Are We There Yet? (21 page)

Twilight was approaching and I joined the throngs making their way towards the rugby ground where the reason for my visit — a Super 12 clash between the ACT Brumbies and the local Cats — would be taking place. Despite the fact that it seemed to have had a charisma bypass, Bloemfontein felt like a town that was doing all right, content within itself and clocking up milestones like being the capital of the first state to elect a black woman premier, Dr Ivy Mastepe-Casaburri.

My mate Francois would have said she was a shoo-in for the job, but for a region that had produced many of apartheid's staunchest advocates this was no small irony. Unlike Johannesburg, Durban and even Pretoria, Bloemfontein felt safe. They were no armed guards watching over every ATM and no wailing sirens every few minutes. In fact, the only crimes I witnessed were those against fashion and let me assure you that you haven't lived until you've seen a man wearing a short-sleeved mustard safari suit jacket with a long-sleeved burgundy shirt beneath it. There was only one accessory that could have done justice to this ensemble and the wearer nailed it: a comb-over.

My sense of personal wellbeing vanished shortly after entering the stadium. After migrating to Australia I became a rabid supporter of my new national team in whatever sport was being played, and if truth be told, there's nothing I like better than when the Aussies take it to the Jaapies.

Steep-tiered and designed to intimidate visitors with the appearance that it is closing in on you from all sides, this stadium was the venue where generations of Afrikaner Springboks – farm-toughened and powered by an unshakeable belief in their racial superiority – slayed Lions, Wallabies and All Blacks. This paddock was one of a select few on which a rugby nation came to believe it was the world's best. It was a notion which only grew stronger during the sports boycott of the apartheid years when teams of rebel has-beens were crushed by young, skilled men in green and gold and culminated in the 1995 World Cup victory. For a few glorious hours after Nelson Mandela – wearing the rugby jersey of blue-eyed Afrikaans skipper Francios Pienaar – handed the William Webb Ellis trophy to the beaming captain, the nation was united in a collective delirium the likes of which it had never seen nor will again.

Like junkies chasing that first rush, South African rugby fans have never quite replicated that dominance. Since these halcyon days, the elite coaching staff of South African rugby have rolled over like rent boys at Mardi Gras in an elusive chase for victory. They have even taken to importing Australian coaching talent such as Tim Lane who would be guiding the Cats around the paddock in the game I had steadfastly maintained I was going wear my Wallabies jumper to. I swiftly discovered that good-natured rivalry had long been replaced by hardened bitterness as team after South African team across a variety of sports choked on the threshold of victory over Antipodean rivals.

By the time I had covered the ten metres between the booth and the turnstiles I had already been called Bruce four times and told that I was “going to get the crap beaten out of me in that shirt” by a concerned security guard.

The match was scheduled for a 7pm kick-off, but being a Friday most of the spectators had knocked off early and were enjoying numerous frosties in the beer garden adjacent to the stadium. Seething with antagonism and the contents of half-a-dozen longnecks calling their small intestines home, the punters who were still sober enough to make out where my loyalties lay fixed me with narrow-eyed death stares. Others merely alerted their pals to my presence by giving me the bird with one hand and nudging their pals amid a sideways “look at this fuckwit” with the other. The solitary smile I received that evening came from Owen Finegan as the Brumbies' bus rolled by.

Having been sent reeling by a series of shoulder charges, I found my seat. Which happened to be next to an Afrikaans family who clearly viewed me with the type of virulent disdain usually reserved for war criminals and Bon Jovi impressionists.

The taunts dissipated as the home team edged in front by half-time. Lulled into a false sense of security, I brazenly got to my feet at the referee's whistle and was promptly pelted with a well-directed mandarin to the bridge of my nose. Upon which most everyone seated in the adjacent sections burst into heartfelt applause.

Temporarily blinded by an explosion of citric acid, I groped my way to the men's room. Having doused my burning retinas, I foolishly decided to pee. No sooner had I taken my position at the trough when I felt a meaty hand in the small of my back deliver a powerful push. Yes, in a horrifying revisitation of schoolyard humiliation, I was launched feet first into the urinal.

Shortly after the second half commenced, a Brumbies winger bolted across the line for a try that was not converted, thus giving the visitors a six-point lead. The tension in the stadium built as penalties were awarded and missed, the ref dropped some clangers in the face of obvious foul play and time ticked away towards a victory for the Australian team. All the while the glares and taunts I drew became more threatening.

A glimmer of redemption was mercifully delivered in the last minute of injury time when the Cats fullback glided over in the corner for a five-pointer. With the siren wailing and the home team still a point behind, he slotted the conversion from a miraculous angle. Joyous pandemonium broke out and as the beaming Afrikaner family beside me packed up their esky, their seven-year-old son who hadn't made a sound all night craned his golden-fringed head to look me dead in the eye and beamed, “Vok jou”.

Chapter 11

Highs and Lows

The region surrounding Bloemfontein is known as the
platteland,
which imaginatively translates as “the flat land”. It is a prosperous agricultural belt and consists of hectare after hectare of cattle-strewn paddocks and wheat fields. Mildly agreeable to begin with, the scenery very quickly begins to feel like it's on an audiovisual loop and tedium rides shotgun shortly afterwards.

The odd troupe of monkeys and stoats standing up on their hind legs in the yellow grass by the roadside made fleeting appearances – as did raptor specks gliding against a backdrop of liquid sky – but mostly it seemed like just interminable stretches of same old, same old.

My destination was a church in the restful viltage of Adelaide near the town of Somerset East. It began life as a military outpost during the Frontier Wars and then became a sheep-farming hamlet of unpretentious charm – a quality it has regained today – until British forces rode into town during the Anglo-Boer War. The troops commandeered the local Dutch Reformed Church, turned it into barracks and left things in such a state of disrepair that the locals had to embark on a funding drive to restore their place of worship. Offers of labour and time were abundant, but the townsfolk simply could not afford the expensive materials needed to complete their task.

Three months after the donation drive was abandoned through lack of results, it seemed the congregants' prayers were literally answered when two wagons rolled into town stacked with cut timber, a hand-carved pulpit of intricate allure and a matching chair. Believing that the master builder in the sky had seen fit to bestow this miracle upon them, locals quickly set about fulfilling their part of the bargain and restored the church immaculately.

The packaging on their gift revealed the items had been imported from England and locals viewed them as a spiritual lesson that all races had goodness in their hearts. They believed that their former enemies' consciences had got the better of them and the timber had been sent as an apology. The time had come to live and let live.

A few years later, however, a letter arrived addressed to the town mayor. It was from his equivalent in South Australia and read: “Dear Sir, It is with some trepidation that we enquire as to whether a consignment of oak wood, which we ordered from England about two years ago for our new church, has not, perhaps, by mistake been delivered to your town in South Africa instead of ours.” The locals admitted to nothing and the church they restored remains one of the prettiest in the nation.

After cutting through a succession of dry, dull and dusty towns, the road began to traverse a series of jagged charcoal peaks. Lined up in tight formation behind one another like overweight relatives at a bar mitzvah buffet, they signalled the start of the Kat River valley. A compact cluster of citrus orchards set between a succession of gentle ridges, this it was one of those rare places where agriculture has complemented Mother Nature rather than being a boil on her pristine bottom. Wooden roadside kiosks offered kilogram-bags of plump mandarins for R10 ($2). Fruit hung in the trees in such profusion that they looked like spatters of luminous amber flicked from a paintbrush onto a bottle-green backdrop.

By the time I reached my destination of Grahamstown it was late in the afternoon and the air was beginning to chill. I had never been to the town before but it was there I would most likely have studied had my family remained in South Africa.

After a brief conversation with a hotel receptionist about evening distractions in town, I was directed to a pub called the Rat and Parrot. By the time I arrived it was thrumming with the kind of crowd that only university towns can muster. Women in the unfortunate combination of G-strings and hipsters pretended not be interested in floppy-haired lads nursing beers and Foucault. Rugby boys were already losing their ability to pronounce consonants as jug after jug of Castle Lager was consumed, and Ashanti was blaring from the speakers.

Using that ever-reliable technique of buying students' company with alcohol, I began chatting to a group of English majors nearby. Boisterous, amiable and opinionated in the way that only undergraduates who have happily fallen on an unexpected source of booze can be, we spent a couple of mildly inebriated hours discussing everything from sport to politics to racial integration. When I asked why there were so few – or more precisely, zero – black students in the bar, one of the girls replied, “They have the bars they prefer to go to and we have ours. Obviously no one is banned from going anywhere but human nature is such that like tends to stick with like. Jews hang out together. WASPs gravitate towards one another. It's just a matter of choice.”

Some hushed discussions then followed during which I wondered whether I had overstepped the mark with the race question. In a telling blow to my coolness count, they were actually debating whether or not I was a narc. Having decided that I probably did not make a living from law enforcement, an architecture student named Tim asked if I had sampled any zol on my trip. It was one of those words that I recalled from when I lived in South Africa but whose meaning I momentarily struggled for.

My glimmer of confusion presented Tim with what seemed like a linguistic opportunity he had been awaiting for some time. “You know,” he beamed, “grass, dope, ganja, green, the sacred herb, skunk.”

His mates dissolved into giggles as Lexicon Boy went through his pace and I replied in the negative. “Well,” he said, producing a joint from his pocket, “it's time to fix that.”

Minutes later we were in a cobblestoned laneway out the back of the bar, passing the Duchy from the left-hand side. Several other groups clustered around glowing cherries were also imbibing. What else would you expect from a university town located in a region where
Cannabis sativa
grows like a wild weed?

Long before white occupation, the Xhosa tribe had cultivated a thriving dope business and exchanged the crop with Zulus for beads and iron. Today it is a primary component of South Africa's rural economy.

Despite exhaustive eradication programs aimed at reducing supply beyond the budgets of consumers, the price has remained stable for decades and in some cases has even dipped. In fact, it is frequently cheaper to get stoned on dope in South Africa than it is to get drunk on beer or buzzed on espresso.

It is mostly produced by poor black farmers who supplement their subsistence existence with an easy-to-grow cash crop that flourishes several times a year alongside South African staples such as corn and cabbage. By the time the foliage has gone from farmer to wholesaler to retailer to street dealer it has been divided into what are known as “bankies” – the plastic bags banks use for storing R100 worth of coins – selling for around R50 ($10) each. Those in the trade are there to get by and it is not a hugely profitable business. In fact, the estimated gross profit of one dagga house selling hundreds of bankies a day in a well-to-do area of Durban is little more than R15,000 ($3000) a month.

The real money is overseas. South Africa has knocked Jamaica off top spot as the single largest supplier of cannabis to the United Kingdom and is importing vast quantities of club drugs from Blighty in return. So widespread is South Africa's THC reputation that enterprising travel companies are now running tour groups through the Eastern Cape and Natal so that overseas travellers can sample Durban Poison and Maritzburg Gold at ground zero.

That evening we were enjoying the former, referred to by those in the herbal know as DP. The smoke had the sweet tang of caramel and the pungency of football socks forgotten behind the couch. Within seconds of a petite puff, my head began to implode in slow motion and I felt myself withdrawing at light speed to a galaxy far far away. My companions, however, coherently maintained a conversation about whether human beings inherently knew right from wrong or if we needed a moral system imposed upon us to prevent anarchy. At times, one of their voices would penetrate the fog between my ears to ask my opinion. To which I could offer no more than a glazed smile and a shoulder shrug followed by the kind of convulsing squealy giggle that eventuates when feather meets armpit.

I waited for waves of wellbeing to wash over me but instead currents of nausea ripped through my abdomen. Then paranoia joined the party. I formulated a cogent hypothesis that I was about to become victim of a well-rehearsed gang that fleeced visitors of their belongings and pride, leaving their quarry naked on the main street as they swapped postmodern bon mots.

I mumbled something about an early start in the morning, thanked the group for their hospitality and wandered off in the opposite direction from my hotel. The broad oak-lined street featured half-a-dozen pubs clearly designed to attract different faculties: there was a sports bar for the engineers, an avant-garde (read: sign upside down, lots of neon and Kraftwerk remixes) for the fine arts mob and a candlelit coffee bar where a doleful guitarist was bleating about some misery or other for a clutch of twenty-year-olds in antiglobalisation T-shirts.

I ended up at a late-night diner decorated in a 50s rock and roll motif where I had the best banana milkshake, toasted cheese sandwich and choc-fudge sundae of my life.

I woke up the next morning surprisingly clear-headed but accompanied by the flaky remnants of a block of chocolate that judging by the packaging had once been the size of a roof tile. It was a bright warm morning and Grahamstown was mine to explore. Its streets were wide enough to allow for two rows of parking in the middle, separated by a concrete flowerbed awash in yellow and purple pansies. Students with second-hand jeans but top-of-the-line laptops dawdled their way towards the grand archway at the entrance to Rhodes University; townsfolk browsed shop windows to see if anything had changed from yesterday, and shopkeepers swept footpaths in the sunshine. The high street couldn't be a more different scene for eleven days in July when the Grahams-town Festival transforms the town. Second only to the Edinburgh Arts Festival in scale, it is twenty-nine years old and in 2002 it showcased around 200 plays, cabarets, art exhibi tions, films, concerts, dance performances and lectures. There are also two separate jazz festivals – no one would tell me what caused the ruction – a separate fringe, a literature fair and a thousand craft stalls. From the sound of it, things get awfully bohemian around festival time with some locals apparently offering floor space to weary pilgrims while others embark on a gouge-fest at the dozens of B&Bs.

The town was established in 1812 by Colonel John Graham as a military outpost on what was the eastern frontier of the Cape. The surrounding region was essentially one enormous battlefield where nine frontier wars were waged over a century. Each had its share of treachery, slaughter, vengeance and provocation, but it says something for the resilience and military ingenuity of the Xhosa that they resisted the mightiest army on earth for almost one hundred years while the proud Zulu fell in a mere handful.

Like most frontier towns, Grahamstown's early residents could be neatly divided into two distinct groups: the pious and the bonkers. Grateful for their survival on the edge of civilisation, almost every religious denomination with a congregation in the town set about constructing their own house of worship. It soon became a case of keeping up with the Jehovah's and today almost forty spires rise from the compact town centre. It's like someone put Prague in the tumble-dryer.

The brooding Methodist Commemoration Church with its Gothic revival facade topped by a quintet of spires and ten stained-glass windows is magnificent. Not least for the winged figure of Peace, commemorating the Anglo-Boer War dead, sitting atop a plinth out the front with a plaque written by no less than Rudyard Kipling. It is not a particularly moving piece of prose and reading it I couldn't shake Groucho Marx's response to the question, “Do you like Kipling?”

“I'm not sure,” he said, “I've never Kippled.”

Grahamstown's most prominent landmark is rather unsurprisingly another church. The Cathedral of St Michael and St George is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous edifice in early English Gothic. Its spire is the tallest in South Africa and peers into backyards like a nosy neighbour on the hunt for scandal. Before the word had all meaning flogged out of it by the extreme-sports crowds – “that wave was awesome!” “your bungee jump was awesome!”, “my socks are awesome!” – it would have been tailor-made for the space.

Having faithfully visited a handful of the buildings built by the devoted, it was time to explore the doings of some of Grahamstown's other main players: the eccentrics.

After the Fifth Frontier war, 4000 Britons were granted land and passage to the area to consolidate the empire's power base. As military activity continued to push eastwards, Grahamstown blossomed into South Africa's second largest city after Cape Town. Aspirations to grandeur accompanied its growth. Imposing public buildings, such as the colonnaded sandstone Town Hall with streamlined clocktower, sandstone law courts and stately libraries took their place among the ornate churches and stretches of Victorian shopfronts.

The civility, climate and picture-book charm drew genteel oddballs by the dozen, but HG Galpin made the rest look like mere dabblers. His home – a cream two-storey Victorian town house with a turreted clocktower – has been preserved as the Observatory Museum. The architect, surveyor, civil engineer and chronometer-, watch- and clockmaker bought the pile in 1859 and over the next twenty years added a basement, three storeys to the back of the structure and a rooftop observatory.

Picture Henry Higgins's home in
My Fair Lady
, up the bizarre Victorian gadget factor by around 30 per cent and you'll have some idea of the restored Galpin residence. Beside his bed was what appeared to be a mahogany shoe box but my guide Walter Pamca deftly opened a latch in the middle to reveal a porcelain commode. The man of the house's faded burgundy smoking jacket and fez were arranged on a Chippendale by the window while the polished floorboards were strewn with lion, zebra and, oddly enough, tiger pelts. Heavy velvet curtains decorated with lace framed the windows; photographs (at least one of Queen Victoria in every room) crowded the walls; and the library was dominated by a celestial globe, a terrestrial globe and an exotic insect collection in a mahogany cabinet. On the wall swings the five-metre, 136-kilogram pendulum from the rooftop clock.