Life could get no grimmer than this, I thought — the urban shanty town, without foliage, too sandy to grow anything but scrawny geraniums and stubbly cactus; people having to draw water into plastic buckets from standpipes, and using candles in their huts; cold in winter, sweltering in summer, very dirty, lying athwart a main highway; what was worse? Rural poverty at least had the virtue of gardens and animals and the traditional house of reliable mud and thatch. Rural poverty had its pieties, too, as well as customs and courtesies.
Thando took me to meet the committee. This too was funded by contributions from the visitors. The committee was of course all men. But they were optimists.
‘There are no drugs or gangs here,’ one man said. ‘This is a peaceful place. This is our home.’
The squatters were mostly people from the eastern Cape, the old so-called homelands of the Transkei and the Ciskei, as well as the slums of East London, Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, industrial cities which were not faring well in the new economy.
The committee had aims. One was for roads to be made throughout the squatter colony; another was for piped water.
‘We want to build houses here,’ a committee member explained to me.
The scheme had been outlined and blueprinted by some volunteer urban planners at the University of Cape Town. Every shack had been numbered and its plot recorded. A census had been taken.
‘In situ upgrade,’ the committee spokesman said, rolling out the plan on the table in the committee room.
The idea of transforming a squatter camp into a viable subdivision by upgrading existing dwellings had been accomplished in Brazil and India but not so far in South Africa. This meant that in place of each miserable shack there would be a small house or hut. The driving force for this was the pride the people took in having found a safe place to live. The goodwill of foreign visitors also helped: they had contributed money for the crèche, for three brick-making machines, and for the establishment of a trust fund. The fund was administered on a pro bono basis by an otherwise outward-bound travel company, Wilderness Cape Safaris, which had put New Rest on its itinerary. Some children were sponsored by visitors who sent money regularly for their clothes and education. It was a strange hand-to-mouth arrangement, but the element of self-help in it made me a well-wisher.
I asked what had been here before the squatter camp and got an interesting answer. It had been low bush with the specific function of concealing initiates (mkweta) in circumcision ceremonies (ukoluka) performed by the local Xhosa people. The deed was done with the slice of a spear (mkonto) on boys — men, really — aged from seventeen to twenty-five. No one could explain why circumcision was left so late, but all agreed that it was a necessary rite of passage, essential for male bonding.
‘Even these days they use it,’ one of the committee members said. ‘In June and December, we see them — sometimes many of them, hiding in the bush at the far side.’
Though it was not bush, but only scrub land that lay next to the highway and bordered large scruffy settlements, the area must have had some significance as a refuge in earlier times. Here the newly circumcised young men were rusticated for six weeks of healing, wearing only rough blankets, cooking over smoky fires, their faces painted in the white clay that designated them as initiates of the old ceremony. They remained in the background. In the foreground was Guguletu and this camp. New Rest, the squatter camp, was filled with people so grateful, all they wished for was to make their shacks more permanent, so they could stay there for the rest of their lives.
This being South Africa, and specifically the Western Cape, there was hardly any distance between this squatter camp /circumcision refuge and another kind of refuge. Twenty miles up the highway in Paarl, on the slope of Paarl Mountain itself and its fluted monument to the Afrikaans language, among gentle hills draped in vineyards, was a magnificent country house hotel, the Grande Roche Luxury Estate Hotel. This was an eighteenth-century manor restored to its former glory and now receiving guests. I went there for lunch. The slave quarters had been gutted and redecorated into guest suites. Weddings were held in such a lovely chapel you would hardly have known that this buffed-up and beautified place had been the slave chapel.
A pool, a spa, a walled herb garden, a library, and a gourmet restaurant: the Grande Roche had everything. In Bosman’s, the hotel restaurant, which had achieved Relais Gourmand status, I had lunch — the Caesar salad with slices of Karoo lamb and the herb dressing, my entrée a red stumpnose — something like snapper — served on polenta, with baby vegetables and several glasses of Grande Roche’s own sauvignon blanc. Dessert was marinated strawberries and clotted cream.
Then I sat in the sunshine on a deck chair among the blossoms of the Grande Roche rose garden, drank coffee, nibbled chocolate bonbons from a china saucer, and looked south where rising smoke darkened the sky. There, under that smutty sky, on the Cape Flats was the squatter settlement — grateful people in shacks — where I had spent the morning.
Above me, offering shade, was a lovely tree in blossom with thick pendulous orange flowers.
A svelte white woman passed by me, with the pert, uplifted profile of someone breathing deeply, perhaps inhaling the aroma from the herbaceous border of the path. She wore a blue silken dress and a stylish large-brimmed white hat. Her lovely shoes crunched on the gravel. She smiled at me. I said hello. We talked a little.
‘What kind of tree is that?’ I asked.
‘That’s a coral tree,’ she said. ‘A kaffir boom, actually — you must not say that name these days, though.’
My destination on this African safari had been Cape Town. But, as is often the case with a long trip, I arrived at this destination only to gain a vantagepoint and see another destination, farther ahead, tempting me onward. So I dawdled and procrastinated in this sunny windswept city, and the coziness of a clean hotel, and the greater novelty in South Africa of the only province in which Mandela’s African National Congress was not in the majority. The provincial government was in the hands of the Democratic Alliance, a squabbling coalition of right-wing and conservative parties, Cape Town’s way of asserting that it was unlike any other place in South Africa. Happily for me, people spoke their mind, a reaction perhaps to so many years of whispering.
Some of these locals were so vivid as to seem caricatures. ‘Swanie’ Swanepoel was one of those. A big pale fleshy-faced Boer with angry blue eyes, a jaw like a back-hoe, thick farmer’s hands and tight suspenders stretched across his huge gut and bursting shirt, hooked to his slipping trousers. Everything about him, his voice, his eyes, even his jowls and the way he crooked his fat fingers emphasized his sense of grievance. He had hated the way the system had changed, and his refrain was, Where is the world now?
He was from Upington, an agricultural town in the Northern Cape, on the upper reaches of the Orange River, a twelve-hour drive from Cape Town.
“ ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be poor,” people tell me. Yes, I do! I was poor! We had nothing,’ he told me in his second-hand shop in Cape Town. ‘My mother ran a boarding house. She took in poor blacks and gave them food. For that we were known as kaffir boeties. But the world didn’t know anything of that. The world demanded that we hand over our country. They had sanctions against us. So we had to do it. And so what happened ten years ago was a disaster. And where is the world now? You know they’ve been killing farmers?’