South Africa - 3

Cezanne picked me up in the morning in a VW rented from Budget.

We drove out of Stellenbosch on the R310, through wine country and green hills and stone mountains, past ostrich and horse ranches. There were prostitutes standing along the N2 junction, out in the sun, wearing bright short tight clothes, waiting.

Khayelitsha came up on the right. There were thousands of shanties made of corrugated rusty metal and faded cardboard signs and concrete and wood. You could see more of them all the way to the horizon. Wood telephone poles and concrete light posts were the only things sticking up above the houses.

The highway rose over a hill and we got near the sea. It was turqoise, streaked with lines of waves coming in. Sand was spilling onto the road from the dunes and the wind and we had to swerve and slow down.

It was getting overcast and rainy. Surfers were on the water, bobbing.

We drove down the east side of the peninsula to the national park, to Cape Point. We drove to the gate of the park. It was drizzling. The lady at the gate said it probably wasn't going to get much nicer.

Cezanne drove fast through the fynbos to the tip of the park. We parked at the stairway to Cape Point. There were dozens of big tour buses and vans and hundreds of tourists in shorts and hats and sunglasses. We walked up the stairs to the old light house.

Cezanne said he's done some TV commercials. He's never starred, but has been in the background. He did a Heineken one, recently. When he was little he was in a commercial as a tennis player.

I took some pictures in the fog and the mist. We walked down and drove to the Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern tip of Africa. I waited my turn and took a picture near the famous sign. We hiked up a trail and sat on the side of a cliff while the sun came out and the water turned a deep shining true blue.

We drove out of the park. We didn't see any zebras or ostriches or baboons or seals. I saw a lizard that I took a picture of, and people.

There was a stand set-up by the back gates with wood sculptures of giraffes and lions and other safari animals. There were different sizes of each sculpture, small enough to fit in your hand, or too big to fit in your car.

We drove up the west side of the peninsula, past seaside towns. There were don't-feed-the-baboons signs everywhere. There were more roadside vendors selling the same sculptures we'd seen before.

We drove along the M6 into Hout Bay. It's a toll road, along the cliffs. It gets closed sometimes because boulders fall down and crush peoples' cars and kill everyone inside while they're driving and sightseeing.

We drove past the look-out points and didn't stop. The sky was clear now and the sunlight bright and dense. My left arm was getting sunburnt while I sat shotgun.

We got into Clifton, a lavish South Beach-type part of Cape Town. It's a narrow strip between the sea and Table Mountain. Cezanne was listening to KFM, the pop station. A new Alicia Keys song about New York was getting a lot of airtime. I felt kind of trapped and suffocated as we waited in lunch hour traffic with the sea on one side and a wall of mountains on the other.

We got into the city bowl and parked near Long Street and walked to Greenmarket Square for lunch.

We went to a place called Kauai. It's a Hawaiian-themed wraps and salads and smoothies healthy fast food place. It's a South African chain. I got a Peanut Bliss smoothie delight and a chicken Moroccan wrap. Cezanne got a grilled oriental chicken salad and a Mango Bang fruit smoothie. We sat under an umbrella at a table out front along a pedestrian mall.

Cezanne got up and went to the bathroom. I heard a woman sitting nearby talking in a clear composed voice about why she lives in Cape Town and what she likes to do here and what she's looking for career-wise. There were two guys in matching grey tucked-in golf shirts sitting with her. One had a clipboard and was on the phone. The other was listening to her.

We got our food and ate. The waiter came over and asked if I was still busy. Yes, I said. He came back a while later but stayed near the entrance and looked to get my attention. I looked and he gave two thumbs up with a look on his face. I gave him a TU and he smiled and walked back in.

The girl who was talking had brown curly hair and pale skin and freckles and light eyes. She finished talking and the guys said they'd be in touch and now the other one was talking on his phone and they got up and left. She got up and went the other direction.

I asked Cezanne if you can tell the difference between a coloured person and a black person in South Africa. He said it's easy and started pointing out people nearby. But then it's more complicated than that because there's English-speaking coloureds and Afrikaans-speaking coloureds, and then blacks with all sorts of different origins.

Cezanne is an English-speaking coloured. He said his parents named him Cezanne because they were watching an arts show on TV about the French Impressionists after he was born and they liked the name. He said he's trying to get into the arts more now, feels like he should.

We drove back to Stellenbosch and I got dropped off at my hostel.

I laid down for a while then went and met Joe after his afternoon broadcast.

We met at The Mystic Boer and got Carling Black Label beers. I got a pizza with avo (avocado) and feta and bacon. Joe said South African's have a thing for feta cheese and avocado pears. We talked for a couple hours til after dark. We said bye and I walked home and went to bed.

Bradley was picking me up early the next day to go back to Cape Town and go to the Consulate.

South Africa - 2

A driver named Calvin was waiting for me at the gate of the Cape Town airport. My flight got in on time at 11PM.

We left, heading for Stellenbosch.

A little kid wearing a canvas jacket was standing on the median at a stop sign, his hand out. Calvin shook his head. The kid sat down on the curb and picked at his hair with a comb.

There was a Christian talk show on the radio. It was going back and forth from Afrikaans to English. The host was talking to call-in guests about how long they’ve all been serving the Lord.

I asked Calvin what Stellenbosch was like. Very conservative, he said.

We drove past walled neighborhoods, then out to a winding road through black hills. The only lights were out over the triumphant gated entrances to vineyards.

We got into Stellenbosch after a half hour.

Calvin slowed as some kids were walking down the street. He shouted "ahoy" at them.

We got to Banghoek Place, the hostel where I was staying.

Calvin walked to the gate with me, leaned his head close, and whispered the password for the keypad.

The front doors to the lounge were locked. There were some kids eating and one got up and walked outside and opened another gate for us.

Calvin led me in and pointed upstairs to number eight, my room, and gave me the key.

I didn’t know what kind of room I’d be staying in. I figured it’d be a shared dorm.

I opened the door.

It was a single room. It had its own bathroom, a queen-size bed with high thread-count white sheets that you really had to yank at to untuck. There were animal pelts on the floors and designer lamp shades made with recycled soda cans on the nightstands.

There was a brown gift bag on the bed.

Inside was a new cell phone, granola, juice boxes, a carton of milk, dried fruit, biltong (dried meat), peanuts, a bunch of bananas, and a signed welcome letter from Bradley.

I washed up and got into bed. A mosquito came in and was flying by my ear and keeping me awake. I turned on the lights and saw it on the wall and killed it with my slender edition of "Waiting for the Barbarians". There was blood on the cover.

I went to sleep.

* * *

In the morning I ate breakfast and read and drank some complimentary rooibos tea, which is grown in the Cape.

I looked around the place. A concrete wall surrounded the hostel. There were four wires suspended above it. It was an electric fence.

Bradley came at 10. I had been sitting on a sofa, waiting, looking towards the front gate and the street.

I saw a tall guy walking up. He was in the shade of a tree. I thought he was black. Then he got a little closer and I thought he was coloured. Then he came into the lounge and I saw he was white and tan. This was Bradley.

We walked through campus to his office. There weren't any sidewalks until close to the university buildings and student housing.

School had just started for the year. It was bright and hot and crowded. There were shorts, dresses and sandals. The buildings and lawns and students looked clean and well kempt.

Stellenbosch is one of the few South African universities that still teach in Afrikaans. The campus signs are in Afrikaans and English.

Bradley took me to his office and served me some more rooibos tea. He teaches geography at the University of Cape Town and works at Stellenbosch for CIEE.

He gave me a short version of the study abroad, welcome-to-Africa tips and rules. He went over my itinerary for the week, with some trips to Cape Town and some free time to wander through Stellenbosch.

Bradley had spent time in Latin America, too. I asked if he still read any Spanish lit. He said he liked post-coup Chilean stuff. He said it fast and it sounded like “Postkoochelean”. I remained quiet and nodded my head until I parsed the phrase and figured out what he meant.

We left to go eat lunch with one of his assistants, a recent-grad named Joe.

We went to a café called The Nook, a place painted what I guess would be Tiffany Blue and had thin chrome chairs on the patio and Death Cab for Cutie and Iron and Wine playing on the speakers. I felt like I was in the North Shore of Chicago.

The waitress came. Joe ordered a Thai chicken sandwich. I ordered a Thai chicken sandwich. Bradley ordered one, too. He made a joke about there being enough for three. The waitress didn’t get it. None of us looked at each other.

We sat and ate and talked. Joe studied philosophy, like me. Unlike me, he did what a self-respecting philosophy student should do and studied Greek and Latin. He’s written journalism, too. He’s thinking of doing a Masters in linguistics next year.

He’s the co-host of a popular afternoon-drive radio show. It’s a sports show where every so often the hosts go out and do something and bring listeners with and let the sponsors come on air and talk about what the hosts used as they did some interesting and amusing athletic outdoor thing.

We finished our sandwiches. We got more drinks. Me, a latté. Bradley, a cappuccino. Joe, another coffee with a side of honey.

Bradley left and Joe took me through the downtown.

The buildings are whitewashed and glow in the sun. Many of them are Cape Dutch style, with thatch roofs and tall curling gables.

It’s a tourist town, with big buses passing through the narrow streets. There’s Italian gelato, gourmet hamburgers, an Ernie Els restaurant called Big Easy, used bookshops and home ware stores and art galleries. One shop had large black women seated out front in traditional dress working on looms.

There’s old historical buildings still, like a magistrate’s court with a rose garden in front and the original town cathedral, called the Mother Church.

Joe took me to one of the campus bookstores. I couldn’t believe all the Routledge philosophy editions they had there. More than I’d ever seen in the U.S. or Canada.

We left and went to a bar Joe spends a lot of time at called The Mystic Boer. It’s got a lot of nostalgic Afrikaner stuff nailed to the walls like a TGIFridays in America. He said he DJs there sometimes, with CD turntables.

Joe left and I walked back to my hostel. Bradley came at six and got me for dinner.

Joe’s radio show had just ended, he said. We drove back downtown and parked and a guy in a neon vest came over and helped us pull-in. That was the car guard, the guy who tries to make sure no one steals your stuff while you’re eating or shopping or whatever.

Bradley said that a lot of car guards in Johannesburg are immigrants from other, usually Francophone African countries. He said they’re often well-educated and get brought here by recruiters for “job opportunities”. Bradley said there he just speaks French to them.

We went to the gourmet burger restaurant and met Cezanne there, another assistant.

Cezanne was a champion junior tennis player but blew out his shoulder just before university. He studied accounting but is now trying to get to Brazil to teach English.

Bradley said Brazil’s like a Creole South Africa.

Cezanne got to talking about tourists and how they expect there to be huts and tribes and spears and lions when they get to South Africa. He said he’s never been to a tribal village his whole life.

Bradley said people might complain how here across the street for instance there’s a Cape Dutch building next to a Victorian building, but that is just what makes this place what it is. And that there’s a Porsche SUV driving down this street, but shanty towns ten minutes away.

We drank white wine and ate our gourmet burgers and our French fries served in slim metal canisters.

Bradley asked for the bill. He said never let anyone take your credit card in South Africa. Even if you pay at a restaurant they’ll bring a machine out to you.

The waiter came out with the machine. We paid, said bye to Cezanne, gave the car guard a few coins and left.

Cezanne was coming in the morning to drive me to Cape Point, the southwestern tip of the continent.

I shut the windows so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get in.

South Africa - 1

I left for South Africa at the end of January.

The trip was a prize for the Exchanges Connect video contest that I won last year, for my short "A Friend in Nanjing".

The trip was supposed to be two weeks, but I extended the flight to be there five instead.

I'd been in Chicago a month since getting home from Argentina and my Fulbright grant before Christmas. It was cold and dark and bleak and I was ready to leave to go somewhere warm.

I chose South Africa - of the other countries I could've gone to - because: One, it's far away and justifies a free flight; Two, it's in Africa and I'd never been; Three, it's English-speaking and gives me some reasonable chance of getting to talk to people there unlike other far-off places like Nepal, Russia, Egypt, etc.; and, Four, I was trying to track down a philosopher, Frithjof Bergmann.

Bergmann was really the big reason South Africa loomed in my mind over other choices.

He's a German/American philosopher, a retired UMichigan prof who roams around the world trying to create what he calls New Work.

I studied New Work with one of Bergmann's former students - who's now a UIllinois phil. prof. I studied this in spring of 2006, just before I took my first study abroad trip, to China.

So this trip to South Africa wound up as this sort of grand - and grandly disappointing, in some ways - culmination, termination of a lot of things that began in 2006, or, to put it in a bit more general bildungsroman/coming-of-age terms, that began when I was an eager and confused and inexperienced student, and then resolved when I was a more cyncial, clear-headed, worldly young professional.

These thing I'm talking about that...came to term...were: deep personal relationships, a certain intellectual curiosity, a succession of traveling and scholarships and wandering through various continents.

* * *

I left on a Sunday morning. My mom dropped me off at the airport before church. She dropped me off as she had almost a year before when I left for Montreal, and soon after that when I left again for Argentina.

I was flying South African Airways, first to Washington, then to Johannesburg with a stop in Dakar, and then a last connection to Cape Town.

My first week in SA was planned by a study abroad director, Bradley. He works at the University of Stellenbosch, which is in a small city outside Cape Town. Bradley's also from Illinois, from a farm town west of my city, along I-80.

My flight from O'Hare was delayed and got me into Dulles with ten minutes to connect. After a long wait for the people mover to drive across the tarmac and get me to the right terminal, I had to run to the gate. I didn't check any luggage and just had a hiking backpack and a school backpack. I used to be self-conscious about wearing the school backpack in front, on my stomach, maybe thinking it looked weird or evoked pregnancy in some way, but it's just too convenient particularly when you have to run through an airport with two moderately-packed bags.

I brought a few books with me and a fresh Moleskine notebook my sisters gave me for Christmas. I brought Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" and Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians", both of which had been sitting on my shelves in my bedroom for a couple years. I also brought Shaw's "Man and Superman" and Greene's "The Power and the Glory", though wondered if I'd read them as their socio-cultural relevance to South Africa was eyebrow-raisingly low.

The SAA flight was uncrowded. People had rows to themselves. My seat was next to two large women wearing puffy dresses who were talking on cell phones and didn't look at me. The stewardess told me I should move somewhere else. I went for seats by the window.

The pilot greeted the passengers in English and Afrikaans. On each seat was a blanket and pillow and a clear plastic zip pouch. Inside was a pair of brown socks, a brown nylon eye mask, a snap-together two-piece tooth brush, and a small tube of Aerodent toothpaste.

We took off in the late afternoon. Dinner was meatballs and rice, a roll, a butterfly-shaped cracker, cheddar cheese, a salad with raisins and beef, mint ice cream cake, and a Kit Kat bar. I drank ginger ale and mineral water.

I watched "District 9" on the in-flight, in-seat monitor. It's a South African film, funded by Peter Jackson, in which anthropomorphic crustacean aliens come to Johannesburg and are penned into a township quite obviously the same as those used against blacks and coloureds during Apartheid.

The film starts off nicely, using a verité style, in which all the footage is as if recorded right there in the world itself. But then that stops and the movie becomes some mild-mannered white guy trying to stand-up for the oppressed ugly dark things, with a lot of gun violence and immigrant jokes and an unfulfilling and ambiguous conclusion.

I tried to watch Steven Soderbergh's new movie "The Informant!", but the cabin was too loud and the headphones too weak to clearly hear so I turned it off and read and slept.

We got into Dakar early in the morning. The plane crew was swtiched and Sengalese airport workers wearing neon vests with large X's on them came on to clean the plane.

We waited on the runway for an hour. I got up and stretched and an American guy from San Diego started talking to me. He was working for a evangelical missionary business that does work all over the world. It was his first time in Africa too, though he'd be coming back in a few months to go to Kenya.

We took off at dawn. Kids were playing soccer in a dirt field along the runway. There were dull plain apartment flats near the airport and golf courses and pools and tennis courts near the mansions along the ocean.

In accordance with an unexplained WHO ordinance, the pilot said the plane had to be sprayed. He didn't say with what.

The flight attendants walked up the aisles, blue aerosol canisters in each hand, white clouds hissing out. The spray faded and evaporated into the air like the pilot's own explanation for such a measure.

We were sterilized. The cabin felt like the smell of fabric softener.

We were served breakfast. We got folded pancakes, a wedge of sausage, a hot tin of syrup, a cold croissant and butter. A fruit salad of an orange wedge, blueberries and raspberries. A sealed plastic container of orange juice, a container of berry yogurt, and a cup of tea.

The flight attendants spoke a prim, tidy English, while offering us drinks and meal choices and tea or coffee refills and duty-free shopping. They all wore perfumes and colognes, the odor of which trailed behind them and grazed your face like a long delicate scarf. I wondered if they did it on purpose, to reassure you of their presence and/or to counteract in its own highly chemical way the stale, airplane-food-flatulence-soaked cabin air.

We flew along the west coast of Africa, over deserts and beaches. I slept, and when not sleeping read "The Wretched of the Earth". There seemed to be something both appropriate and disgusting - or appropriately disgusting - that I was reading such a book seated in a jetliner, coasting above the clouds, being served food and drinks and multimedia entertainment, flying towards a really-not-much-more-than-a-glorified-vacation-getaway to Africa.

The pilot said turbulence was ahead, so lunch would be served early. We got a cold bowtie pasta salad with chickpeas, red peppers, and olives. A hot bowtie pasta with chicken and mushrooms and cream sauce. Some crumbly bread and Kiri cream cheese. A roll. An eclair for dessert.

We got to Johannesburg in the late afternoon. The city and the tall buildings were off in the distance, away over the hills and the suburban homes and their walls and swimming pools. The air was hazy and orange.

I had a couple hours to wait until my flight to Cape Town. I sat down in the red plastic chair of a Vida e Caffe, a new coffee shop franchise in SA.

A woman came up to me who'd seen me on the flight. She asked if my bags arrived OK. I said I hadn't checked any.

She said hers didn't come, and she's worried because the Tambo airport has a reputation for theft. Her bags wouldn't come until the evening, on another flight. She'd come from Iowa, where she was visiting her daughter.

She asked what I was doing, where I was going. I took out a map of the country in my Lonely Planet guide.

She pointed to Johannesburg and said "This is a terrible part of the world."

She and her husband live in the country, in KwaZulu-Natal province. They're not city people she said.

One of the VeC workers was dancing and strutting to some Afro-Latin music. She looked at him and shook her head and said he wasn't a Zulu.

She gave me her name and her number and said to give her a call if I pass through. She went back to her table, finished her coffee, and walked off without looking back.

I read some more, waiting, then got on the flight to Cape Town. It was the last of the evening.

Summertime is the rainy season in Jo-burg and storms usually build-up in the afternoons.

The plane took off into a thunderstorm. Lightning shone into the cabin as we gained altitude.

I was seated in an emergency exit row and sat next to the door and its large red tempting handle.

I started "Waiting for the Barbarians". I got tired and closed the book and fell asleep.