Part III, 2-27 - 3-12

Scatterings 2-27

My inbox came with a warning this morning. “… 200 students at the Edgewood campus in Pinetown blockaded the entrance in a protest action aimed at drawing attention to the slow pace at which students are receiving financial aid payouts. They also point to the registration appeals process which is taking too long to complete,” it said. “The South African Police Services are on the scene.”

I thought about what Joan had said.

How close is this country, really, to being just another African state that’s period of optimism and economic functionality has given way to chaos, where the whites leave in droves and the blacks divide themselves among their clans and fight it out with each other for dominance? This is the most stable nation in Africa, they say, so probably pretty far. The real danger of the youth should never amount to more than the small riots and roadblocks at universities that it does now.

That is the realistic expectation, which is more than the benefit of the doubt. People who were surprised about Kenya were either ignoring huge aspects of the fragility with which the nation was being held together for virtually its entire half-century of existence, or they were just being completely unrealistic about how stable Kenya really was.

Until then, I roam the campus and the city, with occasional ventures elsewhere, catching glimpses of the “true” face of this country, it’s “wildness” as Joan had said – but just glimpses. Other times I feel as though I could be anywhere, maybe not the states but certainly in a lot of other places. Then, at times, even that will change.

This morning I found myself in the lounge of my dorm watching whatever the resident already there was watching. It was an American talk show, one of those Christian ones where they two women talk about Christ like it was a man they had both loved from another time in their life and still thought fondly of.

“Thank you for sharing your story with us,” the host said. “I can feel the love of Christ running through you, and I just know it’s running through many of our viewers right now. Now I want to talk to you about bringing some of that love to those most in need. With your one-time gift of just 48 dollars, you can help build a well for a village in a drought stricken part of the African continent, bringing water to ten people. For 480 dollars, you can bring water to a hundred people on the African continent, for life.”

It took me a minute to appreciate the irony that I was watching this from the one corner of the African continent, albeit not a very drought stricken one. The wonders of globalization had brought requests for charity almost to the back door of its intended recipients, and I had been caught not even realizing it.

It wasn’t long after that that I reaffirmed an earlier decision from that morning, that I needed to get out today. I hadn’t been into town since the week before, and with no classes on Wednesday, it was as good a time as any to go. I took a Combie from Gate 4 to the City Center, arriving around 2 PM. Hungry, I set out for lunch at one of the local eateries.

One thing positive I can say about Durban for certain is that the blending of foods has never been inconspicuous. The people here have been fusing cuisines for as long as the option has been available, and you don’t have to walk far through downtown to find the local creations. In the States they might be called “Asian fusion.” Here, they’re just lunch. Dishes like mince meat samosas (an English meat recipe packed inside fried Indian dough), and its reverse, chicken curry pies (Indian meat recipe inside English dough). Boerwors, the Afrikaans sausage of choice can be found almost anywhere for anyone and served by anyone as well, be they Indian, Zulu or other. Some places also stock mutton sausage, which is essentially the same thing, except more acceptable among Hindus. One item recommended to me by my fellow sailors is the somewhat common chip and cheese roti – a serving of French fries covered in cheese sauce and served in a flat Indian bread. I didn’t find that today, so I settled for a heaping pile of chicken curry over pap – the indigenous South African version of a thick maize porridge common throughout almost every part of Africa. At a mere 12 Rand with servings of two kinds of coleslaw, it was more than just delicious.

But that was the only highlight of my outing.

A few blocks later I took a swig from my water bottle but decided to save some for later and slipped it into my shoulder bag. Not long after I felt wetness on my right leg. With rain passing in and out that day, I ignored it, figuring it was just a leaky roof that I had walked under. But not long after it felt dripping, and looking down, I realized my water bottle had opened itself up and emptied inside my bag. The book I was reading at the time and a notebook were sorely damaged. For a minute I threw a fit on the street not caring who saw me.

I took both items out and kept walking. For four Rand I took the bus to the beach and decided to make the most of it all by sitting and reading comfortably situated between the heat and the breeze. At first, I first laid down on a concrete slab with my bag under my head. After that became uncomfortable, I sat up and kept the bag to my side. Not even five pages into reading I heard a sliding sound only to notice a kid my age with his hand on my bag. When he saw that I had caught him he nonchalantly kept walking as if to apologize for inconveniencing me.

“Get a job, motherfucker!” I yelled from twenty feet away, again not caring who saw me. He kept walking. I’ve realized this week that I’ve become more significantly more bitter towards the people here since the last time I was here.

Even if it doesn’t thrill, always, this part of Africa at least it manages now to do something for me that the whole continent is known to do for foreigners and returning immigrants, people who have one foot in the West and another here: it pisses me off, frustrates and annoys me. Tourists, falling under the larger category of visitors, don’t feel that. Visitors either see nothing of the place or only see what is unfortunate but ultimately does not affect them. Visitors are filled with optimism for the place, but it is often a sensation that is entirely baseless, or based only on the most selective understanding of the country they visit. There are visitors in my group. I may have been a visitor my first time here, but that subject is still being debated. My view certainly wasn’t very selective then.

But the next time someone tries to rob me I’ll link it to this time. The frustration will pile on itself and admitting to it will concede everything that is so unexceptional about this place. Within a few weeks I will be conceding my own Afro-pessimistic attitude to anyone who will listen. “This continent is going nowhere fast,” I’ll tell the jubilant incomers. Maybe then I’ll say I’ve lived here and I know it for what it truly is.

“The great thing about being a pessimist is that you’re constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised,”

- George F. Will

Honestly, I can’t wait. I think I’m finally beginning to fit in.

Easter Break pals and the like 2-28

I couldn’t help but feel discouraging tonight.

Hayden and I have been riding a streak of actually getting along, something that I suppose is born out of necessity more than anything else, being the only non-black and among a very few non-Zulus in our entire dorm. So we cook together; it’s what we do. As of two weeks ago, the little group that was the party that we came here with did what most all cliques do after whatever veneer of optimism that was covering it wears off and people realize they’ve spent too much time together: it split apart. Some stuck with each other; others went looking for new people. Hayden and I were one of very few who had distanced ourselves long before, and in our separation, we’d found each other, in the kitchen.

The conversation at first was about what to cook, and then about stupid, trivial things like “what sort of music do you listen to?” a question I hate to ask and hate even more to answer, as my answer is inevitably a variation on everyone’s: “I listen to a lot of stuff, but mostly Bob Dylan and Jazz.”

That was how it started anyway. Later it got into a more sincere talk about Africa, and environmentalism, a subject that touched on briefly, which he was fine to talk about but that I only listened on.

“Everything gets recycled, and people get recycled, and that’s how you go on,” he said. I was impressed. It was one of a few instances where he sincerely let his guard down what still at times appears to be a basic instinct to be smug had subsided. Even then he was still being wise, and not in the most positive sense. But there were some (admittedly rare) times when he actually looked less than on top of things, when he willingly accepted that he didn’t know more than the other person in the room about the given subject, and his humility, however reluctant, showed through.

“What does ABSA stand for?” he asked as we passed one of their branches during our day at the Victoria Street Market.
“Associated Banks of South Africa,” I said. “There were like four or five of them and they merged together years ago to be more competitive.” For every inch he gave me I’d repay him with two.

But tonight as we made Thai curry he began telling me about something sincerely and my willingness to reciprocate never came through.

“So I was talking it over with Kelly and Nicole and Jordan today, man” – already I knew this wasn’t starting well. It sounded oddly like an inquisition, like a setup for peer pressure, like he was one of the housemates to tell me what the other three actually thought of me. He also said ‘man’ far too often and so often in just the wrong places entirely. Once I had caught him say the word three times in two short sentences, at the beginning and end of one: “yeah man, that’s a great idea. Yeah man, I’ll talk to you later, man,” I think it was. Waiting for a cab at the grocery store one afternoon, a fellow international student from Iowa not on my program had mentioned that he was especially pissed at someone else from his university, a fellow Iowan who talked too much and had absolutely nothing to say, because he represented his state poorly, and he felt that the association was carrying over. Hayden was from San Francisco, the only other guy on our program, and Asian, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. “Have you seen the South Park episode about the Prius?” I asked him. “That’s exactly what he’s like.”

“Yeah, anyway, I was talking with Kelly and Nicole and Jordan, and we were talking about our plan for Spring Break. Your totally welcome, but um, we were thinking of starting in Nambia, and then going to Botswana, Zambia, then to Vic Falls and then maybe through Zimbabwe then, and then down back to Durban through Mozambique.”

They, we, had two weeks. It had taken my group four years ago that much time to travel from Cape Town to Durban along the coast, stopping periodically but never more than two nights at a time. Some times we drove for ten hours straight. It was a great trip, a fantastic trip, but in a part of the world where the roads were admirable, the people were easy to get along with, and there were no borders to cross. I couldn’t help but raise the obvious question.

“You really think you’ll have the time?”
“I don’t know, man. I mean I hope so. It’s just kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity, you know? I just don’t know when the next time I’ll be in Africa will be.”
“How long do you want to spend in Namibia?” I asked.
“Maybe a couple of days.”
“Just in Windhoek or do you want to go elsewhere?”
“Probably just there, yeah.”
“And then to Botswana?”
“Yeah, man, yeah.”
“Truthfully, if you cross the border into Botswana from Windhoek, it’s really just the same country all over again. It’s all the Kalahari Desert; I mean if you want to see the coastline in Namibia or something, that’s different –“
“Yeah, well it’s a different city, a different country, different culture and people.”
“Sure. But I mean, what you could do is just fly to Johannesburg, which would cost you half as much, and then just go to Gabarone, which is only a few hours away from there, and then go up through Botswana and see all of that.”
“Where’s Gabarone?”
“It’s the capital of Botswana.”
“That’s true, man, but I really wanna see Namibia.”

Less than a week ago he couldn’t even pronounce the capital of Namibia correctly, despite insisting since he got here that he wanted to go there. The place name was also the name of one of South Africa’s most common beers. Wind-Hock, he said, referring to the beer. “Vint-Hook,” I corrected him. Tonight he didn’t know where Gabarone was. He also seemed more than a little unrealistic about the distances he was intending to travel. Just coming back to Durban from Maputo – the capital of Mozambique an close to its southernmost border – took about six hours. That was where the roads were well maintained and the flood damage was minimal. Coming from farther north where that was not the case could take you a week, and that was just Mozambique. They were small mistakes, forgivable for people not planning to go to these places or who were but were also curious and still asking questions. But this guy was determined, and assumed he knew exactly what he was doing, and for his smugness I couldn’t help but rub his errors in from time to time.

Even so: Namibia, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Even Mozambique was on the list. It had all come together in one place, even if it was just a map in his head. I respected his insistence, and I was flattered that he would invite me.

“You could also fly from Windhoek to Lusaka, in Zambia, go to Victoria Falls from there and just skip over Botswana,” I advised him. “Like I say, the stretch between Windhoek and Zambia is going to be a lot of the same landscape.”
“Yeah, but I really wanna see Botswana.”
“What specifically?”
“(Laughs) Infrastructure?” It was a curious answer, and one that I didn’t really understand, though I knew saying that out loud just wasn’t going to get us anywhere. “There’s also some AIDS camps that I want to see there.”
“AIDS camps?” I was again unsure what he meant. It sounded like he was talking about a leper colony or something. “Where about?” I asked.
“One of the big cities.”
“So in Gabarone.”
“Yeah, maybe. I have to look into it.”
“That’s the only big city in Botswana,” I said.
“Well I don’t want to just see cities, man. I mean cities are cool, but what appeals to me, personally, is that really expansive African landscape, you know? In my opinion, that would just be a really amazing experience, so I just kind of want to see that, man.”
“You just said you want to see some AIDS camps.”
“That’s true, man.”
“In Gabarone.”
“Well you know, I’m just thinking about my own logistics right now; a lot of this can change. I’m not spending any more time here after the semester’s over, so I just don’t have any other time, man.”

And there again was that smartass attitude of his, overshadowing whatever possibility his trip really had. It had backfired before, when he had distanced himself from the group in part to befriend two French engineering students who he considered more worth his time but who hardly returned the affection. Later, it was in signing up for an especially but unnecessarily rigorous course schedule, which, as it turned out, had left him no free time to do the things he wanted. He had to switch out of almost all his classes.

This evening he had proposed we make a curry out of potatoes, coconut milk, turmeric, red chili powder, onions and leftover sausage. I thought it was ridiculous, but somewhere over the course of our talk, it actually turned out alright. He was happy to take credit for it, and I let him have it.

“So how do you think we do this?” he had asked me on the onset.
“I don’t know; this was your idea.”
“Curry? I thought that was your thing.”
“This is another kind of curry.”

Twenty minutes later, after boiling the potatoes with olive oil like you would pasta, cutting up four sausages to add to the two we already had and taking out a can of coconut milk which until then he had kept in a fridge for god only knows what reason, he admitted amidst a trickle of laughs that he had no idea what he was doing. For me, the metaphor to everything we were talking about was glaring. “I think I’ll just figure it out as I go along,” he said.

Yeah, and maybe I’ll meet just you afterwards, when you’re done with it all.

Free State disaster zone 2-29

For this weekend, the program arranged for us to take a trip into north and west of Durban to see the epicenter of the Zulu world. For the second weekend in a row I had plans far off campus, and this time I didn’t even have to pay, so after class I went back to my room, packed my things, took a few notes and got ready to leave.

My phone rang. It was a text message from Nicole, inviting me to a protest.

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, so I went to the library and looked for the big news. The story that day was about a mess at Free State University in its namesake province on the western border of KZN. Some white kids had filmed a group of custodians – three women and one man – running around like fools and eating meet which the boys had taped themselves pissing on just moments before. As they ate, the boys espoused the “way of the Afrikaner” and some other white supremacist nonsense.

Half an hour later, I went to the bus stop. Alana was passing out printouts from CNN.com summarizing the story. Everyone in the group was disgusted, and so was I, but unlike them, I was neither shocked that this had happened or about how the group was reacting to it. I thought back to my conversation with Shelden returning from Newlights, about the rape last semester and how people had reacted to it, about how, when people came across they didn’t understand, they went back to Apartheid, to race, to the old paradigms that made the system evil from inside and out and perhaps still did.

“I can’t believe people are surprised this happened,” Yohanna said. Alana agreed
“People think that since the Apartheid laws ended that there’s no more racism, no more Apartheid, but there is,” she said.

It’s a common phrase among both South Africans and Americans who talk about race relations in their own country that systematic oppression of black people has not ended with more progressive legislation, it simply went from being overt to being subvert, where it continues to act but in more subtle ways. Racism is said to be ever present among whites, just hidden behind closed doors where whites talk quietly amongst themselves. So when what was meant to be an inside joke among a few white people was exposed to South Africa’s blacks and to the world after the girlfriend of one of its makers leaked after they broke up, the angriest saw it as the true face of White South Africa – young whites acting out their fantasies of racial domination in front of the camera.

Assuming that whites were always just inclined to be secretive about their true racial opinions anyway, how representative this was of what they really thought of blacks was unclear for those who harbored suspicions anyway. Naturally, some just assumed the worst: every white person in the country was into this sort of shit. Overnight, one group’s sick joke had made a full ten percent of the country look almost as bad in the eyes of the world as they had before F.W. De Klerk went against his party to release Nelson Mandela from prison eighteen years ago. South African whites had found their Jenna 6.

At the bus stop, rumors circulated about how the video had been made and what had inspired it, so I was glad to know something about the province and its predicaments already. Even during Apartheid, Free State had been a bastion of white and specifically Afrikaans rule. Having forfeited the Cape Colony to the British at the onset of the twentieth century, the Afrikaners ventured east in search of a place of their own to live free of British incursion, eventually settling into two independent republics, Transvaal, built squarely in the desert on a plethora of gold mines with Johannesburg at its center, and the more scenic, more arid Orange Free State to its south.

As the city of Johannesburg grew uncontrollably with its exploding gold economy, attracting black workers in droves, Free State emerged as a more homely alternative for modest Afrikaners whose intent in moving east in the first place had been less about getting rich and more being allowed who to associate with, a right denied to them under British rule.

After the Second Anglo-Boer War, when the British, led by Cecil Rhodes, crushed two Afrikaner republics intending to wrest their wealth for themselves, Free State, and its counterpart, the Transvaal, were consolidated into the greater Southern African Empire. After independence, they became provinces in the South African Republic.

But Free State’s identity as the Afrikaner homeland, where no one could incur on their way of life lived on. Even today, among white people, it was known for little more than its secluded landscapes and reclusive inhabitants. Street signs were often in Afrikaans only, and before 1994 you couldn’t even be in the province after dark if you were black. Being caught otherwise could have landed a person in prison, and often did. Since then, a few compounds of Afrikaners had sprouted up there, founded by old whites who were determined to find one last place to live on their own accord, as they wanted, free of the English and black people. The places gained international notoriety – a curiosity for those who had followed the anti-Apartheid struggle to its last days and wondered now about who that tremendous paradigm shift had left behind. Journalists would sometimes venture out there to interview the Afrikaners about what there lives had been like since Apartheid had ended, like some “Entertainment Tonight” feature on the villainous cast of yesterday’s news, long after they’d held the attention of the world. “Especially Hateful White South Africans: where are they now?” If you ever had doubts, they were in Free State.

As it turned out, the video had been made a few years ago as a protest among friends to one of the university’s failed attempts at integrating its on campus residences. After the university had been opened to black applicants, the residences were made open as well. But after a few years, as integration of the races was failing to materialize, the administration pushed to put blacks and whites in the same dorm. Riots ensued among both parties, and administrators all but gave up, reviving the issue once every few years after incidents of violence would break out again between whites and blacks as one stepped onto the other’s turf and was assaulted for it.

Now South Africa’s blacks - if not the world at large - wanted answers. The whole of the white race in the country was being asked to provide an explanation for the actions of a few.

I remember one night how I mentioned off handedly to some of the girls that I was glad NJ didn’t feel out of place with us on our nights out. I enjoyed his company, and it was nice that he didn’t feel or even look out of place at the venues we went to despite usually being the only black person in the entire room.

“We don’t like what you’re saying, Alex,” one of them said.

Three of the girls in my group are black, and just like in the States, any even slightly general comment about black people could be interpreted as racism, and racism was not tolerable, despite how true some of the notions were. On the other hand, during our nights out, people were frank when they said they hadn’t met a single white person that night that wasn’t racist, like announcing the uncontestable conclusions of some recent study.

As our pus went out the main gate and down Francois Street, we passed some telephone polls with the headline news posted to them, enticing passersby to buy a newspaper and read the whole story (South Africa is one of the few countries in the world where newspaper readership is on the rise).

“Zuma cheated taxman, says state,” read a headline from the Mercury. Zuma also had four wives and was rumored to be HIV positive, and at that juncture, he was still simultaneously being investigated for corruption a sling of corruption charges and primed for the nation’s highest office. Moreover, as Nikita had memorably pointed out to me, some of his reported interactions with women were more than just the result of “old-fashioned” ideas about gender roles, as some had said, they were outright assault.

The program had arranged for this to be an assembly of all their exchange students in the province, and a few others. The twelve of us from Howard made up the bulk of the group, but there were still a few from other places – four from UKZ-N’s Pietermartizburg Campus, and one from the University of Witwatersrand, outside Johannesburg, who had come there originally from the University of Minnesota. Spotting a chance to socialize outside of my predetermined clique Howard attendees, I leapt at the opportunity to meet the new people.

By breakfast the second day, I had already left the long table of Howard students to go sit with two girls from Pietermaritzburg and the one guy from the U of M at first and now Witwatersrand. Before long, the talk turned to Easter Break plans. We had almost two weeks off, as it turned out.

“I was thinking about going to Botswana,” I said. They sounded interested.

Zululand 3-1 (written at a truck stop @ 14:18)

We started late today, like yesterday, pushing our schedule back another half day. Supposedly we’ll be seeing a museum, King Shaka’s grave and a few other things tomorrow, the day we go back, instead of this afternoon which has been taken up by incessant stops for food, a side effect of both starting late and the Shakaworld resort that we stayed at yesterday not providing the lunch they had promised us.

It’s about halfway through now, and this trip has said few things positive about the organizational sensibilities of everyone involved.

Earlier today it was a stop at a plaza of fruit stands where our tour guide bought us bottled water, crackers that tasted like nothing and an assortment of fruit which was almost impossible to eat on the bus. That we had to make the stop at all was difficult enough, especially upon hearing that even though our guide refused to call it lunch, it was going to take the place of lunch anyway.

“I don’t want to call it lunch,” she said, “because it’s really more of a snack. There’s really nowhere to eat from here until we get to the Game Park for dinner, so come now, and I’ll buy you some snacks for the road.”

But instead of making a wholesale purchase for all of us, the woman had to take piecemeal orders for each individual group at each individual stand after the twenty of us had broken up into groups of four or five and scattered ourselves across the place, despite the fact that every stand was selling exactly the same thing.

“Does anyone want some bananas?” she asked when she got to my assembly.
“Sure.”
“Guava?”
“Why not.”
“Peaches? If we get peaches we have to wash them.” If there was any sink in the vicinity it wasn’t like we knew anything about it, so honestly I’m not sure how she expected us to answer that one

Half an hour later we were back on the bus, peaches in hand, which brings us to now, at a service station complete with a Steers, a KFC and a convenience store where I write this now. Despite her claim that there was nowhere to eat until our final destination for that day, just twenty minutes down the road we discovered this place to make up for earlier follies – both those of our guide and Shakaworld. On arrival, she promised to buy lunch for anyone who wanted. I passed, knowing that the final stop and its promised buffet were (in theory) just a few hours away.

But half of our especially large group took up the offer anyway, ordering burgers and chips at Steers and then coming to wait on the bus for their orders while the rest of us waited for them.

Through the window in the parking lot, I saw Nicole walking atop the half wall that separated the parking from the lot next to it in her bare feet, like a balance beam. She didn’t order anything, money-conscious vegetarian that she is.

“I love her,” one of the girls in the bus said. “She’s just so in her own universe.”

Watching her, it made the day thus far feel easier manage, after lunch had been cut out of our schedule, and the waiting it had necessitated, which only added to the stress already induced by the Mariah Carrey singles, played on repeat throughout the bus despite our vocal complaints. If any of it had bothered her, she didn’t show it, walking from end to end of that wall, and then stopping on the street side to gaze onto the landscape. I wondered if she was looking at anything at all, or just checking in case there was anything to see.

Afterwards she climbed down an adjacent pay phone to reclaim her sandals and water bottle. A car pulled into the space in front of it just as she was getting down, and she waved and exchanged smiles with its driver, as though to apologize for taking up the space, though he didn’t seem to mind.

We went on the road not long after.

The good, the bad and the smug 3-4

So, is it worth noting that Hayden had the brilliant realization earlier today that he could fly from Windhoek (he still can’t pronounce the place name) to Lusaka and skip over Botswana, like I had advised him to days ago? Of course he didn’t care to mention that part in our conversation earlier. Honestly, I doubt he even remembers. The real matter for him is the added convenience that this will bring. Someone should tell him what I forgot to mention earlier, though, which is that there are no flights between those two cities. The whole of Namibia has a population about the size of Oakland, and Lusaka, by most accounts, is a sprawling jungle mess with tall buildings that house corruption and little else. There really isn’t a lot in the way of traffic between those two locales. This isn’t Europe, after all. There’s no Rhyne Air or universal Rail Pass to just sing you along from one third world state to the next. All your flights have to go through Johannesburg, and by then you’re not really traveling between countries in the traditional sense, your just making two separate trips, and at a great cost which I doubt even he could afford.

So much of the time, it’s not even what he says it’s just how he says it that pisses me off. No matter how flat he falls he just can’t admit that he doesn’t know that much about this region. He still thinks that Cape Town is an easy weekend trip that won’t cost him that much and that he won’t even need to take off class for, and that Zimbabwe is plenty safe just because Chris from Umzumbe who went there and pet lions said it was cool. To prove how much he knew and how busy he was knowing it, he blew up at Shanice earlier today when she asked him for advice on traveling the neighborhood.

“I’m not in the business of making itineraries for people,” he said smugly in the kitchen tonight. That’s right, Hayden, because you can barely hammer out a plan for yourself.

I could tell you more stories, but I really don’t care to this evening.

The news and business as usual 3-5

The headlining news on TV hit on all usual themes today: ANC rivalries, issues for the upcoming election, Mbeki’s denial, Zuma’s populism, and all of it under the ubiquitous subject of crime. As of today, Zuma wants to reopen discussion of the death penalty, which was outlawed after 1994. No study on the subject has ever proven a link between the death penalty and a reduction in crime, and people seem to get this, but it does go to satisfy a thirst for retribution which runs high in this country.

“I think the death penalty is good,” one mother whose infant daughter was killed by a stray bullet in downtown Johannesburg said. “They took someone from my family, and now their family will also lose someone.”

Last year there was an average of 51 murders in South Africa every single day, it said. Zuma hasn’t been afraid to call it a crisis, in firm opposition to his rival, President Mbeki, who calls the nation’s reputation for high rates of violent crime a “misperception.” He and the goons in his cabinet appear to be the only ones claiming that.

They were about to go onto the next story, about riots at the Edgewood Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in the Pinetown township of Durban. But one of the guys in my dorm entered the room just then and changed the channel to look for a soccer game or something. I didn’t bother to stay after that, but no matter, there’ll likely be something about it in my inbox tomorrow morning.

Thoughts 3 -7

Sometimes I’ll just go into a sort of trance, lying in bed after a nap (I do that a lot here; maybe it’s the heat) or just sitting at the laptop between extended typing sessions where I think about bullshit back home – drama that burned a hole in me a semester and another world away. When I hear someone mutter a greeting across the hall and through my door in Zulu, and it’s such a relief. It’s startling, too, but just to be reminded of that: I’m here, I’m in Africa. If ever I want to shut out my contact with home, or even just restrict to a select few people, I can. I don’t even have to do anything, I’m already here and they can’t touch me. If I hadn’t told anyone no one except the registrar would know where I was at all. If I leave, go somewhere else, through a string of combies and busses and trains, in the backs of pickup trucks and bicycles or anything else, then they’ll never be able to track me.

I was never naïve enough to believe that I could evade all my problems with other people just be putting some distance between me and them. Just look at the racist, still backwards Afrikaners who, in failing to either move to Australia or take Desmond Tutu’s words of self-forgiveness to heart, they just moved off to Free State or the Karoo to live in a compound with other whites as hateful and backwards as they are, where they are as far from the people they fear as they can possibly be while still being in someplace they call home. How much of their inferiority complex is the result of being the neglected part of a now powerless white minority in a black country on an even blacker continent, and how much of it is baggage from 400 years ago, when they were the collected runoff of the prisons and poor-houses of Amsterdam and sent here, rejected from their homeland but still forced to serve it anyway? No one wants to be an Afrikaner these days. That’s what people will tell you now. The truth is that no one has ever wanted to be an Afrikaner. No one wants there people’s only contribution to the international cultural melting pot to be a string of rugby stars, fragments of a language that nobody likes and an usual tasting beef sausage that only South Africans can pronounce and that’s only eaten in South Africa. Nobody wants to have to go out into the world and defend that, either.

“But to speak Afrikaans would be like speaking Nazi, if there were such a language,” J.M. Coetzee said of his college days in London in the seventies. You might be surprised how little things have changed since then.

Nobody wants to dance like an Afrikaner, or fuck like one. If you’ve ever been to a white club in this country you’d understand what I was talking about.

I’m not an exile here, wondering why I ever left home, nor am I a fully acculturated citizen of an adopted society. I’m an exchange student, for chrissake. I take classes, I travel, and I’m frugal with money. I buy people drinks even when I can’t afford it. And I observe, and meet people, and I write. It’s a job; it’s a living; it’s a way to focus at those times that I forget where I am or what it is that I’m doing here. On days like today, that’s what gets me through.

Is dis goed met jou? Ek kan nie kla nie. Ek lekker werk.

Alles van die beste, totsiens.

Tilt 3-8

A few people invited me out last night, and reluctantly, I accepted, knowing full well I had nothing else to do that night and really I hadn’t gone out in a long enough while that the money I would inevitably spend there seemed justifiable.

We called A. Kay, the international crowd’s designated cab driver, and he arrived within ten minutes. A. Kay’s always been known to be a nice guy, with fair rates. He remembers names and talks to you while he drives. Between rides he smokes Stuyvesant cigarettes, which is probably why only the front half of his upper teeth are left, but his car never wreaks of smoke, even slightly. And with one exception, when he’s praying at the mosque for an hour and a half on Friday afternoon, any day of the week between 6AM and 12AM, he’s available for hire. With his tinted windows, he was also willing to fit five people in the back seat this night while I rode shotgun.

The club we were going to was called Tilt, and it was just across the street from the International Conference Center – a massive modern looking glass and white painted steel complex built a few years after 1994, on the site of an old prison. When we arrived, I was reminded that the government had left the main gate, a wall and two guard towers of the old institution to serve as its own memorial. You could see it all from the balcony.

The towers still had their light blue glass in tact, like the control towers of a small airport, lending them both a surprisingly contemporary air that almost matched the ICC adjacent to it. To think: only fourteen years ago there had been a prison in downtown Durban, square between the beach and city hall, established to collect and neutralize the threat of non-whites reluctant to submit to the Apartness which the state had imposed on them. It was chilling.

But after Apartheid’s end, the police state that was its caretaker also vanished, and instead of being pushed into the townships on the peripheries of the cities where it was ignored, and cracked down upon ruthlessly when it spread elsewhere, violence had spread throughout the country, in the cities, the suburbs, on the beaches of Durban and in the clubs on Florida Road. In tearing down one prison, the state had left others to be overcrowded. Now there was talk of reinstituting the death penalty.

On our way to Tilt, one of the people in our cab, a black student who I hadn’t met before with an accent that suggested he had gone to boarding school mentioned that he had had a difficult afternoon.

“I saw someone get shot today.”
“Who? Where?” the attention inside the cab focused acutely.
“It was a thief, outside the Workshop,” he said.

That was one of the main shopping areas of the city, right downtown, a block from city hall and very near the Combie stand where Hayden and I had witnessed the fight between the blacks and the coloureds where one had a machete a few weeks before.

He went on to explain that the thief had shot the first round after running from wherever he had come from. The crowd panicked, and then a pair of cops shot him in the chest. As he stumbled, almost to the ground, they shot him twice more and he fell, never to get up again.

“The police here are so corrupt,” one of the girls said.

It was true. There propensity for excessive use of force was infamous, even if it, like the death penalty, had the political advantage quelling the public’s lust for retribution. But even as a cop could be unnecessarily violent towards one party, they could just as easily be found to be in bed with another. Letting some heinous criminals slide because they had paid them off and killing others because it was the easiest way to end their crime streak – that was the way of the police these days.

A. Kay interjected. “Oh, but you can’t blame the police,” he said.
“They shot somebody today,” the original witness said firmly.
“They’re told to shoot to kill these days, because if they didn’t there’d be more crime, and nice people like you wouldn’t want to come here anymore.”

On the way, we stopped at the ABSA so Yohanna and the shorter Amanda could get cash. There was an ABSA ATM on campus, and the extra detour had added ten rand to the bill, but that didn’t seem to deter the girls.

“70 Rand.” That was the bill: even, and agreed upon before we had left, with the extra addition for the earlier stop. A. Kay didn’t use a meter.
“Ok,” Yohanna said. “So that’s twelve from everybody, right?” I didn’t even care to acknowledge that request with an unimpressed look, so I just paid my ten and stepped away from the car.

Sunday morning 3-9

Before Tebogo invited me, I hadn’t been to a church service since I was in my early teens and at my aunt and uncle’s house in the mountains of New Mexico where it was compulsory. Even then, I failed to get along with them for more reasons then I can name. My dad had always said he looked at his older brother and saw what he might’ve been had I not come into the picture. He was tall, built, and had a temper that a ten year old could, and often did set off (my cousin was never quite as quiet as I was at that age). The man simply did not know how to relate to children, and neither did his wife. And that somewhere down the line, after a bout with alcoholism and (family rumors have it) coke, they took up evangelical Christianity as their new path could only mean bad things as far as I was concerned. After all, just because you’ve been saved doesn’t mean you’re a good person, it just means you have a veneer to cover your bad deeds with.

And then on Saturday night, Tebogo invited me.

“I think you should come to church with me,” he said getting something out of his kitchen locker. “You sing, the guy talks while you sit there, you feel good. I’ll come get you, half-past-nine.”

To be clear, in principle, I’ve got nothing wrong with religion or with evangelical Christians and their churches. I like gospel music; I respect a lot of evangelicals that I’ve met. I know and I can see how their faith has bettered their lives, so to be invited by this one who I knew came at first as a surprise, but then, I thought why the hell not.

“Sure,” I said. “Come wake me up.”

Tebogo was a member of the Tswana tribe, one of the few at Howard, and hailed from Pretoria. With no place in the area and very little money for a room even if their weren’t a housing shortage, he did what a lot of students without housing did, he squatted, keeping his few things – clothes, a suitcase, notebooks, pencils, Tupperware, an iPod and a bible in a pair of lockers in the kitchen – and sleeping between a couple of chairs that he put together every night in the lounge with the broken TV across from Hayden’s room in the basement of Townley Williams.

We had met at the beginning of the semester. Considering that the kitchen was shared between three floors, it was odd that so few people seemed to actually use it. Tebogo was in and out almost any time that I was there, for breakfast, lunch or dinner, though rarely to cook anything. Usually he was just going through his lockers, charging his phone or socializing with some of his friends, mostly Xhosas from the Eastern Cape.

Early on we’d talked about the city. He didn’t like it much. “The beaches are not that great,” he said. Pretoria was a half hour drive from Johannesburg in Guateng, the desert province in the middle of the country where all the gold mines were. They might have had sand there but there certainly weren’t beaches. Even so, he was insistent, Pretoria was better. If I came to Pretoria, he would show me a real city. The people were nicer there as well, he said. Here where most everyone was Zulu and only hung out with their kind, in Pretoria the people were willing to talk to you no matter who you were.

“So what should I wear?” I asked on Saturday.
“You could come like that,” he said. At the time I was wearing quick-dry shorts, a short-sleeve shirt and flip flops. I wondered what kind of church this was, but on Sunday morning, I found out. Tebogo came and knocked on my door, dressed in leather pants and flip flops and holding a small bible in one hand. We walked up Francois to what I thought was science related building. As we got closer, I realized it was. The service was in a rented lecture hall upstairs.

When we got inside the whole crowd, mostly students, was standing and singing hymns. “You can read Zulu, can’t you?” Tebogo said, clapping between rhythms with the assembly. He pointed to a projection screen where the words were spelled out for the newcomers who hadn’t yet memorized them. They switched to English not long after our arrival and it went on like that for most of an hour.

“Lord, I can feel your presence here today, amen,” the pastor, a thirty-something coloured man with a wide smile said. “I really do believe that everyone here today has been touched by Him, and if there’s anyone who hasn’t yet accepted you, Lord, as their personal lord and savior, then maybe today will be that day that they do, amen.” The assembly echoed that one.

Halfway through, the pastor asked if there was anyone who had not yet been saved, and three people raised their hands. He asked them to come see him after the service.

I remembered Joan asking me if I belonged to a church or not. “I’m working on it,” I remembered saying. Wherever she was now, she would have been happy to know I was at a place like this, among my peers, standing, clapping and singing with all of them. I’m not sure if the presence of God was something that had been conjured in that lecture hall or if it were real. Honestly, I didn’t matter to me then. Whatever this presence was, at the very least, I understood what the pastor was talking about.

After the service Tebogo and I went and sat down over some coffee with one of his friends, another T-Willy resident. I realized Tebogo had only recently been converted. “You know the bible says that if your arm makes you sick, you must cut if off, if your eye makes you sick, you must take it out,” he said. “I called home and I told my girlfriend back in Pretoria, ‘I’ve been saved,’ and she just said, ‘what are you talking about?’” he laughed. “You know this guy is going to Zambia,” he said, pointing to me across the table. “Of all the places, Zambia! Zambia and Zimbab. I keep telling him, they are crazy their, mafutu, crazy.”
“Of all the places in the world? Well, you know, there are good beaches in Somalia, I’m told. And there’s a nice resort in Sierra Leone, and another in Liberia. Oh, and the jungles in the Eastern Congo? Beautiful. You’re right, man, I should just go there instead.”
“They cut off people’s arms in Zambia, mafutu.”
“And South Africa has the highest violent crime rate of any country not at war. Zambia is not at war; neither is Zimbabwe.”
“But you go to Johannesburg, you can collect statistics, you can see for your own eyes what’s going on there. They keep records of that. In Zambia and Zimbab, there is no one to do that, no one.”

It was all in good spirits, of course. I was joking a little, and Tebogo was being overly cautious. In any case, he was right: after two and a half hours of singing and hearing a sermon, surrounded by people my age who had “accepted the Lord as their personal savior,” I felt good. I felt optimistic. I had the whole day ahead of me, and for now, I was sitting next to friends, and one in particular who was genuinely looking after me. I don’t care if he was wearing leather pants and flip flops at the time. His heart was genuine.

“Did I see you at church today?” A young woman asked me on the stairs up towards the library later that evening.
“Yeah, I was there,” I said.
“Who did you come with?”
“Tebogo, the Tswana, from Pretoria. Short guy with a gold tooth. He had a red shirt today.”
“I don’t know him.” She started walking away. “Did you enjoy the service?”
“I did,” I said.
“Well I hope to see you there again, and many, many times after.”

I smiled and walked away without saying anything.

Johannesburg Talk 3-12

“There is nothing in Johannesburg, I swear!” A. Kay said, his hand swatting at the air as he drove us back from the mall today. This, after Jordan had said that he, Kelly and Hayden were kicking off their Easter Break with three full days in Johannesburg.
“I’m really not sure why Hayden wants us to be there for three days,” Jordan said. “He’s got some itinerary but I haven’t looked at it at all. I’m just worried we’ll get bored as hell there. A. Kay, what parts of the city should we really avoid?” He was talking about safety.
“Well, you don’t really want to see any of the city,” he said. “You can go downtown, but it’s just buildings. See this is what you do: you take a day; you go to the Apartheid Museum. Get the cab driver’s number, and when you’re done, you call him back. After that you go to your Backpackers or wherever you’re staying, and the next day you can see Soweto, that’s the largest black settlement in South Africa, and then the next morning, get out of there. That’s how you go to Johannesburg.”

But of course, since they were leaving Lusaka by way of international jet to Lusaka, that wasn’t really an option. They were stuck there, and why anyone would want to be for three days, without intending to see a lot of the nightlife or the arts seen there would have been a mystery to me. But Hayden was intent on going to see his “friend” Chris, one of several he had half-handedly acquired during his time here. Like the French engineering students and the pair of Tutsi refugees he had courted with them at a bar in Durban for their stories of fleeing machete wielding militants in the Eastern Congo, Chris was someone who Hayden had taken up and called a friend after not many encounters because of what he was as a connection, a story.

I had actually met Chris myself. He was the young Brit at the Backpackers in Umbzumbe who had been traveling along the South African coast with the cute girl who’d flown down from London to see him and always wore striped halter tops. Everything thought they looked cute together, even me, but they weren’t together – not in that sense – it turned out later. They were just best friends. When I thought back to it, I liked that about them. I wondered if there had been any tension between them in the past and it had taken a long time to work out but now they thought every minute of it had been worthwhile.

But regardless, Chris was to me the one who had advised us all to take a train to a rural part of Zimbabwe and pet lions. If you look close, you can find three completely ludicrous things to do in that single piece of advice. Never the less, it had set Captain Smug off onto the seas of Southern Africa, at least in his head. He was determined to go to Zimbabwe after that. I’m not sure if he’ll make it this time, though he’ll probably have the opportunity if he’s smart about it, which is not guaranteed, either. More importantly and already scheduled for now is a trip to a township outside Johannesburg to see Chris’ NGO, a pediatric burn victim support center with the strange title Children of Fire.

From how Chris had talked about it, it sounded like they did good work, but I couldn’t stand the name. Why couldn’t they have just called it something generic, or at least less like the title of some obscure fantasy novel? After all, who said that just because you had been scolded with hot oil a few years before meant that you were now one of these elusive “Children of Fire”?

I told A. Kay my group would only be there for an afternoon and a day and then leave very soon after that

“See that’s perfect,” he said. “You spend a day there, and then the next morning, you’re gone, because there’s other places you can go that are better, like Zambia, or Zimbabwe or something.”

With the two girls from Pietermaritzburg, Cat and Kate, and the guy from the University of Minnesota who goes to Witwatersrand outside Johannesburg, I’m planning to go to Johannesburg on the afternoon of the 19th, stay there until the early afternoon of the 21st and go to Gabarone, Botswana. We’ll spend 24 hours there before leaving for Fransistown, Botswana by train, then we’ll take a bus north to the Zambian border, cross over in the early evening and stay in Livingstone, by Victoria Falls for the next two nights. If the locals say its safe, we’ll walk across the border into Zimbabwe and see what we can find before heading back. After on the 26th we’ll take a bus to Lusaka and see more of Zambia before flying back on the 30th before classes start the next day.

I made up the schedule myself, planning every detail I could and synthesizing it into seven pages of word processed notes and a dozen emails. There are a bunch of people going to Zambia at the same time: Hayden, Kelly and Jordan is one group. Nicole, Shanice and Alaina are another. We’re almost guaranteed to be in Livingstone on at least one of the same nights, though with any luck I’ll get to pick and choose who I see among them.

It’s weird how there’ almost a competition going around: our four versus the other groups of three. But if that’s the case then I want to have the better trip. I want to beat the socks off of them. If they go to Zimbabwe, I want to go to Zimbabwe and do it better. If they get a cheap ride through Botswana I want to get an even cheaper and dirtier one.

Tebogo warned me that they ate rats in Zambia. If these others don’t, than maybe I will, because I’m going to have a good trip, by god, a fun trip, a memorable trip, and I’m going to take lots of notes and lots of photos. The other three will look up to me at the end of it and say “I’m glad I went with him.” When we get back, Isaac will come to one of our parties across the river and tell the boys about how I saved his ass from armed guards in Zambia. But I might not have to, either. Maybe it’s his good Christian moral compulsion, but Tebogo’s promised to utilize his connections to pressure a guy here at school from Zambia to call up his friends back in the home country to protect us during our time there.

“They’ll tell you where to go, where not to go. Maybe afterwards you give them fifty rand or something,” he said. If they come through and they do that well, friend, I’ll give them plenty.

I don’t know what beer they drink up there but I’ll drink it. I don’t know what they eat up there but I’ll eat it. I’m not sure what’s outside the tourist circus in Livingstone, the bus stop and the airport in Lusaka and the bus in between but I’ll find something of it, and when I’m there I’ll take lots of photos and lots of notes and tell all of you what I saw. And whatever fountain Hayden thinks he’s leading his party to in Johannesburg, I’m going to skip the search and look for something better and more fascinating, and when the time comes, I’ll leave and know I hadn’t wasted a second in that place.

Don’t worry, folks: I’m going to do great.

Part II (2-12 -2-26)

An angry mob, 2-13

In the evening two nights ago, I was lying awake in bed with the windows in to let in whatever breeze might exist outside to keep me even the slightest bit cooler. Around eleven I could hear chanting, like gospel, but not in English. There was a chorus of it, so full of energy that it could have come from anywhere on campus because just by the sound of it you knew the sound carried.

I couldn’t sleep with it going on so I stepped out of bed, put on some pants and walked in the direction of the sound. It was the way I often took to the Memorial Tower Building, by the Student Union, past where the security guards would always be sitting on their break and still were then, gossiping, talking about other people. The Zulu language sounded beautiful when the talk was as lively as that.

When I got to the music’s source, a common room on the ground floor of the Student Union, the chanting had stopped, replaced by the droning hum of a chorus’ murmuring, unsynchronized prayers. A man stood outside, perhaps keeping guard at the door, and gave me an odd look like of both surprise and warning. Through a crack in the door I could see the group, all dressed in their Sunday best, pacing the room and bobbing their heads in unsynchronized rhythm. The only word I could make out was the loudest of them all “Jesus,” repeated again and again with the emphasis on the first syllable between words of fearful praise. Around the corner trying for a better glimpse inside, I imagined a minister holding a bible and standing on a table in the middle as the others circled him.

…

Yesterday – the second day of classes – was uneventful, except for a small and mysterious riot that briefly occupied the attention of campus. I was at my 8:30 Afrikaans class – the second of the day – when I started to hear the reports of an angry mob breaking windows and making demands outside. The class, mostly Indians at that time, joked that either we’d be first or last on their target list: first because compulsory Afrikaans language instruction was historically a source of conflict within the education system, sparking the infamous Soweto riots, but last because no one cared about that history any more.

By the time I got to the coffee shop in the Memorial Tower Building it seemed as though the event was more on people’s minds than I originally thought. Cups and saucers were apparently too dangerous to let circulate amidst the possibility of outright violence.

“Could I get a Rooibos, with milk, to serve?” I asked at the counter.
“Due to the strike we’re only doing take-away. Would that be alright, love?”

I remembered Nikita was having her birthday party on the deck that day, so I walked over to the crowd – her boyfriend and ten others I didn’t recognize – and passed her my copy of the Essential Interviews which I had just finished the night before. She took it and hugged me softly.

“So how’s your day been?” I asked.
“Difficult,” she said. “They kicked me out of the LAN.” I knew she was referring to the strike somehow, but I assumed she meant that she had been evacuated, or that the building had closed temporarily after a power outage. I was wrong. “I was just sitting there and one of them came from over the monitor and hit Control-Alt-Delete, and told us all to get out.”

I wondered then how I would react to seeing someone’s hands come over my workstation and even try to shut it off while I was in the middle of writing an email or even playing a game of freecell. In my minds eye I imagined how he would react if I grabbed his wrist and twisted it.

“I don’t give a shit what you want, just keep me the hell out of it,” I might have said. I wonder how he would have reacted. I wonder how his companions would react. I could have a class with any one of them, copying their notes from one of the development lectures or acting out a skit with them in Afrikaans.

It was a known fact that the dorms had been over packed with mostly black students as the college faced a housing shortage. During Apartheid, the place easily had enough space to accommodate its students since all of them were white and most came from a commutable distance. Even if they didn’t, most could afford to get a place in Durban. But since 1994, the demographics had shifted away from white and more towards blacks, many of whom came from rural villages in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere in KwaZulu-Natal. Commuting from home was impossible for them and getting a place in the area was largely out of the reach of their affordability, or their understanding of the area. So for past years, many were squatting in the dorms with friends, sleeping on the floors or sharing beds, and for every year that that went on they demanded better options and rioted.

“They do this every year,” Nikita said, “all over campus. It never seems to stop.”

I thought about that. A little later I considered it all more, and I remembered what Joan had said on the bus back from Umzunde.

“… The youth, you see, it’s the youth who you really have to watch out for.”

The future, as I see it, 2-14

I never wanted to do humanitarian work. Plenty of people descend onto here from some other part of the world, arrange for someone else’s food to be airlifted into this war zone or the next, and leave. They’ll never admit it to your face, but they like the thrill of the work more than the place that they do it in. The shittier it is there, the better off they think they are. People are starving and women are being raped everywhere, but if they’re being raped and starved in the thousands, than that’s not just terrible, that’s a real prize. The more ridiculous and more tragic the premise for whatever crisis they’re up against, the more reason to go.

The Second Congo War: Five years, eight countries involved, 5.4 million people dead, millions more displaced. Ended five years ago and declared the bloodiest war since World War II.

The Sierra Leone Civil War: began when an ambitious ex-wedding photographer named Foday Sankoh founded a small “revolutionary” militia to take control of the country’s diamond mines. Infamous for recruiting children by having them hack off their parents’ hands. 50-90 thousand dead. Lasted nine years, ended three years ago.

But I saw Africa as a place to build something, not just a hemorrhage gushing blood to dress, alleviate and walk away from. Sure, you could easily dismiss the place as hopeless underdeveloped, but you could also say that it was waiting to be developed. While the West, China and India are trying desperately to clean up their economies, rebuild their education systems and restore their environments, Africa has the good fortune of starting nothing, and therefore having nothing to reinvent, or tear down before they started building something new.

There is even an inkling of that now. Africa is today the fastest growing cell phone market in the world – faster than China, India or the United States, and the vast growth has already yielded millionaires in a multitude of countries. The continent once thought of as a sinkhole of modern technology is now developing its own. In Kenya, for instance, a pilot program developed by a local cell phone provider allowing users to transfer money via text message is taking off while the same technology is unheard of elsewhere in the world. While sustainability activists in the West are now triumphing “localism” as the future of our own food distribution, residents in Kinshasa and Harare have already begun farming on vacant lots in their cities to fill existing food shortages in their own communities. And while teachers and parents are pushing to make schools in the United States more technology driven to prepare them for a more techno-centric future, solar powered laptops are already being distributed to children throughout Africa.

In a place so detached from the West as so much of Africa was – in trade, in culture, in mentality – you had to respect the shear tenacity of the local way of life.

“Their pirogues and all the weapons and tools of their livelihood were efficient and had the beauty that is the unsought result of perfect function” Nadine Gordimer said of fishing implements used by villagers on the Congo River. “[Their tools] could have gone straight into an art collection.”

South Africa, too, has its own array of beautiful household items: FM radios made from Coke cans, ceremonial dresses from bottle caps. Eva bought a pair of plates entirely out of woven telephone wire, intricately stitched together in perfect concentric circles, one after another. Nadine Gordimer would have been proud: these really can be found in the MOMA, in the gift shop at least, Eva said. There they sell for forty dollars a piece, she said. She got hers for ninety Rand for both.

Africa always knew how to be Africa. Even if it couldn’t always feed itself, it could still be that. Christianity, Western languages, “civil society” – all of them were institutions that foreign powers at work tried to impose on it, succeeding for brief instances but only to turn around and find that their ways of thinking had been turned on their heads.

Mozambique, 2-15

Well, it looks like my trip to my much hoped for trip to Mozambique might be over before it even started. Massive flooding due to storms has swamped much of Southern Africa and Mozambique in particular. Things were bad when the storms had begun, but after Zimbabwe decided to relieve some of its own trouble by opening up a dam on the Mozambican border, that only made things worse. 96,000 people have already been evacuated from their homes, doing their best to avoid the diseases that necessarily afflict a country following this kind of disaster. I don’t intend to be one of them.

My malaria pills are in the bottom drawer, I’ll get my visa later in the semester. Maybe I’ll go for Spring Break. It would allow me time to go further north, out of the dirty, slummy parts and into some place more beachy and tropical. It should be cooler then anyway, and the rainy season will have stopped.

Pointillism, 2-17

Yesterday was going to be a work day. Hell, it was going to be and still is a work weekend. There’s a paper due (I’m almost done, but I’ve been saying that all day), and this to write. When it’s all done and said I’ll have a cover letter and an application to fill out. Yesterday I was going to do what I had been doing all week and just spend a few hours in my room, in the library, in the LAN, typing away and making the most of it.

On a side note, this is about the first time that I’ve really had to feed myself for every meal for weeks on end. It’s amazing how quickly eating can become such a pain. It either requires the spending of money, or the spending of time, either of which takes away from whatever else I was doing until then. This weekend in particular, I haven’t been eating much. I’ve put it off until I’m hungry enough to put down the work and go get something, but even then it’s usually something cheap (and therefore small) or fast and cooked myself (and therefore not very filling). I know things are cheap in this country and that I should really just eat more, but it’s not like I have a job, and I’ve got travel plans that I need to enact, all of which require large allocations from my already finite sums. I’m cooking rice and beans now, and typing this in the kitchen, which I suppose is a compromise that I should get used to trying out more often.

But anyway, yesterday was meant to be a workday, but two hours after waking up I needed to eat something and I really didn’t feel like making it myself. I texted Nicole, to see if she wanted to go find something downtown – the girls always complain (not without grounds) that they can’t really go out by themselves, or even each other while they’re here. But she was in the LAN, on Skype with the boyfriend, so that was the end of it. I grabbed a Combie by myself determined to someplace with food, the beach and then a bar where I could spend a few hours reading and taking in the sun.

The ride into town is always a trip with all the other Combie’s swirling about. Most are nondescript Toyota vans, but some are elegantly painted, with names painted on the side – Rock & Roll, Tsunami, Bhai. They pass within inches of each other, the other cars, the pedestrians on the busy streets of the City Center. Everywhere else they just gun it at 90 KPH and expect anyone who happens to be there at the same time to get out of the way.

I found some fish and chips on Prince Alfred Street near the beach for 15 Rand and sat there until I had finished it but no longer. There was a bar I knew on the beach in front of the hotel where Eva had stayed in her last few nights in Durban, but it was a little far and I wanted to see something new, so I started walking along the beach in the direction of the Point neighborhood, by the harbor.

People had been telling me since my first visit to the city to avoid the area. “Well there’s Point, by the docks. The Nigerians control that place, so you don’t want to go over there.” That was what one had told me when I asked if there were any dangerous neighborhoods in Durban.

It was odd, how different Durban was from Cape Town. In Durban you hardly ever here about the townships. They’re there, of course, past the hills, beyond Westville, where you can’t even see, really. Of all the Combies you see in the City Center probably more than half are going off in that area. Even so, I’ve never really met anyone from there, never been there myself. Everyone I talk to in the residence halls comes from this village or the next in KwaZulu-Natal or the Eastern Cape, they do their laundry in the bath tubs and hang it out to dry on clothing lines, even though to use the washers and driers here is free. In this city, it seems, there’s a decrepit but bustling downtown, a beach, and somewhere else is the homestead, the Zulu village, the place where the people who work here send there money, or who go to school here are expecting to in due time, when they have the money. Anything else in Durban has to fit somewhere between those three, somewhere on the beach, in the city or far off but oriented towards here anyway. If you’re very far from the City Center you’re not really in Durban any more, in the way that if you come from Khayelitsha you’re still from Cape Town, the trains run from Cape Town to your part of the world. A white commuter who still votes for the National Party could mistakenly take yours instead of the Simon’s Town line he usually does one evening in the winter after work, fall asleep fall asleep in your part of the world, in the dark. He’d know it then.

…

I decided I’d walk towards Point until it started looking especially sketchy, and then turn around and find a beer or hit the beach. That morning I had looked up things to do in the city and I had found something about a new art, café and restaurant development in the areas, so I figured it couldn’t be all that bad. The recently constructed uShaka Marine World had also found a locale there, with white, conspicuous looking tourists passing through by the thousands daily.

Walking down the beach I noticed white family of five and decided to keep them in my sights. Regardless of who was there or what they might want from me, I figured they were smart enough not to try anything with tourists around.

I was surprised by some of the people I saw. Not all of them were Nigerian, as I was told, though honestly I couldn’t tell a Nigerian from a Congolese, a Mozambican or a Cameroonian by a glance if I had too. There were more coloureds there than I had seen elsewhere in the city. By some accounts, there were more coloureds than whites in the country at large, which was easy to understand in Cape Town but far more difficult in Durban.

A lot of people were laying in the median in the street between the beach sidewalk and its adjacent counterpart. Equally numerous were the people on the sidewalk itself, who I tried to avoid any eye contact with if possible.

“What are you looking for?” a coloured woman in a bikini asked me after following my walk with her eyes for some time. I shrugged my shoulders and kept going.

The architecture was probably one good reason I had been told to stay away. It could have been Kinshasa, or Luanda or any other port city in some far more derelict and bankrupt country than the one I was walking through, and for moments at a time I imagined it was. There were old, towering colonial buildings, all falling apart, all decaying from the inside out. Between the beach and whatever lay a block inland was a whole neighborhood of them: old warehouses, old municipal offices, old banks and magistrate’s headquarters. Some time early within the last century the development of the city had shifted away from this place completely and the new builders had forgotten do to so much as tear these buildings down, so it was a ghost town of a bygone era when sugarcane was like oil and the Indians were less known for their good food and entrepreneurship and more for their slave-like status as indentured servants toiling in the plantations a little to the north and a little south.

The paint was peeling on all the buildings; the doors were rotting off. Some still had their shudders, still hanging by their rusted hinges, still open, letting in the daylight and the Indian Ocean breeze, filling the empty space as it ate the walls away slowly. This is what “international business” had meant, once: a beachside office three stories from the street, overlooking the water as steam ships left the harbor carrying that precious white powder back to whatever place the Englishmen called home before they had gotten there and probably still did.

The orientation of the city and the surrounding area couldn’t have been much different then, with a bustling business district squarely centered between the harbor and the beach, and somewhere, out there, over the hills was where the Zulus lived. In between, all that mattered for a magistrate at that time were the cane fields.

Away from the beach and more towards the harbor, sometime after I actually got inside the Point neighborhood, I found another warehouse. This time, half of one of its walls was caving in. I put my hand on the edge of the wound and pressed my head in. You could see the tropical vines already taking a hold and crawling over one side of the decaying wooden window sill. The light shone through the rafters and the vegetation in the ceiling which had merged together after a century of conscious neglect, combining with the light that streamed through the window with the vine on it to dazzle on a pile of bricks on the floor. I heard a bird chirping, perhaps from inside. Humans had ignored this place for generations but they were the only ones.

That’ll change before too long, though. Down the street was a warehouse sized Indian club called Cape 2 Cairo – a curious nod to Cecil Rhodes vow to build a railroad from Cape Town to Cairo entirely on British soil, one of the more noted aspirations of the colonial era. The place was obviously changing, which, realistically, was why I felt safe there at all. On the beach side of the area was a new housing development, built in part within restored colonial houses. Along the road you could see as the little two story buildings became progressively more derelict until finally they started to look greatly improved, even livable, with new doors and windows and roofs, fully restored and awaiting tenants for the first time in a century. Even the street signs indicating the neighborhood’s namesake street had had their name crossed out, with another sign declaring it “Mahatma Gandhi Road,” after the city’s most historically famous resident posted above it. Now all the signs indicated was change.

Talk with Shelden, 2-18

That evening, after I had drifted through the Point neighborhood in search of excitement, we went to an almost all white metal club called “burn” to celebrate the birthday of someone who had come from another group. After the midnight shot we went to a black club on Prince Alfred, down the street from where I had gotten lunch.

I had passed this place before, in fact, that day and on other walks through the city. In the day it was a restaurant like any other in that area – serving up calamari and Windhoek beer to mostly white tourists and locals while they sat under the shade of umbrellas, happy to be out of the sun. I had considered stopping in there from time to time as I passed it, but it was never close enough to the beach for me to make it worth waiting in for an hour or more.

But tonight it was all black, the music was so loud that a sign was posted above the DJ reading “Warning: the sound levels on this premise can cause permanent hearing damage.” Immediately I started getting warnings from the others in my party and I realized this was where Shanice had gotten her camera stolen a few weeks prior. Knowing that, I kept my hands in my pockets and pretended to enjoy myself.

I felt a tap on my shoulder from behind.

“What are you looking for?” a coloured woman asked with a hint of anger. She had just starred me down for no particular reason and now she was asking me this. In the dark I couldn’t tell if this was the same person I had encountered earlier in the day and she had just followed me all the way there. I had had enough.

…

By three AM I had persuaded Shelden, one of NJ’s friends to get me a ride back to campus after a thorough conversation. We drove up towards the freeway and pulled up at a stoplight. I noticed a sign for a hostel and after a few seconds of starring I realized why I was looking.

“I almost stayed there once,” I said. “My first time in Durban. It was an absolute shit hole, so we left for some place that wasn’t much better.”
“Word of note, if it’s in Durban, it’s shit.”
“They’ve got some nice places on Florida Road,” I said, thinking of one place in particular, “and the beach of course.”
“Yeah, sure, Florida Road. But by then your not really in Durban anymore; it’s more suburban,” he said, as if to affirm one of my previous realizations.

The road back home had become familiar by now: down Prince Alfred, past Smith, and City Hall and the combie stand where I typically caught my ride home in the day. A little more than two but no more than three hours later it would be filled, but for the time there was nothing there but litter. After that it was onto the freeway, and the conversation shifted to unemployment.

“The affirmative action programs had some good ideas,” Shelden said, “they were just horribly mismanaged. Right now, jobs are preferenced to people who were historically challenged, and if you don’t have the right degree but you are historically challenged, well you might get the job anyway, and if you’re not but you do have the degree, well, you probably won’t.”

‘Historically challenged’ of course was a government term, and it therefore only meant what the government wanted it too. While coloureds and Indians had typically faired better than the blacks during Apartheid, they were never allowed to ascend all the way up the social ladder. Income caps were put on their earnings throughout the Apartheid years, and they didn’t receive the vote until the 1980’s, after a compromise struck with the ruling National Party to more or less prevent their outright defection.

But after 1994, their historically cozy relationship with the white rulers meant that the government effectively classified them in the same category. ‘Historically challenged’ was an understatement for anyone in South Africa during Apartheid, (except for the whites, of course, who were by law always guaranteed a job), but in the ANC’s lexicon it meant black and black only.

“Computer programmers especially are considered a really high skill profession, partly because they’re so hard to find here,” Shelden said. “Most people would just prefer to go into business or something. But a lot of whites and Indians especially get their degrees in computers, and then they leave, because they can’t find work. A lot of white South Africans at Microsoft, actually.” The last part he said almost laughing. I had heard that before. It sounded like an urban legend, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. You can imagine that white South Africans have a way of not standing out, and especially at a place like Microsoft where everyone is white or Indian and comes to work dressed in the same pleated slacks and the same button down shirt. It would be easy to blend in. That any one of the ordinary looking wage slaves was not from Michigan, or Missouri, but Africa, of all places – that might strike a surprise, something to talk about around the water cooler. But for a white immigrant who was actually in that position, it wouldn’t be something to brag about, having left home essentially because his own country wanted no part with him. If blacks were “historically challenged” then whites were historically the opposite, historically oppressive, and that label carried weight not just in South Africa.

“So what about you, do you worry about getting a job at all?” I asked as we turned up the street into Pigeon Valley.
“Yes, actually,” he sighed. “I’m actually going abroad next year.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“No, as it turns out, I’ve got some relatives in New Zealand, so I’ll be with them next year. So there you have it.”

So there you have it.

Those were exactly his words. Talk all you want about how the whites were being screwed in this country, being pushed out to far reaches of the world, away from their families, or with distant relatives, but don’t ever forget that you’ll be part of the exodus yourself when the time comes. In a suburb of Cape Town I had talked with some Afrikaans students from UCT about their own futures come graduation day.

“It’s almost like Apartheid reversed,” one said, laughing at the irony. Most of them said they’d be heading to Johannesburg after they finished their degrees. If they couldn’t cut it there they would go abroad. They hated the Johannesburg of course, most people in Cape Town do – it’s less scenic than Pretoria, more dirty than Durban, and has more crime than all of South Africa’s cities put together. But it was where the jobs were, and if you were Afrikaans, it was the last chance you had of being anywhere near home.

Shelden was English and over five glasses of wine and some beers at an open braai one night at the scuba club house one night we had found each other and talked about the “plight of the Afrikaner.” He was fluent in Afrikaans and had an Afrikaans stepmother, so he knew how to talk shit about the people, capitalizing on a long held rivalry between his people and there’s.

“If you’re Indian, you can go back to India easy, the government even encourages it. If you’re English, you have the whole commonwealth, and if you’re black you have the whole country. But if you’re Afrikaans, you don’t have shit to go to.” He laughed heartily at that, though I wasn’t sure why any of it was a point worth emphasizing.

In our conversation earlier the night he drove me home, Shelden had slipped that he hadn’t been abroad in his life. Some friends were talking about a trip to Mozambique, but that was down the road. Right now he was a post-graduate student, pinching pennies, working and studying in the day and going out with friends at night. He was waiting until he graduated, he said, when the money would start rolling in, and there at the end of our ride, I got what he meant.

Race and all that Jazz,2-20

A few weeks before I came, the program sent us an email informing the group that security levels around campus would be increased by the time we got there. One of our fellow Americans studying abroad had been raped in a shower.

When we arrived it was one of the more important subjects of our first meeting together and further details started to trickle out, about the bad publicity, about how seriously the university took it all. Notes about victim and the culprit were made more ambiguous. All they said was that she had come from UC Santa Cruz and was studying at Howard at the time, part of a large contingent from UCSC which immediately became the last one ever sent to Durban. He was not a student, and like most rapists in this country, was never caught, and no one was even sure who it was.

“We just weren’t being careful enough,” Anita, the program director said to us. “We were letting in people without checking who they were.”

But even with those ambiguous details about who was involved, it as clear from the beginning that around campus, anyone who had been there from the year before knew more details about what had happened and who it had happened to. The international students, as they called us, always stood out here. Since the college was by preference a commuter school, anyone who was from the area or for whom getting an apartment was within their means did so. That only left the mostly Zulu and some Xhosa students who came from small villages from further away, and the mostly white international students.

In our own building, Townley Williams, Hayden and I were the only non-black residents on any of the six floors. Since there were more girls this semester and every other, the girls had more of a presence in their own dorms, but they still stood out, making a presence in the residences and on campus wherever they went. That the victim was one of such a noteworthy group of people had no doubt made it all the worse for the school. That she was white, as I later found out, was an even greater blow.

“When people encounter things that confuse or upset them, they always go back to the past, to race, to Apartheid. It becomes an excuse for everything,” Shelden said on our drive back a few nights ago. “For instance when that girl was raped, people were making a fuss, saying ‘why should we care if this one white girl gets raped, when that happens to so many black girls all the time?’”

It was amazing to me this time in the country how loaded such intentionally generalized pronouns could be, words like ‘People’ and ‘They.’ On their own they could mean anyone, but in the right context – not even a context of words but a context of subject, of speaker and listener – it was obvious who they meant and exactly how. When one said ‘We’ he or she meant you, I and the people with whom this tension, this notion walking on egg-shells and being careful about what you say does not exist. When one said ‘They,’ he or she meant the people with whom it did exist.

Shelden hasn’t yet had to defend himself, and I would never ask him to. I haven’t heard him say “some of my best friends or black,” but even if he did, I would know it to be true. I only met him through NJ, the black leader of our pack assigned to look after us when we first arrived. He had spent some years in New York – at least enough to adopt an American accent and more or less renounce the Zulu name that ‘NJ’ stood for – but he was still black South African, and proud of it. Later I found that he lived in the Durban township of Pinetown, where Shelden would sometimes crash on late nights so as not to disturb his parents when he was drunk and ending a late night out.

But NJ was at least outside enough to prefer to speak English, to always talk in an American accent, even in the company of other Zulus, which was a rare sight. Perhaps when Shelden said ‘we’ he meant NJ as part of that club.

I remembered what Anita had said about how ‘We were letting in people without checking who they were.’ That the culprit was black was now obvious to me.

Joan, on the bus, was even more blunt, about ‘the youth,’ and how ‘they will have to elect this Zuma fellow.’ Some time in that conversation, after I mentioned that I was considering development work, she told me that she had done that herself elsewhere in Africa. It was “very rewarding and very frustrating work” she said, with a piece of advice, a bullet.

“Just remember, you’ll always have to do it yourself. You can never expect them to do it for themselves. It’s sad, but that’s just how it is.” So was she a racist for that? I don’t know. In any case, I don’t think it would be the point if she was. Like everything else she told this nameless American student whom she had met on the back of the bus, her advice only came through a lifetime of experience, and considering what she had been through, if she had chosen to join the KKK by now I would have been sympathetic.

But these days she worked through a church or some other religious organization, teaching children with parents who had AIDS or who had AIDS themselves to pray, to help them deal coming crises that were soon to take hold of their feeble lives. There again, one didn’t have to tell me what the race of those involved was, it was obvious by the context.

People come here looking all the dirty little secrets that others are afraid to talk about since 1994. They want to see for themselves how the end of Apartheid was a start but how every white woman and child you meet is still as racist, rich and hateful as ever. It’s there, of course, if you want to look for it. In South Africa it’s not hard to find people who will stare at you threateningly just because of the way you look. It’s even easier to find people who talk loosely about every stripe of people – including their own – in casual conversation. That’s when you’ll hear things from “you’ll find that the Indians tend to wear jeans religiously” (Anita) to “The coloureds have had no purpose except through us” (Afrikaans student I met on the plane my first time coming here).

I know, all the whites in this country are the same racist SOB’s they always were. I’ve heard it before. But if you want to talk like that about the whites then don’t forget the blacks, too, many of whom are convinced that the buppies who roll through the streets of Johannesburg in their Mercedes shooing away the starving children who once were their peers are not corrupt and despicable at all, and are actually the greatest heroes of their country.

I told Eva during our conversation on Florida Road that South Africa had a long way to come before it became anything besides the mess it was now.

“People say this country could be like China, like India, that in ten or twenty years we’ll talk about South Africa like we do about those now,” she said.
“Every little inch of progress they make here has to be done with this notion of racial justice first and foremost. In Rwanda they’re building a university modeled after MIT, in Kenya they’re developing cell phone technology that’s more advanced than anywhere else in the world. Along the whole East African corridor they’re preparing to lay the groundwork for high speed internet cable. Drop a few hundred-dollar laptops in the mix and within a few years you’ll have a generation of computer literate, English speaking people with access to high speed internet willing to work on ten dollars a day. What happens then?”
“What about Kenya?” she asked. “The whole country’s coming apart …”
“Sure, it is. But hasn’t everyone already agreed that the African state is a colonial vestige that’s only, artificially held together through some shaky compromises between rival ethnic groups? Maybe breaking down the state is more progressive than we think. In this country, things are held together by force. The rivalries in Kenya are not much deeper than those between a Xhosa and a Zulu. They hate each other, and the only reason they’re not at war now is because you have this very stable, very strong state that was built up during colonialism and beefed up even more during Apartheid that reigns over all of it now and keeps all of them in check. But the country is stiff for that. It’s so stiff it can barely move forward. Every ounce of the government’s resource is devoted just to holding shit together: appeasing the blacks who still rightly think they haven’t gotten their fair shake since 1994, keeping crime down to keep businesses in the country, keeping the lights on. And as you can see now, it can’t even really do that.”

And it was true. The country was still in the midst of rolling blackouts as South Africa struggled to expand its power grid beyond capacity. The reason? “Years of steady economic growth,” according to the government, and provisioning electricity to the townships, something the state didn’t have to deal with before 1994. So it still came back to race, to justice. Fixing the past was leaving only leftovers for the future. To bring light and running water to those who had gone without during Apartheid, the whole country had to take a hit. To get blacks jobs in the skilled labor force, the whites with degrees had to settle for something that didn’t require them or leave. Such was the reality of South Africa today.

During Apartheid, the blacks, constituting nearly 80% of the population, weren’t even recognized as citizens. Their crime went unchecked unless it got out of hand and started to instill some fear in nearby whites, in which case it was dealt with harshly. Their plight, on the other hand, was completely ignored. Now that they had a say in the system, they wanted more than they had, and the government which they had elected, having promised it to them, was hard pressed to deliver.

Four years ago during my first time here, I remember seeing a cartoon where president Mbeki was cutting a slice of a large but not enormous cake for himself. The cake had a candle on and the words “ten years” inscribed in it. Behind him a mass of people, farther than the eye could see, was standing around with plates patiently waiting for their own. Mbeki looked worried. And in reality, he had reason to be. But it wasn’t cake the people wanted; it was bread, and by now they were getting impatient. The blame game was starting to cycle over, with blacks blaming whites for their plight and whites growing increasingly irritated for it.

Four years ago, in the midst of celebration during my last time here, when the talk of the town was about “Ten Years after Apartheid” I hadn’t picked up on that. Now it was everywhere. Between the promise and the past not everyone was finding room to get along.

Overheard in the MTB coffee shop, 2-22

My Afrikaans class had been cancelled because the professor was sick so I went to the coffee shop in the courtyard. Nikita and one of her friends were sitting on the “members only” deck and sharing a Milo shake. The three of us talked for a little while before Nikita got up to get something. When she came back she stopped to talk to a man that until then I had only known as someone who bussed the café’s tables, often the sole black face in the entire courtyard. She must’ve known him, and noticed that he had come late that day, because within a few seconds he looked infuriated as he told her about his morning commute.

“The taxi, it put me very far away today. I had to start walking very far; I was so mad. And then a man came up, put the gun up to my head, for true! An’ I know, things like this make me very cross, and I was mad already. I do not expect this because I was ne’er a crook. So I say ‘Shoot Me! Right now! I do not care.’ An’ I turn around, like this” (he shows us). “And I walk away.

“I almost expect the sound of a gun to go off, but it ne’er did. An’ then I had to walk very far! I was angry for that. That is why I was so late today,” he said.

I’ll never look at him the same way again.

Sailing, 2-24

“When I went to Egypt, I remember I showed them my passport and they looked at me and they were so surprised. They were just like, ‘you’re South African?’ And I just said, ‘Yes, I am.’ I mean, what do they think Apartheid was about?”

…

I’m sore today. I’m not sure exactly why, but it’s probably a combination of yesterday’s strenuous exercise, sunburn and having not slept on a mattress for two nights in a row.

It’s official now; I’m the most experienced new member of the UKZ-N sailing team, a loose band of two girls, two guys, and a pair of coaches who blend in pretty well with the team and who only mention “training” in reference to our preparation for competitive drinking games. This weekend was our first regatta. We were one team in dozens, among the youngest there, save for a group of boarding school boys who had come for the same reason I had: to get off campus for the weekend.

During our first week there, they brought all the international students to the bar by the pool to hear from the spiel of the various club teams. I expected to be bored, as one after another, all the old British sports presented themselves in as interesting a way as possible to suit our American tastes. There was cricket, which was pitched as “a casual sport with games that lasted up to a day,” rugby, fencing, as well as the various throw-ins like step-aerobics. Sailing was one of the last but it caught my eye.

“Durban has some of the best sailing in the world,” said a perpetually smiling, clean cut man in a polo shirt tucked into his khaki shorts. Having been to the beach only a few times until then I had to believe him. Even if the wind was poor the sea was warm enough that it wouldn’t have made a difference. Immediately, riding the sides of fifteen foot racers in the clear green water off the beach came to mind. I signed up in an instant.

Three weeks later, I still hadn’t heard anything, so I dug up the man’s number and called him. I had missed the first event, he said, but there was another, at the Midmar dam an hour west of Durban. For 135 Rand he’d get me a ride, a tent, some boerwors for the evening, a few beers and the chance to race. Once again it was a deal I couldn’t refuse, so I missed my second and last class on Friday on a day when Afrikaans had already been cancelled and hitched a ride with a stranger and another American down to the dam.

“So this is your first race?” Craig, the driver asked.
“First formal race I’d say.”
“Oh there’s nothing formal about the way we race. You’ll see when we get there, but we’re not exactly the most competitive team in the world.”

He was right, of course. When we got there we met with the rest of them. There was Clint, the still perpetually smiling “coach” who I had called earlier, and his wife, Robin, Wayne – a middle-aged gentleman who owned one of the boats we were to use but whose affiliation with the team beyond that is still unclear to me –Charlotte, a sophomore who was born in England and raised mostly in South Africa, and Duncan, an engineering student.

The men constituted the core of the group. All of them were white, all but one was English (the sun-dark Wayne was Greek by descent). For the most part, their travel experience outside South Africa was limited to the neighborhood – Mozambique, Zambia, Namibia, Lesotho – places that were exotic to us but for them were just another place to go fishing or hiking – and Europe. None of them had been to the States. Craig had spent a month there a few years prior, like so many Americans do, going between hostels, meeting other people. It wasn’t something he bragged about. The only part he mentioned about the experience was meeting Australians.

“What do you call South Africans in the States?” he asked Sky, the other American and I.
“I don’t think we have a term for them,” Sky said.
“Oh, ‘cause in Europe I met a lot of Australians, and I told them I was South African, and they said, ‘oh, so you’re a saffer then.’ You know, like ‘kiwi’ or something? I didn’t like that much.”

For all of them, South Africa was their home, the only home they would ever consider. Even so, the two Americas on their trip seemed to know more about the place than they did, a point they weren’t ashamed to recognize. They had lived through the benefits of the Apartheid years, but touching on the subject never brought out the white guilt I usually associated with whites, especially of that age, who were preparing to go abroad in a fit of anger and resignation, like Shelden. Over dinner and beer the first night, we talked about African politics, an area they had an interest in, but only remotely, answering the questions I posed for my benefit and not their own, and then only when matched with their own curiosity. I asked for their thoughts on Robert Mugabe and after a lengthy answer they asked my thoughts on George Bush. I asked about Afrikaners and they asked about the American South.

But after we had all had our fair share of alcohol and knew each other’s names, it got easier to joke about each other. The conversation surrounding exclusively African topics shifted squarely to talking shit about Afrikaners and discussing the local varieties of beer. But for the most part, our talk was about it was the normal subjects, like school, and camping, and of course, sailing.

Sitting by the grill in a tailgate chair, watching the group watch our sausage sizzle and chilling on a Windhoek beer, it would have been hard to distinguish them from any group of friends in Minnesota or Wisconsin in summertime: modest people with a worthy sense of humor who spent their weekends practicing hobbies and spending time with friends. That we came from different countries seemed insignificant, and they made little point of it, except in their mannerisms and phrases – South African to the core, but which they threw around as if they were universal among English speakers:

“Do you need a fix your costume?” meant ‘why don’t you put on a swimsuit.’
“What are you busy with?” meant ‘so, what are you majoring in?’

What I had woefully anticipated but did not get my first time in South Africa – long and beer-laden conversations with white people over ordinary topics – I had found this weekend at the side of a dam called Midmar, and happily so.

…

We went to the bar that evening and after four beers I was asked to decide if I wanted to join another team for the regatta the next day. I was uncertain about why, so I just told them that if the team needed me, I would make myself available, but if not, I’d be happy to help out someone else.

“They just need someone who has some experience, who can follow commands, which is you,” Clint said. I had mentioned earlier that I had some experience sailing, but only to get onto the team. I didn’t mean to imply that I knew what I was doing as much or more than anyone else on the team. But to coaches, it was obvious that I did. In fact, just that I knew the difference between a jib and a mainsail indicated to them that I had more understanding of the principles of sailing than Sky, the other new recruit, and was therefore worthy of a greater opportunity than they could provide, another point they were intent on making clear for me.

The UKZ-N team would be struggling just to make it around the buoys. If I wanted, there was something far better awaiting me. I tentatively accepted the offer.

…

The next day, we went back to the shoreline and I was introduced to the boat I would be crewing and its caretakers. The thing was sleeker and more fast-looking than I had originally anticipated. At twenty feet, it was four feet longer than what the team was sailing. But it didn’t just look like an extended Hobie 16; its hulls were more acute, its frame more streamlined. Every piece seemed to fit perfectly into one of its component parts, and the trampoline – the fabric expanse that covered the frame and supported the crew – wasn’t just some stained piece of fabric to sit on, it was a black mesh, slick with a shine that glimmered like the water it was to ride across.

“Are you all fixed with the crew?” Clint asked standing next to me.
“No, we still need him,” one of them said.

I introduced myself to the three of them. The owner’s wife and another would make the first crew. I would be with the owner, a thin, older fellow with wire frame glasses named Ed.

Later when they raised the bright yellow sails, I could tell how easily one could identify it on the water, even among the hundred boats that were racing that day. After the first crew did two laps, Ed met on the shoreline and waded into waste deep waters and the boat switched crews, almost in motion. We did two laps and came back, switched crews again and then waited.

A few hours later the wind had picked up and it was time to get back on the boat. We made one turn and the wind took us at a blitzing speed. I took the spinnaker line and held onto it for dear life as the boat sailed carefully balanced on one hull for a minute at a time.

The whole thing sang, literally. At fifteen knots every part of the hull vibrated in harmony to make a long, whistling sound. At seventeen knots it changed octaves. People would look behind themselves as we passed them, well aware of our coming before our boat overtook there’s.

After three laps, Ed was getting especially competitive, pushing the boat to its limits and swearing loudly. At the far side of the dam he fastened himself into the trapeze for the first time, suspended over the water by a thing line that connected to the mast while standing on the edge of one hull with his legs straight, looking intently for the next turn, the next boat to overtake, the next gust of wind. I put my feet in the straps and leaned out, bending my head back to see if it could touch the water. My sunglasses almost fell off, but I caught them, laughed, and made a comment about a close call that Ed didn’t hear or didn’t care to respond to.

We came in fourth overall, but placed in the mid-twenties after handicaps.