Dub Steps (16 page)

The Kruger Park trip had its roots in my conversation with Gerald while doing gate work. It was my initiative. Quite possibly, now that I think about it, it was my one and only attempt to drive something. To engineer.

I felt a sense of karmic wrong at the fact that Gerald had never experienced the bush in the white man’s sense – that he had only ever broached the extended reaches of his homeland, the place of his birth and childhood, by looking over the fence.

Initially it was only going to be myself and Gerald. The twins were a late, surprise addition to the party. Javas slung a backpack each for him and Andile into their Toyota as we started packing ours.

‘We’ll follow,’ he said casually. ‘Been a while since I was that side.’

Tebza jumped into our back seat at the last second with no bags or luggage at all. ‘Please get me the fuck out of this place,’ he said.

We drove like real tourists. Gerald had secured several pairs of binoculars and we were stacked past the rooftop with wood and firelighters, even a cooler box with ice bricks. We were a fully stocked tour party.

It was a quiet trip, but not deathly quiet. Quiet as antidote, rather. Quiet as relaxation and holiday. Gerald looked genuinely happy. The corners of his leathery face tweaked frequently in what approximated a smile, and there was a looseness in his form that ran contrary to the tight barrel of the man I had always known.

The road opened up as we came over the escarpment past eMalahleni, past the heaps and heaps of coal, the rudderless conveyor belts and black dumps of stuff. We turned to Dullstroom to find six shiny 4x4s stranded outside a pseudo English-style
pub. We smashed through a few lodges for trout rods and made a pretence of fly-fishing.

The dams were overrun.

‘Be easier just to grab one,’ said Javas, and Andile did exactly that, squealing with triumph as she wrestled the resistant fish into the air. We built a fire and braaied the trout with onion and garlic, then slung ourselves out on the five-star balcony, beers in hand.

Gerald belched. ‘The rich. So few ideas …’ He shook his head and wiped the lemon-butter sauce from his lips. We all agreed, without understanding. Our dynamic had become very much like this: a series of vaguely linked comments and assertions, expressions of mood really. We were feeling each other instead of understanding. Words were irrelevant.

In Hazyview we found an enormous yellow Hummer in the parking lot of a single-storey strip mall that stretched around four different streets, all cheap face-brick and peeling transmission paint.

The Hummer was a triple-cab beast. We dumped our vehicles and loaded everything and everyone in it. I played DJ. We left the town with Brenda Fassie, and then Andile started requesting.

‘Any dub?’ she asked.

Tebza sought clarity. ‘Reggae dub, dubstep or German I’ve-been-taking-Valium-for-three-weeks dub?’

‘The stuff in the middle,’ Javas said. ‘You know, big Eurobeats and the reggae feel. Crossover stuff.’

There followed an extended two-day debate of the technical specifications of the various dub genres. I took them on the widest journey possible, reaching into the far corners of Russle’s musical armoury. Gerald didn’t participate, of course, only smiling ironically at the nuances of a conversation he would never understand. We explained dubstep to him as best we could, but the blankness of his face always pushed the lessons back to the essential basics.

True dub, Tebza maintained (and I was with him), required a repetitive beat – a steady rhythm that resisted the drift. Where the Germans always got it wrong was with the beat – they let the pacing go, and as soon as it did the dub was over. Javas defended
the Germans, we all laughed, and then somewhere along the way we realised we were laughing, really laughing, and we did it some more.

We entered the park at the Kruger Gate. It was appropriate, symbolic somehow, to go past the man’s granite bust and to enter at the front, such as it was. We stopped the Hummer at the statue and had a good look. Javas squatted on his heels, ran sand through his fingers and considered Oom Paul. The dub – German Valium – rumbled on from inside the Hummer.

‘What you thinking?’ Gerald asked him.

‘A doos ahead of his time,’ Javas said, rocking back lightly on his heels as the Afrikaans expletive rolled awkwardly off his tongue. ‘The park was a good call. Can’t deny it. In a time when people just shot everything.’

It was one of the longest sentences I had ever heard him produce, and it was impressively decisive.

There was nothing to add.

In keeping with the spirit of visionary ecological decision-making, as we travelled we decided to open the park’s gates, which were all in the night-time lockdown position. We started with Oom Paul. It was initially a flippant suggestion from Tebza and we laughed at the idea of it, like we were kids trying to open up the zoo at night, but then, as we collectively put our hands on that red-and-white boom and pushed, it felt profound and metaphorical and important.

Of course the animals had already been drifting across the borders of the park on their own accord. No longer bound by humanity, they took natural advantage of existing gaps in the fencing, and of the fact that the front gates – really just simple, symbolic booms – were always intended to be protected by humans. We had started seeing the first herds from the town of Sabie. Packs of zebras, their fat asses glistening in black-and-white health, followed by wildebeest and impala. Plenty and plenty of impala. Grazing on the lawn outside the Sabie Spar, grazing on the hills. We stopped to examine them in their new context, peering and leaning.

‘Weird, eh?’ I asked.

‘Sho,’ Gerald said. ‘Won’t be long before there’s nothing but animals.’

‘What I want to know is, what was the big deal with the Kruger Park anyway?’ Andile asked, her question floating in search of a respondent.

I, the most frequent visitor to the place, tried to explain. ‘It was a culture. For Afrikaners especially, but also the English. Everything about it. The huts, the camping, the camps, each camp with its own identity and way of being. A family thing. Driving all day, looking for game. Going to the bush without having to go to the zoo.’

‘No blacks?’ she queried knowingly.

‘Plenty washing and serving. A few scattered tourists. But no, no blacks.’

‘As a black,’ she giggled at her boldness, ‘I always wondered about it. Looking at animals. We just never had it. Nè …’ She shrugged.

‘It’s peaceful,’ I explained. ‘Watching animals being animals.’

‘Let’s go learn,’ Andile said, thumping the back of Gerald’s headrest excitedly. ‘Teach me to be white, Roy, teach me.’

I had believed, down in the place where we assume and hope for such things, that Gerald would be revealed on this trip. That the bush – the real bush – would bring him, a local boy, out of himself, and that we, myself especially, would gain insight into who he really was.

But Gerald remained inscrutable. We drove to the Kruger Gate, past his hometown of Mkhuhlu, in silence. He pointed at a cluster of houses set at the base of a hill, four hundred metres back from the main road. ‘Scene of the crimes,’ he said.

‘Should we stop? Wanna pull over?’ I asked, wanting him to want to.

‘I know what it looks like, thanks.’

‘Must have been a weird place to grow up, nè?’ I prodded, half to try to get him going and half in genuine reflection on the road we had just travelled, a blizzard of eco resorts, game resorts, golf resorts, getaways and hideaways. Jams and biltong and carvings
and breads. Maps of the park, hats and sunglasses, signs for game meat, dried wors and fruit. Bananas and mangoes. And, filling in the cracks, the townships and shacks, homes of the servants and game rangers, receptionists and cleaners. Barbers and petrol stations.

‘More than you can imagine,’ said Gerald. Later he pointed out a lone buffalo grazing outside the gates of the Protea Hotel, on the public side of the Sabie River, just before the Kruger Gate. ‘I’ve never seen a buffalo before like that.’ He stopped the Hummer and half leaned over me for a better view.

‘Beautiful.’

And that was it. Gerald was on a game drive. He wanted nothing of his past.

We camped the first night at the completely off-grid Tinga Game Lodge, outside Skakuza. It was as typical, eco-themed and high-end as a lodge could get. A flat wooden deck overlooking the river, with what once must have been a crisp-blue swimming pool sunk into the far right corner, now green and festering with life. Low-slung cane furniture stacked and waiting at the back of the deck, along with loungers and sleepers and general sun-worshipping equipment. A thatched roof, generic African landscape prints on the walls, wooden sculptures from across the continent. Big rooms with yawning double beds and en-suite bathrooms.

We cracked all the windows open and the winter sun poured in.

We had beer. We had vegetables. Bread. Potatoes. But no meat.

‘Someone will have to go hunting,’ Gerald cracked. He pulled a lounger to the deck railings and put his feet on them. ‘Meat,’ he mumbled. ‘Fucking meat. I lust.’

Twenty minutes later we heard the crack of a rifle shot, and about forty minutes after that Javas marched across the lawn in front of the deck covered in blood, a skinned, gutted buck carcass draped around his neck. ‘Let’s eat,’ he said.

Javas crouched on the grass in front of us, a green Amstel bottle propped next to the carcass, and delivered what can only be described as performance butchery, carving the prime chunks
off the impala and stripping the rest of the easily accessible meat off onto biltong hooks he had prepared who knew where or when. Andile sat next to Gerald and myself, grinning.

‘You okes take a break,’ Javas said. He stood up, sipped on his beer and paused to check out the setting orange sun, the buck and the giraffe drinking at the dam. ‘This one’s on me.’ I laughed at his sarcasm – we were all completely slumped in our chairs – but realised as the evening grew that he was serious. He built his fire casually yet methodically, creating a small oven with firelighters and twigs and bringing a cooking flame to life within half an hour. At his invitation, we jumped down as the sun set and added logs to the flame, creating a bonfire. When we were good and drunk and the sun was completely gone, Javas built a set of brick walls, pulled a spade out of nowhere and shovelled hot coals into his new oven. Andile threw foil-wrapped potatoes into the fire and organised the vegetables, and then we burned and ate the impala steaks.

And they were delicious.

Better, really, than anything I had eaten in my life. This was meat in its original sense. It made me want to learn how to hunt.

When we were fully gorged and rubbing our stomachs and listening to the bats and the bugs, Javas told us his story.

Javas was not his real name. South Africa was not his country.

Art was a recent flourish.

He was born in a small village on the outskirts of the Tsholotsho district in Zimbabwe, and it was there that his father told him how his great-grandfather had been hung by his feet from the rafters of the shed and cooked alive by Mugabe’s Shona. It was one small episode. A tiny, almost forgotten sliver of tragedy in the wider river of blood that was the Ndebele extermination.

The image was etched into his father’s heart. The story was told and retold, the details sharper and clearer with each telling, a small boy’s horrified view through the corner cracks growing more stark, casting brighter, clearer light on the savagery every time.

The death of his great-grandfather was the crux of Javas’s family.
His father rolled in it, in his anger towards Mugabe and the Shona. But he wasn’t a man able or willing to turn to politics. Instead he veered inward, rotting in booze and recriminations, losing his family along the way, his wife and offspring drifting away in ever-widening circles, without him.

Javas – Jabulani actually, at that time – grew up a quiet, unobtrusive middle child. Like all children of his geography and generation, by the time he hit puberty his ambition had expanded to incorporate Jozi as a logical antidote to living the rest of his life on, as he put it, a ‘sinister, abandoned farm’.

Even after Mugabe’s death, Javas wanted nothing more than to leave the country of his birth. While waiting, he turned himself into an adult in the bush, tracking and watching game, making fires, climbing trees, observing. Retrospectively it was, he said, one of the happiest times of his life.

Gerald grunted at this. I couldn’t tell whether it was affirmation or rejection. He slipped a few notches further down in his lounge chair, his face a mask.

Aged sixteen, having nursed his father out of his frothing, bitter deathbed and into his grave, Jabulani hugged his mother, punched his younger siblings on the arm and hit the road. Before he even got to the border crossing – he had intended to take the through-the-Kruger route – he met up with two teenagers en route to a game farm balanced on the tip of the triangle joining Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, the furthest point of the transfrontier game reserve. They claimed work was available there. He followed them, and so began his five-year stint as a game ranger. He lasted less than six months at the first park (‘It was like school, but the pay was worse’) but developed the contacts necessary to get a gig at the Mukato Reserve, on the South African side. Here he became a genuine ranger, ferrying foreigners from camp to camp, leading night drives and bush walks, answering questions, and explaining spoors and nesting habits and who kills who and why. He stayed at Mukato for three years, and then was poached by a new reserve further south. Now working in the area of the Groot Letaba (he laughed again at his Afrikaans pronunciation, at the impossibility of
rolling his tongue that far around anything), he was part of a more commercialised set-up, one of a crew of twenty or more rangers.

The hustle for clients, the constant push and pull over tips and pay, the strange and often bizarre divisions of labour (blacks carrying and cleaning, whites guiding and talking) ate his love for the bush and created a new and growing set of resentments and frustrations. It was, of course, never as simple as black and white. Instead, he had to negotiate a convoluted maze of relationships and vested interests, alliances and partnerships. He never quite figured out who was with whom, nor who owed whom what. What he did figure out was that he didn’t understand enough of what was going on.