South from Limpopo E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

South from Limpopo is a social, cultural and political journey through South Africa, before, during and after the transfer of power in 1994, by the much-loved and formidable travel writer, Dervla Murphy. It is an account of three journeys, covering more than 6000 miles by bicycle, which took Murphy through all nine provinces of the new South Africa. She talked to people of all colours and political persuasions from wealthy and fearful whites, to impoverished, rural Boers and black farm labourers, to Indian shopkeepers and those living in the vast townships. To read this unique book is to share a gruelling experience of a country in tumultuous transition.

Leseprobe

DERVLA MURPHY

SOUTH FROM THE LIMPOPO

Travels through South Africa

For Rose, who did a lot to delay the completion of this book, and for Rachel and Andrew who collaborated in her production

‘What we are witnessing in South Africa now are the problems that the whole world is going to face increasingly in the twenty-first century. We are witnessing a rich white enclave having to deal with the fact that it is actually part of a wide world and it has to share with that world or die. We are at the forefront of a profound global transition.’

Francis Wilson, Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphIllustrationsAcknowledgementsMapAuthor’s NoteForeword Prologue: Return to Africa PART I Pre-elections: March to August 1993  1. In at the Deep End  2. Convalescent in Lebowa  3. A Time to Mourn  4. The Platteland Volk  5. From the Centre to the Sea  6. A Worried Mother  7. One Corner of Khayelitsha  8. Back to Mother  9. The Klein Karoo10. Surplus People PART II Elections: April to May 199411. States of Emergency12. The Miracle13. What Next? INTERLUDEIreland – Mozambique: June to September 1994 PART III Post-elections: September 1994 to January 199514. Post-euphoria15. The Problem Province16. Below the Drakensberg BRIEF INTERLUDE Happenings behind my back 17. To Griqualand East18. Where Chaos Rules OK19. What’s Wrong with Bloemfontein?20. Christmas in Khayelitsha Glossary of Acronyms and South African WordsSelect BibliographyPlatesCopyright

Illustrations

  1. A late-nineteenth-century homestead in western Transvaal

  2. The author and friend beside a traditional Boer open-air bread-oven

  3. Koppies in the Great Karoo

  4. Lear in Griqualand West

  5. Sunday braai in Vosburg

  6. Lear in the middle of a dry river-bed in the Klein Karoo

  7. Weaver-birds’ nest on telephone pole

  8. A corner of Khayelitsha

  9. A Khayelitsha track flooded with sewage

10. The author with a Khayelitsha Xhosa friend

11. A Khayelitsha shoemaker

12. A Khayelitsha shack – upmarket

13. A Tswana helper in Kimberley

14. A Boer family graveyard in Western Cape

15. Lear with a young Boer admirer

16. Local enterprise in Khayelitsha

17. Khayelitsha crossroads

18. The end of an era, 16 December 1994: the last Day of the Vow

19. Lear in the Great Karoo

20. Chris in the Transkei

21. Gable-end in Umtata, December 1994

22. A bar attendant in Eastern Transvaal

23. Chris on the battlefield

24. A Zulu kraal between Melmoth and the coast

25. Isandlwana

26. A friend in her family graveyard

27. A church serving the Anglican community in Griqualand East

28. Khayelitsha in midsummer

29. Waiting for a taxi on Christmas Eve

Acknowledgements

Special thanks must go to Margaret Fogarty; without her practical help and unflagging encouragement I might never have finished this book. Her mother Daphne tolerated my erratic arrivals at and departures from their home with limitless patience. And her friend Jennifer Alt became my most valuable South African mentor.

On the Cape Peninsula, Ray and Wally in Retreat and Wendy Woodward and Chris Wildman in Observatory provided me with ‘homes from home’. Jane and David Rosenthal would have done likewise but time ran out …

Elsewhere, numerous new friends of all colours offered generous hospitality and precious insights into the new South Africa. However, not everyone would want to be directly associated with this book and some names have been changed in the text.

On the last lap, John Murray VII, Hugh Lewin, Justin Cartwright and a Capetonian friend who wishes to remain anonymous gave shrewd editorial advice. And, as always, Diana Murray saw at a glance what was wrong with the first draft and inspired me – as only she can – to try harder.

Author’s Note

Definition of ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian’ and other groups as used in the text

In 1993 South Africa’s population was guestimated to be 41 million, of whom 76 per cent were black, 13 per cent white, 8.5 per cent Coloured and 2.5 per cent Indian.

It is politically correct to describe as ‘black’ all South Africans who are not white. This usage is understandable, in reaction to the Population Registration Act and all that went with it, yet for the sake of clarity I have eschewed it. South Africa’s Indian citizens are South Africans as the white citizens are South Africans. But they are not blacks. Nor are the Cape Coloureds, to whom I refer as ‘Coloureds’. Their ancestry is no more than one-third African, the other components being Asian and European. The Griquas are also mixed, the result of Boer/San or Boer/Khoikhoi interbreeding in centuries past. The copper-skinned San (or Bushmen) and Khoikhoi (or Hottentots) were the original inhabitants of the southern regions of Africa, and the only inhabitants of the Cape and its hinterland when the first Dutch settlers arrived in 1652.

In general, South Africa’s whites are either Afrikaners (formerly known as Boers) or English-speakers. Afrikaners are descended from the earliest European settlers: Dutch, French Huguenot, German. Most English-speakers are descended from the British who settled in the Cape Colony and Natal in the nineteenth century. However, this category by now includes Jews from Russia and Central Europe, southern Europeans who were encouraged to migrate – to increase the white population – during the 1950s, and some 150,000 Portuguese ‘refugees’ from Angola and Mozambique who were welcomed by the apartheid state when their degenerate ‘empire’ abruptly collapsed in 1974.

I have revived the obsolete term ‘Boer’ to describe Afrikaner farmers, a dwindling breed for many of whom I developed – much to my surprise – a great affection. The urbanized Afrikaners are very different from their rural cousins; the use of ‘Boer’ (which simply means ‘farmer’) is my way of emphasizing the difference.

Another difference in need of emphasizing is that between South Africa’s so-called Communists and all other Communists. The apartheid regime, set up at the start of the Cold War, immediately jumped on the West’s anti-Communist bandwagon. For the next forty-five years many opponents of apartheid, however impeccable their Christian/liberal/capitalist credentials, were defined as ‘Communists’ and treated as criminals.

Glossary

Acronyms are usually spelled out in full on first mention. All are listed in the Glossary, as are Afrikaans and other local words.

Foreword

By 1952 I had begun to collect books about South Africa and to realize that apartheid was not in fact a new anti-black weapon forged by the Afrikaners. Since the 1870s British observers – including Anthony Trollope, J. A. Froude, Lord Bryce, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Milner – had been warning the Colonial Office about the danger of extending the franchise to ‘natives’. In 1901 Lionel Curtis – fresh from New College, Oxford, one of Lord Milner’s infamous ‘kindergarten’ of youthful colonial officers – wrote: ‘It would be a blessed thing if the negro, like the Red Indian, tended to die out before us.’ Two years later John Buchan, Lord Milner’s Private Secretary, produced a blueprint for the country’s future ‘native policy’ and noted that:

Mentally the black man is as crude and naive as a child, with a child’s curiosity and ingenuity … His instability of character and intellectual childishness make him politically far more impossible than even the lowest class of Europeans.

Lord Milner then appointed a Commission which recommended segregation policies that shocked his more civilized compatriots. When the South Africa Act was passed in 1909 Keir Hardie protested that MPs ‘should not assent to the setting up of the doctrine that because of a man’s misfortune in having been born with a coloured skin he is to be barred the possibility of ever rising to a position of trust.’ But Lord Balfour argued, ‘You cannot give them equal rights without threatening the whole fabric of civilization. The Red Indians are gradually dying out. The Australian Aborigines are even more clearly predestined to early extinction. But with the black races of Africa, for the first time we have the problem of races as vigorous in constitution, as capable of increasing in number, in contact with white civilization.’ Not only Afrikaners feared the swart gevaar. ‘the black peril’.

It is no coincidence that several of the designers of Grand Apartheid studied at German universities during the 1930s. Many English-speakers were at first appalled by the Afrikaners’ creation of a totalitarian state, yet there is no escaping the fact that apartheid was supported, actively or passively, by the vast majority of South Africa’s whites. It was also supported by a minority of South Africa’s blacks who, for personal gain, collaborated in the setting up of the ‘independent homelands’.

By 1983 the cracks in the apartheid edifice were visible from Ireland. As an Irish citizen I could then have visited the country for sixty days without a visa, but so brief a visit would have been pointless. Optimistically I applied for a twelve-month work permit ostensibly ‘to write a travel book’. After an eight-month delay Pretoria, rightly distrusting my motives, said no. Instead I went to Madagascar.

As the apartheid state disintegrated, amidst increasing, uncontrollable violence, many influential right-wingers – both at home and abroad – rallied round Chief Buthelezi, the Zulu Inkatha leader, still hoping the ANC might be held at bay. Ten months after Nelson Mandela’s release, Laurens van der Post dismissed him as someone ‘who has nothing more than tired rhetoric to offer’ and praised Buthelezi as ‘a man of vision, better prepared than any leader in South Africa to lead the way ahead’. Margaret Thatcher, too, drooled over the Inkatha leader and asserted that ‘the day the ANC is elected South Africa will be in cloud-cuckoo-land’.

In 1991 the apartheid laws were rescinded. But while all-party negotiations continued spasmodically, a cabal of senior army and police officers – sure of President de Klerk’s covert approval – were conspiring with Buthelezi to block the ANC’s coming to power. Their ruthless ‘Third Force’ was responsible for thousands of deaths but could not prevent the inevitable.

By 1993 Afrikanerdom was in such a state of disarray that one could simply ignore its bureaucracy. I entered South africa as a ‘tourist’ and stayed for six months. During April and May 1994 I was back to witness the birth of the new South Africa. And in September 1994 I returned again to observe the infant’s progress. These cycle tours were journeys with a difference. Usually I travel to get as far away as possible from motor cars, advertisement hoardings, fast-food outlets, supermarkets, electricity pylons, television, muzak and that pitiable breed of people afflicted by a bizarre new obsession (they call it ‘surfing the Internet’). Plainly no one of my disposition would choose to pedal through South Africa for fun. Yet that country’s pull was so powerful that I had felt it all my adult life. So I shouldn’t have been so surprised to realize one day that I had come to love the place.

PROLOGUE

Return to Africa

At midnight, on my flight to Johannesburg, an alarming commotion woke us all. A black stowaway had been discovered, a sad mad young man whose history is anybody’s guess. At dawn I saw him lying in a narrow space behind the last row of seats, his hands and feet heavily manacled, his expression terrified. When I glanced down at him he began to cry. He had wet himself: they wouldn’t, he sobbed, let him go to the toilet. One could scarcely blame them for that; he looked seriously deranged and the midnight struggle had sounded strenuous. Nearby, an Afrikaner steward sat on guard, a tall hulky fellow, his thick sleek hair like a shiny brass helmet, his pale blue eyes close-set, his lips thin in a plump face that was easily rearranged. For me it wore a professional, steward’s smile. When I emerged from the loo it wore a snarl of contempt as he addressed some remark, in Afrikaans, to his captive. I asked, ‘What’s the story?’ Discomfited, the steward looked away – this stowaway might, after all, have been a hijacker … Then he muttered, ‘Even in the air they make trouble!’

At Jan Smuts airport I changed planes for Lusaka. From there, on the morrow, a bus would take me to Karoi in northern Zimbabwe, where Lear (my dearly beloved bicycle) had been left with friends at the end of last year’s ride from Nairobi.

As we took off the extrovert Afrikaner beside me introduced himself as Mr Du Plessis, sales director of a pharmaceutical company. He thoroughly approved of the recent political changes. ‘Sure we dodged most sanctions easy enough – Malawi helped a lot. Only our expansion northwards was blocked. The Chinese, Japs, Taiwanese, Koreans – all those yella fellas, they had Africa all sewn up. But since ’91 we’re right in there, fighting hard.’ Mr Du Plessis had no hang-ups about being governed by blacks in the nearish future. ‘The ANC know which way to jump, they can smell where money comes from. And their Commie friends don’t count any more.’

Gazing wistfully down at Mashonaland, Mr Du Plessis lamented having been born too late to kill an elephant. Hunting was his ‘hobby’, but now only Arabs and Americans can afford to shoot big game. He didn’t seem to notice my failure to make sympathetic noises.

In June 1992 I had left a drought-stricken region, Lusaka’s air harsh with dust and despair, starving villagers flocking to the city from hundreds of miles away, the vestigial grass like brown wire, brittle leaves rattling on the trees. Now, eight months later, I stepped out of the airport into warm light rain and a riot of fecundity – all around the brightness of new growth, a gleaming tender green. My impulse was to sing and dance in celebration but that might have alarmed Mr Du Plessis.

Walking to the main road, a pannier-bag in each hand, I passed herds of cattle still bony but now content, grazing avidly. When an archetypal African bus, palsied and hoarse, picked me up at the junction a youth made four inches available at the edge of his seat and asked where my vehicle had broken down. I don’t think he believed my story. South Africa beckoned – ‘Here are no good jobs’ – but he feared capture on the border. ‘Down there the police put you working on farms for no wages and the farmers whip you.’

Lusaka is a ramshackle mini-capital, swarming with small highly skilled pickpockets and large daring muggers. I felt a glow of affection as its few obligatory flourishes of high-risery appeared on the horizon. At a residential centre for AIDS patients, where I stayed on previous visits, ten black South African public-health workers had arrived the day before ‘to learn from the Zambian experience’. They were USAID-sponsored and led by a paunchy information co-ordinator from Colombus, Ohio. African countries, he asserted, need teams of Western psychotherapists to enable people to get a handle on all this AIDS trauma. He sounded like a skit on ‘the Western helper in Africa’; his protégés made no comment but their body language was eloquent.

In Lusaka’s bus terminus – sprawling, thronged at sunrise, the atmosphere cheerful – nothing indicated from where which bus left and the legends over the cabs were best ignored; a bus marked ‘Blantyre’ might be going to Mbeya. Most of the drivers sitting in empty buses didn’t yet know their destinations but hoped soon to find out. Two kind youths noticed mama’s problem. When the unmarked Harare bus at last appeared they promptly identified it and trustingly I climbed aboard.

The fare for the 180 miles to Karoi was £3, a the rate commensurate with the vehicle’s condition. Only faint traces of cream paint remained on the grey metal of the interior. The red leatherette seats were in shreds. One door handle had long since been replaced by a rusty nail-and-chain contrivance. The other door had been welded to the body after the last crash – so explained our corpulent driver as he heaved himself across the engine to get to his seat. There was no roof-rack, though most passengers were setting off on trading expeditions to Karoi or Harare. They embarked in high spirits, exchanging long complicated greetings and cryptic jokes. Two baby-laden young women had a struggle to enter: their head-loads were a colossal round basket of tomatoes and a bulging sack of maize-cobs. They laughed uproariously at their own predicament, then at last were in, depositing their loads on the floor where other passengers had to surmount them, which they did uncomplainingly.

A green-and-white bus parked nearby looked much smarter than ours but when required to start its engine made resolutely uncooperative noises. At once a dozen men volunteered to push it, resembling a rugby scrum as they bent and shoved, and shoved, and shoved. They were still shoving when we rumbled away, no more than an hour late.

I felt content that morning – and curiously liberated. Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship ‘economic growth’ – the ultimate unreality in a finite world.

By noon I was happily reunited with Lear, who had been polished, oiled and pumped in anticipation of my arrival.

It took me eighteen days to cover the 1,270 miles from Karoi to Beitbridge, via Raffingora, Mutorashanga, Mazowe, Harare, Chivhu, Gweru, Zvishavane and a few Communal Areas (ex-Reserves) deep in the bush. Because Zimbabwe’s main-road traffic is quite heavy, by African standards, I chose dirt tracks – usually well maintained – wherever possible.

Towards the end of The Ukimwi Road I wrote: ‘Having sniffed the air south of the Zambezi, I felt Zimbabwe to be not a continuation of Black Africa but – both historically and emotionally – the beginning of South Africa.’ This is hardly surprising. Most of the original white settlers, the Rhodes-funded Pioneers, came from South Africa in 1890 and soon apartheid (known as ‘parallel development’) was flourishing in Southern Rhodesia. The Reserves were the equivalent of South Africa’s ‘homelands’, infertile places of banishment for ‘surplus people’. Southern Rhodesia was established not as a new colony ruled from London but as a commercial enterprise run by the British South Africa Company. When the Pioneers failed to find another gold-bearing Rand they turned to farming, with small-scale mining as a secondary interest. In 1897 an official British government report noted that slavery – delicately described as ‘compulsory labour’ – was widespread, as was the use of the sjambok to make that labour more productive. However, Rhodes’ diamond-and-gold-based omnipotence tempted London to ignore his company’s ill-treatment of the ‘natives’. A century later the residue of that brutal tradition remains obvious enough to shock newcomers.

Most commercial farms are still white-owned though some blacks – whose sources of wealth do not bear scrutiny – have joined the ranks of the landed. A lucky minority of rural blacks own subsistence farms, the soil pale and poor, or have a share in a new and usually inefficiently run co-operative. Many of the landless are seasonal workers who reap tobacco for Z$175 a month, the minimum legal wage, equivalent to £16 at the 1993 rate of exchange. As in South Africa, those workers are allowed to cultivate small plots of their employer’s land. In 1948 the Danziger Commission decided that 10 acres (not hectares) was enough for both the cultivating and grazing needs of a black family in Southern Rhodesia. Forty-five years later a tobacco farmer told me that 40 hectares (100 acres) of tobacco could keep a white family in modest comfort – yet farms of up to 80,000 hectares are common. Moreover, in addition to their spacious homes many whites have a holiday bungalow on the Kariba dam, complete with speedboat. All this under a black government … Peering apprehensively into South Africa’s future I wonder if, more than a decade after ‘liberation’, the needs of the majority will be similarly disregarded.

Zimbabwe, too, had been transformed by the ending of the drought. Everything was thriving: tobacco, maize, sorghum, cotton, sunflowers, pastureland. The clarity of the light, especially after a rain shower, exaggerated each colour: the redness of the soil, the greenness of the forests, the silveriness of the cliffs, the whiteness of high, complicated cloudscapes. Sometimes surreal granite-rock formations towered over the road where erosion had gone mad, creating gravity-defying constructions: piles of house-sized boulders on cliff-edges, looking as though a finger could topple them. Other crazily marvellous geological aberrations were visible in mountain form, thrusting up along distant horizons in a wild disarray of angularity.

Having ascended to Karoi by bus, I had forgotten Mashonaland’s altitude: about 5,000 feet. From Zvishavane a spectacular descent, around and around and around precipitous forested mountains, took me into enervating heat. Here stretch many miles of unpeopled rough bush, unused though capable of sustaining cattle. This whole area is extra-securely fenced as the property of Union Carbide – an ominous name, posted on gateways under ‘KEEPOUT!’ warnings. Throughout Zimbabwe, I found cycling past so much fenced farmland disquieting. Those fences, essential on commercial farms, are profoundly – philosophically – unAfrican.

Next day I was down to the punishing lowveld, sweating towards the Limpopo on a road hideously yellow-carpeted with squashed locusts. The unsquashed compounded the repulsiveness of the scene by eating their dead comrades. All around loomed baobabs, those most improbable of trees, seeming sculptures rather than growths. By sharing their vitality with humans and animals, baobabs – immensely complex organisms – have saved countless lives. In regions otherwise waterless the fibrous wood secretes water, some fruit trees storing up to 5,000 litres. Wherever it grows the baobab’s fruit is the locals’ main source of vitamin C and women believe it increases their fertility, which may well be true. I rested under one awesome giant, leaning reverently against a trunk perhaps three or four thousand years old.

My last evening in Zimbabwe was spent in Peter’s Motel on the border, beer-drinking with truckers from Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland. No one was even remotely interested in the politics of the new South Africa; they had other things on their mind, like feeding their wives and families by fair means or foul. Helpful hints were exchanged about which sort of bribe was most acceptable to which customs officer; everyone seemed to be smuggling something to or from somewhere. An alarming number did not retire alone. One can only hope they used the free condoms found on their bedside tables.

PART I

Pre-elections

March to August 1993

1

In at the Deep End

Messina – Venda – GaKagapane

It was never the bad guys who got into trouble in the townships. It was almost always one of the tiny, tiny minority of whites who were willing to break the unwritten rules that governed everyone else.

Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart (1990)

Messina, Transvaal, 9 March 1993

The wide no man’s land between Zimbabwe and South Africa still looks rather sinister. During the 1980s Comrade Mugabe authorized Umkhontu we Sizwe (the ANC’s armed wing, MK for short) to open an infiltration route through Zimbabwe from their training camps in Angola. The South African Defence Force (SADF) then devised an ‘electrified parapet’ – 20,000-volt wires on a high wall – reinforced by dense rolls of razor wire (a South African invention) and a ‘living barricade’ of aggressive-looking sisal. Now the wires are rusted and sagging but the sisal flourishes, its serrated swords forming a threatening frieze above the road.

From the rail-cum-road Bridge of Beit – a starkly utilitarian construction – I gazed down at the sluggish Limpopo, dully brown, not yet catching the rays of the newly risen sun. At this hour there was no traffic and under a curiously colourless sky all was hushed. For miles on either side of the river lay flat uninhabited veld, green-dotted with thornbushes. To the north-east rose Zimbabwe’s Mateke Hills, smooth-crested and powder blue. In the Messina direction towered a high tangle of mine machinery; copper has been mined hereabouts from time immemorial. And to the south (it suddenly seemed improbable, after so many years of waiting) – to the south stretched all of South Africa, a country in transition, Land of Hope and Tension.

The border-post suggests no diminution of white supremacy; it is guarded by well-armed expressionless young Afrikaners in crisp uniforms. Here the AIDS-education posters, so conspicuous on the walls of every border-post between Kenya and Zimbabwe, are replaced by anti-terrorist posters illustrating life-size limpet mines and hand grenades and other such lethal gadgets. A fading legend on a weather-beaten board says WELCOME TO SOUTH AFRICA, a sentiment not echoed in the voices or eyes of the immigration and customs officers. When a visa form was thrust towards me I disingenuously declared: ‘Purpose of Visit – TOURISM; Duration of Stay – TWOMONTHS; Profession – RETIRED TEACHER.’ It seemed advisable, even in 1993, not to admit to being a writer on a six-month visit.

The customs officers ignored Lear’s two small dusty pannier-bags, not in a genial way but contemptuously. My first South African smile came from the black policeman who opened the gate releasing me on to the highway.

Two Stuttaford Removals pantechnicons were parked nearby – a sign of the times. In the early 1980s thousands of ‘Rhodies’ who couldn’t take black rule migrated south. Now, to the sardonic amusement of their friends who stayed put, many are attempting to re-migrate north. For those who became South African citizens this is not possible; a fair enough ruling, though they don’t think so. But any who retained Zimbabwean citizenship are welcome back.

The ten miles to Messina, through dreary lowveld, are memorable only for their litter-strewn verges. Broken beer bottles, plastic milk bottles, fast-food containers, paper handkerchiefs, disposable nappies, cooldrinks tins, sheets of newspaper, cigarette packets and plastic bags by the hundred – all proof that South Africa is a developed country … On either side high steel-mesh fences indicate that this is still military territory. At 8 a.m. it was already too hot.

When Messina’s black township appeared on a wide hillside invisible from the whites’ dorp, I turned left and pedalled slowly upwards on a rough track. Soon I was surrounded by hundreds of little tin-roofed homes in tiny plots – most gardens neat and flowery, a few shimmy, each with an outside latrine. Many dwellings have brightly painted woodwork and curtained windows, some have lean-to shacks at the back. Electricity has recently been laid on for the minority who can afford it. Small supermarkets stock a range of manufactured goods and processed foods unseen (outside of the capitals) between Nairobi and Karoi. I counted seven churches, some hut-sized; South Africa has approximately 3,500 indigenous Churches, independent of the imported variety, their memberships varying from hundreds to millions. On the township’s southern edge, upwardly mobile blacks occupy new two-storeyed brick houses with garages attached. By the standard of black Africa, all this looks like affluence.