The Last Train to Zona Verde (8 page)

My home is where I was born. I am only staying here. My home is Ngqamakhwe. I only work here. But my future where I would die is Ngqamakhwe
.

Ngqamakhwe, which I found on a map, was a tiny rural settlement halfway across the country, in the green bosom of the Eastern Cape.

“Why do these people come here if there’s so little work?” I asked Mr. Smile.

“Because of drought in their village,” he said. “Because of no food in the house. Because they have hopes.”

And because, as Elias Canetti points out in
Crowds and Power
, people feel more secure in a crowd; so they flee the emptiness and insecurity of the countryside to seek consolation in an urban slum crowd, even a futureless and filthy one, like this in Lwandle.

In the thickening dusk and the dirty light, skinny children, some of them barefoot, were kicking a ball across a stony patch of ground and screaming at each other and then hooting at me as I passed.

Each evening in Cape Town, after traipsing through the townships, I returned to my luxury hotel. The difference in circumstances was emphatic, and the implications made me cringe. I was well aware
that in the nineteenth century, wealthy, voyeuristic Londoners headed to the slums of the East End for the thrill of the gutter — the word “slumming” dates from 1884. During Prohibition, white New Yorkers looked for booze and exoticism in outings to the poorest parts of Harlem and the Bowery. Today, such social descents are a recognized branch of the travel industry; so-called slum tourism exists in India and South America and is a brisk business in South Africa.

Slum tourism perhaps originated when the first passionately nosy tourist met a hungry slum dweller who recognized a lawful opportunity and, instead of contemplating robbery, guided the tourist — for a fee — to see the people of the abyss. The poorest Africans began to realize that the very fact of their poverty engaged many foreign visitors who — associating poverty with danger and failure — could not possibly indulge themselves this way back home.

This sort of tourism has been denounced as “poverty porn” and exploitation, monetizing the misery of slum dwellers who had nothing else to offer. For some day-trippers, the experience was an extreme example of curiosity bordering on voyeurism, the leering intention of the alien tourist to feel the shiver of difference, the horror interest that was indistinguishable from slumming. But there were others — sympathetic, charity-minded outsiders — who were moved to contribute money as well as to gape, and having seen the slum they were contributing with a degree of understanding. As I had seen myself, early visitors and volunteers in the squatter camp of New Rest, with a genuine desire to help, had been instrumental in supporting a clinic and a nursery. And they had played a part in transforming the camp into a viable township.

Voyeurism is an element in much, perhaps most, of travel, but even so, I believed my visits were neither horror-driven nor high-minded. “When some people travel they merely contemplate what is before their eyes,” the Taoist Lieh Tzu said. “When I travel, I contemplate the processes of mutability.”

Of course I wanted to prettify my intentions — what traveler doesn’t? — but I did think Lieh Tzu’s point of view summed up how I felt: not slumming, not patronizing, but looking for changes. (And maybe a bit of voyeurism too; otherwise, why not stay home?) I wanted to see changes, and I had found many: the hovels-to-houses development at New Rest, the establishment of the Tertiary School in Business Administration in Pinelands, the diminishing of attacks with sticks and stones on Khayelitsha railway cars, and a general sense of uplift in the city. Seeing differences like that (the process of mutability) seems to me one of the purposes of travel, and often suggests how the world changes and gives glimpses of the future.

But after a day’s immersion, I always went back to my hotel. My hotel was splendid — and slightly worrying for its splendor, because a hotel can be so much like home that it becomes a barrier to understanding the outside world and its discomforts. The pleasure of being at the hotel made me procrastinate; I knew that when I left it I would be traveling into the unknown — at least for me: I had never taken the road north out of Cape Town, toward Namibia, Botswana, Angola, and perhaps beyond. I had a map, and some money, and months ahead of me.

My hotel, the Taj Cape Town, had a spa where I sometimes got a massage (“Guest is God, sir, allow me to wash your feet”), and an Indian gourmet restaurant where I could be found most evenings tucking into my tandoori, my shirt front scattered with poppadom crumbs. Coffee and cream buns were served every afternoon in the lobby, where I sat in a leather armchair and read the latest installment in the
Cape Times
of the racist rants of one of South Africa’s rising demagogues, Julius Malema, or wrote of my day’s events in my notebook.

Capetonians tended to wince when I told them I was going to yet another township, much as a New Yorker might show bafflement — and rightly so — toward a visitor in Manhattan saying he’d spent the day in Brownsville, in Brooklyn, where there are eighteen
low-income public housing projects, of somber and unprepossessing aspect. New Yorkers had now and then challenged me in this very way. Yet one of my most enlightening weeks in New York had been spent wandering in Brownsville and the South Bronx, gathering material for an essay (“Subterranean Gothic”) about the far reaches of the New York subway system.

“Why do Africans invite people to see their misery?” a South African friend asked me. It was a frequent question. “And why do people go on these township tours?”

He happened to be a chef, a traveler, and a foodie. To introduce me to Cape Town’s gourmet food scene, he had brought me to Aubergine Restaurant. I started my meal with crayfish bisque involtini with daikon and asparagus, and he ordered game-fish carpaccio, Namibian crab salad, and seared scallops accented by mizuna coulis. For my entrée I had seared ostrich fillet “accented with buffalo mozzarella and Cape gooseberries,” and he chose rolled rabbit saddle with strips of crispy rabbit belly, flavored with lardo, served on a haricot vert purée. He went on badgering me about slum tourism while I listed for him the miseries I had seen in the townships, which for me was every bit as arresting and unusual as the seared ostrich fillet with gooseberries, and much more enlightening.

“This 2005 Boekenhoutskloof from Franschhoek is an excellent pairing with the ostrich.”

“Yes, just a touch more, thanks. What was I saying?”

“You were going on about the squatter camps.”

I thought then, and I still believe, that the only way to understand a city is to see its periphery, because that’s where the workers generally live, the people who are employed to maintain it — who were probably the ones sweeping the crumbs off this table at the Aubergine and others in the back prepping the food. A city cannot function without such people. That was as true of New York as of Cape Town: city workers never lived downtown, but rather on
the fringes, in the townships, and commuted by train or minibus to their jobs. The woman who made my bed at the Taj — a venerable building, once a bank, which shimmered near the park and botanical garden known as the Company Gardens — this smiling, wheezing soul who always asked in a welcoming way if I was enjoying myself, clocked off each day to return to her humble home in a dusty township on the Cape Flats.

My foodie friend said I should take a tour around the mountain to see the tidy seaside communities. I did that the next day, with Claire Jones driving and narrating. Claire had come out from England as a small girl long ago. She’d thought of leaving during the oppressive years of apartheid, but had stayed and been exhilarated by the political changes, the release of Mandela, the new prosperity, the World Cup.

“It’s my home. I travel, of course, all the time. But I always come back. I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

She took me down the west-facing coast and the high cliffs (“and those rocks are the Twelve Apostles, but don’t count them, there’s more than twelve”) to Sea Point, Bantry Bay, Clifton, and Hout Bay (“they used to issue passports here, as a joke”), then over to Scarborough, where on a bench a huge nanny in a pinafore and floppy sun hat held a tiny white girl in her vast soft lap. We then went over the ridge — glimpses of knuckle-walking baboons — to Simons Town (and a new category of tourist: chattering, well-heeled tourists from the People’s Republic of China); to Boulders Beach to look at the jackass penguins I’d seen ten years before — but many more of them now, and better protected; and up the shore of False Bay to Fish Hoek and Glencairn and Kalk Bay, where the fishermen were just purring into the harbor, in their beamy wooden open-decked boats, with crates of freshly caught kingklip — all-Xhosa crews, all raised as fishermen, their blackness set off by yellow oilskins.

It was a simple jaunt. I was sightseeing, an aimless, usually goofy activity I generally disparage for its self-indulgence, but the sights
were beautiful, the food was excellent, the weather was perfect — it was all so undemandingly pleasant there was nothing to write about; and I had the feeling that once I left, I would be on a bumpy road, headed through dust into uncertainty.

And something else held me back too: a nagging thought that kept me idling, in a way cowering, in the comforts of Cape Town. It was the morbid belief that I might not return, not just to Cape Town, but home; that I was setting off to suffer and die.

As a young man, I never entertained this idea of death in travel. I had set off for Africa almost fifty years ago with the notion that my life had at last begun, that I was free in this great green continent, liberated from my family and its paternalism just at the time many African countries had liberated themselves from the paternalistic hand of colonialism. And when Africans told me how they had been repressed, confined, belittled, exploited, and infantilized by their colonial overlords, be it Britain, Belgium, Portugal, or France, I thought of my fierce mother saying, “It’s your own damn fault” and “You’re not going anywhere — you have no gumption,” and my father saying, “Get a job — money doesn’t grow on trees” and “Why are you so defiant?” and “Why do you write trash?”

So Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity. Many people feel that same relief, happiness, and sense of possibility on first arriving in Africa. Africans themselves inspire it. And in Africa I had at last something to write. At that time, the early and mid-1960s, many parts of the continent, remote and seldom visited, beckoned to me. I became a teacher in a small school in Malawi and then a professor at Makerere University in Uganda. On vacations, I traveled to the Congo, Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, up and down Malawi, and to the Lower Shire River, a marshy tributary of the Zambezi. I got married in Uganda, and my first child was born there. Africa gave me everything. I never thought of death: Africa had given me life.

But my good luck in travel had held for so long that it was bound
to give out at some point, and surely soon. Africa had changed. Countries I had loved to visit had imploded or failed, and the people themselves often said, pleadingly, “We are hopeless, sir,” as they extended their hands, appealing for money. I would soon leave for the malarial part of Africa, the pushing-and-shoving part, where life was precarious, where there wasn’t enough food or water, where buses gasped down the bad roads, and where people had been so thoroughly abandoned by their governments, so left to their own resources, they were possessed by their own fears for survival. Why should any of them care about an aging white man asking nosy questions and scribbling the answers in his notebook?

In a life of travel, I had been in awful places and taken foolish risks, and I had survived. I always thought of myself as the Fortunate Traveler. But at some point even the luckiest person, full of hope, opens a door and finds a skeletal reflection on the other side. And so the traveler each morning in the mirror, like Webster in Eliot’s poem, becomes much possessed by death, and sees the skull beneath the skin, the hollow eye sockets, the lipless grin.

In my last few days in Cape Town, I prowled the markets and shops. Many of them sold industrial curios for tourists, fake masks and beads and baskets, though a few small shops had the genuine article: old carvings and village implements — stools, trophy staffs, digging sticks, ritual objects. I love old wooden objects that have been handled and used: the stool that has been polished by a skidding bottom, the symmetrical neck rest that has supported the drowsing head of its owner for many years, the wooden bowl with its pumpkin-colored patina, the ivory bracelet darkened by the wearer’s wrist, the fetish object glowing with the nervous chafing of superstitious fingers. I found a Yaka fetish, a staring, open-mouthed cubist figure with a long neck and nothing else, carved out of black wood, small enough to hold in my hand. It seemed to be a frightener. The Yaka people straddle the border of the Congo and Angola, most of them near the Kwango River at the edge of the topmost
part of Angola, where I was headed. It became my personal fetish and protector.

And I bought a detailed map and a bus ticket.

The last item on my Cape Town wish list was a boat ride. I longed to get a view of the city from the sea. I had never been on a boat offshore. My modest request was converted by some well-wishers into a picnic on a fifty-six-foot motor yacht,
The Spirit of the Cape
. The name was appropriate: it was the spirit of the Cape that I wanted to feel. We set off from a mooring next to the Cape Grace Hotel and sailed past the docks and the pedestrian swing-bridge into Table Bay, six of us on board, good companions, great food, the lovely sea, and looming above us the mountain that had been first glimpsed by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488; he called it Cabo das Tormentas for the torments of its storms and rough seas.

On this blindingly bright day, a cold wind gusting in from the south, we sailed about three miles offshore and then coasted south, past Table Mountain, monumental in the sunlight, the numerous Apostles arrayed in rock near the summit, the city scattered across their granite robes. Anyone knowing its history, especially its recent history, could be confident that Cape Town was a city with a future, one that inspired the notion that all things are possible. Robben Island, just offshore, was no longer a penal colony, and its most famous prisoner had guided the country to freedom and was still alive and smiling, affectionately known to all by his clan name, Madiba.