The Game: Southern Africa

The Mission: Conquer All!

Entry 120: Brothers From Another Mother - March 26, 2008.


Part 1: That's Why We Smoke the Shit!

"I've been mugged at least 40 times," Mark tells me. He's 21 years old and living in Durban, a major city along the coast of South Africa. I came a few hours earlier on the bus, connected with him through CouchSurfing, and now he has just driven me to a dark hilltop at night overlooking the cityscape. I ask him about crime and out it comes, story after story after story.


The last time it happened I was coming out of a club at night and I went to my car. I've been to this same club a bunch of times before, you know? The next thing I remembered was being down on the pavement in so much pain. I could see my car from where I was lying. The door was open. I tried to crawl to it but my hand hurt too much. Then I noticed it was covered with blood. I looked around and I saw the parking attendant nearby. I asked him what happened and he said I'd just come to my car and opened the door when someone came from behind and slammed the car door shut, smashing my fingers. Then he hit me on the head.

You see that part of the city, where I'm pointing? That's a place you never want to go, even in the daytime. If you walked from there to the beach I reckon you'd get mugged three times on the way. I was around there a couple of years ago and I knew I shouldn't have been there and all I wanted to do was get out. Finally I made it to a spot I recognized, and I knew where I was. I was out of the really dangerous part and I relaxed a little bit. Then a beggar came up to me in the middle of the road and asked me for money. I said no and moved past him even though he tried to get in my way. I looked back just in time to see a guy behind him pull out a knife and start coming for me. I grabbed the beggar and held him close to me to keep the knife guy away, and I never let go of him until I backed all the way to the end of the street, where I could turn the corner and get away.
There were plenty of stories coming from Mark. I could have listened all day if I'd wanted.


A friend of mine from Zim[babwe] came to live in Durban a little while ago. He found an apartment in the rough part of town. I told him to find another place but he was a tough guy and he went anyway. Three weeks later he couldn't take it anymore. From his bedroom window he'd seen two people get shot in the head. He said it scared ths shit out of him, this neighborhood. And he was from Harare!
Mark took me around to bar after bar, and one time I went with him to eat at a Mexican restaurant where ten of his friends were sitting at a big table on a balcony. One girl was talking about something that happened to a female coworker of her mother's. It was nighttime, the woman had said, and she was driving out of town. Suddenly a taxi pulled up alongside her and passed her, and then slowed down. She couldn't pass. When it came to a traffic light they both stopped. They waited. The light turned green. Nobody moved. It turned red again, and then green, and then red again, without anyone moving. It was dark, traffic was still coming the other way, and cars were beginning to form a line behind them. On the third time that the light turned green the woman honked twice at the taxi in front. The door of the taxi opened, the driver got out, and walked up to the woman's open driver-side window. He punched her in the head, and then walked back to his taxi. As soon as he got inside his car, a different driver got out of his car and checked if the woman was OK. "Go back to your car," she said, "I'm fine. Go back. Don't go up to that taxi. Stay in your car." The man went and got back into his car. The light turned green and then red again, and green once more. She honked twice again at the taxi blocking the road. The taxi driver got out of his car and walked back again to the woman's driver-side window. She pulled a gun and shot him in the head. The passengers in the taxi got out and ran off in separate directions. The woman had witnesses to say she was attacked and shot him in self-defense, and that is where the matter would rest.

I'd come to Durban from an idyllic place called Coffee Bay, famous among South Africans and foreigners as a place to chill out and hang with hippies and forget about the world. I spent 5 days there and was lucky to meet a wonderful girl named Sarah, from Penzance in England, an easygoing town in the beautiful southwestern county of Cornwall. Sitting on a bench drinking tea, she told me how she ended up in Coffee Bay. She was in Port Elizabeth until a couple of days ago. But then, coming out of an internet cafe in the city, in mid-afternoon, she was mugged on the sidewalk by two men with knives. She gave them her handbag with everything in it -- phone, money, cards. Soon afterwards she decided to leave Port Elizabeth. So she took a bus towards Coffee Bay. But she hadn't realized that the bus would only drop her off at Umtata, a town along the highway 90km away, and so she hadn't set up any transport for herself along the minor roads towards the bay itself. With no better options, she decided to take a taxi. The taxi was very dodgy and the driver insisted she sit up front while putting her bag in the back. She refused at first but eventually gave in; after all, the bag would be right behind her.

After a few kilometers the driver pulled to the side of the road and let in a couple of locals. She got an even worse feeling from them, and the fact of the driver's hand on her leg didn't help matters. She told them to stop at the next town they pass; she wanted to get out. She got out and found that her bag in the back was open. She pulled her things out and got ready to leave. One of the men in the back showed her an adapter for her digital camera that he said must be hers. "This fell on the floor," he said. Like hell it did.

She finally gets free of them but still has no way to get to Coffee Bay. Everyone has told her never to hitch in South Africa. But what choice is there? It has begun to rain, she is miserable, and she is at the end of her rope and beyond caring. She hitches. The driver who picks her up is hitting on her and telling her that he would love to have a visa to England and that black men and white women often make beautiful-looking babies together. He touches her arm. She endures this all the way to Coffee Bay, the relaxing holiday spot which, along with the equally-tranquil Port St. Johns a little bit up the coast, is a famous getaway for people who want to let loose and be themselves.

I never did visit Port St. Johns, but it wasn't long after I left the area that a gang of thieves invaded the most popular hostel there in the middle of the night and held everyone at gunpoint while the owner emptied the safe and the criminals went from room to room stealing wallets and valuables from the terrified backpackers. The thieves were ballsy enough, but clearly amateurs. One of them saw a backpacker's credit card on a table and said he wanted to take it. The girl said that it was a Canadian credit card, and useless to them in South Africa. Not wanting to look stupid, he believed them, and left it there on the table. In the next room was a German. "Give me your wallet!" the thief said. The German showed him an empty wallet. "There's nothing in it," he answered. "Okay, keep it," the thief said. The German's pockets were bulging with cash and credit cards that he'd only a minute earlier taken out of the wallet, but the thief never asked what was in the man's pockets. Idiots they may be have been, but they successfully destroyed a business, ruined two dozen holidays and sent shockwaves through backpacker hostels across the country.

Most burglaries aren't so brazen. In the summertime people tend to leave their windows open (though certainly barred). There is an inventive way of gaining entry into people's houses via the bedrooms, even when people are sleeping inside. You take an ordinary compact disc and set fire to it. The chemicals that coat and hold the CD together are potent enough that, if inhaled, they will knock you out for a good amount of time. So when the CD is on fire, you stick it between the bars of the windows and into the victim's bedroom. Let it burn until the room fills with the smoke, and then you can make any amount of noise you want sawing away at the bars until you gain entry into the room. It gives rather new meaning to the phrase, 'burning a CD'. In early February I couchsurfed with three Peace Corps volunteers in a quiet community near the Royal Natal National Park in the Drakensberg mountain area. Aside from the usual stories of theft and disturbing moments that come with the territory here, there were two incidents they told me that stuck out. One was that someone tried this CD-burning technique on her one night, a couple months earlier, while she was sleeping. She had left the windows open as usual, but this time she happened to leave the fan on as well, which was lucky for her because it blew the smoke out of the room before she could inhale it. She only pieced together what happened in the morning, when she'd remembered waking up in the middle of the night to the smell of something burning, and then hearing noises outside, and then seeing vague shapes walking away from her window.

The other incident that stuck out with her happened around the same time, as she was walking on a sidewalk in Durban with her friends in the middle of the day when someone leaned out of a passing car and shot her in the neck with a BB gun for no reason at all. T.I.A., as they say around here: This is Africa. It's a sort of verbal shrug you use when you encounter senseless social breakdown and are tempted to complain about it. It means: You're here; what do you expect? The always-smiling tour guide at Coffee Bay had a another way of putting it. "Shit happens," he said. "That's why we smoke the shit."

One rainy evening, my first night in Lesotho, I shared a room with an Israeli traveler who had an iPod, playing Nick Cave's "The Boatman's Call". I lay down on the bed and thumbed through my Lonely Planet for information about the country. Already I was surprised at how many signs of death I'd seen everywhere. Coffin-makers and funeral directors had prominent shops on every main road, usually next door to health clinics -- a pattern repeated throughout the country. I looked at the chapters for health in Lesotho and around. The Israeli had a different edition of the book, and I read both. Between our two copies I found a few striking passages. Because of AIDS,


Recent projections have put life expectancy by 2010 at 29 in Botswana, 30 in Swaziland, 33 in Namibia and Zimbabwe and 36 in Malawi and South Africa. Without AIDS it would be 70 in most of these countries.
30% or more of the adult population is infected in most of these countries. AIDS is the leading cause of death in South Africa, accounting for 30% of all deaths. South Africa also has the world's highest rate of rape, and the highest absolute number of AIDS infections. Lesotho has 45% unemployment; and AIDS infection rate of 30%; and a few years ago, 500,000 people found themselves in real danger of starvation, out of a total population of 2 million.

For Swaziland (my next destination), in 1992 the AIDS infection rate was 3.9%. In 2007 it was 39%. 25% of the 1.1 million population will be dead of AIDS by 2010. Also by 2010, 1/6 of the population will be children under 15 years old who have lost both parents.

I had just come to Lesotho from KwaZulu Natal, one of the major provinces of South Africa. There, the AIDS infection rate is 33%, which, factoring in the low rate of infection among white communities living in the province, would mean that in Zulu communities in this province the rate is about 50%. This is the same region of the country where a rumor has been going around that sex with a virgin cures AIDS (the younger the virgin, the more potent the cure). The next South African head of state, Jacob Zuma, was acquitted of raping an HIV-positive woman though he admitted to having unprotected sex with her -- a fact that did not concern him because he "had a shower afterwards". Despite widespread ridicule from most of the educated population, Jacob Zuma's popularity in his native Zulu communities has reportedly resulted in t-shirts worn by some of his fans at his political rallies, which read, "Jacob Zuma, rape me!"

In Lesotho, AIDS work is frustrated by mismanagement of the education system, lack of proper methods of distributing what few medical resources there are, and distrust of white people. Volunteers from abroad often attempt to bring sex education to Lesotho, along with free condoms; but occasionally their interference is interpreted as a malevolent plot for population control: Some xenophobic locals believe that the volunteers are giving away condoms which have deliberately been pre-infected with AIDS, in order to do away with the population. The cynicism here is a cover for naivete, and is not the only instance in Lesotho where foreigners are scapegoated for problems which have causes closer to home. More on this later.

In Lesotho I would meet Cindy (not her real name), another American Peace Corps volunteer with some stories of her own. She enjoys her life in Lesotho, but it has not been without some bumps. On one occasion she took a weekend in South Africa, where some of her things were stolen out of her hotel room by the hotel staff themselves. Far more seriously, she and a few others were staying at a friend's house one time when the house was broken into and everyone was awakened at gunpoint. Someone screamed, and the neighborhood guard heard the noise and came running. There was a shootout and the police came much later. At first the guard was thought to be dead, but he turned up alive and when morning came they were all able to count the bullet holes in the house. Cindy could not sleep for 2 months afterwards, and was eventually sent home to the United States for counseling and recovery. She came back to work later on.

Then there was the time she took a minibus taxi -- the common way for most of the population to get around -- which seats 15 people and lets you get on and off just like a normal bus does, except that each taxi is its own private enterprise. At one of the stops, three men got off, turned around, and pointed guns into the taxi, demanding wallets from everybody. A woman screamed, the taxi hit the gas, and bullets started firing. No one was hurt.

When I came to visit her, she was planning another weekend sojourn into South Africa and invited myself and another Peace Corps volunteer to come along. We did, and were all robbed in the process. We had left our bags with some friends, who emptied them out, took what they wanted, and re-packed them in a very sloppy way beforegiving them back to us. Given my money problems -- which had still not sorted themselves out -- and the fact that all of my money and a couple of seemingly non-functional credit & debit cards were taken during that robbery, I ended up in bad shape after the event. I'd lost 500 rand (about 45 euros), which was all that I had in the world, and also a pair of sandals, khaki pants and shorts. Cindy lost her digital camera and some electronics equipment, and her friend Anne lost a phone. Fortunately Peace Corps volunteers are refunded immediately for stolen cash, and have decent (but not great) insurance on their valuables, so they were kind enough to reimburse me on the spot for what I'd lost, before being reimbursed partially for what they lost. I haven't yet followed up on how Cindy and Anne are doing these days, but when I left them there was a sense that one of them, although in cheery spirits just days earlier and was considering extending her stay in the Peace Corps for another year, might have felt that this last, minor robbery was really the last straw for her in Africa, and was contemplating just going home.

Over on the other side of the mountains, I chatted with a tour guide named Matthew who is from South Africa, and who embarrassed himself somewhat by telling his clients that there was no starvation anymore in Lesotho, at the exact moment when one of them happened to be reading a current newspaper article about starvation in Lesotho.

During one of his earlier travels, Matthew had met an Israeli who'd come to South Africa on holiday via the international airport at Johannesburg. On his first day the Israeli got mugged on the street. Then on his way to the police station to report the mugging, he got mugged again. That was it. His next move was to buy an air ticket out of the country. At the same place where I met Matthew, I also got to know a white woman from Zimbabwe who had immigrated to South Africa many years before. Her parents had stayed on in Zim, until they were attacked one day in Harare so severely that her father lost an eye. That was when they decided to come to South Africa to live in the quiet countryside there.

I kept to the countryside for a while also before going to Johannesburg, a city of more than 5 million people whose crime epidemic is so notorious among backpackers that, despite Joburg's enormous importance for the entire continent, most visitors to South Africa don't even stay long enough to take a look around. And even if they do stay, they don't get out much, aside from shuttle buses and taxis from their hostel directly to the shopping malls and museums. The rest of the city is left to the locals. Frankly, we backpackers are terrified of the place. And the thought of visiting the gigantic Soweto township next door is so far beyond our imaginations that the idea never even enters our minds. With nearby Pretoria meant to be a dull, lifeless administrative capital, the entire province of Gauteng, which encompasses the three cities, is usually treated by backpackers as a transport hub only, and a great big sigh of relief is often heard when we tourists see the back of it.

Why, then, am I staying here now, and why am I fascinated by the place? Why did I refuse when a group of South African partygoers offered me a free ride into Mozambique -- the undisputed paradise of southern Africa -- just yesterday, because I wanted instead to stay at least another week in Joburg, with extra time for Soweto and Pretoria? To answer that question I will need to back up a bit, and take another look at what T.I.A. really means to me.

---

Part 2: T.I.A.

My last journal entry from 2 months ago ended with a quick trip to a mountain town called Hogsback, which was a nice diversion from the characterless city of East London. I uploaded the entry as soon as I got back to East London, and then treated myself to the Will Smith zombie movie I am Legend, which was playing in a mall about 8km from my guesthouse at the beach. I caught a mid-afternoon show, left the theater at around sunset, and looked in vain for a minibus taxi going back to my part of town. I gave up after 10 minutes, decided I wasn't going to pay full-fare for a private taxi, and decided to walk fast. Just like in the film, you do not want to be on the streets in any South African city once darkness falls.

I got 2 shocks in the first 5 minutes of my walk. The first was a decrepit, ghoulish-looking homeless man an rags who could have very easily been an extra in the film I just walked out of. He was sitting, propped up against a security wall that surrounded a house on the main street, staring at me. I wasn't ready for such a sight -- I still had images from the movie swirling through my head -- and the vision before me now made my flesh creep. I kept walking, and 200 meters on, right in the middle of the same main road, a black man was pissing on the pavement with a bottle in one hand. Traffic was cruising by on either side of him. On I went, walking all the way down the main road, past the Steve Biko statue^* and along the beach to my guesthouse, planning my trip to Coffee Bay all along the way. East London had been a decent stopover for me, but there was no more mystique.

^* I had met a South African girl in Hogsback who had never heard the name Steve Biko before, and knew nothing of his Black Consciousness movement nor his martyrdom.


The bus to Umtata was about 4 hours, and from there I had to transfer to a shuttle bus to go the last 90km to the Coffee Shack, the big party hostel at Coffee Bay. After a long and irritating ride over a damaged road with thousands of potholes interspersed, rather hilariously, with speed-bumps, we made it through the pouring rain, past several spread-out rural Xhosa villages, and out to the coast again. At last we were there.

It was a relief to arrive, and a warm welcome of free drinks awaited us, with a game of Killer Pool for all the guests at night. When darkness came there was a home-cooked meal by the Xhosa cooking staff, served up after a half-dozen local teenage Xhosa girls came out to the hostel to dance topless for us in short skirts and necklaces and nothing at all else. There were drums and spirited singing and rump-shaking -- this was a dance, and no one was just going through the motions of it ... except us. The dancing girls called out to the women in our group for volunteers to practice shaking their booties next to the girls. Nobody did. So the girls kept their show going all on their own, 20 minutes or more of pure energy. Backpacking has lost a lot of its soul in the past few decades, and it might not be long before that weary lethargy sinks into the local culture as well.


My favorite character at the Coffee Shack was Joseph, the happiest, most talkative and easygoing guy around -- and he was working there, not backpacking. His philosophy: Everybody drop your guard, get together and open up and have fun. Hey, we're all just brothers from another mother. Joseph was a Xhosa barman at the hostel as well as the tour guide -- a lousy tour guide for sure, but even his failures were delightful. The first day I was there, he took us on a cultural tour of his nearby home village on a dark, rainy day, and from there we went on a slip-sliding mud walk through fields and forests to a natural swimming hole.

Joseph's home was a set of three limestone-green painted mud huts with a straw roof on top of each; two huts for his family's sleeping quarters, one for cooking, no toilet. He took us inside one. We all crowded into the doorway and stood there, waiting for something, some explanation, some context, some idea of what we were looking at inside this hut, some insight into daily life, some history about the village or how the huts were made. Joseph was oddly quiet and seemed to be waiting too; he stared at the same walls as we did, the same cheap furniture, the same straw ceiling and odds and ends. He sighed, hands on his hips. We stood there in absolute silence for thirty seconds, not knowing what to do. Finally Joseph spoke.

"Yes," he said.

That was it, and we filed out, only me giggling at what had happened. But when it went the same way with the other huts and landmarks we passed, others found the humor. It was a very African moment, to set up a tour of all the sights and then not know how to talk about them, and in a way it was as informative as any other part of the tour. South Africa was still learning the game, and it hadn't worked out the kinks just yet.

Joseph's mother cooked lunch for everyone, and we ate in the typical Xhosa way: Men in chairs, women on the floor. Outside in the rain, children in underwear kicked mud at each other for fun; their parents were off somewhere else. Other children brightened up and shouted 'hello' and screamed and danced for us as we walked by. Down the path a ways from the house was the communal water tap, installed only 10 years ago for the village, which was really nothing more than some farm and grazing land with houses lightly dotting the hills. Before the water tap was set up with its own filtering system, cholera was a serious problem in the area.

It rained more and more, and the others on the tour began complaining about all the walking we were doing in soggy clothes and muddy shoes, nothing but bare green hills and occasional identical-looking round limestone mud huts. Joseph tried to keep the mood up, and this is when he grinned and said to us: "Shit happens. That's why we smoke the shit."

Our heads were down to keep the rain out of our eyes and to help us avoid stepping in mud puddles, and all we could think about was getting indoors and in front of a fire -- or even better, getting back to the hostel to shower and to put on dry clothes and get some beers into us. It all sounded reasonable enough. We're only human. But on another level, what the hell were we thinking? How jaded we were, and how silly the whole trip, if we'd come all the way across the world to see a place, and when we got there we could only think of seeking refuge in a hostel rather than put up with some mild discomfort. Didn't we know what we were signing up for when we chose Africa over, say, Europe or Australia or Thailand? This was a chance to see how real people really lived -- and not in a modern industrial country, but how most of humanity lived through all history, and how many still do through today. And three in our group wanted, because of the rain, to give up, break off from the tour and go back to change clothes and drink beer.

We ended up all staying together because Joseph kept telling jokes. He took us to see a village healer. As for the study of medicine, the healer is self-taught -- sort of. The Ancestors speak to him and tell him which herbs to pick and to give to each ill patient. So we sat in the hut of an esteemed medicine man with a rotten tooth and young children who enjoyed breathing through thin plastic bags over their mouths, then sucking the plastic, then feeding the plastic to ducklings living alongside the baby chickens in the hut. The healer had several wives, for whom he paid dowries; the standard dowry was 10 cows, but the number can go up or down depending on the circumstances surrounding the woman. He offered to take one of the women in our tour group on as an apprentice -- or an extra wife, whichever suited her. For some reason she declined.

We did, at the end of the tour, go home and kick our feet up. I put the day out of my mind for a long while, but later I looked back on it and realized what the problem was. The problem was with perspective and expectation. If you come to Africa hoping for a good time and to get some stories and photos to send home or put on Facebook, then it makes perfect sense to call off a tour on a rainy day; you're not having a good time, the rain will ruin the pictures and keep anything spontaneous from happening. But if you respect the place, and respect that it has a value of its own beyond what it can give to you, and if you care what that value is, then creature comforts fade away in comparison to the opportunity to find things out, and you end up absorbed in the world that is in front of you. Yes, This Is Africa -- but we knew that coming in, and we chose Africa anyway. So how can we turn around and demand an easy ride when we arrive? To me T.I.A. means that you had better be prepared to adapt to Africa, because Africa sure isn't going to adapt to you.

Of course, I am not just talking about one rainy day. A lot of other situations come into clearer focus when we look at them through this lens, and I will come to them soon enough. (One South African told me that the phrase "Conquer All!" looked silly at the top of my webpage. "You don't conquer Africa," he said. "Africa conquers you.")

I also expect that some of my South African friends were fuming as they read the first part of this journal entry. If there is any refrain that I keep hearing endlessly as I move through the country, it is that we foreigners should not emphasize the violence here; it isn't that bad. Nonsense. It is that bad, and it will never get better without us talking about it and putting the issue on the table. I've never heard of a problem that was solved by people averting their eyes to what was right in front of them -- a point that unfortunately needs to be repeated in a different context later. Plainly, if it wasn't that bad, they wouldn't have to keep telling us not to talk about it.

But equally, this is a real flesh-and-blood country, and it won't do to just simplify whole communities into, "Coffee Bay is so mellow and has great waves for surfers," or, "Joburg is a charnel house; best stay away." Transparently, it is national pride and not any kind of sense or principle that encourages locals to object more strongly to the second of those phrases than the first; both distort and reduce in the same dehumanizing fashion, and both simplify real communities into an almost colonialist "what can this place do for me?" mentality. South Africa is keen on solving its identity crisis by selling itself to us (and to itself) as a gorgeous and chill backpackers' mecca; this is a misguided attempt to please. What it is is a country, and it is better off for that. A country is more interesting than a postcard anyway.

Next day we set off again to get another a look at that country, with a 3-hour walk in the sunshine along the coastal cliffs to a place called Hole in the Wall, which gets its name from a giant rock a few meters offshore with a hole through the center where the waves come crashing through. At night we went off to a special cultural dinner in one of the other nearby villages, where we met the "head man" and groups of children staring, giggling, following us. They offered us all some rather unimpressive Xhosa beer followed by a plate of pap-based traditional food. Pap is a staple of the Xhosa diet, and although at a glance it seems to resemble mashed potatoes, it tastes remarkably similar to wet cardboard. We were treated after dinner to another round of dancing by the Xhosa girls, and this time everyone was invited to dance along. With topless girls all around and drums beating and Joseph calling out, "shaaaaake dat body," what could I do but obey? I shook till I could shake no more, and got some nice compliments afterwards. A few of the girls got into it this time as well, but all the other guys I came with looked embarrassed and just bobbed back and forth in a clumsy way.

I spent the next day at the beach and was sick for the 5 days following that, so for a little while I took things easy and hung around and talked to people. Then I got on a bus to Durban, an 8-hour trip through absolutely empty land in order to get to a city whose streets were clogged with traffic. I called up Mark the CouchSurfer, who told me to wait for him at a local hangout area on Florida Rd., and we met up there and hung around with a half-dozen of Mark's friends who just happened to be there because there aren't too many other places for a young crowd to go in the city at night. The next morning, I scribbled down:


They are pierced and tattooed with dyed hair and punk rock t-shirts, and stoned out of their minds, hooking up randomly every 10 min with new people. I am attracted and repelled. It is a chemical fest. Spaced out. I'm invited to pot parties and drinking binges and jam sessions the rest of the week. We're up drinking till 3AM with roomie John-O even though Mark needs to go to work at 7AM. For a double shift. Girl with blue hair is ethereal and otherworldly. On alcohol only?

Mark: "Maybe you heard about Durban Poison already. It comes from here."

It's a crisis if the city's dealers are short on pot. We smoke and drink and drive to a scenic hillside lot and look at Durban -- city lights (and giant casino complex) twinkling on the horizon. Mark is 21 and he's an old hand at this. Been with his share of the ladies, done the harder drugs from time to time. Everything is 'rad' and 'hectic'. He spends his hours talking about avant-garde film directors and authors that are making waves. Envious? Yes. But he is also struggling. He doesn't like his job (wedding film editor) and his apartment is awkward, with a positively murderous sun baking the place (no fans, no a/c) at 5:30AM as it starts its deadly climb up from the sea on the horizon. And then there is just the fact of SA and life in the city, and maybe the reason for the 'live fast, die young' approach.

For a while until I met Mark and Sarah and the others who told me their stories, I took precautions in public places but generally I thought I could get through SA without running into trouble. Now I am starting to be much more cautious. Very few walks at night, even short distances.
On my first full day in Durban, Mark had to work from 7AM to 10PM and I was left to explore the city a bit on my own, with a vomit-taste in my throat from the alcohol, the pot and the sickness, but curiously not from vomit. My stomach was in bad shape, and I swore to myself I would go easy on the alcohol -- which turned out to be impossible in Mark's world, which I should have known. Every evening in Durban I drank with Mark, and every day following I felt sick from that drinking. Years ago I outgrew the idea of going out to loud bars and drinking for hours while yelling at my mates around a sticky wooden table, but this time, lousy as I felt, and nasty as that beer tasted, I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. Things were happening here, and you either adapt to Africa or you miss out on everything.

The joke of the week was Eskom, which will probably turn out to be the joke of the year and the rest of the decade as well in South Africa. It is the ultimate and quintessential T.I.A.

Eskom is the national power supplier. Ten years ago they warned the government that electricity demands would soon outstrip supply and that new power plants were necessary. The government, in its infinite wisdom, announced a growing economy but decided not to have more power plants built to service that economy. Now the electricity grids are way overloaded, and there are still no new power plants even under construction; they will take several years to build even if the ball gets rolling immediately. There are regular controlled blackouts for hours at a time in various places around the country in order to ease the strain on the electrical grid -- a process called "load shedding" -- a situation which arose even as Eskom was exporting power to South Africa's neighbors and as the company's own executive officers were voting to give themselves pay raises and bonuses.

The load shedding is crudely arranged; no district in the entire country is safe, and usually no warning is given. One of Mark's wedding videos was destroyed in the editing booth because when the power came on after a bout of load shedding, the system reverted to the last command, which was the 'record' button. Hospitals have had their power cut during regular operating hours, and surgeries have to be carried out by flashlight. All this comes as South Africa prepares for the 2010 World Cup, which would normally be an event of overpowering national pride, given the banning of South Africa from the FIFA organization for decades during its apartheid years, the nurturing of the sport in streets and township parks, and the hard-won rights for minorities to compete with whites on a playing field -- a struggle closely identified with the larger human rights battle that tore the country to pieces. And now as a warm-hearted tribute, FIFA chooses South Africa to host the games, an event that will bring tears to millions of eyes here ...... and they will be crying in the dark. Because all the country's electricity will be diverted to the stadium areas during the month or World Cup action, and the rest of the country will be in silent darkness, the lucky ones being able to afford a generator to power their TV so they can watch the games that their own country is hosting.

Even in the near-term the consequences will be devastating. In nearby countries where the utilities and infrastructure are unreliable, people have weaned themselves off of dependency on the government, and have already invested in their own ways of doing things rather than waiting for the public services to come through. South Africa, a country with so much comparative natural wealth, may have to soon follow suit, with devastating consequences for the economy. At the start of February I read a front-page newspaper story declaring "4 weeks of massive blackouts, starting immediately" courtesy of Eskom, followed by 4 weeks of further rationing. (The same newspaper, famous for its own unique blend of absurdity and horror, also disclosed that large amounts of raw sewage had been leaking into the Durban River for 9 months before anyone noticed.) The best emotional defense against such an outrage is laughter, and the South Africans do know how to laugh. And so you start to hear jokes like this one:


Two prisoners are sitting on death row, waiting to be executed. They're scared shitless, until a guard comes and tells them, look, there isn't much pain with the electric chair. You get a jolt, and then you're dead -- no suffering at all. The prisoners are relieved. "Are you sure?" they say. "Yes yes, it's pain-free. You won't feel a thing."

The time comes for one of the prisoners to be executed. The other one is terrified when he hears hours and hours of horrific screams coming through the wall. Finally the noise stops, and the guard comes back. "Guard!" the prisoner says. "You said it was quick, you said we wouldn't feel anything. But it took all night to kill that other guy!"

The guard says, "Yeah. It was a shame. We had to use candles instead of the electric chair. Load shedding!"
There was also a silly joke going around about South African president-to-be Jacob Zuma, famously accused of rape, inviting Mike Tyson of all people for a special audience with him in South Africa. Except it wasn't a joke. It actually happened. T.I.A.


Durban is a messy city saved by a pleasant beach and esplanade which are spacious and friendly enough to walk around with their pools, cafes and amusement park rides, and which attract some very impressive street artists making trinkets, paintings and giant sand sculptures in the shapes of animals. The water has some plastic floating around in it, but at least it is a great deal warmer than the icy Cape Town bays where the penguins come ashore. With Mark at work again I went exploring a bit on my own, until I stopped off in a KFC for a cheap ice cream cone. The napkin they gave me along with it had a very curious and condescending advertisement on it. "Are you as smart as a 5th grader?" it asked, and invited me to tune in and watch some TV quiz show to find out. The question wasn't part of any kind of kids' Happy Meal or anything. The question was a serious one. And it was meant for adults.

I spent the rest of my Durban experience smoking pot with Mark and John-O, playing Playstation and watching teen comedy movies in true slacker style. I walked up and down the streets, seeing the same posters on pillars and lampposts that I have seen everywhere in South Africa:

SAFE ABORTION
PAIN FREE
SAME DAY

On my last full day in the city, my illness finally went away and I was ready to buy a bus ticket for Bergville, a town near the base of the Drakensberg mountain chain (a flat-topped, grass-covered string of peaks which translates as "Dragon Mountains" and roughly marks the beginning of the country of Lesotho), and a place where I was to meet a Peace Corps CouchSurfer named Monica. Her house somewhere else, but was taking a weekend off to visit two of her other friends from the Peace Corps, who had an apartment in Bergville with a spare couch for me.

There wasn't a whole lot to do in tiny Bergville, but somehow in addition to the Peace Corps folks, there was also a German guy living down the road at his own house, and that evening he happened to be hosting a braai (barbecue) at his house and we were all invited. We were all fairly impressed with the white pet snake that he kept in a glass case; less so with the South African guest who loudly declared that white people were the most discriminated-against ethnic group in the country, a claim that would become wearyingly familiar as time went on.

The next day Monica invited me out to the nearby Royal Natal National Park, where we hiked on a clear sunny day up two nice trails to a waterfall and a peak overlooking the nearby mountains and the plains off in the distance. A family on weekend break invited us to join a braai and then, bellies full, we hitchhiked back to Bergville with a Muslim family that asked us religious questions and then played a CD of Islamic sermons as we drove past the incongruous spectacle of some roadside goats getting it on. The next day it was time to go, and I hitched by myself towards the south, to get a look at a different section of the Drakensberg.

The guesthouse where I ended up was called Inkosana, and as far as guesthouses go, it was the hidden gem of the whole country for me. A common room big enough to play frisbee in, a pool big enough to swim laps in, grass like you find on a golf course, and a wide stretch of Drakensberg peaks filling the horizon. I spent two days hiking to waterfalls and enjoying the magnificent company of a French, Australian and Israeli trio of backpackers who cooked for me, drove me around and chatted up a storm with never a dull moment. Then I left.

I never know whether I am moving too fast or too slow when I travel. When I type such a paragraph as the one I've just finished, I wonder about it. Why didn't I stay longer at Inkosana while I was there? In its modest way it proved to be an unforgettable highlight of the trip. So why just pick up and leave? On the other hand, I am writing this note from Johannesburg, almost four months after I entered the country, and I do not feel at all ready to leave the country. Most people take 2 or 3 weeks to travel between Cape Town and Joburg for their entire trip. I've met people who have seen 10 African countries in the time it has taken me so far to see South Africa and Lesotho. Is this because they have that different perspective on travel that I wrote about earlier? Or that they're on a schedule? Or is it just that I'm a weirdo with no life, spinning around dizzily as people pass by me with such speed?

Whatever it is, it is. I left Inkosana after only two nights, and spent a whole 10-hour day of hitchhiking and wrong turns and squeezing into crowded minibus taxis before I ended up tired and sweaty, standing at an empty crossroads in twilight, thumbing for a ride that I really hoped would come. I was just outside of a town called Himeville, and the crossroads was the start of a road called the Sani Pass, one of the main roads entering Lesotho. I had no plans to enter Lesotho that evening, but the hostel where I was meant to stay was located on this road. The road was so rural and quiet that every establishment from where I was standing to the border post 25 km away was listed on a tall signboard right next to me. I stood there in broken shoes, with an unshaven face and still very little money in my pocket, dirty, no food, my backpack at my feet and the rain starting to come down.

Somebody pulled over. He took me 10 kilometers up the road to a place called Sani Lodge, a backpackers hostel at the edge of a national park in the mountains. The lodge had leftover salad and a supply of milk and chocolate cake, so I survived the evening. A notice on the refrigerator offered a short-term Assistant Manager position which I took note of. I also met a pair of travelers from South Africa and Canada who were both working in Korea and who were on holiday together here; they filled me in on a few queries I'd had about the job. More importantly, they also had a friend doing ESL work in Zanzibar (an island off Tanzania) and being paid well for it. They gave me contact information for when I'm in the area. ESLing in Zanzibar is just my thing. I'm there, dude.

Even better: I met a Dutch girl who is living for a year in Soweto -- the world's most infamous township -- both to stay with her boyfriend there and to do research for her master's degree. I've got a standing invitation to meet her there and I wouldn't miss it for the world.

In the morning I took a look around the lodge. There were mountains in all directions that looked a little bit like oversized Grampians. I did a short hike into the national park, but if you wanted to do longer you could sleep in caves, and get this -- you had to call and make reservations for the caves. But I had no time. Money was running out and I had a plan already to meet a Peace Corps girl in Lesotho, so soon I had to pack up and leave, standing alongside a hardcore Israeli backpacker named Michael on the side of the road in the rain, hoping for a ride to come along to take us into Lesotho. A minibus taxi came instead, which was just as good, but the road was in such awful condition that a trip which would normally take 3 hours ended up taking almost 6. The road to the top of the pass was a muddy 4x4-only track even in the best of times, and if it hadn't been pissing down rain I'm sure the views would have been marvelous. As it was, the best thing about the ride was the local guy who had a laugh exactly like Flavor Flav's, using it liberally to grace all the shouting and fast music of the typical long-distance minibus taxi. Later Michael would tell me that he was making small talk with the man sitting next to him on the minibus. "So what do you do?" Michael asked. The answer: "I'm a drug dealer." He crossed back and forth from Lesotho to South Africa, exporting blocks of marijuana from the small country and making a daily profit of 6000 rand (500 euros), he said.

The top of the pass featured the highest-altitude pub in Africa (nearly 3000m), as a friendly welcome to the mountain-plateau nation of Lesotho. Once on top, the air cleared immediately and we got brilliant views through the plains and into the mountains shooting up on all sides. Someone I had met at Sani Lodge had just come down from Lesotho, and she told me the roads were so slow that she had to spend most of her trip in the car -- but that she enjoyed every minute of it. I could see why. My first impression of Lesotho was that it was a cross between Texas and Tibet. Texas because of the cowboys riding horses and wearing western hats, and the frontier feel of every small town. Tibet because of everything else: The round stone huts everyone lived in, the poverty, the high altitude preventing any vegetation beyond grass, the simple food and lack of luxuries, the cold, the empty landscape walled-in by rock mountains, the long roads to nowhere.

In late afternoon we got off the minibus taxi in a parking lot in a town called Mokhotlong, which has nothing special in it except that it is the first town you get to in Lesotho and it is a perfectly typical example of how people live in the country. We were the only whites, and the stares we received never let us forget that. The first item of business was to find a place to sleep. My six-year-old Lonely Planet said there were beds available at a place called the Farmer Training Center, but his newer edition didn't mention anything. We decided to ask around. On the main road there were three teenage girls in school uniforms walking in our direction, smiling and watching us.

"Excuse me," I said. "Do you know where is the Farmer Training Center?"

The girls smiled from ear to ear.

I repeated: "Farmer ... Training Center? Yes? Do you know?"

The two younger girls looked at the oldest, whose mouth was parted in the widest grin I have ever seen. She couldn't answer because she was enjoying the moment too much. I smiled as well, and soon we were all laughing, so hard that no one had any hope of saying anything. Giggling like crazy, Michael and I walked off, and I knew I would never forget that encounter.

We asked around, and people seemed to all point to a hillside overlooking the town. It had a couple of buildings on it, and the letters "LDF" covering the grass in giant white paint. Everyone told us that that was where we needed to go, so we walked a few kilometers through the town and up the road to get there. The town had some features about it that surprised us both, namely the visibility of death. Everywhere there were coffin-makers and billboards advertising life insurance, funerals and the threat of AIDS. A cafe in the center of town doubled as a slaughterhouse, and part of the floor had streaks of fresh blood on it leading to the open door of the freezer in the back which contained a row of beheaded pigs. A truck out front was loaded with dozens of sheeps' heads and feet, stomachs bursting with intestines, and lying on the sidewalk next to the front door were the skins of more sheep. Or more likely the same sheep. 10 meters from my table was a giant pen for sheep who were probably busy living their last hours. A few dogs shared the cage with them, lying down lazily on one side.

Otherwise the town had its own ramshackle shops and stalls lining the road, and when we got to the end of it someone in a car pulled over and asked if we wanted a lift. We said sure, and he offered to drive us to the "LDF" marker at the top of the hill where we pointed. A moment later it started raining, and then we arrived. A man stood in uniform with a machine gun in a corrugated metal shack -- the kind you see in the poorest of South African townships -- next to the road. "Is this the Farmer Training Center?" we asked. "This is the Lesotho Defense Force," he answered. Oops. The same driver was kind enough to drive us back into town, ask directions himself, and then take us to the correct place, which was not signposted at all -- a fact that might explain why we were the only visitors.

The place was nice and, by Lesotho standards, probably a lot better than average. The room had electricity, nice blankets and a space heater, although the only toilets were outhouses and the only showers were ice cold. We put our bags down and decided to wander around the town for a while. Almost immediately as we came to the road again, a Lesotho teenager approached us, and said, with dead-on accurate inflection, "Yo, yo, yo, wassup homies? You just chillin'?" It wasn't just a cute beginning; he had a repertoire of ebonics to last the entire conversation. He came from Maseru but was going to high school in Mokhotlong, and obviously had a lot of spare time to watch movies and listen to rap.

South African soap operas--hugely popular nationwide -- will throw in some phrases like this as well. The dramas are acted out onscreen in a mix of a half-dozen South African languages being thrown into the dialogue at random times. If a conversation onscreen is taking place in Afrikaans, Xhosa or Sesotho, the character will every now and then throw in an English expression like, "no freakin' way" or "what's up with that?" before switching immediately back to the other language, just for variety's sake. Nobody in real life actually talks like this, but it does help people get a foot in the door with the other languages of South Africa, which has 11 official languages in all.

We wake up early the next morning and it is rainy again and so we figure we might as well make it a traveling day. We cross the entire country on an 8-hour trip to get to Maseru, the capital city, where we finally begin to see some white people among the crowds. Lesotho has great poverty and consequently a large number of aid workers in addition to the embassy officials that normally station themselves in capital cities. One of them directed us to an Anglican Church Center which offered cheap accommodation. Later in the afternoon a few more people showed up, including a woman visiting Lesotho as part of her linguistic research program, and an Irishman on holiday from a bird-watching expedition in the Kalahari. The four of us went out to eat in the center, whose atmosphere was more of a humdrum Third World town than a capital city.

In the morning we got a morning bus to Malealea, which was nothing more than a small village far away from populated areas, but it also happened to be one of the two most famous spots in the country for sightseers and backpackers. It took us all of five seconds to figure out why. The drive getting there was, like all drives in Lesotho, both utterly gorgeous and utterly unlike anything you can find in South Africa, and again we enjoyed the odd but now-familiar spectacle of the gutted shells of cars and trucks dotting the landscapes, roads and villages throughout the country. The absence of buildings, trees or even tall grass in Lesotho gives a great impression of emptiness and bestows upon every open space an enormous feel to it, which is ironic in a country as tiny and unassuming as this one. After a drive like that, Malealea village was an anticlimax made up of mud huts and crude shops with corrugated metal roofs and lopsided signposting, with one local bar, one half-stocked fruit & veg shop and one quarter-stocked convenience store.

But the whole settlement was situated next to a splendid gorge, and the people here clearly made all of their money from the lodge that, in great contrast to the rest of the village, was assembled and maintained with great care so that not even a blade of grass was out of place. Even though the place was nearly empty of guests, a group of local musicians came to perform for us and the well-educated young children waiting for us outside the front gate of the lodge were always willing to give tours of the area and show us around in exchange for some pocket change. The most interesting thing they showed us was how to eat a deliciously juicy purplish fruit that crew off of a kind of wild cactus plant that I'd never seen before. They also showed us which hikes to do to get the best views -- advice very much worth taking. We hiked the rim of the gorge, met local farmers and goatherders in the area, and took in giant doses of pristine landscape every minute.

My money situation was beginning to grow dire, so instead of staying longer I made plans to meet with the Peace Corps volunteer in her town of Mafeteng, before heading back to South Africa to see if I could finally get hold of my ATM card that had been the bane of my existence up until this point. What I wondered most about this girl, who I'll call Cindy, was how she felt about living in Mafeteng. My Lonely Planet had this to say about the town:


There's not much of interest in this town, although it is important as a bus and minibus taxi interchange.
That was the entire description of a town where Cindy would have to live for 2 years to fulfill her Peace Corps contract. I asked Michael to see his Lonely Planet; maybe the newer edition had more in it. This is the text in his book:


Mafeteng is named after an early magistrate Emile Rolland, who was known to the local Basotho as Lafeta (One Who Passes By). Little has changed; you'd do best to move on.
I tried to picture her face when, getting her long-awaited Peace Corps assignment, she ran to the bookstore to read something about it, and encountered that description.

I came to visit the next day, and after a few hours found her village, which wasn't even in Mafeteng, but rather Ha Rama Hapi, a very humble roadside settlement several kilometers down the highway from Mafeteng. I didn't have a cell-phone, so when I arrived there I asked everyone I could see if they knew a white woman living in the area. They directed me through a maze of houses, towards a house with no one in it. I left my bags there and made my way back out to the road, where a public phone put me in touch with her. She'd come and pick me up, she said.

So Cindy came and quickly figured out that I'd gone to the other white woman's house in the area. We picked my bags back up and I followed her through dirt paths for five minutes, until at last we came to a lovely, solidly-built red brick house with a garage, large windows and a nice vegetable garden in front, that was such a contrast to all the dirty huts in the rest of the village. The place had a nice yard, some privacy and even a satellite dish. I was very surprised and I complimented her on having a luxurious home like that.

"That's .... not my house," she said. She redirected my gaze towards a gray concrete cube behind the house which looked like an oversized storeroom or toolshed. "That one."

But she's still lucky, all things considered. It had two rooms and electric power, which is more than a lot of other Peace Corps volunteers could boast. And what did she think about Mafeteng? She loved it. Happy with the town, happy with the job. A few of the rules at Peace Corps irked her -- for the volunteers' safety, PC volunteers were not allowed to have cars or motorbikes ... which only meant that they would have to hitch everywhere -- but the good far outweighed the bad. She was even thinking about extending for another year beyond the two years she'd signed up for.

We went out shopping in Mafeteng, a couple of PC volunteers came over and the four of us had tacos and beer for dinner and watched Knocked Up on Cindy's laptop before going to sleep. In the morning Cindy boiled a pot of water and emptied it into a water-bladded hanging from the ceiling of her bedroom, and had me stand in a bucket on the floor. This was to be my shower. We had breakfast with the other PCers, hitchhiked to Maseru with a couple of Germans volunteering with an NGO, and then came to the Peace Corps compound. in the capital city. I wanted a look around the place.

It was like any other office building, but the atmospher was better. A few of the volunteers picked a marijuana plant that they found growing wild behind the Peace Corps office, put it in water and offered it as a gift to one of the country program supervisors, who, back in the day, had been a bit of a hippie himself. One new arrival at the PC office caused a few eyebrows to go up; there was a volunteer in Kenya who had been evacuated and reassigned to Lesotho after the Kenyan election collapsed into widespread violence. But on the whole, the sense of ordinariness mixed with bemusement about the eccentricities of the host country seemed awfully familiar to me, and matched in many ways what I'd experienced already in the teachers' room at my English school in Japan. And just like in Japan, one of the best ways to learn the truth about the country here was to be a fly on the wall in a room just like this one.

AIDS was ravaging the country mercilessly, and most of the volunteers had some connection to the efforts to confront that problem. None of them had any illusions about doing much good; the idealistic ones had already given up and gone home in frustration, and the ones who stayed were a bit more world-wise and realistic about how things went in Africa. I took a few shorthand notes while eavesdropping on other people were talking to each other across the room. Here are some notes:


Sodomy common among bored herd-boys in country.

Not considered gay if just for kicks.

Many PCers flee long before their time is up. When Cindy visited PCHQ today she learned of yet another. The poor girl was traumatized after being chased by herd-boys and she threw in the towel soon after.

There's another PCer who lived far away from things, whom the PC lost touch with for 4 months. When they went looking for him they found him in his hut in a remote village, surrounded by hundreds of bagels, naked, making more bagels continuously. They sent him home.
Opinions are divided about that last story, with some believing it to be apocryphal. But it's a damned good story anyway.

Cindy bid me farewell and told me I should call her later in the week in case she was free to go wandering around on the weekend. But she gave me phone numbers of other PCers in Lesotho and also in Swaziland -- the other tiny country dwarfed by its South African neighbor -- should I later stop there. I most certainly will; but for the meantime I took a long, filthy, scorching hot bus on a bumpy road to Semonkong, the one Place You Have To Go if you are in Lesotho. It was billed as a virtual paradise, but I would have been quite happy if all it had was fresh air. Among the thousands of other superstitions in Lesotho is a widespread belief that fresh air causes sickness, and so no matter how full a bus is, or how hot, all the windows will be closed so that the passengers will breathe the same air and, of course, make themselves more likely to get sick.

But Semonkong lived up to the hype anyway. The lodge was every bit as meticulously kept as the Malealea one, with the added benefit of a 200-meter waterfall emptying into an even more gorgeous gorge than at Malealea, with the world's highest single-drop abseil right next to that waterfall. From my notes:


Semonkong Lodge is The Shit.

I come at sunset to the river, where pinks and purples tint the sky. Hills all round. Just lovely. Men on horseback, kids playing on hills. Yes.
I called up Robbie, Cindy's PC friend from Boston who lived out here so far from everyone else, and who was a bit green but kept a cool head and enjoyed the life. He came over for some drinks, and we both sat down with an Afrikaner missionary named Sean who grew up in Joburg but now worked at the lodge and ran the abseiling activity whenever anyone signed up for it. They were both pleasant company, but the conversation soon devolved, as conversations around here often do, into an Afrikaner guy insisting that he and the other whites are victims of The New Apartheid, the one against whites. He strenuously believed that black people -- no, wait, crippled black people -- in South Africa had easier lives than whites due to runaway affirmative action, a wearying lecture that couldn't help but bring to my mind thoughts of American History X or even Birth of a Nation.

It was funny, then, how the ragged townships and ghettoes of the country were uniformly black and colored rather than white. I told Sean I'd believe every word of his spiel as soon as I saw a backpacker hostel full of crippled black holidaygoers dropping off their dirty laundry for a white mama who'll wash and dry their clothes by hand for pocket-change. He replied that I didn't know a thing about the situation here because I was an outsider. That was how we left things. I had been warned of such people long before I came to South Africa, by a Kiwi friend of mine who said she loved the country but couldn't stomach the white people in it. I asked her what questions she'd needed to ask to get white South Africans to make fools of themselves. "None," she said. "They just have to open their mouths." I had already heard more than my share of racist talk from white South Africans, and was to hear plenty more later, but at least I can say that I've met a few people who buck the stereotype. So, for Carol, Mark, Matthew, Russell and Simone, and a few (but only a few) others, I need to say my thanks here for putting me at ease and showing me that at least some white people from here have put a little thought into things.

The walk to the Semonkong waterfall was a stunner. But where were the tourists? From what I could tell I was the only human being for miles around, and it was a beautiful day and I was standing right in front of the most serenely beautiful sight I'd seen so far in Africa. The waterfall itself looked exactly like a time-lapse picture of a waterfall, with flowing, thick, creamy-looking spray rising off the bottom like smoke from Mark's bong in Durban, except that the bong smoke hadn't made any rainbows. I stood watching it for a half-hour and could have stayed hours more, but it was getting late and I needed to get back to the lodge by sundown. In the morning Sean took his truck to Maseru for some errands, and he offered me a ride, stopping off also to give a free ride to a black man in Semonkong who'd broken his leg and needed treatment at a hospital in Maseru.

While in Maseru I gave a call to Anne, one of Cindy's PC friends who had, shortly before, sat down for drinks with the king and queen of Lesotho (we would soon see the king's limo being escorted around the streets). Anne picked Cindy and I up and invited us to stay the night at her place, which was in a suburb of Maseru and was more middle-class than Cindy's concrete cube-hut had been. We watched a few DVDs and the next morning the three of us decided to hitch into South Africa. Crossing back into South Africa gave me a new 3-month visa for the country, and it wasn't long before we got a ride offer from a friendly and easygoing Afrikaner who took us straight to Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State province^*. We couldn't have known it at the time, but we would have been much better off staying with him.

^* The term "Free State" comes from a 19th century acknowledgement of independence. In a shopping mall, however, I saw a sign that should have been a parody of consumerism, but wasn't. It read: "Enjoy the Freedom to Shop at More Stores!"


Instead we stayed with a friend of Cindy's, who had a country farm house several miles outside the city with the natural world close by. He promised us a braai and all the liquor we could handle, and was quite the generous host. He also let me have my first proper bath or shower in a few days, and a lengthy shave to get rid of the beard I had let grow for much too long. We three guests would have our own bedroom to share, though there were a bunch of others who showed up for the festivities.

There were four dogs at the house, and for the first time in my life I was able to experience the spectacle of dogs eating ants. It was a good thing, because the ants were everywhere, and they liked to bite aggressively. The dogs were even more aggressive, licking them up off the porch by the tongueful, for hours at a time.^* The only thing that took the dogs' attention away from the ants was when the meat came off the barbecue and they started begging for it. There was also a lizard at the house, a very large and striking yellow-and-black one. It bit my hand. There was a neon-blue bug zapper out by the porch, blackened by insect corpses.

^* We shouldn't have felt too superior in our dietary habits. Only a few hours earlier we'd gone to the supermarket and bought a bag of 'monkey gland'.


So we sat around the fire and gnawed on steaks and sausages, and chatted for a while. I can't remember how the subject came up, but somehow we got on the topic of race and where the country was going. One of our host's friends blurted out, "I hate kaffirs.^*." I asked why. "Apartheid," he said. I waited for more. More wasn't coming.<sup>**

*</sup> This is the Southern African version of the N-word.

^** This was an interesting moment because Sean in Semonkong had insisted that Thabo Mbeki, current president of South Africa, had said -- and I quote, "I hate white people." I didn't believe him, and told him so. "So you're saying that if I get online and google 'thabo mbeki i hate white people', I'll get the quote?" Sean was adamant: "Yes!". So I googled it, and I was horrified to see a string of evil quotes from Mbeki such as, "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white," and others that were equally sinister. Nothing about hatred, except for a blanket condemnation of the idea. But here in Bloemfontein were white people unselfconsciously saying the reverse of what Mbeki was falsely accused of saying -- but in much more derogatory language.


Or, to put it another way, more was coming. We were all sitting around a table chatting, when Cindy decided to take a straw poll of everyone present. "Would you date a black?" she said. Answers:

"No."

"No."

"Not unless she was a supermodel." (laughs, sips beer)

One of the guys present, Johann, then took it upon himself to educate me about the "reverse apartheid" that white people were suffering from. He wound up his lecture with a sigh: "I understand we did the same to them before, and now they want their revenge. But it's been almost 15 years now. When will it be enough?" Cry me a river!

A little while later the party disintegrated, and between the dogs and the cats running around the apartment, I got a nasty case of allergies and my eyes puffed up to obscene proportions, my throat closed and it took an effort to breathe. In the morning we all decided that we would not spend another night there, though we would all go to the rugby match between the Bloemfontein Cheetahs and the Johannesburg Lions together. We left our bags at the house and went into the city.

I left the group for a little while and toured around a shopping mall called Mimosa to do some book-buying. I checked the map of the mall to find some stores, and it turned out there was a shop called "CUM BOOKS". I had to go. Sadly it turned out to be an acronym, and the 'C' was for Christian. The shop was only a few meters away from a Christian Book Centre -- competition! I looked in the windows and spotted titles like, "Heaven is So Real!". It wasn't just this city; I'd seen ordinary bookstores across the country devote half their stock to Bibles, Bible covers and theological texts.

The rugby match was great fun, and cheap, but the home team lost, and we went to a bar called Cool Runnings to cry in our beers. We'd planned to stay with another of Cindy's friends, and so our host for the previous night stopped by, dropped off our bags and drove away. All of our bags were much lighter than they were when we had left them with him. They had all been emptied out, our most personal things had been rifled through, and everything that was worth any money was taken out, and then the rest of it was re-packed with all the care and delicacy of a pack of monkeys. I had now had my things taken from me twice in the country -- but I'd not yet been mugged -- and both times were by white people, a small minority of the population. We followed Deon, a friend of Cindy's who insisted that I must be homosexual because I wear nice shirts, and we put our bags down in his apartment for the evening, a rundown place with cockroaches everywhere.

In the morning we all split up, Cindy more than a little dejected. I would have been flat broke if Anne had not reimbursed me on the spot for the money that had been taken from my bag, but as it was I had just enough cash for one day's living costs and to buy one bus ticket somewhere. I called the lodge at the Sani Pass, where I had arrived 10 days earlier and seen a note advertising a short-term assistant manager position. A woman answered the phone and told me not to come, but then her husband took the phone from her and said they'd be glad to have me. All sorts of new developments were to spring forth from that little stroke of luck of me calling at a moment when he just happened to be sitting next to her.

There was an overnight bus going to the city nearest the lodge, but there were several hours before that bus was to leave, and I spent that time reading books on a bench in a mall, where I was to witness some of the "reverse apartheid" that whites complain of. From my notes now:


A curious type of apartheid. An unremarkable scene from it:

I spend this evening in a mall, rather empty with most shops closed down. I am reading while 3 white children play tag and other games, running around barefoot, shouting and laughing. 20m away a 30-yr-old black woman in proper uniform, dressed up and fixed without a hair out of place, like a flight attendant, has been hunched over continuously for the past half-hour, scrubbing each step in a wide staircase with a bucket of soap-water and a hand sponge. As I was writing the last sentence, an Afrikaner couple walked up to her, asked for directions in Afrikaans, and evidently didn't like her answer; the man snorted and turned round with a parting shot; the woman followed suit, giving a dismissive gesture (palm out to her side, pushing) as they walked on. Cleaner-lady stood watching the pair walking away, then picked up the sponge again.

It's hard to know how to describe white people here in the Free State. From what I can see, if you approach them well then they will go out of their way to help. If you appear to be a candidate for their in-group (meaning: if you are lost or are introduced by a friend), their hospitality is exceedingly warm.

If you are of their out-group (a guard, garbage collector, cleaner or other blue-collar worker) then you are made to know that you are simply beneath them. The idea of considering your feelings or where you come from simply does not occur to them. It doesn't even seem to them like it ought to occur to them. This is often the vibe coming off even the good-hearted.
I took an overnight bus, and then a minibus taxi to the nearest town to the pass, and then once again I was tired and sweaty, standing at an empty crossroads, thumbing for a ride that I really hoped would come. It came, as it always does for me. I started work there the next day. The work was easy. I didn't have to clean toilets, make beds or do gardening work like the black staff did. My job was to sit around, greet people, and tell them about the area. That's it. It gave me plenty of time to read books, and the one I was in the middle of was Gore Vidal's Julian. One passage in particular seemed sadly appropriate:


I am alone in my study. I have already put away Julian's papers. The thing is finished. The world Julian wanted to preserve and restore is gone ... but I shall not write "forever", for who can know the future? Meanwhile, the barbarians are at the gate. Yet when they breach the wall, they will find nothing of value to seize, only empty relics. The spirit of what we were has fled. So be it.

I have been reading Plotinus all evening. He has the power to soothe me; and I find his sadness curiously comforting. Even when he writes: "Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failure of the wing." The wing has indeed failed. One sinks. Defeat is certain. Even as I write these lines, the lamp wick sputters to an end, and the pool of light in which I sit contracts.

Soon the room will be dark. One has always feared that death would be like this. But what else is there? With Julian, the light went, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of time's mystery and man's love of light.

---

Part 3: The Sun Also Rises

I came to the lodge with no more clean clothes in my backpack, having had no showers for days (a mixture of sweat, cologne and the dampness of half-dried laundry coming off me), a careless beard, a long time since my last haircut, unwashed shorts, pockets full of scribbled-on scrap paper, sneakers whose bottoms you could poke a finger through, and a backpack with a broken strap. Step by step I made myself look half-presentable again.

Sitting in the lodge as I did for a month, and with 90 rand (8 euros) in my pocket, I had plenty of time to think about things, and read books, and meet people. The 90 rand didn't last long, and for a few weeks I had less than 10 rand in my pocket, and had to live on free milk, coffee, salads and donated food from backpackers in the hostel who gave me their leftovers. So with a lot of free time and nothing better to do I started to write some things that had been simmering in my head for a while. Some of it about the country, some of it about the people coming through the lodge. The more I wrote and thought back on what I've been doing all this time, the more I realized how lucky I was to find myself in the middle of such a unique place as this, with so many interesting things going on all around. A case in point, from my notebook:


You know that you are in a hell of a place when a guy who shot and killed two men in the past year (on separate occasions) barely makes your list of the most interesting people you've met that day. In one case they robbed his home, or tried to, before he shot one of them. In the other, they were trying to steal someone else's car. He sauntered in, they pulled guns, he fired, killed one and the others were arrested.

Last time he was on the Sani Pass was 9 yrs ago when he came in 3rd in a mountain-biking race to the top of the pass and back. Shit yeah. Lovely bloke.

Later I met a Corsican grandson of a Belgian Congo ruler. Now lives in Pemba [in Mozambique], speaks Portuguese, Italian, French, bits of Swahili and Japanese, and has toured the East of Africa. Studied aikido, jujitsu, and some Filipino martial art I had never heard of, and is soon off to live in Maldives for 3 yrs.

He also compared malaria stories with Natsuno, a Japanese girl who was the star of the day by a mile. Exchange student in Uganda, formerly lived in Oz & Germany. Speaks French, a bit of Portuguese and some Swahili. Has spent one semester in Uganda and has learned nothing besides "corruption, bureaucracy and human stupidity". She is hit-on at all times, crudely and by people who've bought and paid for her phone number and decide to cold-call her and propose marriage to her at 6AM. Got malaria twice -- the second time landing her in a horrific Mozambiquan hospital that, sanitation and incompetence aside, criminally neglected her to the point where the nurses were actually stealing her food. Wants to see all of East Africa, from here to Eritrea, and come back to Uganda for final exams only (skipping the entire semester's lectures). Her university is nicknamed 'The Harvard of Africa' and it features 60-minute lectures that the teachers are invariably 20 minutes late for, and if it rains then they don't come at all. Schedules are changed without notice, and teachers chat on cellphones during class if someone calls them. Natsuno's first 9 weeks in the country were spent doing nothing but registering for classes. It was always, "You need to fill out Form X," and, "Where can I get Form X?" "You have to go to Mr. Y's office," and Mr. Y is never in his office during his office hours, so hours are spent sitting in a chair in the corridor, waiting for him to come back. Classes themselves are pure dictation, with the teacher talking and the students copying down every word, with every bit of punctuation needing to be exact. Later I meet a couple of American teachers in Ethiopia who have similar stories to tell.

Natsuno and Japan fit together like me and America, and she will be shooting around Earth like a cannonball for years to come, and damn all the hardships. Who is the only backpacker here actually doing a proper trip to Lesotho? Actually wanting to visit Soweto? Her. No wonder the audience around her tonight!
Later I would meet an Italian who drew me a map to giant marijuana fields in Swaziland, for when I go there. Then a woman on crutches who had been bit on the foot by a puff-adder. And a couple who had spent a combined three years in Antarctica, and said there were jobs available if I wanted them. (Note to future self!) And then another couple who were on a cross-continental Africa tour by motorbike to honor the man's brother who was killed by malaria during his trip here years ago. They plan to write a book about the trip.

Andrew from Denmark came along and traded travel stories and trivia with me well into the night. A few of his gems: As the Karakoram highway was being built between Pakistan and China a few decades ago, Chinese villages nearby prepared bales of hay in order to feed the trucks, which must have been exhausted from all the hard work of roadbuilding. Andrew had also visited South America, where people made a snack out of eating green ants straight off the tree; they put their tongues on the tree bark and waited for the columns of ants to march into their mouths.



Books I've been reading

(Also Alfred G. Aronowitz & Peter Hamill - Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Man, which was an old book and had no cover photo online)


And then I met some more South Africans. The most interesting among them was a middle-aged guy from Johannesburg named Jackie, who is also set to flee the country because he thinks there isn't much of a future here. (I agree.) He too has a great affection for Mozambique, and also lived in Pemba, but didn't know the other guy who'd left the lodge only shortly before.


Says Mozambique has the hottest girls anywhere. "Mulattoes. Green, shining eyes, like cats." They get married young. 11, 12 years old. Married. His wife didn't believe him when he told her they already had kids at that age. So he told his wife to come visit him, and she came. They'd been invited to 6 weddings all taking place on the same day at the same venue. The grooms were men in their 30s. But she couldn't find the brides. Someone pointed to a group of children: "That's them." All of them had children already. One of the brides was 8. And had a baby. Apparently this is possible, and happening. Child-prostitutes as well. Women are quite liberated and openly sexual.

Mozambique is also openly corrupt. Always carry an extra can of beer with you when you're driving, to give to the cop who pulls you over. Jackie, my source for this, was pulled over for "speeding" (he wasn't) on a street he knew well. He argued. The policewoman was adamant. He said he lived here and knew the speed limit. He wanted to see proof -- a radar gun. She said she didn't have one. She used her eyes, she said. The speed limit on the road was 60kph. He asked how fast he was going then, according to her eyes. "72," she said.
Jackie said he had spent years in Mozambique when he was younger, killing "terrorists" trying to dismantle the country. In reality, as everyone on the planet knows except South Africans, it was the South African army that was the terrorist force. Months earlier I had met another South African man of similar age who had put in his time in Angola, killing "terrorists". In Angola there had been several forces at war with each other, but any reasonable person would have called the South African army a terrorist army. So much for truth & reconciliation. Jackie switched subjects, prompted by nothing I or anyone else said, into this:


"I was raised to say how you feel. Why let it build up? If I got a problem with you, I'm gonna let you know it. I'll tell you to your face. If it comes to it, I'll punch you. If I can't take you on I'll tell you not to turn around 'cause I'm just gonna hit you from behind. If not then I'm gonna shoot you.

"I was in Joburg with my family one day when a taxi cut me off. I got out and put two bullets in him. If I was alone I would have let it go. But my family was there. You do not mess with my family. So I went up to a policeman, said here's the gun, here are the bullets. He said alright, carry on, it's alright. You know, I don't like fighting. I'm a peaceful man. Life's too short for fighting."
Some author one day will write a book about South Africa called, "They Shoot Black People, Don't They?" It's really open season here. Always has been. Crime is one thing that crosses all class and race divisions here, but only in the white community is it socially acceptable and civilized to just shoot blacks in such a way and chat about it afterwards over coffee. I've been around murders before in Vietnam (my housemate's friend was killed) and Thailand (I was close enough to hear the scream of the unfortunate housekeeper who discovered the body of a Westerner murdered in his bed by a prostitute), but here it is a whole new ball game.

There was a tour guide named Matthew at the lodge. A funny guy, good character, innocent of the kind of 19th century level of social thought that still pervades the country. He called one of the housekeepers at the lodge "Michael Jackson", on account of the skin-whitening cream she's used on her face for decades, which has left a permanent stain and now makes her look forever pale and sickly. Matthew told me a joke that he uses with his American clients while on tour. His irreverence, and cynicism, are reassuring to me:


An American unearths a magic lamp with a couple of genies inside it. The genies promise him that if he makes three wishes, then when he wakes up the next morning he will find that his wishes have come true.

So he makes his three wishes and goes to sleep. In the morning he opens his eyes and finds that instead of his normal house, he is now living in a mansion. It is enormous, with diamond chandeliers and golden furniture, and he realizes that he has gotten his first wish.

He walks downstairs and looks out the window, and there in the driveway is a brand new, state-of-the-art Hummer, gleaming in the sun. "I can't believe it!" he says. "My first two wishes have come true!"

Then he hears banging on his front door. The door breaks open and a bunch of men walk in, wearing loose white robes and hoods with eyeholes cut out. They throw him on the floor and beat him with sticks and lead pipes, and then they drag him out to a tree in the front yard and string him up, putting his head through a noose hanging from one of the branches.

Later on the two genies are talking. "I don't get it," one of them says. "I mean, I understand the first two wishes. But why did he say he wanted to be hung like a black man?"

One day I needed a few supplies so I borrowed some money from the lodge owner and hitched into town. The driver who picked me up had the radio on. I heard that the day before, five teenagers cornered a fisherman and his daughter at St. Lucia, another tourist spot along the coast, and mugged them. They killed the fisherman and gang-raped the daughter. Oddly neither this nor any of the other stories deterred me from hitching. The radio announcer also said that there was another spurt on inflation in Zimbabwe stemming from anxiety over the coming elections, and now the exchange rate was US$1 for Z$25,000,000. Zimbabwean dollars are the only currency I've ever heard of that has an expiration date printed on them.

Often while driving, or even walking around, I spy something I like to call The Lonely Black Walk. It's always a mystery to me when I see it. Typically there is one person (always black) walking down the road, usually carrying a bag. There is no town or village for several miles in either direction. Where do they come from? Where are they going? Nobody knows, but every traveler here has seen it.

An accompanying phenomenon is something I call The Slow Black Walk. It's even easier to find. Usually two or three people are walking at a snail's pace between buildings, or down a corridor. It passes the time for people, often on the job, who are in no hurry to arrive at the place where they are headed. When outsiders come to Africa to try to do some good, they often fail to take into account such seemingly trivial cultural quirks. Thus we get stories like one I heard from an aid worker, illustrating the resentment that can come from even the most innocuous-seeming efforts. One particular village had as its fresh water source a river that was an hour away on foot. Every day the women of the village would take hours just to walk to the village and carry back buckets of water on their heads. An NGO decided to help out by digging a well in the center of the village. The plan worked, and the local women were furious. Now that the water was readily available, they had no excuse to be alone and gossip together. So when they were told to get water, their husbands expected them to be home in five minutes, at which time they'd give the wives new tasks. Lifestyles in Africa form around existing living conditions, and unwelcome disruptions inevitably result from forced and abrupt change.

But there is no doubt a lot of work is needed anyway. Among seasoned Africa travelers, there is an interesting pattern to the way people talk. After limitless praise of how fantastic Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe are, someone utters something like, "Of course, you need to watch out for malaria," and for the next three hours the talk turns to disease horror stories and never wavers one bit. You get graphic descriptions of bilharzia, black water malaria and cerebral malaria. Stories of friends who have had malaria three times in one month. I've not met anyone who has had malaria only once. Always several times, and usually with long-term internal damage resulting.


Today there was a tour guide from Pretoria staying at the lodge. He said he often visits Mozambique but never takes malaria medicine. The thought of this drives another traveler, a former medical worker, wild -- albeit with an asterix. Because as terrible as malaria is, the anti-malarial preventive tablets he's taken have side-effects which are, to him, as awful as the disease itself, including a nasty anal thrush that bloodies his stool for days on end. "I'd rather get malaria again than take that stuff!" The ladies at the table clear their throats. Oblivious, he launches into a catalogue of all the diseases and parasites out there, each worse than the last.

• Mosquitoes carrying eggs that hatch and block the host's lymph ducts, making body parts swell to grotesque proportions; elephantiasis.
  
  
• Worms living around riverbanks that bore under the skin. A friend of his had 50 embedded in each foot, some under toenails. Most painful to remove. Must stick a pin into the skin and twist it about and pull each worm out pieces at a time.
  
  
• Worms (or bugs) that lay eggs under the skin. They often gain access to you via your laundry; they are attracted to sweat and urine smells, and wait for you to put on your washed clothes. Then they dig under your skin and feed upon you until they grow to a full size of about 30cm in length -- clearly visible from through the skin. When it is time for them to lay their eggs they create a painful boil in your skin, through which to release the eggs which hatch near the surface so that the flies can fly out. The treatment is to cover the boil with oil when it occurs and slowly, slowly wrap a stick through the boil, around and around the worm, like spaghetti on a fork, until it is all out. Go too fast and the worm will break into pieces and it will be much harder to remove.
  
  
• Small bugs which enter your body and swim up to your eyes and you can see them (and feel them) eating behind your eyes and there is nothing you can do about it until you are blind.

This in addition to the usual dangers of drinking bad water, getting STDs and the lot.
In mid-March, the usual manager at the lodge returned after about 4 weeks of visiting her family in Zimbabwe. I asked her about conditions there, and she showed me pictures of all the money you get from changing just a few American dollars: A table full of stacked Z$500,000 notes held together by rubber bands. Prices go up so fast that you need to change your money every day; if you hold onto your Zimbabwean money from yesterday, it will be worth a great deal less in the morning. This is just as well, since acquiring one day's worth of cash will force you to stuff your entire handbag with piles and piles of bills. She told me that she went shopping for cloth one day, and store owner told her it would come to Z$28,000,000 per meter of cloth. She wasn't sure about the price, so she decided to shop around. Later the same day she returned to the shop and decided to buy. But by then the price had gone up to Z$40,000,000 per meter. Inflation within that day had brought the price up that much. She figures that by now the rate is up to about Z$50,000,000 per US$1.

With the regular manager back at work, I wasn't particularly needed anymore. I decided to do a couple of hikes through the national park nearby, and then eventually go to Johannesburg. While I was out hiking one day, a pair of especially irritating European backpackers decided that nothing at the lodge was up to their standards, and they decided to complain to the staff, mixing insults in with demands. Then they wanted to talk to one of the owners. The manager, who is black, picked up the phone to call her. "Hang on," one of the backpackers said. "Is the owner white?"

I've seen quite a bit of this kind of treatment in my time here, around the country and also at the lodge, but never quite so brazen as this. The same week that this incident occurred at the lodge, a nearby city was holding a John Pilger Film Festival, in honor of his commitment to social justice. The festival, running through most of the month of March, showed all of his major films ... with the notable exception of the only film he made about South Africa, Apartheid Did Not Die. Some subjects here are still too hot to handle, even for an audience ready for John Pilger.

The manager at the lodge, whose name was Scholar, had plans to visit Joburg also, at the same time as me, because her 13-year-old son was coming to visit her from Zimbabwe and she wanted to be waiting for him at the bus station when he arrived in the country. A friend of hers gave us both a ride from the lodge to Pietermaritzburg, the nearest place where we could catch a bus to Joburg. On the highway a bird splattered into our windshield, leaving a smear of blood and bouncing high into the air, falling limp behind the car.

There are plenty of "don't-do's" in a city like Johannesburg. My Lonely Planet says that "you'd be crazy to walk around at night in Joburg." Everyone will also warn you to stay away from the center of the city and avoid minibus taxis at night, and that only a suicidal lunatic would even attempt to hitchhike. I pointedly broke the rules and did all of that. My travel book didn't mention whether it was OK to approach people at random and request hugs, but I did that too. I'm writing all this from a computer zone in a popular mall. I have been in Joburg for a week now, and it is a fine city. You just have to keep your head about you and ask local advice -- but that's just like the rest of Africa, so why the fuss? T.I.A., but we all knew that coming in. Once you accept that this is Africa, you're ready to go exploring. And Joburg, like Africa, rewards exploration.

The bus trip was six hours, and on it we passed by towns and landmarks named Mount Everest, Bethlehem, Gaza, Newcastle, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Belfast, Perth and Baltimore. The grass turned more and more yellow as we passed each of these eerily-named spots as we moved further north. Scholar and I finally got off the bus at night, in central Johannesburg, and spent a half-hour alone and surrounded by hundreds of black people before being picked up from the bus station. Ooooooooooh, scaaary. The shuttle took us to Gemini Backpackers, a lousy hostel in a northern suburb whose only merits are the free internet and DVD library. But movies and internet were just what I needed after six weeks in the mountains, and I think I must have infuriated some people by using monopolizing one of the two computers for 8 hours or so each day to catch up on news & emails. Once in a while I talked with a charming Australian girl who plans to move to Joburg with her boyfriend, and a couple of chilled-out Americans named Cole and Boyd just passing through, and then I got back to typing my journal again.

But on Saturday I had to take a break, because the city needed me. For superheroes like us CouchSurfers, it falls to us to serve the people. So a group of a dozen or so CouchSurfers descended on a mall called Rosebank, armed with posters reading, "FREE HUGS!" I was given a poster, and our mission was to spread some love around the city by hugging everyone in the area. We accosted everyone passing by. A lot of people weren't sure they wanted hugs, or weren't sure if we were sane, but we got in their way, and followed them, feigned heartbreak when they tried to pass, and were generally smiley enough to reel a few hundred people in for some soft, squishy affection. Some people were watching us and mouthed the word, "Why?" and I just mouthed back, "Why not?". Later on, after we finished the hug-fest, somebody else approached our group and asked us why we would do such a thing. "To piss people off," I shouted, which earned a few giggles around the table.

I was introduced to the CS Huggers by a girl named Meruschka, a CouchSurfer I'd met already in Cape Town ages ago. After the event, I followed Meruschka home in her tiny purple Meruschkamobile, and went off to her apartment to put my bags down and wait for a few more CouchSurfers to arrive. The first to come were ...... Cole and Boyd, the same Americans I had left at the hostel a few hours earlier. Turned out they happened to be CouchSurfers also, and happened to be surfing with Meruschka at the exact same time as me. So after a bit of "howdy stranger," we got down to the serious business of breaking open several cases of Windhoek beer and getting somewhat hammered along with some help from another local CouchSurfer, who brought along something potent to smoke. By then about six more CouchSurfers had come along, most of them hardy veterans of the day's hugging extravaganza, and also Meruschka's brothers and cousin had come for the weekend.

I had actually met up with Meruschka a few days earlier, when she invited me for a tour of the University of Witwatersrand, one of the biggest and most respected universities in the country, where she was a graduate student. My travel book said that the campus was beautiful and well worth a walking tour, so I accepted and we made a plan to meet in the morning at the university gates. I took a shuttle bus, then a minibus taxi, and then I had to hitch with a city maintenance truck to get to the university gates. When I called her and she didn't answer, I just decided to go in myself.

In the main university building there was an entrance hallway with security guards. There were also turnstiles that required a university ID to unlock, so I approached one of the security guards, standing behind bulletproof glass with a "visitors here" sign above his head. I asked for permission to visit the campus, and he interrogated me, taking about 15 seconds to decide that I was not worthy to visit the university and had to leave. I told him that my travel book said the campus was a fine place to visit, and that I should go. The guard had a different suggestion: "Go away."

Meruschka showed up anyway and snuck me in with her car. The university really was nice -- just like the place I went to school, except this one had a freeway running through the middle of it. She gave me a quick tour, and then showed me around the trendy nearby district where she lived, and where, days later, I would find myself drunk and tired and in the middle of a party.

The next day was Easter, and we went back to the shopping mall that we'd turned into a hugfest just 24 hours prior. This time the big attraction was the rooftop arts & crafts market, and the live classical concert that some schoolchildren were putting on, and then more movies in a theater in which I was to end up seeing 7 movies by the time the week was over. At night I ate dinner in a revolving sushi restaurant and joined Meruschka, Cole and Boyd in a Mediterranean-themed dining room that served nice seafood platters.

After two nights Meruschka dropped me off at a backpackers' hostel near the same shopping mall. The place had a pleasant cockroach population in the kitchen and dorm rooms. When I arrived the manager wasn't in, but one of the cleaners took me inside and showed me to a dorm bed I could take. I set down my things, used the bathroom and then took a walk down the road to get some lunch and watch a movie.

When I came back the manager was furious. I had left the outside gate open, and such a thing is just not done in Joburg. "A few months back a pair of travelers came by in a rental car. They parked it just outside the gate for five minutes, to grab a few things from inside. When the came back the car was gone. Five minutes, Steve!"

In Joburg you can take a 15-minute drive from shite-town through malls, health clubs and golf courses -- and back to shite-town again. If you avoid the problem areas (there are pockets of them all over the city, and some entire districts are problem areas), you are just fine. Joburg has all the youth culture, rock concerts, esoteric bookshops, university hangouts, fine dining restaurants and everything else you'd expect from a city of more than 5 million. It is not a place to avoid if you are at all serious about seeing the country. There's nothing at all wrong with visiting South Africa to catch some waves and going bungy-jumping -- but such people aren't generally going to be the ones who will bring home measured portraits of the country anyway.

What is my measured portrait at this stage? Till now I have talked mostly of my own experiences and things I've overheard from other people. But there's more going on here than just my little tour, and to understand the country you have got to know the rest of it, like where the country has come from and where it is going.

The past has been pretty well-documented, and so for now I'll stick to the future. The most common complaint from White South Africa relates to the job market, where recent affirmative action initiatives from the government require that, in many industries, fully half the jobs need to be filled by nonwhites (there are taxation penalties for noncompliance), and that qualified whites are turned away from work in favor of unqualified blacks who cannot perform the jobs as well. As a result, South Africa suffers from a brain drain of qualified whites seeking work elsewhere in the world, as well as the economic damage which is the result of work that is done poorly. I agree completely with this analysis, but disagree with how it is used.

When the facts above are voiced by whites, the accompanying implication is always clear: The affirmative action scheme in the country is much too strong, to the detriment of the national economy. I believe exactly the opposite. Even aside from the structure of companies, which ensures that nearly all of the highly-skilled labor, managerial positions and investment power remain in white hands, a closer look at the economy shows that whites are firmly in the driver's seat. The complaint boils down to the fact that whites merely enjoy enormous privilege rather than absolute privilege -- and this is one of the main reasons why white South Africans are leaving the country in droves. (Another reason they cite is that the country is currently led by a bunch of corrupt idiots, and on this count I am in complete agreement.)

Turning first to numbers. The country is about 11% white; the rest are colored (mixed race) or black, with a relatively small number of Asian and Indian people. If 11% of the population hold 50% of the jobs -- and almost always the higher-paying ones -- and the other 89% have to scramble for the leftovers, then that minority is still massively privileged and no honest commentator will keep that fact from you.

Regarding the other complaint, highlighting the fact that many black and colored people receive jobs without having the proper education, training and preparation necessary to actually do those jobs, the solution is even more obvious: Educate, train and prepare them! That approach has the additional benefit that when the brain drain comes, it won't hurt as much because the country will have plenty of reserves. As a quick glance around a township will make clear, school funding in South Africa is hideously lopsided between communities populated by different ethnic groups, and this is a discrepancy that needs immediate attention. Obviously the job quota and the school funding quota need to, at minimum, resemble each other; if more black and colored workers are wanted, then school funding in their communities needs to start to rise proportionately.^* It is tempting to conclude (and many foreigners regrettably do) that the virtually uniform failure of South African whites to comprehend this point indicates thoroughly-embedded racism. I do not accept this explanation; it seems to me a case of cognitive dissonance amplified by confirmation bias and a simplistic media system stoking the fires.^** We in the West have no lack of experience with such phenomena ourselves, as plenty of South Africans will happily point out.

^* Such a tactic would put the South African government in direct conflict with international banking institutions which insist on prioritizing debt repayment and a free-market system including foreign investment, over the Venezuelan model of social welfare and spending programs. The South African government, corrupt as it is, has no wish to do this, since the same foreign money-lending institutions provide the connections and the funding for large investment projects to be approved -- with the associated paybacks to the local politicians who grease the wheels.

^** The media here adopt, with great success, the tried-and-true xenophobic tactic of blaming all the outsiders when things go wrong (in South Africa's case the ruling party fills the role of outsiders, and are perversely accused of being too anti-white), and the same goes for Lesotho, where the immigrant Chinese middle class is targeted by politicians who stoke meaningless ethnic sentiment to curry favor with the public, rather than build a solid and responsible economic foundation for improvement.


To my eyes therefore it seems that the proper solution is more resources geared towards the black and colored communities; more investment and dependence on their future participation -- not less. No more half-measures: Organize the economy around the entire population and do it right, and damn the international banks, because any progressive moves to help develop the country further will necessitate damning them anyway. But, to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite authors, the solution just proposed is so inconceivable to white people here that they have never even conceived of conceiving it.

And so it goes: As a general rule the country's whites say they aren't getting a fair shake from a government which feels likewise. These two national powers find themselves in constant opposition, with each group trying to pull the country in a different wrong direction, while the only sustainable and farsighted option is the one that no major political force is fighting for. There are indeed many people advocating an idea like the one I mentioned, but they are nearly invisible and have not formed strong coalitions that could organize and exert pressure. Internet is essentially nonexistent in most black communities -- I still have vivid memories of people in internet cafes typing one finger at a time, not knowing how to use MSWord and making the simplest spelling mistakes all over their CVs -- and underground groups have not yet rumbled to the surface. Racist resentment smoulders^* as economic opportunities fall away one by one due to micro- and macro-mismanagement.

^* In 2004 one of the country's most popular TV channels hosted a national poll, asking the country to vote for "The 100 Greatest South Africans of All-Time". The polling was cancelled out of embarrassment, because early results indicated that Oliver Tambo, a major leader of the black resistance and elected-president of the ANC during apartheid, was ranked lower than H.F. Verwoerd (credited as the main architect of apartheid) and Eugene Terr'Blanche (founder of a white supremacist movement and the leader of extremist paramilitary gangs).


At times like these, conditions are right for loud public figures to gain huge followings. But whether these figures will grow into heroes or demagogues is anybody's guess.


So why do I like this place so? If you've been reading between the lines, then you already know why. Partly it is the Natsunos I keep meeting. Partly the Coffee Bays. (Partly the fact that English is an official language -- rare for me!) But also that South Africans, like Australians, open up. Sometimes by opening they accidentally reveal stinking, rotten infections, believing that they smell sweet. But I don't mind that. It's better by far than being reserved and politically correct. People here may live closed, guarded public lives, and barricade themselves behind fences and walls, and feel a constant shadow of shame or deep ambivalence about their history. But they open up anyway, maybe because their circumstances keep them somewhat forlorn and starved for attention; this could explain the religious side of life here as well.

So many people live frustrated lives around here. Even if they are misguided, the response from the rest of us should not just be to close our ears and complain that their unenlightened whining irritates us. This place deserves much more careful attention than it is getting. The rest of the world gets summaries of the developments and setbacks in countries like this (and around Africa as well), but very little about the people who are living through them. I feel lucky to have worked here and to have met such a colorful cast of characters along the way. I plan to stay in Southern Africa for the rest of this year and next year, spending at least a month in every country within reach and learning more about them. There is nothing else I'd rather be doing.

A protest over forced eviction in front of one of the country's high courts. I was there for the demonstration, and the balcony of my youth hostel can be seen in the background of this shot.

Entry 121: What's in My Mouth, Batman? - June 26, 2008.


Prologue: Hendi's Choice

Just after I uploaded my last entry a few eons ago, I met up with another Couchsurfing host, named Hendi, in Johannesburg. He was a successful businessman, organizing licensing rights between the country's national television broadcaster and various sporting institutions, like FIFA and the Olympics. He liked his job, drove a nice car and got regular free tickets to sports matches. But when I met up with him for drinks before going to his apartment, he was all ears about my own adventures. I told him about my life, without ever sugar-coating it, but it seemed to be just what he needed to hear.

The next day was Friday, and when he came home from work he said he had a surprise for me: He had quit his job that day. "I want to live like you," he said. "I want that life!" And so he actually went ahead and threw away all he'd been building up, in order to go off to South America and teach English.

If he had known what I was in for during the months that followed, he might have made a different decision.

However, all the drama was to come later, and meanwhile Hendi drove me all around the city. I felt lucky to get a nice, slow, breezy drive through dodgy central Joburg, where streets looked run-down and neglected and where most people would not be safe walking. We passed by a stadium to be used in 2010 for the World Cup, but the grassland in front of the stadium was completely covered in garbage, as though a hard rock concert had taken place there with no one picking up after. We drove off to a club with some live music, and later he introduced me to his American friend Ben, who lived in a very picturesque and upscale apartment complex on the other side of the city. Ben & co. were in the middle of a morning-till-night party on his front lawn by the swimming pool, with dozens of people hovering around the drinks coolers and the braai meat. I was just settling down when Ben interrupted everybody to announce a round of shots that were coming around, a mixture of his own creation that he called "30% Chance of HIV". We gulped it down.

At the party were plenty of other travelers and businesspeople living in Joburg. One of them was a local guy who was getting himself ready to move to New Zealand because he thought South Africa's future looked bleak. "I bought a car a few months ago," he told me. "But I didn't want it to get stolen, so I kicked it and scratched it and shot it with paintballs." It was true. On my way into the apartment complex I'd noticed a car that looked like it had been through a warzone; it turned out to be his. Carjacking is common enough around here to make drivers very anxious, and this guy thought it was worth wrecking his car to preserve his peace of mind while on the road. T.I.A.

To give some perspective on how serious crime is here, there are advertisements on billboards, TV and radio asking people to call the police if they have information about electricity & telephone cable theft. Alright, fair enough. But I'm not talking about people who steal the services. I'm talking about people who physically steal the cables themselves. The thieves literally cut them off the street, melt them down and turn them into saleable items, like jewelry, or just scrap metal. This has been an industry for some time now. So has ATM-bombing. So far in 2008, an average of more than one ATM per day has been bombed, and police involvement in this fiasco is suspected. But at least the police in South Africa aren't as overtly corrupt as some of its neighbors. I met a guy at the party who'd been driving in Angola, when he was pulled over by a policeman. The cop walked up to his car.


"You missed the stop sign."

(looking back) "What do you mean? There is no stop sign."

"Last week there was a stop sign there. You didn't stop. You have to pay me $100."

"No."

"Ok, I'll take your passport then. You can pick it up at the police station later, after you pay $100 to each policeman there, plus $1000 to my supervisor."

"Ok, here's the money."

---

Part 1: Heart of Darkness



I left Hendi in order to meet up with Meruschka again for her birthday party, which was to be at a backpacker hostel in Soweto.

Soweto. Goddamn. Soweto was best described by J. R. R. Tolkien, although he spelled it M-o-r-d-o-r. From his description: The place is a "dying land [but] not yet dead", with "low scrubby trees", "coarse grey grass-tussocks", "withered mosses", "great writhing, tangled brambles", and thickets of briars. Its inhabitants are "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." Or so goes the view of much of White South Africa, which is scared to death of the place.


Mordor. I mean, Soweto.


To my eyes the place looked different, very different. But what do I know? As white South Africans keep reminding me, I am a newcomer here, and I haven't yet learned how to look at things. So I shall brush my own impressions to the side as much as I am able, and report things as they must actually have been, rather than how I saw them.

Where was I? Ah yes -- Meruschka gave me a ride into Mordor and there was plenty of food, drinks and in-house entertainment to keep us going for hours. The venue was a hostel called Lebo's, and it's one of the modern success stories that the township likes to boast about. Lebo is a local man who realized that a lot of tourists were curious about Soweto, and decided to start up his own hostel offering tours of the township, doubtless for some nefarious motive that I was not able to piece together. He also started a few sinister community initiatives, including cleaning up the garbage dump outside his house and turning it into a park for kids to play in. He's been featured in several magazine articles, and during the week I stayed at his place a camera crew from the SABC national television network (read: damned liberal media) came around to do an interview with him for one of their tree-hugging TV newsmagazines. He lives within walking distance of the train tracks, where local daredevils occasionally put their lives at risk by "train-surfing" -- standing up on the roof of a moving train and dodging the high-voltage electrical lines that zoom by -- and also the Hector Pieterson Museum, named after the first casualty of the bloody

The girl in the picture is Hector's sister, who now works at the museum.

Books I've been reading

Victory!

• African Development and the Future
  
• Agents-Provocateurs in the UK and the US
  
• Alex Jones
  
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  
• Anti-Stupid People
  
• Biological / Social Anthropology Books
  
• A Bit of Satire
  
• Books with Bad Influence
  
• Burmese Dreams
  
• Burundi: It Isn't All Roses
  
• The Changing of the Guard in the USA
  
• Clever Articles Re: Atheism
  
• Contributions to The Great 9/11 Debate: 1, 2, 3, 4
  
• Double-Entendres from the UK Media
  
• East Africa: The Mzungu Song
  
• Equality, American-style and replies
  
• Gaza is Still the Issue
  
• Giacche enne Binnestaucche
  
• Global Democracy
  
• A Good Comic
  
• A Great Book or Author You Think I Don't Know Of
  
• If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next
  
• The Joys of Zimbabwe
  
• Memes
  
• Mohammed Omer's Triumphant Return to Gaza
  
• More Information for Protesters
  
• The New Generation of Writers?
  
• Palestine: A Touch of Irony
  
• A Place and a Book
  
• Plenty of Food for Those Who Bomb
  
• Questioning the Official 9/11 Story (all threads)
  
• South Africa, Meet George Orwell
  
• Traveling Mozambique / Malawi
  
• "Truth" and Consequences of US-Georgia-Russia
  
• What are the Best Books Written by Journalists?
  
• What Atheists are Up Against
  
• What is Happening Right Now in Somalia
  
• What is Your Favorite Book and Why? and a later reply
  
• 9/11 Truth Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize 2008
  
  

Important books and article links, year by year:


2007 (severely abridged)
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000