Dark Star Safari

18. The Bush Border Bus to South Africa

Southward one hot morning down the hot straight road out of Harare, a farm fence on either side, past the grazing land of white-owned cattle ranches with names like ‘Broad Acres’ and ‘Sunset,’ a sentry at every gate, a raptor on most telephone poles, always a watching hawk here: to South Africa. What a pleasure it was to leave Harare on a sunny day, sitting in an upholstered seat in this long-distance bush bus, on the road that began in Cairo.

Low white farm buildings were dwarfed by bougainvillea as high as apple trees. Little rivulets and streams, and the land so flat and rural I might have been on a back road in Ohio. But every now and then there was an emphatic reminder of Africa: a bungalow-sized anthill, an African in a blue suit and porkpie hat pedaling a bike, a fat-bellied zebra and a skinny horse grazing side by side, an ostrich under a tree, glaring in disapproval, a monkey picking his teeth on a fence post, and the distinct signs of farm invasions — crude huts, the Zimbabwe flag, stacks of gum tree poles for another hut, and in large farm fields small circumscribed maize patches where there should have been a whole hillside of stalks. In the bright dusty town of Dryton twenty-two cars were lined up at a gas station because of the shortage of fuel.

The pious voice of the driver animated the bus’s loudspeaker: ‘With the help of Almighty Goad we will be guided on our jinny and shall be safe in His Divine Hayns.’

Had I chuckled? Perhaps. All I ever thought of when on an African bus was the standing headline, ‘Many Dead in Bus Plunge Horror.’ Whatever noise I had made provoked the man sitting next to me who was fingering a devotional pamphlet to lift his face near mine.

‘Are you a Christian?’ he asked.

This impertinence I found to be a frequent inquiry in Africa.

‘Let’s say I have a lot of questions.’

‘I was like you once,’ he said.

Where do people learn to talk like this? I could see that he believed himself to be, as the man said, in sole possession of the truth. The odd thing was that I happened to be working on my erotic story of the young man and the older woman, started in Egypt, now more than half complete in a notebook. I smiled at the evangelist, indicated my work and went on writing, the notebook on my knee.

In that somber starry light was a specter handing me a wine glass, and still she wore her lace gloves. I drank and touched her hand and was surprised by the warmth of the lace, how her flesh had heated her gloves, and when I reached to touch her breasts I was surprised by the way in which her body had heated her silk chemise, her gown, her sleeves…

The land was dry, the grass a dusty green that made it silver in the sun. One hour passed, and another, and a third, all of unvarying pretty pastures. Every so often the sign of a farm — a hot straight road running at right angles to this main road — white dust, the soft talcum of the deep countryside, two parallel wheel tracks disappearing into the distance.

The African man next to me was smiling the triumphant patronizing smile of the true believer.

‘What sort of questions?’ he asked.

‘Like do you eat crows?’ I said, to keep it simple, and I quoted Deuteronomy, chapter and verse, and added a few more inedible abominations of the Mosaic Law that most people in Zimbabwe would have been delighted to eat in a stew with their evening sadza porridge.

The man equivocated.

I said, ‘How do you interpret chapter ten in the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter has the vision of the unclean animals in the house of Cornelius?’

‘I asked you a simple question and you are asking me ones that are not simple.’

‘Here is a simple one,’ I said. ‘Jesus was born 2000 years ago. What happened to the millions of people who were born before Jesus? Were they saved?’

‘They are damned for worshiping false idols,’ he said.

‘I see. What is your name?’

‘Washington,’ he said.

‘Washington, what is your tribe?’

‘I am Shona.’

‘Excellent.’ I said that since the Minister of Tourism had given me to believe that a person was enlightened and calmed by consulting a traditional healer, a mondhoro, what did Washington, as a Shona, think of that?

‘Spirit worship is pagan and mondhoros are responsible for the deaths of many children.’

He explained that the mondhoro could diagnose a problem but often the solution required sacrificing a young boy or girl. Ritual slaughter was as common as brewing beer or finding a certain herb to undo a curse.

‘The child is then strangled.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘Many people in your government, including your president, believe that mondhoros must be consulted.’

‘Then they are wrong,’ he said. ‘If you trust in Almighty God you will be saved.’

‘And if Almighty God had been an immense duck capable of emitting an eternal quack, we would all have been born web-footed, each as infallible as the pope. And we would never have had to learn to swim,’ I said, somewhat misquoting Henry James’s father.

But it did the trick. Washington saw that he was wasting his time with me. He went back to his devotions and I wrote a bit more of my story. Then I looked out the window at the regular rocks like ruins, like tumbled temples on the summits of small rounded hills, the litter of boulders resembling broken-apart foundations, reminiscent of the monumental boulders on the plains near Mwanza in far-off Tanzania by the lakeshore. But these rocks were even more forcible reminders of the stately piled-up stones in Great Zimbabwe, which was just over the next hill, near the town of Masvingo.

When we came to Masvingo I thought of lingering here and visiting the ruins. But it was against my temperament to go sightseeing, and Washington got off the bus here, which was an inducement for me to stay on.

Masvingo was a lovely country town. I thought: I could live here, and quickly realized that I actually did live in a small country town just like it. Masvingo had been Fort Victoria, the site of the first white settlers’ fort and then a farming town. The name had changed but the town had not, for here was the Victoria Hotel and the dry-goods shop and the Indian clothing store, Zubair for Flair, and the bottle store and the ironmongers. The street, like all old main streets in Zimbabwe, was wide enough to allow an ox-wagon to make a U-turn.

The scheduled stop in Masvingo turned into a delay, but that was fine with me. I was able to see that the other passengers on the bus were all sorts — white families, black families, Indian women in a group, six white girls in gym slips traveling as part of a school soccer team, African men in suits and ties, others dressed like me. But even though the vehicle resembled a Greyhound Bus and the passengers looked like the people you might find on a long-distance Greyhound, the decent, the hard-pressed, the marginalized, the weird, the aromatic; yet I still felt that I was on another planet, one that bore a striking similarity to the planet earth but was in fact a dark star.

We spent a good part of the afternoon in Masvingo. I went for a walk up the main street, wondering at its emptiness until I remembered it was Sunday. We set off again into the stillness and the green hills of Matabeleland and were at Beitbridge at dusk, another river marking the border, this one the Limpopo, South Africa’s border.

In the darkness, after all the slow lines and the fussing with passports and interrogations, the trip became hallucinatory. Beyond the Limpopo was a tall steel fence topped with razor wire, and the bright spotlights playing on it gave it the look of an armed camp or a prison we were being bused into along a fortified bridge. No other border crossing in Africa was as menacing or efficient as this — like a nightmare of being whisked into prison, dreary and dark except for the occasional blinding lights, many sentry posts and roadblocks on a short stretch of road. At the last roadblock a white soldier boarded the bus and re-examined every passenger’s entry stamp — politely, but strangely goose-eyed and carrying an automatic rifle.

At the town of Messina a young African girl got on and sat beside me, jostling the notebook on my knee.

‘What are you writing?’

‘Just a letter,’ I said, but it was my erotic story. ‘How long to Jo’burg?’

‘Twelve hours,’ she said. ‘But more for me. I am going to Maseru.’

Lesotho was her home. Her name was Thulo, she was a Suthu. She said, ‘My country makes nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’

She went to sleep, briefly and when she woke we talked a little about Lesotho, how it sometimes snowed there.

‘I want to leave Lesotho — leave South Africa,’ she said. ‘Not emigrate, just get away. You know? Just get away from the Third World for a while.’

After that, flashes of light indicated settlements — no other place I had seen on my trip was so well lit at night as this introduction to South Africa. No other country had been so electrified. The light was interruptive and disturbing, for it gave bright not-quite-right glimpses of prosperity — tall power lines and large houses and used-car lots with shiny vehicles and the sinister order of urbanization, more lights, more fences, illuminated windows. So much electric light seemed nightmarish after the darkness I had accustomed my eyes to, for the glare conveyed a sense of distortion and bigness. And, really, there was not much modernity here at all, for this Northern Transvaal was lightly settled, the market towns of Louis Trichardt and Bandelierkop, and the hills of Soutpansberg — all of it farming country

Around midnight, at a long delay in the town of Pietersburg, I walked around in the cold and still saw some people in the street, and women selling bananas and oranges, much as their counterparts did in rural Malawi. But these women were selling them in front of the Big Bite convenience store, which was still open and smelling of warm meat pies and carbolic soap and disinfectant. People in this town were swathed in all sorts of sweaters and shawls and leggings and aprons and turbans, which they peeled off, unlayering themselves as the day grew warmer. But in the dark, plumped up and wrapped in all these woolens, they also looked like creatures in a dream, especially the ones wandering into the bright empty main street.

I was lulled to sleep on the highway across Springbok Flats and the hundreds of miles of booming Afrikaner place names — Potgietersrus, Vanalphensvlei, Naboomspruit, Warmbad and Nylstroom. That last place, with its ‘Nile’ prefix, was significantly named by the trekking Boers in the 1840s who were guided by the Holy Bible. The river they encountered here, the Mokalakwena, flowed north, which could mean only one thing. It had to be the Nile flowing into the unmapped heart of Africa and through Egypt; thus their logical name for the village on its banks, ‘Nile Stream.’

Now and then I woke in my seat and through glazed eyes saw bright raised-up motorway signs — Day’s Inn, IBM, Xerox, DHL — and after so many months of bush the very look of these signs spooked me, for in a dream the scariest things are the most familiar.

The lights woke Thulo. She said, ‘I just had a dream that I would marry someone from the Philippines. I think I probably will.’

But she had a boyfriend. He was in Zimbabwe. ‘He wants to be a personal trainer.’ She had a seven-year-old daughter. ‘She’s living with my mother.’

I dozed, I woke. Lights blazed beside the motorway.

‘Pretoria,’ Thulo said. ‘They say Indians never sleep. They just stay awake, doing business night and day. That’s why they are rich.’

When I dozed and woke again, Thulo said, ‘It’s nice. But I want to leave the Third World.’

She said it as though it was a trip she would be taking in a rocket ship to another planet.

Around four-thirty in the morning of this night of blazing imagery and strange dreams, like a psychedelic journey fuelled by acid or ayahuasca, we entered the outskirts of Johannesburg. The road was glittering black and our vehicle was alone on the broad empty motorway, as though making a grand entrance into a nightmare city, the packed Zimbabwean bus speeding under the dazzling lights, and the driver on the loudspeaker again thanking God for delivering us safely.

‘Jo’burg is so dangerous,’ Thulo said.

We entered a tunnel, a car park, a covered garage, a lighted empty station. Everyone on the bus looked alarmed, piling out with gray worried faces and claiming bags and shuffling in the cold of the station platform. They did not linger, and even before I could say goodbye Thulo was gone. There was light in the station, darkness outside and no taxis. After almost twenty hours sitting upright on the bus, I felt sick with fatigue. Thinking it better to take my chances in daylight in this city of low repute, I sat down, holding my bag between my knees and drowsed until the sun came up.

At dawn, to kill a little more time in Park Station, I bought a Johannesburg Star, one of the daily newspapers. This was unwise, probably the worst thing I could have done as a stranger to the city, certainly the most unsettling. The front page was filled with sordid political stories, and a lengthy feature was devoted to Johannesburg prostitution, one of the growth areas in the country’s shaky economy. The story was surprisingly upbeat, the women speaking in a positive way about their jobs as hookers. ‘With this job I will never be retrenched [laid off]’ and ‘No need for a CV or a formal education’ and ‘You can drink on the job’ and ‘You can work your own chosen hours.’

As though in support of this career choice, half a page of classifieds in the Star was explicit ads for prostitutes, escorts, brothels, promises of threesomes, Greek, bondage, punishment, pleasure, gays, black, Malay, Indians, Chinese, ‘Zulu,’ white, ‘European,’ and whole columns headed, ‘Horny College Girls’ and ‘Bored Housewives.’ I supposed it to be a mark of successful urbanization, if not civilization, that so many diverse sexual tastes were catered for. And by the way, these steamy classifieds also seemed to represent the epitome of multiracialism.

But the inside pages — and much more worrying for their being inside — were all crime stories. In the worst one four tied up and blindfolded people, two men and two women, were found ‘shot execution-style’ in a van outside Johannesburg. No clues, no identities, no leads. ‘The motive is thought to be robbery.’ In a second story, ‘another witness’ in an upcoming murder trial was found dead — eight witnesses altogether had been killed, leaving no one to testify. And there were assorted instances of racial vendettas, road rage, car hijackings, farm invasions, poisonings and deliberately scalded tots. An astonishing number were muggings, maimings, and robberies with gratuitous violence. In the quaintest story a man had been assaulted, had one eye poked out, his throat slashed and his penis chopped off. ‘Police suspect that his genitals — which are still missing — will be used for muti [medicine] by an inganga [witch-doctor].’

The morning newspaper, especially that report of forcible organ donation, made me cautious about leaving Park Station. What I read seemed to support the startling statistics most visitors find out soon after they arrive in the country: there are 20,000 murders a year in South Africa and 52,000 reported rapes, almost a quarter of the rapes against small children and even infants. The most grotesque explanation for the child rapes was the vicious folklore that having sex with a virgin was a cure for AIDS. Even the people who praised South Africa as the richest and most successful country on the continent said it was also a jungle.

Still I paced, and procrastinated, and sat restlessly on a molded plastic chair. I was not emboldened to leave the station until the sun was shining on everyone equally. Only then did I feel I was entering South Africa.