In Hazyview we found an enormous yellow Hummer in the parking lot of a single-storey strip mall that stretched around four different streets, all cheap face-brick and peeling transmission paint.
The Hummer was a triple-cab beast. We dumped our vehicles and loaded everything and everyone in it. I played DJ. We left the town with Brenda Fassie, and then Andile started requesting.
‘Any dub?’ she asked.
Tebza sought clarity. ‘Reggae dub, dubstep or German I’ve-been-taking-Valium-for-three-weeks dub?’
‘The stuff in the middle,’ Javas said. ‘You know, big Eurobeats and the reggae feel. Crossover stuff.’
There followed an extended two-day debate of the technical specifications of the various dub genres. I took them on the widest journey possible, reaching into the far corners of Russle’s musical armoury. Gerald didn’t participate, of course, only smiling ironically at the nuances of a conversation he would never understand. We explained dubstep to him as best we could, but the blankness of his face always pushed the lessons back to the essential basics.
True dub, Tebza maintained (and I was with him), required a repetitive beat – a steady rhythm that resisted the drift. Where the Germans always got it wrong was with the beat – they let the pacing go, and as soon as it did the dub was over. Javas defended the Germans, we all laughed, and then somewhere along the way we realised we were laughing, really laughing, and we did it some more.
We entered the park at the Kruger Gate. It was appropriate, symbolic somehow, to go past the man’s granite bust and to enter at the front, such as it was. We stopped the Hummer at the statue and had a good look. Javas squatted on his heels, ran sand through his fingers and considered Oom Paul. The dub – German Valium – rumbled on from inside the Hummer.
‘What you thinking?’ Gerald asked him.
‘A doos ahead of his time,’ Javas said, rocking back lightly on his heels as the Afrikaans expletive rolled awkwardly off his tongue. ‘The park was a good call. Can’t deny it. In a time when people just shot everything.’
It was one of the longest sentences I had ever heard him produce, and it was impressively decisive.
There was nothing to add.
In keeping with the spirit of visionary ecological decision-making, as we travelled we decided to open the park’s gates, which were all in the night-time lockdown position. We started with Oom Paul. It was initially a flippant suggestion from Tebza and we laughed at the idea of it, like we were kids trying to open up the zoo at night, but then, as we collectively put our hands on that red-and-white boom and pushed, it felt profound and metaphorical and important.
Of course the animals had already been drifting across the borders of the park on their own accord. No longer bound by humanity, they took natural advantage of existing gaps in the fencing, and of the fact that the front gates – really just simple, symbolic booms – were always intended to be protected by humans. We had started seeing the first herds from the town of Sabie. Packs of zebras, their fat asses glistening in black-and-white health, followed by wildebeest and impala. Plenty and plenty of impala. Grazing on the lawn outside the Sabie Spar, grazing on the hills. We stopped to examine them in their new context, peering and leaning.
‘Weird, eh?’ I asked.
‘Sho,’ Gerald said. ‘Won’t be long before there’s nothing but animals.’
‘What I want to know is, what was the big deal with the Kruger Park anyway?’ Andile asked, her question floating in search of a respondent.
I, the most frequent visitor to the place, tried to explain. ‘It was a culture. For Afrikaners especially, but also the English. Everything about it. The huts, the camping, the camps, each camp with its own identity and way of being. A family thing. Driving all day, looking for game. Going to the bush without having to go to the zoo.’
‘No blacks?’ she queried knowingly.
‘Plenty washing and serving. A few scattered tourists. But no, no blacks.’
‘As a black,’ she giggled at her boldness, ‘I always wondered about it. Looking at animals. We just never had it. Nè…’ She shrugged.
‘It’s peaceful,’ I explained. ‘Watching animals being animals.’
‘Let’s go learn,’ Andile said, thumping the back of Gerald’s headrest excitedly. ‘Teach me to be white, Roy, teach me.’
I had believed, down in the place where we assume and hope for such things, that Gerald would be revealed on this trip. That the bush – the real bush – would bring him, a local boy, out of himself, and that we, myself especially, would gain insight into who he really was.
But Gerald remained inscrutable. We drove to the Kruger Gate, past his hometown of Mkhuhlu, in silence. He pointed at a cluster of houses set at the base of a hill, four hundred metres back from the main road. ‘Scene of the crimes,’ he said.
‘Should we stop? Wanna pull over?’ I asked, wanting him to want to.
‘I know what it looks like, thanks.’
‘Must have been a weird place to grow up, nè?’ I prodded, half to try to get him going and half in genuine reflection on the road we had just travelled, a blizzard of eco resorts, game resorts, golf resorts, getaways and hideaways. Jams and biltong and carvings and breads. Maps of the park, hats and sunglasses, signs for game meat, dried wors and fruit. Bananas and mangoes. And, filling in the cracks, the townships and shacks, homes of the servants and game rangers, receptionists and cleaners. Barbers and petrol stations.
‘More than you can imagine,’ said Gerald. Later he pointed out a lone buffalo grazing outside the gates of the Protea Hotel, on the public side of the Sabie River, just before the Kruger Gate. ‘I’ve never seen a buffalo before like that.’ He stopped the Hummer and half leaned over me for a better view.
‘Beautiful.’
And that was it. Gerald was on a game drive. He wanted nothing of his past.
We camped the first night at the completely off-grid Tinga Game Lodge, outside Skakuza. It was as typical, eco-themed and high-end as a lodge could get. A flat wooden deck overlooking the river, with what once must have been a crisp-blue swimming pool sunk into the far right corner, now green and festering with life. Low-slung cane furniture stacked and waiting at the back of the deck, along with loungers and sleepers and general sun-worshipping equipment. A thatched roof, generic African landscape prints on the walls, wooden sculptures from across the continent. Big rooms with yawning double beds and en-suite bathrooms.
We cracked all the windows open and the winter sun poured in.
We had beer. We had vegetables. Bread. Potatoes. But no meat.
‘Someone will have to go hunting,’ Gerald cracked. He pulled a lounger to the deck railings and put his feet on them. ‘Meat,’ he mumbled. ‘Fucking meat. I lust.’
Twenty minutes later we heard the crack of a rifle shot, and about forty minutes after that Javas marched across the lawn in front of the deck covered in blood, a skinned, gutted buck carcass draped around his neck. ‘Let’s eat,’ he said.
Javas crouched on the grass in front of us, a green Amstel bottle propped next to the carcass, and delivered what can only be described as performance butchery, carving the prime chunks off the impala and stripping the rest of the easily accessible meat off onto biltong hooks he had prepared who knew where or when. Andile sat next to Gerald and myself, grinning.
‘You okes take a break,’ Javas said. He stood up, sipped on his beer and paused to check out the setting orange sun, the buck and the giraffe drinking at the dam. ‘This one’s on me.’ I laughed at his sarcasm – we were all completely slumped in our chairs – but realised as the evening grew that he was serious. He built his fire casually yet methodically, creating a small oven with firelighters and twigs and bringing a cooking flame to life within half an hour. At his invitation, we jumped down as the sun set and added logs to the flame, creating a bonfire. When we were good and drunk and the sun was completely gone, Javas built a set of brick walls, pulled a spade out of nowhere and shovelled hot coals into his new oven. Andile threw foil-wrapped potatoes into the fire and organised the vegetables, and then we burned and ate the impala steaks.