Are We There Yet? (20 page)

In the years that followed Gandhi became increasingly influenced by the life of simple, honest toil that Tolstoy extolled. Ruskin's
Unto This Last
had a similar effect, particularly the assertion that “the good of the individual is contained in the good of all, that all work is equal and that the life of labour of the tiller of the soil and handicraftsmen is the life worth living”. For a man who had been born into relative wealth to a family in which professional success was as cherished as the ingrained prejudices of the caste system, this was a shift of seismic spiritual proportions.

Gandhi put his newly found ideals of truth, equality and fairness into practice by forming a self-sufficient hundred-acre community twenty-six kilometres from Durban. Known as the Phoenix Settlement, it contained a spring, a few orange and mango trees and cost £1000. It was here that he printed the weekly
Indian Opinion
newspaper, a moderate mouthpiece for the Natal Indian Congress.

Over the course of the twenty-one years he would spend in South Africa, Ghandi developed the political strategy of satyagraha – meaning “truth firmness” and often translated as passive resistance. It formed the cornerstone of the Struggle for half a century and was only abandoned when Nelson Mandela and his cohorts realised that the white man's heart was hardening over time.

Already being hailed as a mahatma (literally a great soul), Gandhi returned to India in 1914 and his son Manilal arrived in Durban to preside over Phoenix House. The settlement remained a sanctuary of peace until 1985 when squatters from a nearby shantytown rampaged through the grounds burning homes, looting their meagre contents and sending terrified residents fleeing for their lives.

Thanks to wads of cash from the Indian government, the local community and the city council, the squatters have now been relocated to vacant land nearby and work has begun to restore the gutted buildings as a national monument. Writing to Maganlal Gandhi about the name of his newly formed settlement in 1909, the Mahatma noted, “As the legend goes, [the Phoenix] comes back to life again and again from its own ashes, it never dies. The name serves the purpose quite well for we believe the aims of Phoenix will not vanish even when we are turned to dust.”

At last count Durban's Indian community numbered around the million mark – 70 per cent of whom are Hindu, 20 per cent Muslim and the remainder Christian. When I was a child its heart and soul was to be found not by the breakers but at the sprawling Victoria Market. A seraglio of raised walkways leading to what felt like acres of stalls over three levels, the market had always been a highlight of our annual Durban daytrip.

You smelt it before you saw it. Wafts of garam masala, clove and cinnamon enveloped you like scented arms. The scores of spice traders who operated out of the market displayed their wares in enormous metal buckets from which rose infant-high peaks of fragrant powders in shades from cream to deep orange. In addition to the usual suspects such as rogan josh, vindaloo, korma and tikka, each would offer intriguingly named custom blends like “Honeymooners' Delight”, “Mother-In-Law's Tongue” and “A-Bomb”.

Dispersed between these were fabric emporiums where columns of sari silk in gold-flecked magenta, turquoise and acid green stood cheek by jowl with shop dummies sporting natty safari suits which could be custom-made within twenty-four hours. Samosas – deep-fried on the spot and served with a dollop of cucumber raita – were sold at a dozen locations throughout the market. Condiment specialists invited visitors to sample a spread of aromatic chutney on still-warm pappadams and linen traders offered “special prices for a beautiful lady” whenever my mum wandered by.

A part of me knew I had romanticised the experience but another chose to ignore that. I had been warned that the market was no longer what it had once been, but this proved to be euphemistic in the extreme. The pavements on the surrounding streets had been commandeered by vendors hawking malodorous Zulu herbal remedies – one of which purported to cure both AIDS and cancer – sad arrays of fruit in plastic bags, and packets of sweets. Inside, the market less than a half-a-dozen of the spice traders remained. The buckets of flavoursome powder were still on display, but judging by their lack of pungency – and the ready-mixed jars on the shelves – these were merely window-dressing hauled out every day rather than freshly mixed and replenished through demand. The textile kings had abdicated their thrones and the remainder of the stalls were selling mobile phone covers, crappy Chinese yapping dog toys and knock-off Beckham football jerseys.

Hoping there was still a fresh samosa to be had on the premises, I made the mistake of asking for directions to the food hall. As a journalist I had once spent a nausea-free day with a forensic doctor as he examined a murder victim to determine the cause of death. A bone saw, numerous scalpels and the phrase “Would you mind holding the cavity open?” were involved and I therefore consider myself fairly strong of stomach.

Or at least I did until I entered the food section of the Victoria Market. A fluorolit pavilion of warehouse proportions, it was packed with row upon row of butchers and fishmongers hacking into flesh with rusty cleavers. Carcasses hung from hooks at every turn, ventilation was nonexistent and the stench of rotting entrails filled my nostrils, prompting an evacuation drill further south.

A hurried and pale-faced departure later, I was in the posh end of town and the Durban I remember. The Berea is a sedate hilly burb where frangipani trees drizzled with palm-size buds of yellow, white, pink and mauve peep over low walls. Stately old-money homes with oak-lined gravel driveways glanced down the hill towards the harbour and in a garden or three a Union Jack snapped in the warm breeze.

The city had always seen itself as a bastion of British civility looking inland towards a landscape and natives of conquerable savagery. They may have won battles, but they lost the war. Now suburbs you can count on one hand take on the role the entire city once did as decay and degradation steal metres each day. That said, I was glad to be ending my stay in a part of town fiercely determined to maintain its quiet dignity while privately moaning about what had become of itself. What could be more English?

Chapter 10

Walking the Dragon

To the Zulus, they looked like the blades of the gods and were called uKuhlamba, meaning “barrier of spears”. To the white settlers whose hearts undoubtedly sank at first sight, they resembled the scarred scaled ridges on a dragon's back.

The Drakensberg range runs down the right side of the country like a 1100-kilometre vein before swinging southwest into the Eastern Cape where it transforms into capillary mount ain chains. Three hours northwest of Durban, the Berg, as it affectionately known, is at its most spectacular.

Bordering the nation of Lesotho in the shape an arrowhead, the Drakensberg soar in excess of 3000 metres with the highest peak out-altituding the Matterhorn. A crescent of national parks surround the Berg at its base and the region was declared a World Heritage site in November 2000 on account of its staggering biodiversity and numerous works of San rock art dating back 5000 years.

For those who don't have the luxury of weeks to explore the Berg, the Royal National Park is the mountainous equivalent of a tasting plate. Turning off the highway towards the northern section of the range, the road bisected pancake plains of russet farmland before passing through the amiable town of Winterton with its smattering of oak-lined streets, cellar doors and cosy B&Bs. The landscape eventually began to assume an incline. Grassy ridges serrated the topography as lazy cattle grazed beside catatonic rivulets. These sandstone and shale tumescences are known as the Little Berg and as the name suggests are merely support acts to the main gig.

The headliner at this rock festival is undoubtedly the Amphitheatre. A elliptical wall of solid basalt half a kilometre high and stretching five, it is framed by the flat-topped Sentinel (3165 m), the jagged Beacon Buttress (3124 m), while the Eastern Buttress (3121 m) looks on indifferently from the left. It is a sky-consuming vista exuding a mystical beauty that renders superlatives impotent. The entrance to the Royal National Park lies at its base.

In the visitors' centre was a framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth and South African prime minister Jan Smuts taken here in the 1950s. She is wearing her standard polite smile while he has a “so what were you saying about Ben Nevis?” gloat writ large across his dial.

It was a Monday afternoon, few visitors were about and a ramble was in order. The map I had purchased offered myriad options and I sett led on the Fairy Glen trail on the grounds that it was the closest to where I was standing and perfectly described a close friend. Colour me gobsmacked, but this was like stepping into a fairytale forest.

On one side of the path a steep embankment of double-storey ferns swept toward the crest of a spur. On the other, a percolating brook glinted in the freckles of sunlight that pierced the canopy. Scarlet butterflies drifted by as distant birdsong harmonised with the river's soundtrack. After crossing the stream on a wooden pole bridge, the path traversed a hillside ablaze in red-hot pokers, lichen-dipped boulders and mauve bell agapanthus.

The closer you get to the Amphitheatre the less uniform the landscape becomes. Furrowed and cracked, it is a melange of pinnacles, saddles, cutbacks and ridges projecting outward at right angles from the escarpment. It is also draped with waterfalls that tumble from the precipice like streamers from an ocean liner about to set sail. From my vantage point, I could make out the Thukela Falls which drop 850 metres from summit to valley floor in five tumultuous cascades.

Another of the names by which the Drakensberg is known is “the cradle of rivers” and the mountainside was crisscrossed by rivulets that could be leapt in a single stride or clumsily sloshed through depending on how much attention you were paying to what lay on the ground in front of you. Not an easy feat when surrounded by the majestic backdrop used for the film
Zulu Dawn,
a rug of weeping lovegrass and irises that appeared to have been tossed over the spur as if it were a couch in need of some pizzazz, and a family of curious bush buck.

The track eventually turned into a camp ground consisting of a hectare of lawn, spotless ablution blocks with thatched roofs and a small general store. Shirtless men with beers in one hand and tongs in the other presided over barbecues, campers dozed under trees with newspapers on their chests, and children rode their bikes around a series of pathways on the periphery of the grass. Meandering through the camp site, I scanned the conversations for accents and found only locals.

That night I called my mate Andy – who had recommended the Royal – and asked whether many international tourists visit the Berg. “Don't be a
doos,”
he said, the last word being an Afrikaans one whose literal translation is “box” but is more often reserved for those with a tendency to plumb the depths of moronic behavtour. “They see a few lions, take the cable car up Table Mountain, buy some diamonds and go home. They aren't too interested in the Drakensberg.” He didn't seem overly disappointed by this, a sense that was confirmed when he added, “So don't you go making them.”

From the camp site the path tracked a glassy stream five metres across and strewn with smooth boulders. Conifers dipped their branches into the rush like nervous swimmers testing the temperature of a pool. Thick rafts of yellow-tipped gladioli and cream gardenias sprung from the banks.

At the risk of coming over a bit Thoreau, there are few things to beat a drink from a mountain stream on a hot day, and nothing to top dropping your daks for a swim. Although the temperature took a few minutes of adaptation, I was soon happily floating on my back with the Amphitheatre upside down behind me.

Consulting the trail map when I got back to the car, I was surprised to discover I had covered eight pristine kilometres. I had booked a room that night at a local institution called the Cavern which is nestled between a pair of ridges a short drive from the Amphitheatre. The place is a series of tiers upon which perch wide-fronted thatched terrace houses. Below these lie tennis courts, a swimming pool and a further series of terraces ablaze with leonotis, strelitzias and purple daisies which found their way into the vases on every table at dinner. The Cavern has its own bowling green, a dance is held every Saturday night and tea is included in the room tariff but served strictly at 11am and 4pm when a gong is sounded.

With the 1960s on the horizon, guests christened it the “resort of many happy returns”, but at the Cavern it was still and would forever be 1958. And when I was refused entry to the sparsely populated dining room on the grounds that I was not wearing a collar, the Cavern grew on me even further.

The next morning I awoke early and stepped out onto the balcony into air so crisp that it felt freshly laundered.

Wearing nothing but boxer shorts and the stupefied grin of contentment that only surfacing to a summer's day in the country can bring, I wasn't quite expecting company. However, the occupant of the room next door had also decided to venture onto his balcony and thought it rude not to introduce himself.

“Francois Du Plessis,” he said in the confident tone of a man answering an early-round question in a quiz show, before thrusting a hand and a ready smile in my direction. A civil – exceedingly so, in fact – engineer, he was attending a national conference at the hotel and assumed that I must have been a colleague from a regional office. Making a mental note to re-evaluate the underwear which had so effortlessly lead him to this conclusion, I started chatting and it soon became clear why Francois was so anxious to network.

He had been unemployed for three years and believed that as a white Afrikaans male in the job market, his opportunities had been not merely hamstrung but amputated by the government's affirmative-action employment policies. “By law, every level of every company now has to have a certain number of what are called Previously Disadvantaged Persons or PDPs,” he said. “If, for example, my company bids for a road-building project, we have to prove that we are black empowered before being considered. By that I mean 75 per cent of the board of directors must be black, women or preferably both and they must genuinely run the firm. A lot of companies tried to pretend that the guy who was cleaning the toilets yesterday got an overnight promotion to GM and the government stung them big time. If you are tendering for a government contract in South Africa today and are not a proven black-empowered company, your quote has to be 20 per cent lower (than those who meet the criteria) to even be considered. Even if you get the job, 15 per cent of the work must be subcontracted to PDPs or the government will slug you with extra tax to the same amount.”

Francois acknowledged that while this policy had forced companies to boost their black staff numbers to qualify for tax concessions and government contracts, he was convinced it was a double-edged sword. “The generation of whites that voted for change is being punished,” he said. “When the concept of merit is thrown out of the window and a person gets a job on the basis of his skin colour being darker than mine, that's reverse discrimination. I understand that wealth and all levels of jobs should be open to everyone, but I'm not convinced that throwing someone without the skills, experience and training into the deep end is the solution. Often through no fault of their own, they will drag down the company's performance and international investors will turn away. I mean, would you sink your dollars into a firm that didn't employ the best possible people in the marketplace?

“You hear all these stories about the white brain-drain because of the crime or the big money on offer overseas, but in many cases they have just become redundant here. I can tell you one thing,” he added, the faintest trace of anger entering his voice, “if I was a black lesbian in a wheelchair, I wouldn't have been unemployed for three years.”

Some unconscious element in my reaction must have betrayed my scepticism and Francois darted into his room to return with the Sunday paper. “Do me a favour,” he grinned, “tomorrow morning, pick ten jobs from the employment section, call them up, say you're a white male who is qualified for the position and ask if it would be worth sending in your résumé.”

Up for the challenge, I did as instructed and followed the script with positions ranging from media and manufacturing to IT and sales. In all but one of the cases I was told that the job was for a PDP but they would keep my résumé on file should a more appropriate role become available. The majority of the people I spoke to during these conversations – and who, judging by their accents, spanned a number of races – were far more sympathetic than I thought they would be. But as I'm certain Francois would tell you, sympathy don't pay the mortgage.

The conversation I had with Francios was repeated time and again with other white South Africans. On the one hand most of those I spoke to recognised the need for the majority of the population to be able to access the highest levels of management. On the other, they privately recoiled at the notion of effectively barring many of South Africa's best and brightest from entering the workforce because they were too pale.

Like Francois, many took the economic rationalism approach, arguing that companies forced to employ quotas would dilute the quality of their workforce. This in turn would impact on the firm's performance, which would send potential backers scuttling towards Asia (I don't know why Asia was continually singled out, but it was).

Others were more circumspect, saying that at some point the country had to start paying the cost of apartheid and if it took a generation for the average South African worker to boost his or her skill level and experience, then so be it. The nation would eventually be all the stronger for it.

Bloemfontein, which lies close to the heart of the country was everything I expected and less. The judicial capital of South Africa, it brought to mind Spike Milligan's likening of Woy Woy on the New South Wales central coast to “the world's only above-ground cemetery”. Like many state capitals, it had failed to capture the city vibrancy that it was prepared to sacrifice its country charm for.

Even when I was growing up under the apartheid regime, the Orange Free State was viewed by many South Africans as a redneck backwater. It's an argument supported by the fact that the Free State is still home to communit ies such as Orania, a town of staunch Afrikaners who believe that the only way to preserve their heritage and identity is to establish an autonomous ministate so far away from the Rainbow Nation that everything is still black and white. The town was purchased from the Department of Water Affairs and in order to fulfil their vision, these descendants of the Voortrekkers did something that none of their forebears could ever bring themselves to: they got rid of their black and coloured servants. Yet Mandela has visited Orania and was treated like an honoured guest.

This is one example of how the Free State has always been and probably will continue to be a soft target for stereotypes when in fact its history is far more complex. It was here that the architects and administrators of apartheid, the National Party, was established in 1914. It was here, too, that apartheid's primary foe, the African National Congress, set up shop two years earlier.

The centre of the city is given over to a historic precinct that is stately yet compact. In essence a roomy square, it consists of a trio of imposing two-storey buildings all fronted by ionic columns. One of these is the Afrikaans Literature Institute, which I was heartened to see was still a bustling academic centre despite commemorating a language that many feel was apartheid's mother tongue. This of course makes as much sense as vilifying German because it was the language of Nazism. In this instance civil service pettiness seems to have been put aside and government funds allocated to preserve Afrikaans. Yes, twelve years of compulsory Afrikaans study was foisted upon all South African students under the apartheid era, but it was the medium of conscience-jarring, soul-poking writers I would never have had the privilege to sample otherwise.