Are We There Yet? (24 page)

Part of the Choo Tjoe deal was a shuttle bus back to Knysna on an uninspiring stretch of highway. Our driver was a retired Afrikaans teacher by the name of Corne. Not what you'd call the talkative type – something one might imagine would be an obstacle for a career in tourism – he responded to my enquiries about the area with a string of “I'm not sure's”, “that's a good question's” and “I'd be interested in knowing the answer to that myself”. He was, however, certain of one thing. When I asked what he thought about a story in that morning's paper which reported that a local farmer had transported the wreck of the late, disgraced South African cricketer Hansie Cronje's aircraft from the foreboding Outeniqua mountains to a shed on his property where he was charging an ogling fee, Corne shot me a withering look and spat the word “bullshit” in my direction. The elderly Welsh woman in the seat behind me gasped. I had clearly struck a nerve as raw as steak tartare. In many quarters the charismatic and devout Springbok is still viewed as a man who had the rare courage to admit to his mistakes and as a result became the whipping boy for the international cricket community. “If Shane Warne and Mark Waugh had been honest about those pitch reports,” Corne said, before leaping headlong into a non sequitur that pushed the very definition into slightly intimidating new ground, “Hansie might still be alive today. But that's journalists,” he hissed in what he believed was a subtle dig.

It was lunchtime when we arrived back in Knysna, so I headed to a pub by the heads where the lagoon empties into the open sea. The gap between the two rocky outcrops is no more than eighty metres with a frothing fury between them. Compressed into this narrow avenue, the tide surges and recedes into the estuary with such unpredictable fury that it was only thirteen years after the area was settled that the first ship attempted to navigate the passage. Cruise boats now ferry bilious tourists back and forth but I was thoroughly content to watch the spectacle from a table by the water's edge with two dozen local oysters and a chilled bottle of beer sweating droplets in the afternoon sun.

It was where I spent most of the afternoon in a state of mildly intoxicated bliss which manifested itself in a pounding headache by the evening. As much as the idea of another night of high camp with Charmaine and Jacques appealed to me, I had an early start the next morning and four hundred kilometres to cover before reaching a city where unfathomable beauty and brutality are separated by a mountain shaped like a table.

Chapter 13

Oceans Apart

Before reaching Cape Town – where I was due to meet Jennie and suggest we spend the rest of our lives together – I detoured off the main highway for lunch in Swellendam, which bills itself as the third oldest city in the country. One out of two ain't bad but it's no city. Instead, it is a town of utter loveliness amid plush fields watched over by the mauve Langerberg mountains. It was a Sunday morning and the main street was lined with the cars of the faithful who were singing up a reverential storm in the local Dutch Reformed Church. Dating from 1911, it's a snow-white cocktail of neo-Gothic, Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque that is near perfect. Not least for the fact that it harmoniously incorporates elements of the Cape Dutch style of architecture.

Regarded as a national treasure, it is essentially the evolution of a seventeenth-century Dutch template which was adapted to meet the demands of a new geography. Whitewashed, thatched, single-storeyed and taking either the shape of an inverted “T” or recumbent “H”, the most obvious and striking features of these buildings are their fluid gables set above a symmetrical facade punctuated by shuttered picture windows.

Between 1690 and 1850 these gables took a wide array of forms influenced by everything from the home-owner's pretensions to the neoclassical revival sweeping Europe. And so they appear, liberally sprinkled around Cape Town, the mountainous vineyard districts on the city's fringes and outlying districts such as Swellendam.

Guesthouses, upmarket gift stores and tearooms in this style stand shoulder to shoulder on the main street of Swellendam like pale soldiers on parade, and in the cool morning air the place looked freshly scrubbed in preparation for the weekend rush of day-trippers from Cape Town. Stiflingly picturesque, it is one of those towns in which you grew up feeling only one of two ways: either you can't bear to leave or you can hardly wait to get out.

Those who opted for the latter most often turned right at the highway and crested the precipitous Sir Lowry's Pass to Cape Town, where some lived like tanned royalty but most died before their time.

The sandy Cape Flats are a sea of corrugated-iron shacks, dilapidated concrete council flats and burnt-out cars that either function as single-occupant brothels or family dwellings. These badlands stretch relentlessly in every direction off the main road which heads into Cape Town from the east.

If you happen to be of the reincarnation persuasion, being born into a life on the Cape Flats would imply a serious fuck-up last time around. On the bright side, though, you won't have to hang around long. A 2003 report into living standards in Khayelitsha, one of Cape Town's biggest townships, found that 70 per cent of households had insufficient food the previous year, three-quarters of residents live below the poverty line and in over a third of all homes the main breadwinner had lost their job in 2002.

As they do around the world, poverty and squalor go hand in hand as refugees – one-third of South Africa's population are estimated to be illegal aliens – crowd into areas such as the Cape Flats, straining already meagre sanitationinfra structure. If it exists at all. As a result, the now-curable diseases that decimated the slums of Jack the Ripper's London run rampant. As do the rats.

As lung cancer victim Agmat Fischer, forty-one, lay dying in his corrugated-iron room on Sugarloaf Street in the Manenberg township, rodents reported to be the size of full-grown cats nibbled at his toes and feet. Too weak to shout for help, he was discovered by a relative who rushed him to hospital. He died the next day. A paraplegic named Billy Fisher who also lived in Sugarloaf Street was attacked by rats which gnawed their way into his room and didn't stop until his shins were gone. He, too, died the day after the assault.

Rats, polio and TB aside, the most prolific killer in these shanty cities is AIDS. For the poor, sex is probably the only form of free entertainment available, a few glorious minutes of escapism, and more than a third of South African nineteen-year-olds have fallen pregnant at least once.

That's just the consensual figures. The Minister of Safety and Security – who apparently admits to this title – reported that 181 crimes against children are logged daily in South Africa. Rape tops the list. That's 66,065 a year, for which the average conviction rate is less than 10 per cent. (So under-resourced are the child protection units that, for example, in the Northern Cape town of Springbok, there are no facilities for cases to be heard so the process has to take place in Cape Town. But wait, not only is there a dearth of facilities, there is also an acute shortage of police vehicles, resulting in the accuser and the accused often having to travel over 400 kilometres in the same vehicle.)

So horrific is the toll taken by AIDS that one million South Africans live in households headed by children under eighteen – with some as young as eight.

If the present rate of infection continues, by 2009 the average black resident in Cape Town will clock off at forty, a drop of fifteen years from the current life expectancy. Coloured people will see a decade shaved off their average lifespan. In the country's prisons AIDS has turned practically any incarceration into a death sentence. Not only are 90 per cent of deaths in custody attributed to the disease, but prison gangs are now using the virus as a weapon of coercion. Known as a “slow puncture” those who refuse to pay protection money are raped by a series of HIV-positive men, with the assault being named after the rate at which death presents itself.

The government's response has ranged from the ludicrous to the inhumane with President Thabo Mbeki stalling on the roll-out of antiretrovirals because he was not convinced of the link between HIV and AIDS.

Citing the not inconsequential challenges faced in trying to promote condom use in traditional tribal cultures and the utterly ridiculous notion that medication alone is not the answer – a claim critics counter with “it's a bloody good start” – the government's approach to AIDS has infuriated South Africans from every social strata. “Once upon a time, not so long ago, we had an apartheid regime in South Africa that killed people,” wrote AIDS activist and satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys in his autobiography
Elections and Erections.
“Now we have a democratic government that just lets them die.”

The South African government's AIDS prevention campaign has been only marginally more effective than its response to citizens who have contracted the disease. For example, to combat unsafe sex practices it commissioned … a musical. Which died in the arse after a handful of performances and took R14 million out of the health budget.

In another case, a well-meaning but spectacularly misguided local safe sex organisation decided to distribute 44 million free condoms with instructions on how to use them plus a blurb on the importance of safe sex. Which they
stapled
to the prophylactic packaging.

In his show
For Facts Sake,
Uys recommends that the schoolgirls in his audience carry a condom at all times in case of the deplorably high chance that they will become a rape victim. “At least hopefully you'll be able to say: ‘If you're going to rape me, use a condom'. If he says, ‘I don't use condoms', then lie. Say: ‘I have AIDS, you'd better use a condom'.”

Solid advice in a nation where the lack of any coherent and pervasive AIDS education campaign still sees many rural black men believing that they can cure themselves by having sex with a virgin.

A marginally less life-threatening township diversion is drugs. The isolation that came with apartheid practically insulated South Africa from the heroin, cocaine and ecstasy booms; it was only after the fall of the white regime that significant amounts of these drugs began to appear. Until then – and for many still – the drug of choice was mandrax or “buttons” as it is known by users. No other country has an industry based around this combination of methaqualone (the primary ingredient in Quaaludes) and diaphen-hydramine (an antihistamine found in cold medication) or diazepam (otherwise known as Prince Valium).

A potent sedative when popped, it is more frequently smoked like crack, thus enhancing both the high and the chances of addiction. Often vaporised in a bong-like contraption known as a white pipe and teamed with marijuana that has been dried with paraffin or other solvents, the initial rush is so powerful that many users “earth” immediately after use and drop unconscious to the ground.

The raw chemicals required to produce a kilogram of man-drax can be purchased for around $200 and cooked in a five-litre bucket on any suburban kitchen stove. In addition to the main ingredients, hydrochloric acid purchased from swimming-pool supply stores is thrown into the mix to draw off excess oil. Unlike the wide variety of markings – Calvin Klein logos, white doves of peace and Mitsubishi branding – that appear on ecstasy tablets, buttons are most commonly marked with a swastika. It is no small irony that these symbols of white supremacy are sprayed around township schools to indicate the presence of an on-site dealer.

Cheap to produce and highly addictive, mandrax has long been shadowed by a conspiracy theory which suggests the apartheid government flooded townships with it, thereby sabotaging the chances of black unity and mass uprisings. Such speculation would have forever remained in the realms of crop circles and grassy knollsters had it not been for the anguishing Truth and Reconciliation Commission which aired apartheid's dirty laundry in the wake of the transition to majority rule.

One of those interviewed was Dr Wouter Basson, head of Operation Coast, the white government's secret chemical and biological weapons program aimed at combating the pro-democracy movement. Aside from attempting to cultivate HIV for use in biological warfare and untraceable contact poison that was applied to a victim's clothing and mimicked natural causes of death, Operation Coast manufactured quantities of street drugs that made Pablo Escobar look like a narcotics minnow.

The official line is that the drugs were to be used as a crowd-control mechanism to be spread by tear gas. However, mandrax was incinerated in the vapour-dispersion process, thus rendering it useless. No plausible explanation was offered as to the scale of production – we're talking tonnes – or why it was necessary to press the chemicals into tablet form with a logo designed to mimic that of the original pharmaceutical source.

No one is suggesting that the mandrax issue was solely created and fostered by the government, but there are many who will swear blind they gave it a kick along.

Regardless of who was manufacturing the buttons, they couldn't be profitably disseminated without a distribution network willing to put their own material wealth ahead of the wellbeing of the communities in which they operated. Enter the gang-bangers who rule townships from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth to Cape Town. Facsimiles of American-style gangsterism down to dress codes, slang graffiti, tattoos, hand signs and symbolism, the merciless numbers gangs (which originated in prisons and take their names from their cell blocks) rule the Cape Flats. Each defends its turf with extreme force while monopolising illegal business activities and extracting protection money.

When the inevitable confrontations occur, they are bloody and ferocious, and stray bullets frequently claim the lives of children. With police outnumbered, underresourced and so badly paid that the kickbacks from gangs make paying school fees for their children a more viable option, vigilantism is rife.

Yet, somehow, from these miserable slums has arisen a culture that crackles with wry wit, innate musicality and the wisdom to recognise that because life here is so often characterised by loss and pain, celebration should be consumed in lusty gulps.

The coloured community's best-known festival is called – I shit you not – The Coon Carnival, a name which has survived the recent tide of political correctness and which the community has steadfastly refused to abandon. Thousands of participants in gaudy, glittering costumes parade through the main streets of Cape Town strumming banjos, shuffling and leaping along to Afrikaans songs as they make their way to a local stadium for a day of festivities. In the South Africa where I grew up, this was the closest we'd get to interacting with the coloured community, though individuals still scrubbed our floors and made our beds.

The Cape Flats eventually morphed into rust-licked factories, junkyards and silos, which in turn gave way to working-class suburbs of neat brick homes where children rode their bikes in the streets. The light had all but been swallowed by the evening sky when I reached my hotel in the suburb of Seapoint. It was an area of which I had fond memories. My grandmother lived in a residential hotel called the Kei Apple Grove off the main street, and it seemed practically everyone else's did too. Then this road was lined with tearooms, kosher delis and boutiques selling twin sets. The area was so heavily populated by ageing Semites that pretty much every Jewish joke we told began with “These two old ladies/men meet on the main road of Seapoint.”

At night, however, when the oldies were tucked away with bedsocks on their feet and milk of magnesia in their tummies, Seapoint was the domain of the young, the hip and the dangerously suntanned who'd been sunning themselves at nearby Clifton Beach for weeks.

We waited in line outside discos while groups of girls dressed like Kim Wilde were ushered through hinged metallic doors which swung open to reveal gyrating bodies in a swirl of coloured light and artificial fog. Duran Duran blasted out of bars with pavement tables from which Kouros-drenched boys cruised girls in cut-off gloves who pretended not to notice the attention. Beside these were restaurants with candlelit corner tables that hosted dinners which were the hopeful prelude to third base. Further along the strip were burger joints, video game arcades – Galaga anyone? — and milkshake bars with names like the Purple Cow.

But we weren't in Kansas anymore. The few stores that remained were fronted by iron bars of such profusion that the retail precinct wore a penal institution motif. Seedy neon-trimmed brothels with names like Madonna's and Pleasure Palace stood on practically every corner. In their windows were dated posters of girls with big hair and breasts to match. These were apparently intended to provide an enticing glimpse of the calibre of female company which waited inside, but it seemed unlikely that Elle Macpherson had turned her back on a lingerie empire to make jiggy-jig with Portuguese merchant seamen on shore leave.