Arrival 1-28
The mattress hints of stale piss, in its stains at first and then again when I catch whiff of it more closely. There’s a sink in the room, but its square shape and steel composure evoke a sense that is closer to a prison cell than a dormitory. It’s hot as hell. There’s no fan to speak of, so I’ve chosen to leave the windows open – leave, because they were already that way when I moved in. As of yet, it’s allowed one gecko to cross the curtain and nonchalantly ascend my wall. I’m not sure where he is now.
So far, the program hosts have been generous to me. After my prospects for Uganda fell through early, I kicked off the beginning of last semester by doing a Google search for “study abroad, undergraduate, Durban.” After some sorting, I got my wish: a PDF application form with the promise of a dorm room, a cell phone, and a bed and a place at the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s university of choice. I wanted something that was unstructured, a program that would allow me to have the maximum amount of freedom, the minimum amount of control, but which would still be there to prevent, and, if need be, rescue me from despair and bail me from any mishaps. More or less, I wanted a safety net: nothing more, nothing less. And so far, I have a room the size of a Robben Island prison cell with a mattress that smells like piss and a padlock for security.
I can see them now. “Mandela endured it for 27 years, so what’s a semester? You don’t even have to work in a lime quarry during the day.” Maybe that’s a bad joke. But this is what I asked for, and what I do with it now is the question.
Down the hall and up some stairs is a communal kitchen, where outside young men were talking about girls in a solemn blend of Zulu and English.
“How is it?” one said.
“It’s fine,” I returned.
Considering I was only put on their list through a series of emails and mailings, having never met one of them until I arrived here, in Africa, I feel blessed, well taken care of. Someone is looking after me, even if they don’t really know who I am. So far they’ve provided me with a cell phone, linens, a towel, a set of plates, and some mostly non-perishable food in a reusable shopping bag.
Outside, someone is either watching MTV or listening to music.
Clearly, my thoughts are a little scattered tonight. Time to rest. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Out and about, 1-29
Yesterday was a stretch. I woke up at six in the morning for the third time that night, this time to a chorus of cicadas and exotic birds right outside my window and completely unable to go back to sleep. With nothing scheduled until 9:50, I took it upon myself to rearrange the furniture so that it would be more accommodating. My bed now rests under the window, with its foot parked just under the sink. My desk is opposite the closet and I can actually put my chair down and use it now. Prior to the rearrangement I couldn’t simultaneously have the door open, the bed out and the chair down and at my desk at once. But this makes it less prison-like. In the day, with natural light filling the room, it’s actually quite nice, especially lying in bed, where the heat is less prone and the space looms large over my head.
But that only took up so much time before the far off 9:50 deadline. I went for a walk, descending far down the hill in the direction looked out by my window, determined to find that much talked about view of Durban and the ocean somewhere down by one of the other dorms.
The last time I was in South Africa I only spent a couple of days in Durban, and none of them were anywhere near Howard College. But still, there is something so familiar about the place. Call it a smell. It’s creeps into my senses and reminds me how exotic it is here. Perhaps it’s the vegetation, or the wildlife. The humidity touches everything and blends its pheromones into one, universally appealing smell, which manages to stretch across the entire country. Durban smells like the suburbs of Cape Town, and Cape Town smells like Durban. But I imagine there is something far more unique about this college in particular, if only because it’s situated in the middle of a nature preserve. There’s so much wildlife it’s almost a hazard. They’ve warned me once already not to keep any food on my desk while the windows are open and I’m not there.
“They’ll peer into your window, see that you’re not there and they won’t stop at anything in taking it,” Anita, the program director here in Durban said. She was referring to the monkeys on campus. I haven’t seen any yet but I’ll take her word for it.
Around campus there are more reminders of where I am: uniformed black women, speaking Zulu, fill a bucket of water with the garden hose together for cleaning. Further down the hill, a Zulu couple stands at a taxi stop on the side of the road, alternately holding hands and looking at each other with tired eyes and shouting at each other with more vigor and all the same sincerity. Every path that isn’t paved is made with red dirt.
Like the sky was another kind of blue and the trees were another kind of green.
There’s a bridge to cross the road the main road that runs through the lower part of campus which I walked across the day. The view from there, as I imagine it is around much of this place is quite striking, but only because we are so far up, and so far away from where the action is. I’m disappointed for that reason. Even though we are within the city limits, everything urban about this are is a little farther away. Nonetheless, with a few taxi routes nearby, it shouldn’t be hard to get into town for very cheap, when I finally break away from the rest of my party.
I couldn’t really stand some of them yesterday.
The group itself has a range of experience traveling. There are two in particular – both from the Bay Area surprisingly – who stand out as having a lot of travel experience. They’ve done the typical route – for the affluent youth interested in the global citizen’s life: time with parents in Europe, time alone working at some kind of locally based NGO in Latin America, now Africa through college.
Lunch was at some everything-fried-plus-beer place on the North Beach. It was hot as hell, which didn't help, and humid. In the city like in the hills by campus, the air was thick and even ten minutes outside could make you sweat through your shirt. Things got better down by the beach where the heat didn't dissipate but at least it was matched by the Indian Ocean's breeze. The humidity all but dissapeared down there.
Hayden was curious about slang, if there were any words he needed to know to get around. “I remember in Brazil, that was helpful to know,” he said unnecessarily. Already, he’s starting to irritate me a little.
For NJ, the subject couldn’t help but touch on racial lines.
“Forget everything you’ve heard about the Rainbow Nation,” he said. “In South Africa we see the world in four colors: black, white, coloured and Indian, and each group has its own vocabulary.”
“You mean for each other?”
“Yes, but also just within each group of people.”
In answer to the first question, NJ listed for us every derogatory term he could for the racial groups of South Africa. Blacks, it was well understood, were called kaffirs. Like in the United States, telling this to one black person could get you a smile and a laugh. From another, it could get a punch in the face or worse.
Coloureds could be dissed by any of a list of names, most of which I hadn’t heard before. As for whites,
“There really are no derogatory terms for whites.” That answer struck me by surprise. I recalled the first and only time I had made that error of judgment during a conversation with an Afrikaans student who was sitting next to me on the plane to Cape Town from Frankfurt, when I referred to the entire contemporary Afrikaner population as “Boers.”
“That’s an old term,” he said chidingly, but ready to forgive the mistake. I found out later that the term really only meant “farmer.” With a few exceptions, the Afrikaners were not “farmers” since they had been forced into exile following the British takeover of the Cape Province, only to find gold in the area later to become Johannesburg. Most of them lived in suburbs or small towns scattered across the country; they liked barbequing (called a braai here), rugby and, depending on their age, some listened to shitty hip-hop. Calling one a “Boer” was close to calling one a “settler,” an even more derogatory term used now only by radical black nationalist groups such as the Pan African Congress. It implied artificiality – that the Afrikaners were no more to the country than whatever purpose his ancestors had been originally sent here for. In a word, it implied that after 400 years of settlement, the Afrikaners had outlived their welcome. You couldn’t get more loaded than that.
“There are some terms,” I interjected. “If you call the wrong Afrikaner a Boer he won’t he even bother to correct you, he’ll just put his fist through your face.”
“It’s not incorrect,” NJ said.
“It means farmer. It’s a term from the past that only really applies at all to a few people anymore, and I’m not even sure they’d like to be called that. It would be like going up to a black man in the States and telling him to get back to his sharecropping.”
“So then it’s a class thing,” Hayden added in, correcting me. “Now you’re just mixing up race and class; those are two different things.”
Needless to say, I didn’t like being corrected, and certainly not by someone whose experience in the country until then had amounted to a couple of airports and a single night in a dorm far up in the hills.
Evening 1-29 – 1-31
When the girls in my group wanted to go out tonight there was really no excuse not to. There were twelve of us total – ten girls, myself and one other, a guy named Alex who went by “Hayden” to avoid confusion. He was also from the Bay Area, also interested in doing development work in Africa, but together all we seemed to have in common was that we were tag-alongs to the other ten. Two days in, and what they wanted to do, we followed.
The drinking age is lower here of course, as it is in virtually every country outside the United States. With so many of us turning 21 sometime in the course of the trip it was as if the birthday had become as arbitrary as any other. We were offered wine on the plane from New York to Dakar. For many, it meant that the days of being refused alcohol on the grounds of our age had ended. It was as if we had actually turned 21 somewhere over the Atlantic. But that was on a plane. Tonight would be our first in the country without the hassle of airports, without being caught between time zones. We would be rested and ready to go.
After a deep and dream laden sleep in my room, I put on a white tee and my most expensive pair of jeans and stepped outside to go to the bathroom.
“Put on a shirt,” NJ shouted from down the hall. “Something with a collar.” I did, and stepped outside.
On Tuesday night, we were told, the only places that we could get into without looking conspicuous were all white. Like in the United States, the patrons of various clubs in South Africa tend to sort themselves into predictable racial categories. When they’re drunk and dancing, people like to be surrounded by others they find attractive and whom they most like to bed if they had the chance to, so they go to places that cater accordingly. The irony in it all is that at these white clubs in Durban, non-whites look solemnly out of place.
The first place we went to was an all-white bar and restaurant serving a mostly older crowd that played American top-forty radio hits from a few months earlier. Like movies and other elements of pop-culture in the West, music takes time to filter down to South Africa and by the time it gets there it’s already old, making the whites who listen to it look outdated and backwards, merely imitating a world they know exists but can’t see with their own eyes, and lagging at it. Tiesto would never come here. Neither would Fifty Cent, Justin Timberlake or most of the other artists they admire. It was odd, I thought at the table, drinking a vodka tonic, that in a country that has been exploding with good music of its own for as long as anyone can remember that all these people want to listen to is the same crap that we listen to on ClearChannel back home.
And this was Durban: a bunch of white young men and women and their friends, dancing to American music, wearing the American clothes that they’ve seen in American fashion magazines. I had always been struck by the isolation of South Africa. It took 27 hours to get there from New York this time, with only a brief layover in Dakar. Between here and Europe was an entire continent, so different than the rest of the world that some dared to call it another world entirely.
For the second time that day, people in my group ordered nachos. They were terrible. The cream was fresh, but it wasn’t sour. The guacamole was uniform in both its consistency and color, as if it had been pureed and came frozen. I’m not even sure the cheese was real, in fact, I doubt it very highly.
“These are so much better than the ones earlier,” one of them said of the plate. That much was unfortunately true. So we sat there and watched white people dance and shared nachos in a far corner of Africa, lauding ourselves for being such bold travelers as everyone else in our room pretended they weren’t even there.
The Parade at night, talk with Eva – 2-2
People will always laud this place for being the most progressive, the most industrial, the most unlike the rest of Africa. So often when they come, in fact, the first thing observation that leaps out of their mouth is that the place is “so much like Europe.” Perhaps it’s the architecture. Every former British colony in the world down to Sierra Leone has Victorian style buildings to brag about, but in South Africa they are especially well kept. In fact, one of the finer selections in the world can be found in Pietermaritzburg, west of here by about an hour. There the streets are so densely packed with the old houses of the institutions of old that it’s possible to imagine for long stretches of time that you are not in Africa at all. People come to see the collection from all over the world and from Europe especially, traveling to a far corner of the African continent to see something that is essentially European in nature.
“Pietermaritzburg is one of the most European cities in Africa,” I’ve heard people say. True as that may be, I never thought it was much of a compliment. After all, would you ever say “Of all the imitations of Europe in Africa, Pietermaritzburg is one of the better ones,”? or “Pietermaritzburg is a good city, at least by African standards.”
On the plane to Johannesburg, I met a young woman who was working on issues related to girls’ coming of age for an NGO in New York. This was going to be her first time in Africa, she said. She had spent a great deal of time in India and Bolivia, and the week before she was in Guatemala, where most of her work was based, but now it was off to Africa, and she’d be keeping her eyes and ears open.
A few days later we met for drinks on the veranda of the Reform Club, a small coloured spot on the boutique laden Florida Road, down the street from her guest house in one of the more posh areas of town.
“So what do you think so far?” I asked. “Any impressions of the place?”
“I don’t know … I’m a little disappointed,” she said. “Maybe it’s just where I’m staying. I’m in this old style, very colonial looking guest house, with this old British furniture everywhere, and Dutch paintings on the walls. We have dinner together every night, and the woman who runs the place is this old little white lady …” And then stepping outside everyone on the street was white as well. Florida Road was known for its fine restaurants, a few galleries and some classy bars. The place catered to tourists, of course. But most of the tourists in Durban came from elsewhere in South Africa, looking to escape winter in the high desert metros of Johannesburg or Bloemfontein to enjoy some place more tropical.
So the place was as African as any, in the sense that it was African money and African people crowding it. And yet, the only blacks present were either their servers or panhandlers who had come off from the beach where to try their luck pushing belts and cheap sunglasses over people’s dinners. Nonetheless, I encouraged her to not the locale to be representative of the entire country.
“It is there,” I said. “This is as much Africa as any part of Africa. If you’re really tired of it here on Florida Road, you should go into the city center, where everyone is black, they cook food on the street, there’s garbage everywhere and the women carry the groceries of the day on their heads. If you just walk twenty minutes down this street towards the beach, you might encounter more than one band of Zulu men shaking their fists at you who alternatively want to jump you and give you travel advice.”
And there I was referencing real events. Though I’d only driven through the city center and wouldn’t actually step foot in it until two days later, I had been on the waterfront only a few hours prior. Having come from dinner with the other people in my group, I started walking along the Grand Parade – the street that edges the water – assuming it was safe since the whole street as far as I could see was lined with hotels, each with a doorman keeping guard in front.
But not even five minutes into my stride, six gruff looking Zulus approached me with their fists raised. I crossed the street for the nearest hotel. Two of them followed me.
“We’re not trying to rob you,” one said. “The fist, it’s just a sign of Africa. We are showing our support for African unity, you see.” As the others kept walking, the man explained that they had been working on the piers until now and were just then going back home. When I told them where I was headed he looked a little surprised and insisted that I take a cab. “It’s very dangerous out here at night,” he said. “We mean no harm, but there are others, not so much.”
I hailed a cab and an Indian man with a subwoofer that I could’ve heard from a mile a way picked me up. I rode in the front seat and asked him about the area.
“Is this street no good at night?” I asked.
“Not so much, no.”
“But it’s all hotels!”
“Here?” he said pointing left. “These are apartments.” Sure enough, I looked out the passenger side window and all the doormen were gone, replaced only with the occasional lamp post and rows of bleak looking high-rises.
“Maybe it’s just the places I’m visiting,” she went on. “So far, it’s not like the other places I’ve seen. Like India, for instance, you could step off the plane and immediately you knew you were in another country. Just the smells, the colors, the shear volume of people on the street – you’ve never seen anything like it before in your life. But here, at times it feels like I could be anywhere.” And this, while we sat on the balcony of an overpriced club playing shitty American hip hop from the summer before. I couldn’t really argue with her.
At the guest house down the road where she was staying, she said, all the furniture looked like it had come out of a Victorian house. The paintings were Old Dutch portraits, and the manager, an old white woman constantly asked her where she was going whenever she left. All the guests had dinner together. In a few days she’d be moving to a hotel by the beach where she hoped it would feel less like a colonial experience.
We talked for two more hours about the future of Africa and the possibilities of our respective development careers. It was a nice talk, speedy, filled with all the references without having to pause for explanation. It brought me back to some other trips where I actually lived with the NGO workers and the talk always made me feel like an insider among insiders.
I downed two vodka tonics there. Afterwards I walked her back to the guest house and called the same cab who had picked me up before.
“Cab’s here boss,” the driver called to say when he pulled up. He did 90 K’s up the hill to the college and still managed to charge 90 Rand – a little less than fifteen dollars – for the ride.
A few days later I would discover that the club we were just at had only reopened recently, following a shooting there only three weeks before that night.
Walking through the Victoria Street Market, fight, 2-3
When the girls wanted to do what they do, either talk about Grey’s Anatomy or go to the beach and drink Triple Sec, or whatever else, it was up to Hayden and I to do something more adventurous.
We needed more food to cook, for tonight and every night after that. We also needed a couple of padlocks for the refrigerator and the locker to keep our supplies in. There wasn’t a cafeteria here, only a couple of restaurant-sized kitchens per every dorm, each with multiple, lockable fridges and half a dozen electric ranges. Ours even had a balcony and vaulted ceilings. Next door was the TV lounge with almost forty seats, all of which would be filled this week in the evening hours while the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament was being played, so we could drift between outside and inside, walking soccer and enjoying the evening cool, all while making dinner.
And to do that we needed supplies. Hayden had asked if I wanted to go to the Indian Open Market with him a day earlier for some of these things, but I was in the middle of a nine hour nap in the middle of the day (my sleep schedule still hasn’t gotten back on track yet). I took him up on the offer this day instead, so we walked down to Gate 4 and got into a Taxi.
As is the case throughout Southern Africa, a “taxi’ in South African cities rarely means a car that drives exactly where and when you want it to for a price that begins high and escalates with every kilometer traveled. In Durban, taxis – or Kumbis as they’re called in Zulu – are vans that seat up to 16 people along a specific route for a set price. Among whites and Indians, they’re known for their liability on road, dodging between cars and pedestrians at high speeds, sometimes with only inches to spare.
They’re also known for their tendency to be violent when crossing each other’s territories. On our first day there we were strongly advised never to ask a taxi to go off his route. Later I would find out that three months prior to our arrival, a driver took that risk and paid for it dearly as a rival caught him, leading to a shootout somewhere in the city that left 16 people – passengers and drivers included – dead, part of an ongoing, never-ending phenomenon throughout urban South Africa known as the “taxi wars.” When asked why they don’t take taxis, people who confidently object usually cite this reason.
But for poor blacks living in far off townships, they are as vital as cars are to suburban dwelling whites: by far the most reliable, cheapest and fastest way to and through town. This is especially the case in Durban, where, unlike in Cape Town, Pretoria or Johannesburg, there are no commuter trains, making the Kumbis the only way into the city center, a reality that is not hard to believe when entering downtown Durban, where on the busiest streets more than half the vehicles you see are mini-bus taxis.
Taxis are also the only way to get anywhere from Howard’s hillside location for cheap. At 4 Rand fifty for one person to go downtown, it was the ride that we could afford. Meter cabs may have dominated our evening transport, often for outrageously inflated prices, but in the day, the taxi, dangerous as it might be, was the only way to go, and in ten minutes flat, we were there.
This was my first time walking in the City Center, a task that I had recommended to Eva a few days earlier but never tried myself. Having driven through it before, I had expected a few crowds, but stepping out of the vehicle and on to the sidewalk, we were surrounded by people – almost all of them black – squashed between rows of street vendors on one side and shop owners whose merchandise would often extend beyond their garage door on the other side. Passing Indian owned hardware stores and cell phone boutiques, bearded men dressed in long white tunics would match our eyes and bow, their arms pointing to their storefront while still managing to be open. Walking was hard at times, and always in close quarters. I was grateful to have a small shoulder bag which I could keep in front of me for when we passed through the crowds.
Since there was no program in Durban when I came to South Africa the first time in 2004, and I had wanted to go to Cape Town anyway, I went there instead, but I did manage to visit Durban for a day and a night before I left. Driving into the City Center from the inter-provincial highway, my first reaction was that the place looked “Detroit meets the Indian Ocean, meets an African refugee camp.” The place was dense with soaring commercial buildings, most of which were concrete and grey, or were covered in an unattractive blue-tinted Plexiglas. On the street level were the same dense crowds and vendors that I saw now, all scurrying about, selling whatever they had on hand. I had almost no interest in returning.
But revisiting the idea of going back to South Africa early last semester, it occurred to me that the place might have something to offer. The largest port, with close proximity to the borders of three other countries and a massive population of Indians, mostly descendents of indentured farm laborers brought over to harvest sugarcane, the place was in many ways at the forefront of the future of the nation, and the continent at large. I thought about going back to the crowds, to the streets, to see what I could find there.
This day, I could see what they had to offer in detail: knives, both rusted and clean (we bought a clean one), machetes, fresh fruit (I had bought six peaches that morning down the street from the university for five Rand), used tee-shirts and dresses, multi-outlets, and other dusted, maybe functional electronics. The similarity between merchandise among stalls was curious. On one street, a number of stalls were selling J&B Blended Scotch Whiskey, but almost no other liquor. Most interesting of all were the stalls that sold supplies for traditional remedies, such as dried herbs and a variety of animal parts, including furs, feet, feathers and an assortment of skulls, some of them oddly human like in shape, probably from monkeys. In the back of every one of these stalls there were usually small Smirnoff bottles – the kind you see old women buying for their purses at liquor stores – filled with different colored concoctions, from brown to silver to green.
Down the way and through several blocks of this was the Indian Market we had originally set out for. The place turned out to be a sprawling complex, two stories tall indoors with a separate section that extended outside, part of which was under the freeway. The inside was clean, orderly for the most part. The only aromas were from the Indian spice stalls, each of which had buckets of colored powder: red chili powder, jeera, turmeric. Some places had their own specialty chili powders at varying degrees of intensity: “mother-in-law masala,” “mother-in-law annihilator,” “A-Bomb.”
But outside was a different story. The whole place smelled like piss, but in an endearing way. It brought a sense of familiarity, like that esoteric, perhaps imagined place that I though Africa was, that I hoped to find here, where filth was a part of everyday life, and if walked in it enough you too could become used to it – that much seemed to exist here.
What Eva had said she couldn’t find two nights before was all over outside. There the vendors were too poor to afford space inside the market, so they set up shop on boards over upturned buckets for tables, and sheets of cardboard on the asphalt. Music vendors blared cassette tapes from behind their stalls while belt vendors preferred to keep standing, letting their buckled strips of leather dangle from one arm while they pushed samples as you walked by with the other. Homeless men lay between vendors with blocks of wood for pillows. Next to the entrance of a mosque a black man worked a pair of pliers inside another man’s mouth. It looked painful. Street dentistry? I wondered. After the work was done the customer picked up a mirror, then paid him and walked away, proudly displaying a new gold cap on his lower row.
“I’ve got a camera if you see anything,” I told Hayden.
“That’s alright.” He said. “You know Shanice [a girl in our group] got hers stolen last night.”
Later I would find out that the girl in question had kept her camera on a lanyard around her wrist when they were at a club the night before. One minute she looked down to her wrist and the camera was gone.
“Maybe it fell off,” she told us. “Or maybe someone cut it off.”
The first time I had considered going to South Africa, one of my teachers advised me to go to Durban since anecdotal reports had called it the safest big city in the country. In my own experience, that seemed entirely believable. Whereas in Johannesburg and even Cape Town, the routes of the Kumbis (or mini-bus taxis that black commuters typically took to get around town in the day) were only loosely regulated, in Durban, they were specially licensed to specific areas and forbidden from going anywhere else. In Cape Town, a lack of regulation led to a random violence between drivers upset at competitors incurring on their routes, and eventually, a whole series of “Taxi Wars” in the 80’s and 90’s, when random violence turned to outright attacks on the passengers of taxis of rival companies as they passed each other. By now, that kind of directed violence was said to have subsided in Cape Town; I never once saw a driver or a driver’s assistant openly carrying a gun while I was there, even though it is legal with the proper licensing. In Johannesburg, rumor had it that shootings were still rather common.
But in contrast, Durban’s regulations seem to keep such outright violence between taxis low – at least in comparison. Moreover, unlike either Cape Town or Johannesburg, there were no trains in and out of the townships and suburbs – another site typically associated with random violence. In Cape Town it was so bad that riding a train at night on the first Friday of the month was considered suicide.
But despite its favorable reputation in compare to South Africa’s first and third largest metropolises (Durban is fourth, Pretoria is second), the important thing to keep in mind is that it still is a South African city. You have to keep your bag in front of you, keep your wits about, know who to trust by instinct alone and vigilantly avoid those you can’t. Every ten seconds some woman was being raped in this country; there are more car jackings here than any country in the world, and the violent crime rate is the highest of any nation not at war – higher than Jamaica, higher than Brazil. That much was made chillingly obvious to Hayden and I as we waited for a ride back to campus.
It was on Pine Street, near city hall where all the Kumbis lined up to while their drivers smoke cigarettes and started the reverse of whatever path they had taken to get their initially. With so many potential passengers, especially so late in the afternoon, the drivers didn’t bother to leave until their whole van had filled up. We took two of the last three seats. A few seconds later we noticed a coloured man yelling at a black man, perhaps a driver. They appeared to have some kind of disagreement. The coloured mentioned that the black man or someone associated with him had been “careless,” and that someone had been hurt. The details were vague, and it seemed apparent that at least the coloured was drunk.
Just then another coloured man came from the other side of the street and walked just past the front of our van, his mouth gushing blood to cover his entire chin. He made no effort to stop it or cover it up, as if to make a point to the others. By then some other men were gathering around to take the black man’s side. One of them, we knew, would have to be our driver, interrupted from his break to either stop a fight or engage one. I felt safe inside the Kumbi, in the back row counting change for fare. I knew this was a dispute between men who had some prior dealing with each other. There was no way there mess could erupt into something any larger than it already was and threaten us.
When a third coloured man started across the street angrily waving a rusted machete as long as my arm, I felt especially calm. Surrounded by commuters older than myself, I knew that whatever madness was ensuing or was about to ensue beyond the threshold of the wide open sliding door of our vehicle, within the Kumbi, things made sense. The people here were rational. There was no excuse for senseless violence here. One could not simply exercise his frustration over another, no matter how willing, or how frustrated he might be. There were simply too many people to ready to call out the stupidity of it all.
And that sanity would have to prevail, I thought, and not just because it needed to then but because it always had. People had to get home, the world of life and work had to move onward. There was no time for these antics and sooner or later that would be recognized, by everyone, no matter how angry or belligerent. The calm would win the day. After all, it was the only thing that kept this country from turning into Zimbabwe.
Moments later, the one woman present at the argument placed her hand on the bleeding man’s shoulder and a towel to his face. He took it. A second after that, the last seat in our Kumbi was filled and the driver came back to his seat and took us swiftly away.
Thoughts, 2-3
"Have you ever lain with someone when you hearts were beating in the same rhythm? That’s true love. A man and a woman who lie down with their hearts beating together are truly lucky. Then you’ve truly been in love, m’boy. Yeah, that’s true love. You might see that person once a month, once a year, maybe once a lifetime, but you have the guarantee your lives are going to be in rhythm. That’s all you need"
Bob Dylan, March 1978
I used to dream of cutting it out here. I used to tell people that in the deepest depths of Africa, when your greatest concern was how to eat that day, or at the very least, you were surrounded by people whose greatest concern was how to eat that day, and yours, how to feed them, then all the bigger questions would be answered at once. I’m not sure if I’ll get there.
I realize now that so much of that impulse to just disappear into Africa was driven by a desire to get away from wherever I was at that moment. I wanted to be away from where the gossip and the drama and the trivialities that I knew to be pointless but still managed to consume my life anyway all lived, and bred. In college, on the days towards the ends of long breaks that I found myself in limbo, with very little at home and almost no desire to go back to school in Minnesota, I thought about going back to Cape Town and “doing the immigrant thing” as my dad and I referred to it. That meant sleeping on a friends floor, looking for whatever job I could get, taking cash under the table but all while working towards something better, plotting a move. He’s always been supportive of my impulse to get away, and I admire that about him.
I thought about only telling a few people, and just letting the story spread its wings and turn into a legend of sorts as it flew over all of my old classmates.
“What happened to Alex?” they would say.
“He went to Africa.” He went to Africa and he’s staying there. Only your prayers can reach him now. That was going to be my line.
One day they’d notice that my Facebook photo had changed to something black and white, something of me with a shaved head and an earring, wearing a green fatigue or a flowing white shirt, and holding a staff, or an AK-47, sitting on the back of a pickup truck and looking jolly with a bunch of black men, passing back a cigarette or a joint or something, just grinning. Was it all for show, or did he actually go and just do that? Who knew, but they would see the look on my face and know that whatever it was I had set out looking for, I’d found it. I’d gone to Africa; I’d led the hard life just like the rest of them did, fought off the hardship and made peace with those who never thought I could. That’s how they’d know, I found it.
But I suppose for the plan to work, I would have had to come back eventually, like Tom Sawyer falling through the rafters to drop in on his own memorial service after everyone assumed he had drowned in the Mississippi river. I dreamed of disappearing into the jungle for years, but coming back, coming out with a beard, wiser, older, and more intimately aware of the powers of life and death than any of my contemporaries. No matter what happened in my life after that, I’d be able to say I had been to Africa and made it there. Even if you’ve never been you would know to respect that.
Last talk with Eva, 2-5
“I need two, please,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Passport photos come in a set of four, that’s thirty Rand. And like I tell everyone in this country, you never know when you’ll need the other two.”
…
I saw Eva for the second and last time last night. Her flight back to New York was this afternoon after packing and a meeting, so this was the last chance I had. After dinner, I called A. Kay, the designated cabbie for our program.
“… He charged ninety Rand to get back from Florida Road,” I said.
“Ninety Rand? Look, whoever this guy was, you’ve got to delete his number from your phone right now. That’s too much, too much …”
The ride was a quick one; from the hills right down to the edge of the beach. It didn’t take long, and it cost thirty Rand less than last time. I remembered the area from our first days there. It was North Beach, a small stretch on the breezy Golden Mile where the sea was especially fresh, and the breeze especially cool. A stone’s throw from the street from the Central Business District, I had come here several times before, most often with my group or some sampling of it, to eat, have a beer or two, and play in the water.
Just down the street was Joe Cool's, the bar and restaurant with the cheap pasta and good calamari which turned into a club in the evenings. In their bathrooms were small posters for their “Girls’ Night” with five Rand tequila shots and eight Rand LIITs. All the girls in the posters were white, but I was used to that. What struck me more was that “Girls’ Night” was a 21 and up event, for some reason. On the beach itself was the Beach Café, where two days prior I had literally seen a black waiter dance for two Afrikaners after he said something pleasing to them.
Eva and I had tried to meet at a mausoleum next to the Victoria Street Market a few days prior, but we had lost each other in the mass of people.
“Have you seen a young coloured woman come by here in the last half hour?” I asked an Indian man painting the side of the small structure. He hadn’t, so I left, frustrated with myself and the cheap disappearing act that the city’s center had pulled on me.
But by yesterday afternoon I had long forgotten all of it. An Indian girl sitting at the university coffee shop noticed my copy of Bob Dylan: the Essential Interviews, sparking a conversation that lasted almost four hours. Mid way through I realized I still hadn’t learned the girl’s name.
“Nikita,” she said. “I’m here a lot, usually on the deck where it says ‘faculty only.’ You can ignore that sign.” She mentioned that she was having a birthday party there in a few days.
…
I went inside the hotel lobby and called. When Eva came down, she was dressed in a short white dress that came up past her knees. We walked towards the beach looking for a bar, but before long she suggested we just go back to her room and order wine.
So we did, stopping at the pool deck on the second floor first to look on the view and take in the breeze. “I’ve had such a good time here,” she said in stark contrast to when we had met earlier. “I’m already planning my trip back.”
They had wanted her to help organize a conference on AIDS education in May. If all went as planned, she’d be back in Durban then, for a month this time, and with the opportunity to travel around.
“Usually when I travel on work, I’m stuck in a hotel room, eating hotel food in the evenings and going to meetings all day,” she said in her room, starring again out onto the Indian Ocean. “By the time I have any free time, they tell me not to go outside, because it’s too dangerous, too dark, or anything. I don’t meet anyone, or really see the place at all. But here, I’ve actually met people who are doing interesting research, who talk to me, who invite me to go surfing and lend me books … I really think I could spend a lot more time here.”
For both of our encounters until then, I was the one with the experience. Even if she had been out and about in the townships and learning about issues effecting Durban more than I, I still knew more about the greater geo-political context that it all took place in. After a few days, little had changed since then. Despite our age difference, despite being on opposite ends of a soul-probing career search, we balanced out well. I had knowledge, and instincts for the place; she had the credentials and connections to actually do something with those things. I was somewhere in the middle of my affair with South Africa. She was just beginning hers. It was the same with jobs for us, but opposite.
“I can see why you chose to come back here,” she said, still smiling grandly. We didn’t even have to pay for the wine; it was all covered by her donors. At the start of her glass she had her feet up and apologized periodically as she readjusted her hem line. But halfway through it she stopped bothering. At another time, in another place, if our conversation were far more sappy and devoid of the of questions you only pose to one who is as compelled as you are, instead of filled with them, then I might have risked getting kicked out and acted differently, but there was no need for it. So we kept talking, about home, about jobs, about Africa. She had friends in other parts of the continent who could put me up if I wanted a bed, and connections at NGOs in Durban, in case I wanted experience. I told her about the fight outside the taxi. “Maybe not one to tell your parents about, at least until you get back.” That was so far from then, it was hard to fathom.
The breeze outside was only slightly cooler than the air inside, and as they intermingled it made it so perfectly temperate that I almost agreed when she said
“I’m jealous,” she said. “You get to be here forever.”
“You’re right in a way,” I said. “It really is like a lifetime of sorts. It has a beginning, an end. By the time you leave, you’re old and wise, having experienced it all.”
“Is that so?” she asked with a smirk. Perhaps we hadn’t fooled each other at all.
I went home at 1AM and passed out on the bed, too tired to even brush my teeth.
The mattress hints of stale piss, in its stains at first and then again when I catch whiff of it more closely. There’s a sink in the room, but its square shape and steel composure evoke a sense that is closer to a prison cell than a dormitory. It’s hot as hell. There’s no fan to speak of, so I’ve chosen to leave the windows open – leave, because they were already that way when I moved in. As of yet, it’s allowed one gecko to cross the curtain and nonchalantly ascend my wall. I’m not sure where he is now.
So far, the program hosts have been generous to me. After my prospects for Uganda fell through early, I kicked off the beginning of last semester by doing a Google search for “study abroad, undergraduate, Durban.” After some sorting, I got my wish: a PDF application form with the promise of a dorm room, a cell phone, and a bed and a place at the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s university of choice. I wanted something that was unstructured, a program that would allow me to have the maximum amount of freedom, the minimum amount of control, but which would still be there to prevent, and, if need be, rescue me from despair and bail me from any mishaps. More or less, I wanted a safety net: nothing more, nothing less. And so far, I have a room the size of a Robben Island prison cell with a mattress that smells like piss and a padlock for security.
I can see them now. “Mandela endured it for 27 years, so what’s a semester? You don’t even have to work in a lime quarry during the day.” Maybe that’s a bad joke. But this is what I asked for, and what I do with it now is the question.
Down the hall and up some stairs is a communal kitchen, where outside young men were talking about girls in a solemn blend of Zulu and English.
“How is it?” one said.
“It’s fine,” I returned.
Considering I was only put on their list through a series of emails and mailings, having never met one of them until I arrived here, in Africa, I feel blessed, well taken care of. Someone is looking after me, even if they don’t really know who I am. So far they’ve provided me with a cell phone, linens, a towel, a set of plates, and some mostly non-perishable food in a reusable shopping bag.
Outside, someone is either watching MTV or listening to music.
Clearly, my thoughts are a little scattered tonight. Time to rest. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Out and about, 1-29
Yesterday was a stretch. I woke up at six in the morning for the third time that night, this time to a chorus of cicadas and exotic birds right outside my window and completely unable to go back to sleep. With nothing scheduled until 9:50, I took it upon myself to rearrange the furniture so that it would be more accommodating. My bed now rests under the window, with its foot parked just under the sink. My desk is opposite the closet and I can actually put my chair down and use it now. Prior to the rearrangement I couldn’t simultaneously have the door open, the bed out and the chair down and at my desk at once. But this makes it less prison-like. In the day, with natural light filling the room, it’s actually quite nice, especially lying in bed, where the heat is less prone and the space looms large over my head.
But that only took up so much time before the far off 9:50 deadline. I went for a walk, descending far down the hill in the direction looked out by my window, determined to find that much talked about view of Durban and the ocean somewhere down by one of the other dorms.
The last time I was in South Africa I only spent a couple of days in Durban, and none of them were anywhere near Howard College. But still, there is something so familiar about the place. Call it a smell. It’s creeps into my senses and reminds me how exotic it is here. Perhaps it’s the vegetation, or the wildlife. The humidity touches everything and blends its pheromones into one, universally appealing smell, which manages to stretch across the entire country. Durban smells like the suburbs of Cape Town, and Cape Town smells like Durban. But I imagine there is something far more unique about this college in particular, if only because it’s situated in the middle of a nature preserve. There’s so much wildlife it’s almost a hazard. They’ve warned me once already not to keep any food on my desk while the windows are open and I’m not there.
“They’ll peer into your window, see that you’re not there and they won’t stop at anything in taking it,” Anita, the program director here in Durban said. She was referring to the monkeys on campus. I haven’t seen any yet but I’ll take her word for it.
Around campus there are more reminders of where I am: uniformed black women, speaking Zulu, fill a bucket of water with the garden hose together for cleaning. Further down the hill, a Zulu couple stands at a taxi stop on the side of the road, alternately holding hands and looking at each other with tired eyes and shouting at each other with more vigor and all the same sincerity. Every path that isn’t paved is made with red dirt.
Like the sky was another kind of blue and the trees were another kind of green.
There’s a bridge to cross the road the main road that runs through the lower part of campus which I walked across the day. The view from there, as I imagine it is around much of this place is quite striking, but only because we are so far up, and so far away from where the action is. I’m disappointed for that reason. Even though we are within the city limits, everything urban about this are is a little farther away. Nonetheless, with a few taxi routes nearby, it shouldn’t be hard to get into town for very cheap, when I finally break away from the rest of my party.
I couldn’t really stand some of them yesterday.
The group itself has a range of experience traveling. There are two in particular – both from the Bay Area surprisingly – who stand out as having a lot of travel experience. They’ve done the typical route – for the affluent youth interested in the global citizen’s life: time with parents in Europe, time alone working at some kind of locally based NGO in Latin America, now Africa through college.
Lunch was at some everything-fried-plus-beer place on the North Beach. It was hot as hell, which didn't help, and humid. In the city like in the hills by campus, the air was thick and even ten minutes outside could make you sweat through your shirt. Things got better down by the beach where the heat didn't dissipate but at least it was matched by the Indian Ocean's breeze. The humidity all but dissapeared down there.
Hayden was curious about slang, if there were any words he needed to know to get around. “I remember in Brazil, that was helpful to know,” he said unnecessarily. Already, he’s starting to irritate me a little.
For NJ, the subject couldn’t help but touch on racial lines.
“Forget everything you’ve heard about the Rainbow Nation,” he said. “In South Africa we see the world in four colors: black, white, coloured and Indian, and each group has its own vocabulary.”
“You mean for each other?”
“Yes, but also just within each group of people.”
In answer to the first question, NJ listed for us every derogatory term he could for the racial groups of South Africa. Blacks, it was well understood, were called kaffirs. Like in the United States, telling this to one black person could get you a smile and a laugh. From another, it could get a punch in the face or worse.
Coloureds could be dissed by any of a list of names, most of which I hadn’t heard before. As for whites,
“There really are no derogatory terms for whites.” That answer struck me by surprise. I recalled the first and only time I had made that error of judgment during a conversation with an Afrikaans student who was sitting next to me on the plane to Cape Town from Frankfurt, when I referred to the entire contemporary Afrikaner population as “Boers.”
“That’s an old term,” he said chidingly, but ready to forgive the mistake. I found out later that the term really only meant “farmer.” With a few exceptions, the Afrikaners were not “farmers” since they had been forced into exile following the British takeover of the Cape Province, only to find gold in the area later to become Johannesburg. Most of them lived in suburbs or small towns scattered across the country; they liked barbequing (called a braai here), rugby and, depending on their age, some listened to shitty hip-hop. Calling one a “Boer” was close to calling one a “settler,” an even more derogatory term used now only by radical black nationalist groups such as the Pan African Congress. It implied artificiality – that the Afrikaners were no more to the country than whatever purpose his ancestors had been originally sent here for. In a word, it implied that after 400 years of settlement, the Afrikaners had outlived their welcome. You couldn’t get more loaded than that.
“There are some terms,” I interjected. “If you call the wrong Afrikaner a Boer he won’t he even bother to correct you, he’ll just put his fist through your face.”
“It’s not incorrect,” NJ said.
“It means farmer. It’s a term from the past that only really applies at all to a few people anymore, and I’m not even sure they’d like to be called that. It would be like going up to a black man in the States and telling him to get back to his sharecropping.”
“So then it’s a class thing,” Hayden added in, correcting me. “Now you’re just mixing up race and class; those are two different things.”
Needless to say, I didn’t like being corrected, and certainly not by someone whose experience in the country until then had amounted to a couple of airports and a single night in a dorm far up in the hills.
Evening 1-29 – 1-31
When the girls in my group wanted to go out tonight there was really no excuse not to. There were twelve of us total – ten girls, myself and one other, a guy named Alex who went by “Hayden” to avoid confusion. He was also from the Bay Area, also interested in doing development work in Africa, but together all we seemed to have in common was that we were tag-alongs to the other ten. Two days in, and what they wanted to do, we followed.
The drinking age is lower here of course, as it is in virtually every country outside the United States. With so many of us turning 21 sometime in the course of the trip it was as if the birthday had become as arbitrary as any other. We were offered wine on the plane from New York to Dakar. For many, it meant that the days of being refused alcohol on the grounds of our age had ended. It was as if we had actually turned 21 somewhere over the Atlantic. But that was on a plane. Tonight would be our first in the country without the hassle of airports, without being caught between time zones. We would be rested and ready to go.
After a deep and dream laden sleep in my room, I put on a white tee and my most expensive pair of jeans and stepped outside to go to the bathroom.
“Put on a shirt,” NJ shouted from down the hall. “Something with a collar.” I did, and stepped outside.
On Tuesday night, we were told, the only places that we could get into without looking conspicuous were all white. Like in the United States, the patrons of various clubs in South Africa tend to sort themselves into predictable racial categories. When they’re drunk and dancing, people like to be surrounded by others they find attractive and whom they most like to bed if they had the chance to, so they go to places that cater accordingly. The irony in it all is that at these white clubs in Durban, non-whites look solemnly out of place.
The first place we went to was an all-white bar and restaurant serving a mostly older crowd that played American top-forty radio hits from a few months earlier. Like movies and other elements of pop-culture in the West, music takes time to filter down to South Africa and by the time it gets there it’s already old, making the whites who listen to it look outdated and backwards, merely imitating a world they know exists but can’t see with their own eyes, and lagging at it. Tiesto would never come here. Neither would Fifty Cent, Justin Timberlake or most of the other artists they admire. It was odd, I thought at the table, drinking a vodka tonic, that in a country that has been exploding with good music of its own for as long as anyone can remember that all these people want to listen to is the same crap that we listen to on ClearChannel back home.
And this was Durban: a bunch of white young men and women and their friends, dancing to American music, wearing the American clothes that they’ve seen in American fashion magazines. I had always been struck by the isolation of South Africa. It took 27 hours to get there from New York this time, with only a brief layover in Dakar. Between here and Europe was an entire continent, so different than the rest of the world that some dared to call it another world entirely.
For the second time that day, people in my group ordered nachos. They were terrible. The cream was fresh, but it wasn’t sour. The guacamole was uniform in both its consistency and color, as if it had been pureed and came frozen. I’m not even sure the cheese was real, in fact, I doubt it very highly.
“These are so much better than the ones earlier,” one of them said of the plate. That much was unfortunately true. So we sat there and watched white people dance and shared nachos in a far corner of Africa, lauding ourselves for being such bold travelers as everyone else in our room pretended they weren’t even there.
The Parade at night, talk with Eva – 2-2
People will always laud this place for being the most progressive, the most industrial, the most unlike the rest of Africa. So often when they come, in fact, the first thing observation that leaps out of their mouth is that the place is “so much like Europe.” Perhaps it’s the architecture. Every former British colony in the world down to Sierra Leone has Victorian style buildings to brag about, but in South Africa they are especially well kept. In fact, one of the finer selections in the world can be found in Pietermaritzburg, west of here by about an hour. There the streets are so densely packed with the old houses of the institutions of old that it’s possible to imagine for long stretches of time that you are not in Africa at all. People come to see the collection from all over the world and from Europe especially, traveling to a far corner of the African continent to see something that is essentially European in nature.
“Pietermaritzburg is one of the most European cities in Africa,” I’ve heard people say. True as that may be, I never thought it was much of a compliment. After all, would you ever say “Of all the imitations of Europe in Africa, Pietermaritzburg is one of the better ones,”? or “Pietermaritzburg is a good city, at least by African standards.”
On the plane to Johannesburg, I met a young woman who was working on issues related to girls’ coming of age for an NGO in New York. This was going to be her first time in Africa, she said. She had spent a great deal of time in India and Bolivia, and the week before she was in Guatemala, where most of her work was based, but now it was off to Africa, and she’d be keeping her eyes and ears open.
A few days later we met for drinks on the veranda of the Reform Club, a small coloured spot on the boutique laden Florida Road, down the street from her guest house in one of the more posh areas of town.
“So what do you think so far?” I asked. “Any impressions of the place?”
“I don’t know … I’m a little disappointed,” she said. “Maybe it’s just where I’m staying. I’m in this old style, very colonial looking guest house, with this old British furniture everywhere, and Dutch paintings on the walls. We have dinner together every night, and the woman who runs the place is this old little white lady …” And then stepping outside everyone on the street was white as well. Florida Road was known for its fine restaurants, a few galleries and some classy bars. The place catered to tourists, of course. But most of the tourists in Durban came from elsewhere in South Africa, looking to escape winter in the high desert metros of Johannesburg or Bloemfontein to enjoy some place more tropical.
So the place was as African as any, in the sense that it was African money and African people crowding it. And yet, the only blacks present were either their servers or panhandlers who had come off from the beach where to try their luck pushing belts and cheap sunglasses over people’s dinners. Nonetheless, I encouraged her to not the locale to be representative of the entire country.
“It is there,” I said. “This is as much Africa as any part of Africa. If you’re really tired of it here on Florida Road, you should go into the city center, where everyone is black, they cook food on the street, there’s garbage everywhere and the women carry the groceries of the day on their heads. If you just walk twenty minutes down this street towards the beach, you might encounter more than one band of Zulu men shaking their fists at you who alternatively want to jump you and give you travel advice.”
And there I was referencing real events. Though I’d only driven through the city center and wouldn’t actually step foot in it until two days later, I had been on the waterfront only a few hours prior. Having come from dinner with the other people in my group, I started walking along the Grand Parade – the street that edges the water – assuming it was safe since the whole street as far as I could see was lined with hotels, each with a doorman keeping guard in front.
But not even five minutes into my stride, six gruff looking Zulus approached me with their fists raised. I crossed the street for the nearest hotel. Two of them followed me.
“We’re not trying to rob you,” one said. “The fist, it’s just a sign of Africa. We are showing our support for African unity, you see.” As the others kept walking, the man explained that they had been working on the piers until now and were just then going back home. When I told them where I was headed he looked a little surprised and insisted that I take a cab. “It’s very dangerous out here at night,” he said. “We mean no harm, but there are others, not so much.”
I hailed a cab and an Indian man with a subwoofer that I could’ve heard from a mile a way picked me up. I rode in the front seat and asked him about the area.
“Is this street no good at night?” I asked.
“Not so much, no.”
“But it’s all hotels!”
“Here?” he said pointing left. “These are apartments.” Sure enough, I looked out the passenger side window and all the doormen were gone, replaced only with the occasional lamp post and rows of bleak looking high-rises.
“Maybe it’s just the places I’m visiting,” she went on. “So far, it’s not like the other places I’ve seen. Like India, for instance, you could step off the plane and immediately you knew you were in another country. Just the smells, the colors, the shear volume of people on the street – you’ve never seen anything like it before in your life. But here, at times it feels like I could be anywhere.” And this, while we sat on the balcony of an overpriced club playing shitty American hip hop from the summer before. I couldn’t really argue with her.
At the guest house down the road where she was staying, she said, all the furniture looked like it had come out of a Victorian house. The paintings were Old Dutch portraits, and the manager, an old white woman constantly asked her where she was going whenever she left. All the guests had dinner together. In a few days she’d be moving to a hotel by the beach where she hoped it would feel less like a colonial experience.
We talked for two more hours about the future of Africa and the possibilities of our respective development careers. It was a nice talk, speedy, filled with all the references without having to pause for explanation. It brought me back to some other trips where I actually lived with the NGO workers and the talk always made me feel like an insider among insiders.
I downed two vodka tonics there. Afterwards I walked her back to the guest house and called the same cab who had picked me up before.
“Cab’s here boss,” the driver called to say when he pulled up. He did 90 K’s up the hill to the college and still managed to charge 90 Rand – a little less than fifteen dollars – for the ride.
A few days later I would discover that the club we were just at had only reopened recently, following a shooting there only three weeks before that night.
Walking through the Victoria Street Market, fight, 2-3
When the girls wanted to do what they do, either talk about Grey’s Anatomy or go to the beach and drink Triple Sec, or whatever else, it was up to Hayden and I to do something more adventurous.
We needed more food to cook, for tonight and every night after that. We also needed a couple of padlocks for the refrigerator and the locker to keep our supplies in. There wasn’t a cafeteria here, only a couple of restaurant-sized kitchens per every dorm, each with multiple, lockable fridges and half a dozen electric ranges. Ours even had a balcony and vaulted ceilings. Next door was the TV lounge with almost forty seats, all of which would be filled this week in the evening hours while the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament was being played, so we could drift between outside and inside, walking soccer and enjoying the evening cool, all while making dinner.
And to do that we needed supplies. Hayden had asked if I wanted to go to the Indian Open Market with him a day earlier for some of these things, but I was in the middle of a nine hour nap in the middle of the day (my sleep schedule still hasn’t gotten back on track yet). I took him up on the offer this day instead, so we walked down to Gate 4 and got into a Taxi.
As is the case throughout Southern Africa, a “taxi’ in South African cities rarely means a car that drives exactly where and when you want it to for a price that begins high and escalates with every kilometer traveled. In Durban, taxis – or Kumbis as they’re called in Zulu – are vans that seat up to 16 people along a specific route for a set price. Among whites and Indians, they’re known for their liability on road, dodging between cars and pedestrians at high speeds, sometimes with only inches to spare.
They’re also known for their tendency to be violent when crossing each other’s territories. On our first day there we were strongly advised never to ask a taxi to go off his route. Later I would find out that three months prior to our arrival, a driver took that risk and paid for it dearly as a rival caught him, leading to a shootout somewhere in the city that left 16 people – passengers and drivers included – dead, part of an ongoing, never-ending phenomenon throughout urban South Africa known as the “taxi wars.” When asked why they don’t take taxis, people who confidently object usually cite this reason.
But for poor blacks living in far off townships, they are as vital as cars are to suburban dwelling whites: by far the most reliable, cheapest and fastest way to and through town. This is especially the case in Durban, where, unlike in Cape Town, Pretoria or Johannesburg, there are no commuter trains, making the Kumbis the only way into the city center, a reality that is not hard to believe when entering downtown Durban, where on the busiest streets more than half the vehicles you see are mini-bus taxis.
Taxis are also the only way to get anywhere from Howard’s hillside location for cheap. At 4 Rand fifty for one person to go downtown, it was the ride that we could afford. Meter cabs may have dominated our evening transport, often for outrageously inflated prices, but in the day, the taxi, dangerous as it might be, was the only way to go, and in ten minutes flat, we were there.
This was my first time walking in the City Center, a task that I had recommended to Eva a few days earlier but never tried myself. Having driven through it before, I had expected a few crowds, but stepping out of the vehicle and on to the sidewalk, we were surrounded by people – almost all of them black – squashed between rows of street vendors on one side and shop owners whose merchandise would often extend beyond their garage door on the other side. Passing Indian owned hardware stores and cell phone boutiques, bearded men dressed in long white tunics would match our eyes and bow, their arms pointing to their storefront while still managing to be open. Walking was hard at times, and always in close quarters. I was grateful to have a small shoulder bag which I could keep in front of me for when we passed through the crowds.
Since there was no program in Durban when I came to South Africa the first time in 2004, and I had wanted to go to Cape Town anyway, I went there instead, but I did manage to visit Durban for a day and a night before I left. Driving into the City Center from the inter-provincial highway, my first reaction was that the place looked “Detroit meets the Indian Ocean, meets an African refugee camp.” The place was dense with soaring commercial buildings, most of which were concrete and grey, or were covered in an unattractive blue-tinted Plexiglas. On the street level were the same dense crowds and vendors that I saw now, all scurrying about, selling whatever they had on hand. I had almost no interest in returning.
But revisiting the idea of going back to South Africa early last semester, it occurred to me that the place might have something to offer. The largest port, with close proximity to the borders of three other countries and a massive population of Indians, mostly descendents of indentured farm laborers brought over to harvest sugarcane, the place was in many ways at the forefront of the future of the nation, and the continent at large. I thought about going back to the crowds, to the streets, to see what I could find there.
This day, I could see what they had to offer in detail: knives, both rusted and clean (we bought a clean one), machetes, fresh fruit (I had bought six peaches that morning down the street from the university for five Rand), used tee-shirts and dresses, multi-outlets, and other dusted, maybe functional electronics. The similarity between merchandise among stalls was curious. On one street, a number of stalls were selling J&B Blended Scotch Whiskey, but almost no other liquor. Most interesting of all were the stalls that sold supplies for traditional remedies, such as dried herbs and a variety of animal parts, including furs, feet, feathers and an assortment of skulls, some of them oddly human like in shape, probably from monkeys. In the back of every one of these stalls there were usually small Smirnoff bottles – the kind you see old women buying for their purses at liquor stores – filled with different colored concoctions, from brown to silver to green.
Down the way and through several blocks of this was the Indian Market we had originally set out for. The place turned out to be a sprawling complex, two stories tall indoors with a separate section that extended outside, part of which was under the freeway. The inside was clean, orderly for the most part. The only aromas were from the Indian spice stalls, each of which had buckets of colored powder: red chili powder, jeera, turmeric. Some places had their own specialty chili powders at varying degrees of intensity: “mother-in-law masala,” “mother-in-law annihilator,” “A-Bomb.”
But outside was a different story. The whole place smelled like piss, but in an endearing way. It brought a sense of familiarity, like that esoteric, perhaps imagined place that I though Africa was, that I hoped to find here, where filth was a part of everyday life, and if walked in it enough you too could become used to it – that much seemed to exist here.
What Eva had said she couldn’t find two nights before was all over outside. There the vendors were too poor to afford space inside the market, so they set up shop on boards over upturned buckets for tables, and sheets of cardboard on the asphalt. Music vendors blared cassette tapes from behind their stalls while belt vendors preferred to keep standing, letting their buckled strips of leather dangle from one arm while they pushed samples as you walked by with the other. Homeless men lay between vendors with blocks of wood for pillows. Next to the entrance of a mosque a black man worked a pair of pliers inside another man’s mouth. It looked painful. Street dentistry? I wondered. After the work was done the customer picked up a mirror, then paid him and walked away, proudly displaying a new gold cap on his lower row.
“I’ve got a camera if you see anything,” I told Hayden.
“That’s alright.” He said. “You know Shanice [a girl in our group] got hers stolen last night.”
Later I would find out that the girl in question had kept her camera on a lanyard around her wrist when they were at a club the night before. One minute she looked down to her wrist and the camera was gone.
“Maybe it fell off,” she told us. “Or maybe someone cut it off.”
The first time I had considered going to South Africa, one of my teachers advised me to go to Durban since anecdotal reports had called it the safest big city in the country. In my own experience, that seemed entirely believable. Whereas in Johannesburg and even Cape Town, the routes of the Kumbis (or mini-bus taxis that black commuters typically took to get around town in the day) were only loosely regulated, in Durban, they were specially licensed to specific areas and forbidden from going anywhere else. In Cape Town, a lack of regulation led to a random violence between drivers upset at competitors incurring on their routes, and eventually, a whole series of “Taxi Wars” in the 80’s and 90’s, when random violence turned to outright attacks on the passengers of taxis of rival companies as they passed each other. By now, that kind of directed violence was said to have subsided in Cape Town; I never once saw a driver or a driver’s assistant openly carrying a gun while I was there, even though it is legal with the proper licensing. In Johannesburg, rumor had it that shootings were still rather common.
But in contrast, Durban’s regulations seem to keep such outright violence between taxis low – at least in comparison. Moreover, unlike either Cape Town or Johannesburg, there were no trains in and out of the townships and suburbs – another site typically associated with random violence. In Cape Town it was so bad that riding a train at night on the first Friday of the month was considered suicide.
But despite its favorable reputation in compare to South Africa’s first and third largest metropolises (Durban is fourth, Pretoria is second), the important thing to keep in mind is that it still is a South African city. You have to keep your bag in front of you, keep your wits about, know who to trust by instinct alone and vigilantly avoid those you can’t. Every ten seconds some woman was being raped in this country; there are more car jackings here than any country in the world, and the violent crime rate is the highest of any nation not at war – higher than Jamaica, higher than Brazil. That much was made chillingly obvious to Hayden and I as we waited for a ride back to campus.
It was on Pine Street, near city hall where all the Kumbis lined up to while their drivers smoke cigarettes and started the reverse of whatever path they had taken to get their initially. With so many potential passengers, especially so late in the afternoon, the drivers didn’t bother to leave until their whole van had filled up. We took two of the last three seats. A few seconds later we noticed a coloured man yelling at a black man, perhaps a driver. They appeared to have some kind of disagreement. The coloured mentioned that the black man or someone associated with him had been “careless,” and that someone had been hurt. The details were vague, and it seemed apparent that at least the coloured was drunk.
Just then another coloured man came from the other side of the street and walked just past the front of our van, his mouth gushing blood to cover his entire chin. He made no effort to stop it or cover it up, as if to make a point to the others. By then some other men were gathering around to take the black man’s side. One of them, we knew, would have to be our driver, interrupted from his break to either stop a fight or engage one. I felt safe inside the Kumbi, in the back row counting change for fare. I knew this was a dispute between men who had some prior dealing with each other. There was no way there mess could erupt into something any larger than it already was and threaten us.
When a third coloured man started across the street angrily waving a rusted machete as long as my arm, I felt especially calm. Surrounded by commuters older than myself, I knew that whatever madness was ensuing or was about to ensue beyond the threshold of the wide open sliding door of our vehicle, within the Kumbi, things made sense. The people here were rational. There was no excuse for senseless violence here. One could not simply exercise his frustration over another, no matter how willing, or how frustrated he might be. There were simply too many people to ready to call out the stupidity of it all.
And that sanity would have to prevail, I thought, and not just because it needed to then but because it always had. People had to get home, the world of life and work had to move onward. There was no time for these antics and sooner or later that would be recognized, by everyone, no matter how angry or belligerent. The calm would win the day. After all, it was the only thing that kept this country from turning into Zimbabwe.
Moments later, the one woman present at the argument placed her hand on the bleeding man’s shoulder and a towel to his face. He took it. A second after that, the last seat in our Kumbi was filled and the driver came back to his seat and took us swiftly away.
Thoughts, 2-3
"Have you ever lain with someone when you hearts were beating in the same rhythm? That’s true love. A man and a woman who lie down with their hearts beating together are truly lucky. Then you’ve truly been in love, m’boy. Yeah, that’s true love. You might see that person once a month, once a year, maybe once a lifetime, but you have the guarantee your lives are going to be in rhythm. That’s all you need"
Bob Dylan, March 1978
I used to dream of cutting it out here. I used to tell people that in the deepest depths of Africa, when your greatest concern was how to eat that day, or at the very least, you were surrounded by people whose greatest concern was how to eat that day, and yours, how to feed them, then all the bigger questions would be answered at once. I’m not sure if I’ll get there.
I realize now that so much of that impulse to just disappear into Africa was driven by a desire to get away from wherever I was at that moment. I wanted to be away from where the gossip and the drama and the trivialities that I knew to be pointless but still managed to consume my life anyway all lived, and bred. In college, on the days towards the ends of long breaks that I found myself in limbo, with very little at home and almost no desire to go back to school in Minnesota, I thought about going back to Cape Town and “doing the immigrant thing” as my dad and I referred to it. That meant sleeping on a friends floor, looking for whatever job I could get, taking cash under the table but all while working towards something better, plotting a move. He’s always been supportive of my impulse to get away, and I admire that about him.
I thought about only telling a few people, and just letting the story spread its wings and turn into a legend of sorts as it flew over all of my old classmates.
“What happened to Alex?” they would say.
“He went to Africa.” He went to Africa and he’s staying there. Only your prayers can reach him now. That was going to be my line.
One day they’d notice that my Facebook photo had changed to something black and white, something of me with a shaved head and an earring, wearing a green fatigue or a flowing white shirt, and holding a staff, or an AK-47, sitting on the back of a pickup truck and looking jolly with a bunch of black men, passing back a cigarette or a joint or something, just grinning. Was it all for show, or did he actually go and just do that? Who knew, but they would see the look on my face and know that whatever it was I had set out looking for, I’d found it. I’d gone to Africa; I’d led the hard life just like the rest of them did, fought off the hardship and made peace with those who never thought I could. That’s how they’d know, I found it.
But I suppose for the plan to work, I would have had to come back eventually, like Tom Sawyer falling through the rafters to drop in on his own memorial service after everyone assumed he had drowned in the Mississippi river. I dreamed of disappearing into the jungle for years, but coming back, coming out with a beard, wiser, older, and more intimately aware of the powers of life and death than any of my contemporaries. No matter what happened in my life after that, I’d be able to say I had been to Africa and made it there. Even if you’ve never been you would know to respect that.
Last talk with Eva, 2-5
“I need two, please,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Passport photos come in a set of four, that’s thirty Rand. And like I tell everyone in this country, you never know when you’ll need the other two.”
…
I saw Eva for the second and last time last night. Her flight back to New York was this afternoon after packing and a meeting, so this was the last chance I had. After dinner, I called A. Kay, the designated cabbie for our program.
“… He charged ninety Rand to get back from Florida Road,” I said.
“Ninety Rand? Look, whoever this guy was, you’ve got to delete his number from your phone right now. That’s too much, too much …”
The ride was a quick one; from the hills right down to the edge of the beach. It didn’t take long, and it cost thirty Rand less than last time. I remembered the area from our first days there. It was North Beach, a small stretch on the breezy Golden Mile where the sea was especially fresh, and the breeze especially cool. A stone’s throw from the street from the Central Business District, I had come here several times before, most often with my group or some sampling of it, to eat, have a beer or two, and play in the water.
Just down the street was Joe Cool's, the bar and restaurant with the cheap pasta and good calamari which turned into a club in the evenings. In their bathrooms were small posters for their “Girls’ Night” with five Rand tequila shots and eight Rand LIITs. All the girls in the posters were white, but I was used to that. What struck me more was that “Girls’ Night” was a 21 and up event, for some reason. On the beach itself was the Beach Café, where two days prior I had literally seen a black waiter dance for two Afrikaners after he said something pleasing to them.
Eva and I had tried to meet at a mausoleum next to the Victoria Street Market a few days prior, but we had lost each other in the mass of people.
“Have you seen a young coloured woman come by here in the last half hour?” I asked an Indian man painting the side of the small structure. He hadn’t, so I left, frustrated with myself and the cheap disappearing act that the city’s center had pulled on me.
But by yesterday afternoon I had long forgotten all of it. An Indian girl sitting at the university coffee shop noticed my copy of Bob Dylan: the Essential Interviews, sparking a conversation that lasted almost four hours. Mid way through I realized I still hadn’t learned the girl’s name.
“Nikita,” she said. “I’m here a lot, usually on the deck where it says ‘faculty only.’ You can ignore that sign.” She mentioned that she was having a birthday party there in a few days.
…
I went inside the hotel lobby and called. When Eva came down, she was dressed in a short white dress that came up past her knees. We walked towards the beach looking for a bar, but before long she suggested we just go back to her room and order wine.
So we did, stopping at the pool deck on the second floor first to look on the view and take in the breeze. “I’ve had such a good time here,” she said in stark contrast to when we had met earlier. “I’m already planning my trip back.”
They had wanted her to help organize a conference on AIDS education in May. If all went as planned, she’d be back in Durban then, for a month this time, and with the opportunity to travel around.
“Usually when I travel on work, I’m stuck in a hotel room, eating hotel food in the evenings and going to meetings all day,” she said in her room, starring again out onto the Indian Ocean. “By the time I have any free time, they tell me not to go outside, because it’s too dangerous, too dark, or anything. I don’t meet anyone, or really see the place at all. But here, I’ve actually met people who are doing interesting research, who talk to me, who invite me to go surfing and lend me books … I really think I could spend a lot more time here.”
For both of our encounters until then, I was the one with the experience. Even if she had been out and about in the townships and learning about issues effecting Durban more than I, I still knew more about the greater geo-political context that it all took place in. After a few days, little had changed since then. Despite our age difference, despite being on opposite ends of a soul-probing career search, we balanced out well. I had knowledge, and instincts for the place; she had the credentials and connections to actually do something with those things. I was somewhere in the middle of my affair with South Africa. She was just beginning hers. It was the same with jobs for us, but opposite.
“I can see why you chose to come back here,” she said, still smiling grandly. We didn’t even have to pay for the wine; it was all covered by her donors. At the start of her glass she had her feet up and apologized periodically as she readjusted her hem line. But halfway through it she stopped bothering. At another time, in another place, if our conversation were far more sappy and devoid of the of questions you only pose to one who is as compelled as you are, instead of filled with them, then I might have risked getting kicked out and acted differently, but there was no need for it. So we kept talking, about home, about jobs, about Africa. She had friends in other parts of the continent who could put me up if I wanted a bed, and connections at NGOs in Durban, in case I wanted experience. I told her about the fight outside the taxi. “Maybe not one to tell your parents about, at least until you get back.” That was so far from then, it was hard to fathom.
The breeze outside was only slightly cooler than the air inside, and as they intermingled it made it so perfectly temperate that I almost agreed when she said
“I’m jealous,” she said. “You get to be here forever.”
“You’re right in a way,” I said. “It really is like a lifetime of sorts. It has a beginning, an end. By the time you leave, you’re old and wise, having experienced it all.”
“Is that so?” she asked with a smirk. Perhaps we hadn’t fooled each other at all.
I went home at 1AM and passed out on the bed, too tired to even brush my teeth.
.
Zimbabwe talk, 2-10
Until today, no one had Zimbabwe on their menu.
Before coming here, I considered a map of the countries I had been to following my return. If I maxed out grandest prospects for regional travel, I would have a covered most of the states in the region. A three or more day expedition to Mozambique via Swaziland to practice my Portuguese and experience the local latinesque nightlife – that’s already in the works. If I did a day in Lesotho following an already scheduled trip to the Drakensburg region, that would be another.
With any luck, I could make it to Botswana via Johannesburg, and then from Cape Town it would only be a short job up to Namibia at the end of spring. With a few exceptions, that would mean every country in Southern Africa, and every country bordering South Africa – except Zimbabwe.
That would constitute one big, gaping hole on my map, representing the real sink hole of the universe, where reason and good health have not found safe refuge in more than twenty years. No one except the most connected, the most livid travelers would be stupid enough just to waltz across the border there, no one except the ones most respecting of the madness that existed in that country, the type of which there are none in my group.
Sure, with beautiful landscape, a favorable exchange rate, one of the highest literacy rates in the third world and a population that is widely characterized as well read, well informed and constantly willing to talk, there is a certain appeal to visiting the place. But the danger makes going there like playing with fire, or petting a lion: an unpredictable situation that, despite its appeal, can turn lethal at any instant. None of us talked about going there.
That much changed today when a traveler at the hostel we were staying at unabashedly recommended that we take a first class train into the center of Zimbabwe for the 1.000.000 Zimbabwean Dollars (about 1 USD), and, among other things, visit a game park where we could walk with, pet, and play with lions. The conversation over dinner later that night was dramatically different than in the nights before.
“Why did he say we should go?” a girl from my group asked.
“He said because the people there were really chill, and he actually got to hang out with them, and they were nice and stuff …”
When people discuss the problems facing Zimbabwe, they usually talk about inflation. It’s the only thing that appears to be on the up these days; it’s also one of the few things that follows a predicable trend. Outside observers know it’s bad there, but as the situation changes radically from day to day, they never seem to know how bad it really is at any given time, except that it’s probably as bad as you could imagine. Then again, the backwards, anti-fairy tale that is Zimbabwean reality has readily pushed the limits of everyone’s imaginations for more than two decades. Every report that comes out of there seems like a rumor, bizarre legends pieced together from snippets of first-hand accounts.
In my own reading of the place, I know of determined white farmers holed up in their farms for weeks, if not longer, armed to the teeth waiting for periods of political instability to pass. Days when the president declares a day of reckoning on whites mean that anyone caught with fair skin on the streets of Harare is beaten mercilessly. That this traveler would recommend a game park to us at all is especially unfortunate, since I recall seeing photos of elephants starved to death in the nation’s game parks since its keepers had run out of food to feed them.
“It’s less violent, and more just destitute,” Hayden smugly informed me while smoking a cigarette in my face over dinner. He took a full second to blink his eyes as he said that. And what the fuck would you know about Zimbabwe? I wanted to ask.
I keep finding that smug people like this one, who, unsurprisingly, came out of a prep school in San Francisco, live off of truisms: little statements that are true and clever and because they are true and clever they think that is all there is to say about the subject at hand. So often I find it hard, if not impossible to argue with smug people for this very reason. I can’t just say, “You’re wrong,” because if I want to be honest where they are not, I have to open the case that they have already declared closed. I have to say something like “it’s not that simple,” followed by why this is, and what the greater, more complex truth is, and that rarely comes off as easily as their simple, clever statement. And this is more or less what happened over dinner. Where Hayden made a grandiose statement based on his own misguided optimism and the account of someone who he trusted, I countered with something less jovial, less succinct, and admittedly, less clever. Sure, Harare was not like Johannesburg, a city which if you had a death wish I could easily point you to. There were scarce reports of robbery, or rape. By that standard we were probably less safe in Durban. Zimbabwe was no gangsters’ paradise.
But there was violence. Even if it was sporadic and centered in areas where we agreed no one would be going, what was there was legally condoned. Reports coming out of Zimbabwe talked about government sponsored youth groups that effectively preyed on white settlers, and anyone else they mistook for one. In Johannesburg, you at least had the support of the police behind you. In Zimbabwe, the police – along with these youth groups, the army and their other allies in the country – were exactly who were against you.
And destitution, too, can have its dangers. I told them about the chapter on Zimbabwe in Paul Theroux’s overland Africa travel account Dark Star Safari, in which he was temporarily stuck in the country at a time when the entire country had run out of fuel. By luck alone, he had a friend who had saved a tank and was willing to drive him to the border to safety at a time when violence was beginning to erupt.
A day after the dinner, on the bus back to Durban, I sat next to a white woman from Zimbabwe, who some chance ended up telling me her story. She had had farm there before the government sent in waves of attacks to take it from her. Before long, they lost the entire place and were forced to South Africa with the clothes on their backs and 100 Rand for the entire family. It was a story like that of any other white Zimbabwean refugee.
I asked her if it was safe there now. “I suppose you could go there for holiday, if you wanted,” she said, “except they do run out of water sometimes.”
The ride back from Umzumbe, conversation with Joan, walk with Nicole 2-10
At the Kumbi stand on Pine Street, nine people in our group of eleven caught a taxi early and filled its last seats. Nicole, a girl from Los Gatos originally who now went to Berkeley, and I were the only ones left. Left on the street, we agreed to take another ride. I told her I knew a place nearby that sold Shwarma for a dollar, so she smiled and we went on our way. I think as far as I go I’ll keep getting stuck with people from the East Bay being alright with it.
We had come back from the hostel in Umzumbe just a minute prior. On that bus I had actually managed to catch one of the last seats. An old white woman with platinum blond hair took her purse off the space next to her and I sat down. Before long she struck up a conversation with me, and I explained that I was from the States, was studying at Howard College in Durban, and that this was my second time in Africa – the same gist I gave everyone I met.
“My grandchildren live in the states,” she said as she pulled an envelope from her purse and pointed to the return address.
“Idaho,” I said. “I’ve spent a lot of time there. Beautiful state.”
Inside the envelope were photos. She flipped through each, pointing out her grandchildren. This one’s doing well, this one not so well. They seemed like any ordinary American family, with a tract house and a swing set. Looking at their faces you would never have suspected their roots were in Africa. When it got to a photo of a middle aged woman who I took to be the boys’ mother, she skipped the photo without explanation.
After some time it came out that the woman was from Zimbabwe. A man next to her, old enough to be her son, also white and wearing sunglasses, nudged her with a bottle wrapped in a paper bag a few times. As she started speaking in a low tone, slowly telling her story about leaving Zimbabwe she finally took a swig.
“We had a farm, a beautiful farm. We would go away on vacation and come here and leave the house open. When we got back it would be cleaner than when we left it. They were so good to us then. You can’t do that here.”
She lost the farm “and all that jazz” as she put it dimly, when it was repossessed during the land repatriation program that made the country’s then and current president Robert Mugabe famous. In sparse, quiet sentences that drifted from our conversation, sounding like a prayer to conjure ghosts, she mentioned “waves of attacks” that eventually forced her off.
“We came to South Africa with 100 Rand in our pocket,” she said returning. And for whatever reason now they were on the back of a bus again, passing a bottle around, while she sat clutching a purse and recalling out loud how they had gotten there. It must’ve been no different the first time they had come to the country. There was hardly anything I could say to that.
Ian Smith, the last white president of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) had died in November somewhere in his 90’s at his home in Harare. He had stayed there all his life, unwilling to leave, remaining a stalwart testifier to the benefits of white rule, almost to his dying breath. Before the war that would end white rule in that country and give rise to Mugabe insinuated, he had said unequivocally that no matter how little they thought of blacks, white rulers like him were better for blacks than their own leaders. He died vindicated.
And then there was Zuma – the ANC’s controversial presidential nominee, the coming election in South Africa, Mbeki and all the rest, right down to the South African national rugby team, which, for the first time in its history, was considering a qualified but coloured coach, to the disgust of many of its core fans. It seemed that everywhere you turned there was some kind of prophetic message about black and white leadership going head to head.
I wanted to ask her what she thought of South Africa’s future now, coming from where she did.
“Well I suppose the writing’s on the wall, isn’t it?” It was as much as I had expected from old white Zimbabwean like herself: a bleak assessment, but there was more. “I think they’re going to have to elect this Zuma fellow. If they don’t, people are going to be very upset. The youth, you see, it’s the youth who you really have to watch out for. That’s how it happened in Zimbabwe. When the youth got angry there was no stopping them, and this Zuma fellow, he seems very well tied to them.”
It was true. And it was true that Mugabe had won over the youth, turning groups of them into state sanctioned land repossession gangs, as they went from farm to farm, violently evicting whites and forcing them out of the country, to England, Kenya, Australia, and, in most instances, South Africa. Zuma’s ascension to the presidency was no sure thing, especially with the resistance he’s met, stemming both from a general dissatisfaction with the ANC, and with the man himself. I recalled my conversation with Nikita a few days prior.
“I used to be a card carrying member of the ANC,” she said, invoking the sense of pride she once felt, one passed down to her by her parents, both saboteurs who had hid in Mozambique with her for long periods of time, crossing the border occasionally to plant bombs at government agencies.
She told me in that conversation that she always voted because she thought of the time she was hiding in a safe house and her older cousin – another anti-Apartheid revolutionary – hid in a cabinet, and instead of arresting him the police shot every inch of it and every other cabinet in the place to make sure he was dead.
“But there is no way in hell that I am voting for a known rapist for president,” she said. For that instant I put aside anything I may have heard about the man and believed every word of what she said.
…
“Do you belong to a church?” Joan asked me nonchalantly as we approached the Durban airport.
“Not at the moment, no,” I said, conveniently excusing myself by saying that with college and study abroad I was always moving around and that it made it hard to belong to any kind of static community.
“Right, I see, but you have some kind of … relationship?” she said, pointing up.
“You could say I’m working on it,” I said.
“Good, good.” There was a long pause. “I think you’re bound for something here,” she said. “You’ve got Africa in your blood, and once you’ve got it, nothing else satisfies. It’s that wildness, that danger. It’s here, it’s always here. I went to England to see relatives and I was so surprised by how … orderly it was. I couldn’t manage.
“But it’s good that you have some kind of relationship, because you really have to have that in this country. You need something to count on, to keep you in the chaos, because it happens here.”
She had me read a prayer card, and then she took down my address and gave me her phone number without prompting.
Update, 2-11
“If you can make the Zulus laugh, then you’re halfway there.” That was what Joan, the white Zimbabwean woman who I sat next you on the bus back from Umzumbe told me, almost out of the blue, between two long pauses in our conversation. I believed her.
I had my first class of “Afrikaans for Beginners” today, one of the three that I’m taking here. I came in late and took a seat on the right side, next to two Indians and one black student. On the other side were something like ten black students, probably all Zulus.
As we were going around introducing ourselves, the professor, a very dark Indian gentleman, commented that students were prone to date within the class.
“I didn’t think Afrikaans was such a romantic language,” I said out loud. They all laughed, the kind of laugh you laugh when you see someone whose wronged you get what they deserve. I suppose that’s understandable, coming from what they did. Maybe I’ve won them over a little.
I got my passport photo today and I’m thinking of getting my visa to Mozambique tomorrow. I’m not sure when I’ll use it exactly, but it takes six days to process and it’s good for two months, which gives me until mid-April. I think I can live with that.
I might go with Nicole. She wants to travel but won’t go alone, for all the obvious reasons. She says, too, that she has different priorities than the other girls, which is understandable as well. I didn’t think I’d be going with someone else when I got here, but after thinking about it, it sounds like a much better idea than going by myself.
A friend from Iowa told me that apparently there’s a way to get to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, through Swaziland, all via a network of Kumbis. The cost of that whole endeavor? About thirty to fifty Rand. It’s a little more dangerous than some of the other options, of course, but you see more of the country.
Sitting here in my room, nearing the end of a lengthy collection of Bob Dylan interviews, the danger scares me less than it ever has. I’ve come to the part where Dylan has come out of an extended period of seclusion, only to find that he’s only grown older than even he realized, and that his seven years away from the world had brought him very little in return. It’s a stark contrast to the image of care-free, cigarette wielding youth on the cover of the book. There, he’s about my age. On page 411, he’s 60, with heart problems.
"That night in Switzerland, it all just came to me. All of a sudden I could sing anything. There might’ve been a time when I was going to quit or retire, but the next day it was like, ‘I can’t really retire now because I really haven’t done anything yet,’ you know? I want to see where this will lead me, because now I can control it all. Before, I wasn’t controlling it. I was just being swept up by the wind, this way or that way."
Bob Dylan, December, 2001
Please, God, tell me I won’t end up like that. Tell me that realization will come when I’m thirty, if not before, and not thirty years afterwards. Tell me I’m not getting swept up by the wind. Tell me I’m working towards something here.
Alright, fine, I’ll go to Mozambique.
Until today, no one had Zimbabwe on their menu.
Before coming here, I considered a map of the countries I had been to following my return. If I maxed out grandest prospects for regional travel, I would have a covered most of the states in the region. A three or more day expedition to Mozambique via Swaziland to practice my Portuguese and experience the local latinesque nightlife – that’s already in the works. If I did a day in Lesotho following an already scheduled trip to the Drakensburg region, that would be another.
With any luck, I could make it to Botswana via Johannesburg, and then from Cape Town it would only be a short job up to Namibia at the end of spring. With a few exceptions, that would mean every country in Southern Africa, and every country bordering South Africa – except Zimbabwe.
That would constitute one big, gaping hole on my map, representing the real sink hole of the universe, where reason and good health have not found safe refuge in more than twenty years. No one except the most connected, the most livid travelers would be stupid enough just to waltz across the border there, no one except the ones most respecting of the madness that existed in that country, the type of which there are none in my group.
Sure, with beautiful landscape, a favorable exchange rate, one of the highest literacy rates in the third world and a population that is widely characterized as well read, well informed and constantly willing to talk, there is a certain appeal to visiting the place. But the danger makes going there like playing with fire, or petting a lion: an unpredictable situation that, despite its appeal, can turn lethal at any instant. None of us talked about going there.
That much changed today when a traveler at the hostel we were staying at unabashedly recommended that we take a first class train into the center of Zimbabwe for the 1.000.000 Zimbabwean Dollars (about 1 USD), and, among other things, visit a game park where we could walk with, pet, and play with lions. The conversation over dinner later that night was dramatically different than in the nights before.
“Why did he say we should go?” a girl from my group asked.
“He said because the people there were really chill, and he actually got to hang out with them, and they were nice and stuff …”
When people discuss the problems facing Zimbabwe, they usually talk about inflation. It’s the only thing that appears to be on the up these days; it’s also one of the few things that follows a predicable trend. Outside observers know it’s bad there, but as the situation changes radically from day to day, they never seem to know how bad it really is at any given time, except that it’s probably as bad as you could imagine. Then again, the backwards, anti-fairy tale that is Zimbabwean reality has readily pushed the limits of everyone’s imaginations for more than two decades. Every report that comes out of there seems like a rumor, bizarre legends pieced together from snippets of first-hand accounts.
In my own reading of the place, I know of determined white farmers holed up in their farms for weeks, if not longer, armed to the teeth waiting for periods of political instability to pass. Days when the president declares a day of reckoning on whites mean that anyone caught with fair skin on the streets of Harare is beaten mercilessly. That this traveler would recommend a game park to us at all is especially unfortunate, since I recall seeing photos of elephants starved to death in the nation’s game parks since its keepers had run out of food to feed them.
“It’s less violent, and more just destitute,” Hayden smugly informed me while smoking a cigarette in my face over dinner. He took a full second to blink his eyes as he said that. And what the fuck would you know about Zimbabwe? I wanted to ask.
I keep finding that smug people like this one, who, unsurprisingly, came out of a prep school in San Francisco, live off of truisms: little statements that are true and clever and because they are true and clever they think that is all there is to say about the subject at hand. So often I find it hard, if not impossible to argue with smug people for this very reason. I can’t just say, “You’re wrong,” because if I want to be honest where they are not, I have to open the case that they have already declared closed. I have to say something like “it’s not that simple,” followed by why this is, and what the greater, more complex truth is, and that rarely comes off as easily as their simple, clever statement. And this is more or less what happened over dinner. Where Hayden made a grandiose statement based on his own misguided optimism and the account of someone who he trusted, I countered with something less jovial, less succinct, and admittedly, less clever. Sure, Harare was not like Johannesburg, a city which if you had a death wish I could easily point you to. There were scarce reports of robbery, or rape. By that standard we were probably less safe in Durban. Zimbabwe was no gangsters’ paradise.
But there was violence. Even if it was sporadic and centered in areas where we agreed no one would be going, what was there was legally condoned. Reports coming out of Zimbabwe talked about government sponsored youth groups that effectively preyed on white settlers, and anyone else they mistook for one. In Johannesburg, you at least had the support of the police behind you. In Zimbabwe, the police – along with these youth groups, the army and their other allies in the country – were exactly who were against you.
And destitution, too, can have its dangers. I told them about the chapter on Zimbabwe in Paul Theroux’s overland Africa travel account Dark Star Safari, in which he was temporarily stuck in the country at a time when the entire country had run out of fuel. By luck alone, he had a friend who had saved a tank and was willing to drive him to the border to safety at a time when violence was beginning to erupt.
A day after the dinner, on the bus back to Durban, I sat next to a white woman from Zimbabwe, who some chance ended up telling me her story. She had had farm there before the government sent in waves of attacks to take it from her. Before long, they lost the entire place and were forced to South Africa with the clothes on their backs and 100 Rand for the entire family. It was a story like that of any other white Zimbabwean refugee.
I asked her if it was safe there now. “I suppose you could go there for holiday, if you wanted,” she said, “except they do run out of water sometimes.”
The ride back from Umzumbe, conversation with Joan, walk with Nicole 2-10
At the Kumbi stand on Pine Street, nine people in our group of eleven caught a taxi early and filled its last seats. Nicole, a girl from Los Gatos originally who now went to Berkeley, and I were the only ones left. Left on the street, we agreed to take another ride. I told her I knew a place nearby that sold Shwarma for a dollar, so she smiled and we went on our way. I think as far as I go I’ll keep getting stuck with people from the East Bay being alright with it.
We had come back from the hostel in Umzumbe just a minute prior. On that bus I had actually managed to catch one of the last seats. An old white woman with platinum blond hair took her purse off the space next to her and I sat down. Before long she struck up a conversation with me, and I explained that I was from the States, was studying at Howard College in Durban, and that this was my second time in Africa – the same gist I gave everyone I met.
“My grandchildren live in the states,” she said as she pulled an envelope from her purse and pointed to the return address.
“Idaho,” I said. “I’ve spent a lot of time there. Beautiful state.”
Inside the envelope were photos. She flipped through each, pointing out her grandchildren. This one’s doing well, this one not so well. They seemed like any ordinary American family, with a tract house and a swing set. Looking at their faces you would never have suspected their roots were in Africa. When it got to a photo of a middle aged woman who I took to be the boys’ mother, she skipped the photo without explanation.
After some time it came out that the woman was from Zimbabwe. A man next to her, old enough to be her son, also white and wearing sunglasses, nudged her with a bottle wrapped in a paper bag a few times. As she started speaking in a low tone, slowly telling her story about leaving Zimbabwe she finally took a swig.
“We had a farm, a beautiful farm. We would go away on vacation and come here and leave the house open. When we got back it would be cleaner than when we left it. They were so good to us then. You can’t do that here.”
She lost the farm “and all that jazz” as she put it dimly, when it was repossessed during the land repatriation program that made the country’s then and current president Robert Mugabe famous. In sparse, quiet sentences that drifted from our conversation, sounding like a prayer to conjure ghosts, she mentioned “waves of attacks” that eventually forced her off.
“We came to South Africa with 100 Rand in our pocket,” she said returning. And for whatever reason now they were on the back of a bus again, passing a bottle around, while she sat clutching a purse and recalling out loud how they had gotten there. It must’ve been no different the first time they had come to the country. There was hardly anything I could say to that.
Ian Smith, the last white president of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) had died in November somewhere in his 90’s at his home in Harare. He had stayed there all his life, unwilling to leave, remaining a stalwart testifier to the benefits of white rule, almost to his dying breath. Before the war that would end white rule in that country and give rise to Mugabe insinuated, he had said unequivocally that no matter how little they thought of blacks, white rulers like him were better for blacks than their own leaders. He died vindicated.
And then there was Zuma – the ANC’s controversial presidential nominee, the coming election in South Africa, Mbeki and all the rest, right down to the South African national rugby team, which, for the first time in its history, was considering a qualified but coloured coach, to the disgust of many of its core fans. It seemed that everywhere you turned there was some kind of prophetic message about black and white leadership going head to head.
I wanted to ask her what she thought of South Africa’s future now, coming from where she did.
“Well I suppose the writing’s on the wall, isn’t it?” It was as much as I had expected from old white Zimbabwean like herself: a bleak assessment, but there was more. “I think they’re going to have to elect this Zuma fellow. If they don’t, people are going to be very upset. The youth, you see, it’s the youth who you really have to watch out for. That’s how it happened in Zimbabwe. When the youth got angry there was no stopping them, and this Zuma fellow, he seems very well tied to them.”
It was true. And it was true that Mugabe had won over the youth, turning groups of them into state sanctioned land repossession gangs, as they went from farm to farm, violently evicting whites and forcing them out of the country, to England, Kenya, Australia, and, in most instances, South Africa. Zuma’s ascension to the presidency was no sure thing, especially with the resistance he’s met, stemming both from a general dissatisfaction with the ANC, and with the man himself. I recalled my conversation with Nikita a few days prior.
“I used to be a card carrying member of the ANC,” she said, invoking the sense of pride she once felt, one passed down to her by her parents, both saboteurs who had hid in Mozambique with her for long periods of time, crossing the border occasionally to plant bombs at government agencies.
She told me in that conversation that she always voted because she thought of the time she was hiding in a safe house and her older cousin – another anti-Apartheid revolutionary – hid in a cabinet, and instead of arresting him the police shot every inch of it and every other cabinet in the place to make sure he was dead.
“But there is no way in hell that I am voting for a known rapist for president,” she said. For that instant I put aside anything I may have heard about the man and believed every word of what she said.
…
“Do you belong to a church?” Joan asked me nonchalantly as we approached the Durban airport.
“Not at the moment, no,” I said, conveniently excusing myself by saying that with college and study abroad I was always moving around and that it made it hard to belong to any kind of static community.
“Right, I see, but you have some kind of … relationship?” she said, pointing up.
“You could say I’m working on it,” I said.
“Good, good.” There was a long pause. “I think you’re bound for something here,” she said. “You’ve got Africa in your blood, and once you’ve got it, nothing else satisfies. It’s that wildness, that danger. It’s here, it’s always here. I went to England to see relatives and I was so surprised by how … orderly it was. I couldn’t manage.
“But it’s good that you have some kind of relationship, because you really have to have that in this country. You need something to count on, to keep you in the chaos, because it happens here.”
She had me read a prayer card, and then she took down my address and gave me her phone number without prompting.
Update, 2-11
“If you can make the Zulus laugh, then you’re halfway there.” That was what Joan, the white Zimbabwean woman who I sat next you on the bus back from Umzumbe told me, almost out of the blue, between two long pauses in our conversation. I believed her.
I had my first class of “Afrikaans for Beginners” today, one of the three that I’m taking here. I came in late and took a seat on the right side, next to two Indians and one black student. On the other side were something like ten black students, probably all Zulus.
As we were going around introducing ourselves, the professor, a very dark Indian gentleman, commented that students were prone to date within the class.
“I didn’t think Afrikaans was such a romantic language,” I said out loud. They all laughed, the kind of laugh you laugh when you see someone whose wronged you get what they deserve. I suppose that’s understandable, coming from what they did. Maybe I’ve won them over a little.
I got my passport photo today and I’m thinking of getting my visa to Mozambique tomorrow. I’m not sure when I’ll use it exactly, but it takes six days to process and it’s good for two months, which gives me until mid-April. I think I can live with that.
I might go with Nicole. She wants to travel but won’t go alone, for all the obvious reasons. She says, too, that she has different priorities than the other girls, which is understandable as well. I didn’t think I’d be going with someone else when I got here, but after thinking about it, it sounds like a much better idea than going by myself.
A friend from Iowa told me that apparently there’s a way to get to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, through Swaziland, all via a network of Kumbis. The cost of that whole endeavor? About thirty to fifty Rand. It’s a little more dangerous than some of the other options, of course, but you see more of the country.
Sitting here in my room, nearing the end of a lengthy collection of Bob Dylan interviews, the danger scares me less than it ever has. I’ve come to the part where Dylan has come out of an extended period of seclusion, only to find that he’s only grown older than even he realized, and that his seven years away from the world had brought him very little in return. It’s a stark contrast to the image of care-free, cigarette wielding youth on the cover of the book. There, he’s about my age. On page 411, he’s 60, with heart problems.
"That night in Switzerland, it all just came to me. All of a sudden I could sing anything. There might’ve been a time when I was going to quit or retire, but the next day it was like, ‘I can’t really retire now because I really haven’t done anything yet,’ you know? I want to see where this will lead me, because now I can control it all. Before, I wasn’t controlling it. I was just being swept up by the wind, this way or that way."
Bob Dylan, December, 2001
Please, God, tell me I won’t end up like that. Tell me that realization will come when I’m thirty, if not before, and not thirty years afterwards. Tell me I’m not getting swept up by the wind. Tell me I’m working towards something here.
Alright, fine, I’ll go to Mozambique.
