The driver’s name was Norman. He looked to be a Khoisan – light brown, small head, tiny chin, daintily slant-eyed. The Khoisan were better known as Hottentots, a rude name bestowed on them by Afrikaners who, hearing the clicks in their subtle language, nailed them as stammerers.
Norman was still cursing ‘those people,’ the ones in the tents, lean-tos, plastic huts, ingenious humpies, sheds of scrap lumber; the people lying jumbled croc-like in the grass, others lying singly, or with their backs against the light poles, the vagrants, the drunks, the desperate, the sinister, the bewildered, the uncaring, the lost, cluttering the station entrance.
‘They smell, they make messes, they make shit, they fight, they won’t go away. And the government does nothing, so it will get worse. I hate it!’
He said he was from Soweto, he was indignant and angry.
‘People like you will stay away! Our business will suffer!’
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘Other people,’ he said, meaning not South Africans. ‘In Yeoville and Hillbrow there are too many tsotsis’ – rascals. ‘Congolese and Nigerians. Why they do come to Janiceburg? They just only make trouble.’
But he became cheery as he drove on. I asked him why.
‘The end of the world is coming. Another end of the world. The Waist is finished.’
‘You think.’
‘I know.’
He was of course a Jehovah’s Witness. He claimed the large amount of crime and violence was a sign. He saw explicit indications of Doomsday all over South Africa.
‘You might well be right, Norman,’ I said.
It so happened that at a stop light there was a gaunt greasy-haired beggar standing in the middle of the road holding a sign saying, No home – No work – No food – Please help. The people sleeping rough at the station had not been actively begging, and so the first South African beggar I saw was an able-bodied white man.
My hotel in Braamfontein was not far from Park Station, walking distance in fact, in a neighborhood reputed to be dangerous. But what did ‘dangerous’ mean in a city where people were mugged and their cars swiped by hijackers in the driveways of their own gated communities? The exchange rate made everything a bargain. I had a bath, ate breakfast, and went for a walk, feeling happy.
I was happy most of all because I was alive. Before I had set out, I’d had a premonition that I would die in some sort of road accident en route (‘Globetrotter Lost in Bus Plunge Horror’). As this had not happened, I could now apportion my time and make onward plans. I had never known from week to week how long my travel would take, but South Africa was a land of railways and reliable train timetables. I was encouraged to think that I might eat well here. I had not had many good meals since leaving Cairo, but the breakfast I’d just had, and a glimpse of the dinner menu, made me hopeful for more. Also, having arrived in South Africa I was able to begin pondering my trip, and it seemed to me a safari that had been worth taking, the ideal picnic.
Lastly, I was happy because my birthday was the day after tomorrow. I considered my birthday a national holiday, a day for me to devote to pleasure and reflection, on which I did no work. And because I was among people who didn’t know it was my birthday, I would have no one here forcing jollification upon me and making facetious remarks involving the word sexagenarian.
Another satisfaction about being in South Africa was that the country had been written about by many gifted people, among them Nadine Gordimer. I had known Nadine since the 1970s, when she made annual visits to New York and London. Unlike many other South African writers and activists, she had resisted fleeing into exile. By staying put in Johannesburg where she had lived her whole life she had become one of the most reliable witnesses to the seismic South African transformation. She was that wonderful thing, the national writer who transcended nationality by being true to her art, like Borges in Argentina, R. K. Narayan in India, Jorge Amado in Brazil, V S. Pritchett in England, Shusako Endo in Japan, Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, and Yasar Kemal in Turkey. They were writers I had sought out as a traveler.
Months before, I had warned Nadine that I was heading for South Africa and was looking forward to seeing her in Johannesburg. She was a writer who belonged to the world, but true to her home and her disposition, she had made South Africa her subject, had anatomized its problems and its people. The complex country became human and comprehensible in her prose. Among the few books I had held on to was one by Mahfouz, whom I had met in Cairo, the gnomic Echoes of an Autobiography. Nadine had written an introduction to it, as a friend and fellow Nobel laureate. Seeing her here would be pleasant and symmetrical, another way of joining two distant corners of Africa.
The truth of Gordimer’s fiction was apparent to me from my first days in Johannesburg, for her fiction was full of immigrants from remote villages, from distant countries – Portuguese, Arabs, Lithuanians, Russians, Greeks, English, Hindus, Jews, Hereros, Swazis and Khoisan. Johannesburg was full of immigrants, too, wanderers like the earliest hominids, another native species. I was not in Johannesburg long before I met a Lithuanian, a Bulgarian, a Portuguese, a Senegalese holy man, a Congolese trader. I quickly learned that everyone in South Africa had a story, usually a pretty good one.
After a few days I became attuned to the accent, which in its twanging and swallowed way seemed both assertive and friendly. Johannesburg was ‘Janiceberg’ or ‘Jozi,’ and busy was ‘buzzy,’ and congested ‘congisted,’ ‘Waist’ West, and said ‘sid.’ There was no shortage of glottal stops, and a distinct Scottishness crept into some expressions; for example, a military build-up was a ‘mulatree buldup.’ Nearly everyone had a tendency to use Afrikaans words in ordinary speech, such as dorp, bakkie, têkkies, naartjies, and dagga, but these words had percolated throughout Central Africa long ago and I knew from having lived in Malawi that they meant town, pick-up truck, sneakers, tangerines, and marijuana. If there was a pronunciation problem it was that for dagga or Gauteng you needed to use the soft deep throat-clearing and gargled ‘g’ of the Dutch.
Voetsek meant bugger off all over southern Africa, and was regarded as impolite. Forbidden words sometimes slipped into conversation. Kaffer was the worst, koelie (‘coolie’ for Indian) not far behind, and so was bushies (for coloreds, mixed-race people). Piccanin was one vulgar word for African children, but there were others. When a white high court judge, perhaps believing himself to be affectionate, described some African children with the diminutive klein kaffertjies (‘little niggerlings’), he was suspended from his judicial duties. Afrikaans was nothing if not picturesque, though some slang words had etymologies that needed explanation, such as moffie for homosexual, which derived from mofskaap, a castrated sheep.
‘I don’t call them kaffers, I call them crows,’ a white 72-year-old janitor said in a newspaper story about racism in Pretoria. Ek noem hulle nie kaffers nie, ek noem hulk kraaie, laughing at his waggishness. Another headline was ‘Unlikely Romance in Conservative Town Has Rightwingers Reeling.’ In this story, when Ethel Dorfling, a white thirty-year-old full-figured mother of four, disappeared and set up house with Clyde Le Batie, a black 42-year-old full-figured detergent salesman, none of her friends would speak to her except to call her a kafferboetie, the equivalent of ‘nigger lover.’ A joshing Yiddish term for a very young wife or a heavily made-up floozy was kugel, a type of sugary pastry.
Moving his vowels, someone would say, ‘Ah thoat ah’d osk for an expinsive gless of shirry.’ That was clear enough, once you got used to the cadence. But the newer, more despised immigrants tended to stick with the accents they had brought.
‘It is a nice place, South Africa, but I don’t like the people,’ the man from Senegal told me.
This tall thin man in a multi-colored Rasta bonnet called himself El Hadji, and believed he was of Ethiopian ancestry. ‘Look at my face. You find us everywhere in Africa. Nous avons des boeufs. We traveled with our cattle for hundreds and thousands of years.’ He sold artifacts. I was always lookingfor unusual c
arvings and fetish objects. He had some, but instead of describing them he grumbled about the South Africans.
‘Which people don’t you like?’
‘All the people - black, white, all. It’s their history, maybe. They fight, they hate each other. They hate us, they call us foreigners. It is such a problem. But I like the country.’ Flourishing a fetish, pinching its head, he added, And the business is okay.’
He had come in the early nineties when Mandela, having recently been released, encouraged diverse people to emigrate to South Africa and help build a new nation. This open-door policy had been criticized and curtailed, but many people I met had arrived when it had been instituted, just ten years before.
Edward the Lithuanian was one. He was skinny, pasty-faced, agitated, only thirty or so but with thinning hair and that squinting adversarial manner of East Europeans, raised in an authoritarian system, untrusting and humorless. He had been brought to South Africa by his fleeing parents, when he was a twenty-year-old civil engineering student in Vilnius. ‘But engineering wasn’t me. I was bored.’ His parents hated working for peanuts, hated having to wait to buy the simplest material object, hated the feeling of confinement and destitution that came with the departure of the Soviets. I listened hard but heard no patriotic Lithuanian noises.
‘In Lithuania they have nothing. You wait twenty years for a car. Life in Lithuania is terrible. I go once a year to visit friends. They make nothing. They just buy and sell. What kind of business is that? Here, everything is simple.’
I said, ‘But this is Africa. It’s so far from Lithuania. You could have gone to Britain.’
‘The weather sucks there.’
Sniffing at Britain’s quality of life the climate-conscious Lithuanian émigrés had landed in Johannesburg.
‘My father is Jewish, my mother is Lithuanian,’ Edward said. ‘I would not go to Israel with all their problems, but even if I could they wouldn’t want me. In Israel I’m a Lithuanian, everywhere else I’m a Jew. Jewishness comes from your mother. Ha! My mother is nothing!’
I still didn’t understand why they had chosen South Africa. He explained that it took ten years to get a US visa, but they found it very easy to secure visas and work permits for South Africa. ‘And here if you work you can make money, You can buy things. I want to own things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Clothes. A car. A stereo.’
South Africa, for many people a wilderness of wild animals and high desert and nationalistic Africans, represented to Edward the Lithuanian a modern world of accessible material culture. As others traveled to South Africa to see gnus, he had come for the stereo systems. A hominid in search of glittery objects.
‘I do day trading on the stock market in the day. I drive a cab at night. Okay, the market is down right now but for three years we made money. The Nasdaq people who are complaining should shut up – they made a lot of money.’
Edward, who was unmarried, said he had no African friends, did not speak Afrikaans or any African language. There are eleven official languages in South Africa.
The Bulgarian whom I met in Johannesburg – Dave the electronics expert – was in his mid-thirties and small and pale; and he too had Edward’s look of suspicion. He had come from Sofia in 1991 and had a similar story to tell: two jobs, his main one fixing and reconditioning electronic contraptions, like TVs and VCRs. He spoke only English and Bulgarian, had not been outside of Johannesburg and knew no Africans well. His two kids went to a private school in which there were a few African students. He said with satisfaction, ‘The school fees keep most blacks out.’
Like Edward he liked the South African weather, but he wasn’t happy about the economy.
‘It’s going to get worse here, sure,’ Dave said. ‘I think I have a hundred thousand in US dollars – my flat, my car, my things. When the rand gets to ten to the dollar I will go away. I don’t know where. Not Canada – I don’t like the weather. Maybe the States, if I can live in California.’
He had no notion of South African history, not even recent events. He shook his head doubtfully when I talked about it. When I mentioned that the fiercest and most successful of the South African political activists had been Communists he began to rave.
‘Ha! They must have had mental instability!’ Dave said. ‘If you live in a democratic country and you are a communist there is something wrong with your mind. You have to be crazy.’
I said, ‘But this wasn’t a democratic country before 1994. That’s when they had their first free election.’
‘It was all right before – everyone says so.’
That cynical view, that apartheid was preferable to a multi-racial society, was still held by some skeptics, even Africans. But on the whole they tended to be marginalized people, the Boers, the Khoisan, or the mixed-race people known as ‘coloreds’, or migrants from nearby countries.
One Suthu, Solly from Lesotho, said, ‘My parents came here from Maseru. My father worked on farms. Sometimes he had work, sometimes none. He went from farm to farm. It was not an easy life, but it was better than this.’
I questioned this: The life of a migrant farm laborer under apartheid was better than a worker with a secure job in free South Africa?
‘It was better,’ Solly said in a don’t-argue-with-me tone. ‘There is too much crime. I see it every day. I would like to go, but where? The white government was better!’
‘In what way?’
‘Not as much crime. Not as much litter,’ Solly said. ‘I am not saying this because you have a white face. It is true – the white government was better. Now I don’t know what to do.’
Speaking to people at random I was constantly meeting strangers and émigrés, people who regarded Johannesburg with a mixture of disgust and wonderment. Nearly all of them had come to make money, and now that the work had begun to dry up they were seriously questioning whether to stay. But even to many of the whites who were old-timers living here seemed to them like living in a foreign country. I had the notion that for many whites black South Africa was a foreign land that they had only recently begun to inhabit, and that it took some getting used to.
‘We’re economic prisoners,’ one white man told me. He owned his own small business. ‘We can’t afford to go anywhere else.’
But when I pressed him, he said that he really didn’t want to go anywhere else. He was shocked, he said, by how little the white government had done over many decades to educate Africans. Like everyone else he said that crime was South Africa’s worst problem. And the police were part of the problem.
‘During the apartheid era the police were horrible,’ he said. ‘They arrested people for no reason – for being in a white area, for not having an ID card. They killed people, they tortured people, they were unfair. No one respected them. Now this whole past of theirs has come back to bite them on the ass.’
One of my taxi drivers was a Portuguese man who had fled to Spain from Portugal in the 1960s, to Mozambique from Spain in the 1970s, then to South Africa from Mozambique in the 1980s. He had run out of countries to flee to. ‘Because of the EU, Portugal is full of foreigners.’ He said he thought South Africa had become a dismal place.
I said, ‘This isn’t a Third World country.’
‘Not yet,’ he said, and winked at me in the rear-view mirror.
We were rolling down a tree-lined street in a pretty part of Johannesburg, known as Parktown West. The garden walls were whitewashed and high, concealing each premises, though inside each one a big solid house loomed. On most gates, with the house number was the name of an alarm company and the words Armed Response. It could have been Bel-Air or Malibu.
‘But if you live on this street you never have worries,’ the driver said.
That was presumptuous, because Nadine Gordimer lived here, and she had known plenty of anxiety in her seventy-seven years in South Africa. She was a Johannesburger to her fingertips having been born in Springs, a mining town, only twenty-five miles from this pretty hou
se in Parktown. She was of Latvian descent, through her father, who had left Riga and come to South Africa at the age of thirteen – alone – to escape Tsarist pogroms in an earlier wave of immigration. That boy, her father, had come to find his brother. He had no trade. He became a watch-mender, he went from town to town in the Transvaal tinkering with watches. Later he set up business selling watches and ultimately trinkets, gee-gaws, wedding rings, and jewelry in the gold-mining town of Springs. Nadine had written about her father in ‘My Father Leaves Home,’ a story in Jump.
I had valued her writing from my first reading, but I had discovered her only in the 1960s and she had been writing since the late 1940s. She had begun writing at the age of fifteen; as a 24-year-old she had begun publishing in The New Yorker. Her first story, ‘A Watcher of the Dead,’ is a beautifully observed tale of the conflict between the impulses of a daughter’s love and the demands of ritual, in this case a Jewish funeral in Johannesburg.
Very early in her writing career, Nadine had marked out her emotional territory – the passionate relations between men and women; and her geography – settlers’ South Africa, Mozambique, and Rhodesia, as well as the much more foreign and forbidden territory of the African village and the black township. She had never ceased to be political in a wide sense. In her first collection of stories, The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952), these territories were represented, the lovers traveling on the road to Lourenco Marques in ‘The End of the Tunnel,’ the mismatched couple in ‘The Train from Rhodesia,’ the woman in ‘The Defeated,’ who begins her story, ‘My mother did not want me to go near the Concession stores because they smelled, and were dirty, and the natives spat tuberculosis germs into the dust. She said it was no place for little girls/.’ In that last story, the little girl goes to the African store and discovers vitality and sadness.
So, from the first – and life was wickedly divided in the early years of the apartheid era – Nadine wrote of race relations, and her black characters were as carefully delineated as her white ones. One of the hallmarks of her prose has always been its intense physicality, the pleasures of sex, of food, of sunshine, or the converse of these, frustration, hunger, bad weather.