“There was a prophet here long ago! His name was Ntsikana — he made a prediction!”
“What was the prediction?”
“It was in the year 1600,” Archie said, and in a solemn prophesying tone seemed to quote Ntsikana: “People will come from the sea.” Archie raised one finger for emphasis. “These people will have a book and money.” Archie wagged his finger. “Take the book but not the money!” Archie let his finger droop. “But they took both.”
“They shouldn’t have taken the money?”
Archie said, “That was the badness.”
I remembered the name Ntsikana and later looked it up and found that there was a Xhosa prophet by that name, his life well documented. Indeed, he was a pioneer of “black theology,” a self-created Christian (he’d had contact with missionaries, though he was never baptized and never studied with them) who had flourished in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. In 1815 Ntsikana had an epiphany, “an illumination of the soul,” that confirmed in him a belief in monogamy, river baptism, and Sunday prayer to a sovereign God. He wrote hymns and composed poems. Because his conversion had occurred without any missionary intervention, so he said, his followers “claimed a pedigree for Xhosa Christianity independent of missionary influence.”
“I am sent by God, but am only like a candle,” Ntsikana said, using a felicitous image of illumination and finiteness. “I have not added anything to myself.” Furiously proselytizing, he established rural congregations throughout the Eastern Cape. One day Ntsikana foretold the coming of a race of people to the shores of South Africa. He described them as people “[through] whose transparent ears the sun shines redly” and “whose hair is long as the tail-hairs of a zebra.” Since he had previously seen whites, this prophecy proved accurate, and he apparently did warn his followers not to put much faith in the new people. Ntsikana died in 1821, and his grave, near Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape, is a place of pilgrimage.
Although Archie had a few details wrong, his sudden parable introduced me to this powerful sect, which still had many adherents. We were walking along the broken paving of littered roads that ran between a pair of two-story cinderblock buildings that had the prison starkness of much public housing. They had once been, Archie said, the hostels of migrant workers — all men — who were employed as field hands, common laborers, and domestics in Cape Town during the apartheid era. An effective way to control them was to house them in an isolated place, require them to carry the dompas, and separate them from their wives and children, who remained in distant villages.
Behind these beat-up hostels were small wooden shacks piled against each other. Ragged children, their noses running on this chilly morning, lurked in the doorways.
“More people,” I said. “More shacks.”
“Informal settlements,” Archie said. The name always brought a grim smile to my lips because it conjured the image of people in bright bungalows, sprawled on sofas. “The name for them is siyahlala.”
I asked him to spell it, and I wrote it down.
“It is Xhosa,” Archie said. “It means ‘We are staying here.’ ”
He said five or six people lived in each shack, though there seemed hardly room for two. Scattered around the edge of the settlement, beyond the hostels, beyond the shacks, were shipping containers — great rusty steel boxes — and people were living in those, too, recent arrivals, Archie said. Some containers had been divided into two- or three-family dwellings, doors and windows blowtorched as crude openings in the sides. In front of several were stalls selling blackened sheep heads.
“We call them smileys.” Archie explained that when the severed head was thrown on the hot grill, “the lips shrivel up in a smile.”
The locals ate them with “train smash,” he went on, and laughed. “Tomato sauce.”
As we strolled, teenagers stared at us from where they sat on benches or rubber tires. Some glowered from doorways, others glanced up from card games or from kicking a soccer ball, still others simply stood the way herons stand, motionless, on one leg, the other leg crooked behind it. All of the youths were idle, not a dozen or so, but scores of them, perhaps hundreds, apparently with nothing to do. A few of them began to follow Archie and me, but they quickly tired of this — maybe we were walking too fast for them. One of my rules in an apparently insecure place was to walk fast and look busy.
Archie said the hostels had been renovated in 2002, which perhaps meant that was when they had been painted the dull yellow I saw. He showed me inside one of them — a hive of dirty two-room apartments crammed with filthy mattresses.
“Six rooms here,” he said at another of the hostels. The places were crammed with damp quilts, old clothes, broken shoes, and children’s plastic toys, as well as CD players and radios.
“How many people live here?”
“Thirty-eight.” He could see my incredulity. He said, “Some sleep on the dining table. And under it.”
Misery acquaints us with strange bedfellows. The smell grew riper as we penetrated to the last narrow room, where there were two small beds. It housed a family he knew.
“Nine people in this room,” he said.
I tried to imagine where they lay at night on the beds and on the floor of this room, which was no more than nine by five feet. He nodded, satisfied that he had startled me, because some of these township tours seemed designed to shock the visitor. But I also thought that there must be places like this in the United States, perhaps many, yet how would I ever know? There were no tours, no men like Phaks or Archie to guide anyone to them.
“And what is most disgusting is that they make use of one toilet,” he said, meaning the thirty-eight occupants of the place.
“Where are the people now?”
“Outside,” he said. “It is too small to live in by day.”
This was also a habit of the village, where people spent the day in the open, under a tree or in the informal courtyard, and used their mud huts only for sleeping or for protection against nocturnal animals.
The next places Archie showed me were roomier, and one looked habitable. Certainly it was cleaner, a two-bedroom apartment in which one family lived. The watchful but polite matriarch nodded at me, and a small, stunned-looking boy peered from the side of a doorway. The rent was 500 rand a month, about $60.
More shacks stood nearby, of the meanest sort, just piled-up lumber and plastic sheeting, with low ceilings. It was hard to imagine anyone living in them.
“We call these vezinyawo, because they are so small,” Archie said. He explained that the word meant “Your feet are showing” or “Your feet are outside,” because one hut was not large enough to accommodate a whole supine human being.
Some streets adjacent to these shacks were lined with bright, compact bungalows, painted in pastel colors, surrounded by fences, with newish cars parked in the driveways. Other solid houses, some of them just completed, faced the main road, the highway to the airport, and these were the houses that foreign visitors would see as they passed by, perhaps saying, “Doesn’t look that bad, Doris,” never guessing at the shacks and doghouses beyond them that were out of sight. At one of them, a woman had set out on a wobbly table an array of beaded bracelets. She had made them with her own hands, she said. That expression made me look at her hands — the woman was wringing them in anxiety. She had nine children, and all of them lived in this shack. She looked pleadingly at me to buy, and I came away with my pockets bulging with beaded artifacts.
“And this is a shebeen,” Archie said, parting the curtain that was hung on the doorway of a shack. The ceiling was so low I could not stand up straight, and the air was rank and doggy and warm with stink. When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw six beer-swilling men inside, three on benches, three squatting on the floor, drunk and incapable at noon on a Monday. An old gaunt woman in an apron presided over the place, stirring a tureen of porridgy liquid.