South Africa - 6

I got into Johannesburg in the afternoon, a Sunday. I called the hostel and they told me a driver was waiting there at the airport, about to leave. They said his name was Jamma. He was wearing a blue shirt. To hurry up.

I found him. We walked back and he called to a skinny blond girl sitting on a bench. She picked up her hiking bag and Jamma took us to his Explorer and we got in and he drove into the city.

The girl was Polish. Her hair was greasy and pulled back into a ponytail. Her eyes were blue. Her face was sunburned. She smiled when I asked her questions. She’d been living in Scotland for four years, living on an island and taking care of horses and working at a restaurant. She took a couple months off for the winter and was going on an overland tour in a converted truck from South Africa up to Kenya. They’d stop at the big nature reserves and camp-out at night along the highway. There were a dozen other people going. The truck was leaving from the hostel we were headed to, from the Backpackers’ Ritz.

There was some traffic.

We got to the Ritz. It was at the end of a lane of big mansions and offices-inside-mansions. There were black metal fences and electric wire around each place. You could see off into the hills between each place. The hills were all trees.

There were two gates to enter the Ritz. Two fences. In between the fences were thick coils of razor wire, wrapped through bushes and tree branches.

The Ritz was in an old mansion.

A tall fat white-haired guy was working the desk. He had a scratchy low voice. When the girl and I gave him our passports he laughed at our pictures and asked what we’d been on. He explained where everything was in the hostel, how to get stuff, what was nearby. He said it like he was reading a list he’d had to read too many times.

There was a kitchen but the guy said there wouldn’t be any dinner, that he’s the cook but hasn’t felt like cooking for a while.

There was a pool in the backyard of the place, down by a guest house. The water was green. There were a few kids sitting around on the grass drinking beer. Some of them were on the same overland tour as the Polish girl. I walked down there and sat on the grass and didn’t know what to do. There was a girl lying off by herself on a higher part of the lawn. She had dark hair and dark eyes. I thought maybe she was from South America.

I walked up and checked my mail to see if my friend C. had made any more plans to come visit. She hadn’t written.

I walked out to the front porch. That same girl was sitting there smoking a cigarette. I went back in and bought a pack at the front desk.

She was French, it turned out. She was doing an internship in Jo-burg and was waiting to get picked up by a brother in this host family she’d stayed with for a couple weeks. A tall skinny Scandinavian guy came up and said something to her. He had short gelled hair and was wearing tight white jeans and an undershirt.

I left and walked back down the lane to a busy street. The bakery and the fruit stand and everything else was shut in the shopping center to the right.

There was a lot of traffic. A lot of nice cars. Only a couple people on foot. It was warm, balmy. They said it was safe around there.

I walked to a BP station. I bought some biltong – cured spicy meat – and a Mail and Guardian, which comes out on weekends, a couple potpies and a Coke.

I walked back.

The potpies had been sitting out at the BP and were cold. I heated them in the microwave. They got hot and soft.

The Ritz is at the top of the hill and you can see almost to downtown Jo-burg. I went to a picnic table in a garden and ate my pies and watched the sun go down and listened to an episode of Entitled Opinions.

My mom gave me a call from the U.S. I told her Frithjof was supposed to be getting into South Africa today and that I hoped we’d meet up the next day. I called the two numbers he gave me to call: the taxi driver Mike and the innkeeper Richard. Mike referred to Frithjof as the professor. He said he’d tell him to call me.

I was sleeping in a big circular room at the top of a tower of the mansion. There were a dozen bunk beds along the wall but only a couple people staying the night. The windows were dusty and some of the latches were broken. Only a couple opened. The ceiling was curved and the floors were wood. You could hear echoes of your voice when you stood at the right spot. The air was thick and hot when I first walked in there and put my stuff down.

I hung around the lounge after it got dark and kept reading The Wretched of the Earth. A girl came up to me and pointed at the book and said it was great. She walked out to the front porch to smoke.

I walked out there.

Her name was Lia. She was from Italy. She said she’d read Wretched of the Earth in French for a class in Paris. She’s doing a Masters on transgenderism in Africa. She took mini-bus taxis everyday from the Ritz to Wits University downtown to research in their library. She’d spent a while in Nairobi working on the same thing at a university there. She had brown hair and skin whose best description was…stereotypically…olive oil.

She told me to check out Andre Brink. That she’d read A Dry White Season and liked it. I told her about Waiting for the Barbarians.

I went up to the dorm to go to bed. I got under the covers and lied there. It wasn’t so hot anymore. Then a mosquito hummed by my ear.

I didn’t sleep much. The mosquitoes started biting. Then a couple people checked in late and unpacked their bags and got into their beds. Then a couple people checked out early and packed up their bags and left their beds.

In the morning there was a lady working in the kitchen. I ordered toast and beans and orange juice. The toast was white bread with some butter. The beans were heated up from a can. The orange juice was a concentrate powder mix.

I took my plate back to the picnic table and ate outside again. It was sunny and humid but not too hot yet.

I went back inside to read. The fat man from the day before was lying down on the sofa in the lounge. He was watching a history show on Scotland. He said he should get some work done and got up and sauntered out to the patio and smoked a cigarette. He had a dry hard cough while he smoked.

There was a chalkboard on the wall. It was supposed to list dinner on it. It said instead Thought of Day: The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like Prostitutes…

A couple backpackers came to check-in. The fat man made fun of their passports.

I was going to go the mall and the bakery and wait for a call from Frithjof.

South Africa - 5

A driver named Malcolm picked me up the next day. When I tried to leave the hostel the key code for the gate didn’t work. They said they changed it and gave me the new combo.

Malcolm brought me back to the consulate.

He wasn’t allowed to park in the lot. He dropped me off and said he’d be waiting in a strip mall and to just give him a missed call when I was done.

I met with a large man in a red and white Hawaiian shirt. He led me down a hallway that had a very large and original Roy Lichtenstein painting on the wall.

There were a dozen TVs in his office, stacked on metal shelving, muted, playing news and commercials and daytime talk shows. A few of them were showing Tony Blair being questioned on the invasion of Iraq.

I wasn’t able to offer much help about the thing I was brought back to talk to him about. The man in the Hawaiian shirt said it was OK.

He led me outside. It was windy and sunny. He said he didn’t care. Whatever. I gave him my e-mail address. He gave me his card.

I called Malcolm and we got back on the highway. We drove past Khayelitsha again. There was a prostitute waving a yellow flag. The oldest game in town, Malcolm said.

There was a big brush fire ahead off the road. Fire trucks were pulled up near it. The flames were blowing close to the shanties.

I got back to the hostel. One of the American study abroad students called and wanted to meet with me.

I walked onto campus. A colored guy came up to me and mumbled something and sort of put his hand out. I thought he was asking for money but just said huh? He pointed at his wrist like asking for the time. I looked at my watch and told him and walked away and felt guilty but also suspicious.

I met the student. He had a bag of laundry with him.

We went to a place next to The Nook and got a table outside. He got an Appletiser. I got a cappuccino. The tables had white tablecloths and blown-glass vases with roses in them.

He wanted to show me a documentary he made the semester before. He took out his Macbook. It was red. It was the same red as his Lacoste polo.

A toothless black homeless man came up to us and put out his hand for change. We said we didn’t have anything. He walked away.

A little disheveled black kid came up selling long-handled wooden spoons and feather dusters. We also waved him off.

There were some Afrikaner girls sitting at a table across from us. One of the girls was slouched against the booth, laughing, sipping a milkshake. She had on the same kind of sandals that my girlfriend in Argentina spent several gratuitous hours shopping for in Buenos Aires a day before I flew home to Chicago.

He showed me the documentary. It was about a school in a colored township. There were interviews with a few kids and one of the administrators of the school. There were shots of the township. They were shot from inside a bus as it drove through the neighborhood.

We finished our drinks and got the bill. It came in a cigar box.

I walked to the art museum. There was a permanent collection of a lot of European-style painting and an anthropological section on African tribes from the region.

One of the captions on the wall read: “Young Thembu men dressed in their beaded finery and decorative head-cloths on their way to intlambe: a formal gathering of their peer group organized as an age association, which has important socialization functions and to which any initiated males and marriageable females belong.”

I walked upstairs. There were a lot of gray-haired white people looking at drawings on the walls. There was a new show opening of illustrations done by a couple early European settlers of Cape Town.

I was looking at a portrait of some Cape Malay slaves. An old lady came up next to me and said the slave girl’s hairstyle was very modern, like the mannequins in the fashion stores today.

The only non-white person was a kid on the museum staff helping set-up chairs.

It was a gathering of the Friends of the Museum. They took their seats and a younger man started explaining this illustrator and how gentleman in those times would be able to draw quite well and so on.

I stayed back from the chairs and just kept looking closely at the drawings.

A lady started coughing and staggered out to the hall. Her continued hacking echoed from the hallway back into the hushed gallery. Her cell phone then went off with the familiar Nokia tune and also echoed back into the hushed gallery.

I walked past the crowd and tried to get out. A lady, one of the Friends’ organizers, asked didn’t I want to stay for the talk?

I looked at her, paused. She said oh go on no you don’t.

I walked back to the entrance of the museum. There were a few monographs for sale. I saw one on Willie Bester, the sculptor. The guy at the front desk gave me a copy. I paid. Then I asked for a second one, for my friend C. who told me she was going to come visit me from France.

I walked a couple blocks outside of town, to a creek. The sidewalks ended.

I walked back downtown. I took a picture of a shadow of a tree on a white wall and noticed some guys down the street looking at me. I walked past them. One of them was selling mangoes. I asked for two. He wanted to sell me a whole box. Then he offered four with a fifth thrown in free for twenty Rand. I asked for two. He said five for twenty. I walked away.

I went to a Pick ‘n Pay and bought a couple pot pies and a big slice of watermelon. At the checkout the guy in front of me took out an old yellow plastic bag. The cashier took it like she expected to and put the groceries inside. I got up and said I’d use my backpack. It didn’t seem to be a big deal.

I walked back to the hostel and re-heated my curry beef pie in the microwave and ate it with the watermelon at a picnic table in the shade. I read some more of Waiting for the Barbarians.

A couple was in the kitchen near me. The wife asked where the milk was. Her husband said it’s in a plastic pouch next to the water!

I walked to a park. There were a lot of black people barbequing and hanging out. I didn’t see any white people. I got looks when I walked past.

I walked along a trail, under some trees, past rock sculptures. There were wildfire warnings on signs. I took some pictures, read. I saw some graffiti that said ZEITGEIST, which I’d talked about in a lecture in Argentina.

That night the undergrads called me up and invited me to an informal gathering of their peer group. It was a barbeque, a braai. Their dorm was down the road from my hostel.

I called them when I got there. We walked past a couple other dorms. A bottle was thrown out a window and smashed on the ground. There was hooting and yelling and people talking loudly and happily.

There was a security door to get into the dorm. It was a thick glass sliding door that opened in the middle and shut after a few seconds. It made a merciless whoosh when it closed. It seemed like the doors to a pressure lock of a spaceship or underwater research station.

The girl who met me said Bradley spent like several minutes with them emphasizing that these doors will hurt you very badly and you just have to be calm and step right through and not mess around.

We got up and stepped through and walked to the courtyard.

There were a lot of study abroad students milling around. One kid from Mexico. One from Iran. A lot of Americans. There was boerewors and potatoes and ostrich meat on the grill. There was some wine in plastic cups to drink.

A couple students came into the courtyard. A girl was pushing a metal grocery cart. She heaved it aside and they walked upstairs to a room.

We ate. Talked. I was going on and on to this one girl about this friend of mine C. who seemed like she was going to come visit me. I hadn’t seen her in person for almost a year and a half, and even that last time was just for a few hours.

This girl and I got to talking about relationships. She’s from a farm town in the Great Plains and said if she marries a lousy husband then that just must be Christ’s plan for her.

The Iranian kid was talking to an American about how big America is and the American said five thousand kilometers and the Iranian went “Five thousand kilometers…wheeumph!”

The American talking to him had long blond hair slicked back and held down with a sweatband. I asked him what he was doing at Stellenbosch. He said he’s in Arts, so he can do anything.

I left. The girl I was talking to walked me out and opened the threatening sliding door for me and gave me a hug and said bye.

I got back to my hostel and took down my clothes from the hangars and folded up all the paper and brochures and maps I’d gotten since I’d arrived. I was leaving for Johannesburg the next day.

I was going to there to meet up with Frithjof Bergmann. He was flying to Jo-burg from Germany the day after I’d get there. He’d sent me a couple e-mails with the numbers of the taxi driver and of the private house where he stays. Though he said I couldn't stay at the house because it's sort of a brothel.

In Stellenbosch they’d kept asking if I had accommodations and an itinerary with Frithjof. I just kept saying it’d be taken care of.

I made a reservation at the Backpackers’ Ritz, a hostel in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. The biggest thing it's closest to is the Hyde Park shopping mall. They were going to send somebody to pick me up from airport.

Bradley had given me some laminated in-case-of-emergency contact info cards. I put one in my notebook, one in a pocket of my backpack and one in my shoe. I charged my phone. I got into bed and finished Waiting for the Barbarians.

I went to sleep.

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.