Paradise, Razor Wire and the of Ghosts of Alex

by John Keeble

It is Freedom Day in the tourist paradise of South Africa and the razor wire is glinting dully under an unusually glowering sky in real life Johannesburg. On the streets, BMWs and Toyotas whish past jobless black men standing on corners hoping for someone, anyone, to give them a day’s work. In the shopping malls, rich whites and blacks are buying electrical goods and considering the latest boutique clothes. In the black townships, there is little freedom from poverty. In the coastal tourist areas in the south, the sophisticated living moves up a holiday notch; in the money-spinning game reserves, hopefuls rubber-neck from crawling cars; and in rural areas, farmers wait for the next murder.

For a country that once defined itself as white and black, South Africa’s complicated life is very tricky for an Africa novice like me to comprehend in a few weeks. It is full of contradictions, yawning social chasms, easy living and desperate poverty, big city violence and small-town leisure.

It would be easy to portray South Africa as guns and razor wire, or breath-taking coastlines, or game parks with the thrill of coming nose to nose with a lion (either side of the car window, hopefully), or social injustices … or dip into the past, taking sides and forgetting the white liberals who helped end apartheid… forgetting, also, that the victors in any social change are always innocent heroes and the vanquished are always fiends from hell. Journeying through the country – from the northern game reserve of Kruger National Park, where the lodge warned guests to beware of the hippos, to the southern tip at Cape Point where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet – was a fascinating, beautiful and sometimes shocking trip through the nation’s jigsaw of realities.

It occurred as one of the not-infrequent outbreaks of racial tension was gripping the nation: the ruling factions were insisting on singing the ANC song that included the words: ‘Kill the farmer, kill the Boer.’ Then former apartheid strong man Eugene Terre’Blanche was hacked and battered to death on his farm. Four days earlier he had given a TV interview, shown after his death, in which he alluded to the widespread horror of farm murders by saying: ‘We are not going to be murdered. We will fight back.’ He was a sad and unconvincing figure, appearing broken from the uncompromising leader of the apartheid years.

I was lucky to have South African friends with the patience to help me catch up, what little I could, on events that have shaped and coloured most or all of their lives. As a tourist, I would have seen just the fabulous sights and read the news in the local papers.

Maybe that is the joy of being a tourist anywhere: you take the beauty and the fun, you leave the ugliness and strife. Maybe the best of being a traveller is trying to make some sense of strange places, though we see them through the lenses of our own cultures and experience… an understanding as far from the reality of the local people as a translation is from a living language and culture.

It was in Johannesburg that I first felt I was touching real life in South Africa, but then I came to realise that the country’s ‘real life’ was everywhere and everywhere it was as different as the patterns in a kaleidoscope. Johannesburg’s streets could be on a different planet to Cape Town’s and neither gelled with the small towns like Colesberg; and the black townships hardly seemed to be in the same universe as the white holiday paradise of Glentana down on the Atlantic coast.

We ate alfresco soon after I arrived in Johannesburg, a warm night, takeaway pizza and dry local wine, discussing the political situation and life in general in South Africa. The quiet garden, Lulu the gentle Rottweiler sitting hopefully nearby… it could have been a peaceful summer evening in southern England apart from the African plants – and, of course, the 8ft walls topped by electric fencing, the security gates and razor wire at the front of the estate, the security gate at the front of the house, and the stark warning to would-be criminals: Armed Response.

Johannesburg is like that. Every house has maximum protection against the threat of violent criminal attacks but the streets, in daytime at least, are safe and cheerful. For the tourist, there are things to see and do but transport can be both difficult and expensive. Many people fly into Johannesburg as the hub from which to visit the game reserves and the coastal areas far to the south.

My favourite ‘Johannesburg’ trips were to the black township of Alexandra [see below] and a bike ride through Soweto, where nationwide fury and protests were sparked by children being killed and injured by police and security forces when they marched in 1976 against a government decree that all teaching would be in Afrikaans. No one is sure of the exact death and injury toll during the second half of 1976 in Soweto – they range from 300 to 600 killed and up to 15,000 injured in six months of bloody protests. Today, there is a memorial area, full of symbolism and so peaceful that ideas of violence and suffering are as foreign as I felt standing on this sacred ground.

From Johannesburg, I took the tourist route to the biggest of the game parks – the Kruger National Park, to see as many of the iconic animals as possible. The park is so popular that you have to book 11 months in advance if you want to stay there overnight. It stretches 380km along the Mozambique border and lures visitors from around the globe to see its animals roaming free.

As we drove through, giraffes were munching on leaves by the track; hippos and crocodiles were idling in the rivers; and dozens of other species were enjoying their habitat enough to ignore us. Other local highlights included what would have been a spectacular vista across the low lands: the high point was called God’s Window but s/he had the curtains drawn on that day with the mist thick and mysterious.

The long trek south – a thousand miles or more – took in eye-catching scenery and places to linger, like the Valley of Desolation (which was quite jolly, really, in a beautifully desolate way) and Vanderkloof dam and reservoir, which was lovely but the real interest, for me, was along a mud track guarded by thorn trees: the site of a Boer War concentration camp and its cemetery, now an overgrown monument to the inhumanity of British forces and the suffering of Boer prisoners. Eight hundred names are listed, more round the sides, many the same family names from a sparsely populated new land.

And there were little towns, quiet and quaint. Forget the big city razor wire, chat with the small town residents who welcomed travellers like us as sources of income and interest. Many had Afrikaans as their first language and even those with English had difficulty with my southern England accent but humour and determination got me vegan breakfasts and lunches... even if one restaurant owner had to pop out to get the strange ingredients and another breathed ‘straf’, the Afrikaans word for ‘punishment’, to describe my diet.

On the south coast, the Eastern Cape where the waves crashed and the mist hung in the air even as the sunlight pierced it, we stayed at a borrowed house in the incredibly beautiful Glentana. The house was owned by generous friends who could visit it only a couple of times a year – a gleaming white structure that looked like it had materialised from a fashionable living magazine.

There, life is so casual that the gates have no more than a small bolt for convenience and hidden away, just for those who know them, are nice little places to eat when you tire of the endless, incredible beaches.

A few miles away, in Mossel Bay, commercial development meets leisure with everything anyone could want… for us, it included a climb to the clifftops overlooking the town and the lighthouse. After a little further on, beyond what most tourists wanted to climb, there were just us and the wildlife, including overgrown rabbit-like creatures called Dassies that live among the rocks.

In the other direction the town of George must have the largest population in the world. Not in numbers. In size. All those ancestors who had dragged wagons across the Karoo with hawsers clamped in their teeth have an echo today in the queue for coffee at Mugg & Bean – men who look like 7ft mounds of bone and muscle and their women matching them. ‘We have a lot of very large people in South Africa,’ understated one of my friends, a 5ft 10in midget, as we hiked round the mountains to peer in for empty tables. Near the coffee queue, in a big shopping complex, a guard stood out of the way of passers-by. He had a smart outfit, an efficient look and enough firepower to conquer a small nation or fight a deadly battle with armed robbers in a crowded shopping mall.

A fast, interesting road put Cape Town a comfortable five hours away but we had other plans: a look at Cape Point, with the historic lighthouse sharing its highpoint with hordes of tourists snapping down at opposite coves where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans can be crammed into one frame.

Cape Town is a tourist joy – it must be great to live there, too – with its interesting hilly streets, shops and restaurants. And its location puts visitors on easy routes to follow the coast, stopping at spectacular views or cosy resorts … and, just behind the town, the obvious must: Table Mountain.

It is not cheap to take the ride to the top, 1134 metres above sea level, but the experience is beyond price. On the top, we walked in the light breeze and easy sun, for once free to indulge our need for an adrenaline hit by tap dancing along the edge of sheer drops to the next world. We sat on the edge and watched a pair of birds, eagles we thought, but compromised on a technical term: big black birds with white on them. We were not skilled enough to really tap dance but the birds put on an amazing aerial dance, swooping and soaring, rocketing towards the rock faces and sheering away. We clumsy humans sighed with envy and plodded on to the next thrill.

On a good, breezy day you can see Table Mountain from above. Local paragliding firms will take you for a 30 or 40 minute flight for about £100. We booked, climbed the Lion’s Head mountain by Table Mountain to reach the launch site but the weather changed. The wind dropped and we watched one paraglider plummet to the bay beneath in five minutes – which works out at £20 a minute and no real excitement – so we told the company it did not look worth it and they cancelled flying for the day.

There are a number of places from which you can see Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, and you can get tours there too. From a distance, it looks flat and unimpressive… the geographic image not living up to its role in the formation of modern-day South Africa.

The geography in the wine region around Stellenbosch certainly lived up to expectations and our efforts were rewarded with a little sun and dramatic skies, several times slashed with colour as rainbows formed and melted. Nearer Cape Town, the old British naval base of Freetown tracked time with a museum - it had the story of Just Nuisance, a Great Dane which became the friend of British naval ratings (though he did not like officers, women or anyone not wearing the square rig of ordinary seamen). He used the railway with the seamen to get into Cape Town in the late 1930s and rail officials threatened to shoot him as a freerider – so the Navy signed him up as able seaman Just Nuisance, put him on the base staff and gave him a free rail pass just like any other seaman. Ho hum, those were the days.


After Cape Town, it was back north to see lions. But the weather got bad and the lions were saved from yet another rubber-neck photo party… My friends offered to take me to the zoo. But vegans do not like zoos. So we went for some Bunny Chow instead – half a loaf with the centre scooped out and filled with curry. Wonderful.

**

Lingo chancing:

Eish! (‘aish’) Exclamation, like wow! but used more widely
Lekker Nice. ‘South Africa is a lekker place.’
Robot Traffic lights
Woema (‘woma’ like woman without the ‘n’) energy, get up and go
Biltong doggie chews for people
Shalawala my goodness!
Spaza shop home or street shop
Mielies (like ‘millys’) corn cob
Vet Koek (‘fet cook’) aka Fat Cake … doughnuts without the egg or milk
Pap (‘pahp’) dry porridge from maize meal
Madala term of respect for old people
Boerewors (‘buravors’) farm sausage

**

‘Alex was very different then,’ said apartheid protest veteran Pam as we drove to the black township of Alexandra near Johannesburg. There was an edge of interest and excitement to this trip: it was her first visit since those violent times.

Pam was one of the white South Africans who rejected apartheid – despite being able to trace her ancestors back to the original settlers – and she was ready to put her own life on the line to visit fellow Christians in no-go Alex.

‘My church had been collecting clothes and other items to help the people there in the worst of the trouble in the mid-1980s,’ she said. ‘We used to visit a house in Second Avenue and the people used to come to us there.

‘I remember driving in at night, when murders and bombings were everyday horrors. We were not banned from entering the townships but, being white, the security forces did not like it.

‘Even the black residents we went to see were shocked that we would drive in. But I had my Ford Escort and I was determined. The security forces tried to insist on giving us an escort but we told them to keep away from us with their big vehicles and guns – if we had been seen to have their protection, we would have been even less safe.

‘Many of the houses were good. They had been part of a government project. But in other ways it was a terrible place then. The “roads” were just dirt, running with water and everything you can imagine, and there were animals everywhere.’

In Alex, we searched for the house she visited but could not find it. In the 1980s, the houses had open areas at the front but in the intervening decades, thousands of shacks have been squeezed on to every available space to provide income for the owners and homes for the incoming population.. We walked the street where the house stood, chatted to the locals… but the past had gone.

So we rode round the colourful and vibrant area, walked through the market… we were greeted by friendly people surprised to see us and wanting to know why I was shooting them (the current way to say ‘photographing’).

The era of real shooting died with apartheid. We were just looking for ghosts.

**

The shebeen, the one-time secret drinking shack of the black population, was dark, very dark with the only light coming from the entry gap in the corrugated metal sheets that were perched uneasily on uneven ground on the edge of the apartheid-era men’s lodging rooms in the township of Soweto.

We sat opposite a dozen or so locals, all of us crowded in on wooden benches trying to make conversation with people whose difference made it as difficult as if they spoke an entirely different language. We exchanged names, told them where we were from, tried to get individual conversations going.

This was today’s poor Soweto, or at least part of it because the township is huge with a population put at more than three million. We were there on a cycling tour, led through the byways of yesterday’s disasters and today’s slums and comparative mansions.

Sepo, our guide, eased himself into the 3m x 3m shack which had maybe 20 people in it. He was carrying the specialities of the house … home-brewed beer in a kalabash, a communal drinking bowl so much part of the culture that a huge new World Cup stadium was being built in the same shape a few kilometres away. Plus some other alcohol drinks, one flavoured with banana and one based on milk… we sipped, passed on, sipped, passed on. Our new friends drank deeply: a friend in need of a drink is a friend indeed.

For something more solid, we stopped half an hour later. There the brave ate cow’s face and pap (a maize staple of the black population).

Then we rode off again, on our mountain bikes, through the sites and sights of Soweto, where the apartheid battle scars – apart from the big memorial and a re-faced Mandela house – have been overwhelmed by the poverty.


First published in VISA 91 (Jun 2010)