The Last Train to Zona Verde (3 page)

I also suspected that this trip would be in the nature of a farewell. For many older writers, and some not so old, a spell in Africa was a valedictory trip. The last serious journey Joseph Conrad embarked
on, his twenty-eight days piloting a boat up and down the Congo River, formed the basis of the powerful novella
Heart of Darkness
, which he wrote eight years after returning from Africa, describing the book as “experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.” After a lifetime of traveling, Evelyn Waugh spent the winter of 1959 in East and Central Africa and wrote an account of it in
A Tourist in Africa
. He died six years later. Both Laurens van der Post and Wilfred Thesiger spent their later years in African travel — van der Post in the Kalahari Desert, Thesiger in upcountry Kenya — and wrote about it. Hemingway’s ultimate safari, his last serious journey, was to East Africa in 1953–54, and though he shot himself six years afterward, his fictionalized version of the safari,
True at First Light
, edited by his son Patrick, was published posthumously in 1999. After V. S. Naipaul published his
Masque of Africa
, a lengthy interrogation of “the nature of African belief” through six African countries, he made it plain that it would be his last travel book.

Africa can be fierce, and some of it frankly scary, but as Naipaul’s experience showed, it can also be kind to an ailing and elderly traveler. You might expect people to say, “Go home, old man.” But no — in general, Africa turns no one away.

And so this, the greenest continent, would seem the perfect landscape for a valedictory trip, a way of paying respects to the natural world and to the violated Eden of our origins. “All the hungers of life are blankly stated there,” the English writer and traveler V. S. Pritchett wrote about Spain fifty years ago. But what he said could be an assessment of Africa too. “We see the primitive hungers we live by and yet, by a curious feat of stoicism, fatalism, and lethargy, the passions of human nature are sceptically contained.” In Africa we see human history turned upside down, and it is possible in Africa to see where we have gone wrong.

“Africa gives one back the necessary feeling that the world is vast, prodigious and noble,” wrote another traveler, and to this very region,
Jon Manchip White, in
The Land God Made in Anger
. “In spite of what the pundits say, our planet is neither congested nor contemptible.”

All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be. There are many endangered countries, or places whose futures are threatened. I think of the radioactive Ukraine, or anarchic Chechnya, or the overburdened Philippines, or tyrannized Belarus. Each of them could use a helping hand, but when the celebrity or ex-president or glamorous public figure wishes to make a charitable appearance it is nearly always in Africa, for the sake of the exotic — or is it the drama of high contrast in black and white, or its being hypnotically unintelligible? In Africa the traveler’s license is unlimited, and Africa itself magnifies the experience in a way no other place can.

When I was following the spirited, fleet-footed Ju/’hoansi people through the low sunlit bush of Nyae Nyae, I knew I was where I wanted to be. And that kind of traveling was a way of recovering my youth, because as a twenty-two-year-old teacher at a small school in rural Africa I had spent some of the happiest years of my life — years of freedom and friendship and great hope.

If I had a sense of foreboding about this trip, it was because travel into the unknown can also be like dying. After the anguish of the goodbyes and the departure itself, you seem to diminish, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance. In time, no one misses you except in the casual, mildly mocking way of “Whatever happened to old so-and-so, who threatened to beetle off to Africa?” You’re gone, no one can depend on you, and when you’re only a dim memory, a bitterness creeps into the recollection, in the way that the dead are often resented for being dead. What good are you, unobtainable and so far away?

And that makes you two ghosts, because in the distant country, too, you’re like a wraith, with your face pressed to the window of
another culture, staring at other lives. And much of what you see, like the harmonious life in the bush, has another side.

It took me a while to understand that the window of Africa, like the window on a train rushing through the night, is a distorting mirror that partly reflects the viewer’s own face. Among the Ju/’hoansi I was indeed witnessing a reenactment, and I came to realize that the folk who called themselves the Real People were, alas, unreal. The heroic pagan world of golden-skinned Ju/’hoansi was an illusion. I had hoped to find that rarity in the world, a country of uncontaminated delight, but what I found was a desperate people, sad static unhoping souls, not indestructible, as I’d thought, but badly in need of rescue.

2
The Train from Khayelitsha

S
OME WEEKS BEFORE MY VISIT
to the Ju/’hoansi, who sleep flat on the ground in their simple lean- to shelters, ever wakeful because of the nighttime prowling of predators, I woke from a sound sleep in a soft bed in a luxury hotel, between the swooping green flanks of Table Mountain and the aqueous glitter of Table Bay. This was in Cape Town, with its heights and cliffs, the only city in Africa with a claim to grandeur.

Yawning toothily like a baboon, I switched on the TV and saw the turmoil in Europe, the sort of improvidence and chaos that people usually associate with Africa, and gave thanks that I was far away. I would head north one of these days by road to Namibia, Botswana, and Angola, and perhaps farther. No long-range plan was required. I was alone, traveling light, and needed only a cheap one-way ticket. A daily bus ran to Northern Cape province, to isolated Springbok, and continued overnight past the Namibian border, which was the east-west course of the Orange River.

An aging traveler now, I took my morning pills, two different ones to keep gout away, a vitamin, and a dose of malaria suppressant,
and then dawdled, still groggy from jet lag. And remembering that I was on a journey, I dated and wrote the first line of my diary, about waking in a soft bed in a luxury hotel.

In such a pleasant place, no matter how far away, you never imagine you’re too old to travel. I can do this till I die, you think as you summon room service for lotuses to eat (“On second thought, I will have the pepper-crusted Wagyu steak with the black truffle vinaigrette”). It’s only when in a hovel in the bush, or being stared down by a hostile stinking crowd (“Meester! Meester!”), or eating a sinister stew of black meat or a cracked plate of cold, underdone, greasy, and eye-speckled potatoes, or banging in a jalopy for nine hours down a mountain road full of potholes — with violent death as close as that dark precipice to the right — that it occurs to me that someone else should be doing this, someone younger perhaps, hungrier, stronger, more desperate, crazier.

But there is such a thing as curiosity, dignified as a spirit of inquiry, and this nosiness has ruled my life as a traveler and a writer.

In much of Europe and North America a curious gaze is considered a hostile intrusion, and curious questions often arouse a vicious or unhelpful response. “You writing a book, pal? Well, leave this chapter out.” But in Africa such close attention is taken for welcome concern, a form of friendliness, especially when customary pleasantries are exchanged and tribal niceties observed. What brought me back to this beautiful city, and this continent, was the wish to know more at first hand, that vitalizing itch that keeps all of us amazed and some of us on the road.

Over breakfast — salmon, scrambled eggs, fruit, guava juice, green tea, brown toast, and “Please pass the marmalade” — reading the
Cape Times
, I saw the headlines “Mountain Closed at Night” and “City Responds to Attacks.” The reason for shutting down Table Mountain after dark was crime — muggers, thieves, or in South African slang,
tsotsis
and
skelms
, the local names for thugs. A number
of nighttime strollers and people beaming in admiration at the city lights from their parked cars had been attacked, beaten senseless, and robbed. How it was possible to close such a mountain was anyone’s guess. This enormous, dominant upswelling of rock, two miles wide on its plateau, constituted a ridge that extended forty miles to Cape Point.

But this was Africa, so subject to sudden change. Less than a month later, Table Mountain was named (along with Halong Bay in Vietnam, the Amazon rain forest, Iguaçu Falls, and three others) one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Recognized across the globe as a marvel, Table Mountain was proudly reopened to the public.

That same day of my waking at the luxury hotel, I went for a walk. At Texies Fish and Chips on Adderley Street, in the Grand Parade near the train station, while I was eating my lunch of broiled kingklip and admiring the view, the apparent prosperity, the busy to-and-fro of shoppers, the scavenging pigeons pecking at crumbs tossed by passersby, I noticed some young men in the shadows of the arcade near where I sat at an outdoor table, returning my gaze. Seeing that I had had enough of my meal, one of them, a skinny teenage boy, came over and hesitatingly asked, “Can I finish?” I simply nodded, because he had taken me by surprise. He carried the remains of my food — the plate of greasy chips — a short distance away, scattering the pigeons, and wolfed them down.

Travel writing is sometimes no more than literary decor for a sort of mocking misanthropy or mythomania or concocted romance, but at that moment I felt only helpless pity. And I was to see this same desperate reflex a number of times during these African travels, the hungry lurking man or boy, waiting to take my leftovers, or someone else’s, and eat them with his dirty fingers.

If I wondered why I had come back to Africa, I suppose I had to answer: to happen upon that, among other chance encounters. It was wrong for me to say that I was seeking something. I was not
seeking anything. I was hurrying away from my routine and my responsibilities and my general disgust with fatuous talk, money talk, money stories, the donkey laughter at dinner parties. Disgust is like fuel. It took the curse off the zigzagging flight from New York to Dubai, and the next leg to Cape Town, twenty-two hours of flying, thirty hours of travel. But I was glad to get away. It was travel as rejection, as though in leaving I was saying to those fatuous people,
Take that
. And perhaps hoping they’d say afterward,
What happened? Where is he? Was it something I said?

Most of all, I wanted to go back to Africa and pick up where I’d left off.

Ten years before, I was here and wandered through the slum of a squatter camp, called New Rest, on the desolate sand flats on the outskirts of Cape Town. On my return, the first place I wanted to go was this camp, to see what had become of its shacks, its outhouses, its bedraggled people who had settled in the wasteland beside the highway.

Was it still vexed, a slum made entirely of scrap lumber and ragged plastic, still shonky amid the windblown grit?

The majority of black South Africans live in the lower depths, not in picturesque hamlets or thatched huts on verdant hillsides. Three quarters of city-dwelling Africans live in the nastiest slums and squatter camps. But what happens to these places after a decade or so?

“Don’t go to a squatter camp. Don’t go to a black township. You’ll get robbed or worse,” a mixed-race clerk at Cape Town’s central railway station had said to me one Sunday morning ten years ago, refusing to sell me a ticket to Khayelitsha.

I asked why. His adamant certainty captured my attention. He was not making a racial generalization. He would not sell me what he regarded as a ticket to violence. He explained that the train to Khayelitsha was routinely stoned, the windows broken, the passengers
assaulted, by unemployed youths in the township and the nearby squatter camp.

The next day, provoked by his warning, I went to the New Rest squatter camp, and I wrote at the time of the 1,200 shacks that had been accumulating for a decade on the sandy infertile soil of Cape Flats, beside the busy road that led to the airport. Most of the 8,500 inhabitants lived in squalor. It was dire but not unspeakable. There was no running water; there were no lights or any trees. It was windy and bleak. Because it had been plopped down by squatters on forty acres of sand, there were no utilities, and as a consequence it stank and looked hideous. The houses were sheds made of ill-fitting boards, scrap lumber, bits of tin, and plastic sheeting. The gaps between the boards were blasted by the gritty wind. One man told me that he constantly had sand and dust in his bed.

Life could get no grimmer than this, I had thought then — the urban shantytown, without foliage, too sandy to grow anything but scrawny geraniums and stubbly cactuses; people having to draw water into plastic buckets from standpipes and burn candles in their huts; the huts cold in winter, sweltering in summer, very dirty, lying athwart a main highway and its noise. What could be worse? Call them “informal settlements,” as some people did, and they would smell just as foul.