IN DURBAN WE WERE MET by the port police and allotted a berth at the Point Yacht Club. It was late at night, so I waited until next day before tackling the shore entry formalities, which in South Africa are complicated, for this is, despite all the efforts to conceal the fact, a police state. Every move, in any direction, is carefully watched and recorded. This is not immediately obvious and it takes some time to sink in. Not in our case, however, for we had Alem aboard and Alem was an African, a black.
The first fireworks went off at the immigration office, where I presented the passports. At first, I was received cordially and politely, for the white South African can be the pleasantest of people, the most genial of hosts; but as soon as Alem’s picture was discovered all this changed. I was told that he would not be allowed to stay onboard a small craft such as Barbara with two white men. In South Africa it is unlawful for members of two races to live in the same place.
“But where would he live?” I protested.
“In the African township,” I was told.
“Where is that?”
“Fourteen miles inland.”
“But he doesn’t speak Zulu or Xhosa; he is not a Bantu—he has nothing in common with the Bantu. He is Hamitic.”
“No matter, that is the law.”
“Then if that is the law, the law is bloody stupid!” Did they mean to tell me that a man who was fit to be at sea with me in all weathers, who did his duties and did them well, who was as civilized as any other sailor under the sun, whose father I had promised I would treat as my own son, did they mean to tell me that he was not fit to use the same shower or shithouse? That he was not fit to sit at a table with me in a restaurant? That he could not use the same cinema? What the bloody hell was all this about?! But it was the law of the land and the immigration and police, who by now had joined the scene, were adamant: “You can’t allow the other races to mingle with us, they’re just not ready for it, not in this country.”
“Look!” I said, for by now I was getting riled. “Look, I don’t give a damn about your politics. What happens between your blacks and whites and Indians in this country doesn’t matter a hoot to me, but what happens to my bloody crew does, and if he can’t stay onboard the boat, if he has, by your laws, to go fourteen miles, walking [for there’s hardly any public transport for Africans], to the township to get a meal or a bed, if he can’t even use the Asiatic shithouse at the Club, if he can’t get even a meal at the back door of the Club, then I’m off. My boat is in a bad state, we’ve weathered several storms, we’re short of food, and the Cape of Good Hope is a bitch at this time of year, but if this is the case, if you can’t bend one fraction of an inch, then bugger it, gentlemen, we will leave and I’ll tackle the Cape and the South Atlantic to Brazil direct. But I tell you this, and this is my word, that if we are forced to do this near suicidal thing, I will make damned sure that sailing men the world over know exactly why. You can do what you like about it—arrest me, arrest the boat; chuck us out, lock, stock, and bloody barrel, but don’t expect me to stand by and watch one of my crew treated like a blasted subhuman; because I won’t and he isn’t.”
By now the chief of the port police had joined us, a big, florid Dutch South African. He looked as if he could crush me and I have no doubt that he would have been quite happy to do so.
“Careful now,” said the immigration official, “there’s such a law as the Suppression of Communism Act.”
“Communism! What the hell are you talking about? Just because a skipper won’t let his crew be messed about with? Bloody communism! You must be joking. Anyway, if that’s the way it has to be, then I’m off, and I repeat, I’ll scream blue murder about this for the rest of my life and make damned sure that every sailing man from Valparaiso to Gibraltar knows exactly what happened. Good morning!”
I made for the door, shaking.
“Now just a minute, Captain.” The police chief lowered his tone down a few notches. “Just a minute. There’s no point in leaving in a huff. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. This Kaffir”—a favorite Boer word for a black, similar to “nigger”—”we’ll register him as an Asiatic. Yes, that’ll do the trick. Let’s see, we can say he comes from the Maldive Islands. They’re Indian and the goliwogs there are black enough. No one’ll know the difference. Then he can use the Asiatic facilities, washrooms, toilets, restaurants. That’s the answer.”
And so it was that we bent the rigidly entrenched South African laws of apartheid, just a very little, but bent them—Alem got his meals, his films, and his shit, too. It used to rile me at lunch time when we would go to a little cheap restaurant for meat pie and chips. Down the center of the restaurant was a line of refrigerators and soft-drink machines. Alem would have to stand to eat on one side of these, while Conrad and I sat down at a table on the other side. What stupidity! What narrow-minded, blind, futile, foolish, short-sighted, half-witted, fuddle-brained, irrational, senseless, ridiculous poppycock! But the meat pies were delicious and Alem even enjoyed them standing up!
The morning air in Durban is fresh and cool. We would rise early and work hard until one o’clock, when the heat becomes oppressive. Tall, white apartment buildings line the waterfront, fading away into the distance beyond the Yacht Club. Between the Yacht Club jetty and the skyscrapers there is a wide highway, with traffic roaring along from one set of traffic lights to the next.
All around the port there are great cargo ships, oil tankers, grain and sugar carriers, for Durban was then, with the Suez Canal closed, a very busy port. Out in the roadstead, beyond the harbor entrance, were as many as twenty ships lying to anchor, awaiting berth in the port.
Barbara was berthed hard by the public boating ramp, alongside a dozen other ocean-cruising craft, most of which had been in Durban for more than a year, their owners working ashore to earn enough to carry on around the Cape of Good Hope to the West Indies or Europe. Most of them had come from Australia or the Pacific, for this is one of the ocean-cruising world’s focal points. Practically every yacht that crosses the Indian Ocean on her way to Europe, the United States, or the West Indies calls there. Barbara was back in the mainstream of world cruising, having been, since leaving the Mediterranean, off the beaten track. During the time the Suez Canal was closed, she was the only small craft to pass from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea. Gradually we were joined by a few other sailing craft arriving from the east, awaiting the southern summer before tackling the redoubtable Cape of Good Hope.
“What have we got to do here, Tristan?” Conrad asked.
“Well,” I said, “first of all, the engine’s got to come out. It needs an overhaul badly and it looks as if this is the only place we can do it between here and the headwaters of the Amazon.”
We headed round to Wilson’s yard under sail and moored the boat steady. Four huge Zulus lifted the engine out with the aid of a small crane, four bottles of beer, a couple of puffs of dagga (a narcotic that grows in Zambia), and some chanting. Out it came, and we set to painting the engine compartment bilges, scraping and varnishing topsides, and repairing the sails. In a month, with the engine replaced, gleaming with paint, topsides revarnished and sails all repaired, we were ready to tackle the Cape. I was anxious to reach the South Atlantic quickly, in order to get to the Amazon before the rainy season commenced in March. We still had five thousand miles to go to the coast of Brazil; then another four thousand to reach Pucallpa and the Promised Land.
During the time we were refitting, Alem returned to the misty highlands of Ethiopia, for his father had died and he was due to enter the Imperial Navy in January. We shook hands at the airport, looking each other straight in the eye. He was going back almost an ocean sailor, with some salt in his blood and the breeze in his ears. He could swear like a sailor by this time, too. Also, far more importantly, he had learned a lot about tolerance.
Conrad took a week off to explore the bar of the River St. Johns, in the Transkei. Meanwhile, I explored the bars on the Durban waterfront, thinking that I would have enough river trips to last me quite a while during the next few months. I would tackle rivers when I came to them; I certainly wasn’t going looking for them in Africa.
On the fourteenth of November, revictualled and refurbished, we sailed out of Durban harbor to tackle the thousand-mile run around the Cape of Good Hope, the Cape of Storms, as Dias originally called it. We were heading for the Atlantic, our own ocean, the waters I had been born upon, in a British tramp steamer off the island of Tristan da Cunha, forty-six years previously. I felt like I was heading for home.