After a while you switch on the radio to find out what the story is but you've just missed the news. They're up to the cancellations. The only one they've got today is a senior citizens' backgammon afternoon; the hall they were going to use burnt down last night. There's a few ads, then the music: ‘Billy Don't Be a Hero’, by Paper Lace. A timeless hit from the seventies, says the announcer. Two hitchhikers walk past.
When she was here on a speaking tour in 1988 Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had a story about this very situation. There were long lines of traffic on a road somewhere in Europe, all going to a football match. There'd been a serious accident and the road was blocked. Everyone was pissed off. One of the victims died but was brought back to life. Later, when he'd recovered, he could remember his spirit travelling to a car waiting down the road and explaining to the people in it that they should be more patient, it was worse for the people in the accident. Not only that, he also remembered the name and address of the car's driver. He was promptly referred to a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist contacted the address to help cure the man of his delusion but it turned out the name was correct, and the man who lived there had indeed been travelling to the soccer that day on that road. He and his friends had been annoyed at first but they'd realised after a while that it was worse for the people in the accident. The psychiatrist not only discharged the man who'd momentarily died, he also gave up psychiatry.
You turn the radio off. There's a page from an old newspaper in the back seat and you read every word on both sides, even the ads, then do the crossword. You only cheat on three. Some articles you read again. Finally you're down to one:
FISHY WEATHER
It rained sardines in Queensland on Sunday.
During a violent storm in Ipswich, 50km inland from Brisbane, residents were pelted by scores of squirming sardines.
Scientists said updrafts probably took the fish from shallow water into the atmosphere. When it rained, they fell.
In the end you tear it out and put it in your pocket.
It occurs that perhaps your family are trapped in the supermarket. The pressure to escape through the narrow checkouts has become so intense they have blocked and everyone in there is slowly suffocating. Someone must have called the fire brigade; you can see the flashing lights in the distance. Strange, they seem to be taking forever. Hurry up, you think. For God's sake hurry up!
I'm reminded of the old woman who lived down the other end of our street when I was at high school. Our street was only a block from the main road and every afternoon about four she'd walk up to the main road and peer anxiously at the traffic coming from town. She was waiting for her husband to come home from work, even though he'd been killed years earlier. It was said he'd rolled at the exact same spot she waited. Rain or shine she was up there, every afternoon, hands held tightly together, the wind pressing her dress against her thin legs.
One day a man came round and told my mother there was going to be a meeting to discuss the woman. People were unhappy with the situation, they thought something should be done. He was sitting on our couch with his legs wide apart, all the time throwing a tennis ball to himself. Sometimes he tossed it up in a loop, other times he'd throw it hard, like a baseballer throwing a baseball into their own mitt.
Finally he dropped it. My mother had started to tell him off for his attitude to the old woman and this had taken him by surprise. The tennis ball bounced across our living-room and out into the kitchen. The back door was open and I got to the kitchen just in time to see it roll out and down into the back yard. It took us half an hour to find it. He kept apologising and telling us not to worry but I was really only looking because I wanted to keep it myself. My mother was only looking because she wanted the man out of her house. The man was only looking because he wouldn't be able to talk to the other neighbours without it.
A boy walks up the road towards you. He's carrying a tray like the boys at football matches, with a strap that goes up round his neck. The tray is loaded with chocolate bars and cans of soft drink. Nobody else seems to want anything but you get a Moro bar and a Coke. You have no cash but he accepts cheques with ID. He tells you the road will be clear soon. You chew your Moro slowly, find yourself humming the tune of ‘Billy Don't Be a Hero’. At least you won't be here the rest of your life.
THE WILD COAST
There are so many children in South Africa you sometimes wonder if they aren't in fact running the show. Dawdling home in every direction from the crowded school buses, playing twenty-five-a-side soccer with a screwed-up cigarette packet on a dusty bit of ground, swarms of pre-schoolers running after your car with their hands out, pleading at the top of their high voices for sweets. Always a kid ready to light you a fire or wash your car or run a quick message for a rand. And thousands more born every day.
At Mpande a heavily pregnant woman in a group of people walking past our campsite collapsed right in front of us. For a few awful seconds she lay on the ground without moving. When she came to she let out a few low moans; the group stood in a circle around her, arguing. A boy was sent running back the way they'd come. We tried to offer our van to take her to a clinic but they wouldn't hear of it; I think maybe they could see we'd have to take down the tent to drive anywhere and they didn't want to be that much of a problem. After a few minutes the woman got up anyway and they walked on. The boy who'd been sent back came by on a horse an hour or two later.
The next day the woman walked back along the path the other way with a baby. She waved, we waved back. Just like that, another one.
If anyone was running the show at Mpande it was probably Joshua. All of nine, I suppose there could have been someone else behind the scenes, someone we never met telling him what to do but somehow I don't think so. He was too good to be reading lines. Looking back on our time in the Transkei I find myself dreaming that the influence of his entrepreneurial instinct and flair might spread beyond the outskirts of Mpande, that maybe he could one day turn his cleverness to making some kind of a difference … of course this is the way with travel: the buildings and monuments are so grand, the scenery out of this world, the people we happen to meet destined to one day make history …
The Transkei is named for the Great Kei river which marks its southern border. North of the Great Kei other rivers beginning on the eastern face of the Drakensberg make their way down from the mountains through the steep, bare hills of the Transkei to empty into the Indian Ocean. Mpande is at the mouth of one of these rivers.
The river at Mpande is a brown sluggish thing, edges covered with algae: a breeding ground for insects. At night the place is alive with them. Alongside the river—and a single, low, tree-clad dune away from the beach—a piece of flat ground makes do as the camping ground. There's a broken tap, a long-neglected toilet, a tumbledown office with the fees painted on the side in English and Xhosa and nobody ever in it. There must be someone who keeps the grass down.
There were three of us: Pete, Greg and me. We were travelling the coastal route from Durban to Cape Town. People had insisted we stay a few days on the Wild Coast, told us it really had to be at Mpande. Don't go to Port St Johns, they said, that's where everyone goes. Go to Mpande. Nobody goes there.
Joshua first appeared soon after we'd arrived. We were still getting the tent right; there was always this confusion with the poles. At first he loitered slyly in the background, watching us from a distance, only slowly sidling up the tree-line to the campsite before finally sitting on a log by the remains of a fire near our van, chewing on the end of a bit of grass and nodding seriously at our attempts to introduce ourselves. It took maybe five minutes before we were happy with the tent, another five after we'd sat down with him before he first spoke—English—and told us his name in a mumble: Joshua; a moment later his age: nine, ten next month. As we gained his confidence he opened up more and more: he lived just a mile away with his mother and seven sisters and brothers; he was second, the oldest boy. He went to a school nearby but wasn't there today because it was a holi
day. He liked school, liked his teacher, but his family had no money to buy schoolbooks. Did we want him to organise a fire?
Apart from the four of us the place was deserted. There didn't seem to be anything more to Mpande than the camping ground. It was hot and still; humid. We had no need of a fire.
But to cook, Joshua persisted. To cook we'd need a fire.
No, one of us said. No fires.
He picked gloomily at the remnants of the previous fire with a half-burnt stick. Maybe that had been his fire too. He looked so sad … no money for schoolbooks … in a vague sort of way we were his guests …
Okay, we said. We can have a fire.
Within seconds he produced a smaller friend to help him and both hared off into the trees. We could hear branches snapping as we argued with each other. Should we have employed them? How much should we pay? Should we just give them some money and leave it at that?
My opinion was if they were going to work we should pay what they'd get for the same work in New Zealand. Greg pointed out that was probably a lot more than their parents' wages. Pete thought we should work their butts off and give them fifty cents. We compromised in the end on a rand an hour, to round it up if they worked less. As it turned out it took them twenty minutes to get our fire going; at the end of this time we gave them each a rand. They thanked us politely and ran off.
It was only in our last half hour at Mpande that we finally found out what labour was supposed to be worth, when Greg met an old woman who could speak English at the tap. Ten cents for a full eight-hour day, she said, that was what we should have paid them. They were cheeky for asking any more than that.
Pete, Greg and I were medical students on a three-month elective working in a hospital at Edendale, in KwaZulu, another homeland to the north. We'd been there about six weeks and now we were taking some time for this holiday to the Cape. We planned to stay with friends of people at Edendale; many of the doctors there had trained in Cape Town. We were travelling in a late 60s pop-top Commer campervan we'd bought for R1500 in Johannesburg; it came complete with the tent which went up along one side as an awning. So far it had proven ideal.
There was a joke among those at Edendale who'd been to Mpande that whites would only ever go there for one of two reasons: to buy cheap bulk undersized lobster or to buy cheap bulk marijuana—dagga, everyone seemed to call it—in either case to smuggle back to South Africa where there is a ready market for both, the dagga ending up on the streets as so-called Durban poison. We weren't planning to smuggle anything; it was just that all these people had said it was a great place to hide away for a few days, put our feet up, catch up on our budgets a bit, see the real South Africa. Of course if someone were to offer us cheap Durban poison we weren't going to ignore that … but we didn't want to end up rotting in jail, not in the Transkei nor in South Africa.
An hour or so after Joshua and his friend had left we were approached again, this time a young man in his mid to late teens, good-looking, with a sparse half-beard and a wide smile. Despite the warmth he had on a bulky jersey and an old bomber jacket, a woollen hat pulled down over his ears and fingerless woollen gloves—black men in South Africa often dress as if it is cold and wet; you see guys wearing balaclavas on hot sunny days. He didn't speak English and we nodded and smiled to each other for a minute or two before he joined us on a log beside the fire.
In South Africa the secret symbol for dagga amongst users and sellers is the thumb rubbed back and forth across the fingertips—doctors call it pill-rolling—and when Pete finally made this movement the young man laughed and repeated it back. We all laughed and smiled, all made the pill-rolling movement, and a few seconds after this he pulled a rucksack from his jacket and tossed it over to Pete. Stuffed inside it was a football-sized plastic bag packed full with dagga. Pete ran his hand through it, scooped some out to show me and Greg. It was one hundred per cent heads, all sparkling with resin, over a pound of it. We couldn't believe our eyes. The commonest unit of sale in South Africa is the bullet, a few joints' worth, a few grams at the most. Here in front of us was maybe five or six hundred grams.
Although without English the young man did know his numbers. Fif, he said.
Fifty rand? Pete asked. He nodded.
Fifty rand was an absurd price. It would have bought maybe ten bullets max on the streets of Johannesburg. We looked at each other wide-eyed; Pete stifled a laugh.
Twenty, he said, winking at me. The young man frowned and shook his head.
Four-fie.
Twenty-one.
Four-four.
In the end we didn't get him down so much: R30 plus a carton of Chesterfields we'd picked up duty-free, bought—along with a bottle of Jack Daniels—with exactly this kind of situation in mind. No one was going to offer us three quarters of a kilo of dagga again, not for any price; it was worth the cigarettes just to be able to write home and brag about it, and we still had the whiskey for emergencies.
Having reached the agreement Pete realised he'd need some cigarettes for himself and despite protests from me and Greg opened the carton and took two packets out; after some less friendly renegotiation the deal became R32 plus eight packets of Chesterfields. I could see why the guy was unhappy. A carton of Chesterfields is worth more than the sum of its parts.
Still, once he had the money and the cigarettes in hand he cheered up and pulled out from his jacket another plastic bag, this one stuffed with several lobsters.
No, we didn't want any, Greg tried to explain, the dagga would do fine. The young man didn't seem to want to accept this answer at first but with all of us shaking our heads and saying no and pushing the lobster away he finally acknowledged he understood and we smiled and waved our goodbyes. As soon as he was around the corner all three of us burst into laughter. We'd never in our lives done such a deal.
While I was still rolling the first joint, Joshua and his friend returned, drinking Coca-Cola and smoking Peter Stuyvesants. From several people I'd heard the story that Coca-Cola have themselves paid to wire electricity to some of the most obscure parts of the country, just so outlying stores can have a Coca-Cola freezer. The freezer is supplied free of charge on the condition that only Coca-Cola products can be stored in it. You come across these places out in the wops with a few cans and bottles in a largely empty freezer while perishable goods stacked alongside slowly wither away in the heat.
Joshua and his friend sat on the log and stared into the fire, sipping their Cokes and smoking. What about the schoolbooks? I said, but he just laughed. The initial shyness had gone; they were both quite happy now to sit with us. You could see it in Joshua's eyes, they were narrower: smoker's eyes. He was a man now, one of us.
I lit up the first joint. It was strong, hard to hold in, and I felt it straight away in my face, a kind of pleasant stretching or pulling, as if my head was slowly growing behind it. I looked out across the river to the trees on the other side. For the first time I noticed the birds, the vague hum of distant insects; somewhere, further away, the shrill laughter of children.
The Transkei is not so old itself. First established as a Bantustan by the Nationalist Government in the 1950s, in 1959 it became one of the eight original homelands created under the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act and in the early 60s began to move towards self-control. On 26 October 1976 it celebrated its independence. Now if you want to cross the border you need a visa—you can get one at a border post no problem—and South African national statistics no longer include the Transkei. It has its own government and its own police, even its own defence force.
The rest of the world sees things differently, however, continuing to consider the Transkei a part of South Africa and not a separate country at all. It is only in South Africa (and the Transkei) that the Transkei is actually a country; beyond the South African borders it disappears from the map, leaving it in a kind of limbo, a half-country, a country you cannot be certain even really exists. Perhaps this explains why only some of the roads in and out actually do
have border posts, why it is possible—at least in an official sense—to enter and then never leave, or go to leave only to discover you never in fact entered.
Of course there's a lot more history to the place than the last fourteen years. People have been around in various stages of evolution for over two million. Being at the very south of the continent changes have come slowly—until, that is, the arrival of white explorers and settlers from Cape Colony. From there history gathers momentum, and the last two hundred years have seen a confusing array of policies and wars, treaties and broken treaties, immigration and emigration, resistance and decline.
Probably the most famous incident in the Transkei's last two hundred years is the Great Cattle Killing. In 1854 the Governor of Cape Colony, George Grey—later to govern New Zealand—decided he would once and for all civilise the Xhosa and other neighbouring Transkei and Ciskei tribes. He dreamed of establishing a country where the primary divisions were of class, not race, and his policy involved creating a chequerboard of small white farms and black reserves. Eventually, Grey believed, the blacks would follow suit and divide their reserves into individually owned smallholdings in the manner of the whites.
Instead the blacks became fearful they would lose their identity and their land. In October 1856 Xhosa prophet Nongquase told of a vision that a great wind would sweep the whites into the sea if everyone slaughtered their cattle. Twenty thousand cattle were killed; many went further and did not plant out crops when the summer rains came.
The great wind never arrived. Instead, by early 1857 there was a catastrophic famine and ultimately the weakened black population was left powerless to deal with Grey's chequerboard policy. It is not recorded what became of Nongquase.
By the beginning of the twentieth century all of the Transkei was firmly under the control of a united South Africa. Legislation expelling blacks from Orange Free State and Cape Colony saw a large wave of immigrants arrive and overpopulation forced excessive use of limited land space. As it lost its nutrients and the plants to hold it there the soil on the Transkei's steep hills was washed away. The productive capacity of the once fertile land was now more limited than it had ever been, and many were forced away to find work in the Transvaal gold mines. The increasingly repressive pass laws of the 1950s forced more and more back, however—some to a place which had not been their tribal land in the first place. Today the Transkei is like a country at war: large numbers of the men—like Joshua's father—away to work in South Africa as immigrant labour for all but the few weeks of the year they can return to their homeland to get to know their families again, meet last year's baby, hurriedly conceive the next.
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