18. Trek Into Zululand
We need the tonic of wildness, we need to witness
our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never
wander.
- H. D. Thoreau
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On November 1st a French gendarme issued me a clearance certificate. Within the hour I was back aboard Atom slipping out of St. Pierre’s small-boat harbor. My course lay to the south of Madagascar where the steady warm breezes of the tropics give way to variable and strong winds born along tight isobars around anti-cyclones. Closer to South Africa, southwesterly gales follow one after the other in menacing processions. I expected to face a storm-ridden passage, and from the stories of other sailors, it looked like few yachts make the passage without a good bit of punishment.
As
intimidating as it sounds, the alternative route to the Atlantic, via the Red
Sea and Mediterranean, is far more challenging for the solo sailor. The choice
for me was easy. I would sooner face ten storms on the open sea than contend
with the contrary winds and currents, the reefs and pirates, and the hostile
Arab ports and bureaucracy of a Red Sea passage.
For four days our sails did their work quietly under the
last breaths of the Southeast Trades. The motion was easy and the progress
steady. On our fifth day out, I began to feel the swells of a distant storm
mixing it up with the familiar wave pattern. A boat as small and light as Atom
cannot hide the effects of changing wave patterns as she lifts and rolls to the
slightest touch. After a few of these cross-swells tumbled on deck, I took the
warning and tucked a reef in the mainsail at dusk. All day I had felt unusually
weary and could not find the strength to finish my habitual two hours of
exercise. That night a terrific pain grew behind my eyeballs, followed hours
later by fever, chills, and an agitated stomach. I recognized the malignant
stowaway of malaria back to haunt me.
My thoughts went back to New Guinea where I lay close to
death in a mountain village during my first encounter with the fever. What would
it bring me this time? Incapacitated and unable to navigate, would I drift
uncontrolled into a storm or be pulled down on the lee shore of Madagascar? The
Australian doctor I saw in Port Moresby had prescribed anti-malarials to kill
the parasites hiding in my liver, but explained that the other second strain of
malaria I carried was drug-resistant and had a lifespan of five years. As it
turned out, I had yearly relapses for exactly five years and nothing since. That
night before retreating to my bunk I swallowed a heavy ear-ringing dose of
quinine from Atom’s medicine cabinet.
My journal for the next few days is mostly blank. But I
have snatches of recollections beginning with Atom hard pressed for another reef
as I lay lethargic and deaf to her plea, drifting through fragmented dreams.
Flashback to a wild-eyed shaman chanting to the spirit world in cadent monotones
as he drifts above me where I lay in a smoke-filled mountain hut. With the next
sideways slam in the trough of the sea, the wings of my mind flew forward to
Mauritius where Dolores ran across a pink sand beach, the wind blowing her dress
into a cluster of dancing flowers. Dawn overtook the night as lonely hours
turned into lonely days.
Sledding down the building waves, Atom repeatedly broached under too much badly balanced sail, burying the side deck under the sea and sending me sprawling across the cabin with a cascade of loose gear. At some point I pulled myself on deck and put a sloppy third reef in the mainsail and changed down to the storm jib. My worries were not so easily reefed in as I lay face down on the cabin sole, dripping with salt spray and perspiration and shaking with fever.
A loud bang and my word turned on its side. The steering
line from windvane to tiller snapped and the tiller began pounding itself
against the side of the cockpit seat. I listened and waited. I tried to care.
Storing up my energy, I told myself, “Action is needed. Get up. Do it now.”
I don’t remember getting up, but do recall hanging over the transom trying to
get a new line routed through the aluminum tubes of the steering gear. The sea
repeatedly lashed out with a wet fist to my head and more than once I felt a hot
jolt of pain as the steering gear rudder pinched my fingers against it’s metal
frame.
Eventually the quinine took effect and to my great relief the fever disappeared as quick as it came, leaving me in a weakened state for several more days as my blood rebuilt its exploded cells. I was able to bring out the sextant for the first time in days and found myself some 80 miles south of Madagascar. Somehow Atom had run wildly along, without my control, and was still more or less on course.
Here I turned more directly west to compensate for
the south-setting current. As the weather and my health improved, the seas
calmed. We drifted all night without a breath of air to stir the limp sails and
I welcomed the rest it provided. The following day was less restful as I worked
to trim the sails and adjust the helm to light puffs of wind, mainly from the
north.
The lazy carefree days and familiar puffy white cumulus clouds of the tropics were behind me. Cirrus and other high altitude clouds suggested a shift in weather patterns. Sunsets here were no less brilliant as the pink-tinged sky reflected off the aquamarine sea. While sunrise the world over is a universal symbol of hope and renewal, even the most scenic sunset, for the solo sailor entering high latitudes, is harbinger of a long night filled with the slight uneasiness of the unknown.
The jumpy barometer, recording a
series of frontal passages and shifting winds, kept me jumping to the sails at
all hours. Tack, reef, adjust course, and count each mile as its own success.
The days passed in this anxious way until one night I stood on deck sniffing for
the next breeze in the calm and noted a flashing light sequence identifying a
lighthouse ahead. I was approaching the African coast some eighty miles
northeast of my destination at the port of Durban. This was no accident of
navigation, it was exactly where I wanted to be. With the current moving at
seventy to eighty miles a day to the southwest, wind or no wind, I could be
certain I’d be carried to Durban the next day.
Lightning flashed in the distant north as I spent a
peaceful night drifting along the coast. As if on command of the sun, a fair
wind rose at sunrise and bore me over the waves with a combined speed over
ground of eight knots. A thick haze hung over the low hills and empty coastline
in the rising heat. The local radio station reported the noon temperature ashore
at 35 C (100 degrees F). When the cement towers of Durban’s skyline pierced
the horizon and I cheerfully noted I had coaxed Atom across yet another ocean.
As I passed a group of anchored ships lying exposed in the open roadstead outside the harbor inlet, I hoisted the yellow quarantine flag to announce my arrival. Before I even entered the breakwaters, a police launch met me with a line and towed me towards the yacht club. As I glided through the harbor they shortened the towline and a customs officer reached over with a clipboard full of papers attached to a long pole. There I sat, filling out forms before even touching shore. It was a fair taste of the stiflingly eager bureaucracy permeating South African society.
The launch brought me along a pier
where I moored alongside the other international yachts facing Durban’s main
waterfront street. Four officers in brightly trimmed uniforms from three
different offices checked my documents and poked around my boat and then handed
me over to the secretary of the Point Yacht Club next door. I was pleased to
hear I could stay at the pier and use the yacht club facilities for no charge.
Back among the cruising community I recognized several
friends and boats from earlier ports of call, sharing a similar route around
Africa. Canadian Alan Butler, whom I had gotten to know in Mauritius, was moored
nearby with his 26-foot Heavenly Twins catamaran. He was attempting to make the
smallest catamaran solo-circumnavigation, which he eventually completed. By
coincidence, we had each departed different harbors on Reunion Island on the
same day and both arrived in Durban within an hour of each other. Other boats
here were new to me, including the 25-foot wooden sloop I was moored alongside.
This thirty-some year-old boat named Tarmin, belonged to John Sowden, who
was twice the age of his venerable little boat and had already been around the
world solo two times since the mid 1960s.
As you might imagine, this senior solo sailor was by now
highly opinionated. He was also a touch eccentric and borderline anti-social as
viewed by the younger gregarious sailors around the club and international
jetty. Few of the other sailors here could tolerate John’s dismissive attitude
and he seemed not to miss their companionship or their approval. I looked at him
as a Godfather to learn from and took his advice whenever it was offered.
Perhaps John and I saw something of ourselves visible in the other and became
friends in the way of men pursuing similar paths: myself at the beginning of my
adventures and John nearing the end of life’s voyages.
Early each morning John emerged from Tarmin’s
ill-kept cabin wearing the same old pair of torn and stained shorts, clutching a
coffee cup so encrusted with dried sediments that it remained half full even
after he finished his drink. I almost asked John about that cup, but when he
offered me a similarly silted cup, I drank up without comment. When not busy
repairing and preparing our boats for the next passage around the African cape,
I spent hours listening to John recount his adventures in the South Seas. He had
been to places where the islanders had never seen a Westerner on a sailboat.
John witnessed the world as it became discovered by yachts and tourists during
the past twenty years and made a point of telling me that his experiences then
were not repeatable. I thought I knew something of the sea by this time, yet
when John spoke of those magical times and related the techniques that kept him
and Tarmin from misadventure, I listened as if I knew nothing.
There was little privacy for the yachts moored along this waterfront esplanade of Durban. Throughout the day and into the evening, people wandered along the pier, twisting their necks to see inside the homes of the floating gypsy tribe. I imagine the foreign flagged yachts coming and going from the pier, made uneasy some of the locals who longed to travel, but had put down roots too deep to pull up.
Working on deck under Atom’s American flag, I was
barraged by increasingly tiresome questions and comments from passersby. “Did
you sail all the way from America? Don’t you get lonesome, frightened,
seasick?” At least once a day someone was so keen to see the boat that I
happily invited them aboard. Most were the English or Dutch Afrikaners who ruled
the segregated country. I also hosted Indians, blacks and the multi-racial
Coloureds, each of whom came aboard in strictly segregated groups, as was their
custom.
A block away from the yacht jetty was a secretarial school for Coloured girls and each lunch hour they came to ogle Atom and her skipper. Groups of four or five of them found their way aboard where I told them about the strange world of sailing and they told me about the stranger world ashore. The girls were mainly of African/Indian mixture with a trace of European ancestry as well. In America they would call themselves blacks. But in the stratified system of apartheid they are considered one step above pure Africans on the social ladder to whiteness. If they could not decide this for themselves, there was a government tribunal to choose their racial classification.
For some
people the fate of their entire life rests on a few percentage points of black
ancestry. Families had been broken up because one member was too light or too
dark. Once they are classified, they know which township to live in, where they
can go to school, who they can marry, even which bus to ride or toilet to use. A
population of several million Coloureds in South Africa proves that white and
black racial separation was not always popular in less “civilized” times.
One weekend the girls asked me to come with them to
Durban’s beach. As we walked the two miles through town to the beach I felt
the disapproving stares of the whites. More than one Afrikaner crossed the
street to tell me I should not be walking with “Coloured girls”. Someone
called out “kaffir-boetie” (nigger lover) to embarrass us. I felt badly to
be attracting this unwanted attention to the girls, but they had heard it all
before and pretending not to notice, told me to ignore it. I was now glad I had
not brought Dolores to this country because I could not bear to see her hurt in
this way.
At the beachfront we passed a fence and sign declaring
“Whites Only” then “Indian Beach” and “African Beach”. We turned
through the gate at the “Coloured Beach". If the sign was not there I
could tell where I was by the exclusively brown bodies lying on the sand and
playing in the surf. If this was a beach to be avoided by whites, I could not
understand why. I was far more welcome here than I had been minutes before among
the whites on the street. Stepping down a rung on the social ladder as I was perceived
to have done was merely
frowned on; stepping above your position was forbidden.
One of the girls came back from the Indian grocery across
the street with bunny-chow, a hollowed out loaf of bread filled with spicy
vegetable curry, topped with grated carrots. We sat in a circle in the sand with
our bunny-chow in the center. Many hands in turn broke off pieces of bread and
scooped up the curry. The other popular food along the beach was a fast-food
version of English potpies that is South Africa’s equivalent to the American
hamburger and even less appealing.
Around the yacht club lingered a few black men seeking employment repairing and maintaining boats for the white owners. A man named Boi, from the Zulu tribe, approached me for a job, saying he had painted and repaired boats for several years and charged 10 Rand (US$4) a day. Boi worked alongside me for two weeks, varnishing Atom’s weathered teak and mahogany trim, repairing leaks and repainting the deck.
We then moved Atom to a nearby beach
where I careened the boat at high tide with lines to posts holding her along the
shore. At low tide Atom lay over on her side exposing her fouled bottom to our
scraping blades and paintbrushes. Every six hours for three days and nights Atom
went from upright to forty-five degrees as we painted one side then turned her
to paint the other side. Despite the discomfort of sleeping at various extreme
angles, it was an affordable alternative to the marine yard.
For lunch, Boi took over galley duty and invariably prepared
cooked vegetables with red-hot chilies and pap, a lumpy porridge of cooked corn
meal that is the staple of the African diet. If I had not employed Boi I would
not likely have a chance to get to know a South African black because friendship
between black and white outside of work was considered not only
incomprehensible, but dangerous as well. If I had tried to visit his home in the
black township outside Durban, I would have been turned back at the police
roadblock. If I did evade this obstacle, Boi told me he would be marked as a
police informer by his neighbors. Anyone suspected of collaborating with the
police risked receiving a “necklace”, which is a cute name for being bound
hand and foot with a gasoline soaked tire lit afire around your neck. Zulu and
Pondo tribes had clashed recently in Boi’s township using knives, firebombs
and homemade guns, killing over a hundred people. As in New Guinea, tribalism
here runs deep.
A peculiarly South African incident took place when Boi
guided me to the outdoor vegetable market in Durban. At the market entrance he
stopped to use the public toilet while I waited with a crowd of blacks milling
around outside. A minute later Boi came out chuckling quietly to himself and
hurried me away from the staring eyes. Boi told me a young black man claiming to
be a soldier for the ANC (African National Congress) had followed him into the
toilet and said, “Quick, change your clothes for mine and jump out the rear
window and run away.” The man assumed I was undercover police and bringing Boi
to jail. Why else would I be walking with a black man in this part of town?
On another day, when I offered to buy Boi lunch I learned
apartheid cuts both ways. We went to his usual place, a restaurant/bar called
the Regent. At the door, the Zulu security guard asked what we wanted. “Just
food,” I replied and was reluctantly waved in. At our table the waiter took
Boi’s order and then walked away as if I didn’t exist. I called him back to
take my order and he stood in silence looking at the floor. Eventually the
Indian manager noticed us and came over and told me he could not serve a white
person because he might lose his license, but if I insisted I could take my meal
in a closet off the kitchen. I felt deeply insulted and then remembered that
this was merely a harmless little taste of the real injustices and humiliations
millions of non-whites go through every day.
The passbook for blacks that Boi carried permitted him to
enter the city only while working during daylight. The city at night belonged to
the whites. I could see a deep resentment in his eyes as he showed me his
passbook, though Boi guarded his tongue until he knew me better. Some days later
he admitted his sympathy was with the ANC and believed in their goal of violent
overthrow of white rule. “I’m sure in my lifetime we will break apartheid
and regain our dignity and the wealth that now is in white hands.”
Since most blacks living around Durban were not permitted
to enter the city at night, the side streets and alleys became deserted after
sunset. As I walked by the park near the yacht club one evening, an unmarked van
squealed to a halt next to me and five white police in plain clothes leapt out
the back doors. I froze as they brushed past me with drawn nightsticks and
pulled a black vagrant out of the shadows. Seconds later he was tossed in the
van and sped away.
In complete contrast to how they treated their countrymen,
the locals treated us sailors at the international jetty like gods, inviting us
to their homes for the weekends and on sightseeing tours of the countryside.
Typical of the kind folks I met here was Colin and Mary Rose, English South
Africans who had months earlier called out to me on Atom from the beach in
Mauritius where they were on vacation. They asked if I was stopping later in
Durban and promised to look out for me when I arrived. I never expected to see
them again and was surprised when they located me here three months later. I
spent several restful days with them at their home in Margate, about an hours
drive south along the coastal highway from Durban. Like the many middle-class
white South Africans, they lived comfortably in a spacious home complete with
built-in swimming pool, a maid and gardener.
On my travels around the suburbs and small coastal towns of
South Africa I noticed there was something extraordinarily tidy about each
place. It took some time to put my finger on it, and then I realized there were
no telephone poles or electric cables to mar the skyline. These lifelines of
civilization were all buried underground were they belong. Colin said one of the
first things they noticed on a vacation to America was that virtually every road
was accompanied by a sky-cluttering array of poles and cables. It’s funny the
things we learn not to see.
Colin and Mary Rose acted as tireless tour guides, taking me to the scenic park of Oribi Gorge where waterfalls plunge over orange sandstone cliffs to land in the Valley of Mzimkulu (Great home of all rivers). They drove me through the Coloured and Indian townships where people lived in American-style subdivisions.
The Indians are now the shopkeepers of the country after having been brought over by the British to work the sugar-cane plantations of Natal. Many now live in relative mansions with a staff of African servants and twin Mercedes-Benz in the garage. In most cases whites have buffered themselves from the blacks by placing an Indian or Coloured township between them. This flaunted wealth at the edge of black townships is partly why blacks dislike the Indians as much as they dislike whites and vent this anger when they burn and loot the Indian settlements.
We also drove through a newly built black
township of neat brick homes constructed and mostly paid for by the government.
The new school had already been burnt down and the whites pointed to this as
proof the blacks could not be safely integrated, that they preferred to destroy
that which could help them. The blacks, I suspect, would counter that it
signified their refusal to accept the gifts of apartheid.
I twice visited with Colin’s neighbors at their frequent
braais, or backyard barbecue dinners. As a vegetarian I couldn’t help notice
the South Africans are ravenous meat-eaters, even out-consuming Australians in
thick steaks, spare ribs and hamburger, all washed down with generous amounts of
beer. At these gatherings their conversation always turned to emigration. Due to
recent disinvestments and international banking policies, the South African
currency had plummeted in value. This along with the upsurge in ANC bombings and
general violence, left whites feeling there was no future for their families in
their homeland. More than half of everyone I spoke to were on an emigrant
waiting list for Australia, Canada, or the US, or had friends who had already
left.
I returned from Margate to Durban by train to catch another view of the coastal countryside. At the station, I dutifully took my seat in an empty passenger car marked with the sign Blankes (Afrikaans for Whites). I settled into a plush leather seat surrounded by varnished hardwoods, polished brass hardware and porcelain washing sink as the diesel-powered engine pulled our ten passenger cars forward.
The first thing we passed was an antique steam-powered locomotive moving the opposite direction on the narrow gauge tracks, spewing black soot as it trundled past. Our track followed the rocky coast, at times within sight of the booming surf. We rarely got up to speed before slowing down to stop at the next station. There were about thirty stops on this three and a half hour run, each stop part of a blur of children begging pennies beneath the windows and signposts marking the stations: Mercury Halt, Umzumbe, Scottburgh, Mtwalume, Amanzimtoti.
Our Afrikaans conductor herded the blacks on and off the
train with his stick, then waved it to the engineer to set us rolling north again. Gangs
of a hundred men sweating shirtless under a midday sun worked repairing the
track with their white overseer standing nearby.
Leaning out the window I noticed a steady stream of mango
and banana peels tossed out the windows of the cars ahead. Bored in my empty
luxury car and curious, I made my way forward through two more empty first class
cars and flung open the door to third class. The car benches were filled to near
capacity and the aisles crammed with luggage and children. The air was filled
with the lively clicking and musical sounds of the Zulu language. Young girls
sold fruit from boxes as they moved up and down the crowded aisle. I bought a
bagful of mangos, passed some out to my neighbors and wedged myself into a hard
wooden bench between a dozing wrinkled old man and a heavy Zulu woman with a
baby on her knee. I looked up to see the conductor glaring down at me with a
tired look of “here’s another trouble-making kaffir-boetie.” Instead of
bashing me with his stick, he pointed with it back towards the first class cars
and said, “No whites allowed in third class.”
Back in Durban, I accepted an invitation to travel inland to a strawberry farm in the Valley of a Thousand Hills by the manager who was a member of the yacht club. An entire village of Zulus worked the farm. Women harvested the crops with babies riding strapped to their backs or wrapped in a blanket and set under the shade of a banana tree. Some young women wore light brown clay smeared thinly on their face, claiming it kept them cool in the sun, though one admitted to me that the men said it made them more attractive. At dusk I heard them singing as they walked up the hill to their village. The men drove tractors, repaired fences and buildings and drove the produce to town. These people work for a dollar a day and rarely go shopping in the city because the bus fare alone cost two days wages.
I stayed in a guest room in an elegant house with the
manager and his wife. One of the house servant girls spoke some English and told
me her name was “Queen Victoria.” When I asked for her real name she showed
me her passbook and I saw she was telling the truth. Many Zulu children proudly
own royal names of England I was told. Giving a powerful name to your child was
a way of directing a portion of that power to them. Victoria’s sister's name was, of course,
Queen Elizabeth.
Despite the often-smiling faces, I felt tenseness in the
atmosphere here. My host, I noticed, was never far from the pistol he usually
carried in an ankle holster. At night the holster hung from his bedpost. Putting
on a gun was just a part of getting dressed. There had been no confrontations
yet on this farm, although closer to the Mozambique border, white farmers were
being bombed, shot at or burnt out by ANC terrorists, and sometimes by their own
hired help. It was only a matter of time before the killing reached this valley
as well. The thought of being murdered in our beds made for uneasy sleep.
Before I could make these excursions outside Durban’s
port area, I was required to obtain a special travel permit. Around the time I
applied for the permit I noticed visitors to Atom were becoming fewer by the
day. Even the lovely secretaries were gone. Our novelty has finally worn off, I
told myself. At the end of Boi’s last day of work he said, “Did you know
that policeman has been watching you for two days,” and nodded towards a man
in dark sunglasses and plain clothes sitting on a bench on the jetty.
“Don’t be silly. Why would they be watching me?”
The following day the yacht club commodore visited Atom.
“James, why are the police watching you?” he asked.
“Are they? I can’t imagine why.”
“Perhaps it’s because of… all those… those
non-whites you’ve been associating with. Better watch your step,” he warned.
As the commodore left, I walked up to the man sitting
behind the newspaper ten steps down the jetty and asked, “Are you here for
me?” he looked at me expressionless for many seconds, then got up and walked
away. If my friends were wrong and he wasn’t police, he certainly would have
thought my question odd.
The next day at my immigration office appointment I was
told to sit in the corner where I waited several hours before being gruffly told
to leave and come back tomorrow. This charade was repeated for the next three
days until they finally grew tired of trying to outwait me. Compared to them I
was powerless, but I had patience. At last, a huge, stern-looking Afrikaner in a
uniform barely containing his bulk, presented me with the pass I had so long
awaited. As he handed me the well-stamped paper, he glared at me with a look
that said he would gladly crush me with his bare hands if only he could find an
excuse for it in his color-coded law book.
Rather than follow tourists on the obligatory bus tour of the African game parks, with my coveted travel document in hand, I accepted an invitation to join the Durban Ramblers Club for a three-day weekend trekking through the Drakensberg Mountains of Natal Province. Our plan was to follow the Miambonja River to its source in the high plateau country of Lesotho and to climb nearby Rhino Peak. We would sleep in caves previously inhabited by a people known simply as the Bushman. Our group of ten, including Afrikaners, English South Africans and an ex-Rhodesian, drove in three cars to the Himeville Nature Reserve where we put up tents along the river as darkness fell. The mountain air was refreshingly cool during a night of light rain.
By dawn we were
packed and moving up the river, crisscrossing it in shallow places and making
steady progress up the gorge – a watery avenue among giant wind-scoured peaks.
From rolling grasslands we moved up into the narrow gorge, surrounded on both
sides by fantastic rock formations jutting out over our heads from the
red-orange walls. Below, the green grasses of the veld were littered with gray
boulders as if tossed by Hercules from the high pillars. In the distance, rocky
spires rose like islands across a sea of grass. Hawks and eagles soared on
thermals up the faces of the cliffs. Dwarfing them with his 10-foot wingspan was
a bearded vulture called the lammergeyer.
Our unspoken group leader was Tom de Waal, an Afrikaner in
his early fifties who had traveled extensively in the “Berg”. Being an
amateur naturalist, he best among us understood the plants, animals and geology
around us. From Tom I learned that millions of years ago in this area a volcanic
upheaval lifted the basaltic lava miles above the surrounding plains to form
this
“roof of Southern Africa”, which today is the independent black nation of
Lesotho. For millions of years, wind and rain have eroded this eastern edge of
the plateau, leaving a multitude of strange formations - sharp pinnacles,
overhanging cliffs and caves, river-cut gorges among crumbly basalt and
sandstone. Early European settlers named the Drakensberg (Dragon) Mountains for
their jagged dragon-like spine as seen from the east. Zulus living below the
mountains say the edge of the escarpment resembles a barrier of a row of spears
they call, Ukhahlamba.
As we walked through a light rain, a troupe of baboons on the cliff above screamed and threw rocks at us before disappearing into the fog. Of all the dangers of the wild, until now I had never considered an animal might one day strike me down with a thrown rock. Footing became treacherous on steep sliding gravel. Half of our group retreated to meet us at a lower elevation later in the day.
Hours later, four of us gained the ridge of the escarpment and
were amazed to see patches of snow on the highland plain. Summer snow is
uncommon, even at this high altitude, so we made use of the novelty with a brief
exchange of snowballs. A Sotho herdsman on horseback, wrapped in a colorful
blanket against the cold wind, passed us to round up a stray cow grazing on the
sparse grass. He seemed as out of place in this sterile land as white men
throwing snowballs. To survive here, they bring their cattle and pack mules down
into Natal to trade wool, mohair and hides for corn meal and other trade goods.
We took a compass bearing on Rhino Peak just as it disappeared behind a veil of rain from blue-black clouds. My companions stopped somewhere short of the peak and told me we must turn back or risk being caught in a flash flood in the gully on the way down. A group of climbers died this way the year before when a fast-moving storm overtook them and they were washed away in a flood of rocks and water. I didn’t feel ten minutes more would change our fate and so ran off alone to bag the peak.
When I returned my brooding friends
asked what was the point of reaching the top when there was no view to be seen
in the cloud and rain. What could I say? If one climbs mountains solely for the
view he will often be disappointed. Inexplicably, I needed to reach every peak I
set out for, regardless of the mountain’s tempestuous moods. Fortunately, the
rain remained light as we bounded down the loose rocks of the riverbed while
noticing a group of deer-like rhebok outpacing us along the rocky slopes in sure-footed
leaps and bounds.
We meet up with the rest of our party and carried on to our
night’s campsite at Nutcracker Cave, so named because of its skull-cracking
5-foot ceiling, as more than one of our group discovered the hard way. The cave
was actually shallow, more of a recess in an overhanging cliff with a trickling
waterfall over the entrance and a sweeping vista over the river and valley
below. Leaning back in our sleeping bags, that night Tom told us some stories by
candlelight about the vanished Bushmen that inhabited these caves until driven
out by Zulus and white settlers.
The Bushman was a little man, about five feet tall with
brown skin and Mongolian facial features. He was superbly adapted to the feast
or famine lifestyle of the African hunter, soaking up water and food like a
camel before running across a barren desert. Actually, he preferred to run
everywhere and was hardly seen to walk at all. A true stone-aged man, he was a
hunter-gatherer with few possessions and no agriculture whatsoever. His language
was a complicated set of clicks and smacking of lips. He was so sensitive of his
size that it could be fatal to mention his smallness in his presence, which was
reflected in his standard greeting to fellow Bushmen: “Tshjamm” (I saw you
looming up from afar and I am dying of hunger). Being an expert botanist, he
knew how to use the plants and roots for food, medicine or poison. While the
women gathered roots and berries, he hunted Africa’s largest game with his
poison-tipped arrows, tracking a wounded animal for days if need be.
The bushmen’s rock paintings of wildlife and hunting
parties and dancing ceremonies scattered about these caves eventually came to
record the bloodshed of Zulus and Dutch settlers encroaching on their territory.
His little poison arrows found the Voertrekkers cattle an easy target, but a
poor defense against farmer’s guns. By the 1890s he was exterminated from the
Drakensberg. Other groups of Bushmen retreated to the howling deserts of the
Kalahari where they lived as close to perpetual anguish and deprivation as any
human settlement on earth. Up until a few years ago, small bands of Bushmen
still roamed the trackless wastes in search of game and the life-giving rains
that come briefly once a year.
As the evening rain fell, the streaming waterfall blocked
our cave entrance and we tucked ourselves closer to the back wall to stay dry.
The conversation eventually turned to the current strife in this country. The
ex-Rhodesian in our group remarked with some bitterness, “We white Africans
are like the bushmen of today, surrounded by hostile blacks and economic
sanctions from the rest of the world. We surrendered to the blacks in Rhodesia
and they are turning a prosperous country into another failed African state. The
blacks don’t care about our European standard of civilization. My family has
been in Africa 300 years, developing and civilizing this land. I cannot and will
not live as a black man and we will fight to keep South Africa under white rule.
I have nowhere else to go.”
He was right to see the irony of us sheltering in caves
where the bushman sheltered when they ruled the land. The waterfall thundered
outside like the beating of Zulu war drums. The bushman had been a passing
shadow over the land and the shadow of white rule was also destined to pass.
Maybe whites and blacks would learn to live together, or maybe not.
I noticed the English South Africans in our group were less
certain their privileged white rule was sustainable or even desirable. By the
time I returned to South Africa nine years later, the whites had handed the
country over to the blacks, virtually without a shot being fired in its defense,
despite the promises I heard from some Afrikaners that they would fight to
retain control. Even though the “whites only” signs would soon come down,
how long will the Apartheid of our hearts linger?
We got up to meet the sun as it poured down the valley,
turning the sky from pink to the flame blue of the African summer. Tom led us
across the lower valley and up to the cliffs on the opposite side where he
wanted to show us a gallery of Bushman rock painting on the overhanging ledges.
While most of us walk blindly through life, Tom missed nothing, whether watching
the bearded vulture soaring on air currents a half mile away or bending down to
identify a specie of grass as if Latin where his second language. Even if
unaware of the classification, the least aware of us could not fail to observe
the masses of blossoms painting the high veld in waves of color: red
bottlebrush, white, yellow and red proteas, and terrestrial orchids.
Tom was fluent in Zulu, which sounded odd from the lips of
a white man. With each peak that hove into view Tom delighted in shouting its
name: “Indumeni (Place of Thunder)” then the jagged peaks of “Ndedema
(Place of Reverberations)”. With a tilt of his head he indicated
“”Intabayikonjwa (Mountain at Which one Must not Point).” If pointed at
you risk being punished by storms. One hardly need point at all, since almost
daily, wreaths of black clouds and thunder clung to the highest peaks.
During a lunch break, I climbed a rock overhang for a
better view with Michelle, an airline employee from Durban. Thousands of feet
below the Polela River lay out its serpentine course towards the sea. Michelle
pointed out a herd of black wildebeest grazing on the sweet grasses along the
river. Before the weekend ended we also saw the elk-like eland and red
hartebeest. Leopards and other rare creatures lived here, but stayed well
hidden.
Again we split into groups of those who wanted to rest and
those ready for several more hours strenuous climbing. To be back to a
campsite before dark, we set out at a fast pace, moving through the sea of grass
under a high and hot sun and washed by the summer wind. “Safari” (we march),
I repeated to myself as I kept pace with the others. And march we certainly did.
The mountains absolute shape morphed into infinite profiles as viewed
from the differing angles around its base. The heat intensified along the cliff
side. We sucked our water bottles dry as we moved along rocks radiating the
afternoon sun like spitting yellow cobras. An eagle climbed into the sun and
disappeared.
Suddenly we were in the merciful shade of the ledge and staring at a smooth light-brown rock surface adorned with the crude and eloquent stick-like figures painted by bushman artists hundreds of years ago. What amazed me most was how the ancient paint of mineral oxides, blood, urine and tree sap applied with animal hair and feathers, barely shielded from the elements, looked as fresh as if applied yesterday.
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The Paleolithic graffiti began at one end with a group of
hunters pursuing antelope. Further along the rock face the figures danced. Then
a battle scene of Bushmen being attacked by a black tribe. To ease the
artist’s fears he painted himself as a giant among other giants. At the far
end of the wall he painted his last scene – white men on horseback. The
Bushman called themselves the “harmless people.” He lived simply off the
land until he died and the land absorbed him. He could not be tamed and
so became one of the ghosts of Africa. Only an aura remains, a state of mind,
and a legacy of painted figures on rock. To read the story requires only open
eyes, an open heart and an open mind. I’m reminded of The Song of the Rain
from The Lost World of the Kalahari, by Laurens Van Der Post. As they wait for
the life-giving rains, a woman sings:
Under the sun
The earth is dry,
By the fire
Alone I cry.
All day long
The earth cries
For the rain to come.
All night my heart cries
For my hunter to come
And take me away.
A man hears her song and tenderly sings back:
Oh! Listen to the wind,
You woman there;
The time is coming
The rain is near.
Listen to your heart,
Your hunter is here.
Returning to my boat in Durban, I felt as alien to the
people of the city as a Bushman and was eager to get under sail. Somewhere along
the way I began to understand my views, my values, my morality, had been largely
dictated by society. This country of the cruel and the kind, held no more
absolute truths than any other. The world over, an angry person sees corruption
wherever he looks, while the thoughtful person sees beauty. It is a beautiful
country.
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