AT SEVEN ON SUNDAY MORNING, July 5, 1896, the Clemenses arrived at Cape Town, where they stopped at the last Grand Hotel of their world tour. During their stay in Cape Town, a stream of admirers trooped to the hotel to press handpainted ostrich eggs upon Clemens or to ask him for favors, from signing his autograph to serving as godfather.
Unlike the other towns Clemens had visited in South Africa, all of which were relatively young, Cape Town dated from the seventeenth century. The settlement began as a stopover for ships of the Dutch East India Company, and was seized by the British at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If Cape Town was older than other South African towns, it was also different in at least two other ways. First, the town was more heterogeneous racially. A relatively large proportion of “coloreds” lived there, the descendants of Boer men and nonwhite women. The town was home also to many Cape Muslims or Cape Malays, the descendants of Muslims brought by the Dutch to Cape Town as slaves or as political prisoners. Second, Cape Town was without question the most beautiful city in South Africa, among the most beautiful in the world, with its white, sandy beaches and its immense, dramatic, flat-topped Table Mountain, against which the town was built.
Cape Town is still exceptionally beautiful, but its racial diversity declined a generation ago. Breyton Bretenbach, the Afrikaner poet and painter, remembers the city in the late 1950s as “Alexandria in the southern Atlantic.” This was before the Group Areas Act drove nonwhites from neighborhoods in which they had resided for years, forcing them to live far from their jobs, usually in poorer housing in dangerous districts.
A colored cabdriver tells Alice and me, as he takes us on a tour of the city, that in 1963 he was driven from a Cape Town neighborhood in which his family had owned land for generations.
He lost his land, his cows, his sheep. “So unfair,” he says. He took a job as an assistant to a young white guy, who sat around playing the guitar, while allowing him to do all the work. After learning that his young boss, who did virtually nothing, earned more than he did, he quit and joined the railroad. By virtue of acting humble and doing as good a job as he could, he eventually supervised seventy men, some of them white. The whites resented working under him, and the blacks viewed him as siding with the whites. Stink bombs were thrown into his office, and his life was threatened. Trusted by neither whites nor blacks, finding that his job had become intolerable, he left his employer after eighteen years and became a taxi driver. “Life is better now,” he says. “Now anyone can go anywhere.”
A black cabdriver, who works at night, agrees. During the afternoon he operates an after-school program for young people in his neighborhood, offering activies such as ballet, music, and sports. His wife began a day-care program, tending two neighboring children. Today she cares for forty children and employs several assistants. Now, he says, people’s success is up to them.
A Hindu bartender, whose family has been here for generations, also says that life has changed for the better. As recently as six years ago, he tells us, certain stores were closed to nonwhites; other stores would allow nonwhites to enter, granting them a special entrance at the rear and restricting them to special counters. Jobs once confined to whites are now open to others as well. Black and colored shop assistants and hotel desk clerks, for example, work alongside their white colleagues, who are sometimes supervised by nonwhite managers. He used to think that blacks were unintelligent, but now that he sees them in responsible jobs, and now that he’s seen black children at his son’s multiracial school, he’s changed his mind. He’s optimistic about the future.
Clemens was optimistic too. The day after his arrival in Cape Town he told a reporter that one need not be a prophet to predict that the Uitlander population in the Transvaal would continue to increase so that eventually it would “carry its desires without any war.” Three years later the second Anglo-Boer War began. Expected by both sides to last a few months, it proved to be, in the words of a South African historian, “the most extensive, costly and humiliating war fought by Britain between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.” After almost three years of fighting, after 450,000 British and Empire troops had been required to subdue a part-time army of 45,000 farmers, after the British had burned down 30,000 farms, and after ten percent of the Boer civilian population had died in British concentration camps, the British were forced to negotiate a settlement, which excluded blacks and coloreds from political participation in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
The interviewer asked Clemens his views about South African audiences. Not surprisingly, Clemens reported that they were “very delightful” and “exceedingly bright.” Most of the audience were people who had traveled abroad, he said. “I have seldom met anybody who has been able to say that he has not been out of Africa. I played billiards with a man in Kimberley whom I met only once before and that was over a billiard table twenty-five years ago in America. The guard of a train reminded me that he crossed in the steamer with me twenty-five years ago. Captain Mein, one of the political prisoners, I knew very well thirty-two years ago, and John Hays Hammond I have known for many years.”
On Thursday, July 9, three days after that interview, Clemens gave his first At Home in Cape Town’s Opera House, where he was received enthusiastically by a crowded and fashionable audience, including the colony’s chief administrator and his staff, the Speaker of the Assembly, and several members of Parliament. Fifteen minutes late, he apologized for his tardiness, explaining that he had lost his way on Table Mountain, which he thought provided a shortcut from his hotel to the Opera House. Clemens’s hotel was a few blocks down the street.
The one-thousand-seat Opera House, which survived another half century, faced the Grand Parade, the town’s oldest square. The Parade now serves as a combination of parking lot and flea market. A statue of Edward VII, robed and regal, surveys the pigeons and seagulls that flock about the square. Usually one of them has flown down to perch upon his head. A nearby monument memorializes soldiers from the Cape Colony who fell during the second Anglo-Boer War.
Clemens’s three performances at the Opera House, on the ninth, tenth, and eleventh of July, were successful enough to warrant a fourth performance. It could not be held at the Opera House, however, because that venue was engaged. As a substitute, Smythe hired the Town Hall in suburban Claremont, about six miles away, for the last paid performance of Clemens’s world tour.
Until the Group Areas Act destroyed it a generation ago, Clarement was a racially mixed community. “Outsiders complain,” wrote a resident in the fifties, “that the population of Claremont is ‘so mixed,’ not stopping to think how much the character of the Village owes to this variety. The different races have learnt to live together here in a civilised fashion: there is room for all in this Market Place. There is no Colour Bar in the shops, and no one is scowled at or jostled off the pavement because of the colour of his skin.”
Clemens’s last performance of his world tour was followed by his last club supper, when about two hundred members and friends of Cape Town’s Owl Club entertained him. The club presented him with an album of Cape views and drank to his health and to that of Mrs. Clemens and Clara. In response, Clemens referred to that night, July 13, as the anniversary of the first lecture of his tour. The anniversary, he said, was “an occasion of parallels,” for he hoped that he had just given his last lecture on any stage. The first lecture of his world tour, he said, was on July 13 (actually it was July 14) in Elmira, New York, before a male audience. Like the present one, they were “intelligent men who had done something to bring their name before the world.” But, he continued, he must not forget to point out that his first audience was — in jail. Unlike those present, the men in Elmira were paying for their crimes, whereas the gentlemen before him had “not even commenced to repent of theirs.” He would, he said, remember with pleasure the evening he spent with “this noble assembly of unclassified convicts.”
The next afternoon he visited another assembly. Sitting in the Distinguished Visitors’ Gallery of the Cape Colony’s House of Assembly, Clemens listened to a tumultuous debate about whether Rhodes, who had already resigned as Prime Minister, should be granted a leave of absence from his seat. Would a leave be construed as a vote of confidence, exonerating him from involvement in Jameson’s raid? Members cheered when references were made to “combating barbarism in the north” (Rhodes was currently in Rhodesia, helping to quell the revolt) and relatively few approved a reference to him as “the man who brought red ruin to the Transvaal.” A member of the Assembly sat with Clemens and interpreted those speeches that were made in Afrikaans.
A journalist reported that “anyone who witnessed the last two days debate at the House would have been reminded of Huck Finn’s description of a show in which every man who went in had his pockets bulging.” After quoting Huck, “I shoved in there for a minute, but it was too various for me; I couldn’t stand it!” the reporter noted that “Huck Finn’s genial creator … ‘shoved in for a minute’ at the House of Assembly yesterday afternoon; and members could not have been much surprised if he had found the moral atmosphere almost too various. Speaker after speaker yesterday and the day before seemed to have come in with his pockets bulging with dead-cat charges and sickly-egg imputations against his fellows.” In Following the Equator, Clemens recalled his visit to the Parliament: “they quarreled in two languages when I was there, and agreed in none.” The handsome, red-and-white neoclassical building in which Clemens heard the debate is now a wing of the nation’s parliamentary complex.
In addition to the Parliament, Clemens reported seeing Table Rock, Table Bay (“so named for its levelness”), the castle constructed by the Dutch East India Company, and St. Simon’s Bay, the headquarters of the fleet. He drove along the mountain roads and saw “some of the fine old Dutch mansions.”
In one of the Dutch mansions, Clemens saw “a quaint old picture … a picture of a pale, intellectual young man in a pink coat with a high black collar.” It was a portrait of Dr. James Barry, a military surgeon who was born in London. Educated in Edinburgh and London, he started his army medical career as a hospital assistant in Cape Town in 1816, and ended it as the senior of Her Majesty’s Inspectors-General of Army Hospitals, a rank equivalent to that of Major-General, when he retired in London in 1859.
Dr. Barry’s life would be remarkable even without the romance associated with his name. He performed the first successful cesarean section in South Africa, years before this operation succeeded in Britain, and saved the lives of both mother and child. In lieu of a fee, he asked that the child be named after him, a name that has been handed down to the present day, held among others by James Barry Munnik Hertzog, founder of the Nationalist Party and a prime minister of the Union of South Africa, who was the godson of James Barry Munnik, the son of the child Barry saved. Highly regarded by his medical colleagues, Barry cured the Cape’s governor, Lord Charles Somerset, of a nearly fatal attack of typhus and saved the life of Somerset’s daughter after her case had been declared hopeless. When invited to treat a desperate case, he would throw out all the patient’s medicines, open the windows, and order the patient to be bathed, often with wine because of its antiseptic properties. He would never ask for a second opinion. If the patient survived, Dr. Barry took all the credit. If the patient died, Dr. Barry had been summoned too late.
During the twelve or so years he spent at the Cape, he performed his official duties zealously, angering pharmacists by his insistence on examining their drugs, and offending officials by his outspoken criticism of their behavior. He regularly inspected government institutions such as the town jail, the leper colony, and the Somerset Hospital, and as regularly submitted indignant reports about the appalling conditions he found there. Of the hospital, for example, he wrote that the wards were as dirty as the patients.
Witty and brilliant but imperious, quarrelsome, strongly opinionated, and politically obtuse, he alienated many and created powerful enemies. Nonetheless, his inflexibility upon matters of principle and his outspoken criticisms helped lead to reforms in the prisons and hospitals of the Cape.
He left Cape Town in 1828, but so vivid was his personality that years after his death, nannies there would tell their wards that if they were not good, Dr. Barry’s ghost, said to appear in the Georgian dress of a young officer, would come and get them.
Short and slight, he placed three-inch false soles in his boots and stuffed cotton wool into the shoulders of his jacket. Nonetheless, he looked slightly ridiculous when he wore his uniform, with its plumed cocked hat, long spurs, and large sword, the ordinary dress of a military doctor. He flirted with the prettiest girls and challenged Captain (later Sir) Josiah Cloete, the governor’s aide-de-camp, to a duel. Cloete and Barry fought with pistols, both missing their mark and later becoming fast friends. After he left the Cape, Barry served in other outposts of empire, conscientious and combative to the last.
The romance surrounding Barry began almost immediately after he died in 1865, at the age of about seventy, when the charwoman who had laid out his body claimed that Dr. Barry was a woman and had borne a child. Barry’s body exhibited the striations that indicate motherhood, she said. “I am a married woman, and the mother of nine children. I ought to know.”
Clemens told Barry’s story as he heard or remembered it, which included a few misstatements of fact as well as some of the unsubstantiated legends which had become attached to Barry’s name. The story is a great one and surely deserves its place in Following the Equator, but it may have been especially compelling to Clemens, who seemed fascinated by twinship and dual identity, a favorite topic in his books and stories. His interest is not surprising in view of the doubleness in his own life, in which Samuel L. Clemens and Mark Twain shared the same body, and in his own performances, in which the contrast between comic content and solemn demeanor was central.
James Barry’s portrait still hangs in the home where Clemens saw it, the white, oak-shaded, eighteenth-century manor house of the Cloete family. They have recently converted it into an elegant hotel. The manager, Mr. Leaver, tells us that Dr. Barry and Sir Josiah fought their duel behind the house.
On July 15, soon after his visit to the Cloete mansion, and a year and a day after he left Elmira, Clemens sailed away from Cape Town and South Africa, his world lecture tour completed. He told readers of Following the Equator that “I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand years.”