I was happy most of all because I was alive. Before I had set out, I’d had a premonition that I would die in some sort of road accident en route (‘Globetrotter Lost in Bus Plunge Horror’). As this had not happened, I could now apportion my time and make onward plans. I had never known from week to week how long my travel would take, but South Africa was a land of railways and reliable train timetables. I was encouraged to think that I might eat well here. I had not had many good meals since leaving Cairo, but the breakfast I’d just had, and a glimpse of the dinner menu, made me hopeful for more. Also, having arrived in South Africa I was able to begin pondering my trip, and it seemed to me a safari that had been worth taking, the ideal picnic.
Lastly, I was happy because my birthday was the day after tomorrow. I considered my birthday a national holiday, a day for me to devote to pleasure and reflection, on which I did no work. And because I was among people who didn’t know it was my birthday, I would have no one here forcing jollification upon me and making facetious remarks involving the word sexagenarian.
Another satisfaction about being in South Africa was that the country had been written about by many gifted people, among them Nadine Gordimer. I had known Nadine since the 1970s, when she made annual visits to New York and London. Unlike many other South African writers and activists, she had resisted fleeing into exile. By staying put in Johannesburg where she had lived her whole life she had become one of the most reliable witnesses to the seismic South African transformation. She was that wonderful thing, the national writer who transcended nationality by being true to her art, like Borges in Argentina, R. K. Narayan in India, Jorge Amado in Brazil, V S. Pritchett in England, Shusako Endo in Japan, Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, and Yasar Kemal in Turkey. They were writers I had sought out as a traveler.
Months before, I had warned Nadine that I was heading for South Africa and was looking forward to seeing her in Johannesburg. She was a writer who belonged to the world, but true to her home and her disposition, she had made South Africa her subject, had anatomized its problems and its people. The complex country became human and comprehensible in her prose. Among the few books I had held on to was one by Mahfouz, whom I had met in Cairo, the gnomic Echoes of an Autobiography. Nadine had written an introduction to it, as a friend and fellow Nobel laureate. Seeing her here would be pleasant and symmetrical, another way of joining two distant corners of Africa.
The truth of Gordimer’s fiction was apparent to me from my first days in Johannesburg, for her fiction was full of immigrants from remote villages, from distant countries — Portuguese, Arabs, Lithuanians, Russians, Greeks, English, Hindus, Jews, Hereros, Swazis and Khoisan. Johannesburg was full of immigrants, too, wanderers like the earliest hominids, another native species. I was not in Johannesburg long before I met a Lithuanian, a Bulgarian, a Portuguese, a Senegalese holy man, a Congolese trader. I quickly learned that everyone in South Africa had a story, usually a pretty good one.
After a few days I became attuned to the accent, which in its twanging and swallowed way seemed both assertive and friendly. Johannesburg was ‘Janiceberg’ or ‘Jozi,’ and busy was ‘buzzy,’ and congested ‘congisted,’ ‘Waist’ West, and said ‘sid.’ There was no shortage of glottal stops, and a distinct Scottishness crept into some expressions; for example, a military build-up was a ‘mulatree buldup.’ Nearly everyone had a tendency to use Afrikaans words in ordinary speech, such as dorp, bakkie, têkkies, naartjies, and dagga, but these words had percolated throughout Central Africa long ago and I knew from having lived in Malawi that they meant town, pick-up truck, sneakers, tangerines, and marijuana. If there was a pronunciation problem it was that for dagga or Gauteng you needed to use the soft deep throat-clearing and gargled ‘g’ of the Dutch.
Voetsek meant bugger off all over southern Africa, and was regarded as impolite. Forbidden words sometimes slipped into conversation. Kaffer was the worst, koelie (‘coolie’ for Indian) not far behind, and so was bushies (for coloreds, mixed-race people). Piccanin was one vulgar word for African children, but there were others. When a white high court judge, perhaps believing himself to be affectionate, described some African children with the diminutive klein kaffertjies (‘little niggerlings’), he was suspended from his judicial duties. Afrikaans was nothing if not picturesque, though some slang words had etymologies that needed explanation, such as moffie for homosexual, which derived from mofskaap, a castrated sheep.
‘I don’t call them kaffers, I call them crows,’ a white 72-year-old janitor said in a newspaper story about racism in Pretoria. Ek noem hulle nie kaffers nie, ek noem hulk kraaie, laughing at his waggishness. Another headline was ‘Unlikely Romance in Conservative Town Has Rightwingers Reeling.’ In this story, when Ethel Dorfling, a white thirty-year-old full-figured mother of four, disappeared and set up house with Clyde Le Batie, a black 42-year-old full-figured detergent salesman, none of her friends would speak to her except to call her a kafferboetie, the equivalent of ‘nigger lover.’ A joshing Yiddish term for a very young wife or a heavily made-up floozy was kugel, a type of sugary pastry.
Moving his vowels, someone would say, ‘Ah thoat ah’d osk for an expinsive gless of shirry.’ That was clear enough, once you got used to the cadence. But the newer, more despised immigrants tended to stick with the accents they had brought.
‘It is a nice place, South Africa, but I don’t like the people,’ the man from Senegal told me.
This tall thin man in a multi-colored Rasta bonnet called himself El Hadji, and believed he was of Ethiopian ancestry. ‘Look at my face. You find us everywhere in Africa. Nous avons des boeufs. We traveled with our cattle for hundreds and thousands of years.’ He sold artifacts. I was always lookingfor unusual carvings and fetish objects. He had some, but instead of describing them he grumbled about the South Africans.
‘Which people don’t you like?’
‘All the people — black, white, all. It’s their history, maybe. They fight, they hate each other. They hate us, they call us foreigners. It is such a problem. But I like the country.’ Flourishing a fetish, pinching its head, he added, And the business is okay.’
He had come in the early nineties when Mandela, having recently been released, encouraged diverse people to emigrate to South Africa and help build a new nation. This open-door policy had been criticized and curtailed, but many people I met had arrived when it had been instituted, just ten years before.
Edward the Lithuanian was one. He was skinny, pasty-faced, agitated, only thirty or so but with thinning hair and that squinting adversarial manner of East Europeans, raised in an authoritarian system, untrusting and humorless. He had been brought to South Africa by his fleeing parents, when he was a twenty-year-old civil engineering student in Vilnius. ‘But engineering wasn’t me. I was bored.’ His parents hated working for peanuts, hated having to wait to buy the simplest material object, hated the feeling of confinement and destitution that came with the departure of the Soviets. I listened hard but heard no patriotic Lithuanian noises.
‘In Lithuania they have nothing. You wait twenty years for a car. Life in Lithuania is terrible. I go once a year to visit friends. They make nothing. They just buy and sell. What kind of business is that? Here, everything is simple.’