Quirky travelogue on life in an upside-down land

In Rainbow Nation My Zulu Arse travel writer Sihle Khumalo casts his gaze on our rainbow nation and it’s a zoom through our country that is funny and thought-provoking.

The first leg of the journey begins at a cracking pace. And it continues that way. Taking his wife and two children they visit areas of political, historical interest such as Sharpeville and Boipatong. He writes: “Leaving Boipatong, I spotted youngsters sitting on verandas and pavements sharing 750ml beer bottles. I checked the time. It was 09:54” — and such details of the social fabric of life in SA today pepper Khumalo’s story. Woven through his visit is an account of the Boipatong Massacre that occurred in 1993. 

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Diary extracts (2008)

Wednesday, April 9 2008

Aboard MV Mozart, Danube River

Gliding through Europe on the MV Mozart, on the Danube, on another press trip. Making our way toward Budapest, the Danube greeny-grey rather than its fabled blue. I sampled Munich in two days, saw Dachau, boarded the boat, peeked into the village of Durnstein, tasted Vienna in the form of a Sacher torte. And now, gliding toward Budapest, formerly a place name on a map, now a place I’m going to be able to name, say I saw.

I’m a million miles from home, making my way through a gentle, peaceful Europe where it’s safe to walk around at night, where you catch trains and buses to go home, and they run on time. Trying to explain home to the people who share my table at night in the dining room is like trying to explain Mars to earthlings. “So do you catch the train into town?” asked Roger, the English investment banker. And how could I begin to explain Johannesburg with its chaotic roads, the minibuses going where they like, the buses that are infrequent, if they come at all? The minibuses that are not state controlled, are often not road worthy with Coke bottles attached to steering wheels to hold brake fluid and screw drivers sometimes serving as steering wheels? Every time I open my mouth I feel like I’m telling tales, exaggerating or complaining. At dinner I drink bitter lemon (called dry lemon at home) and say how much I enjoy it, and say that I haven’t been able to get it for a while as we ran out of gas to make it. Or so I assume. Because we seem to be told regularly that we’ve run out of gas when you can’t find a brand of cold drink, or even sparkling mineral water.

Similarly I can’t explain the joke the SAA pilot made as we flew out of OR Tambo and the lights were, as usual, put off before we lifted into the air: “Load shedding is about to begin,” said the pilot, and those South Africans on board caught the joke and laughed wryly. How do you explain load shedding?

And so South Africa follows me here. People are interested in what’s going on. A Swedish woman on the Dachau tour asked me if it was dangerous to go out into the “woods” or “forest”. Knowing she meant the veld or the bush, I think, I said not really, as lodges are often protected by fences, and you can take guided walks with rangers, and they often carry guns. I did speak of the dangers of crime, however, and that tourists become victims as they aren’t aware of the dangers. A tourist went running along the beach at night and was raped. You can perhaps do this in Europe, go running on a beach at night, but you can’t do this in South Africa. So I said no, the animals weren’t dangerous as such, if you keep to designated areas, stay in a game drive vehicle. It was the people – although, along with that, there is a tremendous amount of friendliness and goodwill.

But of course your country does follow you. I walked the streets of Munich at night and it was fine and safe. Of course if anyone came too close, just trying to pass, I tensed automatically. And yes, thefts happen anywhere, but you can still do this in Europe. Stroll with your bag, an ordinary, not very amazing thing to do. And yet, it’s not something I’d ever do at home. In Johannesburg we drive from mall to mall. The level of fear, of threat to your body all the time, is unimaginable to Europeans.

And so the comparisons follow me through Europe. You expect the safety, the neat, quiet orderliness of Germany, of Europe, but still you can’t quite believe it. It feels comfortable to catch a cab from Munich airport one morning and then to suddenly realise how quiet, neat and orderly the streets are. When someone hoots you turn to look around around, because it’s all so unusual, it disrupts the serenity. It actually feels odd. And you wonder why someone has dared to put their hand on the hooter. And yet, it’s only leaving Munich that you suddenly realise there are no beggars and no hawkers at every robot. Again, how unusual.

There are beggars of course. Not everywhere. One at the main train station, a Gypsy-looking woman, face creased into pleading. A man on a street corner. Another sitting on a pavement in Vienna, a young man with long, brown hair, head bowed to the ground, yet with his hands outstretched, waiting. But they are seemingly, oddities, few enough not to be noticed. A mime artist dressed as Mozart, hands outstretched as you point your camera at him. Another form of begging, you could say, and he’d probably argue with you.

Munich. Beggars and casinos and strip clubs. Kebab shops on just about every corner. And the internet shop was run by Turks. I emailed South Africa listening to Turkish music, while pecking my way through a German keyboard. The z is where the y is, and I never did find the apostrophe. The Chinese ran cheap shops where I bought a 10 euro canvas bag. And sex saloons: a winking figure of a plastic woman, red lights flashing from an interior, Abba blaring out into the street. So many of them and the casinos too, seemingly open all the time. And on Sunday, as in apartheid South Africa, the shops are closed. You can only window shop. Only the kebab shops, restaurants, internet cafes are open.

One night I saw a young woman eating in an Asian restaurant, all by herself. Forking her food in a dimly-lit place, quite self-contained. Perhaps I glanced at her for a second only, and her partner or friend was simply in the toilet. And then again, perhaps not.

Budapest. The waters of the Danube are finally beginning to look blue if you look towards the distance. We’re docked in the heart of yet another old, grand European city, surrounded by famous buildings, history, a sense of proud grandeur. It’s a film set setting; you can’t help but be impressed.

Friday April 18 2008

Back home. Each journey throws up another nuance, reveals something different to you, or about you. Each journey highlights a particular place in your life, and each journey is ultimately about you, not the country you’re visiting or the city you’re wondering through. Seen at another time your experience is altered. I loved Spain when I visited three years ago, yet couldn’t wait to leave it when I visited last June, and this time I fell in love with Europe all over again.

Sunday May 25 2008

Glancing at a newspaper article this week: 20 percent of South Africans in the 18-44 age bracket are considering emigrating – that’s the prime of the working population.

Meanwhile xenophobic attacks have plagued the country for the past two weeks. They started in Gauteng, attacks on foreigners living in South Africa, spreading from the townships to Cleveland and Hillbrow last weekend, and then KwaZulu Natal and the Cape. The newspapers are full of images: Mozambicans, Malawians, Congolese and Zimbabweans fleeing the townships, blood pouring from their wounds. Fleeing to churches and police stations where makeshift tent cities are springing up. These people have lost everything: homes, shacks, possessions. Appeals for food, soap, underwear. The Mozambican government has been sending buses to transport them home. Looting of shops and homes. On TV I watched as police fired rubber bullets, roughing up looters who pillaged for food. Two men carting a looted fridge down the road in a mad hurry, doors opening as they hurried, plastic ice trays spilling out. You couldn’t help wondering who the fridge belonged to: a foreigner chased out of his or her home, a foreign-owned shop looted?

Images of the attacks have been flashed around the world. It feels like the 1980s again: the townships on fire, mobs marching, police firing. Town on Tuesday was eerily quiet; the Indian-owned shops near The Star’s building were shut. They did open again on Wednesday.

It took Mbeki days to make a statement about the attacks. And he still hasn’t visited Alexandra township where it all started. It took Morgan Tsvangerai to visit Alex.

The attacks were sparked by fears that immigrants are taking all the jobs away from local workers because foreigners are said to work for less money. Food prices are spiralling. Life is getting harder and unemployment is still (unofficially) at 40 percent. The government has wavered between condemning the attacks, saying they are not xenophobic in nature but are the work of criminals instead. And yet it’s foreigners being targeted, hounded, raced out of their homes. And the most chilling of all: two men necklaced in scenes even more reminiscent of the 80s. And more chilling: a woman laughing as the man burned with the tyre around his neck.

Sunday June 22 2008

Today is Michael’s birthday. Obviously this has been weighing on my mind. The other night I wrote two poems about him, “I’ll always miss dreaming my dreams with you” and “You’re only ten weeks old”. And then today I wrote a short story called, “Finally, a meeting”. About all the times I have imagined bumping into him: from sitting in Trafalgar Square, imagining him being there, say on holiday from Canada; to other times when I have met men who look like him, a training course recently, or a guide at Ichobezi Lodge, to other times I have fantasised about seeing him. This story takes it further, and imagines a meeting sometime in the future, when me as narrator, is in Canada and the new older Michael bumps into her. But she is now happily married. It’s too late now, to do what she’s always wanted to do. I hope it’s good. I enjoyed writing it – a “found” story in the sense that I hadn’t been planning or pondering such a piece.

Funny, or not so funny how he still continues to haunt and dominate me. I realise that at the time of the break up I think I decided I never wanted to be so hurt again. And so, to prevent being hurt, I never did open myself up as I did then, nor fall as heavily for the other men I have known since him. So I did what I set out to do then. It’s only by opening up that you get to experience the roller-coaster of love. It was like a death recovering from that breakup, I’m afraid I won’t survive another. And yet, people do survive.

Friday August 22 2008

I entered the POWA (People Opposing Woman Abuse) writing award. The story had to be about healing from abuse, the journey to healing. I edited 'Octopus Fingers' down to 2 500 words. Cutting the story nearly in half means really paring it down to its essentials. Does it work? It ends differently, and I took out the bit about the woman (based on my mother) never healing from the spousal abuse and I renamed it 'Crumbs'. A few months ago I took another look at it and decided it didn’t work and I must take it out of my MS collection of short stories. Rereading it today, really rereading it by having to prune it, I liked it, revised my decision. But it’s hard to be objective about your own work, to really judge it. And rereading it I thought that the theme of the story is how Hazel (my mother in disguise), doesn’t heal from the abuse, the experience. That’s the whole point of it. A sad point – that some people don’t recover but remain mired in the effects of the abuse, or a bad relationship. *

Sunday August 31 2008

Thinking back to the words used in my childhood, how usage changes not just within a person’s life, but within a few decades. As a child “cookies” were what the Americans called fairy cakes and are now referred to as cupcakes. Now I haven’t heard the word cookies used in years. When did cupcakes supplant cookies? And the word still exists – it’s what the Americans call what we refer to as biscuits.

And then there’s another foodstuff: pasta. At some point we stopped saying “Would you like spaghetti or macaroni?” and asked instead, “Would you like some pasta?”Only then do you choose whether you’ll be eating fettuccine or linguine or penne or whatever. Why the change? Again, who knows.

As a child I heard my mother referring to “rouge”. By the time I was using the stuff in my twenties, in the early 1990s, I referred to “blusher”. My mother still refers to ships and countries as “she”. I do a double take when she says something like, “America is a bully, she should stay out of the war.” She? I know what she means but in my generation’s use, I’d say something like, “The boat, it’s called the MV Mozart.” A boat, for me, is an it. A country even more so. English lost all its gender cases, but for these instances, and yet they have survived in my mother’s lexicon. But not in mine. How odd. Our language stretches and bounces back like elastic. Living, breathing, dynamic.

But what were to happen if English were a dying, vanishing language? Instead of flourishing, let’s pretend there are only a handful of elderly speakers left. When they die, the rich heritage of our literature, movies, music, idioms, dies with them. It’s an unutterably lonely feeling. To think if losing the language you’ve known since birth, loved and lived in. To think that your language dies with you: its unique sounds, its hard masculine character, its flexibility. And yes, it’s unimaginable to think this of English when it’s such an alive language, with life being breathed into it every day by its millions and billions of speakers. It pulses. And yet, this language death is happening to so many marginal languages, from Aboriginal languages, to Native American, to others that are clinging, Provencal, or look at Cornish, now clawing its way back with a few determined students learning it. For English speakers it’s unimaginable not being surrounded by our language. But contemplate it, imagine it. It feels lonely; it feels like you’re the last person left on planet earth. (And there are aliens out there.)

Monday September 22 2008

Dance of friendship. The uncertainty of it. I never can take anyone for granted; friendships like balls, sparkly balls dangling from a Christmas tree. I could say or do the wrong thing. The lack of intimacy. Yes, I do talk about what matters – work issues, writing, but I don’t go further now. Say how jittery I feel about the future, not sharing deep personal stuff. So many friends don’t know about my childhood or my teen years and how that scars and cuts me up still. I feel like it’s an essential part of me, of who I am, the way I am. Seeing personal stuff as being dirty. Yet, friends do tell each other these things.

Wednesday October 1 2008

October, birthday month. “At the age of thirty-seven,” sings Marianne Faithfull in “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, my favourite song, “she realised she’d never ride in a sports car in Paris with the warm wind in her hair.” I’m still hoping that’s to come. Paris, warm wind, love.

Thursday October 2 2008

I love the short story. It’s definitely my genre, whether I go on to write novels, or novellas, or anything else, I’ll always have to write short stories, be satisfied by writing them, and reading others’. Alice Munro made her name writing stories. It’s what I want to do. That and personal essays, personal travel writing, some journalism. And have the space to tackle larger projects too, when I want to.

Sunday October 12 2008

Out last night with Jenny to see Coupe, a quietly brilliant play, created by Sylvaine Strike and Sue Pam Grant and the members of the Fortune Cookie Company. Set in a coupe, a second-class train compartment, three people share the compartment, a Frenchwoman, speaking only French, a twittery nervous English-speaking South African and an Afrikaner. Each speaks only in their own language to each other, and yet they manage to communicate. A revolving coupe is the stage set as they travel overnight. A play filled with layers, levels, meaning. Nuances. The head of a gazelle affixed to the wall of the coupe becomes mirror, repository of deep dreams and desires. As night goes on and each sleep another kind of communication takes place, More unnamed desires emerge. Each caught up in their own impossibilities. A rich work that lives on, no wonder it’s won so many awards and has garnered such a reputation.

At Jenny’s you feel the passage of years, not a weight, it doesn’t feel oppressive. The photographs in frames, on the fridge, in her bedroom, her family, brothers and sisters, her daughter as a baby, a toddler, a teen, grown up, Jenny and her husband through the years. Jenny seated at a typewriter in the 1980s. The settled feeling, you feel, you know that they have created lives, histories together, a warm, satisfied feeling, a contentment is present.

Saturday, November 22 2008

Went away with Venise to Umkwali Reserve to track cheetah. As always with Venise we find ourselves discussing personal things. We spoke a bit about Michael – this haunted, unresolved relationship in my life – and at one point she commented that everything I brought about him seemed negative. That observation felt uncomfortable and I laughed it off by saying but oh he looked so good and sexy in his leather jacket with his broad, handsome shoulders. I knew what I was doing – not wanting to see that comment or dwell on the negative, that there was a lot wrong with that relationship, when I often romanticise it. And I didn’t want Venise feeling like she had to analyse me. That’s her job as a therapist, I don’t want her to think she has to bring it to our friendship, be my therapist.

But her words reverberated and I have been thinking about it, and how right she was with that observation, and it closed something, that comment. How is it that no-one else has ever said it, seen the negative of that relationship through all my talking about it? Did the therapist I saw ten years ago, ever comment like this? Have friends ever said the same? Perhaps I haven’t been ready to hear that before, if it has been said. But suddenly, somehow, I was ready to hear it, and admit that yes there was a lot wrong with it and that it wasn’t right. A door clanged quietly: I stopped obsessing about Michael, and wondering what he might be doing now. Somehow that comment made me let him go, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, married, divorced, with kids or without. It no longer mattered to me to know. I put him in the past. A door shut and with it shutting, I saw other possibilities. It was the most liberating feeling. Could it be that I am finally over Michael? It feels like it.

* 'Crumbs' was published by POWA in 2009.

These extracts were published in In Our Own Words: A generation defining itself, 2008

Soweto Crawl

If you’ve done the Soweto Heritage route, seen Mandela’s house and the Hector Peterson Memorial, there’s something new on the tourist map. Take a Soweto shebeen tour with the Soweto Rhubuluza. Boarding the minibus you get a goodie bag with a tomato-red vuvuzela, some wors, a cap, a CD with an eclectic sampling of music. Hang onto the vuvuzela, you’ll be making a lot of noise, and that’s all part of the fun. Start drinking on the bus, the cooler box is packed to the brim. It might also be a good idea to include some hangover remedies, guys.

Billed as a team-building exercise for companies, Andrew Law, director of Simkile, who runs the company, showed our media group a DVD of a rather rowdy bunch of workers who had been taken on the shebeen crawl for the day. Bonding there was aplenty.

The shebeen crawl takes you to six shebeens, all varying in style and sophistication. Mathula’s Inn had a few regulars propping up the bar on this Friday afternoon. Situated in Diepkloof Extension (or you may want to say Diepkloof Expensive), it’s all rather dark and gloomy at first, but that just adds to the slightly dingy atmosphere of the place. En route to the next shebeen, you drive past the Ellias Motsoaledi squatter camp, as well as the brightly coloured Soweto cooling towers, icons in their own right.

Next stop is The Shack, the appropriately and delightfully named shebeen. Set at the back of a house in a real tin shack, you can shoot a few rounds of pool, listen to the blaring music, or take a load off outside under the green awnings. A sign tells you to leave your problems at the door, and that doesn’t seem so very hard to do here. Next up is Wandie’s Place. It hardly needs an introduction – Wandies seems as well known overseas as locally.

Wandie’s is lined with messages from all its patrons, as well as curling bank notes from all over the world, and business cards that have been stuck to the walls. Food is rice, as well as green salads, pasta salads, cold sweet potato salad and fish. In Mofolo North you’re taken to a traditional shebeen, Bra Pat’s Place, for a sip, in my case, of sour beer, or Jozi beer. This shebeen is behind an informal spaza shop, right in a dark corridor behind a house. Sit on the rough wooden planks along with the other patrons. It’s late Friday afternoon and the drinking had started hours ago. As dusk fell over Soweto, and the township started humming with commuters and dwellers returning home, we made our way to The Rock for sundowners.

“Everybody goes to the Rock,” said tour guide Gugulethu Buthelezi. Started seven years ago, this nightclub has a huge roof area for jolling the night away, as well as alcoves for smokers. Owner Tebogo Motswai said The Rock attracts 50 percent of its patrons from outside Soweto, a figure that pleases him as it means people are partying in the township even if they don’t live there. “Decision-makers come to Soweto,” he said. “People get tired of town,” he added, referring to anywhere outside of Soweto as town.

We didn’t stay long enough to really see the place pumping, it was early still as we headed back to the bright lights of “town” – but as Tebogo cheerily waved us goodbye, you could tell the night was still young.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, June 2006)

On Tour in Alex

You’re warned that this is the real deal. This is not sanitised, touristoriented Soweto with its B&Bs and museums ready for the public. This is Alexandra where narrow streets are lined with slums, three hostels rise like hulks over the sprawl, and a squatter camp clings to the banks of the Jukskei River. I was told that some foreign tourists are too scared to get out of the minibus, which is pity. Still, you’ll also find your posh areas with fancy copperycoloured gates here, real brick houses, and no squalor or signs of poverty.

Alex is readying itself for tourism. Gone are the days when Alex was called “Dark City” because it didn’t have electricity, or “Nobody’s Baby” because the apartheid government considered it a blight. For years there were plans to demolish Alex, the township in the heart of the northern suburbs. Now there’s a spanking new Mandela Museum set to open later this year or early next, a shopping centre is being planned, and other projects are on the go.

But I was here to be a tourist. Alex may lie a few kilometres away from the wealthy heartbeat of Sandton, but, like many whites, I had never been. Back in apartheid days, Alex had only one entrance, a bridge over the Old Pretoria Road with a sign proclaiming “Whites enter at your own risk”. Today, tour guide Abey Sechoaro, of Bosele Township Experience, told me that there are many entrances.

The day was a typical autumn one, sunlight bright Jo’burg’s roads were packed with cars. “You can take these off,” joked Sechoaro, referring to our seatbelts, as we crossed the bridge and entered Alex. It was a joke alright, referring to the huge division between Alex and out there. It is still like entering a foreign country. From manicured Sandton you glide into narrow streets lined with hawkers, shops selling cheap furniture and other goods, and live chickens are on sale in cages, one for R10, special, two for R17.

And then you enter the oldest part of Alex with makeshift tin shacks, electricity wires spanning the roofs, a bunny aerial dangling from a wire, catching TV signals. Lorded over by one of the men’s hostels, the contrast of poverty and institutionalised building is surreal. Goats scratch among grassy knolls, and a security door is firmly attached to a shack and padlocked. The narrow streets hum with people; informal stalls trade in telephone call units, fruit, vegetables, sweets and canned foods. People sit and chat in the streets, hanging up washing, a group of women were talking companionably as another plaited a woman’s hair.

The atmosphere was languid, but the large amount of people in the streets did point to a more sinister problem: Alex has a high unemployment rate. Those who can trade informally do, opening stalls and spaza shops, others wait. A butcher at the outdoor butchery was hacking away at a dead animal’s head: a clean jawbone lay nearby as smoke from cooking fires rose, the pulpy mass still bore a resemblance to a head. I watched kids playing among the narrow alleyways and paths through the shacks. I entered one where a man stood ironing in a small, dark room. The room was everything: kitchen, bedroom, living area, all in a space somewhat like a jail cell. On the wall, neatly glued pieces of red and white typing paper covers decorated the walls. The air of quiet pride was palpable.

I was taken to Nelson Mandela’s old home – a small brick structure now part of a compound of a group of families. One tap and one toilet sometimes serve up to 40 people. The ugly reality of poverty hits you then, and much of Alex is still mired in it. Inevitably you start to shake your head, that people should still be living like this, queuing for one toilet, making their homes in basic shacks.

It’s not new, this scenario, but glimpsed on the TV, or read about in countless news reports, it doesn’t touch you. You need to enter a shack, feel its cramped confines; you need to enter a compound where you can imagine people lining up before sunrise, waiting to use the facilities before rushing off to catch one or two or sometimes three minibuses to get to work by eight. Only then do you really start to get an understanding of poverty, and its wearying effects.

“Let people come to Alex,” Darlene Louw told me over lunch at Joe’s Butchery. She and Liezet Loubser are working on the Alex renewal project. She’s enthusiastic about what the township has to offer tourists, and suggests that some should do a stayover: “There’ll be some who miss their BMWs when they’re waiting for their taxis in a long line.”

“Not to mention those with beat-up Toyotas too,” I added. No matter how old your car it still beats waiting in long queues and spending hours going home. But Alex is not just about shacks and poverty, of course. There are posher areas, there’s also a gym, Ikasi gym, powered by Virgin Active. Here I saw an array of gym equipment and met a young artist, Tumi Masite, hawking striking paintings. The gym is attached to a side of a house. In a cheeky bit of humour a sign on the opposite sign of the road points to a rock painted with South Africa’s flag and warns passing pedestrians, “Don’t piss here”. In a corner shop I read another sign offering snoopy juice and vanilla mayo, but patrons were ordered not to read the sign without paying.

I visited an RDP house, built in 1999, but was told the walls were cracking and the roof leaked. This house belonged to another tour operator, Patrick Gumede, a friend of Sechoaro’s, who was busy on his laptop when I barged in, wanting to see his home. He was cheerful about this unexpected intrusion, however. At Borch’s Place we met up with some late morning patrons who also cheerfully obliged me in posing, and drinking while I took photos. This shebeen is being upgraded and is run by Monica Borchardt.

We travelled through Phase One and the East Bank, newer areas with proper housing. As we drove Sechoaro told me about his passion for encouraging tourism in Alex. Still a resident of the township where he grew up, he started his tourism business four years ago. He does all sorts of tours – from Pretoria to Soweto to Alex and beyond – but it’s Alex that he really is passionate about. It was a sentiment echoed by Darlene. “Alex has a vibe, you’ve got to look at how to sell this vibe. If tourists want to see night life in Alex, then each shebeen will offer them a particular type of vibe.” In addition a community hall is being turned into a theatre. It seems Alex gets into your bones; Sechoaro was almost speechless in trying to impart what it was about Alex that continued to grip him. Somehow the words “a special place” don’t quite do it justice.

I picked up a copy of the knock-and-drop Alex News at a corner shop. The headline that morning was, appropriately enough, “Revival of Alex on track”. According to the paper, living conditions were continuing to be improved, while construction of the Alex stadium should resume. A letter from a proud Alex resident, Monde Mbingeleli, seemed to sum it up when he proclaimed that “an Alexandrian is anyone with a place to stay in Alexandra, whether living in a shack or a house”. As we left I saw yet another sign: “It’s happening in Alex!”


(Published in The Sunday Independent, June 2006)

A place of sadness

On a trip to Cape Town I decide to join the tourists and take a trip out to Robben Island. It was opened in the late 1990s as a tourist destination, but I’ve always flown in and out of the Cape in a monumental hurry, the island lying out to sea marked into a future agenda.

I purchase tickets at the Nelson Mandela Museum Gateway, located in the Cape Town Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. You walk through tourist-kitsch shops, and get mistaken for a tourist. Perhaps it’s the big camera you’re lugging. When you discover that your camera’s batteries are dead and rush into a camera shop to buy more , the salesman informs you that you can go reclaim VAT at the shop upstairs. Smiling and saying no, I’m from here, I mean South Africa, well Johannesburg, as though Johannesburg were really a foreign country and we both smile together as the man says, “You’re lucky. We’re lucky to live in such a country, aren’t we?” Aren’t we.

The first taste of Robben Island comes in the mini museum at the Gateway. Waiting to board the ferry, I rifle through the past. Opening up a cabinet I find old notebooks kept by the prisoners, there are old accounts: R20-odd collected by them for a prison jazz club in the 1960s.

The ferry leaves. The scenery is picturesque: from the bulk of Table Mountain forming a backdrop to the working harbour, to the prettified buildings in colourful pastels, Victorian style. Cape Town’s famous miserable winter hasn’t arrived, the weather is mild, the sun out.

The boat dips and dives toward the island, a journey of a half an hour.

Once on the island, it’s off the ferry and onto a bus for a guided tour. Our guide, 21-year-old student Craig van der Horst, is enthusiastic, witty and extremely knowledgeable. Life was harsh for prisoners on the island, of course, it was meant to be. Visits by family members were sometimes allowed once a month, sometimes only every six months. They lasted 30 minutes, and the conversation could only be conducted in English or Afrikaans. A guard was always present, and the prisoners weren’t allowed to discuss prison life or conditions, or any other prisoners. Their subjugation began the moment they arrived on the island. They were already chained at the ankles, short men paired with tall so that the chains chaffed, making their ankles bleed, humiliating them from day one, a painful introduction to life as a prisoner.

A brief history of Robben Island follows, from leper colony from 1846 to 1931, to prison. There is a leper graveyard that serves as a reminder of those who were banished here. When Craig asks if anyone knows who Robert Sobukwe is, only the handful of South Africans raise their hands.

“It’s a sad story,” says Craig, “he has been forgotten.” Sobukwe was responsible for organising the mass rally to protest against the carrying of passbooks that turned into the Sharpeville massacre on March 21 1960. It was a strong show of defiance against the apartheid government, a turning point. The struggle went underground, became militant, and the eyes of the international community were opened to the brutalities that were taking place. Sobukwe was arrested, and kept on the island indefinitely. It was that first time that parliament introduced a law that would ensure he was kept there. He was not allowed contact with anyone except parliamentarians, who would make yearly treks to persuade him to apologise and renounce his ways in exchange for his release. When he didn’t, they would extend his stay. Four years of silence damaged his vocal cords. Sobukwe died of cancer.

Past the leper graveyard and onto the small village. There is, of course, a Church Street, as there is in every town in South Africa. The village housed the children of the warders, and a primary school was built to educate their children. From 1963 only white wardens were allowed to work on the island. You begin to wonder who these wardens were. What were their children like? What was it like to live on a prison island – never seeing the prisoners, yet always aware of what must have seemed a hidden menace?

A church built by Sir Herbert Baker in 1895 still stands in stone grandeur, now owned by the Anglican Church. An older church, the Garrison Church, built in 1841, is a popular wedding venue today. There’s a twinkle in guide Craig’s voice as he says: “Last year 28 people got married there on Valentine’s Day.”

The old Commissioner’s Residence, in cheery red and white, is now a guest-house. “So if you miss the ferry you’ll be quite comfortable,” says Craig.

And then there are the animals. There are four frustrated male ostriches without a mate. Buck roam. Parts of the island are now restricted sites, hence we’re not allowed off the bus. A nature reserve for the African oystercatcher bird. A lighthouse built 30m above sea level hasn’t always prevented shipwrecks. Prisoners tried to escape. One man tried three times and was caught on the other side every time.

The lime quarry was where prisoners like Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki and other political prisoners, housed in Section B, toiled in blinding glare, with no protection, damaging their eyesight.

“Today Mandela cannot cry because his tear ducts are damaged, and you can’t use a flash when photographing him,” Craig tells us. Guards patrolled the piercingly white quarry; a policy of shoot to kill existed. The toilet was a hole in the wall, a confined space where, everyday 32 prisoners relieved themselves, uncovering each others’ waste. Yet more humiliation and degradation. They worked and slept in their clothes. Now empty, but still emitting a blinding glare, the place feels harsh, forbidding, lifeless. You could just about imagine the prisoners still toiling, the guards patrolling as Craig describes it.

“This was the birthplace of the new South Africa,” Craig intones. “In the quarry they had contact that was denied to them in the cells. They gave each other hope. They were planning the new South Africa.” Pause. “This is the birthplace of the new South Africa. Welcome to parliament.”

A silence on the bus. Has Craig gone too far now? This has become theatre, it’s slightly uncomfortable, not propaganda exactly, but something mawkish, fawning, adulatory. Once inside the prison, a former inmate Glen Ntsoelongoe, prisoner No 3884, takes over the tour. Standing in the cold blue stone courtyard Glen addresses a too-large group, of mostly foreign tourists.

Robben Island was used for only political prisoners, the minimum sentence was five years, the maximum was life. White political prisoners served time in Pretoria. Up to 60 prisoners shared a communal cell. The section we’re standing in, outside Section B, was known as the “high command”, the place where Mandela and the other Rivonia trialists had their cells. The walls of the courtyard are built from “blue stone”, mined on the island, which lends a cold, grim prison-like feel to the courtyard.

We are finally taken inside, to see Mandela’s famous cell, Block B, number five. It’s a small, cramped cell, like all the others, wide enough for an iron bed, the length just about equal to that bed. There are cold, green bars, a grimy blanket still covers his bed. I take some really bad photos, there’s too much jostling and elbowing. The foreign tourists stand in front of the cell and pose for portraits. It feels like a travesty. This was a man’s cell; he was incarcerated here from 1964 to 1982. And here are these tourists smiling happily for the cameras, wanting this as a memento, as proof of their visit: photos in front of the great man’s cell. It feels sick. I walk away in disgust, my friend following me. We have no desire to pose and smile. Perhaps it’s because we’re South Africans, and lived through and remember the apartheid that allowed this prison cell to exist. We can only try to understand the tourists – for them this is another stop on the agenda of things to do while in the country. There are no memories for them. I wonder if we’re being oversensitive.

When, days later, I finish reading the novel The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, by Ellen Feldman, I find an echo of what we have experienced. The novel tells the imagined story of what would have happened had Peter van Pels, one of those who hid in the Secret Annexe with Anne Frank, had survived and immigrated to the US. In a scene towards the end of the book Peter visits the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam, and it all feels wrong. Instead of silence, people whispering and the stench of fear, there are gawkers tromping loudly through the cramped annexe, gaping in awe. Outside a young girl poses next to a statue of Anne Frank. For Peter this is all still wrong; for him this place means so much more than a tourist site. To a lesser degree, certainly, that’s what two South Africans feel looking at tourists being snapped in front of cell number five.

The tour is rushed, and we hardly have a chance to get a feel of this grey place. We have little time to peer in the cells, to wonder what life must be like when freedom is taken away from you. There are photos of previous occupants, and their stories. In Saths Cooper’s cell (1976 to 1982) I see a single tatty brush displayed and the story behind it: “It was a problem getting this brush because the prison authorities only allowed combs to be brought in. I had to make application after application until, eventually, in my second year of imprisonment on Robben Island, they took an order for a hairbrush and it is a fairly hardy brush, appropriate for Robben Island weather.”

Other stories: refusing to dig in a particular quarry results in having privileges denied for a year, and isolation from other prisoners. Tokyo Sexwale’s cell (1978 to 1990) has a soccer ball mounted in a wooden grip. Referring to the popularity of sport in the prison, he writes: “This thought, that we are part of the global village, our isolation notwithstanding, was the driving force of our existence.”

But there’s little time to really read the plaques. I rush on, with the rest of the group. Glen takes us to the communal cell where he was incarcerated with others. There’s a board detailing the differences in food rations for allowed for “Asiatics/Coloureds”, the B group, and the “Bantu”, the C group. Breakfast is the same for both: but fat is an ounce for B group and half an ounce for blacks. The disparities continue: six ounces of meat for the coloureds, five for the blacks. Jam syrup was denied to the blacks, sugar was also regulated, two ounces for all except the blacks, they have to make do with one and half ounces. Who made these arbitrary decisions? No mention of fruit or vegetables, and the only protein those ounces of meat.

Guide Glen shares a small part of what life must have been like. He says: “We were only allowed to write one letter a month of 300 words, in English or Afrikaans. As in the visits, no political mention was allowed in the letters. Censorship of them was by scissors or blackout with a marker. You weren’t guaranteed 12 letters a year – it was up to the head of the prison whether to post that letter. I had only four visits in the time I was here, from 1984 to 1991. But I wrote and received lots of letters.”

Soweto-raised Glen left for Botswana at the age of 15, joined the ANC in Tanzania and was trained in guerrilla warfare and the use of explosives. In 1983 he and a team had instructions to infiltrate South Africa. But it turned out that the supposedly “safe house” was swarming with security personnel. Glen was captured and tortured for six months.

“Torture didn’t keep regular hours. It could happen at 2am, 9am, 5pm. We were kept naked as it took too much time to take our clothes off. I don’t remember a day I was not bleeding. “We were charged with treason. We knew we were going to be found guilty. I was sentenced to 25 years. I came here on December 23rd, 1984. Life was never the same again. “I left here on May 17th, 1991. I continued working in the ANC. In 2003 I came here to do this job, to be a guide. I stay on this island for some reason. I have no regrets. This had to be done or I would only be leaving in 2009. That would have been a very long time.”

We stream out to catch the ferry back. We want to take a look in the souvenir shop and find it closed, even though it’s before 5pm. The shop assistant slams the door in our faces. We’re shocked, outraged. Robben Island is a sad place to be: the sadness seeps out everywhere. It underscores the visit, lies around us like a cloud. As the vista of blue sea spreads before us it is disturbing to think of what had been going on here while people like us were leading ordinary, unfettered lives.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, July 2006)

On the cat walk

He takes us to the little wooden house he first occupied when arriving at this private 18 000ha reserve in Limpopo Province. Now the wooden home is mainly unoccupied, and the garden is a little overgrown, but it was here that the dream of a home for cheetahs was born...Read more here

As one with the elephants

An elephant's hide is curiously soft, wrinkled and folded over on itself, but also incredibly soft. That was a surprise; only having seen elephants in the wild from game drive vehicles, I had assumed the skin to be as tough and coarse as it looks from afar. Elephants also have their own personalities, and that weekend at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hartebeespoort, we all fell in love with our individual elephants...Read more here

Spanish lessons in Málaga

My cousin, Déborah, has a new maid starting work this afternoon. Moroccan, she comes highly recommended by friends. OK, I think, I’ll be back only after six, so I won’t get to meet her. Wrong. She’s coming from five to eight o’clock tonight. Of course. Déborah did say afternoon after all, and in Spain afternoon doesn’t end at six or so as it does everywhere else. And neither does work. Spain, especially in Andalusia, still observes the traditional long lunch and siesta. Shop gates shut at two and so the long afternoon begins. Settle down for a lunch lasting several courses and find some Spaniards to pass the afternoon with. They’ve been doing it all their lives, unlike the tourists, wondering bewildered, wondering what to do with ourselves.

And then, come five o’clock and shop fronts go up again, offices open, and workers carry on into what we’d call night, meaning that the Spanish work longer hours than many other Europeans. But it’s summer and it doesn’t get dark till nine or so. Isn’t that really afternoon then, goes the explanation. Don’t argue. Don’t point out that in winter it doesn’t stay light after six and darkness falls when it should. It’s pointless to argue, after all. Spain is a country with traditions and customs stretching back centuries.

A Spanish-born, South African-raised, argumentative visitor who doesn’t really speak the language isn’t going to change things. Might as well enjoy the differences and meet the new maid.

Which you do. Her Arabic-influenced Spanish sounds perfect to you, although Déborah and her husband, Juanmi, tell you it’s grammatically challenged, to say the least. You don’t quite know what to do with yourself, hours and norms turned upside down. But you are adjusting to eating supper at 10 at night, so a maid cleaning the floors at eight at night is just one more adjustment
in the fabric of your time in Spain.

Still, you notice the differences, remark on them, and they are a source of much conversation.

Why does English have such an annoying habit of joining words: “take-out” and “dish cloth”, for instance? New words are created all the time in this way, and it’s a foreign concept to Déborah and Juanmi.

“In Spanish there’s one word for things,” says Juanmi crossly,“you can’t join words together.”

Too true, but doesn’t this lend English a wonderful elasticity and variety?

“I think it comes from the German roots of English,” you say, “I think German does that.”

In fact you have never thought about it, even as you go about joining words with the alacrity all native English-speakers do. Meanwhile Juanmi is busy mixing up kitchen and chicken, but not to worry. Not half as embarrassing as trying to say you’d like the thigh, when asked what part of the chicken you’d enjoy.

When your aunt blushes red and there’s laughter around the table, you know you’ve made a boo-boo. You’ve asked to eat a man’s thing rather than the thigh. Never mind. You’re among family.

You’re also among family as you unwittingly turn yourself into a male by using masculine endings, and it’s your turn to get cross, asking, one dinner, why Spanish doesn’t just have one form for all nouns and adjectives, like English. What’s with this masculine, feminine, tables are female as are chairs, and the beach is both masculine and feminine, depending on whether you’re trying to be poetic or not.

In one of your more tired moments – you’ve been battling to speak Spanish to shopkeepers all day, English seems woefully unknown – you suggest that Spanish change just a little and from now you’re just going to wilfully ignore all rules. You don’t realise such a statement can hurt however.

You’re talking about English again, and how it is bent out of shape by all the billions of people who speak it as second and third languages, Déborah says then she should be allowed to say “buyed” instead of “bought”. Ouch, that hurts and you realise what you’ve done.

OK, you’ll try to get your masculine and feminine endings in order. Language is as close to you as a loved one. You often don’t realise how attached you are to your English-speaking country.

It hits home when you walk into a bookshop in Málaga and ask if they have any books in English. They do, surprisingly, because I mean, you are in Spain. But you realise that you are a typical English-speaker in many ways: you’d probably expect to find some English books to buy in outer Mongolia. After all, the whole world should just speak English, shouldn’t it?

Browsing among a limited selection, you’re surrounded by novels in Spanish by authors you have never heard of. The covers are wild swirls of artwork, and you can’t reach and touch with anything approaching understanding. How frustrating. Even Juanmi’s novel, recently published, is a closed world to you. You translate the title into English but get no further.

Instead you discover a Survival book to living in Spain and read of expats, so many Brits, who try to make a life along the Costa del Sol, and don’t exactly thrive. It’s hard to make friends, they say, it’s hard to earn a good living, it’s hard to integrate.

The Spanish, it would appear, are a closed, homogeneous society. With the number of expats coming and going, not settling, and moving on shortly, it’s no wonder many Spanish often don’t befriend them. Why bother? Then there are the enormous numbers of retirees who buy homes and go about creating a little England in the sun, complete with satellite TV that brings you all the BBC channels, and fish and chip shops serving mushy peas. They often don’t even bother to learn Spanish.

Later you meet an English-speaking journalist who’s lived here 20 years, is married to a Spaniard and has two daughters. “My husband gets incensed when he sees our neighbours and they greet him in English,” she tells me. “Can’t they say hola, acknowledge that they’re in a different country?”

You read in Giles Tremlett’s book Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past of expats who retire to the coast. Walking through n “urbanisation” or complex of townhouses, he asks an English ex-pat if there are any foreigners in the town. “No, not really,” he answers, “There is one Norwegian, the rest of us are British.”

You laugh wryly.

Wondering about this friendship thing once more you talk late into the night with Déborah about friends made and lost, and where she has met her own circle of close friends. And then you ask something: she keeps referring to a cousin of Juanmi’s as a friend. Is he a cousin or a friend? Well, he’s really a cousin, she says, but he’s part of their social circle, so he’s a friend. The terms are used interchangeably and you start to get a sense of the close-knit circle Spanish people move in.

“We don’t have people to lunch on Sundays,” Déborah tells me another day. “People spend that time with family, they are not available.”

How odd to this South African-raised observer. Next day is Sunday of course, and family time. Aunts and uncles come to lunch, the table is laid with Spanish omelette and Iberian ham. Family day, but among the differences, there are the other echoes of globalisation. We talk about the Spanish versions of TV shows in which contestants are made to look 10 years younger with Botox treatments, facelifts, dental caps and well-fitting bras.

“I’d never have plastic surgery,” says my aunt in Spanish. “These lines are me, there’s no one else in the world who has this face.”

You have to agree, but your Spanish isn’t advanced enough to also suggest erhaps some people do need the surgery, that confidence levels improve when they’ve had the nips and tucks, and you are, after all, living in a world where youth is prized as a jewel, some things don’t change, no matter what country you’re in.

But it’s the differences that are challenging and tire you after a while. Wandering Málaga’s streets one day, you’d like a simple lunch. Not a full sit-down meal that’s going to cost you an arm and a leg. After all, you’re carrying hard-earned euros in your pocket. A small Coke is R16, you compute, mouth hanging open. A plate of fish and rice and a bottle of mineral water comes to close to R100. So you’d like a toasted sandwich for lunch.

You tramp the streets, there are no toasted sandwiches in this land of the extravagant lunch. And then you do what you swore you’d never do. You go into a mall and order a takeaway hamburger from a Burger King. It feels like failure, but you don’t need much Spanish to point at the order on the board and you do know what you’re getting, more or less.

Back in the streets you walk among a sea of Spaniards, a homogeneous sea of white. Spotting the odd black face is an event, a novelty. You don’t realise how just how multicultural the society you live in has become. It’s evident in the sea of white faces, and the traditional Spanish food on offer at so many restaurants. Back home you eat pasta at coffee shops, drizzle balsamic vinegar on salads in all sorts of restaurants. It's hard work making your way in a country where English is not as widely spoken as you’d expect. With Spanish being spoken by 417 million in the world as either a first or second language, (English is spoken by 508 million), you find Spanish-speakers have the same insularity that so many English-speakers do, many not having seen the need to learn the language. It’s frustrating, but familiar.

Then The Lion King opens in Johannesburg and you watch a snippet being shown on a newscast one night. You don’t understand much of what they’re saying, but it’s a small glimpse of home and you realise it’s time to leave.

As the plane lifts you away, you watch Spain disappearing. The fields patch-worked into farmlands look like Dalí or Picasso creations. The colours are brown, beige and dark greens. The fields are oblong, oddly shaped approximations of triangles, tapering to curved or hooked points.

Nothing is uniform and nothing is as you would expect.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, August 2007)

Death Camp

Spring day in Munich. Still we are bundled in coats, wrapped tight against the German weather. Huddled around a few benches at the station, a Swedish man and his wife hug each other; a New Zealand woman travelling the world is absorbed in her cellphone; two men from Istanbul wait quietly. We're soon to meet our guide, and share an experience that none of us will forget. Days later, I will be unable to view the pictures on my digital camera. They're there, but the horrors are hard to look at again. It is so much easier to download, then hit delete on the camera card...Read more here