by James Best
A bus took us over to the bleak quarry where the prisoners laboured all day every day, pointlessly breaking limestone rocks, purely to keep them busy. We went past a house where the Pan Africanist Congress leader Robert Sobukwe was held. In the early 1960s, The Prof was considered such a threat to the government that at the end of his three-year sentence for incitement a special law was passed, which contained what became known as the ‘Sobukwe Clause’, empowering the minister of justice to prolong the detention of any political prisoner indefinitely. The law was never applied to anyone else. Sobukwe was moved to Robben Island and kept in solitary confinement for six years. Even when he left prison he was banished to the dusty and remote small town of Galeshewe in the Northern Cape Province and kept under house arrest.
The next morning we left Cape Town, as well as our friends, both staff and guests, at the hostel. It was surprising how much we had bonded with them all in only a few days; a young man from Melbourne gave Sam a mini AFL football as a parting gift.
In my disorganised and flustered state getting bags onto the bus, I worried a daypack had been left behind. Max later said Sam had told me three times it was already on the bus, which I had ignored. Hearing this shook me. As the bus wound through Cape Town’s suburbs I realised that I needed to listen, properly listen, to Sam, and value more what he had to say.
We were finally on the road, heading east on the Baz Bus, a backpacker bus that links the hostels along the coast. Our first stop was Hermanus, a quiet town on a rugged rocky coast. At lunchtime on our second day there, Max, Sam and I stumbled upon a small Indian eatery. Half restaurant, half Indian produce store, it had floor-to-ceiling shelves brimming with glass jars containing curry leaves, cinnamon sticks, cumin and seemingly every spice imaginable. The owner, Shareen, quizzed me about our travels. She was immediately fascinated by Sam. Some people just get him, and she was one of them. She glossed over his oddness, his overly loud speech when stressed, his clumsiness in spilling his drink on the table. She encouraged him in conversation, talking with him on his level about his interests. When he wandered towards the door, she quickly called him back before I could do the same. It was a balm for Sam and I to spend some time with someone who just understood, no explanation necessary.
Max parted ways with us the next morning. Our last encounter with him was as he filmed us departing on the bus, after a hurried goodbye in a roadside bus shelter in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden, we were really on our own. It was a relief to have the stress of filming lift, and it also meant an end to the helter-skelter schedule.
I did, however, feel a rising anxiety about what lay ahead and a sudden pang of loneliness. I was going to miss Max. The training wheels were off. It was all up to me now. Or maybe, more importantly, it was all up to Sam.
CHAPTER 4
The Baz Bus
The next stop was Mossel Bay, a large town which sits at the western end of the ‘garden route’ of South Africa. This picturesque stretch of coast is backpacker heaven, all long wide beaches, rivers, lagoons and quaint villages. On the bus with us were twenty Europeans, mostly in their twenties, and the African driver. Our fellow travellers were curious about Sam and what we were doing.
Sitting next to Sam in the back seat of the bus was a twenty-year-old sports and language teacher from Hamburg who’d soon be volunteering as a teacher in Port Elizabeth for two months. We’d meet lots of expat volunteers and NGO workers on the South African backpacker circuit. He had a long conversation with Sam, which ranged over whether the teacher looked like Professor Lupin from the Harry Potter films (I didn’t think so) to whether stomping hard on the ground scares lions away to a failed attempt to teach Sam how to count to ten in German. Maybe next time.
In a roadside cafe, Sam perched in a red vinyl booth with three backpackers hotly debating the relative merits of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia over morning tea. Sam finally agreed to disagree, and moved on to theorising whether Kim Jong-un was more evil than Lord Voldemort or Sauron from The Lord of the Rings. That is why everyone is interested in Sam.
It had been a very white African experience so far. We had met a few South Africans, but they were mostly white and mostly tourists. While things have improved, there is still a stark economic divide between black and white in post-apartheid South Africa, with the borders of townships well defined by the sudden shift from rendered brick and high-walled gardens to corrugated iron, dirt and rubbish. Black South Africans still dominate service roles, while whites still mostly own businesses and hold professional positions. What was not evident, however, at least in this part of the country, was animosity or hostility. There was an ease between black and white that I didn’t expect, given the raw recent history. It was a remarkable achievement for a remarkable country.
The most important tool of the intervention so far had proven to be our fellow travellers. The backpackers all took to Sam and frequently tried to strike up conversations with him whenever I could pry him away from playing Nintendo DS in our room. Still, it was clear this was hard work for him.
One afternoon, Sam had a typically obscure but none the less productive exchange with four young men—Dutch, Danish and English—about Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and video games on various consoles. They were remarkably patient. But eventually Sam decided he’d had enough and abruptly took off, with me in pursuit.
I sensed that his conversation skills had started to improve. We discussed what questions were suitable for different people. For example, it was okay to ask someone’s age, but not while ordering lunch at a restaurant. On the bus from Mossel Bay to the evocatively named village of Wilderness, something amazing happened to Sam. After meeting a couple from England, Sam asked the woman, Erica, what she did for work. It turned out that she was an actress. ‘I was an extra in Harry Potter,’ she said. Well, you can imagine Sam’s reaction! It transpired Erica played a Slytherin in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and actually knew Tom Felton, the actor who played Draco Malfoy. Sam talked about it for days.
Wilderness is a beautiful place. It’s a small village on an endless beach shrouded in mist and surrounded by protected jungle. The evening we arrived, a group of us went to a restaurant with live music. I was worried Sam would be overwhelmed by the music but he did quite well. The people at our table were fascinated as Sam touched my whiskers, ear lobes and hair as sensory calming actions. I didn’t mind; I was well used to it.
The next day we trundled along an abandoned rail line through a tunnel to the Cave Man’s house. Set up a few years earlier by a man who had a spiritual epiphany, it is a maze of rooms made from driftwood and flotsam set deep inside a cave in the cliffs overlooking a wild beach, lit by candles and decorated with shells and stones. The man allows the homeless to stay, and asks visitors for a ‘contribution’ for being shown around. Sam was just relieved the man wasn’t a real cave man. My boy was definitely more relaxed now. The facial rash was easing.
From Wilderness, two long bus trips took us into and then out of Port Elizabeth, with a short overnight stay in a hostel in the city. We had now moved from the Garden Route to the Wild Coast, a more isolated and windswept stretch of coast, but still beautiful in a different sort of way. The Wild Coast is crossed by a multitude of rivers, which form lagoons and wide mouths as they cleave the wide white beaches pounded by heavy surf.
One of these is the Great Kei River, and the area north of this is known as Transkei, which means ‘across the Kei’. Nelson Mandela grew up here. Transkei was nominated as a supposedly independent state for Xhosa-speaking people during the apartheid era. This was one of four ‘homelands’ established under the separate development policy. These states had their own governments and defence forces but were more a justification of apartheid than anything else, and weren’t recognised by any country other than South Africa. They became dumping grounds, beset by poverty and unemployment. Transkei’s thirty-one-year history was dominated by a corrupt leader, Kaiser Matanzima, wh
o effectively ran the country as a one-party state. As a result, the area is still lagging behind in infrastructure. It can take a long time to recover from decades of neglect.
In fewer than twenty-four hours we had travelled from what could easily have been part of Europe to a much more ‘African’ landscape: rounded stone and mortar huts with thatch roofs called rondavels appeared, the population and traffic thinned, the flora became coarser, the roads rougher.
The travelling gave me time to reflect on how we were both going. Sam had certainly settled, but I was now much more aware I had to pace how hard I pushed him, not only with organised activities but with chance conversations with strangers on buses or in hostels, or just with the rigours of travelling itself. I needed to make the jelly wobble, but not fall off the plate.
I also wanted to make sure I didn’t just focus on Sam making conversation, but also on the way he thought during those conversations. I needed to help him develop his ‘theory of mind’. Theory of mind is more than empathy; it is trying to get inside the head of someone else and second-guess what they are thinking and what they might be about to do. As Atticus Finch puts it in To Kill a Mockingbird, it is ‘to walk in another man’s shoes’. This skill starts developing very early in childhood, even in the first twelve months of life. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University in England, has theorised that ‘protodeclarative pointing’—pointing to bring attention to, or share interest in, an object, which typically develops between seven and nine months of age—is a ‘critical precursor’ to developing theory of mind.
Trying to figure out what’s going on in other people’s heads is something most of us do naturally all the time, and impairment in this ability is a central deficit in many people with autism. People with autism have particular difficulty with tasks that require them to understand another person’s beliefs. With all my focus now on Sam, I continually peppered him with questions to try to develop this type of thinking. ‘What do you think he is thinking?’ ‘Why do you think she said that, Sam?’ ‘How do you think that made that person feel?’
My own theory of mind was being tested in regards to our upcoming travel plans. I wasn’t entirely sure why but Sam had been demonstrating increasing resistance to going to Namibia, our next major destination after South Africa. He was aware we were going to countries poorer than South Africa and he wasn’t happy about it.
He started up again. ‘I don’t want to go to Namibia.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said.
He leant towards me to emphasise his message. ‘I’m too tired to go to Namibia.’
‘Let’s just see how we go,’ I replied, trying to end the conversation.
‘I don’t like this hard life,’ he continued. ‘I want an easy life. I want to go back to Sydney.’
‘Let’s just think about today.’ I looked over to the kitchen. ‘What do you want for dinner?’
He wasn’t budging. ‘I don’t want to go to seven countries. Seven countries is too hard for me.’
‘I think you’ll be okay. Let’s just see how we go.’
And so it went on. Little did he know we were already booked to fly to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, in two weeks. I wondered if this issue would escalate over that time.
As for me, I was definitely feeling lonely, and we were only two weeks into the trip. While I was meeting people constantly, it was always through the prism of what I was doing with Sam. It was also tiring. I had to make sure I was pacing myself, as well as Sam. It was okay, I decided, to have an occasional day when we didn’t do much, especially tourism stuff, which I was determined should remain a low priority in any case. Experiences were fine, but ticking sites off lists was not. We were here to get a job done.
Our destination after the second long bus trip was Buccaneer’s Lodge in Chintsa. Sam and I would spend three nights here, taking in the white sand, big rolling surf and panoramic views from the hostel’s verandahs.
Our room was named after medical student Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who was arrested, tortured and killed at the hands of the police in 1973. His words were painted on the wall of the room: ‘It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.’
On the second day we visited a nearby village where pigs, geese and dogs roamed the dirt roads between rondavels. Children peered out of the doorways and women balanced firewood on colourful bandanas wrapped around their heads. As part of the visit, we met a local Xhosa legend, ninety-five-year-old Mama Tofu. She had begun to explain the principles of their culture, standing over a small group of seated Europeans in the community rondavel, when Sam started playing up. I had forgotten to give him his ADHD medication that morning, so he was more boisterous than normal, bouncing off the mud walls of the small thatched-roof hut. But Mama Tofu was unfazed, and insisted I not restrain him and just let him do whatever he wanted as long as he was safe.
Sam immediately pointed to a photo she had on display, which showed a topless African woman. ‘Inappropriate!’
Mama Tofu laughed uproariously and gave him a hug. He looked at her, trying to extricate himself from the hug. ‘You’re old,’ he said.
She smiled, her deeply lined face with sparkling eyes creasing into a wide grin with angled and missing teeth. ‘Yes, I am, Mr Sam.’
‘I hope you don’t die,’ he said.
Fortunately, I think she missed the last comment. Language barriers can be protective sometimes. Mama Tofu was quite taken with Sam. They walked hand in hand around the hut. Animated and engaging, she was remarkable for her age. On a side table she had a photo of her with Jacques Kallis, the famous South African cricketer. Like me, she was a cricket nut. We discussed South Africa’s recent disappointing loss in the ICC Cricket World Cup, and how silly mistakes had cost them dearly in the semi-final. With a shake of her head she admonished various team members for their performance. I scrambled to stop Sam knocking over a jewellery display, but Mama Tofu waved me away. ‘Let him be. Whatever happens in here is fine by us. You just relax.’
As we were leaving, I took a photo of two young girls with a pattern of white dots painted on their faces standing near Sam. Much to his surprise, one of them burst into song and within a few seconds a chorus line of ten children and adults, including Mama Tofu, clapped, swayed and sung in perfect harmony. The two young girls then leapt forward from the line and swung their lower legs in turn, like gyrating helicopter blades, while skipping on their other leg. We were all gobsmacked. Sam laughed and bounced his way back to the minibus. ‘The girls are dancing!’
On the way out of the village, we spied a man walking along the road wearing a road worker’s fluoro jacket. As we passed, I noticed his face was painted white. I asked our Xhosa driver why.
‘He is a witchdoctor,’ he said.
Of course.
The next evening, back in my room with Sam, I started to fret about my capability again. I had lost yet another object, this time my water canister’s lid, and was seriously pissed off with myself. I thought about the countries that lay ahead, far more challenging than South Africa, and I wondered again if I was taking too much of a risk with this project, and too much of a risk with Sam. Perhaps I was too old for this crap?
Earlier that day, the South African staff at the hostel had been swapping real-life horror stories—of being robbed at knifepoint or having guns pointed at their heads in broad daylight in Cape Town or Johannesburg—and scaring the bejesus out of the guests, myself included, before adding, ‘Yes, but it’s not that bad. You just need to be vigilant.’ An Australian on the Baz Bus into Port Elizabeth had told me about a close call he’d had with a guy with a gun while walking near Wilderness, exactly where we’d been two days earlier.
Sitting on the lounge in the room, watching Sam listen to music on the bed, I felt a sudden surge of panic. I must not fail him. These thoughts had hit me several times a day over last few days. Just don’t fuck up. I distracted myself by watchi
ng a film on my computer.
During our three days at Buccaneer’s we met more fellow travellers and, as happens when travelling, quickly formed bonds with them. Sam and I hung out with a couple, Ed and Lana, and Anka, a Dutch physiotherapist, as we went canoeing, walked to the beach and played volleyball. The three of them joined us when we caught the Baz Bus to the next stop, Coffee Bay.
Anka was here to meet up with a South African doctor she’d gone out with in the Netherlands for two years, but hadn’t seen since they’d broken up two years earlier. They had planned to go to South Africa together but when their relationship had ended, he had left and she had stayed in Holland. Now she had come to see him again, to find out whether their relationship could be rekindled. It had been hard for her to find the strength to travel here, being a naturally cautious person. I nicknamed her Captain Sensible. Sam liked Captain Sensible; Captain Sensible liked Sam.
Anka was meeting her ex-boyfriend an hour’s drive away from Coffee Bay and then staying with him for five days, so if it didn’t work out it would be awkward. We divulged our anxieties to each other, mine for Sam and our adventure, hers for her upcoming rendezvous and her future.
Ed and Lana were soon-to-be Australian citizens from Israel and Belgium respectively, and they lived in inner Sydney not far from our home. All three were so understanding of Sam’s behaviour and made such an effort to involve him that I was, yet again, deeply touched.
On the bus to Coffee Bay, Ed asked the group where we would go in time and place if we had a time machine. Nominations included Ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the building of the pyramids and Nelson Mandela’s release.
