Part III, 2-27 - 3-12

Scatterings 2-27

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

I thought about what Joan had said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was the only highlight of my outing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- George F. Will

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

Easter Break pals and the like 2-28

I couldn’t help but feel discouraging tonight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free State disaster zone 2-29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We went on the road not long after.

The good, the bad and the smug 3-4

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

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

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

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

The news and business as usual 3-5

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

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

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

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

Thoughts 3 -7

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alles van die beste, totsiens.

Tilt 3-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday morning 3-9

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

And then on Saturday night, Tebogo invited me.

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

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

“Sure,” I said. “Come wake me up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I smiled and walked away without saying anything.

Johannesburg Talk 3-12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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