Uncomfortable with the silent standoff, the teacher resorts to threat. “If you can’t explain yourself, I’ll give you another topic.”
“Tell her, Issa,” Kagiso wills silently. Tell her. Tell them all.
Issa doesn’t move.
“It’s because of Lawrence, Teacher,” Kagiso wants to shout.
“We saw the film. It’s his favourite. He watches it over and over again.” Tell her Issa. Tell Teacher that it’s what Lawrence said:
Bentley: ... May I put two questions to you, straight?
Lawrence: I’d be interested to hear you put a question straight, Mr Bentley.
Bentley: One. What, in your opinion, do these people hope to gain from this war?
Lawrence: They hope to gain their freedom. Freedom.
Bentley: “They hope to gain their freedom.” There’s one born every minute.
Lawrence: They’re going to get it, Mr Bentley. I’m going to give it to them. The second question?
Bentley: Oh. Well. I was going to ask... erm... What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?
Lawrence: It’s clean.
“Well then, Issa,” the teacher intones, “if you’ve nothing to say for yourself, your next task will be on something completely different – oceans.” But her decisive nod is undermined by Issa’s immediate response.
Oceans are not completely different to deserts.
The teacher stares back at him across a sniggering class.
They’re deserts of water. And “the desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.”
“Don’t distract Ma Vasinthe now. Kudu are nocturnal.”
Knock?
“Noc tur nal.”
Noc tur nal.
“Yes. That means they are most active at night, like leopards and foxes.”
And bats and owls.
“Yes. So we have to be especially vigilant when driving in the dark.”
Vi gi lant. He turns around and stares out the back window at the road already travelled, counting the white stripes as they flick by in the tail lights. There are no other cars behind them. It feels to him as though they are alone in the world. He tries to imagine what he’d do if he were left behind in this wilderness. Would a black dot appear from a mirage on the shimmering horizon and grow slowly into a Bedouin on a camel with a gun? The prospect fills him with dreadful excitement.
Look, he says.
“What is it?” asks Gloria from the front.
He doesn’t respond.
Kagiso turns to follow Issa’s gaze. “Ha ka ka!” he exclaims.
Vasinthe peers into the night sky through the rear view mirror. What she glimpses makes her pull over onto the sandy embankment on the side of the road, sending clouds of dust rushing into the beams of the headlights. They get out of the car and watch in silent amazement as it rises serenely over the horizon, the bride of the night, big and full and red behind a veil of desert dust, like another world coming slowly and silently to envelop their own. He wants to run forward a little, but Ma Gloria is running her fingers through his hair, so he stays by her side, slips his hand into hers and with his left forefinger held up to his narrowed eyes, he traces the outline of the man on the moon.
Kagiso traces the path on the map north, past Johannesburg and across the border into Zimbabwe at Messina. Then on to Harare and across the border into Malawi at Nyampanda. Then up to Lilongwe and around the shores of Lake Nyasa. At Mbeya, he traces the route to the right through Iringa and across the border with Tanzania to Dodoma, then Arusha. Still further north, across the border with Ethiopia at Moyele, up through the Great Rift Valley as far as Asmara.
“As ma ra,” he says, breaking the silence of rubber on tar.
The interruption pulls Issa back from his own far-off place. He can recall whole paragraphs, entire chapters of what he has read, in minute detail:
In these pages the history is not of the Arab movement, but of me in it. It is a narrative of daily life, mean happenings, little people. Here are no lessons for the world, no disclosures to shock peoples. It is filled with trivial things, partly that no one mistake for history the bones from which some day a man may make history, and partly for the pleasure it gave me to recall the fellowship of the revolt. We were fond together, because of the sweep of the open places, the taste of the wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we have worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
What? He asks, as if stirred from sleep.
“Asmara. In Ethiopia.”
It’s not in Ethiopia.
“It is according to the map.”
Forget about maps. They don’t show things as they are. Asmara is in Eritrea.
“Eritrea?” He scrutinises the map. “Don’t see it.”
That’s because it’s still a dream. Maps don’t show dreams either. Only nightmares.
“But in reality, Asmara is still in Ethiopia.”
Not to the people of Asmara. Not to those men and women dying on the battlefield for their convictions. To them, Asmara is in Eritrea and will one day be its capital.
From Asmara Kagiso follows the route as it sweeps to the left and across the border into Sudan. At Kasala he pauses, contemplating left to Khartoum or straight ahead to Port Sudan on the Red Sea Coast. He decides on the road to Khartoum, union of the Blue and White Niles. It sounds to him a magical place.
From there, he traces the path up through the Nubian Desert all the way to Wadi Halfa on the shores of Lake Nasser, where his finger leaps across the lake to Abu Simbel and then all along the Nile to places with names, which, like As ma ra, call out to be uttered:
“Aswan
Luxor
Qena
Asyût
Beni Suef
Cairo
Alexandria
A lex an dri a.”
Memory house of the world.
“Is that so?”
Issa nods.
“Let’s just carry on. Imagine that, if we didn’t stop at Jozi but just carried on all the way north, up and up and up. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Let’s do it sometime. You like driving. You can drive all the way across Africa, all the way to Alexandria, to the world’s memory, on the northern edge of Africa.”
Violent Night
KATINKA STRIKES A MATCH AND holds it to the nightlight on her bedside table. Slowly, the tiny flame starts to lick away the darkness from the objects in its shaky circle: two photographs; one of Issa, the other of Karim, and the items from the ritual she enacts here every day. Flowers arranged along the base of each picture. Leaves, picked in passing from the same tree, flat and large, on which to stand ornate bottles of unction. Precious, the crushed essence from a thousand flowers – jessamine, violet, rose – their fragrance so concentrated, it endures a bath. But only ever used here to anoint the cherished photographs.
She reclines and lets the flame lull her back into the violent night when she searched the smoky room, looking left, looking right, over and under, for her friend among the dazed onlookers...
Eventually, she catches sight of his red T-shirt, but it retreats from her when she tries to focus on it. So she stops, rubs her eyes, and tries again, this time not looking directly at him, only approximately, so as to keep the blurred T-shirt in view. But then there is a flash and a thunderous noise. She looks towards it – explosion – and in its intense rays, she glimpses a vision of him, not face to face, almost; he has his back turned towards her, slightly, so that she only catches his profile, askance, as he sits, chin to chest, in an op
ulent room, smoking a water pipe. He doesn’t notice her. From underneath a furrowed brow, he stares ahead in disbelief at the giant screen, which fills the wall at one end of the room.
His shoulder-length black hair is tied back from his face with a black and white kefiya in the manner of the lead singer in one of his favourite bands, Fun-da-mental; one of the first gigs he went to after coming to London. On the front of his red T-shirt is emblazoned an inscription: ‘I am a standing civil war’, and the letters MK. On the back, just below the neckline, the logo of the South African Communist Party and its motto: ‘Simply Revolutionary’.
He is fastidious, but not to the unobservant: notice his used serviette, folded neatly on the saucer beside his empty glass, not crumpled into a ball and thrown aside; that would irk him. And in his left trouser pocket is a handkerchief, but not for his nose; he keeps that one in the right pocket. Careful never to touch anything in the public domain with his bare hands, he uses this one, inconspicuously, as a protective shield between himself and the city’s contaminated door handles and handrails. The handle of the water pipe is a rare exception; despite his ascetic preferences, he likes the feeling of the rich, velvet casing in the palm of his gently squeezing hand.
She stayed with him for part of his vigil, but only for an hour or so before leaving – she had to teach the next morning – a move she now regrets and for which she constantly reproaches herself You should have stayed with him. He was clearly disoriented. You should not have left him alone...
On the bedside table the flame has settled quickly into a steady, perfectly still glow. The more she returns to the violent night, the more she remembers. On the table in front of him are the dismembered remains of the day’s broadsheets and an open folder. She knows it well, but has not seen it for some time. She’d proofed its contents, his near-complete thesis. For several weeks, months, he had to drag himself away from the news, the thesis untouched, set aside.
“Haven’t seen this for a while,” she recalls saying. “What prompted its exhumation?”
The headlines, he replied, not looking at her. Here. He slid the manuscript in front of her: Read. Then, with a direct translation from Arabic, handed her the mouthpiece: Drink. She was so at home in this world now turned upside down that the imperative didn’t sound strange to her. There must certainly have been a time when it would have, but she can’t remember it. At a glance, she spots the changes, the redrafted sentences, the adapted opening, which now starts with a quote:
History is the science of reality that affects us most immediately, stirs us most deeply and compels us most forcibly to a consciousness of ourselves. It is the only science in which human beings step before us in their totality. Under the rubric of history one is to understand not only the past, but the progression of events in general; history therefore includes the present.1
The history of early European exploration and settlement at the Cape of Good Hope remains universally and eternally pertinent. The procedures of dispossession and domination implemented here in the fifteenth century would be repeated around the globe for the rest of the millennium, and then again at the start of this new millennium.
To declare these events over is the recourse of perpetrators, collaborators, benefactors and perpetuators. While Europeans and latterly North Americans have achieved the economic gain, which was the ultimate aim of their economic migrancy, the majority whose indigenous systems and futures were adversely shaped, experience the political, economic, cultural and mnemonic consequences of this flooding as present and perpetual catastrophes: what exactly, to begin with, do the Khoi of southern Africa, the aboriginals of Australia, the natives of North America, have to ‘move on’ to? Another barren, ever-shrinking reserve? The past is eternally with them.
And us.
Detailed records remain of the early years of the Dutch settlement at the Cape as well as of the voyages of discovery – or, rather, as the accrual of geographical knowledge was, after all, a bogus veneer for a less scholarly motive – the pursuit of pathways to plunder, hacked by the Portuguese and Dutch, followed by the French and eventually the eternally wait-and-see British. It is therefore possible to access an almost day-to-day account of life in the early settlement.
In this thesis, I would like to focus on this initial phase of European/African contact at the Cape, in particular, the first fifty years leading up to the establishment of a permanent Dutch settlement there, 1652-1702.
My interest is in the hybrid dynamic, the complex trans-cultural exchange and fusion that, though fragile and uneven, nevertheless formed an integral feature of the early settlement and ensured its development; the heterogonous bartering, which, by the time of the disaster of 1948, had been almost entirely obliterated from memory.
Whatever shards of the bastard truth remained by that stage, would, over the next four decades, be ruthlessly revised, edited and suppressed as racist nationalists in South Africa – and their counterparts around the post-war world – embarked upon the simplification, the very literal whitewashing, of history. They commenced their collision path with the intricate fabric of diversity by substituting the reality of global cross-pollination and intermingling with the sanitised invention of ‘man’s most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race’, and the synthetic fabrication of inviolate national identity.
She hands him back the mouthpiece and turns to look around the room. Whole sections of the thesis were refined here, in this café, in the middle of the night, under this ornate ceiling in which little lights twinkle in embossed brass panels – the Smoky Way, they call it. Written and rewritten on these tables with mother-of – pearl laid into intricate geometric designs – though not at this particular table – at his favourite, the one in the corner behind the mashrabeya screen. But it is a busy night and that seat was already taken by the time he arrived. She strains to see who is seated in their seat on the other side of the screen. He observes her futile attempt – a mashrabeya shields the privacy of those who want to see without themselves being seen – then looks down to the voluminous manuscript under her tapping hand.
He knows it virtually, by heart, not just because he wrote it, painstakingly, word for meticulous word, but also because it is his nature: his eyes move over the pages of a book like the beam of light in a copier; every detail of the written word is captured, and pleasure is deferred. Later, far away, he will turn the pages again slowly in his mind. At school, the habit of reading books that hovered in front of his seemingly vacant, distant stare got him dismissed as a distracted daydreamer: ‘Dreamer schemer, history’s cleaner’.
When coverage on the screen is interrupted – the prime minister is about to make a statement – they scramble for distraction. He feels around under his T-shirt for the control switch of his most extravagant possession, a portable music player, a gift from Kagiso, then inserts one of the earphones while passing her the other. When the mournful tune he has selected starts up, lilting, gently, she watches him lean forward and sink his eyes into his palms. She starts again to read:
On 6th April 1652, three ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company, de Drommedaris, de Goede Hoop and de Reiger, dropped anchor in a beautiful bay on the southwest tip of the African continent. On board the flagship, de Drommedaris, were Jan van Riebeeck, the commander of the mission, his wife, Maria de la Quellière, and their young son, Lambertus. They had just completed the three-month voyage from Amsterdam; their charge, to set up a refreshment station at the Cape, the Cape which Van Riebeeck would name after the second ship in his fleet, Kaap de Goede Hoop, the Cape of Good Hope.
From the shore, their arrival would have been keenly observed by the Goringhaicona, a small group of around fifty Khoikhoi who first appear in the logbooks of passing ships as early as 1608 and who “had survived for many years by hunting and gathering, and by being alert when Dutch, French and English merchantmen put into port.”2 In this group were three individuals; Autshumao, their self – serving leader, Krotoa, his young, impressionable niece,
and the militant, Doman, “the first indigenous South African resistance leader”3. History had arrived on their beach. Forced by it into a new consciousness of themselves, each would respond to it differently. All would be forever changed by it.
Van Riebeeck’s instructions from the Company were immediately to start the construction of a fort and the cultivation of a garden, which would provide passing Company ships with fresh produce. On April 7, he went ashore and, without consultation, chose a piece of land at the foot of Table Mountain – where Cape Town’s Grand Parade is today – for this purpose. Building work commenced promptly, on April 9. Within three days of arriving at the Cape, Van Riebeeck had set in motion “aprocess whereby the landscape used not only by the Goringhaicona but by thousands of transhumant pastoralists was adversely and irrevocably changed.” The Dutch had not chanced upon an empty, abandoned landscape: the site chosen was in the middle of the most fertile seasonal grazing pastures of cattle-rich Khoikhoi who had retreated with their herds into the interior for the winter.4
He glances up at the screen. The prime minister has said his bit, handing them back to the horror of shock and awe. She takes a final puff. “Yalla?” she suggests, laying down the mouthpiece. “I’ll give you a ride. We can chat about your revisions in the car if you like?”
No. Thanks. I’ll stay here a while longer.
“You sure? It’s late. The tube will be closed.”
I’ll be fine. Thanks for coming.
She lays her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry it’s turned out like this, Issa. But try not to let it get you down.”
He didn’t rise to see her off as usual, so she bent down to kiss him on the cheek. Stubble – but not like Karim’s, wispy and sparse, no – more dense and prickly. When her lips touched his jaw she felt it tense as he clenched his teeth. Did he sniff? Was he crying? She couldn’t be sure, didn’t want to intrude, so withdrew and started for the door.
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