Across the seasons was laid the diurnal one of being without a man; it overlaid sowing and harvesting, rainy summers and dry winters, and at different times, although at roughly the same intervals for all, changed for each the short season when her man came home. For that season, although she worked and lived among the others as usual, the woman was not within the same stage of the cycle maintained for all by imperatives that outdid the authority of nature. The sun rises, the moon sets; the money must come, the man must go.
At the prosperous town of Worcester — beautiful villas and trim houses, a tall steepled church, football fields, tennis courts, schools, lawns, flower gardens — big pleading black men begged at the windows of First Class, gesturing to their mouths and pointing to their stomachs, saying, ‘Hungry, hungry’ and asking for money.
I bumped into the English couple in the lounge. Without my asking, the man volunteered that he was not planning to emigrate.
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘We’re retired.’
They lived in a suburb about fifteen miles north of Johannesburg. Of course, there was crime there, the man said; there was crime everywhere. He gave me an example.
‘I was coming home a few years ago and stopped in my driveway. I got out of my car to open the gate and was surrounded by three chaps. They had guns. They were shouting at me — they wanted my car. My wife heard the noise. She thought I was talking to the neighbors. She came out with our two dogs.’
‘So you were safe?’ I said.
‘Not a bit. The dogs were useless. They thought we were going for a ride. They wagged their tails. My wife was pistol-whipped and I was hit hard. We both needed stitches. We lost the car. But, you see, that could have happened anywhere.’
‘Anywhere in South Africa.’
‘Quite.’
They got off at Wellington, to head for Paarl and the wineries. Wellington was another lovely place with a huge hut settlement joined to it — acres, miles perhaps of flat-topped shanties, becoming simpler, cruder, poorer, more appalling the farther they were from town. The squatter camps seemed a weird disfigurement but I made a note to myself to visit one when I got a chance.
For hours there had been mountains to the south of the railway line, great rocky peaks, but at Belleville I got a glimpse of a single bright plateau ahead, standing in the sunshine, and I knew we were at the city limits of Cape Town.
The cold gusting wind, and the frothing sea, and the sunny dazzle on Table Mountain’s vertiginous bulk looming behind it, made Cape Town seem the brightest and least corrupt city I had ever seen in my life. That was its appearance, not its reality The high wind was unusual for the Africa I had traveled through but not for this coast, my first glimpse of the Atlantic. The wind was usually blowing twenty knots, and often gusting to forty, enough to tear the smaller limbs from trees and send them scraping along the pavement. The huge mountain and its precipitous cliffs made the city seem small and tame, and unlike Johannesburg which had a city center of dubious-looking people whose stare said I can fox you, Cape Town was provincial-seeming and orderly, the train station looked safe. I wanted to be near the sea, so I took a taxi and found a good hotel on the waterfront.
After making the usual inquiries, and receiving the usual cautions, I went for a walk along the waterfront and sauntered into the town and through the museums. Nearby were the Company Gardens, dating from 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, had planted them with the idea of provisioning Dutch ships. On their arrival at the Cape, the Dutch had found various groups of people, Khoisan among them, scouring the beach for shells and edible seaweed. They called them ‘beachrangers’ and ‘Hottentots.’
Yet some of the natives they met spoke broken English — ones who had been in contact with the English, who had come ashore years earlier. From the first, these ‘beachrangers’ were put to work, as van Riebeeck wrote in a memo, ‘washing, scouring, fetching fuel, and doing odd jobs. Some of them have even placed their little daughters, who are now dressed after our fashion, in the service of our married people.’
That had been the reason for Cape Town’s existence: it had been founded as a port for supplying cattle, vegetables and water to the ships of the Dutch fleet headed for Batavia and the Indies. After ten years at the Cape, van Riebeeck himself went to the East Indies, where he died. The interior of Africa, unknown land, had held no interest for the Dutch or anyone else. The hinterland had been named ‘Kaffraria’, a translation of ‘Quefreia’, on a sixteenth-century Spanish map. The Spaniards had gotten this word for infidels (‘people who live without any religious laws or sanctions’) from the Muslims who had occupied Spain. The word appears on all early maps. For example, on an eighteenth-century French map that I bought while living in Kampala, I find among the descriptions of the natives, ‘Peuples cruels’ and ‘Anthropophages’ and ‘Sauvages’ and ‘Hotentots.’ The word ‘CAFRERIE,’ printed big, covers a large blank area from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Equator. In 1936, van Riebeeck’s biographer naively explained, ‘Today, the term kaffir, with its invidious connotation utterly forgotten, is attached solely to the Bantu, and as a matter of fact it was never colloquially applied to the Hottentots.’
When the Huguenots arrived with their enological improvements and enlarged the vineyards, life was just about perfect and it remained so, for the whites anyway — winebibbers and wog-bashers — for over 150 years. The Dutch were content to remain in this Mediterranean climate of the Western Cape until the early nineteenth-century, when the British took charge of the Cape Colony. Under pressure from the missionaries, the British abolished slavery, and promoted the idea of racial equality. Feeling crowded by the British, and insulted in their belief in white supremacy, and robbed of their workforce of serfs and slaves, the Boers decided to abandon their fertile farms. In 1838, in what is known as the Great Trek the Boers headed north into the interior, across the Orange River and the Vaal to dispossess and enslave local blacks, and create their own white states. Among the ostrich skin wallets and zebra skin cushions in the curio shops of Cape Town, were supple leather sjamboks. It was impossible to see these whips and not think of them as the very symbol of South African history
What impressed me in Cape Town was its smallness, its sea glow, its fresh air; and every human face was different, everyone’s story was original, no one really agreed on anything, except that Cape Town, for all its heightened contradiction, was the best place to live in South Africa. No sooner had I decided the place was harmonious and tranquil than I discovered the crime statistics — car hijackings, rapes, murders, and farm invasions ending in the disemboweling of the farmers. Some of the most distressed and dangerous squatter settlements of my entire trip I saw in South Africa, and without a doubt among the handsomest districts I had ever seen in my life — Constantia comes to mind, with its mansions and gardens — I also saw in this republic of miseries and splendors.
Not long after I arrived I called Conor and Kelli, fellow travelers, whom I had last seen on the faltering Kilimanjaro Express. I used a telephone number they had given me. I was curious to know what had happened to them after I had gotten off the train at Mbeya.
‘Paul, it was incredible. Come over and we’ll tell you all about it,’ Kelli said. They were both in town, staying at the house of Kelli’s mother, somewhere up the side of Table Mountain.