We Are Not Such Things (4 page)

Mzi sidled up next to me, his cap pulled low over his deep-set eyes. He was tall and strong, with a little paunch he was self-conscious about, so he was always abstaining from chocolate milkshakes even though he loved them. We each crossed our arms on the roof of the sedan and rested our chins on our forearms. By then, Easy had reappeared and parked the van to the side of the memorial, and was hiding behind us, hoping he would not be called on to talk. He was mumbling: Man, he hoped Makhulu did not make him stand up before the group.

“Amy was an accidental hero,” Nancy said.

Mzi’s hands were shaking. He looked down at them, and so did I.

“Her death was a Shakespearean tragedy!” Nancy said.

The old lady and the girl had hit up everyone, I noticed. Every lapel boasted a beaded pin and a cutout heart.

“Linda is strong, charismatic, beautiful,” Nancy said.

I looked around. I felt a surge of fury, inexplicable in its intensity. I moved closer to Mzi. In a few days, his great-aunt’s house would burn down, with his great-aunt inside. Just like his own mother’s house back in the old days of politics and firestorms, when the ANC kids in the neighborhood shot it full of lead and set it alight with petrol bombs. Now there was no liberation movement to blame, no just cause or grand scheme, no enemies intent on your demise. Just faulty wiring and cheap petroleum heaters. Mzi was listening intently to Nancy, his face set in that practiced flat expression of his, composed specifically to shroud the fact that he was almost always overwhelmed by various emotions.

Nancy praised Easy and Ntobeko. This was a story of “gentle forgiveness,” she said. “Of lived apology!”

When she finished her speech, the crowd applauded.

Linda stood before her guests. She looked for Easy and Ntobeko. Ntobeko was long gone, so she called for Easy. A sharp intake of breath, back straightened, and then he emerged from behind us and went to her. Easy hooked his arm in Linda’s and stood with her as a local reporter scribbled, a pair of student videographers filmed, the hometown newspaper photographer snapped away. Linda began to say her part. Easy and I looked at each other for the briefest of moments, eye-to-eye above the small crowd, and then he turned back to smile for the cameras.

When I went to live in South Africa in November 2011, I didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t reflect on it. My husband, Sam, then my fiancé, wanted to return on sabbatical to the country he had left at age eighteen, so I followed. Career-wise, I was untethered. Years earlier, I had published a light travel memoir to nobody’s notice, and since then I had no real writing prospects as far as I could tell. Every single article I pitched to magazines was rejected. I kept submitting short stories set in Montana to literary journal contests, in the hopes of winning $500, but I only came in as runner-up twice, so I actually lost money, since it usually cost $20 to enter. To make ends meet, I had taken to editing a celebrity doctor’s website, despite having no medical knowledge. If Sam wanted to move across the world, I had no argument against it.

Soon after Sam took off to find us a place in Cape Town, I sold the old SUV I’d had for years, moved my boxes to a storage locker in New Jersey, packed an oversized duffel bag full of clothes, forced my flailing dog into a travel-safe crate at the JFK cargo terminal, and hurtled fourteen hours across the ocean to Johannesburg. Sam met me at Arrivals. We planned to drive the nine hundred miles to Cape Town rather than put the dog on another connecting flight, so we rented a car and cut through the Karoo desert.

Karoo, which means “land of thirst” in the indigenous Khoikhoi language, is a vast, bleak scrubland that stretches through the country, searingly hot in the afternoon and cold as steel at night. Sheep roam across its inhospitable terrain, dotted with rugged little shepherds’ dwellings where young boys with hard feet spend months alone. I sat in the passenger seat and gazed out the window at the monotonous landscape. It looked like a place picked over, as if anything of value, anything lush or desirable or even a little bit sweet or pretty, had been collected by a determined band of looters sweeping across the plain, leaving behind only dry bush and dust. The N1 highway slices through that rugged expanse, wide and smooth and lonely.

Only a few hours from Johannesburg, we came upon a gruesome car accident. The remains of a car sat diagonally across two lanes, its mangled hood smashed into its windshield, its roof sliced clean off. The pavement was strewn with glass, sparkling like crystals in the high spring sun, and a couple of truckers had pulled to the side to call for help and to snap cellphone photos. Some merciful soul had rolled a heavy woolen blanket across the top of the car to try to conceal three bodies sitting upright.

The image lingers bright and precise in my mind: two men flank a woman in the back of the ruined car, which was slammed—by what? a tractor trailer?—with such force that the passengers must have died on impact but were not ejected from their seats, perhaps because they were packed so tight in there. All three are slender with dark brown skin, and young, judging by their builds. The woman wears a pink T-shirt. Her hair is jet black and plaited into stiff shoulder-length braids that stick out in all different directions—like Pippi Longstocking, I remember thinking.

From then on, we drove slowly and anxiously to the guesthouse where we planned to stay the night. It was situated in the stark Northern Cape desert town of Colesburg, the halfway point between Johannesburg and Cape Town, where it seemed every other home offered a bed for weary travelers. The owner, an elderly man of British ancestry, led us to our room, a white square filled with pink floral pillows, a pink comforter marred by a tiny blood spot, and a knitted woolen throw so rough that the dog used it to scratch her back. The decoration was minimal: a single straw hat, pinned with a fake rose, nailed to the wall.

That night, we drove through the town, which gave the impression of overwhelming flatness—flat roads, flat land, flat houses—and ate tasteless, mushy vegetables at a pub patronized only by white people. After, we stopped for snacks at a local twenty-four-hour shop. As I stood in line to pay for chips and a drink, a tired-looking light-brown-skinned woman at the register spoke to me in a heavy Germanic-sounding language I couldn’t understand. She was, Sam explained, a colored woman, a term that sounds offensively retrograde to Americans but is in fact the designation for the population of mixed-race South Africans. The language she had directed at me was Afrikaans, a derivation of Old Dutch spoken mainly by South Africa’s colored people and white Afrikaners, the descendants of early European settlers.

The next day, as we were leaving, we chatted with our host, a former school principal who said he had taken a buyout package for state employees when the black majority came to power in 1994. He had retired early to run this unique interpretation of an inn.

“So, what’s the population of Colesburg?” Sam asked.

“Two thousand whites, five thousand coloreds, and fifteen thousand blacks,” the man answered. That was how he automatically understood his hometown—as a collection of people broken into racial categories. We herded the dog into the car and headed toward our final destination: Cape Town.

The Western Cape contains the southernmost tip of the African continent. European explorers and kings and queens had long agreed that if they could only round the Cape, they would be able to sail northeast to India and open a sea route to Asia, with its silks and spices and gemstones and teas. Such a route would prove lucrative to European powers, which had so far only managed to arrange an arduous and dangerous trade trek through the Middle East, which was teeming with bandits and costly middlemen. The only problem, as the Europeans saw it, was the Cape’s habit of swallowing ships.

On February 3, 1488, the square-jawed Portuguese voyager Bartolomeu Dias and his crew anchored near a freshwater spring in a fishing village known today as Mossel Bay. Dias had departed Lisbon seven months earlier in an attempt to chart a new southern route to Asia, and he and his haggard crew had just survived a harrowing storm. Above, watching from a bluff, stood a group of Khoikhoi tribesmen, indigenous cattle farmers with yellow-brown skin, standing around five feet tall.

The Khoikhoi, grazing their animals by the sea on that day in the fifteenth century, watched as a vessel full of ashen humans docked in their watering hole and started taking water. The Khoikhoi were not a particularly warmongering group, but, angry and frightened, they pelted the explorers with rocks. The whites responded with gunshots, killing a Khoikhoi before sailing away.

Though Dias wished to continue charting the eastbound journey, his bedraggled crew threatened mutiny, and so the ship stopped at what is now known as Bushman’s River, where Dias planted a Portuguese flag and then turned homeward. One cold comfort for Dias was that he had at least laid eyes on the meridional tip of Africa, a rocky point of land where waves crashed relentlessly against the shore and heavy winds blew through tough grasses and low, hardy scrubs. The balmy currents of the Indian Ocean here meet the arctic currents of the Atlantic. From a height, one can see the two bodies of water tangle together in a shaky line of wild white foam that stretches past the horizon.

These waters had pushed Dias blindly out to sea, and Dias, returning home after seventeen months with his men, named the area Cabo das Tormentas, or Cape of Storms. King John II of Portugal, who saw the Cape as a stop on the profitable opening to the East, rebranded it Cabo da Boa Esperança, or Cape of Good Hope. But Dias had been prescient: twelve years later, on another journey, he and his crew were swallowed whole by the Cabo das Tormentas, their sunken ship never found.

Dias’s bearded compatriot Vasco da Gama was more successful. In 1497, he was the first to navigate an all-water eastern passage. Da Gama rode the winds down the African coast, then arced into the Atlantic and swept back toward land, docking for supplies and water in an inlet on the Western Cape today known as St. Helena Bay. There, the threatened Khoikhoi again attacked, spearing da Gama in the thigh. Undeterred, da Gama and his crew continued down the coast and rounded its tip. Again, they came upon a tribe of Khoikhoi, but this time they enjoyed better relations, offering gifts. Da Gama even danced with some locals.

The good vibes were short lived. As was the Portuguese habit, da Gama took water supplies without asking the chief for permission. The Khoikhoi, aghast at da Gama’s slight, readied themselves to attack, and da Gama quickly sailed off to the western coast of India, which he would reach in 1498 with the help of an Arab navigator he picked up in East Africa. In 1510, the Khoikhoi slaughtered sixty-five Europeans, including a Portuguese viceroy heading home after his term in the East—a massacre that resulted in a century during which ships gave the Cape a wide berth.

This was the inauspicious beginning of the relationship between blacks and whites in South Africa, a relationship that began with whites taking natural resources that both groups assumed were rightfully theirs. In a foretelling of events to be replayed in centuries to come, the blacks threw stones, and the whites responded with bullets.