Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  My job became all-consuming. Sharon considered teaching too, but she had paperwork problems with the bureaucracy. Then word came that her mother was seriously ill. She threw her things in a bag and flew to Los Angeles. I muttered about going with her, but I didn’t seriously consider it. It had been a year since she came to Singapore. We had found a good rhythm together—our curiosities overlapped; we rarely quarreled. But I had projects: a novel, a circumnavigation, places I wanted to surf, and, now, teaching in Grassy Park. Sharon’s goals were less immediate, less evident. With my usual one-eyed thoughtlessness, I never asked her what she wanted. We never talked about the future. She was nearly thirty-five. The truth was, we were mismatched. I had somehow kept her interested for years, but I wasn’t what she wanted. Meanwhile, I took her for granted. We made no plans or vows when she left Cape Town.

  • • •

  ONE OF THE REASONS teaching became so engrossing was that it was impossible to teach using the textbooks we were given. They were rank with apartheid propaganda and misinformation. The geography curriculum, for instance, included a section on South Africa’s neighbors that depicted them as peaceful Portuguese colonies. Even I knew that, in fact, Mozambique and Angola had both fought long, bloody wars of national liberation, had thrown out the Portuguese some years before, and were both now fighting desperate civil wars in which South Africa was arming and training the rebels. Our curriculum’s version of South African urban geography was, in its way, worse. It treated residential racial segregation, for instance, as if it were a law of nature, peacefully evolved. Presenting this regime-serving fiction as fact in a community that existed only because of violent mass evictions from downtown neighborhoods designated “white” was clearly not on. So I buried myself in research, trying to quickly learn up these and other topics, which turned out to be harder than expected. Many of the relevant books were banned. I found my way to a special section of the University of Cape Town’s library where some banned publications could be consulted, not checked out, but I was still, of course, playing hapless catch-up when it came to local and regional politics and history.

  Not that my students seemed particularly concerned about my expertise or lack thereof. They nearly all declined to be brought out on political subjects—whether from indifference or wariness of me, I couldn’t tell. The exceptions were among the seniors I saw, ostensibly for religious instruction. At their insistence, we never cracked the Bibles that were our sole textbooks, but passed our class time in free-ranging discussion. Their favorite topics were careers, computers, and the pros and cons of premarital sex. Among the seniors not averse to talking politics was a brooding, worldly boy named Cecil Prinsloo. He knew somehow about my efforts to teach my academic classes something other than the government syllabus. He started staying after class to talk, questioning me closely about my background and views, testing my feeble grasp of the situation in South Africa. The only real resistance to my efforts to end-run the syllabus came not from my students but from my more conservative colleagues. They too had heard that I wasn’t simply preparing my classes for the standard examinations they would eventually face, and they let me know that this was unacceptable. I couldn’t see what to do. Luckily, none of my students in the exam subjects I taught were facing standardized national exams that year. Those were another year or two away for them. So my abandoning the toxic syllabus wasn’t putting them in immediate academic peril. I tried to reconcile myself to the good chance that I would soon be fired. I had no job security—just the principal’s goodwill. And the principal was quite conservative himself. But I really, really didn’t want to stop teaching.

  Some of my students, Grassy Park High School, Cape Town, 1980

  Everything changed one April morning when our students suddenly started boycotting their classes, protesting apartheid in education. I say it was sudden because it stunned me. In truth, the boycott had been long and carefully planned. The school was plastered with banners: DOWN WITH GUTTER EDUCATION; RELEASE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. The students were marching, singing, fists raised, roaring the Zulu call-and-response of the liberation struggle:

  “Amandla!” (Power!)

  “NGAWETHU!” (To the people!)

  At a mass meeting in the school courtyard, Cecil Prinsloo told the crowd, “This is not a holiday from school.” He emphasized every word. “This is a holiday from brainwashing.”

  Other Cape Flats high schools were also boycotting, and the protest quickly went national. Within weeks, two hundred thousand students were refusing their lessons, demanding an end to apartheid. At Grassy Park High, the students continued to come to school each day, organizing, with the help of sympathetic teachers, an alternate curriculum. I was among the sympathetic teachers. With revolution-minded students now in charge, my previous deviations from the syllabus no longer seemed like derelictions, and I stopped fearing for my job. My classes on the U.S. Bill of Rights were packed. It was a chaotic, exhilarating period.

  But the exhilaration was short-lived—a matter of a few weeks. The authorities had been wrongfooted. The prime minister, P. W. Botha, blustered and threatened, but the state’s enormous machinery of repression seemed slow to lurch into gear. Once it did, however, the atmosphere darkened fast. Student leaders, including some from our school, and revolution-minded teachers, including my colleague Matthew Cloete, who taught in the classroom next to mine, began to disappear—some into hiding, most into the regime’s jails. It was called detention without charges, and the number of known detainees quickly soared into the hundreds.

  The confrontation escalated. In Cape Town it climaxed in a general strike in mid-June. For two days, hundreds of thousands of black workers stayed home. Factories and businesses were forced to close. The police, now armored and fully mobilized, attacked illegal gatherings—and all gatherings of black people were effectively illegal now, under something called the Riotous Assemblies Act. Burning and looting began, and the police announced that they would “shoot to kill.” The Cape Flats became a battlefield. Hospitals reported hundreds of maimed and injured. The press reported forty-two dead. Many of the dead and injured were children. The schools were all closed now, along with all the roads into Grassy Park. Information was hard to come by. When the roads reopened, I drove to Grassy Park. The destruction in some areas of the Flats was extensive, but our school was fine. I found three of my students. They said that they had stayed inside their houses throughout the violence. It seemed that none of our students had been hurt, which felt like a miracle.

  Three weeks later, classes resumed. We were only halfway through the school year and, as the principal kept reminding us, there was a great deal of extra work to do now.

  • • •

  DID I SURF while my world abruptly compacted into a township high school and a few dozen teenagers there? Some. There were good waves on the Atlantic side of the Cape, where the water was surprisingly cold—my parents sent me my wetsuit. Heavy swells rolled in from the Southern Ocean as winter commenced. Most of the better spots were in rocky coves, some of them right in the city, hard by swanky apartment blocks. Others were farther down the mountainous, windswept Cape. My favorite spot was a quiet country righthander called Noordhoek. It broke at the north end of a magnificent sweep of empty beach: an A-framed peak with a lovely inside wall, good on southeast winds. The water was often a luminous blue-green. I sometimes surfed it completely alone. One afternoon I climbed the hill back to my car and found it full of baboons. I had left a window open. The monkeys had made themselves comfortable and did not scare easily. I ended up having to use my board as épée, club, and shield when they staged frightening mock attacks, teeth bared, before ambling off.

  The place I was waiting on, though, was in the Eastern Cape, some four hundred miles up the Indian Ocean coast from Cape Town. It was called Jeffreys Bay, and no circumnavigation on a surfboard would be complete without a stop there. The Endless Summer, a 1964 film that warped the career
goals of many young surfers, including me, climaxed near Jeffreys, when two American surfers found “the perfect wave” at Cape St. Francis. The spot featured in the film turned out to be a fickle creature, not often ridable, but Jeffreys Bay was the real thing: a long right point of the highest quality, with heaps of swell in the winter and frequent offshore winds. I tried to keep my eye on conditions, and I made a couple of quick trial runs from Cape Town without catching it especially good. Then, in August, I went for a week on a promising weather map: two big low-pressure spirals in the Roaring Forties. They looked like wave-generating storms spinning right in the window for Jeffreys.

  And they were. The surf pumped all week, peaking on a day so big that only one guy made it out—a number of us tried and failed—and he caught only one wave. Jeffreys Bay was a tiny, tumbledown fishing village with a few stucco summer houses scattered through the aloes. I stayed in a weatherbeaten boardinghouse in the dunes east of the village. There were four or five Australians also staying there, and it was comforting, I found, to be back in the easy company of Aussie surfers. The great wave was just down the beach, farther east. There were few people around—rarely more than ten surfers in the water—and with the size of the waves and the length of the rides we were generally scattered up and down the point. On a couple of mornings I was the first one out, slipping through a keyhole that I’d seen the locals use near the top of the point. There was often an icy offshore wind, and at sunrise the waves approached out of a blinding sea. As soon as you caught one, though, the wave threw a deep green-and-silver shadow inside which, as you rose to your feet, everything became radiantly clear.

  It was an astoundingly long ride. Longer even than Tavarua. And it was a right—on my frontside. The two spots are not actually similar. Jeffreys is rocky but not especially shallow. It’s a facey wave, a broad canvas for sweeping long-radius turns, including cutbacks toward the hook. It’s fast and it’s powerful but it’s not particularly hollow—it has no bone-crushing sections à la Kirra. Some waves have flat sections, or weird bumps, or go mushy; others close out. The rule, however, is a reeling wall, peeling continuously for hundreds of yards. My pale blue New Zealand pintail loved that wave. Even at double-overhead, dropping in against the wind, it never skittered. Some of the biggest sets that week nobody wanted, at least not out at the main takeoff spot, where the walls on the big days were massive and intimidating. You want it? No, you go! And the moment would pass, the beast unridden. Farther down the line, at a less scary juncture, somebody might jump aboard. These were the best waves I had ridden since our first trip to Nias, more than a year before. It was different, surfing in a wetsuit, and the famous Jeffreys was nothing like the equatorial obscurity of Lagundri, but technically it was as if my board and I picked up almost exactly where we had left off. Big right wall, power over the ledge, jump up, pick a line, pump for speed, run and gun. Try to keep from screaming from joy.

  In the evenings we threw darts, played snooker, drank beer, talked surf. The owner of the guesthouse was an older man, a British colonial blowhard who had been chased south from East Africa by decolonization. He liked his gin and loved to boast about all the Africans he had “taken down from the tree” and taught some useful skill—boot polishing or how to use a broom. I couldn’t listen to him. The Aussies didn’t mind him, though, which reminded me of my least favorite thing about Australia. In the casino kitchen where I had worked, the other dixie bashers all talked disdainfully of “wogs,” a vast category of humanity that included southern Europeans. Refugees were pouring out of Southeast Asia then—“boat people”—and the caustic racism that suffused the subject in nearly every discussion I heard in Oz was startling.

  As things turned out, I made it back to Jeffreys the following winter—1981—and caught it good again. By then, I had been in South Africa eighteen months—far longer than I had ever expected to be. And yet I never found anyone in South Africa to surf with. I got to know surfers in Cape Town, but their familiar obsession with scoring waves felt, under the apartheid circumstances, vaguely embarrassing, almost ignominious. I had no right to judge how South Africans, black or white, dealt individually with their extraordinary situation, but working on the Cape Flats, seeing the workings of institutionalized injustice and state terror up relatively close, was deeply affecting me—was making me impatient with, among other things, myself. There was simply no escaping politics, and I found no common political ground with any of the surfers I met. So I chased waves alone.

  • • •

  MY PARENTS CAME TO CAPE TOWN, on short notice, uninvited. I didn’t want them to come. I was exceptionally busy at school, but it wasn’t that. I was homesick, chronically, particularly now that Sharon was gone, and I was worried that seeing my mother and father—seeing their faces, hearing their voices, particularly my mother’s laugh—would shatter my resolve to stay on this lonely expat track and complete my chosen projects: teaching, the novel.

  It was also the cognitive dissonance between the world I was living in now and what I imagined to be their world. Not that I had anything like a clear view of their lives. They wrote letters faithfully, and I did too. So I knew the outlines, even the details, of my family’s projects, mishaps, interests. My siblings were in college now, and they also wrote. But my parents’ reports of movies made, vacations taken, sailboats bought, seemed to arrive from a particularly distant planet. My father had been on the ropes, professionally, a few years before. He and my mother had started their own production company, and then had shows canceled, deals fall through, financing vanish. I only understood how bad it was when I discovered that they were attending trendy neo-Buddhist “est” seminars offered by an authoritarian charlatan named Werner Erhard, who briefly charmed much of Hollywood. This discovery had frightened and, I am ashamed to say, disgusted me. It suggested desperation and seemed so egregiously L.A. (Actually, “est” was popular in New York, Israel, San Francisco, and many other places—even white Cape Town!) My parents’ New Age nadir now seemed to have occurred very long ago, though. In the intervening years, their company had prospered, their horizons widened. They were making pictures they were proud of, working with people they liked. This was all to the good, of course. The problem was, I had been gone so long, their lives now sounded very glossy and foreign, while my life in Cape Town was so funky and modest. I was not ready for some spiffed-up jet-set version of my parents to come crashing into my humble schoolteacher’s daily slog. They understood that, I’m sure. But enough was enough—it had been two and a half years—and I didn’t have the heart to ask them to stay away.

  That was lucky. It was unambivalently terrific to see them. And they seemed elated to see me. My mother kept grabbing my hand and kneading it between hers. They both seemed younger, more bright-eyed and spry, than I remembered them—and there was nothing spiffed-up about them. I showed them around the Cape. They seemed fascinated by every Cape Dutch gable and WHITE PERSONS ONLY sign, every shantytown and vineyard. I was living at that point in a room near the university, on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain. With two of my housemates, we climbed the mountain—not a small hike—and picnicked on top. From up there, we could see, out in Table Bay, Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and his comrades were imprisoned but not forgotten. (Their words and images were strictly banned.) Then we descended the western slopes to the coast.

  My folks insisted on visiting Grassy Park High. My students double-insisted that I bring them. And so we went, on a day that I had taken off. The principal was an enthusiastic host—he loved Americans. He took my parents on a campus tour, and I made sure that we stopped in on my students, whose schedules moved them always in a group. Each time we entered a classroom, they all sprang to their feet, staring, bellowing, “Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan.” I didn’t know what to do, so I introduced them individually, running up and down the rows—Amy, Jasmine, Marius, Philip, Desiree, Myron, Natalie, Oscar, Mareldia, Shaun—eliciting grins and blushes as I went. After fiv
e or six classes of this, the principal claimed he had never seen such a prodigious feat of memory, but it actually was effortless and, I realized, an easy way to show my parents, without belaboring it, the extent of my involvement with these kids. My own classroom, New Room 16, had been taken over by a group of senior girls who had prepared a banquet. There was a huge pot of curry, and a great array of Cape Malay specialties: bredie, samoosas, sosaties, frikkadels, yellow rice with raisins and cinnamon, roast chicken, bobotie, buriyani. School had let out by then, and the other teachers were invited. June Charles, my youngest colleague—she was only eighteen yet teaching high school—guided my father through the strange and tasty dishes. My mother, meanwhile, hit it off especially with a math teacher, Brian Dublin, and complimented him more than she knew when she said that with his beret and his beard he reminded her of Che Guevara. Brian was an activist whose seriousness and dedication I had come to admire.

  My parents, it occurred to me, were proud of me. Okay, it wasn’t the Peace Corps—my mother’s early ambition for me—and it certainly wasn’t Nader’s Raiders. But I had become their son-who-was-helping-oppressed-black-kids-in-South-Africa, which was not bad. They were particularly taken with an ad hoc career-counseling project I had started, which they heard all about from my biggest fan, the principal. The project had grown from my first conversations with seniors, who were full of big career dreams but seemed to have almost no information about colleges and scholarships. We had written to universities and technical schools all over South Africa and received armloads of booklets, brochures, and applications, including a great deal of encouraging news about financial aid and “permits” that would allow black students to attend formerly all-white institutions. The material eventually filled a whole shelf in the library, and proved to be popular reading, and not only among seniors. With the seniors, I had worked out applications plans and strategies that seemed to me quite promising. What I didn’t know was that the “permits” we needed were fiercely controversial in the black community and had become, indeed, the object of a liberation-movement boycott—nobody could bring themselves to tell me. Actually, what I didn’t know was far more than that. Very few of our seniors, for instance, would ultimately qualify after their final exams for entrance to most of the universities we were interested in, including the University of Cape Town. There were already, of course, existing networks, invisible to me, for graduating seniors to make their way into the worlds of work or further study. In the end, I came to see my careers program as an enormous American folly, even in some cases quite destructive, where it encouraged false hopes or encouraged kids to defy boycotts that I knew nothing about.