Dark Star Safari

19. The Hominids of Johannesburg

‘These people!’ the taxi driver screamed as I got into his car, around seven-thirty, having hurried from the entrance of Park Station in Johannesburg. The station had an imposing carved frieze on its façade — granite elephants and lions and native trees and iconic African scenes. This was an appropriate backdrop, for I felt smaller and more disoriented here in this huge city than I had in the Elephant Marsh of the Lower River in southern Malawi, athwart a dugout canoe and slapping my paddle at the water hyacinths. The city was gray and the only humans I saw were sleeping rough all over the sidewalk and the grass outside the station in the manner of critters in the bush.

The driver’s name was Norman. He looked to be a Khoisan — light brown, small head, tiny chin, daintily slant-eyed. The Khoisan were better known as Hottentots, a rude name bestowed on them by Afrikaners who, hearing the clicks in their subtle language, nailed them as stammerers.

Norman was still cursing ‘those people,’ the ones in the tents, lean-tos, plastic huts, ingenious humpies, sheds of scrap lumber; the people lying jumbled croc-like in the grass, others lying singly, or with their backs against the light poles, the vagrants, the drunks, the desperate, the sinister, the bewildered, the uncaring, the lost, cluttering the station entrance.

‘They smell, they make messes, they make shit, they fight, they won’t go away. And the government does nothing, so it will get worse. I hate it!’

He said he was from Soweto, he was indignant and angry.

‘People like you will stay away! Our business will suffer!’

‘Who are they?’ I asked.

‘Other people,’ he said, meaning not South Africans. ‘In Yeoville and Hillbrow there are too many tsotsis’ — rascals. ‘Congolese and Nigerians. Why they do come to Janiceburg? They just only make trouble.’

But he became cheery as he drove on. I asked him why.

‘The end of the world is coming. Another end of the world. The Waist is finished.’

‘You think.’

‘I know.’

He was of course a Jehovah’s Witness. He claimed the large amount of crime and violence was a sign. He saw explicit indications of Doomsday all over South Africa.

‘You might well be right, Norman,’ I said.

It so happened that at a stop light there was a gaunt greasy-haired beggar standing in the middle of the road holding a sign saying, No home — No work — No food — Please help. The people sleeping rough at the station had not been actively begging, and so the first South African beggar I saw was an able-bodied white man.

My hotel in Braamfontein was not far from Park Station, walking distance in fact, in a neighborhood reputed to be dangerous. But what did ‘dangerous’ mean in a city where people were mugged and their cars swiped by hijackers in the driveways of their own gated communities? The exchange rate made everything a bargain. I had a bath, ate breakfast, and went for a walk, feeling happy.

I was happy most of all because I was alive. Before I had set out, I’d had a premonition that I would die in some sort of road accident en route (‘Globetrotter Lost in Bus Plunge Horror’). As this had not happened, I could now apportion my time and make onward plans. I had never known from week to week how long my travel would take, but South Africa was a land of railways and reliable train timetables. I was encouraged to think that I might eat well here. I had not had many good meals since leaving Cairo, but the breakfast I’d just had, and a glimpse of the dinner menu, made me hopeful for more. Also, having arrived in South Africa I was able to begin pondering my trip, and it seemed to me a safari that had been worth taking, the ideal picnic.

Lastly, I was happy because my birthday was the day after tomorrow. I considered my birthday a national holiday, a day for me to devote to pleasure and reflection, on which I did no work. And because I was among people who didn’t know it was my birthday, I would have no one here forcing jollification upon me and making facetious remarks involving the word sexagenarian.

Another satisfaction about being in South Africa was that the country had been written about by many gifted people, among them Nadine Gordimer. I had known Nadine since the 1970s, when she made annual visits to New York and London. Unlike many other South African writers and activists, she had resisted fleeing into exile. By staying put in Johannesburg where she had lived her whole life she had become one of the most reliable witnesses to the seismic South African transformation. She was that wonderful thing, the national writer who transcended nationality by being true to her art, like Borges in Argentina, R. K. Narayan in India, Jorge Amado in Brazil, V S. Pritchett in England, Shusako Endo in Japan, Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, and Yasar Kemal in Turkey. They were writers I had sought out as a traveler.

Months before, I had warned Nadine that I was heading for South Africa and was looking forward to seeing her in Johannesburg. She was a writer who belonged to the world, but true to her home and her disposition, she had made South Africa her subject, had anatomized its problems and its people. The complex country became human and comprehensible in her prose. Among the few books I had held on to was one by Mahfouz, whom I had met in Cairo, the gnomic Echoes of an Autobiography. Nadine had written an introduction to it, as a friend and fellow Nobel laureate. Seeing her here would be pleasant and symmetrical, another way of joining two distant corners of Africa.

The truth of Gordimer’s fiction was apparent to me from my first days in Johannesburg, for her fiction was full of immigrants from remote villages, from distant countries — Portuguese, Arabs, Lithuanians, Russians, Greeks, English, Hindus, Jews, Hereros, Swazis and Khoisan. Johannesburg was full of immigrants, too, wanderers like the earliest hominids, another native species. I was not in Johannesburg long before I met a Lithuanian, a Bulgarian, a Portuguese, a Senegalese holy man, a Congolese trader. I quickly learned that everyone in South Africa had a story, usually a pretty good one.

After a few days I became attuned to the accent, which in its twanging and swallowed way seemed both assertive and friendly. Johannesburg was ‘Janiceberg’ or ‘Jozi,’ and busy was ‘buzzy,’ and congested ‘congisted,’ ‘Waist’ West, and said ‘sid.’ There was no shortage of glottal stops, and a distinct Scottishness crept into some expressions; for example, a military build-up was a ‘mulatree buldup.’ Nearly everyone had a tendency to use Afrikaans words in ordinary speech, such as dorp, bakkie, têkkies, naartjies, and dagga, but these words had percolated throughout Central Africa long ago and I knew from having lived in Malawi that they meant town, pick-up truck, sneakers, tangerines, and marijuana. If there was a pronunciation problem it was that for dagga or Gauteng you needed to use the soft deep throat-clearing and gargled ‘g’ of the Dutch.

Voetsek meant bugger off all over southern Africa, and was regarded as impolite. Forbidden words sometimes slipped into conversation. Kaffer was the worst, koelie (‘coolie’ for Indian) not far behind, and so was bushies (for coloreds, mixed-race people). Piccanin was one vulgar word for African children, but there were others. When a white high court judge, perhaps believing himself to be affectionate, described some African children with the diminutive klein kaffertjies (‘little niggerlings’), he was suspended from his judicial duties. Afrikaans was nothing if not picturesque, though some slang words had etymologies that needed explanation, such as moffie for homosexual, which derived from mofskaap, a castrated sheep.

‘I don’t call them kaffers, I call them crows,’ a white 72-year-old janitor said in a newspaper story about racism in Pretoria. Ek noem hulle nie kaffers nie, ek noem hulk kraaie, laughing at his waggishness. Another headline was ‘Unlikely Romance in Conservative Town Has Rightwingers Reeling.’ In this story, when Ethel Dorfling, a white thirty-year-old full-figured mother of four, disappeared and set up house with Clyde Le Batie, a black 42-year-old full-figured detergent salesman, none of her friends would speak to her except to call her a kafferboetie, the equivalent of ‘nigger lover.’ A joshing Yiddish term for a very young wife or a heavily made-up floozy was kugel, a type of sugary pastry.

Moving his vowels, someone would say, ‘Ah thoat ah’d osk for an expinsive gless of shirry.’ That was clear enough, once you got used to the cadence. But the newer, more despised immigrants tended to stick with the accents they had brought.

‘It is a nice place, South Africa, but I don’t like the people,’ the man from Senegal told me.

This tall thin man in a multi-colored Rasta bonnet called himself El Hadji, and believed he was of Ethiopian ancestry. ‘Look at my face. You find us everywhere in Africa. Nous avons des boeufs. We traveled with our cattle for hundreds and thousands of years.’ He sold artifacts. I was always lookingfor unusual carvings and fetish objects. He had some, but instead of describing them he grumbled about the South Africans.

‘Which people don’t you like?’

‘All the people — black, white, all. It’s their history, maybe. They fight, they hate each other. They hate us, they call us foreigners. It is such a problem. But I like the country.’ Flourishing a fetish, pinching its head, he added, And the business is okay.’

He had come in the early nineties when Mandela, having recently been released, encouraged diverse people to emigrate to South Africa and help build a new nation. This open-door policy had been criticized and curtailed, but many people I met had arrived when it had been instituted, just ten years before.

Edward the Lithuanian was one. He was skinny, pasty-faced, agitated, only thirty or so but with thinning hair and that squinting adversarial manner of East Europeans, raised in an authoritarian system, untrusting and humorless. He had been brought to South Africa by his fleeing parents, when he was a twenty-year-old civil engineering student in Vilnius. ‘But engineering wasn’t me. I was bored.’ His parents hated working for peanuts, hated having to wait to buy the simplest material object, hated the feeling of confinement and destitution that came with the departure of the Soviets. I listened hard but heard no patriotic Lithuanian noises.

‘In Lithuania they have nothing. You wait twenty years for a car. Life in Lithuania is terrible. I go once a year to visit friends. They make nothing. They just buy and sell. What kind of business is that? Here, everything is simple.’

I said, ‘But this is Africa. It’s so far from Lithuania. You could have gone to Britain.’

‘The weather sucks there.’

Sniffing at Britain’s quality of life the climate-conscious Lithuanian émigrés had landed in Johannesburg.

‘My father is Jewish, my mother is Lithuanian,’ Edward said. ‘I would not go to Israel with all their problems, but even if I could they wouldn’t want me. In Israel I’m a Lithuanian, everywhere else I’m a Jew. Jewishness comes from your mother. Ha! My mother is nothing!’

I still didn’t understand why they had chosen South Africa. He explained that it took ten years to get a US visa, but they found it very easy to secure visas and work permits for South Africa. ‘And here if you work you can make money, You can buy things. I want to own things.’

‘Such as?’

‘Clothes. A car. A stereo.’

South Africa, for many people a wilderness of wild animals and high desert and nationalistic Africans, represented to Edward the Lithuanian a modern world of accessible material culture. As others traveled to South Africa to see gnus, he had come for the stereo systems. A hominid in search of glittery objects.

‘I do day trading on the stock market in the day. I drive a cab at night. Okay, the market is down right now but for three years we made money. The Nasdaq people who are complaining should shut up — they made a lot of money.’

Edward, who was unmarried, said he had no African friends, did not speak Afrikaans or any African language. There are eleven official languages in South Africa.

The Bulgarian whom I met in Johannesburg — Dave the electronics expert — was in his mid-thirties and small and pale; and he too had Edward’s look of suspicion. He had come from Sofia in 1991 and had a similar story to tell: two jobs, his main one fixing and reconditioning electronic contraptions, like TVs and VCRs. He spoke only English and Bulgarian, had not been outside of Johannesburg and knew no Africans well. His two kids went to a private school in which there were a few African students. He said with satisfaction, ‘The school fees keep most blacks out.’

Like Edward he liked the South African weather, but he wasn’t happy about the economy.

‘It’s going to get worse here, sure,’ Dave said. ‘I think I have a hundred thousand in US dollars — my flat, my car, my things. When the rand gets to ten to the dollar I will go away. I don’t know where. Not Canada — I don’t like the weather. Maybe the States, if I can live in California.’

He had no notion of South African history, not even recent events. He shook his head doubtfully when I talked about it. When I mentioned that the fiercest and most successful of the South African political activists had been Communists he began to rave.

‘Ha! They must have had mental instability!’ Dave said. ‘If you live in a democratic country and you are a communist there is something wrong with your mind. You have to be crazy.’

I said, ‘But this wasn’t a democratic country before 1994. That’s when they had their first free election.’

‘It was all right before — everyone says so.’

That cynical view, that apartheid was preferable to a multi-racial society, was still held by some skeptics, even Africans. But on the whole they tended to be marginalized people, the Boers, the Khoisan, or the mixed-race people known as ‘coloreds’, or migrants from nearby countries.

One Suthu, Solly from Lesotho, said, ‘My parents came here from Maseru. My father worked on farms. Sometimes he had work, sometimes none. He went from farm to farm. It was not an easy life, but it was better than this.’

I questioned this: The life of a migrant farm laborer under apartheid was better than a worker with a secure job in free South Africa?

‘It was better,’ Solly said in a don’t-argue-with-me tone. ‘There is too much crime. I see it every day. I would like to go, but where? The white government was better!’

‘In what way?’

‘Not as much crime. Not as much litter,’ Solly said. ‘I am not saying this because you have a white face. It is true — the white government was better. Now I don’t know what to do.’

Speaking to people at random I was constantly meeting strangers and émigrés, people who regarded Johannesburg with a mixture of disgust and wonderment. Nearly all of them had come to make money, and now that the work had begun to dry up they were seriously questioning whether to stay. But even to many of the whites who were old-timers living here seemed to them like living in a foreign country. I had the notion that for many whites black South Africa was a foreign land that they had only recently begun to inhabit, and that it took some getting used to.

‘We’re economic prisoners,’ one white man told me. He owned his own small business. ‘We can’t afford to go anywhere else.’

But when I pressed him, he said that he really didn’t want to go anywhere else. He was shocked, he said, by how little the white government had done over many decades to educate Africans. Like everyone else he said that crime was South Africa’s worst problem. And the police were part of the problem.

‘During the apartheid era the police were horrible,’ he said. ‘They arrested people for no reason — for being in a white area, for not having an ID card. They killed people, they tortured people, they were unfair. No one respected them. Now this whole past of theirs has come back to bite them on the ass.’

One of my taxi drivers was a Portuguese man who had fled to Spain from Portugal in the 1960s, to Mozambique from Spain in the 1970s, then to South Africa from Mozambique in the 1980s. He had run out of countries to flee to. ‘Because of the EU, Portugal is full of foreigners.’ He said he thought South Africa had become a dismal place.

I said, ‘This isn’t a Third World country.’

‘Not yet,’ he said, and winked at me in the rear-view mirror.

We were rolling down a tree-lined street in a pretty part of Johannesburg, known as Parktown West. The garden walls were whitewashed and high, concealing each premises, though inside each one a big solid house loomed. On most gates, with the house number was the name of an alarm company and the words Armed Response. It could have been Bel-Air or Malibu.

‘But if you live on this street you never have worries,’ the driver said.

That was presumptuous, because Nadine Gordimer lived here, and she had known plenty of anxiety in her seventy-seven years in South Africa. She was a Johannesburger to her fingertips having been born in Springs, a mining town, only twenty-five miles from this pretty house in Parktown. She was of Latvian descent, through her father, who had left Riga and come to South Africa at the age of thirteen — alone — to escape Tsarist pogroms in an earlier wave of immigration. That boy, her father, had come to find his brother. He had no trade. He became a watch-mender, he went from town to town in the Transvaal tinkering with watches. Later he set up business selling watches and ultimately trinkets, gee-gaws, wedding rings, and jewelry in the gold-mining town of Springs. Nadine had written about her father in ‘My Father Leaves Home,’ a story in Jump.

I had valued her writing from my first reading, but I had discovered her only in the 1960s and she had been writing since the late 1940s. She had begun writing at the age of fifteen; as a 24-year-old she had begun publishing in The New Yorker. Her first story, ‘A Watcher of the Dead,’ is a beautifully observed tale of the conflict between the impulses of a daughter’s love and the demands of ritual, in this case a Jewish funeral in Johannesburg.

Very early in her writing career, Nadine had marked out her emotional territory — the passionate relations between men and women; and her geography — settlers’ South Africa, Mozambique, and Rhodesia, as well as the much more foreign and forbidden territory of the African village and the black township. She had never ceased to be political in a wide sense. In her first collection of stories, The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952), these territories were represented, the lovers traveling on the road to Lourenco Marques in ‘The End of the Tunnel,’ the mismatched couple in ‘The Train from Rhodesia,’ the woman in ‘The Defeated,’ who begins her story, ‘My mother did not want me to go near the Concession stores because they smelled, and were dirty, and the natives spat tuberculosis germs into the dust. She said it was no place for little girls/.’ In that last story, the little girl goes to the African store and discovers vitality and sadness.

So, from the first — and life was wickedly divided in the early years of the apartheid era — Nadine wrote of race relations, and her black characters were as carefully delineated as her white ones. One of the hallmarks of her prose has always been its intense physicality, the pleasures of sex, of food, of sunshine, or the converse of these, frustration, hunger, bad weather.

It seemed puzzling to me in Johannesburg to reflect that I had never been there before, for the city seemed so familiar. There was a reason. The voices, the faces, the smells, the slur and twang of speech, the dissonant combination of sunshine and strife, the sense of place in Nadine’s work had made Johannesburg seem like a city I was returning to, as Mahfouz’s work had done for me in Egypt. For an author, there was no greater achievement than this, the successful recreation in prose of the texture and emotions of a real place, making the reading of the work like a travel experience, containing many of the pleasures of a visit. How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there, or even better — because reading about being shot at and poisoned and insulted was in general less upsetting than the real thing.

Blossom-filled jacaranda trees hung over Nadine’s garden, big scalloped-leafed monstera vines clung to their trunks. Her garden wall was softened with bougainvillea and thorny whips of rose bushes. The bedding plants were velvety violets and spongy primroses. Nadine’s work was also full of closely observed flora.

I had called the day before and invited her to dinner — she could choose the restaurant. My idea was to enjoy a pleasant meal with a good friend as a secret celebration of my birthday. I went to the iron gate at the driveway, and got barked at by a big brown dog until an African woman at the kitchen door howled at the dog to shut up. An African man in a white shirt and blue pants swung the gate open for me. Something possessed me to thank him in Chichewa, which was widely spoken in southern Africa because of the wandering Malawians, looking for work.

‘Zikomo, bambo.’ Thank you, father.

We talked a bit and I asked him his name.

His name was Albino. He was from Mozambique.

The house was servant-tidy, mopped and spare and rather shadowy. As I was led from one room to another, the kitchen with its tableau of elderly servants (old women sitting, old man standing), through narrow corridors, I could just make out African masks and shadowy baskets and a hat rack piled with wide-brimmed hats.

Then I was propelled through a door, as though onstage, into the sitting room, which was well lighted and hung with family photos and lovely paintings, and Nadine was standing there, very straight, rather small, with piercing eyes. She kissed me, welcoming me with the first good hug — she was strong for her size — 1 had had since leaving home.

‘That looks familiar,’ I said as we kissed for I saw just behind her head, over the fireplace, a framed picture, three vividly drawn figures, heads and shoulders, and you knew it had to be a Daumier the way you knew a certain paragraph had to be a Gordimer.

And turning to size up the room, looking for a place to sit, I saw another brilliantly colored picture, a lithograph of Napoleon flanked by a lancer and an Arab sheik.

‘Toulouse-Lautrec,’ Nadine said. ‘Isn’t Napoleon handsome? I always think he looks like Marlon Brando.’

That was when I saw the other person in the room — motionless, seated with a blanket over his knees, so quiet I had missed him. He was hooked somehow to a breathing machine, tubes to his nostrils, and he was smiling — apparently had been smiling the whole time at the apparition of big badly dressed American ogling his paintings. He was Reinhold Cassirer, bright and friendly, and clearly frail. He was ninety-three years old and ailing, but fully alert, with good color, and even though he was sitting in a wheelchair I could see that he was a tall man.

‘He came from Cairo — on the bus!’ Nadine said sharply to her husband.

Reinhold smiled at me and raised one hand in salute and murmured, ‘Good, good, good.’

He had a beautiful smile, the sort of smile that indicates great generosity and a capacity for pleasure. He sat in the center of the room seeming to enjoy the warmth, the light, the talk. He hated the confinement of his sickroom and the ministrations of his nurse. What he liked best, Nadine told me later, was what he had liked best throughout their marriage, drinking a pre-dinner whisky at the end of the working day.

A young African arrived, Raks Seakhoa, a poet and a former political prisoner.

I said, ‘I want to hear about your imprisonment. I’ve been meeting ex-convicts all along my route.’

‘Paul came from Cairo — on the bus!’

‘I’ll be glad to tell you about it. I served five years on Robben Island.’

‘With Mandela?’

‘Yes. We passed notes secretly, on philosophical subjects.’

Nadine said smartly, ‘Isn’t it your birthday?’

I tried not to look deflated. I said, ‘How did you know?’

‘Someone saw it on the Internet.’

‘Oh, God, the world of useless information.’

Raks Seakhoa said, ‘It’s my birthday, too.’

The rumbling of my secret seemed less awkward then, for someone who shares your birthday shares much more, a certain kinship and characteristics. Raks was turning forty-two. He looked older — another former prisoner whose time in jail had added years to his life, made him gaunt, grayed his hair. I liked the thought that we two Aries were brothers under the skin, but he had suffered in his life and my life had been a picnic.

Another guest entered, hugged Reinhold, hugged Nadine, hugged Raks, and was introduced to me as Maureen Isaacson, literary editor of the Johannesburg Sunday Independent.

‘Happy birthday,’ she said.

‘He came from Cairo — on the bus!’

We drove to the restaurant in two cars; I went with Maureen, Nadine with Raks. Maureen carefully hand-locked each door before we set off, and said, ‘I’ve had robbery attempts. But I refuse to be intimidated by the violence, so I’m vigilant.’

‘What happened?’

‘People trying to get into my car on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge-one bloke taps at the windscreen and distracts me, while another snatches at the back door. Pretty soon I’m surrounded by these men, six or eight of them.’

‘God. What did you do?’

‘I screamed at them. “Fuck off!” ’ Maureen said, sounding fierce. She added quietly, ‘Now I lock everything.’

The restaurant — lovely, furnished with antiques, very large — was almost empty: a consequence of the crime in the city center after dark, muggings and car hijackings. Of perhaps thirty other tables, only one was occupied. The owners warmly welcomed Nadine. She commiserated with them about the crime in the city that kept their restaurant empty. Then she introduced me.

‘Paul came on the bus — from Cairo!’

Over dinner, Nadine said she was weary from spending the day reading the galley proofs of her new novel, The Pick-Up.

‘The American proof-readers often try to correct my English,’ Nadine said. ‘They follow the rules. I don’t. I like my sentences.’

I mentioned that I kept meeting Johannesburgers who had amazing tales to tell. She said this was a characteristic of South Africans generally, their lives full of events. My mention of the recent immigrants stirred memories of her father, his arrival here as a thirteen-year-old.

‘Imagine my father,’ she said, and let her voice trail off.

Her mother had been English, from a Jewish family long established in London. Nadine smiled at the memory of her piano-playing mother turning up her nose at her husband’s origins and in a shocked accent of mimicry said, ‘They slept round the stove.’

There is a pitiless description of her parents in the story, ‘My Father Leaves Home.’

In the quarrels between husband and wife, she saw them [the relatives] as ignorant and dirty, she must have read somewhere that served as a taunt: you slept like animals round a stove, stinking of garlic, you bathed once a week. The children knew how it was to be unwashed. And, whipped into anger, he knew the lowest category of all in her country, this country. You speak to me as if I was a kaffir.

‘Sounds like Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers. “I was cut out for better things than this.” ’

‘Yes. That was my mother. Mrs Morel.’

‘But I don’t think I could bear to reread that novel again. What do you reread?’

‘Everything. All the time. I want to reread Dostoievsky.’

I asked, ‘What should I read to understand South Africa better?’

‘There are so many good South African writers,’ Nadine said and she encouraged Raks and Maureen to help make a reading list for me. This included The Peasants’ Revolt, by Govan Mbeki, Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet, Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda, Soft Vengeance by Albie Sachs, and poems by Don Mattera and Jeremy Cronin.

‘And Raks too, I wish he would write more,’ Maureen said.

But Raks got a call on his mobile phone and when Nadine had loudly sighed at the silly noise of the ring, Raks had left the table to talk.

‘I’m glad I read your book about Naipaul,’ Nadine said. ‘The reviews put me off. It’s about you, not him — and unsparing about you. It’s such a good book. I cheered for you at the end. “He’s free,” I thought.’

‘Naipaul always wears such a gloomy face,’ Maureen said,’ ‘But isn’t A House for Mr Biswas wonderful?’

‘Vidia hates it when people mention only that one book.’

Nadine said, ‘The book of mine that everyone mentions is July’s People.’

‘Patrick White complained that everyone praised Voss, which is a great book.’

Nadine agreed and said that she admired White’s A Fringe of Leaves (‘I want to reread it’). Her generous praise for her contemporaries was not in general a writer’s characteristic.

I said, ‘Will it annoy you if I ask you about July’s People?’

She laughed, and I said that the reason people liked it was because it represented their secret fears — having to flee a political cataclysm, losing your home, becoming a fugitive in your own country, finding that the world has been turned upside-down. This was the extreme white South African nightmare, becoming totally dependent upon your black servants, reduced to living in a simple and remote village.

‘I was writing about the present,’ Nadine said, meaning the years of its composition, between 1976 and 1980. ‘It was a very bad time here. Everything was happening. I put all that into the book.’

She said that by the time she finished July’s People she was committed to staying in South Africa. ‘I felt we had been through it all.’ But there had been a period when she had thought seriously about leaving South Africa, in the late 1960s, when she had been writing A Guest of Honor. ‘We traveled around. We had friends in Zimbabwe and Zambia. I felt I might consider one of those places. I’m an African. That’s Africa.’ She needed to be near South Africa.

‘Or so I thought,’ she added. ‘I looked closely at my friends — they were mostly white, mostly expatriates, they had loyalties elsewhere. So what life would it have been for me? I would have been a nice white woman who was interested in Africans, but living in this world of expatriates. I couldn’t do it. And so I stopped thinking of leaving.’

I said, ‘Were you a member of a political party?’

She smiled at the question. ‘I suppose I could have joined the Liberal Party, but they were so weak — and who did they represent? I thought hard about the South African Communist Party. But it was too late for me. I should have joined earlier. Yet I have the greatest respect for the Communists here. We would never have achieved our freedom without them.’

Raks returned to the table, and talked about what it was like to be hearing about the political struggle while serving time on Robben Island as a political prisoner. The news from the outside world came in whispers and scribbled messages, for newspapers were forbidden.

Nadine had been ruminating. She said, ‘I didn’t leave. I stayed. I saw everything. The people who left — well, you can’t blame the Africans. Life was terrible for them. But the others — the whites, the writers’ — she shook her head — ‘after they left, what did they write?’

Maureen said, ‘I feel sorry for anyone who left, who missed it. All those years. And it went on for so long — beyond Mandela’s release.’

I said, ‘Isn’t it still going on?’

‘Yes, it is. You can write about it,’ Nadine said.

Afterwards, driving Nadine’s car — Nadine navigating — I asked about Reinhold’s health. She said it was terrible but that she felt lucky in having had such a happy marriage. ‘Reini smoked a lot,’ she said. ‘Smoking is nice. Did you ever smoke dagga?’ She lamented that the center of Johannesburg was so empty. We talked about our children. And eventually she wished me a last Happy Birthday, and said, ‘Travel well. Travel safely.’

It is all right to be Steppenwolf, or the Lone Ranger, or Rimbaud, or even me. You visit a place and peer at it closely and then move on, making a virtue of disconnection. But such an evening as this, after months of solitary travel, reminded me that a meal with friends was a mood improver, and that a birthday need not be an ordeal. I had been self-conscious, though. One of Nadine’s many strengths was that she noticed everything. The best writers are scrupulous noticers. And since a birthday is an occasion for a summing up, the annual balance sheet, I was sure that she had seen my Ugandan patched jacket, my baggy pants, my scuffed shoes, my tattoos, my thinning hair, how I had changed in the twenty years since I had last seen her. I couldn’t complain: that was life. And yet, alert, bright, fully engaged and funny, she had not changed at all.

The next day, Raks Seakhoa invited me to a poetry reading at the Windybrow Theater. ‘Take a taxi.’ The theater was in one of the most dangerous areas of Johannesburg. And I almost didn’t go at all, because leaving my hotel I met a man who said that the big event that night was a soccer match between the two best teams in South Africa, the Chiefs against the Pirates. As a visitor, I was duty-bound to see these great local athletes. He said, ‘You can buy tickets at the stadium.’

But I met Raks instead in the community center that had once been the mansion of a Johannesburg millionaire (cupola, mullioned windows, porches, wood paneling), and after the poetry reading, plucking at his pebble glasses, Raks told me his story. He had been arrested, aged eighteen, in a township outside Johannesburg, and taken into custody. He was charged with sabotage and belonging to an unlawful organization. While in police custody he had been tortured and beaten. This was in the late 1970s.

‘They wanted me to tell them about the ANC, but I didn’t know much,’ Raks said. ‘The Black Consciousness Movement was what animated me.’

‘What about the charge of sabotage?’

‘We were in various actions,’ he said blandly. ‘But the police were vicious. At first, they just hit us. No questions, just whack. We were beaten really hard. It went on for two or three weeks. We were put into sacks and thrown into the river. We thought we would drown — we knew people who had died.’

‘Didn’t they interrogate you?’

‘After that, yes. But the beatings went on. They wanted to know who our friends were — the details. “Who are the Communists?” That kind of thing.’

Raks spoke without much anger but with feeling, as though it had all happened long ago, in another galaxy, far away. He was quite well dressed, wearing a jacket and tie, as he had at the birthday dinner, but there was something about him — an intimation of frailty — that was disturbing.

‘They stopped beating us when they realized that we had nothing to tell them,’ Raks said. ‘Then we went to trial. It was a short trial. Torture was not mentioned, nothing of our treatment came out. We were sentenced. I got five years. In those days you did every day of your sentence.’

‘Tell me about Robben Island.’

Robben Island in the sea, just a mile off Cape Town, was now a popular tourist attraction, though a sobering one. Visitors were taken out in boats, and former political prisoners served as guides.

‘I served my whole sentence there, from 1979 to 1984,’ Raks said. ‘It was cold and uncomfortable and impossible to escape from. As I told you, we saw Nelson Mandela. We passed notes, scribbling on pieces of paper and smuggling them back and forth.’

But books and papers and pencils were forbidden and were confiscated if they were found. Even Mandela, the future president, was trifled with — his books and writing material taken from him. In place of study or self-improvement or any intellectual activity there was manual labor.

‘We did road repairs,’ Raks said, for the island had once had a community on it — houses, roads, churches, a leper settlement. ‘Most days we dragged seaweed out of the ocean — ten-foot lengths of kelp. The seaweed was sold to Taiwan and Korea.’

That was an interesting detail, the Chinese and the Koreans enjoying the delicacy of Cape Town seaweed with their noodles by wringing the sweat from the faces of these slave laborers. But there was no recrimination against them, no hard words for Margaret Thatcher or Dick Cheney who had both publicly declared Mandela a terrorist; no bitterness against the Belgians who bought diamonds, and the Israelis who traded in guns and food to a racist government which was committed to killing and torturing and imprisoning some Africans and creating ghettos for others; and just laughter for the Japanese who got themselves officially declared white in part so that they could trade with the white supremacist government, but mainly so that they could play golf at whites-only country clubs.

Raks said, ‘When I got out I was deported to Bophuthatswana.’

Bophuthatswana had been a Bantustan, a small deprived ghetto of bad land and poor houses where Separate Development was to take place. Bantustans had since been dismantled, the fences taken down, and were now a source of labor and of emigrants to the urban shanty towns outside the major cities.

That was Raks’ story. He had disliked telling it. But listening to him I saw something familiar in his limp posture and sad expression. It was the ravaged look of someone who had had a near-death experience that had gone on far too long: years in a cage. I had seen that same look in the Ethiopians who had been locked up in the prison in Addis, in my friends in Uganda who had suffered through Amin’s tyranny, in Wahome Mutahi who had been given the water torture in Nairobi. It was a look of seediness, not a broken spirit but a fractured body, premature aging, and a sort of sidelong mode of delivery, hating to look back. In a word, their spirit had not been broken but their health had been shattered.

Going home that night, I noticed a great fuss in the streets. The taxi driver was excited, his blood was up, his radio was chattering. I suspected a riot or some kind of civil disorder, for there were helicopters going thunk-thunk-thunk overhead and the sound of ambulance sirens.

‘Trouble at the Pirates football game,’ the driver said.

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Stampede,’ he said.

Latecomers to the game, 15,000 of them, had been trapped and crushed in a tunnel at the stadium entrance. There had been nowhere for them to go, for there were 60,000 people inside the ground. Forty-three people had been killed and hundreds injured. With the first screams and the confusion, the game had been stopped and then abandoned.

‘Someone told me to go to that game.’

‘Would have been a great game. But the stampede. Ach. Was terrible, man.’

Through a friend I met Mike Kirkinis, guide to fossil sites. I liked him immediately. He was energetic and an optimist and he worked hard. He was no snob. He said, ‘Africans in Jo’burg tell me that they’re from the bush. That their grandparents herded goats. I say, “Hey, what a coincidence! My grandfather herded goats in Cyprus.” It’s true. It helps to remember where you came from.’

Mike, in his early forties, owned a helicopter. He ran tours out to the archeological sites of Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, places that bristled with bones of humanoids, the richest fossil sites in the world and South Africa’s first World Heritage Sites. I agreed to go out with Mike one Sunday morning.

‘I’ll bring my girlfriend. We can have a picnic.’

His girlfriend, Sybilla, was a German veterinarian. She was six foot one and very beautiful. She owned a Rottweiler. As a vet, she specialized in the health of elephants. The previous year, when she was on an expedition to Mali ‘darting’ elephants and treating them, an elephant which had been insufficiently tranquilized rose up unexpectedly, tossed Sybilla to the ground and trampled her, smashing her pelvis and her legs. Mike had flown to Bamako to help her and in the course of the year she had healed. You would not have known she had come close to being destroyed by big elephant feet unless you gave way to temptation, as I did, and gazed intently at her legs. The tiny scars and stitches did not detract from their beauty but only reminded me of her strength and courage. She had long silken hair and flinty-blue eyes. She flew the chopper expertly.

‘She intimidates people,’ Mike said.

I said, ‘Not me. I mean, if you wanted to go to the ends of the earth she’s the one to go with.’

When we were aloft, Mike explained that what I was seeing down below was the ridge on which Johannesburg sat — the Witwatersrand, the White Water Ridge — clearly upraised, because (so he said) an asteroid had hit the planet right here a few billion years ago and rearranged the landscape, displacing the inland sea by pushing the gold-bearing reef, the great lip of rock, nearer to the surface. The gold, discovered in 1886, was the making of Johannesburg. (Diamonds had been found in great quantities in Kimberley about twenty years earlier.)

Flying in this helicopter was a guilty pleasure, because although I bemoaned air travel I loved flying low over the Johannesburg suburbs, looking at the mansions, the evidence of white flight from the city, and black flight, too. From aloft I could see clusters of condominiums and gated communities, stately homes with swimming pools and horse paddocks, the adjacent slums, the squatter settlements: everything was visible. Flying with Mike was a language lesson, too: the park land, the drifts, the vlei (marshland), the klows (ravines), the kopjes (little hills), the narrow tracks, known as spoor across the veld, a large wildtuin (game reserve), the snelweg (highway), the vryweg (freeway). Also, the variously named detritus from the gold mines, for they created an enormous amount of rubble and sludge — the mine dumps and slime dams.

We landed at Swartkrans, because there were buses of tourists at Sterkfontein, and no one else here.

‘The oldest bones on earth have been found here,’ Mike said, and led us through the cave system, down a narrow path. White bones like fragments of flint and chalk protruded from the wall. Looking closely I could easily discern molars, vertebrae, long hollow limb bones, talons and canines and obvious chunks of skull, every vertical surface was covered with bits of smashed bone.

At the base of the cave, Mike said, ‘This site contains the evidence of the first controlled use of fire by early man anywhere in the world. That was probably the single major pivotal point in human evolution a million years ago. Imagine what a difference fire made. It gave humans the ability to master their environment and to become the most destructive species in the history of the planet.’

The remains of prehistoric hand-made bone tools had also been found in the cave, as well as evidence that the humans there had been the prey of large animals. The site at Swartkrans had been excavated since the 1930s, Mike said, and two types of early hominids co-existed here almost two million years ago, homo erectus and homo robustus. But the cave had been continuously occupied for those two million years. Besides early man, animals had also used it as a lair. It had served as a shelter for African pastoralists for hundreds of years. During the Boer War this cave had been used by Boer soldiers. And more recently such caves had been the hideouts of African guerrillas in the struggle to overthrow the white government.

With Sybilla working the controls, we flew into a remote gully and had a picnic by a cold spring, among twittering birds and ochre butterflies and watching hawks.

‘Humans evolved here,’ Mike said. ‘Right here where we’re sitting. We’ve found stone tools, and bones, and everything else. Africa was perfect for evolution. But you want to know something?’

Sybilla had been combing her long hair by the spring. She looked up at Mike, and I too tore my attention away from the comb-tugs fluttering Sybilla’s hair and gave him my full attention.

‘Probably none of those bones are those of our direct ancestors.’

‘I thought that was Adam and Eve in the cave back there.’

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Mike asked. ‘There’s a guy you have to meet. He’s got this amazing theory.’

The man to whom Mike introduced me in a sushi bar in an upscale Johannesburg mall was Professor Lee Berger. He was head of the Paleoanthropological Unit for Research and Exploration at the University of Witwatersrand. A paleoanthropologist studies ancient humans, but Professor Berger has said that this science of taking the widest view of history is ‘one of the greatest privileges… of being human.’ It was a vast search into our own elusive ancestry.

He had published a book in 2000, elaborating his research, In the Footsteps of Eve. A genial American from Georgia, in his late thirties, his theory was that humankind’s direct ancestor was probably not among any of the bones or fossil forms that had been dug up in Africa or anywhere else. Yes, humanoid species had been found and the forms were more related to us than to chimps. But while that was extraordinarily close, it was not a direct link to us. Our actual ancestor had not been found.

I said, ‘What about these people who report startling findings? “The ancestor of man.” There was one just this year.’

‘Kenyanthropus,’ Professor Berger said. He was smiling. ‘Imagine naming a new genus, just like that. And so quickly — three weeks between the submission of the research findings and the acceptance.’

‘So you don’t buy it?’

He said, ‘Paleoanthropologists are competing for money and grants, so they tend to make earth-shaking pronouncements about finding our ancestors. If you need money for research it helps to make headlines.’

Professor Berger’s forthrightness and skepticism, his insistence on presenting fossils in the right context, his habit of doubting and demanding proof, had earned him many admirers and some enemies. Because paleoanthropology involved so much interpretation and ‘emotional resonance,’ rivalries were inevitable and competition among scientists and fossil hunters was intense. He said that the Leakeys, competitive within their own family, had not found Adam in Olduvai Gorge, and for him the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton that I had seen in Addis Ababa was not Eve, but rather a three-foot-tall bipedal ape with a chimp-like jaw.

‘She’s in our family tree. We were an ape until two million years ago. We became erectus — had skills, learned to control fire, learned hunting, got weapons. But the Lucy fossil is probably a dead end.’

‘Family tree’ was not an expression he used much, and in fact he said that such a concept misrepresented the progress of our origins. The notion of a tree was too simple for being so linear, for the pattern of our ancestry more likely resembled a ‘complex bush.’

Disputing fossil finds had given him some predictable supporters, among them Creationists who believed literally in Adam and Eve, and the Flood, and Lot turning into a pillar of salt. Taking Professor Berger’s words out of context Creationists cited his work as evidence that Darwin and his heresies were nothing but a low trick in getting God out of America’s schools.

But it was understandable that little was known about our ancestors, he said. ‘The study of human origins is only thirty or forty years old. That’s all. Before then it was like stamp collecting.’

Professor Berger had come to South Africa via Kenya in the 1980s. He had worked with Richard Leakey on a dig in Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. At that time South Africa awaited discovery. Because of the Nationalist Party, which came to power in 1948, and the academic boycott that was called because of the white supremacist policies of that party, there was no digging at all in South Africa for forty years — no work in paleoanthropology, and no finds from 1948 until 1989. Just as bad, a great deal of fossil material that had been found earlier was useless because it was undated.

‘It’s not like Europe, where they have lake sites. Lake sites are easily datable. We didn’t have vulcanism. No geochemical signals. No one here knew exactly what they had found.’

In 1990, when Professor Berger started seriously looking for fossils, there were only five established early hominid sites in South Africa. ‘But there were dozens of caves — dozens and dozens,’ he said. ‘I began by walking in the bush around Krugersdorp’ — Swartkrans was near there — ‘and I’d see a cave and we’d dig and find fossils. There were fossils everywhere. We started digging in Gladysville and two weeks later we found fossils of hominids. In some caves we found hominids that had been preyed upon by saber-toothed cats — no, not the other way around.’

Talking about Africa, the larger meaning the fossils had, Professor Berger lost his circumspection and spoke of ‘the incredible binding power of fossils,’ how they brought people together. The lesson of evolution in Africa was not tribalism and division, but cooperation.

‘Every critical event in the development of homo sapiens has come out of Africa,’ he said.

In his book In the Footsteps of Eve he had written,

Humanity is a product of Africa. We are what we are today because we’ve been shaped by our environment — and it was the African environment that hosted almost every major evolutionary change we’ve experienced on our journey towards being human.

‘The morphology of the face, how we lost our canines, the very definitions of our humanity,’ he said. ‘We are defined by peacefulness and cooperation. Those qualities developed here in Africa.’

There were four of us at the sushi bar — Professor Berger had brought a friend, and Mike had brought me.

‘Look at us,’ Professor Berger said. ‘You couldn’t take four of any other mammalian species to sit down as we are doing here. This is the proof that we are the cooperative species.’

Picking up a spicy tuna hand roll, Mike said, ‘So maybe there’s hope for the world?’

‘We are undoubtedly a peaceful species. We developed a pedomor-phic face — child-like, non-threatening. Go ahead, Paul, threaten me with your face.’

I attempted a fierce face.

Professor Berger crowed to the table, ‘See, he didn’t show his teeth! Mammals express threat by showing their teeth, but humans don’t. Warfare is symbolic — it was, anyway, until this century. The idea of mass slaughter is pretty recent.’

A recurrent human event in history that has always fascinated me is First Contact. The most vivid examples come from travel — exploration and discovery. Usually, First Contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him an Indian; but consider the converse — the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels on the deck of a caravel. In the year of Contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain Cook to be the God Lono. The Aztecs in 1517 took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzal-cóatl, the Plumed Serpent, God of Learning and of Wind. The Polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, ‘Are you from the sun or the moon?’

And as recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders met for the first time. The grasping world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking, They are like people you see in a dream. But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative.

We talked about this, appropriately, four strangers discussing the elements of meeting, the hope implied in our amiable lunch. First Contact was a vivid and recurrent event for everyone — bumping into a stranger on the subway, finding yourself with a fellow rider in an elevator, knocking elbows with your seat-mate on a plane, at a bus stop, a check-out counter, on a beach, in a church or movie theater, wherever we were thrown together and had to deal with it. As a traveler, First Contact was the story of my life, and was a motif of my African trip, the safari that had taken me through the Sudanese desert, on a cattle truck from the Ethiopian border, on a steamer on Lake Victoria or in a dugout on the Zambesi, at a lunch table or a farm in Harare, and right here in the sushi bar.

‘All the evidence in First Contact proves that we are a peaceful species,’ Professor Berger said, summing it up. ‘The aggression comes later.’

Africa, ancient in human terms, was the best place for studying our ancestry, he said. Humankind had been able to develop here without leaving, had roamed over this enormous fruitful place, with a good climate and shelter. Africa had everything, Europe not much, which was why there were humans living in Africa 160,000 years before anyone remotely human existed in Europe.

‘We are a coastal species — we lived, historically, with access to the sea,’ Professor Berger said. ‘That’s especially true in Africa. We were able to conquer the marine environment. When we ran out of animals to kill we turned to the sea. There’s never a lean season if you know how to fish.’

One theory he had discussed in his book was that the larger brain size of early man was attributable to the protein-rich marine diet available on the African coast.

I said, ‘But what about the people who have always been living in the African forests, in the jungle, even in the deserts.’

‘People in the forest were historically sidelined,’ he said. ‘Look at the pygmies in the Ituri Forest. Also the desert-dwelling Arabs, the Khoisan, and certain native Americans. The people who lived away from the watercourses were people who became marginalized.’

He had painted a bright persuasive picture — we humans were peaceable, resourceful, cooperative. But there was a dark side. Not long after that lunch, a Johannesburg psychologist described South Africa as ‘a society that has come out of an abyss.’

The man was Saths Cooper, a close colleague of the murdered Steve Biko. Cooper’s political activism had earned him a jail term of nine years, more than five of it on Robben Island. He was now a doctor. He chaired the Statutory Professional Board for Psychology at the Health Professions Council of South Africa. He said, ‘We have not come to actual grips with the depth of depravity that occurred.’

At its high-minded best South Africa was a society concerned with justice, dealing with its murderous past in a noble way, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and trying to get a handle on its conflict-ridden present. Capital punishment had been eliminated, mercy and forgiveness were the text for every sermon and for most political speeches. But at another level there was something akin to savagery suggested in the crime figures — fifty-five murders a day, and a rape every twenty-three seconds. These were just the reported incidents; the actual numbers were higher. The society that existed in South Africa — probably the most open in Africa — had a free press, virtually no censorship, no political terror, and had produced a distinguished literature in two languages. Its very openness insured that every lapse, every crime, every transgression was scrutinized in detail.

At a popular level, a mall culture had begun to develop at the edge of its cities, partly as a response to the insecurity and high incidence of crime in city centers but also because there were enough consumers with money to spend on new clothes and restaurants. The suburbs of Rosebank and Sandton were multiracial and generally safe, and their shopping malls were palmy and serene.

I took heart from a wise paleoanthropologist who knew his hominids saying: Here we are, four strangers together, sitting at the same table. We are peaceful We are the cooperative species. That was hopeful, and the fact that he was saying that in the clean and safe food court of an African shopping mall, was hopeful too.