Holidays in Hell

  Finally, they got around to George Shultz. "This magnificent institution stands for a great tradition of intellectual openness, free inquiry and pursuit of truth," Shultz said, while protestors in the audience tried to drown him out. He talked about the advantages free nations have over communist societies in the "Information Revolution." "How can a system that keeps photocopies and mimeograph machines under strict control exploit the benefits of the VCR and personal computer?" Shultz asked the unresponsive audience.

  Shultz proposed that freedom is a revolutionary force, and there were mixed noises when he mentioned resistance groups in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua. "In South Africa, the structure of apartheid is under siege as never before," he said.

  "Not by you," screamed someone in the crowd, and there was scattered applause.

  "Today the validity of the idea of democracy is the most important political reality of our time," said Shultz and received some yells of dissent. Shultz spoke cogently against government central planning-no response. Shultz argued persuasively that "America's weakness makes the world a more dangerous place"no response. Some conservative listeners bestirred themselves at the mention of the Libyan air strike. Others booed. ". . . [A] better future is likely to take shape if, and perhaps only if, America is there to help shape it," said Shultz-no response.

  Shultz made an attack on the neo-isolationism that has formed the basis for liberal foreign policy since the early seventies. He condemned "the illusion that we can promote justice by aloof selfrighteousness, that we can promote peace by merely wishing for it." There was no response to that either. He damned economic protectionism and got some hand claps until he said, "Another form of escapism is self-righteous moralism," and the booing began again. Then Shultz went into the debate about congressional cuts in the foreign affairs budget, but this seemed too deep for the audience and they quit booing or clapping and started rifling through the program notes trying to figure out where lunch was.

  "Those who built a college at the edge of a boundless forest were not fearful, timid people," said Shultz at the end of his speech. "They did not shirk their responsibilities. They were practical men and women. They were earthy and realistic. . . . Let us honor that tradition." Maybe George was mixed up. Maybe he thought this was the 350th Anniversary of Ohio State.

  In Whitest Africa

  DECEMBER 1986

  I'd been told South Africa looks like California, and it looks like California-the same tan-to-cancer beaches-the same Granola'd mountains' majesty, the same subdeveloped bushveldt. Johannesburg looks like L.A. Like L.A., it was all built since 1900. Like L.A., it's ringed and vectored with expressways. And its best suburb, Hyde Park, looks just like Beverly Hills. All the people who live in Hyde Park are white, just like Beverly Hills. And all the people who work there-who cook, sweep and clean the swimming pools-are not white, just like Beverly Hills. The only difference is, the lady who does the laundry carries it on her head.

  I was prepared for South Africa to be terrible. But I wasn't prepared for it to be normal. Those petty apartheid signs, NO DOGS OR NON-EUROPEANS, are rare, almost tourist attractions now. There's no color bar in the big "international" hotels or their restaurants or nightclubs. Downtown shopping districts are integrated. You see as many black people in coats and ties as you do in Chicago. If I'd really tried, I could have spent my month in South Africa without noticing any hint of trouble except the soldiers all over the place. South Africa is terribly normal. And this is why, I think, we get so emotional about it.

  Everywhere you go in the world somebody's raping women, expelling ethnic Chinese, enslaving stone-age tribesmen, shooting Communists, rounding up Jews, kidnapping Americans, setting fire to Sikhs, keeping Catholics out of country clubs and hunting peasants from helicopters with automatic weapons. The world is built on discrimination of the most horrible kind. The problem with South Africans is they admit it. They don't say, like the French, "Algerians have a legal right to live in the sixteenth arrondissement, but they can't afford to." They don't say, like the Israelis, "Arabs have a legal right to live in West Jerusalem, but they're afraid to." They don't say, like the Americans, "Indians have a legal right to live in Ohio, but, oops, we killed them all." The South Africans just say, "Fuck you." I believe it's right there in their constitution: "Article IV: Fuck you. We're bigots." We hate them for this. And we're going to hold indignant demonstrations and make our universities sell all their Krugerrands until the South Africans learn to stand up and lie like white men.

  Forty miles from Jo-burg is Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. It looks like Sacramento with soldiers, like Sacramento will if the Chicanos ever rebel. And on the tallest hill in Pretoria stands the Voortrekker Monument, a 120-foot tower of shit-colored granite visible for twenty miles in every direction. The Voortrekker Monument is to the Afrikaners, the controlling majority of South African whites, what the Salt Lake City Tabernacle is to Mormons. It commemorates the Great Trek of the 1830s when the Boers escaped such annoyances of British colonial rule as the abolition of slavery and pushed north into the interior of Africa to fuck things up by themselves. The Voortrekker Monument's rotunda is decorated with an immense, heroic-scale bas relief depicting the entire course of the Great Trek from Bible-kissing sendoffs in Cape Town to the battle of Blood River in 1838 when 3,000 Zulus were killed vs. 0 dead Boers.

  It was with unmixed feelings about Afrikaners that I climbed the wearyingly dramatic steps to the monument. One stroll through central Pretoria and one walk through the memorial's parking lot were enough to see that they're no-account people-dumpy women in white ankle socks and flower-print sundresses, skinny, quidspitting men with hair oil on their heads and gun-nut sideburns. Their language sounds like a Katzenjammer Kids cartoon: Die telefoon is in die sitkamer ("The telephone is in the living room"). Die dogter ry op n' trein ("The daughter rides on the train"). And their racism is famous for its high degree of international deplorability. Liberal pinkteas, unreconstructed Stalinists, cannibal presidents of emerging nations and fascist military dictator swine all agree on this point.

  Therefore my heart sank when I saw the Great Trek sculpture. It was, God help me, "Wagon Train" carved in stone. There was no mistaking the pokey oxen and Prairie Wagoneers parked in a circle for a combat-ready campout. The gals all had those dopey coalscuttle bonnets on and brats galore doing curtain calls in their skirts. The fellers all wore Quaker Oats hats and carried muskets long as flagpoles. Horses pranced. Horizons beckoned. Every man jack from Ben Cartwright on down stared off into the sunset with chin uplifted and eyes full of stupid resolve. Every single give-mea-home-where-the-buffalo-roam bromide was there, except the buffalo were zebras, and at that inevitable point in the story where one billion natives attack completely unprovoked, it was Zulus with spears and shields instead of Apaches with bows and arrows. The Zulus were, of course, doing everything Apaches were always depicted as doing before we discovered Apaches were noble ecologists-skewering babies, clobbering women and getting shot in massive numbers.

  South Africa's bigoted, knuckle-headed Boers turn out to be North America's revered pioneer forefathers. And here I was, a good American descendant of same, covered with gore from Indian slaughters and belly stuffed to bursting by the labor of kidnapped slaves, ready to wash up, have a burp and criticize the Afrikaners.

  Now, if the horrible Afrikaners resemble us-or me, anyway-what about the English-speaking white South Africans? They're better educated than the Afrikaners, richer, more cosmopolitan. They dress the same as Americans, act the same as Americans and, forgiving them their Crumbled Empire accent, speak the same language. What are they like?

  I'd heard about the sufferings of the blacks in South Africa. I'd heard plenty about the intransigent racists in South Africa. And I'd heard plenty more than enough about the conscientious qualms and ethical inconveniences that beset whites who go to South Africa and feel bad about the suffering blacks and intransigent racists there. But I'd never heard much about the
middling sort of ordinary white people with Mazdas to keep Turtle Waxed and child support payments to avoid, the ones who so resemble what most of us see when we brush our teeth. What's their response to the quagmire of apartheid? How do they cope with the violence and hatred around them? Are they worried? frightened? guilty? bitter? full of conflicting emotions?

  I stayed a month in South Africa, traveled five thousand kilometers, talked to hundreds of people and came back with a twoword answer: they're drunk.

  The South Africans drink and open their arms to the world. Before I left the States I phoned a lawyer in Jo-burg, a man I'll call Tom Mills, a friend of a friend. I called him to see about doing some bird hunting. (Just because you're going to a place of evil and perdition is no reason not to enjoy it.) And when I called him back to tell him what hotel I'd be staying in, Tom said, "The hell you are. We've got a guest house and a swimming pool. You're staying with us." This was a sixth-generation white African, no radical or pal of the African National Congress. He knew I was an American reporter and would do to South Africa what American reporters always do and which I'm doing right here. And he didn't otherwise know me from Adam. But Tom insisted. I was his guest.

  "It isn't like you thought it would be, is it?" said Tom as we walked around the lawn with enormous whiskeys in our hands. "It's like California, isn't it?" Except the sparrows are chartreuse and the maid calls you Master. "That doesn't mean anything," said Tom. "It's just like saying `boss' or whatever." And that barking noise, that's jackals on the tennis court. "Mind your step," said Tom. "This is where the yard boy got a cobra in the power mower."

  The South Africans drink and make big plans. Tom's plan was to put a property qualification on the vote. "Do away with apartheid and the Group Areas Act and all that. Let anybody have whatever he can afford. If he can afford political power, let him have that, too. That's about how you do it in the States, isn't it? It doesn't change things much."

  Tom's friend Bill Fletcher had a plan for splitting up the whole country into little cantons, like Switzerland's, and federating it all back together again some way or other-togetherheid.

  Tom's wife had another plan, which I forgot. We watched the TV news and mixed more drinks. Down in the black townships the "comrades" and the "fathers"-the young radicals and older moderates-were going at it with necklacings and machetes. But this wasn't on the news. New regulations had been issued by the government that day, forbidding any media coverage of civil disturbance. The lead story was about sick racehorses.

  The South Africans drink and go on the offensive. Tom and Bill and I and some other bird hunters went to Jim Elliot's house for drinks. Jim was a dentist with a den made up almost entirely of animal heads and skins and other parts. The bar stools were elephant feet. "A man can live like a king in this country!" said Jim, petting a Labrador retriever named Soweto. "Like a goddamned king! I've got my practice, a house, a couple of cars, a shack down on the beach and the best goddamned hunting and fishing in the world. Where else could I live like this?" He hauled out a five-kilo bag of ice. "I know you Americans like your ice." He stuffed in as many cubes as my big glass could hold and filled it with Scotch to the brim.

  "The blacks live better here than they do in the rest of Africa, I'll tell you that," said Bill Fletcher.

  "We like the blacks," said Tom. "They don't deserve to be treated the way they are."

  "We all like the blacks," said Jim.

  "Though they're a bit childish," said someone and told a story about the new maid at his house who tried to make tea in the steam iron.

  "But they don't deserve to be treated the way they are," said Tom. And he told how last year he'd seen a white motorist run into a black man and knock him across the road. The motorist stopped but wouldn't get out of his car. Tom called an ambulance and tried to get the white man to help, but the man just drove away. "He was a British tourist," said Tom with some satisfaction.

  Later Jim said, "We fought alongside everybody else in World War I and World War II, and now they all turn their backs on us. The minute we're in trouble where are our friends?"

  And a good deal later somebody said, "Thirty days to Cairo," by which he meant the South African army could fight its way up the whole length of Africa in thirty days. It's probably true. And it would certainly put the South African army thirty days away from where it's causing trouble now. But I didn't point that out.

  The South Africans drink and get serious. Tom and I were shooting doves and drinking beer with a Greek car dealer named Connie. Connie had lived in the Belgian Congo and had been trapped there with his wife and little children in the horrors of '60 and '61. Sitting out in a grain field at sundown, Connie talked just a little, just obliquely about people mutilating each other, about the rape of nuns "by the very ones which they were ministering," about cattle left alive with their legs cut off at the hocks. "It makes me shaking to even think what I saw"

  That night Tom and I drank with Carlo, who'd come out to Africa in 1962, a teenager from a little village in Sicily carrying his mother's whole savings, one English pound and fifty pence. He'd made his way to Angola, "so rich, so beautiful. You put a dead stick in the ground, it would grow." He'd prospected for minerals, gotten rich, started a big-game hunting operation that had, at last, eighteen camps. Then the Portuguese left. He talked about corpses hanging in the trees, about men castrated and fetuses hanging out of the slit bellies of women and, like the Greek, about cattle with their legs cut off. He abandoned all his mineral claims, dynamited his hunting camps-"not even the stones were left in one piece"and came to South Africa to start over.

  I wondered what I'd think if I were South African and looked at the rest of Africa and saw nothing but oppression, murder, chaos, massacre, impoverishment, famine and corruptionwhereas in South Africa there was just some oppression and murder. "You think the blacks can't govern themselves?" I said to Carlo.

  He shrugged. "It was the East Germans, the Cubans who did the worst things I saw."

  "You know Jonas Savimbi?" he said, naming the head of the more-or-less pro-Western UNITA guerrillas fighting Angola's Marxist government. "I would cut my arm off, here, to put Savimbi in power." And he pointed to the same place on his limb as the cattle had been mutilated on theirs.

  South Africans drink and get nostalgic. I spent the Christmas holidays on the Indian Ocean in Scotboro-a sort of Southampton or Hilton Head with its peak season at South Africa's midsummer Yuletide. There were a lot of old people there, members of the "Whenwe Tribe," so called because most of their sentences begin with "When we were in Nyasaland. . . ," "When we were in Bechuanaland. . . ," "When we were in Tanganyika . . ." It seems Africa was a paradise then, and the more that was drunk the more paradisical it became. Though it must have been an odd kind of Eden for some of its residents.

  "You can see why the blacks steal," said one old man, ex of Rhodesia. He'd been captured by the Germans at Tobruk. "In the POW camp at Breslau we worked in the post office-stole everything in sight. Only natural under the circumstances." He flipped his cigarette out onto the lawn, the way everyone does in South Africa. There's always someone to pick up the butts.

  "The only reason blacks have bones in their skulls is to keep their ears apart," said a startlingly ugly old lady just as the maid, with expressionless face, was passing the cocktail weenies around.

  "Now, wait a minute..." I said.

  "Well, of course your blacks have white blood." The ugly woman shook her head. "I've never understood how any man could be attracted to a black girl," she said, helping herself to several miniature frankfurters and looking right through the very pretty maid. "That kinky hair, those fat noses, great big lips ..."

  I would be drummed out of the Subtle Fiction Writer's League if I invented this scene. The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth-pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles which come on
ly from a lifetime of bad character. All that day I'd been driving through KwaZulu, through the Valley of a Thousand Hills in the Natal outback, driving through little villages where the Zulu girls, bare-breasted to show their unmarried status, were coming to market. Burnished skin and dulcet features and sturdy little bodies like better-proportioned Mary Lou Rettons-I had fallen helplessly, fervently, eternally in love thirty or forty times.

  And the South Africans drink and grow resigned to fate, at least the younger ones do. At a dinner party full of junior business executives, the talk was about the olive-colored South African passport that most countries won't accept as a travel document. "We call it the `Green Mamba,"' said an accountant, "because you can't take it anywhere."

  The guests discussed countries the way people their age in Manhattan discuss unfashionable neighborhoods where they might be able to find a decent-sized apartment.

  "We're looking at Australia," said an estate agent.