by David Smiedt
Despite their circumstances, however, the people of Ladysmith remained defiant. The local newspaper continued to pump out a fresh edition every day and the banner headline on 23 December screamed: “LADYSMITH BOMBSHELL. THE CONVENT IS NOW EMPTY. NUN LEFT.” So proud were the locals of their defiance that when the town hall was damaged during the deluge, they didn’t bother fixing the hole in the clocktower until 1923 and instead wore it like a proud battle scar.
Another of these battle scars occupies display number 21 in the museum. The envelope-sized piece of skin bearing a small tattoo is all that remains of a soldier burned to death during the nearby Battle of Spioenkop. It claimed the lives of so many Liverpudlian troops that the town’s football team named the most parochial section of its Anfield stadium “the Kop” in their honour. Several generations of museum staff have reported that, during quiet periods, they have seen the reflection of a forlorn, dishevelled soldier peering longingly into the cabinet.
Where other towns in the region capitalise on their history through hard facts, solemn memorials and mordant battle sites, Ladysmith adds to the hard data of its turbulent past with a supernatural soupçfon. The otherworldly encounters that have been matter-of-factly discussed by locals for years are now a bold element in Ladysmith’s tourism drive.
One of those behind the strategy is Fifi Meyer, who works for the local council and was instrumental in establishing the town’s ghost tour. There are certain people you encounter on the road that you instantly warm to and Fifi was one of them. In my exper ience, women with this name divide neatly into two categories. The first are prissy princesses who “relate” to Sex and the City and believe they regularly mingle with the working classes because one does their pedicure every week. The second are garrulous types who wear bold prints, can hold their Scotch and if pressed can generally complete limericks that begin, “There once was a girl from Nantucket”. Fifi belonged squarely in the latter category.
Although the spectral circuit is a self-drive affair, Fifi couldn’t resist getting me started with a personal tour of the town hall. Built in 1883, it consists of a Renaissance Revival facade atop which sits a clocktower. The midsection of the building is given over to a Tuscan portico with half-a-dozen council offices on each side. Beyond this lay a grand civic hall with a parquet floor, soaring walls painted in a dignified burgundy and under whose patterned plaster ceiling hearts were broken and romance blossomed at scores of dances.
“There was often an uninvited guest though,” whispered Fifi. “Guests would frequently be heard muttering about the obviously intoxicated violin player who they thought was part of the orchestra. He would be glimpsed clowning around amid the guests and his favourite party trick was climbing the balcony wall, staggering, swooning and pre-tending to fall onto the dancers below. There were even instances when the orchestra leaders were reprimanded about his conduct, but they responded by saying that they had no violin player who even remotely matched his description.”
Fifi’s eyes flickered with intrigue at the conclusion of the tale. Sensing that I had chosen to merely wade into it as opposed to dive in headlong as she had, Fifi checked herself with the most endearing half-apology that has ever been thrown my way. “I really get intoxicated by the exuberance of my own verbosity,” she smiled before equipping me with a map for the remainder of the tour.
La Verna Convent sat on a ridge overlooking the town and was now its primary hospital. It turned out that the area also functioned as Ladysmith’s top make-out spot and the area was lined with a handful of vehicles whose shock absorbers emitted rhythmic sighs while the occupants within did likewise. Shrouded in a pearly mist, the hospital was all creaking doors and echoing corridors. It could have been the setting for one of those horror movies in which busty trainee nurses are transformed into catheter-wielding zombies by a demonic surgeon. The spirits that apparently roam this former nunnery are somewhat kinder. Numerous patients have emerged from fevers with a request to thank the pretty nun who straightened their bedding during the night. However, the only habits that have been in the hospital in decades have been confined to the detox unit.
The next morning I wandered into town in search of a cappuccino. With froth on my nose and sun on my back, I’m not ashamed to say that I developed somewhat of an infatuation with Ladysmith. Its slumbering streets were edged with whitewashed homes topped by pitched corrugated-iron roofs in mint green. Many of these were guesthouses peeping through French doors onto rose gardens and rugs of kikuyu.
People chatted with the easy familiarity of those who had pretty much the same conversation the day before. On the main street I browsed in shop windows made all the more intriguing by a universal reality of country retail: the charmingly incongruous display. With a modest population to service, many family-owned establishments are understandably wary of specialising too narrowly in terms of the stock they carry and instead opt to be all things to all people. Call me old-fashioned, but I like the fact that there are some shops where you can still pick up luggage, a bicycle and some cookware and have the staff address you by name without having to read it off your credit card.
Unlike Dundee, which lives somewhat in its past – albeit graciously – Ladysmith has a quiet modernity which has been achieved without compromising its sense of small-town snugness.
It is also the home town of South Africa’s most successful musical export. Led by the honeyed tones of Joseph Tshabalala, what started as a backyard a cappella group became Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the group that transfixed audiences around the world after they collaborated with Paul Simon on his Graceland album. What makes the group unique is that, unlike those globally successful artists who their countrymen think of as cheesier than a quattro formaggio, the locals can’t get enough of them. In South Africa they have outsold the Beatles and Michael Jackson. When Nelson Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, he took them along to belt out a few numbers at the ceremony.
A hall in the town’s cultural museum is given over to the group and their remarkable story. Their style, known as isicathamiya, is not strictly a derivative of gospel but more a product of the harsh labour system of South Africa’s mines. Working six days a week, the poorly paid miners would fill their desolate compounds with sounds of joy into the small hours of every Sunday morning. The singers referred to themselves as cothoza mfana (tiptoe guys) because of the softly-softly dance steps they choreographed so as not to attract the ire of the mine security guards. When the miners drifted back to their homelands, the sound went with them and local towns soon pitted their groups against one another in competition. These contests continue to take place in YMCA halls and church basements throughout what was once known as Zululand, and sometimes the traditional prize of a goat is still awarded.
With a posse consisting of his brothers, cousins and friends, Tshabalala entered the fray. But before a note could be sung, the group needed a name. The Ladysmith component is self-explanatory. Black refers to the type of oxen regarded as the strongest animal on the farm. Mambazo is the Zulu word for axe and stems from the group’s proclivity to chop down the opposition. After a time they were so dominant that they were forbidden from entering competitions but achieved a large local following. A bootleg tape sent to a Los Angeles DJ eventually found its way to Paul Simon and six million albums later the group ranks alongside Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela as keepers of the sound of South Africa.
With a newly purchased copy of their Grammy-winning Shaka Zulu album blaring from my car speakers, I drove out of Ladysmith and into the misty valleys that rippled towards the distant coast. Hoping that my proximity to Durban meant that I’d finally escaped the saccharine clutches of Jac-aranda FM, I scanned the radio dial. Perfection comes not in stretches but snatches and I experienced precisely four minutes and forty seconds of it. Best of all, it came with an Australian twang in the form of Powderfinger’s “My Happiness”.
It was the bespoke musical backdrop to a landscape which felt like a perfectly measured coll
age of sapphire-blue sky, vast sugar cane lakes and dark conifer forests that pressed into the road on both sides like a lecherous uncle on a blushing bridesmaid.
At times cairns of stones would appear at crossroads. The Zulu refer to them as isivavini. In traditional culture, when a man set off on an important journey he would stop at the first junction and search for a generously sized stone. Holding it to his forehead and closing his eyes, he would then make two wishes. The first was intended for those who had walked this road before him and conveyed the hope that their journey had been fruitful. The second featured the same sentiment but was reserved for those yet to travel this path. The stone would then be placed on the pile by the side of the track. Thoughts of personal good fortune played no part in the process as, according to this practice of Ubuntu, your needs are covered twice over by those who have gone before you and those who will follow.
The isivavini is just one manifestation of a tribal culture that is equal parts savage and enlightened. The country’s other major tribal force, the Xhosa, who think of themselves as far more cerebral and form the bulk of the ANC’s brains trust, often deride the Zulus as dim and aggressive bully boys who stab first and ask questions later. The descendents of Shaka, however, now refer to the power players in South African politics as the “Xhosa Nostra”. Pretty smart if you ask me.
When it comes to friendliness, the Zulus don’t exactly go out on a limb and greetings are returned but rarely offered. That said, their courage, sense of self-worth and pride in their heritage is palpable at a distance – and intimidating close up.
Nowhere was this more evident than on the freezing night of 20 February 1917 in the middle of the English Channel. The commandeered liner SS Mendi was carrying hundreds of black South African troops – the overwhelming majority of them Zulu – to Le Havre from where they would head to the front line at Flanders.
War-time regulations forbade the use of lights on ships and another vessel crashed into the bow of the Mendi. To a man, the troops raced to deck from below, formed ranks and awaited further instructions. Having been briefly addressed by a Zulu clergyman on a black and lilting deck, the men stripped. “Barefoot and naked, the way their ancestors went to battle, against the noise of the wind, crashing seas and creaking plates of the doomed vessel,” wrote Roger Webster in At the Fireside, “they began stamping their feet in the death drill, celebrating their onrushing doom with the war songs of Shaka. It was a scene, the survivors declared, that would be burnt into their memories forever – those singing men slipping into their cold grave in the English Channel.”
Boer war general, staunch Afrikaner and South African prime minister Louis Botha moved a motion of sympathy in parliament for the mourning relatives. No sooner had he finished than the entire whites-only assembly rose to their feet and bowed their heads in silence. It was the only time black heroism was honoured in this fashion.
I stopped for lunch in Pietermaritzburg. Ensconced in a ring of apple-green hills, it is named after the Voortrekker leader who founded the place in 1838 but presents itself as a captivating outdoor gallery of Victorian and Edwardian architecture so Disneyesque British that I was half expecting Dick Van Dyke to appear at any second followed by half-a-dozen animated sheep bleating, “It’s a jolly ‘oliday with Maaaaaary”. All I needed to complete the picture was a street urchin, a flower seller with immaculate bone structure and a harrumphing bowler-hatted toff who used the word “awfully” when he meant “very”.
The City Hall is the star attraction in Pietermaritzburg’s stellar architectural gallery. According to Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” it is the largest all-brick building in the Southern Hemisphere. Three storeys of Victorian wonder, it is emblazoned with ornate friezes, arch-framed balconies, stained-glass windows, lashings of Corinthian columnettes whose purpose has more to do with aesthetics than structure, and contrasting brickwork that lends the entire structure a subtle motif of horizontal stripes. Topped by a handful of cream domes that surround a clocktower containing a dozen bells, it would not look out of place as the centrepiece of some chic Parisian rue. However, it is all the more charming for the fact that it’s located in this regional centre. It also boasts the second-largest organ in the Southern Hemisphere and we’ll leave it at that.
With hamburger grease on my chin and a mustard trail in my wake, I spent a marvellous hour wandering along Pietermaritzburg’s broad and dozing thoroughfares. Understated charm lurked at every turn. Beside a neat park exploding in pyrotechnic outbursts of purple and pink tibouchinas stood an octagonal bandstand bedecked in Chinoiserie with a roof designed to resemble a Mandarin hat. Fine examples of Collegiate Gothic architecture mingled with Magpie Tudor, Palladian and Classic Revival like genteel guests at an embassy cocktail party.
The sky had been occupied by bruised clouds which descended on Pietermaritzburg like a bully trying to psych out his victims by invading their personal space. I had been warned that the road into Durban was one of the most treacherous in the country and was keen to avoid adding to its perils with slick surfaces and poor visibility.
Too late. Fat splats hurled themselves onto my windscreen like kamikaze pilots from the battleship cumulo-nimbus. The carnage on South African roads is unfathomable to international visitors. For example, between 1 December 2002 and 9 January 2003, 1210 locals lost their lives in a mess of mangled metal. The road death toll for the same period in Australia, where traffic volumes, weather and road conditions are comparable, was 66.
Road-safety organisations lay the blame squarely at the government-issued boots of the nation’s 8000 traffic police, suggesting many are inexperienced, insufficiently trained and easily bribed because they are poorly paid.
I can vouch for the last from personal experience as my brother-in-law has escaped numerous speeding fines by carrying extra sandwiches for traffic officers. At times he has had to also reach for his wallet, but a roast beef on rye has done the trick on more than one occasion. Similar strategies are also routinely employed by the owners of rust-chomped taxis who always carry cash in anticipation of this work expense.
These frequently unroadworthy vehicles are routinely loaded with so many passengers that even the most innocuous of dings can become a potentially fatal affair. Only the day before I headed into Durban, traffic inspector Deon Fredericks had pulled over a minibus near the town of Laingsburg in the Karoo desert. En route to Cape Town, it was licensed to carry twenty-one passengers. Forty-six piled out. In addition to the van having no lights, bad brakes, a faulty steering mechanism and tyres buffed smooth by years of wear, the driver was four sheets to the wind.
The story had apparently been the source of ribald hilarity in at least one national newspaper office and that morning’s edition had featured a cartoon of a minibus wrapped around a lamppost. Limbs protruded from every window; contorted faces complete with swollen eyes and scratches were pressed against side windows. Surveying the scene were two traffic officers, one of whom was excitedly yelling out the punchline: “It’s okay, I’ve found the missing two passengers in the glove box!”
Laugh? I thought I’d never start. This perilous state of affairs becomes all the more dangerous for motorists when you consider that the metal doors and roofs that protect signal-box controllers fetch a small yet sufficiently attractive sum with Durban’s more unscrupulous metal dealers. Scores of the city’s traffic lights are then disabled as a result of exposure ot the elements. So widespread is the problem that civic bosses have ordered pepper booby-trap mechanisms to be installed to curb not merely the theft but the dozens of gut-churning smashes at volatile intersections.
I was soon to discover that the reality of a minibus crash was far different from the comically confused version in the morning paper. With the rain still tumbling, I descended a steep mountain pass at a crawl and thought it odd that few vehicles were approaching. Distributed around the crumpled fragments of a minivan ahead of me was an array of ambulances and police cars. Nearby lay eight bodies covered in blue tarpaulin
s while a dozen battered survivors wailed in grief as paramedics battled to save a small boy. Shards of glass lay like frost on the tarmac and the air smelled of petrol. It was the first time I had seen blood on a road and I hope it’s the last.
Soon afterwards I reached the squatter camps that mark the outskirts of Durban. Balanced gingerly against plunging hillsides strewn with litter and dead dogs, the tin shacks and cardboard dwellings appear to have been dropped from a considerable height. With no evidence of sewerage facilities and running water but plenty of overcrowding, they converge upon one another like a domino stack. I was left with the impression that a collapse near the bottom of the stack would send dozens of these structures tumbling towards the gurgling brown sludge at the base of the hills.
When I was growing up in apartheid South Africa, poverty meant not being able to afford a colour TV. We knew that black people did it tough, but the scale, spread and specifics of the poverty were unfathomable. Nothing would give me more pleasure than being able to report that the lot of South Africa’s needy has improved since the transition to majority rule. The sad reality is the rich have grown even richer while the poor have not so much slipped below the breadline but are on their hands and knees foraging for crumbs.
As anywhere, the spin doctors are quick to spring into action with counterinformation. For example, the South African Advertising Research Foundation proudly proclaims that between 1994 and 2001, the percentage of the population that falls into the poorest-of-the-poor category fell from 20 to 5 per cent. Buried in the small print is the fact that this bottom rung earns less than $500 per year, while the next one up has an annual income of between $500 and $1200.
Admirable efforts have been made with 1.4 million homes being delivered to needy South Africans between 1994 and 2002. Electricity access rose from 58 to 80 per cent of households in the same period. However, at ground level these initiatives look like a couple of sponges trying to mop up a dam-wall collapse.