After writing my final exams at Grahamstown’s Rhodes University, I shoulder my rucksack and stick a thumb out on the road to Jo’burg, via King William’s Town. Three black guys in a skoroskoro stop for me and I jump on the back, taking shelter from the pounding Border storm under a torn piece of old tarpaulin. This is 1975 and I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing here.
Especially when they stop off at a busy shebeen in King William’s Town and load up with sweet wine and Carling Black Label beer.
“Celebration drinks for after they’ve sorted me out,” I worry to myself.
They potter on into the countryside of thickets and low hills, and come to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Uh oh. This is it.
The driver’s mate hops out and hands me my very own bottle of sweet wine.
“It will keep you dry,” he laughs. Yeah, right. You just want to get me drunk and then it’s all over. But this line of thought is starting to tire me. They drive on, while I get a bit pissed at the back, singing Neil Young softly to myself in the rain. Let me exit this world with a suitable rendition of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’. Kind regards, Mugged & Maudlin, Eastern Cape.
Just south of Cathcart, my benefactors stop again and go searching for wood to burn. Is this my final resting place? No. A piece of boerewors sausage the length of a champion python is flung onto burning bush. The lightly toasted meat is divided into quarters and I am handed my share.
There is a minimum of conversation. No life stories are exchanged. All I know is that they’re three Pondos going to look for work on a farm up in the Stormberg, somewhere near Molteno.
The men leave me on the N6 to Aliwal North, half-cut, well fed and bemused. Fear had driven me just this side of mad. The uncomplicated kindness of a lift, a bottle of sweet wine and a piece of sausage brings me back.
“OK Jules, let’s go out and commit some serious responsible tourism,” I joked to my wife 28 years later as I packed camera gear for a spin around Port Elizabeth’s townships with Calabash Tours. Finally, we were back in the Eastern Cape.
Responsible tourism. What a fuddy-duddy name for a great thing. A fun thing. Rather ‘dance-in-the-street tourism’. Rather ‘win-win tourism’.
“Maybe they should call it ‘discovery tourism’,” mused Jules as we left our boutique hotel in the Summerstrand with one Nelson Sebezela from Calabash. On the way, we picked up an aspiring wine maker from Australia, a hulking youngster called Michael. He was already looking green about the gills, muttering something about a late-night curry that was shouting the odds back at him.
“And you haven’t even seen your first Smiley yet,” said Nelson.
“What’s a Smiley?” asked Michael with an uncertain look.
“Wait. That’s for later.”
I wanted a photograph of Queen Victoria, who stood stern and forbidding outside the Port Elizabeth Library. She was a silent reprimand to overdue-book borrowers everywhere.
As I was framing her glaring visage in my lens, two local lasses called out:
“Leave that old lady. Take our picture instead.” I made them pose with The Librarian Queen as a compromise.
From the minute we climbed into the Calabash-mobile, it was clear who our guide’s hero was.
“Nelson! Rolihlahla! Mandela!” he cheered, fist clenched and waving out of the minibus window. Nelson Sebezela then launched into Xhosa for Dummies & Daytrippers with an exhibition of confounding vocal clicks.
Driving into the middle-class township of KwaGxaki, Nelson spoke of goats and street committees:
“Around here, when you move into a new area, it’s traditional to have a big party, invite all your neighbours and slaughter a goat. They’ll quiz you about where you’ve come from, what you do, who your family is and what made you give up your last place.
“I recently left my parents in KwaZakhele,” he said. “I found my own spot, in the same township, and my new neighbours were so curious they sent a delegation to the family home to find out more about me.
“Even in the richer townships, there are street committees. That’s us Africans – we’re always in each other’s business. Sometimes, however, those street committees play a vital role, like breaking up family feuds.”
Three ghosts, magnificently covered in white clay, strode across a gully in the distance. I wanted to photograph them but because they were abaKwetha (initiates) no verbal contact was allowed. So, after a hundred hand gestures, they finally agreed to pose in silence.
We passed through the morning markets of KwaZakhele, where women vendors were cooking up a roadside storm. Among the “Chickens, Plucked or Live” signs was far stranger fare.
“Welcome to Smiley Street,” said Nelson. There came an audible groan from the sick Aussie at the back as we encountered scores of blackened sheep’s heads – the local breakfast of champions.
“The sheep’s head is put into the fire,” Nelson informed us, thoroughly enjoying this part of the tour. “When the lips have been stretched into a smile, you know it’s done. The women then take it out of the fire, clean it up and remove the brains, which we rarely eat. The real treats are the cheeks and the gums.”
Just then, somewhere in the vicinity of historic Red Location, Michael had to exit the minibus and chunter loudly in the mud.
“Sies, man!” a couple of passing township women remarked, and turned their heads away in disgust.
Three years later, on the great Shorelines tour, we were back in the townships of Port Elizabeth with Nelson. This time, his boss, Paul Mediema of Calabash, was with us. We were drinking beer down at Kwekwe’s in KwaZakhele Township.
Was our kombi safe around the corner, I asked. “If the kombi is stolen, we just report the matter to the amaDhlozi,” said Paul, rolling himself a cigarette rather expertly. “It’s a system that evolved out of the anti-apartheid movement. Self-defence units became street committees. If you lose something, you just go to them, pay a finder’s fee and that’s that.”
In the kitchen at Kwekwe’s, Patricia January and her assistant Beauty Dywili were adding final touches to the tourists’ feast of chicken stew, boerewors, coleslaw, mealie pap, mash and fresh bread. They were expecting a large busload of Hollanders.
“We can’t give them too much traditional food,” Patricia said. “It would stress them.” There would be no grinning sheep on offer tonight.
The regulars, mostly older men, were having their Friday-night drink and catching up with mates.
The huge luxury bus arrived and out streamed about 40 bewildered souls. The township choir, a ragtag band of singing angels, began a litany of praise and welcome. The Hollanders walked the gauntlet of warmth and song into the shebeen, studiously avoiding eye contact. Soon, a few cold beers, some excellent singing and Patricia’s hot meal relaxed the group and grins began to emerge like shy little face-ferrets. Some very responsible tourism was on the go …
The next day we drove north towards Port Alfred. It was raining and the land about us looked Irish. The firestorms of the past week were nearly forgotten, as though they had happened in another country 10 years before. Still, we phoned Ashley back at Storms River to find out if all was well.
“The rain arrived,” he said, and you could hear the party in his voice. “The fires died just in time and missed the village.” We said goodbye as we entered what looked like the set of The Truman Show.
The morning sun lit up the Port Alfred marina in a dozen pastel hues. Fluffy clouds drifted overhead. Canvas-covered boats bobbed gently on blue water and the air was still.
We were in Port Alfred’s pre-Christmas lull, guests of the founder and developer of the Royal Alfred Marina, Justin de Wet Steyn. Within weeks, most of the 200 mansions that made up this slice of seaside heaven would come alive with upcountry families. Endless rows of Christmas lights would shine into the skies of settler country and Santa would ride the canals in a ski boat laden with presents. Canoes would forage up the Kowie River; deep-sea fishing boats would head out into the Indian Ocean for bigger stuff. And no Smileys would be served here, either.
“This is the lifestyle people dream about,” said the developer, who had made his earlier fortune from fried-chicken franchises all over southern Africa.
“Me, not so much,” I confided to my wife as we detoured inland. “I’d prefer something in a shabby little Mozambican beach bar one day.”
The bar we were headed to was the Pig ’n Whistle in Bathurst, a settler village with a history of frontier wars and house-to-house battles with the “rampant Xhosa”. On our travels I had found a very strange book called Camp Life & Sport in South Africa by one TJ Lucas, who had been a Grahamstownbased hussar in the early 1850s.
Lieutenant Lucas had a rough time of it at first. Pranksters sold him a vicious horse that ran him straight into a stone wall at high speed, causing half his flowering moustache to shear clean off. Then a new commanding officer, named, for reasons of propriety, “Colonel S”, arrived. The little colonel particularly hated wearing his hussar’s shako, a kettle-shaped helmet fancied at the time. After various parades, he could be spotted kicking the poor shako about his office floor with gusto.
Colonel S once took them out on patrol, and they were beset by a huge swarm of locusts. One of the locusts flew directly into the colonel’s eye, distressing him greatly.
“I’ll serve you out for that, you little beast,” the colonel shouted, snatching the locust up in his fingers and turning around to his troops. “Now who has a pin for me?”
Someone produced a pin and the colonel shortly had the offending locust skewered.
“You’ll hit me in the eye, will you, will you?” he yelled at the writhing locust while giving the pin “a vicious twirl”. Both locust and pin were then placed in one of his saddlebags and they rode on, into the scrub. But whenever his eye pained him, the colonel would have the little locust withdrawn and “subject to fresh torments at the hands of its remorseless captor”.
Like the frontier wars that took place between Xhosa and colonial, the book has its deadly-serious side. We were to find out more about that later, but our next item of business lay in the Buffalo City itself: East London.
We stayed overnight with Lew Elias, a senior journalist from the Daily Dispatch newspaper. Joining us was a mutual friend, the photographer Les Bush, who had grown up in East London with Lewis. With Lew and Les as our guides, we travelled around the city where the late Janis Joplin would have felt at home. Everyone, it seemed, owned a brand-new Mercedes-Benz.
Daimler-Chrysler practically owned the town. Staff had great incentives to buy themselves C-Class Mercedes coupés.
“So you’d get spray painters and the like driving to work in these very expensive cars,” said Lew. “Any stranger to East London would think there was some serious money here somewhere.”
We went for breakfast to a great spot on Latimer’s Landing. Opposite us stood rows and rows of different models of Mercedes.
“There’s more than R46 million in cars watching us have breakfast,” said Lew, who, one suspects, was a bit of a petrol head.
While we waited for our food, I read from an advertising leaflet fixed to the middle of the table:
“Private Investigations. Confidentiality Guaranteed. Spymaster
specialising in hidden cameras, bugging and de-bugging”
“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”
– Henry Ford
“Don’t upset me. I’ve run out of places to hide the bodies.” – Anon.
Latimer’s Landing had been named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who first discovered a dead coelacanth (aka Old Four Legs), a fossil fish that once left the sea to stump around on land and decided hell no, this isn’t for me, returning swiftly to the waters. But it still had those stubby little legs.
Marjorie was called down to the East London docks one day in 1938 to check out a load of sharks that had just come in on the boat Nerine. She noticed a strange-looking blue fin sticking out from the pile of otherwise pure shark.
“I picked away the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” she told author Samantha Weinberg in A Fish Caught in Time. “It had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy-dog tail.”
The part I liked in Weinberg’s book was the struggle Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had in handling the rather bulky coelacanth. Firstly, the taxi driver wouldn’t have “that stinking fish” in his cab. He finally allowed her to put it into the boot.
The only place to store such a large fish was the mortuary, she reckoned. But the mortuary officer thought she was mad. The people at the local cold-storage depot also refused the coelacanth entry. So she and a local taxidermist decided to preserve it in formalin, keeping it wrapped in copies of the Daily Dispatch and her mother’s double-bed sheet until it could go off to Professor JLB Smith from Rhodes University.
Lew, knowing we’d be looking for something more than regular tourist snapshots of East London, took us to a place in the local harbour where more than a kilometre of hardwood – worth about $25 million – stood piled. These trees had been cut from the first-growth forests of equatorial Africa and loaded onto a boat called the Kiperousa, destined for south-east Asia and life as millions of strips of veneer.
But the Kiperousa had sunk just south of East London, and these huge logs had drifted off into the sea lanes. Some had beached themselves, others were still out there, waiting to smash into a passing yacht.
But a bigger problem lay before us. There had been a wave of criminal attacks on tourists along the Wild Coast in 2005. Jules and I were driving into another kind of fire. Snatches of the Daily Dispatch headlines were beginning to worry me:
• May: Three men shoot dead a security guard at Mbotyi River Lodge and wound the manager, Charles Lamb; Eight elderly tourists attacked – two are killed – by hijackers outside Port St Johns;
• July: A group of tourists attacked at knife point by youths while on a hike outside Port St Johns;
• October: Four foreign tourists escape with their lives when armed gunmen open fire on two vehicles near Coffee Bay.
Jo’burgers live and sleep in a hotbed of crime. There’s always someone getting shot, hijacked, robbed or raped back home. And yet, when we go on holiday to the country’s poorest province, we expect safe passage, warm welcomes and good fishing. And the weather had better play its part, too.
I was 21 years old again, sitting in the rain on the back of a bakkie on the way to the Stormberg, with my old Neil Young song and my fear. I desperately needed a bottle of sweet wine, a length of boerewors and some reassuring words. Failing that, an armed escort up into the Wild Coast …