by Ted Simon
Perhaps there are men raised in peace and lucidity, with no phantoms on their tails, who see nothing in a storm cloud but convection currents
and water vapour. In any case I would not change places with one of them. What grandeur there is in my life blossoms out of my own mean beginnings. What times of peace I know are a thousand times more precious for being interludes. And there is much more. For example, the fascination with which I watch myself come closer and closer to merge with the world around me, dipping first a toe, then a foot, then a limb. Although I am made of the same stuff as the world, it used to seem that I might as well have been born on an asteroid, so awkward and unnatural was my place in the scheme of things. I remember my clumsy efforts to simulate 'normality', to win acceptance by any false pretence, and my desperate betrayals of my own nature to avoid detection. Then the gradual discovery (born, I think, out of some irreducible core), that others were twisting and cracking under the same strains, and that behind the apparent conformity of daily life was a world of 'all things counter, original, spare, strange.'
Then began a long apprenticeship, to become something certain in my own right, from which to see and be seen. Beyond that came the search for connections, freely offered and accepted, to confirm that the world and I, after all, were made for each other.
There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe could be reconstructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than trying to discover these secrets.
Now, with the engine running beautifully, I ride along the edge of the Orange Free State towards the Orange River. My waterproofs are crammed away confidently in a pannier, and my flying jacket is beating off the cool wind. On either side, among clumps of marshy grass, water gleams pale after the rains of a few days ago, when parts of this road were eighteen inches deep under floods. This enormous plain I am crossing, which will eventually become the Great Karroo, is supposed to be dry as a bone, but the whole of the Southern Hemisphere is awash this year. Here and there are cattle settled among a surfeit of greenery. Round them and over them hop Cattle Ibis, the slim white birds which live with the cattle, like private nurses, gracefully relieving them of their ticks.
The sky is still only faintly streaked with cloud when I pass Modder River, but on the horizon to my right are the beginnings of a sinister change. Hundreds of miles away across the moorland the sky is changing colour from light blue to gun metal, as though a vessel of dark pigment has been pricked by the western point of the compass and is seeping out into the heavens. Surely it is not merely fanciful to read apocalyptic warnings into the sky like this. Out on the veld, miles from even the nearest tree, there is no escape from the momentous events unfolding themselves above. Unknown to this human speck making his snail's track
across the floor of a vast arena, another spectacular has been prepared. Pressures and temperatures have plummeted, winds veered and strengthened, and when the first stain darkens the western sky the thing is already all but accomplished.
The climax is so quick and subtle and on such vast scale that my eye cannot follow it. The sky is light, then dark, then cloudy, then black. I am still hoping for another half hour's grace when the first drops fall splat on my goggles. Cursing, I pull up at the verge and begin the ludicrous business of putting on my waterproofs. Then I am in it.
The rain hardens to an obliterating downpour as I cross the Orange River, and I notice that the river reflects a baleful orange light from its charge of suspended red silt. Then into Hopetown, slowing down to look for shelter, cursing again as the goggles mist over without the fast air-stream to clear them. Peering through the mist I see two petrol stations, one on each side of the road and, astonishingly, two rival sets of African attendants grinning madly and beckoning me with theatrical gestures to patronize their pumps. Like the donkey that starved between two bales of hay, I get several times wetter before deciding to stick to the party on my own side of the road.
Calling at a petrol station is an event, particularly on a motorcycle with a foreign number plate. In Southern Africa everyone plays the number plate game. You can tell instantly where each one comes from - C for Cape Province, J for Jo'burg, and so on. My plate begins with an X, a mystery all the deeper because some pump attendants belong to the Xhosa tribe.
Peeling off damp layers of nylon and leather, unstrapping the tank bag to get to the filler cap, fighting to get at the money under my waterproof trousers, shaped like a clown's, chest high with elastic braces, I wait for the ritual conversation to begin.
'Where does this plate come from, Baas?' asks the man.
'From England.'
A sharp intake of breath, exhaled with a howl of ecstasy.
'From England? Is it? What a long one! The Baas is coming on a boat?'
'No,' I reply nonchalantly, knowing the lines by heart, relishing them rather. 'On this. Overland.'
Another gasp, followed by one or even two whoops of joy. The face is a perfect show of incredulity and admiration.
'On this one? No! Uh! I can't! You come on this one? Oh! It is too big.'
The wonder of it produces a pleasing sense of intimacy but it is illusory. It leads nowhere. He is safe in his attitude of admiration while I consent to play my heroic role. It is not a role in which I feel comfortable. I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them. I am embarrassed by exaggerated respect.
This black fellow in his boiler suit props me up on my pedestal and feeds me on a White Man's diet of flattery and indulgence until I ooze benevolence like a greenfly tended by ants. African wildlife is full of these symbiotic relationships, and that may be one reason why apartheid can be entertained at all in South Africa. As a practical system it has its advantages, and not just to one side, but the underlying suggestion that it makes a convenient arrangement for two different species to get along is such a travesty of the human ideal that I wriggle with embarrassment at being placed in such a false position.
From the shelter of the petrol station, looking along the sodden streets of Hopetown and into the swirling grey storm clouds above, there seems no hope of sunshine. In my mind's eye the blanket of wetness lies across the Karroo from end to end, and no effort of the imagination can raise so much as a corner of it. So out I go across the mud and puddles, resigned to the advance of moisture through the pinholes and seams of the waterproofs, past the leather and sheepskin and denim, through the worn soles of my boots, saturating trouser pockets and their forgotten contents, leaving a mash of match heads, a pulp of currency, turning hastily scribbled notes to an inky wash.
Yet only minutes from the town the grey brightens from lead to mercury and a last flash and flurry of droplets recedes into rainbow, leaving a tranquil blue vastness ahead. Once again the cosmic drama has been staged both to chide me and encourage me. The light and warmth was waiting. I had only to ride out faithfully to find it. Somewhere the same chorus is murmuring the same inexhaustible theme of light and dark, hope and despair and renewed hope, a world where everyone can be a hero, where there is an absolute guarantee of renewal which will only once be broken in a lifetime.
For me this is a landscape and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love the sorrow for the pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or hunger between meals. Perhaps even to discover that pain and pleasure, since they cannot exist without each other, are really the same thing.
I strip off my waterproofs and bundle them away, feeling a great, heart-pumping pleasure at being let loose on this shining land. The wind rushes through my clothes, whipping away the last shreds of mist and moisture, and I sing loudly about Shenandoah's Daughter and the Rio Grande.
Strange things peer at me across the corn and pasture. Tall silver objects on three legs with mooning, fan-shaped faces, strain
ing for a puff
of wind to agitate their rusty bearings, to tug their long slender roots dangling into the ground and suck up moisture. Poor senseless creatures that can't comprehend the abundance, the superfluity of water that has descended all around them. They remind me of people I have known; of the old newsvendor on my high street who died at his pitch leaving a fortune; of the big Pools winners who'll be 'clocking in at the works as usual on Monday'.
Far away over softly undulating marshes a cathedral rears up to the sky in splendid isolation, blankly astonished by its limitless diocese. Where is the bishop? Who are the flock? It is an immense grain store, with a central tower and four silos flanking it on either side. What a harvest festival will be celebrated here from these streaming fields. South Africa anticipates the heaviest crops in memory as the results of these rains, and there is no end to the good fortune of the ruling Nationalist Party and its Afrikaaner backbone.
Soon an election is to be fought - well, teased would be a better word. There is no contest. The price of gold has never been higher. Terrorists on the borders give patriotism just the necessary injection of the vital jingo serum. The election is a foregone conclusion. In Jo'burg dispirited Opposition supporters throw up their hands and say they are tired of fighting God. The grain cathedrals of the Karroo proclaim his presence. So do the astonishing yellow mine dumps rising above Johannesburg, monuments to gold the father, gold the son and gold the holy ghost. All is ordained.
I am grateful for one of the White God's ordinances. He has kept most of the traffic off the road. The world oil crisis (more power to God's elbow) has brought a nationwide speed limit of fifty miles an hour. It is enforced with dour efficiency. Khaki-clad policemen everywhere leap along the hedgerows and roadside ditches uncoiling wires for their speed traps. The fines for speeding are draconian, hundreds of pounds in some cases. At weekends all petrol stations are closed, and woe betide him who is caught with more than two spare gallons.
For me fifty miles an hour is a perfect speed, the golden mean between dawdling and drumming vibration. At this excellent rate I can spin and tumble along all day in comfort, and see where I'm going. There are now some five hundred miles between me and Cape Town. By nightfall I should be well within a day's ride. I fly past Strydenburg and Britstown feeling like Pegasus on wheels. In the early afternoon some cloud mounts a few scattered fortresses in the sky, but I am able to ride under them before they can release their leaden charges. Now the heat is building up and the road is steaming. The sun drilling through the haze begins to poach my eyes in a hard diffuse light, and I stop for a few minutes to lean forward on the handlebars and doze, cocooned in still, warm air and the song of the black, long-tailed Sacabula birds perched like crochets on the telegraph wires.
When I open my eyes I see that the day has turned to afternoon, the light has a golden touch to it, and a big bank of cloud has stretched across my path reflecting glimmers of lilac and purple at its ragged, rolling fringes. The bar is rooted in the west among distant, shadowy hills in a black corm veined with lightning. I can see under it and beyond to the first peaks of the ranges that weave across the southern tip of Africa, with their strange Gothic names; Grootswartberge, Witteberge, Outeniekwaberge, and a hint of Frankensteinian menace.
Thinking I can easily ride under this cloud bar and out again before it breaks, I leave Victoria West behind and rush on. Then, just as I am about to congratulate myself on one more storm avoided, the road swings to the west and I find myself still under the cloud and headed to the very heart of it. Still gambling I think maybe it will break and disperse before I get to it, and so I pass Beaufort West as well and keep going. Quite unexpectedly, in late afternoon, it breaks on top of me, a roaring mass of rain and wind laced with lightning. I seem to be in the heart of the cumulus, and the forces are terrifying. Inches of water rise immediately on the road. I have to stop, and shelter under the umbrella. The wind snatches it from me, and I recover it with difficulty. Lightning is exploding everywhere, and I am seriously concerned about being hit. Rivers of brown water are already racing down either side of the road, and for half an hour I have to stand there and wait for the clouds to empty themselves. The rain lets up only as the last light fails, and I continue in the dark, damp and anxious to stop. The first town, Laingsburg, seems to lie downhill from the highway on a series of descending terraces. In the darkness, and still under the influence of the storm and the mountains, they remind me somehow of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. There is something bizarre going on down there. I arrive to find myself in a plague of locusts. The air is thick with them, crashing about in the fluorescent light, a wild, mad scene. They crunch disgustingly underfoot and one hits me in the eye, quite painfully, before I can get inside the hotel.
Kimberley to Laingsburg is four hundred and sixty miles. That leaves me with only one hundred and sixty miles to go to Cape Town. I like to arrive early in big cities, so that I can get a feel for them and relax a bit before it gets dark. Also I have people to find, friends of friends. I'm up and away just after dawn, planning to have breakfast at Touws River and fill up for the last lap. When I get there it hits me. I forgot it was Saturday. No petrol. I last filled up fifty miles before Laingsburg. That leaves me just two litres short of what I need.
No one at Touws River can help - there is hardly anyone there, anyway. I ride to Worcester, another forty-five miles, through a lovely valley
planted with vineyards. The last range of mountains is piling up ahead of me now. There's a tremendous crosswind blowing too, and I have to lean right into it as I go, but it's steady and no real problem. I can feel the approach of a milder climate, and an easier life. More houses, gardens, people. Worcester has a very nice small hotel. Its name is the Arab word for hotel, but the owners don't know it and seem unsure whether to believe me. They are very helpful though and, at last, we find a legal way out of my petrol problem. The man next door lets me take two litres out of his lawn mower. Breakfast is a great pleasure, and everything is feeling very good. I am letting it creep into my conscious mind now that very soon I may actually come to the other end of Africa. It is not certain. I don't allow myself such expectations. Many things can happen in eighty miles, but it is a distinct probability.
I have a very confused impression of Cape Town. I imagine that I am now on Table Mountain, and that when I come to the edge I shall look down on the city, but the valley soon narrows and I come to a pass called Du Toit's Kloof. On the other side I look down from five thousand feet to land that looks fertile and busy with farms, vineyards, prosperous towns, with the ocean still hidden by the haze. I freewheel for miles and miles to save petrol and feel my heart lightening all the way. Somehow I know I'm going to make it, and that Cape Town is going to be wonderful. It is a rare and beautiful feeling, that certainty that nothing can go wrong.
The great freeways sweep me on past Stellenbosch and Belleville towards the ocean, into the suburbs of Cape Town, winding me down effortlessly and without error as though on an automatic flight path to the heart of the old city and setting me down in the Plaza beside the ocean. My joy is almost hysterical as I park the bike, walk slowly over the paving towards a cafe table and sit down. I have just ridden that motorcycle 12,245 miles from London, and absolutely nobody here, watching me, knows it. As I think about it I have a sudden and quite extraordinary flash, something I have never had before and am never able to recapture again. I see the whole of Africa in one single vision, as though illuminated by lightning. And that's it. I've done it. I'm at peace.
Among bright flowers and flights of shimmering blue and green birds I came over the high mountains from Swaziland and down to Mozambique on 28 April. The Zoë G was due to sail on 3 May.
There was the friend of a friend in Lourenco Marques, but I arrived too late to find him. In the twilight I searched for the hotel that a casual acquaintance had suggested, enjoying my first experience of a Portuguese colonial city, and getting lost.
Four kids stood idly on the pavement
outside a bar and I asked for the Carlton Hotel. The one who answered me was the natural leader of the group, and about sixteen. He wore a very short, tight red sweater and flared trousers the colour of strawberry ice cream running down the inside of a dustbin.
'Hi man,' he said, with an indefinable mixture of strange accents. 'How ya doin'? I'm sure glad to meet you. Sure man. We're all friends here. We don't care about the colour here. I'm just at school. Sure. But I'm in the bar here, fuckin' plenty of businesswomen. Plenty, sure. Businesswomen from Mozambique. Sure.'
His face was smooth and brown under a woolly black fleece, and his breath smelled of whisky. He didn't stop talking. His three companions clung to him silently, hoping to learn the trick. One was a white Portuguese with a sensitive face, and the others were whispy in-between kids. I mentioned the name of the hotel again.
'Oh you want a room to sleep. Sure, I can show you. Great place. All South Africans go there. That one you talkin' about is shit, man. That all Portuguese shit, shouting and noise. I show you. I can take you alright. Maybe fifty 'scud, I don't know. It was, three months ago. We are smoking too, man, you know? Grass. Green grass. You know what I mean?'
We set off along the streets, dark and deserted. As we walked, one after another they opened their trousers and sprayed the pavements and the walls with wide arcs of silver piss.
Across the Republica and up two blocks, we turned into a doorway and up a green and brown stairwell to the first floor. Two Africans sat in chairs facing the stairs, backs to the wall, with a table between them. The nearest one had large holes in his earlobes, but they were empty and he was dressed for business. His skin was hard and dry and close-pored like old walnut. He wouldn't speak English although he plainly understood it.
His price was 120 escudos for the night. For Portuguese it was only 50, but for South Africans and lesser foreigners it was 120. That was a fixed price, he said, the same all over, and could not be altered in any circumstances. For this price I would get one of four army beds in a nine foot square cell. Each one was 120 'scud, which meant he was looking for £12 or $28 a night, plus a free meal for his insects. The enormity of it had me laughing all the way down the stairs. My whisky-drinking, grass-smoking, businesswoman-fucking schoolboy friend seemed rather crestfallen. But he put on a brave show. He maintained that all peoples should be treated alike, and that economic discrimination between races was a gross injustice. In consequence he said he was unable to persuade me to accept the price.
