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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Apocalyptic futures surround us. In films, books and in news feeds, we are subjected to a barrage of end-time possibilities. Award-winning writer Hedley Twidle, in quixotic mood, sets out to snatch utopia from the jaws of dystopia. Whether embarking on a bizarre quest to find Cecil Rhodes's missing nose (sliced off the bust of the Rhodes Memorial) or cycling the Scottish islands with a couple of squabbling anarchists; whether learning to surf (much too late) in the wild, freezing waters off the Cape Peninsula or navigating the fraught polities of a Buddhist retreat centre, the author explores forgotten utopias, intentional communities and islands of imagination with curiosity, hope and humour. Ranging from the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin to the 'living laboratory' of Auroville in south India, Show Me the Place investigates the deep human desire to imagine alternatives to what we take as normal or inevitable.
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HEDLEY TWIDLE
JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS
JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN
The troubles came, I saved what I could save
A thread of light, a particle, a wave
Leonard Cohen, ‘Show Me the Place’
A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.
Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Contents
Offshore
Thirty-six is no longer young, promising or even emerging. It’s one year too late to join the Youth League and twenty years too late to start surfing, especially in the wild, cold waters at the southern tip of Africa.
All that lost time weighs on us, Alex and me. We watch teenagers or outright children paddle onto some heaving Atlantic swell, make the drop, carve some shapes along the moving, blue-green wall then kick out like it was the easiest thing in the world.
‘Poets,’ he would say, beard in hand, as we watched from a car park in the depths of winter, when the swells come in. ‘There are poets among us.’
Alex and I both have beards that are beginning to go silver, but I’m average height and skinny while he is tall and rangy, muscular. We are both only children, sort of, both loners who like having someone to play with, now and then. We both have odd surnames that nobody can spell or pronounce.
After sessions that had gone more than usually badly – when we had fluffed a take-off in front of Coach, or our boards had gone vaulting over the white water, or (worst of all) we had pretended to paddle and miss a wave when in fact we were too chicken to take it – Alex could be less philosophical:
‘All those years, doing what? Jerking off in the suburbs. When I could’ve been at Long Beach in fifteen minutes.’
His new cold-water hood made him look somehow Nordic. Hooded, bearded, grizzled: he looked, I guess, better than he was. Out in the back line he seemed to get the kind of respect I never do. He looked like the kind of Kommetjie big wave surfer who might get towed onto a moving hillside of ocean out by Dungeons, then keep it monosyllabic in the post-sesh debrief: ‘It’s a team effort out there, I rely on my guys.’
But the fact is we were struggling to deal with a dirty two-foot shorebreak off the Milnerton lighthouse carpark, where the water tasted of phosphates and Alex had at one point emerged trailing a nappy from his leash. And this gap was getting to him, to us: the gap between our surfing aspirations and abilities. Between the utter sublimity of what we were seeing – up close at the Gat or the Hoek; online in YouTube clips from Portugal, Ireland, Bali, the endlessly spooling barrels of Namibia’s Skeleton Bay – and the prolonged humbling that the middle-aged kook (beginner) must endure.
When we were younger, Alex did a school exchange and as a result still holds the Scottish under-16 record for high jump. Many of us remember how he would sail over that bar in a state of grace. That strange, floating, corkscrewing motion – I didn’t have the vaguest notion of how it might or could feel in the body: it was literally unimaginable. He played club football in Cape Town for many years with great focus, forbidding anyone he knew to come and watch him. He venerates the one-time midfielder Zinedine Zidane and in fact looks a bit like him: craggy and intense. His mother has dementia, as mine once did: something we have discussed far out to sea in a world of grey glass and mist, or in a howling offshore that whips our words away as soon as they are spoken. The only memory that his mother has left of me is school sports days, when all those who didn’t qualify for anything else were placed in a 1 500-metre race at the end of the day, a sort of hold-all charity event.
‘And I remember how he used to wa-a-a-a-a-a-ve when he went past!’ This is what she would say, and he liked to bring it out. ‘With a big grin on his face, so happy! W-a-a-a-a-a-ving to the crowd.’
My only claim to sporting prowess was a brief period when my tennis was good enough, or infuriating enough, to earn me the nickname ‘The Wall’. And this difference between Alex and me – not just in athletic ability, but also sporting philosophy – has played out in various ways during our surf career to date. He wants grandeur, the Romantic sublime, feats of perfection and beauty. He has known them in his youth, and so expects them, hopes for them again. Any success for me would come, if at all, via attrition and doggedness. But mostly it was undiluted humiliation out there: being whistled off a wave by a seven-year-old, or chucking your board and diving for the bottom as the next set rumbles in near the Koeberg nuclear plant, on a day when no one else is in the water and your car window’s already been smashed, when you start hyperventilating to get enough air into your system ahead of what you know is coming: the underwater somersaults of a long, glorious Atlantic hold-down.
‘Five years,’ said Alex, who had been googling, ‘Five years to get to a decent level. If—,’ and this was the kicker, ‘you surf every day.’
Coach believed there was still time for us. He grew up near Vic Bay, one of the most reliable point breaks in the country: endless afternoons of peeling rights. What one needed to learn, he said, was a consistent wave without too many changing variables. One needed the closest natural equivalent to Kelly Slater’s wave pool in California, recently constructed and consistently delivering identical, mud-coloured inland tubes in front of all the Budweiser stalls and corporate boxes. Working with chaos mathematicians, the ex-world champion had engineered the surf equivalent of cracking the human genome: truly we were living in the end times.
Coach’s build was compact and muscular. He had that mystical quantum of extra time afforded the athlete. When catching a wave (seemingly without paddling – he was always at the right peak at the right time) he would do a sort of mini cobra pose, a half-press-up, looking left and right before deciding whether to pop up. If yes, it was already done, and he was now moving along the face, describing thoughtful curves, his gaze far ahead and down the line.
Though ten years younger than us, Coach brought great emotional intelligence to bear in the role of surf mentor. Never too quick to praise nor to blame, he was a master of understatement (to Alex’s annoyance he would never specify how big a swell was in figures), and a paragon of back line etiquette. On his own time he mainly surfed the feral, kelpy breaks near Cape Point. Snorkelling once in those parts had been enough for me. As I dropped from a rock ledge down through water so planktonic and full of nutrients that it was almost soupy, I had a strong bodily sense that something was near, was aware of me.
Coach downplayed such dangers and said these breaks were the only places left where surfers had any manners. But for a year or so, right at the start, he graciously accompanied us to wherever the wind was offshore.
The on/offshore question is the fundamental binary of surfing; it determines everything. Onshore winds (blowing from sea to land) are pure evil: they mangle the swell, breaking ranks, knocking waves on the back of the head, spilling them over themselves into a grey-brown mush. Offshore winds (blowing from land to sea) are godly: they comb the swell into stately lines, with spray pluming behind, walls going green and barrels hollow.
Offshore winds ‘wreathe waves in glory’, writes William Finnegan in Barbarian Days: ‘They groom them, hold them up and prevent them from breaking for a crucial extra beat … On a good day, their sculptor’s blade, meticulous and invisible, seems to drench whole coastlines in grace.’ His epic memoir of a surfing life ranges from the warm-water tubes of Hawaii and Bali to the cold-water bombs of San Francisco and Madeira. And since the author spent some time teaching at a ‘Coloured’ school in Cape Town’s Grassy Park during the 1980s, the book even touches on Surfers’ Corner, the nursery at nearby Muizenberg. Vaguely embarrassed even to be thinking about waves at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, Finnegan quickly dispenses with it as ‘a wide, shapeless beach break’ that he surfed when not too busy grading papers or planning lessons. It stung a little, seeing a patch of ocean where I’d spent so much time reduced to those four words.
Because Cape Town is at the head of a coastal peninsula, you can, in theory, always find a break where the wind is offshore. If the summer southeaster is turning False Bay into a foaming algal mess, it will be producing crystalline A-frames on the other side at Dunes. If the winter northwester has reduced Glen Beach to a disgusting slop of stormwater and sewage blowback, then Muizenberg might finally be coming into its own. Pulled over near the Shark Spotters booth uphill, you will see dark-blue lines queuing up from far out to sea.
There is, however, a problem with learning to surf in this city, or at least with advancing beyond beginner. Yes, there is the broad, sheltered, multidenominational church of Surfers’ Corner. Here, young and old, short-boarders and long-boarders, stand-up paddlers and surf tourists, can all have a grand old time getting in each other’s way and being very decent about it.
‘Too happy clappy,’ said Alex. ‘It’s like Sunday school out there’.
But as soon as you want to move out and up a step, there is no intermediate stage. The remaining options are the icy, bone-crunching breaks of the west coast, where waves are fast, steep, hollow and (like the local crews who dominate them) unforgiving.
‘The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast,’ writes Finnegan, ‘every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell – a longitudinal study, through season after season, is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break. Getting a spot wired – truly understanding it – can take years. At very complex breaks, it’s a lifetime’s work.’
My local break is Glen, just five minutes up and over the hill from the city apartment where I live. I have been conducting a longitudinal study of it for ten years now – first as bodysurfer, then surfer – but the results remain inconclusive. It is so fickle, changeable, powerful – by turns sucky, wedgy, peaky, slabby – and full of the city’s best surfers. During one session, I tried to duck-dive under a set and failed; or at least the wave somehow took and pushed me about fifty metres backwards, all of this underwater, like a cold relentless hand against my forehead, pushing me until I was almost back on the beach. I bobbed up near a local who was just beginning his paddle. ‘Fuck,’ he said, looking straight at me. Not ‘fuck you’ or ‘fucking hell,’ just ‘fuck’ – as if the disbelief, or maybe just the cold, was so intense that he couldn’t bring himself to go any further. Having witnessed this, Alex had to go back to shore and lean on his knees, he was laughing that hard.
Over beers afterwards, I was tempted to broach the issue of the ‘poo stance’: a derisive term for beginners who do a bent-kneed squat on the board, and which is more prominent (and hilarious) in a taller ‘poo man’ like Alex. With typical ambition, he would crouch down on a narrow, five-foot-something, high-performance board that I christened the Toothpick; whereas I (five ten) went for a seven-footer: longer boards are more buoyant and easier to paddle. But this kind of teasing was against the advice of Coach, who had said that the question of poo-manning was ‘a sensitive issue that needed to be delicately handled’.
Alex, not making as much sporting progress as he was used to, was trapped inside on a biggish day soon after. He stormed out of the ocean and began a six-month, anti-surfing sulk during which I was left to plough the choppy furrows of False Bay alone. There were tantalising moments that winter, glimpses of greater things: there always are. One day the ragged lines resolved into a long, grey wall that delivered me all the way from back line to shallows, a full minute’s worth it felt like, until I dived ecstatically off the board way out beyond the old pavilion.
But a surf session often proceeds according to the law of diminishing returns: as your arms tire out, you are less and less able to paddle onto waves, or under them. Sometimes I would reach a kind of disorientated fugue state out there in the grey wash cycle, towed along the coast by strange rips, far from shore, not knowing quite where I was or what I was hoping to achieve. Where were the outputs, the deliverables, the take-homes? What was there to show for this outrageous amount of time devoted to sitting on a seven-foot fibreglass raft while the world burned? You should have called it after that last decent ride; but you don’t, and then there is the ultimate humiliation of paddling back to shore. At certain points that winter, I remember being almost too exhausted to pull off my wetsuit. There I would be, towel round my knees in a car park near the railway line, freezing, thinking: What are you doing?
Alex was focusing on his job as the headmaster of a primary school in Philippi, one of the poorest and most violent parts of the city. He had been the founding teacher and was growing the school year by year: each January another intake of Grade Ones. I had gone out there a few times to give the kids ukulele lessons. Alex stalked around in his skinny jeans and long coat, six foot plus and mock serious amid all the kids who would mob his car when he arrived each day, shouting his unpronounceable name with delight. I put it to Principal that Muizenberg was actually very close, for an after-work session, I meant. But he spoke disdainfully about all the tourists clogging up the water now that summer was coming, and bent his head back over Singapore maths, saying maybe we could try Derdesteen, if traffic wasn’t too bad.
As I slowly improved, I also began trying out a bit of surf lingo and surf hauteur, which is full of mockery poked at beginners and complaints about crowds and tourists. But to disparage tourists while being a tourist, or traffic when you were traffic, or crowded breaks when you were part of the crowd – this was, Coach had once pronounced, ‘the way of the barbarian’.
The remark was not related to Finnegan’s book but somehow got tangled up in my reading of it. The title Barbarian Days comes from an epigraph by Edward St Aubyn: ‘He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour landing on a page.’
Throughout his life, Finnegan chases some of the world’s greatest waves as antidote to his job as foreign correspondent and New Yorker staff writer: the sea as a respite from tinkering with sentences. But when he turns to writing about waves in late career (and becomes famous for it), he must reckon with a paradox at the heart of surf culture: that the search for the perfect, uncrowded wave inevitably contains (when photographed or written or bragged about) the seeds of its own downfall: surf tourism. As a young man, Finnegan is one of the first to surf a paradisal reef break on a remote island off Fiji. Towards the end of the book he returns to the place, now a surf lodge full of social media streams and spectator boats.
Barbarian Days is wonderfully ambivalent about the world it describes. Finnegan doesn’t even seem sure if he likes surfers, or surf culture. Living and paddling out along San Francisco’s forbidding Ocean Beach, he is steadily writing about other things: finishing his books on 1980s Cape Town and travels with black reporters in Soweto, still feeling ‘mentally flayed’ by his time in the country. To write about surfing was something different, and closer to home: it risked losing the ‘sizable tract of unconsciousness’ near the centre of his life, the self-enclosed, non-verbal quality which means that most surf line-ups are quiet, with everyone cocooned in their own space and silence, not places for the loud or garrulous.
Stacked five deep in my local surf shop, Barbarian Days must be responsible for unleashing droves of bookish, middle-aged groms like me on the already crowded line-ups of the English-speaking world. And it is in the surf shop that such contradictions reach a particular intensity, since they are run by locals who are often kitting out kooks (from the Hawaiian kuk, meaning shit). The proprietor didn’t seem amped to be selling me a wetsuit, given that it might enable me to ruin his wave later that day at Llandudno.
‘Your arms are thin all the way up to the shoulders, so this one isn’t tight enough.’
I soon realised that it was a broad-based misanthropy though: nothing personal. When another customer walked in, they soon established they were both from Durban, where all you needed was boardies and at worst a rashie. The shop owner began a litany of complaints:
‘It’s shit in Cape Town. First it’s kak cold, then you have to drive everywhere, it’s always a mission. In summer it’s the wind, in winter it’s too big. I’ve got ear infections bru – three operations now. In Durbs you just stroll on over.’
‘But Glen?’ said the punter. ‘That’s nearby?’
‘It’s a kak wave. Those sandbars move around, then there’s all that churned up kelp, all those little bits. And the stream running in there – disgusting. All the shit they pump out there. No man, it’s a kak wave, literally.’
Drone footage shot by concerned ratepayers had shown plumes of raw sewage being released just off the city’s most expensive beaches, a few hundred metres away from the bungalow mansions and anchored party boats. According to a recent scientific study, Kalk Bay snoek were full of ibuprofen and Hout Bay anemones showed traces of antiretrovirals. High levels of anti-anxiety and heart meds in the urchins off Sea Point – just some of the many drugs that filtered daily through bladders and pipes and then out to sea. Every sea creature was full of caffeine, apparently, and probably cocaine too: what must that be like? And several of the desalination plants meant to rescue us from drought couldn’t run. On the Atlantic coast the water in the docks was too polluted; on the Indian ocean side the problem was algal blooms and red tides.
Despite knowing all this, I somehow still retained my idea of seawater as a healthy, bracing, salty tonic – right up until the session when Alex brushed his foot against a rock in Glen and walked out with an inflamed toe ‘so angry that it was squeaking’. Only swift medical action saved the digit, or even the foot. The staph infection required hospitalisation, and he was on crutches for a while.
After ‘Glen Toe’, he was more ready to dial things down a little, and we began leading surf outings for the kids from Philippi and Marcus Garvey. I was feeling good about this: taking kids to the ocean, suiting up, combining surfing with social outreach – what was not to like? And they were hugely excited as we guided them across the car park and into the hire shop. The man behind the counter looked up at me and said:
‘Your wetsuit’s on backwards.’
I ran out and back to the car to rip off this burning shirt of humiliation: how could it have happened, a wetsuit I had put on a hundred times before?
Alex wisely didn’t refer to this moment ever again, but he and the owner would exchange a knowing smile every time we arrived with the kids. Then we would wade out into the shallows with two or three shrieking, terrified, delighted children attached to us and try to stand them on a foam board, while also scanning obsessively to make sure that none of the others were being dragged out or under. Often we had to cut our sessions short because one of the assistant teachers would find us and say that people were throwing stones at Golden Arrow buses on Eisleben Road, or that tyres were burning near the school gate, and it looked like it might get worse, so we should go now. I half suspected they were just bored waiting on the shore, but we would then drag everyone out of the water and the wetsuits and back onto the bus. Then we might paddle out to the back line for our own session, and the quiet and self-enclosure would return. Thinking back to that melee with the kids in the white water – touch and go at times – I realised I had never been clutched so hard by anyone.
After the trials of summer – crowds, traffic, wind, days of flat seas – winter is here again. Monster storms detonate somewhere between Africa and Antarctica, aftershocks of swell hit the southern peninsula days later, and these break in turn into our social media feeds. Suddenly there are galleries of old warriors and young chargers dropping unimaginably deep into hollows that – just from the wind-scoured, bottle-green of them – you know to be utterly, skull-achingly frigid: the kind of cold that sews ear bones closed. At this point Alex will start getting excited and sending messages, wanting us to hit up Llandudno or Thermopylae, a menacing spot named for an old wreck off the Sea Point promenade, one only roused by the chunkiest westerly swell. Here we will (if we even manage to make it out) sit on our boards and let wave after wave pass underneath us, spray whipping back into our faces and the boom of it reaching us a second later.
After several sessions of this, when there was no more pride left to swallow, I had to give a pep talk:
‘We’re ten years away from those waves, at least. Not five, ten. We’re Chopsticks level, and this is Rachmaninov. We’re ukulele, this is Stradivarius.’
And when he started complaining again about the crowds and evangelists at the surf-industrial complex of Muizenberg, I reminded him that we were socialists. Or at least that he had a poster of Jeremy Corbyn on the wall, and that on our surf trip to Vic Bay he had talked my ear off about the British Labour leader and the unwarranted attacks on him by the corporate media. All the way from Riviersonderend to the PetroSA refinery, Alex raged against the anti-Corbynite smear campaign, which was destroying one of the last hopes for a progressive government in the West, which hid its nefarious agenda under the patently ridiculous accusation of anti-Semitism. Which got him started on Israel and Palestine, and then the Christian Zionist lobby, then Modi, Bolsonaro and Trump, who was building sea walls for his Scottish golf courses even while denying climate change – the sheer anti-human cynicism, the flagrancy of these people, like being forced to eat a turd! Every day, another turd like the one we’d seen floating off Milnerton being gradually forced into your mouth.
It was such a long and impassioned performance, continuing along the backroads as we were diverted off the highway, first due to protests and then smoke from bushfires, that I eventually asked him, over some lasagne in Wilderness, what was actually on his mind. And he confessed that he had just learnt, just before getting in the car, that he was going to be a father.
And so our trip became both the peak of our surf career so far and the beginning of its end, or at least the end of its beginning. The barbarian phase was over. The scandalous stretches of open time and space needed for the pastime would soon be radically reduced, at least for one of us. We needed, Alex said, to make it count.
Vic Bay is V-shaped and compact with steep walls, more of a cove, really. On its right-hand shore, cottages line a track almost all the way to the point, which means that instead of paddling from the beach you can walk right up to the take-off zone, then pick your way across a few rocks, jump out and you’re in position. Schooled on the wide, shapeless beach breaks of Cape Town, where sometimes the backline moves hundreds of metres out to sea and a stepladder of rumbling white water bars entry, Alex and I could hardly believe this set-up. We found a room in the guesthouse closest to the point, where, from our romantic and well-appointed flatlet, the wave was just metres away.
For that first afternoon we hung back off the shoulder, sussing it out and catching a few scraps left behind by the locals; but in fact there were no leftovers – every wave got ridden, every set picked clean. So, the next morning we woke before dawn and picked our way down the rocks in the dark. One of us watched for a lull between sets and gave the signal, the other launched across the white water and into position.
For half an hour in the pre-dawn light, we were alone in the water. Great things were accomplished, apparently. Alex says it was my finest hour, but it’s curiously hard to remember.
What I do remember is that after a while we were joined by another party, who paddled in from the beach: one woman and three men. From the first instant that she pulled into a wave, it was clear that this was a superb surfer. Her power, control and room for manoeuvre within the tight space of the break was awesome. At one point she came pumping down the line towards me, less with aggression than supreme confidence, then cut back mere centimetres from my face, so that I was drenched by the torque and spray of her board.
‘I’ve been baptised!’ I said to the other guys in the line-up, who seemed to be her entourage, maybe one of them was her husband. He laughed.
‘I know the feeling.’
A month or so after our trip, Alex emailed me with the subject heading: ‘CHECK OUT 5mins47!’ and a YouTube clip titled ‘Pop Up Like the Pros’. After segments on Kelly and Jordy, there she was, hunkering down at Pipeline doing sick bottom turns. The three-time world champion Carissa Moore, resident of Honolulu! Yes, undoubtedly, I recognised the open face and the powerful stance. We had indeed been baptised by greatness, sprinkled with holy water.
As we sat there, pensive in the dawn, trying to hold our place and maintain our dignity, Alex’s board suddenly popped out from between his legs like a piece of soap. Entirely unprovoked, and from a resting position, the Toothpick shot skywards like a surface to air missile, and he capsized backwards into the water right next to Carissa and her husband, her coach, maybe her dietician, the whole crew obviously on the way up the coast to the J-Bay Open, where she would go on to lose (‘probably the lowest I’ve ever felt’, according to her Instagram), but then stage a triumphant return the following year. ‘My journey is imperfect but I am laughing, loving and learning every step of the way. Thanks for sharing it with me.’
After the birth of his son, Alex began travelling out of the country with his partner, who is French, so that young Marcus (named half after Marcus Aurelius, and half Marcus Garvey) could spend time with his grandparents. I began getting swell updates from the coast of Brittany, and pictures of mussels cooked in cider. Then he would come back alone for stretches, resuming his duties at the school. Though I had the sense that he was winding things up there, and would soon break it to me, somewhere beyond the back line, that they were leaving South Africa for good.
After work and on weekends he would surf obsessively as a means of coping with the sudden separations and was now clearly better than me: a strong paddler who could power through the impact zone. But our attitudes had shifted slightly, switched around a little. He had less to prove, and seemed more at peace with the Anthropocene shore, no matter how scruffy or unromantic. We met more often in the lumpy swell of Milnerton, where the beach was slowly washing away and plastic bags brushed against your feet like delicate seaweed. When conditions were glassy, a brown haze hung over the docks at the foot of Table Mountain.
Whereas I was now more open to the moments of sublimity that surfing reliably delivers, if not in person, then at least via the feats of others. After all, doesn’t the world need people who love music without adolescently wanting to be in a band? Yes, absolutely, said Alex, whose decks and vinyl had been in storage for years. And doesn’t the world need people who love reading without needing to write books? Who know that there are enough books in the world already, great and unrepeatable masterworks, to be read and enjoyed without childishly comparing every sentence with your own paltry efforts? Yes, all true, he agreed – to act otherwise was the way of the barbarian.
A kind of middle-aged enlightenment was dawning, I told him as we pulled off our wetsuits in the car park, keeping an eye on the twerking video being filmed next to us. A woman in a mini skirt bent over the bonnet and did her thing as the latest gqom banger throbbed from inside a BMW. ‘Stop it I like it!’ said the car guard who had been trying to sell us fossilised shark teeth. I began shouting it after a pummelling out to sea: ‘Stop it I like it!’ Now we made a noise out there at the back line, crying to heaven with mock anguish if we fell off a two-foot wave, shaking our fists at the gods. Hamming it up, puncturing the macho solemnity of it all.
Then one day all the breaks suddenly emptied. The COVID pandemic was keeping everyone at home. Our strict lockdown was a special kind of anguish for the surf community, since as the winter swells came in you knew that conditions would never be this perfect and uncrowded again. After a month or so, news spread that surfers had begun violating the regulations: mass paddle-outs, beach trespasses. Footage went around of police staring helplessly out to sea.
But I was happy to stay home and dry, and to pursue my car park argument to its final logic. The world needed people who loved surfing without feeling the need to surf themselves. Or even further still (I was reinventing the wheel here): who loved watching waves with nobody on them. Alex sent me Kookslams compilations of appalling drop-ins and rookies getting dashed onto rocks. I replied with a brooding short called ‘Empties’: drone footage of Portugal’s Nazaré on days just too big and unruly to be rideable. Sixty-foot swells detonated in high definition slo-mo; whole fogbanks of spray blew back across the water in their aftermaths, skittering across the sea surface in the lulls between sets. Now this, I said, was enlightenment: the camera lingering in the emptiness, the stillness between two waves of the sea.
He messaged back that I should pull myself together, do push-ups and be ready to get back in the water.
To spite his face
The nose disappeared from Cecil Rhodes’s face in September 2015. It was sliced off the bronze bust in the Rhodes Memorial on the slopes of Table Mountain. The plinth below was spray-painted: THE MASTER’S NOSE BETRAYS HIM.
Since then, it has been at large. Was it stashed at the back of some cupboard or put to use as a paperweight? Did it go underground at a safe house, or was it ironically mounted on the wall by student comrades? Maybe it fled to New Zealand, trying to shuck off its colonial past and live in peace.
I work at the university just downslope from the memorial, and around the time of the disappearance, I was teaching Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 story ‘The Nose’. In it, the nose of a St Petersburg bureaucrat, Major Kovalyov, vanishes under mysterious circumstances. He wakes up to find a blankness, ‘quite flat, just like a freshly cooked pancake’, in the middle of his face. We follow this hapless and petty man as he tries to find and confront his nose, which has taken on a life of its own. It is gallivanting round town, wearing a uniform of higher rank than the major, disowning him at every opportunity.
‘Imagine what it’s like being without such a conspicuous part of your anatomy!’ says Kovalyov as he tries to place an advertisement for his missing organ in the papers. When he finds it at Kazan Cathedral, we read: ‘The nose’s face was completely hidden by the high collar and it was praying with an expression of profound piety.’ Censors forced Gogol to change the cathedral to a shopping arcade, on grounds of blasphemy – an example of how the story can co-opt any reader into its ridiculous universe. ‘Whatever you may say, these things do happen in this world,’ the narrator reflects. ‘Rarely, I admit, but they do happen.’
So, when Rhodes’s nose vanished, I felt intrigued and somehow implicated. I admired the gesture. Each year as I taught the Gogol again, I was reminded of the unsolved mystery, and would ask for information at the end of lectures, promising to protect my sources. I dreamed of holding that bronze nodule in the palm of my hand. I wondered where it had been and what its adventures might reveal.
In South Africa, the first semester starts in February: high summer, the dry season, fire season. I would be standing up in front of Literature 101 on the hottest day of the year, which often coincided with the opening of Parliament. Rhodes left his Cape Dutch mansion just downslope to future heads of state and the highway below campus would be sealed off so the president could make his way into town to deliver the State of the Nation address, causing mayhem during Cape Town’s already chronic rush hour. With the heat, the traffic, the army, the helicopters rattling overhead, the evidence of presidential corruption stacking up, the Rhodes Must Fall student protests brewing – things had a manic feel, as if the city, the country, the whole world was fraying at the edges.
The wind worked on your nerves, kicking up dust on the dry slopes and turning small mountain fires into epic blazes. I often worried that a fire would sweep down from the slopes above the Rhodes Memorial and engulf the university – and then one day it did, just about. I’m writing up this investigation – which is a convoluted one – opposite a charred library, with a view of blackened cypresses outside my office window. They went up like Roman candles, ignited by flying embers.
After several years of asking, I finally got a tip from a student. She said she knew someone who knew someone who had removed Rhodes’s nose. Not only that: this person kept on removing it whenever a replacement was stuck on by an organisation called the Friends of Rhodes Memorial. There was a kind of arms race in progress.
‘So apparently he has a whole collection of noses,’ she told me. ‘His name is Josh.’
He’d been at a homeless shelter – that’s all she knew. There was a police docket open and her source was nervous, wouldn’t say more. But apparently some of the noses were just lying around in the shelter, next to the toaster.
Josh. It didn’t sound particularly pan-African, Azanian, or decolonial. But then again, you never could tell. So much had been written about Rhodes – his statues, his crimes, his legacy. But in the world of the nose, I came to realise, things were never quite what they seemed.
The bust in the Memorial is one of several Rhodes statues in Cape Town. There was a bronze in the middle of the university campus (Rhodes sitting, like Rodin’s Thinker) until it was removed during the Rhodes Must Fall protests of 2015. There is another in the city centre (Rhodes striding) amid the trees, museums and pigeons. He raises a vaguely Fascist arm, more Mussolini than Hitler – ‘Your hinterland is there!’ – and points (as the writer Alex La Guma liked to remark) towards what were once the ‘segregated lavatories’ of the Company’s Garden.
Then there is Rhodes Avenue, Rhodes Drive, Mount Rhodes, not to mention Mandela Rhodes Place – you can’t move a metre without running into him. A Rhodesia Road still survives somewhere. There is also Cecilia Forest, which I’d always associated with Simon and Garfunkel and making love to Cecilia in the afternoon, so it came as a shock that I was actually making love to … Cecil John Rhodes.
Who was very likely a closeted gay man. Who kept a collection of stone phalluses from Great Zimbabwe and other ancient African sites in his mansion at Groote Schuur. And surrounded himself with adoring young men who were known as ‘Rhodes’s lambs’. And had a big granite bathtub of Roman stature – but such a big hunk of stone that it was impossible to have a hot bath: the granite drained out all the heat. No matter: Rhodes the mining magnate, prime minister, financier, fruit farmer, empire builder, white supremacist and warmonger preferred cold, manly baths – of course he did.
Why do I know all this? Because while doing a PhD on the literary history of Cape Town, I got sidetracked by the cautionary tale of Rudyard Kipling, who spent many summers on these slopes as Rhodes’s pet writer-in-residence and imperial PR man.
Along with the Roman lion cages, Mediterranean pines, English songbirds, summer houses and zebra paddocks that make the landscape around the University of Cape Town such a bizarre imperial pick ’n mix, Rhodes also installed a cottage in the woods for poets and artists so that they could draw inspiration from the mountain. In this cottage, Kipling read the Just So Stories to his kids, but his writing for grown-ups took a drastic downturn. He became a fervid champion of the South African War, putting Rhodes on a pedestal as a British hero with an almost divine right to oversee the development of southern Africa (even referring to Him with the capital usually reserved for deities). This is why statues of Rhodes in Cape Town tend to come paired with lines of bad verse by Kipling.
All the statues have long histories of alteration, both authorised and not. On Heritage Day in 1999, contemporary artists were allowed to creatively deface public memorials. The Rhodes Memorial lions found themselves caged under a banner that read FROM RAPE TO CURIO (a riff on Rhodes’s obsession with building a railway that might run from Cape to Cairo). The statue in the Company’s Garden was strung with brick-weighted ropes: a kind of ghost image, the artist explained, of the mine riggings in Kimberley where Rhodes founded his De Beers company.
The Rhodes Memorial bust has been repeatedly daubed, spattered, bludgeoned and even necklaced. This is when a tyre full of petrol is placed round someone’s neck and set alight (a way of rooting out suspected informers during the 1980s, when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its climax). Over the years on campus, I had seen the sitting Rhodes wearing traffic cone hats, wrapped in black bin bags and swaddled in green fabric. This last reference was to Mgcineni Noki, also known as The Man in the Green Blanket. Thirty-year-old Noki was the leader of the striking rock drillers who were shot down by police at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in August 2012.
In March 2015, the statue was pelted with shit that had been brought in from Khayelitsha, where thousands of residents were still using bucket toilets. When the Rhodes Must Fall movement began making international headlines, the statue was removed from its prime position in the centre of campus.
Felling that Rhodes, up there on his plinth like a sitting duck, was a fairly simple process, technically speaking. He was unbolted from the platform and hoisted up with a crane, not so much falling as ascending or levitating. It was an uncanny thing to see: something that had been so still, such a fixture for so long, suddenly beginning to move, wobbling in the harness of a crane. There is an iconic image of the moment, in which the performance artist Sethembile Msezane seems to be lifting him up with her wings. She turns her back on History while everyone else is saluting it with their smartphones. NEXT THE INVISIBLE STATUES read one of the placards; LEGALIZE WEED! read another. Rhodes was lowered onto a flatbed truck and then raced down the highway to a secret location, the empire builder now in the position of day labourer. A grey box was placed over the plinth and that was that.
But the Rhodes Memorial further up the slopes is a different proposition for the aspiring Fallist. It’s a big, hulking acropolis: part-Greek, part-Roman, part-Egyptian, with a touch of Nuremberg. You approach the inner sanctum via granite steps (one for each year of Rhodes’s life), flanked by bronze lions with shiny rumps from all the kids riding on them. The steps and pillars make it a popular backdrop for wedding and birthday pictures. On any given Sunday, people will be queueing between the columns with foil balloons.
And there he sits, the arch-imperialist. Or rather slouches, leaning on his arm, with a masklike face and cleft chin. ‘The immense and brooding spirit still shall quicken and control’, reads the inscription by Kipling, ‘Living he was the land and dead his soul shall be her soul’. Perhaps there’s a little sneer of cold command, but mainly he looks bored and slightly bloated, gazing out ‘across the lands he’d won’, the poem continues, ‘the granite of the Ancient North, great spaces washed with sun’. Some two thousand kilometres to the north are the granitic domes of the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe, where Rhodes is buried – and where ZANU-PF loyalists periodically threaten to dig up his bones, whenever some distraction is needed from the tanking economy or electoral gains by the opposition.
Rhodes died of a bad heart in 1902, murmuring his famous last words: ‘So little done, so much to do.’ It was said to be heart trouble that made him come to southern Africa in the first place. A sense that he didn’t have long to live urged on his feverish imperial dreaming, his obsession with legacy, secret societies, scholarships – a desire to keep shaping the world from beyond the grave. ‘In its own way, Rhodes’s heart was almost as significant an organ as Cleopatra’s nose,’ wrote one biographer (not realising that one day the reverse would also be true): ‘Had it been weaker – or stronger – the whole aspect of Africa would have been altered.’
The Rhodes Memorial, in other words, is not of the cheapskate, Soviet variety. It’s not like the Lenins and Stalins put out to pasture in Budapest’s Memento Park, or the heroic, quota-exceeding steelworkers whose legs go dong when you rap them. Nor is this a Saddam Hussein or a Confederate general who can be hooked up to a truck and bent to the ground like a cheap toy. This is the British Empire in the final flush of its power and, like Ozymandias, the granite temple will probably be the last thing standing around here. Removing that nose must have required a serious power tool. It was sliced clean off, leaving a patch of bright, untarnished metal.
Five years later, during the hard pandemic lockdown, the memorial bust was beheaded. Someone had accessed the padlocked Rhodes Estate at night, during a huge winter storm – perhaps to disguise the sound of a portable angle grinder. That’s what had been used in 2016 on the striding Rhodes in the city centre. Operating in broad daylight, a group in orange vests had posed as construction workers. They put caution tape around the statue and got a quarter of the way through its lower right leg, leaving a serious gash in the heel.
