by David Smiedt
Solid advice in a nation where the lack of any coherent and pervasive AIDS education campaign still sees many rural black men believing that they can cure themselves by having sex with a virgin.
A marginally less life-threatening township diversion is drugs. The isolation that came with apartheid practically insulated South Africa from the heroin, cocaine and ecstasy booms; it was only after the fall of the white regime that significant amounts of these drugs began to appear. Until then – and for many still – the drug of choice was mandrax or “buttons” as it is known by users. No other country has an industry based around this combination of methaqualone (the primary ingredient in Quaaludes) and diaphen-hydramine (an antihistamine found in cold medication) or diazepam (otherwise known as Prince Valium).
A potent sedative when popped, it is more frequently smoked like crack, thus enhancing both the high and the chances of addiction. Often vaporised in a bong-like contraption known as a white pipe and teamed with marijuana that has been dried with paraffin or other solvents, the initial rush is so powerful that many users “earth” immediately after use and drop unconscious to the ground.
The raw chemicals required to produce a kilogram of man-drax can be purchased for around $200 and cooked in a five-litre bucket on any suburban kitchen stove. In addition to the main ingredients, hydrochloric acid purchased from swimming-pool supply stores is thrown into the mix to draw off excess oil. Unlike the wide variety of markings – Calvin Klein logos, white doves of peace and Mitsubishi branding – that appear on ecstasy tablets, buttons are most commonly marked with a swastika. It is no small irony that these symbols of white supremacy are sprayed around township schools to indicate the presence of an on-site dealer.
Cheap to produce and highly addictive, mandrax has long been shadowed by a conspiracy theory which suggests the apartheid government flooded townships with it, thereby sabotaging the chances of black unity and mass uprisings. Such speculation would have forever remained in the realms of crop circles and grassy knollsters had it not been for the anguishing Truth and Reconciliation Commission which aired apartheid’s dirty laundry in the wake of the transition to majority rule.
One of those interviewed was Dr Wouter Basson, head of Operation Coast, the white government’s secret chemical and biological weapons program aimed at combating the pro-democracy movement. Aside from attempting to cultivate HIV for use in biological warfare and untraceable contact poison that was applied to a victim’s clothing and mimicked natural causes of death, Operation Coast manufactured quantities of street drugs that made Pablo Escobar look like a narcotics minnow.
The official line is that the drugs were to be used as a crowd-control mechanism to be spread by tear gas. However, mandrax was incinerated in the vapour-dispersion process, thus rendering it useless. No plausible explanation was offered as to the scale of production – we’re talking tonnes – or why it was necessary to press the chemicals into tablet form with a logo designed to mimic that of the original pharmaceutical source.
No one is suggesting that the mandrax issue was solely created and fostered by the government, but there are many who will swear blind they gave it a kick along.
Regardless of who was manufacturing the buttons, they couldn’t be profitably disseminated without a distribution network willing to put their own material wealth ahead of the wellbeing of the communities in which they operated. Enter the gang-bangers who rule townships from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth to Cape Town. Facsimiles of American-style gangsterism down to dress codes, slang graffiti, tattoos, hand signs and symbolism, the merciless numbers gangs (which originated in prisons and take their names from their cell blocks) rule the Cape Flats. Each defends its turf with extreme force while monopolising illegal business activities and extracting protection money.
When the inevitable confrontations occur, they are bloody and ferocious, and stray bullets frequently claim the lives of children. With police outnumbered, underresourced and so badly paid that the kickbacks from gangs make paying school fees for their children a more viable option, vigilantism is rife.
Yet, somehow, from these miserable slums has arisen a culture that crackles with wry wit, innate musicality and the wisdom to recognise that because life here is so often characterised by loss and pain, celebration should be consumed in lusty gulps.
The coloured community’s best-known festival is called – I shit you not – The Coon Carnival, a name which has survived the recent tide of political correctness and which the community has steadfastly refused to abandon. Thousands of participants in gaudy, glittering costumes parade through the main streets of Cape Town strumming banjos, shuffling and leaping along to Afrikaans songs as they make their way to a local stadium for a day of festivities. In the South Africa where I grew up, this was the closest we’d get to interacting with the coloured community, though individuals still scrubbed our floors and made our beds.
The Cape Flats eventually morphed into rust-licked factories, junkyards and silos, which in turn gave way to working-class suburbs of neat brick homes where children rode their bikes in the streets. The light had all but been swallowed by the evening sky when I reached my hotel in the suburb of Seapoint. It was an area of which I had fond memories. My grandmother lived in a residential hotel called the Kei Apple Grove off the main street, and it seemed practically everyone else’s did too. Then this road was lined with tearooms, kosher delis and boutiques selling twin sets. The area was so heavily populated by ageing Semites that pretty much every Jewish joke we told began with “These two old ladies/men meet on the main road of Seapoint.”
At night, however, when the oldies were tucked away with bedsocks on their feet and milk of magnesia in their tummies, Seapoint was the domain of the young, the hip and the dangerously suntanned who’d been sunning themselves at nearby Clifton Beach for weeks.
We waited in line outside discos while groups of girls dressed like Kim Wilde were ushered through hinged metallic doors which swung open to reveal gyrating bodies in a swirl of coloured light and artificial fog. Duran Duran blasted out of bars with pavement tables from which Kouros-drenched boys cruised girls in cut-off gloves who pretended not to notice the attention. Beside these were restaurants with candlelit corner tables that hosted dinners which were the hopeful prelude to third base. Further along the strip were burger joints, video game arcades – Galaga anyone? — and milkshake bars with names like the Purple Cow.
But we weren’t in Kansas anymore. The few stores that remained were fronted by iron bars of such profusion that the retail precinct wore a penal institution motif. Seedy neon-trimmed brothels with names like Madonna’s and Pleasure Palace stood on practically every corner. In their windows were dated posters of girls with big hair and breasts to match. These were apparently intended to provide an enticing glimpse of the calibre of female company which waited inside, but it seemed unlikely that Elle Macpherson had turned her back on a lingerie empire to make jiggy-jig with Portuguese merchant seamen on shore leave.
I stopped at a set of traffic lights near the hotel and was instantaneously greeted by a mahogany face at the window. Despite the fact that I was driving your bog-standard 1.8 Toyota Corolla rental, I immediately assumed that I was about to be carjacked. Not an entirely unreasonable premise given that only that day a seventeen-year-old Pretoria boy had taken his sister and brother hostage demanding guns, ammunition, two-way radios, R6 million in R200 notes ransom and his favoured getaway vehicle: a 1.6-litre Hyundai Excel. My point is the criminal mind works in strange ways and I was about to leap from the car begging for my life when my would-be assailant motioned for me to wind down the window. I did as I was told, only to be offered a choice of cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana or a buy-in-bulk-and-save combination of all three. Declining with a “no thank you but I appreciate the offer”, I sped away in the direction of my hotel and turned into the driveway having seen the ugliest facets of arguably the most naturally beautiful city on the face of the planet.
I woke up the next
morning ready to be seduced and glanced out my window at a 1000-metre-high aphrodisiac. It is impossible to overstate the presence of Table Mountain in Cape Town. Almost ten kilometres long and over three wide, it can be seen from as far as 200 kilometres out to sea and is the only landscape element on the planet to have a constel-lation named in its honour. It’s called the Mons Mensa (Latin for Table Mountain) and is a next-door neighbour to the Southern Cross. The mountain is garlanded by more plant species than are found in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland combined. It is wholly inanimate but possesses an undeniable soul. Viewed from the north, its sandstone ramparts coalesce into an amphitheatre whose dimensions are topped only by the magnificence of a vista that renders superlatives impotent. Six times older than the Himalayas, Table Mountain presides over the city at its feet like a wise and kindly quartzite benefactor.
The first European to come over all Edmund Hillary upon seeing it was a Portuguese navigator and admiral by the name of Antonio De Saldhana. In March 1503 he packed some sandwiches and clambered up a perilously inclined skinny fault in the northern face known as Platteklip Gorge – the first word being Afrikaans for “flat stone” and we’re not talking horizontal. Judging by the name he gave the mountain – Taboa do Cabo (Table of the Cape) which sounds more like one of those upmarket delis where the staff feel compelled to correct your pronunciation of tapenade – Antonio wasn’t much for descriptions. That task was better left to another of his countrymen, explorer Livio Sanuto who explored the summit in 1588 and wrote that it “hath formed here a great plain, pleasant in situation which with the fragrant herbs, variety of flowers and flourishing verdure of all things, seems a terrestrial paradise”.
Table Mountain is framed on one side by the conical Devil’s Peak, so named because Lucifer apparently once lost a pipe-smoking contest up there to a local farmer. It continues to blow the stream of alabaster cloud that tumbles from its flat-topped neighbour and is known as the tablecloth. This phenomenon is actually caused by southeast winds that bring moisture-filled air from the sea into contact with the mountain, where it rises, cools and condenses into downy cloud quilts.
To the right of Table Mountain is the 699-metre Lions Head peak. One of its flanks boasts a marginally leonine rock protuberance and faces the Atlantic, while the other dips and levels out over a kilometre to Signal Hill, otherwise known as the Lions Rump. The combined effect is that of a recumbent feline, the tip of whose tail emerges several kilometres out to sea as Robben Island. Viewed from the string of eastern beaches and glittering bays, the mountain is a craggy behemoth butted up against a succession of nine peaks which wade ankle-deep in the blue ocean at their feet and are somewhat confusingly called the Twelve Apostles.
Johannesburgers like us always considered Cape Town as somewhat less cosmopolitan than our golden metropolis. But in truth, for me anyway, it was the voice of deep and abiding jealousy. I envied my cousins who spoke of volunteering for surf-livesaving patrols and coast-guard activities. I coveted the fact that they had a “home” beach. But I would have swapped it all for the mountain at their back door. Like meditation made manifest, it simultaneously stills and energises me.
A certain young lady who inspired precisely the same response in me was shortly to fly in from Sydney and I figured that the Mountain would provide no end of help in securing an affirmative response to a question I would pop once we hit the summit. Unlike the intrepid Portuguese adventurers and the numerous hikers who venture up one of the 350 trails to the summit, my plan called for a semblance of dashing charm and a speech bubbling with heartfelt declarations. Difficult enough to conjure without being marinated in your own sweat and wheezing between every syllable. Clearly this wasn’t going to be a case of “you had me at ’stop complaining about those blisters there’s only five kilometres to go’”. So with a ring in my pocket and a lump in my throat, I steered Jennie towards the queue for the cable cars that ferry thousands of visitors a year to the summit.
Having asked Jennie’s dad for his daughter’s hand a few days earlier, I now thought of my own father and how he would never meet the woman who would, I hoped, take his name. He had, however, been beside me the last time I made this mountaintop pilgrimage. I have only two memories of the experience. The first was that the cars were cramped metal cages that resembled enclosed Ferris wheel seats. The second was that I picked out a relative’s house way below on the shores of Camps Bay because of the distinctive shape of their swimming pool. I was told by my parents I was talking nonsense, which swiftly became “You’re ruining it for everybody” as I continued to point out what I could clearly see and they couldn’t.
The old cars had been replaced by high-speed models that rotated during the three-minute journey from the base station. Around twenty-five people can fit in each and the universal vowels of gobsmacked wonder plus the whir of camera lenses filled the cabin as we ascended. Being the premier tourist attraction in South Africa’s premier tourist city, I had feared the mountaintop would be too crowded to find a secluded spot to do my spiel. Fortunately, there are three kilometres of walking tracks on the summit and within a few minutes we were sitting on a secluded precipice above a sweep of azure ocean pounding a succession of columned peaks. I found out later that my paramour was thinking, “If I had the balls, I’d ask him to marry me right now”.
Somehow the lines I had rehearsed a million times on the road came out in the correct order. Perched on one knee with a sheer drop at my back, I placed the ring onto her finger and was greeted with the response, “Oh my God, you’re doing it!” Which after a brief interlude of vexed clarification, I was told meant “Yes”.
In a glazed daze we wandered the summit hand in hand before repairing to a beachfront bar in Camps Bay for champagne.
Aside from being a creamy expanse of beach bounded by smooth boulders on either side, wide strips of lawn and chunky palm trees, Camps Bay is also the suburb in which three generations of my mother’s family lived. It is one of the few places in South Africa to which I felt a genuine connection.
This strip of surf was the stage on which my Aunt Fay would strut with a hibiscus behind her ear and a midmorning martini in her hand. A kosher Mame who was something of a bombshell in her youth, she volunteered for the nursing corps in World War II on the grounds that she looked great in white. Family folklore has it that another aunt was walking on the beach one morning with a friend when in the distance a woman approached in an ensemble for which “makeshift” is too kind a description. “Look at that,” said my Aunt Monica, “it looks like she’s taken a sheet, sewed up the sides then cut two holes for the arms and one for the head.” Lo and behold, Fay materialised from the mist with the greeting, “Darling! Don’t you just adore my new caftan? I took a sheet, sewed up the sides then cut two holes for the arms and one for the head.”
When darkness fell, we went to a nearby restaurant for dinner and began calling home to share the news as it was now early morning on the eastern seaboard of Australia. Although we tried to be discreet throughout the conversation with my prospective parents-in-law, fellow diners overheard the tale of the mountain proposal and sent over a bottle of champagne by way of congratulation. Although it was an individual gesture of kindness, it left us with an affection towards Cape Town and its residents that will endure henceforth.
Seapoint was a far more attractive prospect by day than it was by night and the next morning we wandered along the ocean-front promenade. The path is several kilometres long and bounded by a stone wall over which frothy explosions of sea spray leap. A string of coloured lights runs between the lampposts on the path, which is bordered by patches of grass large enough to accommodate dog walkers, several games of six-a-side soccer and the odd wino howling at the moon.
The paths were packed with groups of shirtless lunchtime joggers, mothers cantering along behind prams and even – bless – a few retirees who gladdened my heart by bellowing, “So this is a race track now?” to anyone who had the temerity to pass them.
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sp; The shimmer of the Seapoint Public Swimming pool, a sleek Art Deco collection of change rooms and admission booths, was exactly as I remembered it. But the high diving board on whose precipice I had cowered before hanging off the edge by my arms and bellyflopping into the water was inevitably more modest.
Alerted by the beep of a horn and a shrill cry of “Cape Town”, we boarded one of the crowded taxi minivans that make up for the city’s abject lack of public transport and leapt out a few minutes later at the Victoria & Albert Waterfront.
Locals rave about the place and although it revitalised the once scungy harbour district, replacing venereal sailors with well-heeled tourists, it is, at the end of the day, a shopping mall. Or more accurately a collection of them straight out of that struts-and-plexi school of retail architecture whose practitioners should be condemned to assembling IKEA furniture in hellish perpetuity. Save for the mountain peering down on the scene, we could have been in Sydney’s Darling Harbour or San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf and would not have known the difference.
Cape Town is a fairly compact city to navigate on foot, so we struck out towards the CBD past fishing boats unloading crates of rock lobster and tuna. Outside the impressive city aquarium stood a line of Muslim students in white fez-style hats, long navy trousers and matching shirts. They must have been six or seven and all looked immaculate despite the heat of the day and the volume of their clothing. A few of the scampish scoundrels at the back of the line even made sure they were out of the range of teacher’s ears and shot a “Howzit pretty lady!” towards Jennie.
Unlike Johannesburg where businesses have fled the CBD in the face of horrendous crime and ambivalent policing, Cape Town’s authorities took proactive action when they saw things heading the same way. The result is a city centre that teems with visitors, smartly dressed office workers of all races, roadside traders of one, and low-key security.