The Cape Peninsula
Boers are much easier to mislead than lead.
Andries Botha, an Anglo-Boer War Commando Leader
24 June 1993
Since yesterday I have been house-sitting for friends in Observatory, known to its residents as ‘Obs’. This is my favourite corner of Cape Town, built quite close to the city centre at the turn of the century to house artisans and workers, white and Coloured. Now it houses many young academics and students, with enough of its original families remaining to preserve an air of continuity. The streets are short and narrow, the small dwellings – mostly one-storeyed, no two alike – stand in tiny gardens, often tree-shaded, and display a variety of ornamental detail that blends Coloured creativity with imported fashions. Residents sit on their little stoeps and greet passers-by, children are seen and heard, dogs are taken for walks and traffic is light – people go shopping on foot. This afternoon the postman met me walking back from the pub and asked, ‘Have you lost your bike?’ – he had noticed me arriving on Lear. That’s very Obs, heart-warmingly non-urban and non-dorpy.
On Lower Main Road a welcoming bookshop offers bargains to the persistent burrower. A ‘Malay’ health-food shop sells delicious home-made titbits and excellent cheeses. In the congenial Heidelberg Tavern, not yet Americanized, all races and mixes of races relax together – or sit outside at long trestle-tables beneath trellised vines.*
Observatory’s recent gentrification bothers some older residents. A cobbler who has been cobbling here for forty-five years – and his father before him since 1903 – grumbled much about the chic new boutiques, the picture-gallery-cum-ceramics shop, the antiques shop where five obese cats sleep rolled up on velvet chairs (at first I mistook them for cushions), the AIDS Advice Centre and, worst of all, the Artists’ Co-op where ‘young women sit around all day in front of men with no clothes on’.
Directly above Obs rises the 3,000-foot Devil’s Peak, wide and sheer and sharp, displaying various shades of silvery grey in the changing light. Seen against this season’s flaring sunsets the mountain turns purple, then black, and seems to grow bulkier and come closer. Often in the early morning fragments of cloud wander around it, wisping over rocky shelves or lingering scarf-like on the summit when elsewhere dispersed. Obs is fortunate to be thus dominated.
26 June
Yesterday morning, at the ANC head office, I sat in a little windowless room talking with a new Xhosa friend. Peter spent ten years on Robben Island (1980–90) and is now Peace Co-ordinator for the Western Cape. This oddly named job involves him in the worst township crises and requires patience, tact and extraordinary courage. Just now his main worry is a renewal of taxi warfare. Most Cape taxis wear a large blue-and-white sticker depicting a flying dove. (You avoid any that don’t.) This means the association concerned signed the truce ending the 1989-92 taxi war between Lagunya and Webta, a war that began as fierce competition for the most profitable routes but soon came to be manipulated by criminal factions from Crossroads and Khayelitsha. Within six months, in 1991, it led to sixty-seven murders, the burning of countless shacks and more than a million rands’ worth of damage to vehicles. The Rand, too, has its taxi wars; one such caused the murders of more than fifty people in 1990.
‘Of course the police don’t help,’ said Peter, ‘because often they get a cut. But suppose taxi wars killed whites? All concerned would be in detention! Tell me, why do sentimental foreigners try to make excuses, saying it’s all apartheid’s fault for creating such poverty? Taxi warriors are not poor or how could they own taxis? An owner makes at least R5,000 a month clear profit – nearly ten times a worker’s wage!’
All the ex-prisoners I have met are remarkable men. After ten, twenty or more years in jail – their only crime opposition to apartheid – they remain not only unembittered but serene. Many prisoners were highly intelligent and well educated; Robben Island became known as ‘the University of the Struggle’, a university in which the warders were also, involuntarily, educated. These officers had to be replaced frequently, as daily association with their courteous, articulate captives weakened their allegiance to the apartheid state. The removal from black society of so many of its natural leaders, through imprisonment, exile or death, recalls Ireland’s Flight of the Wild Geese. But South Africa has been luckier: most of its wild geese have now flown home.
The ex-prisoners’ magnanimity is genuine; they are not coping with years of suffering by repressing memories. In Guguletu I met a gentle elderly man who recalled how some warders repeatedly smashed the delicate figures certain prisoners liked to carve out of flotsam. ‘Those carvings showed the survival of our spirit. We weren’t really imprisoned, the most important part of us was beyond reach of the system. We thought that form of cruelty very significant. It exposed the vulgarity of apartheid.’
A striking phrase, ‘the vulgarity of apartheid’ – more stinging than any condemnation of physical ill-treatment. And it helps to explain the survival of the prisoners’ spirit. If vulgarity is seen as a system’s defining characteristic, brutality and injustice can be withstood from an unassailable vantage point.
Many prison friendships, Peter said, developed a supportive quality unlike anything experienced ‘outside’. Also, prisoners learned the importance of affectionate – as distinct from erotic – touching and soon discarded the inhibitions instilled by white mission-school regimes. ‘It was better than university!’ laughed Peter.
At that moment we heard a commotion outside – people racing along the corridors, jumping down the stairs, doors banging, anxious voices shouting questions.
Peter vanished, then reappeared to tell me I must leave at once. The AWB had just invaded the World Trade Centre in Jo’burg where the negotiations are taking place, and this could be the start of something serious. All ANC offices had been put on Red Alert.
In fact the invasion proved to be a mini-drama, though terrifying at the time for the twenty-six senior members of the negotiating council trapped within the building. The previous evening, when warned about an AWB demo, they had contacted the SAP and vainly expressed concern for their own safety. The TV cameras recorded a shocking sight: 630 armed police officers passively watching as a Viper armoured vehicle, with ET riding on the back, smashed through the plate-glass frontage and was followed by a howling armed mob of between two and three hundred, all khaki-clad. These went swarming through the building – accompanied by an AWB band, defiantly drumming – and assaulted negotiators while yelling insults. Television cameras were encouraged to film their activities: good publicity, by the skewed standards of the right wing, if an organization doesn’t have to worry about incriminating evidence. Having beaten up any delegate who couldn’t hide in time, including women, the mob withdrew in triumph, their quasi-swastika flags held high. On the way out they paused to slash thirty tyres in the delegates’ car park, under the eyes of that ‘protective’ ring of 630 police. Then off they marched, behind their kettle-drummers and buglers. Today’s newspapers carry outraged reports of their next move. On a nearby grassy patch the conquering heroes celebrated, having brought braaivlei grills, picnic hampers and six-packs. Police were photographed chatting and laughing with them.
Imagine SAP’S reaction had that private army been black! Not long ago a PAC demo, of course unarmed, was sjamboked and tear-gassed outside the Trade Centre. On hearing SAP’S excuse – ‘But the AWB were armed!’ – Tony Yengeni ordered all Western Cape ANC members to ignore the government’s call to hand in their arms under an amnesty arrangement.
As destabilization was the motive for the invasion, its organizers see it as a great success. It has heightened the feeling that now South Africa has no effective government, is poised on the brink of chaos; President de Klerk’s feeble response has stoked black anger and aroused white contempt. The dodging of tough decisions is giving too much space to extremists both black and white, all of them cunning enough to use that space destructively.
Since visiting the AWB’S headquarters I’ve regarded its antics as more amusing than frightening, though I do notice how few South Africans are able to see the funny side. Maybe I have been under-reacting.
27 June
Again, seething black rage requires a safety-value and the ANC have responded swiftly and wisely. Yesterday posters went up all over Cape Town naming 1 July as a nationwide Day of Action to protest against AWB aggression and show support for interracial harmony. Mindful of the Hani riots, the City Council and the ANC are limiting Tripartite Alliance participation to 3,000 and the demo is to last only one hour – the lunch hour, when SAP have agreed to close Adderley Street to traffic.
Another wise response, on a different level, has come from Wilhelm Verwoerd, lecturer in political philosophy at Stellenbosch University. This 30-year-old grandson of Hendrik Verwoerd – ‘the architect of Grand Apartheid’ – is hopeful for the future.
Once Mandela is President and people see there won’t be any violent destruction of those things they hold dear, they will become more moderate. But the Trade Centre incident is a terrible tragedy. It is a tiny minority reinforcing the old stereotype of the Afrikaner while many Afrikaners are trying to break loose from this historical bondage. What we saw at the Trade Centre was a bunch of people who have been impoverished emotionally and intellectually by the success of apartheid propaganda. They are trying to stop the wheel of history. One hopes there will be strong enough action to marginalize the dangerous ones, while at the same time efforts should be made to draw into the process the more moderate right-wing Afrikaners. We must not write off all of them. We must find ways, for example within the ANC, of building relations with them, and showing them that their fears are built on sand, on disinformation.
1 July
By 11 o’clock the Day of Action crowd was assembling around St George’s Cathedral, as yet mainly whites and Coloureds – mostly middle class. Several whites admitted that this was their first demo; only extreme concern about the implications of the AWB’S confident defiance of the police had compelled them to venture forth. Then the chanting township contingents began to arrive, spilling out of their buses waving SACP flags while prim-looking women from the affluent suburbs eyed them nervously. But soon these ladies were to be soothed by the ANC marshals’ efficiency and the theological content of the speeches delivered by Revd Allan Boesak of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, a black Roman Catholic bishop, a Muslim imam and a Xhosa-speaking Afrikaner predikant with a bald pate but shoulder-length grey ringlets. This mesmeric character wore a long black robe and a plain wooden cross; I spoke to him afterwards, but was so overcome by his aura I forgot to ask his name.
Never, anywhere, have I attended such a moving demo. As it gained spiritual momentum, that against which we were protesting seemed to fade into insignificance. Looking to the future, what mattered was this novel coming together of staid Coloured business folk and professionals, ebullient Comrades from the turbulent township, Afrikaner bank clerks and secretaries, timid English-speaking housewives – all united in a longing for peace. One could sense their longing overcoming diversity and generating optimism about the new South Africa. At least in Cape Town, the AWB spectacular has backfired on its organizers in a glorious way.
Why did the media fail to reflect this? Why focus on half a dozen jolly Coloured and black teenagers burning an AWB flag? Or on a minor post-demo scuffle with SAP outside the railway station? Neither incident was typical of the occasion. Why not have a description of those thousands of blacks, mostly young and deprived, sitting quietly on the ground listening attentively to an Afrikaner clergyman? And why did the TV cameraman not zoom in on the Xhosa youth, wearing a black leather jacket and peaked cap, who stood on the plinth of Smuts’ statue holding aloft a placard that read: ‘NOT ALL AFRIKANERS ARE AWB’? Although the media habitually seek drama they don’t always recognize it when they see it.
Yesterday twenty-one of the AWB invaders were arrested – four days after the event, giving them ample time to get rid of incriminating evidence. ET is not among them. The police claim to be ‘unable to establish what role he played’. It seems they need help from the millions of TV viewers who watched him riding the Viper as it smashed through the plate-glass frontage.
2 July
The Coloureds are frank about their own colour snobbery, a characteristic of most ‘mixed-blood’ communities. Unless constrained by political correctness, most admit to valuing fair skin, straight hair, European features – sometimes even to the extent of one child being favoured over another on this account.
Four weeks ago I met Sylvia (endowed with all these genetic ‘advantages’) outside a ramshackle, overcrowded primary school in Bonteheuwel, one of the dreariest Coloured townships. She was waiting to collect her youngest son, aged 8, and immediately invited me home for coffee; she and her three older children speak excellent English.
Among this family’s problems the latest – and one of the worst – is Sylvia’s youngest sister. In May 1990 Marigold emigrated to the USA and within months had married a black man. Seriously black, ebony black: a photograph was shown. Shock! Horror! Disgrace! And now Marigold plans to return home with this creature and what will the neighbours think? It would be best if the couple settled elsewhere, kept away from Bonteheuwel. They are moving because Marigold hates the USA, misses the Cape unbearably. Jeff, her lamentable mate, is a computer analyst and will have no trouble getting a good job in the new South Africa. Given the extreme poverty of this damp, cramped, sparsely furnished home, it surprises me that Jeff’s prospects fail to compensate for his colour. But so it is.
Two years ago Sylvia’s husband lost his job in an Epping Industria textile factory, closed as a result of sanctions. (‘It was a cruel thing the outside world did – why punish us? We didn’t invent apartheid!’) Eric had worked there for twenty-two years, since the factory was built. After eighteen months of enforced idleness he took to his bed where he has been lying ever since – eating little, never talking, not wanting to meet anyone, feeling humiliated and worthless. ‘But some say I’m lucky. So many took to the bottle – and then to crime, to pay for all the bottles!’
Sylvia’s main worry is universal: will her two jobless teenage sons get onto the drug-dealing scene? During that first visit they talked with me for half an hour – intelligent, handsome lads, polite to the visitor but showing to their mother and older sister the hopeless sullenness of unemployed youths everywhere. When they had slouched aimlessly away Sylvia said, ‘They’re bright boys – too bright! It’s the brightest get into drug-dealing – not only for the money, it’s a way of using their brains. Then they’d be into our gang wars, we have that all the time on our streets like an American movie. It’s nothing new. When I was a kid in District Six whole areas were ruled by gangs.’
Lilian, the 22-year-old daughter, did well enough in her matric to get into UCT but she can neither afford the fees nor find work. To pass the time she writes reams of poetry, directly descended from Wordsworth whose Collected Works is this home’s only visible book. She showed me the pile of jotters and wondered if someone in Ireland would publish a selection? I fielded that one as tactfully as possible and hastily moved on to the job crisis. Jeff is willing to pay Lilian’s fare to New York where he could guarantee her a secretarial job in a friend’s office. But she feels her mother – with a husband in a depression and sons in temptation – needs her support. Unease about Mom would prevent her from settling down to a new life.
Sylvia looked at me then and asked, ‘Should I be encouraging her to go? No, no! I do need her, really I do. She’s my only daughter! And my closest friend – Marigold used to be that but not now …’
This chance meeting led to my forming a little circle of Bonteheuwel friends – many jobless, a few tubercular, all living in ‘sub-economic’ housing, a bureaucratic euphemism for thousands upon thousands of cut-price council hovels thrown up in a hurry during the ’60s and ’70s. Here are numerous Nat supporters, as fearful as any whites of the swart gevaar – indeed, more fearful, since they can see that word made flesh all around them on the Cape Flats. But Lilian, my self-appointed interpreter, is an active ANC member, much to her mother’s disapproval.
Coloured/black tension is most noticeable in bustling Mitchells Plain, a new city of 400,000 Coloureds and the nearest business district for the surrounding black shanty towns and squatter camps. I have spent several days there but seen no fraternization; blacks seem outsiders, just as they do in Cape Town’s city centre. Yet when one surveys a busy street or crowded store, a bank or hospital queue, they often outnumber Coloureds.
On Mitchells Plain’s periphery, a ‘house war’ is now provoking sporadic violence. Truculent and very determined blacks are squatting in empty new council houses for which Coloureds have already paid rent to secure tenure. ANC pleas for ‘peaceable behaviour’ are being ignored and rumour has it that Comrade Winnie is encouraging the squatters to hang in there. When I approached one area of conflict five Young Lions appeared from behind a barricade of builders’ scrap, mistook me for a journalist and told me to get lost. No media attention is tolerated.
Today, at last, the Negotiating Forum announced the election date: 27 April 1994. Immediately I decided to return to South Africa on 1 April.
3 July
At weekends the early cyclist escapes the traffic and before dawn I set off for Hout Bay. But alas! the Peninsula’s air pollution is today more than twice the World Health Organization’s ‘recommended level’ and a thick brownish pall veiled the view from the Steenberg Pass. Whites tend to associate this problem with the cooking-fires of the black ‘influx’. Scientists who spend their days analysing the smog put most of the blame on unregulated industrial emissions and motor fumes.
From the pass a gradual descent, through heathery moorland, is followed by an easy climb into terrain befouled by another sort of pollution. Apart from a nature reserve, even the remotest corners of the Peninsula – all silent wild beauty not long ago – are now being built over by ‘Secure Estates’. These clusters of luxury homes, behind high walls with sophisticated electronic gates and lights, have proliferated as refuges from ‘them’. Many elitist extras are offered on hoardings, including ‘bridal paths’ – which I assume are bait for horsey types rather than honeymooners.
At Noordhoek, on the Peninsula’s west coast, everything suddenly looks English to the point of caricature: acres of seaside caravan parks, oaks shading ‘Tudor’ farmhouses and dozing over-fed labradors, small green paddocks with neat white fences where Thelwell-type ponies graze when not being galloped along sandy beaches by rosy-cheeked children.
Then, for seven miles, a narrow corniche road climbs around Chapman’s Peak, its cliffs of glowing sandstone soaring up to the 2,300-foot summit – vertical, layered cliffs, geological antiques. Below glitters the jade-green Atlantic, so very far below that its waves break silently at the base of erosion-distorted precipices. Deep gullies hold a chaos of spherical granite boulders – and strewn among them a gruesome number of rusted car-corpses. At this distance the waters of Hout Bay, on three sides mountain-sheltered, are sapphire blue, bordered by a silver sandy crescent. In midwinter, if you are lucky (I wasn’t) calving whales may be seen here, close inshore. Some gross entrepreneur recently put forward a plan to take tourists out in motor boats to view the mother whales in labour. Presumably there are enough humane people on the Peninsula to stymie this.
At first sight Hout Bay also seems quite English. Originally a Coloured fishing village, motor transport brought it within reach of wealthy Cape Town commuters and retired folk; then it was developed as an upmarket tourist resort. But now ‘they’ have arrived – an overflow from the Cape Flats and elsewhere – and below Hout Bay’s tranquil surface dissension simmers. Pedalling along the discreetly affluent main street, I was taken aback by my own gut reaction on first seeing groups of disconsolate, down-at-heel blacks. They looked utterly out of place, they even looked (the word did flash through my mind) like intruders. Severely I reminded myself that they are South Africans who have very sensibly moved from some intolerably overcrowded region of their country to another region where there is plenty of room for them – if the whites push over …
So discreet is Hout Bay’s affluence that the best hotels are undefiled by lettering; only one small wayside notice told me that an old (1800) Cape Dutch farmhouse is now a hotel, with bar. Into this sort of establishment one does not wheel a bicycle, so I pushed Lear around to the back where a pleasant patio is overhung by winter-bare trees. Sitting alone with his beer was a tall, bony, middle-aged man. His rugged features, bushy grey hair and dark-blue eyes looked disconcertingly familiar; soon it transpired that I had lunched with his sister a fortnight ago. The Peninsula’s small white world is like that.
At present the professor – of Anglo-Boer stock – is working on a book about eighteenth-century agriculture in the Cape Province. Having grown up in Hout Bay, he feels uneasy about the area’s immediate future. Naturally blacks have moved in – that’s what the new South Africa is all about – yet he doesn’t condemn whites for foaming at the mouth when noisy, unsightly squatter camps arise at the end of their gardens. I had to admit that neither would I want squatters, of any pigmentation, as neighbours. Recently, to avoid a much lesser calamity, I bought a next-door garden, though the large garden I already own is a shaming wilderness of weeds.
‘What does upset me,’ said the professor, ‘is the denial of the newcomers’ humanity, seeing them as encroaching vermin who lower property values. It’s not helping that the rates are about to go up. We must pay to turn the camps into a town so we lose every way round. Not before time, you might say. But somehow the historical perspective gets lost when your own patch is being sacrificed to justice.’
We talked for hours; Afrikaner liberals make exhilarating company. The genus is unmistakable; some special quality comes across be the individual an ancient dame, an adolescent boy, a young mother, a middle-aged academic. Such people must be scattered all over this country (except perhaps in the northern Transvaal) but so far I have found specimens only around Jo’burg (a few) and on the Peninsula (quite a number). Unlike most Afrikaners, they understand where they have come from – and why where they have come from was as it was. And now they know where they want to go: into a new South Africa of mutual respect. ‘But it must be genuine respect,’ said the professor, ‘not only polite speeches and expedient gestures in public.’ With luck, given a change of climate, this genus will spread.
Here I am the weekend guest of classic Capetonian liberals, their links with the ANC close and long term. Sue is a first-generation English settler; Cecil, though of Russian extraction, also counts as ‘English’. Their home, on a steep forested mountain, combines gracious living with comfortable informality. To my delight Cecil has suggested a mountain walk tomorrow, a serious daylong hike.
4 July
The sun rose as we set off, well provisioned and laden with water bottles. At the foot of Constantiaberg (2,800 feet) Cecil’s hiking-club awaited us: open-air types wearing shorts and knapsacks and looking, I thought, unduly purposeful. Two were octogenarian ladies, snowy-haired, weather-beaten, short, compact – both eminent botanists. A few eager dogs – one a bull-terrier, the other indeterminate – completed the party.
As we ascended on an easy zigzag path the talk was all of plants, referred to by their Latin names. The region around Cape Town – known as the Cape Plant Kingdom and equal in area to the Republic of Ireland – offers some 8,600 types of flowering plant. On the Peninsula alone, more than 2,600 indigenous species have been identified, plus 600-odd species of heather, and all these hikers live in hope of attaining immortality by spotting a new species.
The path ended at the base of a towering cliff. Having become absorbed in a political conversation with Ann, a young UCT French lecturer, I had been paying no attention to our companions. Now I looked around, puzzled; half the party seemed to be missing. And where did we go from here? Where could we go? Then Ann moved towards the cliff and I glanced up to see the octogenarians ascending it effortlessly, like lizards running up a boulder. ‘We go up here,’ said Ann casually, over her shoulder. I stared at the cliff, wide-eyed with horror. I have never been a mountaineer, I thought we were going for a walk.
Ann took off (another lizard) as Cecil appeared by my side. ‘It’s easy,’ he assured me. ‘You just find handholds and footholds.’
I scrutinized that almost sheer grey wall but could discern nothing even remotely resembling a handhold or a foothold. However, there seemed to be no alternative to self-destruction. So I also took off, sweating with terror. On my right the dogs were swiftly ascending – this was unreal, dogs aren’t baboons. From the top Ann shouted guidance. ‘There’s an easy handhold just to your right – now stretch your left leg and you’ll reach that solid foothold. No! Don’t use your knees – never! Now let your left arm take all the weight – that’s it! You’re doing fine!’
Doing fine? I knew that at any moment the law of gravity would claim me. The whole enterprise was preposterous. When normal people climb cliff-faces they wear ropes and things. No wonder this lot had been looking purposeful. As I dragged myself onto level ground, pale and trembling, everyone made kind congratulatory noises. ‘You’ll soon get the knack,’ they encouraged me. ‘It’s easy, really – it’s just a knack.’ But I had no interest in getting this knack; you can’t teach an old bitch new tricks.
Onwards and upwards: no zigzag path here but straight up on a severe gradient. My thigh muscles are at present out of order (too much toyi-toying in Khayelitsha) and now they felt inflamed. I was lagging far behind the rest as we approached the next sheer (in my terms) cliff-face, even higher and smoother than the last. I paused to gaze up, in a misery of fear. The octogenarians – both well into their eighties, I’m not exaggerating – were almost at the top, biceps and calf-muscles bulging efficiently. Capetonians are very abnormal, I decided at that stage. On I crawled, to the base of the cliff, where Cecil eyed me solicitously – then proved himself a perfect host. ‘Should we go home?’ he asked.
Selfishly but emphatically I said ‘Yes!’ thereby wrecking his day. On the way down he explained that a sizeable proportion of the Cape’s population, human and canine, is trained to this sort of thing from childhood and puppyhood. In their view, walks aren’t worthwhile without a series of these death-defying obstacles. They don’t call it ‘climbing’, they call it ‘scrambling’. For non-Capetonians, it is the stuff of nightmares.
While recovering from my ordeal I read the Sunday Times which today dwells complacently on ‘the extraordinary success of South Africa’s political parties in crafting a constitution that faithfully follows the mainstream Western liberal-democratic models … The constitutional principles take us closer to the American and German models than to any of the calamitous socialist models that were once held as examples for South Africa to follow.’
This sounds like white supremacy doing a phoenix. Is a ‘Western liberal-democratic model’ really suited to this mainly black country where almost half the population is illiterate and poverty and crime are rampant? And where, among all race groups and most political parties, there is a marked shortage of the raw materials from which democracies are fashioned. The recognition of one-(wo)man-one-vote as the definitive action ending white supremacy – each individual contributing to end it, tasting triumph – is not at all the same thing as knowing how to, or wanting to operate within a democracy day by day. However, these elections must happen; there is no acceptable alternative route to a new South Africa.
6 July
My last day on the Peninsula: but next year I’ll be back. Tomorrow I leave for Jo’burg, taking as motor-free a route as possible through the Klein Karoo and the Transkei.