Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  Once a seedy cavalcade of brothels, bodegas and other dubious enterprises beginning with “b”, the Victorian buildings – complete with wraparound iron-filigreed balconies – are now host to restaurants, African music stores, fashion design studios-cum-stores and marvellous second-hand bookshops. The cumulative effect, however, is greater than the sum of its louche parts and we decided to return that night for dinner at a restaurant known more for its live music than its food: Mama Africa.

  Although many tour operators were offering evenings in traditional township drinking dens, the musicians who traditionally gave these raucous bars their sonic African edge had been lured to businesses like Mama Africa to play for audiences who gleefully handed over cover charges that would be laughed at in Soweto.

  Yet without these township shebeens – a word many South Africans would bet the stashed currency in Switzerland has a local origin but was actually introduced by Irish members of the Cape Town police force and is Gaelic for “little shop” – South African jazz would probably never have flourished. As black migrants flooded to the cities in the wake of mineral discoveries and the establishment of manufacturing industries, these illegal drinking dens became centres of urban social life. Often run by shebeen queens – women who became relatively wealthy and wielded significant influence over their communities, police force included – the township bars were embroiled in fierce competition. Aside from offering patrons a wide range of drinks such as traditional maize and sorghum beer, noxious chemical brews like Kill Me Quick and commercial European liquors, they also tapped into the fact that musical performance was the traditional accompaniment to drinking in tribal societies.

  At first the patrons themselves performed, but eventually miners and contract workers who strolled about playing African, Afro-Western and Afrikaans folk songs on guitars, concertinas and violins were yanked off the street and plonked on tiny stages.

  The increasingly urbanised black patrons eventually grew bored of the traditional sounds and demanded ones which would reflect city life. By the 1920s musicians had responded by assimilating elements from every performance tradition they encountered into a single urban African style. It was called marabi, a word which signified not only the music but also the lifestyle of its listeners.

  Thoroughly working class and overtly sexual – the word marabi also meant a category of people with low social status and a reputation for immorality – it coaxed African polyphonic principles into the western harmonic system. In other words, it was smokin’.

  Marabi was, however, merely the precursor to a style of music influenced by the American jazz that flooded areas like Sophiatown and Cape Town’s similarly multiracial District 6 (of which nothing remains but a museum and a musical).

  The appeal of this type of music is apparent when you consider that blacks in the United States were also forced to make the difficult transition from a rural to an urban existence. In doing so they adapted the African rhythms that filled the slave ships into blues and then jazz. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to also figure out that music was one of the only arenas in which underprivileged black Americans were able to earn a form of respect.

  Township bands like the Boston Stars, Manhattan Brothers and Jazz Maniacs, resplendent in lurid broad-shouldered zoot suits, tore joints apart and many were hired by the military during World War II to entertain the troops. For the conscripted white boys in the audience who thought Bing Crosby was pushing the envelope, this must have been nothing short of a revelation.

  Rural black newcomers to cities took a while to get into the sophisticated facsimiles of Satin Doll and many were seduced by tsaba-tsaba, a brash blend of New York jive and traditional tribal beats that dared listeners to keep their feet still. One of these tunes by August Musururgwa called “Skokiaan” was renamed “Happy Africa” and topped the US charts in 1954. Penny whistles were soon layered over the tsaba-tsaba foundations by musicians agog at the conjuring of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. The result was kwela music – brash, ballsy, raw and frenetic.

  Its rough edges were slowly smoothed with saxophones relegating the penny whistles to cameo appearances. Kwela jazz had arrived and, by the time the Group Areas and Separate Amenities Acts closed down many of its best-known venues, it had developed into a subtle, idiosyncratic and sophisticated entity whose foremost proponents such as Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim fled their homelands for sanctuary overseas.

  Kwela jazz with a generous side-serve of percussion was on the menu at Mama Africa the night we visited. This was not your finger-snapping variety of music – it was all about foot-stomping and booty-shaking. Patrons left their tables to crowd around the ten-strong band, which syncopated fiercely while a trumpet and sax rose above the beat like the opening clarinet in Rhapsody in Blue then exploded like a mushrooming firework.

  The sound trickled into Long Street as patrons edged through the doors to sway, grind or close their eyes with a half-smile and savour what was being created before them. We danced, drank and danced some more until the sweat-soaked band played one more encore then called it a night.

  The older I get the worse I boogie, the more inclined I am to use words like boogie and the less I am sure of. However, I know for a fact that if South African music doesn’t move you, it’s time to start checking for a pulse.

  Chapter 14

  No Man is an Island

  Having sped through the Cape Flats a few days later, we were meandering through what locals call the Wine Route, a term which could be applied, phonetically anyway, to a number of my single friends. While the bottled product of the region doesn’t quite match up to that of Australia, France or California, the locale in which it is harvested makes the Hunter Valley, Napa and most of Burgundy look like the agricultural equivalent of a crack den.

  Under a canopy of diluted sapphire, squat wide-fronted Cape Dutch homesteads sat in the midst of vineyards that looked as if they had been braided onto the buttresses of merlot mountains.

  The first cellar door at which we stopped was located on the enormous Spier Estate. An ensemble of whitewashed restaurants and conference facilities complemented picnic areas along the fringes of a gurgling river with the vines on the opposite bank. Aside from hosting a summer arts festival whose commendable motto is “without new works there are no classics” and introducing a profit-sharing scheme with employees that has led to new housing developments for those most in need, Spier has also donated a portion of its voluminous land holdings to a cheetah sanctuary. There, Jennie and I posed for photos with the skinniest of the big cats. After being led into a wire enclosure, we sat on a couple of logs in front of which lay a dozing feline. As we ran our hands over its coarse coat and bony frame, the cheetah rolled onto her back like a kitten and playfully swatted at our hands. It was like playing with a tabby on steroids.

  Of all the cats in Africa, cheetahs are the most threatened. For a start, they have no natural killing instinct – mothers have to literally show their cubs every aspect of hunting – and therefore lose out in the prey stakes to lions, leopards, hyena, vultures and wild dogs. As if to compensate for this fundamental shortcoming, they have a range of natural attributes that is unparalleled in the animal world. For example, under each of their eyes is a black strip of fur which cuts down glare, and the tips of their tails are as individual as fingerprints, allowing them to hunt in concert in long grass. Finally, a cheetah can also go from 0 to 120 kilometres per hour quicker than your average hatchback.

  The greatest concentration of wild cheetahs is found in the arid and isolated farmland of southern Namibia and the Kalahari Desert (hence the nickname Kalahari Ferrari). Like most predators they will go for the easiest kill – the weakest victim – which frequently turns out to be calves under eight weeks old. Farmers in the area faced with stock losses began to lump cheetahs among other pests to be eradicated. According to a survey in the Cheetah Conservation Fund’s June 2002 newsletter, in the decade up to 1991, only 10 per cent of 241 regio
nal farmers interviewed said they had not slaughtered a cheetah on their property. The fund’s education campaign saw that number jump to 24 per cent for the decade up to 2001. In addition to touring schools with the cheetahs, the foundation has also given away 170 Anatolian shepherd puppies to farmers. Bred in Turkey to protect herds from wolves and bears, this is a prop forward of a hound that ain’t gonna take no shit from no pussycat and has proved a far more effective deterrent to stock loses than bullets have ever been.

  From Spier we travelled to Franschoek, a village founded by the French Hugenots who fled to the Netherlands and travelled on to the Cape after 1685 when Louis XIV revoked the edict of Nantes which tolerated Protestantism. Before you could say pogrom, they had arrived in this bountiful valley with their faith unshaken and wine-making nous from the homeland. Enclosed by the saw-toothed Drakenstein mountains which take the form of cupped hands, Franschoek (literally the ‘French Corner’) is essentially a gen-trified main street of Gallic symbols such a vignerons, fromageries and patisseries. While strolling towards the monument at the end of the road we were approached by a smartly dressed local schoolboy collecting for a gym, sports tour or charity drive of some sort. The reason I am so unclear is that I became immediately transfixed by the fundraising activity. For every R50 collected, a teacher of the students’ choosing would spend half an hour perched in a tree outside the school hall. I handed over R100 on the condition that he nominated the cantankerous prick who got his jollies by repeating obscure questions to quivering students he knew didn’t know the answer. Every school has one.

  Franschoek is Cape Town’s foodie mecca with eight of the nation’s top 100 restaurants. We lunched on nouvelle nosh in a pretty restaurant named La Petite Ferme which overlooked the valley from a wooded ridge.

  Despite growing up in a household that had its own modest cell ar and wine on the table at most meals, I’m ashamed to admit that I never acquired a taste for the stuff. Consequently, the allure of the numerous cellar doors that lay at the end of oak-lined gravel driveways was purely aesthetic. That said, coachloads of ever-so-slightly-slurring tourists were piling in and out of them carrying vacuum-packed bottles. Although the quality of wine produced in the early days of the colony ranked somewhere between burgundy dish water and bitter vinegar, things soon picked up considerably and by the time Napoleon Bonaparte was doing time on St Helena he would only drink wine from the Groot Constantia estate.

  Sorely tempted to stay overnight, we instead opted to head back to Cape Town for cocktails at a certain seaside bar where I would tell a joke that began, “A Texan, a South African and a Sydneysider were standing on the deck of a cruise ship …”

  On the way we passed through some of the most sought-after real estate on the planet. Taking a circuitous route back to our hotel, we traversed the leafy enclave of Constantia. One of Cape Town’s old-money havens, it is an elegant composite of Cape Dutch gables behind don’t-even-think-about-it walls. Acorns and oaks overhang the streets and the occasional clip-clop of hooves filter onto the road from an unseen gulch. It is all frightfully civilised in an Enid Blyton sort of a way.

  Skirting the wind-whipped froth of Hout Bay, we crested Chapman’s Peak on a road hacked out of cliff faces that couldn’t be any sheerer were they made of organza. In the distance below, bounded by a crescent of hyper-white sand and an electric blue swell, nestled Llandudno – which looked more like a Greek fishing village than a metropolitan suburb. Darting this way and that like a schizophrenic serpent, the road eventually dipped a few metres above sea level at the seaweed-draped bay of Oudekraal. The angle of the slope eventually eased into foothills lined with homes of the multitiered, extensively balconied variety. We were back in Camps Bay.

  The odd beachfront cafe I remembered as a child had mushroomed into a row of trendy wine bars, restaurants and cocktail lounges frequented by what the tourist brochures termed “the beautiful people”. This turned out to be a euphemism for too-tanned models wearing fake Dior sunglasses and implants, affected waiters who were no doubt “really writers/actors/directors” and all manner of male poseurs for whom how much they could bench press was a valid topic of conversation.

  We drove on to La Med, the bar in which I had envisioned myself at the start of my journey. Set on a rock promontory beside a bowls club my grandfather had helped found, it looked out over all of Camps Bay and its attendant Apostles. And that was just when you turned your head to the left. Directly in front of the outdoor terrace was an oval where paragliders who’d leapt from Lions Head would touch down to golf applause, and beyond that 180 degrees of shimmering open sea.

  It was the eve of the World Cup cricket final and Australia were a cert to take out the trophy. With the hosts shooting themselves in the foot through bungled run-rate mathematics, Jennie suggested it might not be prudent to gather a group of locals for a joke about emigration. With the death stares I’d received at the rugby match in Bloemfontein still casting a malevolent shadow, I did the only thing I could: sulk and stare out to sea as my fiancée quietly asked herself what kind of man she’d agreed to spend the rest of her life with.

  As with most children, my mood brightened after a beer and a bowl of ice cream. On the drive towards Seapoint we passed through Bantry Bay, a cliffside retreat so exclusive and pricey that most of the houses have private funiculars beside the garage. After all, darling, do you know what steps can do to a pair of Blahniks?

  Having spent most of the day imbibing, we skipped dinner in favour of a sunset amble by the sea. Eleven kilometres offshore lay the island where we would spend our final day in this enchanted city.

  The Dutch word for seal is robbe and the seventeenth-century sailors who were the first Europeans to explore the 3.2-kilometre-long, 1.6-kilometre-wide island named it after the abundance of these creatures frolicking on the bone-white slivers of beach.

  As early as the 1660s the Dutch authorities were using Robben Island as a prison where Khoikhoi who were sus pected of theft were dumped after being branded, thrashed and chained. From its earliest incarnation, it was also a place to hide those with scandalous notions of racial equality.

  The British needed little convincing of the island’s penal value and everyone from the odd farmer who refused to grant freedom to slaves who had served their time, to tribal warlords were imprisoned here. Along with thousands who had committed the heinous offence of contracting leprosy.

  At only seven kilometres wide, the stretch of water between the island and nearest landfall at Blouberg Strand seems to invite escape attempts. Until you consider that it’s an icy coffin where if the hammerheads, great whites or hypothermia don’t get you, the tenacious currents fresh from the Antarctic will. According to some sources, the only successful bid for freedom from the island was made in 1658 by a banished Khoikhoi leader named Achumatu – bless you! – who only pulled off the feat because he stole a boat. Others point to the sorry story of Carel and Jacob Kruger, a pair of eighteenth-century vagabonds who reached shore in a boat fashioned from animal hide. After absconding into the interior, Carel was stomped into rigor mortis by an elephant, while his brother endured in the bush for two decades before being granted a pardon. God only knows how they found him to deliver the news, but on his way to Cape Town to formally receive his freedom, the poor bastard became lion food.

  When World War II rolled around, the strategically valuable port of Cape Town was considered a possible target for a German attack. Robben Island was promptly outfitted with a battery of antiaircraft guns, 3000 military personnel and an infrastructure of accommodation, places of worship and recreational facilities. So real was the threat that city residents were instructed to black out their windows and cover car headlights with cardboard into which thin slits had been sliced. Air-raid sirens would scream across the Atlantic Seaboard several times a week for emergency drills. My mother vividly recalls diving under desks with her classmates at Mrs Lotz’s kindergarten and biting down on the eraser they were required to wear at all times on a str
ing around their necks. Presumably this would absorb the shock of a building falling on their heads.

  Over half a century on, the island that would have protected the city from attacks which never materialised is now a tourist attraction so lucrative that only the Table Mountain cableway rakes in more cash.

  A sleek concrete and glass terminal-cum-museum known as the Nelson Mandela Gateway is the departure point for the three-and-a-half hour round trip to Robben Island. Lumbering through the harbour populated by behemoths stacked with containers, compact fishing trawlers and the odd bobbing seal, the captain cranked the engine as we passed the breakwater of interlocking concrete fingers. Even with a calm sea and twin hulls, it was a matter of mere minutes before I was on the back deck focusing on the horizon as my stomach was flipped like a patty on a grill.

  As we neared, the blurred mass whose highest point sits only thirty metres above the Atlantic began to acquire some detail. The white spire of a church was traced against a leaden sky, followed by a modest lighthouse and a string of low buildings with faded red metal roofs lining a jetty. Beyond these stood the rusting watchtowers.

  When the retching prisoners arrived here, they were lined up along the stone wall by the jetty and herded through an archway bearing the motto of the prison service: “We Serve With Pride”. Yep, and Arbeid Mach Frei.

  A gunmetal-grey bus was waiting for us and we piled in for a spin around the island. It was dotted with more structures than I had expected: a football club, tennis courts, a domed Muslim shrine built on the grave on an esteemed cleric, the quaint Church of the Good Shepherd chapel erected in 1895 and designed by no less than Sir Herbert Baker.

  When we pulled up at a stone cottage surrounded by razor wire, our tour guide swiftly lost her perky demeanour and adopted a quietly reverential tone. Zinzi, a vivacious twenty-something student who had up until that point delighted in playfully exposing the ignorance of the visitors, then asked who had heard of Nelson Mandela. Every hand on the bus was raised. She then asked who had heard of Robert Sobukwe. Only me and a pair of African-Americans responded in the affirmative. And in my case, it was only through the fortuitous coincidence that I had been researching this book.