The bus was going to leave Durban only in four hours’ time. Since my fiancée was working in the city centre, we decided to go to her office to kill time. One thing led to another and before I knew it we were having sex in her office (she, like other women, prefers to call it ‘making love’). There is something exciting about having sex in the office. The possibility of files falling from the table/somebody walking in/accidental bumping of the head on the computer screen/trying to suppress any noises in case someone is walking past, etc., etc., heightens the pleasure.
Back at Durban station, rejuvenated and in high spirits, we hugged and kissed, my fiancée very much aware that this was one of the biggest risks I would ever take. I promised that I was going to be safe and that I was going to keep in touch. By then she was in tears and the other passengers were giving her the ‘what-is-wrong-with-you’ look. Close as I was to crying myself, I had to be strong for her sake and quickly stepped into the Greyhound bus, my backpack stowed in the belly of the bus but my sleeping bag with me.
As the bus joined the main freeway, just past the Berea Centre, I spotted my fiancée driving next to us, waving and blowing kisses. I reciprocated while fighting back the tears, and looked steadfastly at the office parks and the Musgrave Centre flashing by.
An hour later we arrived at Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal’s capital city, now sometimes also called by the original Zulu name uMgungundlovu and not by the name of the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief. Here I was joined in the bus by Nkosinathi Mtshali, who I learned was a student in Cape Town who had come up for his older brother’s funeral. Lying back in the seat next to me, Nathi told me his late brother, a teacher, loved two things: babes and booze. He had been sick for more than 18 months. I could see that Nathi was still hurting.
Being an introvert I normally find it very hard to console someone I know, leave alone a stranger. So, instead of trying to comfort Nathi I changed the subject. I started talking about beautiful women. That seemed to work. Nathi confessed that he, too, could not resist beautiful women. By the time we stopped in Montrose – the unofficial halfway point between Durban and Johannesburg – he had relaxed and we were talking about cars, politics, sports and stuff like that. Because the bus was not full, I was able to move, towards evening, to an empty seat and sleep comfortably. My sleeping bag ensured that I survived the freezing Free State night.
It was a comfortable trip, except that roadworks and fog between Laingsburg and Worcester caused the bus to run about 60 minutes late. We were still about an hour and a half from Cape Town when I realised I was going to miss the bus to Namibia. I thought of forfeiting the ticket I had bought for the Cape Town–Windhoek leg of the journey but, since buses to Namibia travel only on certain days, this meant I would be forced to spend at least three days in Cape Town. Apart from Mpucuko, a friend who was a medical student at the University of Cape Town, and Nathi, blissfully asleep sprawled over two seats, I knew no one there. Also, I had not budgeted for three days in a city that caters mainly for overseas tourists with deep pockets.
I had, again, to think proactively. I decided to jump off the bus at Bellville, the second-to-last stop before Cape Town and the first stop out of Cape Town for buses en route to Namibia, in the hope that my seat would not have been sold to standby passengers at Cape Town station, the starting point.
The implication for my trip was of course that it would not begin at the southern tip of Africa. In fact, I was not even going to be able to start from Cape Town, leave alone Cape Agulhas, the most southerly point of the continent. I had always wanted to visit Cape Agulhas (‘Cape of Needles’), so named by the seafaring Portuguese explorers of the 15th century because of the sharp rocks and reefs that wrecked so many of their ships. It looked as if I was not going to be able to see the meeting place of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, the great oceanic divide where two currents – the cold Agulhas and the warm Benguela – merge.
Since I had been to Cape Town a number of times, I was not too disappointed about this change of plan and about not visiting one of the most beautiful cities on the continent, if not on earth. However, there are four Cape Town trips that I want to include in this Cape to Cairo account:
I made my first trip to Cape Town when I was a third-year student at the then Natal Technikon (now Durban University of Technology). I remember only one thing well about that trip – drinking cheap brandy in the backseat of the bus. It was 1995 – a year after South Africa’s first democratic elections – and, once in Cape Town, we headed for Parliament where we were addressed by a female MP. As a highly ignorant student I did not understand the significance of sitting in a hall which, until the previous year, was a no-go area for black people – not to mention the significance of being addressed by a black female parliamentarian. Pity I was too drunk to care or understand what she was talking about.
The one thing I remember about that speech is the phrase ‘the new dispensation’, which the MP kept repeating. At the time I was too inebriated to appreciate that after 46 years of official racial segregation and white domination our lives would no longer be determined by the colour of our skin. It did not strike me then that, precisely because of the new dispensation the woman was talking about, I stood a better chance in life than my parents when they were my age.
My second trip to the fairest Cape was the most enjoyable and best organised. It was my first year in the corporate world and, together with two colleagues, I attended a week-long course there. One of my colleagues, Stephanie, had studied in the Cape, so she took us around to all the hip-and-happening bars and some of the exclusive and sought-after strip clubs Cape Town had on offer. It was on that trip that I came to the conclusion that, although I had never been outside South Africa, Cape Town had to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
My third and most enriching trip to Cape Town was when I took my mother to the Mother City. It was just before South Africa’s second general election in 1999 and it was the first time she had been in an airplane. For her everything was fascinating and mind-blowing. She did not eat during the flight because she thought she might throw up. She prayed every time we hit a bit of turbulence.
The show-stopper on that trip was a visit to Robben Island. My mother was deeply moved by what Nelson Mandela and the other political prisoners went through during their incarceration. On our way back from the island I noticed that she was uncharacteristically quiet and absorbed in very deep thought. As the ferry entered the Cape Town harbour she said, out of the blue, ‘Hhayi ngeke, ngizovotela i-ANC.’ Loosely translated this means: ‘Hell no, I will vote for the ANC!’ To appreciate the extent of this life-changing experience it must be remembered that my mother, although educated, had spent almost all her life in rural northern KwaZulu-Natal, where the Inkatha Freedom Party was the only party anyone ever voted for.
My fourth and most recent trip to the Mother City was when I went down with the Top Dogs, my friends, to listen to the likes of Beyonce Knowles, Peter Gabriel, Anastasia, Bob Geldof, Eurhythmics, Angelina Kidjo and Youssou N’dour at the first 46664 Concert at Green-point Stadium on 29 November 2003. The concert was part of a series of charity shows to honour Nelson Rholihlahla Mandela, former Robben Island polical prisoner number 46664 – the 466th prisoner to arrive, in 1964. The trip was fun although we were in the company of our girlfriends and could not manoeuvre, as most guys would love to do when visiting another city, because our madams kept a very close eye on us.
While I was offloading my bags from the Durban bus in Bellville, the Namibia-bound bus pulled in. I realised that if I had stayed on the Durban bus until it reached Cape Town station I would most definitely have missed the Namibia bus. It was literally a case of getting off one bus and climbing into the other. It was certainly not the ideal way of starting a long overland trip. I had already spent a long night on a bus and I was tired. Naturally, my Cape to Cairo expedition started with a very big yawn.
‘Are you related to Doctor Khumalo, the soccer player?’
&
nbsp; This was the first question the hostess on the bus asked me, in typical Cape Coloured English, peppered with Afrikaans words and sounds, after checking my ticket.
‘The question should be “Is Doctor Khumalo related to me?”’ I replied. ‘And the answer to that question will be: “No he is not.”’ While she was giving me that ‘who-do-you-think-you-are’ look, I used the opportunity to peer at Table Mountain, looking unimpressive from a distance but clearly visible on this cold Cape winter’s morning.
On the upper deck I found a seat next to a slightly overweight girl at the back of the bus. Her name was Laura and she had been visiting her boyfriend in Cape Town for three days. She looked tired and exhausted. I understood why.
We passed Tygervalley shopping mall, drove through Durbanville and took the R302 to the N7, which runs in a northerly direction from Cape Town through Namibia, where it is called the B1, all the way to the Angolan border. This was the fourth time I had been on the West Coast. The other three times I had to go to the port of Saldanha for work reasons. Whenever I travel in the Wes-Kaap, as the locals call it, I cannot help but think of my retirement days. I would love to retire to a place like the West Coast, with little traffic, white sand, laid-back culture and open spaces. I like the dry look of the coast with its short and sparse vegetation – the exact opposite of my home town Durban where lush sub-tropical shrubs and trees compete for space with thousands of human beings living all over the place.
Apart from a nervous feeling that our bus was having a problem with gear selection and transmission, it was pleasant and relaxing to go through the small towns along the N7: Piketberg, Clanwilliam, Klawer, Vanrhynsdorp, Bitterfontein, Garies, Kamieskroon. Throughout the journey I kept asking myself: what do people do with themselves in these small towns in the middle of nowhere? I knew that in spring tourists flocked there to view the thousands of desert flowers that turn most of Namaqualand into a colourful garden, but at this time of year, besides the occasional sheep, there were few signs of human activity on those grey and dusty plains.
One thing for sure, though, is that people there have a far better quality of life than we city dwellers. Living in a small town makes you stop living life as if it is one big emergency. You stop chasing your own tail because you are not thinking that more money will make you happy. You do not have to accept the concrete jungle, which is what a big city is, with noise, fake/shallow people, air pollution and traffic as part of your daily life.
People who live in small towns tend to be more relaxed and calm and their lives far simpler and more stress-free than those of their big-city brothers and sisters. That is why I know that it is unlikely that I will ever meet a happy billionaire.
Laura spent most of her time sleeping. Now and then she would rest her head on my shoulder, without my permission of course. I did not mind. Not at all.
At dusk, we finally arrived at the small, attractive town of Springbok, strung out along one long street. I wondered, firstly, why most of the buildings were white and, secondly, whether South Africa’s (or should I say Mzansi’s) rugby team, the Springboks – the Amabokoboko as they are called by black South Africans – had ever played a game in Springbok in the town’s 114-year history. As far I was concerned this town should be their spiritual home.
Passing through Springbok made me think that rugby remained one of the least transformed sports in our country because not only was the Springbok coach (at the time) white, but his surname, too, was White. It was obvious to me that the SA Rugby Union could appoint a coach of any race as long as his surname was Swart (Black). With such a move rugby’s transformation problems would be solved once and for all.
I was disappointed not to see any springboks in Springbok although I have no particular attachment to these athletic antelope. I suppose it was a quite irrational feeling. After all, Baptists do not have to baptise, or Protestants to protest, or Methodists to be methodical.
It was already dark when we got to our last stop in South Africa: a very small and sleepy town called Steinkopf. Even though we were just over 500 kilometres from Cape Town, we were not yet halfway to Namibia’s capital city, Windhoek.
For the record, I wish to state that throughout this stretch of the trip we were within 90 kilometres of the coast and the cold waters of the Atlantic. I had already covered more than 2200 kilometres since leaving Durban, and was within an hour of crossing the first of the many borders I was going to have to go through on my journey.
In Steinkopf, I made two big mistakes: First, I decided to phone my fiancée from the only public phone in town. When I phoned I could hear our daughter, Nala, crying in the background. I enquired and the answer was simple: ‘I think she is missing you.’ We had a brief chat and after the call, although I had only been away for just over a day, I started feeling terribly homesick.
My second mistake was that for one reason or another I decided to buy a litre of fresh milk from a general dealer who stocked all the basic necessities – to judge from the bending shelves.
It was already pitch-dark when we got to the Vioolsdrif/Noordoewer border. As a result, I could not see the mighty Orange River, which separates South Africa from Namibia, but I was stamped out of South Africa without a glitch. So far so good.
Each time I go through a border I cannot help but think that working at a border post in the middle of nowhere, stamping people in or out of a country, has to be one of the most boring jobs. No wonder immigration officials hardly ever smile and always make a big fuss about nothing.
Nujoma’s Namibia
Father of the Nation
When the European powers were scrambling for Africa in the 1880s, Germany grabbed the area between the Orange River and the Kunene River and, in 1884, declared it a protectorate named Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Only Walvis Bay was excluded because Great Britain had already laid claim to it. Germany, it seems, found it difficult to manage the territory and its brutal policies towards the ‘natives’ caused many uprisings.
Deutsch-Südwestafrika became South West Africa at the end of World War I, when the League of Nations gave South Africa a mandate to administrate the territory. When South Africa later became reluctant to let go of her gains, despite a 1978 UN resolution to recall the mandate, a new hero emerged: Samuel Daniel Shafiishuna Nujoma, the first president of the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Nujoma had cofounded SWAPO’s forerunner, the Ovamboland People’s Organisation, in the late 1950s. In 1966 he authorised SWAPO to turn to armed resistance. During the struggle for independence he took the combat name Shafiishuna – ‘lightning’.
Namibia became Namibia on 21 March 1990. As head of SWAPO, Sam Nujoma was unanimously declared president after the party was victorious in UN-supervised elections. Nujoma was elected president three times (the constitution was changed in 1999 to allow him to become president for the third time). When, after 15 years in office, he could no longer be president, Hifikepunye Pohamba – described by some as Nujoma’s ‘handpicked successor’ – was elected with a large majority. Nujoma stayed on as president of the ruling SWAPO party, a position he still holds. Just before relinquishing his position as head of state in March 2005, he was given the official title of ‘Founding Father of the Namibian Nation’.
Namibia is the 34th largest country in the world and, after Mongolia, the least densely populated, with fewer than two million people, i.e., only two inhabitants per square kilometre.
I realised I was in another country when I registered that most of the notices hanging in the immigration offices were in German and Afrikaans, although English was made the official language of Namibia in 1990. The Namibian immigration official asked me, ‘Why are you only visiting Namibia for the first time when we are neighbours?’
I had no answer, really. Otherwise, getting into Namibia, which takes its name from the 1 600-kilometre stretch of desert along the Atlantic coast known as the Namib, was no problem at all.
My second consecutive night on a bus proved to be much more difficult tha
n I had expected. You know what it’s like when you’re dog tired and yet keep waking up every half-hour. The fact that I had drunk all that milk and had to visit the toilet three times did not help either.
While trying to sleep, I made the first of the many resolutions I was to make on the trip: I resolved that I would return one day to Namibia to do the five-day hike in the Fish River Canyon, the world’s second largest canyon after Colorado’s Grand Canyon. That was my Resolution No. 1. Zooming, exhausted, through the south of our northwestern neighbour in the middle of the night was not good enough.
The only thing that helped me to keep going was Laura’s suggestion that we share my sleeping bag and her blanket. Otherwise, I am not sure how I would have survived that cold night. Laura seemed a genuinely nice person, but a Eugène Terre’ Blanche look-alike seated opposite us did not appear to approve of our getting so cosy. As the minutes passed, I could see from the way he was looking at us that he was turning greener and greener with envy.
My first glimpse of Namibia, at dawn, was of a vast nothingness: few plants, huge open spaces – uninhabitable semi-desert under a big sky with no people anywhere to be seen, the towns very few and very far between. On the 786-kilometre stretch between the Orange River and Windhoek there were only two sizeable towns: Keetmanshoop and Mariental. There were no mines visible either along the route – as with many African countries, Namibia’s main exports are minerals, mainly diamonds and uranium.
It was still early in the morning when we arrived in the spread-out, uncluttered city of Windhoek. The bus stop was right in front of the modern Supreme Court building. I was struck by the multi-storey modern buildings that could be anywhere in the world, the wide but, at this early hour, deserted streets. Except for a few stragglers.
Dark Continent my Black Arse Page 2