by Paul Theroux
“Good journey, sir.” Jinny.
“You’re smiling because I’m taking the bus,” I said, breathing diesel fumes from the idling buses.
“Not at all, sir.”
“Why, then?”
“Because you have bought a one-way ticket only, sir.” Tucket.
Yes, I did not know how far I’d get, or whether I was coming back this way. It was a leap in the dark, northerly, in the direction of the Congo.
The whole color spectrum of South African racial identities was represented at the station, preparing to board the bus: black, Indian, Cape Malay, “colored,” Chinese, and some beefy Boers, all of us headed to Springbok and the border, and perhaps across it. No formalities except a perfunctory ritual with the driver, who held a clipboard and checked my name. It was casual and orderly, with no security, no delay; as soon as we were on the bus, we were driven out of the city, toward Namibia and l’Afrique profonde, into the gut of the greenest continent.
I sat by the window reading the Cape Argus, relishing the prospect of the long trip and catching up on the news. All week, in and out of the townships, I had been following the progress of a public battle between disciplinarians in the ruling party, the African National Congress, and Julius Malema, the boisterous president of its Youth League, who rejoiced in his own mayhem. Malema was always in the news for his offensive pronouncements: his shouted threats to whites and Indians, his demands that the mines should be nationalized, that Botswana must be invaded and its government overthrown, that the white-owned farms in South Africa be overrun and seized — handed wholesale to black South Africans — as had happened disastrously in Zimbabwe, a ruined country on the brink of bankruptcy that Malema admired and frequently visited.
Though he was depicted in the press as a buffoon, and had three convictions in South African courts for uttering hate speech, Malema was a possible future leader of South Africa. Indeed, he was a leader now, though a divisive one. Only thirty years old, but wealthy, dangerous, and vindictive, he was just reckless enough to seek the highest office. The current president, Jacob Zuma, who, as his mentor, seemed an older, cannier version of this arrogant bully, had begun to fear him. Like Zuma, Malema had — so newspaper investigations reported — enriched himself through shady deals and backhanders in state contracts. As a result, he owned a newly built mansion in a posh suburb of Johannesburg.
Malema had presided over the Youth League since 2008, and pictures of him, fist upraised, ranting at a microphone, from year to year showed him sequentially swelling, an intense black wire of a man transformed, growing fatter and balder until his big smooth head was almost without features, like an overinflated balloon with eyes swollen to wicked slits, a face that did not achieve any expression except when, with popping eyes and bared teeth, he succeeded in inspiring fear by spreading racist menace.
Popular among the black urban poor for his unapologetic insults, his bellowed speeches were widely quoted. So were his unruly press conferences, where he went out of his way to humiliate journalists and anyone else who disagreed with him, especially members of the foreign press. His abuse was memorable for being blunt: “stupid,” “imperialist,” “little tea girl,” “go away!” It seemed that no one in the government knew what to do with him, and that malicious thought gave him pleasure, because the more he was censured, the greater was his defiance.
Those noisy obedient souls who were his following had the leisure to show up any time, anywhere they were summoned, to cheer him, wave signs, and jump up and down — his audience’s peculiar display of approval was energetic jumping, giving a Malema rally the look of an enormous aerobics class. These jumpers were nearly all young, unemployed males from the townships — hardly reassuring to Malema’s opponents (of whom there were many) since the largest proportion of out-of-work South Africans lived in the townships. They were the many millions with nothing to do and nowhere to go, for whom Malema offered a diabolical sort of hope in the politics of racial incitement.
Demagoguery in Africa, as far as speechifying was concerned, had never mattered much. Though spitting and screaming speeches were fairly common among up-and-coming party hacks, a gift for oratory was not crucial to an African politician aiming to be a tyrant. The traditional chiefs and kings did not engage in public speaking, but merely whispered their wishes to their right-hand man — the porte-parole in West African kingship, the “chief’s messenger” in East and Central Africa — the mouthpiece who conveyed the words that had to be obeyed.
Though the sympathies and howls of the rabble, the poor, the mob, might be helpful, they were seldom decisive factors in promoting a man to power, unless the mob was also well armed. In every African tyranny it was the army’s loyalty to the leader and its impartial cruelty that made the difference. Once a leader established himself as a dictator, he controlled his country through the army and the police, supplemented by the thuggery of self-appointed intimidators in the ruling party’s youth league. Speechmaking was irrelevant; if you had armed men on your side, no further persuasion was needed. An African dictator could be a mute and merciless enforcer and spend many decades in power without ever being seen in public.
But, oddly and perhaps unique to Africa, music always mattered to the political process. Never mind the speeches — who had the patience to listen to the lies? Along with the gun, music was the most persuasive influence in African political life, as it was in African culture; politics was dominated by rousing songs. This had always been the case. In the early 1960s in Nyasaland (soon to be Malawi) the defining song was “Zonse Zimene za Kamuzu Banda” — “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda,” both a hymn and a prediction, in praise of the incoming prime minister, sung in villages, at political meetings, and by the students at my little school. Banda took power, suppressed and jailed the opposition, and went on to rule (the music still playing) for the next thirty-four years.
South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma had his personal anthem, which he sang and danced to in public at every opportunity. It was a song from the struggle, about his machine gun.
Umshini wami, umshini wami (My machine gun, my machine gun)
We Baba (O Father)
Awulethu, umshini wami (Please bring me my machine gun)
An inconvenient fact is that South Africa was not liberated by all-out war and certainly not by machine-gun-toting guerrillas. There was no Gettysburg in South Africa, only the waste ground of Sharpeville, which was the site of a one-sided massacre of sixty-nine unarmed protesters. Mandela was not sprung from Robben Island by an indignant mob in a mass, Bastille-storming movement of prisoner liberation. Toward the end of his sentence, Mandela was secretly transferred to a serene, bucolic, country-house setting in the winelands where, with the connivance of the white government, he quietly awaited elections and the transfer of power.
Violent protest, sabotage, and armed struggle had been factors, but not decisive ones, in South African independence, which was gained through stubbornness, labor unrest, paralyzing strikes, public disorder, backroom negotiations, economic sanctions, and especially foreign pressure. The South African army was well armed and overwhelming. Independence was not taken but given, and was long overdue, in the drip-drip-drip of history’s inevitability. Zuma’s machine-gun anthem, and his war dance to its tune, was merely grimly comic posturing, but it had symbolic value to a populace that still felt aggrieved.
Julius Malema — uneducated, corrupt, canny, crazy-acting, and power mad — much resembled Zuma. He was one of Zuma’s supporters and had a personal anthem too, called “Shoot the Boer.” Like Zuma, he sang it with exaggerated gusto, hamming it up. You might be excused for thinking — if you didn’t know the meaning of the words — that this was exuberant clowning, like a turn in a minstrel show, mimicking an “end man” in blackface, shuffling and playing for laughs; the only prop lacking was a banjo or a tambourine.
But he was serious. A huge headline in the Cape Argus I was reading on the bus concerned Malema, denouncing the man for defian
tly leading his followers in singing his signature hate song because it seemed he would not stop singing it. “Shoot the Boer” was perfect for a black South African politician on the make — tuneful, with few words, easy to remember, anti-white, and an incitement to murder.
This song, too, had come out of the struggle, but the country had moved on, as it had moved on from Bring me my machine gun. Yet there were a great many people in South Africa who liked the message of murder and revenge, because many had yet to find any work, any wealth, any place for themselves, and they were envious of the visibly rich and enraged over them. These disaffected people were the township toughs who stoned trains, hijacked cars, and terrorized neighborhoods with brazen robberies that sent crime statistics soaring. With an annual homicide rate of 32,000, and rapes amounting to more than 70,000, South Africa led the world in 2011 in reported rapes and murders.
Given that “Shoot the Boer” advocated the killing of white farmers, it was another dire statistic that, since apartheid was banned in 1994, more than 3,000 white farmers had been murdered by black assassins. Most of the victims had been ambushed on isolated farms in the veldt. The anthem’s lyrics in Zulu were brutally simple:
Ayasab’ amagwala (The cowards are scared)
Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
Ayeah
Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
Ayasab’ amagwala (The cowards are scared)
Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
Awu yoh
Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
Aw dubul’ibhunu (Shoot the Boer)
Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
Except for the misguided folk who sang this with Malema at his political rallies, the song was condemned in newspaper editorials and by many citizens as hate speech, calling it an embarrassment and a backward step for the country.*
But wait: one voice was raised in defense of Julius Malema, fat and sassy in his canary-yellow baseball cap and canary-yellow T-shirt, his fist raised, shouting “Shoot the Boer — shoot, shoot.” This supporting voice was the confident brogue of the Irish singer Paul Hewson, known to the world as the ubiquitous meddler Bono, the frontman of U2. He loved the song. The multimillionaire rocker, on his band’s “360-Degree Tour” in South Africa in 2011, had squinted through his expensive sunglasses, tipped his cowboy hat in respect, and asserted that “Shoot the Boer” had fondly put him in mind of the protest songs sung by the Irish Republican Army.
“When I was a kid and I’d sing songs,” Bono reminisced to the Sunday Times in Johannesburg, “I remember my uncles singing … rebel songs about the early days of the IRA.”
He treated the reporter to a ditty about an Irishman carrying a gun, and added, alluding to “Shoot the Boer,” “It’s fair to say it’s folk music.”
So willing was Bono to ingratiate himself — and, in his haste or ignorance, oblivious of the grotesque murder statistics and the horror of people who feared for their lives — that he went out of his way in his approval of the racist song, bolstering his argument with the observation that “Shoot the Boer” was a thoroughly Irish sentiment. Maybe so; though many disagreed, Irish and South Africans alike. His comments caused howls of rage by people in South Africa who noted the paradox that, just the year before, in April 2010, Bono (sharing the stage with former president Bill Clinton) had been honored by the Atlantic Council, which conferred on him the Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership Award.
And here I was, reading this in a bus headed north through the high veldt, with a man who might well have been a Zulu in the seat in front of me, an elderly black woman behind me, and two men who were undoubtedly Boer farmers conversing in Afrikaans in the seat across the aisle.
Into the heartland we went, down the main streets of small towns that were lined by the arcades and porticoes of hardware stores and old shops, past the immense farms and spectacular landscapes of the Northern Cape — a great relief, and uplifting after my experience of the dense dogtowns and squatter camps and townships and the fortified suburbs.
Many of the South Africans I’d met had wanted to be reassured. How are we doing? they’d asked, but obliquely. How did South Africa compare to the country I had seen on my trip ten years before and written about in Dark Star Safari? I could honestly say it was brighter and better, more confident and prosperous, though none of it was due to any political initiative. The South African people had made the difference, and would continue to do so, no thanks to a government that embarrassed and insulted them with lavish personal spending, selfishness, corruption, outrageous pronouncements, hollow promises, and blatant lies.
The new prosperity was evident as we traveled up the N1 highway past Century City, which was still being developed when I was last in South Africa and had grown to an enormous complex of houses, high-rises, and “the largest shopping mall in Africa,” Canal Walk, with hundreds of stores, resembling its sister stereotype, the residential community and shopping center in Florida or California, after which it had been modeled. And serving the same purpose: the middle-class flight from the city, seeking space and security. Well-funded and well-swept Century City was the opposite in every respect of the improvisational townships ten miles to the south of it.
Past a power station, a prison, and Corpus Christi Church (REFUEL HERE AND CONNECT WITH GOD confidently lettered on its sign out front), we swung north on a new road, passing more suburbs — and I noted that the more expensive-looking the home, the higher the perimeter fence or brick wall. In a republic of open country, one that celebrated the freedom of African space, every substantial dwelling was surrounded by walls, every house a fortress.
Up a road lined with gum trees through Durbanville, we passed the first heights of the green bosomy veldt, the gentle Tygerberg Hills, covered with grapevines in orderly rows. They were the extensive plantings of D’Aria Vineyards, composed of two wine farms, Doordekraal and Springfield. The first vintage of this winery was a sauvignon blanc, produced and offered for sale in 2005.
This fact I found out in the next town, Malmesbury, where the bus stopped for half an hour and I was able to talk to one of the Boers in the seat opposite.
His name was Hansie, a miner, headed to Springbok, but he had come this way often, noting the settlement and expansion of Durbanville and the nearby farming towns. This vineyard was no more than ten years old.
“There was nothing here before, just veldt and some old farms,”
Hansie said. “Now’s it’s a working wine farm.”
He asked me where I was from. I told him.
“You could have stayed at D’Aria instead of the city — it takes guests as well. Nice and quiet.”
Over the past decade he had seen the towns here grow, settled by Capetonians looking for a serene life in the hills. The place we had stopped, Malmesbury, was an example, a market town in an old farming district, surrounded by wheat fields, on Hansie’s route to Springbok. This town, too, had grown.
“Lots of new people here,” he said. “Lots of new shops. It’s coming up. And, ach, only thirty kilometers from Cape Town.”
Thitty kilometers, he said, and added that we were in Swartland, so called because of the bleck soil.
I wanted to ask Hansie about Julius Malema but did not have the heart to speak the name of a man who was obviously his nemesis. South Africans are not unusual in being sensitive about reminders of their history, but their recent past was so full of ambiguities none could say what the future might hold for them.
“Catch you later,” he said, releasing me so that he could, as he said, “buy an ass cream cone.”
Remembering I had no food or drink with me, I went into a large supermarket just off the main road which loomed like a warehouse and was stacked with merchandise, toppling crates and irregular piles of canned goods in ripped-open cardboard boxes.
The owners were Chinese, and their English was almost nonexistent. All I wanted were some bottles of water, which I couldn’t find until the woman at the register, with helpful ducklike nods and nasal
yips, guided me from where she stood behind the counter. She and the man piling cans were perhaps some of the new people. They were the first of many immigrants from the People’s Republic that I was to meet on this trip, and though most of them were doing business in remote and unpromising places, they seemed content, absorbed, unflappable, even grateful, their feet squarely on the ground.
After Malmesbury, the countryside widened into an immensity of low hills and surrounding black ridges. As Hansie had said, the darkness of the soil had earned the region the name Swartland. It was only in such a rural place that South Africa made sense. This was its heartland, its food supply, gentle, settled, serene. I described in my diary the sunlit landscape, cattle browsing in the meadows, the distant farmhouses, the empty roads, the peacefulness.
I held that happy memory in my head, thinking of Malmesbury as a blissful realm, mentioning it later to my friends in Cape Town. And they referred me to a headline in the local newspaper, “Couple Attacked on Malmesbury Farm”:
A couple was attacked with an axe and steel pipe at their house outside of Malmesbury in the Western Cape this morning, police said.
Captain FC van Wyk said three men forced open the back door of the farmhouse around 3 am.
“They demanded money and other valuable items from the 30-year-old victim and his 26-year-old fiancée,” Van Wyk said.
“The intruders overpowered and assaulted the couple with an axe and a steel pipe. The man suffered multiple injuries to his back, chest, arms, and legs.”
The men ransacked the house and fled with wine and a DVD hi-fi system.
This assault immediately found its way to the Afrikaner Genocide Archives website, which was dense with accounts of attacks on farmers and other rural crimes, and gave more details about the incident in Malmesbury. The victims were Pieter Loubser and not his fiancée but his wife, Brenda, members of the Wes-Kaap Simmentaler cattle breeders’ club. The Loubsers ran a dairy farm — their milk, sold locally and in Cape Town, was one of the cheaper food items to be found in the townships. The other facts tallied: an early morning break-in by three men, an ax attack in the bedroom, the demand for money, the theft of valuables, the serious injuries. And another detail, something new: “Other news sources also say that Brenda was very brutally sexually assaulted.”