Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This?

by P. J. O'Rourke

  The guests discussed countries the way people their age in Manhattan discuss unfashionable neighborhoods where they might be able to find a decent-sized apartment.

  "We're looking at Australia," said an estate agent.

  "Oh, Christ, England, I guess," said a law clerk from Tom's office. "My grandmother is English."

  "The `Florida option' is what most people are thinking about," said an assistant hotel manager. "Same weather, strong economy, and that's where everybody else goes when their governments fall apart."

  They didn't talk about money or careers. They didn't even talk about apartheid as much as we do.

  "If the United States were serious about fixing the situation here," said the law clerk, "all they'd have to do is give every young professional in South Africa a green card. Nobody would be left." At least nobody they knew very well.

  "When you don't work with people and you don't live with people, you don't know them," said the accountant. "Just the help."

  And the help's attitude, lately, has been, as they put it, "shifting."

  "Who can blame them?" said the law clerk.

  "They say it's those of us who've been moderates," said the estate agent, "who'll have our throats cut."

  "What about the Afrikaners? Do you blame them?" I asked.

  Helpless shrugs all around. "A lot of us are part Afrikaans," said the assistant hotel manager. And he told a Van Der Merwe joke, the South African equivalent of a Polish joke, about an American, an Englishman and Van Der Merwe the Afrikaner. They can each have a wish. All they have to do is run off a cliff and shout their heart's desire. The American runs off the cliff and shouts, "Gold!" A pile of gold bars appears at the bottom of the cliff. The American falls on top of it and he's killed. The Englishman runs off the cliff and shouts, "Silver!" A pile of silver coins appears at the bottom of the cliff. The Englishman falls on top of it and he's killed. Then Van Der Merwe runs off the cliff, but as soon as he gets over the edge he looks down and yells "Oh, shit!" A huge pile of shit appears. Van Der Merwe lands in that and walks away unscathed.

  Those Afrikaners drink a lot, too, though it looked like just plain drinking as far as I could see. I spent an evening in a dirty little bar in a farm town called Humansdorp in the Cape Province. At first I didn't think the locals even noticed I was there. Then I realized they had all been speaking Afrikaans when I came in, but, after they heard me ask for more ice in my whiskey, they switched their conversations into English-still not saying a word to me. The bartender regaled one customer with the details of a practical joke he'd played, putting cayenne pepper in somebody's snuff. The rest of the bar was trading stories about bad and foolish black behavior.

  A kid who'd just gotten back from his two-year army hitch was saying that Namibian girls smear menses mixed with mud all over their bodies. (For all I know it's true but no wierder than some of the ingredients I've noticed in my girlfriend's shampoo lately.) Somebody else said he kept building houses for his farm families, and they kept tearing holes in the roofs to let out the smoke from their cooking fires. There was concerned clucking over the neighborhood black teens. After they're circumcised they're supposed to spend a month alone in the bush, but instead they spend it begging beside the highway. Finally one of the Afrikaners turned to me and asked about sheep farming in the United States. By that time I'd had enough to drink to tell him, although I don't believe I know which end of a sheep you're supposed to feed.

  Then everyone wanted to have a chat. "Was it difficult figuring out the South African money?" (There are 100 cents to the Rand.) "Did people try to deal [cheat] you around here?" "Does America have a lot of blacks?"

  "I want to go to America," said the young ex-soldier, "to see how you do it."

  "Do what?"

  "Get along with the blacks."

  What a strange place America must be-land of sanctuary for all beleaguered oppressors, with simple money and endless sheepfarming opportunities, where blacks behave somehow because they've got white blood. Mike Boetcher, the NBC correspondent in Jo-Burg, told me his baby's nurse, a beautiful girl of nineteen, wants to go to Harlem "because everybody is young and rich there" and because no one in Soweto has enough cows to pay her bride price. Mike said he tried in vain to tell her most guys in Harlem don't have a lot of cows. And in the Transkei "homeland" I talked to a black divinity student who'd visited America. "The most wonderful place," he said, "so wealthy and beautiful and with perfect racial harmony."

  "What part of America did you visit" I asked

  "The South Side of Chicago."

  I was pretty drunk myself by the time I'd been in South Africa for three or four weeks. Not that I'm not usually, but there was something white African in this bender. I was fuddled. My head boiled with cliches. I was getting used to being confused. I was getting used to hearing the most extraordinary things. From this Irish couple who'd been living in Africa for three decades, for instance. "There hasn't been apartheid here for years," said the wife.

  "One of the problems is that that word was invented," said the husband.

  I was becoming South African-used to having people all around me all the time doing everything for me and not doing it well.

  I went in to dinner at my resort hotel in Mosselbaai, on the spectacular Big Sur-like "Garden Route" along the coast between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. I'd had my six or eight whiskeys with the Irish couple in the lounge and was ready for one of the elaborate, big, bland and indifferently cooked meals that constitute South African cuisine. The restaurant was turned out in red plush and crisp linen. Candles glittered in cut-glass sconces. But when I sat down at my table there were three teaspoons, two water glasses, one dirty wine glass, no forks, no knives and no napkin.

  "I need a dinner fork, a salad fork, a knife and a napkin," I said to the waiter, who stared at me in dull suprise and then headed out across the dining room at the speed of a change in seasons. His feet were sockless below the tuxedo pants and he was standing on the backs of his shoes with just his toes stuffed into the unlaced oxfords.

  He returned with another spoon.

  "I need a knife, a fork and a napkin!" I said.

  He came back twenty minutes later with the water pitcher and filled my wine glass.

  "LOOK HERE," I said, "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?"

  He thought about that for a long time. "Oh, yes." He disappeared and came back in half an hour with one more water glass. "Is the master ready to order?"

  He was without recourse, voteless, impoverished, impropertied, not a legal citizen in his own nation, yet he had me reduced to a paroxysm of impotent drunken rage. I left him a huge tip and ate my chicken with a spoon.

  It's always hard to see hope with a hangover, nowhere more so than at the butt-end of this continent in a country that's like a nightmare laundry-detergent commercial-makes whites whiter, coloreds brighter. They're building themselves a gigantic Cinerama, Technicolor Ulster here. And the troubles in Ireland have been going on since my own relative Tighernan O'Rourke, prince of Breffni, had his wife stolen by Diarmuid MacMurrough, king of Leinster, and O'Rourke got so mad that MacMurrough had to call on Henry II of England for help. That was in 1152. 1 think we can expect the same swift and decisive resolution to the problem in South Africa.

  Divestment and sanctions-I guess those are the big answers proposed in the States. Well, economic sanctions sure nipped the Russian Revolution in the bud, made the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran fold like a hideaway bed and put Chiang Kai-shek right back in power on the mainland.

  The whole time I was in South Africa I only talked to one person who was in favor of sanctions and that was the divinity student in Transkei who'd visited the South Side of Chicago. He cited biblical example ("When the Pharaoh hardened his heart, God had to find another way"), but he also told me the Bible requires polygamy. So I'm not sure whether he was in earth orbit or not. Of course, there were a lot of people I didn't talk to. The comrades, busy performing "the necklace"-that is, putting flaming car tires around
people's necks (actually, down over their shoulders in order to pin their arms to their sides)--were hard to chat up. And I never bumped into Bishop Tutu. Most of the blacks I did talk to would be considered, by South African standards, middle class, even sellouts-Uncle Bantus. They told me "political power grows from economic power." They saw sanctions as hurting one of the few black chances to get a leg up the ladder.

  I have no idea whether they were right or wrong. But when I was in Ulundi, the administrative capital of the Zulu tribal lands, I was hanging around, drinking beer and talking to people, and a young political organizer leaned over to me and said, "It's really very simple why we are against sanctions. If we have money, we can buy guns." So maybe we should factor that into our next U.S. -Outof-South-Africa rally.

  The South African government's own solution, the homelands, is a hideous joke. I traveled through the Tswana tribal homeland, Bophuthatswana, in the north; KwaZulu in Natal where the Zulus refuse to accede to "independence"; and through the two Xhosa homelands, Transkei and Ciskei along the Indian Ocean. They're all the same. Everyplace is littered with windowless huts that you couldn't tell from latrines if there were any latrines to tell them from. The garden plots look like Grateful Dead fan beards. People are dumped into these rural wastes, far more people than the land can support. So the men have no choice but to go off to the rest of South Africa and work as "foreigners." The homelands are on the worst land in the country, scorched foothills and prairies on the verge of desertification. Raw trenches of the red African soil have eroded in webs across the pastures. Every foot of ground is overgrazed.

  The tribal economic system, like that of ancient Europe, is based on cattle. (The word "pecuniary" comes from the Latin, pecus, "cattle.") The cows aren't often eaten or sold or even milked. They are the bank account, the measure of the clan's and the family's wealth. They're also an ecological nightmare in these cramped precincts.

  I used to have eight head of Hereford beef cattle at my place back in the States. I asked some people in Ulundi what kind of wife these would get me.

  "Oh," said one, "probably a girl who's lived in the city for a while and had a couple of kids."

  "But," I said, "these are pure-bred Polled Herefords, going a thousand pounds or more."

  "No, no, it's like Rand notes, it's the number of cows that counts."

  I did see one homeland that worked, beautiful and severe bushveldt taken back from Boer farms and restored to its natural state with blesbok and gemsbok and springbok boking around all antlered and everything and herds of zebra-art deco on the hoof-and packs or gaggles or whatever-they're-called of giraffes (an NBA of giraffes would be the right term). This was, however, a homeland for the animals, the Botsalano Game Park in Bophuthatswana.

  Tom Mills and I were riding in a Land Rover with his wife and two kids when we came right up beside five rhinoceri-four really enormous gigantic ones and a calf that was pretty tremendously huge itself. It's not easy to describe the effect that the first sight of a wild rhino has on a not very brave author from Ohio. It's like taking your four-year-old on a surprise visit to the Mesozoic era. I felt a vaulting thrill combined with some desire to start crying and crawl under the jeep. Tom, in what I felt was an extremely foolhardy move, turned off the engine.

  "There are two kinds of rhinos," said Tom. "White rhinos are fairly docile. They don't usually bother you. But black rhinos are very nervous and aggressive. They'll charge."

  ""These rhinos are gray," I said.

  "White rhinos and black rhinos are actually about the same color," said Tom.

  "How do you tell them apart?"

  "White rhinos have a square upper lip. The black rhino's is pointy."

  I looked at our rhinos. Their upper lips were square, in a pointy sort of way. "How else do you tell them apart?"

  "I forget."

  The rhinos, who are very nearsighted, finally noticed us. They cocked their heads in this Godzilla way they have and began to amble in our direction. A rhinoceros ambles at about 60 mph. There was a moment of brief-but nonetheless high-drama while the Land Rover engine went ugga-ugga-ugga before it caught.

  The rhinos made South Africa more depressing, if that's possible. The big game is disappearing from Africa. Most Africans have never seen a rhino in its natural state (which is a state of mild pique, I believe) any more than we've seen the prairie black with bison. And, to be fair, the white South Africans are the only people on the continent returning any land to the wild. Whatever's going to happen in South Africa will be bad for the rhino, too. And rhinos only occasionally kill for fun and never go to the U. N. afterward and say they did it because of American imperialism or communist subversion.

  We drank as much as usual that night, sitting outside the tents with Botsalano's game warden. While baboons goofed off in the shrubbery and frogs sounded in the water hole like ten thousand little boys with sticks on an endless picket fence, Tom's wife Sally talked about her father, an Edinburgh grocer who'd come out to South Africa when she was a little girl. "He was looking for a healthier place to raise a family, where my sisters and I could grow up with more of a future than we'd have in Scotland."

  The game warden told how the leopard was coming to extinction in South Africa. The leopards used to be hunted as trophies, mostly by Americans and Englishmen. Any farmer who had a leopard shot on his land received a trophy fee of several hundred Rand. So whenever a farmer had a leopard around, he was careful to preserve it until some rich guy came looking to decorate the rumpus room. Even if this cost the farmer a few lambs or calves, it was worth it. Then the animal rights people, the "bunny-huggers' as the warden called them, got legislation passed forbidding the import of all spotted fur, including stuffed heads, into the U.S. and the U. K. Now the farmers just shoot the leopards-mothers, cubs and everything-as pests. "So fucking bloody much for good intentions," said the warden.

  A couple days later, driving with Tom in his Mercedes sedan through the perfectly empty Sunday streets of Jo-burg, I put it to him about South Africa. "There aren't that many Afrikaners. What, three million vs. two million English and other real Europeans? And you guys control the economy, almost all the major industries, right?"

  "Mostly, yes."

  "You've got the money. You've got forty percent of the white vote. And you've got twenty-four million blacks, coloreds and Indians who'd back you up. What's keeping you from taking the Afrikaner National Party and snapping its spine like a chopstick?"

  "That's just not how the English are, you know," said Tom. "Most of us aren't very political."

  "A couple of Chicago ward bosses and you'd have this country in your pocket."

  "I suppose people think it wouldn't be cricket."

  I'd never heard "wouldn't be cricket" used seriously before. Interesting what "cricket" means if you think about it-boring, insanely complicated and riddled with snobbery and class.

  We'd pulled onto the N-3 freeway. Jo-burg's office towers shone behind us. Flat-topped artificial hills from the gold mine tips rose in the distance. I was staring out the window at South Africa's admirable highway beautification when we came over a rise, and I caught a glimpse of what was beyond the screen of trees and shrubs.

  Thousands of tiny, slatternly huts were pressed together in a jumble stretching for miles. And every one of those hovels seemed to be on fire. Smoke drifted in an ominous smudge across the highway. "Riots!" I thought, trying to fasten my seat belt for the high-speed evasive driving we'd have to do through hordes of angry comrades who would, no doubt, come roiling across the freeway at any moment, stones and firebombs in hand.

  "If you look over there," said Tom, "you can see Alexandra. It's one of our older black townships."

  Maybe he hadn't noticed it was on fire. "Isn't it on fire or something?" I said.

  "That's from the cookstoves. They don't have electricity."

  And then Alexandra slipped back behind the decorative landscaping and was gone.

  Tom and I had been out that afternoon
shooting doves again with Connie the Greek car dealer. We were shooting near Sharp ville, site of the famous 1960 massacre, a sleepy farm town, nobody's picture of a killing ground. All around were huge Afrikaner grain spreads, completely up-to-date and identical to big mechanized American farms except they weren't going bankruptthanks, in part, to worldwide bans on selling grain to South Africa. But out in the middle of these homesteads, invisible from the pretty country roads, are the people who work the land. Their one-room, cinderblock, tin-roofed shacks are set in the fields with wheat growing right up to the doors-not even room for a garden, just a communal well in a muddy dooryard. There were half-naked kids all over the place. We took some of the kids along to run after the dead birds and pluck and gut them-"curly-headed retrievers," the South Africans say. The kids got a Rand apiece, about fifty cents, U.S., plus cigarettes. One of the boys, who said he was fifteen but looked an undersized twelve, was fascinated by Tom's Mercedes. He'd never been in a car before. Tom and I gave him a ride up and down the dirt track by his home. The boy kept sniffing and poking at the air conditioner vents. "Where does the cold air all come from?" he asked.

  "Um . . ." said Tom and looked at me.

  "God, I don't know," I said. "Something gets heated and that, uh, makes it cold." So much for the educational benefits of superior civilization. Tom flicked the electric sun-roof switch to change the subject.

  The kid watched the roof panel slide back and forth. "Now I've seen everything," he said.

  Tom had a client named Gilead, a man of sixty or seventy who'd started out selling coal from a sack in the black townships and was now one of the richest men in Soweto. Save for a bit of melanin, Gilly was the image of my Irish grandfather-closecropped hair, a build like a Maytag's and fingers thick as my wrists. He even had the same gestures as my grandfather, pulling on the old-fashioned pointy lapels of his banker's stripe suit, then planting his thumbs in the pockets of his vest and toying with the thick watch chain that ran across his belly. Gilly's skull bore four or five large hatchet scars from the gang quarrels of his youth. When I first met him, in Tom's office, he was telling about one of the stores he owns being "off-loaded" by the comrades.