Are We There Yet? (18 page)

I stopped for lunch in Pietermaritzburg. Ensconced in a ring of apple-green hills, it is named after the Voortrekker leader who founded the place in 1838 but presents itself as a captivating outdoor gallery of Victorian and Edwardian architecture so Disneyesque British that I was half expecting Dick Van Dyke to appear at any second followed by half-a-dozen animated sheep bleating, “It's a jolly ‘oliday with Maaaaaary”. All I needed to complete the picture was a street urchin, a flower seller with immaculate bone structure and a harrumphing bowler-hatted toff who used the word “awfully” when he meant “very”.

The City Hall is the star attraction in Pietermaritzburg's stellar architectural gallery. According to Ripley's “Believe It or Not” it is the largest all-brick building in the Southern Hemisphere. Three storeys of Victorian wonder, it is emblazoned with ornate friezes, arch-framed balconies, stained-glass windows, lashings of Corinthian columnettes whose purpose has more to do with aesthetics than structure, and contrasting brickwork that lends the entire structure a subtle motif of horizontal stripes. Topped by a handful of cream domes that surround a clocktower containing a dozen bells, it would not look out of place as the centrepiece of some chic Parisian rue. However, it is all the more charming for the fact that it's located in this regional centre. It also boasts the second-largest organ in the Southern Hemisphere and we'll leave it at that.

With hamburger grease on my chin and a mustard trail in my wake, I spent a marvellous hour wandering along Pietermaritzburg's broad and dozing thoroughfares. Understated charm lurked at every turn. Beside a neat park exploding in pyrotechnic outbursts of purple and pink tibouchinas stood an octagonal bandstand bedecked in Chinoiserie with a roof designed to resemble a Mandarin hat. Fine examples of Collegiate Gothic architecture mingled with Magpie Tudor, Palladian and Classic Revival like genteel guests at an embassy cocktail party.

The sky had been occupied by bruised clouds which descended on Pietermaritzburg like a bully trying to psych out his victims by invading their personal space. I had been warned that the road into Durban was one of the most treacherous in the country and was keen to avoid adding to its perils with slick surfaces and poor visibility.

Too late. Fat splats hurled themselves onto my windscreen like kamikaze pilots from the battleship cumulo-nimbus. The carnage on South African roads is unfathomable to international visitors. For example, between 1 December 2002 and 9 January 2003, 1210 locals lost their lives in a mess of mangled metal. The road death toll for the same period in Australia, where traffic volumes, weather and road conditions are comparable, was 66.

Road-safety organisations lay the blame squarely at the government-issued boots of the nation's 8000 traffic police, suggesting many are inexperienced, insufficiently trained and easily bribed because they are poorly paid.

I can vouch for the last from personal experience as my brother-in-law has escaped numerous speeding fines by carrying extra sandwiches for traffic officers. At times he has had to also reach for his wallet, but a roast beef on rye has done the trick on more than one occasion. Similar strategies are also routinely employed by the owners of rust-chomped taxis who always carry cash in anticipation of this work expense.

These frequently unroadworthy vehicles are routinely loaded with so many passengers that even the most innocuous of dings can become a potentially fatal affair. Only the day before I headed into Durban, traffic inspector Deon Fredericks had pulled over a minibus near the town of Laingsburg in the Karoo desert. En route to Cape Town, it was licensed to carry twenty-one passengers. Forty-six piled out. In addition to the van having no lights, bad brakes, a faulty steering mechanism and tyres buffed smooth by years of wear, the driver was four sheets to the wind.

The story had apparently been the source of ribald hilarity in at least one national newspaper office and that morning's edition had featured a cartoon of a minibus wrapped around a lamppost. Limbs protruded from every window; contorted faces complete with swollen eyes and scratches were pressed against side windows. Surveying the scene were two traffic officers, one of whom was excitedly yelling out the punchline: “It's okay, I've found the missing two passengers in the glove box!”

Laugh? I thought I'd never start. This perilous state of affairs becomes all the more dangerous for motorists when you consider that the metal doors and roofs that protect signal-box controllers fetch a small yet sufficiently attractive sum with Durban's more unscrupulous metal dealers. Scores of the city's traffic lights are then disabled as a result of exposure ot the elements. So widespread is the problem that civic bosses have ordered pepper booby-trap mechanisms to be installed to curb not merely the theft but the dozens of gut-churning smashes at volatile intersections.

I was soon to discover that the reality of a minibus crash was far different from the comically confused version in the morning paper. With the rain still tumbling, I descended a steep mountain pass at a crawl and thought it odd that few vehicles were approaching. Distributed around the crumpled fragments of a minivan ahead of me was an array of ambulances and police cars. Nearby lay eight bodies covered in blue tarpaulins while a dozen battered survivors wailed in grief as paramedics battled to save a small boy. Shards of glass lay like frost on the tarmac and the air smelled of petrol. It was the first time I had seen blood on a road and I hope it's the last.

Soon afterwards I reached the squatter camps that mark the outskirts of Durban. Balanced gingerly against plunging hillsides strewn with litter and dead dogs, the tin shacks and cardboard dwellings appear to have been dropped from a considerable height. With no evidence of sewerage facilities and running water but plenty of overcrowding, they converge upon one another like a domino stack. I was left with the impression that a collapse near the bottom of the stack would send dozens of these structures tumbling towards the gurgling brown sludge at the base of the hills.

When I was growing up in apartheid South Africa, poverty meant not being able to afford a colour TV. We knew that black people did it tough, but the scale, spread and specifics of the poverty were unfathomable. Nothing would give me more pleasure than being able to report that the lot of South Africa's needy has improved since the transition to majority rule. The sad reality is the rich have grown even richer while the poor have not so much slipped below the breadline but are on their hands and knees foraging for crumbs.

As anywhere, the spin doctors are quick to spring into action with counterinformation. For example, the South African Advertising Research Foundation proudly proclaims that between 1994 and 2001, the percentage of the population that falls into the poorest-of-the-poor category fell from 20 to 5 per cent. Buried in the small print is the fact that this bottom rung earns less than $500 per year, while the next one up has an annual income of between $500 and $1200.

Admirable efforts have been made with 1.4 million homes being delivered to needy South Africans between 1994 and 2002. Electricity access rose from 58 to 80 per cent of households in the same period. However, at ground level these initiatives look like a couple of sponges trying to mop up a dam-wall collapse.

Economists, too, have been furiously waving the flag with the National Press Club naming the rand as the 2002 Newsmaker of the Year for gaining almost 40 per cent against the US dollar. Unfortunately it's 40 per cent of sweet fuck-all.

A small but conspicuous number of black movers and shakers have been catapulted into the highest strata of society and have made millions since apartheid ended. However, according to a survey by Statistics South Africa, many of their brethren were actually better off under the old government. Between 1995 and 2000, the average black household was slugged with a 19 per cent fall in income, while the average white one enjoyed a 15 per cent increase. In 2000 the average white household earned six times as much as the average black one. In 1995 the ratio was four to one.

The real-world results of these inequities are hunger – a study by the University of the Western Cape's School of Government found that 70 per cent of the 750,000 residents in the greater Nyanga area had insufficient food last year – crime and the other calling card of Third World destitution, child labour. According to the Department of Labour, 36 per cent of South African minors are engaged in labour that by its own definition is “exploitative, hazardous, or otherwise inappropriate for their age, detrimental to their schooling or social, physical or moral development”.

Nowhere was the disparity between the fat cats and ferals more obvious than at the turn-off to Umhlanga, a resort town where I had spent a number of Christmas holidays as a child and which is a mere twenty minutes from downtown Durban. The moment I pulled up at the traffic lights my car was besieged by four filthy children begging for coins. Distended bellies inflated their threadbare shirts. Glassy eyes stared at me from sunken sockets, and beneath their snot-crusted nostrils lay streaks of the spray paint that offers a diverting intoxication when sniffed from a bag. The light changed as I was fumbling for a donation and as I drove away, the coins failed to land in the palm of the intended recipient and scattered on the road instead. I heard a squeal of brakes behind me and in the widescreen format of the rear-view mirror I saw the kids scrambling for silver amid flying fists, utterly oblivious to the vehicle that had almost ploughed into them from behind.

Within minutes I was surrounded by palatial holiday homes propped on a lush spur garlanded with mauve Star of India and surveying 180 degrees of placid Indian Ocean. These worlds of opulence and poverty were no more than a kilometre apart.

The handful of hotels I remembered from my childhood had become a ritzy conglomeration of tiered town houses, corporate headquarters inspired by the “who gives a fuck as long as it's shiny” school of architecture and a shopping mall so vast it could have qualified for its own postcode. The beachfront strip was, however, much as I recalled it. My family always stayed at the Cabanas, a twelve-storey faux-Mexi-can
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where I would routinely catch head lice in the swimming pool and spend the rest of the holiday reeking of carbolic acid shampoo. Which was just what I needed at that hormone-soaked juncture in my life when a holtday romance was a priority for the first time and my best efforts at wooing were hampered by a larynx that leapt between registers of its own accord.

My other most distinct memory of the Cabanas was the discovery that guests – even young ones – could order whatever their sugar-craving hearts desired and sign them to the room. It was only at the end of one three-week stay that my father was presented with a bill that included almost fifty chocolate sundaes, whereupon he had a conniption so fierce that I couldn't wrench my gaze from the vein that was throbbing in his neck. I could tell that he was mad because he used the phrase “with all due respect”. Refusing to pay for items he was adamant he had not ordered, he demanded to see the bills. These were duly produced and when he caught sight of the signature at the bottom the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Thus began the great pocket money drought of 1980.

With nostalgia seeping from every pore and a suspicious itch in my scalp, I enquired about the price of a night at the Cabanas. The response made me instantly realise why Dad had chucked that tanty. For a fading four-star resort that had a TV blaring in the lobby, the room rate took the concept of exorbitancy into a perverse new realm.

Flanked by an embankment of waxy green shrubbery on one side and a blanket of champagne sand on the other, the concrete beach path hadn't changed a smidge. The air tasted like the rim of a margarita glass and the spray threw misty drapes over the breakers. I walked the length of the beach shin-deep in warm water with a mild sun on my face. It was fourteen types of marvellous.

On this Friday evening in low season, the handful of pubs a block back from the beach were occupied by locals flushed with hard spirits and the contented countenance of those rich or lucky enough to call Umhlanga home. I wandered into a bar with a crowded terrace overlooking a seascape iced with pink meringue clouds. Here I wiled away the evening as a middle-aged cover band ripped into “Hotel California” and “The Boys are Back in Town” while I did likewise with a laager or three.

Between songs, the balding troubadours made “this is one of our personal favourites and we hope it's one of yours” in-jokes. These were mainly for the benefit of a table of brassy blonde groupies in lycra, Wonderbras and the throes of hormone replacement therapy. Having spent most of their lives in the seaside idyll, they had skin like Louis Vuitton luggage.

This was a clear sign that it was time to call it a night. Ditto the fact that it had reached that juncture of the evening where a number of the single male drinkers began playing air guitar in their seats.

I was collected the next morning by Andy Heimann, an old family friend who had kindly offered me a lift into Durban. On the way he switched on the news. The top story revolved around a minister who was negotiating with a large German vehicle manufacturer regarding a defence contract and had accepted one of their flashy cars as a heavily discounted sweetener.

An ebullient, gregarious type, Andy had spent his two years' compulsory military training either running “get captured and we'll deny you exist” insurgency raids into Angola or guarding the apartheid era state presidents under constant threat of assassination. He rolled his eyes at what he described as “daily reports of government corruption”.

“Of course it also happened under the white government,” he said, “but few of us thought it would be so prevalent under the equality that so many of the current ministry suffered for during the Struggle. Maybe I was naive, but I expected more from the government after what its elected representatives went through in the past. Instead a lot of them have been tearing the ring out the chicken.”