Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  A former resident of District Six named Hassan explained to me, ‘One day in 1962 we all got a letter from the government. “This is now designated as a white area.” But there were many whites there. We all lived together happily. Malays, Indians, blacks, coloreds.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We were relocated to the Cape Flats, and District Six was bulldozed,’ Hassan said. ‘All the houses were destroyed. They left the churches and the mosques. You can see them.’

  But redesignating District Six as white was such a controversial decision that the land was not built upon, the white houses that were planned never went up.

  ‘We had to live in an awful place near Muizenberg – Mitchell’s Plain. Hot, dusty, windy,’ Hassan said, in his local snarl – hoat, darsty, weendy. ‘There had been prisoners there in the war. Eye-talians. We got those prisoners’ barracks. We hated it.’

  Forty years later, Hassan still lived in Mitchell’s Plain, and District Six was still unpopulated. What remained was the District Six Museum, where I learned that, such was the stupidity of the apartheid government and the irrationality of their Group Areas Act, the harmonious multiracial community of District Six had been separated and dispersed. The District Sixers were sent to monochromatic communities, the coloreds like Hassan to Mitchell’s Plain, the Indians to another outer suburb, Athlone, the blacks to Langa and Guguletu and Khayelitsha. By the mid-1970s most of the residents had been relocated and District Six was renamed Zonnebloem, ‘Sun Flower,’ though the name didn’t stick.

  On the floor of the District Six museum was a plan of the streets and the individual houses, with snapshots attached and scribbled over by former residents who offered details and memories in notes and testimonials, many of them heartfelt. I was shown around the museum by Noor Ebrahim, a writer who had grown up in District Six. His grandfather had come to South Africa from Bombay in the late nineteenth century with his four wives and the money to start a ginger beer business. His father had also been in the business. Noor said they were Gujaratis.

  ‘I’m curious. Did you speak Gujarati at home?’

  ‘No. We spoke Kitchen English.’

  ‘Not Kitchen Dutch?’

  ‘It was Dutch – sort of. But we called it Kombuis Engels. Everyone spoke it in District Six.’ Noor gave me a few examples, all of them Dutch. ‘We spoke proper English at school.’

  This word kombuis for kitchen was interesting for being archaic and obsolete. I was told by a South African linguist that the word would have been laughed at in Holland, for it referred to a ship’s kitchen – a galley, in fact. The Dutch word for kitchen was keuken. Every now and then, this man said, a Dutch person would be startled by something in Afrikaans, like the busload of theologians who were told that the bus was slowing down on the highway so that they could pull off. The expression ‘pull off,’ aftrek in Afrikaans, meant masturbate in Dutch.

  Of the paraphernalia in the District Six Museum the saddest were the sign boards and warnings of an earlier era, plainly worded cautions: For Use by White Persons (Vir Gebruik deur blankes) and drinking fountains and entry ways labeled Non White (Nie Blank) or Whites Only (Slegs Blanks). The earlier era was not so long ago, for the signs had been displayed as recently as the late 1980s. But such signs, familiar and ubiquitous in the American South, had persisted in the 1960s – White and Colored over side-by-side drinking fountains, for example. Any American who could look upon South African bigotry feeling anything but shame was a hypocrite.

  One hot Sunday morning, with reluctance, hating to signify the end of my safari, I set out on the last leg of my trip. It was a day of blue sky and brisk winds. I bought a ticket on the train to Simonstown. Though I had varied my journey with chicken buses and cattle trucks and overcrowded minivans and matatus, it was possible to travel by rail between Simonstown and Nairobi. Cecil Rhodes’s plan had been to extend this line to Cairo. But he had always been something of a dreamer. Another Rhodes wish was for Great Britain to take back the United States, so that we would be ruled by the monarchy, the Union Jack flapping over Washington.

  First Class and Third Class were clearly marked on the train, yet we all sat in First, in spite of our tickets, black, white and all the other racial variations that characterized Cape Town’s people. The conductor was nowhere in sight; no one punched our tickets. We sat, no one speaking, on this sunny morning.

  We stopped at every station – Rosebank, Newlands, Kenilworth, Plumstead, Heathfield – but in spite of the pretty names some looked prosperous and some poor, with bungalows surrounded by shaven lawns, or squatters’ shacks blowing with plastic litter, graffiti everywhere. Some of these places were the addresses listed in the Adult Entertainment ads of that day’s Cape Times. I knew who lived here ‘Amy Kinky to the Extreme,’ and ‘Nikki and Candy for Your Threesome’ and ‘Abigail – On My Own’ and ‘Candice – Come Bend My Fender,’ and the anonymous but just as promising ‘Bored Sexy Housewife.’

  Dead silence in the swaying train, people reading the papers, children kicking the seats, the great yawning torpor of a hot Sunday morning. We stopped in the glare of roofless platforms and then carried on. Soon we were at the shore, passing the wind-driven waves at False Bay and Muizenberg, a very stiff southeasterly with wicked chop driving the greasy lengths of black kelp, so thick you’d take it for a chopped up ship’s hawser. It was strewn in such profusion that it obstructed surfers from paddling out to the breaks.

  Just after Fishhoek I saw a strange thing. Out the window about sixty feet from shore, sticking straight out of the sea was a great flapping whale’s tail. It was so near, a swimmer could easily have slapped it. The tail was upright and symmetrical, like a big black rubber thing swaying above the water.

  A whale standing on its head? I looked around. The adults were dozing and the children seemed to take it as a normal occurrence, a whale’s headstand in shallow water, an enormous creature’s vertical tail glistening in the sunlight, and remaining upright for so long it was still there after the train passed.

  ‘They do that all the time,’ a man in the next car said, when I noticed that he had seen the whale, and I asked him about it. ‘That was a Southern Right Whale. It’s known as “sailing.” No one knows why they do it.’

  At Simonstown, the end of the line, I walked out of the small white station into the high road. This could have been the high road of any English coastal town, with greengrocers and chemist shops and lime-washed bombproof-looking brick houses named ‘Belmont’ and ‘Belvedere’ and ‘The Pines.’ The arcades and shop terraces were dated 1901 and 1910, and even the coast itself looked English – Cornish to be exact, rocky and wind-flattened, as though Penzance might be just down the road.

  The naval station was the reason for Simonstown’s existence, so it was not odd to find fish and chip shops, and pubs advertising ‘Traditional Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud.’ Captain Cook and Charles Darwin and Scott of the Antarctic and Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain and many others who had rounded the Cape had stopped in this beautiful harbor. The funny old self-conscious timewarp, with cottages and villas and little chalets on the bluff above the road, even the bus shelters and the telephone kiosks, mimicked those in the blustery harbor villages of the kingdom by the sea.

  I walked to Boulders Beach to see the colony of jackass penguins. Unperturbed by the nearness of bungalows and spectators, they were nesting on eggs, frolicking in the surf, and wobbling up the strand like perplexed nuns.

  On the coast road at one of the Simonstown bus shelters I waited for a bus to Cape National Park. All the difficulty was behind me. I was just sitting on a bench, waiting to board a bus for the short ride to Cape Point, the end of my trip. A man sitting on a bench opposite was smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of that day’s Johannesburg Star. Some words caught my eye. Flagged on the front top of the paper was the teasingheadline, ‘PESSIMISTIC GLOBETROTTER WINS NOBEL PRIZE.’

  ‘Looks like I’ve got the big one,’ I murmured, and leaned closer, to give t
his stranger some news that would amaze him.

  But he hadn’t heard me speak, nor did he hear me sigh. The feeling came and went, like the overhead drone of one of those search and rescue planes that misses the castaway adrift in a rubber dinghy: just the briefest flutter of hope. But no one actually loses, because there is only one winner in the Swedish Lottery.

  The man engrossed in the newspaper was fleeing his home in England, so he told me. I found it hard to concentrate after the vision I had just had. His name was Trevor. We sat together on the bus and he related his sad story. Trevor had been a crewman on a merchant vessel carrying ammo during the Falklands War. The ship had come under fire, days of shelling.

  ‘The net result was the skipper lost it – went round the bend – wouldn’t leave his cabin, had to be dragged on shore, was invalided out. But that wasn’t the worst, was it?’

  ‘What was the worst of it?’ Still I saw the words, PESSIMISTIC GLOBETROTTER, but I took pleasure in the way Trevor, concentrating on his story, dealt with his newspaper by folding it in quarters and tucking it under his bottom, the teasing headline pressed under one buttock.

  ‘Went ashore for the post, didn’t I? Was a “Dear John” letter, wasn’t it? And they thought I’d go mental like the skipper, so they discharged me before I could take a header off the ship. Called me wife, didn’t I? She says, “There’s nothing to discuss, Trevor” and “Why are you shouting?” And she bloody hangs up on me, doesn’t she? So I went home and we split up. It was horrible. Now her boyfriend goes around saying, “Trevor refuses to have a drink with me.” ’

  Trevor’s story and the Star somewhat colored my view of the Cape Peninsula. We crossed a great empty herbaceous moorland of purply-blue fynbos, low bush shaking in the wind, as aromatic as the maquis in Corsica, miles of trembling herbs. Some wild things roamed here – eland and ostrich, children on school outings, baboons, tourists.

  ‘Tutta la famiglia!’ an Italian woman on the bus screeched, seeing some peevish baboons by the roadside baring their teeth at her.

  When the bus stopped at this, the uttermost end of Africa, I got out. Trevor followed along. He lingered to buy a souvenir baseball cap lettered Cape Point on the crown. I kept walking, to the lookout, down to the sloping trail, to the narrow path in the bright afternoon, through the gusting wind. On my left, the cliff dropped away 200 feet to frothy ocean. I walked to Dias Point – Bartolomeo Dias was here in 1488 -and farther on, to Cape Point itself, jutting like the prow of a ship over the bright sea, until I reached the last of the warnings, No Access Beyond this Point, and Do Not Throw Stones, and End of Trail.

  23 Blue Train Blues

  The Blue Train that ran every few weeks between Cape Town and Pretoria was described on its brochure as ‘the world’s most luxurious train.’ I returned to Johannesburg on it. The superlative was perhaps true, but even more amazing, this luxury train was operated by the South African government, the same department that ran the Trans-Karoo Express, and the dusty Trans-Oranjie to Durban and the littered halting choo-choo to Simonstown. Butlers in zebra-striped shirts met me at Cape Town station and served snacks, looking disappointed at my small scuffed bag. How were they to know that it contained some lovely Chokwe carvings, and my expensive watch, my spare cash, and tanzanite baubles to propitiate my wife in her enduring my long absence?

  A tour group of twenty Japanese men and women scuttled ahead to board the train. And then I was shown to my wood-paneled compartment, where there was a phone and a fax machine. I winced, imagining that they would disturb my solitude, but they never rang for me.

  ‘I am Dalton, your butler.’

  He brought me champagne. I sat with a book, and sipped wine and read. Even from the best train across the Karoo the scenery was the same – the great blue hills, the vineyards, the grassland, the startled ostriches, boozers under bridges, bright lime-washed bungalows blazing in the stony desert, the sight of shanty towns and squatter camps and magnificent mountains.

  My book was a small Penguin of Montaigne’s essays, which I kept for emergencies, when I had nothing else to read; it was my bedside book, my solace. I had finished recopying the erotic story, my notes were done, so I reread ’On the Cannibals.’ This short essay was to me like a sacred text, for in it Montaigne discussed the hypocrisy of seeing strangers as savage: ‘every man calls barbarous the thing he is not accustomed to.’ Cannibalism Montaigne regarded as less offensive than the many French cruelties. The wider world was unknown. ‘What we need is topographers who would make detailed accounts of the places they had actually been to.’ At the end he recalled his encounter in Rouen in 1562, with three self-possessed Brazilian natives, cannibals perhaps, remembering their sense of honor, their courage in battle, their dignity as leaders.

  Not at all bad, that. Ah! But they wear no breeches…

  My berth on the Blue Train was the softest bed of my entire trip, the dining car food the most delicious, the comfort incomparable. This comfort gave me a keener eye for seeing Africans toiling in the fields out the window: the old woman carrying two beat-up suitcases across a hot dry road, walking away from the tracks towards a distant hill; a man in blue overalls bent double under a mealie sack – his month’s food slung over his shoulder; a child standing bare assed in a filthy yard.

  At Laingsburg a well-heeled couple on the train tossed apples from their crystal fruit bowl to children panhandling by the tracks. At Leeu-Gamka a skinny girl of about ten or eleven pleaded with me for food, murmuring in the shy prayerful way of a child softly begging. She was so thin and curveless her blue dress hung straight down from her shoulders to her knees like a faded flag of defeat. I could not bring myself to fling food at her. She ducked out of sight, and after we started up she reappeared, fierce-faced, and flung a small stone through the window, just missing my head. A few more small stones clattered into my sumptuous compartment, plopping on the cushions and smacking the wall – not serious, but meaningful; a symbolic stoning.

  The Blue Train cut through the late afternoon, its wide black shadow lying flat and hurrying next to it. At dusk a great watery darkness descended, dissolving the light, the high plains going purple then blue then black, with a flattening orange stripe of sunset in the sky that made the landscape blacker.

  The next day we stopped at Kimberley, a dust-blown mining town, slummy at the edges, with a huge pit in the middle, ‘the biggest man-made hole in the world.’ Billions of dollars’ worth of gems had been scooped from this pit, yet the town was just a dreary dorp, of waste dumps and hills of gravel, and bungalows with tin roofs, video parlors and fried chicken restaurants and burger joints and used car lots and a hideous desert climate with terrific summer heat and wicked winter frosts, nothing to do in the dorp except dig and sift and pick through the dirt for baubles. All this visible tedium and poorly paid labor was the reality behind the wickedest confidence trick in the world, the diamond trade.

  Back on the train: ostrich carpaccio, followed by a choice of honey-glazed breast of duck, or ostrich Wellington, or baked kingklip, and dessert of chocolate mousse. I ate and watched the settlements pass, some very grand, but also squatter colonies of tin-roofed shacks, and in some places at nine in the morning drunks on benches, guzzling their free ration of wine.

  The train was almost heartbreaking for being so pleasant, for offering this view of South Africa, the same misery, the same splendor. But also my work was done, my safari ended. This trip was just a dying fall; I was clinging to Africa because I had not wanted it to end.

  Huck never returned from the Territory, as far as we know. Yet Captain Gulliver went home, wiser but also alienated and revolted not by the trip but by the domestic scene. Unable to stand the Yahoo smell that adhered to his wife and the sight of his savage-looking family, he comforted himself by talking to his horse and finding companionship in the stable. Travel had changed him. You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back. You think, I is someone else, like Rimbaud.

&
nbsp; Several occurrences in South Africa helped me find a sense of proportion. Just before I left Johannesburg I left my locked bag and every expensive thing I owned in the safekeeping of a hotel’s padlocked strongroom. I took a short trip to the coast, carrying only a briefcase, my notes, my story, and a change of clothes. I did not want to be burdened by a bag, or any valuables. I returned to the hotel four days later and handed over my claim check to an uncertain bellhop.

  ‘We cannot find your bag, sir.’

  The thing had been stolen. And so I lost everything I had brought to Africa, watch, wallet, cash, air tickets, as well as artifacts and treasures I had bought along the way; everything except my briefcase and its rattling contents. I still had my house keys, the selection of Montaigne’s Essays, the fair copy of my erotic story, a change of clothes, a small Congolese fetish of wood and beads which was a remedy against thunder, and – a miracle – all the notes I had taken to inform the writing of this book.

  ‘That’s very Janiceburg,’ a Johannesburger said to me, of the theft. ‘Very Jozi.’

  Not long after that, while I was still cursing my loss, Nadine’s husband Reinhold died. The funeral took place on a lovely day, fragrant with sunwarmed yew trees, at Braamfontein crematorium, an old stone building in the middle of a wooded walled-in cemetery. Among the hundred or so mourners were former political prisoners, civil rights lawyers, poets, novelists, journalists, activists, family friends.

  Nadine’s son Hugo spoke tenderly of his father. Others apostrophized him. And in the course of the service I got better acquainted with this remarkable man, Reinhold Cassirer – art connoisseur, humanist, businessman, wine expert, philanthropist, horseman, raconteur, great friend, loving husband.

  Petite, yet strong and sure of herself, and witty even on this occasion, Nadine spoke of her love for her husband.