All the dancing I’ve done has been alone in the veld, when I’ve jumped in the air and thrown up my arms and shouted with the mere joy of living.
Olive Schreiner
Within hours of finishing the last entry (more than a fortnight ago) my ‘little headache’ had become a road-drill-through-the-skull experience. Until dawn I sweated hard and couldn’t lie still; that strange twitchy restlessness was uncontrollable and oddly scarey. Then I slept and woke to hear Gloria knocking. She sat on the edge of the bed and said, ‘You’ll be fine tomorrow, after so much sweating. I’ll tell them to bring fresh sheets and a bucket of drinking water.’
For the rest of the day I dozed between further bouts of heavy sweating and violent twitching; the Halfan wasn’t working. Malaria apart, my insect bites were by now things of wonder; each deep suppurating hole had turned purple-brown and was surrounded by a huge crimson area, all swollen and hard. That night the fever returned, the sweating stopped, both the hammering headache and the twitching worsened. It was time to seek medical advice.
On the way to the hospital my legs and thighs throbbed painfully; those sores would in any case have prevented cycling, so their coinciding with malaria seemed convenient. In the overcrowded out-patients’ department an obviously exhausted young Indian doctor said malaria is very common in the northern Transvaal. He advised me to go back to bed and drink water every half-hour. I didn’t mention my bites, regarding them as an occupational hazard.
That evening Gloria pronounced, ‘You must see a white doctor, our medical services are not good. And the Health Department says our malaria cases have increased tenfold this season! We’ve had warnings about cerebral malaria – you must be careful!’
At sunrise I set off to push Lear to Duiwelskloof; cycling was out of the question. Dr de Beer, on hearing of the Halfan’s failure, looked grave and was decisive. ‘To Jo’burg immediately, by bus. Leave your bicycle here, it will be safe.’
Enter Margaret – a Capetonian by birth, who became a close friend while working in Ireland. Now she lives in Florida, a far-out Jo’burg suburb, and a telephone call brought her to meet my bus in the city centre at 9 p.m. When I displayed my bites, as a bizarre phenomenon, she rather fiercely condemned my ‘occupational hazard’ stance and insisted on their being shown to the doctor. She had secured an 8 a.m. appointment.
Dr Eksteen, a congenial Afrikaner, found my case-history puzzling. He felt my pulse, probed my liver, checked my blood-pressure, collected three blood samples. Pending the test results, there was no more to be done. Then I remembered that Margaret, sitting watchdog-like in the waiting room, would be wrathful if I failed to declare the bites. Feeling wimpish, I turned back from the door and said apologetically, ‘I don’t want to waste your time, but I’ve got two funny insect bites on my legs – at least I think they must be insect bites …’
When I rolled up my trousers Dr Eksteen looked both relieved and exasperated. ‘Why didn’t you show them at the start? You’ve got tick-bite fever – we all get it.’ He scribbled a prescription, assured me I’d be fit to cycle in a fortnight and added that my suffering had not been in vain. Tick-bite fever treated on Day One tends to recur. If left to linger in the system for several days an immunity is built up and it rarely recurs. He didn’t tell me that untreated encephalitides (the lowveld tick-bite fever: there are many varieties) can, if one’s stars are so aligned, cause paralysis and death.
Having finished my antibiotic course I felt as good as new (well, almost) and planned to bus back to Duiwelskloof. Then something improbable happened; on ringing a friend in Pretoria it transpired that he was planning to motor through Duiwelskloof today, en route to an educational conference at the Ofcalaco Mission.
Kevin has been a teacher-priest in South Africa for thirty-five years; more than half a century ago, he and I were schoolmates. As we sped north on the N1, across the flat colourless highveld, he gave me a glimpse of non-racism in action – real non-racism, which has nothing to do with being politically pro-black. He seems to have so transcended race-consciousness that he no longer thinks in black/white terms. If he judges it right to be vigorously anti-black on some particular issue, no guilty inhibitions trouble him. Nor does he talk any nonsense about ‘equality’ on those levels where the concept is clearly invalid. Unlike many of South Africa’s home-grown liberals, he is neither intellectually patronizing towards nor emotionally subservient to blacks. I envy him; I would like to be where he is but I know I’ll never get there.
Kevin has invited me to spend tomorrow night at the Ofcolaco Mission, some thirty-five miles south of Duiwelskloof: a suitable distance for my first post-fever cycle. Tonight I’m staying in a tourist ‘camp’, a pleasant enough place – rondavels on a wooded hillside, each provided with a braai grill. It overlooks the dorp’s four-court tennis club, complete with pavilion and bar. In reaction to the segregation laws being abolished in 1991, this club increased its membership fee fivefold. ‘What else could we do?’ demanded the Afrikaner woman who fed me this unsavoury titbit.
In the pre-dawn half-light I rejoiced to be back on the road – a narrow hilly road, traversing the base of steep mountains clothed in tea estates or commercial plantations. This area is an esteemed beauty spot and having glimpsed the monotony of the highveld I can see why. As the sun rose the traffic increased, much of it school traffic – mothers (occasionally fathers) transporting their flaxen-haired blazered offspring in large fast cars.
Tzaneen is an attractive dorp; here hilliness defeats the dreary grid-plan. At 7.30 no café was open, but as I paused to read the ‘Drakensberg View’ menu the Afrikaner proprietress noticed me and immediately unlocked the door. Beckoning me inside, she shouted to the kitchen for a full breakfast to be quickly prepared. Then she sat beside me – her vast bulk so obscuring a little chair that she seemed disconcertingly unsupported – and deplored my travelling alone.
‘It’s too dangerous these days – why didn’t you come before? Then we had a peaceful country, everything under control, everyone happy, running their businesses and farms, doing their jobs quietly, everyone friendly … Now you must get such a bad impression, all crime and cruelty, everyone afraid. I’m cut off from my daughter in Pretoria. I can’t drive there any more – all is lawless! This is the end of the world coming soon, as foretold in the Bible – you remember? FW is so weak he’ll let the ANC grab all the power. Sometimes in bed I cry to think of our beautiful country falling to bits, given over to Communist terrorists. We can have no hope for the future, we must accept it has to be like the Bible says. Young people can leave but where can I go? And why should I go? I don’t want to go, this is my country – but I don’t want to see it falling to bits all around me!’ She looked directly at me and her red-rimmed brown eyes filled with tears. ‘I shouldn’t talk about it, that makes it worse. I don’t talk much about it since my husband died last year. After a landmine near the border in ’86 he never got his full health back. We left the farm then and came here. You know I was never – never once, in my whole life, and God knows this is true – I was never unkind to the Bantu. Why do I have to feel afraid now, seeing them looking at me with hate? Before we were all happy together, everyone knew how to behave …’
When a slim, pretty black waitress brought my giant hamburger with chips and salad, Mrs Stals heaved herself up and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Enjoy your meal and then be careful how you go – be very careful, remember they hate us now!’ She and the waitress disappeared into the kitchen and could be heard chatting animatedly in Afrikaans. Clearly they were good friends.
Cycling on, I found my sympathy-compass veering towards the Afrikaners. It was impossible to imagine Mrs Stals being unkind to ‘the Bantu’ – to anyone. How could she and her like be held in any way responsible for apartheid? Denied access to information about its dynamics, they must have been blind to the ugliness of the structure in which they lived – the only structure they knew and one ordained, they were persuaded, by the will of God. Surely Mrs Stal’s neurotic perceptions – ‘everything is falling to bits, all is lawless’ – are as much the fruits of total incomprehension as of racial prejudice? If you don’t understand the nature of your own society, if all your thoughts and emotions have been distorted by Afrikanerdom’s Unholy Trinity – the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), the National Party and the Broederbond (a Masonic-type, quasi-secret society) – then the imminence of black rule can only be terrifying. To the more sophisticated South African whites and to outsiders this change isn’t all that sudden; for years we’ve seen it coming without knowing exactly how or when it would arrive. But of course the unsophisticated whites have been traumatized by recent developments, perhaps above all by the return from exile of the dreaded MK ‘terrorists’. Afrikanerdom’s certainties, apparently as solid as the Voortrekker Monument, are now lying in ruins.
‘You turn off the main road just beyond Ofcolaco,’ Kevin had said. But I almost missed Ofcolaco, another of those much-signposted non-dorps – a general store, petrol station and Drankwinkel set back from the road behind a line of bluegums and pines. While I queued to pay for amasi – fermented milk, one of the few forms of palatable nourishment available in rural South Africa – my fellow-whites did their usual shunning act after a quick sideways look. Outside the store loitered a group of ragged youths, faintly hoping to pick up some casual work from passing farmers. In the shade of a pine tree three elderly women sat behind orange-crate trestles selling home-made buns, small spotty tasteless apples and second-(or third-)hand clothes from Zimbabwe. Their English was adequate, though rusted for lack of use.
The apple-seller offered me a spare crate to sit on and asked, ‘Why are you cycling? Where is your vehicle?’ My reply attracted the attention of two men waiting nearby for a minibus taxi: an elderly Zionist Christian Church (ZCC) pastor and a young ANC activist from Tzaneen’s township. Then we were joined by a truck driver, also drinking amasi, and a Tsonga businessman from Pietersburg who took a picnic basket from the boot of his gleaming Toyota Corolla and sat beside me, having carefully spread a newspaper on the dusty ground. After introductions he offered me an egg sandwich: ‘It is clean food, don’t be afraid.’
No one seemed to feel any great excitement about the new South Africa. The businessman said, ‘Only after Comrade Mandela was released – for a few days then – all went wild with joy. But you see how it is, for most people these changes make no difference – yet. Now there’s no law against blacks doing business wherever they want. But still they won’t give me a licence to trade in Pietersburg shopping mall. If local bureaucrats choose to keep apartheid, who can stop them?’
‘Be patient,’ said the activist. ‘Our Bill of Rights will take all power from bureaucrats – they won’t even have jobs, if affirmative action works well for us. Now is an in-between time, no apartheid laws but no Bill of Rights so whites still running everything. Only zero comma six per cent of senior civil servants are black.’ (Using commas thus is one of the South Africans’ more harmless foibles.)
When I asked about land redistribution the truck driver – from Mamelodi, a township near Pretoria – proclaimed that all white farms should be seized for the benefit of the homelands’ dispossessed. ‘They stole our land, now we take it back – that’s justice.’
The activist was shocked. ‘Hey man, no way, man – our policy is not like this! Those guys are on their land for centuries and we pay them – that’s justice!’
‘We can’t pay them,’ said the businessman. ‘It’s too much money, our government won’t have so much.’
‘Around here,’ said the pastor, ‘some farmers are giving back some land – free, no payment from anyone. God is guiding them, they see injustice was done, they have repentance in their hearts.’
I stared at him, suspecting an hallucinatory state. But this evening I have found his information to be correct. However, I would guess that prudence, rather than God, is the guiding factor. If you have unused land, as many whites do, it is now a sound move to give it to the landless who might otherwise (because after all anything could happen in the new South Africa) be tempted to take the lot.
‘It’s important,’ said the businessman, ‘not to mess up commercial farming. If too much white land is taken our townships people won’t get fed. That’s why we hear so little about redistribution.’
‘The PAC talk plenty about it,’ said the truck driver. ‘They want it, that’s why APLA kills farmers, trying to drive them all off the land.’
‘That is not what God wants,’ said the pastor. ‘Killing is very sinful.’
‘For whites, killing us is OK,’ retorted the truck driver.
When the taxi arrived I went on my way, following a red, rough, dusty track. On either side stretched miles of sugar-cane and mango orchards where the trees have been cleverly coppiced. The few people about – ragged farmworkers – gave grovelling responses to my greetings. Tzaneen’s activist was wrong about all whites having owned their land for centuries; some of these Ofcolaco estates are owned by English settlers who migrated after the Second World War. Moreover, the elimination of ‘Black Spots’ continued into the early 1980s, removing thousands from communally owned lands in Natal and the Transvaal. Even those blacks who long ago bought their land from the Boers, and had deeds to prove it signed by no less a personage than President Kruger, were forced to move. Village elders who refused to sign title-transfer agreements and lead their people to a homeland were detained without charge or trial for up to six months. Pretoria wanted to make apartheid look legal; hence the manic array of laws, as though injustice could be rendered just, and immorality moral, by the passing of Acts in Parliament. Only when black resistance was uncommonly stubborn did the authorities set about bulldozing schools and churches. If that didn’t work, water supplies were destroyed and people threatened with the bulldozing of their homes – containing all their possessions. Then everybody moved.
A mile-long ‘private road’ – little more than a path, hedged with spiky vegetation – leads to the Mission. Why is it here, this colony of bungalows isolated amidst green-gold savannah and now used only for occasional conferences? Is it a major planning error, or some thwarted ambition? It might be tactless to ask.
One young Irish priest holds the fort between conferences. At sunset he and I sat under an acacia with our Castles, slapping at mosquitoes and lamenting South Africa’s laid-back attitude to AIDS. Yesterday, returning from Tzaneen, Declan picked up two teenaged girls hitch-hiking to a nearby farm. They, seeing a well-dressed and with luck temptable young man, eagerly invited him home. Declan, fluent in their language, then did some devious sociological research. ‘I have AIDS,’ he solemnly declared. ‘If you sleep with me you will be infected with the virus, you will become HIV-positive and soon you will die.’ The girls giggled and said that was not important. He could have them both, they promised, for the price of one in Tzaneen. ‘What do you do,’ said Declan, ‘when they don’t believe in AIDS? How to get through to them?’
I remarked that at a time when so many South Africans are murdering each other, and millions don’t know where their next meal is coming from, a subtle long-term killer virus must seem unimportant.
Declan is a remarkable man – as he would need to be, living here alone without a postal service or telephone or anything much to do. Luckily he enjoys reading and music and appreciates his surroundings. Only a few miles west of the Mission, beyond a wilderness of thorny woodland and savannah, magnificent mountains rise abruptly from the plain. Old, old mountains, their blue-grey slopes sometimes evenly pleated like an accordion, then becoming a disarray of sharp angles, smooth curves, deep gorges. Such mountains do things to my adrenalin supply. I asked Declan about paths; the map shows nothing. Yes, a rarely used track, said to be one of the original Voortrekker trails, crosses the Orrie Baragwanath pass. A new motor road goes to the top – this area is being developed as a nature reserve – but on the far side the track is a mere footpath, leading into the homeland of Lebowa. Mentally I licked my lips.
A cloudy and blessedly cool morning. Not far from the Mission a red-and-white pole marks the entrance to the Downs Nature Reserve. On seeing me, three black wardens in crisp khaki uniforms registered comical amazement, followed by agitation. Madam must turn back, there is no through road! Madam said she didn’t want a through road, only to cross the pass and join the R37 at Zeekoegat. Increased agitation – Madam must turn back! The wardens’ minimal English precluded a reasoned argument but then their baas arrived in a bakkie, a cheerful friendly young Afrikaner – so friendly he seemed out of place hereabouts. I probed and he is out of place; he comes from the Cape, where they breed another sort of Afrikaner. Politely, sympathetically, he told me I’d gone astray: ‘There is no way through for cyclists.’ But he was amenable to reason and soon the barrier was lifted. His final warning: ‘You’re into a homeland on the other side, there’s no hotel, I don’t know where you can sleep.’ It’s odd how many people imagine travellers must sleep in hotels.
This new tarred road climbs steeply – at times very steeply – for 4,000 feet. First through a magical shadowy forest of ancient contorted indigenous trees, creeper-linked, supporting a multicoloured abundance of mosses, fungi, ferns. Here birds and monkeys were shrieking and chattering, darting and swinging. A swift stream sparkled on the left, then on the right, then on the left again as the road wriggled to and fro. Above the forest, on both sides, rose sheer wooded mountains gashed with bare gullies of carmine rock. From three high escarpments distant waterfalls drew noiseless silver lines through the trees. An avocado orchard (abandoned in 1984 when the reserve was established) filled one long valley. For hours only bird-calls and the petulant quarrelling of baboons broke the silence – hundreds of baboons, teeming on the slopes or sitting on clifftops, abusing me. The final gradient, just below the pass, was so severe that I had to rest at intervals, leaning on Lear, gazing back at all the wild grandeur now below. Then at last I was on level ground where the tar ended.
Ahead lay an immense plateau, distantly bounded – north and south – by irregular ridges of low blue mountains with tenuous cloud fragments drifting over their crests. On the stony and sometimes muddy path cycling was possible for an hour across this wide, bright world of gleaming grassland – the cool breeze varying its shades of green, the sun glittering on granite boulders. But why so many NO ENTRY warnings, engraved on rounds of wood atop pathside poles? No entry to what? Then my binoculars revealed traces of numerous derelict kraals – more forced removals … In pre-reserve times, this must have been superb grazing country.
From the edge of the plateau we plunged into Paradise – a gruelling paradise. The path resembled the dry bed of a rocky stream, the gradient was fit only for baboons. My wrists ached from braking Lear, my thigh muscles ached from braking myself. I thought admiringly of the Voortrekkers who hauled their dismantled ox-wagons and all their worldly goods up and down such mountains – but probably Coloured slaves did most of the hauling. However, the women and children had to walk over many such passes. A tough breed; perhaps their present sybaritic lifestyle doesn’t suit them. They might be happier – less tense – if still being physically challenged.
These mountains are tightly packed, separated by deep ravines. Escarpments streaked red and grey soar up and up – smooth, sheer, naked, rejecting vegetation. But the path clings to clothed mountains. Extravagantly clothed: elegant yellow orchids, grotesquely writhing cacti, countless varieties of flowering shrubs, richly scented. Around their blossoms – red, blue, orange, white – flitted clouds of brilliant butterflies, from stamp-size to saucer-size. And for hours the silence was unflawed. Something happens to time during such interludes; they are neither long nor short, only intense – and indestructible, forever fortifying.
Then faintly came the sound of an axeman, far away down the valley, signalling my exit from Paradise.
Half an hour later I was on a wide strip of grassland; it felt odd to be so suddenly on level ground. Ahead rose the reserve’s high wooden gate, sturdy and firmly locked – an unforeseen contretemps. But not a serious one: neglected wire fencing let us through at the expense of a torn shirt. Then a soft earth path led through woodland smelling of cattle-pads and here were people – many people, though the terrain allowed little cultivation. Three young men, dragging a tree trunk out of the bush, looked at me with something not far from terror; when I dismounted and made friendly noises they cringed. I smiled reassuringly and went on my way.
Soon a ‘Surplus People’s’ settlement appeared, scattered on wide slopes amidst scrub and boulders. The few original inhabitants live in round thatched huts, the many newcomers in tin-roofed concrete cubes. A small store, its Coca-Cola sign faded but still an irritant, was closed and barricaded with iron grilles. Often I had to dismount to negotiate tangles of gnarled tree roots, lying across the path like petrified serpents. The androgynous creature with the bicycle may well enter the local folklore. Small children took one look and fled, adolescents stared with a mixture of alarm and defiance, even the adults registered apprehension. My antennae told me to keep moving.
A homeland ‘motorway’ – the ruts chasmic, the loose stones large, the dust deep – curved around the base of forested foothills overlooking a vividly green valley some five miles wide; but that marshy land was cultivable only along a narrow strip below the track. Here I met the day’s traffic: a windowless bus, loaded beyond credibility, slowly lurching towards me in a cloud of dust. To ford three shallow rivers, from which children and goats were drinking while women washed clothes and pots, I had to roll up my trousers. The consequent two-tone effect – white legs, near-black face and arms – caused the young women to point and smile at me timidly while whimpering toddlers clutched at their skirts.
Beyond that valley, no more greenery – all harsh stony dryness, gaunt cacti, low thornbushes, and on three sides stark jagged mountains, their rock-crests glowing red. At a crossroads I asked the way to Zeekoegat but the two couples sitting on the verge looked away and were silent. Guessing, I turned right and pushed Lear up and up into a wide pale grey valley, its floor fissured by gullies, the arid slopes above strewn with concrete cubes. At 4.45 it was fiercely hot; this sort of terrain acts like a storage-heater. And here it became apparent that I am still convalescent, a fact obscured by my Orrie Baragwanath euphoria. I collapsed on a pile of stones, in the scanty shade of an embankment topped by prickly pear, and ate groundnuts.
How to define Mafefe? Population-wise it is a large town, extending for miles along this dusty valley. Otherwise it is a grievously impoverished village, without running water, electricity, sewage or adequate medical care. Until the nearby asbestos mine was closed in 1974, leaving as its memorial many asbestosis sufferers, Mafefe was used to outsiders. Now whites are a rarity and scores of excited children came racing down to the track to inspect me – from a safe distance. As I nut-munched, they gradually and silently edged closer and closer until I was looking up at a semi-circular wall of malnourished little bodies. Then one of the older boys, aged perhaps 12, summoned his courage and his scraps of English and asked where I was going.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I’m looking for somewhere to sleep.’ The boy pointed to high white walls a mile away on the next ridge-top – ‘Big man, big house.’
Within those walls, beyond a depot for agricultural implements and fertilizers (but where is the land to be fertilized?) Mafefe’s ‘supermarket’ sells salt, soap, Coca-Cola, tinned fish, cigarettes, white bread rolls and bales of cloth. The two young women behind the counter speak no English and made no effort to conceal their distrust of Whitey. As I sat on the high stoep, drinking warm Coca-Cola and longing for a Castle, twenty or so adolescents, male and female, joined my juvenile entourage and stood staring at me. I found their silent scrutiny a trifle unnerving but told myself that if I sat around for long enough something positive was likely to happen; it usually does, in rural Africa.
Soon Doris arrived: a lovely lass, better dressed than the average with large lustrous eyes, unblemished milk-chocolate skin and, I was relieved to notice, a friendly smile. She is aged 17, a member of the Assembly of God and a schoolgirl – ‘But no more school, no books last year, this year, why go for school and have no books?’
Doris, the linguist, had been delegated to suss me out. When she reported back to her peers they argued with her, their voices raised in anger. Returning to the stoep she explained cheerfully, ‘They don’t believe, they say you are thief.’
That took me aback. A police spy, perhaps – but a thief? ‘Do they say all whites are thieves?’
Doris, for a moment looking solemn, answered, ‘Yes.’ Well, I thought, one can see their point. Luckily Doris herself had accepted me. ‘You wait for my cousin Harry, coming now from Lebowakgomo, he thinks good about foreigners.’
Soon Harry came trotting towards us across the compound, a bouncy excitable little man. Sitting beside me, he declined a Coke: ‘It is an impure stimulant.’ Heartily I agreed and suggested seeking a beer instead, whereupon he looked utterly scandalized; it seemed his prejudice against Coke was religious rather than scientific. He enthused about the privilege of meeting a lady from overseas, then raged about asbestosis, Mr Nelson Ramodike’s vices and Lebowa’s consequent underdevelopment. As the sun slid behind a mountain Doris murmured something and he turned to me quickly – ‘You need to sleep here? You rest in our home?’
As we set off – back the way I had come – groups of small boys were racing down steep slopes behind wheelbarrows loaded with plastic jerry-cans to be pulled home from a distant unclean stream, using ropes as harnesses. Some adult males also fetch water, Doris said, but only if all their womenfolk and children are dead or very ill.
Last year Harry taught in Mafefe but without textbooks you can’t really teach. Anyway, the pay was ‘too small to keep alive’ and the work too hard, with over forty pupils in each class – and nearly ninety in one classroom. He himself left school at the age of 13, after Standard Five – ‘for the other five years, no fees!’
In the six non-‘independent’ homelands 22 per cent of primary-school teachers are similarly unqualified – and 15 per cent of secondary teachers.
Today Harry was job-hunting in Lebowa’s ‘capital’. ‘A lot of money for that bus fare, then no work! But the Lord will be my shepherd, he will lead me to green pastures and sweet springs!’ Harry wore the navy-blue peaked cap and silver-star badge of the ZCC, the biggest and most influential of South Africa’s indigenous Churches with an estimated membership of 5 million. Its leader, unfortunately, has much in common with certain wealthy American televangelists.
Harry’s acceptance of me had transformed the atmosphere. The surly adolescents disappeared and the adults we met along the track greeted me with friendly curiosity. My gold tooth-filling, visible when I smile, was much admired; one old mama, mistaking it for a movable decoration, begged me to give it to her. The children, their numbers by now trebled, formed a laughing and singing escort, some running up to smile at me and stroke my arms, others helping to push Lear up the gravel-skiddy slope.
As we passed a derelict bungalow where the white mining manager once lived, Harry brooded on the thousands of miners who had come to Mafefe from the Transkei, Natal, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe. Nineteen years after the mine’s closure, no one knows how many have permanently damaged lungs. And anyway, under the Occupational Diseases in Mines and Works Act, black victims are entitled to only 10 per cent of the compensation paid to whites with identical complaints. In Mafefe scores of youngish women, including two of Harry’s sisters, suffer from asbestosis; as children they were employed to do ‘cobbing’ – hammering open those maize-cob-shaped splinters of rock which contain asbestos. Six months’ exposure to the fine grey dust is enough to cause asbestosis. This the Mafefe people learned through experience. No wonder they don’t much like whites.
An astounding number of decrepit cars passed, coating us in dust before turning off to jolt up hillsides like bucking broncos. Each was packed with workers: Mafefe’s envied élite, returning from factories over the ‘border’. For black as well as white South Africans the motor car is the ultimate status symbol; even here in Lebowa, the poorest of all the homelands, it is given priority over domestic comforts.
The light was fading as we climbed a barren slope towards long lines of cubes set in minute fenced plots – scarcely big enough, even had the soil been fertile, to produce a family’s vegetables. Here a small boy suddenly materialized and handed Doris a 14-month-old baby. ‘My son,’ she explained proudly, baring a breast. The small boy is her youngest brother; two other brothers and her mother died in a cholera epidemic. She lives in a four-roomed cube with her father, Mr Sevoka, and Phoebe, her older sister, who has three children by an absent miner husband, and Harry and his childless wife, and Harry’s brother Tom with his wife Sheba and their four children. As this demographic scene unfolded, I resolved to camp outside. But of course that wasn’t allowed; the guest must have the best available: a comfortable double-bed which no doubt normally sleeps six to eight persons depending on their size. Doris apologized for the absence of interior doors; money had run out at that stage. Then she pointed me to the earth-closet thirty yards away, shared by three families, and visually clean though olfactorily less so.
Mr Sevoka is a frail 50-year-old who looks 70 and speaks no English. He was completely thrown by my arrival but quickly recovered himself and welcomed me graciously, at first assuming me to be male; correcting this impression took time. Then he disappeared, leaving Harry, Tom and me sitting around the living-room table conversing by candlelight – or in the dark, when the one candle was needed in the kitchen while the eight children were being fed. The only furniture, apart from a Formica table and four camp-chairs, is a huge antique gas refrigerator, retrieved years ago from a Pietersburg dump but no longer used; gas has become too expensive.
‘For our future we want a country full of friendship,’ said Tom, a secondary-school teacher (unqualified). ‘We’ve had too much hating, it’s a bad life when there is hating. We are sad and afraid about our township children, they hate too much. Their world has gone wrong, now they must make their hearts peaceful.’
As we talked, a glory of sound filled the evening – singing at once joyous and plaintive, in sweet flawless harmony. Tom went to the door, then beckoned me. Beyond the wire fence, just visible by moonlight, a massed choir of small children – at least 200 – was staging an impromptu concert. ‘To welcome you!’ smiled Tom. ‘They give you our tribal songs to make you happy!’
I felt a lump in my throat. ‘Who suggested this – a teacher?’
‘No one suggested it, it comes from their hearts. And they like to sing, they like to have cause for it.’
Before the choir dispersed, half an hour later, I made to go out to thank them. But both Harry and Tom firmly said ‘No!’ ‘It would not be right,’ Tom added enigmatically.
Mr Sevoka returned then with bad though not unexpected news. A nephew had just died; six months ago he came home from his miners’ hostel with TB, then quickly lost weight, ‘grew sore skin on his face’ and finally developed chronic diarrhoea.
‘In the hostels they have too much TB,’ said Harry angrily. ‘More and more they die of it – why is this?’
Tactfully I said nothing – perhaps a misplaced tact? The least ineffective AIDS-education is the realization that already one’s family and friends are dying of AIDS-related diseases, TB being the commonest in South Africa.
When Doris offered me herbal tea but no food I retired even earlier than usual, leaving the family to eat what little they have, and wrote by torchlight.
My reappearance at dawn caused Mafefe’s juveniles riotously to reassemble, singing and cheering as Doris and Phoebe escorted me down to the track. They were going to fetch water from a murky trickle some four miles away in the depths of a steep-sided gully, a punishing twice-daily chore.
‘You talk now to the government,’ begged Doris, ‘to say this people needs water like Soweto have. Clean water! This dirty water gives people sick and children die! I listened about Soweto, all peoples there has water near the door.’ Scores were converging on the stream and I marvelled at their personal cleanliness; in such a situation I’d soon give up the washing habit.
In the unpeopled region beyond Mafefe I often had to dismount, so erosion-ravaged was the track. For hours it rose and fell between ochre mountain walls, all knobbly with rounded rocky outcrops, the vegetation a mere stubble of scrub – an austerely beautiful landscape of stern textures, dramatic shapes and strong bold colours glowing under a sky intensely blue. Yet all this beauty is dimmed by one’s awareness (throbbing like a wound) of the area’s artificial human suffering. ‘Artificial’ is the keyword. Often I have seen even worse rural deprivation – but as an inescapable fact of local life, not something callously planned.
Towards noon, flat cultivated land replaced the mountains: maize and sugar-cane and miles of desiccated pasture on which skeletal cattle lethargically roamed. Then came another crowded settlement and, startlingly, massive roadworks employing hi-tech machinery, all shiny and new and operated by whites.
The little store was milkless. ‘Our people have no money for luxuries,’ explained the owner – elderly, gentle, with resigned but astute eyes. He surprised me by damning the new road. ‘Where no one has work, why use machines? Why spend billions on a two-lane tarred highway? We don’t need it, for us a good smooth earth road is enough. That could be made and kept good by the men who live here without jobs or hope. Where is this road going? Over the Orrie Baragwanath pass, for tourists! How much will it cost to put a road up there?’
Despair swamped me. A motor road through that paradise – that special, hidden, tranquil, inexpressibly lovely place!
‘For years it’s been planned,’ said the store-owner. ‘A game park or nature reserve – something like that. They removed everyone living high up – rich people, growing potatoes. The soil was so good for potatoes they grew tons and tons and made big money and were happy. Now they are starving in Mafefe and here. How will tourists driving over the pass make them happy again? It’s not possible.’
In my rage I scarcely noticed the landscape over the next ten miles. The sheer crassness of it, the double vileness of it – to destroy a prosperous community while exposing such an ecologically precious corner to the physical and spiritual pollutions of motorized mass-tourism. Who, I wonder, is profiting from this? There is of course nothing particularly South African about the immolation of special places on the altar of tourism. Ireland does it too – in fact is among the worst offenders. Witness the desecration of the Burren.
While I was tick-fevered in Jo’burg it was claimed that the Lebowa Tender Board had done a deal with a chemical company, Firechem, which then donated R100,000 to Mr Ramodike’s ruling party. The managing director of Firechem, William McNaught, blandly explained that his company has a policy of ‘ploughing something back into the community’. But nobody even attempted to explain why Lebowa needs 2,000 tonnes of cleaning chemicals. The story went that this contract was never put out to tender – though that’s irrelevant. Rumour had it as well that Mr Ronald Rasebotsa, a cousin of Mr Ramodike, won a R1.3 million contract to supply meat to the Groothoek Hospital despite his tender being R227,000 above the lowest.
The Lebowakgomo–Lydenburg main road carries an uncomfortable amount of fast traffic through another rural slum on semi-desert hillsides spiky with cacti. The sky was cloudless, the sun fierce, the vehicle fumes queasing. At 4 p.m. I began to look out for a suitable campsite, not very hopefully. The exceptionally high wire fencing puzzled me but that mystery was soon solved by a high arched wooden gateway leading to a privately owned game-reserve-cum-tourist-camp. Tourist camps depress me yet one can’t afford to be choosy at a certain stage of heat exhaustion.
My arrival baffled the two middle-aged Pedi wardens sitting outside the reception rondavel. The isolated campsite, one explained, is very far away – five miles! Being alone, I should camp on the grassy patch beside the rondavel. Firmly I refused, rejoicing at the prospect of a secluded site. The men muttered to each other, then reluctantly gave in. I paid R15 and signed the register, noting that it had last been signed four months ago by a German couple. As Jack led the way on his ancient bicycle, through tallish trees and thickish bush, we glimpsed giraffe, ostriches, springbok, zebras.
Dwarf acacia hedge the site, a quarter-acre of short grass; the only ‘facilities’ are a tap over a stone sink, a small bathroom hut and the essential braai grill. Directly behind the hut, on a steep rocky ridge, scores of dassies were giving their bird-like alarm calls. My cup of joy was o’erflowing but Jack’s unease remained. ‘Too much far away?’ he persisted.
‘Perfect!’ I assured him. ‘Very good, no problem!’
‘Sure no problem? Not you fear too far away?’
‘I like being far away, I like to be alone.’
Still he hesitated and lingered, seeming more than anxious – almost afraid, as though somehow he himself were threatened. To speed him on his way I gave him a R5 handshake but even that didn’t cheer him up. While mounting his bicycle he gave me one last apprehensive sideways look.
An inquisitive giraffe family, including a calf, stood peering at me over the hedge as I devoured an unwholesome supper of stale white bread rolls and tinned fish (species undisclosed) in a sauce with an ominously metallic tang. As I conversed with the giraffes their ears moved to and fro in response to my voice. Only when I stood up did they withdraw, quite quickly; their comical slow-motion lope is deceptive.
Under a crimson western sky I went wandering through the bush, sending a zebra herd trotting before me. Then I was on open savannah, where the gods were kind. Surely the springbok in motion is the most graceful of living creatures. Here eleven of them appeared, no more than thirty yards away, their white ‘fans’ open, tinted pink by the sunset glow. I watched through my binoculars as they streamed away into the distance, springing ten or twelve feet above the golden grass, clearing fifteen feet with one bound, flowing over the veld like emanations from some other world not limited by the law of gravity. Yet even today many hunters kill springbok for fun …
Back at the site I wrote by candlelight (there was no breeze) while savouring the silence of my solitude. At 8.30 I retired with Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War and soon (not Thomas’s fault) was sound asleep.
Curiously enough, the headlights – not the engine noise – woke me an hour later. These were powerful lights, shining directly onto the tent. ‘Now that’s bad luck!’ thought I, assuming the arrival of fellow-campers. After some door-banging, footsteps approached and stopped a yard from my ear. A hand slapped the roof of the tent and a voice loudly demanded, ‘Come out! I’m here! Get up!’ A recognizable voice: Jack’s.
I lay motionless and silent, wondering ‘What the hell …?’ Next the tent frame was shaken and Jack shouted, ‘Murphy, come out!’ Turning on my stomach I unzipped the entrance flap and stared up angrily. ‘How dare you disturb me? I’m tired, I was sleeping!’
Two young Pedi policemen appeared in the headlights’ glare, cuddling rifles. ‘Come to police cell for night,’ said one. Was this an arrest or an invitation?
‘Get lost!’ I snapped. ‘I’ve shown my passport, signed the register, paid my fee and now I’m staying here!’
The policeman moved closer, made his rifle look more obvious and repeated, ‘Come to police cell, this man Jack not trust you, come in van.’
Jack added, ‘Come out, Murphy! Come in van!’
I continued to argue – very conscious of being in a disadvantageous position, lying on my stomach – until the second policeman also moved closer. Now there was determination in the air and it occurred to me that were I to continue to resist arrest (if arrest this be) I could be forcibly removed, perhaps without Lear and my possessions. Fuming, I wriggled out of the tiny tent and set about dismantling it.
Ten minutes later Jack lifted Lear into the back of the van and my captors signed me into the front seat. But no one can be expected to leave their luggage exposed to Lebowa’s degenerate police force. During the monosyllabic argument that followed my temper shortened by the second. When finally I pushed the policeman aside and climbed in beside Lear, Jack joined me. Our destination was the next big settlement (its name escapes me: I was too enraged to write it down) some ten miles along the road to Lydenburg.
Under pressure, Jack admitted to having telephoned the police, reported the arrival of a suspicious foreigner and urged them to do something about it.
Three armoured vehicles stood outside the long, low police station protected by a steel-mesh fence. The main door led into a brilliantly lit room – a generator growled in the background – where filing cabinets lined two walls and a young lieutenant sat behind a high counter. Only the top of his head was visible when I stormed in, wheeling Lear and followed by Jack, now completely unnerved after our tête-à-tête in the van. When people who rarely lose their temper do get angry, they tend to get very angry. Banging my fist on the counter, I glared at the bemused-looking lieutenant and demanded to see the commander. The lieutenant muttered something about the commander being in his home. ‘Then fetch him from his home,’ I ordered. ‘I want to see him now. And then I want to be driven back to the campsite.’
When four more policemen entered from the wings my captors joined them behind the counter. For fifteen minutes I stood silent and scowling while a noisy debate took place – occasionally involving Jack, still cowering by the door. This debate might have continued indefinitely had not Major Nakaphala arrived, wearing a pin-striped royal-blue lounge suit. Affably he shook hands, politely he requested my passport, calmly he asked me to make a statement and diligently he wrote it down – not once but four times, in separate ledgers and copybooks. Then he told one of his men to fetch the commander. Clearly he, too, was angry with my captors; but to have reprimanded them then and there would not have been the African way. He did, however, intimate that they had overreacted to Jack’s scare-story.
I couldn’t return to the site as the gate was locked and the man with the key ‘very far away’. And my R15 couldn’t be refunded before morning, those rands being behind the locked gate. I protested that I must be gone by 5.30 a.m. and if the police gave me the money now they could retrieve it later. But allegedly those eight policemen couldn’t between them scrape together R15. Instead, the major ordered Jack to deliver my rands not later than 5.25, white time.
Close on midnight the commander appeared: tall, burly, self-satisfied, wearing a crimson and yellow tracksuit and several gold rings. Then things took a new turn. The tacit understanding arrived at between Major Nakaphala and myself (there had been a regrettable mistake) was to him unacceptable. His police force doesn’t make mistakes. As a suspicious character I must be searched.
The two policewomen were sympathetic but extremely efficient. In a tiny bare cell (later my bedroom) they stripped me naked – that was a ‘first’ – and greatly admired my leg muscles. The panniers’ contents were also closely scrutinized, even to opening my toothpowder tin and film containers. (Looking for drugs?) We moved into the corridor to unfold the tent, which operation attracted seven mesmerized spectators, all chewing bubble-gum. (Why so many police on night duty in this remote settlement? To earn overtime?) Finally, at 1.10 a.m., the girls pronounced me innocent, Coca-Cola was served and the commander and I improbably settled down to discuss current affairs.
I listened, poker-faced, while being told that the ANC and PAC sell guns to local criminals because they want all Lebowa police officers killed in preparation for the election campaign. The ANC must be prevented from holding election rallies in the homelands, they’d lie to the people. That Mandela fella is a phoney, claims to have a law degree but never went to school. The Nats must stay in control, even if they have to pretend to share power – no one else knows how to run a modern state. Mr Nelson Ramodike must remain Lebowa’s leader, he understands very well all the local problems. The ANC are planning to drive the whites out of the country, keeping the mines for themselves and their Commie friends – who now need South Africa’s gold more than ever because Russia is going bankrupt.
Studying the commander’s face, I wondered if he believes all this. Maybe he does; South Africa’s brand of corruption has bred millions who live in whichever fantasy-land best suits their chequebooks.
At 2.15 I retired to my cell. Soon after a policewoman joined me, unrolling her straw mat on the concrete floor beside my flea-bag. Moving over to make room for her, I bruised my brow on one of Lear’s pedals. Ten minutes later hymns started, tapes of a ZCC Easter gathering at Moria. Very loud hymns. Very little sleep.
Less than three hours later, Jack was handing me R15. He looked so dejected that – having made my point and feeling guilty about having made it – I gave them back to him. The lieutenant at the desk, bleary-eyed at the end of a long hard night, registered disapproval of this irrational gesture.
Pedalling away – here even the dawn air is warm – I pondered this strange episode. Why had Jack felt compelled to take such drastic action? And why had the police so quickly responded? Did they really suspect me of being a terrorist/drug-smuggler? Or did Jack suspect me of being some malevolent white sangoma wielding dangerous powers and needing restraint? Or did he simply wish to protect me from a night alone in the bush? But no – for whatever reason, he was afraid of me, not for me. And the atmosphere during the police-station debate prompted by my arrest had been disturbed by powerful psychic crosscurrents, baffling to me and evidently distressing to all those present. Hereabouts the belief in witchcraft is so common that hundreds of alleged ‘witches’ have been murdered within the past ten years.
This evening, reviewing my own behaviour, I rightly feel ashamed. I acted like a white supremacist of the nastiest sort, giving no one time to explain anything (even had they been so inclined) and throwing my weight around as though I were entitled to bully all those stupid blacks. Yet now what shocks me most is not what I said or did but what erupted inside myself. Facing that reality is a chastening experience. As Gramsci said somewhere, ‘It is useful to “know thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’
Forty hot miles took me to the Lebowa ‘border’. On my right a parched yellow-brown plain extended to the base of low, worn-looking mountains, some mining-scarred. A line of giant pylons bestrides this range, for the benefit of a chrome-mine and industrial estate just over the ‘border’, while the countless shacks beneath them remain unelectrified. Many families, gallantly determined to brighten their dreary plots, use battered old paint tins as flowerpots. The multitude of vehicles parked around the shacks puzzled me until my binoculars revealed that most have been cannibalized. Among the cacti and thornbushes a few emaciated cattle, donkeys and goats wandered and nibbled. One rarely sees emaciated goats; when they look poorly things are truly desperate. Ragged women and children, equally emaciated, criss-crossed the plain seeking scraps of firewood. Little herdboys sat leaning against boulders, doodling in the dust. My standard Map Studio road map, subservient to apartheid, indicates that this R37 route to Burgersfort crosses uninhabited country – in contrast to the surrounding Transvaal, dotted with dorps.
Here the ‘border’ is a narrow brown river between high bushy banks. While still in Lebowa one can see white-owned land ahead, the irrigated fields vividly green. Burgersfort, an uphill mile from the river, is a dorplet dominated by big brash white-owned, black-staffed stores where Lebowa folk can buy shoddy goods. On this Saturday morning the streets were thronged and the stores crowded yet the place felt oppressive – sullen, watchful. I bought two litres of amasi and continued, the road rising gradually. Here one family may own 6,000 productive acres, the lush pastures grazed by fat cattle of European ancestry. For ten miles I saw no one, apart from speeding motorists; throughout these ‘ethnically cleansed’ rural expanses the spirit of Africa is missing. Anywhere else on the continent such fertile regions are busy, colourful, noisy with gossip, laughter, argument, vigorous bartering and bargaining, drunken quarrelling, dancing children.
The next dorp is Lydenburg, thirty-five miles further on and a few thousand feet up beyond a formidable mountain-wall – the sort of challenge I normally enjoy. But today I viewed it without enthusiasm and was relieved to see a simple wooden sign pointing left down a dirt track to a ‘Guest House’. This well-maintained track ran downhill past two handsome farmhouses, red-tiled and white-walled, their gardens shrub-filled, their green lawns tree-shaded. I turned left again at a T-junction below an escarpment where swathes of vines drape thin elongated boulders, like organ-pipes. Then, approaching the guest house entrance, alarm bells rang. By the gateway a high, curved mud wall, reminiscent of the Middle East, conceals the servants’ quarters – a veritable village. From here the track climbs steeply, through cool indigenous forest, and coming towards us were three blond children in very correct riding attire, mounted on plump glossy ponies and attended by a black syce resplendent in a gold-braided scarlet uniform. Assuredly this track did not lead to a frugal farm guest house.
Soon all was revealed: an enormous two-storey L-shaped hotel, its handsome timbered façade smothered in bougainvillea; an Olympic-sized swimming pool plus a children’s pool; two tennis courts with flood-lighting; a bowling green; a miniature golf course; a line of stables; a mountain-bike racetrack; an adventure playground – all surrounded by towering trees and flowering shrubs, and interspersed with succulent rockeries, sparkling fountains, emerald lawns. But it was too late to turn back; I had put another twelve miles between myself and Lydenburg.
In the empty foyer, leopard and lion skins – complete with heads, jaws agape – decorate the shiny stinkwood floor. Other hunters’ trophies – a cemetery of antlers – decorate the walls, together with romantic scenes from the heroic Voortrekker days. When the receptionist appeared – a svelte and rather haughty Coloured woman – I haggled spiritedly, pretending to be quite ready to move on, and the charge for my room (without breakfast) came down from R250 to R150 (£30).
I told myself to regard this extravagance as a sound investment, giving me an opportunity to mix with rich Afrikaners at play. There is, however, a snag: these Afrikaners don’t seem to be at play and won’t mix with an uitlander. The only friendly creature around is a long-haired dachshund named Budser. Obviously the humans share a serious problem, an inability to relax and enjoy themselves. Is this a normal (for them) condition, or a Transvalers’ herd reaction to the new South Africa?
Throughout the afternoon young bronzed stern-faced couples swam lengths of the pool swiftly and methodically, as though in training, then sat chain-smoking under a milkwood tree, just occasionally exchanging brief remarks about some evidently gloomy topic. Slightly older couples sat by the adventure playground, stolidly observing their highly competitive and frequently fractious offspring. Elderly couples sat at the long thatched open-air bar, its counter displaying a macabre collection of stuffed monkeys, and glumly sipped vividly coloured cocktails. Weirdly, nobody smiled – not even at each other, never mind at me. Usually I can overcome communication barriers, even in such introverted places as East Belfast and Afro-Caribbean Handsworth. But not here. These are people grimly locked into themselves and uninterested in being released. They remind me of a conversation in Harare with an octogenarian Natal woman who quoted Trollope’s 1877 comment: ‘The Dutch Boer is what he is not because he is Dutch or because he is a Boer, but because circumstances have isolated him.’ In the Natalian’s view, ‘The Afrikaners are doomed and they know it. Look at their low birth rate! Always a sign, since the decline of the Roman Empire, that the collective unconscious sees the writing on the wall. To survive they must marry out.’ At the time I ascribed this to prejudice; the Afrikaner and English-speaking South Africans are not mutually devoted. But now I begin to wonder …
At 5 p.m. I retired to my opulent suite – where Lear’s companionship felt positively comforting – and wrote until 7.30. Then everybody gathered around the braaivleis to help themselves to a multi-course dinner (R27 extra). My doggedly resumed efforts to communicate prompted a few stiff smiles and many averted eyes – no words. The food and wine were superb by any standards, yet the atmosphere in that open-air restaurant remained resolutely joyless. No buzz of conversation – forget laughter – just people leaning mutely over their plates, shovelling it in, then swigging good wine as though it were beer before going back for another heaped plateful.
While packing in preparation for an early start I pillaged my marble bathroom; its array of mainly unidentifiable (by me) perks will be useful to give as presents en route.
The R37 was traffic-free on this Sunday morning as its many hairpin bends twisted around steep rock-crested mountains wearing dense green-brown bush and populated only by baboons. At the top, on the dramatically definite edge of the highveld, I rested and nut-munched. From here the lowveld seemed all golden grassland, wide and smooth, bounded to the north and east by powder-blue mountains isolated and conical, or forming long jagged ridges towards the Orrie Baragwanath pass. In this region, during the first century AD, Bantu communities were grazing cattle and sheep, cultivating grain and vegetables, carving bone, ivory and soapstone, firing elaborate pottery, forging copper or iron weapons and tools in village furnaces. Yet ‘official’ Afrikaner history puts the first migration of blacks across the Limpopo in the seventeenth century. According to white mythology, the Transvaal’s original goldfield was discovered near Lydenburg in the 1870s. In fact the Bantu had found it some 700 years previously and loaded their women with finely wrought ornaments, to the envious wonder of the early Portuguese explorers.
Even at noon a cool breeze was blowing across the highveld and I sprinted thirstily over the last few miles, forgetting that on Sundays bars remain closed until 6 p.m. After three pots of tea in Morgan’s Hotel – agreeably old-fashioned – I went walkabout. The only people visible were cheerfully chatting (in Bapedi) churchgoers, the women looking nurse-like in identical white uniforms and blue berets; each indigenous Church has its distinctive Sunday uniform. As no one spoke English I failed to find Lydenburg’s most cherished possession, the oldest extant school building in the Transvaal. (This failure was not too frustrating.) I did however pay my respects to an ancient – by South African standards – DRC church built in 1864 and now serving as a Voortrekker museum (closed on Sundays). On the earliest maps of the Transvaal only three towns are marked: Potchefstroom, Pretoria and Lydenburg, the last meaning ‘Place of Suffering’ – so named by a few grieving Voortrekkers who retreated to these heights from the lowveld after malaria had killed most of their companions and the tsetse fly most of their cattle. In the 1850s this dorp enjoyed a moment of glory as the capital of a short-lived independent Boer Republic. In the 1990s it is hopefully looking forward – so the hotel receptionist told me – to the expansion of South Africa’s tourist industry.
Eve and Elizabeth – Natal born – sounded less optimistic as we talked in the ladies bar. Eve now lives in Bristol and is visiting her Jo’burg-based sister. She is tall and stout with dyed raven hair. Elizabeth is also tall but bony and faded: faded blonde hair, faded blue eyes, faded pink cheeks. Eve knows I will be murdered en route, probably before ever I get to Jo’burg, certainly before I get to Cape Town. Returning to South Africa after a thirty-year absence has done her no good. ‘Changes I expected, never did I guess the Bantu had taken over! In Jo’burg they’ve moved in! They’re swaggering around everywhere, you can’t shop safely in the centre – or even walk on the pavements with hawkers spreading their goods, a public nuisance. There’s no control any more. It’s like – what is it like? It’s like Nairobi!’
‘We don’t notice it so much,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Of course we do, really, but it’s not a shock – it’s been happening over years, long before they let Mandela out. And it’s no good blaming anyone. It had to happen.’
Eve snorted fiercely; I got the impression the new South Africa had driven this sororial relationship onto the rocks. ‘Why did it have to happen?’
‘Economic reasons,’ Elizabeth replied succinctly.
‘Rubbish! I find all our friends poorer – much poorer. Families with three, four servants in the old days are lucky now to have a girl once a week and a garden-boy twice a week. And I see rich blacks all over the place with fine cars and good jobs – while our youngsters must emigrate!’
I asked, ‘If the blacks couldn’t afford to consume, what would happen to the whites?’
‘Exactly!’ said Elizabeth. ‘That’s one reason apartheid couldn’t work.’
‘It was working perfectly well thirty years ago.’
Elizabeth looked at her sister. ‘Remember Boksburg? Just one example. Thirty years ago we’d no well-organized boycotts.’
‘I don’t remember Boksburg,’ said Eve sulkily. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Tell us,’ I urged Elizabeth. (Her surname, Louw, revealed that she was married to an Afrikaner.)
‘Well, it taught us a lesson. My husband has a few little business interests there – and did we suffer! In ’88 the CP [Conservative Party] promised to bring back segregation and won 70 per cent of the Transvaal town councils. So again Boksburg had full-scale segregation. Next thing, a full-scale boycott for a year – genuine, no intimidation. The CP leader, Clive Derby-Lewis, swore it was only bluff, wouldn’t make any difference. He couldn’t have been more wrong. All work was suspended on a new R30 million shopping centre and a R110 million hypermarket – that lost who knows how many jobs. The CP mayor had to sell his business for R80,000 though it was valued at quarter of a million in January ’88. Nine offices had to close, including my husband’s, and eighteen shops – furniture and hardware takings dropped by 30 per cent. It was the Boksburg boycott [of white businesses] pushed the repeal of the Separate Amenities Act in ’90. When I joined the UDF [United Democratic Front] in ’85 my husband wasn’t too pleased – now we’ve been half-ruined he admits I was right!’
It’s uphill all the way to Dullstroom, between round green mountains where fast streams sparkle and sleek cattle browse in wide shallow valleys. All morning the strong tail-wind was cool, the sun warm, the sky cloudless. Soon the altitude became apparent, yet away from the lowveld heat I seemed to have more rather than less energy. At Die Berg – the highest point in the Transvaal, marked by a monolithic boulder inscribed ‘6,904 feet’ – I dismounted to gaze back. Below me only mountains were visible, all smooth-crested, all of the same height, all leaning in the same direction like the immobilized breakers of a stormy sea.
Dullstroom is a holiday resort where rich Vaalies enjoy ‘recreational fishing’ in the region’s well-stocked, privately owned trout streams. As the two hotels charge R400 (£80) for a single room, I turned towards the campsite (£3) on the dam shore. Then suddenly the weather changed; low dark clouds swiftly advanced over Die Berg and it was cold – very cold. For this I was unprepared; on returning to Duiwelskloof I had taken only hot-weather clothes.
A rough track descends to the campsite, ten bumpy acres of coarse short grass cut off from the dam by an eight-foot wire fence. Apart from a taciturn black in a wooden kiosk at the entrance, there was no one – nor any dwelling – in sight. By now a howling gale was sending those dark clouds speeding across the long barren ridge beyond the dam. It wasn’t raining, yet the air felt icily moist. I tried to get the tent up but the rock-hard ground rejected the pegs. Shivering, I unfolded my space-blanket at an ill-chosen moment – an extra-strong gust tore it out of my hands and away it sailed, high up into the clouds, never to be seen again.
This site’s ‘amenity’ is a barn-like edifice, open at both ends, with a tin roof that rattles loudly in the wind and a head-high wall of wooden slats on the dam side – through which the gale is now penetrating like cold swords. Here I must sleep, spreading the folded tent on the concrete floor to supplement my hot-weather flea-bag.
At dusk a small caravan parked nearby. Three young men emerged, equipped with braai firewood, and their flames drew me like a moth. But my reception was as cold as the gale. I hesitated, not being a natural gate-crasher, then gave priority to thawing and crouched by the fire with outstretched hands while the men, conversing in Afrikaans, spiced their meat. All were warmly clad, with compact athletic bodies, blunt features, small moustaches and army haircuts. The scene seemed absurdly unreal: me, wrapped in my flea-bag, too desperate for warmth to accept a brush-off while the trio, completely ignoring me, went about their meaty business. They were having a problem; that gusty wind kept the wood flaming and you can’t braai over flames. Finally I suggested, ‘Why not move the caravan, to shelter the fire?’ All three stared, as though noticing me for the first time. But that was the breakthrough. When the caravan had been moved and the meat at last was sizzling they allowed me slowly to dismantle their anti-uitlander barrier, brick by brick.
They are engineering apprentices from Krugersdorp on a fishing holiday – AWB members and proud of it. If Eugene Terre’ Blanche can’t deliver a Volkstaat they plan to emigrate, though they admit they don’t know where to, where jobs can be found … As they condemned the rest of the world for ‘misunderstanding’ apartheid their voices went hoarse with resentment. ‘You people think kaffirs are humans but they’re fuckin’ not – they’re animals! We wasted our taxes giving schools they’re too thick to use – they burn them down instead! We’re living centuries with these monkeys, we don’t need fuckin’ sermons from you people!’ And much more in the same vein …
It is hard to imagine these young men ever outgrowing their conditioning; for that a certain level of intelligence is required. When I asked what they knew about AIDS in South Africa one said, ‘That’s a kaffir disease, not our problem.’ Another added, ‘It could save this country, they say most could be dead in ten or fifteen years.’
‘Then who would work in the mines and factories and on the farms?’
They all laughed and one replied, ‘We’ll get migrant labour from Asia like the Saudis do – that’s clever!’
This first encounter with AWB-type hatred has shaken me. Seen from a distance, it can be dismissed as just one more manifestation of fringe fanaticism. But at close range it has a terrible psychic power; sitting listening to those three, I found myself trembling.
Motoring across the highveld with Kevin had left me resigned to a monotonous few days between Dullstroom and Jo’burg. Instead, I have found beauty. Quiet narrow secondary roads took me over miles of pastureland, golden-brown or copper-tinted. All the verges and many meadows are now gay with cosmos, a tall richly pink flower – South Africa’s autumn glory. In the clear air the highveld’s horizons induce a heady sense of freedom; no wonder the Voortrekkers, reaching this remote bright spaciousness, decided that here was their Promised Land and came so passionately to love it. Their descendants’ red-roofed farmsteads usually lie far back from the road, surrounded by stately spreading trees and dominated by the essential water-pump windmill, whirring against a deep blue sky.
I passed through Belfast, Carolina, Hendrina, Bethal, Leandral, spending nights in Carolina and Bethal. Having escaped from the northern Transvaal, I am meeting some more flexible Afrikaners, still rabidly anti-black but quite pro-uitlander – indeed, often warmly hospitable. Here in Devon’s bleak little hotel bar I haven’t been allowed to pay for my Castles and concerned locals have made me promise to send the hotel a postcard confirming my safe arrival in Cape Town. But the Afrikaners’ thinking (wrong word: their mindset) is depressingly uniform. Groups of blacks often disagree in conversation, groups of Afrikaners only rarely. One senses Afrikanerdom’s mould holding them together, reducing them to an essential passivity in relation to South Africa’s future, even when their response to changing circumstances involves aggressive language. For the blacks, changing circumstances hold a promise and a challenge. For the sort of whites I am meeting in these little dorps, changing circumstances represent defeat – not stimulating argument but encouraging laagerism.
My breakfast companion in Bethal, an obese peroxided travelling saleswoman, shrugged off the repeal of the apartheid laws. ‘We know how to protect ourselves, we’ve doubled the fees for all amenities – and if that doesn’t work we’ll treble them! I don’t mind standing in the same queue in a post office or railway station – I’ve never been racist, I always thought that was a silly rule. It’s when you want to relax, to enjoy yourself, you can’t have them around. And no way can you travel with them, because of the smell.’
All the way from Bethal to Devon the Rand’s penumbra of pollution was visible across the level treeless veld – an ominous grey-brown haze, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40 miles away. As Jo’burg is a city of macho drivers – a place so inimical to cyclists that the species is never sighted – Margaret had volunteered to drive to the rescue. Near Devon, when a wildly swaying truck tipped Lear and me into the ditch, I judged it was sos time. Margaret will pick us up at 7 a.m. tomorrow – so early because tomorrow is Good Friday and the ZCC Easter ceremonies attract millions to Moria in the northern Transvaal, many starting out from the PWV region.