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.

20: "To the country: Part 2"

Sole and I slept in til noon on Saturday. We were going to the country, to a farm outside Maciá that her uncle José takes care of.

It was hot and windy and humid. We left her grandma’s house and walked down the main street. We stopped at a kiosk to see if they had El Uno, one of Paraná’s daily newspapers. An article of mine was going to be in it. I had been writing what I called portraits of contemporary U.S. culture. This week’s was going to be on David Foster Wallace.

We didn’t see an Uno. We asked the lady and she said it doesn’t come to Maciá.

We passed an office building, the only one on the street. It had black tinted windows and was surrounded by a tall dark fence. There were delivery trucks in the parking lot.

This was the headquarters of Huevo Campo (“Country Egg”), which is one of biggest egg distributors in MercoSur. The Roths are the family that own the company. They’re the richest people in Maciá and their son went to Harvard. They own a school, and an evangelical church, too.

On the website of Huevo Campo it says "producido por familias que creen en el Poder y Amor de Dios" (made by families that believe in the power and love of God).

We got to the edge of town after walking a few more blocks. We passed some speed bumps. A warning sign called them donkey humps (lomo de burro).

We walked under a tree, to wait in the shade and try to hitch a ride to the farm. Sole’s aunt, Dioni, and José were cooking an asado for us, with chicken and sábalo, a big river fish. The food was almost done and we should’ve been there already.

A couple of cars and trucks came by on the gravel road. Sole stood up and put out her thumb but they just looked at us and pointed down the road and kept going.

They were going to work at a recycling plant, she said. The plant was a quarter mile down the highway. You could see it from where we sat.

I took some pictures and Sole and I drank from a bottle of Sprite she’d bought. We drank with a straw. That’s usually how they drink from plastic bottles in Argentina.

She called her aunt and they came and picked us up in her uncle’s new used car.

We got in. They told us we should’ve gotten up earlier, that no one’d be headed out this way so late in the day.

We drove along the highway. A guy on a horse was coming in the other direction. He was wearing baggy brown pants and a white shirt and a flat brimmed hat. He had a knife hanging from his belt.

I asked if that was a gaucho. I said it was the first real one I’d seen.

That’s José’s son, Sole told me. José’s a gaucho, too, she said. José was wearing an aqua blue polo and khaki slacks and moccasins and glasses.

We got to the farm. We pulled up to the house and got out and a pack of dogs came up and barked at us.

In the yard of the house was a cage with a couple of parakeets. They were squawking and screeching when we got close. Dioni said they do that with strangers. She came over and talked to them and they quieted down. She got them to repeat what she’d say.

Behind the parakeet cage was a big pen with ducks and roosters and chickens.

Sole went inside and got a plastic pitcher and we went to a big mulberry tree in the front yard to pick berries.

She stood on a plastic chair and I held the pitcher. The ripe ones fell from a touch. The juice stained our fingers and hands.

The food was ready and we went inside and sat down to eat.

The sábalo had a lot of bones and you had to feel the meat in the front of your mouth, with your tongue and your teeth, carefully, so you didn’t swallow any.

There was a tomato and onion salad, squash, and homemade bread. We drank a knock-off lemon lime soda.

Dioni served fruit salad for dessert.

After lunch Sole and I left the farm and walked on a path through the monte, to a creek.

There were cows grazing in the forests along the way. We walked past an electric fence that wrapped around another field.

We saw the nest of a bird up in the trees. It’s made of dried mud and is called an hornillo, which means little oven. It’s got an entrance on one side, like a cave.

There were ducks in the creek. They had a blue in their feathers that glowed in the sunlight.

When we headed back the cows stopped and turned and stared at us. We stopped, then walked ahead, slowly. The cows relaxed and some turned away and some kept looking, but none of them moved.

We got back to the farm in the late afternoon.

We sat down at a picnic table under a portico, in the backyard, to eat some more fruit salad.

José took a sheep from a pen and brought it close by and strung it up by one leg from the mulberry tree.

Sole got nervous and started breathing hard and telling José no. She turned away and covered her eyes.

I kept eating the fruit salad and turned to look at what José was doing.

He cut the sheep’s neck and let the blood pour onto the ground. It was thick and steaming and splashing into the dirt and the grass and the fallen berries.

The dogs came close and waited with their tongues out.

The sheep kept kicking after the blood had drained.

José began butchering it. He cut off the hoofs and tossed them to the dogs. You could hear the crunch while they chewed them. There was blood and wool on their snouts.

I was taking pictures. I had never seen this before.

Dioni called me over. She was posing with one of the dogs. It was up on its hind legs and had a cap on its head. I took a picture then turned back to the sheep.

José stripped and pull off the wool, then split the stomach.

José was talking to Sole and I. He took out the kidney. It was bright blue and wet. It’s the kidney, he said, just like you have. He tossed it into the grass and a dog went for it.

He pulled out the rest of the organs in one big bundle – the stomach and intestines and all that – and threw them onto the lawn.

The dogs ran for them and chewed and ripped them apart.

A black cat came by and tried to nibble at the organs but a collie growled and it backed away and had to watch.

Each dog took different parts. The collie took the stomach. It split it open and green mush oozed out and didn’t smell good. It was partially-digested grass, José said.

A tiny black lab was eating the small intestine. The stuff inside was splattered on its paws. It pulled at them like spaghetti.

The dogs looked happy and focused.

José was wearing the same clothes as earlier. There were big dark stains on his pants now.

Dioni took me and Sole into the barn, past big tractors, past sacks of feed and fertilizer. We went into one part that was dark and stuffy. There was a cardboard box on the ground. It had a half-dozen puppies in it. They were feeding on its mom.

We shined a flashlight inside and the mom – a tiny, short-haired dog – looked up at us. Sole took one of the puppies out of the box. It fit in her hand. She put it back and we left.

We walked into the chicken coop and Dioni and Sole collected the eggs. José came by and threw seed to the birds and they all came by and started pecking and fighting.

The day was getting late and we were going to head back into town. José had butchered the sheep for somebody and had to drop off the meat.

Dioni took the parakeets out and put them into a tiny cage to bring them with. They´ll bite everyone but her, she said.

We got into the car and drove down the road to the gate. I got out and opened it up. José drove ahead but then Sole shouted that I’d left my door open. They stopped and shut the door, then I closed and locked the gate.

Well, I did something on the farm, Sole said.

We got into town and walked to Sole’s mom’s house. She made empanadas for us. Sole didn’t like them much and got out the leftover perdix from the night before.

We went back to Toni’s for ice cream afterwards. Toni served us again.

We went home and changed and then went to one of the two social clubs in town and had a couple drinks with some of Sole’s old high school friends.

* * *
Sunday we slept in again then got up and walked to Dioni’s house for lunch. José made tallerines, which are a pasta like spaghetti, from scratch.

We got there late and they and Jose’s son - the gaucho - had already finished eating. They served us plates and we sat and ate while they had seconds.

José´s son didn´t speak much. Sole said he´s studying biology in Paraná and hitchhikes back and forth from Maciá every week. He works on the farm on the weekends. His hands were so big the fingers looked swollen.

We finished and left and stopped by to see Sole’s friend Diana. She was working at an ice cream parlor. Along the way we passed a nice two-story house that had the same black fence around it as the Huevo Campo office. Sole said it was one of the Roth homes.

We got to the ice cream parlor. It was connected to the house of an old couple, who own the store and make the ice cream there.

When we went up to the counter I could see through into the living room. The curtains were drawn and an old man was sleeping in a recliner.

We got two-scoop cones and played a card game. Nobody came in. I did a magic trick that I’d learned when I was in middle school by taping and studying a David Blaine TV special. He’d done it for villagers in the Amazon.

Diana’s shift ended and we walked together to go see another old high school friend. She was with her baby – a boy who was about a year old. We drank tereré, which is mate served cold with fruit juice.

The sky was getting dark and we headed back to Sole’s grandparents’ house to pack our bags. We had to buy bus tickets to go back to Paraná. Since it was Sunday we had to wait for the station attendant to show up at 7:00 PM. The bus was coming at 7:40 and we had to meet it at a highway junction 10 miles outside Maciá.

José and Dioni came by to say goodbye and take the key to the house. One of the dogs came with them in the car.

Another dog came up and got into a fight with José’s and he threw a rock and it ran off.

Sole and I said bye and left and got to the bus station. Her brother Pepe was going to give us a ride to the junction. He had to get up at 3:00 AM the next day to do his mail route.

The bus station attendant wasn’t there at 7:00. We waited as the sun set and the sky looked stormy towards where we were headed.

The guy finally showed up. He was bald and sweating. He got the computer turned on and we asked for the tickets. He said there were three seats left. We bought the tickets as Pepe showed up in his station wagon.

I rode shotgun and Sole sat in back. When we got up to speed he asked me if I wanted to put on my seatbelt. Argentine’s don’t wear seatbelts.

We got onto the highway. It was a two-lane road. There was no shoulder, just a strip of grass and then fields. It was windy and Pepe went into the grass a couple times. There was lightning up ahead and it smelled like rain.

We got to the exchange. A couple other cars and a couple other people were there, waiting for the same bus.

We got out and it was breezy and cool and you could see the storm close-by but it never started raining. I took a few more pictures while Sole talked to her brother.

The bus showed up and we got on. Our seats were in the way back. We drove into the storm and the rain and lightning.

We got back to Paraná around 10:30.