Paycheck embezzlement in the Transkei health department was so entrenched the new government has had to tender an outside contractor to manage the payroll. Phantom teachers at phantom schools were paid very real salaries. The Transkei government defrauded itself in a bizarre scam where it charged itself illegally high interest through its own bank.
Mark Gevisser (1996)
The little-used Kokstad–Palmiet track continues south over the mountains to join the N2 near Mount Ayliff. By dawn I was on the edge of the Niemandsland plateau with mountains close by on three sides – at first darkly bulky against a colourless sky, then all their gullies and rock-walls and irregular crests defined and made to glow as the light strengthened. I paused, leaning on Chris, to watch. A long belt of saffron cloud suddenly flushed pink; moments later half the sky was aflame and the western escarpments reflected that redness and in the deep valley below a rosy effulgence replaced shadows.
Very slowly I freewheeled down, twice stopping to rest my wrists and bird-watch. High dove-grey cloud defended me from the sun, plants and herbs unknown gave off strange pungent scents. This was a long, long descent through rugged bushy mountains, the terrain too precipitous for habitation, cultivation or even grazing. Sweat began to flow as the cloud dispersed and on emerging into a narrow populated valley I thought again of James Baxter. Here he was killed.
This village extends for miles. Hundreds of round thatched huts, and scores of tin-roofed shacks, overlook a rain-deprived river trickling between huge smooth boulders. The women and girls fetching this filthy water in plastic basins and buckets seemed half-scared when I greeted them. Each umzi (group of huts) stands in an ample garden. On long level strips of riverside land pairs of young men were ploughing – one leaning on the clumsy home-made wooden plough, the other cracking a long whip and, at each turning point, chanting stylized commands to teams of two or four magnificent oxen. Comparing their way of life to the turmoil of the townships – predatory SDUS, frustrated Young Lions, disillusioned MKs – I thought, ‘How lucky they are!’
Several older men were encouraging one or two oxen to drag odd wheelless carts – wide platforms of wood – along the bumpy track. They, too, looked somewhat apprehensive when greeted. But various friendly youths, fascinated by the mama on the bike, tried to engage me in conversation. As their mangled English was incomprehensible we settled for sign-language and to try to clarify things I unfolded my map. They, however, had never before seen a map, and were illiterate, so clarification foundered.
A reassuring calm pervades this self-sufficient village in its tucked-away valley. One senses it has retained a purposefulness unknown – impossible – in those rural slums dependent on the earnings of migrant menfolk.
At the valley’s end the track swings right to ascend the arid flanks of rock-strewn mountains. Below me – farther and farther below – the wattle-lined river wound through a ravine where something lay dead or dying; vultures were gathering from all directions, gliding over the crests of the hills, their wing-movements not discernible – which gave them a macabre sort of dignity.
I stopped to eat a Fay-provided brunch below a solitary slim summit of naked grey rock – aloof and severe, towering above wide slopes offering meagre grazing to many moving dots: sheep and goats. Then a young man appeared, climbing up the nearby hillside followed by two hunting-dogs. Seeing me, he froze. Then cautiously he advanced, half-smiling – but lost his nerve, sprinted across the track and disappeared around a corner. Here was an ironic reversal of roles: in South Africa white women are supposed to be afraid of black men.
Beyond the pass the road undulated for miles between steep scrubby ridges, then coiled down and down, the temperature rising as we lost height. Arriving abruptly on the N2 motorway I got a double voltage of culture-shock – incessant speeding traffic and littered verges resembling an extended municipal rubbish tip. The noon heat was menacing and the garbage-stink revolting over the next few miles to the edge of Mount Ayliff.
In the small café of a large petrol station I drank two litres of amasi in ten minutes. Dissolute-looking youths and ragged little boys gathered around the doorway to stare at me unsmilingly. On the far side of this squalid little town, well away from the N2, stands an L-shaped colonial-era hotel. In its securely fenced garden blossom-laden shrubs seem to spout from the smooth green lawn like fountains of colour – red, purple, orange. Two sagging single beds furnish my room which became an intolerable furnace during the afternoon; its tin roof is also the ceiling.
In the grotty supermarket a surly security officer swooped on me to remove my plastic bag, holding precious objects never left in hotel rooms. I stifled my protest, realizing I was about to be racist – a white expecting not to be treated as a potential shoplifter. Having emptied the bag I handed it over. The officer scowled. ‘Think I’m a thief? Think all blacks steal?’ I looked at him helplessly, too heat-addled to come up with a soothing reply. He turned away, making some remark in Xhosa that caused great merriment among the checkout queue.
Remembering Mount Fletcher, I had been eager to revisit the Transkei. But Mount Ayliff is different. In the hotel bar – carpeted with cigarette ends, bottle tops, crisp packets – the atmosphere was not welcoming. At 3 p.m. a dozen or so scruffy men and women, already half-drunk, greeted me by demanding beers all round. When I claimed to be short of cash one elderly man lurched to the counter and appropriated my half-full bottle of Castle. Then a younger man moved to the stool beside me. ‘Let’s share!’ said he, and took a swig from my glass. Retrieving it, I withdrew to the stoep, the preserve of the élite, where well-dressed youngish men, some with stylish briefcases between their feet, occupied a long bench. When I sat on the end my reception was cool. However, several spoke English – ungrammatical but graphic – and soon I was making progress. Two MK returnees from Uganda, very angry young men, were not at all interested in ‘amalgamation’ with the SANDF. If things don’t quickly change, they foretold, the growling Young Lions will show their claws. ‘People says justice comes but we can’t see it. Where has they hid it? We know! It’s hid for them and their white friends! We listen about “economic empowerment” for blacks. For what blacks? For them who make deals with white friends!’ And so on …
As we talked, one of those instant-gales sprang up. Under a black sky I hastened to my room as the storm broke with a ground-shaking crash of thunder and a fusillade of hail – sharp chunks of ice – on the rusty tin roof. Then, for forty minutes, torrential rain poured through countless holes onto both beds.
Surprisingly, dinner was excellent: perfectly cooked rice, tender roast chicken cleverly herbed, runner beans, grated raw carrot, and an onion and tomato salad. I had the large, shabby, high-ceilinged dining room to myself until the waitress said, ‘You are lonely’ and pulled out a chair and sat beside me.
This handsome young woman ran away from a violent husband in Umtata. ‘He has a good job with government and we lived nicely in a big bungalow. But after four years of it I couldn’t take any more of the drinking and beating. He wouldn’t let me go so I gave the kids to my mother – he didn’t care about them. Then I left in the night and found work here. Now I’ve a good man, a policeman but kind. And next June’ – she beamed – ‘I’ll have another baby.’ Her expression hardened when I brought up the new South Africa. ‘Nothing has changed,’ she said. ‘We wait for change, after we’ll praise.’
I packed by candlelight; the hotel generator is switched off at 11 p.m. Because of the Transkei’s topography I must endure motorway traffic all the way to Umtata and, despite a dramatically mountainous landscape, today’s thirty miles were penitential. Where the gradients permitted, formless settlements covered every slope and valley floor. By 7 a.m. it was hot, by 8 much too hot, by 9 dangerously hot yet again. Then a long freewheel took me down to the Keneka river, a mere dribble in a wide bed. Ahead the road could be seen soaring upwards, for miles, around heat-radiating mountains.
Dismounting to drink, I noticed an unusual scene on the far side of the road. A white woman had just stopped a black motorist and was negotiating a lift for a well-dressed Coloured girl. When the car had driven on the woman noticed me and beckoned. ‘Where are you going?’ she shouted. ‘It’s too hot, be careful! Would you like tea? Come, you need to rest.’
I crossed the road and Cinder introduced herself: ‘I was christened Cinderella but that’s too long.’ A plump effervescent young woman, she was avidly curious. ‘Tell me your story, come and have tea with my friend Liz.’
As Cinder led me along a dusty track to a tumbledown bungalow I realized that she is in fact Coloured, though more fair-skinned than I am. The new black crinkly hair around her ears belied the rest – straightened, dyed auburn, pulled tightly back into a ponytail. Moreover, her purely European features are contradicted by distinctively African buttocks – also to be observed among certain Afrikaner women whose ancestors mated democratically. (The longer one spends in South Africa the more sensitive one becomes to these physiological nuances; not a desirable sensitivity, but inevitable.) Sadly, Cinder likes to present herself as white: there was much talk about her Irish mother, and growing up on a big farm, and her wonderful father who was related to the Duke of Kent … Well, I know nothing of the Dukes of Kent and I daresay it’s possible that one contributed to the Cape’s gene pool.
Behind Liz’s bungalow, once a white farmer’s home, decrepit outbuildings are now used by a black dealer in second-hand (or fifth-hand) cars. He and his family live in two-thirds of the dwelling; Liz, her daughter and two fatherless grandchildren occupy the rest. A fawn hunting-dog bitch, about to pup, lay panting in the shade of the stoep and languidly wagged a welcome as we approached. Liz breeds hunting-dogs, selling the pups at three months for R150 each. Later, she proudly showed me two nursing bitches in an outhouse, each with a litter of nine. These dogs are still used to hunt buck – for meat – in remote mountain areas; a pack of six or seven can bring down and kill their prey without assistance. Care is taken to keep the breed pure and recently there has been talk of applying to Crufts for recognition.
Liz is Cape Coloured and proud of it. Olive-skinned, with a shaggy head of African hair, she has a keen intelligence, a sardonic sense of humour and (like many educated Coloureds) the sort of English accent white English-speakers strive for but rarely attain. Why is such a woman living in poverty in the back of beyond? Although uninhibited when trawling for political or religious views, I can never bring myself to ask the more personal questions.
As we drank tea at a rickety table in the small kitchen a baby was being bathed in a stone sink and two cauldrons of dog food were simmering on the gas stove – lucky dogs, their lunch smelled delicious.
‘If you breed you must feed,’ said Liz. ‘You wouldn’t credit how much suckling bitches eat. I never keep accounts, my daughter says if I did I’d find I make nothing. But it’s my hobby, I love those bitches and their pups, I dread the selling days … But they all go to people who value them. And blacks treat dogs well, even in poor families they get fair shares.’
Soon Cinder looked at her watch and jumped up; the shoe shop she manages in Mount Frere should already have been opened. Giving me a spontaneous hug she asked, ‘Can you stay with us tonight? Please! My husband works in Kokstad, coming home only weekends. But I’ll ring him and he’ll be back this evening to meet you. He enjoys foreigners!’
While recycling our tea bags Liz remarked, ‘I’m sorry for Cinder, she can’t be happy with herself. Often I feel apartheid harmed some of us more than the blacks. In the old days her husband passed for white. She didn’t – because of her hair. And no way would their son have. He’s a gorgeous little boy, you’ll meet him this evening, takes after an uncle in features though not quite so dark-skinned. I’m sorry for him, too. How will he ever sort out his identity, brought up by two pretend-white parents?’
I went on my way with refilled water bottles and my dripping bathing-togs (this was Liz’s idea) tied around my head, protecting my neck. I shall never forget those six miles – mostly walking, though that incline should have been cycleable. Within fifteen minutes the sodden togs were bone-dry.
I was gulping amasi in the shoe shop when news came of a ghastly crash in Kokstad. Six 10-year-old pupils, on their way home from a school outing, were killed this morning when their minibus collided with a truck.
‘It’s those drunkards!’ exclaimed Cinder. ‘Even early morning they’re drunk, all night they’re drinking with their mates in the cabs, next day they’re not fit to wheel a barrow!’
‘But we don’t yet know,’ I protested, ‘which vehicle caused the accident.’
‘I know!’ said Cinder. ‘A drunken black caused it – a nice white teacher drove that minibus, a real gentleman, I’ve met him.’
Then another violent storm temporarily reduced the humidity. Within moments the steep street had become a river and when ragged blacks scuttled into the shop Cinder said, ‘Watch them! Move around so they can see you’re watching – if anything’s stolen, I pay! A few years ago I wouldn’t have them inside my door, now they’ve no respect for anyone.’
After the storm I explored Mount Frere, not a time-consuming exercise. These ex-‘homeland’ towns have a war-zone air of places abruptly abandoned to ‘aliens’; thirty years ago they must have looked just like the Eastern Cape’s neat, moribund dorps. Their deterioration provides much-used ammunition for whites intent on shooting down the new South Africa. Few acknowledge that the bizarre and tragic circumstances surrounding ‘relocation’ were not conducive to an orderly transfer of administrative power. Mount Frere’s war-zone flavour is strengthened by the blackened shell of a fine town hall, in the Cape Dutch style; it was torched by the ANC (some say the PAC) during the last phase of the Struggle.
Mount Frere is built high on the side of a mountain, overlooking an array of lower hills. Many shops are ‘old colonial’, some arcaded. Recent developments include a bank, a car showroom, a glitzy-shoddy shopping-mall, all owned by a local black tycoon. He drives a Jaguar and his wife drives a Mercedes and their only child, a daughter, is married to a burgeoning Durban tycoon and drives a BMW. These curiously precise motor-breed details were provided by Cinder, who extolled this man’s kindness and friendliness. But several blacks with whom I talked condemned him as ‘no better than the whites, he does nothing for his own people, only exploits’.
Socially Mount Frere is a great improvement on Mount Ayliff. Apart from a few groups of young men who regarded me with open antagonism, most people were cheerful and chatty – though their good humour was not linked to optimism about the future. One high-school teacher forcefully expressed what others indicated more obliquely. ‘We’re all fucked up,’ said he. ‘And we’ll be that way for years and years. Let me tell you something, lady – our new provincial government doesn’t want us! They’d give us away – to the Free State, to Natal, to anyone fool enough to take us. You think Lebowa is bad, or Venda or Bop? Hey man – sure they’re bad but not like us! You know what is anarchy? OK, so you know what we’ve got. At school I tell the kids, “It’s over to you, you must make a new Transkei, we can’t, we’re all fucked up, if we’re not corrupt we’re intimidated.” I want those kids to get politically aware but not so’s to think politics is all about yourself getting rich quick. Now that’s all they know about politics. Voter education, it’s not enough. Why won’t the ANC send good trainers to our schools to teach kids about having a conscience? I’m a religious man, I tell kids the Lord will help them make a new Transkei if they have new attitudes. Right? I go to no church, but inside myself I trust the Lord Jesus. If you live here you gotta trust in something that’s someplace else or you’d give up. Maybe you think all Xhosas believe in Madiba to save us? Wrong! We love him but we don’t believe he’ll solve our problems. Sure, some do – but not me, I’m not stupid, right?’
Anarchy indeed! By now everything in this former ‘homeland’ has collapsed: health care, education, the police service, water supplies, garbage collection, the postal service, local administration at every level. And the latest Human Sciences Research Council report reckons 85 per cent of households in the Transkei and the Ciskei are living in poverty.
Five years ago Cinder and Grant moved to Sophiatown, some two miles away, where the ‘kind’ tycoon has jerry-built a dozen bungalows and two-storey villas. Their neighbours, occupying villas, are doctors from Ghana and Kenya attached to the government hospital. (‘Very stand-offish,’ commented Cinder, ‘like our Indians.’) A dirt road leads to Sophiatown, winding between maize-fields and patches of brown grassland where small boys herd goats and cattle and several fine horses belonging to the Kenyan.
The Ficks’ five-roomed bungalow, brightly furnished from the tycoon’s emporium, has a fitted bathroom and two flush lavatories but as yet nothing with which to flush them. Outside the back door stands a circular rain-dependent water tank, ten feet high; when it runs dry Detta must carry buckets from a muddy dam more than two miles away. Detta, the maid, is one of a family of twelve from a Pietermaritzburg township; she left school after Standard Six but speaks adequate English. I winced when Cinder, showing me around, made a point of inspecting her room in her presence: ‘You have to watch them, see they sweep under the bed and so on.’ These houses, built by a black in the 1980s, follow the traditional white plan and the servants’ quarters are in outhouses: two tiny rooms with concrete floors.
To supplement their wages the Ficks keep hens – over 200, huddled in a dark, cramped smelly shack – and sell pullets and eggs door-to-door. A black youth, the ‘poultry manager’, was loudly reprimanded for some minor misdemeanour; it seems Cinder fancies this is the way to impress me – by treating servants as she doubtless imagines all white women treat them.
Soon Grant arrived: a jovial vulgarian, unsure how to relate to me and veering throughout the evening from impertinence to subservience. Conversation was impeded by pop music blaring from an enormous tape-deck; simultaneously, the TV was on full volume for Victor’s entertainment. Victor, the ‘gorgeous’ 3-year-old, is half-spoiled, half-bullied – as are two adolescent hunting-dogs. Cherry and Sharon complete the household – Cinder’s orphaned nieces, aged 18 and 20.
Grant – fleshy and florid, with deep-set grey-green eyes – sat combing his blond curls over the dining table. Then, clutching a tumbler of brandy and Coke (half and half) he turned to me. ‘Those blacks, they only look civilized on the surface. They wanted to govern – OK, now they’ve the chance but those new MPs won’t work at it. While they’re paid like Oppenheimer! If I don’t get to the depot on time every morning I’m fired, like that!’ He punched his left palm with his right fist. ‘Why should they be able to choose to work or not?’ He leaned forward and helped himself to two of my mini-cigars, putting one behind an ear.
Then Sharon brought a large tin basin of hot water to the table for hand-washing before eating. Cherry followed with a grubby towel. Both girls are charming, good-looking and obviously Coloured. Cherry – heavily pregnant – spent most of the evening studying articles on baby-care in tattered women’s magazines. She has been deserted by the father (‘He was only a casual boyfriend’) but this is no source of tension. The baby will be joyfully welcomed – ‘Though it would be easier if I could find a job,’ said Cherry. Neither sister can find work; this morning Sharon was the hitch-hiker going to Kokstad for an interview with a supermarket manager. She returned disappointed. ‘These days only blacks get jobs,’ said Cinder sourly.
As I set off in starless darkness every Sophiatown dog went berserk and the figures of several nervous householders appeared on stoeps, shining torches in our direction. I enjoyed the long pre-traffic climb out of Mount Frere, the air cool, the vast depths of the valley on my left only revealed as the road curved away from it at sunrise. The Transkei is superbly unpredictable. That climb led not to a pass but to the first of a series of high, broad ridges – all overpopulated. Probably many of the children seen here have been left with granny by young single mothers struggling for survival in urban townships where caring for a baby would be impossible. Not that these rural children have much to look forward to; some thin little faces are old – hunger-lined – some kwashiorkor bellies are grossly swollen.
In recent years the incidence of rural child-abuse has increased ominously – a very ‘unAfrican’ crime but normal devotion to children cannot always withstand the multiple unnatural stresses of ‘homeland’ life. These communities have neither land to sustain them physically nor the structures of traditional family life to sustain them spiritually and emotionally. In theory, the Bantustans were to have been self-supporting, the women farming and rearing the next generation of miners (born in September: December is the holiday month) while the men earned cash. But now three-quarters of the workforce are jobless; since 1982, the number employed in gold or coal mines has gone down by 76 per cent to about 2,500.
The Transkei’s estimated population is 3.5 million – 94 per cent classified as ‘rural’, without access to water that would be considered ‘safe’ in white areas or adequate sanitation. This morning my nose confirmed that last lack. For millennia, in villages, people have been devising hygienic alternatives to a sewerage system but in overcrowded rural slums this is not feasible.
A long descent to a dry river-bed – then again up and up – then a long descent to a petrol station at a junction where I stopped for amasi. Here friendly truck drivers sympathized with mama’s poverty and offered lifts. After one more brief climb the final twenty miles were downhill: the longest continuous freewheel in my fifty-three years of cycling. Between Mount Frere and here I saw not one green leaf or blade of green grass – as if the Transkei didn’t have troubles enough, without a drought. When I reached Umtata soon after noon the temperature was 38°C in the shade.
The Transkei’s ‘capital’ is a large straggling town, its commercial centre replete with the usual range of prestige skyscrapers. There is a baffling plethora of hotels: the Imperial, the Royal, the Savoy, the Protea, the Transkei, the Holiday Inn and the stately 1890s Grosvenor, which I had been advised is now the cheapest. Long and two-storeyed, painted mustard-yellow with white lacy wrought-iron balconies, it faces the brash expanse of a new Total petrol station.
I was approaching the Grosvenor when distant anger became audible. Then two young men raced towards me, pursued by a dozen others who brought their quarry to the ground almost beside me. As they crowded around the young men I hastily dragged Chris onto the pavement. The pair screamed in terror, their screams curiously like women’s cries. Some of the nearby pedestrians hurried away, while groups of excited youths sprinted to the scene and urged on the attackers – one armed with a long metal rod, three wielding sjamboks. When a police van appeared, slowly driving down the centre of Owen Street, I felt a huge relief. But the two officers simply glanced at the fracas, accelerated and were gone. The screaming ceased before the attackers stood back, sweat streaming down their faces. I braced myself to see two corpses but the victims had survived, were evidently meant to survive. They lay writhing with pain, pouring blood. One of the sjambok-wielders, noticing me, stepped closer and grinned and said, ‘See how we do it in Umtata? Here we don’t like car-thieves!’ As he spoke, four of the youths who had been revelling in the violence went to pick up the victims, stopped a passing taxi and hauled them aboard. Then a red Toyota bakkie pulled up and the smiling driver leaned out to address the attackers in Xhosa. Their spokesman turned to me and shouted, ‘Lady, you listening? This guy thanks us – right? He don’t want to lose his bakkie!’
As I moved on, a stout well-dressed woman trotted to overtake me. Breathlessly she said, ‘Madam, excuse me – this is bad, what you have seen. This is kangaroo court punishment. Those boys – I saw it – they only fiddled with the bakkie doors. Sort of aimless – laughing, not looking like car-thieves, looking silly. This gives you a bad impression of Umtata. And you’re right. We have only disorder here, no respect for laws, no justice, much fear. I want to say to you not every person is bad here. Many of us want change, hope for it, pray for it.’ She paused, glanced up at me, asked, ‘Why are you here with this bicycle?’ When I explained she looked blank, then silently shook hands and crossed the street to enter a café.
My R50 ground-floor room – sans TV, radio and telephone, amenities I rarely use and resent paying for – is very small and very hot. The Grosvenor now has several long-term inmates, young foreign NGO workers helping (or not, as the case may be) to pull the Transkei out of its Slough of Despond. The Americans are falsely hearty with their black colleagues; the Germans show symptoms of frayed nerves (‘These people, they don’t know about time!’); the Scandinavians seem bemused but resolutely tolerant; the Dutch wear rose-tinted spectacles (they have only recently arrived) and are extremely polite to everyone. I don’t envy this contingent; Umtata’s population is notoriously ambiguous in its attitude to whites. And foreign whites, intent on ‘straightening things out’, must be anathema to the élite who for so long have had everything their own way. Not to mention their dependent followers, the 90,000 civil servants now arguing that GNU’s ‘no job losses’ guarantee to the old South Africa’s Afrikaner employees should also apply to them.
Umtata has several large banks, as befits a ‘capital’ where so many billions of tax-payers’ rands have been swilling around for eighteen years. I went as usual to the First National Bank – said to be Barclays’ associate company in the days when British customers were sensitive about apartheid. The tennis-court-sized floor was thronged, the numerous long queues resembling an army awaiting marching orders. It took me two hours and twenty minutes to complete a transaction that takes four or five minutes in any little dorp bank. Here the transaction is subdivided and I had to stand in three separate queues, always starting from the back. In one section, at this the busiest time of day, six out of ten tellers were absent: in the other section three out of four. Those on duty were farcically incompetent, vaguely messing about with photocopiers and computers and customers’ bank-books and ID-books and chequebooks, repeatedly getting something wrong and having to do it all over again. Corruption may not be entirely to blame for those missing billions referred to in a recent report by the Auditor General. I surveyed the silent, docile crowd with astonishment; they seemed to regard this outrageous situation as normal.
‘Where are all the other tellers?’ I asked the pinstriped young man in front of me.
He looked puzzled, then said, ‘They must take it in turns to rest.’
I felt myself becoming acidly Eurocentric. ‘To rest? But these are their working hours!’
The young man gestured dismissively. ‘Here is Umtata, we have other working habits.’ And pointedly he turned away.
A middle-aged woman in the adjacent queue touched my arm and half-whispered, ‘You are right, we should complain. But here we have given up complaining so nothing is properly conducted. And you are thinking we seem like fools – am I right?’
I smiled. ‘Wrong! I am thinking you seem like victims!’
In the Protea Hotel bar I paid R8 instead of R3 for a Castle: my fee, as it were, for the privilege of observing Umtata’s élite in relaxation mode. The bar sported a novel floor-covering widely advertised in South Africa: ‘Genuine Oriental Carpets, Guaranteed Made in Britain.’ A cut-glass chandelier glittered above animated groups sitting in low red-plush armchairs around glass-topped tables with gilded bow legs. The women’s clothes showed taste as well as money; they had purple lips and nails, loud laughs, gold earrings and bracelets, fingers laden with bulky zirconia rings. The men wore dark suits, flamboyant ties, pointed shoes and Rolex watches; some played compulsively with lap-top computers. Everyone was drinking ‘shorts’ and nibbling cocktail snacks. Sitting alone at the bar, I briefly considered trying to ingratiate myself with this ruling class. But I am improperly attired, my arrival had drawn glances of incredulous disdain.
I was about to seek a more congenial area of operations when Nkane appeared, a ‘smart-casual’ young man who shyly responded to my smile and sat on the next stool but one. He is a 25-year-old UCT student (chemical engineering) from the nearby village of Centuri, now on vacation and finding his domestic scene hard to take after the bright lights of Cape Town. ‘That’s why I come in here, life feels too poor in the village – and today too hot, with so much dust!’
Two beers later Nkane allowed himself to grieve over his close friend, a Fort Hare University student, who died last week. He was an abakhweta, which had to be translated for me. It means a Xhosa undergoing initiation to manhood through circumcision, following a period of isolation – with fellow-initiates – in the bush. Nkane’s friend was one of four local abakhweta who have died within the past six weeks.
‘It’s part of our confusion now,’ said Nkane. ‘We are educated not to drink dirty water but the abakhweta, during their alone time, have only very dirty water to drink. My friend, he tried not to drink and in this terrible heat got kidney failure and died. The same with the others. It’s not possible to have your new ideas about health and our old ideas. If my friend drank dirty water he would be here with me today. Maybe he would have some small problem with his stomach but he would be alive. In my village everyone drinks dirty water. There is no other water. But this year, because of the drought, the only water for the abakhweta was very muddy – with a smell. So the well-educated wouldn’t drink it. All who died were university students. The uneducated drank and were safe.’
Nkane is alarmingly thin and his dry little cough, he admitted, keeps him awake ‘half the night’. Last term he had pneumonia twice. Yes, he knows all about AIDS and since the elections condoms have been distributed free at UCT. But, ‘You forget all you know when you’re young and meet a beautiful girl. That’s natural. AIDS education can’t make people behave against nature. And I never heard of AIDS seven, eight years ago when I needed many girls.’
Nkane knew that I knew he was dying.
This evening’s meal in the Grosvenor restaurant was singularly repulsive. Very tough, dry roast ‘lamb’, grey greasy potatoes – the grease indicating a thwarted intention to roast them – and slimy red and green heaps that proved on investigation to be carrots and beans boiled to destruction. It is unprecedented for me to walk away from a meal costing good money but I did walk away from this, feeling queasy. Was the heat partly responsible? One slow-motion ceiling-fan in a large dining room does nothing to help when the temperature is nearing 40°C. Even now, at 9.30 p.m., it remains so hot that I must write with a towel under my forearm to protect the paper.
At 5 a.m. it was walkabout time. I roused the nightwatchman, sleeping on a black horsehair couch in Reception with his woolly cap pulled over his face. Blearily he released me into the humid dawn air, then woke up some more and called after me, ‘Madam, take care! We have bad men everywhere!’
I didn’t have to walk far; the Grosvenor forms part of old Umtata. In 1877 the Anglicans established a mission station here and five years later the town was founded. In the 1990s the Anglican cathedral, dark grey and stern, seems to have strayed far from home. The nearby town hall (1907) speaks of confounded imperial certainties and the formally laid out Town Hall Gardens, now smothered in litter, have fine wrought-iron gates, a memorial to Major Sir Henry G. Elliot, Chief Magistrate from 1877 to 1902. Elliot was a benevolent despot so appreciated by the ‘natives’ that they collected over £1,000 – then a vast sum – and presented it to him on his retirement. With it he endowed ‘native’ wards in Umtata’s hospital, which provided a much better service then than now.
Around the next corner stands Umtata’s architectural pièce de résistance, the Bunga Hall, its classical façade designed to remind the ‘natives’ – or so legend has it – that democracy came from Greece. Once it served as a pretend parliament where the territory’s twenty-seven British magistrates met annually with the Xhosa chiefs to discuss regional affairs for sixteen days. The chiefs’ collective opinions/advice/requests were then conveyed by the Minister for Native Affairs to the Parliament in Cape Town. Soon the Bunga Hall may be used again by the chiefs (the amakhosi, now known as ‘Traditional Leaders’) if they get their way in negotiations with GNU. The Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa, founded in the late 1980s, backed by Winnie Mandela) is agitating for the establishment of Houses of Traditional Leaders in six of the nine provinces.
In June ’93 I discussed with an ANC Big Man the awkward fact that the chiefs’ claims and the claims of a democracy are irreconcilable. No amount of constitutional juggling, however deft, can give equal legitimacy to their standards, methods and attitudes and a Western-style Bill of Rights. I suggested then, ‘The new government will be calling the bluff of the white right-wingers – why not let it be seen that you are dealing even-handedly with anti-democratic elements on both sides?’
‘Speaking personally,’ said the Big Man, ‘I completely agree with you. But …’
The intervening eighteen months have taught me a lot about those ‘buts’. They are legion. For instance, if your Bill of Rights guarantees ‘freedom of religion’, how can you reduce chiefs to the status of ordinary citizens when their role, in the lives of millions, is intertwined with certain African religious beliefs that have survived – by courtesy of a super-fudge – alongside conversion to various brands of Christianity? In theory it should be possible to respect the amakhosi’s ceremonial religious role while depriving them of all political power. But not in practice, not in a context where those two exercises of power are seen as indivisible.
Most senior ANC leaders and activists have little time for the amakhosi. They want to get on with the job of transforming their country into a modern state untrammelled by witchcraft, sexism and too much fuss about the ancestors. But they know, though it is not PC to say so aloud, that they are in a minority. Urbanized township dwellers may have shed their loyalty to individual chiefs yet much respect remains for old customs – and much fear of the consequences of disregarding them. In the new squatter camps migrants from ex-homeland’ areas on the whole remain loyal to their chiefs, a more comprehensible source of authority than MPs elected to a puzzling parliament. Recently the amakhosi have provoked unrest in several rural districts and, through Contralesa, have formally threatened to spread that unrest should the need, as they perceive it, arise. Chief Buthelezi asserts, ‘There can be no peace in Africa unless tribes are allowed to uphold their traditions and culture.’ A plausible enough argument: elsewhere in Africa I have met many who favour a return to customary law – having suffered so much, since independence, from the failure of imported systems. But this country doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of Africa.
By way of controlling ‘native territories’, the British saw to it that the chiefs and their headmen lieutenants prospered. Confident of white support, many chiefs then bullied their followers unmercifully – which abuse of power has to some extent weakened their present position. But not enough to make it safe for GNU to defy them. The Constitution therefore protects chiefly stipends, an ad hoc manoeuvre that has left impoverished provincial governments committed to paying out many millions annually – to Zulu chiefs (not members of Contralesa) as well as the rest. (The five Transkei Paramount Chiefs will each receive £58,000 p.a.) In return, these amakhosi hold an occasional imbizo, a jolly get-together with their followers during which an ox is slaughtered and eaten and much beer imbibed. Work of any description is not on the imbizo agenda and villagers pay for the party. In reaction to this constitutional concession, new MPs may be heard indignantly complaining that they earn ‘only’ R154,000 per annum (£30,800). Some also argue that such generosity to the amakhosi is sending the wrong message to all South Africa’s citizens: ‘If you’ve got a problem, buy your way out.’
Last evening I rang my four Umtata contacts: an ANC community leader, a school principal, a woman lawyer and Mr Ngozwana – described to me by our mutual friend as ‘a returnee with a difference!’ The community leader was in jail and the teacher in hospital but Mrs Mngomyana, the lawyer, invited me to her home this evening and Mr Ngozwana came to the Grosvenor this morning.
A remarkable man, Mr Ngozwana: tall and lean and grey-haired, wearing a vividly patterned shirt à la Madiba and green cotton slacks and leather sandals. In 1992 he returned from a twenty-six-year exile in Moscow, Lusaka, London. We settled down in the pleasant wood-panelled lounge, furnished with worn leather armchairs and long stinkwood coffee tables. The Grosvenor is barless; drinks are brought to guests (only) by slow-moving Xhosa waitresses. Mr Ngozwana ordered tea – ‘In Moscow I became an alcoholic, too much tension and vodka, a bad combination. In Lusaka I became a teetotaller.’ We had the lounge to ourselves and it is a TV-free zone. I like the Grosvenor, despite its chef.
Mr Ngozwana, I already knew, is a scion of one of the Transkei’s chiefly houses but exile has modified his traditional allegiances. He believes any attempt to power-share at local level with the amakhosi must lead to disaster.
Since the elections, this province has been plagued by rivalry between SANCO, Contralesa and the Eastern Cape government. (‘The battle is for power and money – nothing original!’) In July a bloody confrontation followed the taking over by SANCO members of the amakhosi office near Herschel. Soon after, another squad of SANCO thugs kidnapped a headman in the Nqamakwe district and interrogated him (‘you know that usually means “tortured”?’) for twelve hours. His wife and children were then intimidated out of the area. In September Chief Zamodla Ndamase was badly beaten up and a fortnight ago two headmen shot dead two SANCO members, (SANCO, formed during the ‘make South Africa ungovernable’ campaign, has in some areas become a grievous embarrassment to the ANC.)
‘After returning I lived in Katlehong for a few months,’ said Mr Ngozwana. ‘I like to find things out for myself, not just reading reports. But this South Africa of ’92, down on the ground – it was not the country I left. We have paid a terrible price for success. I don’t want to exaggerate, most of our people remain sound. But the baddies – yoh-yoh, they are very bad! And powerful. People who can kill their neighbours casually, like swatting a fly, are very powerful. They don’t have to be many to dominate. Some say our biggest problem is education. I disagree. Our biggest problem is lawlessness. A democracy can’t work without respectworthy laws and a population that knows the State will enforce them. Now we do have respectworthy laws but no matching police force.’ He paused before adding, ‘I’m just an observer in my old age, resting in my own place and watching. In exile I studied and worked for liberation. But I’m not sure I was working for this.’ (He studied comparative religion at London University – ‘I thought that might be useful for understanding my own country. Here religious beliefs are very relevant, in all sorts of indirect ways.’)
Mr Ngozwana peered into his empty teapot, said ‘Excuse me’ and went to find a waitress. Ten minutes later he returned. ‘They were in the basement, playing with their boyfriends. It’s only a harmless aspect of lawlessness.’ Then he asked rhetorically, ‘Have I been too negative? Actually by nature I’m positive. I believe our new South Africa can work. You know, I like the English language – its nuances. Can work doesn’t mean will work. It can work if we don’t try to dodge the challenges. The Struggle wasn’t only about overthrowing apartheid. We were struggling for something, we had ideals. Now we must avoid making do with a modification of white supremacy. We’ve taken on a sick, psychotic society – my wife says I was an idiot to stay in Katlehong. She says it unbalanced me and she could be right. Seeing the necklacing and so many other cruelties … Smelling the roasting bodies – alive bodies roasting, necklacing wasn’t a quick death. And children enjoying the spectacle, thinking it was fun … Then I did almost lose faith in our future, watching children laughing and clapping and dancing around the victims. Was I overreacting? Could you over react to such a thing?’
In response I told Mr Ngozwana about the English badger-baiting cult – men enjoying the reality and later on gathering to watch, over and over again, videos of that same sickening scene. And I told him about a new ‘fashion’ among some depraved Irish children; light a bonfire, find a cat with a litter, throw the kittens into the flames and watch the mother burn to death as she tries to rescue her young. Granted, badgers and cats are not human beings. But, given the townships’ political/emotional ambience, those badger-baiters and cat-roasters would surely regard a necklacing as entertainment.
Mr Ngozwana shuddered. ‘That’s even sicker – coming from within themselves, nothing to do with ambience.’
We fell silent for a little, then talked of cheerful things. Like the considerable achievements of Kader Asmal as Minister for Water and Forestry and of Derek Hanekom as Minister for Land Affairs. And the fact that certain cabinet ministers, who wish to remain anonymous, donate all their salaries to self-help township projects. ‘This secretiveness I can understand and admire,’ said Mr Ngozwana, ‘but it’s a mistake. Our people need to know some of their leaders boycott the gravy train.’
At sunset I crossed the narrow, winding Mthatha river, brown and sluggish but lined with pale green gracefully drooping willows – their greenness a refreshment, here and now. Cascades of litter pour down the high banks and bright wild flowers peep out from under a cloak of tins, cartons, takeaway boxes and plastic bags and bottles.
Uphill from the Mthatha, some of Umtata’s middle class (the less wealthy) live in colonial bungalows, almost all well maintained. I found Somikazi Mngomyana playing with her 4-year-old son on a vine-draped stoep. Somikazi is a young widow – ‘Three years ago my husband was killed in mysterious circumstances.’ She lives with Nona, her unmarried doctor sister, and Freddy, a rather dour businessman brother whose wife speaks no English and therefore didn’t join us. Sitting on the lamplit stoep, surrounded by hot darkness, we could see Umtata’s street lights twinkling dimly between the shrubs – until suddenly they went out. ‘Here we don’t even pretend to be First World,’ observed Freddy.
Nona’s attractive oval face – dainty, almost childlike under a high mass of hair – looked haggard with exhaustion. She admitted to being ‘stressed out’ and Somikazi explained, ‘The Transkei’s doctor–people ratio is 1 to 30,000.’
‘That wouldn’t matter,’ said Nona, ‘if we could function. We can’t do anything in our hospital. For a week past we’ve had no supplies because we owe suppliers more than quarter of a million rands. As we speak, people are dying from neglect in intensive care. We’ve no working phones or X-ray machines, no ambulances. We’ve patients with typhoid, meningitis, hepatitis-B all stuffed into the same ward and the ceiling falling down on their beds. Our nurses, paid half-nothing, often use their own money on aspirin to try to save babies with fevers. Three years ago the Blood Transfusion Service gave up taking donations here – so much was HIV-positive. But still the Education Department wouldn’t help us set up AIDS education in schools.’
‘But now,’ said Freddy, ‘the holiday season is coming. We’ll have thousands driving through, whites who might have an accident in the Transkei. So the army is being sent to our hospitals with reliable drugs and trained staff – “emergency relief” they call it. And they want us to believe this is a new South Africa! Who are they trying to kid?’
Dinner was served by a gargantuan maid who had to turn sideways to get through the kitchen doorway. She was very excited to meet me because her taxi-driver son had noticed the cycling mama near Mount Ayliff. ‘Hey, it is too dangerous! May our loving Lord Jesus protect you!’
As we helped ourselves to mashed potatoes (‘because you’re Irish’) and mildly curried beef, Nona admitted – ‘To be honest, I’m on the edge of quitting this place.’
‘Me too,’ said Somikazi. ‘And let them get on with their mob law and stock theft and police-force mutinies.’
Since 1990 stock theft has been a well-organized trade here, as in parts of the Transvaal. Certain wealthy chiefs, their names known to all, employ armed gangs to steal villagers’ cattle. These are bought by whites who truck them to the PWV for sale to hostel dwellers. A percentage of the profits go to the police who terrorize any villagers rash enough to seek justice through official channels. Hence the popular support for mob justice. Last year more than one hundred men, mostly stock-theft suspects, were sentenced to death by ‘people’s courts’. ‘And this year we’ve had even more executions,’ said Somikazi.
Nona, I noticed, was eating little. Suddenly she turned to me and asked, ‘Are we being too impatient? Our first democratic government, it doesn’t have a magic wand.’
‘But maybe,’ I said, ‘it needs to feel the pressure of an impatient public. Maybe South Africa’s blacks have been too patient for too long.’
Today’s weather forecast included a health warning so I took off at dawn, by taxi, for Madiba’s birthplace – Qunu, twenty miles to the south. In the overcrowded kombi many heads turned as we passed Umtata’s latest development, opened three days ago. Shell Ultra City is conspicuous from afar on the flat fawn veld, its garish lettering and consumerist glitter seeming to taunt the locals’ destitution.
Soon the University of Transkei appeared below road-level – another visual horror, perpetrated in 1976, and another academic disaster. But the threadbare young man beside me pointed it out with pride.
As we crossed undulating grassless pasture bony donkeys laden with jerry-cans and women carrying buckets on their heads were walking slowly home in knee-high clouds of dust. The young man smiled at me and said, ‘Next year we will have piped water, clean and coming from taps!’
Qunu is no longer a traditional village but one of a series of straggling settlements. The driver dropped me off opposite Madiba’s private retirement home, a red-brick bungalow built in 1992, standing alone on the veld. The casual passer-by wouldn’t give it a second glance; it resembles the homes of countless middle-income whites. Nothing indicates its owner’s identity – until, as you approach, two policemen emerge from a gateway in the eight-foot brick wall. Agreeable policemen, pleased to have this break in the monotony of guarding an empty house – ‘Sometimes Madiba comes here to rest but he has little resting in his life.’ Proudly they told me the Eastern Cape government has plans to put Qunu on the tourist map ‘as part of an “In the Footsteps of the President” initiative’. Then they allowed me to wander around the paved forecourt and little garden where a few adolescent shrubs struggle against the drought. If I wanted to take photographs, that would be R5 per shot …
Strolling across the veld, I was moved to think of Nelson Rolihlala Mandela, who could have built his home in any of South Africa’s famed beauty spots, wanting to end where he began – his only neighbours the ‘surplus’ people of Qunu.
When I turned towards the nearest settlement, one of the policemen pursued me. ‘Not to walk here!’ he ordered. ‘Is not safe, please go home.’ He escorted me to the roadside and said, ‘We wait, I get you safe taxi.’
Moments later, as I signalled an approaching kombi, he caught my hand and lowered it. ‘This one not good, wait more, be patient.’
‘Why are you so worried?’ I asked.
‘Too much crime,’ came the succinct reply. But I intuited something more; traces of pre-election-type tension linger around Umtata. A year ago five APLA activists were shot dead here when the SADF raided their local base and Whitey is rarely smiled upon.
Back in Umtata, even the locals were wilting; by noon the temperature was 42°C and the streets were deserted. Near the taxi terminus I noticed an inscription in black letters two feet high on a white wall: KILL A WHITE A DAY VIVA PAC APLA. Someone had tried to erase ‘WHITE’ but it remained legible. This wall happens to be the gable-end of a handsome old building in which the Tourist Board has its office. Presenting myself there, I suggested that it might be a good idea, in the interests of tourism, thoroughly to obliterate this whole exhortation. Point not taken.
The four youngish women staffing this office seemed to regard me as a tiresome distraction from whatever they do when unbothered by tourists – which is 99 per cent of the time. Under pressure one woman grumpily rummaged through a drawer to find a glossy brochure promoting the Wild Coast, one of South Africa’s most famous natural glories – soon to be despoiled by a motorway, if the provincial government’s dreams come true. Then I was more or less dismissed – the door held open for me to leave.
Across the road I fared even worse in the two-roomed cobwebby Transkei National Museum. The curator exuded hostility and sat smoking in his office with his feet on the desk ignoring all my questions as I viewed waxwork figures displaying tribal beadwork and headdresses. Recently this museum has been hastily rearranged to emphasize, through newspaper cuttings and photographs, the historic Eastern Cape/ANC links. Sepia studio photographs showed the earliest generation of academically successful Xhosa dressed as Victorian gentlemen, precisely placed between classical pillars – their demeanour grave and elderly, even when captions recorded their youth. Several clergymen – standing or sitting stiffly, looking awed by their own achievement – reverently rested long-fingered hands on large bibles.
The Xhosa were the first tribe to be baptized and mission-educated in bulk. When Madiba was born in 1918 the only way forward, for intelligent ambitious young blacks, was along the road of white thinking. This led to the 1955 Freedom Charter, a document inspired by Western values imbibed at the mission schools and universities. The ANC-led Struggle was never black versus white. It was a crusade to establish a European-style democracy.
In the Department of Health, visibly overstaffed, my queries about the Transkei’s six AIDS-prevention organizations provoked angry rudeness. (Do these organizations really exist? I find it hard to believe in them.) In the Department of Agriculture sullen silences followed my queries about the scandal-stained Qamata and Ncora Irrigation Schemes, supposedly ‘valuable community-development projects’. I then withdrew to the National Library of the Transkei; most of its stock was donated in times past by homebound colonial officials. The five dozy pseudo-librarians stared at me as though I were a spectre and during my hours of browsing nobody else entered the building. However, in 1994 one must make allowances; these sinecure jobs are doomed and the Transkei’s (un)civil servants know it. One can’t fairly blame them, as individuals, for their present idle lifestyle. They, too, were ‘surplus people’, left with no choice but to become parasites on a puppet government.
At 4 a.m. many blanketed bodies lay on Umtata’s pavements. Some were hawkers, their boxed goods piled between themselves and the wall; daily taxi fares home would devour their profits. Others were beggars, of whom an uncommon number, mostly male, congregate around Umtata. Last evening an SACP leader told me why. During the NUM-led strikes of the 1980s, Transkeians were renowned for their militancy. After the 1987 strike the AAC referred to them contemptuously as ‘Mandela’s children’ and leaned on the Chamber of Mines to reduce recruitment from here and hire more Zulus. (Zulu peasants, conditioned to obey chiefs meekly, are much less politically aware than Xhosas.) As some 90 per cent of employed Transkeians were on contract to the mines, their ‘homeland’ rulers panicked and ran an expensive anti-union propaganda campaign. Also delegations hastened from Umtata to Jo’burg to beg the Chamber not to limit recruitment. But limited it was and now ‘Mandela’s children’ are suffering the consequences.
Today was cloudy and cool, with quite heavy traffic on my main-ish road to the Free State. For fifty miles I was never out of sight of shacks. From one, a ragged old man hurried to the road as I pedalled slowly uphill and offered me R1.50 – ‘Mama, buy some food, you are hungry!’ Small herds of dejected-looking cattle pulled at the short wiry brown grass; one could see little puffs of dust as they uprooted clumps. Every roadside bus-shelter has been vandalized, roofs and seats removed. And each bears an inscription in red or green letters three feet high: APLA KILLS WHITES or HIT THEM HARD APLA or BEST SETTLER DEAD SETTLER. How quickly some things have changed! According to yesterday’s paper, the PAC/APLA leadership ‘sees no further need for violence’ and has launched a campaign to recruit white members.
At noon I crossed a red rocky mountain, then sped down and around green forested slopes marking a new ‘climate zone’. Once Engcobo was a busy commercial and administrative centre, the seat of a magistrate, the social centre for rich white farmers. Now it is forlorn: the colonnaded shops unpainted, the main street potholed, the gutters rubbish-blocked, the Royal Hotel closed, the jobless conspicuous – scores of young people hanging about, apathetic and malnourished, wearing those often incongruous second-hand garments imported from the First World and sold throughout Africa. But here, unusually, many older women wear what is known as ‘traditional dress’ – in fact a missionary-imposed fashion, long skirts and high-collared bodices. The only genuinely traditional item is a piled headdress, like a small blanket worn turban-wise.
On the edge of the town, down a rough track, the Ulundi Motel looks onto a small field where cattle and ponies graze. In lieu of electricity and plumbing a candle in a beer-bottle lights my room and a ewer and basin are provided – prettily painted with bouquets of violets and made in Nottingham, England. Sometimes I wish inanimate objects could tell their stories. The outdoor Ladies and Gents have WCs where the W stands ready in a bucket – always immediately refilled by a bouncy young maid who giggles whenever she sees me.
Having locked Chris to my bed I wandered through dense indigenous forest, lively with unfamiliar birdlife, then crossed a stream and climbed for miles to fertile uplands – maize-fields and well-watered pastures. Three formerly white homesteads now house several families each – judging by the juvenile population – and are in a sad state of disrepair. Where the track petered out I was on the edge of a deep ravine, its vegetation lush, with a range of sheer green-cloaked mountains beyond. ‘Relocation’ also punished whites; the farmers moved from here must have felt like Adam and Eve turned out of Paradise.
Engcobo’s colonial suburbs, shaded by ‘settler trees’ – magnificent limes and horse-chestnuts – are now slum-like. The middle class enjoy a small new suburb of identical, brightly painted, neat little houses on a wooded slope. Here I met Bongiwe Ngumbela (most Transkeians choose to use their African names) and was mistaken for an NGO rep. Could I donate funding to complete the nursery school? Bongiwe is one of three teachers coping with eighty-five 3-to-6-year-olds (fee: R50 per annum) in what used to be the white primary school catering for thirty children. She led me across wasteland where cattle grazed and goats tore strips of bark from sycamore saplings. The half-built school has three classrooms, a teachers’ common room, a row of lavatories, a ‘lie-down room for tired little ones’ – all roofless. In the four years since Umtata’s funding was cut off, vigorous weeds have cracked walls and floors.
Bongiwe lives in two minuscule rooms – an outbuilding previously used by the white school’s caretaker. She is soon to do her finals for a University of South Africa (UNISA) arts degree. Pumping a Primus stove to make coffee she said, ‘I want to be properly qualified, not to get a good city job but to give our kids here the best start. They must have nursery education to prepare for a European curriculum. I don’t agree about making the curriculum more Afrocentric – that’s crazy, our kids must compete with whites.’
Then Bongiwe showed off her bedroom; a double bed, draped in a frilly rose-pink nylon counterpane, took up most of the floor space. Opposite hung a portrait photograph of a Xhosa Adonis. ‘My fiancé,’ smiled Bongiwe. ‘But he has a lobola problem. He’s a teacher too, poorly paid. And our families are old-fashioned, there must be lobola. In cities modern young couples can make their own arrangements.’
It began to rain as I returned to the hotel, the sort of gentle, persistent rain that gladdens farmers’ hearts. I found the clingy, sparsely furnished bar surprisingly crowded; local ANC members had assembled to discuss their future relationship with the reformed non-violent PAC and how best to defeat stock thieves.
The day before yesterday, in Umtata, I had to endure 42°C in the shade. This morning, as I climbed for an hour from Engcobo, I had to endure a thick freezing fog. Where the road at last levelled out I could only try to imagine what must lie on either side of this high saddle; yet again, South Africa’s fickle climate was discriminating against me.
During the descent, heavy cold rain replaced the fog. Beyond a shallow valley on my left rose overgrazed hills, deeply grooved by cattle-tracks. Broken gates marked the entrances to formerly white farms but now this area – a buffer-zone between the Transkei and the old Cape Province – is unpeopled. At the junction with a wider, smoother road the sky cleared; freewheeling down to Elliot I soon thawed and dried out.
At Elliot begins the thirteen-mile ascent to Barkly Pass’s solitary hotel. Here are harsh angular mountains, streaked red and ochre, all loose slabs and boulders and dramatic escarpments bristling with scrub. Ahead rose sharp peaks, but halfway up these disappeared as pale clouds rolled towards me. Moments later it was snowing. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘is unreal.’ However, those fine white particles were so real that I arrived here wearing an icy helmet.
Having rethawed in my bath, I joined two young off-duty police officers sitting by a cheery log fire in the bar. Astonishingly, the English-speaker remembered seeing me last year on the road from Elliot to Maclear.
His Afrikaner companion is quitting the force next week to start work with a Bloemfontein car-dealer. ‘It’s my wife,’ he explained defensively. ‘Barring Natal, political violence is over. But the criminals are running wild, we’ve had 203 officers murdered since January. My wife can’t take it, every time I leave the house she looks like crying – and now there’s a baby on the way …’
My cycle tours of South Africa seem destined to end abruptly. Actually this one could have ended bloodily; I was lucky today.
At dawn, Barkly Pass wore a thin white mantle and small untidy clouds drifted between the jagged rock peaks. Soon a steady gale-force wind was behind me, the sort that propels you uphill. On the traffic-free road to New England, through an almost unpopulated region, the colours and contours were ever-changing in brilliant sunshine and each turning revealed something unexpected – an isolated misshapen mountain, an awesome chasm directly below the verge, a distant range of symmetrical serrated peaks like silver battlements along the horizon.
From this plateau the descent is very long and very steep. Then comes the Free State’s flatness: a semi-desert landscape, its thornbushes, cacti and aloes quivering in the heat. Despite the gale, the temperature here was menacing. As we passed the ‘16 km’ marker (ten miles from Aliwal North), I calculated that we had covered exactly 100 miles in eleven and a quarter hours.
Moments later Chris’s back tyre burst. Had this happened on the descent, at a speed of some 35 m.p.h., I would now be in an intensive-care unit – or perhaps a coffin. Contemplating my good fortune I plodded on, feeling heat-sick. I had resolved to seek succour in a farmhouse, should one appear, when an elderly Boer who spoke no English offered a lift in his bakkie and dropped me outside the Balmoral Hotel.
A shocking fact then emerged. In Aliwal North on the Sabbath there is no source of beer. The Drankwinkels and the hotel bar remain closed all day. Despair threatened – but I held it at bay. Even in Aliwal North there must surely be a corner where the local dominees are defied.
I bathed and changed, then walked three miles to the golf club – well signposted, as golf clubs usually are. Ominously, no cars were parked nearby and the only person visible greeted me with a scowl. He was the nastiest sort of Afrikaner and when nasty they’re very nasty. No one plays golf on the Sabbath nor does the club bar open. And even if it did, he added venomously, I couldn’t use it. It is ‘Members Only’ and for security reasons this is a strict rule … It seems Aliwal North has not yet arrived in the new South Africa.
By my count, seven denominations cater for the spiritual needs of this pious dorp and the place only came to life at 5.50 p.m. when Sabbath-smart families piled into their cars and zoomed off in seven different directions.
I ended up drinking tea with geriatric Irish nuns well to the right of ET. It seems blacks are lesser beings, though redeemable if turned into Catholics cast in the Irish mould – or what was the Irish mould sixty years ago, when these ladies left home.
Just now I have sadly come to a sensible decision: to sell Chris here instead of in Bloemfontein. For one thing, a new tyre would cost R65. For another, in this heat the 140 miles to Bloemfontein, via Wepenet, would be an endurance test rather than a pleasure. Yet I know I’ll feel desolately incomplete tomorrow. For three months, over 2,140 miles, Chris and I have been a team.