Shorelines

by Chris Marais

  The Wild Coast, from the big-picture distance of expensive plexiglass and a 100-metre height, is the best landscape in South Africa. It cannot be allowed to fall into the careless hands of miners and the bad-taste brigade, with their low-maintenance intentions and truckloads of pale facebrick.

  All that was back in March 2004. More than 18 months later, we were experiencing the Wild Coast at ground level. Although the visit had been a little scarier this time, I still didn’t want it to open its doors to the kind of development we’d seen so far on the trip.

  We left Mbotyi River Lodge early one morning in the company of a bunch of peevish elves that had settled somewhere deep inside the Isuzu. They yelled and squealed every time we hit a pothole. I played some Jimi Hendrix to shut them up and then we nestled in behind a very slow, old vehicle called a “Grim Boy Pleasure Bus”, which was holding fast in the slipstream of its brother, called “Grim Boy wa Bantu”.

  Lusikisiki (say it softly and you can hear the wind sliding through summer grass on Pondo hills) was waking up. A man was leading a goat to slaughter, and the animal strained at its leash as they quickly crossed in front of us. A small sign said:

  “Welcome to Las Vegas. Decent Accommodation For You.”

  The minibuses gathering like flies in the town bore names like “Lady Luck”, “After Tears” and, in the words of both Cat Stevens and John Lennon, “Love Is All”.

  Just outside Flagstaff we passed an ambulance with its siren on Howl, a cabal of police cars with their blue lights on Flash, and a crippled soft-drinks pantechnikon resting on its side in the Tilt mode. The sweet smell of Fanta Pineapple filled the air, and the outskirters of Flagstaff began to gather. Nothing yummier than roadside loot in Africa.

  Flagstaff at peak hour was like a splash of Jo’burg in the face. Bizana was not much better. And then we were out of the old Transkei and into the business end of the South Coast, where we stopped for diesel and the worst meaty pie on the planet. I normally always eat my meat pies right up, but this one was not a keeper.

  “Well, at least we’re in the South Coast,” I announced with gusto, a piece of pastry and a blob of monosodium glutamate in my mouth. Yes. After a week of lavish, disgustingly fresh seafood spectaculars all along the Wild Coast, it was just too wonderful to be chomping on microwaved roadkill. We bought a local paper and read about the murder of a young student on nearby Anerley Beach. This news, combined with the deadly traffic around us and the poisonous road fodder on offer, nearly sent us scuttling back to Port St Johns.

  We were on a famous route, to be sure. Back in 1842, when Queen Victoria had been in the hot seat for only four years, Port Natal (now Durban) was besieged by Boers. The finest horseman (and, seemingly, the most charmed) among the British was Dick King, and he volunteered to ride the 850 km to Grahamstown to get help. He and his manservant Ndongeni rode south in an epic journey that ended in success for Her Majesty’s forces in Natal.

  Nearly 90 years later, a charming young hippo called Huberta left her homestead in the river reeds near Richards Bay and waddled southwards on an even more incredible journey. She walked all the way down, in the space of three years, to a spot on the Keiskamma River near King William’s Town, where she was killed by a hunter. At the time of writing, a dusty Huberta was still on display at the Amatole Museum in King William’s Town.

  “Hi, my name is Dorothy,” a charming young housekeeper at The Claridges in Ramsgate greeted us, broom held in the rest position. And then she spotted pie remnants on Jules’s jersey, leant forward and began to groom her like a fussy mother. My wife just sighed happily.

  Dorothy Mvundla must have thought she was in the company of tramps. We were not at our dashing best. All our clothes were filthy. The vehicle looked like a scrap-yard dog. And here we were, in the finest penthouse in sight. Rooms and rooms of beds and television and fridges and views over a Blue Flag beach, where people in silly hats cheerfully paddled around in pedalos and the smell of fresh waffles drifted up to our window sill. We hugged Dorothy for all kinds of reasons.

  This was just the ticket, after these many weeks of travel. The weather was suitably foul outside, the TV programmes looked enticing and we had a great excuse to treat the South Coast as a pit stop: we needed some serious laundry time.

  I had my nose in a local newspaper called South Coast Fever. Page three had a piece about “hinterlanders” who came to the beaches in minibus-loads, set up braai equipment on the sidewalks and began to burn meat at top volume. I didn’t think too much about that item until later, when we heard about the Norwegians who sailed here in 1882.

  “The Zulus came over the hills in waves, singing and dancing and beating drums,” our guide, Lood Boshoff, told us a couple of days later. “They slaughtered cattle, drank the blood of the beasts and roasted flesh right there on the beach. The Norwegians regarded this with alarm.”

  Then we discovered that, more than 50 years before the arrival of the Vikings, mighty King Shaka visited the kraal of hunter-explorer Henry Francis Fynn, where he was treated to fried beef steak. Shaka loved the meal so much that he ordered his own frying pan up from traders in Durban. And later, he became so adept with this nifty piece of kitchenware that he offered Fynn a pancake from his new pan.

  The road from Ramsgate to Port Shepstone was Bucket-and-Spade Alley. I forced Jules to stop the bakkie at Towel World, which sported sheet-sized beach towels embellished with naked mermaids and happy dolphins. We bought two of the less lurid – but still damn spunky, if you ask me – towels for fun.

  The turn-off to Pure Venom Snake Park was just ahead, but unfortunately there was no time to visit it. Besides, I’m no great shakes on snakes. The day before, I’d read about a local man who’d been bitten by some sort of mamba.

  “He actually held on to it,” I told Jules. “So the authorities knew exactly what had bitten him. They could then give him the right anti-venom medication. And the snake got a life of three squares here at Pure Venom. Win-win all around.”

  The South Coast prided itself on being a party venue for the whole country, with foreigners welcome. Mardi Gras came in the form of the winter Sardine Run, as thousands of people flocked to the beaches to gather in the fish.

  The Sardine Run: more than 30 000 tonnes of sardines take advantage of a tongue of cold water extending up the Wild Coast and KZN, followed by game fish, dolphins, Bryde and Sei whales and thousands of seabirds screaming blue murder.

  During out-of-sardine season, the South Coast was a holiday crèche for teenagers, who came to get trashed on the beaches and chase each other about. Like the old Plett days. At first they scared the locals with all their testosterone and their music. Then the South Coast woke up to the money factor of teenage tourism and began to ‘manage’ the youngsters into beach competitions and beauty shows and such.

  “Last year we had a concert by Reverend Thumb and Godly Thunder in Margate,” said Ina Gericke of South Coast Tourism. “With about 40 000 people dancing on the beach.”

  We met a great guy sitting in the lee of a rusty fan on Marine Drive at a place called St Mike’s Book Exchange & Sales, where the neon sign flashed Open.

  The amiable 45-year-old Bert Kaminer was a retired cook from Jo’burg. He’d managed Al’s Burgers in Hillbrow, which, in its time, had been one of my favourite late-night joints. Now he sold bodice-rippers and Wilbur Smiths to the holiday crowd looking for a cheap read on the beach.

  “OK, you want life on the South Coast?” he asked, and launched forth in a most delightful way.

  “You first have to learn about the three Rs: Rust, Rot and Relatives. The rust. Now look at my fan,” he said, pointing at the oxidised hunk of spinning metal. “I used to be a stressed-out chef. Now I sit here and watch my fan rusting away. And it’s been painted twice.

  “There’s also human rust. We hardly drive anywhere these days. Everything we need is just around the corner. It’s a big deal for me to drive to Port Shepstone. I get tired just hearing about you guys and your trip.
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  “Then there’s the rot. Well, that’s everywhere. It doesn’t matter how rare a book is, no collector will take one that’s been on the South Coast. You get mildew, you get gecko shit, you get spider shit. I call my books Golden Mouldies.

  “Lastly, the relatives. They’re the guys you never knew were family before, the long-lost cousins who suddenly want to bond with you over the summer holidays.”

  With all these el-cheapo books gently gathering mould around him, how did Bert keep the wolf from the door?

  “It’s feast or famine around here. Holidays, you feast. But the festive season is a nightmare in other ways. Marine Drive is one line of cars that never stops.

  “And then suddenly, after the holidays, they’re all gone. Life goes back to normal. The day starts off quiet.”

  And then?

  “It kind of tapers down from there.”

  But we knew. Bert Kaminer would never trade his rusty-fan life for a chef gig back in the Big Smoke. We thanked him for his insights and went bliss-out shopping at Woolworths.

  “You! Yes, you!” a thin old lady insisted, poking me in the ribs with one of her painted claws.

  “Yes?”

  “You look like a tourist.” No shit. Had my beer-drinking Mozambican shirt given me away?

  “I am.” I wasn’t going to do the whole Shorelines presentation for an aged crone with a sharp fingernail.

  “You people! Whenever you come here, the prices go up! Look at this pizza! Last week it was R6 cheaper!”

  I hardly ever meet people who speak in exclamation marks, but this pensioned-off harridan was the real deal.

  “I think you should complain to Woolworths. We tourists pay the same prices you do.”

  Hmm. I could see her brain ticking away. Loud Shirt has a point. She gave me one more resentful glare, thought about stabbing me again, changed her mind and simply edited me out of her life by staring at the stand with the chocolate-ball specials.

  I scuttled for the safety of the Claridges penthouse and looked down at all the potentially murderous South-Coast pensioners stalking the streets below, soothing my fevered brain with Scotch and satellite TV.

  The next morning, we met the aforementioned Lood Boshoff, a tourism promoter of note and one helluva cattle auctioneer. He proved this in a private moment in his car later, his sing-song staccato voice reminiscent of the old Rhodesian tobacco auctions. Lood gave us the grand tour of Port Shepstone and surrounds, and by sundown we were ensconced on the wooden deck of the forested house belonging to our friends Dave and Sue Holt-Biddle at Trafalgar. We sat in near-darkness listening to the surf and drinking wine like Mauritian planters or characters from Daphne du Maurier’s world.

  Recently (not, thank goodness, today) a spotted bush snake had issued a land claim on their deck and kept dropping in to visit from the roof. Inside, their TV set was permanently switched on – not because they loved TV so much, but because if they didn’t the rust would have it for breakfast.

  Which was what we all found ourselves tucking into the next morning at the waffle place below our penthouse, while a mystery pan-piper played some tunes from his hideout in the reeds. And the rust settled in for the day.

  Chapter 30: Durban to Ballito

  Inner Zulu

  “When I was a small boy my folks moved from Jo’burg to Zululand and found me a nanny,” my friend Dave Charles says one morning as we drive towards Durban. “My mother asked the Zulu woman if she spoke English.

  “ ‘Yes’, she replied, and was hired on the spot. But ‘yes’ was the only English word she knew, and so I was raised in the Zulu vernacular.”

  Over the years, Dave and his wife Sue have developed a network of local Zulu craftswomen who weave tapestries and baskets for sale at the lodge trading store.

  Following a trail of rumour, wood smoke and tradition, Dave Charles has discovered an astounding fact: the heart of true Zulu workmanship has moved to the Durban area. Right under the sun-browned skin of this First World holiday city, known more for its beaches, high-rise resorts and trendy nightclubs than for its Deep Zulu nature.

  One day he offered to take us ‘Zulu shopping’ with him.

  KwaMashu is a vast, technicolour township that rivals Soweto in size and complexity. We drove down ever-narrowing roads past mazes of corrugated iron shacks and wooden huts, each connected to a spider’s web of overhead electric lines.

  We passed a tumbledown strip mall of tuckshops, TV repair dens, shoe stalls, and a ‘steakhouse’ where the braai fires had been lit and a cow awaited the chop. Eventually, we arrived at Bheki Biyela’s place, on the crest of a small hill.

  If this had been London, Bheki Biyela would have had a shingle out on Bond Street, saying ‘By Appointment To His Royal Majesty’. As a supplier of traditional garb to the Zulu Royal House, he was known to be one of the finest Zulu tailors in the country.

  Outside his modest shack was a serval skin, stretched out on a rack. Inside Bheki’s place was a workroom and a bedroom – and little else. A stout Zulu man entered with the air of a regular customer and admired himself in a leopard skin mantle – usually reserved for royalty. Three women who had seen our parked vehicle came by to show off their new isixolo, modern and lightweight versions of the wide red headdress worn by Zulu matrons.

  Bheki – who had accepted us because we were with Dave Charles – displayed the striking new trend that had swept through the world of Zulu traditional garb: black and white suedette patterns with coloured car reflectors inset. Which was then worn with buckskin or catskin. It was tough on the local feline populations, but one realised that luiperdlap (faux leopard skin) would never be a runaway item in this part of the world ...

  We left KwaMashu and entered Durban from the north, passing fabric shops and the venerable Lion Match factory, stopping at the disused railway station in Umgeni Road. This was where Zulu women ruled. They were mostly rural women weavers who trekked in for a few weeks to sell their wares. They stayed somewhere in the back of the building and each morning they set up shop on the sidewalk, selling sleeping mats, black clay pots and Zulu cutlery. And they didn’t haggle, as I soon found out.

  “How much for this mat?”, asked Dave, in his slow, amiable Zulu.

  “Seventy rands”, the seller replied.

  “How about sixty rands?”

  “Seventy rands.”

  “Maybe sixty-five?”

  “Seventy rands.”

  OK then. We’ll take two.

  Dave Charles asked the women if they were safe here on Umgeni Road. Weren’t they worried that the men would rob them?

  “Let them come”, one said defiantly. “Then they will see what we do to them ...”

  Dave was looking for one James Bhengu, the best shield-maker in town. He worked in a hostel near the docks, and for the ten minutes we spent searching the building for him in vain, we felt extremely pale in a very dark world.

  We crossed over to the Dalton Road Skin Dealers, a hive of industry. Zulu radio blared out from the stalls, which doubled as bedrooms and shops for the workmen inside. They were making spears, knobkerries, drums, shields and the entire array of traditional Zulu paraphernalia you saw the warriors wearing on TV at special occasions.

  Here we found another Bhengu – a powerful, strong-featured man called Kay. He made everything from beautiful cowhide shields to nut-like objects worn at the end of a warrior’s penis – the umncedo. Dave provided a little light background:

  “In the old days, a Zulu man could be considered fully dressed wearing only this little widget fitted onto his member. It is said that when King Shaka berated his advisors, all their umncedos would drop off at the same time ...”

  Our last stop of the morning was the Victoria Street Muthi Market, a sprawling outdoor display on a bridge overpass with the Durban skyline in the background. This was the second economy of our country, Africa-to-Africa in full throttle. More than 80% of all South Africans used traditional medicine at some time in their lives. Hundreds of metres
of stalls were bunched up next to each other selling powders, roots, barks, shells, animal heads, skins of every description, sea beans, wings, feathers and other body parts – each with a specific medicinal purpose.

  I caught up with Dave Charles, who was joyously chatting with a woman about one of her potions. They were inspecting some ‘Zulu Viagra’, and it turned into a crowd-stopping passage involving ribald hand movements, raised eyebrows and much laughter. Everyone passing by had something to add to the conversation, and by the way they leered at me I could see Dave was setting me up for a big sale. I was right. The potions lady scooped together a package of twigs and fine brown powder into some newspaper wrapping and told me, via Mr Charles:

  “One tablespoon if you’re brave, stirred into a glass of milk or a cup of soup. But make sure there’s a woman in your arms already, because this thing, it works fast.” Jules had wandered off to a discreet distance from us, but I could see her straining to hear the translation...

  We continued to Ballito to visit Dave’s cousin, Michael O – an extraordinary man.

  Before dawn every day, regardless of the weather, he slips on his Zulu Thousand Miler sandals (with carved-in ‘swoosh’) and walks the 18 minutes from his apartment to the sea.

  Michael’s route takes him past some of the more serious money in South Africa. Ballito (Italian for ‘little ball’), less than an hour’s drive north of Durban, is the archetypal playground for the wealthy. In season it’s madness as the rich and beautiful gather in vast apartments, on fairways and in boutique hotels to celebrate the year’s coups in the corporate world. Out of season, they build. Ballito is about as far as you can go from the Wild Coast, in terms of development. And to the eye that prefers a Pondo hut to a condo squat, Ballito is more than a little charm-free.

  But Michael O has found a shrine. It comes in the form of Thompson’s Tidal Pool down by the beach. Michael has become the custodian of the tidal pool. In its own way, the tidal pool tries to look after him, too.