Today being the evening of Monday, I am joined at Les Deux Magots by Serge, a much younger man than Yves who has confused me tremendously by being introduced as a Mauritian, only to tell me he is part Russian and, I think, part West African. I gave up on trying to understand. He is dressed like a real young corporate executive with the tie off. He has on a wonderfully cut suit with a shirt that you know would fetch about R2 500 in South Africa. He has brought his white Parisian girlfriend. She has on a beautiful gold watch with a leather strap. The watch seems to have come down at least one generation before reaching her. The two of them look like a couple on the rise, with her looking and sounding like she might even have a trust fund waiting already.
Perhaps it is fitting that I should have this debate with this couple here. We are in Les Deux Magots and across the road is Brasserie Lipp, after all.
She is arguing that there is something very wrong in what Sarkozy is doing with regard to foreigners in France. He is listening to both of us and hedging his bets a little. After all he is not a French native from what I gather and I seem to agree with what Sarkozy is doing.
The discussion started with me talking about all the lovely places I had seen and how I think Paris is so beautiful and wondering if many Parisians even care about the historical places I have seen.
She said that I should move more to the outskirts of Paris, then I would see a different side of the city that is not so nice. I would see the ‘real’ Paris, she said. What’s ‘unreal’ about central Paris I wondered in my head? Out loud I asked why I should do that, go to the ‘real’ Paris. She said only a short while ago there were some foreigners living in France sleeping in tents, protesting their lack of French citizenship. I asked if these people did not have their own countries. She said these protests were by people who had lived in Paris for over five years and had children here in France. I asked her if she knew what had brought them to France in the first place.
She said it’s partly because of the heavy French taxes. People here in France, she added, were trying to avoid the heavy taxes by hiring illegal immigrants. I added that it must also be because the countries where these people come from are not functioning properly, which is\ why they want to escape in the first place to come here.
She says that’s true.
He says that Sarkozy is also trying to pass a law that says if you claim to be a naturalised French person and want to bring your family over to France you and that family member must undergo DNA testing to check if you are truly related. I say that’s good. He says but a lot of French people don’t like this because it reminds them of that German fascist thing that they fought so hard against.
He tells me that about a week ago there was an anti-racism concert and some socialist French politician stepped on to the podium and condemned this Sarkozy DNA move. I say everybody must relax here in France because DNA testing is very advanced, it doesn’t lie and it is the best way to establish family ties. I say to him that it seems to me that history is blinding those against this Sarkozy move to what could prove to be a very good system to stop the fraudulent importation of illegal immigrants into France, or any country with similar problems for that matter.
I think I have shocked this lovely couple. Surely this kind of talk from a thoroughbred French woman should get praise, not opposition, from a black African.
I argue that fighting to be allowed into a country that is not yours does not change the fact that your country is a mess. I say that France and all the other ‘western’ countries cannot absorb every one of the poor of the world and that immigration squabbles are at the superficial level of solving the real problem. France, I say, should concentrate on helping the countries where these people flock from to get back on their economic feet so that they can support their own citizens. France, I say, together with all the other ex-colonisers that can afford to do this, if they really want to correct their immigration problems, should follow South Africa’s lead of refusing to be a rich nation floating in a sea of poverty.
I don’t want to come to Paris, I say to this lovely couple, and not want to leave because I have nothing to go to back in my country. I want to visit this place or any other place on the planet and be happy to be going home thereafter. I want a world where we can all visit each other and only move because we are needed wherever we are moving to and are glad to go and help, not because where we are is so bad that we have no option but to run. Making the rest of the world better or as functional and rich as France or wherever poor people are sneaking into is a deeper way of solving the problem of immigration, I say. Not this plaster cast of DNA laws to screen people and whatever other strict laws to limit the number of illegal immigrants. Make immigration and the need for these laws disappear by truly engaging in helping the whole world to function better.
The English have their pubs. South Africans have their shebeens. The French have restaurants they call cafés or brasseries. I like Parisian cafés. My overall impression of these is of history and good food. But it is also of women clutching their bags and moving them to the other side whenever I sit at a table nearby. This first happened when I went into Salon de The, a little corner café opposite Le Lutetia, a hotel that the Germans once used as their headquarters during the Second World War, up the road from my hotel on Boulevard Raspail. This French woman grabbed her bag from the chair between us as I sat down in the chair next to it. I quickly put my own bag in the very space vacated by hers as a subtle up yours, and acted like nothing had happened. Then it happened again at Les Deux Magots when another French woman grabbed her umbrella as I slid into a chair at the table next to where she sat. What the hell does she think I’ll do, I wondered – grab the umbrella and eat it?
The French, like most other whites I know, are still scared of black people, even when relaxing in their French cafés. This is a bit sad. I am sure it is partly because the only blacks they see are in need of one thing or the other and never just travelling. After all, aren’t they the ones who triggered the tent-sleeping protests? But then again, the woman could be grabbing her umbrella simply out of politeness, just making room for me, which would mean I have brought my prejudice here. Who knows? I choose to go with my prejudice for now. I’m alone at Les Deux Magots today, sitting in the exact spot where Simone de Beauvoir sat when Robert Doisneau took that famous picture of her. It took some time, but I have finally worked out how to set the time delay on my camera to take a self-portrait sitting in this exact spot, next to which is where Jean-Paul Sartre liked to sit as the plaque says on the wall. I like that I’m finishing the writing of this letter from Paris sitting right here. I think about my argument here the evening before over French immigration laws and wonder if having more and more Africans travelling for fun as opposed to the hunt-for-greener-pastures wouldn’t help change what now appears, at least on the surface, to be pure racism borne of fear. The bag-grabbing habit that I seem to provoke in French women here really disturbs me.
The updated edition of From Joburg to Jozi contains over 50 pieces of writing on Johannesburg, selected and edited by Dinner with Mugabe’s Heidi Holland and The Wonga Coup’s Adam Roberts. All royalties from the sale of the book go to Cotlands, for the benefit of children with HIV and AIDS.
Here’s a take on Jozi – or is that Joburg? – from Christopher Hope:
* * * * * * * *
On the airport road into town two BMW convertibles neck and neck, hoods down, came barrelling past and I swear one driver had a cellphone in his ear. The Jo’burg earring. The boys were having fun. Dark and often fatal fun. Jo’burg fun. The word is ‘dicing’. It catches that curious blend of cockiness, aggression and fatalism one might call Jo’burg noir. So you get wiped out on the motorway – or playing the slots. But if you’re going to go – may as well stay in the fast lane. It’s all dicing, anyway. Isn’t it, hey? So fuck you – arsehole! Suck my exhaust.
Welcome to Jo’burg – have a nice day.
On the side of the airport road is the familiar, fearsome clutter. Some child-giant got tired of his toys and has thrown them out of his cot. Low-browed office parks, pompous warehouses, and a clenched fist of houses sphincter-tight behind beautiful walls, Jo’burg’s trademark, the anal-retentive suburb. And then the brand new architecture of liberation – the Romano-kitsch casino, a thousand slot machines wrapped around a shopping mall.
But then what do you expect? This is a town that thought mine dumps were pretty, that had a soft spot for slimes dams, and thanked God he had given it a reef of gold beneath its feet. The mine dumps are shrinking. Years ago they hung around town like drunks on day release from the detox clinic. The sandy equivalents of meths drinkers in Joubert Park. Scrubby grass like fierce unshaven stubble grew over their yellow faces. Thing was – you liked them, you blushed a bit when visitors said ‘what do you do with them?’
Some bright spark took one of these sandcastles, sheered off its head and planted a drive-in movie on the crest. Great stuff. Someone had an even better idea. What about tearing down the dumps and taking them to the cleaners all over again, for the pinpoints of gold they didn’t give up first time round?
Very Jo’burg.
I dropped down the off-ramp into a place called Motortown, into the grid of streets adorned with the names of this city’s singular rip-off merchants, its energetic scoundrels, its gold-diggers who built a brothel and a bourse, and never could tell the difference. Not then, not now, not ever – Loveday, Harrison, Rissik and Jeppe . . . Once-upon-a-time Jo’burg preserved in the poetry of their names.
The headlines roped to the lamp-posts sing the old dark songs – golden city blues –
Ten Shot Dead in Bed
Pregnant Housewife’s Poisoned Present
School Hall Stolen
Here is the Carlton Centre. To build it they had to excavate a hole, and not just any hole, the hole was the biggest, best urban hole anywhere in Africa. Nowhere in the southern hemisphere was there a hole to touch it – and people came from all over the place just to look at the hole. No one anywhere, said the people of Jo’burg, dug better holes or dug them faster, or deeper, or sunk more money into them. The Carlton hole was big enough to swallow the Empire State Building (if melted down). It did no good wondering aloud how you’d melt down the Empire State. Or why? The Carlton sneered at such questions; fifteen acres of hole was going to contain shops, restaurants, pavement cafés, movie houses and an ice-rink. On top of the hole was the tower – it was going to be fifty storeys high, it was going to be the tallest tower in Africa. And next to the tower, its rich twin would be the best luxury hotel in creation. And on top of the tower there would be an observation room that would allow you to look thirty miles into the distance. On a really clear day you might see as far as Pretoria.
The accomplices of the mining house tycoons were the New York architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who seemed to have risen to the challenge of designing – even by the record standards of the 1960s – one of the most brutally ugly buildings on the planet. And how we loved it! We had the deepest hole, tallest tower, richest hotel in the country – it was very, very Jo’burg. Soon we were talking in awe of its room prices, its silver cutlery. Its sheer hulking brutal Jo’burg pizzazz, its gold-plated nerve. And the skating was fine.
We boasted about the Carlton – it was said to be the greatest concrete erection in the world – another triumph attributed to those razzle-dazzle boys who ran the town. Their collective names were spoken in that peculiar reverent drawl that is Jo’burg at prayer, whenever money, gold, big bucks, moolah is mentioned – creators of all that was good and profitable, they turned bare veld into bullion, the Godlings of Hollard Street who were collectively worshipped as the Mahninghowzez . . . See how the knee bends, the head bows at the magical invocation of true, ingot-dripping, bullion-loaded dazzle. And why not? Since buying shares or salting a gold mine is as close as most Jo’burgers ever came to a truly religious experience.
Let’s face it: the books are funny. They’re crass, to be sure, and they respect very few boundaries – cross-reference the first entry below with the third for a taste of just how catholic the offense-giving can be – but they also elicit sniggers, chortles and smiles of recognition.
In short, you can blow off steam with the Kak books. This one boasts “50% more material and 500% more exclamation marks” and will be launched on Friday. (It also has a strapline: bow-chikka-wowow! – which is code, I think, for “put on your kak-porn goggles before proceeding”.) Here are the first five entries:
* * * * * * * *
AA
Something new and interesting to kick off Complete Kak!, you ask? Throw in a banana kick and start with those badly dressed Automobile Association technicians or the party poopers at Alcoholics Anonymous? Of course not. How could we not start with Affirmative Action? It’s big, it’s bad and it’s not budging. Complete kak? You betcha.
About the only thing that’s changed about Affirmative Action in South Africa in the last few years is that we now have black people complaining about it. And an Mbeki, no less – albeit the one that white people approve of. In his book Architects Of Poverty Moeletsi Mbeki argues that AA and BEE are in their current forms not practical solutions to growing the economy, creating a black middle class or trickling wealth down to the poor. Not quite the same line of thinking as your average white guy being told “Pale male, bottom of the scale”, but another opinion to add to the list. Because everyone’s got one. And they all end up tweaking someone else’s nipples.
“AA policies are necessary to uplift underprivileged ‘previously disadvantaged’ black South Africans from generations of repression and lack of opportunity…” Tweak.
“Affirmative action is even applied to university entrance requirements these days – to teenagers who weren’t yet born when Nelson Mandela was let out of prison…” Tweak.
“South African business hierarchy resembles a cappuccino: black on the bottom, white above, with a sprinkling of black right at the top. Without employment equity nothing will change…” Tweak tweak.
“Affirmative action is hypocritically based on the colour of a person’s skin – it’s as racist as any apartheid policy…” Tweak tweak tweak tweak tweak tweak tweak tweak…
Maybe it’s the cynical application of AA legislation by window-dressing big-money corporations that rubs you up the wrong way. Or it could be the huffy white boys fresh out of varsity complaining that jobs aren’t just landing in their laps; or the way affirmative action has been implemented with far more enthusiasm and good intention than common sense and forethought. For many, it’s the great, big irony that those who suffer the most due to the failure of basic service delivery are the poorest of the poor – that is, the previously disadvantaged who are supposed to be benefiting the most.
For me, it’s the four months I’ve been waiting for my new ID. That’s AA’s fault, right? Or is it corruption? Or just incompetence? Speaking of which…
Actions without consequences
Corruption and incompetence may be universal, but the notion of having to suffer the consequences if you’re caught apparently isn’t. Certainly that idea doesn’t seem to fly much in SA these days.
In the UK you can’t be speaker of parliament any more if you’re deemed to have abused your expense account. In China they execute you for getting the lead content of the baby formula wrong. And in Japan you’re expected to disembowel yourself, or at least jump to your death, if you dishonour your family and country.
But shame and contrition are far down the list of reactions when our local bigwigs screw the pooch. Lie to parliament and no-one bats an eyelid. Grossly mismanage your ministerial portfolio and all’s well. Run a state-owned enterprise into the ground and you don’t even have to say sorry. Hell, if you head up Armscor they’ll bail you out to the tune of half a billion rand the one year and give you an 89 percent pay raise the next; if you’re CEO of the Road Accident Fund you’ll get a R2.1-million “performance bonus” despite the fund being R40 billion in debt; and if you effectively commit HIV-related genocide while Minister of Health you’ll get off with the odd newspaper caricature, a new liver and a smattering of international ridicule.
Then there’s the genuinely illegal stuff: corruption, cronyism, fraud, kidnapping of teenagers, that kind of thing. Get caught with your hand in the till and you can feel hard done by for being the fall guy while everyone else gets away with it. Don’t fret, Tony Yengeni, your prison sentence will be slashed to a couple of months in minimum security and you’ll have a decent supply of Armani suits while you’re in there. Back on the ANC’s National Executive Committee in no time!*
And if your name’s Schabir Shaik, well, the nation owes you an apology for the undue stress and discomfort you’ve endured while sleeping on a hospital bed and eating takeout before your comrades organised you a medical parole. Luckily you had a spot of high blood pressure rather than Aids-induced pneumonia! Enjoy the Struggle-like kudos you’ll no doubt have thrown your way until your dying day. And do let us know when that is. We wouldn’t want to miss it.
Here’s a parting truism for you and your cronies from PJ O’Rourke (which you may think is way past its sell-by date): “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”
* Less than a year after getting out of jail! And more than three years before he was due to be released according to his original sentence.
Afrikaans music
On more careful consideration of that last entry right there, perhaps, in a more abstract or ethereal sense, it’s not always such a bad thing that actions do not always lead to deserving consequences. Because if there were genuinely such a thing as karma it is hard to see how the universe would not conspire to send a giant asteroid to the earth to eliminate all the creators and listeners of Afrikaans music. Being as they are dispersed across our entire country, this would necessitate a particularly large lump of extraterrestrial rock striking somewhere in the Free State, which in all probability would be the end of the rest of us. But sometimes, when I consider the extraordinary popularity of Afrikaans music, it occurs to me that the asteroid, despite its obvious drawbacks, may actually be the best solution.
The world is indeed a vexatious place that it lets bonehead beats rule the South African music market as they do. I’m not talking about boeremusiek here. You know, okes on accordions singing liedjies and having a jol. They’re fine. Well no, they’re not fine. They’re horrendous, and choosing between listening to them or listening to a Celine Dion/Barbra Streisand duet* would be like choosing which arm you’d like sawn off. But because you never hear them unless you physically venture out beyond the Boerewors Curtain, they’re not much of a bother. Unlike Afrikaans music, which is huge! And it finds you! At the rugby, in shopping malls, during commercial breaks…
Someone please enlighten me as to how albums like Langarm Sokkie Dansklub Treffers and that annual Bokjol Somerpartie monstrosity can afford so much prime-time advertising space. And why Steve Hofmeyr is such a god in this country. And how Bok van Blerk can fill Loftus Versveld to the brim with demented fans by singing about a Boer general with a rhyme-able name. And how the gelled-hair, open-shirt, kak-music, cheeseball-male-singer formula works. Van Blerk, Kurt Darren, Nicholis Louw, Jaco, Robbie Wessels, Robbie Klay – are these guys the same person in disguise? Or are they Steve Hofmeyr’s illegitimate kids, genetically modified by Wouter Basson to send out subliminal messages that hypnotise unsuspecting young Afrikaners?
Probably Wouter’s fault. Daai kabouter.
* Which exists, by the way. It’s called Tell Him. The Americans used it as part of their torture repertoire at Guantanamo Bay. I imagine.
Agents
Few people know this, but the term “agent” is actually an abbreviation of the phrase “agent of the devil”. Yes, this is true. And it’s quite logical if you think about it. Estate agents, recruitment agents, celebrity agents – they have no soul, morals or conscience, hence they are clearly minions of the Prince of Darkness. The least evil of all agents are secret agents; as in the people who spend years learning the dark arts of espionage in order to assassinate, murder and maim without conscience. Those other agents: far worse.
Note that travel agents are not necessarily pure evil, as such, but they make up for this through sheer incompetence.
Airline weight allowances
Of the many factors that can contribute to making air travel a thoroughly unpleasant experience – the queues, the delays, the body-search violations, SAA – the two worst must surely be excess-baggage costs and sitting next to fat people.
Having to pay extra because your bag is over the permissible weight might be understandable if the fuel-to-weight ratios were as critical as when, say, a rocket ship is sent into lunar orbit. But they are not – as is clearly evident when you see the inevitable selection of gargantuan passengers gravitating towards your airline counter. Here I am paying a R48,000 fine for being a couple of kilograms overweight, and there’s Larry Lardass checking in his titanic butt without any penalties. It’s an outrage! Given the current ludicrous arrangement that sees a one-ton wideload with 20kg of luggage in the clear, while a svelte lady carrying 30kg has to take out a second mortgage just so she can bring her makeup kit on holiday, it defies logic that passengers aren’t weighed together with their bags like they were in the good old days. If this gets me steaming, I can’t imagine how the anorexic chicks must be feeling.
Oh the cruel irony of those fateful flights when you’re pinged for an overweight suitcase and then get seated between a couple of heffalumps for 11 hours. Naturally, they both fall into catatonic sleep seconds after nomnomnomming their way through dinner, leaving you trapped and cowering while your TV screen malfunctions and a teething baby wails away in front of you. With flabby arm-rolls invading your miniscule territory, engine failure is just a heartbeat away.
* * * * * * * *
Complete Kak is published by SchreiberFord/Two Dogs
A whole host of launches for The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers will take place this week, including tonight’s launch at the Book Lounge in Cape Town. Start the festivities at home with the following excerpt:
* * * * * * * *
I was eight thousand kilometres away, drunk and happily unaware at a friend’s birthday party in Berlin, when I learned that the first white farmer had been murdered. Someone had left a television on in the corner of the apartment. I knew, even with the sound off, that it was a news report on Zimbabwe.
There’s something about rich red earth the colour of blood that you can never wash away, no matter how far you’ve travelled, or how long you’ve been running. It was a Sunday afternoon, 16 April 2000.
For the previous month back in Zimbabwe the government of President Robert Mugabe had been threatening to take away land from the country’s forty-five hundred white farmers. Gangs of armed men – said to be veterans of the liberation war that had ended white rule twenty years earlier – had begun invading white-owned land, assaulting black farmworkers, looting homes, burning tobacco barns and stoning dogs, pigs and cattle to death. Still, it was a shock to discover that a farmer had now been murdered. His name was David Stevens. He had been savagely beaten, and then shot in the face and back at point-blank range with a shotgun, after a mob abducted him from his farm in the district of Macheke.
I had been out of Zimbabwe for seven years, travelling, writing, drinking away my late twenties and early thirties in the rootlessness of London, but I knew that Macheke was only an hour’s drive from my parents’ game farm and backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains of the country, and that they were in terrible danger. If they didn’t leave fast, they would surely be murdered as well, and it would be a brutal, bloody, all-too-African end. They would die like this man Stevens.
I frantically dialled their number and waited for what seemed like hours to get a connection. My mother finally answered.
She sounded on edge, her voice high-pitched through the static.
‘Hello, yes, who’s this?’
‘Mom, it’s me, Douglas. Jesus, what’s happening? Are you guys all right?’
‘It’s terrible,’ she said.
I pictured her and my father barricaded in the house, a mob rattling their gates.
‘What’s happening? Mom, what’s happening?’
‘We’ve already lost four wickets.’
‘Four what?’
‘Four wickets, darling. Not going very well at all. It’s ninety-one for four …’
Christ. She and my father were watching a cricket match. I could hear the crackle of the commentary on the TV in the background. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or horrified.
‘Jeez, Ma. Not the cricket. The farm. Have you any idea what’s going on? This guy has been murdered up the road from you. Are you sure you’re okay?’
There was a long pause, as if I had sucked the air out of a balloon. I heard her take a drag of her cigarette. She would have a drink nearby. Bols brandy on the rocks. She’d switched from Gordon’s gin years ago. Said it gave her headaches.
I could picture my father clearly now, too, down the passageway, around the corner in the living room, feet up in his leather recliner. The remote would be in one hand, a mug of Coke in the other, and he would be cursing at the new batsman for playing a loose shot: ‘Move your bloody feet! Get into line! Ag, hit the ball, for Chrissake!’ Dappled late-afternoon sunlight would be streaming through the arches of the veranda, illuminating the purple crests of the mountains behind and setting on the wheat fields of the farms in the valley below.
Those farms could have been on fire for all my parents knew.
‘Oh, that,’ my mother finally said, her voice fading through the static.
‘Yes, well, it doesn’t look very good, does it? I guess we’re just going to have to wait and see.’
Wait and see didn’t seem a wise option to me.
I told her I thought it best they pack up fast and lie low, whether in Mutare, the closest town, in another valley over the mountain pass nineteen kilometres away, or, even better, across the border in Mozambique. Mozambique. It sounded absurd just suggesting it. Mozambique had been at war for most of my childhood. People fled Mozambique for our side of the border. But like the seasons, in Africa the state of nations turns and occasionally comes full circle. Yes, Mozambique. Anywhere would be safer than Zimbabwe.
But my parents, I discovered on that phone call, were not going anywhere.
‘Darling,’ my mother said, ‘don’t be ridiculous. We are Zimbabweans. This is our land.’
And then I heard steel in her voice, fury rise in her throat.
‘Over my dead body will they take this place. Over my dead body.’
By the time I put down the phone my mother was asking me how I was, and when I was going to come and visit again. She had the stoic, breezy air of someone who had lived through a lot and expected to live through this, too. She had seen worse.
‘How are they?’ my friend asked when I returned to the party.
‘They’re watching cricket,’ I said. ‘They have no idea what’s going on.’
Hello, what’s this? I asked myself when, while perusing a recent Book Lounge newsletter, a work with the novel title The Ayahuasca Diaries caught my eye.
Ayahuasca, of course, is a well-known psychedlic herb – but references to it are far and few between in this corner of the world.
Turns out, Sunday Times journo Caspar Greeff went off to South America in search of the kind of consoling that ayahuasca can purportedly give – and he took his father along with him. The result is a memoir unique on the SA Lit scene, which is being launched at the BL tonight, and from which we are pleased to bring you this excerpt:
* * * * * * * *
This morning Scott brought his .22 rifle to the Internet room at the heart of his magical jungle empire. He strode up the stairs, posed like Buffalo Bill onstage at his Wild West show and aimed the rifle at the ceiling.
POW!
A bat tumbled down, blood trickling out of its little mouth. The creature flapped its wings feebly and died. ‘That bat’s had better days than this one,’ Scott observed.
I don’t want to give the impression that Scott Petersen was a trigger-happy cowboy who enjoyed killing: the shaman shot the bat because it shat on his computer.
Another pilgrim – as Scott calls his clients – had joined us. Ralph, a 58-year-old, bearded, bespectacled builder and Buddhist, lives in Crestone, Colorado. Crestone, on the western shoulder of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, has a population of 82, but is one of the centres of spiritualism in the United States. The village is home to seven Buddhist temples, two Hindu ashrams, a Zen retreat, a Carmelite monastery, a Tibetan Peace Park, a Cretan labyrinth, and an Assyrian ziggurat.
‘And five brothels,’ added Scott irreverently.
‘And one crystal meth lab and one opium den,’ laughed Ralph, a gentle soul who looked not unlike Jerry Garcia in his Blues for Allah days.
A large turquoise insect was trapped on the green mosquito netting of a window and, experiencing a moment of compassion, an instant of Buddha-mind, I picked it up to free it to the outside world. The insect buzzed furiously and fire shot through my system. My right index finger was aflame, my heart accelerated dramatically. The flamboyantly coloured creature was a wasp, and it had done what wasps do in these situations: stung me.
‘Fuego! Fuego! (Fire! Fire!),’ I yelled in my makeshift Spanish. ‘Jesus, this thing’s got a hell of sting.’
Dad grinned. ‘No good deed ever goes unpunished,’ he said. He believed that.
‘No, that was great,’ I muttered through tears of pain. ‘Exhilarating. I could get addicted to this feeling, keep one of these wasps as a pet and let it sting me whenever I feel less than alive.’
But today I feel alive. So very alive, even before the wasp injected its venom into my system. Maybe it has something to do with last night’s ayahuasca ceremony. Dad, having decided that the potion is poison, stayed in the bungalow, reading, when Scott came to fetch me at 8pm. I heard the shaman’s gumboots squelching through the mud and felt my pulse quicken.
‘Hope I don’t get stuck in Hell,’ I remarked to Dad as I walked out.
‘I’m sure you won’t. I think you’re going to have a breakthrough tonight. Good luck.’
‘Thanks Dad. Good night,’ I replied and joined the shaman on the path to his temple/ceremony room. The ayahuasca had been freshly heated to remove fermentation, and was still warm when I put the cup to my lips. It was a dark russet colour; the colour of rich soil, a hue of autumn.
I looked into the cup and said a short prayer to the goddess of ayahuasca. (‘Please don’t make me go mad.’) Then held the cup up. Toasted the universe. ‘Salud! (Health).’ I downed the potion in two sips. As usual it tasted vile. Horrid, bitter medicine. I ignored the shrieks of protest from my taste buds, went to my place on the wooden bench and waited.
Scott said his customary prayer in Spanish, and extinguished the candles. The moon was full and silver light danced in the room. I waited for the jungle juice to take effect. The waiting was scary – then I saw legions of eyes. The moonbeams stopped dancing and the darkness doubled. I felt as if I was in somebody else’s mind. I was trapped between two realms. The air was charged with magic. A lattice fell from my eyes, and I saw the fine filaments that connect everything. Honeycomb fractals flashed across my vision.
Then the fear. That feeling of mega déjà vu. Mega vu. Mega-view. The knowledge that I had done exactly this millions of times before and would be in this same room in this same ceremony feeling the same emotions and thinking the same thoughts countless numbers of times again. I travelled back to the beginning of time, when a disembodied consciousness created the universe out of loneliness and all history unfolded, then I arrived at Scott’s ceremony room and drank ayahuasca and travelled back to the beginning of time where a disembodied consciousness created the universe out of loneliness, and all history unfolded … and I was looping, over-compensating again.
I reached for my notebook. My hands looked far away and were elongated as if they were underwater: they glowed like they’d been picking beetroots in Chernobyl. I scribbled down two sentences: ‘This has never happened before. And this will never happen again.’
That seemed to help. I felt flooded with compassion and love. I stopped thinking about myself, brought friends to mind, and it felt as if we were communicating on a plane far removed from the physical world.
Walter started singing icaros, and he sang all of creation into existence. My spirit soared. I was filled with awe and gratitude. I had an inkling of what is called ‘shamanic ecstasy’.
According to the late Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade, the shaman:
… commands the techniques of ecstasy – that is, because his soul can safely abandon his body and roam at vast distances, can penetrate the underworld and rise to the sky. Through his own ecstatic experience he knows the roads of the extraterrestrial regions. He can go below and above because he has already been there. The danger of losing his way in these forbidden regions is still great; but sanctified by his initiation and furnished with his guardian spirit, a shaman is the only human being able to challenge the danger and venture into a mystical geography.
I may have been unsanctified by my initiation, I may have been unfurnished with a guardian spirit, but I was certainly venturing into a mystical geography. Vivid pictures flashed through my mind. Scenes transformed and metamorphosed. I saw Moses schlepping up Mount Sinai to fetch commandments inscribed in stone by the wrathful storm deity Yahweh, back in the days when men still heard the voice of God as clear as a tune through an iPod earpiece. I went to a village on a planet in another galaxy where I have another life which I live concurrently with my Earth-life. I had committed a crime there and was imprisoned inside a colossal tree which was called the Axis Mundi – the Centre of the World. I felt my blood turn to sap as the tree absorbed me. Then I was on a bridge over a river which I knew was the Ganges, facing a trio of monkey-faced demons who brayed like donkeys and brandished massive clubs. A blow from one of those clubs would knock my head off. I walked up to the monkey-demons and surrendered completely and they vanished.
I became aware that all life is sacred, that all beings are fragments of one mind.
Someone walked over to me. He had the head of a fish and the body of a man. He wore Scott’s white robe. I looked at him curiously. He blew perfume on me, and gave me a word of advice.
Rian Malan’s collection of journalism, Resident Alien, was launched last night in Johannesburg, at one of the biggest book events of the year.
As a physical object, the volume is an impressive specimen: it runs to a bulky 336 pages; it’s got a cover shout from the London Times that marks the author out as “South Africa’s Hunter S Thompson”. The back cover, meanwhile, carries quotes from the closer-to-home Lin Sampson and Koos Kombuis.
Despite this, at first, I thought it was going to be a book I wasn’t going to get too excited about. But then I read Malan’s introduction, and I knew I’d have to carry on all the way to page 336. Sampson calls it correctly in her blurb: Malan is a dangerously good writer.
BOOK SA is pleased to be in a position to remind you why; here’s the dangerously good introduction in full, an exclusive excerpt that we’re proud to feature:
* * * * * * * *
Once upon a time in America, I worked for a semi-underground newspaper that had offices on a seedy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and at least one great writer on its masthead. Michael Ventura was a New Yorker who’d somehow reinvented himself as a straight-shootin’, hard-drinkin’ cowboy from the lonesome plains of Texas. I guess that was the Larry McMurtry part of his complex persona. He also had a Kerouac aspect and broad streaks of Mailer and Hemingway, but on the page, the spirit he most often channelled was Thomas Wolfe, whose incantatory rhythms he could mimic with uncanny accuracy.
Ventura started out as a reporter, but he’d decided that ‘nobody can write fast enough to tell a true story’ and moved on to movie reviews.
If we were lucky, he’d pitch up on a Tuesday morning with black rings around his eyes and two days’ stubble on his chin, bearing a searing 5 000-word essay on whatever Hollywood blockbuster had irritated him that week. The best of those reviews began, ‘This is a chickenshit movie.’
So then – let’s get on with it. This is a chickenshit collection, and the best I can offer is some lame excuses as to why. Let’s begin with Ventura’s aphorism about the alleged impossibility of writing a true story. This is of little consequence to news reporters who glance at the charge sheet and produce a dry recitation of the basic facts, but some of us had other dreams. I suppose the ideal was a piece of non-fiction so carefully observed and exhaustively reported that reading it was as good as being there.
This was a fiendishly difficult thing to pull off, even in America, where people speak the same language, share most values and understand with a reasonable degree of certainty the boundaries of the matrix they inhabit. The laws of cause and effect are known. The narrative may twist and turn, but the forces that drive it are quantified. Even so, your chances were slender. You could set the words down and polish them until your fingers bled, but Ventura was generally right: the ideal was beyond attainment Nobody can write fast enough to tell a true story.
In America, this was an artsy verdict on the limitations of the form. In South Africa, it’s like a law of nature: there’s no such thing as a true story here. The facts might be correct, but the truth they embody is always a lie to someone else. My truths strike some people as racist heresies. Nadine Gordimer’s strike me as distortions calculated to appeal to gormless liberals on the far side of the planet. A lot of South Africans can’t read either of us, so their truth is something else entirely. Atop all this, we live in a country where mutually annihilating truths coexist entirely amicably. We are a light unto nations. We are an abject failure. We are progressing even as we hurtle backward. The blessing of living here is that every day presents you with material whose richness beggars the imagination of those who live in saner places. The curse is that you can never, ever get it quite right, and if you come close, the results are usually unpublishable.
I would say, looking back, that the only worthwhile writing I’ve done over the past two decades appeared in letters to friends in whose company I could ignore the crushing racial taboos that govern public discourse and just call it as I saw it. Beyond that, I don’t know. I think it was TS Eliot who said the end of all exploring is to return to where you began and see it as if for the first time. When I came home from America, everything seemed different to me; I saw that I was in Africa, and that changed everything. Those I’d left behind remained obsessed with apartheid. I became obsessed with what replaced it. They thought apartheid was the source of all SA’s pain. I thought we were doomed unless we figured out what had gone wrong elsewhere in Africa, and how to avoid a similar fate. I was an atheist in the great revival tent of the New South Africa; the faith on offer was too simple and sentimental, the answers too easy.
We’ll probably disagree here, but if you ask me, the most telling creation of apartheid was not the dompas, or the veiligheidspolisie, or the mines and factories that generated the taxes that paid for repressive measures. It was not the sjambok, or the whites-only signs that once hung on everything from toilet doors to the portals of higher education. Apartheid’s great triumph was the creation of a generically Western moonbase on Africa, where whites lived exactly like whites in the capitals of the great white empire.
It follows that apartheid’s greatest glories were actually suburbs like Parktown, where English-speaking liberals lived in a bubble that resembled nothing so much as the more civilised parts of Boston or London. Parktown had it all. It had Nadine Gordimer, who won a Nobel for her fashionable literary critique of the empire that largely tolerated and sustained her. It had the Linder Auditorium, where civilised whites gathered to hear other whites playing the music of Dead White Men. And finally it had that great university on the far side of Empire Road, where white professors faithfully propagated doctrines laid down on the far side of the planet by the High Priests of white civilisation.
By the time Mandela came out of prison, those doctrines were gen- erally of the variety called ‘progressive,’ which rejoiced in the downfall of white males. Practitioners of this doctrine saw themselves as part of, sometimes even heroes of, the uprising of the natives. They thought the wrath of the masses would fall on the bad white males who controlled the land and the mines, while ‘good’ whites merged into a smiley-face culture of interracial harmony and soft socialism. I said, bullshit, dudes, the laws of poetic symmetry call for another outcome entirely. The wind of change will eventually sweep everything away – your job, your illusions, your university as presently constituted, the wires that bring light at the flick of a switch, the pipes that discreetly remove your turds, the freeways on which you drive, the high-tech chemical farms that put food on your table, the investments intended to sustain your comfortable old age, and the clean, efficient hospitals in which you plan to expire. All these things are creations of the empire, and when it fades, they will too.
That was more than two decades ago. Every day since has brought thunderous confirmation of the rectitude of my prognostications. Every day also brought irrefutable proof of the fact that I was mistaken. I cursed Mandela when he refused to shake De Klerk’s hand during some televised debate during the peace talks era. A few months later I was fighting back tears at his inauguration. I claimed vindication when the rand began its great collapse, ate my words when it bounced back again. Every farm murder seemed to herald the onset of generalised ethnic cleansing. Every visit to Soweto left me believing in the brotherhood of man again. And so on.
There was a time when I thought these howling ambiguities could only be resolved by a great cleansing apocalypse, but the apocalypse never came. Instead, we had the delirious triumph of the 1995 rugby world cup, where dik Boers wept and said, ‘That is my president,’ as Mandela raised the golden trophy into the blue heavens celebrated in Die Stem. The resulting goodwill was obliterated by the one-sided maunderings of the Truth Commission, but it made a comeback when the economy started growing under Mbeki. Five years later, Zimbabwe put catastrophe back on the agenda, and by the time the lights went out in 2008, the end seemed nigh. Everything seemed to be disintegrating: Eskom, the parastatals, the sewerage system, the highways, the hospitals, the putative moral integrity of the Rainbow Nation. But even as the rot deepened, we saw the rise of the only force that could check it – black people who said, fuck racial solidarity, this cannot be tolerated.
Which brings us back to Michael Ventura. I imagine him shaking his head in disbelief as he reads this. ‘Chickenshit,’ he says. ‘Malan can’t make up his mind. He’s been sitting on the fence so long the wire is cutting into his pompous and cowardly arsehole.’ I agree entirely, but if there is an overarching truth here, I can’t see it. The only true line I’ve ever written about South Africa is this one: ‘We yaw between terror and ecstasy. Sometimes we complete the round trip in just fif- teen minutes.’ If you share the feeling, thanks, but there’s a significant difference between us: I am a journalist, which means that I leave a trail of prophecies and judgements, several of which are mortally embarrassing in retrospect. There is no excuse for such failings, but if this was a trial, I’d waltz my way to an acquittal.
In the past two decades, South Africa has been stricken almost weekly by scandals that would have toppled governments in the West but seem almost meaningless here. Who stole the funds donated to help resettle ANC exiles? Who asked the Zambian government to throw Katiza Cebekhulu into a dungeon so that he couldn’t testify against Winnie Mandela? Did Thabo Mbeki really negotiate the arms deal on a ‘government to government’ basis and pocket the resulting commissions? Did he really tell Bulelani Ngcuka to bring him the head of Jacob Zuma, even if that entailed fabricating evidence and setting honey traps? When these stories break, you think they’re going to tear the country apart and alter everything forever. But they don’t. They linger for a week or two and then fade into oblivion, blown off the front pages by the next dumbfounding scandal. The ordinary laws of cause and effect don’t seem to apply here. The boundaries of the matrix we inhabit remain unknown.
But what the heck, there’s something to be said for practising journalism on the edge of an abyss, trying to follow your targets into the murk that surrounds. In the pieces that follow, I often miss, but there are a few passages that come close to disproving Michael Ventura’s dictum. For the rest, I tried my best, and provoked reactions as richly varied as the reality we inhabit. A few people said nice things, of course – ‘a born story-teller,’ according to the judges on some American awards jury – but the reactions that lodge in my memory are mostly the angry ones. Some said racist, but that’s so commonplace it’s barely worth mentioning; any South African journalist who hasn’t been called a racist or self-hating black is a kak one whose lips are chapped from sucking the unmentionable appendages of those in power. The more interesting accusations were incest, homosexual tendencies, heterosexual debauchery, incompetence, deceit, murder, sissiness, ‘carbuncular’ practices, a secret alliance with the diabolical President Mbeki, spying for Inkatha, drinking too much, taking drugs and smelling bad.
What can I say? My name is Rian Malan and I called it as I saw it.
In 1992, a gang leader was shot dead by a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Kroonstad. The murder weapon was then hidden on Krog’s stoep. In Begging to Be Black, Krog begins by exploring her position in this controversial case.
BOOK SA is proud to bring you first sight of Begging to Be Black. Here is the book’s dramatic opening sequence:
* * * * * * * *
Chapter one
A gunshot cracks. The man lunges forward, his hands groping towards a stationary taxi nearby.
Somebody yells.
Bystanders scramble in all directions. Waiting taxi drivers duck behind their steering wheels. Another shot and the man falls on the tar, his attaché case flung sideways. Blood streams from his shattered shoulder blade as he crawls towards the vehicle. He would reach it, but a figure wearing a balaclava closes in on him. Light-footed, as if with sprung ankles, his pursuer stands astride him as he comes to a stop.
The wounded man turns on his side to look up.
From the planted stance of the heels, the perfect balance of the pelvis, the way the arms in red sleeves reach down, with strange grace, to point the pistol at his forehead, the wounded man knows: this is the end.
A final shot. But because the wounded man moves his head at the last moment, the bullet that kills him does not leave his body: it penetrates the frontal skull bone two centimetres above the eye and exits four centimetres behind the left ear, where it is caught between the skull and the black skin in a small swelling.
Quickly, the killer pulls off the balaclava, rolls the pistol in it and, with elated energy, runs off – accompanied by another man – away from the body and towards the station, sidestepping taxis and terrified spectators.
~ ~ ~
It is 25 February 1992 – quarter past six in Kroonstad.
Of what has just happened, we know nothing. Serene from deep-breathing exercises, J. and I roll up our yoga mats and call our youngest child, who is playing with other kids in the garden outside the house where we have our weekly classes. We drive to the local café for milk and bread. I greet the woman working at the bread-cutting machine, but instead of her usual banter, she lowers her eyes and disappears among the shelves. Later, at the till, I pick up her voice in heightened conversation at the back, where fresh milk is being carried in.
I don’t make anything of it, knowing too well that trying to live across racial lines in a rural town is not always easy – for black or white. J. puts the groceries on the back seat and flips Willem a packet of wine gums.
We drive home and we seem what we are: a reasonably comfortable middle-class family in a small rural town. During the height of apartheid we consciously decided to live among poor people and bought a house near the railway line. When our daughter went off to a birthday party one Saturday and came home distraught, after being pushed into the street towards a bakkie draped in AWB flags and called the child of a terrorist, we sent our children away to boarding schools in Bloemfontein.
It is not always easy to work out how to live a righteous life. That apartheid is wrong is relatively obvious, but how to live against apartheid is the harder question, because even the smallest decision has complicated consequences. Moving in and out of townships, without permission, for rallies, meetings and workshops causes tension at home. Sometimes J. calls me The Great Moral Denouncer, who judges every decision taken by the family as white-privileged, exploitative, unfair. Shall we go and see the Lohengrin production in Pretoria? Of course not: the money paid to the soprano flown in from South America would keep our local township in electricity for a year! Even the choice of black or white coffee acquires political undertones in our house, J. says. Sometimes he turns the argument around: because he is working hard, and is civilized to rich clients, his wife can afford to put his cars, fax machine, phone, house and life at the disposal of the oppressed.
So let me try again to describe this moment. A very precise moment in which the terrible has already happened but has not yet reached you, and it’s only looking back that you realize how protected, fortunate and naive you were at that moment, in the car along the familiar streets in which you grew up. (But, as always when I start this story, I feel I am sinking – as if my brain loses its capacity to maintain a physical integrity, a coherent skin around the story, as if my being becomes dispersed in the telling. I also know that when I reach the end of this tale, completely worn out, I will still be asking: What would have been the right thing to do? – and the terror, the real terror of moral bewilderment, is lost among the words.)
So: We’re coming back from yoga. With milk and bread, we stop in our garage. When we get out, Reggie is peering down from the stoep above the driveway. This is a surprise, because I didn’t see his car in front of the house. I laugh: ‘Are you now so high up in the political structures that you are being dropped by helicopter?’
We walk towards the front stoep, where Reggie and three other men are standing.
‘We need a lift,’ he says. He doesn’t introduce the others – which isn’t unusual, because he is often accompanied by chance passengers or political figures who need to remain incognito.
‘Don’t you want coffee or something cold to drink?’ J. offers.
‘No, thank you,’ says Reggie. ‘We’re in a hurry.’
Seeing it’s already dark, J. says he’ll quickly take them.
‘No,’ Reggie stops him. ‘I have to discuss something with your wife.’
I get into the car, with Reggie in front and the other men in the back. I start reversing and, just before I’m all the way out of the garage, Reggie says cursorily, ‘Get rid of this for me.’ And he hands me a red T-shirt.
I open the window and throw it into a box of old clothes that people come and drop off at our place. I drive and turn into Voortrekker Road. Reggie tells me that Regina, his wife, is not doing well and asks whether I can recommend a ‘right’ psychologist in Welkom: ‘You know what the doctors in Kroonstad are like!’ After being in solitary confinement for four months in ’76, Regina had a nervous breakdown and is still battling with the consequences.
I talk about their eldest daughter, Winnie, who is in Standard 9 at Brentpark High, where I teach. She was recently made hockey captain. ‘No other centre forward breaks through like her,’ I say. ‘Takes after her father …’
Reggie laughs, pleased at the compliment.
At the crossroads he says, ‘Rather take us to Maokeng.’ I turn right to the black township instead of left to Brentpark, the coloured area. We drive. The men in the back start talking in Sesotho. They sound angry. Reggie says something, also in Sesotho, which calms them down.
Suddenly police cars come racing past us – it looks as if everyone inside has a walkie-talkie against his mouth. ‘God,’ I say, ‘the police can sometimes look hysterical when they want to.’
Reggie placates the men in the back. ‘It’s a free country,’ he says, speaking Afrikaans now. ‘We can say what we like; we can drive where we like.’
I stop at Tau’s shop. Everyone gets out, and I see my passengers for the first time. Later, however, I will remember only the tall black man with the paper bag and the short one with the long hair and yellow-green eyes.
I drive back. At home J. is busy making toast. I go outside to cut some roses: Porcelain, Duet and the big ochre Just Joey. J. finds me in the passage, holds up my hand with the bunch of roses, and dances with me to his new Harvest Moon tape:
When we were strangers I watched you from afar When we were lovers I loved you with all my heart
He kisses my neck and our hands are clasped together around the roses and the scent of jasmine. From somewhere a phrase drifts up in me: ‘’n haag van bloed’ – a hedge of blood. I go and write it down, the beginning of a poem. Our youngest is sitting at the table doing his homework. The phone rings. ‘Where’s Reggie?’ a voice asks. ‘The Wheetie is dead and the police are looking for Reggie.’ I say I don’t know and hang up.
‘There’s something bloody funny going on,’ I say to J. and fetch the T-shirt from the garage. ‘Let’s burn this.’
‘You don’t do anything,’ says J., ‘until you know what’s going on.’
I do not argue. J. is irritated enough. We have a couple of especially difficult months behind us. At the office people started asking what architectural work he thought the firm would be getting if a partner’s wife collaborated with those endangering the lives of the people who used architects in the first place. Some weeks before, there were photographs in the local newspaper of me and Reggie attending ANC rallies, with reports of how we incited innocent children to take part in life-threatening marches.
* * * * * * * *
Begging to Be Black is published by Random House Struik
Her notes on Fowler’s novel – which is set in Kalk Bay, among other Cape-y places, and comprises a “story of secrets, warped friendships and addiction, and how families guard their secrets to keep up appearances” – are certainly worth the click-through; but perhaps a taste of the text is called for first. Here’s chapter three in full, narrated by the main character, Lily:
* * * * * * * *
Every morning, the whole lot of us walk to school together. We live in Gran’s Kalk Bay house, but because she lives on the farm, we have the place all to ourselves. I’m in sub A and Beth is a year behind me in the pre-school class at Kalk Bay Primary, near where we live.
Mom pushes the pram, and it rattles over the cobblestones in the street. She has to hold on carefully or it will run down the hill, and that’s why we can’t hang onto her or hold her hand. Inside the pram is Gracie. Mom says it’s the last present Dad gave her before he went to heaven. I imagine Dad passing Gracie to Mom, with a big pink ribbon wrapped around her and a bow on her head.
When we walk to school in the morning, blanketed in the salty air, I watch Mom’s steps. Gran says Mom and I have the same walk. She says we should have both tried ballet. It would have fixed the walk and some other things too. Long, slow, tiger legs – that’s Mom’s walk. Her legs are short, like mine, but the way she stretches them out and forwards makes them longer. We move along slowly, and I look at everything. I see Mom does the same. Her head swivels and wanders.
Gran says I am my mother’s child because we’re both quiet. You can never know what secrets are brewing in a head like that. Gran isn’t a fan of Mom’s head in any way. She says it looks like a bird’s nest, and, what’s more, it’s the muisneste that got us where we are today. I think it means that Mom has something funny inside her head. And plus, Gran says Mom and I like the same trash music, and that’s another thing that makes us deurmekaar.
Gran doesn’t hate all music. She likes what Mom plays on the piano. She’ll sit and listen, with her back straight and her knobbly hand gripping her walking stick. She takes this walking stick everywhere. I’ve seen her without it, and she does fine. But she needs it to show people she’s an old lady, because old ladies deserve respect. Also, it’s a good way to get our attention when she’s cross. She bangs it on the floor twice, and then you know you must listen.
The music Gran doesn’t like is called Queen and The Doors. There’s also Simon and Garfunkel, Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull. And Abba, which is the only thing that makes Mom sing along, and then Beth and I join in, but Gran says it’s sentimental candyfloss. She says Simon and Garfunkel is a little better, because at least they can carry a tune, but you can’t trust those folksy hippies, they smoke dagga all the time, and plus they’re revolutionary, and look what that Paul Simon has gone and done now, singing all this native music with that black lot from Ladysmith.
Mom plays less of this music these days, because since Dad died and Gracie was finished getting born, Mom had to start working to put food in our mouths. So now she’s tired all the time, and has to lie down a lot. Before the tiredness, Mom used to dance with us sometimes. She’d put on a record and turn it up. We’d all get turns to choose the music, but Beth and I weren’t allowed to touch the records because they can get scratched and then you’re done for. Dancing meant holding hands and spinning around in a circle, which Beth called a rallentando. At the end, you all fall down, same as in Ring-a-Rosie. There were other dances that meant jumping up and down. Mom was never much of a jumper, but she laughed at us doing it. You could see her little pearl teeth shine.
*
It’s my special job to carry the house keys every morning. If the tlinka-tlinka sound stops, Mom stops in her tracks, and then looks at my hands.
Sometimes the sound stops because I want to see if I can make it stop, and other times because I’m holding the keys up to the light, turning them slowly to watch the metal gleam. Then Mom asks me why I’m not moving, and she gives me a little push. But most of the time we just walk, and Beth and Mom ask each other lots of questions.
Sometimes I stop listening, because the hush of the sea swims into my ears and whirls around my brain. It gets chopped up by cars roaring past on the main road. Kalk Bay is a quiet place, but it’s morning, and everyone has somewhere to go.
This morning, I notice a tiny pink flower sprouting from a green frill that has poured out from the crack between the tarred pavement and a stone wall. It stops my breath for just a second. I can’t believe this beautiful thing in between all the hardness and greyness. It’s a miracle, so I grab at it and pull it out of its home. I feel bad about this immediately, but I must have it.
I trot to catch up to Mom and Beth. They never even noticed I was gone. Mom is sighing because she has to answer so many questions, and I know she doesn’t really like to talk. Just like me. I sniff my flower, and it’s my turn to sigh. No smell. I was expecting a thick, deep perfume to come out of this little flower, but no such luck. Still, I’ll keep it and press it in the phone book.
* * * * * * * *
The Elephant in the Room is published by Kwela, an imprint of the NB group
Paddy Kearney’s biography of anti-apartheid campaigner and Catholic bishop Denis Hurley, Guardian of the Light, is a world-traveller – much like its subject – and is being launched in the UK and Ireland this week.
The biography’s title comes from Alan Paton, coined the phrase in reference to the bishop. Hurley was also known as an “ecclesiastical Che Guevara”.
Born in Cape Town in 1915 of Irish parents, Hurley became the youngest Catholic bishop in the world in 1947 at 31. His career as an outspoken opponent of apartheid began in 1951 when, as chairman of the Southern African Bishops’ Conference, he drafted the first of the ground-breaking pastoral letters in which the bishops denounced apartheid as “blasphemy” and “intrinsically evil”.
BOOK SA is pleased to bring you three excerpts from his biography:
* * * * * * * *
EXTRACT ONE: DENIS HURLEY ON ROBBEN ISLAND
Archbishop Denis Hurley’s father was a lighthouse keeper. At the time of Denis’s birth in 1915 his father was stationed at Cape Point. Three years later he was transferred to Robben Island.
Over the years, the island has been used for various purposes, but at the time the Hurleys lived there, from 1918 to 1923, it had a mental hospital, a leper asylum and a big prison for black convicts serving long sentences. There were Anglican and Catholic churches, a school, a library, sports fields, tennis courts and recreation halls, a police force and a fire brigade which made a big impact on the children.
Denis’s memory is that ‘father and mother were wonderful parents, and we became a deeply united family with a strong Irish-Catholic faith. Mother was the predominant influence in the matter of faith … She lived her faith and communicated it easily to her children. Father was devout but it was mother who created the deep spiritual atmosphere of our home’.
His father, said Denis, had a tremendous sense of justice and fair play. He used to tell his children.: ‘No matter what level people are at, what colour their skin, you know that you are not to treat anybody badly in this house.’
Denis attended the little government school on the island. One day Denis was asked by his teacher, “What is your religion”, to which he replied, “Irish”. He told his mother about this at home, but she said he should not say that too loudly. It was the early 1920s, the time of the Irish rebellion against British control of Ireland. His mother was aware that the Irish rebels were unpopular with loyal British subjects on Robben Island and in Cape Town.
In the early mornings a group of convicts would come round to each house to collect the night soil. Dressed in bright-red striped uniforms, they drove on a dashing mule cart, clanging and rattling buckets and shouting to each other. Denis found this activity most attractive and would have liked to join them as a convict – an ambition that did not last long.
His parents took turns to wash up at night. The one who was not ‘on duty’ would read aloud interesting articles from the newspaper. Often the items concerned conflicts in Ireland, and one name sounded most ominous: ‘devil era’. Later, Denis learnt that this was Eamonn de Valera, the elected leader of the Irish rebels, later to become prime minister of Ireland.
An event on Robben Island that caused great excitement, especially for children, was the arrival of planes which took people on short trips for ten shillings a flight. From Robben Island they flew to Table Mountain, giving their passengers an outstanding view of Cape Town, and then returning to the island. Denis was also fascinated to watch ocean liners sweeping into Table Bay east of the island. The Union Castle liners were particularly impressive and he enjoyed sketching them.
EXTRACT TWO: DENIS HURLEY AND THE GREAT DICTATORS
During his studies at the Jesuit-run Gregorian University in Rome, the young Brother Hurley focussed on the Church’s social teaching. In a dissertation entitled: ‘Economic Domination by Credit Control’ he focussed on a passage of Pope Pius X1’s letter dealing with credit control. This involved Hurley in research on the big mining houses and banks of South Africa which were imposing a tyrannical domination over the country, a study he described as ‘a great sharpening of conscience’.
Hurley was impressed by the angry phrases that Pope Pius used against credit control: ‘He was a real fighter, Pius X1’. Quite how much impact was made by the Pope on the scholastics is captured by Hurley’s comment: ‘We ate and slept and pondered over the Pope’s letter. And then there were the other encyclicals against communism, fascism and Nazism. These things were our bread and butter.’
Dramatic political developments were taking place in Italy, and the young and impressionable Hurley eagerly recorded what he saw: ‘The whole Italian nation is mad with Fascism. Every second man in the street … wears some kind of uniform, principally the black-shirt variety. Soldiers carry rifles, revolvers, bayonets. Policemen sport sabres, rapiers, daggers and revolvers. Even little boys are togged out in black shirts and wellington boots.’
Towards the end of April 1936, about the time of the Italian conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Hurley saw Mussolini for the first time. He and another Oblate student, Joseph Fitzgerald (later, also an archbishop), remembered seeing posters announcing that Mussolini was to address a fascist rally in the Piazza Venezia next to his office. Hurley and Fitzgerald went along to listen:
“We found the Piazza full of people, shouting ’Duce, Duce, Duce’. After quite a long period, the French doors opened from the office to the balcony and out came Mussolini, alone. He stood there, looked at the crowd, threw up his hand in the Fascist salute. Left and right there were more cries of ‘Duce’, so that he held up his hand for silence … and began to speak”.
On 3 May 1938 Adolf Hitler came to Rome on a six-day state visit. He wanted to be received in the Vatican, but Pius X1 showed his total disapproval by leaving the city for his summer residence. He gave instructions that no member of Hitler’s party be allowed into the Vatican.
During the visit, a big military parade took place along the Via dell’Impero. That morning, Hurley was in the study hall of the International Scholasticate, close by. One of the scholastics came running into the hall and said to him: ‘Come quickly. You can see Hitler from the roof.’ Following the Pope’s example, Hurley said: ‘No, I’m not going to see that man.’ In 1999 he said: ‘By that time … we knew that Hitler was already something of an embodiment of evil. We didn’t know about his attitude to the Jews, but we knew he had taken up the cudgels … against the Catholic Church.’
EXTRACT THREE: HURLEY ON TRIAL
Archbishop Hurley paid a price for his prophetic witness against apartheid. Most notably he was charged and brought to court in 1985 for statements against the notorious Koevoet counter-insurgency group in Namibia.
In the midst of Hurley’s preparations for this trial, a message came from a famous prisoner – Nelson Mandela. Writing from Pollsmoor Prison, Mandela said: ‘Archbishop Hurley is often in my thoughts, especially now. I would like him to know that.’
Three days before the trial date, Minister Kobie Coetsee announced that the charges would be withdrawn. Since Hurley had already been formally charged, the state would be obliged to give reasons for not proceeding with the trial when Hurley appeared in court.
When Hurley entered the Pretoria Magistrates Court on 18 February 1985, it was packed with supporters who overflowed into the corridors, many of them wearing WE SUPPORT HURLEY stickers. Bishops, priests, nuns and lay people had come from many countries, as well as representatives of other churches, legal and human rights experts, diplomatic representatives and a large media contingent. As Hurley entered the court, they gave him a standing ovation, and the magistrate, W.J. van den Bergh, had to call for order.
Hurley stood in the dock as the lead prosecutor, Mr Frans Roets, made a short statement indicating why the charges were being withdrawn. The crowded court listened quietly during Roets’s statement until he accused Hurley of ‘wallowing in the glamour attributed to him’ as a result of the case. Then ‘there was a roar from the whole court … people were so surprised by his remark and so indignant that they all shouted him down’.
The hearing over, the crowd of supporters walked with Hurley to nearby Khanya House, the SACBC headquarters, where a media conference was held. Hurley described it as ‘bright and cheery … like a crowd after winning a rugby test match’. He began the conference by speaking about his relief that the case was now over, but also his disappointment that the behaviour of the security forces would not now be made public. His legal team had assembled a ‘devastating’ collection of findings at trials and inquests involving the security forces in murder, rape, assault and robbery.
After thanking his legal team, Hurley expressed ‘the hope and prayer that the aborted trial may be used by God in hastening the day when the horror of Namibia may come to an end, when the good name of the security forces so grievously tarnished, when the designation of ‘policeman’ so sadly disgraced, will be reinstated and rehabilitated and when freedom and peace will come to a country subjected to the distress and cruelty of a war for which unfortunately South Africa is mainly responsible. May God grant the grace of repentance to the offending party and the grace of forgiveness to the offended, that reconciliation may result and peace and friendship come into their own’.
The other, however – Peter Harris’ gripping account of the trial of the Delmas Four, In a Different Time, which won the Alan Paton Award – has heretofore gone unexcerpted on our network.
Clearly, this is a problem that requires rectification without delay. We are very pleased, then, to bring you one of the book’s key scenes, in which Harris and his colleagues lead the evidence of notorious apartheid operative Dirk Coetzee – in their clients’ defence:
* * * * * * * *
We meet Coetzee in the hall. He’s wearing a sporty checked jacket and looking pumped up, ready for the occasion. In the past few days, Dennis Kuny has spent a lot of time with him going over his evidence. Bheki and I have also spoken to him to get his motivation right. Fortunately, reviving his spirits wasn’t too difficult: all it took to get his blood up were a few reminders of how his erstwhile colleagues had turned on him. With Coetzee is his brother Ben who has come to London to be with him at this critical time and is a major stabilising influence.
I have to hand it to Dirk Coetzee, he’s a fighter. He shows no fear or apprehension. I’ve come to realise how resilient he’s been in dealing with his isolation, desperately alone, estranged from family, friends and country, and at the mercy of his former sworn enemies, the comrades of people he’s murdered. That he’s still alive is extraordinary, and contrary to all predictions, including mine. Nevertheless, despite the fraught situation, he’s prepared to testify against the police. (more…)
You asked for it – well, Helen did – and we’ve brought it to you: an excerpt from Eric Miyeni’s new book, A Letter from Paris: Essays and Photographs. Here’s a tantalizing taste of both:
Paddy Kearney’s biography of anti-apartheid campaigner and Catholic bishop Denis Hurley, 
