How real a concept is freedom? You start to function when coming to terms with a set of limitations.
Athol Fugard
Freedom of association also implies freedom of disassociation.
Johan Heyns
Welcoming me back, several friends have remarked, ‘You’ll find everything changed and nothing changed.’ They didn’t need to expatiate; the paradox is tangible, powerful, the keynote of the new South Africa. And though unsurprising it disconcerts.
In Sandton an elderly English-speaking couple were honest about how much they value ‘freedom of disassociation’. Recently, driving back from their Knysna holiday home, they stopped as usual at a Willowmore café.
‘But it was full of blacks!’ said George. ‘Crowded with them!’
‘So we drove on,’ said Mary, ‘though we were dying for a pot of tea.’
‘We should have stayed,’ said George – genuinely contrite.
‘But at our age it doesn’t matter,’ said Mary. ‘Our children would have stayed – I think. Certainly our teenage grandchildren would. And that’s what matters.’
Next morning, beside Florida Lake, I met an atypical Rhodie sorting out his fishing-tackle. He has been running a business in Krugersdorp since 1982 and was full of cheer. ‘One day,’ said he, ‘this will be a great country. Don’t listen to the pessimists. I’m surrounded by right-wingers, they’re my customers and my friends and I tell you I’m stunned by their climb-down. It’s like they’re fed up of posing as Boer War heroes. Two have asked well-heeled blacks to join them in business – as equal partners! I’m not kidding! OK, the headcase killers are still around. But every country has those, they’re not a political problem.’
Among blacks, the ‘infant’ simile is in frequent use. Returning by train from my Home Office expedition, I sat opposite a Xhosa pastor (Anglican) who asked with a twinkle, ‘You want to hear my favourite sermon? It’s like this. When your baby is born you feel very happy and have a big party. A baby is all good news. You don’t think about problems, how will you feed and clothe and educate it. But maybe twenty years later you are sad because it is not a good person, or not healthy. Now we are content, having our baby democracy. But we mustn’t forget we’re all its parents – everyone, every race. This new baby depends on us. Foreign investors won’t rear it. They want nothing but more money, they don’t care about us. So we must care for one another – am I right?’
This afternoon I saw a hard-faced white woman and her daughter, aged sixish, leaving a Florida shop, the child clutching two bars of chocolate. As Mom dealt with the car’s security system a well-dressed young black woman passed, followed by her son, also aged sixish. Suddenly the little girl turned, ran after them – and presented one bar of chocolate to the boy. Although both mothers looked astonished they didn’t communicate, didn’t acknowledge each other’s existence. The boy, wide-eyed, solemnly said, ‘Thank you.’ The little girl gave him a quick hug before running back to Mom. Walking on I felt I had witnessed Florida’s very own mini-miracle.
The Arm has passed its first serious cycling test; today’s sixty miles have caused only the mildest discomfort.
Our first stage, to Magaliesburg, was familiar. Lear and I followed this road seventeen months ago when South Africa was in a very different mood – the post-Hani tension high enough to be menacing. Pedalling across unexciting farmland – most pastures burned black to encourage growth – I reflected on euphoria as a phenomenon. Its impermanence does not have to mean its inspiration was illusory. It seems the elections interlude, that period when a healing calm came upon the country, really did lay the foundations for long-term reconciliation. Not instant reconciliation, an absurd goal though so popular among sentimentalists during the euphoric phase. (In fact, more than absurd – an oblique insult to those who have suffered so much for so long.) But there is no need to feel embarrassed, in retrospect, about the nation’s mass-excursion to Cloud Nine in April/May 1994.
The noon heat forced me to lie reading for two hours, in the shade of a wayside shed, and all day on this narrow road a constant stream of two-way Sunday traffic plagued me – families in long fast cars, a child or two plus a dog or two in the rear seats.
Near here, four curious white police officers stopped their van to offer me a lift – and, when that was declined, a long cooldrink from their ice-box. They commended GNU – ‘So far it’s an OK government’ – and proudly explained that they are community police. ‘That’s a new sort of work,’ said the captain. ‘We’re learning how to make everyone love us! Everyone except the criminals and tsotsies. It’s easier for us now, we’re not puzzled who’s a criminal and who’s an activist. Now they’ve got a black President, everyone who does bad is criminal.’
Rustenburg’s run-down motel is owned by a disagreeable Indian who overcharges (R100 minus breakfast) for a room in which the TV set works but the bedside lamp doesn’t. The adjacent store offers only gluey white bread, that revolting shocking-pink polony and sour milk – sour because the fridge broke down yesterday. The bar and restaurant are permanently closed.
On a grassy expanse, behind the long row of rooms, several rondavels are occupied by Afrikaner families. When I arrived, trios and quartets of large women with coarse features were sitting silently in white plastic chairs around a small swimming-pool reeking of chlorine. Meanwhile their husbands drank beer under a distant tree, their male offspring kicked a rugger ball and their female offspring bickered over the dressing of dolls. Then the women were stimulated to converse (muttered remarks, certainly rude) by the arrival of six Tswanas from Gaborone in a luxurious camper-van. Botswana’s rich are very rich and these youngsters displayed the latest gaudy Outdoor Life fashions and state-of-the-art music-making machines. Having unloaded a giant ice-box of booze they set up their braai, laughing and arguing and singing. This is how the new South Africa hits your average Vaalie. The invasion of hitherto ‘white’ space is the measure of change.
For The Arm’s sake I did thirty minutes’ side-stroking in that cramped, warm pool – not my idea of fun. Then a bouncy young Tswana woman asked, ‘D’you have some salt to spare?’ I gave her half my supply but when the tourists discovered that I am travelling by bicycle they tittered behind their beringed hands and thereafter ignored me.
Last night’s lodgings were not conducive to diary-writing.
Yesterday, as dawn broke, I was again circling that small smelly pool, watching the sky turn from dove-grey to the faintest pink, tinged with primrose and violet – then streaked with crimson. Already the air was warm. And this is only springtime…
Two hours later I had escaped from a hellish region of platinum mines and miners’ hostels, articulated trucks and strange mobile mining monsters forced me onto rough verges strewn with broken glass. Then an unsignposted road, tarred but unmarked on my map, took me into one of former Bophuthatswana’s many segments – at first a vastness of undulating, waterless, uninhabitable bushveld. Next came square miles covered by thousands of shacks and hundreds of mini-bungalows and scores of two-storey villas. As I was filling my water bottle at a windpump standpipe it became apparent that these ‘surplus people’ are used to being tourist-fodder.
‘You’ve come to see how blacks live?’ shouted one woman, standing outside her cacti-hedge.
I turned and hesitated; her tone was sardonic, yet not aggressive. Slowly I pushed Chris across the space between us, a littered patch of grey dust and sharp little stones. She laughed when we came face to face. ‘But you’re a madam! I thought you were a man!’
A dozen adults and a pack of begging children (‘Give money! Give sweets!’) were already converging on me. The woman extended her hand and said, ‘You call me Pleasure, my other name you couldn’t say or remember. From where do you come?’
‘From a country called Ireland, very small and far away.’
‘You have little money,’ observed Pleasure, eyeing Chris. ‘Why so little? Your country has bad droughts?’ Suddenly she raised a fist and yelled at the pestering children who, by now, were trying to pick my pockets. They fled, then reassembled in a fascinated huddle some thirty yards away.
A rheumaticky grey-haired elder stepped forward to shake my hand. ‘I know about Ireland, at the mission school we had Irish teachers. Ireland is a poor country, people eating only potatoes. Comes a drought and no potatoes they die.’
Pleasure looked at me sympathetically. ‘Put your bicycle inside,’ she directed, ‘or it will be stolen. Now I will give you tea.’
Cheap and cheerful furniture – the sort sold by the wayside in the bigger townships – overcrowded Pleasure’s three-roomed shack. She is a retired nurse, a shrewd self-confident woman who now does voluntary work in a primary-health-care centre funded by a Scandinavian NGO. ‘My children say it’s crazy to work for nothing. But why sit idle when I have knowledge to help? That is not the Lord’s plan!’
As friends and relatives arrived, a large tin of biscuits was taken from a cupboard top, thoroughly dusted and opened in my honour. Many invitations were issued and during the noon hours I drank herbal tea in four other shacks. Pleasure, bearing the biscuit tin, escorted me along rutted laneways and – despite her friends’ hospitality – sullenness marked the general attitude to the visitor. The traffic consisted of numerous water-carts drawn by two, three or four miniature donkeys with spindly legs and sore backs. Pleasure informed me that only 20 per cent of Bop’s rural population (which comprises 84 per cent of the total population) have access to what is officially described as ‘adequate sanitation’ – ‘adequate’ including pit-latrines.
We sat outside the shacks, our torsos in the eaves’ sparse shade, our legs exposed to the sun: a lesser evil than the intolerable heat within, under tin roofs.
Local expectations of the new South Africa are low. Recently the platinum mines laid off 1,500 workers – what can GNU do about that? Despairing faces surrounded me. We pity blacks who must endure a working life spent underground. Those blacks pity themselves when they cannot find such work.
The tales then told of Mangope’s misdeeds sounded like urban legends, but from other sources I know them to be true. Few of the billions of rands poured into his coffers by Pretoria benefited the ‘common people’. Bop was reputed to be the best-run and most prosperous Bantustan, yet its rulers’ corruption makes the mind reel. I am told Mangope and his twenty-three ministers collected luxury properties in London and Paris and fleets of expensive cars. Mangope himself had twenty-nine; now he has only two, a BMW and a Mercedes-Benz, both bullet-proof. Judging by my friends’ comments, bullet-proofing is an essential extra.
Posters of President Mandela – and other ANC election flotsam – decorated the walls of each shack but some doubts were expressed about the effects of ‘victory’ on the ANC.
One of my hosts, a redundant miner, asked, ‘What happens in their heads when they get big jobs in government?’
His wife said, ‘No – what happens in their hearts?’
Pleasure said, ‘Give them time. Now they’re all excited with their big houses and cars and salaries and forgetting us. But if they go on forgetting us they can’t keep power. They’ve given us democracy – right? So we have the real power. When enough people understand that, we’ll be OK.’
On the way back to Chris I asked, ‘Who owns these grand bungalows?’
Silence for moments. Then Pleasure said, ‘Good businessmen. Smart operators. Now they can move out and live with whites. We won’t miss them.’
As this Bop road is a cul-de-sac, I had no choice but to return to the nearest main road, struggling against a strong, hot headwind. Pleasure’s illusion – ‘we have the real power’ – saddens me. Possessing a violin is not the same thing as being able to play it.
At a junction, five non-English-speaking Tswanas conveyed that the nearest hotel was at Pilanesburg, a dorp unmarked on my map but if it had a hotel it must exist. As I sped across flat drab veld the low summits of the Pilanesberg drew closer on either side – then loomed directly ahead, beneath a swollen crimson sun. And still there was no dorp in sight. Then, rounding a corner, I was confronted by a series of gigantic illuminated roadside signs, forty feet high, their disco-type lights flashing on and off, synthetic colours glaring through the dusk. I stopped and stared. These signs were all to do with money – unimaginable amounts, nine-figure sums. I shuddered as the ghastly truth overwhelmed me: Pilanesburg’s hotel is SUN CITY. No dorp exists, only the four most luxurious hotels on the African continent. Because the Unholy Trinity forbade gambling, casino/hotels proliferated in the ‘homelands’. But none could compete with Bop’s ‘international playground’, created in 1979 by Sol Kerzner, the Midas son of penniless Russian-Jewish immigrants.
So, what to do? On my right a ten-foot steel-mesh fence bounded the Pilanesberg National Park with its recently imported populations of kudu, rhinoceros, elephant and leopards. On my left smoke rose from an invisible valley to which hundreds of factory workers were now being returned in a fleet of orange coaches speeding downhill from the direction of Mogwase. This was not camping territory, unless I could find a corner within the Midas kingdom.
Pedalling on between those illuminated mega-signs, I soon saw Sun City’s castellated entrance, a hyped-up version of a motorway toll gate. Armed security guards hovered and two pretty white girls peered at me from their IN and OUT booths. It is possible (even probable) that for them Chris was a first. Smiling frostily they left their booths, beckoned the guards and held an emergency meeting. A guard then requested my passport, studied it closely and made a telephone call. In his absence one girl asked, ‘You have money?’ ‘Of course,’ I replied loftily. ‘Lots of money.’ The guard returned and waved me on as a coach arrived from Bloemfontein.
For two miles I pushed Chris uphill, at first parallel to an elevated monorail that conveys day-trippers to the casinos from the acres-wide car park by the entrance. Beyond a crocodile-enclosure-cum-restaurant I turned right and climbed a steep mountain. Anxiously I looked for a camping corner but none appeared. Where the ground levelled out, ponds (‘picturesque’) were surrounded by tropical vegetation. Their visible residents – black swans and pink flamingoes – showed symptoms of disorientation: all about them was bright as day. Here stands the hideous Cascades Hotel (1984), a clone of all those other multi-storey hotels now defacing every continent.
Morbid curiosity propelled me into a long, low-ceilinged foyer where mobile multicoloured spotlights induced giddiness and every sort of gambling-machine lined the walls, whining and clattering and squeaking. Ladies in voluminous West African robes sat cross-legged on triangular purple sofas drinking champagne and eating potato-crisps out of cut-glass bowls, while their menfolk tried to get richer quickly. When I pushed Chris to Reception he left snakes of grey dust on the gleaming black marble floor.
Something odd was going on at Reception’s immense semi-circular counter. An elegant Afrikaner couple, both tall and slim and wielding calculators, were angrily arguing with the Tswana receptionists. Then a battered cardboard carton was drawn from beneath the counter and placed on top. It contained bundles of R50 notes; outside of a bank, I have never seen such an accumulation of cash. The Afrikaners, tense and narrow-eyed, followed the count while each bundle was checked and rechecked. No one even glanced at me as I stood nearby, leaning on Chris, streaming sweat after that climb. Finally the Afrikaners admitted defeat; they had not, after all, been cheated. But what was all that loot doing in a carton on the floor? When the couple had moved away, I asked. A woman receptionist giggled and explained: ‘Someone’s lost the key of our safe, but don’t tell!’
The cheapest room costs R460. Sympathetically the receptionist observed, ‘It’s much when you are poor on a bicycle.’
While investigating the outdoor possibilities I moved furtively, trying to keep in the shadows. On one side, the monorail on its high concrete pillars imitates a motorway flyover – would you pay £92 for a view of a flyover from your bedroom window? Skirting another car park of cosmic proportions – this one for coaches – I came at last upon a secluded, tree-surrounded grassy slope behind another of those ‘four most luxurious’ hotels. The gradient required me to lie against the tree to which Chris was chained, lest I might gradually slide onto the concrete path.
Soon after I had settled down, if you can call it that, a Tswana security guard appeared.
For a long moment he stood over me, saying nothing; I felt he didn’t believe I was real. Then he asked, ‘Why?’ I explained.
‘You are not afraid?’ marvelled the guard. When reassured on that score he said, ‘You like it this way, OK! Goodnight, lady. Have deep sleep!’
Sun City’s security system explains why the receptionist could afford to giggle about that lost key. Throughout the night an armed guard regularly toured the complex in a silently rolling little tin box (electrically powered?) and shone a dazzling lamp into every corner, including mine. But that was the least of my nocturnal worries. I needn’t have bothered locking Chris – it was impossible even to catnap.
Our tree chanced to belong to a peacock who came home to roost at about 9 p.m. and whose piercing resentment of the intruder was articulated, continuously, until dawn. ‘May-O! May-O! May-O!’ he screeched from amidst the foliage. ‘May-O! May-O! May-O!’
Then there were the mosquitoes, unaccustomed in this area of five-star hotels to easy pickings (or stabbings) and eager to make the most of me. And there were numerous coaches, arriving with blaring tapes and ill-tempered, argumentative passengers. Also there was a cat – one of the larger models: a leopard? – confined somewhere nearby. From midnight onwards his growls and snarls, added to ‘May-O!’, formed a contrapuntal jungle chorus. Many people regard Sun City as ‘an exotic experience’. And I suppose, in its way, it is.
This morning I decamped at 4.45, very hungry (only groundnuts for supper) and cross-eyed with exhaustion. While Chris was being unchained the peacock shat on my head; perhaps he felt better after that. At the exit a security guard wanted to search the panniers but I was in no mood to be trifled with; making a noise like that large cat I sped on my way. Inevitably, guilt followed; I am after all a suspicious character, in the Sun City context, and the poor fellow was only trying to do his duty.
I arrived at Northam in tar-melting heat. This dorplet is the commercial centre for workers in three nearby platinum mines and blacks thronged its two short streets. It is – or used to be – proud of its Afrikaner ‘purity’; there are no resident English-speakers. A single-track railway has to be crossed en route to the hotel, though not at any particular point; the mile-long goods trains chug to and fro at walking-speed.
Within the hotel compound eight whitewashed rondavels are shaded by fig trees, their leaves floating on a long-neglected mini-swimming-pool. The elderly Afrikaner at Reception was sympathetic when I described my Sun City night; she disapproves of gambling and was pleased that I had refused to subsidize the vice.
I shared a table in the homely little dining room with a youthful bank clerk, in Northam on his first posting. Usually Jan drives home after work to his parents’ farm near Thabazimbi, but today his third-hand car broke down. Cheerfully he remarked, ‘Now more whites will have old cars and more blacks Mercedes and BMWs. But I don’t mind. Our changes let us into the free market and that’s good for everyone. Last month rich blacks from Mmbatho bought the farm next ours but my folk don’t mind. Dad says they’re good neighbours, they go to church and have polite children.’
Conversation with Jan required slow speech and a restricted vocabulary. The standard of English teaching in most Afrikaner schools has ill-equipped his generation for the new South Africa where English will soon become the main language, however ‘equal’ in status the other ten official languages.
Mr Uys, a supermarket manager and chairman of the town council, invited me to lunch in his eyrie-office overlooking the supermarket’s length and breadth. Without pretending that he could ever regard blacks as equals, he is now prepared to work with them for the mutual benefit of both communities.
I warmed to Mr Uys (bred on a Free State farm) when he confided his main current worry. Northam’s whites are all set to oppose the admission of blacks to their school – built for 400 pupils but now down to 208, a measure of the rapidly declining white birth rate.
‘It’s the town parents who are angry,’ said Mr Uys. ‘The farmers are adjusting better. OK, so they hate the notion of an integrated school – that’s natural. But they’ve got the message – we’ve lost power and making trouble won’t help. The town parents – well, too many still listen to ET!’
(A pretty frog has just hopped into my room: russet flanks and legs, a pale grey back with four symmetrical black spots.)
This evening in the bar a mining engineer pulled a wad of leaflets from his pocket and handed me one – ‘Your souvenir from Northam!’ I read:
MANDELA IS MY SHEPHERD
Mandela is my Shepherd
I shall not work
He maketh me to lie on park benches
He leadeth me beside the still factories
He restores my faith in the Conservative Party
He guideth me in the path of unemployment
Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Soup Kitchen
I shall still be hungry
For I feel they are evil against me
They have anointed [sic] my income with tax
My expenses runneth over my salary
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me
All the days of the commie administration.
Poor Chris is doomed to be compared unfavourably with Lear – punctured only once between Kenya and Zimbabwe despite carrying me over some of Africa’s roughest tracks. At dawn yesterday the back tyre went flat a mile from Northam. But then, all of Chris cost £100 and each of Lear’s tyres cost £150.
The two Tswanas on petrol-station night duty spoke no English but were coping effortlessly with their office computer; the rapid spread of computer literacy makes me feel obsolescent. While one young man tended to Chris the other put on a rap tape and offered me chewing-gum which I gallantly masticated in the interests of good race relations. In this country no one thinks it odd that I can’t mend a puncture; ‘madams’ are expected to rely on the nearest ‘boy’.
For thirty-five miles a not-too-busy road descended gradually through grey-green thornbush veld. Then, near Thabazimbi, it seemed a shawl of sky had fallen on the nearby mountainsides: all their jacaranda trees are in full blue bloom. This little dorp exudes civic pride; richly glowing flower beds bisect the streets, an orderly jungle of tropical trees and shrubs shades the pedestrian shopping mall and each lavishly sprinkled lawn shines like an emerald – despite this being one of South Africa’s most parched regions.
Leaving Chris in my room I dandered around the dorp for a few hours and felt sorry for Thabazimbi’s whites – buttoned-up folk, at first uneasy with the uitlander. But it was not too difficult to unbutton them and then they exposed sheer bewilderment. Not fear of the swart gevaar – that was left behind on 27 April 1994 – but an incomprehension of Afrikanerdom’s apparently sudden collapse. And varying degrees of uneasiness when they looked ahead, based on a not entirely unfounded scepticism about GNU’s capacity to govern.
Today I discovered what The Arm does not like: fifty-five jolting miles on a severely corrugated dirt track. But the beauty of this route more than compensated for The Arm’s complaints.
I was on my way before sunrise, the dawn air cool, the dawn scents fragrant in a herbish way, the dawn chorus loud but staccato or harsh, not melodious like ours. Beyond Thabazimbi I turned off the R510 and soon low mountains surrounded me – steep, rocky, thinly forested – and for hours the landscape was dominated by a shapely, conical 6,000-footer slightly to the north. Sometimes the track was squeezed between high cliffs, creeper-draped. Sometimes the mountains drew back, leaving grazing-space for herds of glossy red-brown Afrikaner cattle who thrive on the matching red-brown bush as imported breeds do not. A few farm entrances appeared but no farmstead – or any other building. We met only two bakkies; both farmers were nonplussed when I declined their kind offers of a lift. As I brunched on a bridge, high above a wide, dry, rocky river-bed, hundreds of baboons entertained me – the babies playful, the adolescents daring, the mothers anxious, the fathers abusive. All day it remained overcast, the breeze cool: perfect cycling weather.
This hotel in the centre of Warmbad was bought only three weeks ago by Judith and Piet, a young Afrikaner couple (smallholders ruined by the ’92 drought) who have no notion how to run the place and no cash left to pay staff. Judith, aged 22, almost wept with relief when I explained that my flea-bag renders sheets superfluous. Her four children – she married at 17 – look like Botticelli angels but behave otherwise. This is being written by lamplight because the local authorities have pronounced the wiring unsafe and Piet must somehow raise a loan before rewiring.
Warmbad was once a quiet spa town. Then the developers moved in and around its natural hot spring created the Aventura Leisure Centre: many acres of prefab chalets and caravan parks, with their attendant horrors. When the turnstiles opened at 7 a.m. I paid R15 and the date was stamped in invisible ink on my right hand – allowing me leave and re-enter at will throughout the day. Walking to the main pool, I winced. From amplifiers on all the many tall lampstands pop music blared. To break me quickly and extract a false confession, that’s all the police would need.
Caravanners and chalet-dwellers were already disporting themselves in the strangely shaped hot pool – all inlets and coves, as it were, dominated by a central metal tower from which artificially heated water gushes. (This bizarre pool is far from the original hot spring.) Most people stood around the edges, shoulder-deep, splashing each other’s faces. For The Arm’s sake I plunged in and spent a penitential thirty minutes enduring a truly horrible experience – who wants to swim in hot water? Moving onto the allegedly cold pool, I found it lukewarm. An hour later I retreated to my room with the WM&G, reluctantly returning at noon to give The Arm more therapy.
Aventura’s black employees provided today’s silver lining. Enos, one of the garbage collectors, spent his lunch-break hour with me. We sat on a shaded bench overlooking one of the children’s pools. In 1990 Warmbad grudgingly desegregated its ‘public amenities’ and simultaneously Aventura raised the adult entrance fee from R5 to R15. As under-12s have to be admitted free, many more juvenile than adult blacks were visible on this hot Saturday afternoon. We watched several white mothers beckoning their young out of the water when blacks joined them.
‘They think we have diseases,’ said Enos, smiling indulgently, as at the error of a child too young to understand.
Enos earns R700 (£140) a month and his wife R600 as a maid in Pretoria. Out of that she must spend R120 on taxi fares; his monthly fares come to R60. He longs to buy a bicycle but can’t afford the R25 deposit. ‘We’ve three children to feed – three’s enough! After feeding comes education, let them wear old clothes but have enough school books. This new government is no good for our young people if they can’t get education.’
Looking at Enos – courteous, dignified, intelligent – I thought, ‘In no other country with South Africa’s resources would this man be a garbage collector.’ And then I thought, ‘For one hotel night I pay four times what he needs for a bicycle deposit.’
However, Enos and his wife are lucky – employed. An estimated 32 per cent of urban blacks live below what is known to sociologists as ‘the minimum living level’. In plain English, they are permanently hungry. And in rural areas the figure is approximately twice that.
Blessing replaced Enos. She washes floors in the Steak House and has six children, aged 8 to 18. ‘Morning and evening I thank God for He has given me good children, always to church on Sundays, no dagga, no fighting, no politics. They try to study well but that school is bad with stupid teachers.’ She wore a ZCC cap and badge. ‘How is it with blacks in your country? They have good schools?’
‘Ireland has no black communities, only a few students from Africa.’
‘No blacks? You have Coloureds and Indians? No? All white people? Aah – that is a funny country!’ She reflected for long moments. Then, ‘So that’s why you sit talking with us, not same like our white people talk to us? You have a curiosity about blacks?’
‘More than a curiosity. I like the peoples of Africa. I’ve been to other countries where there are few whites, as there are few blacks in Ireland.’
Blessing chuckled. ‘Aah – you are funny! Our white people say they like blacks only if we do things their way. Then we’re good blacks, we say, “Yes, baas,” they like us. Now we all have a black baas and they hate him!’
Left alone, I gazed at the whites (mostly obese) lounging under beach umbrellas above the children’s pool. An unlovely sight, many with lobster-red backs, their chief occupation applying lotions to each other. They had no aura of enjoyment (I recalled that day in the ‘guest house’ near Lydenburg) but presumably being herded together in this horrendous place gave them some satisfaction. Between blacks and whites I saw not one social exchange. Each behaved as though the other did not exist.
To restore my flagged spirits I bought a bottle of homemade ‘lemon wyn’ from a pathetic-looking Afrikaner woman of advanced years; like several other poorish whites she had set up her little stall – selling home produce both edible and wearable – outside Aventura’s entrance.
Pre-dawn exits from security-conscious hotels can be complicated but Warmbad’s hostelry has a broken side door. By 1 p.m. I had crossed seventy-five miles of drab, flat maize-farms interspersed with stretches of dusty, dehydrated bush. Our narrow, almost traffic-free road was entirely dorpless and only on arrival here did I remember that this is the Sabbath. Everywhere was closed – including, it seemed, the hotel bar.
At Reception I was sourly received by the owner’s elderly wife who has dyed black hair and a jutting nose like the prow of a ship. She also has a pure white bulldog with azure-blue eyes, by name Pretty. This creature is the centre of her universe and when I made much of him, and he in response licked my sweat-salty arms with slobbering relish, Mrs de Beer admitted that the bar, though not open, could be – was being – used by friends. Pretty, evidently suffering from salt-deficiency, showed me the way to this irreligious scene, then scrambled onto the counter via a stool and resumed licking my arms.
The friends were two jolly early-middle-aged couples from Germiston, still at the ‘kaffir’ stage and not worried by the new South Africa because they believe FW will win the ’99 elections after everyone has realized that Mandela remains a Commie at heart.
Mr de Beer – tall, fat and florid, with a haystack of white hair – drew my attention to a poster hanging beside a blonde almost-nude calendar woman posing on a beach. I read:
| The Americans have | We have | ||
| Bill Clinton | Mandela | ||
| Stevie Wonder | No Wonder | ||
| Bob Hope | No Hope | ||
| Johnny Cash | No Cash |
‘How’s that?’ grinned Mr de Beer. ‘Hey, man – that says it all!’
Today: more maize-farms in shallow valleys and cattle crowded near dams; they will be moved, after the rains, to the wide bare slopes across which our road switchbacked for fifty-five miles. From 9 a.m. onwards the heat was punishing and I needed four rest-stops.
Stoffberg consists of a grain-silo and a petrol-station-cum-general-store. There Nettie overheard me asking about accommodation and at once offered hospitality; the nearest hotel is in Belfast, twenty-five miles on. Nettie’s husband is descended from a famous Voortrekker leader whose son, in 1860, demarcated their farm in the customary Boer way: the new settler was entitled to as much land as he could ride around in a given time. For 134 years this land has been passed from father to son but now there are only three daughters, aged 16, 14 and 12. Comely lasses, who shyly welcomed me into their Landcruiser.
For fifteen miles a vividly red track took us up and up and ever up into a region where the new South Africa seemed unreal. The R—s’ nearest neighbours are ten miles away – ‘We can’t see their smoke’, the old Boer ideal. Here is a world apart, high and silent and very beautiful. Subtract motor vehicles and this could be 1894, yet the PWV is only an hour’s drive away. Not that the R—s ever go to Pretoria or Jo’burg; they venture as far as Middelburg only when compelled by some exceptional necessity.
We had turned onto a five-mile private track when the weather changed with theatrical abruptness. As the sun dropped behind a nearby range a gale-force wind swept across the maize-fields. Instead of a sunset glow, black clouds filled the sky, racing over and then obscuring the mountains. ‘Rain!’ exclaimed Nettie and the girls in unison, their faces radiant. All evening thunder rumbled and the gale raged coldly around the farmstead, depriving us of electricity, bringing down the party telephone line and frightening the dogs by sending zinc buckets rattling across the yard. But the rain came only an hour ago (at 10.30: I’m up late tonight) and was no more than a brief deluge.
The R—s’ hospitality is bountiful though a trifle awkward. Father (Jan) speaks no English, and Nettie and the girls only a little. However, Oupa (grandpa) saved the situation. He lives in a ‘dower-bungalow’ and, having been schooled in the Smuts era, speaks ‘the imperial language’ fluently and correctly – though with long pauses to recall forgotten words.
On 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) the R—s run more than 1,000 cattle, 5,000 sheep, hundreds of pigs and fowl, and a herd of wild horses descended from Voortrekker stock and cherished for sentimental reasons. Their thirty farmworkers, plus large extended families, live in round thatched huts with Ndebele designs on the exterior walls.
Those South Africans didn’t vote in the elections because – Oupa asserts – ‘they don’t want anything to change’. They are so cut off they probably don’t realize change is possible. And without help from the baas, how could they have got to the nearest polling station at Stoffberg? Suggestions that the farm-school should be used as a polling station – the arrangement in most areas – were rejected by Jan, who forbade both voter-education teams and ANC canvassers to set foot on the property.
Helen, the eldest daughter, invited me into her room to admire a litter of newborn kittens and then confided that she wants to leave her Belfast school now. Mother quite approves of this idea but father won’t hear of it; you don’t leave any endeavour unfinished – faint-heartedness didn’t get the Voortrekkers into the Stoffberg mountains. Poor Helen finds school boring and meaningless – apart from bookkeeping, a skill needed by farmers’ wives. She is radiantly in love with and unofficially engaged to the 22-year-old son and heir of their nearest neighbours, who must relish the prospect of uniting the R—s’ 10,000 hectares with their own 8,000. By our standards this romance seems almost unnaturally neat. Yet one can understand its flourishing in an isolated community where, even now, the young rarely challenge their traditional codes of discipline and decorum. This farm feels like a leftover from the pre-Grand Apartheid era, an authentic remnant of that Boer feudalism I encountered last year on a few Western Transvaal farms.
Jan’s plans for his farm’s future indicate that he feels unthreatened by the new South Africa; nothing has happened to alarm this little colony. Nettie remarked that President Mandela comes across on TV as ‘a good man’ and everyone concurred. The numerous potentially destabilizing problems facing GNU are of no concern (as yet) to people whose own prosperous world is peaceful and under control.
However, without generous state subsidies this world will be much less prosperous. In March 1993 Dr Japie Jacobs, then adviser to the Ministry of Finance, announced that the Land Bank’s government-backed selective lending policy, favouring white commercial farmers, was no longer serving any useful purpose. Two months later the Land Bank, glowing with political correctness, publicized its decision to grant loans to part-time farmers by way of helping blacks. But Oupa refused to see the significance of this move. ‘It’s not important,’ said he. ‘It’s only crazy political talk. Blacks can’t run farms.’
The dawn sky was overcast as I loaded Chris outside Stoffberg’s store (his lodging house) while the girls boarded their school bus. Half an hour later another gale rose, forcing me to walk most of the mainly uphill miles to Belfast. It is hard to credit that yesterday I suffered from heat exhaustion. Why did no one warn me that in springtime the highveld can be Siberian? All morning visibility was restricted to a few hundred yards and at 1 a.m. a freezing cloud sat firmly on Belfast. Reputedly this is the coldest place in the Transvaal and all the blacks wore thick blankets, woolly caps and long scarves. Clutching a bottle of cane-spirit, I retired to bed in a refrigerated room, supplementing the skimpy bedding with my flea-bag. It took me three hours to thaw.
This hotel’s design is perverse. Around the corner from the main entrance, on another street, stand its jerry-built bedrooms to which the gale finds easy access through ill-fitting windows opposite ill-fitting doors leading directly onto the pavement. Poor value for R90, especially as my bath is non-functioning – an inconvenience soon to be rectified, the manager claimed, but the depth of dust on its enamel belies him.
Venturing out to the bar at dusk, I hurried through an opaque cloud of ice particles. At least the bar was warm – as was my welcome. The only other customer, a lean elderly English-speaker from Natal, had passed me on the road and was congratulatory. ‘Well done! I never thought you’d make it – and at your age, too, if I may say so! What’s your poison?’
Having been poisoning myself all afternoon with cane-spirit, I chose more of the same. Mr Rowland looked shocked. ‘But that’s a shebeen drink! You going a bit native?’
Soon he was telling me that during the previous weekend he had visited a township for the first time in all his sixty years. Driving his thatcher to fetch a load of grass, he was astounded to see ‘the rotten shack’ where dwells this well-dressed, well-mannered, well-spoken Zulu. ‘You know, he’s such a decent respectable fellow I’d pictured him living in some neat little bungalow. That shack, I couldn’t believe it! No running water, no electricity – but his wife and kids clean and well turned out! How do they do it? All those shacks and squatter camps you see on TV – I’d got it wrong. Took it that’s where gangsters and agitators live – and lazy scroungers.’ Mr Rowland beckoned the barman, ordered another round, then continued. ‘To talk truth, I’d not have dared set foot in a township before the elections. Not even in my youth when things were quiet. Hey, it’s strange to look back! In those days we didn’t think about blacks. They were off the scene, except when we needed them. Not that I’m complaining, as long as we have Mandela I’m happy. Even after him the ANC have some good chaps, clever fellows we never heard of before. And they’ve some bad chaps, but no worse than the old guard – we’re used to corruption in high places. It can’t get worse and it could get better.’ He looked at his watch and finished his whisky. ‘Must go, I won’t stay in this stable. Carolina’s hotel is better.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘last year I stayed there. Give my regards to the fat corgi and the tortoiseshell cat.’
Mr Rowland’s township shock helps to explain white resentment of the blacks’ failure to pay income tax. Seeing so many ‘respectable well-dressed’ blacks around the place, they cannot conceive of their living in untaxable poverty.
Discovering that the hotel restaurant has been closed for two years, I rushed out to buy food. But all the shops and takeaways were closed and the foggy streets deserted, save for a youth with a bloody gashed skull lying unconscious in a gutter. I reported his life-threatening situation to SAPS, then nut-munched.
Today the weather is even worse – and what a place to be weather-bound! Last year I paused here on a sunny morning to breakfast after my gruelling Dullstroom night. Now Belfast is in the new province of Eastern Transvaal, but what else is new hereabouts? One can’t expect many tangible changes, five months after the elections. However, my fear is that five years hence there still won’t be many, from the majority’s point of view. Particularly worrying is the World Bank’s meddling. Its goal is to create a small but prosperous class of black commercial farmers on freehold land, a comparatively rich peasantry whose interests will coincide with the white farmers’ – leaving the rural masses in Square One. This policy has already increased the misery of millions throughout the Third World. And the countries of southern Africa have been hardest hit. To see the damage done by World Bank/IMF manipulations, GNU need not look far.
All day a cloudless sky but the icy wind blew hard as I covered sixty hillyish miles, mostly through commercial forestry, every slope in sight wearing a dark green uniform.
Approaching Carolina I was startled to see a new bright sign, high and wide, depicting the flag of the old Transvaal (Kruger’s) Republic and proclaiming in red-and-blue lettering: CAROLINA VOLKSTAAT. A feeble gesture of defiance; whatever the design defects of the new South Africa, it is secure enough for Volkstaat nonsense to be discounted.
Halfway along Voortrekker Street, a tall slender young Muslim woman – her black gown ankle-length, her black headscarf theologically correct – called a greeting from a shop entrance and offered a ‘cooldrink’. When first we met, in April ’93, Nazeem had been a member of the DP. After that party’s election obliteration she joined the ANC: ‘My husband didn’t approve, he thought we should remain loyal to the DP, try to revive it – he’s still mistrustful of all those black ministers! But though I dress like this I keep my independence of mind. And it helps people like me, knowing our new regime stands up for women’s rights.’
Nazeem does indeed think independently. ‘Too many in our community are scared of blacks, the Nats always tried to make us feel just privileged enough to give us something to defend from the swart gevaar. It’s time to resist that conditioning, otherwise Tutu’s rainbow nation won’t work. Because we have been a bit privileged we should give a lead. It’s true most blacks dislike us even more than they dislike whites. They see whites having some sort of “natural” right to be superior and richer, but when we do well they’re jealous. It’s also true some of us exploit and cheat them, especially small traders and travelling hawkers. I don’t want to deny our own faults, now everyone must look at the whole picture. We all have a chance to start again, that’s the President’s message. And he’s right. Shame he can’t talk more directly to the young. Those black kids adore him but laugh at his old-fashioned way of talking. Only Hani could have got the Mandela message across to kids with no schooling. I’m glad you called your new bike Chris!’
After the conversational aridity of the past fortnight I needed the refreshment provided by an educated Indian.
This country’s cartographers baffle me: why give Warburton the status of a town? No such place exists. Not even a petrol station or grain-silo marks the spot, only a minimalist store opposite a large wayside notice saying WARBURTON. Usually groups of blacks hang around rural stores, but not here. The young Rhodie woman sitting behind the counter, knitting a tiny garment, looked momentarily scared when I arrived. Then, collecting herself, she tentatively suggested my seeking food and shelter from her aunt and uncle, to be found in a log-cabin in the Mundi forestry workers’ compound a few miles further on.
The Johnsons – effusively kind – have amply fed and are cosily sheltering me. In 1980 Don gave up managing a lowveld cattle ranch in ‘Rhodesia’; as someone ‘prominent’ in the Bush War his life was threatened. The whole family – husband, wife, granny, niece – have been Born Again to the point of semi-hysteria. It was obligatory to pray, all tightly holding hands, not only before and after supper but before and after watching TV, that the Lord might guide our reactions to what we saw and heard. By great good fortune what we did see and hear was an excellent BBC documentary about Ruth and Seretse Khama. It took me back to my adolescence, when that long-drawn-out drama first drew my attention to the race problems of southern Africa.
Around Marble Hall one enters a region where the new South Africa is suffering from post-natal stress. This has to do with the farmworkers’ rejection of feudalism; human-rights lawyers describe labour tenants’ living conditions as ‘the closest we have to slavery in South Africa’. A labour tenant provides free labour in exchange for the right to cultivate a small patch of land; the R—s’ thirty tenants have ten hectares between them. In the 1960s the Nats outlawed this system, not because they had anything against slave labour per se but because they foresaw a ‘blackening of the countryside’, given the size of each tenant’s extended family. (The R—s’ ‘village’ has a population of 227, including infants and octogenarians.) Over 1 million blacks were then banished to the ‘Bantustans’. But in this south-eastern corner of the Transvaal, and in much of Natal, farmers resisted the outrageous notion of paying wages to blacks and dodged the new law by giving each tenant a nominal R10 per month. Now those hardliners are up against a less accommodating government. A proposed Bill (part of a scheme designed to give the rural poor 30 per cent of South Africa’s arable land within five years) would entitle quarter of a million labour tenants to live on white farms, without fear of eviction, and to purchase land (with state subsidies) from farmers who refuse to pay a fair wage. This has prompted many farmers to evict tenants now. Families are being compelled, by the use of physical force, to leave their homes and growing crops at a few hours’ notice. In retaliation, the evicted are burning maize- and canefields, stealing or hamstringing cattle and cutting fences. That last ploy, if stock are involved, endangers both animals and passing motorists.
From the invisible Warburton a little-used road undulates through more miles of forestry, then between gentle slopes of yellowed grassland, desperate for rain. All day the Kingdom of Swaziland lay on my left: chunky blue mountains in the distance, brown foothills nearby. Not far from Piet Retief I came upon a stretch of dismantled fencing, presumably cut last night.
Where the de-fencing ended, at a farm entrance, five infuriated Boers stood beside three parked bakkies, loudly arguing. I dismounted and feigned bewildered concern: ‘What happened the fence?’
The five stared as though I had dropped out of a UFO. Four were youngish, the fifth a patriarchal type complete with white beard – a mighty man, no less than six foot four and broad in proportion. (They breed them like that around here.) Suddenly he laughed and extended a hand. ‘I know about you, Jan R—told me. You’re that crazy woman from overseas. Hey man! Those kaffirs will get you! Here and now they’re running wild – what you reckon happened my fence? I’d a visit from Mandela’s Commie friends. Gone rabid they have, think now they can intimidate us, grab our land – this government is telling them to do it. Yesterday they burned a milking-shed, on the next farm. Day before they lamed ten cows. But we know where to find them – they want another war, they can have it.’ He pointed to the gateway. ‘Up there, you’ll find my wife. Tell her I say you’re to drink coffee.’
A two-mile dusty track ended at a 1970s bungalow. On the way I paused to walk around the original four-roomed homestead: of mud and stone, thatched, now used as a fertilizer store. Later, my host reminisced about his youth in that typical Boer home, without electricity or running water – never mind wall-to-wall carpeting and microwave ovens. He spoke nostalgically of those more robust days when men weren’t afraid to wash in cold water or women to slaughter sheep.
My arrival did not surprise Mrs Van der Walt; Jan, it transpired, is her nephew.
‘Tonight you stay here,’ she said. ‘It’s good for us to talk with overseas people. I have lived seventy-two years but you will be my first overseas guest.’
Mrs Van der Walt is small and round and rosy-cheeked and disagrees with her husband (though never in his presence) about almost everything. ‘My thinking is more like the younger people’s. The change has happened. War-talk is no good now. We must trust Derek Hanekom [the Minister for Land Affairs]. Even if he’s ANC, he’s also an Afrikaner farmer. He promises we’ll be paid when blacks get some of our land and he wouldn’t break a promise. It’s true we don’t need so much land. I say that to Jan but he won’t listen. Is it easier for women to see things the way they are? Jan doesn’t live now, he’s lost in the past. You saw for yourself. Up there on that mountain they think they can go on like that for ever – but they can’t.’
Over supper Mrs Van der Walt made no reference to the de-fencing but her husband did. ‘They destroy my property because I look ahead. The more tenants you have the more land you’ll lose. I only got rid of five families and that’s crazy – I’m too soft, should’ve got rid of ten. The Commies are organizing all this. In July we’d 7,000 or more marching in Piet Retief, handing demands to that Phosa fella.’
Mr Mathews Phosa is the Eastern Transvaal’s provincial premier. I already knew about those demands: an end to evictions, the immediate return of all the labour tenants’ impounded livestock, the rebuilding of homes demolished by farmers or police.
The Van der Walts could produce only one daughter. Her second son, Willem, now aged 24, is their live-in heir. After supper he and I talked while Oupa and three Rottweilers went kaffir-hunting and Ouma loaded the dishwasher. Willem’s father is a wealthy Natalian (English-speaking) cane-farmer and his parents had to elope, so strongly did Oupa disapprove of the alliance. ‘It was a secret marriage,’ chuckled Willem, ‘though my Dad’s family is so rich. Oupa would have preferred his daughter to marry a poor Afrikaner, which is good – that’s having principles. Now he’s out with his gun and if he finds blacks making more trouble he’ll shoot them dead. But that’s OK, blacks understand violence. They don’t understand my father’s sly way of exploiting them without violence. I went to an English school near Maritzburg but I’m happier here – I feel Afrikaner.’
This labour-tenant trouble is not new; it has been recurring, at irregular intervals, for a century. What’s new is blacks having the law on their side, the most positive aspect of the reborn South Africa – at present causing turbulence hereabouts, yet allowing people to see ‘liberation’ functioning, not merely being proclaimed from on high.
Piet Retief is as expected only more so: a dull, tight-lipped and now uneasy dorp. Unusually, the township is visible from afar, covering a few high hills. For two hours I wandered up and down its very steep, dusty, stony tracks beside stinking open drains. The burgeoning middle class have built some fine new bungalows – even a few two-storey ‘villas’ – and many of these have lavatory bowls propped outside the front door, awaiting the arrival of piped water, as promised by GNU. But the majority occupy mud-brick shacks or flimsy hovels, the latter known as ‘informal housing’ in bureaucratese. Several outwardly imposing schools dwarf all other buildings. The abundance of litter must be deeply demoralizing – or do township residents accept it, as city dwellers everywhere accept air pollution?
My tour caused general amazement but communication was limited. Most local blacks speak only Afrikaans as their ‘white’ language – or, if they come from Swaziland, as thousands do, minimal English which they seem reluctant to use. However, the barrier between us was not mainly linguistic. This corner of the Eastern Transvaal and the adjacent north of Natal are so notoriously right-wing that no white stranger could reasonably expect to be made welcome in a township.
Back on Voortrekker Street, I saw yet another example of that gratuitous violence towards children so disturbingly common among Afrikaners. Outside a pharmacy a small boy and an even smaller girl were sitting on a step, licking ice-creams. When the boy dropped his cone they began to squabble and a florid thick-set young man – presumably father – rushed from the shop, angrily shouting. He struck both simultaneously and, as they screamed with pain, picked them up by an arm and flung them through the doorway. We hear a lot about child abuse in Europe but only in South Africa have I repeatedly seen such examples. And the public nature of these incidents points to uncontrolled aggression being tolerated behaviour, associated with no feelings of guilt or shame.
In Jo’burg last month a Cape Afrikaner educational psychologist assured me that the many horror stories related about South African schools are not exaggerated. Every male state-school pupil and many females (of all colours) retain memories of regular and severe beatings for trivial misdemeanours – or simply for failing to achieve academically. This institutionalized brutality matched the militaristic flavour of the old regime and something similar was to be found in Ireland when the authoritarian Roman Catholic Church controlled most schools.
On the rugby field, foul play – especially the sort that draws blood – always gratifies a large section of a South African crowd. This afternoon the Springboks were playing Argentina and I withdrew to the hotel’s empty lounge to watch. The men gathered in the bar were too awful, their testosterone seriously over-stimulated by the occasion. Among Afrikaners, the role of rugger is akin to that of hurling and Gaelic football in Ireland; it has been co-opted as the athletic expression of a people intent on asserting their nationalistic distinctiveness. Another South African irony – that the Afrikaners should have adopted, as one of their most cherished tribal totems, a game invented by ‘the imperialists’.