For the exercise, I walked to the Samora Machel celebration at the Praça da Independencia, which was at the top end of Samora Machel Avenue, near the Botanical Garden. I passed the Iron House, the ‘Casa de Ferro,’ and admired it as another of Eiffel’s designs. Children were running and jumping under the statue of Machel. The plaque on the statue’s base had been vandalized, making the inscription indecipherable. In the plaza, soldiers were dancing with each other, men and women dressed the same, bopping clumsily in combat boots, laughing as they stumbled.
I left Maputo the following morning early on the good bus, hummed across the savanna, swayed into the low hills, the usual snags and odd looks at the border posts, then the perverse miracle of South African freeways and beautiful houses and dismal orderly squatter settlements. I was in Johannesburg before dark.
22. The Trans-Karoo Express to Cape Town
After even a short spell in the warped fourth dimension of Mozambican ruin and reconstruction it seemed odd to be back so soon in the bustle of urban South Africa. I was disconcerted by the sight of smooth streets and stoplights, even of mature roadside trees, and undefiled parks, and of such a novelty as a stylish babe in a new convertible, gabbing on a mobile phone in Rosebank, a diamond-dealer perhaps or someone cornering the market in tanzanites. It was even stranger to hear the Johannesburgers’ constant grumbling, black and white obliquities about their lack of prosperity, their sagging economy, how the buying power of their money had halved in just a few years.
The frequent South African remark ‘This is a First World country with a Third World mentality’ could easily have been applied to so many countries in the world that I had seen, I did not take it seriously. The statement brought to mind not just Northern Ireland but some of the more picturesque and sullen parts of the United States and Europe — irreconcilable, like parts of South Africa.
For me, South Africa was a place where almost everything worked, even the political system. The whole huge place was accessible by train and bus. One of the consequences of the decades of white government paranoia was the ambitious road-building program, for military purposes, to keep order. This road network meant that the army could go anywhere; and now civilians could do the same. The universities were excellent, the level of public debate was impressive, and the newspapers were embattled, following crime stories and impartially assessing government policy and political scandals which, in South Africa, were sometimes steamily related. Even the education system was praised for its high-mindedness.
So it seemed a bad sign when a front-page headline the day after I arrived was ‘GORDIMER “TOO RACIST” FOR SCHOOLS’ — Nadine’s novel July’s People had been stricken from the reading list by the Book Selection Committee in the Gauteng Province Education Department. Because this province included Johannesburg and Pretoria, it contained South Africa’s largest concentration of classrooms, in which this plausible doomsday novel had been required reading. The book was labeled ‘deeply racist, superior and patronizing,’ and ‘an anachronism because it projects a South African future that has not happened,’ and ‘not acceptable as it does not encourage good grammatical practice.’
The silly remarks were an excuse for me to reread July’s People, which I did with pleasure. One morning I wrote an article for the Johannesburg Sunday Independent, jeering at the ignorance and philistinism of the Book Selection Committee and having a bit of fun with Nadine’s chief persecutor, a commissar who rejoiced in the name Elvis Padayachee. I mentioned how the imaginative brilliance of Gordimer’s work was its utter fidelity to the truth — how we behave, how we speak, how our cities look, how our marriages work, how we love, how we die. And how, if someone writes truthfully, their work always seems prophetic. Given the uncertainties and changes in South Africa, the cataclysmic events in July’s People were still possible. Thirty years before, in A Guest of Honour, she had described the crisis that was being played out by rivals and land reformers and racists in Zimbabwe today.
Nadine said, ‘This sort of banning reminds me of the days of the apartheid regime, when they suppressed books they didn’t like. I had thought we had moved on from that.’
She said the suppression was a bad sign; she didn’t take it personally. But censorship in South Africa had never been simple. In the days of paranoid white rule, not only had my Jungle Lovers and The Mosquito Coast been banned, but for their seemingly racial and inflammatory titles so had The Return of the Native and Black Beauty On the other hand, The Mosquito Coast was now a required book in South African high schools and my defense ofJuly’s People was prominently published. I could not think of another newspaper in Africa that would have published such a piece as mine, because I dealt with a government directive by mocking it for its stupidity.
‘I am much more worried about Reinie,’ Nadine said, of her ailing husband. ‘He’s very weak. He is my concern at the moment.’
Knowing in advance that it was the last leg of my trip, and perhaps the best train, I dithered over boarding the train to Cape Town. I wanted to savor the anticipation of going, but I also procrastinated because after this my safari would be at an end. I lay on my hotel bed in Johannesburg replaying my journey through the good people I had met, seeing the proud Nuba, Ramadan, driving me across the gritty wadis of the Sudanese desert; Tadelle and Wolde in box-creased newly bought clothes at our sad parting on the border at Ethiopian Moyale; Wahome, the writer and former prisoner in Nairobi; Apolo, the unlikely prime minister, teasing me in Uganda; the hospitable captain, and squiffy-eyed Alex on Lake Victoria who was at this moment in the engine room of the Umoja, tinkering with the old diesel; Julius on the bush train from Mwanza; Conor and Kelli on the Kilimanjaro Express; Una Brownly, the self-effacing nurse from Livingstonia Mission; my student Sam Mpechetula in Zomba; Karsten Nyachicadza, expert paddler, in Marka Village on the Shire River, smiling at life in general through a haze of blue smoke; the farmer Peter Drummond outside Norton, shrugging at the appearance of yet more invaders; all the African prisoners, and the long-distance bus drivers, and the market women — cheerful people, doing their jobs, against the odds. I was grateful to them for making my trip pleasant. I missed them. I wished them well.
At Park Station one morning waiting in line to buy a train ticket I struck up a conversation with the young African woman in front of me and told her where I was going.
She said, ‘I heard the other day on the radio there is a really posh train running to Cape Town. It’s expensive in our money, but in your money it’s probably cheap. Ach, have a safe trip!’
Another kindly person, helping me on my way.
It wasn’t the well-known Blue Train, and it wasn’t First Class; it was Premier Class, a new designation, on the Trans-Karoo Express. I bought a ticket, and made a reservation. The fare of $140 included all meals and a private compartment. At the Park Station newsagent I bought two blank notebooks. I was expecting to have plenty of time for making a fair copy of my long story. It was a twenty-seven-hour trip, 850 miles from Johannesburg to Cape Town, across the high desert known as the Great Karoo, something like the distance from Boston to Chicago.