Softly, tenderly Jesus is calling
Calling for you and for me
Safe on the portals
He’s waiting and watching
Watching for you and for me.
Come home to me.
You who are weary come home.
9 September 1990. The third-class carriage coming in from Simonstown. A town of magnolia-coloured porticoes, the feet of the pillars slashed with Wedgwood blue or vermilion stripes; advertisements all over windows for batteries, pies and cocktail olives. One old advertisement for Durex. It features a man in a polo neck and a woman with bouffant hair-style. ‘Plan your family carefully.’ Suddenly, at a stop, a black man in a tawny and crimson striped tie, leaps on the train and starts playing an accordion and singing in Afrikaans: ‘Kom Volg Jesus.’ ‘Come follow Jesus.’ He is followed by three women, one with lime and yellow striped rattles which she plays vociferously. One with a tambourine. The last, in a soot-black coat, who begins to dance around the carriage, bowing her head. After their number a little girl with her hair in tight corn rows, who wears green, yellow, black – the colours of the ANC – and the crimson lake of revolution, gives us a song.
Ride on Moses.
Ride on King Emmanuel.
He is the golden son.
He is the king who will save the world.
It’s dusk outside but the sun will be going down on the western side of the Cape. I am back in Alabama, exactly a year ago. A gospel-song concert in a cinema where I was, like now, the only white person.
Little girls in white party dresses, pearl contraptions hanging from their corn rows, dog-rose taffeta around their ankles. Women in cocktail hats, in décolleté dresses, in dresses with plunging backs. Men in sharkskin suits. The man on the stage, doubled up almost against the hand-held microphone, is telling how he was crippled as a baby, how his mother prayed over him like Daniel prayed in the lions’ den – of his subsequent cure.
Hands are raised in trance-like testimonial. A woman stands up. Tinsel stars are twinkling on the ceiling. ‘This man is the son of God,’ she cries. Another woman starts rolling on the floor between the rich crimson seats.
Outside, during a break, after the song: ‘Don’t know where I’ll be. On the roadside or at my door. But, Lord, I hope you’ll be there’, under a poster for Brigadoon, a woman had proposed to me. ‘Are you married? I’d like to marry again.’
Now the man on stage starts talking about white men who’d have them scrub floors if they got a chance, descends from the stage and, microphone still in his hand, starts advancing towards me. I make a dash for it, get on my bicycle outside and speed up the street, past a technicoloured advertisement for pancakes and strawberry sauce in Woolworths’ window.
In South Africa I stand my ground.
Soweto, September 1990. On Masopha Street a woman in the fuchsine garb of the Shangan tribe suddenly looks around towards the taxi. There’s a huge Omo packet as advertisement against the sky. A dry cleaner’s in a caravan, the caravan penned in by grazing oxen. Outside a hostel where about twenty men sleep to one room a woman sits over an array of second-hand shoes which she’s selling, a little stove keeping her warm. After five years of a rent strike there’s rubbish everywhere, rubbish burning sacrificially in skips. But nothing about the worst of Soweto – Mshenguville shanty town – is as bad as the shanty towns I saw in Port Elizabeth. Kleinskool – the coloured shanty town. Kwazekela – the black shanty town. Corrugated iron, plastic, even posters of Maxi Priest making up home. One isolated pump for water. A turquoise-hued fast-food joint beside one section of a shanty town. Elsewhere in the black and coloured areas of Port Elizabeth the houses are neat – flamingo pink, nursery blue – a tapestry showing a bulldog playing snooker, a spaniel in a bowler hat just behind him inside one one-roomed house. In the shops huge sausage shapes of peanuts hang and some buildings are burnt out after the riots of the second week in August, some buildings just singed. Outside a teacher training college, students hitch into the white centre of town – a town of alabaster fan-shape-topped buildings, coffee-coloured Doric pillars, surly-looking mock Queen Anne houses.
One part of the coloured area of Port Elizabeth is called Katanga. There are kites stuck all over cables and the white authorities are thinking of putting the cables underground because people keep stealing bits of them at night. Near Katanga is the poor white area. There the whites still insist on having their black servants call them ‘Boss’. The information is told to me as a joke by Peter, the hare-lipped taxi man who knows Ireland by the graffiti in North of Ireland pictures: ‘In loving memory of a fallen comrade.’
19 September 1990. A rust-purple train passes through Soweto, below the even, concentration-camp rows of hostels, among the middle-class streets named after streets in Hollywood. This is a country of trains, buses; de luxe buses, first-class buses, second-class buses, third-class buses. ‘Beauty’s only skin deep but black is as deep as bone,’ an old black man had said, talking to himself, as a bus I was on had pulled out of New Orleans a few years ago. We drove through Alabama, the man talking sonorously at the back about an epic sight he’d seen once, candle-carrying boats being blessed way out on the Caribbean. Outside the fields were golden, sepia-coloured in turn, and black people looked at us from the porches of houses where they sat or from the dog-runs of houses where they halted in walking. By default I was back living in Alabama two years later and in turn the experience of having lived in Alabama sent me to South Africa.
Outside a plantation house in Alabama, little huts near the house, miniature chrysanthemums in orange paper-wrapped pots outside the huts, a woman had lamented to me how in her childhood the cotton fields had been a scherzo of scarlet shirts and dresses. Now the young black people had gone to Detroit. But in South Africa in September 1990 fields of neonate sorghum throbbed with colour – women in poppy-red skirts bending to pick the bad grass.
21 September 1990. The bus from Johannesburg to Cape Town. It has stopped at Bloemfontein. A little boy comes up to me with a bag. There’s a birthmark charcoaled just above his lip. ‘Does Uncle like children?’ In South Africa, though he looks virtually white, he would have been classified as coloured until recently. A grandmother, a grandfather coloured. He has elected to be my companion for the night. At each café stop he buries his face in his hands before eating or drinking. ‘Thank you, Lord, for this day you gave us and for the food on the table.’ ‘I am the latlametjie of my family,’ he – Jonathan – says in Kimberly, where a black man wearing a damascened tie and a bowler hat comes to the bus looking for a daughter who has not turned up and then goes away, sits down and starts gazing, for some reason, at transparencies of X-rays. ‘Latlametjie’ is the smallest. At another stop, Jonathan beside me, a black man tells me of the last time he voted, Egypt, the desert war, 1943, as if he tells this to travellers in the cold every night. There are a few white men beside him who are on the dole – ‘aalmoes’ they say – and they ask for money. Each time there are soldiers outside – in rust-purple – as the bus stops briefly Jonathan looks out. He’s got a cousin in the army. Like his cousin he belongs to a house church. Each Sunday morning he drinks wine in someone’s home.
You’re in a sand-coloured part of this country, a sulphurous yellow part and suddenly there’s a religious inscription – on a lamppost, on a wall.
‘If a man also lies with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them commit an abomination.’ Leviticus
Above this inscription in the veldt a picture of a preacher from Louisiana in a wide 1950s tie, a halo of light two feet over the preacher’s head. A black boy in an impeccable dark suit gets out of a bus in the little Karoo mountains, carrying framed hardboard with heavy dried flowers stuck on it, a Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses a few feet away, buff sheep in the fields. Inside the bus a girl soldier sleeps on a teddybear and a host of Afrikaans women who look like elderly Doris Days – all primrose, almost albino curls, candy pink colours – yap. An owl with a dicky bow hangs at the front of the bus and in the distance I see two cranes beside water as the sun begins to go down, the sky sloe-blue, gold.
‘Behold, I shall create new heavens, and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come to mind.’ Isaiah
That was beside a place where the third-class bus stopped in Eastern Transvaal, the men getting out to urinate in a group in a burnt flaxen field. Hawkers imploded on the bus – walking down the aisle, selling watches they carried in buckets. One smoky-haired boy offered me a package of silver bullets, touching my crotch to indicate what they were for. Most of the men on this bus wore trilbies. The women wore hats, wine-red hats, black berets. There were Persian lilac trees – syringas – in the fields outside, yellow wattle trees, delicate fever trees, crimson-leaved fig trees. One young man – the whites of his eyes brandy coloured – wore a bronze-purple officer’s-style hat. On it the inscription: ‘Saint Eugena’s Zion Christian Church.’ He was going back to work in the Transvaal from his home in Pretoria. He doesn’t like it up there. ‘I go out for a few drinks and they throw me in gaol.’ Another man was travelling from Soweto to his farm near Nylstroom. He grows papayas, oranges, millet, onions. Recently a Jewish professor from an English Midlands university visited him in Soweto, went to see the Iwisa Kaiser Chiefs, the Moroka Swallows, the Orlando Pirates play and liked Soweto so much after an English Midlands city – his flat was beside a showroom for luxury showers – he applied for permission to live there. But permission was refused. ‘Why?’ the man asked in amusement. His trilby was smashed down on his head and he wore a chocolate-brown suit, the same as the rent collector did in Ballinasloe when I was a child.
At one stop a girl, her belongings beside her in plastic food containers, sang a song in Xhosa as she waited for another bus.
‘Thina Sibambene no Sotha na amagingxi-gingxi.’
‘We are fighting the evil spirit.’
On a metropolitan bus in Port Elizabeth a few days previously, by the sea, I heard another song in Xhosa. A man in navy workman’s clothes just suddenly rose and started chanting a song which called for Nelson Mandela and Dr Mangosuthu Buthelezi to meet, and then a boy on the bus who was munching a bunny chow sandwich – curried bread – joined in.
In Johannesburg a woman in a dress patterned with peonies, waiting in a half-mile long queue for a taxi to Soweto – to avoid trains – was humming another song in Xhosa and the crowds listened.
‘Ndisoloko ndiwnye no Thixo.’
‘I’m always with God.’
Behind her a porticoed shop of white and ultramarine, a banner saying: ‘Bulbulios call for peace. Nothing more than ten rands.’ The sunset behind the skyscrapers was peach and made a strange clash with the colours of clothes in the windows of clothes emporiums – brown, dull red, off-white; clusters and clusters of clothes, clusters and clusters of shops, clusters of boy models in windows, many in American baseball outfits, in American flaps.
In Johannesburg, this city of pearl-white skyscrapers, of chocolate-coloured clothes windows, of musky second-hand clothes, of mustard-coloured train billboards, of monkey-gland curries, of knoberries, pangas, axes, I met an Irish boy who’d left Ireland years ago, partly because he was gay, he says. He has a young friend who’s dying of Aids now in Parktown Hospital. His cranium has expanded and parts of his insides are protruding. He’s from Benoni in the East Rand – a landscape where tractors sift henna earth. He came into Johannesburg, fleeing a culture which has ‘I’ll kick his arse’ as a response to every crisis, frequenting bars like the Harrison Reef, Connections.
After I’d spoken to the Irish boy in a pizza parlour on Pretoria Street I came across a triad of old English ladies feeding wild cats outside Hillbrow Hospital. The cats were darting through a railing, between a yesterday, today and tomorrow tree – blue, white, navy – and the pavement.
‘This used to be our hospital. Now we just come back for the wild cats. We couldn’t see a cat go hungry.’
A black man in pointillistically dotted pyjamas, his neck bandaged, looked on.
Cape Town, 24 September 1990. On Sandy Beach I meet someone from Ireland I last saw in the Milky Way at Kelly’s Corner. He had a car accident in Dublin. Came here, via Cairo, to have plastic surgery, and stayed.
The beach is engulfed by lemon, purple, mauve vygies and pincushion proteas, by yellow-bolled knoppies, by wine tumbleweed, by turquoise turrets of mountains. A black woman is breast-feeding her child, her naked breast like one of those mountain turrets. She wears a T-shirt which shows a scene from recent South African history, Sharpeville, Soweto riots, a SADT Buffel firing on a crowd.
This man is from Cork and so is Dermot, a boy staying at the YMCA who’s a gardener in Cape Town. He was born in Cork, of an Irish mother and a father from Rugby. His mother started travelling when she lived in England in the early 1960s – Club holidays. She met Dermot’s father in South Africa. He wore a tattoo on his left shoulder: ‘If I die in combat box me up and bring me home.’ A favourite South African tattoo at the time. And he introduced her to a cocktail which was the rage in Rugby. Amoretto. Baileys. Brackish Mexican liqueur. They returned to England. Dermot was born during a holiday in Cork. But Dermot’s mother found the anti-Irish racism of England too much after South Africa and they returned.
First they lived in the Eastern Transvaal where Dermot went to primary school with Irish nuns in the Rosenberg Convent. Then they moved to Cape Town where he went to a multiracial school run by Irish Christian Brothers in Greenpoint. Now his parents have returned to the Transvaal and he’s stayed here, living sometimes at the YMCA, sometimes with his girlfriend.
The city his mother first came to had signs on benches saying ‘Slegs Vir Blankes’, ‘Whites Only’ among the carnelian and auburn-coloured Dutch-gabled buildings, among the serrated ultramarine of porticoed entrances, among the galleried buildings hugged by date palms. It was the buildings and the flowers that won. The flowers of Cape Town – the down-hanging moon flower with auburn ends, the richly scarlet aloe, coral and sugarbush, the pink and white azalea, the mauve and complicated tree ageratum, the orange crane flowers with cobalt tongues, the orange clivea, above all the honey-coloured Port Jackson mimosa tree. She lives now by a lake in the Transvaal, the house surrounded by kameeldoringboom trees, a tree which has creamy-grey shield-like pods standing up on the branches.
Dermot helps me to identify the trees, the flowers, the birds of South Africa; the fried-egg flower I saw in the Transvaal; the lemon Namaqualand daisies I saw coming into Cape Town with Jonathan, the deep orange calendulas, the purple lobelias; the statice I saw on graves in Soweto; the inky-centred randknuckles sold by women on Adderley Street who wear peacock-green scarves; some of the flowers I saw cycling to the Cape of Good Hope are unidentifiable, frog-coloured leaves with crimson dapples, white interwoven cauliflower shapes, but he knows the yellow weaver which flies among these flowers.
27 September 1990. I watch the sun going down over Robben Island, from Signal Hill, with Dermot. There are tugboats, freighters and a drilling ship out on the sea. Below are the high-rise buildings of Greenpoint. The sun is peach, the cirrus clouds primrose-coloured. A little swarm of young revellers in dinner suits, short silver-lamé or black dresses have come, armed with champagne, one boy’s hair a cadmium blond Viking’s over his dress suit. A little battalion of schoolboys in green and canary-yellow striped school blazers suddenly appear, their feet bare. A black man is lathering his hair with shampoo on the side of the hill, using a bucket of water, as he awaits the dramatic point of the sunset. What looks like a few hundred cormorants fly low over the sea. A guinea fowl goes up to look at the people with the champagne.
I think of the people I’ve met in this city. A man from Beirut – ‘All I know is that Mohammed was prophet and I don’t care about anything else, factions, vengeance’ – who remembered the lorries painted with swans in Beirut; a rabbi from West Hampstead who plays klabbejas in a Turkish baths every Saturday afternoon; an Indian woman called Dawn who started following me my first day in South Africa. She wore a two-piece dress, a slit in the ankle-length peach dress. There was a cyclamen spot on her forehead. What religion does that represent I asked her. ‘All religions,’ she replied contemptuously. She lives under a milkweed tree in Hout Bay. ‘If apartheid ends I’ll kill myself. There’ll be too many love children.’ As I boarded the train for Simonstown, a man in a koofekei going by behind her, she started throwing azaleas at me. ‘Beauty is sorrow.’
‘You can’t take my richness from me. But you can murder me,’ Peter, a second-hand clothes dealer from Guguletu township told me. He had a girlfriend called Letetia from Cape Town and one called Sylvia in the township. The women are hungry for men there, they far outnumber the men he says fearfully – his tie is a mark of his profession, wide, night-sky blue, a ruddy streak going through it. They surround him, touch his private parts as he walks home at night and try to abduct him to a ‘jol’.
In the Malay quarter a woman in a grey velvet biretta told my fortune under a picture of a Hindu-like Sacred Heart, bird droppings all over the wall from a Ku-Klux-Klan-hooded, rosy-cheeked love bird and from a scruffy, moulting Indian dovetail, bottles of crimson potions on shelves, bubbly movements in those potions. ‘Someone wants to poke you with a knife or shoot you with a gun.’
I thought of a man I’d seen in a township, his head covered by a pink balaclava, a stick in his hand, a woman cycling by him, her shopping tucked in a rug which engulfed her backside, as if he wasn’t there.
‘When the tension is high,’ Peter the clothes dealer said of Nelson Mandela, ‘he takes a puff on a cigarette and considers the situation. If there’s no truth on the table you fight. But I myself am a churchman and leave all to God. Things will not be better for all tomorrow. But soon.’
The sun is suddenly an iridiscent, hard-edged boll, more and more cirrus clouds delineated in the heavens, pink, primrose-coloured. Then it disappears, the bottom of the sky a uniform, relinquished lilac. I’ve known Dermot for three days. I’ll probably never see him again. But he has brought me to this sunset.
And when you move people do sometimes recur, by chance. I think of a boy I met in Leningrad, Christmas 1988. Six months later, on a return trip to Leningrad, I met him in the Tchaika Bar by the Griboeva Canal. In the meantime, helped by his mother, he’d slashed his wrists to avoid the army and had been put in Gatchingh Hospital with some of the mentally retarded people who he said had allowed themselves to be fucked for a cigarette. The lady doctor had told him: ‘We couldn’t get out. But you must.’ At Anna Akhmatova’s grave, on her centenary day, the Patriarch of Leningrad praying, the same boy, Sergei, asked me about Anna Akhmatova, pondering her determination to stay in Russia. ‘Why commit suicide?’
Maybe some countries are worth committing suicide over. South Africa has reminded me over and over of Russia, maybe the bigness of the place, maybe the trains, a sense from the landscape, rarely felt in the British Isles, that recourse to God is always possible.
It hasn’t reminded me just of the American South but the American South was there; a freak advertisement in the veldt for a preacher from the American South; the same church brands – the Moravian Church, the Apostolic Church; the same flowers – hibiscus, poinsettia, azalea. It was like taking a bus down the road from the Greyhound bus station in Alabama which had the vinyl chairs outside.
Just a closer walk with Thee.
Precious Jesus let it be.
I can never be dissatisfied
While you’re walking by my side.
A secretary bird beside a small lake in the veldt, a newly green willow tree in the middle of a field, a meadow of newly sprouted lucerne grass, a black boy riding a chariot by a row of tea shacks and stopping by one which had the number 87 chalked outside; it was Alabama in the spring.
One place leads to another, one Greyhound bus journey leads to another Greyhound bus journey, a different set of characters, a different talisman by the driver’s window, a different kind of courage required.
Before we leave Signal Hill I consider racism, how Dermot’s mother and so many Irish people had come to this country to flee racism in England. People like the Irish woman from County Waterford in the viridian trouser suit and viridian hat I met in Fish Hoek, the whitest place in South Africa, as she sat on a bench watching the sea. Not far away I’d seen the grave of a young drowned Irish sailor. Bartholomew Maloney. Able Seaman. 1863. ‘Though full of life death cometh quickly.’ The woman had lived in the Woodthorpe suburb of Nottingham for a few years. Now a rich woman, like so many white South Africans, she fears nationalization. Maybe she’ll be going back to County Waterford after all. There were whales out on the sea and our conversation turned to those and she got merrier the way people in South Africa get merry when they identify a bird, a flower.
Nationalization or not, rich or poor, black or white, I take one last look at the lilac horizon and I remember how you used put on the Nina Simone song ‘Ain’t got no’ on the jukebox in the Milky Way at Kelly’s Corner and a multi-coloured constellation would balance before the record played, as the smashed faces of figures in blue denim suits walked by outside.
Ain’t got no mother.
Ain’t got no friends.
Ain’t got no love.
What have I got nobody can take away?
I’ve got myself.
I’ve got life.