled him off and went boof! – right in the Boer’s chest, and down he went. As he settled on the floor we ran upstairs.’
‘That’s an amazing story,’ I said, laughing, because Conor had acted it out in the center of the parlor, with the wind snarling and pressing at the windows.
‘It wasn’t over!’ he said. ‘When we were in our room we heard him climbing the stairs.’
Conor imitated a Frankenstein-like stumping up the stairs and along the corridor of the inn, and the Boer’s growling, ‘I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!’
‘I locked the door, but just to be sure I took a chair. I thought: I’ll break it over his head. I heard him start to bellow, “I know where you are!” and still he was banging all over the place. But he didn’t find us.
‘That was the first forty-five minutes of our weekend on the Karoo. I’ll tell you the rest some other time. Have a beer. Cheers. Some people are coming. I forgot to tell you this is our going-away party. We’re leaving tomorrow.’
The guests arrived for the party, multi-hued, a cross section of Cape Town. We drank and they told more stories. I felt I had fallen among friends. I felt close to Conor and Kelli, who knew the tortuous route through East and Central Africa. But they saw no future for themselves here. They were going back to San Francisco, where they had green cards and jobs.
For a few days in Cape Town I did what tourists do. I took a day trip to the wine lands of Franschoek and Paarl and Stellenbosch; looked at the vineyards and the cellars; went to wine tastings. I spent a morning at Constantia and an afternoon on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain, at the national botanical garden, Kirstenbosch, a lush repository of South African plants, filled with succulents and cycads and palms, as well as the fragrant varieties of low bush called fynbos, that was peculiar to the purple moorlands of the Cape. A boundary hedge, planted by Jan van Riebeeck in 1660, was still flourishing at the margin of Kirstenbosch.
One day intending to take the train to Simonstown I went to the station but got there too late for that. However, I was on time for another train, to Khayelitsha. I was in the mood for any train. Unable to find Khayelitsha on my map, I went to the information counter and inquired as to its whereabouts. The clerk, a young affable man of mixed race, showed me the place on the map.
Then he leaned across the counter and smiled and said, ‘Don’t go there.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ he said. ‘Don’t go.’
‘I’m just taking the train. How is that dangerous?’
‘The train was stoned yesterday,’ he said.
‘How do you know it will be stoned today?’
He had a beautiful smile. He knew he was dealing with an ignorant alien. He said, ‘The train is stoned every day.’
‘Who does it? Young kids?’
He said, ‘Young, old, lots of people. From the town. They’re not playing. They’re angry. And they do a lot of damage. How do I know? Because yesterday I was on the train to Khayelitsha. With my friend – he’s the driver. We were in the driver’s cab. When the stones came he was hit in the side of the face. He was all bloody. Listen, he’s in the hospital. He’s in rough shape. He was just doing his job.’
This convinced me. I decided not to go to Khayelitsha and told him so. The clerk’s name was Andy. We talked a while longer. Khayelitsha in Xhosa meant ‘Our New Home,’ and there were 700,000 people there, most of them living in shacks, on the Cape Flats.
While we talked, another clerk sat rocking back in a chair, a big middle-aged African woman in a thick red sweater and a wool hat, with her feet propped against the counter, just out of earshot. She was staring straight ahead and fiddling absently with a scrap of paper.
‘I’m not a racist,’ Andy said. ‘But the blacks in this country think they are being passed over for jobs. In places like Khayelitsha they have no jobs – no money. They thought that after apartheid they would get jobs. When it didn’t happen they began to get wild.’
‘I wanted to see a squatter camp.’
‘No,’ Andy said, smiling, shaking his head at the madness of it, and reminding me of all the times I had heard, There are bad people there. ‘Don’t go to a squatter camp. Don’t go to a black township. You’ll get robbed, or worse.’
The next day I went to a squatter camp. It was called New Rest, 1200 shacks that had been accumulating for a decade on the sandy infertile soil of Cape Flats beside the highway that led to the airport. The 8500 inhabitants lived mainly in squalor. It was dire but not unspeakable. There was no running water, there were no lights, nor any trees; there was only the cold wind. I never got to Cape Town International Airport, but I could just imagine travelers arriving and heading up the highway and looking at this grotesque settlement from the taxi window and saying to the driver, ‘Do people actually live there?’
New Rest was adjacent to an equally squalid but older settlement, called Guguletu, a place of old low beat-up brick houses. Guguletu had achieved prominence in 1993 when a 26-year-old Californian, Amy Biehl, was killed here. She had been a Stanford graduate, living in South Africa as a volunteer in voter registration for the following year’s free election, and had driven three African friends home to the township as a favor. Seeing her white face, a mob of African boys (‘dozens’) screamed in eagerness, for this was a black township and she was white prey. Her car was showered with stones and stopped, she was dragged from it. Her black women friends pleaded with the mob to spare her. ‘She’s a comrade!’ Amy herself appealed to her assailants. She was harried viciously, beaten to the ground, her head smashed with a brick, and she was stabbed in the heart – killed like an animal.
