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.