Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  So it seemed a bad sign when a front-page headline the day after I arrived was ‘GORDIMER “TOO RACIST” FOR SCHOOLS’ – Nadine’s novel July’s People had been stricken from the reading list by the Book Selection Committee in the Gauteng Province Education Department. Because this province included Johannesburg and Pretoria, it contained South Africa’s largest concentration of classrooms, in which this plausible doomsday novel had been required reading. The book was labeled ‘deeply racist, superior and patronizing,’ and ‘an anachronism because it projects a South African future that has not happened,’ and ‘not acceptable as it does not encourage good grammatical practice.’

  The silly remarks were an excuse for me to reread July’s People, which I did with pleasure. One morning I wrote an article for the Johannesburg Sunday Independent, jeering at the ignorance and philistinism of the Book Selection Committee and having a bit of fun with Nadine’s chief persecutor, a commissar who rejoiced in the name Elvis Padayachee. I mentioned how the imaginative brilliance of Gordimer’s work was its utter fidelity to the truth – how we behave, how we speak, how our cities look, how our marriages work, how we love, how we die. And how, if someone writes truthfully, their work always seems prophetic. Given the uncertainties and changes in South Africa, the cataclysmic events in July’s People were still possible. Thirty years before, in A Guest of Honour, she had described the crisis that was being played out by rivals and land reformers and racists in Zimbabwe today.

  Nadine said, ‘This sort of banning reminds me of the days of the apartheid regime, when they suppressed books they didn’t like. I had thought we had moved on from that.’

  She said the suppression was a bad sign; she didn’t take it personally. But censorship in South Africa had never been simple. In the days of paranoid white rule, not only had my Jungle Lovers and The Mosquito Coast been banned, but for their seemingly racial and inflammatory titles so had The Return of the Native and Black Beauty On the other hand, The Mosquito Coast was now a required book in South African high schools and my defense ofJuly’s People was prominently published. I could not think of another newspaper in Africa that would have published such a piece as mine, because I dealt with a government directive by mocking it for its stupidity.

  ‘I am much more worried about Reinie,’ Nadine said, of her ailing husband. ‘He’s very weak. He is my concern at the moment.’

  Knowing in advance that it was the last leg of my trip, and perhaps the best train, I dithered over boarding the train to Cape Town. I wanted to savor the anticipation of going, but I also procrastinated because after this my safari would be at an end. I lay on my hotel bed in Johannesburg replaying my journey through the good people I had met, seeing the proud Nuba, Ramadan, driving me across the gritty wadis of the Sudanese desert; Tadelle and Wolde in box-creased newly bought clothes at our sad parting on the border at Ethiopian Moyale; Wahome, the writer and former prisoner in Nairobi; Apolo, the unlikely prime minister, teasing me in Uganda; the hospitable captain, and squiffy-eyed Alex on Lake Victoria who was at this moment in the engine room of the Umoja, tinkering with the old diesel; Julius on the bush train from Mwanza; Conor and Kelli on the Kilimanjaro Express; Una Brownly, the self-effacing nurse from Livingstonia Mission; my student Sam Mpechetula in Zomba; Karsten Nyachicadza, expert paddler, in Marka Village on the Shire River, smiling at life in general through a haze of blue smoke; the farmer Peter Drummond outside Norton, shrugging at the appearance of yet more invaders; all the African prisoners, and the long-distance bus drivers, and the market women – cheerful people, doing their jobs, against the odds. I was grateful to them for making my trip pleasant. I missed them. I wished them well.

  At Park Station one morning waiting in line to buy a train ticket I struck up a conversation with the young African woman in front of me and told her where I was going.

  She said, ‘I heard the other day on the radio there is a really posh train running to Cape Town. It’s expensive in our money, but in your money it’s probably cheap. Ach, have a safe trip!’

  Another kindly person, helping me on my way.

  It wasn’t the well-known Blue Train, and it wasn’t First Class; it was Premier Class, a new designation, on the Trans-Karoo Express. I bought a ticket, and made a reservation. The fare of $140 included all meals and a private compartment. At the Park Station newsagent I bought two blank notebooks. I was expecting to have plenty of time for making a fair copy of my long story. It was a twenty-seven-hour trip, 850 miles from Johannesburg to Cape Town, across the high desert known as the Great Karoo, something like the distance from Boston to Chicago.

  I left the next day. Waiting with the other passengers on the platform for the train to arrive I noticed the different postures of anticipation – the whites habitually stood, looking watchful, facing inwards in little family groups, surrounding their luggage; the blacks lounged on the benches in pairs, looking relaxed, their legs extended; the rest, the mixed race people, the uitlanders, foreigners, Indians, seemed to keep moving, circulating warily among the others.

  Because of security, steel fences divided the platform, and only travelers Could get past this barrier.

  ‘Not like this in Australia,’ said a stocky white man, heaving his bag Bob, traveling with his wife, Sylvia, both of them about fifty and rueful. And years ago you could see your family off. It was friendly. None of this security. None of these fences.’

  ‘Different in Australia,’ Sylvia said.

  They were Johannesburgers born and bred but within eight months would be emigrating to Brisbane and planned never again to return to South Africa. ‘It’s just too horrible, what’s happened here,’ Bob said, in that complex South African way of saying ‘here’, yeueah. He was a factory worker, hoping to find employment in Australia, though would he? His trade was the fabrication of railway ties – cement and wooden ‘sleepers.’ Not much call for those in Oz.

  An African approached me, singling me out of a large group of waiting travelers, and said, ‘Mr Theroux?’

  No one ever mispronounced my name in South Africa, because Leroux was a common name and the place was full of the descendants of French Huguenots.

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘I’m the steward. After a while on this job you get to know people by sight. I can usually fit a name to a face.’

  That was Craig. He escorted me to my compartment, and explained the features – hot shower next door, bar in the next coach, reading area and lounge. Pinky, a Zulu woman in a smart uniform, would take my drink order. Lunch would be served in an hour in the dining car.

  The train whistle blew two sour notes, and with a yank on the couplings that sounded like an anvil clang, we pulled out of the station and headed west. I sat in perfect contentment and watched the city pass the windows. The long shadows of big buildings were replaced by the brighter suburbs, the garages, the fast food outlets, the supermarkets, the squat fenced-in bungalows, and the one-man businesses that characterized small settlements, Mohammed’s Meat Market, Solly’s New and Used Hardware, Dave’s Deals for Wheels, Prinsloo’s Panelbeating. If there were no people in sight I would have taken these lifeless and antiquated Edwardian terraces and arcades to be Australian, for they showed the same turn-of-the-century colonial architecture, bungalows of hot stucco, with gingerbread trimming, and tin roofs, even the same hardy shrubbery, bright-eyed lantana bushes and peeling, droopy eucalyptus trees. Farther out, the small industries, meat packers, rubber tire warehouses, cement, scrap metal, soap: they actually made things here.

  Sixty or so miles out of Johannesburg we passed an enormous graveyard at Tshiawelo, Avalon Cemetery. Two heroes of the struggle were buried here, Joe Slovo and Helen Joseph. But all I saw were muddy slopes and fields, without either trees or grass, just crude graves. Each grave was surrounded by an iron cage, like a baby’s crib made of rusty uprights and steel mesh, to keep the digging animals out, dogs, hyenas, ferrets, whatever. In different parts of the graveyard, funerals were in progress, people p
raying, or standing near newly dug holes, in the posture of mourners, no one standing straight, everyone somewhat crook-legged and bowed in crippled attitudes of grief.

  At Roodepoort a little later, in the dining car, George the waiter was serving me pan-fried Cape salmon fillets, while a whole platform of waiting, luggage-carrying Africans burdened with bales, baskets, crates and blanket rolls, looked in at me – or were they looking at the African family of four at the table behind me, being served by the jolly white waiter?

  The towns here were small and orderly, most of them built in the shadow of mine workings, rows of houses on the main street, a school, a church, a rugby field, low hills and fields beyond, Mayberry in the goldfields, among mine dumps that looked like hills. Some of these towns looked as though they had been built to last. The station at Krugersdorp, with corbels and finials and severe Cape Dutch ornaments, had been built in 1899, the date carved high on its cupola. At the edge of town there were simple solid uncomfortable looking miners’ huts and miners’ hostels, also a century old and still inhabited, and partly hidden by billboards saying Please Condomise and Thank You for Condomising.

  In even the whitest town on the veldt there was a reminder of less fortunate Africa – a ragged man walking up a path, an old man on a bike, a woman balancing a bulging bale on her head, an amazing bird on a post, African huts, barefoot kids, tin privies, squalor, cornfields. And the place I took to be an armed camp – high chain-link fence, razor wire, guard dogs, spotlights on poles – turned out to be the perimeter of a country club, the area that looked like a training ground for recruits, just a golf course.

  We came to Potchefstroom. I remembered the name from a story a Venda man named William had told me in Johannesburg. He had grown up in Pietersburg in what had been the Northern Transvaal and had gone to a black school there.

  ‘It was just a country school,’ he said. ‘I was very young and didn’t know anything. But one day we took the train to Potchefstroom to play another school at football. After the game we were so hungry! We walked to a restaurant. We saw white people inside, but they wouldn’t let us in. They said, “Go to the window.” Beside the restaurant was the window where we were served.’

  I told him that this arrangement was common in the American South up to the 1960s.

  William said, ‘Here it was take-away for black people and sit-down for white people. We didn’t get angry. That was the situation. We got used to it, but that was my first experience of “Go to the window.” I never sat in a restaurant. Even now – true – I don’t know how to use a restaurant. You need money, yes, but you also have to know what to do when you get inside. I don’t feel comfortable.’

  The signs Slebs blankes, Whites Only, persisted into the late 1980s. I asked William whether he had children.

  He said he did, two girls, sixteen and thirteen. ‘My kids know how to use restaurants. They have no idea of what life was like before. I haven’t told them yet. I will tell them when they are twenty-one. But they won’t believe me. They think it’s nothing to go into a cinema or a restaurant or a hotel. When I was young we had no idea. We were afraid. Or white areas – we didn’t go. We didn’t hate whites. We were frightened of them. They were so hard.’

  I asked him to give me an example of this fear.

  He said, ‘About 1981, I was still a teenager, working for Mr Longman. I went to Durban with him, for a job. When we got there they wouldn’t let me into the hotel. He was a carpenter, on a job there. I was his assistant. He said to the hotel people, “I will pay for his room.” But they said no. They wouldn’t let me in. So I slept in the car. After a few days, Mr Longman found me a place to stay at the church. You think my kids would believe that?’

  The name Potchefstroom had jogged my memory of his story.

  Klerksdorp was the first big station on the line. An English-sounding man in the corridor said to me, ‘This is Terreblanche territory’ – meaning that it was fiercely white still; not just verkramp, unbending, but far-right neo-fascist. Eugene Terreblanche, a bearded demagogue in his late fifties, was the white separatist leader of the AWB, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), a rump of unrepentantly racist Boers that were based in Ventersdorp. He was now in prison serving a sentence for assaulting (and paralyzing) one black man and for the attempted murder of another. Depending on who you asked, Terreblanche was either the Afrikaner Moses or a hard-drinking womanizer and embezzler.

  The fact that on the south side of the tracks there were salubrious houses did not mean the whole of Klerksdorp was prosperous, for on the north side of the tracks there was a shanty town of tin shacks – box-like huts made of old tin sheets, windowless walls and flat roofs, a squatter settlement as slummy as anything I had seen in Tanzania.

  Markwassie with its crude sign, 173 miles to Johannesburg, had the look of 1930s Mississippi in the evocative Depression photos: ragged blacks, hot sun-baked fields of pale cookie-dough furrows, grease-stained train yards, rusty tin-roofed warehouses, a curving shine of parallel switching tracks. Markwassie was a railway junction, where skinny black children screeched and waved at the Trans-Karoo Express.

  Nothing of Africa here – this looked like hot, sad old America until, about ten miles farther up the line, I saw eland cropping grass at a game ranch. In the distance there were big purple and pink clouds, intimations of sunset in the still air and the uncertain chirps of birds at the day’s end on the high plains of the Middelveld.

  I used the hours of darkness to turn from the window and scratch away at my erotic story, copying and revising, and reminding myself that, however secret or forbidden, such images vitalized us and fueled the imagination. In his book on Hokusai, Edmond de Goncourt wrote, ‘Every Japanese painter has a body of erotic works.’ All the greatest Japanese print makers had indulged themselves in the erotic and had devised a nice euphemism for such works, calling them shunga, ‘spring pictures’.

  In Johannesburg I had bought Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Onze Mille Verges, which was plainly porn, not to my taste, Gothic and absurd by turns, most of it too athletic or too painful to be likely. Apollinaire, who had invented the word surrealism, had written about the Japanese prints I had in mind. I read his book quickly and at one point describing the motion of a train he alluded to the Alphonse Allais couplet,

  The titillating motion of trains

  Sends desire coursing all through our veins.

  The dinner gong rang. I sat at a table with a shaven-headed motorcyclist named Chris and an older English couple who seemed tetchy but perhaps were just nervous. They kept their names to themselves. But they did say that they had lived in southern Africa since 1960 and, ‘We could never live in England now.’ They were taking a holiday in the Cape wine lands. The man said he was a train buff. ‘My dream is to take the Trans-Siberian. But I have health problems.’

  In spite of his shaven head and missing teeth and bike-madness, Chris had a zen-like view of the world and he discouraged any belittling of the state of the world, Africa included. ‘Yaaaw, never mind.’ Chris said he was half-English and half-Afrikaans. ‘So, yaaaw, I’ve got problems, too.’

  ‘You go on all these big holiday rides with all the bikers, I suppose,’ the Englishman said, as though chipping flint with his teeth.

  ‘Oh, yaaaw. Very nice. Like flying,’ Chris said mildly.

  ‘Quite a few members of the swastika brigade on those rides,’ the Englishman said.

  ‘Oh, yaaaw. You get everyone,’ Chris said. ‘Women. English. African, too.’

  I said, ‘I rode a bike for a while, but I stopped. I figured I would end up an organ donor.’

  ‘Oh, yaaaw. I’ve got me some good organs to give away. But I smoke, so – Ha! Ha! – not lungs.’

  Meanwhile we ate the four-course meal of soup, fish, Karoo lamb, and mousse for dessert. I did not volunteer anything of my travels, and was fearful of mentioning trains to a train buff, but instead asked the Englishman how he happened to choose a life in Africa.

&
nbsp; ‘I was eighteen, just out of school. I joined the Colonial Service and told my mother I would be away three years. She was so angry. She said, “You’ll never come home!” ’ The Englishman smiled. ‘And I didn’t.’

  He had worked in Northern Rhodesia until it became Zambia; then in Southern Rhodesia, until the struggle for Zimbabwe became violent, and finally had come to South Africa. To ask the question that hung in the air – was he staying? - was indelicate, even impertinent.

  Anyway, he changed the subject. He said, ‘This is in fact the boat train. People sailed from Europe to the Cape and took it up to Jo’burg. And they went home that way, too.’

  I guessed that he was tormenting himself with thoughts of emigrating to Australia.

  That night, late, we came to a station in the bleak Karoo. I hopped out of the train to look upwards at the starry sky, the brilliance of luminous pinpricks, more stars than there was darkness around them. I saw a shooting star.

  ‘Sometimes you can even see the Mulky Why,’ said a disembodied voice on the platform.

  In the morning, we passed the stations of Prince Albert Road and Laingsburg, where the Great Karoo descends to the Little Karoo. The Karoo is plateau land and high desert, and rolling through it on this pleasant train I had a creeping recollection of entering Patagonia, seeing the same sorts of simple farm houses and bushes blown sideways and flocks of sheep squinting into the wind, everything except Welsh settlers and gauchos. Even in the middle of nowhere, in grazing land of low bush, with a horizon of low blue mountains, the settlers were houseproud.

  The land was mostly prairie, some of it just scrub, and here and there a grove of trees, each one like a farmer’s implanted flag, and at the end of a long cart track a classic white house with a Dutch façade and a white gate.

  A rap on my door: the steward. He said, ‘We are coming to Touwsrivier and De Doorns, sir. Please make sure your windows are closed and locked. We’ve had thefts before. People coming through the windows.’