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.
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.
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